By Jörg Heiser
Margaret Harrison, Take One Lemon, 1971, Lithograph on paper
The year 2014 feels fragmented and torn by culminating conflicts, war atrocities and political disasters connected to names of places like Ferguson, Kobane, Gaza, Donetsk, Dresden (with its shameful anti-Islam Monday protests of Germany’s far right silent minority); hence naming cultural ‘highlights’ in this shitty landscape of lows seems to sit somewhere on the scale between ignorant and defiant.
Which is just to say that this year it became even more obvious than in other years that the act of making art is, per se, fragile and futile – and yet all the more vital exactly in the face of it all. Don’t get me wrong, this is not to say that the only justifiable art therefore is engagé– quite the opposite, I firmly believe that the light-hearted and silly, or the unashamedly idiosyncratic, or the formally experimental, are not only much-needed indicators that there is still air to breathe; they are the air. That said, the jarring soundtrack of political events this year makes a certain kind of complacent, a certain kind of blasé-bullyish artmaking even less tolerable. All the more the highlights of the light-hearted, the silly, the idiosyncratic, and the engaged, do deserve mentioning. But it feels all the more appropriate to describe them, rather than in terms of holistic experiences and well-rounded œuvres, in terms of glimpses of details and small epiphanies – single artworks instead of whole shows, songs instead of albums, scenes instead of plots.
For me the year began with a curious and somehow very rewarding exercise; collecting together artist books by Stanley Brouwn for them to be still-photographed, the only images to run along Oscar van den Boogaard’s beautiful piece on the artist published in March’s issue themed around Big Data. Brouwn for decades has resisted his work otherwise being reproduced. An artist who never attends his own openings and doesn’t give interviews, lest allows portraits of himself being circulated, felt right in the midst of the scandals of state surveillance and the accelerated Social Media hysteria of creepy self-promotion and click-baiting – an arcane ascetic of data production and consumption. I’m admittedly not the dieting type though, and giving up the tools of circulation and going into reclusion is just not an option. As Pablo Larios observed, Network Fatigue is a condition on the rise, and it will have to be checked for sectarian leanings (only the initiate will have the privilege to know etc.). But at the other end of the spectrum is what Jon Ronson described vividly, and backed empirically, in a fascinating keynote at Frieze London Talks, offering a sneak preview of his forthcoming book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (coming out in March 2015): how Social Media are structurally favouring instant, rumour-fuelled public humiliation over the boring labour of nuanced, fact-based consideration. Which for me is an observation leading not to a call to abandon Social Media and the ‘sharing’ economy they entail but to engage with them towards ethical standards for both entrepreneurs and users alike (not to mention the State spoofs virtually behind their shoulders) – towards an online Magna Carta so to speak.
And why not start by erasing the Uber app from your phone? The art world with its taxi-heavy events around the globe is a good place as any to start behaving ethically – towards standards of fairness, and plain civility – given a company who has a record for bad business practices , from unfair fare cuts for its drivers, through a series of sexual assaults indicating the company lacked background checks on some of those drivers, to being ‘Platinum Sponsor’ of Oakland’s Urban Shield conference, an event heavily promoting the militarization of urban police forces (after Ferguson, the questionable character of that needs no further explanation), to dramatic surge pricing (charging four times as much as usual) during the recent Sydney hostage crisis. This all may sound like satirical exaggeration, as if coming straight from Neal Stephenson’s dystopian SF novel Snow Crash (1992) in which the Cosa Nostra runs a high-speed pizza delivery service (drivers who fail to deliver on the guaranteed time of maximum 21 minutes face the fate of all who fail the Mafia). But it’s happening all around us and we rub our eyes in disbelief as, for example, it has been revealed that British company Cable & Wireless, now owned by Vodafone, actively provided the British secret service GCHQ with access to its underwater cables, thus providing for 70% of the Internet data volume GCHQ spied on. Any Consequences? None, of course.
I think the time has really come for users/consumers to become more active in responding to these issues, from boycotting a company altogether to restraining ones use of their service in certain ways. Using Amazon amounts to accepting the calculated subversion of minimum wage legislation: workers in Germany for example have been on strike lately as they are paid according to the lower collective bargaining agreements of the logistics industry, even though Amazon is clearly in the mail-order and retail business, with its higher wages. And people working for Amazon’s ‘Mechanical Turk’ division often only earn about $2 or less per hour. Even if you can’t always resist buying that rare book through Amazon marketplace, it’s worth considering alternatives.
Or take Facebook: from 1 January 2015, Facebook has a change of terms that any professional artist or photographer should be worried about. It allows FB to sell, distribute or otherwise commercialize any imagery uploaded, with no compensation. The obvious solution is to either quit FB – tough if there is no other well-functioning social network of its kind – or to simply not upload any high-res photos anymore, and instead only upload watermarked and/or low-res images, or link to images uploaded onto other websites. For better or worse, we will all have to learn to not make it too easy for the over-eager data-devourers.
It’s just that I’m getting increasingly annoyed at the utter numbness many in the art-world seem to feel towards these issues. Taking for granted that we inevitably have to continue facebooking and phoning away like there’s no tomorrow, as if giving in to unrestrained data-mining or indirectly supporting exploitative wages was a mere occupational hazard of being in the art world. It reminds me of that boiling frog metaphor. Ok, enough for the rant.
Where in the arts do we see anything close to a serious engagement with these issues of digitization and its effect on culture and economy? The obvious agit-prop example would have been Dave Eggers’s novel The Circle, which I was impressed by in terms of its sketching of a Google-like company taking to the extreme what’s already (or soon) possible technically, in terms of radically expanding data-mining to a cultish ideology of total ‘transparency’. But the book also left me strangely cold in terms of its characters and their motivations – they seemed like pawns on Eggers’s chessboard, sheepishly following the logic of his plot rather than driving or at least twisting it; as if he were treating them like an algorithm of his novelistic purposes. It was sort of like The Internship in reverse: the Hollywood comedy, more than an Owen Wilson/ Vince Vaughn vehicle, was really a Google vehicle, and a creepy one at that; but Dave Egger’s The Circle just ends up being a vehicle of its own logic, leaving its protagonists, and its readers, with little left to do. Looking for another recent literary novel on the subject, I came across David Shafer’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, telling another story of data-mining totalitarians, and their dissident underground opponents; I’m only just half-way through reading the book but, compared to The Circle, the increased amount of playfulness and wacky humour already seems to save it from its own it’s-all-a-plot logic.
And in contemporary art? After an initial deferral, the discussion is becoming more present. Trevor Paglen skipped the deferral, since he has been on the subject for years. His lecture at the last Chaos Computer Club Congress in Hamburg at the end of December 2013 (online here) complemented perfectly with that of Net activist Jacob Appelbaum. While the latter revealed new information about the way the NSA manipulates and infiltrates Computer hardware on the domestic scale (from manipulated Ethernet plugs to hacked Wifi), Paglen presented astounding facts about the macro level of surveillance, namely the way underground sea cables and orbiting satellites are tapped. But apart from being very well informed, Paglen also makes lucid work that captures the ill spirit of our day. In October in New York I saw his installation Code Names of the Surveillance State, which does what it says – a multi-screen projection of seemingly endless credit roll columns listing more than 4000 surveillance programme code names used by the NSA and the GCHQ, say ‘…Red Baron / Red Bear / Red Belly / Red Bone / Red Bridge / Red Bull…’, and so on, turning the monstrosity of bloated surveillance organizations into concrete poetry.
Yuri Pattison, Outsourced Views, 2013–ongoing
‘Private Settings’, at Warsaw’s Museum of Modern Art, curated by Natalia Sielewicz, was one of the more inspiring group shows I saw this year, tackling the datasphere and its implications for art. The exhibition more or less bypassed the ‘3-D printer’ novelty character often associated with Post-Net work that has become a kind of stigma already in the ears of many these days, indicating Zeitgeist art eager to churn out sellable objects with shiny gadgety surfaces while promoting retrograde concepts of technological progressivism. Instead, involving a geographically wide range of artists from Saudi-Arabia (Sarah AbuAbdallah) to Thailand (Korakrit Arunonandchai), the emphasis was put on identity politics – on the way gender roles play out, or on the way online imagery co-structures our desires and fantasies, while keeping the underlying big data economies in mind. Irish artist Yuri Pattison asked Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to photograph/fillm the view from their window, turning the premise of cheap labour into an invitation to produce contemplative imagery of often drab environments; Canadian artist Jon Rafman’s little makeshift video display – a kind of small cockpit built into a drawer, allowing one viewer at a time – featured strangely fascinating footage of online fetish imagery, of people in furry costumes, or a bodybuilder crashing a watermelon with his hefty leg muscles. Another highlight were the collages of Montenegro-born Darja Bajagic, who tackles the stereotypically sexualized imagery of Eastern-European women found on the Web and elsewhere by combining them into deadpan minimalist collages involving wallpaper and simple paper cut-outs.
Darja Bajagic
Also in Warsaw, at Zacheta Gallery, I saw Gregor Schneider’s project relating to a house he bought in his Rhineland hometown of Rheydt. The house in question was identified a few years back as the birth-house of Joseph Goebbels. Schneider could have easily wallowed in the ‘controversial’ nature of such an acquisition. But everything he did with the actual structure was geared towards preventing it from becoming a fetish site for Neo-Nazis. Initially Schneider wanted to tear the house down, but then couldn’t because the next-door house would have been damaged. Instead, he gutted it down to its naked walls and wooden beams, transporting the rubble to Warsaw. Before he filmed the rooms, still decorated 70s style by the previous owners, in long static shots; as well as himself in short, eerie shots sleeping in the previous owners’s bed or eating a soup at the 1960s kitchen table.
As said, the light-hearted and silly, or the unashamedly idiosyncratic, or the formally experimental, are needed not less but more at times like these. In no particular order some highlights this year in these registers.
Aleksandra Domanović, and James Richards, at Hamburger Kunsthalle gave me snappy moments of joy: Domanović’s timeline of technological progress co-defined by feminist, post-Yugoslavian and dadaist denominators (1843, Ada Lovelace writes what is considered the first computer program; 1963, the invention of the Belgrade prosthetic hand, which features a primitive sense of touch; Zaha Hadid named Veuve Clicquot Business Woman of the Year 2013 etc.). Whereas Richards turned the medium of video/film into a kind dreamscape of the Internet age, in which x-rays morph into skin and wetness morphs into touching moments of youtube intimacy (a young guy on a winter night-time parking lot singing ‘I can’t live if living is without you’).
The Robert Gober retrospective at MOMA, when I saw it in October, initially left me relatively unmoved with what I perceived as continuously skilful but oddly textbook-psychoanalytical ‘queerings’ of Magrittian surrealism. But I also realized how the scenarios have staid with me; the sinks and the legs as much as that creepy room of continuously running water tabs.
Lothar Baumgarten’s piece Caiman Nariz Blanca (1978-2009)
(which I saw at Marta Herford, Germany, in the group show ‘Booster’ about sound) involves field recordings of the Yanomami tribe at the upper Orinoco in Brasil and Venezuela, their beautiful and endangered language played on the audio system of a Saab car previously used by the artist for twenty years. A personalized time capsule providing an intimidate space for listening as well as a marker of difference that emphasizes rather than glosses over the tension between observer and observed.
Christoph Girardet & Matthias Müller, Meteor, 2011 (Still)
Christophe Giradet & Matthias Müller’s survey exhibition at Kunstverein Hannover, was an echo chamber of found film footage restructured to allow new, transfixing, non-narrative experiences. Locomotive (2008) is a true master piece, culled from train scenes from multiple movies, shown alongside each other to expose the surprisingly stereotypical nature of the scenes, but not to expose them as cliché but to highlight their quasi-ritual function within the cinematic. Anyone who loved The Clock by Christian Marcley should have had a chance to see this show of works that preceded Marcley’s.
Apropos, as an aside, a small observation about cinema I had this year, which may be an old story for aficionados but somehow was fascinating for me. The old saying of script writers – ‘show me, don’t tell me’ – is a stab against patronising ways of storytelling that insult the intelligence and suffocate the affection of the viewer. But for me it became clear, by way of three recent film scenes, that there is also the ideal of ‘_don’t_ show me, and don’t tell me’: the first was from Yuval Adler’s Bethlehem (2013, came out on DVD this year), the controversial thriller about the Palestinian boy Sanfur who is recruited as an informant by an Israeli agent. Early on in the film Sanfur is about to prove his courage with other adolescents with being shot at wearing a bulletproof vest; the test of courage is interrupted and prevented. But later on, we see him trying to hide something under his jacket, which turns out to be a wound inflicted by a second attempt at that same test of courage, leading Sanfur further into his entanglement with the Israeli secret service as he will have to rely on their help to get medical treatment. As the shooting itself is not shown, the film thus reflects exactly its traumatic character. In Richard Linklater’s much-lauded Boyhood, a similar logic is played out in a very different context, that of relationships breaking up. While the film leads us through the growth from boy to man, at some point we learn, purely in passing and without it being explicitly mentioned, that his mother has separated from her latest partner. Again, the way it’s told emphasises the idea of moving on as an (inevitable?) act of repression, of not narrating the breaking up itself. Finally, in the Dardenne brothers’ Two Days, One Night the heroine is about to lose her factory job because her boss proposes to her colleagues that if they agree to make her redundant they would receive a 1000 € bonus. The film is all about her desperate attempt, over the course of a weekend, to convince each of them to revise their vote, and allow her to continue working. But the story is told without us ever seeing how that initial sneaky scheme comes about – again, the story unfolds around a central gap, something we’re not shown, and not told beyond the most basic facts.
Ming Wong, BÜLENT WONGSOY: BIJIDIVA!, 2014
But back to contemporary art, where the technique of ellipsis is part and parcel of the legacy of abstraction and conceptualism. Judith Hopf: I just loved her Flock of Sheep at Praxes, Berlin, with the grumpy-looking sheep’s face sketched onto concrete boxes on iron stilts levelled by wooden wedges. Silent comedy. Ming Wong’s Bülent Wongsoy routine at Carlier Gebauer, Berlin, was a thrilling piece of karaoke pop history-telling, including meticulously re-imagined album covers, with Wong re-impersonating the Turkish singer Bülent Ersoy, who publically changed from man to woman in 1981, while keeping the male first name Bülent – and who had to go to exile in the wake of the military putsch in Turkey, before triumphantly returning in 1988. A genuine homage, at times of Gezi Park, to the political diva who can ‘turn teargas into hairspray’ (Ming Wong).
Visiting the studio of the late Italian conceptualist Vincenzo Agnetti in Milan was a rewarding experience; I had known his name but not much more, his work of the late 1960s, early 1970s had been hitherto unknown to me. Especially loved his piece Autotelefonata of 1973. I’ve been a fan for years of the work of both Bettina Allamoda and Manfred Pernice, and it was great to see the work of these Berlin sculptors together in a double solo at Kunstverein Potsdam.
The Berlin Biennale was all in all underwhelming, but I did enjoy Goshka Macuga’s contribution Preparatory Notes for a Chicago Comedy (2014), a lovingly silly piece of cut-out grotesque theatre (conceived together with Dieter Roelstrate), a kind of farce about the art world and its history based on Aby Warburg’s unpublished play Hamburg Conversations on Art: Hamburg Comedy of 1896, about the struggles between the avant-garde and the art traditionalists, culminating in an in-bed scene of Marina Abramović and Roman Abramovich. I seem to be a sucker for good corny jokes.
I’ve said what I love about Sharhyar Nashat’s work, whose Hustle in Hand was another highlight at the Berlin Biennale, but I should mention how much I also enjoyed the work of Adam Linder (who often collaborates with Nashat) this year, especially his Some Proximity (2014) at the Silberkuppe stand in Frieze London, involving him and congenial co-dancer Justin Kennedy responding in choreographed form to short snippets of writing by art critic Jonathan P. Watts. The piece breathed its own time and space. Silberkuppe’s show, in Berlin, of Margaret Harrison’s work alerted me to the British artist’s pioneering feminist pop work, opening up that gap between cheery imagery and the darkness of violence against women. Which reminds me that I learned a thing or two from Rebecca Solnit’s latest book Men explain things to me, which convincingly leads you from a hilariously annoying incident of a bully explaining things to the writer that she for the record knows as opposed to him, to the sickeningly pervasive rape culture around the globe. On that note, Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist is a great collection of impressively fearless, ruthless and crystal-clear writing about race/class/gender, on everything from Django Unchained to Fifty Shades of Grey. Even when I disagree I agree.
Ryan Trecartin’s tour de force show at Kunst-Werke this summer was a manically nauseating highlight even for Trecartin’s ambitiously nauseating standards (and I’m curious about his upcoming co-curating, with Lauren Cornell, of the New Museum Triennial, opening in February 2015).
I realize I’m running out of time and steam and you probably out of patience, so I’ll switch to listing art stuff I enjoyed this year: Olaf Brzeski’s metal sculptures at Raster from Warsaw; Harun Farocki’s Parallele I-IV (2012-2014), his piece based on video game footage which I saw in Unlimited in Basel, shortly before he died all to soon; Martin Kippenberger’s late paintings at Gisela Capitain in Berlin; Simon Denny at Buchholz in Berlin; Stefan Kern’s new wonderfully candy-trash body of suspended sculptures at Karin Guenther, Hamburg, and Luis Campana, Berlin; Austrian quirky conceptualist Heinrich Dunst at KOW Berlin; Antony McCall’s impressive survey at Amsterdam’s EYE museum, including his sound piece Traveling Wave (1972/2013), which is what it says though it isn’t, as the sound of the wave moving through the space like on a beach is actually produced purely with white noise. Talking about sound, Clemens von Wedemeyer’s show at Kunstverein Braunschweig explored the ambivalent legacy of the Nazi-time linguist Eberhard Zwirner, father of art dealer Rudolph Zwirner – a difficult but rewarding walk-through radio play.
Tamara Henderson, at Andrew Kreps and Rodeo – quirky and lovable. The positively SciFi, black and white Heinz Mack collages at Sperone Westwater in New York (but not so much Zero at the Guggenheim, a movement that as a whole I find strangely superfluous and over-estimated). Chris Ofili’s 1994 Shithead at the New Museum impressed me in terms of how it shocked me. Andra Ursuta’s hilariously nasty Floorlickers– life-like tongues on the ends of broom sticks – as shown, for example, in Maurizio Catellan’s Shit and Die exhibition in Milan. Seeing Andrea Fraser perform ‘Men on the Line: Men Committed to Feminism, KFPK 1972’ at Berlin’s Volksbühne (a piece originally commissioned by Emi Fontana in Los Angeles in 2012) provided me with another chance to witness Fraser’s great skill at finding the right material, and at its perfect impersonation, in this case the scenario of four early 1970s Californian male artists struggling to be feminists; again lessons to be learned about how things have changed – and how they haven’t.
My favourite art book this year is Andrea Büttner’s illustrated edition of Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of Judgment) issued by Museum Ludwig Cologne but published with Kant’s regular German publishing house Meiner.
The breadth of Malevich in Bonn; the films of Polke at Tate; the drawings of Kai Althoff at Michael Werner’s London Gallery; Reinhard Mucha’s Frankfurt Block at Sprüth Magers Berlin; Gianfranco Barucchello’s survey show at Sammlung Falckenberg in Hamburg; paintings from the estate of Norbert Schwontkowski at CFA Berlin; Renata Lucas’ record players seamlessly inserted into the basement marble floor of Secession in Vienna, to be spun by revolving doors, playing Bowie at yowling, alternating speeds; at the same time at the same space, the new video installation by artist group Chto Delat, entitled The Excluded. In a Moment of Danger, featuring students of the group’s newly established St Petersburg ‘School of Engaged Art’, left me impressed with the raw but eloquently choreographed admittance of confusion over Russia’s worrying political state and the (im-)possibility of making work in the face of it all.
Florine Stettheimer vs. Georg Baselitz in Munich: the work of the great New York painter at Lenbachhaus provided highs of 1910s bohemian rapture; whereas the German painter’s show at Haus der Kunst was a ridiculously overblown affair of gargantuan sculptures and canvases of recent years that reeked the desperation of a man who doesn’t seem sure of his status, put to shame by his sometimes brilliant (and smaller-scale) work of earlier decades, and by his preposterous statement from last year that women can’t paint. Quod erat non demonstrandum.
Phill Niblock, at 81, doesn’t seem desperately trying to prove something at all, being the forerunner of many a microtonal drone composers of following generations. I knew his stuff but had never seen him, as I did in Stuttgart, performing along to his beautiful, matter-of-factly films documenting rural workers in East Asia and South America, while he himself sits still behind a laptop playing music based on single notes played by life instruments but with the breathing as well as the attack and decay edited out. The tension between the footage showing traditional manual labour and the act of not acting from behind the laptop as the music unfolds was startling.
Sitting still while listening to dance music may sound like an odd concept, but Wolfgang Tillmans’ Between Bridges space in Berlin put it to great effect with the show ‘American Producers’ – the idea is to create a dedicated space for listening to recorded music on a great sound system. It worked. Kanye West’s ‘I Am A God’ never sounded better, as did Franc Ocean’s ‘Pyramids’, or Missy Elliott’s ‘Get Your Freak On.’
While we’re at it, here’s my Spotify list of favourite tracks this year:
Finally, art things I’m looking forward to:
The New Museum Triennial, John Latham at the Triennial building in Milan (already on), Okwui Enwezor’s Venice Biennale as well as Simon Denny’s New Zealand pavilion, Danh Vo’s Danish one, Hito Steyerl and Olaf Nicolai at the German Pavilion. Andreas Hofer’s new works at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich, Charline von Heyl early work in Spring in New York, and her most recent canvasses in late Summer in Berlin. Over and out.