RES No.9

RES Art World/World Art is proudly celebrating its fifth year with its growing number of contributors and readers.

This ninth issue of RES offers a variety of inspiring interviews. The guest editor of RES 8 Hans Ulrich Obrist opens the issue with his conversation with world-renowned novelist Amin Maalouf. Sabine Boehl talks with Frank Stella about his show in Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg. Lara Pan follows them with her questions to Josephine Meckseper, while Gisela Capitain answers the questions of Paolo Colombo as the gallerist of the issue. Burcu Yüksel’s interview with David Shrigley and Fatoş Üstek’s comprehensive talk with Defne Ayas conclude this very absorbing series.

As for the articles, our very productive contributor Barbara J. Scheuermann continues her Big Picture series and presents a joint review of Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition at Tate Modern and Pipilotti Rist’s at Kunsthalle Mannheim. Laura McLean Ferris on the other hand gives an expansive tour of Gilbert and George’s London Pictures. While Heinz Peter Schwerfel takes a closer look at Hans Op De Beeck’s moving images, Grit Weber proposes another way to interpret Michael Riedel’s work.

Last but not least, Shirana Shahbazi livens up the issue with a selection of her works.

You can subscribe for a hard copy of RES or access the PDF version of the current issue as well as previous issues by visiting the website www.resartworld.com We hope you enjoy the read.

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EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

3 received the Kenyatta Prize, the most important literary award of Kenya. It’s just to tell you that this idea amused me. I had been publishing every now and then, but without the proper intention of publishing things resembling a narrative, a novel, a novella, or theatre plays by the way, but it did not appear important to me at the time. What was important to me, and still is –in a different way though– is the spectacle of the world. I have always –and that is related to the atmosphere I live in journalism too– I have always been passionate about the observation of what happens in the world, I have always been following in a very regular manner the news all over the world.

CONDUCTED IN FRENCH, TRANSCRIBED AND TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDRA RIEGEL (Interruption by a call). That was the minister calling me from Lebanon.

HUO First things first… Tell me about your family?

HUO To congratulate?

AM I come from a family of teachers and journalists. My father was a journalist and a teacher of comparative literature. He was a poet; some of his poems were printed in the schoolbooks we studied when I went to school. He also painted. He was really a talented person.

HUO Someone you could call a comprehensive artist?

AM Yes. Yesterday the President called me…

HUO Just to congratulate… That’s fabulous.

AM (Laughs)

Amin Maalouf

AM Yes, and a literate in the ancient meaning. He wrote in Arab, of course, except for a publication he made in English, an anthology of Lebanese writers writing in English. He never wrote any fiction. He wrote essays, and regularly for the newspapers, and he wrote also poetry. When I started working as a journalist in Beirut, I was pretty young. It became a regular occupation when I was aged 22.

HUO Your career is asymmetric to Tayeb Salih’s one: he started as a novel-writer in his youth and converted to journalism towards the end of his life.

AM The idea of writing novels was present in my mind, but not omnipresent. It was something I did not really believe in. I was in an intellectual environment. First and foremost there was politics, we were journalists above all. This is funny, the first time I met someone of my age whom I asked “What do you do in life”, and he replied, “I am a novelist”, it felt bizarre to me. That was in winter 1974, in Nairobi.

HUO Were you on journalistic mission in Nairobi?

AM Yes, to cover the events in Ethiopia and East Africa. I had just left Addis Ababa to reach Nairobi, there I met this man; we had a nice contact and took a couple of beers together. And then he told me “I am a novelist”. I remember it well, it’s funny, because it was the first time that someone I knew told me most simply what he was doing… His name is David Mwangi, but he writes under the name of Meja Mwangi. I am following his work a bit from the distance, sometimes I google him.

HUO This takes us back to Lebanon. I met this person who wrote The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb. He told me, at the time he grew up in Lebanon it was a practically like Switzerland, a very stable country.

And all of a sudden, like a black swan, there was this war. How was this experience to you? As a journalist, you talked about all this. You have been a political journalist, right?

AM As a journalist, but also out of personal interest, I have always been following the events in Lebanon very closely, and not only in Lebanon, but the entire region. My memory has stocked in detail events from over the last 50 years. But I have very seldom written about the events in Lebanon. When I was there and worked for the Lebanese press, I never wrote about Lebanon. When I arrived in France, as the Lebanese that I was, I have been asked once in a while to write about Lebanon, which I did – because I could not say no. But it was not something I felt like doing. I was never attracted to the idea of being a reporter in Lebanon. I was far more interested in covering the events in Ethiopia, in Vietnam, in Iran…

HUO The same applies to Anri Sala, he tells me he is able to do a film anywhere but where he lives. He lived in Paris and was never able to do a film about Paris.

AM And I felt happy when I went somewhere, I covered a situation, a country. But the idea of being a reporter in Lebanon, to play the journalist in my own country, did not match my personality.

HUO So how did your condition change? After having spent some time in Africa, you started writing novels. Do you remember the epiphany of getting the idea to write your first novel? That was Leo Africanus, right?

HUO It teased something inside of you.

AM Yes, that was the first novel.

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AM Yes. And I see he has been writing lots of books lately, translated into various languages like German or English, and I still remember this moment when we were sitting in this café in Nairobi, a “hip” café of that time called “Fruit of the Loom”, where he said to me “I am a novelist”. He had just

HUO I talked a lot about it, because last week I had dinner in Zurich with Mayassa, she is passionate about this book, she wants to put it into a movie.

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INTERVIEW HANS ULRICH OBRIST / AMIN MAALOUF

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5 (Interruption, their restaurant order is served).

HUO So, Leo Africanus… When you talk to scientists, they often can name a particular day… for instance, Albert Hofmann says ‘That was the day when I have discovered LSD’, or Benoit Mandelbrot –whom I knew well- told me “That day when I discovered the fractal…’ Did something similar happen with Leo Africanus? How was this complex book born?

AM There is a moment that remains in my mind which seems very important to me. It was such a furtive moment. I had arrived in France, and had started to work in the press, and I had written a first book on the crusades. The history of the crusades seen from the other side. When the book came out, my publisher was pretty satisfied and told me ‘It would be interesting to follow this path», and he suggested to write a book on Ibn Battuta – a big Moroccan traveller of the 14th century. I started reading things on this man, and in so doing I came across a little note. It said that this and this observation by Battuta had been confirmed by Leo the African. But that was not yet the big moment. The name of “Leo the African” amused me. I found that strange. I never looked it up… at that time you had no such things as search engines and all that, I just looked briefly in a dictionary, there were three lines on him. It raised my interest, originally because there was a similarity with the research on the crusades: The idea of counting the fall of Granada seen from the other side.

HUO What is your method? (…) The book The Crusades is very complex; one gets deeply involved while reading it.

AM A small preliminary observation: For Leo the African I did the same research as for The Crusades.

Yet I did not use them the same way. The subject of the crusades made that what I was going to tell was one of the crusades. When you relate an event stretching over two centuries, there is a real need to remain linear. Otherwise you get completely lost. I read the chronicles of that period, and also modern narrations of the crusades, because first of all you need a solid reference on which to build up. So the topic was dominated by classical history, and starting from there I turned history the other way round, basing myself upon oriental chroniclers in order to tell the story. This story is, simply, to tell, “They arrived” instead of “They left”. When I started doing research after The African, I originally did the things in the same spirit. The result though was totally different. That is, it was not about chronology any more. The chronology was more of a narrative tool; for years and years I had been working in the manner of chroniclers. But in reality, from the very first line I was completely in the novel. That was another moment of jubilation, there were figures coming up at a certain point and taking shape, and figures which I had not even thought of on the previous page. And they appear because they have to appear in the story, but then they become…

(Interruption, the restaurant waiter) HUO I just read a book by dos Passos, …

AM I do not know him.

HUO From another perspective.

AM That’s it, to reverse the perspective with respect to the one you’re accustomed to in the Western world.

So I started to read on that period, the fall of Granada, the Reconquista. And one day I started writing, and the determining moment arrived around the year 1984, I don’t remember precisely when. I had started to write the first paragraphs of an imaginary autobiography of Leo the African. And with the first lines, I felt some kind of an epiphany. I thought to myself, “That’s what I always wanted to do in my life.”

HUO The epiphany arrives during the writing process.

AM I launched myself head over heels into the imaginary. And it was such a joy, such a euphoric feeling, and I instantly said to myself, this is what I’ll do for the rest of my life. I was 35 years old, quite old actually. But it was really – a revelation. I could almost tell the lines where it happened.

HUO The interesting thing is that the method you followed when you prepared Leo the African was not so different from the one for The Crusades Through Arab Eyes. It’s a bit like a history painter: When Gericault made The Raft of the Medusa, he read a lot, he drew a lot, it was an enormous research work.

You too, you made a lot of research, and you write novels. This research seems to be the continuation of your journalistic work?

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AM Absolutely!

HUO You would love his books, he is an American writer of the 20th century, he died long ago. He wrote this extraordinary anthology named USA. It is entirely a book between documentary and fiction. It reminds me of Adam Curtis, who made films that are borderline between documentaries and fiction.

I wondered if there is a similarity in your case? You start from a documentary and then end up with fiction? Or where does this displacement come from in your case? As you said, the original tools were the same, but with Leo the African there was another form of…

AM Indeed, the basic material is used as raw material for the fiction, and I carefully watch out not to leave the path of historical truth. My aim is to reconstitute – not what the moment was, as we are in fiction, but – what could perfectly have been. In the case of Leo the African, the things that are historically solid and verifiable in certain documents only represent ten percent of what I tell about him, the rest is imagination. Everything that concerns his family, his life as a human being, is pretty uncertain to me. There is a line that says that he made a travel with his uncle, another one which says that he left Granada with his family at the moment of its fall….

HUO Fragments.

AM Yes. But I read records –even if they’re anonymous- on the fall of Granada, on the exodus, and I placed them into the context in fact.

HUO And when you wrote The Crusades after Leo the African, who were your heroes in literature? Were they references to Orientals or to the Middle East?

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AM Oh, we talked a lot about it. She is a very nice person, I’ve known her way before she took official functions, when she studied in the US… She talked to me about the book, we discussed it, and we said that one day we could…

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7 HUO In a way, both, but mainly literary, in the sense of this invention that is the figure in the novel Leo the African. But as Panofsky says, ‘we often invent on the basis of fragments of the past‘. Which could be the fragments of the past that have inspired you The Crusades – and above all the transition from The Crusades to Leo the African and the novels that followed?

AM In The Crusades, one of the figures is of course Saladin, and I was happy to discover the very human aspect of Saladin, cutting with the martial image. I think I wrote a chapter that is entitled ‘the tears of Saladin’, something like that. It is true that he was a fragile person, who could break into tears when he told a sad story … At a given moment I understood Saladin was not a name, but his title. The majority of people at that time had a title that was given to them at a later point in their life. His real name was Yusuf. I took pleasure in sometimes talking of him as Yusuf in the book, Yusuf who grew up in the shadow of a father and an uncle that were militaries. Well, he must have been pretty smart too, as he rapidly became emperor of a country he had just arrived in, he was all but naïve. On the other side I was sensitive to his human side, in counterpart to the crusades. Without wanting to make any easy psychology, it cannot be a coincidence that out of the blue I found interest in someone having left his country in war, in order to immigrate to a different world. He eventually found himself in Italy, writing in Italian.

HUO In a language that was not his. – So there were biographic parallels. One may say that Leo the African is an anticipation of Origines. Because there is a certain amount of autobiographic elements, or am I wrong?

AM I am somewhat cautious with regard to autobiography. But often I approached it in indirect manner through my figures. But when I felt the need – I was going to say the obligation – to write autobiographically, it was not out of an internal “urgency” in connection with myself, but out of a feeling of gratitude towards my family. I had the wish to talk about certain figures of my family; my grandfather, whom I have never known, but who was of a strong presence in my childhood, and who was often talked of. I was fortunate to discover practically all of his documents intact, 70 years after his death.

told me the same – this extraordinary moment before the outbreak of the war, of coexistence – which also existed in Granada at a given moment.

AM That’s true. In Lebanon, you know, relations between the communities are complicated; it is not a simple thing. There were small tensions, there were periods of heavy violence, there have been constantly… at least for 170 years, conflicts, reconciliations, new conflicts, other reconciliations…

Many lies, when my mother told me about the ones and the others… Still there is something extremely precious which I live profoundly, and that was natural when I was a child, which is not natural any longer in today’s world. I discovered it at some later point only: There is an intimacy in the relations between people from different communities which you can never find anywhere else. I, for one, come from a small Christian community. There is an intimacy with the Muslims from Lebanon! Which was deeply related to personal links, a whole bunch of things…

HUO Why did it disappear?

AM Because Lebanon has known dramas… They still exist, to a certain degree in Lebanon, but less than before the war. There have been all the dramas of war. The atmosphere in the world has changed, there is more harshness about identity… People feel their worlds differ from one another, that everything is complicated. In my youth, there was a quality of relations and intimacy between people from different communities, something you do not find any longer, and nowhere else. Some tell me – I myself haven’t experienced it – that in Sarajevo it was similar before the big… That’s possible, I haven’t known it. But where this other one, who is at some different place, the absolute ‘other one’ is not seen as ‘another one’ but as: ‘an other person in my life’. This is the ground of my wish, to be traced in my books, to say to peoples of the Western world – but it applies to both sides by the way - “Listen, when I hear you talking about Arabs and the Islam, that’s not it. There is a misunderstanding, a false perception.” It is not a question of justifying or not, but there is something wrong in the gesture of the discussions, something I don’t feel comfortable with. I would say exactly the same to the Arab world, to the Muslim world: When they talk about the West, it has nothing to do with the West. I, who has been living in the intimacy of the Western world, I can tell it’s not like that. I don’t recognize myself in this rhetoric, neither of one side nor of the other.

HUO It shines through in your books that you feel something missing.

HUO One could say your grandfather was kind of a hero.

AM Yes. And I would say this was transmitted from my father to me. My father, when his father died, was only 10 years old. He felt a fascination for this father he had not known so well, whom he rather knew through what he was told by others, which was what he later transmitted to me. To one and the other I owed to take over this stack of paperwork my grandfather had left – which my grandmother had left in place until her own death and never mentioned to me – and which I found 15 years after my grandmother’s death. That’s when I felt the need to talk in a more direct manner about my family members. Before, I talked about them… For instance, I had someone in my family who lived in a very shielded religious community. And in a book entitled The Gardens of Light, I talk of a religious community – it is also a manner for me to talk about this family member, he appears briefly in Origines, towards the end.

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HUO You said that when you live in Lebanon, the first religion is coexistence. The author of Black Swan

AM To my mind this perception is constant in everything I write, this feeling that the reality of relations is not matching people’s view of things, a view inflicted as a consequence of all sorts of events. (the telephone rings) HUO Another recurrent thing in your œuvre is the wish to create positive myths. You said this in various interviews, that across all different cultures, be it in the Middle East, in Africa, or the Mediterranean area, there should be the wish to create positive myths. Can you explain that idea to me?

AM Lévi-Strauss, whom I’m plunged in right now –as it’s him I am going to replace within the Académie Française; I have always liked and read his work, but currently I am definitely immerged in it– he said: “When we observe the societies called primitives, when we compare them to ours, the civilised, developed ones, we do not want to see the reality of what we call ‘myths’ in their case. In our case, we do not call

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AM In the literary sense or in the sense of life?

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9 HUO I will send you my book on Lorca.

AM With pleasure.

HUO The moment in Greece, the moment in Spain – are there any such examples within the Arab world?

AM It is not true! If you tell me that their history is made of conflicts and mutual disdainfulness, I am not going to tell you it’s false. What I’m trying to say is that we all have some sort of negative myths, producing heavy handicaps to these relations, and making it difficult to change them. We are to confront these negative myths, not by truths, which we don’t possess, but by positive myths that need to be constructed. One must construct positive myths. When I talk about the Spain of the three religions,

AM A very beautiful moment is Vienna in 1900. Which Stefan Zweig describes so marvellously within the first dozens of pages in “The World of Yesterday”. It is an extraordinary moment. There is also an American historian, Barbara Tuchman, who tells in The Proud Tower all this extraordinary period on the eve of 1914. Thereafter, you have the outburst of barbarism within civilisation, starting with the butchery of World War I and going on for a long time after that, and that demolishes something. Of course, there is scientific progress etc., but something has broken. Something has broken when we entered 1914. I have tender feelings for these last moments of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Vienna in 1900, full of so many talents in all fields…

HUO … the moment of Granada, the coexistence, …

HUO There was this big exhibition “Vienna 1900” that I saw, …

AM … yes, the whole period - Granada was at the end – the whole period going from the 8th century to… the great period was from the 8th century to the 10th or 11th century, then comes the decline. There was a moment of encounter between these different cultures. Of course, when you have a closer look at it, you can say, “in reality, there never was such a thing as equality between all those cultures, there were tensions, conflicts, humiliations, harassment - constantly…” Yes, of course, but we need to build on the interaction that existed between these cultures, on what this culture has brought forward, at all levels, from agronomics to poetry, in all fields, and build on this the positive myth of a possible coexistence.

AM It was in Paris too…

HUO The true version, or the solution.

HUO Yes, afterwards.

AM It had a beautiful subtitle: “The jolly apocalypse” with a painting by Klimt with a pregnant woman, very beautiful. Indeed I remember that.

HUO So, there is Greece, Spain from the 8th to the 11th century, …

Another example: As I told you, I was a profound admirer of Jacqueline de Romilly, she was someone I liked very much. She was one of the great specialists of Ancient Greece. One of the greatest moments in universal History is this Athenian moment where you have the invention of democracy, the invention of theatre, etc. Looking back at this period of History, one thinks, what a marvellous moment in history of mankind, what a miracle to have known this moment. But then you can also say, ‘but you know, at that time, women were totally excluded, there have been constantly wars between the Athenians, the Spartans, Thebes etc, one can say there was slavery – and all is true! One can always say “yes, but”, “yes, but”. I say, there are moments in history where one must say: Here you go, what this moment of History has finally brought, is this: the possibility of a miracle, which brought light to the rest of the world, and for a long time. I think it is important to build those positive myths, even if there are always things able to attenuate. As far as I am concerned, I am trying to construct around the destiny of the three religions…

AM Maybe others, but that is what comes directly to my mind.

HUO Do you have projects, non-realised novels?

AM Oh, plenty!! (Laughs) HUO Dreams?

AM Many! Some are in a latent state; some I have written in part and for all kinds of reasons I passed on to something else, they are lying in a drawer – I even have two or three novels, written, but for a reason or another, I let them rest, with the thought there is something I’d like to modify, and don’t know what.

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HUO … that was another miracle …

HUO Can you talk about them, or…?

AM …and that had the same clauses as that one… At the same time…

AM No, it is too early.

HUO I worked a lot about Granada and Federico Garcia Lorca, he was very inspired by that. The whole triangle Dali- Buñuel- Lorca was inspired by its magic.

HUO In the present art world the Middle East is much talked about. This is in some way linked to the question on The Crusades through Arab Eyes – the artists of the Middle East are very displeased about this wording, they say it is an Occidentalism; it is the Western world that calls this region “The Middle East”. It is the Middle East from here, but not the Middle East from their perspective. And in lack of other

AM I have Lorca’s bust in my office.

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them ‘myths’, because we have a different perception of what we are, but also because we have our own myths, our manner of telling History. There are myths, we need founding myths, for our nations, our societies.” In some way, it appealed to a kind of modesty. A cultural modesty. “Yes, these are also myths.”

I share this opinion, I do not want to declare that what is said about the relations between the Western and the Eastern world for instance is false, and that I am going to present you the true version; it is not true!

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11 AM What does the term of Middle East exactly cover?

in disorder, my grandfather, the protestant staff at the school he went to, the school he had founded – but everything was sort of mingled, and this is what the novel is made of. Eight years later, I went to Lebanon, and discovered the papers of my grandfather, which I believed had disappeared; that is when I wrote Origins, the book I wanted to write when I wrote The Rock of Tanius. Apart from the fact that in 1991/92, I had not found the documents and have thus imagined a story.

HUO Turkey, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Cairo, and the Emirates. Roughly.

HUO Origins was the non-realized project!

AM The advantage of this denomination is talking about a universe of mainly Muslim civilization without referring to the religion. The reference to religion, despite everything, is restrictive. The idea of calling it Middle East – it’s not that I like the term in itself - … At the age of 26, I was a young journalist, I went to New Delhi. I had a meeting with Indira Gandhi, I had asked for an interview with her. Of course I was very intimidated, I was only 26. I had prepared my questions, so she goes: “What are your questions?”, and I said : “Middle East”. That’s when she told me: “Why Middle East? We in India, we never say Middle East. We say West Asia. Middle East is an appellation that comes from the Occident.” And from wherever you look at this region: It remains West Asia!

AM Exactly, and I did not feel I could realize it. When I found the documents, I wrote Origins, which was the initial project for which I had written The Rock of Tanius. (Laughs) HUO Fabulous, like a time travel. – It is thanks to Catherine Temerson, your translator that we have been able to meet…

AM I had planned to go to New York three or four months ago, but some trouble with my back prevented me from going. She wrote to me that she was going to come – for she was there at the time – to participate in the meeting I was in.

HUO So this is the solution maybe…

AM Maybe. Because the idea to place the world between Near East, Middle East, Far East etc. and West Asia, that would be the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, Turkey, up to Iran. I found this remark intelligent!

HUO Currently at the Serpentine, I work on gardens. Maybe we could invite you for a reading on Garden of Life, or do you have something else linked to the subject “Garden”?

AM I like readings, but not so much lectures.

AM Maybe that is the solution! We will thank Indira Gandhi, incredible. – You told me before that Semprun was your friend, he went into politics, you were a political journalist, you are one of the great writers of our times; I wondered –because often great writers go into politics – could one imagine that one day you will be minister, or president?

AM No, sincerely it is something I would not be good at. Really. I believe that politics – I am very interested in politics, I know politics well enough to know it is something demanding a high degree of professionalism and dedication. You can’t just do it as an amateur, at the end of your career, just like that. No, you can’t. I entertain a platonic relationship with politics (laughs), I am highly interested in it, I am capable of following events in the world for days, weeks, months, without ever getting tired, not only without the intention of getting involved, but even without wanting to give my point of view! (Laughs).

Just observing the world gives me satisfaction, and I need that, I am nourished by that, but when I write, what I write is not directly linked and can only be inspired by the spectacle of the world.

HUO When we talked about coexistence, positive myths – the first of your books I have read was The Rock of Tanius, it was a story within a story, like a Russian matrushka doll. It is set in the 19th century. There is also the subject of coexistence, and many of your other subjects. Can you tell me how it is all linked?

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AM The Rock of Tanius is a book that should have been something else. (Both laugh). In reality, I felt the wish to write about my grandfather, about the school he had founded in 1912, about the village, yet I did not have the necessary elements to talk about it. So, after going round in circles – I remember this period well, I was rather anxious, because I felt this wish to write about my grandfather, but the available elements were exiguous. At the end, an incident happened in my family, and I took this incident and expressed on the basis of this incident – it was the homicide of a patriarch -… I narrated,

HUO It is a reading, yes.

AM This is something I like. I did a few ones in Germany and in England, but not at all in France, much to my regret.

HUO We would like to invite you with The Gardens of Life. Can you talk to me about the book? What made you write it?

AM At a certain point of my life I was very interested in Persian civilization. I had written a first book, Samarkand, which spoke of Omar Khayyam, and as usual I read a lot on the History of Persia. I came across an astonishing figure, Mani. I must confess that earlier, I did not even know the etymology of the word Manichaeism. I was not aware that it came from a person called Mani. Sincerely, I thought it was a Greek term that meant something. And I was fascinated by this figure, and I was fortunate to obtain, through the intermediary of a French university professor, a clergyman having intensely worked on the phenomenon of Manichaeism, and who had discovered a manuscript. Well, not discovered, but he worked on it. It is a manuscript he had found in the 30s, in Egypt, well preserved, and that was a narration of Mani’s youth, preserved in the sand, as is often the case in Egypt, still well preserved. I started working on the story of this figure, and as I said, at a certain point it crossed with a story linked to my family.

There was someone in my family who, at a certain time went to spend a year in a religious community in the United States. I would say there was an interaction between those two phenomena: On the one side, the discovery of a figure of which I felt like finding the real face, and something that touched me intimately, as it was– I would not say one of my traumata, but something very present during my childhood and my youth. That is how the title… And Mani, for whom light was a constant revelation, had

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solutions, in museums it is still called “Middle-Eastern art”. Just as in bookshops, by the way, your works are ranged in the section “Middle East”. We need a neologism or a new idea, because the artists do not feel comfortable with that – to this day, nobody has found it.

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the feeling that in every human being there is a portion of light, and the name he gave to God was ‘the king of the gardens of lights’.

HUO Wow… That’s where the title comes from. Did you make any research on Arab gardens? It is a whole story about Arab gardens…

AM And mainly Persian ones! You know the word ‘paradise’ comes from a Persian word meaning ‘garden’.

It is true that this idea of paradise, of lost garden, of the Garden of Eden, is rather primordial.

HUO It would be fabulous to have a reading in our garden.

AM It would be my pleasure.

HUO It will be on October 15… (…) Are there other authors from Iran we could invite along with you?

AM There are beautiful things, Saadi for example. (...)

HUO I was curious to know what would be, in 2011, your advice to a young writer?

AM The most important thing seems to me to be constantly confident that, despite thousands of years of history and stories, including history of culture or history of literature, we still stand at the beginning.

Everything remains to be invented.

HUO That’s beautifully said. There could be no better conclusion... So many thanks.

Amin Maalouf Novelist born in 1949 in Beirut, writes in French. Studied sociology at the Université Saint Joseph in Beirut. Started his career as a journalist and worked as the director of An-Nahar. In 1975 moved to Paris.

Received Prix Goncourt in 1993 for his novel The Rock of Tanius. Leo Africanus (1986), Samarkand (1988), The First Century after Beatrice (1992), The Gardens of Light (1991), Ports of Call (1991), Balthasar’s Odyssey (2000) are among his other fictional works.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-director of the Serpentine Gallery in London. Prior to this he was curator of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris from 2000 to 2006, as well as curator of Museum in progress, Vienna, from 1993 to 2000. Obrist has co-curated over 250 exhibitions since his first exhibition, the Kitchen show (World Soup) in 1991: including 1st Berlin Biennale, 1998; Laboratorium, 1999; 1st & 2nd Moscow Biennale, 2005 and 2007; and Indian Highway, 2008-2011.

Accompanying Obrist’s curatorial projects are his editorial accomplishments; these include the writings of Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois and Gilbert and George, and he is the editor of a series of conversation books published by Walther Koenig. Obrist has contributed to over 200 book projects, his recent publications include ‘A Brief History of Curating’, The Conversation Series (Vol. 1-20.), and ‘Ai Weiwei Speaks’.

Jonas Mekas 5 December – 20 January

Serpentine Gallery Kensington Gardens London W2 3XA United Kingdom T +44 (0)20 7402 6075 F +44 (0)20 7402 4103

Media Partner

Photograph: Liz Wendelbo

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CONVERSATION WITH JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER

LARA PAN LARA PAN Josephine, we both grew up during 70s and 80s in countries where politics and political activism was at the core of our everyday lives: you in Germany, and myself in the former Yugoslavia. We were exposed to utopian visions and revolutionary languages. What did you keep from childhood memories?

JOSEPHINE MECKSEPER A revolt against corporate capitalism and right wing politics was in motion in Western Germany in the ‘70s, and had an impact on my immediate environment. Especially the Baader-Meinhof Group, which declared war against “consumer society” and the wealthy functionaries of the time. The imagery and sentiment of the leftist revolts of the ‘70s, but also the Situationists had a large influence on how I started out as an artist. One of my first films is a documentation of a 24-hour happening with five fellow Cal Arts students on a rooftop in Los Angeles during the Rodney King riots. The idea was to occupy a space, and inhabit it through deliberate action and accumulation of spatial and filmic materials introduced by the group members. It was based on the concept of the Situationist International, who advocated experimentation with the construction of situations, namely setting up environments as alternatives to capitalist order.

LP People commonly say that we experience the“The end of ideology”, and maybe “the end of democracy” as well. Slavoj Žižek talks about ‘post-politics’ where there is no difference between left and right anymore. How do you vision this topic and how do you envision our global political landscape in the future?

JM The recent events of Occupy Wall Street and the mass protests in Northern African and Middle Eastern nations confirm that there is a threshold for tolerance in every society. People want freedom and independence. In Western society on the other side, the commodification of political content has been instrumentalized both in the media and art. They offer digestibility and packaging of human tragedy. The image of a “real event” has to compete with an advert. My works exaggerate this mode of disseminating information and consumerism in order to expose it.

LP How do you define your participation in American and global consumerist culture?

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JM I favor the flip side of commercial celebratory art, by choosing modes of production that give voice to protest culture. My aim is to present consumer display systems that have an auto-critique built within. This can take place, for instance, by inserting images of the opposition produced by capitalist society, namely protestors and rioters, or by using pieces of shattered glass. The installations of display forms like shelves and vitrines represent the static face of capitalism. The collective performative aspect of consumption is frozen inside the vitrine and the flip side of capitalism (like images of exploited factory workers) is literally glued to the back of displayed objects. The concealed power structures that are the core of alienated production are made visible here.

Berlin Demonstration Series 1 [Fire Cops, Smoke, Television Crew, Police Brigade, Flag] 2002 Five C-Prints each, five prints Edition of 3 Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

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17 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Manhattan Oil Project Presented by: Art Production Fund March 5 – May 6, 2012 Location: Times Square, The Last Lot, 46th Street and 8th Ave, NYC Photos: James Ewing Courtesy Art Production Fund

Installation view, Josephine Meckseper, 2009 Migros museum für gegenwartskunst, Zurich Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

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LP As an artist, do you understand you can engage the public in a better awareness of social problems?

JM My work to various degrees reflects the role of the artist in our current consumer society. How does one reconcile the symbolic and the monetary value of cultural production? How does one make visible real economic and political realities without just mimicking them? Is there really still a subculture or subversiveness in art? This is the narrative behind my installations. The manifestation and aesthetics of consumption are in a state of complete transition. The point that I’m making in my work is on one side a critique on the fetishization of the object; on the other, to expose a new history of the object that has become a free agent and is now arranging and rearranging reality for us.

LP If I use the language of contemporary art criticism, one is tempted to claim both that every art is critical, and every art is political. Your work is a reflection of our political landscape. What kind of critique and what kind of politics does it re-define?

JM I am looking at how politics is the organization of power and authority and how this gets channeled into forms of propaganda. I am interested in how life in its most normal and abnormal forms can be recycled and reclaimed. The political aspect of my work only shows itself in a sense of instability and uncertainty. There is no affirmative reassurance in the seemingly benign appropriated objects. The fundamental principal of my work is a conceptual process that reflects on the world that we live in. I see my work as a fragment and window into our time, an archeology of the present.

LP Your sculpture at Times Square is as you mentioned a public sculpture with a real application.

How did this particular project come about?

JM I was interested in exposing the endpoints of the United States capitalistic and militaristic crusades since 2001 and demonstrate the anachronistic nature of oil exploitation by taking the oil pump jacks out of context and confronting them with the epicenter of US American entertainment propaganda that Times Square represents. In this in area of diversion and commercialism, the sculptures become the hard-edged reality of a culture that is defined by its control of supplies of natural resources. The presence of the sculpture in Manhattan and Times Square shows that the crisis is now in our back yard, just blocks away from military recruiting stations. The oil pumps act as monuments to an entire culture fueled and defined by consumption. They are monumental in a sense that they mirror or simulate consumer madness, and yet un-monumental in how they are symptomatic of a cultural pathology that engenders wars fought over oil and irreparable environmental damage.

LP What is the next new project that you are working on?

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JM A large window installation at the Contemporary Art Gallery in Vancouver. It will be comprised of eight new self-contained window treatments in the museum’s street front vitrines. The windows will showcase an odd combination of black sandals, chrome car wheels, mannequin legs, a totem sculpture made out of found consumer items like coke cans and ash trays against a black background.

American Mall 2010 Mixed media 120 x 282 x 48 in (304.8 x 716.28 x 121.92 cm) Installation view: New York Armory Show, 2010 Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

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21 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Installation view, Whitney Biennial: 2010, 2010 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

Installation view, Whitney Biennial: 2010, 2010 Whitney Museum of American Art, New York Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

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The Complete History of Postcontemporary Art 2005 Mixed media in display window

23 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Installation view, Josephine Meckseper, 2010 FLAG Art Foundation, New York Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

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Natural History 2011 [Inkjet print on canvas; umbrella, metal fixtures; mixed media and acrylic on umbrella; acrylic on canvas on acrylic mirrored MDF slatwall with aluminum edging and plastic inserts] 96 x 96 x 12 1/2 in (243.84 x 243.84 x 31.75 cm) Courtesy Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York and Timothy Taylor Gallery, London

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LP You have been publishing FAT magazine in the past. Would you tell more about the concept that FAT was offering?

JM After graduating from Cal Arts in the 90s, I started the conceptual magazine FAT. It was inspired

by Jean-Paul Marat’s newspaper “Ami du Peuple,” (the most celebrated radical paper of the French Revolution) and the avantgardist tradition of breaking down barriers between art and life. There was a rebellious undertone in FAT magazine’s tabloid style that was completely antithetical to the academic and even commercial side of the New York art world. Photographic reproductions and art images are subverted into a montage with representations of advertising and propaganda next to fictitious news items. Sylvère Lotringer contributed an essay on The Art of Evil, about pre- and post W WII art and literature in relationship to the Holocaust. Subsequent issues included contributions

by Dan Graham, Sam Durant, Mathew Barney for example.

LP Josephine, I would like to thank you for this interview and one last question Is there any book or movie that has informed you work lately in an important way?

JM Werner Herzog’s film “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”. It’s about the recently discovered Chauvet cave in Southern France which houses 30000 year old charcoal drawings and human artifacts.

Josephine Meckseper The work of the New York-based German conceptualist, Josephine Meckseper, deals with themes of consumerism and commodity fetishism in modern society. Meckseper studied at Berlin University of the Arts in Berlin from 1986–1990, and completed her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in 1992. Meckseper, also publisher of the FAT Magazine, addresses questions about the politics of power and the propagation of political ideas as commodity.

Lara Pan is a free-lance curator, art critic, and contributing writer for Art Pulse Magazine based in New York. Born in Belgrade (Serbia), Lara holds a B.A. in Art History from the École d’Art et Communication (EAC) in Paris.

9/20 2012–2/3 2013

Ernst Wilhelm Nay

The Polyphonic Picture Gouaches, Water Colours, Drawings Museumsmeile Friedrich-Ebert-Allee 2 53113 Bonn Info: 0228 77-6260 www.kunstmuseum-bonn.de

Abb.: Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Mit gelbem Bogen, 1966; VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

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HEINZ PETER SCHWERFEL TEXT IN GERMAN, TRANSLATED BY JEREMY GAINES T H E A E S T H E T I C S O F T H E O B J E C T knows no innocence. Every form is also a function, a shape that we give things, and there is always an ulterior motive behind this – it is intended to please, seduce, unsettle, provoke, embellish the everyday or disappear within it, invisible. Artworks provide the best example of this concept, though it can also be seen in the applied arts, design, fashion, architecture, urbanism and even so-called functional aesthetics. No form created by man is innocent, not even the construction of a shopping mall, a highway rest stop or a hospital, all of which are allegedly strictly functional.

In 2007 Hans Op de Beeck created the short film “The Building”, a nighttime walk through an empty hospital. The camera crosses a large foyer, glides into an elevator, whose doors close, flies through long corridors, inspects the canteen, kitchen, patient rooms. Everywhere the typical architecture of public buildings in the age of faceless postmodernism, always the same blend of megalomania and functionality. Everything looks real, yet nothing is. The appearance of the rooms, furniture and lighting harmonizes down to the last detail – all too beautiful to be true.

27 details and emphasizing others, which makes the model’s atmosphere even more uncanny. A confusing yet fascinating mood results – the empty supermarket becomes an allegory of end-time civilization. The lonely observer simply looks at that sad part of his reality he doesn’t actually want to see.

“Loneliness”, says Op de Beeck, “can also be comforting.” Through the form’s ambivalence to the artistic theme he first analyzes it, then aesthetically enhances it, but never plaintively bemoans it. Not even in the two installations entitled “Extension”, one of Op de Beeck’s rare forays into the explicit. “Extension (1)” of 2006 is a life-sized, round examination room from the hospital, an intensive care unit, with a forest of stands for intravenous drip pouches, tubes and machines.

Everything is made of wood and steel, i.e., is fake. Life is the only real thing, but that is missing.

Two video projections with color effects constantly change the atmosphere in the room and the odd voice and innocuous ambient music can be heard.

“Extension (2)” also addresses the spatial extension of the human body, existential interior design with a specific function. This time it is a deserted matte black office with a desk and chair, all made of paper and cardboard and illuminated by cold neon light. Again we see too much technology: several meters of cable, computers and hard disks. A – naturally fake – fax machine is blinking, a printer next to it.

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The secret of the work is that the hospital shown doesn’t exist. The camera is not documenting a real place, but exploring computer-generated animation, conceived, shaped, built by the artist. A new building, a perfect form, but with an ulterior motive. What is the virtual hospital’s relationship to reality; is it imitation, copy, simulation? Is it a model or design? A continuation of reality with artistic means or a pure product of the imagination?

Both rooms are deserted, devoid of people, but they seem to be waiting for us and will soon be occupied again. By us. This is not the first time the minuteness of human existence was a key theme in art history, we need think only of 19th-century English and particularly German Romanticism. The most famous depictions of human loneliness are by Caspar David Friedrich: a wanderer in the mountain gorge, a cross on the summit, chalk cliffs, ice floes. Friedrich was interested in the powerlessness of the tiny individual compared to almighty nature, spiritualized by its unlimited power. The trained painter Op de Beeck also focuses on melancholy and the passing of time, mortality and isolation, yet he shows the alienation of the lonely individual in modern times. And here there is not much left of nature’s unlimited power.

Another medium, another artistic functional building: “T-Mart” from 2004, the over 50-squaremeter model of a faceless shopping complex in the twilight. A playground of consumerism as found in its thousands in the suburbs of cities around the world. Endless aisles, full shelves, checkouts, elevators, giant parking lots at the main entrance. Yet Op de Beeck’s hypermarket has no roof; anyone can look from above into the consumerist temple, all in gray. The observer’s eye makes the model a sculpture. It is at once a beautiful and frightening sight, monument and monster, elegant, solemn and devoid of people. Numerous small lights and streetlamps emit alternating light, the day progresses. In the evening light an animated film is projected into the roofless hypermarket, sounds can be heard, elevator doors open and close mechanically.

In his early film “Places” of 2001 we see a single shot of a landscape with a lake. First the seasons change, then the lake dries up; the landscape dies. Only to then bloom once more, but this time as a park, as tamed nature. His theme is the relationship between nature and civilization: How is landscape transformed? It is an animated film consisting of many different drawings all showing the same image. Yet the changes in the pictures are not made by erasing, as in South African artist William Kentridge’s work, but by means of digital cross-fading. It is similar in another film, “Loss” (2004). Here the viewer looks through a window out over a city with a park at night. Backed by melancholy music, the city transforms into a landscape of ruins, as though after a nuclear disaster.

As he does not trust the aesthetics of the everyday and suspects capitalist ulterior motives even in the functional architecture typical of our day and age, Hans Op de Beeck and his assistants built the “T-Mart” model themselves over several weeks. They made every shelf, painted the parking bays, laid every cable, programmed all the alternating lighting moods. Every last detail is realistic and yet stylized, for, according to the artist, “everything has to be entirely personal, so that it can look impersonal.” His own personal signature is in the stylizing. It means omitting certain

Op de Beeck transports Romanticist painting and its themes into contemporary art. He does this with the help of complex technologies, yet he always and unexpectedly couples high and low tech, resorting to familiar methods and thus reinforcing the effect of his most important artistic trick, namely, overwhelming. His most important artistic tool here is the element of surprise, especially in the installations that from a distance look like building sites, until we enter them and are surprised by something we are familiar with – a picture.

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HANS OP DE BEECK AND HIS MODEL REALITY REALISM OR SIMULATION?

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29 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Hans Op de Beeck ‘Location (6)’ 2008 Sculptural installation, mixed media, mist and artificial light 18 metres diameter x 4 metres high (cylinder) Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin Co-producer: Holland Festival, Amsterdam

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31 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Hans Op de Beeck ‘Location (6)’ 2008 Sculptural installation, mixed media, mist and artificial light 18 metres diameter x 4 metres high (cylinder) Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin Co-producer: Holland Festival, Amsterdam

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Hans Op de Beeck ‘Sea of Tranquillity’ 2010 Full HD video, 29 minutes, 50 seconds, colour, sound Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; Galerie Ron Mandos, Rotterdam – Amsterdam Coproduced by the National Centre for Visual Arts - Ministry of Culture and Communication (F), the Flanders Audiovisual Fund (B), Emmanuelle and Michael Guttman and Le Fresnoy - Studio National des Arts Contemporains

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33 Born in 1969 in the Belgian city of Turnhout, Op de Beeck studied art in Brussels, going on to complete a post-graduate degree. Then he spent two years working on a project at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, where he created his first large installation, a street intersection with traffic lights that also inspired his first film in 1998. He works in all media; alongside drawing and video also photography, sculpture and installation. Moreover, he has just written his first film score, likewise for “Sea of Tranquility”, a melancholy Jazz song or, to be more precise, the synthesis of all melancholy Jazz songs. Incidentally, he has also published a book of short stories.

He lives and works in Brussels, where he bought and renovated a former workshop three years ago.

On the ground floor is a storeroom and space for models, on the first floor an office with a kitchen, then a glass wall separating this area from his studio. The living area is on the second floor.

Everything seems sober, tasteful and reserved. There is no luxury here; every penny earned goes into his work. For one of his life-size models Op de Beeck and four assistants worked day and night for two months; a blend of bricolage and high tech.

“Location (6)” is one such model, four meters high and with a diameter of 18 meters. From the outside the wooden structure is circular in shape, similar to traditional 19th-century panorama pavilions, with a long annexed corridor. The observer walks through this corridor and reaches a circular room with panoramic windows. He sits down and looks outside, into an expansive, slightly foggy, snow-covered landscape, barren but for a few bare trees and frozen waterholes.

The effect is incredible. Op de Beeck’s art may be considered challenging, because you need time to get to grips with it. But here he has built a life-size model of an ideal world; without wanting to we become part of this work simply because we have walked along a corridor, and we are overwhelmed by the power of the panoramic picture he lays before us. He presents to us a false horizon, feigns a central perspective of infinity, transports the trompe-l’œil principle to the third dimension.

Trompe-l’œil spaces as funfair attractions were around as early as the Renaissance; today they have long since been replaced by high-tech amusement parks from Disneyland to Universal Studios. Op de Beeck’s unobtrusive, handcrafted approach is far more subtle: the white of the snowy landscape is a metaphor for emptiness, yet also calls to mind the longing of the late Romanticists for the far North, as emerged in the late 19th century. As well as kitsch photographs in cheap calendars. This is another difference to Romanticist art: Hans Op de Beeck has a sense of humor.

And he takes risks.

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“Artificial snow and winter landscape, that is of course dangerous. I want ambivalence; something that is beautiful and terrible at the same time. I play with a mixture of feelings, and sentimentality

Hans Op de Beeck ‘Location (7)’ 2011 Sculptural installation, mixed media, sound, light 18 x 8,5 m, 5 m in height Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin; Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; Galerie Ron Mandos, Rotterdam – Amsterdam

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Hans Op de Beeck ‘T-Mart’ 2004-2005 sculptural installation, mixed media, sound, video projection 8 x 9 x 1.4 meters Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Le Moulin; Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna; Xavier Hufkens, Brussels; Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York; Galerie Ron Mandos, Rotterdam – Amsterdam

His films are different; they work like loops and absorb us with their powerful, melancholy images. Op de Beeck says the following of himself: “I am not a filmmaker; my roots are in drawing and painting.” Nonetheless his films are full of cinematographic effects, false perspectives, computer animations, complex soundtracks and – in his latest film “Sea of Tranquility” – even professional actors. The dimension of time plays a key role, the slow rhythm of cutting and fading in, the playing with narrative fragments. Only psychology is missing, and drama; man is and remains alone and helpless – helpless in the face of the progression of his existence. The tragedy of mortality, that is Op de Beeck’s real theme, but it is too big – and the artist too modest – to call it by its name.

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is of course the kitsch form of emotion. The bad thing is, though, that it works! You just need to watch Disney movies to see that.” It is a long way on a thin ridge from Walt Disney’s animated films to Hans Op de Beeck’s installations, but the artist loves such balancing acts and deliberately uses the potential of kitsch. He brings Hollywood to the art museum by using artificial snow, the central perspective and lighting effects. The result is a melancholy that is never nostalgia for something that has passed, but always has to do with the present. Our present.

Measuring 11 x 21 meters, “Location (5)” is another giant installation, which Op de Beeck built over three months in 2004 with two assistants and 15 students from the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.

It is a model of a freeway rest stop, the likes of which we all know from our travels. The observer sits down at a table at the window and looks down onto a freeway that leads into the distance and appears to disappear beyond the horizon – the worst cliché you can imagine. “But I love clichés and use them time and again, because as pictures clichés work like archetypes.” An accessible archetype, in which we sit down and look out into the artificial world. The only thing missing is the sunset. We become part of a picture by Edward Hopper. Or actors in an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Speaking of cinema, in his most recent work “Film Socialisme” director Jean-Luc Godard uses a cruise ship as a symbol of postmodern end-time capitalism. The film was shot on the “Costa Concordia” no less, which now lies like a stranded whale off a small Italian island in the Mediterranean. The idyll of spectacular tourist offerings and tamed nature has come to a violent end. At the same time as Godard shot his film, Op de Beeck conceived his cruise ship “Sea of Tranquility”, a computer-generated ocean liner, a hybrid of the “Queen Mary 2” (Op de Beeck developed the project during a studio residency in the Breton harbor of Saint-Nazaire, in whose docks the “Queen Mary 2” was built) and a bellicose monster of the deep, deconstructivist in style à la architect Zaha Hadid. Like Godard’s “Costa Concordia”, the gray “Sea of Tranquility” is also an allegedly safe universe sealed off from the rest of the outside world, a microcosm quietly crossing the ocean, where the current present is condensing into bar, restaurant, spa and club. A temple of consumerism and leisure activities in Godard’s work, a melancholy island in Op de Beeck’s, whose film begins with an elderly man taking a long shower: the captain in his element, water.

What follows is not a continual story, but loosely linked scenes on the ship; on the bridge, in the kitchen, in the Jazz club or cigar bar. The decor is in part real, in part designed on computer, and the actors don’t act, but present clichés. Op de Beeck is not interested in stories, only situations, and once again these situations and their images are stylized down to the last detail. In the restaurant, for example, a strange blue mass is served, avant-garde molecular cuisine from a real Michelin-starred chef. A gourmet feast, no simulation, and thus characteristic of the entire universe of this artist, who is still unknown to a wide public yet is highly regarded among his fellow artists. “My works,” says Hans Op de Beeck definitively, “always play with the reproduction of reality. They are my interpretations of reality – but are never simulation.”

Heinz Peter Schwerfel is born in 1954 Cologne, Germany. He is the founder of Artcore Film in 1985. He is a journalist and filmmaker, founder and director of the artists’ film festival KunstFilmBiennale (until 2010). The retrospectives of his films have been shown, among others, in Paris (Centre Pompidou), New York (MoMA), Mexico City (Cinemateca), Helsinki (Ateneum) and Buenos Aires (Malba). He lives in Paris and Cologne.

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TALK TO EXIST THE RUNNING WHEEL OF COMMUNICATION GRIT WEBER GERMAN ORIGINAL TRANSLATED BY MICHA GOEBIG Talk to exist. The running wheel of communication.

Michael Riedel’s works always focus on the same theme: How much text information an image can take and vice versa.

Michael Riedel Tirala, 2006 installation view, Art Statement, Art Basel, 2006 wall paper, table replica, 2 chairs, computer, Tirala Magazine Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © Michael Riedel

Somehow it is tragic and also mythical that the greatest of all media theory experts who spent most of his lifetime thinking about the essence of images as compared to texts and who ought to be writing this article instead of me, had a dramatic car accident and died. That person was Vilém Flusser. He died over twenty years ago, traveling home from a lecture he gave in Prague.

Michael Riedel is not a fan of theoretical frameworks. He is quick to dismiss questions referencing Flusser’s ideas and prefers to keep matters simple and easy to understand (whether everybody understands him in the end remains to be seen). Whether the pop Portrait of the artist artist Michael Riedel appreciates Flusser’s ‘phased model’ that defines Photo by Jason Schmidt, 2011 the image as a two-dimensional, descriptive and imaginary material © Michael Riedel/ Jason Schmidt and text as a one-dimensional entity that allows for understanding in terms of terminology, it is compelling to imagine Flusser confronting the screen prints, posters and publications, lectures, installations and performances of Michael Riedel. After all, since Flusser’s death in 1991, digitalization, image editing and the Internet has seen incredible advancements; developments that have allowed artists like Riedel to arrive at entirely new images.

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Arts on text – From writing to art and back In 1999, for instance, the first edition of Adobe’s publishing software InDesign was introduced to the market. One of the newer versions of this program is used to design this very issue of RES. Michael Riedel works with InDesign too. For his ‘Poster Paintings’, he lets the source text – downloaded in advance from the Internet – flow into the program’s text box. The chosen text is based on one of his exhibitions is published online. This is the basic information, his artistic material so to speak – the communication through art – about his own art. The source text used this way is complemented by a color surface in the form of a circular segment that covers parts of the text and thus ignores it to a certain extent, which makes the reader encounter again and again the limitations between text and surface. Riedel prints out this format several times, using the color sections to serve him as a matrix, as an orientation applied to composing a poster from the individual sheets. He has previously papered entire exhibition walls with those posters – in his last show at David Zwirner in New York, for instance, and at Bischoff Projects in Frankfurt. He also screen-prints them onto large-scale canvases. It seems as if Riedel would counter the world’s ultimate transcription, its coding into logical symbols with a

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Michael Riedel Poster Paintings, 2011 installation view “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”, David Zwirner, New York, 2011 Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © Michael Riedel

39 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Michael Riedel Filmed Film Trailer, 2008 Video projection on cardboard; 8:05 (loop), color, sound, 154.9 x 152.4 x 149.9 cm Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © Michael Riedel

Filmed Film Trailer (detail), 2008

dispute, so that ultimately painting would prevail as the supreme discipline among all the arts. As Riedel is an artist and not an IT expert, he comments optimistically: “The act of applying color on the canvas rules over text, over criticism.” At that, however, his bearing as an artist-hero is hard to believe.

After all, Riedel does not investigate the essence of painting. “Poster Painting” could just as easily be called “Poster Printing” because Riedel uses screen-printing, which produces an original, but it is and remains a printing method. No, the quest of this Frankfurt-based artist is not so much about painting as about the essence of information. And information is what both texts and images are based on. As Riedel places color on top of text, in his current works he continues exactly along that line at which the spectator can watch how images turn into texts. In his series of works, he puts a form to information, which transforms it into an aesthetic event. An overview of earlier results of this intense consideration is currently being prepared by Kunsthalle Schirn in Frankfurt/Main. The show is titled “Kunste zur Text” (Arts on Text), a title not translatable into any other language. It is a satirical wordplay on the German art theory publication “Texte zur Kunst” (Texts on Art). The title itself already reveals one of Riedel’s work strategies: to deform something existing in a way that leaves the original material just barely recognizable so as to create a punch line from the discrepancy of old and new material. In any case, Kunsthalle Schirn presents Riedel’s “Poster Paintings” as well as “Power Point Paintings” (both 2012), two series that are based on digitalized image and text information. Also on display are the “Printed and Unprinted Posters” (2008), which – like the “Tirala Art Statements” (2006) – are displayed as expansive wallpapers. In a sense, byproducts of actual art production become the center of attention: Internet or book publications that no art environment can do without any longer as their content, helps make art classifiable and recognizable as art.

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“The point is that the show only exists when it is reviewed,” says Michael Riedel. The response of the art world is what turns art into something that is meant by the term. Art in post-modern times, pop art, poppop art – or however else our era wants to be titled –arises first and foremost from language. And this is where Riedel indirectly agrees with Vilém Flusser, who – though much more culturally pessimistic – regards written language as a kind of filter between man and the perceivable, multi-dimensional world.

While Riedel is no critical artist, he is an analytical one who, in the fashion of an impish positivist,

Michael Riedel Vier Vorschläge zur Veränderung von Modern (31), 2008 Pigment print on canvas 275 x 250 cm Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © Michael Riedel

Michael Riedel Vier Vorschläge zur Veränderung von Modern, 2008 Installation view “Stutter”, Tate Modern, London, 2009 (left: No. 14, right: No. 3) Pigment print on canvas 275 x 250 cm Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © Michael Riedel

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Michael Riedel Untitled (Slide Show), 2010 Poster Painting Silkscreen on linen 230 x 170 cm Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © Michael Riedel

Michael Riedel Untitled (Vertical), 2011 Power Point Painting Silkscreen on linen 230 x 170 cm Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © Michael Riedel

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43 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Michael Riedel Oskar-von-Miller-Straße 16, 2000-06 Oskar-von-Miller-Straße 16, Frankfurt am Main Photography Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © Michael Riedel

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Michael Riedel Untitled (Poster “Kunste zur Text”), 2012 84 x 118 cm Offset print Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © Michael Riedel

Michael Riedel Oskar-von-Miller-Straße 16 (replica), 2003 Installation view “Kontext, Form, Troja”, Vienna Secession, 2003 Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © Michael Riedel

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works with the conditions of modern, technology-driven everyday life, structures, forms, and deforms it until, in the end, it has the aesthetics that satisfy him.

Oskar-von-Miller StraSSe as a production lab Information and communication are the materials that Michael Riedel has put to productive use for years. “Oskar-von-Miller Straße 16”, which he co-founded with fellow artist Dennis Loesch at the same address in 2000 is probably the most popular and most vibrant project that exemplifies his art practice. In walking distance from the original Portikus Frankfurt, the legendary exhibition space of Frankfurt’s art academy Städelschule, Riedel offered not only a production space for exhibitions, performances, concerts and “Freitagsküche” (Friday Kitchen), but also duplicated – together with his friends and fellow artists – entire art events that were originally staged either at Portikus or at other places around town. A good example of this is when they recovered the disposed remains of silver Michael Riedel foil used for a Jim Isermann exhibition and recreated the show just a few Michael S. Riedel, 1997 hundred meters down the road at the house on Oskar-von-Miller Straße.

Stamping ink on paper (paper bag) 70.4 x 43.4 cm Instead of the original floor covering, which Loesch and Riedel did not Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York manage to get a hold of, they installed a replacement consisting of white © Michael Riedel balloons. The “Gert und Georg” campaign also deals with the connection and distance between original and reproduction. When Gilbert and George presented themselves and their colorful wall panels at Portikus, the British artist duo was followed at a distance of only five meters by Gert and Georg, a pair of actors hired by Riedel and Loesch. When the building of the production lab was due for demolition, Riedel and Loesch staged a final “Anecdotes Conference” at which, for two whole days, seven people told each other stories of the place that they remembered from the past years. When the building was torn down, it was copied in fabric in full size and displayed at the Frankfurt Fine Art Fair that still existed at that point.

From information to communication to the aesthetic event Looking more closely at Riedel’s concept, what is most striking is the mix of appropriation, sampling, coding and decoding, and most of all, the delimitation of the genre and the incursion of everyday life in art. Compared to the performances, “Poster Paintings” and “Power Point Paintings” seem like handouts for the market. And the fact that his publications, such as “Perlstein”, are even named after Riedel’s collectors, turns this acceptance of the art market and its doings into a strategy for his creative process.

This is where Riedel’s critics find themselves in a tight spot: why should the artist remain outside of the production mechanisms, which could be so useful to him? Smart pragmatism has just proven to tower over the sublime...

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On the occasion of his first solo exhibition in 2005 at David Zwirner, where Neo Rauch’s paintings were previously shown, Michael Riedel did not only utilize the panels constructed for the preceding show, which he decorated with black-and-white prints of installation views of Rauch’s exhibition and called “Neo”. Riedel even used the text from Rauch’s catalog, though, in his personal manner of structure and order: all letters and punctuation marks are grouped – each is listed with its own kind, all data is complete. However, in this order without any information (if any information of a sort remains), it is a completely new kind. Riedel’s approach shows text as material, as a module, as a system.

Michael Riedel Untitled (Michael S. Riedel), 1997 Photography Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © Michael Riedel

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Michael Riedel Printed and Unprinted Posters, 2003-08 Offset print on paper 546 x 376 cm Courtesy Michael Riedel and David Zwirner, New York © Michael Riedel

With his actions, Riedel neither positions himself at the center nor does he regard himself as an intermediary, but takes another step closer toward the world. The observer has to follow him along this way: “I have moved beyond being an artist who does art, but now I am also the artist who watches himself doing art and understands this doing as art, which also changes the position of the observer who now has to watch the artist watch himself while creating...” [sic]. This quote can be found in one of Riedel’s self-published volumes, in which he included a lecture on his works from 1997 to 2010 without periods, commas or any other punctuation marks. Riedel ignores the rules of reading texts and concentrates entirely on the word as it was spoken at the moment of the lecture (includes noun slips and errors, repetitions and instructions to move on to the next image). The text puts the emphasis on the information and not on how information is conveyed or, to be more precise, text is perceived as an aesthetic event because its rules are not followed.

The big chat, and after all we are providing our share to that here too, is part of the works, as is the prayer of belief. Ultimately, it is neither me nor Vilém Flusser who has the last word. No, as soon as this text has been published Riedel will be able to find it on the internet, he can move it onto the level of mere information via source codes, which are behind both images and texts in times of digitalization, and can turn it into an image. So consequently, he – the artist – has the last word. Or is it the image after all?

Grit Weber, born in Dresden in 1970, studied art history, art education and cultural anthropology in Frankfurt/ Main from 1995 to 2001. Besides being involved in numerous art projects, she frequently writes exhibition reviews for a variety of newspapers and art magazines, including “Kunstbulletin” and “Journal Frankfurt”. Since 2006, she has been editor-in-chief of “artkaleidoscope.

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EXHIBITING EXHIBITING

BARBARA J. SCHEUERMANN C URR E N T L Y, S O M E T H I NG T RUL Y E X C E P T I O N A L is taking place in Düsseldorf: on view is already the third part of an exhibition series that is exclusively dedicated to large-scale installations including video, and even better, time-based art. To my surprise and delight, this exhibition series, “Big Picture”, is not being shown in a museum focusing on video or new media, but in the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, a well-established museum for modern and contemporary art with a strong emphasis on its own collection of modernist masterpieces. Usually video and time-based artworks are not the main interest of institutions such as this one. However, in Düsseldorf there is curator Doris Krystof at work, who has been pursuing for years now, the challenges of reflecting and presenting (that is curating) video art.

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Krystof is responsible for quite a few exhibitions centered around video art. The “Big Picture” series, however, seems to hold a special position, as it brings together not only highquality artworks in a carefully thought-out architectural layout, designed by Stadler Prenn Architekten Berlin, but also highlights some of Krystof’s most important curatorial concerns. Already, the first part of “Big Picture” concentrates on ‘cinematographic installations’– that is, on a certain technique and presentation rather than a particular subject. (s. RES issue 7) However, all three parts have titles: Places/ Projections, Time Zones, and Scenes/Figures. What was true for the first ‘Big Picture’ is true for the whole series Dieter Kiessling – its special interest in the medium and the technique is Mädchen, 2002 evident in aspects which are worth mentioning even briefly.

Videoinstallation, 6’30’’, ohne Ton, loop Leihgabe Dieter Kiessling, Düsseldorf Co-curator Maria Anna Bierwirth is a video conservator, Courtesy Galerie Rolf Hengesbach therefore, each work is described in detail, indicating its © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011 format, duration, sound, number of channels, projection size, installation dimensions, etc. – particulars that you miss in surprisingly many video art shows.

For the first part, you could find all of these details in the catalogue along with floor plans and architectural models of the exhibition layout. This not only emphasizes the spatial aspect of the exhibition, but also shares the complexity of installing works, which is a process that requires a new conceptualization and construction each time, depending on installation instructions and the respective exhibition space. This way, time-based artworks become apparent as complex and special artefacts, which can be challenging to install. There are no new publications for part II and III, and yet there exist comprehensive short guides that lead the visitor through the dim exhibition space.

Architecturally, not much change has been done to the space between part I and part III, which, in April 2012, replaced the shorter part II and is now on view until the end of January 2013.

Danica Dakic´ New York Diary, 2001/2002 Videostill Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf © Danica Dakic´ / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2011

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Ana Torfs Anatomy, 2006 Dia- und Videoinstallation Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf.

Erworben durch die Gesellschaft der Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, 2010, © Künstlerin

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Experiences of time, and recollections of the past were the focal themes in part two, which, as all parts do, featured installation works from the museum’s collection. Alongside moving ‘time images’ in film and video projects, the exhibition included a variety of installation-based works that explore how time is visualized and experienced. An exploration of various experiences of time are juxtaposed with narrative arrangements of historical time. The artist list included Danica Dakic´, Hanne Darboven, Lucinda Devlin, Jochem Hendricks, Martin Honert, Nan Hoover, On Kawara, Dieter Kiessling, Korpys/Löffler, Angela Melitopoulos, Jason Rhoades, Hito Steyerl, Ana Torfs and Samuel Beckett. In all three parts, selected loan works complemented the thematic guideline of the collection. Ana Torfs’ work, “Anatomy” (2006), for instance, was purchased for the museum in 2010, after the Belgian artist had her solo show. “Anatomy” is based on documents from the “crown case regarding the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg” in 1920. The founders of the German Communist Party had been murdered by members of the Armed Forces of the Weimar Republic in 1919. The court hearings, however, proved to be a mock trial, resulting in nothing more than acquittals and minor punishments. Ana Torfs thoroughly analyzed the 1,200 pages of case files.

She then selected 25 statements given regarding the circumstances of the deaths, and had young actors dressed in contemporary daily clothing read them out loud. The videos are juxtaposed with slides from the Anatomical Theater of the Berlin Charité clinic. Torfs often uses black and white slides in her works – exemplary of the necessity to use the term “time-based” artwork rather than “video art”– evoking a unique atmosphere that radiates calm and timelessness, with a sense of non-allocatable nostalgia.

These characteristics are also true for Dieter Kiessling’s video installation consisting of an enlarged class photo taken in 1904 at a girl’s school. It is presented as an image projected into the room. Using an image editing program, the artist produces an effect by which, gradually, every individual face stands out as an extreme close-up. The result is an insistent rhythm of appearance and disappearance. The fact that the image is over a hundred years old is not only evident in the girls’ appearance and the serious, determined looks, unusual for their age. Dieter Kiessling also “demonstrates the ageing of the technical image media.” Doris Krystof explains, “while the photograph is in black and white, in keeping with the technical developments of the time, and over the course of time has accumulated numerous scratches and the like, he orchestrates the frozen historical scene using today’s digital media as a moving image.”

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The other pole of the wide range of time-related works in this part of the exhibition is marked by the profoundly unsettling, somewhat crazy work of Korpys/Löffler, “The Nuclear Football” (2004), with its strictly contemporary (today!) documentary imagery. The work gathers images from the state visit of George W. Bush to Berlin, on May 22 and 23, 2002. Captured from the press box using a highdefinition digital camera, power rituals and regalia, as seen at the President’s arrival at Berlin Tegel Airport, his reception at Bellevue Palace and his departure, are depicted with meticulous precision. The secret suitcase, known as the “Nuclear Football”, is of particular interest as it never leaves the President’s side. The scenes at the airport are underscored by Brian Eno’s Music for Airports (1978). An additional inset, a voice that mysteriously whispers, turns the beholder into an accessory in this political act, which ends with the German government’s refusal to participate in the US invasion of Iraq. The quirky selection of documentary images of the “real” event, along with the specific sound and text unhinges the reliabilty of the imagery, thus dissolving the values of documentary and historical “truth”.

McCarthy, Paul Peter Paul, 2001/02 Körperabguss aus Gips und Ton, Gussmodell aus Fiberglas, Körperfragment aus Gips in Kartonschachtel, zwei Transportkisten 200 x 600 x 700 cm © Paul McCarthy Photo: Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf 2005

Hanne Darboven Evolution >86< © Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf Photo: Walter Klein, Düsseldorf

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In its entirety, “Big Picture II” provided a wide range of views on time through different meanings and forms. While the first part of the exhibition had an impressive visual power, the second part asserted its conceptual strength, particularly via the demure works by On Kawara and Hanne Darboven. The work by the latter, “Evolution ‘86’” (1986), a large-scale installation with hundreds of framed sheets of paper, a skeleton and a toilet bowl among other things, kept its position and is now part of “Big Picture III” too, considering that the installing requires much time, effort and manpower. Yet there is no objection against its inclusion, as it beautifully fits into the theme “Roles/Figures”. The third and most recent installment of “Big Picture” lays its foundation on the question: What is presentation? The concentrated selection articulates ideas about role, identity and the self in contemporary art. It includes works by Vito Acconci, Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Peggy Buth, Keren Cytter, Hanne Darboven, Jeanne Faust, Christoph Girardet und Matthias Müller, Stefan Hablützel, Nan Hoover, Paul McCarthy, Imi Knoebel, Tony Oursler, Pia Stadtbäumer – again, a wide range of artists, techniques, themes and, well, times of when they were created.

The exhibition architecture works well for this presentation too. The viewer enters one darkened room after another, but there are always ways out into brightness, and the rooms don’t feel like the usual black boxes. Nan Hoover’s body videos from the 80’s on T V monitors work as well as Christoph Girardet’s and Matthias Müller’s wild yet meticulously selected and edited compilation entitled, “Phoenix Tapes” (1999). The work is based on footage from Hitchcock’s films, tracing cinematic rituals and gestures – kissing, crying, fighting, smoking, waiting – until all gestures seem empty, meaningless, and even silly, then full of pathos and importance again. Hipster Keren Cytter’s piece “Avalanche” (2011) also uses theatrical roles and rituals. Once again, her now well-known way of narrating which is “characterized by temporal, linguistic, and spatial disjunction”, the curator says, “the work brings together a variety of recurring motifs: a disco mirror ball, a girl eating an apple, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In keeping with Dostoyevsky’s psychological penetration, the film sketches out a multilayered study of the drama of ordinary relationships, at the same time breaking with the traditional narrative model of the feature film.” Hence, Cytter creates a captivating piece of narration and play.

Moments. Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten Eine Ausstellung im ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst Reinhild Hoffmann: „Bretter“, 1980 b/w Photography Photo: Silvia Lelli © Reinhild Hoffmann

Although, the show had opened some days before, at the time of my visit, one work, Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s “Talo – The House” (2002), was not yet on view. However, its room was ready, with work labels and all. As the curator explained, due to the advances in technology since the artwork’s creation, there were technical issues to be solved – mind you, this is a video piece that is not older than ten years. So the empty room, waiting for the artwork to inhabit it, functions like a monument for the challenges curators face when they want to show technology-based art properly, true to its content and intention.

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Interesting enough, there is another exhibition, just a couple of hours away, that aims to get a grip on documenting and presenting the performative within an institutional frame. Again, exhibiting itself is on stage, as well as place/space, time and figures – that makes three out of three aspects which connect this project to the “Big Picture” in Düsseldorf. It makes perfect sense that the wave of exhibitions and projects dealing with performance/dance/body in art is followed by reflections on how time-based and/or ephemeral artworks are presented. And the ZKM, the center for Art and Media, is usually at the forefront of these projects. “Moments. A History of Performance in 10 Acts” is conceived as a “live exhibition” on the history of art performance in dance and fine art with participations by performance superstar Marina Abramović, Graciela Carnevale, Simone Forti,

Ahtila, Eija-Liisa Talo – The House, 2002 Three-channel video installation, color, sound, 16-mm-film on DVD 6-channel-Dolby-sound Duration: 15’00’’ © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

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55 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Moments. Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten Eine Ausstellung im ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst Anna Halprin: „City Dance“, 1976–1979 b/w Photography Photo: Buck O’Kelly © Anna Halprin

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Moments. Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten Eine Ausstellung im ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst Anna Halprin: „City Dance“, 1976–1979 Videostill Photo: Buck O’Kelly © Anna Halprin

Moments. Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten Eine Ausstellung im ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst Simone Forti: Re-Enactment „Face Tunes“, 2011 Farbfotografie / Photo color Foto, ©: Jason Underhill

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Moments. Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten Eine Ausstellung im ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst Lynn Hershman Leeson: „Roberta Climbs Steps of Del Coronado Hotel to Meet a Date (San Diego)“, 1976 19 x 23.5 cm Photography Chromagen-print Courtesy Galerie Waldburger, Brüssel

Moments. Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten Eine Ausstellung im ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst Channa Horwitz: „Movement #2, Sheet C, 2nd Variation“, 1969 39 x 33 cm / 15.5 x 13 inches, Fasersjpgt auf Papier / Pen on paper © Aanant & Zoo

Moments. Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten Eine Ausstellung im ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst Lynn Hershman Leeson: „Roberta’s Dress“, 1976 Photography Chromagen-print 20.4 x 25 cm Courtesy Galerie Waldburger, Brüssel

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Moments. Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten Eine Ausstellung im ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst Lynn Hershman Leeson: „Roberta on her Way to Work“, 1978 20 x 25.5 cm Photography Digital print Courtesy Galerie Waldburger, Brüssel

Moments. Eine Geschichte der Performance in 10 Akten Eine Ausstellung im ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst Sanja Ivekovic: „Practice Makes a Master 09“, 2009 Performance (performed by Sonja Pregrad) Photo: Barbara Blasin © Sanja Ivekovic

Anna Halprin, Reinhild Hoffmann, Channa Horwitz, Lynn Hershman Leeson and the brillant Sanja Iveković. As an exhibition “in progress”, the project shows and develops new formats of museal presentation of live acts. During the eight week-long exhibition project, a scenic act of around ten central stages of dance and performance history unfolded before a public. One of the key focal points is the performances and works by women who have consciously been thematizing, transgressing and critiquing the genre boundaries between dance, performance, and visual media since the 1960s.

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It’s a great idea and an ambitious concept that requires participation, involvement, and “witnesses” rather than beholders, to borrow the term from artist Anna Halprin. It takes some time until one understands the setting of minimal-style stages, tables, installments of T Vs, recorders and wires (so many wires!), projections and texts on the floor, the walls and everywhere else.

Speaking of texts: do texts dealing with theoretical issues really need to be so dry and boring, while the art itself is sometimes refreshingly clear and straight, like Anna Halprin’s “Scores”, for example? “Pay attention to your senses, leave an impression.” Isn’t that what it’s all about? Or: “Rap with the neighbors. Play with the kids.” Just stop for a second and imagine!

“Moments” offers much to see, listen and learn, and this is great. However, it demands the strong will of the visitor to be drawn into the concept and follow the partly wonderful, original and idealistic ideas of the artists. Otherwise, it could probably leave you cold. Because this is what even the most elaborate exhibition will never be able to provide: the particular atmosphere when two human beings are in one space and something happens.

Barbara J. Scheuermann works as curator in Berlin and Brussels. In Berlin she runs the art project space Babusch. Before she moved to Berlin in November 2008, she had worked as curator of contemporary art at Tate Modern, London, and earlier as assistant curator at K21, Düsseldorf, and Haus der Kunst, Munich.

Her doctoral thesis (2005) analyses narrative structures in contemporary artworks using as example works by William Kentridge and Tracey Emin. In her curatorial work and her writings she mainly focuses on video and installation, questions of narrativity, performativity and gender as well as on the discourse of postcolonialism and multiculturalism. As independent writer and art critic she has contributed, and still contributes, to numerous international art magazines as well as to exhibition catalogues and other publications.

Vernissage | December 5, 2012 | By invitation only Catalog order | Tel. +1 212 627 1999, www.artbook.com Follow us on Facebook and Twitter | www.facebook.com/artbaselmiamibeach | www.twitter.com/abmb RES NOVEMBER 2012

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INTERVIEW WITH DAVID SHRIGLEY

BURCU YÜKSEL O N E O F T H E M O S T F A S C I N A T I NG A S P E C T S of David Shrigley is his constant exploration of different formats to express himself as an artist. Not only is this reflected in his varied choice of media but also the type of projects he is involved in which range from music videos to newspaper cartoons, publishing books to doing tattoos, in addition to of course his drawings, sculpture and animated films. He even tackled live performance with a recent work Pass the Spoon, his “sort-of opera” based around a faux T V cookery show that was performed in Glasgow and will make its London premiere in May. But whatever Shrigley may be working on, it always has his witty commentary and dry humor.

He has come a long way since finishing Glasgow School of Art in 1991 and selling his quirky simply drawn cartoons in pubs to now having a major solo show in London with thousands of fans following him on Twitter and Facebook. His show “Brain Activity” at the Hayward covers the full range of his work that aim to provoke surprise and laughter, with the headless ostrich, tomb stone with a shopping list, a stuffed Jack Russell holding a placard that says “I’m Dead” and the tiny word sculpture LOOK AT THIS, placed outside in the terrace. His animation New Friends, 2006, is about social relationships, where a little square man loses all his square friends and when he finds a colony of circle men, they welcome him with opens arms but shave him into a circle like themselves.

This kind of dark humor with a dose of violence is very typical of Shrigley’s work. So it is not a surprise to see that he is heavily influenced by Surrealism, and names Rene Magritte as one of his favorite artists along with Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and Philip Guston. In his drawings he refers to Magritte’s famous motifs, the bright green apple and the pipe of “The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe)”, 1929. Similarly, the installation of hundreds of insects in different shapes and sizes made of found and odd shaped pieces of metal recall the ants that swarm through paintings of Dali.

Shrigley’s work creates different responses amongst art journalists and critics; there are those who delightfully enjoy the exhibition and those who question whether what he does is art or not. I think one has to go to a contemporary art exhibition with an open mind, and suspend all expectations that contemporary art is not allowed to be light and funny. And as Shrigley explains himself, it is not possible to please everybody and he wants to make works for himself.

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BURCU YÜKSEL Let’s start by talking about your exhibition, “Brain Activity” at the Hayward Gallery. I’m curious as to whether this exhibition made you look back and assess your career as an artist?

Leisure Centre 1992 C-print, Edition 4 of 12 25.7 x 25.5cm (10 1/4 x 10in)

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DAVID SHRIGLEY I think most artists are quite resistant to the idea of having a retrospective. I’m not entirely sure it’s really something that you want to do, to look back. I think most artists want to look forward. So in a way the idea of a retrospective in quite an important space wasn’t something that I really wanted to do. But I guess we reached a compromise whether there is a retrospective element. It’s more of a survey show, and there quite bias in the exhibition towards quite recent work, lot of which that haven’t been shown.

BY Could you talk about your transition from art student to become a full time working artist and how and when did you decide to go to art school?

DS I graduated in 1991 from Glasgow School of Art. Then until 1996 I had five years of doing odd jobs not really making a living as an artist. I don’t know whether that is a common experience at that age, whether that is unusual. I was pretty happy to give up work. I decided to go to art school when I was a young kid. I don’t think I wanted to be an artist in the sense that I didn’t realize there was such occupation. I had the notion that I wanted to go to art school and be an art student, spend my time making art. Just seemed like an exciting thing to do.

BY Do you remember your first experience and interaction with art?

DS I have always been interested in making art as a young child. Drawing and making objects was something I really enjoyed. The point of which I realized my liking of art in terms of the art world was when my father took me to the Tate, which is now Tate Britain in London when I was about 14. We saw an exhibition by Jean Tinguely, a Swiss kinetic artist. At that moment I became really interested in art.

Until then my experience of art was mainly through books. The city I grew up Leicester is quite a small provincial city, so my visit to London and visiting the Tate gallery was a big deal. Another comparable experience I had was when I saw the dinosaurs at the National History of Museum with my parents when I was 5 years old. So for awhile I was really into dinosaurs, then I went to a football match and I was really into football for quite a long time, I wanted to be professional football player. I do still like football but dinosaurs wore off a bit and then eventually I was really into art from the age of 14.

BY How did your interest develop in all the different media and formats you are working in? Is there one particular that is more exciting for you?

DS I was never trained to work in any particular media. If I had studied painting in art school, it would have affected me but I studied Environmental Art. I was always encouraged to think about the work and art in general rather than craft too much. I didn’t really display any craft skills, I couldn’t draw that well and could never really make things well either. Drawing is the center of what I do, it’s my default practice, something I have done my whole life. It comes natural to me allows me to say anything I want to say quickly and easily.

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I always made sculptural work and always had a camera as a young teenager, taking photographs.

Making animated films is something that came much later and I had to learn how to do it. My attitude towards different media is that because I never had any real craft skills anyway, I delegate what I’m not able to do myself, in the sense that a film director doesn’t necessarily know how to act. This way I am able to do a lot of different works. I’m just not very good at making things and I’ve never been afraid to say it.

Lost 1996 C-print, Edition of 12 39 x 49cm (15 1/4 x 19 1/4in)

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65 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Balloon 2002 C-Print Edition no. 1 of 10, 30.5 x 38cm (12 x 15in) 12 x 154.7 x 5.9

Anti-Depressants 2002 C-Print Exhibition copy 28 x 41cm (11 x 16in)

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BY As we are talking about your collaborations, in the past you have done cartoons for newspapers, and music videos, and more recently collaborated with a composer and director for your libretto, Pass the Spoon. What has been your experience in working with people outside the fine art world?

Was it challenging or enjoyable? Would you want to do again?

DS The interesting thing about working out of the art world is that you reach a bigger audience and that is really nice. I learn a lot from the people I’m collaborating with on these projects. I also worked in advertising, illustration and cartoons for magazines and ad campaigns. It’s nice because you reach a larger audience but I want to keep the center of what I do in the art world because this is where you can do whatever you like. It’s not the same if, say you are making illustrations, certainly it’s always to a brief, and although it promises to be an interesting project and exercise, it’s not something I would want to do all the time. Unless I’m offered so much money that I can’t say no!

BY How did you end up doing the music videos for Blur and Bonnie Prince Billy? Was it something that you proposed?

DS When I made the pop video for Blur, which is the most well-known, I got asked by the animators who were commissioned to make it and they wanted to collaborate with me. I didn’t really know the band much. Bonnie Prince Billey, however, was quite different, it was very Do It Yourself, lo-fi.

Someone at the record label knew that I really like the band and they asked me to do their music video. It’s also because I got to know a lot of people in the world of music since Glasgow is a big music town. I don’t think I will do another music video, I’m not very interested to be honest. It’s quite a hard commission in a way. And the music people, to put it bluntly, are not the greatest to do business with. It was an exercise for me and I’m glad that what pays my mortgage is the fine art world. As long as I can be a fine artist and make my living that way, I’m happy.

BY How do you position yourself in relation to your works? Does one of your many characters represent you?

DS My work is not autobiographical at all and I think that is pretty apparent even without meeting me. The voice of the author in my graphic works in my books, I am playing a character to a certain extent because the statements that character makes are not the type of statements that would be acceptable to make as a human being. I’m not interested in autobiography, or being the center of my work. I’m mystified when people are interested in what I actually got to say. When you think about it, most artists are like that. Artists like Tracey Emin are quite unusual, who want to be in the center of their artwork. I want to make universal statements, not necessarily personal statements.

BY Your work is always humorous, are you the same way in your daily life? Are you mostly serious or do you make a lot of jokes?

DS I don’t know, it’s very difficult to see how people see you but I’m not a comedian. I do have a liking of lighter side of life, like to laugh and joke a bit.

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BY You must come across people who don’t really understand your humor, what would you say them?

New Friends 2006 Animation, Edition 3 of 6 + 1AP Running time: 1 minute

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Insects 2008 Steel and paint Sizes variable

Ostrich 2009 Taxidermy Ostrich 195 x 160 x 95cm (76 3/4 x 63 x 37 1/2ins)

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DS I don’t think you can please everybody or make art that everybody likes. I made quite a good attempt in making work that is a bit more popular or accessible to a wider audience than a lot of artists in my generation. This doesn’t mean the work is necessarily any better. The big part of what I do is cartoons, and when you are working in that kind of medium, your work will be more accessible than somebody doing very dry conceptual work for example.

BY So you are conscious of the audience whether you are making an animation, sculpture, or cartoon for a newspaper. Does that affect the outcome of the work?

DS I’d say not, the strategy to making art is that it has to be for yourself firstly and you have to entertain yourself and find the work really interesting and engaging. You can’t make works for anybody else.

Otherwise it is like what an ad agency does, trying to speak specifically to certain people, and that is not how I work. You can’t expect anybody else to like it unless you like it yourself. If you read the reviews of my exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, you will see that there is quite a panorama of critical responses to it.

BY What are your sources of inspiration? Do you explore a certain theme for extended periods or is it much more intuitive?

DS I think it is much more intuitive than that. It is not often that I make work about certain things or certain themes. The work is probably about the same things over and over again but my working method is very intuitive. I try to set myself projects and I just fill the page. I do a lot of drawings in a day. It’s my strategy to not to think too hard about the work so the subject matter is something that comes naturally and intuitively. I’m not really in control of it. Having said that, I try to make certain things at certain times, as part of one project.

BY What are you working on at the moment?

DS I’m working on a new book, which is going to be published by CanonGate. They also published my last book but that was the first book that I’ve done with them. They are quite a big independent publisher, so this was the first time I had a literary agent who got me a big advance, and there is publicity involved and I have to do Twitter and Facebook and all that stuff. Unlike my previous books, this book has a theme.

That’s the way these things work with the agency, you have to tell them what the book is going to be about.

It is sort of a self-help book. I’m quite enjoying that because it’s a change, something else to do, something different. It will be published in September or October this year.

The show from Hayward is also travelling to Cincinnati and then to San Francisco next June so I’m going to look at the San Francisco space and see how the show can be adapted and maybe work another piece of work on site there as well. Then I got another show in Manchester in October 2012. That is going to be quite a different show, much more an installation. And if I’m still alive, I will try to more works after that.

BY Do you collect objects, art? Are you a collector yourself?

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DS Yes, I have a collection of art. If I had more money, I’d buy more art. I also have a collection of rulers!

I just really like rulers and I got a lot of them. So I think that constitutes a collection. And I use a lot of them, so they are everywhere in my studio.

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Gravestone 2008 Granite, gold leaf 122 x 61 x 10cm (48 x 24 x 4in)

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Look at This 2012 Bronze 16.5 x 164 x 3.5 cm (6 1/2 x 64 1/2 x 1 3/8in)

Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m Dead 2010 Taxidermy puppy with wooden sign and acrylic paint Overall: 70 x 15 x 25cm (27 1/2 x 5 7/8 x 9 7/8in)

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BY What was the last exhibition that you saw that had an impact on you?

SOLO PROJECTS: FOCUS LATIN AMERICA

DS There are several exhibitions that I’m looking forward to seeing. I haven’t actually seen the Jeremy Deller show yet at the Hayward and I’d quite like to see the David Hockney exhibition at the Royal Academy. What else have I seen? Gosh I don’t know. My mind is going blank.

OPENING: YOUNG GALLERIES

BY Do you try to keep up with the art world? There are so many events and exhibitions to go to, fairs to attend, do you try to go and see everything as much as possible?

HIGHLIGHTED ARTIST

DS Not so much but I usually have a list of exhibitions that I want to see, particularly if I’m in London. And whenever I’m travelling, I always try and go see exhibitions because I love art. There is nothing more pleasure than going to see an exhibition, at least a good exhibition anyway. It makes you happy. It’s like reading a good book or watching a good movie.

EXPERTS FORUM PROFESSIONAL MEETINGS

BY Does it help being outside of London? What is the Scottish art scene like?

DS There are a lot of things going on and lot of artists in Glasgow but there aren’t enough big important spaces that show art and most of the things happen on a small scale. And when Glasgow International Festival takes place, more events take place but I don’t think the Scottish government quite understands how successful the world of contemporary art has been in Glasgow and Scotland and the amount of people paying attention to it from all over the world, particularly the festival. There are lots of young artists in Glasgow, I suppose I am an older generation now in my forties, and a really good vibrant art scene here but it’s not one based around a Kunsthalle type large institution. The really interesting things are the artist-initiated projects.

INTERNATIONAL COLLECTORS PROGRAMME

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BY Do you ever take a break from art? And if you do, what do you do to relax?

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DS I quite often have a day off on Saturday. I do yoga and go running if I’m feeling energetic. I might go to football matches, go for dinner with my wife. Sometimes we go on a holiday, which is always nice. I always try not to do anything when I’m on holiday. I go to exhibitions on my days off, always enjoy catching up on seeing art works. I see a lot of live music, I’m really into bands and contemporary music and Glasgow is great for that.

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BY When you are working, do you have a daily routine? Are you disciplined?

DS I’m disciplined as I need to be and work as hard as I have to. You have to be disciplined to a certain extent to meet your obligations and the demands that are made upon you. Otherwise I’d get stressed out and couldn’t do the projects I’d like to do. Normally I do 8 hours a day, easily 6 days a week. If I’m lucky I get two days off.

Sometimes I stay up really late and work and I quite enjoy that, my mind is really awake at night and I tend to get a lot done.

International Contemporary Art Fair Turkish born Burcu Yuksel received her M.A from New York University. She is currently working at Derek Johns Ltd, dealers in Old Master Paintings in London as Assistant Director, and also works for PERFORMA, New York on Special Projects.

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David Shrigley went to Glasgow School of Art. Although he works in various media, he is most widely known for his witty drawings and humorous cartoons published in different books, magazines and newspapers. He has also directed music videos, works in sculpture and animation. He lives in Glasgow.

ORGANISED BY

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77 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Shirana Shahbazi for RES Magazine

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87 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Shirana Shahbazi

[Komposition-01-2011] C-print [Komposition-51-2012] C-print [Komposition-52-2012] C-print [Komposition-50-2012] C-print [Komposition-14-2011] C-print [Stilleben-35-2010] C-print [Farsh-09-2005] Handknotted rug, wool on silk [Octopus-03-2008] C-print [Komposition-13-2011] C-print Copyright the Artist Courtesy Galerie Bob van Orsouw, Zurich

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GILBERT AND GEORGE LONDON PICTURES 9 MARCH - 12 MAY, WHITE CUBES BERMONDSEY HOXTON SQUARE, MASON’S YARD AND HONG KONG LAURA MCLEAN FERRIS A C O UPL E O F W E E K S A G O , in Regent’s Canal, East London, not too far from my house, the torso of a young woman – a soap actress – was discovered in the water. I was out running along the canalside with a friend when she told me the news (I had been out of the country for a few days), because we unexpectedly came to an area that had been cordoned off with police tape; forensics investigators were tweezing, white-protective-suited, through the drains. The combination of a high heart rate, pumping the blood heavily through my ears, and the horrific report of her death, suddenly made me want to stop running Gilbert & George and throw up. And inevitably, in the oncoming days, ‘London Pictures’, White Cube Hong Kong which saw her brother confess to the murder, this 2 March - 5 May 2012 © the artist extremely violent, senseless act took on the scale of the grim London story, which repeatedly arises in conversations with friends and acquaintances for a period. Like the canal itself, the event-asnarrative is carried along in conversation, eddying and flowing until the shock finally subsides.

London, a bright, vibrant city though it is, has always been home to grizzly horror stories, which seep out of its dark corners and make their way into news, conversation, and history. The headlines are unavoidable: from the front pages of newspaper posters outside shops to the free papers given out at tube stations, Londoners consistently participate, albeit sometimes passively, in a shared story of their city.

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Gilbert & George, for decades now, have been fully intertwined with the fabric of London, and a regular presence in East London, striding along the road in smart tweed suits to Mangal II; the Turkish restaurant in which they dine every day. This is not, as is now well known, an incidental detail: ever since Gilbert & George, in 1969, submitted themselves to the world as ‘living sculptures’, their appearance, routine and demeanour in the city has been an intrinsic part of their work, and its character. Rule one of Gilbert & George’s Laws of the Sculptors (1969) is that they must be ‘Always smartly dressed, well groomed, relaxed, friendly, polite and in complete control’. Over the many years in which they have been simultaneously appearing in the streets and appearing in their work, they have come to seem as though they embody something ancient about the city – part gargoyle, part hero, part prophet – almost like the urban equivalents to the bucolic, rural embodiment of England seen in the character of Johnny Byron in Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem (2009), which has had a successful run in the city the past few years. In contrast to all the frenetic activity, the changing landscapes of gentrification or recession, these artists and their routines

Gilbert & George ‘London Pictures’ White Cube: Mason’s Yard, Bermondsey, Hoxton 2012 © the artist Photo: Ben Westoby Courtesy White Cube

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Gilbert & George Robbery 2011 89 x 74 13/16 in. (226 x 190 cm) © the artist Courtesy White Cube

Gilbert & George Teacher Straight 2011 118 7/8 x 124 13/16 in. (302 x 317 cm) © the artist Courtesy White Cube

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remain a constant: it’s difficult, in fact, to think of many others (the Queen comes to mind, and, indeed, she does appear as a presence in the artists’ work described below).

It’s this kind of embodied presence that appears in Gilbert & George’s latest set of works, London Pictures (2011), which were displayed this spring across all four White Cube galleries: three in London, and one in Hong Kong. For this epic series of works – 292 ‘pictures’ created in the artists’ systemic, gridded style – the pair devised a system of presentation based on nearly 4000 newspaper advertising sheets that they stole from display boards over the past six years. These shouty statements are meant to entice Londoners into buying a newspaper, displaying the main headline of the day – depending on the brand of the title some headlines are printed in a straight, clean font, whereas others have a ‘handwritten’ style. Because of the limited space on the posters, their language has developed into a very specific system of shortcuts and the words often act like blunt instruments, rushing straight to the key points of interest, with little space for nuance.

Gilbert & George divided their collection of headlines into categories, based on key words that appear over and over again: ‘killer’, ‘woman’, ‘death plunge’, ‘gang’ or ‘school’, and placed them into a grid formation, so that London itself, and the interests of its reportage, would dictate the size of each panel. Each headline is stripped away from its white background, leaving only a short white border around each word. In each collection the ‘key’ word is presented in red, so that it leaps out at the viewer over and over again: ‘killer’, ‘killer’, ‘killer’, ‘killer’. Instead of the white plain background from which they are ripped, the headlines sit on images of Gilbert & George, who stare sorrowfully out of the pictures in sets of distorted, abstracted images. In one image, fingers stretch from the pairs’ heads, in another they gaze balefully out from behind lace curtains – the stereotypical location from which onlookers to an incident twitch behind but don’t intervene. In some images the artists are pictured as part of a kaleidoscopic, nightmarish pattern – the peach tone of their faces and hands and the whites of their eyes are the only colours picked out in a sea of monochrome imagery. Occasionally we glimpse fragments of London – a shopfront, some corporate, reflective architecture, and the sash window of a rundown Victorian terrace.

The final element in the artists’ presentation system, in the bottom left-hand corner of each grid, is a kind of heraldry or hallmark, which features the name of the picture: Teacher, Killer, Muslim for those headlines displayed in the ‘handwritten’ font, and the title followed by the word ‘straight’, for each of the simple, straight-lettered font style: Teacher Straight, for example.

Below each title is an image of the Queen’s head taken from a coin, different in each picture, and covering all the ages of the Queen as she has been pictured on the British currency – from those images of her as a young woman, to a more aged presence that graces our coinage today. Each image of the monarch, taken directly from a coin itself, has been subjected to different degrees of wear and tear. Though the metallic rendering of her face gives her a statue like presence on the images, as though she too, like Gilbert & George, is an embodiment of an ancient London spirit, in most of the images her face is covered in pocks, scuffs, gouges and scratches. Below her head is the date, the artists’ familiar joint signature and the phrase: ‘A London Picture: It’s Written All Over Them’.

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Out of this system of constraints emerges a narrative of the city the past six years, and the most obvious thing to say about this is that this picture is shockingly and unremittingly violent – nearly every headline refers to violence save for a huge swathe that obsesses over money –

Gilbert & George London Crime 2011 118 7/8 x 124 13/16 in. (302 x 317 cm) © the artist Courtesy White Cube

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95 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Gilbert & George School Straight 2011 148 7/16 x 250 in. (377 x 635 cm) © the artist Courtesy White Cube

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Gilbert & George Preacher 2011 59 7/16 x 50 in. (151 x 127 cm) © the artist Courtesy White Cube

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97 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Gilbert & George Mystery 2011 59 7/16 x 74 13/16 in. (151 x 190 cm) © the artist Courtesy White Cube

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Gilbert & George Knife Murder 2011 59 7/16 x 50 in. (151 x 127 cm) © the artist Courtesy White Cube

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bankers bonuses, misspent public money. The artists’ themselves have expressed their surprise at this finding – realising that even a category of words that seemed softened, such as ‘lover’, were invariably accompanied by violent words, ‘stabbed’, ‘killer’, ‘shot’, etc.

National obsessions and the prejudices used to sell papers are revealed, as well as a specific lexicon that is not often employed in speech: ‘’thugs’, ‘tots’, ‘paedos’. There’s much concern over schools and teachers, as well as traces of the screeching rollercoaster of financial events that the city has been through over the past six years. In Money First we find: ‘£93BN to Save One Bank’, ‘£44m Cuts Axe Looms’, ‘Free £5 Bet for Every Reader’.

It’s melancholic to see the characters that appear again and again within this period: those haunting presences that become shorthanded into a single name: ‘Kinsella’, ‘Lawrence’, ‘Milly’, ‘Baby P’, ‘Damilola’, ‘Lucie’, – chiefly the names of teenagers and young people who have been violently killed, and who begin to stand for a particular concern or problem: racism, paedophilia, gang violence, teenage stabbings, neglect and failings in social work. Their names and images are constantly dredged up, in our grubby historical canal, whenever these issues are mentioned.

It’s two murdered young men, both aspiring actors: Ben Kinsella and Rob Knox (the latter often unnamed in the headlines and, significantly, referred to as ‘Potter actor’, because he had a part in one of the Harry Potter films), who were both fatally stabbed by other teenagers in 2008 and whom I noticed recurred most frequently in Gilbert & George’s panels: Kinsella’s sister was a pretty soap actress in EastEnders, the same show which featured the girl found in the canal, whereas he had taken a small part in The Bill; a police drama. While it might seem perverse to bring up such connections, in part their small fame and youth is a significant element in the way that their stories become reported and obsessed over. Handsome young men (or women) with everything in front of them who become tragic poster-figures for the media and the public.

The British press has been a focus of international interest over the past year, due to the scandal surrounding a British newspaper owned by Rupert Murdoch, The News of the World, which was shut down amid a scandal over phone-hacking. This interest is coupled with the fact that another newspaper, The Daily Mail, recently overtook The New York Times as the most popular website on the globe, due primarily to its salacious coverage of celebrities (mainly female: ‘Bikini Beach Bodies’ etc.). A piece by Lauren Collins in the New Yorker (April 2) explained the culture of British tabloids, as seen from afar, comparing it to the US’s Fox News. British television, Collins writes, ‘tends to be a dignified affair, while print is berserk and shouty.’ It’s precisely this kind of ‘beserk and shouty’ atmosphere that arises when Gilbert & George corral together so many headlines. One might think of it as an equivalent to Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), being rather, ‘London Reports on Itself’, a constant dialogue that spirals inwards to affect as well as to effect changes and atmospheres in the city. And what emerges from this exhibition, subtle as repeated blows to the head, or stabs in the chest, is a picture of a city obsessed with money, sex and violence.

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This is a depressing scene. And yet, at the same time, it doesn’t seem to be a straightforward critique of media hysteria and tabloid reporting. Laid out in this way, something, if not the truth, seems a little clearer. The stratification of society is particularly apparent – the vast gulf between the superrich; and the poor, young and angry, who erupted in rioting in the city last summer: it’s all there, really: ‘it’ written all over it’, as the artists point out. And, as Gilbert & George,

Gilbert & George Racist 2011 59 7/16 x 50 in. (151 x 127 cm) © the artist Courtesy White Cube

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101 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Gilbert & George Jail 2011 59 7/16 x 100 in. (151 x 254 cm) © the artist Courtesy White Cube

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Gilbert & George Stabbed to Death 2011 118 7/8 x 100 in. (302 x 254 cm) © the artist Courtesy White Cube

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who profess to love London, stand behind the headlines, gazing out sombrely, watching the city’s dark stories, its murky subconscious, swirl around them, as though they could have seen it coming all along. Gilbert & George, unlike so many artists, are attuned to listening to murmuring of the city’s underbelly: they listen to that world as they stride through London every day, their routine giving them a chance to register incremental change. For it’s only by doing so that one can understand the city, it’s problems and its wonders. And that really is loving a city, in all its festering glory.

Laura McLean-Ferris is a writer and curator based in London. She is ArtReview’s editor at large and a critic for the Independent, and has contributed to many other publications, including Art Agenda, Art Monthly, the Guardian and Another Magazine.

The Humans Alexandre Singh

Surplus Authors Group Exhibition

A production in progress on view until 6 January 2013

On view until 28 October 2012

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With monthly Causeries 13 September: Aristophanes 11 October: The Mountain in Art and Literature 15 November: Artificial Moons (Lighting in Theater)

Artist Talk on 6 October 2012 Work by Marianne Flotron, in conversation with Philippe Pirotte

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Artist Talk on 25 October 2012 Assemblages by Angela Melitopoulos and Maurizio Lazzarato www.wdw.nl

BARBARA J. SCHEUERMANN “ M Y A R T O R I G I N A T E S F R O M hallucinations only I can see. I translate the hallucinations and obsessional images that plague me into sculptures and paintings,” Yayoi Kusama says, explicitly interrelating her art practice and mental state. For the last 40 years, the artist (b. 1929, Tokyo), who is best known for her absorbing, colorful environments overlaid with polka dots, has been living, by choice, in a mental institution in her native city Tokyo. Kusama clearly states that her “artwork is an expression of [her] life, particularly of [her] mental disease.” Reportedly, Kusama, as a child, had suffered from hallucinations, in which the entirety of her surrounding space was covered with repeating patterns of dots.

For the most of us, it might be difficult to imagine the fear of a girl perceiving her familiar environment, suddenly and permanently, dot-bedecked. One might get a sense of it when entering into one of Kusama’s overwhelming installations, such as “I’m Here, but Nothing” (2000/2012), a domestic room completely covered with fluorescent dots, currently on view at the Tate Modern in London as part of a thorough retrospective of Kusama’s work. “She is somebody who evidently from childhood onward has suffered from various neuroses, anxieties, depressive episodes, suicidal thoughts, so there is an admittance of a kind of fragility in her mental health, or however one likes to put it,” Tate curator Frances Morris explains, and continues, “I think it’s an incredible demonstration of the way she has brilliantly controlled that. She’s ploughed the strengths and the weaknesses that she was born with into her work.”

Kusama’s work is not only about making a certain mental disposition perceptible to the viewers.

It’s rooted in the art of happening and the environment of the 60’s when Kusama was part of the New York art scene, though, a rather alienated one as a young female artist from Japan. She first explored installation in her 1963 solo exhibition “Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show” at Gertrude Stein Gallery in New York. The show consisted of a single work, one of Kusama’s “Accumulation” sculptures — a rowboat covered in soft, phallic protuberances — presented in a space, the walls of which were covered in 999 reproductions of a photograph of the same sculpture.

This installation has been re-installed at the Tate’s show and it beautifully calls up a sense of the 60’s with its notions of space, body and repetition. The Tate exhibition covers the whole span of Kusama’s work, beginning with her smaller paintings and drawings from the 40’s to her most recent colorful paintings of patterns, some of which assemble certain kinds of folk art. It’s probably the environments that intrigue visitors most, as they seemlessly feel themselves transferred from the position of viewer to participant.

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“Infinity Mirrored Room – Filled with the Brilliance of Life” (2011) is a great example for this shift from viewer to participant. The walls and the ceiling of the room are mirrored, and the floor features a shallow pool of water. Visitors walk through the room on a walkway made of mirrored

tiles. Hanging from the ceiling are hundreds of small, round LED lights that flash on and off in different colour configurations. The pinpricks of light in the otherwise darkened room have an infinite reflection in the mirrors, giving the viewer the experience of being in a seemingly endless space, broken only by points of light in the darkness. People tend to stand there, pausing, staring, willfully getting absorbed in the rhythm of lights changing their colours. The “Infinity Mirrored Room” may be another visualisation of the above mentioned work’s title “I’m here, but Nothing”.

Inside, one seems to dissolve in the play of light and colour, transforming into nothing except infinity, and yet, still being there!

The mirror installation is the most recent work in the Tate exhibition. The second part of its title, “Filled with the Brilliance of Life”, has a joyful sound and is somewhat unusual for Yayoi Kusama.

Did the artist choose these words on purpose as an optimistic conclusion, as life-affirming last words of the exhibition list? One doesn’t know but likes to imagine that Yayoi Kusama, this fearful, powerful and extraordinary artist, has been “filled with the brilliance of life”.

In this vein, we are easily reminded of another artist, who works with overwhelming spatial installations, Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962 in Grabs, Switzerland). Rist’s work is currently on view in a first major retrospective, titled “Eyeball Massage”, which was previously shown at the Hayward Gallery, London. Since emerging in the international art scene in the mid-80’s, Pipilotti Rist has had numerous solo and group exhibitions and is one of the most celebrated video artists working today. The video “Ever is Over All” (1997), in which a beautiful woman walks dreamily down a street, smashing the windows of parked cars one after another, won the Premio 2000 at the Venice Biennale in 1997 and made Pipilotti Rist famous overnight. Like many other of her early single-channel videos “Ever is Over All”, already a classic by now, involves the manipulation and distortion of sound, speed and colour, and plays with fantasy and reality. Rist’s later work began to encompass architectural space in multimedia environments that became increasingly immersive, involving high-definition video projections, and audio-visual installations with psychedelic images and sounds conceived specifically for particular spaces. Hence, she is able to create a total sensory experience for her audience.

When you enter the show at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, first, you probably see the giant work “Massachusetts Chandelier” (2010) made from underpants of the artist’s friends and on them, a projection of moving colorful images. Underpants, Rist says, are the temples of the abdomen: “This part of the body is very sacred, the site of our entrance into the world, the centre of sexual pleasure and the location of the exits of the body’s garbage.” This is basically Rist’s approach in a nutshell, or “it’s both life and death, both beauty and ugliness.” And this is exactly what makes her work so very intriguing, the missing disctinction between good and bad, pretty and ugly, useful and useless. Everything has its value (or none) and everything is worth a closer look. And Pipilotti Rist surely takes an intimate look at all kinds of things with a special focus on plants and body parts, without shame or timidity. On the contrary, Rist seems to find beauty in everything; “approving the glory of life, approving the wonder that we exist – that is a good aim,” she says. Is that corny?

Perhaps. But if, after you have seen one of Rist’s works, your heart is not filled with joy about the “brilliance of life”, you might like to check if you have one.

It’s probably the mix of beauty and ugliness that prevents Rist’s often dream-like video installations from becoming too easy for the viewer. One moment one is enjoying the sight of a

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“FILLED WITH THE BRILLIANCE OF LIFE”

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107 Yayoi Kusama 1965 Courtesy of Victoria Miro Gallery, London and Ota Fine Arts, Tokyo © Yayoi Kusama, courtesy Yayoi Kusama studio inc.

Photo: Eikoh Hosoe

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Yayoi Kusama Self-Obliteration No.2, 1967 © Yayoi Kusama and © Yayoi Kusama Studios Inc.

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Yayoi Kusama Kusama posing in Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show 1963 Installation view, Gertrude Stein Gallery, New York 1963 © Yayoi Kusama and © Yayoi Kusama Studios Inc.

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1. Pipilotti Rist Foto: Giorgio van Arb Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth 2. Pipilotti Rist, Digesting Impressions, 1993 Audio-Video-Installation Installation view, STAMPA, Basel/CH Foto: Walter/Spehr Courtesy Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York

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3. Pipilotti Rist Administrating Eternity, 2011 Audio-Videoinstallation.

Installation view Pipilotti Rist: Augapfelmassage, Kunsthalle Mannheim 2012.

4. Pipilotti Rist: LungenflĂźgel, 2009 Audio-Video-Installation (Videostill) Courtesy Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York 5. Pipilotti Rist: LungenflĂźgel, 2009 Audio-Video-Installation (Videostill) Courtesy Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York

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6. Pipilotti Rist, Massachusetts Chandelier, 2010 Video-Installation Courtesy Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York 8 7. Pipilotti Rist, Selbstlos im Lavabad, 1994 Audio-Video-Installation (Videostill) Courtesy Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York

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8. Pipilotti Rist, Vorstadthirn, 1999 Audio-Video-Installation Courtesy Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York 9. Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All, 1997 Audio-Video-Installation (Videostill) Courtesy Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York 9 5

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10. Pipilotti Rist, I Couldn’t Agree With You More, 1999 Audio-Video-Installation (Videostill) Courtesy Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York 11. Pipilotti Rist, I´m Not The Girl Who Misses Much, 1986 Sammlung Kunsthalle Mannheim Courtesy Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York

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12. Pipilotti Rist: Eyebal Massage Installation view, Hayward Gallery Lap Lamp, 2006 Courtesy Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York Foto: Linda Nylind 13. Pipilotti Rist, YOGHURT ON SKIN – VELVET ON TV, 1994 Installation view, Hayward Gallery Foto: Linda Nylind Courtesy Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York 14. Pipilotti Rist, YOGHURT ON SKIN – VELVET ON TV, 1994 Installation view, Hayward Gallery Foto: Linda Nylind Courtesy Pipilotti Rist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York

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15. Pipilotti Rist Lungenflügel, 2009 Audio-Videoinstallation, Loop 15:36 min.

Installation view Pipilotti Rist: Augapfelmassage, Kunsthalle Mannheim 2012.

Foto: Cem Yücetas 16. Pipilotti Rist Lungenflügel, 2009 Audio-Videoinstallation, Loop 15:36 min.

Installation view Pipilotti Rist: Augapfelmassage, Kunsthalle Mannheim 2012.

Foto: Cem Yücetas

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17. Pipilotti Rist Lungenflügel, 2009 Audio-Videoinstallation, Loop 15:36 min.

Installation view Pipilotti Rist: Augapfelmassage, Kunsthalle Mannheim 2012.

Foto: Cem Yücetas

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18. Pipilotti Rist Massachusetts Chandelier, 2010 Videoinstallation, Loop 5:32 min.

Installation view Pipilotti Rist: Augapfelmassage, Kunsthalle Mannheim 2012.

Foto: Cem Yücetas

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Ekrem Yalcindag well-formed breast, the hollow of a knee or the bright colour of a flower, and the next, one wonders if that beautiful red is of blood (probably) and if that obscure form might be an anus (it most likely is).

Before you know it, the image has turned into something else altogether.

Impressions from the Streets 2. Sept. - 7. Okt. 2012 Kunsthalle Bremerhaven

Major themes in Rist’s body of works consist of being human and being present. Since the artist wants us to be comfortable while being human, alive and present, she builds large sofas or provides cushions and pads to lie on while watching “The Lobe of the Lung” (2009), for instance, a large-scale installation on show at the Kunsthalle Mannheim. The ideo consists of images of organic material (tulips, tongues, piglets) that seem incredibly familiar and utterly unknown at the same time.

While Yayoi Kusama often states that she wants to obliterate the world with her polka dots – which are “a way to inifinty” – Pipilotti Rist aims to find new perspectives on our irrevocably finite lives.

“The idea is,” she says, “that now we’ve explored the whole geographical world, pictures or films are the new, unexplored spaces into which we can escape.” Both artists seek alternatives to the conventional perception of life, one through a decidedly limited repertoire of forms (dots!), and the other, through explorations of endless forms and things. Yet, both offer the viewer a chance to experience something special: his/her body within an environment meant for him/her, connecting the artist’s thoughts and experiences directly and intuitively, rather than intellectually, with those of the viewer. Obliterating, escaping, being filled with the brilliance of life – no matter how you call it, it’s happening in this world and makes an experience to remember.

Yayoi Kusama Tate Modern: Exhibition 9 February – 5 June 2012 Pipilotti Rist Augapfelmassage (Eyeball Massage) Kunsthalle Mannheim 25 March – 24 June 2012

Barbara J. Scheuermann works as curator in Berlin and Brussels. In Berlin she runs the art project space Babusch. Before she moved to Berlin in November 2008, she had worked as curator of contemporary art at Tate Modern, London, and earlier as assistant curator at K21, Düsseldorf, and Haus der Kunst, Munich.

Her doctoral thesis (2005) analyses narrative structures in contemporary artworks using as example works by William Kentridge and Tracey Emin. In her curatorial work and her writings she mainly focuses on video and installation, questions of narrativity, performativity and gender as well as on the discourse of postcolonialism and multiculturalism. As independent writer and art critic she has contributed, and still contributes, to numerous international art magazines as well as to exhibition catalogues and other publications.

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Impressions from the Streets 2011 Öl auf Leinwand Ø 80 cm courtesy Kai Middendorff Galerie www.kunstverein-bremerhaven.de

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IN 1970, AT THE AGE OF 34, Frank Stella who profoundly influenced numerous later generations of abstract artists had his first retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 2012, the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg has staged another retrospective – the most comprehensive one since 1995. Frank Stella personally chose the works on display and decided about the set-up.

Back to the formal turning point in the oeuvre of Frank Stella Following the MoMa show, Stella increasingly turned toward Cubism and Constructivism, in particular Malevich. At the end of this creative period, Stella stated: “Nothing much has changed in the externals of my life. But while I was painting the Protractor pictures, I felt I was coming to the end of something in my work. I really did want to change, and wanted to do things that went beyond the methods and systems that underlay my paintings until then. (...) That the new work could be contradictory and good is what makes the life of an artist exciting.” (William S. Rubin, Frank Stella, 1970 – 1987, p. 14) Out of these considerations, Stella developed the Polish Village Series, named for the wooden synagogues built between the 17th and 19th century that were destroyed during the Nazi occupation. Other than themes covered by Malevich, Popova and Tatlin, William Rubin also detected a literal connection to Constructivism: “The relationship to Constructivism has also to do with Stella’s literal building up (or ‘engineering’) of the pictorial object.”

In this exhibition, works such as “Requiem for Johnny Stompanato,” 1958, works from his Black Paintings Series such as “Moro Castle” and “Tuxedo Junction” are joined by early geometrical works like “Ilfafa II,” “Bafq,” works from the Protractor Series such as “Khurasan Gate I,” “Paradoxe sur le comedien,” 1974, some from the Diderot Series and his beginnings in relief works, and works from the Polish Village Series like “Ostropol III,” 1973. This line-up is complemented by works produced during the time Stella turned towards relief works: besides the Polish Village Series, there are examples from the Indian Bird Series (Bonin Night Heron, 1976), the Moby Dick Series (The Grand Armanda (IRS, No. 6,1X), 1989), the Cones and Pillars (Bene come il sale, 1987) and the large sculpture “The Broken Jug. A Comedy (D#3) (left handed version)” of 2007.

In the period following on the Polish Village Series, Stella increasingly worked into the room, with works such as the Indian Bird Series, the Moby Dick Series, the Cones and Pillars like “Lo sciocco senza paura” (1985). In the 1980s, Stella commented on these works: “Mathematicians talk now about figures of 1.78 dimensions or 2.3 dimensions,” (...) “Pictorial space is one in which you have two-dimensional forms tricked out to give the appearance of three-dimensional ones, so that the space you actually perceive comes down somewhere in-between ... I work away from the flat surface but I still don’t want to be three dimensional; that is, totally literal . . . more than two dimensions but short of three so, for me, 2.7 is probably a very good place to be.” (William S. Rubin, Frank Stella, 1970 – 1987, p. 77) William S. Rubin described the expansive, baroque reliefs as Maximalism to distinguish them from the minimal painting of his early days.

On the first floor, from which visitors can get a clear idea of the structure of the museum’s architecture as well as the positioning of the works, Stella’s architectural models are shown.

His “Chinese Pavillion (model)” (1993) and the “Constantini Museum (model), Buenes Aires” (1999) are displayed on pedestals opposite the painting “Basra Gate I” (1968) from the Protractor Series.

Basra Gate refers to the four gates of the City of Bagdad. So in fact, an early painting whose title indicates an architectural theme actually encounters tangible, architectural designs. A cursory glance at the semi-circular composition of “Basra Gate I,” with orange at the center, followed by grey and dark green, evokes the impression of a draft of a model city in its juxtaposition with the architectural models.

This Maximalism is transferred to the architectural setting. Frank Stella had been friends with the architect Philip Johnson since the 1950s. Stella gave his “Draft for Dresden: the space ‘Die Herzogin Garten mit Kunsthalle’” from September 1991 to his friend Johnson, who realized a personalized version of the draft in the garden of his Glass House. Shortly afterwards Stella designed – on his own assignment – the “Chapel of the Holy Ghost (model)” (1992). Stella is also befriended with the architects Richard Meier and Santiago Calatrava. For his latest project, “The Michael Kohlhaas Curtain” (2008) in the Mies van der Rohe building of Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Stella collaborated with Calatrava: There, Stella’s monumental painting was combined with a supporting construction by Calatrava.

A VIEW OF AN EXHIBITION AND A CONVERSATION WITH FRANK STELLA

TEXT IN GERMAN. TRANSLATED BY MICHA O. GOEBIG AND CHRISTINE LIESE-SCHIKANEDER TRANSCRIPTION OF THE INTERVIEW BY SABINE BOEHL

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The “Circus of Pure Feeling for Malevich” is presented on several tables. “Kazimir Malevich once said that abstract art was able to convey pure feeling … However, what I do here is play a trick on both Malevich and Alexander Calder – Calder made a three-ring circus – what we do is a foursquare tables! (Laughs)” (Frank Stella in an interview with Maddalena Kröner, 2011).

Leaving this presentation behind, the visitor reaches a cabinet with works on paper by Frank Stella. Here, designs have been swiftly jotted down on paper with marker, pencil, ball pen, pastel crayon, and color crayon. These “Drawings are diagrams ... It’s a beginning, a plan, I go from there,” as Stella noted at the press conference on his paper works. All of his paper works are on loan from the Kunstmuseum Basel’s Kupferstichkabinett that had published “Frank Stella Working Drawings 1956-1970” as early as 1980.

Following the Polish Village Series, in the 1990s Stella focused his work on the motifs of the Brazilian beach cap and cigar smoke, which he had photographed and documented from various aspects and angles and transferred into three-dimensional models. “I got hung up in the beginning; building a painting became the issue: building the painting, building the sculpture, building the building—that became a kind of leitmotif. I was looking to get away from that by using smoke as a source of image and form but unfortunately I didn’t, because that ended up being the problem of building the smoke. (Laughter)“ (Frank Stella in an interview with Saul Ostrow, BOMB 71/Spring 2000, ART)

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Frank Stella at the Kunstmusem Wolfsburg Photo: Sebastian Wulf

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FRANK STELLA-THE 2.7TH AND FURTHER DIMENSIONS

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Frank Stella Ostropol III, 1973 Mixed media on cardboard 234 x 268 x 43 cm Sammlung Henkel Photo: Jack Richmond © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

Frank Stella Bene come il sale, 1987 Mixed media on aluminum 238 x 227 x 157 cm Sammlung Henkel Photo: Jack Richmond © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

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Frank Stella Lo sciocco senza paura, 1987 Mixed media and painted etched magnesium on aluminum 266.7 x 215.3 x 163.2 cm Sammlung Froehlich, Stuttgart Photo: Marek Kruszewski © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

Frank Stella The Grand Armada (IRS, No. 6, 1X), 1989 Painted aluminum relief 315 x 186.5 x 99 cm Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel Photo: Robert Bayer, Basel © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

121 Following the press conference for the Frank Stella retrospective at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg on 5 September 2012, I had the opportunity to talk to the artist.

SABINE BOEHL Dear Mr. Stella, first of all I want to thank you (Frank Stella laughs) as an artist as well as a writer for the magazine Res for giving me the great opportunity to talk with you about your exhibition and your artworks.

FRANK STELLA Okay.

Smoke The term “sfumato” directly translated also means “gone up in smoke.” A synonym is “svanire” (evaporate).

The term was used to describe the painting technique used by Leonardo da Vinci – to create an atmosphere with soft, cloudy contours. The fleeting, permanently changing rings of smoke were transferred by Frank Stella into solid steel compositions. Referring to Leonardo da Vinci’s sfumato, Frank Stella points to the sculptural quality of painting: “What Leonardo does (...) is to spin off the shadow of modeling, creating a sense of atmospheric softness that gives way in turn to a kind of magical sculptural impressionism. The result is a pictorial ‘rounding’ of space that paves the way for Caravaggio...” (Frank Stella, Working Space, p.

6, Harvard University Press, 1986).

SB My first question is: You are now doing a retrospective. (…) In 1970 you had your first retrospective at MoMA, at the age of 34. Is it in your view back a conclusion of one working period?

FS (…) in 1970, I don’t know it was... It was nice, I mean actually it had a big advantage, I think in some way -yes that I felt that- well, now I have done this -I can -it was kind of- I don’t know if that will happen here- but it was a kind of sense of freedom- I can do anything I want now. I don’t have to worry about it anymore, about what I was doing.

SB After this you started your relief works with the Polish Village Series.

Etymology Etymology in the context of linguistics refers to the origins of word, or the origin of a word and its history.

The work “Etymology (Q-10)” is part of the Moby Dick Series, created by Frank Stella between 1985 and 1987.

The first chapter in Herman Melville’s novel “Moby Dick” is titled “Etymology;” and the derivation of the word “whale” is presented in these first pages, referring to the relation between the words round, roll and whale. “Whale Sw. And Dan. Hval. This animal is named from roundness or rolling; for Dan. Hval is arched or vaulted.” The front of “Etymology (Q-10)” by Frank Stella appears at the same time both floral and chapped.

Steel and aluminum, smooth surfaces in the outer area, followed by a honeycomb structure and reflecting metal in the center collide. Is this an etymology of Stella’s painting/sculpting? Form, color and light are highlighted in this work that is reduced to grey and silver hues. And grey, grey is the color impression that appears when you mix all primary colors at equal shares.

Markus Brüderlin, the director of Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, who during his time with the Fondation Beyeler in Basel initiated the exhibition “Ornament and Abstraction” in 2001, which juxtaposed Frank Stella’s works with those of other abstract artists of the ornamental tradition, wished to stage the Frank Stella retrospective coinciding with the show “Ornament – Outlook to Modernity. Ornamental graphics from Dürer to Piranesi.” Brüderlin compares the formal design development history of Frank Stella’s works with ornamental forms: “In Frank Stella, the history of abstraction interlocks with the history of ornamentation.”

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In the catalogue, Brüderlin contrasts Albrecht Dürer’s Knots with Stella’s Black Paintings, and the rocaille with the shapes in Stella’s aluminum reliefs: “Stella’s shaped aluminum sheets can be regarded as enhanced technoid offsprings of the interchanging surface elements of framing scrollwork and filling cartouches.” (Catalogue, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Frank Stella, p.111) Frank Stella, who relates to the tradition of the art of the Renaissance and thus the unity of architecture-sculpture-painting, objects to this comparison: “This is Markus Brüderlin.” From early on, Stella saw himself in a context with Tizian, Caravaggio, and Rubens; as well as Kandinsky, Mondrian, and Malevich. He considers himself an artist in the definition of the Renaissance where there was no separation between the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture.

FS Yes. SB What was the reason to start with this?

FS I think it was a kind of obvious, a way of just starting again. What was something I was interested in and something that wasn’t quite the same as what I have been doing before.

SB Yeah, but you went in one direction. So why did you went in this relief direction?

Was there any starting point, any idea about this?

FS Well it was a simple idea, but I mean the basic idea was that I would – you know -normally you have a painting or a surface and you make a painting on that and in this case I felt that I build my own painting first and then I paint it. So, make it sort of all mine from the very beginning.

SB I read in your “Painting into Architecture” catalogue: “If there is anything that characterizes Frank Stella’s protean career as a painter, it is the desire to break out of the canvas, to go beyond the limits imposed by a conventional two-dimensional rectangle within the frame.” Did you think about this possibility when you did stripe paintings like “Plum Island” or “Astoria” or “West Broadway” here in the show in 1958?

FS No, probably not, because I think it’s there. I mean you can see it in those pictures – I went from all the way across, all the time as trying to use the whole thing. And so at any point there is a certain logic- you know- that one of those bands could have gone of the edge and keep going.

(Laughter). So, some of it was there.

SB Did you think about volume in your work since you made the set for Merce Cunningham dance piece “Scramble” in 1967?

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As early as 1985, Frank Stella had digital three-dimensional models made of his “Cones and Pillars”. In the early 1990s, this process was finally put into sculpture, in the series “French Mining Towns,” the “Etang d’Ambach” (1992). Once again, Stella proved to be a pioneer with regard to a technique or technological procedure. Today, computer-aided modeling is not only applied in the arts, but also in architecture and design. Peter Halley notes in his catalogue statement on the Wolfsburg retrospective that Stella used digital tools even before the architect Frank Gehry did. But not only Gehry, also young fashion designers like Iris van Herpen apply computer-aided procedures – in this case to create dresses via 3D printer.

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123 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Frank Stella Bonin Night Heron I, 1976 Acrylic on aluminium 275 x 350 x 65 cm Museum Ludwig, Cologne/Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation Photo: © Rheinisches Bildarchiv Cologne © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

Frank Stella West Broadway, 1958 Oil on canvas 200 × 231.5 × 7.2 cm Kunstmuseum Basel Photo: Kunstmuseum Basel, Martin P. Bühler © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

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125 SB As I understand your works, there is a sort of linear development from the beginning to the black paintings series as pictures as well as objects to dart, relief structures that grow into the room.

Is it that linear?

FS I guess. I don’t know where it is. I look at things but I don’t – I mean of course I get postcards and stuff like that- I have something. And of course I have books with pictures. But I don’t personally collect what I see. Or preserve what I see.

SB So you have all in your mind and you recombine impressions and other visual effects directly?

FS Ultimately you can trace a line. But the line goes more like this (Frank Stella makes a gesture of waves on the table)

FS Yeah- I don’t think about it in that way. I mean I do see after a while that I say: Oh I actually I know where that came from. Well that idea that I had seen before.

SB So it is more of a zigzag?

SB Once you described art as marks on surfaces... If we keep in mind Lascaux, Chauvey, Catalhüyük up to Renaissance frescoes and contemporary art. How important for you is the relation to former works in art history?

FS Yeah, yeah more of a zigzag. Because you do double back a lot. You go in a way and then you say well maybe back here is good, or you could go this way. Sometimes you have to go back to go ahead, too.

SB In an Interview with David Sylvester in 1965 you said: “Sometimes some of the titles seem to have an expressive quality and that in their sound or the way they look maybe people will see something in the way they want to”. Titles are often relatetd to cultural places like Asia Minor (nowadays parts of Anatolia), or Baghdat (Madinat As-Salam) like Khurasan Gate I, 1968 here in the show (the Protractor Series) as well as Hacilar, Çatal Hüyük (early Neolithic settlement) (Çatal Hüyük (level VI B) Shrine VI B.1 2001).

What is the reason for this connection to one of the roots of culture, as we know it?

Is there any?

FS Yeah I think there is. There is definitely a relation to Çatal Hüyük. (…) Çatal Hüyük is a particularly interesting place, in a lot of ways. One of which is that it appears that you enter from the top and you drop down into the space. And in the space there are both –paintings and – essentially- furniture and sculptures. So it looks though it’s a livable space in which everything that I did in separate was once all together. So it was painting and sculpture and architecture (Laughs) all completely integrated actually in a very elegant and simple way.

SB So it touched you because of the whole space?

FS Yeah- the whole idea of it!

SB And did you grasp out quotations (...) like single structures, like ornaments?

FS No. I just really worked with (...) Most of those pieces I made for some reason. (…) I made in the sand. I mean and then I poured metal in the sand and then painted on that.

FS It’s pretty strong. I mean I try not to worry about it. But I mean I also (…) it’s also a relieve or a satisfaction. You know, it’s nice to know that in a way the notion of making art is a kind of organism and you are only a small part of as it grows all the time. And then you get very excited when you are involved in the enterprise of art –right, which is going on everyday. So you have that, but you also have the larger line to follow. So it’s nice to have something comforting to belong to.

SB And- If there was any artist dead or alive, lived before, that you could meet, is there any person or artist you would meet - like in science fiction- you can say: Oh I want to meet Caravaggio…?

FS No, I would be too embarrassed, I mean there are lots of works I would like to see. I would like not so much to meet the artist. I would not mind having a little – but it seems like a voyeur or something- I would not mind to see them actually work a little bit. Not much- if someone would send me a little clip of the actual studio of the activity of painting- yeah.

SB So you were more curious about the way they work?

FS Yes. Yeah. Yeah.

SB Ad Reinhardt, the artist who ended up with black paintings, while you went the other way round, asked himself: “Perhaps in Islamic architectural decoration there might be the first awareness in history of art-as-art …”

What do you think about that?

FS I’m not quite sure if I understand it. But basically the “art as art” is – you know- is as bad as good as “what you see is what you see”. I mean it’s obvious. (Laughs) Art is art and it’s not gonna change.

SB You have been working with repetitive geometric structures. How far do you feel related to the tradition of ornament?

SB Do you have an archive with images of art or places that touched you in some way?

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FS No. I never have taken a photograph.

SB Is it all in your mind?

FS I mean ornament exists and I like it. The question is: one, to enjoy it for yourself and two, what are the – it’s a funny word to use- “abstract” possibilities of ornament, you know. (…) Ornament is tricky. I mean from the beginning we don’t really know what ornament really means in some senses, particularly early on, early geometric forms. A lot of times you see a little thing:

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FS No, the real change came round 70s when I started working on the Polish Village pieces.

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127 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Frank Stella Ifafa II, 1964 Metallic powder and acrylic on canvas 197 × 331.5 × 7.5 cm Kunstmuseum Basel Photo: Martin P. Bühler, Kunstmuseum Basel © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

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Frank Stella Tuxedo Junction, 1960 Enamel on canvas 310 × 185 × 7 cm Van Abbemuseum Collection, Eindhoven, Netherlands Photo: Peter Cox, Eindhoven © VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2012

129 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Frank Stella Bafq, 1965 Fluorescent alkyd on canvas 238.8 x 274.3 x 10.2 cm

Frank Stella Basra Gate I Magna on canvas 304,8 x 609,6 x 10,2 cm

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concentric circles -right?- with a dot in the middle and someone would say that’s decorative. But maybe the guy had an idea about– you know before Kopernikus, when he was drawing.

SB There have been a lot of different ideas of that – Cosmologies. Çatal Hüyük, Anatolia One of the oldest archaeological urban cities

FS Yeah.

SB Depiction of paradise etc.

FS Yes. SB But nowadays as a free form it’s different- do you agree?

FS Yeah.

SB Some of your series refer to titles of works of literature like those of Italo Calvino, Hermann Melville or Heinrich Kleist- in which sense are they related to your work?

FS In the simplest way: The ambition on to dramatic. But anyway, the idea is that abstraction has a few more possibilities than we give it credit for maybe and that having the advantage of using forms and building shapes and everything you can create of vocabulary that works visually in the sense that it seems to give the impression of narrative, that you can have, you can tell a visual story. That’s all about itself- it’s all visual.

SB In your shaped canvases and relief works like the Polish Village series you used wood and plywood. For “Severinda” fiberglass, for the Michael Kohlhaas Curtain you showed in Berlin, tarpaulin. How do you choose your material or image carrier after having left the traditional form of canvas?

FS Well I continue to choose other than canvas, because I really don’t want to stretch canvas anymore. (Laughs) But different materials do different things. Like plywood gets heavy after a while and carbon fibre is very expensive but it’s very light and strong.

SB Victor Vasarely once said: “Every form is a base for color, every color is the attribute of a form.”

So what is your next aim after getting more and more into architectonical forms?

FS I think the forms were always there. (…) I consider form, form. I don’t have to ascribe the form to painting or ascribe the form to sculpture or ascribe it to architecture. I think I just settle for the conventional Renaissance idea of fine art so it’s painting, sculpture and architecture and anybody can do it.

SB So it’s the Renaissance idea of art you have?

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FS Yeah. Yes I think so. They are interchangeable essentially.

Frank Stella Chapel of the Holy Ghost (model), 1992 Cast stainless steel 78.7 x 86.4 x 83.8 cm Photo by Steven Sloman © 2007

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Frank Stella, Çatal Hüyük (level VI B) Shrine VI B.1 2001 Aluminum pipe and cast aluminum 246.3cm x 322.4cm x 231cm

Frank Stella Etymology (Q-10), 1990 (Moby Dick-Series) Aluminum and steel 241 x 223,5 x 139 cm

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SB Agnes Martin’s “Advice to Young Artists” was: “The life of an artist is inspired, self sufficient and independent (unrelated to society).”

(Fully: „The life of an artist is inspired, self sufficient and independent (unrelated to society.

The direction of attention of an artist is towards mind in order to be aware of inspiration. Following inspiration life unfolds free of any influence. Finally the artist recognizes himself in the work and is happy and contented. Nothing else will satisfy him. An artist’s life is an unconventional life.

It leads away from the example of the past. It struggles painfully against its own conditioning.

It appears to rebel but in reality it is an inspired way of life.“).

So what would be your advice to young artists nowadays?

FS I can’t give advice. I mean- I don’t agree with Agnes either- I mean you are part of the society – do the best you can! Do best and hope for the best!

SB “Do the best and hope for the best”. That’s a really nice last statement. Thank you Mr. Stella.

The show „Frank Stella - Die Retrospektive – Werke 1958-2012“ at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany lasts till 20th of January 2013. On show are 63 large-format works an 82 works on paper through all working periods of Frank Stella. Opening hours: Tuesday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays closed.

In the English and German catalogue are contributions by Holger Broeker, Markus Brüderlin, Gregor Stemmrich as well as statements by Michael Fried, Santiago Calatrava, Sarah Morris and Serge Lemoine, among others.

For further information’s: http://www.kunstmuseum-wolfsburg.de/exhibition/

Frank SteIla, born in Maiden, Massachusetts, in 1936, lives and works in New York City.

Frank Stella studied between 1950-1954 at Phillips Academy Andover. After receiving his Bachelor in History in 1958 he moved to New York. In 1959, he was included in the exhibition, “Sixteen Americans”, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He showed his Aluminium Paintings, the earliest shaped canvases, in his first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1960. After many shows in museums and galleries he was shown at XXXII Venice Biennale (1966) and Dokumenta 4 (1968). Stella had a full-scale retrospective at MoMA in 1970 at the age of 34. In 2010 he received the 2009 National Medal of Arts.

Sabine Boehl, born in 1974 in Darmstadt, Germany. Lives and works in Düsseldorf and Istanbul. Between 1995 and 1999 she studied painting at Hochschule für Gestaltung, Offenbach and 1999 and 2004 at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In 2004, 2005 and 2006 she exhibited at Galerie nächst St. Stephan, Rosemarie Schwarzwälder, and in 2008 Kunstverein Arnsberg. In 2009 she was an artist in residence in Istanbul, 2010 at Künstlerhaus Schloss Balmoral, Bad Ems. 2011 she had her solo show at Dirimart. Between 2001 and 2004 she was writing for the online art magazine Kunstmarkt.com, since 2009 she is a regular contributor of RES.

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Q&A WITH GISELA CAPITAIN

BY PAOLO COLOMBO

PAOLO COLOMBO Were you a student of art or art history?

GISELA CAPITAIN When I moved to Berlin in the early ‘70s I was fascinated by the political consequences of the ‘68 student protests. I therefore started to study philosophy and sociology but changed two years later to German and mathematics so I could become a teacher. I didn’t study art or art history.

PC How significant was coming into contact with Martin Kippenberger in your decision to open an art gallery?

GC Martin Kippenberger was my first and most influential contact with contemporary art. In fact, he was essential. We met in 1977 and in 1978 he asked me to be part of his ‘Kippenbergers Büro’ in Berlin Kreuzberg where he wanted to present himself as an entertainer, a manager, and an initiator of all kinds of projects in the Berlin art scene of the time. His model for this Büro was Andy Warhol’s Factory. During the years 1978 to 1980 I became more curious about contemporary art and also more knowledgeable. Even more importantly, those years defined the style of my relationships with artists. I was confronted with Kippenberger’s method, which was to work hard, to be continuously creative, to produce a lot, and to party intensely; at the same time I was confronted with his extremely demanding and extremely generous character. After being taught by him, I felt prepared when I met his artist friends, and I was also able to learn more from the artists I got to know later on.

Gisela Capitain and Martin Kippenberger in “Martin Kippenberger. Petra” Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, 1987 Photo: Martin Lutz

PC Who were the first artists you represented? Do you still work with any of these artists?

GC I opened my own gallery in Cologne in 1986 and started to work with Werner Büttner, Günther Förg, Georg Herold, Hubert Kiecol, Martin Kippenberger, Zoe Leonard, Albert Oehlen, Stephen Prina, Franz West, Christopher Williams, and Christopher Wool. I still work with all the American artists as well as with Günther Förg and the estate of Martin Kippenberger.

PC You have been particularly faithful to your artists. Many of them have had shows with you over the years. Your trust in their work has remained unchanged: a number of artists you represent are among the most relevant for today’s art practice. Tell me about (reciprocal) trust with artists. (Three words will be enough!).

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GC Like in a good relationship between two people it is all about communicating; it is about the kind of language you choose.

Capitain Petzel, Karl-Marx-Allee, Berlin

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139 GC Because of my first experiences with Kippenberger, I have always been interested in very complex, intelligent, and formally challenging work with a good sense of humor (even though Christopher Williams would deny the last).

PC How has the situation changed for artists in Cologne since you opened the gallery?

GC Cologne is still an important place for artists to show because of the many museums and institutions in the Rheinland that, together with local collectors, build an extremely well informed and critical audience.

PC What is the role of the gallery you share with Friedrich Petzel in Berlin, in regards to the gallery in Cologne?

Kippenbergers Büro, Berlin, 1979

GC Berlin provides a prominent platform for all the artists we work with, but in the future it will develop its own program as well.

PC Can you think of an exhibition – any exhibition, anywhere in the world, at any time – that you walked out of with a sense of elation, your spirit completely free, as if you were walking on cloud nine?

GC Actually, so far three exhibitions have made me feel as though I’m walking on cloud seven, as we say: Zoe Leonard, Observation Point at Camden Art Center, London, in 2012 Jorge Pardo, Prototype at Dia Art Foundation, New York, in 2003 Martin Kippenberger, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s ‘Amerika’ at the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 1994

Paolo Colombo has been an art advisor to the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art since 2008. He was one of the curators of the 3rd Thessaloniki Biennial (18 September–18 December 2011). From 2001 to 2007 he was the curator of the Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo in Rome. He has been associate producer of a number of award-winning films.

Gisela Capitain. Born in 1952, studied at FU Berlin. 1977-80 Büro Kippenberger in Berlin. 1983 -85 Assistance at Galerie Max Hetzler, Cologne. Since 1986 Galerie

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All photographs: Courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and The Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain Cologne Installation view, Christopher Wool, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, 2003

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PC All of the artists with whom you work have a clear vision and a distinct body of work. Yet there are a number of similarities, and one feels there is a gentle and discreet complicity with you. To the outside viewer, no work by any artist you represent seems sentimental – one recognizes a degree of toughness and reserve, mixed with an impeccable formal sense. I also sense an overall visionary approach (for example, I find Uwe Henneken’s work visionary and not about lingering youth; I feel Jorge Pardo’s work is about the utopia of a democratically refined architectural/social space; in Charlene Von Heyl and Christopher Wool’s work I detect a belief in the absoluteness of the practice of painting). Please forgive this generalisation: am I misreading the nature of some of the work you represent?

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DO YOU REALLY WANT TO GET WHAT YOU CAN’T POSSIBLY WANT? ON DEFNE AYAS’S ENDEVAOURS IN ART AT LARGE

FATOŞ ÜSTEK FATOŞ ÜSTEK Dear Defne, it is a pleasure to have this interview with you. You are working literally all around the world, occupying significant positions such as curator at large for Performa, New York; co-director for Arthub Asia, Shanghai; recently you have been appointed as director of Witte de With, Rotterdam. First of all, how do you cope with your cross-continental presence?

DEFNE AYAS Thanks, Fatos. Funny we are meeting this way. To answer your question, tons of telegraphs in the form of e-mails and SMS’es, SKYPE calls, FB notes shower me every day. In a strange way, the more I try to reduce carbon emissions, the more there seems to be a demand for flights and my physical presence. It is a phase, I think, because of the recent appointment. It shall pass. Plus I am also questioning the “why” and the “for what” as my appetite withdraws. In the meantime, my Ayurverdic Indian Goddess, my Brazilian housekeeper, my Wenzhounese hairdresser, my British landlord and his French hypnotist wife, The Consul General of our land, who is almost the king in the country, my foodand coffee-advocate Dutch friends, Hong Kong dimsum palaces nearby the office as well as my most patient man – still in Shanghai, they all do their best to keep me anchored in this non-city of Rotterdam of 160 languages and a dramatic 22% illiteracy rate.

FÜ Ah, sounds all very amazing. In a way your presence in trans-national contexts also feels amplified in your locality as such! How were you first interested in art? Have you inherited your interest from your family?

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DA I grew up in fertile soil, you are right. In the backstage of a newspaper, and a children’s theater, under the editorial desks of a few cultural magazines, covered with the mind-numbing perfumes of a medical clinic, in the midst of demonstrations of the budding Green Party movement in Turkey, in the privileged and massively subsidized sand beaches of military resorts. My mother is a writer and seducer of many artists of modernist ilk. My dad was a dentist who loved Joseph Beuys for his politics and was the last President of the Green Party in Turkey, which got shut down. My adopted dad comes from a lineage of Ottoman Grand Viziers, and yet he is a relentless anti-establishment crusader, a journalist who ended up being closely watched and listened to by the establishment in a pervert kind of way. People don’t know this but he is a great cartoonist with a great sense of humour. As a result of my upbringing, I have never been one to be impressed by headlines or spectacle. I saw very early on how achingly difficult creation and expression can be, how quickly optical illusions can take form via statements, how political relationships can get in creative environments, and the only way to move forward is to move forward and just follow your gut and principles. But then the irony is when I wanted to study art history, both my parents said “no, don’t bother, there is no use to it.” So here you go. In that sense, they were not any different than supposedly-non-intellectual parents. They didn’t know any better that you could continue existing when you follow your own desires. But then who knows, perhaps they are still right in their own way.

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Installation shots of the Blind Dates Project All images courtesy of Pratt Manhattan Gallery and Blind Dates Project

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FÜ I think following your own desires requires such strength. On the one hand you cannot be yourself if you do not follow them, while on the other, there is always the challenge of not meeting parental expectations. I wonder if most parental expectations are set to employ rather protective environments or most desires involve artistic endeavours.

DA I think desires are related to what you think will allow you to simply expand - be it on intellectual, financial, artistic, or physical grounds. I took a long route to find this fire in me, more so because I had to figure out what I exactly wanted to take form. I just had too many interests, and I still do. It took me a few back-steps and some adventurous leaps of faith to get forward.

FÜ I share the same state of mind with you. I think being interested in far too many things brings such a wealth, while at the same time you keep rocking on and on as you initiate and accomplish projects. I must add that this makes things harder in a way that you cannot define yourself in a singular channel of production. In other words, being interested in far too many subjects makes it a challenge for people to relate to your practice, let alone define your territory of signification.

DA It is not only we who are interested in many topics. You have to be able to distil multiple stories and histories at the same time all the time, to know enough about Aristophanes and Daoism but also Dr. Dre and South Park to be able to pique and move people’s interests. There is definitely a public responsibility attached to all of this. You are lucky, because you also get to think and write a lot.

FÜ To me, your practice seems to evolve around commissions that encourage creation and artistic expressions, which in a way draws parallels to your portrait of growing up. In other words, I am wondering if we could cast bridges between your experiences of creativity at early ages, let alone the articulation of one’s self through things with your invested labor in working with artists along commissions all around the world, significantly for Performa, New York.

DA In a way it is the case for all producers and curators. In my case, I see my job as a collaborator cultivating the seeds of the work of an artist and enabling all sorts for transactions for the public, while respecting the artist’s mind, source and creation process. As with commissions, the interpretation has to be somewhat guided. We are committed to steering interpretation but also to carving spots of platforms for making art a conversation generator. We are here to intervene in the gap between consumption and creation.

FÜ How do you choose artists or your collaborations? Do you follow your inner voice? Would you say it is rather intuitive?

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DA Artists are anything but indifferent: they are engaged with their materials, contexts, and ideas on a continuing basis. I work with artists who appreciate the generosity, reciprocity, and curiosity of a peer, who can let others be their accomplice, be it in the part of research, production, presentation or knowledge-production. I prefer to work with artists who are interested in social transformation, who believe in the potency of art, who are able to exercise and manifest their intelligence in more than one way. Ideally the collaboration should share some intellectual sparks, and magic, and also the belief that the sum of our parts can be stronger than each of our parts. When working together, I like to cultivate a good journey of short circuits and long-term conversations.

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Installation shots of the Blind Dates Project, Pratt Manhattan Gallery All images courtesy of Pratt Manhattan Gallery and Blind Dates Project

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Xu Zhen Long March Project - Xu Zhen, ln Just a Blink of an Eye,2007. Photo by Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa, Long March Project, and James Cohan Gallery.

Sislej Xhafa Sislej Xhafa, Yellow Associates in Motion,2005. Produced by Performa in association with Yvon Lambert New York for Performa 05. Photo by Paula Court.

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FÜ This is such an elaborate position, to approach collaboration as symmetry of a peer while the outcome is more than the quantitative togetherness of both parties. I also agree that creative friction is a necessity. There is an additional dimension to that of collaboration, especially when you commission an artist for a new piece. There, you involve the notion of trust while accepting to take the risk.

DA Not really elaborate, is it? And I agree with you. Trust is key. Trust is the birthplace of anything that you want to flow. Being able to make sharp decisions and draw the force of life towards creation and presentation is also essential. Artists’ desires can be enhanced, expanded, and challenged - that’s where collaboration comes about. When taking on a pilgrimage to go through the ideas of the artist and their collaborators, this cannot be encapsulated within a neutral setting, personal input certainly kicks in. You have to be able to act selfishly and collectively at the same time to be able to do this.

FÜ It is quite a fine line, to sustain the progression of a prolific collaboration while at the same time not fall into the lapses of ego-drives. In this regard, what is the nature of your relationship with art? Do you fall in love with art?

DA I love the artist’s agency to reach in and out, through and within. Artists take us into the layers, cracks and crevices of the unknown, omitted, or forgotten, sometimes into the most fraudulent histories of a country, sometimes into the speculative and wildly imaginative, sometimes even to the magical reality of the stars. It takes us sometimes years to find fully satisfying artworks, or admirable artists, but then once we do, aren’t we eternally struck? That’s what makes us going, I guess.

FÜ What is an encounter? What do you expect an encounter to contain?

DA Perhaps an initiation? To a path within you, albeit untapped by you before, which is enabled via the agency of another who, on their path, asked for the same.

FÜ Hmm, you add the unknown for both parties into the equation. Let us think about the notion of encounter in the realm of art. I have a feeling that your practice amplifies the significance of encountering art –be it in the content production of Performa and Arthub Asia as well as in your new position as director at Witte de With. In other words, your curatorial practice has not really been about generating static displays of artworks in dedicated white cubes, but rather as an event-based practice that manifests itself as a series of processual engagements.

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DA I am all for a perpetuation of different collisions, encounters, introductions, and driftings. That’s what Arthub Asia was all about. It was a fragile exercise. The question is eternally about how we can align with the life force of artists and art-making, that’s why I have mostly focused on live work while at Performa. Now that I am responsible for a major institution and its building, I will embrace it as a place that will be half something and half something else, for instance half church for connections and transactions, and half think-tank for thought-provoking knots, oscillations and activations across humanities. Art can be a facilitating force through the crisis of humanities. Here, the exhibition will still remain as a center, holding many centers and gravity points simultaneously, with explicitly imbedded collaborations. But then, I don’t think I can dwell on structures and process too much either, as the audience’s patience is also getting more limited.

Ozkaya 2 Serkan Ozkaya, Bring Me the Head Of...,2007. Photo copyright Paula Court.

Courtesy of Performa.

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FÜ The patience of the audience plays quite a significant role, I reckon. Especially if we consider the fast-paced indigestive encounters that are encouraged by art fairs that keep growing in quantity, and large-scale museum shows that simplify the formulation of subject matter. Moreover, the presence of the Internet and increasing usage of search engines in our daily life introduces another habitual parameter, that is: Scanning through rather than delving in.

DA That’s why live work is so critical and essential. You cannot zip the live experience. You have to engage with it and with the ideas put forth. You cannot escape it like you would a video. But to this day, solid works are capable of gluing you in, no doubt, despite Windows, despite Google Chrome. But then I am now getting even more interested in “creation” itself, pre-performance, preproduction, pre-live momentum, and how ideas are being conjured up and distilled.

FÜ Your approach to museums from the position of modern temple brings forth the challenge of the role of the curator, let alone the artist. Can museums be different from temples? Can artists or curators play a role in this?

DA I am a fan of the idea of “museum without walls” for sure. With Performa, we were zealously cross-pollinating museums that were usually in competition with each other for the “higher good”. Now as you know, museums are starting their own performance departments. And the deep secularization experienced in Europe for sure allowed the function of the church to be replaced by an atmospheric museum, which is in perpetual crisis as an entity, and is being only salvaged by the rescuing arms of local, national, and international tourism agencies as well as educational outreach via broadcast machinery at the moment. Gerardo Mosquera, adjunct curator of the New Museum circa 2003, thought a museum should be a hub for cultural partnerships channelling new art and ideas from all around the world, which sounds no-brainer after eight years. But at the time, Museum as a Hub was a ground-breaking idea, and I worked on it in my junior capacity at its inception, with the Curator of Education at the time. Its embrace was quite microscopic at the beginning. My experience from within was that even a non-collecting museum leadership was purely into blockbusters, and justified its existence only by numbers of attendance and press coverage it received. Now that I am within four walls at a Kunsthalle, I believe we need to form other forms of criteria for validation for places as such. Its catalytic function in the humanities, which is one of my main focuses right now via Erasmus and Leiden University, and its potential impact in the long-term cannot be measured by numbers only.

FÜ What kind of exhibitions do we need right now? What voices do we need to hear?

DA For me the redefinition of European core values in the next two decades is a major focus, be it through the defence lines of Islam or China. Defences make us who we are at the end of the day and have to be carefully threaded, and I think agency remains within those in-betweeners, culturally shuffled, psychologically challenged. I also agree with you that artists have a big role to play in this, so I am putting them back in the center of the map. I asked artist Heman Chong to moderate a pipeline between Hong Kong and Witte de With, and invited A A Bronson to curate a show with us next year in 2013.

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FÜ This sounds very exciting. Could you tell us a bit more on these two projects? Additionally, what do you envision for your programming? What do you think will be more amplified during your years?

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Asli Cavusoglu Asli Cavusoglu, Words Dash Against The Façade,2011. Photo by Paula Court.

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DA I’d like to, but it’s too soon. Slow-cooking is a major focus, I can tell you that. Especially in the case of Alexandre Singh’s The Humans, which is evolving over a year, allowing us to get into the tissues of the key topics that drive the artist’s work and mind such as cosmogony, cosmology, pictorial satire from Daumier to the idea of mountain in art and literature. This slow-cooking is combined with a dynamic program that works with select artist propositions from all around the world to expose and refine the European lines of what is causing defensiveness in the continent…

FÜ What is your relationship with history? What do you seek when you seek?

DA I studied history, but I also grew up seeped in it. I am smitten by all of its dysfunctions. And I attract it to my path like a magnet. Lippmann, Rosenthal & Company -the Jewish looting bank story I worked on when at de Appel Curatorial Program- for instance fell onto my lap like a divine intervention. I met the former owner of the building, a Woody Allenesque character, by chance while I was marvelling at the building on a street corner. I didn’t know that his little appearance next to me would change my life that year as well as my perception of Dutch history in a blink of an eye, and take me on a journey from the renowned late writer Harry Mulisch to the Auschwitz records at the National Library in the Hague, from conversations and research at the War Documentation Center (NIOD) and Sotheby’s in Amsterdam to the resistance of the ABN Ambro’s managing partners. All this eventually made me invite artist Michael Blum, who was trained as a historian, to tackle all these findings, and in him I have found a true collaborator.

FÜ In a former article by the Armenian Mirror Spectator, you have elaborated on history as a purposefully constructed reality: “History is always written with a purpose, with an agenda, and there’s often a discrepancy between the history of the establishment and other versions that have been left out because they didn’t fit in a given regime’s agenda. Maybe this platform can allow for alternative points to be made, either in order to de-construct an existing myth, or to build up a non-existing narrative.” This is quite a strong positioning of relating to reality as it is and as is articulated. Could you briefly tell us about the Blind Dates project, for which this article was published?

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DA Under the title Blind Dates: New Encounters from the Edges of a Former Empire, thirteen new collaborative artistic projects were launched at Pratt Manhattan Gallery in November 2010. The exhibition, together with a series of related public programs which began five years prior to its opening, provided a rare platform, particularly in the North American context, for both artists and non-artists, who were curatorially “match-made” to tackle what remains of the legacy and rupture of the Ottoman Empire (1299-1923). The Blind Dates Project was conceived by me and Neery Melkonian in 2006, upon the invitation of a committee formed by people who were investing in exploring forms of dialogue on the Turkish-Armenian axis and who wanted to do something with art, but didn’t know what. The project is built on the premise that the empire’s abrupt rupture and its violent reformulation into nation states have their lingering effects on life to this day. One could also argue that the current struggles in Egypt, Libya, Iraq, and Palestine as well as the modern formation of the Armenian and Greek Diasporas are largely linked to this particular historical moment in question. Add to that a corresponding amnesia and perversion of historiography or continued denial of catastrophic events in Turkish politics today.

Until now interested audiences have mostly relied on academics, politicians, even literary traditions to learn about this underexplored yet highly nuanced topic. Even though Ottoman Studies have been in existence in leading Western institutions for decades, only recently have we begun to witness non-

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Qiu 2 Long March Project - Qiu Zhijie, The Thunderstorm is Slowly Approaching,2007.

Photo by Elizabeth Proitsis. Courtesy of Performa and Long March Project.

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formalist or critical scholarship on related subjects. We trusted the task of “unlearning and relearning” to an international roster of established and emerging artists including Ahmet Ogut, Jalal Toufic, and Nina Katchadourian, and practitioners, and encouraged the integration of other fields of knowledge production within their inquiries, i.e., architecture, philosophy, anthropology, and dance.

FÜ What else influences you or moves you?

DA Deep politics as such. Deep knowledge as found rarely in people. What moves me is a desire for awareness and expansion, along with the prospect of creation, and co-creation, as within my job.

FÜ What has drawn you to performance? Is it its potential of tackling issues of duration, temporality, marked space-time experience? Or what?

DA Performance as a medium is essentially about “live”ness, politics, everything human. I remember becoming interested in performance in high school listening to bootleg Laurie Anderson tapes sold in Taksim Square. I went to the Austrian high school in the heart of Galata, next to a brothel. It was an all-girls school, filled with nuns, and somehow it all worked out for me. And then I got into the visual art scene -into contemporary art- during my freshman year in college in Philadelphia. I had to write a paper about the Robert Mapplethorpe/ NEA situation, Cindy Sherman vs. Madonna. I became obsessed with performance.

Depending on what the project is, you can find yourself in the midst of a production with a number of lawyers, venture capitalists or strip-teasers in New York, astrophysicists and Old Testament scholars in Rotterdam, punk-bands, Cultural Revolution experts, and experimental drummers in Chinese opera, straight singers in Norway singing songs of male-to-male love. I was lucky to also work with art historian RoseLee Goldberg, whose commitment to performance was indeed pioneering for all.

FÜ In this regard, would you support the current tendency of turning away from object-based exhibitions as a way of initiating collaborative processual structures and at the same time as a way of avoiding market domination?

DA For sure. Everything I have worked on was part of this collaborative ilk, but it is my experience that the market always finds its way in. One way or another. This has been so historically and will remain so. What I am finding now is that there is an increase in market agents such as dealers and collectors who are far more adventurous that artists and curators of my ilk. Fascinating times indeed.

FÜ How do you relate to your new condition of working within the physical walls of a space - running an institution rather than commissioning experimental live art?

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DA It is a special place, this Witte de With. Admittedly, it is one of the best white cubes in the world.

I get requests from China for its floor-plans and blueprints. Yet even my best intentions to be outside of it at times, have to be negotiated with its walls, with its institutional weight. The art of exhibition-making remains at its core for sure. All of a sudden it is a new dimension of politics for me, with the added Matthew effect of course.

Performa lnstitute, Ragnar Kjartansoon,2011. Photo by Elizabeth Proitsis

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Qiu Zhijie, Blueprints. Installation view. Photography Bob Goedewaagen

Qiu Zhijie, Map of Utopia, 2012. Courtesy the artist.

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FÜ Who is Matthew?

DA This refers to a line in the biblical Gospel of Matthew: For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken even that which he hath.

* Question asked by Defne Ayas during our e-mail and facebook ping pong.

Defne Ayas (b. 1976) is the Director and Curator of Witte de With, Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam as of January 2012. Before that, Ayas worked as a director of programs of Arthub Asia and as an art history instructor at New York University in Shanghai. Ayas has also been a curator/programmer of PERFORMA since 2004, the biennial of visual art performance based in New York City, where she has managed the biennial’s collaborative partnerships with a consortium of eight+ cultural institutions across New York City and (co-) organized acclaimed projects and programs with an international roster of artists, architects, curators, and writers. She remains a curator-at- large at Performa.

Defne Ayas completed De Appel Curatorial Programme in Amsterdam and received her Masters degree from ITP – Tisch School of the Arts at New York University, and her MA in Foreign Affairs and Studio Art at University of Virginia.

In September 2012, Ayas is curating the 11th Baltic Triennale (with Benjamin Cook, LUX), and 2012 Shanghai Biennale’s Istanbul city pavilion.

Fatoş Üstek Independent curator and art critic, from Istanbul, currently based in London, UK. She is a member of AICA TR; guest tutor at Vision Forum, Linkopings Universitet, Sweden; regular contributor to art magazines and publications. Ustek is a member of OuUnPo, leads La Duree with Per Huttner and Infra with Anna Gritz under the framework of Vision Forum. She is the editor of Unexpected Encounters Situations of Contemporary Art and Architecture since 2000 (2011) and author of Book of Confusions (2012).

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