FLASH ART

289

no.

issn 0394-1493

Volume 46 – 2013 March – April poste italiane spa - Sped. in A. P. - D.L. 353 /2003 (conv. in L. 27/02/2004 n° 46) art. 1, comma 1 / PE / Aut. N.164 /2008

Alex Katz

T h e W o r l d ’ s L e a din g A r t Magazin e • I n te rn ation al Ed ition

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Focus Mexico: Tamayo’s reopening / Eugenio López / Adriana Lara / Abraham Cruzvillegas / Stefan Brüggeman / Survey US / Olaf Breuning / Trisha Brown & Boris Charmatz

T h e W o r l d ’ s L e a d i n g A r t Magazin e • I n te rn ation al Ed ition

Editor & Publisher Helena Kontova —helena@f lashartonline.com Giancarlo Politi —giancarlo.politi@tin.it Chief Editor: Gea Politi —geapoliti@gmail.com Managing Editor: Umberta Genta —umberta@f lashartonline.com News Editor: Lucy Rees —lucy@f lashart.it US Editor: Nicola Trezzi —nicola@f lashartonline.com Los Angeles Editor: Patrick Steffen —patrick@f lashartonline.com India Editor: Kanchi Mehta —kanchistan@gmail.com Copy Editor: Charles Gute

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Contributors Miguel Amado, Sara Arrhenius, Sam Bardaouil, Barry Barker, Klaus Biesenbach, Francesco Bonami, Nicolas Bourriaud, Maurizio Cattelan, Fabio Cavallucci, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Patricia Chen, Florence Derieux, Ory Dessau, Jacob Fabricius, Douglas Fogle, Michael Frahm, Massimiliano Gioni, RoseLee Goldberg, Donatien Grau, Katerina Gregos, Hou Hanru, Vít Havránek, Jens Hoffmann, Udo Kittleman, Christine Macel, Rosa Martínez, Rodrigo Moura, Hans Ulrich Obrist, João Ribas, Michele Robecchi, Andreas Schlaegel, Joshua Simon, Adam Szymczyk, Jan Tumlir, Octavio Zaya, Neville Wakefield, Catherine Wood

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Correspondents Argentina: Alejandra Aguado — Australia: Natalie King, Jarrod Rawlins, Adam Jasper, Reuben Keehan — Austria: Severin Duenser — Belgium / Luxemburg: Pierre-Yves Desaive — Brazil: Felipe Scovino, Fabio Cypriano, Fernanda D’agostino — Canada: Rosemarie Heather, Dion Kliner — China: Angie Baeker, Orianna Cacchione, Chaos Y. Chen, Biljana Ciric, Carol Lu, Pauline Yao, — Colombia: Paula Bossa — Czech Republic: Karel Císar, Edith Jerábková — Denmark: Nicolaj Stobbe — Egypt: Yasmeen Siddiqui — Estonia: Ando Keskkül — Finland: Eva Neklyaeva — France: Myriam Ben Salah, Timothée Chaillout, Emanuele Fontanesi, Vincent Pécoil, François Piron, Estera Tajber — Georgia: Nathaniel McBride — Germany: Danijel Matijevic, Mark Prince, Judith Raum, Laura Schleussner, Aurélie Voltz, — Greece: Cristopher Marinos, Margarita Poumara — Guatemala: Emiliano Valdes — Hungary: Gábor Rieder — Iceland: Markús Þór Andrésson — India: Rajashree Biswal, Suman Gopinath — Iran: Homa T. Nasab — Israel: Galia Yahav, Vardit Gross — Ireland: Luke Clancy — Italy: Daniela Ambrosio, Samuele Menin — Japan: Midori Matsui, Satoru Nagoya — Latvia: Anda Klavina — Macedonia: Suzana Milevska — Mexico: Eduardo Egea, Ruth Estevez, Bernadette Felber, Eugenio López, Alessandra Poggianti, José Springer — New Zealand: Ariane Craig-Smith — Norway: Ruth Hege Halstensen — Poland: Anna Czaban, Aleksandra Jach, Martha Kirszenbaum, Ewa Małgorzata Tatar — Romania: Marius Tanasescu — Russia: Yulia Tikhonova — Spain: Emma Brasó, Chus Martinez — South Africa: Rory Bester — South Korea: Kim HongHee, Keunhye Lim, Iris Moon — Sweden: Robert Stasinski — Switzerland: Raphael Gygax — Taiwan: Susan Kendzulak — The Netherlands: Tessa Verheul — Turkey: Nancy Atakan, Firat Arapoglu,

Design Editor: Fabio Biffi fabio@flashart.it

Flash Art © 2013 issn No: 0394-1493 Is Published Bi-Monthly By Giancarlo Politi Editore, Italy. Unauthorized reproduction of any material is strictly prohibited.

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News

Switzerland

THE YEAR OF KATZ by lucy rees

At 85 years of age, with a career that spans over six decades, Brooklyn-born painter Alex Katz has never had more energy nor been in more demand.

Developing his painting-from-life style at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, his career tentatively began while he was in his twenties, finding his way in a 1950s New York art world dominated

by Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. Katz, however, forged his own decisive path and developed a figurative

billboard style characterized by flat, slick, colored planes and inexpressive brush strokes.

Art historian Irving Sandler believes that he is a one-man movement, and he points out how figurative artists owe much to Katz. His influence on a younger generation of artists like Elizabeth Peyton, Julian Opie, Merlin James and Peter Doig is especially clear.

In 2011, Katz made an unexpected career move and broke away from his dealer of ten years, the established Pace Gallery that represents blue-chip artists like Chuck Close and Lee Ufan as well as the estates of Rothko and Willem de Kooning, and signed on with the younger, more hip Gavin Brown’s enterprise.

Before Pace, the historic Marlborough Gallery represented Katz for thirty years. Katz also reportedly turned down an offer to sign on with mega dealer Gagosian. With a more informal, experimental approach, Gavin Brown’s enterprise in the West Village seems to always have a finger on the pulse and might just be becoming adept at embracing the return of midcareer talents — also in 2011, Brown held the

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Alex Katz, Kym 2, 2008. Oil on canvas, 114 x 172 cm. Courtesy Monica De Cardenas, Milano/Zuoz

first show of Peter Nadin in NYC since 1992.

Katz’s work is more abstract today but his subject matter of landscapes, friends, recreational scenes of middle-class America, and his wife and muse Ada is consistent and even timeless.

Spanning the full breadth of Katz’s career, “Give Me Tomorrow” in 2012 at the Tate St Ives and the Turner Contemporary in the UK grouped together his paintings, oil studies, collages and freestanding cut-outs on aluminum.

A particularly interesting overview of Katz’s work currently on display at the Yale School of Art’s 32 Edgewood Gallery in Connecticut: “KATZ X KATZ” (January 4 - March 10, 2013), curated by Robert Storr, presents an eccentric selection of some seventy paintings, drawings and prints dating from the ’40s to 2010.

In March 2013, Katz has three major museums shows opening in Switzerland: “Alex

news Katz and Félix Vallotton” at the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne (March 22 - June 9); “Alex Katz: Maine/New York” at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg (March 9 - July 7); and “Alex Katz: Landscapes” at the Museum Haus Konstruktiv in Zürich. Also, a solo exhibition at Monica de Cardenas in Zuoz (February 16 – March 30) presents the artist’s more intimate side with a selection of his smaller paintings and preparatory oil on board studies.

One of the most respected living American artists and a well-known figure in New York, Katz was never as widely known on the other side of the Atlantic. Perhaps now he will receive the in-depth attention he deserves.

Hamburg

Twinkle Twinkle Little White Star gea politi talks to ingrid roosen trinks, director of the montblanc cultural foundation, on the occasion

of the 10th anniversary of their art collection at the Montblanc Headquarters.

Gea Politi: Montblanc has a long-term relationship with contemporary art. How did it start?

Ingrid Roosen Trinks: It’s a long story: Montblanc comes from the notion of writing by hand. We are still the biggest company in the world in terms of writing instruments.

Contemporary art came out of the development of many other projects. We wanted to have a look at the most important museum of contemporary art in Hamburg, and we saw the Kunsthalle and the Galerie der Gegenwart.

This cooperation started in the ’90s, and we wanted to find a creative way to work together, rather than just sponsoring them with money.

We sat with the museum director and came up with the idea of buying something for the museum that they wanted but couldn’t afford.

The extra building came when we had this agreement to make an art space and a training center. This room is exclusively reserved for the artwork we buy for the museum every two years. We showed for the first time in 1998 or 1999 a piece from Stephan Huber, who did a sculpture consisting of three mountains and the rivers that run through them. That piece

View of the Gallery space at the Montblanc Headquarters. Photo: Annalisa Scandroglio

stood as agreed for two years, and then it went to the museum. The staff was upset when the work left, so, with the CEO at the time, Mr. Platt, we decided to start our own art collection. Our logo stands for many things such as success, everlasting values. We asked artists to create new commissions based on the white star logo. Out of this we had many discussions with galleries.

GP: The idea of the star in all works of your collection is quite unique. How did you approach galleries and artists with this project?

IRT: I had some good friends from the gallery scene. I heard at the beginning “you will never find artists to do this kind of work — it’s too close to a commercial interest.”

I had a lot of criticism from the outside at the beginning, but we were sure of things on the inside. With the help of gallerists we had a lot of young artists willing to make work for us.

I was positively surprised that nine out of ten artists said yes.

GP: Do you give artists restrictions?

IRT: Yes, we do, because we are willing to lend our works to our subsidiaries worldwide.

There are elements that are perhaps not appropriate to show in the USA or the UAE. We do have this written in the briefing for artists.

We are not a company that buys art to keep it closed away; we like to share it. In the beginning we had 25 artists working on the theme

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of the Montblanc star. You can see, looking at the 180 works, there is a wide interpretation. In 2012 we celebrated ten years of the collection.

Sharjah

RE – EMERGE: TOWARDS A NEW CULTURAL CARTOGRAPHY lucy rees talks to yuko hasegawa, curator of the 11th Sharjah Biennale (March 13 - May 13, 2013)

Lucy Rees: Could you elaborate on your inspiration for the “Islamic courtyard” and how it’s been used in your curatorial concept?

Yuko Hasegawa: Upon visiting the historical heritage area where the biennale takes place I saw there were many typical Islamic courtyards. Sometimes the courtyard is very private, somebody’s home or joined to a mosque, and some are large and used for group performances. The original courtyard

news was Roman, a townhouse design, but the Islamic people transformed it for more elaborate use. We can see examples of it in Mogul India, North Africa, Spain and even Jamaica.

I want to make a contemporary courtyard — a practical site where people can meet and exchange ideas; and secondly as a metaphorical condition to stimulate cultural negotiation and create knowledge.

LR: Is there a way we are supposed to read this new “cultural cartography”?

YH: A Western perspective once dominated the debate about globalization, but things have changed. Only two selected artists are from America for example, and about twenty from Europe. After the process of modernization and colonialization we have seen various intercultural shifts, processes of hybridization, and among the traditional cultures there are lots of in-betweens. I am thinking about these links and shifts. It is especially evident in Hong Kong, Singapore, New Delhi and Sharjah over the last ten years, where they have developed economically but also politically, having taken on their own initiative and identity. Also the traditional empires of China, Turkey and India are re-emerging in a new contemporary format. I am not trying to simply criticize a Eurocentric viewpoint but hoping we can re-orientate ourselves and shift our point of view. This is the new contemporary that I am talking about.

LR: Out of one hundred participating artists, are many making site-specific commissions?

YH: There are thirty-five. Some are making completely new works and others are extending their practice. CAMP, the collaborative project group from Mumbai, for example, has been researching how people from South India are moving to Sharjah. Yang Fudong has done an entirely new piece. He has been shooting an eight-channel film in a courtyard garden in Granada and Sharjah. A beautiful work. I’m very interested to see social spaces be created, and that’s why I invited architects and cultural practitioners to create interventions in the city. Kersten Geers and David Van Severen (OFFICE) have created a multi-site urban project, an oasis as a metaphor for paradise. The minimalist Japanese architect Kazuyo Sejima has made a pavilion with one hundred bubbles in the calligraphy square. The architect Bijoy Jain from Studio Mumbai has employed a traditional method working with one hundred carpenters to make temporary pavilions or gathering spaces with nets. My aim was to invite people from the street who might be hesitant to engage with the exhibition.

Fulvio Reuter, Aerial view of Beirut, 1972/73. © Photo Library Ministry of Tourism, Lebanon.

Part of the installation by Lamia Joreige, Beirut Autopsy of a City, 2010.

Courtesy Sharjah Biennale Foundation, UAE

Milan

Deep S.E.A. at Primo Marella On the occasion of the recent exhibition “Deep S.E.A.” (November 22, 2012 – February 7, 2013), helena kontova talked to gallerist primo marella about working with Southeast Asian artists.

Helena Kontova: Is Southeast Asia the new territory to discover and invest in after India and China?

Primo Marella: It is a region that is transforming, not only socially and economically but also politically. These factors — with the presence of new and well-organized art academies, the possibility for artists to move

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around, and the Internet — have generated incredible artistic energy. My research tends to take me where there are strong arguments for survey and investigation (something I have done for the past 15 years). Others who at first criticize often end up following my direction. The static programming of many galleries who cover the same artists every two years isn’t for me. Southeast Asia in this moment is incredibly fertile. It’s been recognized by the Guggenheim Museum, New York, as they open a major exhibition, “No Country: Contemporary Art for South and Southeast Asia” (February 22 - May 22, 2013).

HK: Your exhibition is a collaboration with other curators?

PM: One of the biggest challenges, given the vastness of Southeast Asia, was in identifying the critics and curators and dedicating parts of the exhibition to them. We worked with Jim Supangkat (Indonesia), Iola Lenzi (Singapore), Zoe Butt (Vietnam), Erin Gleeson (Cambodia) and Jim Amberson (Malaysia).

news HK: You deal with artists from countries that are often in a state of political instability. What type of works are you allowed to import? Are there restrictions?

PM: The biggest problems we’ve had have been with Myanmar due to the severe restrictions and permits necessary, not to mention high censorship. To allow seven burning scales together with strings found on the street, and the video of the political performance by Aung Ko (for which he was arrested three times) was extremely difficult. In most of these territories it isn’t easy to organize transport and complete all the necessary paperwork. The costs are substantial, and you don’t know if you’ll make a profit at the end. It’s complex, risky and difficult work that we do, but it’s absolutely worth it.

Kiev

2nd Future Generation Art Prize by lesya prokopenko

The results of the second edition of the Future Generation Art Prize were made known at the Kiev Planetarium in December 2012.

After a short webcam introduction by jury members Massimiliano Gioni and Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Agnaldo Farias announced five Special Prize winners: Marwa Arsanios, Rayyane Tabet, Micol Assaël, Jonathas de Andrade and Ahmet Ögüt. In the end, Victor Pinchuk generously declared that the sum of the Special Prize was to be slightly increased because of the number of winners. He followed up with a genuine gender-bending joke to congratulate the earlier announced Main Prize winner, artist and writer Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Lynette’s vivid paintings presented an especially poetic and political challenge within the project. Significantly, the exhibition gives the impression of structure and integrity, and does not seem to be collaged together, a feat considering that works by 21 shortlisted artists from 16 countries were brought together in one space. This indicates not only the unified selection process of the jury and the rigorous

Natee Utarit, The absence, 2011. Oil on linen, 100 x 80 cm. Courtesy Primo Marella, Milan.

Yan Xing, Super-Modernist, 2012. Installation, performance. Produced by Pinchuk Art Centre.

Courtesy the artist and Pinchuk Art Center, Kiev.

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news curatorial work of Bjorn Geldhof, but also supports some general expectations about what “artists under 35 years of age” are currently pursuing in their work.

The Future Generation Art Prize concentrates on art as a social tool — in the most open and productive way this can be implemented. For instance, a smartly discreet installation by Yan Xing, followed within the same hall by André Komatsu’s Construção de Valores (Construction of Values, 2012) offers a sophisticated rebellion against cultural conventions. And rebellion here does not become yet another artistic cliché.

Still, the return of aesthetics is evident when we think about the first edition of the Future Generation Art Prize, the international shortlist of which included no paintings whatsoever. The only oil on canvas pieces belonged to Artem Volokitin, who holds the PinchukArtCentre Prize for Ukraine-based artists (the winner of which automatically joins the shortlist for the worldwide prize the following year).

The shortlist bravely showcases unconventional beauty, irony and conceptual sophistication in a variety of formats — whether an objet trouvé installation by Abigail DeVille, in Tala Madani’s works on the verge of mockery, in a minimal and reflexive series by Emily Roysdon, or in videos by the recipient of the People’s Choice award, Meiro Koizumi, who adroitly plays with cultural sentiments.

Anna Zegna: ZegnArt was founded with the belief that creating a bridge to different worlds is a prerequisite for the creation of new thoughts, new relationships. It is an occasion for dialogue with our new shareholders. ZegnArt is a platform for various cultural interventions. It is structured in three main areas: “Public,” “Art in Global Stories” and “Special Projects.” We want to create opportunities for direct involvement with institutions, artists and curators. For “Public,” every year Zegna selects a country with which to establish a partnership. We provide support on two fronts: first is the realization of a public artwork commissioned by a mid-career artist from the guest country, in collaboration with an internationally recognized local institution where the work will eventually be donated; second is the funding of a study residency in Italy for a young artist in that country. India is the first protagonist, followed by Turkey (September 2013) and then Brazil (2014). On March 2 we will have the opening of our first public artwork at the Dr Bhau Daji Lad Museum in Mumbai. It is the oldest museum in the city, with a collection that documents both the applied arts and daily life in Mumbai from the 19th century through to contemporary art projects. On the façade of the museum, for two weeks, the work of Reena Kallat (Delhi, 1973) will be displayed. In collaboration with the MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome, from August to December 2013, young Indian artist Sahej Rahal will undertake a residency in Italy.

Mumbai

GP: What is your and Gildo Zegna’s role in the project?

AZ: The decision to give life to a contemporary art project was originally my brother Gildo’s. We both wanted to project the culture of our time, the values of which our company has shared for the last 100 years. Ermenegildo Zegna is still a family business, and for four generations we have placed importance on social responsibility and had a desire to always enhance the dialogue between ethics and aesthetics. The uniqueness of ZegnArt is that it is an international project that is carried out with the direct participation of the company and works in parallel with the activities of the Fondazione Zegna, which is committed to focusing on contemporary art in the territory of Trivero, the home of our original factory.

ZegnArt Public gea politi talks to anna zegna about the ZegnArt Public upcoming project in India

Gea Politi: ZegnArt Public is a project that is based on an exchange with emerging countries.

How did this develop?

GP: What was the selection criteria for curators and cultural institutions?

AZ: We chose a young and very competent curatorial team, Cecilia Canziani and Simone Menegoi, who work together with

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Andrea Zegna as the project coordinator. The team works in close collaboration with the company and with the curator of the cultural institution in the selected location.

GP: If Zegna started out from Trivero (IT) to conquer the world, is it now returning to its roots with all the expertise accumulated over the years?

AZ: Zegna started from Trivero and has always been characterized by a long-term vision and pioneering spirit, both in business and culture. Our experience, history and innovation are intertwined and mutually enriching.

Busan

speaking artists by tammy ko robinson

“Speaking Artists,” curated by Lóránd Hegyi at the Busan Museum of Art, South Korea (December 12, 2012 - March 20, 2013), focuses on a range of vocabularies that artists have honed to speak about art. If Trinh T. Minh-ha would have us consider the challenge of “speaking nearby,” culling “an attitude in life, a way of positioning oneself in relation to the world,” then Hegyi’s exhibition takes this charge further in a layout that appears to anticipate an approach in parallax.

Along one corridor of the exhibition, we are permitted discrete encounters with speech acts that find their echo elsewhere in the show.

For instance, William Kentridge’s film Zeno Writing (2002), from Italo Svevo’s 1923 novel Confessions of Zeno (La coscienza di Zeno), offers an assemblage that reveals not just the banality of everyday life that Zeno will never enjoy, but also how the remnants of unfulfilled promises erased by the conditions of war appear as the stuff of dreams. Like Zeno, other figures in the exhibition appear in an inexorable procession, all seeing through a haze at the edge of various historical projects with shifting poetics, including Jan Fabre’s Lancelot (2004) and Gloria Friedmann’s Les Contemporains (2007).

Around the corner there are groupings of works in which displacement is inevitable. For example, a color print from Marina Abramovic and Ulay’s performance piece Pieta (1983) shares a site line with four of Orlan’s self-por-

news traits, and becomes repositioned askew when seen alongside Rosemarie Trockel’s video Balthasar, 6 Jahre (1996). In another room, the performative photography of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons hangs across from an installation of portraits of Malevitch, Gontcharova, Rodchenko and Maïakovski in Braco Dimitrijevi’s Thin Edge of Conventions (2006). Are the speaking artists speaking in radically different languages? If yes, then the exhibition compels us to look at the works from different ontological, epistemological, and political angles.

At the same time, it attempts to recollect their kinship as contemporary artists, as suggested by the magnetic field generated between Dennis Oppenheim’s Lightning Bolt Men (2001) and Barthélémy Toguo’s The Farmer (2003).

Most visitors spent less than an hour with the exhibition, calling into question how artistic vocabularies are made legible in a show without any Korean artists.

Paris

Always Yours, Des Objets Manqués, Des monuments myriam ben salah talks to French-Algerian artist neïl beloufa on the occasion of the group exhibition he curated at Balice Hertling (January 11 – March 16).

Myriam Ben Salah: Was curating this show a detour to bring you back to producing a work?

Neïl Beloufa: I think a lot of artistic practices are influenced by curatorial modes.

Actually the art of exhibition might be taking over the art within the exhibition. The blurred frontiers of my work tend to drive me towards curating as I organize, associate, integrate parasites and jump from pillar to post. For this show I tried to produce or at least articulate some meaning. However all exhibited works are strong enough not to need each other to make sense. I just initiated gestures. I reproduced some processes I use, like building that fake wall made of waste because we didn’t have anything else at hand, which certainly emphasized your feeling.

Braco Dimitrijevic, Thin Edge of Convention, 2004-2012. 5 photographs, glass panels, shoes, 88x78cm each. Courtesy Busan Museum of Art, South Korea.

View of the exhibition at Balice Hertling. Courtesy Balice Hertling, Paris.

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i n t erv iew

Art is not enough Swiss-born artist Olaf Breuning talks about living as an artist in the Big Apple and how to communicate with the public: be funny, simple and wear a nice sweater. Good English is optional. by olivier zahm

Olivier Zahm: You arrived in New York eleven years ago.

What would you say to a young artist coming to New York from Switzerland or Europe?

Olaf Breuning: I would say to jump into New York and let go of the heaviness of European culture. It was kind of a release to be here, because in Switzerland you have a discussion and then things get very heavy, and here I felt so free. Here they come and say, “You have a nice sweater,” and I like that. My suggestion would be: come to New York at least for one year in order to get into the mood of the city.

OZ: Do you think New York is still the best place for a young artist to be?

OB: Maybe not to produce works. Switzerland would be better for that for example. But to be inspired and to feel free? Yes. In Switzerland you have all the Swiss artists, same as in any other place (similar influences, interests, practices). In NY there are so many artists, too many artists, so it’s definitely a good place.

OZ: Do you feel part of a community of artists here in New York?

OB: I have some friends who are artists, but I was never an artist who needed to be surrounded by art or by other artists to be happy. I am not within an art community.

OZ: Do you maintain distance from the art community?

OB: Yes, I would say so.

OZ: Why? OB: In New York, if you are open to it, there is an opening or a party every day, and I have to protect myself from that. There are so many reasons to do things other than work. That’s why I keep a distance.

OZ: There are a lot of distractions in New York.

OB: Yes, and that’s dangerous. Also, I am turning 42 years old; I am not 22 anymore. Also, I don’t want to meet people that are mirroring what I am doing.

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I prefer to meet people who are not doing what I am doing; it’s more inspiring.

OZ: Do you feel part of a generation of artists, or do you see yourself as a solitary artist? Would you say that you are part of the generation of Maurizio Cattelan, Philippe Parreno and Rirkrit Tiravanija, or do you feel more connected to a younger generation?

OB: When I started to be a professional artist it was the time when Maurizio Cattelan was getting bigger, so I would say I started during that period. But the funny thing is that my work over the last fifteen years transformed. I happen to be in many shows with younger artists, so my work sometimes fits in again with the new generation. Plus, I think these days it’s very difficult to speak about generations because there are no generations anymore; all things happen in one year.

OZ: So there is a generation every year?

OB: It seems. Things get very fast in the art world.

OZ: You come from a place in Switzerland called Schaffhausen. Can you describe this town?

OB: It’s a very picturesque, beautiful town with houses from the Middle Ages. We also have the Rheinfalls — it’s very lovely and small.

OZ: Is it a town for amateur painters and romantic weekends?

OB: Definitely. I actually grew up by the river, so in the summer you can swim there. I don’t want to go back, but I think very highly of it.

OZ: Maybe you will go back one day! What kind of family do you come from? Is it an art family? An educated or working-class family?

OB: A would say an art family. My father was a graphic designer, and my mother was interested in art.

I never had problems telling my family, “Now I am a contemporary artist.” They always thought it was great.

They didn’t want me to be a doctor or a banker.

i n t erv iew

Previous page: Olaf Breuning, Mammoth, 2008, 150 x 180 cm, c-print.

Courtesy Metro Pictures Above: Bully, 1998, 120 x 150 cm, c-print. Courtesy the artist

OZ: So your father is a graphic designer. And your mother?

OB: My father used to do graphic design and window displays. Now he’s retired, while my mother died of cancer when I was eighteen. She was mostly at home, being a mother, but she was also doing side jobs with a connection to art. The whole family was into art. My father makes music; he was a big blues musician in Switzerland.

OZ: What pushed you to New York? Did you live in other cities in Europe before moving here?

OB: When I became a very hot artist in Switzerland I got all the stipends you could win, and one of them was a one-year grant in New York, which was given by the city of Zurich. So they sent me here, and I lived in this big loft on West Broadway. It was a beautiful place, which they don’t have anymore. After I lived there for one year I fell in love with the city and decided to stay.

Eventually I moved to Chinatown.

OZ: Was it a culture shock to move to New York from Switzerland?

58 — march / april 2013

OB: My English was very bad. I could not really talk. It was difficult to communicate, but I felt happy like a clam. I was here, and I knew this was the place I wanted to be.

OZ: Was it right after 9/11?

OB: Right before. It happened a year after I moved, and I was already living in Chinatown.

OZ: So you experienced New York’s first political trauma.

OB: I was not unhappy to be here; it was a very intense and interesting time. Beside the people who died, which was horrible, I must say that to be here in the city during that moment was very dramatic. Were you here?

OZ: I was. You could feel it was a transitional period, when some people suddenly wanted to leave the city.

OB: But for those who stayed in New York it was a very loving time. People were very sensitive and paranoid at the same time. I felt very close to the people who stayed. It was strange.

i n t erv iew OZ: So in New York your art makes sense.

OB: I don’t know. It doesn’t really matter whether my art makes sense in China or Thailand. I hope I do art not only for a city or a country.

OZ: Do you think that art can be a universal language?

OB: Not that it “can be” — it is. Let’s consider the drawing book we did together; any idiot can understand it. I strongly believe that as a contemporary artist I have a mission to speak not only about internal and elitist questions but also to speak about things people can understand.

OZ: I also feel you like the tension — or the conflict — between Western and exotic culture. You like to travel and to have your work dialoging and interacting with spaces in the middle of Africa, where the art world is a total fiction.

OB: Yes, but it could be any culture, either Papua New Guinea or Japan. It doesn’t matter. It’s more like: the West is my heritage, where I come from, this is how my brain works, and the rest is unknown. I like to cross that border and have a reaction to it. It’s a human thing.

You think you know it all, and then you encounter things that are completely different or strange.

OZ: You are experimenting with the possibility of a dialogue.

OB: Yes, because the dialogue is different whether I speak to you here or to someone in Africa. I like to see it with my “Western glasses” on. I don’t try to understand African culture when I go to shoot a movie there. I go there to be perplexed, to ask questions. It’s more like a monologue rather than a dialogue. It’s my perspective.

OZ: So you are also a sort of traveler between cultures and different contexts. You don’t want to just stay in the art world; you want to experience the world in your way, which is sometimes not naïve but still very spontaneous. You don’t necessarily arrive with a pre-determined perspective — you just go there.

OB: Sometimes I actually have a micro-concept.

I always say, “I want to speak about my life,” and my life is bigger than just the art world. I am an artist — and this is beautiful — but it’s not enough. It would be boring to just talk about and to the art world.

OZ: When I read interviews with you I can see that people are really confused about your movement between different media, from photography to film or from installation to drawing. Do you feel your art is misunderstood? Would it be better understood if it focused on a single medium?

OB: Maybe. But as you know, I don’t give a shit.

What I know is that for fifteen years I’ve liked making art, and I want to do it for the next twenty, thirty or forty years. That’s my goal. You have an artist like On Kawara, he had one single conceptual idea. I feel that reality is so colorful around us; it’s changing too fast and I want keep up with that. This is my life, this is the time, and I want to go further. And as long as I can pay the rent, I don’t give a shit.

OZ: It’s also that your art is really tied to your life and to your own personal evolution. You compare your art research to a diary.

OB: Yes. A diary is something you do because you want to keep track of something in your life that seems to be going away very quickly. With a diary you can hold things back. It is like what you do with your Purple Diary, which I find very nice. I hope when I am a seventy-year-old man I can look back. Even now, after fifteen years of working, I am excited about what I’ve “touched”: I went to Easter Island, I went to Papua New Guinea, I hired prostitutes, I did all these things in my work that made me happy. The difference between a diary and what I do is that you can put your diary under your pillow and show it to nobody. Obviously I like to show my stuff, and that’s why I am an artist!

59 — march / april 2013

Olaf Breuning, Camelop Johanna, 100 x 130 cm, 2013, c-print.

Camelop Kuki, 100 x 130 cm, 2013, c-print. Courtesy Carbon 12

i n t erv iew

Olaf Breuning, Smoke bombs 2, 2011. C - print, 120 x 150 cm. Edition of 6

OZ: You show it, but you also like to create a reaction — you like to provoke. You are not only collecting and expressing your own emotions: you want to force people to react in a way.

OB: I was shooting this movie entitled Home 3, which is all about New York, and that I presented at the Swiss institute in September. When I shot it and watched it on my computer I sometimes laughed, I was

60 — march / april 2013

so happy. One night two friends came for dinner and I showed it to them — it was unfinished then — and then I felt so embarrassed. I thought, “What will people think about this? Will they think this is too stupid or too primitive?” Nevertheless, I can say that I work for myself in order to have my own pleasure. For sure, I am happy if people like it, but I don’t expect anything. My concept is not to provoke others.

i n t erv iew

OZ: So does New York have a primitive perspective?

OB: This is my perspective. I tried to show our time, to show a character who is no longer able to focus on anything. He is naïve and sweet at the same time, and he goes through the city in order to have different experiences.

Top right: Olaf Breuning, Mr Hand, Mrs Ass, Mrs Knee, Mr Foot, 2004. C - print, 120 x 150 cm Edition of 4

OZ: When you came to New York, you came to forget everything and rediscover an immediate relationship to culture. Do you think everything has been done in art?

OB: I guess Picasso in circa 1910 would say that.

What I do believe is that the speed of things is incredible. The art world runs one direction and then another direction; one year it’s Chinese art, then painting, then conceptual art, and then it seems there is no orientation anymore. Probably this situation comes from the fact that most of the artworks have been done. The big, pioneering works have been done. Or maybe new things will come. I would be excited to spill some colors on the floor, but I cannot do it anymore because Jackson Pollock did it, and we reserve it for him. Like his drips, there are a thousand other works that someone did already, so the moment you do that, it becomes a remake.

This is what is happening at the moment. Many artists speak about what happened in the past, trying to figure something out. I don’t say it is bad, but I still believe that I can make one or two pioneering works that will be considered new. Maybe…

61 — march / april 2013

Olivier Zahm is the editor-in-chief of Purple Fashion.

Olaf Breuning was born in 1970 in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. He lives and works in New York and Zurich.

Selected solo shows: 2013: Paul Klee Museum, Bern (CH); Carbon12, Dubai. 2012: Swiss Institute, New York. 2011: Metro Pictures, New York; Kodama, Kyoto. 2010: Nicola von Senger, Zurich; Centre d’Art Contemporain la Chapelle du Geneteil (FR); Kunstmuseum Luzern.

2009: Metro Pictures, New York; Michael Benevento, Los Angeles; Kodama, Tokyo. 2008: Metro Pictures, New York; Conduits, Milan. 2007: Nicola von Senger, Zurich; Migros Museum, Zurich; Bunkier Sztuki, Krakow; Kodama, Tokyo; Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces, Melbourne. 2006: Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane; Australian Centre for Photography, Sydney; Nils Stærk, Copenhagen. 2005: Metro Pictures, New York; Nicola von Senger, Zurich; Meyer Kainer, Vienna; Chisenhale Gallery, London.

2004: Metro Pictures, New York; Kodama, Tokyo; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Nils Stærk, Copenhagen. 2003: Air de Paris, Paris; Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Mexico City; Musée de Strasbourg, Strasbourg; Arndt & Partner, Berlin; Le Magasin, Grenoble. 2002: Swiss Institute, New York. 2001: Metro Pictures, New York; Swiss Institute, New York; Meyer Kainer, Vienna.

news

focus me x ico — i n t erv iew

Subversion through inefficiency Abraham Cruzvillegas’s work raises questions related to the aesthetic and social dimensions of objects, pedagogical processes and social relationships. by amanda de la garza mata

One of the key concepts in Cruzvillegas’ work is “self-building,” which refers to the way that much housing in ThirdWorld urban areas is built: that is, made by the inhabitants themselves through processes that imply coexistence and collaborative work. Cruzvillegas takes up the structures and the components of self-building to disseminate his work in a wide variety of formats and contexts.

Amanda de la Garza Mata: Could you tell me about the last project you completed for the Gwangju Biennale in South Korea?

Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Biennale is held in a city that had an important event in 1980, a series of student protests against a dictatorship that was installed following the division of the country after the Second World War. On May 18 there was a massacre in the city of Gwangju. Eight years later they managed to overthrow the dictatorship. The Biennale was the result of that situation, a sort of compensation to society. It became a catalyst, a space for discussing social, political, and economic problems. So, instead of making a piece in the Biennale building, I used an abandoned house.

The house belonged to the owner of a movie theater that’s had an experimental film program since the ’30s.

I asked to work there because in it you can see the vestiges of the house’s different uses — its modifications, adaptations and destructions. I asked them to let me use it as a workshop in two senses: a workshop where things are made, but also a workshop in an academic sense. I spent three weeks using it as a studio, making my piece only with materials from the house. At the same time, I was organizing meetings with people twice a week to talk about topics of a different order, but that were about the local context: the house, the theater, the city, the country, history, economics, politics, culture, food, etc. I tried to design that space in the direction of a discussion workshop, as an educational apparatus, so

I could learn from the people there. The pieces were left as an exhibition in the house.

AdlGM: In what way does the project synthesize aspects of your earlier work?

AC: I’ve used the artisanal aspect before — recuperating materials and turning them into a whole, which meant sculpture, then putting the objects into an assemblage, but trying to respect each of their experiences, which is what I have done since I began working as a sculptor — and also the educational aspect, which has interested me a lot ever since I studied for a degree in education rather than art. There’s also an epistemological interest, but always in a more individual sense, with the possibility of constructing an individual identity that is not collective. But obviously this affects the collective, and in that sense the urban experience: how we inhabit the city.

AdlGM: We might think of objects as ideological containers. Although you work under a single structure that brings together assemblage and found objects, in some way each sculpture produces meaning in each specific culture, or for the audience in the context where you’re working.

AC: This idea of objects as containers of experience is important. Experience isn’t just that objects should be rusty or look old in order to become attractive and be incorporated into a work of art. For me, that’s decoration. On the contrary, experience implies a series of moments of economic transformation, and objects are vessels for that, for the transformation of thought and of the modes of perceiving reality. From the perspective of self-building, I would say that it’s a necessity demanding a possible transformation. Objects appeal to different ways of seeing reality, and that’s what I want: to create phrases or enunciations that might bear many meanings, to give objects voices other than my own. I’m interested

63 — march / april 2013

Opposite: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Morgenlatte nach einem Hausarrest während der Reichskristallnacht, 2011.

Found diverse wooden elements, stainless steel, acrylic paint, felt and beer bottle caps, 280 x 250 x 255 cm. Courtesy the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

Photo: Michel Zabé and Omar Luis Olguín.

fo cus me x ico — i n t erv iew

in taking on the social life or the political life of objects as a very fertile field of work.

Even when I know how to use a drill, a hammer, I know how to make something that is a sculpture, but I also know that I can keep on learning. It’s something that has happened in my work from the beginning — projects in which I appeal to the local, understood as something from which I can learn, like the project in Korea or at Documenta 13, or in a project that I did with craftspeople in France, or another project that I did with craftspeople from my father’s hometown Michoacán in Mexico. There’s a part that has to do with approaching a body of knowledge in order to appropriate it, so I can transcend my own limitations.

Nowadays it would be strange to appeal to the idea of style. In my case it’s what I try to escape. Occasionally those ways of using the drill, one material or another, are repeated. Still, in each experience, in each new project there’s a learning process that makes all the previous bodies of knowledge unstable, so it becomes a pile of instabilities.

AdlGM: In the case of the dialogues in Gwangju, there’s the idea of process. But in the project you did for Documenta 13 there’s another dimension that has to do with actions on the street. In that context I was trying to understand the idea of living sculptures.

AC: For me, what I did for Documenta 13 represents a big challenge; it implied formulating a more profound critical reflection about public space and about my own work. I reviewed constant features of my work, trying to

destabilize my own forms. I worked with thirty-four concepts, in order to generate works that could not be seen.

I wanted to create a space of work and of experimentation that may not necessarily yield products. My list sought to go to the territory of experience and not so much of accumulation. The list of concepts came up by chance.

I found myself with concepts like sweat: you sweat when you work, but also when you dance, when you’re in bed with someone, when you’re at the beach; it’s a situation with a lot possibilities. I assigned each concept a color, and I painted a game of pick-up sticks with the thirtyfour colors that I used as a tool to decide the actions I made in the street. I used as a reference the dynamics of the Situationists, renaming streets and transforming them with gestures that weren’t necessarily meant to be visible. I went out in the streets each day with the possibility of making a living sculpture, but with a weight or a burden that was pressuring me. There came a point where I wasn’t doing anything; I reached a blind spot in the coordinates of my own internal discussion. I’m interested in creating a space with a certain degree of what you could call “subversion through inefficiency.”

That’s where an economic dimension reemerges in my work. One part of my belief lies in Taoism and contemplation, which is inefficient. I produce works that occasionally get into commercial spaces, but I believe that those moments serve to generate resources for more inefficiency, and not in an accumulative way. In the eyes of the institution it’s immoral, which could be the institution of capital. Investing in art becomes an immoral act to a certain degree.

64 — march / april 2013

Top left: Abraham Cruzvillegas, Atelier Autoconstruccion: The Inefficient Tinkerer’s - Workshop: Free Advice Behind Cinema, 2012.

Photographic documentation of the project, Gwangju Biennale (KR), 2012..

Courtesy the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

focus me x ico — i n t erv iew Abraham Cruzvillegas, Untitled non-productive activities, 2012. Photographic documentation of the project, dOCUMENTA (13) Kassel (DE). Courtesy the artist and kurimanzutto, Mexico City.

Amanda de la Garza Mata is associate curator at MUAC. She lives and works in Mexico City.

Abraham Cruzvillegas was born in 1968 in Mexico City where he currently lives and works.

Selected solo shows: 2013: Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

2012: Regen Projects, Los Angeles.

2010: kurimanzutto, Mexico City. 2009: Thomas Dane, London; Redcat, Los Angeles; CCA Wattis, San Francisco. 2008: CCA, Glasgow.

2007: Jack Tilton, New York. 2005: The Breeder, Athens; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca, Mexico (with Dr. Lakra). 2004: Roberts & Tilton, Los Angeles; MARCO, Monterrey (MX). 2003: Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Jack Tilton, New York. 2001: MUCA, Mexico City.

Selected group shows: 2012: Gwangju Biennale (KR); dOCUMENTA (13), Kassel (DE). 2009: Bienal de Mercosul, Porto Alegre (BR); Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, Puerto Rico. 2008: “Mexico: Expected / Unexpected. Colleción Isabel & Augustine Coppel,” La Maison Rouge, Paris; Salón Nacional de Artistas, Cali (CO). 2007: “Unmonumental,” New Museum, New York. 2005: “Universal Experience: Art, Life And The Tourist’s Eye,” MCA, Chicago / MART, Rovereto (IT); Torino Triennale, Turin (IT). 2003: Venice Biennale; “The Squared Circle: Boxing In Contemporary Art,” Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. 2002: São Paulo Biennial. 1995: “La Liga De La Injusticia, ” La Panadería, Mexico City. 1994: In Site, Tijuana, Mexico; Havana Biennial. 1993: “The Return Of The Cadavre Exquis,” The Drawing Center, New York.

65 — march / april 2013

spot ligh t

Dark and Deadpan by wendy vogel

Pop Art was brilliant in its ability to mirror society — to reflect not only the shiny, colorful plasticity of its surface, but also reveal the fissures beneath it. Two Whitney exhibitions explore the dark underbelly of this movement. Drawn from the permanent collection, “Sinister Pop” frames unsettling irony as the era’s key sensibility.

Along with objects by Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, works like Judith Bernstein’s excoriating political collages, Jim Nutt’s grotesque drawings, and snapshot photography by William Eggleston depict the range of Pop’s influence. An accompanying video and film exhibition, “Dark and Deadpan: Pop in TV and the Movies,” investigates the symbiotic relationship between mass media and Pop Art. This succinct but smart show of TV ads, video art and underground film illustrates the rampant cannibalization of popular culture to subversive and sinister ends.

A selection of mass-media footage traces the razorthin, often shifting line between dark and deadpan.

Campaign ads for Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon display a sophisticated understanding of montage techniques and the ’60s youth cult, deploying their appeal to promote dubious political agendas.

The godfather of deadpan, Andy Warhol, hovers between complicity and critique. His commercial for the restaurant Schrafft’s — an ice-cream sundae casually filmed with psychedelic video effects and a soundtrack of banal chatter — is adjacent to a film clip from 1981

by Jørgen Leth and Ole John in which the artist eats

a Burger King hamburger. By today’s standards, this pokerfaced gesture of fast-food consumption appears almost grotesque.

However, the most evocative thread of “Dark and Deadpan” illustrates artists’ negotiation of sexual liberation at the moment of its co-optation by capitalism.

Herbert Marcuse named this channeling of desire into a need for instant consumerist gratification “repressive desublimation.” Kenneth Anger parodies tropes of popular romanticism in Scorpio Rising (1963), a soft-focus homoerotic homage to biker gangs set to ’60s girl-group hits. Animator Fred Mogubgub’s jumpy collage film, The Pop Show (1967), shuffles images of consumer and sexual desire against a pulsing soundtrack of Rolling Stones and The Beatles. The quick-cut film features a young Gloria Steinem as a soft-drink spokeswoman “drinking” Pepsi and cleaning solution with the same blank grin on her face. Ger Van Elk’s conceptual film of shaving a cactus provides a punny counterweight to Sherman Price’s trailer for The Imp-Probable Mr. Weegee (1966) — a dizzying parade of giggling, topless ingénues. But George Kuchar’s HOLD ME WHILE I’M NAKED (1966) truly shines with humor and pathos.

This story-within-a-story features the loveless director’s attempt to make a glamorous erotic film. Knitting together passionate filmed scenes with vignettes from his lonely life, Kuchar exposes hippie hedonistic sensuality as a constructed yet alluring fantasy. This imbricated critique continues to define Pop’s avant-garde legacy.

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Dark and Deadpan: Pop in Tv and the Movies is on view at the Whitney Museum until March 31, 2013.

George Kuchar, (19422011), still from HOLD ME WHILE I’M NAKED, 1966. 16mm film transferred to video, color, sound; 17 min. Courtesy the Estate of George Kuchar, © the Estate of George Kuchar.

br a nd new

Vanessa Safavi by andreas schlaegel

Andreas Schlaegel: Your works appear to communicate exceptionally well in images.

Vanessa Safavi: I suppose so, but it also has to do with scale. If you’re talking about the birds in Each Color is a Gift for You (2012), they have a strong presence that lends itself to photography. But the installation deals with absence — not really death, but non-life or inactivity. It speaks to our relation to exoticism, how we treat it as a fetish and consume it.

AS: As taxidermy specimens they seem to refer to the notion of the ruin as a form that exists for eternity — a form devoid of life.

VS: They are installed lying on their backs, the same way that biologists keep the pieces in drawers, as study material. Taxidermy is a form of preservation, but it is in fact very romantic. I didn’t want to make an apocalyptic scenario, even if the birds represent a sense of failed utopia. The first time I showed them was at CRAC Alsace for my exhibition “I Wish Blue Could Be Water”(2012).

I proposed a utopian possibility and its own failure. It is a very old philosophic concept — that opposites exist and work together.

AS: But the birds were only one part of the exhibition.

What else did it consist of?

VS: I showed them with two cast white silicone

pieces on the wall, white monochromes. It was a very poetic juxtaposition, a dialogue — as if the color had vanished out of the paintings on the wall and had taken on the form of birds. I’m also fascinated by resins, plastics and gums.

AS: What are the qualities of resin that attract you?

VS: There is a deep relation to the unconscious in translucent materials. They have a potential for contemplation in the original sense of the word — of seeing something, admiring it and thinking about it. Silicone is like jelly, like a jellyfish, a deep-sea creature that creates light out of itself. It brings up things from Buddhism and psychology that are based on theories of the unconscious, things in the mind that we are not aware of.

AS: Is your mixed cultural origin important for your work?

VS: It’s where everything starts. With my Iranian origins and the impressions of the country, having grown up surrounded by that culture, it made it easy for me, for example, to travel in Asia. I was not taking a Western perspective, seeing things as exotic. I don’t like to categorize, or to be categorized. My work criticizes but also leaves things as they are. I try not to deconstruct too much or present too much reality. I’m a witness, a good witness.

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Andreas Schlaegel is an art critic and curator based in Berlin.

Vanessa Safavi was born in Lausanne in 1980. She lives and works in Berlin.

Selected solo shows: 2013: Chert, Berlin (upcoming); Castello di Rivoli, Turin.

2012: Kunsthalle Basel, Basel; CRAC Alsace, Altkirch, FR; Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris.

2011: Kunsthaus Glarus, Glarus CH. 2010: Chert, Berlin; Claudia Groeflin Galerie, Zürich.

Selected group shows: 2013: “If I was John Armleder,” a project for Art Genève 2013, Geneva; “Harum-Scarum,” Blancpain Art Contemporain, Geneva.

2012: “Partoftheprocess 5” Zero, Milan.

2011: “Be nice to me,” Nordenhake, Berlin.

Reviews 110 On Creating Reality by Andy Kaufman aniko berman

111 Meg Webster christopher hart chambers

112 Fiona Connor yael lipschutz

113 Michelangelo Pistoletto joshua white

114 Nico Vascellari myriam ben salah

115 Marisa Merz adrian notz

116 Idris Khan mark prince

117 Anri Sala & Edi Rama danijel matijevic

118 Oskar Dawicki anna czaban

119 Envy, Enmity, Embarrassment basak senova 120 Dmitri Prigov laura gascoigne

r ev iews

On Creating Reality

by Andy Kaufman Maccarone inc., New York

Andy Kaufman rose to fame in the ’70s, appearing first on the stages of New York comedy clubs and then on the mainstream platform of popular television programs such as Saturday Night Live. Generally identified as a comedian, Kaufman refused facile classification, creating acts that denied genre and questioned the nature of performance itself. By the time of his untimely death in 1984, Kaufman had achieved an iconic status and a cult-like following.

Yet, Andy Kaufman has remained relatively obscure and, according to artist Jonathan Berger, publicly unrecognized for his contributions to contemporary performance art. For this reason, Berger organized “On Creating Reality, by Andy Kaufman,” a sweeping, fluid portrait of the artist as presented by a selection of Kaufman’s personal effects, performance ephemera and the spoken testimonies of various close friends, family members and collaborators.

Housed in a group of minimalist, freestanding vitrines, the objects on view — records from Kaufman’s collection, pieces of his writing, news clippings, mails from fans, costumes — are residual traces of Kaufman’s life. The only guide to these artifacts is a binder with a single sheet dedicated to each numbered item (346 in total), which can be found at the roundtable where invited guests hold court daily. The exhibition’s unique presentation is wholly deliberate, and it comprises Berger’s artistic gesture: a set of conditions — the show’s “score” — that is personally activated by each viewer, serving a multilayered, transparently subjective project of narrative creation. Indeed, the vitrines’ height makes it difficult for the viewer to properly observe the objects, thus promoting an awareness of the act of looking and assessing. Overheard conversations of fellow viewers in close proximity produce an element of narration that may or may not coincide with one’s current inner monologue. Finally, there is the presence of the invited guests, whose evidentiary testimonies offer further and distinct versions of the truth. The content of the exhibition may be Andy Kaufman, but Berger’s greater endeavor is really an epistemological one: the exploration of the nature of knowledge and reception, biography and authenticity, to which the elusive subject of Kaufman offers an appropriate and revelatory inroad.

“On Creating Reality, by Andy Kaufman.” View of the exhibition at Maccarone, New York, 2012. Courtesy The Estate of Andy Kaufman, Maccarone, New York, Bob Zmuda, and Al Parinello.

by aniko berman

72 — march / april 2013

r ev iews

Meg Webster Paula Cooper, New YorK

Housed in one of the gallery’s smaller exhibition spaces, Meg Webster’s presentation comprised five spare and elegant pieces completed last year and one from 2008, which was clearly included in light of the current outcry against assault rifles in the wake of yet another mass shooting by a disturbed individual in the US. Titled Melted Weapon Box, it consists of a photograph of an M4 assault rifle that Ms. Webster purchased online with little difficulty. She melted it down into two nested, small square boxes made of the two types of metal used in the weapon’s construction.

The boxes are open at the top, suggesting a possible void waiting to be filled. Typical of her work, it is a formalistically simple object that subtly radiates ponderous inferences that the viewer relates to and interacts with on a physical level. One of the newer pieces, Polished Stainless Steel for Reflecting Outstretched Arms (2012), is a six-foot-high crucifix cut from plate steel and polished to a mirror surface that casts the viewer in the role of martyr/savior.

On the floor in the center of the room was Sand Bed (2012), a neat, six-inch-high mound of sand, flat on top with sloped sides and an overall footprint about the size of a child’s bed. One feels rather than thinks the artist’s intention: something elemental and restful. One reacts entirely differently to the threatening Wand (2012), a stainless-steel needle tapered to a sharp point. And, emanating an almost preternatural presence, Copper Disk for Facing Hands (2012) is merely a hand-sized discus displayed on a lower-than-average pedestal. It exudes a mysterious presence, a magnetic life force that draws one to it like a moth to a flame. The last piece is one of an ongoing series of natural materials affixed to paper, such as cocoa, various spices, or in this case, eggs.

We might categorize Webster’s work as conceptual minimalism with Fluxus undertones; but the non-linear narrative and compelling presence of these modestly scaled artworks is indefinable.

Meg Webster, Melted Weapon Box, 2008. Steel, aluminum, photograph. © Meg Webster. Courtesy Paula Cooper, New York.

by christopher hart chambers

73 — march / april 2013

r ev iews

Marisa Merz Monica de Cardenas, Zuoz

“I can only write about the show by Marisa Merz in Galleria Monica de Cardenas from a very personal point of view.” This was my first thought after seeing the show. I have to travel back in time to when I had my first ideas about art as teenager. In this fragile moment, in 1995, Marisa Merz played a strong role with her exhibition in Kunstmuseum Winterthur. She formed my understanding of art, and she subsequently opened a wormhole through my subconscious that links directly to these moments.

Some of the works from the 1995 Winterthur show are also on display now, in Zuoz. They immediately grasp your attention; when you enter the gallery they pull you into the space.

The first term your consciousness produces in an attempt to understand is: “icon.” Marisa Merz creates icons. The subtle impressions of faces in her paintings and drawings give an idea of the very first icon, in which Jesus marked a cloth with his face. The coins, metal sheets and copper wire in the paintings refer to the gold used in orthodox icon painting. “But this is just an art-historical attitude. Much more important is what happens in the act of seeing the painting. It is a spiritual experience, an illumination.” At the same time, you ask yourself: “How can I think something like that?” You begin questioning yourself about these expansive thoughts, until you realize that these questions raised by Marisa are in fact questions about yourself. She shows you that the sublime is not very far away, but actually right here, very simple and banal. In viewing her untitled faces from the past two years, which are all painted on small boards, you take a step further toward this simple experience of the sublime. Even if the faces look somehow lost and sad, you start to smile, as in a moment of bliss. Marisa’s work provides a powerful hint that such bliss comes from everyday things.

Istallation View at Monica de Cardenas, Zuoz. All courtesy Monica De Cardenas, Milan/Zuoz Photos: Andrea Rossetti Marisa Merz, Untitled (deep blue), 2010-12. mixed media on wood, cm 23 x 23.

by adrian notz

74 — march / april 2013

r ev iews

75 — march / april 2013