ajay rs hothi

is a writer, lecturer, and filmmaker. I teach Design at Kingston School of Art, and the Royal College of Art, London. I am the editor of A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE (Cornerhouse/Art Editions North, 2015). I have an MPhil in Critical Writing in Art & Design from the Royal College of Art, London, and I'm a PhD candidate in Graphic Design in the Design School at Kingston School of Art. My research blog, Adler im Herzen, can be found here: adlerimherzen.wordpress.com 

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LFF2015 Dispatches: DER NACHTMAHR

Der Nachtmahr (2015)

dir. AKIZ

88 mins

When you see a group of pretty bikini-clad teenage girls playing with their smart phones on their way to a nighttime summer pool party in the woods, you may think you've seen this film before. When one of the girls, Tina, our protagonist, is shown a cellphone video of another girl being hit by a speeding car, you may still think you've got the measure of it. When, a few minutes later, its revealed that the girl hit by the car was Tina herself, you may still even think that you'll know how  Der Nachtmahr wil play out.

Later, when Tina turns down a raw egg being offered to her by a goblin who is sat on her kitchen floor, raiding her fridge in the middle of the night, you'll understand that this is a fillm that asks for patience. And while Der Nachtmar certainly does enough to keep our patience, ultimately we're not rewarded with an entirely cohesive or essentially satisfying film.

Der nachtmahr is an old German word for 'the nightmare', it's also the title of a 1781 supernatural Gothic Romantic painting by the Swiss artist Johann Heinrich Füssli. The painting features a goblin sat devilishly on the chest of a woman, unconscious on her bed. Tina is the only character in the film who can see the goblin. After alleviating her fear of it (by its sheer persistent presence), she becomes its caretaker. There are instances where other characters do encounter the goblin but little is made of it, though even Tina's mother believes her to be making the whole thing up.

Unfortunately, this denial of an issue downplays the most critical drama within the film. Presumably, the goblin represents an aspect of Tina's mental or psychopathological capabilities. We see the whole film from her perspective but even still we can wonder whether she herself is imagining it. This film by director AKIZ (the director of five films under his real name, Achim Bornhak) is well-meaning, well-intentioned, and well-executed, but its drama feels a lot like an after-school special on how to deal with mental illness.

Der Nachtmahr screens as part of the BFI London Film Festival tonight, Saturday 10 October, at Hackney Picturehouse.

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LFF2015 Dispatches: THE FORBIDDEN ROOM

The Forbidden Room (2015)

dirs. Guy Maddin & Evan Johnson

130 minutes

The Forbidden Room works hard to maintain the tempo with which is sets up its phantasmic adventure. It does so, but only just. And that's probably because director Guy Maddin is such an assured hand of films that straddle the line that divides the cinema and the gallery.

What begins as a series of vignettes taking us through a series of rooms – that begins in bathroom, where our sometime narrator instructs us on the best way to take baths, to a desperate moment in a submarine that's running out of air, to a mission led by a saplingjack to rescue a beauty supposedly kidnapped by forest barbarians – soon degenerates into a much looser narrative, involving a night-time cabaret (in the film's most engaging sequence), doppelgangers, moustaches, angry volcanos and virgin sacrifices, the pitfalls of gardening and housekeeping, insurance fraud, motorbike crashes, forgetting your spouse's birthday, murder, and a song in which Udo Kier undergoes a lobotomy to cure his obsession with ladies' bums.

This film may likely win Maddin new fans, though it's certainly more difficult to follow than the films that won him wider commercial success – look at My Winnipeg (2007) or The Saddest Music in the World (2003) with Isabella Rosselini. The Forbidden Room is a hallucinatory acid trip. The fact that its episodic narrative is fractured even within its sequences is almost incidental to the film's overall effect. As just sound and vision there are very few films that might compete with it. It's telling that Maddin's co-director, Evan Johnson, is a composer. While Maddin plays with countless film stocks, each of which has been treated differently and effected to varying levels, the aural aspects puncture any kind of visual trope that might begin to linger, any kind of image that we might hang onto to keep our heads above water.

This isn't a film for everyone. It's a brave film, and it has many unique qualities, but it's a construction, a designed object (“an object with attitude”) rather than one with direct purpose. It's a John Cage-esque experiment with form and medium. Maddin and Johnson are barmy conductors that weave us a passage through plots, imagery, and audio. It's dazzling, if not also a little tiring.

The Forbidden Room will screen at BFI London Film Festival tonight, on IMAX (if you think you have the tenacity for it).

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LFF2015 Dispatches: BEASTS OF NO NATION

Beasts of No Nation (2015)

dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga

136 minutes

Beasts of No Nation is a film of three distinct acts. Their cumulative effect is strong, however each act seems to have been produced with a different audience in mind. For this reviewer, the film is anchored by its second act, which comprises of sequences of guerrilla warfare between government units and rebel militia on the streets and in the houses of this unnamed African country. It’s in this act that we see Agu, a child soldier in the rebel faction, and the film’s protagonist, evolve from a terrified young boy to a murderous freedom fighter. It’s this character development that underpins the film’s dramatic narrative from the first act, where we see Agu’s family torn apart – his mother and young sister fleeing the invading army, his father, brother, and grandfather executed in the street – and his escape into the jungle; to the third act, a quiet section where Agu personifies the disappointment of a collapsing defence force and the disappointments of its leadership.

The success of the film hinges on two strong performances: of Agu (Abraham Attah, who won the Marcello Mastroianni Award for his performance at the most recent Venice International Film Festival), and of the Commandant (Idris Elba), the savage, merciless – and charismatic – leader of Agu’s rebel battalion – and, naturally, his substitute father figure. There are no other performances of particular note, but that these two can carry a film of weight is significant. Elba especially derives both charm and disgust in equal measure and at deft turns.

In the film’s most potent sequence, the Commandant leads his troops in a ground assault to capture a bridge held by government forces. He orders mortar fire from distance before rallying his men in a dazzling display of mobilisation. He stomps his feet and claps his hands, building a rhythmic crescendo that he shares with each of his men in turn, his open palms on their chests like an evangelist healer in rapture, summoning their strength – and strength from above – through his entire being. They enter the fray, shooting at will, grenades thrown asunder, all the while singing and dancing to his infectious, though utterly toxic, music.

Beasts of No Nation is on limited release 09 October, and is released on Netflix on 16 October.

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Keeping up with the real

(The following article featured in the A/W 2015 issue of TANK.)

Contemporary art does not stand still: it is a mobile, nebulous body that snakes around trends and concepts, ingesting what it can use and discarding the rest. At the behest of some, and to the chagrin of others, contemporary art is about, specifically, that: the contemporary, the current, the utter now.

In 1996, Hal Foster published his seminal analysis of contemporary art, The Return of the Real, in which he argued that contemporary art is a form of ethnography: it is an analysis of the cultures and peoples from which it emerges. Think, for example, of the gleaming pinnacle of international contemporary art: the Venice Biennale. This year’s is titled All the World’s Futures and has a non-Eurocentric focus, imposed specifically by its Nigerian artistic director Okwui Enwezor, the Biennale’s first artistic director from outside of Europe or the U.S. As such, this year’s event is a study of how artists all over the world are responding to their present political, economic and cultural situations, and how they are projecting future trajectories based on this analysis of the contemporary. The Return of the Real is about the avant-garde in art, the absolute cutting edge. Foster claimed that the avant-garde references two other periods in the 20th century: the 1910s and 1920s, when contemporary art was concerned with the state, and the 1960s and 1970s, when it was concerned with the body. When the two are fused, the result is a return to art and theory that is grounded in actual bodies, materiality and social sites.  

Over the past few years, we as audiences have been introduced (and have waved goodbye) to avant-garde practices such as post-internet art (an art-historic retrospective of the movement at the Whitechapel Gallery early next year will bang the final nail in that coffin), and Foster’s conclusions seem reflected in a contemporary idea of art as performing identity in a time of social instability, asking what it means to “be” “now”.

Jordon Wolfson, Raspberry Poser

Jordon Wolfson appears in his 2012 work, Raspberry Poser, as a punk, listlessly meandering through a Berlin park. The 14-minute piece is a hypnotically hallucinogenic loop of animation, illustration, video and photography. It is a complex work that, in part, is about performing the role of an artist. The punk is only a minor character in this work – it is peppered with sounds, animations and objects all competing to be the focus of attention. Images of high-end interiors are invaded with giant computer-generated HIV viruses swimming through condoms; a bushy-haired, Dennis the Menace-esque scamp continuously disembowels himself; Beyoncé’s distorted voice weaves through the soundtrack. Wolfson’s mode of address, which reflects his multiple spheres of influence, is flattened in this world of his creation. Meaning that we may draw from Raspberry Poser doesn’t necessarily come from Wolfson’s act of doing; it comes from the resultant chaos on the screen. What makes Wolfson’s work so interesting is how it forces us to question and rethink what we understand of hypermedia and authenticity.

Ian Cheng, ewCloud

Chaos also reigns in Ian Cheng’s series of digital- and video-based sculptures ewCloud (2013). A mass of random, seemingly disparate objects are flung before your eyes in Cheng’s parallel world: potted plants, office chairs, coffee tables, shooting guns, dolphins, dinosaurs and much more, all in a variety of perspectives. The result is a digital trompe l’oeil, enhanced by the fact that ewCloudis a work made specifically for virtual-reality headsets. These headsets are connected to a network and the objects that you see are what Cheng terms “live simulation” – that is, born from a set of constantly changing algorithms. No two moments of any work from this series are the same. Simulation is the imitation (becoming ever more precise with the advent of computer-generated imagery) of real-life processes. In that way, with these works, Cheng has taken the most up-to-date technology widely available and presented his version of classical sculpture, except that we’re not using art to attain transcendence. God can actually be found in the machine.

Wu Tsang, Wildness

Wu Tsang’s work, in its simplest description, is about representation. Focussing specifically on queer and transgender communities, Tsang’s most high-profile work is the feature film Wildness (2012), which won that year’s Grand Jury Award for Outstanding Documentary at Outfest. The film is a documentary about the Silver Platter, a trans-friendly bar in Los Angeles that, since 1963, has catered to a predominantly Latin LGBT community. The documentary is framed around a series of weekly performances by a group of young artists at the bar, including Tsang. As director, Tsang allows the performers and patrons to speak for themselves, with minimal mediation from behind the camera. Where Tsang’s voice does come in is to speak about judgement, stereotype and his own personal responsibility for their representation. As a performer, Tsang speaks directly on performance as research and lived experience. More than most contemporary artists, whose Photo Booth and Instagram selfies provide snapshots into their personal behaviours, Tsang’s work has a particular honesty to it, presenting straightforward accounts of individuals’ experiences.

Pamela Rosenkranz, My Sexuality

Nothing can be more personal than one’s sexuality, Wu Tsang suggests. Pamela Rosenkranz takes an inverted position. The series of works that comprise My Sexuality, first shown at Karma International, Zurich, in 2014, are large-scale aluminium canvasses covered in squirts or swathes of acrylic paint with the titles Sexual Power (Viagra painting 1-11). In a 2015 piece for Art in America, Aoife Rosenmeyer wrote that Rosenkranz has achieved widespread international attention because “her work raises fundamental – and potentially troubling – questions about what it means to be human in the contemporary world”. The 11 works in My Sexuality stand on the floor, at approximately head height.

They are weighty and project an atmosphere that swings between gentleness and aggression, more so when you consider that the walls of the gallery are draped in clear plastic, as though lifted from some gruesome slasher film, or a BDSM basement. Standing head-on in front of the works, viewers will see a distorted reflection looking back at them. These exquisite, beautifully crafted gallery objects are deeply concerned with their material being; they are carnal, degenerate bodies.

Mark Leckey, See, We Assemble

See, We Assemble, a 2011 exhibition by Mark Leckey at the Serpentine Gallery, presented a range of sculptural, sound, video and performance works. Really, what we want to do is start in 1999 with Leckey’s video Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, which looked at British nightlife from the 1970s to the present day, and its relationship to contemporaneous fashions. Three figures loom large over See, We Assemble: Fiorucci, Henry Moore and Samsung. Leckey looks at how images – anything from fine art to commercial, high-street brands – have an affective power over individuals and communities, but also over one another. For the work BigBoxStatueAction (2011), a sound system is put “in conversation” with a work of art. For GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010), Leckey communicates with a “smart fridge”, even going so far as to use green-screen technology to replace his own body with that of the object itself.  

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Pindul’s Rewards | Carlos Reyes and Alessandro Bava

(The following review **appeared **on DIS Magazine in June 2015.)

Pier Pasolini and Carlos Reyes Pindul’s Rewards Arcadia Missa

May 1–June 27 2015

With thanks to Centro Studi Pier Paolo Pasolini.

Let’s, for a moment, argue that art and politics (as we currently practise their convergent theories, and – with a secondary disclaimer – specifically in western visual art terminologies) has its roots in Italy. We’ll point out how the artists’ manifesto was the first real example of the merging of art and politics in the form of the art object, and that it was The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (published in Bologna in 1909) that provided the textual aesthetic template that would become common to all subsequent artists’ manifestos. Its introduction unpacks a narrative that forms the basis for the propositions that follow; its conclusion takes the form of a rhetorical speech act that defines or critiques these propositions. The artists’ manifesto proposes a new social ideal based on embedding the principles and morals of a movement’s perceived ‘ideal’ of art. The manifesto, after Futurism, became the most effective mode of criticism and rhetoric.

Futurism’s social impact was due, in large part, to the timing of its emergence. Its rise occurred during a tumultuous period in Italy’s recent political history. In the years leading up to the First World War, national conciliation between the political Right and Left became unworkable. A series of strikes and riots in favour of suffrage for the working classes – known as ‘Red Week’ – brokered a schism between the rich and the poor; worsening economic conditions resulted in the country being coerced into joining the war. Futurism, which rallied for the mechanisation of industry and promoted the (perceived) magnificent racial qualities of the Italian (who they saw as demonstrating “all the qualities of GENIUS”), increasingly appealed to the Italian public. As the Futurists’ de facto leader, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti ensured that a large section of the Italian population would have access to their series of manifestos because they were printed cheaply and quickly and in great number using the latest in lithographic print technology. With the publication and distribution of their manifestos, Futurism – and subsequent artistic movements – was suddenly able to gain a more public spectatorship than they would have received in just galleries and performance venues.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in Bologna at the peak of Futurism’s influence in the artistic-political landscape after the First World War. The city and its region, Emilia-Romagna, is renowned for its historic and deep-standing support for the Italian Communist Party – it is known as one of Italy’s ‘Red Regions’. Pasolini would later graduate from the University of Bologna, but as a child his family moved to Casarsa della Delizia, a small town near the Italian-Slovenian border. Casarsa is in the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, one of only five (of twenty) regions of Italy that are governed autonomously (due to the region’s cultural, racial, and linguistic diversity, part self-governance was granted to the region after the Second World War, in 1947, as an attempt to prevent secession). It was in this highly politicised climate that two years later, in 1949, Pasolini also took pen to paper and had people from the village copy posters by hand to produce a series of political posters as a call to arms for the people of Casarsa. These posters are archived in the town at the Centro Studi Pier Paolo Pasolini and were exhumed by curator Alessandro Bava while working with the institution in 2014, before bringing Carlos Reyes in for the project.

For the exhibition Pindul’s Rewards at Arcadia Missa, London, organised by artist-architect Alessandro Bava, Reyes and Pasolini are given collaborator credit on the marquee. Pasolini’s words provide the starting point for this display; Reyes re-performs the texts written by Pasolini for his posters. They have been made into photocopied replications and projected onto the wall, and they have been laser engraved onto shirts and, incongruously – but most effectively – onto wide-capped, dried mushrooms.

These texts include “The Satisfactions of ‘Pindul’,” a fable that recounts the ‘rewards’ of a politically-blinkered man; a series of newspaper clippings, annotated by Pasolini, that highlight how Italian culture is ultimately undermined by foreign aid and ‘assistance’; and a polemic against the Christian Democratic Party that accuses them of hypocrisy against the poor. Alongside these texts are sculptural elements: a stemmed wine glass containing ferrofluid (a magnetized liquid), and a hand-painted poster for The Matrix Reloaded that Reyes found in China.

The political message of the show comes through powerfully – Pasolini identified as a Communist, with faith that the State must defend its sovereignty as strongly as the individual rights of its citizens. Any party that claims power within Italy must do so in the name and in support of its peoples. Perhaps this message resonates even stronger at the present time: I visited the exhibition the day after the British general election, when our center-Right minority government won an outright majority on the promise of a more extreme shift to the Right. It was heartening to see that Reyes had replicated one of Pasolini’s recurrent emblems in his collages: the silhouette of a big-bellied man with wide grin dressed in top hat and tails, carrying bags fat with cash. Heartening because it’s an image that has become common in British newspapers over the past few years – it is a similar image used by satirists when referencing Prime Minister David Cameron, a figure mocked for his detached, monied, upper-class background. 

The texts and illustrations appear engraved on mushrooms. It is an interesting material, and one that deserves closer scrutiny. As an organic substance, it begins the process of bio-degradation immediately upon foraging. As a fungus its primary characteristic is that it forms a symbiotic relationship with other organisms and aids nutrient recycling and therefore enables more efficient decomposition. Used in this context, the audience is faced directly with the idea of the parasitic nature of rhetoric (of all persuasions), as well as its rapacity for self-preservation. The mushrooms that Reyes selected for these works are reishi mushrooms. They are incredibly rare in their natural state, found most often today in their dried form. These particular mushrooms were individually sourced and shipped from a supplier in New York. They are a treasured ingredient within traditional Chinese medicine. This strain of mushroom is believed to be around two and a half thousand years old, but it has only been in more common use in the past five hundred years. Previously, it was solely supplied to the ruling Emperor. The reishi (‘lingzhi’ in its Pinyin Chinese name, ‘reishi’ being Japanese) mushroom is believed to preserve the Qi – the life energy. That when taken for extensive periods of time it has the power to preserve life.

Pindul’s Rewards is an evenly-balanced display, with strong visual elements tempering the artists’ ‘Right On’ politics. But the exhibition’s strongest aspects are those elements that demand close, careful, and detailed scrutiny. Of course, print poster political placards and their distribution don’t necessarily equate to left-wing demonstrative politics (let’s not forget that even the Futurists supported war and would eventually merge with Mussolini’s ruling Fascist Party), but it’s worth remembering the enigma posed by German artist-activist Dieter Ruckhaberle in 1968, in opposition to Documenta 4: “What’s left to do for artists of nation[s] that wage criminal war…other than to make Minimal Art?

[dogsandcorsets]

TALK: TRAVIS JEPPESEN

(An edited version of the following interview appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of TANK.)

Travis Jeppesen is novelist, art critic, poet, and artist. Born in Florida, Jeppesen lives and works between London and Berlin. He is the author of four novels, most recently All Fall: Two Novellas (2014), two collections of poetry, and one non-fiction book, Disorientations: Art on the Margins of the Contemporary (2008), which was named Nonfiction Book of the Year by 3am Magazine. His play Daddy premiered at the HAU Theater in Berlin in 2009 and his criticism regularly appears in publications including Artforum and Art in America. Jeppesen was a participant artist in the Whitney Biennial 2014, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He is currently completing a PhD at the Royal College of Art, London.

When did you start writing, either seriously or not seriously?

I started writing when I was a child, around the same time that I learned to read. Re-writing stories, adapting favourite story books into stage plays, etc. From the age of ten I became very interested in theatre and I began writing plays as a teenager. I guess that's when it became 'serious'. I was also writing poetry and prose, producing sort of inter-disciplinary texts – things that would bleed into each other. Plays with outrageous, fantastical stage directions that could never possibly be staged. I made my own zines, wrote for other people's – I was writing fiction and poetry and plays, but then also reviews of bands for punk and indie rock publications. I was all over the place. Still am.

Your first novel was Victims (2003) (the novel is about the final days of a religious cult as they go about their lives preparing for the cosmic event that their leader prophesied will end their time on Earth). Is there a relationship between this book and your previous writing? How did you centre on the plot of your first novel?

I was very young when I wrote it, though I don't know that this is as important as people make it out to be. The intricate, episodic structure of the novel – the way it jumps back and forth in time, often giving very few clues along the way – came out quite organically through the composition of the thing. It's something of a miracle, I think, the way it turned out. I'm proud of the audacity and sophistication of the thing – I wonder how I pulled it off at twenty-three and I wonder if I'll ever be able to accomplish something similar again! And I think that's why I have such pleasantly nostalgic memories of writing “Victims,” how organic the process of its coming-together was. That's not to say it was smooth sailing all the way, but I was learning by doing, and that is a most pleasant way to go about things.

I guess it's related to my previous writing in that it was the crystallisation of a particular voice. And maybe my voice was a bit stronger and better developed than other twenty-three year-olds because I had already been writing my whole life – since I learned how to read, practically. I don't think I was meant to do anything else, really.

Victims is an American novel (at least that's how I read it) and, though the themes of religious fanaticism are not specific to America, there's something very pervasive about its American Gothic-ness. But I think of your work as distinctly un-American (in that specific sense of the phrase which has nothing to do with nationality). Does living in Europe give you some kind of perspective on America, a kind of license to comment on America more objectively?

I've lived in Europe for fourteen years now, pretty much my entire adult life, so it's hard to think of myself as 'fully American'. You know, I could never write anything authoritative on the American scene of the past two decades. Though I've been back plenty of times to visit it's different from living there, you know, hearing and contributing to the daily lingo, paying taxes, dealing with the various bureaucracies of daily life, understanding the politics from a ground perspective – all of those things are lost to me. Not that Victims is a realist novel; it was more about capturing the otherworldliness of a particular world. So even though about half of it was written when I was still living in the United States there isn't the documentary realism that you'll find in a very American writer such as Philip Roth.

At the same time I feel silly asserting that I'm European, although in terms of my lifestyle and ways of viewing the world certainly a lot has been absorbed. I really belong to no place, and I'm fine with that. I'm a cosmopolitan outsider, I guess you could say.

Music, theatre, poetry, visual art – what relationship to writing novels do these things have in your head?

I think there's a fluidity that unites all the arts. Unites art to life, also. I'm interested in abolishing all the artificial boundaries separating these things. I'm anti-categorical. The clearest manifestation of this, I suppose, is the development of object-oriented writing, one of my major ongoing projects for the past four years.

(Jeppesen's work 16 Sculptures (2014), which was featured in the Whitney Biennial 2014 and in a solo presentation at Wilkinson Gallery, London, 02 July–17 August 2014, is an example of what he terms 'object-oriented writing'. He describes this as “writing that enacts a subjective, embodied encounter with and response to art objects.” For 16 Sculptures, Jeppesen invites viewers to put on a pair of blacked-out sunglassses and listen to recordings of spoken recreations of sculptures. In this process, the viewer is deprived of their usual facilities for processing artworks: sight and visuospatial reasoning. Jeppesen positions his own voice within the object, treating the objects as inhabitable. He says, “Something that is located within an object can never be 'about' that object – aboutness is always external.”)

I just want to return to Victims for a moment because one) I think its handy for the reader to focus on a single work and view it as a prism to explore the wider – sometimes very wide – themes of your work, and two) because it was recently republished as a new edition (Victims was reissued in 2014 by ITNA Press). You know, we can be pragmatic about things: the opportunity to republish a book is really beneficial, in terms of market, for an author. Does revisiting the story have any effect on how you view your stories going forward?

I think it was just a very good opportunity to give the book a new life. There were some things in the original edition, just very minor things, that bothered me and I was able to clean it up a bit. But I didn't change much – rereading it after so many years, the prospect could be a bit scary – you know, what if I hate it now, think it's a piece of shit – but that didn't happen, I'm happy to say. It's a book I can still stand by, that still resonates with me today somehow. And on a personal level it brought back a lot of happy memories from that period of my life.

What sort of things do you read?

I'm fairly omnivorous. Since I work all the time, often on several projects at once, most anything that I read these days tends to be research-related. It could be anything, as my obsessions are quite diffuse, spread pretty evenly across poetry, fiction, art criticism, and philosophy/theory.

Writing novels, writing for gallery work (I'm not saying artwork), writing in or as artwork, writing poetry, writing plays, writing for performance. What's the difference to you? Does anything in your head have to click or change to say 'okay, this is what I'm doing now'?

It's all pleasurable for me, though pleasurable in different ways. The less it feels like 'work', the happier I am. Deadlines are the worst, they create all sorts of pressure, though I understand why they are necessary, and all that pressure, though I hate it, can even be useful and enrich the work. I guess the major difference between working strictly on my own projects and writing for publication is the heavy editorial process that the latter often entails, though this varies a great deal according to the publication and the editor. There can be times when it's quite unpleasant, when there is a communication breakdown, for instance. There is also an editorial culture that exists at certain publications where they feel it is necessary to meddle with every single line, even when there is nothing apparently wrong with a sentence or the idea it contains; for some reason they think that this needless meddling is 'good editing'. Sometimes, one wishes that there was more of a focus on the individual's authorial voice, maintaining and honing that. An awareness as to the poetic aspects of language, such as sound, musicality. I like writing where a certain degree of ambiguity comes through, necessitating more of a collaborative endeavour between reader and writer on the path to meaning-formation, rather than a writing that is more journalistic in form and strictly intended to convey information.

Does your approach remain the same? You read your novel The Suiciders (2013) in one long bash at the ICA here in London in October last year. I'm interested in whether your approach to it as anovel remained the same knowing that it was going to be read as an endurance performance, and it was going to be received by an audience in a very different way than if they had read it themselves.

My approach is still the same in that I have no approach! Nearly everything I write, the process is completely different. It has more to do with the peculiarities of the project itself. Which is not to say that there's no advance planning. That's what notebooks are for. I have ideas for dozens of different projects and books that I want to do and those ideas have existed for years, all catalogued in both my mind and on paper, in notebooks and files on my computer. The generation of work is an ongoing process, it's hard if not impossible to clarify the moment that it begins. Increasingly, life circumstances determine what it is that I am going to be working on at any given moment. Though I could be walking down the street and get an idea for one of the other projects that I intend to work on eventually, so that's where the pocket notebooks come in handy – I have to write everything down or else I forget. So it sounds very chaotic but in my own way I'm also very organised.

With art criticism, it has become a bit more standardised, because the deadlines are more immediate and time is not a luxury. So, for example, if I'm going to review a show I have a rule where I will see the show at least twice before I can write anything. The first time I just go to look and think, the second time is for taking notes. I then go home and write a draft from my handwritten notes. If it's for a longer feature or something more essayistic then the process is usually a bit more layered, as it involves research, possibly talking with the artist, then two or three or four drafts, including the back-and-forth with the editor.

With The Suiciders I didn't know in advance, while I was writing it, that I was going to do these endurance readings of the entire novel. That idea came later, after the thing was already published. Like the object-oriented writing installations that I've produced, I look at it as publishing 'in the expanded field', to hijack Rosalind Krauss's phrase – a different means of disseminating the text. I don't think I'l ever do it again, it was really an idea tied to that particular book.

[dogsandcorsets]

TALK: STEWART HOME

(The following interview appeared in the Summer 2015 issue of TANK.)

Stewart Home is an author, artist, and filmmaker from London. He writes both fiction and non-fiction, and he has written, edited, and published pamphlets, magazines and anthologies. Home’s work is difficult to define – it often reflects the fundamentals of Neoism, which by definition resists definition – but there is evidence of clear influence of punk, the occult and the radical left. Home’s most recent novel is The 9 Lives of Ray The Cat Jones, (2014) the true story of a teetotal, fitness-obsessed, working-class Welshman whose plans to become the middleweight champion of the world are thwarted when he is put in jail for crimes he didn’t commit, thereafter setting in motion a life of stealing from the rich to give to the poor in order to redress the balance of inequality in British society.

Stewart, when did you start writing?

When I was 15 or 16, for music fanzines. Punk music. Basically I wanted to get to see the shows for free. I wasn’t so interested in writing; I was interested in music. I learned to play the guitar and I was in some rock-and-roll bands that attempted to play EFM, or extra-fast music, although it wouldn’t be extra-fast by today’s standards. One of the things about me is that I’ve never known whether I’m right- or left-handed. I can write with both hands, though when I was a kid I was always made to do it right-handed. I started using a keyboard and mouse right-handed because my girlfriend was right-handed so she had it set up that way. After about 20 years I wondered whether I could do it left-handed to see whether I could avoid RSI and now I mostly use my mouse left-handed and it actually feels weird when I do it right-handed.

Anyway, the point of this is that I think I should have learned to play the guitar left-handed instead of right-handed. It was fine when I was playing bass guitar or rhythm guitar but when I started playing lead guitar my lead guitar playing was very odd – which wasn’t to say that it was bad. I used to play with some very good guitarists and they just couldn’t figure out what I was doing to make this sound, even though they could do very many things that I couldn’t. My rock-and-roll career didn’t go where I wanted. I really wanted to be the singer but I couldn’t sing like Aretha Franklin. Very few people can, but that’s what I aspired to. Even Tina Turner would have done, for the screaming and the level of vocal control at least. But all the time I was writing and people were saying, “You can write very well” and I was like, “I’m not interested in that, I’m into rock and roll”.

I was still writing about rock and roll and I carried on writing, as well as doing art shit. I didn’t go to art school, maybe I should have done, but no. I think if you’re going to go to art school you have to go to a metropolitan art school, like in London or Glasgow or Edinburgh, and you network. Having said that, I did win a Hamlyn Award in 2013, which is the one everyone wants because it’s the most money, and I have sold work to the Arts Council, and I have had a show at White Columns. Maybe I didn’t need to go to art school. I certainly think that people don’t need to go to creative-writing school. I honed my skill by signing on the dole in the 1980s and reading shit and working on shit. I was interested in a mixture of things: music stuff and visual stuff. I started re-reading a lot of fiction when I was in school: skinhead books and Hell’s Angels books, Mick Norman and Richard Allen. Mick Norman was a progressive guy who had the gay Hell’s Angels being harder than the straight Hell’s Angels and after the authoritarian right-wing government took over the Hell’s Angels were the only hope for the country after the Angry Brigade had been crushed. He was a good guy. Mick Norman was actually called Laurence James. He edited the early Richard Allen skinhead books. By the time Skinhead Girls was published in 1972 he had gotten so fed up with Richard Allen’s racism that he refused to deal with him anymore and passed him on to another editor. Richard Allen’s work got worse; his drink problem got worse.

I was looking at all those books again and looking at them through the prism of the nouveau roman and other stuff that I read as a teenager (because I didn’t just read skinhead books and Hell’s Angels books). The kind of fiction I wrote took off because I used to be involved with a magazine called Workers’ Playtime and some of our friends had joined Class War, which was degenerating into anarchism. Because we weren’t anarchists I thought it would be really funny to write a story in the style of Richard Allen but about Class War, parodying them. But in the end I decided to model it more on a Hell’s Angel writer called Peter Kay who wrote a story called “Anarchist”. The collective I was in that produced the leftist magazine fell apart during the time I was writing the story. I think I originally wrote about 55,000 words and published it in a magazine that I published myself called SMILE, and it had quite an impact and I thought, “This is good”.

This went down really well, so then I did a parody of the art world called “Straight”, and then I thought I should go for novel length again. I wrote my first novel, Pure Mania in 1988. I sent it to a few places – 4th Estate, Serpent’s Tail – I think I heard politely negatively from Serpent’s Tail. I wanted to get a proper publisher to show that I could do it. I knew a guy, Peter Travers, who edited The Edinburgh Review; he was the guy who discovered James Kelman and Tom Lennon. He was a friend. I worked on a magazine that he edited. When he was student in Edinburgh he published them as part of Polygon, which was a student imprint connected to Edinburgh University. I was in Glasgow when I saw him and I said that I’d written this novel and I was wondering if you’d take a look at it because I don’t know where to get it published. He said, “Oh, don’t you know? I’ve just become editorial director of Polygon again and it’s just been bought out by Edinburgh University Press, so it’s not run by students anymore. I like your stories so if I like your novel we’ll publish it”. He got back to me really quickly and said, “Yeah, it’s great, we’ll publish it”. So that was that. After that I got a really snotty letter from 4th Estate with my manuscript back saying, “Oh yeah, you know, sorry it’s taken me a year to look at your manuscript. What’s more, when I read it, I didn’t like it, you can spit on my grave”, and the manuscript was annotated with all these comments about how shit I was as a writer.

One of the ideas that I had taken from the nouveau roman was the idea of repetition, and I had read these pulp writers and seen how they had repeated phrases through books. With Richard Allen you can find whole paragraphs repeated and so I repeated stuff through the book, but the idea was that it was meant to be humorous. They didn’t get that I had done this deliberately. It’s like they thought they were sophisticated literary guys, but they hadn’t got past Evelyn Waugh. They hadn’t found out about Alain Robbe-Grillet or Claude Simon or any of that continental stuff.

People are quite surprised by the comedy. A lot of the literary critics didn’t get that I was not trying to produce pulp fiction or highbrow fiction, but instead some kind of hybrid between the two. Of course I was influenced by Baudrillard as one was if one was in the art world in the 1980s, and obviously I had looked at the Surrealists and the nouveau roman and I thought if you can have repetition then you can have simulation of the whole plot as well and it doesn’t have to be non-linear. But after doing five novels in that style which, again, the repetition of style was part of the whole joke, and having thought I’d perfected it with the fifth, and then getting fed up that English literary critics didn’t understand that I was not trying to write pulp fiction, I decided to do non-linear books for a while. And, lo and behold, when the first non-linear novel came out in 1997, Come Before Christ and Murder Love, Time Out was saying how Stewart Home was influenced by Alain Robbe-Grillet and I was like, “Uh, yeah... but it wasn’t just this book”. How did it take you guys six books to figure this out? Because of course you get influenced by references, but you try to use them in different ways and try to cross material.

In the mid- to late-1990s I was absolutely massive in Finland. I was their biggest-selling author and the most borrowed in the library system. My first couple of books did well in Germany, too. They also did well in Russia, but you don’t get rich by selling books in Russia – because of the exchange rates they sell the books a lot cheaper. My favourite of the early novels is Slow Death from 1996 because I think it was then that I had perfected what I was doing. Although there’s nothing wrong with the earlier ones, some of them have some really nice passages. I always try to find a gimmick: the first one was angry neo-punk rock vegans attacking tea-swilling scummies with baseball bats in cafés, and people who ate Hitler cuisine, and because they were in a band they couldn’t go wrong. If they got away with it they had struck a blow for veganism and if they were nicked they got he publicity. With a love story in it, of course.

But my favourite story is probably 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess from 2002. I was in a band managed by a guy who was an English teacher. He liked the fact that I was into Beckett, and Burroughs and Robbe-Grillet. He was into the English equivalents like Alan Burns, who didn’t really do it so much for me. He was a big fan of B.S. Johnson, even then. But the English writer he turned me onto that blew me away was Ann Quin. The manager wasn’t the only person doing that; it happened at punk-rock gigs when people happen to think that you’re smart because they come across your reviews and they want to encourage you, so people would give me books like Nietzsche and I was like, “What’s this crap?”’ So the manager, Dave Tiffin, gave me a copy of Berg (1964). I didn’t read it for years and years. A friend of mine, who I’ve known since before he was writing his best-selling books, was John Key. I was living in my council flat in Shoreditch and he was living down in Clapham for a long time, so I got on the 35 bus, which is a long ride but an easy way to go, and picked up my copy of Berg and started reading and I thought, “Oh wow”.

Because I used to, for various reasons, spend quite a lot of time in Aberdeen, even though I’ve never lived there. You have this weird thing on the seafront at Aberdeen because it used to be one of the big beach holiday places in Scotland before everyone started going to Spain. People used to go cruising there like it was American Graffiti, so there’s this joke that Aberdeen was L.A. on the North Sea. I was reading Berg and thinking that you could really do something in Aberdeen that starts off like this, but I can’t do a Scottish voice so it’d have to be an English-literature student, but I’ll have a female one having a nervous breakdown. And then there’s all these stone circles in Aberdeenshire; it has the highest concentration of stone circles in the world, although they’re on a much smaller scale than Stonehenge or Avebury. I went to a lot of them. When Attack! Books was going, Steven Wells and Tommy Udo were always asking me if I had any ideas for books. When Princess Di died I said that I did. You know that book 101 Things to Do with a Dead Cat? I said that I’d like to do one called 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess”, but it’d be a cartoon book and they said that they’d need a novel. But I’d had the title for quite a while at that point. We could have this conspiracy theory that Princess Di’s body was being ritually taken around the stone circles in Aberdeenshire. So the protagonist and this older male, who she may be hallucinating or she may have met, can be discussing literature because then you could have all these reviews of books – I used to trawl through shops buying remaindered novels for 50p because I wanted the sludge of the industry. And so she can discuss literature, have sex with this guy (of course, because that’s an important element of any novel), and go to these stone circles, so you can have all this antiquarian description. Also they’re carrying around this ventriloquist’s dummy, because there’s one in Berg as well, but it’ll be weighed down with bricks. But rather than getting burned my dummy will come alive and take over the narration of a chapter and take part in the sex and whatever else.

So that’s how you get your ideas. There’s always stuff banging around, but the beginning is just stuff riffing on Ann Quin.

[dogsandcorsets]

“FLOW MY TEARS, THE POLICEMAN SAID“

(The following article appeared in the June–August 2015 issue of Frieze d/e.)

Hassan Khan Museum für Moderne Kunst Frankfurt am Main 30 January–12 April, 2015

The first work in Hassan Khan’s exhibition at MMK 3 is viewable from the outside. It comprises two heads cut from light filters and applied to the glass façade of the smallest of Frankfurt am Main’s Museum für Moderne Kunst’s three buildings. The heads face away from one another, pointing, in semi-profile, inward to the gallery, and outward towards the street. The work and show’s title, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (2015) – taken from the artist’s favourite Philip K. Dick novel – is written in vinyl and has also been applied to the windows twice, facing inward and outward, directly above each head. Hassan Khan’s work has a tendency to implicate the viewer in its dynamic and here the passing pedestrian is granted the same privilege as the gallery-goer.

Inside Flow My Tears… a gripping sound work resonates across the show’s entire space. Live Ammunition! (2015) is a four-channel audio installation, a spell-binding rhythm of clapping, strings, and electronics that the Cairo-based artist describes as ‘the beat of the show’.

The next piece one encounters, LightShift (2015), is comprised of fluctuating coloured lights whose gentle pulse guides you up the dozen steps into MMK 3’s main hall. Though the museum’s unfortunate decision to place a ticket inspector at the top of the steps (two when I visited) disrupted the careful, systematic logic of the exhibition.

MMK 3’s chapel-shaped gallery tends to give the works it houses an imperious quality, adding a near-tangible sense of theatricality to its exhibitions. Here the architecture mirrors the pronounced grandness on the work that fills the centre of the room: a cluster of 13 glass sculptures, each raised from the ground on individual small wooden plinths, lit dramatically from above. The title, Abstract Music (2015), seems deliberately off-kilter, shifting the material presence of the works into the realm of the intellectual. What can abstract music and glasswork have in common, other than the measured precision required to make both? The work then, becomes something else entirely, anchoring and defining the structural space of this show and challenging the viewer to examine their own path through it.

A small projection shadows this centrepiece. Studies for Structuralist Film no.2 (2013) is a 24-minute, black-and-white HD video in which a camera circles two people in an empty room. The video is rear-projected and you are invited to view it from behind. This provides an arresting counterpoint: the degraded image quality viewed from the rear makes it seem like we have stepped out of the exhibition and are watching a performance from the wings. Set off to the side of the room, the third artwork in the main space felt incongruous, creating an odd sense of balance to the display. The Double Face of Power (2015), a title that recalls this exhibition’s first work, is a three-panel wooden dressing screen. Each displays a different emblem comprised of white lines carved into a grey, green and red coloured background. Its frontage being its only decorated side, the piece feels frustratingly incomplete, deliberately giving the viewer no reward for close examination.

Accompanying the show is a text written by Khan that takes the form of an imaginary exhibition tour. Outlining the background to the works it resists definition beyond its originating context. And so does this exhibition. Khan does not seek to to create a language for ideas with these works, nor to systematize a process of thought. Instead, his hand gently conducts the passage of the viewer through the show, maintaining a uniform tempo. That’s when this exhibition reveals its internal logic: it’s a performance in which you are inextricably involved.

[dogsandcorsets]

A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE

(The following essay appeared in the book The Edge of Our Thinking, published by the Royal College of Art, London, in November 2012.)

In October 2011, Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art, University ofDundee, invited artists Bruce McLean, Sam Belinfante and DavidBarnett to take up residency at the on-site gallery, the CooperGallery.  McLean, Belinfante and Barnett had been commissioned by Sophia Hao (Curator, Exhibitions & Visual Research Centre at Duncan of Jordanstone College) to, over the course of five days, devise, rehearse and exhibit an original performance.

The three artists conceived the project prior to arriving in Dundee on Monday 17 October but had not worked together on the performance before then.  Titled A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE, the performance was devised as a comic opera, incorporating drawing, sculpture, moving image and a libretto being written live.  The work would be rehearsed over the five days in private within the gallery and with three, hour-long public rehearsals: Once within the gallery itself, once in Dundee City Centre and again the town’s Botanic Gardens.  Following the performance on the evening of Friday 21 October, the Cooper Gallery would host a month-long exhibition of artefacts created by the artists from the performance and its rehearsal.

Alongside this Sophia Hao invited participation from the Department of Critical Writing in Art & Design, Royal College of Art, London; I and two first year MA students and took up writing residences within The Cooper Gallery for the period of the rehearsals and performance.  Our roles during this exercise in ‘live writing’ were to, broadly, bring a concurrent critical interrogation to the work that was being undertaken that week.  We were not given any fixed direction in which to work but it was on the implicit understanding that we would create objects that could be placed within the subsequent exhibition of A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE.  The residency was given the title An Action of Words and was described by The Cooper Gallery as: “…a live writing action in site to publicly share observations and reflection in a dedicated space at Cooper Gallery.  This space will also act as a collaborative text, in which common ideas and responses will be drawn out and addressed by the writers.”1 Observations, reflections, annotations and commentaries were and continue to be published on the An Action of Words blog.  The live writing residency was funded by the MFA Fine Art department at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design and we writers were therefore encouraged to involve the MFA Fine Art students (who attended on a voluntary basis) within the discourses that we would be exploring.  Though open and advertised to the public, these sessions (daily, at midday, and entitled Meet the Writers) were grounded in a conversation around the practice of criticality in the creation of a new work of art.  Further discursive events were the daily Salons, which took place immediately following the hour-long open rehearsals. These were a series of open, roundtable conversations about the rehearsals, performance-in-progress, the project overall and thoughts provoked.  Initially led within the gallery by the performing artists but moved at their choice to the space established for the writing residency, these Salons became spaces for critical dialogue with the work-in-progress.

During the first Salon, Sophia Hao, in conversation with Bruce McLean, told the artist “Remember Bruce, you have permission to fail.” This notion was quickly picked up by all three of the artists – they insisted that the framework provided for them by the institution was based fundamentally on experimentation in cross-disciplinary practice and that this was their remit to explore.  Throughout the week, they recalled and relied on the notion that they had been given ‘permission to fail’; they had been given the luxury of failure, be it by accident or design.

The open rehearsal on Wednesday 19 October took place in Dundee City Centre; the curved paving stones creating an invisible stag for a non-physical amphitheatre.  A tuxedoed Sam Belinfante conducted with a megaphone from a red-painted soapbox.  Beside him, a similarly-tuxedoed, Bruce McLean provided stage directions from a hastily-assembled libretto.  The rehearsal, which included seven drummers, performer Adeline Bourret and soprano and lead performer Lore Lixenberg, felt successful.  While it was stressed throughout the previous day’s open rehearsal that this was a work-in-progress, this performance felt, for an audience, assured and certain ‘incidental incidents’ that the artists were keen to explore hit their (un-)intentional marks.  There were few expressly intended expectations from the artists but as we returned to the Salon I remarked to fellow writers John Dummett and Christina Manning Lebek that the performance ‘looked good’.

Later that afternoon, Sam Belinfante opened proceedings with the following remark:

“For me, I thought it was one of the least successful things that we have partaken in so far.  I think the main reason for that is that we contradicted stuff that we have been talking about all week – in terms of the fact that (today) we made a performance…I think it’s about ownership of that performance and asking ‘Who are you performing for?’  I think we just got to do the same thing we would do in an empty gallery and with the kind of supplementary interest of having public engagement.”

Fellow writer-in-residence Christina Manning Lebek later wrote on the An Action of Word blog: “How much of this undertaking of rehearsals operates as an attempt to initially obfuscate the notion of a rehearsal and performance yet all the while building towards that which is familiar?”2

Until that point, the question that had preoccupied me, personally, was ‘Who is this for?’ – that is, the performance, the live writing exercise and the event.  At this Salon it became clear that the notion of a public was secondary to the research that the artists were undertaking in creating a performance from scratch and within a time-sensitive period.  As mentioned above, the discursive sessions were open to the public but were based on conversations rooted in philosophy and art theory and were in practice limited to people who had some understanding of one, the other or both.  In addition, these conversations were taking place in a room within a private institution and not in a specifically public forum.

In 11 Statements Around Art Writing, co-authored by the teaching faculty of the MFA Art Writing at Goldsmiths, University of London, the fourth statement reads: “Art Writing does not take modalities of writing as given, rather it tends to, and experiments with, non-division between practice and theory, criticism and creativity”3. The attempt to instigate a non-hierarchical position within an institution is optimistic rhetoric, but one that was explicit in the foundations (at least) of A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE.

When Sam Belinfante made the above remark he had revealed a displeasure in their work that day.  When David Barnett and Bruce McLean joined the session later, it was discovered that they had made a (humorous) pre-arrangement to remain silent for as long as possible, an arrangement broken by Belinfante.  From this, further questions arose, including how much of what the artists were attempting to achieve was a manipulative act that the viewer accepts as a form of performative entertainment?  In then asking questions of our live writing exercise, the artists wished to explore a perceived disparity in our professional relationship with them – insofar as in the collaboration with ‘their’ project but in keeping a critical (and physical, the room dedicated to our writing being some thirty metres down the hall from the gallery and core focus of the event) distance, they felt that, in part, our intention was to analyse and ultimately ‘expose’ what was described by John Dummett during that session as ‘the trickery of the artist’; that virtuosity of technical skill and professional manipulation of aesthetic and temporal elements that the artist can make evident but that which can also disguise or confuse intention.  There was also their concern that their authorship was being undermined.  Dummett wrote on the An Action of Words blog:

“During an act, or process, of interpretation its relation to what is being interpreted changes…the space of interpretation can gain its own agency and volition.  The space of writing, or of reflection, assumes its own peculiar and specific gravity, it becomes a ‘body’ in its own right and it can assume a position of phantom authorship in relation to the material or matter under interpretation.”4

The question of authorship can be divided further still. As artists commissioned by The Cooper Gallery, Bruce McLean, Sam Belinfante and David Barnett were creating a work for the institution; this was reinforced further by the fact that The Cooper Gallery would be hosting an exhibition of collected artefacts from the performance. Working within the structures erected by Sophia Hao on behalf of University of Dundee, she acted in position of curator, commissioner and producer of A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE.  In one aspect, the questions of ‘Who is it for?’ and ‘Who is it by?’ can be, conversely, the institution.

Also revealed to the artists during this Salon was the fact that a further iteration of A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE would be hosted by the Royal College of Art at the end of Spring Term 2011/12, a fact that we writers had been aware of since the agreement of our participation. The framework for the forthcoming installation of the exhibition at the RCA was yet to be decided, though we were all keen to have the participation of the artists as much as was possible without re-staging the performance.

The role of the Royal College of Art in the subsequent instalment of A CUT A SCRATCH A SCORE will use the artefacts collected by The Cooper Gallery to explore, in part, how interpretation can occur as an exhibitive act within the art academy.  Conversely, can the museum become a site of interpretation or is it constrained by its own curatorial framework and the internal critical discourse that runs through its public programming?  In this sense, the gallery (the exhibiting institution) shares more common elements with the art academy, collapsing spaces of learning with spaces for exhibition. The notion of ‘permission to fail’ may actually be a permission granted for one expert (artist, curator, teacher, writer, etc.) to work in the mode of another without expectation of a necessarily entirely professional outcome.  Museums and galleries, of course, have less stringent (sometimes non-existent) regulations regarding accreditation.

With large-scale expansion of the contemporary art museum taking place across the UK in the twenty-first century, the institution has evolved to incorporate interpretation and education as a core function within its exhibitive practice.  The key question to explore is whether the museum gallery can become a site for free interpretation (as opposed to, for example, display) or is it constrained by its own curatorial framework and the discourse that it wishes to promote within its own reflexive curatorial boundaries?

Irit Rogoff writes of “…envisaging the museum as the space for unexpected learning”.5 With education, and art education, becoming a site for politicisation, the institution/academy has allowed itself to take up responsibility for a practice-based learning, with exhibitive rather than accredited outcomes (those which testify to the successful completion of a prescribed course of study).  The nature and direction of the institution in question will inevitably frame the context into which the materials exhibited are both created and received, and in return for providing a public platform for artists to create and exhibit work, the institution will shape its critical reading.

In 2006, Alex Farquharson (now Director of Nottingham Contemporary, the reformed Kunsthalle developed from Centre for Contemporary Art Nottingham) wrote how there is the danger in such immersive, gallery-based interpretive work, that “…the institution becomes a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk ultimately authored not by artists but by curators”.6 Writing then in response to ‘new institutionalism’, a small movement of indicating to a shift toward ongoing, research-based exhibition (notable examples of which come from northern Europe in the early- to mid-2000s, and include Rooseum, Malmö; Kunstverein München and Witte de With, Rotterdam), there are parallels to work that is being undertaken currently across extended or newly-built Kunsthallen in the UK: The Public, West Bromwich; Whitechapel Gallery, London; The Showroom, London; and Turner Contemporary, Margate, for example, all demonstrate within the structures of exhibition how visitors can encounter artwork both directly and in the conceptual spaces between their various metaphysical states of responsibility.  If the institution functions (as former Director of Rooseum Charles Esche stated) as: “…part community centre, part laboratory and part academy”7 or as a site of production, then Farquharson’s forewarning still has merit.  However, the institution has a accountability (either overt or implicit) to provide responsible approaches for all of its stakeholders.  

Maintaining this balance ultimately became untenable for a number of organisations managing projects within the tenets of ‘new institutionalism’, though of the organisations that closed (including Rooseum but that also includes Museum of Contemporary Art, Oslo; and the Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art, Helsinki, among others) most were integrated into neighbouring larger institutions, though under a significantly more traditional remit for visual art exhibition.  With access to larger available resources, the contemporary art museums are placed within a more robust position to develop integrated interpretation within their working practice, supported, as the majority in England are, by public funds.  Whether this support is robust enough itself to maintain this contemporary form of ‘new institutionalism’ may, ultimately, be another political decision.

1 An Action of Words

2 An Action of Words

3 11 Statements Around Art Writing

4 An Action of Words

5 Rogoff, I., Academy as Potentiality

6 Farquharson, A., Bureaux de Change

7 Esche, C. What’s the Point of Art Centres Anyway? – Possibility, Art and Democratic Deviance

[dogsandcorsets]

Andy Parker

(The following essay was written for an exhibition catalogue for artist Andy Parker at Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf, in 2011.)

During summer 2011 Andy Parker is participating in a group exhibition at Aspex, a contemporary art gallery in Portsmouth, UK.  Under the name Working Title, the first stage of the exhibition involves the collection of unwanted domestic and small-scale industrial items from within the local area. The invited artists will use these discarded, appropriated or donated objects as their materials for the creation of a new, original, art work that has been built, or utilised within performance, on-site.  The piece that Andy Parker makes for Working Title will be created within an evolving tradition of work that he has been developing since studying Printmaking at Royal College of Art, London.  Working Title is part of a wider EU-funded collaborative project entitled Landscapes, Cities, People, which aims to broaden audiences for contemporary visual art by building a sustainable model of audience engagement and development.

In his book Two-way Mirror Power, Dan Graham writes that under the influence of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (titled here Passagen-Werk) he was able to comprehend the latent sensory impact of objects that had become slightly out-of-date.  Graham saw how these objects of the “just-past” contained what Benjamin described as an almost-mythical power to be able to resuscitate a memory or the memory of a period of time.  Further readings of the Arcades Project can lead one to note how these just-past memories are assemblages, conglomerations of nostalgia and sentiment, devoid of any specific signification.  The arcades of nineteenth century Paris to modern eyes are surfaces to infer upon; archaic attitudes represented through architectural evocations, original lives with purposes no longer intact.  The steady trickle toward obsolescence is a defined feature of twenty-first century Western society and is an integral part of the consumer experience.  Andy Parker’s fascination with these objects (and explications of concept) demands engagement on a multitude of levels; he produces surfaces functioning as specious outward appearances of quality.  These are surfaces to infer upon also, but too are representative of the tacit agreements that form a considerable aspect of our common cultural consciousness.

Parker’s interest in objects that have lost their contemporary industrial application first emerged through printmaking, a mode of artistic creation that, similarly, becomes outdated with every new advance in technology.  For the series Train Windows (2004-) Parker created large-scale intaglio prints that used vandalised train carriage windows as etching plates.  In the process of being scratched and defaced the glass had become both obsolete (in terms of function) and socially disregarded.  Parker’s act of appropriation and (re-)creation had the resulting consequences that though the window’s use had been compromised in the act of graffiti, its purpose had shifted and had been revitalised as a drypoint etching plate.  Parker had redirected the stream of this object’s lifespan away from complete obsolescence (the German term ganz encapsulates this sense of totality).

(As an aside, let’s take this concept further and speculate upon the nature [in the organic sense of the word] of objects.  In the simplest equivocation, Parker’s practice and methods of creation highlight the ephemeral character of the goods upon which contemporary society is built, the goods which we are led to believe define our own characters.  The objects we choose to live with, decorate our houses with, become representative of the personalities that we select to exhibit to others.  Constructing domestic industrial objects from cardboard and sticky tape, Parker replicates these objects and in doing so imbues them with a pre-determined lifespan.  These are patchwork pirates/propositions built with the knowledge that they will be destroyed, pushed out to sea [literally], when their functions as art objects are complete.  In the most common Indian languages, the phrase ‘to die’ translates as ‘to become whole’, and this is precisely the attitude with which Parker, as artist, builds his fabricated world.

The Train Windows series allowed Parker to utilise a mode of production that was at the vanguard of technological innovation during the Industrial Revolution but that technological advancement had rendered useless as the twentieth century progressed.  These works consider multifarious lines of reasoning on the nature of authorship and being in relation to the objects themselves.  Taking the unseen hands that vandalised the windows, the adapted representations of the windows themselves become indicative archetypes for a common cultural feature and the distance that Parker has an artist had to create for himself in the production of these works gives the series a sense of presence that is both implied and negated, much like the implied and negated ‘nature’ of the objects themselves, what Parker calls “…the thrilling exchange of being present and absent.”

On the nature of absence and how artists can react to the presence of external influences (metaphysical, including language and communication; or physical, including waste and commerce) Parker is developing a new series of works that take as a starting point a pre-evolution of mechanised industry, focusing on the parallels in the concerns of contemporary English society with that of Imperial Britain.  The works are models of hulked naval sailing ships, stripped of sails and with gun ports barred these once glorious models are dwarfed, their historical value diminished, in their original display case.  What follows are two stories on opposite trajectories.  The economy of Great Britain was bolstered by an international trade (led by its navy) that laid the foundations for technical and cultural advancements in society, making the Industrial Revolution possible and ensuring that the country remained at the international forefront.  The social, moral and ethical conflicts encountered at the intersections of commerce and colonialism, abundance and need, meant that, after fulfilling their brief purposes the ships became earmarked for other uses, floating as static, rotting hulks most often used as prisons.

Execration (2011) is an exact replica of HMS York, used for seven years as an active warship but for a subsequent thirty-five years as a floating prison in Portsmouth Harbour.  Parker is a native of Portsmouth and the son of a sailor. (In a further example of a resuscitation of the just-past, the high seas, naval and maritime travails evoke an assumed sense of romanticism, exoticism and scientific discovery; the practical truth is very often more disturbing and tragic). Parker draws upon what he calls ‘the invisibility of industry’, hearkened in the following passage from Patrick Keiller’s folk song to England and Englishness, Robinson in Space (1997): “The Victory, Nelson’s flagship, is preserved at Portsmouth…the largest industrial unit of its day…Those of use aesthetes who view the passing of the visible industrial economy with regret and who long for an authenticity of appearance based on manufacturing and innovative modern design are inclined to view this English culture as a bizarre and damaging anachronism.  But if so, it is not an unsuccessful one.”  The HMS York was launched in 1807, built after the major battles of the Napoleonic Wars had taken place. It’s place, and appropriated, extended, functionality, is a sombre reminder of the damage of abundance.

In Parker’s constructed detailed replicas of domestic white goods, the challenge (for both artist and audience) is to navigate between the appearance and the (ir-)reality of life.  Assembling these galvanised contrivances into makeshift rafts, Parker sends them out to sea in a ceremony that recalls references as diverse as the final voyage of fallen Vikings to Valhalla, Neptune and the evolutionary notion of the sea as pool of first life, Donald Campbell and the ill-fated Teignmouth Electron, and Reginald Perrin seeking ultimate escape and self-sacrificing baptism.  For Parker, the creation of a new work is a propositional concept made manifest.  The deconstruction of the art work is representative of the natural order of an item of both whose material and ganz has a function to be integrated (in the primary instance) and ephemera (once the primary function has been fulfilled).  The temporary is important, if not vital; the exhibition of an art work strips the object of any sense of function, other than, say, aesthetic or contextual.

Taken in this sense, a refrigerator constructed from used boxes and old paint becomes paradigmatic of all refrigerators, and by extension all domestic industrial goods.  In his 1994 book The Instant of My Death, Maurice Blanchot recounts his near-fatal experience at the hands of a Nazi firing squad in the French countryside in the latter days of the Second World War.  At the very moment of intended execution Blanchot gains a reprieve.  In that second he was both alive and dead, his corpse the corpse of all men, and vice versa.  Parker's objects evidence an awareness of function based on appropriated usage and, further, expectation.  The expectation of what an object can achieve is equal only to what its creator intended; we can, however, interpret value, meaning and extended purpose based on the cultural aspect that each object has carved for itself.

This is the individual and cumulative effect of Parker’s work, the energy of what we expect is absorbed and embedded within the fabric of creation and engulfs the act of seeing, comprehending and understanding the inherent logic in the life of things we momentarily think we depend upon.

[dogsandcorsets]

CRITICS' PICKS: PAUL KNEALE, "4 OR 5 SELF-PORTRAITS FOR FREE-FORM NATURAL LANGUAGE DESCRIPTIONS OF IMAGE REGIONS"

(The following review appeared on artforum.com in February 2015.)

Paul Kneale Evelyn Yard Evelyn Yard January 27–February 27, 2015

At the center of Paul Kneale’s latest solo exhibition is Quantum £1 shop I–V (all works 2015). Here, ten clocks are suspended facedown above five tables. The clocks’ hands have been replaced by LED microchips, whose lights bounce off the tabletops’ reflective surfaces. Between the blinking of the LED and its embedded technologies and the reflection from the tabletop, an image (previously shot by the artist) will be transmitted, scanned, and stored for digital printing.

A piece made in this manner hangs in one corner of the gallery. Post-post-post production Skid Row is a large print of a blurry scan; facing it on the opposite wall are similar images, this time projected on the wall via a slide projector, in Post-post-post production. These works, which are richly indistinct, like a glitchy Gerhard Richter, will be passed on to Google, and the company will create automated text descriptions of them.

Kneale’s previous solo show, “SEO & Co.” at tank.tv in London this past October, was a cacophony of inexact digital content. The artist compiled a script generated from YouTube keywords used for search-engine optimization to create five filmed performances that examine the degradation of language and meaning in online environments. This exhibition, however, presents an oppositional and more precise paradigm of the language of artistic production today, one in which the artist mediates information that feeds back into itself, that reproduces and supports itself. It is an ecosystem of automated concept, production, and reading that replicates and subverts the role of the artist in the commercial gallery environment.

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CRITICS' PICKS: "SCHIZO-CULTURE: CRACKS IN THE STREET"

(The following review appeared on artforum.com in November 2014.) "Schizo-Culture: Cracks In the Street” [space] 129-131 Mare Street October 03, 2014–December 03, 2014

This exhibition is a major presentation of research into “Schizo-Culture: On Prisons and Madness,” the 1975 Columbia University conference where the Semiotext(e) publishing collective introduced radical French philosophy to a North American audience. The 1978 book Schizo-Culture was revised and republished earlier this year and edited by the group’s de facto leader Sylvère Lotringer and London-based writer David Morris. Extending that catalogue’s examination of the conference’s potent legacy, this display, cocurated by Morris, Paul Pieroni, and the artist Katherine Waugh, brings together extensive audio recordings and documentation along with works from the conference’s original participants, including some of William Burroughs’s ’80s “Shot Sherriff” paintings, posters from Plastique Fantastique—such as thr s nt & nvr hs bn nythng t ndrstnd, 2013—and Vivienne Dick’s video She Had Her Gun All Ready, 1978.

Most striking is an untitled, black-and-white collage made this year by Semiotext(e) cohort Hedi El Kholti, whose source material was the 1978 published tome of Schizo-Culture. From a distance it looks like a large-scale, hazy scrawl of jumbled words and overlaid images displayed like a wall of graffiti. But up close, it turns into a makeshift reading room—recognizable are excerpts from a variety of magazines, postcards, and poems. The arrangement overall is similar to the publishers’ installation in the last Whitney Biennial—which was criticized as merely an archive of past publications and ephemera, but that criticism is unwarranted here. Instead, this exhibition visually demonstrates the group’s lively philosophies addressing the creative potential associated with schizophrenia. El Kholti's piece exemplifies this in its attempt to break down formal hierarchies, also evident in social structures, in favor of fragmented and therefore original methods.

[dogsandcorsets]

CRITICS' PICKS: "HEATHERS"

(The following review appeared on artforum.com in October 2014.)

"Heathers” ROWING 3 Leighton Place September 19, 2014–October 25, 2014

This exhibition in a small, single-room gallery displays twenty-two works by nine artists. It should feel claustrophobic, but the curation by Alex Ross is acutely balanced and simple without being too austere or overly Minimalist. Comprising a variety of mediums—digital prints on fabric, embroidered canvas hung on metal rods, painted papier-mâché, and printed sleeves inside PlayStation game cases from a series of works addressing recent, highly publicized school shootings—the works on view would give the impression of being thematically related, given its organization under a title taken from the 1988 black comedy Heathers, yet it is the acute focus on materiality that each piece has in common.

Daniele Milvio’s glazed clay works, including colorful bowls and ashtrays, are hung on walls and have toothy, wicked grins cut into their bottoms as if delighting in rejecting a more functional use. Two canvasses by May Hands, both made of polythene and netting stretched over aluminum, have fragrance test strips affixed to the backs. Titled Endless Euphoria (Calvin Klein), and Guilty, (Gucci), both 2014, these have a sensual appeal that engages our sense of smell, widening the typical boundaries of interaction with artworks. The pieces in this exhibition demonstrate a compelling, contemporary engagement with craftsmanship, luxuriating in their technical, tactile qualities. The overall impression is a bit like that of a teenager’s bedroom, filled with handmade objects serving as signs of embellished individuality slightly detached from the outside world, cumulatively creating a deep sense of intimacy in a public space.

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CRITICS' PICKS: KORAKRIT ARUNANDCHOI, "2557"

(The following article appeared on artforum.com in October 2014.)

Korakrit Arunanondchai CARLOS/ISHIKAWA 88 Mile End Road, Unit 4 September 18, 2014–November 1, 2014

A group of mannequins face the gallery’s entrance in Korakrit Arunanondchai’s debut UK exhibition and collaboration with his twin brother, Korapat, “2557 (Painting with history in a room filled with men with funny names 2).” The models are dressed in a combination of denim and sportswear, including Manchester United FC uniforms, as well as traditional Thai morhoms, and a sweatsuit the artist produced with Disown. The whole scene is covered in paint. In fact, the entire exhibition has been doused in various hues—from the canvasses on the walls to the cushions on the floor—and in the center of this display is a massage chair, which has been upholstered in bleached denim, while miniature arms protrude from the seat.

Also in the mix is a video that shares the title of the show. Here, we see the artist and his brother visiting Thailand’s ornate Wat Rong Khun on a pilgrimage. The brothers examine the building’s surreal sculptural elements: armed demons and hands that swell from the earth in a vision of hell. The temple’s white-and-gold color scheme provides the palette for the exhibition’s canvasses, and the mannequins on view are based on different characters in the film played by the artist and his brother.

This video quietly, almost imperceptibly anchors the exhibition—balancing the visually disruptive elements here. Moreover, it extends the installation into the totemic as it indicates an unconscious spiritual kinship between people, which is both enhanced and poisoned by contemporary culture. The serene imagery of the temple and the luxury objects in the installation are treated with an even-handed objectivity. The installation becomes a hypocenter of cross-cultural miscellany. It ultimately represents the debris of lifestyles distributed over the Web traveling without context.

[dogsandcorsets]

TALK: Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev

(The following interview was published in the AW14/15 volume of TANK.)

Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev is a curator, author and researcher. She was the artistic director of dOCUMENTA (13), the most recent version of the international art event that takes place in Kassel, Germany, every five years. Previously she served as the artistic director of the 16th Biennale of Sydney (2008), chief curator at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Turin (2002-08), and was a senior curator at MoMA PS1, New York (1991-2001). In 2012 she was ranked top in Art Review’s annual Power 100 list of the most influential figures in contemporary art. Earlier this year she was asked to curate the 14th Istanbul Biennial (2015), which she says she will “draft”, rather than curate.

  dOCUMENTA is a vast exhibition – I think of it as the visual art equivalent to Ulysses, certainly they both represent pinnacles of modernism. You extended the exhibition beyond Kassel with outposts in Alexandria, Cairo, Banff and Kabul. Can I ask what making that decision meant to you?

I was nominated to do dOCUMENTA in December 2008, so I had four years ahead of me. I was thinking about what possible meaning it could have to organise this great exhibition in the heart of Europe after a decade or two of thinking that related to decentralising the arts ecology, what in other fields – sociology, economics – would be called globalisation, even though I don’t use that term in relation to art.

When you arrive at dOCUMENTA you can’t forget the history. It is the highest (in the modernist sense of the word) thing that modernism created. It came after World War II and the trauma of the West “killing” itself with the Holocaust. Out of that shambles internationalism was shattered. Artists couldn’t work – it was illegal to paint, forget about exhibiting. You have the severing of your own body, of your culture, and the severing of international relations. These were reborn after the war through the making of this exhibition. Of course Kassel was very close to the border of East Germany, so it was also a tool for the West to demonstrate its democracy. 

So, the art exhibition was a reengagement with internationalism through modernist ways. I wanted to continue with Okwui’s project to decentralise platforms.[1] Kabul is a city where you can’t travel as tourist – at least you couldn’t not between 2010 and 2012. It wasn’t illegal to apply for a visa to travel to Kabul but the only people who received them were embedded journalists, NGO workers and people of the Afghan diaspora. With one wipe of the sponge we would get rid of the art tourists no matter how wealthy they were. This was an experience that couldn’t be bought. Secondly, they wouldn’t want to come. It wasn’t glamorous; why would they want to come to a semi-warzone? Officially the war was over but people remain scared. Kabul was a place similar to post-war era Kassel, a place under military occupation for many years after the war. It was a country ravaged and bombed to the utter end, and occupied by its liberators, the major Allied forces (the USA, French, Germans, and British), and still without its constitution. I wanted to experience what Kassel was like at the time of planning for the first dOCUMENTA.

A second motivation concerned how art could contribute to building civil society but without being instrumentalised by foreign military occupiers? Also without being stupidly antagonistic. The choice is not between Taliban rule and being happy with the occupying forces – that’s humiliating. Art has a natural tendency towards complexity, contradiction, ambivalence, and ambiguity that resists being instrumentalised. And in visual art you don’t need so many words or translations so it felt that the visual arts could offer more of a platform for communicating with one another: through the body, the sensual, the imaginary, the image, colour, form. We organised workshops to learn from each other. I learned a lot, for example about miniatures.

Forty thousand people came to this exhibition in Kabul. There were families, children, the park was full of people. It was fantastic. There was one metal detector on the door and a sign that said don’t bring guns. There was absolutely no trouble. Unfortunately, the Western media didn’t report on it at all. They only report about the war and the bombings and that’s not a good portrait of what Kabul is. It was, and still is, a very vibrant city, while Kandahar has over 150 publishing houses!

One of the aims was to try and change the symbolic vision that one has of this war-torn place and to represent a truer image of daily life that exists. Most of the foreigners there don’t know it because they live in compounds with huge, great walls.

Istanbul’s last biennial took place in the wake of the first demonstrations at Gezi Park and Taksim Square. This, of course, has effects on the political atmosphere in which the biennial takes place and responds to. Do you feel any impact on the next Istanbul Biennial? Is there a common discourse on the global biennial circuit? 

Let’s first go back for a moment to 16th Sydney biennale. That happened before all the recent revolutions started. In 2007, “revolution” was an abandoned word. Nike shoes or the newest smartphone were “revolutionary”. That word had been co-opted by industry and had become culturally obsolete. Now it’s not. Revolution means to turn, and turn again. If we start using the word revolution therefore to mean to find again, and thus to change, we make a strange set of relationships with time, that is the ability of the present to find the past, again. By finding mistakes – gaps, lapses, whatever – it provokes change, the future. It’s always been this way. The renaissance looked to antiquity and thought they would never be that great. At the same time they were busy figuring out that the world wasn’t flat and they were building ships, clocks and compasses. They were also starting the market economy, international slavery and colonialism, which was horrible. However, the cultural, artistic side of the renaissance was an area of great humbleness. It consisted of these artists and architects thinking that the ancient past was so much brighter and better than the present, and while doing so they invented modern Western art and architecture. There are many specific moments of revolution, including in the Arab and Islamic worlds today, where reconnecting with something that is so-called “past” makes a great shift in the society.

Concerning the broader question of art and politics, there is a politics in form. I am not focussed on content-driven political art. Art can be very radical simply on a formal level, and it’s not just that it should be particularly aesthetic or visually pleasing. For me, the aesthetic, first, has to be the site of emancipation, then collectively. I believe strongly in such a politics of form. If a work of art is not directly activist, then its form better be revolutionary!

It is not only today that artists have critiqued the system they also are a part of an historic tradition in art.. Look at Caravaggio. He hated the papacy and he hated power. He would get drunk and fight, he was exiled, but he was also commissioned to paint for the Church, and he did. We return to the question then: who is instrumentalising whom? I learned this lesson in Australia in 2008, speaking with one of the traditional, aboriginal painters. I asked him about selling paintings as souvenirs, with them being in the market as these ethnic artefacts for tourists, and how he felt about this. He said, first of all, there are many levels of quality in these paintings. For him, he said, “these newcomers have only been around for 200 years, but we’ve been around for 40,000 – I see it as a passing wave. It’s not clear who is instrumentalising whom.”

In this period, there is visibility for artists whose work is politically engaged and who act politically within the art system. Take the latest Sydney Biennale as an example.[2] Around Sydney 2014, I’m glad that the questions were raised. I respect those who decide to withdraw or boycott initiatives that are funded by entities they think are not appropriate to their own politics. I too want to be able to make those choices. At dOCUMENTA, the Occupy movement sat on the grounds of the Fridericianum [the exhibition’s main building in Kassel]. They were there because they had been thrown out of Frankfurt and I said that they were welcome in Kassel. A minority of citizens complained, but between myself and Kassel’s mayor the appropriate authorisations were made for the tents to be erected on the grounds with appropriate conditions to keep Kassel clean and safe.

Now, I do not want to be an insensitive, apolitical person, nor do I want a leader of the global left to tell me which choices to make. The choices that people make are individual and singular and we can change these choices from one year to the next, from one situation to the next. I acknowledge that all money is a little bit “dirty”. I accepted to direct dOCUMENTA although dOCUMENTA is funded by public money and a number of private funders as well. The city of Kassel and its tax money comes from industries that also produce arms and tanks. That tax – public money – is not absolutely clean. So the question is, do I go and participate or do I pull out completely? If you pull out completely, you can maybe work in one country in the world, Costa Rica, because you can’t do it in Brazil or the USA, or France, Turkey, the UK, Germany, or anywhere. Each one of us, because of our past and our alliances, can choose not to work in any specific location or context. You may choose not to work in the country where you are from, or if you feel especially close to that context. It may be a big concern and I completely respect that. The problem is everywhere. All money is power and all power is evil, by nature. I accept individual positions but I believe in using space and resources with care, so that we have as much as possible at our disposal. It’s important to use powers as tools to further ideas of emancipation, individual happiness, communication, poetry, joy, and the flourishing of life in the world. I can use the tools of Istanbul to try and make things better, whether there is a sponsor there or not. Hito Steyerl, made a very important piece at the last Istanbul Biennial about Koç Holding [main sponsors of the event] and she did well to bring this up. That’s the way to go about it in my opinion, she used the resource to question the resource. But no stories or histories are simple. The politics of art and the art of politics are so complex, I feel you can’t run around the world boycotting things because you’ve identified one thing that you find unacceptable. I can’t do this, if somebody else wants to, then that’s fine. I prefer to navigate contradictions.

[1] Okwui Enwezor was artistic director of dOCUMENTA (11) in 2002. The concept of that exhibition was that it would be supported by a year-long series of five public debates and presentations called “Platforms” in six cities: Vienna, Berlin, New Delhi, St. Lucia and Lagos.

[2] The 19th Biennale of Sydney, “You Imagine What You Desire” took place March 21-June 9, 2014. The event was in danger of not opening due to a boycott by a number of artists because of the biennial’s sponsorship by Transfield Holdings, a conglomerate that had recently won a government contract to build immigrant detention centres on the island of Nauru.  

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HOW WE LIVED THEN

(The following article was published in the September 2014 issue of Art in America.)

CURRENTLY ON VIEW “Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living,” Whitechapel Gallery, London, through Sept. 14.

The first months of 1979 are remembered in Britain as the “Winter of Discontent.” The coldest weather in nearly two decades coincided with a string of economic crises that tested the Labour government and exacerbated the social unrest that had plagued the UK throughout the ‘70s. Industrial actions by sanitation workers, truck drivers, gravediggers and many public sector employees strained an economy already beset by double-digit inflation and high unemployment. The government had swung between the two major political parties on a regular basis for the previous two decades. But the watershed 1979 vote that brought Margaret Thatcher to the country's leadership ushered in 13 years of Conservative rule. Armed with a mandate to reverse the UK’s economic decline, Thatcher launched an ambitious effort to undercut trade unionism and dismantle broad swaths of the welfare state—an effort that many critics decried as a fundamental revision of Britain’s 20th-century social contract.

The relationship between the individual and society has been a central interest of Stephen Willats, one of the UK’s leading Conceptual artists. It was therefore timely that Willats’s solo exhibition, “Concerning Our Present Way of Living,” opened at London’s Whitechapel Gallery in January 1979, a bleak month on the cusp of the Thatcher era. The show presented Willats’s research into the lives of working families in the neighborhood surrounding the museum. Hanging on paperboard panels throughout the gallery were captioned photographs of the individuals whose everyday routines Willats had studied, overlaid with schematic diagrams labeled as representing different levels of “social reality.” Much of the work resembled the imagery one might encounter in a sociology textbook, and the installation itself looked more like a science museum display than a conventional art exhibition. Presented in a season of national despair, Willats’s probing of working class individuals’ attitudes toward their government, their employers and their neighbors had inherently political overtones. Yet the installation’s cool aesthetic seemed a world away from hot tempers that prevailed on picket lines and in tabloid op-ed pages.

Now, 35 years later, Whitechapel has re-created “Concerning Our Present Way of Living” and supplemented it with archival material related to the show’s reception and its place in Willats’s career. Revisiting the exhibition today is a timely endeavor in its own right. The updated show occasions a consideration of East London’s rapid gentrification, the changing role of Whitechapel within its neighborhood and the limits of socially engaged artwork in general.

Like many artists of his generation, Willats turned away from traditional studio practices in the early 1960s, in part as a reaction against the romantic individualism that went hand-in-hand with much abstract painting. “By 1964 it became apparent to me that the modus operandi the artist had inherited from the 1950s was not adequately able to express what was happening in society,” he wrote recently. Willats identified himself instead as a “Conceptual Designer.” Adopting the Productivist rhetoric reminiscent of Soviet avant-garde manifestos, he sought to integrate his work with “what people would consider useful and familiar.” His quasi-sculptural projects of the early 1960s were based on simple designs for clothing and furniture. The Optical Sheet Dress (1964), for example, is a garment made from a kit of interchangeable PVC panels. Wearers could assemble their own simple tunics out of the boldly colored plastic squares, a process that, for Willats, not only yielded a somewhat stylish outfit but also manifested the routines of self-fashioning that individuals undertake to establish their identities in the public sphere.

By the 1970s, photography, texts and diagrammatic drawings had become Willats’s primary mediums. Then-fashionable theories of cybernetics and social systems began to transform his notion of Conceptual Design. In works like Perceptions of a Married Couple (1975) he attempted to convey the complexity of interpersonal relationships. Its flowchart-like drawings link images of domestic tranquility, malaise and conflict. Incorporated captions and labels identify shifting roles played by the husband and wife—companion, guide, idealist, confidant—in response to various everyday situations. Willats’s self-described aim was to prompt viewers to project their own experiences of married life onto the generic situations he deconstructed in the work. 

Willats followed a similar formula for the Whitechapel exhibition, which comprised three works (all 1978), each focused on a different social type. The artist followed a group of dockworkers on the River Thames for Working Within a Defined Context; he interviewed local leathersmiths for The Place of Work; and he documented the lives of residents of a social housing block for Sorting Out Other People’s Lives. Willats presented participants with a questionnaire asking about their finances, social aspirations and cultural interests. The responses were then distilled into photo-and-text collages overlaid with descriptions of individual relationships and institutional power dynamics. Records of Willats’s own working process, including the original questionnaires, were also displayed in surrounding vitrines.

Exemplary of the entire exhibition is Sorting Out Other People’s Lives, which centers on a woman, designated “the subject” by Willats, living with her husband and six children in the Ocean Estate, a large, prewar block of terraced apartments just off East London’s main arterial road. Writing in November 1978, Willats said that the housing project, “resembles a large transit camp. . .It is now one of the biggest estates of its kind anywhere but its expansion has been matched by shrinking opportunities for employment. With the local docks and warehouses closing, the main source of jobs . . . has gone, leaving the employment level at around 25 percent.”[i] Sorting Out Other People’s Lives was created through tape recordings and visual documentation of the subject and her husband, as well as written responses registering her attitudes toward “four areas of reality: environmental, educational, economic and social.” Each panel pairs images of the woman’s home with scenes from her interactions with four public organizations of which she was a member: the Tenants Association, the Claimants Union, the Furniture Workshop and the Citizens Advice Bureau.

Aphorisms lifted from the interviews and questionnaires are embossed in Letraset texts across some of the photographs. “You just got to cope with the means that you get from the benefit” reads one text, printed over a picture of a kitchen table. The scene is juxtaposed with a shot of the woman standing outside her home overlaid with the phrase “Provide them with a chance to get up off the floor.”  The responses suggest the woman’s overall self-assurance and determination in the face of government institutions that could be a source of immense frustration as they dismantled the structures of social support, even amid unforgiving economic conditions.

In addition to the panels on display in the gallery, the original exhibition also included a selection of similar works on view at the nearby Ocean Estate. This connection between the art gallery and the actual everyday environments depicted in the work was a key part of Willats’s conception of the exhibition. Those individuals who cooperated with Willats’s research were both subjects of the work and integral to the presumed audience for it. Indeed, while studying contemporary social patterns within an artistic context—already an unconventional task for any artist—Willats also aimed to define the position of the art gallery in its community.

Until very recently, Whitechapel Gallery was East London’s only publicly funded visual arts organization mandated to provide gallery-based education initiatives. In a symbolic coincidence, the art center’s building faces East London, turning its back to the banks and grand institutions of the affluent West End. Whitechapel and its immediate surroundings—Brick Lane, Spitalfields, Mile End—were the sites of England’s first ghettoes. These neighborhoods have been a stop-over for immigrants since the 18th century. Waves of Irish settled there, followed by Huguenot refugees, then Jews escaping the Eastern European pogroms. More recently, an influx of immigrants from Bangladesh gave rise to the borough’s nickname “Banglatown.”

“Concerning Our Present Way of Living” was one of the first initiatives organized by Martin Rewcastle, who was appointed the Gallery’s inaugural education curator in 1977. At the time, such a position, which linked exhibition making directly with interpretative programming, was nearly unprecedented in public UK art institutions. Pedagogy was seen by Nicholas Serota, Whitechapel’s then-director, as a primary means of making the art galleries accessible—and useful—to the Whitechapel community. Still, Willats’s exhibition opened at a moment when the meanings of “accessibility” and “inclusivity” were being contested.

By the mid-1960s in the UK, those terms had largely become synonymous with the Community Art Movement, which had gained significant traction among cultural leaders and liberal left-wing politicians. Led by the Association of Community Artists (ACA), the movement realized participatory creative projects such as murals and public sculptures. During a period of decolonization, the ACA’s agenda included explicit support for immigrant rights through collective action. Works such as The Floyd Road Mural, a painting on the gable wall of the end of a Victorian terrace in South East London not far from Whitechapel, was created in 1976 by the Greenwich Mural Workshop as a local landmark to halt the proposed demolition of the buildings. The colorful work, which depicts members of an ethnically diverse community working together to renovate neighborhood structures, received commercial sponsorship from a national paint company and public funding from various local and national arts councils.

However, as the 1970s progressed, the idealism embodied in the Community Art Movement, with its wholesome imagery and unrelentingly positive message, came under fire from a new generation of left-wing academics, who saw the project as aesthetically and politically compromising. The underlying spirit of “We’re All in It Together”—a Labour party adage in the ‘70s—was seen as masking the true reality of haves and have-nots, whose positions in society were cemented in part by the state bureaucracy. With Rewcastle’s appointment, the Whitechapel Gallery signaled that its mission to create exhibitions would be paired with ample resources for pedagogy. Yet the figure of an educator curator also implied that exhibitions designed to engage the wider community would, in contrast to the immediately accessible murals,require intensive, guided interpretation, even when the exhibition’s subject was ostensibly the everyday lives of the people in the surrounding area.

The gray photographs and detached tone of “Concerning Our Present Way of Living” emerged out of this context. In Willats’s work, collective action is represented as a daily grind that stretches from the jobsite to the public sphere to the home. Still, for Willats, the unsentimental study of social structures could produce real knowledge and understanding, enough to spark substantial change. As he said in a recent interview, “The world doesn’t have to be the way it is, it could be different and one of the ways we can make it different is [by] changing our behaviors.”[ii] So we strip bare the structures that govern routines in order to explore our roles within them, and through that investigation we find the means to alter the larger, impersonal systems of oppression.

Or at least that’s the theory. Viewing the exhibition today, in the wake of the worst economic crisis in the UK since the 1970s, Willats’s rhetoric feels less like an effective call to arms than an echo of the naive-sounding idealism of the Community Art Movement. East London has largely shed its Banglatown identity has been re-ghettoized in order to create new housing and retail developments for the City's bankers. In the past decade, it has become one of the most prohibitively expensive areas to live in the entire country. When Willats undertook the project, he also assumed a privileged position; he was the agent called to represent the growing impoverished in what was then a tight and active community and what is now a transient area for short-term, high income renters. Whereas this archive exhibition should be a spur to action from a similar period in recent history, it feels instead like little more than a quaint reflection on a less complex time.

[ii] ‘Sorting Out Other People’s Lives’, 1978. Reprinted in ‘Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living’, Whitechapel Publications: London, 2014. 

[ii] Stephen Willats in conversation with Nayia Yiakoumaki, ‘Stephen Willats: Concerning Our Present Way of Living’, Whitechapel Publications: London, 2014.

[dogsandcorsets]

TALK: Banu Cennetoglu

(An edited version of the following interview appeared in the AW14/15 issue of TANK.)

Banu Cennetoglu is a Turkish artist. She works with photography, installation and printed matter. She left Turkey in 1994, thereafter living and working in Paris, then New York, then Amsterdam, before returning to her home country. In 2006 she initiated BAS, a project space in Istanabul with a focus on artists’ books and printed matter. The same year, with Austrian artist Philippine Hoegen, Cennetoglu founded the publishing project, Bent. Banu Cennetoglu has exhibited at biennials in Berlin, Tirana, Istanbul, Athens, Venice, and at Manifesta. She is participating next at the Gwangju Biennale, 05 September – 09 November 2014.

You often show at the large-scale international art events. How do you approach each one?

It’s really hard to work remotely, and at such distances. Take Gwangju, for example. The work that I’m showing is a new commission, and the language difference between me and them is huge. There’s a lot of potential to be lost in translation. I’m very curious to see how the work will be perceived, ultimately. South Korean is a very sensitive culture – perhaps they can be a little over-sensitive. There are series’ of rules and etiquettes and things that you’re not supposed to say, and if you do say it then you need to say it this way and not that way. It’s fun, but it can be hard. 

Interestingly, I stopped doing these kinds of conversational interviews a few years ago, precisely because I felt there was a danger in this kind of communication. I preferred to communicate via email because then I can see what I’ve written.

Language is vital in your work. What does it mean to you?

The question of language is a very large one. I don’t trust language so much, even though it is very important in my work. I collect things that are dependent on written and spoken language. What’s interesting for me is the idea of language as a value system. 

For my next show, which opens at Rodeo Gallery, Istanbul, in September, one of the most significant pieces is a newspaper work, but this one is a version from the UK. I’m very pleased because I didn’t think I would get around to making a UK version so soon. I would love to make one of these pieces every year, because I feel it’s important to archive one compilation annually, until the hard copy versions disappear.

I collect newspapers from a single day, from a single geography, and compile them. It started with Turkey in 2010. It was conceived very specifically for my first commercial exhibition. The fact that it was conceived for a commercial context is important.

The show then travelled to Switzerland, so we did Swiss editions, which was interesting because Switzerland, of course, has four official languages. Turkey was very complicated because there was no full database of all the newspapers – national, regional, local, etc. – that are printed daily. They tell me that these databases are comprehensive. Trust me, they are from it! I once called a very small local newspaper located by the Black Sea. I spoke to the owner, the printer and its designer (they were all the same person). And this was a daily newspaper! This man has an audience for a daily newspaper! Even if sometimes it’s only six pages or four pages, he prints every day. I explained the project to him and here I am trying to explain the logistics of how I can get a copy and tells me, “Oh, wait a minute! There’s a guy around the corner who has a newspaper as well!” I thought to myself that this guy is kidding me. No, actually. It turns out his neighbour also had a daily newspaper.

The third version addressed the Arab Spring. With an invitation from Makan, in Amman, Jordan, we started with an experiment: to see how many newspapers we could collect from across the Arab-speaking countries. You have to understand, these are complete editions of newspapers from a single day printed all across the Arab-speaking region. We ended up collecting a hundred and thirty newspapers across nineteen countries. I don’t categorise them geographically, but alphabetically. Of course, very often you have newspapers with the same names across the entire region. 

What stands out during this process is the idea of power structures, when you consider the layout of the newspaper, its editing, how pieces of information are structured and how, in displaying these processes, you can manipulate people’s minds. If you only follow one newspaper you’ll never see the other layout, which is a representation of the other state of mind.

That’s why I started to archive newspapers from the same day. Also, I’ve been doing this work in a geography in which I don’t speak the language. It’s extremely challenging, but I think that you have to make art for the local community first. After a while it becomes an historical artifact and where it goes it will be displayed and preserved as an archive. It’s interesting to think about what kind of possibilities and meanings an archive can offer.

Further, the research and production place a huge dependency on the local community. I find that I don’t have full power in that process and I have to work with…well, whoever. All I’m doing is orchestrating a situation. I’m not avoiding taking responsibility; I’m interested in sharing that responsibility. I’m interested in that dynamic because I make books. Creating a book work is always a collaboration: you’re working with a press, a pre-press, a printer, and so on. Their work is a major aspect of the final piece.

When you’re working at an international art event, you’re working in a context that you don’t belong to. You visit for a few days, you go back for the production, you probably don’t speak the native language, so you’re always facilitated by translations, and in translation there can be lots of things lost but also a lot of things gained. The priority for me is always the local language. I’d rather make the work for the local audience first, then for the visiting professionals second. I have refused to show work that was in English at venues whose native language was not English.

Even though you work, predominantly, with books and printed matter you are a very ‘visual’ artist. There is a distinct aesthetic in your work.

Because I cannot write! After the opening night of my show at Kunsthalle Basel, [curator] Adam Szymczyk said to me, “From this show, I can see that you are an editor.” I like that. It feels like a true and relevant comment on my work. I didn’t necessarily realise this, but in the process of my work I had a tendency to separate – it’s an editorial process. I’m interested in editing already existing information, rather than creating new information. Of course, I’m aware of the fever around excavation and archival practice, so sometimes it can be a very problematic approach. That’s why I try to minimise my intervention to the final collected situation. I try to simplify my artistic role. What you see as a display is very simple, very minimal. I try to show things as directly as possible. The questions are, “When do we interfere, and how much?” I have a sense of responsibility, and I try to keep my work as much as possible at an unemotional level. I edit my own work, in that I approach my own art with an editorial perspective. There’s a lot of surplus in the art world, and I constantly have to ask, ‘Do we need all that?’

I think for many people directness is very boring, it’s felt that directness is not very lyrical or poetic. The idea that somebody else could put this work together is very scary. So we have to talk about the concept of translation – from one medium to another, from one language to another. Finally into an artistic language. But to depart from a very conceptual point of origin and to end up with a loose, dreamy – sometimes very beautiful – object needs explanation of the phases of translation. For who’s sake are you making the work? The audience’s or your own? It’s a struggle, because it’s not possible to explain everything – and you shouldn’t. It’s difficult to find the balance between saying something but being careful not to say too much.

I want to propose a statement, and not necessarily a question, here. You work with books but you are not an author. There is always an emotional investment with the object of the book. I feel that notions of identity and psychological catharsis are important here. 

Identity is very important when you’re dealing with printed matter, because it has many different identities all at once. Even from the level of conception, through its production, to it ending up on a table in your room, or in an exhibition context, or on a shelf in a library or bookstore. These are all very different sorts of engagement and interaction, and each changes the identity of the work and its meaning. It’s a different situation to a more static work, like a painting or a sculpture. If the artwork has a mobile, or changeable, identity in combination with a non-stable audience then there is vast potential. But that’s within a particular situation. It might be not interesting to me, but it might work for another person, in another geography, in another time. This is the magic of book works. It’s probably not going to be single unit piece that sits for it’s entire life in a museum; it’s more likely to be an edition of 750 and you have no idea where each copy will travel over the years and what contexts it will encounter.

Also, I agree with the idea of the book as an object of psychological catharsis. Years ago, I had six months of experience with a psychiatrist – it was just after participating in the Venice Biennale! You can understand this! Anyway, we talked and it was a very classical kind of analytic experience. He asked me about my work and was interested when I said I made book works. He was not so knowledgeable about visual art so he was curious, asking me if I was a writer and so forth. Then he said something very interesting to me: he said, “You want to show, but you don’t want to show.” He said that that it’s a huge task to complete and create a book. That I chose this medium to represent me; that I’m represented in a context that starts off with exhibition but which ideally is for the bookstore or for somebody’s house. Unless a person opens this book (which is not a given) your work remains a mystery forever. All that labour that goes into the creation of an object may potentially remain entirely invisible. Usually the art world is about visibility, circulation and distribution, but this book could sit on a shelf somewhere and nobody might turn its pages – ever.

There is this very amazing library in Washington (now, it used to be in Vermont) called The Brautigan Library. It’s based on a book by the author Richard Brautigan called The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971). This book narrates the story of a librarian who lives in a library for unpublished manuscripts. It’s a love story, around books. Brautigan committed suicide in the ‘80s. He lived a bit of a troubled life. Years after, a man named Todd Lockwood opened The Brautigan Library. It aimed to collect unpublished manuscripts – stories that weren’t published and that would never be published. They have three hundred and four manuscripts, mainly from the USA but they are open to anyone. They have a unique cataloguing system, called The Mayonnaise System, which is the first book classification system in the USA since the introduction of the Dewey Decimal System. The categories are great: they have ‘The Meaning of Life,’ ‘Spirituality,’ and one ­– my favourite – which is just ‘All the Rest.’ They are very basic concepts. I made a piece about that library. If we’re talking about the book as psychological catharsis, this is the physical manifestation. When you’re there it hits you right in the face. You can almost see the labour, the hope, the effort, the trust, and hope, and anger invested in that body, on every page. The books are a projection of everything that the author has been waiting for for years.

The manuscripts are bound according to their length. The thickest books have brown covers, the thinnest ones have navy blue. Each book also has an info page submitted by the author which contains a summary of the story in just a few lines. There is the category of the book and the year of submission, but there is no information at all about the author.