Jaime Gili, Bill at Pittier, 2009. Exhibition at Kunsthalle Winterthur with Gran Salazar (left) and Yemaya (right). Courtesy Kunsthalle Winterthur.

Jaime Gili (*1972 in Caracas, lives and works in London) is known for his large-scale acrylic paintings that show geometrical forms in truly explosive compositions; an intricate mesh of forms and colors catches the spectator’s attention and draws it into the paintings or, on the contrary, with a dynamic impulse launches it beyond the artworks’ boundaries. Within the thicket of artificially designed surroundings and wallpapers, his large-scale paintings are integral parts, but at the same time they stand out as solitary and autonomous objects. Jaime Gili seems to combine the wilderness of the jungle with a formalist and reductionist artistic language; the result is a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, a crystalline pulsating organism that almost comes alive.

By Oliver Kielmayer

FROM VENEZUELA TO EUROPE AND BACK

Oliver Kielmayer - Tell me about the very beginnings of your artistic career. What was your background and how were the conditions then in Venezuela?

Jaime Gili - At that time there was no faculty of fine arts. People who wanted to become artists would traditionally study architecture or art history, or they went to a governmental school of art, which was a bit old fashioned. But there were also schools for graphic design. In 1989 I went to one that had teachers from different disciplines: architecture, painting, sculpture. When my family decided to go to Barcelona - where they originally came from - I told the director about the opportunity I had and he said: “What are you still doing here? Go!” When I went to the design faculty at the university in Barcelona I was very disappointed; however, I realized that I didn’t want to become a graphic designer but a painter. I wanted to set my own rules. After a few years, having been offered a grant for the Royal College, I moved to London in 1996.

O.K. - What did your first paintings look like? Were they totally different from what you are doing now?

J.G. - They looked totally different. In Venezuelan painting there is a strong abstract, optical and constructivist tradition, and in Barcelona I hadn’t yet recognized my “South Americanity,” even at the Royal College. I only started later to go deeper into abstraction.

O.K. - Tell me more about the reference to the Venezuelan painting tradition.

J.G. -The art of the 1950s was especially important for me. Abstraction was an international movement then, but in big South American cities there were many particular scenes. Even today the look of Venezuela owes much to the 1950s and painters like Soto, Otero, and Cruz-Diez. Their way of seeing became a general and popular thing and you can see this even now: the way people paint their houses, the way they paint the buses … This popular visual culture is an important source for me, more so than Soto, Otero or Cruz-Diez directly. My visual reference is not so much an intellectual, art-historic one, but much more one based on popular visual culture. When I became conscious of this background, I suddenly felt in place and from there I could decide where to go next.

ABSTRACTION, MODERNISM AND THE SOCIAL CONTEXT

O.K. - In Europe, the 1950s were a time of economic growth and prosperity; most people were happy with life. Nowadays life has become difficult again. The references you mentioned are more of a formal and aesthetic kind and I wonder how this kind of visual language fits into contemporary life. Another example is World War I, when abstraction was big for the first time. I keep on asking myself how you can celebrate abstraction and aesthetic formalism when the world is on fire.

J.G. - For me it’s all linked to a positive and optimistic kind of thinking. It’s not the idea that you sit in your studio and don’t look at the world, but that you offer a happier alternative to what is going on.

O.K. - In literature there was a similar movement, based on the fact that traditional language is just not capable of accurately describing the nightmare called reality anymore. Maybe this can be transferred into visual language, meaning no picture of reality can possibly show the horror of the modern world.

J.G. - That’s an interesting possibility. Things can always be better. In the early fifties most of the infrastructure in Venezuela was built, and in 1958 Venezuela became a democracy and conditions have improved only a little since then. Recently, destruction seems to be the law. Maybe I’m looking at better times, times of creation.

Mashrabiya, 2009. Exhibition view at COMMA 04/ Bloomberg Space in London. Courtesy Jaime Gili.

O.K. - What do you think about the current revival of abstract and modernist traditions in contemporary art? Is it based on the need for more sincerity and intellectuality or is it just the art circus being fed up with the banality of real life references?

J.G. - You can always find artists who follow a certain tradition, even if it is not so visible for a time and only concentrated in certain countries.

O.K. - Have you ever been tempted to paint in a naturalistic manner?

J.G. - Oh yes, sometimes I feel the need to reproduce reality. I often reproduce images from the newspaper in watercolor on paper, only in a small size. But it’s more of an exercise; I would never show these works.

THE SLOW MEDIUM CALLED PAINTING

O.K. - Let’s talk a bit about the painting process. How do you begin and how does the work develop?

J.G. - I almost all the time start with an idea from a previous painting; there is always something I want to work out. It can be a shade of brown that I find difficult to deal with or a part of the painting that is astonishing. I also prepare the canvas and prime it myself; to me this is part of the work, and I work on several paintings at the same time.

O.K. - How has your work developed over the last decade?

J.G. - Formally it is quite clear: The first paintings of the current series started with simple star shape, a graphic representation of what a star is. The beginnings were different overlapping star shapes in black and white. Then color got complex; the stars became pointier, and then they started to go beyond the limits of the frame, and now I seem to be concentrating on what’s going on in the middle. I don’t know where it’s leading me next, but it’s been going on for 8 years now.

O.K. - It’s pretty amazing that you stuck to your very particular way of painting over such a long time. Abstract painting was not very hip for a long time, but you seem to be quite immune to fashions and trends.

J.G. - If you take painting seriously, it is a very slow medium. It’s full of little processes and decisions that may look stupid from the outside, but you must go through them, and this is time consuming.

EXPANDED PAINTING

O.K. - You always arrange your paintings into a very particular spatial arrangement; also, you prefer to place them on a wall painting or wallpaper also designed by you. Where do you position yourself in the tradition of expanded painting?

J.G. - Well sometimes things that are labeled expanded painting are not … Maybe I should try to expand expanded painting in such a way that nobody else will be able to use the label of expanded painting anymore! But honestly, for me it’s all about the struggle with space; I always have to fight it. The space can have a lot of character, but still I have to make it mine. I have this urge to make every single corner and every little detail, window and ceiling part of my work. Ideally the painting doesn’t stop at the end of the canvas but goes further into the space, into architecture…

O.K. - So you must like to do art in public space on a large scale. Maybe you should work together with Zaha Hadid?

J.G. - No, she does curves; I don’t do curvy things! But yes, I would love to build houses or whole parts of a city. Look at the “Ciudad Universitaria” in Venezuela: Villanueva, the architect, worked together with artists such as Vasarely, Arp, Calder, and many local ones, and considered their proposals before he actually designed his plans. I don’t see a reason for not going on with this “integration of the arts”; there should be no limit.

O.K. - This brings us to your ongoing project in Portland, Maine; the painting of 16 oil tanks.

J.G. - People who saw the open call told me that it was definitely something for me. Many painters would refuse to paint oil tanks, but I decided to go for it. Well, the restriction of the bright colors like safety red and yellow were upsetting, but in the end I found a good solution with the allowed palette. I created a painting based on the spatial conditions there. Of course it would even be nicer if I didn’t have to stop with the tanks but just go on into the surroundings; the space between the tanks could be linked and one day the whole area could be turned into a park with little painted paths between the tanks; and inside the tanks there could be useful spaces, galleries …

Art all around. Ongoing project for painting 16 tanks in Portland, Maine. Courtesy Georgia Flanagan and Maine Center for Creativity.

O.K. - You like crossing the traditional borders of art. Do you sometimes think about strategies for achieving a more wholesome designing of the world according to your aesthetic standards?

J.G. - I started recently to make more and more contacts with architects. In Venezuela I had the chance to work with some leaders of the opposition who invited me to do bigger projects, from bus designs to a park I am intervening in a very poor neighborhood this year. I’m enjoying this process very much.

O.K. - What is the relation of your work to design? Is it important? Are you conscious of the proximity to some aspects of design and decoration and are you scared of it?

J.G. - I’m not afraid of decoration but perhaps of artists being dragged into mass production. If somebody invites me to do a design for this or that, I tend to be very careful. For example I would be afraid to design a lamp for mass production. It must be the other way round: If somebody asks me to do something for a space and I find I have to design a lamp, it’s fine; vice versa I think is terrifying.

Oliver Kielmayer is director of the Kunsthalle Winterthur and manager of the international artist-in-residence program of the foundation Künstlerhaus Boswil. He co-curated the International Biennial of Contemporary Art (IBCA) in Prague in 2005. Kielmayer is also publisher of the free artist’s newspaper WeAreTheArtists and mentor for students in the master’s degree in curating program at the Zurich University of the Arts.

Olivier Gourvil, Erostar, 2007.

By Claude Temin-Vergez

Painting’s omnipresence today is difficult to untangle from the climate of insecurity and safe value strategies associated with its format. Although it might seem fair to a medium that had been precipitated into darkness in past decades by the advent of conceptualism, the installation generation and the tidal wave of new media, its eclipse was not always unfounded. What interests me here is the effect of those decades on a genre that was born from the modernist project and seems to have carried through with constant conceptual adjustment. The abstract problem, in which my own practice is rooted, is here in question.

Three years ago, I was invited to take part in “The Expanded Painting Show.” Its basic concept relied on an analogy with R. Krauss’ “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” but applied to painting in a new positive outlook and in the light of a postmodern, highly media-driven society. As a matter of fact, I am writing this on my iPhone, with my Mp3 gear on, fully connected and digitalized.

This concept, however, is not new. Movements, like Support-surface or BMPT in France as well as Minimalism in America in the 1970s, already envisaged the possibility of considering painting in a wider scope; whether unfolding its constructs, exploring its relationship with architecture, sculpture, film and the environment. What has happened since is a sheer explosion of new media in the world and in art practices. How does the medium of painting respond to this?

Present in these shows, New York-based Tim White-Sobieski’s ambitious plasma screen installation literally allowed you to see the paintings folding and unfolding into endless combinations. Although conforming to formal modernists’ means of painting, geometry, color combinations and systems, the digital movement and rendering on the screen created a highly hypnotic experience.

Dominic Lejman’s projection onto canvas, also a literal application of technology into the process of painting, proposed a film of a corpse in one of the classic reclining postures of Christ. The display of a moving (but still) image on the “symbolic” canvas medium provoked a gut reaction by allowing you to stare at iconographic video-stillness. Carlos Bunga’s ephemeral and architectural experiments were more reminiscent of the low-key spirit of Support-surface. His work provided poignant insight into the concept of painting’s expansion by stripping away the possibilities of means of painting and exploring its relationship between structure and environment.

Carlos Bunga, Elba Benítez Project, 2005, Cardboard, adhesive tape, matt paint, light table and slides, Photo: Luis Asín.

“La Peinture est Presque Abstraite” (1)  (Almost Abstract Painting) is another project in which I have recently been involved. Although focused in part on the influence of new media on painting, it is quite different in its scope.

Some of the artists in the show might be working with digital media and video (Xavier Drong) or installation (Nicolas Royer and I), but the particular works selected for the exhibition seemed deeply rooted in painting’s tradition. Canvas or board on stretchers is used, always hung frontally and more or less square; in short, a painting show.

Even if the works in question clearly emerged from the abstraction genre, they made use of all things representational: images, figures, icons, ornaments, screens and signs, with a kind of distance that they all share. Far from mere repetition, they loop, clone and use aliases … Clarity and attention to surface are recurrent themes in the work as well as a kind of “digested” mixing of codes and signs fed by contemporary experience and technology. These works equally enjoy playing with graphic and pictorial codes of art and painting tradition, as well as those of our contemporary environment (2).

The “Abstract ” Problem

In today’s post-medium age, the position of abstract painting is problematic. The common notion that it could not progress beyond the monochrome is now a given and echoed in what (Blois 229) perceived as the impasse of Modernism itself. The post-modern and conceptual era left but little space for painting, which was in a sense happy to thrive out of the limelight.

Today the conceptual model itself is being reassessed in light of the Fluxus movement and hippy culture, as a set of propositions, which had its time. Indeed critic Jan Verwoert titled his recent series of lectures: “Why are conceptual artists painting again? Because they think it’s a good idea.”(3)

Emerging from this bumpy road, painting evolved from Modernism to a dead-end to a rebirth of sorts. It bears the stigma of these traditions from Modernism to Post-Modernism, Minimalism and Conceptualism.
Survey exhibitions examining the position of painting often reactivate the traditional dichotomy abstraction-figuration. This dichotomy only serves to stigmatize the question of the “tableau” within the heterogeneity of two painting traditions, one coming from Picabia and the other from Mondrian. Another view is proposed here: painting as a mixing up of the codes between media and art.(4)

Thomas Nozkowski, Untitled (7-127), 1999.

Painting is often envisaged “after photography” (as in the recent Hayward Gallery show in London, “The Painting of Modern Life”), but this project proposes a wider and richer relationship with other new media and technologies (whether computers, the Internet, billboards, graphic design, advertisements, urban signs and culture …) and shows painting able to thrive as a vehicle for the expression of contemporary experience in a media-driven world at ease with popular culture.

In the show “As Painting,” a large survey exhibition set at the Wexner Center for the Arts in the United States in 2001, Stephen Melville, drawing from the Support-surface group, proposed a reading of abstract painting as intrinsically divided; the medium being folded, collaged or woven as to include other media, and therefore displacing “painting” per se. The nature of present attitudes seems radically opposed to such an approach. They envision painting positively embracing the new media culture, and able to retain its identity, coming out enriched by this dialogue rather than displaced by it.

Authentics, Hypers, Systematics, and Eclectics

A couple of years ago, I read a catalogue essay by Matthew Collings of a huge survey exhibition of painting at Flowers East Gallery in London. In his unique, sometimes rather un-reverential and always funny way, he was trying to categorize the work of these 70 abstract painters from different generations; needless to say, a tedious task for a medium that has always resisted definition, let alone classification. His sense of humor probably helped him tackle such an endeavor. His categories were: the Authentics, the Hypers, the Systematics, and the Eclectics (Collings 4).

The Authentics were painters from an older generation who basically use improvisation at the base of their work and are respectful of European & American post-war art in a kind of genuine way. They try and create works that still fit this tradition, but in a contemporary, utterly different context. The Systematics were artists who use rigor and a set of rules to go about making their work with a conceptual drive. They rely on integrity, setting something up - it must be the right thing- and following it through.

Then you had the Eclectics who seemed to use processes that belonged to all the other categories and they made up the biggest part of the show. They seem to have a strong sense of geometry and a kind of systematic approach, but also respect a certain atmospheric feel, dear to the Authentics.

After that you had the category of the Hypers, defined by Collings as a younger generation of artists. I will quote him directly here:
“Probably some of them went to art schools where the Authentics taught in the 80s. But they reject the Authentics’ idea of authenticity and want to express something about a world that doesn’t care about it either. They do a kind of hyper-abstraction where you can believe there is a faint respect for the same painting traditions the Authentics like, somewhere in the picture, but a world of doubt too. They don’t take it for granted that rough, open, atmospheric feel is sincere. It could just as well be fake - since it’s so much part of nostalgia. Or fake might be good. Their style has an ironic look. If there are brush strokes visible at all, they seem as if they’re fetishized rather than real “(Collings 4).

Matthew Collings would probably agree that most of the works featured in “La Peinture est Presque Abstraite” fit into the hyper category. So this is, of course, much of a caricature, but helps perhaps to define the territory on which this project was built.

For David Ryan, Olivier Gourvil’s Erostar (2007) is a bold diagrammatic exposition in black and yellow of a sexualized body - a body of overlapping folds of flesh, a grotesque hybrid of hanging udders and protuberant lumps … The work anthropomorphism is filtered through an immense repertoire of sign-structures, some sifted through urban signs or the signs of the body as seen in comics or graphics. In some of his paintings, forms can have the look of architectural plans, pre-fabricated design units, bulbous forms of graffiti or elements from modernist painting (Ryan 31).

Impurity and Extremes

What seems to connect the works is the shared impurity of their sources as a kind of reaction against the constant quest for purity led by their modernist predecessors. This denotes a moving away from theoretical frameworks provided by Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried.

“La Peinture Est Presque Abstraite” Installation view from left to right C. Temin-Vergez, Meta-drawing#2, 2008; X. Drong, BS_03, 2008; R. Kirwan, Perfect Conditions, 2009.

Cited as one of the most quietly influential painters for almost two decades,(5) Thomas Nozkowski’s work embodies the modernist abstraction tradition, while transporting us to cuckoo land by means of a highly considered staging of infectious references ranging from contemporary architecture, nature to details of Durer’s 1501 detailed ornaments. Jonathan Lasker is another enormous influence on today’s younger generation abstractionists. He fascinates through his ability to give theatrical presence to his “abstract events.” Mary Heilmann, an equally important figure, manages to reconcile abstract references and everyday life.

Current positions seem to exacerbate opposite extremes: expressionism and the deadpan, Rococo and minimalism, graphic design and gestural abstraction, formalism and improvisation, excess and restraint. These are many of the dichotomies at the root of this venture.

Richard Kirwan’s work (on the far right in Figure 4) excels at playing opposites. For David Ryan, Kirwan’s work prefers to dispense with relational composition. His pieces are made up of disjunctive fields, divided or repetitive accumulations that tend to approximate diagrams of cellular structures or microscopic units. But they also clearly celebrate a rampant Pop culture, as in False Fire (2009) with its “Ghostbusters” or computer-game personages. In Foreign Tongue (2009), a backdrop of brightly colored bands provides the foil to a repetitive cluster of silvery forms, which resemble a stack, a pile or a dump (Ryan 35).

All the artists present here share a strong sense of a centered organization of space and a preoccupation with the image on the surface, rather than a concern for objecthood. They also share a strong conceptual stance on decision making and an idea of construction of the “tableau.”

Namely: “… a key modernist question: ‘the rejection of composition’ as a rationale for making decisions. What is at stake here is the critical conviction that consistent decisions in painting should transcend mere tasteful composition. The rational grid and spontaneous gesture were formal means introduced to undermine a rationale of decision making based on compositional consideration” (Verwoert 54).

Current relevant strategies in painting seem to embrace modern tradition by keeping it in check, while browsing the vast vocabulary of our contemporary visual experience. Long gone is the myth of the lonesome improvising genius. These stances allow the work to stand with a strong sense of clarity, while distilling impure sources through a kind of filter that renders them devoid of sentimental charge.

NOTES
1. This project arose after two French artists, Olivier Gourvil and Geoffroy Gross, were offered carte blanche at the Transpalette Art Centre in Bourges, France in May 2008. They proposed to curate a painting exhibition (”La peinture Est Presque Abstraite” May 2009) bringing 4 French (Xavier Drong, Nicolas Royer, Geoffroy Gross and Olivier Gourvil) and 4 British artists (Jane Harris, Richard Kirwan, Daniel Sturgis and Claude Temin-Vergez) together. The book La Peinture Est Presque Abstraite published at Analogues Editions was launched at the Institut Francais in London in November 2009 where the show toured.

2. See Gourvil, Olivier & Geoffroy Gross. Oxymore and more, a proposal, 2008.

3. See Verwoert, Jan. “Why are conceptual artists painting again?” Conference at unitednationsplaza in Berlin on October3, 2008.

4. See Gourvil.

5. See Schwabsky, Barry. Thomas Nozkowski. Haunch of Venison, 2004.

WORKS CITED
Blois, Y. A. Painting as model. MIT Press, 1993.

Collings, Matthew. Rough Guide to playful thoughts on abstract art. Catalogue of the exhibition British Abstract Painting, 2001.

Ryan, David. “Almost…but not quite…” La Peinture Est Presque Abstraite. Analogues Editions, 2009.

Verwoert, Jan. “Choosing to choose.” Parkett. no. 84, 2008.

Claude Temin-Vergez is a French painter and Senior Lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts, who studied painting at Central St. Martins College of Arts, Royal Academy Schools. Temin-Vergez recently contributed to the book and exhibition “La Peinture est Presque Abstraite” (2009) which toured France and the United Kingdom.

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/peinture-presque-abstraite/feed/ http://artpulsemagazine.com/liam-gillick-art-and-functional-utopias/ http://artpulsemagazine.com/liam-gillick-art-and-functional-utopias/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:57:34 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=7555

Liam Gillick, Three perspectives and a short scenario, 2008. Courtesy Liam Gillick / © Liam Gillick.

By Ernesto Menéndez-Conde

This commune is a place in which the design of the trays is better than in the outside world.
Liam Gillick, Literally No Place (2)

During the last fifteen years, the British artist Liam Gillick has created parallels between his personal shows and his own writings. Many of his exhibitions have run simultaneously with the publishing of a book. Frequently, the books are included in the installations, along with flat-color panels, text sculptures, architectural structures, videos, and designs. For “Three Perspectives and a Short Scenario” -the retrospective currently showing at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) of Chicago- there was the release of an anthology of essays titled Meaning Liam Gillick. Seventeen scholars attempted to define Gillick’s works, or offer hints for understanding his creations from a wide variety of topics. Meaning Liam Gillick somehow works as the catalog of the show. Even though this time Gillick’s texts were not included in the anthology, the parallelism of installations and writings remains the personal seal for his artistic events (the show at the MCA of Chicago was also accompanied by a curatorial project of the institution’s collection, also created by Gillick). Last year, while the retrospective was held in some European institutions (3), there was the release of All Books, a collection of the scripts and novels he has published since 1994.

For the artist himself, it is a mistake to over-determine this simultaneity (Gillick, 2006 167). Nevertheless, this parallelism seems to be a self-conscious artistic practice (Gillick 160-161) and it is at the core of his artistic production. The books are neither merely supplementary materials, nor incursions in a quite different field of creation. Gillick’s exhibitions, on the other hand, cannot be reduced just to his installations. Even if the artworks or books can be enjoyed as autonomous pieces, isolating Gillick’s artistic productions or underestimating the structure of the whole looks like a rather deceivable approach. The structure of his works seems to be precisely this parallelism between the writings and the visual images. He provokes the search for dialogue among the installations, novels, scripts, and essays he writes.

Liam Gillick, Three perspectives and a short scenario, 2008, installation at Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam. Courtesy of the artist. Photos by Bob Goedewaagen.

This peculiar practice turns Gillick into a hermetic artist since it raises the need to find connections among his whole set of creative productions. The viewer/reader is challenged to produce meanings through attempts to establish a coherent system from a variety of sources and means of expression. This task, which even seems difficult to avoid, is one of the most rewarding intellectual adventures in Gillick’s body of works. However, it looks as if the interpretation must remain open, since there is always room for conflictive points of views in the quest for unity or even parallelism among his heterogeneous fields of production. As Julian Stallabrass has asserted, “Gillick is an artist that offers possibilities rather than holds a position.(4)” Gillick’s works, seen in their simultaneity, are always metaphorical, suggestive, and even enigmatic.
However, it could be argued that this hermetic character is very eloquent in its own right, at least if interpreted the way Theodor Adorno understood the social resonance of art. As the author of the Aesthetic Theory noted:

“Hermetic works bring more criticism to bear on the existing than those that, in the interest of intelligible social criticism, devote themselves to conciliatory forms.” (145)

These words, written more than forty years ago, are still crucial in order to understand the possibilities of art as a mean of resistance in contemporary society. Actually they are particularly relevant today, in a Post Utopian World, when not only, as Adorno states, the direct treatment of social conflicts in artwork is the weakest, and most superfluous link between art and society (229), but also at a moment when tolerance has become genuinely repressive (Jameson 110), and the opposition to Neo-Liberalism seems to lead nowhere. The critique of Contemporary Capitalism lacks a social project, which somehow could be envisaged as a paradigm, or could provide a direction to the unconformity. Since the fall of Socialism in Eastern Europe, all progressive thinking risks being dismissed as “Communism,” or as reminiscent of a repressive, authoritarian Modernism.

In Gillick’s works, the criticism of Neo-Liberalism also implies a critique and a redefinition of Utopian thinking. In his novel, Literally No Place, he talks about grasping the “idea of a commune, a functional rationalistic commune that can really work and be productive” (Gillick, 2009 204). He also insists on being “communal, but not communistic” (Gillick, 2009 206). Some of his artistic experiments could lead to these types of experiences. Instead of Utopias, Gillick proposes developing the notion of “functional utopia,” which would be displayed throughout time, and would be intrinsic to the structure of the exhibition. A “functional utopia” is a participative one. It must create a “better place, and actually have a better time, rather than just providing soothing images of experimental architecture and a mish-mash of interactive structure” (Gillick, 2006 282). Instead of projections into the future, functional utopias are an alternative present. Art institutions themselves, while the exhibitions last, could be spaces for implementing these “functional utopias.” The collective show A Viable space: Der Umbau Raum (Klünterhous, Sttugart, 1996) -for which Gillick wrote a text and also participated as an artist- could provide an example of these attempts. In A Viable space, the artists were using the gallery as a site for research, hanging out, viewing and production (Gillick, 2006 103).

Liam Gillick, Rescinded Production, 2008. Collection Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Gift of Mary and Earle Ludgin by exchange. Photo courtesy of Casey Kaplan Gallery, New York.

Functional utopias are in many ways related to Modernism, from Neo-plasticism to Bauhaus (some members of the Bauhaus movement, like Josef Albers, Kurt Schmith, and Marcel Breuer could be seen as precursors of Gillick’s installations), but the aims are quite different. Unlike Modernist conceptions, art is not pointing towards integration into life; it intends to maintain a critical distance from the social system.

By appealing to the hermetic, or by producing what the Spanish scholar Peio Aguirre has called “elusive social forms,(5)” Gillick takes advantage of artistic practices in order to create a social critique that also contains the conditions for exploring alternative means of social exchange. He places art in opposition to society, while, at the same time, conceiving it as a form of social consciousness.

Notes

1. Cited by Peter Bürguer in Theory of the Avant-Garde, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2002: 10.

2. In All Books, London: Book Works, 2009: 205.

3.The title “Three Perspective and a Short Scenario” has to do with the institutions in which the exhibition was shown. It is an itinerant project which was presented at the Kunsthalle Zürich (January 25 to March 30, 2008), Witte de With in Rotterdam (January 19 to March 24, 2008), Kunstverein Munich (June to August 2008), and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (October 10, 2009 - January 10, 2010).

4. Cited by Chantal Mouffle, in Meaning Liam Gillick: 101.

5. See Peio Aguirre, “Social Elusive Forms,” in Meaning Liam Gillick: 1-27.

Works Cited

Adorno, W. Theodor. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Gillick, Liam. Proxemics. Zurich-Dijon: JRP/Ringier & les Presses du Rėel, 2006.

___________ All Books, London: Book Works, 2009.

Jameson, Fredric. Marxism and Form. Princeton University Press, 1971.

Szewczyk, Monika et al. Meaning Liam Gillick. Massachusetts, London: MIT Press, 2009.

Ernesto Menéndez-Conde. PhD in Latin American Literature from Duke University (2009). His field of research is related to Aesthetic Ideologies and Theories of the Image. He has collaborated with Sotheby’s (New York). He has published in magazines in New York, Spain, Havana, and Miami.

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/liam-gillick-art-and-functional-utopias/feed/ http://artpulsemagazine.com/lasting-looks-the-75th-whitney-biennial-interview-with-gary-carrion-murayari/ http://artpulsemagazine.com/lasting-looks-the-75th-whitney-biennial-interview-with-gary-carrion-murayari/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 23:11:09 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=7545

Gary Carrión-Murayari

The 2008 Whitney Biennial had me prowling the large halls of the Park Avenue Armory and participating in a performance while sipping absinthe. The upcoming 2010 biennial promises to be less sprawling and perhaps, in tune with the economic crisis that has erupted since, a bit more sobering. It also simply might be the case of a different kind of ambition. As this year’s co-curator Gary Carrión-Murayari explains in our interview, they are not only placing their best bet for the present direction of American art, but they are also foregrounding the venerable past of the Whitney biennial, as the parallel show “Collecting Biennials,” with works acquired by the Whitney from previous biennials, and a catalogue with ample historical materials can attest to. While we might not know which of this year’s artists will make a lasting impact in the history of American art, Carrión-Murayari is sure that the Whitney Biennial will continue to do so.

By Maja Horn

Forecasting the 2010 Whitney Biennial

Maja Horn - The 75^th Whitney Biennial will be opening on February 25, but there are already some comments circulating about the selection process and about what it is shaping up to look like. Some of the things that have been mentioned are that it will be a smaller biennial; that, unlike the last one, it will be mostly contained within the museum itself; and that women, for the first time, will be representing over 50% of the participating artists. Besides these initial observations, I wanted you to forecast a little bit. What do you think critics will notice about this biennial after it actually opens to the public or what do you hope will be noted?

Gary Carrión-Murayari - That initial response to the list is always very speculative. I have read some discussions that were just looking at the numbers, which I think are a misleading thing. But there have been some more careful and well-considered [discussions], looking at individual artists in the show, and that is hopefully what people will take away from it - [to] really judge the artists in the show on their own merits, and then judge the show on its own merits. I also think one of the benefits of having fewer artists in the show is that you have more control over the pacing of the show. In most biennials where there have been hundreds of artists or a hundred artists, it is really easy for an artist that you care about to get lost in that installation, in that struggle to find space for everyone. With this number of artists we have been able to construct a show, construct an experience that hopefully will be provocative and successful for the viewers.

M.H. - When you say “provocative,” is there anything that you think will stand out? [...]

G.C.M. - You can never really guess how critics are going to respond. That is why you can’t really think too much about critical responses beforehand, because people pick up on different things. And the interesting thing about the biennial is that there really is a difference between a curatorial perspective and a critical perspective, and both of them are completely subjective in their own ways. So, I don’t know what is going to be “provocative” to people necessarily. I know what was exciting for us: all the artists in the show; it was exciting for us to include them.

Josephine Meckseper, Mall of America, 2009, video, transferred to DVD, color, sound; 12:48 min. Collection of the artist; courtesy VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

One thing we are doing is, in the catalogue we have been looking at the history of biennials very closely for this collection show (”Collecting Biennials” on view until November 28). The catalogue is going to have lists of all prior biennial artists going back to the thirties, as well as old installation shots, and then selected reviews from the history of the biennial, some of them are very positive, and we also included some very, very negative ones. However, those reviews do not necessarily correspond to how we evaluate those biennials or those artists now. So, both practices are subjective and fallible to a certain degree.

On Collaboration, Selection, and the Whitney Collection

M.H. - You are the co-curator with Francesco Bonami, and, between the two of you, you are seen as representing the next generation of curators and the “up-and-coming.” I wonder, when it came to the selection process, which parameters did you both easily settle on, or were there also any concerns that you specifically found yourself pushing for?

G.C.M. - It was great to do this with a curator who is so experienced, but also it was good to do this with a curator who is so open and supportive of younger curators. Francesco and I have known each other for a few years now [...], so I never really felt like I had to push for anything. But also, it was a wonderful experience of his bringing artists to the table and my bringing artists to the table and really having that kind of process of discovery together with other artists. I would be hard-pressed to draw a line in the show and say “these are my people and these are his people.” There was a consensus in what we were doing, and so there was no real haggling over artists. Part of that too is that we didn’t wait until the end to invite all the artists; we did it along the way. So, if we saw an artist that we were both really excited about, we invited him/her to the show. We had really great discussions about what we were seeing and trends that we were observing, but the best part is the process of discovery. All these studio visits you are going on; it is artists opening up their work processes and their concerns to you. It is really more about that than about haggling over artists.

M.H. - Once you agreed upon an artist, what about picking that one work that you wanted to represent the artist?

G.C.M. - We knew we wanted to show new work by all the artists, artists’ [work] that hadn’t at least been shown in New York, but that for the most part hadn’t been shown at all. We weren’t telling artists “produce whatever you want for the biennial,” that was not really what we were trying to do, because we were trying to build an exhibition not necessarily just a random collection of contemporary work. If an artist was working on a new project that we were excited about, that’s what we would invite. Nobody was really invited just because we thought they were great and should be in the show … well, there are maybe a couple. But for the most part we were really trying to construct this as we were going along. We certainly discussed the recent work with the artist, but the final decision rests with us.

M.H. - So could you mention two or three artists that for you best characterize some of the directions of this year’s biennial and, in broader terms, currents in American art right now?

G.C.M. - Sure, I think there is a fair amount of performance in the show, and one artist that is going to have a pretty visible presence within the show is Aki Sasamoto. She is going to be doing a pretty small, room-sized installation, but she is going to be performing fifteen or twenty times during the course of the biennial on the floor, during the day, while [the museum] is open to the public. There are other platforms for performances that are going to be happening. In the lobby gallery, there is a sculptural installation by Martin Kersels, and then there are large-scale sculptures that are going to function as a stage for performances, so he is picking dancers, and writers, and musicians, and there will be some educational programming too. It will be very dynamic, active, and I think that speaks to the nature of contemporary practice; it is interdisciplinary, but there is also a sense of collaboration.

Aki Sasamoto, still from Secrets of My Mother's Child, 2009, performance and installation. Collection of the artist. Photo: Arturo Vidich

There is a lot of painting in the show. Both of us care quite deeply about painting, and I think it is something that will never go away. We have older and younger painters, people who work in abstraction or figuration; someone like Suzan Frecon, who is in her sixties, a more established figure who hasn’t gotten that much exposure, and then there are younger painters like Tauba Auerbach and Sarah Crowner who are looking at abstraction from a different perspective.

M.H. - This year the biennial is simply titled “2010,” which further foregrounds its role as a pulse-taker of American art, and then, on the other hand, you also have mentioned that it is not only about the artwork’s timeliness in some ways but also about investments in the long-term, given that the biennial does play a role in the museum’s acquisitions process and collection-building. That is definitely something you are also focusing on in the catalogue and the current exhibit, “Collecting Biennials.” Could you say something about how these different roles or purposes of the biennial shaped your curatorial work, and did you, at any point, feel that rather than going hand-in-hand they were working against each other?

G.C.M. - The struggle is, especially when you start looking at the history of the biennial, … to evaluate the contemporary for its future importance. In the collection show we have some very recognizable names who are in biennials, sometimes many times, sometimes only a couple times, one was only in two biennials, but then there are those people who were in fifteen or twenty biennials, whom you probably never heard of before. So, it is always a process of speculation. The biennial, as much as outside interpreters like to believe that it launches young careers, does not necessarily do that. To a certain degree we are putting these artists out there because we do feel that they stand for contemporary art at this moment, but when we look back, some may still be around and some may not. I think there are a fair amount of artists in the show who will continue to contribute at least to our immediate art historical discussion. That is the challenge. You can’t really try to put together a show in which you have fifty artists that you are completely sure will be household names twenty years from now.

American Art?

M.H. - One of the qualifiers of the Whitney Biennial is that it is supposed to be of “American art.” In Frieze Magazine, your co-curator Bonani mentioned that there are several foreign-born artists in the show, and he defines artists as “American” by saying that “most of them have digested the culture in a particular American way that was relevant.” I was wondering what role the qualifier “American” played for you in the curating process?

Martin Kersels, Study in Orange & White #4, 2009, colored pencil on paper, 14” x 11”. Collection of the artist. Courtesy Galerie Georges-Philippe & Nathalie Vallois, Paris, and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

G.C.M. - We used the same sort of distinction. All of the artists generally live in New York, and some of the Americans spend time abroad. The fact that artists were born abroad shouldn’t necessarily be an issue. That has been the case with biennials going back to the thirties … Dalí was in a biennial at some point in the thirties. They are about artists who have been here for a significant amount of time and do not necessarily represent “Americaness,” but have to be comfortable as part of this discussion of what American art is. Obviously in American life in general, but especially in the art world, we are enriched by voices that come from different backgrounds, people who want to be more conservative about that definition … What? Are you only supposed to include white men or something like that? I don’t think that would make sense either. There are artists who live in the United States and who are from Europe or from other places, who don’t feel that they are participating in a discussion. They are doing what feels “German” or feels “Italian” …. It is kind of a subjective definition, but I do think that it is, again looking at the history of the biennial, a discussion that becomes a bit irrelevant to the larger field.

M.H. - If artists either are not American or may not be comfortable participating in a discussion of American art … do you think that this is an organizing category that will definitely be something to hold on to, or is it something that might need revision?

G.C.M. - I think so. I think we will hold on to that category. It does mean something; we have an artistic community here, and that is true in other cities too. We visited artists in Chicago and in Los Angeles too. It is a community and it is a discussion that takes place here, and I think that it is different than the ones that go on in other places, like London.

Biennials - Past and Present

M.H. - Besides being the co-curator for the upcoming biennial, there are two other Whitney Biennials that you in some form have contributed to or participated in, so that means you have been thinking about biennials for at least six years, if not more. So, I have two questions: Is there anything in the past that has informed your work for this biennial? Lessons learned? Things you wanted to do differently? Or something you really wanted to do in this one and haven’t been able to do before? And, then more broadly, have you seen the role of biennials changing over time?

G.C.M. - I worked on the 2004 and 2006 biennials with Chrissy Iles, so that definitely informed at least my desire to have a smaller biennial, in terms of the number of artists; just seeing how difficult it is to do exactly what you want once you get on the floor, even with the artists that you really care about, and during the selection process. This desire to have it contained in one building also comes from observing biennials in the past few years…not that great projects haven’t emerged from these offsite venues, but I do think it did dilute the experience of the biennial to a certain degree. Also, as far as the catalogue is concerned, from a really practical perspective, 2004 and 2006 were extremely interesting, constructive catalogues - the 2004 edition was the one in the box and the 2006 edition had these fold-out panels - and they were great catalogues, [but] we wanted something a little more like a traditional book, a little bit more comfortable to read, especially with this historical material, as well as a really nice and usable resource.

M.H. - There have been some comments about how biennials have become more commercialized, more like fairs, and how that might be negatively affecting the quality and validity of biennials. Do you perceive any of these changes and could you say to what extent you think a biennial is a valid and a distinctive platform?

G.C.M. - I can’t defend all biennials, and some are obviously better than others. At the Whitney, we have really been looking at why the Whitney Biennial is important and different and its engagement with American art as an essential part of it, and also how it is tied to this institution. I think Venice is older than the Whitney, but that is pretty much it, I think. The identity of this institution and our goal of supporting living American artists are built through the biennial; the biennial started two years after the museum opened. You mentioned the connection with the collection already, but also some of the younger artists in the show will appear in future Whitney shows. This is a very special relationship since it is an institutional biennial; however, in general, Venice hasn’t lost any relevance necessarily, and some of the other biennials in more far-flung places around the globe are also important in bringing a global discussion about contemporary art to different publics. That is always a useful thing. Maybe some are better than others, and it shifts from year to year, but I am not critical of biennials in general. Furthermore, you have seen some biennials in the past that have been very ambitious in their curatorial approach; I think that is what separates them from fairs. I think a little bit of that criticism about biennials being like fairs has waned in recent years as the market has slowed down. They are not the same thing and fairs are not necessarily the place where everybody is going. The fair is still an important part of the commercial art world, but that importance waxes and wanes. Something like the Whitney Biennial or Venice, however, is a continuously important show.

M.H. - Since you represent a new generation of curators, is there anything that you see changing or any challenges that you foresee that your generation will be facing?

G.C.M. - Absolutely, there is obviously a much, much larger group of curators working internationally, who are part of similar dialogues in different parts of the world, than when the people who are my mentors came up twenty years ago. There is also an increasingly larger pool of artists, who are also more aware of what is going on in other places in the world; it is a little bit tougher and more competitive for the artists. It is also a good thing for the public to become more engaged with contemporary art; we see that in New York for sure, but there are other cities where that is the case too. As a curator you have to be aware of what the larger public is going to experience in the shows, and hopefully it will be an opportunity to bring people into this discussion.

M.H. - Thanks for your time.

Maja Horn specializes in performance and visual art, both writing and lecturing on the subject after earning a Master’s in Performance Studies from New York University and completing a PhD in Romance Studies from Cornell University. She is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College in New York.

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/lasting-looks-the-75th-whitney-biennial-interview-with-gary-carrion-murayari/feed/ http://artpulsemagazine.com/public-art-in-the-era-of-nuits-blanches/ http://artpulsemagazine.com/public-art-in-the-era-of-nuits-blanches/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:53:06 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=7533

Santiago Sierra, No, Global Tour. Times Square, New York, 2009. Courtesy prometeogallery by Ida Pisani/Milano, Lucca and Galeria Helga de Alvear/Madrid.

By Pablo España

Public art that attempts to go beyond mere urban decoration has always had a marked social and even political character. We find ourselves at a moment in time when this practice has become incorporated into the mechanisms of “spectacularization” and institutionalization of contemporary art, where its potential is neutralized.

In order to speak of today’s public art, the first thing we would have to take into account is that often times it has become a simulation of real social policy. It is easy to detect a certain complacency in institutions upon organizing or supporting public art events. Let us take, for example, a festival that appears to be proliferating throughout different points in Europe and the Americas and that arises from the Parisian Nuit Blanche model initiated in 2002. This is an annual artistic event that lasts one night, during which art centers, museums, theaters, and concert halls on an exceptional basis extend their hours until the early morning and open their doors free of charge. Different artistic expressions take place outside of specific buildings, significant city monuments or on streets blocked off from traffic, which are invaded by citizens hungry for culture.

Looking at photos of the different Nuits Blanches around the world: Rome, Genoa, Montreal, Toronto, Berlin, Madrid, Saint Petersburg, Tel Aviv, Sao Paulo, Paris… etc., it is easy to understand all of Adorno’s prejudices against a cultural industry that, for him, was nothing more than part of the Fascist totalitarian universe. In these images of the masses instinctively moving based on cultural experience, we are reminded of the martial choreography of totalitarian exhibitions. Art and culture are utilized as tools of control and mobilization of the masses, as pure propaganda. Culture is becoming more and more concentrated on pure celebration of the cultural act, that is to say, identified with its strictly propagandistic presentation. It is the propaganda of the very authority that backs the event, in this way projecting a desirable image of modernity, in which citizens are favorably shown cultured and learned. It is curious that at these events art is presented as a point of encounter, of socialization, as a stage for civic participation; when, in fact, such participation appears with difficulty in other more commonplace situations or may even be flatly rejected by the city fathers. Although public space is presented to us in a naïve way as an agora, as a space for debate, dialogue and encounter, the reality is that it is a highly surveilled space from which there is an attempt to remove all exceptionality.

For those of us who believe that democracy is something more than an irreversible consensus, that it is a never-ending process, a permanent dialogue and that art is part of the process, the acquiescence of art to the status quo is anything but innocent. Let us then not construe the urban environment as a space for consensus, but rather for conflict and from there we can establish how an artistic activity can liberate public space, as much in its physical as in its symbolic dimension.

Burak Delier, We will Win, “Counter Attack: The Intervention Team”. Taipei, Taiwan, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.

The role of the artist in this type of event becomes compromised since it assumes co-opting the meaning of his work in an event that equalizes all offerings under the neutralizing mantle of the cultural act (and social). Nevertheless, this is a common situation that artists have to face: if they force the pretension of dispensing with the system of art, they run the risk of falling into artistic irrelevance (and therefore risk the very continuity of a specific practice); on the other hand, if they minimally recognize that they operating in the artistic realm, they have to submit to the imperatives of the system of art. Cultural politics is usually up to date on creative energies, but when it claims them, it is to place them at the disposal of its own priorities.  The problem then is not only the contents, but also where and under what conditions they are produced and how they are put into circulation, giving careful consideration to what each moment and each context requires. Thus, an asystematic praxis is needed, a hybrid not due to a lack of definition but as a matter of principle, capable of being in one place and another.

Inside and Outside

In this sense, we should point out Santiago Sierra’s project, NO, Global Tour, which consists of having a large physical “NO” travel through different points on the globe; it is transported by truck and put on display during brief temporal intervals. This “NO” left Italy for Germany passing through depressed cities of the GDR industrial past. Upon arrival in Berlin, it was installed on the roof terrace of Atelier Doukupil in front of a metro station; it traveled to Brussels, where it was placed in front of NATO headquarters; it crossed the Atlantic and was exhibited at the Toronto Nuit Blanche; from there it traveled to New York, visiting Wall Street and Times Square, to later reach Miami and once again be exhibited at the Art Basel fair. And so it continues on tour…

This project will be complemented by a “road movie” that will document moments during which the “NO,” in front of specific landscapes, acquires its status as an icon of negative thinking, of anti-symbolism, of a collective shout that responds to a very common perception of societal dysfunction, that there is something false and mistaken about it.

NO, Global Tour does not only present the profile of displaced public art that is in continual movement; it also enters and leaves the system of art, exploiting its own need for diffusion. That stark and generic “NO” also has the ability to carry a concrete message when it becomes supporting iconography for specific protests. Converted into stencil and stickers, it was used in Madrid for a campaign, organized by the architects and artists’ collective Todo Por la Praxis in conjunction with neighboring associations, against the gentrification of the city center and the conversion of the barrio into a commercial brand. In Madrid, it was also utilized by a social movement in the barrio of Lavapiés, an area with a significant migrant population, for its protest against the installation by city hall of surveillance cameras in public places.

Art and Communities

The strategy of collaborating with social movements or communities is a path increasingly traveled by artists who seek a social effectiveness in their work. Let us recall the intervention of the Turkish artist, Burak Delier, in the recent Taipei biennial. Delier’s work, under the generic name Counter-Attack, is based on micro-actions of a guerrilla nature that strive to give common people tools of resistance against the system. In Taipei, Delier was working with the Taiwanese indigenous minority, a marginalized community that lives in hovels at the foot of the great skyscrapers that they themselves have built. Working with said community, Delier created the support for a poster that said We Will Win, which could be read from those sumptuous skyscrapers that surround the settlements where he developed his work. Apart from the claim, not devoid of cynical irony, implied in the phrase of a minority community displaced by China, another point of interest was working with the very community charged with creating the oeuvre, so that the cash flow generated was redirected toward the community involved in the project.

Speaking of working with communities, we must necessarily refer to the project Park Fiction started by Christoph Schaefer and Cathy Skene. In the mid-1990s, a group of residents and artists in St. Pauli decided to design a public park, but not in just any unused place,  in a special place for which the city had just decided on a private initiative construction plan. The main idea behind Park Fiction is that residents should and can take over the city. After forming a collective of artists, activists and neighbors, a long and complex protest was started that ended up being successful and the city government forgot its initial plans. Thus, the group of residences on Hafenstrasse, which was the nucleus of the conflict, was converted into an area negotiated by neighbors, who ended up creating a park on the banks of the port of Hamburg. Furthermore, in the process, a network of neighbors was formed that, once this particular process was finished, dedicated itself to other projects. The general exhibition of the project was presented at Documenta 11 in 2002. This also speaks to us of a new paradigm of action at the intersection of art and politics. If the most radical modern artists have wanted to abolish art, many current creators want to continue operating within the system of art, since it is a communicative platform, but without submitting to its impositions or increasing (or forcing) the limits of its institutional permissiveness.

Propaganda

Continuing on with this line of work and from a more radical point of view as far as being committed to social movements, and more politicized in the sense of supporting some specific struggles, we can refer to the oeuvre of many Argentine collectives whose work results from an active commitment to reality. The economic collapse implied by the corralito (1) and the subsequent social outburst gave rise to some highly committed artistic practices, which on many occasions collaborated directly with social movements or political formations. In this context we recall actions such as Mierdazo carried out by the group Etcétera, which organized a popular protest consisting of throwing feces at the door of the National Congress while governmental budgets were being debated, or the collaboration of the Grupo de Arte Callejero (Street Art Group) with H.I.J.O.S -  Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia contra el Olvido y el Silencio (Sons and Daughters for Identity and Justice against Oblivion and Silence)  involved in the fight against impunity for members of the military involved in the repression and disappearance of citizens. Among projects carried out in this framework, a map of the city of Buenos Aires was developed, pinpointing residences of soldiers implicated in torture during the military dictatorship.

Grupo Etcétera, Mierdazo, Group Performance. Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2002. Courtesy of the artists.

The work of the defunct collective Taller Popular de Serigrafía was focused on providing various anti-establishment movements with their own iconography in the form of posters, announcements and placards. Their modus operandi consisted of presenting their ideas to the assemblies of these movements; the members of the assembly themselves were the ones who decided which icons would be utilized, and therefore produced, and which would not. Art as a tool and artists as producers were placed completely at the disposal of a political movement that collectively decided what to do.

In the preceding examples we find ourselves before carefully camouflaged art that operates as such in predetermined contexts, but which is presented as something else in other domains, not to mention any names, and which acts to meet the needs of specific problems. That reminds us of the efficacy of aesthetic resources as sensitizing elements in certain political actions. One can say that this is also propaganda. In effect, that is what it is and there is no reason to fear it, as long as we do not pretend that an artist’s labor has to be pure, essential labor only concerned with the problems of meta-language, totally emasculated from the society in which it is produced and at which it is directed. Here, however, we are pitting propaganda against a propaganda that in our western democracies is increasingly acquiring the appearance of culture.

NOTES

1. In Argentina, corralito was the term to denote restrictions against the withdrawal of fixed cash deposits, checking accounts and savings imposed by the government of Fernando de la Rua in December, 2001. The objective of these restrictions was to prevent the outflow of funds from the banking system in order to avoid a run on the banks and the collapse of the system. A secondary justification outlined by Domingo Cavallo, head of the Ministry of the Economy, was to achieve greater usage of electronic payments in order to prevent tax evasion and provide bank access to the public at large, the latter being of benefit to the banks.

Pablo España is a member of the artistic collective Democracia; professor of Fine Arts at the Universidad Europea de Madrid; director of the magazine, Nolens Volens and recently contributed to the book, Neutralizados, Empatía Ediciones, 2009. Among the recent exhibitions in which Democracia has participated, of note are: “Evento 2009,” Bordeaux, France; “Taipei Biennial 2008,” Taiwan and the 10^th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey.

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/public-art-in-the-era-of-nuits-blanches/feed/ http://artpulsemagazine.com/reality-is-overrated-when-media-go-beyond-simulation/ http://artpulsemagazine.com/reality-is-overrated-when-media-go-beyond-simulation/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:28:51 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=7523

Oliver Laric, Versions, 2010, four channel video installation. Courtesy the Artist and Seventeen, London.

By Domenico Quaranta

“Where is reality? Can you show it to me?”

Heinz Von Foerster ¹

Reality Construction and Simulation

The relationship between media and reality has been debated since the very beginning of Western culture. The two main keywords at stake here are: representation and construction. According to the first, media portray reality; according to the second, media construct reality. Of course, these two approaches are strictly connected to the model of thought you are adopting in order to describe reality itself: a realist model (reality is something that exists “out there”) or a constructivist model (reality does not exist; it is only a construction in the mind of a given “agent”).

Constructivism is an epistemological perspective according to which knowledge is the result of an act of creation, and not of a process of discovery. ² It was started in the mid-1990s by Jean Piaget, even if it has many roots in Western philosophy, from Protagoras to Vico and Kant; and in its more radical iteration it becomes a claim that “ontological reality” does not exist at all, or is, at least, utterly incoherent as a concept. “The environment as we perceive it is our invention” because “the nervous system is organized (or organizes itself) so that it computes a stable reality,” demonstrates scientist Heinz von Foerster in a 1973 article titled “On Constructing a Reality.” (212-225)

However, today’s catch-phrase “media construct reality” rarely shares this kind of radicalism.³ In most cases, it either means “if something is not on TV, it doesn’t exist” or “media manipulate reality in order to make us believe in an altered version of it.” It works as a complaint about the power of the media to modify the perception of something that exists out there, rather than to claim that no reality exists outside of the media. Even Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra, probably the most advanced theory on the power of media still available today, does not go much further. Even if he draws distinctions between representation and simulation, and writes that “the age of simulation [...] begins with a liquidation of all referentials” (Baudrillard  4); even if he claims that there is no difference anymore between the map and the territory, and that the map actually precedes the territory; simulation as he describes it neither deletes nor negates ontological reality; it just takes its place. The real is still there, yet it has been substituted in our perception by “signs of the real.” So, this is how Baudrillard explains the notion of “the successive phases of the image”: “(1) it is the reflection of a basic reality (2) it masks and perverts a basic reality (3) it masks the absence of a basic reality (4) it bears no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum.” (Baudrillard 11) The common-sense interpretation of the sentence “media construct reality” lies between points 2 and 3; Baudrillard continues on, introducing point 4.

The Desert of the Real

Some years later, Slavoj Žižek framed the problem of the relationship between media and reality in a completely different way, talking about the “virtualization of the real” and explaining that today reality imitates the media. He wrote: “ in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without being the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one. However, at the end of this process of virtualization, the inevitable Benthamian conclusion awaits us: reality is its own best semblance.”( Žižek, 2002) According to this approach, 9/11 is the best application ever of “digitalized special effects” developed by the cinema industry in recent years: a real event designed to be televised, a terrorist act perpetrated not “to provoke real material damage, but FOR THE SPECTACULAR EFFECT OF IT.”

In my opinion, the effectiveness of both Baudrillard’s and Žižek’s thoughts on this subject is today undermined by the fact that, when talking about the media, they are basically talking about TV and mass media. The fact that Žižek refers to virtual reality and to The Matrix (1999) has little importance here, because he understands virtual reality as a “simulation” (an indication of the real misunderstood for the real thing) and because The Matrix itself is strongly grounded in Baudrillard’s theories. The Matrix is nothing more than a convincing simulation built by intelligent machines in order to persuade us that we are still living in the good old world, while in fact we are convicted slaves in a desolate, post-atomic landscape, kept alive in order to provide energy to the machines. A nice story, but is it able to picture the contemporary media environment? Or is it just updating twentieth century paranoia, which claims that media replaced religion as “the opium of the masses”?

Computing a Reality

Picture this: a teenager cooped up in his bedroom, sitting down in front of his computer. He stays there all the time, does not participate in any sports, has no friends apart from those he meets in World of Warcraft, and the long list of contacts featured in his Facebook account. His parents think he is a good guy, maybe a little bit shy and antisocial, until they discover that he defecates on the floor. Guys like this are called, using a Japanese term, hikikomori. It means “withdrawal,” and is used to describe reclusive people who have chosen to withdraw from social life, often seeking extreme degrees of isolation and confinement.⁴ Actually, the term worked very well when the hikikomori did nothing else but read manga comics, watch TV and play computer games. Today, the hikikomori are rarely hermits. They withdrew from their social life, yet they have a social life; they left the world, but they have a world. The problem is that they are mediated by a sophisticated machine called “the computer,” designed in the 1960s and 1970s by a vast community of people. Some were involved with LSD experiments; others shared constructivist ideas. However, it is still difficult to prove that these had any influence on the final product. What we can be sure of is that this machine, especially in its networked version, completely redefined the usual relationship between media and reality, escaping both the logic of representation and the logic of simulation, giving birth to a new reality, which is neither a reproduction nor a simulacrum.

It is a cultural landscape with its own habits, rules, cultures, jargon and iconography. It is a social landscape with its own communities and parties. It is a place where you can talk, work, have sex, enjoy art, waste your time, and die. It is a “reality.” Let us call it “media reality” or “digital reality” if you like. It did not replace ontological reality; it simply asked to occupy a place next to it - to improve it. The map does not precede the territory, as Baudrillard claimed; the real still exists, and the map is now part of it. Sure, the hikikomori chose to completely “retire” into it, but hikikomori is a disease. Every new lifestyle has produced its own diseases, and media reality is no exception.

However, most people simply agreed to integrate it into their lives, learned to switch from one level to another, and enjoyed the enhancement. You either contribute to Wikipedia or build real estate in virtual worlds, spend hours managing your parallel life on social networks or dig into GIF repositories, browse through Youtube in search of your favourite video ever or download movies from peer-to-peer networks. You either write code for Linux or travel the world through Google Maps, play with Photoshop filters or with text-to-speech software, and you can be a producer, a user or a prosumer; all this is now part of your life. You took the last train to the world of Perky Pat, and there is no turning back.

Media Constructivism

How does artistic activity react to this shift? How are artists dealing with their “improved life” and with the expanded reality they are living in? Just like anybody else? My answer is: by tackling the so-called “digital medium” as it was described above - not just a medium, but a new level of a “reality” that is more and more layered, more and more “constructed,” and where, between ontological reality, simulated reality and media reality there are no barriers anymore, but only the translucent, easily penetrable sheets of shadow theater: by exploring it, sometimes contributing to building it and adding layers to its own narratives; by referring to its aesthetics; by digging deep into it. In the early days of the medium, both those who embraced it and their opponents described this approach as “self-referential” and “formalist.” It was a misunderstanding, the consequence of another misunderstanding: interpreting the digital media environment as a “medium.” In recent months, I have started filing different artworks under the working label “media constructivism.” That seems to work quite well for works that understand the digital media environment as a reality, and that consider what is constructed by media to be “real.” The following are some examples:

After portraying avatars as real people and re-enacting art performances of the past in virtual worlds, Eva and Franco Mattes shot pictures of landscapes in an ultra-violent first-person shooter. When the spectator faces these silent “topographies,” which call to mind the sublime landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich, as well as the urban atmospheres of Edward Hopper and the magical realism of the 1920s, she can hardly imagine that to attain this peace the artists had to fight off hundreds of aliens and human enemies.

The sublimity of the virtual landscape has been explored recently by the Spanish artist Joan Leandre in his video In the Name of Kernel (2009 - ongoing), which hacks corporate flight simulators, while identity construction in digital realities finds its master in Gazira Babeli, an avatar artist who plays the role of a virus in the system with a Keatonian sense of comedy. Babeli is living proof that the separation between the so-called “virtual” and the so-called “real” is just a matter of perspective; and probably Brody Condon, who took part in the 10th Sonsbeek International Sculpture Exhibition (2008) with a series of physically and psychologically intense live games involving 80 players and a whole forest, would agree with her on this point.

For years, Miltos Manetas has been portraying characters from videogames, as well as painting webpages and people living too close to their machines. For some weird reason, he never did it with Cory Arcangel, who enjoys and subverts almost every machine, from old Ataris to Quicktime, from VHS to plasma screens and Adobe Photoshop. One of his last works, and a beautiful example of media constructivism, is a series of abstract prints which are the result of a dumb, literal application of Photoshop gradient tools. Arcangel’s work represents, at its best, a double concern that we may find in the work of many artists belonging to the second generation of Web users: the interest in what artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied called in a recent, inspiring book, “digital folklore” (9-12) and the will to explore the conceptual potential of simple software tools and processes.

In his recent work Paul B. Davis deploys the aesthetic and conceptual implications of video compression errors; Oliver Laric appropriates a Web vernacular and its modes of expression, from clipart to homemade remakes of pop star videos, and makes a powerful statement on customization, manipulation and versioning in his recent video essay Versions (2009), which makes us miss some artists’ essays from the 1970s less. Damon Zucconi is interested in what lies under the surface of our visual culture: an “underlying problem” that a little manipulation of the surface brings to the fore. For example, in Morris Louis; Dalet Kaf (Horizontal and Vertical blur) he appropriates a painting by Louis, applying a simple editing filter to it and then printing it out quarter-scale.

In these works and in the work of many other artists, all the layers of reality collapse. They are not about reality, like a painting by Courbet. They are not about media reality, like Andy Warhol’s Car Crashes or Richard Prince’s Cowboys. They are not about the map or the territory. They are about both, because the two have become one in the same.

NOTES

1. Das Netz. The Unabomber, LSD and the Internet. Dir. Lutz Dammbeck , 35 mm, 121 min., (Germany), 2003.

2. See Craig, Edward (ed). Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Routledge, 2000. 171.

3. See Weber, Stefan. “Media and the construction of reality.” in Mediamanual.at, 2002.                                < http://www.mediamanual.at/en/pdf/Weber_etrans.pdf >

4. See Jones, Maggie. “Shutting themselves in.” in The New York Times. January 15, 2006.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikikomorihttp://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/15/magazine/15japanese.html.>

WORKS CITED

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. New York: Semiotext[e],1983. 4.

Lialina, Olia & Espenschied, Dragan, ed. Digital Folklore. Stuttgart: Merz & Solitude, 2009. 9-12.

Von Foerster, Heinz. “On Constructing a Reality.” Understanding Understanding. New York: Springer-Verlag, 2003. 212 - 225.

Žižek, Slavoj. “Welcome to the Desert of the Real.” The Symptom. Issue 2. Spring 2002.                               < http://www.lacan.com/desertsymf.htm.>

Domenico Quaranta is an art critic and curator based in Italy. He has focused his research on the impact of the current techno-social developments on the arts. A regular contributor to Flash Art magazine, he wrote, edited or contributed to a number of books, including GameScenes. Art in the Age of Videogames, Johan & Levi Editore, 2006.

AES+F, The Feast of Trimalchio, 2009, courtesy of AES+F and Triumph Gallery, Moscow, Installation view Witte de With, October 2009. Photo Bob Goedewaagen.

Act I: Beautiful from Every Point of View
Act II: From Love to Legal
Witte de With, Amsterdam

By Caridad Botella

The Witte de With, Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam has chosen to articulate its program around the concept “Morality” as leitmotiv. “Morality” is an assemblage of exhibitions, performances, interventions, projects and dialogues that will take place from October 10 till the summer of 2010. The exhibitions are divided into acts, a term which makes reference to the theatrical distinction between interrelated narratives, at the same time that it brings forward religious and legal connotations. With this concept and modus operandi, the curators, Nicolaus Schafhausen and Juan A. Gaitán, far from willing to make a statement, wish to isolate such a controversial and provocative concept as morality. Removed from its social, economical or religious implications, it functions as a platform where a wide range of attitudes meet, questioning a total conception of morality.

The visitor is welcomed by the first intervention of the program on the building’s façade, a huge banner of a new project by AES+F, The Feast of Trimalchio, first shown as a video projection in the Russian Pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale. This provocatively aseptic and poignant image, which wraps the entire front of the building, sets the tone for the acts that we are about to encounter: Do multicultural societies only exist in a capitalist (doomed) dream of constant pleasure and perfection? After seeing the banner, it is really worthwhile checking the video on YouTube. Through a program of four interventions called Between You and I, curated by Fulya Erdemçi & Nicolaus Schafhausen, Witte de With confronts the spectator and the urban tissue of the city of Rotterdam with a critical interface, rising the debate of the boundaries between society and the public institution.

“Act I: Beautiful from Every Point of View” is a group show with works by: Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Marko Lulic´, Kris Martin, Josephine Meckseper, Sarah Morris, Ron Terada, Tobias Zielony and Arthur Zmijewski. Each work poses different questions, allowing the visitor to engage with them independently, but always keeping the leitmotiv in mind. The selection points to certain issues such as the problem of individual identity, the manipulative power of images, our commitment with the past or the multifaceted aspect of certain strategies. Works, such as Ron Terada’s video wall Voight Kampff or Tobias Zielony’s La Vele di Scampia, are excellent commentaries on how reality can be artificially constructed, turning images into carriers of different discourses. Hypnotizing is Sara Morries’ video Beijing. This 84:47 minute film is a sharp compilation of images filmed during the preparation and realization of the Beijing Olympic Games of 2008. Images and sound work as a score, which from the distance lets us be witnesses of how reality can be at all times staged.

“Act II: From Love to Legal” shows a selection of artworks by Isa Genzken, Joachim Koester, Chritodolous Panayiotu, Isabelle Panwels, Mark Raidpere, Tobias Rehberger, Nedko Solakov, Danh Vo, Peter Wächtler and Katarina Zdjelar. What happens when a personal anecdote interferes with a historical fact or vice versa? This compilation of works is an excellent closing for the exhibition, as it engages us fully from the moment we are confronted with Nedko Solakov’s handwritten texts Agreement and Bill. These texts make a connection between the fictional space and the visitor, who can no longer look from a distance and is forced to embrace his/her presence as part of the exhibition. Private lives are entangled in facts, in historical events. The thin border between anecdotal and factual unfolds in works such as Isabelle Pauwels’ video B&E where the artist shows how in dividing the inheritance of her grandparents, their part in Belgian colonialism becomes evident.

“Morality” functions as a prism and magnifying glass, which guides our eyes through the different layers of meaning an image can create. Perhaps it is Sarah Morris’ work Beijing that best embodies the ideas behind these acts. The camera interferes with a discourse that has been clinically and methodically rehearsed in order to sell a certain image of political glory and power to the rest of the world. Through her lens we are able to construct a reality much more complex than the one that has been offered to us though the mass media.

Caridad Botella. Art critic based in Amsterdam. She is the director of Witzenhausen Gallery.

Harold Klunder, Sun And Moon IV, 2008-2009, oil on linen, 114”x78”, courtesy Clint Roenisch.

By David Liss

During the rise of neo-expressionist painting in the 1980s, then Toronto painter Harold Klunder established a reputation as one of Canada’s leading figures of the era, with huge-scale, intensely colored, densely impasto paintings of imaginatively constructed forms that hovered at the cusp of figuration and abstraction. As the winds of fashion shifted in the early 1990s and painting had (again) slipped from favor, Klunder’s profile too was eclipsed by emerging trends and the onslaught of upcoming generations, although the strength and authenticity of his practice was never diminished. Within the last few years, however, a number of exhibitions at various institutions and commercial galleries across the country have once again thrust the now Montreal-based Klunder into the forefront of current Canadian painting. Given the consistency that he has sustained throughout his entire career, and the quality of recent exhibitions, including his latest at the Clint Roenisch Gallery in Toronto, many are now considering Klunder to be one of Canada’s best living painters. Looking at the work of any number of younger Canadian painters, his influence cannot be underestimated. His current work is vibrant, fresh and attuned to the pulse and relevancy of current global painting. If not for the confidence and maturity of his paint handling and a complex pictorial sophistication, viewers could not be faulted for assuming that these are the works of the next young hot-shot from Brooklyn or Berlin.

The exhibition in Roenisch’s intimate front-room space consists of 4 oil-on-linen paintings of equal size, 290×200cm, and all completed during 2008-09. It is a tight fit in the room mainly because of the intense, tightly compressed and barely containable power that these pictures evoke as they threaten to unravel and explode through the picture plane. They appear as a coherent group and indeed they all bear the same title, Sun and Moon, (I, II, III, IV), with the lighter-toned compositions alluding to the solar and the darker, the lunar. Clearly Klunder’s approach to painting is rooted in classical analogies between paint and the human condition. The subject matter too, as revealed through the titles, is associated with overarching issues related the dualities of existence; the sublime, the invisible and the inexplicable are viscerally conveyed through paint and matter. But this series does not feel antiquated at all. Currency and timeliness are evoked through a radiant urgency of line, color and form that unmistakably invokes our peripatetic era. Consistent within Klunder’s distinctive vocabulary, figures and faces, seemingly in perpetual motion and flux, weave in and out of complex layers of paint and form. Disorienting perspectives are created by jarring juxtapositions of thick passages and blobs of paint and thin washes and drips. Linear space and time are confounded. Truth and reality are not fixed but suspended between states of being and consciousness. The infinite possibilities of reinvention and the transformative potential of paint and perception are unleashed and vital in the hands of this master painter in his prime.

Clint Roenisch Gallery - Toronto
September 18 - October 26, 2009.

David Liss is the Chief Curator of Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto.

]]> http://artpulsemagazine.com/harold-klunder-4-paintings/feed/ http://artpulsemagazine.com/hannes-schmid-rockstars/ http://artpulsemagazine.com/hannes-schmid-rockstars/#comments Sun, 29 Nov 2009 04:42:29 +0000 raisa http://artpulsemagazine.com/?p=7450

Hannes Schmid, Kraftwerk, 1981, courtesy Hannes Schmid.

Gallery Nicola von Senger, Zurich
Through December 24, 2009

By Oliver Kielmayer

It was rather late when Hannes Schmid (*1946) became interested in contemporary art; besides working for big fashion magazines like Vogue, Elle and Cosmopolitan or designers like Kenzo and Armani, for more than a decade he was busy shooting the Marlboro campaign. His indifference towards contemporary art changed fundamentally in 2003, when he visited the Venice Biennale and found himself in front of one of his own photographs showing a Marlboro cowboy. After the initial shock - Who dares to take a commercial ad photographed by another, blow it up large scale, put his own name under it and become famous? - Hannes Schmid soon found out about Richard Prince and decided to have a look in his own archives to see if there was more to be found that could be acknowledged by the art world. And there were, for example, some 70,000 pictures of rockstars that he took between 1977 and 1984, while he was living with them on tour or during their holidays. Hannes Schmid was with the stars when they were cooking, preparing for the show or learning to ski in the Swiss Alps. His photos give backstage insight into the world of rock and pop that, even with its glamorous attitude, was still down to earth and somehow innocent.

The time to show a selection of these pictures could not be better, as the 1980s are currently rediscovered as a kind of golden age before the digital revolution, with a society in between materialist saturation and mass media innocence. There was no Starsearch or Britain’s Got Talent on television, but at the same time there was Boney M. as the first example of faked popstars, artificially and strategically put together to star as a pleasant surface for songs performed by others. Schmid’s photos always show authentic people; they may be superstars, but even if they strike the pose, they still do it like we all do when somebody wants to take a picture of us. The show at Gallery von Senger combines band portraits, among them Kraftwerk, Status Quo and Depeche Mode, a beautiful accumulation of several hundred photographs and the presentation of the book Rockstars, published by Edition Patrick Frey. A selection from Hannes Schmid’s Rockstars will also be part of the show “Who Shot Rock & Roll” at the Brooklyn Museum in New York until January 31, 2010.

Oliver Kielmayer
 is the Director of Kunsthalle Winterthur
, Winterthur.

Eugenia Calvo, Las fuerzas predominantes (The Prevailing Forces), 2009, Video installation, variable dimensions. Courtesy 713 Contemporary Art.

713 Contemporary Art, Buenos Aires

By María Carolina Baulo

The exhibition presented by the Argentine artist Eugenia Calvo focused on daily objects, dealing with highly powerful concepts, such as uniformity and diversity, and analyzing the roles each one plays while keeping its individuality even when interacting within a superior order.

The installation addressed the usage of furniture and ordinary objects establishing a new rule which then logically affected every other previous order between those objects; they were forced to relate thereby losing their original function. Paint became of crucial importance in that scenario - synthetic blue and green enamel - to understand the criteria of the show. Differences disappeared when the color unified the elements in the room and, at the same time, that homogeneity allowed other centers of attention to stand out, emerging from that enormous blue volume surrounding us. The paradox was that those same elements acted as a barrier for the spectator not to trespass.

When creating, Eugenia Calvo assumes an experimental point of view when it comes to manipulating objects. That search, which inspires her work, broadens their functionality according to the space they occupy, separates them from uses we generally identify them with and therefore, if the structure and essence of the elements change, the space that contains them also mutates. The idea is to create new conflictive situations - a struggle of forces establishing new bonds and questioning laws.

The Prevailing Forces submerged us in the emotional battlefield that moving represents: joy, defiance, an enigma; it could also generate insecurity and confusion and a constant need to recognize ourselves in a space of our own, a brand new place that speaks for us even when we are not aware of it. Moving is a traumatic situation by definition. In this exhibition we were in the middle of the tension that emerged from both spaces: the one we leave when we move and the new one we start occupying. We experienced the exact moment when we are “not from here and not from there” at the same time. The show was completed with two videos, strategically located in a place with full access for the spectator. The total opposite of homogenization of objects accomplished by the blue-green paint was displayed. Following a coherent strategy that always combined different forces and tensions, some spaces determined by furniture and monochromatic objects clearly limited us and stopped our move forward, and on the other hand, the short stories and anime films - based on the aesthetic of the decorative designs of nineteenth century place settings and china - invited us to actively participate.

The challenge was to find different ways in which to relate to the daily objects, avoiding underestimation or ignoring their real potential. Following the famous Stanislavsky command for improvisations, the conditional “what if” seems to rule the actions of the artist: “it nurtures my works and allows me to think about another possible universe,” she says.