This exhibition begins forcefully and ends on a whimper. The first works one encounters are without a doubt the best: 1st Light, 2005 and 2nd Light, 2006. The problem with the rest of the exhibition is that these two works say it all. The rest of the exhibits reiterate and progressively inflate and dilute the initial impact right up to the final whimper of 4th Light which casts itself over a pathetic charcoal drawing and literalises to death the motifs so beautifully and lyrically handled in 1st Light and 2nd Light. We find that Chan wasn’t really ready to fill up the Serpentine, and certainly revealed the weaknesses in his young oeuvre in trying to do so. But rather than dwelling on negatives we can focus instead on the really good works in this exhibition. (more…)
In this post I will examine Michel Day’s media installation Transit at Timebased Arts in Hull. During his preparation for the show Day became interested by the movement of traffic over the bridge behind the gallery. The constant flow of vehicles over the bridge seemed to have no predictable structure, although each passage held in common the experience of the traveller being raised above the water, being suspended above the city for a moment or two. These transient journeys over the bridge, with unknown start or destination, formed the basis for the piece. (more…)
N55 is a Danish artist group who are dedicated to the goal of bringing art out of the gallery/museum (the art system) and into life. An extract from N55’s ‘manual’ states: Persons should be treated as persons and therefore as having rights. … Concentrations of power force persons to concentrate on participating in competition and power games, in order to create a social position for themselves.’ (N55). And, of course, this includes the fine art system with its network of commercial galleries and state sponsored art museums. Most of those who aspire to be fine artists are required to be single-mindedly focused on building up their CV and obtaining representation from a commercial gallery. Being an artist has become a career like any other. (more…)
Austrian artist Elke Krystufek reinforces, or enforces, her insertion into the Symbolic Order by creating a seemingly endless stream of self-portraits and autobiographical narratives using a collage of photographs, drawings, paintings, performances and installations. In her frenetic and obsessive process of multi-mediated cross-referential self-representation Krystufek breaks visual conventions regarding the representation of the female body. The aggression evident in her work not only reflects Cindy Sherman’s grotesque period but is also a critical reflection upon the Viennese Actionists: Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Günter Brus, Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl und Adolf Frohner. (more…)
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, still from Beach, 2001. 35mm colour, 15min. A hypnotic panorama shot in the early morning from a hotel room in Rio de Janeiro overlooking the Copacabana accompanied by a soundtrack of voices, music and bursting fireworks.
Gonzalez-Foerster’s installations could be described as oneiric (dream-like) mises en scène. Mise en scène is the process of arranging actors and scenery on a stage or film set. Gonzalez-Foerster combines being a filmmaker with being an installation artist and the intersection of the two media in her work is of interest because in installation art the mise en scène becomes the work of art. (more…)
Malachi Farrell, Dying Fish Flag, 1998-2000
Malachi Farrell’s work reveals that the skin-deep, cosmetic beauty of packaging masks its ultimate incarnation as environmentally destructive waste. Farrell intersects his critical post-povera style with more progressive aspects of popular culture such as punk, grunge and industrial music. His installations consist of mechanically animated objects that give a circus-like quality to his work. Humour is often one of the most potent social-critical weapons and Farrell exploits this to the full. (more…)
Hannah Starkey’s work destablises the association of photography with realism evident in the genres of photo-journalism and social realism which are such key players in the sphere of photography. One of the keystones of classic photography as opposed the discourse of fine art is the claim to being an imprint of the real. The concept of capturing the moment this fundamental to so-called “straight photography”. Starkey’s work is of interest because it appears to be straight photography but isn’t. When we look at Starkey’s works we appear to be looking at moments captured from everyday life, in particular the everyday life of women. In fact Starkey’s photographs are constructed, the people we are looking at are actors. (more…)
Aernout Mik’s videos are resolutely anti-narrative, they are tableaux vivant, mises-en-scène that deliberately dispense with any sense of narrative progression or reward for narrative expectation. They operate in the interstice between still photography and film; they are, essentially, still photographs that move. His work is partially comparable to instances of ‘still-moving’ video art such as Sam Taylor Wood’s video portrait of the British celebrity footballer David Beckham filmed when he was asleep in a hotel room.[1] (more…)
The 51st Venice Biennale, 2005, commissioned a work from Breitz and she created the double video Father + Mother, 2005. The two video installations were exhibited in totally blacked out rooms conjoined by light and sound trapping doors. Each piece consisted of six wall-embedded monitors in a sculptural semi-circular array. In each work Breitz took six films that dealt with issues concerning mother or fatherhood and extracted scenes in which the principal actor makes significant statements to camera. (more…)
In Ahtila’s works we discover a remarkable instance of the conflation of a literary subjectivity with visual creativity. By literary subjectivity I mean one less inclined towards self-obsession than with intersecting self-insight with knowlege of others in order to formulate narratives about people, which is something art is not very good at in comparison with literature. The object of this account of Ahtila’s work is the large survey exhibition of Ahtila in Tate Modern 2002. (more…)
Ellen Gallagher is of interest particularly if we compare her aesthetic strategy to that of her predecessors. Essentially Gallagher takes advertisements and deconstructs them but she does so in a way that is very different from earlier work by artists such as Hans Haacke and Barbara Kruger, and the fundamental difference in her work is due to its autobiographical dimension and its focus on the issue of racial identity. (more…)
Nan Goldin, Rise and Monty on the lounge chair, NYC, 1988. From the series Ballad of Sexual Dependency. Colour print, silver dye bleach (Cibachrome) process, 39.4 x 59.7 cm. George Eastman House, Still Photograph Archive© Nan Goldin
Nan Goldin is best known for her snapshot-like representations of people she knows including herself, but the impact of her work arises out of the fact that she lives within a fringe subculture in which social conventions can be deconstructed. Goldin notes, for example, that her work is ‘very political … it is about gender politics. It is about what it is to be male, what it is to be female, what are gender roles…Especially The Ballad of Sexual Dependency [which] is very much about gender politics, before there was such a word, before they taught it at the university.’ (in Mazur 2003). But perhaps the reason why she has become celebrated as a fine artist is due to the autobiographical character of her work. (more…)
Doug Aitken (b. 1968, LA, USA) exhibited Eraser at the ‘Beyond Cinema’ video and film art exhibition at the Hamburger Bahnhof (29 September 2006 - 25 February 2007). Eraser was certainly the most elaborate installation of the entire exhibition consisting of seven twin screen projections which the viewer progressed through one by one. The aim of the installation was to immerse the viewer in what Aitken refers to as a ‘linear journey, north to south, of the active volcanic island of Monserrat, West Indies’ (so stated a text written on the wall facing the viewer entering the installation). Each twin screen segment of the installation produces a disorienting effect due to thunderous soundscape and the dislocation between two views of the same subject. The following video of just one of the twin screens should be listened to with headphones to get a sense of the power of the soundscape.
Michael Ashkin’s Adjnabistan 2005 is a remarkable landscape sculpture arranged on a tabletop. Exhibited at the Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York, the work filled the room to such an extent that the viewers had to ‘scrape around the sides of the room’ (Cohen 2005). The simulated ground consists of plasterboard sheets and the habitations are made from recycled cardboard and gypsum. Ashkin notes: (more…)
Elmgreen and Dragset, Secession, Vienna, 1998. The artists paint a ‘white cube’ inside a ‘white cube’ gallery.
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset take minimalism to its illogical conclusion. Their primary focus is on what they understand as the quintessential modernist concept of the art gallery as minimalist ‘white cube’. Commenting on their first ‘painting performance’ (12 Hours of White Paint, Ex-Teresa, Mexico City and Galleri Tommy Lund, Odense, 1997) the artists note that:
For twelve hours we continuously painted and washed down the walls of a smooth white cube space, until the physical features of the gallery blurred and became an accidental landscape. By adding more of the gallery’s main signifier, white paint, the gallery became relieved of its so-called sublime qualities and could no longer function as just a neutral backdrop for the presentation of art. (Winkelmann, 2000)
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Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917
It would not be exaggerated to assert that Marcel Duchamp’s, Fountain, 1917 is the most influential work of art of the twentieth century. The fact that a male urinal of the kind found in public conveniences could aspire to such heights seems absurd, but that is precisely the anti-aesthetic point, or part of the point. (more…)
The integration of art and life has been on the radical avantgardist agenda since Duchamp, Dada and Surrealism. There have been innumerable variations on this theme. But few have use humour as a weapon against the adminstered world to the extent evident in the work of Maurizio CattelanLike Slominski, Maurizio Catalan uses humour as a tool of transgression. In 1994 he persuaded his famously promiscuous Paris art dealer Emmanuel Perrotin to spend a month dressed as a giant pink phallus. The history of twenetieth century avant-gardism is one in which gallerists have had to be increasingly more than reasonable in accommodating transgressive art practice. Cattelan is a trickster who uses his artistic licence to the full. And there can be a more serious side to his actions, as one commentator notes:
the comic and the abject are not dissimilar: the feelings they evoke, pity or disgust, often hide behind the mask of the joke: a technique which Freud considered as a form of pleasure, loosening inhibitions within a socially acceptable framework. (Janus 1997)
This particular commentary continues noting Cattalan’s use of ‘situational aesthetics’, an evident reference to the Situationist movement headed by Guy Debord. This reference indicates an attempt by the commentator to imbue Cattalan’s work with social significance.
Maurizio Cattelan Emanuel Perrotin in a rabbit-penis suit. 2000. Cattelan contracted his famously promiscuous Paris gallerist to dress up in a rabbit-penis costume for one month.
In his 1997 installation at Le Consortium, Dijon, Cattalan placed a bland, grey of?ce cupboard in the pristine white gallery reception area. The object of this door was to make the gallery staff who normally inhabited their own secluded zone to enter into the gallery space, effectively becoming the installation. In this way Cattalan played with the political boundaries of the art institution, making visible what was previously invisible and connecting what had previously been unconnected. As the Le Consortium commentary notes, Cattelan forced the staff to ‘come out of their closet’ at least at least once a day {Consortium, 1997}. The rest of the gallery was bare apart from another aggressive intervention in the form of a ‘grave’ dug in the ?oor of one of the galleries. This pit reveals various strata with pebbles and neatly cut plastic pipes. Again the gallery becomes the plaything of the artist: a kind of mini-world that indicates what might happen if art ever did escape out into everyday life.
REFERENCES
Janus, Elizabeth. 1997. ‘Maurizio Cattelan: Le Consortium’ in Frieze no. 34. Online version accessed September 2004: http://www.leconsortium.com/expo95.php (translated from French).
EXTRACT FROM DECONSTRUCTING INSTALLATION ART
Since the 1980s it has been de rigueur to use French poststructuralism as the principal frame of reference for addressing deconstructive art. But although there is much that is beneficial in this framework vestiges of romanticist mystification indicate that a more empirical approach to creative process could be of advantage. In this paper I will attempt to shift away from the orthodoxy of French theory and deploy an alternative model of creativity in the form of David Hume’s foregrounding of the autonomous association of ideas. (more…)
Paul McCarthy, Hot Dog, 1974. Self-immolatory performance art was not uncommon in the 1960s and 1970s.
John Bock and Jason Rhoades were born in the same year, 1965, and their work reflects the exuberant hopelessness of art at the turn of the millennium. There is no real attempt to be emancipatory because to think in terms of emancipation in the context of the globalisation of capitalism seems absurd. It is interesting therefore to examine the work of Rhoades’ mentor Paul McCarthy, who is twenty years his senior and possessed of a world view that belongs more to the 1960s and 1970s that Claire Bishop refers to in her history of installation art (2005). But due to one of the anomalies of the fine art system McCarthy came into stardom with the newer generation and his work tunes in very well with that of Bock and Rhoades due to its obsession with a theatre of the absurd. But there is evidence that this artist has not totally relinquished a social-critical stance. (more…)
Andreas Slominksi does take the viewer into consideration, but not in the relational aesthetic mode evident in Iwai’s work. Slominski has created what might be termed anti-interactive installations that, from one viewpoint, serve to highlight the lack of concern for the viewer-reader that has become entrenched in the dominant discourse of deconstructive art. His work is playful, but it is also serious because of the issue of viewer exclusion that it raises.
We can begin with Slominski’s installation Bucket of Water, 1998. The basic aim of this work is simple, to place a bucket of water in an art museum’s shop. But Slominski goes about achieving this task in a most convoluted manner. He commissioned a plumber:
to come install a 15-meter long pipe from the nearest bathroom to the bucket. In no time the pipe, including a faucet, was installed and the artist was able to fill the bucket. After that was done the pipe was removed and all traces of the action were eliminated, leaving only the bucket full of water behind. It is important to mention that this action took place with no audience present. The only thing the audience was able to see later was the relic of the action, a bucket of water, sitting lost and seemingly forgotten in a museum shop as if the cleaning personnel had left it behind by accident. … the only documentation of the activity were photographs in the publication. (Hoffmann, 2003)
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Jason Rhoades, Detail, The Black Pussy … and the Pagan Idol Workshop, 2005. Hauser and Wirth, London.
If Bock transposes the manic self-expression of Expressionism into a simulacral, hyperreality then Jason Rhoades (1965-2006) does something similar with the American Dream. But whereas Bock takes something putatively ‘authentic’ and transforms it into simulacral theatrics, Rhoades hyperrealises the already hyperreal. Rhoades’ immersive installations are a theatre of dementia and dissolution; and like Bock, Rhoades’ mises en scène take over an entire gallery space thereby becoming thoroughly immersive. The Black Pussy … and the Pagan Idol Workshop is such an installation constructed in London at Hauser and Wirth in 2005. At the sensory, immersive level The Black Pussy … and the Pagan Idol Workshop treats us to an experience not unlike the regression to childhood evident in Bock’s Klutterkammer. In Black Pussy we find an adult psyche metaphorically hurled through the Lacanian mirror into the polymorphous perversity of the American Dream. (more…)
John Bock, Klutterkammer, 2004. Installation at ICA, London. A woman treads carefully through Bock’s grunge ‘art museum’ erected inside the real museum that is ICA, London.
The German artist—his nationality is relevant due to references to expressionism—John Bock’s installations are a self-conscious theatre of the Id. And although his immersive installations appear to be about the body and materiality they are also quite hyperreal. Lacanian theory seems too heavy, too serious as a framework for understanding this artist. The problem is that we are not dealing with authenticity when we examine the work of Bock. There is no question of a traditional German Expressionist romantic exploration of the soul. Instead Bock adopts the persona of the mad artist in the manner of an actor. He appropriates that persona and parades it in a carnivalesque manner but strictly within the confines of the art institution where the parody can be understood and enjoyed by the cognoscenti. But if we think on what Bock is doing, he is actually parading the absurdity and failure of the aesthetic politics of the ‘liberation of desire’. (more…)
The aim of this website is to provide a space for critical texts on contemporary art that cover as broad a space as possible in terms of media and theme.
