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

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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.
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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.
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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.
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“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. ”
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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.
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“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

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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.

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*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.

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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.

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*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:
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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.

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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.

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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]

When Form Becomes Content, Or Luanda, Encyclopedic City

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Luanda, Encyclopedic City, installation view, 2013, via beyond entropy
In 2013, Luanda, Encyclopedia City, an exhibition by Edson Chagas at the Angola Pavilion, won the Golden Lion for National Pavilion at the Venice Biennale. It was the first time Angola had participated in the Biennale, and the first time an African country had won. It was Chagas’s first solo exhibition in Europe.
The exhibition comprised images from Chagas’ ongoing series, Found, Not Taken (2009 – ), in which he photographed an object from various cities’ streets in front of a carefully selected background. The curators of the pavilion, Paula Nascimento and Stefano Rabolli Pansera of the firm Beyond Entropy Ltd, selected 23 images of Luanda.
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Luanda, Encyclopedic City, installation view via tankboys.biz
The commissioned title, Luanda, Encyclopedic City, is an unabashedly direct callout to the main Biennale exhibition, Encyclopedic Palace, curated by Masimiliano Gioni. The pavilion was the Palazzo Cini, a private museum of Venetian painting just off the Grand Canal.
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From Found Not Taken, installation of inkjet prints on pallets, title via moma.org, image via beyond entropy
Chagas’s images are appealing, but not groundbreaking. They feel like painterly Gabriel Orozco photos where journalism replaces self-conscious lyricism. What was most striking about the exhibition was its sculptural and spatial qualities. Offset prints of the images were placed in large stacks on pallet-like plinths, providing a stark contrast of both content and form with the palazzo’s ornate galleries and collection.
While I’ve found no mention of Orozco’s work in discussions of the show, the references to Felix Gonzalez-Torres were clear, broad, and abundant. Indeed, it felt like Chagas’s works were the most powerful and effective use of the replenishable stack since Felix put the form on the contemporary map 25 years ago. Beside the bases, one innovation was a large, printed folder, which turned visitors’ sheafs of free prints into a tidy, transport-friendly exhibition publication.
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Ocean of Images installation shot with Edson Chagas’s Found, Not Taken, Luanda, 2013, image: moma via aperture
When MoMA included five images from Chagas’ Found, Not Taken series in last year’s Ocean of Images show, they showed the stacks, minus the folder, with the pallets. Or again, pallet-shaped plinths, since the stacks involved actual, non-sculptural pallets, too. The works were now credited as coming from the Founding Collection of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa. [You know what collectors say: biennials before Basel.]
The stacks’ appeal, as Felix knew, is their distributive power. As MoMA’s Kristen Gaylord put it, “they require the interaction of our thousands of visitors, who take them away to hang on a wall, toss in the garbage, or give away, distributing Chagas’s work throughout the world.”
So it’s kind of amazing to find out that the stacks weren’t Chagas’s idea; they came from the graphic designers’ for the Angolan Pavilion, a two-person firm in Venice called Tankboys. In the official press release, the curators were described as collaborating withsomeone called Thankboys on “design and art direction,” but almost no other mention of a Thankboys can be found online. Tankboys, however, Lorenzo Mason & Marco Campardo, lists the pavilion on their un-Googled website:

Our role as designers was to find an adequate setting for the contemporary artworks while also creating a dialectic relationship with the permanent collection present on the site. While observing the space, we have decided to create a physical and imaginary landscape, adding another layer to the location by creating 23 towers with posters of the 23 photographs selected by the curators. The physical structure of the exhibition has allowed us to obtain two goals: we have been able to give shape and structure to the photographs while also creating a physical encyclopedia (as the title suggests) of the artworks displayed. Twenty-three posters scattered around the room, 70 x 100 cm large, can be collected from the piles and bound together using a red cover especially designed (the chosen typeface was our interpretation of Aldo Novarese’s Forma) to hold the prints together.

This is how your Venetian sausage is made. Other of the firm’s projects include finely crafted wood tables, so I assume they created the plinths, too.
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Ibrahim Mahama and Edson Chagas installation view at Palazzo Gallery, 2015
Chagas’ other exhibitions of Found, Not Taken included c-prints of images from the cities where he lived-London and Newport as well as Luanda-framed, editioned, and hung on the wall. For example, in a victory lap after Venice, he had a two-person show with Ibrahim Mahama at Palazzo Gallery where things are framed. The stacks appear to be a direct product of the exhibition conditions in the Palazzo Cini. Which were then bought by the Zeitz and repeated at MoMA. With no mention of Tankboys’ formative contributions at all.
I don’t mean to denigrate Chagas’ images, or to assert he has any less than total claim to authorship of his works. I’m sure Chagas had ample opportunity to consider the options and proposals for presenting his work. But I can’t shake the feeling that I misunderstood the works in Luanda, Encyclopedic Pavilion, and my misperceptions were reinforced at MoMA.
Megan Eardley wrote about Luanda, Encyclopedic City for Africa Is A Country:

Enter Africa, the expert in European fantasies. At the Angolan pavilion, Edson Chagas has crafted an elegant response to the encyclopedic project, which begins with the title of his photographic series. “Found Not Taken,” thumbs its nose at the Europeans who cannot stop carting off the world’s knowledge to its curio shops, laboratories, and museums.

And yet I can’t help but feel it’s the opposite now, that the western art system has safely processed and subsumed another African artist for consumption. Independent curators took a particular, localized tranche of a little-known African artist’s work, and poured it into an instantly recognizable form, one long associated with a canonical contemporary artist, whose work deals with identity and power, and optimized it for propagation at the art world’s greatest curatorial circus, where it wins top prize and spawns hours-long lines. It’s like Venice gave the Golden Lion to itself.
But what about the stack? Can we have stacks now that nod to Felix without being necessarily and only an appropriation? Can they work outside of the high-traffic, souvenir-hunting environment of a biennial or a museum? Maybe when Tankboys grafted Felix’s concepts of print-as-sculpture and the endlessly free, devalued original onto Chagas’s work, they helped create a place for the stack apart from Felix’s legacy. For Chagas’s otherwise unrelated images, the stack functioned as an exhibition device and a publishing & distribution strategy. Maybe the stack can now begin to function as a platform, not just an object, like how Seth Siegelaub’s Xerox Book was at once a book and a show. Maybe. We’ll have to see. [h/t to Paul Soulellis for the impetus to revisit the stack]

⌘S

About five years ago I began collecting dead websites. It started in 2010 with Thomas Hirschhorn, after his first website, made for the Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival in Amsterdam, disappeared from the net. The Spinoza project was the third in a series of temporary projects dedicated to philosophers.
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Hirschhorn calls these “presence and production” works. Here is a 2009 interview with Ross Birrell:

“Presence” and “Production” are terms I use for specific projects which require my presence and my production. It means to make a physical statement here and now.
I believe that only with presence – my presence – and only with production – my production – can I provoke through my work, an impact on the field.

When the project is over, the programs end, the materials are dispersed, the artist moves on, and a couple of months later, the website where the entire thing had been documented disappears. Then the links go dead, the URL expires, and gets scooped up by some zombie ad network. All that remains are some jpgs illustrating Marcus Steinweg’s Bijlmer lectures.
I’d been to the first at Documenta, the Bataille Monument, in 2002, but not the Spinoza Festival, and so the website was it for me. I’d wanted to read and see more, longer. And then I discovered I couldn’t. It was gone.
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So when Hirschhorn launched his second website the next year, for CRYSTAL OF RESISTANCE, the Swiss Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennale, I was ready. Almost. I grabbed the whole site several times, but l missed some galleries. And then it was gone.
The GRAMSCI MONUMENT site in 2013, I definitely got that one. And Hirschhorn’s project at the Palais de Tokyo in 2014, FLAMME ETERNELLE, I got that one too.
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When the greatest website in the world got edited into oblivion, I grabbed it from the Internet Archive and made a piece out of it last year: Untitled (Embroidery Trouble Shooting Guide).
Then a few months ago I heard MOCA had deleted the informative and interactive mini-site for Philipp Kaiser and Miwon Kwon’s Land Art show, so I rebuilt that one. Or I’m in process. I still have to reconnect the Google Earth links. [Google’s deprecated KML API may have led to the page’s demise.]
This is how I started posting them as subdomains, similar to found texts or found web objects. In the case of Hirschhorn, I was very aware since Venice that these were different, and very much not his work: “This website is neither an artwork, nor part of the artwork <>”, it said on the front of the site.
But wasn’t, but now it was, but of a different work. Hirschhorn’s projects required his presence and his production, and my sites had neither. They appeared the same but were the opposite.
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They weren’t just for me anymore. At least I didn’t have to think so.
I do edit them, leave my mark, track changes, in the text somewhere, or the source, in ways that are invisible or imperceptible, where I imagine literally no one will ever know or care. At one point, in a more cynical mood, I rewrote the entire Gramsci Monument to be entirely about me. But the more I consider Hirschhorn’s practice, the less sure I am that the gesture works as critique. [Of him, anyway. Of me, OTOH… At least I kept a clean version too.]
For example, here is something I wrote in the source of Ends of the Earth:

Though it is still available on the Internet Archive, this is the kind of thing that should, I feel, exist within an art context. It is too off-the-cuff to imagine these two mirrors as a site and non-site, but that is an apt reference, I won’t throw it out. What ultimately motivates this repetition of the site is a bafflement at why MOCA removed it in the first place. Huge shoutout to Kimberly Drew (@museummammy) for calling this to my attention.

I just feel like I have to grab these things, even the ones that get scraped into the Internet Archive. It’s an urge that I can’t dismiss, even when I can recognize the futility of it. I have to save them.

It. Was. The. Jutes. It. Was. The. Jutes.

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Ibrahim Mahama, installation KNUST, Summer 2014

[Ibrahim] Mahama is largely concerned with the way in which these materials are given meaning as commodities, as well as literally, as products of a given environment. The economic circulation of the jute sack is informed both by various transferences of value (from the container of commodities to a unique commodity by appropriation) and processes of exchange (from the official Cocoa Board to the quotidian lives of traders and consumers).
– curator Osei Bonsu [via Ellis King]

And it goes on from there. Ibrahim Mahama is a 28-year-old Ghanaian artist whose large-scale installation of repurposed jute sacks, stitched and draped, provides the overwhelming coda to All The World’s Futures, Okwui Enwezor’s exhibition at the 2015 Venice Biennale. He’s also been called “the next Oscar Murillo” by none other than Stefan Simchowitz, who claims he discovered the artist “on the Internet” and gave him his career. Now ArtNEWS is reporting that Mahama is being sued by Simchowitz and his dealer-partner Ellis King, for breaking their exclusive contract to represent him, and for “de-authenticating” nearly 300 [!] artworks he previously signed. The value of those artworks is now claimed to be nearly $4.5 million.
The complaint filed by Simchowitz in Central California Federal Court is eye-opening for its combination of candor, hubris, and delusion. [Here is a pdf, it’s only 17 pages, so read the whole thing.] The ArtNEWS article explains the circumstances of Simcho’s case very clearly, so read that, too. I don’t need to recap it.
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Ibrahim Mahama’s 2013 installation at KNUST Museum, Ghana
What I find so extraordinary is Simcho’s claims at having made Mahama’s career and his audacious manipulation of Mahama’s work. Let’s look at the first one first:

8. Prior to meeting Simchowitz, Mahama had little, if any, recognition in the Western art world. Mahama had never displayed his work in any gallery or exhibit outside Ghana, either individually or as part of a group. He had made few sales of his work, if any. His work was not included in the collections of any museums, and exhibitions of his work were limited to Ghana. In short, Mahama was virtually unknown to the art world and had no experience exhibiting his art outside of his home country.
9. In or about 2012, Simchowitz contacted Mahama through Facebook. Simchowitz had seen photographs of some of Mahama’s pieces online, principally consisting of draped jute coal sacks, and thought that he showed promise. Simchowitz eventually introduced Mahama to Ellis King, and the parties agreed to work together.

The timing here is not trivial, and Simcho’s 2012 claim is vague at best. But in late 2012 Mahama showed one of his first jute sack installations during his MFA show at KNUST, El Anatsui’s alma mater and the leading art school at the top university in Ghana. That’s where artist/filmmaker/curator Nana Oforiatta Ayim scouted him out and began collaborating with him, introducing him to her international network. As Ayim put it:

I agreed to collaborate with him, connected him with collectors, wrote about him to institutions like the Tate and the Saatchi, to provide him a bridge at that early stage of his career. The art world, like so many others, is so full of corridors and gatekeepers that an artist, especially one working and living in Ghana, could go their whole lives without ever being able to sustain themselves through their work. I am a little weary of institutionalising this kind of ‘residency’ as I’m not keen on that particular play of power and never have been, the thought of myself as a purveyor whose word ‘makes or breaks’ an artist is a little sickening, as I don’t adhere to that notion of privilege. And yet, there is no denying that an email here, a phone call there, from someone who has already built a reputation through their work, can enable an artist like Ibrahim to have his art seen in galleries and museums internationally, enable him to have a residency in London, to sell and provide himself an income, to stay living in Ghana rather than moving abroad, to not compromise on his vision.

And that is almost exactly what happened. In 2013 Mahama had a residency in London at Gasworks; created a jute sack installation at the Saatchi Gallery [and another in 2014]; and, according to the lawsuit, in October 2013 he agreed to sell Simcho & King six “Lots” of sewn jute sacks for £90,000. Two Lots, Simcho claimed, totaling about 5,000 sf, would be for two installations in King’s Dublin gallery. In 2014 the other four “Lots” [which I estimate to have been 8-9,000 sf total] went to London where they were cut up and stretched to make 309 separate, painting-lookin’ artworks in three different sizes [9×4.5′, 8×4′ and 6×3′].
Which would turn out to give the young Mahama a new perspective on commodity, appropriation, and the process of exchange. Simcho’s suit says the “Contract” with Mahama was oral, yet there is obviously email traffic that flowed throughout the relationship. Mahama, the suit says, visited Simcho’s guy in London “to oversee and approve the stretching process.” Months later, in Dec. 2014, Mahama went to Dublin where he installed King’s show, and where he “signed the 294 Individual Works.”
“As a result [of the Dublin show in January 2015], the formerly unknown Mahama suddenly rose to fame,” claims Simchowitz. This, after two shows at Saatchi, a London residency, participation in DAK’ART, the largest African biennial, and an announced show at The Mistake Room in Los Angeles, and certainly after the decision to be in Enwezor’s Biennale [though two months before the public announcement]? No. Simchowitz did not make Mahama famous. He tried to buy big into momentum surrounding a clearly ambitious, talented, young–and recognized–emerging artist.
And then he sold big right ahead of the Biennale announcement. Simchowitz says he made Mahama’s career, and made him famous, but the collectors he flipped to didn’t even know who “the next Oscar Murillo” was they were buying: “I’ve sold Ibrahim’s work to ten of my best collectors without telling them what they will be getting,” Simcho told Los Angeles magazine, “I called it the Simchowitz Trust-Me Special.”
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Lot 107: Ibrahim Mahama, Untitled, 2014, “Signed and dated ‘Ibrahim 2014’ on the reverse.” It already found its way from Simcho to secondary market dealer Inigo Philbrick, who cashed it out for £12,500 in June 2015. image:phillips
What would Mahama call it? Despite having sold the material and signing them, the artist clearly had second thoughts about the 300 stretched works, and about continuing with Simchowitz and King. Another important exploration of capital, commodification, exchange, and colonialism, I guess. During the Dublin show the artist cut ties, asserted that the 300+ works were no longer authentic, and claimed control and copyright over the installations.
The suit says 27 stretched works were sold for around $16,000 each. That’s almost $450,000, at least double the dealers’ entire outlay. The lawsuit is over the impending worthlessness of the remaining 282 stretched works, which comes to $4.45 million. Plus expenses. Simcho can’t claim he lost money on Mahama; only that he hasn’t made enough. And enough here means at least a 20x return.

So WTF. The copyright thing is a non-starter. The only way Simcho can claim copyright on artworks is if he claims he made them, in which case, they’re even less than worthless, or he documents they were work-for-hire, which who even ever? The biggest issue of the lawsuit is whether it’s even valid. Does Mahama selling entirely other work directly to an unidentified California collector give the court enough reason to examine events that transpired between parties in Ghana, London & Dublin? Lawyers can tackle that one.
It all leaves the question of the stretched artworks. Which, though he regrets it, Mahama was apparently involved in making. And signing. Part of me says, so what? Richter signs stuff that’s not art. He excludes stuff that he’s made and sold. Is an artist bound for life by every creative decision he makes at 26? That’s the risk of buying early work from emerging artists. It might be famous someday, it might be worthless. Simcho’s real problem is that he had 300 pieces of it. He tried to buy it all. He bought all the guy’s materials in bulk, then he chopped them up. He turned installations into paintings. Not paintings in the art sense, but as a unit of exchange: painting like breaking a hundred into singles so it goes farther at the club.
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Ibrahim Mahama, Adum Train Station installation, 2013, image via: publicdelivery
There is one subset of 15 unsigned works which might show Mahama the way out of this dispute. Simcho calls them “the California Works,” because he has them:

Each of the unsigned pieces was created at the same time, in the same place, by the same person (Atkins), in the same manner, from the same materials, and for the same cost to Plaintiffs as the works Mahama did sign. On information and belief, Mahama did not provide any reason why he failed to sign the California Works.
59. Bearing Mahama’s signature to verify their authenticity and provenance, the California Works may be sold for approximately $16,700 each. Without his signature, the pieces are simply jute coal sacks mounted to wooden frames, which impacts their commercial value.

He says “Simply jute coal sacks mounted to wooden frames” like it’s a bad thing. Yet the transactional history, the embedded memory and experience, and the transformation of those jute sacks is at the core of Mahama’s practice. What if he just kept on making them, as an infinite edition? Instead of de-authenticating Simcho’s 300 Mahama pseudo-artworks, why not just devalue them, by making as many as anyone in the world wants?
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Mahama employs the traders who provide him the bags to sew them. Usually they are undocumented migrant workers. So a big jute sack artwork export business would create jobs in Ghana. image: gasworks
Mahama could continue his jute sack acquisition process, and keep hiring his undocumented migrant merchant workers to sew them. And then he could sell these entry-level Mahamas for what Simcho paid: about $300, stretched. Make as many as the demand warrants, whatever the market will bear. It’d be like Olafur Eliasson’s Little Sun solar lamp artwork, but in reverse. Like Danh Vo’s father’s calligraphy letters. Or Walter de Maria’s infinite edition High Energy Units. Who says art has to be expensive, or that the white guy collector’s the only one who can reap the profits from selling it? With Mahama’s Stretched Art, Ghana can diversify from cocoa and develop an export market for the detritus of consumer capitalism transfigured into tasteful masstige commodities of criticality. Catch the vision!
Jute Sack Artworks Are at the Center of Simchowitz Lawsuit Against Venice Biennale Artist [artnews]
Ibrahim Mahama talks with curator Osei Bonsu in Oct. 2014 at the Contemporary African Art Fair in London [youtube]
UPDATE: SIMCOR CEO responds on Facebook [facebook]

Robbrecht & Daem’s Documenta Pavilions

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Aue Pavilions in Karlsaue, 1992, Robbrecht & Daem, image: documenta.de
While poking around documenta 9 (1992), the year Cady Noland and Bob Nickas did their amazing thing in the new parking garage, I found these nice pavilions in the Karlsaue. Documenta director Jan Hoet commissioned five temporary exhibition pavilions from Ghent-based architects Paul Robbrecht and Kristien Daem.
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Aue Pavilions interior, 1992 Kassel, image: Kristien Daem
The corrugated steel shells read a bit like train cars, but with an entire wall of glass, which made them perfect, someone figured, for showing painting. Which, Isa Genzken actually showed a resin sculpture. Gerhard Richter enclosed his gallery in walnut paneling. Adapted from simple, prefab industrial structures and raised on wooden pylons, were built to last the summer. They’re still with us.
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images: google streetview from 2009
After documenta wrapped, the pavilions found their way to Almere, a planned Dutch city east of Amsterdam built on reclaimed land.
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For nearly twenty years, they housed an arts center, and eventually a municipal museum called–De Paviljoens.
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The architects compared it favorably to a caravan (trailer) park. It was the kind of place where kids could hang out underneath, no problem. It even looks to have inspired the modular manufactured insta-architecture of the school across the street. [Speaking of streets, I thought the museum being located on the corner of Odeonstraat and Slapstickpad was a fluke, but surfing around Google, Almere has the greatest street names in the world. The next neighborhood over is Comedy Caperstraat, which intersects streets named for Abbott, Costello, Laurel, Hardy, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin. There’s even a David Nivenweg. Another neighborhood’s named after directors, including Fassbinder, Tati, and Pasolini.]
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Not sure what happened here, though. Looks pretty edgy!
The artist-themed neighborhoods include a Marcel Duchampstraat, but now the city has no museum. Dutch culture budget cuts hit The Pavilions hard, and though its website lives on, the museum closed for good in 2010. Developers [bought? got?] them, and In 2012, plans were announced to move the pavilions to the center of Nieuwe Stad (New City), an adapted reuse development of a former industrial site in Amersfoort, a city between Almere and Utrecht.
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That finally happened, and just this summer, the pavilions hosted some big festival. Nieuwe Stad’s slogan, DOE MEE IN DE PAVILJOENS! sounds hilariously worse in English.
Aue Pavilions, Kassel, Almere, Amersfoort, 1992- [robbrechtendaem]
documenta 9 archive [documenta.de]
De Paviljoens [depaviljoens.nl]
Doe Mee In De Paviljoens! [denieuwestad.nl]

Court Order, Or What Would Danh Vo Do?

Oh no, I was too slow. I was in the middle of a deadline-intensive project when I suggested that. While I understood the reluctance, even the revulsion, an artist might feel, but being compelled by a judge to make a “large and impressive” artwork–and a $350,000 one, no less–sounded like a fascinating situation. What would you do?
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…, 2015, oak and polychrome Madonna and child, French Early Gothic 1280- 1320; marble torso of Apollo, Roman workshop, 1st-2nd century ad; steel 154.2 × 50 × 50 cm
Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery [works list (pdf) via palazzograssi.it]

Well, today, just as I was mapping out the parameters of my own proposal, Danh Vo apparently answered that question himself. His proposal to Dutch-in-Switzerland collector Bert Kreuk was a little unclear in the details, but it involves a quote from the demon possessing Regan in The Exorcist, which Vo had also used for a piece in his show at Marian Goodman in London last January, and which he included in “Slip of the Tongue,” his fantastic group show at Punta della Dogana in Venice. [I guess it’s still available. Ask for it by name!]
Maybe Vo already had this whole Kreuk/Gemeentemuseum/lawsuit situation on his mind when he chose The Exorcist for his source material. Who knows? But the artwork parameters cited in the court’s new ruling in Kreuk’s lawsuit are intriguing enough to lay out, and at least give some though to the question: What Would Danh Vo Do?

Continue reading “Court Order, Or What Would Danh Vo Do?”

I Got Up, I Met, I Went, I Read

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On Kawara’s One Million Years readings have always had a profound effect on me. From the first time I saw it at the Dia, to the resonance of One Million Years in Okwui Enwezor’s Documenta 11 in 2002; to an installation at David Zwirner, to the reopening Stedelijk. It was Brian Sholis’s moving account of reading with his then-fiancee Julia Ault at Zwirner that cemented my determination to read one day, too.
That day was April 5th, Easter Sunday. I had booked my wife and myself to read in the first shift, just as the Guggenheim opened. I’d already seen the museum’s On Kawara retrospective, but on a day when there was no reading. These are some recollections and thoughts of the experience with the piece.
One Million Years and an unannounced roaming exhibition of one week’s worth of date paintings in kindergarten classes are the two projects Kawara authorized to continue after his death last summer at age 29,771 days. Mary, who was coordinating production of One Million Years and prepping volunteers, took our picture when we sat down on the dais. She said the artist used to listen to recordings of One Million Years as he worked in his studio, and that the liked to have photos of the readers.
I had not anticipated such a thing, but now the entire project felt extremely personal. It was not just a performance, but a communication, a communion, with the artist himself. But not anymore, not for us. It turns out the Guggenheim was recording the reading, but only for exhibition documentation. Posthumous recordings like ours would not end up contributing to a “complete” recording. That aspect of the work, too, ended with the artist’s death.
Still, as I’d expected, reading itself was a wonderful experience. I found it somehow meditative and exciting at the same time. I found myself thinking of the dates we were reading, long before modern humans, and their history, existed. Yet narrative was there; the numbers became their own narrative. There was suspense as we counted down to an even hundred. Symmetrical numbers, or pairs or trios of digits, or chains of multi-syllabics, felt momentous, like a winning poker hand. These numbers, these years, with literally no significance of their own had significance thrust upon them, at least for a few seconds, by being read aloud. It turns out long numbers are not usually read aloud.
The greatest thrill was the echo of the Guggenheim’s rotunda. We sat on the ground floor, backs to the window, with loudspeakers flanking us, and our numbers seemed to ring out through the show. We took it slow and serious. We intoned, and I imagined how we must affect the reception of the rest of Kawara’s works up the ramp. We contributed our small part to everyone else’s enlightenment.
After we ended, we went through the show. We stopped on the way out to watch our replacements. Mary had said it’s easy to tell when the readers are a couple. Inversely, it was immediately obvious that the two jokers after us were either breaking up, or didn’t know each other and could not be bothered. Even on the rare numbers they didn’t mumble away into nothing, you could barely hear them standing right in front of the dais.
But how was this really any different from our experience? In fact the sound from One Million Years never left the ground floor, and sometimes it hardly left the little stage. In the hard-surfaced cacophony of the rotunda, One Million Years was essentially lost. I felt very acutely the gap between our rewarding personal experience of performing and the empty opacity the being in the audience. Or of not even noticing the piece existed.
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In glass half-full mode I considered this divergence alongside the rest of Kawara’s practice, where dates and times and lists barely hint at the complexities of the artist’s daily experience.
Did I say half-full? This comparison, along with some of Kawara’s lesser known series [60s word diagrams, the coded letters, and of course, all the newspaper clippings in all the Today series boxes] made me wonder what there actually is to know? Frankly, I’ve begun to fear that under it all lurks an actual Message, hidden by Kawara, just waiting to be cracked. And that the profundity, the interpretation, the significance, will turn out to be all in our heads.

Recitation

While I knew the basics of its origins, I did not know that qur’an means “recitation”. From Oxford Islamic Studies:

Most members of the early Islamic community, including Muhammad, were illiterate. The new scripture was known as the qur’an (recitation) because believers learned it by listening to public readings and recitations. Many of Muhammad’s followers committed the passages to memory. But the Prophet also commissioned many scribes to preserve the messages in writing. They recorded the words on a variety of available materials, including paper, stones, palm leaves, and pieces of leather.

By the time of Muhammad’s death, several of his followers had memorized the entire Qur’an. Many of them, however, were killed in battle. Fearing that knowledge of the Qur’an might be lost, the leaders of the Islamic community decided to collect all the revelations, from both written and oral sources, and to compile an official version of the sacred text.

I was looking this up because several religious traditions include the public reading of sacred texts. When Okwui Enwezor introduced the concept behind the public reading of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital at the Venice Biennale, he chose Sikhism:

Taking the concept of the Sikh event, the Akhand Path (a recitation of the Sikh holy book read continuously over several days by a relay of readers), Das Kapital will be read as a dramatic text by trained actors, directed by artist and filmmaker Isaac Julien, during the entire duration of this year Art Biennale.

This reading, Okwui explained, was the center of the center of the Biennale, and was inspired by the 1974 Biennale’s condemnation of the [US-backed] coup in Chile on Sept 11, 1973 and its oppressive aftermath:

The dedication of the program of events to Chile and against fascism remains one of the most explicit attempts, in recent memory, by which an exhibition of the stature of the Art Biennale not only responds to, but courageously steps forward to share the historical stage with the political and social contexts of its time. It goes without saying that, in view of the current turmoil around the world, that the Biennale’s Eventi del 1974 has been a curatorial inspiration.”
“In response to this remarkable episode and the rich documentation it generated, the 56th International Art Exhibition: All the World’s Futures, will introduce the ARENA, an active space dedicated to continuous live programming across disciplines and located within the Central Pavilion in the Giardini. The linchpin of this program will be the epic live reading of all three volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital (Capital). Here, Das Kapital will serve as a kind of Oratorio that will be continuously read live, throughout the exhibition’s seven months’ duration.”
“Designed by award-winning Ghanaian/British architect David Adjaye, the ARENA will serve as a gathering-place of the spoken word, the art of the song, recitals, film projections, and a forum for public discussions.

And so the linchpin of the Biennale’s central programming space dedicated to the Biennale that courageously stepped forward to explicitly attempt to share the stage with the political and social context of the time is a religiously inspired recitation of a venerated text.
I had barely finished watching Enwezor say these words at the Biennale Press Preview when it was reported that Venetian government officials had ordered the Icelandic Pavilion to close immediately, because they disapproved of Christoph Büchel’s artwork, The Mosque. The full title is The Mosque: The First Mosque in the Historic City of Venice, but the website for The Mosque, which was created in collaboration with the Islamic Communities of Venice and Iceland, calls it Misericordia Mosque & Islamic Cultural Centre Venice, after the deconsecrated Catholic church Iceland rented for their pavilion.
The Mosque was contested before it opened, for the two weeks it was open, and for the several days it has been closed. Icelandic Art Center officials say the city kept changing the terms and throwing up successive obstacles beforehand, and were determined to shut it down. In the face of this resolve, it seems almost irrelevant to debate whatever pretexts were finally used. Büchel saw this coming when others did not. A sympathetic local law professor told the NYT:

Venice is without a doubt the most tolerant city in Italy and proud of it, and so I think it’s the wrong place to make this kind of statement.”
Mr. Büchel said he had seen little evidence of such tolerance in his dealings with the city over the mosque.

Similarly predictable and irrelevant: answering the moralistic scoldings and second-guessings of art world critics eager to disapprove of Büchel’s confrontational hyper-realities.
Büchel’s art didn’t float an argument or evoke a narrative; he made a real situation. The Mosque posed a non-hypothetical moral test, which politicians and pundits alike are lining up to spectacularly fail.
The worst failure of all, though, would be the Biennale itself. Would be, or already is. Eiríkur Thorláksson, the Chairman of the Icelandic Art Center, said:

Most disappointingly, the administration of La Biennale di Venezia, an institution within the City of Venice, has not supported this artistic endeavor in the way that would have been expected for an organization of its stature and proclaimed advocacy of contemporary art.

The Times reported that neither Enwezor nor Biennale president Paolo Barrata had made any public statements of support for Büchel or The Mosque, even though the Icelandic Pavilion is part of the official Biennale program.
If Biennale officials are indifferent, they are complicit in The Mosque‘s unjust and unwise censorship. If they are actively maneuvering to thwart The Mosque and keep it closed, they are betraying the very mission Enwezor announced for himself and his exhibition, and hollowing out its lofty pretensions. If they are constrained by some unseen political situations, they should call it out.
But what Enwezor could really do is embrace The Mosque, and make its successful realization the center of his Biennale. I don’t presume to know how to achieve this. My first impulse was to move The Mosque to the ARENA somehow. But the actual Venetian Muslims attending and operating The Mosque are not actors or props performing their prayers for an art world audience. They have autonomy. So ask them. Have Büchel ask. Maybe it’d work somehow. Or maybe the pavilion could reopen without the spectators. Why does The Mosque have to be a spectacle? The important thing now is that it’s there. And it is the political and social context of our time.
UPDATE: After I posted this, Cristina Ruiz from The Art Newspaper tweeted about another Venice Biennale work I’ve been thinking of, and which didn’t quite fit here: Gregor Schneider’s Venice Cube, a large, draped sculpture inspired by the Kaba’a, which was to be installed in the Piazza San Marco in 2005. Gareth Harris’s July 2005 TAN article on its fate is very relevant [pdf via gregor-schneider.de.], in that it details the political process by which Venice Cube was rejected. Harris reports that Rosa Martinez, the co-curator who commissioned Venice Cube, “was not permitted to argue her case directly with the city authorities and later with the Ministry of Culture”; these discussions were held by the Biennale president, then Davide Croff. Today the president is Paolo Baratta, whose decision, actions, inactions, and present silence shame the principles and the institution of the Biennale.