Highlights 2014: Fatima Hellberg

By Fatima Hellberg

Andrea Fraser, Men On the Line: Men Committed to Feminism, KPFK, 1972, 2012, documentation of a performance at Volksbühne, Berlin, 2014

Hurry.
Resemble your mother.
Dismantle appliances with vigor.
We will not detract anything from the achievement of the French.

Gregg Bordowitz, Taking Voice Lessons, 2014

Ah, Gregg Bordowitz. How many times have I returned to his beautiful yellow book, Taking Voice Lessons? I am finding it hard to write about this piece of writing, partly because it so delicately teeters on the edge of things: it’s dealing with care, but is equally about obligation, and about writing and thinking at a self-described ‘juncture.’ In the book, he cites The Fall’s ‘Totally Wired’ (1981)– ‘You don’t have to be weird to be wired’ – and like all other citations, and included texts, from the poetry of Essex Hemphill and the writing on ‘Container-Contained’ (1970) by psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, I am left with this sense that the work reaches for so much, that it has a vast appetite. The book, designed by Will Holder and published as part of Bordowitz’ two-year residency at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part of Your Revolution, was also reflected on in a part-reading, part-performance in Amsterdam. During the evening Bordowitz’ spoke of his work as part of the AIDS activist groups ACT UP and DIVA, of his changing understanding of identity politics, but also of a restlessness, and an eloquently argued desire for the uncontainable.

Andrea Fraser also speaks of contingency in her own way, and of the emotional, but also intellectual value of being moved. I was both moved, and bemused by her Men On the Line: Men Committed to Feminism, KPFK, 1972 (2012-), a performance based on a live radio broadcast from 1972 in which four men discuss their relationship with feminism. To a full house at Berlin’s Volksbühne theatre in November, Fraser performed all four participants, re-enacting and delivering verbatim their reflections on separatism, essentialism and struggles for empathy. In the delivery, Fraser steps into and embodies these positions, and really, it was those subtle shifts in body language, posture and intensity as she moved from one character to the next that were so unbearably funny, and so very dark. The work deals, in complex ways, with self-determination and identification. I appreciated the immaculate presentation and confidence, but also the undeniable and unapologetic ambivalence of the work.

I am less certain about what Trisha Donnelly’s exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery was doing, or exactly what it was setting out to do, but I really loved it. The thing that struck me about the show was how much it felt like it was about the decision, and the idea of an internal logic. There was a sense of things having to be ‘just so’, from a slightly melancholic soundtrack playing throughout the galleries, followed by interludes of silence, to the slight shifts and alterations taking place in the space across a number of video projectors and spatial interventions. There was something about these minimal shifts that felt very confident and resolved, also in the sense that there was an acute awareness of what had to remain unarticulated, and incomplete. I liked the stubbornness of the show, and how it insisted on a very precise and concentrated refusal to speak – ‘a golden ring of reluctance’, as J.H. Prynne would have it. Each time I went to the exhibition, there would always be some form of presence from the park, and one invigilator admitted to a ‘dog problem’ – dogs running into the opened up gallery space. Without reading too much into it, the dog problem felt significant somehow; the Donnelly show communicated in far-reaching, sweeping registers, leaving a lingering, and generous sense that there was more there to be perceived, and felt, around the edges.

Finally, a real revelation this year, and something that I also returned to, has been artist James Richards’ screening programme ‘Mercy Mercy Mercy’, with work by Stuart Baker, Julia Heyward, Stuart Marshall, Chris Saunders and others, shown at the DAAD Gallery in Berlin. Many of the short films use the direct address, and speak of sincerity and a sense of anticipation. Built up between the works and their combinations is a real concentration, yet one which is sort of off. It brings to mind the term ‘off-pointness’ that Richards’ sometimes uses to talk about his and other artists’ work. I like the idea of something being totally focused, precise and committed, yet in its own slightly derailed way. What I would love to see next year is more work that has the space to do that, and here I mean headspace, and the opportunity to be able to take one’s time, to return, and to afford to do things, that limp along in their own necessary way.