By Dan Fox
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'CALL THIS NUMBER', Screen shot, 24 September 2015
I look back on 2015, and keep returning to the word ‘land’. The land we all stand on, our Earth, which this year gave us some of the freakiest weather in human history, making life increasingly like a JG Ballard nightmare become reality.
Land and the people it includes or – as paranoid demagogues such as Donald Trump or ISIS insist from their patches of the same dog turd of ideological fear – the people it excludes. Land and who owns it: this month artsy.com and UBS named New York the world’s ‘Most Influential Art World City of 2015’ but how true is that when few can afford to live a decent life of the mind here? As I walk through parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn I can’t help but suspect that old avant-garde dreams have become cautionary tales of being careful what you wish for. The old Situationist call for cities to be given over to leisure, play, fantasy and desire has come true, and look what it is: restaurants selling pig-snuffled shiitake mushrooms drizzled in macadamia nut milk, and entire neighbourhoods turned over to the production of espresso-based drinks. Easy access to cold-press coffee is not what makes a city creative.
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Ben Rivers, ‘There is A Happy Land Further Awaay’, 2015. Film still
And so, the most engaging art I saw this year was, in one way or another, also about land. Ben Rivers’ evocative solo exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, London, ‘Earth Needs More Magicians’, brought into dialogue a number of the filmmaker’s works both old and new, all of them engaging with the idea of landscape. In one new film, There is A Happy Land Further Awaay [sic] (2015), Rivers combined imagery from the cyclone-devastated island of Vanuatu with a voiceover reading of Henri Michaux’s poem ‘I Am Writing to You from a Far Off Country’ into a disturbing dream of ecological havoc, a fevered and troubling memory of anthropological film history. It played off his 2008 film Ah! Liberty, which depicts children playing amongst the debris of machinery on what could be a rural farm of the present or the lawless countryside of an uncertain future. The film reminded me equally of Russell Hoban’s novel of survival in post-apocalyptic England, Riddley Walker (1980), and of the rural modernism of painters such as Graham Sutherland or Paul Nash. (In 2016, Tate Britain will stage a major exhibition of Nash’s landscapes.) To accompany his show, Rivers also curated ‘Edgelands’, a small collection of works about geographical peripheries, including powerful photographs by Helen Levitt and Ralph Eugene Meatyard.
Mark Leckey’s film Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD (2015), shown at Cabinet Gallery, London, was an archaeology of Liverpool and London, and the broader cultural landscape of British television and pop. It dug beneath the surface of postwar Britain in search of objects and images that could be used to create a self-portrait of the artist. Using YouTube footage, old photographs tweaked with uncanny animated effects, and a deftly collaged soundtrack, Dream English Kid 1964–1999 AD told an autobiographical tale of self-construction, from childhood through adolescence to the wisdoms and disenchantments of adulthood.
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Performance of Maria Fusco’s ‘Master Rock’, Cruachan Power Station, Scotland, UK, 2015
Master Rock, an Artangel commission by Maria Fusco recorded live inside Cruachan Power Station in Scotland and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, told a different story of people and places. The power station was opened in 1965, nestling inside Ben Cruachan mountain. Master Rock channelled the voices of two people involved in its construction – artist Elizabeth Falconer (who produced a mural on the site) and John Mulholland (one of the ‘tunnel tigers’ who blasted through the mountain during the construction of the station) – and Ben Cruachan itself, together creating an atmospheric ‘repertoire for a mountain,’ part social history, part science fiction in the tradition of Nigel Kneale, or Alan Rudkin’s Penda’s Fen (1974).
In a poignant show at Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, Claes Oldenburg showed a selection of previously unseen maquettes, small sculptures and drawings stretching right back to the earliest days of his career, including many studies for public works made in collaboration with his late wife, Coosje van Bruggen. Noah Purifoy’s retrospective exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, ‘Junk Dada’, took us from the inner city to the heart of the California desert. Purifoy – who died in 2004 – created his earliest work in the 1960s from debris collected in the aftermath of the Watts Riots in Los Angeles, later worked for the California Arts Council to bring art into social institutions such as prisons, and eventually decamped to the Mojave Desert where he made a home for his eclectic salvage sculpture. In northern California’s Mendocino County this past summer, I was lucky enough to visit Salmon Creek Farm, originally founded as a commune in the early 1970s, and is now being revived as a long-term project by artist Fritz Haeg. Over the course of a week spent making two shortvideos about Salmon Creek Farm in collaboration with filmmaker Sierra Pettengill, it became clear that Haeg’s ideas about living lightly on the land, about how to think around ‘civilising’ nature and ‘re-wilding’ our cities, are vital to us all.
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Math Bass, ‘Newz!’, 2015, gouache on canvas, 1.1 × 1.1 m.
(Try as I might, I can’t shoehorn fellow Los Angeles artist Jim Shaw’s survey exhibition ‘The End is Here’ at the New Museum, New York, into this distended theme of ‘land’, but it has to be mentioned as being one of the most ecstatically deranged and imaginative museum shows of the year. Nor can I pull on a thematic thread for these other exemplary New York exhibitions this year: Math Bass at MoMA PS1; Camille Henrot at Metro Pictures, Ron Nagle’s stunning ceramics at Matthew Marks Gallery; ’30/130: Thirty Years of Books and Catalogs, etc.’ ‘a bibliography of critic and curator Bob Nickas’ at White Columns; Dana Schutz at Petzel; Clement Siatous at Simon Preston; and Martine Syms at Bridget Donahue. Suffice to say, all were top notch.)
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Luc Sante, ‘The Other Paris’, 2015
A strong sense of place haunted my favourite books of the year. Luc Sante’s beautifully written and exhaustively researched book The Other Paris may well do for the French capital what Low Life, his 1991 study of Manhattan, did for New York history. A magnificent and sympathetic anatomy of the Parisian poor, criminal, bohemian, and subaltern, The Other Paris took on an extra gravity in the wake of the November shootings. The latest in Four Corners Books’ series ‘Four Corners Familiars – new editions of classic novels, designed by contemporary artists – was Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Fiona Banner reimagined Conrad’s story of the search for rogue ivory trader Kurtz in the Congo as a luxury magazine, illustrated with photographs by Magnum conflict photographer Paulo Pellegrin. Pellegrin, who has worked extensively in the Congo, turned his lens on London’s financial district, photographing trading floors, offices, and those who work in the Square Mile, reminding us that old practices of trade and exploitation never die. Best exhibition catalogue of the year was that for ‘The Freedom Principle: Experiments in Music 1965–Now’ curated by Naomi Beckwith and Dieter Roelstraete at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; a richly illustrated book looking at the history and legacy of the 1960s African American avant-garde music scene and its connections to the visual arts, beginning with Chicago’s own Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians (AACM) which this year celebrated its 50th anniversary. In a year dominated by musician’s memoirs and essay collections – Carrie Brownstein, Elvis Costello, Kim Gordon, Richard Hell, Chrissie Hynde, Grace Jones, Patti Smith and Ian Svenonius amongst them – one of the more thought-provoking music books of 2015 was art critic Jan Tumlir’s The Magic Circle: On The Beatles, Pop Art, Art-Rock and Records. Using The Beatles’ landmark work of rock’n’roll conceptualism Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band (1967) as his compass, Tumlir wanders the places where methodologies and sensibilities of art-making are shared with pop music.
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Various artists, ‘Sherwood at the Controls Vol.1 1979–1984’, 2015
I was slack this past year when it came to sniffing out new music, finding myself looking backwards rather than forwards. Reissues of Richard Dawson’s The Magic Bridge (2011) and The Glass Trunk (2013) were enjoyable discoveries following the powerful and strange musical narratives on his 2014 album Nothing Important. The first in a series of compilations dedicated to the work of British dub and post-punk producer Adrian Sherwood, Sherwood at the Controls Vol.1 1979–1984, was on high rotation at home too, as were reissues of Peter Gabriel’s first four solo albums Peter Gabriel 1, 2, 3 and 4– albums by turns excruciatingly self-serious and, in the cases of album 3, nicknamed ‘Melt’, imaginative and sonically inventive.
Returning to the theme of land and place, perhaps my favourite music project of the year has been CALLTHISNUMBER. Organised by Douglas Hart, Jeannette Lee and Steve Mackey, CALLTHISNUMBER is an erratically scheduled online TV music show, essentially, filmed in a garage somewhere in North London. Each episode is announced via Twitter and Instagram, then streamed only once via a temporary website that’s taken down as soon as the broadcast is over. Each live performance is captured by Hart with eye-watering 1980s-style video effects, evoking the age of 1980s US public access television, and broadcast signal intrusions. This year, CALLTHISNUMBER has featured, amongst others, appearances by Prinzhorn Dance School, Georgia (with Warpaint’s Stella Mozgawa), Yak, Mark Stewart, Ian Svenonius and Jon Spencer Blues Explosion. It’s a refusal of the Internet’s archival impulse, of the need to access anything at any time in endlessly lateral digital space. It’s an anchor to the land of the here and now.
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