Category: Art Writing

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

Aernout Mik at The Power Plant, Toronto by Rosemary Heather

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

Aernout Mik, Reversal Room (2001)

Because of their historical significance, the events of September 11th appear to exist in a timeframe of deferred comprehension. It is as if what is required – a god-like point of view – is distinctly unavailable. In light of September 11th, the work of Aernout Mik seems unnervingly relevant. It is hard to imagine artworks that could better encapsulate the historical moment. Constructing a hybrid form of video-installation/sculpture, Mik’s works offer a proto-realist immersion in events that are profoundly ungodly in their perspective.

 

In ‘Reversal Room’ (2001) the artist creates a vaguely plausible Chinese restaurant scenario that one would hope never to be a part of. Portrayed from multiple perspectives, on 5 different screens, a scene of diners eating unravels into inexplicable – if low-grade – violence. Patrons appear little disturbed as three men shove one another, a table is overturned, and then righted again. The video-loop format ensures that this scene is repeated ad infinitum. Through the multiple perspectives represented, Mik violates the convention of representation that allows the viewer to master what they see by placing them at the apex of a singular perspective. The other diners’ implacability contributes to the feeling of unease, a confusion confounded by the work’s sculptural components. Viewers’ enter the piece via a path composed of low-level walls of height equal to the video projections, which are installed on the floor. To emphasize that the space of each video is equal to the space of the viewer, two glass-enclosed rooms abut the projections, one containing a chair, the other a door that goes nowhere. By creating a tension between the sculptural flow of the installation – which surrounds the viewer – and the stasis the videos’ portray, the artist replicates in abstract form the envelope of an incomprehensible reality.

 

A lack of dialogue or even ambient noise further distances the viewer from the expectation of understanding. The overall effect is that of a curiously mesmerizing kind of estrangement. The work is convincing to the extent that one feels a part of the action. You are, in effect, inside the scene – in a restaurant – and can accept your place within it in the same way that you accept what you don’t know about the lives of the people who surround you. The work absorbs your attention within the problem of what you cannot understand, until you hit a limit of interest and switch back to feelings of indifference. Few works of art so accurately mirror the degree and limits of viewer engagement, a fact that curiously contributes to the work’s credibility. One explanation for this is found in the process the artist uses to create each piece. In a talk he gave at the Power Plant, Mik discussed how his working method strives to create the semblance of the real within the parameters of artifice. Each scene begins when non-actors are given minimal direction within ambiguous scenarios. Real dynamics develop out of play aggression as the individuals become absorbed by the actions they are asked to repeat and the situation takes on a life of its own, regardless of the absurdity of its premise – Mik reports that the scenes tend to fall apart of their own accord after about 50 minutes.

 

Mik works within the conventions of cinematic realism because it has the capacity to create a reality adjacent to that of the viewer. Within those conventions, he contrives to torment the cinematic moment; in the scenes portrayed, things occur and yet fail to progress. As the 20th century techniques of collage and montage have demonstrated, viewers are more than able to assimilate discontinuous and disjunctive elements to a greater meaning, synthesized within the picture plane or filmic space. Mik’s innovation is to situate elements that are irreconcilable to one another within the scene itself. Periodically, ‘Reversal Room’, itself reverses, changing into a scene of people working in the kitchen of a restaurant, the videos now slowly rotating in a counter-clockwise direction. The situation would be unremarkable but for the presence within it of other people, drinking coffee or sleeping on available shelf space. While most just hang around, some of them follow behind the staff as they work in a somewhat disruptive matter. Their actions as useless as the employees are purposeful; those working take no notice of these literal parasites. Hence what we see seems fragmented against itself, as if two realities were on view, joined together but opposite, reconcilable only in a world beyond sense.

 

Mik’s artworks succeed because he creates situations that are undecidable rather than implausible.  Plausibility in fact helps the installations overcome the need for explanation as meaning moves from the particular to the general; the present lived as an abstract reality divorced from any awareness of its larger significance.

 


This text originally appeared in BorderCrossings Volume 21#1 (#81).


The 2006 Sonambiente Festival of Hearing and Seeing, Berlin

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Bernard Leitner, Kaskade (2006)

By Rosemary Heather

Shown at a number of locations in Berlin, The Sonambient Festival of Hearing and Seeing took place within the wider context of the 2006 World Cup. This was a circumstance that found its most tangible expression at the Brandenbrug Gate branch of the Akademie der Kunst. Situated next to the Gate, on the Pariser Platz, the Akademie also happened to be at the start of the so-called ‘fan mile’. Running along the tree-lined boulevard that connects the Gate to the city’s Victory Column, the fan mile saw audiences of up to 700,000 people congregate to watch live football broadcasts on giant TV screens and bleachers temporarily erected for the occasion.

Two basic assumptions framed the event. The first is that sound art is somehow intrinsically populist. Acknowledging that it sat at the doorstep of an uncommonly powerful global event, the Akademie offered fans the ‘Public Viewing World Cup Sound Art Lounge’, which bracketed screenings of each game with various sound art events, most of them themed DJ evenings. Presumably the idea was to offer fans a gateway to the appreciation of other types of sound-based phenomena. The second more interesting premise is that the festival would in effect provide the context to enable an experience of the city of Berlin as “an actual work of sound art.” By stating its desire to make a connection between “urban experience and sound experience”, the festival organizers reveal a preference for cultural sounds, as opposed to those found in nature – if one can put it like that? It is a distinction made if only for the purposes of shedding light on a deeper bias: that is, in favour of the synthetic character of urban sound experience and its innate connection to spectacle.

The idea that sound based art may lead on to thoughts about spectacle proves useful when considering the artworks presented by the event. It suggests criteria for evaluating the work that is otherwise lacking in the catchall category of sound art. This is especially true because, as a mode of art making that is about aural experience but is not music, sound art has long operated as a subgenre of modernist art practice. Dedicated to experimentation with volume and the spatial, durational and physical effects of sound, it falls within the larger modernist project of finding ways to give tangible expression to a medium’s formal properties.

Much of the work presented by Sonambinete adhered to this proto-modernist formula. Austrian artist Bernard Leitner’s Kaskade (2006), a sound installation in a kidney-shaped stairwell, provided one of the more stellar examples of this type of practice. Six tweeter-fitted parabolic bowls mounted in the 12-story stairwell created cascading effects of sound that changed according to where one was standing. As with the best of these types of experiments, the aural effects had tangible physical and almost visible correlates to create a physically embodied experience of the architectural space. However, most of the artworks in this mode presented by Sonambiente were far less compelling, if only because this type of experimentation seems irrelevant to those aspects of contemporary experience that the best sound-based art can offer a critical perspective on.

A large portion of the show was devoted to works of sculpture with a sound component, and this had the inadvertent effect of exposing the weakness of sound art as a category. For what may be good examples of audio art can also be just middling examples of artworks generally. Belgian artist Kris Vleeschouwer’s Glassworks, a+b (2005), consists of 10,000 glass bottles sitting on a mechanized industrial shelving unit. Connected by an ADSL line to five glass-recycling containers around Berlin, the shelving moves every time someone throws a bottle away, displacing the bottles in the gallery so that they smash to the floor. Although breaking glass always brings with it some residual excitement, the work never quite escapes the banality of its conceptual framework: people recycle and accidents happen, whether casually connected or incidental, both are unremarkable occurrences in everyday life.

Like Vleeschouwer’s piece, the German Robert Jacobsen’s Skulpturelles Theater Nr. 4 (2006) easily falls within the genre of kinetic sculpture. A drum and large symbol are balanced on either ends of a microphone stand that hang’s from the ceiling by a single chain. A small fan next to the symbol causes the sculpture to spin languidly but with enough velocity to activate a drumstick attached to its other end. Although there is a nice economy of materials used, and a kind of semantic equivalence between elements achieved, the sculpture is of a type that could have been made any time in the last 50 years. The historical particularities that gave kinetic pioneer Jean Tinguely’s work its playful and bracing relevance belong to his time; as mechanical devices are themselves an almost outmoded format of our interface with the world, art about machines are also look as if they are speaking to us from another era.

Opera for a Small Room, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, 2005

Addressing the disjunction in timeframes that are always a part of the historical condition is Opera for a Small Room (2005) by the Canadians’ Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Viewers look through the windows of to-scale built cabin into an interior filled from top to bottom with old fashioned record players, 24 antique speakers and almost 2000 long playing record albums. Over the course of 20 minutes, a scenario plays out. Animatronic activation of the record players, and light and audio elements evoke a tale about the opera-obsessed individual who retreats to this cabin to play music and reflect on his life. A voice distorted as if speaking through a megaphone, and dreamy as if lost in thought, provides the basic elements of a narrative. Orchestral and pop music, arias from operas, and ambient sound effects such as the thunderous noise from a passing train are layered together to create a fully immersive art experience. So persuasive is the mise-en-scene of this work that one has to stop and remind oneself that what they are watching is happening but is not actually there; no one sits in this cabin playing records. Existing in the imagination in some melancholy Canadian back wood, far from the urban milieu that creates opera and even history, the work sat in fact in an art gallery in Berlin. The Sonambiente festival provided no better example of our susceptibility to the seductions of virtual experience. Perhaps it was the work’s dislocation of locales and implied historical timeframes (record albums are a thing of the past) that helped to make tangible the synthetic nature of the world it creates. The artists had no need to avail themselves of futuristic metaphors to make visible the fantastic virtual character of the reality that comprises much of contemporary experience. Instead they made use of a slight historical time lag to give sharp focus onto the world of the present. Creating an awareness about not the content of that experience but the form that enables its expression is what made this work most relevant to the spectacle of the World Cup that was occurring all around it. In such a large and varied event as Sonambiente 2006, it might seem odd to say that one work more than all the others fully met the event’s ambitions to provide a critical context for a sports event with an unprecedented media reach, but this would only be to point out just how elusive critical reflection on the present can be.

This text originally appeared in The Senses and Society Vol 2, Issue 1.

The 2006 Gwangju and Singapore Biennales by Rosemary Heather

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba, Memorial Project Waterfield: The Story of the Stars, 2006

It is not surprising that an artwork could suggest a metaphor for the global explosion of biennales. Korean-American Michael Joo’s prize winning work Bodhi Obfuscatus (Space-Baby) (2005) at the 2006 Gwanju Biennial is a case in point. A gold-painted Buddhist statue sits in a darkened room surrounded by a latticed grid of webcams; surrounding this, mirrors and flat screen TVs mounted on poles refract and reflect the images relayed by the tiny cameras’, but what the viewer sees is indistinct. Fragmented views of the statue’s face glow with the sickly green hue typical of real time images when transmitted on the Internet. If Joo makes the somewhat obvious point that the web redefines our experience of time and place, he also encapsulates an idea about the biennale phenomenon: cultural translations are often murky but the mechanisms of their transmission remain the lingua franca of globalism today.

This is true of modern communications technologies and the biennial format, use of the former sometimes being the best way to standardized an artwork in the international style. There is a kind of depersonalized universalism inherent to professionalised art practice that allows for the expression of local concerns. As in Joo’s work, the meeting of East and West, and past and present, was a central focus of the Gwanju Biennale. This was also true of its counterpart in Singapore; which by cross-promotional design had opened just prior to Gwanju, and which put forward a set of interests that were overall perhaps less coherent but more interesting for their relevance to the Asia-Pacific region.

If Gwanju was the stronger exhibition, it also was the more conventional, although this impression may simply be a reflection of its site. All the works in Gwanju were shown in one huge multileveled venue, whereasSingaporeused multiple locations, many of them places of worship, giving a greater sense that the show was knit into the fabric of the city. Gwanju also presented a higher proportion of artists known on the international circuit. The Incidental Self II (2006) by the collaborative duo Elmgreen and Dragset featured hundreds of small framed photographs all in some way referring to the gay lifestyle. Tepid and banal, this commissioned work was also presumably not intended for jaded Western eyes as its primary audience. The Italian Monica Bonvicini offered What Does Your Wife/Girlfriend think of your Rough Dry Hands? an ongoing project consisting of a questionnaire the artist has been conducting with construction workers in various cities and languages since 1999. Presenting the hand-scribbled answers in rows papered along a corridor, the work looks at preconceptions about gender. Like that of Elmgreen and Dragset, it has a domestic scale that is appropriate to its sociological conceit; inadvertently, however, this exposes the slightness of Western preoccupations – and specifically identity politics – when compared to the weight of issues informing works by their colleagues in the East. Chen Cheieh-Jen’s spectacular and disturbing Lingchi: Echoes of a Historical Photograph (2002) is a multi-screen reconstruction of an archival photo from the early 1900s. Using the techniques of cinema and the actual photograph it elaborates a scenario of extreme cruelty: execution by mutilation. The rhetorical devices of film mean that you infer the violence more than you see it. Balancing the aestheticisation of the act with its analysis, the artist provokes a range of questions, not least the intrinsic connection between visual representation and power. On an outdoor walkway between the two sides of the Biennale building, viewers of Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s Memorial Project Waterfield: The Story of the Stars (2005-2006) look down one level onto a field of 26,000 empty water bottles. Working in this area, which is likened by the artist to a “prison courtyard”, white clad performers drink water from tanks strapped to their backs and then release it when they can into the plastic bottles. Their urine becomes the paint of the picture plane, the bottles being slowly accumulated and arranged into the yellow stars of the Vietnamese flag. The performers looking like nothing so much as labourers in a rice field, the artist suggests that the colonial struggles of his country continue: the containers of their body fluids bear the labels of the bottled-water brands Aquafina and Desani, subsidiaries of Pepsi Co. and Coca Cola, respectively.

Bani Abidi, Shan Pipe Band Learns Star-Spangled Banner, 2004

Artworks inSingapore’s first Biennale also focus on a globalism that beats a path to your door. As with Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s work, global economic forces are identified with their most notorious ambassador; America’s influence is as large as the resentment it appears to inspire. In the large screen projection, The White House (2005), the Korean artist Joonho Jeon digitally animates an image of himself whitewashing out the windows of 2100 Pennsylvania Avenueas it appears on the back of the US 20 dollar bill. Like the strain of anti-Americanism running through both exhibitions, what the current US administration doesn’t know may be hurting them. In Shan Pipe Band Learns Star-Spangled Banner (2004), the Pakistani artist Bani Abidi tells melancholy a story on two screens. On one, the eponymous brass pipe band struggles to master the American anthem; on the other, one of their members gets dressed into a uniform with the red tunic and gold epaulettes of the country’s colonial past. The Chinese artist, Jianhua Liu powerfully expands on this theme to the point that it becomes not a specific but a universal indictment. Exhibited in a former Methodist Church, Dream (2005-2006) is a large-scale sculptural installation. Broken ceramic casts of consumer goods ­– such as computer keyboards, light bulbs, guns and toy airplanes – litter the floor in thousands of pieces. Seen from the perspective of a raised viewing platform, the fragments cohere into the image of a space shuttle – an elegant and harrowing expression of the idea of the catastrophe that is modernity itself.

Singapore is a city-state which is famous for its unusually high degree of social controls (e.g.: the no chewing gum edict, like decriminalized marijuana you can use it but its sale is against the law). It was a situation of unknown restrictions, against which the Biennale’s curators played a fascinating game of low-grade political provocation. Swedish duo Bigert and Bergstrom’s video work, The Last Supper (2005) looks at the American tradition of serving condemned men a last meal of their choice. A rather facile news-magazine type documentary, the work nonetheless made the ironic cruelties of the custom tangible. It also served to highlight the tensions inherent to the ambitions ofSingapore’s Biennale. A peacefully multicultural society,Singaporeis also known for its somewhat relaxed attitude to the death penalty. In this context, The Last Supper took on an added resonance, foregrounding other possible views on the topic than the one the country practices as a cultural norm.  Although showing the work did not exactly constitute an incident of political dissent, its toleration shows how artworks can help to expand the realm of thought. Even if this toleration was in the name of what was speculated to be one of the Biennale’s larger goals, to create the impression of the liberal environment in advance of a conference of the IMF, its knock-on effects are still positive.

This text was originally published in C Magazine, #92.

Of Mice and Men: the 4th Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Paul McCarthy, Bang Bang Room, 1992

The 4th Berlin Biennial presents art about death, decrepit sculptures and rancid dreams. Tacitly it poses the question: “Is this a world you would want to live in?” And gives the answer: “Too bad, because you already do.” Or as the title of one of the works in the exhibition so aptly puts it: “I cannot forward or rewind this state of being, this aged resign…” (mixed media installation by Sebastien Hammwohner, Dani Jakob and Gabriel Vormstien, 2004) Charged with the task of putting a gloss on contemporary art practice, international art expositions rarely risk making a statement as strong as this – or at least rarely one that is so pessimistic.

Curated by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni and Ali Subotnik, who are also responsible for the various initiatives of the Wrong Gallery, the Biennial lived up to the trio’s reputation for defying expectations, but true to form, not in the way they were expected to do so. Other Wrong Gallery projects include a Manhattan exhibition venue of the same name that consists only of a street front space confined to the dimensions of its doorframe, and a 1:6 scale replica of the same that is available for purchase. Like the work of Cattelan himself, the Wrong Gallery’s modus operandi is to tweak conventions within the well-established confines of contemporary art practice. And indeed the 4th Berlin Biennial started out in this mode. Expanding the Biennial’s boundaries in the year leading up to the event, the three conducted bi-weekly interviews with artists in the Berlin listings magazine Zitty, put together a photocopied tome called Checkpoint Charley of unauthorized reproductions of all 700 artists they met with who were not included in the Biennial, and in September 2005, began presenting a series of exhibitions, using guest curators, in a space they called The Gagosian Gallery. Since the real Gagosian Gallery is well known and exists elsewhere, and the art world being the small ecosphere that it is, everyone could experience the fun of being in on the “joke.”

These projects did much to raise the profile of the event and the Biennial benefited greatly from its most inspired innovation: the presentation of the entire exhibition on a single street, Augustrasse, in the centre of the former East. Home to the KW, or Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art, the major non-collecting contemporary art venue in the city, Augustrasse also has a preponderance of one of the most distinctive features of Berlin, disused buildings. Spaces richly evocative of the city’s complex and troubled history were put to powerful use by the curators. Naming the Biennial Of Mice and Men, after the Steinbeck novel (the phrase is taken from a poem by Robert Burns) signals a narrative intent for the exhibition: like the street of Augustrasse, it has a beginning and an end – and it tells, however tangentially, a story. Similarly, the art presented in the show is for the most part figurative. The use of the street and the in some cases almost derelict sites and were clearly intended to compound this impression. The romance of seeing promenading crowds on opening night combined with cold wet March weather to reinforce the overriding tone of much of the work in the show, which was dark and gloomy; by forcing its audience to move between venues on the street, the curator’s created a fitting metaphor for the exhibition’s worldview: a biennial about prevailing conditions.

More than one person I spoke with commented that the show’s narrative emphasis had its most obvious manifestation in the curators’ preference for so-called “mannequin art,” of which there seemed to be a lot. Mannequins, dolls and marionettes, defenseless as they are, lend themselves to abject statements, perhaps because of the ease with which they are dismembered, or otherwise abused. The Glaswegian artist Kathy Wilkes’ mixed media installation, Non Verbal (2005) provides a good example of this tendency. In the centre of a selection of disparate scattered objects, a black manikin stands mid stride, her face obscured by a small rectangular painting that is attached to it. The canvas is smeared by a few disconsolate brush strokes of color, its placement where the sculpture’s face should be turning it into the very image of angry inarticulateness. Wilkes’ work is redolent of self-reproach, suggesting that in the 21st Century painters and sculptors of the human figure move in dicey territory.

If this is an ulterior thesis of the exhibition, it is one that the artists, in effect, wrest back from the curators. For the context in this Biennial, especially for those works presented in the Former Jewish School for Girls, is problematically dominant. Distrust of the figure could be considered a theme in the work of American sculptor Rachel Harrison, but it’s a distrust leavened by humour. Harrison refracts sculpture through its contemporary practice as installation, bringing the figure back into the work through the use of pop cultural references. But shown in the Girls’ school, with its peeling paint, dust and faded graffiti, her trademark sculpture’s combining pink insulation foam, plywood and figurative elements – in this case a typewriter – gets dragged down into the firmament of the venue’s pathos-laden ambience.

Other works in this venue fair better, if to the perhaps questionable end of creating a macabre atmosphere. Markus Schinwald’s Otto (2004), for instance, is a life-sized Marionette that sits slumped in a chair. Guy wires are visible but Otto (get it?) doesn’t work. Similarly mawkish, if haunting, is the late Polish artist, Tadeusz Kantor’s The boy in the bench (1983), in which a life-sized child doll sits at a 19th century wooden school desk. More interesting and genuinely unsettling is Bulgarian artist Pravdoliub Ivanov’s Territories (1995/2003) a mud encrusted series of flags running along a hallway on a the school’s first floor, or the Russian Viktor Alimpiev’s Summer Lightings (2004) a video consisting of tight shots of young school girls enigmatically drumming their fingers on their desks, intercut with distant glimpses of summer lightning. Most spectacular in this setting is Paul McCarthy’s Bang Bang Room (1992). Flush with a platform, the four mechanized wallpapered walls of a room, each with its own door incessantly opening and banging shut, lever out to constantly make and unmake a room. The action of the walls is slow enough that viewers can safely step on and off of the platform, but the effect of the work is manic and unsettling just the same, much like the Biennial itself.

 This article was originally published in Border Crossings #98 June 2006

 

The Normal Condition of Any Communication

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Claire Fontaine: Foreigners Everywhere (2011): Neon. Installation at Gallery TPW, Toronto. Photo: Magenta.

Ayreen Anastas + Rene Gabri, Neil Beloufa, Keren Cytter, Claire Fontaine and Reza Haeri. Curated by cheyanne turions

Gallery TPW, Toronto June 23 – July 30, 2011

By Rosemary Heather

This exhibition begins with a quote from Rancière: “The normal condition of any communication is distance.” Distance is arguably the first principle of any art exhibition. Visual art has indirection built into it; witness the tendency to glance sideways from artwork to wall label in search of clues to its meaning. Curator cheyanne turions finds different ways to foreground this process of translation. Ayreen Anastas + Rene Gabri present notebooks of their collaborative texts and drawings. Ostensibly a project to make sense of things, the artists’ meanderings are curiously written in miniature. Their texts are then made almost illegible by the notebooks presentation in a vitrine. Claire Fontaine’s Foreigners Everywhere (2011), is an ongoing neon project that translates the eponymous into languages other than English, depending on where it is shown. In Toronto, the phrase is translated into Ojibway to highlight gallery’s location, on the territory of a disputed land claim the tribe has with the Canadian government. Godard once famously spoke of the Children of Marx and Coca Cola. The three video works that make up the remainder of the show are by artists who could easily be called the Children of Jean Luc Godard. Neil Baloufa’s Untitled (2010) displaces cinematic verisimilitude onto its facsimile: artifice. Flimsy paper constructions set the scene in an Algerian villa, while actors, their backs mostly to the camera, talk about the time unnamed terrorists came to visit. Strategies of storytelling mirror shifting subjectivities of understanding. Iranian Reza Haeri’s All Restrictions End (2009) a cinematic essay in the manner of JLG’s Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98), looks at fashion as a mode of desire, one that has been made particularly acute by the Islamic Republic’s injunctions against Western dress. Finally, Keren Cytter’s The Hottest Day of the Year (2010) makes audacious use of montage to cleave together seemingly unrelated stories about a fictional French nurse in Africa and female Israeli soldiers. Of all the works in the show, Cytter’s shares most in common with Clare Fontaine in exploiting the art context to produce canny meta-contextual meanings.

This review appears in the October 2011 issue of Flash Art #110

Gary Evans spce invdrs by Rosemary Heather

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Courtyard, 2011, oil on canvas, 36 x 60 inches

Writing about the paintings of Jan van Eyck, art historian Erwin Panofsky said: “Jan van Eyck’s eye operates as a microscope and as a telescope at the same time…compelling the beholder to oscillate between positions very far from the picture and many positions close to it.” The quote could also describe the paintings of Gary Evans — but with the important distinction that, in Evans’ work, the oscillations are inscribed onto the canvas. Rendering dimension in a picture as shifting planes of paint has always been a predominant feature of Evans’ art. It’s a technique that creates oscillations, or suggested shifts in position for the viewer that, in their way, are just as characteristic of the world the artist inhabits as van Eyck’s more detailed figurative paintings were of his.

Panofsky’s quote points to the broad context Evan’s paintings have always had as their first point of reference: the tradition of landscape painting. For Evans, the Dutch painters of the 17th century have particular significance. Van Eyck provides a reference point as a Nordic master who worked in what is considered to be a naturalistic style – which is to say a style unencumbered by the idealizations of Italian Renaissance Humanism. Of greater relevance is Jacob van Ruisdael, whom Evans cites as an influence. Indeed when looking closely at the artist’s paintings, viewers can often glimpse segments of landscape peaking through, styled in a descriptive mode that is distinctively Flemish.

This text was originally written to accompany Gary Evan’s show ‘spce invdrs’ at Paul Petro Contemporary Art. More info here.

Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection 1963-2005

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Douglas Gordon: 24 Hour Psycho, 1993. Photo: courtesy of the artist and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington. Photographer: Christopher Smith. Film stills from Psycho, 1960. Director: Alfred Hitchcock.

Works from the Flick and Kramlich Collections and others

Curated by Stan Douglas, Christopher Eamon, Gabriele KnapsteinAnd Joachim Jäger

Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin
29 September 2006 – 25 February 2007

By Rosemary Heather

It is hard to imagine that only 30 years ago John Szarkowski’s presentation of William Eggleston’s photographs at the Museum of Modern Art could be considered a breakthrough because they were in colour. By separating lens-based imagery from the 19th century notion of fine art to which the black and white photograph had been, up to that point, confined, MOMA – a key player in the creation of the very idea of modern art – expanded the definition of art to include contemporary production, opening the door to, among other things, works in new media. Arguably it is this event, rather than say work done in structural film, that augured the current dominance of video installation in contemporary art: It points to the growing importance of the institution itself. This is especially true of work on video. If Duchamp had critiqued the artwork’s institutional dependence a prescient 90 odd years before, the triumph of video installation as an art form represents its wholesale consolidation; the two cannot be separated.

Functioning as a companion piece to, and update of, the Whitney Museum’s 2002 exhibition about the projected image “Into the light: Image in American art 1964-1977”, Beyond Cinema presents 27 works designated as markers along the road to video’s present supremacy. The focus of both shows is the art form’s basic technical requirement of projection as a stepping off point for the creation of a spatial experience in the gallery, whether perceptual or psychological and usually a combination of the two. Video’s ability to be projected from the rear, as opposed to film’s frontal orientation, adds an extra dimension to this dynamic. The exhibition does an excellent job of showing the different ways that artists have devised to think through the permutations of this possibility.

Edge of a Wood (1999) a ravishing installation by Rodney Graham opens the show, and suggests its emphasis. While early video art was once valued for its anti-aesthetic austerity, Graham’s work has a shimmering painterly lushness. On a two-screen projection, helicopter-mounted searchlights illuminate trees at the edge of the forest to the deafening sound of the chopper’s blades. With this simple but gorgeous update on the genre of landscape painting, Graham implies that art may change in keeping with technological developments but its focus stays the same: the world and the complicated business of how we see it.

Graham’s work creates a threshold for the viewer’s entry into the exhibition – this is especially true due to the enveloping nature of its soundtrack ¬– suggesting that the prevalence of video projection in art is only a reflection of the immersion of our culture in a mediated world. Douglas Gordon’s 24-hour Psycho (1993), is well-served in this context. The artist’s slowing down of Hitchcock’s film to a molasses pace looks today less like a neat trick than a statement of millennial significance: The dream – and the nightmare – of our mediated lives has no beginning or end.

On a lower level of the venue,

Diana Thater: The best space is the deep space, 1998. Courtesy of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Los Angeles, California, USA. Photographer: Fredrik Nilsen.

encapsulates this idea in a dazzling four-part installation. An image of a white horse and her handlers standing in a ring is seen through the haze of dry ice and a changing array of colored spotlights. Variations of this scene are repeated in two large screen projections and on a monitor placed on the floor: viewers see what the cameras see and see the crew filming this in a shot from behind their backs. As the colored gels change from pink, to yellow to blue, the horse appears and disappears, and on another monitor, alphabet fridge magnets in primary colours spell out the production credits against a white background. The installation acts like an object lesson in the persuasive authority of the image. For all of Thater’s efforts’ to break down the illusion, its powers of mystification remain no less profound.

Another stunning work, Monica Bonvicini’s Destroy She Said (1998), uses repetition and dissonance to fracture the space of filmic artifice. On an angled two-screen projection with the wooden grid of its support sticking out on all sides, the artist presents clips of European film stars, such as Anna Karenna and Monica Vitti, in a variety of fraught cinematic moments. On the audio track we hear a women crying, a phone ringing, a plane traveling overhead, the sounds sometimes in sync with the image but mostly not. When in this montage of distress, a woman shoots a gun, the repertoire of dramatic effects is complete, the artist suggesting that, at least as far as cinema is concerned, the psychological space of femininity is dangerously overwrought.

Toronto artist John Massey’s seminal As the Hammer Strikes (A Partial Illustration) (1982) offers a kind of masculine counterpart to Bonvicini’s work. A three-channel installation in black and white and color, the artist drives a car on the highway in the desolate Canadian winter. As he converses with a hitchhiker he has picked-up, the screens alternate between images of the landscape, the driver and his passenger, and stock footage shots of the things they talk about. Because the hitchhiker speaks with a slight stutter, the conversation is somewhat stilted, and this impression is reinforced by the image montage. When the passenger talks about being at a strip bar and we simultaneously see the image of a stripper on an adjacent screen, it creates a strangely hollow feeling, as if the speaker had no interiority. A little seen example of video projection in its early form, as a critique of mediated subjectivity the work is devastatingly effective.

For Canadians, Beyond Cinema is a watershed for two reasons. Amongst a curatorial team of four, two are from Canada, the artist Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon, curator of the San Francisco-based Kramlich collection, one of the largest and most important private collections of media art. The duo’s involvement and the strong presence of Canadian artists in the show attests to the leading role Canadians have played in the development of this art form (Douglas’ is represented in the show with his magnificent 1986 work Overture.) A crucial acknowledgement of this contribution, The Art of Projection may also represent a turning point in Canada’s ability – or willingness – to sponsor its artists internationally. Beginning April 1st, 2007, the Harper government has allotted a budget of exactly zero dollars to its missions abroad for the promotion of Canadian culture. This from a Federal government that the Oct 25th Globe and Mail reported was “awash in surplus cash.” Although in Quebec there has been considerable uproar about this disturbing shift in cultural policy, it appears to have gone relatively unnoticed in English Canada. Now is the time is for everyone involved in the arts in Canada to work to reverse this trend. There is more at stake here than the careers of Canadian cultural producers abroad. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that a government so unaccountably hostile to the arts portends a dark future for the country.

This text was originally published in Bordercrossings #101

 

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun: Upending art history

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Colour Zone, Acrylic on Canvas, 2000
Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Colour Zone, Acrylic on Canvas, 2000

“It’s nice to make beautiful paintings, but at some point I have to record history”

By Rosemary Heather

Given its aversion to rankings, I will risk offending Canada’s ultra-egalitarian sensibilities by saying Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun is Canada’s best artist. By this I mean, Yuxweluptun is the artist you would learn the most from if you were lucky enough to see his works presented in a career retrospective. Far from poking around in the increasingly dimly-lit corridors of conceptual art practice, Yuxweluptun maps out his own territory in art. Yuxweluptun’s work shows how a long term commitment to craft and the set of problems it presents to the artist will pay in the end a certain dividend of freedom. If an artist’s work is good enough to merit career examination, viewers’ get the chance to understand what it means to be an artist. A Yuxweluptun retrospective, currently only available on his website, would tell you how the best art creates its own context of authority, and that this is the way an artist speaks to his or her audience; speaks as if gifted with language, that is, regardless of the format of expression. In his work, it is clear how the words ‘authority’ and ‘authorship’ are related, and why mastery of an art form can create a position of autonomy for the one who has mastered it —and if words like ‘craft’, ‘self-expression’, and ‘mastery’ have been in recent years have become unfashionable, maybe its time to bring them back again?

When I spoke with him on the phone, Yuxweluptun seemed to have little interest in discussing his work. His focus instead was almost exclusively on the subject matter that informs his paintings: the double bind of the Pacific Northwest Coast Indian, who in Yuxweluptun’s view has been sold out by white man and Indian chief alike. From speaking with Yuxweluptun, I know it would be wrong to call him a ‘Canadian’ artist. His ancestry is a mix of Coast Salish and Okanagan First Nations. It is a heritage embodied in the iconography and political perspective made manifest in his work. Differing from most other parts of Canada, First Nation land claim negotiations in British Columbia are ongoing, to this day. For Yuxweluptun, this means the potential for betrayal of his land and people is ongoing, feelings of connection to the land carrying within them a threat of dispossession. For Yuxweluptun, then, history is not in the past, something understood in retrospect. Rather it is the developing story of his people, their present reality, something, as he says “you wake up to every day.”

That Yuxweluptun sees himself as a History painter is clear. He is a newspaper reporter and polemicist, dramatizing the issues he cares about with the suspicion that some people would prefer he didn’t do this. Few artists in any medium have more successfully vilified ‘the man’, an enemy who in Yuxweluptun’s paintings—whether he is Indian Chief, government official or corporate factotum—wears a suit and a tie. Each of these figures bears a head derived from the artistic iconography of the Pacific North West Coast as a marker of the compromise or worse betrayals he represents: the mask worn is one of perfidy. That he chooses to characterize this iconography as sinister is a measure of not necessarily of Yuxweluptun’s alienation, but of his desire portray alienation of his people. Not quite human, Yuxweluptun’s figures are recognizably a part of the landscape he depicts in his paintings. It is a fully animistic universe, with hills, trees and mountains given life through compositional use of those same iconographic forms. And if his counterparts who inhabit an everyday reality of common sense–that would be us, the audience–fail to see the world as similarly alive and animated by a cosmology of good and evil, this is a mark of our own alienation and complacency, one that will probably doom us in the end.

As a history painter working in the realm of contemporary art, Yuxweluptun keeps company with a select group of artists in Canada, none other that I can think of who make paintings. Rather, Jeff Wall and some of the other Vancouver photoconceptualists come to mind, and maybe the work of Althea Thauberger, an artist who makes video and photo-based installations with the aim of bearing witness to history. I can only speculate that the powerful presence of the natural landscape on the West Coast in Canada makes ‘History painting’ in its contemporary incarnations a concern of artists living there. By comparison, Toronto artists seem preoccupied by the contemporary formats of the still life, suggesting that while West Coast art ensues from a sense of place, Toronto’s artistic imagination is more inward looking and reduces down to the scale of the domestic.

Extending his cosmology beyond the figurative is the body of work Yuxweluptun has made around the compositional figure of the ovoid. Freeing the ovoid from the role it traditionally plays in the art of the region, most recognizably as a pictorial component of the totem pole, Yuxweluptun then lobs the form at the familiar styles of Modernist painting, causing Modernism’s eternal verities to come tumbling down. This tells us not that Modernism had a short eternity so much as it represents a territory that continues to expand. Stacked one on top of the other Yuxweluptun’s ovoids make up a totem pole of Colour Field composition. Gently upending a succession of Modernist genres, the ovoid becomes the ‘Indianized’ format of art history’s re-composition. The playfulness of Yuxweluptun’s approach does not undermine his seriousness of purpose, or the clarity of message his simple method of historical revisionism imparts. Few artists I can think of find such freedom in their facility with a medium. To have this degree artistic control and such a strong of editorial point of view is to be a complete artist. As such, Yuxweluptun sets a standard. The deskilling of art in recent decades has meant a loss in our ability to set criteria for the judging of artworks. Take a look at the paintings of Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun if you want to find them again.

This text originally appeared in Hunter and Cook #5

Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s work can be viewed at: www.lawrencepaulyuxweluptun.com/

Inside The Library Inside My Head: Soft Turn’s Enclosed by Rosemary Heather

Posted on by Rosemary Heather
Soft Turns, Enclosed, 2009, 2:28 loop, stop-motion animation

In the best part of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2, the last instalment of the eight part series, Harry speaks to Dumbledore in a vast white space. ‘Is this real?’ Harry asks, ‘Or is it inside my head?’ ‘Of course it’s inside your head,’ the wizard replies, ‘but why should it be any less real?’ From the mouth of a wizard in a children’s tale comes wisdom about the metaphysical problem of our age.

 

Like storybooks, image-based media tend to be thought of as ‘not real’.  When you watch a movie you are participating in an illusion; it’s made-up, in part ‘inside your head’. With the proliferation of electronic media, the boundaries of this ‘in your head’ dimension are expanding and consequently our understanding of the real is changing. Sarah Jane Gorlitz and Wojciech Olejnik, working together as Soft Turns, create artworks that examine a key part of this phenomenon: our credulity. Their video, Enclosed (2009), dramatises this shift in the form of a question: What is real? With Enclosed, the artists suggest that representational media, in the form of film or video, is one cause of the complexity of this question. Just how real is the world created by image technologies?

 

We are so easily fooled. It’s a narrative Soft Turns often play out in their work. In /mm (2007) and just add water (2007) stop-motion animations move through maquettes of subway stations the artists have constructed. In Enclosed, the camera pans amongst the shelves of a library. In this work, sleek spaces cast shadow and reflect light, and as we look at these volumes and surfaces our eyes draw their own conclusions. What we see is real enough, that is, we understand that we are looking at a subway or library; we refer to the idea of these things we already have in our mind and recognize contemporary, familiar enough places, which happen (not incidentally) to be devoid of people.

 

In the artists’ hands, verisimilitude is achieved by a meticulous attention to detail. Soft Turns describe their work as “meditative”—this applies equally to the time they spend making their works and to the pleasure viewers get from looking at them. Scaled to the size of a hardcover book, the library featured in Enclosed is made of salvaged material from discarded books the artists found in Berlin. Through a labour-intensive process, Soft Turns have transformed the substance of books into a library, a sly commentary on the idea that books contain multitudes. That the library is a universe in itself is one potential reading of the work’s title.

 

Soft Turns’ use of real world source materials (as opposed to computer-generated graphics) in combination with their concern for accuracy of architectural scale and their careful attention to detail has the effect of infusing the animation with a tangible presence and gives the represented space a feeling of substance. This is a figural space, a library we might visit in our dreams. It is important to note what we see is a composite structure, made up of 12 different maquettes, each a different library. The end result is a generalized space, a Platonic Form as it were. Enclosed, then, presents ‘library’ as an idea, accessible and yet just out of reach—a contemplative entity. We recognize what we see but we will never read these books.

 

The world of Enclosed is not real but does exist within the real world of film. By creating a space for the purpose of filming it, the artists concede to practicalities. However heroic the effort, making art is certainly less arduous than making architecture—and serves a different purpose. In the construction of each maquette, fidelity to detail translates into the indeterminate scale of filmic space. Miniature-ness does not necessarily matter when filmic illusion sets in; it simply becomes the volume that defines the space in the film. By shooting the maquettes and editing all views into one homogenous entity, the artists create an encompassing view. However, the continuous motion within the film, and of the film itself, prevents close looking. The illusion is protected from scrutiny and so further perpetuated. This is true even though Enclosed is presented as two films on a split screen, each providing slightly different views of the library construct.

 

In his book The world viewed: reflections on the ontology of film (1971), Stanley Cavell writes, “In viewing a movie my helplessness is mechanically assured. I am present not at something happening…but at something that has happened, which I absorb (like a memory).”[i] Elaborating on this passage by Cavell, Rosalind Krauss notes that the viewing of a film “suspends our presence to the world it shows us.”[ii] In Enclosed, however, the artists create the world they show us; they determine the materials used in making the film as well as how it plays out for the audience. This process is co-enacted by the viewer in every instance of watching. The camera pans through the halls of a ‘library’ and we see the books on its shelves. At a certain point, the camera zooms close enough so we can see that the books are something other: cut up pages folded into dummy books. This is the reveal: the moment when the mise en scène looks fake and the illusion is dispelled. The film plays on a loop such that the world of this particular library is created and destroyed over and over again.

 

As sophisticated viewers, we greet each stage of this cycle with equanimity. We credit the library as real in the moments that this is possible and we accept that it’s a maquette when the cracks in the illusion start to show. Initial perceptions are followed by a reassessment. And each time, arguably, we are willing to be duped. Perhaps this is the real meaning of the title Enclosed: we live inside the world inside us.

[i] Stanley Cavell, The world viewed: reflections on the ontology of film (New York: Harvard University Press, 1971) 27.

[ii] Rosalind E. Krauss, Perpetual Inventory (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2010) 63.

 

This text was written to accompany Soft Turns’ exhibition Enclosed at the Stride Gallery in Calgary.

Soft Turns is Sarah Jane Gorlitz and Wojciech Olejnik. You can find more info about them here.

Fassbinder: Berlin Alexanderplatz – An Exhibition

Posted on by Rosemary Heather

Fassbinder: “Berlin Alexanderplatz - An Exhibition,” 2007
Fassbinder: “Berlin Alexanderplatz - An Exhibition,” 2007. View of the exhibition at KW, Berlin. Photo: Uwe Walter.
Writing about Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1983 when Reiner Werner Fassbinder’s 14 1/2 hour film epic was first shown in the US, the New York Times’ film critic Vincent Canby noted that the – at that time – recent appearance of home video rental offered a way to negotiate the film’s unfeasible length, and also possibly presaged the creation of a new art form. Canby was right about this, but in a way that he could not have anticipated. The idea that video rentals could democratize and decentralize artworks, putting control into viewer’s hands has been borne out in spectacular fashion by the online video site YouTube, which invented not only new conditions for viewing but an entire universe of viewer-created content.

The question of whether the short videos that can be seen on YouTube can be considered art is entirely germane to Klaus Bisenbeck’s presentation of Berlin Alexanderplatz at the Kunst Werker in Berlin. A major force at the KW since its inception, and now also a curator at PS1 in New York, Bisenbeck is a controversial figure in the Berlin art world. This exhibition will do nothing to alter that reputation. All credit should be given to him for the scale of vision he brings to the staging of Fassbinder’s film. Although revered internationally, the German attitude to the director continues to be ambivalent. As a friend of mine said Fassbinder was “too gay, too political and took too many drugs” to really be a welcome addition to the pantheon of great German artists. Recognition of Bisenbeck’s achievement, however, can’t avoid mention of the obvious caveat about the way this exhibition reduces the conditions for viewing the work to the diminished scale of a contemporary audiences’ YouTube-like attention spans.

Originally made for German television in 1980, the film’s 13 episodes plus an epilogue, which have been re-mastered for 35mm, are shown as loops in 14 separate viewing booths. The film is also screened in its entirety in a small adjacent room outfitted with cinema-style seating. While this is intended to provide a context for the liberties the KW takes in presenting the film as an art installation, the intact screening of the film also makes the weaknesses of the latter strategy apparent. Perhaps this was intentional too? Certainly the exhibition is successful in staging a dialogue between the two formats of viewing. In contrast to the strong narrative pull one experiences when the film is seen as a whole, the installation caters to a more distracted form of reception. Temporarily constructed for the show, the 14 connected booths snake around the perimeter of the KW’s ground floor exhibition space, the last booth functioning like an exit into a central atrium-like area where the obverse screen of all the projections can be seen simultaneously. The effect is spectacular, the coherence of Fassbinder’s vision being blown apart into competing disjunctive fragments.

The claim of the show’s press release is that presenting the film in this way allows the viewer to decide “how they want to approach it”. The assertion ignores the fact that viewers’ have always been able to decide how they approach an art exhibition, but the KW is merely speaking in lingua franca of the contemporary art world when it emphasizes the viewer’s ability to participate in an exhibition as one of its main attributes. As English literary theorist Terry Eagleton notes, the current culture’s preoccupation with audience interactivity originates in reception theory’s insight that, “readers were quite as vital to the existence of writing as authors.”1.

Reception theory gave the world the idea that readers and viewers have an active role to play in the creation of meaning, but the question remains: What meaning can result from presenting Fassbinder’s film in this way? Fragmenting the German director’s massive cinematic accomplishment into bite-sized pieces would seem to play to our culture’s worst atomizing tendencies. Take the time to watch an episode from beginning to end, sitting in a viewing booth on one of the cushions provided, and your patience will be rewarded; Fassbinder’s greatness as a director ensures that. Presented with so much choice, however (leaving aside the possibility of watching each episode in full, laboriously going from booth to booth in chronological order to undermine the show’s premise) the urge is to flit around and sample the film, suggesting that the point is to experience its ambience rather than meaningfully engage with its content.

View the work as a momentary series of encounters, and the static quality of Fassbinder’s dramaturgy becomes apparent — but then he never was a director interested in naturalism. Enter a random choice of rooms in quick succession and you get the impression that all of Berlin Alexanderplatz takes place while the characters sit around talking to each other in one bar or another. The presentation makes the film’s typological connection with the genre of the soap opera apparent. Regardless, viewing the film in this way also gives it the fascinating quality of a parallel universe. Each screen is like a window proving a figurative glimpse into Berlin’s past, a world comprised of the extraordinary history of the city and the artworks and literature it has inspired.

The precedent for Bisenbeck’s show is Scottish artist Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho (1993). Gordon’s premise was that presenting Hitchcock’s famous film as an installation (slowing the projection down to a speed of 24 frames per minute) would reveal the film’s unconscious: the ulterior world it created beyond any of individual element of the director’s intention. Considered from this angle, Bisenbeck’s installation works exceptionally well; he compounds the brilliance of Fassbinder’s work by abstracting it. In the process, the prismatic reality he created is made apparent, not only in this film but in Fassbinder’s body of work as a whole.

1. After Theory, Terry Eagleton, Penguin Books, London, 2003. p. 53.

By Rosemary Heather

Curated by Klaus Bisenbeck
Kunst Werker Institute for Contemporary Art
Berlin, March 18-May 13th, 2007

This text originally appeared in Bordercrossings # 103