In the total art madness that is Frieze week I have decided to try to post works and people of interest through out the week. Oddly it really started last week for many London galleries as they attempted to beat the rush of overlapping private views that occur this Monday to Friday. The show I would single out from last week was James White’s exhibition at the Max Wigram Gallery.
Artist, curator and author, director of MOCA London
London Day 2
Posted: 16/10/2013 09:24
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Day 2 in London saw the start of a huge number of private galleries launching shows for the major fall season. Brand leader Gagosian Gallery had a massive group show of blue chip artists called The Show is Over, and White Cube went with Mark Bradford at their museum-like Bermondsey space.
Blain Southern had one of the most stylish shows called CANDY featuring the work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Damian Hirst
At Other Criteria artists Tim Noble & Sue Webster launched a multiple edition of 10 bronze casts of their “nipples and assholes” called Portraits from the Bottom Up.
Tim Noble
Portraits from the Bottom Up, Tim Noble & Sue Webster
Artist, curator and author, director of MOCA London
Frieze: Day 3
Posted: 17/10/2013 14:33
The opening of the Frieze art fair was in a much improved tent this year. The ceiling was higher and the aisles wider so that the whole thing felt a lot better, not so crowded and easier to view the work. The following images are of pieces that took my fancy and are in no order of preference or even when I came across them at the fair.
Doug Aitken, You/You, 2012, wood, mirror and glass
And now for something completely different. Thursday night in London was the West End Night with most of the contemporary galleries staying open for all those visiting London to have a look after a long day at any one of the fairs.
But it was also the opening of a completely different type of show called Big Deal No 5, a massive group show (over 100 artists) in a central London underground car par (Cavendish Square). The show was organised by Geoffrey Leong and curated by artists Vanya Balogh and Cedric Christie and looked vastly different from other events on offer in London.
Martin Sexton, Spectre of Marx
Rebecca Scott, No-one gets abused in the bed of human rights
Amy Sharrocks, Rolling Umbrellas
Danny Pockets, Kebabs & Chicken
Demelza Louise Moreau, The push and pull of the gaze
Mark Woods, The Unchanging Nature of the Fetish Object
Roger Clarke, Red Knob
Nicola Hicks, Profit is God
Roberto Ekholm, Untitled (O wave)
Sophie Dickens, Landscape
Karolin Schwab, three places
Perry Roberts, Nobody knows what I really think
Big Deal No 5
Cavendish Square car par lower level 3
18 – 20 October
11am – 7:30 PM
FREE
Artist, curator and author, director of MOCA London
Day 5: Sluice Alternative
Posted: 20/10/2013 11:52
Sluice art fair is completely different from the usual clean white visual aesthetic of modern art fairs, where sales are paramount and visual clutter to be avoided. Sluice goes for odd spaces and mainly artist run galleries and there is a wild performative aspect to the fair. For 2013 it is in an old factory space that reminds me of former times in New York, London and Berlin, when the have a go spirit saw artists flock to Alphabet City, Hoxton and the Former East all now transformed to chic places to shop (if not live – well maybe the grandchildren can for a few years).The following images are my pick of the fair.
Rob Leech, (A touch of ) Instant Tan, 2012, printed self-adhesive vinyl (the colour taken directly from an image of Amy Childs)
Philip Newcombe, Hooligan, 2013, installed polished aluminium football stud at Fort gallery, London
And perhaps my own personal favourite was Dave Evans‘ Artist’s Car Bumper Stickers part of the TOOOLS shop “of items to assist your navigation of art fairs worldwide” at Liverpool’s The Royal Standard gallery.
One of the last preparations before doors open to the Frieze art fair tonight is the installation of Richard Long’s mud painting at London’s Lisson Gallery. The mud is applied directly to the wall, and the floor needs to be covered with a protective sheet. When the work is finished, there is a clean black line along the bottom of the wall that draws the eye. In an environment where everything is slick, the work stands out as a refreshing example of healthy earthiness.
Now in its 11th year, Frieze London 2013 (Oct. 17-20) hosts some 170 exhibitors (up from last year’s 120), attesting to the fair’s status in the global art market. Exhibitors represent 34 countries, making this year, according to the organizers, the fair’s most international outing yet.
Countless satellite fairs like Moving Image and (new this year) Strarta have sprung up, and London galleries schedule exhibitions of their biggest hitters to coincide with the fair’s opening; see Tim Noble and Sue Webster at Blain Southern. At the preview, all the familiar faces from the art establishment were present: museum directors like Nicholas Penny (National Gallery), Ralph Rugoff (Hayward) and Nicholas Serota (Tate), as are artists like Grayson Perry, Anish Kapoor and Martin Creed.
If Frieze truly is nothing more than a temple of consumerism at its most devout, then the altarpiece is Jeff Koons’s bronze megaliths of lobsters, kittens and candies, showing at Gagosian Gallery. The rumored $10 million price tag (which the gallery declined to confirm) reinforces the notion that cash is king. Yet only a booth away, at Berlin’s Esther Schipper, Pierre Huyghe’s aquarium works house horseshoe and arrow crabs—this living ecosystem is utterly unconcerned with cash flow. Even if his aquarium pieces do come with a price tag of $165,000 each and a life span of 15 years, here “prehistoric life forms that pre-date all this,” as a gallery representative describes it, are top of the food chain.
Still, the chief traffic is buyers. Dealers in the Frame section, reserved for 18 galleries founded post-2003 (16 of whom are Frieze first-timers) all told A.i.A. that sales were good. There are some lively examples here, like Berlin-based artist Ryan Siegan-Smith’s works concerning memory and mnemonic techniques in a mixture of video, installation and drawing at Malmö’s Johan Berggren. Seemingly everyone’s favorite were Marlie Mul’s sand and resin puddles at Milan’s Fluxia, for about $5,500.
In the main exhibitors section, Laura Bartlett is returning for her fifth year with a sampler of artists including Cyprien Galliard, Nina Beir, Ian Law and Allison Katz. “Art fairs are where the relationship between gallerist and artist is both least and most romantic,” the London dealer told A.i.A., “but underlying everything is the same yearning, seeking out treasure.”
No one is forthcoming about what they are selling, for how much and to whom, but A.i.A. did overhear one dealer comparing shopping styles. “The Europeans walk round for days writing notes, then do all their buying on the Sunday. If the Americans want it, they buy on the spot.” One pair of arty spectacles with a New York City rasp dropped $80,000 on two Warhol drawings at New York’s Cheim & Read with the comment, “I just came off my medication this morning!”
On the whole, the air is less frenzied than past years. Air kisses have given way to a more serious crowd. Combined tickets to Frieze and Frieze Masters are $80 this year, so it is less about networking and more about cold, hard currency. “The market has matured,” an English collector told A.i.A., “and people are here to do business.”
That includes the crowd at Frieze Masters. Now in its second year, Frieze Masters provides a greatest hits of everything up until 2000. If modern art has been knocked off its perch by the growing strength of the contemporary market in recent years, then Frieze Masters addresses that balance. Dealers bring out prestige works of Japanese Gutai and Russian Constructivism, with 12 galleries focusing on Brazilian modernism.
Most galleries at Frieze Masters are returning exhibitors, but some pulled out, deciding to concentrate on the main fair and its reputation for guaranteed sales. “We did both fairs last year, and did well at Frieze but we didn’t make any money here” at Frieze Masters, Elliott MacDonald, representing Pace, told A.i.A. “But when you don’t do a fair, you always have the sneaking suspicion you are missing out.”
MacDonald’s suspicions may be right. Walking into Cheim & Read, one of the dealers says loudly on speakerphone, “I can’t tell you exactly what but a very nice thing happened today.” One museum director (who wished to be unnamed) put a reserve on the entire exhibition documenting artist Rose English’s feminist dressage performances at London’s Karsten Schubert.
There are no bargains at Frieze Masters. Sam Fogg, a London specialist in medieval art, has maybe the most beautiful object in the entire fair: an illuminated manuscript from the Book of Kings, selling for $8 million. New York-based Hans P. Kraus Jr. has a Julia Margaret Cameron album for about $7 million; portrait subjects include Darwin and Tennyson. Then there is The Census at Bethlehem by Brueghel the Elder, which hasn’t been on the market since it was bought directly from the studio 400 years ago by an English family who has kept it in Kenya in recent years.
Frieze Masters contextualizes Frieze London in a way the organizers probably never intended. It backs up contemporary works as often as it tears them down. Korean artist Kyungah Ham is showing an embroidered canvas at Kukje Gallery (Seoul), a clear homage to Alighiero Boetti (showing at London’s Dickinson as part of Frieze Masters). But when quizzed, the exhibitor told A.i.A., “No. Not like Boetti. Original.” On the flip side, the three Michelangelo Pistoletto works on sale by different galleries at Frieze Masters are called out by Gavin Turk’s Pistoletto’s Waste (2013) at Vienna’s Galerie Krinzinger at Frieze London. Turk’s work mimics the originals’ mirrored stainless steel, but replaces the boy and dog pictured in Pistoletto’s series with an image of black trash can liners.
Where inclusion in Frieze once meant you had made it, Frieze Masters makes the main fair look increasingly like level one in a long-drawn-out strategy game, with the question now being: How many of the works showing at Frieze London will make it into Frieze Masters in 10 years’ time?
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Galerie Gmurzynska participates in Frieze Masters London 2013
Frederick Kiesler (1890–1965) was an architect, exhibition designer and artist responsible for changing standard notions of how we display art. Kiesler is most well known for his designs for Peggy Guggenheim’s museum-gallery, Art of this Century (1942–1947), as well as his influential designs for important Surrealist exhibitions including ‘Bloodflames 1947.’
Curated by noted art critic Nicolas Calas, ‘Bloodflames 1947’ was a major avant-garde and the last exhibition of the Surrealist group in New York held at the Hugo Gallery, and heavily focused on the work of Wifredo Lam.
Galerie Gmurzynska is pleased to announce a retrospective exhibition of historic proportions by Wifredo Lam at Frieze Masters, London installed in an environment based on designs by Kiesler. The exhibition is a career spanning survey of Lam’s groundbreaking oeuvre.
Lam was a vital part of Guggenheim’s legendary collection and Kiesler’s design for her Surrealist gallery is considered one of the cornerstones of mid-20th century art. Galerie Gmurzynska will present Lam’s work on similar iconic floating curved walls inspired by Kiesler’s designs.
The main focus of ‘Bloodflames 1947’ was a curtained area where one could recline and contemplate a work by Lam, which was hung on the ceiling. Galerie Gmurzynska will recreate this curtained area with Kiesler furnishings at Frieze Masters presentation.
This is the first time that these designs have been recreated.
Wifredo Lam (1902–1982) was a central figure of twentieth century art. He integrated himself into every major artistic circle and movement of much of the twentieth century. He greatly inspired Picasso, was a member of the Surrealist movement and also explored alternatives to the abstract expressionism of the 1950’s. Lam participated in the most important international exhibitions of his time such as “documenta” II and III in Kassel, Germany and the Venice Biennale in 1972.
The exhibition was organized by Galerie Gmurzynska in cooperation with the Estate of Wifredo Lam and the Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.
Galerie Gmurzynska represents the Estate of Wifredo Lam worldwide.
A portfolio on the ‘Bloodflames 1947’ exhibition will be published by Galerie Gmurzynska on the occasion of this exhibition, featuring documentary images, articles and texts showing the important contemporary reaction to this exhibition and the influence of Wifredo Lam’s work on its continued influence.
A major monograph will also be published, it will be extensively illustrated with documentary images, many never before published.
Galerie Gmurzynska at Frieze Masters, Stand B7
Photos by Will Amlot/Galerie Gmurzynska
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TIME MAGAZINE
Reporting from Frieze: Eight Exciting Discoveries at the Contemporary Art Fair
I really wasn’t sure what to expect this year of Frieze, one of the world’s leading contemporary art fairs, which takes place every October in Regents Park, London. At its inception ten years ago, the fair was a vibrant, colorful event, with lots of artists milling around – both emerging and established – as well as curators, gallery owners, collectors and art lovers. But over the years, the ticket price has increased to the point where some artists now feel reluctant to pay the entrance fee for something that, as one journalist put it, “is basically an art supermarket.”
Upon entering the temporary structure built by architects Carmody Groarke, and walking into the first of many gallery booths, I realized that, if this is a supermarket, it’s a high-end model.
In fact, I was so impressed by most of the art on display that I made a call to a reluctant artist friend and said, “Even if it means you’re eating nothing but beans tomorrow, come have a look.” After three days of full immersion, I attempted to select my eight favorite photographs. In no particular order, they are:
There is poetry in the frailty of this object, as if one gust of wind could shatter the book into a galaxy of crystal splinters. According to the gallerist, Tacita Dean immersed J.G. Ballard’s 1960 story “The Voices of Time” in a stream, on a salt plane in Utah, for several weeks to get this effect. The artist then used photography to document the outcome of her experiment, as the book was too fragile to move. To me, the book appears like a physical manifestation of the death of the printed page, made all the more apparent by gallery owners preferring to show artists’ work on iPads rather than with the help of a catalogue raisonné.
“What exactly is going on here?” I wondered as I stood in front of the large-scale Thomas Ruff photographs. I have to say, even after the kind gallery assistant explained Ruff’s working practice to me for this series, I remained slightly confused as to how exactly a virtual darkroom was used to create this photographic magic. Nevertheless, it left me entranced.
After lots of conceptual art, it’s quite refreshing to stand staring straight into a man’s crotch. Greying sports socks on train-seat fabric has never been the most arousing of combinations but Tillmans certainly tickled my feathers with Karl Marseille II.
Wolfgang Tillmans—Courtesy of Galeria Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid
Karl Marseille II, 2013
4) Koji Enokura, Symptom-Lump of Lead to the Sky I, 1972, Takaishii Gallery
I admit I knew nothing about the Japanese artist Enokura before seeing this photograph, but it stopped me in my tracks. The graphic elements of the image — the criss-crossing lines of the square paving stones, the vertical lines of the wall and the darker and lighter elements of the photograph — really enticed me, as well as the fact that it left me wondering, How is this lump airborne just so?
Koji Enokura—Courtesy of Taka Ishii Gallery
Symptom-Lump of Lead to the Sky Ⅰ (P.W.-No.41), 1972
The Swiss artist Hefti creates his photograms using photo-sensitive paper in a pitch-black underground storage facility. A modern-day alchemist, Hefti then lights the spores of the flammable plant “witches moss,” thereby achieving “color explosions” with enchanting hues.
Raphael Hefti—Courtesy of Ancient and Modern
Two works from the Lycopodium series, 2012
6) Anne Collier, Negative (California), 2013, Marc Foxx
According to the gallery, the photograph is a reconsideration of earlier source material from Collier’s archive. Its life-size print is alluring, drawing the viewer into the scene. The silvery sea looks like mercury or even mountain snow, adding a sense of mystery and suspense to the image. Will I drown if I follow her in?
Anne Collier—Courtesy of Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles
Negative (California), 2013
7) Shimabuku, Gift: An exhibition for monkeys, 1992, Wilkinson Gallery
Tucked away in the far end of one of Frieze’s long aisles was the Wilkinson Gallery. Having assessed the contents of countless booths, I felt by this stage that Shimabuku had not only created a gift for the monkeys with this image, but a gift for me, too.
Shimabuku—Courtesy of Wilkinson Gallery
Gift: Exhibition for the Monkeys, 1992
8) Akram Zaatari, 60 Men Crossing Ain El Helweh Bridge, 2007, Sfeir Semler Gallery
This is a collection of exceptional black and white images from the Hashem El Madani Archive. Hashem El Madani was a photographer working in Saida, Lebanon, between the late 1940s and ’70s. His archive is maintained by the Arab Image Foundation, of which the artist Akram Zaatari is a founding member. In these images we see men, young and old, crossing Ain El Helweh Bridge in their suits, on bikes, laughing, chatting, some walking leisurely, others in a rush. The bridge and its characters have come alive all over again, thanks to Zaatari’s fabulous archival work.
Akram Zaatari—Courtesy of Gallery Sfeir-Semler, Beirut-Hamburg
Sixty young men posing while crossing the Ain el Helweh bridge, 2007
The 36 photographs were made by Hashem el Madani in Saida, Lebanon, early 1950s. Each here measures 22 x 15 cm.
The first conversation I overheard at Frieze London was an American collector suggesting to her husband that they buy Dan Graham’s glamorously minimalist seven-metre curving glass and mirror sculpture “Groovy Spiral” as an alternative hallway for their latest home.
In fact, “Groovy Spiral” at Lisson Gallery is the fair’s most democratic, inclusive work – despite its $600,000 price tag. Framed in steel, it resembles from the outside a three-dimensional question-mark, or perhaps semi-colon, momentarily punctuating the rush and crush of too many people, pictures, prices. Walk inside, and its mirrored surfaces dizzyingly blur, mute and distance you from the crowds, who are reflected on a long white wall opposite as a frieze of pale shadows.
This is Frieze in microcosm: a glassy, self-referential world all its own. Jeff Koons became a record-breaking market presence by sculpting banal, kitsch objects glorifying another alternative reality, Disney-like and infantilised; Gagosian has literally raised the roof of Frieze’s tent to showcase his giant hanging sculptures “Sacred Heart” – a stainless steel blue balloon tied with a pink ribbon – “Lobster” and the aluminium/rubber “Titi Tyre” modelled on children’s inflatable ducks. I loathe Koons, but as a statement of his role in conceptual sculpture’s history, Gagosian’s display is unassailable.
If all its booths were like Lisson’s and Gagosian’s – clear, decisive, committed – Frieze would be pure provocative pleasure. Certainly structural changes made to echo the sober elegance of last year’s Frieze Masters have benefited this fair: wider aisles, softer lighting, fewer exhibitors. But among the galleries themselves, too many have responded to Masters’ cut-off date of 2000 by assuming in contrast an unconsidered contemporaneity: haphazard, provisional hangs; slick, unoriginal work, much of it dated 2013.
Even at big-name spaces, some market-stall juxtapositions are so discordant that pieces argue each other out of existence. Alex Katz’s 34 small studies, landscapes and flower paintings, marvellously abbreviated dramas of light, shade and time (more than half of them sold by yesterday), struggle amid the surrounding installation of Rob Pruitt’s “Safety Cones” jokily adorned with sunglasses, smiley faces and hats at Gavin Brown’s enterprise. Affectingly wan and melancholy, Ron Mueck’s diminutive hyper-realist “Woman with Shopping”, looking as if she is about to stride out of Hauser & Wirth’s stand, is not helped by the backcloth of a massive, violent Paul McCarthy painting (already sold to a European collection for £750,000).
The best displays, aping Frieze Masters, are intensely curated and concentrated. Pace’s exploration of global portraiture is outstanding. It includes Romanian wunderkind Adrian Ghenie’s painterly depictions of epoch-changing figures – “Charles Darwin”; a scrawled-over face of Hitler in which paint seeks revenge on history – in dialogue with both Hiroshi Sugimoto’s uncanny photographs such as “Lenin”, modelled on a waxwork, and Li Songsong’s “Marshal”, a historical painting built up in impasto brushwork on panels roughly stuck together, disjointedly overlapping, so that the image never coheres. These in turn relate to the grid-patterned self-portraits with which Chuck Close questions realism and abstraction.
Saleable, accessible painting of wildly varying quality dominates the fair: highlights among new works are a free cascading landscape by Hurvin Anderson (sold by Thomas Dane in the fair’s first half hour for £130,000), a Jules de Balincourt cityscape (Victoria Miro), Chris Ofili’s monumental black figures playing out classical myth (David Zwirner, sold on the first day for $500,000).
Sculptural presentations tend to be more radical. Stuart Shave’s Modern Art intriguingly groups artists who test the limits of informality and non-traditional materials within a rigorously abstracting, post-minimal aesthetic: Karla Black’s foil and nail varnish “Living Conditions”, Eva Rothschild’s steel and lacquer “Hansel and Gretel”, Bojan Sarcevic’s burning candle on onyx “Tridiminished”, the mix of charcoal drawings with plaster and fibreglass in Matthew Monahan’s gently Gothic column “A Certain Time of You”.
Argentinian sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas was all but unheard of in London until his theatrical exhibition, focused on a charging elephant, opened last month at the new Serpentine Sackler Gallery. At Marion Goodman and Kurimanzutto he balances this figurative work by more abstract clay and concrete pieces, at once strong and fragile-looking, surfaces gnarled and cracked, which seem to belong to a fossilised jungle (the large looping, circular piece at Marion Goodman is called “Innocence of Animals”). Rare, delicately inky works on paper evoke ruined cityscapes. A sort of visual descendant of Borges and García Marquez, Villar Rojas drowns out the hype and sales pitches here with a vibrant magical realism making him the un-
expected, very popular star of Frieze 2013.
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FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON
PAD London – report
By Caroline Roux
This user-friendly fair joyfully mixes decorative arts and design with fine art
Thomas Lemut armchair from Fumi
If visitors to the Pavilion of Art and Design (PAD), which takes place in a Mayfair marquee during Frieze week, are in any doubt as to what to do with their high design purchases when they get them home, Timothy Jeffries has the answer. Jeffries, the director of photography specialists Hamiltons Gallery, has kitted out his booth at the fair as a Belgravia sitting room – all velvety brown walls and classy Irving Penn photographs. But then, with a nod to more decadent tastes, he has furnished a dimly lit back room with black brick walls and Araki imagery of complicated bondage techniques, where trussed-up women gazed balefully down onto a black leather Mies van der Rohe daybed. A large-scale Richard Avedon is hung at the perfect height to allow contemplation of 1990s supermodel Stephanie Seymour’s carefully topiaried pubic hair.
The booth’s design is more sad than erotic, suggesting a world in which sex is more likely a transaction than a pleasure. And it isn’t representative of a fair whose annual mission is joyfully to mix 20th-century and contemporary decorative arts and design with fine art in a “do try this at home” kind of way (assuming your home is an airy apartment in the 7th arrondissement, or a duplex on the Upper East Side).
Dealers love the London edition of PAD, a Parisian product that’s now onto its seventh year in the UK. With just 60 galleries, largely of European and US origin (though this year SMOGallery from Beirut joined in), it attracts the high rollers who are in town for Frieze Week.
If Frieze Masters is about connoisseurship and Frieze London about the highly competitive collecting of the contemporary art world, PAD is about comfort and shopping, and the booths are organised accordingly. At Stockholm gallery, Modernity, a pair of Alvar Aalto gleaming black Paimio chairs sit on a stunning rug by Marta Maas Fjetterstrom (an underrated designer of the 1920s and 1930s, though this carpet was posthumously made in the 1950s).
At the Downtown, from Paris, a serious sofa and chairs by Jean Royère, created for a Paris apartment in the 1960s, are shown off against a cream rug, while a stunning Royère lighting arrangement (“Liane”), of seven white shades on meandering black stalks, creeps up an adjoining wall.
London art dealer Robin Katz, a tub-thumper for 1960s and 1970s British artists including Bridget Riley and neglected talents such as Bob Law (“I feel quite patriotic about bringing this work back to people’s attention,” Katz said), has furnished his stall with a Nakashima coffee table and a “school of Rietveld” chair. “The furniture’s not for sale,” he said. “I just like being an interior decorator for a week.”
The New York gallery Van de Weghe adjusted its set economically too, showing a suite of recent Ross Bleckner paintings at around $100,000. The same gallery is showing Picasso’s “Nue Allongée” (1968) on its Frieze Masters stand at $8m.
The PAD formula certainly works. On the opening night alone, sales were ridiculously brisk. Fumi was relieved of a Rowan Mersh shell sculpture and a jesmonite table by Studio Portable within minutes. A brilliant green table by Marc Newson (at €300,000) was snapped up from Galerie Kreo, Paris’s most sophisticated design gallery, along with vintage Gio Ponti mirrors and work by the Campana Brothers. A sleek, masculine carbon fibre shelving piece by Pierre Charpin was under consideration by several buyers. “This really is a commercial fair,” said Clemence Krentowski, the elegant Alaia-clad co-director of Kreo. “The user is at the centre of all this work. Sure, it’s nice if there’s a story behind the piece, but this,” she pointed to the Charpin, “is still a shelf. Otherwise, we’d be at Frieze.”
Not that useability is always the goal. An unlikely new arrival at the fair is the Paris-based Jean-Christophe Charbonnier, specialist in 17th- to 19th-century Japanese armour. Glossy helmets in iron and lacquer sell for £24,000-£60,000 and are proving to have crossover appeal with design-oriented buyers seduced by their sculptural form and exquisite execution.
Next spring, PAD will make its first foray to Los Angeles, and Gregory Gatseralia of SMOGallery has already signed up. “I’m excited about it,” he said. “I’m waiting for Brad Pitt to come along and buy something.” If LA is anything like London, the chances are reasonably high.
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Jeff Koon’s Tweekie Pie
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FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON
Frieze Masters, Regent’s Park, London – report
By Jackie Wullschlager
The fair’s second edition encapsulates 21st-century shifts in taste and taste-making
Monet’s ‘L’église de Varengeville; soleil couchant’ (detail) (1882), unseen for more than a century, is at Dickinson
Who needs museums with walls when a pop-up version in a Regent’s Park tent makes art look fresher, brighter and more surprising than it does in any public institution?
The fair has grown up since last year’s launch. The jumble of top-class works from ancient times to 2000 still delights: a small pink-hued Tang dynasty “Pottery Figure of a Court Lady” at Ben Jannssens, a gorgeous off-kilter Cézanne cupid at Acquavella, and Lisson’s theatrically recreated Richard Long walking piece are formally and emotionally arresting highlights. But the overall feel is more serious, less showy, with many galleries attempting to dig deeper, stake significant positions and juxtapose old and new in revealing not gimmicky ways – Jackson Pollock’s early drawings alongside the tribal masks that inspired them at Washburn Gallery and Donald Ellis; Leon Kossoff’s tensely wrought charcoal/oil versions of Old Master suffering (Titian’s “Flaying of Marsyas”, Rembrandt’s “Blinding of Samson”) at Mitchell Innes Nash.
Last year’s high standards have provoked competition to boast trophy pieces, including Monet’s scintillating “L’église de Varengeville, soleil couchant”, from a French private collection, unseen for more than a century, at Dickinson, and Modigliani’s elongated, melancholy “Bride and Groom”, one of only two double portraits the artists ever made, deaccessioned from New York’s Museum of Modern Art and on offer at Landau. Both galleries are new to Frieze, and Robert Landau’s often important works do not reach public eyes as he neither sells nor lends to museums (“they take too long to make up their mind and send 17 committee members to have a look”). Along with an unusual Fauvish Chagall “Still Life” (1911-14) and a rare 1905 Derain “Collioure”, Landau has the monumental, transitional “The Sleepers” (1965), favourite of Picasso’s dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler – it hung above his desk until his death.
The subject, a naked woman and a black-suited gentleman reclining on the grass, reprises the “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” series but bold facture and slangy language inaugurate Picasso’s late style. The flattened forms and disruptive contrast of curves and angles merging the two bodies were inspired by Japanese erotic prints – such as the elegantly explicit 17th-century woodblock “Scenes of Lovemaking” by Sugimura Jihei, at Sebastian Izzard. Such chancy, do-it-yourself contextualising is a chief pleasure here.
Best stand? Mnuchin Gallery’s mini-retrospective of Willem de Kooning, centred on a sunburst pink/lemon abstraction “Flowers, Mary’s Table”, was the magnet throughout yesterday’s opening. The savage “Woman” series, highly textured sculptures (“Cross-Legged Figure”, “Hostess”) and emptied-out late paintings all excite in London, which seldom sees de Kooning, and missed the reassessments at MoMA’s 2011-12 retrospective.
Running close for erudite reappraisal and tour-de-force display is Mnuchin’s neighbour, Gmurzynska, which precisely reconstructs a seminal 1947 Wilfredo Lam show, with surrealist compositions hung at crazy angles off the ceiling, and mask-like portraits and “Jungle” paintings playing figuration against abstraction, Picasso against Pollock. Lam, the continent-hopping Cuban communist son of a Chinese railroad worker and African mother, embodied globalisation before the word was invented. He embodies too the nerve centre Frieze Masters aims to hit – blue chip but not fully discovered modernism. A Tate show is under discussion.
Who makes history? Increasingly the market – which is why modernism, its nuances still to be negotiated, triumphs in impact and scope here over Old Masters as marvellous as Velázquez’s “Portrait of a Gentleman” (Otto Naumann) and Antonello’s “Madonna” (Moretti), and energises our response to them. Seventeenth-century polychrome wood/silk religious figures at Coll & Cortés look like modern mixed-media installations; austere ancient sculpture at Rupert Wace takes on modern echoes in Hans Josephsohn’s enigmatic stele form (1953) at Hauser & Wirth.
I lost count of the numerous Calders on every aisle – following last year’s sensational six-metre “Rouge triomphante” at Helly Nahmad, Calder is this year’s must-have – but how bizarre to find his abstract metal shapes in primary colours flapping even among the jewel-like Brueghels, Avercamp and 15th-century Master of Schongau at De Jonckheere. Free-floating, upwardly mobile and in august but unexpected company – Calder is the poster-boy for Frieze Masters.
Exhibition: 12-18 October 2013 | The Sorting Office, 21-31 New Oxford Street, London WC1A 1AP Auction: TODAY, 17 October 2013, at 5pm | Christie’s London, 8 King Street – St. James’s, London SW1Y 6QT
London – The Saatchi Gallery and Christie’s are proud to announce Thinking Big, a special auction of major contemporary sculpture and installation offered to support the Saatchi Gallery’s continuing policy for free entry to all exhibitions, and free education programme for schools.
To accommodate the monumental scale and scope of the work, Thinking Big will exhibited not at Christie’s, but at The Sorting Office, a vast former postal depot in central London, to coincide with the Frieze Art Fair in October 2013.
Francis Outred, Christie’s Head of Post-War & Contemporary Art, Europe, says, “We have been working with the Saatchi Gallery on this project for about a year now. This exhibition and auction will be pioneering in that all the works will be offered without estimate or reserve. In addition, a state of the art exhibition at the Sorting Office, a huge ex postal building in the heart of London, will house major sculpture and installation from across the last twenty years beginning with the Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers to Berlinde de Bruyckere, who is one of the stand out artists at this year’s Venice Biennale. The artists come from five different continents and the exhibition and auction will be a fundamental celebration of the sculpture in the 21st century. Thinking Big refers to the huge ambition and imagination of the artists here, as much as it does to the scale of their work, and to the power of educating young people about art.”
Thinking Big features the work of 50 artists who have been shown at the Saatchi Gallery, including YBAs, such as Tracey Emin and the Chapman brothers, as well as newer talents such as Toby Ziegler, Kader Attia, Conrad Shawcross, Kris Martin and Sterling Ruby. Among the many leading contemporary artists included are Berlinde de Bruyckere, whose work at the Belgian Pavilion was a highlight of the 2013 Venice Biennale; Gert and Uwe Tobias, who had a solo show at London’s Whitechapel Gallery earlier this year; and David Altmejd, Karla Black and Liu Wei, all of whom were selected for Art Basel’s Art Unlimited show of large-scale sculpture this year.
Philippa Adams, Senior Director, Saatchi Gallery, comments: “Thinking Big aims to provide the broadest possible access and opportunity to museums, institutions and collectors alike by offering these works with no estimates and no reserves. This will be the first time in history that works of this scale will be so readily accessible. To this end, our endeavor is to reflect the Gallery’s commitment to constantly support and showcase emerging talent. We hope this new platform will bridge new dialogues and the works from this sale will be seen by new audiences across the world.”
The Saatchi Gallery has consistently collected high quality emerging work, whose importance has endured. It has also showcased new talent emerging around the globe, providing a widely visited museum environment for new art. The Thinking Big auction will support the Saatchi Gallery’s ongoing policy of free admission to all exhibitions and its free education programme – with over 2000 school visits each year.
The Saatchi Gallery will be thirty years old in 2015. It was the first art space in the UK to show a whole host of artists before they became household names, from Jeff Koons and Bruce Nauman to Andreas Gursky, Sigmar Polke and Damien Hirst. During the last five years it has showcased new art from the Middle East, China, India, Russia, Germany, America and Britain. Art from all of these regions, as well as the UK will be on display in Thinking Big.
According to The Art Newspaper, it hosted 10 of the top 15 most visited exhibitions in London over the last four years. The Saatchi Gallery believes that its policy of free admission to all exhibitions – supported by this auction – is fundamental to this success.
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THE GUARDIAN LONDON
Frieze Art Fair: Buyer choice expands from porn and puddles to a Brueghel
With work of 2,000 artists from galleries worldwide the fair at Regent’s Park, London, attracts collectors with deep pockets
Jeff Koons’ Cat on a clothes line (yellow), on show at the Frieze Art Fair this week. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
It is chucking it down in Regent’s Park, cars are splashing pedestrians, expensive frocks and suits are getting drenched. And, once you are inside the UK’s biggest commercial art fair, you can add to the experience by buying your own dirty black puddle.
Each one of Marlie Mul’s resin and sand hyperreal puddles would cost you €4,000 (£3,400)from the Frieze stand belonging to Fluxia, a young gallery based in Milan.
If you are not interested in splashing out on a puddle, then there are a further 151 contemporary art galleries displaying works in the vast tent that has appeared in the London park for the past 10 years.
As thousands descend on the fair – some buying, an awful lot more wishing they had the money to buy – hundreds of other galleries and museums open shows and have parties all over the capital. It is an art equivalent of the Japanese cherry blossom.
This year’s Frieze is as dizzying and as diverse as ever. You can see astonishingly expensive works by Jeff Koons (“We don’t release prices to the press,” a Gagosian gallerist sniffed); and you can see far, far more affordable works by the possible next generation – for example post-graduate Goldsmiths students Sam Keogh and Joseph Noonan-Ganley, on display at Kerlin Gallery‘s stand.
And you can see porn. There are content warning notices but it is very easy to stumble into a screening of Omer Fast’s Everything That Rises Must Converge, a four-channel film exploring the everyday and often ordinary lives of four hardcore porn film performers. It is being seen for the first time and does not spare viewers the graphic detail “although one of the things we found very compelling is the banality of the day at work”, said Euridice Arratia of Berlin gallery Arratia Beer. “They are very regular people, there is an unexpected normality.”
Arratia conceded it is a difficult work to sell – you would need €65,000 – but she hopes people will come and sit down and watch it.
A rather less in your face film is on display at Kate MacGarry’s gallery stall. Marcus Coates – one of the artists shortlisted to be next up on London’s Fourth Plinth – has made a film about hospice patient Alex.
Although the view is only from his window, the story is an epic one in that Alex told Coates he had always wanted to go the Amazon but obviously could not now – so could the artist go, which he did.
“It is a very moving film,” said MacGarry. “It is a very strong work which says a lot about Marcus’s wider practice.”
Also on display are National Geographic-style photographs Coates has made of birds and animals and then screwed up and let unravel. Each are in an edition of three and would cost you £4,500.
Should visitors need a break from the crowds and intensity of Frieze, a good place could be a curvy glass pavilion installed as the only exhibit for the Lisson Gallery. Called Groovy Spiral, visitors are encouraged to walk into it.
Lisson’s Ossian Ward said the work was a “people-watching experience. You feel like you’re in the calm in the middle of the storm and you’re on show as well. It is a nice place to be.”
It is a meditative work, on Wednesday still for sale for $600,000 (£375,000). Ward said: “You don’t get many moments for reflection at an art fair generally, a lot of what you see gets immediately forgotten, so it’s nice to have that one moment. Frieze has matured so galleries should mature with the fair and feel confident to do big and bold statements and not feel they just have to chase after the money.”
Frieze gets criticised because it is a place for conspicuous wealth and there may well will be oligarchs and hedge funders walking the aisles idly wondering what best to spend their millions on.
Matthew Slotover, fair co-founder, believes some of the criticisms are unfair.”Some of the prices can get very high and if you don’t like that then this is probably not the place for you,” he said. “For me it is a wonderful thing that private collectors and museums buy art and support living artists so they can carry on making their work.
“Also commercial galleries all over the world offer hundreds of free shows every month.”
With 2,000 artists at the fair it is also “an amazing opportunity to see a lot of what is going on”.
He said a lot more big collectors were present this year, helped by the successful debut last year of a parallel fair for historical art called Frieze Masters, 15 minutes walk away in the park’s north-west corner.
Here 130 galleries are selling their wares. For €22,000 you might be tempted by a Polynesian toggle, or for $1.5m an insanely kitsch example of Victorian narrative art, John Anster Fitzgerald’s painting of Shakespeare’s Bottom surrounded by fairies.
Or even a beautiful Brueghel winter scene, called The Census at Bethlehem, which, remarkably, was unknown and unrecorded until it was unveiled this week. The painting has been in the same family since it was bought direct from the artist’s studio in 1611 and for the past 60 years has been in east Africa. “When we took it off the wall a mummified gecko fell off the stretcher,” said Johnny Van Haeften, the Old Master dealer selling it.
It is Van Haeften’s first Frieze – “I saw all my clients here last year and thought I’d better come” – and he is encouraged. “People who collect modern art are now beginning to look back at Old Masters which are so much cheaper by comparison. This is a great masterpiece by Brueghel and it is £6m – what does that buy you in contemporary art?”
It is sometimes frustrating to write this column all the time from this distant vantage point, so far from Amuwo Odofin. When I started it with uncertain frequency, some ten years ago, I was travelling often, and was able to offer all kinds of datelines, especially from Lagos, but also including Paris, Brussels, Dakar, Lomé, Cape Town, not to mention Kampala and Port of Spain, reporting on Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings (CHOGMs) in 2007 and 2009. Varied datelines continued when I switched to the weekly back-page format in June 2007.
Now, reasons of ageing and problematic health have grounded me substantially, although in the past year I have still occasionally ventured abroad, especially since the surgeon’s scalpel no longer immediately threatens. Indeed, I have been in the last twelve months in Cape Town, Lagos and Brussels. The wandering journalist of my younger days always hankered for rare datelines. I will, however, not be doing CHOGM in Colombo this year, even though it promises to be one of the most turbulent of recent times (this is something to which I’ll be returning).
Looking at Africa through a political prism, one notes that the politicos and would-be investors have all been pondering the somewhat farcical decision of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation not to award its famous $5m prize for good governance in Africa for the second year running. There have been justifications for this – it is not awarded every year, indeed in seven years there have only been three winners. One of them, Festus Mogae ex-President of Botswana said it was not a censuring of leadership in Africa – there were still a lot of incumbent presidents doing a good job, and there are those who still argue that it should include incumbent rulers, and those who have shown “excellence in leadership” in fields outside government. Indeed, both Mandela and Tutu have had special awards. There is still an uncomfortable feeling about an award that is not conferred more times than it is – it is seen to be passing an adverse comment on African leadership. Maybe that is intended, but what a clumsy way of doing it. The Mo Ibrahim Index is a more apposite initiative, as it gives countries a yardstick against which to perform that compares fairly well with the UNDP’s Human Development Index.
In his press conference, Mo was asked about the AU special summit early this month on the International Criminal Court, called because of a certain feeling of victimisation because only African leaders have so far been convoked to appear before it (a summit condemned strongly by Archbishop Desmond Tutu). Mo said that there was no alternative to the ICC to cope with crimes against humanity, but the best way forward was to try and reform it, not to leave it, as some African headers reportedly wished to do, although this move was blocked by the summit. I also liked his comment that Africa needed neither Afro-optimism or afro-pessimism but “Afro-realism”
In London, however, we have also been looking at Africa through a different prism, that of art. The occasion has been the first ever Contemporary Art Fair. This goes by the name of ‘1:54” – illustrating the unity of the African continent’s fifty-four countries. I cannot quite recall anything like it, although some contemporary African art was on show in both the Africa ’95 and Africa ‘05 Festivals. The fair, held in several rooms of the Palladian surroundings of Somerset House in the Strand grouped fifteen different selected galleries and over seventy artists. The organisers comment is that it is “a rare opportunity to expose the rapidly emerging African art market” in all its vast variety (painting, drawing, photography, sculpture – with artists working in many materials). The emphasis may seem to be very much on the new commercial possibilities the work of Africa’s growing body of creative artists present for dealers and brokers (one hopes the artists are also able to retrieve their share), but for those of us in London, it is still a promising area for promoting Africa’s image. It would be invidious to start listing names here, but I do want to commend the October Gallery, which has a well-situated room in the fair, and has consistently supported African artists over the past thirty years. I feel that with this show their faith has been justified, as a step-change is taking place in awareness.
It is significant that the 1: 54 fair coincides with the annual Frieze Art Fair, described in The Times as “an elite bun-fight between oligarchs, bankers and film stars”, which is also a dream world for art pseuds, socialites and Prosecco-loving celebrity-spotters tottering between private views. The 1:54 show is fortunately not quite there, although not short of the show-business aspects of the art world The media publicity has been good, and as a sympathetic piece in The Financial Times observed it is a “snapshot of a continent” with “an array stamped by its diversity.” In short, very prismatic.
By: Kaye Whiteman
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DB ARTMAG 77
Jubilee in Regent’s Park: 10th Year of Deutsche Bank’s Partnership with Frieze London
Rivane Neuenschwander, I Wish your Wish, 2003. New Museum, New York. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Gerry Bibby, Pacing Wall Progressing Columns (2013) Video Still. Performance Video. Performed at Kunsthalle Bremen 14th & 15th Sep. 21012 by Adam Linder & Gerry Bibby.. Courtesy the Artist and Silberkuppe
Andreas Angelidakis, Design for Frieze Projects 2013. Courtesy of the artist and The Breeder Gallery (Athens, Greece)
Angelo Plessas, Temple of Truth Tlatelolco. Courtesy of the artist
Josef Strau, Paperweight for the Arcadia Diary, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Vilma Gold, London
Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Why Should Our Bodies End At the Skin 2012. Video still. Image courtesy The Artist; Mary Mary, Glasgow
Frieze London is one of the most important art fairs worldwide; it always pursues new paths as a way of staying dynamic. Frieze has had Deutsche Bank as its partner since its second edition. As every year, Deutsche Bank will be present at the fair, with a lounge in which it will show works from its collection. This year, the focus is on the feminist postcard installation Woman to Go by Mathilde ter Heijne. For this project the Dutch artist, to whom an entire floor of the Deutsche Bank Towers is devoted, researched the biographies of around 300 forgotten women. They are artists, pirates or suffragettes who fell victim to male-dominated historiography. On the postcards, per Heijne combines their extraordinary biographies with historical portraits of unknown women. Visitors to the lounge are invited to take postcards with them, as a piece of history and as inspiration for the present. Special versions of the installation were also created for the ArtMag stands at the Frieze Art Fair and the Frieze Masters. Here too visitors can take postcards. At these stands, new subscribers to the magazine also receive a bag printed with a Woman to Go motif.The fair’s recipe for success includes setting standards not merely as a marketplace, but also as a cultural platform. Frieze has always been a fair for important collectors, but it’s also a public event that over 60,000 visitors now flock to each year. This year, the fair presents itself in Regent’s Park with even more space than before, in a new architectural setting designed by the London agency Carmody Groarke, which has been responsible for the design of the tents since 2011. Once again, over 150 international galleries are taking part. Among the new participants are big names like Blum & Poe (Los Angeles) and Max Hetzler (Berlin), as well as newcomers such as Rodeo of Istanbul, which has previously taken part in the young section Frame and is now conquering the main fair.Frieze Projects has always been one of the fair’s highlights. This year, curated by Nicola Lees, these commissioned works will be even more interdisciplinary in nature than before. Already as curator at the Serpentine Gallery alongside Hans-Ulrich Obrist, she encouraged artists to experiment with a wide variety of media. Now, Lees has invented a new format for Frieze: for the first time, invited artists present their works on a modular stage designed by Andreas Angelidakis that will change on a daily basis. Rivane Neuenschwander, whose works occupy an entire floor in the Deutsche Bank Towers in Frankfurt, includes the audience in her performance, playing off one of her most recent installations, The Conversation (2010), which was inspired by Coppola’s surveillance thriller of the same name. Gerry Bibby’s performance series is also based on the idea of participation. Here, however, the main roles are played by fair staff and a pile of oysters that are consumed. And in the work of Ken Okiishi, it’s robots that intermingle with the public.Only a few minutes away on foot from Frieze London, Frieze Masters shows art from antiquity to the 20th century—from a contemporary perspective. Deutsche Bank is also partner to this fair. Its extraordinary quality and unique mix of various epochs already met with overwhelmingly positive resonance last year. Once again, around 120 of the leading galleries and art traders worldwide will come to London. Here, too, the fascination derives from the relationship to contemporary art. This can be seen in the Frieze Masters Talks, in which artists like John Currin, Beatriz Milhazes, and Catherine Opie talk to directors and curators over the influence historical works have exerted on their art.Frieze London & Frieze Masters
October 17–20, 2013
Regent’s Park, London
In the most eagerly anticipated institutional show for quite some time, Sarah Lucas‘ YBA upbringing matures to form an important and ever-relevant legacy. All the usual features apply – the stuffed nylon tights, the breezeblock plinths – alongside the old guard that made her name – the two fried eggs, the bucket and cucumber. Lucas, as the self-styled bad girl of British art proves she’s still got it and in this case shows the next generation of DM wearing wanna-be-bad-girl-artists how to play with the big boys. Whitechapel disclaimer: ‘the exhibition contains sexually explicit materials and is not recommended for children’.
Click here to read Susanna Davies-Crook’s interview for Dazed Digital with Sarah Lucas and Has Ulrich Obrist.
Whitechapel Gallery, 2 October – 15 December 2013
FRIEZE ART FAIR
The indominable art fair of our time once again sprawls it’s stud-walled tendrils across Regent’s Park. The highlights this year are happening in parallel to the galleries’ booth presentations in the various curated Frieze programmes that seem to exponentially grow year on year. Within ‘Frieze Focus’ Omer Fast presents ‘Spam Atlas’, a new work which starts with an email describing a financial opportunity resulting from the death of a lonely but very wealthy person, next to Trevor Paglen’s ‘Non-functional Satellite’ that could be viewed from Earth as a flickering star or up close as a sail-like minimalist sculpture, created for the purpose of entering orbit then burning up without trace. In ‘Frieze Film’ Petra Cortright presents her internet-inspired, experimental software videos whilst over in ‘Frieze Masters’ Victoria Miro gallery lodges Alice Neel in the macho narrative of ‘master’ artists. In the section reserved for developing galleries, Pilvi Takala at Carlos Ishikawa London presents a project inspired by infiltrating ‘college moms’; the wives of faculty staff on US college campuses.
GCC are a collective founded in 2013 of artists that including the multi-talented musician and artist and Fatima Al Qadiri alongside Abdullah Al-Mutairi, Amal Khalaf, Aziz Al Qatami, Barrak Alzaid, Khalid al Gharaballi, Monira Al Qadiri, Nanu Al-Hamad and Sophia Al Maria. This exhibition acts as a fortification of their collaborative practice which first and foremost aims to ‘effect collaboration, transformation and inter-connection between Artists in all fields in order to achieve unity between them’. Drawing on diplomatic protocols, ceremonial pomp and accomplishments made during the GCC collective’s first meeting in Morschach, Switzerland. ‘this show represents the official Communiqué of the cooperative: a High Level Strategic Dialogue’.
During Frieze week, the exhibition will additionally be open Sunday and Monday, 20 – 21 October 2013 12:00 – 18:00 and by appointment.
Florence Peake, Michael Dean, Juliette Blightman and Rodney Graham
The gallery transforms from it’s daytime persona as the host of current Orpheus Twice exhibition into the setting for a performance of new work by 4 artists. Florence Peake presents a double duet new movement work followed by ‘an act’ by Michael Dean that poetically introduces itself, ‘How inanimate that alphabet. With the policy of its use in its face. A demonstration of the letter n for you. You user with your policies.’ Juliette Blightman presents a characteristically subtle new work ‘Between Acts’ and finally Rodney Graham plays his psychedelic ‘Softcore – More Solo Guitar Music for the Sex Scene, Zabriskie Point’.
In a week when the art world comes to town, it’s important to get some perspective. This talk investigates the roots, developments and outcomes of the term ‘post-internet’, drawing together Arcadia Missa’s Rozsa Farkas, artis tHarm van den Dorpel (who recreated the Game of Thrones throne in his berlin space amongst other things), Ben Vickers and editor of Mute Magazine Josephine Berry-Slater. A good line-up if you’re interested in unravelling the intricacies of the much-bandied, slippery and potentially soon to be canonised term ‘post-internet’ and further conceptualising the ‘post-net aesthetic’.
Bringing his blend of tech-pop, computer-game-fetishist music-heavy art to the ICA, Cory Arcangel presents a new ‘suite’ of piano compositions . Arcangel aficionados be not afeared, the music in question will be performed solo by John Reid on a Korg M1 electric piano, an instrument made famous by it’s late 80s influence on classic rave and trance. This event comprises part of the 25 frames season by Film & Video Umbrella.
In the tradition of the namesake day of the week, Sunday is a more chilled out affair, and an increasingly welcome and inspiring accompaniment to Frieze booth mania. Adding new blood and backbone to the Frieze train in it’s fourth incarnation, Sunday invites younger galleries which in turn means that for the most part the artists shown are ones to watch / next big things / bright young things. New this year are LA’s FreedmanFitzpatrick at only their second ever fair exhibiting Mathis Altmann & Lucie Stahl, and Berlin’s charge-leading Kraupa-Tuskany-Zeidler showing Dazed faves Katja Novitskova and Avery Singer.
Showing at London’s Ambika P3 17 – 20 October 2013
Andy Holden @ Zabludowicz Collection
Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity, 1999-2003: Towards a Unified Theory of MI!MS
The Music of MI!MS – a short lived art movement established by Holden during his teenage years in Bedford – will be performed, this time inviting The Grubby Mitts and Johnny Parry Orchestra to add their own spin on things. An experimental live set combine with video and spoken word in a half-remembered nostalgic investigation of irony, sincerity and teenage intellectual dilemmas oddly in tune with the zeitgeist of the time and America’s David Foster Wallace inspired ‘New Sincerity’. The event takes place alongside Andy Holden‘s room-filling three storey installation containing environments and assemblages of ephemera that influenced the artist as a teenager.
A bit of light entertainment infused with art intellectualism, this robot contest comprises one of the events leading up to Juneau Projects forthcoming exhibition ‘Welcome to Happy Redoubt’.Betting on a robot will result in (hopefully) winning tokens, which can then be later spent throughout November in the artist duos’ ‘interactive post-apocalyptic encampment’, inspired by sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson’s concept of the ‘infocalypse’. The installation will boast its own marketplace which will expose systems, create new mechanisms and challenge obsolescence.
Wednesday 16th October 8-9pm
This event is free and open to all but booking is required
Welcome to Happy Redoubt (6 November – 15 December 2013)
For his Frieze week solo exhibition, the French-born but Berlin-based enfant terrible of legendary beer-tower-sculpture fame pairs himself with another risk-taker of the avante-garde, colour field pioneer Morris Louis. Gaillard’s interventions in images from an archive of National Geographic catalogs refashioned into glueless wave collages, weave through a history of colour, representation and evolution. His bronze ‘Fence (after Owen Luder)’ security barrier exchanges knowing glances with Morris’ 1958 work ‘Beth Samach’. In dialogue with Morris, Gaillard investigates ruins and trace, disintegration and desolation.
Oct 15th – November 16th 2013
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THE AGE – NATIONAL
A woman poses for a photograph in front of artwork by Jeff Koons at the Frieze London art fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. Photo: Getty Images
A man admires a painting by Richard Phillips entitled ‘Sasha II’ in the Frieze London art fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. Photo: Getty Images
A visitor photographs part of Robert Pruitt’s “Safety Cones” at the Gavin Brown’s Enterprise from New York’s stand at the Frieze Art Fair in central London Photo: Reuters
Art dealers with the Galerie Sanct Lucas wait in their exhibition space in the Frieze Masters Art Fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. The annual Frieze Art Fair takes place in London’s Regent’s Park and runs from October 17 to 20. The exhibition comprises of the Frieze Masters exhibition and Frieze London which aim to showcase historic and established art as well as contemporary works. Photo: Getty Images
A woman views Ron Mueck’s artwork ‘Woman with Shopping’ at the Frieze London art fair. Photo: Getty Images
Members of the public admire Eduardo Basualdo’s artwork ‘TEORIA’ at the Frieze London art fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. The annual Frieze Art Fair takes place in London’s Regent’s Park and runs from October 17 to 20. The exhibition comprises of the Frieze Masters exhibition and Frieze London which aim to showcase historic and established art as well as contemporary works. Photo: Getty Images
A man admires artworks by David Shrigley in the Frieze London art fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. Photo: Getty Images
A man admires Jaume Plensa’s sculpture entitled ‘Chloe’ in Regent’s Park, which is part of the Frieze London art fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. The annual Frieze Art Fair takes place in London’s Regent’s Park and runs from October 17 to 20. Photo: Getty Images
A work entitled “He” by Danish artist Michael Elmgreen and Norwegian artist Ingar Dragset (Elmgreen and Dragset) is displayed at the Frieze London art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England, on October 16, 2013. Running from October 17-20, 2013, Photo: AFP
A woman talks on her phone as she stands near works entitled “Lounge Lover” by British artist Dee Ferris (L), “Nia” by Japanese artist Tomoaki Suzuki (C) and “Blue Milk” by Dee Ferris (R) at the Frieze London art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England Photo: AFP
A man looks at a piece by US artist Jeff Koons at the Frieze London art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England, on October 16, 2013. Photo: AFP
A woman looks confused as she looks at work by British artist David Shrigley entitled “A Burden” at the Frieze London art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England Photo: AFP
Visitors look at “Blue Skies” by late US artist Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Frieze Masters art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England, Photo: AFP
A 19th century Italian marble Vanitas is displayed at the Frieze Masters art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England. Photo: AFP
A visitor is pictured with work by artists Gerhard Richter “Funfzehn Farben (Fifteen colours)” (L) and John Chamberlain “Dearie Oso Enseau” during a private viewing of the Frieze Masters 2013 art fair in London. Photo: Reuters
A couple stand near a work entitle “Flat Tyre” by British artist Gavin Turk as they look at a work entitled “Flag I” by South African artist Willem Boshof is displayed at the Frieze London art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England, on October 16, 2013. Running from October 17-20, 2013, Frieze London features over 150 of the most exciting contemporary art galleries in the world. Photo: AFP
LONDON, ENGLAND – OCTOBER 16: An artwork by David Shrigley entitled ‘Untitled (look at this)’ is exhibited in the Frieze London art fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. The annual Frieze Art Fair takes place in London’s Regent’s Park and runs from October 17 to 20. The exhibition comprises of the Frieze Masters exhibition and Frieze London which aim to showcase historic and established art as well as contemporary works. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)
Don’t ask … Adrian Searle inside Judith Rubell’s Portrait of the Artist, 2013. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
I have had a tango alone in a darkened room with nothing but a portrait of Marilyn Monroe for company (this sort of thing I can do almost as well at home). I have tracked a pool of ink across nice grey floors, and almost been splatted by paintballs. I have eyed up a dangling noose, but it looks like someone else has already tried Elmgreen & Dragset‘s gibbet (the frayed rope lies useless on the floor). That was when I climbed back into the womb to try to escape, only to be pounced on by a gang of paparazzi. All this, and I’ve only been at Frieze for two hours. I do so love an art fair.
Once more into the killing fields! The artists represented by London’s Limoncello gallery hang around its stand, waiting for someone to chat them up, or possibly buy them. People are so much more fun than art – and by and large self-cleaning. Nearby, at Fluxia (over from Milan), puddles of black goo sit on the floor, with decorative bits of binbag and weeds mired in the stickiness. What would one do with these cowpat-sized objects? Or with the giant black foil rock that hangs from the ceiling of a Berlin stand? I guess you could position yourself under it, so it looks like a “thinks” bubble, to signal your bad mood.
Dunno, by Urs Fischer, 2012. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the GuardianAt Sadie Coles, Urs Fischer‘s giant fried egg lies on the carpet, perfectly cooked, but out of scale to any but the most gargantuan appetite (and everybody knows collectors only peck at things, their appetites reserved only for beefed-up art).
Art fairs may be all the same, filled with schlock, shiny things, grim things, and things that make you wonder why galleries across the globe bothered to drag them all the way here, but there’s always something to brighten your day as you wander the aisles. The 11th incarnation of Frieze is more manageable than most, with better lighting, wider aisles and a bigger spread of behemoth mega-galleries and startup spaces, young galleries and old lags. Not that the art is necessarily better, though the galleries seem to be trying harder this year.
Now for a nice lie down. In the Project Space, a fountain in the middle of a bed spouts black ink on to the white sheets, and on to the book being read aloud by Lili Reynaud-Dewar, nestling on the plumped-up pillows. It’s a dirty book anyway, In My Room by Guillaume Dustan, and as she reads the line, “I was lying on the bed jerking off, smoking a joint” in a delicate voice, the artist starts getting spattered, too. More ink leaks from the pump beneath the bed and oozes over my shoes. I like to get up close and personal at fairs. It’s the only way to focus.
Rather than the usual collection of cash-cow artists, Lisson shows a single work, a huge spiral Plexiglas corridor by veteran American artist Dan Graham. You wander in to the middle, view the passing crowds through the curving walls, then walk out again, refreshed. It is an oasis. Nearby, at Gavin Brown, two lovely nocturnal cityscapes by Alex Katz, with lit windows on a dark New York night, look over Rob Pruitt’s mad, humanoid fluorescent orange traffic cones. This is fun. Round the corner is another big Katz, of buildings in a blizzard. It is magical.
Cat on a Clothes Line (Yellow), by Jeff Koons, 1994-2001. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the GuardianFinding things that stop you in your tracks here is easy, but mostly for the wrong reasons. You tend to gawp, incredulous. There are a great many overblown stupidities here, the sort that only seem to come out at art fairs. You could count Jeff Koons‘s huge wrapped bouquet and his cute pussy-in-a-sock sculpture among these, though there are many who see his work as a Duchampian critique of excess.
Jennifer Rubell’s giant, reclining, all-white Portrait of the Artist has a large sculpted hollow for a womb. You can climb in and curl up, in full view of the passing trade. As a serious art critic, I felt it my duty to get on board. What would you do with a thing like this? Where would anyone keep it? Why? Do not ask.
On Juana de Aizpuru’s stand, Tania Bruguera has reproduced the infamous Nazi “Arbeit macht frei” sign from Auschwitz concentration camp. The original was stolen in 2009 (it has since been recovered). Bruguera’s copy leans in a corner, surrounded by metal-cutting tools. The artist wishes, apparently, to reference historical memory.
Never a great context for looking at anything, fairs are more and more the places where collectors congregate and buy. In an unfortunate juxtaposition, a drawing of a lemon by Mike Kelley hangs over the sign referencing the song by Led Zeppelin about squeezing my lemon till the juice runs down my leg. For some reason, all this upset me, but only for a moment. After a bit, you just stop caring.
Le Monde en Miniature et la Mode en Miniature, by Meschac Gaba, 2008. Photograph: S/arah Lee for the Guardian
What is the right context for Bruguera’s sign? Everything becomes a hostage to fortune here. You have to be open to the absurd. At Stevenson, from South Africa, Meschac Gaba shows an array of children’s clothes, all embroidered with volatile French words: Kalachnikov. Inceste. Pédophilie. Prison. Slavery. Sida (Aids). Terroriste. In part, this is a play on shop displays, and the kinds of signage kids all over the world wear on their clothing. But this is more about the signs people don’t wear. These words are labels that float about and sometimes stick.
You have to keep moving, stay a moving target. Swivel-eyed dealers wait to pounce. Here’s a Gerhard Richter, there’s a room of shouty Julian Schnabel paintings, now a sculpture of a squatting woman delivering a very small poo, by David Shrigley. And over there, a thing that looks like art but probably isn’t. This time next year, it will be forgotten, probably in a collector’s warehouse somewhere. At Laura Bartlett Gallery, gigantic currency notes lie framed on the floor. Mmmm, smell that money – but watch out for the cowpats.
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BLOOMBERG
Koons Leads $2 Billion Art-Market Test for Frieze Week
By Scott Reyburn – Oct 14, 2013 4:00 PM PT
London’s Frieze Week starts today with a record 10 fairs, about as many auctions and numerous dealer shows boosting the value of the art on sale to as much as $2 billion.
Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park opens to VIP visitors tomorrow and attracts billionaires looking for new art stars and established names. Among the 152 galleries taking part, Gagosian will be showing five large-scale works by Jeff Koons. The sister event, Frieze Masters, opens today with 130 dealers showing a contrasting range of modern and historic works.
“Sacred Heart (Blue/Magenta)” (1994 to 2007) by Jeff Koons. The stainless steel sculpture was made for the U.S.-based artist’s “Celebration” series. Source: Gagosian via Bloomberg
Lothar Schnepf/PAD London via Bloomberg
A sculpture of the ancient Egyptian goddess Bastet in the shape of a cat. Dating from about 600 BC, the bronze will be shown by Gordian Weber Kunsthandel, Germany, at the Pavilion of Art + Design in London, which previews on Oct. 15. Photographer: Lothar Schnepf/PAD London via Bloomberg
Robert Wedemeyer/Hauser & Wirth via Bloomberg
“SP246” (2013) by Sterling Ruby. The painting, spray paint on canvas, will be priced at $550,000 at the Hauser & Wirth booth during the Freize Art Fair at Regent’s Park. Photographer: Robert Wedemeyer/Hauser & Wirth via Bloomberg
FXP London 2013/David Zwirner via Bloomberg
“574#” (2013) by Oscar Murillo. The work, oil paint, oil stick, graphite and studio-dirt, will be shown, priced up to $150,000, at the David Zwirner booth during the Frieze Art Fair, which opens to VIP visitors on Oct. 16. Source: FXP London 2013/David Zwirner via Bloomberg
“The pace is non-stop,” New York-based art adviser Heather Flow said in an interview. “There are a lot of art fairs this week, though I’m not sure if too many good things to see is such a bad problem. The search for the next superstar is gathering momentum. Secondary market prices are astronomical.”
Frieze and its offshoots have grown into the biggest seven-day concentration of art-market events in any European capital. Also opening today are the Pavilion of Art + Design in Berkeley Square and the inaugural 1:54 fair of contemporary African art at Somerset House.
Starting tomorrow, Phillips, Sotheby’s (BID) and Christie’s International will be offering more than 900 works of postwar and contemporary art valued at as much as 152.9 million pounds ($245 million).
Balloon Dog
The Koons works at Gagosian’s Frieze booth include the stainless steel “Sacred Heart (Blue/Magenta), (1994-2007), part of the U.S.-based artist’s “Celebration” series. Gagosian never discloses prices to the media. A version of “Balloon Dog” from the series is estimated to sell for between $35 million and $55 million at Christie’s New York next month.
A recent painting by Colombian-born Oscar Murillo, priced at as much as $150,000, will be shown at Frieze by the New York-and London-based dealer David Zwirner.
Two years ago, paintings by Murillo, who has a London studio, could be bought for less than $3,000. He is now hailed by some as the new Jean-Michel Basquiat. One of his abstracts sold for a record $401,000 at Phillips New York on Sept. 19.
Hauser & Wirth will show U.S.-based Sterling Ruby’s 2013 spray paint-on-canvas “SP246,” priced at $550,000, typifying the upper price levels at a fair that specializes in works by younger, living artists. More valuable works by dead artists, stretching back to Old Masters and beyond, will be shown today at the second edition of Frieze Masters.
Old Master
The event has been bolstered by the arrival of heavyweight exhibitors such as the London-based Old Master specialist Johnny van Haeften, and New York’s Mnuchin and Dominique Levy galleries, who will bring big-ticket 20th-century classics.
“The fair has reinvigorated interest in people coming to London for this week,” says the dealer Thomas Dane, who is exhibiting at both Frieze events. “Masters is more of an adventure, and hopefully the connoisseurship we see at that event will spill over into Frieze.” He has a 1950s Lucian Freud drawing ofFrancis Bacon, priced at 1.3 million pounds.
The Pavilion of Art + Design London, a fair of 60 dealers held in a temporary structure near Claridge’s and the Connaught hotels, includes a white single-cut Lucio Fontana “Concetto Spaziale, Attesa,” priced at 6 million euros ($8.15 million) on the booth of the London dealer Ben Brown Fine Arts. Paris-based Galerie Applicat-Prazan will be showing a 1953 Pierre Soulages abstract at 3.5 million euros.
The main innovation of this year’s Frieze Week is the first 1:54 fair devoted to contemporary African art with 15 dealers.
The fair will include photographs by Angola’s Edson Chagas, who won the Golden Lion for his nation’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale in June. The London-based Jack Bell Gallery will be showing art made of weapons from the Mozambique civil war by Goncalo Mabunda. Prices for the artist range from 5,000 pounds to 14,000 pounds.
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Frieze art fair 2013: 10 things to see
From a retrospective by art’s king of pop, Jeff Koons, to a video laying bare the porn industry, via a collection of Matisse masterpieces, here’s what to seek out at Frieze
Pop star … Jeff Koons’s Sacred Heart (Blue/Magenta). Click to enlarge
1) Shiny happy people
No one sums up big-money art-fair glamour like Jeff Koons. The pop-art superstar and master of shiny surfaces shows key works from the last two decades here. Expect hisSacred Heart, wrapped in blue foil like a chocolate, and his Lobster, which masquerades as a party balloon. Frieze: Jeff Koons, Gagosian Gallery
2) 24 hours as a porn star
Omer Fast’s X-rated video Everything That Rises Must Converge is a must-see. It’s a bare-all look at the LA porn industry, showing 24 hours in the life of real porn stars. But Fast, who’s never one to keep things simple, has interwoven the sex with stories of illegal immigration and dinosaur egg theft. Frieze Focus: Omer Fast, Arratia Beer Gallery
3) The art of paintballing
Ken Okiishi’s paintballing should be the ultimate splatterfest: a carnival-style shooting gallery, with paint guns aimed at canvases. But instead of visitors having to put down their champagne and get their hands dirty, little remote controlled robots – pet-sized takes on drones, perhaps – will bomb their targets while filming, then mop up their own mess. Frieze Special Project: Ken Okiishi
4) Block party
The theme of this year’s Frieze special projects is “play” – and nothing says play likeJudy Chicago’s Rearrangeable Rainbow Blocks. An early work by the feminist art titan, these supersized building blocks are a prod at macho sculpture. It’s as if some toddler giant has left them in the sculpture park for other overgrown kids to experiment with. Frieze Sculpture Park: Judy Chicago
Detail from Pivi Takala’s Drive With Care
5) School of thought
Pilvi Takala’s video Drive With Care sees the Finnish artist go undercover in an elite US boarding school. What comes across is a Truman Show kind of existence: a self-contained world that the staff rarely leave, and where the “college moms” (faculty wives) spend their days power-walking the grounds. Frieze Frame and Emdash Award Winner: Pilvi Takala, Carlos Ishikawa Gallery
6) Cover to cover
Whether dancing through galleries naked and doused in paint or working in a glass room in a public park, Lili Reynaud-Dewar is ever the exhibitionist. Her Frieze installation turns an intimate bedroom setting into a public stage. Sitting in a bed gradually soaking herself in ink, she’ll be reading from her favourite autobiographies, including that of French author Marguerite Duras. Frieze Special Project: Lili Reynaud-Dewar
7) Game theory
The Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander once got a security firm to bug a gallery then tore up the walls and floors until she’d discovered the secret surveillance devices. For Frieze Projects, her version of Battleships continues the mind games, turning the traditional pastime into an interactive wall installation that visitors can rip through to uncover lurking vessels. Frieze Project: Rivane Neuenschwander
Henri Matisse’s Tête de jeune fille (1951)
8) Matisse’s many faces
If you wanted to make a noise at Frieze’s new Masters offshoot, you could scarcely do better than with Matisse. Portraits are the focus of this solo presentation of drawings, paintings and sculptures, which show off his virtuoso technical skills. There’s also the rare chance to see his early bronze nude Olga, with her ingeniously twisting form designed to be appreciated from any angle. Frieze Masters: Matisse, Thomas Gibson Fine Art Ltd
9) Requiem for a dream
In the glittery confines of an art fair it’s good to be reminded that culture is about more than cold hard cash. “How can art help people?” is a question that runs deep for Marcus Coates, the eccentric Brit known for his performances dressed as a shaman. A solo show features his standout film and audio work The Trip, created at St John’s Hospice, where he offered to realise a dying patient’s lifelong dream – and ended up travelling to the Amazon. Frieze: Marcus Coates, Kate MacGarry Gallery
10) Name’s not down, not coming in
Right outside the Frieze tent is a fitting location for Elmgreen & Dragset‘s sendup of hierarchy But I’m on the Guestlist Too!. It’s an oversized VIP glass door that stands alone like a magic portal to an enchanted land – and has its own real-life bouncer. Frieze Sculpture Park: Elmgreen & Dragset
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YAREAH
David Zwirner at Frieze & Frieze Masters 2013
Chris Ofili. Poolside (Crystal), 2012-2013. Oil on linen. 122 1/8 x 78 3/4 inches (310 x 200 cm).
David Zwirner will present a range of gallery artists at this year’s Frieze Art Fair (Booth C12). Highlights include the debut of two new paintings by Chris Ofili; works by Adel Abdessemed, whose solo exhibition at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar is on view through January; a painting and works on paper by Tomma Abts; a recent large-scale photograph by Stan Douglas; a concrete and steel sculpture by Isa Genzken, who is the subject of a major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York opening in November; a painting by Neo Rauch; a selection of works on paper by Raymond Pettibon, whose show To Wit is currently on view at David Zwirner, New York; large-scale photograms by Thomas Ruff; a new painting by Lisa Yuskavage; photographs by Christopher Williams, whose first American museum solo exhibition will open in 2014 at The Art Institute of Chicago and will travel to The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and a new work by Michael Riedel, made especially for the fair and installed on-site by the artist.
Also featured are new works by the Colombian-born, London-based artist, Oscar Murillo, who recently joined the gallery. He is also part of the fair’s Sculpture Park presentation which takes place in Regent’s Park. There he will debut social anomalies from a factory (2013), a sculpture comprised of a series of stainless steel fruit crates. The artist currently has a solo show at the South London Gallery, where he has also created a unique “lottery ticket” project, and winners will be chosen on Friday, October 18.
At Frieze Masters (Booth F11), David Zwirner will present key works by a selection of gallery artists and estates, including Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Gordon Matta-Clark, John McCracken, Fred Sandback, and Al Taylor, as well as Ad Reinhardt, whose work will be on view at the gallery’s new building on West 20th Street in New York in a show curated by Robert Storr featuring black paintings and cartoons; and early works by Yayoi Kusama, who will have her first show with David Zwirner (on West 19th Street in New York) in November, which will feature over 30 large-scale paintings and two infinity rooms. Also on view will be a seminal work by Gerhard Richter; an important painting by Martin Kippenberger along with a suite of “Hotel Drawings” by the artist from the 1980s through 1990s; a large-scale sculpture by John Chamberlain; an early Paßstück by Franz West; and a selection of early works by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Daniel Buren, Joseph Cornell, Konrad Klapheck, and Brice Marden.
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LUXURY
Work in progress: American artist Jennifer Rubell poses naked for a digital scanner when eight months pregnant to create a 25ft sculpture to be revealed at Frieze
Picture: Jennifer Rubell c/o Stephen Friedman Gallery
Jennifer Rubell ‘Portrait of the Artist’ 2013, steel-reinforced fibreglass, 257 x 719 x 285cm
Picture: Stephen White c/o Stephen Friedman Gallery
Left; ‘Portrait d’homme’ self portrait by Corneille de Lyon circa 1550. Right:’Le Peintre’ self portrait by Pablo Picasso, 1967.
Art Sales: Eyes of the world turn to London’s art fairs
As over £1 billion of art goes on sale at a variety of London art fairs including Frieze, Frieze Masters and PAD, Colin Gleadell picks out the highlights set to make headlines.
BY COLIN GLEADELL
OCTOBER 14, 2013 23:11
The original Frieze fair remains the big attraction, striving to enhance the visitor experience this year with less galleries, more public space, and smaller crowds through ticket restrictions
Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, 1966. Ben Brown Fine Arts
The tents are up, the stands are hung, and 350 international art dealers have been attending to last-minute niggles at London’s mega fairs – Frieze and Frieze Masters in Regent’s Park, and the Pavilion of Art & Design (PAD) in Berkeley Square – before they open this week. In addition to the £150 million of contemporary art on the auction block, they boast nearer £1 billion of art from all periods for sale.
In their wake, numerous other events for less expensive art are hoping to catch the attention. Last week, I highlighted the new 1:54 fair for African art. For serious talent-spotters, the small, select and free-entry Sunday Art Fairopposite Madame Tussaud, much favoured by cutting-edge collectors such as Anita Zabludowicz or David Roberts, is recommended.
For the streetwise, urban look, go to theMoniker Art Fair in Brick Lane, east London, which shares the cavernous Old Truman Brewery space this year with The Other Fair. For lower-priced prints and multiples by emerging and established artists, Multiplied, at Christie’s in South Kensington, is worth a trawl.
An avalanche of gallery openings includes three of the most sought-after young talent: British artist Hurvin Anderson, who fills both of Thomas Dane’s St James’s galleries with new work, and Americans Jeff Elrod at the Simon Lee gallery in Mayfair and Mark Bradford at the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey. The openings are not for buyers, though, as everything had been sold already.
The first fair to open its doors, for a select private view on Monday, PAD is perhaps more weighted towards design than art this year. But this allows the viewer space to focus on the art that is there. The modern, post-war era is best represented with an all-white Lucio Fontana painting with Ben Brown (€6 million), an architectural-looking abstract by Pierre Soulages with Galerie Applicat-Prazan (€3.5 million), and Christmas Eve, 1951, the largest early painting, 10 feet in length, by Patrick Heron ever on the market, for which London dealer Offer Waterman will ask a seven-figure sum.
Frieze Masters, which embraces the ancient and the modern, holds it private view this afternoon. Having been adjudged a success in its first year, it has attracted more exhibitors, notably Richard Green, whose range of stock has allowed him to meaningfully juxtapose pairs of still lifes, portraits and landscapes painted 400 years apart but resonating in a way that captures the spirit of the fair completely. The pairing of a 16th-century courtier by Corneille de Lyon with a late self-portrait as a courtly musketeer by Picasso, for instance, is inspired. The differential in prices (£950,000 for the de Lyon to £5.6 million for the Picasso) is not so much to do with size but the general disparity in value today between old and modern masters, says Jonathan Green.
One of Frieze Masters’ strengths is its single-artist displays. The Mnuchin Gallery from New York, for instance, is bringing an array of de Kooning paintings and sculptures priced from $1 million (£624,000) to $10 million.
Marlborough Contemporary artist Laurence Kavanagh is a fan of the late Victor Pasmore, so he has curated a display of Pasmore’s work (£10,000 to £100,000).
The original Frieze fair for new art, though, remains the big attraction, striving to enhance the visitor experience this year with less galleries, more public space, and smaller crowds through ticket restrictions. A new, child-friendly element seems to have crept in, with paintball machines making splattered paintings, a show curated by children who were given thousands of pounds to spend, and a multimedia playground for children and adults among the sponsored projects.
Bound to attract attention will be a self-portrait sculpture by US artist Jennifer Rubell, who posed naked for a digital scanner when eight months pregnant, reclining like the Velázquez Rockeby Venus. The scans have now been translated into a massive 25ft figure from which the womb has been removed leaving a cavity large enough for an adult to nestle in. The $200,000 interactive fibreglass sculpture, made in an edition of three, will occupy all of the Stephen Friedman gallery stand.
There might be a rush to the Spruth Magers stand for a new striped-wool work by Rosemarie Trockel, priced at €200,000. Trockel’s recent London show, with prices from €80,000 to €180,000, was a sell-out. But then again, with American debt suddenly threatening to destabilise the global economy, there might be no rush at all.
Albert Oehlen, ‘I 24’ (2011),Courtesy: Albert Oehlen & Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
Frieze Art Fair is kicking off on Wednesday (VIP Day) including a new curator, sponsor, fair design, and of course some new participating galleries.
Kendell Geers, ‘Country of my skull’ (2010), Goodman Gallery
Probably the most noticeable change this year is the layout of the art fair. Working with architects Carmody Groarke, Frieze London has been made over to give more space for visitors. This will make it much easier to view the featured artworks in comfort and enjoy the fair as much as possible.
Curating the fair this year will be Nicola Lees, who was also on the judging panel at this year’s Emdash Award. Lees has worked for the past five years as Senior Curator of Public Programmes at the Serpentine Gallery in London. She is taking over the role from Sarah McCrory who curated the fair from 2009-2012.
A new and exciting associate sponsor is joining Frieze – Alexander McQueen, who have always been committed to promoting contemporary art. Jonathan Akeroyd, CEO of Alexander McQueen remarked on the sponsorship: ‘Frieze brings together the most exciting galleries from around the globe and Alexander McQueen supports and shares their vision in making contemporary art more accessible and engaging for the public.’
Frieze is notoriously hard for new galleries to get involved with, so it’s a great honour for those who’ve managed it this year: Marian Goodman (New York); Galerie Max Hetzler (Berlin); Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg); Maccarone (New York); Overduin and Kite (Los Angeles); and Rodeo (Istanbul).
It’s the stuff of satire. An artist awarded a prestigious art prize by vowing to give her winnings to a group of strangers so that they can produce the work. Even better, the strangers should be aged between eight and 12. Better still, no one has any control as to what they might do with the £7,000 given them.
Yet that’s exactly what the creators of the Frieze Foundation’s Emdash Award decided to do when they gave the annual prize to artist Pilvi Takala earlier this summer, thus placing one of the art fair’s biggest site-specific commissions into the hands of a youth centre from Bow. The announcement may have raised a few eyebrows, but the fruit of Takala’s project, The Committee, is officially unveiled this week.
Takala, a slight 32-year-old with an asymmetric blonde fringe and the softest of voices, has a certain childishness about her that perhaps lessens the surprise of her commitment to the project. Originally from Finland, Takala splits her time between Amsterdam and Istanbul, and is known for an almost guerrilla approach to art that has found her gently shaking up “normal” codes of behaviour, using secretly filmed footage, hired actors and a lot of role play. In one of her earliest works, The Trainee, she got a job at Deloitte in Helsinki, only to film herself sitting motionless at her desk for a month. In Bag Lady, she wandered around a shopping precinct in Berlin with a transparent bag laden with cash to gauge how people would treat her: with caution, it transpired.
For her, the Emdash award has been a chance to steer a group of children towards a joint enterprise that could be both empowering and outside their normal artistic experience. “Of course, if they just wanted to buy several thousand pounds’ worth of balloons and fill a room with them, that would be fine,” she insisted when it was suggested that eight year olds might not be the most responsible curators on earth. “Or they might decide to put all the money towards buying a piece of work and hanging it up. And that would be fine, if that’s what they wanted to do. But you would hope, with a bit of encouragement in a workshop environment, and within a group, that they would realise they had more freedom.”
So far, so terribly liberal arts. But there’s something rather brilliant in hearing Takala’s earliest interviews with the young team tasked with the project. “We couldn’t buy a house or a building,” explains young Kacey, “because we’d have to share it… and besides, we wouldn’t have enough money.” Another little boy tells her that he’ll “spend the money on a holiday to Jamaica”. A third suggests buying a giant skip and making a swimming pool.
So, what they did spend it on? The children will reveal all this Saturday. In the meantime, you can follow the countdown at The-committee.org.
Written by Jo Ellison
Day One: Cyprien Gaillard
The nomadic French artist Cyprien Gaillard makes a well-timed debut tomorrow as his first London solo show, From Wings to Fins, opens its doors a day before the VIP launch of Frieze Art Fair. With Miuccia Prada, Phoebe Philo and François Pinault on the guestlist of friends and supporters attending this evening’s private view, the unveiling is set to be much more than a warm-up act where critics and collectors are concerned. At just 33, Gaillard arrives fresh from his large-scale exhibition at MoMA’s PS1 gallery in his current hometown, New York – a show that saw him fast-tracked from talented émigré to bankable favourite of the NY art establishment.
Getting up to meet me, he is anything but straight-faced – the famous birthmark that drifts over his right cheek is set within a suntanned complexion. But if the tagline “retrospective” or the attention that hangs over his conspicuously good looks had begun to get on his nerves, this latest smaller show shifts the focus back on to all-new works.
“Come and have a look at this” – he leads me, still smiling, into the semi-private attic room and taps the eyepiece of an antique telescope. I find myself on tiptoe, spying on an empty bottle of rum planted atop the neighbouring office building, almost the unwitting participant in a magician’s trick.
Downstairs, Gaillard’s not-so-everyday observations (spreads of retroNational Geographic magazines assembled into 3D tension collages) are displayed alongside paintings by the deceased painter Morris Louis, whose stained canvasses dominate the elegant shop front of the Dover Street space. His admiration for Louis’ home city of Baltimore and paint-pouring technique lay the common ground for this posthumous co-habitation: the American worked on bended knee to penetrate untreated canvases with streams of colour, while the Frenchman’s fieldwork saw him crouched at road level on Baltimore’s deserted streets, taking rubbings of drain covers.
This is nevertheless a Cyprien Gaillard show. “From the street you will be able to see this” – he peels the dustsheets off a life-size replica of spiked fencing used to ward off trespassers he “acquired – no, saved” from the wreckage of the Trinity Square car park in Gateshead. I’m elbowed with a reminder that the original piece played a starring role in the 1971 film Get Carter, which is typical of Gaillard’s talent for monkeying around the overlooked corners of the civilized world in the process of producing serious work. On another wall is a further clue to his current favourite place – a photograph of a dilapidated bench, dedicated to “BALTIMORE. The Greatest City in America”. Pulling the doors closed on the old-fashioned lift, he tells me through the metal gate that he is, however, “happiest on the road”, which will only add to the excitement surroundingFrom Wings to Fins. Catch Cyprien Gaillard while he is in town.
Cyprien Gaillard, “From Wings to Fins”, October 15 to November 16, 2013 at Sprüeth Magers London, Spruethmagers.com
With Stephen Shore talking, Meredith Monk performing, and Ken Okiishi paintballing, this year’s Frieze London is not to be missed. In its 11th edition, Frieze London gathers 150 galleries and works by over 1,000 contemporary artists in Regent’s Park. This year promises a new, more spacious layout and an exciting programme of site-specific installations, talks, films and the nearby Sculpture Park.
1. What? When? Where? How?
Frieze London is an art fair dedicated to contemporary art with a special emphasis on living artists. With a prime location in London’s Regent’s Park, the fair takes place October 17 through Sunday, October 20, 2013. Tickets are limited and must be purchased in advance online or by phone. Buy your tickets here. If you plan to visit both Frieze London and Frieze Masters, save by purchasing a combined ticket.
2. Main, Focus, and Frame
While the fair is limited to contemporary art, it’s split further into three sections: a main section with traditional gallery booths and two additional sections that are more limited in scope. Focus includes galleries that have opened since 2001 and have proposed a project specifically for this year’s fair.Frame includes galleries that have been open for under eight years, who will dedicate their booths to solo artist presentations.
3. Alexander McQueen joins Frieze team!
While 2013 marks the tenth year of sponsorship by Deutsche Bank, Frieze’s official sponsor, this year Frieze London engaged a new associate sponsor, Alexander McQueen. As part of the sponsorship London’s Alexander McQueen stores will house exhibitions of contemporary art curated by gallery owner and director, Sadie Coles. (Hear from Coles herself about the project here.)
4. Frieze food
Frieze London offers a variety of fine and informal dining options at the fair site. Formal sit-down options include:Arnold & Henderson’s Rochelle Canteen, where guests can enjoy breakfast lunch and dinner as well as a full bar and wine list; Mark Hix, which offers classic British fare and signature dishes as well as oysters and Mark’s own smoked salmon;Caravan, new to the fair, offers fresh, seasonal options and a brunch menu.
Informal and to-go options include: Gail Bakery for coffee, pastries, sandwiches, and salads; La Grotta Ices for ice cream made from fresh, local ingredients in artist-inspired flavors;Moshi Moshi for sushi; Coming Soon Coffee for you art fair caffeine fix. Additionally, Pizza Pilgrims, Pitt Cue, and Yum Bun will be on hand for all comfort food cravings.
5. Frieze Projects
Seven Frieze Projects, specially commissioned works to be included in the fair, have been assigned to seven artists, and will be presented together within Frieze London. The projects are curated by 2013 Frieze London curator Nicola Lees. The projects include:
Andreas AngelidakisAngelidakis was commissioned to create a custom pavilion to house the 2013 Frieze Project activities. Angelidakis’s construction, an island-like platform within the fair space, provides partitions and display surfaces for fellow projects. The work is an assemblage of white block-like modules, at once paying homage to and deconstructing the white cube.
Gerry BibbyAfter discovering fragments of oyster shells in the earth at Regent’s Park the Australian artist chose to investigate London’s historical relationship with oysters through a series of performances. A pre-fair performance includes art fair workers eating oysters and leaving piles of oyster shells scattered around the exhibition space. A second performance will last the duration of the fair’s second day and involves collaboration with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, an Amsterdam-based performance platform.
Rivane NeuenschwanderNeuenschwander contributes motivated by her previous work The Conversation(2010). Inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 psychological thriller of the same name, the 2010 iteration included a gallery space filled with spying devices. Learn morehere.
Ken OkiishiOkiishi’s project is contained within a space with acrylic glass, transparent walls within which he will employ paintballing to create a series of abstract paintings. Additionally, his project will include a participatory performance during the fair, involving humans and robots.
Lili Reynaud-DewarReynaud-Dewar’s project coincides with her commitment to only create bedroom pieces in 2013; thus she presents a bedroom installation. She will examine the works of writers who use their own lives as the subject of their work, including Guillaume Dustan’s Dans Ma Chambre (In My Room, 1996).
Josef StrauJosef Strau presents a new series of “Letter Tunnels,” the artist’s interactive letter-shaped structures. Fair-goers are invited to sit on and crawl into the tunnels, where they will encounter audio-, text-, and object-based installations.
Family Space: Angelo PlessasFor his Frieze Project, Greek artist Angelo Plessas has designed the fair’s Family Space, a first for the fair. The space, titled “The Temple of Play”, is a free, creative playground which will include a schedule of programming including games, performances, and screenings.
6. The Emdash Award: Pilvi TakalaThe Emdash Award funds an emerging artist from outside the UK to create a custom project for Frieze London each year. Finnish artist Pilvi Takala, the winner of this year’s Emdash Award, chose to involve a group of children in the planning and execution of her project. After selecting several children around the age of 12, Takala will put together workshops during the three months before the fair where they will devise a plan for the project. The artists hopes to demonstrate the potential for children to work collaboratively and as equals. (Learn more inthis interview with Takala.)
7. Frieze Talks
A daily schedule of lectures, panels, and discussions are presented, covering a variety of relevant issues. This year’s talks include:
Sexuality, Politics and ProtestFriday 18 October: 1.30pm
Neil Bartlett (Theatre Director, Author and Performer, Brighton), Marlene McCarty (Artist, New York), Zanele Muholi (Photographer, Johannesburg), Chair: Jennifer Kabat (Writer, New York)
Participants discuss the impact and legacy of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Gran Fury (artist/activist group) and queer activism, on contemporary art today, 20 years since their beginnings.
Stephen Shore in conversation with David CampanySaturday 19 October: 5pm
Stephen Shore, known for his photographs of Warhol’s Factory, spent his career experimenting with color photography, beginning at a time when it was frowned upon by the art world. Shore discusses the trajectory of his work over the past 40 years with David Campany (Writer, Curator and Artist, London).
Jérôme Bel in conversation with Catherine WoodSunday 20 October: 1pm
Choreographer Jérôme Bel joins Catherine Wood (Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance, Tate Modern, London) to discuss the potential for curating within his work, particularly his dOCUMENTA(13) piece Disabled Theater, which was performed by professional actors with learning disabilities.
MacArthur “Genius” Award winner Meredith Monk has been performing interdisciplinary works of music, theater, and dance since the mid-1960s. On October 15th at 8pm Frieze presents Meredith Monk with Katie Geissinger in Concert, at Cecil Sharp House. Monk’s first performance in London in nine years, she will perform with Geissinger, whom she’s been touring with since 1990. In addition, Monk will give a talk at the fair on Thursday, October 17, at 5pm to discuss her inventive performance work and her investigations into the human voice.
9. Frieze Film
Frieze offers an exclusive programme of five new artist films, which are co-curated by Nicola Lees (Frieze Foundation) and Victoria Brooks (EMPAC). Artists presenting films this year are Petra Cortright, Peter Gidal, Patricia Lennox-Boyd,Oraib Toukan and Erika Vogt. Accompanying the films are a think-tank and a panel discussion to consider the commissioning of artist films.
Photograph by Lyndon Douglas, courtesy of Lyndon Douglas/ Frieze; Commissioned and produced by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Projects 2012, Frieze London 2012, photograph by Polly Braden Courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze, photograph by Polly Braden, courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze; Frieze Talks 2012, Frieze London, photograph by Polly Braden, courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze.
With Stephen Shore talking, Meredith Monk performing, and Ken Okiishi paintballing, this year’s Frieze London is not to be missed. In its 11th edition, Frieze London gathers 150 galleries and works by over 1,000 contemporary artists in Regent’s Park. This year promises a new, more spacious layout and an exciting programme of site-specific installations, talks, films and the nearby Sculpture Park.
1. What? When? Where? How?
Frieze London is an art fair dedicated to contemporary art with a special emphasis on living artists. With a prime location in London’s Regent’s Park, the fair takes place October 17 through Sunday, October 20, 2013. Tickets are limited and must be purchased in advance online or by phone. Buy your tickets here. If you plan to visit both Frieze London and Frieze Masters, save by purchasing a combined ticket.
2. Main, Focus, and Frame
While the fair is limited to contemporary art, it’s split further into three sections: a main section with traditional gallery booths and two additional sections that are more limited in scope. Focus includes galleries that have opened since 2001 and have proposed a project specifically for this year’s fair.Frame includes galleries that have been open for under eight years, who will dedicate their booths to solo artist presentations.
3. Alexander McQueen joins Frieze team!
While 2013 marks the tenth year of sponsorship by Deutsche Bank, Frieze’s official sponsor, this year Frieze London engaged a new associate sponsor, Alexander McQueen. As part of the sponsorship London’s Alexander McQueen stores will house exhibitions of contemporary art curated by gallery owner and director, Sadie Coles. (Hear from Coles herself about the project here.)
4. Frieze food
Frieze London offers a variety of fine and informal dining options at the fair site. Formal sit-down options include:Arnold & Henderson’s Rochelle Canteen, where guests can enjoy breakfast lunch and dinner as well as a full bar and wine list; Mark Hix, which offers classic British fare and signature dishes as well as oysters and Mark’s own smoked salmon;Caravan, new to the fair, offers fresh, seasonal options and a brunch menu.
Informal and to-go options include: Gail Bakery for coffee, pastries, sandwiches, and salads; La Grotta Ices for ice cream made from fresh, local ingredients in artist-inspired flavors;Moshi Moshi for sushi; Coming Soon Coffee for you art fair caffeine fix. Additionally, Pizza Pilgrims, Pitt Cue, and Yum Bun will be on hand for all comfort food cravings.
5. Frieze Projects
Seven Frieze Projects, specially commissioned works to be included in the fair, have been assigned to seven artists, and will be presented together within Frieze London. The projects are curated by 2013 Frieze London curator Nicola Lees. The projects include:
Andreas AngelidakisAngelidakis was commissioned to create a custom pavilion to house the 2013 Frieze Project activities. Angelidakis’s construction, an island-like platform within the fair space, provides partitions and display surfaces for fellow projects. The work is an assemblage of white block-like modules, at once paying homage to and deconstructing the white cube.
Gerry BibbyAfter discovering fragments of oyster shells in the earth at Regent’s Park the Australian artist chose to investigate London’s historical relationship with oysters through a series of performances. A pre-fair performance includes art fair workers eating oysters and leaving piles of oyster shells scattered around the exhibition space. A second performance will last the duration of the fair’s second day and involves collaboration with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, an Amsterdam-based performance platform.
Rivane NeuenschwanderNeuenschwander contributes motivated by her previous work The Conversation(2010). Inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 psychological thriller of the same name, the 2010 iteration included a gallery space filled with spying devices. Learn morehere.
Ken OkiishiOkiishi’s project is contained within a space with acrylic glass, transparent walls within which he will employ paintballing to create a series of abstract paintings. Additionally, his project will include a participatory performance during the fair, involving humans and robots.
Lili Reynaud-DewarReynaud-Dewar’s project coincides with her commitment to only create bedroom pieces in 2013; thus she presents a bedroom installation. She will examine the works of writers who use their own lives as the subject of their work, including Guillaume Dustan’s Dans Ma Chambre (In My Room, 1996).
Josef StrauJosef Strau presents a new series of “Letter Tunnels,” the artist’s interactive letter-shaped structures. Fair-goers are invited to sit on and crawl into the tunnels, where they will encounter audio-, text-, and object-based installations.
Family Space: Angelo PlessasFor his Frieze Project, Greek artist Angelo Plessas has designed the fair’s Family Space, a first for the fair. The space, titled “The Temple of Play”, is a free, creative playground which will include a schedule of programming including games, performances, and screenings.
6. The Emdash Award: Pilvi TakalaThe Emdash Award funds an emerging artist from outside the UK to create a custom project for Frieze London each year. Finnish artist Pilvi Takala, the winner of this year’s Emdash Award, chose to involve a group of children in the planning and execution of her project. After selecting several children around the age of 12, Takala will put together workshops during the three months before the fair where they will devise a plan for the project. The artists hopes to demonstrate the potential for children to work collaboratively and as equals. (Learn more inthis interview with Takala.)
7. Frieze Talks
A daily schedule of lectures, panels, and discussions are presented, covering a variety of relevant issues. This year’s talks include:
Sexuality, Politics and ProtestFriday 18 October: 1.30pm
Neil Bartlett (Theatre Director, Author and Performer, Brighton), Marlene McCarty (Artist, New York), Zanele Muholi (Photographer, Johannesburg), Chair: Jennifer Kabat (Writer, New York)
Participants discuss the impact and legacy of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Gran Fury (artist/activist group) and queer activism, on contemporary art today, 20 years since their beginnings.
Stephen Shore in conversation with David CampanySaturday 19 October: 5pm
Stephen Shore, known for his photographs of Warhol’s Factory, spent his career experimenting with color photography, beginning at a time when it was frowned upon by the art world. Shore discusses the trajectory of his work over the past 40 years with David Campany (Writer, Curator and Artist, London).
Jérôme Bel in conversation with Catherine WoodSunday 20 October: 1pm
Choreographer Jérôme Bel joins Catherine Wood (Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance, Tate Modern, London) to discuss the potential for curating within his work, particularly his dOCUMENTA(13) piece Disabled Theater, which was performed by professional actors with learning disabilities.
MacArthur “Genius” Award winner Meredith Monk has been performing interdisciplinary works of music, theater, and dance since the mid-1960s. On October 15th at 8pm Frieze presents Meredith Monk with Katie Geissinger in Concert, at Cecil Sharp House. Monk’s first performance in London in nine years, she will perform with Geissinger, whom she’s been touring with since 1990. In addition, Monk will give a talk at the fair on Thursday, October 17, at 5pm to discuss her inventive performance work and her investigations into the human voice.
9. Frieze Film
Frieze offers an exclusive programme of five new artist films, which are co-curated by Nicola Lees (Frieze Foundation) and Victoria Brooks (EMPAC). Artists presenting films this year are Petra Cortright, Peter Gidal, Patricia Lennox-Boyd,Oraib Toukan and Erika Vogt. Accompanying the films are a think-tank and a panel discussion to consider the commissioning of artist films.
Photograph by Lyndon Douglas, courtesy of Lyndon Douglas/ Frieze; Commissioned and produced by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Projects 2012, Frieze London 2012, photograph by Polly Braden Courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze, photograph by Polly Braden, courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze; Frieze Talks 2012, Frieze London, photograph by Polly Braden, courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze.
The night before the first Frieze Art Fair opened in London’s Regent’s Park in 2003, co-founder Matthew Slotover had a terrifying dream. Instead of a large white minimalist tent, housing dozens of international galleries, he arrived at the fair to find a big-top circus tent. Instead of clean, smooth flooring, there was grass.
The nightmare is telling because art fairs are so often referred to as circuses, garish horror shows of conspicuous consumption. This year, 152 galleries will rent a booth at Frieze and display their wares: artworks created since the year 2000, ranging from traditional paintings to crazy installations that challenge the bounds of what art can be. Rather than the cool Zen of the White Cube, the aisles of the fair are harshly lit and crowded. And the impetus is on selling.
Gallerists will hope to woo the mink-wearing, spike-heeled, yacht-owning international elite into buying a Richter or a Hockney. These oligarchs and technocrats and popstars might simply want a painting that matches their kitchen décor. In this way, the fair is a bit like a giant Ikea where nothing is remotely practical or affordable. Alternately, they might want a sculpture that speaks of the bitter existential nothingness of contemporary life. At Frieze, they can have both.
Why do people buy art? For the rush of acquisition? The pleasure of exercising good taste? Maybe. But they also want a piece of that ephemeral, fiery thing – the force that goes into the creation of a work of art, the power that separates artists from us mere mortals. Inspiration? Genius? The heavenly muse, bottled? It is the quasi-mystical quality of the work of art that persuades collectors to splash the cash. The idea of purchasing meaning rather more than another boring old Bentleys to block up the drive. Plus art can be a really good investment – not that I know from firsthand experience; I’ve never been able to afford it.
Last year, Frieze Masters opened for the first time alongside Frieze London. Frieze Masters sells work from the classical age to the year 2000, featuring 130 galleries. Unlike other fustily traditional fairs around Europe, it seeks to explore the old through the lens of the new. “No one had done this before,” Victoria Siddall, director of Frieze Masters, tells me. “It was incredibly well-received.” Indeed, it was – a huge success with an emphasis on elegant, contemporary curation. The number of galleries wishing to participate in Frieze Masters has doubled this year.
Siddall is particularly excited about a series of Matisse ink drawings from Thomas Gibson Fine Art and erotic Japanese prints from Sebastian Izzard. While the term “Masters” may evoke all that is elitist and exclusionary about art history, pointing to the dominance of dead, white, male artists, 50 per cent of the artists represented in the Spotlight section will be either female or non-Western.
Victoria Miro will be showing an enigmatic range of paintings by the American artist Alice Neel (1907-1984). Overlooked for much of her career, Neel was a committed Leftist and painted street scenes of depression-blighted New York as part of the WPA government-relief programme in the 1930s. She was an important figurative painter, lost amidst a generation of masculine Abstract Expressionists, and rediscovered by the women’s movement in the 1970s. Particularly intriguing is Mimi (1955), an oil on canvas of a woman with smudged, hollow eyes wearing a sunny yellow pencil skirt. The painting is characteristic of Neel’s ghoulish eloquence as a portraitist.
‘The Adorationof the Cage-Fighters’ (2011) by Grayson Perry
LA gallery Blum and Poe will be showing a sculpture called Centred Infinity (1992) by Japanese artist Kishio Suga. Comprised of a metal cross on a wooden board splattered with blue paint, the work is characteristic of the Mono-ha art movement, which rejected the idea of creation in favour of blunt materialism. Blum and Poe will also be returning to Frieze London after an eight-year break, one of a wave of big US galleries attracted to the city’s ever-expanding art scene. Marian Goodman, doyenne of New York contemporary art, will be returning after four years, ahead of the opening of her new gallery in Mayfair’s Golden Square.
Goodman’s booth at Frieze New York earlier this year was acclaimed for housing not paintings on makeshift walls but a “constructed situation” by British-German Turner Prize nominated artist Tino Sehgal, in which a young girl recited Heidegger. Visitors were enthralled. Frieze New York opened on Randall Island for the first time last year, and was deemed a huge success. As Slotover told me on the phone, “London is being seen more and more as a very important art centre.”
But what of the recession? According to Slotover, who also founded Frieze magazine in 1991, along with his business partner Amanda Sharp, “the art world has not been as badly hit as people expected”. While sales are less extravagant than the 2006 “bubble period”, “we haven’t seen the kind of swathes of gallery closures that some people predicted”. It is the high-end galleries that have continued to prosper. Like the rest of the society, “the rich have got a lot richer”.
Fine art: Romano Alberti da San Sepolcro’s kneeling candlesticks
What kind of sales are they expecting this year? Siddall explains that most galleries are “very discreet” about figures. Many sales are completed post-fair. However, she can tell me that a Miró went for $20 million last year, and a Picasso for $9 million. “I love the fact that we can organise a really successful commercial event but also cultural events as well,” she says. Many of the artworks will be moving from one private collection into another so Frieze is an opportunity to see them – briefly – on display.
Indeed, most of the 60,000 visitors who go to Frieze each year are members of the public who simply want to see the art. Despite the cattle-market ambience, the fair is about creativity as much as commerce. Due to popular demand, Slotover tells me that they had to cut the number of tickets on sale this year by 25 per cent so that the fair will be less crowded. “Anyone who’s been to the fair will walk in this year and see a huge change,” he says. There is more public space. “It’s a much cleaner, more even environment.”
The phenomenon of the art fair has expanded alongside the biennale since the globalisation of the art market in the 1980s. Fairs are distinct from biennales because you can buy art on the spot. And it’s not all for oligarchs. East End gallery Limoncello will be exhibiting at Focus, a section of the fair dedicated to young galleries. While artists are often absent from fairs, allowing their dealers to do the work of selling, Jack Strange, Jesse Wine, and Sean Edwards will all be present, sitting at a round table ready to discuss their work with prospective clients.
Projects specially commissioned to run throughout the week serve to enhance the atmosphere of a festival that Slotover and Sharp intended. These include a film by exciting young LA artist Petra Cortright, member of The Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club. Cortright’s webcam videos have been called “glitch art”: work that uses the internet and embraces the faults and failures of software. Slotover cites this kind of “post-internet art” as one of the predominant trends of new work at the fair. New York artist Patricia Lennox-Boyd’s film will focus on the use of hands in the on-screen marketing of consumer goods. It will “touching”: literally, about touch.
Like the great patrons of the Renaissance, Frieze sponsors talent in a way that can’t be viewed too cynically. Finnish artist Pilvi Takala has won this year’s Emdash Prize for emerging artists living outside the UK. Contrary to the fair’s spirit of acquisition, she handed £7,000 of the £10,000 award over to a group of 12-year-olds from a Hackney Youth Club and let them decide how to spend the money. Takala has guided the kids during workshops over the past few months. Is this a Lord of the Flies in the making? Or democratic decision-making that would put adults to shame? The results are top-secret for now, but will be revealed at the fair.
Takala is interested in “questions of value”. While the kids are mostly oblivious to the value of so much money, the fair is about “symbolic value” as much as wealth. Rather than buying and thereby possessing art as a precious object – an expensive painting or sculpture – Takala tells me that some collectors are now investing in more ephemeral art forms such as video by funding its production process. In this way, collectors feel as though they are supporting artists while eschewing more traditional notions of property. This seems to be art patronage at its best.
Frieze encourages both raw capitalism and raw art. For Slotover, “the art market allows small producers to make a living. All art exists somewhere along the spectrum of critical value and monetary value.” This is true, but where’s the conflict? “I don’t see it as a conflict at all,” he says.
Frieze Week 2013: How to make the most of it
By Alice Jones
Be adventurous
Rooftops, tunnels and car parks have all been popular venues in past Frieze weeks. This year’s non-traditional space sensation is set to be 180 The Strand, a Brutalist block-turned-arts- hub. During Frieze week it will host two ambitious shows. The Moving Museum’s Open Heart Surgery will let 31 young London artists – including James Balmforth, Shezad Dawood and Lucky PDF – run amok in 25,000sqft of former office space (12 October-15 December; themovingmuseum.com). The basement will house BRUTAL. For the past three years Steve Lazarides has staged his free street art extravaganzas in the Old Vic Tunnels, now closed. This show, featuring graffiti from Pose, photographs of LA gangs from Esteven Oriol and new work from Mark Jenkins, Antony Micallef and Doug Foster, promises to be just as dark (15-27 October; lazinc.com).
For more urban grit, Big Deal No 5, a non-profit show of up-and-coming artists will be held on Level 3 of a multi-storey car park just off Oxford St (18-20 October; deal-big.biz).
Remember there are other fairs
Frieze has seen various satellite fairs come and go over the past decade. Strarta is the young pretender for 2013 – up and running at the Saatchi Gallery and featuring 30 international galleries with work ranging from £250 to £250,000 (To 13 October; strarta.com). PAD continues to cater to the luxury end of the market with a marquee crammed full of Picassos, Kandinskys and champagne on Berkeley Square (16-20 October; pad-fairs.com). The Other Art Fair shows 100 of the best unsigned artists as selected by a panel including Yinka Shonibare, director of the Saatchi Gallery Rebecca Wilson and founder of Paradise Row, Nick Hackworth. This year it shares a venue, The Old Truman Brewery, with the urban art fair Moniker who will show work from Shepard Fairey and D*Face among others (17-20 October; theotherartfair.com; monikerartfair.com). Sunday Art Fair returns to Ambika P3 for a fourth year with a credible line-up of 22 young galleries from Berlin, London and New York (17-20 October; sunday-fair.com). Finally, The Animal Art Fair, opens a pop-up at 273 Fulham Road for all your gorilla etching and duck sculpture needs (14-19 October; animalartfair.com).
Get outside
Just a few minutes’ walk across Regent’s Park, the Frieze Sculpture Park provides a breather from the commercial and celebrity frenzy of the main fairs and, unlike them, is free to the public. This year it has work by Yinka Shonibare and David Shrigley. There will be one of Rachel Whiteread’s sheds and photo opportunities to be had with Elmgreen & Dragset’s But I’m on the Guest List, Too! an oversized VIP door that leads nowhere but is guarded by a bouncer.
Book in for a blockbuster
As usual, London’s galleries and museums are bringing out the big guns for Frieze week. Tate Modern is staging the UK’s largest Paul Klee retrospective in a decade, which will draw fans of Bauhaus and colour (16 October- 9 March 2014; tate.org.uk). Dulwich Picture Gallery is catering to the influx of foreign collectors with An American in London: Whistler and The Thames, a wide-ranging survey of the artist’s time in the city with paintings and drawings of Wapping, Chelsea and Battersea Bridge (16 October-12 January, 2014; dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk). And treasure can be found at the British Museum, whose exhibition Beyond El Dorado: Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia will dazzle with 300 exquisite objects from South America’s lost city of gold (17 October-23 March, 2014; britishmuseum.org).
Watch out for artists doing odd things
Frieze week is prime time for artists to experiment. The Chapman Brothers will showcase their musical talents with a gig at Fabric. Dinos’s audiovisual project, Luftbobler, will make its UK debut, supported by brother Jake’s band, Heimlich, and Jarvis Cocker will be manning the decks (17 October; fabriclondon.com). Aslı Çavusoglu will screen a three-part crime drama, Murder in Three Acts, that she shot at last year’s Frieze Art Fair (Delfina Foundation; to 25 October; delfinafoundation.com), while Rodney Graham will play psychedelic guitar at David Roberts Art Foundation (17 October, davidrobertsartfoundation.com). And at The Serpentine, Carsten Höller is among the artists taking part in the gallery’s 89plus Marathon, a two-day festival of ideas. As the first public event to take place in the Sackler Gallery, it’s a good excuse to have a poke around Zaha Hadid’s newest building, too (18-19 October; serpentinegallery.org).
Go for a group show
Try a group show at a commercial gallery for a fair experience in miniature. Gagosian’s The Show is Over will examine “the end of painting” via Fontana’s slashed canvases, Richter’s Grey paintings and pieces by Lichenstein, Warhol and Yves Klein (15 October-13 November; gagosian.com). Thirteen at Alan Cristea Gallery will show brand new work from an impressive stable including Gillian Ayres, Michael Craig-Martin and Julian Opie (To 9 November; alancristea.com). And at The Dairy, Ai Weiwei, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman and Julian Schnabel are among the artists meditating on Aldous Huxley’s utopian last novel, Island (To 8 December; dairyartcentre.org.uk).
Get involved
Frieze week is as much about the art as it is about the art world making a spectacle of itself. As such, there are ample opportunities to become part of the art, should you wish. Stuart Semple has taken over a £14million townhouse by Regent’s Park for his show Suspend Disbelief. Among the works spread over four floors will be an installation of smiley clouds and a giant bouncy castle room (16-21 October; stuartsemple.com). At Frieze itself, several commissioned projects will be interactive, including a game of Battleships using fair visitors and a piece by Ken Okiishi that will examine the “poetic potential of paintball”. Representing Southard Reid Gallery in the Frame section of the fair, the London artist Prem Sahib will open a Soho nightclub. Elsewhere, The Other Art Fair will hold free taxidermy demonstrations for Polly Morgan wannabes (17 -19 October; theotherartfair.com).
Keep an eye on the auctions
Canny art lovers know that auction houses are the place to go for close encounters with modern masterpieces in Frieze week. Phillips is now showing £20million-worth of Kiefers, Basquiats and the like in its showroom ahead of sales on 16 and 17 October (phillips.com/auctions). Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s will stage their usual contemporary art sales next week. In addition, both have exhibitions in their brand new London venues. Christie’s will stage a show of British Pop Art, When Britain Went Pop! in the old Haunch of Venison gallery on New Bond Street (To 24 October; christies.com) while Sotheby’s has an exhibition of 12 Joseph Beuys works in its new S2 gallery on St George Street (To 15 November; sothebys.com).
Eat, drink and be merry
An art army marches on its stomach and fairs are now foodie destinations. Restaurant partners at Frieze this year include Hix and Caravan, but it is the street food offerings from Yum Bun, Pitt Cue and Pizza Pilgrims that will likely see the biggest queues. Visitors to Frieze Masters will be catered for by the more classic Locanda Locatelli. At Sunday Art Fair, the always buzzy bar will be run by Art Review, Jack Beer of Arbutus and George Howard of eatpeckham.com. Elsewhere there is an endless whirl of parties and private views to crash – this year’s glitziest is likely to be a VIP dinner at Café Royal, sponsored by fair associate, Alexander McQueen.
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ART NEWS
The ArtLyst Power 100 List,Alternative Art Power List, ArtReview
The ArtLyst Power 100: 2013 Alternative Art Power List Unveiled
DATE: 16 OCT 2013
London during Frieze Week is the only place to be on the planet if you are a dedicated follower of the visual arts. Every October an international herd of artists, gallerists and art professionals descend on our metropolis to feast on a wide range of art events. From ‘Blue Chip’ Frieze Masters to a pop up in an underground car-park, Frieze week is full of surprises.
Mid October is also the perfect time for us to release Artlyst’s Art PowerLyst, the alternative to ArtReview’s Power 100. Many think that AR’s list is erroneous and tired, their criteria is based on ‘sheer financial clout,’ as it is dominated by commercial gallery owners, big-buck artists, and misguided auctioneers.The ArtLyst editorial staff believe that achievement should not be compromised for the sake of the dollar, so we have created our own alternative list, instead of a Machiavellian Power List that has more in common with the Times ‘Rich List’. This year we have put together a Resourceful PowerLyst that celebrates exactly what it says on the tin – not those with the fiscal muscle to bend the artworld into whatever shape they please, but those with the creative power and ability to influence and augment the British and international art scenes through merit alone.Out go the Gagosians, the Damien Hirsts and the François Pinaults. In come the organisers of Peckham and Hackney’s finest events, the Director of Artangel, and the heads of art colleges across the country. Yes: let’s gratuitously pat ourselves on the back for the third consecutive year: here is the ArtLyst Power 100 Alternative Power List, in alphabetical order plus our curated Top 10 for 2013.Top Photo: (Left) Chris Dercon, Nicholas Serota (Right) Tino Seghal1. Tino Seghal: British-German artist of part Indian origin, based in Berlin. Exhibited at Tate Modern for the 2012 Unilever series commission. Won the Golden Lion for best artist at 2013 Venice Biennale and nominated for Turner Prize 2013.2. Chris Dercon: Director of Tate Modern since 2011 with an enthusiasm for ‘mixing it up’, formerly the director of the Haus der Kunst, Munich.3. Jeremy Deller : English conceptual, video and installation artist. Winner of the Turner Prize in 2004, represented Britain at 2013 Venice Biennale4. Hans Ulrich Obrist/ Julia Peyton-Jones: the Serpentine Gallery’s Co-directors of Exhibitions and Programmes.5. Grayson Perry: artist known for his work in ceramics, and awarded the Turner Prize in 2003, self-curated show The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum 2011, received BAFTA in 2013 for his series All in the best possible Taste and will deliver this year’s Reith Lectures for Radio 46. Jenni Lomax: Director of Camden Arts Centre, led the major refurbishment of the centre that was completed in 2004.7. James Lingwood/ Michael Morris: Co-Directors of Artangel since 1991, responsible for building Artangel into a significant international commissioning and producing organisation.8. Elizabeth Neilson: Director 176 Zabludowicz Collection9. Elmgreen & Dragset: leading contemporary artists currently exhibiting a site specific installation at the V&A10. Hannah Barry: Founder of the Hannah Barry Gallery and one of the leading people responsible for transforming Peckham into an international art centre
Artlyst Power 100 In Alphabetical Order
1. Marina Abramovic: Serbian New York-based artist, and the self-professed ‘grandmother of performance art’, who began her ground-breaking career in the early 1970s.
2. Michael Archer: Programme Director of BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, art critic and freelance writer, contributing regularly to the Guardian Culture section on contemporary art from 1960 onwards.
3. Ziba Ardalan: founder and Director/Curator of Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, a privately-funded educational charity and a not-for-profit art gallery.
4. Bill Arning: Director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, former curator of the List Visual Arts Centre, MIT, and a freelance writer.
5.Karen Ashton: founder and organizer Art Car Boot Fair (new)
6. *Hannah Barry: Founder of the Hannah Barry Gallery and one of the leading people responsible for transforming Peckham into an international art centre (new)
7. Pryle Behrman: Art Critic, curator and Director of Art Projects at London Art Fair (new)
8. Gareth Bell-Jones: Curator at Wysing Arts centre, Cambridge, has written articles for Artvehicle and Contemporary Magazine, chaired symposiums at Cafe Oto
9. Peter Blake: English pop artist, who celebrated his 80th birthday last year and continues to be a major force in the art world
10. Iwona Blazwick: Director of Art at the Whitechapel Gallery, former Head of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Modern, and Chair of Cultural Strategy Group, London.
11.Erica Bolton: PR catalyst and organisational magician. Partner at Bolton & Quinn Ltd.
12. Trisha Brown: Postmodernist Artist, dancer and choreographer, inducted into the National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame in 2000, and awarded the National Medal for Arts in 2002.
13. Jonathan Burton: Director of London Art Fair (new
14. Kate Bush: Head of Barbican Art Galleries, made multiple TV appearances on the subject of Art, and even been mentioned in a Harry Hill sketch.
15. Romain Chenais: French London-based art critic and independent curator, curated the first major retrospective of British filmmaker John Smith at the Royal College of Art.
16. Billy Childish: prolific painter, poet, printer and musician. Co-founder of the Stuckist art movement. (new)
17. David Chipperfield: Modernist architect, with two buildings shortlisted for the 2007 RIBA Stirling Prize, and winning with the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach.
18. Matthew Collings: began his career on Artscribe, before producing and presenting The Late Show for BBC, and is still involved with broadcasting on productions such as School of Saatchi and
19.Susan Collins: Slade Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art since 2010, (new the 2010 BBC documentary ‘Renaissance Revolution’. He also lectures at the City and Guilds London School of Art.
20. Sacha Craddock: art critic and curator, Programme Director of Max Wigram gallery, curator of the Bloomberg Space, tutor at the RCA, Chair of New Contemporaries, and sat on the 2009 Turner Prize judging panel.
21. Michael Craig-Martin: Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths London, previously a tutor at Goldsmiths where he fostered the talent of many of the YBAs.
22. David Crawforth & Naomi Siderfin: founders, Directors, Curators, and artists at Beaconsfield, a gallery with a vision to ‘provide a critical space for creative enquiry’, that occupies ‘a niche between the institution, the commercial and the ‘alternative’’.
23. Martin Creed: artists and musician, Turner Prize winner 2001, numerous exhibitions and projects in 2013. Look out for his retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 2014
24. Penelope Curtis: Director of Tate Britain with a scholarly background in British art, especially 20th-century sculpture, she was also the first exhibitions curator at Tate Liverpool when it opened in 1988. She was a judge of the Turner prize 2012.
25. Alan Davey: Chief Executive of the Arts Council, has worked in the Department of National Heritage, and as head of the Arts Division and Director of Arts and Culture in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
26.*Jeremy Deller : English conceptual, video and installation artist. Winner of the Turner Prize in 2004, represented Britain at 2013 Venice Biennale
27. Melissa Denes: The Guardian’s arts editor, she also writes for the New Statesman.
28. *Chris Dercon: Director of Tate Modern since 2011 with an enthusiasm for ‘mixing it up’,
29. Emily Druiff: Director of Peckham Space, one of London’s newest purpose-built public galleries, dedicated to commissioning artworks made in partnership with community groups.
30. *Elmgreen & Dragset: leading contemporary artists currently exhibiting a site specific installation at the V&A
31. Kate Fowle: Chief Curator of Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (new)
32. James Franco: American artist, actor, and writer who balances his work as an artist with a mainstream acting career.
33. Katherine Fritsch: for her large blue cockerel Hahn/Cock currently to be seen on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square
34. Jason Gaiger: Head of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, also a Fellow of St. Edmund Hall Oxford, previously worked as Director of Research of Art History in the Open University, and Recently published ‘Aesthetics and Painting’.
35. Ryan Gander: London-based artist, creator of the Locked Room Scenario in Shoreditch, awarded the 2010 Zurich Art prize, accompanied by an exhibition at the Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, and winner of the 2003 Prix de Rome.
36. David Gryn: Director Artprojx, curated moving image projects (new)
37. Andreas Gursky: German visual artist who is known for his large scale architecture and landscape photographs
38. Zaha Hadid: architect responsible for the 2012 London Olympics Aquatics Centre, and has won the RIBA Stirling Prize twice, winning this year for the Evelyn Grace Academy, Brixton. Designed Serpentine Sackler Gallery which opened in 2013.
39. Margaret Harrison: Feminist artist and winner of 2013 Northern Art Prize (new)
40. Thomas Heatherwick: English designer known for his innovative use of materials, also designed the London 2012 Olympic cauldron and the ‘Borismaster’ bus launched in 2013.
41. James Hughes-Hallett: Chairman of the Courtauld Institute of Art.
42. Achim Borchardt Hume: Returns to Tate Modern as Head of Exhibitions. Previously Chief Curator at the Whitechapel Art Gallery
43. Heather Hubbs: Director of NADA art fairs (new)
44. Roger Hiorns: artist, 2009 Turner Prize nominee, His work Seizure currently on show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Unititled series is at The Hepworth Wakefield. (new)
45. Thomas Krens: former Director of the Guggenheim Foundation, New York, currently Senior Advisor for International Affairs, overseeing the completion of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
46. Yayoi Kusama: Japanese artist who had a major lifetime culmination of her work shown at Tate Modern.
47. Michael Landy: YBA most famous for the work Break Down (2001), elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008, current Rootstein Hopkins Associate artist in residence at the National Gallery
48. Joseph La Placa: CEO All Visual Arts curator of Metamorphosis, Vanitas and The Viewing Room.
49: Nicola Lees: Curator of Frieze Foundation (new)
50. John Leighton: Director General of National Galleries of Scotland, taught Art History at Edinburgh University before moving into curating at the National Gallery, acquired the Artist’s Rooms collection for National Galleries of Scotland, and was awarded an honorary degree for services to the arts from Edinburgh University in 2009.
51. *James Lingwood/ Michael Morris: Co-Directors of Artangel since 1991, responsible for building Artangel into a significant international commissioning and producing organisation.
52. *Jenni Lomax: Director of Camden Arts Centre, led the major refurbishment of the centre that was completed in 2004.
53. Declan Long: Irish art critic, curator and lecturer. He teaches at the faculty of visual culture at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin[1] and regularly appears on Lyric FM, discussing and reviewing contemporary art.
54. Sarah Lucas: part of the Young British Artist movement that emerged in the 1990s. The subject of a current major retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery
55. Christine Macel: Chief Curator of the Musee National d’art Moderne- Centre Pompidou, currently developing the exhibition ‘Dance your life’ which will open in November 2011, she also writes for FlashArt and Artforum.
56. Anna Maloney: Director of Hackney WickED festival (new)
57. Christian Marclay: Swiss-American visual artist and composer, most recently exhibited at the 2011 Venice Biennale where he won the Golden Lion for his piece The Clock.
58. Rebecca May-Marston: Director of Hoxton’s Limoncello gallery, and One of the Independent’s 10 gallery owners who ‘are changing – and challenging – the British art scene’.
59. Ben Moore: Artist/Curator of Art Below (new) a London based public art enterprise, founded in 2006 using billboard space in underground stations to display artworks in London and overseas.
60. Simon Morrissey: independent curator and writer on contemporary art, who regularly talks publicly about contemporary art and curating, as well as frequently acting as a visiting tutor on a number of leading Fine Art courses at UK universities.
61. Gregor Muir: Executive Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
62. Banksy clever street artist and art guerrilla. Nominated this year for setting up a stand in New York and selling ‘Spray Art’ for £40 a pop. Real value £20,000-£100,000 He sold 6 paintings for $420.
63. Andrew Nairne: Director of Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Chair of the Visual Arts and Galleries Association (VAGA), and former Director of Modern Art Oxford.
64. *Elizabeth Neilson: Director 176 Zabludowicz Collection
65. *Hans Ulrich Obrist/ Julia Peyton-Jones: the Serpentine Gallery’s Co-directors of Exhibitions and Programmes.
66. Kirsty Ogg: curator at the Whitechapel Gallery and of the London Open, and Lecturer in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London.
67. Yoko Ono: Japanese painter, and performance based,Director of Meltdown festival 2013
68. Sandra Penketh Director of Art Galleries National Museums Liverpool
69. Nicholas Penny, FSA a British art historian. Since Spring 2008 he has been director of the National Gallery in London.
70. *Grayson Perry: artist known for his work in ceramics, and awarded the Turner Prize in 2003, self-curated show The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum 2011, received BAFTA in 2013 for his series All in the best possible Taste and will deliver this year’s Reith Lectures for Radio 4
71. Michael Petry: multi-media artist, writer and curator. Director of MOCA London, co-founder of the Museum of Installation, (new)
72. Heather Phillipson: video and installation artist, 2013 exhibitions at Zabludowicz collection, BALTIC centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
73. Victoria Pomery: Director of Turner Contemporary since 2002, previously the Senior Curator at Tate Liverpool, has worked at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Australia, and was part of the selection panel for the 2007 Ebbsfleet Landmark Project.
74: Alan Powers: teacher, researcher, writer. Former chair of 20th century society (2007-12) and organizer of the campaign to save public art around UK. (new)
75. Elizabeth Price: video artist and winner of the 2012 Turner Prize
76. Laure Provost: filmmaker and 2013 Turner Prize nominee, Her piece Wantee was included in the Tate’s Schwitters in Britain exhibition. (new)
77. Pussy Riot: Russian guerilla art movement, three members were imprisoned last year based on their involvement in an “anti-Putin” ‘art performance’ piece.
78. Gerhard Richter: German visual artist who specializes in abstract photorealism.
79. David Roberts: Prolific art collector in the UK, in 2008 started the ‘David Roberts Art Foundation’ to help emerging artists and young curators.
80. Ralph Rugoff: Director of the Hayward Gallery, previously Director of the Wattis Institute, best known for his curated work Just Pathetic (1990).
81. *Tino Seghal: British-German artist of partly Indian origin, based in Berlin. Exhibited at Tate Modern for the 2012 Unilever series commission. Won Golden Lion for best artist at 2013 Venice Biennale and nominated for Turner Prize 2013.
82. Nicholas Serota: Director of the Tate (1988-present) and the driving force behind the opening of the Tate Modern. Has participated on the board of The Architecture Foundation and chaired the Turner Prize jury.
83. Amanda Sharp/Matthew Slotover: founders of Frieze magazine and the Frieze Art Fair in London and New York
84. David Shrigley: British Artist known for his work in humorous cartoon style, contributes a weekly cartoon to the Guardian’s weekend paper, and has exhibited internationally including solo shows in New York, Gateshead, Barcelona and Mainz. Nominated for 2013 Turner Prize.
85. Taryn Simon: American art photographer, with a major feature show at the Tate Modern in 2011.
86. Bob and Roberta Smith: contemporary British artist operating under pseudonym, famous for painting slogan-bearing signage in support of various activist campaigns.
87. Donald Smith: CHELSEA Space Director, with the ambition to create ‘a research development centre for invited art and design professionals, providing a gallery space, library research facilities, and a platform to develop personal projects that may otherwise remain unrealised’.
88. Polly Staple: Director of London’s Chisenhale Gallery, contributing editor to Frieze, on jury panel for Max Mara Art Prize for Women 2009- 2011, and one of the Guardian’s 2010 ‘women to watch’.
89. Katherine Stout: Head of Programmes at ICA, formerly Head of Contemporary art at Tate Modern. (new)
90. Callum Sutton; CEO Sutton PR – 2013 clients included Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries,
91. Paul Warwick Thompson: Rector of the Royal College of Art, served as Director of the Smithsonian’s National Design Museum in New York until 2009, trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a Member of the Wellcome Collection Advisory Committee at the Wellcome Trust.
92: Jeremy Till: Head of Central St Martins Art School since 2012 (new)
93. John Tusa: British arts administrator, currently the Chairman of the University of the Arts London, presented BBC 2’s Newsnight from 1980-1986, from 1995-2007 was managing director of the Barbican Arts Centre, London, and is Honorary Chairman of theartsdesk.com.
94. Christoph Vogtherr: Director of the Wallace Collection from October 2011, previously the Curator of pre-1800 pictures at the Wallace Collection.
95. Mark Wallinger: sculptor and installation artist, double Turner Prize nominee, won the Prize in 2007 for the work State Britain. Notable work includes the sculpture on the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square Ecce Homo (1999). Created Labyrinth for 150th anniversary of the London Underground in 2013.
96. Ai Weiwei: Chinese contemporary artist and political activist, awarded Das Glas der Vernuft Kassel citizen award in 2010, and serving as an Artistic consultant for the 2008 Olympics Bejing National Stadium.
97. Matt Williams: Curator of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and co-editor of the annual publication Novel, which focuses on artists’ writing and poetry.
98.Godfrey Worsdale: Director of the BALTIC centre for contemporary art, Gateshead, responsible for hosting the Turner Prize 2011, Vice Chairman of the UK’s Visual Art and Galleries Association, and selector for the 2011 Threadneedle Prize for Painting and Sculpture.
99. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Exhibited Extracts and Verses at Chisenhale Gallery, nominated for 2013 Turner Prize (new)
100. Anita and Poju Zabludowicz: founded the Zabludowicz Collection in 2007, a space for exhibitions, commissions and residencies, as well as establishing the Zabludowicz Collection ‘Curatorial Open’ and ‘Testing Ground’ programmes to promote contemporary art education. She is also a key sponsor of the upcoming Sunday Art Fair.
It’s London’s turn in the great art fair cycle, and Frieze and its satellites have descended upon the British city for the eleventh year. The Carmody Groarke-designed pavilion will be even roomier this year, with wider aisles to suit visitor’s comfort and optimize the art-viewing experience. Along with the expected roster of top galleries, the fair welcomes some new seasoned faces like Blum & Poe, Marian Goodman and Maccarone. As expected, the powers behind Frieze have a world class line up of special exhibitions, film, and a sculpture park curated by Clare Lilley, Director of Programs at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, that will pair contemporary and historical pieces, giving a well-rounded presentation of modern masters like Judy Chicago, Jaume Plensa and Rachel Whiteread.
Judy Chicago, Rearrangeable Rainbow Blocks, 1965. Courtesy of Riflemaker.
Nicola Lees of the Frieze Foundation will put her newly-appointed curatorial imprint on the fair, curating both Frieze Projects and Frieze Film, for which she partners with Victoria Brooks of EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. This year, Frieze Projects has commissioned site specific pieces by Andreas Angelidakis, Gerry Bibby, Rivane Neueunschwander, Ken Okiishi, Angelo Plessas, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Josepf Strau, while Frieze Film has commissioned works by Petra Cortright, Peter Gidal, Patricia Lennox-Boyd, Oraib Toukan and Erika Vogt, made during a residency at EMPAC.
Petra Cortright, vvebcam, 2007, avi file, webcam video, 1:42 min. Courtesy of Frieze.
For the collector seeking the art historical, Frieze Masters will return, with highlighted works by Pieter Breughel the Younger, Murillo, Velazquez, and modern masters like Bacon, Calder, Guston, Picasso and Pollock. There is also an incredible Masters Talks program planned with contemporary artists John Currin and Catherine Opie, whose work references the historic, whether in subject or technique, alongside conversations between the Victoria and Albert’s Director Martin Roth and Beatriz Milhazes, and the Kunsthustorisches Museums’ Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Jasper Sharp with Richard Wright.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger, L’Auberge St. Michel, 1619. Courtesy of De Jonckheere.
Philip Guston, Untitled (Shoe), 1968. Courtesy of McKEee Gallery.
This year Frieze will also bring its influences into the retail realm, with a partnership with fair sponsor Alexander McQueen. During the fair, the London retail stores (Bond Street and Saville Row) will feature contemporary art curated by Sadie Coles, once again merging art and fashion like the late designer did so expertly.
The exciting week will kick off on October 17, with special combination discounts for art lovers visiting both the Frieze and Frieze Masters Fairs. And once you have had your fill at the main fair here is a selection of satellite fairs to visit, guaranteeing something for everyone, including cutting edge contemporary, street art, video art , African art, artist multiples and design.
The edgy satellite fair features only 20 galleries, with an emphasis on the best of emerging art. The feel is like a large group show, without the stereotypical booths that define an art fair (exhibitors are instead separated by tape on the floor). This year’s participants include New York’s White Columns and London’s Studio Voltaire, with a fair sponsor of ICA.
Still from Annika Larsson’s Animal in 14 movements, 2012, video, 41 minutes. Courtesy of Moving Image.
The unique fair returns to the Bargehouse to celebrate video art, including 30 single-channel videos, video sculptures and large video installations. The fair brings the issues surrounding the collecting video art to the forefront, even offering the “AV Bar,” a sort of take on the Mac Store’s Genius Bar, to answer collectors’ questions about displaying and caring for video art. This year curators, Kyle Chayka and Marina Galerpina, will indulge the self-portrait craze, with the National #Selfie Portrait Gallery, featuring short form “selfies” from 16 emerging video artists from the EU and the US.
For its fourth year, the street and urban art fair will be shacking up with The Other Fair at the iconic Old Truman Brewery. Expect works by recognizable urban artists like Banksy, The London Police, D Face, Greg La Marche, Shepard Fairey and Pure Evil, plus special installations.
Delphine Lebourgeois, Deesse VIII Photo de Classe. Limited edition of 3 Giclee print finished by hand with pencils and inks. Courtesy of The Other Fair.
Also at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, The Other Fair offers collectors a chance to scoop up works by over 100 unrepresented artists. The fair fosters artists year round by offering free seminars and workshops to help them enter the art market and connect talent with buyers.
Stephen Hobbs, Pop-up Book, 2013, silkscreen book, Courtesy of David Krut Projects, Johannesburg, Cape Town & New York.
Collectors of prints, editions and multiples can find all they are looking for at the fourth edition of Multiplied. With an emphasis on art priced for every budget to bring art to everyone, Multiplied extends this mission with its charity affiliate, Vital Arts, which brings art, music and performance to hospital patients. The fair, located at Christie’s auction house in South Kensington, is free to the public and will feature live printmaking workshops and an exhibition by Graduate students of the Royal College of Art’s Print Department.
New to Frieze Week this year, 1:54 is the first contemporary African Art Fair and brings together 17 carefully curated galleries, accompanied by an educational and artistic program curated by Koyo Kouch. 1:54 will also offer lectures, film screenings and talks, such as Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Godfried Donkor, Christine Eyene in conversation with Senam Okudzeto, as well as a discussion on building an African collection of contemporary art. The 1:54 fair aims to educate visitors on the importance, context and market of African art.
The PAD fair is designed to ask art collectors and enthusiasts to relate fine art to the same context as design, decorative arts, photography and tribal arts, encouraging visitors to use each of these elements to find their aesthetic voice by building comprehensive collections that touch on each genre. The eclectic fair offers pieces steeped in history, museum quality art works, notable photography and design furniture of the highest caliber, all set in an all encompassing, boutique style atmosphere.
LYNETTE YIADOM–BOAKYE
interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Six AM Wednesday, 2009
Courtesy of Corvi-Mora, London
HANS ULRICH OBRIST In your paintings you have a very clear methodology, which is actually quite conceptual. It sounds like, in a sort of On Kawara way, a painting a day. Can you talk about this? It seems that with a painting, no matter what, you finish it.
LYNETTE YIADOM-BOAKYE Yes, exactly. That started off as being a practical consideration: the way I was initially painting, if I didn’t finish in a day the surface wouldn’t work, it would dry at different times, so it was completely a structural thing. Then I started to realize that the way I was working was as important to the work itself as the finished product, it was about reading between works rather than becoming very precious about one. It’s to do with the way I think: I say it’s a short attention span, but what I mean by that is that it’s one thought and it’s fresh in my mind. It’s about a certain kind of urgency and capturing that time frame. Because if it were dragged out over days I feel like the whole resonance of it would go, it would become a much more labored process and I would personally become too precious. If I get to the end of the day and something hasn’t worked I don’t sleep well. I’d rather destroy it than think about it over night just to come back and try and force myself to like it.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Hard Wet Epic, 2010
Courtesy of Corvi-Mora, London
HUO It’s interesting also because you say that you don’t fix the particular narrative behind it. The paintings are like snippets or part of something, it’s almost like the viewer writes the stories. Duchamp said the viewer is half of the work, Dominique Gonzales Foerster says the viewer does at least half of the work. It seems to be the case with you as well.
LYB I give all I can, as I think seduction is very important. I love painting. I love the surface of it. I know how it makes me feel when I see certain works or when I’m in the presence of works that I really admire, and I think the pleasure for the viewer comes out of that kind of feeling, rather than me trying to tell a story. It’s a sensual thing—it’s about a sense of touch and a sensibility. I want it to be that kind of experience as well, which is why I don’t like the idea of giving too much of a story and trying to control that response too much.
HUO You say in all your texts and interviews that you conceive the paintings as groups, and think of how they could work together. Can you tell me a little bit about the main groups in your work?
LYB They develop over a period of time, and relate more or less directly to what I’m thinking about at the time. I try to put as many different things into a group as possible and often things that relate to each other. There are paintings that come in pairs. But I don’t necessarily show them together. There’s a recurring pair that goes into every body of work. When I start a body of work I will do these two paintings and each time there will be a slight variation but essentially it’s the same man. He’s always wearing basically the same thing, always facing in opposite directions, the pose changes and the facial expression changes slightly, so he’ll always come into that group and there’s always a man in a stripy top. In a way they are like an anchorage. Somehow they start the body of work and then from there everything kind of builds around them. It changes each time. More recently I’ve been trying to paint a lot of landscape, and I’m not very good at it. (Laughs.)
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, From Here Until Never, 2011
Courtesy of Corvi-Mora, London
HUO I wanted to ask you about these two characters. They are larger portraits filling the canvas completely and almost coming out of the wall. You say that they are always there, these figures, one has a stripy top and the other one not. So how did they enter? You have often mentioned that this is a recurring element but I didn’t find any literature on how they entered into your work. How did you have the epiphany? How did these two guys pop up?
LYB They happened quite separately. The really big ones of the man with the white top, the massive ones that always come as a pair, they started of as a very small work. It was a triptych of three of that man and there was something in the facial expression that really captured everything for me, everything that I was trying to do somehow. Really, if I had to choose two pieces that encapsulate the spirit of what I’m trying to do, it’d be him and the stripy man. When I say capture everything I’m trying to do, or the spirit of what I do, I mean the way that I think, the way my sense of humor works. When I start a body of work they are a good reminder, if you like, an anchoring of how I think generally and the reminder of where I am. It is also the sense of getting to know someone better. They have changed a lot since their first incarnations.
HUO And what about the stripy one?
LYB Again it’s like they are opposite poles of the same thing. So there are two emotions there. There’s this calm, sense of something level and almost elegant in the stripy man, and then the white shirt is far more like a sphinx I suppose.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Bound Over To Keep The Peace, 2012
Photography by Marcus Leith
Courtesy of Chisenhale Gallery, London
HUO I’d like to talk about the characters that you invent for each of your portraits. Your fictitious characters are all black people, and you have said that that it produces a kind of normality. I wanted to ask you about this, and to what extent you view this as a political gesture.
LYB I think it’s always in some way going to be political. But for me the political is as much in the making of it, in the painting of it, in the fact of doing it, rather than anything very specific about race or even about celebration. I don’t see what I do as at all celebratory, because to me it just is. The fact that they are all black is double edged as well. They’re all black, or what I should say is they are all tinted black or brown—some of them actually have black features, others have completely Caucasian features—but they are still sort of black. For me, that is the normalizing aspect. It’s not normal, because they’re not real people, but at the same time that means also that race is something that I can completely manipulate, or reinvent, or use as I want to. Also, they’re all black because, in my view, if I was painting white people that would be very strange, because I’m not white. This seems to make more sense in terms of a sense of normality. I suppose with anyone doing anything you set yourself certain parameters, it’s not about making a rainbow celebration of all of us being different. It’s never seemed necessary to alter the color of people just for the sake of making that point.
HUO You also say in a statement that you don’t like to paint victims. Jennifer Higgie says it’s a kind of empowerment, kind of power to the people.
LYB Absolutely. I said that many years ago in relation to how I like to think about how I finish a person, how a person should look in a painting, and what I want their expressions to be. One of the things I always destroy in the work is anyone that I think looks passive. In part, this is because they’re black, and in part because I don’t want them to like anyone has taken anything from them. I don’t want them to be victimized basically, or to look that way. It’s as much about avoiding certain tropes in the work as anything else.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, Fiscal Sweatsuit, 2012
Photography by Marcus Leith
Courtesy of Chisenhale Gallery, London
HUO I would like to ask you about Ghana, as your family comes from there. I was wondering if you have any connections to Ghana or to Africa?
LYB Not very strong ones. I mean, my strongest connection is my parents.
HUO Who live there?
LYB No, they live here in London, and they have for forty years. But just the fact of them having raised me the way that they did, they are my connection. I kind of have an idea of Ghana from them, but I wouldn’t say I have a strong personal connection with it, in that I haven’t been there that much and I certainly never lived there. I wasn’t born there—I was born here, and I was raised here. Really my connection is through my relatives, the people who raised me, and their way of thinking, which to me is very much Ghanaian, and that has obviously effected how I think and what I think about. But it would be disingenuous of me to claim some strong connection with Ghana as a place because I don’t really know it and I wasn’t raised there.
HUO But it’s there through the transmissions of your parents.
LYB Definitely. The way I always put it was that Ghana is present as a way of thinking and a way of seeing, which has influenced me.
Some of Hans’ published works Hans in conversation with John Baldessari at LACMA last month Giacometti Still from The Way Things Go Still from The Way Things Go Published to accompany Richter’s 1992 show at Nietzsche’s house in Sils-Maria Richter’s Swiss mountains
Epiphanies: In Conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist
by Yanyan Huang
Arts contributor Yanyan Huang travels the world in search of big game. In her first blog post with OC she interviews contemporary art curator Hans Ulrich Obrist.An anomaly within the art world, Hans Ulrich Obrist operates as an auteur who takes ideas from the past, present, and future and stitches them together to provide a well-founded framework. Hans’ approach to his work is organic: ideas come from conversations and spill over to provide the fuel for the next project, ad infinitum.Of course, there can be no reaction without a preceding action, and Hans has had incredible luck in finding the right mentors to fuel his imagination. In a conversation with him after one of his public talks at LACMA last month, he cites the generosity of these “artist-teachers” who provided the inspiration and set him along on his artistic trajectory.Yanyan Huang: During tonight’s talk you asked John Baldessari about the epiphanies he’s experienced throughout his life and career. He mentioned: “conceptual art is pointing at things,” “talent is cheap,” and “be in the right place at the right time.” Have you ever had such epiphanies?
Hans Ulrich Obrist: One of the first epiphanies that triggered my obsession for art was the Giacometti collection at Kunsthalle Zürich. I was 12 years old and would visit the gallery after school.
The second was when I began to meet artists: it was like I was reborn. At the age of 17, I visited the studio of Peter Fischli and David Weiss. At this time (1985), they were just about to work on an amazing film called The Way Things Go, a film of chain reactions. I decided I wanted to be a curator after visiting their studios and speaking with them. Out of this grew one of my first exhibitions held in my kitchen and in a hotel room.
A few months later I met Gerhard Richter, prompting another development. He had a big show in 1986 in Switzerland and invited me to his studio. This is a dialogue that has continued ever since. We collaborated in 1992, at Nietzsche’s house in Sils-Maria (where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra). I organized Gerhard’s work, particularly photographs he did of the Swiss mountains. All my early shows had to do with this idea that art can happen unexpectedly in unexpected locations.
Fischli and Weiss suggested I go to Rome to meet with Alighiero Boetti. I spent a day with him where we discussed the concept that artists should be involved in a global dialogue. This triggered in me a whole other way of working. From then on, I never stopped. I had infinite conversations and these conversations led to more epiphanies or moments of insight. It’s always a dialogue. I started thinking about how I could expand the notion of curating. How could I curate science, literature, and music? I started exploring these fields.
YH: You realized it was important to contextualize your ideas within other fields of study?
HUO: I thought it could be interesting to curate in different fields: to curate in science and literature museums and in the context of architecture. This led to Cities on the Move and other museum mutations.
YH: Have you found similar themes underlying the different fields of art, architecture, and science?
HUO: There’s not one thing that connects everything together, but many. I’ve been working with the Institute of the 21st Century to archive my conversations. Within the digital interview archives there are a lot of recurring conversations, so we did tagging. Whenever someone speaks about museums, that’s a tag, and so on. Eventually, we tagged different conversations between different fields and different practitioners. It will make the interviews more accessible in the future. The idea is that this archive could be a “book machine.”
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032C
Limited Lifespan of Cities
An interview with architect CEDRIC PRICE on the limited lifespan of cities. By Hans Ulrich Obrist. Issue #02 (summer 2001).
By HANS ULRICH OBRIST
HANS ULRICH OBRIST: One of the reasons your work has been so important to many architects in Asia has a lot to do with the notion of time and the ephemeral, something which is understood better in Asia than in Europe. CEDRIC PRICE: A short lifespan for a building is not seen as anything very strange in Asia. Angkor Wat in Cambodia is so vast and yet it lasted for less than three hundred years. I liked your dependence on change in the “Cities on the Move” exhibition you curated and I particularly liked the Bangkok exhibition where time was the key element. I see time as the fourth dimension, alongside height, breadth and length. The actual consuming of ideas and images exists in time, so the value of doing the show betrayed an immediacy, an awareness of time that does not exist in somewhere like London or indeed Manhattan. A city that does not change and reinvent itself is a dead city. But I do not know if we should use the word ‘city’ any more; I think it is a questionable term.
What could replace it? Perhaps a word associated with the human awareness of time, turned into a noun, which relates to space. The paradox is that the city changes all the time, so it would have to be a word in permanent mutation; it could not be a frozen term.
But let’s return to the idea of dead cities, tell me more about why they die! Cities exist for citizens, and if they do not work for citizens, they die.
Which is interesting because you also talk about the fact that buildings can die. Yes, the Fun Palace was not planned to last more than ten years. The short life expectancy of the project had an effect on the costs, but not in a limiting, adverse way. No one, including the designers, wanted to spend more money to make it last for fifty years and we had to persuade the generators and operators to be economic in terms of both time and money. The advantage, however, was that the owners, the producers and the operators, through necessity, began to think along the same lines, as the project created the same set of priorities for everyone. That should be one of architecture’s aims; it must create new appetites, rather than solve problems. Architecture is too slow to solve problems. I suppose we should ask what is the purpose of architecture? It used to be a way of imposing order or establishing a belief, which is the purpose of religion to some extent. Architecture does not need that mental imperialism any more. As an architect, I do not want to be involved in creating law and order through fear and misery. I see the creation of a continuous dialogue as both interesting and also perhaps the only reason for architecture. In the sixteenth or seventeenth century, someone defined architecture as “commodity, firmness and delight.” Commodity equates to good housekeeping, particularly in terms of money; firmness is the structure; and the delight factor is the dialogue.
Could you talk a bit about your time-based project in Glasgow and how that opened up a dialogue between the city and its citizens. The city hall is in the centre of Glasgow. They are very proud of it and people are not allowed in very often, unless they have got a complaint against the city. We decided to improve the lift to the top of the tower – putting a carpet in, installing lovely mirrors, spraying it with perfume – and invited the public in. We did not tell them why; all we said is that they could go to the top of the tower and for free. In the lift was a tape announcing “tonight, all the areas which we think should be saved without question will be floodlighted red.” Only parts of the city were lit up, so their attention was focused. You heard comments like: “Well of course that church should be saved” and “Why keep that slum?” The next night, different areas of the city were flooded green, indicating districts they decided should be improved. On the last day, the floodlights were white. The public was invited to tell the city what they should do with the spaces lit in white. There were no “superiors” involved, no architects with patches on their tweed jackets around for miles. The city was saying, “We’ve thought about it for years and still don’t know what to do with the white areas. You tell us. But don’t tell us next year, tell us within a month, because after that it’s too late. As you go down, pick up a free postcard and mail us your response.”
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Sarah Lucas & Hans Ulrich Obrist
The bad-girl artist and the Serpentine curator talk shop
Twenty years ago, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin set up The Shop in a former doctor’s surgery on Bethnal Green Road, east London, selling handcrafted art and knick-knacks like badges, t-shirts, keyrings and wire penises. Their DIY enterprise stayed open for six months while they got pissed in front of their David Hockney altar and used their aquarium as a moneybox. Meanwhile, budding curator Hans Ulrich Obrist was initiating his project do it, conceived with artists Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier, which invites artists to invent sets of handwritten instructions, or “scores”. do it has now grown to include Ai Weiwei’s instructions on how to make a spray device to block a surveillance camera, Gilbert & George’s “Ten Commandments for Gilbert and George” and Theaster Gates’ “How to Catch the Holy Ghost in a Shopping Mall”.
For the new do it 2013 exhibition at this month’s Manchester International Festival, Lucas has created a homage to Franz West using instructions from the do it back catalogue and Emin has paid tribute to the late Louise Bourgeois. The ideas, DIY attitude and “just do it” spirit of 1993 are still going strong.
Hans Ulrich Obrist: It’s not that in 1993 all of these things were invented. The spirit – the genesis of it – started much earlier. But maybe in 1993 it all came together. 1993 was the year of The Shop, it was the year when do it happened, it was the year of Aperto ‘93 in Venice, where a lot of artists from our generation met for the first time. A lot of things crystallised.
Sarah Lucas: It wasn’t one thing or one person; so many people kept the whole scene buoyant. We were our own audience and we liked it. It generated a lot of energy but
I don’t think you can bring it down to one moment.
HUO: I remember the first time I visited your studio. A DIY spirit was very much in the air. What was the epiphany behind The Shop? Do you remember the day you and Tracey had the idea?
SL: Yeah, I think we were sitting in a restaurant in Brick Lane. I was previously at a studio with Gary Hume. Tracey was mostly writing then, she wasn’t making much art… And we came up with the idea of getting a shop. Just doing it, I suppose. There was this particular shop that was empty and I contacted the estate agent. We rented it for six months and paid in advance. We thought we’d just start turning up there and make it up as we went along. Looking back on it, Tracey really did have this entrepreneurial flair. We used to make these t-shirts, and Tracey would say, ‘When we sell the first one it’s a fiver, we make another it’s a tenner and then the next one, £20.’ We did a lot of drinking at The Shop until the late hours. I can always remember swinging in this hammock we had and falling out on many occasions. We used to spend a lot of time in the pub next door. When someone came in and bought a badge they’d pay 50p. We’d go next door to the pub and buy two halves of Guinness because they were 25p a half. We did actually get by from what we made at The Shop.
(The YBAs) were largely our own audience, but other people came along because we were having such a huge party. So in the end, we decided what art was legitimate
HUO: You invented The Shop in an Indian restaurant in London with Tracey, and I had coffee and breakfast with Boltanski in Paris maybe about the same month and conceived do it. It was also about the promiscuity of collaboration. For me, do it was almost open source. It was the beginning of things becoming more global. It was a moment of intense travelling, taking night trains all over Europe. You know, ‘How can I make things that globally make sense, have a show that travels in a different way?’ For my Hotel show (Hotel Carlton Palace: Chambre 763, 1993) I was basically in the hotel room for 24 hours and anybody could come in at three or six in the morning. It was non-stop. It was a similar feeling to The Shop – your dialogue with Tracey was also non-stop.
SL: Certainly on Saturday nights, we were open all night on purpose. It was a good area to be, just off Brick Lane. There were bagel shops open all night. We were absolutely knackered at the end of the six months. We went from nothing to having half the world coming through the door. I look back on it all fondly. I’m one of these people who are very fond of their own work. They’re sort of like friends to me.
HUO: I remember I basically had no money, but I bought this cigarette package from The Shop, a ready-made one. I remember a conversation we had then about the use of cigarettes and you said something I never forgot. I was wondering if it was about death and you told me, ‘Only if we think about such distractions that make us think about life,’ something like that. So that was already all there, no?
SL: Yeah. It’s amazing, making things, how often you realise that something was there very much earlier. Really, things started happening for me in early 1992. I did ‘Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab’ and I had my first one-person show at City Racing, which was where I met Tracey. You could even say it started before that, being part of the Goldsmiths group. The Shop was about using premises that nobody else was using at the time. It was a social necessity (to adopt the bad-girl image) in those days, living in squats and co-ops in rundown areas of London. I didn’t have that much money so I was either cycling, walking or taking the nightbus. I found it useful to have a good pair of boots on and look a bit tough. It was a way of not getting picked on. Now I live in the countryside and don’t feel a great necessity for that. I mean, there are similarities in my appearance now in the sense that I’m still in old jeans and jumpers with black hair, but that toughness was rather integral to the reality of living in that situation.
New generations have to reinvent this for themselves, not that it really went away. It is continuous. There’s just that feeling that the energy has to come again.
HUO: It’s interesting that you mentioned City Racing. When you talk about the DIY spirit, the artist-run spaces were very important in early 90s London.
SL: City Racing was an old betting shop, and ‘Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab’ was in a shop in Kingly Street, which funnily enough is where Sadie Coles is opening her new gallery. So that’s kind of gone full circle, back in Kingly Street where it all started for me.
HUO: When I came to London in the late 80s, early 90s, there was a whole map of these artist-run spaces, which is quite difficult to imagine now because it was obviously before rent was expensive. Now most of those spaces are public spaces and commercial galleries. Back then, none of these spaces were really commercial – they were self-organised, artist-run spaces that worked on a shoestring budget. Gilbert & George were a great inspiration for me, that idea of art for all. I remember as a teenager I went to see them and they explained about that famous 1969 show When Attitudes Become Form at the ICA. Gilbert & George were devastated as young artists not to be invited, so they just went to the opening as living sculptures, and that’s obviously what got the most attention. That was a great inspiration, to see that one doesn’t have to wait for an entitlement.
SL: It’s also who decides what’s legitimate art. In terms of the huge bunch of artists that we became (and it seems to be continually expanding), it was like a sort of ongoing party. We were largely our own audience, but other people came along because we were having such a huge party. So in the end we decided what was legitimate.
HUO: Robert Musil said in his great novel The Man Without Qualities that art can happen when we expect it least. That’s why my first show in ’91 was The Kitchen Show. When your show Penis Nailed to a Board happened, it happened in a shop. After that I invited you to my Hotel exhibition because that was another model of an exhibition that was more in the context of life.
SL: New generations have to reinvent this for themselves, not that it really went away. It is continuous. There’s just that feeling that the energy has to come again.
HUO: One of the reasons we did the new do it book is that there are so many younger artists reconnecting to that DIY spirit. There is also the idea of the rumour. In 1993 I lived between Switzerland and Paris and heard rumours about The Shop and came to London to see it. A similar thing had happened with my shows – there wasn’t really any advertising, so it became a rumour. People came to the hotel room and there were queues outside. Richard Wentworth said one of the ways an exhibition travels is in these concentric circles through rumour. The same for 60s performances which only seven people saw but then became very well known.
SL: And some things, because of the rumour, continued to grow after they opened, even when they had technically finished. The rumour keeps it going.
Until September 22, DO IT 20 13, Manchester International Festival, Manchester Art Gallery.mif.co.uk. manchestergalleries.org
As today’s art world continues to expand at an exponential rate, with new museums, exhibitions, and biennials popping up seemingly by the minute, contemporary curators are increasingly expected to be up-to-date and knowledgeable about all the goings on around the globe. Only a select few “super” curators have the drive and the wherewithal to handle the mounting responsibilities required to stage today’s monumental shows. We’ve compiled a list of eight of these exceptional gatekeepers, who also happen to be some of the most influential and important people around.
Name: Hans Ulrich Obrist Affiliation:Serpentine Gallery in London (Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programs, and Director of International Projects) Known For: Being everywhere at once, writing a Brief History of Curating. Curatorial Approach: Interdisciplinarily-inclined advocate for evolving and participatory exhibitions, Obrist’s curatorial reach knows no limits. Most Notable Exhibition: “do it,” a still-ongoing project begun in 1993 consisting of a set of instructional works—contributed by artists including Rirkrit Tiravanija, Marina Abramović, Christian Marclay, and Olafur Eliasson, among many others—that anyone can follow to create an open exhibition in any location. Weirdest Exhibition: Beginning with an “Interview Marathon” in 2006, Obrist has conducted a series of 24-hour cultural endurance tests, with themes ranging from “Experiments” to “Manifesto” and “Poetry.” Sartorial Flourish:Blazer, notie.
Name: Okwui Enwezor Affiliation: Haus der Kunst in Munich (Director) Known For: As a writer, critic, and editor, as well as a curator, Enzewor serves on numerous curatorial teams and advisory boards. Curatorial Approach: Enwezor’s exhibition topics focus primarily on post-colonial art and political activism. Most Notable Exhibition: In Enwezor’s case, it’s a tie: As the artistic director of the second (and final) Johannesburg Biennale, Enwezor’s “Trade Routes: History and Geography” is largely credited as an important moment for African art on an international scale. As curator of Documenta 11 in 2002, he made the exhibition truly international, conceiving it as a series of decentralized “platforms” located in Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, St. Lucia, and Lagos, as well as the main event in Kassel. Weirdest Exhibition: Not so much weird as revolutionary, “In/Sight,” an 1996 exhibition of African photographers at the Guggenheim helped challenge visual stereotypes of African representation. Sartorial Flourish:The man can rock an ascot.
Name: Massimilliano Gioni Affiliation:The New Museum in New York (Associate Director and Director of Special Exhibitions); the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan (Artistic Director) Known For: Being the Wall Street Journal-annointed “crown prince” of the art world. Curatorial Approach: Gioni frequently pulls together art regardless of genre classification, creating generally pleasant and thought-provoking juxtapositions. Most Notable Exhibition: His “Younger Than Jesus” exhibition, the first iteration of the New Museum’s triennial, which he co-curated with Lauren Cornell and Laura Hoptman, reads like a “who’s who” list of hot young artists, from Cory Arcangel and Tauba Auerbach to Elad Lassry and Adam Pendleton. Weirdest Exhibition: His exhibition for the Venice Biennale sports the theme “The Encyclopedic Palace,” based on an outsider artist’s theoretical museum, and contains a bizarre assemblage of art, including “anonymous tantric paintings” alongside work by Robert Crumb and James Castle. Sartorial Flourish:No blazer, no tie.
Name: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev Affiliation: Independent Known For: Being the first woman to reach #1 on Art Review‘s annual “Power 100” list. Curatorial Approach: The American writer and art historian often takes a step back curatorially and lets the potentially-drawn associations between her disparately gathered artworks do the talking. Most Notable Exhibition: Under her curatorial guidance, Documenta 13 in 2012 was a smashing success, drawing over 100,000 more visitors than its previous edition in 2007 and being an impressive feat of organization, as it spread beyond the usual location of Kassel, Germany to Kabul, Banff, and Cairo. Weirdest Exhibition: Serving as the senior curator at MoMA PS1 in 2000, Christov-Bakargiev helped mount the first edition of the quinquennial “Greater New York” exhibition, which spotlights the very diverse (and very weird) art being made throughout New York City. Sartorial Flourish: Scarves and those glasses.
Name: Klaus Biesenbach Affiliation: MoMA PS1 (Director) and MoMA (Chief Curator-at-Large) Known For: His ascetic lifestyle, not having any furniture in his apartment. Curatorial Approach: Ideas for Biesenbach’s exhibitions tend to derive from his own personal taste, which is excellent. Most Notable Exhibition: While his retrospective for (former flame) Marina Abramović in 2010 deserves mention, “Any Ever,” the New York debut of innovative video artist Ryan Trecartin in 2011 probably takes the cake. Weirdest Exhibition: In 2006, Biesenbach curated the group exhibition “Into Me/Out of Me” at PS1, which focused on the act of “passing into, through, and out of the human body.” Sartorial Flourish:Tailored Terminator.
Name: Thelma Golden Affiliation: The Studio Museum in Harlem (Director and Chief Curator) Known For: Championing early career artists. Curatorial Approach: Golden’s exhibitions tend to focus on emerging African American artists, considering their work within nuanced conceptual and theoretical groupings. Most Notable Exhibition: Shortly after joining the Studio Museum in 2000, Golden curated “Freestyle” (2001), a widely lauded exhibition of 28 emerging artists of African descent. Golden’s catalogue essay for the show introduced the concept of “post black,” a term coined by Golden that “identified a generation of black artists who felt free to abandon or confront the label of ‘black artist,’ preferring to be understood as individuals with complex investigations of blackness in their work.” Weirdest Exhibition: Golden was on the curatorial staff at the Whitney when they launched their infamous “Identity Politics” biennial in 1993 that forever altered the course of contemporary art. Sartorial Flourish: Bold patterns.
Name:RoseLee Goldberg Affiliation:Performa (Founding Director and Curator) Known For: Writing the definitive tome Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present. Curatorial Approach: As the driving force behind the Performa biennial, Goldberg is known for being on the cutting edge of performance art. Most Notable Exhibition: Performa 2012 included commissioned work by a laundry list of art stars, including Elmgreen & Dragset, Ragnar Kjartansson, Liz Magic Laser, Laurel Nakadate and James Franco, Shirin Neshat, and Frances Stark. Weirdest Exhibition:David Salle‘s first solo exhibition “Bearding the Lion in His Den” at the Kitchen in 1977, which featured ten high intensity light bulbs flashing at random while Tim Buckley’s “Song for the Siren” plays. Sartorial Flourish:Killer bangs.
Name: Paul Schimmel Affiliation: It was recently announced that Schimmel will be joining the blue-chip gallery Hauser & Wirth as a partner in a new Los Angeles space, Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, which is set to open in 2015. Known For: Putting on critically acclaimed exhibitions year after year and getting unceremoniously fired for it. Curatorial Approach: His vision is expansive and his exhibitions are often grand in scale, though they have often tended to focus on L.A.-based artists. Most Notable Exhibition: Schimmel set the bar high with “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” (1992), his first exhibition as chief curator at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, which sought to upset stereotypes about West Coast art and challenge the assumed superiority of the New York art scene. Weirdest Exhibition: His (probably) once-in-lifetime show “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines” at LA MOCA (2005), which traveled to the Metropolitan Museum of Art the following year, a collection of over 50 of the postwar artist’s rare and fragile collages. Sartorial Flourish:Cosby sweaters.
Damien Hirst I’ve always liked series. I remember looking at Robert Motherwell’s painting when I was young. Do you know ‘Splashes by the Sea’? I thought that was great.
You get some sort of security from the repetition of a series. If you say something twice, it’s pretty convincing. It’s more convincing than if you say it once. [Laughs].
I think it’s also an implication of endlessness, which kind of theoretically helps you avoid death. I’ve thought quite a lot about it. In a way, that’s why smoking is so sexy. Apart from the addiction, the attraction is that there’s nothing certain in life and things change all the time, but you can always rely on something like a cigarette – which punctuates your whole existence time and time again – to be the same. It’s almost like you’re cheating death. But it’s killing you, so then, smoking becomes even sexier. People are afraid of change, so you create a kind of belief for them through repetition. It’s like breathing. So I’ve always been drawn to series and pairs. A unique thing is quite a frightening object.
HUO A sort of umbilical cord in your work, which is more than a series, is the idea of the aquarium. You’ve spoken about that in many interviews before, but I thought it would be interesting if we could touch on it briefly. It revisits Minimalism but recharges it with a very different content. So how did this aquarium idea start?
DH I’ve always had a thing about glass. I had a magic mushroom experience very early on where I got a bit freaked out about being symmetrical. I imagined I had a sheet of glass running right through me. Glass became quite frightening. I think glass is quite a frightening substance. I always try and use it. I love going around aquariums, where you get a jumping reflection so that the things inside the tank move; glass becomes something that holds you back and lets you in at the same time. Its’ an amazing material; it’s something solid yet ephemeral. It’s dangerous as well. I just love glass. And it’s a way to separate people but engage them. You can invite them in and keep them away at the same time. It’s probably my favourite material, glass. And water. No, my favourite material is water and then glass. But glass and water are very similar. Glass in water is amazing; glass disappears if you put it in water.
HUO And there’s the series of animals in formaldehyde.
DH ‘Natural History’ that was called. I just imagined a zoo of dead animals. I keep thinking that I’m done with that, but then I recently had the idea for the crucifixions, which I think are fucking brilliant; I have to do that. I think there’s a narrative within those now. I was also thinking about doing the Stations of the Cross as fourteen cabinet pieces. I don’t really think they’re a series. I’m not sure.
HUO If one thinks about all the different series, one can see your whole work as a sort of open system from which new series start and others stop.
DH I think they’re aspects of personality. It’s shit to go on the wall at the end of the day. You’re decorating apartments a lot of the time; it’s something to go over the sofa. I remember my friend Joe Strummer said to me that a long time ago, cavemen used to go out and smash buffalo over the head and bring them back and cook them and eat them. Then at some point there were are a couple of guys who got their hands in the blood and put something on the cave wall. It was just about making the cave nice. Art came out of the desire to make your habitat more interesting. I love that. Or even music – the guy who started banging bones together and the other guys said, ‘We like the sound of that and we like the way the walls look. Why don’t you guys stay her and we’ll get the meat for you, so at least when we get back to eat the meat we’ll be in a cool place?’ So I’ve always loved that kind of view of art: that art is a reflection of life. I think there’s an infinite number of ways to get to the same point. Every artwork is fundamentally the same thing.
HUO Some of your work links to display features in science museums, and other works have more to do with scientific formulas. I’m interested in this relationship to science. Can you talk about that?
DH I just hitched a ride on science – or not really science – it was medicine. It’s just collage, isn’t it? Art is always very simple, or good art is always very simple. I took science in the way that Picasso took the bike seat and the handlebars and made the bull’s head. I mean, there’s nothing complicated about it. Science seemed to be getting people’s attention and art didn’t, so I hitched a ride on that. Or people were believing in science and questioning art, so I just took it very directly and used the science. It’s been a very rich vein for me. It also partly came from David Cronenberg’s film ‘Dead Ringers’.
HUO ‘Dead Ringers’was the original of all the ‘Medicine Cabinet’ works?
DH Yes. Jeremy Irons as a gynaecologist, in the red fucking robes, and those weird gynaecological instruments that were like art. It was that real high-end medical stuff. And I saw some dark, smoked cabinets in there and I thought, ‘Fucking hell. They look great.’ And so I made some myself. That, combined with seeing Jeff Koons’ Hoovers, and all that Neo-Geo stuff and Kurt Schwitters. I was thinking, ‘What would Kurt Schwitters be doing if he was alive today?’ Bless him, he’d be down the pub. He’d be a priest.
HUO I think he might just have continued his Merzbau.
DH Yes. He’d have finished it.
HUO Because nothing could really stop him from doing it.
DH Only one thing.
HUO Death.
DH Death, yes. Don’t you hate that guy?
HUO Schwitters?
DH Death. No, I like Schwitters. I just fucking hate death. He’s such a dumb guy.
HUO It’s a dull fact. Leon Golub called death, ‘A dull fact’.
DH If it’s true. I don’t know if it’s true. [Pause] Come on, it can’t be true!
HUO It’s a rumour.
DH Elvis is still around. And sex doesn’t really make babies. How the fuck could that work?
HUO Another rumour.
DH Yes, it’s a rumour. It’s bullshit. I heard a great quote by George Burns, the American comedian. Somebody asked him in an interview when he was about 96, ‘What do you think about death?’ And he said, ‘It’s been done’. [Laughs].
HUO [Laughs] Great! We were talking about science.
DH Yes, the whole story of it, alchemy and everything; it’s fantastic. Trying to understand the world, looking for the keys to understanding: that’s what artists do as well in some ways. It’s like God should be, the way they sell you the pills, the forms, the utopia, the hope, the cure. We’ve come a long way since quack doctors.
HUO Were you inspired by science museums?
DH Yes. I love them: science museums, natural history museums, anything that takes your mind off death, really, or focuses your mind on it. I love all that hands-on stuff. It’s great when you feel that you’re being entertained and also educated. I’ve always felt if you could do that with art it would be great.
HUO I’m interested in finding out more about how you work, in terms of the collection, archives and studios. Picasso said one should never give up a studio: you should shut the door and take a new one and forget about it and accumulate more studios. Each time we’ve met, you’ve mentioned another place and it seems as if you’ve got lots of studios all over the world.
DH I think you should definitely shut them down. Somebody once said to me, ‘Which bit do you like the most? You must love it when you’ve got all these big machines and tanks and people and they’re all in the gallery piling stuff in and there’s all this chaos.’ I said, ‘No. I fucking hate it.’ I like it when it’s all one and there’s just a perfect exhibition at the end. Picasso was obsessed with fame, he wasn’t he? He thought every time he wiped his ass people would find it important. I’m more convinced by the Beatles than Picasso these days.
HUO Why the Beatles more than Picasso?
DH They had much more influence on the people around them at the time, and they were struggling with truth in a much deeper way. They grew up in public and they went through so many changes. Picasso is brilliant, don’t get me wrong, especially the late Picasso. Maybe it’s because I’m an artist… When I was a kid, I just loved the Beatles. I think I wanted to be the Beatles or something. It’s funny because I was from a different generation. I wasn’t around when the Beatles were around. I was born in 1965, so I witnessed it second hand, in the same way, I suppose, that you witness Picasso second hand. And then I was too young to be a punk. A lot of our generation missed the punk thing that really split everything wide open; we came in the wake of it. We were like punk artists. Some of us have a lot of the attitude. I always thought; especially when you look at the Beatles and the artists who were around at the time – Richard Hamilton and Peter Blake – that the Beatles really made a different. The artists, especially compared to the Americans, didn’t really.
HUO Warhol made a difference.
DH Yes, it was Warhol and the Beatles. With Picasso, maybe the talent is a little too apparent. I don’t know. Picasso became his own idea of himself; he created a persona and he lived it, whereas the Beatles split at the height of their fucking success, which is a phenomenal thing to do. They just got sick of it; they said, ‘We’re not going on tour any more.’ They were never just going to take the money. Which is great for people from a working-class background.
HUO Warhol is in your collection. Can you talk a little bit about him?
DH Warhol’s great. You can’t argue with it. It’s simple, isn’t it? And visually great. It’s easy, cheap, simple. He certainly doesn’t over-complicate things. I think that’s good. And in terms of consumerism and all that sort of stuff, art has been in a constant battle for hundreds of years with every other kind of image-making. We’re fighting it today. The paintings that I’m doing now are about that battle. The paintings came out of the time when the newspapers went colour. When newspapers go colour, it’s almost like you get information overload and image overload. Newspapers are about facts and truth, and you believe you get a true view of the world from these images when you don’t: they’re completely fake.
HUO Which paintings are you referring to?
DH The realistic ones I’ve been doing. Like the ones in the Gagosian show this autumn. It’s like taking one of those images and trying to make it into a painting, because paintings you believe and images you don’t, so you want to throw away the images. What’s happened though, is that we believe in images.
HUO How are these paintings made? Are they done by people who work with you, like in Warhol’s Factory?
DH For two years I worked with a sculptor called Nick Lumb. I was giving him these little photographic images and saying, ‘I want it to look like that.’ But I didn’t really know what I wanted. We didn’t get any results – well, we did, but they were horrible. We were trying to do it with airbrushing. I kept going back to these paintings and hating them. And after all the airbrushing, after two or three years, we just went back to oil paint. When you’ve learnt all that discipline, the oil paint really cracks back in. They’re still not there, but all I know is they’re getting better. They’re getting closer to what I want. I’ve been setting up my own photographs. I’ve taken photographs of diamonds. I’ve been doing photographs of the Beatles; just creating this mass of images that keep piling up. But it’s real chaos because I don’t know what I want. I keep stopping and starting. I keep thinking about Goya and Soutine, and I sort of imagine that at the end of my life I’ll just fucking paint. I’ll be fucking sat in a tiny little room with one light bulb doing self-portraits on my own. There’s a lot of complications with what I do now. You have to be young, you have to be fit, to run the operation that I run, and I certainly don’t think I can get old running an operation like this.
HUO So the operation will have to reduce?
DH Yes. It will have to. If you’ve got people working for you, and they’re getting older and you keep replacing them with younger people, and you’re getting old too, it’s going to be mental. But if you keep everybody working for you and they get old, eventually they’re not going to be able to move big things around. So instead of getting rid of them younger, why not make the works smaller? You could make smaller things that they can carry. You’d end up with this fucking studio of old people carrying little things around – ‘Can you make it in wood, please? I can’t carry the steel.’ It would be good if you could do that. I love the idea of a company, an old-fashioned company. I’m just an old-fashioned boy at heart, really.
HUO In some ways it does feel like a new model of Warhol’s Factory. But this idea of revisiting painting is interesting. You could get rid of all these structures without concentrating on painting. Why painting?
DH It’s like, ‘Why books?’ It’s just a great way to convey a message. It’s a brilliant illusion. It’s very simple; the illusion that something two-dimensional is three-dimensional evokes emotions in people.
HUO You mentioned that you’re doing a new show and a book of the drawings in New York.
DH It’s called ‘Corpus‘. I’ve just sent 300 drawings over to Larry Gagosian, so it’s kind of everything I’ve done. When I started doing the drawings, I didn’t really want anybody to see them. But as I’ve been doing it for longer and have got older, I think maybe it’s good to see them.
HUO Is there a daily practice of drawing?
DH Yes, it’s the first point of call, isn’t it? You have an idea, and when it gets too complicated to hold in your head, it’s a great way to visualise it. It’s a very cheap and effective way to visualise it. I love that. You can work out what size it needs to be. You can imagine it. So I’ve always done that. I can work out in a few lines with a pencil on a piece of paper how big I need to make a tank. That way, you don’t make expensive mistakes.
HUO Peter Fleissig showed me the drawing of the shark.
DH That was done after the fact. Peter said he wanted a drawing of the shark, so I did one. I think you can tell if they’re done afterwards because you can see they’re drawn from a photograph of the piece.
HUO Are the drawings after the fact rare, or are there lots of them?
DH I think as long as you don’t pretend that they’re done before, it’s OK. If someone said to me, ‘Can you do me a drawing of the shark?’ I don’t mind doing that. But the ones done before are more interesting, because you’re trying out different possibilities and you can see the progress of how you got to the actual shark.
HUO Are there a lot of unknown drawings in the show that nobody has ever seen before?
DH Yes, there are lots. There are some drawings of horrible sculptures that never got made. There’s one called ‘Lambie Loves Snoodle’. It’s got a pram in it and a baby monitor with a skull; it’s the very stupid idea of death talking to birth on a baby walkie-talkie or a mobile phone. The title was from a Lonely Hearts column.
HUO That piece was never made?
DH No. I don’t think it ever will be. There are lots like that. Loads. When you have an idea for an animal in formaldehyde, you do drawings for every animal. I was going to do a big Raft of the Medusa with dead animals and meat and big butchers’ tables, but I never made it. There’s a great one of a butterfly made out of two pigs sewn together ass to ass; you cut the back end off it and then four sides of beef make the wings. It’s a huge thing, like a butterfly of death, which I never made. You do drawings very quickly, and that’s easy, but then you work out how much it’s going to cost to make it and it becomes a ridiculous amount of money.
HUO There was this whole debate in the press the other day. People were asking about the shark: how will it be in the future? Does it matter if it’s a different shark? Does it matter whether or not you, as the artist, choose the shark? Can someone else make it?
DH The idea of replacing the shark is a bit of a difficult one. The original shark (in ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living‘) was done badly – that’s the problem. With the other ones, you probably won’t replace them. Everything is replaceable in my mind, but then, I’m not the person who’s going to decide that, because it happens when you’re gone. But I feel pretty bad about the way the shark was looking, because it’s deteriorated. A shark has got to look fierce. So I think it really had stopped doing what I wanted it to do. The problem with the shark was that it was done with MoMA and it was done with Charles Saatchi; there were too many people doing it and they all got involved with the commission. Different people advised them that there was no need to inject the shark. I wanted to inject the shark, they didn’t want to inject it – Charles can be a bit bullish – and they pushed me into not injecting it. So in the end, it didn’t get injected, and it was the only thing that didn’t get injected. Then we had all the stories that it had started floating; it completely rotted insider, and we had some real problems with it. In the end, Charles went off on his own and had it gutted and skinned and stretched over a fibreglass mould, so it wasn’t a real shark after a while, and it just started to be totally wrong: it was the wrong shape, it just didn’t look frightening, didn’t look dangerous, didn’t look like a shark. So for me to get involved at this point now, knowing what I know, I can go back in and get a new shark and make it look exactly like I wanted it to look originally because I’m still alive, so I think that’s good. But that’s an example of an artwork being handled really badly. It’s not like the ‘Venus de Milo’. The arm is missing – it looks great. With old art you’ve got to use a lot of imagination. In a way there’s a big joy in looking at things and reconstructing their past lives. I mean, every day you have to deal with your own mortality, so a good way of doing that without too much fear is to deal with the mortality of an object.
HUO Some artists in the 1960s tried to make contracts stating that a work had to be dealt with in a particular way. That was another part of my question: how do you feel about that difficult business?
DH I don’t mind. There are two things in an artwork, aren’t there? There’s a visual thing and there’s a cerebral thing; there’s a mind thing and an eye thing going on. And then mind thing is always secondary; no matter how great or important conceptual art is, at the end of the day, it’s secondary to the eye thing. If it looks fucking good on the wall, none of that matters; it’s really not important. But I think you’ve got to be careful. When you’re making an artwork, there’s an idea and you play around with it and then it comes to life. But you can have an idea and put things together, and then it doesn’t work. So I suppose if things can come to life then they can also die. You can create an artwork, and it comes to life, but then maybe 500 years later it dies. I’ve never really thought about that. It’s a weird thought; a good thought.
HUO A limited lifespan? Like buildings.
DH Yes, like everything else. In my mind I think that art’s immortal, but maybe it has a limited lifespan. All these Old Masters are falling apart, and we’re clinging onto them through preservation. It’s like in that film of HG Wells’ ‘The Time Machine’, when the books fall apart in his hands. You’ll get that happening with art, I guess. With a Jackson Pollock painting that’s going to happen eventually. Or is it? You can create it digitally. Maybe art is like true love; maybe it never dies. That’s my hope, anyway. But it will die with the world. If we do nothing, the earth is going to smash into the sun, so we’re fucked really.
‘An Interview’ constitutes excerpts from an interview (with permission from the artist and the interviewer) which took place in connection with the exhibition ‘In the darkest hour there may be light.Works from the Damien Hirst murderme collection’ at Serpentine Gallery, London.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-director of the Serpentine Gallery, London. He has served as curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and has curated 250 exhibitions worldwide.
Obrist’s recent publications include A Brief History of Curating and The Conversation Series (Vol. 1-20.)
In 2011, Obrist has been awarded the Bard College Award for Curatorial Excellence and the Swiss Institute Honoree Award 2011.
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Artfacts.Net Interview with Hans-Ulrich Obrist
Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Marek Claassen
Hans-Ulrich Obrist is one of the most prestigious curators of contemporary art. Currently he serves as a Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes, and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London.
AfN: Hello Mr. Obrist
HUO: Hello. Good morning.
AfN: Rather randomly I browsed to a web site called www.edge.org. A website where usually scientists publish their very personal opinion, for example their dangerous idea. Now it’s you the curator asking about the formula of life. When did your connection to the world of science occur?
HUO: My connection to science started a long time ago in Germany. When I was a young curator, I started to work with Kasper König in Frankfurt. He was at Portikus, at Städelschule in the early 90s. We were working in ’91 on a book called “The Public View”, my first book, and then on a big painting show called “Der zerbrochene Spiegel” [The broken mirror], in ’93 in Vienna. I was contacted by Christa Maar who runs the Academy of the Third Millenium which brought people like Ernst Pöppel, Wolf Singer, two German neurologists, together with architects and scholars from all disciplines and artists.
In ’93, they had invited me to come to the Academy meetings. For me, it was really a revelation because it was the first time I met scientists. I had never met scientists before in my life, I was always with art and architecture. I had long conversations with Ernst Pöppel and others. And that really triggered a relation to science. I would show Semir Zeki a Mark Rothko exhibition, and he would tell me about neuroscientific issues, about what happens in our brain when we see a Mark Rothko painting.
So little by little, I began to think that it could be very interesting to connect artists with these scientists and develop an approach. And one of the first approaches was called “Art & Brain” which we did in a science centre in Germany where we basically had an extended coffee break. Carsten Höller was there, Rosemarie Trockel, Douglas Gordon and many others. And then, after that extended coffee break, we did another project called “Bridge the gap?”, and another one called “Laboratorium” which then became a bigger project.
I started this thing at a certain moment when I thought it could be interesting not only to do conferences but also bring that science link into the medium of the exhibition which is my primary medium. I basically worked on these different things and on conferences like the 24-hour marathon here in London. That obviously shifts the rule of the game of what a conference is.
But for me, the main medium remains the exhibition. And the question was how to bring science into an exhibition, and this was the primary focus for “Laboratorium” in ’99 – the show which Barbara Vanderlinden curated, where we invited scientists and artists to talk about the laboratorium, about their studio, about their science lab. Different labs have happened in Antwerpen. Rosemarie Trockel did her sleeping lab; Jonas Mekas revisited Andy Warhol‘s factory, and wondered what happened to the factory later on, what it became; we had Luc Steels developing colour recognition experiments and robots; we had basically Panamarenko defining his laboratory, his studio to be close to the public; it was a secret place; and we invited also the eminent Bruno Latour to actually curate a show within the show, and he came up with this idea of the table top experiments. So he curated a series of public lectures and demonstrations where scientists, artists and architects would publicly present either a new or an old experiment. So that’s the first time in ’99 where we – the science investigation – reached a critical mass. We really developed a larger scale exhibition.
Then it moved on with conferences again like “Bridge the gap?” with Akiko Miyake where we invited – for a week – scientists, artists and architects to Japan, and had a sort of a think tank where art meets science meets architecture in a different environment. In this case it was a house on the outskirts of Kitakyushu, very remote.
Then, I moved to London last year, and we started with Julia Peyton-Jones to welcome these different projects of the Serpentine Gallery: education and public programmes, exhibition, and architecture which are the three main strings. Obviously, the question was also: how can the pavilion be a “content-machine”? And Julia had initiated and invented in 2000 this pavilion scheme with world leading architects doing a temporary pavilion every year. Together, we invited Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond to design the pavilion, and we spoke with them about his idea that it could also be a forum, an agora for conversation. We had a very intense summer of conversation last year which culminated in the marathon, and Rem said, architecture without content is meaningless shape. So when this year, we approached Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen, they immediately picked up on this idea as well but pushed it further, and Olafur agreed to be involved. Olafur was here most of the weeks; there was a colour experiment, there was an experiment of models; there was another one about sound. The pavilion became a musical instrument.
Olafur and I had been through “Bridge the gap?”, but also through an event in Eidar, in Iceland which was another interdisciplinary think tank. So it’s a really long story. We’re working a lot on these art-science-relationship. So we felt it could be interesting that the pavilion becomes really a place where a marathon of experiments could take place. And Olafur thought that maybe last year, there have been enough conversations, and it could be interesting to, this year, really not talk but ask people to do something, to do an experiment in the pavilion. There have been up to 60 experiments on the Frieze weekend in October, ten days ago, where artists, scientists did an experiment. The results are on www.serpentinegallery.org.
Hans-Ulrich Olbrist during the interview in the streets of London
AfN: And is this your formula of life?
HUO: Yes, that brings us to the question about the formula. Besides the exhibitions, the conference season, the symposium, I have always had this other type of projects, more immaterial exhibitions which are basically “Do it”, a book made out of recipes, or also “The future will be” where I had asked artists to define the future, and my most recent project of such an immaterial exhibition is “Formulas for the 21st Century”.
So in the last 18 months, I started to ask artists from all over the world to send a formula for the 21st century. It was triggered by an interview I made with the great inventor Albert Hofmann. At the end of the interview, he drew on a piece of paper the formula of LSD. It was an incredibly simple formula, and I just thought “wow, it could be interesting to ask 100 artists to email their formula!”. My projects are kind of a flanerie. Out of this flanerie, things very often – also by chance – develop. It’s not a masterplan. These things, these projects just happen. Little by little, whenever the artists email a formula, I put it on the wall of my office. At the beginning, when I started to work here, my office was empty, there were just three formulas on the wall, and then, the office became more and more full with these formulas which had been faxed or emailed. After about the year, the whole office was full with these formulas.
One night, when we had an opening, Brian Eno who is my neighbour here in Notting Hill and who obviously had been one of the world’s great pioneers to bring music in relation to science, he came with John Brockman to one of our openings. John Brockman is the founder of “Edge”. He saw all these formulas on the wall at my office, got really excited and said “this is an ‘Edge’ project! We should do something together!”. I had known John Brockman for almost 10 years, through James Lee Byars and many other common friends, but we never had collaborated directly. I contributed to some of his online-things but we have never done a big project together. He said: “You do it with artists but I could ask the ‘Edge’ list to contribute”. John Brockman asked all the scientists of his mailing list to send a formula; so in some kind of way, he had quite a parallel way of working. He took my idea, obviously with my acquaintance, and asked his mailing list to send a formula which we then presented as part of the science marathon we did here. We invited John Brockman not only to do this formula but we also thought it could be interesting that John Brockman actually does a section of the marathon. Brockman invited about 10 scientists to do an experiment, so there was an ‘Edge’ sequence. Projects of this sort are not developed in one masterplan. It’s an archipel-like model of different islands which we then connect in many different ways. So there was a John Brockman island, there was a Israel Rosenfield and Luc Steels island;…. On the website, you can see an image of each experiment.
What happened is that suddenly this immaterial exhibition of formulas has, by being on ‘Edge’, reached a completely other context. Suddenly we ended up on top of Boing Boing which is the biggest blog on the planet, and hundreds of thousands of people all over the world would visit it. To some extent, that obviously is very important for us because it is not only about bridging the gap between disciplines, but it’s also about reaching art and building bridges to other visitors who usually would not come to an art gallery, and we have 800,000 visitors p.a. Admission is free. So this kind of way is also an interesting link to the internet. You go to “Edge”, it’s free. You come to the Serpentine, it’s free.
Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2007 by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorsen
AfN: ‘Edge’ always asks these interviews “What is your question?” with a question mark. And you have a website called “Point d’ironie”, and there is also a question mark but it’s turned upside down. So I asked myself how these things are linked with each other? It has nothing to do with irony, right?
HUO: No, artists like James Lee Byars or Alighiero Boetti have been immensely influential for me when I started in the late 80ies, early 90ies to work as a curator. James Lee Byars had in ’71 this wonderful project called “The World Question Center”. It was a huge inspiration for me, but it was also an inspiration for Brockman who has seen Byars earlier than me because he started earlier than me. But we both, being from different generations, were equally inspired by James Lee Byars, and we kind of met through this inspiration by James Lee Byars‘ “World Question Center”. And he asked as an artist all the eminent people like Freeman Dyson, the Dalai Lama among others, to ask one question. He’d ring them, and the moment, he had that question, he’d hang up the phone. So the World Question Center was certainly a trigger.
The “point d’ironie” leads us to another project; it is related in a sense that we disseminate art broader than just in the conventional way, and it’s got to do with this idea of inventing other circuits of disseminating art. The “point d’ironie” was really a discussion between Christian Boltanski, the French artist, Agnes B., the French designer, publisher, and collector, and myself. About ten years ago, we were thinking, it could be nice to do two-folded posters that would be a magazine and a poster in one. We had printed hundreds of thousands of copies and distributed them for free all over the world. If you go the “point d’ironie”-website, you will see that it’s been going on now for ten years. Jonas Mekas did the first issue; the most recent ones were done by Damien Hirst and also by Richard Prince and Hreinn Fridfinnsson. What is interesting is that each time, it’s also a different circuit because we print about a hundred thousand copies and distribute it globally, obviously through Agnes B.’s channels, then through the mailing list of museums, but each time also, through where the artist wants it to travel. So the artist brings each time his or her mailing list. I think, to some extent, that’s the core of this project.
Currently, we have all these forces of globalisation, and obviously, they lead to a danger because sometimes the danger is that in my world of exhibition, they can lead to a homogenising force. The difference disappears. I believe in this idea that we use the forces of globalisation because they are an opportunity, a possibility to stimulate and trigger more global dialogue but that we, at the same time, resist those homogenising forces so that we define models which are actually a difference producing globalisation.
AfN: We are sitting here in this wonderful pavilion designed by Olafur Eliasson and Kjetil Thorson. It’s a temporary installation. This pavilion will be replaced by another one. Isn’t this sad, don’t you want to keep it. What’s your relationship to possession?
HUO: Interesting question. I mean, to some extent, exhibitions are temporary mediums that is so much related to possession. In the art world, there is a strong art market; there is galleries, there is collections, and I think that’s incredibly important. I am very much convinced that there is a necessity for that because it helps to create sustainable, long-term presence of art and of architecture.
However, parallel to that, it is very important that we have laboratories, that we have experiments which not necessarily last, which are temporary because they allow to test things, they allow to test ideas, they allow new things to emerge, and I have always seen my role rather on that end to basically develop experimental situations where temporary constellations can be tested and can be invented. The exhibition is very much a temporary medium; exhibitions are temporary constellations of objects, of quasi objects, of processes which, after the exhibition, dissolve again. You have a book, you have a website, sometimes you have a lot of interviews and conversations, you have a memory, you have a documentation, you have archives, you produce archives but not necessarily permanent objects. With architecture it is similar because we are not producing permanent situations but we basically produce temporary architecture, temporary buildings which are pavilions. And this project initiated by Julia Peyton-Jones has actually developed a very very global visibility for architecture because it is visited by hundreds of thousands of people, it is published all over the world. However, it is not creating a lasting building here. First of all, we are not allowed to do it because this is “Royal Parks”, and it can only have temporary things but beyond that, it is also carried by the belief that temporary architecture sometimes produces the most innovative architecture. If you look at the history, there have been a lot of incredible inventions of architecture done by pavilions. If you think for example of the Mies van der Rohe pavilion in Barcelona…
Buckminster Fuller once said that maybe we can own cars or buildings, but we can also consider cars or buildings to be a service which means we only have the building when we need it. We only have a car when we need it. We do not necessarily have to own a car. […]
However, I do believe that there is a place and a necessity for such experiments which are not necessarily gone by thinking. Somebody builds a building, and it has got to last; he builds that building with a different spirit than if he builds a building for two or three months. So it gives the freedom to the architect to really test something maybe more daring, more extreme than he or she would if it was a permanent building. He would build a different pavillion. […]
AfN: You are known a somebody who breaks the custom habits of viewing (e.g. Hotel Carlton Palace, Cloaca Maxima, Take me (I’m yours)) or the casual ways of presenting art (e.g. Biennale Lyon). Your putting the things in a different context or adding a layer. It’s like reminding the people: Hey, this is art, it’s here and there it’s everywhere. Do you consider yourself as somebody appointed to train our senses?
HUO: I think it grew out of a necessity of conversations with artists. […] Alighiero Boetti once told me that, as an artist, he was always asked to do the same thing. You are asked to do gallery shows, you are asked to do museum shows, you are asked to do these very repetitive things, and it is unbelievably limited and restraining. […] [An art project and its realisation] are very much driven by discussions where one thinks about how to produce reality, how to make things happen which very often prove to be possible. […] It has to do with making things happen but it has also to do with the fact that when you ask an artist to do things which are not a routine but which are slightly different, he produces sometimes very very different work. […] It is the drive or necessity to produce new experiences
AfN: Another thing, something that striked me by reading one of the many interviews you did was that there was quite a lot of traveling involved. But not in the sense of just visiting some other place more in the sense of the German word “Wanderjahre” (journeyman). Where one to be considered professional has to gain knowledge by working and learning through emigration. Is this physical emigration obligatory if someone wants to succeed in the art world?
HUO: […] Since last year, I spend my week, from Monday to Friday, in London. Then I started to always travel from Friday night to Monday morning, each time to another continent. So I do my China research, the India research, and then my New York research – I changed my rhythm, and I began to do more short journeys. […] In 2000, at a certain moment, I chose not to travel at all, to stay for three years at one place. […] There are so many professions in history where it was not necessary to travel at all, and the idea that it becomes an obligation, in the worst case, even to do travelling without it being a necessity or a pleasure or a conviction, is not beneficial. It cannot be an obligation. Everybody travels, and it is certainly good that there is a lot of travelling going on but then, at the same time, maybe it is not important for every practice. Whenever I write a book, I cannot travel. Then I have – for several weeks – to stay somewhere. So to some point of vue, it is about rhythms, waves with intervals, pauses, silences.
I mean, sometimes it is very interesting not to go somewhere but to imagine a journey; if you think for example of Robert Walser’s fictitious Gazettes Parisiennes or Joseph Cornell’s European Grand Tour that never took place. It happened in the imagination.
And particularly in terms of exhibitions, it is sometimes not necessary to travel, sometimes it is more important to do a local research. One of my most interesting experiences was for example when I did the first Berlin Biennale with Nancy Spector and Klaus Biesenbach, and we decided “let’s just look at Berlin!” [for the selection of artists]. So we did not proceed like curators who travel all over the world to catch artists for a biennale but we just stayed in Berlin and looked at all the artists who live and work in Berlin. And it was really a very interesting experience. […] I prefer to focus on a few places and to dig deep. The cities where I live are obviously the cities where I research more deeply what is going on. […]
AfN: I always had the feeling that there are three different layers in the profession of an artist. You either are a teacher, or an installation artist in shows or you produce for the art fairs. And some of them serve every layer. Do you think that this trichotomy exists?
HUO: The big danger is that there is a pressure to homogenise practices, and that the difference disappears. It is interesting, to some extent, to resist this whole organisation and to be different. […] Everbody doing the same leads to an impoverishment, and in some kind of way, it is all about how – in a context where the homogenising forces are at stake – to produced a difference. That’s why there cannot be a prescription which says “It has got to be this way. An artist has to be like this”. It is something which has really to do with finding out one’s own projectory.
It has a lot to do with “Spaziergangswissenschaften” (Lucius Burckhardt). There are so many different ways of navigating the world.
AfN: But the artists you choose, do you meet them by wandering around?
HUO: It is also systematic. As John Cage said, it is chance but it is very controlled chance. […] I have been very inspired by Cage’s idea of the musical score and analogue the curatorial masterplan being too policing; maybe we should allow more chance in it, we should allow more improvisation, and that is something that you have in urbanism, in music a lot.
[…] At the same time, you have Yona Friedman or Oskar Hansen and Cedric Price in urbanism who, since the 60s, have talked about how to question the masterplan.
If you look for example at these people over there at the bus stop, we do not know whether they are going to take the bus or to change their mind, maybe they are going to walk… there is a lot of unpredictability, and how can we actually bring what urbanism and music have done since the 60s about questioning the masterplan, to curating. In terms of curating, it is very much about the masterplan. The curator makes the list of artists. In France, you even call the curator a “commissaire” which is police vocabulary. I found it very inspiring: music and urbanism, and how I can bring that into curating and develop self-organisation, develop models where controlled chance can enter.
AfN: Is this habit you have “quality”? – In the art world everybody speaks about “quality”. But when you talk, I get the impression that this is the quality of an artist – to jump in, to build a pavilion, to do something completely different. Would you call this quality in terms of an art work?
HUO: It’s also to change what we expect from art. I think, great artists always change what we expect from art.
And then there is the famous “étonnez-moi”. In the conversation with Cocteau and Diaghilev and the Ballets russes which was a great moment where art met theatre, and there was this famous explanation, and they said “étonnez-moi” (surprise me).
Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist talks to Emily Wardill about her enigmatic film work
‘Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck’, 2007, 16mm film. Courtesy Fortescue Avenue London. Photo Polly Braden
Hans Ulrich Obrist:It’s the first month, the 10th year, the first decade, the third millennium and we’re in London — Deleuze wrote about repetition and difference…
Emily Wardill: Yes, I was thinking about him, because I was thinking about windows.
Obrist:Windows?
Wardill: Throwing a body through a frame. You couldn’t really throw yourself out of that window.
Obrist:No, I couldn’t throw myself out of the window. But why do you think about windows this morning?
Wardill: Partly because I’m working on a catalogue at the moment and trying to organise everything under ideas of theatre and the object in the window, and I had heard that Deleuze, when he threw himself out of the window, did it because he was trying to get air into his lungs.
Obrist:Christian Boltanski told me that in an artist’s life there are a couple of inventions, great inventions, just as in a scientist’s life. Benoît Mandelbrot still remembers the day he discovered fractals. When was the first time you had an awakening epiphany?
Wardill: I think art made sense of the feeling that some things make sense and some things don’t. Maybe it was more accumulative than an epiphany.
Obrist:Do you remember the first piece you were happy with?
Wardill: I was really into editing and filmmaking — it was a performance piece (a re-enactment of Joris-Karl Huysmans’ black dinner from À rebours, 1884), ‘The Feast Against Nature’, 2005. When I was making sense of that vast project — two years of trying to work out the voices and how they came together — I realised that something happens when you edit, you can make connections that are not expected. It was an important piece of work also because it was made as a collective.
‘Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck’, 2007, 16mm film. Courtesy Fortescue Avenue London. Photo Polly Braden
Obrist:So it was a performance in which, for the first time, things came together. What was your inspiration?
Wardill: I remember being struck by Des Esseintes’ temporary loss of virility and that this gigantic black feast would then be something ridiculous and grand at the same time. And also the idea of decadence — decadence in the sense of the late 19th century word, but also the American contemporary version of decadence, which relates to its original meaning — a kind of moral decay (in relation to Gary Indiana). It was just before Bush was re-elected, so that feeling was really present in people’s minds in New York. In England this decadence came across as a much more romantic sort of dandy-esque embodiment.
Obrist:And did you see a link to ‘happenings’?
Wardill: Yes, people had this pathological relationship to the thing they were talking about instead of having an academic one, and I think that that was something, as I understand the ‘happenings’, that happened to the participants; that you would kind of play through your roles, be it gender roles or societal structures.
Obrist:Etel Adnan, the seminal poet and painter from Lebanon, says that identity is shifty, identity is a choice.
Wardill: That you perform it? Yes, and also that you can have stories you hold onto, that you carry along with you as ‘being’, as opposed to being therapy which demands you search for answers and origins. Adam Phillips talks about this.
Obrist:Cerith Wyn Evans was telling me the other day that when he was a student Peter Gidal told him to read Proust and Beckett and that had completely changed his life — have any books changed your life?
Wardill:A Fire On The Moon by Norman Mailer. He was commissioned by the American government to write about the moon landing and it got really slated by the critics. So he took out an ad in the New York Times which published all the criticism from Moby Dick when that first came out. Hilarious. The thing I liked about it was it was constructed like Moby Dick, so it had this big sort of technological expansion in the middle of it, but also right in the beginning he puts himself in it. Even though it’s about a grand world event, he’s always there. He always places himself there so you have this thing that’s both expansive and grounded in autobiography — everything that is wrong with him, all his vices, all his insecurities and passions and posturing become part of this world event — when you hold a lens up to something it makes it big but you’re aware of it being small and you’re aware of the mechanics of that sort of magnification as well.
Wardill: I’ve been reading Carlo Ginzburg’s essay ‘Making It Strange’ (from Nine Reflections on Distance). He’s talking about Tolstoy’s writing, which he wrote from the perspective of a horse, and this idea of changing perspective in order to point out how strange common sense is. And then, Love is Colder than Death, the Fassbinder book. I love where he talks about his films being like the walls of his house. So he never needs a house because he’s constantly making films. That’s his stability. The thing I like about it is that it can’t just belong to him.
Obrist:After that you made your first solo show, the legendary Reader’s Wife at Fortescue Avenue.
Wardill:The Reader’s Wife was an expansion of the Smithson example of the boy running around in a sand pit that’s half black sand and half white sand. If he runs around clockwise it turns grey and if he turns around anti-clockwise it doesn’t go back into its two distinct halves. I was really interested in how that stage towards understanding could become a kind of theatrical stage and how you could then re-complicate it and make new connections from it. So in terms of fictionalising significant spaces, it was a kind of an epiphany. I’m using your word now. I’m not sure if I like the word.
Obrist:What does London mean to you as a kind of context where you work?
Wardill: I keep on getting out of London and then coming back and really liking it a lot more than when I left. But I think what’s hard about London to leave is that it’s full of people that I love and respect and it’s full of a kind of energy which is special.
Obrist: So cities are people?
Wardill: Yeah, but when I went to Marseilles last year I really liked it better then any other city. That was a different thing, because in Marseilles it feels like everyone is outside and swarming around each other. The beaches in the city are all rocky with graffiti and people go swimming as the sun sets. Everyone is in on it — grandmas, kids, groups of teenagers playing guitar, army men, inflatable aeroplanes…
Obrist:In 2006 you did the exhibition Basking In What Feels Like An Ocean Of Grace, I Soon Realized That I’m Not Looking At It, But Rather, That I Am It Recognizing Myself. Titles seem important to your work. Sometimes you have verylong titles. What’s their role?
Wardill: Well that one was because the film was based around a soundtrack I wrote which reflects in on itself. So if you look at sheet music, it’s like you’re holding a mirror down the middle of it and then you play the music backwards. But I didn’t want to actually play it backwards, because I thought it would have allusions to Satanism and I didn’t want that. So the title becomes a thing that’s almost semi-therapeutic — it has to do the same thing that the work is doing.
Obrist:What role does chance play in your work?
Wardill: It helps. [laughter] It’s dangerous but it helps.
Obrist:Is music important to you?
Wardill: Definitely. Because it does this thing where it bypasses your brain. I’ve been thinking about dub a lot for the new film, because of this relationship of sort of talking to people who are dead and on repetitions. But I also like what Marguerite Duras said when she was making ‘India Song’— that she played music to the actors so they would relax and could do nothing without feeling.
Obrist:You’ve got a lot of soundtracks to your films.
Wardill: Well in something like Basking In What Feels Like An Ocean Of Grace, I Soon Realized That I’m Not Looking At It, But Rather, That I Am It Recognizing Myself, the music gives it structure, becomes this cage. But with something like BornWinged Animals and Honey Gathers the Soul, [2005], the music is much more like an image. The next film was called ‘Ben’ [2005], and I quite like the fact that that title was so surly in relationship to the earlier title. It was shot on a set built to look like it was black and white but is in colour and has two stories about Ben. Ben becomes an object halfway through — I was thinking about case studies, and how they take ostensibly casual situations and expand out to reach giant conclusions and patterns which can be applied to other situations. Because one of the case studies is about a person suffering from paranoia, I tried to make the film paranoid. It’s like when you can’t disconnect the idea from the form.
Wardill: The sound is two voices and one of them one is the voice of a girl — Keisha Sandy Wellington. She’s reading the case study about the man Ben. The other is the voice of a hypnotist — he lulls you into feeling you can trust him. He’s like the voice of God as voice-over. She’s a much more faltering, fragile voice.
Obrist:Which film followed Ben?
Wardill: After ‘Ben’, I made a film called ‘Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck’, [ICA, 2007]. It was a kind of playlet based on ideas from British stained glass. I was trying to shoot it in such a way that it looked like the colours were really saturated but also, as with stained glass, things are framed in a really illogical and fragmented and, it seems, in very contemporary way. The stuff I was looking at was medieval English — you have faces with eyes and noses lobbed off and all these kind of strange framings. The film is framed in a similar way, but it was the beginning of an interest in the way in which stained glass windows were used to communicate to a largely illiterate public. I was trying to make this connection between that and the way Karl Rove had woven religion into the republican party discourse. So that then leads on to the film ‘Sea Oak/The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter)’ which was a much more pedagogical way of thinking about that.
Obrist:Why Descartes’ Daughter?
Wardill: Because there’s a famous story about him being summoned by Queen Christina to be part of her court and he doesn’t want to go because he is scared his thoughts will freeze over like the water in Sweden. He was right because that was when he died.
Obrist:And so his intuition was right?
Wardill: Yeah. His daughter had died when she was five, of scarlet fever and it was the big sorrow in his life that he carried around. He booked into this journey on a ship with his daughter but they never saw her with him. There was a huge storm and in the midst of it the sailors went to look for Descartes. There was no one in his quarters but they found a box with a little automaton that he built that moved just like a little girl. They were shocked by this and thought she had cursed the journey. So they threw her overboard. So he loses his daughter twice, but the second time he loses her she’s a strange embodiment of all his rational ideas taken to the point of irrationality. I thought that this was amazing.
Obrist:Your work has a lot to do with the digital relating to the physical.
Wardill: Often the way I make a film is to start it as a performance. Similarly with ‘Gamekeepers Without Game’— the performance ‘Life is a Dream’, at the Serptentine, helped me to think through the film.
Obrist: So the performance triggers the film, the film triggers performance? It’s kind of a communicating vessel maybe?
Wardill: Yes, but I’m also quite slow, my brain works quite slowly. Which is why I’m not very good at keeping up with these ideas of epiphanies. But that being so, it helps me to think through what the film is going to become.
Obrist: Can you tell me about this performance you did in Reykjavik [relates to ‘Sea Oak/The Diamond (Descartes’ Daughter)’]?
Wardill: It was about this imagining of me, trying to remember this scene from a film where there’s a diamond in a room protected by lasers, but also, the search for that scene. So I re-created the scene and then I had a girl dressed up as one of the subjects that Etienne Jules-Marey used to use when he was conducting chromophotography. She’s playing on a Nintendo Wii under a strobe light, so she’s a physical version of his photography. I was trying to think of a contemporary movement that was like sport: playing tennis with the television seemed to be the closest thing, using stunted mechanical movements particular to the present. With the voiceover I wanted to make the connection between this and the fact that his photography was really important in relation to proving the efficiency and productivity of the labour force in America. So there was a relationship between what this original and rationality, and a way of living that is like a machine.
Obrist: Do you make drawings?
Wardill: I have big sketch books full of things, full of workings through ideas and then I have photography and drawings.
Obrist:Are they like storyboards?
Wardill: Some are like storyboards. Some are like costume design — similar to things I’ve seen. Some are credits.
Obrist: 2010 has been a really active year because of the show at De Appel. But you also had a solo show called Solo Show?
Wardill: Imaginatively! At Spacex. That was the same film I was showing at The Showroom in London — ‘Gamekeepers Without Game’.
Obrist:Can you tell me more about that film and how it works?
Wardill: Well, I wrote a script for a future film because I became interested in adopting modes of communication that are really familiar to explore ideas that are difficult. This script has everything you would have in a conventional melodrama: an introduction, a violent scene, a sex scene, a death scene. Everything’s told through objects that go from being status symbols, to evidence of crime, to theatrical props… and there are acted scenes you get dropped into, where people are acting very realistically, but not touching each other. It looks a bit like airline food, so you kind of have this separation, but it’s all brought together under the rubric of a script. There’s also a drumming soundtrack that’s in 5.1 that runs all the way through. So you have again this feeling of a house being built, but are aware of it being built through individual elements. It’s like individual drums become the bricks. It carries you through pathologically too. At one point, the younger son has a panic attack and you become anxious because the drums are fast. As he calms down they slow and you can relax.
Obrist:It reminds me of the Fassbinder story of the house. You’re back to that idea — it seems recurrent.
Wardill: Definitely.
Obrist:There’s also the house of the Winchester Widow, where the widow of the man who invented the Winchester rifle builds room after room after room.
Wardill: My next film, ‘Full Firearms’, is based on that story of Sarah Winchester — she had upset the spirits and they were hounding her, so she builds a house to accommodate them all. She was trying to disorientate them so they would leave her in peace. As a story it’s really intriguing but when you actually see the house, it’s kind of ‘wacky’ in a really tinny way.
Obrist:I’m wondering what your unrealised projects, dreams, utopias, projects, the projects you don’t dare do (as Doris Lessing pointed out to me recently were so important) might be?
Wardill: I’m 32 so I hope I still have some unrealised projects! One of the things I really want to do, but probably won’t until I’m Doris Lessing’s age is to set up a film school/production company.
Obrist: Your own structure?
Wardill: Yes. And then have a group of people that you have a sense of responsibility towards.
Obrist:Do you have a motto?
Wardill: A motto?
Obrist:Hans-Peter Feldman answered the question with an image — a photograph of a boy in front of a closed wooden door, next to a brick wall.
Wardill: I like that. I like answering a question with an image, but I can’t do that here.
Obrist:What’s your connection to science?
Wardill: Science is massive, how am I supposed to answer that?
Obrist:Duchamp was inspired by Poincaré.
Wardill: Well, Marey was a scientist — I was really interested and still am in how those documents which are essentially scientific become influential outside their original intent… the Robert Smithson example as well is, obviously, an example which relates to entropy, I suppose. There’s a way in which science adopts the material in order to clarify its ideas that I find interesting.
Obrist:What ought to change?
Wardill: The people who are in power ought to change, the reliance of government on business, this ought to change, education should be more elliptical to the economy. Lots of things ought to change.
Obrist:Are you a situationist?
Wardill: The inheritance from the situationists is that spectacle is inherently suspect — I have a real problem with that. Though I obviously have a lot of respect for its history. I think a lot of art people have inherited this attitude, which is really problematic — it relates to a kind of inheritance from fascism, that spectacle in itself, is evil.
Obrist: What role does the computer play in your work. Paul Chan says, ‘Linking is beautiful and de-linking is sublime’.
Wardill: De-linking is sublime?
Obrist:There are moments when it is important to disconnect.
Wardill: You know, I was in Chicago giving a lecture and I showed ‘Gamekeepers Without Game’ and a student asked me, ‘What’s the relationship between the white space and me and how am I supposed to enter this white space of your film’? I had to keep on asking him what he meant because I didn’t really understand. In the end, it seemed to me that it was a kind of compression: the film gets compressed and then de-compressed in your head. I think there’s something about what the computer does that has completely changed the way we think about that idea of what images can become and then how they come back to us. Also, it offers up the democratic promise of linking people up, but actually, what you’re doing is looking at a screen and it becomes a different matter. It has the potential to be so much, but that potential very often seems unrealised.
Obrist:It’s a ‘spectacle of’ unrealised projects.
Wardill: [laughs] Maybe so.
Obrist:What’s your favourite mistake? In our western society, it has become very difficult to make use of mistakes.
Wardill: I like when you make mistakes in bookshops and in record shops. When you go to buy something but buy something else. Or, I like it when people read things wrongly.
Obrist:What was the new work you created yesterday?
Wardill: [laughs] What I did yesterday was try to think about a compilation tape I made for a friend when I was a teenager. It had a picture of a woman on it and her spine was the spine of the cassette and I was thinking about how books become bodies.
Wardill: Curling. Because it makes art look less ridiculous.
Obrist:What’s time?
Wardill: Can I answer that with a quote?
Obrist:Yes of course.
Wardill: ‘The hands of the clock must know where they stand. Otherwise, neither is a watch but only a white face and a trick moustache.’
Obrist:Beautiful. Who said that?
Wardill: Nabokov.
Obrist:What have you forgotten?
Wardill: So many things. [laughs]
Obrist:Do you have dreams?
Wardill: I have really good dreams. I often have dreams where I’m being chased by a faceless predator around a multi-story car park. I have better dreams than that but that’s a re-occurring one.
Obrist:Please tell me about an exhibition that has inspired you?
Wardill: An Anselm Franke one in Antwerp, Animism. It was very atmospheric but also intelligent. It didn’t make this strange disconnection between being emotional or intelligent. It was both things at the same time. Also, I really loved the Richard Wentworth at Lisson about a year ago. You saw all these objects from very different artists, from very different points in their career, but that didn’t matter; they were not named. You looked at them for what they were. You didn’t really understand it but then you saw the film about Rem Koolhaas’ house, shot from the perspective of the cleaner, and you realised in this generous and slow way —‘ah!, that’s it’ — it’s about seeing privilege from another position where it becomes almost comical.
Obrist:What is energy?
Wardill: Is it something to do with the present? I wonder if it is, I wonder if that’s why the present is so scary — why people are constantly deferring it. I mean that’s what money does isn’t it — it defers the present to what it might become.
Obrist:Do you have nightmares?
Wardill: I had a nightmare the night before the Haswell and Hecker laser show at Conway Hall. It haunted me for a long time. There was an old woman lying on top of me, scratching at me. She was still there when I was awake and I had to leave that show— the show was aggressive attacking.
Obrist: Jeannette Laverriere, an extraordinary one hundred-year-old designer in Paris, asks visitors, ‘Are you political?’, and if you say no she doesn’t see you. So are you political or do you think art is political?
Wardill: I think politics has become this difficult thing now — I had a meeting the other day with the poet JH Prynne and he said to me. ‘I think artists are parasitical’, and I said parasitical in what way? I think there’s been this thing that politics has done very slowly, which is to create the idea that art is somehow parasitical and kind of dangerous. That it’s sort of fluffy. That it’s a useless thing and has been replaced by a weird sort of rationality, which is all to do with the way we spend and the way we serve and what we conserve. The government somehow doesn’t allow any sense of responsibility for that and I find that really terrifying and think it’s going to get worse. So, yes I’m political. It’s completely necessary to be political right now.
Obrist: And the future is?
Wardill: I’m not a predictor. I thought that’s what you do.
Obrist:I listen to artists. I’m not predicting anything. Last question: what kind of cameras do you use?
Wardill: I use everything, everything’s a technology. A lot of the time I’ve used an old Bolex camera, but then the last thing I shot was on HD with 35 mm lenses.
Obrist: Do you have collections? Do you collect art or found objects?
Wardill: I collect cassettes and records, CDs and sort of collect books. I’d like to collect art but can’t afford the art I’d like to collect.
Obrist:What would you like to collect?
Wardill: I’d collect Rembrandt’s ‘Abduction of Proserpina’, Hans-Peter Feldmann’s ‘All The Clothes of A Woman’, Hollis Frampton’s ‘Nostalgia’. Oh, lots of things. Actually, I was sort of inspired by the way that you ask questions, to go around asking people if they could collect ten things, what would it be? It’s a nice question to ask people.
Obrist:And you’ve got already some answers?
Wardill: Yeah, lots of people have different answers, and lots of people say they wouldn’t collect anything. They don’t feel like they should.
Hans Ulrich Obrist is co-director of exhibitions and programmes and director of international projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London
Portrait of Hans Ulrich Obrist by Ian Cheng and Micaela Durand (2013) (all images courtesy Badlands Unlimited)
The celebrity curator may be a phenomenon on the rise, but before Klaus Biesenbach and Paola Antonelli, there was Hans Ulrich Obrist. Obrist, who’s currently the co-director of exhibitions and programs and director of international programs at London’s Serpentine Gallery, has a list of curatorial accomplishments so long, it’s daunting. He started out small enough, organizing a show in his kitchen in 1991 (he was 23) that included contributions from Christian Boltanski and Fischli & Weiss; in the decades since, he’s curated and co-curated more than 250 exhibitions, including the first Berlin Biennale and the first Manifesta. He’s also known for his ongoing conceptual projects, among them do it, a roving show built around artist-given instructions for viewers, and The Interview Project, for which he’s racked up more than 2,000 hours of conversation so far, with artists, writers, philosophers, scientists, and others.
It turns out he’s also been taking notes the whole time — making diagrams and sketches, scribbling down ideas and keywords. And when artist Paul Chan, who’s also the founder and publisher of Badlands Unlimited, found out that these copious notes and drawings existed, he knew he wanted to release them.
“I wanted to publish them because I’m surprised they exist, still,” Chan told Hyperallergic over email. “Badland’s publishing program is mindlessly simple: we publish things that no one knew existed. The poems of Yvonne Rainer, speeches on democracy by Saddam Hussein, afternoon interviews of Marcel Duchamp, and now this. I didn’t know he made them. Did you?”
The resulting book, Think Like Clouds, premieres at the New York Art Book Fair, where Badlands has also mounted a small exhibition of the some of the artworks — or whatever you might call them. “I don’t know if these drawings are important,” Chan said. “I don’t even know if they are in fact drawings. This is to me their appeal.”
Badlands sent us six of Obrist’s sketches specifically related to his curatorial practice:
All drawings untitled, ink on paper, date unknown
And here are a few more from the book:
The New York Art Book Fair opens to the public today and runs through Sunday, September 22, at MoMA PS1 (22-25 Jackson Avenue, Long Island City).
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THE TELEGRAPH LONDON
Hans Ulrich Obrist interview for Serpentine Gallery’s Map Marathon
Alastair Smart meets the Serpentine’s revolutionary co-director, officially the most powerful man in art.
Not since Roger Federer has a Swiss reached the top of his profession with quite such speed and humility as Hans Ulrich Obrist, officially the most powerful man in art.
Obrist, 42, has come a long way since staging his first show in the kitchen of his student-flat in St Gallen in the early Nineties. The co-director of London’s Serpentine Gallery since 2006, last year he came No 1 in the annual ‘Power 100’ list published by ArtReview magazine, leaving previous winners – Hirst; Saatchi; Christie’s owner François Pinault; super-dealer Larry Gagosian – trailing in his wake.
Not that he himself paid much heed. Obrist reckons he’s a mere ‘utility’, arguing that ‘it’s not curators or collectors who set the art-world agenda, it’s artists. By definition, without them there would be no art world.’
Fair enough, Hans, but it’s surely no coincidence that Venice Biennale curator Daniel Birnbaum ranked fourth in the Power 100 – behind curator-cum-museum directors Glenn D Lowry (MoMa) and Sir Nicholas Serota (Tate). It seems that while artists’ prices and collectors’ clout have both waned in the global economic downturn, it’s now the moment of the creative curator.
But what sets Obrist apart from the rest? Well, first, a relentless schedule. He juggles day-job commitments at the Serpentine with endless freelance commissions around the world. He is newly returned from talent-spotting at the São Paulo Biennial in Brazil and, ahead of this week’s Frieze Art Fair jamboree in London, he’s just unveiled an exhibition of Anish Kapoor sculptures in Kensington Gardens.
‘The 21st-century curator works in a supremely globalised reality,’ he says. ‘Where once there were just a few centres, now the art world has a polyphony – India, China, Latin America, the Middle East…’ Obrist has done his bit to introduce us to artists from two of those centres, with his Serpentine group shows Indian Highway and China Power Station (held off-site in Battersea Power Station).
Fluent in six languages, with full-time museum jobs in Vienna and Paris behind him, he’s also bombarded with invitations to seminars and symposia, to discuss his trendy ideas about the future of exhibiting. The antithesis of your stereotypical, dusty-old-relic curator who never leaves his museum, Obrist is of a new, go-getting breed of über-curator.
He has long advocated taking art beyond the confines of the gallery –
as well as in kitchens, power stations and Kensington Gardens, Obrist has held shows in a monastery, an aeroplane and even Friedrich Nietzsche’s Alpine home in Sils-Maria.
‘To keep art stimulating, it’s important to open it up to new horizons, which includes showing it in unexpected contexts,’ he says, decrying the normal museum-going experience as ‘like being on a ski piste: go
left, go right… It’s too linear, too homogeneous.’
Traditionalists often call Obrist a charlatan, a celebrity curator intent on stealing the thunder from art and artist. But, in his defence, aren’t we all a bit tired of the diktat that contemporary art must be viewed in crushingly anonymous, white-walled galleries?
Obrist is also a serial interviewer. Down the years, he’s conversed with pretty much everyone in contemporary art – from Robert Crumb to Yoko Ono – recording the results in two 1,000-page volumes called Interviews. His contacts book is duly tome-like, and since 2008 he’s attracted artists in the Richard Prince, Gerhard Richter and Jeff Koons league to show at the humble, one-time tea room we call the Serpentine.
Next weekend he’ll be calling on yet more of his contacts. As his fellow art-world potentates descend on London for Frieze, Obrist will be chairing the latest of his annual ‘Serpentine Marathons’, for which he invites 50 artists, architects and philosophers to give short presentations on a chosen theme.
In 2009, he had them reciting verses (Poetry Marathon); in 2008, they launched manifestos for the future of art and society (Manifesto Marathon); and this year he’s decided on a Map Marathon, with the likes of Gilbert & George and Marina Abramovic each producing and discussing maps.
‘In this new age of GPS, Google Earth and multidimensional digital maps, mapping is suddenly hugely relevant again,’ Obrist says. The Marathon promises a postscript to the British Library’s recent Magnificent Maps exhibition, which held up the Enlightenment as the previous major turning-point in cartographical history: between maps as art and maps as scientific record.
Rather fittingly, this year’s Marathon – the first ever outside the Serpentine – is being held at the Royal Geographic Society, with talks running non-stop through next weekend’s waking hours. Even by Obrist’s standards, it promises to be a busy old week, with ArtReview publishing its new Power 100 list on Thursday. What odds that he’ll continue to dominate the contemporary art mappa mundi?
‘Map Marathon’, Royal Geographical Society, London SW7 (08444 771 000), Oct 16-17
This review also appears in Seven magazine, free with The Sunday Telegraph
To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.
These are exhibitions which are not material, but which are more virtual, virtual in the sense of them always being able to be reactualized. They can be revisited and reactualized and updated, and they are also not related to a place. The exhibition can go to where the viewer is. Anybody in the world can download these formulas and pin them on the wall, or they can do their own and trigger their own formulas. We are in the very early days of understanding how the Internet can be used for exhibitions.
HANS ULRICH OBRIST, a Swiss curator, is Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, of the Serpentine Gallery in London.
Introduction
By John Brockman
Beginning May 15, Edge travels to Iceland for the Reykjavik Arts Festival, which will reprise the Edge Formulae of the 21st Century project, presented last October at the Serpentine Gallery, London, by curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of the Serpentines Exhibitions and Programmes. ThatWorld Question Center project was a response to Obrist’s question: “What Is Your Formula? Your Equation? Your Algorithm?”
One of the highlights of the Reykjavik Arts Festival will be the Experiment Marathon Reykjavík, an exhibition and program of related events organized by the Reykjavík Art Museum and the Serpentine Gallery, London. Lasting from 15 May through August 17, the focus of the project is experimentation. The RAM [Reykjavik Art Museum] will become a laboratory in which leading artists, architects, film-makers, and scientists will create an environment of invention through a series of installations, performances and experimental films.
Additionally, previous related projects will be presented as archives within the exhibition. The exhibition and related events are curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, Serpentine Gallery, London, in collaboration with artist Ólafur Elíasson.
The Experiment Marathon Reykjavík builds on the enormous success of the recent Serpentine Gallery Marathons which have taken place in successive Serpentine Gallery Pavilions, an annual architectural commission conceived in 2000 by Serpentine Gallery Director, Julia Peyton-Jones. In the 2007 Serpentine Gallery Experiment Marathon, which took place in the Pavilion designed by Ólafur Elíasson and Kjetil Thorsen, leading artists, writers and scientists performed a huge variety of experiments, exploring perception, artificial intelligence, the body and language. Participants included John Brockman, Steven Pinker, Marina Abramovic and John Baldessari. The event was collaboration with Thyssen- Bornemisza Art Contemporary. The Serpentine Gallery Marathon series began in 2006 with the 24-hour Interview Marathon conducted by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist. A presentation of these previous programs will be shown in the Reykjavik Experiment Marathon in a pavilion of archives designed by Ólafur Elíasson and Einar Þorsteinn. Another collection of archives will refer to Hans Ulrich Obrist’s and Barbara Vanderlinden’s exhibition, Laboratorium, from 1999.
A substantial catalogue will be published on this occasion, documenting the Experiment Marathon Reykjavík together with previous marathons and with textual contributions by Bruno Latour and others.
Obrist and I, as Edge readers may recall, have a mutual connection: we both worked closely with the late James Lee Byars, the conceptual artist who, in 1971, implemented “The World Question Center” as a work of conceptual art.
As a curator, he is ever curious about the world around him and this includes the latest ideas and developments in science. Obrist interviewed me for Art Orbit in the 90’s. With this Edge feature, I get to ask the questions.
-JB
HANS ULRICH OBRIST, a Swiss curator, is Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects, of the Serpentine Gallery in London.
One of the questions I started out with, at the beginning, was trying to understand the forces effective in visual art and contemporary art, which is my field as a curator, trying to understand what is necessary in art: Is it necessary to understand the forces effective in other fields of knowledge?, which is a question Alexander Dorner asked early in the 20th century.
He was the great pioneer of experimental 20th century museum studies, he inspired Alfred Barr to do the Museum of Modern Art, and he wrote a very groundbreaking book called Ways Beyond Art, where he really expressed the necessity of going beyond the fear of pooling knowledge. The question of how we can create a pool of knowledge has somehow been at the beginning of my activity.
Another great inspiration was György Kepes, the artist and legendary editor of the Vision + Values book series, which were books introduced to me early by Bruce Mau and which have been instrumental ever since. And that has led to a lot of projects relating art and architecture, art and science, art and literature. And that has been the umbilical cord of a question that I that I’ve always asked while working with artists, and then later with scientists and architects, because I tried to do to curating what happened to art in the ’60s and ’70s when artists expanded what art is. They created an expanded field on an expanded notion of art.
And if you think about an expanded notion of art, it becomes interesting to think about an expanded notion of curating. But I was thinking how it could be an interesting to ask how we could do the same thing to curating as what had happened to art in the ’60s and ’70s, how we could really have an expanded field of curating — curating at large, where there would be curating of art, curating of science, curating of architecture — and about how these things could be brought together.
Now, that obviously always implies a problem, which is the curator defining a “rule of the game.” Every project has a rule of the game. Every exhibition process has a rule of the game. What this means is that the curator sets these rules of the game, but then it might not fit what the art is about, and then it is the art illustrating the curator’s rule of the game, and that is not as interesting. So, from that point of view, I started to think a lot about just starting with artists, and starting with architects and scientists, and above all, listening to them.
One of the key aspects of my trajectory has always been conversations with artists. And this became particularly clear to me in a very early conversation I had, which was an early encounter with an artist that changed the way how I see. I had gone to Rome, and I was told by my friends Peter Fischli and David Weiss, the amazing Swiss artist, who was the first artist I had really long conversations with, that I should visit Alighiero e Boetti there. Mr. Boetti was from the same generation as our mutual friend James Lee Byars. He was a visionary artist who emerged in the ’60s.
I went as a student to his studio, and just paid him a visit. And he told me that there had always been curators and museum people and galleries inviting him to do projects, and it was always the same format — it was museum exhibitions, it was gallery shows, or maybe it was art fairs, maybe biennials. But he said there were all these other things he wanted to do. So, I asked him what he wanted to do. And he said one of his main desires had always been to exhibit in all the airplanes of an airline, to do an airplane exhibition. And within the parameters of the art world, of what is given in the art world, that project would never have been possible. He just was never asked to do it, and never able to do it.
I was 18 or 19 at the time, so really just starting, and he said, “you know, young man, it will be a project for you to actually not squeeze art into your kind of predetermined scheme, but to start to look around and see what great projects artists have and try to make them happen, to produce them as realities.” At the time I went back to Switzerland and I started to work with museum in progress in Vienna, in Austria. But then we approached Austrian Airlines, and three years later we made Boetti’s project happen, so that for a year he had an exhibition on every single airplane of that airline, which was carried all over the world. It not only developed an expanded notion of what an exhibition is, but it also geographically disseminated the exhibition into totally different circuits where art wouldn’t normally go.
More or less at the same time, I spoke to the French artist Christian Boltanski as well as Fischli/Weiss, and they said that it would be interesting to do exhibitions where nobody ever does them. And I said, “Where?” And they said, “In the kitchen. Do it in your kitchen.” They had always thought a kitchen show could be interesting. So, they transformed my kitchen in my apartment into an exhibition space, out of which then grew this idea that maybe exhibitions can also happen in unexpected places. And ever since my beginnings in the early ’90s, that is a question I’ve asked myself, and also the question I’ve asked each of my interlocutors, each of the people I have talked to: What are your unrealized projects? What projects have been too big to be realized? What projects have been too small to be realized? What are sense of projects of yourselves, sense of projects?
Doris Lessing, the Nobel Prize winning author, once told me in a conversation that there are not only the projects which are made impossible by the frames of the contexts we work in, but there are also the projects we just don’t dare to think up. The self-censorship of projects. And there are all the books she hasn’t written because she didn’t dare to write them. So, that is the question that been my umbilical cord, and it’s also the only question that I ask in all of my interviews. What is your unrealized project?
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I started out actually studying economics, social science, political science at St Gallen University, but I was always friends with artists. It was almost a sort of parallel reality. I never wanted to study art because curiosity drove me to understand other fields. But from that moment on I was always anchored in the arts, because I knew from the beginning of my early adolescence that somehow I wanted to work with contemporary artists.
In Switzerland there was Harald Szeemann, the legendary curator, so the notion of a curator for me as a kid growing up in Switzerland was already somehow concrete. But I always thought that curiosity drove me to all these other disciplines. And during my studies, when I started to do exhibitions, little by little, I wanted, through the exhibitions, to make these bridges.
First it went from art to architecture. Architecture was the first contact zone. I started to work a lot with architects, and that is obviously also a quite direct contact zone, because when you do exhibitions you have a link to architects, you have exhibition designs, and you involve architects in the exhibition design. So I started a lot of research in that direction. And the history of exhibition design is incredibly interesting, because it has got to do with the invention of new display features.
Exhibitions can push the radical, experimental solutions because they are not permanent. I think that is why very often exhibitions are an interesting “laboratory” for architecture. It is not by coincidence that pavilions and exhibition designs were the contexts for a lot of inventions in architecture, because it is not the rigid thing of a permanent structure, but an ephemeral structure where an architect can really play, and can experiment.
Other exhibition designs are invented by the artists themselves. When you think about Marcel Duchamp and his radical displays for the surrealist exhibitions — which for me were very inspiring — if an exhibition does not really invent a new display, there’s a risk that it is forgotten, because art is not only about the works, but also it’s about a new way of seeing the works.
I always felt that when I went into other disciplines, I learned a lot for my own field. From architecture, I became familiar with the whole critique of the master plan, because, in the late ’50s, there was an increasing critique of the Le Corbusier notion of the master plan, the top-down master plan, and architecture started to look into this idea of self-organization. So, I became very familiar with architects like Yona Friedman, Oskar Hansen and Cedric Price, all of whom very early on thought about how self-organization could be brought into the master plan. This questioning of the master plan I then fed back into curating, and I started to think about how could we do exhibitions which are not just a top-down master plan, but which could grow more organically.
There is the link between art and literature and philosophy. If you look at all the avant-gardes of the 20th century, they have a great link to literature. And that connection goes from the beginning of my work, when I worked with Gerhard Richter on Nietzsche, to a current exhibition, “ever still”, that I have curated at the Lorca House in Spain, which is about the poet and writer Lorca.
Science never really played a role for me at the beginning. I was completely ignorant about science. I didn’t grow up with a scientific background, I didn’t study it, and I didn’t auto-didactically work on it. Then in ’93, I got a phone call from Christa Maar, who at that time was just about to set up the Academy of the Third Millennium with Hubert Burda. She had read an article about my unusual exhibitions on airplanes and in hotel rooms, and she thought it would be interesting to invite me to these meetings.
I went to Munich, and the first couple of times I was completely lost, because I had never met scientists before, I had never read science, and there were people there like Wolf Singer and Ernst Pöppel. After not saying anything during the first meetings, I then started to systemically read. And it was really through these experiences at the Academy of the Third Millennium that I began to build bridges with scientists. In the meantime I had started to work as a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, and each time a well-known scientist would visit Paris, Christa would ring me, and would say, “Show him your museum.” I started to walk with biologists and neuroscientists through the Mark Rothko exhibition at our museum and that was really the beginning of how this whole bridge with science began.
A very interesting next step somehow happened. In a certain way, all my work in terms of curating, and expanding the notion of curating, has never been a priori defined, because it’s almost like a long walk. It is a sort of a “flânerie,” to use the French term. It is almost like strolling. It is a promenade. And chance plays a very big role. It is a sort of controlled chance, but it is always about how to allow chance to come into the process.
Out of our conversations in ’95, Christa then invited me to do an exhibition for her first big conference in Munich, Mind Revolution, which was about the connection between the computer and the brain, between neuroscience and the computer. Bruce Sterling was there. It was the first time I met Bruce Sterling. A lot of scientists were there, neuroscientists. But I felt intuitively that somehow it would be wrong to get artists to illustrate a scientific conference, and I also felt the conference wouldn’t be the right place for an exhibition to take place, so, instead, I suggested to Christa, and to Ernst Pöppel, that we could invite artists to Ernst Pöppel’s KFA in Jülich, artists from Douglas Gordon to Matt Mullican to Rosemarie Trockel to Carsten Höller.
Ernst was located near Cologne in Jülich, Germany’s biggest science center, which has hundreds of labs. He is a leading neuroscientist who is also part of Edge. We thought we’d do a conference there, but then talking to Ernst, we actually realized that that was again wrong, because to some extent why would we do a conference with artists and scientists who had never met, and who would feel put on the spot. Instead, we decided that the most important thing would be to create a contact zone, which wouldn’t put people on the spot, where something could happen, but nothing had to happen.
I feel very often with my projects that we cannot force things. One cannot engineer human relations. One can set the conditions under which things then happen. For that reason, we decided, a few hours before the event was supposed to take place, to cancel the conference and to just do a “non-conference.” It had all the ingredients of a conference — badges, tee shirts, bags with all the speakers’ CVs, a hotel where all the people would stay, a bus to pick them up in the morning and bring them to the science center, people at the airport picking the guests up, all of the logistics — but the conference no longer was there. It was just a coffee break. It was the invention of this idea that we should just do a coffee break. And it was my first project with art and science.
This came from that observation that obviously at a conference the most important things happen in the coffee break. Why do the rest? We’ll just do the coffee breaks.
The most important things happen in interstitial spaces, they happen in between, and they happen when we least expect it. Incredible things happened. The artists visited the science labs they were interested in. At the end we made a little film, and everybody spoke about his or her impressions. We published a set of postcards. It was the first conference as a coffee break, of which we did many afterwards.
Just as Cedric Price talks about the “non-plan” in urbanism, this was the “non-conference.” That was the inspiration. As a curator, conferences and symposiums are not my main activity. But I felt it was a very interesting thing, because in exhibitions almost every single rule of the game has been invented. The whole 20th century is a permanent invention of new ways of doing exhibitions. Almost every radical gallery gesture has been tested, from the full gallery, to the empty gallery — everything. Yet somehow with conferences and symposiums very little has been shifted in terms of rules of the game. It is always the same kind of protocol: there is the table, there are speakers, there is a speech by everyone, then there is discussion, then there is a Q&A, and then, maybe, there is a dinner. I think there is a huge potential to change the rules of the game.
Then we did Bridge the Gap?, which was in Japan with Akiko Miyake and CCA Kitakyushu, and it was again art and science, and we paid homage to Francisco Varela, who had just passed away.. Varela was a very important person for me, a mentor, a great inspiration in the few meetings we had. We made a homage to him, so we invited a lot of his friends. At the same time, we also had scientists and artists and architects. We thought we’d do it in a remote house, on the outskirts of Kitakyushu. Guests would fly to Tokyo, and then there would be an internal Japanese flight, and then an hour-long car ride. Finally they were brought to this very old Japanese house so remote that once they were there, they couldn’t get away anymore.
The idea was for three days to bring into the house all these incredibly busy people, who would usually immediately run away after their lecture and have meetings. We had rooms that would were for official meetings, and then, inspired by online chat rooms, we had rooms where people could retire and have their own self-organized chats. There were a lot of rooms in the house, rooms for Hosts, Guests and Ghosts to quote Marcel Duchamp.
There were about 30, 40 speakers, all in one big house. There was a a Japanese garden, so people could also stroll outside. And we had all the books by all the speakers inside, so there was a reading room that was a big success. The speakers went from Rem Koolhaas, to Marina Abramovic, to Gregory Chaitin. Anton Zeilinger who came with a little suitcase and made one of his teletransportation experiments.
The whole event was also about what artist Paul Chan calls “delinking.” That was also a conference that had to do with how we can delink very linked people.
Curating is my primary activity, even while experimenting with these different types of conferences, I always wanted to bring it back to the exhibition, which is my main medium. So, even though my whole venture into science actually started out with actually refusing to do an art and science show, I then, in ’99 with Barbara Vanderlinden, brought science back into the exhibition, and we did Laboratorium, which investigated how studios and labs are more and more inter-related. And we investigated the notion of the laboratory in the late 20th, early 21st century. Laboratorium was a transdiciplinary project searching the limits of the places where knowledge and culture are made. It started as a discussion that involved questions such as:
What is the meaning of Laboratorium?
What is the meaning of experiments?
When do experiments become public and when does the result of an experiment reach public consensus?
We installed many laboratories all over the city:
A laboratory of doubt
A cognitive science laboratory
A highway for choreographic investigation
An existing artist studio
The first laboratory of Galileo etc
We invited Bruno Latour to curate the theatre of proof, a series of demonstrations, a lecture series aiming at rendering public what happens in the laboratory. At the same time we declared the whole city of Antwerp a lab. And we found out that actually labs are very often invisible, part of the invisible city. People were saying, “You’re crazy to do a show in Antwerp about labs. There are no labs in Antwerp.” But we had a whole group of researchers mapping every lab, and there were dozens of world-leading labs in Antwerp; people just didn’t know about them. They’re invisible. So, we had an “open lab” day so people could visit the labs throughout the whole city. And then the museum became a place for all the artists’ “labs.”
The city got behind it. And we had the full support from Antwerpen open. It was really about the idea of the citywide lab exhibition, and then the museums.
Laboratorium showed me that the most effective thing for the issue of art and science is really this idea of doing something together to produce reality.
This leads us right away to the Marathons in London last autumn. I moved to the Serpentine London two years ago, and with the Serpentine director Julia Peyton-Jones, we started to think about concentric circles: the gallery, the park, the world. We started the Serpentine International projects with China Power Station and now a big project on India. We also felt it was important to open up in terms of disciplines, and to go beyond the fear of pooling knowledge, so we thought it could be very interesting to connect this to the Pavilion, which Julia Peyton-Jones had invented nine years ago, with an amazing pavilion by Zaha Hadid, which became the Serpentine annual Architecture commission.
We thought it could be interesting to have the content reflected as much as the building. So when Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond did the pavilion in 2006, Julia and I discussed with Rem the idea of conversations. The pavilion became a place for interview marathons It was basically an “infinite conversation” in the Pavilion — an architecture of conversation. It culminated in October ’06, when Rem and I interviewed 70 Londoners from all disciplines in 24 hours, including, for example, Brian Eno or Richard Hamilton. The London Marathon is part of my ongoing project of, so far, 1400 hours of recorded conversations.
Then when Olafur Eliasson, together with Kjetil Thorsen, designed the Pavilion last year, he said he would very much like to continue this idea of a marathon. So, we felt it would be interesting to make it a completely different temporality, a 24-hour non-stop thing, so people can come and they can go, and then they can have dinner, and then they can come back again. And there can also be chance encounters.
Olafur said he would like to do an experiment marathon rather than a conversation marathon. It was very much tied in with what we earlier discussed with Latour, with the tabletop experiments. The idea was that we invited people throughout the summer, and then in autumn, to participate in this marathon. It was an experiment marathon, where we invited practitioners from all kinds of different disciplines to develop a new experiment and to realize it in the pavillion.
The interesting thing was that artists did their experiments, and scientists did their experiments. It wasn’t necessarily about forcing artists and scientists to collaborate. They all did their own thing, but yet it happened in the same space. And there is the possibility that certain encounters happen. What I have experienced is that very often these things take a lot of time. For me, it’s never a question of doing these things in a rush, because very often they trigger something. It is like a butterfly effect. It is maybe five or ten years later, and two of the people who met there are doing a book together.
For me, it is very important to trigger these possible sparks, and it is very organic. Freeman Dyson was saying on Edge that the 21st century will be biological. I think it is also very possible to think about exhibitions and conferences in biological terms, as growing over time, and not just as these sorts of one-off events. We are living in an event culture where we always switch on and off, and it’s very unproductive because we move on to the next thing.
For me, it is very important to work on these things as if it were long distance running, over many years. Little by little, new ramifications happen. So, the answer to your question of how one can bring these things together is by, first of all, not rushing them, and, secondly, not jumping from one project to the next, but instead having sustained projects that evolve over a long time, through different chapters. It’s about making mistakes, learning from those mistakes, and then making new mistakes.
There are a lot of aspects of exhibitions and the world of art that have to do with objects, and that is a very important dimension, but I don’t think it is everything. I think art has many, many dimensions. In this multi-dimensional field of art, I think it is also important to explore all the other possibilities that are not objects: performances, processes, and also non-material exhibitions.
Besides my more “materialized” exhibitions I’ve always been very interested in the idea of the dematerialization of art, which led to new forms of exhibition. In the ’60s, Lucy Lippard wrote the famous book on dematerialization of art. I’ve always been very interested in lists, something we actually share. I think it’s not by coincidence that we somehow directly and indirectly met through James Lee Byars.
And there is this whole idea of exhibitions and lists where one asks the question. I very often just launch the question, “what is your unrealized project? What is your dream project?” I’ve asked hundreds of artists and that’s going to be an online project at the Serpentine. I asked hundreds of artists and architects and scientists, “What is your recipe? Is there a recipe? Is there an instruction?” And that led to Do It, which is my score book based on an idea we developed with Boltanski and Lavier.
I think art can travel in different ways. Art can travel through objects, and great artwork can travel over centuries, and that’s a very valid way for art to travel. But art can also travel through scores, like in music.
Scores was Do It, like musical scores. Or as Pierre Boulez, the French composer, told me, we should think of open scores, of how the scores are actually unfinished. That leads us to Project Tempo del Postino, where Philippe Parreno and I curated for the Manchester Festival a time based group show for an opera house: The group show as an open score. Last but not least there is the Formulae project, where I invited more than a hundred artists to contribute a formula or an equation for the 21st century. These projects arrived in my office, where they are pinned on the wall. Many arrived by email. Many by fax. After about six months, my office wall was completely filled. And there was the day last October when Brian Eno came with you to my office, and that encounter triggered a fantastic Edgeproject where you invited your whole Edge community to develop a formula or an equation for the 21st century.
You could really say these are also exhibitions. These are exhibitions which are not material, but which are more virtual, virtual in the sense of them always being able to be reactualized. They can be revisited and reactualized and updated, and they are also not related to a place. The exhibition can go to where the viewer is. Anybody in the world can download these formulas and pin them on the wall, or they can do their own and trigger their own formulas. We are in the very early days of understanding how the Internet can be used for exhibitions. For instance, there was Do It, where with e-flux.com, we developed an online project, where anybody who sees the instructions online can download them and can then send their feedback. They can send a photograph of their interpretation. And then, all of a sudden, we have many different possible interpretations of an artwork. It is the very early days, but I see a great potential for these digital exhibitions for my curatorial work in the next years.
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NEW YORK OBSERVER
The Man Who Made Curating an Art
By Staff12/16/09 12:44am
Hans Ulrich Obrist enjoys a level of prominence in the art world that would have been unimaginable for a curator of contemporary art 20 years ago. Back then, curators didn’t get famous, and though they talked among themselves about their work, no one else cared very much about who they were or how they made their decisions.
People care about Mr. Obrist. At 41, the Swiss-born impresario has spent the past three years as co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London, and has curated some 150 exhibitions internationally since his early 20s. His reputation is that of a fast-talking, tireless obsessive, and his various activities–which include mounting shows around the world, moderating panels, writing catalog essays, hosting early-morning salons and conducting scores of in-depth interviews with artists and other cultural figures–have made him an improbably influential, globally ubiquitous presence in the art world.
After making his first bit of noise as a curator in 1991 with a group show in his kitchen that featured, among others, Christian Boltanski and the duo Fischli/Weiss, Mr. Obrist quickly made a name for himself as a self-consciously innovative exhibition-maker interested in working closely with artists and mounting shows in unconventional spaces.
“There’s a certain kind of curator who is really down with the artists, and Hans Ulrich is definitely down with the artists,” said the downtown gallerist Jeffrey Deitch. “There are many other curators who keep their distance, simply because it’s their personality or their background or because they think that’s what one should do. They’re not on the scene. You’re not going to see them at a party at 1 a.m., deep in discussion.”
The interviews Mr. Obrist has conducted over the years currently add up to some 2,000 hours’ worth of tape. A fraction of them have been published in books and magazines, but the vast majority remain in Mr. Obrist’s personal archive. Through these interviews, Mr. Obrist has established himself as the unofficial secretary of the contemporary art world. “The way we might read Vasari for primary information on the Italian Renaissance,” said Mr. Deitch, “people will be looking at the archive of Hans Ulrich’s interviews to construct the art history of this era.”
For all that, Mr. Obrist remains all but unknown to the general public.
“Sometimes people who are a little bit below the popular radar are actually more powerful than people everyone knows about,” said Paula Marincola of the PEW Center’s Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative, who edited a 2006 collection of essays on curatorial practice. “In our field, he’s kind of a rock star.”
In that capacity, Mr. Obrist has functioned as a “catalyst,” according to the artist, critic, and White Columns director Matthew Higgs, but at some point during his career, “this other thing happened, which is that this character emerged, ‘Hans Ulrich Obrist,’ who is clearly at the center now of all this activity and is as well known as a lot of the subjects of his interviews, exhibitions, and research.”
Earlier this fall, Mr. Obrist was named the most powerful person in the art world by the British magazine ArtReview, bumping the fellow who topped last year’s list, Damien Hirst, down to No. 48. The U.K.’s Independent wrote at the time that Mr. Obrist’s placement was evidence that “it is curators rather than artists who are now regarded as the real movers and shakers of the art world.”
THOUGH HE GRADUATED with a degree in economics and social science, Mr. Obrist was set on being involved with art from the time he was a teenager, and made himself known in the art world at a young age.
“He was this enthusiast, you know? This kind of genius thinker who was very hyperactive,” said gallerist Barbara Gladstone of Mr. Obrist’s first few years on the scene. “He read voraciously-he’d wake himself up in the middle of the night to read. He had this huge library in Switzerland, which wasn’t so much where he slept as where he kept his books.”
At this early point in Mr. Obrist’s career, no critic or scholar had thought to study the role of curators in art history, and while there was plenty of secondary literature on museums as institutions, there was no book one could read to learn about milestone exhibitions or the history of curatorial practice. Mr. Obrist was surprised to discover this state of affairs when he resolved, in his early 20s, to learn everything he could about his chosen line of work.
“At a certain moment, when I started doing my own shows, I felt it would be really interesting to know what is the history of my profession,” Mr. Obrist said in a phone interview last week. “I realized that there was no book, which was kind of a shock.”
Mr. Obrist was not the only one who had this experience. In New York City, a young gallery director named Bruce Altshuler found himself in the same position, and in 1989 quit his job to research a book on the history of exhibitions that became 1994′s The Avant Garde in Exhibition.
“I was working in a commercial gallery, so I was seeing the role that exhibitions played all over New York in terms of the functioning of this overall system,” said Mr. Altshuler, now the director of the museum studies program at N.Y.U. “Art history tended to be written monographically: most of the effort in the discipline had gone into studying individuals and their works, rather than looking at the system of display and distribution of those works.”
Mr. Altshuler’s book was followed two years later by another milestone text, Thinking About Exhibitions, this one an anthology of essays on exhibition practices edited by the independent curator Bruce Ferguson, the art historian Reesa Greenberg, and British museum professional Sandy Nairne.
This flurry of scholarly interest in the work of curators and the history of exhibitions–now a burgeoning field within art history–came as a result of several factors, starting in the 1980s with the emergence of a class of independent curators who saw the exhibition as a medium unto itself and were driven to experiment with it.
These curators collaborated more with artists than traditional museum curators ever had. They weren’t merely taking care of collections, but commissioning original work and organizing group shows around sophisticated themes. As the contemporary art world exploded in size during the 1990s, international biennales proliferated–there are now more than 150–and became platforms for ambitious emerging curators who wanted to showcase their curatorial voice and vision. Curatorial-studies programs, where students learned the trade and thought critically about the practice, popped up all over the country.
“In many ways, curators took on the role of what we might have once thought of as a role of the critic,” said Tom Eccles, the executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College. “Someone like Clement Greenberg was able to codify moments in art and promote individual artists into groups, and say, ‘This is what is significant in our time.’ I think there’s a moment in the ’80s when that transfers over to curators.”
BY THE TIME Mr. Obrist read Mr. Altshuler’s book and the Thinking anthology, he had already begun making his own contribution to the field by interviewing the generation of ’60s curators–men his grandfather’s age, like Walter Hopps, Pontus Hultén and Harald Szeemann–who had inspired him.
“Exhibitions are kind of ephemeral moments, sometimes magic moments, and when they’re gone, they’re gone,” said Mr. Obrist. “I wanted to find a way of recording this. And since there weren’t any books, I thought a good way would be to do an oral history, to start to speak with all these pioneers who had been somehow forgotten. … It was the last moment when one could get a really firsthand account of the history of curating in the 20th century.”
Starting in 1996, some of the interviews started appearing in ArtForum, and this fall, 11 of them were collected in a book called A Brief History of Curating. It is Mr. Obrist’s third collection of interviews–the other two are with artists–and an informal survey this week made it seem like basically every curator of contemporary art in New York is either currently reading it or already has. Though it is hardly the first time someone has published a collection of extensive conversations with curators–see Carolee Thea’s 2001 book Foci and her recently published follow-up, On Curating–Mr. Obrist’s book is nevertheless being called a landmark work, in part because so many of the people in it have passed away in recent years.
Norton Batkin, the founding director of the curatorial-studies program at Bard, called it an “invaluable contribution,” and praised Mr. Obrist for getting his subjects on tape while they were still alive. “Other people didn’t think of interviewing curators,” Mr. Batkin said. “It’s a history that in some sense wasn’t there before.”
And yet, Mr. Obrist is decidedly not a historian. Rather than synthesizing primary-source material and making arguments about what it means, he merely generates that material and moves on, hoping others will pick up the ball. Throughout his career, he has made little of his own views on art, asserting his taste through exhibitions, to be sure, but only occasionally writing argumentative essays of the sort one might expect from a man famous for his rigorous engagement with ideas. In effect, Mr. Obrist functions as something like a neutral mediator–a listener who asks questions of others and provokes them to explain themselves while keeping his own beliefs to himself.
That he has managed to become as famous and influential as he is in spite of that role is what makes him a singular figure in the art world, and a poster boy for how much that world has changed since the days when curating was considered just a job.
“Anybody who pumps a lot of energy into a situation, anybody who expresses interest in other people and brings good things out of them … is bound to be a player of a special variety,” said Robert Storr, the curator, critic and current dean of the Yale School of Art. “The ability to generate excitement, to focus attention and to stir things up in a positive way is a particular skill, you know, and it is not to be taken lightly. We need animators. We have too many of them who have no seriousness and no curiosity, who are just making events and spectacles. He’s an animator who actually creates interesting situations.”
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MATTHEW STONE.COM
Hans-Ulrich Obrist interviews Matthew Stone
April 2009 London
Hans-Ulrich Obrist: To begin with the beginning, I’d like to ask you how it all started, where are your beginnings? In terms of feeling your way around, in terms of becoming an artist.
Matthew Stone: I have always been aware that you can be an artist. There is a history of going to art school in my family. Very few people are taught that it is a job, or even a way of being, so I’m lucky. But essentially I’ve always known that it was something I would do.
HUO: I was wondering if there was some kind of an epiphany, you know, some sort of a revelation or epiphany.
MS: I don’t know about one particular event, I think about the role of the artist in relation to that of the shaman, within a Beuysian tradition. I remember lying in bed when I was a kid playing with balls of invisible energy in my hands and then bouncing them off the walls. What I am doing now feels the same as that, so… I guess it has always been there.
HUO: That’s interesting, because during my childhood in the late 70’s and in the early 80’s, Beuys was really like God. He came to Switzerland and gave a lecture and he was somehow, the most important living artist, it was his aura… And strangely when he died, somehow his influence diminished considerably and throughout the 90’s and the 00’s, Warhol became much more of a greater influence. What is interesting is that I have a feeling that in the last couple of years there’s been sort of…
MS: … A renewed interest. Well I’ve always made a comparison between Warhol and Beuys. I wrote my dissertation at college on the spiritual content of Warhol’s work, arguing that he recognized an inherent religiosity to post-war America. They had very similar messages, but they explained themselves in very different ways. These differing ways were relevant to their specific socio-political environments at that time. Andy Warhol took the everyday and turned it into art, whereas Beuys wanted our everyday lives to become art. It’s almost the same statement and surely the same sentiment, but superficially inverted. I think that Warhol, to all appearances, didn’t state his true intent and that’s one way to be very powerful as an artist.
HUO: So they were different sides of the same coin or something like that.
MS: Exactly, and I think that finding this spiritual aspect in Warhol is an idea that runs completely against the grain of most people’s approach to his work. It’s too easy to read his work in an overly simplistic way. I think that if you really listen to what he said, you find the depth he spoke of when he said “deeply superficial”.
HUO: I was very curious how you reconnect to a kind of unmediated experience. I think that after 2000, there seems to be a reconnection to unmediated experience, and also performance comes back and that obviously ties in with Beuys, who was involved with all of these performances and political activities, which were at the moment he died, kind of forgotten.
MS: I think the main thing that was forgotten about Beuys, was the seriousness of his intent to reform society. I think that in the 90’s, that was something that disappeared, replaced by a fetishization of nihilism, which is a dead-end ideology.
HUO: So one can say that clearly you are part of a new generation. Are you younger than Jesus?
MS: I’m under 33, yes. I think it’s interesting, because a “generation” is a myth, but one that we can in certain ways use. In a sense definitions can become a death to possibility. As soon as you define something, you limit what else it can be or become. So in that sense, the idea of a generation or of a singular movement is perhaps limiting. However if it can be used in a playful or more fluid sense, then it can become something that is empowering, not only in terms of comprehension for the audience that encounter it, but also for the community of artists who are linked to it.
HUO: So then it’s positive.
MS: It can be positive, but you must be aware of its potential to create elitist structures rather quickly.
HUO: We met in a group context on the roof of Hannah Barry’s Gallery, about a year ago, you were a part of Bold Tendencies II. You have developed an artist-run space in London, you have weekly salons. You are involved with a lot of collectives. You are not identified with one context.
MS: I hope that the current level of activity promotes further diversity. Art must fight for freedom but if it can only light one path to freedom, it returns to oppression. But to retrace your initial question, which I feel described my extended sense of community… This is something central to my work. Whether conscious or not,collaboration is inherent to every human process. I think that often for artists there is a fear to expose where somebody helps them.What I tried to focus on was crediting my creative interactions. It was quite a frightening thing to do, because you have to give up on the myth of being a solo operating genius. It’s very seductive this myth of the artist working alone, misunderstood by everyone else. When I exposed this level of constant collaboration, the work developed a much wider meaning, and became stronger. As I tried to destroy myself (by recognizing other people), my individual identity actually became stronger. For me it really exposed a rational argument for altruism.
I think a lot of the ideals, which Joseph Beuys upheld and supported very sincerely, have sadly been seen as irrelevant hippie liberalism, unfounded in any intellectual structure. But there is a real context to find and reactivate the initiatives that were started in the sixties. They were dialogues that aimed to do more than just passively comment on the nature of society, they were to truly transform it. For example the Art into Society – Society into Art show at the ICA [Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 1974].
HUO: That’s an exhibition, featuring Gustav Metzger, Hans Haacke, Joseph Beuys…
MS: I’ve have the catalogue.
HUO: So that’s a reference for you.
MS: Definitely.
I was part of this community in 2004-2005 in Peckham, we were a squat-based collective that involved not only artists, but fashion designers, writers and musicians. We squatted an old 7,000 sq ft, Co-op department store and maybe ten of us lived there. At that time, it felt that there was no identifiable young art collective in London. We were doing ambitious exhibitions and throwing huge after-parties with performances involved. We ended up with 2,000 people in this old ballroom.
HUO: So that was before you had an identifiable art structure?
MS: Yes, but we had our own structure and organized a series of artist-run shows in different buildings.
HUO: Can you tell me about these shows?
MS: There was one that was called Rising Tendencies Toward the United States of Mind, and there was Optimism as Cultural Rebellion…
HUO: So optimism started there?
MS: Yes, in 2004 I wrote “The Manifestation”,which was a manifesto that didn’t seek to dictate a specific course of action. It was a call to self-manifest. In a way I returned to it when I wrote the introduction to the book for Optimism – The Art of Our Time show at Hannah Barry’s, and then that text was included as part of your Manifesto Marathon event.
HUO: Exactly, and obviously we’re now curious to know more about this manifesto about optimism, because I’ve always thought we needed new optimism and then we see here that in 2004 you became interested in optimism.
MS: Well it takes a few years for a new century to start. When cultural movements occur, artists pay attention to one specific aspect from what is a wide spectrum of art-making, this is because a previous generation seems to have neglected that specific aspect. This is why movements aren’t forever and they shouldn’t be. Movements exist to momentarily remind us to question the fluidity of what we collectively assume is solid.
In a sense I think all art is optimistic. My optimism is not necessarily about happy art or cheap positivity, Optimism is the vital force that entangles itself with, and then shapes the future.So for me it’s a dynamic stance rather than a belief that everything will be OK, it’s not a naive hope. Optimism is about actively commandeering reality, and shaping the future. I am an optimist, and always have been. At first formulating this approach to art and idea of optimism really felt like the antithesis of cultural credibility.
HUO: So this is a kind of a counter reaction?
MS: Well, my blog is “Optimism as Cultural Rebellion”…
HUO: So your blog is a kind of daily practice of rebellion!
MS: Well, I think optimism itself is still a rebellion. But at that time, it really felt that there was no space in art for a sincere discussion relating to optimism. Back then I was thinking about blind optimism, that to seek utopian ideals or even to speak the language of those kinds of manifestos was a necessary cultural rebellion. I was thinking less about the real consequences of that, just that it needed to happen.
You manifest the full intensity of an idea to understand it. This is part of the process of creating visions of the future. But once you have this vision of the future, you have to step back to understand how and to what extent you are going to work towards realizing it. Like the Dogma films, at the beginning they made and stuck to the rules, but afterwards were still influenced by the most useful parts of what they had established. I think that’s the way that movements should operate. I think Beuys said that inside every human, there’s all of the past, but there is also visions of the future.
HUO: Panofsky said that if we want to be the future, it’s out of fragments of the past.
MS: Within shamanic logic, there exists a non-linear sense of time and a relation to history that is impossibly intertwined with all the potential futures. History cannot and should not be forgotten. But also if we only think of the past there is a danger that we will forget to design the future. In your interview with Ballard, he says “We now live in the present, unconsciously uneasy at the future, and this short-term viewpoint does have dangers. We know that, as human beings, we are all deeply flawed and dangerous, but this self-knowledge can act as a brake on hope and idealism.”1
HUO: Talk more about your exhibition, “Interconnected Echoes”, in Paris.
MS: In that show there is a series of digital collages, one drawing and also a photographic billboard work that is installed sculpturally. The billboard is sunk into the walls of the gallery. Similarly, the collages appear to show cubes that have sunk into each other. The show is called Interconnected echoes, which is also the official title of my salon and an interview-based blog that I run.“Interconnected”, is a term that relates to this advanced idea of community that we spoke about earlier. The collages emerged from designs for my sculptures which you saw on the roof in Peckham.
HUO: These are photographic sculptures, kind of performative photography, fragments of bodies blown up, it’s quite monumental.
MS: I was thinking about creating 3D Venn diagrams which evidence shared space. But in my sculptures these solid and geometric cubes somehow go off the grid and sink into each other. The Venn diagram moves into the next dimension, from the second into the third. I was wondering whether this sense of multidimensionality could move from the formal perspectives that cubism challenged into the conceptual realm. We can project ideas into multiple dimensions, and then maintain a multitude of perspectives on those ideas.
HUO: … It’s multidimensional.
MS: Marina Abramovic and I talked about multidimensionality in terms of travelling between worlds, and from the shamanic perspective, that’s always been possible. We can all perceive these things directly, but you need to shift your consciousness slightly in order to experience them. They don’t happen in the same way as placing a cup on a table does.
But going back to the cubes with bodies on them, they have become a way of proposing the coexistence of uncompromised visions. An illustration of shared spaces that should be read as being both physical and conceptual.
HUO: You use these multidimensional constructions with photography, putting them in a-perspective constellations. Where is the source of this material, because we see these entangled and disentangled bodies in fragmentary poses and oppositions. Are these coming from live performances? Do you have some kind of an archive?
MS: They are staged images, I regularly shoot in my studio and there’s a small group of people that I work with. I have an archive, and use the images at different times. I use the ones that stand out to me visually. I can’t make any claim to understand beauty other than when I see it. I think this is difficult for some people when they approach the work. If the images are beautiful, it’s in quite a traditional sense. I struggle at times with the pressure of beauty being contextualized.
HUO: So that might lead the next step then? What are your unrealised projects?
MS: I want to write an opera that describes the shamanic journey. The opera would describe and also engage the audience in the journeying process. It wouldn’t be an artwork that you engage with just by viewing or listening to; it’s something that the audience would interact with on a very personal level.
HUO: So it’s a collective decision. The engagement will produce reality in some ways…
MS: Or realities, collectively personal realities.
HUO: Talking about parallel realities, it’s kind of an issue which independent of generations seems more and more relevant. You are an artist, but you run a salon, numerous spaces that are parallel realities, you might want to enter into politics. So these ideas of identity or citizenship become a sort of “perceptive band”, as Stefano Boeri says.
MS: I think that this complexity you describe is the gift of post-modernity that will stay.
HUO: And you don’t seem to be against that?
MS: I’m not. I think there is a danger that people are tempted to try to introduce a re-modernism of sorts. There is no Golden age. The artistic movements that have looked back only ever occupy footnotes in History. Whilst there was a period of what could be described as a “conceptual baroque”, the complexity of meaning and understanding is vital to promote diversity and tolerance thereof.
The true death of post-modernism will not be described in relation to it. Before post-modernism, there was this idea that if you knew the name of a god, you had power over him. Post-modernism became a god if you knew its name and it then had power over you. This was the imbalance that led to the collective power loss we see now. We need to talk about it now, because it’s a type of exorcism of old ideas. But it will seem absurd soon. Any idea applied in totality leads to absurdity, whether capitalism, socialism… Or postmodernism. So we must look head forth into the abyss and stare at the future. The future is the unknown, and all fear comes from a fear of the unknown. Artists must be fearless.
HUO: We haven’t spoken yet about your influences. We spoke about Joseph Beuys in connection to Andy Warhol, as if they were one, as two sides of a coin. But we haven’t really spoken about your English influences. John Latham was described in the 70’s in Germany, as a kind of English Beuys, with his Artist Placement Group, and his political dimension which he ran in tandem with his art projects. He used to be your neighbour. I knew him very well. I was wondering about John Latham, who was also a hero in the early 90’s because of his introduction of time…
MS: I am very interested in his work and considering I spent so much time in Peckham while he was alive, it’s sad I never met him. In terms of other English influences I can clearly identify Derek Jarman as a mentor. His extended practice, priestly nature and role as a facilitator of others has influenced me. His open and unashamed romanticism is also something I relate to very directly. I mentioned earlier Louwrien Wijers who in 1990 organised Art meets Science, and Spirituality in a Changing Economy. That project and accompanying book is heroic. She conducted the longest ever interview with Warhol. We are back to Warhol and Beuys again! She asked Beuys ten questions, who sent her to Warhol with the same questions. Warhol then suggested she take the questions onwards to the Dalaï Lama. Isn’t that incredible? This perfect triangle of Beuys, Warhol and the Dalaï-lama, three men working in different ways, on different continents and yet all suggesting the same things. Warhol sticks out, he’s like “um, well I mean, gosh, sure, uh…” But he also speaks very clearly about the future of religion, in which he talks about big rock concerts where everybody is singing the same song. He also says that anyone can be an artist, like Beuys.
I see that pyramid of interviews as Louwrien’s perfect artwork and social sculpture; she created and facilitated a wider vision. This vision is not only the people she gave a voice to, but the collective voice that she identified. Which brings us back to opera, the beauty of different people singing at the same time. This was an example that Norman Rosenthal gave and I thought: “Oh my God, that’s it!”
To talk to the man who talks to everyone you want to talk to.
There was a surprising dearth in the history of art curation, until Hans Ulrich Obrist, specifically surrounding the curatorial pioneers perspective. It was because of this Hans began a series of relentless interviews to create an intimate documentation of this turning point in art history, collected in A Brief History of Curating (2008). Since his mid twenties he has been single-handedly documenting a first hand take on art history through conversations with some of the most interesting artists, writers, curators and thinkers of the 20th century.
This interview was a cold call, we didn’t get to sit before hand and compare the wear on each other’s shoes. However it was setup by a mutual friend, so the pressure was slightly off.
Adam O’Reilly: Have you ever been intimidated by anyone you’ve interviewed?
Hans Ulrich Obrist: It’s an interesting question because I don’t think that intimidation necessarily occurred, but I started to be in awe, you know, great artists or philosophers whom I had never met before. I would not meet someone and then immediately interview him or her. So you know very often the interview only happens when there is a relationship, a dialogue, and after many meetings there is a moment I start to record. There is a curiosity for me. The curiosity is kind of stronger than the intimidation, maybe?
A: I only asked that, because I was a bit intimidated to interview the interviewer. Interviews have always interested me, I like that they generally begin a little one sided, a linear prompt that triggers a non-linear response and then they have a life of their own. How do you go about preparing for an interview?
H: I usually read as much as I can on the work. In the case of a writer I read the novels, and I look at as many possible shows of an artist, and I read lots of interviews they have given in the past. Here to give you an example, with one of the greatest living artists, Gerhard Richter, at some point I realized he had never been interviewed about his relationship to architecture, so we did this interview and that was published in Domus, the architecture and design magazine about his relationships with architects like the late Oswald Mathias Ungers, an architect he was friendly with, the design of his own studio he built for himself, his architecture models he inserted in his early paintings, the unrealized projects that were meant to be unrealized, was a topic I mentioned. That became because I read so much, met him so many times, so I found this loophole that had never been done. Very often it’s that, so that the preparation leads to something, which maybe hasn’t been discussed. Also, for my influence to work I have to be very prepared in order for then in the interview to be free to improvise. And I very often have a pile with lot of notes, I have a lot of questions, I have researchers helping me to make research, obviously it’s changed a lot with the Internet, because now Google plays also a big role, so books and Google, and then at some point during the interview I very often throw overboard a lot of the preparations and go into freestyle, but I can do it because I’m prepared and if I don’t prepare I don’t have the confidence to do that, so I need to over prepare to then be free.
A: Actually, I am glad you brought up Gerhard Richter, I wanted to ask about your conversations with him, they are beautiful documents. It’s also interesting to see you both grow in your respected disciplines through them. How have your conversations with him progressed through the years?
H: It’s interesting to talk about the Richter conversations, because it was one of the first, he’s one of the first artists I met and when I was a teenager, I was 18, and that was definitely a great inspiration for me to realize that that was what I wanted to do in life is to work with artists. We then, after initial conversation, started to work on projects together, and I think the dialogue has always circled around the reality we produced together, so I invited Gerhard Richter to do a show at the Nietzsche House in Sils-Maria then I started to collaborate with Kasper König, out of that grew the painting exhibition, The Broken Mirror, which is my first large-scale exhibition I worked with, and König had invited me to do this with him. That was when I was 24. Then for the catalogue, we decided we wanted the artists’ own words, so we asked them for their own writings, and I realized how amazing that fragment of Richter was, so I became curious and I started to research and I saw that there were all these amazing writings he had done, and there was never a book, so the third project we did after the Nietzsche house and the group show in Vienna, The Broken Mirror, was I started to edit, over years, a book of his collected writings, which came out, and has now come out in an augmented edition, a second edition, co-edited together with Dietmar Elger, and is now double the size of the one from fifteen years ago, and then, so it’s always been approached in working on another exhibition together. Ever since we’ve always worked on books really, lots of artist books.
A: A cyclical relationship, the interviews become a by-product of working together?
H: Yeah, or the other way around. It’s either a by-product, or you could say the conversation produces the project, so it can be both ways, right? At the moment I am reading a long new interview with Gerhard Richter on his artists books.
A: The interview you did with Julian Assange, (e-flux journal 25, May 2011) was really revealing. With an interview like that, you’re changing a public perception of a person, in this case someone shrouded in a lot of controversy. Is it important to you to give them a candid place to talk?
H: Yeah, there has always been a situation with the interviews. My interviews are supposed to have a lot to do with empathy, creating an empathic situation.
A: Empathy is rare to find in the art world,
H: And, I think if you want to understand the forces which are effective in art it’s important to understand what’s happening in other disciplines.
A: Of course, and you have that attachment coming from the art world.
H: The art world is my home, and I am based in the art world, so why would I interview Julian Assange? I mean I’m very interested in how Wikileaks had an impact on events over the last twelve months. But the main reason, is that artists kept telling me how much they are interested in Julian Assange, they’ve got questions for Julian Assange. At a certain moment I felt, as in conversations with Anton Vidokle, Julieta Aranda and Brian Kuan Wood from e-Flux, you know it could be great to do this as a polyphonic interview, and get artists, through me, to ask him the questions they always wanted to ask him.
A: I thought that interview was very on point. Many artists that I talk to, are trying to think of ways to use Wikileaks or just trying to figure out the impact it is having on everyone. Assange’s approach is so selfless and impressive. Documents like that have the power to challenge popular positions and perspectives. In A Brief History of Curating, you went about it retroactively, how did that change project start?
H: I think the book came out of the feeling that something is missing, it’s driven by curiosity, I mean, I came into the art world being very close to artists, I obviously realized when I started to curate that… at the very beginning I was very naïve and came out of a desire to do an exhibition in my kitchen and then on a mountain peak and then I realized, you know what, there has actually been a history of that and a lot of people have been doing that beforehand and then I realized this sort of history hasn’t really been written, why hasn’t it been written, and then you know, like always, when I see an exhibition that hasn’t been done and I want to see it, I do it, and when there is a book which hasn’t been written, and I want to read it, then I realize I have to do it. I just started to do this, not for a publisher, just out of my own interest and curiosity, and then at some point, I spoke to Jack Bankowsky, the then editor of Artforum, and he thought that was interesting, he said, “you know, why don’t we do a series for Art Forum so we can do it more systematically?” He commissioned me to do Walter Hopps, Harald Szeemann, and Pontus Hulten so that added three more to the mix, and then ever since I just continued to do them. I think now that many people know I’m doing these recordings, there is a lot of collective thinking about it in the sense that it’s no longer just me sitting in the office and thinking, “Whom could I interview next?” But there are lots of people who Email me and say, “Why have you never interviewed this person?” Every day I get an Email or a phone call and somebody says, “It’s very urgent that you interview this person. By the way, if you have any ideas for pioneers in Vancouver, I’m most curious.
A: I know pioneers in Nova Scotia, which is where I am right now, Gary Neil Kennedy is really fantastic, he gave a lot of early conceptual artists space and time to make new work.
H: Yes, Kasper König often talked about him. I saw a show of his at Portikus. Great, the next time I’m nearby I should interview Mr. Kennedy. That’s a great idea.
A: It is a pretty fascinating history, his push to start the NSCAD Press with König and Benjamin Buchloh. Those books are such great primary resources for early conceptual work.
H: Then obviously you know there is a link to Nova Scotia because I was very inspired by the NSCAD books. I mean the whole NSCAD book series was, for me, a great inspiration to start to make books with artists, and I’m a fan that the medium of the book as a medium, so that books aren’t a secondary reality. Michael Snow’s Nova Scotia book, and the great books by Gerhard Richter, Dan Graham or Dara Birnbaum. It’s interesting you mention Halifax, I was learning from Halifax, definitely. Also, I was always very inspired by David Askevold. He was a part of my “Do It” project, and sadly we had planned an interview with him, and then he died. But at least we could collaborate on Do It and he made marvelous texts for me for the Do It Books, and I think a lot of it has to do with his protests against forgetting and trying to remember, and I think the art world is quite good at this, and I think it’s a collective activity. You know, it’s not you or me, but it’s many, many people in the art world collectively trying to remember and I think that’s what is so interesting that this interview approach a very collective project, a lot of people thinking together whom we could remember, whom we could visit, and sometimes it’s like a lot of people are telling me that I should visit someone or interview someone. It gives a lot of people the idea to revisit your conversations and it has a very positive, hopefully, impact on the process of remembering, and that’s really what happened with these curators, because this curatorial history was partially forgotten or only very patchy and then at some point started. We thought we could bring all of these interviews I had with curators together and make the book. It wasn’t like a priori, it came a posteriori, no? After me having done so many interviews, obviously within the archives I’ve got a lot of potential books, or websites, or things I can now extract. It’s 2,200 hours, so someone could classify them according to geography, like all the China interviews we did with Phil Tinari or I could do all the London interviews, all the New York interviews according to the cities I have lived or spent time, all the Paris interviews. So one could do them according to disciplines like all the artist interviews, all the architect interviews, brief history of architecture, brief history of music, of sound, because we did lots of sonic inventors.
A: How do you go about putting together group exhibits?
H: I think it’s very much inspired by John Cage. Cage said that during a period of time he doesn’t just make music, but he also writes texts, he makes etchings, and a whole list of other things, and he does them in a different way so it’s not a linear situation, and I think with me it’s also overlapping a lot of layers. I’m not just a curator of exhibitions, but I write texts, I make interviews, I do films, I organize panels, and symposiums, and conferences, and research, so it’s a lot of parallel realities. It’s very non linear and then within these overlapping layers all of a sudden things emerge. And mostly it starts with a conversation with an artist. If there is an umbilical cord, it’s because I’ve got a very strong proximity to artists and that’s how ideas pop out.
A: I find it easy to get both optimistic and pessimistic when in conversation with artists about the role of art in a time when it is so easily absorbed into popular culture. It is a very exciting time to be making work because of unstable political climates, new technology, and a welcoming public. What sort of subversive role can art take in this?
H: Yeah, I think that’s a complex question, which I think is difficult to answer quickly, but I think when there is no more priests and philosophers says Gerhard Richter, the artists will be the most important people in the world. I have always felt it’s a very important moment where the art world is magnetic and there is a lot of other disciplines that are interested in the art world, I think it has a lot to do with the former. There is I think within the art world, a high degree of flexibility also of the formats and the possibility to invent new rules of the game, new formats. I very often think through the medium of exhibition we can show artists, architects, scientists, philosophers and all kinds of practitioners, it would be very difficult to do this in another field right now, so I think there is a great possibility right now to bring the different disciplines together in the art world as the formats are open. Obviously the art world has gained a lot of territory, and I think in this sense, it’s much broader than it used to be and much bigger. Maria Merz is always telling me that he loves this quote by General Giap who said, “When you gain territory, you lose concentration and when you gain concentration you lose territory”, and obviously the challenge right now is how the art world doesn’t lose the concentration, so for me it’s important to always not forget that, so every now and then, besides the big exhibitions I put on, I do very intimate, small exhibitions which are really concentrated moments with artists, they are focused shows a bit like the Kitchen. The Kitchen always stayed with me and it was the poet Cavafy who said, “the city you are born with, you always carry it with you wherever you go” and for me there is always the Kitchen in St. Gallen, Switzerland, where I grew up and studied and this kitchen is always with me, and so like besides all the very public shows in the big museums and biennales and stuff I always very regularly find a little exhibition like in the Barragan House in Mexico or now soon in Brazil or in the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London about ten years ago, these sort of house museum exhibitions in very intimate small houses concentrate and develop projects that are important, so I hope it’s both, it’s both trying to reach out and bridge the gap between other disciplines, but also remain concentrated.
At the age of 23, Hans Ulrich Obrist curated his first exhibition in his kitchen; it included the work of artists including Christian Boltanski and Richard Wentworth. He is now Co-Director, Exhibitions and Programmes, and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery in London. Since the early 1990s, Obrist has mounted 150-plus exhibitions around the world, hosted The Brutally Early Club (a breakfast salon before the sun has risen), written catalogue essays and published numerous books. Obrist is the author of The Interview Project, an extensive ongoing anthology of more than 2,000 hours of interviews with artists, architects, scientists, writers and engineers.
Clo’e Floirat: I am interested in the form and the concept of the interview itself, rather than an isolated interview about an artist, a designer or an architect’s work. What is its role when it transcends the traditional answer and question structure? A form of art criticism? May it become an art form?
HUO: This is a very important question. Obviously interviews played an important role in art history, at least since Vasari. Vasari was a great influence for me, because I was always thinking: what will we know about the art of our time if we look back in some century? Warhol too was an influence, because to record everything at a certain moment is like creating a time capsule. I would say the third historic influence on me was David Sylvester. He did this wonderful book of interviews with Francis Bacon, which is one of my favourite interviews book ever. You have a very rare in-depth situation because Sylvester has interviewed Bacon again and again, and all over again, throughout his life. The other influential character was Jonas Mekas. I think without Jonas Mekas I would not have started to film my interviews.
CF: Did you initiate your first questions with the plan of making a collection of interviews? Was The Interview Project premeditated?
HUO: I have always done this as a curator; I talk to artists. Little by little the interviews were published and now there are artists holding seminars about The Interview Project. It was not premeditated, there was never a strategy behind it at all, it was never a conscious idea of ‘now I want to write the history of my time!’ That sort of grand gesture was not there. For me, it was to be in the middle of things and in the centre of nothing. There was no master plan and still there is not. It is more that, all of a sudden, there is an occasion or a desire to interview someone; little by little there a system develops. But the system comes a posteriori, not a priori.
CF: What does that system look like?
HUO: If this is the art world, [draws a square in the centre of white page, and illustrates artists with dots inside that ‘art-world square’], I have interviewed many great protagonists. First the artists I met when I was a student, Alighiero Boetti… I did not record these first conversations sadly. Everything between 1986 and 1991, the first five years are lost. From 1991, I started to record. Because I was a curator, I also wanted to know where curating comes from, so I started more systematically to interview curators, like Pontus Hultén. But if you want to understand the forces in art you need to understand what is happening in other fields. From art I went into science; from art I went into music; from art I went into literature; from art I went into architecture. And gradually it is like a concentric circle, it goes from the art world to all these other worlds, and then, from there, it goes into the multitude.
CF: In the first volume of your Interviews, what is the reason of listing the interviews in an alphabetic order? Not chronological? Is it to emphasize the manual aspect that the volume eventually provides?
HUO: There are lots of different books from The Interview Project, and, each time, there is a different rule. When you have a big archive of interviews, you can start to edit in different ways. One is according to cities, for example we have the ‘Beijing Marathon’ and the ‘London Marathon’. David Sylvester’s interviews were published according to geography: his London interviews, and his New York interviews. I can have them according to professions; I can have all the curators’ interviews, like in A Brief History of Curating. Or I can have them according to one artist, which is Sylvester’s model for Bacon: all the interviews I have ever done with Gerhard Richter or Olafur Eliasson, for example. Or there is the Conversations Series with Walther Koenig Books: 21 books of in-depth interviews.
In Volume 2, the editors – Karen Marta, Shumon Basar and Charles Arsène-Henry – wanted to show, as well the in-depth model, the broad spectrum of The Interview Project. In Volume 1, the order is according to the alphabet, and then for Volume 2 the three editors decided to do it according to birthdays so highlighting the five generations occupied by the interviewees. But who knows? We have to find out our own rules of the game, how to classify the material. It is a very big body of texts. A great-unrealized project is to do something online with it; that will be the next step.
CF: Do you consider yourself as an art historian?
HUO: I never studied art history; I studied social science and politics. I am curator foremost, I am curator of science, a curator of music, a curator of literature, a curator of architecture, but also I work as a critic.
CF: Of the different roles you play which one of them do you assume when you interview someone?
HUO: When I am interviewing, I am just learning.
CF: A listener?
HUO: Yes and I am like a student, I want to be a student all my life. I think the best thing in life is to be a student. When one stops learning it is terrible, particularly when you develop a trajectory, then you start to become more and more busy, and stop reading. And for me The Interview Project is to be an eternal student. I still function like a student, with hundred of books at home. When I do an interview I need to read all night long to prepare it, so it is the same intensity as when I had seminar as a student. And usually that goes away in life, but The Interview Project keeps me alive like a student.
CF: Robert Storr has said that you are an animator, but an interesting one. At first I found it rather derogative, perhaps too connected to talk-show culture. But then I appreciated that it was, in fact, a very accurate portrayal of your purpose if one reflects on the word ‘animator’ in terms of the one who animates situations, conversations and his ability to generate attention, just like a motivator or a generator even.
HUO: Animator is one of my many roles, I am a researcher, I am a fundraiser, I am a museum director, and I am definitely an interviewer. These are just aspects of a generalist profession. I think in the idea of ‘animating’, there is obviously a little bit of a negative connotation, because it has so much to do with events culture and all that, so I preferred the definition of the ‘junction maker’. What J.G. Ballard taught me is to make junctions and build bridges. I think we live in a world where we have objects, quasi-objects, non-objects. It is important also to have inter-subjective situations. I think my role of curator is not just in the exhibitions I install in spaces like in the Serpentine, or the exhibitions I install in time like ‘Il Tempo del Postino’ and the ‘Marathons’. But it is also in the projects that bring people together, and I see this as a very important part of my curation. I want my work to be useful for the world; I want it to be a toolbox. I do not want things that close down. I was never interested in occupying territories. I want to liberate.
CF: You question artists about their references, their influences, who from the past have inspired them. By stimulating the past, and the forgotten practitioners, it generates a mise en abîme in producing art history. It generates some kind of family tree. Is it a way to keep the past present?
HUO: It is clearly an aspect of what I often call ‘the protest about forgetting’. Obviously, I have a lot of questions; I learn from an interview what it is very interesting to ask the next person about. As Philippe Parreno says la chaîne est belle; it’s a kind of chain reaction. I observed, for example, that if on Monday I interview a film director, on Tuesday I interview an artist, on Wednesday I interview an architect – which is very often my week – then, by the end of the week, what the architect told me connects to what the artist told me, connects to what the film director told me. There is a kind of strange morphogenetic field, as Rupert Sheldrake calls it, different disciplines are interested in similar things. So then I started to think, I have a quite extreme schedule, if I push it even further then I could do the ‘Marathon’: 50 interviews in one day. We did the ‘Marathon’ for the first time in 2005, in Stuttgart, and then in London with Rem Koolhaas, and since then we have done it many times. I have lots of papers like this, thousand of these papers, and if I do an interview I take some of them. I do not script it in a linear way, for me it never works if I have a list with all the questions. While people talk to me – and actually sometimes people become confused because they think I am not listening to them – I am actually looking what could be a great link to the next question. Suddenly it is like a card game.
CF: You frequently question the existence of unrealized projects. Is this a method to stimulate lost, forgotten or misunderstood projects from the past? From that they are too often unreported propositions and solutions for the art world and its future?
HUO: It is actually my most frequent question. The second most frequent is: what advice to a young artist? And, finally, the question about the epiphany. How did Benoit Mandelbrot discover fractal geometry? How did Gerhard Richter discover over-painted photographs? But there is a reason that the most recurrent question is on unrealized projects. I believe that we know very little about them.
CF: They could still play a valuable purpose for the future? Like in architecture, models and projects submitted for competition remain unrealized, yet when they are not published they stands on every architect’s website as visions.
HUO: That is right, but, for example, we do not know about the unrealised projects of filmmakers, of scientists, and of artists, even less.
CF: If the California artist Amy Alexander would invited you to ‘self-interview’, what would be the answer to your own question about the unrealized project?
HUO: In 1986, when I was 18 years old, Alighiero Boetti told me this could be my life. I really did think artists were the most important people on the planet, and I wanted to be helpful and useful for artists. He said I could get all of these unrealized projects and try to make them happen, to produce them as realities. And so the irony is that I have been gathering thousand of unrealized projects, but whenever I want to do my big exhibition on unrealized projects it fails. So my unrealized project is to do a big exhibition on unrealized projects. And maybe even more to build a palace of unrealized project.
CF: Today is it still you chasing artists for interviews, or is your prey lying in wait to be captured in their interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist? To be part of his oral history?
HUO: Very often the desire has to come from me in the first place. Because it is my way of questioning the world so it has to come from my desire to understand the world. As much as it is a personal system within which it is about this desire, there is also a certain degree of objectivity and also collectively. The Interview Project now is a more collective project, it is more known that it used to be. People know that I have done many interviews so they say: ‘have you ever interviewed this great 80-year-old composer? Or this wonderful scientist? It could be nice to add it to your project’. It is very generous, and very wonderful that is has become a feedback loop. And the Marathon obviously is a very new form of producing interviews. Each time it produces a micro-archive in itself, and these interviews can then be published again in magazines. But what is very important, what I said in the beginning, there is not a master plan. It is very ‘rhizomatic’, it is a very Deleuzian thing.
What is also very important is that The Interview Project was always almost like a broke heaven, it’s a zero-sum calculation; I never made any money with it. But the money I make from publishing in magazines, catalogues and books pays for the editing, the PhD students from different countries that work on those transcriptions. But what I always did from the beginning and what is very important is that I can keep the rights with the artist so that later I can publish it again in any anthologies. There is always the thought about the archives.
CF: Your interviews are by-products of other events. You use every occasion to conduct them. In the most unexpected situation, you always take out your video camera to record any exchange of ideas. Is it also the case when you are being interviewed? Do you record and collect those conversations too?
HUO: When I was a student I travelled in night trains and had my ‘grand tour’, and after that I was really prepared. At 23, I did my first kitchen exhibition; from then everything went pretty fast. I got a grant from Cartier Fondation in Paris, I was invited to the Museum d’Art Modern de Paris to do ‘Migrateurs’, I was invited to work with Kaspar König. So between 1992 and 1993 my activity went from this strange obscure Swiss student travelling around in night trains to see artists, to the most public voice of new curating. But because it was like this that I had to go out in public, I think The Interview Project was very important, otherwise one would burn out very quickly.
CF: I met Markus Miessen two weeks ago in Berlin. He mentioned The Archive as a Productive Space of Conflict project in which you are involved. How is this project connected to your Interview Archive project?
HUO: With Markus Miessen I have been discussing how we use the archives digitally. There is obviously the whole tagging technology, so we worked together with Armin Linke and the Institute for the 21st Century, founded by Karen Marta and Bettina Korek. And the Institute tries to help The Interview Project, we get support to try to archive and keep it together. With Miessen, Linke and the Institute we developed this tagging site for Cedric Price. The beautiful thing about the tagging system – we showed at the Venice Biennale – is that you can just click in ‘Fun Palace’ and there everything that has ever been said about the Fun Palace comes. So you could imagine once my all archives are there, you could type colour red or colour blue, and then everything an artist or an architect who ever mentioned something about the colour red would start to speak. So you can actually make the living and the dead speak to each other.
About the author
Clo’e Floirat is a critic and cartoonist, based in Berlin and currently a student on the Critical Writing in Art and Design MA programme at the Royal College of Art, London.
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TIMEOUT LONDON
Hans Ulrich Obrist: Interview
A new role at the Serpentine Gallery is the latest chapter in Hans Ulrich Obrist‘s love-affair with London. Time Out finds out why he keeps coming back for more
By Sarah KentPosted: Mon Apr 24 2006
As guest curator at the Serpentine Gallery in 1995, Swiss-born Hans Ulrich Obrist mounted ‘Take Me I’m Yours’, a show that was more like a jumble sale than an exhibition. Gilbert and George gave away badges and Christian Boltanski invited people to fill a carrier bag with second-hand clothes for a pound. The following year he presented ‘Life/Live’, a survey of artist-run spaces in Britain, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1999 he stayed at the John Soane Museum while curating ‘Retrace Your Steps: Remember Tomorrow’, for which he invited artists like Steve McQueen and Cerith Wyn Evans to respond to the collection. Now, after being involved in curating some 90 major exhibitions, including ‘Cities on the Move’ that came to the Hayward in 1999, he takes up a post created specially for him: Co-director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery.‘For ten years I was working freelance and travelling non-stop’, he tells me.‘But since 2000 I’ve been based in Paris at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville, curating the programme there. Internationally, it’s a very open situation that goes beyond national boundaries; directors and curators move from one country to another, which has opened up the museum landscape.’ Isn’t there a danger, though, with curators moving from one country to another, that museum programmes become the same the world over? ‘It’s essential that there’s a strong local ingredient,’ he argues. ‘You have to have a mixture of protagonists from inside and outside to create a dialogue – a negotiation between the local and the global – otherwise institutions become homogenised.’ Hasn’t he chosen the wrong time to move here, just when the London art scene has lost its creative edge? ‘It’s very exciting to be here again,’ he insists, ‘because London keeps reinventing itself. There’s a new generation of artists’ spaces and galleries and London is an amazing laboratory for new architecture and design.’With Tate Modern dominating the scene, how does he see the role of public galleries like the Serpentine? ‘The question is more about relevance and vision. This has nothing to do with scale; it would be much simpler if it did. For the last year Julia [Peyton-Jones] and I have been discussing what an institution of the twenty-first century should be. It’s not about filling spaces, but intuiting what’s necessary and urgent.At a time when other museums are building new wings, we are building a new image; our extension will be through programming in concentric circles: the Serpentine, the park, the world. The gallery offers a very specific experience, because it’s a world within a world – a lofty space, which you walk to through the park. The change of momentum from slow to fast, and from noisy to as silent as a chapel is important; it works especially well for monographic exhibitions.’ I’m told that persuading artists to show in smaller public galleries can be difficult, because they are hoping to exhibit at Tate Modern. ‘You have to propose something that is context-specific,’ he explains. ‘At a certain time an artist needs a big retrospective, at other times they need a more focused exhibition. It’s a different story each time; it’s about establishing a dialogue. Flexibility is essential, otherwise everything becomes predictable; planning too far in advance is potentially deadly: it can make the programme very stiff.’He won’t divulge details, because the programme will be announced in the summer, but the first project is a pavilion with an inflatable canopy by Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas and Cecil Balmond which will stay on the lawn through the autumn. ‘There’ll be debates, performances, screenings and 24-hour interview marathons as well as a café,’ says Obrist, ‘to build bridges between art, architecture and design.’A Royal College graduate compared curating to writing an essay with artworks. How does he preceive the role? ‘I see a curator as a catalyst, generator and motivator – a sparring partner, accompanying the artist while they build a show, and a bridge builder, creating a bridge to the public. Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva proved that essay shows can be successful, but they have to be brilliant, otherwise they are in danger of using art to illustrate a text. You have to avoid a pre-written scenario. Great group shows are journeys that get written along the way; you don’t know the end point. ’How does the London art world compare with that of, say, Berlin? ‘The scene is no longer centred in one place, as it was in the past,’ says Obrist. ‘There’s a polyphony of centres and London plays a crucial role. Most cities have a centre surrounded by suburbs, but London has numerous centres: it’s the model of a twenty-first century metropolis.’
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MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
THE Q&A: HANS ULRICH OBRIST, CURATOR
In November Art Review magazine named Hans Ulrich Obrist the number-one most influential person in the art world. But according to Obrist, the excitement hasn’t interrupted activities at London’s Serpentine Gallery, where he is co-director of exhibitions and programmes and director of international projects. For decades, Obrist has authored analytical commentaries on contemporary art, while simultaneously redefining its presentation at renowned institutions such as the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Obrist also conducts interviews. In the past few years he has released two 1,000-page volumes of his collected conversations with the most talented artists, architects, scientists, engineers and thinkers living today. Most recently he interviewed Jeff Koons for the artist’s new book “Hulk Elvis“, which features works from the series of the same name.
It could be intimidating to interview someone with a C.V. like Obrist’s, but the man at the other end of the telephone line is disarming and reassuringly self-possessed. He draws his interlocutor into a cocoon of seemingly all-encompassing knowledge about everything involving aesthetics. Obrist speaks incredibly fast, and crams in so many snippets of insight that it would be impossible to relay them all in one pass. Here we present the highlights, including his thoughts on the trouble with meetings, the world’s most exciting new art scene and why it is vital to consider posterity.
More Intelligent Life: What did you eat for breakfast this morning?
Hans Ulrich Obrist: I always have coffee and porridge for breakfast. My breakfast happens very early, at 6.30am, because I wake up early. I founded a club, which is called the Brutally Early Club. It’s basically a breakfast salon for the 21st century where art meets science meets architecture meets literature. The reason why I decided to do my club at 6.30am in different cafés, which are open so early, is because in 21st-century cities it’s become very difficult to improvise. Everybody has a schedule and it becomes really difficult to decide from one day to the next to gather for a meeting. You have to plan it weeks and weeks in advance. It’s so important to have improvisation in cities. Most people are free at 6.30, so that’s the idea of the Brutally Early Club and I have done it ever since I moved to London.
MIL: At this point in your career it seems that you could curate at any museum or gallery of your choosing, but you’ve been with Serpentine for quite a bit. What’s special to you about working there?
HUO: It’s a very exciting collaboration with Julia Peyton-Jones, the director [of the gallery]. I am the co-director and we began working together in 2006. That collaboration is one aspect, and another is obviously the park. It’s the gallery, the park, the world, and it’s in Kensington Gardens. Artists really love the location because it’s completely a world in its own. There’s nothing else there. When they have an exhibition it is really their world with art in the park. Another thing that is special is that admission is free, so it’s art for all.
MIL: And it’s in London, which is a city that you love and a perfect place for your open-ended model of curation that doesn’t rely on a city or a locale. You seem to have settled down from your constant travels in the ’90s. It’s like you’ve reversed the process and are making the work you want to see come to you now.
HUO: From 1991 to 2000 I was totally nomadic. I was travelling 300 days a year and building out my research. These were a bit like my learning and migrating years, so to say. Goethe called it lehr und wanderjahre, this sort of idea of having these years where one would learn and migrate.
In 2000 a new decade started, and it was sort of my second professional decade. I felt that it would be important to somehow have a place that was more grounded and with regular exhibition activity. It would also allow feedback. Otherwise you just book the show and you are already at the next one, and you never hear or feel what happens with the show. When I began this work the art world was still limited to art centres mostly in the West, but today the art world is totally global, particularly in the non-Western world like China, India, and so on. For me, the most exciting experience the last couple of years has been the Brazilian art scene. Brazil is completely exploding with an extraordinary optimism and an extraordinary energy. One cannot just sit in one place because you miss out on the extraordinary historical circumstances with so many new centres.
MIL: You’re also a big proponent of research and ensuring art from different cultures is documented for history’s sake.
HUO: As Larry Halprin says, it’s a protest against forgetting. That means not only looking at younger and emerging artists, which is obviously a main focus of my work, but also to look into positions from the past and pioneers and artists who are maybe forgotten but need to be remembered. It’s key to see that there are not all of a sudden all these great artists, but there have been very interesting artists throughout the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s. It’s important to make this archaeological investigation.
MIL: You seem to be embracing a sort of globalisation of the art world.
HUO: It’s interesting because in some way the forces of globalisation, so to say, have always been a part of every society, and it’s not the first time that we have experienced globalisation. But in our time we’re being exposed to a particularly strong or extreme form of globalisation and I think that these forces are not only effective in society at large but also effective in the world of art. To some extent the question is always how to work within globalisation.
MIL: I’d like to switch gears for my last question. You’ve interviewed Jeff Koons many times and one of the interviews is included in the new “Hulk Elvis” book, which was just released. He is primarily an object-based artist, which seems to be far away from the non-object-based art you’re so interested in at the moment. But I have a feeling you can easily connect these two types of work. How do you reconcile these different mediums?
HUO: As you say I’ve interviewed Jeff Koons many times, and we are actually working on a book right now where all these interviews I’ve done with him are going to be gathered together. I’ve done about eight interviews with him and then two interviews with him and Rem Koolhaas about architecture and art. Mr Koons’s work has always inspired architects, which I think is very interesting. I think he is an artist who has reinvented himself so many times and reinvented so many different series. Earlier this year we had a big exhibition that Julia Peyton-Jones and I organised at the Serpentine Gallery—the Popeye exhibition. He is clearly an artist who inspires a younger generation of artists. For example, [he has influenced] Tino Sehgal, the German artist who is going to do a big solo project at the Guggenheim Museum in New York [opening on January 29th]. He is one of the youngest artists ever to get the whole Guggenheim to himself. He’s also an artist that never works with objects. He basically works with situations. It’s a non-mediated experience and so in this sense it’s completely and totally different from Jeff Koons. Therefore it’s very interesting that Mr Sehgal has what he calls the “Koons test”.
MIL: I’ve heard of this. He says if they someone dislikes Koons then he doesn’t want to work with him or her.
HUO: Exactly. And he’s an artist in his early 30s. So it all shows how Koons’s work resonates with a young generation of artists and I think that’s always very important—how art travels and if a new generation artists connects to a practice. That is super relevant.
The work of the German artist Rosemarie Trockel is not easy to pigeonhole. Conceptual, postmodernist, feminist: none of those terms is adequate to describe her multifaceted oeuvre. It is actually that hybrid and intangible quality that she is out to achieve. As can be seen yet again in “Flagrant Delight”, the fine exhibition that Wiels is currently devoting to her.
Artists are often reduced to their best-known or most iconic work. In the case of Rosemarie Trockel (born in Schwerte in 1952) that means her woven Playboy motifs and cooking rings hung on the wall as minimalist sculptures. In both cases Trockel makes use of material associated with the world of women in order to offer a commentary on phallocentrism. Both the knitting and the cooking rings are to be seen at Wiels. But what makes the exhibition worthwhile is that that kind of readymade reading of her work is broadened out to encompass a body of work that is much more varied than those almost slogan-like works would lead one to suspect.
Trockel’s oeuvre is intentionally hybrid and involves a great diversity of media. Thus the exhibition begins – although a deliberate choice has been made not to have a beginning or an end, never mind a chronological sequence – with a group of forty collages. Strikingly, these make an almost spatial, sculptural impression, partly due to the fact that the works in question are framed and the frame is often an integral part of the work. In her collages Trockel combines photographs with text, drawings, painted images, newsprint, and a considerable number of items of clothing. In a number of cases, moreover, she sticks replicas of eyes or a nose onto the works. The collages are hard to grasp and radiate an ominous, defiant atmosphere. They function not so much as the usual preparatory studies, but rather as a reflection on earlier works. Gossip, for example, consists of a reproduction of Courbet’s L’origine du monde – an 1866 painting, frequently evoked by Trockel, that presents a full-frontal portrayal of a vagina – onto which the upper body of the artist Raymond Pettibon has been stuck, with in the background a design for a public-space commission. The collage expresses a feminist outlook on being an artist, combined with an intensive formal investigation that also refers to the legacy of Dadaism and surrealism.
Butterflies and the world of men There is a recurrent tension in Trockel’s work between the rational/analytical and the subjective/subconscious. One could say, schematically, that this is about the contradiction between the male and the female. That recurrent tension is also reflected in her choice of materials, as can be seen, for example, in her assemblage sculptures. In one of those works she hangs a pair of neckties on a minimalist, cube-like form in steel, thereby playing with the contrast between the bleak industrial material and the colourful textile. Both materials also evoke the world of men, with the tie functioning as a phallic symbol. A butterfly is pinned to one of the ties – a symbol of the male urge to conquer? The other works also involve fascinating choices of material. An austere white cube and rectangle, for example, is made of foam rubber, a material one would not usually expect to see in minimalist art. Trockel often works with ceramics, which in her work are associated with domestic chores and the world of women; she maintains a tension between the fragility and the solidity of the material. That traditional “feminine” is also to be seen in her mechanically executed wool paintings, which play with the opposition between the manual and the mechanical.
Trockel’s diverse oeuvre is disconcerting. She constantly changes style and technique, but her work is never arbitrary: the material is always deployed in a thematically relevant way. With her deliberately quirky work she succeeds in creating an uncomfortable atmosphere, working with associative connections and underlying psychoanalytical meanings. Rather than using facile antitheses as a gimmick, her work fascinates by its formal searching and its surprising choices of material.
Rosemarie Trockel: Flagrant Delight > 27/5 • wo/me/We > zo/di/Su 11 > 18.00 (1st & 3rd We of the month: > 21.00), €7
WIELS avenue Van Volxemlaan 354, Vorst/Forest, 02-340.00.50, www.wiels.org
Rosemarie Trockel (1952, Schwerte, Germany) is held to be one of the most important international artists of our times. Museion in Bolzano is hosting her Flagrant Delight exhibition, bringing together more than 80 of her works, including textile paintings, a kitchen hob, ceramics, sculptures and collages. The works address many issues, using many techniques, but always with a precise, poetic and explicitly feminine touch. As the title suggests, her works are often playful and mysterious: whether direct and political, or openly sensual, all are open to a multiple interpretations. The exhibition is curated by Dirk Snauwaert and a special presentation will be held by Muesion’s director Letizia Ragaglia (check this interview we had with her) and Rosemary Trockel.
Rosemarie Trockel’s retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery is a dense, complex affair but ultimately succeeds in illuminating the practice of one of the most original and provocative artists working today. From the ancient Greek word for “order”, Trockel’s cosmos is very much her own as she curates and appropriates often un-known artists’ works, placing them in dialogue with her own. A Cosmos is both democratic and generous, and very much lateral as opposed to hierarchical in its rigorous conceptual premise of inclusivity. It also puts paid to the recent Der Spiegel interview with painter Georg Baselitz. His dismissal of women artists in general and Trockel’s work in specific as “having a lot of sympathy” 1(lacking the destructive impulse that begets originality), shows him as outmoded and insecure.
Where Trockel is ‘destructive’ is in her approach to taxonomy and her steadfast refusal to accept previously established museological hierarchies and classifications. Working across multiple media (painting, photography, drawing, video, textiles, ceramic sculpture and installation), divisions between craft and art, the trained and untrained, and most pertinently, between the natural and the man-made, dissolve and become obsolete. Reminiscent of early Wunderkammern, the first ‘wonder-room’ is its “epicentre”2: white-tiled with an upside-down palm tree suspended from the ceiling and adjacent to an aviary with taxidermied birds ‘dancing’ to a recording of their own song. Human-kind’s impact on nature becomes obvious when viewed next to Replace Me, an altered digital print of Courbet’s L’origine du Monde with a large tarantula replacing the pubis, bringing into focus Trockel’s feminist concerns surrounding androcentric ‘looking’ and zoology. Elsewhere, the wool-knitted paintings for which Trockel became famous in the 80’s are shown near ‘outsider’ artist Judith Scott’s obscure and mysterious yarn-wrapped objects, pointedly blurring distinctions between historically demoted ‘feminine’ craft and art-historically sanctioned painting. Deaf, mute and institutionalised for decades with Down’s Syndrome, Scott’s sculptures literally embody the unknown, and stand in stark, nuanced contrast to Trockel’s modernist canvases.
Park Avenue brings botany into focus. A slide series of assemblages of leaves, flowers, pods and sticks in quasi-figural poses flickering briefly upon a white cloth, it reveals an absurd anthropocentrism that shows Trockel at her ephemeral best. By placing her photograph Prime-Age (a skinhead’s ornately, botanically tattooed torso) adjacent to Maria Sibylla Merian’s delicate botanical watercolours from the 1700’s, Trockel highlights an alliance that spans centuries, gender and class, and points to a mutual human interest in botany as both biological study and decorative draughtsmanship.
Trockel chooses the medium of photography expediently when it best serves a practise whose concern is the monumental chain of experience and being that is A Cosmos. Here images and objects attest to the tangential nature of human consciousness, the deeper, unseen relationships between humans, animals and the natural world, as well as between various fields of knowledge, with none taking precedence over another. A protean and anarchic artist, Trockel’s interests lie less in her own art-making career, than in art as an open-ended, porous endeavour that inextricably links all matter physically, psychically, and ultimately politically. It is a cosmic show indeed.
In Untitled (Wollfilm) (1992), a female torso turns in a central window in a much larger and dark projection plane. With each movement, a thread, which is clearly being pulled from outside the frame, unravels another row of stitches in her woollen pullover. After a time, the background picture plane, which becomes identifiable as a stitch, begins to separate from top to bottom until the naked torso becomes one with the empty projection plane. In this video, Rosemarie Trockel calls into question important art-historical conventions and codes and models from the history of ideas and gender stereotypes with a witty formal ease and meticulous attention to detail.
Rosemarie Trockel, who was born in Schwerte, Germany, in 1952, has been producing her stylistically heterogeneous works in a wide range of media since the 1970s. Her œuvre, which has assumed an important and unique position at international level and encompasses drawings, two and three-dimensional picture and material collages, objects, installations, “knitting pictures”, ceramics, videos, furniture, pieces of clothing, and books, cannot be reduced to a single artistic genre or style; its common denominator is the intensity of its content, which incorporates an equally wide-ranging network of associations and discourses, and extends from the premises of western philosophical, theological and scientific debate and various role models and symbols to the standardisations and canonical manifestations of art. All of this content is formulated from a precise and explicitly female perspective. However, the artist also outwits feminist platitudes and leads them ad absurdum – for example, in the “hot plate” works, which she has been producing since the late 1980s and which deliver a forceful blow to the minimalist aesthetic, and with her now trademark “knitting pictures”, which present an ironic take on both the cliché of the agreeable, craft-based and mechanical form of art created by women and the traditional art-historical conventions.
However, Rosemarie Trockel’s “female” perspective extends beyond a feminist gesture. Her works are the expressions of an author who – starting with the coding of her own individuation – distances herself from systems that impose both social and sexual identity and gender-related constraints.
This is repeatedly expressed in works concerning the polar opposites of the conscious and unconscious and the culturally formed and unformed, including, for example, the numerous works she has created with and about animals: i.e. the series of animal films produced between 1978 and 1990, the models and houses developed for various animal species since the late 1980s, the project Haus für Schweine und Menschen developed with Carsten Höller for documenta X 1997 and the bronze-cast “Gewohnheitstiere”, including Gewohnheitstier 3 (Dackel) (1990), which contrast the unconcealed presentness of animals with the controlling awareness of humans. Elisabeth de Fontenay sees “anthropocentrism under house arrest” in Rosemarie Trockel’s animal works while Markus Steinweg detects the thematicisation of the relationship between “animal vivacity and human intellectuality”. Moreover, the artist’s repeated works on the theme of sleep – for example the installation for the German Pavilion for the Biennale di Venezia in 1999, her numerous drawings and works on paper, and the new series of sofa works (Watching and Sleeping and Composing, 2007) – explore the potential of sublation, or as the artist herself likes to put it in rather pompous terms, taking a sideswipe at the pronouncements of Joseph Beuys: the liquidation of the restrictive control mechanisms of the conscious.
«Verflüssigung der Mutter» is the title given by Rosemarie Trockel to her exhibition at the Kunsthalle Zürich, which, following on from her Swiss debut at the Kunshalle Basel in 1988, an exhibition of works on paper in the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel in 1991 and a presentation of her video works at the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva in 1994, provides comprehensive insight into her œuvre and features works and groups of works produced from the early 1980s on and works created specifically for the exhibition. The exhibition is presented as a well appointed sequence of spaces, in which groups of works can be experienced in an ordered minimalist form: furniture and ceramic wall works, large-format monochrome knitting pictures, collages, videos and a re-interpreted extended installation S.h.e. (2000/2005/2010), in which the entire range of media used by the artist is combined in a dynamic cabinet. This retrospective “overview show” is presented in two oversized “display cases” built into the walls of the Kunsthalle, which the artist developed as a central installation for the exhibition: the cabinets contain signature works like the knitted trademarks, egg works, felted wool monsters, for example the armchair Atheismus (2007), and exemplars from the early group of plaster objects (Hydrocephalus / Wasserkopf II, 1982). Also presented are a very wide range of “hot plate” works, for example the cardboard hot-plate record player with a knitting needle stylus (Untitled, 1991), mouth sculptures (1989), Daddy’s Striptease Room (1990), figures, body fragments and everyday objects. These refer to the “weighty” themes of the exhibition and set them in motion with lightness and ease through the interaction between the condensed “display cases” and the fluid spatial layout.
Rosemarie Trockel, Queen Anne Is Dead, 2013, Mixed Acrylic Material, 60 x 70 cm
Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are pleased to present an exhibition of new wool pictures and wall sculptures by Rosemarie Trockel. The artist had her first show with Monika Sprüth in 1983, in Cologne, where she still lives and works.
Rosemarie Trockel has always used a diverse range of genres and media in her work, from sculpture and drawing to collage, photography, video, and installation. She also uses a variety of materials, not least wool, with all its socially charged meanings. Her deep engagement and experiments with wool over many years have allowed Trockel to attain great freedom in her handling of the medium.
In the most recent works in wool, the material is placed like a stroke of the brush on the canvas, initiating a subtle examination of twentieth-century abstract painting. The exhibition features black monochrome pictures placed among others with vibrantly coloured stripes, creating a shifting set of colour relationships that constantly renew themselves as the viewer moves through the gallery.
A similar approach is evident in her handling of ceramic and ceramic-like material such as Acrystal, which she combines with Plexiglas in her recent sculptures. She applies casts of different cuts of meat to transparent, curved carrier panels, wittily referring to stylistic innovations of twentieth-century art yet also dislodging the material from their conventional connotations or meanings. The titles, such as “Rubbersoul” or “Marble doesn’t smile”, as well as her selective use of colour and its painterly application on unlikely surfaces, further highlight her humorous handling of paint and materials. As Roberta Smith shrewdly writes, Trockel is ‘a subversive anti-painting painter and a dedicated, non-ideological feminist.’
Rosemarie Trockel (1952) is included in “Il Palazzo Enciclopedico”, 55th Venice Biennial where in 1999 she presented her work at the German Pavilion. Parallel to the exhibition “A Cosmos” in Madrid, New York, and London (2012-2013), a solo exhibition, “Flagrant Delight”, was presented at Wiels, Brussels, Culturegest, Lisbon, and the Museion Bozen. Other recent solo exhibitions include Kunstbau im Lenbachhaus, München (2002), “Post-Menopause”, Museum Ludwig, Cologne (2005) as well as MAXXI, Rome (2005), “Deliquescence of the Mother”, Kunsthalle Zürich (2010), as well as an exhibition of drawings, collages, and book designs that travelled to the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, and the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2010-2011).
All images Courtesy of Sprüth Magers Berlin, London, Photography by Stephen White.
Sprüth Magers Gallery
7A Grafton Street
London W1S 4EJ United Kingdom
Robert Havell
American flamingo [Phoenicopterus ruber], 1838
Etching and aquatint on paper
84.5 x 61.4 cm
Special Collections Research Center
Syracuse University Library
Günter Weseler
(b. 1930, Olsztyn, Germany [now Poland])
Atemobjekt New Species U 90 /73 (Nr. 15, Nr. 16), 1973
Synthetic fur and electrical mechanism
20 x 40 cm (diameter) each
Private collection
Morton Bartlett
(b. 1901, Chicago – d. 1992, Boston)
Untitled (Ballerina), 1950/60
Polychrome plaster, synthetic hair, wood, metal, and clothing
80 x 90 x 31 cm
Courtesy The Museum of Everything, London
Ruth Franken
Four and Seven 1969
Aluminium metal numbers, cushion and other materials
Galerie Yves Gastou, Paris
ROSEMARIE TROCKEL
A Cosmos
13 February – 7 April 2013
Rosemarie Trockel (born in 1952 in Schwerte, Germany) has long been admired for her highly independent and influential practice. In A Cosmos she places her work in the company of others to explore varying disciplines. Central to the exhibition are a number of core works, including new works never seen before in the UK, by Trockel, and arranged around these in a constellation according to type and theme are artefacts, both natural and human.
A Cosmos reflects the artist’s interest in creating a space for ideas to exist between different disciplines, past and present. Many of the objects and artworks, selected by Trockel in dialogue with curator Lynne Cooke, produce a context for the artist’s work within other fields of inquiry, such as the natural sciences and natural history. Watercolours painted by the pioneering botanist Maria Sibylla Merian sit alongside intricate models of marine invertebrates crafted by Leopold and Rudolph Blaschka, initially used as research tools by naturalists who had no access to living specimens.
Works by self-taught artists, such as Judith Scott and James Castle, are presented in parallel with films, such as Władysław Starewicz’s early, pioneering stop-motion animation of 1912, The Cameraman’s Revenge. Trockel’s appreciation of such variously under-recognised objects and artists stems from her empathy both with the questions their work addresses, and with the directness and inventiveness with which they are realised. These artists provide models of dedication to their chosen field that, for Trockel, are exemplary and inspiring.
A Cosmos traces an historical lineage from the early cabinets of curiosities (the wunderkammer) to natural history and modern art museums through to the white cube of contemporary galleries. Within this framework there is a focus on the relationship between skill and craft, and the practices of self-taught and under-recognised artists, reflecting Trockel’s ongoing tendency to overturn traditional disciplinary categories. The objects that make up this cosmos offer a wealth of resonant relationships between different fields of knowledge and experience, proposing that we remain open to new discoveries.
For more than thirty years Trockel has resisted an identifiable style, working in a variety of materials, including wool, bronze and found objects, and a range of mediums, including photography, collage, video and assemblage. The constants of her wide-ranging practice include issues that have long occupied her thinking and that have underpinned her diverse activity, such as contrasting ideas of feminism as well as the divides constructed between amateur and professional, celebrity and anonymity, and the fine and applied arts. More broadly, through her works Trockel probes not only interrelationships between humans and animals but also our impact, as a species, on the natural world.
The subject of numerous solo shows, Trockel’s works have been exhibited widely, including at New Museum, New York; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland; Dia Center for the Arts, New York; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Centre Pompidou, Paris and Whitechapel Gallery, London. Trockel represented Germany at the 1999 Venice Biennale and participated in Documenta in 1997 and 2012.
This exhibition is curated by Lynne Cooke and organised by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery.
ONE by ONE WEDNESDAYS’ is a weekly series wherein one of our Blacklist staffers selects a cultural contributor of their choice and provides an introduction to that person. These are the people who get us excited, inspire our pitches, and interrupt our days with something beautiful.Installation shot of ‘Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos’ (Via NY Times)We’re late on this again. We’re sorry. Anyway, Rosemarie Trockel is a wonderful visual artist from Germany whose popularity in the States has been something of a cult status. Her somewhat reclusive demeanor and intensely eclectic work makes her difficult to pin down but endlessly interesting in the same instance. Trockel’s current retrospective at the New Museum, ‘Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos’, features work from a selection of other artists, artifacts from natural history museums, and of course some of her own highlights. All of this enmeshed makes for a provocative alchemy. Check out some of our favorites below!Rosemarie Trockel ‘Prime-Age’. 2012The diversity and playfulness of the exhibition is well summarized by Roberta Smith when she says: ‘In “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” she seems to blow art history apart, to make it porous and open-ended, fomenting a bigger, wilder history that ranges beyond traditional art on several fronts, including science and nature. At least that seems to be what’s happening in the mix of objects and images by Ms. Trockel and others that she has orchestrated at the New Museum in collaboration with Lynne Cooke, former chief curator and deputy director at theMuseo Reina Sofía in Madrid, where this exhibition was mounted last summer. It includes works by imposing outsider artists like Morton Bartlett, James Castle andJudith Scott, along with early-18th-century botanical illustrations by Maria Sibylla Merian; exacting late-19th-century glass models of invertebrate sea life, by Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka; and quite a bit more.’
Installation shot of ‘Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos’ (Via NY Times)
You can catch ‘Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos’ at The New Museum through January 20th.
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texte zur kunst
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Bonfire of the Vanities
Rachel Haidu on Rosemarie Trockel at the New Museum, New York
“Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos”, New Museum, New York, 2012/13, exhibition view, Photo: Benoit Pailley
The massive formal and conceptual statements comprising recent blockbuster monographic exhibitions often aim to overtake institutions, with the underlying desire of strong-arming viewers into remembering the artist as a household name.
But what would it mean to oppose this trend – to sacrifice the sovereignty of the artist-brand and risk the high visitor stats that come with a marquee, must-see show? Portraying Rosemarie Trockel’s practice via a cosmology of more or less related artworks as well as non-art objects, curator Lynne Cooke cast the artist’s survey into unforeseen territory: Most of the work in fact derived from the past few years, rather than the years in which Trockel made a name for herself, serving to prevent its easy ascription to one prevailing interpretive framework.
Perhaps the days of the artist’s retrospective, with its glistening highlights and historicizing tail-end view, are numbered. After a decade or two of another kind of monographic exhibition – in which the artist takes over an institutional space, in either a supra-architectural or meta-performance blockbuster – we are now seeing curators undertake a kind of post-monographic practice of their own. Not by doing the artist’s work (as some have complained), but by actually rethinking the curatorial mandate, refusing to let the stakes of the monographic exhibit fall so readily into predetermined categories and value structures. How might a monographic exhibition disperse the artist’s identity in a way that is commensurate (if not at all identical) to the impulses behind artists’ collectives or even the way that historical work, included in contemporary art biennials, shifts our understandings of the present and the past? How might a curator even mine the lines between “professional” artists and whatever their opposite is, between craft and whatever its opposite is, between the binaries that continue to power the markets and other institutions? What could be made of – not just elided by – massive historical and geographic shifts between artists?
Any recent account of how exhibitions might undertake these challenges would have to start with discussions of metaphors like the one advertised in the title of “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos”. If the notion of the “cosmos” suggests an orderly universe without any real gravitational center, then curator Lynne Cooke has ingeniously reconceived how a monographic art exhibit might behave “cosmologically”, displacing the ordinary pulls toward a singular center with new kinds of relationships that remain fundamentally mysterious. Given the cosmological precept of a unity of time and space – their interweaving into a fabric that bends between points that are both geographic and temporal – and its own apparent desire to move away from the purely monographic, “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” cannot rest easily on contextualization, intimations of influence, or even such academic commonplaces as the “period eye” (Michael Baxandall), though it brings together works by disparate artists in ways that suggest, as in a “real” cosmos, multiple centers, gravitational pulls, and weights. In place of familiar modes of relating one artist or artwork to another (or to history), we have in this exhibition intimations of cosmological darkness – the black night sky echoed on the cover of the accompanying catalogue and on the dark walls of one of its central rooms, on the bottom floor, where indeed the majority of the other artists shown in this post-retrospective join Trockel. Promotional materials describe the “small, tiled room reminiscent of a Wunderkammer” (which actually overturned that cliché with its audio accompaniment to caged mechanical birds and an upside-down Broodthaersian palm tree hanging from the ceiling) as the show’s “epicenter.” But my experience was that, whereas the tiled white room was so celestially bright it was hard to stay in it for very long, the rest of that dark and cavernous floor was the show’s real tour de force.
Yet that was not where the bulk of Trockel’s work, nor the works that gained her a “reputation”, could be seen. The museum’s third and fourth floors held works using wool on or in the place of canvas, as well as freestanding objects, videos, books, and glazed ceramic sculptures. But not only did Cooke avoid giving us any of the “greatest hits” of Trockel’s work from the 1980s, she stayed almost entirely within the artist’s production of the past few years. Drawing our attention to and then keeping it well past the arc that canonizes artists’ early work only to conveniently drop them off the map of visibility, Cooke gives us such a concentrated focus on Trockel’s present work that she performatively invalidates such sell-by dates. Only a handful of works – for instance, “My Dear Colleagues” (1986), a sculpture bearing the eponymous phrase inked onto a plastic mold of a torso of indeterminate gender, with knitted sleeves – and a host of books refer us to the period in which Trockel came into international renown, the period that might have represented her career, until this show and with the exception of her intermittent gallery shows.
Of course that’s not the only way that Cooke rewrites the concept of the monographic show with this cosmos. On the third floor she surrounded and interrupted Trockel’s new works that use wool on canvas with works by Judith Scott, who wrapped ordinary objects in multicolored yarns so obsessively that they take on the uncanny shapes of small, domestic monsters (fabricated from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, these works are all untitled). As underscored by the Perspex frames that Trockel often places over the knitted or laid-wool canvases in her recent works, yarn defeats the “surfaceness” of the canvas’s two-dimensionality, absorbs our gaze in the manner of a dark color (most of the wool works shown were in hauntingly dark blacks and blues), and encourages us to perform a kind of up-close looking. These sculptural qualities took on a new dimension next to Scott’s works, with their far more immediate pleasures. But perhaps most interesting is the confrontation between the kind of canonical feminist challenge once emblemized by Trockel’s works in wool and the singularity of Scott’s story – that of a woman with Down Syndrome who was also deaf and mute, and who only began making these objects in her middle age in the supportive environment of a facility for the disabled. If such brief sketches of Scott’s life story redirect and also perpetuate feminist concerns with the body, with identity, and with confinement and institutional invisibility, it reframes not only Trockel’s “classic” works but also the currency of her present efforts. Issues such as domesticity and labor, implied not only in many of her materials, processes, and thematic concerns, are subsumed in a kind of suspended temporality suggested by Scott’s works, which testify to a truly other way of being. Thereby jolted from the congealed discourses on feminism’s “waves”, Trockel’s recent works also offer remarkable formal interest that complement and complicate such politicizations.
On the fourth floor, we found Trockel’s ceramic objects and books, including some oversized ceramic monuments – a massive white sofa draped in plastic and paint and yarn, another white plinth wearing a black shroud – that seem to both invite and refuse traditions of rethinking domesticity, including those of the Bauhaus and post-Bauhaus variety. Are these Post-Minimal in the Richard Artschwager-Tom Burr lineage? Such incorporation seems anathema not only to Trockel’s work, but also to Cooke’s vision of it. For, in a cosmos, Trockel is far more likely to bump up against – or fall into a circuit with – an “outsider” artist such as Scott or someone from an entirely other time-space. One wall running along the staircase leading to the fourth floor contained several monitors showing the remarkable 1912 films of Wladyslaw Starewicz that use beetle carcasses to enact familiar early film melodramas on a new scale. Thus Starewicz – like two other artists in the show, Salvador Dalí (not included in New York but on view when the exhibition was presented in Madrid’s Reina Sofía) and Ruth Francken – shared Trockel’s apparent belief that melodrama and scale need to be thought in relation to one another. Thanks to these disparate planets that now catch Trockel in their orbits, we can understand her interest in scale according to the psychosexual manias they make explicit. A new postwar Surrealist thread emerges, altogether extinguished in Joseph Beuys’s and Georg Baselitz’s heroicizing – or even the hermaphroditic figuration of Louise Bourgeois. If it seems most sympathetic to the oversized scale of Annette Messager’s collections and weavings, even such a “canonical” relation becomes, in the Trockel/Cooke version, less academic, loosened into another sense of history altogether.
On the museum’s second floor is where we found Trockel’s more “private” works, something like a collection of her favorite prints as well as companions made by a host of artists who are likely to be first-time discoveries for almost all audiences: Günter Weseler, Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, Mary Delany, Maria Sibylla Merian, Manuel Montalvo, José Celestino Mutis. Those who are perhaps familiar – James Castle, John James Audubon, Morton Bartlett, and the aforementioned Dalí and Francken – are only marginally more so: We might know their names or importance or even their work, but that doesn’t mean we have understood their work as contemporary art (only in Castle’s case can one unequivocally say that this has taken place – thanks again to efforts by Cooke and others [1] ). Here the professionalism of art is subdivided, with model-making and illustration sharing space and overlapping with obsessive taxonomies. We begin to see, perhaps, a world in which categories (of the Blaschkas’ jellyfishes, of the pitchers and wine glasses, parrots, and phone numbers of Montalvo’s handmade notebooks, of Merian’s insects and Bartlett’s ballerinas) generate ideas about what art can be and vice versa. But more powerfully, art in “Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos” is tasked with generating new thought about categories – thought located in both labor and its apparent others (domesticity, natural life). In so doing, art becomes a stake without precise definition. There may be no better use for the monographic format than its auto-destruction, but if there’s going to be a bonfire, let it look like this.
“Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos”, New Museum, New York, October 24, 2012–January 20, 2013.
“James Castle: Show and Store” (Reina Sofia, May 18–September 2011) was also curated by Cooke.
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Rosemarie Trockel Josefina Ayerza
The wicked witch appeared and warned the princess dear, ‘beware the rose, for when it pricks, you’ll sleep a hundred year.’ ‘The evil spell,’ a fairy cried, ‘just might not have to be! A handsome prince – if brave and true – can kiss and set you free.’
Rosemarie Trockel’s Sleeping Beauty right away raises the case as to esthetical parities concerning the famous fairy tale’s belated images. Again, what other referent is there than the signifier provided you take on its meaning? Now you look quietly into the image, the questions crowding, but a head… swollen, asleep, dead… dying? And is it at all the head of a woman? Chances are your reflection upon the image won’t fit the formal truth. And what this attests to is that Sleeping Beauty is not a signifier, but a name, indeed a spectre. The meaning it brings forth sets up the real. Legacy, or the surplus subtracted from the legend, lurks in the spectre. When it verges on delusion it is because the name’s place is void, kept void, celebrated as void. A rigid designator, it ascribes to the unmovable, it is not displaceable. Say you proclaim the Sleeping Beauty is a Mafioso, a passed out bum, a dead corpse, he will still be Sleeping Beauty however you describe him. Again, the singular topic, forever split between a story and a void, is not designated to reach its object. Its deeds lining up with melodrama, you recognize reality in fictional texts because that’s where you come from.
There was one oddball, yet the many look-alikes. A pale fellow crested with a profusion of dark, wavy hair – you surmise his complexion is almost white by virtue of rice powder; that his lips, not necessarily colored, are nevertheless painted; that his eyes and eyebrows, emphasized with kohl and mascara, hide things… that the nose, too perfect, is fictitious, and also the ears – and he could be suffering though he’s also smiling, vacillatingly, as if it all were a joke. A distraught audience has fingered him as multiple, claimed that he may not have been him – the One – whatever it takes to make him an Other getting only worse. Again you surmise, joyful music, glittering candelabra, luxurious costumes, charisma, diamonds and dazzle… the Persian Room in New York’s Plaza Hotel, the honky-tonk pianist in the movie South Sea Sinner with Shelley Winters, the Madison Square Garden, the Radio City Music Hall… and since Mr. Showmanship has no particular history, the figure in the portrait, thus the argument goes, must be Wladziu (Polish for Walter) Valentino Liberace. And it also is the many Liberaces – his famous chauffeurs – following Liberace’s will to reproduce himself, outside himself, in other people’s flesh, identical. The nature and dynamics of the operation are the domain of the character’s myth, which also tells you how Liberace, a maverick of cloning, used human beings to extract himself from others, to be in the Other flesh. Trockel’s drawing retains the label Untitled on behalf of profusive metonymy, or the many speculations… not so much from the One over to an Other, but from the Other over to the One.
An asleep, inert baby, a target mark over his chest… The Misfortune. A 1991 interview with Meyer Vaisman comes to mind; on the occasion Vaisman told of the popular festivals in his native country. Thus, in Venezuela, when a baby dies they proceed to boil him, and then they dress him in white and paint him as an angel. In addition the baby gets paper wings and is then set on a table. With people dancing and feasting, around the table the infant represents a newcomer in heaven. When the party concludes they hang the baby on a hook over the front door, so everybody can see that there is a new name in heaven. Angels, said Vaisman, are always children… Thus ensued the different sort of angels in my mind, specially the ones consisting of a head and a pair of wings, those that have certainly being equated to signifiers, and yes, they fly. With Trockel the names in heaven mark the body of the baby by cutting around the heart. And the invisible stigmata is resolved only when the desperate search for meaning yields to the agency of the signifier – whose misfortune is it?
An inert Young Man Dozing, it was past twelve o’clock when he awoke. The sun flowing in through the curtains of the room, rays of light bathed his face, arms, and torso. In the dream he was a butterfly. Now he says to himself – it’s only a dream. Again, still pondering over the fancy, he comes to ask himself whether it is the butterfly who dreams he – the butterfly – is Choang-tsu…
He is not mad, first because Choang-tsu doesn’t regard himself as absolutely identical with Choang-tsu, and secondly because he does not fully understand how right he is. Why is he so right? According to Jacques Lacan when he was the butterfly that he apprehended one of the roots of his identity – that he was and is, in his essence that butterfly who paints himself with his own colors – and it is because of this that, in the last resort, he is Choang-tsu. Because of the nature of dreams it’s not likely that while he is the butterfly he would start wondering whether, when he is Choang-tsu awake, he is not the butterfly he is dreaming of being. Now he dreams of being the butterfly, now he wakes up and wants to tell the story. Not that he represented himself as a butterfly, he was a butterfly. This does not mean he is bewitched by the butterfly – he is a witch butterfly, yet spelled by no one, for in the dream he is a butterfly for nobody. It is when he is awake that he is Choang-tsu for others – entrapped in their butterfly net.
Art: Rosemarie Trockel: Sleeping Beauty, colored pencil on paper, 2000 Untitled, photocopy on paper, 1993 Le malheur (The Misfortune), colored pencil on board, 2000 Young Man Dozing, pencil on paper, 2000
courtesy The Drawing Center, New York
Auratic Cabinet of Curiosities
Rosemarie Trockel’s Art Cosmos at the New MuseumRosemarie Trockel’s oeuvre defies all categorization. The important German contemporary artist works with every conceivable medium and style. Numerous works on paper by the artist are in the Deutsche Bank Collection, and she created an exclusive edition for the bank in 1993. Her knitted work Who will be in in ’99? has been on view in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt on permanent loan from the Collection since 2011. Now, the New Museum in New York presents a show of her work that resembles a cabinet of curiosities. Trockel’s retrospective combines her work with the objects, personalities, and works of art that inspire her. Cheryl Kaplan on one of the exhibition highlights of recent years.
A short man with whiskey flasks strapped to his legs like holsters has two black plumes sticking out of his head. He looks like some wacko bandit or 17th-century French grenadier stuck in a glass cage, staring at a row of decoy ducks and fake pistols. Just another day at the New Museum? Hardly. Rosemarie Trockel is in town, and she hasn’t come alone — she’s brought an entire universe with her of works and things that define her world. And if the title of this bandit is any clue, we might just have to “Kiss [Her] Aura.”From the get-go, curator Lynne Cooke knew that a “standard retrospective wouldn’t be of much interest to the artist.” Why would it be? Trockel has spent the last 30 years like a rogue operative in the art world: as soon as she’s been identified with one signature style, she drops it. Think about her knit paintings in the ’80s, a genre Trockel invented that used wool instead of canvas. This work propelled the artist to international stardom, emerging as she did from Cologne, then the epicenter of one of the most important art scenes in post-War Europe and the world. Trockel’s now iconic series of multiple knit ski masks and leggings used industrial machines to create patterns ranging from a Playboy bunny logo to swastikas and a hammer and sickle. While it used the very methodology that had confined women for centuries, handicraft such as knitting and sewing, to drive home a political and social point, it also perplexed the public with its unwillingness to stick to one art historical genre, such as Feminism, Modernism, or Minimalism. Just as Trockel hit her stride, she went headlong into a new identity as filmmaker, then sculptor, painter, and book-maker.For most of her career, the artist has been accused by critics of being enigmatic, evasive, or elusive in exhibitions such as the recent documenta, or earlier at the 1999 Biennale di Venezia, where she represented Germany. Trockel may be the ultimate trickster, but her latest and most significant contribution to the art world, on view in New York, is likely to stop you in your tracks. Rosemarie Trockel: A Comos is a stunning and disturbing exhibition that began in Madrid at the Reina Sofia and travels next to the Serpentine in London before concluding at the Kunst- und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn.Riddled with misfits and outcasts, beauty and violence, bawdy humor and a “peculiar realism,” as Cooke puts it, the show is a Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities: “a forerunner of the museum as we know it in the West.” Though Trockel is at the fulcrum of the show, it also includes work by fourteen other artists coming from several countries, centuries, and disciplines including natural history, fashion, and art. The beautifully vivid flora and fauna drawings by the 17th-century naturalist and illustrator, Maria Sibylla Merian — “likely the first person to go anywhere on a purely scientific exploration at the time” — stand opposite Trockel’s own weirdo memento mori case titled Picnic, 2012 on the second floor that contains a rotting hand, some dead flowers, and twigs. There are also breathtakingly detailed glass replicas of sea anemones, jellyfish and other invertebrate sea life by the 19th-century father/son duo of Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka, first created for the Harvard Botanical Museum and natural history museums worldwide. These objects, models, and artifacts require time to observe, significantly slowing down the usual breakneck pace at which we view contemporary art.But it’s the harsh, cold neon light oozing out of the entrance and exit to a small, white tiled room nearly hidden from view in an otherwise dark-walled expanse on the second floor that feels the most peculiar. The room is disquieting; it has the look and feel of an interrogation chamber or a butcher shop (according to Trockel), or a mad laboratory. An upside-down fake palm tree hangs from the ceiling. Next to it, a tarantula, that large hairy American spider, sits on top of a woman’s pubic hair like a codpiece or toupee. This bawdy digital print, called Replace Me, 2011, is Trockel’s version of Gustave Courbet’s famously scandalous painting, Origin of the World, 1866. In using the tarantula, Trockel not only opts for rude double entendres, but invites purposeful ambiguity that not only references the genitals as the place where the spinning of the world starts, but the classic male accusation of women as vicious spinners of tales or gossips.As Cooke sees it: “In some ways, the white ceramic tile room is the heart of the show: things radiate out from there chronologically and conceptually. We had what we can say in retrospect were two lynchpins for the show related to Natural History (botany and zoology) and an interest in maverick figures who were either outsiders or less recognized artists. In some ways, we built around that.” Cooke continues: “We didn’t ever sit back and analyze the project, it was done in the way Rosemarie usually works: by trial and error… I proposed that Rosemarie think about a cosmos — an imaginary universe of things she felt strongly about or that made a picture of an imaginary world she identified with. Obviously that was very open-ended.”While other exhibitions have used the Wunderkammer as a thematic foothold — for instance Andy Warhol’s 1969 RISD Museum show Raid the Icebox, where he raided the museum’s basement to display bins of 18th-century shoes, unknown paintings from the 1920s, and contemporary oddities, or MoMA’s 2008 show Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities that included prints and book art by Louise Bourgeois, Damien Hirst, Otto Dix, and James Ensor. Lee Miller in Hitler’s bathtub, a text work by Lawrence Weiner, ancient Afghan princess sculptures: even the “brain” of the last documenta, in which curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev brought together a wide range of epochs and movements in a cabinet of curiosities, shows how popular art historical references are on the current scene.Rarely, however, has the Wunderkammer gone beyond its original concept as a collection of curiosities to challenge and reanimate contemporary art. What we see in A Cosmos is not just Trockel’s “trial and error” sampling system, but a project aimed at revamping the very act of how we see ar
t in a museum. Is A Cosmos a new prototype to stop that time-honored search for the next best, hottest, youngest, outrageous artist? Let’s hope so, even if we don’t know what to call this phenomenon. Cooke says: “It’s the porousness between the fine arts and the applied arts or the fine arts and craft that’s of interest in order to make a sharper critique and at the same time a playful one.”Museum chief curator Massimiliano Gioni has called A Cosmos “an autobiography in images.” But this exhibition is not simply a compilation of odd-ball objects and artifacts organized to express Trockel’s personal mythologies, strange as they are in works like Fly Me to the Moon, 2012, Trockel’s first collaboration with German artist Gunter Weseler. Here, a baby with a fly on its cheek is swaddled in a Snoopy dog astronaut outfit in a string net crib. A very surreal-looking black, white, and grey stuffed animal is tucked next to the baby’s chin, surreptitiously inflating and deflating, causing this cute furry blob to breathe on its own and make us jump mid-air. A phantom lullaby drifts in and out of the second floor. It’s not clear where the sound is coming from, because there’s no mobile hanging over the bassinet, just an empty hook (poor baby).
At times, Trockel’s show is like a fairground showcasing outsiders, for instance the Idaho-born deaf/mute artist James Castle and his decoy ducks, or Judith Scott, also deaf and born with Down Syndrome, and her obsessively wrapped yarn objects. There are also exotic attractions, like Cedric, a gigantic lobster caught and cooked in 1964, on view in New York as the understudy to Salvador Dali’s surreal Aphrodisiac Telephone, 1936. Dali’s phone used a lobster body as the receiver and was seen in the Madrid exhibition. In Lucky Devil, 2012, a crab lays prone on a stack of wool remnants that are actually the original industrially knit works that brought Trockel early fame. There are also three paintings by Tilda, an orangutan whose lyrical abstract canvases Trockel has collected.
The 1912 stop-action animation The Cameraman’s Revenge is Wladyslaw Starewicz’s super-surreal and morbidly charming love fest of two beetles and a grasshopper dashing in out of hotels and after-hours clubs, escaping up chimneys, having knock-down, drag-out fights, only to fall back into each others’ arms (or claws?). Trockel frequently features animals in her work. With Carsten Höller, Trockel created a House for Pigs and People for documenta X. (Höller once described the project as “a monument of incomprehensibility.”) So don’t bother placing any art historical harnesses on Trockel. She’ll defy them every time.
The third floor suddenly shifts to Modernism, housing mostly wool hand-knit paintings. These largely blue monochromatic works, such as Sky, 2012 and Kind of Blue, 2012 are reminiscent of Malevich or Yves Klein. But other work in wool riffs Agnes Martin’s minimalist paintings. Cooke observes: “The monochrome is the quintessential abstract format of 20th-century painting with all its aspirations, as in Malevich or Mondrian, where it became transcendental. Trockel’s big wool paintings deliberately avoid the natural heroics that scale often implies. They’re amusing and wry. They’re made with thick wool, as though for a very cold climate. The paintings have these slightly tacky-looking borders that are gorgeous and funny.”
Trockel’s works in the Deutsche Bank Collection are good examples of the artist’s early interest in embracing and upending Modernism, mastering and mimicking its form in order to create her own idiosyncratic language. Her 1988 knitted picture Who will be in in 99? is on view in the Städel Museum’s new annex, where it hovers above the main hall, hung in a corner like a Russian icon in an homage to Malevich’s Black Square. On the silk scarf Trockel made in 1993 as an edition for the Deutsche Bank Collection are her own Schizo Pullovers with their dual neck holes as well as geometric forms typical for Constructivist art. The edition’s color scheme, reduced to black, white, and red, also frames a reference to the Russian avant-garde.
The fourth floor presents book drafts using the formal language of Constructivism, as well as Trockel’s quirky and beautifully awkward ceramics. The ceramics are like live mutations with an eerie, anthropomorphic vibrancy. Cooke reveals: “Trockel literally throws clay onto a surface to get these strange aquatic structures that are like coral or sea creatures, while other ceramics are strictly formed and tabulated casts of meat organized into a grid. Her world is made up of this movement between order and disorder.”
Trockel’s not only raided the icebox, she’s also filled it back up with worlds immense and trivial, tragic and humorous, sacred and perverse, colliding the real and the surreal. Her misfits and outcasts offer a peculiar realism that might just teach us how to see or at least recognize one of the most unique auras we’ve come across in a long time.
Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos
until01/20/2013
New Museum, New York
One of the last preparations before doors open to the Frieze art fair tonight is the installation of Richard Long’s mud painting at London’s Lisson Gallery. The mud is applied directly to the wall, and the floor needs to be covered with a protective sheet. When the work is finished, there is a clean black line along the bottom of the wall that draws the eye. In an environment where everything is slick, the work stands out as a refreshing example of healthy earthiness.
Now in its 11th year, Frieze London 2013 (Oct. 17-20) hosts some 170 exhibitors (up from last year’s 120), attesting to the fair’s status in the global art market. Exhibitors represent 34 countries, making this year, according to the organizers, the fair’s most international outing yet.
Countless satellite fairs like Moving Image and (new this year) Strarta have sprung up, and London galleries schedule exhibitions of their biggest hitters to coincide with the fair’s opening; see Tim Noble and Sue Webster at Blain Southern. At the preview, all the familiar faces from the art establishment were present: museum directors like Nicholas Penny (National Gallery), Ralph Rugoff (Hayward) and Nicholas Serota (Tate), as are artists like Grayson Perry, Anish Kapoor and Martin Creed.
If Frieze truly is nothing more than a temple of consumerism at its most devout, then the altarpiece is Jeff Koons’s bronze megaliths of lobsters, kittens and candies, showing at Gagosian Gallery. The rumored $10 million price tag (which the gallery declined to confirm) reinforces the notion that cash is king. Yet only a booth away, at Berlin’s Esther Schipper, Pierre Huyghe’s aquarium works house horseshoe and arrow crabs—this living ecosystem is utterly unconcerned with cash flow. Even if his aquarium pieces do come with a price tag of $165,000 each and a life span of 15 years, here “prehistoric life forms that pre-date all this,” as a gallery representative describes it, are top of the food chain.
Still, the chief traffic is buyers. Dealers in the Frame section, reserved for 18 galleries founded post-2003 (16 of whom are Frieze first-timers) all told A.i.A. that sales were good. There are some lively examples here, like Berlin-based artist Ryan Siegan-Smith’s works concerning memory and mnemonic techniques in a mixture of video, installation and drawing at Malmö’s Johan Berggren. Seemingly everyone’s favorite were Marlie Mul’s sand and resin puddles at Milan’s Fluxia, for about $5,500.
In the main exhibitors section, Laura Bartlett is returning for her fifth year with a sampler of artists including Cyprien Galliard, Nina Beir, Ian Law and Allison Katz. “Art fairs are where the relationship between gallerist and artist is both least and most romantic,” the London dealer told A.i.A., “but underlying everything is the same yearning, seeking out treasure.”
No one is forthcoming about what they are selling, for how much and to whom, but A.i.A. did overhear one dealer comparing shopping styles. “The Europeans walk round for days writing notes, then do all their buying on the Sunday. If the Americans want it, they buy on the spot.” One pair of arty spectacles with a New York City rasp dropped $80,000 on two Warhol drawings at New York’s Cheim & Read with the comment, “I just came off my medication this morning!”
On the whole, the air is less frenzied than past years. Air kisses have given way to a more serious crowd. Combined tickets to Frieze and Frieze Masters are $80 this year, so it is less about networking and more about cold, hard currency. “The market has matured,” an English collector told A.i.A., “and people are here to do business.”
That includes the crowd at Frieze Masters. Now in its second year, Frieze Masters provides a greatest hits of everything up until 2000. If modern art has been knocked off its perch by the growing strength of the contemporary market in recent years, then Frieze Masters addresses that balance. Dealers bring out prestige works of Japanese Gutai and Russian Constructivism, with 12 galleries focusing on Brazilian modernism.
Most galleries at Frieze Masters are returning exhibitors, but some pulled out, deciding to concentrate on the main fair and its reputation for guaranteed sales. “We did both fairs last year, and did well at Frieze but we didn’t make any money here” at Frieze Masters, Elliott MacDonald, representing Pace, told A.i.A. “But when you don’t do a fair, you always have the sneaking suspicion you are missing out.”
MacDonald’s suspicions may be right. Walking into Cheim & Read, one of the dealers says loudly on speakerphone, “I can’t tell you exactly what but a very nice thing happened today.” One museum director (who wished to be unnamed) put a reserve on the entire exhibition documenting artist Rose English’s feminist dressage performances at London’s Karsten Schubert.
There are no bargains at Frieze Masters. Sam Fogg, a London specialist in medieval art, has maybe the most beautiful object in the entire fair: an illuminated manuscript from the Book of Kings, selling for $8 million. New York-based Hans P. Kraus Jr. has a Julia Margaret Cameron album for about $7 million; portrait subjects include Darwin and Tennyson. Then there is The Census at Bethlehem by Brueghel the Elder, which hasn’t been on the market since it was bought directly from the studio 400 years ago by an English family who has kept it in Kenya in recent years.
Frieze Masters contextualizes Frieze London in a way the organizers probably never intended. It backs up contemporary works as often as it tears them down. Korean artist Kyungah Ham is showing an embroidered canvas at Kukje Gallery (Seoul), a clear homage to Alighiero Boetti (showing at London’s Dickinson as part of Frieze Masters). But when quizzed, the exhibitor told A.i.A., “No. Not like Boetti. Original.” On the flip side, the three Michelangelo Pistoletto works on sale by different galleries at Frieze Masters are called out by Gavin Turk’s Pistoletto’s Waste (2013) at Vienna’s Galerie Krinzinger at Frieze London. Turk’s work mimics the originals’ mirrored stainless steel, but replaces the boy and dog pictured in Pistoletto’s series with an image of black trash can liners.
Where inclusion in Frieze once meant you had made it, Frieze Masters makes the main fair look increasingly like level one in a long-drawn-out strategy game, with the question now being: How many of the works showing at Frieze London will make it into Frieze Masters in 10 years’ time?
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October 17, 2013 7:26 pm
Frieze London: report
By Jackie Wullschlager
An unlikely star emerges from among
variable new work at Frieze London
The first conversation I overheard at Frieze London was an American collector suggesting to her husband that they buy Dan Graham’s glamorously minimalist seven-metre curving glass and mirror sculpture “Groovy Spiral” as an alternative hallway for their latest home.
In fact, “Groovy Spiral” at Lisson Gallery is the fair’s most democratic, inclusive work – despite its $600,000 price tag. Framed in steel, it resembles from the outside a three-dimensional question-mark, or perhaps semi-colon, momentarily punctuating the rush and crush of too many people, pictures, prices. Walk inside, and its mirrored surfaces dizzyingly blur, mute and distance you from the crowds, who are reflected on a long white wall opposite as a frieze of pale shadows.
This is Frieze in microcosm: a glassy, self-referential world all its own. Jeff Koons became a record-breaking market presence by sculpting banal, kitsch objects glorifying another alternative reality, Disney-like and infantilised; Gagosian has literally raised the roof of Frieze’s tent to showcase his giant hanging sculptures “Sacred Heart” – a stainless steel blue balloon tied with a pink ribbon – “Lobster” and the aluminium/rubber “Titi Tyre” modelled on children’s inflatable ducks. I loathe Koons, but as a statement of his role in conceptual sculpture’s history, Gagosian’s display is unassailable.
If all its booths were like Lisson’s and Gagosian’s – clear, decisive, committed – Frieze would be pure provocative pleasure. Certainly structural changes made to echo the sober elegance of last year’s Frieze Masters have benefited this fair: wider aisles, softer lighting, fewer exhibitors. But among the galleries themselves, too many have responded to Masters’ cut-off date of 2000 by assuming in contrast an unconsidered contemporaneity: haphazard, provisional hangs; slick, unoriginal work, much of it dated 2013.
Even at big-name spaces, some market-stall juxtapositions are so discordant that pieces argue each other out of existence. Alex Katz’s 34 small studies, landscapes and flower paintings, marvellously abbreviated dramas of light, shade and time (more than half of them sold by yesterday), struggle amid the surrounding installation of Rob Pruitt’s “Safety Cones” jokily adorned with sunglasses, smiley faces and hats at Gavin Brown’s enterprise. Affectingly wan and melancholy, Ron Mueck’s diminutive hyper-realist “Woman with Shopping”, looking as if she is about to stride out of Hauser & Wirth’s stand, is not helped by the backcloth of a massive, violent Paul McCarthy painting (already sold to a European collection for £750,000).
The best displays, aping Frieze Masters, are intensely curated and concentrated. Pace’s exploration of global portraiture is outstanding. It includes Romanian wunderkind Adrian Ghenie’s painterly depictions of epoch-changing figures – “Charles Darwin”; a scrawled-over face of Hitler in which paint seeks revenge on history – in dialogue with both Hiroshi Sugimoto’s uncanny photographs such as “Lenin”, modelled on a waxwork, and Li Songsong’s “Marshal”, a historical painting built up in impasto brushwork on panels roughly stuck together, disjointedly overlapping, so that the image never coheres. These in turn relate to the grid-patterned self-portraits with which Chuck Close questions realism and abstraction.
Saleable, accessible painting of wildly varying quality dominates the fair: highlights among new works are a free cascading landscape by Hurvin Anderson (sold by Thomas Dane in the fair’s first half hour for £130,000), a Jules de Balincourt cityscape (Victoria Miro), Chris Ofili’s monumental black figures playing out classical myth (David Zwirner, sold on the first day for $500,000).
Sculptural presentations tend to be more radical. Stuart Shave’s Modern Art intriguingly groups artists who test the limits of informality and non-traditional materials within a rigorously abstracting, post-minimal aesthetic: Karla Black’s foil and nail varnish “Living Conditions”, Eva Rothschild’s steel and lacquer “Hansel and Gretel”, Bojan Sarcevic’s burning candle on onyx “Tridiminished”, the mix of charcoal drawings with plaster and fibreglass in Matthew Monahan’s gently Gothic column “A Certain Time of You”.
Argentinian sculptor Adrián Villar Rojas was all but unheard of in London until his theatrical exhibition, focused on a charging elephant, opened last month at the new Serpentine Sackler Gallery. At Marion Goodman and Kurimanzutto he balances this figurative work by more abstract clay and concrete pieces, at once strong and fragile-looking, surfaces gnarled and cracked, which seem to belong to a fossilised jungle (the large looping, circular piece at Marion Goodman is called “Innocence of Animals”). Rare, delicately inky works on paper evoke ruined cityscapes. A sort of visual descendant of Borges and García Marquez, Villar Rojas drowns out the hype and sales pitches here with a vibrant magical realism making him the un- expected, very popular star of Frieze 2013.
========== FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON
PAD London – report
By Caroline Roux
This user-friendly fair joyfully mixes decorative arts and design with fine art
Thomas Lemut armchair from Fumi
If visitors to the Pavilion of Art and Design (PAD), which takes place in a Mayfair marquee during Frieze week, are in any doubt as to what to do with their high design purchases when they get them home, Timothy Jeffries has the answer. Jeffries, the director of photography specialists Hamiltons Gallery, has kitted out his booth at the fair as a Belgravia sitting room – all velvety brown walls and classy Irving Penn photographs. But then, with a nod to more decadent tastes, he has furnished a dimly lit back room with black brick walls and Araki imagery of complicated bondage techniques, where trussed-up women gazed balefully down onto a black leather Mies van der Rohe daybed. A large-scale Richard Avedon is hung at the perfect height to allow contemplation of 1990s supermodel Stephanie Seymour’s carefully topiaried pubic hair.
The booth’s design is more sad than erotic, suggesting a world in which sex is more likely a transaction than a pleasure. And it isn’t representative of a fair whose annual mission is joyfully to mix 20th-century and contemporary decorative arts and design with fine art in a “do try this at home” kind of way (assuming your home is an airy apartment in the 7th arrondissement, or a duplex on the Upper East Side).
Dealers love the London edition of PAD, a Parisian product that’s now onto its seventh year in the UK. With just 60 galleries, largely of European and US origin (though this year SMOGallery from Beirut joined in), it attracts the high rollers who are in town for Frieze Week.
If Frieze Masters is about connoisseurship and Frieze London about the highly competitive collecting of the contemporary art world, PAD is about comfort and shopping, and the booths are organised accordingly. At Stockholm gallery, Modernity, a pair of Alvar Aalto gleaming black Paimio chairs sit on a stunning rug by Marta Maas Fjetterstrom (an underrated designer of the 1920s and 1930s, though this carpet was posthumously made in the 1950s).
At the Downtown, from Paris, a serious sofa and chairs by Jean Royère, created for a Paris apartment in the 1960s, are shown off against a cream rug, while a stunning Royère lighting arrangement (“Liane”), of seven white shades on meandering black stalks, creeps up an adjoining wall.
London art dealer Robin Katz, a tub-thumper for 1960s and 1970s British artists including Bridget Riley and neglected talents such as Bob Law (“I feel quite patriotic about bringing this work back to people’s attention,” Katz said), has furnished his stall with a Nakashima coffee table and a “school of Rietveld” chair. “The furniture’s not for sale,” he said. “I just like being an interior decorator for a week.”
The New York gallery Van de Weghe adjusted its set economically too, showing a suite of recent Ross Bleckner paintings at around $100,000. The same gallery is showing Picasso’s “Nue Allongée” (1968) on its Frieze Masters stand at $8m.
The PAD formula certainly works. On the opening night alone, sales were ridiculously brisk. Fumi was relieved of a Rowan Mersh shell sculpture and a jesmonite table by Studio Portable within minutes. A brilliant green table by Marc Newson (at €300,000) was snapped up from Galerie Kreo, Paris’s most sophisticated design gallery, along with vintage Gio Ponti mirrors and work by the Campana Brothers. A sleek, masculine carbon fibre shelving piece by Pierre Charpin was under consideration by several buyers. “This really is a commercial fair,” said Clemence Krentowski, the elegant Alaia-clad co-director of Kreo. “The user is at the centre of all this work. Sure, it’s nice if there’s a story behind the piece, but this,” she pointed to the Charpin, “is still a shelf. Otherwise, we’d be at Frieze.”
Not that useability is always the goal. An unlikely new arrival at the fair is the Paris-based Jean-Christophe Charbonnier, specialist in 17th- to 19th-century Japanese armour. Glossy helmets in iron and lacquer sell for £24,000-£60,000 and are proving to have crossover appeal with design-oriented buyers seduced by their sculptural form and exquisite execution.
Next spring, PAD will make its first foray to Los Angeles, and Gregory Gatseralia of SMOGallery has already signed up. “I’m excited about it,” he said. “I’m waiting for Brad Pitt to come along and buy something.” If LA is anything like London, the chances are reasonably high.
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Jeff Koon’s Tweekie Pie
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FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON
Frieze Masters, Regent’s Park, London – report
By Jackie Wullschlager
The fair’s second edition encapsulates 21st-century shifts in taste and taste-making
Monet’s ‘L’église de Varengeville; soleil couchant’ (detail) (1882), unseen for more than a century, is at Dickinson
Who needs museums with walls when a pop-up version in a Regent’s Park tent makes art look fresher, brighter and more surprising than it does in any public institution?
The fair has grown up since last year’s launch. The jumble of top-class works from ancient times to 2000 still delights: a small pink-hued Tang dynasty “Pottery Figure of a Court Lady” at Ben Jannssens, a gorgeous off-kilter Cézanne cupid at Acquavella, and Lisson’s theatrically recreated Richard Long walking piece are formally and emotionally arresting highlights. But the overall feel is more serious, less showy, with many galleries attempting to dig deeper, stake significant positions and juxtapose old and new in revealing not gimmicky ways – Jackson Pollock’s early drawings alongside the tribal masks that inspired them at Washburn Gallery and Donald Ellis; Leon Kossoff’s tensely wrought charcoal/oil versions of Old Master suffering (Titian’s “Flaying of Marsyas”, Rembrandt’s “Blinding of Samson”) at Mitchell Innes Nash.
Last year’s high standards have provoked competition to boast trophy pieces, including Monet’s scintillating “L’église de Varengeville, soleil couchant”, from a French private collection, unseen for more than a century, at Dickinson, and Modigliani’s elongated, melancholy “Bride and Groom”, one of only two double portraits the artists ever made, deaccessioned from New York’s Museum of Modern Art and on offer at Landau. Both galleries are new to Frieze, and Robert Landau’s often important works do not reach public eyes as he neither sells nor lends to museums (“they take too long to make up their mind and send 17 committee members to have a look”). Along with an unusual Fauvish Chagall “Still Life” (1911-14) and a rare 1905 Derain “Collioure”, Landau has the monumental, transitional “The Sleepers” (1965), favourite of Picasso’s dealer Daniel-Henri Kahnweiler – it hung above his desk until his death.
The subject, a naked woman and a black-suited gentleman reclining on the grass, reprises the “Déjeuner sur l’herbe” series but bold facture and slangy language inaugurate Picasso’s late style. The flattened forms and disruptive contrast of curves and angles merging the two bodies were inspired by Japanese erotic prints – such as the elegantly explicit 17th-century woodblock “Scenes of Lovemaking” by Sugimura Jihei, at Sebastian Izzard. Such chancy, do-it-yourself contextualising is a chief pleasure here.
Best stand? Mnuchin Gallery’s mini-retrospective of Willem de Kooning, centred on a sunburst pink/lemon abstraction “Flowers, Mary’s Table”, was the magnet throughout yesterday’s opening. The savage “Woman” series, highly textured sculptures (“Cross-Legged Figure”, “Hostess”) and emptied-out late paintings all excite in London, which seldom sees de Kooning, and missed the reassessments at MoMA’s 2011-12 retrospective.
Running close for erudite reappraisal and tour-de-force display is Mnuchin’s neighbour, Gmurzynska, which precisely reconstructs a seminal 1947 Wilfredo Lam show, with surrealist compositions hung at crazy angles off the ceiling, and mask-like portraits and “Jungle” paintings playing figuration against abstraction, Picasso against Pollock. Lam, the continent-hopping Cuban communist son of a Chinese railroad worker and African mother, embodied globalisation before the word was invented. He embodies too the nerve centre Frieze Masters aims to hit – blue chip but not fully discovered modernism. A Tate show is under discu
ssion.
Who makes history? Increasingly the market – which is why modernism, its nuances still to be negotiated, triumphs in impact and scope here over Old Masters as marvellous as Velázquez’s “Portrait of a Gentleman” (Otto Naumann) and Antonello’s “Madonna” (Moretti), and energises our response to them. Seventeenth-century polychrome wood/silk religious figures at Coll & Cortés look like modern mixed-media installations; austere ancient sculpture at Rupert Wace takes on modern echoes in Hans Josephsohn’s enigmatic stele form (1953) at Hauser & Wirth.
I lost count of the numerous Calders on every aisle – following last year’s sensational six-metre “Rouge triomphante” at Helly Nahmad, Calder is this year’s must-have – but how bizarre to find his abstract metal shapes in primary colours flapping even among the jewel-like Brueghels, Avercamp and 15th-century Master of Schongau at De Jonckheere. Free-floating, upwardly mobile and in august but unexpected company – Calder is the poster-boy for Frieze Masters.
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THE GUARDIAN LONDON
Frieze Art Fair: Buyer choice expands from porn and puddles to a Brueghel
With work of 2,000 artists from galleries worldwide the fair at Regent’s Park, London, attracts collectors with deep pockets
Jeff Koons’ Cat on a clothes line (yellow), on show at the Frieze Art Fair this week. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
It is chucking it down in Regent’s Park, cars are splashing pedestrians, expensive frocks and suits are getting drenched. And, once you are inside the UK’s biggest commercial art fair, you can add to the experience by buying your own dirty black puddle.
Each one of Marlie Mul’s resin and sand hyperreal puddles would cost you €4,000 (£3,400)from the Frieze stand belonging to Fluxia, a young gallery based in Milan.
If you are not interested in splashing out on a puddle, then there are a further 151 contemporary art galleries displaying works in the vast tent that has appeared in the London park for the past 10 years.
As thousands descend on the fair – some buying, an awful lot more wishing they had the money to buy – hundreds of other galleries and museums open shows and have parties all over the capital. It is an art equivalent of the Japanese cherry blossom.
This year’s Frieze is as dizzying and as diverse as ever. You can see astonishingly expensive works by Jeff Koons (“We don’t release prices to the press,” a Gagosian gallerist sniffed); and you can see far, far more affordable works by the possible next generation – for example post-graduate Goldsmiths students Sam Keogh and Joseph Noonan-Ganley, on display at Kerlin Gallery‘s stand.
And you can see porn. There are content warning notices but it is very easy to stumble into a screening of Omer Fast’s Everything That Rises Must Converge, a four-channel film exploring the everyday and often ordinary lives of four hardcore porn film performers. It is being seen for the first time and does not spare viewers the graphic detail “although one of the things we found very compelling is the banality of the day at work”, said Euridice Arratia of Berlin gallery Arratia Beer. “They are very regular people, there is an unexpected normality.”
Arratia conceded it is a difficult work to sell – you would need €65,000 – but she hopes people will come and sit down and watch it.
A rather less in your face film is on display at Kate MacGarry’s gallery stall. Marcus Coates – one of the artists shortlisted to be next up on London’s Fourth Plinth – has made a film about hospice patient Alex.
Although the view is only from his window, the story is an epic one in that Alex told Coates he had always wanted to go the Amazon but obviously could not now – so could the artist go, which he did.
“It is a very moving film,” said MacGarry. “It is a very strong work which says a lot about Marcus’s wider practice.”
Also on display are National Geographic-style photographs Coates has made of birds and animals and then screwed up and let unravel. Each are in an edition of three and would cost you £4,500.
Should visitors need a break from the crowds and intensity of Frieze, a good place could be a curvy glass pavilion installed as the only exhibit for the Lisson Gallery. Called Groovy Spiral, visitors are encouraged to walk into it.
Lisson’s Ossian Ward said the work was a “people-watching experience. You feel like you’re in the calm in the middle of the storm and you’re on show as well. It is a nice place to be.”
It is a meditative work, on Wednesday still for sale for $600,000 (£375,000). Ward said: “You don’t get many moments for reflection at an art fair generally, a lot of what you see gets immediately forgotten, so it’s nice to have that one moment. Frieze has matured so galleries should mature with the fair and feel confident to do big and bold statements and not feel they just have to chase after the money.”
Frieze gets criticised because it is a place for conspicuous wealth and there may well will be oligarchs and hedge funders walking the aisles idly wondering what best to spend their millions on.
Matthew Slotover, fair co-founder, believes some of the criticisms are unfair.”Some of the prices can get very high and if you don’t like that then this is probably not the place for you,” he said. “For me it is a wonderful thing that private collectors and museums buy art and support living artists so they can carry on making their work.
“Also commercial galleries all over the world offer hundreds of free shows every month.”
With 2,000 artists at the fair it is also “an amazing opportunity to see a lot of what is going on”.
He said a lot more big collectors were present this year, helped by the successful debut last year of a parallel fair for historical art called Frieze Masters, 15 minutes walk away in the park’s north-west corner.
Here 130 galleries are selling their wares. For €22,000 you might be tempted by a Polynesian toggle, or for $1.5m an insanely kitsch example of Victorian narrative art, John Anster Fitzgerald’s painting of Shakespeare’s Bottom surrounded by fairies.
Or even a beautiful Brueghel winter scene, called The Census at Bethlehem, which, remarkably, was unknown and unrecorded until it was unveiled this week. The painting has been in the same family since it was bought direct from the artist’s studio in 1611 and for the past 60 years has been in east Africa. “When we took it off the
wall a mummified gecko fell off the stretcher,” said Johnny Van Haeften, the Old Master dealer selling it.
It is Van Haeften’s first Frieze – “I saw all my clients here last year and thought I’d better come” – and he is encouraged. “People who collect modern art are now beginning to look back at Old Masters which are so much cheaper by comparison. This is a great masterpiece by Brueghel and it is £6m – what does that buy you in contemporary art?”
• Fairs open to the public 17-20 October.
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DB ARTMAG 77
Jubilee in Regent’s Park: 10th Year of Deutsche Bank’s Partnership with Frieze London
Rivane Neuenschwander, I Wish your Wish, 2003. New Museum, New York. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York
Gerry Bibby, Pacing Wall Progressing Columns (2013) Video Still. Performance Video. Performed at Kunsthalle Bremen 14th & 15th Sep. 21012 by Adam Linder & Gerry Bibby.. Courtesy the Artist and Silberkuppe
Andreas Angelidakis, Design for Frieze Projects 2013. Courtesy of the artist and The Breeder Gallery (Athens, Greece)
Angelo Plessas, Temple of Truth Tlatelolco. Courtesy of the artist
Josef Strau, Paperweight for the Arcadia Diary, 2007. Courtesy of the artist and Vilma Gold, London
Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Why Should Our Bodies End At the Skin 2012. Video still. Image courtesy The Artist; Mary Mary, Glasgow
Frieze London is one of the most important art fairs worldwide; it always pursues new paths as a way of staying dynamic. Frieze has had Deutsche Bank as its partner since its second edition. As every year, Deutsche Bank will be present at the fair, with a lounge in which it will show works from its collection. This year, the focus is on the feminist postcard installation Woman to Go by Mathilde ter Heijne. For this project the Dutch artist, to whom an entire floor of the Deutsche Bank Towers is devoted, researched the biographies of around 300 forgotten women. They are artists, pirates or suffragettes who fell victim to male-dominated historiography. On the postcards, per Heijne combines their extraordinary biographies with historical portraits of unknown women. Visitors to the lounge are invited to take postcards with them, as a piece of history and as inspiration for the present. Special versions of the installation were also created for the ArtMag stands at the Frieze Art Fair and the Frieze Masters. Here too visitors can take postcards. At these stands, new subscribers to the magazine also receive a bag printed with a Woman to Go motif.The fair’s recipe for success includes setting standards not merely as a marketplace, but also as a cultural platform. Frieze has always been a fair for important collectors, but it’s also a public event that over 60,000 visitors now flock to each year. This year, the fair presents itself in Regent’s Park with even more space than before, in a new architectural setting designed by the London agency Carmody Groarke, which has been responsible for the design of the tents since 2011. Once again, over 150 international galleries are taking part. Among the new participants are big names like Blum & Poe (Los Angeles) and Max Hetzler (Berlin), as well as newcomers such as Rodeo of Istanbul, which has previously taken part in the young section Frame and is now conquering the main fair.Frieze Projects has always been one of the fair’s highlights. This year, curated by Nicola Lees, these commissioned works will be even more interdisciplinary in nature than before. Already as curator at the Serpentine Gallery alongside Hans-Ulrich Obrist, she encouraged artists to experiment with a wide variety of media. Now, Lees has invented a new format for Frieze: for the first time, invited artists present their works on a modular stage designed by Andreas Angelidakis that will change on a daily basis. Rivane Neuenschwander, whose works occupy an entire floor in the Deutsche Bank Towers in Frankfurt, includes the audience in her performance, playing off one of her most recent installations, The Conversation (2010), which was inspired by Coppola’s surveillance thriller of the same name. Gerry Bibby’s performance series is also based on the idea of participation. Here, however, the main roles are played by fair staff and a pile of oysters that are consumed. And in the work of Ken Okiishi, it’s robots that intermingle with the public.Only a few minutes away on foot from Frieze London, Frieze Masters shows art from antiquity to the 20th century—from a contemporary perspective. Deutsche Bank is also partner to this fair. Its extraordinary quality and unique mix of various epochs already met with overwhelmingly positive resonance last year. Once again, around 120 of the leading galleries and art traders worldwide will come to London. Here, too, the fascination derives from the relationship to contemporary art. This can be seen in the Frieze Masters Talks, in which artists like John Currin, Beatriz Milhazes, and Catherine Opie talk to directors and curators over the influence historical works have exerted on their art.Frieze London & Frieze Masters October 17–20, 2013 Regent’s Park, London
In the most eagerly anticipated institutional show for quite some time, Sarah Lucas‘ YBA upbringing matures to form an important and ever-relevant legacy. All the usual features apply – the stuffed nylon tights, the breezeblock plinths – alongside the old guard that made her name – the two fried eggs, the bucket and cucumber. Lucas, as the self-styled bad girl of British art proves she’s still got it and in this case shows the next generation of DM wearing wanna-be-bad-girl-artists how to play with the big boys. Whitechapel disclaimer: ‘the exhibition contains sexually explicit materials and is not recommended for children’.
Click here to read Susanna Davies-Crook’s interview for Dazed Digital with Sarah Lucas and Has Ulrich Obrist.
Whitechapel Gallery, 2 October – 15 December 2013
FRIEZE ART FAIR
The indominable art fair of our time once again sprawls it’s stud-walled tendrils across Regent’s Park. The highlights this year are happening in parallel to the galleries’ booth presentations in the various curated Frieze programmes that seem to exponentially grow year on year. Within ‘Frieze Focus’ Omer Fast presents ‘Spam Atlas’, a new work which starts with an email describing a financial opportunity resulting from the death of a lonely but very wealthy person, next to Trevor Paglen’s ‘Non-functional Satellite’ that could be viewed from Earth as a flickering star or up close as a sail-like minimalist sculpture, created for the purpose of entering orbit then burning up without trace. In ‘Frieze Film’ Petra Cortright presents her internet-inspired, experimental software videos whilst over in ‘Frieze Masters’ Victoria Miro gallery lodges Alice Neel in the macho narrative of ‘master’ artists. In the section reserved for developing galleries, Pilvi Takala at Carlos Ishikawa London presents a project inspired by infiltrating ‘college moms’; the wives of faculty staff on US college campuses.
GCC are a collective founded in 2013 of artists that including the multi-talented musician and artist and Fatima Al Qadiri alongside Abdullah Al-Mutairi, Amal Khalaf, Aziz Al Qatami, Barrak Alzaid, Khalid al Gharaballi, Monira Al Qadiri, Nanu Al-Hamad and Sophia Al Maria. This exhibition acts as a fortification of their collaborative practice which first and foremost aims to ‘effect collaboration, transformation and inter-connection between Artists in all fields in order to achieve unity between them’. Drawing on diplomatic protocols, ceremonial pomp and accomplishments made during the GCC collective’s first meeting in Morschach, Switzerland. ‘this show represents the official Communiqué of the cooperative: a High Level Strategic Dialogue’.
During Frieze week, the exhibition will additionally be open Sunday and Monday, 20 – 21 October 2013 12:00 – 18:00 and by appointment.
Florence Peake, Michael Dean, Juliette Blightman and Rodney Graham
The gallery transforms from it’s daytime persona as the host of current Orpheus Twice exhibition into the setting for a performance of new work by 4 artists. Florence Peake presents a double duet new movement work followed by ‘an act’ by Michael Dean that poetically introduces itself, ‘How inanimate that alphabet. With the policy of its use in its face. A demonstration of the letter n for you. You user with your policies.’ Juliette Blightman presents a characteristically subtle new work ‘Between Acts’ and finally Rodney Graham plays his psychedelic ‘Softcore – More Solo Guitar Music for the Sex Scene, Zabriskie Point’.
In a week when the art world comes to town, it’s important to get some perspective. This talk investigates the roots, developments and outcomes of the term ‘post-internet’, drawing together Arcadia Missa’s Rozsa Farkas, artis tHarm van den Dorpel (who recreated the Game of Thrones throne in his berlin space amongst other things), Ben Vickers and editor of Mute Magazine Josephine Berry-Slater. A good line-up if you’re interested in unravelling the intricacies of the much-bandied, slippery and potentially soon to be canonised term ‘post-internet’ and further conceptualising the ‘post-net aesthetic’.
Bringing his blend of tech-pop, computer-game-fetishist music-heavy art to the ICA, Cory Arcangel presents a new ‘suite’ of piano compositions . Arcangel aficionados be not afeared, the music in question will be performed solo by John Reid on a Korg M1 electric piano, an instrument made famous by it’s late 80s influence on classic rave and trance. This event comprises part of the 25 frames season by Film & Video Umbrella.
In the tradition of the namesake day of the week, Sunday is a more chilled out affair, and an increasingly welcome and inspiring accompaniment to Frieze booth mania. Adding new blood and backbone to the Frieze train in it’s fourth incarnation, Sunday invites younger galleries which in turn means that for the most part the artists shown are ones to watch / next big things / bright young things. New this year are LA’s FreedmanFitzpatrick at only their second ever fair exhibiting Mathis Altmann & Lucie Stahl, and Berlin’s charge-leading Kraupa-Tuskany-Zeidler showing Dazed faves Katja Novitskova and Avery Singer.
Showing at London’s Ambika P3 17 – 20 October 2013
Andy Holden @ Zabludowicz Collection
Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity, 1999-2003: Towards a Unified Theory of MI!MS
The Music of MI!MS – a short lived art movement established by Holden during his teenage years in Bedford – will be performed, this time inviting The Grubby Mitts and Johnny Parry Orchestra to add their own spin on things. An experimental live set combine with video and spoken word in a half-remembered nostalgic investigation of irony, sincerity and teenage intellectual dilemmas oddly in tune with the zeitgeist of the time and America’s David Foster Wallace inspired ‘New Sincerity’. The event takes place alongside Andy Holden‘s room-filling three storey installation containing environments and assemblages of ephemera that influenced the artist as a teenager.
A bit of light entertainment infused with art intellectualism, this robot contest comprises one of the events leading up to Juneau Projects forthcoming exhibition ‘Welcome to Happy Redoubt’.Betting on a robot will result in (hopefully) winning tokens, which can then be later spent throughout November in the artist duos’ ‘interactive post-apocalyptic encampment’, inspired by sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson’s concept of the ‘infocalypse’. The installation will boast its own marketplace which will expose systems, create new mechanisms and challenge obsolescence.
Wednesday 16th October 8-9pm
This event is free and open to all but booking is required
Welcome to Happy Redoubt (6 November – 15 December 2013)
For his Frieze week solo exhibition, the French-born but Berlin-based enfant terrible of legendary beer-tower-sculpture fame pairs himself with another risk-taker of the avante-garde, colour field pioneer Morris Louis. Gaillard’s interventions in images from an archive of National Geographic catalogs refashioned into glueless wave collages, weave through a history of colour, representation and evolution. His bronze ‘Fence (after Owen Luder)’ security barrier exchanges knowing glances with Morris’ 1958 work ‘Beth Samach’. In dialogue with Morris, Gaillard investigates ruins and trace, disintegration and desolation.
Oct 15th – November 16th 2013
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THE AGE – NATIONAL
A woman poses for a photograph in front of artwork by Jeff Koons at the Frieze London art fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. Photo: Getty Images
A man admires a painting by Richard Phillips entitled ‘Sasha II’ in the Frieze London art fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. Photo: Getty Images
A visitor photographs part of Robert Pruitt’s “Safety Cones” at the Gavin Brown’s Enterprise from New York’s stand at the Frieze Art Fair in central London Photo: Reuters
Art dealers with the Galerie Sanct Lucas wait in their exhibition space in the Frieze Masters Art Fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. The annual Frieze Art Fair takes place in London’s Regent’s Park and runs from October 17 to 20. The exhibition comprises of the Frieze Masters exhibition and Frieze London which aim to showcase historic and established art as well as contemporary works. Photo: Getty Images
A woman views Ron Mueck’s artwork ‘Woman with Shopping’ at the Frieze London art fair. Photo: Getty Images
Members of the public admire Eduardo Basualdo’s artwork ‘TEORIA’ at the Frieze London art fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. The annual Frieze Art Fair takes place in London’s Regent’s Park and runs from October 17 to 20. The exhibition comprises of the Frieze Masters exhibition and Frieze London which aim to showcase historic and established art as well as contemporary works. Photo: Getty Images
A man admires artworks by David Shrigley in the Frieze London art fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. Photo: Getty Images
A man admires Jaume Plensa’s sculpture entitled ‘Chloe’ in Regent’s Park, which is part of the Frieze London art fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. The annual Frieze Art Fair takes place in London’s Regent’s Park and runs from October 17 to 20. Photo: Getty Images
A work entitled “He” by Danish artist Michael Elmgreen and Norwegian artist Ingar Dragset (Elmgreen and Dragset) is displayed at the Frieze London art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England, on October 16, 2013. Running from October 17-20, 2013, Photo: AFP
A woman talks on her phone as she stands near works entitled “Lounge Lover” by British artist Dee Ferris (L), “Nia” by Japanese artist Tomoaki Suzuki (C) and “Blue Milk” by Dee Ferris (R) at the Frieze London art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England Photo: AFP
A man looks at a piece by US artist Jeff Koons at the Frieze London art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England, on October 16, 2013. Photo: AFP
A woman looks confused as she looks at work by British artist David Shrigley entitled “A Burden” at the Frieze London art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England Photo: AFP
Visitors look at “Blue Skies” by late US artist Jean-Michel Basquiat at the Frieze Masters art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England, Photo: AFP
A 19th century Italian marble Vanitas is displayed at the Frieze Masters art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England. Photo: AFP
A visitor is pictured with work by artists Gerhard Richter “Funfzehn Farben (Fifteen colours)” (L) and John Chamberlain “Dearie Oso Enseau” during a private viewing of the Frieze Masters 2013 art fair in London. Photo: Reuters
A couple stand near a work entitle “Flat Tyre” by British artist Gavin Turk as they look at a work entitled “Flag I” by South African artist Willem Boshof is displayed at the Frieze London art fair in Regent’s Park, north London, England, on October 16, 2013. Running from October 17-20, 2013, Frieze London features over 150 of the most exciting contemporary art galleries in the world. Photo: AFP
LONDON, ENGLAND – OCTOBER 16: An artwork by David Shrigley entitled ‘Untitled (look at this)’ is exhibited in the Frieze London art fair on October 16, 2013 in London, England. The annual Frieze Art Fair takes place in London’s Regent’s Park and runs from October 17 to 20. The exhibition comprises of the Frieze Masters exhibition and Frieze London which aim to showcase historic and established art as well as contemporary works. (Photo by Oli Scarff/Getty Images)
Don’t ask … Adrian Searle inside Judith Rubell’s Portrait of the Artist, 2013. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the Guardian
I have had a tango alone in a darkened room with nothing but a portrait of Marilyn Monroe for company (this sort of thing I can do almost as well at home). I have tracked a pool of ink across nice grey floors, and almost been splatted by paintballs. I have eyed up a dangling noose, but it looks like someone else has already tried Elmgreen & Dragset‘s gibbet (the frayed rope lies useless on the floor). That was when I climbed back into the womb to try to escape, only to be pounced on by a gang of paparazzi. All this, and I’ve only been at Frieze for two hours. I do so love an art fair.
Once more into the killing fields! The artists represented by London’s Limoncello gallery hang around its stand, waiting for someone to chat them up, or possibly buy them. People are so much more fun than art – and by and large self-cleaning. Nearby, at Fluxia (over from Milan), puddles of black goo sit on the floor, with decorative bits of binbag and weeds mired in the stickiness. What would one do with these cowpat-sized objects? Or with the giant black foil rock that hangs from the ceiling of a Berlin stand? I guess you could position yourself under it, so it looks like a “thinks” bubble, to signal your bad mood.
Dunno, by Urs Fischer, 2012. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the GuardianAt Sadie Coles, Urs Fischer‘s giant fried egg lies on the carpet, perfectly cooked, but out of scale to any but the most gargantuan appetite (and everybody knows collectors only peck at things, their appetites reserved only for beefed-up art).
Art fairs may be all the same, filled with schlock, shiny things, grim things, and things that make you wonder why galleries across the globe bothered to drag them all the way here, but there’s always something to brighten your day as you wander the aisles. The 11th incarnation of Frieze is more manageable than most, with better lighting, wider aisles and a bigger spread of behemoth mega-galleries and startup spaces, young galleries and old lags. Not that the art is necessarily better, though the galleries seem to be trying harder this year.
Now for a nice lie down. In the Project Space, a fountain in the middle of a bed spouts black ink on to the white sheets, and on to the book being read aloud by Lili Reynaud-Dewar, nestling on the plumped-up pillows. It’s
a dirty book anyway, In My Room by Guillaume Dustan, and as she reads the line, “I was lying on the bed jerking off, smoking a joint” in a delicate voice, the artist starts getting spattered, too. More ink leaks from the pump beneath the bed and oozes over my shoes. I like to get up close and personal at fairs. It’s the only way to focus.
Rather than the usual collection of cash-cow artists, Lisson shows a single work, a huge spiral Plexiglas corridor by veteran American artist Dan Graham. You wander in to the middle, view the passing crowds through the curving walls, then walk out again, refreshed. It is an oasis. Nearby, at Gavin Brown, two lovely nocturnal cityscapes by Alex Katz, with lit windows on a dark New York night, look over Rob Pruitt’s mad, humanoid fluorescent orange traffic cones. This is fun. Round the corner is another big Katz, of buildings in a blizzard. It is magical.
Cat on a Clothes Line (Yellow), by Jeff Koons, 1994-2001. Photograph: Sarah Lee for the GuardianFinding things that stop you in your tracks here is easy, but mostly for the wrong reasons. You tend to gawp, incredulous. There are a great many overblown stupidities here, the sort that only seem to come out at art fairs. You could count Jeff Koons‘s huge wrapped bouquet and his cute pussy-in-a-sock sculpture among these, though there are many who see his work as a Duchampian critique of excess.
Jennifer Rubell’s giant, reclining, all-white Portrait of the Artist has a large sculpted hollow for a womb. You can climb in and curl up, in full view of the passing trade. As a serious art critic, I felt it my duty to get on board. What would you do with a thing like this? Where would anyone keep it? Why? Do not ask.
On Juana de Aizpuru’s stand, Tania Bruguera has reproduced the infamous Nazi “Arbeit macht frei” sign from Auschwitz concentration camp. The original was stolen in 2009 (it has since been recovered). Bruguera’s copy leans in a corner, surrounded by metal-cutting tools. The artist wishes, apparently, to reference historical memory.
Never a great context for looking at anything, fairs are more and more the places where collectors congregate and buy. In an unfortunate juxtaposition, a drawing of a lemon by Mike Kelley hangs over the sign referencing the song by Led Zeppelin about squeezing my lemon till the juice runs down my leg. For some reason, all this upset me, but only for a moment. After a bit, you just stop caring.
Le Monde en Miniature et la Mode en Miniature, by Meschac Gaba, 2008. Photograph: S/arah Lee for the Guardian
What is the right context for Bruguera’s sign? Everything becomes a hostage to fortune here. You have to be open to the absurd. At Stevenson, from South Africa, Meschac Gaba shows an array of children’s clothes, all embroidered with volatile French words: Kalachnikov. Inceste. Pédophilie. Prison. Slavery. Sida (Aids). Terroriste. In part, this is a play on shop displays, and the kinds of signage kids all over the world wear on their clothing. But this is more about the signs people don’t wear. These words are labels that float about and sometimes stick.
You have to keep moving, stay a moving target. Swivel-eyed dealers wait to pounce. Here’s a Gerhard Richter, there’s a room of shouty Julian Schnabel paintings, now a sculpture of a squatting woman delivering a very small poo, by David Shrigley. And over there, a thing that looks like art but probably isn’t. This time next year, it will be forgotten, probably in a collector’s warehouse somewhere. At Laura Bartlett Gallery, gigantic currency notes lie framed on the floor. Mmmm, smell that money – but watch out for the cowpats.
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BLOOMBERG
Koons Leads $2 Billion Art-Market Test for Frieze Week
By Scott Reyburn – Oct 14, 2013 4:00 PM PT
London’s Frieze Week starts today with a record 10 fairs, about as many auctions and numerous dealer shows boosting the value of the art on sale to as much as $2 billion.
Frieze Art Fair in Regent’s Park opens to VIP visitors tomorrow and attracts billionaires looking for new art stars and established names. Among the 152 galleries taking part, Gagosian will be showing five large-scale works by Jeff Koons. The sister event, Frieze Masters, opens today with 130 dealers showing a contrasting range of modern and historic works.
“Sacred Heart (Blue/Magenta)” (1994 to 2007) by Jeff Koons. The stainless steel sculpture was made for the U.S.-based artist’s “Celebration” series. Source: Gagosian via Bloomberg
Lothar Schnepf/PAD London via Bloomberg
A sculpture of the ancient Egyptian goddess Bastet in the shape of a cat. Dating from about 600 BC, the bronze will be shown by Gordian Weber Kunsthandel, Germany, at the Pavilion of Art + Design in London, which previews on Oct. 15. Photographer: Lothar Schnepf/PAD London via Bloomberg
Robert Wedemeyer/Hauser & Wirth via Bloomberg
“SP246” (2013) by Sterling Ruby. The painting, spray paint on canvas, will be priced at $550,000 at the Hauser & Wirth booth during the Freize Art Fair at Regent’s Park. Photographer: Robert Wedemeyer/Hauser & Wirth via Bloomberg
FXP London 2013/David Zwirner via Bloomberg
“574#” (2013) by Oscar Murillo. The work, oil paint, oil stick, graphite and studio-dirt, will be shown, priced up to $150,000, at the David Zwirner booth during the Frieze Art Fair, which opens to VIP visitors on Oct. 16. Source: FXP London 2013/David Zwirner via Bloomberg
“The pace is non-stop,” New York-based art adviser Heather Flow said in an interview. “There are a
lot of art fairs this week, though I’m not sure if too many good things to see is such a bad problem. The search for the next superstar is gathering momentum. Secondary market prices are astronomical.”
Frieze and its offshoots have grown into the biggest seven-day concentration of art-market events in any European capital. Also opening today are the Pavilion of Art + Design in Berkeley Square and the inaugural 1:54 fair of contemporary African art at Somerset House.
Starting tomorrow, Phillips, Sotheby’s (BID) and Christie’s International will be offering more than 900 works of postwar and contemporary art valued at as much as 152.9 million pounds ($245 million).
Balloon Dog
The Koons works at Gagosian’s Frieze booth include the stainless steel “Sacred Heart (Blue/Magenta), (1994-2007), part of the U.S.-based artist’s “Celebration” series. Gagosian never discloses prices to the media. A version of “Balloon Dog” from the series is estimated to sell for between $35 million and $55 million at Christie’s New York next month.
A recent painting by Colombian-born Oscar Murillo, priced at as much as $150,000, will be shown at Frieze by the New York-and London-based dealer David Zwirner.
Two years ago, paintings by Murillo, who has a London studio, could be bought for less than $3,000. He is now hailed by some as the new Jean-Michel Basquiat. One of his abstracts sold for a record $401,000 at Phillips New York on Sept. 19.
Hauser & Wirth will show U.S.-based Sterling Ruby’s 2013 spray paint-on-canvas “SP246,” priced at $550,000, typifying the upper price levels at a fair that specializes in works by younger, living artists. More valuable works by dead artists, stretching back to Old Masters and beyond, will be shown today at the second edition of Frieze Masters.
Old Master
The event has been bolstered by the arrival of heavyweight exhibitors such as the London-based Old Master specialist Johnny van Haeften, and New York’s Mnuchin and Dominique Levy galleries, who will bring big-ticket 20th-century classics.
“The fair has reinvigorated interest in people coming to London for this week,” says the dealer Thomas Dane, who is exhibiting at both Frieze events. “Masters is more of an adventure, and hopefully the connoisseurship we see at that event will spill over into Frieze.” He has a 1950s Lucian Freud drawing ofFrancis Bacon, priced at 1.3 million pounds.
The Pavilion of Art + Design London, a fair of 60 dealers held in a temporary structure near Claridge’s and the Connaught hotels, includes a white single-cut Lucio Fontana “Concetto Spaziale, Attesa,” priced at 6 million euros ($8.15 million) on the booth of the London dealer Ben Brown Fine Arts. Paris-based Galerie Applicat-Prazan will be showing a 1953 Pierre Soulages abstract at 3.5 million euros.
The main innovation of this year’s Frieze Week is the first 1:54 fair devoted to contemporary African art with 15 dealers.
The fair will include photographs by Angola’s Edson Chagas, who won the Golden Lion for his nation’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale in June. The London-based Jack Bell Gallery will be showing art made of weapons from the Mozambique civil war by Goncalo Mabunda. Prices for the artist range from 5,000 pounds to 14,000 pounds.
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Frieze art fair 2013: 10 things to see
From a retrospective by art’s king of pop, Jeff Koons, to a video laying bare the porn industry, via a collection of Matisse masterpieces, here’s what to seek out at Frieze
Pop star … Jeff Koons’s Sacred Heart (Blue/Magenta). Click to enlarge
1) Shiny happy people
No one sums up big-money art-fair glamour like Jeff Koons. The pop-art superstar and master of shiny surfaces shows key works from the last two decades here. Expect hisSacred Heart, wrapped in blue foil like a chocolate, and his Lobster, which masquerades as a party balloon. Frieze: Jeff Koons, Gagosian Gallery
2) 24 hours as a porn star
Omer Fast’s X-rated video Everything That Rises Must Converge is a must-see. It’s a bare-all look at the LA porn industry, showing 24 hours in the life of real porn stars. But Fast, who’s never one to keep things simple, has interwoven the sex with stories of illegal immigration and dinosaur egg theft. Frieze Focus: Omer Fast, Arratia Beer Gallery
3) The art of paintballing
Ken Okiishi’s paintballing should be the ultimate splatterfest: a carnival-style shooting gallery, with paint guns aimed at canvases. But instead of visitors having to put down their champagne and get their hands dirty, little remote controlled robots – pet-sized takes on drones, perhaps – will bomb their targets while filming, then mop up their own mess. Frieze Special Project: Ken Okiishi
4) Block party
The theme of this year’s Frieze special projects is “play” – and nothing says play likeJudy Chicago’s Rearrangeable Rainbow Blocks. An early work by the feminist art titan, these supersized building blocks are a prod at macho sculpture. It’s as if some toddler giant has left them in the sculpture park for other overgrown kids to experiment with.
Frieze Sculpture Park: Judy Chicago
Detail from Pivi Takala’s Drive With Care
5) School of thought
Pilvi Takala’s video Drive With Care sees the Finnish artist go undercover in an elite US boarding school. What comes across is a Truman Show kind of existence: a self-contained world that the staff rarely leave, and where the “college moms” (faculty wives) spend their days power-walking the grounds. Frieze Frame and Emdash Award Winner: Pilvi Takala, Carlos Ishikawa Gallery
6) Cover to cover
Whether dancing through galleries naked and doused in paint or working in a glass room in a public park, Lili Reynaud-Dewar is ever the exhibitionist. Her Frieze installation turns an intimate bedroom setting into a public stage. Sitting in a bed gradually soaking herself in ink, she’ll be reading from her favourite autobiographies, including that of French author Marguerite Duras. Frieze Special Project: Lili Reynaud-Dewar
7) Game theory
The Brazilian artist Rivane Neuenschwander once got a security firm to bug a gallery then tore up the walls and floors until she’d discovered the secret surveillance devices. For Frieze Projects, her version of Battleships continues the mind games, turning the traditional pastime into an interactive wall installation that visitors can rip through to uncover lurking vessels. Frieze Project: Rivane Neuenschwander
Henri Matisse’s Tête de jeune fille (1951)
8) Matisse’s many faces
If you wanted to make a noise at Frieze’s new Masters offshoot, you could scarcely do better than with Matisse. Portraits are the focus of this solo presentation of drawings, paintings and sculptures, which show off his virtuoso technical skills. There’s also the rare chance to see his early bronze nude Olga, with her ingeniously twisting form designed to be appreciated from any angle. Frieze Masters: Matisse, Thomas Gibson Fine Art Ltd
9) Requiem for a dream
In the glittery confines of an art fair it’s good to be reminded that culture is about more than cold hard cash. “How can art help people?” is a question that runs deep for Marcus Coates, the eccentric Brit known for his performances dressed as a shaman. A solo show features his standout film and audio work The Trip, created at St John’s Hospice, where he offered to realise a dying patient’s lifelong dream – and ended up travelling to the Amazon. Frieze: Marcus Coates, Kate MacGarry Gallery
10) Name’s not down, not coming in
Right outside the Frieze tent is a fitting location for Elmgreen & Dragset‘s sendup of hierarchy But I’m on the Guestlist Too!. It’s an oversized VIP glass door that stands alone like a magic portal to an enchanted land – and has its own real-life bouncer. Frieze Sculpture Park: Elmgreen & Dragset
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YAREAH
David Zwirner at Frieze & Frieze Masters 2013
Chris Ofili. Poolside (Crystal), 2012-2013. Oil on linen. 122 1/8 x 78 3/4 inches (310 x 200 cm).
David Zwirner will present a range of gallery artists at this year’s Frieze Art Fair (Booth C12). Highlights include the debut of two new paintings by Chris Ofili; works by Adel Abdessemed, whose solo exhibition at Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha, Qatar is on view through January; a painting and works on paper by Tomma Abts; a recent large-scale photograph by Stan Douglas; a concrete and steel sculpture by Isa Genzken, who is the subject of a major retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York opening in November; a painting by Neo Rauch; a selection of works on paper by Raymond Pettibon, whose show To Wit is currently on view at David Zwirner, New York; large-scale photograms by Thomas Ruff; a new painting by Lisa Yuskavage; photographs by Christopher Williams, whose first American museum solo exhibition will open in 2014 at The Art Institute of Chicago and will travel to The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and a new work by Michael Riedel, made especially for the fair and installed on-site by the artist.
Also featured are new works by the Colombian-born, London-based artist, Oscar Murillo, who recently joined the gallery. He is also part of the fair’s Sculpture Park presentation which takes place in Regent’s Park. There he will debut social anomalies from a factory (2013), a sculpture comprised of a series of stainless steel fruit crates. The artist currently has a solo show at the South London Gallery, where he has also created a unique “lottery ticket” project, and winners will be
chosen on Friday, October 18.
At Frieze Masters (Booth F11), David Zwirner will present key works by a selection of gallery artists and estates, including Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, Gordon Matta-Clark, John McCracken, Fred Sandback, and Al Taylor, as well as Ad Reinhardt, whose work will be on view at the gallery’s new building on West 20th Street in New York in a show curated by Robert Storr featuring black paintings and cartoons; and early works by Yayoi Kusama, who will have her first show with David Zwirner (on West 19th Street in New York) in November, which will feature over 30 large-scale paintings and two infinity rooms. Also on view will be a seminal work by Gerhard Richter; an important painting by Martin Kippenberger along with a suite of “Hotel Drawings” by the artist from the 1980s through 1990s; a large-scale sculpture by John Chamberlain; an early Paßstück by Franz West; and a selection of early works by Bernd and Hilla Becher, Daniel Buren, Joseph Cornell, Konrad Klapheck, and Brice Marden.
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LUXURY
Work in progress: American artist Jennifer Rubell poses naked for a digital scanner when eight months pregnant to create a 25ft sculpture to be revealed at Frieze
Picture: Jennifer Rubell c/o Stephen Friedman Gallery
Jennifer Rubell ‘Portrait of the Artist’ 2013, steel-reinforced fibreglass, 257 x 719 x 285cm
Picture: Stephen White c/o Stephen Friedman Gallery
Left; ‘Portrait d’homme’ self portrait by Corneille de Lyon circa 1550. Right:’Le Peintre’ self portrait by Pablo Picasso, 1967.
Art Sales: Eyes of the world turn to London’s art fairs
As over £1 billion of art goes on sale at a variety of London art fairs including Frieze, Frieze Masters and PAD, Colin Gleadell picks out the highlights set to make headlines.
BY COLIN GLEADELL
OCTOBER 14, 2013 23:11
The original Frieze fair remains the big attraction, striving to enhance the visitor experience this year with less galleries, more public space, and smaller crowds through ticket restrictions
Lucio Fontana, Concetto Spaziale, Attesa, 1966. Ben Brown Fine Arts
The tents are up, the stands are hung, and 350 international art dealers have been attending to last-minute niggles at London’s mega fairs – Frieze and Frieze Masters in Regent’s Park, and the Pavilion of Art & Design (PAD) in Berkeley Square – before they open this week. In addition to the £150 million of contemporary art on the auction block, they boast nearer £1 billion of art from all periods for sale.
In their wake, numerous other events for less expensive art are hoping to catch the attention. Last week, I highlighted the new 1:54 fair for African art. For serious talent-spotters, the small, select and free-entry Sunday Art Fairopposite Madame Tussaud, much favoured by cutting-edge collectors such as Anita Zabludowicz or David Roberts, is recommended.
For the streetwise, urban look, go to theMoniker Art Fair in Brick Lane, east London, which shares the cavernous Old Truman Brewery space this year with The Other Fair. For lower-priced prints and multiples by emerging and established artists, Multiplied, at Christie’s in South Kensington, is worth a trawl.
An avalanche of gallery openings includes three of the most sought-after young talent: British artist Hurvin Anderson, who fills both of Thomas Dane’s St James’s galleries with new work, and Americans Jeff Elrod at the Simon Lee gallery in Mayfair and Mark Bradford at the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey. The openings are not for buyers, though, as everything had been sold already.
The first fair to open its doors, for a select private view on Monday, PAD is perhaps more weighted towards design than art this year. But this allows the viewer space to focus on the art that is there. The modern, post-war era is best represented with an all-white Lucio Fontana painting with Ben Brown (€6 million), an architectural-looking abstract by Pierre Soulages with Galerie Applicat-Prazan (€3.5 million), and Christmas Eve, 1951, the largest early painting, 10 feet in length, by Patrick Heron ever on the market, for which London dealer Offer Waterman will ask a seven-figure sum.
Frieze Masters, which embraces the ancient and the modern, holds it private view this afternoon. Having been adjudged a success in its first year, it has attracted more exhibitors, notably Richard Green, whose range of stock has allowed him to meaningfully juxtapose pairs of still lifes, portraits and landscapes painted 400 years apart but resonating in a way that captures the spirit of the fair completely. The pairing of a 16th-century courtier by Corneille de Lyon with a late self-portrait as a courtly musketeer by Picasso, for instance, is inspired. The differential in prices (£950,000 for the de Lyon to £5.6 million for the Picasso) is not so much to do with size but the general disparity in value today between old and modern masters, says Jonathan Green.
One of Frieze Masters’ strengths is its single-artist displays. The Mnuchin Gallery from New York, for instance, is bringing an array of de Kooning paintings and sculptures priced from $1 million (£624,000) to $10 million.
Marlborough Contemporary artist Laurence Kavanagh is a fan of the late Victor Pasmore, so he has curated a display of Pasmore’s work (£10,000 to £100,000).
The original Frieze fair for new art, though, remains the big attraction, striving to enhance the visitor experience this year with less galleries, more public space, and smaller crowds through ticket restrictions. A new, child-friendly element seems to have crept in, with paintball machines making splattered paintings, a show curated by children who were given thousands of pounds to spend, and a multimedia playground for children and adults among the sponsored projects.
Bound to attract attention will be a self-portrait sculpture by US artist Jennifer Rubell, who posed naked for a digital scanner when eight months pregnant, reclining like the Velázquez Rockeby Venus. The scans have now been translated into a massive 25ft figure from which the womb has been removed leaving a cavity large enough for an adult to nestle in. The $200,000 interactive fibreglass sculpture, made in an edition of three, will occupy all of the Stephen Friedman gallery stand.
There might be a rush to the Spruth Magers stand for a new striped-wool work by Rosemarie Trockel, priced at €200,000. Trockel’s recent London show, with prices from €80,000 to €180,000, was a sell-out. But then again, with American debt suddenly threatening to destabilise the global economy, there might be no rush at all.
Albert Oehlen, ‘I 24’ (2011),Courtesy: Albert Oehlen & Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
Frieze Art Fair is kicking off on Wednesday (VIP Day) including a new curator, sponsor, fair design, and of course some new participating galleries.
Kendell Geers, ‘Country of my skull’ (2010), Goodman Gallery
Probably the most noticeable change this year is the layout of the art fair. Working with architects Carmody Groarke, Fri
eze London has been made over to give more space for visitors. This will make it much easier to view the featured artworks in comfort and enjoy the fair as much as possible.
Curating the fair this year will be Nicola Lees, who was also on the judging panel at this year’s Emdash Award. Lees has worked for the past five years as Senior Curator of Public Programmes at the Serpentine Gallery in London. She is taking over the role from Sarah McCrory who curated the fair from 2009-2012.
A new and exciting associate sponsor is joining Frieze – Alexander McQueen, who have always been committed to promoting contemporary art. Jonathan Akeroyd, CEO of Alexander McQueen remarked on the sponsorship: ‘Frieze brings together the most exciting galleries from around the globe and Alexander McQueen supports and shares their vision in making contemporary art more accessible and engaging for the public.’
Frieze is notoriously hard for new galleries to get involved with, so it’s a great honour for those who’ve managed it this year: Marian Goodman (New York); Galerie Max Hetzler (Berlin); Goodman Gallery (Johannesburg); Maccarone (New York); Overduin and Kite (Los Angeles); and Rodeo (Istanbul).
It’s the stuff of satire. An artist awarded a prestigious art prize by vowing to give her winnings to a group of strangers so that they can produce the work. Even better, the strangers should be aged between eight and 12. Better still, no one has any control as to what they might do with the £7,000 given them.
Yet that’s exactly what the creators of the Frieze Foundation’s Emdash Award decided to do when they gave the annual prize to artist Pilvi Takala earlier this summer, thus placing one of the art fair’s biggest site-specific commissions into the hands of a youth centre from Bow. The announcement may have raised a few eyebrows, but the fruit of Takala’s project, The Committee, is officially unveiled this week.
Takala, a slight 32-year-old with an asymmetric blonde fringe and the softest of voices, has a certain childishness about her that perhaps lessens the surprise of her commitment to the project. Originally from Finland, Takala splits her time between Amsterdam and Istanbul, and is known for an almost guerrilla approach to art that has found her gently shaking up “normal” codes of behaviour, using secretly filmed footage, hired actors and a lot of role play. In one of her earliest works, The Trainee, she got a job at Deloitte in Helsinki, only to film herself sitting motionless at her desk for a month. In Bag Lady, she wandered around a shopping precinct in Berlin with a transparent bag laden with cash to gauge how people would treat her: with caution, it transpired.
For her, the Emdash award has been a chance to steer a group of children towards a joint enterprise that could be both empowering and outside their normal artistic experience. “Of course, if they just wanted to buy several thousand pounds’ worth of balloons and fill a room with them, that would be fine,” she insisted when it was suggested that eight year olds might not be the most responsible curators on earth. “Or they might decide to put all the money towards buying a piece of work and hanging it up. And that would be fine, if that’s what they wanted to do. But you would hope, with a bit of encouragement in a workshop environment, and within a group, that they would realise they had more freedom.”
So far, so terribly liberal arts. But there’s something rather brilliant in hearing Takala’s earliest interviews with the young team tasked with the project. “We couldn’t buy a house or a building,” explains young Kacey, “because we’d have to share it… and besides, we wouldn’t have enough money.” Another little boy tells her that he’ll “spend the money on a holiday to Jamaica”. A third suggests buying a giant skip and making a swimming pool.
So, what they did spend it on? The children will reveal all this Saturday. In the meantime, you can follow the countdown at The-committee.org.
Written by Jo Ellison
Day One: Cyprien Gaillard
The nomadic French artist Cyprien Gaillard makes a well-timed debut tomorrow as his first London solo show, From Wings to Fins, opens its doors a day before the VIP launch of Frieze Art Fair. With Miuccia Prada, Phoebe Philo and François Pinault on the guestlist of friends and supporters attending this evening’s private view, the unveiling is set to be much more than a warm-up act where critics and collectors are concerned. At just 33, Gaillard arrives fresh from his large-scale exhibition at MoMA’s PS1 gallery in his current hometown, New York – a show that saw him fast-tracked from talented émigré to bankable favourite of the NY art establishment.
Getting up to meet me, he is anything but straight-faced – the famous birthmark that drifts over his right cheek is set within a suntanned complexion. But if the tagline “retrospective” or the attention that hangs over his conspicuously good looks had begun to get on his nerves, this latest smaller show shifts the focus back on to all-new works.
“Come and have a look at this” – he leads me, still smiling, into the semi-private attic room and taps the eyepiece of an antique telescope. I find myself on tiptoe, spying on an empty bottle of rum planted atop the neighbouring office building, almost the unwitting participant in a magician’s trick.
Downstairs, Gaillard’s not-so-everyday observations (spreads of retroNational Geographic magazines assembled into 3D tension collages) are displayed alongside paintings by the deceased painter Morris Louis, whose stained canvasses dominate the elegant shop front of the Dover Street space. His admiration for Louis’ home city of Baltimore and paint-pouring technique lay the common ground for this posthumous co-habitation: the American worked on bended knee to penetrate untreated canvases with streams of colour, while the Frenchman’s fieldwork saw him crouched at road level on Baltimore’s deserted streets, taking rubbings of drain covers.
This is nevertheless a Cyprien Gaillard show. “From the street you will be able to see this” – he peels the dustsheets off a life-size replica of spiked fencing used to ward off trespassers he “acquired – no, saved” from the wreckage of the Trinity Square car park in Gateshead. I’m elbowed with a reminder that the original piece played a starring role in the 1971 film Get Carter, which is typical of Gaillard’s talent for monkeying around the overlooked c
orners of the civilized world in the process of producing serious work. On another wall is a further clue to his current favourite place – a photograph of a dilapidated bench, dedicated to “BALTIMORE. The Greatest City in America”. Pulling the doors closed on the old-fashioned lift, he tells me through the metal gate that he is, however, “happiest on the road”, which will only add to the excitement surroundingFrom Wings to Fins. Catch Cyprien Gaillard while he is in town.
Cyprien Gaillard, “From Wings to Fins”, October 15 to November 16, 2013 at Sprüeth Magers London, Spruethmagers.com
With Stephen Shore talking, Meredith Monk performing, and Ken Okiishi paintballing, this year’s Frieze London is not to be missed. In its 11th edition, Frieze London gathers 150 galleries and works by over 1,000 contemporary artists in Regent’s Park. This year promises a new, more spacious layout and an exciting programme of site-specific installations, talks, films and the nearby Sculpture Park.
1. What? When? Where? How?
Frieze London is an art fair dedicated to contemporary art with a special emphasis on living artists. With a prime location in London’s Regent’s Park, the fair takes place October 17 through Sunday, October 20, 2013. Tickets are limited and must be purchased in advance online or by phone. Buy your tickets here. If you plan to visit both Frieze London and Frieze Masters, save by purchasing a combined ticket.
2. Main, Focus, and Frame
While the fair is limited to contemporary art, it’s split further into three sections: a main section with traditional gallery booths and two additional sections that are more limited in scope. Focus includes galleries that have opened since 2001 and have proposed a project specifically for this year’s fair.Frame includes galleries that have been open for under eight years, who will dedicate their booths to solo artist presentations.
3. Alexander McQueen joins Frieze team!
While 2013 marks the tenth year of sponsorship by Deutsche Bank, Frieze’s official sponsor, this year Frieze London engaged a new associate sponsor, Alexander McQueen. As part of the sponsorship London’s Alexander McQueen stores will house exhibitions of contemporary art curated by gallery owner and director, Sadie Coles. (Hear from Coles herself about the project here.)
4. Frieze food
Frieze London offers a variety of fine and informal dining options at the fair site. Formal sit-down options include:Arnold & Henderson’s Rochelle Canteen, where guests can enjoy breakfast lunch and dinner as well as a full bar and wine list; Mark Hix, which offers classic British fare and signature dishes as well as oysters and Mark’s own smoked salmon;Caravan, new to the fair, offers fresh, seasonal options and a brunch menu.
Informal and to-go options include: Gail Bakery for coffee, pastries, sandwiches, and salads; La Grotta Ices for ice cream made from fresh, local ingredients in artist-inspired flavors;Moshi Moshi for sushi; Coming Soon Coffee for you art fair caffeine fix. Additionally, Pizza Pilgrims, Pitt Cue, and Yum Bun will be on hand for all comfort food cravings.
5. Frieze Projects
Seven Frieze Projects, specially commissioned works to be included in the fair, have been assigned to seven artists, and will be presented together within Frieze London. The projects are curated by 2013 Frieze London curator Nicola Lees. The projects include:
Andreas AngelidakisAngelidakis was commissioned to create a custom pavilion to house the 2013 Frieze Project activities. Angelidakis’s construction, an island-like platform within the fair space, provides partitions and display surfaces for fellow projects. The work is an assemblage of white block-like modules, at once paying homage to and deconstructing the white cube.
Gerry BibbyAfter discovering fragments of oyster shells in the earth at Regent’s Park the Australian artist chose to investigate London’s historical relationship with oysters through a series of performances. A pre-fair performance includes art fair workers eating oysters and leaving piles of oyster shells scattered around the exhibition space. A second performance will last the duration of the fair’s second day and involves collaboration with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, an Amsterdam-based performance platform.
Rivane NeuenschwanderNeuenschwander contributes motivated by her previous work The Conversation(2010). Inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 psychological thriller of the same name, the 2010 iteration included a gallery space filled with spying devices. Learn morehere.
Ken OkiishiOkiishi’s project is contained within a space with acrylic glass, transparent walls within which he will employ paintballing to create a series of abstract paintings. Additionally, his project will include a participatory performance during the fair, involving humans and robots.
Lili Reynaud-DewarReynaud-Dewar’s project coincides with her commitment to only create bedroom pieces in 2013; thus she presents a bedroom installation. She will examine the works of writers who use their own lives as the subject of their work, including Guillaume Dustan’s Dans Ma Chambre (In My Room, 1996).
Josef StrauJosef Strau presents a new series of “Letter Tunnels,” the artist’s interactive letter-shaped structures. Fair-goers are invited to sit on and crawl into the tunnels, where they will encounter audio-, text-, and object-based installations.
Family Space: Angelo PlessasFor his Frieze Project, Greek artist Angelo Plessas has designed the fair’s Family Space, a first for the fair. The space, titled “The Temple of Play”, is a free, creative playground which will include a schedule of programming including games, performances, and screenings.
6. The Emdash Award: Pilvi TakalaThe Emdash Award funds an emerging artist from outside the UK to create a custom project for Frieze London each year. Finnish artist Pilvi Takala, the winner of this year’s Emdash Award, chose to involve a group of children in the planning
and execution of her project. After selecting several children around the age of 12, Takala will put together workshops during the three months before the fair where they will devise a plan for the project. The artists hopes to demonstrate the potential for children to work collaboratively and as equals. (Learn more inthis interview with Takala.)
7. Frieze Talks
A daily schedule of lectures, panels, and discussions are presented, covering a variety of relevant issues. This year’s talks include:
Sexuality, Politics and ProtestFriday 18 October: 1.30pm
Neil Bartlett (Theatre Director, Author and Performer, Brighton), Marlene McCarty (Artist, New York), Zanele Muholi (Photographer, Johannesburg), Chair: Jennifer Kabat (Writer, New York)
Participants discuss the impact and legacy of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Gran Fury (artist/activist group) and queer activism, on contemporary art today, 20 years since their beginnings.
Stephen Shore in conversation with David CampanySaturday 19 October: 5pm
Stephen Shore, known for his photographs of Warhol’s Factory, spent his career experimenting with color photography, beginning at a time when it was frowned upon by the art world. Shore discusses the trajectory of his work over the past 40 years with David Campany (Writer, Curator and Artist, London).
Jérôme Bel in conversation with Catherine WoodSunday 20 October: 1pm
Choreographer Jérôme Bel joins Catherine Wood (Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance, Tate Modern, London) to discuss the potential for curating within his work, particularly his dOCUMENTA(13) piece Disabled Theater, which was performed by professional actors with learning disabilities.
MacArthur “Genius” Award winner Meredith Monk has been performing interdisciplinary works of music, theater, and dance since the mid-1960s. On October 15th at 8pm Frieze presents Meredith Monk with Katie Geissinger in Concert, at Cecil Sharp House. Monk’s first performance in London in nine years, she will perform with Geissinger, whom she’s been touring with since 1990. In addition, Monk will give a talk at the fair on Thursday, October 17, at 5pm to discuss her inventive performance work and her investigations into the human voice.
9. Frieze Film
Frieze offers an exclusive programme of five new artist films, which are co-curated by Nicola Lees (Frieze Foundation) and Victoria Brooks (EMPAC). Artists presenting films this year are Petra Cortright, Peter Gidal, Patricia Lennox-Boyd,Oraib Toukan and Erika Vogt. Accompanying the films are a think-tank and a panel discussion to consider the commissioning of artist films.
Photograph by Lyndon Douglas, courtesy of Lyndon Douglas/ Frieze; Commissioned and produced by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Projects 2012, Frieze London 2012, photograph by Polly Braden Courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze, photograph by Polly Braden, courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze; Frieze Talks 2012, Frieze London, photograph by Polly Braden, courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze.
With Stephen Shore talking, Meredith Monk performing, and Ken Okiishi paintballing, this year’s Frieze London is not to be missed. In its 11th edition, Frieze London gathers 150 galleries and works by over 1,000 contemporary artists in Regent’s Park. This year promises a new, more spacious layout and an exciting programme of site-specific installations, talks, films and the nearby Sculpture Park.
1. What? When? Where? How?
Frieze London is an art fair dedicated to contemporary art with a special emphasis on living artists. With a prime location in London’s Regent’s Park, the fair takes place October 17 through Sunday, October 20, 2013. Tickets are limited and must be purchased in advance online or by phone. Buy your tickets here. If you plan to visit both Frieze London and Frieze Masters, save by purchasing a combined ticket.
2. Main, Focus, and Frame
While the fair is limited to contemporary art, it’s split further into three sections: a main section with traditional gallery booths and two additional sections that are more limited in scope. Focus includes galleries that have opened since 2001 and have proposed a project specifically for this year’s fair.Frame includes galleries that have been open for under eight years, who will dedicate their booths to solo artist presentations.
3. Alexander McQueen joins Frieze team!
While 2013 marks the tenth year of sponsorship by Deutsche Bank, Frieze’s official sponsor, this year Frieze London engaged a new associate sponsor, Alexander McQueen. As part of the sponsorship London’s Alexander McQueen stores will house exhibitions of contemporary art curated by gallery owner and director, Sadie Coles. (Hear from Coles herself about the project here.)
4. Frieze food
Frieze London offers a variety of fine and informal dining options at the fair site. Formal sit-down options include:Arnold & Henderson’s Rochelle Canteen, where guests can enjoy breakfast lunch and dinner as well as a full bar and wine list; Mark Hix, which offers classic British fare and signature dishes as well as oysters and Mark’s own smoked salmon;Caravan, new to the fair, offers fresh, seasonal options and a brunch menu.
Informal and to-go options include: Gail Bakery for coffee, pastries, sandwiches, and salads; La Grotta Ices for ice cream made from fresh, local ingredients in artist-inspired flavors;Moshi Moshi for sushi; Coming Soon Coffee for you art fair caffeine fix. Additionally, Pizza Pilgrims, Pitt Cue, and Yum Bun will be on hand for all comfort food cravings.
5. Frieze Projects
Seven Frieze Projects, specially commissioned works to be included in the fair, have been assigned to seven artists, and will be presented together within Frieze London. The projects are curated by 2013 Frieze London curator Nicola Lees. The projects include:
Andreas AngelidakisAngelidakis was commissioned to create a custom pavilion to house the 2013 Frieze Project activities. Angelidakis’s construction, an island-like platform within the fair space, provides partitions and display surfaces for fellow projects. The work is an assemblage of white block-like modules, at once paying homage to and deconstructing the white cube.
Gerry BibbyAfter discovering fragments of oyster shells in the earth at Regent’s Park the Australian artist chose to investigate London’s historical relationship with oysters through a series of performances. A pre-fair performance includes art fair workers eating oysters and leaving piles of oyster shells scattered around the exhibition space. A second performance will last the duration of the fair’s second day and involves collaboration with If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want to Be Part of Your Revolution, an Amsterdam-based performance platform.
Rivane NeuenschwanderNeuenschwander contributes motivated by her previous work The Conversation(2010). Inspired by Francis Ford Coppola’s 1974 psychological thriller of the same name, the 2010 iteration included a gallery space filled with spying devices. Learn morehere.
Ken OkiishiOkiishi’s project is contained within a space with acrylic glass, transparent walls within which he will employ paintballing to create a series of abstract paintings. Additionally, his project will include a participatory performance during the fair, involving humans and robots.
Lili Reynaud-DewarReynaud-Dewar’s project coincides with her commitment to only create bedroom pieces in 2013; thus she presents a bedroom installation. She will examine the works of writers who use their own lives as the subject of their work, including Guillaume Dustan’s Dans Ma Chambre (In My Room, 1996).
Josef StrauJosef Strau presents a new series of “Letter Tunnels,” the artist’s interactive letter-shaped structures. Fair-goers are invited to sit on and crawl into the tunnels, where they will encounter audio-, text-, and object-based installations.
Family Space: Angelo PlessasFor his Frieze Project, Greek artist Angelo Plessas has designed the fair’s Family Space, a first for the fair. The space, titled “The Temple of Play”, is a free, creative playground which will include a schedule of programming including games, performances, and screenings.
6. The Emdash Award: Pilvi TakalaThe Emdash Award funds an emerging artist from outside the UK to create a custom project for Frieze London each year. Finnish artist Pilvi Takala, the winner of this year’s Emdash Award, chose to involve a group of children in the planning and execution of her project. After selecting several children around the age of 12, Takala will put together workshops during the three months before the fair where they will devise a plan for the project. The artists hopes to demonstrate the potential for children to work collaboratively and as equals. (Learn more inthis interview with Takala.)
7. Frieze Talks
A daily schedule of lectures, panels, and discussions are presented, covering a variety of relevant issues. This year’s talks include:
Sexuality, Politics and ProtestFriday 18 October: 1.30pm
Neil Bartlett (Theatre Director, Author and Performer, Brighton), Marlene McCarty (Artist, New York), Zanele Muholi (Photographer, Johannesburg), Chair: Jennifer Kabat (Writer, New York)
Participants discuss the impact and lega
cy of ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), Gran Fury (artist/activist group) and queer activism, on contemporary art today, 20 years since their beginnings.
Stephen Shore in conversation with David CampanySaturday 19 October: 5pm
Stephen Shore, known for his photographs of Warhol’s Factory, spent his career experimenting with color photography, beginning at a time when it was frowned upon by the art world. Shore discusses the trajectory of his work over the past 40 years with David Campany (Writer, Curator and Artist, London).
Jérôme Bel in conversation with Catherine WoodSunday 20 October: 1pm
Choreographer Jérôme Bel joins Catherine Wood (Curator of Contemporary Art and Performance, Tate Modern, London) to discuss the potential for curating within his work, particularly his dOCUMENTA(13) piece Disabled Theater, which was performed by professional actors with learning disabilities.
MacArthur “Genius” Award winner Meredith Monk has been performing interdisciplinary works of music, theater, and dance since the mid-1960s. On October 15th at 8pm Frieze presents Meredith Monk with Katie Geissinger in Concert, at Cecil Sharp House. Monk’s first performance in London in nine years, she will perform with Geissinger, whom she’s been touring with since 1990. In addition, Monk will give a talk at the fair on Thursday, October 17, at 5pm to discuss her inventive performance work and her investigations into the human voice.
9. Frieze Film
Frieze offers an exclusive programme of five new artist films, which are co-curated by Nicola Lees (Frieze Foundation) and Victoria Brooks (EMPAC). Artists presenting films this year are Petra Cortright, Peter Gidal, Patricia Lennox-Boyd,Oraib Toukan and Erika Vogt. Accompanying the films are a think-tank and a panel discussion to consider the commissioning of artist films.
Photograph by Lyndon Douglas, courtesy of Lyndon Douglas/ Frieze; Commissioned and produced by Frieze Foundation for Frieze Projects 2012, Frieze London 2012, photograph by Polly Braden Courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze, photograph by Polly Braden, courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze; Frieze Talks 2012, Frieze London, photograph by Polly Braden, courtesy of Polly Braden/ Frieze.
The night before the first Frieze Art Fair opened in London’s Regent’s Park in 2003, co-founder Matthew Slotover had a terrifying dream. Instead of a large white minimalist tent, housing dozens of international galleries, he arrived at the fair to find a big-top circus tent. Instead of clean, smooth flooring, there was grass.
The nightmare is telling because art fairs are so often referred to as circuses, garish horror shows of conspicuous consumption. This year, 152 galleries will rent a booth at Frieze and display their wares: artworks created since the year 2000, ranging from traditional paintings to crazy installations that challenge the bounds of what art can be. Rather than the cool Zen of the White Cube, the aisles of the fair are harshly lit and crowded. And the impetus is on selling.
Gallerists will hope to woo the mink-wearing, spike-heeled, yacht-owning international elite into buying a Richter or a Hockney. These oligarchs and technocrats and popstars might simply want a painting that matches their kitchen décor. In this way, the fair is a bit like a giant Ikea where nothing is remotely practical or affordable. Alternately, they might want a sculpture that speaks of the bitter existential nothingness of contemporary life. At Frieze, they can have both.
Why do people buy art? For the rush of acquisition? The pleasure of exercising good taste? Maybe. But they also want a piece of that ephemeral, fiery thing – the force that goes into the creation of a work of art, the power that separates artists from us mere mortals. Inspiration? Genius? The heavenly muse, bottled? It is the quasi-mystical quality of the work of art that persuades collectors to splash the cash. The idea of purchasing meaning rather more than another boring old Bentleys to block up the drive. Plus art can be a really good investment – not that I know from firsthand experience; I’ve never been able to afford it.
Last year, Frieze Masters opened for the first time alongside Frieze London. Frieze Masters sells work from the classical age to the year 2000, featuring 130 galleries. Unlike other fustily traditional fairs around Europe, it seeks to explore the old through the lens of the new. “No one had done this before,” Victoria Siddall, director of Frieze Masters, tells me. “It was incredibly well-received.” Indeed, it was – a huge success with an emphasis on elegant, contemporary curation. The number of galleries wishing to participate in Frieze Masters has doubled this year.
Siddall is particularly excited about a series of Matisse ink drawings from Thomas Gibson Fine Art and erotic Japanese prints from Sebastian Izzard. While the term “Masters” may evoke all that is elitist and exclusionary about art history, pointing to the dominance of dead, white, male artists, 50 per cent of the artists represented in the Spotlight section will be either female or non-Western.
Victoria Miro will be showing an enigmatic range of paintings by the American artist Alice Neel (1907-1984). Overlooked for much of her career, Neel was a committed Leftist and painted street scenes of depression-blighted New York as part of the WPA government-relief programme in the 1930s. She was an important figurative painter, lost amidst a generation of masculine Abstract Expressionists, and rediscovered by the women’s movement in the 1970s. Particularly intriguing is Mimi (1955), an oil on canvas of a woman with smudged, hollow eyes wearing a sunny yellow pencil skirt. The painting is characteristic of Neel’s ghoulish eloquence as a portraitist.
‘The Adorationof the Cage-Fighters’ (2011) by Grayson Perry
LA gallery Blum and Poe will be showing a sculpture called Centred Infinity (1992) by Japanese artist Kishio Suga. Comprised of a metal cross on a wooden board splattered with blue paint, the work is characteristic of the Mono-ha art movement, which rejected the idea of creation in favour of blunt materialism. Blum and Poe will also be returning to Frieze London after an eight-year break, one of a wave of big US galleries attracted to the city’s ever-expanding art scene. Marian Goodman, doyenne of New York contemporary art, will be returning after four years, ahead of the opening of her new gallery in Mayfair’s Golden Square.
Goodman’s booth at Frieze New York earlier this year was acclaimed for housing not paintings on makeshift walls but a “constructed situation” by British-German Turner Prize nominated artist Tino Sehgal, in which a young girl recited Heidegger. Visitors were enthralled. Frieze New York opened on Randall Island for the first time last year, an
d was deemed a huge success. As Slotover told me on the phone, “London is being seen more and more as a very important art centre.”
But what of the recession? According to Slotover, who also founded Frieze magazine in 1991, along with his business partner Amanda Sharp, “the art world has not been as badly hit as people expected”. While sales are less extravagant than the 2006 “bubble period”, “we haven’t seen the kind of swathes of gallery closures that some people predicted”. It is the high-end galleries that have continued to prosper. Like the rest of the society, “the rich have got a lot richer”.
Fine art: Romano Alberti da San Sepolcro’s kneeling candlesticks
What kind of sales are they expecting this year? Siddall explains that most galleries are “very discreet” about figures. Many sales are completed post-fair. However, she can tell me that a Miró went for $20 million last year, and a Picasso for $9 million. “I love the fact that we can organise a really successful commercial event but also cultural events as well,” she says. Many of the artworks will be moving from one private collection into another so Frieze is an opportunity to see them – briefly – on display.
Indeed, most of the 60,000 visitors who go to Frieze each year are members of the public who simply want to see the art. Despite the cattle-market ambience, the fair is about creativity as much as commerce. Due to popular demand, Slotover tells me that they had to cut the number of tickets on sale this year by 25 per cent so that the fair will be less crowded. “Anyone who’s been to the fair will walk in this year and see a huge change,” he says. There is more public space. “It’s a much cleaner, more even environment.”
The phenomenon of the art fair has expanded alongside the biennale since the globalisation of the art market in the 1980s. Fairs are distinct from biennales because you can buy art on the spot. And it’s not all for oligarchs. East End gallery Limoncello will be exhibiting at Focus, a section of the fair dedicated to young galleries. While artists are often absent from fairs, allowing their dealers to do the work of selling, Jack Strange, Jesse Wine, and Sean Edwards will all be present, sitting at a round table ready to discuss their work with prospective clients.
Projects specially commissioned to run throughout the week serve to enhance the atmosphere of a festival that Slotover and Sharp intended. These include a film by exciting young LA artist Petra Cortright, member of The Nasty Nets Internet Surfing Club. Cortright’s webcam videos have been called “glitch art”: work that uses the internet and embraces the faults and failures of software. Slotover cites this kind of “post-internet art” as one of the predominant trends of new work at the fair. New York artist Patricia Lennox-Boyd’s film will focus on the use of hands in the on-screen marketing of consumer goods. It will “touching”: literally, about touch.
Like the great patrons of the Renaissance, Frieze sponsors talent in a way that can’t be viewed too cynically. Finnish artist Pilvi Takala has won this year’s Emdash Prize for emerging artists living outside the UK. Contrary to the fair’s spirit of acquisition, she handed £7,000 of the £10,000 award over to a group of 12-year-olds from a Hackney Youth Club and let them decide how to spend the money. Takala has guided the kids during workshops over the past few months. Is this a Lord of the Flies in the making? Or democratic decision-making that would put adults to shame? The results are top-secret for now, but will be revealed at the fair.
Takala is interested in “questions of value”. While the kids are mostly oblivious to the value of so much money, the fair is about “symbolic value” as much as wealth. Rather than buying and thereby possessing art as a precious object – an expensive painting or sculpture – Takala tells me that some collectors are now investing in more ephemeral art forms such as video by funding its production process. In this way, collectors feel as though they are supporting artists while eschewing more traditional notions of property. This seems to be art patronage at its best.
Frieze encourages both raw capitalism and raw art. For Slotover, “the art market allows small producers to make a living. All art exists somewhere along the spectrum of critical value and monetary value.” This is true, but where’s the conflict? “I don’t see it as a conflict at all,” he says.
Frieze Week 2013: How to make the most of it
By Alice Jones
Be adventurous
Rooftops, tunnels and car parks have all been popular venues in past Frieze weeks. This year’s non-traditional space sensation is set to be 180 The Strand, a Brutalist block-turned-arts- hub. During Frieze week it will host two ambitious shows. The Moving Museum’s Open Heart Surgery will let 31 young London artists – including James Balmforth, Shezad Dawood and Lucky PDF – run amok in 25,000sqft of former office space (12 October-15 December; themovingmuseum.com). The basement will house BRUTAL. For the past three years Steve Lazarides has staged his free street art extravaganzas in the Old Vic Tunnels, now closed. This show, featuring graffiti from Pose, photographs of LA gangs from Esteven Oriol and new work from Mark Jenkins, Antony Micallef and Doug Foster, promises to be just as dark (15-27 October; lazinc.com).
For more urban grit, Big Deal No 5, a non-profit show of up-and-coming artists will be held on Level 3 of a multi-storey car park just off Oxford St (18-20 October; deal-big.biz).
Remember there are other fairs
Frieze has seen various satellite fairs come and go over the past decade. Strarta is the young pretender for 2013 – up and running at the Saatchi Gallery and featuring 30 international galleries with work ranging from £250 to £250,000 (To 13 October; strarta.com). PAD continues to cater to the luxury end of the market with a marquee crammed full of Picassos, Kandinskys and champagne on Berkeley Square (16-20 October; pad-fairs.com). The Other Art Fair shows 100 of the best unsigned artists as selected by a panel including Yinka Shonibare, director of the Saatchi Gallery Rebecca Wilson and founder of Paradise Row, Nick Hackworth. This year it shares a venue, The Old Truman Brewery, with the urban art fair Moniker who will show work from Shepard Fairey and D*Face among others (17-20 October; theotherartfair.com; monikerartfair.com). Sunday Art Fair returns to Ambika P3 for a fourth year with a credible line-up of 22 young galleries from Berlin, London and New York (17-20 October; sunday-fair.com). Finally, The Animal Art Fair, opens a pop-up at 273 Fulham Road for all your gorilla etching and duck sculpture needs (14-19 October; animalartfair.com).
Get outside
Just a few minutes’ walk across Regent’s Park, the Frieze Sculpture Park provides a breather from the commercial and celebrity frenzy of the main fairs and, unlike them, is free to the public. This year it has work by Yinka Shonibare and David Shrigley. There will be one of Rachel Whiteread’s sheds and photo opportunities to be had with Elmgreen & Dragset’s But I’m on the Guest List, Too! an oversized VIP door that leads nowhere but is guarded by a bouncer.
Book in for a blockbuster
As usual, London’s galleries and museums are bringing out the big guns for Frieze week. Tate Modern is staging the UK’s largest Paul Klee retrospective in a decade, which will draw fans of Bauhaus and colour (16 October- 9 March 2014; tate.org.uk). Dulwich Picture Gallery is catering to the influx of foreign collectors with An America
n in London: Whistler and The Thames, a wide-ranging survey of the artist’s time in the city with paintings and drawings of Wapping, Chelsea and Battersea Bridge (16 October-12 January, 2014; dulwichpicturegallery.org.uk). And treasure can be found at the British Museum, whose exhibition Beyond El Dorado: Power and Gold in Ancient Colombia will dazzle with 300 exquisite objects from South America’s lost city of gold (17 October-23 March, 2014; britishmuseum.org).
Watch out for artists doing odd things
Frieze week is prime time for artists to experiment. The Chapman Brothers will showcase their musical talents with a gig at Fabric. Dinos’s audiovisual project, Luftbobler, will make its UK debut, supported by brother Jake’s band, Heimlich, and Jarvis Cocker will be manning the decks (17 October; fabriclondon.com). Aslı Çavusoglu will screen a three-part crime drama, Murder in Three Acts, that she shot at last year’s Frieze Art Fair (Delfina Foundation; to 25 October; delfinafoundation.com), while Rodney Graham will play psychedelic guitar at David Roberts Art Foundation (17 October, davidrobertsartfoundation.com). And at The Serpentine, Carsten Höller is among the artists taking part in the gallery’s 89plus Marathon, a two-day festival of ideas. As the first public event to take place in the Sackler Gallery, it’s a good excuse to have a poke around Zaha Hadid’s newest building, too (18-19 October; serpentinegallery.org).
Go for a group show
Try a group show at a commercial gallery for a fair experience in miniature. Gagosian’s The Show is Over will examine “the end of painting” via Fontana’s slashed canvases, Richter’s Grey paintings and pieces by Lichenstein, Warhol and Yves Klein (15 October-13 November; gagosian.com). Thirteen at Alan Cristea Gallery will show brand new work from an impressive stable including Gillian Ayres, Michael Craig-Martin and Julian Opie (To 9 November; alancristea.com). And at The Dairy, Ai Weiwei, Takashi Murakami, Cindy Sherman and Julian Schnabel are among the artists meditating on Aldous Huxley’s utopian last novel, Island (To 8 December; dairyartcentre.org.uk).
Get involved
Frieze week is as much about the art as it is about the art world making a spectacle of itself. As such, there are ample opportunities to become part of the art, should you wish. Stuart Semple has taken over a £14million townhouse by Regent’s Park for his show Suspend Disbelief. Among the works spread over four floors will be an installation of smiley clouds and a giant bouncy castle room (16-21 October; stuartsemple.com). At Frieze itself, several commissioned projects will be interactive, including a game of Battleships using fair visitors and a piece by Ken Okiishi that will examine the “poetic potential of paintball”. Representing Southard Reid Gallery in the Frame section of the fair, the London artist Prem Sahib will open a Soho nightclub. Elsewhere, The Other Art Fair will hold free taxidermy demonstrations for Polly Morgan wannabes (17 -19 October; theotherartfair.com).
Keep an eye on the auctions
Canny art lovers know that auction houses are the place to go for close encounters with modern masterpieces in Frieze week. Phillips is now showing £20million-worth of Kiefers, Basquiats and the like in its showroom ahead of sales on 16 and 17 October (phillips.com/auctions). Both Christie’s and Sotheby’s will stage their usual contemporary art sales next week. In addition, both have exhibitions in their brand new London venues. Christie’s will stage a show of British Pop Art, When Britain Went Pop! in the old Haunch of Venison gallery on New Bond Street (To 24 October; christies.com) while Sotheby’s has an exhibition of 12 Joseph Beuys works in its new S2 gallery on St George Street (To 15 November; sothebys.com).
Eat, drink and be merry
An art army marches on its stomach and fairs are now foodie destinations. Restaurant partners at Frieze this year include Hix and Caravan, but it is the street food offerings from Yum Bun, Pitt Cue and Pizza Pilgrims that will likely see the biggest queues. Visitors to Frieze Masters will be catered for by the more classic Locanda Locatelli. At Sunday Art Fair, the always buzzy bar will be run by Art Review, Jack Beer of Arbutus and George Howard of eatpeckham.com. Elsewhere there is an endless whirl of parties and private views to crash – this year’s glitziest is likely to be a VIP dinner at Café Royal, sponsored by fair associate, Alexander McQueen.
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ART NEWS
The ArtLyst Power 100 List,Alternative Art Power List, ArtReview
The ArtLyst Power 100: 2013 Alternative Art Power List Unveiled
DATE: 16 OCT 2013
London during Frieze Week is the only place to be on the planet if you are a dedicated follower of the visual arts. Every October an international herd of artists, gallerists and art professionals descend on our metropolis to feast on a wide range of art events. From ‘Blue Chip’ Frieze Masters to a pop up in an underground car-park, Frieze week is full of surprises.
Mid October is also the perfect time for us to release Artlyst’s Art PowerLyst, the alternative to ArtReview’s Power 100. Many think that AR’s list is erroneous and tired, their criteria is based on ‘sheer financial clout,’ as it is dominated by commercial gallery owners, big-buck artists, and misguided auctioneers.The ArtLyst editorial staff believe that achievement should not be compromised for the sake of the dollar, so we have created our own alternative list, instead of a Machiavellian Power List that has more in common with the Times ‘Rich List’. This year we have put together a Resourceful PowerLyst that celebrates exactly what it says on the tin – not those with the fiscal muscle to bend the artworld into whatever shape they please, but those with the creative power and ability to influence and augment the British and international art scenes through merit alone.Out go the Gagosians, the Damien Hirsts and the François Pinaults. In come the organisers of Peckham and Hackney’s finest events, the Director of Artangel, and the heads of art colleges across the country. Yes: let’s gratuitously pat ourselves on the back for the third consecutive year: here is the ArtLyst Power 100 Alternative Power List, in alphabetical order plus our curated Top 10 for 2013.Top Photo: (Left) Chris Dercon, Nicholas Serota (Right) Tino Seghal1. Tino Seghal: British-German artist of part Indian origin, based in Berlin. Exhibited at Tate Modern for the 2012 Unilever series commission. Won the Golden Lion for best artist at 2013 Venice Biennale and nominated for Turner Prize 2013.2. Chris Dercon: Director of Tate Modern since 2011 with an enthusiasm for ‘mixing it up’, formerly the director of the Haus der Kunst, Munich.3. Jeremy Deller : English conceptual, video and installation artist. Winner of the Turner Prize in 2004, represented Britain at 2013 Venice Biennale4. Hans Ulrich Obrist/ Julia Peyton-Jones: the Serpentine Gallery’s Co-directors of Exhibitions and Programmes.5. Grayson Perry: artist known for his work in ceramics, and awarded the Turner Prize in 2003, self-curated show The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum 2011, received BAFTA in 2013 for his series All in the best possible Taste and will deliver this year’s Reith Lectures for Radio 46. Jenni Lomax: Director of Camden Arts Centre, led the major refurbishment of the centre that was completed in 2004.7. James Lingwoo
d/ Michael Morris: Co-Directors of Artangel since 1991, responsible for building Artangel into a significant international commissioning and producing organisation.8. Elizabeth Neilson: Director 176 Zabludowicz Collection9. Elmgreen & Dragset: leading contemporary artists currently exhibiting a site specific installation at the V&A10. Hannah Barry: Founder of the Hannah Barry Gallery and one of the leading people responsible for transforming Peckham into an international art centre
Artlyst Power 100 In Alphabetical Order
1. Marina Abramovic: Serbian New York-based artist, and the self-professed ‘grandmother of performance art’, who began her ground-breaking career in the early 1970s.
2. Michael Archer: Programme Director of BA Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London, art critic and freelance writer, contributing regularly to the Guardian Culture section on contemporary art from 1960 onwards.
3. Ziba Ardalan: founder and Director/Curator of Parasol Unit Foundation for Contemporary Art, a privately-funded educational charity and a not-for-profit art gallery.
4. Bill Arning: Director of the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, former curator of the List Visual Arts Centre, MIT, and a freelance writer.
5.Karen Ashton: founder and organizer Art Car Boot Fair (new)
6. *Hannah Barry: Founder of the Hannah Barry Gallery and one of the leading people responsible for transforming Peckham into an international art centre (new)
7. Pryle Behrman: Art Critic, curator and Director of Art Projects at London Art Fair (new)
8. Gareth Bell-Jones: Curator at Wysing Arts centre, Cambridge, has written articles for Artvehicle and Contemporary Magazine, chaired symposiums at Cafe Oto
9. Peter Blake: English pop artist, who celebrated his 80th birthday last year and continues to be a major force in the art world
10. Iwona Blazwick: Director of Art at the Whitechapel Gallery, former Head of Exhibitions and Displays at Tate Modern, and Chair of Cultural Strategy Group, London.
11.Erica Bolton: PR catalyst and organisational magician. Partner at Bolton & Quinn Ltd.
12. Trisha Brown: Postmodernist Artist, dancer and choreographer, inducted into the National Museum of Dance C.V. Whitney Hall of Fame in 2000, and awarded the National Medal for Arts in 2002.
13. Jonathan Burton: Director of London Art Fair (new
14. Kate Bush: Head of Barbican Art Galleries, made multiple TV appearances on the subject of Art, and even been mentioned in a Harry Hill sketch.
15. Romain Chenais: French London-based art critic and independent curator, curated the first major retrospective of British filmmaker John Smith at the Royal College of Art.
16. Billy Childish: prolific painter, poet, printer and musician. Co-founder of the Stuckist art movement. (new)
17. David Chipperfield: Modernist architect, with two buildings shortlisted for the 2007 RIBA Stirling Prize, and winning with the Museum of Modern Literature, Marbach.
18. Matthew Collings: began his career on Artscribe, before producing and presenting The Late Show for BBC, and is still involved with broadcasting on productions such as School of Saatchi and
19.Susan Collins: Slade Professor at the Slade School of Fine Art since 2010, (new the 2010 BBC documentary ‘Renaissance Revolution’. He also lectures at the City and Guilds London School of Art.
20. Sacha Craddock: art critic and curator, Programme Director of Max Wigram gallery, curator of the Bloomberg Space, tutor at the RCA, Chair of New Contemporaries, and sat on the 2009 Turner Prize judging panel.
21. Michael Craig-Martin: Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths London, previously a tutor at Goldsmiths where he fostered the talent of many of the YBAs.
22. David Crawforth & Naomi Siderfin: founders, Directors, Curators, and artists at Beaconsfield, a gallery with a vision to ‘provide a critical space for creative enquiry’, that occupies ‘a niche between the institution, the commercial and the ‘alternative’’.
23. Martin Creed: artists and musician, Turner Prize winner 2001, numerous exhibitions and projects in 2013. Look out for his retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 2014
24. Penelope Curtis: Director of Tate Britain with a scholarly background in British art, especially 20th-century sculpture, she was also the first exhibitions curator at Tate Liverpool when it opened in 1988. She was a judge of the Turner prize 2012.
25. Alan Davey: Chief Executive of the Arts Council, has worked in the Department of National Heritage, and as head of the Arts Division and Director of Arts and Culture in the Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
26.*Jeremy Deller : English conceptual, video and installation artist. Winner of the Turner Prize in 2004, represented Britain at 2013 Venice Biennale
27. Melissa Denes: The Guardian’s arts editor, she also writes for the New Statesman.
28. *Chris Dercon: Director of Tate Modern since 2011 with an enthusiasm for ‘mixing it up’,
29. Emily Druiff: Director of Peckham Space, one of London’s newest purpose-built public galleries, dedicated to commissioning artworks made in partnership with community groups.
30. *Elmgreen & Dragset: leading contemporary artists currently exhibiting a site specific installation at the V&A
31. Kate Fowle: Chief Curator of Garage Centre for Contemporary Culture, Moscow (new)
32. James Franco: American artist, actor, and writer who balances his work as an artist with a mainstream acting career.
33. Katherine Fritsch: for her large blue cockerel Hahn/Cock currently to be seen on the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square
34. Jason Gaiger: Head of the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, also a Fellow of St. Edmund Hall Oxford, previously worked as Director of Research of Art History in the Open University, and Recently published ‘Aesthetics and Painting’.
35. Ryan Gander: London-based artist, creator of the Locked Room Scenario in Shoreditch, awarded the 2010 Zurich Art prize, accompanied by an exhibition at the Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, and winner of the 2003 Prix de Rome.
36. David Gryn: Director Artprojx, curated moving image projects (new)
37. Andreas Gursky: German visual artist who is known for his large scale architecture and landscape photographs
38. Zaha Hadid: architect responsible for the 2012 London Olympics Aquatics Centre, and has won the RIBA Stirling Prize twice, winning this year for the Evelyn Grace Academy, Brixton. Designed Serpentine Sackler Gallery which opened in 2013.
39. Margaret Harrison: Feminist artist and winner of 2013 Northern Art Prize (new)
40. Thomas Heatherwick: English designer known for his innovative use of materials, also designed the London 2012 Olympic cauldron and the ‘Borismaster’ bus launched in 2013.
41. James Hughes-Hallett: Chairman of the Courtauld Institute of Art.
42. Achim Borchardt Hume: Returns to Tate Modern as Head of Exhibitions. Previously Chief Curator at the Whitechapel Art Gallery
43. Heather Hubbs: Director of NADA art fairs (new)
44. Roger Hiorns: artist, 2009 Turner Prize nominee
, His work Seizure currently on show at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and Unititled series is at The Hepworth Wakefield. (new)
45. Thomas Krens: former Director of the Guggenheim Foundation, New York, currently Senior Advisor for International Affairs, overseeing the completion of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
46. Yayoi Kusama: Japanese artist who had a major lifetime culmination of her work shown at Tate Modern.
47. Michael Landy: YBA most famous for the work Break Down (2001), elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in 2008, current Rootstein Hopkins Associate artist in residence at the National Gallery
48. Joseph La Placa: CEO All Visual Arts curator of Metamorphosis, Vanitas and The Viewing Room.
49: Nicola Lees: Curator of Frieze Foundation (new)
50. John Leighton: Director General of National Galleries of Scotland, taught Art History at Edinburgh University before moving into curating at the National Gallery, acquired the Artist’s Rooms collection for National Galleries of Scotland, and was awarded an honorary degree for services to the arts from Edinburgh University in 2009.
51. *James Lingwood/ Michael Morris: Co-Directors of Artangel since 1991, responsible for building Artangel into a significant international commissioning and producing organisation.
52. *Jenni Lomax: Director of Camden Arts Centre, led the major refurbishment of the centre that was completed in 2004.
53. Declan Long: Irish art critic, curator and lecturer. He teaches at the faculty of visual culture at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin[1] and regularly appears on Lyric FM, discussing and reviewing contemporary art.
54. Sarah Lucas: part of the Young British Artist movement that emerged in the 1990s. The subject of a current major retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery
55. Christine Macel: Chief Curator of the Musee National d’art Moderne- Centre Pompidou, currently developing the exhibition ‘Dance your life’ which will open in November 2011, she also writes for FlashArt and Artforum.
56. Anna Maloney: Director of Hackney WickED festival (new)
57. Christian Marclay: Swiss-American visual artist and composer, most recently exhibited at the 2011 Venice Biennale where he won the Golden Lion for his piece The Clock.
58. Rebecca May-Marston: Director of Hoxton’s Limoncello gallery, and One of the Independent’s 10 gallery owners who ‘are changing – and challenging – the British art scene’.
59. Ben Moore: Artist/Curator of Art Below (new) a London based public art enterprise, founded in 2006 using billboard space in underground stations to display artworks in London and overseas.
60. Simon Morrissey: independent curator and writer on contemporary art, who regularly talks publicly about contemporary art and curating, as well as frequently acting as a visiting tutor on a number of leading Fine Art courses at UK universities.
61. Gregor Muir: Executive Director of the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.
62. Banksy clever street artist and art guerrilla. Nominated this year for setting up a stand in New York and selling ‘Spray Art’ for £40 a pop. Real value £20,000-£100,000 He sold 6 paintings for $420.
63. Andrew Nairne: Director of Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, Chair of the Visual Arts and Galleries Association (VAGA), and former Director of Modern Art Oxford.
64. *Elizabeth Neilson: Director 176 Zabludowicz Collection
65. *Hans Ulrich Obrist/ Julia Peyton-Jones: the Serpentine Gallery’s Co-directors of Exhibitions and Programmes.
66. Kirsty Ogg: curator at the Whitechapel Gallery and of the London Open, and Lecturer in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London.
67. Yoko Ono: Japanese painter, and performance based,Director of Meltdown festival 2013
68. Sandra Penketh Director of Art Galleries National Museums Liverpool
69. Nicholas Penny, FSA a British art historian. Since Spring 2008 he has been director of the National Gallery in London.
70. *Grayson Perry: artist known for his work in ceramics, and awarded the Turner Prize in 2003, self-curated show The Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman at the British Museum 2011, received BAFTA in 2013 for his series All in the best possible Taste and will deliver this year’s Reith Lectures for Radio 4
71. Michael Petry: multi-media artist, writer and curator. Director of MOCA London, co-founder of the Museum of Installation, (new)
72. Heather Phillipson: video and installation artist, 2013 exhibitions at Zabludowicz collection, BALTIC centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
73. Victoria Pomery: Director of Turner Contemporary since 2002, previously the Senior Curator at Tate Liverpool, has worked at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, Australia, and was part of the selection panel for the 2007 Ebbsfleet Landmark Project.
74: Alan Powers: teacher, researcher, writer. Former chair of 20th century society (2007-12) and organizer of the campaign to save public art around UK. (new)
75. Elizabeth Price: video artist and winner of the 2012 Turner Prize
76. Laure Provost: filmmaker and 2013 Turner Prize nominee, Her piece Wantee was included in the Tate’s Schwitters in Britain exhibition. (new)
77. Pussy Riot: Russian guerilla art movement, three members were imprisoned last year based on their involvement in an “anti-Putin” ‘art performance’ piece.
78. Gerhard Richter: German visual artist who specializes in abstract photorealism.
79. David Roberts: Prolific art collector in the UK, in 2008 started the ‘David Roberts Art Foundation’ to help emerging artists and young curators.
80. Ralph Rugoff: Director of the Hayward Gallery, previously Director of the Wattis Institute, best known for his curated work Just Pathetic (1990).
81. *Tino Seghal: British-German artist of partly Indian origin, based in Berlin. Exhibited at Tate Modern for the 2012 Unilever series commission. Won Golden Lion for best artist at 2013 Venice Biennale and nominated for Turner Prize 2013.
82. Nicholas Serota: Director of the Tate (1988-present) and the driving force behind the opening of the Tate Modern. Has participated on the board of The Architecture Foundation and chaired the Turner Prize jury.
83. Amanda Sharp/Matthew Slotover: founders of Frieze magazine and the Frieze Art Fair in London and New York
84. David Shrigley: British Artist known for his work in humorous cartoon style, contributes a weekly cartoon to the Guardian’s weekend paper, and has exhibited internationally including solo shows in New York, Gateshead, Barcelona and Mainz. Nominated for 2013 Turner Prize.
85. Taryn Simon: American art photographer, with a major feature show at the Tate Modern in 2011.
86. Bob and Roberta Smith: contemporary British artist operating under pseudonym, famous for painting slogan-bearing signage in support of various activist campaigns.
87. Donald Smith: CHELSEA Space Director, with the ambition to create ‘a research development centre for invited art and design professionals, providing a gallery space, library research facilities, and a platform to develop personal projects that may otherwise remain unrealised’.
88. Polly Staple: Director of London’s C
hisenhale Gallery, contributing editor to Frieze, on jury panel for Max Mara Art Prize for Women 2009- 2011, and one of the Guardian’s 2010 ‘women to watch’.
89. Katherine Stout: Head of Programmes at ICA, formerly Head of Contemporary art at Tate Modern. (new)
90. Callum Sutton; CEO Sutton PR – 2013 clients included Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries,
91. Paul Warwick Thompson: Rector of the Royal College of Art, served as Director of the Smithsonian’s National Design Museum in New York until 2009, trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a Member of the Wellcome Collection Advisory Committee at the Wellcome Trust.
92: Jeremy Till: Head of Central St Martins Art School since 2012 (new)
93. John Tusa: British arts administrator, currently the Chairman of the University of the Arts London, presented BBC 2’s Newsnight from 1980-1986, from 1995-2007 was managing director of the Barbican Arts Centre, London, and is Honorary Chairman of theartsdesk.com.
94. Christoph Vogtherr: Director of the Wallace Collection from October 2011, previously the Curator of pre-1800 pictures at the Wallace Collection.
95. Mark Wallinger: sculptor and installation artist, double Turner Prize nominee, won the Prize in 2007 for the work State Britain. Notable work includes the sculpture on the Fourth Plinth of Trafalgar Square Ecce Homo (1999). Created Labyrinth for 150th anniversary of the London Underground in 2013.
96. Ai Weiwei: Chinese contemporary artist and political activist, awarded Das Glas der Vernuft Kassel citizen award in 2010, and serving as an Artistic consultant for the 2008 Olympics Bejing National Stadium.
97. Matt Williams: Curator of exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, and co-editor of the annual publication Novel, which focuses on artists’ writing and poetry.
98.Godfrey Worsdale: Director of the BALTIC centre for contemporary art, Gateshead, responsible for hosting the Turner Prize 2011, Vice Chairman of the UK’s Visual Art and Galleries Association, and selector for the 2011 Threadneedle Prize for Painting and Sculpture.
99. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Exhibited Extracts and Verses at Chisenhale Gallery, nominated for 2013 Turner Prize (new)
100. Anita and Poju Zabludowicz: founded the Zabludowicz Collection in 2007, a space for exhibitions, commissions and residencies, as well as establishing the Zabludowicz Collection ‘Curatorial Open’ and ‘Testing Ground’ programmes to promote contemporary art education. She is also a key sponsor of the upcoming Sunday Art Fair.
It’s London’s turn in the great art fair cycle, and Frieze and its satellites have descended upon the British city for the eleventh year. The Carmody Groarke-designed pavilion will be even roomier this year, with wider aisles to suit visitor’s comfort and optimize the art-viewing experience. Along with the expected roster of top galleries, the fair welcomes some new seasoned faces like Blum & Poe, Marian Goodman and Maccarone. As expected, the powers behind Frieze have a world class line up of special exhibitions, film, and a sculpture park curated by Clare Lilley, Director of Programs at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, that will pair contemporary and historical pieces, giving a well-rounded presentation of modern masters like Judy Chicago, Jaume Plensa and Rachel Whiteread.
Judy Chicago, Rearrangeable Rainbow Blocks, 1965. Courtesy of Riflemaker.
Nicola Lees of the Frieze Foundation will put her newly-appointed curatorial imprint on the fair, curating both Frieze Projects and Frieze Film, for which she partners with Victoria Brooks of EMPAC (Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center) at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. This year, Frieze Projects has commissioned site specific pieces by Andreas Angelidakis, Gerry Bibby, Rivane Neueunschwander, Ken Okiishi, Angelo Plessas, Lili Reynaud-Dewar and Josepf Strau, while Frieze Film has commissioned works by Petra Cortright, Peter Gidal, Patricia Lennox-Boyd, Oraib Toukan and Erika Vogt, made during a residency at EMPAC.
Petra Cortright, vvebcam, 2007, avi file, webcam video, 1:42 min. Courtesy of Frieze.
For the collector seeking the art historical, Frieze Masters will return, with highlighted works by Pieter Breughel the Younger, Murillo, Velazquez, and modern masters like Bacon, Calder, Guston, Picasso and Pollock. There is also an incredible Masters Talks program planned with contemporary artists John Currin and Catherine Opie, whose work references the historic, whether in subject or technique, alongside conversations between the Victoria and Albert’s Director Martin Roth and Beatriz Milhazes, and the Kunsthustorisches Museums’ Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Jasper Sharp with Richard Wright.
Pieter Brueghel the Younger, L’Auberge St. Michel, 1619. Courtesy of De Jonckheere.
Philip Guston, Untitled (Shoe), 1968. Courtesy of McKEee Gallery.
This year Frieze will also bring its influences into the retail realm, with a partnership with fair sponsor Alexander McQueen. During the fair, the London retail stores (Bond Street and Saville Row) will feature contemporary art curated by Sadie Coles, once again merging art and fashion like the late designer did so expertly.
The exciting week will kick off on October 17, with special combination discounts for art lovers visiting both the Frieze and Frieze Masters Fairs. And once you have had your fill at the main fair here is a selection of satellite fairs to visit, guaranteeing something
for everyone, including cutting edge contemporary, street art, video art , African art, artist multiples and design.
The edgy satellite fair features only 20 galleries, with an emphasis on the best of emerging art. The feel is like a large group show, without the stereotypical booths that define an art fair (exhibitors are instead separated by tape on the floor). This year’s participants include New York’s White Columns and London’s Studio Voltaire, with a fair sponsor of ICA.
Still from Annika Larsson’s Animal in 14 movements, 2012, video, 41 minutes. Courtesy of Moving Image.
The unique fair returns to the Bargehouse to celebrate video art, including 30 single-channel videos, video sculptures and large video installations. The fair brings the issues surrounding the collecting video art to the forefront, even offering the “AV Bar,” a sort of take on the Mac Store’s Genius Bar, to answer collectors’ questions about displaying and caring for video art. This year curators, Kyle Chayka and Marina Galerpina, will indulge the self-portrait craze, with the National #Selfie Portrait Gallery, featuring short form “selfies” from 16 emerging video artists from the EU and the US.
For its fourth year, the street and urban art fair will be shacking up with The Other Fair at the iconic Old Truman Brewery. Expect works by recognizable urban artists like Banksy, The London Police, D Face, Greg La Marche, Shepard Fairey and Pure Evil, plus special installations.
Delphine Lebourgeois, Deesse VIII Photo de Classe. Limited edition of 3 Giclee print finished by hand with pencils and inks. Courtesy of The Other Fair.
Also at the Old Truman Brewery on Brick Lane, The Other Fair offers collectors a chance to scoop up works by over 100 unrepresented artists. The fair fosters artists year round by offering free seminars and workshops to help them enter the art market and connect talent with buyers.
Stephen Hobbs, Pop-up Book, 2013, silkscreen book, Courtesy of David Krut Projects, Johannesburg, Cape Town & New York.
Collectors of prints, editions and multiples can find all they are looking for at the fourth edition of Multiplied. With an emphasis on art priced for every budget to bring art to everyone, Multiplied extends this mission with its charity affiliate, Vital Arts, which brings art, music and performance to hospital patients. The fair, located at Christie’s auction house in South Kensington, is free to the public and will feature live printmaking workshops and an exhibition by Graduate students of the Royal College of Art’s Print Department.
New to Frieze Week this year, 1:54 is the first contemporary African Art Fair and brings together 17 carefully curated galleries, accompanied by an educational and artistic program curated by Koyo Kouch. 1:54 will also offer lectures, film screenings and talks, such as Hans Ulrich Obrist in conversation with Godfried Donkor, Christine Eyene in conversation with Senam Okudzeto, as well as a discussion on building an African collection of contemporary art. The 1:54 fair aims to educate visitors on the importance, context and market of African art.
The PAD fair is designed to ask art collectors and enthusiasts to relate fine art to the same context as design, decorative arts, photography and tribal arts, encouraging visitors to use each of these elements to find their aesthetic voice by building comprehensive collections that touch on each genre. The eclectic fair offers pieces steeped in history, museum quality art works, notable photography and design furniture of the highest caliber, all set in an all encompassing, boutique style atmosphere.
Chris Burden’s “Extreme Measures” Exhibition Opens In New York
by Gary Pini
A major retrospective of works by the California-based artist Chris Burden opens tomorrow in New York City. Covering the artist’s forty year career, Extreme Measures fills all five floors of the New Museum on the Bowery and will remain on view until January 12, 2014. This is Burden’s first major U.S. exhibition in twenty years and it includes two giant pieces installed on the museum’s exterior. While you’re there, be sure to check out the museum’s new food vendor, Hester Street Cafe, operated by the folks who run the Hester Street Fair. They created some tasty treats to go along with several sculptures seen in the exhibit, as you’ll see below in our sneak-peek walk thru.
Thirty-six foot tall structure on the museum’s roof called Twin Quasi Legal Skyscrapers (2013) and Ghost Ship (2005) on the facade.
Hester Street Cafe homage to “Ghost Ship.”
One Ton Crane Truck, 2009
Hester Street Cafe’s homage to One Ton Crane Truck
Porsche with Meteorite, 2013
Porsche with Meteorite (detail), 2013
Hester Street Cafe’s homage to Porsche with Meteorite
The Big Wheel (1979), a cast iron wheel powered by a motorcycle.
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chris burden: extreme measures at new museum
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Oct 05, 2013
chris burden: extreme measures at new museum
courtesy new museum, new york. photo: benoit pailley
chris burden new museum, new york now through january 12, 2014
new museum, new york presents ‘extreme measures’ by chris burden: a selection of the artist’s expansive body of work, which has traversed an incredible spectrum of mediums including performance, sculpture, and installation. thematically, the exhibition focuses on boundaries and constraints, and the point at which physical and moral limits are called into question. the show’s namesake ‘extreme measures’ is a succinct characterization of burden’s prolific, 40-year career: pushing material, object, and body to their maximum allowance and studying the aftermath. his early work remains some of the most controversial and influential art of the 1970s, redefining performance with ‘shoot’ in 1971, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant at a gallery in california, and ‘trans-fixed’ in 1974, where he was crucified to the hood of a volkswagen beetle. one of burden’s central motives in artistic expression is to experiment and challenge the idea of personal danger.
following his expansive interactive endeavors, burden began to translate his provocative aesthetic into sculpture, creating a series of ambitious work that appropriated the context of huge machinery as artwork. ‘the big wheel’ created in 1979 had a death-defying member of the museum staff power the rotation of a three-ton cast fly wheel of a 1968 benelli motorcycle. ‘beam drop’, iterated most recently at inhotim, brazil (see designboom’s coverage of artwork here) is a structural assembly of steel I-beams that had been dropped from a height of 45 meters by a construction crane into a three meter-deep wet concrete pit.
‘chris burden: extreme measures’ at new museum, new york, 2013
courtesy new museum, new york. photo: benoit pailley
most recently, burden’s work can be seen taking over all five floors of the new museum, including its facade. he has installed two sculptures directly onto the surface of the museum’s stacked architecture: one placed on the roof and the other fastened to its side. crowning the building are two, massive aluminum-frame towers placed beside each other, undoubtedly resembling the world trade center structures. seemingly stuck to its side, a thirty-foot handmade sailboat ‘ghost ship’ casually rests near the entrance, which burden intended to allude to a rescue ship in the aftermath of hurricane sandy. even through non-performance, burden responds with an extreme reinterpretation of the contemporary art museum’s already exaggerated engineering, demonstrating his ever-present eagerness to provoke and defy.
‘chris burden: extreme measures’ at new museum, new york, 2013
courtesy new museum, new york. photo: benoit pailley
chris burden
ghost ship, 2005
thirty-foot handmade sixern sailboat, computers and software, hydraulics, global positioning system, auto rudder, rigging; mast
360 in (914.4 cm); overall: 72 x 102 x 360 in (182.9 x 259 x 914.4 cm)
courtesy the artist and gagosian gallery, photo: chris burden
‘chris burden: extreme measures’ at new museum, new york, 2013
courtesy new museum, new york. photo: benoit pailley
chris burden
three arch dry stack bridge, ¼ scale, 2013
974 hand-cast concrete blocks, wood base
45 ½ × 331 × 21 in (115.5 × 840.7 × 53.3 cm)
image courtesy the artist
chris burden
the big wheel, 1979
three-ton, eight-foot diameter, cast-iron flywheel powered by a 1968 benelli 250cc motorcycle
112 x 175 x 143 in (284.5 x 444.5 x 363.2 cm)
collection the museum of contemporary art collection, los angeles
chris burden
the big wheel, 1979
three-ton, eight-foot diameter, cast-iron flywheel powered by a 1968 benelli 250cc motorcycle
112 x 175 x 143 in (284.5 x 444.5 x 363.2 cm)
collection the museum of contemporary art collection, los angeles
chris burden
1 ton crane truck, 2009
restored 1964 f350 ford crane truck with one-ton cast-iron weight
14 ft × 22 ft 10 in × 8 ft (4.2 × 6.9 × 2.4 m)
courtesy the artist and gagosian gallery
chris burden
1 ton crane truck, 2009
restored 1964 f350 ford crane truck with one-ton cast-iron weight
14 ft × 22 ft 10 in × 8 ft (4.2 × 6.9 × 2.4 m)
courtesy the artist and gagosian gallery
chris burden
triple 21 foot truss bridge, 2013
stainless steel reproduction mysto type i erector parts
45 ¾ × 701 × 14 ¾ in (116.2 × 1780.5 × 37.5 cm)
courtesy the artist
chris burden
all the submarines of the united states of america, 1987
625 miniature cardboard submarines
96 x 240 x 144 in (243.8 x 609 x 365.2 cm)
dallas museum of art purchase with funds donated by the jolesch acquisition fund, the 500 inc., the national endowment for the arts, bradbury dyer, iii, mr. and mrs. bryant m. hanley, jr., mr. and mrs. michael c. mewhinney, deedie and rusty rose, and mr. and mrs. william t. solomon
chris burden
l.a.p.d. uniforms, 1993
wool serge, metal, leather, wood, plastic
88 × 72 × 6 in (223.5 × 182.8 × 15.2 cm) each
collection: marion boulton stroud, philadelphia; and collection: fabric workshop and museum, philadelphia
photo courtesy of fabric workshop
Chris Burden, “Trans-fixed” (April 23, 1974). Performance, Venice, California. Documentary photograph in three-ring binder. (all photos by the author for Hyperallergic)
What’s most compelling about Chris Burden: Extreme Measures — the Los Angeles-based artist’s first New York retrospective, which has taken over five floors of the New Museum— is what’s not there. Or almost not there.
What is almost not there, by its very nature, is his early performance work, which now exists only as text descriptions and a handful of photographs and video clips. The New Museum has gathered a chronological compilation of the texts and photos into three-ring binders, which are placed on desks in the fifth floor gallery. There are also some videos playing in the corner of the room.
These events, which took place between 1971 and 1977, courted real danger and tested real limits. The most notorious of them all, of course, is “Shoot” (November 19, 1971), in which Burden arranged to have himself shot in the left arm by a .22 caliber rifle. As reckless as it was, the piece made a crazy kind of sense against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the political assassinations still echoing from the recently extinguished Sixties.
But “Shoot,” at least for me, is not the hardest to take of Burden’s early works, perhaps because it is over so quickly (the film clip of the shooting and its aftermath is a brisk eight seconds long) or because Burden’s reaction to being shot is so unintentionally comical — gripping his arm as he quickly trots forward, evidently in a state of shock, with a wide-legged, Chaplinesque gait.
Chris Burden, “Pair of Namur Mortars” (2013). Bronze, wood, iron, steel, stone. Dimensions: Each mortar: 60 × 132 × 48 inches. Each stack four cannon balls: 36 × 36 inches. Approximate weight of each mortar, cradle, and four cannonballs: 12,000 lbs. Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery.
In my book, the award for the most grueling performance goes to “Trans-fixed” (April 23, 1974). Burden’s typewritten text for the piece begins as follows:
Inside a small garage on Speedway Avenue, I stood on the rear bumper of a Volkswagen. I lay on my back over the rear section of the car, stretching my arms onto the roof. Nails were driven through my palms into the roof of the car.
The implications of this piece are much wider than “Shoot’s” plaintive political statement. Its reenactment of the Crucifixion on a Volkswagen indicts both consumerism and a cultural amnesia that transformed the Hitler-sponsored “people’s car” into Walt Disney’s Love Bug (1968). But its theatricality (“Screaming for me,” Burden continues, “the engine was run at full speed for two minutes”) and the power of its imagery — the documentary photo of the artist splayed against the roof of the car — take the work to another level, probing psychosexual recesses too tender to touch.
By driving hard nails through warm flesh into cold steel — taking literally, and to extremes, the devotional ideal expressed in Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ (ca.1418-1427) — Burden is excavating the unspoken masochism adjoined to the pursuit of perfection. By submitting to the pressures imposed by an impossible ideal while simultaneously controlling the terms of his martyrdom and subverting it with irony, Burden’s ultimate act of self-abnegation may be seen as the ultimate act of defiance — and yet his overriding fatalism, defiant or not, leaves him in the end pinned, tortured and helpless.
It is admirable that the curators of the exhibition, Lisa Phillips, Massimiliano Gioni, Jenny Moore and Margot Norton, decided to leave the documentation of the early performances in binders on desks rather than follow the recent vogue for reenactment (who would sign up for that gig?) or otherwise “bring the performances to life.”
The documentation is extraordinarily powerful in the simplicity of its texts and photos — nothing extra is needed. The binders may be overlooked by the casual visitor, but that too bears implications for the passage of time in an artist’s career and the inherent transience of the art form.
The rest of the show is a choice selection of Burden’s big sculptures, with only a few per floor (and a single piece in the lobby), which makes for an uncluttered assessment of the artist’s concerns after his performance heyday.
Those concerns — which can be summed up as a pas de deux of vulnerability and aggression — are not surprisingly closely related to his early work. Where nails, pins and a bullet once pierced real flesh, we now have full-scale reproductions in bronze, wood, iron, steel and stone of 17th-century mortars and cannonballs (“Pair of Namur Mortars,” 2013) and a fleet of 625 cardboard model submarines (“All the Submarines of the United States of America,” 1987).
Chris Burden, “The Big Wheel” (1979). Three-ton, eight-foot diameter, cast-iron flywheel powered by a 1968 Benelli 250cc motorcycle, 112 × 175 × 143 inches. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Gift of Lannan Foundation.
The retrospective makes the case that Burden’s work is all about power: who is wielding it, who is subject to it, and how the tide can swiftly turn. Some of the works are spectacular, such as the fourth-floor show-stopper “The Big Wheel” (1979), in which a three-ton iron flywheel is set in motion by the rear tire of a revving motorcycle, while others, like the lineup of Los Angeles police uniforms, “L.A.P.D. Uniforms” (1993), made in response to the Rodney King incident, fall flat. A couple of others, most notably “Tower of Power” (1985) — one hundred one-kilo (32-ounce) gold bricks protected by sixteen needle-toting matchstick men (and one very real security guard) — are both overproduced and painfully obvious.
Chris Burden, “Porsche with Meteorite” (2013). Restored 1974 Porsche 914 with 365-pound meteorite, steel frame. Dimensions: 13 ft 6 in x 38 ft 9 in x 13 ft 6 in; car: 3ft 111⁄2in high x 13 ft 6 in long x 5 ft 4 in wide, weight: 2,190 lbs; meteorite: 15 x 17 x 15 in., weight: 365 lbs; steel structure: 13 ft 6 in x 35 ft x 6 ft; 5,025 lbs total. Courtesy the artist
But some of the more intriguing pieces, including “The Big Wheel” and “Porsche with Meteorite” (2013), in which a 365-pound meteorite holds in balance a 2,190-pound restored 1974 Porsche 914, demonstrate that a small amount of pressure, correctly applied, can withstand or upset otherwise overpowering forces (a circumstance that lends a double meaning to the exhibition’s subtitle, Extreme Measures).
That the meteorite is a heavenly body powerful enough to levitate a much heavier manmade object (and that the car, a ’74 Porsche, was produced the same year as “Trans-fixed” and that Ferdinand Porsche was tasked by Hitler with the design and production of the Volkswagen) makes you wonder how reflexively allusive Burden’s work might be.
One of the more remarkable post-performance pieces is also one that is almost not there. It is “Beam Drop,” which first took place in 1984 at Artpark, in Lewistown, New York, with later iterations at Inhotim Centro de Arte Contemporanea, in Minas Gerais, Brazil (2008), and the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp, Belgium (2009). The piece involves hoisting I-beams 100 feet into the air via crane and then dropping them into a large bed of wet concrete.
The work is documented by three videos at the exhibition, and watching the process is mesmerizing. The first few beams land safely in the concrete, tipping only slightly with plenty of space between them, but as more are added — approximately sixty in all — the danger of their striking each other, clanking and sparking and landing at precarious angles, increases dramatically. The result is a stark aggregate of fractiousness, a steel thicket manifesting a mangled beauty harnessed only by letting go.
Chris Burden: Extreme Measures continues at the New Museum (235 Bowery, Lower East Side, Manhattan) through January 12, 2014.
The curator of the 13th Istanbul Biennial recounts to Domus her position in between the institution, the artists and the public after Gezi Park occupation.
The 13th Istanbul Biennial is one of the most important on the international art scene and opened on 12 September. Over the years, the Istanbul Biennial has appointed curators with an urban focus and an interest in the links between art and social change. This year’s case is an even stronger example than usual as, for years, Fulya Erdemci was director of SKOR, Foundation Art and Public Space, Amsterdam, and has always formulated the concept of an art that is not happy to merely portray but demands an active role, aspiring to shape the present world and that of the future – except that, this year, the reality has trumped if not art but certainly the Biennial.
The eruption of protests that began in Gezi Park shook Turkey at a time when the Biennial project had already been finalised. The marches, occupations, major demonstrations and various forms of resistance have eclipsed many artistic interventions in the field. In such a suddenly and radically changed scenario, the Biennial has been hit by controversy and had to defend itself. Many of the works express a sense of hope, courage, radicalism and critical thought but explaining these issues quickly and forcefully is an ongoing challenge for the Biennial. Certainly, with its troubled process and the hullaballoo generated, this Biennial not only reflects the complexity of the moment but has also helped highlight the stereotypes and superficiality of the debate on art and its meaning.
Gabi Scardi: Is Istanbul situation affecting your work for the Biennial? If yes, in what sense? What is your position?
Fulya Erdemci: Actually, the conceptual framework of the 13th Istanbul biennial articulates three axis: a theoretical one based on the notion of public domain as a probable political public forum, and a practical axis that takes the urban public spaces and the violent urban transformation as the praxis sites. As you know, the title of the biennial “Mom, am I barbarian?” is a quotation from a Turkish poet Lale Muldur that forms the artistic axis of the exhibition in terms of the unknown or yet to be invented languages as well as art’s and social movements’ relation with poetry. Certainly, before Gezi, we have planned to realize many projects that intervene with the urban public spaces of Istanbul including Gezi Park and Taksim square as well.
Above: Sener Ozmen, From the series Untitled (Megafon), 2005, detail. Courtesy the artist and Pilot Galeri, Istanbul; top: 13th Istanbul Biennial posters
What is happening in Istanbul right now is larger than life and certainly, it is not comparable to any exhibition or art event. We are all very surprised, exalted and full of hope again. The so-called public sphere, which was merely a question of probability before, has been split open with such a creative energy that the streets have begun to talk, sing, dance, walk and interact. The questions posed in the conceptual framework of the İstanbul Biennial—which is directly related to public domain as a political forum and urban spaces as the spatial component of the democratic apparatus—have alchemically unfolded and entered into the domain of experience. This has changed, transformed us all. It has opened up new horizons we could never have anticipated.
During and just after the Gezi occupation (it was halted violently on the 15th and 16th of June), we didn’t have much time to think and work on the biennial. As everything is very recent and still in the process, it is not easy to respond to the situation through an exhibition in biennial-scale. However, the conceptual framework of the biennial has already articulated these issues, and the art works and projects were selected in accordance with such considerations and criteria. I believe that the biennial exhibition can open up a space for thinking around the transformative experience that we have been going through.
Afterwards, the biennial has been on the verge of radical changes: we have been considering withdrawing from the public domain totally and giving the stage to what has happened and is still happening in the parks, streets and neighborhoods without capitalizing or framing them. After all, we seriously questioned what it meant to collaborate with the authorities to realize art projects on the streets with their permission while the same authorities have been trying to suppress the resistance violently, even the most innocent performances, actions and happenings such as Man Standing or the collective Ramadan dinners (Earth Tables) on the streets. After having made meetings and forums to ask the opinion of the artists, curators, critics and activists, we have reached a final decision of withdrawing from the urban public spaces.
Left Fulya Erdemci (curator) with Bige Örer (event’s director)
Gabi Scardi: From the curatorial perspective, this must be a very challenging situation. What is your position, as a curator between an institution, the artists and the public?
Fulya Erdemci: As an established art institution with an independent international advisory board structure, Istanbul Biennial is able to create a free zone for curatorial practices and concepts. And that is how I was able to bring out my critical reflections in the biennial concept and selection of artistic practices. As I mentioned in the conceptual framework of the biennial, we see that while artistic practices that claim public domain become more prevalent, simultaneously under the spell of privatization, art institutions have become dependent on private funding and commercial support. Our research for the Biennial extends to an investigation of the relation of art and Capital, furthermore, how the “booming” art world, specifically its market, functions in Istanbul and elsewhere, and what traces of this impact we might find. And certainly, unorthodox artistic methods and practices including performances dealing with the issues related to public domain (as a political public forum) constitutes one of the major aspects of my curatorial agenda.
Freee, Protest is Beautiful: Tottehnam, 2007/2013. Photo: Ben Fitton/courtesy: Freee art collective
Gabi Scardi: What about the position of the artists involved in the Biennial?
Fulya Erdemci: For artists, the negotiation with the institutions and the sponsorship systems is a part of their exhibition making practices. I invited artists, who even extend this practice into their artistic productions. Hence, they will share their critical assesments on such risky grounds without giving up their political positions.
Gabi Scardi: Is the high level of energy, tension and conflictuality of the context affecting their projects a lot ? are they activating a dialogue with Turkish context and events? are there new works generated by this situation? Could you make some examples?
Fulya Erdemci: The high level of energy, tension and conflictuality has been in the air for such a long time, much before the Gezi resistance broke out. For that reason, the selection of the works and the development of the new projects were realized in such a context. However, certain projects we need to rethink and now we are in the process of revising them. Actually, I didn’t want to ask artists to comment on Gezi directly as it is too early to digest or react, and thus, might lead to premature births. And yet, some artists have already hinted or foreseen such questions in their works and wanted to extend their ideas to connect with these new political questions raised by Gezi resistance, with whom I am in dialogue right now.
Furthermore, as I mentioned briefly above, “barbarian” refers to languages, especially the ones that we don’t know or yet to invent to call a new world that has just been appearing in the horizon. We all feel that the existing theories and formulas fall short to define new ways/models of living together and governance, but art can open up that possibility for the collective imagination. Therefore, art works in the biennial exhibition that are calling or intending to create novel unorthodox languages (or learn the unknowns ones) can help to understand the new collective culture and languages of the Resistance that have been appearing like a nebula.
Furthermore, I believe that the biennial exhibition can function, not as a tool for an immediate change, but as a process of thinking, besides all, as a possible way of constructing new subjectivities symbolized by the “barbarian”.
Gabi Scardi: I guess that the response and awareness towards the situation are different for Turkish and non turkish artists. If so, in what terms?
Fulya Erdemci: Some of the artists from Turkey directly has gone through the transformative experience of Gezi occupation. Certainly, this creates a major difference in the psyche of the works.
Gabi Scardi: How, on which basis, and with which kind of instruments can we analyse the impact, result and value of an artwork in relation with such a situation?
Fulya Erdemci: The certain art works (including poetry or other forms of literature or film, etc) have the capacity to create such a transformative experience opening up the possibility of utopic moments in our daily routines. So, I believe that such art projects may have paved the road in the formation of collective imagination and action that we have been experiencing through Gezi resistance. However, I don’t think that we can compare art projects’ impact with activism. Though they may have the same aim of changing the society in the face of urgency or learn from each other, they cannot be evaluated with the same criteria or the form of impact
5533 is an independent art insitution founded by the young Turkish artist Volkan Aslan and Nancy Atakan, an American artist and art historian
Gabi Scardi: I know you are interested in “public” works for “public” spaces, in unauthorised public interventions. How does the current situation of tension influence or condition the possibility to put this kind of interventions in place?
Fulya Erdemci: Our initial approach to this situation had two folds: First, the biennial focuses on the debated places and neighbourhoods under transformation to be able to create political public forum beyond the already existing polarized positions and roles to open up the possibility of co-producing the city with its citizens. Secondly, the biennial takes certain grass-root organizations on board, in terms of aiding artistic research and collaborations in order to highlight and bring out the engagement and relations of these resistance platforms with the dislocated communities and neighbourhoods.
As mentioned previously, we decided to withdraw from the urban public spaces very recently. However, when I was structuring the exhibition before Gezi, I have never intended to commission or include the immediate/spontaneous activist/protest art that was supposed to happen in the streets directly in the biennial exhibition, as I believe that they shouldn’t be domesticated or tamed in the institutional frames at which they are reacting. However, I was thinking that it was possible to highlight them if they were there already.
Gabi Scardi: Democracy, livability, social sustainability, publicness, the space of the city; all these concepts are urgent to be discussed. and I guess that this Biennial happening in this very situation is a good place to do it.
Fulya Erdemci: Actually, the concept of the Biennale is directly linked to it. In the conceptual framework, through Chantal Mouffe, I asked how art can open up the conflict to create an agonistic space without reaching a consensus (under which the weakest voices are repressed) to be able to discuss the urgent issues related to the rights and citizenship, to be able to open the ways for collective imagination. Actually, the creative, collective, anonymous and self-organized living and action capacity came out from the Gezi occupation taught (and still teaching) us how diverse, even clashing World views and practices can live together and act together. This was/is one of the main questions that we have asked in the “Public Alchemy” through Bruno Latour’s quotation: “And yet, we are all in the same boat, or at least same flotilla. To use Neurath’s metaphor, the question is how to rebuild it while we are cruising on it. Or rather, how can we make it navigate when it is made of a fleet of diverging but already intertwined barges? In other words, can we overcome the multiplicity of ways of assembling and dissembling, and yet raise the question of the one common world?” [1].
The works and projects in the exhibition in diverse languages and forms articulate and reflect on such complicated layers. Besides, the term ‘barbarian’ in the conceptual framework of the biennial refers to strikingly to the rights of citizenship. It refers to “the antonym of ‘politis’, the ‘citizen’, coming from the polis, the Greek city-state. It is a term that relates inversely to the city and the rights of those within it. We asked what it means to be a good citizen today, in Istanbul for example. In the midst of the ongoing urban transformations – the “battleground” – does it mean to conform to the existing status quo or take part in the acts of civil disobedience? One level of the exhibition is dealing with the concept of barbarian as outcasts, bandits, anarchists or revolutionaries. It also implies to imagine another social contract in which citizens assume responsibility for each other, even for the weakest ones, those most excluded. In this specific focus, what is happening in Istanbul, Ankara, Antakya, Izmir and other cities is related directly to civil disobedience to assume responsibility for the fellow citizens, even the most excluded ones. In this sense, the whole resistance is about a new social contract that the works in the biennial are opening up to discussion.
LaToya Ruby Frazier, “Self Portrait In Gramps’ Pajamas”, 2009
Gabi Scardi: But how do you conciliate them with the art system logics and reasons that are, in one degree or another, unavoidable when we speak about Biennials?
Fulya Erdemci: I took biennial machine as an apparatus that you can use for different reasons. In my case, I used it as a critical machine questioning and unfolding such systems from within. Besides, reversing what is happening in the urban public spaces (privatization and commercialization of what previously belonged to public), we try to create public spaces inside the (mostly) private ones. As a part of this understanding, we worked a lot but finally achieved to make the biennial free of charge for this edition so that anyone can experience art without any financial barriers.
Gabi Scardi: In conclusion, do you think you could say which is the role of art in relation to the contemporary society and to its, sometimes violent, transformations?
Fulya Erdemci: As I mentioned shortly, I believe that art can open up a space for a transformative experience thus has the capacity to foster the construction of new subjectivities. I think that art can create a reflective experience to be able to halt and think that we desperately need now in the process of such turmoil (under the increasing state violence, detentions and arrests) or other powerful transformations that we are going through.
[1] Latour Bruno, From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik – or how to Make Things Public, in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, Cambridge, MIT Press, 2005
Fulya Erdemci, curator of the 13th Istanbul Biennial, took its title “Mom, Am I Barbarian?”, from a book by Turkish poet Lale Muldur, and states in the catalogue that she aims to explore the theme of the public domain as a political forum. The word ‘Barbarian’ is used in this instance to signify people who are marginalized by society: the anarchists, revolutionaries and outcasts – be they artists, demonstrators or poets.The Biennial runs until 20 October, and features 88 artists and artist groups, from Turkey and around the world, whose practice examines issues of barbarity and civilization, occupation, isolation from society and persecution by authorities.
The original aim of Erdemci was to bring art to public spaces all over Istanbul and exhibit in buildings that were due to be demolished. However, in reality the Biennial has been contained within 5 exhibition venues; Antrepo No. 3 next to Istanbul Modern, the Galata Greek primary school, Arter in Beyoglu, Salt Gallery and 5533.
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A crane is positioned by the entrance of the Antrepo No. 3 exhibition, with a plastic ball banging intermittently against the wall. Perhaps a slightly too obvious metaphor for the threatened demolition of sites around the city such as Gezi Park, which stoked the fire of the May protests in Taksim Square.
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What captured our attention inside were; drawings by Christoph Schafer of urban occupations and transformations; slogans by UK artist collective FREEE ‘Protest Drives History’;
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Scottish artist Nathan Coley’s neon sign ‘Gathering of Strangers’; Portuguese installation artist Carla Filipe’s ‘If there is no culture there is nothing’; films by Polish “Theatre of Behaviour” Akademia Ruchu;
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and most intriguingly, SUSPECT by Guillaume Bijl, a Belgian artist whose installation recreates a studio ransacked by police who suspected him of being an anarchist/ outsider. The artists selected for the Istanbul Biennial represent a wide range of nationalities, and are connected by a loose thread in their practices, which examine issues of freedom of speech and notions of the artist or anarchist as an outsider.Last week in Istanbul, as international visitors arrived in the city for the opening of the 13thIstanbul Biennial, protests erupted once again in Taksim Square, the largest demonstrations in the city centre since the occupation of the square back in May.
How ironic then, that on the Tuesday of the Biennial opening week, we were en route to our hotel when our eyes started stinging, our nostrils tingled, and we began sneezing and coughing. “Is it gas?” we asked our taxi driver. “Ah yes. Tear gas.” He replied nonchalantly. We hid out on the roof of our hotel, watching fireworks thrown by protestors on the bridge, and viewing protestors filtering towards Taksim Square, to be confronted by riot police armed with water cannon and tear gas.
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All Images Sky Sharrock But it was business as usual the next day for us Londoner’s, who have experienced protests in our own city, when we headed to the peaceful Fener district of the city, where Kalliopi Lemos and curator Beral Madra have brought to life an empty Greek Girl’s School – Ioakimion – for a powerful and thought-provoking exhibition of sculptures, juxtaposed with a sound installation that examines some of the injustices faced by women in societies around the world today. Titled “I Am I, Between Worlds and Between Shadows”, the exhibition features 7 imposing half-human half-animal sculptures, inspired by the classical mythology of Lemos’s heritage, which act as metaphor’s for indignities and abuses experienced by women and girls in contemporary life. A sound installation features a young girl reading ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, and children singing Greek nursery rhymes, and on the desks are placed news reports from recent months, of some of the harrowing incidents experienced by females around the world, such as trafficking, prostitution and FGM. This contrast between the sounds of innocent children, and the stories of injustices against women in the real world, sends a shudder down one’s spine, and serves as a lesson that we need to protect our young girls from the world when they grow up.
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Image Sky SharrockBeral Madra, co-founder of Istanbul’s Kuad Gallery, and curator of the first two Biennials in Istanbul, and the artist Kalliopi Lemos, were drawn to this unusual exhibition venue, which had been empty for 25 years, and the artworks fit perfectly with the nostalgic ambience of the school, which has been untouched since the last pupils sat at their desks many years ago. The ethos of this exhibition manages to execute what was the original dream of the Biennial, to bring art to empty public spaces in the outer reaches of the city.
Lemos’s exhibition really digs deep into the psyche of women, and makes the viewer stop and think about some of the issues facing the female of the species all over the world today.
THE CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK OF THE ISTANBUL BIENNIAL WAS ANNOUNCED: “MOM, AM I BARBARIAN?”
Curator of the 13th Istanbul Biennial Fulya Erdemci announced the title of the biennial, which will be held from 14 September to 10 November 2013
by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV) under the sponsorship of Koç Holding.
The title and conceptual framework of the 13th Istanbul Biennial was announced by its curator Fulya Erdemci on Tuesday, 8 January at a press meeting which was held at the Maçka Campus of Istanbul Technical University (İTÜ). Bige Örer, Director of the Istanbul Biennial,joined Fulya Erdemci as a speaker at the press meeting. Fulya Erdemci, who determined the title of the 13th Istanbul Biennial as “Mom, am I barbarian?” with a reference from poet Lale Müldür’s book of the same title, explained the conceptual framework.
At the press meeting, Fulya Erdemci announced that, as an exhibition in a dialogue with the city, the 13th Istanbul Biennial’s focal point would be the notion of the public domain as a political forum. According to Erdemci, this highly contested concept will serve as a matrix to generate ideas and develop practices that question contemporary forms of democracy, challenge current models of spatio-economic politics, problematise given concepts of civilization and barbarity, and most importantly, highlight the role of art in this context.
Questioning what the reintroduction of the concept of “barbarian” as a reflection of “absolute other” reveals in our contemporary society, Erdemci referred to art’s potential for engendering new positions and constructing new subjectivities for the sake of creating a space for the weakest ones and the most excluded by destabilising dominant and deep-seated discourses.
Erdemci further explained that the Istanbul Biennial aimed to highlight the potential of the discourse of public domain through an examination of spatial justice, art in the public domain and art-market relations. Aspiring to open new avenues for thought and imagination, the Istanbul Biennial will activate social engagement and public fora to generate a possibility for rethinking the concept of “publicness”.
The 13th Istanbul Biennial will use public buildings which are left temporarily vacant by urban transformation as exhibition venues. These may include public buildings such as courthouses, schools, military structures or post offices, former transportation hubs like train stations, ex-industrial sites such as warehouses, dockyards as well as the very contested Taksim Square and Gezi Park. Furthermore, the hallmarks of current urbanism such as shopping malls, hotels and office-residential towers are being considered as sites for artistic interventions.
Bige Örer also disclosed the details of the 13th Istanbul Biennial Public Programme, which will start in February as a part of 13th Istanbul Biennial. Aiming for bringing artistic production and knowledge production together, the public programme, titled “Public Alchemy,” is co-curated by Fulya Erdemci and Dr. Andrea Phillips, Reader in Fine Art in the Department of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London and Director of the Doctoral Research Programmes in Fine Art and Curating. A series of lectures, workshops, seminars and performances, which will take place from February to the end of the Biennial, will examine how a political, poetic alchemy is at work, both in Turkey and across the world, in which conventional concepts of “the public” are being transformed. The first events of the programme will focus on Istanbul’s current urban transformation under the title of “Making the City Public” from 8 to 10 February.
Additionally, as a part of 13th Istanbul Biennial events programme, a special selection of films will be screened at the 32nd Istanbul Film Festival to be held in 30 March – 14 April. The Istanbul Biennial film screening programme will articulate the concepts of barbarity, civic awakening and the city.
After the meeting organised with the participation of the press and the contemporary art professionals, curator Fulya Erdemci and the Director of Istanbul Biennial BigeÖrer answered the questions. Public programme co-curator Dr. Andrea Phillips was also present in the press meeting.
13TH ISTANBUL BIENNIAL CURATOR FULYA ERDEMCİ
As a curator and writer Fulya Erdemci, who was the director of the Istanbul Biennial (1994-2000), was director of Proje 4L in Istanbul (2003-2004) and worked as temporary exhibitions curator at Istanbul Modern (2004-2005). She was invited to curate the ‘Istanbul’ section of the 25th Biennale of São Paulo ‘Metropolitan Iconographies: Cities’ in 2002 and joined the curatorial team of the 2nd Moscow Contemporary Art Biennial ‘Footnotes on Geopolitics, Market and Amnesia’ (2007). Erdemci initiated the ‘Istanbul Pedestrian Exhibitions’ in 2002, the first urban public space exhibition in Turkey that centred on the “pedestrian” and co-curated the second edition in 2005 with Emre Baykal. In 2008 Erdemci co-curated SCAPE “Wandering Lines: Towards A New Culture of Space”, the 5th Biennial of Art in Public SPACE in Christchurch, New Zealand with Danae Mossman, presenting the work of 25 international artists throughout the urban spaces of Christchurch city. She was the director of SKOR | Foundation For Art and Public Domain in Amsterdam between June 2008 and September 2012. Erdemci has served on international advisory and selection committees. Erdemci has taught at Bilkent University (1994–1995), Istanbul University and Marmara University (1999–2000) and at Istanbul Bilgi University’s MA Programme in Visual Communication Design (2001–2007). Erdemci was curator of the 2011 Pavilion of Turkey at the 54th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale.
ISTANBUL BIENNIAL ADVISORY BOARD
The advisory board consists of the artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13) Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, artist Ayşe Erkmen,art consultant Melih Fereli, director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and chair of the Exhibitions and Museum Studies Program at San Francisco Art Institute Hou Hanru and director of the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jack Persekian.
ISTANBUL BIENNIAL SPONSOR
The 13th Istanbul Biennial, which is organised by İKSV from 14 September to 10 November 2013 is sponsored by Koç Holding. Koç Holding is the “Biennial Sponsor” of all five Istanbul Biennials between 2007 and 2016.
13TH ISTANBUL BIENNIAL VISUAL IDENTITY
The visual identity and publications for the 13th Istanbul Biennial are prepared by the designer Ruben Pater, LAVA Amsterdam.
13TH ISTANBUL BIENNIAL WRITING ON ART WORKSHOP
A workshop for emerging art critics will be held throughout the public programme inviting a selection of writers to work with the biennial curatorial team to develop new writing on artistic and curatorial projects. Writing will be published in an online platform leading up to and during the biennial. Writers will be selected from an open call. Detailed information can be found at the Istanbul Biennial website.
PROJECT APPLICATIONS FOR 13TH ISTANBUL BIENNIAL
Artists who would like to apply to participate in the 13th Istanbul Biennial should send their project proposals together with their portfolios to application.biennial@iksv.org until 1 March 2013. The list of participants and projects of the 13th Istanbul Biennial will be finalized in June.
In order to follow the Istanbul Biennial on social media: twitter.com/istanbulbienali
For high-res images related to 13th Istanbul Biennial: www.iksvphoto.com For videos related to the 13th Istanbul Biennial: files.secureserver.net/3ftF0hmpirxjWV For digital version of the press release: bienal.iksv.org/tr/basin/basinbultenleri/2013
FULYA ERDEMCİ APPOINTED CURATOR OF THE 13TH ISTANBUL BIENNIAL
The 13th Istanbul Biennial, organised by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts and sponsored by Koç Holding, is set for the autumn of 2013, under the curatorship of Fulya Erdemci. Fulya Erdemci, who is currently Director of SKOR | Foundation For Art and Public Domain in Amsterdam, will curate the 13th Istanbul Biennial in 2013.
Fulya Erdemci is a curator and writer based in Istanbul and Amsterdam. Erdemci was curator of the 2011 Pavilion of Turkey at the 54th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale. Since 2008 she has been Director of SKOR (Stichting Kunst en Openbare Ruimte) Foundation For Art and Public Domain in Amsterdam. Her projects at SKOR include: ‘Morality Wall: Between You and I’, four facade projects in collaboration with Witte de With, Rotterdam, 2010; ‘Actors, Agents and Attendants’, international research, symposium and publication series, the first edition, ‘Speculations on the Cultural Organisation of Civility’ was co-curated with Andrea Philips and Markus Miessen in 2010, and the second edition ‘Social Housing-Housing the Social’ (Amsterdam 2011) with Andrea Philips.
Fulya Erdemci, was among the first directors of the Istanbul Biennial (1994-2000), was director of Proje 4L in Istanbul (2003-2004) and worked as temporary exhibitions curator at Istanbul Modern (2004-2005). She was invited to curate the ‘Istanbul’ section of the 25th Biennale of São Paulo ‘Metropolitan Iconographies: Cities’ in 2002 and joined the curatorial team of the 2nd Moscow Contemporary Art Biennial ‘Footnotes on Geopolitics, Market and Amnesia’ (2007). Erdemci initiated the ‘Istanbul Pedestrian Exhibitions’ in 2002, the first urban public space exhibition in Turkey that centred on the “pedestrian” and co-curated the second edition in 2005 with Emre Baykal. In 2008 Erdemci co-curated SCAPE “Wandering Lines: Towards A New Culture of Space”, the 5th Biennial of Art in Public Space in Christchurch, New Zealand with Danae Mossman, presenting the work of 25 international artists throughout the urban spaces of Christchurch city. Erdemci has served on international advisory and selection committees, including “The International Award for Excellence in Public Art” initiated by the Public Art (China) and Public Art Review (United States) Shanghai, May 2012; the SAHA, Istanbul, 2012; the 12th International Cairo Biennial, Cairo, 2011; and, De Appel, Amsterdam’s, Curatorial Programme ’10/’11 and ’09/’10. Erdemci has taught at Bilkent University (1994-1995), Marmara University (1999-2000) and at Istanbul Bilgi University’s MA Programme in Visual Communication Design (2001-2007). Recently in 2012, she was named the Laurie Chair at Rutgers University, New Jersey.
The curator of the 13th Istanbul Biennial was appointed by the Advisory Board of the Istanbul Biennial. The advisory board consists of the artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13) Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, artist Ayşe Erkmen, art consultant Melih Fereli, director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and chair of the Exhibitions and Museum Studies Program at San Francisco Art Institute Hou Hanru and director of the Al-Ma’mal Foundation for Contemporary Art, Jerusalem Jack Persekian.
The 13th Istanbul Biennial will be held between 14 September – 10 November 2013 following the professional preview 11-12-13 September. The conceptual framework will be announced at a press conference in autumn of 2012 by the curator Fulya Erdemci.
Ayşe Erkmen’s bangbangbang (2013), outside the Antrepo customs depot that houses the main portion of the 13th Istanbul Biennial. Every hour, the yachting buoy is swung into the building, which is due for imminent demolition after the Biennial closes as part of a large Bosporus-fronting tourism project.
The 13th Istanbul Biennial, with its unlikely question for a title —“Mom, am I Barbarian?” (taken from a book of poems by Lale Müldür)—is centered around a series a challenging proposals about the meaning of citizenship, processes of urban development, forms of education and the conditions of labor in the neoliberal city. The Biennial was meant to address the rapid, contested development of Istanbul and the modern megapolis at large, but its realization was interrupted by the Gezi Park protests of late May and June—an explosion of discontent at the authoritarian, sectarian policies of the Turkish government. While these recent (and still ongoing) social uprisings are addressed in only a few artworks, many of the underlining causes are—including the egregious urban planning policies that displace marginal communities and privilege corporations over citizens. At its more poetic moments, the exhibition reflected the spirit of the Gezi resistance in the suspended, unfinished, provisional, impermanent, transient and collaborative qualities of works by 88 artists and collectives. Beyond the Biennial itself the week’s festivities included openings of new exhibitions at galleries and art spaces, a performance series and even the debut of a new art fair. Here’s a look around Istanbul in mid-September.
Biennial director Bige Örer welcoming members of the press in front of Jorge Méndez Blake’s The Castle (2007), a brick wall which runs over a copy of Kafka’s 1922 novel of the same name (visible in the lower left corner).
The UK-based Freee art collective’s banner Protest Drives History (2008) was one of several works that obliquely referred to the protests in Turkey over the government’s authoritarian rule while speaking—rather optimistically in this case—about the transformative power of social movements.
Yogyakarta-based new media collective House of Natural Fiber’s Diamagneti (Sm) Species (2012–13) in the center of Antrepo takes the frequencies emitted by plants and transforms them into visible vibrations on suspended geometric forms and charts.
Working with professional filmmakers, Halil Altındere created a music video, Wonderland (2013), for the Roma hip-hop group Tahribad-ı İsyan, who rap about the redevelopment (read: gentrification) of their Sulukule neighborhood by Turkey’s Public Housing Project (TOKİ).
Biennial curator Fulya Erdemci giving journalists a tour, talking about the Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis’s project Monument to Humanity – Helping Hands (2013) about a peace monument in Kars, near the border with Armenia, destroyed on the orders of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who called it “freakish.” The duo pushed a cart around Istanbul with a replica of the monument, and cast 120 people’s hands in plaster, which they then planted in the ground in Kars, near the destroyed monument.
Taking the form of a sacred book, the pages of İpek Duben’s project Manuscript 1994 (1993–94) show the influenced of feminist and conceptual art practices, as well as her concerns about depictions of women in Western self-portraiture.
Influenced by the forms of Indo-Persian miniature painting, Shahzia Sikander’s three-channel video Parallax (2013) is a revised version of a piece shown at the 11th Sharjah Biennial earlier in the year, here with a soundtrack featuring readings of Turkish poetry.
Thomas Hirschhorn’s Timeline: Work in Public Space (2012) is, as the title suggests, an overview of his many public installations rendered in his signature cut-and-paste, cardboard-and-tape style. A monument to Thomas Hirschhorn, by Hirschhorn.
At the Galata Greek School building, İnci Eviner’s Co-Action Device: A Study (2013) is an unfolding, performative installation involving workshops with students from various disciplines—part surrealist theater, part educational model. Visitors could walk around any part of the installation as well as above it.
Upstairs at the Greek School, Peter Robinson’s Ruses and Legacies (2013), made from felt, Plexiglas and wood, comprises abstract forms, carefully arranged yet still emergent as they become structures suggesting architecture or artworks.
At the entrance to Salt Beyoğlu on İstiklal Caddesi, Halil Altindere’s miniature wax figure Guard (2012) keeps watch over Diego Bianchi’s sprawling, chaotic, junk-strewn installation State of Spam (2013).
Beyond the Biennial, upstairs at Salt Beyoğlu, was Gülsün Karamustafa’s long-overdue survey “A Promised Exhibition.” Here, her vitrine Gold Venus with Mirror (1985), with collage in the background.
Shown for the first time ever, Karamustafa’s “Prison Paintings” (1972–78) are recollections of her time in the İzmit Women’s prison, where the artist served time after being sentenced in 1971 for her political activism.
Gülsün Karamustafa being interviewed in front of My Roses My Reveries (1998/2013), featuring an image of the artist as a young girl leaving her father behind on the train between Istanbul and Ankara. The words on the walls are the rhyming words from poems she recited in her youth.
At Salt Galata was a retrospective of photographs by Istanbul-based photographer Elio Montanari, “One, No One and One Hundred Thousand.” Since the 1980s, Montanari has been recording artists at work, installing shows with curators, primarily around Europe. Here are images capturing James Lee Byars’ performances in Venice.
Elio Montanari himself, with the artist Köken Ergun standing next to him, describing projects he had witnessed and captured on film.
A homage to James Lee Byars, featuring a photograph of the artist’s work set alone on a gold-leafed wall, with a red-painted room behind it.
Outside of the major institutions, the NON-Stage festival organized performances around the city. Here, at the nightclub Babylon, Berlin-based Nevin Aladağ’s seven-minute dance piece The Man Who Wanted to Jump Over His Shadow (1999) featured a breakdancer illuminated by a single spotlight.
Another NON-Stage event, Gabriel Lester’s Holes in the Sky(imagination is the higest one can fly) (2013), took place one afternoon in Fındıklı Park on the Bosporus. Experienced kite-flyers tried to launch several of these circular forms high into the sky, although the wind was largely uncooperative that afternoon.
Standing on a roof of the Turkish restaurant Kiva Han, a lip-reader with binoculars was recounting to us viewers a lecture by Ahmet Öğüt, who was hundreds of feet away on the top of the Galata Tower. A performance called The muscles behind my eyes ache from the strain (2013), it was another NON-Stage event.
Ahmet Öğüt, in a white shirt, standing on the balustrade of the Galata Tower, telling stories about the times his works were censored, damaged or altered because of their content, while being interpreted by a professional lip-reader.
Among the week’s openings was this Protocinema exhibition by New York-based Trevor Paglen, in a disused factory. The gleaming orb is a model for a non functional satellite.
Füsun Eczacıbaşı’s art-filled home in Galata was the venue for many parties and receptions throughout the week. Here, a peak at the works on the ground floor, including Ai Weiwei’s plastic crabs, Ori Gersht’s photograph of an exploding vase, a sculpture by Do-Ho Suh, Vik Muniz’s photograph of a skeleton made from junk, and portraits of women wearing animal-organ fashion by Pinar Yolacan.
A project by Rampa gallery, Nevin Aladağ’s video projection Voyeur (1996/2008/2013) of a waiting woman is situated on the corner of a busy street near Beşiktaş.
The week’s final event was the art fair Art International, located on the Golden Horn in the Haliç Congress Center. After a busy opening Sunday, the fair’s three public days were quiet. Here, a remake of Hüseyin Bahri Alptekin’s Mattresses to Imaginary Destinations (2003) with Richard Hudson’s steel sculpture Marilyn Monroe (2013) in the background.
At Galeri Manâ’s booth, a hair sculpture and two photo-collages by Valérie Blass, with an Ayşe Erkmen metal sculpture beneath, and a new photography by Pinar Yolacan to the right.
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ARTREVIEW
In Istanbul for the Biennial?
Merve Arkunlar picks eight exhibitions to see
Nilbar Gures, BERF açık telefon kulübesi serisinden / BERF from the series open phone booth, 2011
Sarkis, Rainbow. Courtesy the artist and Galeri Mana
This exhibition, showing in both the museum’s galleries and the gardens features works in marble, alabaster and other stone materials, many of which have not been seen in public before. The exhibition also includes existing works such as Sky Mirror and Yellow.To 5 January 2014
Şahin Kaygun (1951-1992) was one of Turkey’s best contemporary avant-garde photographers. This exhibition at Elipsis showcases his Polaroid images from the1980s onwards, when the he first experimented with the visual representation of the ‘hidden face’. Working in film as well as photography, Kaygun’s directorial project Full Moon (1988) has been shown at Cannes and other festivals.To 2 October
This exhibition, by an artist whose intelligent and witty projects always intrigue, showcases videos, sculptures, and installations that explore issues of economics and art and notions of private and public. To 26 October
Spanning 40 years this is established artist Gülsün Karamustafa’s most expansive retrospective to date and takes over both SALT locations on İstiklal Caddesi and the old Bankalar Caddesi. Works in a range of media, including painting, collage, installations and video, reflect topics including Turkey’s recent political history, migration, locality, identity, cultural awareness and gender. To 5 January 2014
This exhibition pairs two performance artists whose work around female sexuality, identity and power has often caused controversy Metanoia (later, after, beyond) is an installation that features 29 performance videos by Valie Export, dating back to the 1970s. Despair, the centrepiece of Moral’s exhibition is a video that focuses on a group of illegal immigrants on a boat in the middle of the sea, searching for a better life. To 26 October
Trevor Paglen’s new large-scale sculpture, Prototype for a Nonfunctional Satellite (Design 4; Build 3), takes the form of a satellite with no commercial or military ‘purpose’. Detached from its function Paglen’s spacecraft-cum-art object highlights not only how information is communicated but how art relates to both its function and its audience. To 25 October
This year, Rampa opens the season with two concurrent exhibitions. Cengiz Çekil showcases new work, With a Cleaning Cloth, a work comprised of 144 pieces, each featuring different configurations of a cleaning clth, canvas, string, paint and lace. Nilbar Güreş’s project Open Phone Booth, which debuted at Frieze Art Fair in 2011, and is shown here in Turkey for the first time, is a collection of photographs and a three-screen video installation that documents the need of villagers in an Alevi-Kurdish village in Bingöl to walk up to the hills to find reception on their cell phones. To 26 October
This show features a new light installation Rainbow accompanied by the artist’s 1971 audio work 7 Roulettes. Created over two floors the exhibition sets up a dialogue between past and present, memory and perception. To 24 September
13th Istanbul Biennial: ‘Mom, am I barbarian?’ 14 September – 20 October 2013. The 13th Istanbul Biennial, curated by Fulya Erdemci, borrows its title from poet Lale Müldür’s book, with a focus on the theme of public space as a political forum. The biennial exhibitions aspire to open up a space to rethink the concept of ‘publicness’ through art and elicit imagination and innovative thought to contribute to social engagement and discussion. Biennial website: 13b.iksv.org/en
The Biennial is held across five venues mapped here with artists listed exhibiting at each venue listed below. Admission is free of charge. The five locations are open daily from 10:00-19:00 except Mondays. (During the first week the Biennial remains open Monday 16 September). Image: Peter Robinson – Structure and Subjectivity, 2012. Mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Hopkinson Mossman (Auckland, New Zealand) Photo: Servet Dilber.
(ArtInternational Istanbul art fair takes place: 16-18 September 2013 click here for details).
Antrepo no.3
Meclis-i Mebusan Caddesi
Liman İşletmeleri Sahası
34433 Tophane
Murat Akagündüz
Halil Altındere
Lutz Bacher
Yto Barrada
Anca Benera & Arnold Estefan
Guillaume Bijl
Nathan Coley
Alice Creischer & Andreas Siekmann
İpek Duben
Carlos Eduardo Felix da Costa (Cadu)
Ayşe Erkmen
İnci Eviner
Hanna Farah Kufr Birim
Carla Filipe
HONF Foundation
Jorge Galindo & Santiago Sierra
Goldin+Senneby
Fernanda Gomes
Edi Hirose
Thomas Hirschhorn
Rob Johannesma
Tadashi Kawamata
Amal Kenawy
Ádám Kokesch
Jiří Kovanda
Mierle Laderman Ukeles
Rietveld Landscape
Gonzalo Lebrija
Zbigniew Libera
Lux Lindner
Maider López
Nicholas Mangan
Cinthia Marcelle & Tiago Mata Machado
Gordon Matta-Clark
Jorge Méndez Blake
David Moreno
Fernando Ortega
Wouter Osterholt & Elke Uitentuis
Şener Özmen
Claire Pentecost
Mere Phantoms
Fernando Piola
Provo
Mika Rottenberg
LaToya Ruby Frazier
Akademia Ruchu Freee
Christoph Schäfer
Santiago Sierra
Shahzia Sikander
Hito Steyerl
Nil Yalter & Judy Blum
.-_-.
Artists at this year’s Biennial are turning Istanbul’s public spaces into political forums. It’s no coincidence. Many pieces address the mass demonstrations and social unrest in Turkey.
A green ball pounds against a concrete wall – over and over again. It’s a giant wrecking ball that greets visitors at the entrance of this year’s Biennial in Istanbul. With the installation, Turkish artist Ayse Erkmen references the city’s urban transformation. This echoes the sentiments of curator Fulya Erdemci.
Under the event’s slogan, “Mom, am I a barbarian?” the “oppressed and excluded in society” should be picked up through art, said Erdemci.
Public space as a political forum is a focus of this year’s exhibition concept. And there couldn’t be a more current topic.
Mass protests re-ignited
As the initial Biennial tourists strolled through downtown Istanbul, they were surprised with a fresh wave of protests. Teargas and water cannons were even being used against the protesters.
One of the reasons behind the renewed public anger was the death of 22-year-old Ahmet Atakan, who had been killed while demonstrating in the Turkish city of Antakya. Witnesses and relatives of the young man blame the police and say he was hit in the head with a teargas cartridge. Atakan’s death spurred new protests in cities around the country. According to media reports, 40 people were arrested in Istanbul alone, representing a new wave of protests after the previous mass demonstrations in Istanbul’s Gezi Park.
Ayse Erkmen’s wrecking ball mirrors the changes in Istanbul
It was because of these protests that Fulya Erdemci’s initial exhibit plans were scrapped. For about two years, Istanbul’s public spaces had been slated for the art of the 88 international artists: Gezi Park, Taksim Square, city districts under threat of demolition, endangered natural parks, and all of these places have now suddenly become the focus of national discussion.
For 14 of the projects, Erdemci had applied for permits at Istanbul municipalities and at the Federal Ministry of Culture but never received a reply. The Istanbul municipalities supported the crackdown by police against demonstrators, and they were criticized during the protests as a result.
Curator Fulya Erdemci spontaneously withdrew her applications to five exhibition spaces in public places.
“We don’t want to work with the same authorities who are trying to suppress this peaceful movement, the voice of the people,” Fulya Erdemci said in an expression of solidarity. Her withdrawal sends a strong artistic and political message, she added.
Parks as a political forum
Through the Biennial, international artists can participate in the protests. German artist Christoph Schäfer is one of them. His drawings touch on the importance of parks as political forums. Istanbul’s Gezi Park is an especially good example of politics in public spaces. For hours, students, artists, professors and doctors sat together in Gezi Park to discuss politics – or simply make music.
“As a result, the public debate and the political aspect take on a completely different quality,” Schäfer said.
Christoph Schäfer’s sketches focus on Gezi Park
One of Schäfer’s drawings shows a park in Hamburg. For 15 years, Schäfer has participated in “Park Fiction,” an artistic and socio-political project in a Hamburg park that serves as a prime example of public art. Through their own ideas and drawings, nearby residents have a say in the park’s design. Out of solidarity, the park was renamed overnight to “Gezi Park Fiction.”
“Political movements in other countries could learn a lot from the movement in Istanbul because the protests were done in a smart and clever way,” said the artist.
The Biennial is not a test of “civil disobedience,” as it’s been portrayed in media, said Schäfer, but a reflection of the events in Istanbul. “In the exhibition all the sore points are addressed. But because people today create their own political platforms, the Biennial is no longer the only bright spot,” he added.
For him, the Biennial’s importance has diminished because the people’s anger has already erupted into the street.
Erdem Gündüz, center, initiated the silent protests on Taksim Square
Art of the silent protest
Turkish artist and choreographer Erdem Gündüz can also be found at the Biennial. During the summer protests, Gündüz provided a political platform to demonstrators: He initiated a silent, standing protest on Taksim Square, naming the event “Standing Man.” Hundreds of thousands imitated the move and joined him, standing for hours on the public square. It was a creative alternative to noisy, mass demonstrations. At the Biennial he’s conducting readings on various topics, including about the people in Gezi Park.
“Art isn’t so distant from real life,” said Günüz. “Just like the standing man. Later, people understood that art is important because a man did something like that, and he’s an artist.”
Art against construction plans
Alongside Gezi Park, the financial crisis is an important topic of the exhibition, said Andrea Phillips, co-curator of the Biennial. At the moment it’s especially interesting in Istanbul because the city’s economy is growing. Nevertheless, there are problems with capitalism in Istanbul, added the Brit.
“You only have to look at the housing situation in Turkey,” Phillips said. “This problem also inspired the protests. Many buildings in downtown, also close to the Biennial, will be demolished and replaced by new luxury apartments or shopping centers.”
Serkan Taycan’s photos document many construction projects in Istanbul, helping citizens visualize the changes
Serkan Taycan is one of the artists that address the controversial construction project. The photographer selected a 60-kilometer (37-mile) path, which runs from the north-south axis of the Black Sea to downtown on the Marmara Sea. The path follows the construction plans of Istanbul: the Istanbul Canal as a second Bosphorus River, the third bridge over the Bosphorous, the third airport.
“This greatly affects us residents in Istanbul. With this path, I want to give people the opportunity to experience the transformation,” said Taycan, adding that in five years the path will no longer exist in its current form.
With that, Taycan struck a nerve in the Turkish folk. The demonstrators in Gezi Park have often described the construction plans of the Turkish government as “megalomaniac” and “unnecessary.” Even economic experts criticize the government’s construction plans and say they would rather see an investment in the education and health sectors.
Istanbul Biennial: Solidarity with Gezi Park protesters
Public space as political forum
Long before the Gezi park protests, the motto of the 13th Biennial in Istanbul, “Mom, am I a barbarian?” had already been determined. When demonstrations broke out, however, many in Istanbul’s art scene took part. The events dominate this year’s Biennial.
Through projects like Serkan Taycan’s path or Ayse Erkmen’s wrecking ball installation, the people of Turkey seem to feel understood. “The people who live in Turkey are having a tough time right now,” said a young, Turkish Biennial visitor. “We are happy that artists are devoting time to current issues in human rights and even economic issues.”
The Biennial doesn’t end until October 20, but its resonance with the visitors is already noticeable.
“These exhibits are being viewed with a closeness that isn’t noticeable at every exhibition,” said German artist Christoph Schäfer.
A Swedish visitor traveled to Istanbul just to see the Biennial and made a comparison: “I’m not actually interested in political art, but I’ve been to many Biennials, even the one in Venice,” he said. “I am surprised at how interesting this one is, especially since political events had overturned plans so spontaneously.”
I’m just back home from a Sunday spent around the Istanbul Biennial 2013 (13th Edition). I took the opportunity to visit two venues (the Antrepo, close to the Istanbul Modern, and at the Galata Greek Primary School) and to shoot some photographs.
I found some very interesting pieces, both from local artists and from international ones. I just propose here some shots taken around, without any conceit of having fully covered the exhibition (which is big and located in many different venues). But I recommend everyone (at least, in Istanbul) to dedicate one day to this event, because it is a great opportunity to get the touch of contemporary art.
Raymond Pettibon, Selection of works on paper, 2011, Installation view as part of ‘Untitled (Death by Gun)’
The curators of this year’s Istanbul Biennial, Jens Hoffmann and Adriano Pedrosa, have deflated the overblown biennial format, tossed out locality as a topic of debate and funnelled an entire biennial – comprising five group shows and 55 solo exhibitions – into two waterside warehouses. Sidelining what they call ‘nostalgic or romantic’ views of the city as a crossroads between East and West (a tendency of earlier editions), they have declared allegiance to ‘aesthetic concerns’: put that art back where it belongs.
Their title, ‘Untitled (12th Istanbul Biennial)’, plays on the titles of the Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres and is echoed in those of the individual group shows, each of which adapts the name of one of his works. This pairing – a neutral signifier plus a parenthetical nod to a field of meaning – crisply announces that meaning is mutable, and that the biennial’s business commences from there. Works by González-Torres himself are absent but for a single wall text in each group show that describes each piece; Hoffmann and Pedrosa suggest that his symbolic role should be thought of no differently than more typical uses of literature, music or political events as curatorial inspiration.
Just how little these group exhibitions depart from their allegedly flexible premises is the biennial’s major disappointment. Each grouping strikes a single note over and over again, swelling into a sort of dogmatic march where guns are bad toys for bad boys, in ‘Untitled (Death by Gun)’; homosexuality is about men having sex with men, in ‘Untitled (Ross)’; and more than a dozen art works feature the written page as a means to address the historical record, in ‘Untitled (History)’. Still, the group shows are nuanced by the solo exhibitions that cluster around them in a warren of free-standing white cubes designed by the Tokyo-based architect Ryue Nishizawa. These demonstrate a higher sensitivity to the intersecting politics of geography, gender and media.
A series of revelatory rooms featuring the work of women artists from the 1920s to the ’70s is the biennial’s major strength. Peruvian Teresa Burga’s cataloguing of her body’s form and functions, Elizabeth Catlett’s mid-century wood-cuts of African-American sharecroppers, and Turkish sculptor Füsun Onur’s canvases and small plaster works, lay the formal ground for a biennial that seeks to counter the bombast of recent mega-exhibitions – not least Hou Hanru’s 2007 Istanbul Biennial – with a quieter programme of photography, works on paper and textiles. (There are almost no videos or large installations, and hardly a hint of the Internet or events of the last decade; next door to the biennial venues, Istanbul Modern’s flashy ‘Dream and Reality: Modern and Contemporary Women Artists from Turkey’ is a study in contrasts.) This focus also carries the historical weight of life under authoritarian regimes, a significant issue in Turkey where, over the last decade, efforts to recover the country’s forgotten 20th-century artists have multiplied. Geta Brătescu’s ‘Vestigii’ (Vestiges, 1978), patches of layered fabric scraps hovering between abstraction and figuration, came out of her experiences working in rural Communist Romania. Yıldız Moran Arun’s black and white photographs of 1950s Anatolia – villagers, camels, a horse-drawn cart parading film posters through a village – provide little-seen images of Cold War-era Turkey, where a booming film industry played a major role in international relations.
‘Untitled (Death by Gun)’, in which the few women artists included produce domesticated testimonies to violence largely perpetrated by men, makes for a surprising shift from the deft selections and thoughtful gender politics of many of the solo shows. Rózsa Polgár and Ella Littwitz present a blanket and a sheet riddled with bullet holes, respectively; Jazmín López films violent child’s play. Iconic photojournalism (Mathew Brady’s American Civil War images, Eddie Adams’ 1968 photo of the street execution of a Viet Cong prisoner, Weegee’s New York homicides) sits uneasily alongside Raymond Pettibon’s drawings, Chris Burden’s Shoot (1971) and Mat Collishaw’s emblematic Bullet Hole (1988). The fact that this is one of the only rooms in which American and British artists dominate already signals the difficulty of treating ‘gun violence’ as an invariable concept in contexts with wildly different political and legislative histories. In this sense, ‘Untitled (Death by Gun)’ hews close to the curatorial strategy used by Hoffmann in his trilogy of illustrative exhibitions about canonical American novels at the CCA Wattis in San Francisco (2008–11). Here, a range of art works are forced to conform to a narrative pattern where ‘death by gun’ aborts the action, but we are denied anything further, including responsibility.
‘Untitled (Abstraction)’ pushes a programme of injecting Modernist abstraction with life. In a winning grouping, a series of photographs taken from the interior of a glass box with a black line around its centre,‘Drawing with the Camera – Circle in the Square’ (1970), by the little-known Hungarian conceptualist Dóra Maurer, is matched with Edward Krasinski’s signature line of bluetape (1981); Alexander Gutke’s Singularity (2010), a 16mm film spooled between the corners of the space, frames the ensemble. Grids of fruit, hair, faces and ants are the less felicitous results of a literalizing impulse that unites all of the five group exhibitions.(Though this emphasis on clarity also produces wonderfully lucid exhibition texts.) The writtenpage is redacted, shredded, photographed, stamped and rolled into pearls in ‘Untitled (History)’, strangely blind to the alternative ways that history is written today (from WikiLeaks to Twitter), or to the potential of an exhibition to interrogate specifically visual (rather than textual) strategies of chronicling events. In ‘Untitled (Passport)’, maps are rotated, voided, cut up, redrawn and woven into rugs, often by Palestinians. But American artists – including Tom Burr, Collier Schorr and Colter Jacobsen – get the lease on AIDS and gay sex, with a strong representation in ‘Untitled (Ross)’, where a promising interpretation of González-Torres’s 1991 candy pour (a portrait of his late partner Ross Laycock) gets lost in a slew of beds and bodies. From this room, Kutluğ Ataman’s jarse (Jersey, 2011) – an altered military health report that catalogues his long-standing interest in men – was a major preoccupation for the Turkish media, building on the momentum of the coach of Turkish football team Trabzonspor’s recent denunciation of Ataman’s 2004 work Küba as ‘terrorist propaganda’. The mainstream newspaper Hürriyet listed jarse as a ‘must-see’, alongside an advisory for local school teachers to sign up for a biennial educators’ conference. Turkey has been relatively at ease with alternative sexualities for some time, and it’s disappointing to see an opportunity missed to push public discussion into more complicated territory.
In the solo shows, photography abets a number of projects that claim happy participation in the cult of bygone a look. Simryn Gill’s entropic photographs of abandoned housing near Kuala Lumpur; Akram Zaatari’s recovered Beirut studio portraits; and Jonathas de Andrade’s and Marwa Arsanios’s snapshot-based investigations of tropical Modernism continue a genre that romanticizes histories of Modernism ‘at the margins’. Often these say more about the anxieties of current generations – distant enough to appreciate enduring relics, fraught by their impending disappearance – than the ultimate aim of all this preservation. Another strain of work melds craft, humour and stark political messages. Pieces by the Ardmore Ceramic Art Studio, a South African collective, are partially produced by all of its members, carrying the marks of many hands’ work in the service of a community: their narrative texts and bright animated figures are geared towards HIV/AIDS awareness (and is one of the only examples in the biennial of social practice).
Hoffmann and Pedrosa have deliberately put a full-stop after the last half-decade of the Istanbul Biennial’s history. (The only accompanying event was a conference in November 2010 that convened former curators, resulting in the publication Remembering Istanbul.) Following Charles Esche and Vasıf Kortun’s 2005 edition, ‘Istanbul’, recent iterations have gradually seeped from the city’s historical core into its old apartment buildings, abandoned factories and busy commercial districts, tracing a partial history of Istanbul’s modernization along the way. Although Hoffmann and Pedrosa have adopted the museum’s guise and discarded the habitual euphemistic ‘engagement’ with the city itself, they haven’t pressured the biennial format beyond recognition. Rather, they have made use of its sheer volume and international pull to enact some tried and true agendas, recovering unknowns and diagnosing shared impulses. Unlike many former curators, they have the luxury of an established international viewership and a local audience educated at the biennial itself – last week, for the first time, I overheard it called ‘mainstream’.
When a country is in the throes of political crisis, what position should its cultural guardians take? To ignore the situation smacks of fiddling while Rome burns. To embrace it is to risk myriad ignominies.
Fulya Erdemci, the curator of this year’s Istanbul Biennial, chose the latter option. Her exhibition, entitled Mom, Am I a Barbarian?, took as its theme the role of public space in art and society. To encourage a rapport with Istanbul’s population, the Biennial would be free of charge and there would be displays in public spaces.
As such, it could not be more relevant to a city that has been rocked by civil protest all summer. Triggered by the government’s plans to develop areas such as Gezi Park that are dear to the city’s collective heart, the demonstrations ballooned into a discontent provoked by fears among secular Turks that the ruling AK party wished to Islamicise their culture. The government responded with tear gas and water cannons. Hundred of people were injured and several killed.
Erdemci and her team supported the protesters (her catalogue essay exalts “this feeling of incredible solidarity and joy”). Nevertheless, by the time the Biennial opened last week, questions that provoke controversy during peaceful times – who do you choose? whose money do you take? where do you install? – had became loaded with more tension than one exhibition could comfortably bear.
In truth, Erdemci made an effort to confront the complex systems of power that underpin the urban transformation that has radically altered Istanbul’s infrastructure. This spring, she instigated a public lecture programme with the aim of examining how “publicness can be reclaimed as an artistic and political tool in the context of global financial imperialism and local social fracture”.
Of course, without “global financial imperialism” the contemporary art world would struggle to keep its show on the road. Nowhere is this more true than in Istanbul, where the collecting habits of a handful of wealthy dynasties has fuelled an explosion in the art market that means the city hosts two contemporary art fairs (which have been battling it out in the courts), several hundred galleries and a clutch of privately owned museums. Inevitably, it is often the same families whose conglomerates profit from the modernisation of the city.
The Biennial does not escape association. Its chief sponsor is the Vehbi Koç Foundation, the cultural arm of one of Turkey’s largest conglomerates, Koç Holding. In truth Koç, which is ardently secular, has recently had government contracts cancelled and its rapport with the ruling AK party is fraught with tension.
Nevertheless, during the Biennial’s public programme, artists angered by the Koç connection disrupted a performance and filmed Erdemci’s reaction. Erdemci called the police and threatened to sue the film-maker, actions for which she later apologised.
Yet there is a sense that the Biennial’s reputation as a guardian of freedom has been compromised. Turkey under prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done some appalling things but, during the Biennial’s opening week, it grated to hear rousing speeches about the artistic struggle for free expression at parties held in Istanbul’s most opulent homes, where the inhabitants enjoy wealth consolidated over decades of the brutal military-backed rule that preceded Erdogan’s victory.
Furthermore, this summer, film-maker and artist Kutlug Ataman alleged that art advisers to Omer Koç, one of Istanbul’s most important collectors and a vice-chairman of Koç Holding, had threatened to withdraw their patronage of his work because of a TV interview in which, in their opinion, he was insufficiently critical of Erdogan’s government. Koç instantly issued a denial.
Erdemci defends her sponsorship with Koç as “a device, a mechanism. [It’s like] you have a smartphone but maybe a child worker made them.”
Also problematic is her decision to abandon the plan to display art in public areas. “What does it mean to take permission from the same people who are suppressing [us]? This way, we are pointing out presence through absence,” is how she defended it to me. Yet the result is that her artists are now sheltered in the privately financed, non-profit cocoons of Arter and Salt, which are owned by the Vehbi Koç Foundation and banking dynasty Garanti respectively.
Inevitably, such a freighted back story threatens to crush the work itself. The Biennial’s main venue, the waterfront warehouse Antrepo, was particularly disappointing. The building is earmarked for demolition, a fate that should have made it ripe for a poignant swansong. But from the opening exhibit, a wrecking ball swinging against its façade that is the offering of Turkish artist Ayse Erkmen, a lack of imagination blighted the display. An uneasy cavern, Antrepo drowned the majority of work.
Art that blurs boundaries with social documentary can thrill but here the sheer number of complex, text-based projects rendered much of it flat, cold and overly analytical. From Gezi Park to Lima, New Jersey, Palestine and São Paulo, many pieces took the spectator on a world tour of urban change and its attendant social injustices. Yet the disconnected nature of the stories left the spectator bewildered rather than moved. Many artists deserved better. Consider, for example, the journey of the stone hand cast by Dutch duo Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis. The sculpture was inspired by the demolition, on the prime minister’s orders, of a statue in Kars, a city on Turkey’s Armenian border, that had been erected as a peace monument. Osterholt and Uitentuis wheeled their hand about Kars in a barrow, asking people for their opinions on the scandal, and casting their hands. These hands were installed on the site of the demolished sculpture, where they were instantly removed by police.
Also memorable was “Intensive Care” by Rietveld Landscape, a Dutch studio that had originally intended to install its work, a light that responds to human presence, in the Atatürk Cultural Centre in Taksim. Deprived of that chance, Rietveld simply scaled down its model and put it in a pitch-black space within Antrepo. After the cacophony of ideas outside, the quiet, poetic provocation of that flashing square stilled the mind and opened the imagination. Very different yet sharing the same potent immediacy was Halil Altindere’s film, Wonderland (2013), of Roma hip-hoppers voicing their lyrical fury at the destruction of their Istanbul neighbourhood.
Fortunately, the ratio of artists capable of conjuring poetry out of socio-politics increased at the show held in the Galata Greek Primary School.
Here, the outstanding piece was “I am the dog that was always here” (2013) by Berlin-based artist Annika Eriksson, a video of stray dogs exiled to the outskirts of Istanbul accompanied by a prophetic narrative – “They lived there and came and disappeared and now they are back”, “I can’t remember if those buildings are being constructed or taken down” – which captured the helplessness in the face of dispassionate power that has animated so much of modern Turkey’s history.
Artists who obliquely approached Erdemci’s theme mined deeper depths than their more literal peers. Elmgreen and Dragset, unable to realise a more ambitious public project, returned to a 2003 performance whereby young men sat at school desks writing their private diaries. To come upon these grave, silent scribes in a darkened room was to remember that without ethical public authority, private freedom is doomed. Upstairs, Argentine duo Martin Cordiano and Tomás Espina had recreated the replica of an immigrant’s apartment down to the Balzac novel on the table, the poster of Che Guevara and the crumpled National Geographic map on the wall. A clutch of broken objects – spectacles, crockery – betrayed the psychic fragmentation that is the price of exile.
‘Monument to Humanity – Helping Hands’ (2011/2013) by Wouter Osterholt and Elke Uitentuis
Occasionally, a work breaks all the rules and triumphs anyway. The must-see of this exhibition was “Networks of Dispossession” on the top floor of the Greek school. A project by a collective of Istanbul artists led by Burak Arikan, it used a digital mapping programme to reveal the network of connections between state power and the business and media conglomerates – including Eczacibasi Holding, sponsors of the IKSV foundation that organises the Biennial – that are its partners in the development of the city.
These arid graphics brought to mind a line by the radical American poet Adrienne Rich, whose despair at the depredations wrought by capitalism on society drew her towards Marxist theoretics. “All kinds of language fly into poetry, like it or not.” Art’s battle to speak truth to power yet put bread on her makers’ tables is as old as civilisation. In Istanbul this year, it feels bloodier than ever.
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CLEVELAND BORN AND RAISED, LOS ANGELES BASED ARTIST AND WRITER VINCENT JOHNSON.
WHEN I WAS A CHILD IN THE EARLY 1960’S. EVERY DAY ON THE RADIO I WOULD HEAR: THE GREATEST LOCATION IN THE NATION, AS CLEVELAND CALLS ITSELF.
WHAT I DID NOT KNOW WAS THAT CLEVELAND, PITTSBURGH, DETROIT, CHICAGO, WERE LARGELY BUILT TO BE THE AMERICAN EARLY 20TH CENTURY VERSIONS OF INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ENGLAND. THE MIDWEST WAS MANCHESTER, BIRMINGHAM AND LIVERPOOL.
PEOPLE USED TO CATCH FISH AT LAKE ERIE AND SELL THEM TO OTHER PEOPLE TO MAKE A FEW DOLLARS. CLEVELAND ACTUALLY HAD A REAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE GREAT LAKES. WE SOMETIMES WENT WALKING ON THE FROZEN POND OF THE CLEVELAND MUSEUM OF ART.
AS TEENAGERS, WHEN BORED WE WOULD WALK ALL THE WAY FROM FIVE-POINTS IN COLLINWOOD, TO DOWNTOWN AND LOOK AT THE MILITARY MONUMENTS IN PUBLIC SQUARE. THE CITY WAS NOT LIVELY IN ANY PART OF DOWNTOWN THEN. THERE WAS PROSTITUTION ON PROSPECT AVENUE, NEAR WHERE A GORGEOUS REMNANT OF ROW HOUSES STOOD AND ARE NO MORE.
DURING THE EARLY 1960’S, DOWNTOWN CLEVELAND WAS AMAZING WITH ITS CHRISTMAS LIGHTS AND WINDOW DISPLAYS. ALSO WHAT WAS GREAT FUN WAS WATCHING GHOULARDI AND ALSO HOULIHAN AND BIG CHUCK ON TELEVISION, AND THEIR COMIC ANTICS BEFORE SCREENING BAD HORROR FILMS THAT WERE SO MUCH FUN TO WATCH AS CHILDREN.
THERE USED TO BE THIS AMAZING ARCADE PLACE DOWNTOWN THAT HAD STRANGE AND IMPOSSIBLE TAXIDERMIED ANIMALS. THE CINCINATTI ROYALS BASKETBALL TEAM, FEATURING OSCAR ROBERTSON, PLAYED OCASSIONALLY IN DOWNTOWN CLEVELAND. ANOTHER FOND MEMORY I HAVE OF CLEVELAND IS THAT CONCORD GRAPES GREW ACROSS EVERYONE’S BACKYARD FENCE, AND THERE WERE APPLE AND PEAR TREES, CHERRY AND NUT TREES ALONG LAKEVIEW ROAD ON THE PROPERTY OF THE PRIVATE RESIDENCES.
THE CLEVELAND RIOTS DESTROYED AN ENTIRE AREA OF GLENVILLE. WE WATCHED FROM OUR APARTMENT FRONT WINDOW AS TANKS AND ARMED NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS ENTERED OUR NEIGHBORHOOD. A GAS STATION ACROSS THE STREET EXPLODED. WE HID IN THE BACK ROOM UNTIL MORNING. THERE WERE PEOPLE LOOTING THE STORES. GUNFIRE WAS HEARD. IN THE MORNING PART OF GLENVILLE WAS GONE. YET AS BAD AS IT LOOKED, IT NEVER LOOKED AS DEVASTATED AS CLEVELAND’S EAST SIDE LOOKS TODAY.
YET THERE IS GREAT HOPE BECAUSE OF THE TWO STELLAR HOSPITALS IN CLEVELAND, THAT ARE CAUSING HUGE CHANGES IN THE AREA SURROUNDING CASE WESTERN RESERVE AND UNIVERSITY CIRCLE, CLEVELAND’S STELLAR ARTS DISTRICT.
I TOOK These photographs during the beginning of summer of 2013. It is where I was born, enjoyed so much fun with my family and went to school. It was strange being there this time, as so much of the East Side of Cleveland has been destroyed. Yet there are many signs of new life in the middle of this part of town, as one sees near the hospital district hundreds of brand new homes not far from empty lots. I learned that The Lake Effect did do much greater damage to Cleveland’s East Side while the West Side was protected from the worst of the weather system. Yet still it is strange to see how the West Side is basically intact from the point of its architectural integrity, including apartment buildings and an amazing array of home styles that also can be found on Cleveland’s East Side, but often in a state of complete distress or devastation. My taking these photographs is a way for me to grasp that so many decades have passed since the 1960’s, and the world I knew as a child has nearly vanished.
My fascination with Cleveland’s myriad of vernacular architectural private properties is also a strong element in my wish to document Cleveland. One thing that struck me when taking pictures there in June was how as a car driving adult touring Cleveland, I was seeing so much more of the city than I ever had as a child. I remembered the countless A-frame and Two-flat houses, but had never seen the gigantic boarding houses, and had mostly not seen most of the row house styles. I do distinctly recall there being an awesome row house block on Prospect avenue, which I did not see on my trip but would like to find.
I decided to go into ClevelandMemory.com and get some pictures. I’m focusing on Champlain Avenue, since it completely disappeared as a result of the Terminal development. This is the area of the Terminal development, before it became known, in 1916:But let’s turn to the view that made otherwise-proud Clevelander ashamed of their city in 1922 (think of this view as the same some proud Clevelander not wanting to show Jacobs’ parking lot on Public Square)…..The street directly behind those building is Champlain, a street that went west down the hill from Ontario to Columbus Road. This is at the intersection of Ontario, showing the backside of the buildings that faced Public Square in the shot above….Showing more of the backside of the buildings that faced Public Square…..Just west of those buildings were these, in the 200-block of Champlain, which had outlived their usefulness. Not many people were using horses any more in the 1920s:And stepping farther west down Champlain to the intersection of West 3rd Street, we look east again toward Ontario…..In the shot above, see the man in the foreground? Behind him is what was considered as perhaps the greatest architectural loss from the terminal development. This was the American Telephone & Telegraph exchange/switching building at Champlain and West 3rd, which was replaced by the art deco beauty on Huron which briefly became Cleveland’s tallest scraper before the Terminal Tower was finished, but served as the model for the Daily Planet in the Superman comic strips. So perhaps this building sacrificed itself for pop culture immortality….
Another architectural loss was the Central Police Station at Champlain and West 6th. It was replaced by an art deco gem on Payne Avenue, which unfortunately was demolished only a few years ago…..
Some buildings were already demolished by the time this picture was taken, revealing the back sides of buildings in the 700 block fronting Long Avenue, another “lost street” south of and parallel to West Superior….
Making our way farther down the hill in terms of topography and building conditions were these in the 800-900 block of Champlain…
At first glance this probably doesn’t look like a sloped road, but look at the angle of the buildings against the street/sidewalk surfaces. This view is looking east from Canal Road which ended at Champlain Avenue….
And, finally, at the bottom of Champlain hill was this view at Columbus Road, which climbed up the hill to the left to West Superior. This was one of the oldest commercial districts of Cleveland, dating from the heyday of the Ohio Canal…..
And if you’re still having a hard time picturing where Champlain Avenue ran, this picture reveals it because the Public Square buildings shown at the start of this post are gone, revealing Champlain behind. Ontario is at left…..
By the end of 1924, nearly all buildings were gone and the excavation for the Cleveland Union Terminal Group was well underway. The last building to be demolished was the AT&T building (shown earlier and seen at right, below) at Champlain and West 3rd. The cable ducts that ran below Champlain are seen extending west from the old AT&T building, which was kept intact until the new AT&T building (north of Progressive Field today) was operational…..
And that is a tour from the 1920s from the neighborhood that predated the Terminal Group. It truly was a neighborhood left over from the 1800s, its location to the transit hub on Public Square and its accessibility to nearby railroad lines was why this holdover from the canal era was vulnerable. It was ultimately replaced with this……
« Last Edit: January 03, 2012, 02:38:34 AM by KJP »
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“There should be no more reason for a motorist who is passing through a city to slow down then there is for an airplane which is passing over it.” Norman Bel Geddes, author of the 1940 book ‘Magic Motorways’ & designer of General Motors’ Futurama exhibit at 1939 New York World’s Fair
Case and CSU have a lovely collection of old photographs of Cleveland before its “peak” and during. Thought id post a few of my favorites:A 1930s view of the city from Detroit-Superior bridge. I think at this time the subway trollies ran inside the structure
The Academy of Music in the 1880s
1899 Streetcar Strike on Lower Euclid
The Cleveland Ship Building Company in 1890
One of the many mansions on Millionaire’s Row Euclid Avenue 1890
The Blizzard of 1913
Rockefeller himself in, yes, East Cleveland
The Central Market on East 4th Street in 1946
The Cuyahoga Building in 1893
The riverbank “The Flats” back in 1870
Cleveland Municipal Stadium 1931
Millionaire’s Row
Euclid Beach
First Baptist Church on East 9th in 1875
Public Square in 1910
Public Square celebration of Germany’s Victory over France in the Franco Prussian War in 1871
Haymarket on Ontario Rd in 1930
A Lorain-Carnegie Bridge pillar and their craftsmen
Ah streetcar suburb in the 1920s
The May Company Building in 1941
The Feast of the Assumption in Little Italy 1950 (wow its still the same today!)
Public Square facing the terminal in 1929
Artist touching up a mural in 1938 (wow holding a cig and messy hair, again, so little has changed haha)
1600s. Iroquois take over Ohio in a bloody war with various tribes.
1700s. Iroquois move east to fight the French and English. Wyandot move into region (most artifacts near Sandusky). They were known for their “rough hair” (read: mohawks—my husband is a descendant.)
1799. Doan family builds tavern at E. 107th & Euclid Avenue in East Cleveland township.
1860s. Oliver and Eliza die, and their land is divided into parcels.
League Park railway car
1872. Hough incorporated into Cleveland, which doubled in size in 10 years. Millionaire’s Row built on Euclid Avenue.
1890s. Two electric streetcars run down Hough & Euclid Avenues. League Park built at E. 66th and Lexington as home of the Cleveland Spiders (now the Cleveland Indians). Eliza Bryant built the first “Retirement home for Colored Persons,” later moved into Hough. Area filled with single family homes and exclusive schools like Beaumont School for Girls, University School, Notre Dame Academy, and East High School. Houses of worship built include St. Agnes Parish and Congregational Church.
University School (Cleveland Memory Project)
1900s. Hough Bakeries founded at 8703 Hough Avenue and Rainey Institute on E. 55th.
1920s. Apartment buildings constructed as wealthy residents migrate to the Heights to avoid air pollution from their own factories. Millionaires destroy their homes before moving out.
1930s. Hough fills with middle class immigrants and laborers. Homes take in boarders or split into multi-family dwellings.
1950s. Urban renewal and highway development force African-Americans from Central into Hough, increasing from 14% to 75% of its population. Realtors threaten reduced home values; Polish, Irish, and Spanish-speaking immigrants move out.
1960s. Mounting racial tension caused by deteriorating and overcrowded housing owned by whites and occupied by blacks. (Tip: Don’t be a slumlord).
July 18-23, 1966. Hough Riots cause massive property damage and four deaths until the National Guard takes over. A grand jury ruled that the Communist Party organized the uprising.
1970s. Middle class families flee the neighborhood while activists work hard to rebuild with little outside support. Religious communities collaborate to provide food and other social service programs. Nonprofits like Hough Multipurpose Center, Fatima Family Center, Famicos Foundation, and Hough Salvation Army are formed.
Reverend Jesse Jackson at East High
1976. Jesse Jackson speaks at dedication of new East High School building.
1985. Lexington Village opens, signaling a new era of residential development. Crack and AIDS weaken the community.
1990s & 2000s. Population continues to decline while large number of new, single family homes and townhouses are built. Church Square Shopping Plaza built and visited by President Clinton.
2010-2012. Euclid Avenue significantly rebuilt with Health Line bus connecting Downtown to University Circle. Deteriorating schools replaced with new buildings. Funds dedicated to maintain and restore portions of historic League Park.
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Cities Burying ‘Dead’ by Demolishing Homes
David Levitt/Bloomberg
A boarded-up home stands in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio.
Rust Belt Cities Demolish Homes as Defaults Blight Neighborhoods
By Brian Louis – Nov 17, 2010 9:01 PM PT
Cleveland’s population has been shrinking for 60 years as the city lost manufacturing jobs. Now, after more than 33,000 foreclosures since 2005, it’s demolishing hundreds of deserted, derelict homes.
An agency started last year to manage abandoned houses in Cuyahoga County, which includes Cleveland, plans to acquire as many as 1,000 properties next year, and tear down as many as 900 of them. The city of Cleveland may raze double that amount, according to Gus Frangos, president of Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corp.
A boarded-up home stands in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio. Photographer: David Levitt/Bloomberg
Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) — Cities across the Rust Belt, saddled with abandoned properties under their control as owners stop paying taxes, are choosing to tear down some buildings rather than sell them as residents move to the suburbs and steel, automotive and manufacturing jobs disappear. Bloomberg’s Monica Bertran reports. (Source: Bloomberg)
Cleveland has lost more than half its population since 1950 as the decline of steel, automotive and manufacturing jobs forced residents to leave for parts of the U.S. where employment was growing. Photographer: David Levitt/Bloomberg
“You really have to bury the dead right now,” Frangos said in a telephone interview. “You have to remove blight. It’s unfortunately on a grand scale.”
Cities and counties across the Rust Belt are ending up with abandoned properties under their control as owners stop paying taxes. In Cuyahoga County, a record 2,400 tax foreclosures may occur this year, said Chris Warren, Cleveland’s chief of regional development. The governments are choosing to tear down some buildings rather than sell them as residents move to the suburbs and steel, automotive and manufacturing jobs disappear.
“That decision reflects a perception of what the future is going to be,” said Nicolas Retsinas, director emeritus of the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s “the phenomenon of the shrinking city,” he said.
Detroit Demolitions
In Detroit, like Cleveland, the population has dropped by more than half since 1950. The city is in the process of demolishing more than 3,000 houses, according to Dan Lijana, a spokesman for Mayor Dave Bing. The mayor, elected last year, has pledged to tear down 10,000 abandoned and dangerous homes in his first term, Lijana said in an e-mail.
Detroit has almost 51,000 properties for sale and may add more through this year’s tax foreclosure auction in Wayne County, where the city is located.
“These cities really have to take on the properties,” said Alan Mallach, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Brookings Institution. “If they’re going to be responsible stewards, they really don’t have a choice.”
Detroit, which has about 911,000 residents, plans to spend $14 million of $47 million from the first grant it was awarded in the federal Neighborhood Stabilization Program to get rid of vacant properties that breed blight. Detroit razed 12,600 homes in the decade before Bing took office, Lijana said.
Homes Being Razed
In Ohio, Cuyahoga County Land Reutilization Corp., also known as the Cuyahoga Land Bank, won a $41 million grant in a second round of funding from the federal government’s stabilization program. The land bank has budgeted about $6.3 million to demolish 605 houses in Cleveland and some of its suburbs, according to a report filed with the U.S. government.
“There’s just not nearly enough money to solve the devastation in these neighborhoods,” Frangos said.
A block on Kinsman Avenue near East 144th Street in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood of southeast Cleveland is pocked with boarded-up homes and empty lots where homes once stood. Nailed to one house, its front gutter dangling over the porch, is a piece of plywood spray-painted with “NO COPPER,” an attempt to keep metal scavengers away.
Another neighborhood bearing the plywood scars of foreclosure is Slavic Village, also southeast of downtown. On a residential side street off the main thoroughfare of Fleet Avenue, about every seventh home is boarded up.
Demolitions Scheduled
Cleveland is scheduled today to demolish 11602 Cromwell Ave. on the city’s east side, and 6530 Hosmer Ave., in the southeast part of the city, according to Andrea Taylor, a spokeswoman for Mayor Frank Jackson.
The Cleveland area’s foreclosure rate ranked in the top third of more than 200 U.S. metropolitan areas in the third quarter, according to Irvine, California-based RealtyTrac Inc.
“Foreclosures continue unabated,” Jim Rokakis, the treasurer for Cuyahoga County and a board member of the county land bank, said in a telephone interview. “It’s an ugly situation.”
Ohio’s seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 10 percent in September, the latest month for which figures are available, higher than the national rate of 9.6 percent in October, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Michigan’s was 13 percent. The Cleveland metropolitan area’s jobless rate, which isn’t seasonally adjusted, was 9.4 percent, and Detroit’s was 13.4 percent.
‘Seriously Distressed’
Cleveland has 7,000 “vacant and seriously distressed properties,” according to a report by Warren, the city’s chief of regional development. That’s down from 8,009 last year as the city rehabilitated and demolished homes.
Municipal groups teamed up to target 20 neighborhoods in several cities in the region as part of a revitalization program, according to an “action plan” the Cuyahoga County Land Bank filed with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Neighborhoods in such suburbs as East Cleveland, Shaker Heights and South Euclid are among the targeted areas.
Dayton, Ohio, with a population of about 153,800, is also using money from the second round of federal grants to demolish properties and build new homes and apartment buildings for low- income families. In one neighborhood, the city is spending $1.55 million to buy 40 abandoned properties that will be torn down and replaced with homes for families earning less than 50 percent of the area’s median income.
Urban Agriculture
Cities also are encouraging urban agriculture through the planting of community gardens on vacant lots. In some cases, homes acquired by a municipality are rehabilitated and occupied again.
When buildings are demolished, the lots left behind may be cleaned for agriculture or the planting of gardens, or used for new construction. In the Cleveland area, multiple plots may be put together to allow for larger developments, which won’t go forward until demand for redevelopment emerges, according to Cuyahoga Land Bank.
Phoenix, which has the eighth-highest U.S. foreclosure rate, also received money from the federal government and plans to spend 3 percent of the first round on “clearance,” which includes cleaning up vacant lots and demolishing properties, according to government records.
For Sun Belt cities such as Phoenix, where there likely will be greater growth than in Cleveland and Detroit, the more practical strategy may be to hold on to homes until the real estate market recovers, said Terry Schwarz, director of Kent State University’s Cleveland Urban Design Collaborative in Cleveland.
“Depending on the property and climate, it may be possible to mothball the buildings,” Schwarz said.
Buying Foreclosed Homes
That’s what Phoenix is doing. The city of 1.6 million is buying foreclosed homes through the National Community Stabilization Trust, according to Kate Krietor, deputy director of neighborhood services for Phoenix. The Washington-based trust, sponsored by six nonprofit groups, helps local community- housing organizations buy foreclosed properties from lenders.
Phoenix-area home prices fell 52 percent in August from their peak in June 2006, according to data from the S&P/Case- Shiller home-price indexes. Farther east, values in and around Detroit dropped 44 percent from their 2005 record. Cleveland- area prices are down 13 percent from the peak four years ago.
Foreclosures are likely to continue in Cleveland as the economy struggles to rebound.
“It’s a dismal picture,” said Rokakis, the Cuyahoga county treasurer. “The only thing positive is this land bank and what we’re doing.”
Cleveland, Cuyahoga County allocate $14 million for demolition of blighted homes, hope for federal match
Published: Friday, March 16, 2012, 5:40 AM Updated: Friday, March 16, 2012, 5:42 AM
View full sizeJoshua Gunter, The Plain DealerA pile of rubble is all that remains after a home on West 32nd Street in Cleveland was demolished in February.
CLEVELAND, Ohio — Cleveland and Cuyahoga County expect to put up $14 million, a little more than previously estimated, in hopes of getting a matching amount for the demolition of blighted homes countywide.
The Cuyahoga land bank, the county prosecutor and the city of Cleveland sent a request to the Ohio attorney general’s office last week. They are seeking a portion of the money received by Ohio in a 49-state mortgage fraud settlement with major mortgage lenders.
The county could also see some federal dollars coming its way to battle the problem of abandoned homes. On Thursday, U.S. Reps. Steve LaTourette, a Republican, and Marcia Fudge, a Democrat, announced plans to propose legislation that would create a bond program to finance demolition of blighted buildings. A news conference is slated for Monday in Cleveland.
Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said last month that he is committing $75 million of Ohio’s $335 million share of the settlement to the razing of abandoned and blighted buildings throughout the state.
The land bank, created in 2009, has offered to put up $5 million of the $14 million needed in local money. The land bank, which gets most of its revenue from penalties and interest on delinquent taxes, recently demolished its 750th building. It expects to knock down 700 more properties by the end of this year.
The leftover lots are typically sold to neighbors for a nominal fee or given to the cities where the properties are located, land bank President Gus Frangos said.
The county prosecutor is also willing to kick in $5 million, with $1 million devoted specifically to the city of Cleveland. That money also comes from penalties and interest on delinquent taxes, Frangos said.
Initially, Prosecutor Bill Mason had committed $3 million, Frangos said, but he upped the contribution because he felt it was a worthy cause. Cleveland, which has demolished more than 5,000 properties since 2005 and has its own land bank, has estimated that it can put up $4 million.
The average cost of demolition is about $7,500, Frangos said. Additional asbestos removal costs could range from $500 to $5,000. Plus, there are other costs to maintain the properties pending demolition.
If a full match comes through from the state, it will probably take a few years to spend the $28 million, Frangos said. He said he’s unsure if the state will cap matching amounts.
DeWine said last month that the state money could be forthcoming by late spring. He declined then to say specifically how much Cleveland might get but said it would be millions of dollars.
Regardless of the state contribution, the local commitment of $14 million will not be reduced, he said.
The money “would provide a needed root canal for some neighborhoods that are on the brink of collapse,” Frangos said.
CLEVELAND, OHIO: Historic churches near Cleveland Clinic for sale
Date 2012/1/24 9:30:00 | Topic: News
CLEVELAND, OHIO: Historic churches near Cleveland Clinic campus at center of debate over preservation, land-banking The Episcopal Diocese of Ohio has put the Church of the Transfiguration up for sale, for $1.9 million
The Euclid Avenue Church of God and the Church of the Transfiguration sit empty on Cleveland’s former Millionaires’ Row, remnants of a heyday when mansions marched east from downtown.
Their congregations have fled. And historic preservationists fear that both churches will disappear, swallowed up by the Cleveland Clinic’s appetite for land.
Now the Cleveland Restoration Society, with nine employees and a million-dollar annual budget, is pitting itself against the city’s largest employer, a health care giant that says it has no interest in redeveloping dilapidated churches at the edge of its main campus.
The Clinic has offered to pay $500,000 for the land beneath the Euclid Avenue Church of God, northeast of Euclid and East 86th Street. On the other side of Euclid, the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio has put Transfiguration up for sale, for $1.9 million.
Real estate insiders say the sites would make sense for parking or commercial development. The property owners see a chance to unload unwanted buildings to a deep-pocketed buyer. But two city boards have rejected a request from the Euclid Avenue Church of God to demolish its building, a city landmark. And the Restoration Society is trumpeting that the Clinic should use its muscle and money to remake both churches.
“I don’t think that anybody thinks they’d be able to do heart surgery in one of these buildings, but there are many other uses,” said Kathleen Crowther, the Restoration Society’s president.
This tug-of-war comes as Northeast Ohio is grappling with vacant churches across the region. Religious buildings might be the biggest challenge facing the preservation community. Shrinking congregations and migration to the suburbs have left churches empty, or with fewer members — and less cash.
Local developers have remade churches as condominiums, offices and galleries. Still, the supply of empty buildings eclipses demand. The most likely user of a vacant church is another congregation, but banks are skittish about lending to faith-based groups.
“I think you’re always going to run into challenges like the situation with the Clinic,” said Melissa Ferchill, a Cleveland developer who remade a historic church for Baldwin-Wallace College’s music program and helped industrial design firm Nottingham Spirk transform a former Cleveland Heights church into an innovation center.
“Unfortunately for someone like the Clinic, a church just doesn’t repurpose very well,” she added. “It just doesn’t have spaces that will fit any of their needs very well.”
The Clinic would not make executives available to discuss the Euclid Avenue Church of God or Transfiguration. A new master plan for the Clinic’s main campus does not include the churches. But it’s clear the Clinic, which buys and holds property for development, is interested in the land.
“That’s not something that’s in our plans, to redevelop the property,” said Eileen Sheil, a Clinic spokeswoman. “They’re not our churches.”
Cash-strapped church sees Clinic as a savior
Built between 1890 and 1891, the Euclid Avenue Church of God is a small stone building designed by Sidney Badgley, a Canadian architect who crafted plans for several local churches. The Restoration Society believes one of the building’s stained glass windows was designed by Louis Comfort Tiffany’s studio. Inside the sanctuary, the walls are stained and the carpet feels uneven underfoot. In the bell tower, the plaster is crumbling and the floor has been replaced with plywood.
In the late 1980s and early ’90s, the congregation amassed a building fund and made repairs, members say. That effort stalled as pastors changed and the church’s leaders considered selling. The Clinic has expressed interest in the 0.16-acre property before, said members of the church’s board of trustees. But, they stressed, the Clinic never initiated the conversations.
“We went to them, asking them to help us,” said the Rev. Kevin Goode, the church’s current pastor. “We see them as our savior more than anything else.”
In June, the church asked the Cleveland Landmarks Commission for permission to knock down the building. The commission designates historically or architecturally significant buildings as city landmarks, a status that brings added scrutiny to demolition requests.
The Landmarks Commission turned down the congregation’s request. In September, the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals upheld that decision. Now the cash-strapped church is appealing, in a lawsuit filed in Cuyahoga County.
Meanwhile, Goode has moved his ministry out of Cleveland, merging his 80-person congregation with a small one at the Middleburg Heights Church of God on West 130th Street. He hopes to use the $500,000 from a potential sale to the Clinic to renovate the church’s new home.
The hospital system is helping the church pay for its legal battle, Goode said. Sheil said she could not confirm that. The congregation’s lawyer, Kenneth Fisher, would not say who is paying him.
Goode says the Euclid Avenue property is not safe. An engineering report predicts that a complete redevelopment would cost $1.5 million. Cleveland’s building department has no open citations on the Euclid Avenue Church of God building, according to public records. A city spokeswoman said officials would not discuss the property because of the congregation’s lawsuit.
“My building and Transfiguration, they’re not worth crap,” Goode said. “They’re not worth two dead flies smashed.”
Several longtime members of the congregation disagree. They’re skeptical about the pastor’s pronouncements, and they want multiple opinions on potential redevelopment costs.
“I didn’t have enough information,” said Ulysses McNair, a board member who voted against selling the property. “I also have a thing about being a party to tearing down God’s house. I said that to them. And they were saying to me, ‘Well, God’s people make up the house.’ ”
Restoration Society fears for city landmarks
The Restoration Society believes either building could be reused for office space, a restaurant or a library. But the preservation group hasn’t found other potential buyers for the Euclid Avenue Church of God.
In separate interviews, Crowther and Goode pointed fingers at each other.
Goode: “They [The Cleveland Restoration Society] blow a lot of hot air, but they’re not putting any money on the table.”
Crowther: “Our job is not to bail out every deteriorated landmark in the city. The city has laws that govern how you deal with properties in protected zones, and this is a protected property.”
Crowther criticized the congregation for approaching the Clinic, rather than putting the church on the market. Yet she agrees that the Clinic is the logical buyer — but that the institution should pay more attention to historic preservation, instead of land-banking.
The Clinic demolished the old Hathaway Brown School building in Cleveland and the former Ohio College of Podiatric Medicine building nearby. But the hospital has preserved two historic mansions on Euclid Avenue.
And the institution’s new master plan calls for reusing the Cleveland Play House complex, at 8500 Euclid Ave., as an education center. Preservationists have worried about the building since the Clinic bought it in 2010.
“We care about historic preservation,” said Sheil, the Clinic spokeswoman. “What we try to do with each of the properties that are on our land, that are historic landmarks, is we try to do what’s best for the community and the Cleveland Clinic.”
Sheil said she could not confirm whether the Clinic is looking at Transfiguration, which was listed for sale last month. Built in the early 1900s, the church stands on 0.83 acres just north of a Clinic parking garage.
The Gothic Revival church once offered programs serving up to 1,900 families a month, according to the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. More recently, it was home to a congregation of just 40 to 45 people.
One of several churches that broke off from the Episcopal Diocese of Ohio, the congregation at Transfiguration asserted that it owned its building. But the diocese claimed ownership of the property through a trust. A Cuyahoga County judge sided with the diocese in September.
Under the leadership of an Anglican priest, the congregation recently leased a former Methodist church on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. The Rev. Constance Harris said some members were reluctant to leave Euclid Avenue, but they couldn’t afford to maintain a historic building.
“There’s been a problem with the roof for years,” Harris said. “The plaster falls down. Over the one kind of cloistered aisle, it rains inside if it rains outside.”
Citing safety concerns, diocese officials would not let a Plain Dealer reporter tour Transfiguration. The Rev. Brad Purdom, canon for congregations, noted that the diocese is renovating some properties, including the historic St. John’s Episcopal Church in Ohio City.
But, he said, the diocese cannot restore every building.
“It breaks our hearts,” Purdom said. “But at the end of the day, you have to make some choices about how you’re going to spend the limited resources that you do have.”
Issue Date: March 2010 Tear it DownForeclosure, sprawl and a sagging economy have left a crumbling American Dream in their wake. These ruins remain, scarring our city. But there is hope for a fresh start. Erick Trickey trickey@clevelandmagazine.com
CLEVELAND WON’T BE reborn until it buries its dead.
Empty, decaying houses haunt Cuyahoga County’s neighborhoods — 8,000 dispirited shells where yesterday’s factory workers, nurses, lawyers and mechanics lived. Today, those residents are deceased or bankrupt or they’ve started over in a new part of town, a different city, another state. Many streets wait in vain for new owners and tenants to replace them. No one is coming, at least not until the old bricks and timbers are gone.
Last year, 14,800 foreclosure cases hit Cuyahoga County’s courthouse, about the same as the year before and the year before that. Blame our region’s economic stagnation and the nation’s recession; blame lenders who bent and broke old rules to make loans to people who couldn’t afford them; blame Wall Street speculators who bundled and resold those toxic loans, poisoning the economy. Or blame our drive to expand, leave the old neighborhoods and make new suburbs out of countryside. All those reasons help explain the ruins on these eight pages, the abandoned city that must be laid to rest before a new city can grow.
Vacant houses can hide muggers, drug dealers and rapists. Boarded windows, sagging porches and graffiti wreck the value of homes nearby. Gloom settles into the minds of the adults driving down the street and the kids who walk past the wrecks on the way to school.
“We don’t ever come out after dark,” says Lonnie Marie Woods, whose home on Cleveland’s Nevada Avenue faces three abandoned houses. “Just ask the neighbors. We’re petrified! We are in danger!”
So it’s time to send the bulldozers. Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson has greatly expanded City Hall’s demolition program: It tore down 1,624 houses in 2009, up from about 300 a year before he took office. Another 1,500 are planned for this year. Cuyahoga County recently created a land bank to take over abandoned properties, demolish the worst and least-wanted homes, renovate the best and hold others until they can be fixed and sold.
“As much as I’d like to tell you [otherwise],” says county treasurer Jim Rokakis, “the majority of what we get’s going to be demolished.”
Not every vacant house should disappear: In strong neighborhoods, rehabbers buy, restore and sell foreclosed homes. New owners buy them as fixer-uppers, often with help from government grants and nonprofits. But in the hardest-hit neighborhoods, a house’s first, second or third foreclosure can mean its end. Some abandoned houses are stripped and vandalized, even burned down by vagrants seeking shelter and setting fires to stay warm. Condemnation comes next. Or, the market pronounces a quieter death sentence: The house has no value left because no one wants to buy it.
“There’s a lot more supply than there is demand,” says Rokakis. “If there was huge demand for this housing, people would be moving into it.”
It costs about $6,000 to $10,000 to tear down a house. Cleveland uses federal funds or city bond money to pay demolition contractors then bills the property owner. Private demolitions have also grown, to 1,090 last year. Owners of decaying houses know the city is serious, so they’ll tear them down before the city does.
Still, the problem is bigger than the budget. The city counted 6,820 “vacant, distressed” houses in December, down 1,189 from 2008. So it tears down the worst first: the fire-damaged, the falling-down. It takes down clusters: five on one block. Derelict houses near schools are also high priorities, as are houses on main streets, in high-crime areas, near new economic development and on near-vacant streets.
In Cuyahoga County’s suburbs, which saw more foreclosures than the city last year, vacant houses are far more likely to be rehabbed, resold or maintained.
Even so, suburban governments now condemn and tear down the most-troubled houses. Maple Heights has demolished dozens in the past year. Lakewood took down a handful.
Worst off is East Cleveland, where 1,450 vacant buildings mar the town’s 3.2 square miles, overwhelming its unstable government’s tiny budget. Fire-gutted houses, collapsed porches and rows of ruins, sights rare in Cleveland itself, scar the worst streets. Mayor Gary Norton wants to speed demolitions; the county land bank has offered to help.
At least 8,200 houses in the county are likely too far gone to save. And that’s a conservative figure. Rokakis thinks it’s closer to 17,000.
Once a house is gone, the land can have a new future. Abandoned property often goes into tax foreclosure then to the city or county land bank, which assemble large chunks to offer to developers when an economic recovery finally arrives.
“Everything is cyclical,” says Joe Sidoti, Cleveland’s real estate commissioner. “Eventually, when the market returns, we can dictate what type of development should go in.”
The land banks also split single lots between occupied houses to give the neighbors bigger yards; because a typical Cleveland lot is 30 feet wide, plenty of residents are eager to stretch out. Nonprofits are helping the city start pocket parks, planting trees and shrubbery along busy streets. Residents have started more than 200 community gardens. (At the one above, founded last April on West 48th Street, neighbors are growing collard greens, cabbage and peppers.) Urban-agriculture pioneers also envision farms on newly vacant land. Or, eco-minded planners can create ponds and lowlands to keep storm water from overflowing the sewers.
Cleveland could become “a city in which viable homes have large lots, and commercial strips and viable streets have more green space,” says Gus Frangos, the county land bank’s president. “It’s amazing what a little bit of water and a little green does to attract people.” It’s an opportunity to create a more environmentally friendly region, to take a city built for 900,000 people and remake it for today’s 430,000 residents — and to open up places for Cleveland to grow again.
Thousands of cars pass 5717 Grand Ave. every day, taking a shortcut between Kinsman Road and I-490. The house, one of the last on the block, had one owner from 1956 to 1992. It’s had five since. The Bank of New York Mellon owns it now after two foreclosures. Cleveland Housing Court Judge Ray Pianka signed a warrant Jan. 5 that allowed inspectors inside. A search warrant “can be a death warrant of a house,” Pianka says. It’s the first step in the grimly nicknamed “stations of the cross”: search warrant, inspection, condemnation, demolition. “We’re seeing this section of Grand Avenue disappear,” the judge says. The city found 25 code violations, including holes in the roof and walls and a failing foundation. It condemned the house Jan. 12.
The house at 5241 Dolloff Road scares Joyce Alvino. She lives next door, and at night, she and her husband, Bernie, listen for noises. “People come in from the windows on the other side,” she says. “You don’t want a fire if it’s a windy day.” Her husband shot an arrow into the empty house’s side to warn trespassers away.Dolloff Road, in the North Broadway neighborhood near I-77, is devastated. Vacant houses surround the Alvinos on three sides. They bought the house on one side and use it to store their summer furniture. The empty house across the street is maintained by the guy who’s owned it since 1983. A community group has painted bright flowers and curtains on its window boards.Wells Fargo bought the vacant house to the north at a sheriff’s sale after the Alvinos’ former neighbors lost it to foreclosure in 2007. The bank then sold it to a Utah-based house wholesaler. Go Invest Wisely LLC owns 144 properties in Cuyahoga County and has 25 cases pending against it in Cleveland Housing Court, some for code violations, some for failure to provide disclosure forms. A December probation order requires the company to keep all its Cleveland properties clean and secure.“You’re kind of stuck here,” says Alvino, a retired Cleveland State University office manager who’s lived on Dolloff since 1981. “One time, it was a really beautiful neighborhood. Everyone knew everyone. Now you don’t know anybody.” The last few neighbors trade rumors that an investor will come in and buy all their properties. “That’s our only salvation for any of us to get out of here.”
This house, which fell into foreclosure in 2006, stands six doors down from the house where Anthony Sowell allegedly killed 11 women. JP Morgan Chase Bank bought it in a sheriff’s sale for $49,300 then sold it for $1,000 in April 2007 to its current owner, Cleveland-based Mars Urban Solutions LLC. Foreclosure and vacancy have made many Cleveland neighborhoods more dangerous. One disturbing question about the Imperial Avenue murders is, how could Sowell have buried his alleged victims in his backyard without anyone noticing? One answer: He lived between a sausage shop and a vacant home, better maintained than this one, that was foreclosed on in early 2008.
Three decaying houses stand side by side on Nevada Avenue, a one-block street near Woodland Avenue that dead-ends into railroad tracks. “Tear this down!” shouts Lonnie Marie Woods, who owns a house across from them. “Tear this one down! All three of them!” The county land bank acquired this house, 8624 Nevada, in a tax foreclosure in November. It’s scheduled to be one of the land bank’s first demolitions. The green one next door was seized in another tax foreclosure in October. Woods says she’s waited seven years for the ruins on her street to go. In 2003, two 13-year-old boys were raped in another vacant house on the block. The city tore that house down, she says, but left the others.
When I read Vladimir’s Nabokok’s novel Lolita, I thought of Balthus as being the visual storyteller version of the literary giant’s work. I had forgotten that his brother was the erotic fiction writer Pierre Klossowski. Given Bathus’ several years as an artist in Rome, I now see a connection here with himself and Cy Twombly.
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Please help improve it by adding dated informations, images and videos about Balthus.
In 1921 Mitsou, a book which included forty drawings by Balthus, was published.
1926
In 1926 he visited Florence , copying frescos by Piero della Francesca, which inspired another early ambitious work by the young painter: the tempera wall paintings of the Protestant church of the Swiss village of Beatenberg.
1930
From 1930 to 1932 he lived in Morocco, was drafted into the Moroccan infantry in Kenitra and Fes, worked as a secretary, and sketched his painting La Caserne.
1933
Moving in 1933 into his first Paris studio at the Rue de Furstemberg and later another at the Cour de Rohan, Balthus showed no interest in modernist styles such as Cubism.
1934
Guitar Lesson
Oil on canvas
1937
In 1937 he married Antoinette de Watteville, who was from an old and influential aristocratic family from Bern .
1940
In 1940, with the invasion of France by German forces, Balthus fled with his wife Antoinette to Savoy to a farm in Champrovent near Aix-les-Bains, where he began work on two major paintings: Landscape near Champrovent (19421945) and The Living Room.
1942
In 1942, he escaped from Nazi France to Switzerland, first to Bern and in 1945 to Geneva, where he made friends with the publisher Albert Skira as well as the writer and member of the French Resistance, Andre Malraux.
1944
Christopher Hope, born 1944, wrote a novel, “My Chocolate Redeemer” around a painting by Balthus, “The Golden Days” which is featured on the book jacket.
1946
Balthus returned to France in 1946 and a year later traveled with Andre Masson to Southern France, meeting figures such as Picasso and Jacques Lacan, who eventually became a collector of his work.
1948
In 1948, another friend, Albert Camus, asked him to design the sets and costumes for his play L’Etat de Siège.
Three years later he moved into the Chateau de Chassy in the Morvan, living with his niece Frederique Tison and finishing his large-scale masterpieces La Chambre (The Room 1952, possibly influenced by Pierre Klossowski‘s novels) and Le Passage du Commerce Saint-Andre.
Jesus Fuertes – In 1963 Fuertes left for Rome to receive the first place prize for his painting “Torneo Medieval” awarded by the Grand Prix de Rome for Painting and Sculpture, and it was in Italy that he developed a close friendship with Giorgio De Chirico, the renowned master painter of metaphysical art, with whom shortly after he exhibited his work along with notable constructivists and surrealists Balthus, Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carra in 1965
1964
In 1964, he moved to Rome where he presided over the Villa de Medici as director of the French Academy in Rome, and made friends with the filmmaker Federico Fellini and the painter Renato Guttuso.
1973
The photographers and friends Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine_Franck (Cartier-Bresson’s wife), both portrayed the painter and his wife and their daughter Harumi in his Grand Chalet in Rossinière in 1999.
Le Bal des Debutantes – In 1993, there were 27 Debs from around Europe, including Harumi Klossowksi de Rola, daughter of the painter Balthus, who was dressed by Japanese haute couture designer Hanae Mori, as well as Laetizia Tarnowska, wearing Louis Feraud Haute Couture
Setsuko Klossowska de Rola – At Sotheby’s in Zurich in 1999, a Balthus and Setsuko Klossowski de Rola exhibition was held entitled “Sotheby’s Kingdom of the Cats”
Not very long ago, no English-language publisher would have wanted to consider a comprehensive survey of the life and work of a French painter known simply as Balthus. Balthus was widely regarded as an up-market near-pornographer who painted teenage young women in provocative attitudes and states that bordered on indecency.
“Awfully sorry,” they would say, “but we couldn’t touch it.” On that note, the aspirant biographer was shown the door.
That was just fine with Balthus. He had a horror of being written about. When he made his American debut in New York in 1938 at the Pierre Matisse Gallery, he said, “If there is any one thing that I hate more than anything else in the world, it is an exhibition preface.” The problem recurred when Balthus had a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the winter of 1956-1957. James Thrall Soby was in charge of the catalog. He was on record as believing that Balthus’s The Street, which he had lost no time in buying, was as great a landmark in the history of French painting as Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa.
Soby was delightful company and very much persona grata at the Museum of Modern Art. He could not be prevented from writing for the catalog. “But,” Balthus wrote, “I beg him to leave out all the biographical details that are so much in fashion today. Ancestry, parentage, mode of life, etc.—all that seems to me completely superfluous. Just tell the public that I was born in Paris, and that I am forty-six years old. That should be quite enough.” (As a matter of fact he was going on forty-nine, but he thought that that, too, was nobody’s business.)
By 1968 Balthus had, if anything, hardened his position. When his exhibition at the Tate Gallery in London was all ready to go, he asked the organizer to remove all biographical matter from the catalog. “Just say,” he said, “that ‘Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. Now let us have a look at his paintings.”’
That sentence has often been referred to as if it were some kind of landmark, or even as a historic breakdown, in the artist/curator relationship. As the organizer in question, I never saw it in that light. This was Balthus’s big day in London, even if he never came to the show. His family history was his own business. If he preferred me to confine myself to what he generously described as my “always pertinent” comments on his work, I had no complaint. Matters of “ancestry, parentage, mode of life, etc.” could be left to an eventual biographer. But what eventual biographer? An “authorized life of Balthus” was a contradiction in terms.
That was back then. The big books on Balthus took forever to be researched, written, and published. After more than thirty years, two candidates have at last reached the bookstores. The first is a 644-page biography by an American cultural historian, Nicholas Fox Weber. Initially, and contrary to all expectation, this had been given a cordial go-ahead from Balthus himself.
Nicholas Fox Weber was quite unknown to Balthus when he called him from Connecticut, unannounced and out of the blue, and said that he wanted to write a book about him. Balthus himself answered the telephone. Where an unknown caller might normally have got a stylish equivalent of the bum’s rush, Weber sounded like what he is—a model of courtesy—and he was at once made welcome. (It may have helped that November is a very slow month in the part of Switzerland where Balthus lives.) Balthus wanted to talk only in English. He had had a Scottish nanny, he said, and English was his first language.
To be exact, Weber’s book is not “a biography” of the kind that trudges from week to week. The author remembers what Mark Twain once said—that “biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.” What we get to read is the record of a blameless, one-sided, non-sexual love affair between biographer and artist which blossomed, cooled, and redeveloped with time into a lingering fascination. Much of it has also the character of a traditional conversazione in which people of every age and stripe pipe up and have their say. Weber made it his business to speak to everyone who might have something to say about Balthus.
Partly for this reason, his book has a curious, rambling, many-faceted quality. As he says, there is a moment in almost every biographer’s experience when he falls in love with his subject. In the initial phase of the Balthus/Weber conversations, this was almost bound to occur. Balthus made him welcome in a way that made Weber feel that he was already a friend from whom nothing would be kept back. He was encouraged to take notes even at mealtimes. No subject was taboo.
The friendship flourished, and in January 1991 Weber came back to Switzerland as a house guest of Balthus and his wife. Balthus and Weber talked, Weber tells us, “morning, noon, and night for ten days.” Note-taking was mandatory. It seemed, as Weber says, “an ideal situation.” The book thereafter is in part the story of how that ideal situation unraveled. There were some who said that Balthus was ultimately loyal to no one. It was also disconcerting to Weber that Balthus never hesitated to tamper with the facts if it would be to his advantage. Disappointment bordered on outrage. And yet, toward the end, Balthus reemerged as someone who was infinitely worth knowing.
Weber not only tried to meet everyone who might have something important to say about Balthus and his work, but traveled sometimes widely and sometimes almost next door, from Claus von Bülow in London to Linda Fairstein, the present chief of the Manhattan district attorney’s sex crimes unit, who was asked to comment on the condition of some of the bodies in Balthus’s paintings. Weber also reports that “the erudite and sharp-focused von Bülow proved to be among the most acute and original firsthand observers of Balthus I have ever encountered.” He mentions von Bülow’s speculation about the appeal for Balthus of his friendship with a Roman grandee: “a certain voyeurism—of both the prestigious family and the sexual prowess.”
But by the time Weber went to France, many key witnesses had died. Among them were Alberto Giacometti, of whom Balthus always spoke in a worshipful way, Albert Camus, with whom Balthus had worked in the theater, Paul Éluard, who had written a poem for him, and André Malraux, the architect of Balthus’s almost ambassadorial status in later life. But many others were still living, and not all of them would collaborate.
Balthus’s brother, Pierre, refused to see Weber (to think about his brother gave him migraines, he said). There is no sign that Balthus’s longtime favorites, Frédérique Tison and Laurence Bataille, were accessible. Jean-Louis Barrault and Madeleine Renaud had worked with him in the theater, as had many others, but they do not seem to have made any contribution to the book. The Paris of the 1990s was one that Balthus did not know (and would not have liked).
Other friends (and especially those who had sat for Balthus) were ready to talk. But the talk often slithered sideways into gossip. Was Balthus really the Comte de Rola, the Polish title on which he insisted? Many people get excited about that. It is a point on which many a friendship has been broken, and many another reinforced. I myself applaud the Vicomte Charles de Noailles, who had often entertained Balthus at his house on the Place des États-Unis in Paris. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It gives him so much pleasure.” It has also been pointed out that no one seems to have laughed at Casanova when he chose a few letters from the alphabet, put them together, and said, “Now I am Casanova, Chevalier de Seingalt!”
Balthus himself had told Pierre Matisse in 1956 that the Rola Klossowskis were an ancient Polish family, of which the male members had the rank of count. The Rola coat of arms had been created in 1044 on the occasion of a family marriage. In the 1950s, eighty families—none of them related—had the right to bear that coat of arms. Balthus once said that Rola meant “glebe”—church land—and Klossowski meant an ear of corn.
These meanings did not engage the interest of Balthus’s first wife, Antoinette de Watteville, from whom he had long been amicably separated. “Of course, it’s absolute nonsense,” she said to me over lunch at her house in Switzerland. “But we lived here, and it’s called Rolle. So why shouldn’t he be the Comte de Rola? It sounds just right.”
Gossip also fed on the question of whether or not Balthus had Jewish blood, and did not like to admit it. This was a more telling notion, in that his mother, born Elisabeth Dorothea Spiro, was the daughter of a well-known and highly gifted cantor in Wroclaw (now Breslau). Since Nicholas Fox Weber also has Jewish forebears in Breslau, he saw no harm in saying to Balthus: here we are, two Jews from Breslau, sitting side by side in Switzerland. After a moment or two, Balthus said, “No, that is wrong, Mr. Weber.” “Behind his ‘it really doesn’t matter’ tone of voice,” Weber says, “there was an underlying vehemence.”
There was also the question of his mother. “Baladine,” as she was universally known, had been the mistress of Rainer Maria Rilke. Balthus had certainly witnessed the distress that the decline and end of this relationship had caused her. He had also endured poverty from 1921 to 1924 in Berlin. Rilke could have saved them both from that ordeal. To a friend, Rilke wrote, “I had a ghastly feeling that I was letting someone I loved fall into the abyss. That is what Berlin must mean to poor Balthus’s mother—for many reasons: a bottomless abyss, and one in which she will be continually pushed down deeper and deeper!” That said, Rilke closed to her the door of Muzot, the house she had put into shape for him in Switzerland, and went on with his “Duino Elegies,” undisturbed.
In later years, in Paris, Baladine did not lack for friends. She was well built and outgoing, with a broad, generous face and fine, full lips. People loved to go to her apartment on the rue Malebranche, where she was a source of irresistible animation. The French critic Jean Clair reminds us of a comment made in the 1920s by Jean Cassou, a lifelong connoisseur of the Parisian intellectual scene:
Baladine’s salon was the last headquarters of a society of true spirits. We spent some astonishing evenings in her studio…. There was a charge of cosmopolitan electricity in the air. There were Germans, side by side with delightful and mysterious Austrian women, and Rilke, of course, and Groethuysen and Charles du Bos, and Pierre-Jean Jouve, and Baladine’s two boys…
This was distinctly the honor roll of a certain Paris, with Baladine as its animatrix. But it was not a Paris that Balthus coveted.
Weber’s biography was followed closely by the long-awaited and monumental 576-page Balthus: A Catalogue Raisonné of the Complete Works by Virginie Monnier and Jean Clair. This documents and illustrates more than two thousand works, both large and small. Many were previously unknown. This majestic book has the words “with the authorization of Balthus” on the title page. This was to be expected since Jean Clair, the director of the Picasso Museum in Paris, has been writing on Balthus since 1966. He also organized in 1983 the major Balthus retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. His lengthy essay, “The Hundred-Year Sleep,” in the catalogue raisonné is rich in unfamiliar ideas, fished up from all over.
In the Picasso Museum Jean Clair has charge of Balthus’s The Blanchard Children (1937; see illustration on page 10), which Picasso bought in 1941 and bequeathed to the Louvre. This is how Jean Clair sees the painting:
[The two children] have just returned from school, a satchel has been thrown under the table and the boy has not yet taken time to undo his plaited leather belt or to remove his gray smock; his sister is already down on all fours, absorbed in a book and he, resting his chin on his hand, is already lost in his dreams. From floor to ceiling, all of space is theirs, and with it, the possession of time.
Reading, as portrayed in this picture, is neither a task nor a chore. It is what Clair calls “the weightless time of the free and agile soul, capable of elevation, like a free flight, in an absent-minded sort of reading, a floating, almost negligent attention which, because it merely brushes up against things, allows one to catch their scent without destroying what contains it.”
This is one of the relatively rare occasions on which Jean Clair and Nicholas Fox Weber are in complete accord. Weber says, among much else, that
Thérèse and Hubert have solid, earthly bodies; their poses make them seem even stronger. Thérèse stretches out her gangly, nubile frame and arches it mightily. She places her limbs as only a child might—flattening her lower leg, bending her foot, and twisting her arms in a way that tenses her body like a coiled spring. It looks unnatural, yet children are sometimes endowed with this flexibility. Thérèse’s hands offset one another across a void so that, in addition to supporting her, they impart a certain bounce—and help give her élan.
Balthus in late boyhood was so sensitive to that particular stage in life. When he was fourteen, Balthus said he would like to remain a child forever. It was in painting, for many years to come, that he could replay a period in life in which everything was beginning and nothing had as yet been degraded or dirtied.
The fearless and wholly defensible specificity of many of the images that resulted still gets Balthus into trouble. About such misunderstandings, he seems to say, this is what young people are like. They are dealing with what may well be the most important phase of their whole lives. They have their own ways of dealing with it. If painting is about truth, and not about received opinions, why should we begrudge them an inch of their underclothes, or even an occasional glimpse of their genitalia? They think nothing of such things. Who are we to pounce upon them?
Meanwhile, to pore over the catalogue raisonné is to realize anew the scope, the energy, and the constantly varying direction of Balthus’s ambitions. To include every single surviving scrap of his oeuvre is an act of candor from which most painters would emerge diminished. Balthus had his off days, like everyone else. But the cumulative effect is to keep the reader eager and alert throughout the 349 paintings, the 1,448 reproduced drawings, the eighty pages of drawings from sketchbooks, the forty drawings for the book called Mitsou (published when Balthus was only thirteen, with a preface in French by Rilke), and the forty-one drawings for Wuthering Heights (1933-1935).
Among the Parisian theatrical adventures that counted for much in their day were Balthus’s décors and costumes for an adaptation of Shelley’s The Cenci in 1935. Antonin Artaud both directed the production and played the principal role. Nineteen sketches for The Cenci are in the catalog, as are more than fifty-nine for a production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte in Aix-en-Provence in 1950. As for his drawing of Puss in Boots—for the program of a ballet by Roland Petit—Balthus, the self-styled “King of the Cats,” was never in more genial form.
To have all this in one big book is the more valuable in that the greater part of Balthus’s output can now be seen only in ones and twos, and not often as easily as that. Fenced off behind the words “private collection,” they lead a reclusive life. The catalogue raisonné is particularly useful for that reason, although present owners are not often named.
But of course people don’t only want to see his work. Many would rather gossip about Balthus himself than unriddle a huge painting like The Mountain of 1937, which measures eight by twelve feet. In The Mountain a still-unspoiled Swiss upland scene is marvelously rendered. It is populated by Balthus himself, by his future wife, Antoinette de Watteville, and by a handful of their friends. As in amateur theatricals, and with an evident delight, they act out one version or another of the pleasure of being on pristine high ground on a perfect day. The Swiss village of Beatenberg, which Balthus knew so well, was not yet touched by the tourist industry.
It is to my eye a blissful image, and one that fits perfectly with some lines by Rilke: “We should think back often to the interminable afternoons of childhood, remembering a whole world lost and gone. Time passes. Why can those afternoons not return?”
The Mountain, with its profusion of play-acting, is the epitome of what Rilke had to say. But not everyone agrees. In his biography, Weber says of The Mountain that
the group assembled for a supposedly playful outing seem half dead. They are self-absorbed to the point of being totally out of reach. Forever fixed in a life that Balthus knew to be imperiled, they do not savor it easily.
(Readers who wish to form their own opinion about this redoubtable painting can find it through December 31 of this year in the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition “Painters in Paris: 1895-1950.”)
Jean Clair and Virginie Monnier have for years been authorities on Balthus, about whom Jean Clair has had unique opportunities to acquire knowledge. Who but he might have known, for instance, of the letter (now in the Picasso Museum) that Balthus wrote to Picasso in October 1956. “I always think [of you],” he said, “with happiness and amazement, and a deep gratitude too that you should be there, you, the Great River of nourishing and exterminating fire, the Father of this century!”
Weber, for his part, traveled in Europe and in the United States to see as many as possible of Balthus’s paintings at first hand. This was not always easy, but he succeeded, for instance, in seeing TheGuitar Lesson (1934; see illustration on page 8), one of Balthus’s more startling achievements, where many another eager pilgrim has failed. (The picture hung in the New York apartment of Stavros Niarchos. Weber was left alone to sit and look at it for as long as he liked.) As is widely known, it shows an older woman giving pleasure (or conceivably pain) to an adolescent young woman who is laid across her knees. Fingering is, after all, fundamental to every guitar lesson.
This left Weber with very mixed feelings. “The violation of a girl close in years to my own daughters was heinous,” he says. “But the effects of Balthus’s virtuosity had left me no room for escape.” After long scrutiny he decided that the torturer was actually a self-portrait of Balthus in drag.
In the book by Weber and the catalogue raisonné we have, on the one hand, a superabundance of hearsay and, on the other, every surviving scrap of Balthus’s output, ordered and annotated. Yet he remains a painter on whom the last word has yet to be said. Linda Fairstein, the Manhattan sex crimes prosecutor, gave Weber on many occasions the benefit of her specialized professional knowledge. When shown a photograph of the naked and apparently unconscious figure in Balthus’s La Victime (1937), she looked it over carefully and said, “She looks like a sex murder victim—exsanguinated,” i.e., drained of blood.
After 1959, when André Malraux became President de Gaulle’s minister for cultural affairs, and during the presidency of Georges Pompidou (1969-1974), Balthus took on a new rank in the officialdom of French culture. André Malraux wanted every big city in France to have new cultural centers that would be a lesson to the rest of the world. He wanted Paris to regain its old position as the place where foreign artists most wanted to live. He also wanted the hallowed but sometimes rather ramshackle institutions of French art, like the Villa Medici in Rome, to be reanimated.
In carrying out this grand design it was important to find a French painter who aroused curiosity and admiration in equal measure. There were many good painters in France, but only one who had retained in a supreme degree a fascination all his own. That painter was Balthus; Malraux had been acquainted with Balthus since 1945 and it soon became known that they were close friends. Balthus had an irresistible seductiveness, in which both mischief and an unfailing sense of social nuance had a part. The curious, snorting, half-strangled eloquence of Malraux played against the perfectly formed sentences of Balthus. The match, if there was a match, had two winners and no losers.
How to make the most of this? Balthus had somehow to be set up in grand style, with a distinctive status. Balthus always loved houses that came with their own history and a good name. He and his mother had been bone poor in Berlin and he had not forgotten it. When he lived for a while on the shores of Lake Geneva after World War II, it was not an accident that his address was the Villa Diodati, where Byron had once lived. He liked to say that he was in some way related to Byron.
Balthus could do much for France, simply by being around. He had the looks, the bearing, and the polyglot fluencies. No one ever forgot him. Nor did they forget his paintings. In every way he would make an ideal partner in one of Malraux’s schemes for a revived France. High functions amused him, and he has a great sense of history. In 1961, Malraux appointed Balthus as director of the Villa Medici, one of the most magnificent houses in Rome, its associations indisputably august. To be master of the Villa Medici had once been very grand, and it could be very grand again.
On arrival there, Balthus was appalled by the dowdy, slovenly, uncared-for, municipal look of many of its rooms. He soon put that right. He also revived the tradition of the Villa Medici as a place in which exhibitions of a high order could be offered to the public. As for himself, it was bliss for him to stop looking around for somewhere to live and to preside over a town house as fine as any in Europe.
Bliss of another kind resulted when Malraux sent Balthus to Japan on a mission in 1962. While there, he met Setsuko Ideta, whom he was to marry in 1967. She had lived happily with him at the Villa Medici and was the model from 1963 on of some of his greatest paintings, in which many years of work resulted in hallucinatory and still-cryptic images of his wife.
In 1977 Balthus left the Villa Medici and went to live, as he still does, in Switzerland. His name by then was giving off the kind of buzz that is irresistible to collectors who are confident they can outbid any rivals for Balthus’s works, which continue to puzzle them. And puzzles there are, in plenty. Balthus the painter and Balthus the man have never given up their secrets. But Jean Clair in his catalog essay has a quotation that may be apt. It was written by the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi in 1828:
A woman of twenty, twenty-five, or thirty years may have more evident attraits, she may be better armed to arouse and above all to feed a passion…. But in truth, a girl between the age of sixteen and eighteen has in her face, her movements, her gait, etc. a divine something which nothing can equal.
Thus might Balthus have spoken, a hundred and sixty years later.
==
December 29, 2002
‘Vanished Splendors’: Balthus and His Kingdom
By JOHN RUSSELL
The French painter Balthus, who died in February last year at 92, had an irresistible fascination, when he chose to exert it. He had seigniorial good looks of a kind now rarely met with. He was consistently debonair, though not disposed to waste his time. His conversation was at once high-souled and mischievous. Confidentiality seemed to be its essence. We felt that it was for our ears only, even if he had been saying the same things to other people for half a century.
With his multinational leanings — his sense of the high cultures of France, Italy, England and Switzerland — he was a throwback to a ”vieille Europe” as yet untouched by two world wars. To be with him was distinctly a privilege, and one that could last for a lifetime. (It could also be withdrawn, on the instant.)
Something of that privilege lingers in ”Vanished Splendors,” which is based on a two-year conversation between Balthus in his late 80’s and a French admirer, Alain Vircondelet, and benefits from the inclusion of telling and unfamiliar photographs. The book was published in France as ”Memoires de Balthus,” which was a considerable overstatement, given that the conversations were not structured but fragmented. Balthus was in no shape, and may never have even aimed, to dictate ”memoirs.”
At that time he had trouble walking and seeing, and his voice came as a whisper. ”Vanished Splendors” is a better title, even if many of the splendors that are discussed — among them Balthus’s own paintings — are still very much with us. But we sense, nonetheless, that he is feeling his way, word by word and for the last time, through the long story of his life.
The talks took place in his Grand Chalet in Rossiniere. It was often thought that Balthus liked very big houses because he hankered after ostentatious living. But this was not the case. What he liked was very big houses in which he could live almost alone and see no one. If the house was isolated, his happiness was complete.
This was the case with the Grand Chalet, which is situated way up above Lausanne. People had often assumed that Balthus was ideally happy as director of the French Academy’s Villa Medici in Rome, a post to which he had been appointed by Andre Malraux in 1961 when Malraux was France’s minister of culture. Balthus in Rome had quasi-ambassadorial status and lived in a great palazzo whose garden Velazquez had painted. In that same garden, Balthus had a studio of his own for some years, and he also enjoyed putting the great house back into good shape.
But Rome palled for him when the automobile got the better of its ancient unhurried ways. And although he had been a key figure in Paris in the 30’s, he didn’t fancy the era for which the new Pompidou Center was the symbol. (So vituperative was he on that subject that when he invited the novelist Marguerite Duras to stay at the Villa Medici they quarreled so fiercely that she walked out.)
After spending 16 years in Rome, he found the house in which he was to live and die. It fulfilled all his dreams, and those of Setsuko Ideta, the beautiful, intelligent and gifted young Japanese woman whom he had come to know, and to marry, in Italy. (Pierre Matisse, his dealer in New York, agreed to put up the purchase price for the house in return for a number of paintings, and in 1977 Balthus and his family moved in.)
Balthus prized the Grand Chalet for its ”dozens of rooms and hundred windows,” only a few of which he ever made use of. He loved the golden blond wood that covered every floor and creaked at every step. He liked to remark that Victor Hugo had stayed there when it was a country inn, and there were unconfirmed rumors about both Goethe and Voltaire. He had always liked houses with august associations; after World War II, he lived for some time in the the Villa Diodati, on Lake Geneva, where Byron had been an earlier and rather grumpy tenant.
”Vanished Splendors” confirms that what Balthus really wanted was to live simply in a very large house. Despite its enormous size, he wanted the Grand Chalet to have ”the charm of a farmer’s house.” And that is what he made of it. Servants were few but devoted. And since Balthus, when he was in Rome, had become ”a real specialist in home restoration,” the workforce was minimal.
Before long, the little train that clambered up from Lausanne on a rack railway also endeared itself to him. Not only did he prize the train as a time-keeper; he always intended to paint the Rossiniere station. It was, he said, like a childhood memory kept intact, but he never got around to painting it.
Among moments from his past, many in this book may be unfamiliar even to the enthusiast. It emerges, for instance, that everything that happened during his period of military service in Morocco had matured his work and given it its true meaning. His service with a cavalry unit, the Seventh Spahi Regiment, in Morocco from 1930 to 1932 led directly to his passion for Eugene Delacroix. He experienced at first hand and for weeks on end ”the jagged and fierce landscapes, brilliant light and savage colors” that Delacroix had experienced just 100 years earlier. To the end, Delacroix’s travel sketchbooks were among Balthus’s ”all-time preferred bedside reading.” And when Setsuko prepared his colors for him, Delacroix was her mentor.
In Balthus’s view, most of modern art was ”assembled by pseudo-intellectuals who neglected nature, and became blind to it.” He had been friendly with Mondrian, but never forgot the evening when he remarked about the ”twilight glow” and Mondrian simply pulled the blinds, saying that he didn’t want to see it any more.
Balthus detested surrealism, but he recognized Joan Miro’s ”playful nobility, his lightness, humor, and derision about the human condition. . . . He invented a lot, and in his figures and forms, an innocence, youth, and human truth come through.”
These memoirs were made for a French audience, and therefore have a legitimate bias. But it is only fair to Balthus to say that he had a lifelong, though selective, streak of Anglomania. He loved the language, the literature and the idiosyncratic ways of his English friends, some of whom had pioneered an enthusiasm for his work. He spoke well of the Rolling Stones when one of his sons was friendly with them. And on quite another level, his illustrations for ”Wuthering Heights,” though incomplete, have a terrible power. Passing through Rome, I once gave him a monumental new edition of Hogarth’s prints. I soon heard from Setsuko that he ”looked at them all day and never put them down.”
It is clear from this book that Rossiniere served Balthus well till the very end. After his funeral service in its tiny church, Setsuko and his children walked in all simplicity behind the Swiss country sleigh that bore his coffin to a plot of land that had been acquired the night before. We also learn that in the village church ”cardinals jostled one another.” That, too, was Balthus.
John Russell writes frequently about art and culture for The New York Times.
Pub Date: August 27, 2013 Format: Hardcover Publisher: Flammarion Trim Size: 7-1/2 x 9-1/2 US Price: $29.95 ISBN: 978-2-08-020160-7
About This Book
This album reveals Balthus’s fascination with felines and is a perfect complement to the Metropolitan Museum’s exhibition Balthus: Cats and Girls that opens in September 2013. Alain Vircondelet was a close friend of the late Balthus and originally wrote this text in intimate collaboration with the artist. He explains the symbolism within Balthus’s paintings and draws parallels between the sleepy, languishing forms of the girls and cats he painted. Balthus, who referred to himself as the Thirteenth King of Cats, regularly featured the feline form in his art, even as early as age nine, when he produced a story of his beloved Mitsou in forty Indian ink drawings. Balthus’s wife Setsuko and their daughter Harumi shared his deep affection for cats, and the family’s devotion becomes evident in this volume, which offers behind-the-scenes access into their home, featuring personal photographs, belongings, and reproductions of the artist’s cat paintings.
About the Author
Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, 1908–2001) is widely regarded as one of the most important figurative painters of the modern era. Alain Vircondelet has written numerous books, including biographies of Balthus and John Paul II (Flammarion, 2004), and the three-volume Venice (Flammarion, 2006).
Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations
September 2013–January 2014
The French painter Balthus (Baltazar Klossowski, 1908–2001) strove in his paintings for a classical order and refined aestheticism unrelated to both contemporary art and life. He is best known for his Parisian street scenes, his psychologically probing portraits, and his images of moody girls in closed rooms. He was a master of conveying the ambivalence that is part of adolescence. The children in his paintings are usually withdrawn, self-absorbed, and unsmiling. Cats are their sole playmates. The rare presence of adults enhances the remoteness of these adolescents.
This will be the first exhibition of the artist in this country in thirty years and the first devoted to this subject. Focusing on the finest works, it will be limited to approximately thirty-five paintings dating from the mid-1930s to the 1950s. Between 1936 and 1939, Balthus painted the celebrated series of portraits of Thérèse Blanchard, his young neighbor in Paris. Thérèse posed alone, with her cat, or with her brother Hubert. When Balthus lived in Switzerland during World War II, he replaced the forbidding austerity of his Paris studio with more colorful interiors in which different nymphets continue to daydream, read, or nap. The exhibition concludes with pictures that he created of Frédérique Tison, his favorite model at the Château de Chassy in the Morvan during the 1950s. Key lenders include the Musée Picasso, Tate Gallery, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and many private collectors.
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Balthus
Balthus
(1908-2001)
(Balthasar Klossowski de Rola)
painter
Born in Paris, Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, or Balthus, as he is known, was the brother of Pierre Klossowski. He learned to paint in the louvre and in italy, and his technique is similar to fresco, with a tempera base. His treatment of space is influenced by the italian primitives. He caused a sensation and became widely known in the 1930s for interior scenes depicting disturbing eroticism (Alice: la leçon de guitare). Inspired by Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, he brought to his own work the atmosphere of the Gothic novel in his enigmatic portraits of young women shown in bleak surroundings. Always on the edge of artistic trends, Balthus painted landscapes in the same vein. His work, which later became more academic, is still based on the dual theme of a provocative and suggestive eroticism and monumentalism (La Rue, 1933; Le Passage du Commerce-Saint-André, 1952-53). Balthus served as the curator of the Villa Medici in Rome from 1961 to 1976.
Photographs by Katerina JebbCountess Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, Balthus’s widow, in his old studio at Le Grand Chalet.
All artists have their talismans and rituals. For Balthus the talisman was the tablier he picked up at the American Hospital in Paris during World War II, which he wore religiously. Balthus always painted in the smock, using it like a cloth to wipe his brushes clean. It was never washed and, over 60 odd years, it accumulated layer upon layer of pigment, becoming an artwork in itself. The artist Katerina Jebb, who uses scanners and copy machines in her work, has scanned the front and back of the tablier in 12-by-16-inch fragments to create a life-size copy of it on paper that will be shown at the Balthus Chapel in the village of Rossinière, Switzerland from June 25, 2011 through May, 2012. Jebb’s high-definition scan captures every speck of paint on the sturdy, dark blue cotton — you can almost pick out the colors from Balthus’s surreally erotic “Guitar Lesson.”
The project, which she completed over a year and a half, also includes a film of the Countess Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, Balthus’s widow, who tells the story of the smock and Balthus’s last day painting at home in his studio at Le Grand Chalet in Rossinière. “Balthus’s daughter Harumi invited me on holiday to Le Grand Chalet a few years ago with my children,” Jebb says. “That’s where I met her mother, Setsuko, and the first thing she said was that Balthus would have painted my daughter. And she did a drawing of her.” Setsuko and Harumi invited Jebb to document the smock for an exhibition by the Balthus Foundation with the condition that it not leave the chalet. So Jebb “dragged” her enormous scanner up the mountain an proceeded to copy the smock bit by bit and then painstakingly put all the pieces together.
A detail of Balthus’s smock, scanned and reproduced by the artist Katerina Jebb.
“Balthus’s studio is like the last bastion of luxury, if your definition of luxury is leaving a space intact, as if the person who inhabited it was still there, down to the last cigarette in the ashtray and the blankets strewn around,” Jebb says. “The smock holds 60 years of impregnated matter. The back is like a landscape painting where you can see where he has wiped off his brushes.” In the film, Setsuko recalls that she always knew not to knock on the studio door when Balthus was painting and what happened once when she did: “His eyes pierced me like arrows. For a moment I couldn’t move, or speak, and I realized he was looking at me as if I were one of his paintings. That’s when I really saw Balthus in his tablier.” Balthus counted his birthday only once every four years, and he chose to wear the smock on what turned out to be his last. “And he said, ‘When I’m wearing this tablier, I’m really me,’” Setsuko says. “So perhaps it’s his alter ego.
Ten days before his 93rd birthday, the painter Balthus (1908-2001) died in his Grand Chalet in Rossinière, situated by the railroad line from Gstaad to Montreux, but at the same time far away from tourism. He leaves a relatively small body of works which includes some 350 paintings and about 1600 drawings.
Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola was born in Paris in 1908 – doubts about his title as a “Count”, on which he insisted, remain. He was the second son of the Polish art historian and painter with noble ancestors, Erich Klossowski, whose study of Honoré Daumier (1908) remains a work of reference until today. Balthus’ mother was the painter Elizabeth Dorothea, called Baladine, maiden name Spiro, a Polish woman of the Jewish faith whose father was a cantor. Balthus’ older brother is the writer and painter Pierre Klossowski.
In Paris, the parents of Balthus led one of the leading salons, frequented by artists like Pierre Bonnard, Paul Valéry and André Gide. In 1914, the Klossowskis moved from Paris to Berlin – they also were German nationals. After the separation from her husband, Baladine settled in Switzerland, first in Bern, then in Geneva. Two years later, she met the writer Rainer Maria Rilke, whose lover she became. It was Rilke who named the young Balthazar “Baltusz”.
In 1921, before he was 13, Balthazar’s Mitsous – Quarante images par Baltusz was published, with a preface by Rilke. It was the story of the cat Mitsou, which ran towards Balthus and later disappeared again.
In 1921, Baladine moved with her two sons to her brother’s in Berlin. Three years later, they traveled on to Paris again. In the French capital, Pierre Bonnard and Paul Denis advised Balthus to copy the paintings by Poussin at the Louvre – and that’s what he did.
In 1926, Balthus spent part of the summer in Italy. In Arezzo and Borgo San Sepolcro, he copied the frescos and panel paintings by Piero della Francesca and in Florence the frescos by Masaccio and Masolino. The following year, in Paris, Balthus created his first independent paintings and drawings with scenes of the street and views of the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Jean Cocteau’s novel Les enfants terribles (1929) is in its first chapters strongly inspired by the atmosphere Cocteau had experienced at the home of the Klossowkis. Balthus was also to recall the milieu later in his paintings: “Elegant, but warm. A little bit surreal.”
In 1930 and 1931, Balthus served in the French military in Morocco. In 1932, he returned to Paris, where he created his illustrations for Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. He also met Pierre Jean Jouve and André Derain. In 1933, he opened an atelier at Rue de Furstemberg 4, where he created his two versions of La Rue. The painting hangs today in New York’s Museum of Modern Art. In his childhood, Balthus had learnt to read with the help of a German governess. Influenced from that period, figures of the Struwwelpeter emerged in his paintings. At the same time, La Rue reflected the life in Saint Germain des Prés. Balthus frequented the cafés Les deux Magots and Flore.
In 1933, Balthus also worked on the stage set of Fledermaus in a production by Max Rheinhardt at the Théâtre Pigalle and, in the following year, the Parisian Galérie Pierre showed the first individual exhibition dedicated to the works of Balthus.
1934 was the year of La Leçon de guitare, the painting which caused a scandal at its exhibition in 1977 at the gallery Pierre Matisse in New York. It shows a female teacher holding a child in a compromising position on her lap. Pierre Matisse gave the work to the Museum of Modern Art; whether as an act of provocation or not remains unclear. At first, La Leçon de guitare was banished into the depot. Four years later, under the pressure of a member of the museum’s board, Blanchette Rockefeller, it was returned to Matisse. Today, La Leçon de guitare belongs to the Niarchos’, the Greek family of shipowners. In later years, Balthus acknowledged that he had intended to shock the public in the 1930s with his work, which is not among his best. Balthus almost seemed to wish to eradicate it from his complete works because he prohibited its reproduction.
In 1935 drafted the stage set and the costumes for Antonin Artauds Cenci. In 1936, he moved into a new atelier in the Cour de Rohan. In 1937, he married the Swiss Antoinette de Watteville, whom he had known since his childhood. It was the year in which James Thrall Soby bought his painting La Rue. In 1938, the New York gallery Pierre Matisse organized its first Balthus exhibition.
In the 1930s, Balthus met Alberto Giacometti whom he later called his best friend and consulted on all artistic matters. He also had contact with Diego Giacometti. Balthus’ parents had been acquainted with the elder Giacomettis. Balthus traveled to the village of Stampa in the Swiss mountains where Alberto came from. At his Grand Chalet in Rossinière, Balthus possessed an Annette statute by Alberto (which can be seen on a photograph by Shinoyama).
In 1939, Balthus was conscripted into the military in the Alsace, but was released shortly afterwards. In 1940, he moved with Antoinette to Savoya, where he retreated in the estate of Champrovent near Aix-les-Bains. In 1941, Picasso bought Balthus’ painting Les Enfants Blanchard. In 1942/43, Balthus returned to Switzerland, first to Bern, then to Fribourg, where his son Stanislas was born. He exhibited at the gallery Moos in Geneva. In 1944, his son Thadée was born. In 1945, the family moved into the Villa Diodati in Cologny near Geneva. Balthus met André Malraux. In 1946, he returned to Paris, where he had an exhibition at the gallery Beaux-Arts.
In 1948, Balthus drafted the stage set and the costumes for Albert Camus’ L’Etat de Siège, in 1949 for Boris Kochno’s Le peintre et son modèle and in 1950 for Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte at the festival of Aix-en-Provence.
In 1953, Balthus, without means, settled at castle Chassy in Morvan where he drafted the stage set and the costumes for Ugo Betti’s Delitto all’isola delle capre. In 1954, the financial support by a circle of friends consisting of collectors and art dealers permitted him a certain living standard.
In 1956, Balthus exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1960, he drafted the stage set for Jean-Louis Barrault’s production of Shakespeare’s Julius Ceasar.
In 1961, André Malraux, who had become a minister in De Gaulle’s government, assigned him as director of the Académie de France at the Villa Medici in Rome. Until 1976, under Balthus’ direction, the villa was restored, together with its park and the Palazzo Farnese to its original state. Invitations to the magnificent receptions at the Villa Medici were much sought-after.
In 1962, on a journey to Japan on a mission assigned by Malraux, Balthus met Setsuko Ideta, whom he married five years later. In 1968, their son Fumio was born, and died only two years later. In 1968, the Tate Gallery in London showed a Balthus retrospective. In 1973, his daughter Harumi (see the photo on the left) was born.
In 1977, Balthus left Rome and settled at the Grand Chalet in Rossinière, Switzerland, where he remained until his death. The Grand Chalet is an imposing four-storey building with over 100 windows constructed in 1754 by Jean David d’Henchoz, which had served as a hotel before Balthus’ arrival. For him, it became the ideal set on which he could live out his passion for charades, disguise and staging. By the way, the painter could only afford to buy the Chalet with the help of Pierre Matisse who advanced him a large sum. For its upkeep as well as his representative lifestyle, which included a butler from the Phillipines, Balthus generally had to continuously sell the paintings he had finished.
In 1980, at the Venice Biennale, 26 works of Balthus were exhibited. In 1983/84, the Musée national d’art moderne Centre George Pompidou in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Municipal Museum of Art in Kyoto dedicated retrospectives to the artist. In 1996, a retrospective at Madrid’s Centro de Arte Reina Sofia followed. In 1998, the University of Wroclaw (Breslau) bestowed an honorary doctorate on Balthus. In 2000, the Catalogue raisonné with Balthus’ complete works was published.
Among Balthus’ friends had been such famous contemporaries as Rilke, Picasso, Miró, Dalí, the Giacomettis, Braque and the film maker Federico Fellini. During his entire lifetime, Balthus had withstood all 20th century art currents such as Cubism and Surrealism. He remained faithful to figurative painting. Balthus considered himself an autodidact. Towards the end of his life, when his sight became worse, he moved away from portraiture towards landscape painting.
The opinions about Balthus body of work are divided. Most people consider him a singular person in the 20th century art world. Some add, not without reason, that a lot of his pictures are not so well crafted as his admirers pretend and that a lot of his works contain a strong dose of kitsch. Is Balthus the outstanding preserver of tradition or a mediocre painter who is only remarkable for sexual perversion and snobbery? Do his typical paintings of little girls testify to desires beyond the area of taboo or are they “untouchable archetypes of purity”? Balthus, who had staged his life, partly constructed his vita and surrounded himself with an aura of mystery, leaves art lovers and historians with a lot of riddles to solve.
The art world is divided into people who either passionately love Balthus’s paintings or else are offended by them. Though it’s almost impossible not to admire the masterful way the aristocratic artist wielded his brushes and palette knives, it’s also difficult to remain indifferent to his provocative subject matter. Many of his canvases feature adolescent girls posed seductively on chairs and couches or stretched suggestively across countless beds or involved in aspects of their toilette. Balthus, who would have turned 105 this year, also made portraits of cosmopolitan French men and women such as the Vicomtesse de Noailles, an important collector, and Pierre Matisse, his dealer in America; enchanting landscapes of France and Switzerland; and haunting street scenes of Paris.It’s tempting to call Balthus the Vladimir Nabokov of the visual arts. However, it’s Nabokov who was the Balthus of literature. The French artist was executing pictures of Lolita-like vixens long before the Russian émigré author wrote his scandalous novel. As it was, both men were sophisticated stylists dedicated to formal elegance.Throughout his long life (he died on Feb 18, 2001 at the age of 91) Balthus remained an intransigent realist. Against the backdrop of a century that saw vast political upheavals on one hand and a panoply of art movements on the other — Cubism, Dada, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, and Conceptualism — Balthus went his own way, never reflecting his times in his work. He never wavered from his commitment to portraying people and places through paint on canvas.A precocious youngster born in Paris on Feb. 29, 1908, Balthasar Klossowski had lots of heady, formative influences. To begin with, his Prussian parents were painters, and his father was also an art historian with a doctorate in fine arts. His dad’s friends included the Nabi artist Pierre Bonnard as well as Julius Meier-Graefe, one of the grandest all-time art critics. Balthus was raised in Berlin, Bern, and Geneva after the family left France at the onset of World War I (they were German citizens).In 1921, the poet Rainer Marie Rilke, a friend of Balthus’ mother, saw 40 ink drawings in which the 11-year-old boy depicted the adventures of Mitsou, his stray tomcat. Rilke found a publisher for them and then wrote the book’s foreword. The cover identified the artist by his childhood nickname, then spelled “Baltusz.” In a letter to the poet in 1922, the publisher Kurt Wolff observed, “the ability of the little boy to translate his feelings into graphic expression is astounding and almost frightening.”Balthus, who studied and assisted a Swiss sculptor for several summers, joined his older brother in Paris in 1924. While his sibling worked for the writer Andre Gide, a position arranged by Rilke, Balthus got a day job constructing sets for programs mounted by Les Soirees de Paris, which commissioned theatrical evenings from the likes of Pablo Picasso and Andre Derain. At night, Balthus attended drawing classes. Bonnard, among others, sent him to the Louvre to make copies after Nicolas Poussin. Months later, in Italy, he also copied frescoes by Piero della Francesca as well as Masaccio.During military service in Morocco, Balthus was much taken with the local light and colors. And a friendship with Derain, formerly a Fauve artist who had become a more conservative painter, became yet another decisive influence in the development of his art.Balthus was only 25 in 1934 when he exhibited five remarkable paintings in his first solo show — one of the few he ever held — at the Galerie Pierre. The works, which included young women being groped and in various states of undress, caused an uproar. At a time when abstractions by, say, Piet Mondrian, Alexander Calder, and Joan Miro were garnering attention, Balthus was moving along a different track. Some of the figures were based on frescoes the artist copied in Arezzo and Florence while others called to mind paintings in the Louvre, including a nude by Lucas Cranach as well as a lamentation of Christ. And aspects of the subject matter related to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in the Looking Glass as well as Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. (A few years earlier, Jean Cocteau based sections of his novel, Les Enfants Terribles, on Balthus and his brother.)When, in 1936, Balthus, using a subdued palette, depicted Andre Derain clothed in a striped robe with a model in the background, he created a fearsome painting that’s better known than Derain’s post-Fauvist canvases. Two years later, Balthus’ dealer commissioned a portrait of Miro with his daughter Dolores in honor of the Spanish artist’s 45th birthday; it uncannily prefigures photographs by Irving Penn in its directness and spare truths.Balthus was a slow, methodical artist. In a career that started with a bang and that spanned seven decades, he produced fewer than 400 paintings. He was still working shortly before he died: a brand new nude in a landscape based on a painting by Poussin was included in a group show at the National Gallery in London in 2000.Because his canvases have such a conservative cast, it seems as if Balthus went against the grain of 20th-century art. But despite his painting figures in an age dominated by abstraction, his staged dramas share his era’s interest in space and time. In an understated way, when he depicted men, women and children in stark interiors, he was combining Freudian notions of sexuality with geometric constructs as rigorous as anything created by the de Stijl artists or the Minimalists. Because he was such a classicist, it’s not surprising that he served for 17 years as the director of the French Academy in Rome, a post once been held by Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres.
When representational art and traditional practices returned to fashion, Balthus finally had an impact on younger artists. His solo show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1984 could not have been better timed. As young artists like Eric Fischl began once again to portray figures with oil paints, Balthus set a sterling example. More recently, his spirit looms in canvases by the German Neo Rauch as well as the 40-something Americans John Currin and Lisa Yuskavage. Sometimes slow but steady does win the race.
Museum Ludwig Balthus, La Patience, 1943, Öl auf Leinwand, 161.3 x 163.5 cm Joseph Winterbotham Collection, 1964 Copyright: The Art Institute of Chicago/VG Bild-Kunst Bonn 2007
Balthus — Time Suspended. Paintings and Drawings 1932 – 1960 Museum Ludwig, Cologne Bischofsgartenstr. 1 50667 Köln fon +49-(0) 221-221 24483 fax +49-(0) 221-221 24114 http://www.museum-ludwig.de From 18 August to 4 November 2007 Museum Ludwig will be presenting the first-ever solo exhibition of the French painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, 29.02.1908-18.02.2001) in Germany. On show will be around 70 outstanding paintings and drawings from the years 1932 to 1960, on loan from international public and private collections. Balthus was known throughout his life as something of an oddity and exception who stood apart from his own times. After a childhood in Paris, a series of moves necessitated by the First World War — first to Berlin and then Switzerland, followed by stays in France, North Africa and Italy — all contributed to his outsider status. His exceptional paintings, featuring motifs inspired no less by storybooks, fairy tales and the masters of the Renaissance than by a provocative eroticism, resist categorisation under any of the contemporary art movements. Balthus created his major works over the years from the 1930s to the 1960s while living in Paris and Chassy. The beginning of this period was marked by the scandal occasioned by his first exhibition in 1934 at Galerie Pierre in Paris. He presented a series of large canvases such as La Rue (The Street), La Leçon de guitare (The Guitar Lesson) or La Fenêtre (The Window), all depicting traditional motifs that are, as such, fairly innocuous. But the pointed eroticism in his paintings caused shock and consternation, just as Balthus had intended. Over the following decades Balthus portrayed his contemporaries, painted landscapes and streetscapes, and returned time and again to young girls on the threshold of adulthood. Although during this period abstract and surrealist painting was at its zenith, Balthus cast his figurative motifs in a “timeless realism”, as he termed it. The influence of the Italian Quattrocento and French classicism, as well as his adoption of the painting techniques of the old masters, gave him a singular position within the contemporary art scene. And yet his works were greatly admired by his contemporaries, such as Alberto Giacometti, Antonin Artaud, Paul Éluard and Albert Camus. Balthus had a number of ties to Germany through his friends and relations. His parents, who originated from Silesia (now in Poland) were German citizens, and at times the poet Rainer-Maria Rilke acted like a godfather to him. Yet despite this closeness to German culture, Balthus works are not to be found in any of the public collections in Germany, nor has he ever had a solo exhibition here. The exhibition has been organised in collaboration with Dr. Sabine Rewald, a Balthus expert and curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and been made possible by generous loans from international private and public collections, not least the Metropolitan Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute in Chicago, and the Musée national d’art moderne in Paris. The exhibition will be accompanied by the book Balthus — Time Suspended. Paintings and Drawings 1932 — 1960 by Sabine Rewald, with a text by Virginie Monnier, published by Museum Ludwig and Schirmer/Mosel, Munich, 2007.
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BLOOMBERG
Balthus Obsessed With Nymphets in White Panties: Review
By Lance Esplund – Sep 26, 2013 2:30 PM PT
Q
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden/Smithsonian Institute/Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation/Metropolitan Museum of Art via Bloomberg
“The Golden Days” (1944-46) by Balthus. Erotic ambiguities are developed in Balthus’s paintings of adolescence.
The self-assured 27-year-old painter towers over us. His hand rests on his cocked hip while an affectionate, fat tiger cat nuzzles his leg.
Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection/Metropolitan Museum of Art via Bloomberg
“Therese Dreaming” (1938) by Balthus. The erotic oil on canvas is among 34 paintings in a show devoted to Balthus’s exploration of cats and girls. Source: Jacques and Natasha Gelman Collection/Metropolitan Museum of Art via Bloomberg
Fondation Balthus/Metropolitan Museum of Art via Bloomb
“The King of Cats” (1935) by Balthus, part of “Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations.” The exhibition opens Sept. 28 at the Met Museum. Source: Fondation Balthus/Metropolitan Museum of Art via Bloomberg
Metropolitan Museum of Art via Bloomberg
“Girl at a Window” (1955) by Balthus. The modern annunciation is part of the Balthus show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, U.S. Source: Metropolitan Museum of Art via Bloomberg
Leaning next to the French artist is an inscribed stone tablet that declares him “The King of Cats.”
That he is. He’s also the king of girls — specifically, that mysterious realm known as adolescence.
The 1935 self-portrait welcomes you at the entrance to “Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations,” which opened yesterday at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Balthasar Klossowski de Rola (Balthus) always wanted to remain a man of mystery. For his 1968 Tate retrospective, he sent this telegram: “No biographical details. Begin: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. Now let us look at the pictures. Regards. B.”
The show, curated by Sabine Rewald, is less titillating than its title suggests. Held in Paris in 1934, Balthus’s first exhibition created a scandal.
One of its most daring masterpieces — sadly not on view at the Met — is “The Guitar Lesson,” depicting a prepubescent girl, nude from the waist down, splayed across a woman’s lap. Experienced fingers play with pleasure on the young body. Conflating sexual assault and Pieta, the work was originally exhibited behind a curtain.
Erotically Charged
The most erotically charged picture here is the Met’s beautifully suggestive “Therese Dreaming,” in which an introspective girl in a skirt sits with her knee up and legs apart, revealing white panties, while a cat sips milk from a saucer.
A close second is the Smithsonian’s “The Golden Days.” A nymphet with a mirror reclines on a chaise, exposing herself, while a kneeling man stokes a roaring fire. He is burning. She’s like a princess drifting downstream. The scene hums and purrs with romantic and sexual overtones.
Balthus said the pictures are spiritual, not erotic, and that “The Guitar Lesson” was his only flirtation with pornography. They strike me as traditional Venuses — deep explorations of the sacred and profane.
There are a few other masterpieces among the 34 paintings here — many of which are transitional pictures and feel more like strays than purebreds.
Nude Odalisque
“The Victim,” a nude odalisque floating on a cloud-like sheet, is ephemeral, disturbing, dreamy. The sublime meditation “Girl in Green and Red” imbues overt phallic symbolism with religious devotion.
The flattened, exotic and decorative interior surrounding a young woman in “The Cup of Coffee” is textured like tinted sand and merges still life, fresco and Persian carpet.
And “Girl at a Window,” a modern annunciation, floods the last gallery with crisp, springtime light.
But this exhibition, the first major Balthus show mounted in the U.S. in 30 years, is tame and half-hearted. It’s a misrepresentation of the artist’s oeuvre and of his chosen subject. It’s also a missed opportunity.
When Balthus died in 2001, he was the greatest living painter, producing strange and mysterious pictures that rival those of Piero, Courbet and Titian.
This exhibit’s curatorial coup is its complete set of 40 ink drawings the 11-year-old Balthus created for “Mitsou,” a book about a boy and a cat. Balthus’s earliest professional work, it includes an introduction by Rilke.
But “Mitsou” doesn’t make up for what’s blatantly absent. Abruptly ending in 1959, this show ignores the artist’s miraculous and enigmatic late paintings of the themes he explored until his last day at the easel.
“Balthus: Cats and Girls” is far less than the great artist deserves.
Gagosian Show
For some indication of what Balthus was doing later, Gagosian Gallery has mounted “Balthus: The Last Studies.” The show inaugurates Gagosian’s new ground-floor gallery on Madison Ave. and announces its representation of the Balthus estate.
Beginning about 1990, Balthus — his eyesight failing — drew with a Polaroid camera. He shot his young models, landscapes and paintings in process.
Almost 2,000 photographs exist. About 160, mostly of his last model, Anna, are here, along with a large “Unfinished painting” (2001).
Balthus’s intimate, magical Polaroids are fascinating records of his compositional thinking.
“Balthus: Cats and Girls — Paintings and Provocations,” opened Sept. 25 and runs through Jan. 12 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave. Information: +1-212-535-7710; http://www.metmuseum.org.
“Balthus: The Last Studies” runs through Dec. 21 at Gagosian Gallery, 976 Madison Ave. Information: +1-212-744-2313; http://www.newyorkgagosian.com.
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Balthus; French Artist Was Known for Paintings of Adolescent Girls
Obituaries
February 19, 2001|CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT | TIMES ART CRITIC
Count Balthazar Klossowski de Rola, the reclusive French painter and stage designer known by the single name, Balthus, died Sunday in the Swiss mountain village of Rossiniere. He was 92, although his birth on Feb. 29 during a leap year often led him to insist he was still just a teenager.
Balthus was among the last of the School of Paris painters who dominated Western art before World War II. Although portraits and landscapes were among his many subjects, his signature works focused on the sexual awakening of adolescent girls, who were often depicted in isolation in sparsely furnished rooms assuming poses that wavered between naive innocence and erotic suggestiveness.
Throughout Balthus’ long career, critics remained divided over these paintings. Do they represent a calculated sensationalism, built on an established Surrealist desire to shock bourgeois sensibilities? Or, are they a trenchant acknowledgment of psychological complexity formed in youth, appropriate to an age preoccupied with Freudian analysis of sexuality?
One who was convinced of Balthus’ significance and sincerity as an artist was his friend, Pablo Picasso, who once owned Balthus’ 1937 canvas “The Children” (now in the collection of the Louvre Museum). “Balthus is so much better than all these young artists who do nothing but copy me,” Picasso declared. “He is a real painter.”
The Klossowski family immigrated to France from East Prussia in the mid-19th century. Balthus’ father, Eric, was a minor artist loosely associated with the Impressionists, but he developed into an important critic and art historian whose monograph on the devastating French caricaturist Honore Daumier became a standard text. His mother, Elizabeth Spiro, went by the name Baladine and also had literary interests; she was an influential muse to the Austrian lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke. His brother, Pierre, became a painter and writer.
When the Parisian-born Balthus was 6, his family moved to Switzerland, living principally in Berne and Geneva but making extended excursions to England. His parents encouraged his youthful interests in drawing and painting, but the boy had no formal training in art. In a home where family friends and regular guests included such prominent writers and painters as Rilke, Andre Gide, Pierre Bonnard, Andre Derain and Edouard Vuillard, being an artist simply seemed an obvious path.
Balthus’ first published drawings were made when he was 11. He showed a series of sketches depicting his lost cat to Rilke, who decided to write an accompanying text and had the book published under the title, “Mitsou” (1921). The coupling of literary and artistic interests throughout Balthus’ childhood and adolescence certainly influenced his later commitment to figurative painting with narrative implications, which were seen by many critics, curators and collectors as being out of step with the most adventurous currents of Modern art.
In 1924, the 16-year-old Balthus returned to Paris with the intention of becoming an artist, but he rejected the common practice of enrolling in a painting academy. Instead, he learned by copying Old Master paintings in the Louvre, especially the classically inspired pictures of Poussin. Accompanied by Gide, he traveled to Italy, where he made a special study of the provincial Tuscan Renaissance painter Piero della Francesca, whose importance to Balthus’ mature work is readily apparent. Piero’s use of a clear geometric framework leavened by a sensuous understanding of color, scale and pattern would become a linchpin for Balthus’ work.
Balthus’ first one-man show was held in Paris in 1934 at the Galerie Pierre, an important showcase for Surrealist art. His association with the gallery contributed to disputes over whether his frequently dreamy, memory-laden imagery was authentically Surrealist.
The show, however, was enthusiastically received by critic and playwright Antonin Artaud, whose own writing invoked abject principles of temptation and revulsion excluded in daily life and culture. The most famous picture from the exhibition is “The Street,” now in the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The large canvas shows a variety of figures who seem momentarily suspended in time while passing through an ordinary Parisian street, not unlike the Cour de Rohan near the Odeon, where Balthus found a studio. The central figure of a worker is shown carrying a plank of lumber on his shoulder, which enigmatically obliterates his face. A boy to his right seems to be marching in a trance, like a mechanical doll. At left, a young girl struggles against the apparently unwelcome advances of a Peter Lorre-like man. (The 1931 German film “M,” in which Lorre played a psychopathic child-murderer, had created a sensation.)
Artaud praised the painting’s formal composition and evocation of unfathomable, sphinx-like figures. Albert Camus later described looking at “The Street” as being like “gazing through glass at people petrified by some kind of enchantment, not forever, but for a split second, after which they will resume their movements.”
The following year, Balthus exhibited a group of overtly erotic paintings, in which the subject of adolescent and pubescent girls was prominent. He continued to work with the subject for many years.
Through his friendship with Artaud, Balthus also became interested in designing theatrical stage sets, culminating in 1950 with a well-received production of Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte.” He also began a series of portraits in the late 1930s, the most notable being portraits of fellow painters Andre Derain and Joan Miro.
In 1961, French minister of culture Andre Malraux appointed Balthus director of the French Academy in Rome, where he remained until his retirement in 1977. During his tenure, he renovated and restored the Villa Medici, where the academy is housed, and its elaborate gardens. He also traveled in Japan, where a young woman named Setsuko Ideta became first his model and later his second wife. Stanislas and Thadee, his two grown sons by Antoinette de Watteville, whom he had married in 1937, were joined in 1973 by a daughter, Harumi.
Balthus’ production slowed to a crawl during his years in Rome, and after his retirement he lived mainly in seclusion in Switzerland.
Balthus showed periodically at New York’s Pierre Matisse Gallery. His work was the subject of a 1956 retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, and solo shows were held at London’s Tate Gallery (1968), Paris’ Centre Georges Pompidou (1983) and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (1984). A survey of more than 60 drawings was mounted at the Shoshana Wayne Gallery in Santa Monica in 1999.
TABLEAUX VIVANT | From left: Balthus and his cat Mitsou at home in 1999; The King of Cats, 1935
This September, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hangs some 35 of the most accomplished paintings by the late Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus, it will be the first time in 30 years that the French artist’s work has been exhibited by an American institution. Concentrating on canvases spanning the mid-1930s to the ’50s, the show, running through mid-January, will offer a captivating series of portraits of three of Balthus’s favorite models: his nymphet niece, Frédérique Tison; his adolescent neighbor, Thérèse Blanchard; and Mitsou, his cat. In fact, the feline will have his own section of the aptly titled “Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations,” featuring the youthful ink drawings that comprised his 1921 book, Mitsou, published by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “We always had cats in the house,” recalls Balthus’s daughter, Harumi Klossowska de Rola, who took time from current projects, including designing jewelry for the Swiss house of Chopard, to reminisce here about her father and his artistic proclivities. “I gave him his last cat,” she says of Balthus, who died in 2001, at age 92. “It was also called Mitsou, after the original Mitsou.”
GIRL INTERPRETED | From left: Balthus’s painting Thérèse, 1938; a photograph taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson of Balthus at home with Harumi, then in her late teens, in 1990; Young Girl at the Window, 1955
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“Painting was almost like a prayer for my father. Before he began a painting, he prayed to get rid of his ego and to become only a mediator between the painting and the universe. His studio was across from the main house, in what used to be a barn. If he didn’t go to his studio it was because he was sick—that was the only reason. Otherwise it was every day from 9 to 5, even lunch was in the studio. He would come home at teatime, which was something he always maintained. It was important for him to have everything a certain way. It was like a ritual.
“My whole childhood I listened to my parents speaking about colors and about paintings—all the Italians and the Italian frescoes my father really admired. [Harumi’s mother is the Japanese painter Setsuko Ideta, Balthus’s second wife.] We had great conversations about books that I was reading or cartoons that he would see with me. Our library was full of books. Some of them were almost broken because my father looked at them so much, and when I saw that, it made complete sense—all his work and all his research.
“But for the most part, I just saw him as my father—not an artist. The notion of him as a painter came much later in my life. It took me time to understand his painting because we never really spoke about it. My father was not someone who would explain anything. It was up to people to really discover his work. I remember as a little girl I saw a painting of his, and I thought it was so strange how my father had painted it, that it was so flat. And my father never answered me; he just laughed.
Balthus is always good for some crowds and controversy, as a big Metropolitan Museum show opening this month will likely prove. But, Ingrid Sischy writes, a concurrent exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery—featuring Balthus’s previously unseen Polaroids of the young girl who served as his last model—reveals a more intimate, human, and even poignant side of the self-mythologizing artist.
With New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art about to open “Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations,” focusing on the artist’s work from the mid-1930s to the 1950s, one can already hear the crowds purring about his Alice-in-Wonderland-type paintings. Folks who think contemporary art is the emperor’s new clothes will once again breathe a sigh of relief: “Whew! A real painter!” The shrinks will have a field day: “What’s with the fixation on pubescent girls?” The feminists—please God, there are some left—will weigh in, and maybe the moralists too.
Balthus, who died in 2001, liked to stay above the fray, never embracing the isms that absorbed so many of his contemporaries. Born Balthasar Klossowski, he cultivated an air of mystery and myth, secluding himself in old-world country houses and castles in France, Italy, and Switzerland and inventing a life (and an aristocratic lineage or two) where the discipline of work was the order of the day. “Balthus is a painter about whom nothing is known,” he’d say.
But secrets have a way of busting through. Timed to coincide with the Met show, a polar-opposite exhibition will debut at the Gagosian Gallery in New York—one as intimate as the Met’s is grand, comprising a selection of previously unseen Polaroids that Balthus shot in the 1990s of the model for his last works, at his legendary “Grand Chalet” in La Rossinière, Switzerland. The show leads us right into the heart of Balthus’s process, and also of his humanity. It will include at least one of his final, unfinished paintings for which the Polaroids were made. An accompanying two-book work will be published by Steidl.
Even though Balthus stuck to his routine of a full day’s work right up to the end, it became physically difficult for him to draw. Previously he had made hundreds of drawings as preparatory studies for his canvases; now he turned to the Polaroid. Anna Wahli, the youngest daughter of Balthus’s doctor, was drafted to be the model. Eight years old when she started sitting for him, she writes in an essay in the Steidl book that she was told Balthus chose her because he liked the sound of her humming Mozart. Across nearly nine years, she would show up Wednesday afternoons to pose. She remembers Balthus as being a bit of a klutz with the camera; sometimes she’d have to step in and turn it right side up.
Balthus’s widow, Setsuko Klossowska de Rola, and his daughter, Harumi, have kept a lid on the photos for more than a decade, and they would not have gone ahead with the show without Anna’s permission. (Today she’s a psychotherapist and social worker, and it’s difficult to resist wondering if her sittings with Balthus led to her choice of profession.) The backing of all three women is important because of the content of the photos. Anna is dressed in either a tartan or a white dress when she is younger, typically posing in an armchair, but as time goes on she moves to a chaise longue and wears a brocade robe that sometimes falls open, so she’s partially nude. These images are raw, and true, and risk being fodder for the censors who seem to rear their heads whenever children appear nude in art photographs, even when there is absolutely nothing dodgy going on.
Not that it’s inappropriate to be super-sensitive to whether these images are exploitative. Balthus’s most famous paintings often come with a purposeful sexual undercurrent, and Anna was just a child. The Polaroids have many moods: beautiful, awkwardly acrobatic, creepy, heartbreaking, luminous, timeless. They also document a meticulous artist’s obsession with capturing exactly what he was after—say the position of an arm, the way a leg might stretch, the mood created by just a shaft of light. There is probably no better record of how Balthus worked.
More important, the pictures are a testament to what this unlikely duo shared—the famous “genius” with his glory days behind him, and the local kid with all her dreams ahead of her, both of them aware that their collaboration mattered in some unknowable way. Confession: I’ve always been put off by what I saw as the innate conservatism of Balthus’s work—the fact that everything is so controlled by the maestro. These Polaroids give witness to art, and life, as a much messier, much more democratic process, one in which the young girl is a bit of a boss, too. As such they are deeply touching, the reflection of an artist’s knowledge that time was running out for him. Balthus indicated how much he needed Anna by how much he’d light up when she’d arrive. “It may sound pretentious, but this is the feeling that he expressed so vividly, as if much depended on my presence,” she recalls in her text. My favorite story about the Polaroid sessions comes from his daughter, Harumi, who prepared dishes of sweets for Anna. Once a sitting was over, Harumi remembers: “My father would watch this terrible soap opera, The Bold and the Beautiful, with her because Anna loved it.” What a perfect metaphor for art. What’s bold and beautiful to one person is a very different thing to another.
Harumi serving afternoon tea to her parents at their home in Switzerland,1998.
“He would say very strong things about contemporary art—that he was the last real painter—and I think that was in reaction to the time we are living in now, which he considered limited. He thought you should know what’s been done before, to have respect for all masters, to know how to make your own colors, and he frequently complained that nowadays people don’t really learn the tradition. He also complained that there was too much ego, that it was not about what you make with work but more about who you are.
“There are a lot of things that he was wonderful and open-minded about, and that was always what touched me about him—he was not judgmental but really loved people in general. He had many conversations when he was crossing the street to go to the studio, conversations with the farmer who was always passing by. It was such a ritual for my father—and also for the farmer.”
TABLEAUX VIVANT | From left: Balthus and his cat Mitsou at home in 1999; The King of Cats, 1935
This September, when the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York hangs some 35 of the most accomplished paintings by the late Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus, it will be the first time in 30 years that the French artist’s work has been exhibited by an American institution. Concentrating on canvases spanning the mid-1930s to the ’50s, the show, running through mid-January, will offer a captivating series of portraits of three of Balthus’s favorite models: his nymphet niece, Frédérique Tison; his adolescent neighbor, Thérèse Blanchard; and Mitsou, his cat. In fact, the feline will have his own section of the aptly titled “Balthus: Cats and Girls—Paintings and Provocations,” featuring the youthful ink drawings that comprised his 1921 book, Mitsou, published by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke. “We always had cats in the house,” recalls Balthus’s daughter, Harumi Klossowska de Rola, who took time from current projects, including designing jewelry for the Swiss house of Chopard, to reminisce here about her father and his artistic proclivities. “I gave him his last cat,” she says of Balthus, who died in 2001, at age 92. “It was also called Mitsou, after the original Mitsou.”
GIRL INTERPRETED | From left: Balthus’s painting Thérèse, 1938; a photograph taken by Henri Cartier-Bresson of Balthus at home with Harumi, then in her late teens, in 1990; Young Girl at the Window, 1955
“Painting was almost like a prayer for my father. Before he began a painting, he prayed to get rid of his ego and to become only a mediator between the painting and the universe. His studio was across from the main house, in what used to be a barn. If he didn’t go to his studio it was because he was sick—that was the only reason. Otherwise it was every day from 9 to 5, even lunch was in the studio. He would come home at teatime, which was something he always maintained. It was important for him to have everything a certain way. It was like a ritual.
“My whole childhood I listened to my parents speaking about colors and about paintings—all the Italians and the Italian frescoes my father really admired. [Harumi’s mother is the Japanese painter Setsuko Ideta, Balthus’s second wife.] We had great conversations about books that I was reading or cartoons that he would see with me. Our library was full of books. Some of them were almost broken because my father looked at them so much, and when I saw that, it made complete sense—all his work and all his research.
“But for the most part, I just saw him as my father—not an artist. The notion of him as a painter came much later in my life. It took me time to understand his painting because we never really spoke about it. My father was not someone who would explain anything. It was up to people to really discover his work. I remember as a little girl I saw a painting of his, and I thought it was so strange how my father had painted it, that it was so flat. And my father never answered me; he just laughed.
Harumi serving afternoon tea to her parents at their home in Switzerland,1998.
“He would say very strong things about contemporary art—that he was the last real painter—and I think that was in reaction to the time we are living in now, which he considered limited. He thought you should know what’s been done before, to have respect for all masters, to know how to make your own colors, and he frequently complained that nowadays people don’t really learn the tradition. He also complained that there was too much ego, that it was not about what you make with work but more about who you are.
“There are a lot of things that he was wonderful and open-minded about, and that was always what touched me about him—he was not judgmental but really loved people in general. He had many conversations when he was crossing the street to go to the studio, conversations with the farmer who was always passing by. It was such a ritual for my father—and also for the farmer.”
Great works: Le Passage du Commerce-Saint-André, 1952-4, by Balthus
Private collection
Michael Glover
Friday, 30 August 2013
Here Balthus revisits a Paris street scene in St-Germain-des-Prés that would have been utterly familiar to him – he’d had a studio close by for years. He had painted a similar urbanscape almost two decades before he made this particular painting. And yet the mood here is utterly different.
There is here an atmosphere of disembodiment and even disengagement. Balthus is not so much seeing, as seeing through to an interior world of his own conjuring, which seems to run in parallel with the common world of everyday seeing, everyday memory. In that first painting, La Rue, he had familiarised us with a group of stylised individuals who, though oddly marionette-like, were still going about their daily lives of hurry and bustle. Everything was frenetic, teeming, interconnectedly clashing.
Not so here. This scene seems slowed down to the utmost. Although everything seems utterly familiar in its way – we feel that we almost recognise the rather springy step of that anonymous young man who strides away from us, brandishing his baguette – it also seems utterly unfamiliar, almost otherworldly. It possesses a patina of sightly grainy mistiness. The light looks altogether strange – grey edging off to a kind of queasy saffron. Is this a dreamscape or a cityscape?
The architecture has an air of unreality. It looks like a carefully fabricated simulacrum of itself, courtesy of cinecittà, not so much two bisecting streets as a filmset of two bisecting streets. Too many of the windows are either shuttered or closed off. We can accept shuttering, which is a very familiar sight on the streets of old Paris – perhaps they have not yet opened up for the day; it may, after all, be a little earlier than it looks, in spite of the fact that the street has enough people in attendance for us to regard it as mid-morning at the very earliest – but why are so many of these windows seemingly sealed and blanked off in this way, as if they were nothing but pretences of window spaces, nothing but architectural jokes?
And then there are the various human elements that populate the scene. I use that word with some care because I hesitate to call any of them fully realised human individuals, expect perhaps for the young man previously referred to who walks way from us, and whose face therefore is utterly unknowable. They are either less or slightly “other”. Surely they are all a little too small for a start? That man seated at the curb looks positively dwarf-like. They walk or posture as if they had once played a minor part in some devotional work by the likes of, say, Masaccio.
The child and the babe at the window, with those oddly rounded heads, might be part of some sacred conversation. Except that there is nothing at all sacred about this scene. It is utterly humdrum, utterly everyday. There is light-drifting (which stands in for walking), standing, sitting, and there is also a kind of odd posing – the girl who looks towards us, chin supported by her hand, possesses an oddly rapt and inward look that we could try to describe as, well… otherworldly rapture? Or some such. Certainly set apart, certainly not a lively and fully engaged participant in a Parisian street scene.
How odd it all is, all this wafting, inward-turned joylessness. The old woman with the stick, though seemingly in motion, seems strangely sculpturally arrested in her posture, as if she might eventually find herself in that pose forever. Or perhaps she is indeed a street sculpture of an old woman shopping in a Parisian street, a kind of Duane Hanson de ces jours.
About the artist: Balthus (1908-2001)
The Swiss-Polish painter pen-named Balthus was born Balthasar Klossowski de Rola in Switzerland. His father was an art historian and his mother a painter, and he grew up amongst the cultural elite of Paris. He always resisted any attempts on the part of galleries or newspapers to create a biographical profile, and when a retrospective of his work was shown at the Tate Gallery, London, in 1968, he sent a telegram that could be summarised in this way: This artist is one about whom nothing need be known. Please look at the paintings.
Count Balthasar Klossowski de Rola, known as Balthus, died in February 2001 at the age of 91. ‘Balthus, of course, was never a Surrealist’ are the words with which Jean Clair, the curator of the retrospective at the prestigious Palazzo Grassi, opens his introductory catalogue essay. Strictly speaking, one wants to add, Balthus was also never a Modernist. He rejected both Abstraction and Expressionism in favour of a style that draws heavily on the aesthetics of the fading frescoes of Piero della Francesca. Balthus steered clear of the avant-garde. Although his first exhibition in 1934 was staged at the Galerie Pierre, a bastion of Surrealism at the time, and in 1935 the Surrealist magazine Minotaure reproduced his drawings based on Wuthering Heights (1847), Balthus never mixed with the group around André Breton, but was friends with individuals such as Alberto Giacometti, Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille and Pablo Picasso.
This retrospective is presented as a paradox: in explanatory wall texts and a documentary video it is suggested that because Balthus’ work is the Modernist exception it must be quintessentially Modernist, the artist’s break with avant-garde consensus being perceived as a truly radical gesture. Balthus is thus portrayed as the archetypal mythic Modern artist, a heroic loner characterized by an air of mystery and mastery, aristocratic eccentricity and a professed hatred of the interpreters of his work. Photographs of Balthus with his angular face, slicked-back hair and cigarette elegantly dangling from his lips were on display, as if to authenticate this ideal of the solitary bohemian genius.
Fortunately this myth of mastery is dispelled by Balthus’ works – it is liberating to see lots of bad paintings among them. Especially some of the landscapes Balthus painted after leaving Paris for a château in the country are toe-curling owing to their awkward attempts to capture an ideal of classic beauty. After all, what you look for in Balthus is not mastery, but the indescribable weirdness generated by his myriad displacements of forbidden sexual fantasies. So despite attempts to display the breadth of Balthus’ oeuvre, the works that exemplify the artist’s strange fascination for the subtle perversity of the haute bourgeoisie were the main attraction in this show.
The Guitar Lesson (1934) depicts a female music teacher beating a young girl. The scene is staged in a bourgeois interior. The girl lies on the lap of the teacher like the corpse of Christ in a Pietà, her skirt hitched up to reveal her naked crotch. In defence, she tears at the blouse of her teacher and exposes her right breast. This moment of violence reoccurs in The Victim (1939-46), a painting of a naked sleeping girl. In the shadows beside her bed lies a long knife, like an invitation to murder. The youthful body is presented both as an ideal of innocent beauty and the object of a devastating envy. Like Lacan, Balthus suggests that idealization generates violence, that is, the wish to destroy what one wants to have, or be, but cannot attain.
This sense of impending catastrophe is tangible in most of Balthus’ paintings of this period. The artificial equilibrium of the bourgeois social order, represented by the static space Balthus borrowed from Renaissance painting, is constantly threatened with collapse: not only owing to the threat of violence, but also in regard to a breakdown of pictorial space. The figures in Balthus’ paintings are strangely flat. They always seem on the verge of ceasing to obey the laws of three-dimensionality by dropping out of the picture. This moment of potential transgression is symbolized by the reccurring figure of a cat, which often appears at the scene of an erotic encounter. The cat is allowed to look and even to touch. As its touch lacks violence, the cat can break the taboo without disturbing the symbolic order. So Balthus gives a clue to the riddle of his paintings: who knows the secret of sex? Perhaps the cats do. But they’re not telling.
Balthazar Klossowski, Count de Rola, better known as the artist Balthus, who has died aged 92, was arguably the last great figurative painter of the 20th century. He was also one of its most enigmatic and controversial.Self-invented and self-taught, Balthus created a private and poetic universe which revolved around a few obsessively repeated themes: landscapes full of foreboding, portraits which laid bare the inner lives of their sitters, and, most notoriously, his favourite subject – the bodies of pubescent girls.Some critics have dismissed these psychologically-charged tableaux – where young girls in various states of undress loll, dream and examine themselves in mirrors – as the prurient products of a peverted imagination; others see them as unique insights into the troubled territory of adolescence, and intimate studies of feminine reverie on a par vith Degas or Vermeer.Whatever the point of view, there is no disputing Balthus’s extraordinary ability to conjure up ominous frozen psycho-dramas with an almost unbearably erotic and emotional intensity. His own statements – such as “Balthus is a painter about whom nothing is known” – only added to the mystery of his paintings and his persona; a desire to remain aloof and independent was crucial to every aspect of his existence.Art and exile were built into the family history. Balthus’s Polish father and Russian-Jewish mother had assumed German citizenship and settled in Paris, where the two sons, Pierre and Balthazar, were born. Both parents were artists and Balthus grew up surrounded by their friends, who included Bonnard and Matisse. When war broke out in 1914, the family became enemy aliens and settled in Geneva, where Balthus’s mother became romantically involved with another exile, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.Rilke immediately recognised her younger son as a prodigy when he saw a series of ink drawings commemo rating the boy’s angora cat, and was so astonished by their skill and sophistication that he wrote a preface and had them published in 1920. At the age of 13, Balthus, the artist, was born.Instead of attending art school, he bicycled to Arezzo to copy the Piero della Francescas. Throughout his career, the presence of the quattrocento masters remained a pervasive, albeit an unlikely one: whether in the monumental modelling of Balthus’s chunky young girls, with their aloof smiling faces, or in his later – and only partially successful – use of the chalky-textured “casein” tempera.These were spliced with a disparate range of influences, from Bonnard, Gustave Courbet and Seurat, to Poussin, John Tenniel and Wuthering Heights. One of Balthus’s early masterpieces is the disquieting 1933 painting, The Toilet Of Cathy.He may have been a loner and a non-joiner who stood apart from the artistic movements of his time, but this did not stop Balthus from winning the admiration of his contemporaries. His closest artist friend was the sculptor and painter Alberto Giacometti, who shared his detachment from the outer world; one of the earliest Balthus paintings of adolescents, The Children (1937), was acquired by Picasso; while his portraits of a ferocious Derain, a childlike Miro and a boot-faced Vicomtesse de Noailles indicate an intimacy with uncomfortable areas of the sitters’ psyches that is be almost too revealing.Balthus’s first one-man show was held in Paris in 1934, but it was in America that his reputation was made – largely due to the efforts of the dealer Pierre Matisse and the pay-phone millionaire collector James Thrall Soby, who pushed for his first show in New York in 1956. His work broke the million-dollar barrier in 1984, the same year as his twin retrospectives in New York and Paris. In 1993, there was another retrospective in Lausanne, and in 1994 a major exhibition in Tokyo.In the early 1960s, Balthus was made special adviser to Andre Malreux, during his term as French minister of culture. Malreux made him the head of the Villa Medici, the French cultural centre in Rome, where Balthus lived until 1976.As his international reputation burgeoned, however, he moved to the village of Rossiniere near Gstaad, Switzerland, where he lived a secluded life in an 18th-century mansion with his Japanese wife of over 30 years, Setsko Ideta, and their daughter Harumi. (He also had two sons, Stanislaas and Thaddé, from his first marriage to Antoinette de Watteville).Although he shied away from publicity, Balthus allowed two major works to be published in tribute to him – Balthus: A Catalogue Raison Of The Complete Works, and Balthus, a biography by Nicholas Fox Webber. To celebrate his last birthday, he threw an extravagant fancy-dress party, attended by Tony Curtis, U2 and a last remaining member of the Russian dynasty, Nicholas Romanov.In spite of failing health, he painted every day in his studio.”I am always eager not to tire the canvas,” he once said. “So many painters today have found a trick. I have never been able to find one.” Perhaps that was his secret.Balthazar ‘Balthus’ Klossowski, Count de Rola, artist, born February 29 1908; died February 18 2001
Jan verwoert
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JED PERL THE NEW REPUBLIC MAGAZINE
I stumbled into a secret the other day. Or at least I think I did. I cannot be absolutely sure. I had gone to the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts, to look at “Giovanni Boldini in Impressionist Paris,” the first American retrospective in 20 years of an artist who was almost 90 when he died in 1931. I’ve always been mildly curious about Boldini, a specialist in chic portraiture with a sideline in avant-gardist attitudinizing, but the show was mostly sugarcoated bombast. Only one painting really held my attention: a small, early composition, The Lascaraky Sisters, with three girls seated on a couch in a comfortably overstuffed mid–nineteenth-century interior. It revealed, or so I suspect, a secret—not about Boldini but about another painter, Balthus, who died in 2001 at the age of 92, and for whom the nineteenth century was phantasmagorical, paradisiacal, a parallel universe. For Balthus the nineteenth century was modernity’s doppelganger. In the early ’40s, Balthus was working on a couple of paintings in which a girl sleeps on a nineteenth-century rococo revival couch. And in front of that couch, exactly as in Boldini’s The Lascaraky Sisters, there is a nineteenth-century pedestal table, the top of which partly obscures the girl’s figure. This dark, thrusting tabletop, which was nothing but a compositional gambit in Boldini’s amusing conversation piece, becomes a phallic fantasy in Balthus’s exquisitely carpentered dream.
Was Balthus winking at Boldini? I think Balthus might have been amused by the idea of improving on this artist who was, like Balthus himself, a painter with a fashionable Parisian reputation. Balthus might even have been amused by the echo in their names. Am I making all this up? Am I weaving a Borgesian fantasy? Couldn’t it be that the similarity is accidental, albeit fortuitous, even uncanny? We know that, when Balthus painted two versions of The Living Room in the early ’40s, he was representing an actual sofa and table in the parlor of a house at Champrovent in the French Savoy. Maybe he just happened to paint a couch and a table that closely resembled the couch and the table in Boldini’s painting. I cannot say when Balthus would have seen The Lascaraky Sisters or a reproduction of the painting, although it was exhibited in the 1930s and became part of the collection of the Museo Boldini in Ferrara in 1934. But I find it hard to believe that Boldini’s little composition did not in some way precipitate the eroticized tabletops not only in The Living Room but also in later paintings by Balthus such as The Game of Patience and The Dream II. And there is more. The motif of three sisters in a room with a couch became a central theme in Balthus’s work of the 1960s. And couldn’t these paintings—which were based on studies of three sisters Balthus knew, the daughters of the dealer Pierre Colle–also have been, simultaneously, a meditation on The Lascaraky Sisters?
I doubt we will ever know, at least not for sure. Balthus wanted his thoughts to remain as elusive as the dreams of the young women in his paintings. Freedom, for Balthus, had everything to do with the slipperiness—the evanescence–of his meanings. So allow me the freedom to enrich my impressions of Balthus by regarding him, at least for a moment, from the vantage point of Boldini’s little painting. It would have been like Balthus to want to uncover the conceptual grandeur of what for Boldini was mere quotidian observation, making a modern metaphysics out of an earlier era’s novelistic chiaroscuro. Although Balthus would probably be as repelled as Nabokov was by any association with the man the Russian writer called the “Viennese quack,” there is a sense in which Balthus saw the artists of the past not in terms of formal associations but of psychological patterns. And so the dark tabletop, a striking spatial complication in Boldini, becomes a hard-on for Balthus. Certainly there are painters for whom a table is just a table. Balthus would probably have made just such a claim for his own tables. But when we look back to Boldini, we realize that his was the table that was merely a table, an object with a certain quotidian charm. When Balthus paints a table, it turns out to be the emblem of a table, the dream of a table, even the ideal of a table. What for Boldini was the thrust of the composition becomes for Balthus the thrust of the girl’s dream, an erotic revelation.
Jed Perl is The New Republic’s art critic.
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THE INDEPENDENT LONDON
Balthus
Balthus, the painter, who has died in Switzerland aged 92, may have been the last master of figurative art in the European tradition.
Photo: EPA
12:01AM GMT 19 Feb 2001
A reclusive, mythomanic soi-disant aristocrat, he was best known for his luminous if troubling paintings of adolescent girls. Replete with dreamy introspection and sexual readiness, his figures stare out of windows or stand on step-ladders in trees, gazing into the distance in an atmosphere loaded with erotic tension.
Such work brought him a reputation as an artist with an obsession with young girls. But Balthus made a show of appearing indifferent to this suggestion. “The interpretation of my work,” he held, “is in most cases complete misinterpretation.” His supporters claimed that the mood of elegy and hope in his most typical paintings portrayed something more subtle, a loss of innocence. Balthus, characteristically, was non-committal. “Everybody sees what he wants to see”, was all he would say.
His reticence extended to personal publicity of any kind. When pressed by the Tate Gallery in 1968 for biographical information for an exhibition catalogue, he cabled: “No biographical details. Begin: Balthus is a painter of whom nothing is known. Now let us look at the pictures. Regards, B.”
The Adoration or Perversity of Childhood in Balthus’s Paintings.
Before the concept of Childhood began to take shape during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the concept of the Child had many symbolic connotations in the popular imagery through the history of art. In a general context, the child symbolizes the new beginning, as for example the New Year, or innocence, naivety and a precious gift. The symbolic meaning of child differed from one culture to the next. In Roman mythology the most famous child besides the traditional founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus, was Cupid, the son and inseparable companion of the Goddess of love, Venus. In Christian iconography, especially in the Renaissance and Baroque periods, children were depicted mostly as flying putto,[1] besides the omnipresent child Jesus. In many other mythologies and rituals of the Near East, Mediterranean, Pre-Columbian, or India and China, the child was an object of offerings generated by barbarian beliefs. Only with the social evolution of societies, especially through the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, the importance of elaborated attitude towards the children evolved to the rational social level.
The importance of child as a fundamental element of socio-political regeneration of societies began to be valorized in literature, sculpture, and painting. One of the best descriptions of the importance of the child comes from the William Wordsworth poem “My Heart Leaps Up” in the sentence: “The Child is the father of the Man.” Another great sentence: “The Man is like a river of Childhood,” written by Polish writer Stephan Zeromski, in his book titled “A Story of Sin.” [2] The different psychoanalytical aspects of childhood and adolescence, besides the literature, became more and more visualized in painting and sculpture. Many painters[3] were preoccupied by depiction of different states of childhood.
Balthus was one of the most intriguing painters who depicted mostly feminine childhood in his own particular way. Among other artists who had courage to paint the nude female children in quite provocative poses, as Felicien Rops, Egon Schiele, Otto Dix, or Edvard Munch, Balthus is one of the most mysterious artists. He made his name basically for the intriguing depiction of the female child models. Balthus imagery of young girls oscillates between the adoration and perversity of the childhood. By close dissection of the content of his selected paintings and the elements of their composition as well as the technical aspects of it, we might be able to conclude what generated to such large extend his interest to illustrate the young female bodies the way he did it.
Balthus, whose real name was Balthazar Kossowski de Rola, had Polish origins, but he was born in Paris in 1908. Both his parents were intellectuals and artists.[4] His attraction towards depiction of innocent perversity of the childish female models in their intimately provocative poses was influenced to some extent by the book of Emily Bronte[5] “Wuthering Heights.” Balthus illustrated the first part of the book not because he had a contract for it, but because he was overwhelmed with the story itself. He was especially interested in the childhood of Catherine and Heathcliff, the two principal characters of Bronte’s novel. This particular story inspired majority of his artwork. Each of his paintings is fulfilled with a dose of mysterious sexuality of his models, which is present not only in the exquisite composition, but also in the way he applied the paint on it. Some of the Balthus paintings are still shocking to some viewers even today.
The most controversial of his works is the painting titled “The Guitar Lesson” (see fig.1) which was one of his first five works he exposed in the Gallery Pierre in Paris in 1934 during his first solo exposition. The painting scandalized the public and the French media showed no mercy. He was generally accused of being obsessed with sexual perversity. One of the strongest statements came from Gaston Poulin[6] who named the artist a fanatic nymphomaniac. Furthermore, he described his style as naïve and crude portraying Balthus as the cruelest painter than Goya and Rouault. This particular painting is rarely shown and at the present it is in the hands of a privet collector. Whenever it was exposed, even the first time, it was presented mostly in separate rooms covered with the curtains just for “special” public to see. For forty years Balthus did not wanted this painting to be exposed or printed because as he himself explained from fear of the public misunderstanding of his controversial piece. The close examination of this particular artwork might vaguely respond why would people be offended to such degree by this image. Certainly, it would not be exaggeration to say that this image represents the zenith of his provocative artistic perversity. Many artists are trying to surround themselves with the mist of mystery in order to attract the public interest in their creative efforts[7] and Balthus was a master of it. He never gives any explanation why he does what he does. That is why so much curiosity surrounds him. To criticize his artwork by the imagery would be too easy and unfortunately many critics do it. Before judging his paintings positively or negatively one needs to focus on deeper study of his artwork because in Balthus case each element of the image tells a story, understanding of which depends on how far we are prepared intellectually to dissect the hidden meanings. “The Guitar Lesson” depicts the moment of sadistic violence executed on the innocent female child by her guitar teacher. The child is lying on the teacher’s knees in the position of Pieta[8] suggesting the death Jesus reincarnated in the girl’s denuded figure. The naked body of the child is smoothly transferred symbolically into the erotic guitar on which the teacher is playing the sadistic notes of erotic education. It looks like the child is forced to play hesitantly with the partially denuded sensually erected breast of the teacher. Looking at the Balthus study sketches done for this painting, it becomes clear that he wanted to paint himself as a teacher but probably he realized that such scene would not be acceptable for any public display. It would be too personal and too revealing of his somehow overloaded with sexual fantasies mind. That is why he decided to replace himself with a woman. It probably appeared to Balthus safer to depict lesbian sodomy rather than to use the mixed genders. However, he could not refuse himself the pleasure to portray at least his face in the corps of the woman teacher. Comparing the teacher’s facial futures with the Heathcliff face from “The Cathy’s Toilet,” (see. fig.2) artwork where Balthus portrayed himself as a Heathcliff and his future wife[9] as a Cathy, the two principal characters of his favor book “Wuthering Heights,” the resemblance of the two faces is unquestionable. Furthermore, his sketches (see fig. 3) for the artwork clearly confirm that. The teacher’s right hand is squeezing the girl’s hair lock as the guitar neck and with her left hand she is pulling the imaginary strings in the child’s pubic area. The almost feinted girl gives impression of being entirely submitted to her teacher’s erotic game. Her face projects evident signs of the total subjection to the sadistic sexual sodomy of her innocence. The child’s right hand partly reposing on the floor is touching the guitar neck lying on the parquet forming a triangle suggesting the pubic area. The instrument noise hole is symbolizing the loss of innocence by the girl. The colors[10] of the child’s clothing are also symbols of the transition from the state of innocence to the state of impurity of experienced sexual pleasures. The vertical lines on the wallpaper suggest the cage of immorality to which each female child will eventually be subjected. The green color of the lines symbolizes the freshness of the girl’s femininity. The piano situated on the left side of the painting suggests much more elaborated erotic initiation in the near future when the girl would be a woman.[11] It is really fascinating artwork executed with simplicity and sincere adoration of innocent purity of the childish femininity. This painting is mentioned in many publications as a legendary probably because of its provocative content. Balthus will never again be so open to expose his explicit interiority to the exterior world. This artwork forces us to recognize that we all have a room for provocative drastic perversity and only by pure hypocritical social attitude some of us find paintings like this drastically shocking.
After his questionable experiences with “The Guitar Lesson” painting Balthus elaborated his provocative attitude by painting the adoration of childish femininity using rather poetic eroticism. The best example of such approach would be the artwork titled “Dreaming Therese” (see fig.4). It is beautifully painted canvas. The female child is presented as a dreaming girl. What her dreams might be about we can guess only by her provocatively astride legs exposing in evidence her white panties covering her genital area leaving the space for sensual imagination. Balthus plays with colors to symbolize the content of the picture. The panties are white as well as the half-slip suggesting the unspoiled yet purity. The red skirt surrounds the covered crotch suggesting the future fortress of sexual desires. The red slippers with the black pompons symbolize the approaching sexual enlightenment and the consequences of it. The green colors of the pillow, which make her comfortable, signify the feminine freshness, fertility, and the beauty of the female youth. In the front at the right low corner Balthus placed white cat[12] sipping milk from the white plate. Cat has very rich symbolic meanings but in reference to this picture it symbolizes a protection against demonic forces, perversity, independence, sexual potency, female pubic hairs and in some cultures vagina.[13] The fact that the white cat is licking the rounded white plate suggests the girl’s eroticism of the dreamed dreams. At the same time it suggests the imaginary consumption of the innocence and virginity of the pubescent female child. Balthus is the foreteller of the girl’s intimate future. In the further background he uses again the wallpaper stripes. This time they are red symbolizing again the cage of the future impurity and with the furniture, drapery and pots, the girls unavoidable households destiny. The provocative posture of the model Balthus would use many times in his other compositions. He knew that by such pose he would seduce the viewer’s erotic fantasist imaginary without the necessity to show a young innocent flesh. His mathematically calculated provocative creations would become the trademark of his artistic quest.
During the fifties and the beginning of sixties, Balthus adopted another seductive pose for the models of his sensual compositions. The painting titled “The Golden Age” (see fig.5) is the first from the series of many and as discovered by the scholar Jorg Zutter the first one ever exposed by Balthus in the museum.[14] The artwork shows a young girl stretched comfortably on a small sofa and she is preoccupied by looking at the reflection of herself in the white mirror, which she keeps in her left hand. The mirror symbolizes the world, life, femininity, love, and vanity. The pearl necklace on her neck refers to the virginity, health, perfection, and preciousness. The right hand hung down looks as it is suspended in the air. Her torso is partly uncovered suggesting a delicate touch of feminine coquetry. The girl’s legs are spread in provocative invitation of sexual curiosity. Together, the white slippers on her feet, the white mirror and the white pillow behind her head as well as the white bowl on the table completed with the white light projected from the window situated in the back symbolize the innocent purity of the young female beauty. The entire room is divided by the two sources of light. The white light coming from the window on the left is mixed with the red reflections projected by the chimney. Both these lights blend together exactly in the area of the girl’s spread legs suggesting the boundaries between the innocence and the sexual initiation. The sofa itself has a shape of the hiking shoe suggesting that the young beauty is on her way approaching the sexual fire of her first erotic experience. The man on the right is preparing the ground for her erotic enlightenment by warming up the room. On the left side of the chimney, a small statue with phallic forms is standing. Just beside the sculpture the log tongs are leaning against the chimney surface. The log tongs have the shape of female crotch as well as the form of infant what symbolize the process of future maternity. The chimney itself suggests the female sexual organs and the small in posture man working hard to keep the fire on representing symbolically the process of sexual intercourse. The man with his right hand covered with the white glow is touching the chimney that suggests clearly the act of defloration. The massive quantities of symbolic information, which is easily readable after close examination of all elements of the painting, refer to the passage of time from the childhood to the adolescence and the first encounter with sexuality. It is another great artwork opened to sensual discoveries. Balthus’s mind could be read through the imagery of his paintings. He is proposing the internal conversation and to hear it one needs to understand his symbolic alphabet. His paintings need to be decoded by the meaning of each element. It can take hours or days before one can complete the entire source of information he offers for intellectual digestion on the surfaces of his canvases. To some people his paintings look simple, primitive, or perverse, but only the ignorance can judge his artwork paranoid and obsessive. Balthus came from intelligent and intellectual family and he expressed himself with intelligence too.
Another of Balthus painting titled “The Patience” (see fig.6) reaffirms his genius of writing stories with symbolic images. This artwork is different from the others. Balthus tells the story of a female that is still a child waiting for her sexual enlightenment. The erotic curiosity is already implanted in her soul. She is placing the cards on the pink table trying to foresee when it would happen. The way she placed the cards suggests a window. It is situated between the shadows projected by the girl’s arms on the table suggesting the girl’s spread legs. The candle on the table refers to the phallus. Furthermore, the candle in the chandelier suggests the sexual intercourse. The girl stretched out her legs, one of which is using the support of the chair and the other is on the floor. The curved posture of her body is emphasized by the sensual provocative curve of her buttock. Her face and a part of her body are in the shadow suggesting her innocence and sexual ignorance. The part of the chair is entering between the legs of the table illustrating the process of sexual initiation. The cat under the shadow of the table symbolizes the inexperience of her sexual organs relates to her virginity. Furthermore, the scene of running cat trying to catch the ball suggests the foreplay before the act of the final seduction. The white wall behind with the horizontal division might suggest a bed.
While most of the time Balthus depicted denuded innocence of the childish girls one cannot consider his paintings in anyway as pornographic. The perversity of his images might be disturbing to some only when he painted the models naked with spread legs, this definitely emphasizes the suggestively provocative reading of the picture, as for example in his two chosen artworks for review: first titled “Elevation” (see fig.7) and second titled “Naked and the Guitar” (see fig.6). The “Elevation” was executed in the late eighties. In the square format of the canvas, Balthus painted a child girl touching with the tips of her fingers a toy bird, as she would like to help the bird to fly. Her connection with the toy bird suggests the desire to fly with her innocent mind to satisfy her erotic curiosity. The girl’s spread legs and the half sitting position on the bed with white pillow behind, and sheets, and blankets symbolizes the purity of the sitter waiting for a discoveries of the erotic pleasure. The hungry fixed eyes of the cat, which is coming out from the cage of sexual desires suggest clearly cat’s appetite to catch the bird. The cat might not realize that the bird-versus-girl is not comestible because of her young age. The cat is overwhelmed with the girl’s purity, which makes its appetite for her innocence even greater. The “Naked and the Guitar” was executed in the early nineties. In addition to the even more pronounced and provocative of the girl’s spread legs in this painting, Balthus placed just beside her a guitar as he did it previously in his other paintings. The guitars and cats are very often used in his compositions to emphasize the elaborated erotic content that has to be discovered. Balthus certainly knew that most people even the art critics would judge his artwork by the most evident imagery without seeing the entire story of his paintings. That is why he probably had a lot of fun when he was reading the critics of his works. The scene of this painting is situated in the closed room, probably somewhere in the south, as the window would suggest, maybe even in the Mediterranean. Just by suggesting the Mediterranean region through the window he refers to love and sexual freedom. The girl lying stretched comfortably on the bed marks the center of the painting with her pubic area very evidently saying all what the artwork is about. Her beautiful innocence is offered to the viewer to enjoy looking at her without even being interrupted. The triangle created between her legs, her pubic area and the white blanket refers to the ancient symbol of femininity and erotic poesy and music. The draperies hanged over on the right side of the bed have a form of monk clothing what would suggest the chastity. Furthermore, the violet color of the drapery symbolizes the innocence, virtues, love and beauty but also a short grief and the male genitals in the Indian culture. The composition of the violet drapery by itself is very suggestive. Taking in consideration the omnipresent symbolism in Balthus’s paintings, one has to recognize his artistic genius. Furthermore, each of his artworks has qualities of the sensual novel.
Most scholars recognized the particularity of the subjects of his artistic quest and also his artistic greatness and individuality, while others see rather just the obsessive pedophiliac character and mediocrity of it. His artwork is certainly controversial according to the contemporary social fragility towards such delicate issues as a depiction of the sexual innocence of the children, especially young girls.
However, by careful studies of Balthus works, one can certainly appreciate their thematic and artistic values. In order to have an understanding of his greatness, one needs to see at least one original artwork of his, because Balthus really painted his paintings. By close examination of the surfaces of his canvases one can see his enormous physical effort to produce the three dimensional chromatic coatings. From far away it seems as it is just a flat application of few colors participating in visualization of his images but from a close range by tracing his brush movements, one can feel the excitement he went through in order to get the results he wanted to get. It would not be exaggeration to tell that he struggled with the canvas as he was fighting to exteriorize his adoration and his creative excitement, which was supplied to his mind by the beautiful, fulfilled with innocence childish femininities of the posing models. His seemingly simple paintings have extremely complex exterior chromatic superficies. Whatever excitement he accumulated in his creative mind he throws it out in the chunks of paint with multiple chromatic strokes of his brush. The surface of his canvases besides the figurative content consists of the orgy of the colors applied with the painter’s erotic energy constantly nourished with the adoration of the visual references. The artist devoured the beauty of the innocent bodies with the paint and his brush, and as it can be seen on the surface of his canvases he enjoyed every inch of doing it. Balthus qualities as a painter do not exclude a question, if his artwork is about admiration or perversity of the female childhood. Answer to this question lies somewhere between the two groups of Contemporary society: the paranoid conservative hypocritical part and the mentally healthy and liberated intellectually individuals.
Balthus was one of those artists whose persona had extremely rich inner world filled up with elaborated perverse fantasy. He would not be able to commit any indecent act on the child in reality. His artistic perversity did not materialize in any physical wrongdoing, except on his paintings. He nourished his artistic intellectually degenerative mind with the images of beautiful, young and vulnerable souls. To the certain degree he was a perfect pedophile, one of those who just imagine and keep his dreams in closed room of his mind. The only exteriorization of his lusty thoughts was executed through the genius of his brush. The society would not persecute such pedophiles and certainly the world would be much safer if there would be just Balthuses around. Fantasizing and dreaming do not hurt anyone as long as their fantasies and dreams stay in the closed room of their minds.
To conclude, in the Balthus case to give the clear answer how to perceive his greatly painted artwork is not easy because the line between the adoration and perversion in his phenomenon is extremely thin. However, taking in consideration his inoffensive character it would be honest to say that his dissection of the female childhood was more about the adoration and the dichotomy of it than perversity. Furthermore, his obsessive adoration of the sublime erotic beauty of the unspoiled mentally and physically corpuses served him to provoke the attention to his artwork.
Through his art he was trying to prolong the memories of his own childhood and all his childish erotic fantasies. Balthus knew that each of us has hidden room of perversity locked in our minds against any intrusion of the socio-hypocritical order and with his art he would nourish the hunger of these rooms with his provocative imagery. At the end, art is at its best when it provokes our senses.
[1] Invented during the early Italian Renaissance.
[2] Short-listed for Nobel Prize.
[3] Some of the most interesting are Caravaggio, John Singleton Copley, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Renoir, Sully, John Singer Sargent, William Adolph Bouguereau, Thomas Gainsborough, Peale, Wilson, Butler, Van Honthorst, Ingres, Bonington, Millais, Daumier, Gustave Courbet.
[4] His father Erich Klossowski was the art historian who wrote, besides other books, the Monograph of Daumier. His mother Elisabeth Dorotea Spiro, known as Baladine Klossowska was a painter. Both parents and close family frequented the cultural elites of Paris.
[5] Published in 1847.
[6] Art critique from Comoedia, Paris, France.
[7] Contemporary example would be Freud, who likes to paint naked, or Bacon, who never cleans his studio. Feminist artists as Schneemann or Judy Chicago funded their own way to get the public attention to their creative conquests.
[8] It is suggested that the XVth century painting “La Pieta De Villeneuve-les-Avignon” painted inspired Balthus by Enguerrand Quarton. Scholar Sabine Rewald suggested that Balthus adopted the Pieta position of the girl to avenge the destruction of his mural painting from the Beatenberg church authorities in 1927.
[9] Antoinette de Watteville (1912-1927).
[10] Red: love, energy, excitement, sin, sacrifice. White: innocence, purity, initiation, the summary of all colors. Black: evil, harm, wrong, immorality, destruction, death.
[11] Balthus was using as a model for this painting the daughter of the janitor from the poor neighborhood. The girl was not comfortable to pose half naked but it was a possibility for her mother to gain little more money. The mother was all the time present when Balthus was sketching her daughter.
[12] Balthus was a great lover of cats, in his Chalet Swiss a Rossiniere he had uncountable amount of cats. When fourteen years old he published a book “Mitsou, forty images by Baltusz,” for which Rainer Maria Rilke wrote introduction, in the same time it was his first text written in French.
[13] In some believes cat symbolize vagina and mouse penis that is why women usually are afraid of mice.
[14] The painting was exposed in Kunsthalle de Berne in 1946 during the exposition titled “Ecole de Paris.”
Bibliography.
Christian Delacampagne. Balthus 1908-2001. Editions Circle d’Art, Paris, France, 2002.
Claude Roy. Balthus. Editions Gallimard, Paris, France, 1996.
Costanzo Constantini. Balthus a Contr-Courant. Les Editions Noir sur Blanc, Suisse, 2001.
Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz. Balthus. Editions Assouline, Paris, France, 2000.
Harold Osborne. The Oxford Compagnon to Art. Oxford University Press, 1970.
James Thrall Soby. “Balthus.” The Bulletin of the Museum of Modern Art, Vol. 24, No. 3, Balthus (1956 – 1957), pp. 3-9+11-15+17-20+22-36
Jean Claire. Balthus. Flammarion, Paris, France, 2001.
Jean Laymarie. Balthus. Editions d”Art Albert Skira. Geneve, Swiss, 1982.
Jorg Zutter. Balthus. Editions d’Art Albert Skira, Geneve, et Musee Des Beaux Arts, Lausanne, Swiss, 1993.
Karl Ruhrberg, Manfred Schneckenburger, Christian Fricke, Klaus Honnef. L’Art au XX siecle. Taschen GmbH, Koln, 2005.
Lewis Biggs. Reviewed work(s): Balthus by Jean Leymarie The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 122, No. 925 (Apr., 1980), pp. 270-273
Philip Rylands. Review: “Balthus.” Venice. The Burlington Magazine , Vol. 143, No. 1185 (Dec., 2001), pp. 782-784.
Richard Shone. Balthus and Other Exhibitions. Paris. The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 126, No. 971, Special Issue Devoted to Twentieth-Century Art (Feb., 1984), pp. 117- 116.
Sabine Rewald. Balthus’s Thérèses. Metropolitan Museum Journal , Vol. 33, (1998), pp. 305-314.
Sabine Rewald. Balthus’s Magic Mountain. The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 139, No. 1134 (Sep., 1997), pp. 622-628.
Semir Zeki. Balthus ou La Quete de l’Essentiel. Les Belles Lettres, Paris, France, 1995.
Susan Felleman. Dirty Pictures, Mud Lust, and Abject Desire: Myths of Origin and the Cinematic Object. Film Quarterly, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 27-40.
Terry Barrett. “Modernism and Postmodernism: An Overview with Art Examples” in Art Education: Content and Practice in a Postmodern Era. Edited by J. Hutchens & M.
Suggs, Reston, Virginia: National Art Education Association, 1997.
Rollover for sound
It was an approach reminiscent of that adopted by Greta Garbo, and one that similarly only heightened curiosity about him. It did the prices of his paintings no harm either. In the last decade they have sold for as much as $6 million, a figure only matched by one other living painter, Lucian Freud.
Throughout his career, Balthus set himself apart from the abstract and conceptualist work synonymous with the development of art in the 20th century. He was one of the few artists of his time who sought to represent beauty. His drawing is in a class with Courbet, Cezanne, Seurat and Picasso in his periode rose, while his painting comes closest in spirit to that of Piero della Francesca, blending realism with the spiritual.
Painting, he declared, is itself a form of prayer. It was one he undertook almost every day, even into his nineties, rarely inviting anyone into the sanctum of his studio, even such close friends as Alberto Giacometti and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Yet the results of his meditation seemed to many closer to blasphemy. Indeed, the painting which first brought him to notice, The Guitar Lesson (1934), has a markedly similar composition to the Pieta de Villeneuve-les-Avignons in the Louvre.
In the picture, a teenage girl is shown stretched over the knees of another – her young music teacher – who gazes down at her pupil’s naked abdomen while tugging on her hair as if handing out a punishment. The child’s guitar lies abandoned on the floor. The painting was judged too obscene for public display by the director of the Galerie Pierre and was only shown to clients in a private room.
Nonetheless, it caused a sensation, and as late as 1978 it was withdrawn from an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York because of speculation about its subject matter.
Thereafter Balthus was dogged by a reputation for perversion. “Balthus is a giant,” wrote one critic, “but to most people he’s the fellow who paints little girls showing their panties.”
He was born Balthasar Klossowski in Paris on February 29 1908, the second son of German-born painters. His father, Erich Klossowski, was also an art critic, and was proud of being the only German admitted to the circle of Pierre Bonnard and friends, which included Matisse. Balthasar’s elder brother, Pierre, went on to become a respected painter and an expert on the Marquis de Sade.
Balthasar was encouraged to paint by Bonnard, but it was the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who had a long affair with Balthus’s mother, who recognised the 12-year-old boy as a prodigy when he saw a series of 40 ink drawings by him. In 1921 Rilke had them published as a book entitled Mitsou, to which he provided a preface. Rilke also advised him to use his nickname of “Balthus”.
Mitsou told the tale of a lost cat, and Balthus liked to compare himself to the animal. Certainly there was something feline about his lazy, mischievous, rather manipulative nature. His favourite of his own works – and the only one he retained to the end of his life – was a self-portrait from 1935 which depicts an angular young man with a tawny cat. He called it A Portrait of HM The King of Cats painted by Himself.
From the outset of his career, he set himself firmly in the tradition of narrative painting. When still a boy he spent three months at the Louvre copying Poussin’s Echo and Narcissus. At 18, instead of going to art school, he bicycled to Arezzo to copy Piero della Francesca’s fresco cycle.
He was thus largely self-taught. He always claimed to find painting extremely difficult, and was never satisfied that he had succeeded in committing his vision to canvas.
A 1927 portrait of Balthus by Man Ray captures the painter’s indifference to the vagaries of artistic fashion. His aquiline features are accentuated and he looks aristocratic and ascetic, sitting smoking from a cigarette-holder and gazing off camera.
A few years earlier, Balthus had drawn a self-portrait in the antique manner, with his noble-looking profile enclosed by a circle in the manner of a Roman coin. In later life, he would style himself “Count”, although the legitimacy of his claim to any such title did not bear close examination.
No more plausible was his story that he was related to Byron, a fantasy that revealed the romanticism in his nature. In 1933, after spending a year in Morocco on national service, Balthus created a series of prints illustrating Wuthering Heights. Balthus closely identified with Heathcliff, modelling the character’s features in the prints on his own.
In the 1930s, Balthus was in the thick of Parisian art life. He painted Joan Miro and Andre Derain and designed sets for Artaud’s surrealist production of The Cenci. He designed other sets for productions of Shakespeare and for Camus’s L’Etat de siege. Picasso, in particular, was both an admirer and collector of his work.
In 1934 he held his first one-man show in Paris. He was subsequently taken up by Pierre Matisse, the doyen of the New York art world, whose gallery showed his paintings in 1938. Balthus quickly became one of the most sought-after artists in America, although he did not go there until he was in his eighties.
Yet from the moment of his first big break in America, when he sold his painting The Street to the collector James Soby, his art excited unease. In one part of The Street a man has his hand on a girl’s crotch. When Soby hung the painting at home, his young son called friends round to view “the dirty picture”. It was promptly removed to a vault.
At the outbreak of the Second World War, Balthus was conscripted into the French army, but after a month at the front his health broke down and he was demobilised. He spent most of the war painting in Switzerland.
In 1953 he left Paris for a chateau in the village of Chassy in central France. The seven years he spent there were to be his most productive period, resulting in more than 60 paintings, many of them cool, mysteriously still landscapes reminiscent of Seurat.
He was called away from Chassy in 1961 by Andre Malraux, then Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, who made him director of the Academie de France in Rome. This was situated in the Villa Medici, which has connections to many great artists. Michelangelo may have had a hand in the villa’s design; Velazquez painted in the gardens; Ingres was director for many years. Balthus had the house restored to its former splendour and went on collecting trips to the Far East and Afghanistan.
His work in Rome left him little time for painting, but once he had retired to Rossiniere, in Switzerland, where he lived in a large 19th-century chalet, his painting seemed to reach a new standard. The Turkish Room (1963-66) depicts a nude Chinese girl reclining on a sofa in a shuttered and elaborately furnished room. The decorative orientalism of this painting, completed with an almost other-worldly grace, forms a striking contrast to the solid, bourgeois figures of Balthus’s early work.
He continued the Far Eastern theme in two later canvasses, Japanese Figure with Black Mirror and Japanese Figure with Black Table (both 1976), each of which used as a model his second wife, Setsuko, a Japanese woman 35 years younger than him.
In recent years he had been much feted by younger celebrities, including the singers David Bowie and Bono. He continued to work until his death, and in 2000 showed a painting at the National Gallery in London. He had recently begun to make plans for a museum of his art to be housed in an annexe to his chalet.
He married first, in 1932, Antoinette de Watteville; they had two sons. He married secondly, in 1967, Setsuko Ideta; they had a daughter, and a son who predeceased him.
Oscar Murillo Mints Money With Scribbles, Dirt, Food
By Katya Kazakina – Sep 17, 2013 9:01 PM PT
Rubell Family Collection via Bloomberg
Oscar Murillo at work in a gallery space at the Rubell Family Collection.
Two years ago, artist Oscar Murillo, now 27, cleaned offices to put himself through art school. His paintings sold for less than $3,000.
Rubell Family Collection via Bloomberg
Oscar Murillo, the first artist to become resident at the Rubell Family Collection. During his five week stay, he created 50 artworks. Source: Rubell Family Collection via Bloomberg
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ABSTRACT CRITICAL
27 September 2013
Oscar Murillo at the South London Gallery
Written by Dan Coombs
Oscar Murillo, if I was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator, 2013. Installation view at the South London Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower. Image courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London.
I needed a carrier bag to carry my Oscar Murillo press pack home with me on my bike. The man in the corner shop offered me a minuscule black one; when I asked for something bigger he demanded I purchase something. Feeling peckish I reached for a small bag of nuts and raisins and procured a more sizeable bright blue carrier. Afterwards I felt curious as to where the snack had been put together – it combined the usual mixture of cashew, brazil, unsalted peanuts and raisins, but also unusually included walnuts. Maybe it was a British factory, run on immigrant labour. The nuts inevitably must have been sourced globally – a network of importation converging on a depot. Its rare to feel it, but every commodity carries with it the shadow of a different reality – the reality of production by a global proletariat, the unseen labour force that capital prefers to render as invisible as possible. Production is rendered abstract – the term Marx used was reification. To be a Westerner is to live in a condition of blissful consumerist ignorance. Oscar Murillo’s art attempts to connect us with a different reality.
Oscar Murillo, if I was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator, 2013. Installation view at the South London Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower. Image courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London.
Despite having moved to London at the age of ten, Murillo still has one foot in Columbia where his extended family were employed in the local lollipop factory. The atmosphere of the factory runs through all of his work and his work is imbued with the vividness of the real, real surfaces without meaning created out of the purely functional. He’s obsessed with traces and marks that can resemble scraped metal or the scoured whorls left by a revolving machine, or the imprint of random patterns of paint onto cloth. His paintings are sliced up and stitched together in an almost completely functional way, like jerry-built hoardings or temporary repairs to a broken wall. He combines plastic and plaster and dirt and seems to revel in the liberating griminess and dirty splendour of his work. There’s no aesthetic hierarchy – in the South London Gallery only one painting made it onto the wall- the ominous, bat- like Night Shift (2013, oil stick and oil paint on canvas) [above]. The rest of the paintings were folded up neatly in piles, underneath tables, or spread out so that we could walk across them. Whilst in their use of materials Murillo’s paintings resemble sometimes the textures of Schnabel or Basquiat, they are only superficially expressionist. The paintings have a battered contingency; they are more like arenas for the wear and tear of passing traffic, the scars of their own making , becoming the index of a brutal reality. Across their surfaces Murillo often invokes the names of common foodstuffs – “chorizo”, “milk”, “mango”, like snacks consumed in a work break. Through basic gestures Murillo grinds his own self into the painting’s warp and weft.
Oscar Murillo, if I was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator, 2013. Installation view at the South London Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower. Image courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London.
Murillo employs some members of his extended family to produce his work, and has a strong sense sense of familial collectivity. He continuously recycles the materials from old installations, and this exhibition consists of tables with copper tops, low plywood platforms with functional troughs, workstations, sacks of corns and wooden jigs containing the ingredients of large inedible cornballs that resemble crumbling Franz West sculptures. Canvases on the floor are covered in paper mulch, and plaster sculptures based on ancient Columbian pots vie it out on a crudely makeshift chessboard with some concrete balls. Murillo is attracted to forms that are impersonal, basic, mute and lumpen. Inside the installations he organises events with his family, the public, and curious art collectors, usually involving food, yoga or bingo. This gregarious inclusiveness goes some way to tempering the works’ hidden sophistication; Murillo is well versed in the language of post-minimalism. Precedents like West or the installations of Dieter Roth allow him to transcribe the reality of the conditions he wishes to evoke into the gallery very directly. The detritus of work is everywhere, and the huge labour involved in production is palpable. Along a pencil line drawn along the wall he’s collaged a chain of labels and advertising of basic foodstuffs – such as Pride Vegetable Cooking Oil or Fufu flour. Whether this is ironic is unclear – it seems less a critique of commodification than a description of basic survival. Despite this the installation attempts to transform the trials of manual labour into something aesthetic, a world that is surprisingly rich in its various specificities, and enviably cohesive in its familial and collective bonds.
Oscar Murillo, if I was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator, 2013. Installation view at the South London Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower. Image courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London.
“The idea of labour and work is at the heart of my practice” Murillo has said in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist. Upstairs there’s a video, and in keeping with the impoverished textures of his paintings and installation, its an ad-hoc affair simply filmed on his i-phone. He follows a man around a small Columbian town who is attempting to sell lottery tickets, a low level job with breadline pay, but the man’s resilience and determination to carry on is affecting. At one point the camera slips and we see Murillo’s dreadlocked shadow on the ground – we’re suddenly aware of the artist’s presence and also that he’s riding a bike, in a friendly way, alongside a man who would perhaps prefer he wasn’t there. Murillo seems determined to stay true to the experience and people of his home town, and the video captures its atmosphere by simply being straightforward. Like the installations and paintings, the video documents another form of work.
Murillo makes installations because they frame his paintings; one is subliminally aware of the painterly elements in his installations. The colour for example is extremely carefully controlled, from the browns of the plywood to the white of the plaster pots and their blue collars made from old tin cans. The overall effect is lovely but with the attendant melancholy of a crumbling ruin, an abandoned workplace. The installation extends the logic of the paintings outwards, and allows Murillo to avoid seeing the paintings in a precious or in a formal way. The paintings have to come about with an abandoned, accidental congruity or at least the illusion of it, as their realism is dependent on the sense they’ve been formed by the impersonal hand of chance and contingent circumstance, vulnerable relics that seem to have been pulled directly from the street. The disadvantage of spreading outwards into the real is that qualitative judgments are harder to ascertain; it becomes not so much a question of how good an artist Murillo is, because here, Murillo’s art just is. It would be interesting to see Murillo’s paintings outside this context, whether they would stand up to their precedents Basquiat, Twombly and Rauschenberg. The paintings are close to being naive or tasteful and they seem to struggle with their own conceptually tidy post- minimalist aesthetic where materiality flirts with the decorative. In placing his paintings on the floor Murillo seems to be acting against his paintings status as super expensive commodities, and emphasises the paintings as mere off-shoots of a larger practice – just the manifestations of a process, just another way of working.
Work as a value in itself, the work ethic, is hardly controversial; it’s a value shared by both a communista and a member of the corporate one per cent. The value of work, its point and its purpose beyond earning a living, questions of exploitation or the Marxist idea of the worker alienated from the intrinsic value of his labour are questions that Murillo raises and leaves hanging. He seems to value the aspect of work that brings collectivity and togetherness and from this point of view the installation feels different to a lot of British art where the public tend to equate hard work with diligence and fidelity rather than the manifestation of an explosive energy. The contradictions of the commodification of the art work however, are here somewhat effaced. In placing his paintings on the floor Murillo seems to to be acting against his painting’s status as super expensive commodities, but he may yet be making them more elusive, more desirable. In the catalogue to his show at The Rubell Family Collection in Miami, Murillo has reprinted an earlier essay by the artist Liam Gillick entitled “The Good of Work”. A different sense of super-self conscious commodity awareness is at the core of current artist’s desire to come close to the context within which they work. Projection and speculation are the tools they reclaim in order to power this super-self-conscious commodity awareness”, Gillick writes. Murillo’s paintings, similar to the ones I was walking on, have sold at auction for four hundredthousand dollars, and American and European art collectors are queuing up to buy his work; it’s a sure fire investment whose worth is increasing daily. Is Murillo therefore, in this installation, resisting his collectors – or is he simply being true to his roots? Murillo wants to be part of a community, but does he have his own voice?
Oscar Murillo, if I was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator, 2013. Installation view at the South London Gallery. Photo: Mark Blower. Image courtesy the artist and David Zwirner, New York/London.
It’s perhaps the radical incompleteness of Murillo’s aesthetic, the sense of things being conjoined accidentally or not at all, the sense of immersion in a process and the helpless, jarring collision of elements that provide the basis of his language. Murillo’s strength as a painter could emerge through developing the paintings’ unusual boldness, by pushing their crudity and rawness. His paintings are vessels of potential energy, and the struggle for him is to make them more than comfort blankets or exotic upholstery. It will be interesting to see whether he can hold his own in a world that celebrates money and boredom.
It’s been Oscar Murillo’s week in London with stunning sales at all three auction houses. This evening Phillips sold the above untitled work for £146,000 above a £30,000 high estimate. That caps off the sales Dan Duray highlighted on GalleristNY:
A 2011 painting by the artist Oscar Murillo, who was born in 1986, went for an impressive $391,475 at the Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary day sale in London yesterday, surpassing a previous record by a factor of 10.
Mr. Murillo followed up that auction high today at the London Sotheby’s Contemporary day sale, with a work from 2012 that sold for $177,456.
Judd Tully spoke to the buyer of Phillips’s work to get a sense of the demand:
There was a surge of bidding for market rising Columbian artist Oscar Murillo as “Untitled” from 2011, a bravura oil, paper, and debris on canvas abstract painting scaled at six feet by five and a half feet sold for multiples of its high estimate, making £146,500 ($224,145) (est. £20-30,000). The buyer, who declined to give her full name but said it was “Antonella F,” is a young Columbian collector who lives some of the time in Miami and has a private art fund for young artists. “We learned about Murillo at Art Basel last month.”
Colin Gleadell adds some more details to the Murillo story:
Looking at his very short career to date it is clear this artist is heading somewhere. He has been artist in residence at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, a place where many a reputation has been formed. He has been bought in depth by Charles Saatchi, and this summer presented an installation at the prestigious Art Basel fair. He has shown with many galleries, though most, like the Carlos Ishikawa gallery in London, are not associated with high prices. However, he will be included in a group show next month at the David Zwirner gallery in New York, which is.
The art world has clearly been abuzz with the sound of Murillo’s name. At Phillips, his work was bought by an art fund (that is, an investment vehicle) based in Miami. At Christie’s, there had been unprecedented media attention from Colombia before the sale, and bidding came from four different continents, including South America. A collector told me there was talk that the artist was being head-hunted by the White Cube gallery, an unconfirmed rumour of the kind that fuels speculation and spikes prices.
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Rubell Family Collection via Bloomberg
Artist Oscar Murillo and trend-setting collectors Mera and Don Rubell. The Rubell Family Collection opened the exhibition of the Colombian-born artist during Art Basel Miami Beach fair in December 2012. Source: Rubell Family Collection via Bloomberg
Sotheby’s via Bloomberg
“Untitled (Stack)” (2012) by Oscar Murillo. The lot, estimated to bring $60,000 to $80,000, will be offered during Sotheby’s “Contemporary Curated” auction on Sept. 25 in New York. Source: Sotheby’s via Bloomberg
“Untitled” (2012) by Oscar Murillo. The painting is estimated at $50,000 to $70,000. Source: 2013 Christie’s Images Ltd. via Bloomberg
The way collectors are grabbing for his messy canvases in a frenzy has all the earmarks of an art-market bubble.
“He’s had the quickest upward trajectory for his age of any artist I’ve seen in 25 years,” said Kenny Schachter, a London-based dealer, curator and writer. “There’s a lot of money to be made trading Oscar Murillo at this point.”
True enough.
In June, an untitled 2011 painting featuring scribbles, dirt and the word “Pasteles” fetched 253,875 pounds ($389,199) at Christie’s in London, more than eight times the high estimate.
David Zwirner, whose gallery represents postwar masters Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Ad Reinhardt, added Murillo to his stable just last week.
Tomorrow, the artist’s first major solo show in the U.K. opens at South London Gallery, a nonprofit space where the entire content of the Murillo’s studio will be on view, from stitched canvases and porcelain vases to dried beans and bottle caps.
Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips will offer works by Murillo in their September contemporary-art auctions in New York.
“Untitled (stack),” made a year ago with two overlapping canvases featuring the words “Water” and “Taco,” is estimated at $60,000 to $80,000 at Sotheby’s. (BID)
Next Basquiat!
“He is being branded as the next Jean-Michel Basquiat by the speculative part of the market,” said Belgian collector Alain Servais, who paid about 30,000 pounds ($47,715) for a Murillo installation earlier this year. “I am worried the market will put such pressure on him that he won’t be able to develop.”
Murillo grew up in La Paila, a small town in Colombia where his family worked in sugar-cane mills. Eventually, the clan immigrated to London, where Murillo made his way through the Royal College of Art.
Elements of South American culture — food, music, language — populate Murillo’s art practice, which knows no boundaries, including performance, installation, publishing, painting and sculpture.
The Murillo buzz began building around 2011 with performance art pieces like “animals die from eating too much – – yoga!” In this project, several women twisted into yoga poses as the audience watched.
Energized, he continued with “animals die from eating too much — bingo!” in which he entertained female art patrons with Colombian food and a game of bingo.
Moving On
Dealer Francois Ghebaly, an early supporter, brought 15 paintings by Murillo to NADA Miami art fair in December 2011. They were priced at $2,500 to $8,500.
“Everything sold in the first hour,” said Ghebaly.
Young Murillo was already moving to the next level with the helping hands of Hans Ulrich Obrist, an influential curator, who invited him to London’s Serpentine Gallery and the Roman arena in Arles, France.
At the Serpentine, South American office cleaners mingled with art-world patrons eating Colombian food, drinking champagne and dancing salsa. (This was the piece, not the party.)
On opening night his 15-foot-tall paintings, featuring the words “Mango,” “Chorizo” and “Yuka,” were seen by international collectors and museum directors.
“This kid is striking,” said Mera Rubell in an interview. “When you meet him, you want to be part of the story.”
No Stopping
She and her husband, Don Rubell, met Murillo earlier that year in New York. Knowing they were coming to his temporary studio, he created nine new paintings in 48 hours.
They invited him to be the first resident artist at their foundation in Miami. He stayed for five weeks and made 50 artworks.
“We bought all 50 works,” Rubell said.
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Art
Art Market News: Colombian-born artist Oscar Murillo to be represented by the David Zwirner Gallery
Colombian-born artist Oscar Murillo, whose prices have rocketed in recent months, to be represented by the David Zwirner Gallery which has premises in London and New York.
Yuka Chips, Oscar Murillo, 2013.
Picture: Jonathan Smith c/o David Zwirner Gallery
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By Colin Gleadell
September 10, 2013 09:00
When young artists suddenly start to make high prices there’s often a change in representation about to take place. In the case of 27-year-old Colombian-born London resident Oscar Murillo, whose sudden astronomic price rise I commented on in July, it has now been confirmed that he is to be represented by the David Zwirner Gallery which has premises in London and New York.
Murillo applies studio debris to his rough-hewn canvases in what can be classed as a performance. Last summer, the auction record for one of these canvases leapt from £20,000 to £254,000 amid gossip that he was to be represented by the White Cube gallery. Until then he had shown with numerous galleries, particularly the Carlos Ishikawa Gallery in London.
However, representation with David Zwirner – rated as one of the most powerful and successful contemporary art gallerists with artists Luc Tuymans and Marlene Dumas, as well as the estates of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin on his books – takes Murillo into a new league. The news precedes the opening of his latest show at the South London Gallery in Peckham on September 20.
Up and coming young artists usually get a high-end foodie establishment to cater their after-show parties, but after the recent opening of Oscar Murillo’s exhibition at the South London Gallery, over a hundred of the art world’s great and good were treated to generous (and delicious) plates of pulled pork and rice cooked and dispensed by his auntie.
Other members of the Murillo clan mingled with the crowd, dispensed and consumed copious amounts of mescal and salsa danced way into the night. For while the 27-year-old Murillo may be a soaring star who has recently signed up with the prestigious David Zwirner Gallery, and whose large unruly canvases are making in excess of £200k at auction, the Columbian-born, London-based artist not only keeps his family close, they are also a crucial component in his performative, participatory art.
“What’s interesting to me is how cultures collide – what’s important is functionality and for things to have the same standing” he says. “I’m trying to obliterate hierarchies.”
To this end he has turned an art gallery into a yoga studio with friends and family using his paintings as mats; he’s enlisted relatives to help host and cater an art-world bingo evening; and one of his more lavish “family events” was the “Late Summer Party with Comme des Garçons” he held a couple of years ago in the Serpentine Pavilion in Hyde Park. This brought together London’s art and Columbian communities and also used the hefty credit note Murillo had received from doing a Comme des Garçons ad campaign to buy high-end prizes for dance competitions and games.
Oscar Murillo moved with his family to London from Colombia when he was 10 and he’s described the transition from the small mountain town of La Paila to East London, where many of his family members worked – and continue to work – in the cleaning industry, as “an astonishing cultural displacement.”
Until recently Murillo also worked as a cleaner whilst doing his BA at Westminster University and MA at the Royal College of Art, and there’s no doubt that this experience of cleaning, which he describes as a “social activity”, still feeds into his work. Yet while he concedes that his culture-clashing performances and parties do have a “socio-political undercurrent” overall he views them less as activism and more as a way just to mix things up.
Hallowed art hierarchies are certainly given a good shaking at the South London Gallery where Murillo has transplanted the entire contents of his Dalston studio – what he calls his “cradle of dust, dirt and pollution” – to form what is part installation and part work in progress.
Lines of Colombian foodstuff packaging march around the walls, while on the floor are raised platforms bearing piles of canvases, balls cast in concrete and crud, and pulp-encrusted works made from disintegrated Biro drawings, all of which are intended to be kicked around and/or trampled under foot.
Murillo likes to expose every element of his work to the real world before it becomes elevated into the realm of fine art: nothing is off-limits and everything can be handled by anyone – even the pristine white porcelain vessels based on precious pre-Columbian lime caskets. This rough and ready democratisation especially applies to his highly priced paintings, which are always made on the floor, where dirt, dust and debris becomes as much a component material as oil paint, graphite and pastel stick.
The art market may currently be Murillo’s oyster, but it is also not immune from a gentle puncturing of its infamous snootiness and elitism. Upstairs at the South London Gallery he has set up a special art lottery where anyone can be the proud owner of a personalised Murillo original, as well as having the chance to win an even bigger prize. Family members are again in situ, as is the artist himself, all hard at work hand embellishing each screen-printed ticket with oil paint before it is inscribed on the spot with the name of the purchaser or intended recipient.
These bespoke artworks-cum-tickets cost £2.5k each and are on sale until 7.30pm GMT Friday October 18.
First, second and third lottery prizes have been “devised” by Oscar Murillo and will only be revealed at a prize draw on October 18 to which all ticket holders and their guests are invited and which promises to be another memorable Murillo family-meets-art party. This is an artist who really knows the meaning of working in the gap between art and life.
Oscar Murillo, If I was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400km north of the equator,
Sepember 21 – December 1
Art market news: Colombian-born artist Oscar Murillo to be represented by the David Zwirner Gallery
Colombian-born artist Oscar Murillo, whose prices have rocketed in recent months, to be represented by the David Zwirner Gallery which has premises in London and New York, says Colin Gleadell.
yuka chips, Oscar Murillo, 2013Photo: Courtesy David Zwirner
By Colin Gleadell
5:47PM BST 09 Sep 2013
When young artists suddenly start to make high prices there’s often a change in representation about to take place. In the case of 27-year-old Colombian-born London resident Oscar Murillo, whose sudden astronomic price rise I commented on in July, it has now been confirmed that he is to be represented by the David Zwirner Gallery which has premises in London and New York.
Murillo applies studio debris to his rough-hewn canvases in what can be classed as a performance. Last summer, the auction record for one of these canvases leapt from £20,000 to £254,000 amid gossip that he was to be represented by the White Cube gallery. Until then he had shown with numerous galleries, particularly the Carlos Ishikawa Gallery in London.
However, representation with David Zwirner – rated as one of the most powerful and successful contemporary art gallerists with artists Luc Tuymans and Marlene Dumas, as well as the estates of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin on his books – takes Murillo into a new league. The news precedes the opening of his latest show at the South London Gallery in Peckham on September 20.
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Oscar Murillo, ‘Dinner at the members club? Yes! i’ll have a black americano first pls’, installation views, 2013
Oscar Murillo
Carlos/Ishikawa
The title of Oscar Murillo’s first London solo show was a mouthful: ‘Dinner at the members club? Yes! i’ll have a black americano first pls’. The titular ‘black americano’ in this case was – by his own admission – none other than the young London-based artist himself, whose Colombian origins are often emphasized in his painterly and performance-based practice (though there were also packs of ground coffee at the gallery, which visitors were welcome to take home). ‘The members club’ was apparently a reference to the ICA committee who had invited Murillo to rustle up something nice and performative for their annual fundraising dinner. He was happy to oblige: his debut exhibition at Carlos/Ishikawa became the setting for a champagne lunch, prepared by the artist with his relatives and served on grimy tablecloths made of ornate fabrics that had been gathering dirt for the occasion.
Welcome to the members club (all works 2013) is also the title of a 42-minute video, which documents the making of lollipops at the factory that employs most people in Murillo’s hometown, La Paila, in the southeast of Colombia. (Packed into boxes on one of the two platforms in the main space, the freely available sweets inevitably recalled Félix González-Torres’s candy piles.) But the artist doesn’t consider rough-and-ready, handheld videos such as this one to be art works in their own right; rather, he uses them to set his practice in context. A similar role is assigned to the social gatherings – such as dinners, yoga sessions, games or dances – that Murillo refuses to call ‘performances’ (though others do that for him), because they strike him as a natural, spontaneous outgrowth of his work, as opposed to an exercise in relational aesthetics of the kind practiced by, say, Rirkrit Tiravanija and his peers.
When it comes to Murillo’s broader output, it’s not always easy to determine what is ‘work’ proper and what is mere support. In a sense, everything at Carlos/Ishikawa was folded into his work’s sociable sphere for the duration of the show, and most of the things on display could be bought when they were not freely given. Yet not all of the objects had the same status. For example, one of the exhibition’s most distinctive features – the reflective copper sheets laid over a low plywood structure – were not art as such, according to the artist, but rather work-in-the-making (to be shown at a later date in a different gallery). Three weeks after the opening, these had lost some of their sheen and were looking tarnished – precisely the effect Murillo strives for. Instead of presenting a finished product, the artist wanted this exhibition to reflect some of the processes that inform his studio practice.
Painting forms the backbone of Murillo’s artistic practice, though rather than a brush he often uses a broom stick and a sizeable oil paint pad, in a sort of rudimentary mono-printing technique. Roughly hewn, stitched-up canvases in two or three different sizes – mostly large – and as many varieties (he calls them ‘banners’, ‘stack paintings’ and ‘bingos’) were hung on, leaned or stacked up against all available walls. Before the mark-making process begins, these are left lying about for a month or two to wear them in and let them gather ‘information’ (what the artist has referred to as the ‘DNA of the studio’). Murillo, who sees mess as a generative force, makes it a point never to tidy up his work environment. There is an archival element to much of the artist’s production, which retains traces of former activities, whether in the shape of single, underscored words and numbers (‘work’, ‘yoga’, ‘poker’, ‘maiz’, ‘3’) that feature prominently on his canvases, or condensed into solid dirt balls made up of studio débris (pulped drawings, thread, cement dye, copper, dust) dotted around the gallery.
‘Dirt’, and sometimes ‘dirt on canvas’, is insistently listed among the artistic media in Murillo’s works. More than just a widely available material, dirt for the artist has a levelling effect: we all experience it, black and white, rich and poor alike. In his eyes, that’s what makes it ‘democratic’. It’s easy to dispute this claim. Dirt is, after all, socially stratified; it belongs to the streets, to some more than others, and grows more scarce the higher one climbs. In some quarters (the art world among them), dirt can be exotic, a rarefied commodity, the mark of originality.
Murillo evidently sees himself as a mediator between different demographics, facilitating encounters between two worlds that would not normally meet – namely the art crowd and the Latin American immigrant community – through the events that he organizes. And yet, at the rehearsal fundraising lunch at Carlos/Ishikawa, the artist’s relatives who cooked tamales for us sat at their own table. The event may well have been intended as a critical comment on the exclusivity of the artist’s dinner, but the message it ultimately put across was as confusing as the exhibition’s title.
Agnieszka Gratza
Oscar Murillo, ‘Dinner at the members club? Yes! i’ll have a black americano first pls’, installation views, 2013
Interview with Oscar Murillo: at home with the Rubells
The 26-year-old artist on what it was like to live and work at the Miami collectors’ private museum this summer
By Ermanno Rivetti. Web only
Published online: 06 December 2012
Oscar Murillo at work at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami
The Colombian-born, London-based artist Oscar Murillo, 26, gained attention while he was still completing his painting MA at London’s Royal College of Art. A recently graduate, he is presenting a show of new work at the Rubell Family Collection in Miami. Murillo spent several weeks living at the Rubells’s museum, producing a number of large-scale works, five of which will be exhibited on-site. Murillo talked to The Art Newspaper about his forthcoming show, his two-pronged approach to making art, and the effects of growing up without video games.
The Art Newspaper: How did you meet the Rubell family?
Oscar Murillo: They saw a solo project I did with Stuart Shave/Modern Art at the Independent fair last March in New York, and they were curious to know more about what I do. At the time, I was living in the city so they came to the studio. I knew who they were but I hadn’t met them before. However, they were interested enough to offer me an exhibition.
You are the first artist to have had a residency at the collection.
It’s a kind of residency but it’s not something that [the Rubells] do as collectors—they did it to facilitate my project. I said that I needed to work in situ in order to make something on a large scale. The museum closes in the summer, so it was the perfect opportunity to go there and make the show happen.
What was the set-up like? Were you given any rules to follow?
It wasn’t like a commission—I was never told “we want this type of work”, but I knew I was going to have a show in that space and there were certain things I wanted to focus on. However, there was enough time to treat the space as a studio and not assume that certain works were going to be shown. My living quarters were linked to the museum so, if I wanted to, I could wake up at 2am and have access to it. Despite the fact that they—the Rubells, the museum staff—had seen my work, they were still relatively new to what I do, so this project was something of a leap of faith for them.
Have you worked on this kind of scale before?
No. This was the perfect opportunity to challenge myself.
Were you assisted by anyone while you were there?
Juan Roselione-Valadez, the director of the museum, was great, for many reasons. He looked after me and sourced the materials that I needed, but we also had very interesting conversations about the work as it developed.
You like to incorporate certain words into your paintings.
Certain words are often connected to a type of social endeavour that I like to bring into the realm of my own practice.
You once said that your paintings are “permanent archives or reminders of what else happens in the practice”. What did you mean by that?
When I spoke of the wider aspect of my practice, I was referring to my performances. Some of my paintings contain abstracted words—“chorizo”, “yoga”, “mango”—but the performances create context for them. For example, prior to the performance at the Serpentine [Gallery, in London] earlier this year, I was invited by Comme de Garçons to do a campaign for their new season. They used five images of previous paintings of mine and gave me £10,000. Their clothes are quite expensive and I could have bought a new wardrobe, but instead I invited members of my family to go to Dover Street Market in Mayfair, London, and attempt to buy some of these clothes, which are targeted at a certain kind of audience—my mother is not exactly eight stone. The trip became a cultural clash that I wanted to do something with. The project at the Serpentine was coming up so I called the performance “The Cleaners’ Late Summer Party with Comme des Garçons” and the idea was to invite a wide demographic of our society to participate. The performance was a party and Comme des Garçons became an anchor. It became something that you could win during the evening’s events: raffles, dance competitions, karaoke. The brand, which is usually very exclusive, became a democratised item. That was the idea.
I also did an event in Paris: a bourgeois birthday party where a similar kind of cultural clash happened. This time there were different Colombian foods there. I’ve also done two yoga-based performances. That’s where I got the idea of infusing the words into the paintings and that’s what I mean when I say they become archives. These paintings give me the opportunity to freeze the performances into the work. I mean, a painting is a rectangular device used to record things.
How did you become an artist?
I was never really an artist as a child. There’s no history of anyone in my family being an artist and I didn’t grow up around art at all. In Colombia I grew up outdoors, I played in building sites – I didn’t grow up with a Playstation. It was a very tangible existence and I was raised like that until I was ten. Then I moved to London. You might have found that same environment in post-war London, but in the mid 1990s it was totally different: there were so many safety buffers. It’s a very sanitised environment and so art became one of the only things that I could tap into to satisfy my desire for tangibility.
You say you didn’t have much art around when you were growing up, and that it was more of a physical existence, but this physicality is also central to your practice.
Exactly—the idea of obliterating or abusing material in a way that is kind of careless or primitive is something that I used to do to a piece of wood when I was a kid, for example.
This is an important show so early in your career—did you feel any pressure to perform?
Its hard to contextualise it now—nobody has even seen it. When the work was finished, I felt pretty satisfied with the results and I felt a moment of euphoria. But now I’m just interested in seeing the reaction of the public more than anything. There’s always pressure to perform. I could be naive and say I felt no pressure and that I treated it just like working in a studio, but I decided to go there and challenge myself. I feel this is a real opportunity; who knows, I might not get to make a seven-metre painting ever again, so it was the perfect moment. Everything was there and I wasn’t going to shy away from it.
”Oscar Murillo: Work” is at the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, until 2 August 2013
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Untitled, 2012, oil paint, graphite, oil stick on canvas, 128 x 100 1/2 inches. Images courtesy Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London, Carlos/Ishikawa, London, Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin.
When I meet Oscar Murillo for the first time, it is in Central London. Murillo lives and works in East London. Anyone familiar with this city knows that the distance between East and Central is nothing to scoff at. Yet Murillo shows up unfazed on his bike—neon yellow and neatly folded by the time he enters the café—and greets me with a quiet warmth and open ease.
Murillo has had his fair share of journeys; he is a native of La Paila, Colombia, and a resident of London, who, just a day before our meeting, confirmed our appointment via mobile from Paris and, in less than 24 hours from when we meet, is scheduled to board a plane to Miami. Distance, displacement, movement: these are all concepts that Murillo explores in his practice—a manifestation of a body in transit, an artist’s incisive inquiry into the geographies of space, both on the canvas and off, within the studio and out into the world beyond.
Born in 1986, Murillo is a recent graduate of London’s Royal College of Art. A painter with a flair for the performative, he often works with video and participatory installation. As we talk, he shows me recent work on his computer, a range of paintings, as well as documentation of what the artist refers to as “family parties”—vibrant films, saturated with motion and color, of intimate gatherings of his friends and kin. These pieces—home videos, nearly—are illustrations of localized ceremony and everyday happenings, situated eons away from the white boxes of the art world. They are a window into the celebration and ritual of a collective public.
The canonized archetype of an artist alone in his studio—quickly expiring as we wade further into the tides of a global culture—is one that this artist, refreshingly, does not seem to have much of an allegiance to. For Murillo, the act of making holds as much potential for liberation and functionality within the confines of one’s studio as it does in one’s home, on the street, or within one’s community. In his work, actions and words, paint and parties, all speak at the same volume. The objects made by his hand float buoyantly within the realm of the liminal, always here and there, inside and out, home and abroad, all at once very familiar, and yet, somehow, entirely untranslatable. Murillo’s use of text in his paintings illustrates the limits and the possibilities presented by language; words are part of histories that are not always our own, but that we cling to. The physicality of painting is one that provides a sturdy framework for making the leap into the performative realm, a showing of convivial desire. Here, the artist raises a champagne glass—and sometimes an arepa—in lieu of a looking glass, an eloquent reminder of the spaces we travel between and a reflection of these worlds and the constructs that lend them composure, and neutrality.
Legacy Russell We’re here in London just after your return from Paris last night and before you leave for Miami tomorrow. I’d love to hear about what you were doing in Paris, and what you plan to do once you hit Miami.
Oscar Murillo My Berlin gallery, Isabella Bortolozzi, is taking part in FIAC in Paris. Around the fair other projects are happening, for example, “R4” is working toward building up a museum in the outskirts of Paris on this island called l’île Seguin. The curator of the Migros Museum, Raphael Gygax, decided to commission about 20 artists to do outdoor projects on the island, among them Oscar Tuazon, Annette Messager, Ugo Rondinone, Nicolas Party, Martin Soto Climent, and me.
My piece, called Make it Happen in Steps, was based on something I had done this summer in the South of France and which involved me and a collaborator running, jogging, and dancing in an amphitheater. An amphitheater is a space that demands a spectacle. But the production value of my work is purposely low. I like to work with things that are—I wouldn’t say necessarily always around me, but I like to be resourceful, basically. I got a mirror, two empty cartons of coconut water, and a playlist of Fania All-Stars music—Latin American artists like Celia Cruz and Tito Puente, major salsa musicians. So I created a one-hour playlist and jogged and danced in front of a mirror to this music. At the end of it, I just walked off and that was the piece.
At l’île Seguin in Paris, I didn’t want to do exactly the same thing, but I wanted to use the same principles. I got myself a couple of sheets of reflective acrylic mirror, two speakers, some amplifiers, four car batteries, some disco lights, and an iPod with the same Fania All-Stars playlist. The island is a heavily industrial place, a bit like Detroit. There used to be a car factory there, and it’s quite run-down. The idea was to curate an installation that would play this music continuously, and not be dependent on someone having to turn it on and off. It’d just be there, kind of playing along—bringing some life to the place. So that happened last weekend, just before I did a two-person presentation with David Hammons at FIAC.
milk, 2012, oil, spray paint, oilstick, dirt on canvas, 77 1/8 x 65 3/4 inches.
LR And what about Miami?
OM I met the Rubell family for the first time in New York earlier this year. They got curious about my work, and we had a studio visit. My gallery called, “Don and Mera want to come to your studio.” And I said, “Well, I don’t have any work in the studio.” The gallery said, “We’ll get some work from storage and bring it over.” I thought, Bringing paintings back to the studio, what’s the point? For me it was an opportunity to show my work in process because the process is very important. Finished paintings they could see in the gallery. So before the Rubells visited, I stayed up all night and made a couple of paintings. Making these works created a residue of the process. And the Rubells understood that.
Every year they curate a show for their foundation in Miami; the last one was American Exuberance with four huge paintings by Sterling Ruby in the main gallery space. This year they invited me to do something there. I went to Miami this past April. They suggested this incredibly large room—I mean, it’s overwhelming! I didn’t feel comfortable making work for such a massive space without inhabiting it somehow. So I said, “I think it’s very important for me to come here and make the work from scratch.”
LR You occupied it—physically.
OM At the beginning of summer, I traveled back to Miami with all my materials and lived there for six weeks, working at the Rubell family collection.
LR So when’s the opening? When do other bodies get to occupy the space, along with you and your works?
OM The work is done and will open in December for Art Basel Miami Beach.
LR You paint, you’re doing performance, you’re recording these performances and they’re being shown as videos. All these different strands connect. Where does painting situate itself in your practice and where does it intersect with performance?
OM Paintings happen in the studio where I have my own kind of system, although there can be physical residue of performance in them. I like to cut up the canvas in different sections, work on them individually, fold them and just leave them around for months. I don’t work on a painting with the goal of finishing it or having a complete and finished painting at the end of a work process. The idea is to get through as much material as possible, and various materials go through various processes. In most parts there is this mark making that happens with a broomstick and oil paint. I make a bunch of those canvases, fold them in half, and put them on the floor. My studio is a cradle of dust and dirt, of pollution. I don’t tidy up at the end of each production process. It’s all very much on purpose; it’s continuous process, a machine of which I’m the catalyst. Things get moved around, I step on them, and they get contaminated. It’s not about leaving traces, it’s about letting things mature on their own—like aging cheese or letting a stew cook, they get more flavorful. That’s kind of how these paintings are made.
yoga, 2012, oil, spray paint, oilstick, dirt on canvas, 77 1/8 x 65 3/4 inches.
LR So the textures, these layers—they’re in part done by your own hand, but also by the larger sort of “hand” of the environment they’re born into. It’s a collaboration of creative site and creative body in that way, a sort of merging.
OM The individual canvases are very much the DNA; they record that movement, the process of making. When these different processes are done, I move on to the stage of actually composing a painting. The individual canvases are laid out with the aim of making a composition. For example, the painting we are looking at right now started with different patches of bleached black fabric, then there’s this mark-making process, and then you have the word at the end. And that’s the last thing that is added to the work.
LR Is the text in the foreground meant to represent a dialogue of what’s taking place in the background? “Pizza,” for example, or “Champagne”—are these words represented in the textures and painterly gestures they are suspended in?
OM For me the words are very displaced. Like cultural displacement with performance, in painting it’s material displacement, object displacement. I’ll show you this one, which I’m really excited about. It says, “Yoga.”
LR This one is really neat because there is a physicality that is manifest in the word itself.
OM Yeah. Some words like yoga have gained a duality of meaning in my work. They are not only visually representative of their meaning but also, compositionally, there’s a formality. The canvases get folded so you get the word kind of mirrored in the paint’s absorption onto the other side of the fold, and sometimes you get a pattern. Here it almost looks like a person doing yoga. So as my practice develops, the concept of displacement is present in both my performances and in my paintings.
LR How does performance tie in, regarding the narrative of displacement? How do your physical actions find their place within open space?
OM The idea of the space, regardless of my own art, underlies all that. There’s so much movement in the world, constantly. We all move around, we all travel, and I like to think most of the population in the world has shifted from one place to another; not necessarily globally—it could just be locally from one part of the country to the other. And so things change. For example, I’ve come to appropriate music and Vita Coco coconut water as symbols of displacement. Coconut water has been incredibly well marketed as a tropical drink that comes from parts of the world like Hawaii and the Caribbean. In metropolitan cities it has a certain message attached—healthy lifestyle . . .
LR Restorative powers in some way.
OM You find it in yoga studios, in gyms, and in all kinds of fitness places. So for me, there’re all these interesting navigations. I grew up in a very small town in South America and now live in London, which I have adopted as my home. But I’m also being displaced because I don’t find complete satisfaction with one or the other. That can be a micro example of displacement. For me these paintings are by-products of being in the studio and making work. I mean, that’s one shift. I guess that happens to all artists when showing work in galleries, or showing work in one place or the other.
LR There’s also a literal displacement when you’re taking the work out of the studio—I like how you called it a “cradle” earlier—into a totally different situation, a different context.
OM Yeah, exactly. But I like to think that these paintings also imply a displacement of time. They’re like rugs. An unstretched painting is a kind of abstract thing, one that suggests that it perhaps has been found or comes from some other space or time. But while it has this aura of being a historical thing when placed out of context, it just comes from the studio.
work just happens! to the noon via the beach, 2012, performance in Arles, France.
LR Let’s talk about the sort of family-party performances that you’ve done. I would also like to hear about the collaboration with Serpentine Gallery, The Cleaners’ Late Summer Party, which seems to link back to the idea of bringing people together, providing an opportunity for exchange, and maybe engaging with an audience that extends beyond the bubble of the art world. I mean, for you to have a party with your family is one thing, but to bring that into an art-world context . . .
OM I want to give you more background about the parties: they are family events for celebrating something—a birthday, a communion—or just people getting together. Like most parties, sometimes you only talk, sometimes you dance. I’ve been doing these parties with my family, but I wouldn’t exactly call them performances. I’ve been very cautious as to how I appropriate these family parties and bring them into the realm of my art practice and out to the public as an event that happens within the art world. So the spaces have to be very particular; it’s not like, “Let’s just throw a party in a gallery space.”
LR Well, the rules of a “family party,” versus an “art-world party”—at first blush they are totally different. Yet both are social spaces, both are spaces that can be politicized, that have their own vernacular and rubrics of ritualized behavior.
OM The Serpentine was very interesting because it isn’t exactly a gallery, but an institution. I took advantage of the fact that the institution was willing to host my event not in the main galleries but in the outdoor pavilion. As part of their annual commission, this year the Serpentine had the architect team Herzog & de Meuron collaborate with the artist Ai Weiwei to design a pavilion. Starting in June the Serpentine hosted a summer program there.
The pavilion itself had this interesting architecture—it wasn’t about a show of architecture, it was about an understatement of architecture. It looked like a theatrical space: you had seats, there was a kind of platform where you could speak or perform. So I decided to take over the entire space and decorate it as if we were having a family gathering.
My family works in the cleaning industry and they used to have these really great parties in the summer and Christmas, where people would dress up. It was a big deal. It was very eloquent, in a kind of, you could say, “cheesy” way. But it was really nice. We had food, and there was an abundance. The parties don’t really exist anymore because there’s no money around, there’s no money for parties. So I thought, Well, I have this offer from Serpentine; the conditions are perfect to throw a party. I want to do this. Then there was also this other layer, which was Comme des Garçons—
LR I was going to ask about that, how to negotiate the introduction of that genre of haute couture.
OM I did a project with them; they commissioned me to do an ad for one of their campaigns and I thought, Oh this is great. But also there was a degree of discomfort because as much as I like Comme des Garçons as a label, it’s not something that I wear. The presence of the brand brings up notions of commercialism and publicity, things I’m interested in exploring in my work—hence the words that I use sometimes in my paintings.
LR Right, with the canvases like banners, the words at that scale are almost like billboards. They really speak to the culture in which they’re produced—everything bleeds together in that way.
OM Exactly. They gave me something like $12,000 in credit—it wasn’t in money, it was in credit—and that’s insane.
LR With that, you can buy one shoe there. Maybe two if you’re lucky.
OM So I thought, Well, what am I going to do with this? So I combined the two projects and it became A Late Summer Party with Comme des Garçons. The idea was that the party would be a party, and we’d have champagne. We’d make it as elaborate as possible, and then Comme des Garçons would come in as this kind of extra layer. Now, how to democratize Comme des Garçons? How to make a product that is usually very exclusive available to the masses? So we got as many items as possible with the credit offered—perfume, clothing, what have you—and then made them prizes at the party for dance competitions and games. But we also just gave it away. While the typical art audience was present, the core of the party was my family community, a community of friends.
animals die for eating too much! yoga, 2011, Performance at Hotel, London.
LR It seems like this creates some permeability in the white-wall institutional space that’s not your space, that’s not public space.
OM Yeah. The pavilion was a buffer. These projects and these parties also have a sociopolitical undercurrent.
LR Would you consider it a mode of activism?
OM I don’t think it’s activism; it’s more my wanting to give some strength and purpose. It’s not about an agenda—
LR —or a cause.
OM Yeah, there’s no cause or agenda. There’s a desire to bring different facets of society together through events, and that’s very much the bottom line. It then assumes a social and political agenda because of the potency that it carries. Most of the time it’s positive, but there can be challenging elements that you have to deal with. Two days ago, on the 18th of October, there was a family party that I did in Paris—and I mean this was bourgeois, this was, like, crazy. The event took place in a beautiful private home near the Champs-Élysées in the center of Paris. You had a Picasso on the wall, you had Lucio Fontana pieces by the bedside—it proved to be the perfect setting to celebrate a birthday and I invited a friend of mine. It wasn’t his birthday and he didn’t even know about my intent. About an hour before the thing began I said, “You do know that we’re here to celebrate your birthday?” He kind of freaked out but then he really embraced it. The invitation to the performance was a birthday card; it was kind of confusing, and threw people off. Some people said, “Why am I going to celebrate this guy’s birthday? I don’t even know who he is.” So they come into this incredible Parisian apartment and there’s Latin music, really expensive champagne (Ruinart!) going around, and then tamales, which is a typical Colombian food. So there were these mixtures. Champagne and tamales don’t necessarily go together—
LR But they can, right? Because they did! (laughter)
OM Yeah, exactly. They did! I think it’s psychological. So you had this kind of mishmash of cultures, and then one minute the music stops and this guy makes an announcement to thank me for celebrating his birthday, and everybody starts to sing “Happy Birthday” to him and then we all began dancing.
LR What type of Latin music?
OM A lot of salsa. Just the sound of music in this house was weird, you know?
LR Yeah. I was going to ask you about the concept of “Latin American conviviality,” a phrase the Serpentine used in the press release for your event. It’s interesting to think about what that means, and whether you perceive your work as speaking through a particular vein of Latin American identity.
OM I don’t think so. I mean, it’s inevitable—I’m Latin American myself. So I’m not exactly going to appropriate a different culture to—
LR Right, it’s always good to start by working with yourself, first.
OM Exactly. It has to be genuine, it has to be authentic. It can always fail, I’m not saying that it’s always going to be successful. But the success rate is higher when you have higher control over the different topics at hand. And so it was and is usually Latin American conviviality, but it has a resonance in relation to everything. For example, there are these yoga performances that I’ve done—last year I transformed the whole gallery into a yoga studio and allowed my friends and people I know to come and do yoga for free. I made these yoga platforms and installed these very makeshift mirrors. Because it was temporary, there wasn’t any reason to be elaborate about it. It simply needed to be functional. Yoga, especially Bikram yoga, is incredibly—
LR —hardcore.
OM Displaced.
LR It’s incredibly intense.
The Cleaners’ Late Summer Party with Comme des Garçons, Serpentine Gallery Park Nights, 2012. Photo by Lewis Ronald. Courtesy Serpentine Gallery, London.
OM Yes, it’s intense on the body, a real physical workout. Bikram yoga is something that this guru, Bikram Choudhury, from India, started. Yoga as a practice is a Hindu tradition but then it was transported to Western society, where it was packaged. It started in LA and has been gradually franchised. It’s also an industry that today is dominated by women. Men do it—I do it from time to time—but yoga was something that women were not allowed to do. All these shifts are interesting to me, and I reference yoga because I know it and I’m able to talk about it authoritatively.
LR You start with yourself.
OM Yeah. It has to be personal somehow.
LR I wanted to ask you about the neoconcrete—a lot of people writing about your work have been talking about the history of neoconcretism. That movement happened around 1959 to 1961 and is often tied to artists who worked and lived in Brazil. In the neoconcrete manifesto, they talk about work being conceived as a sort of quasicorpus—the idea that a work’s reality is not exhausted by its constituitive elements. But rather that the work can have a life outside of those elements, exist within social or public space, and, in doing so, avoid a narrow specificity. Do you have any thoughts on that?
OM Obviously I think the neoconcrete movement from that period in Brazil was something quite strong. You had artists like Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Lygia Pape. Neoconcrete art was a catalyst at the time. I think that a lot of the work—not to say it’s derivative—is influenced by modernism. But they were able to appropriate from this stiff, rigid period of European modernism and digest it, and produce their own identity. And they opened it up and made it accessible to society. I guess you could say theirs was a multipurpose, flexible practice, making work that is almost pragmatic, something that’s useful.
LR That serves society in some deeper sense and, in doing so, hopefully avoids becoming part of a more elusive canon that escapes the culture or community the work is meant to serve.
OM This applies to the neoconcrete objects but also to the performances and other projects. They were inclusive because at the time it was normal to bring people together for a common cause. In our time it is difficult to talk about community.
LR Why would you say that is?
OM I think the word community has a stigma attached to it, no? And it’s very elusive too. Community can mean many things. There’s this idea of the art community, which is complete bullshit. Or the Latin American community. It’s just a label that is easy to put on things. These family parties are a way to be with my family and be together with people. It’s not like cultural tourism. These are genuine things that real people participate in.
LR And it’s part of your personal fabric.
OM Yeah, part of a personality. In terms of having a relationship to this period of art in the early ‘60s, the work and the participants were not forced. You can feel that there was a sense of that conviviality, as you were talking about earlier.
LR There is a part of the neoconcrete manifesto that talks about art as an instrument for creating society. It seems to me that it would ring true in talking about these worlds that you’re creating, these environments, these societies, that people can either opt into or opt out of and participate in different ways. So what do you see as your next steps as you continue to build your practice, build your work—are there directions you’re curious about exploring?
OM I want to make it more ambitious, more focused. A lot of these projects have happened between Europe and Colombia or in both Colombia and Europe. I think it would be really interesting to do something along these lines in the States. Like in New York. The idea of tuning into that particular culture is very important. So I think that’s where I see these things working out next—you know, to think about the sensitivity of the next place that I would like to do something, and then make it work there.
LR And continue painting.
OM And continue making these paintings. Like I said earlier: they’re fundamental to my practice. Painting for me functions as a form of mediation. You shut yourself off in the studio and make this work and there’s a relationship to everything else that happens in the practice, whether it’s directly connected or not. How do I apply that same kind of rigor and authenticity to everything else? How to show my works in new ways? How to retain control over them, even if they were sold and someone else now owns them? The dirt we spoke of earlier, well, there’s dirt everywhere—New York, London, New Delhi—all around the world, and so that’s kind of democratic. At least for me.
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In the studio with Oscar Murillo, artist
‘Most painters are terrified of painting as the same space where they are defecating’
Karen Wright
Saturday, 7 September 2013
Oscar Murillo is tucking into a lunch when I meet him across the street from his studio in east London, and we start our interview over tasty Turkish food. I ask about the press he received for his paintings going for record prices in the June auctions and he says he was in his native Colombia and the news swept through the country.
He is clear that his work is not about the market at all, but is about the experiences that he had, first in South America and now here in his adopted country. Born in 1986, Murillo and his family came to London in when he was 10. He recalls his idyllic “childhood innocence” in a small village in Colombia with a large extended family. “My father was a mechanic in a sugar cane factory and my mother worked for a candy factory: we had a sweet life!”
Fifty of Murillo’s relatives have migrated to London, forming as close clan here as in Colombia. “My uncle and cousin work with me in the studio and my mother comes and helps me cook – my auntie too.” Murillo’s past exhibitions have included “events” where his family “play themselves”. “They are not performers, more a re-enactment of who we are and what we do.”
Murillo studied at the Royal College of Art and says this period was important to him, even if as something to react against. He recalls insisting that his seminar would be held in the local chicken shop, admitting his peers “found it very offensive”. He wanted to use the detritus of life in his work, asking the owner to make a bin with one of his canvases to collect the rubbish in, something that he now has translated into his studio practice.
At this point, we decamp across the street to see the practice in action. We walk down a side passage into a surprisingly small space – Murillo’s works can be very large – where his cousin and uncle are casting some of the cannon balls in concrete that will feature in his forthcoming show at the South London Gallery. On the wall hang some of his paintings, unstretched, slightly grubby looking, their surfaces enlivened with words familiar from past works – coco, yoga or chorizo.
He breaks off our conversation to discuss something with his helpers who are un-moulding some of the balls and preparing others, lacing them with the debris of past paintings and dirt from the floor.
I point at the dirt, created in the making of the cement, being transplanted to the canvas, and he says, “Most painters are terrified of painting in the same space where they are eating, sleeping and defecating. This is my idea of how the work progresses.” As I leave, I ask if his uncle and cousin help with the paintings, and his answer is a brisk: “When it comes to making the paintings, that’s my job.”
Oscar Murillo: if I was to draw a line, this journey started approximately 400 kilometres north of the equator, South London Gallery, London SE5 (020 7703 6120) 20 September to 1 December
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GALLERISTNY
UPDATED: Oscar Murillo’s $800,000 Week in New York
“There’s a lot of money to be made trading Oscar Murillo at this point,” Kenny Schachter told Katya Kazakina in her profile of the 27-year-old artist last week. Boy, that’s an understatement! Today and yesterday, a couple of untitled works by Mr. Murillo from last year came up at auction here in New York, and both sold for double their high estimates. These two lots come on top of a third Murillo that set a new record for the artist last Thursday at Phillips at $401,000, ten times over its high estimate.
The first, at Sotheby’s “Contemporary Curated” auction, sold yesterday for $197,000, with premium. It had been estimated to sell for between $60,000 and $80,000.
The second sold today at Christie’s “First Open” sale, and though its estimate was slightly lower ($50,000 – $70,000) it sold for around the same amount $195,750, with premium.
That Mr. Murillo only doubled his high estimate shows a degree of logic exists in his bonkers market. This past June Mr. Murillo exceeded a high estimate by a factor of eight in London when a piece of his sold for $389,199, his previous auction high.
ABOUT PHAIDONPhaidon is the world’s premier publisher of books on the visual arts. We believe passionately in the creative act and aim to make it exciting and understandable by all and to celebrate its greatness in everything we produce. We have published books with some of the most creative artists, architects, designers, photographers and chefs of the 20th and 21st centuries. We work collaboratively with the creative arts world’s most inspiring names to achieve the most faithful representation of, and the truest insight into, the way those artists and visionaries interact with the world around them – whatever medium they work in.
phaidon.com is currently spending its lunch breaks reading through the excellent Focus series of books that are published next month – today we finished the Anselm Kiefer one by Matthew Biro. First a little about the Focus series. The books are designed as a lively, authorititive and accessible introduction to the work of the artists featured in the (initial) six-strong series (Kim, the editor, is already hard at work on the next instalment). As the title suggests, each features special Focus sections that explore specific and important themes, series, pieces or events in each artist’s career, so whether you’re new to the artist or you already know a bit you’ll come away enlightened and, we hope, nourished.
Concrete towers at La Ribaute, Barjac, France
With an artist like Kiefer you can imagine the focus points are many and varied. We don’t have room here to bring you a precis of all of them – and naturally we want you to buy the books. However, we can say it was a tough choice picking just one particular ‘Focus’ to represent what is an engaging yet thorough book by the foremost Kiefer expert. In the end it was a choice between Biro’s brilliantly enlightening deconstruction of Kiefer’s 1981 work Interior, Innenraum and his description of La Ribaute – the studio complex the artist began creating in the 1990s and what Biro calls ‘a total work of art’. In the end, we plumped for the latter purely because it’s better suited to a blog entry and because we suspected a few more of our readers might not now that much about it.
La Ribaute, Barjac, France
“From the mid 1990s, Kiefer’s Barjac studio-estate, which spread over 35 hectares (86 acres), also became his most ambitious project, where he made, displayed, warehoused and imagined his oeuvre. A former silk factory on a hill that the German expatriate transformed into a vast complex of living spaces, studios, workshops and storage facilities, it was also an environment in which he created a new type of ‘land art’ consisting of gigantic concrete structures, some reduced to post-war-like ruins, in the midst of the rural French countryside. For some, La Ribaute was Kiefer’s ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, or ‘total work of art’, a theatrical experience that combined multiple media and that stood as the pinnacle and sum-mation of his career.
As this studio complex developed over 17 years, it grew in shape and complexity. Originally consisting of three nineteenth-century stone buildings surrounded by fields and woods, it was expanded with a single-minded intensity to combine modern functional structures with strange, unwieldy, reinforced-concrete constructions. Since the late 1990s, more than fifty separate edifices – glass and steel greenhouses as well as concrete bunkers – were erected on the property; and, in the new millennium, an amphitheatre and a crypt were added as well as massive concrete towers, sculptural waves and freestanding staircases.
Kiefer’s studio La Ribaute, Barjac, France
Paintings and sculptural installations were sited in the various buildings, and as the complex extended, it seemed like a palimpsest of forms and traces from multiple time frames. La Ribaute and its environs were also the vast set on which Kiefer ‘shot’ his photographs. A number of his new books and paintings were based on it, as well as the factory-like ‘alchemical forge’ where he allowed his artistic fabrications to age and transform. As Kiefer’s production increased, La Ribaute also provided a context for developing his various ‘houses’ and ‘greenhouses’ of art, structures that served as containers for different groups of work.”
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FINANCIAL TIMES LONDON
Last updated: July 4, 2009 12:47 am
The art of Anselm Kiefer rises from the ruins
By Jackie Wullschlager
Entering a golden courtyard through a hidden gate in a hôtel particulier in the Marais, you expect the noise and dust of Paris to still instantly. But in German artist Anselm Kiefer’s stately home in the French capital, you instead meet chaos. Assistants shriek as they lug giant boards across cobbles. Bricks totter, barbed wire sways, a motorised buggy whirrs. Sculptures of life-size, headless figures ballooning into white crinolines lend a surreal note. Through the din, a thin, greying, ascetic-looking man in black T-shirt and jeans carefully dabs lead on a large panel crusty with silver-blue impasto.
When I admire his fragmented women, Kiefer laughs dryly and inquires which one I identify with. Spidery graffiti on stone walls reveal that the martyr topped with a rack is the tortured St Catherine; the brick block-head belongs to Greek courtesan Phryne, who offered to rebuild Thebes; and a figure whose neck soars into a tower of charred books is Sappho but also, the artist adds, “a monument to all the unknown women poets”.
Kiefer is a builder-scholar who makes art from a mix of rubble and mythology. The sets and props filling his courtyard are for the world premiere of Am Anfang (In the Beginning), with which the Bastille Opera celebrates its 20th anniversary next week; the production is also Gerard Mortier’s Paris swansong. It is Kiefer’s first work with opera, though not for want of invitations. “I am usually offered Wagner,” he grins, “but I say no because it’s too …” he flounders for the English word, “too next”.
Kiefer does indeed recall Wagner. His dense, coagulated paintings, layered with materials from wire cages to sunflower seeds to children’s clothes, and sculptural installations such as the sombre “Palm Sunday”, currently on show at Tate Modern, evoke the grand narrative structures and metaphysical scope of the 19th-century romantic tradition. But Kiefer is also a 21st-century multimedia artist, and for the Bastille he strikes an experimental note. Working with young clarinettist and composer Jörg Widmann, he crosses art with new music and a sort of abstract drama: “the actors look like sculptures; they don’t move; I’ve even painted their clothes” .
The spectator at Tuesday’s opening will be greeted by a map representing the Fertile Crescent, the area between Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Egypt that has long obsessed Kiefer. “My work is called In the Beginning,” he says, “because it begins by the end. This is a region of the world where our destiny has been played out … where empires have risen and fallen. A place of ruins that chronicle the throes and rebirths the world has undergone.”
His condition in accepting Mortier’s invitation was “not to play it all on one level. The Bastille is on nine levels, with studios on different floors; it’s like a little town, and I thought, I’ll do it if I can play it as a landscape.” He has piled up “12,000 years of bricks” on different stages, while 12 towers – representing the tribes of Israel – shudder as Widmann’s chords “sound through the ruins like celestial messengers come from the desert, to take possession of space and time”. Beginning in 600 BC, “when there was a lot of action in the fertile crescent, the Jews were separated into the diaspora, there was a sense of the world melting” – but paralleling today’s political unrest too – the opera turns on history’s endgames, from the destruction of Babylon and Thebes to the Trümmerfrauen, the “rubble women” who scratched and scraped at Germany’s debris in 1945.
Kiefer was born in Donaueschingen at the end of the second world war, and “failed to die. My mother couldn’t feed me and there was no powdered milk – at the last moment it came from Switzerland. I was born in the cellar, they put wax in my ears to shut out the bombings – like Odysseus blocking out the sirens of Donaueschingen.”
The visual imprint of his childhood is inescapable in paintings and sculptures which turn on ruined buildings, burnt-out remains, grey-brown-black tonalities. “As a child I had no toys; our house was bombed, but there were lots of bricks. Ruins are wonderful because they are the beginning of something new, you can do something with them.” By the age of four, he was a little builder, begging “for bits of cement, but they couldn’t give me any”. He is still compensating, he laughs. He erected 52 new buildings around his atelier in Barjac near Nîmes, creating his own village; his second Paris studio is the enormous former depot of department store La Samaritaine.
Kiefer dots his conversation with wry jokes, as if forcing himself to lighten up, but he remains, like his art, deadly earnest. “The psychological situation” of Germany during his childhood “was horrible. There is no morality about war; it always destroys people’s minds.” He began his career as a photographer with performances mimicking the Nazi salute; his work, infused with Jewish mysticism and post-Holocaust writings such as Paul Celan’s Death Fugue, is one long challenge to the Germans “who tried to forget”, as well as a self-doubting response to philosopher Theodor Adorno’s questions about art after Auschwitz. “I had no responsibility but I feel completely involved. In the night I still think someone can come to take me away. The denunciations … I know it won’t happen but I wake up and think on that. The brutishness, the horror is unimaginable.” He left Germany in 1990, the year of reunification.
The theme of In the Beginning, latent in all Kiefer’s art, is “theodicy” – theological attempts to defend God’s goodness in the face of the existence of evil. “Man is so badly constructed, there is a mistake in our brain,” Kiefer says. “If you give man permission and reason, he will behave like that [like the Nazis] – not everybody, but yes, I think, the majority. I was always overwhelmed by the Old Testament – by its poetry and brutalism. Its God is threatening, vengeful. To prove God is good is to prove something impossible.”
Brought up “too strictly” as a Catholic in a “little, bourgeois milieu”, Kiefer dreamed of France, “spoke like Racine and Corneille” at school, and developed “a genius complex. I thought, ‘I don’t need to go to art school.’ I chose law, I thought that was the most cynical thing to do. I always looked to the most unreasonable solution, I always tried to prove the contrary.”
Later he acquired an art education, and was influenced by Joseph Beuys, whom he believes he appreciated more “because I had studied law”. But he brushes away questions of artistic inheritance – “I don’t want to speak about other artists, it’s not interesting. I feel in a long line with the dinosaurs. Memory is my material.”
We adjourn for mineral water in the long cool library lining the ground floor round the courtyard. A book on Caspar David Friedrich lies on the table and Kiefer admits to the impact of the philosophy of romanticism. “I’m a little particle in this immense intelligence. We know nothing of why we are here, where we come from. First the world is flat, then it’s round, now there are galaxies and the big bang. The universe is so big, absurd – this is what makes me insecure.”
In In the Beginning, the Jewish people “stride across the stage, delineating its limits, heading for where there is nothing other than nothingness”. The key biblical quotation is from Isaiah: “My heart panted, fearfulness affrighted me. The night of my pleasure hath He turned into fear unto me.” Is there then, I ask, no redemption in Kiefer’s vision?
He answers slowly. “I can recognise beauty. For me, the work is redemption. It’s the only way I can live, the only possibility to create an illusion. It’s still an illusion – but it’s my illusion.”
Jackie Wullschlager is the FT’s art critic
‘Am Anfang’ is at the Opera Bastille, Paris, from July 7 to 14, +33 1 71 25 24 23
Anselm Kiefer has been fascinated with Mao Zedong since the ’60s.
With propaganda images burned into his memory, the 67-year-old has painted Mao throughout this career, but this week’s solo show at White Cube in Hong Kong marks his first in Greater China. “Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom” includes sculptures and vast landscapes with faint images of the former Chinese leader in the background.
Mr. Kiefer rose to fame in 1969 with “Besetzungen” (“Occupations”), a series of self-portraits in which he displayed Nazi salutes. He became a fixture at the Venice Biennale in the 1980s and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and the Academy of Arts London. In 2007, he was the first artist to be given a permanent commission at the Louvre since George Braque in 1953.
Last year, he was the subject of “Over Our Cities Grass Will Grow,” a documentary that featured the gigantic sculptures and buildings that he created in Barjac, a village in southern France. He also has plans for an ambitious installation near Koblenz, Germany, at the site of a decommissioned nuclear reactor, though the local Green Party has so far blocked the purchase.
Mr. Kiefer spoke with The Wall Street Journal about misquoting Mao, destroying photography and how his studio functions as his brain. Below are edited excerpts from the discussion.
The Wall Street Journal: What inspired this show?
Mr. Kiefer: I was, for a long time, interested and fascinated by Mao. The first paintings I did about Mao were already in the 1980s. When this show was coming up, I was pre-occupied with Mao.
What inspired the landscape format of the paintings?
They are based on photos I took in Auvergne, in France. It was many years ago. It’s a mountainous area. We went in springtime, and it was blooming everywhere, like an explosion.
I took a lot of photographs, but I was disappointed. A photograph is only one layer. It’s very flat. You can see the photographs underneath the paintings. Now I’ve painted the photographs, adding meaning and giving it layers. I destroy the photographs with my painting.
“Let a thousand flowers bloom” is a misquotation of Mao and a reference to a period of supposed reform in 1957.
The title is not only ironic. It’s complex. In the 1960s, in Europe and in Germany, Mao was a moral institution. Students were looking in the Little Red Book for solutions, even if they had a problem with their family, or their children.
But I was already a bit critical of this. I thought there was a lot of propaganda around Mao. There was a magazine at the time called “Peking Rundschau” and it was all about China. There were pictures of these workers in steel factories. It’s a difficult thing to work in a steel factory, but these workers were all smiling and laughing for the camera. I thought, “You don’t laugh when you do this work.”
I was fascinated, and I admired Mao, but at the same time, I also thought something was wrong.
Your early work dealt with the legacy of Adolf Hitler. How does he compare to Mao?
There are parallels, but there is a big difference: Mao was a cultured poet. Hitler was a petit bourgeois. His taste, concerning art, was really bad.
You visited China once in 1993. What did you learn from that trip?
It taught me that history is not objective. History is formed by the people, those who have power and those without power. Each one of us makes history. Each time period will construct its own Mao. In 10 years, you’ll have another Mao picture, another Mao idea. If the personality is rich, like Mao was, you’ll always have new interpretations.
You moved to Paris in 2010. How are you adjusting to life there?
I’ve worked all my life in the desert, in isolated places. I was isolated in Germany, and I was isolated in the south France.
It’s good to be in the city. For once in my life, I want to be in the center, surrounded by colleagues, intellectuals, poets.
You have an unusually large studio. How do you work there?
It’s an old department store warehouse. I have 36,000 square meters. There I can see all that I’ve done all my life. My paintings never finish. I have paintings there from the 1970s. If I have an idea, I can take it out and finish it. The whole space is like my brain. It’s like I’m walking through my brain.
Some critics have described your work as depressing, something one can tolerate in a gallery but not at home. How do you respond to that?
If I do something that depresses, it’s not because I’m depressed, but because political life and history is depressing. When Hitler was overcome, we thought we would be in a better world. But we are not. We had Rwanda and so many other massacres. This tristesse isn’t just mine. But I don’t feel sad. I’m happy.
It was to be expected that the Anselm Kiefer retrospective, which opened at the Art Institute of Chicago in December, would be accorded a rapturous reception, and so it has been.[1] Throughout the nineteen-eighties, as the art market soared and an almost unencompassable quantity of meretricious painting glutted the galleries, the museums, and the public consciousness, the emergence of a new master—an artist who could be seen as transcending the more compromising scenarios of the new art scene—was anxiously awaited. And no sooner was the need for such a redemptive figure openly acknowledged than a consensus of sorts seemed to settle on Anselm Kiefer as the leading candidate. This young German painter, born in 1945, seemed to have everything that the role called for: talent, vision, ambition, dignity, and the kind of gravitas that was so conspicuously lacking in so many other artists who were swamping the scene. He even seemed to be in possession of that rare thing in contemporary art: an interesting mind. Most important of all, however, was the fact that Kiefer had a subject guaranteed to win the nervous attention of the entire Western world: the nightmare of the Nazi era and its meaning for European civilization. Both the subject and Kiefer’s handling of it conferred an almost instant distinction on the artist, and he quickly became one of the mythic figures of the international art world.
In New York, remarkably, it wasn’t even held against him that he exhibited his work at Mary Boone’s. From the outset he was exempted from the usual strictures as critics hastened to register their approval—and their awe. It therefore came as no surprise when, in reviewing the current retrospective in Time, Robert Hughes—on this occasion, as on so many others, voicing the established opinion as if it were a personal discovery—hailed Kiefer with the kind of praise (“the best painter of his generation … an unmistakable greatness of vision … a victory for the moral imagination”) usually reserved for the likes of Titian, Rembrandt, and, well, Lucien Freud. The stampede was on. Or, to alter the metaphor, a canonization was in progress. Critics from far and wide descended upon Chicago to attend the press view of the exhibition as if it were a religious obligation, and many remained— not so much looking at the show as transfixed by it—far longer than is usually the case with such events. The atmosphere at the press view was in fact exceptionally solemn and respectful, and to the note of reverence that dominated the occasion there was added at times a discernible element of intellectual anxiety as the large, stately galleries of the Art Institute took on the air of an examination hall in which the critics could be observed checking with the curators and with each other to see who might have the right answers. It would have been unthinkable in such a hushed and reverential atmosphere to crack a joke, especially a vulgar one—which, as a matter of fact, is what critics often do at such events—and everyone seemed agreed that the one thing that would not be mentioned, despite the Mary Boone connection, was the artist’s prices. You do not mention money in such sanctified surroundings. I have been going to the press views of museum shows for more than thirty years, and I’ve never seen anything to equal the solemnity of this one.
Given this response, it is a mercy, of course, that Kiefer’s work is as good as it is. It may be premature to speak of his “greatness,” and victories of the moral imagination are not, I think, to be so quickly proclaimed, but Kiefer is undoubtedly an artist of extraordinary gifts. The critical questions to be answered are: What exactly are those gifts, and what has the artist accomplished with them? That he is undaunted by the challenge of very large subjects—whole areas of German history, mythology, and culture, and the peculiar modalities of German social pathology, all of which remain, as far as their art is concerned, a closed book to the majority of contemporary artists— does not necessarily mean that Kiefer has been consistently successful in finding a way to deal with such subjects as a painter.
The secret of Kiefer’s immense appeal just now—if, indeed, it can be described as a secret—lies, I believe, precisely in his willingness, or, if you will, his compulsion to place these subjects at the center of his art. To the degree that we sense in this compulsion something authentic and involuntary— an impulse that goes beyond anything we have lately come to associate with the tasks of art—it speaks to our own appetite for an art that transcends the aesthetic, and it is natural that we should be exhilarated by our initial encounters with it. As I share in that appetite, at least some of the time, I have a certain sympathy for artists who are driven to minister to its needs, and Kiefer is clearly one of them. (He may even, in this sense, be “the best” in his generation—but where, alas, is the competition?) Yet as I am also aware of how easily such an appetite for the extra-aesthetic is nowadays satisfied—and how short-lived such satisfactions so often turn out to be—I tend to be wary of the kind of art that makes its appeal in the name of something other than art.
But is this, in fact, what is actually going on in Kiefer’s art? Or is his status as a visionary with something important to tell us about history and the human condition a phenomenon that has been imposed upon a body of work that cannot finally support the heroic role that is now being assigned to it? I count myself among Kiefer’s admirers, but what I admire in his art does not seem to have much to do with what so many others see in it, or claim to see. For in my view Kiefer is an artist who demonstrates over and over again what, in the last years of the twentieth century, the limits of art—particularly the limits of the art of painting—now are when it comes to dealing with the great moral and historical issues of the modern era.
That Kiefer has made a determined and sometimes inspired effort to test and transcend these limits is, it seems to me, undeniable. That he brings immense reserves of energy, imagination, and invention to bear on his quest for a meaning “beyond” art is certainly to be accounted a significant part of his artistic enterprise. But the quest itself has an essentially Sisyphean character; it is its destiny to be repeatedly defeated. It is this pattern of Sisyphean defeat that gives to Kiefer’s art its special poignancy—a poignancy, it must be said, that is not always clearly distinguishable from a certain mode of German sentimentality. The spiritual yearning in Kiefer’s work is something that we are all made to feel. There is no way to miss it, if only because it is given such elaborate, operatic trappings. But in neither art nor life are yearnings to be mistaken for realizations. And in art at least, it is only realization that counts. Everything else—even the most exalted yearnings—belongs to the realm of failed dreams.
Kiefer paints—or perhaps one should say constructs, for he uses all sorts of materials —three types of pictures: landscapes, images of architecture, and what might be called didactic diagrams or charts. Many are of immense size, most conform to a bleak and mournful palette of blacks, grays, and earth colors, some—quite a few—have words inelegantly painted onto their surfaces, and all are weighted with symbols drawn from history, mythology, literature, folklore, or the artist’s own biography.
The best of these paintings are the more recent symbolic landscapes: Nuremberg (1982), The Mastersingers (1981-82), Midgard (1980-85), The Book (1979-85), The Order of the Angels (1983-84), Emanation (1984-86), and Jerusalem (1986). The least successful are certain of the didactic-chart paintings—Way of Worldly Wisdom (1976-77), for example, which is said to commemorate, with appropriate irony, the victory of the ancient Germans over Roman invaders at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in the Year A.D. 9. I must confess to having no interest in the subject, and the ponderous ineptitude with which the painting is executed, even if intended as a mockery of the theme (but how can one tell?), does not offer much in the way of aesthetic compensation. Kiefer’s gift is the characteristic German gift for graphic images, but wherever his subject calls for the representation of faces or figures—Ways of Worldly Wisdom is almost all faces—he shows himself to be a very inadequate draftsman. His drawing is always at its best—which is to say, most powerful and moving—where it serves, as it does in the symbolic landscapes, to provide his paintings with a simplified, overscale format. It is drawing that takes little interest in the subtleties of pictorial space —as we can see at a glance in the macabre architectural paintings. If not for their references to the architecture that Albert Speer created for the Nazi regime or their other historical allusions, the architectural paintings would have to be considered eccentric variations on familiar academic themes. Even with their highly charged “content,” I am not sure they escape a descent into pictorial cliche. It is, in any case, on the basis of the symbolic landscapes—and on certain works on paper that are related to them—that Kiefer is likely to survive and develop as a significant artist. The architectural paintings are a dead end, and the didactic charts and diagrams have already been abandoned.
It is in the contemplation of nature that Kiefer’s pictorial imagination seems to attain an expressive freedom it does not enjoy in relation to his other subjects. For the German imagination, nature is not always a realm entirely distinguishable from culture. In Kiefer’s painting, certainly, nature is by no means free of the darkness of history that is his abiding obsession. It is deeply implicated in the myths of a culture that has conferred so many spiritual or symbolic meanings on natural phenomena that the life of the earth seems at times to have been stripped of its independent existence. Which is to say that for Kiefer, as for so many German artists, nature is an allegory—a world of spirit as well as a realm of organic materiality—and it is in the effort to encompass its double nature, so to speak, that his landscape paintings achieve their special distinction.
There is much about these landscape paintings that identifies them as belonging to the Neo-Expressionist school—not only their oversize, “heroic” scale, but their curious mix of materials: straw, lead, sand, crockery, etc. In Kiefer’s case, however, we are always made to feel that something akin to a systematic iconography is what governs this use of materials even if we cannot instantly identify the exact iconographic use to which they are being put. More often than not, there is in these landscapes an overload of materials attached to their surfaces that makes the paintings look heavy, ponderous, and overworked in the Neo-Expressionist manner. Yet in Kiefer’s case, these excesses appear, paradoxically, to be in the firm control of a very particular vision—a vision that is mystical in the German style, turning every material perception into a metaphysical conundrum.
About this whole aspect of Kiefer’s work, the wonderfully detailed catalogue that Mark Rosenthal has written to accompany the exhibition is an indispensable guide.[2] James N. Wood and Anne d’Harnoncourt, in their Foreword to the catalogue, speak of Mr. Rosenthal’s lengthy text as “an essential tool for our understanding of the quotations and iconography that are central to [Kiefer’s] work, much as a skillfully annotated edition of Ulysses aids the reader of Joyce,” and they are right to do so. On everything from the kind of use Kiefer has made of Caspar David Friedrich and Jackson Pollock to his relation to Joseph Beuys[3] to more specifically iconographic research— which buildings are referred to, what historical events or literary symbols or private experiences are invoked—Mr. Rosenthal can usually be relied upon to give us the requisite information. In this respect, his catalogue is a triumph of art-historical scholarship. But, as is even the case with Ulysses, such aids to understanding esoteric allusions are not to be taken as a substitute for our experience of the work itself. Even when we find ourselves properly informed about the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, there is still the problem of what to make of Ways of Worldly Wisdom as a painting.
The landscape paintings are less problematic, to be sure, because they are so much more accomplished—so immediately compelling—as paintings. They have a power, at once pictorial and poetic, that is not dependent on our perfect understanding of their symbolism. Kiefer is an artist who imparts to every picture a characteristic emotion—an emotion that is relentlessly dour and obsessed with death—and you can’t mistake it for anything else. Every painting sounds the requiem note, and the landscape paintings sound that note more effectively than any others.
Indeed, I think it is only in the landscape paintings that Kiefer has to some extent freed his painting from its dependence on hermetic symbolism and achieved the kind of archetypal expression he is searching for. The landscape paintings are wasteland paintings. They are scorched-earth images—images of an earth and a world that is rotting and returning to the primordial mud. They are images of a sublime that has “fallen” into decay. Their real subject is death, and the death that haunts them is as much the death of art as it is the death of the earth. All of this can be vividly—and indeed, insistently—seen in the so-called “books” that Kiefer has produced in such profusion, for what are these large sketchbooks or scrapbooks of images and non-images if not an avowal of the death of art in the face of the enormities of modern history?
In speaking of Kiefer’s relation to Joseph Beuys, Mr. Rosenthal writes that Kiefer “undoubtedly gained from [Beuys] an enormous sense of mission and ambition, that is, the wish to grasp great regions of human history within the boundaries of his art.” It is this sense of a great mission that has conferred on Kiefer’s enterprise its enormous prestige. Yet in the celebration that is now being lavished on this gifted and unusual artist, we ought not to overlook the central place that the death motif occupies in the oeuvre that is celebrated. For myself, though my admiration for Kiefer is undiminished, I cannot say that I have been persuaded that he has succeeded in bringing “great regions of human history within the boundaries of his art.” On the contrary, what this retrospective makes clear to this observer, at least, is that the object of Kiefer’s Sisyphean quest continues to elude him.
The Kiefer exhibition, jointly organized by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, was shown in Chicago from December 5 to January 31. It will be on view in Philadelphia from March 6 to May 1, and will then travel to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles (June 14-September 11) and the Museum of Modern Art in New York (October 17-January 3, 1989). Go back to the text.
Anselm Kiefer, by Mark Rosenthal. The museum (paperback) edition is published by Chicago and Philadelphia at $24.95. The trade (hardcover) edition is distributed by the Neues Publishing Company at $35.00. Go back to the text.
On Kiefer’s relation to Beuys, see also Sanford Schwartz’s article, “Anselm Kiefer, Joseph Beuys, and the Ghosts of the Fatherland,” in The New Criterion for March 1983. Go back to the text.
Hilton Kramer (1928-2012) was the founding editor of The New Criterion, which he started with the late Samuel Lipman in 1982.
The historical and mythic themes of Anselm Kiefer’s epic canvases aren’t as compelling as they once were, when he made a redemptive difference in the world by disentangling Germanic culture from the sinister pathos and catastrophic effects of the Third Reich. Since then, his titanic spins on exalted subjects (medieval philosophy, the Kabbalah, the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann) have seemed more pretext than passion. In a new show at Gagosian, he evokes the Morgenthau Plan, a grotesquely vengeful wartime scheme, proposed by F.D.R.’s Treasury Secretary, to reduce conquered Germany to a primitive agricultural state. (After being fitfully applied, the policy succumbed to imperatives of the Cold War, if not to common decency.) The allusion, expressed in written phrases, feels incidental to standard Kieferian imagery of blasted or flowering fields in steep perspective; the work could just as well be about something else, or nothing much. But the visual music of encrusted textures and ineffable colors is as overwhelming as ever—Wagnerian in its conflation of the deathly with the ecstatic, on a scale as big as buildings. ♦
A still from Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow showing Anselm Kiefer’s ‘tottering, bunker-like’ structures
Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow is a solemn, at times soporific, look at the work of the artist Anselm Kiefer, whose paintings and sculptures can be rather solemn to begin with. Directed by Sophie Fiennes, the movie is occasionally a documentary—when we see Kiefer doing an interview, or making his artworks with his studio assistants—but, devoid of narration, it is more often an art movie. For long, portentous stretches, no one is around. The camera merely takes in, accompanied by astringent music by György Ligeti and Jörg Widmann, the world of ruination that Kiefer has been creating in various buildings, set in fields and forests, in Barjac, in southern France, where he has lived since 1992.
For those of us who have admired, even been awed by, the work of the symbolically-minded German artist, simply seeing Kiefer in his studios, speaking with his assistants (in French), is fascinating. Bespectacled, trim, and not looking his sixty-five years, he isn’t a recluse, but in the three decades that he has been a world-renowned figure he has done a good job of staying out of the limelight. He came on the scene in the early 1980s with enormous landscapes and interior scenes that, whether of burnt-out fields or smoldering, empty, vast halls, suggested, with an unexpected lyrical and elegiac force, the devastation of modern German history.
Over the years, though, Kiefer’s work, continually summoning up Bible stories, wartime legends, and mystical awarenesses, has become woozily grandiloquent. He is an extraordinary showman, however. His pictures, where model ships or women’s frocks are often placed atop images of endless fields, the sea, or forests, can have a phenomenal physical presence. He is a master transformer of materials. From the first he made lead, steel, straw, glass, or crumbly clumps of cement with rebar sticking out bespeak fragility and delicacy. He has practically invented a sculptural form: a loose, disheveled pile of something, whether booklike shapes or plain detritus, placed flat on the gallery floor.
courtesy of Sophie Fiennes
The filmmaker at Kiefer’s Barjac site
In recent years he has been creating sculptures that are in effect tottering, bunkerlike buildings. Fiennes’s movie shows that, moreover, Kiefer has been building a network of often rubble-strewn spaces. Her camera goes down one weather-exposed corridor after another. We see the artist or his helpers (sometimes on tractors) pushing earth around, digging holes, pouring cement, breaking panes of glass, and burning piles of books. The Barjac site, which includes little buildings, underground passageways, depots that seem to double as walk-in sculptural environments—and a number of the artist’s own huge studios—is, however, irritatingly hard to encompass. How vast is it? How do these buildings relate to one another? The film, unfortunately, is loath to look at itself as a giver of plain information.
A viewer assumes that one day visitors will make pilgrimages to Barjac much the way they now go to the Chinati Foundation, in Marfa, Texas, to see the work of Donald Judd and the art he collected, set out in the many buildings he purchased there over the years. Barjac is the un-Marfa. Where Marfa is about clarity of light, distinct artistic accomplishments kept rigorously in order, and a sense of the past as manageable and containable, Barjac is a setting of dust, dirt, dangerous shards of glass, tenuousness, relics, and symbols to be deciphered.
Sophie Fiennes
A still from Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow showing Kiefer at work on a painting
In thrall to loss, literature, and the past, Kiefer has something in common with the American painter Cy Twombly, who died in July, at eighty-three. His works also seduce us with their gracefully distressed surfaces. And both artists—who will scrawl phrases or titles onto their pictures in a similarly stylish, scratchy hand—make me restless with what feels like a too-easily-achieved beauty. Although it doesn’t sum him up, Twombly’s art evokes the lost classical, Mediterranean world (he was based in Rome from 1957). Kiefer’s art often takes us to the charred, stained German past. One believes with both that something is unearned, that what we look at is vaguely illustrational: a grafting of literary, political, or historical associations onto bravura manipulations of materials. These artists, at times heroic in their achievements, can also make the beautiful feel like the pretty.
Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow is playing at The Film Forum in New York City through August 23rd.
August 19, 2011, 1:30 p.m.
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THE INDEPENDENT LONDON
Anselm Kiefer: ‘The Independent wants to know if I am a Nazi!’
In 1969, he photographed himself giving Nazi salutes in public. Forty years on, Anselm Kiefer is a titan of world art, but his controversial work still picks at the scabs of the Fatherland’s history. So why does this most German of artists live and work in Paris’s Jewish quarter?
Like just about every school in the Marais district of Paris, the école élémentaire around the corner from rue Michel-le-Comte bears a plaque to the memory of its most famous pupils – not scholars or statesmen, but those who were among the “11,000 enfants furent déportés de France par les Nazis et assassinés dans les camps de la mort parce que nés juifs”: the 11,000 children deported from France by the Nazis and killed in death camps because they were born Jews. Things that happened nearly seven decades ago are alive on the streets of this still-Jewish quarter of Paris, and nowhere more so than in the vast hôtel particulier that is the home and studio of Anselm Kiefer.
You’ll know Kiefer: it’s hard not to. If you went to the Royal Academy a couple of springs ago, you’ll have cricked your necks looking up at Jericho, the twin towers the honorary Royal Academician had built in the courtyard of Burlington House – 50 foot menhirs of concrete heaped in teetering piles like cargo containers in stone. These paled beside’ the 52 structures Kiefer has erected in the years since 1993 at his other studio, La Ribaute, near Nîmes in the South of France – a one-time silk factory whose 85-acre estate includes tunnels, hills and caves, all woven into a massive Gesamtkunstwerk or total work of art. If your travels haven’t taken you to the Cévennes of late, you might have seen Aperiatur Terra, the artist’s 2007 show of largely monumental canvases – typically 10ft high and 25ft long – at the St James’s branch of his London gallery, White Cube. And if all of these have passed you by, then you can discover Kiefer later this month in exhibitions at both White Cubes, one show called Fertile Crescent, the other Karfunkelfee [roughly, Carbuncle Fairy]. All of which is to say that Anselm Kiefer and his art are a very big deal indeed, and in various senses of the term.
None of this answers the obvious question, though: why a German artist, born in the dying days of Hitler’s Götterdämmerung, has chosen to live and work in the Marais. To answer that, you need to rewind to last July and shift arrondissements from the 3rd to the adjoining 11th – to the Opéra Bastille and the piece which Kiefer staged there, called Am Anfang (In the Beginning).
As with much of his work, Am Anfang is difficult to categorise. The piece being shown in an opera house, the audience may have expected something in the line of bel canto. They didn’t get it. The curtain rose on a scene of desolation, towers like those in Jericho multiplied into a ghost town. Through these wandered a group of women, clinking bricks with hammers to the mildly atonal music of Kiefer’s compatriot, Jörg Widmann. The scene looked vaguely biblical, and, on one level, it was: one of the women was Shekhinah, the Talmudic version of the Holy Spirit, while another was Lilith, Adam’s apocryphally demonic first wife. None of this seemed to impress the audience, though, a number of whom booed roundly from curtain up.
What, precisely, was their problem? In the absence of any home-grown artist of world standing, the French government has courted Kiefer with the kind of privileges last accorded to Picasso. It was Kiefer whose work was chosen for the re-opening show of the Grand Palais in 2007, who was last year invited to decorate a staircase at the Louvre – an honour given to only one other artist since the war – and who was asked to write Am Anfang to mark the 20th anniversary of the Opéra Bastille. A little resentment on the part of the French arts establishment would be understandable. Then again, Parisian opera-goers may simply have found Am Anfang obscure and pretentious, which it was. The work’s title is taken from the opening words of the German bible (Am Anfang schuf Gott Himmel und Erde: In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth), its libretto made up of quotations from the Old Testament. The 180-page programme to the work listed its librettist as “Anselm Kiefer, after the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah”. We are not talking Bizet here.
Possibly, though, the audience was bothered by the fact that Am Anfang seemed to suggest that Biblical ruination and the destruction rained down on Germany at the end of the war were part of the same process; that the sufferings of Old Testament Jews and Nazi-era Germans were equivalent. Lilith and the rest may have been Israelis, but in Am Anfang they looked like Trümmerfrauen – the “rubble women” who picked bricks from the ruins of cities such as Hamburg and ‘ Dresden in the years after the war. Sitting in the vast library of his vast Paris house, Kiefer recalls those years.
Born into a Catholic family in the pretty Black Forest town of Donaueschingen in March 1945, seven weeks before Hitler’s suicide and the end of the war, the artist is a youthful 64. Children by his Austrian second wife, Renate Graf, run about, apparently disappointed that the Englishman called Charles who has come to interview their father is not the Prince of Wales. Kiefer, wiry and in Lord Longford glasses, looks vaguely priestly: he giggles when I say so.
“I wanted once to be… not a priest, I wanted to be an archbishop!” he says, confidentially; then, waving at a collection of ecclesiastical hats on his bookshelves, adds, “You know, I have all the clothes. I was in Rome a long time ago, and I went to the tailors for the Vatican and they measured me for the robes for bishops and archbishops. The Pope was difficult. They said, There’s only one, and I said, That’s not true – there were once three: a woman was even the Pope. And they said, no we won’t do it. So I went to another shop and now I have them all – priest, bishop, archbishop, cardinal and pope.”
Although he can still recite the Mass in Latin, Kiefer is no longer a Catholic. Nor, despite the robes, does he seem keen on the current German Pope, whom he crisply refers to as “Ratzinger”. “Ratzinger wants to make Pius XII a saint,” Kiefer cries. “That man, he signed the Concordat [a 1933 treaty between Hitler and the Holy See]! You know, the Concordat has never been cancelled? And do you know why? Because in Germany, you have to pay 10 per cent of your taxes to the Church!”
The life led by his children in this nobleman’s house with its cobbled courtyard and endless, echoing rooms is in stark contrast to Kiefer’s own childhood. “My mother and father, they put wax in my ears so I couldn’t hear the bombers coming,” he says, then laughs his cartoon-dog giggle. “It’s like Odysseus, you know? I like that. And the Trümmer, the rubble, that was me – I was in those bricks, I played with them in the ruins, I built houses from them. I was part of that little German myth.”
It was this, presumably, that left the artist with his taste for ruination. “Children take all as given, and it is for this reason that ruins are beautiful – to me, extremely beautiful,” he says. “I think the most beautiful movie in the world is the one when planes were sent after the war over Germany to film the ruins – these are for me the most beautiful pictures. It’s wonderful because the vertical becomes the horizontal, you know? On one side, something is hidden because it’s buried and on the other something is exposed – you see the forms. I love this.”
It seems an odd fondness for a man who chooses to live in a perfect 17th-century mansion in the un-bombed heart of France’s un-scarred capital, a point with which Kiefer disarmingly agrees. “Towns that are really well done, like Paris, they are finished,” he says, nodding rapidly. “There is nothing you can add. They need bombs, these towns, to be interesting, no? With ruins, you start again. Then they could become enigmatic.” Distantly, I seem to hear the booing at Am Anfang; it is broken by the phone ringing, a call from the White Cube’s owner, Jay Jopling. “Jay!” Kiefer cries. “The Independent is here! He wants to interview you! He wants to ask you if I am a Nazi!” I cringe slightly, as, I have no doubt, does Jopling.
But then it is a question that is meant to embarrass, and one that Kiefer has long asked himself – “Not whether I am a Nazi, but whether I would have been one. It is an important thing for all of us to know.” A student of Joseph Beuys at the Düsseldorf Kunstakademie in the 1970s, the young artist’s remorseless picking at the scabs of German history went even further than those of his master. In 1969, aged 25, Kiefer staged a series of actions called Besetzungen [Occupations], in which he had himself photographed doing Sieg Heil salutes at various European monuments. This, as may be imagined, went down like a cup of cold sick with German critics: the only one who defended the work was an artist called Rainer Küchenmeister, and he, as Kiefer points out, had been in a “KZ – you know, a [Nazi] work camp. He said the work was fun.”
Having begun by blotting his copybook in heroic form, Kiefer went on to provoke his countrymen mightily. Throughout the 1970s, he made art that alluded to Teutonic myths, to Wagner, to the dark, soughing forests of Caspar David Friedrich. (By happy coincidence, Kiefer means “pine tree” in German.) Some of this art was shown at the 1980 Venice Biennale, to predictable critical outrage back home. The problem was that works such as Malerei der verbrannten Erde (Painting of the Burned Earth), made with the help of Wagnerian fire and axe, were not clearly anti-German. In a day when history was being rewritten backwards to impeach Wotan, Bayreuth and the Black Forest as pre-conspirators in Nazism, Kiefer’s work refused to toe the party line. Making himself a kind of Teutonic Everyman, the artist simply would not airbrush his own German-ness out of the picture. For many, this failure to bury the past made him complicit in it.
Which, I think, explains the house in the Marais, part of Kiefer’s dogged refusal to make life comfortable for himself or other people. I earlier described Am Anfang as obscure and pretentious, and I did not mean those things nastily. To understand the work of most contemporary British artists, you could probably get by on a bit of Baudrillard, a copy of The Naked Lunch and The Ladybird Book of Science. To get Kiefer, it very much helps if you speak Sanskrit, can recite the Latin Mass and have a working knowledge of the works of Paul Celan and Velimir Khlebnikov.
These last have been a particular source of inspiration to the artist over the past decade. Since Kiefer left Germany, his work has become less specifically German and more syncretic, historically omnivorous: contentiously, Jewish Kabbalism is a favourite current source. Celan, a Romanian Jew whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust, went on writing in German after the war – “In the language of the killers, the criminals,” says Kiefer. “It’s as [the 1960s Austrian poet] Ingeborg Bachmann said: your native tongue is like a house, that you have to go on living in it even if you don’t like it.” Khlebnikov, the dedicatee of Kiefer’s 2005 show at White Cube, was a noisy Russian Futurist who invented a universal language known as Zaum. The two poets dealt with the problem of cultural inheritance in different ways, the one by embracing it with nose tightly held, the other by radically reinventing it. Kiefer’s art has a go at both.
To manage this, the artist has had to become a scholar, a magus. The room in which we sit is, at a guess, 60ft long by 20ft wide and is lined end-to-end with books. The book has been a potent symbol for Kiefer for years now – one literally weighty tome, a six-foot lead volume called The Secret Life of Plants, was shown at the V&A last year – and this, too, has a German significance: the Jewish poet Heine prophetically remarked that wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen (Where men burn books, they will end by burning people). Knowledge – knowledge made visible – is a guard against disaster. If this seems pretentious, then, says Kiefer, “Artists are pretentious. They pretend to know all. It’s like any mythology: mythologies pretend to explain the world, in a way that scientists can not. The more they know, the less they know. The artist’s role is to play at being omniscient, omnipotent. But it’s just a role, a pretence.”
When I ask him if, after all these years, he minds still being tagged as a German artist, Kiefer instantly says, “No, no, not at all. How can I deny it? The material is German, whether you like it or not.” He pauses for a moment, then goes on. “On the other hand, I’m also part of the world. I’m not responsible for everything – I’m five per cent, the rest is what is going through me, different artists, different histories. I don’t feel so individual now – more and more less and less.” He giggles. “I’m a channel!”
All of which means that the work you’ll see at White Cube this autumn is pretty much what you’d expect to find if you’ve followed Kiefer’s history. His is not an art of novelties: it is an art of glacially slow accretions, and an archaeological excavation of these. New paintings such as Liliths Töchter hark back to the dark Teutonic woods of work made in 1971, to the steep recessions of the fields in which Kiefer stood, a young artist, saluting Hitler, 40 years ago. The history of these latest works is buried in their own three-inch-thick pigment as if in a shallow grave. Or, perhaps, in ruins.
As Kiefer sees me to the courtyard of his great, strange house, he points to a series of large canvases hanging in the sun, their paint scarred by the artist’s brush or Parisian weather or both. I ask him if they are finished, and he stops short. “Finished is a difficult word,” he says, eventually. “Sometimes I think a work is finished, and then five years later I start it again. That’s what happened with these.” Then he turns with that crazy laugh and says, “Maybe a work is only finished when it’s ruined, no? You wouldn’t believe how many people send me photographs of my paintings when they have fallen down from the wall! They are always afraid that the work will fall down, that objects will fall from them.” He pauses, then says, “It is not so easy, I think, having a painting of mine.”
The Fertile Crescent / Karfunkelfee will be at White Cube Hoxton Square, London N1; and White Cube Mason’s Yard, London SW1, from Friday to 14 November (tel: 020 7930 5373)
Anselm Kiefer has scaled back, way back, from his preposterously overproduced previous solo at Gagosian, but with Kiefer we are always talking about relative degrees of gigantism.
In her review of that show, which was titled Next Year in Jerusalem (November 6–December 18, 2010), Roberta Smith of The New York Times set the scene this way:
The Gagosian space is crowded with 25 sculptures encased in large, often towering vitrines with floors of cracked (or scorched) earth. Each contains a sinister ruin: the fuselage or engine of a vintage airplane; a fleet of small suspended U-boats made of lead; a white plaster ball or wedding gown jagged with shards of glass; an immense and brittle thorn bush dotted with painted flames.
The scuttlebutt I heard at the time was that it cost a million dollars simply to install the exhibition — a figure that does not seem out of line given the quantity of plate glass that had to be factored into the handling.
In many ways, the new show is a retrenchment. Fifteen out of the eighteen works on display are paintings. There are no vitrines, just a few freestanding sculptures. Some of the paintings contain elements that project into the room, but most do not.
While the vitrines in Jerusalem felt simultaneously precious and over-the-top, they were also something different, an exploration of new territory even if the themes were recycled.
In contrast, the most successful paintings in Morgenthau Plan, as the new show is called, could have been made at any point in the artist’s career. I am thinking of two in particular, “Nigredo – Morgenthau” and “der Morgenthau-Plan” (both 2012), which present Kiefer’s familiar blasted landscapes with a powerful density of materials and a refined sense of touch.
However, the rest of the works, with a few exceptions, range from the middling to the embarrassing. What is remarkable is that Kiefer himself supplies the reason why.
The exhibition’s title refers to a proposal drawn up in 1944 by Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, that would take the demilitarization imposed upon Germany after World War I many steps further, leading to a total deindustrialization of the country. Factories would be decommissioned and the economy would revert to a form of pre-modern agrarianism.
On a shelf in the Gagosian Gallery entrance, piled in a neat stack next to copies of the exhibition’s checklist and press release, there is a letter from Kiefer to Richard Calvocoressi, Director of the Henry Moore Foundation, in which he describes the evolution of the series:
Unless a person wishes to practice l’art pour l’art, he needs a subject. But where does that subject come from? This past year I have painted a number of pictures of flowers. […] They’re beautiful. But beauty in art needs meaning. One can’t have just beauty on its own. True art does not portray beauty alone. Beauty needs a counterpart.
And these paintings are unusually colorful and beautiful, again, in relative terms, for Kiefer. Some of the color shifts, from icy blue or hot pink to the ashen gray we know so well, are stunning. But they are also unstructured and pictorial in the most illustrative sense. Their masterful wielding of surface and pigment knocked me out at first glance, but I eventually started to cringe.
Kiefer continues:
If he paints flowers for six months and they become more and more beautiful, closer to perfection, he begins to believe he is losing himself, his identity as a painter, as a good painter. He can even develop a bad conscience because the subject is so easy. […] In thinking about this flaw another flaw occurred to me: the Morgenthau Plan. For it too ignored the complexity of things.
And so I had hit upon the Morgenthau Plan, which would now be associated with the flower paintings. (Emphasis mine.)
He goes on to write that if the plan were implemented:
With the destruction of industrial sites more land would have been gained. The fields would have been opened up for plants of all kinds, for carpets of flowers everywhere.
And so the paintings map out an alternate history for Germany in which the Morgenthau Plan has been put in place and the country’s industrial zones have reverted to their natural state.
The only problem is that the concept has been retroactively ”associated with the flower paintings.” They did not spring from the idea, which bristles with paradoxes (Morgenthau’s radical proposition, presumably based on the belief that the Germans are an incorrigibly warlike race, played into the hands of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda minister, and he used it to rally the population, an effort that possibly extended the length of the war).
Consequently, the repurposed paintings lack all urgency, devoid of historical focus as well as the formal rigor and abstract thinking that make something as florally sumptuous as Monet’s water lilies, to choose an obvious comparison, continually compelling to contemporary eyes.
In her review of Jerusalem, Smith starts out on a positive note (“The German artist Anselm Kiefer knows how to put on a show”), sidling up like a Renaissance assassin about to slip a shiv into the kidney:
Portentously titled “Next Year in Jerusalem,” the Gagosian exhibition is effective middlebrow art as catharsis, spectacle with a message.
That’s pretty damning, and while such an assessment doesn’t necessarily carry over to the work in this show as a whole, it’s hard to shake the “middlebrow” epithet while looking at a painting like “Große Eisenfaust Deutschland, kleine Panzerfaust Deutschland (Velimir Chlebnikow)” (2012), a field of flowers with rusting machine guns mounted at the top.
Kiefer’s interplay between two and three dimensions is a well-worn trope by now, but it may not seem so stale if his pairing of disused weaponry with an overgrown landscape weren’t so obvious and literal. The same holds true for the even more theatrical “O Halme, ihr Halme, o Halme der Nacht” (2012), in which the guns are replaced by an airplane wing.
There are two works, however, that stand apart from the others. One is “Von der Maas bis an die Memel, von der Etsch bis an den Belt” (2011-2012), a colossal Romantic seascape with Courbet-style waves rolling ahsore and heavy, lowering clouds along the horizon line.
The work’s distinctive painterly realism and blue-dominant coloration pull you in, but after a few moments the 19th-century look begins to feel uncomfortably retro, as if Kiefer is attempting to revive a long-dead style for no particular reason.
What I found more intriguing was “Oh Halme, ihr Halme, o Halme der Nacht” (2012), which features a typically blackish Kiefer landscape — a furrowed field diminishing in raked single point perspective — with handwritten text taking up the entire upper half of the picture, from the horizon line to the top of the canvas.
Kiefer’s practice has always incorporated words or phrases that reflect the work’s titles or themes. Sometimes this is quite evocative, as in his series “Dein Goldenes Haar, Margarete,” but just as often the meaning of the painting can depend too much on what is written on the surface.
In “Oh Halme,” Kiefer appears to have allowed his literary bent to run wild. If the actual meaning of the text remains obscure to non-German speakers, its intrusion upon the landscape nevertheless creates a disruptive and refreshing visual element.
Compared to “Nigredo – Morgenthau” and “der Morgenthau-Plan,” the two paintings I mentioned earlier — which, though impressive works, do not escape the trap Smith defines in the same review as Kiefer becoming “better and better at making Anselm Kiefers” — it feels less assured, even confused and hesitant. But for a superstar painter, that seems like a good place to be.
Anselm Kiefer. Photograph: Eamon McCabe for the Guardian
In 1969 Anselm Kiefer, then a 24-year-old art student in Karlsruhe, travelled round various locations in France, Switzerland and Italy where he was photographed giving the “sieg heil” (Hitlergruß) salute outside prominent buildings. His exhibiting of a selection of the images, under the title Occupations (Bezetzung), for his degree show provoked anxious incomprehension among his tutors and, later, anger among the public and critics. The taboo-breaking work has now entered the art-historical canon and Kiefer has been credited with an early “naming” of the evil that so many of his countrymen had chosen to forget, but more than 40 years after it was produced, Occupations remains one of the most polarising artworks to have emerged from postwar Germany.
Late last year in New York, an exhibition of Kiefer’s work featured some of the 1969 images alongside more typical later work such as huge glass cases displaying tableaux made up of cotton dresses, palms, bushes, an aeroplane fuselage and burned books, as well as large paintings of the German landscape made with ash, lead, snakeskin and other organic materials. “When I moved to my new studio in Paris a few years ago I had the space and opportunity to look at old work, often for the first time since it was made,” he explains. “I found all these negatives from 1969 that I’d never even developed. So I developed some of them and put them in a big container for the New York show. It seemed a long time ago when I made them, but even after all these years some people did not like them at all.”
The show attracted a small demonstration, but Kiefer says he is “used to hard reactions. When I first thought of the work I didn’t know anyone else who was doing anything similar, but I had always thought that I had been born an artist and so what I did was art. I was very confident. If I hadn’t been I wouldn’t have been able to do any of this. Even by the time of the Venice biennale in 1980, when I was supposedly established, not a single critic was for me. Everyone was against my work. Of course, they later turned in my favour, but I needed a high degree of confidence to continue.”
Kiefer’s willingness to engage with the German myths and preoccupations that had been contaminated by association with Nazism earned him a certain notoriety throughout the 1970s and 80s. He worked in the darkly symbolic forests, echoed Caspar David Friedrich’s romantic landscapes and cited Wagner via photography, painting and sculpture. He incorporated the alchemical materials of fire and melted metals and became increasingly absorbed by the Jewish myths and beliefs that the Nazis had attempted to eradicate. Over time he began to co-opt his long-standing interest in poetry and myths from many different cultures, not so much in search of a solution to the questions of why we are here and what we are doing, but more to explore human philosophical endeavour in the face of the uncaring natural processes of entropy and decay.
It is a dauntingly formidable prospectus that, for some, can slip into portentousness. One critic of the New York show summed up her antipathy by explaining that she “found the fact that MoMA had to reinforce its walls for the 1988-89 exhibition to support the weight of huge, often lead-covered canvases more significant than the paintings themselves”. But the historian Simon Schama admires Kiefer precisely for his heft, commending his “heavy-load maximalism” at a time when “impish minimalism was king of the contemporary art world”. Kiefer, Schama says, “is incapable of making trivia”. Marina Warner maintains that his “apocalyptic vision has been central to the dilemma about what to remember and how to remember it, to the tensions around oblivion and commemoration . . . The alchemical art builds a historical and literary polyphony, certainly, but at a deeper level it also relates to ritual, to ritual’s yearning to redraft events, to turn death into a celebration.”
Kiefer was in London last week to install his new show at the White Cube gallery. Despite the almost theatrically high seriousness of his work, the now 66-year-old artist cuts a rather cheery figure as he greets staff and checks lighting levels at the gallery, accompanied by his wife and two young children. The exhibition is named after a play by the 19th-century Austrian writer Franz Grillparzer, Des Meeres und der Liebe Wellen (The Waves of Sea and Love), about the Greek priestess Hero and her lover, Leander, who drowned while swimming the Hellespont to be with her. The show comprises large photographs of seascapes, some of which have been subject to various processes, including electrolysis, to ensure that their surface, when exposed to the air, changes appearance over time. Variously superimposed upon the images are obstetric implements, Euclidian drawings, a lead model of a U-boat and the presence of Kiefer himself.
“It is a show about impossibilities,” he explains. “Putting a Euclidian diagram on a seascape is about the impossibility of capturing the sea. The sea is always fluid. The geometrical figure gives the impression of fixing it at a certain moment. It’s the same as us imposing constellations on the sky which, of course, are completely crazy and nothing to do with the stars. It is just for us to feel more comfortable. To construct an illusion for ourselves that we have brought order to chaos. We haven’t. I might have been born into a very literal sense of chaos, but in fact that state is true of all of us.”
Kiefer was born in a small Black Forest village in March 1945, just a few months before the end of the war. He was brought up near the Rhine, not far from both the Swiss and, more importantly, the French borders. “Because of the history and geography I was driven to French culture. And the Rhine would flood every spring so the border never seem fixed, although I couldn’t cross it. France lay behind this moveable frontier and was quite enigmatic because I couldn’t go there but it was there. In effect it was the promised land, but not because of the physical state of Germany. I actually liked the ruins from the war as a child. I used to build little houses out of the rubble.”
His family were Catholic and Kiefer was an altar boy who can still recite the Latin mass. He says his parents were quite conventional in their faith, “but I was interested in transcendence from a very early age. I was interested in what was over there, what was behind life. So when I had my first communion I was very disappointed. I had expected something amazing and surprising and spiritual. Instead all I got was a bicycle. That wasn’t what I was after at all.”
He was making “quite big pictures for a very small child” from as far back as he can remember, but although his facility for art was always acknowledged, Kiefer chose to study law at university, claiming that he must have “had some sort of complex in that I thought I was already an artistic genius and so didn’t need art school. And while I never wanted to be a lawyer, I was interested in the language of law. A law textbook is amazing in how little it has to do with life. In that sense I suppose it is a little like art.” While at law school he continued to make art, but eventually realised he needed to meet with other artists, and so transferred to art school. “Before then I hadn’t really kept any of my work; this felt like a real start.” It coincided with him also first properly comprehending recent German history.
“I got hold of this record which was made by the Americans to educate Germans about their own history. It included speeches from Hitler and Göring and Goebbels, and I was both shocked and fascinated by the sense of will they projected. It had all only happened just a couple of decades earlier, but in school it was taught as if it was about Alexander the Great. It was a dry piece of ancient history. And although my father had been an officer during the war, the war was not really talked about at home. My father was not a Nazi, but of course he was infiltrated by the ideology. So my family, like many others, stuck to this illusion about the Wehrmacht not being Nazis, just being soldiers. But of course we know today a lot of them were involved in the extermination of Jews and others.”
At Düsseldorf art school Kiefer met Joseph Beuys. “I was never in his class but I showed him my work several times. I was working in the forest and would roll up these huge paintings, put them on the roof of my Beetle and drive to show him. He was the first one to say clearly that my Occupations photographs were art. My other tutors just wrung their hands: ‘Is it morally right? Is this allowed?’ Beuys looked at them and said straight away it was a good action, and for him, action was art.”
Throughout the 1970s Kiefer devoted himself to Germanic myths. He explored the forests where early German tribes had defeated Roman legions and which were an “infinite vessel of mystery, of fairytales, of childhood memories”. He absorbed the romantic sturm und drang of Caspar David Friedrich’s landscapes and skyscapes, and delved deep into Wagner’s music and his place in German culture. “My mother once made me listen to Lohengrin on the radio from Bayreuth and it made a big impression. I was attracted to the idea of the holy grail as something far away and enigmatic and a sort of destination where you desperately want to get to, but you know you will never arrive. That sense of longing came to me very early in my life. And art is longing. You never arrive, but you keep going in the hope that you will.”
Kiefer says he was on the left as German politics became increasingly violent throughout the 1970s, “but I was always critical. My brother was in the Communist party and was invited to spend time in China and was absolutely seduced. He is much more intelligent than me, but he came back saying ‘there are no more flies because it is so clean’. When the Baader-Meinhof actually started murdering people I thought it was just like the Nazis again. They felt they could be judges just as Hitler did. Indirectly all this must have affected my art, but not directly. That said, the Tate once bought a triptych of mine that I had painted on very cheap wallpaper. Later they found the phrase “there is torture in German prisons” written on the back of the picture and asked me what it meant. It actually had nothing to do with the art, but it obviously showed I cared about what was going on. But I’ve never made art for the daily political situation.”
After German reunification Kiefer moved to Barjac in the south of France, where over time his studio complex became a work of art in itself as he steadily constructed a series of towers, tunnels and buildings. In 2008 he relocated to Paris and a vast studio space that had once been the depository for the La Samaritaine department store. France has treated him well. He has been commissioned to create site-specific installations at the Grand Palais, became the first living artist since Braque to create a permanent installation at the Louvre and directed and designed the sets for a new opera, Am Anfang (In the Beginning) that marked the 20th anniversary of the Opéra Bastille. In January Kiefer was appointed to the chair of creativity in art at the Collège de France. “I first came to France aged 17 in a truck and was, quite by accident, dropped off at the Louvre. I always think in circles, so I do like it that I now have a painting there.”
France also provides him a vantage point from which to observe Germany. He says the war is now over, “but I wish it was more over. I wish that Europe was more united. Helmut Kohl was criticised for a lot of things quite rightly, but concerning Europe he was very good. Germany needs a strong Europe, because you still cannot completely trust Germany.” He says the fact that it is a comparatively young nation has had an impact. “It doesn’t have the positive national myths of other countries. The French have their revolution, the English the Empire, being the first democracy and Magna Carta, the Americans have their war of independence. Germans just have defeats in wars, so they are always feeling a little bit inferior, and then they over compensate. Being tied closer into Europe would help that.”
Although his move to France coincided with an intensified investigation of myth and religion in his work, Kiefer is no longer a practising Catholic, but acknowledges that “even people who seem not to be spiritual still long for something; I’m sure this is the reason we have art and poetry. I think without spirituality we cannot live, and in this respect the best religion is Hinduism, which teaches that each religion can contain some little truth. Art is an attempt to get to the very centre of truth. It never can, but it can get quite close. It is the dogmatism of the church, the idea that words can express a single truth over hundreds of years, that is complete nonsense. The world changes. Language changes, everything changes. Paintings certainly change.”
Kiefer’s relationship with the processes of time goes beyond mere acceptance. He leaves sculptures and paintings outdoors exposed to the elements. He has subjected his work to acid, flamethrowers and axe attacks. At the White Cube show the colours are already changing. The huge photographs will remain stable while they are sealed under glass, but as soon as they are exposed to the air they will become dynamic. This sense of the provisional and contingent, and the resistance to the idea of a “finished” work, raises philosophical questions as to the curation of his, and by extension of all, art. Talks are underway to establish a joint German-French foundation to look after the Barjac complex, with the specific intention of allowing nature to slowly reclaim the site. Curating his art has become less a matter of conserving it than accompanying it through history.
“It is a fascinating area, and at the heart of what I do. I like it that the White Cube photographs will change, and hope to find a collector who will be brave enough to take them out of the glass. But art should be full of intriguing questions such as this. Art really is something very difficult. It is difficult to make, and it is sometimes difficult for the viewer to understand. It is difficult to work out what is art and what is not art. All this can be hard work. Sometimes in recent years I’ve felt that the parameters have changed. It seems too often a luxury product, a weekend hobby. The only question asked is ‘what’s the price?’ When I was studying the stakes seemed higher. Art was challenging, like Kant or Hegel or Derrida. It was something really worth thinking about. A part of it should always include having to scratch your head.”
Hans Ulrich Obrist: One of the first epiphanies that triggered my obsession for art was the Giacometti collection at Kunsthalle Zürich. I was 12 years old and would visit the gallery after school.
The second was when I began to meet artists: it was like I was reborn. At the age of 17, I visited the studio of Peter Fischli and David Weiss. At this time (1985), they were just about to work on an amazing film called The Way Things Go, a film of chain reactions. I decided I wanted to be a curator after visiting their studios and speaking with them. Out of this grew one of my first exhibitions held in my kitchen and in a hotel room.
A few months later I met Gerhard Richter, prompting another development. He had a big show in 1986 in Switzerland and invited me to his studio. This is a dialogue that has continued ever since. We collaborated in 1992, at Nietzsche’s house in Sils-Maria (where Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra). I organized Gerhard’s work, particularly photographs he did of the Swiss mountains. All my early shows had to do with this idea that art can happen unexpectedly in unexpected locations.
Fischli and Weiss suggested I go to Rome to meet with Alighiero Boetti. I spent a day with him where we discussed the concept that artists should be involved in a global dialogue. This triggered in me a whole other way of working. From then on, I never stopped. I had infinite conversations and these conversations led to more epiphanies or moments of insight. It’s always a dialogue. I started thinking about how I could expand the notion of curating. How could I curate science, literature, and music? I started exploring these fields.
YH: You realized it was important to contextualize your ideas within other fields of study?
HUO: I thought it could be interesting to curate in different fields: to curate in science and literature museums and in the context of architecture. This led to Cities on the Move and other museum mutations.
YH: Have you found similar themes underlying the different fields of art, architecture, and science?
HUO: There’s not one thing that connects everything together, but many. I’ve been working with the Institute of the 21st Century to archive my conversations. Within the digital interview archives there are a lot of recurring conversations, so we did tagging. Whenever someone speaks about museums, that’s a tag, and so on. Eventually, we tagged different conversations between different fields and different practitioners. It will make the interviews more accessible in the future. The idea is that this archive could be a “book machine.”
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