Defining Contemporary Art
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Defining Contemporary Art–25 year ears in 200 piv pivotal
Contents
Works commencing 1986
6
Günther Förg Untitled
8
Je Koons Rabbit
Works commencing 1989
52
Overview o the year 1989 by Okwui Enwezor
58
Alighiero Boetti Map
60
Philip-Lorca diCorcia Vittorio
10
Bruce Nauman Violent Incident: Man-Woman Segment
12
Luc Tuymans Gas Chamber
62
Mona Hatoum The Light at the End
14
Mark Manders Inhabited for a Survey (First Floor Plan from Self-Portrait as a Building)
64
Isaac Julien Looking for Langston
Works commencing 1987
66
Barbara Kruger Untitled (Your body is a battleground)
68
Cady Noland Oozewald
16
Matthew Barney Drawing Restraint 1
70
18
Richard Prince Untitled (Cowboy)
Jimmie Durham Self-Portrait
72
20
Lorna Simpson Guarded Conditions
Peter Fischli and David Weiss The Way Things Go
74
Doris Salcedo Untitled
22
Mike Kelley More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid
24
Cildo Meireles Mission/Missions (How to Build Cathedrals)
76
Damien Hirst A Thousand Years
26
Philip Taae Intersecting Balustrades
78
Sherrie Levine La Fortune (After Man Ray)
RosemarieTrockel Untitled (Made in Western Germany)
80
28
30
Cindy Sherman Untitled
32
Huang Yong Ping The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes
34
82
Michael Asher Untitled
38
Leigh Bowery Untitled
40
Martin Kippenberger Untitled
42
Adrian Piper Cornered
44
Gerhard Richter October 18, 1977
46
Group Material Democracy
48
Allan Sekula Fish Story
50
Chohreh Feyzdjou Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou
Christopher Wool Untitled Vija Celmins Untitled (Ocean)
110 Charles Ray Fall ‘91 112 Rirkrit Tiravanija untitled 1992 (free) 114 Je Wall Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986)
166 Kara Walker Gone: An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart Works commencing 1995
168 Richard Artschwager Untitled
116 Fred Wilson Mining the Museum
170 Martin Creed Work No. 127: The Lights Going On and Off
118 Cecilia Edealk Echo
172 Ceal Floyer Door
178 Yinka Shonibare How Does a Girl Like You Get To Be a Girl Like You?
128 Chantal Akerman From the East
180 Isa Genzken I Love New York, Crazy City
130 Paweł Althamer Self-Portrait
182 Kay Hassan Flight
132 Janine Antoni Lick and Lather
184 Robert Gober Untitled
134 John Currin Girl in Bed 136 Olaur Eliasson Beauty 138 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster Robert Walser Vitrine 140 Douglas Gordon 24 Hour Psycho
186 Tacita Dean Disappearance at Sea 188 Renée Green Partially Buried in Three Parts 190 William Kentridge History of the Main Complaint
146 Steve McQueen Bear
88
Félix González-Torres “Untitled” (Placebo)
148 Gabriel Orozco La DS
196 Hans-Peter Feldmann 100 Years
90
Andreas Gursky Siemens, Karlsruhe
150 Thomas Schütte United Enemies
198 Liam Gillick The What If? Scenario
92
Glenn Ligon Untitled (“I am an invisible man”)
152 Wolgang Tillmans Corinne on Gloucester Place
200 Koo Jeong A Untitled (mothball)
94
Paul McCarthy Bossy Burger
156 Angela Bulloch Rules Series Works commencing 1994
Michael Schmidt U-NI-TY
158 Matthew Barney Cremaster 4 160 Bill T. Jones Still/Here 162 Sarah Lucas Au Naturel 164 Nancy Spero Black and the Red III
232 Zoe Leonard Tree + Fence Series 234 Sheela Gowda And Tell Him of My Pain 236 On Kawara Pure Consciousness 238 the land Foundation the land Works commencing 1999
Stan Douglas Monodramas
154 Rachel Whiteread House
230 Rebecca Warren Helmut Crumb
Works commencing 1996
86
106 Stan Douglas Hors-champs
Works commencing 1998
126 Eija-Liisa Ahtila Okay, Me/We, Gray
194 Rineke Dijkstra The Buzzclub, Liverpool, UK/ Mysteryworld, Zaandam, NL, 1996-1997
100 Overview o the year 1992 by Bob Nickas
224 Meschac Gaba Museum of Contemporary African Art (Draft Room)
228 Anri Sala Intervista
144 Jenny Holzer Lustmord
Works commencing 1992
222 Johan Grimonprez dial H-I-S-T-O-R-Y
176 Martin Kippenberger METRO-Net station, Dawson City
Glenn Brown Atom Age Vampire
98
220 Tania Bruguera The Burden of Guilt
120 Overview o the year 1993 by Massimiliano Gioni
84
David Wojnarowicz Close to the Knives: A Memoir of Disintegration
218 Dieter Roth Solo Scenes
226 Shirin Neshat Turbulent
142 Hans Haacke GERMANIA
96
216 Carsten Höller and RosemarieTrockel A House for Pigs and People
174 Mike Kelley Educational Complex
Works commencing 1993
Works commencing 1991
Peter Fischli and David Weiss Visible World Works commencing 1988
36
Works commencing 1990
108 Je Koons Puppy
192 Pipilotti Rist Sip My Ocean
202 Overview o the year 1997 by Bice Curiger 208 Francis Alÿs The Loop 210 Fiona Banner The Nam 212 Thomas Demand Bathroom 214 Ayşe Erkmen Sculptures on Air
272 Peter Doig 100 Years Ago 274 Harun Farocki I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts 276 Isa Genzken Fuck the Bauhaus 278 Pierre Huyghe The Third Memory 280 Sarah Morris Capital 282 Tino Sehgal Instead of allowing some things to rise up to your face, dancing bruce and dan and other things 284 Tomás Saraceno Venice 2024 2400 Works commencing 2001
286 Overview o the year 2001 by Connie Butler 292 Maurizio Cattelan Him 294 Jeremy Deller The Battle of Orgreave 296 Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster Beaches 298 Rodney Graham The Phonokinetoscope
240 Doug Aitken Electric Earth
300 Steven Parrino Skeletal Implosion #3
242 Monica Bonvicini I Believe in the Skin of Things as in that of Woman
302 Gregor Schneider Totes Haus u r
244 Louise Bourgeois Maman 246 Mary Heilmann The Third Man 248 Mark Leckey Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore 250 Michel Majerus what looks good today may not look good tomorrow 252 Lily van der Stokker Old People Making Spectacularly Experimental Art 254 Gillian Wearing Drunk
Works commencing 1997
270 Paweł Althamer Bródno 2000
256 Pierre Huyghe and Philippe Parreno No Ghost Just A Shell 258 Walid Raad The Atlas Group Archive 260 Carl Michael von Hausswol Red 262 Lamia Joreige Objects of War Works commencing 2000
264 Overview o the year 2000 by Suzanne Cotter
304 Thomas Struth Pergamon Museum Berlin 306 Fiona Tan Saint Sebastian 308 Emily Jacir Where We Come From 310 Rivane Neuenschwander Involuntary Sculptures (Speech Acts) Works commencing 2002
312 John Bock Gribbohm II b 314 David Hammons Concerto in Black and Blue 316 Thomas Hirschhorn Bataille-Monument 318 Chris Ofli The Upper Room 320 Damián Ortega Cosmic Thing 322 Laura Owens Untitled 324 Lygia Pape Web I, C 326 Pascale Marthine Tayou Game Station
328 Seth Price Dispersion Works commencing 2003
330 Olaur Eliasson The Weather Project 332 Ellsworth Kelly Ground Zero Proposal 334 Klara Lidén Paralyzed 336 Renata Lucas Crossing 338 Tobias Rehberger Seven Ends of the World 340 Rudol Stingel Untitled
376 Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno Zidane: A Twenty First Century Portrait 378 Wade Guyton Untitled 380 Carsten Höller Test Site
384 Jason Rhoades Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé 386 Simon Starling Wilhelm Noack oHG 388 Wolgang Tillmans paper drop (gold) 390 Kelley Walker Black Star Press (Rotated 180 Degrees)
344 Yang Fudong Seven Intellectuals in a Bamboo Forest
392 Haegue Yang Sadong 30 394 Chu Yun Constellation
Works commencing 2004
348 Trisha Donnelly The Redwood and the Raven 350 Cao Fei COSPlayers Works commencing 2005
352 Marina Abramović Seven Easy Pieces
Works commencing 2007
396 El Anatsui Dusasa I and II 398 Micol Assaël Chizhevsky Lessons 400 Urs Fischer You 402 Rachel Harrison Voyage of the Beagle
354 Kutluğ Ataman Küba
404 Sharon Hayes Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time For Love?
356 Paul Chan 1st Light
406 Odili Donald Odita Give Me Shelter
358 Karen Kilimnik Installation in the Haus zum Kirschgarten at Historisches Museum, Basel
408 Gerhard Richter Cologne Cathedral Window
360 Maria Lassnig Lady in Plastic
410 Josh Smith Untitled 412 Ai Weiwei Fairytale
362 Louise Lawler Grieving Mothers (Attachment) 364 Joan Jonas The Shape, the Scent, the Feel of Thing 366 Sigmar Polke Axial Age 368 Yto Barrada Cinémathèque de Tanger Works commencing 2006
370 Tomma Abts Meko 372 Carol Bove The Night Sky Over Berlin, March 2, 2006, at 9pm 374 Marlene Dumas The Believer
434 Barry X Ball Sleeping Hermaphrodite 436 Christodoulos Panayiotou Wonder Land; Never Land; I Land
382 Alredo Jaar The Sound of Silence
342 Akram Zaatari This Day
346 Nathalie Djurberg Tiger Licking Girl’s Butt
432 Roni Horn a.k.a.
Works commencing 2008
414 Overview o the year 2008 by Daniel Birnbaum 420 Nairy Baghramian La Lampe dans l’horloge 422 Huma Bhabha Bumps in the Road 424 Roberto Cuoghi Šuillakku 426 Falke Pisano The I and the You 1 428 Dayanita Singh Sent a Letter 430 Cerith Wyn Evans and Throbbing Gristle A=P=P=A=R=I=T=I=O=N
Works commencing 2009
438 Miroslaw Balka How It Is 440 Keren Cytter Four Seasons 442 Artur Żmijewski Democracies 444 Richard Hamilton Unorthodox Rendition Works commencing 2010
446 Overview o the year 2010 by Hans Ulrich Obrist 452 Christian Boltanski The Life of C. B. 455 467 470 472
Round-table discussion Notes Artworks listed by author Index
1986 Günther Förg Untitled Installation with ramed photographs, mirrors, house paint Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland •
Bice Curiger
Günther Förg belongs to a generation o artists who, emerging at the end o the 1970s, witnessed the collapse o the modernist paradigm. With a certain melancholy, his art obliquely laments this demise while simultaneously exploding modernism’s conventions. Long beore notions o installation and site-specifcity gained common currency in Germany, he had developed a multidisciplinary practice in which painting, photography, sculpture and drawing were all deployed and oten exhibited simultaneously. His 1986 exhibition at the Kunsthalle Bern is a pivotal example o his combinative practice and the powerul, immersive environments created by his monumental installations. Spread across fve rooms, this installation included large-scale architectural and portrait photographs hung in calculated relation to expansive monochrome wall paintings and two equally large scale wall-mounted mirrors. The atypical juxtaposition o these dierent modes underscored his anxiety regarding the emerging postmodern paradigm and orceully reected (quite literally in the case o the mirrors and the reective glass covering his photographs) what he perceived as culture’s current state o ux. Förg’s interest in architecture developed at the beginning o the 1980s, coinciding with his adoption o photography. Today we are used to seeing l arge-scale photographs on the walls o galleries, but in the mid-1980s they were a much rarer sight, lending his installations a powerul impetus. Ambivalent space permeated his photographs in Bern. Photographic details o iconic modernist buildings rom the 1920s and 1930s were hung throughout the Kunsthalle, including an image o the stepped roo o the Italian villa Casa Malaparte in Capri, which reerenced the role the building had played in Jean-Luc Godard’s 1963 flm Le Mépris (Contempt). In other rooms there were closely cropped shots o the Casa del Fascio in Como – a municipal building commissioned as the local headquarters o the National Fascist Party, conceived as an elegant ‘set piece’ or Fascist mass
rallies – and interior views o Mies van der Rohe’s Haus Lange in Kreeld, Germany. What captivated Förg was the way in which the architecture o Italian (or Fascist) Rationalism had emerged around he Western world as a received international style – testimonies in stone to a sinister past. Compositionally, the photographs are awkward, and this, coupled with the graininess o their expanded scale, bestows them with a curious ambiguity. Also on display, providing a human counterpoint, were large-scale, close-up portraits o women, anticipating the work o Thomas Ru. For Förg, the experience o architectural space is raught with psychological and ideological implications. The thick protective glass on the photographs’ rames reected the gallery and its visitors, absorbing them into the images. Thus Förg reminds his audience that, although these iconic buildings are now relics o an erstwhile paradigm, they are part o a history – whether heroic, sad, dramatic or diabolic – to which we all still belong. His installation transormed the Kunsthalle into a monumental space in which his combinations o dierent vernaculars created visual discrepancies that sought to question the codes and received orthodoxies underpinning these disciplines. Yet, in doing so, Förg was simultaneously able to reinvigorate them.
1986 Je Koons Rabbit rom the series Statuary Stainless steel 220 x 130 x 160 cm •
Massimiliano Gioni
An archetypical image and an icon o an entire decade, Je Koons’s Rabbit has the coldness o an object not built by human hands. More than just an icily perect industrial product, it is above all a mental image and an embodiment o desire. The artist preers to describe it as a chameleon; with its reective material making it a sort o postmodern Brancusi, Rabbit changes its skin and constantly regenerates itsel. It makes room or viewers within itsel, swallowing them up, yet it reects and rejects them, turning the public into a readymade. Like many other Koons pieces that use mirrors as both a metaphor and a material, Rabbit imprisons the observer, reecting both the artist’s ego and a mass ego, as Koons has explained in his characteristic sermonizing prose: ‘I wanted to make works that embrace everyone’s own cultural history and made everybody eel that their history was perect just the way it was.’1 The sculpture was created as part o the Statuary series (1986), in which Koons continued to experiment with casting everyday objects in stainless steel, as he had done in the Luxury and Degradation series earlier that year. Rabbit is the piece that best represents his entire stylistic evolution, combining an obsession with materials – raised here to a pinnacle o perection and simplicity that would become even more evident in the Celebration series (1994-present) – and a concern with taste, seen as directly expressing identifcation with a given social class. The works in the Statuary series not only employ the same materials – the stainless steel that the artist calls a material o the proletariat, replacing the gold and silver o the aristocracy – but also a ascination with art’s capacity to express social aspirations. Contrary to the popular cliché that writes him o as an artist or millionaire collectors, since the outset o his career Koons has repeatedly described his work as an exploration o art as a means o social mobility; interviews rom the period and the artist’s ‘little red book’, The Je Koons Handbook (1992), are brimming with occasionally delirious slogans in which the stainless-steel sculptures are described as panoramic views o society,
1986 Je Koons Fisherman Golfer rom the series Luxury and Degradation Stainless steel 30.5 x 20.5 x 12.5 cm
or as objects o aection, concrete projections o desire in which economic and political power is rozen and preserved as evidence o one’s own aspirations. Rabbit obviously calls to mind the epic o desire presented by Marcel Duchamp’s oeuvre; the similarity between Duchamp’s Fountain and Koons’s Rabbit is clear yet almost subliminal. Both are eroticized products o industry, and vessels to be flled by the viewer’s imagination. Koons has also evoked the work o Salvador Dalí and said that i he were to retitle the Rabbit he would call it The Great Masturbator , ater Dalí’s amous 1929 painting. Obviously, sexual
1928 Constantin Brancusi Bird in Space Polished bronze Height 137 cm
reerences abound in this as in other works by Koons; the Rabbit clearly hints at the Playboy logo, and the carrot has an unequivocal phallic presence, although the artist has at times suggested it might be a microphone, which would turn the rabbit into a politician. Koons has also described the suraces o the Statuary series, including Rabbit , as ‘pure sex’,2 the hard, masculine physicality o the metal coupled with the eminine sotness and lightness evoked by the inatable material. As with any bachelor machine, Rabbit is most likely a sexual hybrid or a hermaphrodite. A sphinx rom the age o capitalist realism, it questions us in silence.
1986 Bruce Nauman Violent Incident: Man-Woman Segment Video Colour, sound 30 min. •
Bob Nickas
Bruce Nauman is considered one o the most inuential artists o his own and subsequent generations. His iconic neon The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) (1967) is amiliar to almost
any art student o the past orty years, as are his early perormance flms and videos. The same cannot be said o the sculptures he made between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, which could easily register as mere ormal investigation, departing rom the physical/psychological charge o his body- and text-based works. But with the works he produced in the mid1980s – a post-punk period that witnessed an intermingling o art, flm, music and perormance fltered through a sense o alienation and nihilism – his status among younger artists changed dramatically. In 1985 he conceived several fgurative neon works that relate sex with violence. The stick fgure in Hanged Man dies with an erection each time his noose tightens. In Sex and Death By Murder and Suicide, two fgures ace each other, reaching out to shake hands; one points a knie at the other, the other sticks a gun in its mouth, while crouching fgures ellate them and their penises rise and all. In Punch and Judy: Kick in the Groin, Slap in the Face, a man slaps a woman in the ace, and she responds by kicking him in the groin. But the male is visibly aroused by the violence, becoming tumescent each time he slaps her. While all o these pieces reanimate the perormative aspect central to Nauman’s work, in its action and pairing o a male and a emale fgure, Punch and Judy anticipates one o his most disturbing and enduring works, the video Violent Incident . While the bright, cartoonish ormat o the neons allows the viewer some distance on the proceedings, the bodies that inhabit Violent Incident are very much esh and blood, actors hired and rehearsed by the artist to enact an ultimately tragic, albeit slapstick, comedy o manners. The action takes place around a table set ormally or two. As Nauman has described the unolding o the piece, ‘1. The man holds a chair or the woman as she
1985 Bruce Nauman Hanged Man Neon tubing mounted on metal monolith 218 x 140 x 27 cm
starts to sit down. The man pulls the chair out rom under her and she alls to the oor. Man is amused but woman is angry. 2. Man turns and bends over to retrieve the chair and as she gets up she gooses him. 3. Man stands up and turns and aces her now very angry also and calls her a name (shit-asshole-bitchslut-whatever). 4. The woman reaches back to the table and takes a cocktail and throws it in the man’s ace. 5. Man slaps woman in the ace. 6. Woman knees or kicks man in the groin. 7. Man is hurt and bends over, takes knie rom table, they struggle and she stabs. 8. He is stabbed.’ When the table is turned, so to speak, ‘All instructions are the same except the roles are reversed. Woman holds chair or man, pulls it away, man alls, gooses woman; she calls him a name, he throws a drink, she slaps, he kicks, she stabs and he stabs her.’3 All o this takes place in a mere twentysix seconds. Over hal an hour, the action plays out almost seventy times.
As with many pivotal works o art, Violent Incident comes to be reconciled with the artist’s previous work yet remains distinct unto itsel. In the quarter-century since its inception, it has lost none o its psychic or visceral energy. The romantic dinner, oten a prelude to intimacy, is here no less than a prelude to violence and death, and the viewer’s reaction, almost instantaneous, is still the same ater all these years: ‘This is Bruce Nauman?’. One recalls as well that by the end o the 1980s his relevance to younger artists had eclipsed that o any other fgure rom the 1960s, with the exception o Andy Warhol. Nauman was seen as both a historical fgure and a contemporary, with the greatest afrmation taking the orm o Jessica Diamond’s 1989 wall painting YES BRUCE NAUMAN. While others o his generation were content to repeat themselves, Nauman, in this period, reinvented himsel.
1986 Luc Tuymans Gas Chamber Oil on canvas 50 x 70 cm •
Connie Butler
Is it possible to represent the unrepresentable? Are there subjects that are beyond language and understanding? An oil painting made ater a watercolour painted at Dachau, Luc Tuymans’ Gaskamer (Gas Chamber) attempts to dismantle the power o taboo. The very act o making a drawing, a watercolour, at one o the most notorious sites o violence in the twentieth century is, in itsel, an absurd and even obscene gesture. But Tuymans’ strategy is one o conrontation with culture’s most hideous and oten unspeakable moments – images that have no use or language. And, indeed, gazing at this awkwardly succinct painting elicits a visceral response, a kind o creeping nausea at one’s own act o spectatorship. Tuymans painted the watercolour and then put it away, deciding the subject was o-limits. Only upon recovering the sketch some years later did he eel ready to bring orm to this terrible historical memory – a memory that must not be erased. Both horrible and completely seductive, the picture itsel unctions as a kind o warning against the abstraction o collective violence and grie. Tuymans himsel has described the painting as a response to the cultural prohibition around picturing the Holocaust: ‘The Final Solution is something hidden, and I want to integrate that into the cultural discourse. It could be seen as a metaphor or the culture we live in. I see it as something that might happen again, as a possibility. I don’t want to take a moral stance, but I want to oppose the taboo aspect o it.’ 4 This notion o that which is hidden or withheld is key to Tuymans’ work in general. Gaskamer is nothing i not blank – evacuated o human presence and nearly void o emotion. As a composition, it dissolves into unresolved pools and planes o o-white, with the sepia tone o the original drawing and its inherent and intentional smudges and unspecifc marks transerred to the painting and adapted or their ambiguity and eerie bodily resonance. The painting itsel is not large but rather domestically scaled, like many o Tuymans’ pictures. The innocuousness o an easily apprehensible gas chamber, an image
1986 Luc Tuymans Study for Gas Chamber Watercolour and graphite on paper 31 x 40 cm
o horror made more palatable by its nondescript size, blotchy architecture and nearly neutral palate, puts the viewer in mind o H annah Arendt’s concept o the ‘banality o evil’, oten quoted in writing that analyses Tuymans’ ability to rerame history’s most egregious incidents or reconsideration by an unsuspecting public. I good art changes the way we see, then this painting, like Tuymans’ very best, unsettles the brain like a ever. We honour the subject in exhibiting or describing the painting, then recoil in horror as recognition o it seeps through the abstraction that the artist has imposed. Once painted into existence, it cannot be ignored or excerpted rom the artist’s body o work but rather insists on its own truth – both the historical truth o the events o the Holocaust and the obuscation o representation. The strange, enervated quiet o the work lies in the act o history’s muteness and the illegibility o its images. Like several generations o painters whose works rely on the photographic source, including Richard Hamilton, Gerhard Richter, Marlene Dumas, Mamma Andersson and Peter Doig – as well as photographers as diverse as Lewis Baltz and Michael Schmidt, each o whose work depends on the extraction o the historical subject rom the mediated image – Tuymans takes as a given that historical truth is unknowable
1986-2002 Mark Manders Inhabited for a Survey (First Floor Plan from Self-Portrait as a Building) Writing materials, erasers, painting tools, scissors, various materials Dimensions variable •
Massimiliano Gioni
Since 1986, at the age o eighteen, Mark Manders has been working on a piece that can be considered an infnite variation on a theme. Starting with his frst collage-sculpture, Inhabited or a Survey (First Floor Plan rom Sel-Portrait as a Building), he has
constructed installations, sculptures, environments and compositions that describe an imaginary architectural design in constant evolution. The building whose oor plan is depicted with maniacal precision in Inhabited or a Survey is a make-believe structure that represents a fctional artist named ‘Mark Manders’, an alter ego. First Floor Plan rom Sel-Portrait as a Building is the mental map o a fctitious place. The roots o this project, Manders has said, were literary and involved a larger cast o characters: ‘I wanted to write a book. With all the writing materials I had, like ballpoints, pencils and erasers, I made a oor plan on the oor. It was a at building with nine rooms. I called it Inhabited or a Survey and it served as the basis or a written sel-portrait, which was to be ormed collectively by seven imaginary persons living in the oor plan. It was to be a book without a beginning or an end, one that I would always have to keep working on.’5 Each subsequent work by Manders is connected to this frst one. He describes his installations and sculptures – which combine urniture with the unfred clay fgures that are now the best-known element o his work, along with objects reconstructed out o wood and miniaturized or otherwise modifed in scale – as emanations o that frst sel-portrait, or as inhabitants o the rooms traced out in the initial oor plan. The model o the sel, however, is a shiting one, adjusting with each new venue that Manders inhabits, seemingly modelling the unstable nature o the individual in the modern world. (In a work such as Nocturnal Garden Scene, 2005, with its blackened objects and bisected cat, the counterpoint o an alienating exterior reality appears explicit.) And so, over time, the oor plan has been expanded and altered to house
other incarnations o Manders’s alter ego, a neurotic, sensitive i ndividual who, as the artist describes him, can only exist in an artifcial world.6 Founded on this system, Manders’s work appears even more otherworldly than it already is. Confned within an imaginary geography, it seems connected to a lineage o literary predecessors, particularly Georges Perec’s toponomastic exercises in his 1978 novel Lie: A User’s Manual , just as it recalls the precarious constructions o sel-taught artists and the obsessive approach o outsider art. Moreover, in Manders’s installations there is an attention to detail, a combinatory science that evokes the diagrams and sculptures that psychologist Bruno Bettelheim examined in The Empty Fortress, his 1967 book on the creativity o autistic patients. Manders’s art is built around what Harald Szeemann might have reerred to as an individual mythology: a system in which legends and parascience are mingled to create a world that grows and changes like a living organism or a Gesamtkunstwerk
2005 Mark Manders Nocturnal Garden Scene Wood, glass, sand, various materials 220 x 130 x 160 cm
1987 Matthew Barney Drawing Restraint #1 Action Yale University •
Connie Butler
When I frst encountered Matthew Barney’s work, in 1989 at his studio in the Meatpacking District o Manhattan, I recall knowing that I was grappling with something extremely special, unlike any art I had seen. Barney had begun his Drawing Restraint series two years earlier, as an undergraduate at Yale University. Taking as its point o departure his own experience as a competitive athlete (he was quarterback or his high school and college ootball teams), the work deploys the principle o hypertrophy, the development o muscles in the body in response to increasing resistance. Using his experience o training, with all its resistances to and exertions o energy, he made what might be called a series o studio exercises. Colliding the mismatched activities o drawing and physical discipline, the artist attempted to make a sketch on the upper reaches o his studio wall, jumping, grasping and sometimes ailing to control the resulting chaotic marks. Nancy Spector, curator o ‘Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle’ at the Guggenheim Museum in 2003, has written, ‘As Barney’s career developed, the process that had begun in the studio as a rather straightorward transposition rom the realms o athletic training and biology to that o aesthetic invention gradually evolved into an elaborate narrative structure. He began to introduce characters and, hence, conict into the system, so that the element o resistance at the core o his work was no longer sel-imposed, but rather part o an intricate dialectical dance between opposing orces.’ 1 The works immediately ollowing Drawing Restraint #1 – Field Dressing (1989) and Facility o Decline (1991) – unolded as a perormed sel-portrait that engaged with notions o masculinity and heteronormative signifers o gender identity, while at the same time playing with drag and the guises o an inverted hypermasculinity. All o these elements played out through Barney’s crude and insistent enlistment o a Beuysian array o alchemical materials. As his work progressed, what began as studio-based sculptural activities became a complex cosmology drawing on sources including the traditional
1989 Matthew Barney Field Dressing Action with Vaseline Payne Whitney Gymnasium, Yale University
theatrical genres o opera, kabuki and vaudeville, popular cultural orms such as the Brazilian carnival, the Western rodeo and the Hollywood musical, and the physical eats o Harry Houdini and the writings o Norman Mailer. I was reminded recently o my initial experience o Barney’s work when choreographer Ralph Lemon was describing his own frst viewing o Bruce Nauman’s Wall/Floor Positions (1968). Nauman is Barney’s most important historical interlocutor, and Drawing Restraint #1 engages in a similar mash-up o body, material and process. Lemon spoke o the shock o seeing Nauman in his studio, isolated rom the greater context o the cultural upheaval o the 1960s: ‘ What specifcally interests me about Wall/Floor Positions beyond its obvious relationship to art and the body, the beautiully ordinary and rigorous movement statement that it is, is the not-so-obvious parallel realities,
o a period in time, o “a white art reedom” and the black civil rights movement. Body as art material. Body as chattel. Where and how did these orces intersect beyond an inanimate sociology o walls and oors? Was that possible? Does it matter? The proximity o these things is o course precarious.’2 The statement immediately recalls the precariousness o Barney’s early work. This notion o privilege, o the body in training, as chattel, as something to be moulded by the hierarchical, hyper-masculine culture o athletics, as well as the solitude and impregnable uniqueness o his vision – all o these aspects he shares with Nauman. More than any o the milestone works that would ollow in the early 1990s, Drawing Restraint #1 signifes the return o contemporary art’s interest in the body, perormance and sculpture.
1987 Jimmie Durham Self-Portrait Canvas, wood, paint, eather, shell, turquoise, metal 173 x 86 x 29 cm •
Connie Butler
Jimmie Durham’s practice intentionally defes easy categorization. This defance, while making it difcult to summarize his career using a typical art-historical narrative, is also what makes it so compelling. Although much o his work could be described as sculpture, his objects, installations, perormances, theatrical work, poetry and writing all adhere to an insistence on dialogue, a proposal or intellectual engagement between artist and viewer, one that orces acknowledgement and discussion about the overlap o politics, lie and art. Although Durham exhibited in the United States as early as 1965, he moved to Geneva in 1968, eventually attending the École des Beaux-Arts there. When he returned home in 1973, he lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and worked or the American Indian Movement, with which he remained afliated until 1980. His understanding o the history o Native Americans – and by extension the classifcation and marginalization o peoples and cultures – serves as the key subject matter or his art. Assemblage works rom the 1980s oten include animal skulls and other organic elements combined with manuactured and commercially recognizable ones, linked by aesthetic relationships and, requently, by witty insertions o text. ‘I I can stick things together that are physical histories, and they didn’t want to go together, but then something intellectual happens when they are together, I’m just very pleased, I’m very charmed by it,’ he says. ‘And o course I don’t trust it, and I see now I’m going to have to fnd a way out o that.’3 For example, in Bedia’s Mufer (1985) Durham transorms a rusty car part into a mysterious ritual object, covered with leather, beads and paint, and credits it as the discovery o some anthropological explorer rom the distant uture. Animal skulls, eathers and other materials commonly associated with Native American crats, as well as kitschy trinkets produced or tourist consumption, all appear in Durham’s work, repurposed with a sharp irony that orces us to question our very assumptions about the materials and the cultures we ascribe them to.
Sel-Portrait is characteristic o Durham’s humorous but extremely tough and cynical take on the art world’s expectations o him as a Native American artist. The roughly lie-size fgure, cut rom canvas and adorned with turquoise, hair, ur and other organic materials, is inscribed with various phrases, starting with ‘HELLO! I’M JIMMIE DURHAM. I WANT TO EXPLAIN A FEW BASIC THINGS ABOUT MYSELF.’ These things include ‘INDIAN PENISES ARE UNUSUALLY LARGE AND COLORFUL’ (a statement verifed by the artwork itsel) and ‘MY SKIN IS NOT REALLY THIS DARK, BUT I AM SURE THAT MANY INDIANS HAVE COPPERY SKIN’. Very dierent are the more personal notations – ‘I HAVE 12 HOBBIES!’, ‘11 HOUSE PLANTS!’, ‘PEOPLE LIKE MY POEMS’. Durham the poet/indoor gardener occupies
the same attened orm as Durham the exotic Cherokee stud. They are the same but are clearly in conict with one another. What lingers about this work and distinguishes it as one o the most signifcant works o its time – the market-saturated, over-inated, pre-multicultural art world o the 1980s – is its supreme awkwardness. It is unorgettable in its ugliness but also in its strange aliveness. The head, rendered in the round (unlike the crude atness o the body, cut rom canvas), bears enough o a resemblance to the artist that it is impossible to dismiss this clumsy agglomeration o a person as the nonperson he claims we think he is. His very presence – as a specimen, a work o art, a trophy, a cartoon – ushers in the late 1980s, with its return to content, identity and protest.
1987 Peter Fischli and David Weiss The Way Things Go 16 mm flm Colour, silent 30 min. •
Suzanne Cotter
According to artist and writer Jeremy Millar’s short monograph on Der Lau der Dinge (The Way Things Go), there were standing ovations when the work was shown at the Institute o Contemporary Arts in London in 1988.4 Thirty minutes in length, Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s sixteen-millimetre flm presents a delightul staging o everyday objects perorming a mechanical ballet o cause and eect. In a sequence o actions recalling W. Heath Robinson – the English cartoonist and illustrator who drew ingenious mechanical contraptions to perorm everyday activities like making a cup o tea or switching on a light – The Way Things Go transorms the mundane and the ordinary into a disarming choreography. The flm enacts, in real time, the consequences o the artists’ earlier scenarios in Equilibres/Stiller Nachmittag (Equilibres/Quiet Aternoon, 1984-85), a series o photographs o domestic objects, such as cheese graters, carrots, chairs and owerpots, held in tantalizing equilibrium. In The Way Things Go, planks o wood, tyres and watering cans serve as vehicles and routes or a teetering sequence o madcap actions and chain reactions o catalytic processes. A dash o water rom a tilting vessel dissolves a dam o oam, an explosion o our tips a plank that knocks over a bottle, and a boiling kettle bound to an old roller skate races along to the next relay. Seemingly eortless, the flm reportedly took two years to make, its continuity the result o multiple short sequences edited together, an elegantly nonchalant exposition o art as artifce. At certain points in the flm, the intervention o the artists’ hands is evident, recalling Alexander Calder’s assisted perormers in Circus, his 1955 flm with Jean Painleve. With Fischli and Weiss, however, it is more a question o unabashed revelation than suspension o disbelie. Beyond the pleasurable enjoyment o its inventiveness and the paradoxical logic o its silliness, The Way Things Go also oers a wonderully open feld or thinking about sculpture and about art-making in general. Its absurdist, come-around-go-around movements
1981 Samuel Beckett Quad II Teleplay 4 min.
1984-85 Peter Fischli and David Weiss The Experiment rom the series Equilibres/Quiet Afternoon Black and white and colour photographs Dimensions vary rom 23 x 31 cm to 41 x 31 cm
hint at Samuel Beckett’s teleplay Quad (1981) and the early flms o Bruce Nauman in which the artist flmed himsel walking around his studio at right angles or bouncing in a corner. In The Way Things Go, the idea o the studio as a place o play as much as o play-acting takes centre stage as Fischli and Weiss’s bricolaged objects, let to the contingency o mechanical orces, perorm or the camera their actions as defned by mass, gravity and chemical make-up. It is process art taken to its slapstick extreme. The artists described the elements in the flm as ‘ objects reed rom their principal, intended purpose’, with aesthetic decisions let to ‘equilibrium itsel’.5 The luxurious excess o time wasted is a guiding actor. Sculpture – i this is what we are dealing with – is revealed as something mobile, in which the pleasure o misuse reigns.
1987 Mike Kelley More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid Handmade crat items and aghans sewn onto canvas 244 x 323 x 15 cm oreground:
1987 The Wages of Sin Wax candles on wood, metal base 132 x 59 x 59 cm •
Bob Nickas
On the occasion o the 2010 Whitney Biennial, the museum exhibited works acquired or its permanent collection rom its previous Biennial and Annual exhibitions, a presentation entitled ‘Collecting Biennials’. Mike Kelley’s
1955 Robert Rauschenberg Satellite Taxidermy pheasant, various materials 200 x 110 x 15 cm
More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid – initially shown in New York
at Metro Pictures in 1987, then in the 1989 Biennial and later in the artist’s 1993 retrospective – was once again on view. A crowd pleaser, to be sure, though not necessarily so when it was frst shown. How oten do we think o contemporary artworks as ageing? And what o those that appeared shabby and orlorn to begin with? Installed across rom the Kelley was Rauschenberg’s Satellite, a 1955 combine painting with a small stued pheasant roosting at the top-right edge. The pairing pointed to how works o art that were ‘hard to love’ when new are embraced once value has accrued. This work o Kelley’s, along with contemporaneous works by Cady Noland, introduced notions o the abject to art in the mid-to-late 1980s; unlike fne wine, however, detritus doesn’t get better with age, doesn’t acquire a patina o nobility. (The clusters o maize at the top corners o Kelley’s piece read as absurdly heraldic.) I only More Love Hours had been donated to, not acquired by, the museum. For the artist has spoken o it as arising rom the dominant discourse in the art world at the time, that o commodifcation, raming this work within the tradition o git-giving, which he equates with ‘indentured slavery’: ‘There’s no price, so you don’t know how much you owe. The commodity is the emotion. What’s being bought and sold is emotion [...] I each one o these toys took six hundred hours to make then that’s six hundred hours o love; and i I gave this to you, you owe me six hundred hours o love; and that’s a lot. And i you can’t pay it back right away it keeps accumulating
[…] That’s more love than you can ever pay back. So what? You’re just ucked then. I wasn’t even thinking about the objects as objects, I was thinking about them as just hours-o-attention.’6 Kelley’s frst work using stued dolls is signifcant or a number o reasons, oremost among them its intended susceptibility to the viewer’s associations, all raught with psychological charge. The mass o dolls, pawed and gnawed by little hands and mouths, may be seen as surrogates or the children themselves, and it is they who innocently molest the inanimate toys given to or made or them. The Wages o Sin (1987), a sculptural work that accompanies More Love Hours, comprises a miniature waxworks. Among the candles, phallic/psychedelic mushrooms predominate, but an owl and a Chianti bottle stand out as well. The drips o melted wax, somewhat cloudy and dirty, resemble semen. Particularly o note is Kelley’s introduction o crat in contemporary art, especially against a backdrop o so many bright and shiny consumer objects displayed at that time. (The silvery stainless-steel sculptures o Je Koons, rom his Luxury and Degradation series,
had appeared the year beore; Haim Steinbach’s shel works were omnipresent in this period.) Uninterested in the concept o ‘high’ and ‘low’, Kelley is not engaged in the transormation o something debased into something o worth. He – and Noland, too – ully understands that material is intrinsically tied to and animates subject matter. Picked up cheaply in thrit stores, Kelley’s handmade dolls and aghans also register as women’s work. (Noland, or her part, availed hersel o metal sheets and poles; many thought that her sculptures, which could be aggressively conrontational, were made by a male artist.) Although More Love Hours has oten been related to Abstract Expressionism, this work does not in any way resemble action painting, and a stued doll – even one with a button eye ripped rom its socket – is no substitute or an action fgure. Installed across rom the Rauschenberg, however, it can be seen as a new sort o 'combine’, one that, with no trace o nostalgia, uncomortably collides object and emotion. Now, over twenty years down the line, More Love Hours continues to live up to its name.
1987 Cildo Meireles Mission/Missions (How to Build Cathedrals) 600,000 coins, 800 communion waers, 2,000 bones, 80 paving stones, black cloth 250 x 346 x 346 cm •
Okwui Enwezor
It is said that Mexico City’s grand cathedral was constructed atop the ruins o an Aztec temple, beneath which lie the remains o indigenous peoples who perished or were sacrifced there. Every cathedral in the Americas could be viewed through the prism o such a transposition o structures, opening onto histories o mass slaughter, conquest, domination, conversion and spiritual redemption. More importantly, the cathedral as the symbolic heart o la mission civilisatrice situates the act o religious conversion at the nexus o colonialism, and with it the tragedy o genocidal destruction. Within this tragedy stands the fgure o the Christian missionary. Cildo Meireles’ Missão/Missões (Como construir catedrais) (Mission/Missions (How to Build Cathedrals)) was originally conceived or an exhibition in Brazil to commemorate the seven mission settlements ounded by the Jesuits between 1610 and 1767 to convert the indigenous peoples in Paraguay, Argentina and the south o Brazil. Like many o Meireles’ unpredictable installations, rather than using the occasion to celebrate the conversions, this one combines the symbolic and the aesthetic, the philosophical and the political, and spirituality and power to address the catastrophic outcome or the Indians, who by 1770 had all been exterminated. With the disappearance o the populations or which the missions were constructed, the latter likewise olded shortly thereater. This work – characteristic o Meireles’ continuous analysis o the relationship between power and those social experiments devised by vast bureaucracies such as the Catholic Church – subtly critiques the work o these missions. He has described the devastation produced in their wake as the principal motivation behind the conception o the piece: ‘I wanted to construct something that would be a kind o mathematical equation, very simple and direct, connecting three elements: material power, spiritual power and a kind o unavoidable, historically repeated consequence o this conjunction, which was tragedy.’7
With this outline in mind, Meireles commenced to articulate how this conjunction could be elaborated on physical, material, conceptual and psychic levels without resorting to documentary realism. Mission/Missions (How to Build Cathedrals) is an enigmatic work that comprises several elements. First, a square depression measuring two metres on each side, ramed by paving stones, is flled with six hundred thousand sparkling coins (their currency varies according to where the work is exhibited), an eect that transorms the oor into a reecting pool o tinkling metal. Suspended more than two metres above this incongruous material is a canopy made o two thousand cattle bones. Linking these two elements is a slim, ragile column constructed rom eight hundred communion waers, which rises rom the centre o the pool o coins to the apse o the bone canopy – a union o orces that suggests the connection between heaven and earth. Further enhancing the theatricality o this setting is a ring o black netting that
surrounds it, through which one views the installation as i peering into an ancient sanctuary. Though Meireles has employed very basic materials or Mission/Missions (How to Build Cathedrals), its powerul eects – between solemnity and extravagance – were careully calibrated through contrasts between the elements: hard and sot, shadow and light, spirituality and materiality. Meireles has installed subdued lighting above the structure o bones, whose multiple openings allow shats o light and elongated shadows to pierce through, alling on the pool o glittering coins and illuminating the wavering waer column. The drama between the pool, canopy and cord o waers simply inverts the logic o the cathedral; the work lays bare the material greed that accompanied the search or the bounty o the mythical El Dorado, the consequent slaughter and enslavement that attended the plunder o the Americas, and fnally the bankrupt spirituality that gave cover or genocidal buccaneers.
1987 Philip Taae IntersectingBalustrades Enamel ink, silkscreen, acrylic and collage on canvas 330 x 142 cm •
Bob Nickas
Is it true o contemporary art that most movements are best understood in what might be termed post-time, oering a clearer vantage than hindsight alone can provide? Post-time signifes more than what comes ater; it can be thought o as a flter through which one looks back and simultaneously ahead. The appropriation art o the 1980s was epitomized by practitioners who ultimately had little in common: Mike Bidlo, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince and Philip Taae. We know that Levine and Prince’s work most pointedly took the orm o photographs o photographs, a pure gesture that almost eliminated the hand; Bidlo’s most compelling work was purely gestural: painting-as-perormance in his reanimation o Pollock’s ‘drip’ technique. Taae, however, stood apart as a painter, someone or whom an investigation o the act o painting was equally orensic and romantic, his subject held intimately as well as observed rom aar. This was his means o inserting himsel into a history o painting and o articulating his thoughts in his own emotional register. He and Levine would both go on to transorm historical works to meet their needs, and in so doing would defne a post-appropriative strategy in close proximity to appropriation’s original incarnation. While Levine’s subjects were almost exclusively male and rom the distant past (Malevich, Miró, Rodchenko), Taae’s were more recent and thus more sensitive to being reconfgured. Bridget Riley was prominent among them, beginning in 1983 with Overtone; Taae could sense in the once-maligned Op Art the potential or a visuality that was hypnotic and seductive, a vibrational line meant to cast a spell. In his deployment o Riley’s ‘wave’, as well as in his braiding o Barnett Newman’s ‘zip’, he would embark on a subtle eroticizing and homo-eroticizing o orms and elements in their work. In We Are Not Araid (1985), Taae’s response to Newman’s Who’s Araid o Red, Yellow and Blue II (1967), his loosely coiled zips resemble strands o DNA: the thicker braid a l ength o rope, the graceully undulating band a stream o urine. The sheer audacity o taking
1967 Barnett Newman Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue II Acrylic on canvas 305 x 259 cm
Newman’s Vir Heroicus Sublimis (195051) as a jumping-o point, in a work Taae titled Homo Fortissimus Excelsus (1985), combined with the unzipping and serpentine coiling o the vertical zips, stands or the commission o his ‘original sin’. 1985 also saw a number o works that heightened the sexual potential o abstract and optical orms (Big Iris, Elypsis Dentata and Brest ), and with these works he would enter rather than be banished rom the garden; painting or him would come to be grasped as a corpus in which memory and desire could intertwine. By 1987 Taae had worked through numerous artistic fgures, reintroduced crat and ornamental elements into painting via his linocuts and collage techniques, and embraced emotion without having to resort to selconsciously expressive means. With that year’s Intersecting Balustrades, a large X-shaped canvas, he asserted the visual language with which we identiy him today, and simultaneously reinvigorated abstraction’s potential. The painting cannot be directly linked to any other artist, living or dead. Its source, according to Taae, is ‘a wrought-iron balustrade section in the Jersey City
1985 Philip Taae We Are Not Afraid Linoprint collage and acrylic on canvas 300 x 255 cm
Public Library’,8 a building in the Italian Renaissance style completed in 1901 that was near to one o the artist’s earliest studios. The prominent decorative moti that carries over rom his appropriated work is a continuous S-wave that contains optical spirals – apertures alternately expanding or contracting – and which frst appeared in Quad Cinema (1986). The colouration and internal structure o Intersecting Balustrades has the eeling o stained glass, evoking an architectural ragment dislocated in time and place, or an X chromosome illuminated under an antique microscope. Taae has said, ‘It’s a very locational painting, physically locating, and it’s also dealing with a theatre o the absurd in some respect. There’s a lot o memory in that painting, and I think that perhaps distinguishes it. Even though it may read as somewhat static in terms o its overall architectural structure, the many elements are very active, and maybe these little pinwheels, spirals, going in dierent directions, signiy moving orward and looking back at the same time. I think it’s the frst work where I really ound a voice that was truly my own.’9
1987 Rosemarie Trockel Untitled (Made in Western Germany) Wool 250 x 180 cm •
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Rosemarie Trockel frst i ntroduced wool and knitting into her work in the 1980s, at a time when this material and technique had yet to be reclaimed or art – as opposed to crat – practice. As she revealed to the critic I sabelle Graw, ‘in the 1970s there were a lot o questionable women’s exhibitions, mostly on the theme o house and home. I tried to take wool, which was viewed as a woman’s material, out o this context and to rework it in a neutral process o production.’10 Trockel’s woollen artworks have since been recognized as among her landmark pieces (‘that simple experiment grew into my trademark, which I really didn’t want’11) and have ranged rom two-dimensional wall hangings – surrogate paintings – to items o clothing, including the artist’s many balaclavas, gloves and dresses. Though Trockel has become one o the most celebrated living artists, her practice retains a necessary sense o unpredictability, eluding fxed artistic identities. She makes use o diverse media (rom artist’s books and multiples, to sculpture, painting, ceramics, textiles, drawing, printmaking and video), draws on popular and olk culture as well as the history o the fne arts, and rethinks traditional exhibition ormats in order to address sites o presentation as media in their own right, all the while being deeply inormed by an open-ended eminist standpoint. Rather than seeking a position in the centre o the art world, she instead orbits it by pursuing less obvious pathways and opportunities. She is at once in the middle o things and at the centre o nothing. Oten produced on a very large scale, Trockel’s knitted pictures are industrially manuactured according to detailed instructions provided by the artist. She has also produced photographic silkscreen works on Plexiglas showing close-up images o woollen stitching in predominantly grey-brown and orange tones. Along with drawings and paintings that imitate the undulating weaves o knitted wool, these works make plain the imperections and irregularities to be ound even in machine-made objects o consumption. Within the repetition there is thus a continual production o dierence, a prolieration o what Gilles Deleuze
1990 RosemarieTrockel What–If Could–Be Wool 150 x 155 cm
calls repetition as dierence. Trockel’s knitted works remind us urther o Kierkegaard’s identifcation o the will to repeat as a courageous gesture, since ‘he who does not grasp that lie is a repetition and that this is the beauty o lie has pronounced his own verdict and deserves nothing better than what will happen to him anyway – he will perish.’12 Many o the artist’s two-dimensional knitted works have, since the late 1980s, also included images and text woven into the surace. What–I Could–Be (1989) has two speech bubbles originating rom either side o the rame. The question and the response are equally enigmatic: ‘What i’, ‘Could be’. With the phrase ‘Cogito Ergo Sum’ woven onto the surace o an untitled 1988 work, Trockel drew out the implicitly masculine underpinnings o Descartes’ amous axiom, while the two speech bubbles in Bitte tu mit nichts … aber schnell (Please don’t do anything to me … but do it quickly, 1989) suggest a latent violence. Trockel has stated that since the introduction o these materials and processes in her work, and especially in the early stages, she has been concerned with ‘signifers o the eminine, culturally inerior materials and skills such as wool and knitting’ and ‘whether it is possible to overcome the negative cliché by eliminating the handicrat aspect rom the whole complex’.13 Accordingly, her knitted
works are redolent with signs o the handmade but replace these with industrial process. I something is lost, something else is gained. Untitled (Made in Western Germany)
(1987) speaks quietly and eloquently about both connection and disconnection, the material trace and immaterial memory – the one as repository or the other. O all Trockel’s knitted works, it delivers its conundrum with the utmost economy. In act, economy – in particular, the question o labour – is o the essence here. From a distance, the work registers as an abstract, almost a monochrome painting, a surace that hides the traces o its production by reusing internal dierentiation o any sort. On closer inspection, the words ‘MADE IN WESTERN GERMANY’ are to be ound repeated in a pattern across the surace. Repetition o this message, which already expresses the circumstances o its production, urther emphasizes the monotonous labour process involved in its making. The wool signifes artisanship, while prominent use o a phrase commonly ound on actory-produced garments signifes mass industry. Untitled (Made in Western Germany) speaks o the might o the West German capitalist behemoth but does so while bringing a traditional sign o emininity to bear on the masculine, abricating a sly critique o a country that was itsel soon to be unmade.
1987-90 Cindy Sherman Untitled Colour photograph 229 x 152 cm •
Daniel Birnbaum
‘I think o becoming a dierent person,’ says Cindy Sherman. ‘I look into a mirror next to the camera, [and] it’s trancelike. By staring into it I try to become that character through the lens. It seems to work out, it sounds like meditation. But something happens that makes it more un or me because I have no control over it. Something else takes over.’14 I the mirror is the undamental metaphor or the mind as a selreective being, then Sherman’s work is perhaps the most concentrated depiction o identity-construction in contemporary art. Her choreographed photographic selportraits, in which she dresses up and acts out emale stereotypes, have been at the vanguard o eminist practice since the early 1980s and continue to exercise a powerul inuence over the discourse today. Even when she is not in ront o the lens hersel, her subject matter addresses underlying issues o the construction o emininity along with artifcial ideals o perection. Untitled (1987-90) orms part o a small but potent series in which the artist presents a near-abstract amalgamation o colours and shapes. From a distance, the subject matter appears aesthetically pleasing, its colours luscious and shiny. Upon closer inspection, however, these brightly coloured shapes resolve themselves into piles o decaying ood, vomit, slime, blood and other bodily secretions. The shock derived rom this repulsive metamorphosis can be overwhelming, conjuring associations o violence and aggression. Whereas many o Sherman’s masquerades depict women who have constructed their looks according to socially abricated ideals o emininity, this work shows the unembellished reality behind the acade. A direct reerence to anorexia and bulimia, psychological disorders associated with a desperate desire to conorm to the ashion industry’s narrow understanding o perection, the image presents the viewable disorder o the body without showing the body itsel. The initial seductiveness o the work provides a reerence both to the cosmetics industry and to a chauvinistic idea o eminine mystique. Sherman’s art has requently been
1978 Cindy Sherman Untitled Film Still Black and white photograph 20.5 x 25.5 cm
discussed in terms o the abject, a term describing psychologically disquieting representations that transgress our sense o cleanliness and propriety, particularly around the human body. The concept o abjection is commonly used by eminists to draw attention to aspects o emale physiognomy that have been deemed undesirable or taboo by a patriarchal society – menstrual blood, or example. In many o her works, Sherman has gone to great lengths in making her emale subjects look repulsive and ugly, sometimes by using prosthetics and modifed mannequins to challenge expectations o emale desirability or by applying theatrical make-up to disfgure to her own body and ace. Though Untitled (1987-90) doesn’t eature a fgure, it’s almost possible to see it as a portrait in its own right: the ‘inner ace’ o the media’s obsession with size-zero models. By trying to reach the essence o the codes that surround the visual language o the emale image, Sherman’s anxiety-provoking display o bodily secretions shows the darker side o glamour. I her art itsel is a mirror, it’s a broken one. Yet it still reects.
1987-93 Huang Yong Ping The History of Chinese Painting and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine for Two Minutes Chinese tea box, paper pulp, glass 77 x 48 x 70 cm •
Okwui Enwezor
The discipline o art history as practised across academic spaces remains generally ocused on Western art, conceiving it as a thread o time that ows unbroken rom ancient Greek and Roman art through the medieval and Renaissance periods and on to the modern and contemporary era. Aesthetic propositions that have been engendered across diverse global artistic realms fnd themselves subordinated to the methodologies o the Western art-historical view. Rare are programmes that eschew such linearity. Recently, however, in small pockets o academic art history, a reevaluation has slowly been taking place, thus placing in sharp relie the problem o Western art history’s disciplinary ambivalence towards the broader study o art. In 1987 Huang Yong Ping staged one o the most signifcant artistic reections on the possibility o another, nonuniversalizing conception o the history o art in a sculpture predicated on the However, it is important to reect idea o art history as a network rather equally on the context o this work: the than a movement rom a single cultural and artistic milieu o late-1980s originating point. In The History o Beijing, when Deng Xiaoping’s twoChinese Painting and the History o track development policy o Chinese Modern Western Art Washed in the communism and ‘capitalism with Washing Machine or Two Minutes (frst Chinese characteristics’ elucidated shown in 1987 and remade in 1993 ater a new global pragmatism – a move the original was accidentally destroyed), that, once China emerged as a global Huang put two important art historical juggernaut, positioned its artistic and texts – A History o Chinese Painting cultural economies within the global (1982) by Wang Bomin and Herbert order. It is also telling that The History Read’s A Concise History o Modern o Chinese Painting and the History Painting (1959), one o the frst books o o Modern Western Art Washed in the Western art history published in China Washing Machine or Two Minutes – through a two-minute cycle in a was conceived a ull decade prior to washing machine. It is not insignifcant the British transer o Hong Kong to that the machine’s activity starts rom its China in 1997, which urther accelerated centre and, as it spins, moves its contents and cemented China’s rising political to the sides – nay, periphery – o the and cultural power. While Deng’s machine. In so doing, it at once brings development programme and the together and disperses; what emerged Hong Kong transer seemingly have in Huang’s action sculpture ater the nothing to do with Huang’s pointed two books were washed was a mound historical critique, they do point to the o soggy, pulped paper whose symbolic act that art and its histories are equally eect was the hybridization rather than enmeshed in ideology and in projections universalization o art history. Scooping o power. The technology o the the books’ centriuged remnants rom washing machine also illustrates the the washer’s drum, he was able to nascent shit o Chinese industrial collapse one into the other and display production rom being a massive them on top o a Chinese tea crate like a agrarian economy to becoming the piece o deecated matter. actory o the world.
This work, then, seems not only an arteact o the era when Chinese art arrived on the international stage but also represents one o the most proound artistic reections on the coming global turn in contemporary art – one in which Chinese artists o Huang’s generation would come to play a signifcant role. On the one hand, the sculpture unctions on an emphatically optical level, given the impossibility o reading or distinguishing the hierarchy o artistic histories contained in the entangled books. But it also exhibits the epistemological blind spots o art history as practised in the cultural scene o Western Europe to which Huang would subsequently migrate two years later – a ew months beore, frst, the Tiananmen Square crackdown that sent many contemporary Chinese artists into exile and, second, the all o the Berlin Wall at the end o that year. The History o Chinese Painting and the History o Modern Western Art Washed in the Washing Machine or Two Minutes
thereore represents an astute interpretation o the conditions o historical consciousness and critical artistic production that reect the changing stakes o contemporary art.
1987-2001 Peter Fischli and David Weiss Visible World 3,000 colour photographs (transparencies) on 15 light-box tables Overall 2,805 x 69 x 83 cm •
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Over more than thirty years o collaboration, the career o Peter Fischli and David Weiss has been marked by a persistent concern with making the overlooked visible. One o the ways the duo has achieved this in their work is through a rigorous, sometimes playul process o selection and connection between both ound and constructed elements. Their 1987 flm The Way Things Go [p. 20] would seem to be determined by chemical and physical sequences, creating an illusion in which a chain o actions has mysteriously achieved independence beyond human control. The items used in the work are, o course, related by the act o selection and by their i ncorporation into an open system that has been generated by the artists, but that resulting system is ree o any hierarchy or classifcation. Ideas o antithetical opposed pairs – large/ small, important/unimportant, even order/disorder – begin to totter. By contrast, in their Visible World project the act o classifcation is revalued, becoming a means o ostering links. Visible World picks up on the ondness o the artists or the quotidian and the quizzical but stands as perhaps the signal work in what would turn out, during the 1990s and beyond, to be a pervasive ‘archival impulse’ at work in numerous artists’ practices.15 Here, elements o our collective visual world are drawn together by way o the artists’ observation o correspondences and contrasts in the details o everyday lie and consumer culture. The work comprises three thousand small-ormat photographs arranged and uniormly displayed on six specially constructed light tables that together stretch twenty-eight metres. (They have also been shown as a video slideshow and published as a book.) This immense collection is drawn rom the our corners o the world, taking in an array o the maniold natural and built environments – the places and nonplaces – within which contemporary existence is played out, ranging rom jungles, gardens, deserts, mountains and beaches to cities, ofces, apartments, airports, amous landmarks like the Eiel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge, and everything in between.
Everyone who comes to the work will fnd in it his or her world – a Buddhist will fnd Buddhism; a armer, agriculture; a requent yer, aeroplanes. But Visible World can never be seen in its entirety; it denies the total view. I have personally seen the work many times, and when I last saw it, at the 2010 Gwangju Biennial, many things were revealed to me that had not shown themselves beore. All o these images were taken by the artists over the period o the work’s gestation and collation, creating a time capsule o the late twentieth century. In act, just as the subjects o the images establish a playul dialogue between the seemingly timeless and the transient, the astounding and the innocuous, so too is there a typically witty exchange between the apparently lowly orm and origins o the photographs themselves and the almost scientifc exactitude o their arrangement and display on the light table, where the whimsical and the bathetic are oered up or earnest scrutiny. Not least, there is a clear parallel here with the interplay o the meticulous arrangement and choreography o discarded, banal and overlooked objects in The Way Things Go. Fischli and Weiss’s odyssey lays bare
the cumulative, visible results o the twin central processes o modernity: progress and entropy, production and destruction. As with other works by the duo – or instance, the 1993 photo series Settlements, Agglomeration – Visible World examines the links between everyday lie and the built environment. It pits the mundane against the iconic, and proposes – as Fischli told me while discussing the artists’ reduced-scale ofce block, Building (1987) – that ‘mediocrity defnes our urbanized landscape much more than the ew so-called great achievements o contemporary architecture.’ 16 Visible World is a map o lie as we know it, but it is ever alert to its provisionality, asking questions about what, how and under which conditions we can come to recognize, to understand and to interpret. Through its very absurdity, the work maniests above all an exemplary kind o modesty that is entirely appropriate to the early twenty-frst century, making plain that, to borrow Doris Lessing’s words, ‘our entire culture is extremely ragile’17 that the more dependent it becomes on increasingly complex devices, the more susceptible it is to a sudden and terminal collapse. The equilibrium is most beautiul just beore it collapses – but that’s just the way things go.
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