By Dan Fox
Michael Smith, Busman’s Holiday Retreat Revue, performance at The Performing Garage, May 1981; courtesy: the artist, photograph: Kevin Noble.
Dan Foxis co-editor of frieze and is based in New York.
Anatole Broyard once joked that ‘Everyone wants to see himself as disappointed – it’s the influence of modern art.’ That was in the 1940s, way back when modern art was a catalyst for critical dissatisfaction with the world. In 2013, for me it was often art itself that was disappointing. I’ll probably have my membership of the International Echo Chamber of Critical Consensus revoked for saying this, but if, in my lifetime, I don’t see another exhibition of anodyne abstractionist pootling in the foothills of art history, or artists raining $$$ to make spectacular high brow amusement park ride installations, or curators getting meta-masturbatory about re-staging conceptual art exhibitions from the 1970s, it will still be too soon. But hey, don’t listen to this misery guts. According to Hyperallergic, art critics in 2013 top the list of most powerless groups in the art world.
Michael Portnoy, 27 Gnosis, (2012-13), performance still; courtesy: The Kitchen, New York; photograph: Paula Court
But that’s enough Grinching. 2013 was no write-off. W.H. Auden reportedly said that the art of living in New York City lay in crossing the street against the lights. Michael Portnoy’s 27 Gnosis at The Kitchen, New York, attempted to cross the street against the lights, do a pirouette halfway, then pull a wheelie in reverse gear down an adjoining one-way street, and for that I doff my hat to him just for even thinking about trying. I missed its original presentation at dOCUMENTA 13 in Kassel last year – with only 27 people able to attend each performance, it was oversubscribed when I visited – so I was curious to see the New York reboot. Staged in a lilac-coloured auditorium shaped like a lemon squeezer for alien giants, 27 Gnosis was a truly hilarious mock game show that spliced parodies of critical theory with dance, fashion, music and sci-fi-inspired tomfoolery. Portnoy and Ieva Misevičiūtė played bossy pan-dimensional beings who invited their audience to take language for a walk, blindfold it, dose it with strong hallucinogenic drugs and let it wander naked in the jungle until it could no longer remember its name. An imaginative work about the act of interpretation, 27 Gnosis was the most memorable art experience I had this year. If I am looking forward to anything in 2014, it is to be surprised like I was by this.
The dense Sarah Lucas retrospective at the Whitechapel, London, fused old work with new in eye-popping ways that gave me pause for thought about that moment in 1990s British art; that period everyone has been so studiously trying to avoid eye-contact with for the past decade. Stepping back another decade or two, a small exhibition of work by Jo Spence at White Columns, New York– touring from Studio Voltaire and SPACE in London – provided a raw, if a little didactic, insight into 1970s British feminist photography. And whilst we’re still inspecting the rear-view mirror, my fingers and toes are crossed in hope that I will get to see the first major survey of Amy Sillman’s paintings at the ICA Boston before it closes at the start of 2014. The opportunity to see a rare performance of Juan José Gurrola’s 1971 play Monoblock– pieced together by Mauricio Marcin and Fernando Mesta for Sofia Hernandez Chong Cuy’s 9th Bienal de Mercosul in Porto Alegre– opened me up to an intriguing period in Mexican art and performance. ‘Rented Island’, curated by Jay Sanders at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, did the same for certain underappreciated figures in the city’s 1970s downtown theatre and performance scenes; standout works included Ericka Beckman’s films, and the tragicomic brilliance of Michael Smith, whose first UK solo show is opening at Tramway, Glasgow, next spring. I was mesmerized by Florian Hecker’s visual-auditory-olfactory performance CD – A Script for Synthesis, co-presented by Performa and the Guggenheim Museum, which made me think of a philosophy seminar crossed with an opera by Iannis Xenakis on the set of Logan’s Run. A superb exhibition of Ad Reinhardt’s cartoons and ‘ultimate’ black paintings organized by Robert Storr at David Zwirner, New York, in December should have been compulsory viewing for any aspiring artist in today’s over-heated art world: here was an artist who took his work deadly seriously, yet had enough of a sense of humour and distance on the industry itself to not get hopelessly lost in showbiz.
Ben Wheatley, A Field in England (2013)
In cinema, I thoroughly enjoyed Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess, a 1980s period comedy set in a bleak Nowheresville hotel, observing a computer chess tournament and encounter group therapy session unfold alongside each other. Shot in streaky, dull grey colours using vintage Sony tube video cameras, and soundtracked by the hum of the hotel air-con units and gentle folk music, Computer Chess evoked a world of comic awkwardness, political paranoia and proto-tech boom nerdery that resonated with the NSA surveillance revelations unfolding out in the real world. Ben Wheatley’s sumptuously photographed psychedelic English Civil War film, A Field in England , told the tale of a group of army deserters and alchemists high on magic mushrooms looking for buried treasure in, well, a field in England. With nods to vintage British rural horror – Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man, Blood on Satan’s Claw– A Field in England also spoke indirectly to the country’s youth subcultures of the late 20th century: 1970s free festivals, New Age Travellers camped in west country fields, convoys of kids searching the countryside at night in search of illegal acid house parties in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. The most haunting and unforgettable re-release of 2013 was Shirley Clarke’s extraordinary Portrait of Jason– a verité study of performer and hustler Jason Holliday, shot across 12 hours in the Chelsea Hotel, New York, in 1967.
Shirley Clarke, Portrait of Jason (1967/2013)
The year saw some fine reissues in music too: The Zaragoza Tapes 1981–82 gave us the playful, scratchy sounds of obscure UK DIY band BonaDish, whilst the reissue of Cabaret Voltaire’s album Red Mecca was a reminder of the inventiveness of British electronic music of the same period. A Last Discovery, by Finis Africae, was a new discovery for me; a Spanish group emerging from the aftermath of Franco’s Spain, combining new wave chops with African and Latin influences. 2013 saw the sad passing of Tabu Ley Rochereau, the great Congolese singer – do yourself a favour and track down a copy of the anthology of his music, The Voice of Lightness 1961–1977. Keeping with the retrospective theme, I was impressed by Bob Stanley’s melancholy and exhaustive book *Yeah Yeah Yeah: The Story of Modern Pop*; the history of pop music from the 1950s through to the early 2000s, and what Stanley deems the end of the pop period as a significant cultural force.
It wasn’t a bad year for new music either. Top of my list was Daniel O’Sullivan and Alexander Tucker’s LP Glynnaestra, made under the name Grumbling Fur. A rich album pairing Eno-esque melody with the ghosts of early ‘90s electronic music, it’s standout track was ‘The Ballad of Roy Batty’, which managed to turn Rutger Hauer’s famous soliloquy from Bladerunner into a seriously unshakeable earworm of a ballad. Despite sounding deeply indebted to the late, great Country Teasers, I enjoyed Fat White Family’s debut, Champagne Holocaust for sheer attitude and the band’s gleefully horrible approach to making music videos.
Dean Blunt’s inventive solo debut The Redeemer was notable for being a bleak and fragmented album about bleak and fragmented relationships. English Heretic’s Anti-Heroes and Clapper is Still by Way Through were both albums about the British landscape, although wildly different in tone and texture. English Heretic’s vision is frightening, occult, pessimistic, whilst Way Through are far more sonically optimistic, yet sceptical about the changing character of the countryside and how it is represented. Also this year I got a kick out of: Kelela, CUT 4 ME, My Bloody Valentine’s m b v, and Mathew Sawyer & The Ghosts’ Sleep Dreamt a Brother.
Many notable figures died in 2013 and many notable things will be said of them. But I must mention the sad loss of artist, writer, curator, and teacher Ian White at the tragically young age of 41. Ian brought many people together, and was one of those rare, special figures who remind you why you ever cared about art in the first place and why – even when you feel that art’s letting you down, and the circus around it seems out of control – you must not give up. The world is a poorer place without his intelligence, integrity, humour and kindness, but his example lives with all those lucky enough to have known him.
Onwards