Mijn Hoet Hij Heeft Drie Hammons

In 2021, on the occasion of the sale of the most significant artwork documenta IX curator and SMAK Ghent founder Jan Hoet received from David Hammons, his daughter Marianne Hoet, Head of Business Development and Deputy Chairwoman, Phillips Europe, reflected on accompanying her father to the artist’s studio in the late 1980s:

At the studio, we were able to touch objects and works, without being sure if it was an object or already an artwork. At that time, David always gathered objects and found inspiration in the streets. As an outsider in the contemporary scene, he was able to transform material into experience, which also alludes to an African-American tradition of creating art from found objects … Most important was to understand and feel the deep friendship between David and my father. It was a friendship as we remember from our childhood, soulmates as outsiders.

It echoed the uncredited lot description for the sale in 2018 of the most significant artwork Jan Hoet got from David Hammons that his family still owned:

Hammons’ oeuvre is a masterful narrative on the experience of the African American community in American society, introducing his own physicality into his work as well as the debris surrounding him. Through a deft reworking of found-objects, Hammons’ sculptures assume a quasi-mystical status; soldered, glued and nailed, these extracted materials are composed into beautifully rendered structures of detritus, utilising quotidian objects which are often loaded with associative connotations. The present work thus forms a crucial part of Hammons’ highly original artistic approach and, at the same time, symbolises a pivotal relationship between innovative artist and curator, both unified in their shared motivations.

And Marianne’s comment was considered worth repeating to sell in 2023 what is…what is a productive way to describe this…the most conceptual? most austere? most elemental? artwork Hoet got from Hammons, which is this stick.

this sculpture by david hammons is a one meter long stick that has been smoothed a bit, and has the words head warmer on one end. it is being sold for the second time by marianne hoet, whose father jan obtained it from hammons. this image is from phillips, where marianne works, and where it did not sell in 2023. now in december 2024 it is at christie's, which has to sting a bit. maybe if they added some duct tape
David Hammons, Head Warmer, 1998, 99 x 4 x 4 cm, wood, img from a 2023 PhillipsX pop-up collab with AQUALEX a provider of fine drinking water systems in Knokke-Heist, the Hamptons of Belgium

In each case Hoet’s relationship to Hammons is considered an inextricable element of the work’s significance in ways that surpass mere provenance. This may explain why this stick, on which this phrase Head Warmer is carefully lettered, and which is is also signed, was made available first to the Belgian collecting world who also knew Hoet—or Hoets at this point—via a pop-up sale at the beach in August.

Well, Belgium passed, and now the stick is at Christie’s. And what does Christie’s have to say about Head Warmer? Just that it “is emblematic not only of Hammons’ ability to transform found materials into art but also of the close relationship that Hoet and Hammons shared.”

The Hoets’ claim for this work/these works as somehow manifestations of Jan’s relationship with Hammons exceeds but is inextricable from their view of Hammons as a quasi-mystical shaman of the Black Found Object Arts. For a curator who put himself on the cover of his documenta catalogue while writing off Africa as irrelevant, I guess we should expect nothing less. Me, I’d just be happy to have gotten three free Hammonses.

18 Dec. 2024, Lot 31 | David Hammons, Head Warmer, 1998, est. USD50-70,000 [christies]
Summer Wave, August 2023, Lot 20: David Hammons, Head Warmer [phillips]
Previously, stick provenance-related: A Walking Stick Frederick Douglass Gave To John Brown Would Be Quite A Find

Czechoslovakia Radio 1968: Improvised Audio Device

Tamás St. Turba, Czechoslovak Radio 1968, 1969, sulfur paint on brick, documenta 13 installation image via socks-studio h/t jeremy millar

I’ve been fascinated for days by Tamás St. Turba’s Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 (1969) since Jeremy Millar posted about the project on bluesky. St. Turba, who has like five spelling variants and alternate names, is a Hungarian filmmaker, archivist, activist, and Fluxus artist who took Fluxus seriously enough to stop calling himself an artist or his projects art.

Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 is/was a conceptual artwork as protest against the Warsaw Pact military forces’ radio ban: a brick was painted to look like a transistor radio, which Czech residents pretended to listen to. This simple gesture was taken up as an act of defiance to the point that the military confiscated brick radios along with real ones.

St. Turba has made or remade the radios since, as needed, including for Documenta 13 in 2011, and one he remade in 2008 which found its way into Tate’s collection in 2016.

Here is a surviving early blog post about the Radio. And Socks-Studio has a basic post-Documenta account and image. But the most in-depth consideration I’ve found of Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 is An Active Encounter, a 2014 show in Belfast at PS2 (pronounced, alas, PS Squared), which pulled it from Documenta obscurity and gave its ideas of resistance and engagement and community resilience a real workout. Here is curator Ciara Hickey, in an essay/recap which is only available via the Internet Archive, curator Ciara Hickey:

In an early conversation between the artist and myself about the Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 piece the artist noted that the brick could be ‘used to build the courthouse or as a missile to smash it’. On this occasion it seemed the artist had opted to deconstruct or ‘smash’ the format of the project. In terms of a public event, I can only imagine the audience perception of the piece as something thin and uncomfortable. However, in addressing the trickster-ish and conspiratorial nature of Czechoslovakia Radio 1968 it playfully presented a series of disruptive and subversive strategies that resonated with the impulse of the original work.

At a time when resistance to authoritarian stifling of culture has never felt more urgent, it’s been maddening to see how fragmented or detached discussion of St. Turba’s project is. Partly that could be because he refutes it artwork status, but also because he’s busy trying to fill in the archival gaps from Cold War oppression while Hungary grapples anew with another fascist. But it feels like the art apparatus has been failing in its job.

eight Weltempfângeren installed on a table at Isa Genzken’s 2013 retrospective at MoMA and MCA Chicago, img via Galerie Buchholz via artsy

It may also be because the art apparatus, as such, can’t really deal with non-valuable or non-auratic objects. Even/especially when they look and sound uncannily familiar.

Weltempfänger (World Receiver), 1982, Multi-band radio receiver, 37 x 51 x 20 cm, Collection of the artist. PHOTO: Jens Ziehe, Berlin via leapleapleap

I only realize now I don’t know the origin of Isa Genzken’s concrete World Receivers. She first showed a working world receiver as a readymade in 1982, which was then a context, if not a gesture, of reaching information within borders and beyond. I think the non-functional concrete simulacra only came later, and I don’t know how. But maybe it’s entirely unrelated.

Previously, somewhat related: Cash4YourGenzken
Au bout de La Nuit

Thomas Hirschhorn Emergency Library

Thomas Hirschhorn’s Emergency Library, 2003, photo via thomashirschhorn.com

In 2003 Thomas Hirschhorn and Ink Tree Editions published Emergency Library, based on a collection of 37 books which Hirschhorn said were important to him, and which he could not do without. He discussed the project, and explained the reasoning behind each of the books, in a text, republished on the artist’s site.

The Library includes three books by Deleuze, two by Bataille, also Walser, Spinoza, all philosophers who Hirschhorn has created public monument/projects for—all but Bataille Monument, at Documenta 11 in 2002, came after the Library, so it could be viewed as a sort of sourcebook or roadmap for Hirschhorn’s subsequent practice.

Thomas Hirschhorn, Emergency Library (Degenerate Art), 2003, color copies on cardboard, 142 x 114 x 23 cm, sold at Rago Arts on 15 Aug 2024

Artists in the Emergency Library include Beuys, Duchamp and Warhol; Meret Oppenheim and Liubouv Popova; Hélio Oiticica and Jörg Immendorff; and somehow both John Heartfield and Emil Nolde. Speaking of Nolde, whose Nazi past was still being actively covered up in 2003, there is also the entire catalogue from Stephanie Barron’s 1991 exhibition at LACMA and the Art Institute, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany.

Until I started writing this post, I had always read the photo on top, from Hirschhorn’s own site, as the books of Emergency Library on a table. It turns out to be a composite photo of the actual edition, arranged in simulation. It is only when the artist stands next to it, shirtless, that the scale is grasped. And now I want every single one, starting with the biggest, that sweet, sweet Duchamp catalogue.

Tits out Thomas Hirschhorn posing with Emergency Library, via inktree.ch

Emergency Library (2003) Text first published in 2006 [thomashirschhorn.com]
Thomas Hirschhorn Emergency Library [inktree.ch]

Destroyed Sol Lewitt Holocaust Memorial

Sol Lewitt’s Black Form – Dedicated To The Missing Jews, 1987, painted concrete block, installed at the Schloss Münster/University of Münster for Skulptur Projekte, photo: LWL/Rudolf Wakonigg

Thanks to baileybobbailey’s reblog of archiveofaffinities I became aware of what Sol Lewitt described as his only political work: Black Form — Dedicated to the Missing Jews, which was one of two works he installed at Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1987.

The sculpture, an elongated block of painted concrete bricks, was at the entrance to the University of Münster, in the Schloss Münster. Lewitt felt compelled to give a politically charged title referencing not the Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, but the generations of descendants of those Jews, who would never be born, leaving a permanent void in German society.

Lewitt was ready to donate the work to the city, or the university, but it was perhaps ahead of its time; in a divided country where Holocaust memorials were not yet a thing, Lewitt’s Black Form generated tremendous controversy and critique. It was actually destroyed after the Sculpture Project ended—in 2023 Stefan Goebel wrote a fascinating blog post about Black Form‘s fate—and in 1989, Lewitt ended up donating another version of it to the city of Hamburg, which still stands.

Sol Lewitt’s Black Form… sold at Van-Ham in 2019, tho the image is via artsy

Oddly/amazingly, a carved and painted wood replica of Black Form, dated 1985, so perhaps a maquette, turned up for sale in Hamburg. What has not turned up yet is discussion of the relationship between this early Holocaust memorial to the Missing Jews and Peter Eisenman’s (and, once, Richard Serra’s) Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe that was eventually built in Berlin.

Skulptur Projekte Archive, 1987, Sol Lewitt [skulptur-projekte-archiv.de]
Black Form (Dedicated to the Missing Jews): The Destruction of a Holocaust Memorial [munitions of the mind, kent.ac.uk]

Robert Gober Has Seen Some Stuff

And bought some stuff. And made some stuff. The press release discussed it in the context of hashtag collector, and Roberta Smith called it “a resonant portrait of the United States.” But Robert Gober’s exhibition at Demisch Danant, “Cows at a Pond,” felt like the self-portrait of an artist trying to live and work ethically in a present where the injustices and suffering of history repeat themselves. So I guess they’re both right.

I sat in Gober’s chair to read his notes—unfinished and unpublished, except, of course, for putting them in a show—of attending the art forgery lawsuit against Knoedler Gallery. One important observation was the purported shock at the naked fraud perpetrated by the “venerable” gallery, a term Gober remembered from the 2000-2001 coverage of the price-fixing crimes of two “venerable” auction houses: Sotheby’s and Christie’s.

Continue reading “Robert Gober Has Seen Some Stuff”

Incense Sensibility

Chris Rusak, Zine: Survey of Liturgical Incense, 2023, via chrisrusak.com

A couple of months ago, Los Angeles conceptual perfume artist Chris Rusak published a zine with a 9000-word survey of liturgical incense, its history, culture, and performance, and details of fourteen current sources of incense, including “several brands that are handmade by artisanal monks, some of which are not widely known and are hard to acquire due to their limited production.”

Like all of Rusak’s productions, it is beautiful and provocative of both sensation and thought.

Then today I saw that 56 Henry is currently staging a show by the Los Angeles artist and mage L, which includes Talismanic toroidal altar (2022-2023). As barely a novice in these matters, I can only quote from the press announcement:

Talismanic toroidal altar (2022–23) was initially constructed at Documenta 15 last year, in response to a curatorial request for L to conduct magic in service of their fellow artists. The main structure is a chromed coat rack from the D15 exhibition venue St. Kunigundis church, that was gifted to L by the local anarchist priest. One accoutrement hanging from the altar is a steel lemon juicer, utilized at D15 as an incense burner. For this exhibition, a new incense will be activated – 333 – that L co-created with perfumer Christopher Gordon of Maison Anonyme.

L, Talismanic Toroidal Altar, 2022, Aluminum clergy vestment rack from St. Kunigunis, crocodile skull, chain clasps, wood and steel scythe, lemon, aluminum badminton racket, ritually poured molybdomantic lead, quartz crystals, L’s broken mirror, webbing, fishing hooks, galvanized steel spring, selenite wand, ceramic vessel, steel citrus juicer ceremonially utilized as incense diffuser, copal incense, St. Germain herbal blend incense, steel lock, hot glue sticks, yarn, horseshoe from Montauk, pyrite, selenite, lead, glass jar with copal incense, protective stone from Germany. image via 56 Henry

The medium description is an invocation in itself, though it does also seem to be for a previous incarnation. L’s creations at St. Kunigunis were part of the Ghetto Biennial organized by Atis Rezistans, a Haiti-based artist collective. They resonate both formally and etymologically with the altar conjured by the Los Angeles artist collective A.S.T.R.A.L.O.R.A.C.L.E.S in collaboration with Dual Forces, a creative agency for Adidas and Nike, who all seem to exist in harmonic resonance with each other.

There is definitely something in the air out there.

L’s exhibition, Triplet states (+1), runs through October 22, 2023 [56henry.nyc]

Hmm. Sol Lewitt São Paulo Biennale T-Shirt

Lot 110: Sol Lewitt Sao Paulo Biennale t-shirt by M. Officer, est. $500-700, 7 June at Wright20

After he made a giant Italian fresco-colored wall work for them in Hartford, the Wadsworth Atheneum curated Sol Lewitt into the 1996 São Paulo Biennale, where he made giant fresco-colored wall works there, too. Bands of color radiated off of three-, four-, five-, six-, seven-, eight-, and nine-pointed stars. The project was memorialized in a t-shirt collab with M. Officer, the Brazilian Gap. The giant label on the front confirms it was sponsored by the United States Information Agency, The National Endowment for The Arts, The Pew Charitable Trusts, and Arts International IIE [The Institute for International Education].

Verso via Wright20

Five years ago, you could have bought two of these t-shirts for $418. Or you can get one right now on eBay for $1500. If you want to try splitting the difference, a t-shirt owned by modern design aficionados Michael and Gabrielle Boyd is being auctioned in a few days. Me, except for figuring out if these were really screenprinted, I’m not that interested. I’m happy to see what the next Uniqlo collab drags in.

7 June 2023, Lot 110: Sol Lewitt, T-shirt for the 1996 São Paulo Biennale [update: sold for $2,772, almost 2x the price of the one on ebay rn. please explain capitalism to me; I only have an mba.][wright20]

Come And Play

Just imagining a double portrait here. Superflex’s AlUla piece photographed by @colinjr

I have not yet heard from anyone who declined to participate in Desert X Al Ula, but I’ve started seeing reports from people who did. I would have said that the exhibition and all the spectacular work in spectacular scenery was taking place right where it had been planned all along: in the #desertxalula hashtag. But then I saw a slideshow of the artworks from a new instagram account, saudiarabianholiday, which promotes the same as a hashtag, but their link-in-bio is to an unfinished website registered two weeks ago to an anonymous tour packager run out of an Irish coworking space. The point of Desert X Al Ula is to turn Saudi Arabia into an international tourist destination.

While scrolling and marveling at the budget for the Desert X installations, I idly considered what project I would execute [sic] in the stark sandstone cliffs. I decided I would recreate the Buddhas of Bamiyan. Tinted shotcrete over foam block, how hard could it be?

Then I saw the post from @colinjr, a California real estate photographer who was attending the Desert X press/influencer junket. He captured fellow Desert X photographer Lance Gerber and their Saudi driver sharing a moment swinging on a tandem swing. It was Superflex’s contribution to the show, a multilevel swingset sculpture titled, One, Two, Three, Swing!, one of several elements from the group’s 2017 project that began in the Tate Turbine Hall and have since expanded to sites around the world.

I imagined MBS and Neville Wakefield sharing a similar moment, sitting next to each other, working together, in sync, on a common goal of an experience, toward a common spectacular end. And I marveled at the simplicity of the gesture, and the symbolic power with which Superflex captured the spirit of the entire exhibition enterprise. Superflex told people that by using the three-seat swings, they would set the orange line over their heads in motion and potentially change the trajectory of the planet. And it must be working; I do feel like a shift is happening. I apologize for ever doubting them.

One Two Three Swing! at Desert X AlUla [superflex.net, photo credits Lance Gerber!]

 

Are You An Artist Who Declined To Participate In Desert X’s Al Ula Joint? C-A-L-L M-E

I am struggling to understand the Desert X Al Ula collaboration with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and am interested to hear from people who have direct contact or experience with the organizers.

Did you visit Al Ula on that 2018 junket that was organized before Jamal Khashoggi was murdered, but which took place after it? Did you originally agree to visit, but then did not?

Did Neville Wakefield discuss or invite you to propose a project for Desert X Al Ula? Did he or someone else sound you out? Did you consider it? Did you take the meeting, then decline? Do you know of people who had this experience?

I’m not gonna lie, I am profoundly troubled and disappointed that Desert X, Wakefield, and the artists of Superflex, who I have long admired, are all involved in this exhibition.

I’m not sure whether I will write anything about what I learn. I’m happy to talk to anyone in confidence, off the record, or whatever you need to reach out. Text me at 1-34-SOUVENIR or reach me via email or twitter DM. Thanks in advance.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres Hot Tub

Felix Gonzales-Torres, “Untitled”, 1992-95, Carrara marble, water, fabricated 2007, installed at Glenstone [Ellsworth Kelly photobomb]. image: Carolina Miranda/LATimes
The Raleses bought Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “Untitled”, which was made for the 2007 Venice Biennale. It was based on an unrealized sketch the artist made while considering a public art commission. I believe it was for a university. The posthumous thing bothered me at the time, and Nancy Spector and I went around a bit on it, but I decided to roll with it, and it turns out to be fine. Art world shenanigan-wise, it could have been much, much worse.

It was a rainy autumn evening when I first saw it reinstalled at Glenstone. The shallow pools of water on the surface of the concave discs of white Carrara  marble splashed and glistened with rain.

Randy Kennedy reported on the pools’ unveiling in front of the US Pavilion:

“They’re beautiful, and I think people will probably throw coins in them, or might actually get into them if it’s hot,” Ms. Spector said, smiling. “I wouldn’t mind.”

Andrea Rosen, the dealer who represented Mr. Gonzalez-Torres from 1990 until his death and who now oversees his estate, said she did not think he would mind either. He would probably jump in himself.

I did not back then, nor in the two visits since the new building opened, ever once get the sense that the Raleses would be chill with people frolicking in their Felix pools. But the fact that they have custom-fitted hot tub covers does make me wonder if the amount of frolicking is not actually zero.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres “Untitled” is under there.

Better Read, No. 027: Jenny Holzer’s Arno, As Grammed By Helmut Lang

Jenny Holzer projection for the Biennale di Firenze, 1996, photo: Attilio Maranzano via jennyholzer.com

Jenny Holzer made her first xenon projection in 1996 as part of a collaboration with Helmut Lang for the Biennale di Firenze. As Lang would describe it, the text, Arno, was projected from a canoe club across the river onto the facade of a brothel. [The 19th/20th c. Palazzo Bargagli held the offices of Corierre della Serra, at least. That’s all I’ve found.]

In 1998 Jenny Holzer told Joan Simon that the text for Arno originated in a music video for Red, Hot + Dance, which was a 1992 AIDS/HIV fundraiser concert/album. Mark Pellington, the MTV producer/director she mentioned, had done an MTV segment on Holzer, but he was also involved in producing U2’s ZOO TV, which had a video wall full of Truism-like texts that kind of pissed Holzer off. Anyway, there are no Arno-esque texts in the Red, Hot video.

“The texts involve all the reasons to be naked or clothed — from sex to humiliation and murder,” said co-curator Ingrid Sischy to Amy Spindler. The Florence projection only ran for a few days in September, during the opening of the Biennale–and Pitti–but the text remained as LED columns in a Lucky Charms marshmallowy pavilion by Arata Isozaki, which was also where visitors could experience the fragrance Lang and Holzer developed together, that smelled, as they said often, like cigarettes, starch, and sperm.

Arata Isozaki pavilions at the Forte Belvedere, Biennale di Firenze, 1996, image: gabbelini sheppard

[The six other pairings of artists & designers were: Tony Cragg & Karl Lagerfeld (lmao); Roy Lichtenstein & Gianni Versace; Julian Schnabel & Azzedine Alaia (which wut?); Mario Merz & Jil Sander (which, same, wtf); Oliver Herring & Rei Kawakubo (hmm); and Damien Hirst & Miuccia Prada (chef kissing fingers emoji).]

Holzer adapted the Arno text again for her 1998 nine-LED column permanent installation at the Guggenheim Bilbao. Catalan excerpts of it are also engraved in two large benches there now.

As we all know by now, a scrolling LED is a helluva way to take in a text, so it was interesting when Helmut Lang posted an image of the complete [English] text for Holzer’s Arno to Instagram last night. It turns out embedding it in a stream of emoji-filled comments read by a computer is also a helluva way to take in a text, but here we are.

Cosa è Andato al Prada Doppio Club di Miami

prada_double_double_1.jpg
virgil Abloh, J.W. Anderson, Diplo e Ricky Martin erano tutti presenti al progetto di partito di Carsten Höller
Benzoino Luccello
Se fossi a Londra intorno al 2008, potresti ricordare Il Doppio Club: un incongruo pop-up a tema congolese, ospitato in un magazzino del nord di Londra. Creato dall’artista Carsten Höller e bizzarramente sponsorizzato da Prada, il club / bar / ristorante temporaneo ha attratto celebrità, modaisti e club per oltre otto mesi. Probabilmente passerà alla storia come la più eccitante esperienza della vita notturna mai vista nella capitale.
prada_double_double_2_bjork.jpg
L’EVENTO DI APERTURA DI MIAMI DOPPIO CLUB DI PRADA. FOTO: PIETRO BJORK
Quasi un decennio più tardi, Il Doppio Club è riportato in vita per la sedicesima edizione di Arte Basel Miami. Per soli tre giorni, questa seconda iterazione dell’installazione artistica esperienziale ha preso il sopravvento in uno studio cinematografico degli anni ’20 con un’imponente line-up, titolata dalla Principessa Nokia, Metodo Uomo e la Madonna Nera. È stato lanciato con una prestazione di Wyclef Jean, che ha radunato Miuccia Prada, Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Chloe Saggio e Ricky Martin nel suo giardino tropicale illuminato al neon.
Il Prada Doppio Club Miami – in contrasto con la sua edizione originale di Londra – ha una divisione estetica, tra monocromatico e iper-policromatico. Mentre lo spazio esterno sabbioso e il suo palapa bar sono illuminati da neon colorati perfettamente proporzionati, la sezione interna sembra di entrare in un film di Tim Burton – nero, bianco e nient’altro consentito. “Prendo particolare attenzione ai dettagli”, spiega Höller, che aveva incaricato i buttafuori di confiscare le cannucce colorate all’ingresso del secondo spazio, per preservare la sua identità estetica.
prada_double_double_3_getty.jpg
VIRGIL ABLOH. FOTO: GETTY
L’artista tedesco nato in Belgio è noto per la natura interattiva del suo lavoro – spesso associato al movimento dell’estetica relazionale – in cui la percezione e il processo decisionale sono centrali. Per il suo sondaggio presso la Hayward Galleria nel 2015, i visitatori sono stati confrontati con una serie di scelte: tra la porta A e la porta B per entrare nella galleria; inghiottire una pillola da una pila sul pavimento o no (pensa Il Matrice blu e rosso); è stato buttato giù dal museo da una delle due gigantesche diapositive attaccate alla facciata della Rivasud (che ha fatto il suo acclamato debutto alla Tate Moderno nel 2006). Lo stesso concetto si applica al club di Miami, dove le persone dovevano scegliere tra due contesti drasticamente contrastanti (sebbene fossero liberi di viaggiare da uno all’altro).
E mentre il “divertimento” gioca chiaramente un ruolo importante nel lavoro di Höller (è in qualche modo sconcertante pensare di essere stato addestrato come scienziato agricolo), Il Doppio Club va ben oltre il puro divertimento. È un viaggio in cui arte, design e musica coesistono.
prada_double_double_4.jpg
“IL PRADA DOPPIO CLUB MIAMI”, UN PROGETTO DI CARSTEN HÖLLER PRESENTATO DALLA FONDAZIONE PRADA MIAMI, 5-7 DICEMBRE 2017. FOTO: CASEY KELBAUGH CORTESIA FONDAZIONE PRADA
“A volte vengo a conoscere le culture attraverso la musica”, ci dice Höller, indicando la line-up caraibica e sudamericana del palcoscenico all’aperto (un momento saliente del secondo giorno è stata una performance del locale, 7-pezzo Tallawah Mento Banda ). “Volevo celebrare queste comunità, che sono così centrali nel tessuto culturale di Miami”, continua. Nel frattempo, la musica elettronica pesante ha dominato lo spazio al chiuso, grazie a spettacoli come Mimi Xu (conosciuto anche Coniglio Nebbioso) e il produttore di Chicago la Madonna Nera.
Allo stesso modo, nel 2008 a Londra, il dialogo tra culture occidentali e congolesi è stato al centro dell’attenzione. Höller (che divide il suo tempo tra la Svezia e il Ghana) ha viaggiato in Congo estensivamente negli ultimi 20 anni. Questo interesse, senza dubbio, fu alimentato dalla sua educazione in Belgio, la cui violenta eredità coloniale segnò profondamente il paese centro-africano. “Volevo adottare un approccio più positivistico”, racconta Höller. “Il Congo è un posto enorme. Volevo celebrare quella cultura in tutta la sua vitalità e potenza. ”
prada_double_double_5_bjork.jpg
HANS ULRICH OBRIST E CARSTEN HÖLLER. FOTO: PIETRO BJORK

https://pharmaciefr.org/


Ora, Arte Basel Miami – uno dei momenti più esclusivi dell’agenda culturale internazionale, in cui l’uno per cento affluisce da tutte le parti del mondo – non è esattamente l’ambiente ovvio per un autentico scambio culturale. Quindi, la diversità ha in qualche modo abbandonato l’agenda, a favore dell’esperienza esperienziale glamour e guidata dal marchio? “Tu hai l’intrinseca diversità di Miami, e in più la natura internazionale di Arte Basel”, spiega l’artista. “Era una folla molto variegata, imballata dall’inizio alla fine.”
Indipendentemente da ciò, Il Doppio Club sarà probabilmente ricordato come la cosa più bella che è successo a questa edizione di Arte Basel Miami. E, chissà, potrebbe anche creare un campo in una città vicino a te in futuro: “È certamente una possibilità”, dice Höller, che ritiene che gran parte del suo lavoro possa essere concepito come un doppio club. Si spera che la prossima tappa duri abbastanza a lungo per segnare davvero la coscienza collettiva locale.
prada_double_double_6.jpg
“IL PRADA DOPPIO CLUB MIAMI”, UN PROGETTO DI CARSTEN HÖLLER PRESENTATO DALLA FONDAZIONE PRADA MIAMI, 5-7 DICEMBRE 2017. FOTO: CASEY KELBAUGH. CORTESIA FONDAZIONE PRADA
previously, suddenly related: Rem Casafresca

Statement-As-Question: How Do You Get Here? From How Is Art History Made?

No one sends me these, so I have to find them by chance, but I am still interested in the statement-as-question as a form. If the Q&A for panel discussion or public talk *you* experienced was waylaid by such a question, please send me a link.

Last night, while I was experimenting with polishing a painting, I listened to a particularly unsatisfying discussion from the Salon series at Art Basel 2013 titled, “How Is Art History Made?” Moderated by curator Monika Szewczyk, Seth Siegelaub and Adam Szymczyk talked about their Kunsthalle Basel project, which put a series of art world structure-related questions by Siegelaub, translated into six European languages, on posters around town during the fair.
Siegelaub began his remarks by admitting he didn’t have any answers, he was just asking the questions, the main one being, basically, is Art History ultimately a history of the market? There was apparently an agreement not to name any artist names, so the discussion remained very general, which is not to say theoretical.
Ultimately, the only satisfying thing was that the panel’s question-as-title about a question-as-project led directly to the frustrated audience member’s statement-as-question. A woman off camera, unidentified, on the front row, with a Chinese accent, had apparently, and not unreasonably, assumed the officially organized event would answer the question of its title. It had not, and so she had just one simple question.
It begins at 37:00. My interest is to accurately document the experience of the text, so I have preserved grammatical usage. Linebreaks are intended to approximate pauses:
Previously:
Statement-As-Question from Fractures of the Civilization
‘I’m Going To Fail,’ or Protocols of Participation

Continue reading “Statement-As-Question: How Do You Get Here? From How Is Art History Made?”

Répliques at the Musée des beaux-arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds, 30 June 2017

repliques_mba_ch-d-f.jpg
Just when you thought The Grand Tour couldn’t get any grander.
I am psyched, though no longer quite as surprised as you might be right now, to announce that Our Guernica Cycle – Ivanka / Merkel 2017.03.17 will be included in an exhibition at Musée des beaux-arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. Titled “Répliques : l’original à l’épreuve de l’art”, the show explores the history, distribution, and appreciation of art through replicas, duplication, and appropriation. It includes post-war works from the collection of Olivier Mosset, which the artist donated to the Musée in 2007, as well as other historical and contemporary works from the permanent collection. The show is organized by Gabriel Umstätter.
When the Musée folks emerged to identify themselves from the Kickstarter campaign, there were a few harried weeks to get the concept, the image, the object, and the logistics all pinned down in time for the opening. I must say I’m impressed by the cool confidence, precision and thoughtfulness, and I’m relieved that what was essentially a wild test of a print turned out great. [Did I bury the lede here? Has a museum ever acquired a work straight out of a Kickstarter campaign before?]
The Musée will feature a full-scale, Renaissance Edition print of the Ivanka/Merkel painting. I imagine the conceptual disaster-in-the-making of an outsourced painting of a crucial historical instant made in the style of a disgraced, redemption-seeking politician and reproduced following the modified pyramid schema of America’s most mindlessly popular painter offers many, many entry points for a discourse on the moment. But then again, from this artist list, I’m sure there’s no shortage of eye-popping insights:

Greg Allen, Carl Andre [! -ed.], Ian Anüll, John Armleder, Olivier Babin, Robert Ballagh, Aimé Barraud, Francis Baudevin, René Bauermeister, Ben, Mike Bidlo, Julius von Bismarck, Nicolas Boissonnas, Bryan Cera, Jerome Cavaliere, César, John Dogg (Colin de Land & Richard Prince), Gérard Collin-Thiébaut, le Dessinateur (automate Jaquet-Droz), Marcel Duchamp, Gretchen Faust, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Sylvie Fleury, Christian Floquet, Camille Graeser, Peter Halley, Charles Humbert, Donald Judd, Jean-Blaise Junod, Edouard Kaiser, Scott Kildall, Frank Kozik, Joseph Kosuth, L/B (Sabina Lang & Daniel Baumann), Alix Lambert, Bertrand Lavier, Louise Lawler, Jørgen Leth, Sherrie Levine, Claude Loewer, Michael Mandiberg, Jean-Luc Manz, Allan Mc Collum, Claude Mellan, Ana Mendieta [No? I guess I added that one. -ed.]Mathieu Mercier, Olivier Mosset, John Nixon, Richard Pettibone, Raoul Pictor (Hervé Graumann & Mathieu Cherubini), Bernard Piffaretti, André Ramseyer, Martial Raysse, Léopold Robert, Walter Robinson, Norman Rockwell, Bob Ross, Claude Rutault, Yara Said, le Tampographe Sardon, Lily van der Stokker, Elaine Sturtevant, Peter Tillessen, Corinne Vionnet, Wallace & Donohue, Joan Waltemath, Andy Warhol, Lawrence Weiner, Dick Whyte, Ian Wilson, Madeleine Woog.

I am as humbled as I am mystified by the sense of accomplishment this situation gives me right now.
Répliques : l’original à l’épreuve de l’art, Musée des beaux-arts, La Chaux-de-Fonds, 30 June – 29 Oct 2017 [chaux-de-fonds.ch]
Related: Our Guernica, After Our PIcasso Kickstarter campaign page [kickstarter]

Regarding Camille Henrot’s Elephant Child, A Book

It is not clear how the Oracle at Delphi worked. One day a month, except in winter, the priestess, known as Pythia, entered a sacred chamber, perched on a gilded tripod, peered into a bowl of water from an enchanted spring and, imbued by mystical vapors with the *enthusiasmos*, or divine spirit, of Apollo, she answered the urgent questions of the faithful. The Oracle was the most powerful public figure in the Ancient Greek world. No military or public policy decision was made without consulting her, and she was always right; any unwanted outcomes were attributed to mortals’ failure to properly interpret or follow the Oracle’s predictions. Centuries of Pythian pronouncements are recorded. For a long time they were in iambic pentameter. Then they switched to prose. Some accounts had a lucid, forceful Pythia dropping these pure rhymes herself. In others, the possessed priestess’ utterings seemed incomprehensible to all but her handlers, a coterie of priests known as the *hosioi* who, one would say, translated the prophecies.

elephant_child_cover_invpress.jpg

*Elephant Child* is a book about Camille Henrot’s 2014-15 exhibition “The Pale Fox”. Very much like *Grosse Fatigue*, Henrot’s extraordinary video from the 2013 Venice Biennale, it explores humans’ attempts to understand the universe, and it marvels at the structures this inevitably impossible effort yields. It here can refer to either the book, or the exhibition. Henrot suggested thinking of *Grosse Fatigue* as a history and “The Pale Fox” as a geography, which I guess makes *Elephant Child* a map. They are three incarnations of Henrot’s universal narrative, all in one, one in all, a trinity.

henrot_elephant_child_spread_4.jpg
Literally. Many screenshots from *Grosse Fatigue* are woven throughout the book, as is the video’s lyrical poem, performed by Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh and created in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg. Ideas and references from *Grosse Fatigue* also abound, particularly Henrot’s foundational experience as an artist fellow at the Smithsonian, where she captured traces of the museum’s conflicted histories through taxonomy, evolution, colonialism, anthropology, and religion.

henrot_elephant_child_spread_3.jpg
*Elephant Child* begins by holding up a compelling example of what we should be more cautious of calling an origin myth. The Dogon people of Western Africa tell of Amma, who created the universe, his twin, by drawing. The chaotic eighth of their four pairs of twin offspring rebelled, bringing disorder to the universe, but also creativity. He was Ogo, The Pale Fox. Henrot eagerly mined this cosmology for motifs that recur across origin myths-eggs, twins, recursion, primordial drawings-even as she acknowledges its credulous source: a blind Dogon hunter named Ogotemmeli, who reportedly wound out the tale during a long conversation with two white French anthropologists, Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, who published it as a book in 1965. The book was called *The Pale Fox*.

In its function as an exhibition map, *Elephant Child* traces Henrot’s process of identifying structures, and then translating them into schema. The intersection, or collision, of various schema produce the conditions under which the exhibition takes shape. As Henrot said in an interview, that is mentioned in, but does not appear in, *Elephant Child*,

I found it interesting to liken the elements related to the different phylogenies of living beings to the organizational systems of James Joyce’s *Ulysses*. When Joyce wrote *Ulysses*, he had organized systems in which a literary style corresponded to a color corresponded to a theme corresponded to a bodily organ. This over-systematization creates freedom, as categories can be understood together as a group or structure that permits arbitrariness. I wanted my exhibition to have this same freedom.

henrot_pale_fox_doge.jpgDogon meets Doge

And so Henrot lays four chronological stages intuited from Leibniz onto the cardinal points of a compass in a rectangular gallery-a shape representing man, for God is a circle. The walls and floor are painted chromakey blue and encircled by an undulating, sculptural shelf, suggesting a timeline, of polished aluminum, which is piled with metaphorically resonant objects and images:
henrot_elephant_child_spread_1.jpg

There are photos of my family and photos I bought on ebay…and there are different kinds of magazines, advertisements, leaflets, things I picked up in the street, things I bought. The images and the objects have very different statuses…I chose lots of embarrassing objects, because I wanted to focus on clutter-all the objects that you don’t know what to do with, but you don’t dare throw out.

What did not occur to me until I got to the very end of the book, and only then because I’d just seen one appear at auction, is that among these hundreds of objects are Henrot’s own works of art. This category is mentioned once in Scepanski’s intro, and nowhere else, until you get to a checklist of works, which turn out to be the only objects mapped onto the show’s schema. Rather than a *gesamtkunstwerk*, then, Henrot’s show, and its elaborate conceptual confabulations, are a context, a framing, for the production and presentation of her own art. Which here includes dozens of Zen-ish ink drawings that approximate Amma’s generative marks, and bronzes that echo either exoticized artifacts or postwar desktop abstraction. None of which is ever discussed.

henrot_elephant_child_install.jpg

Or maybe it is.

Maybe this book not only maps the arbitrary folly of inevitably subjective systematization that gave the show its premise; it instantiates it. It’s its own recursive cautionary tale, a *Gödel, Escher, Bach* of Henrotian Systems Theory, and turtles all the way down as practice. And the art is the result.

Henrot is trying to be the fun, free, arbitrary elegance she wants to see in the chaotic world she consciously over-systematized to the point of collapse.

The only place I’ve seen Henrot discussing her art per se is an interview with Rachael Vance last winter during the fifth and final installation of “The Pale Fox”.

[CH] I spend a lot of time looking at the objects on my desk. Also, when I go to the doctor I am fascinated by what they have in their waiting rooms, on their desks, and the way these things are placed. The objects are supposed to represent power but they are also ridiculous. More often than not, the doctor will have one of those huge tape dispensers, which just look so silly. Every time I see them, I always think:
“Why would you have a tape holder that takes up all this room? Wouldn’t it be more elegant to have a small tape in your drawer? And wouldn’t it be even more elegant to just do everything on your iPad?” One day perhaps things like that won’t exist anymore, who knows. Most of the bronzes in “The Pale Fox” were conceived out of this process in which we try to introduce rationality to something that is fundamentally irrational.

[RV] Compared to the rest of your material in “The Pale Fox”, your sculptures stand alone as very substantial yet quiet pieces. Do they represent some sort of therapy for you?
[CH] It’s true that they have a very different energy from the rest of my work. When I think about the exhibition, I think that energy came from a sense of anxiety. However, the sculptures came from a more playful and distant part of myself. When I start making a sculpture and stop having fun, I stop making the sculpture and move onto another one. In a way, there is this part of my work that is very disciplined and almost masochistic. The whole process of buying five hundred items on eBay and doing these charts and maps and studying them is a little mad. Just making the list for the exhibition was a headache. It was the same with *Grosse Fatigue*, writing the voice-over was such a long process. Editing the images was a nightmare and my assistant and I became really sick. There was a super-long list of different footage lines because there were more than 25 images running simultaneously. It was really crazy, but I guess I’m driven by this idea of going mad by trying to produce the impossible project.

henrot_elephant_child_spread_2.jpg
The actual genesis of “The Pale Fox” is not clear, but it appears to follow (from) *Grosse Fatigue* and its success. The screenshots in the book show most of the ebay photos shipping in November 2013. Most of the sculptures date from 2014. So this kind of object making seems relatively new for Henrot, who previously favored film and had been skeptical of the artist label.

It is probably speciously late of me to note Michael Connor’s explanation from the preface that the main text of *Elephant Child* was “initially narrated by Camille to curator Clara Meister over a period of several days.” It is an “intellectual framework,” a “set of ideas as carefully crafted as any of her works,” that also comprised, on Connors’ part, “a certain amount of panic” and “scissors and tape.” In her introduction Westphälischer Kunstverein curator Kristina Scepanski credits Meister and Connor as co-authors of Henrot’s text. All three, along with Bromberg, are also the book’s co-editors.

I did not see any installations of “The Pale Fox” in person, but like so many others, I was utterly transfixed by *Grosse Fatigue* and remain so. It remains a remarkable, ambitious, challenging, and beautiful work, and I continue to marvel at its making. *Elephant Child* communicates that essence-and much of the content-in book form. But it also captures the multitude of overlapping systems and the many talented people assembling in the wake of Henrot’s triumphant Venice debut. It documents at least a part of the structure that grows around an artist to sustain a career, or a practice, that might, one hopes, survive the chaos that yields such works again. And if a crowd of *hosioi* decrypting Henrot’s pronouncements and wan ink drawings and elegant bronze pleasure objects are what it takes, then so be it.

Buy *Elephant Child* from Inventory Press, or on Amazon [inventorypress.com]
Order from Chaos: Interview with Camille Henrot [sleek-mag]