Mar
4
Critical Writing & News - Stephen Lee
The critical writings of the sculptor Stephen Lee and news of upcoming shows.
Posts tagged critical writing
Jan
14
‘Museum Show’ Arnolfini, exhibition review by Stephen Lee, commissioned by Art Monthly, issue no. 353, Feb. 2012
Oct
29
‘Between Heaven and Earth, Contemporary Art from the Centre of Asia’ exhibition review by Stephen Lee, originally published in Art Monthly, issue no. 351, Nov. 2011
‘Between’ is a position that Central Asians are historically and geographically familiar with. Artists are caught between the pressure to make art that wears an internationalist face, and that which honestly reveals both the subtle and overt identity of a vast region. The work of 26 artists from the post-Soviet areas centred on Kazakhstan is carefully juxtaposed over two galleries: the result, described by the curator David Elliott at the opening, is a show that is overridingly suggestive of passion.
Duba (cleaning the soul), 2007, by Shaarbek Amankul, is a video work with a large-scale image of the round face of an Asian woman with a shawl who violently rocks to and fro, making sounds of spitting, hissing, vomiting, chanting, belching, crying, wailing and talking in tongues, while her expressions contort akin to Antonin Artaud’s cathartic screaming. The impact, unease and scale make this an experience of the other as gargantuan. Shaarbeck Amankul isn’t an artist as shaman, rather the artist’s role is diminished; he is documenting the methods of the shaman in the film as symptomatic of wider cultural needs in an era of change.
The public space of the corridor of a train is transformed into an ascetic interruption of crawling prayer, meditation and the Caravaggesque re-enactment of crucifixion in Ulan Djaparov’s small, understated video Train Art, 2003-05. For those of us brought up to think that religion is the opiate of the masses, this work initially looks to be a counter-reformation-type resurgence of religion following the dissolution of Soviet power. However the extreme out of context nature of the work enables it to raise questions rather than affirm religious practice.
Many of the artists in the show are keenly aware of how they are perceived by both the West and by the East. They play to stereotypes about Central Asia. Northern Barbarians,2000, a film by Rustam Khalfin, is adjacent to Duba in the exhibition, it has a similar scale and directness. Developed from 19th-century Chinese erotic drawings, a newly-wed couple affectionately make love on horseback in a nostalgic, orange-tinted film conjuring a Hellenic, Scythian golden age of Barbarian life. The film is gently tongue in cheek while celebrating the sensual mystique of nomads. The catalogue fills in the reality behind the scenes: the leading lady is from the red-light district in Almaty and her dalliance has been given leave from the Kazak army to make the film. The couple are certainly not pornographically wooden; they appear to be glad for a reprieve from their neo-liberal era ‘jobs’. Whereas the bravado, authenticity and primitivism of Mongolia are satirised for an artistic, bourgeois audience, the celebration of erotic stereotype likely aggravates the perception of vulnerable people in oil-boom states.
The tin pot materialism of industrial products is melded to heavenly heights in Erbossyn Meldibekov’s Seasons in the Hindu Kush, 2009. Four enamelled kitchen pots have been crushed, embossed and hammered into a paradoxically sensitively sculpted topography of mountainous landscapes. These four upside-down pots from a distance have the appearance of humorously animated, battered helmets, ham-fisted into shape. Close-up, each terrarium has a summit with ridges and valleys with accumulated dust, where the enamel paint splinters into contours and tonal variation.
The Great Game, called the Tournament of Shadows by Asians and popularised by Rudyard Kipling in Kim, consisted of power play between Russian and British empires, focused on Afghanistan. That the Great Game is still operating through the political manoeuvering and exploitation of natural resources with consequent social upheaval is the subject of Galim Madanov and Zauresh Terekbay’s 40 A4-size acrylic paintings that appear to be bronze plaques with small embellished texts. ‘K Leverman the Great Game Blood and Oil in Central Asia’, is one example. The paintings, together called the Defragmentation of History, 2010, provide political markers where the art game of trompe l’oeil facilitates a monumental archive of political truths.
The Aral Sea is dying; the rivers that support the sea have been diverted to irrigate the cotton industry. There are also several ex-soviet toxic sites in Kazakhstan. Almagul Menlibayeva’s film, Transoxiana Dreams,2011, takes as point of departure the accumulation of cultural deserts. Dreams occur in the film centred on the magical inferences of a child in relation to her sister and father and their comprehension of life in a dust bowl village at the edge of the dried-up sea: ‘Ashes from my dead ancestors cover the windows.’ ‘Today at school my sister read Gogol and has awakened the centaurs and foxes who have stolen the sea.’ Like Noah, her father heroically searches for and finds the lush sea. His driving quest is vividly depicted in the film as black and white upside-down footage along the dry sea bed. The centaurs are Soviet costumed temptresses, responsible for toxic deeds and, with additional legs, they cut alluring images. They dance mischievously with their friends the foxes among the rusting hulks of once proud fishing boats. The magical realism and careful composition of the shapes of boats, hats and symbolic figures, upside-down footage and dusty homeland scenes bring the visual and narrative forms together with convincing precision. Almagul’s work has been described as ‘archaic atavism’. She describes her intention thus: ‘historical roots enable people to look to the future with confidence’
The title of Aleksander Ugay’s film Bastion, 2007, can be applied alternatively across two metaphorical images. Again the format is a large-scale, grainy black and white movie exuding nostalgia where the recent past seems archaic. Three adult Kazhaks sit on a bench talking, gazing at the sea. They testify to the survival of central Asian community through generations, just as a grand image of Tatlin’s tower ghosts by, accompanied by the sounds of a wooden sailing ship. The tower epitomises the aspirations of the Russian avant garde, two dialectical cones weave around one another thrusting toward the heavens while anchored in materialism. The tower was never built – it is a dream tower. As a spectre of a Marxist revolution it is perhaps too close, as is the living memory of the three people on the bench, to the ghosts of Stalin for us to yet be able to re-envision its spirit.
Stephen Lee is a sculptor and a writer.
May
29
‘New Cartographies, Algeria-France-UK’, exhibition review by Stephen Lee, originally published in Art Monthly issue no. 347, June 2011, pp nos. 28-29.
New Cartographies: Algeria-France-UK
Cornerhouse Manchester 8 April to 5 June
‘New Cartographies’ maps out changes in cultural perception of boundaries inside and outside of Algeria. The exhibition is arranged over three floors using these themes: migration; resources – physical, economic and human; and memory and history. Both emerging and established artists reflect the diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds of the Algerian diaspora. Indicative of a raised level of consciousness across North Africa, ideas have been conceived with political acumen in new media formats yet the subject matter is expressed and espoused with considerable feeling.
Katia Kameli’s large-scale video and sound installation Dissolution, 2009, forms a locus of many of the critical issues in the show. A short, looped video sequence intends to place the viewer in the position of an Algerian, perhaps a child, gazing across the Bay of Algiers where the occident, as Katia describes, ‘blurs like a fiction’. In the background haze lie stationary tankers out of focus. In the foreground the tops of two industrial chimneys exhaust heat and smoke into the middle-ground of this seascape, where a colourful tanker traverses the screen as it makes its turn into port. Just as the tip of the ship touches the chimney vapour, a small tug enters the screen from the left-hand side. The miniature guide escorts the flaming colossus as it liquefies through industrial heat. Katia describes this event as a ‘transition or rebirth’ as the tanker enters the orient. The dissolution of the ship is echoed by a wall of sound that engulfs the viewer in the installation. The sound is the audio equivalent of the visual evidence of heat emanating from the chimneys: a discordant and meditative hum. Dissolution uses the moving image to demonstrate where radical opposites momentarily fuse.
‘Harragas’ means to burn or transgress boundaries and is a term used to describe migrants desperate to leave Algeria for the West. The metaphor of the flame develops as transcendental homelessness in Harragas, 2010, the title of Zineddine Bessai’s installation of small photographs of male figures with candles strapped to their backs like effigies. Bessai, an Arab Muslim, is a recent graduate from the School of Fine Arts in Algeria and was not granted a visa to come to the opening of the show: immigration authorities stated that he might not return home.
Most of the work in the exhibition does not make reference to Algerian history beyond the War of Independence of 1962. Where reference is made it is as spectre or as erasure. Amina Menia’s photomural Chrysanthemum, 2011 is a comparative study of grave monuments shown in immaculate upkeep or in various states of neglect, depending on the political acceptability of those commemorated. Sophie Elbaz’s video installations L’Ile Fantastique, 2007, and Qacentina, 2007, trace her Sephardic Jewish heritage. Born in France she returned to Constantine, in Algeria, which boasts a landscape of large gorges and natural rock arches; her video journey records simultaneous layers of enchantment and lamentation. In conversation with me she described the pre-Roman beginnings and the subsequent history of Jews in Algeria. The video evokes her family’s experiences, now completely disconnected from their origin. Portraits of her grandfather from the colonial era, her father and herself are superimposed, merge and fade to become enveloped, dream-like, by billowing sand. The memorable image of a down-turned bed is suggestive of her phantasmagorical journey.
Personal accounts of journeying, as the curators Joseph McGonagle and Edward Welch state, are the main thrust of this exhibition. Visual journals and oral history accounts address the complexity of current issues around identity politics with directness. Bruno Boudjelal’s Algeria from East to West, 2001-03, is a photo-journal presented as a large mural with vivid imagery, following the 1990s civil war, of encounters with relatives in Algeria. Yves Jeanmougin’s photographs revisit sites associated with the pied-noir poet Jean Segnac; the silhouetted image of a famous haunted house – a shell that is now a monument following the war of independence – resonates with Segnac’s absence. ‘…while drawing water from a well’, is a fragment of a caption from Omar D’s understated and poignant A4-size slide presentation A Biography of Disappearance, Algeria, 1992-2007. The captions follow ID photographs of men who disappeared during the civil war. Each image offers about a minute of viewing, enough to remember the face, and is followed by a caption which states where they were last seen. John Perivolaris’s North to North, 2011, a journey from the north of England to the north of Algeria, includes a photograph taken of a Muslim woman entering the underground in London. Seen from behind, her flowing garments and purposeful stride synthesise a gamut of conflicting feelings, from vestiges of orientalist exoticism to politicised awareness of a culture in ambitious transition.
Edward Said has argued that the west’s view of the orient has transferred from colonial, paternalistic fantasy to a U.S. dominated ‘matter of policy’. This has resulted, he says, in an increasingly dehumanised view of the orient. It follows that the landscape of Algeria is seen primarily as a material resource. Kader Attia’s severe work Oil and Sugar, 2007, a video installation, has no obvious human or literary element. Crude oil poured over a stack of processed sugar dissolves into cultural sludge as a conceptual critique of the reduction of both nature and culture to policy. The use of video as an extension of the seductive power of mass media imagery always risks critical impotence and complicity. Yet the significance of Attia’s work is that the concoction of oil and sugar remains jarring and conceptually difficult to consume. The soundtrack that accompanies the video is of the barely audible sound of someone singing, the only human element that suggests reprieve in this otherwise stark work.
The War of Independence of 1962 was an intellectual revolution that was spurred by writers and artists. This is affirmed by Zineb Sedira’s Gardiennes d’Images, 2010, a large-scale video installation on two adjacent walls that records conversations with Safia Kouaci, the wife, assistant and now archive keeper of her husband Mohamed Kouaci’s photographs. The photographs document the revolution, but it has not been possible to find an official home for the archive. The camera angle, the juxtaposition of images and the editing allow a relaxed viewing of Safia’s engrossing first-hand account of the events leading to independence. The video enables the viewer to become familiar and connected to Safia’s cause, as she speaks of preserving her culture for the future. New Cartographies is about traversing boundaries, yet the show culminates with a change of pace, in Gardiennes D’Images Safia Kouaci acts as a sentinel, a guardian of a fragile cultural border made of photographic paper.
Stephen Lee is a sculptor.
Sep
20
‘Andrew Cross’, exhibition review by Stephen Lee, originally published in Art Monthly issue no. 339, September 2010 pp nos. 28-29.
Ikon Eastside Birmingham July 1 to 25
The Solo, 2010 a film collaboration between Andrew Cross and Carl Palmer – the drummer from the rock group Emerson, Lake and Palmer – transforms an unassuming landscape into the spatial re-enactment of music as pop idyll.
Previous photographic work by Andrew Cross includes rolling chalk downs and banal truck-stops that trace English and American landscapes that are both bucolic and post-industrial. This exhibition is introduced by a wall of photographs, taken from dawn to dusk, of the site of the Knebworth 1970 pop festival. Blue sky with a backdrop of woods: the field undulates forming a dip, presumably the location of a stage. This landscape today is empty, yet something occurred here, recalling Eric Motram’s essay, ‘Dionysus in America’, in which he describes the electric, rock and roll, orgiastic frenzy, that gives a site such as this its enigmatic and mythic presence.
The exhibition starts in total darkness. The film begins with an image of Palmer, full figure, playing a single drum. On an adjacent, large-scale screen, a close-up of the detailed drumming and footwork can be seen. Four speakers, one in each corner, periodically emit percussion sounds, making musical patterns that traverse the room. The spatial effect of sound is experienced as a powerful and physical environment surrounding the viewer. Yet at times this feels staged and synthetic. Characteristic of Cross’s work, the build up of intense expectation is followed by a feeling of absence. This is particularly noticeable when the percussion is halted with abrupt silences.
Five drum pieces have been collaboratively developed and filmed from various viewpoints. The piece titled ‘Brushes’, for example, is filmed in bird’s-eye view. ‘Ostinato’ shows only Palmer’s torso and feet as military-style drumming evokes the space of Kieferesque landscape. Cross describes this musical piece as emotionally close to the landscape where he grew up: Salisbury plain with its military tanks and heavy military presence. ‘Cymbals’, consists of a shot of the shiny brass undersides of ringing cymbals. Visually they form a continuous horizontal streak reminiscent of Turner’s golden sunsets. Again, Palmer’s head is edited from view.
The image of Palmer drumming at full tilt is neither quixotic nor absurd. A paradoxical image that is apparently straightforward, its complexity can be alluded to by the term, ‘post-human, techno-sublime’. The pop drumming is machine-like and honed as a consumer product, though in this film it is also crafted, and the sense of infinity associated with sublime nature has been supplanted into infinite technological space. In addition to this sublime musical space, the collaboration has identified an artistic space that is important. The play-off between popular culture and serious art has produced a parody of current artistic vanities. Celebrity culture coupled with technical virtuosity as showmanship, plus the signing of autographs, have all been palmed off as parody. This use of disarming humour has opened an artistic space that is not self-consciously claustrophobic. In addition, during a talk on opening night, Palmer referred jokingly to his collaborative assignment as an ‘arty film with drumming’, while Cross mentioned deconstruction as part of his working method. The curator, Nigel Prince, said that one of the intentions of the collaboration was to remove the controlling aspect of art jargon: again this opens the intellectual space in which an artist can work.
I have described The Solo as a re-enactment, but its relationship to history actually has more depth. This exhibition has been curated alongside a 1970s survey exhibition at the Ikon gallery with the aim of drawing political/sociological parallels with today. Whether The Solo should be seen as atavistic, as a nostalgic tribute, or as revisionist can be judged better by considering it in a deeper historical context. It is assumed that Modernism evolved in the 19th-century from the periphery of Paris, where painters, along with the proletariat and petit bourgeoisie, took the train out to the new suburbs in their newly found leisure time to experience what TJ Clark describes as a landscape of commodities and distraction (factories and regattas). Cross’s work is likewise located at the edge of a postmodern landscape of truck stops and pop festivals. White walls and large films are well-trodden territory, yet the ideas about contemporaneous sublime space are exciting and pertinent. Finding a form that moves beyond mannerism and cyclical fashion may be more conceivable through an extended sense of historical continuum which, though complex, is linked to human agency.
Stephen Lee is a sculptor.
Sep
18
Caroline Bergvall and Ciarán Maher: ‘Say Parsley’, exhibition review by Stephen Lee, originally published in Art Monthly issue no. 337, June 2010, pp.19
Arnolfini Bristol 8 May to 4 July
Say Parsley is a collaborative sound and poetry installation over three galleries in which previously exhibited yet ongoing artworks are developed and transformed for the Arnolfini. The viewer as composer/interpreter/writer is invited to conceptually and experientially fill in the blanks, in a sparse white-walled environment of text fragments, sound, objects and media projections of text.
The exhibition is characterised by mixed messages of play and violence. There is a sense of unease and ambiguity between aspects of the installations that are concerned with resisting the violent usage of language as control, and other aspects that refer to language as innate play. Caroline Bergvall suggested in a talk, presented along with various ‘performance writing’ workshops linked to the exhibition, that her deconstructive poetics aim to resist what she describes as a Lingua Franca, where English is the vehicular language of a global business monoculture (Bergvall is a writer of French/Norwegian origin and Ciarán Maher is a composer of Irish descent). Dissociation from given identity in language, and its reconfiguration in new forms, is a central theme.
Parsley references a biblical ‘shibboleth’ as a prophetic example of control through language that ultimately led to a massacre. In the original event, the word, shibboleth, was used as a test to distinguish Gileadites from Ephraimites who were unable to pronounce the ‘h’ sound in ‘sh’ and were consequently slaughtered. In the Dominican Republic in 1937, thousands of Creole Haitians identifiable through their inability to say ‘parsley’ with a rolling ‘r’ were subsequently massacred. This dramatic example resonates in the synchronised sound and text installation Parsley in which the English derivatives of a list of Dutch and French words are heard spoken with slight mismatching of syntax and phonetics. Similar to a child’s chant, innocent yet provocative words – Pig, Fig, Borstel, Trompel, Parsley etc – are heightened as poetry through slippage, ghosting, alliteration and pattern.
For Walls in the adjacent gallery also uses the theme of dropping ‘h’s and mispronouncing ‘r’s to produce misspellings. Ghosted images of the dropped letters are seen as faint vinyl letters among the black letters of the text. Taken from Russell Hoban’s dystopian 1980 novel Riddley Walker, they have elements of pared-down, crudely amusing phonetic slang: a less severe form of Orwellian Newspeak. Bergvall has used her poetic fragments, slips-of-the-tongue and ghosting to produce what appear to be didactic, prophetic warnings, seething with violent reference, that nevertheless could imply a reconfigured emergent identity like that of a rap musician: ‘dogs rr struck in my throtl rat de gates ov law’ (with ghosted ‘r’s).
Alpabet, situated in the same room as For Walls, consists of 25 plumb weights, vinyl letters and badges. This installation has the appearance of a game. The plumb lines are activated as the audience pushes them. Each plumb thereby moves around a vinyl alphabet letter attached to the floor. When activated by a crowd, the plumbs swing randomly in the room, revealing glimpses and patterns of the alphabet. This playing with letters and language, highlighted here but evident in all of the installations, reflects the belief that language is innately formed through play and has a universal grammar. Upon leaving this gallery the viewer/composer/writer may pick up a badge, apparently as an interactive token, which has the letter ‘h’ upon it, the letter missing from the game Alpabet. We are told in the brochure that accompanies the exhibition that the dropping of ‘h’s in language exposes the speaker by stigmatising socio-economic class or, with reference to Irish identity, sectarian allegiance. Again we are offered the letter ‘h’ as a reminder of the shibboleth. The badge then is neither game nor token but a focus of the installation. It functions as a metaphor for the imprisoning effect of language as social stigma.
Maher has said that he believes human beings are hard-wired to construct meaning from minimal information. Some of the richness of Bergvall’s poetry in her book Fig has been carefully edited in the exhibition. This is evident in Ampers&, in which 64 projected ampersands are viewed as visually interesting phenomena in themselves. An accompanying text makes use of the ampersand as a conjoining and shorthand device, stating the need to generate new connections and dissociate ourselves from given identity in language. Within the room, Speakers, a sound installation, floods the gallery with the sound of human voices. When transformed into low-frequency sound they form an audio phenomenon akin to birdsong. The curling, animal-like shapes of the ampersand forms complement the birdsong as it evokes human whispers. The concept of universal grammar is posed here again in the analogous pattern of innate grammar and syntax shared by birds and humans.
This sparse exhibition offers intellectual curiosity coupled with violent prophesy, yet has density by implication only. One problem with leaving the viewer/writer to complete the meanings is that, in art school language, for example, the response could well be that the exhibition is referred to as ‘cool’. My point is compounded if we translate this into Newspeak: ‘double-plus cool’. Having identified the levelling and simplification of language as problematic, then to produce a sparse exhibition with much of the richness of Bergvall’s poetry edited out, is perverse.
Stephen Lee is a sculptor.
‘Pattern Recognition’, exhibition review by Stephen Lee, originally published in Art Monthly issue no. 330, October 2009, pp nos. 28-29.
The City Gallery Leicester 20 June to 24 October
‘Pattern Recognition’ proposes art that is an expanded field of physics, and 31 artists in this exhibition reflect, illustrate, interpret and resist this notion. Curated by Hugo Worthy, a mixture of mostly small-scale works – including painting, animation, pottery and digital artworks – are evenly displayed in this converted Victorian, shop-fronted building. The show is built around a DVD of Robert Smithson’s film Spiral Jetty, 1970, together with his theories of entropy as a cultural metaphor. Some familiar names are included, with Eduardo Paolozzi, Alison Turnbull and Bridget Riley, for example, interspersed with emerging artists.
Many of the artists’ concerns are echoed in the book Critical Mass, 2004, by Philip Ball, which tries to explain every feature of the world in terms of complexity theory and emergent patterns. Here is the story in a nutshell: when water vapour changes to snow a myriad of symmetrical paths of atoms are formed, depending on conditions of the freeze. Similar patterns can be observed in the collective behaviour of all living things. Ideas of evolution, history and free will are thereby radically challenged by geometry, physics and statistics. A ‘physics of society’ today analyses patterns in fields such as sociology to predict events. It is this approach towards patterns in nature and culture that is extended to art in this show.
Andy Harper’s painting Path, 2009, displays a labyrinthine composition of symmetrical branches of plant forms. As with the snowflake structure, the pathways dissolve into entropy, or disorder, at the edges. Plant tissues are rendered with translucent layers of paint and detailed, combed veins into drapery-shaped folds. This image of an edenic cornucopia takes the work beyond structural illustration of pattern into a complex metaphor for our perceptions of the natural world.
The tradition of Mughal miniature painting informs Aisha Khalid’s dynamic abstract series: Kiss, 2007, Truth, 2006, and Entangled, 2007. The theme of love is explored as a narrative sequence, and reference is made to traditional Pakistani textiles in these paintings of flower or cell forms. Blood-red nuclei composed of geometric lattices are surrounded by white-on-white petals. In Entangled two embryonic shapes merge as though in embrace and the two lattices ripple into three-dimensional illusion. From a western viewpoint one is reminded of Goethe’s Elective Affinities, 1809, in which a comparison is drawn between the connecting of electrons in chemical reaction under certain conditions, and the interplay of love relationships. As with Khalid’s paintings, a dynamic of human will and loss of self occurs as events appear shaped by chemistry and chance.
A group of collages by Abigail Reynolds continues the themes of her recent series, ‘The Universal Now’, 2009. Initially they appear to be doll’s house versions of Gordon Matta-Clark’s incisions into architecture. The collages consist of superimposed guidebook photographs of historic interiors taken at different time periods, say 1960 and 1980, for example. Her interest in time is stated through patterned folds and windows that open like an advent calendar projecting one time frame through to another. The claim of a ‘universal now’ connecting space/time, quantum and relativity theory puts a weighty, positive spin on the work. Following a different interpretive path, the collages could be considered as guidebook images of cultural tourism that demonstrate a consumerist endless present. However it is the persistent creativity and sense of play – rather than theoretical allegiance – that gives the collages depth.
The curator also considers pattern in relation to figuration as the pre-eminent tradition in western art. The small image that condenses the themes of this exhibition is Lahore-based artist Mahbub Shah’s Untitled, 2007, collaged portrait of an anonymous sitter, possibly Shah’s ancestor. Key facial features – nostrils, lips, jaw and eyes – are loaded with disembodying circular twists incised into the image then twisted slightly, as though made with a little apple corer. The coded patterns of reading a portrait have thereby slipped or revolved, producing an image that is pleasurably meditative rather than de-humanised or machine-like. These visual slippages or twists of the tongue, eyes and lips collage together an enigmatic image of a person that is fluid, obtuse and decentred, yet comfortably lucid.
Portraiture and pattern also figure in Dryden Goodwin’s Cradle 15, 2008. This large black and white photograph of a young black male has scratched lines over the face, both curvilinear and geometric, that resemble scarification. Reminiscent of Le Corbusier’s modular figure of measurement, here the abstract patterning is carried easily on this life-size image. Hetain Patel’s intense portrait, A(r)t Home, 2008, explores his Indian heritage with a photograph of a naked torso immersed in tattoos up to the neck. This encrypted body full to the brim with ritual meaning is contrasted with his austere western apartment.
The title of the show is borrowed from William Gibson’s 2003 book of the same name. The book’s hero is a ‘coolhunter’ looking for effective corporate logos, and its contemporary coffee-fuelled environment of naturalised, corporate chic is overlaid with ideas of history and collecting. Similarly, several works in the exhibition engage consumer and corporate imagery that hovers between token critique and celebration. Gemma Holt’s product design-aided Pencil Bangles, 2009, have more novelty value than aesthetic dimension; Graham Dolphin’s Chloe Proverbs, 2008, is more advertising than proverb; Carey Young’s corporate style video presentation Terms and Conditions, 2004, which is featured prominently on the gallery website, is more corporate amusement than cultural critique.
The unlikely inclusion of Bernard Leach’s beautiful pot, Leaping Fish Vase, which dates from the1960s, both reiterates and resists the themes of the show. Its emphasis on the absence of ego through the meditative quality of Eastern pottery mirrors other works in the exhibition: Mahbub Shah’s portrait, for example, is concerned with contemporary notions of self, but linked to a non-western tradition. However, when describing the composition of his pots and the integrated arrangement of pattern, Leach used the tasteful term ‘piquancy’. Whether we interpret this term as an ‘emergent’ configuration of atoms on the artist’s tongue or as a complex aesthetic judgement depends on our willingness to accept the forces that push fashion.
Stephen Lee is a sculptor.
Ronny Heiremans & Katleen Vermeir: ‘The Good Life’, exhibition review by Stephen Lee, originally published in Art Monthly issue no. 327, June 2009 pp no. 27.
Arnolfini Bristol April 10 to June 7
Walking the line between parody, pastiche and trickster humour Belgian artists, Ronny Heirmans and Katleen Vermeir have produced an exhibition, ‘The Good Life’ which is an architectural proposal that they believe could be built. With a target date of 2011, the artists’ proposal is to renovate the Arnolfini contemporary art centre into a high-end apartment building, a Pantheon for ‘good quality tenants’.
Visualised from the other side of the docks, the proposed new building – reminiscent of the floating city of Laputa in Gulliver’s Travels – forms a pastiche of borrowed architectural elements. At the top is a gridded trellis of apartments in the manner of stacked Le Corbusier ‘Dom-inos’. They offer a purist lifestyle surrounded by a skin of glass. The next layer in this trickle-down arrangement is a Brutalist colonnade providing amenities for the apartment dwellers. The underside of the colonnade houses a convex mirror that reflects the regenerated surrounding docklands. The whole unit is perched castle-like atop a giant single pilotis at a securely gated distance of 25m from the ground. Below this the Arnolfini former warehouse building, now a shell, appears like a romantic cult of ruins with picturesque parkland and roaming deer. The Arnolfini’s artistic content has been triumphantly morphed, displaced and developed into apartments of distinction, as the dockland developers would say, for the ‘creative classes’. The whole shebang appears to be a Situationist invitation: a postmodern Bastille waiting to be stormed.
On the ground floor, the exhibition turns on large-scale, floor to ceiling films depicting an estate agent’s guided tour. The environmental screens run the films in tandem, with speakers that reflect sound back. Shot in the Arnolfini galleries with actors, they can be seen as a total work of art where the white-on-white cinematographic interiors blur and merge with the white walls of the gallery.
Carly Wijs, an actress working in collaboration with the artists, interprets the estate agent role convincingly. Crisply dressed, she uses a mixture of NLP (neuro-liguistic programming) phrases suited to an up-market sell, with occasional slips of the tongue and a subtly comic, exaggerated corporate manner. She is selling and making apparent what the curator, Nav Haq, has sardonically described as art’s ‘cool-factor’ in an ‘experience economy’. Within the real estate hype there is passing reference to the existence of an underclass when we are informed that the gated community has its own police and that there are ‘no beggars here’. There is also the crack of gunshot that causes a brief hesitation in her ongoing pitch.
The estate agent sells apartments enhanced by the aura of artistic creativity and criticality. There is a frozen sequence in the film, a tableau vivant, where the actors are contemplating blank white walls previously inhabited by art. Upstairs on the next floor the visitor is either amused or bemused by the trickster humour of rooms that are empty save for a few chairs. Initially the Brechtian consciousness evoked earlier continues as we briefly reflect on the meanings suggested in the proposal, gaze at blank walls and imagine ourselves in the proposed warehouse shell and garden.
The perceptive acting and scripting contained in the film and brochure allow a dense sensibility of humour to emerge in the work; otherwise this art practice could easily have produced a dry, theory-led experience. Fredric Jameson has elaborated on the difference between parody and pastiche: both use mimicry but parody, and by extension satire, requires a historical linguistic norm to play around with in order to generate meaning. Pastiche, Jameson says, is ‘speech in a dead language’ a ‘blank parody’; style that has lost its points of reference due to cultural fragmentation.
On the other hand, the trickster figure such as Reynard the Fox or Elgua, with whom the Belgian artists identify, stands at a crossroads of inverted meanings and surprise. It is possible to imagine the play of their humour on entering empty galleries. More subtly, the transition between levels of humour and meaning can be seen when the estate agent, having performed like a marionette, momentarily rests and sips a glass of wine. She appears more human when deflated and the pastiche of her techno-speak transforms into satire.
In today’s popular culture ‘the good life’ and ‘the pursuit of happiness’ are synonymous with the accumulation of wealth and entry into the middle classes. In the ancient world the Stoic idea of the good life meant making thoughtful decisions about a philosophy of life where complex emotional pleasure is more fulfilling than the quick-fix of distraction. It is important that in this exhibition the artists have enough historical awareness to enable us to question playfully the deadening effects of today’s pastiche and market manipulation.
Stephen Lee is a sculptor and writer.
Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller: ‘The House of Books Has No Windows’, exhibition review by Stephen Lee, originally published in Art Monthly issue no. 322, January 2009 pp nos. 32-33.
Modern Art Oxford October 15 to January 18
Franz Kafka, in his book Amerika, published in 1927, describes with startling precision the hypnotic effect of technology and mass culture. Karl, the hero of the story, having just arrived in New York, gazes over the balcony of an apartment block at the teeming sights, smells and sounds of the city. He describes the ‘enveloping light … with an effect as palpable to the dazzled eye as if a glass roof stretched over the street were being violently smashed at every moment’. This image is still relevant today and it is within this context that we might understand Janet Cardiff and George Bures-Miller’s fragmented narratives. The impetus of storytelling drives their collaborative, multi-sensory installations at Modern Art Oxford, where the exhibition is sensitively laid out so that each space enhances the impact and flow of this series of memory theatres.
The sound of Janet Cardiff’s voice is compelling and memorable due to its intimacy, like the reading voice of a friend, lover or mother, and the artists are known for narrated walks using Walkman technology. Fragments of narrative, instructions, collaged sounds from movies, sometimes pleasurable combinations and sometimes anxious, create a form of storytelling that is like lucid dreaming. When integrated here with sculptural objects and spaces the effect – as various media correspond – triggers an intensification of the total sensuous experience.
In the installation The Dark Pool (1995) the storytelling is most tangible. A separate room with one doorway, like a studio where aesthetic experiments are conducted, it is full of clutter and reflects the apparent sensibility of a collector. Dramatically lit by bulbs dangling from the ceiling, closer inspection of tabletop debris reveals that some objects are grouped as vignettes, like a half-finished snack. Some objects function as Surrealist object poems, such as a bird’s wing wired to brass plates where we are instructed to insert a photograph into this ‘Wish Machine’ prototype. Elsewhere found objects generate a sense of deja vu. Like Adorno’s ‘Valery Proust Museum’, objects dislocated from their original context combine with a babel of sound fragments to provoke involuntary memory. The audience meanders through this work, at times sitting, reading or lying down, and becomes so much a part of the set that it can be startling when a figure moves and reveals itself to be real and not sculpture.
Lucid dreaming is a useful simile for the literary mechanisms at play in this memory theatre but it is not quite accurate. The artists describe a notion of the self that disembodies and re-embodies through the conscious experience of editing and re-assembly of meaning. The proposition is that, in an electronic era, hyperrealty may be discerned, articulated and resisted through the pleasurable free-play of narrative. Certainly the influence of Marshall McLuhan’s notion of electronic media as an extension of our bodies’ senses and, more recently, Celia Lury’s theory of experimental ‘editing’ of a shifting conception of self all help this idea to connect. But in the installation it is probably the presence and responses of other human beings in this elaborate set that tends to make us conscious of production and artifice.
The idea of a place where storytelling occurs, like a porch or theatre for example, anchors the narratives. Susan Stewart has written about the construction of narrative through the use of the miniature and the gigantic as metaphors. The miniature implies an ‘interiorised space and time’ while the gigantic is always public. Many of the installations use combinations of these forms: in The Dark Pool the intense longing for miniature space locates the pool as a tiny stage, set in a suitcase that is internally lit, whereas The House of Books Has No Windows (2008) defines the audience as giants with its 3ft-high doorway. Created for this exhibition from a sketchbook of unrealised projects, the latter project has no audible component. Made entirely of stacked books, with mitred corners and corbelled roof, it looks like a child’s playhouse. The spines of the books face outwards so that inside they form a variegated relief as different sizes protrude into the space, giving the appearance of a patterned visual code.
As a finale, the theatrical installation The Killing Machine, (2007) initially very provocative, is quite different from the other works. The catalogue states that this work is about politics, and specifically about American capital punishment, while incarceration of prisoners without due process at Guantanamo Bay is also implied. The audience must choose to be complicit; there is a push-button to start graceful, raptor-like robots that pantomime the killing of an imaginary body. This interpretation of Kafka’s story, ‘In the Penal Colony’, is abbreviated to a five-minute experience. As Walter Benjamin has pointed out, making politics beautiful is always problematic and whether this installation provokes, like Ed Keinholz’ early work to which the artists refer or whether the seductive professionalism of the work merely produces a fetishised shock and awe remains unresolved.
Stephen Lee is a sculptor.
‘Educational Taylorism’, letter by Stephen Lee, originally published in Art Monthly issue no. 316, May 2008 pp no.15.
Having read Graham Crowley’s ‘Can’t get no satisfaction’ and reflected upon my own experiences of teaching and being taught fine art, I can appreciate the current state of educational Taylorism and the overbearing, corporate-style management he describes. The corporate model is a powerful one. It tends to be one-dimensional and seamless, where accountability and success can be clearly measured. To understand the impact of the corporatisation of art schools it’s important, I think, to examine the language or jargon used to organise and disseminate learning, then look at the extent to which fine art students adopt this language. Fine art graduates talk of promotion and marketing, or finding a niche market for their work. If a critic writes about a graduate student’s work the artist may not necessarily see this as participation in an independent critical arena. On the contrary it’s likely they may see it as an opportunity to gain an additional promotional tool with which to market their work. My point is that the corporate model is pervasive in our wider culture industry.
In the interest however, of answering Crowley’s letter rather than reiterating the all too familiar problems, I’d like to try to offer some strategies of resistance. I think that this can be done at the level of language. When one culture colonises another it imposes its jargon by replacing the existing culture’s language with its own. This is done by re-naming and thereby transforming familiar ideas. To some extent the teaching of fine art has been colonised by both corporate and educational jargon, so that rather than acting as support structures or scaffolding they can overwhelm the substance of what’s taught. (This problem is compounded when, in the interests of efficiency, teaching hours are reduced. Inevitably a lecturer will struggle to provide significant content within a reduced time frame).
I feel that in the classroom or studio a constant resistance to the use of jargon is needed, where both lecturers and students critically examine the language used to discuss fine art. Translation of received language into plain language is a process whereby students can control and determine their own artwork. In this way the teaching ‘inputs’ and ‘outcomes’ stand a chance of adding up to more than the sum of their parts.
In addition, I believe that art students benefit massively from listening to, reading and discussing literature. Many of the important art movements in the past have been closely linked to literary movements. I think that the development of a knowledgeable but straightforward language in the studio will prevent what Crowley refers to as the tendency of management to ‘infantilise’ the culture and discourse of art schools.
Ironically, it seems that we are approaching a situation where a comparison can be drawn between the direction our corporate universities are working towards and the academies of the nineteenth century. This kind of controlled, prescriptive, professionalism can be resisted.
Stephen Lee
Banbury, Oxon.
