RES No.6

ART WORLD / WORLD ART NO:6 NOVEMBER 2010

RES Art World / World Art is proud to present its sixth issue since beginning its journey in September 2007. RES set out with the objective of casting a glance at world art from a broad perspective by integrating critical pieces by gallerists, artists, curators and writers. Published by the contemporary art gallery Dirimart from Istanbul; RES has been traveling art fairs and art events around the globe.

Concluding its third year, RES is proud to announce a great list of contributions and in particular several illuminating and engaging interviews. Opening this issue is a very special interview with Franz Ackermann by Pelin Derviş, conducted during his recent visit to Istanbul, the conversation follows him on his path from soccer to Tate Britain and beyond. Another inspiring contribution to RES from Hans Ulrich Obrist introduces for the first time in English his discussion with 11th Istanbul Biennal artist Hamlet Hovsepian. Looking at the more commercial side of the art world Burcu Yüksel catches up with Amanda Sharp as she prepares for her seventh Frieze Art Fair, while Janine Schmutz speaks with former Art Basel Director Sam Keller.

Continuing with our aim to include artistic statements in RES, for this issue Clemens von Wedemeyer crafted a specially composed piece that brings together research and ideas that have fed his My City public art commission for the city of Mardin. RES is also proud to unveil a commissioned collage work by Tobias Rehberger, made during his recent stay in Istanbul.

You can subscribe for the hard copy of RES or access the pdf version of the current issue as well as previous issues by visiting our website www.resartworld.com. We also look forward to receiving your feedback.

We hope you enjoy this sixth configuration of RES and please look out for us at upcoming art fairs and art events so that we can meet in person!

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EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

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CITIES, JOURNEYS AND MENTAL MAPS; AN INTERVIEW WITH FRANZ ACKERMANN INTERVIEW CONDUCTED IN ENGLISH, TRANSCRIBED BY O⁄UZ ERD‹N

PELİN DERVİŞ I was influenced by what Robert Schäfer - the editor in chief of Topos magazine - wrote in his article “Landscape” that appears in a publication entitled Crucial Words. He wrote: “What is landscape really? This simple question will not permit a simple answer. Instead, any answer says more about the person replying than about the subject. The essence of landscape can only be discovered, created and formed through brainwork. It is difficult to communicate about landscape without first defining the concept…” Now, knowing your work, thinking about your mental maps, I would like to raise the same question and ask: What is landscape?

FRANZ ACKERMANN Landscape, of course, is a term in painting. With painting I mean an aspect of illusion, a two dimensional thing which went through centuries like a form of emancipation. For example Hans Memling, one of the earliest painters, when the subject of landscape in his work became focus. Making a big jump to Rembrandt where landscape became very important at the end of his career. Then, up to Piet Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie” which is a plastered piece that shows the New York City landscape in a very modern way, as a pattern… So, hopping through the centuries, landscape is not a homogeneous, closed, iconographic thing anymore. For me, it was very clear that something is missing: interruptions, forms of disorientations, scratches, accidents, even tortures to landscape, whether they are natural, artificial or urban. And I think, what Mr. Schäfer quite nicely explains for me is that we all face the situation where we like to live in the urban constellation. We have to live in urban constellations but on the other side we are trying to be more and more individuals. So a city, an urban living as a form of ideal community is facing the conflict that everyone becomes very egoistic or individual. So on these two poles, we face our upcoming problems. For me it is rethinking these things on a two dimensional level and why I want to bring them back on a lucid level is that these conflicts are visible first. They are not only sociological effects but they are also visible and that’s why I started and still continue making art.

PD Thank you. So let’s go further back.

FA Ok… PD You were born in Neumarkt?

FA Yes, Sank Veit.

PD Sank Veit? This is in Bavaria?

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FA Yeah.

Franz Ackermann during installation time at Städtische Galerie Altötting 2009

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5 FA Yes! PD (Laughs) Would you please talk a little bit about that? The reason why I ask is to try to understand the seeds of your art, whether it arises from these years or not…

FA Regarding my biography, I always say with a laugh, that I can’t compete with a huge biography in terms of growing up in a township or any kind of these pressures... It was a nice childhood in a small village. One hour east of Munich, I grew up with 2 sisters and 2 brothers, a big family.

PD Ah, so you were 5?

FA We were five and it was a very traditional situation. The main focus of my brothers, my dad and myself was playing soccer every day. I don’t know why I started looking at artworks but when I turned 14 or 15, I started reading books and looking at plates, of Salvador Dali and Rembrandt.

I went deeply into etchings of Rembrandt and Hercules Segers for example. So there was this kind of a rhythm besides school, playing soccer, and at the end of the day, being in the cellar and developing etchings of my own. My dad was astonished, got a little bit angry and shocked at the end of school when I got the allowance to study art at the high school in Munich (Akademie der Bildenden Künste). And he looked at me and said “What? What did you do? What are you doing?”

And I said that’s what I’ve been doing for five years in the cellar. And for the first time he ran down to the cellar and he looked at the small studio, it looked like a small printing cabin. So, all the etchings and all the stuff I’d developed my own, this was the starting point. Still today, when I do wall paintings with my brother, a lot of the terms come from soccer. We say “Oh what a weak artwork! We are still 2-0 back but it’s not even halftime” and stuff like that (laughs) … From Munich I started traveling to all these museums. Hitchhiking was the main transportation. I went up to the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, I went to The National Gallery in London - always by hitchhiking - and back when school continued.

PD Do you remember any museum, exhibition or a moment that influenced you at that time?

FA Yes, for instance, I remember that I slept at a bus stop in Copenhagen the day before I went to the Louisiana Museum. I walked over there. It took half a day and I was deeply impressed with the landscape and the first Giacometti sculptures I saw. I thought simply “That’s it!” What a wonderful situation. All these modern art sculptures… Marx Ernst sculptures, all this freedom... For me it was just freedom from where I came from. And I started recognizing cities more or less at the age of 14 or 15. It sounds really strange but for a lot of young people cities are already boring and annoying.

For us, it was going to Munich! Watching a soccer game was still a big event. Going to the city for a full day, or staying overnight was a big thing even when I was already 17.

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PD In an article I remember reading that for you travel is a categorical necessity. Thinking about your work, this seems obvious. I am interested to hear about it, especially starting from Hong Kong where you produced your first major series of mental maps. What were the reasons that initiated such a focus? Why Hong Kong for instance as a starting point?

FA I started studying in Munich and just by chance it was very classically oriented: lots of drawings and paintings. I come from the printing side. Today, you can still see that my paintings have strong graphic aspects. I never denied that because I already knew that I didn’t want to bring an authentic form of emotion or any kind of gesture onto the surface of a painting. So for me, a sport with a ball was much more convenient or convincing than doing gestical paintings. But I learned it and I learned a lot about it in Munich. Studying in Hamburg (Hochschule für Bildende Kunst) brought these conceptual aspects into my artwork. Until today I feel both aspects are very important. When I finished in Hamburg, there was a chance to apply for a small scholarship in Hong Kong. It was quite funny because I applied with a reason to go to a new city where I didn’t understand the public signs!

So in these days I made a lot of work based on emblematic questions, the significant questions about Saussure, and going to the new structuralist side from Roland Barthes and all these analytic things.

With a small scholarship of 500 Euros per month in Hong Kong, unbelievable. I hopped over there and 10 days later I was already in front of a Burger King store selling tickets! This was the start in a big new city and it was so refreshing, I felt so free. I made short trips to New York, to London… And suddenly the cultural clash in Asia took place. I started rethinking about my work in terms of simply the city, fun, nature, tourist attractions, friends, how to survive, how to find the party, a place to stay at night. A lot of English people were down there in those days and I learned a lot by surviving not with a low budget but with no budget! After almost half a year of looking through the signs in Hong Kong and then neon lights, collecting newspapers, photographs, postcards, I came back to the question that even the photographing the city is not enough.

PD It’s not enough?

FA It’s not enough. I felt a form of emptiness. A desire to go on more profoundly and I grabbed an empty notebook, some papers from a cheap Chinese store and started redrawing certain aspects of where I liked to be in Hong Kong, where I hated to be… the forbidden city was still out there. For example there was a huge architecture that impressed me. So I redesigned and redrew that in my small cabin. We were 14 young people in our dormitory for the first 7 months. I couldn’t afford anything else but even the teachers with a job were there so it was really fun. And these were my first notes. From the beginning I called them mental maps. Later on I’ve heard that this term is something already in sociology. I didn’t mind. Until today, it is a 13 to 19 cm piece of paper which follows me as the main backline in my work. Even here today in Istanbul, I have these sheets with me, this is like breathing for me. And then from that point I came back overland, another half a year of traveling, going by boat to Shanghai, traveling all the way with the Trans Sibirian express, stepping out one month in Ulaanbaatar, then in Minsk I got kicked out from a train and there was no other train anymore.

PD Why? FA For my whole trip back from Beijing to Berlin I only needed 95 US dollars. Can you believe that?

That’s what I learned from other travelers: you should only travel in the country side between the borders and cross the country on bridges. That’s what made it so cheap but in Minsk, I was on the train station for two and a half days. Emptiness and only Russian people and suddenly I got woken up, two guys with Kalashnikovs – I know it sounds really adventurous - they offered me tea and pulled me up and said “Now!” and suddenly a huge train came and it was an incredible long one like in Australia but it was completely empty. They pushed me into this train and they gave me…

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PD Would you please tell us about the environment that you lived, about soccer, about your family?

Do you have brothers and sisters?

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7 From the exhibition at Kunstmuseum Bonn 2009

Propeller Installation view Kunstmuseum Bonn 2009

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Altermodern Tate Triennial 2009 Tate Britain, London

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9 PD When was that?

FA 1997… From playing intense soccer to being at a point that Kasper König is interested in showing my watercolors was only 6 to 8 years. It was a very proud moment for me but it was just… I still didn’t know why these watercolors could be of value. There was a very important gap between finishing studying and traveling. Today it seems to me that a main thing for students is to finish studying and already knowing a gallery partner. For myself, traveling after studying, the sketchbooks, the photos, the first mental maps all this stuff came up step by step from the beginning.

Portikus Installation view Frankfurt am Main 1997

PD Food?

FA Not food but bed sheets. And then there was quietness and we were on the Frankfurt/Oder border in two days and they kicked me out. I didn’t know what was happening then but I knew I was at the German border. I stepped out, the police asked for my passport and then I learned this was the train that brought the Soviet army from Berlin back to Russia. The withdrawal of the troops was agreed and I was part of world history (laughs). I was the only one in that direction…

And then, just by chance I met Tim Neuger in a podium discussion, I made some comments and he looked at me and said “What are you doing?” and I said “I just came from the other direction!” He was in LA and learning the gallery job at Luhring Augustin Hetzler and he said “What do you do?” I said “I am an artist” and he said “I plan a gallery”, I said “Great!” So we started together in 1992 with the first show after Jorge Pardo did the design of the gallery. He introduced me to some friends: Elizabeth Peyton, Keith Edmier, Rirkrit Tiravanija.

PD From the cellar!

FA Yes, the main important thing for me to communicate today is a fax machine and everyone in America remarks “a fax machine!” (laughs) And on that dialog, I have the works on paper which bring me through the cities, the canvas which is stiff in the studio and the wall; architecture related interventions which bring the unknown to a fact are permanently shifting in value, right? Last year wall paintings became 100% of my daily work. For example “Wait” in London, then “No Roof But The Sky” and in between, the huge show in the Kunstmuseum Bonn, which was around ten times bigger than the “Wait” installation…

PD Let’s go back to Kasper König. How did it happen?

FA I was in Berlin. One day in the morning he stood in front of my door and said “Hello, I am Kasper König” and I was just coming back from partying. I had 10 sheets of paper on the table. He is one of the most fascinating curators I’ve ever met. This kind of curiosity, this kind of professional interest. I just would love to see that more of the young curators would follow his track. The pictorial, the elusive questions about our world… More paintings, more watercolors in the worldwide biennials would be nice.

PD But your work does not merely consist of painting?

PD And you kept your focus on that and continued traveling, visited other cities and other countries and so on. What happened afterwards?

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FA This stay in Hong Kong for such a long time with a low budget made me mentally independent and today I’m not focusing too much on certain standards or values. I don’t need these and they actually make me crazy. This is a very subjective thing. The interest in my work started with Tim Neuger and Burkhard Riemschneider who joined him to open the Galerie Neugerriemschneider. So now, someone was asking me about work every single day. Suddenly there is a third aspect. This is something that later on as a teacher I always repeat: there is time to create your own life beside your artwork. You travel on your own, privately or with friends, go to a party or to a soccer game without thinking about a mental map.

But you’re also doing your research while traveling with your small watercolor tools… This third aspect - showing the result somewhere - was a very important experience. I created one major work without

FA Exactly, because I know the weight of painting and its failures. I know what kind of belief I can set up and demolish in a painting. So taking a closer look at how I install a painting in a space, it becomes logical that other parts like television, video clips, the material installation structures are necessarily involved where I think the painting structure of this thing is weaker. So think about the early conceptual pieces of Joseph Kosuth for example, a painted chair, the definition of a chair and the “real” chair, so, text, image, physical object. I am not painting all these facts of the whole work like I did in my installation at the Tate Britain. Classical sculptors, friends and colleagues of mine, they would jump out of the window after witnessing how I act three dimensionally.

PD You are using different tools to express your conceptual ideas.

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knowing what it would look like. For example my first trip to Brazil, we didn’t know what kind of paint was around. We only had car paint from an old garage and still today it looks quite interesting. Going public doesn’t mean that I know exactly what I’m bringing with me. Intervening immediately wherever I am. And this was a step by step process because I didn’t have any experience at being quick or acting professionally… One of the first important shows was with Kasper König at the Portikus in Frankfurt.

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11 RES NOVEMBER 2010 my private retrospective Installation view Kunstmuseum Bonn 2009

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Wait White Cube London 2010

Living-Dying Kunstmuseum Bonn 2010

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13 RES NOVEMBER 2010 From the exhibition at Kestner Gesellschaft Hannover 2008

Volcano Oil on canvas 280 x 435 cm 2010

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15 PD I am curious to hear a bit about your generation, in terms of influences and interactions. Other artists, literature, music, academia etc…

FA The fall of the Berlin wall cannot be repeated in terms of teaching it, the students in Berlin have to wait for another event to feel it! (laughs) What happened in Berlin was an accumulation of huge energy to all directions. We know that compared to other cities working and living in Berlin is cheap, you can have a studio. But there was no structure at the beginning. Suddenly, with Galerie Neugerriemschneider, Klosterfelde and Galerie Neu, there were 3, 4 galleries that started showing young art in relation to the established former western galleries. And we talk about 4 to 6 galleries and not over 400 like it is nowadays… Once, we met in the cellar a strange artist called Manfred Pernice. He was making small models there, came one floor up and showed them at Galerie Neu. All these artists were around. Music, literature and it was a very intense time which more and more people joined very rapidly. Berlin is a party city now and a fun city for all generations. It’s a tourist city. I got gentrified 3 times from the studio which is a very normal thing. So now we have this kind of almost hedonistic attitude in relation to art. A lot of galleries, museums, you just can’t do them all. Other cities in Germany underestimated the soak to Berlin, they are not well represented in the media as they should be. I still think Munich is a big scene, Cologne, Düsseldorf is a very important scene. And we will see what happens to Berlin. Maybe we all get tired there and we won’t see the quality anymore…

movement and its reverse. This was the first experience to change the attitude and it’s not by chance. It is important for me. I took a look at the corridor pieces of Bruce Nauman, to Robert Morris’ cages, minimal art. I studied a few months with Dan Graham in Hamburg. All these things were very important for me to learn and to analyze how I can focus on my own interest and necessity of work. So that’s why these “Evasion” pieces stayed separate beside the “Mental Map” pieces because I didn’t want to bring them together for the first years. Step by step, it became the issue of ‘size’ because I wanted them to be physical in the painting. These big paintings with one color field, this classical goddess of modernity, right? This end of modernity in my view was planned for the corridor. So it was intended that people are more in the canvas, in the color field to enjoy the piece rather than being far away. I’ve already seen the color fields in paintings 50 years ago. The color fields are going over a silhouette or a figure. Form and color are not linked together anymore but they have complete freedom. Plus, physical movement. So, these things brought me to this moment when size is a very important physical note. Size, in terms of immaterial surface. Also the show at the Kunstmuseum Bonn, a very large space with huge wall paintings in relation to oil on canvas paintings are in the same room. I call this attitude of making architecture “my small chapel”. It looks like a small Renaissance chapel… Architecture becomes a complete illusion and watercolors fitted there as one and only form of cosmos. Coming back to the beginning topic of landscape, after almost 20 years of doing watercolors, I now have the tools to melt everything together. I am in Istanbul today with one pen but I feel free. I can observe the city, I can analyze, I can decide to install something here without using anything I ever did before or I can go up into my hotel room and make a small mental map. So I am “emancipated” by my own tools. I like this idea a lot and I learned it a little bit, a fuse of what Graham described to me about how to watch, how to analyze and how to focus on certain aspects.

PD (Laughs) Maybe it is time for the fourth…

FA (Laughs) Fourth gentrification. I have a countryside storage studio, one hour south of Berlin. But the fourth permanent gentrification is staying in other cities for a month, instead of three days. It is only half a year that I am in Berlin, mostly for the big canvases and in the other half of the year I am out installing and making watercolors.

PD You have been presenting your works in solo and group exhibitions since 1991. I don’t know the exact number but the list is long! What’s the importance at exhibiting your work to the public?

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FA The audience of course, the visitor, the people who stay in front of a canvas and look at the painting, this classical thing. I followed and watched openings of my shows. I thought that this attitude related to artwork is still one of the most profound forms of looking at something. It’s a 1000 year contemplation. If you think about mental maps, you have to walk from one map to the other. Put your nose very close to the things. What happens if I confront them with a huge canvas where they have to stand in front of them? That’s why in the beginning I called them “Evasions.”

They have to travel with their eyes. Experiencing the physical movement becomes a visual

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The Rock Installation view Mixed media, works on paper Kunstmuseum Bonn 2009

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FA And there is an open thing far away from having a reference, having the question of identity. It’s just like being on stage - the theatrical aspects that you can use today and the next day use something else for a new thought. I always like this idea: not to be identified by a wall painting. There is a short video clip in the installation at Tate Britain. A huge hub of world flags and besides a small clip of a Western, where James Coburn asks Bob Dylan as an actor, “Who are you?” and Bob Dylan answers as a young cowboy “That a good question!” It’s a very interesting constellation, in the context of the movie he is a young boy who is very good at throwing knives. This was a symptomatic title for the whole installation that identity, individuality, being famous or being anonymous…

17 untitled: Mental Map 13 x 19 cm 1994

PD I am also curious about the future; what is the point that you are moving towards? What do you have in mind?

FA What I already mentioned is the confrontation in my daily work: I have a big part of analog material and through daily life and communication, a big part of digital material. So, what I started already in the mental maps or in the paintings I once worked on are becoming a collage of certain different neighborhoods. These days I am convinced that if I confront an experience in Istanbul with a mental map that I started in Rio de Janiero, it is no longer a homogenous landscape, which you’ll follow. It is a topographic thing, which reminds me in Istanbul the landscape in Rio. There are aspects that are different of course but there are things that are very similar. I bring them together as a conflict with the use of language. We are talking now but this conflict is based on letters and sentences, in one media. There I insist on the quality. I sometimes bring a drawing in relation to a black and white shop - which is very documentary - and bring that together with the oil painted facade of a building. So, something very impossible is functioning in my eyes and this is a form of freedom. Of course, you are pushed forward to questions about media, composition, color, form. These traditional terms are all becoming questionnaires in terms of their own neighborhood.

I am not melting it down I think. So, I got the feeling that it worked very well. It’s not an abstract painting in terms of an abstract question of form and color. It is a reference to our life but it is sometimes strongly coded and sometimes strongly clear. It looks like the map from Los Angeles but sometimes it looks like a map from an unknown planet. So on that point, I’m really enthusiastic about getting up and saying to myself “Come on, go ahead! This is an interesting aspect in your work for the upcoming months!”

I have a lot of aspects to clear like: The question between the color and the black and white photograph, what it means to our photographers. What it means to our oil and canvas surface. What it means to a colorful wall painting in relation to the black and white photographs. And of course I can work on them while sitting at the Bosphorus, having a cup of Turkish coffee (laughs)… It is thinking in images. And it’s a lot of work!

untitled: Mental Map 13 x 19 cm 1995

PD Shall we talk a little bit about your exhibition “Wait” at the White Cube in London? In the short interview that I watched you say that we can talk about “a new epoch of materialism which totally changed our attitude in urban living.” Adding that “if the visitor can’t wait I move faster”, you adopt the show for a need as such in a way making fun of “speed” that exemplifies your concerns you just mentioned. I would like to hear more about the conceptual framework of “Wait”.

FA I came up with this title as a part of a full installation in the basement. It is not possible to deny the economical aspects, especially in London and New York, about this crisis of materialism. How freaky is it that people are queuing up in banks… Surveillance and this panic situation, which is in the daily newspapers but is totally absent in any painting. As an artist I tried to bring in this physical aspect of my walking through the city, a portrait of the city in my own language. So, “Wait” started with this aspect of the seven sins like you see it in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and the medieval aspect about love, eternity… I showed a short video of a lot of lockers hanging along the railway bridge over the river Rhine. Couples who are in love put them there, locked them, and threw the key into the river: love forever.

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PD And “No Roof But The Sky” was 10 years ago a label from Marlboro.

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Mental Map: “on stage” 13 x 19 cm 1997

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19 Franz Ackermann was born in 1963 in Neumarkt St. Veit. His most recent installations include “No Roof but the Sky”, galerie neugerreimschneider, Berlin (2010) and “Wait”, White Cube, London (2010).

Pelin Derviş is an architect. She worked on various projects ranging from urban inventory to spatial and object design in her practice (1997-2004). While working as the director of Garanti Gallery -an institution based on urbanism, architecture and design- realized many exhibitions, events and publications (2005-2010). She lives in Istanbul, working as a freelance editor and curator.

No Roof but the Sky galerie neugerriemschneider Berlin 2010

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All photos © studio Franz Ackermann Credits: Reni Hansen & Jens Ziehe.

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FA Yes. Cigarettes got forbidden, the question of freedom in smoking cigarettes disappeared. It’s a very interesting thing. It’s something which is completely out of urban living. It’s still something and, “No Roof But The Sky” is a maximum form of freedom. On one side, totally commercialized by outdoor events and industries and on the other side, they had buried it. So it’s completely a myth, it’s completely over, it’s forbidden as a product, and it’s completely a utopian relevance. And that’s why “No Roof But The Sky” already shows up for the third time in my work cause it’s such a permanently changing association. Unbelievable but true…

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HRAIR SARKISSIAN ON CONSTRUCTION & CHURCHES

NOVEMBER PAYNTER How and when did you first encounter a church that had been adapted for a use other than religion?

HRAIR SARKISSIAN When I first moved to Amsterdam, I started to look for subjects that relate to me and to where I come from. So, my first encounter in this new city of shifting spaces were the temporary summer beaches that are open to the public in the summer and abandoned in winter.

This transformation of spaces was very intriguing and interesting for me as a starting point, and during my research into other similar circumstances I found churches which do not function as sacred places anymore, instead they are transformed into spaces for social events.

NP Did you first see a space within one of these churches that was sparsely lit or was that an action that you foresaw for the space and then created as an environment to photograph?

HS One of the main elements that caught my attention in these spaces was the darkness that created an ambiguity and curiosity for both the viewer and the photographer. They reminded me of the Armenian Orthodox churches, lit by narrow light beams penetrating through the windows, assuring a holiness and dispelling doubts. I didn’t add any action in these images, on the contrary I tried to keep their sparsity as close to reality as much as I could, which adds ambiguity to what are now non-sacred spaces and to their normality too.

NP “Churches” was the first series of work you produced in Amsterdam, but the photographs offer no clue as to where they were taken. Was this ambiguity of location important to you, especially in relation to the subject of religion?

HS When I first arrived to Amsterdam, I had difficulties in the beginning to start a project for my studies, at some point it became a challenge for me to create a work outside of my own territory.

However, it is important for me more than for the viewer, to understand that these churches were photographed in Amsterdam.

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NP In “Construction” Kapla wooden blocks are used to construct spaces, houses and structures that you have imagined and then made from the stories told to you by your family. The lighting effects in the series “Churches” seems to have inspired the chiaroscuro effects in this very different work “Construction”. The photographs take on an almost graphic quality, where the depths of field shift in and out of focus depending on how intensely the work is viewed, was this intentional and does it relate to your personal involvement with the content?

Churches (No.1) 2009 Courtesy Kalfayan Gallerie Athens, Thessaloniki

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HS When I started photographing the churches, I was very influenced by the absence of the light in these spaces, which evokes curiosity and conceals what is visible. I was influenced by the effect that darkness adds to our imagination and makes us wonder and question what we see.

So, for the “Construction” series I worked again with darkness and centered light. Because of the lack of information I have about each particular place I try to depict and to which in fact I have never been, it was important to isolate these structures from their surroundings and present them as individual entities.

NP Seen together the two series seem to compose the story of an empty stage-set that lacks actors and is timeless. Like many of your other photographic projects such as ‘In Between’ and ‘Unfinished’, these more recent compositions appear to both be waiting for inhabitation and completion, while they also seem to have been forgotten and now exist as spaces and memories that have been left behind. Is the condition of being ‘in between’ a clear definition or function something you are interested in within your practice in general?

HS The subjects in my work can be understood in different ways, because of their meaning or because they conceal something, a story behind that what is immediately readable and reachable to the viewer. Consequently, to be ‘in between’ is a condition in most of my works, the hesitation between what we perceive and what we don’t. In the meanwhile, I use photography as a medium to investigate the (in)visibility of a subject, a tool to search for clues or answers.

Coming to an empty stage-set, while taking a photograph in a space, I wait until the figures have disappeared from my view finder. For example, in the series ‘Underground’, the passengers waiting for the next train were forced by two policemen who accompanied me to hide behind the columns until my image was exposed. Eventually this presence/absence gave another dimension to the image itself, they are places where we imagine we can see individuals, but at the same we don’t see anyone at all.

Construction Construction (2010) is a series of images of different structures made of Kapla, the wooden block construction toy consisting of identically sized and shaped pieces of pine. Sarkissian constructed from his imagination the houses from his grandfather’s village, located in present day eastern Turkey, from where he was forced to migrate to Syria during the Armenian genocide in 1915.

Stories and images were the only tools people took with them to keep the narrative alive for future generations, and Sarkissian grew up with stories about this village, even though he has never been there, and has never even met his grandfather.

Churches The Churches series (2009) was realized in Amsterdam, a new and unfamiliar environment with different cultural coding. In Churches, the photographed churches no longer serve as sacred spaces, but have been turned into public spaces for social activities, such as reception halls, or music and dance clubs. By intentionally using only sparse natural light, these spaces are invested with a sacredness and atmosphere they no longer possess through their function.

Churches (No.6) 2009 Courtesy Kalfayan Galleries Athens, Thessaloniki

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25 RES NOVEMBER 2010 Churches (No.3) 2009 Courtesy Kalfayan Galleries Athens, Thessaloniki

Churches (No.11) 2009 Courtesy Kalfayan Galleries Athens, Thessaloniki

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27 RES NOVEMBER 2010 Construction (No.1) 2010 Courtesy Kalfayan Galleries Athens, Thessaloniki

Construction (No.2) 2010 Courtesy Kalfayan Galleries Athens, Thessaloniki

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Construction (No.6) 2010 Courtesy Kalfayan Galleries Athens, Thessaloniki

Hrair Sarkissian Born in Damascus (1973), Hrair Sarkissian studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam). Recent exhibitions: 10th Sharjah Biennial (2011); ‘Underground’ Kalfayan Galleries (Athens 2010); Thessaloniki Photobiennale 2010 (in collaboration with Kalfayan Galleries); 11th Istanbul Biennial (2009); ‘Disorientation II’ (Abu Dhabi, 2009-2010); ‘Unfinished’, Kalfayan Galleries (Thessaloniki, 2007 / Athens, 2008); ‘New Ends, Old Beginnings’, The Bluecoat Gallery (Liverpool, 2008).

In 2010 he did residencies at The Delfina Foundation (London) and at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center (Istanbul). He participated in the seminar ‘The lure of the lens in art practice and research methods. Cultural Heritage, Mobility and Visual Practices�, TATE Britain (2010).

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November Paynter is Director of the Artist Pension Trust, Dubai and an independent curator based in Istanbul. She has held the positions of Curator at Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, Istanbul; Assistant Curator of the 9th International Istanbul Biennial and Consultant Curator at Tate Modern for the exhibition Global Cities.

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31 art. I have been always interested in art as a whole. We were very far from any real, interesting art at that time. We knew that there was Centre Pompidou where contemporary artists displayed their work, we also knew about the biennial in Venice, and the Guggenheim, but they were only distant dreams. We were isolated from the rest of the world.

HUO In the 70’s you moved into cinema. I was wondering when your first contact with cinema was, and when did you make your first film?

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED IN ENGLISH, TRANSCRIBED BY DUYGU DEM‹R

HANS ULRICH OBRIST First of all, many thanks for accepting to do this interview.

HH I made my first film in 1975. The concept was there long before that, but that is when I got hold of a camera that year.

HAMLET HOVSEPIAN It’s a pleasure.

HUO And when did you start to think about the concept?

HUO And, congratulations on your films, which are a great revelation, an extraordinary discovery for me. I wanted to start from the beginning and can you tell me a little bit about how it all started. How did you come to art; did you have an epiphany as a child, or were there Armenian artists you were influenced by?

HH When I returned from the army. I really liked cinema. I was influenced by Luis Bunuel, Pasolini, Fellini, Godard, Chabrol, Truffaut… But they weren’t allowed to be shown in Armenia during the Soviet Union. We only knew about them through reading about their work. When I first saw “Á bout de Souffle” [Breathless] by Godard, it was already a classic at that time.

HH When I was young, my mother, who was a teacher at that time discovered my artistic talent. She told me that since I was good at drawing, it was essential for me to be educated, to see and learn about other artists’ work and talent. So she was the one who encouraged me to develop my talent and skills. My education was very strict, and I focused on art.

I knew more about art than life actually. I was on a constant quest to learn more about things in life because the environment, there was really nothing in it, it was a desert. I was a boy, living in a village, listening to Bach. And I dreamed about seeing and listening to [Karlheinz] Stockhausen.

HUO And when you started to think about your own films, in the 60’s, before you had a camera, what were you thinking, what was your first idea about your own movies?

HH I wanted to produce something, something that was boiling inside me. I wanted to show my feelings.

I have become a painter now, and it is a fusion actually between painting and cinematography. When I try to isolate myself from something, it infiltrates the other, they go hand in hand.

HUO At what age was that?

HUO So in the 60’s he started to think about films and in 1975 you got hold of a camera, so the first film you made must have been the most urgent one. So, the one where a person walks around a stone, is that the first one?

HH Seventeen, eighteen.

HH That came later on.

HUO I interviewed Stockhausen some years ago in his house and we discussed his light formula.

HUO What is the first one?

HH Soviet Union censorship used to insult Stockhausen and they did their best so that people weren’t encouraged to listen to him at that time, but it was his dream. When I first entered the world of art, it was influenced by Pop Art. Although I am an abstract artist, so far, until now, I really like Pop Art. HUO So what was it about Pop Art- because these are two very interesting references, Stockhausen and Pop Art- you have the conception of seriality in his music and in Pop Art you have another form of influence. Yet your work is more abstract, it is gestural painting. So I was wondering, when you started, at seventeen, when you were a young artist just beginning in Armenia, if there were any Armenian artists that inspired you?

HH “The yawning.” The very first film was the one with the bold head, before “The Yawning.” That is the very first film. It’s called “Head.”

HUO Can you tell me about the titles, because they are very simple.

HH I don’t like using titles. My films are very simple; they have no beginnings, no endings –as if time has stopped. Time is the duration of the film. The title is as simple as the film itself. I don’t really focus on the metamorphosis of the elements. It is just whatever you see.

HUO So it is matter of fact. It’s very concrete.

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HH Yes. HH I am talking about art in general, on an international scale. It started with Egyptian art, and Greek

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HANS ULRICH OBRIST IN CONVERSATION WITH HAMLET HOVSEPIAN

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HUO Is it not a metaphor, not an allegory?

HH As I was making the film, the film itself was destroyed, I had to throw it away, but I kept it. I kept all the smears, the blur, all the flaws. And these became the important elements of the film.

HUO But it is very painterly. It is a very painterly approach.

HH Yes, I also show the flaws of the film.

HUO You were mentioning American artists, but around the same time in Eastern Europe there were quite a lot of artists working with performance. You have Tomislav Gotovac in Zagreb, you have Marina Abramovic in Belgrade, and when I saw your films I could not stop thinking about performance art. Is this something you were connected to? Or maybe it is just my reading.

HH In the 70’s I was very isolated, I didn’t have any relation to any of the artists you mention. At the end of the 70’s I was in Moscow. I was talking about my films, and they were very interested, but no one saw them in Moscow. Moscow was the worst place to be.

HUO So you were in the capital, and that was the worst place?

HH The biggest avant-garde movement was in Moscow, but at the same time, censorship was also toughest there.

HUO So after “The Head,” what was the second film?

HH “The Yawning” and then “Itching,” the fourth one is “The Rock.” “The Yawning” is the thinker.

HUO So in the second one, “The Yawning” there is a man yawning, but then suddenly there is also a woman that appears. So how is that related?

HH There is no relation, no link. I connected the pleasant and the unpleasant images. I made them that way, and they stayed the way they are.

HUO They are brought together in the film; they co-exist in the film.

HH I took the footage separately and I put them together. I picked very absurd concepts, very unappealing subjects and I established a connection between them.

HUO Did you make them with the viewer in mind, did you think about the reaction of the viewer?

HH I never think of the viewer. You can show “The Thinker” as the one who yawns at the same time.

HUO How did you find the models in your films?

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HH They are acquaintances. I didn’t want to perform back then. The society would make fun of the performers in the films if they found out they performed in my films. So they were reluctant to perform.

Installation View from the 11th International Istanbul Biennial Photo credit: Nathalie Barki

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35 HH We have seen Rodin’s “Thinker.” In my case, there was no deep thinking, it was just about yawning; that was what was happening during those times for me with moral and spiritual values, it was just about yawning.

HUO What triggered the idea for “Itching”?

HH It’s the same concept as “The Yawning.” It is not really pleasant, it is not appropriate and sometimes without even thinking we start biting our nails. It is the unpleasant and the pleasant, it is the interesting and the uninteresting.

HUO Before, in your presentation you said something very interesting, which was about making very uninteresting things somehow look very interesting. What is the topic of “Portrait”?

HH This is an old video, but I added the music later, it is old footage but the montage is new. The concept is from 1974, but I filmed it in 2006.

HUO Who is the model?

revelation about Bach and Stockhausen. It seems that you are very interested in sound, but all your films are mute, with no sound, except for this film “Portrait.” I am wondering why all your films are mute where as you have a soundtrack from Händel in this one.

HH Music has a very important role in my life because I am always exposed to music. I use music in my last works, those years for me it was impossible to make video with sound.

HUO It seems that you are not very interested in your older work where everybody else seems more interested in the older work.

HH I want to do new things. The old films are done, they are put aside. I want to move forward.

HUO I understand that, but basically you are a painter. And all of a sudden, in the 70’s you have a camera and you make these amazing films. It is like an eruption. For two years there are all these films. And then there is a long break and then it starts again in the 90’s, you make more films. Why was it interrupted? During this intense chapter of filming did you do all you wanted or was it because of material or logistical reasons that you stopped. There are no films between 1976 and 1991, there is a long break of 25 years.

HH After the independence, cinematography and film died in Armenia and we couldn’t get film, it was very chaotic.

HH She used to be my student.

HUO Which year was independence declared?

HUO You were teaching at an art school?

HH In 1991. And I got hold of a video camera at a later stage. That is the reason for the gap.

HH Yes, I taught until 1997. I used to teach art history in Talin. Teaching used to consume most of my time, so I quit to focus on art.

HUO I do not understand in 1991 was the independence, but you stopped making films in 1976, so what happened between 1976 and 1991?

HUO Can you tell me a little bit about the film where nothing happens?

HH I started painting.

HH I took the footage in 1974, and then I decided to show it on the screen.

HUO And it is just an electrical wire?

HUO So painting took over. We are going to go into painting but before that I have one last question about the films. We haven’t talked about this untitled film from 1976 with the rock, which is of all films is actually my favorite, I think it’s a masterpiece.

HH At the end a bird flies near by the wire. It just happened when I was filming. So I thought it would be more interesting.

HH Although I like my previous films, I don’t want to stop there, I want to produce more.

HUO So is it a film about waiting? Because Christian Boltanski once said that all an artist can do is wait and hope.

HUO But can you tell me how this film came about and about the encounter? Who is the man? Where is the stone?

HH I didn’t think about it. I am always hopeful and I am always waiting for something. Maybe I was influenced by “Waiting for Godot”. If I was more exposed to the international museum, I would have done much better work. I had seen the Hermitage; Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh.. I saw contemporary art much later.

HH The rock is in a valley. I suddenly thought of taking footage of the rock. It shows our monotonous life, and the man is one of my friends. Together we cleaned the rock and some time after taking this footage, this rock somehow disappeared. Maybe it was the rain, a flood, it somehow disappeared.

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HUO And to come back to the film with music, I’m intrigued because this interview started with the

HUO When I saw this film, I was wondering about the duration. There is no beginning, there is no end. It is like you say as if time has stopped. What can you tell me about the duration of this film, and when it

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HUO So “The Thinker” is a different film from “The Yawning,” but it has some of “The Yawning” in it. It’s confusing.

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37 HH That is the classical way. I do some sketches, but I know what I am going to paint. The most recent paintings are improvisations.

HH I found the perfect balance for the duration. The film itself doesn’t put pressure on the viewer. It is the right amount of time with the right number of turns, so the viewer is not bored. There is no conflict in my films. The conflict is between the screen and the viewer. What matters to me is how to viewer feels when he’s watching my films. This might relate back to my environment. I talk to myself, I have conflict within myself, that is why I wanted to put the conflict between the viewer and the screen as well.

HUO What are your colors, do you have favorite colors? You use quite a lot of black and white.

HUO How would you describe your paintings, and also I am very curious about what made you leave film in 1976. What did painting do that film didn’t do? The experience of film must have entered the painting -post-filmic painting…

HH I have a numbering system. I don’t give my paintings any titles because it is like giving your days titles. They are all classified under one concept, one idea, or a period of time. I don’t really stop at political issues, for example, the a-bomb. I would like to take my time, I don’t like to rush. And with the Russian regime, there is a constant revolt against socialism, against Lenin, against Stalin. When socialism was abolished, that art was also abolished with it. So I focused on the impact that this had on people, I want to express those feelings. Following the earthquake that happened in Armenia in 1988, I didn’t rush to pick up my brush to depict the earthquake. I wait until the feeling comes out naturally. I don’t really make an effort to depict it.

HH I am a born painter. My education was in painting. I want to embody my feelings in almost everything, whether it is film, painting or any other kind of art. I have done whatever I thought of, without thinking about whether it will please the viewer or not. Why abstract?

HH I like petroleum green. I like the silver green. [points at a painting] I like the contrast between colors.

HUO Do the paintings have titles?

HUO Yes, why abstract?

HUO Why did you return to film in 1991, and about the colors, all of a sudden there is color in the films.

HH I lived in a huge, barren village in Ashnak, I have a studio in Ashnak where I do whatever I feel like doing. The landscape is very spacious, I can almost see Turkey from my window. The landscape is scorched, there is nothing there. I use aluminum and bronze. I mix them with the paint. It is quite absurd to paint something else, given the fact that there is such a landscape.

HH It’s very simple. In the beginning, we didn’t have the means. The camera I used to have was just B&W and after that I couldn’t stop myself from going to cinematography. And the video camera I had later allowed me to film in color.

HUO Before you talked about the pleasant and the unpleasant in the films. Here also, we have opposites in the painting. We have control and chance. We have geometry and gestural abstraction, is that maybe a link?

HUO In the more recent film from 1991, in which there is a still image which hardly moves, and then you see it moves, again, it is as if time had stopped whilst the sand film is very different. There is action, a lot of sand falls. Can you talk about these two films?

HH I don’t know how it became this way, it just happened this way.

HH There is another film, titled “The Earth.” It is a shorter film when I am inside the earth. It symbolizes country, nature, homeland. It also symbolizes contact with the world for me. I want to detach myself from the earth, from my roots, although it gives me energy. For me the inside is ‘death’ and the outside is ‘nothing.’ Nothing can kill art. When you are in the center of art you start getting into contact with people, you get to know others. These films were in my studio until someone found them. This is why I am in a constant conflict with my homeland, with earth.

HUO And how many paintings have you been doing? Is it a big oeuvre?

HH I sold some of them. I work on a daily basis but I don’t paint what someone asks me to paint.

HUO Did you support yourself by teaching or did you support yourself by selling paintings?

HH The internal market is very tough, but if someone comes from abroad and wants to buy some of my paintings I am okay with that. I don’t expect any income from the internal market but because I have become a bit famous, some people want to buy my work.

HUO Do you draw? Make sketches?

HH No.

HUO Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a lovely little book, which is advice to a young poet. What would be your advice today to a young artist?

HH Most importantly, be honest. Don’t go into marketing your art. Go back to your roots, and don’t produce art to sell. Don’t lie to yourself. There is a big different between the environment I live in and here [Art Dubai] Here you see kids coming in and having a look at all the masterpieces, in Armenia it’s really hard to see contemporary art. It is easier for them to look at catalogues and imitate from the catalogues and the viewer can not really tell if it is my work or someone else’s work. Most importantly, be honest, don’t lie to yourself.

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HUO So you don’t prepare for the paintings with sketches?

HUO One last question: you have realized many things, your old films and new films, and now paintings.

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is shown is it shown in a loop? One could imagine this film going on forever. How did you determine the length, how many times did you make the man go around the stone?

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These are great achievements. I was wondering if you have any unrealized projects. Projects that were too big to be realized, dreams, utopias…

HH My dream is to get out my cocoon and discover the things I dreamed of during my childhood.

HUO Thank you very much, it has been a truly great interview.

Hamlet Hovsepian was born in 1950 in Ashnak, Armenia. He is a film and video, performance and land-artist and abstract expressionist painter.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich) joined the Serpentine Gallery as Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects in April 2006. Prior to this, he was curator of Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris since 2000, as well as curator of museum in progress, Vienna from 1993-2000. He has curated over 200 exhibitions internationally since 1991, including do it, Take Me, I’m Yours (Serpentine Gallery), Cities on the Move, Live/Life, Nuit Blanche, 1st Berlin Biennale, Manifesta 1, and more recently Uncertain States of America, 1st Moscow Triennale, 2nd Guangzhou Trienale (Canton China), and Lyon Biennale. In 2007 and 2009, Hans Ulrich co-curated Il Tempo del Postino with Philipe Parreno for the Manchester International Festival. He was also awarded the New York Prize Senior Fellowship for 2007-2008 by the Van Alen Institute. Obrist is the author of 50 books, most recently, A Brief History of Curating.

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MARC GLOEDE TEXT IN GERMAN. TRANSLATED BY MICHA O. GOEBIG

“A text is not a line made of words that reveals a single theological message … A text is much more a multi-dimensional space … A text is a fabric of citations, which are drawn from the innumerable centres of culture.”

Roland Barthes W H E N B R I T I S H W R I T E R Gilbert Keith Chesterton took a stroll along New York’s Broadway in 1922, he was enraptured by the aesthetic impact of its dazzling lights. The fusions of words, images and luminous signs held him in such thrall that he was reminded of traditional courtly festivities, of illuminations and fireworks.

41 Authors such as Franz Hessel and Walter Benjamin showed how much the city had become a kind of legible text for passers-by, whereas the surrealists focused on the undercurrents and the unconscious, and addressed the subtext of the city. The consequences of these grapplings with urban space are, if nothing else, reflected in common expressions such as the ‘texture of a city’, its ‘composition’, the ‘architecture of a text’ and the ‘language of architecture’.

Along with the metaphorical connection between textuality and architecture, however, there were other, more immediate links. Chesterton’s initial remarks, for example, were not construed as contributions to a new discourse about urban spaces. They were regarded more as statements that posed the questions: what do we expect the consequences of greater textuality in architecture to be, and what do we think about this? Inscriptions on buildings such as churches, town halls and palaces were nothing new, of course. But the growing ubiquity of lights – including “commercial lighting”[6] along with street and interior lighting – created a new situation that radically altered the appearance of many cities. After the First World War, the neon sign became a mass medium as part of the large-scale commercialisation of public space. Against this backdrop, the relationship between textuality and architecture came under an entirely new kind of scrutiny. Illuminated advertising began to spread “like a network above the ubiquitous glow of street lighting; it projects the upper outline of the office blocks and their façades, on which horizontal and vertical strips of light appear.”[7]

But in spite of, or precisely because of this effect, which Chesterton was unable to escape, his opinion of the lights was anything but positive. The writer instead criticised the trend that they represented.

For him, the increase in street-facing illuminations was one of the factors that led to urban sensory overload and the need to continually switch one’s focus of attention. Georg Simmel and Walter Benjamin described this as “the intensification of the life of the nerves.” [1] What Chesterton found so objectionable about this tendency was the use of light and words in urban spaces, which had since become an everyday phenomenon.[2] With heavy heart, he thought back to the seemingly forgotten contexts of European festival culture and lamented that the modern age had “completely destroyed the deep significance of such colors and lights. People rarely feel the need to express anything of importance with this kind of illumination, because it is invariably used to proclaim the trivial.”[3]

Although the initial trend was more often than not for illuminated billboards, the situation soon changed with the introduction of light boxes, which were first lit up by bulbs and then predominantly by neon tubes. The new medium proved highly capable of meeting the growing demand for mass product communication. For a huge range of advertising contexts, it represented a serious alternative to billboards, newspapers and poster pillars. The neon light not only changed the face of buildings, roofs and exterior walls, but it also altered the appearance of different times of day, and particularly the night. Such was its appeal that shortly after introduction, a raft of other, very different formats began to emerge. Slogans and company names shone out from static cubes, manifested themselves as rapidly flashing texts or appeared on billboards that lit up as people walked by. The latter comprised a field of tightly packed bulbs that could display letters in a staggered sequence.

Chesterton called attention to the question of how light was used in urban contexts, but also to the relationship between words and architecture, which had already come under discussion in the th 19 century. The force of the argument, however, was directed at the fundamental textualization of culture rather than words on buildings specifically. It was bemoaned at the time that the language of architecture was being warped in a way that weakened its power of expression. Victor Hugo, in his novel Notre-Dame de Paris, rightly talked of a paradigm shift from architecture to printing, and noted in this context that architecture is a special kind of writing – a way for people to ‘register’ their presence.

He read Notre Dame Cathedral as he would a book, regarding it as a “chronicle made of stone.”[4] The metaphorical rhetoric of architecture as a text – and of how a city could be read – cropped up repeatedly in the work of various authors in the decades that followed, because this was a principle applicable to a broad spectrum of “contexts.”[5]

Running lines of text, which mimicked the chronology of film, were often used to report the news as well. The term “modern home newspaper”[8] soon gained currency as a description for these illuminated walls of words. But the application of this principle extended much further. It was also possible to display whole pictures, short scenes or combinations of images and texts. This underpinned the close relationship between this new and dazzling format and the equally young medium of film. Many of these brightly lit signs even won a certain degree of fame. The mid-1920s advert for Germany’s Kupferberg-Gold sekt (sparkling wine), for example, used a sequence of neon tubes to depict a glass of sparkling sekt being slowly poured from a bottle.

Erich Mendelsohn, Broadway, 1924

Samuel Gottscho, Broadway by night, around 1930

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THE INTERWEAVING ILLUMINATIONS OF THE MODERN CITY. ARCHITECTURE AND LIGHTS IN AN URBAN CONTEXT

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43 If we now take into consideration this architectural approach to public spaces, several interesting aspects quickly emerge which set the tone for this new medium. Particularly noteworthy was the initial pressing need to hide the technical gadgetry behind the lights. The challenge was to fit the ‘negatives’ of the constructs into the ‘positives’ of architecture that were visible in daylight.

What had to fade into the background during the day, took on a life of its own at night, revealing a previously concealed cosmos of words. During this boom period, only rare attempts were made to subvert these genuinely phantasmagorical concepts and to cast a critical eye over this early form of media façade. Oskar Nitschke’s 1936 design for his Maison de la Publicité took a step in this direction but tellingly never saw the light of day.

Façade design by Oskar Nitschke, Maison de la Publicité, Paris, 1936

The architecture had to serve tangible commercial and political interests. In the metropolitan context, this functionalization fed the growth of text-image combinations, which became increasingly spectacular as time went on. The interplay between technical possibilities and the size and scale of the message was crucial for the architecture of lights. It was significant, for example, that after a certain point new building materials and innovative static construction techniques meant that exterior walls no longer had to serve a load-bearing function. Not only did this free them from traditional conventions, but it made them available for new uses. Construction with glass, steel, concrete and lights and as a result thinking in terms of space and architecture transformed the exterior walls of skyscrapers and made windows their new skin. The new type of façade could now be used for purely communicative purposes, and opened up new forms of expression in the truest sense of the word. This fixation on the exterior, however, meant that the architecture of the shell was often neglected. For the lights that hung from the outside, there were few articulated cubes with an inner bearing structure. At the Palais de l’Electricité, for the Paris World’s Fair in 1900, the talk was of “unattractive light bulb skins.”[10] In the United States, the corresponding development in places such as New York and Las Vegas took on an almost paradigmatic form. The contemporary feuilleton, however, pointed out that the advertising messages and the words they contained were diverging because of the increase in neon signs (S. Krakauer). Words disengaged from their meanings and set free other opportunities for communication. They became abstract symbols, a pictorial script akin to hieroglyphics.[11]

Façade design by Oskar Nitschke, Maison de la Publicité, Paris, 1936

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For a deeper understanding of the phenomenon, the example of Las Vegas proves particularly enlightening. And it is no coincidence that a critical discourse on the relationship between text, images and architecture emerged in the city during the 1960s and 1970s. “Learning from Caricature of the neon sign advertising Kupferberg-Gold from Lustige Blätter, 4 December 1912

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These radiant messages increasingly transformed the atmosphere of the cities and every evening created a unique and glamorous architecture of light. Day-to-day worries and hardships seemed to evaporate in their glow, at least temporarily. The objections voiced by Chesterton, Simmel and Benjamin were pushed aside in favor of ecstatic indulgence in this bright new world. Siegfried Krakauer turned his attention to this maelstrom of urban lights – from the lamp manufacturer Osram to the Licht lockt Leute slogan – in his novel Die Angestellten. For him, the city estranged “the masses from their own flesh.” Krakauer wrote that “the light throws a cloak over the masses, transforming them. Through its mysterious powers the glow becomes substance, the distraction intoxication.”[9] Looking back, it comes as no surprise that big businesses found increasing use for this form of attraction and spectacle. The triumphal march of neon signs and the emergence of light architectures as a concept in its own right was most conspicuous in the booming USA that had survived the war unscathed.

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45 But this arrangement was not examined solely from the perspective of architectural theory.

Linguistics and semiotics also entered into the picture through the analysis of Roland Barthes and Michel Butor – both in terms of a contemporary sign theory and a broader concept of what comprises text. Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure’s theories, a direct analogy was made between linguistic and architectural structures, and particular attention was devoted to the urban sphere.

The city was interpreted as a coherent system of symbols that could be read like a text. Barthes defined the city as a ‘discours’ (speech) and ‘écriture’ (writing) and described those who moved around in it as ‘une sorte de lecteur’ (a kind of reader). [13] It is now interesting to see that the issue of boundaries was being discussed at almost exactly the same time in the fields of literature and philosophy. But this was a debate that made little reference to texts – such as the neon sign – that could genuinely be considered as being in the public arena. So Foucault’s fundamental questions, for example, as to the relationship and limitations of the categories of text, language and author continued to have little appreciable influence. [14] What stood out far more was a continuous manifestation of the categories Jenny Holzer, Private Property Created Crime, 1985, of interior, exterior and façade. Even media artists, who increasingly Times Square, New York worked with billboards and display screens from the early 1980s, were not that interested in the architecture itself. It was much more about the issue of public space and its capitalist determination. In reference to this early form of media art, Inke Arns rightly said “the work of visual artists explores the theme of public space, which is increasingly changing under the influence of mass media and commercial interests. Pioneers in this field include Dan Graham, Hans Haacke, Sanja Ivekovic, Jochen Gerz and Jenny Holzer.” [15] Works such as Holzer’s “Private Property Created Crime” (1985) and Les Levine’s “Aim, Race, Take, Steal” project – realized in 1982/83 in Los Angeles and Minneapolis – mainly addressed the relationship between advertising and the other symbols and text that surround it, and raised questions about the determination of public space by unspoken/invisible laws. [16]

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The façades and the media emblazoned upon them continued to take the form of a substantial wall that tacitly accepted the categories of interior and exterior. The need to break through and critically interrogate this wall was only phrased as a problem some considerable time later. For this, it was important to address with the visual imagery of these façades. Such debates again posed questions regarding public and private municipal structures, and set the scene for a polemic discussion about the scope of capitalist practices. The fundamental classification of and therefore reflection on architectural categories, however, barely came to the critics’ attention. Interestingly, it was an academic discussion about the medium of film that led to a massive questioning of billboards and exterior walls as media spaces. In a debate about film equipment that began in the late 1960s, the big screen came under critical scrutiny. Jean-Pierre Oudart and Stephen Heath, for example, focused much attention on the subject of cinematic space, whereby great importance was attached to the idea of the suture (literally: needle). [17] People began to see the screen more as a kind of complex three-dimensional nexus than as a surface separating one part of the room from

another. It is precisely in this respect that this theoretical approach correlated with the questions that had been raised by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze on the basis of what ‘text’ means.

Whereas suture theory addressed how stereographic images are stitched together into a fabric, Foucault and Deleuze turned their attention entirely to the Latin origin of the word – textum, meaning what is woven. This focus on the text did not concentrate on its distancing character, but rather the character of how it was weaved together. As the number of public spaces used as media façades increased, this interweaving or suture theory slowly became a subject for discussion in architectural circles. From the aforementioned examples of Las Vegas, Broadway and Times Square with their brightly lit displays, it was plain to see how obsolete the understanding of the media façade as a surface had become. The big casinos, in particular, through their combinations of words, lights and images, attempted at a very early stage to blur the lines between interior and exterior. [18] Eschewing conventional strategy, their architecture of light actively weaved together those spaces that were otherwise thought of as being strictly separate. As a piece of architectural history, it makes a reconsideration of newer media façades entirely worth our while.

As early as the 1960s, the Archigram architectural group was designing highly specific urban concepts – such as “Plug-in City”, “Living Pod”, “Instant City” and “Walking City” – which deliberately incorporated the idea of interweaved media textures. The chances of these being realised, however, seemed to be as slim as a real-life rendering of the media façades from the film Blade Runner (1982), which also pointed to the relationship between media façades and new urban situations. Nonetheless, these (cinematic) architectural images and utopias were to have an ongoing influence on façade-based ideas and discussions. In the wake of an interiorization of public space, no buildings seemed immune to being fitted with an ‘urban screen’ for ‘public viewings’. The television, which had previously been shackled to the family home, increasingly found its place in the living room of the cities, namely the public squares. It was unavoidable, one had the impression, that these new screens would “latch onto the body of the building that hosts them like parasites.” [19] Interestingly, and somewhat strangely, this development was dropped from the agenda of various historical debates. Many discussions, particularly those that began in the mid-1980s (mostly in reference to Toyo Ito’s “Tower of Winds” of 1986), were confined to problems related to the technical dimensions of canvases and screens. [20] As a result, there was another raft of pseudo-interactive digital scenarios arranged in isolation on exterior surfaces, offering the putative ‘user’ a modus operandi for flat-screen media architecture. Only recently have positions begun to emerge, which again ignore the separate dynamics of such surface-focused projects, and ponder the question of how three-dimensional volumes can be weaved together with the help of lights. It becomes clear in this context that an innovative contemplation of textures, space and media is not necessarily bound to new and high-end technology. Architectural firms such as Herzog & de Meuron and realities:united are freeing the discussion from a pure focus on the two-dimensionality of media façades, and opening it up to include the room-filling capabilities and volumes of light. In doing so, they are disengaging themselves from the fixation with screens that took hold in the 1980s.

For realities:united, this entails a historical reflection of the media façade in two respects. Firstly, the cooperation with the former Archigram architect Peter Cook for the BIX project in Graz tapped into the discussion about textures of images and light which began in the 1960s. Secondly, from a technical standpoint, the neon lights concept alluded to the early forms of illuminated advertising in the urban 1920s. This recourse to an old electrical light medium as opposed to expensive LED screens shows that big budgets are not a prerequisite for the progressive design of media and public spaces. It reminds us that media façades should be thought of as three-dimensional constructions, which can be liberated from their two-dimensionality by the depth of the light.

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Las Vegas”, an in-depth treatise by the architects Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Steve Izenour, played a key part in this. It was highly critical of the direction in which symbolism in architecture appeared to be heading. [12]

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47 In the face of such an approach, the challenge of how to stop thinking in surfaces and the interwoven relationship between buildings and images/texts seems almost trivial. If these considerations apply to an entire urban landscape instead of just a single building, we will be confronted with textures and pictures of far greater complexity. Evidently, it is no longer about screens that are merely attached to an exterior, but about images and textures that are integrated three-dimensionally. A trip around the city then becomes an immersion in pictures and words. The stroller trades the passages for a sculptural parcours of oversized pixels.

Marc Gloede is a curator and art critic. He received his PhD in film studies (FU Berlin) and is active in a wide range of projects such as Art Basel Film or the Wild Walls Film and Architecture Festival (Berlin, Los Angeles, London, New York). He has curated numerous exhibitions and film series as i.e., “Light Camera Action” (abc, Berlin), “Andy Warhol: A factory” (Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg/Arsenal) or “The Art of Projection” at the Museum Hamburger Bahnhof. He was invited curator for the Experimenta Festival 2007 in Mumbai/Bangalore and curated the exhibition “STILL/MOVING/STILL – The History of Slide Projection in the Arts” in Knokke/Belgium. He is widely published within the field and is a contributor for Art in America, Fantom and X-TRA magazine. He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

realities:united, BIX, Graz

NOTES

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[1] Georg Simmel. “Die Großstadt und das moderne Geistesleben”, in: Georg Simmel, Das Individuum und die Freiheit. Essays, Berlin 1984, p. 192-204, here p. 192, Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. (third edition)”, in: Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften.

Volume 1.2, published by Rolf Tiedemann und Hermann Schweppenhäuser. Frankfurt am Main 1991, p. 471508, here particularly p. 499 and 505.

[2] At the same time as Chesterton’s voiced his criticism, Germany stood at the forefront of an intensive investigation into the physiological and psychological impact of light in the urban context. See: Joachim Teichmüller, “Das Lichttechnische Institut der Badischen Technischen Hochschule”, in: Das Licht, volume 1, issue 1, 1930, Berlin, p. 29-30 and issue 2, p. 55-59 [3] Gilbert Keith Chesterton is cited here by Dietrich Naumann, “Leuchtende Bauten: Architektur der Nacht”, in: Leuchtende Bauten: Architektur der Nacht, published by Marion Ackermann, Ostfildern-Ruit 2006, p. 16-21, here p. 18.

[4] Cf. Victor Hugo, Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482, Paris 1967, particularly p. 136 and 155.

[5] Cf. in particular the extensive treatise on this topic published by Manfred Smuda Die Großstadt als “Text”, published by Manfred Smuda, Munich 1992.

[6] Cf. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Lichtblicke. Zur Geschichte der künstlichen Helligkeit im 19. Jahrhundert, Munich/Vienna1983.

[7] Anne Hoormann, Lichtspiele. Zur Medienreflexion der Avantgarde in der Weimarer Republik, Munich 2003, p. 247.

[8] Johannes Fritz, “Die Moderne Hauszeitung”, in Seidels Reklame 11, issue 8, August 1927, p. 361-362. realities:united, NIX, 2007 mock-up

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By rethinking the screen as something that can be applied to an irregular rather than a flat surface, realities:united have made it possible to see the visible text or image in three dimensions. Witness the fluorescent lamps illuminating the BIX exterior of Graz art museum, whose textures of light look different depending on your distance to the building. Words and images can easily be made out from afar. Up close, however, the façade reveals an overwhelming array of 3D light effects, which the eye is unable to perceive as a complete picture. Consequently, the traditional realization of images as merely another layer on top of the surface is consigned to the past, and gains a more sculptural value in the process. The next step in the concept of interweaving textures can be seen in one of the latest realities:united projects – the NIX. “Outside working hours, a central computer linked to the building’s lighting system turns the office lights on and off as if they were pixels on a screen, coding sequenced patterns that chase right through the centre of the building.” [21]

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[9] Siegfried Kracauer, Die Angestellten. Aus dem neuen Deutschland, Frankfurt am Main 1971, p. 98.

[10] Schivelbusch 1983 (see no. 6) [11] Cf. Matthias Christen, “Wo Abfälle und Sternbilder sich treffen. Lichtschriften und photographische Chiffren im Werk Siegfried Kracauers”, in: “Wunderliche Figuren”. Über die Lesbarkeit von Chiffrenschriften, published by H.-G- von Arburg, M. Gamper and U. Stadler, Munich 2001, p. 165-186 [12] Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steve Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas, Cambridge/Mass 1972.

[13] Here according to Stefanie Gomolla, Lesbare Architektur und architektonischer Text. Metaphern und deren Überwindung bei Michel Butor, Source: http://www.metaphorik.de/02/gomolla.pdf [14] Foucault, Michel: Schriften zur Literatur. Frankfurt am Main 1993, in particular: “Was ist ein Autor?”, p. 7-31 and “Zum Begriff der Übertretung”, p. 69-89.

[15] Inke Arns, “Soziale Technologien, Dekonstruktion, Subversion und die Utopie einer demokratischen Kommunikation” in: Überblick über die Medienkunst.

[16] An interesting overview of various related works and positions is offered by: Steve Dietz, Öffentlichkeiten. Source: http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themen/public_sphere_s/public_sphere_s/ (as of: 25 Oct 2007).

[17] Particularly: Jean-Pierre Oudart, “Cinema and Suture”, in: Screen, vol. 18, no. 4, Winter 1977/78, p.

35-47; Stephen Heath “On Suture”, in: Questions of Cinema, same author, London 1981, p. 76-112 [18] Cf. Laura Bieger, Ästhetik der Immersion. Raum-Erleben zwischen Welt und Bild. Las Vegas, Washington und die White City. Bielefeld 2007.

[19] Ilka & Andreas Ruby, “Räumliche Kommunikation. Über eine neue Qualität von Medienarchitektur in der Arbeit von Realities:United”, in: Spots. Licht und Medienfassade, Berlin 2007, p 30-59, here p. 57.

[20] Cf. in this context: Scott McQuire, The Politics of Public Space in the Media City, source: http:// firstmonday.org/issues/special11_2/mcquire/index.html (as of: 25 Oct 2007); Joachim Sauter, Das vierte Format: Die Fassade als mediale Haut der Architektur. Source: http://netzspannung.org/positions/digitaltransformations (as of: 25 Oct 2007).

[21] Ilka & Andreas Ruby 2007 (see no. 15), p. 58

Marc Gloede is a curator and art critic. He received his PhD in film studies (FU Berlin) and is active in a wide range of projects such as Art Basel Film or the Wild Walls Film and Architecture Festival (Berlin, Los Angeles, London, New York). He has curated numerous exhibitions and film series as i.e., “Light Camera Action” (abc, Berlin), “Andy Warhol: A factory” (Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg/Arsenal) or “The Art of Projection” at the Museum Hamburger Bahnhof. He was invited curator for the Experimenta Festival 2007 in Mumbai/Bangalore and curated the exhibition “STILL/MOVING/STILL – The History of Slide Projection in the Arts” in Knokke/Belgium. He is widely published within the field and is a contributor for Art in America, Fantom and X-TRA magazine. He currently lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

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A PROJECT BY CLEMENS VON WEDEMEYER TEXT BY NOVEMBER PAYNTER & CLEMENS VON WEDEMEYER M A R D I N I S S I T U A T E D on a hill overlooking the Mesopotamien plain and is regarded as a “city of light”.

Recent archeological excavations have found an ancient pagan sun temple underneath a monastery and the city itself is trying to become a UNESCO heritage site. In terms of the cultural sector, a museum and a cinema were recently built and a film festival has been running for 2 years. But, before this cinema was completed Mardin had no projection space for some time as the previous cinema had gone bankrupt. At the outset of his “My City” project for Mardin Clemens von Wedemeyer, Sun Cinema, 2010 Mardin,Turkey Clemens realized that it would be interesting to contribute Commissioned by My City project, British Council, Turkey to this new cinematic endeavor, because as he describes: “a cinema can contribute a different, or a third form of cultural arena”. He adds: “Mardin’s historical buildings are the city’s main visitor attractions and as these are renovated in the hope of creating a new touristic museum context, in which parts are rebuilt and others demolished, it seems fitting that public space is incorporated”.

All these thoughts have fed into Clemens’ idea to create a “screen of desire” that he will locate in Mardin as a statement of potentiality. This screen, in its first sketch-ups, alluded to the one built by the architect Le Corbusier atop his infamous modernist residential project Unite d’Habitation in Marseille, France (1947-52). Le Corbusier’s idealist community proposal can be imagined as the perfect, classic, public cinema. Since Clemens’ first observations of the historical stone constructions of Mardin and his ideas of trying to create a cinema that could have been imagined as part of the city’s history, the project has developed to focus more on how a modernist structure would function in the city.

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Cinema was invented at the end of the 19th century, but also the Laterna Magica, the Camera Obscura, The Turkish Shadow Theatre etc. used light to entertain. Therefore the “principle of cinema” is much older than we immediately recognize. It is as old as the light of the sun, which has always created images of bright and dark in our memory. “That is why cinema is not dead when the video projectors conquer the scene.” (Alexander Kluge). Both the idea of creating a new public space for the city of Mardin as well as connecting cinema to the sun, has lead Clemens to form a research project on the sun and cinema in relation to the region of Mardin, which is presented here for the first time on the next pages. This research was used as a the basis for a workshop with a group of architects in Istanbul to develop a final design for a screen that will fit into the Mardin context. The screen sits as a current addition to Mardin’s layers of history and reflects the basic elements of an open-air cinema venue.

Initially, a plinth with a projector will stand opposite the monolith screen and projections will occur after dusk. But Clemens is very clear that he does not want to create something that has one function and meaning alone, and that what he produces should be open to interpretation and use. After an initial screening program that will include Clemens’ own video work, as well as other films and videos from the area, it is possible that the projector will travel throughout the city to become a moving cinema with a life of its own. The screen meanwhile may continue to be used for film projections, or it may simply sit as a reminder of how a site of public and active space can be created. Located on the west edge of the city, overlooking the plains to the south in Syria, the screen will connect to the sun’s pattern of setting and through this relationship with light and shadow another trope of cinema reveals itself. Regardless of whether there is a projection taking place, the structure will reflect the evening sun back to the south, via a giant mirror installed on the backside of the screen.

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SUN CINEMA

This screen will hopefully introduce a contemporary arena for the city that will exist as a current, valid and active public space for years to come.

Clemens von Wedemeyer (b. 1974, Germany) studied Fine Arts at the Academy of Visual Arts, Leipzig.

Some of his works are narratively structured films, others consist of reflections and experiments in cinema. With this practice von Wedemeyer moves between the fields of art and cinema, with his films finding their form based on a conceptual relation to content. His subjects include questions of group dynamics, power relations and historical resonances in the everyday.

Recent solo exhibitions include: Barbican Centre, London (2009), Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea (CGAC) (2008), Santiago de Compostela (2008) and at the Kölnischer Kunstverein (2006). Group show participations at (selection): Revolutions - forms that turn, Sydney Biennale (2008), Multiplex: Directions in Art, 1970 to Present, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (2007) and Skulptur Projekte Münster (2007). His works have also been shown at filmfestivals worldwide, such as Rotterdam International Film Festival (2009), Cinemateque Paris and Filmmuseum Munich.

The city of Mardin, Turkey Photo by Clemens von Wedemeyer

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The design of “sun cinema” was discussed after the research together with participants of a workshop led by Asist. Prof. Dr. Yüksel Demir, Head of Fine Arts Department, Istanbul Technical University in March 2010, in Mardin and Istanbul.

Workshop participants Zeynep Ata, architect Ekin Aytaç, architect Sevince Bayrak, architect Elif Çelik, architect Işik Gülkaynak, architect Gürden Gür, architect Avşar Karababa, architect Zelal Zülfiye Rahmanalı architect Ali Taptık, architect, photographer Gökan Uzun, architect Birge Yıldırım, landscape architect Academical Supervision Asist. Prof. Dr.Yüksel Demir, Head of Fine Arts Department, I.T.U Asist. Prof. Dr.Oğuz Haşlakoğlu, Fine Arts Faculty, Akdeniz University Consultants in Mardin Selahattin Bilirer, Local Conservationist and Lawyer, Mardin Mehmet Baran, Mardin Sinema Association (Sinemardin), Mardin Fethullah Duyan, Architect, Mardin Mesut Alp, Mardin Museum Archeology Expert, Mardin Executive Architect Gürden Gür, architect Contractors DZ Architects Devrim Zeren, architect & Nurşah Barto, civil engineer.

My City Project Management David Codling, My City Project Director , British Council Esra Sarıgedik, My City Project Manager, British Council Bilge Kalfa,(Msc.arch) Architectural and Urban Design Coordination, British Council My City has been conceived by British Council together with local partners Anadolu Kultur and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Centre. The project is funded by the European Commission and British Council and led by a dedicated team at the British Council in Istanbul.

Studio Assistant Berlin Marisa Baptista Thanks to Henning von Wedemeyer and Tim Bauerfeind, UTarchitects, Berlin The project will be opened in Mardin on October 21st, 2010

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1.SRAchM. Sun window, Dara, Mardin, Turkey – 505 b.C. 02.SRAchM. Fire place, Dara, Mardin, Turkey – 505 b.C. 03.SRAchM. Castle, Mardin, Turkey – from 330 a.C. it was inhabited by “Assyrian sun and fire worshiper kings” 04.SRAchM. Ancient sun worship temple inside nowadays Mor Hananyo Monastery/Deyr ul-Zafaran Monastery , Mardin, Turkey, unknown foundation 05.SAchSp. Theater of Epidaurus, 300 b.C. 06.SAchSp. Herodes Atticus Theater, Athens, Greece - 2nd century a.C. 07.SRAch. Sinjar Yezidi Temple, foundation unknown 08.SRSc. Sun Dial and Ara Pacis, Rome, Italy – 5th century a.C. 09.SR. Entrance to sun temple 10.SRSc. Model of scientific sun dial, Museum of The History of Science and Technology in Islam, Istanbul 11.SRAch. Great Mosque of al-Mutawakkil, Samarra, 847-61 a.C. 12.SRASc. Persian sun dial, Museum of the Ancient Orient, Istanbul 13.AScO. Al-Haitam (Alhazen), the eye morphology, analisys documents – 1083, Fatih Bibliothek, Istambul; source: Belting, Hans; “Florenz und Bagdad-eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks”; C.H. Beck oHG, München 2008, page 112 14.SAScO. Architectural drawings, Iran, around 1500, Topkapi Museum, Istambul; source: Belting, Hans; “Florenz und Bagdad-eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks”; C.H. Beck oHG, München 2008, page 127 15.AOSp. Turkish shadow play, “Karagoz and Hacivat”, around 1600 16.RAchM. Outdoors Mihrab in Latifiye Camii, Mardin, Turkey - 14th century 17.SScO.,18.SScO.,19.SScO. & 20.SScO. Al-Haitam (Alhazen), sunlight analisys instruments – 11th century, Museum of The History of Science and Technology in Islam, Istanbul 21.SASc. The Sun, by Al-Qazwini, Die Wunder der Schoepfung, arab manuscript, 14th century 22.AScO. Eye Anatomy by Al-Mutadibih, arab manuscript in Cairo National Bibliotheque, 13th century 23.SAchSc. Ulugh Begs Observatorium, Samarkand, 15th century 24.SAchSc. Gunes Saati sundial, Top Kapi Palace, Istanbul, 15th century 25. AScOSp. Camera Obscura and perspective principles, 16th century, source:the net 26.SAScO.Vitruvius, in «De architectura», 1521, from Cesare Cesariano, fol.

12V; a planetarian perspective; source: Belting, Hans; “Florenz und Bagdad-eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks”; C.H. Beck oHG, München 2008, page 259 27.AOSp. Johann Zahn. Reflex box camera obscura, 1685. source: the net (Bridgeman Art Library) 28.SAchScO. & 29.SAchScO.Jai Sing Observatorium, Dehli, India, 1800 30.AAchO. Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, «L’Architecture consideré sous le rapport de l’art, des moers et de la législation» (1804): Coup D’oeil with stage. source: Belting, Hans; “Florenz und Bagdad-eine westöstliche Geschichte des Blicks”; C.H. Beck oHG, München 2008, page 215 31.AchSc. Denge Sound Mirrors, A forerunner of radar, the sound mirrors were intended to provide early warning of enemy aeroplanes, 1940s 32.AchC. Screen, Unités d’Habitation, Marseille, Le Corbusier, 1947-1952 33.AchC. Moscow Cinema Open Air Hall, Yerevan, Armenia, 1932 34.AchSp. “3minutes to Dante’s Inferno Steaks” bilboard, Massachusetts, around 20 miles from Boston, polaroid photo by Wim Wenders, February 1972; source: Färber, Helmut; «Baukunst und Film – Aus der Geschichte des Sehens»;MCMLXXVII München 35.AchC. Drive-in Cinema, location unknown 36.SAO. “Sun Tunnels” by Nancy Holt, Great Bassin Desert, Utah, 1973-76, source: Lailach, Michael; “Land Art”, Taschen, page 59 37.AC. Robert Smithson, “Toward the development of a Cinema Cavern or the movie goer as spelunker”, 1971 38.SC. “Medea”, Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1969 39.SAchSc. Monte Rosa lodge with Matterhorn, 2010, Photo: ETH-Studio Monte Rosa/Tonatiuh Ambrosetti 40.SA. “The Weather Project”, Olafur Eliasson, Turbine Hall, Tate Modern, London, 2003 41.AchMC. Open-air Screen on top of the former cinema and old court, Mardin, Turkey 42.SAMOC. Mirror Test for “sun cinema”, 2010, Mardin, Turkey

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INTERVIEW IN GERMAN. TRANSLATED BY MICHA O. GOEBIG

JANINE SCHMUTZ Sam Keller, you are a prominent figure in the art scene – the former director of Art Basel, and now director of Fondation Beyeler. What do you find so fascinating about art?

Photo: Roland Schmid

SAM KELLER The most fascinating aspect of art, it seems to me, is that you can’t actually explain it, and that coming into contact with works of art provokes emotions, thoughts and questions. It makes you curious. And this fascination grows – at least for me – the more you get involved. This has to do with the works of art themselves, but also the artists. Because it’s interesting to immerse yourself in their thoughts and feelings, and to get other perspectives and views on life. It’s also interesting to grapple with the philosophical concepts in which art is embedded. It helps us to better understand the world and makes our lives more exciting – mine included.

For me, art always has a personal and a public dimension, whereby it first tells you something about yourself, then about your environment and then about society and politics. But the fact that art connects us with other people is also quite inspiring.

JS If we work on this basis that art brings something new to the table, a new approach or a new theme, it then follows that art can give us new insights and views, and move us in new ways. Is that right?

SK Art helps us find our way in the world. It teaches us so much and helps us to better understand ourselves and others.

JS So is there a work of art that you would say has moved you deeply?

SK There are many. But it’s easiest to remember those that came first and last. Reproductions of van Gogh’s paintings that I saw as a child, then Tinguely’s art machines, Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb, and Richard Serra’s steel sculptures. The Rothko exhibition in Paris, in which I spent many hours, particular works by Barnett Newman. In our museum as well, there are works that never fail to move me, such as Nu bleu I by Henri Matisse and Picasso’s Femme (1907).

There are artworks that you lose interest in over time and those that get more exciting the longer you contemplate them. I find that works of art are often like people. There are people who seem interesting and charming at first, but as time goes by you realise that they are superficial and always talk about the same things. Then there are those who you love from the beginning and love more so with time. Others start off unapproachable and distant, but get more interesting as you get to know them.

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JS The art fairs and the art market are major influences today. Do you think the importance of the international art fairs will continue to increase or are changes afoot?

SK That depends less upon art than upon society as a whole. We are currently living in a time of a global system – capitalism – in which man is mainly defined as homo oeconomicus. He queries everything, wants to know how much it costs, what it’s worth and measures the value of almost everything in economic terms. This way of thinking even pervades his thoughts and feelings, his religion and his culture. Art cannot escape this. When man or society changes, the way art is perceived changes as well. One cannot always expect art will lead to things being seen differently to the norm. As far as art and the art market are concerned, one cannot be separated from the other. It’s likely that the first cave painter soon worked out that he could get a piece of meat or a pelt, for example, if he painted someone else’s cave. We can only assume that art and the art market will remain connected – sometimes closer, sometimes more distant. But this is nothing new. Whether art is created for churches, royalty or the aristocracy, it will always be strongly linked with society and business.

JS But there has been a clear shift towards having greater numbers of art fairs and art biennales, which exert a huge influence on traditional art institutions and the gallery scene etc.

SK One can safely say that the art market and the galleries have become more important. This has to do with the demand for art, but also with the art market’s network, which is more globalised than others.

Galleries often open in places before there is a museum. That this kind of art system is favoured, also depends greatly on the country. In the end, the artists themselves have the power to decide where their work will go, and this seems to be the system that best serves the majority. This is most evident in places where the state has withdrawn its financing. Although there are more museums today, many of the traditional ones have had their budgets cut rather than increased. Demands on today’s museums are becoming ever greater. However, they don’t get any more money for this, and neither the visitors nor the state are prepared to subsidise them any further. And because the art trade has long broken into countries without established structures, and because globalisation has been one of the biggest trends in recent years, artists, galleries and art fairs are at the forefront of this development. Institutions, on the other hand, are finding it more difficult. I believe that the market for art fairs and biennales in Western Europe is saturated, while other regions of the world need more platforms of this kind. One can also say that since the 1960s there has been a stronger separation between art trade/commerce and non-commercial art institutions. They were once far more closely linked. Take the Venice Biennale, for example, where you could buy art until the early 1960s. It is only now that people are getting agitated about the sale of art there. They see the Venice Biennale as a non-profit institution in isolation to the art fairs. This is despite the fact that most biennales were originally established to attract tourists, boost art sales and to market a particular location. As a kind of macroeconomic counterpoint to the microeconomic galleries.

Especially now during the economic crisis, in which less money is being spent, the pendulum is beginning to swing the other way. For a long time, people wanted as little state interference as possible and thought that the private sector could do everything better. However, it turned out that this system also had its limits and created problems. Now we are turning to the state again. The best solution probably lies somewhere in the middle and has more to do with societal and economic trends than with art itself.

Art often aligns itself to where the possibilities lie. And it has always been found where the money is. The great boom experienced by the biennales, for example, occurred in the 1990s. In recent years, they have fallen into crisis. Instead, we are experiencing a boom in art fairs. Now we have to wait to see which new platforms will be found for art.

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THE GROWTH OF THE ART MARKET AND THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PUBLIC ART INSTITUTIONS IN MODERN TIMES

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SAM KELLER ON THE IMPORTANCE OF ART

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SK I don’t find it so hard to believe. Art has long been an investment. It has been produced as such for centuries and was once gladly accepted as a form of currency. That is not new. To separate art and the art market so strictly is a modern phenomenon. I think that the hybrid character of the relationship between the two is much less a problem than a solution, and that we have to redefine this relationship. Tension has always existed between art and the market, as there has always been between the individual and society. And it’s not the case that this has to be resolved once and for all. But where care should be taken is with economic thinking. This is expressed through language – business language – comes into art and ends up being applied to concepts for which its use is questionable, such as the works themselves or the emotions shared by people.

Given that there are already courses in which people learn how to sell themselves as a brand, i.e. as a product for the market, this is very dubious. And if such tendencies do not stop at individuals and their thoughts and feelings, they won’t stop for art either. We have to be very careful that art does not degenerate into a product. So I believe that thinking in terms of “blue chips” is extremely suspect.

JS That assumes a subjective perspective that is turned into an objective fact through the value attached to it. Problematic surely?

SK The word “blue chip” comes from the stock exchange, where it is clearly defined what a “blue chip” is. All you need to do is look at the market value or the indices. In the art world, however, such words are used to try to objectify a subjective opinion or valuation. This raises the question of who stands to gain from having “blue-chip” artists and “blue-chip” artworks. Often, it is the very same people who make lots of money from art. And because the term did not originate from the art world, it is not particularly helpful for contemplating art.

JS Continuing this train of thought, the economisation of art would mean that art is much more susceptible to financial crises, regardless of its quality?

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SK It’s already the case that certain artists are suffering (in the financial crisis). They followed either a heavily commercial path or took great risks, in that their production was very expensive or financed in a risky way. And one of the best things about art is its relative autonomy, even if it is never completely autonomous. In a society in which everything is mass-produced, artists are among the last to be masters of the process, i.e. to do something how they want or not at all. And that will presumably remain one of the outstanding qualities of art in the future, that creativity can happen undiluted and without compromise. Economisation is one such compromise, but it is by no means alone in our society. Publicity has also become a key asset. The artist appears not to exist without exhibitions, catalogues, auctions or articles in the press. It would be just as important to question whether this is the right way to gauge art?

JS The economisation of art begins in the production stage. Many ideas are often not even feasible, i.e. the artist either makes a smaller version or he waits until he has enough money.

SK It’s certainly true that artists are not always the masters of their means of production. Even van Gogh had to beg his brother for money, and the Old Masters had to be paid in advance in order to buy the expensive colours.

JS But this means that the possibilities are limited. Presumably, Klimt would have used more gold if he had had the chance?

SK Art production is rarely entirely without limits. But there are, of course, both great and graduated differences between the levels of independence. That should not be a restriction, however, quite the contrary. It is the strength of art that it explores all possibilities, even those provided by the Internet. But the artist should have the freedom to decide for himself.

JS To what extent does this affect artists who have a certain style that sells particularly well? There are those who do not let themselves be influenced in any way, and those who most certainly do.

SK One of the paradoxes of art is the demand for the artist to produce the work for himself. But he is, after all, a person as well, for whom kudos and recognition are important. He needs to make a living from what he does. And because it’s important, for example, what others think about his art, he has already limited himself. Success is always the biggest danger of success. It’s the same for a company that makes a hit product and puts everything into improving this. When no one needs the product anymore, the company collapses.

The danger is just as great for the artist, of course. Success comes up in every interview, collectors want to buy into it, and curators want it to lend cachet to their exhibitions. The artist ends up being defined by his success. Actors suffer in the same way when they become associated with a particular starring role. The same happens to an artist who creates a famous work.

JS It seems more of a problem for actors to me, because they merge into the role they are playing. For artists it is more of a cult of celebrity that is cultivated in the moment, and in which the object or work is separate from the person. Right?

SK It’s true that particular works define artists in a similar way the actors are typecasted. The artist, however, often has to work for a long time before he becomes famous, and he usually finds it hard to do something new after achieving success. Maybe it’s those artists who continually evolve and reinvent themselves who enjoy lasting success, rather than those who always do the same thing. Though this often means that they have to wait longer for success or perhaps do not enjoy it to quite the same extent.

For an artist it is also far more difficult to make plans for a career, because much depends on other people and not on the artist himself. Many things cannot be planned at all, or are bound up with chance and with factors that can only be influenced up to a certain point. Which is why many artists get the feeling that the art world or the art market is unfair. But there is no absolute fairness here. One person has success early, the other later, and the third not at all, which only

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61 Samuel Keller, director and Ernst Beyeler, founder

JS It’s interesting that the link between art and the economy is now so close, that even economic terms are being used within the art world. “Blue chip” artists, for example, are becoming as much a brand as Adidas. What’s more, a kind of art banking is going on, in which art is becoming an investment and gaining a whole new sense of value. Hard to believe?

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63 JS In this context, what do you see as the most important function of a public (private) art institution? And to what extent do they influence the art world?

SK One always exerts an influence – consciously or not – and I think it is better when it is deliberate. That is one of the qualities of a museum. They make conscious decisions that they communicate and reflect on. Galleries and collectors do this as well, but they don’t have to be so aware of it. Nowadays, a public institution has lots of important functions and acquires more as time goes on. The most important function – and this shouldn’t be forgotten – is that artworks are collected in the first place. If an artwork is not collected, it gets lost. The second most important point is that this collection is maintained. With modern art, in particular, this is not a given.

All works of art have a ‘half-life’, not just in terms of the level of interest they generate, but also because of the materials. It’s also important that an institution exhibits a work in the right way, and that decisions are made as to what is good art, what is relevant and what is related. The next factor is the how art is communicated, which includes publicity, but also communication in the broader sense, i.e. guided tours, workshops, audio guides, websites, information panels and children’s games, which establish a connection between visitor and artwork.

so to speak, who generate the basic elements or molecules from which this pictorial information is assembled. Most people are not even aware of this and there are entire research projects, such as Eikones at Basel University, dedicated to understanding how it works.

It’s incredible that since the year 2000, more information has been saved than in all of history beforehand and that this is increasing exponentially. And consider how many images we come into contact with since the creation of the internet. People who have different cultural backgrounds or languages need to communicate, which makes it all the more important to understand images and to have artists who provide us with the building blocks. The danger of not understanding these codes was perfectly illustrated by the Mohammed cartoons, which led to a misunderstanding between two cultures and even to deaths. And all because one set of people interpreted the pictures differently to the others, and those who created them were not aware of the impact they would have.

An art institution should provide a way for people to get their bearings in an ocean of art. Not just in the geographical sense, but also in terms of time, by linking things historically and showing how the new and the old are related. And also by creating connections to the wider context and showing that art does not exist in isolation, but is rooted in history and society. This entails the additional function of education.

JS That ties in nicely with my next question about art in the public arena. A collection implies a process of selection, as does an exhibition (as a compilation with new things to say), and the communication of art takes this one step further. Why is it so important then to bring society into contact with art?

SK On the one hand, there is the inexplicable reason that art has always been there, that creating art is apparently a basic human need, and that for many people it is also a basic need to look at art.

These needs have to be satisfied. On the other hand, art has many important secondary functions within a society – as a kind of catharsis almost. Society expresses certain things through the medium of art that it is otherwise unable to. Artists are like researchers and their ‘results’ can find new and valuable application in other disciplines such as business. The ideas also precipitate into architecture, advertising, film, fashion and any number of other fields.

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Then the question arises as to why society wants to keep art for itself: as a locational factor, for prestige, promotion, entertainment, identity or education? We are living in a time of such a flood of information and images, that we categorically need people who can create these codes in the first place – reading and understanding the images. The artists are those who create the letters

Fondation Beyeler from South Photo: Serge Hasenböhler

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gives us a limited idea of how good the artists are. What one can say is that bad artists in the museum scene or on the art market rarely enjoy success over a longer period of time. That’s not to say that those who are represented are necessarily bad, however. Art history abounds with examples of artists who were either discovered late or rediscovered later, and it is also full of people who were celebrated in their lifetime, then forgotten or re-evaluated.

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65 JS Art criticism also has the important role of making certain artists and positions public, is that right?

SK Art criticism has possibly lost something in this role, in that the artists wait for the critic who will make them famous. This function is carried out by other people today. Gallery owners have often already cleared out the studio before the critic arrives on the scene. And it is also the case today that artists have direct access to the public via the internet.

Art Education in the museum Photo: José Ceballos

JS That is the exciting thing about research projects such as Eikones (on the power of images), which look at how conditioned we are to images, including in terms of our aesthetic capabilities – of looking, perceiving and judging how certain forms take effect.

SK The power (of images) is illustrated by the fact alone that the Christian church made such huge efforts to secure the best artists and claim the greatest pictures for itself. In other religious, such as Islam and Judaism, certain images were banned. No one would go to these lengths if these images did not have a certain power. At the same time, we are closer than ever to the radical statement by von Beuys “everyone is an artist”, not least because of the instruments available to us today on computers.

JS This once again highlights the fact that in the end the question remains: what is actually art and what is declared as art?

SK That is without doubt an exciting question that will never definitely be answered. It never stops being asked and never stops being answered. And the boundaries of what is and isn’t art are also continually being questioned and changed by the artists. That’s why there are no conclusive answers. For a long time, artists were the only ones who made pictures. Today, on YouTube – where everyone can write and make images – the question as to what is art rears its head again.

JS This issue of art criticism and theory is also exciting. Art criticism is barely possible any more, that is to say, in the traditional sense of taking up an external position on a certain theme. One has to know the subject matter inside out to form any kind of opinion. And it will become increasingly difficult to comprehend the phenomenon of art and how it is disseminated.

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SK Art criticism has changed, but it is not impossible. Both the overview and the outsider’s view have become difficult, but so much has changed in the world that hardly any position has stayed

JS The progression of art was originally, and as early as 20 years ago, heavily centred around Europe and North America. Now there is a movement towards Asia and Latin America, something which is also tied in with the economy. To what extent can the European institutions sustain their geo-cultural importance? Will the art movement spread across the whole world, and will Europe remain the driving force?

SK People all over the world have always expressed themselves through art. Europe isn’t the only place with artists. It’s just that the art elsewhere has manifested itself in other ways. This is beautifully illustrated in our exhibition through the African and Oceanic works that were collected by the Beyelers.

The concept of the modern, visual artist – the free art – is, however, a European one, which was brought to America by emigrants. And the traditional centres of art are, of course, in Europe. But these have always changed – take Florence and Venice, for example, which in the 20th century enjoyed none of their former prominence. Then it was Paris, Berlin and Vienna, New York as well after the Second World War, and the trend has been spreading for a number of years now. Japan and South Korea were simply earlier than other Asian countries, and in Latin America it was probably Brazil or Mexico first. Now it’s the whole of South America. Africa and the Middle East were long thought of as art backwaters, but that has changed too. The great centres of art are becoming less important. There are now more places in which art is produced and displayed, breaking the hegemony of individual cities. Economic and political developments are going much the same way.

But I think that Europe is not just losing, it’s gaining as well. It is only losing in relative importance. Overall interest in art is rising massively and a European invention, namely modern art, is suddenly going global. Art is also associated with certain values, such as individual recognition, liberty, freedom of expression and human rights: profoundly humanistic values, European values, which are disseminated through art.

And the fact that countries in places such as Africa, the Middle East and Asia have an interest in this “visual arts” concept, shows that it has something to offer people and societies, that there is something positive in it – a resource that they can use and that manifestly promotes understanding among nations. Just as people wouldn’t trade with each other if they had nothing to gain, they surely wouldn’t exchange culture either.

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the same. It’s possible that art criticism is simply the one that has been affected the most. But that doesn’t mean that it is no longer needed. We had an interesting round-table discussion about this at Art Basel, about the form and function of art criticism, and about how it is demanded and desired by the majority of people who work with art.

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Europeans can be thankful that there are other cultural circles that have an interest in art.

Because if modern art wasn’t such a strong concept, the opposite would be true and we would have to import it from other cultures. Art is not a one-way street and there is always a shift, which is obvious from the way that modern art found inspiration in Africa. Japanese and Chinese art also had an enormous influence on modern art, as we will see again in the Vienna exhibitions. They would be unthinkable without Japanism. I’m therefore of the opinion that the exchange is a very positive one, but one that unavoidably involves all negative aspects of globalization. Something gets lost, something else comes in. But overall I see this as a positive trend, quite apart from the fact that we probably don’t have any other choice. We cannot remain the centre of the geo-political world.

Although it’s clear that professionals set the tone in the art world, the question of what art is has to be verified by the populace so to speak. A museum with no visitors or a gallery in which art collectors buy nothing, will not work. In this way, the public legitimise the decisions made by art experts.

What’s also interesting is the thought that if one day a billion Chinese or Indian people begin to get interested in art, they would have a much bigger say in determining what art actually is. That could be very exciting, particularly if other perspectives emerge that are wholly different to our own.

We live in very interesting times when it comes to art, times in which several major changes – globalization, popularization, the Internet – are occurring, which could alter the face of art and the art world.

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Samuel Keller was born in 1966. He studied Art History and Philosophy at the University of Basel; 1994-9.

He has been the Head of Communications, Art Basel; 1998–9: Deputy Director, Art Basel; 2000-7 Director of Art Basel; since 2008 Director of Fondation Beyeler. He is also active as a jury member and a member of the advisory boards of countless trade fairs and art institutions.

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Janine Schmutz was born in 1975. She studied Art History and History at the Universities of Basel and Freiburg; 2002-4. She is a research assistant at Künstlerhaus Schloß Balmoral, Germany. Since 2004 she works in the Art Education at Foundation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel, Switzerland. She is also active as a freelance curator.

EXHIBITION SPONSOR

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BURCU YÜKSEL Amanda Sharp is an adamant advocate of art fairs. She believes in their great value in providing platforms where people can meet, exchange ideas, and channel a boost of energy to the art. Her dedication and enthusiasm is both exhilarating and addictive. In 1991 along with Matthew Slotover and Tom Gidley she co-founded Frieze magazine. It then came as no surprise that twelve years later, in 2003, Amanda and Matthew launched the Frieze Art Fair with the message that contemporary art can be for anyone. Although not an easy task to undertake, having started their frieze magazine at the time of the dot com bubble burst, Amanda and Matthew were accustomed to challenges. Now despite being such a young fair, especially in comparison to the forty-year-old Art Basel and the Armory Show that started in 1993, Frieze quickly became a leading establishment bringing together more than 150 leading contemporary art galleries and creating an environment where in just one day you can see works of art by the most interesting, important, innovative artists of today.

So what better place to start to get an overview of what is happening now in contemporary art than Frieze?

I catch Amanda Sharp in the middle of her busy schedule and series of meetings. She is a complete professional dedicated to her job which she tackles with huge dedication and diligence. Her calm, soft spoken manner is perhaps the strength behind her successful career. We chat about the ideas behind co-founding an art fair in London and the challenges she and Matthew face to keep it fresh.

BURCU YÜKSEL When you and Matthew began working on this fair, what was your vision and point of departure? Did you run into any particular difficulties?

AMANDA SHARP I think there are always difficulties when you do new business. It’s always two steps forward and one step back. You’re learning the whole time, and you don’t know everything you need to. We had never done an event before, although we had done the magazine, so it was a very steep learning curve, but what’s really exciting is the opportunity to keep learning as you are developing something. For us, we just looked around and saw that every other major city had an art fair. It seemed like a necessary and obvious step for London to have one so that was our simple goal. The strategy, I suppose, and the interest we had, was to look at the existing models and try and think about ways we could improve on those models and create innovation from within to do interesting things while at the same time always being mindful of the fact that the most important thing is the art and you can never lose track of this.

BY How did you find the transition from publishing an art magazine to founding an art fair?

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AS Although we were planning to make a fair, at the time we didn’t have a network of relationships

with and among collectors. We didn’t know the collectors but believed very clearly that the good collectors are interested in good art. What we did know about were artists, curators, writers and gallerists, and we just thought ok, if you are going to do a good fair you need the best of the galleries that you can possibly get. You need to put them in an environment where people want to stay, you have to integrate that environment into the city which is the host and you need to find a way for the fair to benefit the city too, so that it becomes of its city, part of its city, and for its city as well as being an international event. That was really the guiding principle and to do that, we sort of thought why do people want to stay in a place? They need good food, good light, and an interesting design. Potentially we could create somewhere where visitors could find these things and perhaps there could be an opportunity for artists to feel integrated into the fair through other mechanisms in addition to the presentation in gallery stands.

BY How did the development of the Frieze Foundation fit into the fair?

AS We asked ourselves, how do you make this an exciting environment? That was one of the reasons we started a non-profit foundation commissioning artist projects. We always wanted to initiate an exciting international program in London and doing the fair allowed us to do it financially, where as before we couldn’t find an economic model that facilitated this.

BY In a way you are using this commercial model for different purposes.

AS Yes absolutely! And I think it benefits everyone. Meeting of culture and commerce can be a fertile situation and can facilitate an enormous amount of energy, and that cross culmination can be good for everyone.

BY Since you started this fair in 2003, there has been a continuous and somewhat excessive expansion of art fairs in terms of their format and size which naturally leads to a larger audience for all but also to fair fatigue. What is your opinion on this expansion, not only within existing fairs, but across cities and countries?

AS I don’t think more is necessarily better. I think the quality is the thing that matters and that globalization of art fairs isn’t a bad thing per se. Very often an art fair speaks locally before it speaks internationally. If you think of fairs in somewhere like Asia, they are meeting places. They are places where people can come alone, exchange information. That was what interested us in art fairs at the beginning. With the magazine which we started in the early 90s, we would go to fairs as magazine editors, publishers, and utilize it as a place where we found an opportunity to learn an enormous amount because we didn’t have a large travel budget. It was where we could see a huge number of people in a short of period of time, see a great amount of work, be introduced to artists who we wouldn’t have had any introduction or an opportunity for introduction previously. From that perspective it’s just simply a fire of exchange of information and I always found fairs very useful. I think that when you talk about global expansion per se, we can look at what’s happening in Asia for example and there the Hong Kong fair is growing not because it is attracting collectors from London, but because it’s attracting collectors from that region and I don’t mean just China but other countries around China. So one can’t just assume that proliferation or growth is bad. When you look at existing fairs, or models of existing fairs, I think there has to be a reason why things get bigger. If there isn’t a good reason then it shouldn’t get bigger!

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AMANDA SHARP ON FRIEZE ART FAIR

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71 RES NOVEMBER 2010 Photo Credit: Linda Nylind Courtesy Frieze

Photo Credit: Graham Carlow Courtesy Frieze

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Photo Credit: Linda Nylind Courtesy Frieze

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73 RES NOVEMBER 2010 Photo Credit: Graham Carlow Courtesy Frieze

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Photo Credit: Linda Nylind Courtesy Frieze

Photo Credit: Linda Nylind Courtesy Frieze

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BY This art fair and biennial dialogue is due to take a different course in Istanbul where a contemporary art fair will run concurrent with the Istanbul Biennial in 2011. Being a native of Istanbul, I want to ask you if you have visited the city and what would you think of the format of an art fair overlapping with an established biennial.

Photo Credit: Linda Nylind Courtesy Frieze

BY What do you think about the growing use of technology in the art fair format? For example there re iPad or iPhone applications to help navigate through the sometimes overwhelmingly large fairs.

AS If you give people additional tools to navigate something, it should be about making it easier, not more difficult. S, the ideal situation would be that you are creating a good iPad or iPhone application to improve a certain service. Before you may have handed out a physical map that visitors pick up on arrival at the fair, but for those who know their technology and are very organized and want to plan, they can now look online or download an application a week in advance. They can study what art works galleries are bringing, and they can think ‘Ok I’ve only got 4 hours, this is going to be my course through the fair.’

BY And now the use of digital media is taking an even more involved step with the VIP Art Fair, virtual art fair co-founded by James Cohan that will be exclusively online for one wee in January 2011. This will be an interesting experience for the visitors.

AS Yes I’m aware of this fair, but don’t know a huge amount about it. I’m a great believer in the digital. We’re interested in it, we spend a lot of time talking about it, but for me personally, I like to look at art in the flesh. I will be interested in to see how the online fair works though, because there are a lot of hurdles to still get over to do something so virtual..

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As we continue our conversation on the growth of art fairs and how they create a forum where people come and learn, discuss and exchange ideas, I want to know if Amanda has ever made a comparison between the art biennials and the fairs? Are they in competition or complementary?

Her answer quickly makes her point:

AS Very sadly I have not been to Istanbul yet, but it’s very high on my list of priorities. I have a young family and have been traveling less in the past years. Regarding the fair there, I can see why the organizers would try to do that because the biennial is such an incredible draw in Istanbul and it’s such an established Biennial. The fair is presumably struggling to bring an international audience and they hope that may be this might be synergetic. It will be interesting to see how it works.

BY Again, in regard to the growth of international art events, I wonder about the repetition of galleries and artists that keep appearing. How do you keep people traveling from one art event to another? Don’t people get tired of seeing the same names? (Amanda laughs out loud). Amanda, how do you keep an art fair fresh?

AS That’s a good question and one that we wrestle with all the time! It is a hard thing to do. We noticed a few years ago that we were meant to be a youngish fair, or at least a fair that has space for young and interesting galleries and we noticed something ironic; that we had something like 7 galleries in the fair that were less than 6 years old! We started with this reputation of being this place where you discover and we had already become an establishment too quickly. So the question was ‘so what do we do to correct that’? We spent a few years thinking about it and our present solution, which began last year in 2009, was to create a new section called FR AME. We brought in new advisers and curators so that we could really create an environment where the selection committee of the fair would get a lot of information on very young artists because those involved had done diligent research and our committee could take informed risks because they knew more about the work than what was previously send just through an application. FR AME is basically a project based section. There are a lot of galleries out there that are just starting out, maybe they have one really great artist and the program isn’t quite there yet. How do we bring those voices into the fair? Because they are a very exciting new group FR AME became our solution to present that section of young voices, or at least a place where people can discover something new. The response to FR AME when it was introduced last year was remarkably strong. In terms of visitor response, people loved it. They really found it a great blast of energy.

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AS I have never drawn a relationship between the two in my head. I think they serve different functions and are different things. There’s definitely been a lot of conversation in the last five years about the relationship between the two. People say that you might find more good art in a particular art fair than in a particular biennial. I don’t find this an especially useful conversation.

It may simply be that there needs to be a shift in the way that the biennials are done because people travel so much more and move much faster nowadays that the function biennials faced historically needs to be reconsidered. If you would have a very refreshing biennial, where people would be genuinely excited to walk around then no one would have a conversation such as ‘oh the art fair is the new biennial.’ My feeling is that art fairs and biennials are different things; I don’t think they should be the same. But if people are conflating the two it’s because some curators have not been innovative enough in their development of the biennial format.

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BY What about the rest of the fair? How do you maintain that energy and freshness?

AS In terms of more established galleries in the main section of the fair, I think what you are always hoping to do is to provide a great program of activities to encourage good collectors to come which ensures that the galleries prioritize the fair. They know they are going to get a sophisticated client base which includes a lot of curators as well as some very good collectors. That in return encourages them to make a big effort to do a good stand for the fair. We don’t have a big fair. It’s 170 galleries - a lot smaller than other international contemporary art fairs and we try to keep it very focused around the art that is being made now. That in and of itself keeps it very current. The artist commissions program that comes through our foundation hopefully creates surprises and criticality shifts the fair into a slightly different context from others.

BY In addition to the gallery stands and artist commissions, Frieze has a strong program of talks, films and now curated nights of music that are being are introduced this year. Even so, Amanda makes it clear that as the fair organizers, they are not the ones creating the content but ensure a dynamic freshness each year.

AS You never know until the opening day what the fair is going to look like. We do not provide the content. What we do is provide the infrastructure. We just hope that through the selection of galleries and making a strong list, the galleries feel confident it’s going to be a very good fair and that the good people will come and therefore they will build a really great stand. It’s not a much more sophisticated approach than that. We redesign the architecture each year and want every time you approach the fair for it to feel differently. There is a lot of time and effort put into making the gallery selection each year for the fair. The FR AME section, I can happily say, has been successful in re-energizing the fair one more degree. Along with the projects program and the talks, which are freshly curated every year, there is definitely a different feel year in, year out.

BY What is in the future of Frieze Art Fair? Do you have any expansion plans to different cities for example, would that something you would consider?

AS I wouldn’t discount it. It’s definitely something we would consider, but we don’t have any definite plans for any other projects at this point in time.

Amanda Sharp co-founded frieze magazine with publishing partner Matthew Slotover in 1991. Following the success of the magazine, Amanda and Matthew founded Frieze Art Fair in 2003. Now in its eighth year the fair is regarded as one of the world’s best known and most influential art fairs. Amanda Sharp is a regular contributor to the international art world having spoken on various panels and given lectures at venues including Tate, The Walker Art Centre and Yale. She has contributed to magazines, newspaper and books including the Phaidon monograph on Doug Aitken.

Burcu Yüksel is an assistant director at Derek Johns Ltd, dealers in Old Master paintings in London and Curator of Performance at ZOOM Contemporary Art Fair (to be launched December 2010 in Miami).

Burcu holds a Master’s degree from New York University in Visual Arts Administration. She contributes regularly to a number of magazines and newspapers.

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Portrait of Amanda and Matthew Photo credit: Linda Nylind Courtesy Frieze

Tobias Rehberger Why, 2010 Everything Happens for a Reason, 2010 Nothing Happens for a Reason, 2010 Nothing Ever Happens, 2010 for RES

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FAKED? AN INTERVIEW WITH TIM NEUGER

DAVID ULRICHS In the middle of the summer, I received an SMS from the Berlin gallerist Tim Neuger, sent from Yucatan, where he was visiting Jorge Pardo. Apparently, a magazine was interested in an interview with him. When I enthusiastically replied that I was game, he proposed to meet at the end of August, which we did, only for a cup of white tea, the constitution of which he related to me in great detail…

TIM NEUGER White tea is very different from green tea. Made from only young leaves and buds, it has more theanine, which has a relaxing effect and is also mood enhancing. I used to drink about eight cups of espresso but that just gave me a momentary ‘kick’. White tea starts off slowly and then lasts and lasts.

DAVID ULRICHS …oh, mood enhancement is always good! So, you are not worried about me faking an interview with you?

TN Not at all. I think it is a lot more interesting to read than the usual exchange of pleasantries that fill the spaces of art magazines or the cultural sections of newspapers today.

DU Well, most art writers depend on the goodwill of gallerists and artists to commission catalogue texts, so they write non-critical reviews or ask trivial questions, so as not to ruin their business relations. Magazines also prefer ‘descriptive’ reviews and ‘informative’ interviews to humor their advertising clients.

TN Really?

DU In general, it is an open secret that most of the dealings in the art world have a nepotistic aftertaste. I mean you are often considered the protégé of the influential Cologne gallerist Max Hetzler, with whom you realized many successful projects. The exhibition-cum-art fair ‘abc – art berlin contemporary’, which took place for the third time this autumn was co-initiated by you both and although its format remains very vague, around seventy galleries took part. You also both played a large role in the success of the Gallery Weekend Berlin, a concept that has even been adopted, more or less successfully by other cities, including New York.

TN I have great respect for Max Hetzler and admire his courage.

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DU Although the typical gallerist is a loner, it seems as if the Berlin gallery scene is run by a united handful of powerful gallerists, including you…

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Billy Childish installation view Courtesy of neugerriemschneider, Berlin Photo by Jens Ziehe, Berlin

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Jorge Pardo I Love My Wife, 2007 Installation View: neugerriemschneider, Berlin, 2007 Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin Photos: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

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91 1 - July 3, 2010 Wallstrasse 85 10179 Berlin Courtesy neugerriemschneider Berlin Photo by Jens Ziehe, Berlin

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Elizabeth Peyton Installation views

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93 DU The entry conditions to take part in the Gallery Weekend Berlin are not quite clear to me.

Obviously, there is the relatively high participation fee, but I understand that essentially it is ‘by invitation only’, correct?

TN Well, there has to be some kind of quality control…

DU It would be easier to have an official remit, than to apply some arbitrary rules and there definitely is a very strong Cologne presence in its board of directors, especially those gallerists who moved to Berlin in the 1990s, excluding Isabella Czarnowska. Coincidence?

TN I prefer to devote my time to optimizing my program.

DU So you will be visiting studios of young undiscovered artists to spice up your program? Is Billy Childish our latest ‘discovery’?

TN I have known Billy for a long time. After many years of personal problems, which he never saw as problematic, he made these very disquieting paintings, some of which I already showed at Basel this year.

DU Nevertheless, you will have a lot more time on your hands, especially since your gallerypartner, Burkhard Riemschneider, still helps out at the gallery. There must be something going on in the background…a space abroad, perhaps? As far as I know, no Berlin gallery has opened up a second branch abroad, you could be the first! Or do you consider yourself Colognian?

TN I think having a remit would restrict access rather than facilitate it.

TN I was not actually born in Cologne…

DU While it is pretty clear to see the commercial interests that lie behind the Gallery Weekend Berlin, there was confusion about the status of the ‘abc’. Curated by someone hired by a group of gallerists, it aspired to be an exhibition with works ‘for sale’. In short, it came across as some hybrid form of an exhibition that nobody really wanted. By moving this year’s edition onto the grounds of the Artforum art fair, the ‘abc’ clearly defined itself as commercial venture, an accusation that has often been leveled at the ‘abc’, but which its organizers had always denied.

DU I see, but surely your gallery is not affected by the credit crunch, or will you also start layingoff your assistants – ‘restructuring’ as it’s called. Somehow, I cannot imagine Tim Neuger minding the gallery, sitting behind an Egon Eiermann table every day from 10am till 6pm…

TN I think the table in the gallery is from Ikea.

TN I actually liked the fact that it resisted a clear definition.

DU I don’t believe it!

DU This year you, as well as Max Hetzler, were no longer involved with the ‘abc – art berlin contemporary’ and it seems next year you will also not be on the organizing board of the Gallery Weekend Berlin. Are you withdrawing from the Berlin scene?

Tim Neuger is the co-founder of the Berlin based gallery neugerriemschneider.

TN I am focusing my attention on other issues.

DU Oh, are you working on another project? I remember you showed Elizabeth Peyton in a rundown space near Berlin’s Museum Island. Will you be opening something there soon?

TN Actually, I am concentrating on my gallery here in Linienstrasse.

DU Over the last few years many of the neighboring galleries have left this area and now even Esther Schipper will move away to a new space in the en vogue area around Potsdamerstrasse.

Luckily, Peres Projects have recently opened shop in your area…

TN I am not someone who follows the latest location-trends.

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DU What about opening up a project space, to source younger talents, similar to Vittorio Manalese, the brainchild of Bruno Brunnet and Nicole Hackert of Contemporary Fine Arts? Or perhaps hosting some evening events at Berlin’s latest arty venue Soho House, like your blue-chip colleagues at Haunch of Venison?

David Ulrichs is a Berlin-based art writer.

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TN Over the last few years some of us have realized that we have common interests, so naturally we began do things together. That’s how the Gallery Weekend Berlin started.

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Tobias Rehberger Major Problems In Minor Societies, 2008 Installation View: neugerriemschneider, Berlin, 2008 Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin Photos: Jens Ziehe, Berlin

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Artists’ books and printed matter

Nuri Ziya Sokak No 7 Beyoâ‚Źlu Istanbul TR

www.b-a-s.info

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JAKE & DINOS CHAPMAN ON THE SUBJECT OF “HELL” AND THE INFLUENCE OF GOYA

NICK HACKWORTH Do you regard “Hell” as your most misread work?

DINOS CHAPMAN It’s all misinterpreted.

NH I mean in that many people saw the work as a morally sharp artistic comment on war and genocide, just as some have of your various re-workings of the “Disasters of War”. What’s your reaction to that interpretation?

JAKE CHAPMAN Culturally I think it’s true to say that our work operates in that way…in a worse case scenario it confirms a sense of moral conscience. It’s a very unfortunate default in a way. What one can say about the more romantic interpretations of the work is that they indicate how the work wasn’t, on a really fundamentally simple level, looked at. If you want to know whether this work has anything to do with the past then look at the three headed mutants and ask yourself how many how many three headed mutants were there running around in 1945.

DC Yes, seeing “Hell” as a representation of the horrors of the Second World War is actually quite an impressively wilful misreading to make because there are so many parts of it you have to ignore.

The interesting thing about making hell was making a sculpture that wouldn’t allow you to ignore certain parts of it. It’s too big. It’s too involving…

NH So if people seriously looked at the work they…

JC …wouldn’t be able to make those interpretive judgements, because they’re simply factually incorrect. There are Nazis being spat out of a volcano, an Adolph Hitler factory, mutants beyond description... That work was aimed at trying to gather up or present this notion of pathos via bad assumptions of historical interpretation and so the work collapsed under the weight of its own ridiculous audacity. I mean that the work is about audacity. It’s about absolute, utter impoverishment.

NH How is it impoverished?

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JC We used an inherently inert form of infantile representation, toy soldiers, to infect the grownup subliminal self. We were interested in seeing the whole synthesis collapse into a black hole or volcano. I mean the materials are so fundamentally flawed. They’re so pathetic that they can’t amount to the sum total of the pathos that piece began to attract, which is really funny. But then it’s the same with all of our work.

Jake and Dinos Chapman Hell 1999-2000 Glass-fibre, plastic and mixed media (Nine parts) Dimensions variable © the artist Photo: Stephen White Courtesy White Cube

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101 DC Yes, it intensifies all the related work that precedes it as well. But, I mean, ideally I’d like to do without subject matter all together.

DC It’s something, which seems… inevitable.

NH That might be a bit difficult.

JC If you make a sculpture of ‘evil’, it has to have swastika on it. As much as if you make a painting of something happy, it has to have a smiley face on it. The representational semiotics in the work are so banal, they’re so obvious.

NH But however tactical and deliberately warped your deployment of those signifiers might be, the fact is that they still, however opaquely, reference the Holocaust and thus it seems reasonable to read “Hell” as, at least partially a response to other cultural and social responses to horror and atrocity?

JC Well I’m not sure reasonable is an appropriate word to use in this context. I mean the work is excessive and we used overloaded detail to vulgarize metaphysical essence, to overshoot the threshold of poetics.

DC True. Perhaps the best we could do is to limit our subjects to two or three things that we constantly return to.

NH Your constant repetition of Goya’s imagery serves several different purposes. In “Insult to Injury” one of those ends is an attack on authenticity and originality, his, yours’ and everyone else’s…

JC Yes, the first thing I think about when you say Goya is that within our own work there are so many Goya’s. There’s Robert Hughes’ Goya, modernity’s Goya, our own various and different interpretations ideas of Goya. So even our identity, which is dealt with in terms of history, and sort of venerates him as a very particular thing. We’ve pursued a Goya, which is an entity in difference articulated through repetition. With Goya the entity changes with every repetitious move.

NH Presumably the scale, as with “Disasters of War”, was quite specific in its intent?

NH So the repetition is an exemplification of the Deleuzian idea of difference?

JC We took a perverse pleasure in shrinking the scene and thereby denying death its proper proportion… When you scale things down it disinvests them of their presumed existential weight, it compresses their singularity into a mass. This rupture in scale is sadistic.

DC Yes, it took us two years to make several thousand figures, but in one concentration camp it took them three hours to kill 18,000 prisoners who were forced to run into a pit before being shot… Our work is 1/32 scale pathos.

NH So the work does have something do to with genocide and the Holocaust?

JC The logic and efficiency needed to indulge in racial genocide at the level of the concentration camp is indicative of an industrial process. Everyone who figures in the web of industrial relations is implicated that form of industrial murder implicates. It’s part of our flow, our teleology.

NH What was your favourite part of “Hell”?

DC Well in one of the tunnels there’s this one man all on his own who looks like he’s going to escape, but the tunnel continues into another section and you look at the other half of the tunnel and there’s a tank coming that’s about to run him over. I like that bit.

NH Let’s move away now from the immense three dimensional tableau of “Hell” to discuss the related content of your graphic works such as the etchings and drawings that make up “Los Caprichos” and “Disasters of War”. Do you ever get bored of using Goya as source for your work?

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J/DC No. NH Do you think repetition intensifies the power your work draws from its use of Goya?

JC Deleuze is really anti-identitarian, where all terms are infinitely changeable, and are always in flux as opposed to the model of classical philosophy that is based on the idea of keeping all terms that have a transcendent definition unchangeable. On a systemic level we form a crude macrosystem by doubling the number of people making the work – but every time we try to discuss the art in non-identitarian terms and rather in terms of historical continuum and historical materialism, yet this falls on absolutely deaf ears in the art world, in which people aren’t prepared to think in those terms. They’re not prepared to think of art in any terms other than those that orbit the idea of genius.

NH But equally to say that it’s meaningless to talk about human agency seems as crude as to see creativity as a gift from God… JC Of course. In fact we try to allow the active forces in our ideas help generate the work, because it’s as if they are metaphysically determined by things of a higher order to anything else. Which is to say that you recognize your relationship…that when something occurs to you, do you realise it’s the occurring that’s happening to you, or to put it another way, there’s that great phrase ‘language speaks man’. It’s to do with a continuum of ideas are apparent, that are a part of your proximity to history, part of your proximity to material conditions.

NH And why did you want to do ‘improve’ Goya’s other famous series of etchings, “Los Caprichos”?

DC Well, “Los Caprichos” are different to the “Disasters of War. They’re very odd. The “Disasters of War” are quite humane by comparison, with an overt moral justification. These pictures are much more, or rather even more misanthropic. The titles say things like ‘humanity, the fault is yours’ and ‘man lives to have the life sucked from him’. They articulate the dark side of modernity. They’re dark and unredeemable and really, really offensive.

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NH You are amused when it attracts ‘bad thinking’?

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103 DC And violence.

Jake Chapman was born in 1966 in Cheltenham, Dinos Chapman in 1962 in London.

They live and work in London. They have exhibited extensively, including solo shows at Tate Britain (2007) Tate Liverpool (2006) Kunsthaus Bregenz (2005) and PS1 Contemporary Art Center, New York (2000).

Nick Hackworth is a gallerist and writer. He founded Paradise Row, a London based contemporary art gallery in 2006. Previously he was an art critic writing for the Evening Standard in London. He is currently working on a monograph on Jake & Dinos Chapman.

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Jake & Dinos Chapman Insult to Injury 2003 Francisco de Goya ‘Disasters of War’ Portfolio of eighty etchings reworked and improved 14 9/16 x 18 1/2 in. (37 x 47 cm) (incl. frame) © the artist Photo: Stephen White Courtesy White Cube

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JC An absolute elaboration of evil.

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as complicit. And sure enough, at the opening, rumors swirled that the stripped-down Oranienplatz building that served as the Biennale’s anchor is destined to become luxury condominiums.

H.G. MASTERS T H E R OUTE BETWEEN the two locations of the sixth Berlin Biennale, the Kunst-Werke Institute for Contemporary Art (KW) in Mitte and an unoccupied department store on Oranienplatz in Kreuzberg, captures the city’s violent political history and still-evident legacies of lurches between regimes of fascism, communism and capitalism. The journey begins in the formerly Jewish district of Mitte, progresses through Alexanderplatz where discount fashion stores ring the base of the GDR’s monumental Fernsehturm, and passes through a district of Soviet-bloc housing before arriving in multi-ethnic, graffiti-adorned Kreuzberg. The discontents of the three ideologies continue to define Berlin today, as the city debates how to memorialize state-sponsored murder and political repression, how to address gentrification and immigration, and how to solve its chronic economic depression.

Oranienplatz 17, 10999 Berlin Photo: Uwe Walter, 2010 Copyright Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

With these concerns so evident on the faces of city buildings and residents, one wonders: Has reality become so foreign, such a rarefied subject to artists and viewers alike that an entire biennale needed to be devoted to the topic? “What is Waiting Out There,” the 2010 Berlin Biennale, curated by Kathrin Rhomberg, started from the conflicted premise that reality has recently become “problematic,” “ambiguous,” “less credible,” “mere illusion, mere staging,” “robbed of its singularity,” “even lack[ing] in reality.”

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Works by 42 artists, spread over six venues in Mitte and Kreuzberg, tackled this anguished semantic and phenomenological paradox. Announcing the show were Michael Schmidt’s black-andwhite photographs of women’s torsos, midriffs, backs and busts from his series “Frauen” (1997–99).

Plastered around the city on billboards, the images appeared to be grittier, more alternative versions of the H&M advertisements that regularly dominate public spaces. Seen alongside Schmidt’s images in many places were unexpected accompaniments: posters accusing Rhomberg and KW director Gabriele Horn of being gentrifiers—a criticism the show did little to rebut. During the press conference, Rhomberg—memorably seated in the Anatolian Aleviten Cultural Center beneath a mural depicting Ali, in the form of a lion, with Muhammed—said she couldn’t comment on the Biennale’s role in gentrifying Kreuzberg because she had just arrived in the city a few years earlier and she didn’t know the neighborhood’s history well enough, inadvertently casting herself

The show itself was filled with similar contradictions. On the ground floor of the largest venue, at Oranienplatz 17, was Roman Ondák’s functional coat check, which despite its massive size was easy to overlook as an artwork. This wonderful unobtrusiveness stood in contrast to many of the building’s weaker works, which either clumsily or pompously called too much attention to themselves, thereby diluting the show’s premise of looking outward at the present. Adrain Lohmüller’s Das Haus bleibt still (2010), a building-wide system of copper piping carrying water to the first floor where it dripped on a salt block, encrusting a bedcover in crystals over the course of the summer, was needlessly elaborate to the point of being decorative. Anna Witt’s video of her adult-self crawling out from between her mother’s legs, Die Geburt (2003), is a sophomoric conceit, drawing time and attention away from engaging works like Phil Collins’ 30-minute film, marxism today (prologue) (2010), about how three East German teachers of Marxist-Leninist ideology and economics fared after the GDR’s collapse.

Among the seven artists’ work at KW, Mark Boulos’ All That Is Solid Melts Into Air (2008), a two-screen projection juxtaposing footage of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Nigerian rebels on opposite walls, was all too real in its familiar imposition of histrionic, racially tinged binaries— rich/poor, white/black, peaceful/violent, civilized/uncivilized, exploiters/victims. In contrast to Boulos’ didacticism, back at Orianenplatz, Renzo Martens’ 88-minute film Episode 3 (2008) showed the Dutch filmmaker’s quixotic efforts to reverse a dysfunctional system in which European photographers are paid handsomely to document African starvation and aid agencies who repeatedly attempt and fail to alleviate the conditions of poverty.

Alte Nationalgalerie, Bodestr. 1-3, 10178 Berlin Photo: Christian Sievers, 2010 Copyright Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art

By coincidence (but timed around the World Cup), Africa was the subject of a separate summer curatorial project, “Who Knows Tomorrow.” Five African artists presented large-scale installations at important cultural sites in Berlin. Among them were Pascale Marthine Tayou’s installation outside the Neue Nationalgalerie of the 54 African national flags and large wooden figures modeled after sculptures of European colonists. On the neoclassical facade of the Alte Nationalgalerie, El Anatsui hung two irregular curtains made of countless flattened aluminum bottle-caps fastened together. With their scale, overly determined locations and accompanying political-science rhetoric of globalization and postcolonialism, the installations were inert and impersonal. For all its faults, at least the Berlin Biennale avoided these kinds of expensive spectacles, alienated from the very human realities they proclaim to represent.

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REDRESSING BERLIN’S REALITY PRINCIPLE

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Photograph from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 21.5.2010 Photo: Christian Sievers

Photographs in public space

Photo: Christian Sievers

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Michael Schmidt Untitled, from the series Frauen, 1997–1999 B/W photograph Copyright Michael Schmidt Courtesy Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin

Photo: Claudia Jentzsch

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113 RES NOVEMBER 2010 George Kuchar Eye on the Sky, 2008 DVD, Farbe, Ton / DVD, color, sound 21’36’’ Courtesy the artist; Video Data Base, Chicago

George Kuchar SeaSideShow, 2008 DVD, Farbe, Ton / DVD, color, sound 21’ Courtesy the artist; Video Data Base, Chicago Renzo Martens Episode 3, 2008 DVD, color, sound, 90’; two metal trunks, photographs made in collaboration with the “Association des Photographes de Kanyabayonga,” master tape, neon signs, certificate; 90’ Courtesy the artist; Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam; Wilkinson Gallery, London Copyright the artist

George Kuchar Centennial, 2007 DVD, Farbe, Ton / DVD, color, sound 13’14’’ Courtesy the artist; Video Data Base, Chicago

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The Biennale’s official offsite projects offered a variety of immersive, personal experiences. The eccentric American filmmaker George Kuchar presented more than 20 of his rambling first-person narratives, including the “Weather Diary” (1986–90) series, intimate documentaries of a month’s vacation in a rundown Oklahoma motel during tornado season. In Danh Vo’s own Kreuzberg apartment, the artist covered his bathroom with custom-designed Oranienplatz 17, 10999 Berlin tiles featuring delicate botanical drawings by an early 20 th Photo: Uwe Walter, 2010 century Catholic missionary to southeast Asia, and on his Copyright Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art desk displayed comical doodles by former US president Ronald Reagan. That visitors had to walk through a private courtyard and up five flights of stairs to Vo’s apartment was the best example of the transitory show intruding on the lives of Berliners—correspondingly, there were signs of protest hung in many of the building’s other windows.

In its largely indifferent attitude to the histories of Mitte and Kreuzberg, the Biennale appeared to skirt confronting the very present reality of Berlin itself. Instead of seeing the Biennale as an agent in the city’s rapid changes—for better and for worse—Rhomberg was preoccupied with rejecting “art-immanent” and formalist trends, which were nonetheless present in many works. In showcasing artists who supposedly address reality, Rhomberg seemed to suggest that there are some artists who are not concerned with reality—as if a geometric shape painted on a canvas is less engaged with the outside world than Gedi Sibony’s architectural framing of an inlaid star in the exhibition space’s floor.

To appreciate Rhomberg’s Biennale, it is best to leave the weighty context of Berlin altogether, to fly in an airplane to another continent and be surrounded for hours by in-flight magazines, dutyfree shopping, several channels of action films and romantic comedies. There at 10,000-odd meters, traversing time zones while enmeshed in various consumer fantasies, you might at last feel an urgent desire to return to the reality—whatever it is—that’s waiting out there.

H.G. Masters is a writer and editor currently living in Berlin. He works as editor-at-large for ArtAsiaPacific magazine and is the editor of AAP’s annual Almanac, which features yearly reports on the art scenes of the 67 nations of the Asia-Pacific region from Turkey to the International Date Line.

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GRIT WEBER TEXT IN GERMAN, TRANSLATED BY JEREMY GAINES

T H E F R A N K F U R T- B A S E D F I L M M A K E R is showing her works at their place of origin, while the Portikus exhibition space thematizes itself and its history.

A table installation of sorts, made from light-colored wood with small, embedded display cabinets, three work stations with flat screens and a projector beaming an enlarged image of the video works onto the room’s front wall. These are the elements with which Portikus is presenting the work of Frankfurt filmmaker Helke Bayrle and thus, in a way, also telling its own story. Cinema, museum and workspace – these are the three forms of cultural representation Helke Bayrle employs in her filmic work and all three have now, aptly, undergone a public spatial realization.

Visitors are able to look at labeled tapes of her works in the display cabinets, noticing once again that the development is fast-paced and increasingly often overtakes the technology underlying the actual medium used to project the images. Visitors can now sit in front of a flat screen and pick out the digitalized films they would like to see with the click of a mouse. Or they can be content with the preset selection and are rewarded with a large cinematographic screen. The most powerful element of the ensemble, however, stems from the unpretentiously (because they border on the documentary) applied works, as well as what time does with the films, or to be more precise, our perception of them. For as the years literally tick by, the films also become historical documents on the transient, site-specific works of a truly dazzling group of well-known artists, as well as that of an internationally-renowned exhibition space, namely Portikus.

“Thus the world is constructed in such a way that it is as though its center were everywhere and it did not possess a periphery...”

(Nikolaus von Kues)

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Helke Bayrle began her film collection work 18 years ago, to be precise, with the construction of the 45th Portikus exhibition. Since then, she has created over 130 short videos/digital films. Her last, and therefore most current film is about the preparations for her own exhibition. For all of these films are based on the same principle, namely, observing artists engaged in preparing their

117 exhibitions at Portikus. Helke Bayrle’s visits to exhibition openings, which for normal visitors always represent the beginning of their exploration of an artwork, only ever form the conclusion of her films. She came to Portikus’ ‘white cube’ when it really was still empty and the walls were white, as they were for Dan Perjovschi and the Gilbert and George exhibition, and started to film.

Sometimes there were piles of materials strewn about the place, as with Jason Rhoades’ and Paola Pivi’s exhibitions, and we saw how a complex show was constructed from individual elements.

Some of Bayrle’s films are just 2:50 minutes, as with her works on Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset, while others are nearly ten minutes long, as was the case with her documentary on Rirkrit Tiravanija’s cooking performance in 2001 (in which Udo Kittelmann and Daniel Birnbaum have an entertaining cook-off). Thus in their brevity, the films very effectively convey a condensed insight into both the production and presentation of art, which are based on two active aspects, namely, the dialog between artists and their exhibition assistants (who are, in turn, mostly artists themselves) and the construction process, in the sense of building, installing, producing, executing and finally realizing. “The construction of an exhibition is the most lively thing there is,” says the filmmaker, who, in turn, produces her tapes together with her team – artist Sunah Choi normally handles the editing. © Sunah Choi

“In the end, it is incredibly important for me to have understood it.” (Helke Bayrle) And it is precisely this that interests Helke Bayrle: communication and the unpretentious act of construction, i.e., the atmosphere of work. One feature of this is the fact that the majority of her short films do not require verbal explanations of what the artists bring together for their exhibition and what they think of it. In her films, Helke Bayrle does not pursue normal modes of representation of the sort we would recognize from T V and portrait films. She does not work within the context of an interview or spoken moderation and only very rarely includes a short commentary by the artist, such as that of Paola Pivi, who said of her gigantic installation (composed of several fountains), “There is nothing behind it. It is what it is.”

Thus the consistent brevity and avoidance of the artist’ self-representation are the most palpable characteristics of these works, lending them the highest possible density of visual episodes in film and providing the largest possible degree of openness for the viewer. The films thus work with the same elements that form the basis of visual arts. Film-making, which always begins with collecting images, does not seem like an atavistic act to the viewer here, or the surmounting of an approaching loss – for every exhibition finishes at some point, is dismantled and remains only as documentation in the form of text or images. Helke Bayrle’s films are about learning the innumerable ways an observer and a contemporary artwork can converge. And learning from the actions of others naturally presupposes one process, namely aesthetic differentiation.

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HELKE BAYRLE. INFINITE CONVERGENCE AND THE DOUBLE PERSPECTIVE

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All video captions Copyright © 2009 Helke Bayrle, Portikus

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“An image is not powerful because it is brutal or fantastic, but because its association of ideas is distant… and just.” [1] (Jean-Luc Godard) The films certainly function in this way when there is a proportionately short time period between the recording and editing process and the viewer’s reception of the work. However, another value is added to the work when this temporal gap is increased, as Jean-Luc Godard describes precisely with the quote above. For Helke Bayrle generally also observes the way in which visitors approach the work, open up to it, find it funny or tragic, and discuss it with other visitors. However, for viewers of the film it means observing themselves in the process of observing. Bayrle thus employs a double perspective. Her films are always mirrors (with a temporal distortion) that enable her to bring together the film viewer and the viewer of the artwork in the film. This effect is heightened still further if the space at Portikus in the film is the same as in the viewer’s reality. The artist developed this in situ effect exclusively for her more recent film works, in which she records the exhibitions held at Portikus’ current site on Main Island. The observers meet in the same room without actually encountering one another. And because Portikus is an internationally active institution and yet locally anchored, the Frankfurt public watches itself as it gets older. A voyeuristic maelstrom whips up. And the greater the temporal distance between the two sets of observers and thus the more historical the filmic work, the more distant the realities become – and the more just the images.

NOTES [1] “The image is a pure creation of the mind. It is not a product of the comparison, but rather the convergence of two more or less distant realities. The more distant and just the relationships between these two realities are, the more powerful the image. Two realities without a relationship cannot converge. No image is created. Two conflicting realities (…) oppose each other. (Godard in his film JLG/JLG (1994), quoted from Christina Scherer. Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare. In: Ästhetik des Ähnlichen. Zur Poetik und Kunstphilosophie der Moderne, Gerald Funk (ed. et al.), (Fischer; Frankfurt, 2000), pp. 189-216) Helke Bayrle, born 1941 in Thorn, lives and works in Frankfurt am Main. She has shown her videos “Portikus Under Construction” and the MMK (Museum for Moderne Kunst) in Frankfurt am Main, at the National Gallery in Toronto, the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt am Main, the CCA (Center for Contemporary Art) in Kitakyushu, at Massey University in Wallington, at the OCA (Office for Contemporary Art) in Oslo, and the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna.

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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HEINZ PETER SCHWERFEL TEXT IN GERMAN. TRANSLATED BY JEREMY GAINES

Marcel Duchamp and Dennis Hopper Hotel Green (Entrance), 1963 Oil paint on wood panel, 21 x 27 x 2 1/2 in. © The Dennis Hopper Trust Courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust

T H R E E P E R S O N A L I T I E S , three passions, three talents, all rolled into one explosive, free-thinking, marvelously irritating man: Dennis Hopper. He was most probably the last cult figure of old and new Hollywood, once both sonny boy and bad boy, star and outsider, conformist and rebel.

An indie film-maker in the world of industrial studios, an idiosyncratic and yet well-versed actor, above all a survivor, who overcame private and personal crises, films that bombed, drug abuse and a considerable number of mediocre commercial parts – and at the end of it witnessed his place for eternity on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, something he despised at yet needed like a daily dose. Sadly, of all these inner contradictions and paradoxes, the most important Hopper, namely Hopper the visual artist, has more or less gone unnoticed – although he started out in life as a painter.

All the more important, the exhibition arranged for him posthumously in Los Angeles by his friend Julian Schnabel, another megalomaniac who loves transgressing the dividing lines between the arts and another man whom Hollywood does not really know how to rate. It was late in the coming, this redress, as retrospectives of his slender oeuvre have been rare, specifically in America. His portrait photos of the 1960s are the only works to have caught the public eye, if only because they document a long-since complete chapter in US cultural history. They are striking black-and-white shots of the popular heroes of the day, Paul Newman, Bob Dylan and Peter Fonda through to the Pop Art stars: Andy Warhol hiding coquettishly behind an orchid; Claes Oldenburg grinning impishly in the midst of cream cakes (all of them plastic, of course); and Roy Lichtenstein posing in front of his first comic-strip painting. In Hopper’s photos the staging always sets the character, each image tells small stories and one big narrative.

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“I took the shots back then because I knew they were historically correct,” Hopper said ironically 35 years later, commenting on his portraits of stars and poking fun at political correctness. “My real passion has, however, always been painting, collages, Marcel Duchamp and the West Coast artists.” I met him for the first time in 1997, at his house in Venice: An athletic, tanned Hopper sat with his photo album in his hands in his living room and cast his mind back. The news of Roy Lichtenstein’s death had just come in from New York, and Hopper was talking about the photo session for his famous portrait.

“Henry Geldzahler and I had gone to Lichtenstein. It was back in 1964. After the photo we each bought a big picture, right there in the studio. I paid 1,200 dollars for a cloudless sunset. Geldzahler took one with clouds.”

Hopper was not only an artist, but a collector, too. His final collection included a beautiful Basquiat (estimated value: $7-8 million) will go on auction in October. His first art collection from the Pop Art years, went the same way a long time ago, the victim of one of a total of five divorces. “Among other things, I owned Warhol’s first Campbell’s tomato soup, I bought it in 1963 for 75 bucks. Then there were several pieces by Claes Oldenburg, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist and a whole host of others. The collection would be worth at least 30 million dollars.” His first wife, Brooke Hayward, sold them off in 1969 for a fraction of their value. As for Hopper’s own output, dozens of assemblages with found objects and photos: During an altercation with him, she had simply turned the garden hose on them, and that was that. Hopper commented with a grin: “My wives have simply cost me a lot of money” – and alongside money all his early artistic oeuvre, of which today only three assemblages have survived.

Hopper lived in a fashionable windowless avant-garde bunker made of corrugated iron designed in the 1980s by architect Brian Murphy; using a lot of concrete, it was placed in an inhospitable neighborhood of Venice and later expanded to include an apartment by Frank O. Gehry. In the course of the 1980s and 1990s, Hopper assembled a new collection, and it is just as smart and tasteful as its owner. It included smaller pieces by major artists, and large works by minor artists. Joseph Beuys, Gerhard Richter, and Jean Tinguely were represented by drawings, Robert Rauschenberg by a sheet metal sculpture. Hopper’s friends, by contrast, the “bad boys” from New York, were given the run of the land: In the living room hung a Julian Schnabel painting in dark red, dating from his Paris Period, and bearing the inscription “Place de la Concorde”. Alongside David Salle, Eric Fischl, and a huge landscape format by Kenny Scharf. Pop epigone Scharf never painting a better one – Hopper the photographer had a great eye as a collector, too.

While Hopper back then was busy showing me shots of his friend Schnabel painting, his assistant Julie was unrolling prints of impressions from a trip to Japan that had just come back from the lab: abstract still lifes, fragments of walls, gardens, ponds, stones. Framed as large-size diptychs, they were reminiscent of the color field paintings of the 1950s: A calligraphic graffito on a grey ground; simple wall whose strong bright red is shot through with a touch of white. Back in the 1960s, Hopper was already photographing such abstract fragments of walls or torn-down posters. He was always proud of how he had switched from painting to photography: “Painters fled into abstraction in response to the invention of photography,” he declared, “as if in that way they would be able to escape the most important medium of modern times.” He went and got a large painting from the storeroom, a vague, rectangular, white color field on a brown ground. “Looks like a painting by Mark Rothko.” It was based on a photograph on a wall in Venice, where the municipal authorities had painted over graffiti. He photographed the over-painting, and then painted it freely in his studio.

Hopper never stuck with painting, but always crossed over between media: The brown painting goes together with three shots from his thriller “Colors” about L.A. street gangs, which he shot in 1988 with Sean Penn and Robert Duvall as beat cops. At first sight, the movie seems conventional, and then explodes in violence; its title alludes to the skin color of the delinquents, but also to the urban aesthetics of Los Angeles. The three stills, printed on coarse-grained paper, tell the story of what gets painted over in white in the picture: everyday violence. Collages such as “Beat”, which uses cinema, photo, wall painting and oil painting were Hopper’s artistic creed: formally cool, but beneath the surface anger is always raging.

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DENNIS HOPPER-THE LAST OF THE REBELS

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125 RES NOVEMBER 2010 Installation View of Dennis Hopper Double Standard at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA July 11-September 26, 2010 Photo by Brian Forrest

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Installation View of Dennis Hopper Double Standard at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA July 11-September 26, 2010 Photo by Brian Forrest

Installation View of Dennis Hopper Double Standard at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA July 11-September 26, 2010 Photo by Brian Forrest

Dennis Hopper Edward Ruscha, 1964 Gelatin-silver print, 16 x 24 in. Š The Dennis Hopper Trust Courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust and Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York

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The first US retrospective of Bruce Conner did not take place until the end of the 1990s, and not long before his death, and a little later Centre Pompidou bought one of his works. Hopper portrayed him, the polemical satirist of the American way of life, just as he did the always over-elegantly dressed painter-gecko Larry Bell or his neighbor Edward Ruscha, with whom he sometimes joined forces to create litho prints. In the basement of his house, which served as the storeroom and the garage, alongside his much-loved black Mercedes stood one of the last of his very early paintings – produced with almost impasto oils in 1955, struggling with the heritage of Abstract Expressionism, but likewise reminiscent of French abstract painter Jean Fautrier. Hopper’s father found it in the attic and had it framed. Almost all his son’s other early paintings fell victim to the fire that broke out in his house in Bel Air in 1961.

Hopper’s life was constantly interrupted by loss and by catastrophes he provoked himself: His personal history of art was a history of suffering, the mirror of an eventful life, with its ups and downs, its triumphs and its disasters. ““From Method to Madness” was the quite logical name of his first retrospective, held in 1987, in the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. On show were the works of an artist who even found remnants of method acting in his madness. “Whenever I was frustrated by filming I sought consolation in art.” And consolation he certainly needed, for example, on the death of his friend and idol James Dean, at whose sight he gave his silverscreen debut at the age of 19 in “Rebel Without a Cause”. He also played in “Giants”.

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Then Dean died, and Hopper came into open conflict with director Henry Hathaway, one of the powerful men in Hollywood, and was placed on the studios’ black list. For years he dedicated

himself almost exclusively to the visual arts, made his assemblages, took photographs, and as of 1963 regularly participated in exhibitions. At that time, he frequently accompanied Irving Blu, co-owner of Ferus Gallery, on trips to the East Coast. In this way, he had an entry to the studios, met Andy Warhol with his friends Harry Geldzahler and David Hockney, made a portrait of the shy Jasper Johns, or the young Rauschenberg. Hopper was “hip”, worked for US Vogue, made cover-page collages for Artforum magazine, and took photographs for his friend Ed Ruscha for the invitation to the latter’s exhibition at Ferus: two gas Standard Oil stations – themes on which Ruscha had created a whole gallery full of paintings. Like Hopper, Ruscha had quit the deep Mid West to travel to Los Angeles. They feasted their eyes on the visual excitement of California, took part in all the fun and games, and yet somehow remained lone wolves. “That has to do with our roots,” Hopper commented. “I was born in Kansas on a farm. My family had no time for art, but I was able to take water-color classes in Dodge City, where I was born, and later at school in Kansas City.”

He remembers how the then famous painter Thomas Hart Benton commented, when visiting the weekend painting class and seeing one of Hopper’s watercolors: “One day you have to get tight and let loose.”

At some point you drink yourself into a buzz and then let things take their course. At the time, Hopper had just turned eleven. But he later took the advice to heart. When the Hopper family moved to San Diego on the sunny West Coast, Dennis went to acting school and drew sketches of his fellow students. Even after his initial success acting for T V he preferred to spend his time in the art scene rather than in Hollywood.

Not until 1967, when he started preparing to direct his first film, “Easy Rider”, did he consistently abandon photography, painting and assemblage.

Because Hollywood did not like artists? “They still don’t,” Hopper commented, whose status as an artist the Hollywood establishment treated with suspicion to the bitter end. Which is also why for the last 20 years of his life he was not allowed to direct any more films.

It was not until 16 years after Easy Rider that he was to return to art. First of all, the cheap production unexpectedly became a world hit and took in 50 million dollars at the box office. Then in 1971 Hopper produced and shot the suicidal image-poem The Last Movie, the elaborate tale of a Hollywood production and its impact on the local inhabitants of a small Peruvian village. A non-linear experimental movie dripping in meaning, an ingenious attempt, doomed to failure, by the artist to bring painting and happening together under the umbrella of a film.

Dennis Hopper Claes Oldenburg (Portrait with Cake Slices) 1966, gelatin-silver print, 16 x 24 in. © The Dennis Hopper Trust Courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust and Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York

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127 Dennis Hopper, Mobil Man, 2000 fiberglass, waterborn latex paint, steel, and automotive clear coat, 252 in. © The Dennis Hopper Trust courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust

These works resemble their creator not only with their mixture of elegance and aggression. Even Hopper’s works of the 1990s point to his real roots, the protest movement of the 1960s and the Beatnik art of the 1950s. For him, it was not intellectual Jasper Johns who was important, but the fastmoving, experimenting Robert Rauschenberg.

Not Andy Warhol or Roy Lichtenstein, but Edward Kienholz, who was driven by his social critique to quit California for Europe. Hopper lived and worked with many Californians since forgotten: George Herms, Llyn Foulkes, Wallace Beerman, or painters John Altoun and Billy Al Bengston. They all hung on the walls in Hopper’s house, and they also play the key part in the photo album: In it, Hopper creates an impressive testimony to the Californian pendant to Beat Art, which was closer to Fluxus than to Pop Art. And with Bruce Conner, an outsider who lived up in San Francisco and like Hopper was a collagist, painter and film maker, he produced signed joint works.

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129 RES NOVEMBER 2010 Dennis Hopper Florence (Yellow with Silver Paint), 1997 Ilfocolor on metal, 14 x 9 in., © The Dennis Hopper Trust courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust and Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York

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Dennis Hopper Untitled, 1955 Oil on canvas, 24 x 18 in., © The Dennis Hopper Trust Courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust

Dennis Hopper Robert Rauschenberg, 1966 Gelatin-silver print, 16 x 24 in. © The Dennis Hopper Trust Courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust and Tony Shafrazi Gallery, New York

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131 Dennis Hopper After the Fall, 1964 Photograph with objects, 60 x 50 x 2 1/4 in. © The Dennis Hopper Trust Courtesy of The Dennis Hopper Trust

Henceforth he had to fight hard for every new film he wanted to make.

For many years it seemed as if The Last Movie was going to remain just that for him – the gesamtkunstwerk cost him his career, his reputation, his wealth and his health. What followed were years of drug and alcohol abuse; madness seemed to have no method at all. Evil minds suggested that the role of Frank Booth in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, with which Hopper made his comeback as an actor in 1986, was actually merely a reflection of Hopper’s own life in the 1970s, “a disgusting phallic monster of the American unconsciousness”.

The fact is that Hopper’s addiction made acting professionally very hard on him in the late 1970s and early 1980s, despite his appearances in the trance sequences in Coppola’s Apocalypse Now and as Ripley in Wim Wender’s The American Friend. In 1983, in Francis Ford Coppola’s Rumblefish he played the part of a drunk, speechless father, the archetypal failure – and immediately thereafter returned to art, his consolation and his therapy. He recently turned the film recording of a symbolic performance of that time into an oppressive installation of photos and film projection: On the opening day of his first major exhibition in 12 years he surrounded himself on the sand of the rodeo stadium in Houston with a circle of sticks of dynamite. “Then I blew myself up”. “Shot on the Run”, as the title of the dangerous performance read, was for Hopper a self-purgation, a rebirth, a new beginning. That evening he opened his exhibition. And then went into detox rehab.

Hopper always spoke very openly about his excesses. He was just as critical when considering the first paintings he produced after detoxification: colorful, gestural abstract pieces that bring much to mind, little of it Hopper. He commented tersely that it simply took him a long time to find his way back to painting. As a consequence, in his latter period he produced little, was highly selective of what he approved, and did not leave paintings hanging on their own. He ceased to publish portrait photos. And that, too, was Hopper: There was method to his madness, to the point of adamant refusal, quite a rarity in the art world today. What he felt was successful he then refused to repeat, considering this unnecessary, and instead sought new challenges.

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After the box-office success of Colors (1988) in 1991 he shot Backtrack, which premiered in movie theaters under the name Catchfire – about an artist, played by Jodie Foster, whose works are Jenny Holzer’s strips of words. Hopper plays the killer who falls in love first with art and then the artist. It is a great symbol for someone who took over 30 years to combine art and cinema without losing sight of reality. His film output suffered as a consequence, and his last films from the 1990s are ever more superficial and pleasant – but his art was not. Hopper granted himself trips down memory lane, used scenes such as the legendary graveyard-trip in Easy Rider for a piece called Cemetery that he processed on a computer. Or he exhibited his series of images of the assassination

of President John F. Kennedy which he photographed from T V and after 30 years at long last put his first and only large sculpture Bombshell on show.

Dennis Hopper the artist always remained faithful to his ideas: “For me, three factors are important: Marcel Duchamp’s idea that art is to be found everywhere, in every object, irrespective of how minor it may seem. Then the formal rigor of Abstract Expressionism, which shaped my generation, however much we tried to oppose it. And finally the ideology of the Protest Movement, whose attitude has always remained so defining for me.”

In all conversations with Hopper the name Marcel Duchamp keeps coming up. He had met the Dadaist and father of Concept Art on the occasion of the Duchamp’s first US retrospective in 1963 in Pasadena. Hopper visited Duchamp in the latter’s hotel, having first stolen a sign with the company’s name, which he then got his idol Duchamp to sign for him. The emblematic “Hotel Green, Entrance” hung in his house in 1997 next to Warhol’s Pop portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Mao, and Hopper let there be no doubt as to which artist he revered. “And Duchamp was not even the first person I encountered who achieved the necessary mixture of art and the everyday. Rilke called for it in his “Letters to a Young Poet”, and T.S. Eliot also points to this.” Then Hopper proceeded to quote from heart the Eliot verse, as if it were Shakespeare, something hardly any of his colleagues could do. Neither the Hollywood film stars nor the Manhattan art stars. Thanks to all his contradictions, Dennis Hopper was unique – the last of the rebels.

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.

Dennis Hopper (1936-2010) was an American actor, filmmaker and artist. His paintings and photography have been exhibited all over the world, including the recent retrospective, “Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood” in Paris. Dennis Hopper passed away May 29, 2010 in Venice, CA.

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The marriage of art and commerce failed. The Last Movie won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1971, but never made it to the European movie houses. Universal Studios put the film on ice after it had been on general release in the United States for only two days. And it is still on ice. “That was precisely the time when all the major director had their breakthroughs: Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese. Actually, I’m one of them,” Hopper said defiantly.

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© Dirimart, 2010

CONTENTS INTERVIEW WITH FRANZ ACKERMANN PELİN DERVİŞ HRAIR SARKISSIAN ON CONSTRUCTION & CHURCHES NOVEMBER PAYNTER CONVERSATION WITH HAMLET HOVSEPIAN HANS ULRICH OBRIST ARCHITECTURE AND LIGHTS IN AN URBAN CONTEXT MARC GLOEDE SUN CINEMA CLEMENS VON WEDEMEYER INTERVIEW WITH SAM KELLER JANINE SCHMUTZ INTERVIEW WITH AMANDA SHARP BURCU YÜKSEL FAKED? AN INTERVIEW WITH TIM NEUGER DAVID ULRICHS JAKE & DINOS CHAPMAN ON THE SUBJECT OF “HELL” NICK HACKWORTH REDRESSING BERLIN’S REALITY PRINCIPLE H.G. MASTERS HELKE BAYRLE. INFINITE CONVERGENCE AND THE DOUBLE PERSPECTIVE GRIT WEBER DENNIS HOPPER–THE LAST OF THE REBELS HEINZ PETER SCHWERFEL

RES Art World / World Art Publisher: Dirimart Abdi ‹pekçi Caddesi 7/4 Niflantaş› 34367 Istanbul TR T: +90 212 291 3434 F: +90 212 219 6400 info@resartworld.com www.resartworld.com www.dirimart.org Not for sale Review biannual Not to be cited without permission of the author/s and RES Art World / World Art ISBN 978-605-5815-16-5 Editorial Board: Hazer Özil, November Paynter, Ekrem Yalç›nda€, Necmi Zekâ Managing Editor: Lara Ögel Layout Design: Emre Ç›k›noğlu, BEK Graphic Design: P›nar Akkurt, BEK Design Consultant: Bülent Erkmen Pre-press: BEK Design and Consultancy Ltd Printing and Binding: Mas Matbaac›l›k Hamidiye Mahallesi So€uksu Caddesi No:3 Ka€›thane Istanbul Turkey T: +90 212 294 1000 F: +90 212 294 9080

COVER (detail) Franz Ackermann, Volcano, 2010 © Studio Franz Ackermann Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça Photo Credit: Reni Hansen & Jens Ziehe