Category: Art Writing

Art writing I’ve done since the early 2000s, orginally appearing in a range of online and print publications internationally.

On Art and Populism: The Next Universal – An Interview with Laboria Cuboniks

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

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11/12 2015 With the publication of their Xenofeminist manifesto this spring, the anonymous feminist collective Laboria Cuboniks sets the terms for a massively ambitious project. Their goal is to synthesize a new universalism, one that overrides the still-dominant paradigm that derives from the western white-male. Their collectively-authored text, subtitled A Politics for Alienation, is just a first step in a multi-faceted critique that will draw from the various strands of their respective disciplines. While building on the accomplishments of identity-based politics of the last century, the collective argue that the historical moment for this type of analysis has passed. Before reading the manifesto, the urgency of Laboria Cubonik’s program was not clear to me, but it now seems obvious. I look forward to the book they are now working to produce. We spoke through the medium of Google Docs over the past couple of weeks.

I am always interested in origin stories. I realize this approach is a bit contrary to what I understand the Laboria Cuboniks enterprise to be, but…where did you guys meet?

LC: We met up at the Navigation as Emancipation summer school during the summer in 2014 at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, in Berlin. It was organised by Armen Avanessian, Peter Wolfendale and Reza Negarestani. It was basically a two-week program for those interested in pursuing what has been deemed “neo-rationalist” philosophy. (The term “neo-rationalist” sounds a bit harsh, but it basically concerns new understandings of reason and its function for an age of complexity). What bonded us was the fact that many of us had experienced animosity for avowing things like reason, science, technology and/or mathematics — having been accused of “bowing to the patriarchy” for working with and alongside such perspectives, and we all felt a collective need to denaturalize such disciplines from a de jure masculine grip — that the white-male dominated histories of those disciplines does not mean that their future is bound to the same fate.

That experience became your identity then. So how does Laboria Cuboniks now speak in public? On the web only or also IRL?

LC: Our name is actually an anagram of the Nicolas Bourbaki group of mathematicians from the 20th Century, who advocated for abstract and generic approaches to the field — so there is some definite kinship with their pursuits. We’re (currently) six people from different disciplines spread out across three continents right now. But our identity is not so important. More important for us is to begin developing conceptual tools under the umbrella of xenofeminism — a feminism arguing for abstraction, cognitive augmentation in the face of complexity, and a politics able to think an intersectional or “relative” universalism as a gluing operation after decades of identity politics that emphasize particularisms.

So much to unpack here! The Xenofeminism Manifesto gives a thorough articulation of these ideas. I guess what I am trying to do is first look at the context through which you are speaking as a way to articulate those ideas but in a different way. I understand the Laboria Cuboniks identity is not so important, but I am interested in the way it allows you to speak as one voice. Xeno means “other” (as in xenophobia) so this other voice you are adopting is one made possible by internet, is that correct?

LC: There’s no doubt that without the internet we couldn’t work together, being as spread out as we are (although time zones are a problem — just ask our Australian member who joins in video chats at ungodly hours!) This “other” — or “alien” voice as we’d prefer — that came through the manifesto was a pretty arduous process. But it was also quite interesting to work between horizontal and vertical modes of collaboration, moving between diffuse and top-down editorial authoring. The manifesto for us is a foundational document implicitly mapping out a program of work. It needed a unified voice to articulate these perspectives in a cohesive way. That said, we’ll continually rework our formal approach with each project. The book we’re developing, for example, will take on another strategy altogether as a “forking” of the manifesto. We’ll each prepare contributions in our various areas of competence, elaborating critical points that have been raised since the release of the text, potentially with other authors included as well. It will be a curious exercise. On some issues there isn’t a consensus amongst us, so those tensions will be more visible and hopefully help demonstrate a commitment to “impurity” we believe is necessary to address anything on the level of the social. One cannot get very profound in the manifesto form, so we’re very conscious of the fact that many passages should in fact be proper essays in their own right. We want to start pushing the concepts as tools for reappropriation, similar to the function of something like Git-Hub where coders can build off existing projects, orienting or augmenting them in new directions.

I think these tensions are evident on the level of form, in the sheer density of the text. Its got forward propulsion at the cost of elaboration on the many different avenues of inquiry it proposes. Forking seems like the necessary next step. At the same time, the format of the manifesto and the Laboria Cuboniks identity are what make it possible to articulate such an encompassing set of concerns. Again, in the interest of getting you to spell things out, what is the unifying factor here? To quote from the Xenofeminist Manifesto, does “embracing alienation” as a position and “the synthetic potential of a groundless universalism” properly express it?

LC: You’ve basically nailed it — in the (positively) generic sense. What unites us are several fundamental commitments: the first being an affirmation of alienation as a necessary, cognitive and pragmatic “state” to be mobilised for any substantial change to take place at the scale of the normative. The perspectives that arise from “alien” encounters could mitigate against the way the familiar obstructs the effects of new knowledge. Alienation can never be a “total” thing — it expresses a relation between things/people/activities — so any talk that we are “totally alienated” is rubbish. Such a statement disavows this definitive relationality! One of our main issues is the ossification of norms as facts — when plastic norms become naturalised as a truth of biology, physiology, ecology — or even certain economic orders. In order to disentangle the two, we require a state of “alienation” from those inhibiting normative modes, to construct new ones that operate as a collective horizon for navigating the desire of what we do want as a social body. This generative alienation is a means for thinking through the social, technological, economic, ethical and sexual ramifications of new knowledge(s) — rather than falling trap of alternativeless naturalization. We embrace the power of plastic norms as a counter-hegemonic project, provided they are seized as plastic — that is, subject to re-invention. We can’t simply advocate for a politics celebrating the margin anymore, we require a thinking and pragmatics at a scale of the so-called “total” (and therefore naturalized) global scale of the neo-liberal modus operandi. This scale, in our view, can only be navigated and put to other functions when we can properly think the planetary complexity of 21st Century life — a scale that requires thinking from the nano-second to the geological, which is surely an alien proposition given unaided human phenomenology or intellection.

Can you expand on how you are using the term “plastic” — is this connected to “the synthetic potential of a groundless universalism”? I still need that notion clarified.

LC: Definitely. What we discuss as “plastic” most certainly has to do with how a universalism for the 21st century needs to function. What taints the notion of universalism is (quite rightly) it’s Modernist legacy, where we have seen the deployment of “universalism” as: a) a schematic top-down plan, where every difference is subsumed into its over-arching form; and b) as a particularity that is falsely inflated as a universal model — a specifically white Euro-Male “point” or perspective is projected as a dominant mode of orientation globally. On the latter point, we suggest this is no universalism at all. It’s a bloated, disproportionate particularity that has delivered to us global structures of colonialism and capitalism. This is an illogical universalism, a falsely conceived and implemented abuse of the term that does not live up to the potential of its name.

As an important and useful response to this violent (false) universalism, we have seen the development of fields like post-colonial theory, identity politics, queer theory and strands of feminism that highlight marginalized perspectives and voices lost to Modernity’s “inflationary” modes of operation. Addressing critical issues like the “site” or context “from where one speaks” has been a collective effort to emphasize the importance of particularities and give necessary attention to unheard voices and unmapped positions (in art, we saw these tendencies manifest in site specific practices, for example). After decades of such theorizing, though, this almost exclusive focus on particularities has lost sight of the global neoliberal hegemony we are all forced to live by. Calling for a reworking of the concept “universal” should not be taken as a side-swipe against those invaluable theoretical contributions mentioned earlier. It is to face up to their inherent limits in the face of the hegemonic core that has only increased in dominance, and whose scale is gargantuan. It would be a failure to not properly acknowledge those limits and overestimate the usefulness of certain theoretical frameworks, just as Levi Bryant has pointed out how Lacanian psychoanalysis does not offer sufficient tools to adequately examine something like climate change, for example.

Our project is a counter-hegemonic one, which definitively means taking on issues of scale (not only politics understood in its’ local, on-the-ground, phenomenological form) and reformatting what we mean by “universalism”. This is similar to when Rosi Braidotti calls for a feminism unsatisfied by the margins that instead seeks to occupy the centre. To us this signifies a feminism willing to construct what that centre — a normative proposition — could be. This new universalism still requires much thought, to go against the “false” variant we have already been subject to historically. For this universal to live up to its name means not to do away with the important work that’s been done on particularisms, but instead turn our focus to the engineering of a kind of abstract “glue”, in order to plot out coherent relations between particularities — or “solidarities”, in a way. Part of our approach to this concept of universalism is drawn from mathematics, wherein Fernando Zalamea (calling on the work of Alexander Grothendieck) has written about “relative universals” and has begun working with these ideas within a social framework. Now clearly, we are not suggesting an achievement in mathematics can be readily mapped on to the social. But what we can make use of is a functional concept of a bottom-up universal — including the ability to move back and forth between local and global scales. Because this universal is an implicit (bottom-up) and not explicit (top-down) variant, its field of reference is not fixed in stone, but is constituted by the relations it constructs. While we have much more thinking to do on this topic, one thing is clear — if we are going to gain any sort of political and cognitive traction against the almost total subsumption of life to neo-liberalism, we require strategies at a proportionate scale, able to face up to our complex plight — an urgent plight yielding increasingly to (climatic, social, and economic) injustice. It is not sufficient to be against our situation in the negative, but rather to focus our thought towards the affirmative construction of a post-catastrophic world we want.

The position you have mapped out is clear and compelling, and it provides useful insight into a global situation that might otherwise be experienced as an impasse. I am curious to know more about the “conceptual tools” you are planning to develop under the umbrella of xenofeminism. Can you say more about this next step in the project?

The next steps will more distinctly reflect our poly-disciplinary backgrounds — each member delving into the ramifications the manifesto has had upon our thinking since its release (including the myriad of external reactions that it generated — both positive and negative). Having each been infected by alien fields of knowledge in the process of intensively working together, our imminent horizon will be to integrate this conceptual contagion to our respective fields of practice.

http://laboriacuboniks.net/

This is one of ten posts made to accompany the Kunsthalle Wien’s Political Populism exhibition (November 11, 2015 – February 2, 2016).

Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer based in Toronto and Editor-in-Chief of Q&A, an information retail project focusing on interviews.

On Art and Populism: SMP – Social Media Politics

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
arendtHannah Arendt

Selfie populism leads to mob rule, but its delusions are the fault of the elite

09/12 2015 Reading Hannah Arendt is helpful when looking for the origins of certain assumptions we hold to be true about democracy. In her book On Revolution (1963), she notes that the persuasive power of the American Revolution lay in its material basis — what’s known today as the “American Dream.” Arendt writes: “the conviction that life on earth might be blessed with abundance instead of being cursed by scarcity, was prerevolutionary and American in origin.”1 Knowledge in Europe about the American colonial experience had the effect of breaking the psychological impasse of the belief that the rich and poor lived in an unchanging natural state. This lay the groundwork for the role played by what Arendt calls the “social question” in the revolutions that followed, starting in France, that ushered in the modern age. In Arendt’s terms, the social question is the ability of political institutions to ameliorate the problems of need faced by the poor. Innate to this historical development is the notion that fairness is a shared social value; it is one of the building blocks of liberal democracy we enjoy today. Seeing this value eroded by an overreaching rentier class is one explanation for the current groundswell of popular unrest.

The success of Populist political candidates in the US and Europe suggests that this covenant of our political institutions is perceived to be broken. As a result, voter allegiance with Populist alternatives is arising spontaneously, all the while being manipulated by demagogic operators. The American journalist and left activist Chris Hedges has made covering this epochal unrest his beat for some time now. A former war correspondent, the Pulitzer Prize winning Hedges has written twelve books, including five titles that anatomize what he suggests is not merely the moral decline of the US, but signs of the collapse of [its] political and cultural institutions. He sees Donald Trump, whom the New York Times likens to an American Berlusconi, as an inevitable symptom of a political culture made bankrupt by liberal and right-wing elites equally. “It was only a matter of time before a demagogue whom these elites could not control would ride the wave of alienation and rage,” he writes, noting that “Trump is not making a political revolution. He is responding to one.” Hedges’s point is echoed by Chantal Mouffe, who warns that the cheap satisfactions that come with moralizing against the populist tendency, come at the expense of understanding the reasons behind the increasing success of right-wing populist parties.

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The anthropologist David Graeber, who wrote about his experience with the decentralized political movement Occupy in his book, The Democracy Project (2014), notes how the financialization of capitalism creates a sense of the waning legitimacy of mainstream institutions. Most people are aware that increasingly 1% wealth is “no longer from the fruits of industry or commerce but from sheer speculation and the creation of complex financial instruments.” This process affects aspects of daily life that were previously untouched by high finance — student loans or municipal bonds, for instance — ensuring that an increasingly larger proportion of public commons gets implicated in the financialization of debt.2

I am sure it is nice to be a recipient of the outsized gains that ensue from a casino capitalism. However, it’s probably not a great gameplan in the long term. Harvard Business School’s Michael E. Porter, billed as a “leading authority on competitive strategy,” is acclaimed for introducing the idea of “shared value” as a business concept. Porter points out, it’s only common sense that if you mire your populace in debt and limit their ability to participate in the economy by paying them low wages, diminish their quality of life by cutting social programs, all the while degrading their environment through the practice of greedy, unregulated business practices, in the end you won’t have any customers. It’s as simple as that. Elites ignore Arendt’s social question at their peril. In a widely-circulated article, the self-described billionaire Nick Hanauer says as much. Hanauer attributes his success, not to being particularly smart or hard-working; instead,

What sets me apart, I think, is a tolerance for risk and an intuition about what will happen in the future. Seeing where things are headed is the essence of entrepreneurship.

And what do I see in our future now?

I see pitchforks.

Writing on the same topic, the Political Scientist Ira Katznelson describes Populist currents roiling democratic countries with an elegant and an all but devastating accuracy:

there is a sense that constitutional democratic forms, procedures, and practices are softening in the face of allegedly more authentic and more efficacious types of political participation—those that take place outside representative institutions and seem closer to the people.

The idea that Populist political options would seem more authentic because they offer a more direct expression of the people’s will, puts me in mind of other formats of popular participation we take for granted today. The digital tools we group under the term “social media”, for instance. Perhaps a world-wide citizenry who now have a daily habit3 of expressing themselves directly on the internet assumes that this behaviour naturally extends to the way they exercise their political franchise as well. Maybe Populism is merely an expression of a new kind of social media politics? The selfie as a model of political identification bodes rather poorly for the future of our democracy; it also, however, suggests that other, more positive developments might be possible, in the sense that this is a new type of conversation and it’s just begun.

This is one of ten posts written to accompany the Kunsthalle Wien’s Political Populism exhibition (November 11, 2015 – February 2, 2016).

Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer based in Toronto and Editor-in-Chief of Q&A, an information retail project focusing on interviews.

1) Hannah Arendt, On Revolution, (New York: Viking, 1963) 21-25.

2) David Graeber, The Democracy Project: a history, a crisis, a movement (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2013) xxi-xxii.

3) On August 24, 2015, Facebook had, for the first time, one billion people worldwide use its service in a single day. http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34082393

On Art and Populism: The Political Populism of Art Censorship

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
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Goshka Macuga’s Notice Board,  2011

Goshka Macuga’s Notice Board and Model for a Sculpture (Family) take on pointed resonance when presented in the context of the Kunsthalle Wien’s Political Populism exhibition

11/11 2015 “After 70 years of relative stability, history is on the move and we are all in its grip”writes Michael White in the Guardian. He cites three factors in his diagnosis of epochal change: failures of elites; divisive, panacea politics; and fragmentation of the centre — by which he means, I believe, a crisis of legitimacy within the status quo that makes alternatives look plausible. White is writing about the November 1st elections in Turkey, which saw incumbent Recep Erdoğan get returned to power by a decisive margin. He could very well be talking about similar events in Poland, where the right wing Law and Justice party recently won the vote with a commanding majority. Indeed, the casual observer looking for signs of a populist resurgence around the globe is spoilt for choice. You could almost say the dominoes are falling, to use the Cold War terminology, only this time the Communist threat gets replaced by a more shape-shifting enemy.

Poland provides a good case study here. For the first time in its twenty-five year history of post-communist democracy Poland gets a government of single party rule. The promised legislative agenda that got them there represents a significant departure for a country that has beenthe leading liberal reformer in Central and Eastern Europe. It’s a shift that pushes in the direction of the demagogic Hungarian Prime Minister, Viktor Orban, whose factious (and anti-migrant fence-building) style of governance includes undermining the foundations of liberal constitutional democracy. In both countries, populist tactics provide the winning formula for a tightening grip on power. In Hungary, Orban has been at it since 2010, most recently using a clash of civilisations rhetoric to inveigh against Middle Eastern refugee claimants, stating the influx puts Europe’s Christian identity at risk. Poland has also seen an opportunistic xenophobia in Law and Justice leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s assertion that refugees are “bringing parasites” to Europe, among other inflammatory statements.

In Michael White’s article, he discusses a parallel and apparently contradictory political trend of dynasticism, citing the recent elections in Canada where the son of Pierre Trudeau (Canada’s JFK) became Prime Minister, as well as the strong likelihood that Hillary Clinton will become US President in 2016, as two examples among many. With the dynastic option, the basic factor of brand recognition helps solve the question about who we choose as our leaders — and it’s true, I am Canadian and there is about zero chance Justin Trudeau would be Prime Minister today if it were not for his famous father.

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Goshka Macuga’s Model for a Sculpture (Family),  2011

Populist and dynastic politics share in common the ability to simplify things in the same way a brand helps simplify the consumer choices we make. Succinctly stated, brands formalize visual attributes into a set of values and emotions. The replicability of a logo creates a shortform statement about the consistency of a product, amounting to a kind of argument for why it’s worthy of our affiliation. If the goal of the brand is to be always and instantly intelligible, what by contrast is the goal of the artwork? Simple answer: to be intelligible in the first instance. “Make it new” is a modus operandi for the contemporary artwork that stretches back to Ezra Pound. The artwork fulfils its function best when it allows us to see something again for the first time.

This is especially true of Goshka Macuga’s work. At the heart of the artist’s practice is an invitation to revisit what we think we know about something, or more precisely, to think again about objects and the circumstances they can be said to embody. For Macuga’s contribution to the Kunsthalle Wien’s Political Populism show the circumstance would be episodes of art censorship in Poland, where the artist is from. One point of reference is a 2000 presentation in Warsaw of Maurizio Cattelan’s La Nona Ora (1999), a life-like figure of the Pope felled by a meteorite (and so lying on the floor) that resulted in huge controversy including destruction of the work by two members of the public. The Kunsthalle presents two works by Macuga that were originally commissioned by the same gallery where Cattelan’s work was shown. Notice Board presents an extra-long bulletin board covered in the press clippings and ephemera produced in response to a number of art controversies in the country, while Model for a Sculpture (Family), 2011, is a large concrete sculpture, seven-metres high, of two figures hovering over a child reading a book.

Macuga’s sculpture is made in reference to Cattelan’s work, and to Oscar Bony’s La Familia Obrera (Working-Class Family, 1968) from a May 1968 exhibition in Buenos Aires that was eventually shut down due to police censorship. By substituting one censored piece for another Macuga makes evident the social dimension of an artwork’s meaning. If Bony’s work, a performance on a pedestal by a real life family, served to highlight the plight of the low-paid working class in Argentina, with Macuga’s version the nuclear family is rendered in the traditional materials and style of the sculptural monument so that the piece takes on resonance of the social conservatism of the artist’s home country. These are the conservative values promoted by the Catholic Church so predominant in Poland, and so knowingly scandalized by Cattelan, who comes from a country that like Poland is 95% Catholic. Just as Cattelan vanquishes the Pope, Macuga would appear to vanquish Cattelan with the stolidity of Polish society. That might be the joke of the piece, its slapstick conceit, but Macuga’s point is more about how artworks can bring the public sphere to life, in the process articulating the values it deems to be most important. When viewed in the context of the Kunsthalle Wien exhibition,Model for a Sculpture (Family) takes on another implication, appearing to incarnate the “family values” platform that delivered the Law and Justice party to victory.

English political theorist Margaret Canovan has written that Populism should not be dismissed as a political pathology, but instead needs to be understood as a distinct interpretation of democracy, one that sees within its mechanisms a redemptive possibility. It’s this kind of Populist romanticism that Macuga’s work serves to undercut, if only by showing how the condensation of meaning into cultural symbols is a transient and context-dependent proposition.

This is one of ten posts written to accompany the Kunsthalle Wien’s Political Populism exhibition (November 11, 2015 – February 2, 2016).

Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer based in Toronto and Editor-in-Chief of Q&A, an information retail project focusing on interviews.

On Art and Populism: The Unpopularity of Art

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Donald_Trump_August_19,_2015_(cropped)Donald Trump

13/10 2015 One of the discarded ideas I had for the title of this blog, which looks at the topic of political populism as it relates to art, was “Plebiscite.” Populism and plebiscites share the idea that the people are sovereign. Commendable on the face of it, the ideal of direct democracy has limited practical application. The expression of popular opinion that a plebiscite allows risks being too immediate (too emotional, too self-interested) and therefore risks failing to protect the broader public interest. Looked at from this perspective, it’s easy to see why the phenomenon of political populism, whether an impulse arising from the right or left, will always be regarded with mistrust. By seeking out alternatives to established political parties and actors, the populist impulse presumes to appoint the fringe candidate or party as its direct representative. However effective an expression of popular discontent, this bypassing of mainstream political avenues would seem to carry the risk of steering the polity into uncharted territory.

Art is a product of its history and institutions, and by this measure, Kunsthalle Wien’s Political Populism project is motivated mostly by the need to see its own values preserved. Tendencies on today’s horizon suggest these values are under threat: migration as a crisis, and nationalism as an exclusionary phenomenon, the demagogic tendencies of some political parties, and the unpredictability of democratic power — in the words of Chantal Mouffe, populism has the potential to create “a terrain…for the emergence of collective identities whose nature is inimical to democratic treatment.”1 The openDemocracy website notes that the perception of political populism’s current omnipresence derives in part from the newness of this development in Europe, where “historically populism has been a marginal phenomenon…unlike in the Americas (North and South).”2

Tensions within Europe may be one reason for the rise of political populism on the continent, but wider forces are driving the phenomenon. Arguably, the semi-legitimisation of populist political alternatives is a symptom of a larger transition being undergone in the West. In part, this can be attributed to the way digital technology remaps the landscape of the public commons, to good and bad effect. Digital diffuses power across its network, bringing with it new standards of transparency and accountability in public life. At the same time, digital infrastructure enables asymmetric power advantage. The web is an amplification tool, with a wide reach disproportionate to the resources required to have such an effect.

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In his book The End of Power (2013), Moisés Naím argues we are now in an era where power is both more constrained and more anarchic. Although a useful observation about 21st century’s new dynamic of power redistribution, it’s a thesis that fails to acknowledge a bigger and apparently entrenched problem. Today’s transnational economies and the global class of the 1% subjugates the nation state, such as recently happened in Greece, and erodes the tax base — with ruinous effect to the social fabric. Writing from the UK, George Monbiot states “Our political system protects and enriches a fantastically wealthy elite, much of whose money is, as a result of their interesting tax and transfer arrangements, in effect stolen from poorer countries, and poorer citizens of their own countries.”3

And this is rather the case everywhere. Globally, art organizations find themselves embattled. Operating according to a business model that includes public money, they get characterized as being undeserving of tax revenues. The political pressure to justify this largesse results in the education and outreach programs of today’s contemporary art institutions — not in itself a bad thing. Regardless, at its base the practice of contemporary art is not a popular endeavor. Artists work within a context that will be most intelligible to an audience educated about its traditions and precepts. While representing a shared inheritance art can reasonably be perceived as only speaking to the few. Of course this shouldn’t matter. Public money benefits everyone in one way or another, including an encompassing range of initiatives within the private sector. However, the tradition of the public sphere that includes art carries within it many of the common values — like free speech and critical enquiry — that could be considered a threat to the global elite’s highly successful project of public funding cuts for the poor and middle classes and wealth accumulation for the rich.

George Packer notes that populism is a volatile tendency that “flourishes in periods… like our own, when large numbers of citizens…feel that the game is rigged against them.” It’s a truth that explains the ascendance in the United States of Donald Trump, a billionaire demagogue who connects with his audience because he is an independent with no association with institutions rightfully perceived to be corrupt by the general populace. That Trump continues to have a strong lead amongst Republican candidates for Presidential nominee, despite his noxious (and farcical) political ideas (deporting millions of undocumented immigrants; building a wall between the US and Mexico) suggests the degree to which the traditional options are discredited.

If contemporary art can be said to represent a set of values, it’s important to identify what they are and how artworks are understood to embody them. This is the first of an ongoing series of blog posts that will lead up to and accompany Kunsthalle Wien’s Political Populism exhibition and On Art and Populism symposium. The blog proposes to look at what these values are, why they are worth protecting, and what historical circumstances are currently at work to undermine them, as articulated through reference to art and its institutions.

1) Chantal Mouffe, “Right-Wing Populism: The Mistakes of the Moralistic Response”, The Populism Reader (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2005) 63-68.

2) Cas Mudde, “Populism in Europe: a primer”, openDemocracy, 12 May 2015 https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/cas-mudde/populism-in-europe-primer

3) George Monbiot, “To us, it’s an obscure shift of tax law. To the City, it’s the heist of the century,” The Guardian, 7 February 2011 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/feb/07/tax-city-heist-of-century

This is one of ten posts written to accompany the Kunsthalle Wien’s Political Populism exhibition (November 11, 2015 – February 2, 2016).

Rosemary Heather is a freelance writer based in Toronto and Editor-in-Chief of Q&A, an information retail project focusing on interviews.

7th Berlin Biennale, April 27–July 1, 2012, Berlin

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

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OWS at the Berlin Biennial, 2012. Photo by Marcin Kalinski. 

Much reviled, widely derided, the 7th Berlin Biennale (BB7) achieved its aims regardless. The biennale curator, Polish artist Artur Žmijewski, proposed art as a problem and activism as the solution and in the process created the circumstances for reconsideration of both. In keeping with his tendency to be a provocateur and bully, Žmijewski (creator of, among other works, the highly discomfiting video 80064 (2004) in which he persuades a Holocaust survivor to have his faded Auschwitz tattoo redone) poses this question with a brutal hauteur. He titled his curatorial essay “7th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Politics” and made a show at the BB7 press conference of declaring his antipathy to art.

Banishing much of what contemporary art audiences expect to see at an event like this, Žmijewski and his co-curators replaced it with works, often by nonartists, that were unambiguously political in intent. At the Kunst-Werke (KW), the event’s primary venue, the walls were hung with banners and painted with the murals and stencils of street art made by various artists and activist groups. On the level of sheer visuality, the exhibition suffered from too narrowly defining what political art looks like. In this sense, the BB7 was guilty of the oft-repeated critique that overtly political art risks addressing merely the known enemy. Along with street art, the KW presented a number of works that shared in common a taste for devising small problems—little moral dilemmas—for the visitor. In an installation by Jonas Staal related to his New World Summit, an “alternative parliament” event organized during the Biennial, a passageway was hung with the flags of the various participating insurgent groups, positioned low to the ground and close together, creating a kind of gauntlet to be run to get to the other side.  Teresa Margolles’ stack of giveaway posters featured gory images of one year of drug war murders in Juárez as they had appeared on the front page of one of the city’s tabloids. Also free to take home were Łukasz Surowiec’s replanted seedlings that had originally taken root in the ground around the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Of most consequence perhaps, Khaled Jarrar invited the biennale audience to stamp their passports with the seal of the nonexistent State of Palestine. Take up this offer and you would have joined an international community in solidarity with the Palestinian people, a gesture that under certain circumstances—attempting to enter Israel, for instance—could mean the loss of rights you otherwise take for granted. At center stage within this mise-en-scene of political theater, on the main floor of the KW were representatives of the Occupy movement itself. Imported from New York, members of Occupy Wall Street, along with Spain’s M15 and Russia’s Pussy Riot, among others, had set up camp for the duration of the exhibition. The consensus in Berlin seemed to be that moving indoors somehow neutralized the movement; more than one person told me the BB7 was “occupying” the Occupiers (clever!). Who made this rule, so widely agreed upon, that activists have to be cold and wet as opposed to warm and dry to be effective?img_4875

Lukas Surowiec’s Berlin- Birkenau Berlin Biennale 2012

Activists at the venue, who were busy painting signs for an action they would undertake later that day in support of the Deutsche Guggenheim’s nonunionized workers,  reported being happy to have a base in Berlin from which to expand their operations. “You never know where it’s going to blow up,” one of them told me. Where it will not blow up—and we can be certain of this—is inside the walls of an art institution conducting business as usual. This is of course Žmijewski’s point. The tactics of the Occupy activists and their cohort might be a little crude, their handmade signs a little embarrassing, but at least the time frame they are working in is “now.” The alternative is the deferred time frame of the avant-garde that tends to structure art world thinking about political ideas. As Žmijewski notes, the “label of ‘bad art’ is frequently deployed, as if by targeting the form, one needs not be concerned about the message.”  Whether he believes as he claims that the biennale takes part in “transformative social processes,” Žmijewski performs the service of helping us subject to scrutiny claims to political efficacy made on both sides of the argument. When confronted with the vernacular style of political protest arrayed throughout the KW, all I could think of was how feeble the tools are that we have at hand to combat the power of the financial elite, precipitators of financial crises for which they, to a person, remain not held accountable. Žmijewski’s exhibition provokes profound questions about how we experience history—by definition it is understood in retrospect, even when vast sectors of the population suffer from its machinations. It is for this reason that I felt genuinely moved by the 7th Berlin Biennale and the generosity it displayed toward political activism, which will carry on regardless, whether or not the art world continues to give it attention.

By Rosemary Heather

This text was originally published in Art Papers

More info about the 7th Berlin Biennale here

Kelly Richardson Talks Sci-Fi Futures, Life On Mars And Mariner 9

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Kelly Richardson Mariner 9 2012 Installation view Courtesy of the artist and Birch Libralato / photo Colin Davison
Kelly Richardson Mariner 9 2012 Installation view Courtesy of the artist and Birch Libralato / photo Colin Davison

As part of the Future Projections program at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, UK-based Canadian artist Kelly Richardson brought a scaled-down version of her amazing new work Mariner 9 to the Royal Ontario Museum. A panoramic video installation, Mariner 9 presents a detailed portrait of the surface of Mars as it might be seen in the future—littered with space junk, but still apparently uninhabited.

Commissioned by Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle, the TIFF installation offered North Americans a foretaste of the touring mid-career survey of Richardson’s work (also organized in the UK) that will arrive at Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery in February 2013 and, in smaller form, at Vancouver’s Contemporary Art Gallery in 2014. This survey promises to be an event in itself, with eight rooms at the Albright-Knox to be taken over by her work. In this email interview, Richardson talks about the origins of Mariner 9, our fascination with life on Mars, and what that might mean for the future of life on Earth.

Rosemary Heather: There was an almost unnerving coincidence at seeing Mariner 9 in Toronto at the same time that NASA’s Curiosity was exploring Mars. It makes your project seem more real, almost as if you are doing the advance work—mapping the mental territory—for this new era in space exploration. Care to comment?

Kelly Richardson: The idea for Mariner 9 did come about before I became fully aware of when Curiosity would embark on its mission to the red planet. The opportunity I was given to develop the work was during a residency as part of Tyneside Cinema’s Pixel Palace program. The timing was perfect for the commission to be presented in parallel with the Mars mission.

Because of the unique problems the piece introduced, I spent the majority of time during my two-month residency researching and developing the various approaches I could take to produce the work so that, by the end of it, I would be ready for production to begin. Interestingly, by this point—the end of the residency and the beginning of the creation of Mariner 9—Curiosity had departed for Mars.

As we had planned to launch its UK exhibition within days of NASA’s anticipated landing, roughly eight months later, the work was produced entirely during the time it took for Curiosity to leave our planet and arrive on Mars: simultaneous missions. Mariner 9 premiered in the UK three days before NASA’s landing, and given that I had included Curiosity in the work itself, I was obviously thrilled when it landed successfully.

RH: One goal you’ve said you have for the work is to produce an immersive experience for your audience, which the installation delivers when presented at full scale, as it will be for your show at the Albright-Knox. Is it correct to say this effect in part derives from the authentic look you were able to give the piece? Can you also say something about the kind of research you had to do to achieve this look?

KR: I’d say the convincing Martian landscape certainly contributes to the immersive quality of the work. I wanted people to feel as if they could step onto Mars and I did overhear a number people in the UK telling one another that that’s exactly how it felt.

This is the first piece I have done that was entirely digitally produced. Usually I begin by filming existing locations, which I then alter digitally to create the work. However, as I couldn’t film on Mars I had to take a different approach.

I discovered that NASA knows exactly how Mars is constructed and that it had made this data available to the public, which could then be brought into a 3-D program to faithfully create the lay of the land. Using images of the surface of Mars taken from various rovers as a reference, I could then texture my digital version by creating similar rocks, sand, etc., to produce a photorealistic terrain. So that’s exactly what I endeavoured to do—and of course, it wasn’t nearly as straightforward as I’ve made it sound here.

I put a great deal of research into actual missions that had gone to the planet to recreate digitally the graveyard of partially functioning and corroding remains from various spacecraft you see in the work. And as it is a “futurescape” several centuries from now, I also researched current thinking about what future rovers may look like.

Lastly, I wanted the scene to be set during a dust storm, which is one of the most difficult effects to achieve in 3-D. Research aside, the skill set required for the whole of this work was huge. In the film industry, it would have required a large team of people. Two of us (my partner Mark Jobe and I) worked on the project full-time for 10 months. We basically started from scratch, as we had to learn several new programs and methods of working to achieve the desired look.

RH: I love the way, even when describing the project, you convey a sense of why it is so compelling to you—the recent Mars exploration adding extra urgency. I am wondering about the sound. You took great pains to include details that give the piece visual verisimilitude; is this true also of the soundtrack? I recently saw Christian Marclay’s The Clock and noticed how the sound from one segment will often carry on over top of subsequent clips, providing an element of continuity (along with the timepieces) to the artist’s otherwise disparate selection of movies. Can something analogous be said about Mariner 9? Is the soundtrack what makes it truly immersive?

Kelly Richardson Mariner 9 2012 Installation view Courtesy of the artist and Birch Libralato / photo Colin Davison
Kelly Richardson Mariner 9 2012 Installation view Courtesy of the artist and Birch Libralato / photo Colin Davison

KR: I’d say it’s equal parts visual to audio that makes the work immersive. The installation, at 43 feet by 9 feet, takes up far more than your immediate and peripheral fields of view. In fact, it’s so large that you really can’t take in the whole of the piece without physically moving around it.

In England, it was common to see people sitting in front of one area for a good while, and then relocating to another area for an equally long time. Holly Hughes, who is curating my mid-career survey at the Albright-Knox, also noted that when you walk around the work, the light changes as it would in front of a physical landscape and many people have noted how three-dimensional it looks, without the use of 3-D technology.

The sound does play a huge part in the immersive quality of Mariner 9, though. During my research I discovered that we don’t actually know what Mars sounds like. All attempts to record audio on Mars have failed so it’s mere speculation at this point as to how it would behave on the planet.

In lieu of this information, I created a soundtrack which, again, attempts to convince the viewer that they’re there, providing the tools for a suspension of disbelief. It is 5.1 surround sound, made up of a dust storm swirling around the room; faint, strange, rhythmic sounds; and mechanical sounds associated with the movement of spacecraft. The nature of the sound also reflects the function of the visual, which is both hypnotic and strangely beautiful, but equally unsettling.

RH: Finally, I guess the biggest question is, Why Mars? Aside from the current focus of American space exploration, are there other reasons this project took Mars as its subject?

KR: Over the last few years, I’ve been increasingly interested in the way science fiction allows us to experience what life might be like in the coming century. Scientists and futurologists can speculate on what the future might look like, but artists are capable of visualising those futures, making them tangible. If hindsight is always 20/20, experiencing these potential futures offers us a window through which we can view our present time and the direction we are headed in with some measure of clarity.

Mariner 9 presents Mars as littered with the rusting remains from various missions to the planet. Despite its suggested abandoned state, several of the spacecraft continue to partially function, doing their job to look for signs of life, and possibly transmitting the data back to no one.

That search for life—to know that we’re not alone in the universe—is fascinating on many levels, but it’s also a beautiful, endearing endeavour, particularly for us as a species. We are destroying much of life as we know it, literally consuming our planet, at a truly alarming rate. I’m interested in that contradiction at this critical time in history when current predictions for our future are not just unsettling, but terrifying.

By Rosemary Heather

This text was originally posted at canadianart.ca

More info about Kelly Richardson can be found here.

Kelly Richardson is represented by Birch Libralato.

 

Brad Phillips, Literature And The Art Of Autobiography

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

Brad Phillips’s preferred meeting place in Vancouver is Reno’s Restaurant at Broadway and Main. “It’s quiet there, and we will be able to talk,” he says.

In the condo-choked gloss of Canada’s most beautiful city, Reno’s offers a step away from the fray. Albeit of a dying breed, Reno’s is the type of diner you can find pretty much anywhere on the continent. In keeping with Phillips’s practice as an artist, it’s situated at a studied remove from current trends.

As Christopher Brayshaw, the Vancouver critic, photographer and co-founder of CSA Space, remarked to me, an artist concerned with appearing hip would never reference John Cheever. But Phillips does (Unknown Painting, 2005), and Cheever provides a revealing clue to understanding the appeal of Phillips’s art. A paragon of WASP experience in the mid-20th-century US and the writer of matchless tales of suburbia, Cheever created fiction whose power lies in intimations of dark undercurrents that run through domestic life. Phillips makes art with a similar effect. He is an artist who takes photographs and makes paintings in a photorealist style (meaning photorealism is less a goal than a by-product of his practice, but more on that later). Like refractions of light through a crystal, his work creates surface tensions with what’s left unsaid.

A Toronto native, Phillips moved to Vancouver in 2002. Like Cheever, whose relationship to pop culture is at this point etiolated at best, Phillips makes work that appears to have little in common with his city’s dominant art practices. Photography is central to his work, but he uses the medium more as a tool than as a mechanism deployed to reflect back on the genres photography creates. This is not to say Phillips’s work lacks an international audience. Represented by the Zurich gallery Groeflin Maag until it closed in 2010, Phillips is an artist arguably appreciated more outside his home country than within. His work has been purchased by some noteworthy collectors: Toronto financier and philanthropist W. Bruce C. Bailey was an early supporter.

Brad_Phillips_Patricia_Highsmith
Brad Phillips, One Month of Reading in the Mirror (2007)

It is possible Phillips’s work flies beyond the sightlines of full art-world appreciation in Canada because he makes art in a fashion that is deceptively straightforward. His work is plainspoken in a way that is perhaps more intelligible to the European eye. Phillips hews a vernacular style that constructs a world from the materials at hand, as evidenced by his habit of making paintings about books he has read. One Month of Reading in the Mirror (2007), for instance, presents a stack of books by the writer Patricia Highsmith, their spines cracked from use. Not surprisingly, Phillips, a maker of paintings, gives his literary references a surface form. He presents books to be judged by their covers, so to speak. For an exegesis of their references, viewers will need to look elsewhere—including to other works made by the artist.

The implied deferral of significance between works is the method by which Phillips constructs an edifice of meaning through his practice as a whole, his titling of a work being a pointed element within the piece’s overall composition. This is especially true because his work is always figurative with a focus on the still life (Sentimental Monochrome, 2009) or landscape (Summer of Whatever, 2003), and he has made many paintings in which the signifying element is reduced down to a declarative text. The work Richard Prince (2009), for instance, is a painting of a piece of paper taped to a wall, with a note scribbled on it that reads like a one-liner from Prince’s own Joke series (1986–ongoing): “I wish I’d been able to speak to my father before he died, so I could tell him to go fuck himself one last time.”

Brad Phillips, Richard Prince, Oil Painting, 2007

The punch line hits its mark, but it gets a laugh that’s more queasy than funny. Richard Prince poses questions about which components of Phillips’s work are autobiographical, as the reference made to the work of the American artist seems less a clever homage than a discreet form of self-revelation. Similar conclusions can be inferred from the text painting Doctor Shopping (2010), which features a tightly framed list of doctors’ names on a black background. The slight angle given to the list of names and the shadowing in the lower right-hand corner subtly position the viewer, and more explicitly the artist (Phillips is tall), as if perusing the list within the lobby of a medical building.

Brayshaw notes that Phillips’s painting technique is “faux naive”; the artist’s photorealist style risks the appearance of simplicity. Close inspection of the canvas reveals great painterly skill, but it is a technique deployed as a means to an end. Phillips avails himself of a dry finish when applying paint to the surface of the canvas. It is an effort made in firm disavowal of the drama of the brushstroke, and also a way for the artist to maintain a fidelity to his pictorial goals.

“There are no happy accidents in the making of my work. I know exactly what the painting is going to be when I start, and that’s how it looks when I finish. In between, nothing happens except execution,” Phillips says. In a similar fashion, he uses titles to banish ambiguity, all the better to summon full engagement with his works’ melancholic ambience.

In making his works, Phillips uses a camera, but he reports that he mostly knows what image he wants before he takes a photo. While he sometimes exhibits the photographs he takes, they mostly become the bases for his paintings. At each step in the process, Phillips excerpts and revises. Every component in his repertoire—whether paintbrush or camera—is only a tool to facilitate his exceptional talent for pictorial composition. One Month of Reading in the Mirror presents what we assume is a gathering of books read, but this record from the artist’s life is angled, as if seen in a mirror. In this way, Phillips constructs a metaphor for self-reflection: we are what we read, so to speak. Another work, Major Depressive Episode (2011), features a chain lock on a door in close-up. The focus on this detail, combined with the work’s title, is almost cinematic in effect, its impact deriving in part from an implied honesty about the artist’s circumstances.

Rather than being painterly or expressive, Phillips makes artworks in the service of narrative. He has a story to tell, and each painting is not so much a chapter as a sentence in its overall composition. A Modern Painters review of the artist’s exhibition at London’s Residence Gallery last year notes that Phillips focuses on details as if “he had zoomed in until his eyes reached the satisfying flatness of the written word.” Literature finds an equivalency in the clarity and flatness of Phillips’s skill with pictorial denotation.

Phillips’s use of a realist style and his dry application of paint give his work a certain verisimilitude. In the words of John Cheever: “Verisimilitude is…a technique one exploits in order to assure the reader of the truthfulness of what he’s being told.… Of course, verisimilitude is also a lie.”

Phillips uses visual art as a means of self-portraiture. He authors certain truths about himself through the fiction of painting. In the midst of the current ethos of Internet and reality TV–based self-disclosure, his modus operandi strikes one as almost old-fashioned. As Vancouver writer Kevin Chong notes in conversation, Phillips’s work is self-revelatory, but not in the style of the up-to-the-minute Facebook status update. Making paintings is, after all, hardly the quickest way to get your message across. The same could be said of the presentation of art exhibitions. Art occasions slowness and contemplation, which, as the American artist Kerry Tribe has noted, is a proposition that is a “tiny bit radical” when considered in relation to the value today’s culture places on instantaneous content transmission.

Phillips concedes that in recent years his work has become more directly autobiographical. The Victoria-based fiction writer and critic Lee Henderson notes in an email that Phillips’s earlier work tended to favour what Henderson calls “goth girls [Untitled, 2001] and other midnight imagery: a van parked in a vacant parking lot in front of a black sky [The Last Party, 2002], a silhouette of a forest at night and so on.” The imagery, Henderson says, was in keeping with “a young man’s experience.”

Today, Phillips’s work is both subtler and more polished. Perhaps not coincidentally, he matches advances in his painting skill with the recognition of the value of his life as subject matter. His directness of expression, however elliptical, is a measure of his confidence as a maker of artworks, an assuredness that belies the self-recriminating eye with which he often seems to regard himself.

Phillips admits that this new tendency to make works that refer more directly to his own experience leaves him feeling exposed, though he has found that his audiences recognize the vulnerability he risks and respond accordingly. When he cites influences, other artists hardly figure, although he does count himself a fan of Hans-Peter Feldmann, Joan Mitchell and Edwin Dickinson. Phillips says his influences come more from the traditions of literary fiction. In particular, he says the confessional poetry of writers like Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath has had a huge impact on his work. “They made such beautiful prose out of their lives and I realized I could do that in painting,” he tells me.

In keeping with the efflorescence of cultural innovations during the 1950s and 1960s, the confessional poets discovered fresh territory to explore in their work by freeing themselves from the constraints of propriety that had governed poetic expression up to that time. Free verse went hand in hand with the revelation of personal intimacies that were sometimes considered shameful. Phillips likewise uses his work to intimate personal difficulties. They can be as commonplace as insomnia, in Twice a Day or Insomnia (2010), or as bleak as those suggested by Deadbeat Dad (2007), one of a series of works the artist has made of the back of a framed photograph—paintings that pack an emotional punch disproportionate to the bare facts of what they depict.

Brad Phillips, Deadbeat Dad, Oil painting, 2007
Brad Phillips, Deadbeat Dad, Oil painting, 2007

Phillips’s admiration for the work of the confessional poets is, like much else in his practice, a kind of throwback. Viewed in the light of today’s ultra-confessional culture, this connection suggests that Phillips has found a permission set by their example—permission for art to be the vehicle for the imparting of intimacies that gain a life beyond the moment.

By Rosemary Heather

This text appears in the Fall 2012 Issue of Canadian Art.

More info about Brad Phillips can be found here.

Brad Phillips is represented by the Monte Clark Gallery.

Kevin Rodgers: Contingency Problem

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Kevin Rodgers
Poster from Kevin Rodgers, OUT OF ORDER, 2012 McIntosh Gallery in London, ON.

In a 1972 text that takes the Watergate scandal as its stepping off point, Hannah Arendt writes:

The deliberate falsehood deals with contingent facts; that is, with matters that carry no truth within themselves, no necessity to be as they are…

It’s hard to think of a better analogy for contemporary art practice, or at least a certain tendency within it. Watergate may be far from the concerns of contemporary art but the manipulation of contingent facts is often the way art gets practiced today.

The characterization of art as a species of lying is long standing. The idea dates back to Plato. As a bulwark against the temporal nature of existence (which changes and ultimately expires) and the non-omniscient perspective of human beings, Plato posited another reality, one that was more real than the one mere mortals’ experience. It’s a schema that takes solace in the possibility of transcending the imperfectness and contingency of everyday life.

For Plato artworks were non-ideal, mere approximations of their referents, if potentially seductive regardless. Today art trades in a subtle variant on this idea of art’s essential deception. Dispensing with the framework of the meta-physic, contingency is no longer a problem. Instead it represents the opportunity every artist engages with. With each instance of reception meaning crystallizes anew, which is why such a high value is placed on the actual encounter with the artwork.

However, encountering an artwork provides no guarantee that meaning will derive from it. In the best scenario, contemporary art aims for a kind of freedom enjoyed by the spectator in the contingent moment of understanding. But it’s not a freedom easily won, and the reason for this is directly connected to the way art intermingles with falsehood.

Kevin Rodgers, OUT OF ORDER
Installation, Kevin Rodgers, OUT OF ORDER, 2012 McIntosh Gallery in London, ON.

In a certain type of art practice things are made to stand in for other things. This type of practice makes literal the idea that appearances are deceptive. The art encounter that results will require viewers to hunt for the meaning of the facts presented to them. A mental operation will be required that is often tough because exceedingly subtle. Back to Arendt:

“deception [is] so very easy up to a point…it never comes into conflict with reason because things could have indeed been as the liar maintains they were…”

Artworks similarly never come into conflict with reason. If a work defies logic it simply isn’t successful. It fails the demand that it be in some way interpretable.

The best works of art are open-ended and susceptible to multiple interpretations. The onus placed on the viewer in this transaction accounts for the dissatisfaction about art often expressed by contemporary art audiences. Arendt gets at this idea when she says “factual truths are never compellingly true.” And the demand placed on the viewer is perhaps never greater, and meaning is never more elusive, than when artists present an assemblage of facts, things standing in for other things, with only minimal clues about how to grasp their intention.

How do we access the meaning an artwork implies except through the hard surface of the facts presented? In the end, there is only this surface, a set of appearances held in tension with one another and, implicitly, held in tension with what isn’t there. The clues and lack of clues work together to create a kind of surface coherence, the edits or cuts becoming as important, as you will come to understand, as what is left in its stead.

Rosemary Heather

Commissioned on the occasion of the show, this text appears on the poster give away that accompanied Kevin Rodgers, OUT OF ORDER, McIntosh Gallery in London, ON, 19 July to August 11, 2012. The exhibition was the culmination of the artist’s PhD research at The University of Western Ontario.

More information about Kevin Rodgers work can be found here.

Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Susan Philipsz, “Study for Strings”, 2012, Documenta 13
Susan Philipsz, “Study for Strings”, 2012, Documenta 13
Hauptbahnhof, Kassel, photo: Metropolis M

June 9-September 16, 2012

By Rosemary Heather

Mindboggling, exhausting, a blockbuster, whatever superlative you choose for it, Documenta 13 stands as some kind of nirvana for denizens of the artworld. Presenting an in-depth picture of contemporary art practice with the work of over 200 artists, as well as dozens of events featuring professionals from a wide range of fields—including hypnotherapists, priests and political scientists—an exhibition this big hardly lends itself to neat summation. Everyone’s experience of Documenta 13 can’t help but be a different one. Recognizing this, artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev avoids stating an overall theme. Instead, as is appropriate, art finds its definition through the artworks presented, the Documenta 13 experience offering less bird’s eye view of contemporary production than an arduous, if pleasurable, trek through its underbrush.

After arguing with unhelpful Deutsche Bahn staff in Berlin about train tickets apparently lost or delayed in the mail (buy a new one, I was told), things improved. Meeting the first of numerous acquaintances I would bump into in the city, I was pointed in the direction of a work by 2010 Turner Prize winner, Susan Phillipsz, one of many projects located in the train station. Positioned at the far end of Track 8, the artist’s Study for Strings (2012) presents an audio piece based on the eponymous composition by Pavel Haas that was written in the Terezin concentration camp in 1944. Fanning out on speakers arrayed across a number of the tracks, Phillipsz aligns cello string with railroad track to create a doleful, layered experience of a location once used to deport Jewish families to Nazi death camps. The work offers a shimmering instance of Christov-Bakargiev’s curatorial goal to create an exhibition that presents “the shared practices of knowing of all the animate and inanimate makers of the world, including people.” Peer into the weirdness and incoherence of this sentence and you can grasp a useful idea: Demoting humans to just one element amongst others in the experience of being offers a way forward for a crisis-addicted planet in the early 21st century.  Artworks are a mechanism by which we can grasp this reality. History precedes the artist and the artwork and it’s the latter’s special task to create the circumstances through which the viewer experiences its meaning in the present.

Gareth Moore, installation, Karlsaue Park, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany. Foto: Dominik Landwehr

As is typical of an ambitious contemporary event, Documenta 13 supplements art presentations in conventional museum spaces with many many off site locations, including Kabul (naturally), Cairo, Alexandria and Banff. The “walk-in” art experience often associated with the off site location sees perhaps its finest use at Documenta in Pierre Huyghe’s assemblage of animate and inanimate elements found in a clearing in the expansive Karlsaue Park. Composed of piles of rubble, a reclining nude sculpture with a beehive as a head and a white dog with one leg dyed pink running loose, the work proposed itself as “plants, animals, humans, bacteria…without culture.” To become culture-less is a lofty if not impossible ambition, but the piece did have the effect of evoking the Sci Fi mise en scene of a post-apocalyptic world. Instead of eliminating culture, Vancouver’s Gareth Moore proposes to construct it from scratch. In residence in the park for the past year, Moore homesteads a forest enclave, constructing a place for himself to live that includes all the elements of an incipient society. Flagstone paths lead to various way stations, including garden, workshed and lean-to for napping. Spiritual needs are met in a quasi temple, which like the rest of this grand, beguiling project attests to attention the artist has paid to vernacular modes of architecture. Herculean effort was also at work in Geoffrey Farmer’s installation of 16,000 figures cut out from the pages of Life Magazine. Spanning the years 1935-85, the artist creates a delicately monumental artwork that suggests a figural double for photography’s—and latterly, the internet’s—decontextualizations. Constructing culture from detritus is also the theme of Lara Favretto’s massive pile of scrap metal. Assembled by the artist, she then removed various “sculptural” elements from it, replacing them with concrete casts and installing the originals in an adjacent building as if they were artefacts in a museum. A mental operation connects the two parts of the work, the mind finding relief in the separation of order from chaos, making this piece akin to the best conceptual artworks.

Adrián Villar Rojas, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, 2012
Weinberg Terraces: Adrián Villar Rojas, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany 2012, Photo: Haupt & Binder

However overwhelming, Documenta’s organizational commitment to ensuring massive projects are fully realized can’t fail to impress. Argentinean Adrián Villar Rojas presents roughly fashioned concrete sculptures of people and animals together with giant casts of forms that look like discarded bells or overturned flower pots, all of it strewn on the different levels of a hillside terraced garden.  The figure of the classical ruin is writ large and improbable. Nearby, in a nineteenth century bunker carved into the side of the hill the team of Allora and Calzadilla film a griffon vulture in ambiguous proximity with the white-gloved hands of a flautist. The musician, a prehistoric instrument specialist plays a 35,000 year old flute made from the wing bone of one of the bird’s ancestors.  While only feint sounds emit from the instrument, the idea of an ancient and unbroken avian lineage suggested by the buzzard sent shivers down my spine. Achieving a similarly eerie frisson was Michael Rakowitz’s use of the Kunsthalle Fridericianum to present an archive of reconstructed books representing volumes housed in the same building that were destroyed by bombing in 1941. The artist presented the books in a display that included other remnants such as fragments from a meteorite and shrapnel from ammunition rounds used to destroy the Bamiyan Buddha statues in Afghanistan.  Equally provocative in its cultural elisions was French-Algerian artist Kader Attia’s installation, which compares makeshift repairs done on African masks, the seams of each fix clearly visible, with documentation of the grotesque injuries and “repairs” endured by soldiers in WW1.  Among the best received works in the exhibition was Tino Sehgal’s group of youthful dancers performing a cappella pop songs in a darkened room. The presentation dissolves boundaries between stage and audience, as visitors’ inch their way around the room, walking between the performers who occasionally embrace them. For the public, the low risk of having to tentatively navigate a space in the dark offers the pleasing reward of a gentle disorientation. More bracing—and widely discussed—was French choreographer Jerome Bel’s performance piece. Working with a Zurich-based troupe of mentally disabled actors, Bel had them, each in turn, perform not a play but tell their own stories and perform dances they choreographed themselves.  Bordering on the confrontational, self-acknowledged as a “freak show”, the ultimate effect was humanizing. The sum of my own experience was expanded upon in ways that continue to resonate.

This article originally appeared in Border Crossings Issue No. 123

More info about Documenta 13 can be found here.

Geoffrey Farmer Discusses His Documenta Hit

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Installation view at Neue Galerie, Kassel.
Geoffrey Farmer, Leaves of Grass, 2012. Installation view at Neue Galerie, Kassel. Courtesy the artist and Catriona Jeffries. Commissioned and co-produced by dOCUMENTA (13) / photo Anders Sune Berg

Neue Galerie, Kassel June 9 to September 16, 2012
By Rosemary Heather

Geoffrey Farmer’s Leaves of Grass is one of the big hits of dOCUMENTA (13). Toronto critic Rosemary Heather caught up with the Vancouver artist by email to ask about the inspirations, processes and resonances behind the astonishing work—which, as Farmer noted, ended up surprising even himself.

Rosemary Heather: There’s quite a story behind the making of Leaves of Grass. The work features a great number of figures cut out from the pages of Life magazine that have been mounted on dried-grass sticks. Someone told me there were 30,000 figures, but you have amended that, saying it’s closer to 16,000, which is still a huge number. Can you tell me a bit of the backstory here?

Geoffrey Farmer: The collection of Life magazines came from the Morris/Trasov Archive. They (Michael Morris and Vincent Trasov) knew that I had been working with image collections, and about three years ago they asked if I might be interested in it. There were approximately 900 magazines in the collection, spanning five decades, from 1935 to 1985. In the beginning, Life was a weekly; in 1978, it became a monthly. So we had a lot of magazines from the 30s, 40s and 50s. We had fragments—a few pages—from 1935, and then complete copies after that. This includes the first issue that had Time co-founder Henry Luce as publisher; he bought it in 1936 and changed it to a photojournalistic format. The last issue we had, from 1985, was on AIDS.

In Kassel, the work is displayed on the second floor of the Neue Galerie in the loggia, which is a long, sculptural corridor with huge arched windows overlooking the park. The view brought to mind the miniaturization of the world. I was already thinking about how photography has a tendency to make sculpture, and I liked this in relationship with the loggia. The piece is in chronological order and is displayed on a 124-foot table, which is viewable from both sides. There are 16,000 figures, and each figure has two sides. Although the image arrangements may appear chaotic, I took great care in their placement.

During my studio visit with dOCUMENTA (13)’s curator, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, we talked about Paul Klee’s drawing Angelus Novus and Walter Benjamin’s essay “On The Concept of History.” I showed her a film made in 1961 by Arthur Lipsett, Very Nice Very Nice. In it, he uses images from Life, as well as found film footage and sound clips, all montaged together. It contained a quality I wanted to find for the piece. I mentioned to Carolyn that he committed suicide a few weeks before his birthday in 1986. She was curious as to what was happening in the world around the date of his death. So we were looking at timelines, and I began to think about chronology as a composition.

It was a gruelling project, but I wanted to be transformed by the experience. In the last few months, we had about 90 volunteers helping us. We had quotas to keep. We worked in shifts. There was a small group of us who, in the end, I think, were working 20-hour days. I was amazed at the generosity of everyone working on the piece. It was a communal experience. A lot of conversation happens when you are sitting together working around a table. If someone didn’t agree with the image selection or strongly felt an image should be included, they would hold the image up for a vote. We had meals together, a fantastic cook and friend came in to make lunches and dinners. I wasn’t expecting the piece to grow in the way that it did.

There is another story, though, that I want to mention because I think it relates in a broader sense.

When I was very young, my teacher asked us each to bring a leaf to class. She then got us to place the leaf on a piece of paper. Above the paper was a metal screen stretched over a wooden frame. She lowered the frame, and then she gave us a toothbrush dipped in gouache paint to rub on the screen. When I rubbed the toothbrush over the screen, it sent out a fine spray of paint over the leaf and the paper. Then she lifted the screen, and then lifted the leaf off of the paper. Even though she was holding the leaf in her hand, it still appeared on the paper. This deeply shocked me.

When I first saw William Fox Talbot’s early leaf-photo experiments, I recognized them as being linked to this early experience. When I read Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, I also had this recognition. Absence existing simultaneously within presence.

RH: Your anecdote brings to mind a certain uncanny quality the work has. When the figures are cut out from the magazine and brought together again in the amalgamated form, the first thing you notice is the discrepancy in scale between them. This suggests their lost context (the scale that naturalizes each figure within its photo) and makes apparent the essential strangeness of the photographic format, which you evoke in your answer above. So is the work just an expression of a relationship you have always had with photographs, or is something else going on?

GF: I think there are many things that are going on in this piece and I hope people get a sense of that. In one of the last issues of Life, I found a small image of Susan Sontag’s book On Photography. It is about one centimetre by one centimetre. It appears at the very end of the piece, next to a tiny Lady Diana. I think, in some ways, the piece is dedicated to Sontag and to her writing. Not to say there is a warning there, but perhaps there is.

RH: So ideas about the work proliferate in the same way the figures seem to…this suggests why knowing their exact number is not important. There are enough of them to push the mind into the territory of something not previously experienced. Was this a goal you had in mind? Or did you set out to do one thing and in the end discover you had accomplished something else?

GF: I am not really conceptual. I don’t think up a concept and then execute it. I learn through discovery and from direct contact with the material I am using. Even though the work might emanate out of an idea or interest and may have a horizon, I don’t really know exactly what I am doing.

For example, the title partially came from the fact that I was using grass, in a literal way, to mount the images onto, but also because I was looking at Walt Whitman’s use of writing cut-ups to make the poems for his book Leaves of Grass. He spoke about wanting to write a modern portrait of the United States, and I thought that the piece could be looked at as a kind of portrait. I also liked that the first Documenta was in 1955 as part of a horticultural show, and that it occurred on the 100-year anniversary of the publishing of Leaves of Grass. There was a special article in Life on Whitman in 1955, with pictures of his grave that are now in the piece. I also liked that the term “leaves” can refer to the pages of a book and to grass—to something without much value. I thought this related to the form of a magazine.

I didn’t really consider what the effect of looking at so many images would have on me. At certain points in the project, I had a hard time sleeping. When I closed my eyes all I could see were images. I was going through 30 magazines every morning to make selections. And then we would see them again for cutting, again for the gluing, again for the sorting and then again for arranging.

I knew from the beginning that it was important the figures be placed in chronological order, and that their arrangement was important. It hadn’t occurred to me that it would be a strange kind of history lesson. It was like a slow-motion flip-book.

It wasn’t until we had finished making the work that I realized the piece is very much about factory life. Factory farming, the war factory, the death factory, the automobile factory, the Hollywood factory, the personality factory…. History emerging out of a factory. In the end, it takes on the appearance of a conveyor belt.

I was asked to pick a song that the viewer could then download as part of a dOCUMENTA (13) phone app. I chose Over The Rainbow as sung by Judy Garland in the movie The Wizard of Oz. American soldiers used to play it in Germany as a kind of anthem at the end of the war. In the movie, it is a hopeful song, but when listening to it and looking at the piece, it has another effect, making the piece, and history, feel like a very strange dream.

This interview was commissioned by http://www.canadianart.ca 

More information about Documenta 13 can be found here

More information about Geoffrey Farmer can be found here