And in other Venice Biennale of Architecture exhibition news: cityLAB, Dana Cuff and Roger Sherman’s architecture think tank at UCLA, is also in the US Pavilion show, Workshopping. One of the projects they’re apparently showing is called Duck & Cover, which appears to be a community garden in the form of a giant Google logo visible from Google Earth.
Looks awesome, but wait, are those mirrors up there? Magnifying glasses? Spiral escalators to nowhere? Also, isn’t the G a little self-referential for Google? I’d think they could get ‘er done quicker if they sell the structure’s shape to the highest bidder. Or make it a Q for Quimby.
cityLAB [workshopping.us]
previously: heads up: roof as nth facade
Category: documenta, et al
How To Make A Biennale Pavilion Architectural Intervention
MOS, of the PS1’s woolly mammoth carcass MOSes, is one of seven architecture firms and collaboratives included in “Workshopping: an American Model for Architectural Practice,” at the Venice Architecture Biennale. The exhibit is curated by Michael Rooks of the High Museum and Jonathan Solomon of 306090.
The idea is to creat a canopy of spherical Mylar weather balloons in the courtyard of the US Pavilion. From MOS’s project text:
if you’ve seen the structure, i’m sure you’re wondering, ‘why is it made out of helium balloons, why does it make a canopy, why is there seating, etc… is it referencing other projects? is it analogical? is it utopian? is it micro-? is it urban? is it domestic, what is it? is this even architecture?’ (unfortunately, we can’t answer that last question. this type of project is like diet-architecture, a copy without the calories. it’s got a sort of bitter aftertaste that you might grow accustomed to, or you might not. that’s ok. we like fake architecture.)
we’ve been wondering, what kind of architecture would haruki murakami make? well, when we finally write our text we would definitely tell you that it does, indeed, mean something and it does reference things, but why would you really want to know all of that anyway? do you really think it would make it better? I mean, what about just enjoying this weird artifice, this fake social space? hey, it wiggles. look at this strange alternate environment made of reflections and repetitions. enjoy the visual noise. have you ever seen N.A.S.A.’s echo project? google it. what can we say, we just love the aesthetics of radar reflectors and inflated satellites. they are of another reality. seriously, even if we wanted to fully explain it to you at this very moment, we couldn’t. even though we’re trying not to be, we’re only human. also, they need this text before we’ve finished the design. did we mention that we are working with the son of andy warhol’s ‘silver clouds’ fabricator? we’re very excited about this. he lives in duluth. [emphasis added because, well]
So just Google, aesthetics, and a flip three degrees of Andy Warhol reference and voila, instant pavilion! I can’t wait to see what their actual text is. The exhibition opens Thursday.
MOS, Instant Untitled [designboom, thanks john]
Workshopping.us [workshopping.us]
The Player
I can’t say how I feel about Francesco Vezzoli’s work; that’s not how my mama raised me. I will grant though, that he’s extremely smart and astute and has successfully identified an elemental dynamic of the art world and makes highly successful art that taps into that dynamic. OK, fine. his work embodies almost every superficial, vapid, self-unaware, pseudo-celebrity, luxury consumerist aspect I hate about the VIP Preview art world.
So bully for him that he’s turning the MoCA gala benefit tonight into the set for a performance/piece? This faux-ambivalent account of Vezzoli, his date/star Lady Gaga, and the preparations for the event in the LA Times makes for hilarious reading. I’m sure the event will be the biggest, starchasing cluster$%#& at MoCA since Tom Ford and Naomi Campbell turned the Takashi Murakami dinner into a commemorative plate-stealing riot.
Alas, Vezzoli’s use of art to hustle celebrities into working for free unfortunately reminds me of someone I actually like: Robert Altman. To shoot the benefit scene in The Player, where Tim Robbins’ murderous studio honcho Griffin Mills is honored by several hundred of his best celebrity friends, Altman threw a real fundraiser for LACMA, complete with black & white dress code, then hustled all his celebrity friends to attend–then he filmed them for scale for his movie.
At least now I can finally make sense of Lady Gaga: she is post-op Cher.
Francesco Vezzoli escorts Lady Gaga to MOCA’s gala [lat]
Wait, Which “Ban” Was That Again?
Francesco Bonami, director of the 2003 Venice Biennale, writing for the NY Times’ blog, The Moment:
…the sculptor Bruce Nauman, the Sam Shepherd of Contemporary Art, was awarded the Gold Lion for best national pavilion. (A sign that the Obama effect has lifted the ban that during the Bush era made the US pavilion “unfit” for the award.)
Really? There was a ban? Just so we’re clear what Bonami’s claiming, let’s go to the tape:
49th Biennale, 2001: Germany won for Gregor Schneider’s insane, awesomely claustrophobic house. The US Pavilion showed Robert Gober, who had been selected under the Clinton era. Clear winner: Schneider.
50th Biennale, 2003, Bonami’s incarnation: Luxembourg won for Su-Mei Tse’s sound installation. The US Pavilion showed Fred Wilson, who invited African street sellers to display counterfeit Vuitton/Murakami bags in the courtyard. Clear loser: Wilson. [Obviously, I would’ve given the award to Olafur’s transformative Danish Pavilion, but Wilson shouldn’t have won anything, and didn’t.]
51st Biennale, 2005: France won for Annette Messager’s puppet/stuffed animal thing. The US barely got its shit together in time to pick Ed Ruscha. Clear winner? None, really.
52nd Biennale, 2007: So does that mean that, if it weren’t for a “ban,” Nancy Spector’s installation of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which was as damning a condemnation of the Bush era and ideology as a could be imagined, could’ve/would’ve/should’ve won over Hungary’s Andreas Fogarasi, who showed black box video of various European street scenes.
Is that what you’re saying, Francesco? Are you just talking post-game smack? Was there really ban, where jurors took a brave, but apparently totally private stand–one that ended up denying an award to an artist who did speak out even after he died? Or was it the kind of stories we tell to ease our minds, like how everyone in France was in the Resistance?
Elmgreen & Dragset & The Collectors
But enough about muscly, young, naked performance art hustlers in Venice staging homoerotically charged events for attention and acclaim for a moment.
My friends Michael Elmgreen & Ingar Dragset just won a Special Mention Award at the Biennale for their awesome, curated installation at the Nordic and Danish Pavilions, The Collectors. Here’s a picture from the Guardian:
Oasis 7, Haus-Rucker, Documenta 5
In 1972, the Austrian architecture collective Haus-Rucker installed Oasis Nr 7 at Documenta 5.
A steel pipe structure was cantilevered out the window of the Friedericianum, and a platform, two palm trees, and a hammock were installed. The entire thing was enclosed in an 8-meter translucent vinyl bubble.
Oasis 7 was re-created last September It was built on a fake Friedericianum facade at the Victoria & Albert Museum for the exhibition, “Cold War Modern: Design 1945-1970.
Haus-Rucker project archive [ortner.at]
Time lapse making of video: Oasis 7 in the Victoria & Albert Museum [iconeye.com]
via atelier, where I’ve been lifting all sorts of interesting things this week.
Amar Kanwar’s The Torn First Pages
Last September was the first anniversary of what’s now called the Saffron Rebellion, where Burmese monks took to the streets to protest the military government. As a commemoration of that movement, the Stedelijk Museum showed the first of three parts of Indian artist/documentary filmmaker Amar Kanwar’s work in progress about the Burmese resistance.
The title of the project is The Torn First Pages, 2004, which is a reference to the private, anonymous rebellion of a bookshop owner named Ko Than Htay, who was imprisoned for tearing out the first page of everything he sold, pages which contained mandatory praise for the junta.
Parts of footage for The Torn First Pages come from Burmese democracy activists, who surreptitiously tape and smuggle their work to Kanwar in India.
Kanwar talks about the work with the Stedelijk curator above:
I felt that everybody who writes, be it a poem, be it a novel, be it a fashion magazine, whatever, in one way or the other is indebted or connected to Ko Than Htay, because he’s tearing the first page out from any author. It’s not necessarily a specific book. So in a way, I felt that artists of all kinds, writers of all kinds are connected to this. And in many ways what this is all about is your own relationship with authority and your own defiance. Your own need for defiance. Your own articulation. It’s not necessarily that this articulation is going to become public or recognized. So in some way, in order to understand Burma, if one can understand Ko Than Htay and this act of tearing the first page, you can understand what’s happening in Burma. And if you can understand that, you can understand your own life, regardless of where you are.
…
The Torn First Pages is about presenting evidence of a terrible series of crimes, evidence of amazing resistance. In a way, it’s about saying maybe poetry also has a presence, a validity, in a court of law.
…
Everything you remember, there’s a way to remember. If you remember in a particular way, if you look in a particular way, you’re looking only so that it clarifies you in the present. The purpose of clarifying you in the present is only so that you can take a step forward. In that sense, the act of remembering is really the act of moving forward in time.
Longtime readers of greg.org may remember my swooning at Kanwar’s work when I saw it at documenta 11 in 2002.
Amar Kanwar- The Torn First Pages (Part I), 5.09.08 – 1.10.08 [stedelink.nl]
Video Artist Guy Ben-Ner on WPS1
Guy Ben-Ner’s in the zone these days; his ingenious video, “Elia – a story of an ostrich chick,” made like one of those anthropomorphizing Disney nature documentaries from the 50’s, is included in PS1’s Greater NY show. Now, he’s representing Israel in the Venice Biennale.
At Venice, Ben-Ner talks with PS1 curator Bob Nickas about his work and how he uses adaptive techniques for shooting under directorial duress. He references silent film, in which the camera couldn’t move, and nature documentaries, where you can’t direct animals. Ben-Ner uses his kids in his videos, which requires a certain creativity to get anything down on tape.
Ben-Ner’s segment lasts about 15 minutes, and then Nickas and his too-smart sidekicks spiral out of control, gushing over Vezzoli’s Caligula trailer–in exactly the critically unaware way that bugs so bad. While Ben-Ner sits silently by for the next 30-40 minutes, the curator/writer conversation encapsulates exactly the kind of hermetic, bitchy Venetian oneupsmanship that shouldn’t be recorded, much less broadcast. Don’t miss it.
WPS1 Venice Conversation – The Bob Nickas Roundtable [wps1.org, updated link to clocktower.org, July 2018]
A 4 week-old baby reviews the Whitney Biennial
She slept through the almost the whole thing*. Until we walked into the Cecily Brown gallery, when she started screaming at the top of her lungs. On this advice, we cut our visit short, leaving via the elevator so as not to disrupt the Julianne Swartz sound installation in the stairway.)
* Truthfully, she also shattered the misty calm of the Gran Canaria forest in Craigie Horsfeld’s video room with a post-bottle burp worthy of a trucker.
Venice: Vidi, Bitchy
The Venice Biennale is finally
Lisa Dennison, chief curator of the Guggenheim (“Where the sponsor’s always right!”), complained to the Times about the curators having too much say. [Or the Guggenheim not having enough: they apparently lobbied hard for Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle to be chosen for the Guggenheim-owned American Pavilion. Fred Wilson got it instead.]
Wilson has an African street vendor selling fake purses at the entrance to his installation of Venetian Moor-related art. Via Vogel: “Richard Dorment, an American who is an art critic for The Daily Telegraph of London, said he was speechless when he saw the pavilion. ‘To put a seller of handbags in front of a pavilion is condescending to both Americans and Venetians,’ Mr. Dorment said. ‘This is a person, not a work of art. Where are the days when major American artists represented our country?'”
[Rowrr. Dorment apparently lived up to his name; his sniping ignores 1) the inside of the pavilion, which many people praised, 2) the major majorness of the 2001 show’s Robert Gober, and 3) Maurizio Cattelan showing a buried person–an Indian fakir, whose praying hands stuck out of the sand–in 1999. And besides, in 2001, Venice was plastered by billboards for some museum exhibition which pulled the same street vendor stunt as Wilson.]
Elmgreen & Dragset’s e-flux poster, starring Lala, image: e-flux.com
People, if you’re looking for Pitti, it’s in Florence. Venetian art parties rank below even Cannes film premieres on the Burdens Likely To Evoke Sympathy scale. It’s a lesson well learned by the Guardian’s Cannes crank, Fiachra Gibbons, who clearly looked on the bright side in Venice. His reports are giddy fun, from his Black Power shoutout for Wilson’s work, and Chris Ofili’s British pavilion to his star-struck love letter to Lala, the diva chimpanzee star of “Spelling U-T-O-P-I-A”, by my pals Elmgreen & Dragset. [There’s something for the blogosphere to figure out: at what point does “in the interest of full disclosure” become “shameless touting of my connection to famous friends”? Ask me tomorrow when I post about my friend, Olafur Eliasson.]
As I sit here in New York, recovering from my A/C-induced cold, I’m working on an “I Survived the Venice Biennale” T-shirt, for those who truly suffer for art. Stay tuned (or feel free to send a design suggestion or two).
One Million Years (Future), on MP3
Last year, I wrote about the utterly moving experience of On Kawara’s work, One Million Years (Past) at Documenta XI. Now, I find the brilliant art site, ubu has put out a 73-minute excerpt of One Million Years (Future) in mp3. (Heads up: it’s 105Mb.)
On Kawara @ Dia, 1993, photo: Cathy Carver, image: diacenter.org
Originally intoned for the first time in an exhibition at Dia in 1993, “with the CD the amount of time is limited, 74 minutes [sic], and contains a set number of years (1994 AD to 2613 AD), thus transforming the infinite time of the exhibition into the finite time of the CD.”
From their About page:
UbuWeb posts much of its content without permission; we rip full-length CDs into sound files; we scan as many books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. And not once have we been issued a cease and desist order. Instead, we receive glowing e-mails from artists, publishers and record labels finding their work on UbuWeb thanking us for taking an interest in what they do; in fact, most times they offer UbuWeb additional materials. We happily acquiesce and tell them that UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space for them to fill.
On Kawara bonus: Dia: Beacon opens this weekend.
How the Village Voice agrees with me (generally) on Documenta 11
It may be a little overwrought (“So let’s receive this Documenta as the proclamation of a state of emergency.”), but Kim Levin’s Village Voice review of Documenta 11 is pretty right on. I mean, she generally agrees with me, reinforcing my own innate sense of astuteness and acuity. Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Peter Schjeldahl reviews Documenta 11
Peter Schjeldahl reviews Documenta 11 in this week’s New Yorker. He snidely and wearily compliments the show for its “robust, mature…festivalism,” which I take to mean they figured out how to show video-based works. But he at least notices two of my Documenta favorites. On Amar Kanwar’s documentary: “a stunning exploration of the Pakistani-Indian military frontier in Kashmir…[and] skillful, alluring, and notably uncomplaining.” (Gee, sorry to disappoint you, Peter.) On Gabriel Orozco’s terra cotta bowls: the “always witty” artist’s “work’s bristling joke…also invokes the anti-stereotype of a Mexican who is lousy at pottery…” (Huh?? And the one about the pollack who graduated from college?)
Ultimately, though, the real reason I’m linking to Schjeldahl’s review is because he was staying at my hotel in Kassel. Yes, I slept with Peter Schjeldahl.
Still in Kassel, at
Still in Kassel, at least mentally. The bad news first: Michael Kimmelman’s embarassing writeup of Documenta 11 in todays NYTimes is not only self-contradictory, but almost every complaint or criticism he makes of the show can be refuted by the contents of the show itself.
Maybe it’s telling that we approached the show from different angles, literally. He arrived via Cologne, where the Matthew Barney show just opened, and so he supposes that Barney’s work is “just what Documenta 11 is reacting against but could do with a little more of.” I, in the mean time, came via Basel, the world’s biggest contemporary art fair, where the hottest souvenir turned out to be the “I Survived Cremaster 3” T-shirts, which were handed out surreptiously (at first) among the hubris-weary dealers and consumers.
While I do agree with one of Kimmelman’s statements– “It leaves me edified and a little sad” –I doubt we’re sad about the same thing. He lamented “didactic” overly serious, homogeneity and an indifference to “art.” But there were beautiful, moving works that spoke (both directly and obliquely) to injustice, hatred, violence, decay, abuse of power, and any number of important problems facing the world (go ahead, zoom in, and say they face the west, the east, the country, the city). As Documenta 11 makes a very persuasive argument that art can and does matter to the world outside a museum or a gallery, Kimmelman, inexplicably, seems to be pining for irrelevance and overwhelming self-referentiality. There’s a time for that: it’s called 1999.
Now the good news: One of those works is Amar Kanwar’s 1998 documentary, A Season Outside. It begins with scenes of the bizarrely ritualized gate-closing ceremony that takes place at the Kashmiri border of India and Pakistan. Citizens of each country cheer on their own soldiers, who high-step and prance agressively like armed peacocks. Literally, each step a guard makes is matched by the his counterpart, a ridiculous, bravado-blind tit-for-tat that prefigures the blustery statements politicians are making today. It’s breakdancing, but with nuclear missiles. The filmmaker’s voiceover describes a feeling of inevitability and impending disaster, and the crowd of men onscren turn out to be wagering on a pair of rams repeatedly set loose to butt heads.
Refusing either pessimism or cynicism, Kanwar poetically explores the philosophy of nonviolence, even as covert video shows gangs of Chinese soldiers clubbing Tibetan monks. When Kanwar asks a monk if all the injustice they face doesn’t demand a forceful response, the monk replies, “whatever be the way, I must not return pain for pain, evil for evil.” Here’s a work made five years ago that directly speaks to the greatest threat to the world at this very moment and that presciently implicates the exact word George Bush wields as his religio-political sword. The more I remember it, the more impressed I become with A Season Outside, the sadder I become for the current total absence of nonviolence as an element of the debate in the US, and the more I feel that art could play a powerful role in shifting that debate.
[Here is an early review from FAZ.net (in German). Run the URL through Babelfish for a rough translation. Excerpt: “Amar Kanwar’s contribution lives on hinreissenden [ravishing, I think] pictures, detailed observations and a melancholy, which seek to mediate between past and future.” ]
Setting: Fredericianum, Documenta 11, Kassel,
Setting: Fredericianum, Documenta 11, Kassel, Germany
The voice of a woman reading from within a freestanding glass booth echos through the gallery: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and twelve. B.C.
You watch, slightly amused. A set of black binders in a vitrine bear the title, One Million Years (Past and Future). One binder is open, showing columns of numbers, years. A couple enters the gallery and stops right in front of the booth. If it were the window to someone’s home, they’d be standing invasively close. They stare into
The voice of a man reading from within the booth: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and eleven. B.C.
the booth. The woman acknowledges them, but doesn’t speak. They keep staring for a moment, then move on. The gallery is basically square, typically classical, on the central axis of the building, with an extremely high, domed ceiling. The doorways are placed enfilade, creating a path for traffic right in front of the booth. That booth is kind of nice, though. Seamless, slightly grey glass. At least ten feet high, including the suspended ceiling and diffused lighting. Grey carpet, a black table with two places. One chrome mike stand, one binder,
Woman: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and ten. B.C.
and one glass of water for each place. A pile of CD jewel cases on the floor? Ah, they’re recording this, too. (Wouldn’t you? I mean, how much would it be to get interns to record this for you?) How long will it be before the guy reads his next year? If they cough, does that get edited out of the CD, or do they leave it in? More people walk in, pause, smirk at each
Man: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and nine. B.C.
other, look at the label, and move on. OK, now time the interval. Well, maybe later. I mean, they’ll be there a while, right? You move on to the next gallery. Hmm. Not very interesting. The next one is dark, though. A row of thirty or so film projectors lined up on a shelf that spans the entire gallery, but they’re not on. Ein Tagebuch (A Diary) by Deiter Roth. It starts at 11:00, in just about
Woman’s voice, still audible: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and eight. B.C.
five minutes. Push ahead and come back. You know, there are all those little photos culled from Der Spiegel. That should take about five minutes.You head back through the central gallery, past the booth again. Do those people in there think you’re lost? or at least aimless? En route, you try to look purposeful, make eye contact, acknowledge their humanity, their contribution to art and culture. You get it, after all. You know On Kawara’s paintings, too, so,
Man: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand four hundred and four. B.C.
thanks.
The photos are small, pinned under glass, and extend all the way around the gallery. There’s a crowd. a riot, a group of soldiers. Another crowd. Demonstraters in handcuffs. Billy clubs. Another crowd, another riot, another, another. Isa Genzken has found an unsettling aesthetic similarity between these photos spanning decades of unrest and violence on every continent. Now the game is to identify the country and the
Man: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand three hundred and seventy nine. B.C.
era from the clothing the subjects wear and the cars and advertisements in the backgrounds. You check your watch. Almost five minutes. You hustle back through the galleries just as two attendants are signalling each other. They start the projectors from the outside moving in. Little home movie-like images slowly populate a grid on the wall, which the attendants focus and fine tune. Roth’s explanation is in the catalog: “I wanted to show my daily life in the films here…so I didn’t have to do anything courageous…For instance, it would be courageous to make a point
Woman: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand three hundred and seventy four. B.C.
of showing badly made films individually; but because I’m afraid of this kind of exposure, I will show 30 films of this kind at once–a flickering, which dazles and distracts from the poverty of each individual film.” Hmm. Sound like weblogging to me. Looks like it, too. You head back to watch the rest of that documentary on the India-Pakistan border which revitalizes the philosophy of non-violence, considered “quaint” (when it’s considered at all), passing once again through the
Man: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand three hundred and sixty one. B.C.
gallery with the booth. But this time something hits you and you stop. The cycles of life, violence, death, the attempts of people to make sense of it, to be remembered, to gain dignity and avoid embarassment, the lessons unlearned over centuries of conflict, the conceptual memento mori offering no illusions of progress or respite, the same inexorable flow of time giving unexpected comfort that things will pass. You choke back tears as you take up place against the door jamb, yielding to the years that pass over you. The woman looks up briefly, acknowledging my humanity, my contribution to art and culture, and then turns her eyes back to her page.
Woman: Nine hundred eighty eight thousand three hundred and sixty. B.C.