By Laura McLean-Ferris
Mike Kelley, 'Day is Done', 2005-06, installation view at MoMA PS1, 2013. © 2013 MoMA PS1; photograph: Matthew Septimus
Laura McLean-Ferris is a writer and curator currently based in New York, where she most recently worked on Performa 13. ‘Geographies of Contamination’ an exhibition she has curated with Alex Scrimgeour and Vincent Honoré opens at DRAF, London on 31 January. ‘#nostalgia’, a multi-artist performance that she has conceived for Glasgow Sculpture Studios will take place during Glasgow International 2014.
Exhibition:
Mike Kelley at MoMA PS1, New York
To watch several hours of the vast 36-part video and installation works that comprise Mike Kelley’s Extracurricular Activity Projective Reconstruction (2000-13), is to open multiple chambers of emotion and conceptual space, which is exhausting, exhilarating, depressing and often hysterically funny, and showing these works in the rooms of PS1, a former school, was perfect. Each film or installation is based on a found photograph of costume parties, skits, plays and shows from high school yearbooks. In each case Kelley extended the initial scene of the image into a longer performance that riffs on the photograph’s meaning at face value. Instead of playfulness these moments of socially licensed surreality among school children become a claustrophobic reality, which allows the image to be somehow interrogated beyond what would be normally reasonable, tearing the veil onto another reality lurking within. A seductive crooning vampire laments his troubles getting women and endless recourse to masturbation, a group of gymnasts with black eyes and white faces skip around a gymnasium singing ‘chugga chugga chugga!’ ad infinitum, a hooded girl at a talent show explains that she has embraced Satan due to her total lack of God-given talent before being pelted with rotten tomatoes, whilst teenagers posing for photographs speak, without expression, of the pain and sadness of their lives, or the druggy, sparkling beauty of their thoughts. Horrific, tender and comic, these works are also analogies for the skewing, mind altering powers of memory – tiny rooms of the mind that have closed in at the edges, and from which there is little possibility of escape.
Gretchen Bender, Total Recall, 1987. Photograph: Jason Mandella
Exhibition:
Gretchen Bender, ‘Tracking the Thrill’ at The Kitchen, New York
Nine years after Gretchen Bender’s death, the artist’s exhibition at The Kitchen seemed as though it could have been made yesterday, so closely was it attenuated to the strange digital constructions of corporate logos television clips and the way that these communicate so much about a society when they are cut away from their source and allowed to fly free. It is a cold, chrome-plated world that one sees though Bender’s eyes in works such as Total Recall (1987), projected on a huge wall of monitors – endless visions of the earth, metallic triangles flying through space, and anonymous crowds moving through urban environments. It’s intriguing to think about a generation of artists who attempted to infiltrate the entertainment industry rather than commenting from the outside – the paranoia in Bender’s title sequence for the TV show America’s Most Wanted, for example, is sketchy, frenetic and disturbing, but its difficult to say whether it comments on the paranoia or the age or simply adds to it. I have always loved the combination of Robert Longo’s men in suits flying through the air in the music video for New Order’s ‘Bizarre Love Triangle’ to the words ‘Every time I see you falling, I get down on my knees and pray’, but it took this exhibition to reveal that the power of this video really lies in Bender’s sketchy, anxious editing, particularly in the verses, allowing the falling men to convey exhaustion and relief. I wondered, following this exhibition, whether there is space for the work of the editor to come forward in the same way that the curator has in recent years.
Liz Magic Laser, Stand Behind Me, 2013, included in ‘The Magic of the State’, Lisson Gallery, London
Exhibition:
‘The Magic of the State’, Lisson Gallery, London and Beirut, Cairo
As cracks are increasingly appearing in contemporary economic, societal and political structures, it was hugely enlightening to see an exhibition tackling the historical questions that have troubled societies for centuries, such as ‘The Magic of the State’. This interesting collaboration between a young not-for-profit in Cairo and Lisson, the stately London commercial gallery, featured artists such as Liz Magic Laser, Anja Kirschner and David Panos, and Christodoulos Panayiotou, who were attempting to locate the places in which power moves and sticks when societies are being formed and broken – in money, magic, abstraction, political theatre and in individuals themselves. Also this year, Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘l’Ange de l’Histoire’* at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Paris, which included a selection of contemporary artists such as Lili Reynaud-Dewar (also in the Lisson show), Isabelle Cornaro and Carol Bove, attempted a similarly long view, considering the fragment or piece of debris as an opening into a history.
Music:
18+
Smeary, draggy and sexy, 18+ (an anonymous male/female duo) have the kind of vocal delivery that suggests that they nearly couldn’t be bothered, despite the fact that their subject matter (as the name would suggest) is almost exclusively fucking. Their videos take place in Second Life-style environments – exploring a virtual house, or a spaceless, floating, half-rendered ruin. As a trailer for their contribution to Oo, the Cyprus/Lithuanian pavilions at the Venice Biennale, their music video cut between perfume ad clips and a digitally rendered film of giraffes queuing for a diving board and then leaping into swimming pools, twisting and turning through the air in a spectacular, delightfully unrealisable fantasy. Their full, non-interventionist appropriation of Lana Del Ray’s video for ‘National Anthem’ for standout track ‘Rebirth’ is a gloriously appropriate move, taking Americana popstar’s unapologetic channeling of fantasy that appears to arrive half dead in her mouth, and dialling it up to the next level. ‘Hooooooow, do you that?’ the female vocalist drawls, as the camera lingers on Del Rey’s vision of herself as First Lady to all presidents.
Audio:
Lexicon Valley
The chatty, NPR-style radio show has many appealing forms, but this year I have branched away from the general to take in a few more specialist audio shows, my new favourite being Slate’s intermittently appearing language podcast Lexicon Valley, presented by Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo (a man who read former congressman Anthony Weiner’s sex texts and couldn’t help but wonder: ‘just when did “bend you over” become a sex phrase?’) Among the most sparkling episodes is ‘A Needle Pulling Thread’: devoted to the word ‘so’ and its sudden arrival at the beginning of conversational sentences and responses to questions over the past five years. Far from being a neutral conversational filler, ‘so’, it emerges, has arrived due to its ‘agenda’ feel, and the way that the word also acts as a ‘fast forward’ button giving the sense that we are arriving in a conversation that is already underway. As a speech pattern, in fact, it can be traced back to Silicon Valley techspeak via Michael Lewis’s 1999 book The New New Thing, a long form study of the blossoming California tech industry at the end of the 20th century. It made its way into common speech via the helpful explanations of many awkward individuals discussing technology on platforms such as TED talks, and has ended up as a tiny linguistic carrier of computing in our mouths, a subtle companion to the smartphones in our pockets.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/10/31/reviews/991031.31anderst.html
Book:
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
Rachel Kushner’s dazzling The Flamethrowers arrived like a sudden romance, in that it gave me everything that I wanted but didn’t know I needed, to such an extent that in the end I felt it had been written for me and me alone. Though the novel rips through various parts of the 20th century, it is the central protagonist Reno (so called after her home town) the brightly burning motorcycle girl trying to make it in the art world of 1970s SoHo, who gives the novel its incendiary quality, and who acts as the hungry, observant outsider that lights the world around her. It is Reno’s ideas about speed, film, drawing, ambition and passion that throw the ideas of Robert Smithson, Gordon Matta Clark and others into a kind of sharp relief that I cannot imagine being achieved via the non-fictional form, and which incisively revealed the both immense possibilites of this era in New York, as well as its trappings and failings. Perhaps it’s enough to say that I stopped bothering to turn over the corners of pages containing beautiful imagery, phrases or ideas at page 26 because I had already turned over five, and could suddenly see what I was in for: an outlandishly sexy, novel driven by ideas, art, rubber, gasoline and spirit that offered as many ways to think about art, history, industry and class war as it did about ambition, youth and the experience of falling in and out of love.
Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen in ‘The Hunger Games: Catching Fire’, 2013
Film:
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
Speaking of blazing female protagonists and class wars, it would seem remiss not to mention the latest instalment in the The Hunger Games series, which is perhaps the mass-market, pop-cultural equivalent of The Flamethrowers. As the central characters of teen novelist Suzanne Collins’s dystopic future world struggle with their impossible task of murdering one another whilst retaining their humanity, the protagonist Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) is also beginning to take on that strange, cipher like quantity occasionally ascribed to a young woman – the mascot, the emblem, the figurehead, of a revolution. As the starving, oppressed populations in the outer regions of this world became entranced by Katniss’s wedding dress it was impossible not to think of Kate Middleton, her spectacular wedding in 2011 and the riots that followed in London just a few weeks later. I’m not sure if it means something significant that one of the year’s most popular films was a tirade against spectacle powered by a call to class war – whether the film is precisely the spectacle that it claims to rail against or a powerful comment on the present is ambiguous – but nonetheless it was a perfectly pitched blockbuster for 2013.
Dr. Warren Hern at his Boulder, Colorado clinic. Still from Martha Shane and Lana
Wilson, After Tiller
Film:
After Tiller
Following the murder of Dr George Tiller, one of only five doctors to provide third-trimester abortions in the entire United States, documentary makers Lana Wilson and Martha Shane followed the practices of the remaining four – two women and two men. To make a sympathetic and candid portrait of the deeply passionate doctors, who nonetheless have daily struggles with the moral implications of their decisions (not to mention continuous death threats and picketing) is extraordinarily difficult, and the filmmakers resist simplifying the issue at every turn. To say that this is contentious territory in an ongoing battle over the bodies and rights of women in the US is a ridiculous understatement, but the film is a huge contribution which will likely push the conversation forward… oh, all of a couple of millimetres. But how difficult a feat that is. It’s an incredibly sensitive (albeit draining) piece of work that leaves one with a sense of the horrendous hopelessness of women who find themselves in situations in which no decision is the right one. And unforgettable are the sounds of tears and the shots of their grief-stricken hands, anxiously gripping and ripping paper tissues.
Others: ‘Manet: Return to Venice’ at Palazzo Ducale, Venice; Camille Henrot’s showstopping Grosse Fatigue at the 55th Venice Biennial, various writing by Chris Krauss, Steve McQueen’s retrospective at the Schaulager, Basel; Isa Genzken at MoMA, New York, and Ragnar Kjartansson’s S.S. Hangover at the Venice Biennale.
Looking forward:
At the time of writing I am yet to see the Pierre Huygue retrospective at the Pompidou, which I’m very excited about but I was also very glad to hear that the French artist will be the focus of New York’s Artists Institute next year. I was lucky to work with Cally Spooner on her musical And you were wonderful, on stage for Performa 13 which is as enjoyable for its analytic smarts about the as it is for its jazz-hands showtunes, so I look forward to seeing how the work develops when it moves to Tate Britain in 2014. In Munich I hope to see ‘La Voix Humaine’ at Kunstverein Munchen, an exhibition on the voice, which includes the work of Amelie von Wulffen, Tyler Coburn, Cecile B. Evans and R. Kelly. Plus Becky Beasley’s ‘A Slight Nausea: An Interior’ at South London Gallery; Ed Atkins at Kunsthalle Zurich; Glasgow International, and the Whitney Biennial.