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J E F F K O O N S – o u t t h e r ei n a f i e l d o f h i s o w n
A N T O N Y G O R M L E Y c o m ed o w n o f f h i s p e d e s t a Can artists be loved too much? ART & FAME (part plus CARTER, JAMES TURRELL, RICHARD TUTTLE
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1 6 M O U N T S T R E E T L O N D O
W 1 K 2 R H U N I T E D K I N G D O
M A R K G R A F E N S T R A S S E 4
1 0 1 1 7 B E R L I N G E R M A N
S T R Ö N W A I 8
2 5 9 9 9 K A M P E N G E R M A N
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Keizersgracht 82, 1015 CT Amsterdam, The Netherlands, www.grimmfineart.com, Tel +31 (0 ) 20 4227 227, Fax +31 (0 ) 20 3301 965.
HUMA BH ABHA
SEPT 5 - OCT 7, 2009
MATTHEW DAY JACKSON
OCT 10-NOV 21, 2009
DANIEL RICHTER
NOV 28- JAN 9, 2009
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PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE
SEPTEMBER 2009
CATALOGUE AVAILABLE
LEE UFANL E E
UF A N
R E L A T U M- S I L E N C E ,1 9 7 9 –2 0 0 9
PARIS FRANCE 7 RUE DEBELLEYME TEL: 331 4272 9900 FAX: 331 4272 6166 WWW.ROPAC.NET
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September – October 2009
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2
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DISPATCHES 25
CONTENTS
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FORMS DERIVED FROM A CUBE
SEPTEMBER 8—OCTOBER 17, 2009
32 EAST 57TH STREET NYC
LARGE HOLOGRAMSSEPTEMBER 10—OCTOBER 17, 2009534 WEST 25TH STREET NYC
THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE EARTH
SEPTEMBER 10—OCTOBER 24, 2009
545 WEST 22ND STREET NYC
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FEATURES
CARTER 74
RICHARD TUTTLE 80
GUSTAV METZGER:ON COMING IN FROMTHE COLD 85
CAN ARTISTS BE LOVEDTOO MUCH? 90
JEFF KOONS 92
ANTONY GORMLEY 96
ART PILGRIMAGE:SEOUL 108
CONTENTS
REAR VIEWREVIEWS 119
BOOK REVIEWS 142
THE STRIP 146
ON THE TOWN 148
OFF THE RECORD 150
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THE ORIGINAL.
HANDWOVEN FROM WEATHER-RESISTANT DEDON FIBER.
DEDON Collection SEASHELL. Design by Jean-Marie Massaud.
DEDON worldwide: www.dedon.de · [email protected]
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EDITORIAL
CONTRIBUTORS
ART
SUBSCRIPTIONS
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h S w
u l p t u r e E
x h i t i o n
s
–
u c t
5 0 pro jec ts in t he c
i t y b y:
Groupe Bé l ier
Pe ter Co f fin
Fa b iana de Barros
E CA L E lga land-
Varga land
Cao Fe i
Ro ber t F i l l iou
C la ire Fon ta ine
Ho lger Fr iese & Mon
a Jas
R yan Gander
Andreas Go l ins k i
Fa br ice G yg i
Cars ten Hö l ler
Genera l Idea
Lang / Baumann
Jérôme Leu ba Lo k a l- In t
Ma t t Mu l l ican
Neue S lo ven isc he K
uns t
O N S - d ie neue ze i t
Ma i- T hu Perre t
Marco Po lon i
Pe ter Reg l i
D id ier R i t tener
Répu b l ique du Saug
ea is
K a t ja Sc hen k er
K er im Se i ler
L 'éco le de S tép han i
e
Ned k o So la k o v
S ta te o f Sa bo tage
S te iner & Len z l inge
r
Super fle x
Andrea T ha l & Sas k ia Ho lmq v is t
Ta t iana Trou vé
Transna t iona l Répu b
l ics
C lemens von Wede
me yer
W+ W, René Zäc h
Andrea Z i t te l
Zorro e t Bernardo
Eur y t hm ie Zucco l i
36 0 °and 2 0 m
icrona t ions
Cura ted b y S imon L
amun ière
B e i e n n
e
e r l a n d
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PUBLISHING
PRODUCTION
MARKETING
DISTRIBUTION
FINANCE
ARTREVIEW LIMITED
GALLERYADVERTISING
CORPORATE / LIFESTYLEADVERTISING
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NIRU RATNAM
MARTIN HERBERT
CHRISTIAN
VIVEROS-FAUNE
CONTRIBUTORS
DAVID BENJAMIN SHERRY
HETTIE JUDAH
WASSINKLUNDGREN
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DISPATCHESSnapshot
Now See This
The Free Lance / London Calling
Top Five
Design
Consumed
An Oral History o Western Art
On View
SEPTEMBER
snapshot TONY COX
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DISPATCHES
Neal Tait (White Cube Hoxton Square, London, 2 September– 3 October, www.whitecube.com)
Kandinsky (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 18 September – 13 January,www.guggenheim.org)
Modernologies (MACBA, Barcelona, 23 September – 17 January,www.macba.es)
Deterioration, She Said (Migros Museum, Zurich, to 8 November, www.migrosmuseum.ch)
NOW SEE THISwords MARTIN HERBERT
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Satire is in the eye o the
beholder. The most cuttingpolitical satire, i misread,
risks cutting both ways and
appearing to endorse the very
things it set out to assault.
Might resurrecting ugly racist
imagery to condemn racism
also serve to perpetuate
that visual poison and eed
prejudices urther? Or can a
postmodern rereading give
it added potency to shock
and shame? These questions
cannot have escaped Anton Kannemeyer, a white cartoonist-
provocateur rom South Arica who has been ierce and earlessin skewering his homeland’s politicos and bigots and the broader
legacy o colonialism since 1992. That year, Kannemeyer and
pal Conrad Botes were students at Stellenbosch University
and together started Bitterkomix , the sort o uncensored, truly
underground anthology which, under the oppressive apartheid
regime, could only be privately printed and circulated discreetly.
Assuming the pen name Joe Dog (which sounds like ‘you dog’ in
Arikaans), Kannemeyer looked beyond South Arica, a nation
with little comics tradition o its own, and began reerencing
Americans Crumb and Clowes and Europeans Hergé and
Moebius.
For example, in this issue’s strip, Pappa and the Black
Hands, he reinterprets an old, environmentally incorrect‘comedy’ hunting scene rom Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo,
the second book in the series, rom 1931, when the country
was a Belgian colony. Kannemeyer ages the boy reporter into
a balding, black-haired ather igure and blacks up Snowy.
Whereas Tintin keeps shooting at what he thinks is a single
‘indestructible’ antelope, only to ind that he has killed a whole
herd, Kannemeyer’s Pappa slays not one but nine black Aricans,
beore strolling o with a sackul o their severed hands. Beneath
the outrage in his racially and sexually challenging work runs a
dark autobiographical current, the ‘bitter’ in Bitterkomix . Beaten
by his ‘papa’ as a boy, Kannemeyer lays into the indoctrination
o white superiority, conormity, masculinity, puritanism, the
whole middle-class Arikaans culture which he was raised on
and rejected. In a 1999 story, ‘Why Bitterkomix’, he explains,teeth clenched, ‘In retrospect, I guess I must thank these
people or my ucked-up childhood. They gave me inspiration
and taught me empathy. But I will always run away rom them.
I will never stop.’ Living in today’s democratic ‘Rainbow Nation’,
Kannemeyer sees no reason to stop antagonising anyone, no
matter what colour, who abuses power.
words PAUL GRAVETT
Stripped Bare
Thomas Hirschhorn (DundeeContemporary Arts, 19 September – 29 November, www.dca.org.uk)
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THE PRICEOF THEHANGOVER
‘THE PRESENT IS COMPLEX because of all the unsettled
issues.’ This typically laconic formulation penned by Lawrence
Alloway in 1979 goes a way to describing that peculiar day-after-
the-morning-after feeling that appears to cover everything
today. The wave has broken, the sea is calm; everything has
changed, yet, at bottom, nothing has. Firstly – at the very least –
it is necessary to pass through a bitter, unredemptive purgatory.
If things don’t get worse soon, or conversely, much better (and who’s to say now which it will be?), culture and everything that
hangs from it will keep floating in the same stale Belvedere-
and-Cristal-soaked limbo of punch-drunk reckonings. (NB
conscious readers: uncertainty and poverty do not on their own
displace crappy old ideas, breed artistic renaissances or usher
in new paradigms.) Check, please.
For all those folks – and New York publications have
been full of them – who continue to celebrate the demise of
an art market they barely understand, three words: shame on
you. The notion of money being poisonous to art was trashed
decisively 25 years ago by Robert Hughes, a critic who, despite
colossal lapses in judgement, certainly understood the market
and its essential role as a motivator of good art: ‘Picasso was a
millionaire at forty and that didn’t harm him… Some painters
whose names I will leave to your imagination are millionaires
at thirty and that can’t help them.’
It’s nearly inconceivable that experts in other arenas
– medicine, say, or economics – could insist on the salutary benefits of poverty with a straight face. The idea is gross – not just
antiart; it is as fundamentally alien to the moth-eaten tradition
of artistic humanism as the repressive dicta of Iran’s Supreme
Council. To paraphrase Hughes: the idea that one benefits from
an uptick in automated calls from debt collectors is very much
like the belief in the reformatory potential of stoning.
But don’t let me get off track. What I mean to
underscore is not the confusion sown by the messengers but
the confoundedness – in medium, message and situation
– of our global slow boil: our times are not just uncertain, but
chronically, pressingly unresolved. ‘Every generation needs to
know its face’, R.B. Kitaj once said, anticipating generations
that might not. It turns out he didn’t know the half of it.
Our ‘future has no future’, a remarkable politicalmanifesto, enticingly titled ‘The Coming Insurrection’, recently
declared. Authored by a group of French thirtysomethings
calling themselves the Invisible Committee, its NYC summer
launch provoked Situationist happenings (one was bizarrely
conducted inside a cosmetics store) and even an on-air rant
by Fox News’s Glenn Beck. Leaving aside the ludicrousness
of a manifesto as a communicational form some 40 years after
the summer of 1968, its message turns out to be as concise as
the oppressive slogan it cribs from the shoemaker Reebok:
‘I am what I am’. A cogito, ergo sum that captures a growingpopulation of economically swindled, politically disaffected and
tautological individuals – a condition the manifesto’s authors
further describe as characterised by ‘the individualization of
all conditions’ – ‘The Coming Insurrection’ lifts the veil on
a cultural massif that art will have to negotiate to regain any
traction with itself and its public. Like all efforts to name some
persistently obvious Everest, this won’t be easy.
Predictably, the current economic fallout plays itself
out in New York according to scripts of earlier crises, just
in fast-forward: galleries close (especially primary ones),
indictments are handed down (Larry Salander), museums
revisit Minimalism and povera (the New Museum), hipsters
bemoan the passing of yet another junkie-artist (Dash Snow).
We seem to suffer not only from a crisis of memory, but a crisisof imagination.
Still, there a few unflappable folks out there for whom
the shock has worn off. Take the artists Jonah Freeman and
Justin Lowe: their recently constructed environment at Deitch
Projects plunges down a rabbit hole and lands where flyover
America gets its tweak on: a meth lab. And then there is the
Bruce High Quality Foundation. A collective committed to
frustrating received art conventions, their film Isle of the Dead
(2009) haunted Governors Island all summer. A movie about
an attack of artworld zombies, it draws a fair portrait of New
York and does exactly what we should demand of young artists
now: make art through which we can see into tomorrow.
words CHRISTIAN VIVEROS-FAUNE
New York artworld: stop eelingsorry or yoursel and move on
THE FREE LANCE
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DISPATCHES
Monica Bonvicini/Tom Burr (Kunstmuseum, Basel, 5 September
– 3 January, www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch)
Dalí DalíFeaturing Francesco Vezzoli (Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 19 September – 17 January, www.modernamuseet.se)
Paris We are not alone. Animals, too, live on this planet. La Maisonde la Chasse et de la Nature (the House o Hunting and Nature)
is neither a museum o hunting nor a museum o ecology.
It’s more like a museum o myriad orms; where the animals
are stued, their extraordinary bodies displayed as unexpected
treasures, ingenious resolutions to problems, antastic tricks
o equilibrium ound between a long neck and a short limb,
between wrinkled skin and big ears. The scope o a Star Wars
imagination is limited compared to the reality o the animal
world. In glass cube no. III, a wolverine bares his teeth: the
most ormidable carnivore o the northern hemisphere, says
the notice – a species somewhere between cat, dog, bear and
mythological creature. I was also ignorant that I share the earth
– on an unequal basis, o course – with the gerenuk and the
peaceul oribi. In the curiosity cabinets, you can open drawersin which the droppings o various mammals are immortalised:
a sureire success with visiting little ones. A sublime video o a
unicorn (by Maïder Fortuné) convinces my children that the
beast exists (and that you can barely ever catch a glimpse o
it). What is astonishing is that such a simple animal – a horse
endowed with a horn – doesn’t exist, whereas the phacochoerus,
with our antlers, the painted wol, the kudu, the lechwe, the
bubal, the caracal and the topi are all actually living with us.
Contemporary art is everywhere among the beasts. The
oetus o a unicorn, in ormaldehyde, closely resembles a teddy
bear. A ox sleeps in an armchair, monkeys have a picnic with
plates decorated with lowers, Rebecca Horn’s owls wink at us
and a wild boar automaton watches us pass by. At the end o acorridor, my daughter almost knocks over a wol on the lookout.
“Watch out or the wol!” It’s in this jungle o a museum that I
can pronounce such an atavistic sentence.
Beorehand, I quite stupidly ignored the existence o
this museum, since I’m not exactly Chasse, Pêche, Nature et
Traditions (an extreme-right-wing party). But ar rom having
anything to do with those cretins, this old hôtel particulier in the
Marais area is a marvel o antasy and hospitality. Right now,
one o the oremost members o the New Figuration movement,
Gilles Aillaud (1928–2005), is exhibited, and his painted
animals in zoos hide in cages and paintings.
Varlam Chalamov wrote that ‘bears never appear more
real to me than in the zoo’. Here, in their home, the animals –
hooves on the waxed wooden loors and horns in the woodwork– seem both more real and more marvellous than those that lie,
somewhere, in nature.
words MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ
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AlejandroJodorowsky’s ‘Dune’: An Exhibitionof a Film of a Book That Never
Was (Drawing Room, London, 16 September – 25 October, www.
drawingroom.org.uk)
Sally Mann (Gagosian Madison Avenue, New
DISPATCHES
New York As the artworld was gearing up or Venice and Basel, DavidCarradine, star o the 1970s TV serial Kung Fu, was ound
dead in a Bangkok hotel closet. Believed to have been the result
o autoerotic asphyxiation or other etishistic sex-play gone
wrong, the actor’s death set o a voyeuristic media binge in
which his ex-wie claimed he was into ‘aberrant’ practices and
the New York Post headlined with the delicious quip ‘Hung Fu’.
Forget the leading economic indicators: these prurient and
prudish reactions give the pulse o our politics and culture,
wide swathes o which have become as arcical and onanistic as
Carradine’s demise. Voters in Caliornia, or example, recently
rejected spending cuts and tax increases, leaving their state
$21.3 billion in the red and scrambling to pay or things like
prison terms mandated by past voter initiative. In New York,
two Democrats – one indicted earlier in the year or slashing his girlriend with broken glass (he pleaded not guilty and is
awaiting trial) – jumped ship, turning the State Senate over to
the opposition in a revolt encouraged by the upstate billionaire
Tom Golisano, who had apparently became rustrated with
the Democrats ater meeting with the senate majority leader
and inding himsel competing or attention with the senator’s
BlackBerry. Meanwhile, reports arrived rom Basel o starry-
eyed collectors thronging record producer and musician Pharrell
Williams as he discussed The Simple Things – his collaboration
with Takashi Murakami. Parsing the jewel-encrusted sculptures
o a bag o Doritos, sneakers and other ‘things in lie that get
overlooked’, Williams reportedly philosophised that ‘the taste
o a cupcake is worth more than diamonds’. This days aterthe US unemployment rate hit 9.1 percent. Thank you, Marie
Antoinette. The narcissism – and disconnect – that leads
collectors to battle over this $2 million version o lie’s simple
pleasures also lies behind many private-museum acquisitions.
This becomes relevant as public museums suer a decline in
donations and inluence; megacollectors increasingly use their
institutions to present us with what they deem to be worthy in
contemporary culture, and curatorship and scholarship give way
to personal whim – subsidised, o course, by the tax exemptions
granted to charities. None o this is surprising; it’s been me,
me, me over here ever since the ‘Reagan revolution’ ushered
in deregulation and put paid to the idea that government and
society were common responsibilities. So voters in Caliornia
can’t even igure out that they have to pay their own bills, and Williams need not ear the tumbrils anytime soon.
words JOSHUA MACK
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York, 15 September – 31 October, www. gagosian.com)
Lisa Anne Auerbach (Nottingham Contemporary, 12 September – 18 October, www.nottinghamcontemporary.org)
BerlinNot much is going well at the Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlinthese days. At the time o writing, the institution’s ourth
exhibition, o work by Allora & Calzadilla, was installed,
but with no indication about what will ollow or who will be
responsible or programming the second and inal year o this
temporary institution. All in all, the Kunsthalle’s depressing
tale should serve as a warning or contemporary art institutions
– especially those in Berlin – thinking o opening new venues
without appropriate unding and the clearest o visions.
Many people, o course, had great ideas or the Temporäre
Kunsthalle: Constanze Kleiner and Coco Kühn, who initiated the
project; Dieter Rosenkranz, ounder o Stitung Zukunt Berlin
(the Kunsthalle’s main inancial backer), and retired politician
Volker Hassemer, its chairman; and an artistic advisory board
consisting o Katja Blomberg (Haus am Waldsee, Berlin),Julian Heynen (K21, Düsseldor), Dirk Luckow (Kunsthalle zu
Kiel) and Gerald Matt (Kunsthalle Wien). Originally planned as
a platorm or promoting international artists who live and work
in Berlin but are not visible via the city’s existing institutions, the
Kunsthalle was quickly torn apart by the conlicting demands o
market considerations, varying notions o artistic quality and
personal interest. When the Kunsthalle opened last September,
Kleiner was its managing director; a second MD, the artist and
writer Thomas Eller, was hired three months later. Kleiner
let the Kunsthalle in April, and Eller ollowed suit in June,
whereupon the advisory board resigned. Board members had
been complaining privately about the state o the institution or
awhile, but because they were eectively curators o its irst- year programme, they chose not to go public, planning instead
to resign ater their our shows had inished. Fortunately or
them, the conlict accelerated their schedule.
Despite its prime location, opposite where the Palast
der Republik once stood, the Kunsthalle has never attracted
high visitor numbers. The exhibitions – eaturing works by
Candice Breitz, Simon Starling, Katharina Grosse and now
Allora & Calzadilla – were rather ill-suited to a more casual art
audience. Visitors were upset about paying an entrance ee to
see our paintings by Grosse, or example, and the recognition
Rosenkranz sought or the project never materialised (Allora
& Calzadilla’s brilliant new show could not have helped, as it
consists o little more than a lowered ceiling – on which dancers
are moving about, creating a marvellous soundscape). What happens now? Well, or the time being, the entrance
ee has been abolished. Rosenkranz and his oundation have
assumed control o the Kunsthalle, installed a new managing
director with little experience in the arts and are looking or an
artistic director to devise a popular programme or the coming
months. Yet it remains quite maddening to think what could have
been done in some o the city ’s other institutions – Hamburger
Bahnho, KW, Berlinische Galerie or Künstlerhaus Bethanien
– with the Temporäre Kunsthalle’s budget and support.
words AXEL LAPP
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DO NOTREENACTTHIS AGE
ANOTHER NIGHT AT THE ICA, another art reenactment.
It’s not every day I wear a white tuxedo, but here I am, in a ring
of onlookers rubbernecking the card players sitting around a
long blue-baize table, watching a reenactment of Power Game,
a performance by Liliane Lijn, first staged in 1974. The game
being played out by the invited guests involves them betting on
cards that bear words, rather than symbols, in which the valueof a card is assessed according to how much ‘power’ the word
it bears is held to possess. On a projection screen above us is a
live feed of the event, being transmitted to the overspill in the
bar; on another screen is faded, black-and-white video footage
of the original event. A few figures are recognisable – a young
Derek Jarman, a cigar-smoking Michael Kustow, director of
the ICA from 1967 to 1971.
So here we are, restaging something that only a few
people knew of or cared about 35 years ago. And at the end of
the noughties, it’s surprising how ubiquitous the reenactment
form has become. Take the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s ‘short
history of performance art’ seasons – ‘authentic’ reenactments
by artists of old performance artworks – which ran from 2002
to 2006. Remember Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave
(2001), a reenactment of an episode from the 1984 miners’
strike. And then there were the rock-concert reenactments
pioneered by the duo of Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard during
the late 1990s and culminating, again at the ICA, with their
reenactment of a 1978 Cramps concert. Jo Mitchell’s ICA
reenactment of Einstürzende Neubauten’s 1984 ‘Concerto for
Voice and Machinery’. And last year’s restaging (yes, at the
ICA) of Mark Boyle and Joan Hills’s 1965 ‘happening’, Oh
What a Lovely Whore.
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I need to get out more. Yet
walking down the street the other day I came across a poster
advertising a tour by one of the more respected tribute bands,Letz Zep. It features an endorsement, apparently from Led
Zeppelin’s Robert Plant: “I walked in – and saw me. Awesome.”
And I started to wonder at what point in the future I’m going to
walk into some gallery private view, which will turn out to be a
restaging of some gallery opening from 1997 – and see me.
Don’t get me wrong. This is not about the unique problem
of how to preserve performance art which, hey, can’t be put in a
crate and stored in the basement of the Tate for eternity. Nor is it
just that all culture can now be digitised – big music companies,
for example, punch-drunk from falling sales of recorded music,
are busy buying out live music venues.
Neither of these sufficiently explains why the past,
present and future are merging in this way. In Tom McCarthy’snovel Remainder (2005), the traumatised protagonist survives
an accident and spends his injury compensation obsessively and
meticulously recreating a particular moment of his past, as if it
were authentically happening, right now. If there is a trauma in
our current culture, it’s something to do with not having much
personal control over the present, and the fact that past culture
seems more alive, spontaneous and anarchic than the stultified
terms of social and cultural life today, coded and controlled, as
they are, by an ever-expanding set of petty and authoritarian
regulations.
But if individual life is increasingly leached of its
spontaneity, of its liberty of speech and action, this is the fitting
cultural outcome of a politics from which big alternatives and
the possible existence of anything other than the status quo have
long since been banished. Maybe, then, this recent obsession
with reenacting the events of the past hints at a perceived loss of
freedom in the present and an inability to imagine the perceived
freedoms of the past. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it,’ George Santayana famously wrote in
1905. Today, it seems, those who cannot remake the present are
condemned to repeat the past.
words J.J. CHARLESWORTH
Is the current obsession with
restaging art events anythingmore than a sign o our lacko imagination in the present?
LONDON CALLING
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TOP FIVE
WHAT TO SEE THIS MONTH BY
MARINEHUGONNIER Artist
5 IN-FINITUM
2 MAX ERNST
3 PHILIPPE PARRENO
1 WALID RAAD
4 CHEYNEYTHOMPSON
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CAMPANA-ING IT UP
SITTING ON THE SHUTTLE BUS from Weil am Rhein
back to Basel, I asked the Swiss slicker beside me what he made
of the show we had visited at Vitra, a retrospective of 20 years
of design by the Campana Brothers. “Seen it all before,” he said,
with the shrug of one who’d been drawn to the late-nighter more
by the promise of mojitos and Brazilian totty than a passion for hybrid design works. “All those lights made of plastic bottles
and stapled-together chairs – I’m bored of that stuff.” It was a
fair point – one can barely swing an ethically sourced plank at
a design fair these days without hitting a sideboard made from
offcuts, chairs woven out of tangled rope or a fugly PET-bottle
lampshade.
Approximately zero of them will have been designed
by Fernando and Humberto Campana. They may have been
nominated Designers of the Year at Design Miami 2008, but the
Campana Brothers also hold the unofficial award for World’s
Most Ripped-Off design studio. See that Favela chair? The seat
assembled from little strips of wood? People have built whole
careers ‘inspired’ by that chair.
The Campanas’ most recognisable style is an eye-
popping bricolage, in which everything from plush toys to carpet
underlay to rope to plastic bottles is fair game as a furnishing
material. They also weave, knot and tangle pretty much
anything that is available in flexible strips, from wire to garden
hose. This amalgamation of scrap and kitsch, skill and chaos,
is inspired by their ‘laboratory’; the shantytowns of São Paulo.
There are personal elements, too; designs are often described
as the result of a dream, or a traumatic experience in one of
the brothers’ lives; but the absolute key point of inspiration
for their postapocalyptic steam-punk aesthetic is the hunger
for beauty that inspires people scavenging the detritus of thecontemporary urban environment to decorate their homes.
There are some tricky points to make about the effect
that the Campana look has had on the design world these last
years. They have certainly contributed to the acceptance of
a more omnivorous style, one that affords the ugly and cheap
equal status as it rubs against the sleek and luxe, and they have
opened the market for design that takes its inspiration from
fields beyond Europe, North America and Japan.
Nevertheless, there is still something slightly creepy
about the way this very particular style has been co-opted by
‘green’ designers, who present a Campana-esque favela style
as if it were a sustainable approach to furniture production.
The Campanas do green, but it’s political rather than practical,
such as their TransPlastic series, with its hunks of polyethylene
enveloped in the woven fibres of traditional Brazilian materials,
as if nature were overpowering junk.
Some of the Campana Brothers’ furnishings are produced
commercially – notably by the Italian firm Edra – but often
production is the labour of a strange and logic-defying love;
the Vermelha chair, for example, involves knotting cord around
a frame in a more or less chaotic fashion. It’s commercially
produced, but not mass-produced; the mainstay of their output
is limited editions for the collectors’ market. It doesn’t take a
government directive to point out that the Campanas’ style
is only sustainable if we all start to make our own furniture –
which rather takes us back to life on the streets in São Paulo.
It’s odd that designers so often fight against association
with the country they live or work in; few architects would
debate the importance of local light, living conditions and
geography. There’s no shame in local context; indeed, for the
Campanas, engaging with local context has helped make them
glorious. They have championed design with big personality, in
which context and history both play a role, which is why there’s
something plumb wrong and naive about other designers
thoughtlessly transplanting their São Paulo style to theneighbourhoods of Sint Paulus or St Paul.
words HETTIE JUDAH
‘Green’ designers across theglobe are taking the Brazilianavela aesthetic as their own,
but is this actually sustainable –
or even desirable?
DESIGN
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CONSUMED
£200
$250–$500
£100
£260–£650
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CONSUMED
$25,000
£295
€9–€15
$1,000
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25–27 September 2009Admission free
Whitechapel Gallery 77–82 Whitechapel High StreetLondon E1 7QXT +44 (0)20 7522 7888
thelondonartbookfair.org
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AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART
In this ongoing series, the real people who created thehistoric styles give their eyewitness testimony
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–69) was a Dutch painter and etcher.He painted commissioned portraits and biblical scenes, though he is perhaps best known for his great volume of profoundly humanistic self-portraits. He hada dramatic, tragic life, achieving great wealth and fame, and then falling intopoverty and relative obscurity. His children, and various wives and lovers, all died before him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave.
interview by MATTHEW COLLINGS
NO 10:REMBRANDT
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ARTREVIEW Tell me about the socioeconomic background to
your work.
REMBRANDT Wow, these aren’t the things one necessarily
thinks about a lot when working. But this morning I looked my
name up in Julian Bell’s new book, Mirror of the World: A New History of Art , and it says that in the 1610s artists like mysel in
Holland started homing in on Amsterdam and Haarlem because
there was reer trading there, and as he puts it, there was ‘a new
urban public with money to spare or commodities to hang on
parlour walls’.
AR Yes, I’ve read that book. Under a picture o The Jewish Bride
(1667) it says you only let one written statement about ultimate
aims – you write to a patron that you want to represent ‘the
greatest and the most natural emotion’. Where do you think the
emotion is?
R I think in The Jewish Bride a lot o it is in the sleeve. But I never
know what anyone means when they use the word ‘emotion’.
ARBut you used it!
R Yes. But you know, we’ve all got to negotiate with our audience.
To be rank, I can’t remember what I was thinking when I wrote
that letter. On Wikipedia it says that the phrase could just as
easily be translated as ‘the greatest movement’ rather than ‘the
greatest emotion’. That makes more sense to me now, looking
back: I’m very interested in the ugitive eects o light. Julian is
egging the pudding, really, to please his readers. It’s great in the
book when he starts quoting Simon Schama: a luvvie meltdown!
For my part, the kind o thing one says to a buyer – who isn’t
necessarily inormed about what a painting actually is and how
it works, its inner mechanics – well, this kind o thing I might
have said or not said is just what one says to suit the context.
It’s not what I mostly remember rom my studio existence, and
the work I did every day, with my assistants milling around, and
a lot o artworks I’d acquired all scattered about – bric-a-brac
o all kinds, rom vases and medals to paintings by Rubens and
Titian. All this stu I bought and sold, because I was a dealer as
well as an artist: it’s a usual tie-up in the seventeenth century, not
so much in your time, o course. So what was I saying? Oh, yes, how you explain yoursel ater the act isn’t that important. And
in act it’s pretty arbitrary and changeable, depending on who
you’re talking to and what you’re trying to achieve when you’re
doing it. Since we’re talking now, and I’m not trying to sell you
anything, I’d say the account o ‘emotion’ as it might apply to, say,
The Jewish Bride, would work i the painting were cropped to
just the aces. Emotion isn’t necessarily the whole story or the
heart o the matter. In any case, emotion is ampliied and made
a lot richer by the rest o the picture. So the sleeve actually is as
emotional as the aces. And once you start talking like that, based
on actually looking in an unusual way, at least, usual or a painter
but not or a nonpainter, then the word ‘emotion’ becomes less
and less helpul.
AR Don’t you think mysteries are important in art? Do you think
only gnarly painters with painter-knowledge can really see art?
Are ordinary people’s desires or mystery and emotion, and so
on, just deluded and naive?
R You mean, do I paint rom experience and knowledge, or is
it rom eeling? Feeling being more mysterious and thereore
valuable – well, I think it’s more realistic to say experience. The
emotional content that a painter eventually arrives at is only
proound because o the experience and knowledge that’s gone
into the work. I think about the way things loom out, how reality
looks, how light breaks things up, how objects by candlelight
are revealed and not revealed. And it’s the same whether theobject is mythic or a real tabletop or my own real relection in
a mirror. These things are much more oten done without the
setup in ront o me. Most o the time I’m inventing. I do my
work, and while I’m doing it, I’m looking at what I’m doing.
I make adjustments, and I change and alter, all based on critical
judgements that don’t come easily exactly, but are natural to me
– because o experience.
AR So you’re always doing something and then correcting it?
R Yes. I’m making abstract relationships work. Or concrete ones.
They’re all abstract, really. On the other hand, what goes into
them comes rom an artist’s heightened visual awareness o the
look o the objective world: you look, and you make decisions based on your looking. So the architectural relationship between
lecks o paint in a depicted shadow, which has come about
largely unconsciously, is as signiicant and meaningul as the
rest o the arrangement o the picture, which has much more
conscious components. That’s what a painting is – the last thing
o any real interest is the narrative. A Jewish wedding or Jesus
on the cross – what does it matter? When these relationships
work, you could say it’s emotion or you could say it’s whatever
you like. The particular space between the hands in The Jewish
Bride is important. That’s something I certainly considered a
lot. The balance between empty space and solid orms in the
picture as a whole, their equality as areas, that’s important. The
The emotional content thata painter eventually arrives at
is only profound because of the
experience and knowledge that’s
gone into the work. I think
about the way things loom out,
how reality looks, how light
breaks things up, how objectsby candlelight are revealed
and not revealed
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AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART
blur-meisters; Caravaggio – Mr Black; Poussin – Mr Intellectual.
And yet we’re all doing ‘emotion’, o course, whatever that is
– Vermeer, too – Mr Light. Or Mr Light-Light (I’m Mr Heavy-
Light). All the seventeenth-century painters – antastic.
AR Have you seen Classified at Tate Britain?
R Yes, I thought those two early-1990s paintings by FionaRae were good. I’d just been to the Liz Peyton show at the
Whitechapel, which came over rom the New Museum, and the
dierence is very clear, in my opinion. It lies in the relationship
to the whole painting thing o tradition and discipline, and so
on. Actually I’m not sure what the ‘thing’ is, or how one should
reer to it – i ‘tradition’ and ‘discipline’ aren’t misleading. But
perhaps the dierence is the willingness to build a structure that
answers to itsel and has classic elements o internal abstract
drama. What you’ve got instead is the current alternative-to-
the-thing, represented by Liz. She only seems to be entering
the thing. Actually she remains outside. She’s making some kind
o point about something completely irrelevant to the thing,
or the beneit o an audience that is indierent to the thing.But we get used to the airming culture surrounding this new
ironic hal-thing or semi-thing, blithely treating it as i it were all
Rembrandts, as i butter wouldn’t melt in the airming culture’s
mouth.
AR Ha ha – I see what you mean. Well thanks a lot, it’s
been real!
R You’re welcome, Matthew.
Next month: total emotional distance, the great mind of Poussin
blackness o the groom’s hat, to relieve the monotony o the even
tone o the parts o the solid orms in the picture where light alls
– that’s deinitely important. But I wouldn’t say the spaces and
the hat are emotional. But then, is the look in their aces really
emotional, exactly?
AR How did you get so good?
R I was inluenced by Caravaggio, through copying prints by him,
and I copied pictures by various other people, plus I had a bit o
practical teaching. I learned how to do chiaroscuro, I did it really
well mysel, in an original way, with a lot o movement and energy
– eects o lie or movement or whatever. And rom those skills
and talents I built up my general approach over the years.
AR Why did you dress up like Raphael in your sel-portraits?
Were you pitting yoursel against the athers?
R Well, that’s right, yes, it was Freudian, in a way: you want to
assert yoursel. But I wouldn’t say that’s the main point onecould make about a sel-portrait. Their main purpose is that
they show what the artist does. I mean, I really am talking in a
socioeconomic way now: my sel-portraits had the unction o
advertising ‘the artist’, whose job is looking. But then there’s the
philosophy o looking. I you think o the one in Kenwood House,
in London, Self-Portrait with Two Circles (1665–9), the curves o
the circles are crucial even though there’s no literal explanation
or them. They’re structural. They make important rhymes with
the curve o the top o that white smock I’m wearing, where the
light catches, and the curve o the white hat as it meets the top
o my orehead. Somebody who appreciates art stands in ront
o that painting, the eye registers those relating curves, and they
give pleasure, but the mind doesn’t necessarily struggle to workout how the pleasure is happening – you just eel moved. Art is its
own emotion. It’s the same with the one in the Frick Collection,
in New York, Self-Portrait , 1658 – I look at that now and I’m
impressed: the composition is great, the weight o everything,
the gloom.
AR The gloom?
R Yes, there’s a gloom to all the 50 or so painted sel-portraits
that have survived, except when I’m deliberately laughing, which
is the exception that proves the rule. And this gloom is actually
the blues – like Son House: he says that when he plays the blues
it’s internal. You’re in a room on your own. You don’t need anyone
else’s company right now. You don’t hate them. But you don’t want them around. You need to be within yoursel. That’s what
those sel-portraits are about. That’s why you, Matthew, and all
the ArtReview readers, can look at the picture in Kenwood House
or the one in the Frick Collection and see the ace o someone
ordinary-looking rom three and a hal centuries ago looking out
at you. And in that ace you see ageing and you see incredible
painterly skill, and you’re impressed and you go all internal.
AR I do eel that! I love your etchings, too, the lines, the stylistic
shortcuts, the expressive scribbles: you really are amazing.
R I think it was a good period: me, Velázquez and Rubens – the
There’s a gloom to all the 50 or so
painted self-portraits I did… And
this gloom is the blues –
like Son House: he says that when
he plays the blues, it’s internal
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Toronto’s free all-night contemporary art thing
October 3, 2009 - sunset to sunriseFor one sleepless night experience Toronto transformed by artists.
Discover interactive art in galleries, museums and unexpected places—
from churches and grocery stores to chimney stacks and bus stations.
Choose from 130 projects created by more than 500 artists
including world renowned names such as Jeff Koons,
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One night only. All night long.
For more info on the event and special travel deals:
scotiabanknuitblanche.ca
416.338.0338
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53/154TUE - FRI 1 - 6 PM SAT 12 - 5 PM OR BY APPOINTMENT PICASSOPLATZ , 20 METERS FROM KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL
B E H R O U Z R A E
Untitled, 2009
( from IN BIMESTER WE TRUST )Ribbon, glue, fabric, permanent marker
21.5 x 29.5 cm
L A L E H J U N E G A L E R I E
SEPTEMBER 4 - OCTOBER 3, 2009
B E H R O U Z R A E
L A L E H J U N E G A L E R I E
PICASSOPLATZ 4
CH - 4052 BASEL
WWW.LALEHJUNE.COM
T. + 41 61 228 77 78
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ON VIEW
EN ROUTE TO THE NEWLY OPENED James
Turrell Museum, located in a remote vineyard in
the oothills o the Andes in Argentina, the sturdy
vehicle in which I am travelling becomes enveloped
in a thick, soupy cloud. With no concept o what
might be outside the careering vehicle, I eel asthough the car is loating. I consider this queasy
journey later, ater I arrive at the minimal sand-
coloured building dedicated to the Los Angeles
conceptual artist, as he describes the disequilibrium
that is oten caused by his light and space works:
“It’s like when pilots ly by instruments and they
can’t see out o a plane, or when you’re stuck in
a cloud and can’t see anything. You go down into
it, you sink into it. Those are important physical
sensations.”
Turrell’s work – indeed the entire process
o arriving at the museum, which has been
commissioned and built by Swiss vintner and
art collector Donald Hess – deals in heightenedsensations. Turrell’s light and space installations,
which are dotted around the world in private and
public collections – or, in the case o his uninished
Roden Crater project, secreted or the past 30
years in a dormant volcano in the Arizona desert
– orce us to reevaluate the space we occupy. The
museum presents a miniretrospective o his output
since 1967, albeit with works already owned by
His Roden Crater project still to be completed,James Turrell surveys the first museum
devoted solely to him, in the rolling foothills ofthe Argentine Andes
FRONTIERMAN
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words LAURA ALLSOP
Hess. The centrepiece o the museum, however, is a
specially commissioned skyspace entitled Unseen
Blue (2002), which oers a view to the sky through
the museum’s ceiling.
The idea or the museum came up seven
years ago: Hess had been collecting Turrell’s worksince the 1960s but had never seen them properly
realised – the works were packaged away in so-
called grey books, with instructions on assembly
and display; it was up to the collector to carry these
instructions through. Originally they were to be
shown in a museum in Napa, where Hess owns
another winery. But ater being reused planning
permission, he took his plans to the wilder and less
travelled area o Molinos, Argentina.
While Hess is rank about Turrell’s
intentions or agreeing to the project – to inance
Roden Crater, which the artist has been working
on almost as long as Hess has been collecting his
work – nevertheless the location o the museum isin act much in keeping with his philosophy. “I like
places like this”, Turrell says. “I’m an artist who has
his works in out-o-the-way places. You have to
take a journey to see it. That it’s ar away makes it
special, because you give time to it, and this is really
a work that requires time and I’m not sorry about
that.” Indeed, there is something o the rontierist
about Turrell, not least in his dress – all-black
Quaker garb capped with a Stetson. He legendarily
located the site or the Roden Crater project ater
lying over the Arizona desert repeatedly in a light
aircrat, sometimes taking reuge under its wing at
night and carrying on in the morning. His attraction
to deserts is unwavering. “In the desert you havethe opportunity to do things, and some o them are
crazy. When you think about the desert, you think
about all the Prophets wandering, Joshua, Elijah,
even Christ. There’s a tradition o people being a
bit out o the ordinary in the desert.”
The works inside the museum are split
between those that utilise the natural surroundings
and those relying on dark, windowless spaces and
artiicial light. The irst major installation in the
museum is City of Ahirit (1976), which Turrell
explains means ‘city o cosmic light’, and is a tunnel
through several connected chambers throbbing
with coloured light. Most o it is artiicial, but some
natural light creeps in rom small windows in theexternal wall. This blend gives the light a velvety
quality, which obscures basic space delineators such
as corners. Turrell describes the piece as a journey
through colour, but it is also a journey through
memory: “We don’t hold colour. It’s very strange. In
a colour ield, the colour starts to leave immediately,
and so in about iteen seconds you’ll notice that it
isn’t nearly as saturated as when you irst came in.
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ON VIEW
But you’re also building an aterimage – red colour
saturation will give a lime-green aterimage. And
then you move on to a green light-illed chamber…”
And so on, through numerous rooms, with colour
and aterimage intricately layered, the artwork an
increasingly internal experience.
Ideas about time and memory are closely
bound up with the light and space works. Theyrequire time to be ully appreciated: both the
central skyspace, Unseen Blue, and Lunette (2005),
a site-speciic corridor with a portal to the outside,
capitalise on the shiting movements and changes in
colour o the sky or their visual eect. Both call or
at least an hour o peaceul viewing. But the other
works deal with duration, too: how long it takes or
the eyes to register light in a pitch black room, or
example, or how quickly the memory o light can
ade. Allusions to prehistory contribute towards a
sense o timelessness: the newly installed Spread
(2003), or example, eatures a light o pyramidal
steps leading to a deep blue chamber that strongly
suggests an ancient place o worship. Entering
the chamber yields urther disorientation, with
its slight incline leading down to a ield o misty
blue light. “I think o colour as a mystical og that
you could touch or breathe”, Turrell says. “ When
you walk to the space, you see a room illed with
emptiness, a void illed with the sort o purple you
see in meditation. It’s the colour you see when your
eyes are closed”, he explains. As such it is revelatory work, showing us things we know to be true but
rarely stop to consider. “Actually”, he says, “I think
this is very emotional work.”
That evening, those who have come to
Colomé or the museum’s opening gather at sunset
to watch the light show that is Unseen Blue. An
aperture in the ceiling, bordered by Greek-style
columns, provides a portal to the heavens. Turrell’s
assistants activate a series o sot lights that turn
the sunset into an hourlong display that leaves the
viewer dizzy, eyes burning. At points the sky seems
to advance towards the straining viewer beore
retreating again, while the changing textures andcolours bring to mind a host o paintings rom art
history, not least Rothkos and Maleviches. It’s
spectacular work, theatrical as well as meditative.
Yet it is also diicult to accurately explain, something
Turrell’s work (which is also notoriously diicult to
photograph) generally seeks to encourage. “I don’t
use image, and there’s no thing or object other than
that made by the light”, he explains. “Oten there’s
not even a place to ocus or to look. So i you have
no image, no object and no place to ocus, what do
you have let?” What remains is an experience,
though one diicult to relay with words.
Meanwhile, Turrell’s magnum opus in the
Arizona desert is approaching completion. It isnever quite out o his mind, and his message in the
James Turrell Museum’s visitor book conirms this.
Careully written across the irst page is the artist’s
motto: ‘Sooner or later, Roden Crater.’
The James Turrell Museum is located at the
Estancia y Bodega Colomé, Molinos. An exhibition
of new large-scale holograms by the artist opens at
PaceWildenstein on 25th Street, New York, on 10
September
In the desert
you have the
opportunityto do things,
and some of
them are crazy”
“
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ON VIEW
AMONG EXPERTS in the recently revived
technique o 3D cinema, there are reportedly two
schools o thought. For some, a ilm should create
the eect o depth by presenting the screen as a sort
o container, its images held within the rame. For
others, objects should project outwards, emergingto meet the viewer head on. One school, that is,
values distance as an integral part o illusion; the
other seeks to immerse the viewer in the image.
What is true o 3D mainstream ilm also
stands or 2D auteur cinema; here, too, the
opposition is between distance and immersion. This
year in Cannes, the key ilms in competition oered
extreme examples o the drive to detachment on
one hand, immersion on the other.
This year’s Palme d’Or went to The White
Ribbon ( Das weisse Band ) (2009), by Austria’s
Michael Haneke, a director who has made
detachment in ilm something o an exact science.
In The White Ribbon, Haneke adds a urther layero distanciation – historical this time, as well as
ormal. The setting is Austria on the eve o the
First World War, in a village beset by unexplained
crimes. Watching the ilm, we instantly become
aware o the temporal estrangement that aects
us when watching any period drama, but Haneke
accentuates this element by making his iction, and
the world it represents, insuperably remote to us,
despite the vividness o his evocation. Not only are
the characters alien to us in their rigid observation
o archaic social and amilial codes; we also know
we are watching them through a urther distancing
optic: the grid o scrupulous pastiche, namely o the
black-and-white photography o period chronicler
August Sander.
O all the entries in competition, Haneke’s
subtle, complex ilm may well be the likeliest to
endure. But its impact as cinematic event was
drastically overshadowed by the competition’s
two scandals, both o which made their mark by
enguling, even assaulting, the viewer’s sensibilities.
Enter the Void (2009), the long-awaited new eature
by France’s champion extremist Gaspar Noé, was
cinema imagined as out-o-body experience, a hardcore twenty-irst-century update o the 1960s
ideal o cinema as trip.
Noé’s protagonist is Oscar, a young man
who gets killed in a Tokyo police raid and inds his
consciousness embarking on a posthumous journey
that – as a character explains early on, helpully
outlining the story arc – is described in detail in the
Tibetan Book of the Dead . The premise o the ilm
is that, or some 160 minutes, we are Oscar – rom
the very start, in act, when he takes a digitally
generated acid trip that resembles a deluxe screen
saver. Mainly looking through Oscar’s eyes, the
Usually a film’s intensity is measured by whether moviegoers have forgotten wherethey are, but sometimes it’s the veryawareness of being trapped in a cinema seatthat delivers the impact
CANNES 2009:THE CINEMAOF IMMERSION
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words JONATHAN ROMNEY ilm contains interminable-seeming stretches (no
exaggeration, since Noé is out to distort our senseo time) in which Oscar’s restless spirit whizzes
over the streets o Tokyo and in and out o windows,
plugholes and ashtrays en route to eventual (and
bathetic) reincarnation.
The eect is certainly immersive, as i Noé
had taken the ‘star gate’ sequence rom Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) – his avowed
inluence – as the basis or an entire ilm. But
lacking the narrative power o Kubrick’s space
drama, Noé’s ilm achieves exactly the opposite o
what it attempts, alienating rather than submerging
us. Distracted by the constant movement, we end
up wondering exactly how Noé managed to get his
camera through that wall, down that tunnel. Themore Noé attempts to make us eel we’re there, we
remain nowhere but in our cinema seats.
But sometimes the most intense experience
to be had in a ilm is precisely that o knowing we are
in a cinema, and eeling as i we have been locked
in by a malevolent presence – that is, a director
determined to show us a really bad time. This is one
way to describe Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009),
an unpleasant but undeniably overwhelming
drama that is one part Gothic horror, one part
Bergman-esque anatomy o marital hell. While it is
the grisly violence and renzied sexuality that make
Antichrist so provocative, the ilm’s true capacity
to disturb lies in the enclosed, unhealthy-seemingatmosphere created by cameraman Anthony Dod
Mantle, especially in the eerie orest images.
Even i you elt – as I did – that Antichrist was
ultimately hollow horror-kitsch, you could hardly
deny the ilm’s power to overwhelm, not i you were
watching it in an evening press show surrounded
by several hundred other critics variously gasping,
shuddering or hooting derisively. This says nothing
about the quality o Antichrist , and a great deal
about von Trier’s ability to muster a cinematic
phenomenon o startling intensity – even i that
intensity is ated to last or only a single screening.
The estival debut o a succès de scandale always
generates its own sealed microclimate, and– ephemeral as its eect is – such a screening is
arguably the most genuinely immersive experience
that cinema oers.
Antichrist and The White Ribbon are released in
the UK by Curzon Artificial Eye
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MANIFESTOby DR LAKRA
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G o r d o n C h e u n g ,
T h e G u a r d i a n s ,
2 0 0 8 .
C o u r t e s y o f t h e
a r t i s t .
N e a l R o c k i n h i s s t u d i o i n L A ,
2 0 0 9 .
C o u
r t e s y o f t h e a r t i s t a n d f a p r o j e c t s ,
L o n d o n .
Gordon CheungThe Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse
Neal RockFanestra & Other Works
7 August — 1 November 2009
01922 654400
thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk
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EATURE:
‘CARTER’ – THE NAMEALONE HOOKS YOU IN.
THE VERY FACT THAT IT’S
A NAME, ALONE.WHY IS IT UNQUALIFIED?WHAT HAPPENED TO
THE FIRST BIT?OR IS IT THE SECOND
THAT’S MISSING?OR MAYBE IT’S NOT REALLYHIS NAME AT ALL.
words MARK RAPPOLT portraits SHARIF HAMZA
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that Rauschenberg perpetrated. In any case one quick hop-click-and-jump to Wikipedia reveals Carter’s other name.
In Carter’s most recent solo show, And, it, the, constant,although (at London’s Hotel gallery this summer), there was asculpture titled Likeness (2009). It comprises two similar-lookingbusts, one black and one white, on wooden stools at either endof the gallery, a train of carpet running between them. “I’m reallyinterested in forensic artists, not in the aspect of their relation to
the law but in the way in which they find, say, a skull and then haveto recreate, through clay, glass eyes and fake hair, the identity of amissing person: a loss that someone’s trying to address. And thishalf-assed artist-slash-law-person constructs this thing and theyhope that someone will recognise it; but it never looks like theperson they find. But there’s still this care and interest in trying tosolve the loss, and it produces this weird sculpture that’s kind ofbecoming but doesn’t quite make it, that’s almost there. I find thatreally interesting: trying to reconstruct something that you onlyhave pieces of.”
At times that’s exactly what it feels like to experience hisart. Take Untitled, (area) (2009): on its surface float amoebicforms suggestive of faces, which, together with some cubiform
ON THE FACE OF IT, Carter’s body of work to date, spanningpainting, photography, sculpture, sound works and video, feels
just as enigmatic. In general – and this is to offer anything but acomplete overview – you could say that the New York-based artistseems to have a predilection for representing mysterious heads
and faces. These crop up, most often covered in hair (in a CousinIt kind of way that stops just short of suggesting obsession; there’sa wig thing, too) most often in drawings and paintings, reducedto outlines or rendered, as in the paintings in his latest Londonshow, as floating blobs with creepy, staring eyes. There are equallystrange Polaroids of shiny shop-dummy arms ‘making’ the otherworks (preparing the background of a painting, for example, orpoised over a drawing), which, as much as anything else, serve toredouble the mystique of their maker. The loose-limbed themeis repeated in video, photographic and sculpture works (notablyin a 2008 exhibition at Yvon Lambert in Paris) featuring solitarylegs arranged in some sort of homage to Robert Gober. And,in the background to many of his paintings and the set-up of hisexhibitions, there’s a more widespread interest in modernist interior
design (and, perhaps, the domestic setting).In recent months, Carter’s Erased James Franco (2008)
– a 63-minute film in which the titular actor reprises fragments ofdifferent scripts and scenarios from all his film roles, collaged into abewildering, yet mesmerising whole – has brought the New York-based artist to a more general, less artworld-specific attention.The film’s title is a tribute to Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased DeKooning Drawing (1953). Famously, Rauschenberg went over tothe master painter’s studio and said he’d like to erase one of hisdrawings as a work of art. De Kooning agreed. It took one monthfor Rauschenberg to complete the act and no record exists ofthe pre-erased drawing. On the other hand a glance at the listedmaterials –‘traces of ink and crayon on paper’ – seems to indicate
that somehow it’s still a drawing, but a drawing stripped down tothe bare minimum of existence, an Ur-drawing. Carter’s video, asyou watch it, appears to bear no connection to this work.
Just as Rauschenberg selected de Kooning because he wasa star, you watch Carter’s video with the knowledge that Francois one too. But in Franco’s case the so-called erasure serves tohighlight his celebrity – a reminder that the subject is, on somelevel, important enough to merit the labour of the ‘erasure’. Theresult: you’re more conscious of Franco than you might ever havebeen before. To some extent, as he spins out disjointed dialogue(in particular one-sided telephone conversations that served somesort of linking purpose in the films from which they are extracted,but blur into incoherent babble when stitched together in Carter’sscript), Franco appears a bit like a remotely controlled dummy.
Yet he simultaneously becomes a maximal presence: Franco,apparently, unmasked (there are no costumes, just jeans and a t-shirt). The erasure itself seems to be erased.
But back to unmasking Carter. The name thing’s no big deal,the artist says. But not before he tells the tale of how the invitationcard for one of his first New York shows featured a photographof his sister’s head, covered by her luxurious and abundant hair.“People who didn’t meet me thought that was me,” he says withevident glee. Still, let’s not get carried away: Carter is simply whatpeople have been calling him since he was a kid. “Once you stickto something there’s no going back,” he says with the same airof fatalism that wafts though the Franco film. You can’t erase aHollwood star, just as you probably can’t now repeat the erasure
It really is all about portraiture; although it’s probably more
about self-portraiture than I’mwilling to admit”
“
FEATURE: CA
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It’s important to build uponthings that are already done
for you and to referencethem and to honour them”
“
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WORKSIN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
Untitled, (area), 2009, digitally altered and dated interior on foldedand defaced laser prints, acrylic ink, paint, pencil,
coloured pencil, and gel medium on paper and on canvas, 107 x 135 cm
And, it, the, constant, although, 2009 (installation view, Hotel, London).Both images courtesy Hotel, London
Constant (James Franco As Inanimate Object As Robert Gober Sculpture) No. 4,2008, cast of James Franco’s left leg (polyurethane elastomer, synthetic hair), 56 x 12 x 31 cm (leg)
Erased James Franco , 2008 , DVD, 63min, 34 sec. Edition 2/5.Both images courtesy Yvon Lambert, Paris
FEATURE: CA
geometric studies and a couple of botanical drawings, are set inmodernist interiors, bizarrely equipped with Rococo furniture, all ofit greyscale with random splashes of rouge and Lichtensteinesquepaint flourishes splattered about like so much jism or broken shardsof china. It’s as if the busts from Likeness (and there’s a profile
outline not dissimilar to that of the busts lurking to the left of thepainting) have been expanded and collapsed at the same time.The connections between one work and another are an
important part of a Carter show. And certainly he sees his workas part of a connected linear flow: “Growing up I thought: ‘Doesn’tevery artist work in the same way? Doesn’t every artist make onepiece and they’re all related and they’re all about creating andyourself?’” he says. “But artists all work very differently. Which isodd, because I always think that’s always the way you should makeart: it should be very personal and it should be very linear andconnect.” At last, the ego has landed.
So, given that, and the name business (which, howevermuch I want it to go away, cannot help but be an elephant inthe room) it’s no surprise that the artist, talking about his work in
general, states: “It really is about portraiture; although it’s probablymore about self-portraiture than I’m willing to admit. Everythingis about self-portraiture to some degree. Even the film I did withJames.”
At this point he decides to talk me through the evolution of apainting, Area with tree and Picasso (2009). He starts with the imageof a room, he says, then there’s a lot of Photoshop work, then thedrawing and then the painting. The paint is very specifically placed,the outlines around the brush strokes consciously referencingLichtenstein, the splatter effect reminiscent of Pollock. “I want tobe both poetic and cold,” he says. “There’s this cold computer workand then this warm paint-work.” There’s also a Picasso painting onthe wall and a shape reminiscent of a Henry Moore: anything but,
it seems, Carter. It looks like a psychiatrist’s waiting room, full of theghosts of art history. “It’s important to build upon things that arealready done for you and to reference them and to honour them.”
So is Carter’s art a form of therapy or an attempt to locatehis absent self? “I hate to say yes on that, because I can’t stand thatconnection,” he replies. “But I have to say yes. Although in the day-to-day making of it – no.” Erased again.
Carter’s next solo show is at Salon 94 Freemans, New York,9 September – 17 October
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EATURE:
RICHARD TUTTLE , Walking on Air, C5 (2009): two panels of thincotton fabric, each a foot high and a few inches over ten feet long; thetop panel bears two rows of grommets placed at regular (15 and 3/8of an inch) intervals that pierce and hem its upper and lower edge;the bottom panel has only one row of grommets along its upper edge;a running stitch hems the lower one. The grommets allow the panelsto be hung together at eye level on a double row of nails, with the top panel overlapping the bottom by an inch (the grommet width), whilethe lower edge of the bottom panel hangs free. This loose hangingcreates a pattern of subtle billows that reads like a diagram depicting
forces on a load-bearing beam. The left and right edges of each panelare hand-cut and unfinished. The top panel is dyed a faded tangerine; some slight discolouration occurs just left of centre. The bottom panel bears a series of irregular red stains that bleed a watery pink intotheir vicinity; the densest stain resides just under the discolourationof the top panel. Though asymmetric in intensity, the regular verticalcreasing of the bottom panel suggests a symmetry of distribution,like a Rorschach blot with uneven inking. Other ‘x’-patterned creasesaccompany the vertical ones across the bottom panel, but theseappear unrelated to the stains in any way. Two horizontal creasesmark the middle of the top panel and are flanked by two more ‘x’ patterns; again, no relation to the panel’s colouring. The lower edgeof the bottom panel is hemmed with an orange thread.
AS Richard Tuttle PREPARES FOR HISFIRST SOLO SHOW IN LONDON IN 12 YEARS,
JONATHAN T.D. NEIL ASSESSES THE AMERICAN’SCONTRIBUTION TO SHAPING WHATEVER IT IS THAT WE MEAN WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ‘ART’
Why have I stopped here? What licenses the end of sucha description? Consideration of the reader’s tolerance for tediummight be one excuse. But were I really that considerate, I wouldhave cut the paragraph above by half (or more; in any case, makingassumptions about others’ tolerance is always ill-advised). No, thequestion I am interested in, the question that Richard Tuttle’s recentWalking on Air series (seen at PaceWildenstein in New York earlierthis year and at Modern Art in London this month) asks – indeed,what all of Tuttle’s best work asks – is what exactly can be countedas part of the work of art? What, that is, properly belongs to thework as a bearer of meaning, and what is merely incidental to it?
These are not new questions, of course. At least sinceliterary critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published the
‘The Intentional Fallacy’ in 1946, and so formalised (which is to saytheorised) the major tenets of the New Criticism, the matrix of theartist’s intention, the work’s autonomy and the viewer’s share haslargely shaped methods of critical assessment and, by extension,the contest of artistic meaning.
Tuttle’s art matured at the moment when the final of thosethree ideas, the viewer’s share (and all that it entailed), was justbeginning to trade up for a bigger property within the criticalenclave. For a while Tuttle was associated with Minimalism, andthen with Postminimalism, the arts of which, so understood,placed great store by the audience as executor of the work –phenomenologically, epistemically, discursively. But Tuttle’s gambitnever played well within the minimal and postminimal arenas.Though the Constructed Paintings and the Wire, Cloth and Rope
Pieces from the 1960s and 70s were easily assimilated to debatesregarding medium specificity – the ‘neither painting nor sculpture’of Donald Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’ (1965); as Tuttle quite seriouslynotes, he sees his work as legible within a continuum describedby calligraphy at one pole and architecture at the other – thosedebates never exhausted the kinds of questions these works wereasking, and which the Walking on Air series continues to do.
In asking what properly belongs to the work and whatis incidental to it, Tuttle’s art does not do away with the limits ofautonomy, intention and aesthetic experience bu