Bartgolomew Ryan, ‘9 Artists: Bartholomew Ryan on Natascha Sadr Haghighian’, Walker Arts Blog, July 2014

The idea for exchanging artist’s biographies which bioswop is based on originated frommy multiple attempts to play with the conventional formats of art catalogues. If youwant to study the mechanisms of representation, catalogues are a good thing to startwith. Actually there is almost nothing about an art catalogue that I don’t find funny.More than anything else it shows that there is a great doubt about the value andnecessity of art in general but also about every single artwork. So its foremost purposeseems to be validation and valuation. First it usually starts with a text by a specialist whois appointed by the art world to validate meaning and quality. Then it continues withpresenting the artwork mostly in an iconic, fetishist, absolute fashion in order to makeit impassible. Lastly it ends with the artist’s biography which localizes the imagery thatone just saw in places of appointed significance. It proves the artist’s acknowledgementby the art world and helps evaluating his or her importance and relevance. In my eyesthis format is the result of sheer paranoia and lack of confidence. But more importantlyit is mostly just not interesting…. So starting the website bioswop.net first of all hadpractical motivations. As it is tiresome and time consuming to come up with new biosall the time I wanted to have a place where I could just go and click on something. Butsecondly I thought that it might be an interesting practice to share with more people.Maybe it would become a new movement. People exchanging, borrowing bios just likeanything else that you get tired of.1

Haghighian’s desire to study the “mechanisms of representation” is also a desire to evade them,or at least to disjoint the easy flow of prescribed information, the ready formats with which theinstitution of art ascribes and maintains value, and the ideological currents, albeit shifting, thatunderpin this. At this point the artist is still generally introduced by way of bios constructed orshared from bioswop.net. However, in an art world conditioned by strategic placement andpositioning, the gesture itself can become shorthand leading to and identifying the particularstrategies of the artist. Her calling card as it were: something that situates her within thediscourse, a gesture absorbed like most others into the ongoing building of cultural capital.

Yet, as Haghighian points out in her contribution to this publication (page 4), even in the yearssince 2004, the artist CV has become an increasingly archaic tool, with less and less utility inlight of the expansion of the World Wide Web and its associated social networking and searchcapabilities. Now an artist, dealer, critic, curator, or the rare art historian who might attemptsuch a thing is much more likely to simply Google an artist’s name than to request or evensearch for an online résumé. There they will find a much more satisfyingly colorful portrait oftheir object of study by way of Facebook pictures, artist statements, interviews, YouTuberecords of lectures, scrappy reviews, or in-depth features.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian Solo Show, 2008 sound installation, mixed media, publication, in collaborationwith Uwe Schwarzer. Format variable.

In her text, Haghighian describes her surprise when a friend e-mails her a link to the websiteArtFacts.Net, which collects data on artists and posts it online, creating a basic metric ofsuccess based on institutional affiliations, and ranking the artists accordingly for the elucidationof bottom-line cautious collectors. Despite the fact that the algorithms and data-collecting botsdeployed by the website have miscategorized her biography based on data that she herselfinserted into circulation, she is disturbed by the website’s assumption that it has the right toundermine her own artistic project, and also to present her within such a narrow metric. Yet,despite an initial attempt to have the information removed, Haghighian comes to theconclusion that to fight the cloud is as futile as Don Quixote tilting at the windmill. Instead, sheembarks on a meditation about the shifting sands of identification within a world where thebody and the subject are becoming ever more imbricated within that cloud. She takes up thecall of Hito Steyerl and others to identify with the object, rather than the subject, exploring thepossibilities for a renewed form of agency within this approach, one that acknowledges thepower of market forces to manipulate how we are formed and subjugated as subjects, by way ofcommodities that act as portals to this or that lifestyle and construction of one’s sense of self.2

She thus identifies with the object of the graph, which on ArtFacts indicates her rising andfalling fortunes as an artist since 2006. She converses with it, animating it through her address,so that ultimately it is decoupled from its narrow function and can be seen, at leastprovisionally, as an entity participating in a conversation. In a sense, what happens with thisapproach is that she subjectivizes the object (an interesting reversal on the objectification of thesubject). The reader becomes aware of the curve as something with agency, and then canmeditate on its enslavement by ArtFacts, see the structures that contain it, and embargo itsfreedom. After all, perhaps it is just as unhappy with the situation as Haghighian? Perhaps itwould rather redefine the metrics of its own rise and fall along more intuitive lines in dialoguewith the artist. Rather than go down in the months where the artist does not exhibit, why notgo down when she has a cold? Or conversely, rather than go up because of an exhibition at theWalker, why not go up when she is reading a pleasant romance novel on a breezy afternoon in

Berlin? She and the curve enter into a complicity that, even if only provisionally, sidesteps thenarrow intentions of its owners and consumers, emancipating it through a kind of perspectivaldisplacement.

Haghighian further problematizes and explores these questions in her text, so I will dispensewith my summary here. What’s important to hold onto is the contextual and shifting meanswith which the artist engages the world and her place within it, whether through videos, onlineprojects, texts, installations, or designed events. Haghighian is known for her site-specificprojects, or investigations of the format with which she is invited to participate, often highlycollaborative engagements with other writers, makers, and thinkers whose ideas influence herand whom she in turn influences. It’s a shifting practice, certainly associated with the history ofInstitutional Critique for the way in which it can subvert, upturn, and point out the workingsand inherent ideologies of institutional processes. In my first conversation with the artist, shementioned that her New Year’s resolution might be to stop being reactive in relation to aprospective project, to be able to accept the terms and then proactively pursue her owninterests within it (as many artists do). Yet often she feels like that very pursuit is inevitablyclosed down by the way in which the invitation demands her participation with it: that thestructures of inclusion or exclusion are such that she has no choice but to deal with them first.Nevertheless, rather than adopt arch positions that situate her in the role of heroic andenlightened outsider, she, like every artist in this show to greater or lesser degrees, navigatesher involvement with a sense of the complicity with power dynamics that is inevitablyassociated with participation within an art industry, or any industry for that matter.

For example, when invited by her gallerist in Berlin, Johann König, to contribute a work for anart fair, she ultimately agreed (it remains the only work she has produced for this purpose), andafter a month of being in a bad mood submitted the piece, an installation constructed out ofnails hammered to a wall in such a way that the negative space spelled out the declaration “Ican’t work like this …”(PLATE 35).3 The piece had a conceptual richness, deploying the samematerial of construction that is used to mount art fair displays, an economy of means that alsodraws attention to the most proletarian signals of labor itself (hammer and nails). It is perhapsunsurprising, given the universality of the sentiment and the clarity of the final piece as an“object” (i.e., collectible item), that this work might be termed Haghighian’s most successful todate (following the metrics of success that ArtFacts would enjoy). That is: it is featured on thegallery website as the introductory work to her oeuvre, and was snapped up by collections,including that of the Guggenheim Museum.

Natascha Sadr Haghighian’s I can’t work like this, 2007

To give another example of Haghighian’s way of working, she was on her way to the SharjahBiennial and met Uwe Schwarzer of mixedmedia Berlin, a company that helps with themanufacturing and development of artworks.4 She befriended Schwarzer and visited his Berlinfactory, scene to the production of countless artists’ works in different styles bound for variousart fairs, biennials, and gallery exhibitions. While Haghighian rarely works with assistants, shedoesn’t dismiss anything that fails to arise from the artist’s hand. Nevertheless, she was curiousabout Schwarzer’s dis- avowal of his own contribution (or that of his staffs) to the authorship ofthe works, his claims to be following the personal style of a given artist to the letter, despite theobvious occasions where he would need to intuit or interpret what such a personal style mightmean. She wished to look into these questions further, but Schwarzer was understandablyreluctant to have her document the inner workings of the company, given the discretion withwhich he must often proceed. Haghighian and Schwarzer devised a foil with which they couldcontinue their investigations, namely the fictitious artist Robbie Williams, whose debutexhibition would be composed of works produced by mixedmedia Berlin. They settled on thename because, as Haghighian relates, people would generally be satisfied not to ask too manyquestions so long as she clarified “the artist, not the singer.” She expanded:

The name also carries the connotations of the glamour and tragedy of a solo career. And that isan important aspect of the Solo Show project. It is about the construction of the “solo” artist,whose name floats above the Tate Modern in big bold letters. But actually he relies on a hugeteam of people, specialists, technicians, architects, assistants, engineers, management staff, etc.At best, their names will be listed in the imprint of the catalogue. But the public is fed the intactimage of a singular individual whose extraordinary talents or whatever have enabled his worksto float so boldly above the Tate Modern. There is a discrepancy, a distortion of the actualrelationships in the art scene that is increasingly veering towards a mega-event culture. So weneeded an icon to engage in iconoclasm. And “Robbie” took the job.5

Robbie did a really good job; his exhibition Solo Show opened at MAMbo in Bologna in2008.6 The white cube exhibition had two entrances; in one was a series of five sculptures thattook show-jumping fences as their inspiration—they were made in a number of styles with ahost of materials that acted virtually as quotations of contemporary sculpture. For example, onewas composed entirely of televisions, another of fabric folds, and a third of a birdhouseplatform with ensconced dragstyle wigs. A Frieze review at the time described it as “lookinglike weird hybrid mockups for artists such as John Armleder, Monica Bonivinvi, and LiamGillick.” 7 The mixed-media installation certainly mined the history of postmodern sculpture,from contemporary pop culture–inspired assemblage works to media-based installations andfeminist craft-based reclamations. The gallery included the title of the show and Robbie’s name.In the next gallery, a series of elegant speakers were hung in the round with a looped surroundsound of a horse galloping and jumping. Here a vinyl text listed the names, without hierarchy,of some fifty individuals who had contributed to the project, including Haghighian andSchwarzer.

It’s perhaps unsurprising that the reviews of the exhibition concentrated on the structuralconceit of its instantiation rather than the material and conceptual properties of the exhibitionitself. What would it have meant to review it on face value, to tease out the relationshipbetween the horse and the sculptures, the delicate and perceptive play of the materials, thedeliberate vulnerability displayed by the artist(s) in making such an over-determinedrelationship between the objects and the jump- ing horse? Is the horse the figure of the artist,on show for the pleasure of its owners who move from vernissage to vernissage following theupward and downward curve of its motion, waiting for the next horse to take its place? Is thehorse a stand- in for the career of Robbie Williams? (The singer, not the artist.)

Perhaps it is obvious that we are not trained to consider the decisions of a collective asdeserving of such consideration (the group of individuals who authored this collaborativework). At the same time, there is a sensibility to the project that belies any idea of a one-liner.Why not collectivize under a name and produce for a market? Is it because you are doomed tosimply imitate the production of a more singular voice? Or isn’t it true that without theparameters of imitation of this particular structure, the collective might be capable ofsomething far more radical?

1Max Andrews, Uovo Magazine 12 (2007): 156–173. See also Johann König Gallery website.

2Hito Steyerl,“A Thing Like You and Me,” e-flux journal 15 (April 2010),.

3For more on this work and the artist’s oeuvre in general, see the excellent artist talk she gave,“when night falls in the forest of static choices,” at the Guggenheim, organized by associatecurator Katherine Brinson: “Natascha Sadr Haghighian: Conversations with Contemporary

Artists at the Guggenheim,” YouTube video, artist talk presented as part of the Conversationswith Contemporary Artists series at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, onJanuary 21, 2012, posted by “Guggenheim Museum,” March 12, 2012, accessed June 10, 2013.

4The artist discussed the project in some depth in Raimer Stange, “Natascha Sadr Haghighian:Nobody Does Anything on Their Own,” Mousse Magazine 15 (October/November 2008): 72.See also Johann König Gallery website.

5Ibid

6The exhibition Solo Show, curated by Andrea Viliani, was on view at Museo d’Arte Modernadi Bologna (MAMbo) from September 7 to November 2, 2008.

7“Natascha Sadr Haghighian: Institutional critique and collective author- ship; money, fruit

and Robbie Williams,” Frieze 119 (November–December 2008), accessed June 10, 2013.

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