By Aram Moshayedi
Ryan Gander, Artists' Cocktails, 2013
Aram Moshayediis a writer and curator at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
The exhibition ‘oO’, curated by Raimundas Malasauskas for the Lithuanian and Cypriot Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, seemed to characterize a curatorial mode that was felt throughout the short and hazy year that was 2013. As if possessed by sights and sounds that were indifferent to the spectacle and ceremony that was the standard of the national presentations elsewhere, the repurposed gymnasium where this exhibition was located operated according to its own biological clock. ‘oO’ was consumed by an ominous audio installation by Norwegian artist Morten Norbye Halvorsen and continuously inhabited by a trio of slow, writhing figures choreographed by New York-based Maria Hassabi, among others. Together, these works formed integral parts of the exhibition’s overall scenography as a living, breathing entity subject to change and continuous undoing.
This was where I also had my first encounter with a Roomba; a robotic household floor-cleaner that banged and crashed into the walls of the gym’s under-lit hallways. My meeting with such an odd and reticent character was similar to how it later felt to be in Pierre Huyghe’s retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, where most of the goings-on likewise withheld their secrets and had the majority of visitors wandering about the exhibition as though they were lost, staring into empty corners of the museum or reading didactic panels from the Pompidou’s previous installation of works by the late Mike Kelley (whose death in 2012 continued to be felt throughout the year). On my first visit to the Huyghe exhibition, the Pompidou had run out of exhibition guides, which further underscored a directionless reverie that characterized many of the works included in the dense web of the artist’s 30-year output.
Concert, ‘Behave Like an Audience’ LP cover, 2013
If it wasn’t already the title of a debut album by the band Concert (Martin Norbye Halvorsen, Benjamin Seror, and Chris Evans), released in 2013 by Sternberg Press and organized by curator Mai Abu ElDahab – who, with Anthony Huberman, will co-curate the 2014 Liverpool Biennial – ‘Behave Like an Audience’ might have been an astute reminder for those viewers who made their way into the Huyghe exhibition in droves. One can only hope that they will be as lost when the show makes its way to the Ludwig Museum and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2014.
To ‘behave like an audience’ was something of the past year’s mantra, delivered in a flood of exhibitions that played on varying degrees of inwardness, refusal, and withdrawal from an audience that grew ever more intrigued by and skeptical of an inflated art market. In the company of record auction sales, prospecting art buyers who favoured the sweet, fluffy fleet of generic, assembly-line abstraction and formalist painting seemed to cast a particularly disheartening glow on the year’s end (you’ll find none of those artist’s names or praises here). But despite these trends, an ever-increasing audience, and a flood of ‘venture art lovers,’ there were showings by a handful of artists and curators and writers that proved that there are greater things at stake.
Looking forward to 2014, writer Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer’s forthcoming book on Lee Lozano’s Dropout Piece, as part of Afterall’s ‘One Work’ series, is a testimony to the benefits of working in ways that are understated, if not absent, and better kept as secret. It is likely to be a book with conceptual and methodological ties to Bruce Hainley’s Under the Sign of [sic.]: Sturtevant’s Volte-Face, published in 2013 by Semiotext(e) and the most substantial and reflective/reflexive piece of writing on the great Sturtevant, whose recent foray into visibility from a career of relative under-appreciation will culminate in a survey exhibition at MoMA, New York later this year. Hainley’s coupling of criticism and intimacy makes Under the Sign of [sic.] a model for intimately writing and thinking about the lives of artists and artworks.
Also in 2013, operating as something of an underground outpost for artists, curators, writers, and other participants in the ever-expanding ‘art world,’ Piero Golia’s provisional private club, the Chalet, opened its doors to 40 hand-selected guests one night each week for the last few months of the year. Accessed through an un-disclosable entrance not far from Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), the Chalet was christened at almost the very moment LACE announced the sudden departure of executive director Carol Stakenas. With few insights into the hiring process yet to be revealed, the fate of the longstanding non-profit sits in the hands of a perplexing board, who we can only hope in the coming year will find a candidate capable of turning the organization around and retaining some of the glory from its decades-long history. In the meantime, however, the Chalet will continue to operate almost parasitically (and independently funded) for another nine or so months, until the patina of its highly designed interiors wears away and the folklore around its activities concretizes into something seemingly more substantial.
The opening of the Chalet made some long for the earlier era of Jason Rhoades’ epic Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé and the messy adrenaline rush it embodied. This was particularly true as the late artist’s largest museum exhibition in the United States more-or-less occurred concurrently at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (so many end-of-the-year summaries and best-ofs have made mention of the exhibition ‘Jason Rhoades, Four Roads’ that I can’t imagine adding anything more than my favorable allegiance). Admittedly, I was never able to attend a party at Rhoades’ Black Pussy, though I remember wanting so badly to score an invite. But looking forward into the future, for many of us who showed up too late to Los Angeles, to Rhoades’ party, the Chalet will hopefully have a similar ‘you really had to be there’ thing that participants and on-lookers in the Black Pussy debauchery have continued to relay in its aftermath. For now, however, most of us anticipating what will become of Golia’s project in the months to come.
Miljohn Ruperto and Ulrik Heltoft: ‘Voynich Botanical Studies; Specimen 34v JARO;’ 2013
Of the many other things worth mentioning in 2013 that may or may not have had something to do with the above: Miljohn Ruperto and Ulrik Heltoft’s fantastical photographic approximations of the 15th-century Voynich Manuscript at Thomas Solomon Gallery (looking forward: Ruperto will participate in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and will concurrently have his first solo exhibition in New York at Koenig & Clinton); Ryan Gander’s book of Artists’ Cocktails; the SoundCloud download of MIXTA2E by 18+, whose music video for the song ‘BITCH’ takes the place of an official press release for the Lithuanian and Cypriot Pavilion’s presentation in Venice; the reunion of the rap duo The Bushes (Ry Rocklen and Nick Lowe); King Krule’s sorrowful whaling, moaning, bellyaching on 6 Feet Beneath the Moon (True Panther Sounds); the distorted bass of ‘Cars That Go Boom’ reverberating from Wallspace’s HVAC in Paul Elliman’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in New York; the selection of Haim Steinbach photos from the early 1980s in the artist’s 40-year survey at the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College; and the Walker Art Center’s unprecedented acquisition of the complete chapters of Allan Sekula’s Fish Story (1989–95) – Sekula’s death in 2013 was one of the year’s greatest losses.