One more biennale or triennale is likely to elicit little excitement; but when one of the world’s youngest republics – Nepal – launches one of South Asia’s biggest non-profit art events, with an agenda as relevant and pressing as climate change and its human impact, it’s time to sit up and take notice! On the sunny morning of 25 November, the Kathmandu International Art Festival kicked off – even as the Prime Minister reneged on his commitment to formally inaugurate the event and Nepal’s political leaders huddled together, trying to find a way out of a political impasse. The country has been without a government for the past six months, and a constitution is yet to be drawn up.
As I took my seat in the in the ballroom of the grand Yak and Yeti Hotel in a room full of international and local art practitioners, curators, critics, environmentalists, ministers and ambassadors, the Festival Director Sangeeta Thapa came on stage to welcome us to ‘Earth Body Mind’, the second edition of Kathmandu International Art Festival, a new triennale and the largest art event ever to be held in Nepal. A brief retelling of her efforts to materialize an art festival of this scale in the country was enough to convince us of her travails. Though Nepal has contributed less than most other nations towards climate degradation, as Thapa pointed out, it is one of the first countries to be adversely affected because of its Himalayan location – millions are already suffering from changing weather patterns and the threat of ‘glacial lake outburst floods’ (GLOFs) is reaching a point of inevitability. Driven by people’s concern and a hope to bring about policy changes in the yet-to-be written Constitution, Thapa and her team of co-ordinators, including Sharareh Bajracharya and Nischal Oli, took up the challenge of turning contemporary art into a tool for social awareness and change. Thapa’s Siddhartha Art Foundation designed KIAF as an educational event to bring together a heady mix of international and local contemporary artists and environmentalists. The widely attended symposium scheduled alongside the exhibition was proof enough of that commitment. Currently spread across 16 venues, works by artists from 31 countries have transformed Kathmandu – the Nepalese capital – into a brilliant kaleidoscope of visionary ideas, critical negotiations and most importantly, great art.
I head straight for Nepal Art Council, the country’s official art gallery. The ground floor is resplendent with Jyoti Duwadi’s site-specific Shades of Seeds– mounds of brightly coloured seeds on a cracked mud floor reminding us of threats posed by monoculture, genetic mutation and the scarcity of water resources in an increasingly fragile natural balance.
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Jyoti Duwadi ‘Shades of Seeds’
In sharp formal contrast is Mahbubur Rahman’s video–cum–kinetic installation Repeatedly Repetition . The piece grapples with Bangladesh’s realities through interplaying ideas of body and power, movement and stasis, time and structure – strangely ominous and disturbing in context of Nepal’s political reality. Taking the stairs to the second floor, I am greeted by Sarawut Chutiwongpeti’s white room of white-washed rubbish retrieved from Mt Everest, and stacked on flowering spikes against a luminous ball of light. Wishes, Lies and Dreams (2012) reflects the separations and contiguities between energy, form and time while warning us against our reckless materialism. Later, another work shown at the other end of the city reminded me of the same – Meena Kayastha’s tentacle-sprouting plaster faces, Evolving Consciousness (2012) that pay ‘homage to Mother Nature’. Like Sarawut, Kayastha re-energizes scavenged junk.
My next encounter is with Vibha Galhotra’s preoccupation with the dying river Yamuna in Delhi, and the predicament of the communities living along its banks, eponymously called Sediment (2012). Sediment collected from the river is splashed across large canvases, salvaged tires, the printed text of the Indian national anthem. The medium itself is message enough. In fact, the perils simultaneously faced and posed by rivers, oceans, water bodies, or water itself weaves the festival together in unforeseen ways. Brazilian Priscilla De Carvalho’s mural-cum-installation of a teeming metropolis flooded by the ocean and garbage In the Midst of Garbage Sunlight Persists (2012) touch upon raw nerves, as does Australia’s Michelle Hall’s life-size paper boats, poignantly titled We May End up in the Same Boat .
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Michelle Hall ‘We May End Up in the Same Boat’
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On a more meditative note, her compatriot Noelene Lucas’s video of rivers across the world, ranging from the Niagra to the Thai Chao Phraya (Atlas of Water – Rivers , 2012); Mili Pradhan’s recordings of a dying Bagmati in Float, and Sheelasha Rajbhandari’s remapping of the nearly extinct Tukucha in Ghost River – both rivers of the Kathmandu Valley. The waterfront of Karachi is the point of contact for Pakistan’s Yasir Hussain’s video Neuro that goes on to facilitate the interaction between Pakistani fishing communities and Nepali farmers in an internet interaction called Bio during the festival itself and Nepal’s own Sadish Dhakal’s Jamara Might Not Exist is a complex representation of lake Tsho Rolpa’s enhancement in size and volume over the past 60 years, which finds visual correspondence in steadily increasing numbers of earthen pots bearing sprouting barley seeds, better known as the traditional jamara – all of which is contextualized by events in world history – think Sputnik or Berlin Wall! On a more conventional note, the German group Blauschimmer created watercolours and drawings on overlapping layers to tackle issues of historicity and documentation of the ocean in The Ocean is Our Future.
Meanwhile, I find the Cambodian Leang Seckong has taken over the Kathmandu Zoo, probably for the first time in its history, to install a majestic water serpent constructed from salvaged polythene bags, which he calls Naga.
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Lean Seckong ‘Naga’
Talking of which brings me to the pseudo-mythical bamboo creature of Michael Campbell and Janis Rahn, who negotiated the spectre of plastic waste through organic structures and hybrid videos. Plastic waste is also a preoccupation of Kirti Kaushal Joshi’s fine installation Sample that references core samples projected from the future and of course, the celebrated Sheba Chhachhi, whose Neelkanth: Poison/Nectar questions the human race’s predilection for material wealth/waste while offering hope in the form of redemption through the myth of blue-throated, unpredictably forbearing Shiva. Since Shiva is also noted for his mood swings – it is also a warning to humankind to watch its step! On a more hybrid note, Probir Gupta’s complex and layered The Rape and the Product (2012) takes plastic, wildlife and the eco-system, memory and gender, consumption and power games on a tailspin to comment on the current urban Indian experience. On the other hand, a similar theme in Mekh Limbu’s paintings come across as much tamer, if accessible. ‘I am left breathless by the immense range,’ says curator Alka Pande in response to the festival. Even rubbish bins find a pride of place in Bulgarian Svetoslav Nedev’s video pieces visualized to the sound of Bach – or his photo stillsBiotope/Biotope II.
Video installations and performances have found a pride of place in KIAF, much to the benefit of the local viewers for whom the moving image and performance are still, and mostly, restricted to the realms of film or theatre. Duwadi’s video installation, in collaboration with DJ Spooky, of melting glaciers projected on liquefying ice blocks in the middle of teeming Nag Bahal in the township of Patan brings the issue of receding glaciers and GLOFs sinisterly close. As I tip-toe across the shopping mall, Metro Park, I stand amazed by the transformation the space has undergone in the hands of Sujan Chitrakar and his team of dedicated students. Here, among other works, Iranian Fereshteh Alamshah’s elegiac videos capture the traumas of war and environmental degradation in Plastic Art and Henna Party.
Not surprisingly, the body confronts itself through a number of entries in ‘Earth Body Mind’. Visual anthropological works by the British/Brazilian grande dame of photography, Maureen Bisilliat offer inexhaustible insights into the lives of tribes along the Xingu river. In counterpoint are Peruvian artist Cecilia Paredes’ painted human forms photographed against wallpaper, each relentless in its effort to retain a semblance of existential authenticity. Her other work, a diaphanous installation created from 18th century Calderon editions, is a similar query into the fragility and resilience of the material.
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Cecilia Paredes
However, Jupiter Pradhan’s incursion comprising wax torsos sprouting burning wicks and strobe lights fall short of furthering the query. Saurganga Darshandhari’s 300 pairs of plaster cast feet strewn across Patan Museum’s central courtyard – Where Am I?– spark resonances, while Suneeta Maharjan’s painting-installation scrutinizes the tropes of earth and the womb.
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Saurganga Darshandhari ‘Where Am I?’
The body is also the focus for Gopal Kalapremi’s ceramic forms, created en site for the KIAF through the tortuous process of raku. On a more extreme note, we have Takehito Shiina from Japan, whose photo series ‘Dawn of the Photosynthesizers’ record the sprouting of vegetation from his own flesh in search of a symbiotic and energy-efficient future. The flesh, somewhat inevitably, has to confront the aspect of torture too – in this case through Nameera Ahmed’s poignant footage on chicken slaughter (Bloody Birds) and the Palestinian Ibrahim Jawabreh’s performance-video. Exuberant performances by the Mongolian group Nomad Wave were insightful and the Dance Butoh performed by the Italian Valeria Germia during a gala dinner took the conversation further in more ways than one!
Rhythms of migration were central to the multi-layered wall pieces of Paula Sengupta, who inscribed the forced versus natural migrations of Himalayan tribes and Brahminy ducks through symbols and icons (Pages from the Gokyo Diary).
Nepal is a land of synchronicities – which is evident in senior Nepali artists Birendra Pratap Singh’s scroll depicting an urge to return to the source, and the very traditional Lok Chitrakar’s lotuses – the flowers are supposed to change colour over time and exposure to pollution and the painting surely deserves the title of a ‘performance’! Asha Dangol’s oxygen masked and multiple-headed deity Vajravahana is a more direct take on the spectre of pollution! As are Hitman Gurung’s body of work focussing on the gas mask and Wolfgang Stiller’s burnt-out matchstick heads – a runaway hit with the viewers! But Pulak’s pith-flower-covered gas mask (Encapsulated-7), Sanjeev Maharjan’s chopped tree trunks (Untitled) or Guezennec’s deliver nasty jolts to complacency.
On a happier note, light and energy found their place too. Enthusiastic passers-by sweated on a chilly November night to produce enough energy to light up a moon – actually a massive white balloon hovering over Nag Bahal. And Gaynor O’Flynn transmuted the sound energy produced by a dozen Buddhist monks chanting a peace prayer into an exhilarating laser show right on the surface of the revered Bouddha Stupa – a memory that will surely stay with each of us for a long time. What also impressed me about this edition of KIAF was the curatorial expertise of people like Dina Bangdel, Rina Lath and Niilofur Farrukh and of course Pande and O’Flynn – rather than regressing into examples that merely set off a curatorial theme, the interplay of artworks set off a new dynamic that open up fresh avenues of thought – hopefully for a better earth!
But my favourite work remains Forest Walk– a soundscape created specially for KIAF by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. Sounds of nature and civilization blend with external aural sources in a frightening symphony of peace and violence. It helped me rediscover the backyard of an art institution for one, and also helped me wake up to the enormity of humankind’s atrocities. It is a strong reminder that we need to get our act together fast. Thank you KIAF for bringing the message home. ‘Earth Body Mind’ runs until 21 December.
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Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller ‘Forest Walk’
Standing in a circular room roughly the diameter of a small church bell tower, though my feet are anchored to the floor, I feel as if I’m shooting through space. Lime green dendrites burst out toward me in a computer-generated neural landscape spanning almost 360 degrees, vertiginously spinning and whirling forward at the speed of thought. This is Dr. Hermann Cuntz’s video installation, ‘The Neuron’s Turing Test’ (2012), specially created for the PanoramaLab at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. The work is apparently a remarkably faithful representation of the interior circuitry of a human brain. Its bright, spidery networks of neural pathways resemble a lysergic counterpart to the criss-crossing maps of rural lanes or the arterial cartographies of Renaissance travellers, but this is no walk in the country – it’s more like a dizzying, high-speed rollercoaster ride through a neon city.
Imatronic Extended is one of Germany’s largest festivals for electronic music and media arts, and this year it came packaged with a diversely programmed symposium on ‘Neuroaesthetics’. As one of the artistic contributions to the festival, artist Helga Griffiths, who has been working for a number of years on immersive multi-sensory installations wrapped in science-fiction narratives and evoking the crossmodal sensory pollination of synaesthesia, offered another view of the human brain. For Brainscape (2012), she worked with Dr. Lars Muckli from the Max Planck Institute in Frankfurt to transform a tomographic image of her own brain (i.e. photographed in sections by a penetrating wave, as in a CT scan or MRI) into a video driftwork in cloudy shades of grey. We float here not through the axons but along the surface of this encephalon, which seems at once both fragile and strangely insubstantial, like wisps of smoke upon cut glass. In her lecture during the symposium, Griffiths explained the film was made by combining scans of her brain with the image of a Patagonian glacier to create a ‘synonym for the topographical history of the earth.’
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Visuals from the Neurosaesthetics symposium at the Imatronic Extended Festival, ZKM, Karlsruhe
For centuries we’ve been strangely fascinated with the brain of the artist – ever since, perhaps, Beethoven’s autopsy revealed that his neural ‘convolutions’ were ‘very much deeper, wider, and more numerous than ordinary.’ (from Thayer’s Life of Beethoven). The French phrenologist of the July Monarchy period, Broussais, believed that the Maori people lacked the proper organ for producing great painters or poets. Upon the death of poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, Soviet scientists, eager to discover the roots of his genius, weighed his excised brain: it measured some 300 grams heavier than average. As I discovered during the three days of the Neuroaesthetics symposium, modern neuroscience may wield considerably more sophisticated tools, but some of their assumptions may be just as blunt as their 19th-century forebears: that artistry may be quantified statistically and organically located.
Professor Eckart Altenmüller, to cite one of the more egregious examples at the symposium, spent five years hunting for the root of what he calls the ‘chill effect’ of the shivers down the spine we experience when listening to music. ‘I wanted to have the recipe,’ he says of his unfulfilled plan to create the ‘ultimate chill music’ and take his results to North Cameroon and wow the natives. ‘It did not work out,’ he admits, as the only similarity he found after countless fMRI studies was that the so-called chill always occurs during some change in a piece of music – but that change could take practically any form.
For philosopher Alva Noë, also speaking at the symposium, neuroscientists like Altenmüller make the mistake of regarding art merely as a form of stimulus. In presuming that there is no gap between the work and the thing represented, they are doomed to miss art itself. He granted, however, that there need not be anything wrong with artists themselves taking their inspiration from where they find it – and if neuroscience drives an artist to develop novel approaches to his or her work, then that can only be for the good.
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A performance at the Imatronic Extended Festival, ZKM, Karlsruhe
The neuroaesthetics meme seems to have begun with a trio of lectures by American artist and former eye surgeon, Warren Neidich, at the School of Visual Arts in New York, back in 1995 – some years before the term was appropriated by neuroscientists to describe their own aesthetic investigations. For Neidich, neuroaesthetics provides the opportunity to launch a series of ‘artistic researches’, employing the means and wares of artistic practice to investigate the ‘knowledge spheres’ of natural science, with the aim of finding not constancies and correlations, but ‘new paradigms’, new ‘singularities’ (as he put it in his talk). Neidich’s was a recurrent voice of dissent throughout the symposium, questioning the scientists’ seeming desire to systematize the unsystemizable. In his own presentation, however, the idiosyncrasies of his singular pursuits were laid bare, to reveal, in works like his The Education of the Eye (2010) – in which the colour palettes of various expert copyists’ examinations of a contemporary, Chinese-made replica of William Hogarth’s 1757 self-portrait are compared, a colour chart of their collective ‘unchoices’ exhibited – a compelling narrative of perceptual instability and a sideways critique of cognitive capitalism.
Robert Barry is freelance writer and composer, based in Paris. His music can be heard at littleother.blogspot.com
Northern Ballet dancer Jessica Morgan performing in rehearsal for Linder's 'The Ultimate Form', choreography by Kenneth Tindall. Photo Darren Goldsmith.
On 12 December 2012, a small audience gathered in the Stanley & Audrey Burton Theatre on the ground floor of Northern Ballet in Leeds. A photographer and cinematographer hovered around the rehearsing ballerinas, who were adorned in neon catsuits. Electro neo-trance boomed throughout the high-ceilinged theatre, as though foreshadowing the open rehearsal we were about to witness. This was the first public rehearsal of ‘The Ultimate Form’, artist Linder Sterling’s latest performance piece commissioned by The Hepworth Wakefield, which will premier on 31 January 2013 at the opening of Linder’s retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris and will travel to The Hepworth Wakefield in May 2013. ‘The Ultimate Form’ combines the choreography of Northern Ballet’s award-winning Kenneth Tindall, a musical score by Cinematic Orchestra guitarist Stuart McCallum, and costumes by designer Pam Hogg.
Suddenly the all-encompassing soundtrack was switched off. Simon Wallis, Director of The Hepworth Wakefield, took the floor and explained that we were about to see a glimpse of Linder’s performance, which was part of the gallery’s initiative of commissioning contemporary artists to work in the vein of Barbara Hepworth’s artistic concerns. He went on to explain how music and dance were elements that informed Hepworth’s sculptural work, though these aspects of it are often left unappreciated. Specifically, he cited the rhythmic precision of Johann Sebastian Bach as a key informant of Hepworth’s sculptural practice. Hepworth had a keen fascination with the human form, and her sculptures and drawings often echoed the memory of seeing a figure working or moving in space.
After Wallace left the stage, the artist and originator behind The Ultimate Form said a few words about her vision for this ambitious collaboration. Rather than standing to speak to the audience, Linder sat cross-legged in a chair facing us, noting that any rest was welcome after working so many late nights. Despite Hepworth being a blind spot for much of Linder’s life, the artist described her intimate experience at Hepworth’s studio in St Ives one rainy evening several years ago after a performance on the beach at Tate St Ives. Linder noted that her appreciation for Hepworth’s work grew after this, as well as after reading her writings. She also acknowledged that Hepworth intended her audience to touch, climb into, and experience her sculptures in an intimate way.
In Linder’s final words before the ballet company performed, she gave a small disclaimer: all parties involved were ‘in a vulnerable position, at a point where we would never dream of letting people see our work’. The dancers had not rehearsed for three months, and were therefore about to show us a raw performance. Furthermore, this would be the first time that they tried on Hogg’s costumes or performed to McCallum’s tracks.
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Northern Ballet Dancers Michela Paolacci and Nicola Gervasi in ‘The Ultimate Form’ by Kenneth Tindall. Photo Darren Goldsmith
Linder removed herself from the stage as we waited for the seven ballerinas to perform excerpts from The Ultimate Form, which is based loosely on Hepworth’s work The Family of Man (1970), a collection of bronze sculptures installed in the landscape at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Tindall took the archetypes in Hepworth’s monumental work and presented them and tweaked them by incorporating an infusion of Linder’s montages into his work, meshing elements from both Hepworth’s figures and Linder’s collages.
In a direct reference to The Family of Man, three figures, one male and two female, posed on stage for the first dance. The females were clad in green and blue catsuits, respectively, with the male dancer in all black. Hogg had designed headpieces for the dancers, which mimicked the vertical top stones in Hepworth’s original sculpture. The suits for the females included exaggerated elbows and shoulders through the addition of sculptural elements, which Hogg is known for in her work. The first demonstration included sudden, staccato movements alternating with slow, deliberate motions. Arms echoed the action of cutting, as though playing with Linder’s notion of art-making.
The following three excerpts continued to toy with artistic structures set forth by Hepworth’s and Linder’s works, particularly with references to the implied motion of Hepworth’s sculptures and the fragmented contortions of Linder’s collages. The Family of Man invites penetration, and Tindall explored this through the manipulation of the potential within the human figure. Often the dancers of the Northern Ballet linked their bodies together to create a veritable montage, using their physical balance and strength to contort their bodies into new forms. These novel shapes constructed by Tindall and his company translated Hepworth’s sculpture into human form, and manipulated this notion further through referencing Linder’s collage technique.
As Tindall explained, he did not want to ‘give away’ all of The Ultimate Form, so the audience was left wanting more. I caught up with some of the collaborators post-performance, where Linder explained to me that she has been working on ballet collages for about four years and had always dreamt of creating a ballet. She explained, ‘I work so isolated, I can’t help but imagine a soundtrack and dancers dancing. I had to find hosts. The Ultimate Form was my pure desire; I had to find somebody to house it.
Designer Hogg confided about the collaboration, ‘I’d been waiting for years for someone to invite me to design costumes for a ballet. I feel my work screams ‘movement’ and I was knocked out when Linder approached me. I’d never met her before but I knew her by her iconic Buzzcocks single sleeve for ‘Orgasm Addict’, which I still treasure. In my most recent collections I’ve been creating shapes beyond the human form, giving my extended silhouettes a soft sculptural element, so I feel that this is the perfect ballet for me and the one well worth waiting for.’
The first in a series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
Anthony Hubermanis a curator and writer. He is the director of The Artist’s Institute in New York, USA and teaches at Hunter College.
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Lutz Bacher, The Book of Sand, 2010-12, 25 tons of sand, dimensions variable
PICKS OF 2012
EXHIBITIONS:
• ‘Steve McQueen’ at The Art Institute, Chicago (until January 6). I think he’s the Bruce Nauman of my generation, but even more perverted.
• ‘Locus Solus’ at the Reina Sofía, Madrid. Finally, I got my chance to really get to know the world of Raymond Roussel.
• ‘In the Still Epiphany’ at the Pulitzer Foundation, St. Louis. Curated by the artist Gedi Sibony, this exhibition taught me everything about how to hold something in place.
• Lutz Bacher at Alex Zachary Peter Currie, New York and at the Whitney Biennial. One involved 25 tons of sand filling an Upper East Side apartment, and the other thousands of baseballs filling the entire 4th floor of a major art museum (Baseballs II, 2011-2012). Both also included a video called What Are You Thinking? (2011) which simply faded from white to black and back again, with a heart-breaking soundtrack. Enough said?
• The idea of a “brain” made up not of words or statements, but of objects. As in: the semi-circular gallery in the Fridericianum that was the heart of dOCUMENTA (13), and the white-tiled room at the centre of Rosemarie’s Trockel’s ‘A Cosmos’ at the New Museum, New York (until January 20)
• Some great machines: Thomas Bayrle‘s car engines at dOCUMENTA (13), Trisha Donnelly‘s selection of microchip diagrams in MoMA‘s collection, and Bruno Gironcoli‘s possibly alien machines at Mamco, Geneva.
INSTITUTIONS:
• Raven Row. But then again, Raven Row is to the art world what Jon Stewart is to TV – there is no suspense, because you know they’ll win every year. Another extraordinary year at Raven Row.
• Yale Union. A newcomer – Saul Steinberg, Marianne Wex, Ian Hamilton Finlay, George Kuchar, Susan Howe… a brilliant program run by brilliant people in Portland, Oregon.
PEOPLE:
• David Weiss, we miss you.
• Julian Assange, we support you.
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Thomas Bayrle, Frankfurter Tapete, 1980, offset print on paper, wall paper (detail)
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL IN 2013
ALLTHAT IS BELGIAN OR SEMI-BELGIAN:
• Thomas Bayrle at Wiels, Brussels (February 9 – May 12)
• Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter at MuKHA, Antwerp (February 8 – May 19)
• Peter Wächtler, based in Brussels, having his first show in New York at Ludlow 38 (opens January 20)
• Lucy McKenzie, also based in Brussels, and her show at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam (April 20 – September 20)
• Finally getting to visit the Antoine Wiertz Museum, Brussels
Dan Foxis senior editor of frieze and is based in New York, USA.
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Pierre Huyghe, Untitled, 2011–2, Karlsaue Park, dOCUMENTA (13)
The numerologically credulous amongst you will be aware that the 5125-year cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is due to come to an apocalyptic close on 21 December 2012. This is when the Earth collides with the planet Nibiru and suffers a catastrophic geomagnetic reversal of the North and South Poles. In preparation for the arrival of the final day of the 13th b’ak’tun, I am dispensing with the conventional decimal-based ranking system for my highlights of 2012, and will instead use what scholars of eschatology have calculated to be a New Number Order that will come into effect following the appearance of Kisin, Mayan God of Death, and the radical distortion of linear time caused by the supermassive black hole due to open up in the centre of the galaxy around lunchtime on Christmas Day. In the event that Armageddon does not arrive before the holiday sales start, the following list also includes my reasons to be cheerful for 2013, although a fat lot of good they’ll do you as Quetzalcoatl rips you limb-from-limb amidst the scorched ruins of civilization.
1,472,657: dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel. If you had asked me in early June what my exhibition highlight of 2012 was, I might well have predicted a hands-down win for dOCUMENTA (13). Looking back, I suspect I was tIPSY oN tHE kOOL-aID oF cRITICAL pRAISE that had pinned Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s edition of the quintennial mega-show for gongs at the Academy Awards, Nobel Prize and London 2012 Olympics. Which isn’t to say that dOCUMENTA (13) didn’t feature intelligent and thought-provoking passages, but it tested my patience with the rhetorics and personality cults of curating, and as the year wore on, left me with feelings of increasing alienation from the purpose of super-sized exhibitions.
Six months on from visiting Kassel, my memory of dOCUMENTA (13) is made up of only fragments and details; small working parts of a bigger engine motoring curatorial ideas that were often hard to fathom. Clearest of these memories is a walk I took one afternoon that started with Pierre Huyghe‘s Untitled interzone in the middle of the orderly Karlsaue park, a ghostly patch of mud and wild plants populated by bees and a pink-legged dog. From there I walked on to Raimundas Malasauskas and Marcos Lutyen‘s Hypnotic Show; 30 blissful minutes spent under hypnosis, the ‘art work’ appearing in my mind’s eye. My stroll finished up at the Tino Sehgal piece where, in a blacked-out room, a troupe of dancers enchanted the dark with call-and-response cries, anecdotes about the financial precarity of the creative life, and an a cappella version of The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. These experiences were each intimate, small-scale, tinted by humour, pleasure, imagination.
5: ‘Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly’, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Speaking of shows that are intimate, small-scale, and tinted by humour, pleasure and imagination, how about Trisha Donnelly’s ‘Artist Choice’? (This beat to the punch my other favourite MoMA show this year, ‘Century of the Child: Growing By Design 1900–2000’ a fascinating look at how artists and designers have shaped children’s learning and play.) Donnelly’s inventive and often surprising selections from the museum’s art and design collection were spread across three rooms, packing together like cosmic sardines works such as Odilon Redon and Marsden Hartley paintings, Eliot Porter bird photographs, Walter Pichler drawings, pyramidal air-ionizers, Polaroid sunglasses, a wheelchair and psychedelic-coloured diagrams of silicon microprocessors.
2,389,524: Yale Union, Portland, Oregon. Yale Union’s exhibition ‘Steinberg, Saul. The New Yorker. New York, 1945–2000. (Harold, William, Robert, Tina, David, Eds.)’, organized by Robert Snowden and Scott Ponik, looked at Steinberg’s work for The New Yorker, attentive to the questions his career raises about how art circulates in society. (I wrote about it here if you’ve the inclination to find out more.) The existence of this non-profit space in the Pacific Northwest is also a reason to be cheerful in 2013.
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Saul Steinberg, cover illustration for The New Yorker, October 1969
11: Jonas Mekas. Two retrospectives in 2012 – one at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the other at London’s Serpentine Gallery – reminded us not only of the extraordinary historical record Mekas’ film diaries provide of artistic life in New York across six decades, but how the lifeblood of art and culture depends upon communities of friends, family and like minds; not global gallery brands, market logic and the tinnitus din of PR.
79,672: 2012 Whitney Biennial. Particularly LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs, Wu Tsang’sGREENROOM installation, Charles Atlas and Michael Clark’s performance, and the films of Luther Price, Michael Robinson and Laida Lertxundi. And whilst we’re talking about the Whitney Museum, a cheery prospect for early next year is ‘Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective,’ which arrives there from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Leapfrogging ahead, the 2014 Whitney promises to be something to be cheerful about given the recent appointment of Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms and Michelle Grabner as the show’s curators. But before that, in biennial land, I’ve high hopes for the 2013 Carnegie International, put together by Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski.
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Frank Ocean; photograph Nabil Elderkin
9: New music. I didn’t have many no-risk-disks this year, but amongst them were Frank Ocean’sOrange (if R’n’B were to have its own prog rock moment, then surely it’s Ocean’s track ‘Pyramids’ although the return in 2012 of R. Kelly’s lunatic musical soap opera Trapped in the Closet is a close contender); Jai Paul’s single Jasmine, which sounds like a hazy memory of Prince, Detroit techno and too many late nights; Third Mouth by Alexander Tucker, a vision of modern pastoral psychedelia; the drone dub of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s LP Timon Imok Manta and the ever-inventive C Spencer Yeh’s album-length foray into pop songwriting, Transitions. One album I’m particularly looking forward to in early 2012 is Museum of Loneliness, a spoken word LP by filmmaker and writer Chris Petit (director of Radio On and author of essential London novel Robinson), released by London-based label Test Centre as part of a new series of albums made with writers.
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Laurie Spiegel in her home studio, circa 1976. Photo: Lewis Forsdale
431: Old music. Reissues on highest rotation for me were Can’sLost Tapes, and the compilation Personal Space: Electronic Soul 1974–84. Can need no introduction, but Personal Space salvages obscure soul and funk tracks crafted from rudimentary synthesizers and drum machines, creating some astonishing, spaced-out dance music. (Check out Deborah Washington’s ‘Shortest Lady’ or Spontaneous Overflow’s ‘All About Money’, for instance.) Laurie Speigel’sThe Expanding Universe (originally released in 1980) acquainted me with the work of one of the female pioneers of electronic composition, whilst the re-release of the 1985 album Zummo with an X, by Peter Zummo, recorded with Arthur Russell, Rik Albani and Bill Ruyle, was a slow, beautiful reminder of how fertile New York’s downtown music scene was in the 1980s. (The piece ‘Lateral Pass’ was originally composed for the Trisha Brown Dance Company.) I was also happy to see a re-release for Midnight Cleaners (1982) by Cleaners from Venus, an overdue nod to Martin Newell, the one-man music scene of downtown Wivenhoe, rural Essex.
8999: Other music. In live performance, the opportunity to see Pauline Oliveros play in New York, at her 80th birthday concert at ISSUE Project Room in May, was a special one. So too was Darmstadt’s 8th annual performance of Terry Riley’s In C at Public Assembly, New York; a joyous, raucous and spirited rendition of Riley’s landmark work of 20th century art, performed by around 20 key players from New York’s new music scenes, including David Grubbs, David van Teigham, Nick Hallett, Zach Layton, Kid Millions and Alex Waterman. (Waterman’s Vidas Perfectas a new Spanish language production of Robert Ashley’s 1983 opera Perfect Lives, continued to evolve in 2012, with a performance at London’s Serpentine Pavilion.)
For music makers, Sufi Plus Ins released this year and developed by DJ Rupture (aka Jace Clayton) with Bill Bowen, Rosten Woo, Hassan Wargui, Maggie Schmitt and Juan Alcon Duran deserves a nod for blowing open the Western-centric mindset of most music software interfaces.
As for books about music in 2012, Tam Tam Books’ English translation (by Paul Knobloch) of Gilles Verlant’s biography of Serge Gainsbourg, Gainsbourg: The Biography was a page-turner. Once I finally get around to reading David Byrne’sHow Music Works– a book I’ve been excited to read since it came out in September – I’m looking forward to the publication early next year of Bob Stanley’s presumably epic Do You Believe in Magic? A Complete History of Pop.
5499: David Levine, Habit. Here is the long story: but the short version is: realist play performed on loop, eight hours a day – a meditation on the daily grind of creative life, and habituated emotional behaviour. In 2012 Levine also co-authored, with Alix Rule, the essay ‘International Art English’ for brave new pioneers of digital publishing Triple Canopy. If this essay makes even one iota of difference in pushing back against all that is dreary, pompous, vacuous, and downright grammatically whack in art writing, press releases and museum speak, then Levine, Rule and Triple Canopy will have done us a service.
42: W.A.G.E. Survey results: An onerous task, but someone had to do it. This year saw the release of results from a survey undertaken by Working Artists and the Greater Economy into the economic experiences of 600 visual and performance artists who, between 2005 and 2010, worked with museums and non-profits in New York City. The survey asked questions about artist fees, honorariums, payment of expenses, shipping and production costs. Read the analytics, presented in graphic poster form here.
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Graphic from the W.A.G.E survey
74,903: Art in print. Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, describes The Vorrh by Brian Catling as ‘one of the most original and stunning works of fantasy that it has ever been my privilege to read.’ With this novel, sculptor and performance artist Catling has written a dizzyingly vast work of imagination, but it’s thankfully not of the dragons and dwarves variety of fantasy. Rather, the intoxicating language of The Vorrh– like breathing thick tropical air – is in the tradition of surrealist fiction (its title is borrowed from Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, 1910), and closer to the kitchen sink sci-fi of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) than Game of Thrones. I’m not much of a comics fan, but the collection of Dal Tokyo comic strips by artist Gary Panter from the early ‘80s LA Reader, which imagines a future Mars colonized by workers from Japan and Texas, was wonderfully mind-frying. Ridinghouse brought us The Space Between, a collection of writings on art by novelist, critic and frieze contributor Michael Bracewell– long overdue, and essential reading. Also, if anyone wants to buy me for Christmas a copy of O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica, collecting together the collages and works on paper of Bay Area artist Jess, I wouldn’t say no.
Significant Objects spun from a project by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, isn’t exactly an art book, but it has much to say about how we ascribe value to objects. Trinkets, tchotchkes and other unwanted second-hand flotsam and jetsam were purchased for a few dollars and auctioned on eBay, each item paired with a short fictional text by a writer about the object’s provenance. The experiment looked at how each story affected the amount people were prepared to pay for an item. A gold rabbit-shaped candle, for instance, bought for $3, sold for $112.50. It came with a story by Neil LaBute about a man – who may or may not be on the edge of a nervous breakdown – convinced the candle contains a real bunny made from real gold. A kitsch Russian figurine, missing its glass case, that was purchased for $3 went for a whopping $193.50. This crudely made little ornament was gilded with the legend of St. Vralkomir, as unreliably recounted by Doug Dorst. All proceeds were donated to the charity Girls Write Now and contributors included Matthew de Abaitua, Nicholson Baker, Matthew Battles, Meg Cabot, Patrick Cates, Willliam Gibson, Ben Greenman, Jason Grote, Shiela Heti, Wayne Koestenbaum, Shelley Jackson, Jonathan Lethem, Mimi Lipson, Tom McCarthy, Lydia Millet, Annie Nocenti, Jenny Offill, Gary Panter, Ed Park, James Parker, Padgett Powell, Bruce Sterling, Luc Sante, David Shields, Colleen Werthmann, Colson Whitehead, Cintra Wilson and Douglas Wolk. You want insight into the psychology of collecting? Read this.
∞: Sandy. The destructive impact of the super-storm on the Caribbean and east coast was no highlight of 2012, but it was a reminder that the view art provides on life is a parallax view; that there are crucial degrees of difference between what we think is important to keep in the frame, and what’s really essential.
Risks to sentiment but I like smaller, less shiny, set ups for looking. These places provide, startling, indeed impudent, new slants. Artist’s Institute, Soloway, Cleopatras. All are exuberant. As is Triple Canopy and Artists Space – Books and Talks. We should be scrawling their names on subway walls. Lucie Fontaine at Marianne Boesky as a two-week seance of an exhibition gave hope. “Views from a Volcano” on the early days at The Kitchen was a fascinating look back. A few quick trips to the west coast left me enthused, open and receptive – Math Bass’s performance Brutal Set and Vishal Jugdeo’sGoods Carrier both at the Hammer and Land Art at MOCA made the trip. In the Pacific Northwest, the curatorial undertakings at Yale Union are teaching the rest of us a thing or two about the firmness of opinion and the clarity of exposition. And, The Documenta. Sweeping statements miss the crumbs. Michael Portnoy’s27 Gnosis was a highlight, a twisted carnival gameshow in a dirt mound led down a path by Michael and Ieva Miseviciute, Korbian Agnier’s apples stole breath and Kadar Attila’s colonial flotsam has been like philosophical flypaper. I feel lucky to have seen each of these and others.
I am looking forward to Performa 2013 (November 1-24) in all its ambitions and complications.
Quinn Latimeris the author of Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012) and the forthcoming Describe This Distance , which examines the work of Sarah Lucas, as well as shame, palindromes, passivity, fertility statuary, Antonin Artaud, Diego Rivera, and Susan Sontag.
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Heike-Karin Föll, ‘n° 25 – n° 89 (the delphinium version), installation view at Elaine MGK, Basel.
BEST OF 2012 MIXTAPE (EXTENDEDVERSION)
1. Heike-Karin Föll / ‘n° 25 – n° 89 (the delphinium version),’ Elaine MGK, Basel, Switzerland http://www.elaine-mgk.ch/index.php?/project/n-25—-n-89-the-delphinium-version/
2. Cevdet Erek / Room of Rhythms 1, 2010–2012, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, and ‘Week’ (2012) at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
3. Moyra Davey / The Wet and the Dry (The Social Life of the Book) (Paraguay Press, 2012)
4. Mahmoud Darwish Museum / Ramallah, Palestine
5. Charlotte Moth / ‘Ce qui est fragile est toujours nouveau,’ Centre d’art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland
6. Susan Sontag / As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)
7. Solange / ‘Losing You,’ True EP (Terrible Records, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT15fhb9QAA
8. Karl Holmqvist and Stefan Tcherepnin / New Jerseyy, Basel, Switzerland
9. Julia Rometti and Victor Costales / Inscriptions in stone—Cosmic volume (2012)
24-page black-and-white supplement in Al-Ayyam newspaper, Palestine, Sunday November 4, 2012
10. Solange / ‘Some Things Never Seem to Fucking Work,’ True EP (Terrible Records, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkjqudulJTw
11. Lili Reynaud-Dewar / ‘Ceci est ma maison / This is my place,’ Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France
12. Kaspar Mueller / Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich, Switzerland
13. Hannah Ryggen / anti-fascist tapestries, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany
14. Klappfon / experimental music program curated by Michael Zaugg, Plattfon, Basel, Switzerland http://www.plattfon.ch/upcoming-events/
15. Nuri Koerfer / Oslo 10, Basel, Switzerland
16. Cat Power / ‘Manhattan,’ Sun (Matador Records, 2012)
17. Ariana Reines / Mercury (Fence Books, 2011)
18. Fabian Marti / Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland
19. Stedelijk Museum / reopening and re-hang, Amsterdam, Netherlands
20. Clarice Lispector / new translations into English out from New Directions (The Passion According to G.H., The Hour of the Star, Near to the Wild Heart)
22. Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi / ‘Around,’ Think Thoughts (2012)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaIUcAVos5Y
23. La Grotta Bar / Ramallah, Palestine
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Haris Epaminonda, Chronicles, 2010-ongoing, Super 8 transfer to digital, video still
VOLUME 2 (FORTHCOMING 2013)
1. ‘Projects 100: Akram Zaatari’ / June 4–September 23 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.
2. ‘Abstract Generation: Now in Print’ / February 13–June 24 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.
3. ‘Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault,’ / February 2 – 12 May / Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
4. ‘Haris Epaminonda’ / Kunsthaus Zurich (February 15–May 5)
5. ‘Mike Kelley’ (through April 1) / Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
6. Paolo Thorsen-Nagel / And On (Material Records, 2013).
7. I am also looking forward to getting around to reading: Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2013) and Lisa Robertson’s Nilling: prose essays on noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias (BookThug, 2012); R’s Boat (University of California Press, 2010) and The Men: a Lyric Book (BookThug, 2000).
The first in a series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
Anthony Hubermanis a curator and writer. He is the director of The Artist’s Institute in New York, USA and teaches at Hunter College.
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Lutz Bacher, The Book of Sand, 2010-12, 25 tons of sand, dimensions variable
PICKS OF 2012
EXHIBITIONS:
• ‘Steve McQueen’ at The Art Institute, Chicago (until January 6). I think he’s the Bruce Nauman of my generation, but even more perverted.
• ‘Locus Solus’ at the Reina Sofía, Madrid. Finally, I got my chance to really get to know the world of Raymond Roussel.
• ‘In the Still Epiphany’ at the Pulitzer Foundation, St. Louis. Curated by the artist Gedi Sibony, this exhibition taught me everything about how to hold something in place.
• Lutz Bacher at Alex Zachary Peter Currie, New York and at the Whitney Biennial. One involved 25 tons of sand filling an Upper East Side apartment, and the other thousands of baseballs filling the entire 4th floor of a major art museum (Baseballs II, 2011-2012). Both also included a video called What Are You Thinking? (2011) which simply faded from white to black and back again, with a heart-breaking soundtrack. Enough said?
• The idea of a “brain” made up not of words or statements, but of objects. As in: the semi-circular gallery in the Fridericianum that was the heart of dOCUMENTA (13), and the white-tiled room at the centre of Rosemarie’s Trockel’s ‘A Cosmos’ at the New Museum, New York (until January 20)
• Some great machines: Thomas Bayrle‘s car engines at dOCUMENTA (13), Trisha Donnelly‘s selection of microchip diagrams in MoMA‘s collection, and Bruno Gironcoli‘s possibly alien machines at Mamco, Geneva.
INSTITUTIONS:
• Raven Row. But then again, Raven Row is to the art world what Jon Stewart is to TV – there is no suspense, because you know they’ll win every year. Another extraordinary year at Raven Row.
• Yale Union. A newcomer – Saul Steinberg, Marianne Wex, Ian Hamilton Finlay, George Kuchar, Susan Howe… a brilliant program run by brilliant people in Portland, Oregon.
PEOPLE:
• David Weiss, we miss you.
• Julian Assange, we support you.
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Thomas Bayrle, Frankfurter Tapete, 1980, offset print on paper, wall paper (detail)
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL IN 2013
ALLTHAT IS BELGIAN OR SEMI-BELGIAN:
• Thomas Bayrle at Wiels, Brussels (February 9 – May 12)
• Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter at MuKHA, Antwerp (February 8 – May 19)
• Peter Wächtler, based in Brussels, having his first show in New York at Ludlow 38 (opens January 20)
• Lucy McKenzie, also based in Brussels, and her show at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam (April 20 – September 20)
• Finally getting to visit the Antoine Wiertz Museum, Brussels
Dan Foxis senior editor of frieze and is based in New York, USA.
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Pierre Huyghe, Untitled, 2011–2, Karlsaue Park, dOCUMENTA (13)
The numerologically credulous amongst you will be aware that the 5125-year cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is due to come to an apocalyptic close on 21 December 2012. This is when the Earth collides with the planet Nibiru and suffers a catastrophic geomagnetic reversal of the North and South Poles. In preparation for the arrival of the final day of the 13th b’ak’tun, I am dispensing with the conventional decimal-based ranking system for my highlights of 2012, and will instead use what scholars of eschatology have calculated to be a New Number Order that will come into effect following the appearance of Kisin, Mayan God of Death, and the radical distortion of linear time caused by the supermassive black hole due to open up in the centre of the galaxy around lunchtime on Christmas Day. In the event that Armageddon does not arrive before the holiday sales start, the following list also includes my reasons to be cheerful for 2013, although a fat lot of good they’ll do you as Quetzalcoatl rips you limb-from-limb amidst the scorched ruins of civilization.
1,472,657: dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel. If you had asked me in early June what my exhibition highlight of 2012 was, I might well have predicted a hands-down win for dOCUMENTA (13). Looking back, I suspect I was tIPSY oN tHE kOOL-aID oF cRITICAL pRAISE that had pinned Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s edition of the quintennial mega-show for gongs at the Academy Awards, Nobel Prize and London 2012 Olympics. Which isn’t to say that dOCUMENTA (13) didn’t feature intelligent and thought-provoking passages, but it tested my patience with the rhetorics and personality cults of curating, and as the year wore on, left me with feelings of increasing alienation from the purpose of super-sized exhibitions.
Six months on from visiting Kassel, my memory of dOCUMENTA (13) is made up of only fragments and details; small working parts of a bigger engine motoring curatorial ideas that were often hard to fathom. Clearest of these memories is a walk I took one afternoon that started with Pierre Huyghe‘s Untitled interzone in the middle of the orderly Karlsaue park, a ghostly patch of mud and wild plants populated by bees and a pink-legged dog. From there I walked on to Raimundas Malasauskas and Marcos Lutyen‘s Hypnotic Show; 30 blissful minutes spent under hypnosis, the ‘art work’ appearing in my mind’s eye. My stroll finished up at the Tino Sehgal piece where, in a blacked-out room, a troupe of dancers enchanted the dark with call-and-response cries, anecdotes about the financial precarity of the creative life, and an a cappella version of The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. These experiences were each intimate, small-scale, tinted by humour, pleasure, imagination.
5: ‘Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly’, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Speaking of shows that are intimate, small-scale, and tinted by humour, pleasure and imagination, how about Trisha Donnelly’s ‘Artist Choice’? (This beat to the punch my other favourite MoMA show this year, ‘Century of the Child: Growing By Design 1900–2000’ a fascinating look at how artists and designers have shaped children’s learning and play.) Donnelly’s inventive and often surprising selections from the museum’s art and design collection were spread across three rooms, packing together like cosmic sardines works such as Odilon Redon and Marsden Hartley paintings, Eliot Porter bird photographs, Walter Pichler drawings, pyramidal air-ionizers, Polaroid sunglasses, a wheelchair and psychedelic-coloured diagrams of silicon microprocessors.
2,389,524: Yale Union, Portland, Oregon. Yale Union’s exhibition ‘Steinberg, Saul. The New Yorker. New York, 1945–2000. (Harold, William, Robert, Tina, David, Eds.)’, organized by Robert Snowden and Scott Ponik, looked at Steinberg’s work for The New Yorker, attentive to the questions his career raises about how art circulates in society. (I wrote about it here if you’ve the inclination to find out more.) The existence of this non-profit space in the Pacific Northwest is also a reason to be cheerful in 2013.
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Saul Steinberg, cover illustration for The New Yorker, October 1969
11: Jonas Mekas. Two retrospectives in 2012 – one at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the other at London’s Serpentine Gallery – reminded us not only of the extraordinary historical record Mekas’ film diaries provide of artistic life in New York across six decades, but how the lifeblood of art and culture depends upon communities of friends, family and like minds; not global gallery brands, market logic and the tinnitus din of PR.
79,672: 2012 Whitney Biennial. Particularly LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs, Wu Tsang’sGREENROOM installation, Charles Atlas and Michael Clark’s performance, and the films of Luther Price, Michael Robinson and Laida Lertxundi. And whilst we’re talking about the Whitney Museum, a cheery prospect for early next year is ‘Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective,’ which arrives there from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Leapfrogging ahead, the 2014 Whitney promises to be something to be cheerful about given the recent appointment of Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms and Michelle Grabner as the show’s curators. But before that, in biennial land, I’ve high hopes for the 2013 Carnegie International, put together by Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski.
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Frank Ocean; photograph Nabil Elderkin
9: New music. I didn’t have many no-risk-disks this year, but amongst them were Frank Ocean’sOrange (if R’n’B were to have its own prog rock moment, then surely it’s Ocean’s track ‘Pyramids’ although the return in 2012 of R. Kelly’s lunatic musical soap opera Trapped in the Closet is a close contender); Jai Paul’s single Jasmine, which sounds like a hazy memory of Prince, Detroit techno and too many late nights; Third Mouth by Alexander Tucker, a vision of modern pastoral psychedelia; the drone dub of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s LP Timon Imok Manta and the ever-inventive C Spencer Yeh’s album-length foray into pop songwriting, Transitions. One album I’m particularly looking forward to in early 2012 is Museum of Loneliness, a spoken word LP by filmmaker and writer Chris Petit (director of Radio On and author of essential London novel Robinson), released by London-based label Test Centre as part of a new series of albums made with writers.
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Laurie Spiegel in her home studio, circa 1976. Photo: Lewis Forsdale
431: Old music. Reissues on highest rotation for me were Can’sLost Tapes, and the compilation Personal Space: Electronic Soul 1974–84. Can need no introduction, but Personal Space salvages obscure soul and funk tracks crafted from rudimentary synthesizers and drum machines, creating some astonishing, spaced-out dance music. (Check out Deborah Washington’s ‘Shortest Lady’ or Spontaneous Overflow’s ‘All About Money’, for instance.) Laurie Speigel’sThe Expanding Universe (originally released in 1980) acquainted me with the work of one of the female pioneers of electronic composition, whilst the re-release of the 1985 album Zummo with an X, by Peter Zummo, recorded with Arthur Russell, Rik Albani and Bill Ruyle, was a slow, beautiful reminder of how fertile New York’s downtown music scene was in the 1980s. (The piece ‘Lateral Pass’ was originally composed for the Trisha Brown Dance Company.) I was also happy to see a re-release for Midnight Cleaners (1982) by Cleaners from Venus, an overdue nod to Martin Newell, the one-man music scene of downtown Wivenhoe, rural Essex.
8999: Other music. In live performance, the opportunity to see Pauline Oliveros play in New York, at her 80th birthday concert at ISSUE Project Room in May, was a special one. So too was Darmstadt’s 8th annual performance of Terry Riley’s In C at Public Assembly, New York; a joyous, raucous and spirited rendition of Riley’s landmark work of 20th century art, performed by around 20 key players from New York’s new music scenes, including David Grubbs, David van Teigham, Nick Hallett, Zach Layton, Kid Millions and Alex Waterman. (Waterman’s Vidas Perfectas a new Spanish language production of Robert Ashley’s 1983 opera Perfect Lives, continued to evolve in 2012, with a performance at London’s Serpentine Pavilion.)
For music makers, Sufi Plus Ins released this year and developed by DJ Rupture (aka Jace Clayton) with Bill Bowen, Rosten Woo, Hassan Wargui, Maggie Schmitt and Juan Alcon Duran deserves a nod for blowing open the Western-centric mindset of most music software interfaces.
As for books about music in 2012, Tam Tam Books’ English translation (by Paul Knobloch) of Gilles Verlant’s biography of Serge Gainsbourg, Gainsbourg: The Biography was a page-turner. Once I finally get around to reading David Byrne’sHow Music Works– a book I’ve been excited to read since it came out in September – I’m looking forward to the publication early next year of Bob Stanley’s presumably epic Do You Believe in Magic? A Complete History of Pop.
5499: David Levine, Habit. Here is the long story: but the short version is: realist play performed on loop, eight hours a day – a meditation on the daily grind of creative life, and habituated emotional behaviour. In 2012 Levine also co-authored, with Alix Rule, the essay ‘International Art English’ for brave new pioneers of digital publishing Triple Canopy. If this essay makes even one iota of difference in pushing back against all that is dreary, pompous, vacuous, and downright grammatically whack in art writing, press releases and museum speak, then Levine, Rule and Triple Canopy will have done us a service.
42: W.A.G.E. Survey results: An onerous task, but someone had to do it. This year saw the release of results from a survey undertaken by Working Artists and the Greater Economy into the economic experiences of 600 visual and performance artists who, between 2005 and 2010, worked with museums and non-profits in New York City. The survey asked questions about artist fees, honorariums, payment of expenses, shipping and production costs. Read the analytics, presented in graphic poster form here.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Graphic from the W.A.G.E survey
74,903: Art in print. Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, describes The Vorrh by Brian Catling as ‘one of the most original and stunning works of fantasy that it has ever been my privilege to read.’ With this novel, sculptor and performance artist Catling has written a dizzyingly vast work of imagination, but it’s thankfully not of the dragons and dwarves variety of fantasy. Rather, the intoxicating language of The Vorrh– like breathing thick tropical air – is in the tradition of surrealist fiction (its title is borrowed from Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, 1910), and closer to the kitchen sink sci-fi of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) than Game of Thrones. I’m not much of a comics fan, but the collection of Dal Tokyo comic strips by artist Gary Panter from the early ‘80s LA Reader, which imagines a future Mars colonized by workers from Japan and Texas, was wonderfully mind-frying. Ridinghouse brought us The Space Between, a collection of writings on art by novelist, critic and frieze contributor Michael Bracewell– long overdue, and essential reading. Also, if anyone wants to buy me for Christmas a copy of O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica, collecting together the collages and works on paper of Bay Area artist Jess, I wouldn’t say no.
Significant Objects spun from a project by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, isn’t exactly an art book, but it has much to say about how we ascribe value to objects. Trinkets, tchotchkes and other unwanted second-hand flotsam and jetsam were purchased for a few dollars and auctioned on eBay, each item paired with a short fictional text by a writer about the object’s provenance. The experiment looked at how each story affected the amount people were prepared to pay for an item. A gold rabbit-shaped candle, for instance, bought for $3, sold for $112.50. It came with a story by Neil LaBute about a man – who may or may not be on the edge of a nervous breakdown – convinced the candle contains a real bunny made from real gold. A kitsch Russian figurine, missing its glass case, that was purchased for $3 went for a whopping $193.50. This crudely made little ornament was gilded with the legend of St. Vralkomir, as unreliably recounted by Doug Dorst. All proceeds were donated to the charity Girls Write Now and contributors included Matthew de Abaitua, Nicholson Baker, Matthew Battles, Meg Cabot, Patrick Cates, Willliam Gibson, Ben Greenman, Jason Grote, Shiela Heti, Wayne Koestenbaum, Shelley Jackson, Jonathan Lethem, Mimi Lipson, Tom McCarthy, Lydia Millet, Annie Nocenti, Jenny Offill, Gary Panter, Ed Park, James Parker, Padgett Powell, Bruce Sterling, Luc Sante, David Shields, Colleen Werthmann, Colson Whitehead, Cintra Wilson and Douglas Wolk. You want insight into the psychology of collecting? Read this.
∞: Sandy. The destructive impact of the super-storm on the Caribbean and east coast was no highlight of 2012, but it was a reminder that the view art provides on life is a parallax view; that there are crucial degrees of difference between what we think is important to keep in the frame, and what’s really essential.
Risks to sentiment but I like smaller, less shiny, set ups for looking. These places provide, startling, indeed impudent, new slants. Artist’s Institute, Soloway, Cleopatras. All are exuberant. As is Triple Canopy and Artists Space – Books and Talks. We should be scrawling their names on subway walls. Lucie Fontaine at Marianne Boesky as a two-week seance of an exhibition gave hope. “Views from a Volcano” on the early days at The Kitchen was a fascinating look back. A few quick trips to the west coast left me enthused, open and receptive – Math Bass’s performance Brutal Set and Vishal Jugdeo’sGoods Carrier both at the Hammer and Land Art at MOCA made the trip. In the Pacific Northwest, the curatorial undertakings at Yale Union are teaching the rest of us a thing or two about the firmness of opinion and the clarity of exposition. And, The Documenta. Sweeping statements miss the crumbs. Michael Portnoy’s27 Gnosis was a highlight, a twisted carnival gameshow in a dirt mound led down a path by Michael and Ieva Miseviciute, Korbian Agnier’s apples stole breath and Kadar Attia’s colonial flotsam has been like philosophical flypaper. I feel lucky to have seen each of these and others.
I am looking forward to Performa 2013 (November 1-24) in all its ambitions and complications.
Quinn Latimeris the author of Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012) and the forthcoming Describe This Distance , which examines the work of Sarah Lucas, as well as shame, palindromes, passivity, fertility statuary, Antonin Artaud, Diego Rivera, and Susan Sontag.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Heike-Karin Föll, ‘n° 25 – n° 89 (the delphinium version), installation view at Elaine MGK, Basel.
BEST OF 2012 MIXTAPE (EXTENDEDVERSION)
1. Heike-Karin Föll / ‘n° 25 – n° 89 (the delphinium version),’ Elaine MGK, Basel, Switzerland http://www.elaine-mgk.ch/index.php?/project/n-25—-n-89-the-delphinium-version/
2. Cevdet Erek / Room of Rhythms 1, 2010–2012, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, and ‘Week’ (2012) at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
3. Moyra Davey / The Wet and the Dry (The Social Life of the Book) (Paraguay Press, 2012)
4. Mahmoud Darwish Museum / Ramallah, Palestine
5. Charlotte Moth / ‘Ce qui est fragile est toujours nouveau,’ Centre d’art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland
6. Susan Sontag / As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)
7. Solange / ‘Losing You,’ True EP (Terrible Records, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT15fhb9QAA
8. Karl Holmqvist and Stefan Tcherepnin / New Jerseyy, Basel, Switzerland
9. Julia Rometti and Victor Costales / Inscriptions in stone—Cosmic volume (2012)
24-page black-and-white supplement in Al-Ayyam newspaper, Palestine, Sunday November 4, 2012
10. Solange / ‘Some Things Never Seem to Fucking Work,’ True EP (Terrible Records, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkjqudulJTw
11. Lili Reynaud-Dewar / ‘Ceci est ma maison / This is my place,’ Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France
12. Kaspar Mueller / Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich, Switzerland
13. Hannah Ryggen / anti-fascist tapestries, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany
14. Klappfon / experimental music program curated by Michael Zaugg, Plattfon, Basel, Switzerland http://www.plattfon.ch/upcoming-events/
15. Nuri Koerfer / Oslo 10, Basel, Switzerland
16. Cat Power / ‘Manhattan,’ Sun (Matador Records, 2012)
17. Ariana Reines / Mercury (Fence Books, 2011)
18. Fabian Marti / Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland
19. Stedelijk Museum / reopening and re-hang, Amsterdam, Netherlands
20. Clarice Lispector / new translations into English out from New Directions (The Passion According to G.H., The Hour of the Star, Near to the Wild Heart)
22. Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi / ‘Around,’ Think Thoughts (2012)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaIUcAVos5Y
23. La Grotta Bar / Ramallah, Palestine
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Haris Epaminonda, Chronicles, 2010-ongoing, Super 8 transfer to digital, video still
VOLUME 2 (FORTHCOMING 2013)
1. ‘Projects 100: Akram Zaatari’ / June 4–September 23 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.
2. ‘Abstract Generation: Now in Print’ / February 13–June 24 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.
3. ‘Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault,’ / February 2 – 12 May / Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
4. ‘Haris Epaminonda’ / Kunsthaus Zurich (February 15–May 5)
5. ‘Mike Kelley’ (through April 1) / Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
6. Paolo Thorsen-Nagel / And On (Material Records, 2013).
7. I am also looking forward to getting around to reading: Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2013) and Lisa Robertson’s Nilling: prose essays on noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias (BookThug, 2012); R’s Boat (University of California Press, 2010) and The Men: a Lyric Book (BookThug, 2000).
The first in a series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
Anthony Hubermanis a curator and writer. He is the director of The Artist’s Institute in New York, USA and teaches at Hunter College.
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Lutz Bacher, The Book of Sand, 2010-12, 25 tons of sand, dimensions variable
PICKS OF 2012
EXHIBITIONS:
• ‘Steve McQueen’ at The Art Institute, Chicago (until January 6). I think he’s the Bruce Nauman of my generation, but even more perverted.
• ‘Locus Solus’ at the Reina Sofía, Madrid. Finally, I got my chance to really get to know the world of Raymond Roussel.
• ‘In the Still Epiphany’ at the Pulitzer Foundation, St. Louis. Curated by the artist Gedi Sibony, this exhibition taught me everything about how to hold something in place.
• Lutz Bacher at Alex Zachary Peter Currie, New York and at the Whitney Biennial. One involved 25 tons of sand filling an Upper East Side apartment, and the other thousands of baseballs filling the entire 4th floor of a major art museum (Baseballs II, 2011-2012). Both also included a video called What Are You Thinking? (2011) which simply faded from white to black and back again, with a heart-breaking soundtrack. Enough said?
• The idea of a “brain” made up not of words or statements, but of objects. As in: the semi-circular gallery in the Fridericianum that was the heart of dOCUMENTA (13), and the white-tiled room at the centre of Rosemarie’s Trockel’s ‘A Cosmos’ at the New Museum, New York (until January 20)
• Some great machines: Thomas Bayrle‘s car engines at dOCUMENTA (13), Trisha Donnelly‘s selection of microchip diagrams in MoMA‘s collection, and Bruno Gironcoli‘s possibly alien machines at Mamco, Geneva.
INSTITUTIONS:
• Raven Row. But then again, Raven Row is to the art world what Jon Stewart is to TV – there is no suspense, because you know they’ll win every year. Another extraordinary year at Raven Row.
• Yale Union. A newcomer – Saul Steinberg, Marianne Wex, Ian Hamilton Finlay, George Kuchar, Susan Howe… a brilliant program run by brilliant people in Portland, Oregon.
PEOPLE:
• David Weiss, we miss you.
• Julian Assange, we support you.
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Thomas Bayrle, Frankfurter Tapete, 1980, offset print on paper, wall paper (detail)
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL IN 2013
ALLTHAT IS BELGIAN OR SEMI-BELGIAN:
• Thomas Bayrle at Wiels, Brussels (February 9 – May 12)
• Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter at MuKHA, Antwerp (February 8 – May 19)
• Peter Wächtler, based in Brussels, having his first show in New York at Ludlow 38 (opens January 20)
• Lucy McKenzie, also based in Brussels, and her show at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam (April 20 – September 20)
• Finally getting to visit the Antoine Wiertz Museum, Brussels
Dan Foxis senior editor of frieze and is based in New York, USA.
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Pierre Huyghe, Untitled, 2011–2, Karlsaue Park, dOCUMENTA (13)
The numerologically credulous amongst you will be aware that the 5125-year cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is due to come to an apocalyptic close on 21 December 2012. This is when the Earth collides with the planet Nibiru and suffers a catastrophic geomagnetic reversal of the North and South Poles. In preparation for the arrival of the final day of the 13th b’ak’tun, I am dispensing with the conventional decimal-based ranking system for my highlights of 2012, and will instead use what scholars of eschatology have calculated to be a New Number Order that will come into effect following the appearance of Kisin, Mayan God of Death, and the radical distortion of linear time caused by the supermassive black hole due to open up in the centre of the galaxy around lunchtime on Christmas Day. In the event that Armageddon does not arrive before the holiday sales start, the following list also includes my reasons to be cheerful for 2013, although a fat lot of good they’ll do you as Quetzalcoatl rips you limb-from-limb amidst the scorched ruins of civilization.
1,472,657: dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel. If you had asked me in early June what my exhibition highlight of 2012 was, I might well have predicted a hands-down win for dOCUMENTA (13). Looking back, I suspect I was tIPSY oN tHE kOOL-aID oF cRITICAL pRAISE that had pinned Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s edition of the quintennial mega-show for gongs at the Academy Awards, Nobel Prize and London 2012 Olympics. Which isn’t to say that dOCUMENTA (13) didn’t feature intelligent and thought-provoking passages, but it tested my patience with the rhetorics and personality cults of curating, and as the year wore on, left me with feelings of increasing alienation from the purpose of super-sized exhibitions.
Six months on from visiting Kassel, my memory of dOCUMENTA (13) is made up of only fragments and details; small working parts of a bigger engine motoring curatorial ideas that were often hard to fathom. Clearest of these memories is a walk I took one afternoon that started with Pierre Huyghe‘s Untitled interzone in the middle of the orderly Karlsaue park, a ghostly patch of mud and wild plants populated by bees and a pink-legged dog. From there I walked on to Raimundas Malasauskas and Marcos Lutyen‘s Hypnotic Show; 30 blissful minutes spent under hypnosis, the ‘art work’ appearing in my mind’s eye. My stroll finished up at the Tino Sehgal piece where, in a blacked-out room, a troupe of dancers enchanted the dark with call-and-response cries, anecdotes about the financial precarity of the creative life, and an a cappella version of The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. These experiences were each intimate, small-scale, tinted by humour, pleasure, imagination.
5: ‘Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly’, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Speaking of shows that are intimate, small-scale, and tinted by humour, pleasure and imagination, how about Trisha Donnelly’s ‘Artist Choice’? (This beat to the punch my other favourite MoMA show this year, ‘Century of the Child: Growing By Design 1900–2000’ a fascinating look at how artists and designers have shaped children’s learning and play.) Donnelly’s inventive and often surprising selections from the museum’s art and design collection were spread across three rooms, packing together like cosmic sardines works such as Odilon Redon and Marsden Hartley paintings, Eliot Porter bird photographs, Walter Pichler drawings, pyramidal air-ionizers, Polaroid sunglasses, a wheelchair and psychedelic-coloured diagrams of silicon microprocessors.
2,389,524: Yale Union, Portland, Oregon. Yale Union’s exhibition ‘Steinberg, Saul. The New Yorker. New York, 1945–2000. (Harold, William, Robert, Tina, David, Eds.)’, organized by Robert Snowden and Scott Ponik, looked at Steinberg’s work for The New Yorker, attentive to the questions his career raises about how art circulates in society. (I wrote about it here if you’ve the inclination to find out more.) The existence of this non-profit space in the Pacific Northwest is also a reason to be cheerful in 2013.
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Saul Steinberg, cover illustration for The New Yorker, October 1969
11: Jonas Mekas. Two retrospectives in 2012 – one at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the other at London’s Serpentine Gallery – reminded us not only of the extraordinary historical record Mekas’ film diaries provide of artistic life in New York across six decades, but how the lifeblood of art and culture depends upon communities of friends, family and like minds; not global gallery brands, market logic and the tinnitus din of PR.
79,672: 2012 Whitney Biennial. Particularly LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs, Wu Tsang’sGREENROOM installation, Charles Atlas and Michael Clark’s performance, and the films of Luther Price, Michael Robinson and Laida Lertxundi. And whilst we’re talking about the Whitney Museum, a cheery prospect for early next year is ‘Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective,’ which arrives there from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Leapfrogging ahead, the 2014 Whitney promises to be something to be cheerful about given the recent appointment of Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms and Michelle Grabner as the show’s curators. But before that, in biennial land, I’ve high hopes for the 2013 Carnegie International, put together by Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski.
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Frank Ocean; photograph Nabil Elderkin
9: New music. I didn’t have many no-risk-disks this year, but amongst them were Frank Ocean’sOrange (if R’n’B were to have its own prog rock moment, then surely it’s Ocean’s track ‘Pyramids’ although the return in 2012 of R. Kelly’s lunatic musical soap opera Trapped in the Closet is a close contender); Jai Paul’s single Jasmine, which sounds like a hazy memory of Prince, Detroit techno and too many late nights; Third Mouth by Alexander Tucker, a vision of modern pastoral psychedelia; the drone dub of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s LP Timon Imok Manta and the ever-inventive C Spencer Yeh’s album-length foray into pop songwriting, Transitions. One album I’m particularly looking forward to in early 2012 is Museum of Loneliness, a spoken word LP by filmmaker and writer Chris Petit (director of Radio On and author of essential London novel Robinson), released by London-based label Test Centre as part of a new series of albums made with writers.
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Laurie Spiegel in her home studio, circa 1976. Photo: Lewis Forsdale
431: Old music. Reissues on highest rotation for me were Can’sLost Tapes, and the compilation Personal Space: Electronic Soul 1974–84. Can need no introduction, but Personal Space salvages obscure soul and funk tracks crafted from rudimentary synthesizers and drum machines, creating some astonishing, spaced-out dance music. (Check out Deborah Washington’s ‘Shortest Lady’ or Spontaneous Overflow’s ‘All About Money’, for instance.) Laurie Speigel’sThe Expanding Universe (originally released in 1980) acquainted me with the work of one of the female pioneers of electronic composition, whilst the re-release of the 1985 album Zummo with an X, by Peter Zummo, recorded with Arthur Russell, Rik Albani and Bill Ruyle, was a slow, beautiful reminder of how fertile New York’s downtown music scene was in the 1980s. (The piece ‘Lateral Pass’ was originally composed for the Trisha Brown Dance Company.) I was also happy to see a re-release for Midnight Cleaners (1982) by Cleaners from Venus, an overdue nod to Martin Newell, the one-man music scene of downtown Wivenhoe, rural Essex.
8999: Other music. In live performance, the opportunity to see Pauline Oliveros play in New York, at her 80th birthday concert at ISSUE Project Room in May, was a special one. So too was Darmstadt’s 8th annual performance of Terry Riley’s In C at Public Assembly, New York; a joyous, raucous and spirited rendition of Riley’s landmark work of 20th century art, performed by around 20 key players from New York’s new music scenes, including David Grubbs, David van Teigham, Nick Hallett, Zach Layton, Kid Millions and Alex Waterman. (Waterman’s Vidas Perfectas a new Spanish language production of Robert Ashley’s 1983 opera Perfect Lives, continued to evolve in 2012, with a performance at London’s Serpentine Pavilion.)
For music makers, Sufi Plus Ins released this year and developed by DJ Rupture (aka Jace Clayton) with Bill Bowen, Rosten Woo, Hassan Wargui, Maggie Schmitt and Juan Alcon Duran deserves a nod for blowing open the Western-centric mindset of most music software interfaces.
As for books about music in 2012, Tam Tam Books’ English translation (by Paul Knobloch) of Gilles Verlant’s biography of Serge Gainsbourg, Gainsbourg: The Biography was a page-turner. Once I finally get around to reading David Byrne’sHow Music Works– a book I’ve been excited to read since it came out in September – I’m looking forward to the publication early next year of Bob Stanley’s presumably epic Do You Believe in Magic? A Complete History of Pop.
5499: David Levine, Habit. Here is the long story: but the short version is: realist play performed on loop, eight hours a day – a meditation on the daily grind of creative life, and habituated emotional behaviour. In 2012 Levine also co-authored, with Alix Rule, the essay ‘International Art English’ for brave new pioneers of digital publishing Triple Canopy. If this essay makes even one iota of difference in pushing back against all that is dreary, pompous, vacuous, and downright grammatically whack in art writing, press releases and museum speak, then Levine, Rule and Triple Canopy will have done us a service.
42: W.A.G.E. Survey results: An onerous task, but someone had to do it. This year saw the release of results from a survey undertaken by Working Artists and the Greater Economy into the economic experiences of 600 visual and performance artists who, between 2005 and 2010, worked with museums and non-profits in New York City. The survey asked questions about artist fees, honorariums, payment of expenses, shipping and production costs. Read the analytics, presented in graphic poster form here.
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Graphic from the W.A.G.E survey
74,903: Art in print. Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, describes The Vorrh by Brian Catling as ‘one of the most original and stunning works of fantasy that it has ever been my privilege to read.’ With this novel, sculptor and performance artist Catling has written a dizzyingly vast work of imagination, but it’s thankfully not of the dragons and dwarves variety of fantasy. Rather, the intoxicating language of The Vorrh– like breathing thick tropical air – is in the tradition of surrealist fiction (its title is borrowed from Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, 1910), and closer to the kitchen sink sci-fi of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) than Game of Thrones. I’m not much of a comics fan, but the collection of Dal Tokyo comic strips by artist Gary Panter from the early ‘80s LA Reader, which imagines a future Mars colonized by workers from Japan and Texas, was wonderfully mind-frying. Ridinghouse brought us The Space Between, a collection of writings on art by novelist, critic and frieze contributor Michael Bracewell– long overdue, and essential reading. Also, if anyone wants to buy me for Christmas a copy of O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica, collecting together the collages and works on paper of Bay Area artist Jess, I wouldn’t say no.
Significant Objects spun from a project by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, isn’t exactly an art book, but it has much to say about how we ascribe value to objects. Trinkets, tchotchkes and other unwanted second-hand flotsam and jetsam were purchased for a few dollars and auctioned on eBay, each item paired with a short fictional text by a writer about the object’s provenance. The experiment looked at how each story affected the amount people were prepared to pay for an item. A gold rabbit-shaped candle, for instance, bought for $3, sold for $112.50. It came with a story by Neil LaBute about a man – who may or may not be on the edge of a nervous breakdown – convinced the candle contains a real bunny made from real gold. A kitsch Russian figurine, missing its glass case, that was purchased for $3 went for a whopping $193.50. This crudely made little ornament was gilded with the legend of St. Vralkomir, as unreliably recounted by Doug Dorst. All proceeds were donated to the charity Girls Write Now and contributors included Matthew de Abaitua, Nicholson Baker, Matthew Battles, Meg Cabot, Patrick Cates, Willliam Gibson, Ben Greenman, Jason Grote, Shiela Heti, Wayne Koestenbaum, Shelley Jackson, Jonathan Lethem, Mimi Lipson, Tom McCarthy, Lydia Millet, Annie Nocenti, Jenny Offill, Gary Panter, Ed Park, James Parker, Padgett Powell, Bruce Sterling, Luc Sante, David Shields, Colleen Werthmann, Colson Whitehead, Cintra Wilson and Douglas Wolk. You want insight into the psychology of collecting? Read this.
∞: Sandy. The destructive impact of the super-storm on the Caribbean and east coast was no highlight of 2012, but it was a reminder that the view art provides on life is a parallax view; that there are crucial degrees of difference between what we think is important to keep in the frame, and what’s really essential.
Risks to sentiment but I like smaller, less shiny, set ups for looking. These places provide, startling, indeed impudent, new slants. Artist’s Institute, Soloway, Cleopatras. All are exuberant. As is Triple Canopy and Artists Space – Books and Talks. We should be scrawling their names on subway walls. Lucie Fontaine at Marianne Boesky as a two-week seance of an exhibition gave hope. “Views from a Volcano” on the early days at The Kitchen was a fascinating look back. A few quick trips to the west coast left me enthused, open and receptive – Math Bass’s performance Brutal Set and Vishal Jugdeo’sGoods Carrier both at the Hammer and Land Art at MOCA made the trip. In the Pacific Northwest, the curatorial undertakings at Yale Union are teaching the rest of us a thing or two about the firmness of opinion and the clarity of exposition. And, The Documenta. Sweeping statements miss the crumbs. Michael Portnoy’s27 Gnosis was a highlight, a twisted carnival gameshow in a dirt mound led down a path by Michael and Ieva Miseviciute, Korbian Agnier’s apples stole breath and Kadar Attia’s colonial flotsam has been like philosophical flypaper. I feel lucky to have seen each of these and others.
I am looking forward to Performa 2013 (November 1-24) in all its ambitions and complications.
Quinn Latimeris the author of Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012) and the forthcoming Describe This Distance , which examines the work of Sarah Lucas, as well as shame, palindromes, passivity, fertility statuary, Antonin Artaud, Diego Rivera, and Susan Sontag.
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Heike-Karin Föll, ‘n° 25 – n° 89 (the delphinium version), installation view at Elaine MGK, Basel.
BEST OF 2012 MIXTAPE (EXTENDEDVERSION)
1. Heike-Karin Föll / ‘n° 25 – n° 89 (the delphinium version),’ Elaine MGK, Basel, Switzerland http://www.elaine-mgk.ch/index.php?/project/n-25—-n-89-the-delphinium-version/
2. Cevdet Erek / Room of Rhythms 1, 2010–2012, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, and ‘Week’ (2012) at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
3. Moyra Davey / The Wet and the Dry (The Social Life of the Book) (Paraguay Press, 2012)
4. Mahmoud Darwish Museum / Ramallah, Palestine
5. Charlotte Moth / ‘Ce qui est fragile est toujours nouveau,’ Centre d’art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland
6. Susan Sontag / As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)
7. Solange / ‘Losing You,’ True EP (Terrible Records, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT15fhb9QAA
8. Karl Holmqvist and Stefan Tcherepnin / New Jerseyy, Basel, Switzerland
9. Julia Rometti and Victor Costales / Inscriptions in stone—Cosmic volume (2012)
24-page black-and-white supplement in Al-Ayyam newspaper, Palestine, Sunday November 4, 2012
10. Solange / ‘Some Things Never Seem to Fucking Work,’ True EP (Terrible Records, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkjqudulJTw
11. Lili Reynaud-Dewar / ‘Ceci est ma maison / This is my place,’ Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France
12. Kaspar Mueller / Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich, Switzerland
13. Hannah Ryggen / anti-fascist tapestries, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany
14. Klappfon / experimental music program curated by Michael Zaugg, Plattfon, Basel, Switzerland http://www.plattfon.ch/upcoming-events/
15. Nuri Koerfer / Oslo 10, Basel, Switzerland
16. Cat Power / ‘Manhattan,’ Sun (Matador Records, 2012)
17. Ariana Reines / Mercury (Fence Books, 2011)
18. Fabian Marti / Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland
19. Stedelijk Museum / reopening and re-hang, Amsterdam, Netherlands
20. Clarice Lispector / new translations into English out from New Directions (The Passion According to G.H., The Hour of the Star, Near to the Wild Heart)
22. Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi / ‘Around,’ Think Thoughts (2012)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaIUcAVos5Y
23. La Grotta Bar / Ramallah, Palestine
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Haris Epaminonda, Chronicles, 2010-ongoing, Super 8 transfer to digital, video still
VOLUME 2 (FORTHCOMING 2013)
1. ‘Projects 100: Akram Zaatari’ / June 4–September 23 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.
2. ‘Abstract Generation: Now in Print’ / February 13–June 24 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.
3. ‘Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault,’ / February 2 – 12 May / Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
4. ‘Haris Epaminonda’ / Kunsthaus Zurich (February 15–May 5)
5. ‘Mike Kelley’ (through April 1) / Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
6. Paolo Thorsen-Nagel / And On (Material Records, 2013).
7. I am also looking forward to getting around to reading: Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2013) and Lisa Robertson’s Nilling: prose essays on noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias (BookThug, 2012); R’s Boat (University of California Press, 2010) and The Men: a Lyric Book (BookThug, 2000).
Continuing our series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
Jennifer Higgieis co-editor of frieze and based in London, UK.
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Bruno Munari stood in front of Concave-convex, 1948, wire mesh installation. A retrospective of Munari’s work, ‘‘My Futurist Past’, is on show at the Estorick Collection, London, until December 23)
In terms of exhibitions, 2012 was an embarrassment of riches; a year in which the idea of what constitutes ‘political’ has thankfully expanded to accommodate subtlety, idiosyncrasy and cultural specificity. Where to begin? In no particular order highlights for me included dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel – a show I was steeling myself to battle with, and ended up wishing I had longer to explore; the 13th São Paulo biennale, ‘The Imminence of Poetics’, which was, despite its cumbersome title, one of the best biennales I’ve ever visited and chock-full of extraordinary work – much of which I wasn’t familiar with. Also in Brazil, I paid my first visit to the jaw-dropping sculpture park, gardens and pavilions that is Inhotim (in the central Brazilian state of Minas Gerais). In New York, I had to be dragged away from ‘The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde’ at the Met, and a great show by one of my favourite painters: ‘Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940’ at the Jewish Museum. I also enjoyed ‘Ecstatic Alphabets’– an exploration of the material qualities of language – at MoMA and the eclectic mix of the raw and the cooked at the Whitney Biennial; ‘Radical Localism’, curated by Chris Kraus and Mexicali Rose at Artists Space; and the Benefit Exhibition at the ever-splendid White Columns. Finally, two highlights were Anselm Franke’s utterly absorbing ‘Animism’ (a happy counterpoint to the debacle of the Berlin Biennale) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and the inaugural Qalandiya International, a celebration of Palestinian culture that took place across towns and villages in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In London – and quite apart from the good shows at commercial spaces, of which there are too many to mention here – Tate continues its brilliant run of great exhibitions (Damien Hirst proving the exception to the rule). The most exciting development of the year was the opening of the Tate Tanks– a terrific15-week programme of installation, performance and events in an amazing space. Also at Tate Modern, ‘William Klein + Daido Moriyama’ (which runs until 20 January) and Munch were beautiful shows. I’ve long been fascinated by the wonders and weirdness of Victorian art, and thus loved ‘Pre-Raphaelites: The Victorian Avant-Garde’ at Tate Britain. At Studio Voltaire I was reminded, once again, what a great artist Nicole Eisenmann is – her new sculptures are both magnificently nuts and weirdly moving; at the ever-wonderful Estorick Collection, I was thrilled to see a show devoted to one of my heroes, the Italian modernist artist and children’s book writer and illustrator, Bruno Munari. At the Chisenhale Gallery, director (and frieze contributing editor) Polly Staple continues to programme shows that are as timely as they are fresh (Christina Mackie and James Richards in particular) – the latest, by wunderkind Helen Marten, was no exception: it was fantastically inventive (and fun). The Hayward Gallery’s quiet show of contemporary Chinese art was refreshing in its lack of spin; I also loved their pairing of Jeremy Deller and David Shrigley and their month-long ‘Wide Open School’ was inspired. The inaugural LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images heralded a promising future, and at Raven Row, ‘The Stuff That Matters: Textiles collected by Seth Siegelaub for the CSROT’ was an unabashedly beautiful show at London’s most beautiful space. I also enjoyed the plethora of interesting things happening at Auto Italia South East, V22 (in particular, ‘Young London’), INIVA, Camden Arts Centre, Henry Moore Institute, South London Gallery, David Roberts Art Foundation, Peckham Artist Moving Image, and the Showroom. And finally, at the Whitechapel Gallery: ‘Aspen Magazine: 1965-1971’ (which runs until 3 March) – what’s not to love?
Around the UK, galleries such as Baltic, firstsite, Focal Point, IKON, Nottingham Contemporary, MIMA, MK Gallery, Tate St Ives and Liverpool continue to programme great shows. The year was marred by the death of Modern Art Oxford’s director, Michael Stanley; he will long be mourned.
I am writing this in Australia, where I’ve come for my annual visit. Overlooking Sydney Harbour, the new wing of the MCA (under the dynamic leadership of Liz Ann Macgregor) is dazzling; ‘Primavera’, their annual exhibition of work by Australian artists under 35, highlighted the plethora of energy and imagination in the Antipodes. The new John Kaldor Collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales– the result of Kaldor’s generous gifting of his great collection of 200 works by artists including Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, Robert Rauschenberg and Ugo Rondinone – is a great addition to the city.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. Sylvia Sleigh, Paul Rosano Reclining, 1973, 137 × 198 cm, oil on canvas
So, reasons to be cheerful in 2013? Massimiliano Gioni’s Venice Biennale is an exciting prospect as is Yuko Hasegawa’s Sharjah Biennale. I can’t wait to see ‘Hilma af Klint – A Pioneer of Abstraction’ at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet– she’s long been one of my favourite artists. In London – quite apart from the slew of young, energetic spaces and artist collectives in London that I hope to get to know better – Tate Modern will be hosting three shows, all of which will be a treat: retrospectives of Roy Lichtenstein (co-organised by The Art Institute of Chicago); Richard Hamilton (which is travelling to Madrid’s Reina Sofia, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art); and a solo show of Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair– and I’ll also be travelling to Tate Liverpool to see the Sylvia Sleigh show. Anything to do with Rosemarie Trockel is fine by me: thus, I’m really looking forward to ‘Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos’, at the Serpentine, an exhibition that ‘juxtaposes the artist’s works with a range of objects and artworks created by others with which she feels an affinity’. I have come around to the work of Jordan Wolfson, so am curious to see what he’ll come up with for the Chisenhale Gallery. I’m also looking forward to the show of Pacific bark painting at Birmingham’s IKON gallery. In Melbourne, the National Gallery of Victoria has had a shake-up with a new director, Tony Ellwood, who returned to the city after five years running the Queensland Art Gallery; he has appointed Max Delany – who did a great job running Monash University Museum of Art – as Senior Curator, Contemporary Art; to my mind, a hugely clever decision, and I look forward to seeing what he’ll come up with. The Director of the ever-interesting Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Juliana Engberg, has been appointed Artistic Director of the 2014 Sydney Biennale – I know it’s a long way off, but her show is definitely something to anticipate. In the US, Daniel Bauman (and his team’s) Carnegie International is an exciting prospect. I’ll also be travelling to Istanbul for Fulya Erdemci’s biennial.
OK; I know that there is a lot more I could mention and much I have missed, but I must stop somewhere. Suffice to say, I always look forward to travelling, and I’ll be doing a lot of it in the coming year. One of the best things about this job is anticipating experiencing great work by artists I’ve yet to discover – and without a doubt 2013 won’t be an exception. I can’t wait.
Max Andrewsis co-director of the curatorial office Latitudes in Barcelona, Spain.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. SADEIS, 2012, resin and paint, each 147 × 60 × 60 cm, installation view at Meessen De Clercq, Brussels
Some 2012 highlights (short form, vaguely chronological version):
• Retrospective by *Xavier Le Roy *at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies / Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona
• Jeremy Deller, Joy in People at the Hayward Gallery, London
• Tarek Atoui’s Revisiting Tarab, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah
• ‘The Medium of Media’ the 6th Global Art Forum at Art Dubai, Dubai
• Mireia Sallarès’s Se escapó desnuda. Un proyecto sobre la verdad, Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
• Manifesta 9, Genk (Manuel Durán, Praneet Soi, Duncan Campbell, Antonio Vega Macotela…)
• Sarah Ortmeyer,* SADEIS*, Meessen De Clercq, Brussels
• ZOO, or the letter Z, just after Zionism, NAiM/Bureau Europa, Maastricht
• dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (Korbinian Aigner, Michael Rakowitz, Mariana Castillo Deball, Adriana Lara, Rossella Biscotti, Jérmome Bel, Haegue Yang, Walid Raad, Anna Maria Maiolino, Lara Favaretto…)
• Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, 18 pictures and 18 stories / Performance in Resistance, Bulegoa z/b with If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona
• Utopia is possible. ICSID. Eivissa, 1971, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona
• Rirkrit Tiravanija and Arto Lindsay, Untitled 2012, (All those years at No. 17E London Terrace), kurimanzutto, Mexico City
• Terence Gower, Ottagono, LABOR, Mexico City
• Sarah Lucas, Situation / Sadie Coles, London
• The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966-79, Raven Row, London
• Alexandre Singh, The Humans, Witte de With, Rotterdam
• Ends of the Earth — Land Art to 1974, Haus der Kunst, Munich
• Jordi Mitjà, Monumento. Ladrones de alambre, Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
• Asier Mendizabal, ProjectSD, Barcelona
Reasons to be cheerful for 2013:
Moderation(s), the year-long programme between Spring, Hong Kong, and Witte de With, Rotterdam (Latitudes will be in residency at Spring in January 2013).
the 55th Venice Biennale (June 1 – November 24) (Lara Almarcegui for Spain, Mark Manders for the Netherlands, Mathais Polenda for Austria, Akram Zaatari for Lebanon, Jeremy Deller for the UK…)
Jonathan Watkinsis director of Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK.
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Memento Mori, unknown artist, late 18th-century, courtesy of The Richard Harris Collection
Picks of 2012 and Reasons to be Cheerful
John Murphy, Voyages to Italy, at the A.G. Leventis Gallery, Institute of Archaeology, University College London (20 January – 30 February)
One of the most intellectually elegant shows of 2012. A combination of photos, books, film stills and volcanic ash, formally it melded with the permanent collection of the Leventis Gallery – mostly very old objects in old fashioned vitrines – but jarred with any comforting notion of scientific order. The pervasive presence of the Marquis de Sade especially put paid to that.
The Voice and The Lens, Ikon, Birmingham (8 – 11 November)
Not one normally to indulge in self-promotion, I can’t pass up this opportunity to mention ‘The Voice and The Lens’, a four day programme of music, with lots of vocals, and film at Ikon in November. It was the brain-child of Sam Belinfante, one of the most promising young artists now in the UK and highlights were Scott Wilson’s performance of Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room, Mikhail Karikis’s Empty Words, Loré Lixenberg’s The End of Civilisation As We Know It, Adam De La Cour and Bruce McLean in Live Adult Chat, Al Madina’s Childrens Choir (heartbreaking) and Elaine Mitchener performing Christian Marclay’s Manga Scroll. The whole thing was wonderful – rich, rich, rich in content – both entertaining and clearly the product of fine intelligence.
Nastio Mosquito
Not a great success structurally, the Kwangju Biennial was full of gems. Amongst them was the work of Angolan artist Nastio Mosquito. His videos could not be smarter or funnier. Knowingly politically incorrect with respect to post-colonialist clichés (e.g. Nastio answers Gabi) he muses with charisma on the iniquities of the globalised modern world.
Qalandiya International (1 -14 November)
On the Palestinian West Bank, in various venues in and around Jerusalem and Ramallah, QI was good and brave, asserting that art, any kind of art, is politics. The Palestinian cause is compelling in the light of Israeli brutality – as I write 3,000 more dwellings have been granted planning permission in the continuing outrage that is illegal settlement – but this was not an exercise in emotional button pushing. There was a discernible rigour and some great work, including an installation by Tashweesh at Al Mamal, Jerusalem, and flyposting on the streets of Ramallah by Australian artist Tom Nicholson.
Death: A Self Portrait, Wellcome Collection (until 4 February 2013)
Meanwhile, back in the UK, the Wellcome Collection continues its ingenious programme, mixing art and artefacts to great effect. The most recent exhibition there, Death: A Self Portrait, drawn from the Richard Harris Collection, is an exemplary case in point. Renaissance paintings find themselves in the company of sentimental postcards and children’s toys, Mexican papier-maché sculptures, celebrating the Day of the Dead, sit alongside actual human remains. More philosophical than morbid, informed by a sense of humour not just black, the overall result was a fascinating meditation on a subject that ultimately overwhelms us all.
‘On Being Not Dead’
In this vein, my recent reading has included Bill Hayes’ article in the _New York Times _(22 November), ‘On Being Not Dead’. It is just a few hundred words, downloadable, and quite beautiful. In other words, a reason to be cheerful. “http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/opinion/on-being-not-dead.html”: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/opinion/on-being-not-dead.html
Douglas Fogleis an independent curator based in Los Angeles, USA, and a contributing editor of frieze.
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Thomas Schütte, Frauen, installation view at Castello di Rivoli,Italy
Highlights of 2012
1. Thomas Schütte, ‘Frauen’ at Castello di Rivoli, Turin. The Manica Lunga, the 146-meter long former painting gallery of the Savoys in the 17th century, has never looked so impressive. This was a statement about both the possibilities and fragility of sculptural practice. Filled with 18 of Schütte’s frauen along with 100 watercolors and ceramic maquettes, this was perhaps the best show I saw this year until I saw…
2. Marisa Merz, ‘disegnare, disegnare, redisegnare, il pensiero imagine che cammina’ at Fondazione Merz, Turin. I saw both of these exhibitions on the same day and was blown away. Marisa Merz, now well into her 80s, continues to work every day producing work that is both delicate and muscular. This non-retrospective survey showed that sometimes the freshest and most forward-looking artist in the room might happen to be in her 80s.
3. Béla Tarr, Turin Horse. While the beat goes on for Marisa Merz the same cannot be said for the 57 year old Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. The director’s self-proclaimed “last film” actually was released in 2011 but only made it to America this year. Loosely based on a possibly apocryphal story of the onset of Nietzsche’s madness inspired by his witnessing of the beating of a horse in Turin, Tarr’s nearly dialogue-less film is a meditation on the end of the world, the end of images, and the impossibility of communication. A bit of a downer but the apocalypse has never looked so beautiful.
4. First Aid Kit, The Lion’s Roar and their live show at the Henry Fonda Theater, Los Angeles. If the sun has set forever in the oeuvre of Béla Tarr it has risen again in Stockholm in the form of the otherworldly alt-folk sister duo First Aid Kit. Ethereal yet powerful, this album reeks of heartbreaking optimism. It was only outdone by their soaring, enthusiastic, and compellingly authentic live act that made me want to go join something, anything. They are only 19 and 22 respectively so we have much to look forward from them.
5. Shozo Shimamoto’s painting Gutai 02 (1950) in Paul Schimmel’s exhibition ‘Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962’. If First Aid Kit transports us to another brighter world with their angelic voices and infectious anthems, I found myself on another island altogether when I entered ‘Destroy the Picture’, curator Paul Schimmel’s last project for MoCA, Los Angeles, before his departure. The first work in this show dedicated to anti-painting was an oh so delicate mixed media work on paper by the Gutai artist Shozo Shimamoto. Measuring no more than 20 by 14 inches, this work is composed of a swirl of abstract material in its center that is surrounded by a watery field of blue. It said it all. It offered an island to get lost on, a contemplative abyss to fall into, and an understated commentary on the incredible power of abstraction by an artist living in a time just five years removed from the bombing of Hiroshima.
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Ko Nakajima, Paper (formerly Paper 2), 1969, installation view at Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles
6. ‘Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha’ at Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles. We have to give credit to some galleries in the past few years for generating museum quality shows. This exhibition offered the first comprehensive North American presentation of the work of this post-Gutai generation of Japanese artists who explored the relationship between the natural and the industrial.
7. Ellsworth Kelley’s façade of Matthew Marks Gallery Los Angeles. Floating above the neighborhood like Stanley Kubrick’s monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey, Ellsworth Kelley’s black rectilinear façade for Matthew Mark’s new 3,000 square foot Hollywood outpost is a living thing, chameleon-like in its ability to visually morph with the changing light as the day passes by. It’s unusual that an artist’s work merges with architecture in such a seamless way. Like Kubrick’s monolith, it seems to almost unconsciously emit a signal to the viewers around it, drawing them towards the building but without allowing the proximity that would let it be tagged.
8. Yorgos Lanthimos, Alps, (2012) and the emergence of the New Greek Cinema. Can we call it that? Do two directors make a movement? Well, if Lanthimos’s Alps is considered alongside Dogtooth (2009), his devastating study in familial dysfunction, and we then throw in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s charmingly weird coming of age study Attenberg (2010), it becomes clear that something is afoot cinematically in Athens. These films are strange, fascinating, and incredibly human investigations into the inability of people to connect and the consequences of those failures. Produced for very little money amidst the worst economic crisis in modern Greek history, these two directors point to a bright future for their generation of Greek cinema’s entry onto the global stage.
9. Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory. This novel was published in French in 2010 but did not appear in English until this year. How much fun is this book when a novelist writes a story about a successful contemporary artist who is implicated in the murder of…wait for it…the novelist himself? So many novels and films don’t quite get the true nature of the art world (although I’m still laughing at the hilariously apt depiction of “bad” performance art in Jonathan Parker’s 2009 film (Untitled)). Houellebecq’s book is a great read for anyone involved in the art world as a civilian or a capo.
10. ‘Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective’, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. When I hear that a star architect has designed an important exhibition for a major museum I often cast a suspicious eye, but Frank Ghery’s installation design of the Ken Price sculpture retrospective was completely Ghery-esque while also being incredibly sensitive to the delicate nature of his long time friend’s ceramic explorations. This show gives Price his full due within the context of the contemporary art world. We sadly lost Price this year after a long illness which brings to mind the loss of myriad other important art world figures this past year including the likes of Raoul De Keyser, David Weiss, Mike Kelly, Michael Asher, Franz West, Chris Marker, Amos Vogel and many others. It’s a shame that the art world doesn’t have the equivalent of the Oscar’s in memoriam section as many of these figures changed the world that we all live in.
11. Michael Haneke’s Amour. While we are on the topic of the end of life I would have to recommend an 11th addition to my top ten (a bonus track if you will) in the guise of perhaps Michael Haneke’s most poignant and sensitive exploration of the human condition to date. For anyone who has lost a parent (or even if you haven’t) this is a heartbreakingly told, masterfully acted, and also shocking (it is Haneke after all) exploration of personal dignity and the end of life.
Reasons to be cheerful for 2013
Wow, I ended on a bit of a downer. But do not fear, all is not lost. The world goes on as does the art. Here are a few things to look forward to in 2013:
Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites at Walker Art Center (March); Mark Manders in the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (June); the 56th Carnegie International (October); the second installment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (December).
Dena Beardis assistant curator at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
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Fred Londier, 29 Arrests, Headquarters of the 11th Naval District, May 4, 1972, San Diego, shown as part of ‘State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970’, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The Bay Area’s 2012 – some highlights:
At the beginning of the year, the ephemeral State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 resonated within the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s seismically-unsound, Brutalist concrete structure (where I have the precarious pleasure of working). The exhibition, organized by Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss, surveyed California conceptualism in the wake of the 60’s. Walking through galleries punctuated by vitrines, photographs tacked to the wall with push-pins, and flickering CRT monitors with degraded video documentation, the exhibition featured works that could happen anywhere–in the basement of Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art, in Al Ruppersberg’s Grand Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, at a freeway intersection sit-in by Asco, or at the intersection of 17th, Castro, and Market Streets in San Francisco where Mel Henderson, Joe Hawley, Alfred Young, and many others stopped city traffic by hailing 100 yellow cabs at once. ‘State of Mind’ encapsulates an irreverence born of the impossibility of commercial success and a sense of experimentation that resists stagnation. Viewing the exhibition in our present moment, it was hard to avoid the word ‘prescient.’ Suddenly it was impossible to talk about the Futurefarmers’ back-to-the-land projects without referring to Bonnie Sherk’s Portable Parks (1970), the Yes Men’s culture jamming without thinking about Sam’s Café (a collective run out of a former greasy spoon near UC Berkeley), or citizen journalism without a nod to Fred Londier’s photographs of antiwar protestors taken from the vantage of the arresting officer, 29 Arrests, Headquarters of the 11th Naval District, May 4, 1972, San Diego. ‘State of Mind’ resurrected long forgotten artists and it did so with humor and serious risk-taking.
Fueled by cocktails, the weekly conversations hosted by the new San Francisco outpost of the Kadist Foundation have consistently packed in a feisty audience looking for something better than free Tecate. Discussions often get heated enough to steam the windows or bring in a few odd passers-by, and despite rumors of fisticuffs, hot-topic conversations with Jens Hoffmann and Lawrence Rinder about the disputed role of the curator, Claire Bishop about the affect/efficacy in social practice and screenings of Ausländer raus! , Schlingensief’s Container proved more incisive than divisive. Director Joseph del Pesco has hosted international magazines like Fillip from Vancouver, Nero from Italy, May from France, and Taxi from Mexico in an effort to cross-germinate with Bay Area writers, artists, curators, and subjects. The Kadist is a collecting foundation, but exhibitions at the small San Francisco storefront are often refreshingly dynamic, including Ben Kinmont’s ‘An Exhibition in your Mouth’, a six-course dinner of recipes created by Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp, Gordon Matta-Clark, Salvador Dali, and others, accompanied by a hand-printed menu. Zoe Butt of Sàn Art recently curated an exhibition by Vietnamese artists censored in their home country, preceded by an evening screening of Southeast Asian artists’ videos organized by David Teh.
And also:
The Bay Area finally got its own branch of the Public School in the Fall of this year, but it had many precedents, most notably in the autodidactic strategies of Rick and Megan Prelinger, whose Prelinger Library and Archive are wunderkammers of infinite digression. Luca Antonucci and Carissa Potter of Colpa Press recently opened Edicola, a sidewalk kiosk on Market Street re-purposed as a newsstand selling artist books, prints, and periodicals. The dissembling minds behind Will Brown on 24th Street consistently revive oddball cultural gems, most notably the Manitoba Museum of Finds Art, a trove of “unsanctioned art” collected by Alberta Mayo, assistant to SFMOMA Director Henry Hopkins from 1974-1979. Twenty minutes from the city at the national refuge cum artist residency, Headland Center for the Arts, the OPENrestaurant collective served warm bowls of ambrosial ramen with stories of food radiation testing gathered during a recent trip to Japan.
And finally, why be cheerful at the onset of 2013? I’m looking forward to more like this, this , and this).
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Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror, (for Channel 4)
The first in a series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
Anthony Hubermanis a curator and writer. He is the director of The Artist’s Institute in New York, USA and teaches at Hunter College.
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Lutz Bacher, The Book of Sand, 2010-12, 25 tons of sand, dimensions variable
PICKS OF 2012
EXHIBITIONS:
• ‘Steve McQueen’ at The Art Institute, Chicago (until January 6). I think he’s the Bruce Nauman of my generation, but even more perverted.
• ‘Locus Solus’ at the Reina Sofía, Madrid. Finally, I got my chance to really get to know the world of Raymond Roussel.
• ‘In the Still Epiphany’ at the Pulitzer Foundation, St. Louis. Curated by the artist Gedi Sibony, this exhibition taught me everything about how to hold something in place.
• Lutz Bacher at Alex Zachary Peter Currie, New York and at the Whitney Biennial. One involved 25 tons of sand filling an Upper East Side apartment, and the other thousands of baseballs filling the entire 4th floor of a major art museum (Baseballs II, 2011-2012). Both also included a video called What Are You Thinking? (2011) which simply faded from white to black and back again, with a heart-breaking soundtrack. Enough said?
• The idea of a “brain” made up not of words or statements, but of objects. As in: the semi-circular gallery in the Fridericianum that was the heart of dOCUMENTA (13), and the white-tiled room at the centre of Rosemarie’s Trockel’s ‘A Cosmos’ at the New Museum, New York (until January 20)
• Some great machines: Thomas Bayrle‘s car engines at dOCUMENTA (13), Trisha Donnelly‘s selection of microchip diagrams in MoMA‘s collection, and Bruno Gironcoli‘s possibly alien machines at Mamco, Geneva.
INSTITUTIONS:
• Raven Row. But then again, Raven Row is to the art world what Jon Stewart is to TV – there is no suspense, because you know they’ll win every year. Another extraordinary year at Raven Row.
• Yale Union. A newcomer – Saul Steinberg, Marianne Wex, Ian Hamilton Finlay, George Kuchar, Susan Howe… a brilliant program run by brilliant people in Portland, Oregon.
PEOPLE:
• David Weiss, we miss you.
• Julian Assange, we support you.
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Thomas Bayrle, Frankfurter Tapete, 1980, offset print on paper, wall paper (detail)
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL IN 2013
ALLTHAT IS BELGIAN OR SEMI-BELGIAN:
• Thomas Bayrle at Wiels, Brussels (February 9 – May 12)
• Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter at MuKHA, Antwerp (February 8 – May 19)
• Peter Wächtler, based in Brussels, having his first show in New York at Ludlow 38 (opens January 20)
• Lucy McKenzie, also based in Brussels, and her show at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam (April 20 – September 20)
• Finally getting to visit the Antoine Wiertz Museum, Brussels
Dan Foxis senior editor of frieze and is based in New York, USA.
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Pierre Huyghe, Untitled, 2011–2, Karlsaue Park, dOCUMENTA (13)
The numerologically credulous amongst you will be aware that the 5125-year cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is due to come to an apocalyptic close on 21 December 2012. This is when the Earth collides with the planet Nibiru and suffers a catastrophic geomagnetic reversal of the North and South Poles. In preparation for the arrival of the final day of the 13th b’ak’tun, I am dispensing with the conventional decimal-based ranking system for my highlights of 2012, and will instead use what scholars of eschatology have calculated to be a New Number Order that will come into effect following the appearance of Kisin, Mayan God of Death, and the radical distortion of linear time caused by the supermassive black hole due to open up in the centre of the galaxy around lunchtime on Christmas Day. In the event that Armageddon does not arrive before the holiday sales start, the following list also includes my reasons to be cheerful for 2013, although a fat lot of good they’ll do you as Quetzalcoatl rips you limb-from-limb amidst the scorched ruins of civilization.
1,472,657: dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel. If you had asked me in early June what my exhibition highlight of 2012 was, I might well have predicted a hands-down win for dOCUMENTA (13). Looking back, I suspect I was tIPSY oN tHE kOOL-aID oF cRITICAL pRAISE that had pinned Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s edition of the quintennial mega-show for gongs at the Academy Awards, Nobel Prize and London 2012 Olympics. Which isn’t to say that dOCUMENTA (13) didn’t feature intelligent and thought-provoking passages, but it tested my patience with the rhetorics and personality cults of curating, and as the year wore on, left me with feelings of increasing alienation from the purpose of super-sized exhibitions.
Six months on from visiting Kassel, my memory of dOCUMENTA (13) is made up of only fragments and details; small working parts of a bigger engine motoring curatorial ideas that were often hard to fathom. Clearest of these memories is a walk I took one afternoon that started with Pierre Huyghe‘s Untitled interzone in the middle of the orderly Karlsaue park, a ghostly patch of mud and wild plants populated by bees and a pink-legged dog. From there I walked on to Raimundas Malasauskas and Marcos Lutyen‘s Hypnotic Show; 30 blissful minutes spent under hypnosis, the ‘art work’ appearing in my mind’s eye. My stroll finished up at the Tino Sehgal piece where, in a blacked-out room, a troupe of dancers enchanted the dark with call-and-response cries, anecdotes about the financial precarity of the creative life, and an a cappella version of The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. These experiences were each intimate, small-scale, tinted by humour, pleasure, imagination.
5: ‘Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly’, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Speaking of shows that are intimate, small-scale, and tinted by humour, pleasure and imagination, how about Trisha Donnelly’s ‘Artist Choice’? (This beat to the punch my other favourite MoMA show this year, ‘Century of the Child: Growing By Design 1900–2000’ a fascinating look at how artists and designers have shaped children’s learning and play.) Donnelly’s inventive and often surprising selections from the museum’s art and design collection were spread across three rooms, packing together like cosmic sardines works such as Odilon Redon and Marsden Hartley paintings, Eliot Porter bird photographs, Walter Pichler drawings, pyramidal air-ionizers, Polaroid sunglasses, a wheelchair and psychedelic-coloured diagrams of silicon microprocessors.
2,389,524: Yale Union, Portland, Oregon. Yale Union’s exhibition ‘Steinberg, Saul. The New Yorker. New York, 1945–2000. (Harold, William, Robert, Tina, David, Eds.)’, organized by Robert Snowden and Scott Ponik, looked at Steinberg’s work for The New Yorker, attentive to the questions his career raises about how art circulates in society. (I wrote about it here if you’ve the inclination to find out more.) The existence of this non-profit space in the Pacific Northwest is also a reason to be cheerful in 2013.
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Saul Steinberg, cover illustration for The New Yorker, October 1969
11: Jonas Mekas. Two retrospectives in 2012 – one at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the other at London’s Serpentine Gallery – reminded us not only of the extraordinary historical record Mekas’ film diaries provide of artistic life in New York across six decades, but how the lifeblood of art and culture depends upon communities of friends, family and like minds; not global gallery brands, market logic and the tinnitus din of PR.
79,672: 2012 Whitney Biennial. Particularly LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs, Wu Tsang’sGREENROOM installation, Charles Atlas and Michael Clark’s performance, and the films of Luther Price, Michael Robinson and Laida Lertxundi. And whilst we’re talking about the Whitney Museum, a cheery prospect for early next year is ‘Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective,’ which arrives there from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Leapfrogging ahead, the 2014 Whitney promises to be something to be cheerful about given the recent appointment of Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms and Michelle Grabner as the show’s curators. But before that, in biennial land, I’ve high hopes for the 2013 Carnegie International, put together by Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski.
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Frank Ocean; photograph Nabil Elderkin
9: New music. I didn’t have many no-risk-disks this year, but amongst them were Frank Ocean’sOrange (if R’n’B were to have its own prog rock moment, then surely it’s Ocean’s track ‘Pyramids’ although the return in 2012 of R. Kelly’s lunatic musical soap opera Trapped in the Closet is a close contender); Jai Paul’s single Jasmine, which sounds like a hazy memory of Prince, Detroit techno and too many late nights; Third Mouth by Alexander Tucker, a vision of modern pastoral psychedelia; the drone dub of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s LP Timon Imok Manta and the ever-inventive C Spencer Yeh’s album-length foray into pop songwriting, Transitions. One album I’m particularly looking forward to in early 2012 is Museum of Loneliness, a spoken word LP by filmmaker and writer Chris Petit (director of Radio On and author of essential London novel Robinson), released by London-based label Test Centre as part of a new series of albums made with writers.
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Laurie Spiegel in her home studio, circa 1976. Photo: Lewis Forsdale
431: Old music. Reissues on highest rotation for me were Can’sLost Tapes, and the compilation Personal Space: Electronic Soul 1974–84. Can need no introduction, but Personal Space salvages obscure soul and funk tracks crafted from rudimentary synthesizers and drum machines, creating some astonishing, spaced-out dance music. (Check out Deborah Washington’s ‘Shortest Lady’ or Spontaneous Overflow’s ‘All About Money’, for instance.) Laurie Spiegel’sThe Expanding Universe (originally released in 1980) acquainted me with the work of one of the female pioneers of electronic composition, whilst the re-release of the 1985 album Zummo with an X, by Peter Zummo, recorded with Arthur Russell, Rik Albani and Bill Ruyle, was a slow, beautiful reminder of how fertile New York’s downtown music scene was in the 1980s. (The piece ‘Lateral Pass’ was originally composed for the Trisha Brown Dance Company.) I was also happy to see a re-release for Midnight Cleaners (1982) by Cleaners from Venus, an overdue nod to Martin Newell, the one-man music scene of downtown Wivenhoe, rural Essex.
8999: Other music. In live performance, the opportunity to see Pauline Oliveros play in New York, at her 80th birthday concert at ISSUE Project Room in May, was a special one. So too was Darmstadt’s 8th annual performance of Terry Riley’s In C at Public Assembly, New York; a joyous, raucous and spirited rendition of Riley’s landmark work of 20th century art, performed by around 20 key players from New York’s new music scenes, including David Grubbs, David van Teigham, Nick Hallett, Zach Layton, Kid Millions and Alex Waterman. (Waterman’s Vidas Perfectas a new Spanish language production of Robert Ashley’s 1983 opera Perfect Lives, continued to evolve in 2012, with a performance at London’s Serpentine Pavilion.)
For music makers, Sufi Plus Ins released this year and developed by DJ Rupture (aka Jace Clayton) with Bill Bowen, Rosten Woo, Hassan Wargui, Maggie Schmitt and Juan Alcon Duran deserves a nod for blowing open the Western-centric mindset of most music software interfaces.
As for books about music in 2012, Tam Tam Books’ English translation (by Paul Knobloch) of Gilles Verlant’s biography of Serge Gainsbourg, Gainsbourg: The Biography was a page-turner. Once I finally get around to reading David Byrne’sHow Music Works– a book I’ve been excited to read since it came out in September – I’m looking forward to the publication early next year of Bob Stanley’s presumably epic Do You Believe in Magic? A Complete History of Pop.
5499: David Levine, Habit. Here is the long story: but the short version is: realist play performed on loop, eight hours a day – a meditation on the daily grind of creative life, and habituated emotional behaviour. In 2012 Levine also co-authored, with Alix Rule, the essay ‘International Art English’ for brave new pioneers of digital publishing Triple Canopy. If this essay makes even one iota of difference in pushing back against all that is dreary, pompous, vacuous, and downright grammatically whack in art writing, press releases and museum speak, then Levine, Rule and Triple Canopy will have done us a service.
42: W.A.G.E. Survey results: An onerous task, but someone had to do it. This year saw the release of results from a survey undertaken by Working Artists and the Greater Economy into the economic experiences of 600 visual and performance artists who, between 2005 and 2010, worked with museums and non-profits in New York City. The survey asked questions about artist fees, honorariums, payment of expenses, shipping and production costs. Read the analytics, presented in graphic poster form here.
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Graphic from the W.A.G.E survey
74,903: Art in print. Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, describes The Vorrh by Brian Catling as ‘one of the most original and stunning works of fantasy that it has ever been my privilege to read.’ With this novel, sculptor and performance artist Catling has written a dizzyingly vast work of imagination, but it’s thankfully not of the dragons and dwarves variety of fantasy. Rather, the intoxicating language of The Vorrh– like breathing thick tropical air – is in the tradition of surrealist fiction (its title is borrowed from Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, 1910), and closer to the kitchen sink sci-fi of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) than Game of Thrones. I’m not much of a comics fan, but the collection of Dal Tokyo comic strips by artist Gary Panter from the early ‘80s LA Reader, which imagines a future Mars colonized by workers from Japan and Texas, was wonderfully mind-frying. Ridinghouse brought us The Space Between, a collection of writings on art by novelist, critic and frieze contributor Michael Bracewell– long overdue, and essential reading. Also, if anyone wants to buy me for Christmas a copy of O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica, collecting together the collages and works on paper of Bay Area artist Jess, I wouldn’t say no.
Significant Objects spun from a project by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, isn’t exactly an art book, but it has much to say about how we ascribe value to objects. Trinkets, tchotchkes and other unwanted second-hand flotsam and jetsam were purchased for a few dollars and auctioned on eBay, each item paired with a short fictional text by a writer about the object’s provenance. The experiment looked at how each story affected the amount people were prepared to pay for an item. A gold rabbit-shaped candle, for instance, bought for $3, sold for $112.50. It came with a story by Neil LaBute about a man – who may or may not be on the edge of a nervous breakdown – convinced the candle contains a real bunny made from real gold. A kitsch Russian figurine, missing its glass case, that was purchased for $3 went for a whopping $193.50. This crudely made little ornament was gilded with the legend of St. Vralkomir, as unreliably recounted by Doug Dorst. All proceeds were donated to the charity Girls Write Now and contributors included Matthew de Abaitua, Nicholson Baker, Matthew Battles, Meg Cabot, Patrick Cates, Willliam Gibson, Ben Greenman, Jason Grote, Shiela Heti, Wayne Koestenbaum, Shelley Jackson, Jonathan Lethem, Mimi Lipson, Tom McCarthy, Lydia Millet, Annie Nocenti, Jenny Offill, Gary Panter, Ed Park, James Parker, Padgett Powell, Bruce Sterling, Luc Sante, David Shields, Colleen Werthmann, Colson Whitehead, Cintra Wilson and Douglas Wolk. You want insight into the psychology of collecting? Read this.
∞: Sandy. The destructive impact of the super-storm on the Caribbean and east coast was no highlight of 2012, but it was a reminder that the view art provides on life is a parallax view; that there are crucial degrees of difference between what we think is important to keep in the frame, and what’s really essential.
Risks to sentiment but I like smaller, less shiny, set ups for looking. These places provide, startling, indeed impudent, new slants. Artist’s Institute, Soloway, Cleopatras. All are exuberant. As is Triple Canopy and Artists Space – Books and Talks. We should be scrawling their names on subway walls. Lucie Fontaine at Marianne Boesky as a two-week seance of an exhibition gave hope. “Views from a Volcano” on the early days at The Kitchen was a fascinating look back. A few quick trips to the west coast left me enthused, open and receptive – Math Bass’s performance Brutal Set and Vishal Jugdeo’sGoods Carrier both at the Hammer and Land Art at MOCA made the trip. In the Pacific Northwest, the curatorial undertakings at Yale Union are teaching the rest of us a thing or two about the firmness of opinion and the clarity of exposition. And, The Documenta. Sweeping statements miss the crumbs. Michael Portnoy’s27 Gnosis was a highlight, a twisted carnival gameshow in a dirt mound led down a path by Michael and Ieva Miseviciute, Korbian Agnier’s apples stole breath and Kadar Attia’s colonial flotsam has been like philosophical flypaper. I feel lucky to have seen each of these and others.
I am looking forward to Performa 2013 (November 1-24) in all its ambitions and complications.
Quinn Latimeris the author of Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012) and the forthcoming Describe This Distance , which examines the work of Sarah Lucas, as well as shame, palindromes, passivity, fertility statuary, Antonin Artaud, Diego Rivera, and Susan Sontag.
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Heike-Karin Föll, ‘n° 25 – n° 89 (the delphinium version), installation view at Elaine MGK, Basel.
BEST OF 2012 MIXTAPE (EXTENDEDVERSION)
1. Heike-Karin Föll / ‘n° 25 – n° 89 (the delphinium version),’ Elaine MGK, Basel, Switzerland http://www.elaine-mgk.ch/index.php?/project/n-25—-n-89-the-delphinium-version/
2. Cevdet Erek / Room of Rhythms 1, 2010–2012, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, and ‘Week’ (2012) at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
3. Moyra Davey / The Wet and the Dry (The Social Life of the Book) (Paraguay Press, 2012)
4. Mahmoud Darwish Museum / Ramallah, Palestine
5. Charlotte Moth / ‘Ce qui est fragile est toujours nouveau,’ Centre d’art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland
6. Susan Sontag / As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)
7. Solange / ‘Losing You,’ True EP (Terrible Records, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT15fhb9QAA
8. Karl Holmqvist and Stefan Tcherepnin / New Jerseyy, Basel, Switzerland
9. Julia Rometti and Victor Costales / Inscriptions in stone—Cosmic volume (2012)
24-page black-and-white supplement in Al-Ayyam newspaper, Palestine, Sunday November 4, 2012
10. Solange / ‘Some Things Never Seem to Fucking Work,’ True EP (Terrible Records, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkjqudulJTw
11. Lili Reynaud-Dewar / ‘Ceci est ma maison / This is my place,’ Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France
12. Kaspar Mueller / Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich, Switzerland
13. Hannah Ryggen / anti-fascist tapestries, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany
14. Klappfon / experimental music program curated by Michael Zaugg, Plattfon, Basel, Switzerland http://www.plattfon.ch/upcoming-events/
15. Nuri Koerfer / Oslo 10, Basel, Switzerland
16. Cat Power / ‘Manhattan,’ Sun (Matador Records, 2012)
17. Ariana Reines / Mercury (Fence Books, 2011)
18. Fabian Marti / Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland
19. Stedelijk Museum / reopening and re-hang, Amsterdam, Netherlands
20. Clarice Lispector / new translations into English out from New Directions (The Passion According to G.H., The Hour of the Star, Near to the Wild Heart)
22. Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi / ‘Around,’ Think Thoughts (2012)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaIUcAVos5Y
23. La Grotta Bar / Ramallah, Palestine
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Haris Epaminonda, Chronicles, 2010-ongoing, Super 8 transfer to digital, video still
VOLUME 2 (FORTHCOMING 2013)
1. ‘Projects 100: Akram Zaatari’ / June 4–September 23 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.
2. ‘Abstract Generation: Now in Print’ / February 13–June 24 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.
3. ‘Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault,’ / February 2 – 12 May / Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
4. ‘Haris Epaminonda’ / Kunsthaus Zurich (February 15–May 5)
5. ‘Mike Kelley’ (through April 1) / Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
6. Paolo Thorsen-Nagel / And On (Material Records, 2013).
7. I am also looking forward to getting around to reading: Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2013) and Lisa Robertson’s Nilling: prose essays on noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias (BookThug, 2012); R’s Boat (University of California Press, 2010) and The Men: a Lyric Book (BookThug, 2000).
Self portrait of Laurie Spiegel, made with an Apple II, c.1980s.
I first found a copy of Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe some years ago. I had no idea what it sounded like, but the album cover was startling. Every conceivable inch of the cover of the LP was covered with bright white dot-matrix text, over a gradient of bold colour. The text was an interview with Laurie Spiegel – with both the questions and the answers written by Spiegel herself.
‘LS: How would you describe your music?
LS: I wouldn’t. People often ask me to do that, and it seems impossible. Music isn’t verbal or conceptual. I try to get as close as I can to certain qualities, and I’ve found these in a variety of styles. I have also found that they don’t require any known styles.’
Later on in the text, Laurie explains to Laurie:
‘Electronics aren’t a style or a kind of music any more than a piano is. They’re a way of making sounds.’
‘You’re being pretty evasive about what your music is like,’ says Laurie in return.
The Expanding Universe, a tremendous album originally created by Spiegel on a computer system called GROOVE at Bell Labs in the 1970s, was reissued this past autumn by the independent label Unseen Worlds. (The label is named in homage to Laurie Spiegel’s 1991 CD Unseen Worlds.) The reissue has attracted an avalanche of positive attention in the press, in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to The Wire.
The original record was expanded into a double album, and the original text-covered LP cover was enlarged into a handsome 24-page CD booklet, complete with extensive track notes, archival photos, block diagrams, and FORTRAN punch cards from Bell Labs circa 1973. For Spiegel, 24 pages wasn’t long enough.
‘I wanted to include a page of source code in the liner notes,’ she says wistfully when I visit her in her loft in downtown Manhattan, New York. For over three decades, Spiegel has lived in the same loft in Tribeca, in a building she shares with Richard Serra, a friend since the 1970s. Her life story spans Bell Labs and The Kitchen, film soundtracks and computer interfaces, folk music and analogue synthesizers, a Tribeca loft and a trailer near the Mississippi.
Every conceivable corner of her cavernous space is lined with things: vintage synthesizers, instruments, ancient computers, art, books, papers, tapes, photographs. The windows are wide open; birds fly in and out. A big black dog dozes on a sofa.
Spiegel seems shy about her sudden appearance in the spotlight. She speaks about her music and life carefully and deliberately, in long, densely packed sentences. She is particular about details, and has a strong grasp of the technical aspects of computers and synthesizers, which becomes increasingly clear the longer you talk to her.
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Laurie Spiegel in her loft in Manhattan, New York, August 2012. (Photograph: Samantha Gore)
Rave about The Expanding Universe, originally released in 1980, and she smiles and begins talking about her Unseen Worlds. She considers Unseen Worlds to be her best work, and hopes more people discover it.
‘The sounds on The Expanding Universe are really, really simple timbrally,’ she says. ‘Not that the electronic sounds per se aren’t beautiful in themselves, but… it’s pretty much raw sawtooth waves, by and large, with filtration and reverb. It was very limited in terms of the amount of control we had.’
One of the first Apple II prototypes – gifted to her in 1978 by the late Jef Raskin, inventor of the Macintosh – is perched on a shelf near the kitchen. It was custom-modified by Don Buchla, the legendary synthesizer inventor, who added more video colours. The artifacts around her loft trace the evolution of synthesizers, and the history of personal computing.
‘’You had this incredible freedom with those early systems,’ she says, gesturing to the Apple II. ‘The assumption was that you should be free to do everything. You should get the source code for every program you work with in case you feel like changing it. The original Apple II had a disassembler in ROM, so you could reverse-engineer even the assembly language that was running… it was assumed that you would get to know the machine and want to change how you used it. Now it’s such a closed system; there are all these layers of software.’
Spiegel takes a wide-angle view of technology; she has intimate firsthand experience with its history that reaches back four decades. (‘When I saw the Apple II,’ she says, ‘I thought, ‘How can you program this? You can’t get your hands into the registers!’ On the DDP-224 at Bell Labs, we had push-button access to all their individual bits.’) She is a prolific writer and, as she terms it, a ‘general purpose thinker’. In her numerous essays over the years, she offers keen insights on the process of making music, thoughts on emerging technologies, and music’s place within a wider context. Most composers are not great essayists, with some notable exceptions. John Cage’s voluminous writings helped to frame and elucidate his groundbreaking approach to sound. Karlheinz Stockhausen had a way with words, offering a more digestible way for listeners to decode his music. Steve Reich and Brian Eno are among the living composers who are as articulate and thoughtful in their words as they are with their music.
Her essays in the 1970s seem almost Utopian in their positivity about the future. ‘To some degree in the ‘70s I emphasized pretty much only the positive, partly because I was extremely excited about it, but partly also to counteract the tremendous hostility, particularly to computers at the time,’ she says. Any discrimination she faced for being a female composer was nothing, she says, compared to the discrimination against the use of computers in music back then.
‘To do music on computers, most people’s initial reaction was, ‘How could you? It’s completely dehumanizing music, synthesizers are already going too far… but computers?’ I didn’t want to say anything negative initially; you’re talking ‘70s, really. After the personal computers came out, that whole fear of computer technology began to just ebb away, because people had them and people loved them. And so much creative work was being done at a grassroots level by incredible numbers of people. Once you had the personal computers and you had Creative Computing magazine, and little festivals where you’d have two people with stripped-down circuit boards housing little digital processors playing dueling computer sounds back and forth, they were lovable. They were lovable little computers, and it really just swept away the big, corporate, military, threatening image that computers had previously had.’
As a child growing up in Chicago in the 1950s, Spiegel was quiet and introverted. Her mother was a weaver; in a way, looms were the proto-computers of their day. Her father gave her a soldering iron at age 9. ‘I would go into my room and read a lot, or play mandolin and guitar secretly by myself,’ she says. ‘I seemed to be really good at spending vast amounts of time alone and not feeling bad about it.’
By the late 1960s, Spiegel had moved to New York and was studying music at Juilliard. An encounter with Morton Subotnick’s Buchla 100 modular synthesizer in his studio on Bleecker Street led to a lifelong interest in analogue synths, and opened doors to the downtown scene.
‘The downtown music scene, which the Buchla immediately got me enmeshed in, it was more like where I came from,’ she says. ‘I came out of folk music, where people get together and they play and there’s no right way or wrong way to do things. You do things the way you do it, the way you want to do it; there’s a sense of freedom…the downtown music scene was sort of like coming home, in a way compared to Juilliard and the Lincoln Center atmosphere.’
Laurie performed at The Kitchen’s first concert, in 1971, organized by Rhys Chatham. The Kitchen was still in its infancy; Woody and Steina Vasulka had recently set up their video studio there. ‘Rhys decided once a week, we would have composers just playing music for each other,’ she says.
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Left to right: Emmanuel Ghent, Ken Knowlton, Laurie Spiegel and Max Mathews. Undated photograph.
Chatham had also invited Emmanuel Ghent and Max Mathews, prominent computer music researchers at Bell Labs, to The Kitchen’s early concerts. At The Kitchen, Ghent played music with computer-controlled electronics. Spiegel soon became a visiting artist at Bell Labs, working with Ghent, Mathews, and other researchers.
In 2011, I paid a visit to Mathews – the legendary Bell Labs director of acoustics research best known as the ‘father of computer music’ – for a frieze article. I didn’t realize then that it would be his final interview; he died three weeks later, at age 84. When I asked him about women composers he admired, he immediately mentioned Laurie Spiegel. Mathews was a key mentor, a guiding force when she was a visiting artist at Bell Labs in the 1970s.
The Expanding Universe was created using a system called GROOVE that Max designed with a co-researcher, F.R. Moore, at Bell Labs in the late 1960s. GROOVE was a clever acronym for ‘Generated Real-Time Output Operations on Voltage-Controlled Equipment’. The system, which utilized a circa 1965 ‘minicomputer’, the DDP-224, took up three entire rooms.
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The GROOVE system at Bell Labs
GROOVE was a hybrid system, which made it possible to interact with a computer in real time to make sounds. Making digital audio on computers back then was an excruciatingly slow process, but controlling analogue oscillators could be done in real time.
Mathews patiently explained the GROOVE system to me last year. ‘Even though I’m not a violinist and I play very poorly, I love to play,’ he said, with characteristic modesty. ‘I wanted to be able to play the computer live. I was impatient. Now, anyone can play the computer live, because it’s fast enough. But in those days, you could use a computer to process the control signals, the key presses for the baton wavings, or any other motions that the performer makes, but you couldn’t use a digital computer in real time to calculate the samples of the sound wave, at 20,000 samples per second.
‘But analogue synthesizers came out by that time, so you could use these control signals to control analogue synthesizers – the Moog synthesizer and things like that,’ he continued. ‘So I had a hybrid system where the control end of it, and the recording end, were digital, and then it got sent down… analogue signals that could control the pitches, and other things. And that’s how GROOVE worked. We found out a lot that way, and got several good pieces.’
Several good pieces – including The Expanding Universe, created at Bell Labs in the mid-1970s. Spiegel took the lumbering, complicated GROOVE system and figured out a way to make it sing. ‘The thing I wanted to listen to just wasn’t in my shelves of LPs – it was The Expanding Universe,” she says. “which then, as a do it yourselfer, I made it myself, which to do I had to learn FORTRAN and write all this code.’
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Laurie Spiegel at Bell Labs, 1970s
Bell Labs, by all accounts, was an incredible place – the research arm of a massive telephone monopoly, and a home to everything from groundbreaking scientific discoveries to avant-garde art. ‘We weren’t possessive or territorial about our algorithms or our software back then,’ Spiegel says. “People shared and helped each other; this was certainly true at Bell Labs. No one thought the software would have any value. They developed C and UNIX and basically gave them away. The value was in the use of it, in the music. We were in it for the music.’
She picked up programming quickly. ‘Max thought I already knew how to program,’ she remembers. ‘He told me many years later that he just assumed I was a programmer when I first came in… Manny Ghent and Ken Thompson [co-creator of UNIX] used to help me. I got a book on FORTRAN and I sat there at my desk at Bell Labs and worked through the entire book doing all of the problems, then I sat with people while they were debugging code and watched what they were doing…it was logical. Logic was probably my favorite branch of math, anyway; I really liked symbolic logic when I first ran across it in high school.’
The Expanding Universe has a tranquil, meditative quality. The repeating motifs in some of the tracks recall the Indian classical music that Spiegel was attuned to at the time. ‘There’s a ‘60s, ‘70s feel,’ she says. “Coming out of the ‘60s – an interest in Asian religions, and Indian and American folk music, and LSD and Zen and everything.’ Her work is often characterized as “slow change music’, along with the French electronic music composer Eliane Radigue and others. But Spiegel’s work tends to be more active, its pace less glacial. ‘Patchwork’, which opens The Expanding Universe, is practically effervescent – a nimble melody that you could snap your fingers to.
‘Unlike many of my friends doing slow change music at the time, I was never that good at getting things to slow down and stand still,’ she says. ‘My stuff tended to always want to move more than everybody else’s and have a clear form, so that there is an overall buildup and that piece does have a clear form.’
She launches into a discussion of algorithms. ‘The algorithm in ‘Patchwork’ does use repeating and looping, but it’s under immediate manual control,’ she explains. In other tracks, such as ‘Pentachrome,’ ‘Music for Dance,’ and ‘The Orient Express’, the algorithms are progressive, more melodic, less contrapuntal.
‘You have melodic lines and harmonic content that continually evolve and change. They come out of processes that progress without repeating – information theory, cellular automata theory, stuff which is generative rather than simply iterative. I am hoping that people will pay attention to the logic of how the melodic and harmonic content evolves during these pieces, and also the interactivity — what I chose to control in real time.”
Her technical explanations take frequent turns into conversations about art, or the timeless beauty of Bach, or the individualistic beauty of John Fahey’s acoustic guitar work. ‘For me, music is very much an emotional and sensual medium; it’s not just logical,’ she says.
Later on, in an email, she recomposes her thoughts. ‘What is really distinctive about The Expanding Universe…is the compositional logic, the logic by which the melodies, harmonies and rhythms evolve and are constructed by the computer algorithms I wrote,’ she writes. ‘For example, if you listen to the way ‘The Orient Express’s melody unfolds and extends itself and how variation is generated within it, to the best of my knowledge it is still completely unique among composed musical works as to musical structure and method of composing, and similar could be said for some of the others.’
Other pieces on The Expanding Universe, such as ‘Old Wave,’ and the expansive 28-minute-long title track, are slower and more introspective – deep pools of sound. The latter track, especially, has a calming, meditative quality.
‘‘There’s a phenomenon called sensory inhibition, where if you get a lot of stuff coming at you, you tend to filter out what is relatively constant,’ she explains. ‘You tend to suppress awareness of that which isn’t changing because the cognitive system is largely a change and threshold detector — a contrast-based detection system. So when you play people music which is really slow, very slowly changing, a lot of the filters of the neural cognitive system just relax and go away and you become sensitive to more and more minute changes and transitions and levels of contrast that you would never have noticed even five minutes earlier in the same piece. And the things that are constant kind of drop out, and you focus on the stuff that isn’t constant. You are hungry for change so you find it on subtler and subtler levels.”
Her thoughts remind me a bit of Eno’s thoughts on how the eyes of frogs connect to how we process music. Eno was inspired by a famous scientific study first published in 1968 titled ‘What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.’ The paper was co-authored by Jerry Lettvin – a good friend and collaborator of Mathews – with Warren McCullough and others.
‘That makes slow change music relaxing; it increases your sensitivity,’ she continues. ‘I think it’s very similar, probably, to the effects of meditation. It can be rationalized either mystically or scientifically.’
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Screen shot of the user interface for Music Mouse: An Intelligent Instrument, originally developed by Laurie Spiegel for the Macintosh in 1985
Mystic and scientific is a good summation of The Expanding Universe. Despite the flood of recent attention for the album, the layers of richness in Spiegel’s work are only beginning to be uncovered. Go beyond The Expanding Universe and delve deep into the essays, the interfaces of Music Mouse, the art made with the oddly-titled VAMPIRE (which stood for ‘Video and Music Program for Interactive Realtime Exploration/Experimentation), Unseen Worlds, Obsolete Systems, Harmonices Mundi, ‘Sediment’, and the stories that Spiegel’s life reveals about Bell Labs, the downtown New York art and music scenes, and more. Her work is vital to our understanding of electronic music and the history of computing over the past few decades, but even more importantly, the music itself has lasting power. Years from now, it will still feel like a mystery.
Ian Saville, 'Magic for Socialism' (2012), performance at Radical Languages, photo by studioFILMLOVE
Contemporary art is often given the task of resuscitation – of poor neighbourhoods, dusty art collections or historical figures – as though it were some kind of fairy dust that can grant magical properties such as glamour, money, sex, creativity and pure life force. In the case of ‘Radical Languages’, a three-day event in Krakow, Poland in early December, the subject who was to have new life breathed into him was the late Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990), the eminent and influential Polish theatre director, theoretician and artist.
‘Radical Languages’ was organized by Cricoteka, a research centre, archive and exhibition space set up in Krakow by Kantor himself in 1980, which will move to a new site in 2013. The event, curated by Maaike Gouwenberg and Joanna Zielińska, was largely performative, marrying Kantor’s interests in performance and visual art, as well as his focus on death and in poor, low forms of culture. The result was an anarchic atmosphere activated ventriloquism, animism and séance, gesturing toward the radical potentials that might emerge from a cranky lower world populated by comedians, spiritualists, musicians, magicians and obsolete objects.
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Nathaniel Mellors, ’7 Ages of Britain Teaser Face’, (2010), photo by studioFILMLOVE
The curators set their scene by organizing an exhibition in Kantor’s former apartment, which featured works by Nathaniel Mellors and Egill Sæbjörnsson alongside a display of Kantor’s objects – theatrical props, divested of their purpose, which became interesting to Kantor due to their status as ‘poor objects’. (Throughout the weekend it struck me that Kantor’s writings on this subject might to fruitfully be considered somewhere alongside Hito Steryl’s writings and works on the ‘poor image’, and it is exactly these kind of sparks and reactivations that such an event is intended to inspire). Mellors presented a short video, 7 Ages of Britain Teaser Face (2010) which saw the face of David Dimbleby (a prominent British current affairs presenter) unhooked from his body, and falling through the air from a great height. The work also featured an animatronic mask of Dimbleby’s face, brought to life by a selection of rigged movements and sounds, the uncanniness of which extended from its high degree of realism: the face seemed to gargle and writhe involuntarily, its eyes rolling, creating the impression of a person near death or suffering a stroke.
Sæbjörnsson’s rather airier installation, Various Projections (2007) animated a selection of objects, including a bucket, a suspended twig and a rock, by way of the light from a projector that cast the objects’ shadows on the wall. Rogue shadows also appeared occasionally, however, conjuring a jaunty bowtie for the twig, say, which created the sense that these objects might have unseen characteristics.
The majority of the programme, however, took place over two evenings at Theatre Bagatela: the first largely tied to language and performance, and the second more tightly focussed on objects. In an opening lecture, Yann Chateigné Tytelman connected Kantor’s ‘aggressive’ use of obsolescence to the ‘dilapidated, mildewed world’ that one finds in the works of artists such as Mike Kelley, Edward Kienholz, Mellors and in the videos of Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, two of which were screened over the course of the two days.
Sebastian Cichoki’s staged performance at Radical Languages, Krakow, photo by studioFILMLOVE
Sebastian Cichocki created a staged interview, …Of love, springing from pain and despondency, agony and death (2012) between a librettist interviewer (who sang her questions) and a ventriloquist’s dummy of Robert Smithson, an object highly dubious in its ability to channel liveliness, allowing Smithson to speak from a state of ruination. The evening also featured an entertaining magic show by ‘socialist magician’ Ian Saville, in which he brought Bertolt Brecht and Karl Marx to life via ventriloquism; a charmingly shambolic séance by Voin de Voin & Ancelle Beauchamp, entitled Calling Kantor for a Pattern. Piece in Three Acts (2012), in which members of the audience – each of whom had been anointed with a gold symbol painted on her head – was encouraged to look for signs from the spirit of Kantor; and a musical performance by God in Hackney (featuring Mellors and Andy Cooke), who freely employed a kind of nonsense syntax in their lyrics, such as ‘Holt Jamara, fat spaniel Lewis like a polecat and vinegar Tom’.
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Voin de Voin & Ancelle Beauchamp, ‘Calling Kantor For a Pattern, Piece in Three Acts’, (2012), photo by Grzegorz Mart
That evening’s highlight, to my mind, was a performance by Michael Portnoy entitled Carrot Jokes and Cognitive Linguistics (2012), on the subject of ‘carrot jokes’ – a kind of nonsense form of unfunny joke – hilarious in performed failure of the form, and I was fully persuaded by the artist that this was a legitimate, well-known concept, though Google now refuses to confirm this. As well as comedically relating different examples of the form to different shapes of carrot, Portnoy brought two members of the ‘humour research community’ into conversation with him – Wladyslaw Chlopicki and Dorota Brzozowska – and though I couldn’t personally verify the ‘legitimacy’ of anything they were saying, it didn’t matter, because what they did say was profoundly interesting, particularly when they discussed the way that each small element of a joke is a tiny gateway to the larger spheres of meaning and association.
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Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, ‘The Death Show’, 2012, photo by studioFILMLOVE
The second evening opened with The Death Show (2012), a performance by Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, who had brought with him a series of boilers that he had used throughout his life, each of which seemed to threaten to kill him somehow with gas or lead poisoning, and which allowed him to ruminate, with these objects playing the parts of ominous villains or relics of romance, on the presence of death in his body. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s Drama Queens (2007) was also screened, a marionette show of famous historical artworks in Beckettian conversation, as was Thys & De Gruyter’s Das Loch (2010), in which hideously painted mannequins with shabbily stuck-on hair ruminated darkly on art and death in computer-generated voices. Zhana Ivanova’s performance Flipsides [1&2] (2012) demonstrated a new alphabet based on useless objects from her house, as well as useless actions – looking for things in the same place twice and so on – which she used to spell out words.
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Nicole Beutler, ’1: Songs’, performance at Radical Languages
The finale of the weekend was the performance, 1: Songs, by Nicole Beutler, performed by Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, an outlandishly beautiful actress. Beutler has taken the words of female characters from the long history of theatre and literature – Medea, Antigone, or Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, say – and transformed them into blistering pop songs (together with DJ and composer Gary Shepherd), from the kittenish to the sexy, from the thrashingly enraged to the heartbroken. These were performed and danced to by Ferragutti, who crawled, gyrated and head-banged her way around the stage with the kind of superstar moxie that would put Rihanna or Lady Gaga to shame. The experience was shattering, powerful and funny. I found myself moved to startled laughter and a few tears by the sheer intoxicated energy of this work: a master class in raising the dead from their graves and making them sing.
Self portrait of Laurie Spiegel, made with an Apple II, c.1980s.
I first found a copy of Laurie Spiegel’s The Expanding Universe some years ago. I had no idea what it sounded like, but the album cover was startling. Every conceivable inch of the cover of the LP was covered with bright white dot-matrix text, over a gradient of bold colour. The text was an interview with Laurie Spiegel – with both the questions and the answers written by Spiegel herself.
‘LS: How would you describe your music?
LS: I wouldn’t. People often ask me to do that, and it seems impossible. Music isn’t verbal or conceptual. I try to get as close as I can to certain qualities, and I’ve found these in a variety of styles. I have also found that they don’t require any known styles.’
Later on in the text, Laurie explains to Laurie:
‘Electronics aren’t a style or a kind of music any more than a piano is. They’re a way of making sounds.’
‘You’re being pretty evasive about what your music is like,’ says Laurie in return.
The Expanding Universe, a tremendous album originally created by Spiegel on a computer system called GROOVE at Bell Labs in the 1970s, was reissued this past autumn by the independent label Unseen Worlds. (The label is named in homage to Laurie Spiegel’s 1991 CD Unseen Worlds.) The reissue has attracted an avalanche of positive attention in the press, in publications ranging from The Wall Street Journal to The Wire.
The original record was expanded into a double album, and the original text-covered LP cover was enlarged into a handsome 24-page CD booklet, complete with extensive track notes, archival photos, block diagrams, and FORTRAN punch cards from Bell Labs circa 1973. For Spiegel, 24 pages wasn’t long enough.
‘I wanted to include a page of source code in the liner notes,’ she says wistfully when I visit her in her loft in downtown Manhattan, New York. For over three decades, Spiegel has lived in the same loft in Tribeca, in a building she shares with Richard Serra, a friend since the 1970s. Her life story spans Bell Labs and The Kitchen, film soundtracks and computer interfaces, folk music and analogue synthesizers, a Tribeca loft and a trailer near the Mississippi.
Every conceivable corner of her cavernous space is lined with things: vintage synthesizers, instruments, ancient computers, art, books, papers, tapes, photographs. The windows are wide open; birds fly in and out. A big black dog dozes on a sofa.
Spiegel seems shy about her sudden appearance in the spotlight. She speaks about her music and life carefully and deliberately, in long, densely packed sentences. She is particular about details, and has a strong grasp of the technical aspects of computers and synthesizers, which becomes increasingly clear the longer you talk to her.
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Laurie Spiegel in her loft in Manhattan, New York, August 2012. (Photograph: Samantha Gore)
Rave about The Expanding Universe, originally released in 1980, and she smiles and begins talking about her Unseen Worlds. She considers Unseen Worlds to be her best work, and hopes more people discover it.
‘The sounds on The Expanding Universe are really, really simple timbrally,’ she says. ‘Not that the electronic sounds per se aren’t beautiful in themselves, but… it’s pretty much raw sawtooth waves, by and large, with filtration and reverb. It was very limited in terms of the amount of control we had.’
One of the first Apple II prototypes – gifted to her in 1978 by the late Jef Raskin, inventor of the Macintosh – is perched on a shelf near the kitchen. It was custom-modified by Don Buchla, the legendary synthesizer inventor, who added more video colours. The artifacts around her loft trace the evolution of synthesizers, and the history of personal computing.
‘’You had this incredible freedom with those early systems,’ she says, gesturing to the Apple II. ‘The assumption was that you should be free to do everything. You should get the source code for every program you work with in case you feel like changing it. The original Apple II had a disassembler in ROM, so you could reverse-engineer even the assembly language that was running… it was assumed that you would get to know the machine and want to change how you used it. Now it’s such a closed system; there are all these layers of software.’
Spiegel takes a wide-angle view of technology; she has intimate firsthand experience with its history that reaches back four decades. (‘When I saw the Apple II,’ she says, ‘I thought, ‘How can you program this? You can’t get your hands into the registers!’ On the DDP-224 at Bell Labs, we had push-button access to all their individual bits.’) She is a prolific writer and, as she terms it, a ‘general purpose thinker’. In her numerous essays over the years, she offers keen insights on the process of making music, thoughts on emerging technologies, and music’s place within a wider context. Most composers are not great essayists, with some notable exceptions. John Cage’s voluminous writings helped to frame and elucidate his groundbreaking approach to sound. Karlheinz Stockhausen had a way with words, offering a more digestible way for listeners to decode his music. Steve Reich and Brian Eno are among the living composers who are as articulate and thoughtful in their words as they are with their music.
Her essays in the 1970s seem almost Utopian in their positivity about the future. ‘To some degree in the ‘70s I emphasized pretty much only the positive, partly because I was extremely excited about it, but partly also to counteract the tremendous hostility, particularly to computers at the time,’ she says. Any discrimination she faced for being a female composer was nothing, she says, compared to the discrimination against the use of computers in music back then.
‘To do music on computers, most people’s initial reaction was, ‘How could you? It’s completely dehumanizing music, synthesizers are already going too far… but computers?’ I didn’t want to say anything negative initially; you’re talking ‘70s, really. After the personal computers came out, that whole fear of computer technology began to just ebb away, because people had them and people loved them. And so much creative work was being done at a grassroots level by incredible numbers of people. Once you had the personal computers and you had Creative Computing magazine, and little festivals where you’d have two people with stripped-down circuit boards housing little digital processors playing dueling computer sounds back and forth, they were lovable. They were lovable little computers, and it really just swept away the big, corporate, military, threatening image that computers had previously had.’
As a child growing up in Chicago in the 1950s, Spiegel was quiet and introverted. Her mother was a weaver; in a way, looms were the proto-computers of their day. Her father gave her a soldering iron at age 9. ‘I would go into my room and read a lot, or play mandolin and guitar secretly by myself,’ she says. ‘I seemed to be really good at spending vast amounts of time alone and not feeling bad about it.’
By the late 1960s, Spiegel had moved to New York and was studying music at Juilliard. An encounter with Morton Subotnick’s Buchla 100 modular synthesizer in his studio on Bleecker Street led to a lifelong interest in analogue synths, and opened doors to the downtown scene.
‘The downtown music scene, which the Buchla immediately got me enmeshed in, it was more like where I came from,’ she says. ‘I came out of folk music, where people get together and they play and there’s no right way or wrong way to do things. You do things the way you do it, the way you want to do it; there’s a sense of freedom…the downtown music scene was sort of like coming home, in a way compared to Juilliard and the Lincoln Center atmosphere.’
Laurie performed at The Kitchen’s first concert, in 1971, organized by Rhys Chatham. The Kitchen was still in its infancy; Woody and Steina Vasulka had recently set up their video studio there. ‘Rhys decided once a week, we would have composers just playing music for each other,’ she says.
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Left to right: Emmanuel Ghent, Ken Knowlton, Laurie Spiegel and Max Mathews. Undated photograph.
Chatham had also invited Emmanuel Ghent and Max Mathews, prominent computer music researchers at Bell Labs, to The Kitchen’s early concerts. At The Kitchen, Ghent played music with computer-controlled electronics. Spiegel soon became a visiting artist at Bell Labs, working with Ghent, Mathews, and other researchers.
In 2011, I paid a visit to Mathews – the legendary Bell Labs director of acoustics research best known as the ‘father of computer music’ – for a frieze article. I didn’t realize then that it would be his final interview; he died three weeks later, at age 84. When I asked him about women composers he admired, he immediately mentioned Laurie Spiegel. Mathews was a key mentor, a guiding force when she was a visiting artist at Bell Labs in the 1970s.
The Expanding Universe was created using a system called GROOVE that Max designed with a co-researcher, F.R. Moore, at Bell Labs in the late 1960s. GROOVE was a clever acronym for ‘Generated Real-Time Output Operations on Voltage-Controlled Equipment’. The system, which utilized a circa 1965 ‘minicomputer’, the DDP-224, took up three entire rooms.
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The GROOVE system at Bell Labs
GROOVE was a hybrid system, which made it possible to interact with a computer in real time to make sounds. Making digital audio on computers back then was an excruciatingly slow process, but controlling analogue oscillators could be done in real time.
Mathews patiently explained the GROOVE system to me last year. ‘Even though I’m not a violinist and I play very poorly, I love to play,’ he said, with characteristic modesty. ‘I wanted to be able to play the computer live. I was impatient. Now, anyone can play the computer live, because it’s fast enough. But in those days, you could use a computer to process the control signals, the key presses for the baton wavings, or any other motions that the performer makes, but you couldn’t use a digital computer in real time to calculate the samples of the sound wave, at 20,000 samples per second.
‘But analogue synthesizers came out by that time, so you could use these control signals to control analogue synthesizers – the Moog synthesizer and things like that,’ he continued. ‘So I had a hybrid system where the control end of it, and the recording end, were digital, and then it got sent down… analogue signals that could control the pitches, and other things. And that’s how GROOVE worked. We found out a lot that way, and got several good pieces.’
Several good pieces – including The Expanding Universe, created at Bell Labs in the mid-1970s. Spiegel took the lumbering, complicated GROOVE system and figured out a way to make it sing. ‘The thing I wanted to listen to just wasn’t in my shelves of LPs – it was The Expanding Universe,” she says. “which then, as a do it yourselfer, I made it myself, which to do I had to learn FORTRAN and write all this code.’
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Laurie Spiegel at Bell Labs, 1970s
Bell Labs, by all accounts, was an incredible place – the research arm of a massive telephone monopoly, and a home to everything from groundbreaking scientific discoveries to avant-garde art. ‘We weren’t possessive or territorial about our algorithms or our software back then,’ Spiegel says. “People shared and helped each other; this was certainly true at Bell Labs. No one thought the software would have any value. They developed C and UNIX and basically gave them away. The value was in the use of it, in the music. We were in it for the music.’
She picked up programming quickly. ‘Max thought I already knew how to program,’ she remembers. ‘He told me many years later that he just assumed I was a programmer when I first came in… Manny Ghent and Ken Thompson [co-creator of UNIX] used to help me. I got a book on FORTRAN and I sat there at my desk at Bell Labs and worked through the entire book doing all of the problems, then I sat with people while they were debugging code and watched what they were doing…it was logical. Logic was probably my favorite branch of math, anyway; I really liked symbolic logic when I first ran across it in high school.’
The Expanding Universe has a tranquil, meditative quality. The repeating motifs in some of the tracks recall the Indian classical music that Spiegel was attuned to at the time. ‘There’s a ‘60s, ‘70s feel,’ she says. “Coming out of the ‘60s – an interest in Asian religions, and Indian and American folk music, and LSD and Zen and everything.’ Her work is often characterized as “slow change music’, along with the French electronic music composer Eliane Radigue and others. But Spiegel’s work tends to be more active, its pace less glacial. ‘Patchwork’, which opens The Expanding Universe, is practically effervescent – a nimble melody that you could snap your fingers to.
‘Unlike many of my friends doing slow change music at the time, I was never that good at getting things to slow down and stand still,’ she says. ‘My stuff tended to always want to move more than everybody else’s and have a clear form, so that there is an overall buildup and that piece does have a clear form.’
She launches into a discussion of algorithms. ‘The algorithm in ‘Patchwork’ does use repeating and looping, but it’s under immediate manual control,’ she explains. In other tracks, such as ‘Pentachrome,’ ‘Music for Dance,’ and ‘The Orient Express’, the algorithms are progressive, more melodic, less contrapuntal.
‘You have melodic lines and harmonic content that continually evolve and change. They come out of processes that progress without repeating – information theory, cellular automata theory, stuff which is generative rather than simply iterative. I am hoping that people will pay attention to the logic of how the melodic and harmonic content evolves during these pieces, and also the interactivity — what I chose to control in real time.”
Her technical explanations take frequent turns into conversations about art, or the timeless beauty of Bach, or the individualistic beauty of John Fahey’s acoustic guitar work. ‘For me, music is very much an emotional and sensual medium; it’s not just logical,’ she says.
Later on, in an email, she recomposes her thoughts. ‘What is really distinctive about The Expanding Universe…is the compositional logic, the logic by which the melodies, harmonies and rhythms evolve and are constructed by the computer algorithms I wrote,’ she writes. ‘For example, if you listen to the way ‘The Orient Express’s melody unfolds and extends itself and how variation is generated within it, to the best of my knowledge it is still completely unique among composed musical works as to musical structure and method of composing, and similar could be said for some of the others.’
Other pieces on The Expanding Universe, such as ‘Old Wave,’ and the expansive 28-minute-long title track, are slower and more introspective – deep pools of sound. The latter track, especially, has a calming, meditative quality.
‘‘There’s a phenomenon called sensory inhibition, where if you get a lot of stuff coming at you, you tend to filter out what is relatively constant,’ she explains. ‘You tend to suppress awareness of that which isn’t changing because the cognitive system is largely a change and threshold detector — a contrast-based detection system. So when you play people music which is really slow, very slowly changing, a lot of the filters of the neural cognitive system just relax and go away and you become sensitive to more and more minute changes and transitions and levels of contrast that you would never have noticed even five minutes earlier in the same piece. And the things that are constant kind of drop out, and you focus on the stuff that isn’t constant. You are hungry for change so you find it on subtler and subtler levels.”
Her thoughts remind me a bit of Eno’s thoughts on how the eyes of frogs connect to how we process music. Eno was inspired by a famous scientific study first published in 1968 titled ‘What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.’ The paper was co-authored by Jerry Lettvin – a good friend and collaborator of Mathews – with Warren McCullough and others.
‘That makes slow change music relaxing; it increases your sensitivity,’ she continues. ‘I think it’s very similar, probably, to the effects of meditation. It can be rationalized either mystically or scientifically.’
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Screen shot of the user interface for Music Mouse: An Intelligent Instrument, originally developed by Laurie Spiegel for the Macintosh in 1985
Mystic and scientific is a good summation of The Expanding Universe. Despite the flood of recent attention for the album, the layers of richness in Spiegel’s work are only beginning to be uncovered. Go beyond The Expanding Universe and delve deep into the essays, the interfaces of Music Mouse, the art made with the oddly-titled VAMPIRE (which stood for ‘Video and Music Program for Interactive Realtime Exploration/Experimentation), Unseen Worlds, Obsolete Systems, Harmonices Mundi, ‘Sediment’, and the stories that Spiegel’s life reveals about Bell Labs, the downtown New York art and music scenes, and more. Her work is vital to our understanding of electronic music and the history of computing over the past few decades, but even more importantly, the music itself has lasting power. Years from now, it will still feel like a mystery.
Ian Saville, 'Magic for Socialism' (2012), performance at Radical Languages, photo by studioFILMLOVE
Contemporary art is often given the task of resuscitation – of poor neighbourhoods, dusty art collections or historical figures – as though it were some kind of fairy dust that can grant magical properties such as glamour, money, sex, creativity and pure life force. In the case of ‘Radical Languages’, a three-day event in Krakow, Poland in early December, the subject who was to have new life breathed into him was the late Tadeusz Kantor (1915–1990), the eminent and influential Polish theatre director, theoretician and artist.
‘Radical Languages’ was organized by Cricoteka, a research centre, archive and exhibition space set up in Krakow by Kantor himself in 1980, which will move to a new site in 2013. The event, curated by Maaike Gouwenberg and Joanna Zielińska, was largely performative, marrying Kantor’s interests in performance and visual art, as well as his focus on death and in poor, low forms of culture. The result was an anarchic atmosphere activated ventriloquism, animism and séance, gesturing toward the radical potentials that might emerge from a cranky lower world populated by comedians, spiritualists, musicians, magicians and obsolete objects.
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Nathaniel Mellors, ‘The 7 Ages of Britain Teaser Face’, (2010), photo by studioFILMLOVE
The curators set their scene by organizing an exhibition in Kantor’s former apartment, which featured works by Nathaniel Mellors and Egill Sæbjörnsson alongside a display of Kantor’s objects – theatrical props, divested of their purpose, which became interesting to Kantor due to their status as ‘poor objects’. (Throughout the weekend it struck me that Kantor’s writings on this subject might to fruitfully be considered somewhere alongside Hito Steryl’s writings and works on the ‘poor image’, and it is exactly these kind of sparks and reactivations that such an event is intended to inspire). Mellors presented a short video, The 7 Ages of Britain Teaser (2010) which saw the face of David Dimbleby (a prominent British current affairs presenter) unhooked from his body, and falling through the air from a great height. The work also featured an animatronic mask of Dimbleby’s face (The 7 Ages of Britain Teaser Face, 2010), brought to life by a selection of rigged movements and sounds, the uncanniness of which extended from its high degree of realism: the face seemed to gargle and writhe involuntarily, its eyes rolling, creating the impression of a person near death or suffering a stroke.
Sæbjörnsson’s rather airier installation, Various Projections (2007) animated a selection of objects, including a bucket, a suspended twig and a rock, by way of the light from a projector that cast the objects’ shadows on the wall. Rogue shadows also appeared occasionally, however, conjuring a jaunty bowtie for the twig, say, which created the sense that these objects might have unseen characteristics.
The majority of the programme, however, took place over two evenings at Theatre Bagatela: the first largely tied to language and performance, and the second more tightly focussed on objects. In an opening lecture, Yann Chateigné Tytelman connected Kantor’s ‘aggressive’ use of obsolescence to the ‘dilapidated, mildewed world’ that one finds in the works of artists such as Mike Kelley, Edward Kienholz, Mellors and in the videos of Jos de Gruyter & Harald Thys, two of which were screened over the course of the two days.
Sebastian Cichoki’s staged performance at Radical Languages, Krakow, photo by studioFILMLOVE
Sebastian Cichocki created a staged interview, …Of love, springing from pain and despondency, agony and death (2012) between a librettist interviewer (who sang her questions) and a ventriloquist’s dummy of Robert Smithson, an object highly dubious in its ability to channel liveliness, allowing Smithson to speak from a state of ruination. The evening also featured an entertaining magic show by ‘socialist magician’ Ian Saville, in which he brought Bertolt Brecht and Karl Marx to life via ventriloquism; a charmingly shambolic séance by Voin de Voin & Ancelle Beauchamp, entitled Calling Kantor for a Pattern. Piece in Three Acts (2012), in which members of the audience – each of whom had been anointed with a gold symbol painted on her head – was encouraged to look for signs from the spirit of Kantor; and a musical performance by God in Hackney (featuring Mellors and Andy Cooke), who freely employed a kind of nonsense syntax in their lyrics, such as ‘Holt Jamara, fat spaniel Lewis like a polecat and vinegar Tom’.
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Voin de Voin & Ancelle Beauchamp, ‘Calling Kantor For a Pattern, Piece in Three Acts’, (2012), photo by Grzegorz Mart
That evening’s highlight, to my mind, was a performance by Michael Portnoy entitled Carrot Jokes and Cognitive Linguistics (2012), on the subject of ‘carrot jokes’ – a kind of nonsense form of unfunny joke – hilarious in performed failure of the form, and I was fully persuaded by the artist that this was a legitimate, well-known concept, though Google now refuses to confirm this. As well as comedically relating different examples of the form to different shapes of carrot, Portnoy brought two members of the ‘humour research community’ into conversation with him – Wladyslaw Chlopicki and Dorota Brzozowska – and though I couldn’t personally verify the ‘legitimacy’ of anything they were saying, it didn’t matter, because what they did say was profoundly interesting, particularly when they discussed the way that each small element of a joke is a tiny gateway to the larger spheres of meaning and association.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, ‘The Death Show’, 2012, photo by studioFILMLOVE
The second evening opened with The Death Show (2012), a performance by Styrmir Örn Guðmundsson, who had brought with him a series of boilers that he had used throughout his life, each of which seemed to threaten to kill him somehow with gas or lead poisoning, and which allowed him to ruminate, with these objects playing the parts of ominous villains or relics of romance, on the presence of death in his body. Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset’s Drama Queens (2007) was also screened, a marionette show of famous historical artworks in Beckettian conversation, as was Thys & De Gruyter’s Das Loch (2010), in which hideously painted mannequins with shabbily stuck-on hair ruminated darkly on art and death in computer-generated voices. Zhana Ivanova’s performance Flipsides [1&2] (2012) demonstrated a new alphabet based on useless objects from her house, as well as useless actions – looking for things in the same place twice and so on – which she used to spell out words.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Nicole Beutler, ’1: Songs’, performance at Radical Languages
The finale of the weekend was the performance, 1: Songs, by Nicole Beutler, performed by Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti, an outlandishly beautiful actress. Beutler has taken the words of female characters from the long history of theatre and literature – Medea, Antigone, or Sarah Kane’s 4.48 Psychosis, say – and transformed them into blistering pop songs (together with DJ and composer Gary Shepherd), from the kittenish to the sexy, from the thrashingly enraged to the heartbroken. These were performed and danced to by Ferragutti, who crawled, gyrated and head-banged her way around the stage with the kind of superstar moxie that would put Rihanna or Lady Gaga to shame. The experience was shattering, powerful and funny. I found myself moved to startled laughter and a few tears by the sheer intoxicated energy of this work: a master class in raising the dead from their graves and making them sing.
Continuing our series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
Sean O’Tooleis a writer and co-editor of CityScapes, a critical journal for urban enquiry. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
2012: A Year of Mountains
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Etel Adnan, Untitled (Beirut), 2010, oil on canvas, 24×30cm
Where I live, there is a large mountain: it dwarves the high-rise ghettoes and retro skyscrapers which have taken root on the windy slopes of Table Mountain. I don’t recall seeing many works in 2012 that consciously noticed this craggy natural wonder. Julia Clark’s solo exhibition ‘Booty’ at Whatiftheworld / Gallery included a vintage postcard aggregated into one of her collecting-as-drawing collages. Field Notes from Solitude Island/ No Place, her montage of differently hued blues on a coastal map, delivered what would have been the perfect title for painter Carl Becker and photographer Monique Pelser’s exhibition ‘Our Land’ at the Stellenbosch University Art Gallery. A few years ago, both these artists independently set out to investigate the contemporary sites of JH Pierneef’s constructed modernist pastorals from the late 1920s. In search of something miraculous, the artists discovered very little: sun, dust, ennui, creeping urbanity, the subterfuge of an accomplished painter whose singular vistas were the outcome of composite descriptions, and – of interest to me – unyielding stony mountains.
Last year, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with artist Jacques Coetzer. In 2012, in search of some more miraculous, I visited Japan, where, nearly two centuries ago, Hokusai described his much-quoted 36 views of Mount Fuji. Unlike Bas Jan Ader, whose name I repeatedly heard mentioned as a riposte to the ritual parade of good taste and gilded luxury in yet another bubble year, I decided to cycle – not sail – to Japan’s ‘mighty volcano’, as Lafcadio Hearn once described the nearly symmetrical mountain. In the four days it took me to slowly pedal up to the mountain’s northwestern base from Hamamatsu, where I sighted Fuji for the first time – on a billboard – I never once saw Fuji not obscured by clouds. Recounting his 1898 trip, Hearn similarly complained of a ‘uniformly grey sky’ that rendered Fuji ‘always invisible’. Perhaps the weather was different during Hokusai’s time? The lesson: artists are not cartographers.
In Kassel, which I visited after a detour up the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland – to be rewarded with a kitschy mural depicting Caspar David Friedrich’s solitary wanderer – I learnt that Etel Adnan considers Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, the most important person she has ever met. The wall text accompanying Adnan’s dOCUMENTA 13 display mumbled something about Cezanne, who repeatedly painted Sainte-Victoire Mountain in Aix-en-Provence. Recently I spotted a really bad knock-off of Pierneef’s pointillist study of the Swartberg Pass, a fabled route through the Swartberg mountains northeast of Cape Town. It made me again appreciate the difficulty recording stone with paint or pencil. Am I being un-contemporary? Perhaps. But Adnan showed me that it is okay to think about mountains, even idealise them. They are their own kind of miraculous.
I haven’t been to Koh-e Bâbâ, a mountain range in Afghanistan. Michael Rakowitz may have been. What Dust Will Rise? (2012), his elegant dOCUMENTA 13 installation, suggested he has: the display included rubble from the demolished Buddhas of Bamiyan, patiently carved into cliffs in the mountainous Ḥazārajāt region. The habit of artists to exhibit their collections rarely prompts me to say, ‘Gee whizz!’ Rakowitz’s sombre meditation on architecture, printed books, censorship, idolatry and memory (also the failure thereof) made me ditch Karlsaue Park as a bad idea. I returned to the Fridericianum for a second time, happy to silently stare at his gift of stones.
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Robert Griffiths Hodgins, Clem, 1983, oil on board, 60 × 79cm. Courtesy: Strauss & Co, Cape Town
Yes, there were other highlights. They included: Chad Rossouw’s smart autopsy of white nostalgia in his solo exhibition ‘A History of Failure’ at Brundyn + Gonsalves (in which he concocted a fake historical account about a dirigible airship named De la Rey); a handful of Zander Blom’s over many experiments in abstract painting from his solo show at Stevenson; James Webb’s use of Japanese ukiyoe prints, a Henry Moore bronze and commissioned installation by Stephen Hobbs to supplement his semi-survey ‘MMXII’ at the Johannesburg Art Gallery; the appearance at auction in Cape Town of an agreeably unflattering portrait of Clement Greenberg painted in 1983 by the crypto-abstractionist Robert Hodgins; also Barend la Grange and Louis Mabokela’s joint non-verbal response (defacement) of Brett Murray’s painting The Spear (2012), a flaccid work about a flaccid subject. But, ultimately, nothing I saw really approached the rigorous poetry of Rakowitz’s commissioned installation or Adnan’s unvarnished total engagement with the world. Yes, their works whispered, the world still rewards believing in the miraculous.
A speculative postscript: I am looking forward to Burundi-born sculptor and painter Serge Alain Nitegeka’s solo show ‘Black Cargo’ at Stevenson. Although sometimes presented as a couch-friendly modernist by his gallery, Nitegeka’s jet-black installations – physical infrastructure that speak of trafficking and trade – interrupt easy passage through gallery spaces, sort of like Ryan Gander’s wind, but not. The physical barriers are key. Kendell Geers is the subject of a career retrospective at Haus der Kunst in Munich. His recent Goodman show suggests that his defining period has now passed. Emerging during South Africa’s unsettled transition, his 1990s work skilfully blended danger and argument and insult and plagiarism to produce something almost sui generis. More speculatively: Elvira Dyangani Ose, the Tate curator appointed to oversee the third edition of the stalled Lubumbashi Biennale, has some big promises to deliver on. Speaking at the Joburg Art Fair, she mooted plans mooted plans to stretch this event in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo over the entire year. Lastly, a sombre yet hopeful speculation: with troubles continuing in Mali, will we see a 10th edition of the much-loved, always enervating pan-African photo biennial, Bamako Encounters? Fingers crossed.
Jeremy Deller’s Beyond the White Walls (2012) at art:concept, Paris– the artist’s articulate meta-commentary on the projects he’s done outside of galleries or museums
“Set-up” at Galerie Jousse Enterprise, Paris– a tightly-curated group show by Stephen Hepworth that provided one possible view of where photography is going: including Michele Abeles, Kate Costello, Sam Falls, Corin Hewitt, Matt Lipps and Elisa Sighicelli
TV
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. Breaking Bad
Lena Dunham’s Girls (more real than reality tv), Catfish the TV show (what is the authentic self in the age of digital culture?), Breaking Bad Season 5 “Dead Freight” (the train heist episode), *Mad Men* Season 5 “The Other Woman” (the Jaguar episode)
Tig Notaro’s morbidly hilarious stand-up comedy routine after being diagnosed with cancer, as presented on This American Life’s Episdoe 476, ‘What Doesn’t Kill You’ http://www.thisamericanlife.org/contributors/tig-notaro
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Rimini Protokoll, Lagos Business Angels, Hebbel Theater, Berlin
Jerome Bel’s Disabled Theater (2012) at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel
Rimini Protokoll’s Lagos Business Angels (2012) at the Hebbel Theater, Berlin– untrained actors and entrepreneurs from Nigeria and Germany attempt to convince an audience to invest in their businesses through a series of 10-minute presentations. http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project_5410.html
Books
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Luigi Ghirri, Kodachrome
Sally Tallantis Artistic Director of Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art.
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Jérôme Bel, Disabled Theater, 2012, performance documentation. Photograph: Roman März
• Jérôme Bel, Disabled Theater, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel
This extraordinary performance surprised and challenged me in ways that I didn’t expect – I was moved and when we left the theatre we were all stunned and speechless for a moment. This was a truly memorable moment in a brilliant programme.
• Manifesta 9, ‘The Deep of the Modern’, Genk
The layering of heritage, historic works and work by contemporary artist in the post-industrial setting of Genk was a brilliant lesson on coal and curating by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Dawn Ades and Katerina Gregos.
• Einstein on the Beach, Robert Wilson and Phillip Glass, Barbican, London
It was amazing to finally have the opportunity to see this iconic work performed in London after having only ever seen documentation.
• Helen Marten, ‘Plank Salad’, Chisenhale Gallery, London
Helen Marten’s first solo show in the UK assembled a complex range of work with wit and precision. Its exciting to see her use the space with such confidence and panache and I am looking forward to seeing more of her work.
• Klaus Weber, ‘If you leave me I’m not coming and Already There!’, Nottingham Contemporary
This show right at the beginning of 2012 comprised a solo exhibition of work by Klaus Weber and an exhibition of over 200 objects and artworks curated by him. It was an ambitious and encyclopeadic endeavour and provided a wild glimpse into his thinking and practice.
• Glasgow International Festival
Its always inspiring to visit Glasgow. Memorable works by Corin Sworn, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Charlotte Prodger, Rosalind Nashashibi and of course Jeremy Deller’s bouncy Stonehenge.
Things I am looking forward to next year:
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• Homeworks VI, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (Spring 2013)
• Sharjah Biennial 11, United Arab Emirates curated by Yuko Hasegawa (13 – 17 March)
• Manchester International Festival (4 – 21 July)
Mark Beasleyis a writer and curator at the visual arts performance biennial Performa, New York. His first LP with the group Big legs will be released on Junior Aspirin Records in Spring 2013.
My reading in 2012 was largely from the past but the present struck me sharply with John Menick’s, portrait of Mexico City, *A Report on the City*, 2012, published by dOCUMENTA (13). Moving from the quest to locate a VHS snuff movie through hypochondria to tales of ‘Mad Travelling’ each of its six essays tackle, via some very fine and lightly sprung prose, the curious and compelling facts of city life.
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John Menick, A Report on the City
With regard to public lectures, and its lowly cousin hi-falutin’ chat, there have been a number of presentations that have provided substantial brain food. Chiefly Sukhdev Sandhu’s Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University has, over time, hosted a broad range of brilliant minds from Mark Fisher to Mark Pilkington, from Asiatica to off-kilter Englishness. Simon Critchley’s On Truth (and Lies) at Brooklyn Academy of Music presented the facts and otherwise of literary relations to the truth. In quick succession I caught inspiring lectures – come victory laps –by dOCUMENTA (13) curators and organizers Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chuz Martinez.
Anthony Huberman’s Artist’s Institute gallery come schoolhouse continues to be an inspiration. The normative relations of ‘an education in the arts’ – the professor and the schooled – is ditched in favor of direct meditative learning: objects, art works and artists are present in the classroom. Summer Guthery*’s sporadic *Canal Series in an office suite on Canal (New York) keeps the flame of idiosyncratic and savvy programming alive.
Two documentaries recognized two great wordsmiths, BBC4s *Evidently… John Cooper Clarke* provided an overarching insight into the part poet, part singer, part comic, life long inspiration and very thin man Cooper Clarke. Heavenly Films’ Lawrence of Belgravia– technically released at the end of 2011 but screened in New York in 2012 – is a long overdue recognition of Lawrence, the mononamed frontman of Felt, Denim and Go Kart Mozart: perhaps the greatest popstar Britain never had.
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Bedwyr Williams, The Hill Farmer, 2011, c-type print on DuroSpec
Four exhibitions: Trisha Donnelly’s ‘Artist’s Choice’ at MoMA married the inadvertently psychedelic chip-board mapping with hummingbird’s and paintings by Odilon Redon: a curious and compelling mix. Nicola Tyson’s photographs ‘Bowie Night at Billy’s Club London, 1978’ at White Column’s gallery revealed the birth and genesis of a New Romantic look and sound that continued with the Blitz Club and exploding into the popular consciousness of the eighties, sweeping hair and everything else before it aside. The Philadelphia Museum’s‘Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp’ curated by Carlos Basualdo and Phillipe Parreno was a tour de force in curating as seductive theater. Experienced from a distance – via the publication! – Bedwyr William’s ‘My Bad’ at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, has managed to transplant his exceptional writing and ear for the satiric into – as David Robbins would have it – the concrete comedy of objects.
In the realms of theater David Levine’s Habit organized by PS122 was an engagingly nervy and durational work stuck on repeat. Meanwhile at the movies Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, his first film in thirteen years, delivered some of the most memorable images of the year from a jade-green suited, red bearded, finger and flower eating goblin apparition to latex-clad-cyber-sex-martial-arts and talking limo’s. On the small screen E4’sMisfit’s forth series continues to poke at the wtf gland. Parker Posey’s cameo in Louis CK ‘s third season of Louie should also be credited.
A personal highlight of 2012 was to perform in China with the group Big Legs. Junior Aspirin Records’ ‘Junior Aspirin Life Size Model’ gigs in Heihe, on the Black Dragon River and Beijing brought together label fixtures Socrates that Practices Music, God in Hackney, Soul Punch and newer ones in a two hour-nonstop gig before five thousand rattle-waving locals, beneath a vast lighting rig and firework display of which Jay-Z would have approved.
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Mike Kelley in Venice, 1988, Photograph: Sidney Felson
In January we lost Mike Kelley, which will make viewing his Stedelijk retrospective in Amsterdam (on until April 1) bittersweet. Working with Mike on his Judson Church Day is Done show for Performa 09 and co-curating the Fantastic World music festival at Gramercy Theater with him was a privilege and an education. Over the past year I’ve been re-reading his texts, watching his films and listening to his music. He seems more present to me than ever.
Gabriela Jaureguiis a writer, critic and editor. She is the author of Controlled Decay (Akashic, 2008) and lives and works in Mexico City.
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Teresa Margolles, ‘La Promesa’, installation view at MUAC, Mexico City
Perhaps it is indeed the end of an era, as the Mayans say. Looking forward to the new one! In the meantime, here’s some of what made 2012 into a good ending:
Watching Seun Kuti dance and morph along with his Egypt 80 Shukar Collective at Cine Plaza in Mexico City.
The Argentine writer César Aira’s regenerative prose – any and all of it – this year it’s *_El Mármol_ (La bestia equilátera).
Okkyung Lee’s cello explosion at el nicho aural festival in Mexico City in May.
A spring full of marches and protests, the blossoming of a youth movement of resistance in Mexico.
Eduardo Terrazas’ double whammie in Mexico City: at Casa Barragán and Proyectos Monclova (new location).
Patti Smith’s concert under a full moon at the Anahuacalli Museum, Mexico City.
Lizzy Fitch’s ‘Concrete U’ at New Galerie, Paris.
Re-re-re-reading The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (even though it’s not 2012, I kept coming back to them this year, as I did The Stories of John Cheever, Picador 2009 and Vintage, 2000 respectively).
Oskar Fischinger’s ‘Space Light Art’ at the Whitney Museum, New York.
Teresa Margolles’ harrowing exhibition ‘La Promesa’ (The Promise) at the Museo Unversitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City.
The theatrical release of Matias Meyer’s Los últimos cristeros (The Last Christeros, 2011).
Abraham Cruzvillegas’ Monkey self and family portraits at kurimanzutto gallery, Mexico City (‘Nuestra imagen actual, autorrretratos recientes’ ‘Our Current Imagination: Recent Self-Portraits).
The release of Mexican duo Soledad’s debut 12” Fe (on Vale Vergas Discos).
Colm Tóibin’s lecture at the Claustro de Sor Juana University in Mexico City.
Marihuana voted legal in Colorado and Washington states shining a hope for Mexico’s future and a possible end to its so-called war on drugs.
Spiritualized’s new release Sweet Heart Sweet Light (on Double Six Records).
Palestine granted UN observer state status.
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Carlos Cruz-Diez, Physichromie 174, 1965, cardboard, casein, cellulose acetate inserts, mounted on plywood, 62 × 51.4 × 4.6 cm
And in the new year:
I am excited about the retrospective of the French Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, ‘Color in Space and Time’ at MUAC (until February 24)
The first in a series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
**Anthony Huberman* is a curator and writer. He is the director of The Artist’s Institute in New York, USA and teaches at Hunter College.
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Lutz Bacher, The Book of Sand, 2010-12, 25 tons of sand, dimensions variable
PICKS OF 2012
EXHIBITIONS:
• ‘Steve McQueen’ at The Art Institute, Chicago (until January 6). I think he’s the Bruce Nauman of my generation, but even more perverted.
• ‘Locus Solus’ at the Reina Sofía, Madrid. Finally, I got my chance to really get to know the world of Raymond Roussel.
• ‘In the Still Epiphany’ at the Pulitzer Foundation, St. Louis. Curated by the artist Gedi Sibony, this exhibition taught me everything about how to hold something in place.
• Lutz Bacher at Alex Zachary Peter Currie, New York and at the Whitney Biennial. One involved 25 tons of sand filling an Upper East Side apartment, and the other thousands of baseballs filling the entire 4th floor of a major art museum (Baseballs II, 2011-2012). Both also included a video called What Are You Thinking? (2011) which simply faded from white to black and back again, with a heart-breaking soundtrack. Enough said?
• The idea of a “brain” made up not of words or statements, but of objects. As in: the semi-circular gallery in the Fridericianum that was the heart of dOCUMENTA (13), and the white-tiled room at the centre of Rosemarie’s Trockel’s ‘A Cosmos’ at the New Museum, New York (until January 20)
• Some great machines: Thomas Bayrle‘s car engines at dOCUMENTA (13), Trisha Donnelly‘s selection of microchip diagrams in MoMA‘s collection, and Bruno Gironcoli‘s possibly alien machines at Mamco, Geneva.
INSTITUTIONS:
• Raven Row. But then again, Raven Row is to the art world what Jon Stewart is to TV – there is no suspense, because you know they’ll win every year. Another extraordinary year at Raven Row.
• Yale Union. A newcomer – Saul Steinberg, Marianne Wex, Ian Hamilton Finlay, George Kuchar, Susan Howe… a brilliant program run by brilliant people in Portland, Oregon.
PEOPLE:
• David Weiss, we miss you.
• Julian Assange, we support you.
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Thomas Bayrle, Frankfurter Tapete, 1980, offset print on paper, wall paper (detail)
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL IN 2013
ALLTHAT IS BELGIAN OR SEMI-BELGIAN:
• Thomas Bayrle at Wiels, Brussels (February 9 – May 12)
• Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter at MuKHA, Antwerp (February 8 – May 19)
• Peter Wächtler, based in Brussels, having his first show in New York at Ludlow 38 (opens January 20)
• Lucy McKenzie, also based in Brussels, and her show at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam (April 20 – September 20)
• Finally getting to visit the Antoine Wiertz Museum, Brussels
Dan Foxis senior editor of frieze and is based in New York, USA.
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Pierre Huyghe, Untitled, 2011–2, Karlsaue Park, dOCUMENTA (13)
The numerologically credulous amongst you will be aware that the 5125-year cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is due to come to an apocalyptic close on 21 December 2012. This is when the Earth collides with the planet Nibiru and suffers a catastrophic geomagnetic reversal of the North and South Poles. In preparation for the arrival of the final day of the 13th b’ak’tun, I am dispensing with the conventional decimal-based ranking system for my highlights of 2012, and will instead use what scholars of eschatology have calculated to be a New Number Order that will come into effect following the appearance of Kisin, Mayan God of Death, and the radical distortion of linear time caused by the supermassive black hole due to open up in the centre of the galaxy around lunchtime on Christmas Day. In the event that Armageddon does not arrive before the holiday sales start, the following list also includes my reasons to be cheerful for 2013, although a fat lot of good they’ll do you as Quetzalcoatl rips you limb-from-limb amidst the scorched ruins of civilization.
1,472,657: dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel. If you had asked me in early June what my exhibition highlight of 2012 was, I might well have predicted a hands-down win for dOCUMENTA (13). Looking back, I suspect I was tIPSY oN tHE kOOL-aID oF cRITICAL pRAISE that had pinned Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s edition of the quintennial mega-show for gongs at the Academy Awards, Nobel Prize and London 2012 Olympics. Which isn’t to say that dOCUMENTA (13) didn’t feature intelligent and thought-provoking passages, but it tested my patience with the rhetorics and personality cults of curating, and as the year wore on, left me with feelings of increasing alienation from the purpose of super-sized exhibitions.
Six months on from visiting Kassel, my memory of dOCUMENTA (13) is made up of only fragments and details; small working parts of a bigger engine motoring curatorial ideas that were often hard to fathom. Clearest of these memories is a walk I took one afternoon that started with Pierre Huyghe‘s Untitled interzone in the middle of the orderly Karlsaue park, a ghostly patch of mud and wild plants populated by bees and a pink-legged dog. From there I walked on to Raimundas Malasauskas and Marcos Lutyen‘s Hypnotic Show; 30 blissful minutes spent under hypnosis, the ‘art work’ appearing in my mind’s eye. My stroll finished up at the Tino Sehgal piece where, in a blacked-out room, a troupe of dancers enchanted the dark with call-and-response cries, anecdotes about the financial precarity of the creative life, and an a cappella version of The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. These experiences were each intimate, small-scale, tinted by humour, pleasure, imagination.
5: ‘Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly’, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Speaking of shows that are intimate, small-scale, and tinted by humour, pleasure and imagination, how about Trisha Donnelly’s ‘Artist Choice’? (This beat to the punch my other favourite MoMA show this year, ‘Century of the Child: Growing By Design 1900–2000’ a fascinating look at how artists and designers have shaped children’s learning and play.) Donnelly’s inventive and often surprising selections from the museum’s art and design collection were spread across three rooms, packing together like cosmic sardines works such as Odilon Redon and Marsden Hartley paintings, Eliot Porter bird photographs, Walter Pichler drawings, pyramidal air-ionizers, Polaroid sunglasses, a wheelchair and psychedelic-coloured diagrams of silicon microprocessors.
2,389,524: Yale Union, Portland, Oregon. Yale Union’s exhibition ‘Steinberg, Saul. The New Yorker. New York, 1945–2000. (Harold, William, Robert, Tina, David, Eds.)’, organized by Robert Snowden and Scott Ponik, looked at Steinberg’s work for The New Yorker, attentive to the questions his career raises about how art circulates in society. (I wrote about it here if you’ve the inclination to find out more.) The existence of this non-profit space in the Pacific Northwest is also a reason to be cheerful in 2013.
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Saul Steinberg, cover illustration for The New Yorker, October 1969
11: Jonas Mekas. Two retrospectives in 2012 – one at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the other at London’s Serpentine Gallery – reminded us not only of the extraordinary historical record Mekas’ film diaries provide of artistic life in New York across six decades, but how the lifeblood of art and culture depends upon communities of friends, family and like minds; not global gallery brands, market logic and the tinnitus din of PR.
79,672: 2012 Whitney Biennial. Particularly LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs, Wu Tsang’sGREENROOM installation, Charles Atlas and Michael Clark’s performance, and the films of Luther Price, Michael Robinson and Laida Lertxundi. And whilst we’re talking about the Whitney Museum, a cheery prospect for early next year is ‘Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective,’ which arrives there from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Leapfrogging ahead, the 2014 Whitney promises to be something to be cheerful about given the recent appointment of Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms and Michelle Grabner as the show’s curators. But before that, in biennial land, I’ve high hopes for the 2013 Carnegie International, put together by Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski.
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Frank Ocean; photograph Nabil Elderkin
9: New music. I didn’t have many no-risk-disks this year, but amongst them were Frank Ocean’sOrange (if R’n’B were to have its own prog rock moment, then surely it’s Ocean’s track ‘Pyramids’ although the return in 2012 of R. Kelly’s lunatic musical soap opera Trapped in the Closet is a close contender); Jai Paul’s single Jasmine, which sounds like a hazy memory of Prince, Detroit techno and too many late nights; Third Mouth by Alexander Tucker, a vision of modern pastoral psychedelia; the drone dub of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s LP Timon Imok Manta and the ever-inventive C Spencer Yeh’s album-length foray into pop songwriting, Transitions. One album I’m particularly looking forward to in early 2012 is Museum of Loneliness, a spoken word LP by filmmaker and writer Chris Petit (director of Radio On and author of essential London novel Robinson), released by London-based label Test Centre as part of a new series of albums made with writers.
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Laurie Spiegel in her home studio, circa 1976. Photo: Lewis Forsdale
431: Old music. Reissues on highest rotation for me were Can’sLost Tapes, and the compilation Personal Space: Electronic Soul 1974–84. Can need no introduction, but Personal Space salvages obscure soul and funk tracks crafted from rudimentary synthesizers and drum machines, creating some astonishing, spaced-out dance music. (Check out Deborah Washington’s ‘Shortest Lady’ or Spontaneous Overflow’s ‘All About Money’, for instance.) Laurie Spiegel’sThe Expanding Universe (originally released in 1980) acquainted me with the work of one of the female pioneers of electronic composition, whilst the re-release of the 1985 album Zummo with an X, by Peter Zummo, recorded with Arthur Russell, Rik Albani and Bill Ruyle, was a slow, beautiful reminder of how fertile New York’s downtown music scene was in the 1980s. (The piece ‘Lateral Pass’ was originally composed for the Trisha Brown Dance Company.) I was also happy to see a re-release for Midnight Cleaners (1982) by Cleaners from Venus, an overdue nod to Martin Newell, the one-man music scene of downtown Wivenhoe, rural Essex.
8999: Other music. In live performance, the opportunity to see Pauline Oliveros play in New York, at her 80th birthday concert at ISSUE Project Room in May, was a special one. So too was Darmstadt’s 8th annual performance of Terry Riley’s In C at Public Assembly, New York; a joyous, raucous and spirited rendition of Riley’s landmark work of 20th century art, performed by around 20 key players from New York’s new music scenes, including David Grubbs, David van Teigham, Nick Hallett, Zach Layton, Kid Millions and Alex Waterman. (Waterman’s Vidas Perfectas a new Spanish language production of Robert Ashley’s 1983 opera Perfect Lives, continued to evolve in 2012, with a performance at London’s Serpentine Pavilion.)
For music makers, Sufi Plus Ins released this year and developed by DJ Rupture (aka Jace Clayton) with Bill Bowen, Rosten Woo, Hassan Wargui, Maggie Schmitt and Juan Alcon Duran deserves a nod for blowing open the Western-centric mindset of most music software interfaces.
As for books about music in 2012, Tam Tam Books’ English translation (by Paul Knobloch) of Gilles Verlant’s biography of Serge Gainsbourg, Gainsbourg: The Biography was a page-turner. Once I finally get around to reading David Byrne’sHow Music Works– a book I’ve been excited to read since it came out in September – I’m looking forward to the publication early next year of Bob Stanley’s presumably epic Do You Believe in Magic? A Complete History of Pop.
5499: David Levine, Habit. Here is the long story: but the short version is: realist play performed on loop, eight hours a day – a meditation on the daily grind of creative life, and habituated emotional behaviour. In 2012 Levine also co-authored, with Alix Rule, the essay ‘International Art English’ for brave new pioneers of digital publishing Triple Canopy. If this essay makes even one iota of difference in pushing back against all that is dreary, pompous, vacuous, and downright grammatically whack in art writing, press releases and museum speak, then Levine, Rule and Triple Canopy will have done us a service.
42: W.A.G.E. Survey results: An onerous task, but someone had to do it. This year saw the release of results from a survey undertaken by Working Artists and the Greater Economy into the economic experiences of 600 visual and performance artists who, between 2005 and 2010, worked with museums and non-profits in New York City. The survey asked questions about artist fees, honorariums, payment of expenses, shipping and production costs. Read the analytics, presented in graphic poster form here.
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Graphic from the W.A.G.E survey
74,903: Art in print. Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, describes The Vorrh by Brian Catling as ‘one of the most original and stunning works of fantasy that it has ever been my privilege to read.’ With this novel, sculptor and performance artist Catling has written a dizzyingly vast work of imagination, but it’s thankfully not of the dragons and dwarves variety of fantasy. Rather, the intoxicating language of The Vorrh– like breathing thick tropical air – is in the tradition of surrealist fiction (its title is borrowed from Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, 1910), and closer to the kitchen sink sci-fi of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) than Game of Thrones. I’m not much of a comics fan, but the collection of Dal Tokyo comic strips by artist Gary Panter from the early ‘80s LA Reader, which imagines a future Mars colonized by workers from Japan and Texas, was wonderfully mind-frying. Ridinghouse brought us The Space Between, a collection of writings on art by novelist, critic and frieze contributor Michael Bracewell– long overdue, and essential reading. Also, if anyone wants to buy me for Christmas a copy of O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica, collecting together the collages and works on paper of Bay Area artist Jess, I wouldn’t say no.
Significant Objects spun from a project by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, isn’t exactly an art book, but it has much to say about how we ascribe value to objects. Trinkets, tchotchkes and other unwanted second-hand flotsam and jetsam were purchased for a few dollars and auctioned on eBay, each item paired with a short fictional text by a writer about the object’s provenance. The experiment looked at how each story affected the amount people were prepared to pay for an item. A gold rabbit-shaped candle, for instance, bought for $3, sold for $112.50. It came with a story by Neil LaBute about a man – who may or may not be on the edge of a nervous breakdown – convinced the candle contains a real bunny made from real gold. A kitsch Russian figurine, missing its glass case, that was purchased for $3 went for a whopping $193.50. This crudely made little ornament was gilded with the legend of St. Vralkomir, as unreliably recounted by Doug Dorst. All proceeds were donated to the charity Girls Write Now and contributors included Matthew de Abaitua, Nicholson Baker, Matthew Battles, Meg Cabot, Patrick Cates, Willliam Gibson, Ben Greenman, Jason Grote, Shiela Heti, Wayne Koestenbaum, Shelley Jackson, Jonathan Lethem, Mimi Lipson, Tom McCarthy, Lydia Millet, Annie Nocenti, Jenny Offill, Gary Panter, Ed Park, James Parker, Padgett Powell, Bruce Sterling, Luc Sante, David Shields, Colleen Werthmann, Colson Whitehead, Cintra Wilson and Douglas Wolk. You want insight into the psychology of collecting? Read this.
∞: Sandy. The destructive impact of the super-storm on the Caribbean and east coast was no highlight of 2012, but it was a reminder that the view art provides on life is a parallax view; that there are crucial degrees of difference between what we think is important to keep in the frame, and what’s really essential.
Risks to sentiment but I like smaller, less shiny, set ups for looking. These places provide, startling, indeed impudent, new slants. Artist’s Institute, Soloway, Cleopatras. All are exuberant. As is Triple Canopy and Artists Space – Books and Talks. We should be scrawling their names on subway walls. Lucie Fontaine at Marianne Boesky as a two-week seance of an exhibition gave hope. “Views from a Volcano” on the early days at The Kitchen was a fascinating look back. A few quick trips to the west coast left me enthused, open and receptive – Math Bass’s performance Brutal Set and Vishal Jugdeo’sGoods Carrier both at the Hammer and Land Art at MOCA made the trip. In the Pacific Northwest, the curatorial undertakings at Yale Union are teaching the rest of us a thing or two about the firmness of opinion and the clarity of exposition. And, The Documenta. Sweeping statements miss the crumbs. Michael Portnoy’s27 Gnosis was a highlight, a twisted carnival gameshow in a dirt mound led down a path by Michael and Ieva Miseviciute, Korbian Agnier’s apples stole breath and Kadar Attia’s colonial flotsam has been like philosophical flypaper. I feel lucky to have seen each of these and others.
I am looking forward to Performa 2013 (November 1-24) in all its ambitions and complications.
Quinn Latimeris the author of Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012) and the forthcoming Describe This Distance , which examines the work of Sarah Lucas, as well as shame, palindromes, passivity, fertility statuary, Antonin Artaud, Diego Rivera, and Susan Sontag.
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Heike-Karin Föll, ‘n° 25 – n° 89 (the delphinium version), installation view at Elaine MGK, Basel.
BEST OF 2012 MIXTAPE (EXTENDEDVERSION)
1. Heike-Karin Föll / ‘n° 25 – n° 89 (the delphinium version),’ Elaine MGK, Basel, Switzerland http://www.elaine-mgk.ch/index.php?/project/n-25—-n-89-the-delphinium-version/
2. Cevdet Erek / Room of Rhythms 1, 2010–2012, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, and ‘Week’ (2012) at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
3. Moyra Davey / The Wet and the Dry (The Social Life of the Book) (Paraguay Press, 2012)
4. Mahmoud Darwish Museum / Ramallah, Palestine
5. Charlotte Moth / ‘Ce qui est fragile est toujours nouveau,’ Centre d’art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland
6. Susan Sontag / As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)
7. Solange / ‘Losing You,’ True EP (Terrible Records, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT15fhb9QAA
8. Karl Holmqvist and Stefan Tcherepnin / New Jerseyy, Basel, Switzerland
9. Julia Rometti and Victor Costales / Inscriptions in stone—Cosmic volume (2012)
24-page black-and-white supplement in Al-Ayyam newspaper, Palestine, Sunday November 4, 2012
10. Solange / ‘Some Things Never Seem to Fucking Work,’ True EP (Terrible Records, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkjqudulJTw
11. Lili Reynaud-Dewar / ‘Ceci est ma maison / This is my place,’ Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France
12. Kaspar Mueller / Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich, Switzerland
13. Hannah Ryggen / anti-fascist tapestries, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany
14. Klappfon / experimental music program curated by Michael Zaugg, Plattfon, Basel, Switzerland http://www.plattfon.ch/upcoming-events/
15. Nuri Koerfer / Oslo 10, Basel, Switzerland
16. Cat Power / ‘Manhattan,’ Sun (Matador Records, 2012)
17. Ariana Reines / Mercury (Fence Books, 2011)
18. Fabian Marti / Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland
19. Stedelijk Museum / reopening and re-hang, Amsterdam, Netherlands
20. Clarice Lispector / new translations into English out from New Directions (The Passion According to G.H., The Hour of the Star, Near to the Wild Heart)
22. Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi / ‘Around,’ Think Thoughts (2012)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaIUcAVos5Y
23. La Grotta Bar / Ramallah, Palestine
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Haris Epaminonda, Chronicles, 2010-ongoing, Super 8 transfer to digital, video still
VOLUME 2 (FORTHCOMING 2013)
1. ‘Projects 100: Akram Zaatari’ / June 4–September 23 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.
2. ‘Abstract Generation: Now in Print’ / February 13–June 24 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.
3. ‘Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault,’ / February 2 – 12 May / Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
4. ‘Haris Epaminonda’ / Kunsthaus Zurich (February 15–May 5)
5. ‘Mike Kelley’ (through April 1) / Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
6. Paolo Thorsen-Nagel / And On (Material Records, 2013).
7. I am also looking forward to getting around to reading: Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2013) and Lisa Robertson’s Nilling: prose essays on noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias (BookThug, 2012); R’s Boat (University of California Press, 2010) and The Men: a Lyric Book (BookThug, 2000).
Continuing our series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
Jennifer Higgieis co-editor of frieze and based in London, UK.
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Bruno Munari stood in front of Concave-convex, 1948, wire mesh installation. A retrospective of Munari’s work, ‘‘My Futurist Past’, is on show at the Estorick Collection, London, until December 23)
In terms of exhibitions, 2012 was an embarrassment of riches; a year in which the idea of what constitutes ‘political’ has thankfully expanded to accommodate subtlety, idiosyncrasy and cultural specificity. Where to begin? In no particular order highlights for me included dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel – a show I was steeling myself to battle with, and ended up wishing I had longer to explore; the 13th São Paulo biennale, ‘The Imminence of Poetics’, which was, despite its cumbersome title, one of the best biennales I’ve ever visited and chock-full of extraordinary work – much of which I wasn’t familiar with. Also in Brazil, I paid my first visit to the jaw-dropping sculpture park, gardens and pavilions that is Inhotim (in the central Brazilian state of Minas Gerais). In New York, I had to be dragged away from ‘The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde’ at the Met, and a great show by one of my favourite painters: ‘Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940’ at the Jewish Museum. I also enjoyed ‘Ecstatic Alphabets’– an exploration of the material qualities of language – at MoMA and the eclectic mix of the raw and the cooked at the Whitney Biennial; ‘Radical Localism’, curated by Chris Kraus and Mexicali Rose at Artists Space; and the Benefit Exhibition at the ever-splendid White Columns. Finally, two highlights were Anselm Franke’s utterly absorbing ‘Animism’ (a happy counterpoint to the debacle of the Berlin Biennale) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and the inaugural Qalandiya International, a celebration of Palestinian culture that took place across towns and villages in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In London – and quite apart from the good shows at commercial spaces, of which there are too many to mention here – Tate continues its brilliant run of great exhibitions (Damien Hirst proving the exception to the rule). The most exciting development of the year was the opening of the Tate Tanks– a terrific15-week programme of installation, performance and events in an amazing space. Also at Tate Modern, ‘William Klein + Daido Moriyama’ (which runs until 20 January) and Munch were beautiful shows. I’ve long been fascinated by the wonders and weirdness of Victorian art, and thus loved ‘Pre-Raphaelites: The Victorian Avant-Garde’ at Tate Britain. At Studio Voltaire I was reminded, once again, what a great artist Nicole Eisenmann is – her new sculptures are both magnificently nuts and weirdly moving; at the ever-wonderful Estorick Collection, I was thrilled to see a show devoted to one of my heroes, the Italian modernist artist and children’s book writer and illustrator, Bruno Munari. At the Chisenhale Gallery, director (and frieze contributing editor) Polly Staple continues to programme shows that are as timely as they are fresh (Christina Mackie and James Richards in particular) – the latest, by wunderkind Helen Marten, was no exception: it was fantastically inventive (and fun). The Hayward Gallery’s quiet show of contemporary Chinese art was refreshing in its lack of spin; I also loved their pairing of Jeremy Deller and David Shrigley and their month-long ‘Wide Open School’ was inspired. The inaugural LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images heralded a promising future, and at Raven Row, ‘The Stuff That Matters: Textiles collected by Seth Siegelaub for the CSROT’ was an unabashedly beautiful show at London’s most beautiful space. I also enjoyed the plethora of interesting things happening at Auto Italia South East, V22 (in particular, ‘Young London’), INIVA, Camden Arts Centre, Henry Moore Institute, South London Gallery, David Roberts Art Foundation, Peckham Artist Moving Image, and the Showroom. And finally, at the Whitechapel Gallery: ‘Aspen Magazine: 1965-1971’ (which runs until 3 March) – what’s not to love?
Around the UK, galleries such as Baltic, firstsite, Focal Point, IKON, Nottingham Contemporary, MIMA, MK Gallery, Tate St Ives and Liverpool continue to programme great shows. The year was marred by the death of Modern Art Oxford’s director, Michael Stanley; he will long be mourned.
I am writing this in Australia, where I’ve come for my annual visit. Overlooking Sydney Harbour, the new wing of the MCA (under the dynamic leadership of Liz Ann Macgregor) is dazzling; ‘Primavera’, their annual exhibition of work by Australian artists under 35, highlighted the plethora of energy and imagination in the Antipodes. The new John Kaldor Collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales– the result of Kaldor’s generous gifting of his great collection of 200 works by artists including Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, Robert Rauschenberg and Ugo Rondinone – is a great addition to the city.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. Sylvia Sleigh, Paul Rosano Reclining, 1973, 137 × 198 cm, oil on canvas
So, reasons to be cheerful in 2013? Massimiliano Gioni’s Venice Biennale is an exciting prospect as is Yuko Hasegawa’s Sharjah Biennale. I can’t wait to see ‘Hilma af Klint – A Pioneer of Abstraction’ at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet– she’s long been one of my favourite artists. In London – quite apart from the slew of young, energetic spaces and artist collectives in London that I hope to get to know better – Tate Modern will be hosting three shows, all of which will be a treat: retrospectives of Roy Lichtenstein (co-organised by The Art Institute of Chicago); Richard Hamilton (which is travelling to Madrid’s Reina Sofia, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art); and a solo show of Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair– and I’ll also be travelling to Tate Liverpool to see the Sylvia Sleigh show. Anything to do with Rosemarie Trockel is fine by me: thus, I’m really looking forward to ‘Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos’, at the Serpentine, an exhibition that ‘juxtaposes the artist’s works with a range of objects and artworks created by others with which she feels an affinity’. I have come around to the work of Jordan Wolfson, so am curious to see what he’ll come up with for the Chisenhale Gallery. I’m also looking forward to the show of Pacific bark painting at Birmingham’s IKON gallery. In Melbourne, the National Gallery of Victoria has had a shake-up with a new director, Tony Ellwood, who returned to the city after five years running the Queensland Art Gallery; he has appointed Max Delany – who did a great job running Monash University Museum of Art – as Senior Curator, Contemporary Art; to my mind, a hugely clever decision, and I look forward to seeing what he’ll come up with. The Director of the ever-interesting Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Juliana Engberg, has been appointed Artistic Director of the 2014 Sydney Biennale – I know it’s a long way off, but her show is definitely something to anticipate. In the US, Daniel Bauman (and his team’s) Carnegie International is an exciting prospect. I’ll also be travelling to Istanbul for Fulya Erdemci’s biennial.
OK; I know that there is a lot more I could mention and much I have missed, but I must stop somewhere. Suffice to say, I always look forward to travelling, and I’ll be doing a lot of it in the coming year. One of the best things about this job is anticipating experiencing great work by artists I’ve yet to discover – and without a doubt 2013 won’t be an exception. I can’t wait.
Max Andrewsis co-director of the curatorial office Latitudes in Barcelona, Spain.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. SADEIS, 2012, resin and paint, each 147 × 60 × 60 cm, installation view at Meessen De Clercq, Brussels
Some 2012 highlights (short form, vaguely chronological version):
• Retrospective by *Xavier Le Roy *at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies / Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona
• Jeremy Deller, Joy in People at the Hayward Gallery, London
• Tarek Atoui’s Revisiting Tarab, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah
• ‘The Medium of Media’ the 6th Global Art Forum at Art Dubai, Dubai
• Mireia Sallarès’s Se escapó desnuda. Un proyecto sobre la verdad, Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
• Manifesta 9, Genk (Manuel Durán, Praneet Soi, Duncan Campbell, Antonio Vega Macotela…)
• Sarah Ortmeyer,* SADEIS*, Meessen De Clercq, Brussels
• ZOO, or the letter Z, just after Zionism, NAiM/Bureau Europa, Maastricht
• dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (Korbinian Aigner, Michael Rakowitz, Mariana Castillo Deball, Adriana Lara, Rossella Biscotti, Jérmome Bel, Haegue Yang, Walid Raad, Anna Maria Maiolino, Lara Favaretto…)
• Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, 18 pictures and 18 stories / Performance in Resistance, Bulegoa z/b with If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona
• Utopia is possible. ICSID. Eivissa, 1971, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona
• Rirkrit Tiravanija and Arto Lindsay, Untitled 2012, (All those years at No. 17E London Terrace), kurimanzutto, Mexico City
• Terence Gower, Ottagono, LABOR, Mexico City
• Sarah Lucas, Situation / Sadie Coles, London
• The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966-79, Raven Row, London
• Alexandre Singh, The Humans, Witte de With, Rotterdam
• Ends of the Earth — Land Art to 1974, Haus der Kunst, Munich
• Jordi Mitjà, Monumento. Ladrones de alambre, Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
• Asier Mendizabal, ProjectSD, Barcelona
Reasons to be cheerful for 2013:
Moderation(s), the year-long programme between Spring, Hong Kong, and Witte de With, Rotterdam (Latitudes will be in residency at Spring in January 2013).
the 55th Venice Biennale (June 1 – November 24) (Lara Almarcegui for Spain, Mark Manders for the Netherlands, Mathais Polenda for Austria, Akram Zaatari for Lebanon, Jeremy Deller for the UK…)
Jonathan Watkinsis director of Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK.
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Memento Mori, unknown artist, late 18th-century, courtesy of The Richard Harris Collection
Picks of 2012 and Reasons to be Cheerful
John Murphy, Voyages to Italy, at the A.G. Leventis Gallery, Institute of Archaeology, University College London (20 January – 30 February)
One of the most intellectually elegant shows of 2012. A combination of photos, books, film stills and volcanic ash, formally it melded with the permanent collection of the Leventis Gallery – mostly very old objects in old fashioned vitrines – but jarred with any comforting notion of scientific order. The pervasive presence of the Marquis de Sade especially put paid to that.
The Voice and The Lens, Ikon, Birmingham (8 – 11 November)
Not one normally to indulge in self-promotion, I can’t pass up this opportunity to mention ‘The Voice and The Lens’, a four day programme of music, with lots of vocals, and film at Ikon in November. It was the brain-child of Sam Belinfante, one of the most promising young artists now in the UK and highlights were Scott Wilson’s performance of Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room, Mikhail Karikis’s Empty Words, Loré Lixenberg’s The End of Civilisation As We Know It, Adam De La Cour and Bruce McLean in Live Adult Chat, Al Madina’s Childrens Choir (heartbreaking) and Elaine Mitchener performing Christian Marclay’s Manga Scroll. The whole thing was wonderful – rich, rich, rich in content – both entertaining and clearly the product of fine intelligence.
Nastio Mosquito
Not a great success structurally, the Kwangju Biennial was full of gems. Amongst them was the work of Angolan artist Nastio Mosquito. His videos could not be smarter or funnier. Knowingly politically incorrect with respect to post-colonialist clichés (e.g. Nastio answers Gabi) he muses with charisma on the iniquities of the globalised modern world.
Qalandiya International (1 -14 November)
On the Palestinian West Bank, in various venues in and around Jerusalem and Ramallah, QI was good and brave, asserting that art, any kind of art, is politics. The Palestinian cause is compelling in the light of Israeli brutality – as I write 3,000 more dwellings have been granted planning permission in the continuing outrage that is illegal settlement – but this was not an exercise in emotional button pushing. There was a discernible rigour and some great work, including an installation by Tashweesh at Al Mamal, Jerusalem, and flyposting on the streets of Ramallah by Australian artist Tom Nicholson.
Death: A Self Portrait, Wellcome Collection (until 4 February 2013)
Meanwhile, back in the UK, the Wellcome Collection continues its ingenious programme, mixing art and artefacts to great effect. The most recent exhibition there, Death: A Self Portrait, drawn from the Richard Harris Collection, is an exemplary case in point. Renaissance paintings find themselves in the company of sentimental postcards and children’s toys, Mexican papier-maché sculptures, celebrating the Day of the Dead, sit alongside actual human remains. More philosophical than morbid, informed by a sense of humour not just black, the overall result was a fascinating meditation on a subject that ultimately overwhelms us all.
‘On Being Not Dead’
In this vein, my recent reading has included Bill Hayes’ article in the _New York Times _(22 November), ‘On Being Not Dead’. It is just a few hundred words, downloadable, and quite beautiful. In other words, a reason to be cheerful. “http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/opinion/on-being-not-dead.html”: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/opinion/on-being-not-dead.html
Douglas Fogleis an independent curator based in Los Angeles, USA, and a contributing editor of frieze.
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Thomas Schütte, Frauen, installation view at Castello di Rivoli,Italy
Highlights of 2012
1. Thomas Schütte, ‘Frauen’ at Castello di Rivoli, Turin. The Manica Lunga, the 146-meter long former painting gallery of the Savoys in the 17th century, has never looked so impressive. This was a statement about both the possibilities and fragility of sculptural practice. Filled with 18 of Schütte’s frauen along with 100 watercolors and ceramic maquettes, this was perhaps the best show I saw this year until I saw…
2. Marisa Merz, ‘disegnare, disegnare, redisegnare, il pensiero imagine che cammina’ at Fondazione Merz, Turin. I saw both of these exhibitions on the same day and was blown away. Marisa Merz, now well into her 80s, continues to work every day producing work that is both delicate and muscular. This non-retrospective survey showed that sometimes the freshest and most forward-looking artist in the room might happen to be in her 80s.
3. Béla Tarr, Turin Horse. While the beat goes on for Marisa Merz the same cannot be said for the 57 year old Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. The director’s self-proclaimed “last film” actually was released in 2011 but only made it to America this year. Loosely based on a possibly apocryphal story of the onset of Nietzsche’s madness inspired by his witnessing of the beating of a horse in Turin, Tarr’s nearly dialogue-less film is a meditation on the end of the world, the end of images, and the impossibility of communication. A bit of a downer but the apocalypse has never looked so beautiful.
4. First Aid Kit, The Lion’s Roar and their live show at the Henry Fonda Theater, Los Angeles. If the sun has set forever in the oeuvre of Béla Tarr it has risen again in Stockholm in the form of the otherworldly alt-folk sister duo First Aid Kit. Ethereal yet powerful, this album reeks of heartbreaking optimism. It was only outdone by their soaring, enthusiastic, and compellingly authentic live act that made me want to go join something, anything. They are only 19 and 22 respectively so we have much to look forward from them.
5. Shozo Shimamoto’s painting Gutai 02 (1950) in Paul Schimmel’s exhibition ‘Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962’. If First Aid Kit transports us to another brighter world with their angelic voices and infectious anthems, I found myself on another island altogether when I entered ‘Destroy the Picture’, curator Paul Schimmel’s last project for MoCA, Los Angeles, before his departure. The first work in this show dedicated to anti-painting was an oh so delicate mixed media work on paper by the Gutai artist Shozo Shimamoto. Measuring no more than 20 by 14 inches, this work is composed of a swirl of abstract material in its center that is surrounded by a watery field of blue. It said it all. It offered an island to get lost on, a contemplative abyss to fall into, and an understated commentary on the incredible power of abstraction by an artist living in a time just five years removed from the bombing of Hiroshima.
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Ko Nakajima, Paper (formerly Paper 2), 1969, installation view at Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles
6. ‘Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha’ at Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles. We have to give credit to some galleries in the past few years for generating museum quality shows. This exhibition offered the first comprehensive North American presentation of the work of this post-Gutai generation of Japanese artists who explored the relationship between the natural and the industrial.
7. Ellsworth Kelley’s façade of Matthew Marks Gallery Los Angeles. Floating above the neighborhood like Stanley Kubrick’s monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey, Ellsworth Kelley’s black rectilinear façade for Matthew Mark’s new 3,000 square foot Hollywood outpost is a living thing, chameleon-like in its ability to visually morph with the changing light as the day passes by. It’s unusual that an artist’s work merges with architecture in such a seamless way. Like Kubrick’s monolith, it seems to almost unconsciously emit a signal to the viewers around it, drawing them towards the building but without allowing the proximity that would let it be tagged.
8. Yorgos Lanthimos, Alps, (2012) and the emergence of the New Greek Cinema. Can we call it that? Do two directors make a movement? Well, if Lanthimos’s Alps is considered alongside Dogtooth (2009), his devastating study in familial dysfunction, and we then throw in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s charmingly weird coming of age study Attenberg (2010), it becomes clear that something is afoot cinematically in Athens. These films are strange, fascinating, and incredibly human investigations into the inability of people to connect and the consequences of those failures. Produced for very little money amidst the worst economic crisis in modern Greek history, these two directors point to a bright future for their generation of Greek cinema’s entry onto the global stage.
9. Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory. This novel was published in French in 2010 but did not appear in English until this year. How much fun is this book when a novelist writes a story about a successful contemporary artist who is implicated in the murder of…wait for it…the novelist himself? So many novels and films don’t quite get the true nature of the art world (although I’m still laughing at the hilariously apt depiction of “bad” performance art in Jonathan Parker’s 2009 film (Untitled)). Houellebecq’s book is a great read for anyone involved in the art world as a civilian or a capo.
10. ‘Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective’, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. When I hear that a star architect has designed an important exhibition for a major museum I often cast a suspicious eye, but Frank Ghery’s installation design of the Ken Price sculpture retrospective was completely Ghery-esque while also being incredibly sensitive to the delicate nature of his long time friend’s ceramic explorations. This show gives Price his full due within the context of the contemporary art world. We sadly lost Price this year after a long illness which brings to mind the loss of myriad other important art world figures this past year including the likes of Raoul De Keyser, David Weiss, Mike Kelly, Michael Asher, Franz West, Chris Marker, Amos Vogel and many others. It’s a shame that the art world doesn’t have the equivalent of the Oscar’s in memoriam section as many of these figures changed the world that we all live in.
11. Michael Haneke’s Amour. While we are on the topic of the end of life I would have to recommend an 11th addition to my top ten (a bonus track if you will) in the guise of perhaps Michael Haneke’s most poignant and sensitive exploration of the human condition to date. For anyone who has lost a parent (or even if you haven’t) this is a heartbreakingly told, masterfully acted, and also shocking (it is Haneke after all) exploration of personal dignity and the end of life.
Reasons to be cheerful for 2013
Wow, I ended on a bit of a downer. But do not fear, all is not lost. The world goes on as does the art. Here are a few things to look forward to in 2013:
Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites at Walker Art Center (March); Mark Manders in the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (June); the 56th Carnegie International (October); the second installment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (December).
Dena Beardis assistant curator at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
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Fred Londier, 29 Arrests, Headquarters of the 11th Naval District, May 4, 1972, San Diego, shown as part of ‘State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970’, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The Bay Area’s 2012 – some highlights:
At the beginning of the year, the ephemeral State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 resonated within the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s seismically-unsound, Brutalist concrete structure (where I have the precarious pleasure of working). The exhibition, organized by Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss, surveyed California conceptualism in the wake of the 60’s. Walking through galleries punctuated by vitrines, photographs tacked to the wall with push-pins, and flickering CRT monitors with degraded video documentation, the exhibition featured works that could happen anywhere–in the basement of Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art, in Al Ruppersberg’s Grand Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, at a freeway intersection sit-in by Asco, or at the intersection of 17th, Castro, and Market Streets in San Francisco where Mel Henderson, Joe Hawley, Alfred Young, and many others stopped city traffic by hailing 100 yellow cabs at once. ‘State of Mind’ encapsulates an irreverence born of the impossibility of commercial success and a sense of experimentation that resists stagnation. Viewing the exhibition in our present moment, it was hard to avoid the word ‘prescient.’ Suddenly it was impossible to talk about the Futurefarmers’ back-to-the-land projects without referring to Bonnie Sherk’s Portable Parks (1970), the Yes Men’s culture jamming without thinking about Sam’s Café (a collective run out of a former greasy spoon near UC Berkeley), or citizen journalism without a nod to Fred Londier’s photographs of antiwar protestors taken from the vantage of the arresting officer, 29 Arrests, Headquarters of the 11th Naval District, May 4, 1972, San Diego. ‘State of Mind’ resurrected long forgotten artists and it did so with humor and serious risk-taking.
Fueled by cocktails, the weekly conversations hosted by the new San Francisco outpost of the Kadist Foundation have consistently packed in a feisty audience looking for something better than free Tecate. Discussions often get heated enough to steam the windows or bring in a few odd passers-by, and despite rumors of fisticuffs, hot-topic conversations with Jens Hoffmann and Lawrence Rinder about the disputed role of the curator, Claire Bishop about the affect/efficacy in social practice and screenings of Ausländer raus! , Schlingensief’s Container proved more incisive than divisive. Director Joseph del Pesco has hosted international magazines like Fillip from Vancouver, Nero from Italy, May from France, and Taxi from Mexico in an effort to cross-germinate with Bay Area writers, artists, curators, and subjects. The Kadist is a collecting foundation, but exhibitions at the small San Francisco storefront are often refreshingly dynamic, including Ben Kinmont’s ‘An Exhibition in your Mouth’, a six-course dinner of recipes created by Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp, Gordon Matta-Clark, Salvador Dali, and others, accompanied by a hand-printed menu. Zoe Butt of Sàn Art recently curated an exhibition by Vietnamese artists censored in their home country, preceded by an evening screening of Southeast Asian artists’ videos organized by David Teh.
And also:
The Bay Area finally got its own branch of the Public School in the Fall of this year, but it had many precedents, most notably in the autodidactic strategies of Rick and Megan Prelinger, whose Prelinger Library and Archive are wunderkammers of infinite digression. Luca Antonucci and Carissa Potter of Colpa Press recently opened Edicola, a sidewalk kiosk on Market Street re-purposed as a newsstand selling artist books, prints, and periodicals. The dissembling minds behind Will Brown on 24th Street consistently revive oddball cultural gems, most notably the Manitoba Museum of Finds Art, a trove of “unsanctioned art” collected by Alberta Mayo, assistant to SFMOMA Director Henry Hopkins from 1974-1979. Twenty minutes from the city at the national refuge cum artist residency, Headland Center for the Arts, the OPENrestaurant collective served warm bowls of ambrosial ramen with stories of food radiation testing gathered during a recent trip to Japan.
And finally, why be cheerful at the onset of 2013? I’m looking forward to more like this, this , and this).
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Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror, (for Channel 4)
Continuing our series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
Sean O’Tooleis a writer and co-editor of CityScapes, a critical journal for urban enquiry. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
2012: A Year of Mountains
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Etel Adnan, Untitled (Beirut), 2010, oil on canvas, 24×30cm
Where I live, there is a large mountain: it dwarves the high-rise ghettoes and retro skyscrapers which have taken root on the windy slopes of Table Mountain. I don’t recall seeing many works in 2012 that consciously noticed this craggy natural wonder. Julia Clark’s solo exhibition ‘Booty’ at Whatiftheworld / Gallery included a vintage postcard aggregated into one of her collecting-as-drawing collages. Field Notes from Solitude Island/ No Place, her montage of differently hued blues on a coastal map, delivered what would have been the perfect title for painter Carl Becker and photographer Monique Pelser’s exhibition ‘Our Land’ at the Stellenbosch University Art Gallery. A few years ago, both these artists independently set out to investigate the contemporary sites of JH Pierneef’s constructed modernist pastorals from the late 1920s. In search of something miraculous, the artists discovered very little: sun, dust, ennui, creeping urbanity, the subterfuge of an accomplished painter whose singular vistas were the outcome of composite descriptions, and – of interest to me – unyielding stony mountains.
Last year, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with artist Jacques Coetzer. In 2012, in search of some more miraculous, I visited Japan, where, nearly two centuries ago, Hokusai described his much-quoted 36 views of Mount Fuji. Unlike Bas Jan Ader, whose name I repeatedly heard mentioned as a riposte to the ritual parade of good taste and gilded luxury in yet another bubble year, I decided to cycle – not sail – to Japan’s ‘mighty volcano’, as Lafcadio Hearn once described the nearly symmetrical mountain. In the four days it took me to slowly pedal up to the mountain’s northwestern base from Hamamatsu, where I sighted Fuji for the first time – on a billboard – I never once saw Fuji not obscured by clouds. Recounting his 1898 trip, Hearn similarly complained of a ‘uniformly grey sky’ that rendered Fuji ‘always invisible’. Perhaps the weather was different during Hokusai’s time? The lesson: artists are not cartographers.
In Kassel, which I visited after a detour up the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland – to be rewarded with a kitschy mural depicting Caspar David Friedrich’s solitary wanderer – I learnt that Etel Adnan considers Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, the most important person she has ever met. The wall text accompanying Adnan’s dOCUMENTA 13 display mumbled something about Cezanne, who repeatedly painted Sainte-Victoire Mountain in Aix-en-Provence. Recently I spotted a really bad knock-off of Pierneef’s pointillist study of the Swartberg Pass, a fabled route through the Swartberg mountains northeast of Cape Town. It made me again appreciate the difficulty recording stone with paint or pencil. Am I being un-contemporary? Perhaps. But Adnan showed me that it is okay to think about mountains, even idealise them. They are their own kind of miraculous.
I haven’t been to Koh-e Bâbâ, a mountain range in Afghanistan. Michael Rakowitz may have been. What Dust Will Rise? (2012), his elegant dOCUMENTA 13 installation, suggested he has: the display included rubble from the demolished Buddhas of Bamiyan, patiently carved into cliffs in the mountainous Ḥazārajāt region. The habit of artists to exhibit their collections rarely prompts me to say, ‘Gee whizz!’ Rakowitz’s sombre meditation on architecture, printed books, censorship, idolatry and memory (also the failure thereof) made me ditch Karlsaue Park as a bad idea. I returned to the Fridericianum for a second time, happy to silently stare at his gift of stones.
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Robert Griffiths Hodgins, Clem, 1983, oil on board, 60 × 79cm. Courtesy: Strauss & Co, Cape Town
Yes, there were other highlights. They included: Chad Rossouw’s smart autopsy of white nostalgia in his solo exhibition ‘A History of Failure’ at Brundyn + Gonsalves (in which he concocted a fake historical account about a dirigible airship named De la Rey); a handful of Zander Blom’s over many experiments in abstract painting from his solo show at Stevenson; James Webb’s use of Japanese ukiyoe prints, a Henry Moore bronze and commissioned installation by Stephen Hobbs to supplement his semi-survey ‘MMXII’ at the Johannesburg Art Gallery; the appearance at auction in Cape Town of an agreeably unflattering portrait of Clement Greenberg painted in 1983 by the crypto-abstractionist Robert Hodgins; also Barend la Grange and Louis Mabokela’s joint non-verbal response (defacement) of Brett Murray’s painting The Spear (2012), a flaccid work about a flaccid subject. But, ultimately, nothing I saw really approached the rigorous poetry of Rakowitz’s commissioned installation or Adnan’s unvarnished total engagement with the world. Yes, their works whispered, the world still rewards believing in the miraculous.
A speculative postscript: I am looking forward to Burundi-born sculptor and painter Serge Alain Nitegeka’s solo show ‘Black Cargo’ at Stevenson. Although sometimes presented as a couch-friendly modernist by his gallery, Nitegeka’s jet-black installations – physical infrastructure that speak of trafficking and trade – interrupt easy passage through gallery spaces, sort of like Ryan Gander’s wind, but not. The physical barriers are key. Kendell Geers is the subject of a career retrospective at Haus der Kunst in Munich. His recent Goodman show suggests that his defining period has now passed. Emerging during South Africa’s unsettled transition, his 1990s work skilfully blended danger and argument and insult and plagiarism to produce something almost sui generis. More speculatively: Elvira Dyangani Ose, the Tate curator appointed to oversee the third edition of the stalled Lubumbashi Biennale, has some big promises to deliver on. Speaking at the Joburg Art Fair, she mooted plans mooted plans to stretch this event in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo over the entire year. Lastly, a sombre yet hopeful speculation: with troubles continuing in Mali, will we see a 10th edition of the much-loved, always enervating pan-African photo biennial, Bamako Encounters? Fingers crossed.
Jeremy Deller’s Beyond the White Walls (2012) at art:concept, Paris– the artist’s articulate meta-commentary on the projects he’s done outside of galleries or museums
“Set-up” at Galerie Jousse Enterprise, Paris– a tightly-curated group show by Stephen Hepworth that provided one possible view of where photography is going: including Michele Abeles, Kate Costello, Sam Falls, Corin Hewitt, Matt Lipps and Elisa Sighicelli
TV
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Lena Dunham’s Girls (more real than reality tv), Catfish the TV show (what is the authentic self in the age of digital culture?), Breaking Bad Season 5 “Dead Freight” (the train heist episode), *Mad Men* Season 5 “The Other Woman” (the Jaguar episode)
Tig Notaro’s morbidly hilarious stand-up comedy routine after being diagnosed with cancer, as presented on This American Life’s Episdoe 476, ‘What Doesn’t Kill You’ http://www.thisamericanlife.org/contributors/tig-notaro
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Rimini Protokoll, Lagos Business Angels, Hebbel Theater, Berlin
Jerome Bel’s Disabled Theater (2012) at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel
Rimini Protokoll’s Lagos Business Angels (2012) at the Hebbel Theater, Berlin– untrained actors and entrepreneurs from Nigeria and Germany attempt to convince an audience to invest in their businesses through a series of 10-minute presentations. http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project_5410.html
Books
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Luigi Ghirri, Kodachrome
Sally Tallantis Artistic Director of Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art.
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Jérôme Bel, Disabled Theater, 2012, performance documentation. Photograph: Roman März
• Jérôme Bel, Disabled Theater, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel
This extraordinary performance surprised and challenged me in ways that I didn’t expect – I was moved and when we left the theatre we were all stunned and speechless for a moment. This was a truly memorable moment in a brilliant programme.
• Manifesta 9, ‘The Deep of the Modern’, Genk
The layering of heritage, historic works and work by contemporary artist in the post-industrial setting of Genk was a brilliant lesson on coal and curating by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Dawn Ades and Katerina Gregos.
• Einstein on the Beach, Robert Wilson and Phillip Glass, Barbican, London
It was amazing to finally have the opportunity to see this iconic work performed in London after having only ever seen documentation.
• Helen Marten, ‘Plank Salad’, Chisenhale Gallery, London
Helen Marten’s first solo show in the UK assembled a complex range of work with wit and precision. Its exciting to see her use the space with such confidence and panache and I am looking forward to seeing more of her work.
• Klaus Weber, ‘If you leave me I’m not coming and Already There!’, Nottingham Contemporary
This show right at the beginning of 2012 comprised a solo exhibition of work by Klaus Weber and an exhibition of over 200 objects and artworks curated by him. It was an ambitious and encyclopeadic endeavour and provided a wild glimpse into his thinking and practice.
• Glasgow International Festival
Its always inspiring to visit Glasgow. Memorable works by Corin Sworn, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Charlotte Prodger, Rosalind Nashashibi and of course Jeremy Deller’s bouncy Stonehenge.
Things I am looking forward to next year:
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• Homeworks VI, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (Spring 2013)
• Sharjah Biennial 11, United Arab Emirates curated by Yuko Hasegawa (13 – 17 March)
• Manchester International Festival (4 – 21 July)
Mark Beasleyis a writer and curator at the visual arts performance biennial Performa, New York. His first LP with the group Big legs will be released on Junior Aspirin Records in Spring 2013.
My reading in 2012 was largely from the past but the present struck me sharply with John Menick’s, portrait of Mexico City, *A Report on the City*, 2012, published by dOCUMENTA (13). Moving from the quest to locate a VHS snuff movie through hypochondria to tales of ‘Mad Travelling’ each of its six essays tackle, via some very fine and lightly sprung prose, the curious and compelling facts of city life.
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John Menick, A Report on the City
With regard to public lectures, and its lowly cousin hi-falutin’ chat, there have been a number of presentations that have provided substantial brain food. Chiefly Sukhdev Sandhu’s Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University has, over time, hosted a broad range of brilliant minds from Mark Fisher to Mark Pilkington, from Asiatica to off-kilter Englishness. Simon Critchley’s On Truth (and Lies) at Brooklyn Academy of Music presented the facts and otherwise of literary relations to the truth. In quick succession I caught inspiring lectures – come victory laps –by dOCUMENTA (13) curators and organizers Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chuz Martinez.
Anthony Huberman’s Artist’s Institute gallery come schoolhouse continues to be an inspiration. The normative relations of ‘an education in the arts’ – the professor and the schooled – is ditched in favor of direct meditative learning: objects, art works and artists are present in the classroom. Summer Guthery*’s sporadic *Canal Series in an office suite on Canal (New York) keeps the flame of idiosyncratic and savvy programming alive.
Two documentaries recognized two great wordsmiths, BBC4s *Evidently… John Cooper Clarke* provided an overarching insight into the part poet, part singer, part comic, life long inspiration and very thin man Cooper Clarke. Heavenly Films’ Lawrence of Belgravia– technically released at the end of 2011 but screened in New York in 2012 – is a long overdue recognition of Lawrence, the mononamed frontman of Felt, Denim and Go Kart Mozart: perhaps the greatest popstar Britain never had.
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Bedwyr Williams, The Hill Farmer, 2011, c-type print on DuroSpec
Four exhibitions: Trisha Donnelly’s ‘Artist’s Choice’ at MoMA married the inadvertently psychedelic chip-board mapping with hummingbird’s and paintings by Odilon Redon: a curious and compelling mix. Nicola Tyson’s photographs ‘Bowie Night at Billy’s Club London, 1978’ at White Column’s gallery revealed the birth and genesis of a New Romantic look and sound that continued with the Blitz Club and exploding into the popular consciousness of the eighties, sweeping hair and everything else before it aside. The Philadelphia Museum’s‘Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp’ curated by Carlos Basualdo and Phillipe Parreno was a tour de force in curating as seductive theater. Experienced from a distance – via the publication! – Bedwyr William’s ‘My Bad’ at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, has managed to transplant his exceptional writing and ear for the satiric into – as David Robbins would have it – the concrete comedy of objects.
In the realms of theater David Levine’s Habit organized by PS122 was an engagingly nervy and durational work stuck on repeat. Meanwhile at the movies Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, his first film in thirteen years, delivered some of the most memorable images of the year from a jade-green suited, red bearded, finger and flower eating goblin apparition to latex-clad-cyber-sex-martial-arts and talking limo’s. On the small screen E4’sMisfit’s forth series continues to poke at the wtf gland. Parker Posey’s cameo in Louis CK ‘s third season of Louie should also be credited.
A personal highlight of 2012 was to perform in China with the group Big Legs. Junior Aspirin Records’ ‘Junior Aspirin Life Size Model’ gigs in Heihe, on the Black Dragon River and Beijing brought together label fixtures Socrates that Practices Music, God in Hackney, Soul Punch and newer ones in a two hour-nonstop gig before five thousand rattle-waving locals, beneath a vast lighting rig and firework display of which Jay-Z would have approved.
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Mike Kelley in Venice, 1988, Photograph: Sidney Felson
In January we lost Mike Kelley, which will make viewing his Stedelijk retrospective in Amsterdam (on until April 1) bittersweet. Working with Mike on his Judson Church Day is Done show for Performa 09 and co-curating the Fantastic World music festival at Gramercy Theater with him was a privilege and an education. Over the past year I’ve been re-reading his texts, watching his films and listening to his music. He seems more present to me than ever.
Gabriela Jaureguiis a writer, critic and editor. She is the author of Controlled Decay (Akashic, 2008) and lives and works in Mexico City.
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Teresa Margolles, ‘La Promesa’, installation view at MUAC, Mexico City
Perhaps it is indeed the end of an era, as the Mayans say. Looking forward to the new one! In the meantime, here’s some of what made 2012 into a good ending:
Watching Seun Kuti dance and morph along with his Egypt 80 Shukar Collective at Cine Plaza in Mexico City.
The Argentine writer César Aira’s regenerative prose – any and all of it – this year it’s *_El Mármol_ (La bestia equilátera).
Okkyung Lee’s cello explosion at el nicho aural festival in Mexico City in May.
A spring full of marches and protests, the blossoming of a youth movement of resistance in Mexico.
Eduardo Terrazas’ double whammie in Mexico City: at Casa Barragán and Proyectos Monclova (new location).
Patti Smith’s concert under a full moon at the Anahuacalli Museum, Mexico City.
Lizzy Fitch’s ‘Concrete U’ at New Galerie, Paris.
Re-re-re-reading The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (even though it’s not 2012, I kept coming back to them this year, as I did The Stories of John Cheever, Picador 2009 and Vintage, 2000 respectively).
Oskar Fischinger’s ‘Space Light Art’ at the Whitney Museum, New York.
Teresa Margolles’ harrowing exhibition ‘La Promesa’ (The Promise) at the Museo Unversitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City.
The theatrical release of Matias Meyer’s Los últimos cristeros (The Last Christeros, 2011).
Abraham Cruzvillegas’ Monkey self and family portraits at kurimanzutto gallery, Mexico City (‘Nuestra imagen actual, autorrretratos recientes’ ‘Our Current Imagination: Recent Self-Portraits).
The release of Mexican duo Soledad’s debut 12” Fe (on Vale Vergas Discos).
Colm Tóibin’s lecture at the Claustro de Sor Juana University in Mexico City.
Marihuana voted legal in Colorado and Washington states shining a hope for Mexico’s future and a possible end to its so-called war on drugs.
Spiritualized’s new release Sweet Heart Sweet Light (on Double Six Records).
Palestine granted UN observer state status.
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Carlos Cruz-Diez, Physichromie 174, 1965, cardboard, casein, cellulose acetate inserts, mounted on plywood, 62 × 51.4 × 4.6 cm
And in the new year:
I am excited about the retrospective of the French Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, ‘Color in Space and Time’ at MUAC (until February 24)
The first in a series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
Anthony Hubermanis a curator and writer. He is the director of The Artist’s Institute in New York, USA and teaches at Hunter College.
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Lutz Bacher, The Book of Sand, 2010-12, 25 tons of sand, dimensions variable
PICKS OF 2012
EXHIBITIONS:
• ‘Steve McQueen’ at The Art Institute, Chicago (until January 6). I think he’s the Bruce Nauman of my generation, but even more perverted.
• ‘Locus Solus’ at the Reina Sofía, Madrid. Finally, I got my chance to really get to know the world of Raymond Roussel.
• ‘In the Still Epiphany’ at the Pulitzer Foundation, St. Louis. Curated by the artist Gedi Sibony, this exhibition taught me everything about how to hold something in place.
• Lutz Bacher at Alex Zachary Peter Currie, New York and at the Whitney Biennial. One involved 25 tons of sand filling an Upper East Side apartment, and the other thousands of baseballs filling the entire 4th floor of a major art museum (Baseballs II, 2011-2012). Both also included a video called What Are You Thinking? (2011) which simply faded from white to black and back again, with a heart-breaking soundtrack. Enough said?
• The idea of a “brain” made up not of words or statements, but of objects. As in: the semi-circular gallery in the Fridericianum that was the heart of dOCUMENTA (13), and the white-tiled room at the centre of Rosemarie’s Trockel’s ‘A Cosmos’ at the New Museum, New York (until January 20)
• Some great machines: Thomas Bayrle‘s car engines at dOCUMENTA (13), Trisha Donnelly‘s selection of microchip diagrams in MoMA‘s collection, and Bruno Gironcoli‘s possibly alien machines at Mamco, Geneva.
INSTITUTIONS:
• Raven Row. But then again, Raven Row is to the art world what Jon Stewart is to TV – there is no suspense, because you know they’ll win every year. Another extraordinary year at Raven Row.
• Yale Union. A newcomer – Saul Steinberg, Marianne Wex, Ian Hamilton Finlay, George Kuchar, Susan Howe… a brilliant program run by brilliant people in Portland, Oregon.
PEOPLE:
• David Weiss, we miss you.
• Julian Assange, we support you.
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Thomas Bayrle, Frankfurter Tapete, 1980, offset print on paper, wall paper (detail)
REASONS TO BE CHEERFUL IN 2013
ALLTHAT IS BELGIAN OR SEMI-BELGIAN:
• Thomas Bayrle at Wiels, Brussels (February 9 – May 12)
• Harald Thys and Jos de Gruyter at MuKHA, Antwerp (February 8 – May 19)
• Peter Wächtler, based in Brussels, having his first show in New York at Ludlow 38 (opens January 20)
• Lucy McKenzie, also based in Brussels, and her show at the Stedelijk, Amsterdam (April 20 – September 20)
• Finally getting to visit the Antoine Wiertz Museum, Brussels
Dan Foxis senior editor of frieze and is based in New York, USA.
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Pierre Huyghe, Untitled, 2011–2, Karlsaue Park, dOCUMENTA (13)
The numerologically credulous amongst you will be aware that the 5125-year cycle of the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar is due to come to an apocalyptic close on 21 December 2012. This is when the Earth collides with the planet Nibiru and suffers a catastrophic geomagnetic reversal of the North and South Poles. In preparation for the arrival of the final day of the 13th b’ak’tun, I am dispensing with the conventional decimal-based ranking system for my highlights of 2012, and will instead use what scholars of eschatology have calculated to be a New Number Order that will come into effect following the appearance of Kisin, Mayan God of Death, and the radical distortion of linear time caused by the supermassive black hole due to open up in the centre of the galaxy around lunchtime on Christmas Day. In the event that Armageddon does not arrive before the holiday sales start, the following list also includes my reasons to be cheerful for 2013, although a fat lot of good they’ll do you as Quetzalcoatl rips you limb-from-limb amidst the scorched ruins of civilization.
1,472,657: dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel. If you had asked me in early June what my exhibition highlight of 2012 was, I might well have predicted a hands-down win for dOCUMENTA (13). Looking back, I suspect I was tIPSY oN tHE kOOL-aID oF cRITICAL pRAISE that had pinned Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s edition of the quintennial mega-show for gongs at the Academy Awards, Nobel Prize and London 2012 Olympics. Which isn’t to say that dOCUMENTA (13) didn’t feature intelligent and thought-provoking passages, but it tested my patience with the rhetorics and personality cults of curating, and as the year wore on, left me with feelings of increasing alienation from the purpose of super-sized exhibitions.
Six months on from visiting Kassel, my memory of dOCUMENTA (13) is made up of only fragments and details; small working parts of a bigger engine motoring curatorial ideas that were often hard to fathom. Clearest of these memories is a walk I took one afternoon that started with Pierre Huyghe‘s Untitled interzone in the middle of the orderly Karlsaue park, a ghostly patch of mud and wild plants populated by bees and a pink-legged dog. From there I walked on to Raimundas Malasauskas and Marcos Lutyen‘s Hypnotic Show; 30 blissful minutes spent under hypnosis, the ‘art work’ appearing in my mind’s eye. My stroll finished up at the Tino Sehgal piece where, in a blacked-out room, a troupe of dancers enchanted the dark with call-and-response cries, anecdotes about the financial precarity of the creative life, and an a cappella version of The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. These experiences were each intimate, small-scale, tinted by humour, pleasure, imagination.
5: ‘Artist’s Choice: Trisha Donnelly’, Museum of Modern Art, New York. Speaking of shows that are intimate, small-scale, and tinted by humour, pleasure and imagination, how about Trisha Donnelly’s ‘Artist Choice’? (This beat to the punch my other favourite MoMA show this year, ‘Century of the Child: Growing By Design 1900–2000’ a fascinating look at how artists and designers have shaped children’s learning and play.) Donnelly’s inventive and often surprising selections from the museum’s art and design collection were spread across three rooms, packing together like cosmic sardines works such as Odilon Redon and Marsden Hartley paintings, Eliot Porter bird photographs, Walter Pichler drawings, pyramidal air-ionizers, Polaroid sunglasses, a wheelchair and psychedelic-coloured diagrams of silicon microprocessors.
2,389,524: Yale Union, Portland, Oregon. Yale Union’s exhibition ‘Steinberg, Saul. The New Yorker. New York, 1945–2000. (Harold, William, Robert, Tina, David, Eds.)’, organized by Robert Snowden and Scott Ponik, looked at Steinberg’s work for The New Yorker, attentive to the questions his career raises about how art circulates in society. (I wrote about it here if you’ve the inclination to find out more.) The existence of this non-profit space in the Pacific Northwest is also a reason to be cheerful in 2013.
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Saul Steinberg, cover illustration for The New Yorker, October 1969
11: Jonas Mekas. Two retrospectives in 2012 – one at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, the other at London’s Serpentine Gallery – reminded us not only of the extraordinary historical record Mekas’ film diaries provide of artistic life in New York across six decades, but how the lifeblood of art and culture depends upon communities of friends, family and like minds; not global gallery brands, market logic and the tinnitus din of PR.
79,672: 2012 Whitney Biennial. Particularly LaToya Ruby Frazier’s photographs, Wu Tsang’sGREENROOM installation, Charles Atlas and Michael Clark’s performance, and the films of Luther Price, Michael Robinson and Laida Lertxundi. And whilst we’re talking about the Whitney Museum, a cheery prospect for early next year is ‘Jay DeFeo: A Retrospective,’ which arrives there from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
Leapfrogging ahead, the 2014 Whitney promises to be something to be cheerful about given the recent appointment of Stuart Comer, Anthony Elms and Michelle Grabner as the show’s curators. But before that, in biennial land, I’ve high hopes for the 2013 Carnegie International, put together by Daniel Baumann, Dan Byers and Tina Kukielski.
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Frank Ocean; photograph Nabil Elderkin
9: New music. I didn’t have many no-risk-disks this year, but amongst them were Frank Ocean’sOrange (if R’n’B were to have its own prog rock moment, then surely it’s Ocean’s track ‘Pyramids’ although the return in 2012 of R. Kelly’s lunatic musical soap opera Trapped in the Closet is a close contender); Jai Paul’s single Jasmine, which sounds like a hazy memory of Prince, Detroit techno and too many late nights; Third Mouth by Alexander Tucker, a vision of modern pastoral psychedelia; the drone dub of Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe’s LP Timon Imok Manta and the ever-inventive C Spencer Yeh’s album-length foray into pop songwriting, Transitions. One album I’m particularly looking forward to in early 2012 is Museum of Loneliness, a spoken word LP by filmmaker and writer Chris Petit (director of Radio On and author of essential London novel Robinson), released by London-based label Test Centre as part of a new series of albums made with writers.
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Laurie Spiegel in her home studio, circa 1976. Photo: Lewis Forsdale
431: Old music. Reissues on highest rotation for me were Can’sLost Tapes, and the compilation Personal Space: Electronic Soul 1974–84. Can need no introduction, but Personal Space salvages obscure soul and funk tracks crafted from rudimentary synthesizers and drum machines, creating some astonishing, spaced-out dance music. (Check out Deborah Washington’s ‘Shortest Lady’ or Spontaneous Overflow’s ‘All About Money’, for instance.) Laurie Spiegel’sThe Expanding Universe (originally released in 1980) acquainted me with the work of one of the female pioneers of electronic composition, whilst the re-release of the 1985 album Zummo with an X, by Peter Zummo, recorded with Arthur Russell, Rik Albani and Bill Ruyle, was a slow, beautiful reminder of how fertile New York’s downtown music scene was in the 1980s. (The piece ‘Lateral Pass’ was originally composed for the Trisha Brown Dance Company.) I was also happy to see a re-release for Midnight Cleaners (1982) by Cleaners from Venus, an overdue nod to Martin Newell, the one-man music scene of downtown Wivenhoe, rural Essex.
8999: Other music. In live performance, the opportunity to see Pauline Oliveros play in New York, at her 80th birthday concert at ISSUE Project Room in May, was a special one. So too was Darmstadt’s 8th annual performance of Terry Riley’s In C at Public Assembly, New York; a joyous, raucous and spirited rendition of Riley’s landmark work of 20th century art, performed by around 20 key players from New York’s new music scenes, including David Grubbs, David van Teigham, Nick Hallett, Zach Layton, Kid Millions and Alex Waterman. (Waterman’s Vidas Perfectas a new Spanish language production of Robert Ashley’s 1983 opera Perfect Lives, continued to evolve in 2012, with a performance at London’s Serpentine Pavilion.)
For music makers, Sufi Plus Ins released this year and developed by DJ Rupture (aka Jace Clayton) with Bill Bowen, Rosten Woo, Hassan Wargui, Maggie Schmitt and Juan Alcon Duran deserves a nod for blowing open the Western-centric mindset of most music software interfaces.
As for books about music in 2012, Tam Tam Books’ English translation (by Paul Knobloch) of Gilles Verlant’s biography of Serge Gainsbourg, Gainsbourg: The Biography was a page-turner. Once I finally get around to reading David Byrne’sHow Music Works– a book I’ve been excited to read since it came out in September – I’m looking forward to the publication early next year of Bob Stanley’s presumably epic Do You Believe in Magic? A Complete History of Pop.
5499: David Levine, Habit. Here is the long story: but the short version is: realist play performed on loop, eight hours a day – a meditation on the daily grind of creative life, and habituated emotional behaviour. In 2012 Levine also co-authored, with Alix Rule, the essay ‘International Art English’ for brave new pioneers of digital publishing Triple Canopy. If this essay makes even one iota of difference in pushing back against all that is dreary, pompous, vacuous, and downright grammatically whack in art writing, press releases and museum speak, then Levine, Rule and Triple Canopy will have done us a service.
42: W.A.G.E. Survey results: An onerous task, but someone had to do it. This year saw the release of results from a survey undertaken by Working Artists and the Greater Economy into the economic experiences of 600 visual and performance artists who, between 2005 and 2010, worked with museums and non-profits in New York City. The survey asked questions about artist fees, honorariums, payment of expenses, shipping and production costs. Read the analytics, presented in graphic poster form here.
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Graphic from the W.A.G.E survey
74,903: Art in print. Alan Moore, author of Watchmen, V for Vendetta and From Hell, describes The Vorrh by Brian Catling as ‘one of the most original and stunning works of fantasy that it has ever been my privilege to read.’ With this novel, sculptor and performance artist Catling has written a dizzyingly vast work of imagination, but it’s thankfully not of the dragons and dwarves variety of fantasy. Rather, the intoxicating language of The Vorrh– like breathing thick tropical air – is in the tradition of surrealist fiction (its title is borrowed from Raymond Roussel’s Impressions of Africa, 1910), and closer to the kitchen sink sci-fi of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) than Game of Thrones. I’m not much of a comics fan, but the collection of Dal Tokyo comic strips by artist Gary Panter from the early ‘80s LA Reader, which imagines a future Mars colonized by workers from Japan and Texas, was wonderfully mind-frying. Ridinghouse brought us The Space Between, a collection of writings on art by novelist, critic and frieze contributor Michael Bracewell– long overdue, and essential reading. Also, if anyone wants to buy me for Christmas a copy of O! Tricky Cad and Other Jessoterica, collecting together the collages and works on paper of Bay Area artist Jess, I wouldn’t say no.
Significant Objects spun from a project by Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker, isn’t exactly an art book, but it has much to say about how we ascribe value to objects. Trinkets, tchotchkes and other unwanted second-hand flotsam and jetsam were purchased for a few dollars and auctioned on eBay, each item paired with a short fictional text by a writer about the object’s provenance. The experiment looked at how each story affected the amount people were prepared to pay for an item. A gold rabbit-shaped candle, for instance, bought for $3, sold for $112.50. It came with a story by Neil LaBute about a man – who may or may not be on the edge of a nervous breakdown – convinced the candle contains a real bunny made from real gold. A kitsch Russian figurine, missing its glass case, that was purchased for $3 went for a whopping $193.50. This crudely made little ornament was gilded with the legend of St. Vralkomir, as unreliably recounted by Doug Dorst. All proceeds were donated to the charity Girls Write Now and contributors included Matthew de Abaitua, Nicholson Baker, Matthew Battles, Meg Cabot, Patrick Cates, Willliam Gibson, Ben Greenman, Jason Grote, Shiela Heti, Wayne Koestenbaum, Shelley Jackson, Jonathan Lethem, Mimi Lipson, Tom McCarthy, Lydia Millet, Annie Nocenti, Jenny Offill, Gary Panter, Ed Park, James Parker, Padgett Powell, Bruce Sterling, Luc Sante, David Shields, Colleen Werthmann, Colson Whitehead, Cintra Wilson and Douglas Wolk. You want insight into the psychology of collecting? Read this.
∞: Sandy. The destructive impact of the super-storm on the Caribbean and east coast was no highlight of 2012, but it was a reminder that the view art provides on life is a parallax view; that there are crucial degrees of difference between what we think is important to keep in the frame, and what’s really essential.
Risks to sentiment but I like smaller, less shiny, set ups for looking. These places provide, startling, indeed impudent, new slants. Artist’s Institute, Soloway, Cleopatras. All are exuberant. As is Triple Canopy and Artists Space – Books and Talks. We should be scrawling their names on subway walls. Lucie Fontaine at Marianne Boesky as a two-week seance of an exhibition gave hope. “Views from a Volcano” on the early days at The Kitchen was a fascinating look back. A few quick trips to the west coast left me enthused, open and receptive – Math Bass’s performance Brutal Set and Vishal Jugdeo’sGoods Carrier both at the Hammer and Land Art at MOCA made the trip. In the Pacific Northwest, the curatorial undertakings at Yale Union are teaching the rest of us a thing or two about the firmness of opinion and the clarity of exposition. And, The Documenta. Sweeping statements miss the crumbs. Michael Portnoy’s27 Gnosis was a highlight, a twisted carnival gameshow in a dirt mound led down a path by Michael and Ieva Miseviciute, Korbian Agnier’s apples stole breath and Kadar Attia’s colonial flotsam has been like philosophical flypaper. I feel lucky to have seen each of these and others.
I am looking forward to Performa 2013 (November 1-24) in all its ambitions and complications.
Quinn Latimeris the author of Rumored Animals (Dream Horse Press, 2012) and the forthcoming Describe This Distance , which examines the work of Sarah Lucas, as well as shame, palindromes, passivity, fertility statuary, Antonin Artaud, Diego Rivera, and Susan Sontag.
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Heike-Karin Föll, ‘n° 25 – n° 89 (the delphinium version), installation view at Elaine MGK, Basel.
BEST OF 2012 MIXTAPE (EXTENDEDVERSION)
1. Heike-Karin Föll / ‘n° 25 – n° 89 (the delphinium version),’ Elaine MGK, Basel, Switzerland http://www.elaine-mgk.ch/index.php?/project/n-25—-n-89-the-delphinium-version/
2. Cevdet Erek / Room of Rhythms 1, 2010–2012, Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany, and ‘Week’ (2012) at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland
3. Moyra Davey / The Wet and the Dry (The Social Life of the Book) (Paraguay Press, 2012)
4. Mahmoud Darwish Museum / Ramallah, Palestine
5. Charlotte Moth / ‘Ce qui est fragile est toujours nouveau,’ Centre d’art Contemporain Genève, Switzerland
6. Susan Sontag / As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012)
7. Solange / ‘Losing You,’ True EP (Terrible Records, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NT15fhb9QAA
8. Karl Holmqvist and Stefan Tcherepnin / New Jerseyy, Basel, Switzerland
9. Julia Rometti and Victor Costales / Inscriptions in stone—Cosmic volume (2012)
24-page black-and-white supplement in Al-Ayyam newspaper, Palestine, Sunday November 4, 2012
10. Solange / ‘Some Things Never Seem to Fucking Work,’ True EP (Terrible Records, 2012) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkjqudulJTw
11. Lili Reynaud-Dewar / ‘Ceci est ma maison / This is my place,’ Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, France
12. Kaspar Mueller / Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich, Switzerland
13. Hannah Ryggen / anti-fascist tapestries, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel, Germany
14. Klappfon / experimental music program curated by Michael Zaugg, Plattfon, Basel, Switzerland http://www.plattfon.ch/upcoming-events/
15. Nuri Koerfer / Oslo 10, Basel, Switzerland
16. Cat Power / ‘Manhattan,’ Sun (Matador Records, 2012)
17. Ariana Reines / Mercury (Fence Books, 2011)
18. Fabian Marti / Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich, Switzerland
19. Stedelijk Museum / reopening and re-hang, Amsterdam, Netherlands
20. Clarice Lispector / new translations into English out from New Directions (The Passion According to G.H., The Hour of the Star, Near to the Wild Heart)
22. Louis Cole and Genevieve Artadi / ‘Around,’ Think Thoughts (2012)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaIUcAVos5Y
23. La Grotta Bar / Ramallah, Palestine
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Haris Epaminonda, Chronicles, 2010-ongoing, Super 8 transfer to digital, video still
VOLUME 2 (FORTHCOMING 2013)
1. ‘Projects 100: Akram Zaatari’ / June 4–September 23 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.
2. ‘Abstract Generation: Now in Print’ / February 13–June 24 / Museum of Modern Art, New York.
3. ‘Tell It To My Heart: Collected by Julie Ault,’ / February 2 – 12 May / Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel
4. ‘Haris Epaminonda’ / Kunsthaus Zurich (February 15–May 5)
5. ‘Mike Kelley’ (through April 1) / Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
6. Paolo Thorsen-Nagel / And On (Material Records, 2013).
7. I am also looking forward to getting around to reading: Aleksandar Hemon’s The Book of My Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2013) and Lisa Robertson’s Nilling: prose essays on noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias (BookThug, 2012); R’s Boat (University of California Press, 2010) and The Men: a Lyric Book (BookThug, 2000).
Continuing our series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
Jennifer Higgieis co-editor of frieze and based in London, UK.
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Bruno Munari stood in front of Concave-convex, 1948, wire mesh installation. A retrospective of Munari’s work, ‘‘My Futurist Past’, is on show at the Estorick Collection, London, until December 23)
In terms of exhibitions, 2012 was an embarrassment of riches; a year in which the idea of what constitutes ‘political’ has thankfully expanded to accommodate subtlety, idiosyncrasy and cultural specificity. Where to begin? In no particular order highlights for me included dOCUMENTA(13) in Kassel – a show I was steeling myself to battle with, and ended up wishing I had longer to explore; the 13th São Paulo biennale, ‘The Imminence of Poetics’, which was, despite its cumbersome title, one of the best biennales I’ve ever visited and chock-full of extraordinary work – much of which I wasn’t familiar with. Also in Brazil, I paid my first visit to the jaw-dropping sculpture park, gardens and pavilions that is Inhotim (in the central Brazilian state of Minas Gerais). In New York, I had to be dragged away from ‘The Steins Collect: Matisse, Picasso and the Parisian Avant-Garde’ at the Met, and a great show by one of my favourite painters: ‘Edouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940’ at the Jewish Museum. I also enjoyed ‘Ecstatic Alphabets’– an exploration of the material qualities of language – at MoMA and the eclectic mix of the raw and the cooked at the Whitney Biennial; ‘Radical Localism’, curated by Chris Kraus and Mexicali Rose at Artists Space; and the Benefit Exhibition at the ever-splendid White Columns. Finally, two highlights were Anselm Franke’s utterly absorbing ‘Animism’ (a happy counterpoint to the debacle of the Berlin Biennale) at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, and the inaugural Qalandiya International, a celebration of Palestinian culture that took place across towns and villages in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
In London – and quite apart from the good shows at commercial spaces, of which there are too many to mention here – Tate continues its brilliant run of great exhibitions (Damien Hirst proving the exception to the rule). The most exciting development of the year was the opening of the Tate Tanks– a terrific15-week programme of installation, performance and events in an amazing space. Also at Tate Modern, ‘William Klein + Daido Moriyama’ (which runs until 20 January) and Munch were beautiful shows. I’ve long been fascinated by the wonders and weirdness of Victorian art, and thus loved ‘Pre-Raphaelites: The Victorian Avant-Garde’ at Tate Britain. At Studio Voltaire I was reminded, once again, what a great artist Nicole Eisenmann is – her new sculptures are both magnificently nuts and weirdly moving; at the ever-wonderful Estorick Collection, I was thrilled to see a show devoted to one of my heroes, the Italian modernist artist and children’s book writer and illustrator, Bruno Munari. At the Chisenhale Gallery, director (and frieze contributing editor) Polly Staple continues to programme shows that are as timely as they are fresh (Christina Mackie and James Richards in particular) – the latest, by wunderkind Helen Marten, was no exception: it was fantastically inventive (and fun). The Hayward Gallery’s quiet show of contemporary Chinese art was refreshing in its lack of spin; I also loved their pairing of Jeremy Deller and David Shrigley and their month-long ‘Wide Open School’ was inspired. The inaugural LUX/ICA Biennial of Moving Images heralded a promising future, and at Raven Row, ‘The Stuff That Matters: Textiles collected by Seth Siegelaub for the CSROT’ was an unabashedly beautiful show at London’s most beautiful space. I also enjoyed the plethora of interesting things happening at Auto Italia South East, V22 (in particular, ‘Young London’), INIVA, Camden Arts Centre, Henry Moore Institute, South London Gallery, David Roberts Art Foundation, Peckham Artist Moving Image, and the Showroom. And finally, at the Whitechapel Gallery: ‘Aspen Magazine: 1965-1971’ (which runs until 3 March) – what’s not to love?
Around the UK, galleries such as Baltic, firstsite, Focal Point, IKON, Nottingham Contemporary, MIMA, MK Gallery, Tate St Ives and Liverpool continue to programme great shows. The year was marred by the death of Modern Art Oxford’s director, Michael Stanley; he will long be mourned.
I am writing this in Australia, where I’ve come for my annual visit. Overlooking Sydney Harbour, the new wing of the MCA (under the dynamic leadership of Liz Ann Macgregor) is dazzling; ‘Primavera’, their annual exhibition of work by Australian artists under 35, highlighted the plethora of energy and imagination in the Antipodes. The new John Kaldor Collection at the Art Gallery of New South Wales– the result of Kaldor’s generous gifting of his great collection of 200 works by artists including Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Jeff Koons, Sol LeWitt, Robert Rauschenberg and Ugo Rondinone – is a great addition to the city.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. Sylvia Sleigh, Paul Rosano Reclining, 1973, 137 × 198 cm, oil on canvas
So, reasons to be cheerful in 2013? Massimiliano Gioni’s Venice Biennale is an exciting prospect as is Yuko Hasegawa’s Sharjah Biennale. I can’t wait to see ‘Hilma af Klint – A Pioneer of Abstraction’ at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet– she’s long been one of my favourite artists. In London – quite apart from the slew of young, energetic spaces and artist collectives in London that I hope to get to know better – Tate Modern will be hosting three shows, all of which will be a treat: retrospectives of Roy Lichtenstein (co-organised by The Art Institute of Chicago); Richard Hamilton (which is travelling to Madrid’s Reina Sofia, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art); and a solo show of Lebanese artist Saloua Raouda Choucair– and I’ll also be travelling to Tate Liverpool to see the Sylvia Sleigh show. Anything to do with Rosemarie Trockel is fine by me: thus, I’m really looking forward to ‘Rosemarie Trockel: A Cosmos’, at the Serpentine, an exhibition that ‘juxtaposes the artist’s works with a range of objects and artworks created by others with which she feels an affinity’. I have come around to the work of Jordan Wolfson, so am curious to see what he’ll come up with for the Chisenhale Gallery. I’m also looking forward to the show of Pacific bark painting at Birmingham’s IKON gallery. In Melbourne, the National Gallery of Victoria has had a shake-up with a new director, Tony Ellwood, who returned to the city after five years running the Queensland Art Gallery; he has appointed Max Delany – who did a great job running Monash University Museum of Art – as Senior Curator, Contemporary Art; to my mind, a hugely clever decision, and I look forward to seeing what he’ll come up with. The Director of the ever-interesting Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Juliana Engberg, has been appointed Artistic Director of the 2014 Sydney Biennale – I know it’s a long way off, but her show is definitely something to anticipate. In the US, Daniel Bauman (and his team’s) Carnegie International is an exciting prospect. I’ll also be travelling to Istanbul for Fulya Erdemci’s biennial.
OK; I know that there is a lot more I could mention and much I have missed, but I must stop somewhere. Suffice to say, I always look forward to travelling, and I’ll be doing a lot of it in the coming year. One of the best things about this job is anticipating experiencing great work by artists I’ve yet to discover – and without a doubt 2013 won’t be an exception. I can’t wait.
Max Andrewsis co-director of the curatorial office Latitudes in Barcelona, Spain.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. SADEIS, 2012, resin and paint, each 147 × 60 × 60 cm, installation view at Meessen De Clercq, Brussels
Some 2012 highlights (short form, vaguely chronological version):
• Retrospective by *Xavier Le Roy *at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies / Mercat de les Flors, Barcelona
• Jeremy Deller, Joy in People at the Hayward Gallery, London
• Tarek Atoui’s Revisiting Tarab, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah
• ‘The Medium of Media’ the 6th Global Art Forum at Art Dubai, Dubai
• Mireia Sallarès’s Se escapó desnuda. Un proyecto sobre la verdad, Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
• Manifesta 9, Genk (Manuel Durán, Praneet Soi, Duncan Campbell, Antonio Vega Macotela…)
• Sarah Ortmeyer,* SADEIS*, Meessen De Clercq, Brussels
• ZOO, or the letter Z, just after Zionism, NAiM/Bureau Europa, Maastricht
• dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (Korbinian Aigner, Michael Rakowitz, Mariana Castillo Deball, Adriana Lara, Rossella Biscotti, Jérmome Bel, Haegue Yang, Walid Raad, Anna Maria Maiolino, Lara Favaretto…)
• Isidoro Valcárcel Medina, 18 pictures and 18 stories / Performance in Resistance, Bulegoa z/b with If I Can’t Dance I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution at the Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona
• Utopia is possible. ICSID. Eivissa, 1971, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA), Barcelona
• Rirkrit Tiravanija and Arto Lindsay, Untitled 2012, (All those years at No. 17E London Terrace), kurimanzutto, Mexico City
• Terence Gower, Ottagono, LABOR, Mexico City
• Sarah Lucas, Situation / Sadie Coles, London
• The Individual and the Organisation: Artist Placement Group 1966-79, Raven Row, London
• Alexandre Singh, The Humans, Witte de With, Rotterdam
• Ends of the Earth — Land Art to 1974, Haus der Kunst, Munich
• Jordi Mitjà, Monumento. Ladrones de alambre, Espai 13 of the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona
• Asier Mendizabal, ProjectSD, Barcelona
Reasons to be cheerful for 2013:
Moderation(s), the year-long programme between Spring, Hong Kong, and Witte de With, Rotterdam (Latitudes will be in residency at Spring in January 2013).
the 55th Venice Biennale (June 1 – November 24) (Lara Almarcegui for Spain, Mark Manders for the Netherlands, Mathais Polenda for Austria, Akram Zaatari for Lebanon, Jeremy Deller for the UK…)
Jonathan Watkinsis director of Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, UK.
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Memento Mori, unknown artist, late 18th-century, courtesy of The Richard Harris Collection
Picks of 2012 and Reasons to be Cheerful
John Murphy, Voyages to Italy, at the A.G. Leventis Gallery, Institute of Archaeology, University College London (20 January – 30 February)
One of the most intellectually elegant shows of 2012. A combination of photos, books, film stills and volcanic ash, formally it melded with the permanent collection of the Leventis Gallery – mostly very old objects in old fashioned vitrines – but jarred with any comforting notion of scientific order. The pervasive presence of the Marquis de Sade especially put paid to that.
The Voice and The Lens, Ikon, Birmingham (8 – 11 November)
Not one normally to indulge in self-promotion, I can’t pass up this opportunity to mention ‘The Voice and The Lens’, a four day programme of music, with lots of vocals, and film at Ikon in November. It was the brain-child of Sam Belinfante, one of the most promising young artists now in the UK and highlights were Scott Wilson’s performance of Alvin Lucier’s I am Sitting in a Room, Mikhail Karikis’s Empty Words, Loré Lixenberg’s The End of Civilisation As We Know It, Adam De La Cour and Bruce McLean in Live Adult Chat, Al Madina’s Childrens Choir (heartbreaking) and Elaine Mitchener performing Christian Marclay’s Manga Scroll. The whole thing was wonderful – rich, rich, rich in content – both entertaining and clearly the product of fine intelligence.
Nastio Mosquito
Not a great success structurally, the Kwangju Biennial was full of gems. Amongst them was the work of Angolan artist Nastio Mosquito. His videos could not be smarter or funnier. Knowingly politically incorrect with respect to post-colonialist clichés (e.g. Nastio answers Gabi) he muses with charisma on the iniquities of the globalised modern world.
Qalandiya International (1 -14 November)
On the Palestinian West Bank, in various venues in and around Jerusalem and Ramallah, QI was good and brave, asserting that art, any kind of art, is politics. The Palestinian cause is compelling in the light of Israeli brutality – as I write 3,000 more dwellings have been granted planning permission in the continuing outrage that is illegal settlement – but this was not an exercise in emotional button pushing. There was a discernible rigour and some great work, including an installation by Tashweesh at Al Mamal, Jerusalem, and flyposting on the streets of Ramallah by Australian artist Tom Nicholson.
Death: A Self Portrait, Wellcome Collection (until 4 February 2013)
Meanwhile, back in the UK, the Wellcome Collection continues its ingenious programme, mixing art and artefacts to great effect. The most recent exhibition there, Death: A Self Portrait, drawn from the Richard Harris Collection, is an exemplary case in point. Renaissance paintings find themselves in the company of sentimental postcards and children’s toys, Mexican papier-maché sculptures, celebrating the Day of the Dead, sit alongside actual human remains. More philosophical than morbid, informed by a sense of humour not just black, the overall result was a fascinating meditation on a subject that ultimately overwhelms us all.
‘On Being Not Dead’
In this vein, my recent reading has included Bill Hayes’ article in the _New York Times _(22 November), ‘On Being Not Dead’. It is just a few hundred words, downloadable, and quite beautiful. In other words, a reason to be cheerful. “http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/opinion/on-being-not-dead.html”: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/22/opinion/on-being-not-dead.html
Douglas Fogleis an independent curator based in Los Angeles, USA, and a contributing editor of frieze.
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Thomas Schütte, Frauen, installation view at Castello di Rivoli,Italy
Highlights of 2012
1. Thomas Schütte, ‘Frauen’ at Castello di Rivoli, Turin. The Manica Lunga, the 146-meter long former painting gallery of the Savoys in the 17th century, has never looked so impressive. This was a statement about both the possibilities and fragility of sculptural practice. Filled with 18 of Schütte’s frauen along with 100 watercolors and ceramic maquettes, this was perhaps the best show I saw this year until I saw…
2. Marisa Merz, ‘disegnare, disegnare, redisegnare, il pensiero imagine che cammina’ at Fondazione Merz, Turin. I saw both of these exhibitions on the same day and was blown away. Marisa Merz, now well into her 80s, continues to work every day producing work that is both delicate and muscular. This non-retrospective survey showed that sometimes the freshest and most forward-looking artist in the room might happen to be in her 80s.
3. Béla Tarr, Turin Horse. While the beat goes on for Marisa Merz the same cannot be said for the 57 year old Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr. The director’s self-proclaimed “last film” actually was released in 2011 but only made it to America this year. Loosely based on a possibly apocryphal story of the onset of Nietzsche’s madness inspired by his witnessing of the beating of a horse in Turin, Tarr’s nearly dialogue-less film is a meditation on the end of the world, the end of images, and the impossibility of communication. A bit of a downer but the apocalypse has never looked so beautiful.
4. First Aid Kit, The Lion’s Roar and their live show at the Henry Fonda Theater, Los Angeles. If the sun has set forever in the oeuvre of Béla Tarr it has risen again in Stockholm in the form of the otherworldly alt-folk sister duo First Aid Kit. Ethereal yet powerful, this album reeks of heartbreaking optimism. It was only outdone by their soaring, enthusiastic, and compellingly authentic live act that made me want to go join something, anything. They are only 19 and 22 respectively so we have much to look forward from them.
5. Shozo Shimamoto’s painting Gutai 02 (1950) in Paul Schimmel’s exhibition ‘Destroy the Picture: Painting the Void, 1949-1962’. If First Aid Kit transports us to another brighter world with their angelic voices and infectious anthems, I found myself on another island altogether when I entered ‘Destroy the Picture’, curator Paul Schimmel’s last project for MoCA, Los Angeles, before his departure. The first work in this show dedicated to anti-painting was an oh so delicate mixed media work on paper by the Gutai artist Shozo Shimamoto. Measuring no more than 20 by 14 inches, this work is composed of a swirl of abstract material in its center that is surrounded by a watery field of blue. It said it all. It offered an island to get lost on, a contemplative abyss to fall into, and an understated commentary on the incredible power of abstraction by an artist living in a time just five years removed from the bombing of Hiroshima.
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Ko Nakajima, Paper (formerly Paper 2), 1969, installation view at Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles
6. ‘Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha’ at Blum and Poe Gallery, Los Angeles. We have to give credit to some galleries in the past few years for generating museum quality shows. This exhibition offered the first comprehensive North American presentation of the work of this post-Gutai generation of Japanese artists who explored the relationship between the natural and the industrial.
7. Ellsworth Kelley’s façade of Matthew Marks Gallery Los Angeles. Floating above the neighborhood like Stanley Kubrick’s monolith in 2001 A Space Odyssey, Ellsworth Kelley’s black rectilinear façade for Matthew Mark’s new 3,000 square foot Hollywood outpost is a living thing, chameleon-like in its ability to visually morph with the changing light as the day passes by. It’s unusual that an artist’s work merges with architecture in such a seamless way. Like Kubrick’s monolith, it seems to almost unconsciously emit a signal to the viewers around it, drawing them towards the building but without allowing the proximity that would let it be tagged.
8. Yorgos Lanthimos, Alps, (2012) and the emergence of the New Greek Cinema. Can we call it that? Do two directors make a movement? Well, if Lanthimos’s Alps is considered alongside Dogtooth (2009), his devastating study in familial dysfunction, and we then throw in Athina Rachel Tsangari’s charmingly weird coming of age study Attenberg (2010), it becomes clear that something is afoot cinematically in Athens. These films are strange, fascinating, and incredibly human investigations into the inability of people to connect and the consequences of those failures. Produced for very little money amidst the worst economic crisis in modern Greek history, these two directors point to a bright future for their generation of Greek cinema’s entry onto the global stage.
9. Michel Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory. This novel was published in French in 2010 but did not appear in English until this year. How much fun is this book when a novelist writes a story about a successful contemporary artist who is implicated in the murder of…wait for it…the novelist himself? So many novels and films don’t quite get the true nature of the art world (although I’m still laughing at the hilariously apt depiction of “bad” performance art in Jonathan Parker’s 2009 film (Untitled)). Houellebecq’s book is a great read for anyone involved in the art world as a civilian or a capo.
10. ‘Ken Price Sculpture: A Retrospective’, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. When I hear that a star architect has designed an important exhibition for a major museum I often cast a suspicious eye, but Frank Ghery’s installation design of the Ken Price sculpture retrospective was completely Ghery-esque while also being incredibly sensitive to the delicate nature of his long time friend’s ceramic explorations. This show gives Price his full due within the context of the contemporary art world. We sadly lost Price this year after a long illness which brings to mind the loss of myriad other important art world figures this past year including the likes of Raoul De Keyser, David Weiss, Mike Kelly, Michael Asher, Franz West, Chris Marker, Amos Vogel and many others. It’s a shame that the art world doesn’t have the equivalent of the Oscar’s in memoriam section as many of these figures changed the world that we all live in.
11. Michael Haneke’s Amour. While we are on the topic of the end of life I would have to recommend an 11th addition to my top ten (a bonus track if you will) in the guise of perhaps Michael Haneke’s most poignant and sensitive exploration of the human condition to date. For anyone who has lost a parent (or even if you haven’t) this is a heartbreakingly told, masterfully acted, and also shocking (it is Haneke after all) exploration of personal dignity and the end of life.
Reasons to be cheerful for 2013
Wow, I ended on a bit of a downer. But do not fear, all is not lost. The world goes on as does the art. Here are a few things to look forward to in 2013:
Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites at Walker Art Center (March); Mark Manders in the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (June); the 56th Carnegie International (October); the second installment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (December).
Dena Beardis assistant curator at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive.
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Fred Londier, 29 Arrests, Headquarters of the 11th Naval District, May 4, 1972, San Diego, shown as part of ‘State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970’, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The Bay Area’s 2012 – some highlights:
At the beginning of the year, the ephemeral State of Mind: New California Art circa 1970 resonated within the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s seismically-unsound, Brutalist concrete structure (where I have the precarious pleasure of working). The exhibition, organized by Constance Lewallen and Karen Moss, surveyed California conceptualism in the wake of the 60’s. Walking through galleries punctuated by vitrines, photographs tacked to the wall with push-pins, and flickering CRT monitors with degraded video documentation, the exhibition featured works that could happen anywhere–in the basement of Tom Marioni’s Museum of Conceptual Art, in Al Ruppersberg’s Grand Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, at a freeway intersection sit-in by Asco, or at the intersection of 17th, Castro, and Market Streets in San Francisco where Mel Henderson, Joe Hawley, Alfred Young, and many others stopped city traffic by hailing 100 yellow cabs at once. ‘State of Mind’ encapsulates an irreverence born of the impossibility of commercial success and a sense of experimentation that resists stagnation. Viewing the exhibition in our present moment, it was hard to avoid the word ‘prescient.’ Suddenly it was impossible to talk about the Futurefarmers’ back-to-the-land projects without referring to Bonnie Sherk’s Portable Parks (1970), the Yes Men’s culture jamming without thinking about Sam’s Café (a collective run out of a former greasy spoon near UC Berkeley), or citizen journalism without a nod to Fred Londier’s photographs of antiwar protestors taken from the vantage of the arresting officer, 29 Arrests, Headquarters of the 11th Naval District, May 4, 1972, San Diego. ‘State of Mind’ resurrected long forgotten artists and it did so with humor and serious risk-taking.
Fueled by cocktails, the weekly conversations hosted by the new San Francisco outpost of the Kadist Foundation have consistently packed in a feisty audience looking for something better than free Tecate. Discussions often get heated enough to steam the windows or bring in a few odd passers-by, and despite rumors of fisticuffs, hot-topic conversations with Jens Hoffmann and Lawrence Rinder about the disputed role of the curator, Claire Bishop about the affect/efficacy in social practice and screenings of Ausländer raus! , Schlingensief’s Container proved more incisive than divisive. Director Joseph del Pesco has hosted international magazines like Fillip from Vancouver, Nero from Italy, May from France, and Taxi from Mexico in an effort to cross-germinate with Bay Area writers, artists, curators, and subjects. The Kadist is a collecting foundation, but exhibitions at the small San Francisco storefront are often refreshingly dynamic, including Ben Kinmont’s ‘An Exhibition in your Mouth’, a six-course dinner of recipes created by Louise Bourgeois, Marcel Duchamp, Gordon Matta-Clark, Salvador Dali, and others, accompanied by a hand-printed menu. Zoe Butt of Sàn Art recently curated an exhibition by Vietnamese artists censored in their home country, preceded by an evening screening of Southeast Asian artists’ videos organized by David Teh.
And also:
The Bay Area finally got its own branch of the Public School in the Fall of this year, but it had many precedents, most notably in the autodidactic strategies of Rick and Megan Prelinger, whose Prelinger Library and Archive are wunderkammers of infinite digression. Luca Antonucci and Carissa Potter of Colpa Press recently opened Edicola, a sidewalk kiosk on Market Street re-purposed as a newsstand selling artist books, prints, and periodicals. The dissembling minds behind Will Brown on 24th Street consistently revive oddball cultural gems, most notably the Manitoba Museum of Finds Art, a trove of “unsanctioned art” collected by Alberta Mayo, assistant to SFMOMA Director Henry Hopkins from 1974-1979. Twenty minutes from the city at the national refuge cum artist residency, Headland Center for the Arts, the OPENrestaurant collective served warm bowls of ambrosial ramen with stories of food radiation testing gathered during a recent trip to Japan.
And finally, why be cheerful at the onset of 2013? I’m looking forward to more like this, this , and this).
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Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror, (for Channel 4)
Continuing our series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
Sean O’Tooleis a writer and co-editor of CityScapes, a critical journal for urban enquiry. He lives in Cape Town, South Africa.
2012: A Year of Mountains
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Etel Adnan, Untitled (Beirut), 2010, oil on canvas, 24×30cm
Where I live, there is a large mountain: it dwarves the high-rise ghettoes and retro skyscrapers which have taken root on the windy slopes of Table Mountain. I don’t recall seeing many works in 2012 that consciously noticed this craggy natural wonder. Julia Clark’s solo exhibition ‘Booty’ at Whatiftheworld / Gallery included a vintage postcard aggregated into one of her collecting-as-drawing collages. Field Notes from Solitude Island/ No Place, her montage of differently hued blues on a coastal map, delivered what would have been the perfect title for painter Carl Becker and photographer Monique Pelser’s exhibition ‘Our Land’ at the Stellenbosch University Art Gallery. A few years ago, both these artists independently set out to investigate the contemporary sites of JH Pierneef’s constructed modernist pastorals from the late 1920s. In search of something miraculous, the artists discovered very little: sun, dust, ennui, creeping urbanity, the subterfuge of an accomplished painter whose singular vistas were the outcome of composite descriptions, and – of interest to me – unyielding stony mountains.
Last year, I climbed Mount Kilimanjaro with artist Jacques Coetzer. In 2012, in search of some more miraculous, I visited Japan, where, nearly two centuries ago, Hokusai described his much-quoted 36 views of Mount Fuji. Unlike Bas Jan Ader, whose name I repeatedly heard mentioned as a riposte to the ritual parade of good taste and gilded luxury in yet another bubble year, I decided to cycle – not sail – to Japan’s ‘mighty volcano’, as Lafcadio Hearn once described the nearly symmetrical mountain. In the four days it took me to slowly pedal up to the mountain’s northwestern base from Hamamatsu, where I sighted Fuji for the first time – on a billboard – I never once saw Fuji not obscured by clouds. Recounting his 1898 trip, Hearn similarly complained of a ‘uniformly grey sky’ that rendered Fuji ‘always invisible’. Perhaps the weather was different during Hokusai’s time? The lesson: artists are not cartographers.
In Kassel, which I visited after a detour up the Jungfraujoch in Switzerland – to be rewarded with a kitschy mural depicting Caspar David Friedrich’s solitary wanderer – I learnt that Etel Adnan considers Mount Tamalpais in Marin County, California, the most important person she has ever met. The wall text accompanying Adnan’s dOCUMENTA 13 display mumbled something about Cezanne, who repeatedly painted Sainte-Victoire Mountain in Aix-en-Provence. Recently I spotted a really bad knock-off of Pierneef’s pointillist study of the Swartberg Pass, a fabled route through the Swartberg mountains northeast of Cape Town. It made me again appreciate the difficulty recording stone with paint or pencil. Am I being un-contemporary? Perhaps. But Adnan showed me that it is okay to think about mountains, even idealise them. They are their own kind of miraculous.
I haven’t been to Koh-e Bâbâ, a mountain range in Afghanistan. Michael Rakowitz may have been. What Dust Will Rise? (2012), his elegant dOCUMENTA 13 installation, suggested he has: the display included rubble from the demolished Buddhas of Bamiyan, patiently carved into cliffs in the mountainous Ḥazārajāt region. The habit of artists to exhibit their collections rarely prompts me to say, ‘Gee whizz!’ Rakowitz’s sombre meditation on architecture, printed books, censorship, idolatry and memory (also the failure thereof) made me ditch Karlsaue Park as a bad idea. I returned to the Fridericianum for a second time, happy to silently stare at his gift of stones.
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Robert Griffiths Hodgins, Clem, 1983, oil on board, 60 × 79cm. Courtesy: Strauss & Co, Cape Town
Yes, there were other highlights. They included: Chad Rossouw’s smart autopsy of white nostalgia in his solo exhibition ‘A History of Failure’ at Brundyn + Gonsalves (in which he concocted a fake historical account about a dirigible airship named De la Rey); a handful of Zander Blom’s over many experiments in abstract painting from his solo show at Stevenson; James Webb’s use of Japanese ukiyoe prints, a Henry Moore bronze and commissioned installation by Stephen Hobbs to supplement his semi-survey ‘MMXII’ at the Johannesburg Art Gallery; the appearance at auction in Cape Town of an agreeably unflattering portrait of Clement Greenberg painted in 1983 by the crypto-abstractionist Robert Hodgins; also Barend la Grange and Louis Mabokela’s joint non-verbal response (defacement) of Brett Murray’s painting The Spear (2012), a flaccid work about a flaccid subject. But, ultimately, nothing I saw really approached the rigorous poetry of Rakowitz’s commissioned installation or Adnan’s unvarnished total engagement with the world. Yes, their works whispered, the world still rewards believing in the miraculous.
A speculative postscript: I am looking forward to Burundi-born sculptor and painter Serge Alain Nitegeka’s solo show ‘Black Cargo’ at Stevenson. Although sometimes presented as a couch-friendly modernist by his gallery, Nitegeka’s jet-black installations – physical infrastructure that speak of trafficking and trade – interrupt easy passage through gallery spaces, sort of like Ryan Gander’s wind, but not. The physical barriers are key. Kendell Geers is the subject of a career retrospective at Haus der Kunst in Munich. His recent Goodman show suggests that his defining period has now passed. Emerging during South Africa’s unsettled transition, his 1990s work skilfully blended danger and argument and insult and plagiarism to produce something almost sui generis. More speculatively: Elvira Dyangani Ose, the Tate curator appointed to oversee the third edition of the stalled Lubumbashi Biennale, has some big promises to deliver on. Speaking at the Joburg Art Fair, she mooted plans mooted plans to stretch this event in the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo over the entire year. Lastly, a sombre yet hopeful speculation: with troubles continuing in Mali, will we see a 10th edition of the much-loved, always enervating pan-African photo biennial, Bamako Encounters? Fingers crossed.
Jeremy Deller’s Beyond the White Walls (2012) at art:concept, Paris– the artist’s articulate meta-commentary on the projects he’s done outside of galleries or museums
“Set-up” at Galerie Jousse Enterprise, Paris– a tightly-curated group show by Stephen Hepworth that provided one possible view of where photography is going: including Michele Abeles, Kate Costello, Sam Falls, Corin Hewitt, Matt Lipps and Elisa Sighicelli
TV
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Lena Dunham’s Girls (more real than reality tv), Catfish the TV show (what is the authentic self in the age of digital culture?), Breaking Bad Season 5 “Dead Freight” (the train heist episode), *Mad Men* Season 5 “The Other Woman” (the Jaguar episode)
Tig Notaro’s morbidly hilarious stand-up comedy routine after being diagnosed with cancer, as presented on This American Life’s Episdoe 476, ‘What Doesn’t Kill You’ http://www.thisamericanlife.org/contributors/tig-notaro
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Rimini Protokoll, Lagos Business Angels, Hebbel Theater, Berlin
Jerome Bel’s Disabled Theater (2012) at dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel
Rimini Protokoll’s Lagos Business Angels (2012) at the Hebbel Theater, Berlin– untrained actors and entrepreneurs from Nigeria and Germany attempt to convince an audience to invest in their businesses through a series of 10-minute presentations. http://www.rimini-protokoll.de/website/en/project_5410.html
Books
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Luigi Ghirri, Kodachrome
Sally Tallantis Artistic Director of Liverpool Biennial of Contemporary Art.
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Jérôme Bel, Disabled Theater, 2012, performance documentation. Photograph: Roman März
• Jérôme Bel, Disabled Theater, dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel
This extraordinary performance surprised and challenged me in ways that I didn’t expect – I was moved and when we left the theatre we were all stunned and speechless for a moment. This was a truly memorable moment in a brilliant programme.
• Manifesta 9, ‘The Deep of the Modern’, Genk
The layering of heritage, historic works and work by contemporary artist in the post-industrial setting of Genk was a brilliant lesson on coal and curating by Cuauhtémoc Medina, Dawn Ades and Katerina Gregos.
• Einstein on the Beach, Robert Wilson and Phillip Glass, Barbican, London
It was amazing to finally have the opportunity to see this iconic work performed in London after having only ever seen documentation.
• Helen Marten, ‘Plank Salad’, Chisenhale Gallery, London
Helen Marten’s first solo show in the UK assembled a complex range of work with wit and precision. Its exciting to see her use the space with such confidence and panache and I am looking forward to seeing more of her work.
• Klaus Weber, ‘If you leave me I’m not coming and Already There!’, Nottingham Contemporary
This show right at the beginning of 2012 comprised a solo exhibition of work by Klaus Weber and an exhibition of over 200 objects and artworks curated by him. It was an ambitious and encyclopeadic endeavour and provided a wild glimpse into his thinking and practice.
• Glasgow International Festival
Its always inspiring to visit Glasgow. Memorable works by Corin Sworn, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Charlotte Prodger, Rosalind Nashashibi and of course Jeremy Deller’s bouncy Stonehenge.
Things I am looking forward to next year:
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• Homeworks VI, Ashkal Alwan, Beirut (Spring 2013)
• Sharjah Biennial 11, United Arab Emirates curated by Yuko Hasegawa (13 – 17 March)
• Manchester International Festival (4 – 21 July)
Mark Beasleyis a writer and curator at the visual arts performance biennial Performa, New York. His first LP with the group Big legs will be released on Junior Aspirin Records in Spring 2013.
My reading in 2012 was largely from the past but the present struck me sharply with John Menick’s, portrait of Mexico City, *A Report on the City*, 2012, published by dOCUMENTA (13). Moving from the quest to locate a VHS snuff movie through hypochondria to tales of ‘Mad Travelling’ each of its six essays tackle, via some very fine and lightly sprung prose, the curious and compelling facts of city life.
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John Menick, A Report on the City
With regard to public lectures, and its lowly cousin hi-falutin’ chat, there have been a number of presentations that have provided substantial brain food. Chiefly Sukhdev Sandhu’s Colloquium for Unpopular Culture at New York University has, over time, hosted a broad range of brilliant minds from Mark Fisher to Mark Pilkington, from Asiatica to off-kilter Englishness. Simon Critchley’s On Truth (and Lies) at Brooklyn Academy of Music presented the facts and otherwise of literary relations to the truth. In quick succession I caught inspiring lectures – come victory laps –by dOCUMENTA (13) curators and organizers Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Chuz Martinez.
Anthony Huberman’s Artist’s Institute gallery come schoolhouse continues to be an inspiration. The normative relations of ‘an education in the arts’ – the professor and the schooled – is ditched in favor of direct meditative learning: objects, art works and artists are present in the classroom. Summer Guthery*’s sporadic *Canal Series in an office suite on Canal (New York) keeps the flame of idiosyncratic and savvy programming alive.
Two documentaries recognized two great wordsmiths, BBC4s *Evidently… John Cooper Clarke* provided an overarching insight into the part poet, part singer, part comic, life long inspiration and very thin man Cooper Clarke. Heavenly Films’ Lawrence of Belgravia– technically released at the end of 2011 but screened in New York in 2012 – is a long overdue recognition of Lawrence, the mononamed frontman of Felt, Denim and Go Kart Mozart: perhaps the greatest popstar Britain never had.
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Bedwyr Williams, The Hill Farmer, 2011, c-type print on DuroSpec
Four exhibitions: Trisha Donnelly’s ‘Artist’s Choice’ at MoMA married the inadvertently psychedelic chip-board mapping with hummingbird’s and paintings by Odilon Redon: a curious and compelling mix. Nicola Tyson’s photographs ‘Bowie Night at Billy’s Club London, 1978’ at White Column’s gallery revealed the birth and genesis of a New Romantic look and sound that continued with the Blitz Club and exploding into the popular consciousness of the eighties, sweeping hair and everything else before it aside. The Philadelphia Museum’s‘Dancing around the Bride: Cage, Cunningham, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Duchamp’ curated by Carlos Basualdo and Phillipe Parreno was a tour de force in curating as seductive theater. Experienced from a distance – via the publication! – Bedwyr William’s ‘My Bad’ at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, has managed to transplant his exceptional writing and ear for the satiric into – as David Robbins would have it – the concrete comedy of objects.
In the realms of theater David Levine’s Habit organized by PS122 was an engagingly nervy and durational work stuck on repeat. Meanwhile at the movies Leos Carax’s Holy Motors, his first film in thirteen years, delivered some of the most memorable images of the year from a jade-green suited, red bearded, finger and flower eating goblin apparition to latex-clad-cyber-sex-martial-arts and talking limo’s. On the small screen E4’sMisfit’s forth series continues to poke at the wtf gland. Parker Posey’s cameo in Louis CK ‘s third season of Louie should also be credited.
A personal highlight of 2012 was to perform in China with the group Big Legs. Junior Aspirin Records’ ‘Junior Aspirin Life Size Model’ gigs in Heihe, on the Black Dragon River and Beijing brought together label fixtures Socrates that Practices Music, God in Hackney, Soul Punch and newer ones in a two hour-nonstop gig before five thousand rattle-waving locals, beneath a vast lighting rig and firework display of which Jay-Z would have approved.
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Mike Kelley in Venice, 1988, Photograph: Sidney Felson
In January we lost Mike Kelley, which will make viewing his Stedelijk retrospective in Amsterdam (on until April 1) bittersweet. Working with Mike on his Judson Church Day is Done show for Performa 09 and co-curating the Fantastic World music festival at Gramercy Theater with him was a privilege and an education. Over the past year I’ve been re-reading his texts, watching his films and listening to his music. He seems more present to me than ever.
Gabriela Jaureguiis a writer, critic and editor. She is the author of Controlled Decay (Akashic, 2008) and lives and works in Mexico City.
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Teresa Margolles, ‘La Promesa’, installation view at MUAC, Mexico City
Perhaps it is indeed the end of an era, as the Mayans say. Looking forward to the new one! In the meantime, here’s some of what made 2012 into a good ending:
Watching Seun Kuti dance and morph along with his Egypt 80 Shukar Collective at Cine Plaza in Mexico City.
The Argentine writer César Aira’s regenerative prose – any and all of it – this year it’s *_El Mármol_ (La bestia equilátera).
Okkyung Lee’s cello explosion at el nicho aural festival in Mexico City in May.
A spring full of marches and protests, the blossoming of a youth movement of resistance in Mexico.
Eduardo Terrazas’ double whammie in Mexico City: at Casa Barragán and Proyectos Monclova (new location).
Patti Smith’s concert under a full moon at the Anahuacalli Museum, Mexico City.
Lizzy Fitch’s ‘Concrete U’ at New Galerie, Paris.
Re-re-re-reading The Collected Stories of Lydia Davis (even though it’s not 2012, I kept coming back to them this year, as I did The Stories of John Cheever, Picador 2009 and Vintage, 2000 respectively).
Oskar Fischinger’s ‘Space Light Art’ at the Whitney Museum, New York.
Teresa Margolles’ harrowing exhibition ‘La Promesa’ (The Promise) at the Museo Unversitario Arte Contemporáneo (MUAC), Mexico City.
The theatrical release of Matias Meyer’s Los últimos cristeros (The Last Christeros, 2011).
Abraham Cruzvillegas’ Monkey self and family portraits at kurimanzutto gallery, Mexico City (‘Nuestra imagen actual, autorrretratos recientes’ ‘Our Current Imagination: Recent Self-Portraits).
The release of Mexican duo Soledad’s debut 12” Fe (on Vale Vergas Discos).
Colm Tóibin’s lecture at the Claustro de Sor Juana University in Mexico City.
Marihuana voted legal in Colorado and Washington states shining a hope for Mexico’s future and a possible end to its so-called war on drugs.
Spiritualized’s new release Sweet Heart Sweet Light (on Double Six Records).
Palestine granted UN observer state status.
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Carlos Cruz-Diez, Physichromie 174, 1965, cardboard, casein, cellulose acetate inserts, mounted on plywood, 62 × 51.4 × 4.6 cm
And in the new year:
I am excited about the retrospective of the French Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez, ‘Color in Space and Time’ at MUAC (until February 24)
Continuing our series looking back at the highlights of 2012 and thinking ahead to some reasons to be cheerful in 2013, as chosen by frieze editors and contributors.
Jason Foumbergis a contributing culture critic at Chicago magazine, art editor and columnist at Newcity, and contributes art criticism to Photograph and Sculpture magazines.
Chicago picks of 2012 and ones to watch in 2013
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Alberto Aguilar, Photo Tubes (Rachel Herman), 2012, from the ‘domestic monuments’ series, installation view
ONES TO WATCH IN 2013:
• Jeroen Nelemans deconstructs light boxes as they’ve been used in the history of photography, at The Mission Projects in January.
• Alberto Aguilar decorates an iconic Mies van der Rohe-designed residence with “domestic monuments” as part of Elmhurst Art Museums’s ‘Open House’ series (January 19 – April 20)
• Queer Thoughts is a new gallery showcasing emerging artists.
• Aspect Ratio is the first gallery in Chicago dedicated solely to video art, showing Chelsea Knight, Guy Ben-Ner, and more.
• Edie Fake draws the history of queer culture in Chicago, at Thomas Robertello Gallery.
• Kavi Gupta Gallery will expand and open a second location in Chicago, an 8,000 square-foot space.
• Jeremiah Hulsebos-Spofford will open a solo show at the Hyde Park Art Center. There are rumors of naked artists on horseback at the opening.
• Jason Lazarus will open his second solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. Visitors will be able to carry Occupy Wall Street
protest signs throughout the museum.
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Jessica Stockholder, Color Jam, 2012
TRENDING IN 2012:
• Artist residencies: This past summer, dozens, if not hundreds, of artists attended residencies in the Midwest, at Oxbow, ACRE, Harold Arts, and the new Summer Forum. They returned to the city refreshed and energized, with new networks formed. The city seems like a friendlier place to live and work after everyone vacationed and collaborated together.
• New art fairs: Expo sought to revitalize Chicago’s presence in the global art fair arena, while MDW opened its third artist-run fair, an experimental carnival of emerging-artist projects.
• University galleries rise: Solveig Øvstebø will join the Renaissance Society (University of Chicago) as its new director in 2013. Also at the University of Chicago, Monika Szewczyk is the new visual arts program curator at the recently opened Logan Center for the Arts. She joins her husband in Chicago, Dieter Roelstraete, who is senior curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA). Lisa Corrin became the new director of the Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University, and will be filling up the galleries with contemporary art.
• Jessica Stockholder created the largest-ever public art sculpture/painting, called Color Jam, by wrapping a downtown intersection in colored vinyl.
• Industry of the Ordinary opened a retrospective at the Chicago Cultural Center and invited just about every local artist, and all viewers, to participate in their performative artworks.
• Jan Tichy took over the entire Museum of Contemporary Photography and re-presented its collections both in the galleries and online.
• Former MCA curator Tricia Van Eck opened 6018North, an historic mansion-turned-art-house for artists to refurbish with site-specific projects.
• ‘24 Hours/25 Days’ is an exhibit open all day every day (for 25 straight days) to herald the closing of artist-run space New Capital.
• Martin Creed has been the first artist-in-residence at the MCA, and issued a new artwork each month.
TOP 5 SHOWS OF 2012 IN CHICAGO: Heidi Norton at the Museum of Contemporary Art ‘The Great Refusal: Taking on Queer Aesthetics’ at the School of the
Art Institute of Chicago Ramón Miranda Beltrán, ‘Chicago Is My Kind of Town’, at Julius Cæsar gallery Dawoud Bey retrospective at the Renaissance Society Benjamin Bellas at Slow Gallery
Sam Thorneis associate editor of frieze and based in London, UK.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. Einstein on the Beach
• Hanne Darboven, Requiem (2000), St Thomas the Martyr Church, Newcastle
• Alina Szapocznikow, ‘Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972’– Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
• ‘The Stuff That Matters. Textiles Collected by Seth Siegelaub for the CSROT’– Raven Row, London
• Sprawling shows with sprawling ambitions, such as ‘Spirits of Internationalism’ (at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, and M HKA, Antwerp), ‘Animism’ (which I saw at the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin), the Paris Triennale 2012 and, of course, dOCUMENTA (13)
• Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson’s Einstein on the Beach (1976) performed at the Barbican, London
• John Akomfrah, The Unfinished Conversation (2012) – Liverpool Biennial
• Solo shows by Ed Atkins and Helen Marten at Chisenhale Gallery, London
• Music-wise, I found myself listening over and over to new releases by Julia Holter, Andy Stott, Shackleton, Lana Del Rey (sorry), Frank Ocean (obviously), as well as Music for Keyboards, d’Eon’s lovely trilogy of free-to-download synth studies
• In 2013, I’m hoping to catch the touring Kenneth Price retrospective, the Carnegie International (which opens in September), as well as to visit the renovated Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where their Mike Kelley retrospective runs til 1 April.
Katrina Brownis director of the Common Guild, Glasgow.
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Bactrian Princess, late 3rd/early 2nd millennium BCE, Central Asia, shown as part of dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel
Highlights of 2012:
dOCUMENTA (13) was a big highlight of the year, even if its scale risked rendering it an impossible, unachievable whole. Within it, the parts were strong and particular works that stood out for me were those by Omer Fast, Tacita Dean, Pierre Huyghe, Gerard Byrne, Francis Alys, and Roman Ondák, as well as Michael Rakowitz’s remarkable installation What Dust Will Rise? and, of course, those unforgettable Bactrian Princesses.
Elsewhere and throughout the year, some of the most memorable works for me have been particularly strong moving image works: Philippe Parreno’s haunting Marilyn in his solo show at the Beyeler in Basel; Luke Fowler’sThe Poor Stockinger, the Luddite Cropper and the Deluded Followers of Joanna Southcote, which ingeniously and enticingly fused the writings of E.P. Thompson with the voice of Cerith Wyn Evans, at the Hepworth Wakefield, and was a brilliant example of a commission that responded to its location without being overly tied to or dependent on it; and* Helen Marten’s* Evian Disease, which I saw at Palais de Tokyo, Paris in October, accompanied by one of the best gallery texts I have ever come across, describing it as “a wild chase in search of the place and speed of the contemporary individual”.
Michael Clark has been a big part of my 2012, with three shows in Scotland, all of which I saw. His New Work at Tramway, Glasgow in October offered both Relaxed Muscle and Scritti Politti (playing live) as accompaniment to some astonishing dancing with fantastic costumes by Stevie Stewart.
I am currently enjoying reading Edward Hollis’sThe Secret Lives of Buildings (Portobello Books, 2011), which is a fascinating journey through time and its impact on both the form and function some of the world’s most iconic buildings. In fiction, my highlight was probably Ewan Morrison’s Close Your Eyes (Jonathan Cape, 2012), which has stayed with me.
The near ubiquitous Django Django deserve special mention as their eponymous album was almost entirely responsible for getting me through Glasgow International Festival in April. The recently released and very lovely box set ‘Some Songs Side-by-Side’ (a collaborative project between the Glasgow independent record labels Watts of Goodwill, RE:PEATER Records and Stereo Café Bar) featuring Gummy Stumps, Tut Vu Vu, Muscles of Joy and others, is making me wish I still had a record player!
Reasons to be cheerful for 2013
I am really looking forward to Gerard Byrne’s most substantial UK show to date at the Whitechapel in January, Corin Sworn at Chisenhale in February and, in March, Simon Starling’s take on the collection for the Tate Britain Commission, which is sure to be a treat.
As well as our own exhibition for Scotland + Venice at the Biennale, I’m looking forward to seeing how Jeremy Deller tackles the British Pavilion and what the swapping of France and Germany will produce. And I’m looking forward to seeing Fulya Erdemci’s Istanbul Biennial, given her in-depth knowledge of the city.
Vivian Sky Rehbergis a contributing editor of frieze and course director of the Master of Fine Art at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She lives in Paris, France, and Rotterdam.
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William Kentridge, The Refusal of Time, 5-channel projections with megaphones and a breathing machine, 24 min., Commissioned by dOCUMENTA (13). Photograph: Henrik Stromberg
Highlights, lowlights, anticipations, one reason to be cheerful
Hands down, no contest: the most surprising, disorienting and inspiring exhibition I saw in 2012 was Bernd Krauß’s ‘Das ist heute möglich,’ at the Kölnischer Kunstverein. Krauß’s mixed-media works—comprised mainly out of texts, images and objects culled or handcrafted during daily, town and country meanderings—strike the perfect balance between conceptual rigour and material heft, insouciant disorder and methodological precision. They are also, quite frequently, laugh-out-loud hilarious. This delightful exhibition, which should be seen as a pendant to Krauß’s tentacular online presence, exposed his unwavering commitment to cleave art-making to everyday life to the extent that it simply becomes second nature. It put me in just the right—completely receptive—frame of mind for a second trip to dOCUMENTA (13), where I was again captivated by the crowd pleasers. Etel Adnan’s colour-saturated paintings and William Kentridge’s The Refusal of Time jazzed my senses, while Tino Sehgal’s This Variation and Pierre Huyghe’s droning Untitled garden made me leap lightly from the fence I had been sitting on with respect to their work for some time. Speaking of leaps: I left my homebase in Paris for Rotterdam in early 2012, but just managed to catch ‘Le sentiment des choses,’ curated by Elodie Royer and Yoan Gourmel at Le Plateau/Frac Ile-de-France, and inspired by the Italian artist and designer Bruno Munari, who had the good common sense to make foldable sculptures for hotel nightstands. I could have moved in for the duration, slept on Munari’s Robots Abitacolo, a bed/storage/workspace (so what if it’s for kids?), and I would have never been bored, not even for a minute.
Lowlights? There are so many… But closer to home, the biggest downers are the rampant economic precarity that is so harshly affecting what we try to get about doing as artists, writers, curators and advocates of culture at large coupled with the political lack of imagination on the part of those who govern. Of course I feel this particularly strongly in the Netherlands, where I now spend the bulk of my time, but I could also rant about France, if you let me. Unfortunately, as a diehard sceptic, I anticipate things won’t get loads better anytime soon. Still, I am blown away by the ferocious and admirable determination of those struggling to turn the ship around or to invent new, compromise scenarios when faced with the loss of their livelihoods and workspaces. Solidarity: now there’s a reason to be cheerful and a form of good cheer that deserves to be more widespread.
Ronald Jonesis professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, Sweden where he leads The Experience Design Group.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view. The Master, dir. Paul Thomas Anderson, DVD still
Highlights of 2012:
• The Master (dir. Paul Thomas Anderson) – This movie is pure American cult-poetry, and the single contemporary masterpiece I encountered over the past year. It is the wound-up story of the irreconcilable relationship between Freddie, a traumatized war veteran, hauntingly played by Joaquin Phoenix, and Lancaster Dodd, the spiritual impresario, incarnated by the entrancing Philip Seymour Hoffman. Freddie, seeking some direction, any direction, in life joins in with Dodd’s “The Cause,” a quasi-religion which exists precisely because wounded creatures like Freddie need for it to exist; the reassurance for the hollowed-out that they have an inner life, in-there-somewhere. It is a directorial triumph for Paul Thomas Anderson who has created a call and response relationship between this film and his other masterpiece Magnolia.
• Arizona State University Center for Science and Imagination– Wondering why so many science fiction writers are addicted to dystopian visions of the future, Michael Crow, President of Arizona State University, did what would seem counterintuitive, a.k.a. what seems to come naturally to him. He inaugurated the Center for Science and Imagination to bring together sci-fi writers of the rank of Neal Stephenson who created cyberpunk, perhaps the darkest science fiction genre, and scientists like Keith Hjelmstad to imagine an array of post-critical, pro-active future scenarios. Most ambitious is the project run by author Cory Doctorow (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) and the university’s Director of Earth and Space Exploration, Kip Hodges to design a working 3-D printer that, once delivered to the moon’s surface, would begin manufacturing self-assembling astronaut quarters from moon dust, along with other essentials for lunar living.
• President Obama’s re-election– The first black U.S. President’s re-election is the re-assurance that the sea change four years ago will not be turned back, but significantly his second term marks a tipping point even more expansive than his first. As the President to come of age in the post Viet Nam and Watergate era, his re-election tells us that the generations encumbered by ideological and cultural divisiveness, that aggravated the country’s national and international behavior since the 1960’s, are behind us. The President acknowledged as much in his Inaugural Address saying: “On this day, we come to proclaim an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics . . .” The consequence of his re-election? Global beneficence.
Reasons to be cheerful in 2013:
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Hilma af Klint, No. 2, Group 9, The Dove (From ‘Series UW’), 1915
• Hilma af Klint– Some might say that the Obama re-election was in part a matter of score settling. Well, Hilma’s long-awaited retrospective at the Moderna Museet (opening February 16, 2013) is the ultimate in revenge served cold. Having pioneered what “received knowledge” tells us is automatic drawing decades before the boys on the continent ever considered it, she was then overlooked with startling consistency, excepting her cringe-making reputation for being the “occultist” she was; a dubious consolation prize. Decades ago, having conscientiously introduced Hilma’s insight and achievements to a well-known art historian, he sat silently, snuffed out his cigarette, looked up at me and said: “Do you realize how many *PhD’s would be undone should this ever come to light?” Gird your loins.
Kirsty Bellis a contributing editor of frieze based in Berlin, Germany. Her book The Artist’s House is forthcoming from Sternberg Press.
James Benning, Nightfall (2011) A single take, 98 minutes long, shows a fixed view of a forest as day turns incrementally, minute by minute, into night. Unexpectedly dramatic, this film is an epic study of attention, expectation and mortality. As if to make this clear, the final credit shows James Benning’s name and not the date of the film (2011) but his date of birth (1942).”
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Claes Oldenburg, Study for Announcement for One-Man Show at Dwan Gallery– Mickey Mouse with Red Heart, 1971
Claes Oldenburg, ‘The Sixties’, Mumok, Vienna. This show started with The Street (1959-60), a tawdry tableau constructed from odds and ends of cardboard, and culminating in the exhaustive and thrilling Mouse Museum, with its Ray Gun Wing, which assembled all manner of versions of accidental and purposeful “ray guns”, Oldenburg’s ever-present, totemic symbol of transformation.
Katharina Grosse, Galerie Johann König, Berlin and Emily Wardill, Fulll Firearms, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe Two artists for whom I have experienced that rare excitement of a 180 degree turn around, from hate to love. In Grosse’s hyperbolic spray paint installations and Wardill’s feature films that inhabit the genre of melodrama, repellence and overload are integrated and vital parts of the work. Both, in completely different ways, pose challenging questions about ontological relations between one thing and the next, both intellectually and physically.
Danh Võ, 2 Fevrier, 1861, Phung Võ (Kunsthaus Bregenz). This publication synthesized the ongoing project by Danh Võ in which his father, Phung Võ , copies out in his elegant handwriting the last letter sent by the French missionary and priest Jean-Théophane Vénard to his father in 1861, before being decapitated in Hanoi. An edition of unlimited number that will continue until the death of Võ ’s father (the names of all 210 recipients at the time of the making the book are listed in the back), this deceptively simple work is a summation of the overlapping concerns of Võ ’s multivalent work, among them family relations, mortality, labour, language, immigration, colonialism, collecting and distribution.
Philippe Parreno, Fondation Beyeler, Basel. Parreno’s pair of extraordinary new films, Continuously Habitable Zones (2011), a black crystalline, claustrophobic landscape, with no revelation or clues to its location or reason, and Marilyn (2012) described as ‘the portrait of a ghost’, in which we see from the eyes of the actress, as she/we drift somnolently away from the reality of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel interior she inhabits.
‘Between Walls and Windows: Architecture and Ideology’, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. Valerie Smith’s ultimate exhibition as curator at the HKW was a feat of beaurocratic negotiation that looked as light as air. For a short month, the HKW’s building was stripped of signage and furniture, even the cashier’s desk was removed, to enable it to be “architectural monument, understood as an ideologically determined sculpture.” While ten artists and architects groups were invited to intervene in the newly unencumbered building, it was the building itself, a “gift” from the US to the West Berlin in 1957, that became the clearest evidence of ideology in action.
Karl Holmqvist, reading, Galerie Neu, Berlin. Sitting on rustic milking stools on a patch of lawn behind Galerie Neu, Karl Holmqvist treated his audience to a reading from his new book of poetry ‘’K.’ The repetitive refrains uttered in Karl’s inimitable sweet drone took on a hypnotic quality, like a gentle brain-washing. For weeks afterwards, my kids could be heard sporadically intoning the refrain “WORDS AREPEOPLE / LANGUAGE IS POWER.”
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Laura Owens, Untitled (alphabet), installation view at Sadie Coles HQ, London
Laura Owens, Sadie Coles HQ, London. A cracker of a show, easily the best in Mayfair during London’s Frieze Art Fair week, amongst a host of shows by male painter colleagues who paled in comparison to these two wildly energetic series of painterly invention.
Raoul de Keyser, ‘To Walk’ , Barbara Weiss, Berlin. This exhibition of seventeen incredible little paintings that picture the extraordinary locked into the ordinary was the last show of new work by de Keyser, who died on October 6th.
dOCUMENTA (13). My list of highlights would not be complete without mentioning Carolyn Christov-Barghiev’s Documenta. Its combination of a tightly orchestrated “brain” with a somewhat unruly and inclusive “body” seemed an unusually generous and honest portrayal of how art is made and works these days. Is this empathy as a curatorial strategy?
