RES No.12

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ART WORLD / WORLD ART NO:12 OCTOBER 2015

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Relatively (and unjustly) unknown in many quarters outside of his native country, Achille Bonito Oliva is one of the finest brains art criticism has produced over the past 50 years. His extraordinary resume, that goes from organizing ground breaking exhibitions like ‘Contemporanea’ in the parking lot of Villa Borghese in Rome in the mid 1970s to co-creating with Harald Szeemann the Aperto section at the 1980 edition of the Venice Biennale, speaks for itself, not to mention the many books he wrote on a wide variety of subjects, including ‘The Italian Transavantguarde’, the publication/manifesto that hailed the return of painting as a fully acceptable practice following years of conceptual art domination, consecrating the talent of artists like Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino.

A free spirit at heart, Bonito Oliva never settled for the safety of a steady directorial role in a museum, going instead for the society of independent minds – a move that if on the one hand cost him something in terms of visibility and reputation, on the other hand earned him a great degree of freedom. His tart comments on the current status of art writing and exhibition making in the interview he gave to Paola Marino in this issue, are incredibly refreshing, as well as reminiscing of a time when being an independent curator meant aspiring to break away from the institutional world rather than breaking in.

To honour the wide palette Bonito Oliva worked over the years to discuss and represent the creativity of our times, this issue of RES confirms its commitment to offering the richest variety of contents to its readers. Clayton Campbell’s insight into Kiki Smith’s art, Max Weintraub’s reading of William Anastasi’s conceptual practice, Tony Godfrey’s introduction to the work of Geraldine Javier, and the conversation between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Ida Applebroog are only a few of the exceptional group of artists and writers who contributed to this issue. All you have to do to discover the rest is just flipping through the pages. Hope you will enjoy the reading.

Michele Robecchi

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EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

GERALDINE JAVIER

TONY GODFREY W H Y I S I T T H A T I N S O U T H - E A S T A S I A the most interesting installation art is often made not by sculptors or conceptual artists but by painters? The Filipina artist Geraldine Javier (b.

1970) is no exception. In a nation such as the Philippines where there is a big division between those who paint and those who make conceptual works, any artist who like her, can move across the division is especially interesting. Her background like many of her contemporaries lies in the conflict between the critique of art offered by the doyen of Filipino Conceptual Art Roberto Chabet, under whom she studied, and the dominant tendency of Filipino art in the Nineties, Social Realism. Her paintings seem, if not realist, realistically painted and narrative; what she has taken from conceptual art is less obvious: semantic complexity and a taste for making odd objects and installations.

In the past few years Javier has made and exhibited collages, photographs, installations, sculptural objects, prints, paper pulp works, fabric works and produced a film. Given that her paintings are amongst the most sought after in South-East Asia it may seems strange she should devote so much time to other media – all of which far less desired by the market. Are there common themes underlying such diverse materials?

It is normally assumed that because the Philippines is so intensely Catholic all artists there are obsessed with Catholicism – along with poverty and political corruption. However this cliché is not true of her – nor for that matter, of most Filipino artists. Rather, it is clear that her key themes are death and childhood. Less immediately obvious is that she is a profoundly sensuous artist and that her work has much to do with engaging with the world’s tactility.

These three themes are evident in a painting such as ‘Blackbird Singing (diptych)’ of 2008. It is a painting ostensibly about childhood but the girl’s crumpled pose and the blackness of the birds implies the shadow of death. However the girl’s pose is disturbing in other ways: is she in reverie or post coital collapse? The weird juxtapositions of humming birds, potato chip packet and nursery frieze ducks hint both at something private and hidden, and a range of differing sensual experiences. Such a covert appeal to sensuality is heightened by the painting’s varying factures.

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We are presented not so much with a narrative as a situation. We don’t know what is going on, so we have to try and put ourselves in the picture and make up our own story. When asked, she replies tersely that is a tense painting made at a difficult time in her life. She has described herself as a story telling artist, but it would be more accurate to say she creates narrative situations, or situations waiting for a narrative. Many of her paintings and installations depend on the viewer’s recognition of some possible archetypal scene – often from childhood or puberty.

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5 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Blackbird Singing (diptych), 2008 Oil on canvas, 60.5 x 152 cm.

Red Fights Back, 2012 Interactive installation

Yesterday’s Gone, We’re Waiting for Tomorrow (The Happy Bones), 2013 Wood, resin, tatting lace, tree 213 x 91 x 122cm | Dog skeleton 61 x 91 x 61cm. | Human skeleton 91 x 46 x 46cm.

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7 Remaking fairy tales such as Red Riding Hood is a familiar trope for women artists and writers (witness Marlene Dumas or Angela Carter). Javier has perhaps gone that extra step in actually making characters. A 2011 exhibition revolved around a woman known only as Madame A, who, exiled from Europe, settled in the Philippines and built a collection of ethnography, natural history and other curiosities. On the shelves of six cabinets were stacked over forty vitrines filled with embroideries, preserved insects, branches, knick-knacks, and frog skeletons. Typically one vitrine was entitled ‘Frog Pissing Competition’.

The back of the cabinets, as a contrast to this collection of curious, sometimes macabre, sometimes humorous, sometimes poetic ensembles, constituted in effect a six part decorative painting of trees and birds. Life and nature here is being presented as the opposite to the darkness of death. In the third and final installation of this work in a late nineteenth century Manila townhouse the effect of melancholic and faded elegance was enhanced by adding an old portrait allegedly of Madame A, an old chaise longue and hangings of canvas covered by hammered leaves.

Although people have often assumed she has an obsession with death and characterised her work as dark and gothic, such morbidity is always leavened with a perky sense of humour. A recent painting of a skeletal Death sitting chatting to Mary Magdalene does not suggest gloom so much as curious company. It is a wonderfully witty detournement of the familiar trope of Mary Magdalene sitting in the desert holding a skull contemplating sin and death (see Titian, Georges de la Tour, El Greco etc.) Are they discussing mortality or has Mister Death made a lewd or improper suggestion? The held hands suggest a surprising intimacy. There is no definitive interpretation. Why for instance are they meeting beside a dark pool: is this the entrance to the underworld with the waters of forgetfulness or is it just a good backdrop for the extraordinary red cloak? There is something strange about the scale of the figures in this the largest painting she has made: why has she made them so distant from the viewer? There is no foreground, only middle ground and background. For an artist who normally calls for empathy such a refusal is uncanny.

It may be, as she herself says, speaking of the recent exhibition that this painting was made for, that ‘I think this is my way of putting an exclamation mark to that body of work that deals with death. This exhibition is not me talking about death as something to accept calmly, but as someone kicking and screaming and being basically scared.’ A consideration of death as she recently said leads to many other themes. ‘These include the loss of freedom, the loss of innocence, revenge, grief, resolution, acceptance, horror, humour.’

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The desire to involve and animate the viewer even more led her in 2012 to create an environment ‘Red Fights Back’ in which people could enter a forest glade (or a 20 square metre simulacrum of one) put on a red cloak, then play and pose with such archetypal objects as a sword, a crucifix, a wooden snake. Red’s cloak was however an elaborately tatted garment: to be in and participate was not just to role-play (and who one was role playing was uncertain: one was, but one was never quite Red Riding Hood), but also to be in a very tactile, sensuous environment: fabrics, wood, canvas covered with hammered leaves. (Her favoured way of working with fabric is tatting, a complex form of lacemaking.) As with ‘Blackbirds Singing’ this seemingly presents or stages a moment of decision: who is Red about to fight? With what weapon? Where should she go? It was also at least part humorous. The strain of quirky humour in her work should not be neglected: she may be a serious artist but she is never pompous.

One could add beauty. In one of her more complex textile works ‘Yesterday’s Gone, We’re Waiting for Tomorrow (The Happy Bones)’ she uses different types of tatting to make a work that mixes gothic horror with Beckettian humour but that is, above all else, beautiful. Although she has four assistants who tat for larger installations (pictured above in ‘Red Fights Back’ behind Javier herself dressed as Red) she, when in working mode, both tats and paints each day. Here the delicately tufted surface of the tree is entirely by her.

When her paintings appear at auction they are invariably described as having ‘exquisite brushwork’ – this sound feminine in the worst sense of word – it would be better to describe her painting as tough but precise. Having been taught to compose by collage rather sketching she, rather than using the ubiquitous epidiascope or computer, grids up the canvas in 3 inch squares and copies images she has purloined or increasingly had photographed for herself. But ‘copied’ is a misnomer as these source materials are morphed and adapted extensively through the three to four layers of painting.

At heart she is a visionary artist who envisages each exhibition as an entity with its own mood and rationale. Although the exhibitions may seem diverse they increasingly merge installation and objects with painting: in a recent exhibition at Arndt Berlin each of five paintings was enclosed in a tent of hammered leaves. (Certain leaves when hammered hard exude coloured juice or dye.) Leaves, skeletonised so they will no longer rot or fade, fill the bottoms of the tents along with assorted strange objects.

As we have seen certain themes recur: death, the strange and the uncanny, childhood and memory, play, craft and the decorative. The emphasis on making and touch is key to her work.

We often talk about having a feel for textiles but falsely not of having a feel for painting – the visual in an industrialised society has been privileged over the sensual – a bias that has been massively increased in the age of photography and the internet. Today the visual happens without attachment to the physical: cyber sex being the most apt symbol for such estrangement. By placing fabrics (and other material) adjacent to or as part of the painting she is re-instating the act of touch and its connectedness to seeing. Although her work may rarely be sexually explicit it is always very avowedly sensuous. It offers both a critique of the visual and a celebration of the material world and act of making.

The most recent paintings, in which she has used ink and hammered leaves rather than paint, take this further, exploring a new medium, conceiving the landscape as something tangible, not merely seen. As ever, there are lots of complex moods and memories involved – sometimes even contradictory ones: in ‘Seven Nocturnes’, the visionary, romantic feel is offset by the quirky quote from the HBO series ‘Deadwood’: ‘announcing your plans is a good way to hear a good laugh’

Tony Godfrey has written about contemporary art since 1979. His books include ‘Conceptual Art’ (1998) and ‘Painting Today’ (2009). Until 2009 he lived and worked in London. Since then he has lived and worked in Singapore and Manila. Recent curatorial projects include ‘Marcel Duchamp in South-East Asia’ and ‘Do you Believe in Angels?’. He is currently writing a book on painting in Indonesia.

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9 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Seven Nocturnes: Reading the Stars, 2014 Hammered leaves, encaustic on canvas, ink on fabric, wood, 150 x 150cm.

WISE AND UNWISE MESSAGES FROM ANDREAS SLOMINSKI GRIT WEBER T H E A R T I S T S T A Y S S I L E N T . For a good hour he sits on the stage of the lecture room of the Museum for Modern Art in Frankfurt as part of a series of events called “MMK Talks”, which have been advertised as artists’ conversations, though on this occasion, the artist in attendance does not make a sound. And although he hardly counts as a performer, the episode is nevertheless a good starting point for thinking about Andreas Slominski and his art, even if it marks more than just an unconventional diversion from the speech-focused announcement of the institution. In any event, all the other artists’ conversations are stored as film clips on the MMK website. Slominski’s act of silence, however, is missing.

WAITING IN SUSPENSE It is not difficult to imagine the atmosphere of the full lecture hall: the man talking is Mario Kramer, the curator of the museum and an expert in Slominski’s work, which the MMK has been collecting since its foundation. Yet there is no dialogue with the artist, because the artist is saying nothing. Is Andreas Slominski arrogant? Is he looking to give a snub, or is he simply irritated by the questions?

As ever, even as this scene is playing out, there are a good number of Slominski’s Trap-Objects (and other works) in the collection of the MMK, as has been the case for about two decades now: three small pieces from the period from 1984 to 1986, for example, to which hungry small game might well fall victim. The traps came about while he was still studying at the University of Fine Arts of Hamburg and when are shown, they are shown in a state of tension. To exhibit these works is to prime them for prey. In an early catalogue, Mario Kramer also talks of the state of “static action”. The calm in the moment just before “it” happens. It is in snapping shut, capturing, or even in killing that the traps fulfil their destiny. The potential victim is lured, outwitted, vanquished. It is also worth noting, moreover, that the trap is an everyday object, a conventional thing that, through Slominski, is given the character of a sculpture that is as casual as it is treacherous. The museum is also in possession of a number of the artist’s drawings that portray a fictional trapper. If we draw a mental line that connects the artist with the poacher, Slominski’s silent presence on the stage of the lecture hall also appears in a somewhat different light. Did he want to draw an arc between his silence and the traps? Are they both examples of initiating and sustaining a form of “static action”?

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It is of course tempting to link Slominski’s silence with that of Marcel Duchamp. Especially since it was Duchamp who introduced the readymade into art, and readymades also show up in Slominski’s work (for which the fabric stack-pieces from 1987–88, the airplane cutlery of Before/ After 9/11, and the garage doors recently presented as picture panels on the gallery wall serve as good examples). But what interests us here – one hundred years after the invention of the readymade – is less the transformation of everyday objects into art, and much more the attitude of the artist and how that appears behind all the actions and the distortion.

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11 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Coffin Transoxide Brown, 2013 MDF, wood, lacquer, 98 x 65 x 40 cm, plinth: 60 x 90 x 60 cm Courtesy Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt.

Coffins, 2014 Exhibition view.

Courtesy Galerie B채rbel Gr채sslin, Frankfurt.

Coffin Carbon Black, 2013 MDF, wood, lacquer, 50 x 198 x 65 cm Courtesy Galerie B채rbel Gr채sslin, Frankfurt.

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13 The simplest processes are artificially complicated to the point where they themselves become art.

From the trapper of yore, dealing with cunning, tension, and drawn-out waiting, a new figure emerges: Slominski confounds with picaresque interventions. We no longer recognise what is static, but rather the absurd twisted action within the piece, and he who cooks the whole thing up is a fool.

In his original function derived from the middle ages, the fool stands outside the existing order, but works on it from the outside, opening the lid on a closed system for just a moment and messing around with it a little. Since, however, the role of the fool has been accepted or even commissioned by the system (court society, art society), he will never dissolve it. If he were to do this, he would no longer be a fool, but instead a terrorist, or a revolutionary.

It was for the MMK in Frankfurt, once again, that the artist produced a luminous Christmas decoration for the outside wall that operates in the spring, summer and autumn. For Friedhelm Mennekes’ most recent Sunday school service at the Art church of St. Peter in Cologne, Slominski, circuitous as ever, had the holy water delivered by the local fire service: they sent it shooting in an impressive stream, over the roof of the church to the other side where the children were ready waiting to catch the water in their hands and carry it inside to the font. Familiar rituals are given a new impulse, so that the viewer recognises their routines, as well as the distortion of their principle: Christmas as a time-limited phenomenon, the font as transfer or transmission.

Slominski has a proclivity for the unseemly transference of things and symbols – the air pump, the holy water, the candle wax – they are carried into a space from elsewhere and highlight that exposure to the external. The objects themselves unfurl their full effect when they are able to work in all their simplicity, their modesty as a thing, in the face of an absurdly exaggerated effort. This waste, this irrationality is not seen in the object. And that is what is so cheeky about it.

BETWEEN RITUAL AND ROUTINE Barbara Grässlin’s gallery was recently host to a row of idiosyncratically prepared objects that had started out as commercial coffins. Slominski reduced the length of the coffin lid right down to the point that the pitiful bit that remained could also serve as a handle. He unscrewed the usual handle, which is for whatever reason always ornately baroque, and brought it to the gallery wall. He fitted out another coffin to look like a rocket in space, which brings to mind the sudden dynamism of the coffin on a launching pad into the beyond. He cuts coffins crossways to reveal their honeycomb construction, but also to show the cheap material of their mass manufacture. Instead of the coffin concealing a dead body and taking it unobserved from A to B, the coffin itself becomes exposed and at the same time exposes the yawning gulf between funeral ritual and funeral routine.

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FROM TRAPPER TO FOOL His most successful works are therefore those that are dedicated to the routines of others, that study them intimately, and then come to be an artwork through specific shifts, elaborate detours, or bizarre circuitous routes. So he swiped a bicycle pump, and sawed off the part of the frame to which the pump is normally attached before bringing it into the gallery space together with the pump. For the German Guggenheim museum in Berlin, he developed a precision system for transporting a spoon filled with cough mixture. Or he left a heap of snow piled up outside the Serpentine Gallery so a skier could come slithering into the exhibition space. Upon arrival, assistants scraped the ski wax from the blades and moulded it into a candle.

Coffins, 2014 Exhibition view.

Courtesy Galerie Bärbel Grässlin, Frankfurt.

The fools of tradition remind the man of power that despite his privilege, he is ‘just’ a man and a mortal creature into the bargain. The fool does this foolishly, which is to say that he plays games.

Those who observe him, however, can never be quite sure if he is talking rubbish or telling the truth: unveiling the prevailing state of things. But Slominski isn’t playing, he is constructing.

His fool pieces are well prepared, even thoroughly planned, before it is reasonable to appear with them in public and there at least temporarily poke a stick in the works of the establishment. Yet he also plays a part in the establishment, which he feeds not only with doses of confusion, but also with goods for sale. As an established artist-rascal he receives recognition and money from the very establishment that his work is dealing with. This is the tension that Andreas Slominski is moving in, and hopefully he himself won’t get caught up in Ritual and Routines Grit Weber is a Frankfur t-based writer. Since 2006 she has been the editor in chief of ‘Ar tkaleidoscope’ and has contributed regularly to ‘Kunst Bulletin’ and ‘Journal Frankfur t’.

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Empathy & Abstraction

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INTERVIEW WITH ACHILLE BONITO OLIVA

PAOLA MARINO PAOLA MARINO: You’ve often been defined an ‘encyclopaedic’ critic. Why? ACHILLE BONITO OLIVA: If the term ‘encyclopaedia’ is intended to define a cultural space where different languages, categories and disciplines co-exist, and where one looks to multi-faceted practices in order to recognize and address the complexity of our times, then yes, I guess I am an encyclopaedic critic. I have always adopted a trespassing, time-crossing, multi-disciplined attitude.

PM You started with poetry…

ABO I started with poetry. I published two books, ‘Made in Mater’ (1967) and ‘Fiction Poems’ (1968) and took part to many exhibitions of sound and visual poetry. I moved on to art criticism after these early experiences because I found a stronger source of inspiration there, especially through the dialogue with artists. I fondly consider artists ‘my most intimate enemies’.

PM That’s when you introduced the ‘creative critic’ model…

ABO I think we are all creative. Creativity is produced by a subjective impulse. We are all ‘healthy’ narcissists. ‘Creative’ means bringing upfront the idea that art critics are not neutral, distant, and impersonal operators, but people equipped with a selective view that enables them to be killers rather than saviours. Critics have a moral responsibility too – they have to pick up and choose. I want to embody the idea of the critic with a strong identity. I don’t think critics should have a descriptive, partisan, or legalistic attitude. I think critics should interpret the constant developments in culture. They have to be knowledgeable. They have to arrive to a meeting with an artwork carrying a cultural luggage that goes beyond art history and embraces human sciences like psychoanalysis, anthropology and sociology, while being aware that all this has to be delivered through their writing.

PM So critics should be militant?

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ABO Yes. I see art critics as Don Juans of knowledge – they have to be flexible in order to look at art with an investigative mind. Critics should express themselves through different levels of writings. There is ‘survey writing’, where you develop ideas that are published in books, magazines and journals. There is ‘exhibiting writing’, where you express your point of view and carve a path through an exhibition for the benefit of a broad audience. This is when artworks replace words and you come up with motivations, explanations, and examinations that match the art in the space. Then there’s ‘behavioural writing’, where critics deal with mass-media such as

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17 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Wolfgang Vostell Environment Energia, 1973 Installation view at Contemporanea, Parcheggio di Villa Borghese, Rome Courtesy Incontri Internazionali d’Arte, Rome.

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Oscar Tousquets Blanca and Robert Wilson Stazione Toledo, Naples, 2012 Photo: Peppe Avallone.

Courtesy ANP, Naples.

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Karim Rashid Stazione UniversitĂ , Naples, 2011 Photo: Peppe Avallone Courtesy ANP, Naples.

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21 PM The first exhibitions you curated were ‘Amore Mio’ in Montepulciano (1970) and ‘Vitality of the Negative’ in Rome (1970). Then, in 1973 you organized ‘Contemporanea’, arguably one of the most important exhibitions of the 20th Century…

ABO I want to add that in 1969 I wrote my first book, ‘The Magic Territory’, where different practices like art, theatre, film, music, dance, photography, and architecture were discussed one in relation with the other. Already in that book there was an idea of shift, a multimedia, transnational, interdisciplinary analysis. From the ‘survey writing’ of ‘The Magic Territory’ I moved on to the ‘exhibiting writing’ of ‘Contemporanea’ in the parking lot of Villa Borghese in Rome, where I brought all these different languages together and establish a dialogue between European and American art with over 90 artists, from 1973 back to 1955, in order to let the public familiarize with the original context and the chronology of some of the art in the exhibition.

It was a revolutionary exhibition. It introduced for the first time different artistic forms while connecting three separate lines – analytical, synthetic and processual. It allowed the public to live an aesthetic pleasure through diverse experiences. For example Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, Robert Morris, Sol LeWitt, Daniel Buren, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis, Vito Acconci, Vettor Pisani, Gino De Dominicis… There was Bob Wilson, Trisha Brown, Yvonne Reiner, Philippe Glass, Steve Reich, the Anti-Farm group, up to the younger, most radical architects. Same goes for photography, performance, and those art movements normally excluded from international exhibitions. There were artists like Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Wolfgang Vostell. There was also ‘Invito all’opera’ (Invitation to the Artwork), a small section in a place called ‘Open Area’, where every week an artist would make a performance, from Luigi Ontani to Marina Abramovic. Finally there was the emersion of this catacomb-like exhibition from the garage of Villa Borghese to the outside, with the Aurelian Walls wrapped up by Christo.

PM That was followed by your second book, ‘The Ideology of the Traitor’.

ABO I wanted to analyze Mannerism, a period of post-Renaissance crisis that generated a ‘lateral’ creative attitude. That book was written in reverse, starting with contemporary art and with the idea that what happened in 1500 was the matrix for all that followed.

PM Do you think that Modernism was rooted in Mannerism?

ABO Well, you need to remember that that book was written in 1976. It coincided with a new critical time in Europe. In 1973 there was the Kippur War between Arabs and Israel, and the price of oil went up. At the same time there was the crisis of Marxism and of Human science, and that affected art because up until that point avant-garde was armed of some sort of ‘Darwinian linguistic’ ideology – the idea of a linear evolution in art, from the historical avant-gardes; the result of a time of great experimentation, and a progressive idea of history moving towards a better future.

In those years history was sending the exact opposite signals. It was non-linear, blocked from a general crisis, an epistemological, economical and ideological crisis of knowledge. I wondered what could be done to fight the experimental stagnation of art.

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T V, radio, newspapers, public debates, and new technologies, and bring their own theories and strategies while communicating in an authoritative but not authoritarian way.

Oscar Tousquets Blanca and Oliviero Toscani Stazione Toledo Montecalvario, Naples, 2012 Photo: Peppe Avallone Courtesy ANP, Naples.

PM And you felt that that was your responsibility as a critic…

ABO I thought that exploring a model originated by Mannerism and a turbulent time like the 16th Century was the best course to follow. After the Renaissance exploit, the anthropocentric mentality ruling at the time was destroyed by a series of events, including the discovery of America in 1492, the Sack of Rome in 1527, Copernicus and Kepler’s findings about the earth gravitating around the sun, the birth of modern finance and Machiavelli’s political realism. Artists were faced with a creative quandary. The principle of invention and progress that characterized the transition from Gothic to Renaissance was replaced by memory and citationism. They basically found comfort in the past to make the present more acceptable. Art becomes more subjective when it is based on something that already exists. It turns into a meta-language, it finds new elaborations, it acquired those values theorized by Leonardo when he claimed that painting is a state of mind.

PM This analysis of Mannerism seems to anticipate Transavangarde, the movement you theorized in 1978.

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ABO Transavangarde was certainly a sort of neo-Mannerism – a transitory, transitional, new art that no longer relies on the discovery of new materials and technologies after the avant-garde module. It was about reviving a language that seemed doomed at the time – painting. Painting in those days was the representation of a deliberately ironic and voluble subjectivity; it played with the idea of stylistical eclecticism, merging abstraction and realism. It wasn’t superb or monumental. It saved avant-garde by meshing it up with a tradition that belonged to the anthropological domain of the ar tist.

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23 ABO Szeemann was a great partner. He acknowledged that the artists I proposed and my theories were valid. We organized an exhibition with 45 artists interested in painting, including those from the Italian Transavanguarde (Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino) and others like Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer. ‘Aperto 80’ was an international platform for my ideas. The global art system was forced to recognize that there was a movement in Italy that could no longer be ignored.

PM It mustn’t have been easy to break through the American scene, where conceptual minimalism was dominating. How did you do it?

ABO It was a combination of factors. There was the support of people like Jean Christophe Amman in Switzerland, Martin Kunz in Germany, Rudi Fuchs in the Netherlands, Jan Hoet in Belgium.

There was the proverbial American puritan honesty – they are always excited to import what they don’t have. There was an interest from American collectors and museums like the Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Los Angeles County Museum. Italian artists had an edge at the time because Transavanguarde was about memory. It referred to an art that comes from a faraway time. It had a very strong iconographic identity.

Oscar Tousquets Blanca and Oliviero Toscani Stazione Toledo Montecalvario, Naples, 2012 Photo: Peppe Avallone Courtesy ANP, Naples.

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PM In 1980 you and Harald Szeemann curated ‘Aperto 80’ at the Venice Biennale – the exhibition where Transavanguarde became international…

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Karim Rashid Stazione UniversitĂ , Naples, 2011 Photo: Peppe Avallone Courtesy ANP, Naples.

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PM After the 1971 and 1985 editions of the Paris Biennale and the Biennial of Sydney in 1982, you finally curated the Venice Biennale in 1993. The exhibition was titled ‘Cultural Nomadism and the Four Cardinal Points of Art’. To these days many curators and critics consider it a reference point. Why? ABO Because it was a transnational, interdisciplinary, multimedia project. The Venice Biennale was originally modelled after the Universal Expo in Paris, where every country presented their products in a national pavilion. I thought it was a very antiquated approach in a so-called global art world. If on the one hand it’s important to preserve the identity of every single country, on the other hand countries can co-exist through a very fluid communication and information system.

I started to dialogue with the curators of all the national pavilions, and many accepted the idea of showing artists from other countries, with Nam June Paik representing Germany, Joseph Kosuth representing Hungary, and Julian Schnabel representing Italy. As for the multimedia aspect, I invited Wim Wenders to show his photographs and Pedro Almodovar to work on an installation. There were other directors like Derek Jarman, Amos Gitai, Peter Greenaway… I also organised twelve exhibitions around the city, including a tribute to John Cage at the Guggenheim Foundation and an exhibition of Francis Bacon at Museo Correr.

PM Were you the first curator to use all the spaces in the Arsenale?

ABO Yes, ‘Aperto 93’ was the first exhibition to occupy the entire Arsenale. There were 105 emerging artists from all over the world. Helena Kontova and I invited Maurizio Cattelan and many other great artists still not very well known to these days. In the catalogue every Oscar Tousquets Blanca and Francesco Clemente Francesco Clemente, Stazione Montecalvario, Naples, 2013 Photo: Peppe Avallone Courtesy ANP, Naples.

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27 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Oscar Tousquets Blanca and Francesco Clemente Francesco Clemente, Stazione Montecalvario, Naples, 2013 Photo: Peppe Avallone Courtesy ANP, Naples.

exhibition was introduced by a philosopher – a cultural fest that culminated with the Golden Lion assigned to Ernest Junger and Bob Wilson.

PM You were trying to throw the traditional setup of the Biennale off balance…

ABO Yes. The principle of trespassing and shifting was the main force behind it, with the entire city turning into a gigantic venue, using unknown spaces, industrial archaeological sites, even the ferries. My ‘intellectual incontinency’ found a practical application in an invasive project, adding another layer to a place like Venice, which is already an artwork in itself.

PM What do you think is the role of art in relation to the public?

ABO In a post-industrial age like ours, where intellectual practices tend to be viewed as separated, the art world is an assembling line where every subject brings to the table a specific professional component. Artists create art, critics think about it, gallerists show it, collectors value it, museums historicize it, media celebrate it, and spectators view it. The public is the privileged terminal for experiencing contemporary art, and contemporary art comes from an individual impulse to communicate and intercept the society in which it takes place. The public receive a massage on an atrophied collective consciousness muscle through contemporary art. If awaked, it can go from a passive state to an active one.

PM Is art political?

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Karim Rashid Stazione UniversitĂ , Naples, 2011 Photo: Peppe Avallone Courtesy ANP, Naples.

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Karim Rashid Stazione Università, Naples, 2011 Photo: Peppe Avallone Courtesy ANP, Naples.

ABO Plato thought that all men are ‘political animals’. Ever y act has a social impact. T he creative process is generated by a spontaneous gesture. It’s the result of a biological breath, a perennial statement of life versus time, entropy, silence and death. It’s a continuous awakening.

PM Is ar t prophetic?

ABO If we accept the aforementioned idea that an artwork is the product of a creative, personal gesture, artists can use their Nomadism to dream and step out of the boundaries dictated by the present. They can imagine the future and paradoxically design the past. They can bridge the gap between different ages and give them a new life by contaminating them with forms from the present.

PM You always express yourself through provoking concepts. You even went as far as saying that ar tists are biological mistakes when compared to their work.

ABO T hat’s because ar tists die but their ar t is here to stay. At the same time an ar twork can be much more prophetic than the person who has made it. A r tists tend to get distracted by their creative force and forget their initial intentions. A n ar twork’s vision doesn’t necessarily gets the credit it deser ves in real time – it is often acknowledged later.

PM How about the theor y of ‘genius loci’?

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ABO I think the idea of ‘genius loci’ as anthropological identity has given a chance to emerge to ar tists coming from geographically, politically and economically forgotten areas. Up until

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31 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Atelier Mendini and Perino & Vele Stazione Salvator Rosa, Naples, 2015 Photo: Luciano Romano Courtesy ANP, Naples.

the 1970s it was a competition between Nor th A merica and Europe. With ‘genius loci’ I tried to fight the internationalism imposed by the universal, homogenized language of A merican culture. T hanks to the idea of local identity, ar tists from different context like Latin A merica, India, China, Turkey and the Middle-East have finally been appreciated. T hese are places with a strong cultural histor y, but the present somehow blocked their development.

PM Do you think it is more difficult to be a critic in such a global scenario?

ABO T he global development of the ar t world in the 1990s, coupled with the proliferation of museums and foundations, have transformed the figure of the ‘total critic’ into the one of the ‘curator’. Curators only work on what is contemporar y and what is happening at the moment.

T hey operate in a non-inter pretative way; they refrain from responsibility, they only assist ar tists. T here are a few exceptions of course, but the latest generations of curators deliberately br ushed the idea of writing aside. T hey don’t care about the past or the future, they only care about the present.

PM Do you think the market has more power over ar tists and critics than in the past?

ABO T he market has always been present in ar t. T here are many contemporar y ar tists that are deeply aware of the impor tance of money precisely because they know that it’s the only way to realize their ideas. Recently the market has become more impor tant because of the proliferation of fairs and auctions, and for those trend-setting collectors that exercise their influence over ar tists. T here are no absolute parameters in post-modernism – economy

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Michele & Lorenzo Capobianco and Mario Merz Stazione Vanvitelli, Naples, 2003 Photo: Peppe Avallone Courtesy ANP, Naples

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Oscar Tousquets Blanca Stazione Toledo, Naples, 2012 Photo: Peppe Avallone.

Courtesy ANP, Naples.

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35 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Design by Gae Aulenti Glycon Ateniese, Ercole Farnese, C. 200 AC. Stazione Museo, Naples Courtesy ANP, Naples.

and aesthetics are interrelated. T hat’s why it’s impor tant for critics and curators to be responsible and not give in to market logics.

PM Do you think curators are less adventurous today?

ABO They are just doing maintenance. There are a few good ones, like Jean Hubert Martin, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carolyn Christov Bakargiev, Massimiliano Gioni and Lorenzo Benedetti that seek and develop cultural themes parallel to their activism. Discussing art in thematical terms is very important. It’s the only way to establish a vision, and to give definition to the mobility of contemporary art.

PM Your latest project is truly encyclopaedic – the five volumes series ‘Carrier of Time’. What is time in art?

ABO As St. Augustine used to say, ‘Tempus extentio animae’. (Time is a dimension of the Soul) Historically time is the perception of a dimension in movement next to space. I think art is an act of resistance. I found five different times – ‘Comical Time’, about Nietsche and irrelevance; ‘Interior Time’, about Freud and psychoanalysis; ‘Inclined Time’, about Einstein; ‘Full Time’, about Wittengstein; and ‘Open Time’, about Bauman.

PM Your career has been defined by continuous adventures and challenges…

Gae Aulenti and Nicola De Maria Stazione Dante, Naples, 2002 Photo: Luciano Romano Courtesy ANP, Naples.

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37 PM You collaborated with many artists. Do you collect any?

ABO No, my house is art-free. I’m like a surgeon that doesn’t want to see blood on the wall when he comes home. I have a few portraits by my favourite artists but they’re not exhibited in my domestic space. When it comes to art, I’m possessed but not possessive Achille Bonito Oliva is a critic and curator based in Rome, where he is Professor of Histor y of Ar t at Università La Sapienza. He has curated many exhibitions, including ‘Contemporanea’ (Villa Borghese, Rome, 1974), ‘Aper to 1980’ (together with Harald Szeemann, Venice Biennale, 1980), ‘Avanguardia Transavanguardia’ (Mura Aureliane, Rome, 1982), ‘Mythe, Drame, Tragedie’, Musée d’Ar t et d’Industrie, Paris (1982), ‘Ar t and Depression’ (Museo Correr, Venice, 1984), and ‘Minimalia’ (P.S.1 Contemporar y Ar t Center, New York, 1998). He directed the 45th Venice Biennale (1993), the 1st Valencia Biennale (2001), and was the curator of the Italian Pavilion at the 7th Paris Biennale (1971). He has been awarded several prizes and recognitions, including the Valentino d’Oro, an international prize for ar t critics, in 1991.

Paola Marino is a journalist who writes regularly for publications such as ‘Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno’, ‘Max’, ‘Rolling Stone’ and ‘Rode’.

Stefano Giovannoni Jam Session, 2003 Stazione Materdei, Naples.

Design by Atelier Mendini Courtesy ANP, Naples.

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ABO I have always tried to implement my ideas in different places, like ‘Fuori Quadro’ (Out of Frame), the T V program on contemporary art for R AI, or even through public art like the subway in Naples, where I commissioned architects like Siza, Massimiliano Fuksas, Gae Aulenti, and Alessandro Mendini to design some of the train stations, and invited artists to make permanent works. There are something like 160 artworks now. We have made what I call an ‘Obligatory Museum’, as passengers are forced to see the art while they travel

Gae Aulenti and Nicola De Maria Stazione Dante, Naples, 2002 Photo: Luciano Romano Courtesy ANP, Naples.

Oscar Tousquets Blanca and Shirin Neshat Stazione Montecalvario, Naples, 212 Photo: Peppe Avallone Courtesy ANP, Naples.

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39 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Bianco & Valente REM, 2002 Instalation view at Stazione Rione Alto, Naples.

Oscar Tousquets Blanca and Shirin Neshat Stazione Montecalvario, Naples, 212 Photo: Peppe Avallone Courtesy ANP, Naples.

ROBERT SMITHSON

MAURIZIO C AT TEL AN MAURIZIO C AT TEL AN: A few years ago I finally had the oppor tunity to see the Spiral Jetty after its re-emersion. W hat was the process that led you to select the Great Salt Lake in Utah as the ideal location for the sculpture?

ROBERT SMITHSON: My interest with salt lakes began with my works in 1968 on the Mono Lake Site-Nonsite in California. Later I read a book which described salt lakes in Bolivia in all stages of desiccation, and filled with micro bacteria that gave the water surface a red color.

Because of the remoteness of Bolivia and because Mono Lake lacked a reddish color, I decided to investigate the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

MC W hat was about the reddish color that interested you?

RS Chemically speaking, our blood is analogous in composition to the primordial seas.

Following the spiral steps we return to our origins, back to some pulpy protoplasm, a floating eye adrift in an antediluvian ocean. For for ty or more years, people have tried to get oil out of that natural tar pool. Pumps coated with black stickiness r usted in the corrosive salt air. A hut mounted on pilings could have been the habitation of ‘the missing link’. A great pleasure arose from seeing all those incoherent str uctures. T his site gave evidence of a succession of man-made systems mired in abandoned hopes. T he site I selected is one of the few places on the lake where the water comes right up to the mainland. It was a rotar y that enclosed itself in an immense roundness. My dialectics of site and nonsite whirled into an indeterminate state, where solid and liquid lost themselves in each other. It was as if the mainland oscillated with waves and pulsations, and the lake remained rock still. T he shore of the lake became the edge of the sun, a boiling cur ve, an explosion rising into a fier y prominence. Matter collapsing into the lake mirrored in the shape of a spiral. No sense wondering about classifications and categories, there were none.

MC I have to say that getting to see the actual sculpture was something else. T he movie you made about doesn’t prepare the viewer at all for what is actually out there.

RS Well, yes. T he movie just recapitulates the scale of the Spiral Jetty.

MC Is there a spot in par ticular where you feel the piece can be experienced at its best?

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RS I don’t think it really matters where you are. You will always be faced with limits of some kind.

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41 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Spiral Jetty, 1970 Rock, earth, salt crystals, water, 6.783 tonnes earth 1450 x ø 450 m Great Salt Lake, Utah Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, New York, and James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.

Spiral Jetty, 1970 Rock, earth, salt crystals, water, 6.783 tonnes earth 1450 x ø 450 m Great Salt Lake, Utah © Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, New York, and James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.

MC Were you deliberately tr ying to make something that would go beyond the visual possibilities of the viewer? Like something that would expand into infinity?

RS I think that actually it’s not so much expanding into infinity, it’s that you are really expanding in terms of a finite situation. I mean there is no romantic towards the never-land or something.

MC So it was mostly about exploring the possibility of trespassing limited forms like galleries or museums?

RS Not really, no. In my case the piece is there in the museum too, abstract, and it’s there to look at, but you are thrown off it. You are sor t of spun out to the fringes of the site. T he site is a place you can visit and it involves travel as an aspect too. But I think there is really no discrepancy between the indoors and the outdoors once the dialectic is clear between two places.

MC Yet a lot of ar tists and maybe even curators influenced by your work seem to be attracted precisely by this romantic idea today – that you can actually break down limitations.

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RS T here’s no way you can really break down limitations; it’s a kind of fantasy that you might have, that things are unlimited, but I think there’s greater freedom if you realize that you have these limits to work against and actually, it’s more challenging that way. But I think

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43 MC A nd as for museums?

RS No, that’s the sad thing – I think most museum people aren’t conscious of their museum, and they just take it for granted that ar tists are working in some garret and turning out objects. T hey have to think about the limits of their space and how to extend them beyond the walls of confinement.

MC Your early works were quite minimal though. Wouldn’t you consider them par t of this ver y same system?

RS First of all, system is a convenient word, like object. It is another abstract entity that doesn’t exist. I think ar t tends to relieve itself on those hopes. As for my early works, I was not really minimal; the works were more related to cr ystallized notions about abstractions. So there was a tendency towards abstraction, but I never thought of isolating my objects in any par ticular way. Gradually, more and more, I have come to see their relationship to the outside world and finally when I star ted making the Nonsites, the dialectic became ver y strong. T hese Nonsites became maps that pointed to sites in the world outside the galler y, and a dialectical view began to subsume a purist, abstract tendency.

Spiral Jetty, 1970 Rock, earth, salt crystals, water, 6.783 tonnes earth 1450 x ø 450 m Great Salt Lake, Utah © Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, New York, and James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.

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that ar tists are now ver y conscious of strict limitations and they see them ver y clearly and can expand them in terms of other limitations.

Amarillo Ramp, 1973 Earth, Flint Ø 46 m at top Ø 49-49 m at base Tecovas Lake, Texas © Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, New York, and James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.

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45 RS Yes. I am not really interested in that kind of model making or the reiteration of the ready made. T hey offer a sanctification for alienated objects, so you get a generation of manufactured goods. It is a complete denial of the work process and it is ver y mechanical too. A lot of Pop A r t has to do with this too – the transcending of the readymade. Rosenquist is transcending billboards, Warhol is transcending canned goods, and Jim Dine is transcending tools that you buy in hardware stores. Duchamp’s influence is quite per vasive on that level.

He’s tr ying to transcend production itself in the readymades when he takes an object out of the manufacturing process and then isolates it.

MC A re you really saying that Duchamp didn’t have a dialectical view either?

RS I’m saying that his objects are just like relics, relics of the saint or something like that.

It seems that he was into some kind of spiritual pursuit that involved the commonplace.

He seemed dissatisfied with painting or what is called high ar t. Somebody like Clement Greenberg is opting for high ar t or modernism from a more or thodox point of view, but Duchamp seems to want to be playful with that modernism. He doesn’t see it as absolute. It is like a mechanistic view. Duchamp was suspicious of this whole notion of mechanism but he was using it all the time. Take T he Large Glass, which seems to be an attempt to tr y and mechanize the sex act in what you would call a witty way. T here is a great difference between a dialectical view and a mechanistic view. A ndy Warhol saying that he wants to be a machine is this linear and Car tesian attitude developed on a simple level. A nd I just don’t find it ver y productive.

MC Have you ever met Duchamp?

RS Yes, I met him once in 1963 at the Cordier-Ekstrom Galler y in New York. I just said one thing to him, I said ‘I see you are into alchemy’. A nd he said, ‘ Yes’.

MC Were you interested in alchemy too?

RS No, I’m not interested in the occult. T hose kinds of systems are just dream worlds and they are fiction at their best and at worst, they are uninteresting. But you see, the Dadaists were setting up their religion, thinking that ever y thing was corr upted by commercialism, industr y, and bourgeois attitudes.

MC Well, in their days it was probably tr ue. But I agree that carr ying that attitude today doesn’t make much sense.

RS Exactly. T here’s no point in tr ying to transcend those realms. Industr y, commercialism and the bourgeois are ver y much with us. A nd this whole notion of tr ying to form a cult that transcends all this strikes me as a kind of religion in drag. I am just bored with it, frankly. A n ar t against itself is a good possibility, an ar t that always returns to essential contradiction.

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MC T his is interesting. You seem to imply that ar tists working within a different methodology, like confronting the viewer by putting an object in a galler y space, don’t have a dialectical view.

I’m sick of positivists, ontological hopes, and that sor t of thing, even ontological despair.

Both are impossible.

MC W hat was the transition from showing objects in museums to gigantic geological projects?

How did you get there?

RS Well, I first got involved in the earth project situation when I was contracted to do some work for an architectural company as an artist consultant, and they asked me to give them suggestions on what to do with sculpture and things like that. I felt it was wrong to consider sculpture as an object that you would track onto a building after the building is done, so I worked with these architects from the ground up. As a result I found myself surrounded with all these materials I didn’t know anything about – like aerial photographs, maps, large-scale systems, so in a sense I sort of treated the airport as a great complex, and out of that came a proposal that would involve low-level ground systems that would be placed at fringes of the airport, sculpture that you would see from the air. This preoccupation with the outdoors was very stimulating. Most of us used to work in a closed area space. For instance, I did a large spiral, triangular system that sort of just spun out and could only be seen from an airplane. I was sort of interested in the dialogue between the indoor and the outdoor and on my own, after getting involved in this way, I developed a method or a dialectic that involved what I call site and non-site.

MC Did the architects respond constr uctively to this stance?

RS No. A rchitects tend to be idealists, and not dialecticians. T here is an association with architecture and economics, and it seems that architects build in an isolated, self-contained, ahistorical way. T hey never seem to allow for any kind of relationships, outside of their grand plan. A nd this seems to be tr ue in economics too. Economics seem to be isolated and selfcontained and conceived as cycles, so as to exclude the whole entropic process. It’s a rather static way of looking at things. I don’t think things go in cycles. I think things just change from one situation to the next, there’s really no return.

MC Over the past few years there has been a dramatic sequence of natural disasters.

Ear thquakes, Floods, Tsunamis…

RS A lso, the er uptions outside of Iceland. A n entire community was submerged in back ashes.

MC Right. Still, most of these events don’t seem to have the effect they should have on people. Filtered by the constant media exposure, they almost seem unreal, as if they’re not happening here but somewhere else.

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RS Well, that may be something that’s human – that’s a human need. It seems that there’s almost a hope for disaster you might say. There’s that desire of spectacle. I know when I was a kid I used to love to watch the hurricanes come and blow the threes down and rip up the sidewalks. I mean it fascinated me. There’s a kind of pleasure that one receives on that level. Yet there is this desire for something more tranquil. But I suppose I’m more attracted toward mining regions and volcanic conditions – wastelands rather than the usual notion of scenery or quietude, tranquility – through they somehow interact.

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47 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Spiral Hill, 1971 Earth, topsoil, sand, ø 23 m at base Emmen, the Netherlands © Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, New York, and James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.

Robert Smithson at work on The Map of Broken Glass (Atlantis), 1969 © Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, New York, and James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.

Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970 Woodshed, 20 truckloads of earth 300 x 3300 x 1400 cm Kent, Ohio © Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, New York, and James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.

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49 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Partially Buried Woodshed, 1970 Woodshed, 20 truckloads of earth 300 x 3300 x 1400 cm Kent, Ohio © Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, New York, and James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.

MC My question is, as someone deeply concerned with environmental issues, how do you view the current climate situation? W hat do you think people should do about it?

RS T here’s a conflict of interests. On one side you have the idealistic ecologist and on the other side you have the profit desiring people and you get all kinds of strange twists of landscape consciousness from both. In other words two irreconcilable situations hopelessly going over the same waterfall.

MC W hat do you think should be done in order to preser ve the environment?

RS It seems that when one is talking about preser ving the environment or conser ving energy or recycling one inevitable gets to the question of waste. Waste and enjoyment are in a sense coupled. T here’s a cer tain kind of pleasure principle that comes out of preoccupation with waste. Like if we want a bigger and better car we are going to have bigger and better waste productions. So there’s a kind of equation there between the enjoyment of life and waste.

Probably the opposite of waste is luxur y. Both waste and luxur y tends to be useless. Of course there’s an attempt to reverse entropy through the recycling of garbage. People going around collecting bottles and tin cans and whatnot and placing them in cer tain compounds seems to be rather a problematic situation. Recycling is like looking for needless in haystacks.

MC So it’s hard to predict what’s gonna happen.

RS Well, it’s ver y hard to predict any thing. I mean even planning. Planning and chance seem to be the same thing.

MC Really?

RS A bsolutely. Actually it is the mistakes we make that result in something. T here is no point in tr ying to come up with the right answer because it is inevitably wrong. Ever y philosophy will turn against itself and it will always be refuted.

MC So there’s no point in tr ying to create a str ucture for a better tomorrow?

RS Here we go again, creating objects, creating systems, building a better tomorrow. I posit that there is no tomorrow, nothing but a gap, a yawning gap. T hat seems sor t of tragic, but what immediately relieves it is irony, which gives you a sense of humor that makes it all tolerable. Ever y thing just vanishes

Rober t Smithson (1938-1973) was an American ar tist who gained international recognition for his groundbreaking ar t which was not limited by genre or materials as well as for his critical writings that challenged traditional categories of ar t. A pioneer of land ar t, Smithson is mostly wellknown for his ear thwork Spiral Jetty, 1970, located in the Great Salt Lake in Utah.

Maurizio Cat telan (b. 1960) is one of the best-known ar tists to have emerged in the 1990s. Renewed for his works that mock the ar t system, ar t histor y, and sometimes the ar tist himself, Cattelan has also been involved in many editorial projets, including the magazines ‘Permanent Food’ and ‘Toilet Paper’.

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Glue Pour (Destroyed), 1970 Glue Dimensions variable Vancouver Š Estate of Robert Smithson. Courtesy of the Holt/Smithson Foundation, New York, and James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.

THE ART OF KIKI SMITH

CLAYTON CAMPBELL T H E G E R M A N - B O R N A N D N E W J E R S E Y B R E D A R T I S T K I K I S M I T H is an East Coast girl who grew up as part of a generation of social and political art activists amidst the spectre of AIDS and the energy of Feminism. Her own family was art royalty of a sort, her father being sculptor Tony Smith, and her mother Jane Lawrence the opera singer. Kiki went to Hartford Art School in 1974-5 then settled in New York City in 1976, where she is still based. Although an inveterate traveller, she is a product of the New York art world, taking and receiving from it during its golden age as it evolved from the nucleus of a modernist post war community to the enormous roiling international culture industry it has become today. She traversed the era of the experimental non-profit ecosystem of arts collectives and alternative galleries, before she went the big time route and became an international presence and collectible artist. Within that evolution she has remained very much a singular voice and personality in the firmament of her generation.

Blood Pool, 1992 Painted bronze 36 x 99 x 56 cm Photo: Ellen Page Wilson. Š Kiki Smith. Courtesy Pace Gallery, New York.

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53 As she developed her practice in the alternative trenches of the downtown New York art scene her work always had pronounced authenticity and sense of self that appeared to be impervious to the cacophony surrounding it. Her objects moved from the hand made to the conventionally produced, using materials associated with crafts to traditional and more expensive works in bronze. While many of the post war American artists, most of them male, have attempted to brand themselves with a bravura signature style that fit market imperatives and the consumerist tsunami overcoming the 21st century art market, it is clearly the wrong way to approach an understanding of Smith. She works with plaster, bronze, paper, glass, porcelain, installations, prints, drawings, photographs, multiples, jewellery, artist’s books, and film and video works.

The materials themselves point away from an artist who seeks to brand herself. She produced multiples that were accessible to a larger audience yet makes high priced individual works sold at Pace Gallery for elite collectors. These are contrasts, not contradictions, and if anything indicate her intention of making her work as inclusive as possible.

An example of her earliest work deals with a preoccupation with the body and is from 1986. Entitled ‘Uro-Genital System (Diptych Male & Female)’ it is a wall sculpture made in bronze with green patina.

They have the look of illustrations from Grey’s Anatomy, the famous book which most artists reference at one time or another and Smith does as well, and in fact was her starting point for many early works.

A bit later on in 1992, is ‘Intestine’, a long sinewy cast bronze work that hugs the wall like a lanyard but on closer inspection are our guts unravelled.

If Smith’s earliest preoccupation was generally with the body and its parts then later it was the whole figure, if often flayed and distressed. This interest in the entirety of the body suggests a belief in regeneration earned by first pulling apart and then slowly patching it all back together. Her works of the 1980s is often spoken about through the cypher of AIDS. Her sister died of AIDS, and many friends.

Smith speaks of her work in an interview with Carlo McCormick first as an investigation into form, and only after that does she get connected to the obvious social catastrophes that were sweeping through the artistic communalities in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and elsewhere like a firestorm.

I lived and worked in New York at the same time, and the loss of entire groups of friends overnight was breathtaking. It was the plague years. Being around people dying of AIDS, their bodies falling apart, leaking fluids and just disintegrating into pools of tissue and matter seems to parallel what Smith’s investigation is about. But I feel her work is not literal in that sense and her art of this time was exploring the regeneration of the body by proposing a quiet confidence in the sacred spaces they maintain, and the sacral elements they contain, no matter how degraded it may appear. In truth, at the heart of her project can be found the belief in the body’s amazing ability to heal itself.

When work is viewed like ‘Blood Pool’, a painted bronze from 1992, it is hard to see the regenerative possibilities of the figure at first, unless one sees attunes to the pain of regeneration that is occurring. A lot of social and political meanings have been projected onto Smith’s figures of women, yet I feel that the unformed or distressed sculptural figures are revelatory of a much deeper suffering in the core of the feminine, apart from the external debasing of our own time. It is a pain at the

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In the 1980s Smith joined Colab, or Collaborative Projects, a collective that spawned a number of important alternative spaces like ABC No Rio, events like the Times Square Show, or magazines like ‘Bomb’. Some of her earliest work was with seminal queer artist David Wojnarowicz. Smith, like many of artists of her generation, are still highly active making art and she perhaps is one of the best known as an individual practitioner.

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Geneviève and the May Wolf, 2000 Silica bronze with patina.

178 x 66 x 66 cm (Geneviéve); 107 x 36 x 142 cm (Wolf). © Kiki Smith. Courtesy Pace Gallery, New York

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55 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Rapture, 2001 Bronze 171 x 158 x 67 cm Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy Pace Gallery, New York.

core of the planet channelled through a feminine unconscious available to both men and women.

Restlessness exploration pervades her career that snakes between narrative whimsy, visceral examinations of the body, reveries in realms of unnamed spirituality, and poignancy in the paucity or the purity that can be the human condition. In fact she does describe herself as enjoying living in a state of confusion, knowing not where she may be going. That to me seems the essence of a journey worth taking.

Mother’s Coat, 1994 Silver leaf over wax with felt and metal figure 127 x 38 x 23 cm. © Kiki Smith.

Courtesy Pace Gallery, New York.

Smith’s work and her sensibility has oft been described as feminist, because she accessed mediums normally not associated with fine arts yet had been left aside as craft or derided as the stuff of women’s work. So clay and paper, glass making, embroidery, all of this made their way into her practice, as it would with the generation of women she is part of. She continues in this vein, but the designation with the years has become less relevant, and she simply stands alone as one of our most singular and inventive artists.

In the 1990s her work shifted to be more narrative, involving parables of nature, and a fascination with historical symbols and histories. This led to numerous interpretations that Smith’s work was veering in the mystical and the celestial. And in some ways she is, and it reveals the work of a maturing artist whose interests have shifted into a reading of cosmological phenomena. Her project began to harken more to medieval wild women and spectral spirits attesting to knowledge that is ancient, and contained within the substances made by healers, and occasionally, by contemporary artists.

In 1994 ‘Mother’s Coat’, a beautiful installation displayed a gold leafed figure rising above a felt installation studded with stars. This signalled an ascension of sorts into narrative that would link body and spirit, the religious or spiritual with the mythological, and then just the purely imaginary with glimpses of history from cultures that join women together.

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‘Telling Tales’, an installation from 2001 at the International Center of Photography presented ‘Lying with the Wolf’. It revealed a number of works related to women and their coexistence with animals. There are references to Little Red Riding Hood, such as in the piece ‘Rapture’ (2001) or ‘Born’ (2002), then something quite different altogether in ‘Sainte Genevieve and the May Wolf’ (2012). Portrayed communing with a wolf, St. Genevieve the Patron Saint of Paris took cover with its

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57 Smith is a maker. She is always at work and there is no separation between her work and her life, it is a blur of activity. Which is why she works at “home”, and does not have a separate studio. It is all of a piece, and out of this chaos emerges her work. It’s a process other artists employ, starting with tons of unconscious raw material, following whatever investigation illogically or logically presents itself and trusting it to lead somewhere as decisions will be made along the way. It is the opposite of the laboratory studio set up, perhaps one I would characterize as more cerebral and scientific, maybe more masculine and ordered for output and quantifiable outcome.

There is such a volume of work in Smith’s overall project, and a breadth of themes she has encountered, I finally want to mention some of her most recent work from 2012 in the show Visionary Sugar that featured Jacquard tapestries, a punch card system from an 18th century looms. Three large tapestries measuring 290 x 190 cm are entitled ‘Earth, Sky and Underground’ are made of warp and weft threads and employ no printing. Their presence and beauty is striking, and for Smith, I feel she must feel our world is one of Wonder, and our moment here, precarious and to be honoured and respected. No more powerful message can be offered at this time. Her work communes not with the universe, but with the universal. There is something very special happening when you spend time with Smith’s art because you can begin to feel in her work a certain lightness, as if something is saying, with each breath we are loved and supported by the Sacred, the Eternal, and the Divine Clayton Campbell is a cultural producer, visual ar tist, curator, administrator, fundraiser, consultant, and writer.

His most recent project, Words We Have Learned Since 9/11, has been exhibited at venues around the world.

Between 1995–2010 he was the Co-Director of the 18th Street Ar ts Center in Santa Monica.

Born, 2002 Bronze 100 x 256 x 61 cm Photo: Kerry Ryan McFate. © Kiki Smith.

Courtesy Pace Gallery, New York.

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skin, was born from its womb, embodying the complex, symbolic relationships between humans and animals.

Sky, 2012 Jacquard tapestry 303 x 194 cm. © Kiki Smith.

Courtesy Magnolia Editions, Oakland, and Pace Gallery, New York.

Earth, 2012 Jacquard tapestry 295 x 192 cm. © Kiki Smith. Courtesy Magnolia Editions, Oakland, and Pace Gallery, New York.

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59 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Underground, 2012 Jacquard tapestry 303 cm x 198 cm. © Kiki Smith.

Courtesy Magnolia Editions, Oakland, and Pace Gallery, New York.

KEREN GOLDBERG L A T E L Y , I T S E E M S A S T H O U G H C O L L A G E H A S T A K E N O V E R T H E A R T W O R L D . Less than a year ago Hannah Höch’s retrospective, which focused on her politically critical collages, closed at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. On view recently, also in London, was Richard Hamilton’s retrospective, which filled Tate Modern with the daddy of Brit pop’s various collages, only to be replaced by a different blockbuster show – Henri Matisse’s cuts-outs, which will soon travel to MoMA in New York; a new Hayward Gallery touring exhibition is called ‘Pre-Pop to PostHuman: Collage in the Digital Age’, with artists creating prints using familiar iconography from video games, high street advertising, and popular magazines as a response to Eduardo Paolozzi’s collages from the 1950-60s; an exhibition of early collages by the American artist Robert Motherwell was recently on view at the Guggenheim in New York; Kurt Schwitters, who invented the term ‘Mertz’ to illustrate the principle of using any material and is known for his collages and assemblage pieces, was the subject of a long overdue retrospective at Tate Britain in London just a year and a half ago.

This new interest in the medium of collage is not coincidental. Today, many young artists are adopting techniques and aesthetics based on this medium. Maybe this re-examination of the classical collage came to better understand this contemporary practice, which is undoubtedly influenced by the Internet. Multiple windows, uncontrollable adds, tabs, hyperlinks, files, folders, feeds and talkbacks are the visual texture of our every day lives, for better and for worst. We are surrounded by an on-going collage. Many efforts have been made to overcome such excess of visual and literal information. For example, the term ‘economy of attention’ was appropriated for the needs of advertising strategies, and ‘long-reads’, meaning longer and more in-depth texts, are written especially for the Internet.

However, this hyperactive virtual dynamic is not just a barrier that needs to be removed. In the artistic sphere, it is empowered by new meanings, as the visual and aesthetical qualities it withholds became the major preoccupation of many young artists, whose work draws on what can be called ‘Desktop Aesthetics’. These artists have inherited the problematic definition ‘post internet video art’, which includes countless practices and styles. Some of these artists use traditional filming technique, others use sophisticated 3D hyperrealist animations to produce an entirely virtual world, but all combine sound and visual layers in a way that can be described as collagistic. Their works are flooded with various images, usually loosely connected by an incoherent narrative. Although their technique may not necessarily involve physical cutting and assembling, their content is based on a copy+paste tradition.

Of course, every act of editing a moving image can be described as collage. The Russian film maker Sergei Eisenstein’s notion of ‘montage’ is well known for its concatenation of short shots

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COPY+PASTE: THE COLLAGISTIC QUALITIES OF THE DESKTOP AESTHETICS

in order to condense places, times, and meanings. The effect was described as a punch in the face of the viewer. Parallel to the Höch retrospective at the Whitechapel, the gallery hosted a panel discussion called ‘Collage Expanded’. One of the speakers, British video artist Elizabeth Price, mentioned the factor of rhythm that becomes central to the temporal collage, the ability to infinitely reproduce the images, as well as the fact that on the editing software’s timeline, previous layers are always present, thus accumulating an archaeology of the collage creation process.

Indeed, in his essay ‘De-Collage/Collage: Notes Towards a Re-examination of the Origins of Video Art’, John G. Hanhardt claims that video art is historically based on the language of collage, defining the former as the spatial and temporal extensions of the latter. Handhart focuses in particular on the artistic employment of TV sets that took place in the 1960s-70s, and the criticism of this new technology by pioneering video artists such as Nam June Paik and Wolf Vostell.

However, in the work of contemporary artists such as Camille Henrot, Helen Marten, Ed Atkins, James Richards, and Benedict Drew, the relationship between video art and collage possesses a different meaning.

Perhaps the most representative work of this new tendency is Camille Henrot’s ‘Grosse Fatigue’ (2013), who won the Silver Lion for the most promising young artist at the last Venice Biennale. The video is the outcome of an extensive research period at the Smithsonian Institution in Boston, leading to the artist’s decision to focus on two themes – the creation of the universe and the history of humanity. Henrot created a visual overflow of images: endless desktop windows, showing stuffed birds from the museum collection, hands pilling dotted eggs, or sea turtles running to sea, among rest, pop up one after another, blocking each other and accumulating on top of one another. The desktop, which usually functions as a personal space, becomes the backdrop of all humanity and the universe it inhabits. The soundtrack accompanying the images is a spoken word piece, which combines different narratives and myths, describing the creation of the universe, into a nonsensical remix. Less than a year ago, Henrot translated the video into an installation at the Chisenhale gallery in London. The whole space was covered with blue, and masses of objects and images were speared through it. The association with the ‘blue screen of death’, which appears on a computer screen when a fatal fault happens, was unavoidable.

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At the same Venice Biennale a new work by British artist Helen Marten, ‘Orchids, or a Hemispherical Bottom’ (2013) was also exhibited. Unlike Henrot, who uses mostly found footage or traditional filming techniques, Marten employs digital HD animation to create hyper realistic objects, thus plunging into the heart of computer aesthetic. Her work was described as producing the three-dimensional drag version of the real world. In her films, different environments slowly unravel, and the frame focuses on various objects – little pees, artichokes, orchids, fruit, small animals, and furniture, all brightly coloured and perfect in their rendition. The physicality and sensuality of surfaces and materials are the aspects Marten is most interested in. The way the non-existing camera moves seem to be designed to allow viewers to feel as if they are caressing the objects. Paradoxically, Marten uses High-Tec technology to examine the materiality of non-existing objects. The animation emphasises the sensuality of the flavour-lacking, blandless digital world. As Marten says:

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63 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Camille Henrot Grosse Fatigue, 2013 Vidéo (couleur, sonore) / Video (color, sound) 13 min Musique originale de / Original music by Joakim Voix / Voice by Akwetey Orraca-Tetteh Texte écrit en collaboration avec / Text written in collaboration with Jacob Bromberg Producteur / Producer : kamel mennour, Paris ; avec le soutien du / with the additional support of : Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin, Paris Production: Silex Films Lion d’argent - 55e Biennale de Venise / Silver Lion - 55th Venice Biennale, 2013 Projet développé dans le cadre du / Project conducted as part of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship Program, Washington, D.C. Remerciements particuliers aux / Special thanks to: the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, and the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum © ADAGP Camille Henrot Courtesy the artist, Silex Films and kamel mennour, Paris

Helen Marten Orchids, or a hemispherical bottom, 2013 Animation video, soundโ จ19 min 24 sec, loop. Courtesy of the Artist, Sadie Coles HQ, London, Greene Naftali, New York, Johann Kรถnig, Berlin and T293, Rome / Naples

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65 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Helen Marten Evian Disease, 2012 Animation video, sound 28 min 45. Courtesy of the Artist, Sadie Coles HQ, London, Johann König, Berlin and T293, Rome / Naples

‘The ideas of collage and inlay are things I’ve been thinking about a lot. In collage there’s this wonderful idea that images are more bruised. They’re asked to be more vocal about the verbs of squashing and sitting, so the fundamental action of placing one thing atop another is a problem of weight. So I’m thinking about thick makeup, ceramic glaze and stickers on fruit.’

Sometimes, another flat layer overlays Marten’s perfect three-dimensional image. Drawings made of thin black lines, a bit comic-like in nature, or flat solid colour squares and rectangles, which look like a digital version of a Mondrian painting, cover the frame. Her works are indeed loaded with references to art history, as sometimes the lower layer seems as a still life painting in oil colours, in which the colours become a material in itself, while the top layer seems as a minimal drawing in contour lines. Marten, like Henrot, also addresses a tangible aspect in her practice, and creates installations and sculptures that look like the 3D versions of her films.

Ed Atkins Stills from the three-channel HD video Ribbons (2014) © 2014 Ed Atkins Courtesy of CABINET London and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin

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67 In Atkins’ recent solo show at the Serpentine Gallery in London, he addressed a different flat, linear dimension, similar to the black drawings in Marten’s films. It appeared in the shape of black, thin doddles, that surrounded texts printed on large coulisses that were placed against the walls. They also appeared in the tattoo-like marks, drawn on the perfectly toned skin of ‘Dave’, the artist’s virtual avatar, who starred in the video works. It seems that both Atkins and Marten experience a tension between the creation of a meticulous uncanny threedimensional world and the unmediated act of drawing. In one of the video works in Atkin’s show, a floating head approaches the screen, looking as if it wants to say something, but each time the image fades away to be aggressively replaced by abstract lines, shapes, and drawings.

Atkins’ former studio partner, James Richards, creates films that are conceptually similar, although aesthetically completely different. A 2014 Turner Prize finalist, Richards finds inspiration in any possible source for moving images. He combines footage from old VHS cassettes, DVDs or YouTube clips into dream-like, poetic short temporal collages that reflect the materiality of the image. His images are much less processed than those of Atkins, but both artists feast on Internet aesthetic, and their working processes are similar. In a joint-interview with Richards, Atkins remarked: ‘We both work in a way where we are simultaneously answering emails, waiting for things to render, listening to music. There is this perpetual drift to the way we work, which echoes browsing online generally. But I do feel guilty about that experience.’

Today, our immaterial labour in front of a computer is continuously disrupted by multiple, simultaneous actions. Artists like Atkins and Richards utilize these interferences in their editing processes and present them as part of the final work.

Another interesting aspect in these works is the use of language. Atkins often redefines the construction of subtitles – occasionally he plants a visual image where the subtitles text should appear, in the bottom of the frame, to form the visual translation of the main image.

Much has been said about the comparison between collage and language. In linguistic terms, the collaging gesture creates a new syntax from existing words, a syntax that challenges the laws of grammar and breaks the normal concatenation of sentences and words – a process similar to the poetic and philosophical use of language. The words accompanying Henrot’s ‘Grosse Fatigue’, which describe the creation of the universe in a rather nonsensical fashion, operate on the same level, thus duplicating the collagistic rhythm of the images in the words accompanying them.

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Other artists use similar animation techniques. In British artist Ed Atkins’ films the physiological materiality take over. In the two-channel video ‘Us Dead Talk Love’ (2012), two floating heads are discussing the coincidental revelation of an eyelash underneath the foreskin. The characters are uncannily hyperrealists, with their excessive liveliness paradoxically turning to deadness. They communicate an incoherent dialogue, while the images change on the screen in a temporal collage. The various elements are disconnected, floating in the digital endless space, on the flat surface of the screen. One of the major aspects in collage is the re-contextualising of various elements, the estrangement from their original context and displacement into a new one.

In Elizabeth Price’s work, words occupy an equally central position. Her film ‘The Woolworths Choir of 1979’ (2012) for which the artist won the Turner Prize, moves from an architectural academic research on church buildings to a preoccupation with the big fire that destroyed the Woolsworth Department Store in Manchester in 1979. Price mixed original footage of interviews with the survivors and footage of dance or church choirs singing, all accompanied by a minimalistic, rhythmic clapping sound, timed to coincide with the editing of the images.

Fragments with the survivors’ testimonies are soundless and their words are presented only by subtitles, which reappear in different colours in various areas of the frame. In this sense, Price is using words in a similar way to that present in the early twentieth century Dadaists collages.

Paradoxically, in most of the video works by these artists, who operate in a keyboard/mouse dimension and do not get their hands dirty in a classic sense, images of hands are recurrent. In Atkins’s ‘Even Pricks’ (2013), a Facebook-like fist with an approving thumb is raising up until it gets detached from the hand, or falls back deflated, in a cynical, phallocentric act, whereas other times the fist turns down, expressing a harsh ‘unlike’ – the most debated missing function from Facebook.

Benedict Drew, another young British artist, is also interested in physiological materiality.

Hands in his video works are also disconnected from the rest of the body. They’re often visible in close up, massaging an abject liquid material, until their ‘handiness’ is no longer recognizable.

His work combines computer-generated images and found film footage, and is overloaded with images, sound, and text. Drew, coming from an experimental music background, uses a visual and audio maximization to examine capitalistic consumption.

In Marten’s case, hands are computer-generated, and always look perfect, clean, and idealistic, as for example in ‘Evian Disease’ (2012). They hold a pencil and draw black lines over the three dimensional layer, or reach out to hold the edges of the frame, as if they wish to disrupt the illusion of the virtual image and uncover its true flatness. Henrot’s hands, on the other hand, are ‘real’, filmed hands. They assume the function of pedestals, holding the filmed objects, presenting them, or flipping through the pages of history books. Carefully cured, with nail polish neatly applied to match the colour of the image, they are the ultimate representation of the current phase of the ‘cut and paste’ action – the editorial sensitivity and the efficiency of the method are expressed through the light touch of fingertips on keyboards or sterilized mouse clicking.

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The recent video works by the acclaimed German artist Hito Steyerl, who can be associated with a former generation of artists from that of the ones mentioned above, are characterized by a collage sensitivity as well. Although she differs formally and conceptually from the above mentioned artists, she does share their internet aesthetic. In her recent exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London, she presented the video work ‘Liquidity Inc.’ (2014), which investigates the subject of liquidity, being that of water or money. The story of a young American banker who lost his job in the recent financial crisis and turned to fighting arts is interspersed by scenes of a fabricated TV weather forecast and various iconic culture images of water. The images juxtaposed and create the feeling of a Google search for the word ‘Liquidity’ that has gone out of control.

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69 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Benedict Drew ‘Heads May Roll’, 2014 Video still. 261.6 x 200.7 cm.

Image courtesy of the artist and Matt’s Gallery, London.

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Hito Steyerl Still from Liquidity Inc., 2014 Courtesy the artist.

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71 The collage created on our computer desktop, or the montage accumulated over time and virtual space while surfing the web, are most of the times completely coincidental. The works mentioned here do not wish to imitate these dynamics. On the contrary, they rely on a most calculated and meticulous process, which results in images investigating the materiality of inexistent objects and the rationality of irrational processes. They construct the aesthetics of the new collage – making sense of not making sense.

Keren Goldberg is an Israeli art critic and writer based in London. She writes regularly to various international art magazines such as ‘ArtReview’ and ‘Mousse’. She has recently graduated her MA in Critical Writing in art and Design at the Royal College of Art, London, and is currently developing her thesis on Parafiction Art into a book Keren Goldberg is an Israeli ar t critic and writer based in London. She writes regularly to various international ar t magazines such as ‘Ar tReview’ and ‘Mousse’. She has recently graduated her MA in Critical Writing in ar t and Design at the Royal College of Ar t, London, and is currently developing her thesis on Parafiction Ar t into a book.

John G. Hanhardt, ‘De-Collage/Collage: Notes Towards a Reexamination of the Origins of Video Ar t’, in Doug Hall and Sally Jo Fifer (eds.), ‘Illuminating Video: An Essential Guide to Video Ar t’, Aper ture, San Francisco, in association with the Bay Area Video Coalition, 1990.

Helen Mar ten, from an inter view with Katie Guggenheim in the text for the exhibition ‘Plank Salad’, Chisenhale Galler y, London, 2013, http: //www. chisenhale.org.uk /archive/exhibitions/images/ HMar ten_Sheet.pdf Ed Atkins, in an inter view with James Richard and Oliver Basciano, in; Ar t Review;, December 2012, http: //ar treview.com/features/ december_2012_feature_ed_atkins_and_james_richards/

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Of course, in this context, one could also mention artists such as Ryan Trecartin, whose films look like an epileptic episode of a reality TV show, and Jordan Wolfson, who shares a comical approach to web imagery. Examples are numerous, and styles and contents vary. What they have in common is the employment of the day to day information excess, the use of rapid editing, and the preoccupation with the fragmented way in which we spend (or waste) most of our time.

THE MULTIVERSE RESIDENCIES 9 NOVEMBER – 20 DECEMBER 2015 ESSI KAUSALAINEN HEATHER PHILLIPSON PAUL PURGAS ERICA SCOURTI For details of events and artists' opportunities visit www.wysingartscentre.org

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Wysing Arts Centre Cambridge, UK

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INVENT THE FUTURE WITH ELEMENTS OF THE PAST MITCHELL ANDERSON A N O N - S Y S T E M A T I C R E S E A R C H S P I N S A T T H E N U C L E U S O F ‘Invent the Future with Elements of the Past’, the sprawling city wide exhibition headquartered at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire. Curated by Adrian Notz, the director of the legendary Dadaist haunt, the project sent 12 Swiss artists to Venice to research the ideas of the late Swiss sociologist Lucius Burckhardt, best known for his founding of strollology, which sought to incorporate an understanding of walking in a scientific planning method for urban environments. The resulting works, in the exhibition and as related events and performances, are difficult to see as a whole and act more as their own calls to furthered projects and exploration than as a fixed result.

This sense stems from its genealogical relation to ‘a stroll through a fun palace’, Hans Ulrich Obrist’s curated retrospective of Burckhardt presented at the Swiss Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of Architecture during the months of this projects artist’s residencies. Inviting well known international artists whose works find reflection in Burckhardt’s ideas (Dan Graham, Liam Gillick, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno to name a few) to create works, performances and talks, Obrist’s project acts as a high-powered and influential urbane twin to this exhibition’s younger, more scrappy and local adaptation.

The vaulted stone basement of the Cabaret Voltaire serves as the exhibitions headquarters, holding not only a more traditional display of artworks, but also the maps and schedules that are the key to experiencing the project most fully. The interior entrance is flanked by boozy painted posters for Stefan Burger’s ‘Gebüsch’ (all works in the exhibition 2015), a film that will premiere with a screening in the space towards the end of the show’s run. With little, if any, true information depicted, save for the title which translates in English to ‘bush’, the works are comfortable in the childhood home of irrational art.

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Navid Tschopp’s ‘Squatbox’, is a film showing tourists lazily riding through the canals of Venice as their gondolier reads off the names of the wireless connections that continuously scroll on his phone. Almost entirely service provider titles beginning with WLAN or NET (why don’t people get creative with these any more?), it traces Venice through constructed texts that exist in the ether around us. By making a firm ahistorical stance the work questions the ways that environments, especially old world European destinations, are often chained to being experienced through established storylines. Tschopp expanded the work by offering his own walking tour of Zurich one Spring afternoon, pushing the construction of a well made film against the physicality of his walk as performance. It is in this dichotomy that the strange Venice vs. Zurich connection of this show is most apparent, but his idea of experiencing place with alternative and chanced based notions hangs equally thick in both.

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75 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Navid Tschopp Squat Box, 2015 Courtesy of the artist and Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich.

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Paul Polaris Tohu wa bohu, 2015 Courtesy of the artist and Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich.

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Another Saturday afternoon found a crowd surrounding five helium-filled spheres in front of the Kunsthaus for Paul Polaris’ ‘Tohu wâ bohu’. The gigantic balloons each featured brightly colored forms of a different bodily organ; lungs, kidneys, livers etc. From there a procession formed through Zurich’s Old Town, those individuals holding tightly to the ropes mixing in with the larger group fluidly. The balls, though separate, formed a beaded caterpillar, like the dotted line of a pirate’s map made temporarily physical in hovered space. Viewed from outside the group the negative space of urban transportation momentarily became viewable.

Paul Polaris Tohu wa bohu, 2015 Courtesy of the artist and Cabaret Voltaire, Zurich.

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In contributing a title to this exhibition, Obrist adapted a previous press quote for his Venice iteration. While seemingly easy to dismiss it does hold a clue to understanding. The efficiency of the gesture and its connecting the projects over time and location lines up closely with the work and ideas of Burckhardt. Literally taking the recent past for a future exhibition exposes an interest in continuing research and experimentation over the fixed art object and the definitive exhibition. Here we see how loosely walking around ideas opens up continuous points of view Mitchell Ander son is an ar tist living in Zurich where he runs the project space Plymouth Rock.

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WILLIAM ANASTASI: RADICAL INVENTIONS, CONCEPTUAL INTENTIONS MAX WEINTRAUB I N 1 9 6 3 , A T T H E A G E O F T W E N T Y - N I N E , W I L L I A M A N A S T A S I P R O D U C E D a series of India-ink drawings titled ‘Constellations’, which he composed while listening to a recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier by the Polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska.

To make each of the ninety-six drawings in the series – one drawing for each of Bach’s forty-eight preludes and forty-eight fugues – Anastasi closed his eyes and, deliberately keeping the rhythm of his mark-making out of sync with that of Landowska’s performance, dispassionately tapped his pen point onto a sheet of paper. Using Bach’s music to delimit the period of time that his drawing activity would last, Anastasi started each ‘Constellation’ drawing when the particular fugue or prelude to which he was listening began and ended when the music stopped. The resulting drawings consist of clustered configurations of dots of varying size, shape, and density, each titled after the individual fugue or prelude.

These ‘Constellation’ drawings were the first of Anastasi’s ‘blind’ or unsighted drawings, so named because he executed them with his eyes closed, blindfolded or otherwise with his sight averted from the paper upon which he drew. By producing them in this manner, Anastasi yielded conscious, creative control of his mark-making to the unpredictable effects of external measures, conditions and factors – a musical performance’s duration, the movement of his body while walking around or, as in his most celebrated series of such drawings, the swaying and lurching of a New York City subway car while travelling from one location to the next.

By allowing the procedures and parameters of his art to be realized by way of such variable circumstances, the aesthetic results of his drawing activities could not be foreseen. His was a decidedly somatic process of unexpected invention and uncertain outcomes, and which marked not simply the experience of time but the experience of his body in time. More specifically, and perhaps more important, in relying on externally imposed sets of conditions to delimit his creative acts, Anastasi introduced into his art chance and indeterminacy as productive forces, and radically reconsidered the conditions of artistic agency and the body’s relationship to its environment.

In many ways, Anastasi’s ‘Constellation’ drawings marked not only the beginning of an artistic career but, more profoundly, an artistic career that would be defined by his relentless and unorthodox investigations into the status and conditions of art and art making. And it was his work from the 1960s that makes him one of the key figures in the development of American Conceptualism.

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The preoccupation with the vagaries of chance procedures evident in Anastasi’s drawings is also evident in his early sculptures, as for example ‘Sink’. Made in 1963, the same year of the

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83 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Without Title (Constellation Drawing, 5.31.12) 2012 Graphite and felt-tip pen on paper 28.5 x 19 cm, Unique Courtesy Galerie Wolff, Paris.

Microphone, 1963 Microphone, sound 19 x 40.6 x 30.5 cm 2/3 Photo: Hunter College, New York Courtesy of Galerie Wolff, Paris.

‘Constellation’ drawings, ‘Sink’ consists of a thick steel plate and the artist’s instruction for its owner to pour water directly onto the slab’s surface. Each time the water evaporates new water is to be added to the surface. Over time ‘Sink’ has become pitted by rust – its once solid, geometric form slowly, imperceptibly altered by oxidation’s corrosive effects. The sculpture is another early instance of many of the elements and concerns that have become the hallmarks of Anastasi’s art, including the contingencies of chance, the effects of time and the generative possibilities of natural and external forces and conditions.

If ‘Sink’ might be considered a critique of Minimalism’s hard-edged, geometric forms and concerns, ‘Microphone’, another of Anastasi’s works from 1963, marked a decidedly more conceptual turn in his practice. Using a closet in his apartment on the lower east side of New York as a makeshift soundproof room, Anastasi hung a microphone above a Tandberg Model 5 tape recorder and used the machine’s own reel-to-reel recorder to record the sounds it made while operating. When exhibited, the Tandberg recorder played back the resulting audiotape, which Anastasi has described as ‘a recording of the recorder recording the recorder’. Breathtakingly simple yet conceptually rigorous, ‘Microphone’ heralded the central role tautological propositions would play in the emergent American Conceptual art movement.

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‘Microphone’’s complicated use of ambient sound might also be seen as foreshadowing Anastasi’s deep engagement with the ideas of composer John Cage. Anastasi first met Cage while preparing for his 1966 exhibition ’Sound Objects‘ at the Dwan Gallery in New York – an initial encounter that would evolve into a friendship lasting until Cage’s death in 1992. The first of four important

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Sound Object (Jackhammer), 1964-2013. Pneumatic drill, asphalt, speakers, recording 96.52 x 38.1 x 38.1 cm dimensions variable 2/3 + 1 A.P. Photo: Nasim Weiler Courtesy of Galerie Wolff, Paris.

Sound Object (Radiator),1964-2013 Heater, speakers, recording dimensions variable 2/3 + 1 A.P. Photo: Adam Reich Courtesy of Galerie Wolff, Paris

Sound Object (Deflated Tire), 1964-2013 Inner tube, speaker, recording dimensions variable 2/3 + 1 A.P. Photo: Nicolas Consuegra Courtesy of Galerie Wolff, Paris.

Sound Object (Fan), 1964-2013 Fan, speaker, recording Fan: 43 x 40 x 25 cm / 17 x 16 x 10 inches Pedestal:119 x 53 x 53 cm / 47 x 53 x 53 inches 2/3 + 1 A.P. Photo: Hunter College, New York Courtesy of Galerie Wolff, Paris.

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Without Title (Sound Drawing, 5.11.14, 2106), 2014 Graphite on paper, digital voice recorder, plexiglas, clipboard 33.5 x 22.5 cm, Unique Photo: Franรงois Doury Courtesy of Galerie Wolff, Paris.

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87 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Without Title (Sound Drawing, 5.11.14, 2106), 2014 Graphite on paper, digital voice recorder, plexiglas, clipboard 33.5 x 22.5 cm, Unique Photo: Franรงois Doury Courtesy of Galerie Wolff, Paris.

Four one to one photographs of a papered wall at the Bradshaw residence, 436 E. 88th St, NYC, Jan 27, 1977 1977 Polaroids 21.5 x 28 cm Unique Courtesy of Galerie Wolff, Paris.

solo exhibitions of Anastasi’s work at Virginia Dwan’s gallery between 1966 and 1970, ‘Sound Objects’ featured familiar, everyday items accompanied by recordings of the sounds that they make, including a radiator with its hissing and clanking, a pneumatic drill with the percussive rhythms produced while drilling asphalt, a fan with its gentle whirring, and a tire tube with the noise of rushing air made while it deflated. The combination of sounds and sources created an evocative and decidedly durational aesthetic experience informed by each listener’s own knowledge, memory and imagination as much as by the objects and sounds themselves, the overall ensemble functioning as a meditation on the intimate relationship between apperception and apprehension.

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The centrepiece of the 1966 Dwan exhibition, however, was the large sculptural installation ‘Window on the Airshaft’ (1964), where Anastasi reconstructed an entire section of the window from his Lower East Side apartment, complete with wooden window frame, window shade and several square meters of stuccoed wall. Emanating from a tape player hidden behind the windowsill was a twelve-hour recording that Anastasi had made of all of the sounds that he heard wafting in through his apartment window over the course of a day – muffled conversations, dogs barking, emergency sirens wailing, and the innumerable other noises that made up the din of New York City in 1964. The noises produced a veritable Cageian symphony of urban sounds. Indeed, perhaps nowhere else in Anastasi’s oeuvre are John Cage’s

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89 Anastasi’s next exhibition at the Dawn Gallery in 1967 cemented his legacy as a pioneer of American conceptual art. Entitled ‘Six Sites’, it revolved around a series of photographs of the gallery’s six empty walls, which Anastasi silkscreened onto canvases about 90% the scale of the walls. When these photographic simulacrums of the gallery walls – complete with trompel’oeil electrical sockets, vents and other fixtures – were mounted on the very walls that they reproduced, the relationship between art and its environment was suddenly complicated and confounded in unprecedented ways. Furthermore, by covering over the gallery’s walls with their silkscreened representation, Anastasi anticipated subsequent generations’ concerns with the diminishing gap between the real and its representation.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Anastasi would continue to interrogate the conceptual concerns that had by the end of the 1960s become central to his art – the power of sound and its capacity to signify, the relationship between an object and its context, and the variable and durational conditions of art and artistic agency. His radical inventions anticipated postmodern interests in the body, time and context, and testify to his pivotal role in the emerging art movements of the 1960s and beyond Without Title (Roof), 1977 Polaroids 31 x 28.5 cm Unique Photo: Perlino Courtesy of Galerie Wolff, Paris.

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ideas concerning the generative possibilities of ambient sound and the importance of the act of listening in fostering an awareness of one’s environment more evident than in the tableau of sounds of ‘Sound Objects’.

Without Title (Snow), 1977 Polaroids 33 x 33 cm Unique Photo: Perlino Courtesy of Galerie Wolff, Paris

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91 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Without Title (Rust), 1977 Polaroids 26 x 30 cm Unique Photo: Perlino Courtesy of Galerie Wolff, Paris.

IDA APPLEBROOG

HANS ULRICH OBRIST HANS ULRICH OBRIST Tell me about ‘The Ethics of Desire’, your upcoming exhibition at Hauser & Wirth in New York.

IDA APPLEBROOG The title of the show comes from Plato, ‘The Ethics of Desire’. In our culture today, fashion plays a large role in dealing with our desires, and the fashion shows’ catwalks best represent that site of desire.

HUO Where does the idea of the marching figures come from? Are they connected to your early film work?

IA My first films were done with the use of shadow puppets. I will actually be showing one of those early 1978 video tapes in this show. The marching figures do take on the same feel of animation.

HUO You must have gone through a lot of physical image scavenging.

‘The Ethics of Desire’, 2015 Installation view Hauser & Wirth New York, 18th Street © Ida Applebroog Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Abby Robinson

IA I have been an image scavenger all my life. It gives me direct access to my subconscious.

HUO What do you like about drawing?

IA Drawing to me is so immediate. But the process really changed when I started to work digitally.

Things opened up differently for me. Originally, I was a confirmed dinosaur. I would never use a computer. But by 2001, I was scheduled to do a digital print at Pace with one of their printmakers I sat next to this guy, gave him my drawing, and saw him do what would have taken me three months to get that particular effect he got it in just a few minutes. He just pushed some buttons and voila! I was all there! I became a believer.

HUO Was that your entry in the digital age?

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IA Yes - and I have been hooked ever since. [laughs] It’s just another way of making art.

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93 IA I didn’t think there was a basic change at all, frankly. What did change was that I was able to incorporate a new medium into my work. It still all starts with drawings. The drawings are very simple before I put them in to be digitized. I now know what it is that I can get digitally. As soon as they come out of the printer, still wet, I can go into them with brushes and my fingers, wipe away whatever it is I don’t want, and manipulate the results. The printout acts as a wet canvas.

HUO I know you started very early with art. Has drawing always been there?

IA When I started out in the 1950s, I was a graphic artist. I started working for an ad agency.

I didn’t get to do drawings – It was layouts and lettering. It was not great working there. But evenings and weekends I could work at home and do my own work.

HUO Did you have artists who inspired you?

IA When I was at the Chicago Art Institute, the only person who inspired me was Claes Oldenburg.

Every student there felt the same way that I did – we would cover everything with latex and make Claes Oldenburgs all over the place.

HUO So what happened after Chicago?

IA After Chicago, I went to San Diego and taught at UCSD and worked in my studio.

HUO And then in the 1970s you came to New York?

IA 1974 to be exact. I left New York in 1956 and came back to New York almost twenty years later and I didn’t really know anyone. I started just drawing, drawing, drawing. And so I came to do my first books. They were 16 pagers, called ‘Galileo Works’. I was very steeped in information about Galileo at the time. There are wonderful letters from Galileo’s daughter, Virginia, who was a nun.

He had two daughters that were nuns, and their letters to him really blew me away – they were incredible. Remember, we’re talking about two nuns writing to their father who abandoned them.

That’s when I started the books. They’re like diaries.

HUO Have your books been self-published and then mailed out?

IA Yes. After being printed, enveloped, and addressed, I would put them into my shopping cart, go to the post office, and bulk-mail them. When I first started out, I sent them to people whose work I liked, and then other people asked, ‘Would you put me on your mailing list?’ So from just a few, I ended up with a mailing list of about 500 people. Robert Kennedy from the Victoria & Albert Museum in London started to write to me about every book that was sent to him. And other responses were unexpectedly overwhelming, even the negative ones.

HUO Let’s talk about the ‘Photogenetics’ series. Where does the name come from?

IA The name deals with the process of interbreeding photography, sculpture, drawing, painting, printing, and technology. They’re based on photos and deal with genetics in terms of how I put

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HUO Do you think your work changed with the introduction of computers?

‘The Ethics of Desire’, 2015 Installation view Hauser & Wirth New York, 18th Street © Ida Applebroog Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Photo: Abby Robinson

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Chairs, 2014 Oil and acrylic on steel folding chair 96.5 x 46.4 x 5.1 cm / 38 x 18 1/4 x 2 in - folded size 74.9 x 46.4 x 51.4 cm / 29 1/2 x 18 1/4 x 20 1/4 in - open size Photo: Emily Poole

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97 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Goodbye, 1977 Tag board, metals rods and wood pedestal; 1 puppet 144.8 x 40.6 x 21.6 cm / 57 x 16 x 8 1/2 in Photo: Emily Poole

Sometimes A Person Never Comes Back, 1977 Tag board, metals rods and wood pedestals; 2 puppets 143.2 x 63.5 x 49.5 cm / 56 3/8 x 25 x 19 1/2 in Photo: Emily Poole

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The Ethics of Desire, 2014 Acrylic and ultrachrome ink on mylar 301.3 x 106.7 cm / 118 5/8 x 42 in Photo: Genevieve Hanson

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99 RES NOVEMBER 2012 The Ethics of Desire, 2014 Oil and ultrachrome ink on mylar 295.6 x 106.7 cm / 116 3/8 x 42 in Photo: Genevieve Hanson

them together. One of the pieces consists of a long figure based on a face that I came across in the ‘New Yorker’. It was beautiful, a lovely face. It was sort of Anglican and boyish. It was just something that held my interest, and so I clipped it out. And I went into the profile at that point, because I’m thinking, ‘Who is he?’ I take a look, and he’s the new director of Sotheby’s, Tobias Meyer. You know of him?

HUO Yes. IA I fell madly in love with his face. I would change the features with everybody else that I did, redo the hair, etc. but I just couldn’t touch his face. I produced a book of just Tobias, and a whole room in my studio was filled with ‘Tobiases’ from top to bottom. At that point, I still could not stop doing his image. He was my muse, although I didn’t know the man nor did I care.

HUO Have you ever met him?

IA I met him, interestingly. I was at the Whitney Biennial opening many years back, and someone tapped me on my shoulder and said ‘Ida?’ and I turned around and he said his name, and then walked away. That was it. [laughs] HUO Have you had other people whose portrait you’ve made so obsessively?

IA Never. He was the only one that really obsessed me. I was sorry to learn that he was who he was.

I wish he’d been someone anonymous.

The Ethics of Desire (detail), 2013 Ultrachrome ink on mylar, 3 panels 151.8 x 326.1 cm / 59 3/4 x 128 3/8 in Installation size (approx.)

Photo: Genevieve Hanson

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101 RES NOVEMBER 2012 The Ethics of Desire (detail), 2013 Ultrachrome ink on mylar; 6 panels 299.2 x 652.8 cm / 117 3/4 x 257 in approx. installation size Photo: Genevieve Hanson

HUO Have you always kept a diary?

IA Only since I came back to New York in 1974.

HUO What’s the role of chance in your work?

IA It plays a big role. I really like randomness. Early in my life I started to read some of the old Kraepelin books. They are all about schizophrenia and one of my journals is taken straight from there. He called them ‘word-salads’

Ida Applebroog (b. New York in 1929) is an ar tist based in New York. Her works can be found in numerous public collections in the United States including the Metropolitan Museum of Ar t, the Denver Ar t Museum, the Walker Ar t Center in Minneapolis, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Ar t. She has been the recipient of multiple honors including the MacAr thur Fellowship Genius Grant, the College Ar t Association Distinguished Ar t Award for Lifetime Achievement, an Honorar y Doctorate of Fine Ar ts, New School for Social Research/ Parsons School of Design.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Prior to this he was curator of the Musée d’Ar t Moderne de la Ville de Paris from 2000 to 2006, as well as curator of the Museum in Progress, Vienna, from 1993 to 2001. Obrist has co-curated over 50 exhibitions since 1991, including the 1st Berlin Biennale (1998), ‘Laboratorium’ (1999), the 1st and 2nd Moscow Biennale (2005 and 2007), and ‘Indian Highway’ (2008-11).

Accompanying Obrist’s curatorial projects are his editorial accomplishments; these includethe writings of Gerhard Richter, Louise Bourgeois and Gilber t & George, and a series of conversation books published by Walther Kö nig star ted in 2007. Obrist has contributed to over 200 book projects; his recent publications include ‘Ai Weiwei Speaks’ (Penguin, London, 2011) and ‘A Brief Histor y of New Music’ (JRP Ringier, Zurich, 2014).

ULAY

MICHELE ROBECCHI MICHELE ROBECCHI ‘Project Cancer’ (2013), the documentar y film you made about your battle with a disease initially diagnosed as terminal, touches on a ver y personal and delicate subject.

How did you feel about it during filming?

ULAY Filming it was a rather intense experience. I was on heav y cancer treatment, doing chemo and other things. T hey told me I had six months to live so I star ted travelling. I went to New York, Berlin, A msterdam, Ljubljana. I went to Piran – this beautiful Slovenian town on the Mediterranean Sea. Working on the film took my attention away from being a really sick man.

I actually call it a therapy film – it helped me developing a philosophical attitude towards the disease, the illness, the whole ordeal. I think it was ver y impor tant for me not to be another terminal cancer patient thinking about my predicament all the time and worr ying about the last minutes of my life. T he film is great, I must say. Damjan Kozole is a though director but he was also fun to work with. I was ver y sceptical at the beginning, but at the Q&A that followed each projection, most of the questions weren’t about ar t, they were about the stigma of cancer and chemo. Ever y third person in the Western World is somehow affected by it. So I didn’t end up talking so much about the film but more about how my experience with cancer and how I dealt with it.

MR In your life and previous work, you often put yourself in situations that pushed you to explore your psychological and physical vulnerability. Do you think it helped you dealing with the disease?

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U I think so. I think showing your vulnerability can be a demonstration of power sometimes.

Let me give you an example. A couple of years ago, in A msterdam, there was a major clash between some squatters and the police. It was war, absolute war. I saw it on television and it wasn’t far from where I lived, so I stripped off my clothes, hopped on my bike, and jumped into it. I was right there and nobody hit me – nobody. T hey must have thought I was a nutcase, but eventually I was able to use my vulnerability to protect some of the people around me.

Showing your vulnerability can make for quite a strong statement. Of course there is always an element of risk involved. We all are vulnerable but we have been taught to have a different attitude in life. Our usual social behaviour is not about being vulnerable but the exact opposite – it’s about being strong. A nd I’m getting tired of it. My body is not in great shape anymore but I like it better now. I’d rather live with an odd, aching body, openly displaying my limits rather than tr ying to fool myself and all the people around me into thinking that I am a superstar. It’s just not my thing.

MR T he difference is that in these past occasions, like the episode you just described in

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103 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Auto-Portraits from the series Renais sense,1974 Polaroid type 108 8.5 x 10.5 cm each Courtesy of the artist and MOT International London & Brussels

Polaroid Aphorisms series, 1972 – 1975 Collages made of original Polaroids type 107 51.5 x 63.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and MOT International London & Brussels

A msterdam, you deliberately put your self in danger, whereas in ‘P roject Cancer ’ you are battling a situation you fond your self in against your w ill.

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U Yes, that is a big dif ference. One is self wanted – you put your self in a situation w illing to deal w ith all the conseq uences – and the other one just falls on you, and it’s presented as ter minal. It was a dif ferent t y pe of ordeal but I do belie ve that the work s I have done in the past, being per for mances, body work s or e ven tr ips to remote places, made me a ver y strong man. T he y somehow af fected my biolog y, my body and brain cells, whate ver ; the y have shaped me into a dif ferent per son because what I have done is rather unusual.

In a way I have prepared myself for the time where I got sick . A nd it’s a mental as much as a physical thing. T he com bination of my mental and physical abilities seems to be a good match. You k now, body and mind are connected, but there is no way to k now what the brain really thin k s about this connection because the lef t and the r ight hemisphere of your brain communicate exclusively be t ween them almost 90 percent of the time – the y are not busy w ith you. It’s a f unny idea but it’s a scientific fact. I have lear ned to sur v ive adver sities pre tt y early on in life, because I was on my ow n by the time I was 15. My ex per ience doesn’t q uite confor m w ith what a lot of people went through. I don’t mean to say that I ’m special or any thing, but the circumstances that I found myself in, voluntarily or involuntarily, eventually made me what I am – an extremely openhear ted person. I tr y to be honest and straightfor ward as much as I can.

MR It seems to me that from the ver y beginning your work was designed to escape definition.

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105 MR At the time you insisted that it was an action and not a work of ar t.

U I tend to distinguish between performances, actions, demonstrative actions, and works of ar t. ‘Da ist eine kriminelle Ber ühr ung in der Kunst’ was a demonstrative action. It is now credited as an ar twork but it’s not my fault.

MR I guess that’s why you like an ar tist like Tino Sehgal. He seems to be someone escaping categories as well.

U A bsolutely. He’s so good at what he does. I know he doesn’t consider them to be performances but to me his pieces are ever y thing performance ar t should be about. He recently made a great piece in A msterdam. His work is so ephemeral – you don’t need a contract, you just need a handshake. T his is so beautiful. I really env y him. T hat’s the way to do it. A nd he gets paid for it! [laughs] MR I heard a great stor y about ‘Imponderabilia’ in Bologna in 1978 where, in order to get paid, you went to the museum office minutes before the performance with no clothes on…

Polaroid Aphorisms series, 1972 – 1975 Collages made of original Polaroids type 107 51.5 x 63.5 cm Courtesy of the artist and MOT International London & Brussels

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U Yes, I am actually T he Escape A r tist. T hat’s the title Dominic Johnson used for an inter view he did with me. I have escaped the ar t market and stardom. It’s not really escaping – it’s more like avoidance. They just don’t suit my intentions, my picture of things. I literally escaped only once, when I stole a painting at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1976 and got away with it.

Retouching Bruises (detail), 1975 Polaroid photography Installation, 100 pieces 8.5 x 10.8 cm each, unframed Each unique Courtesy of the artist and MOT International London & Brussels

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Retouching Bruises, 1975 Polaroid photography Installation, 100 pieces 8.5 x 10.8 cm each, unframed Each unique Courtesy of the artist and MOT International London & Brussels

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U Yes, I went to the office stark naked and I said ‘I want my money’. I got what I wanted but I didn’t know where to put them. I had to hide them in the toilet in a water container and pick them up after the performance was done.

MR W here do you think this necessity of avoidance ultimately come from?

U I think it’s about wanting to maintain some form of anonymity.

MR It can cer tainly be a value.

U It is absolutely a value. Anonymity doesn’t put any pressure on you. Unlike fame, it doesn’t dominate your life. Being anonymous is good, especially for somebody who is very renewed. I hate the word ‘famous’, I never use it, but for a renewed artist, anonymity is like going on holidays.

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MR Your first solo exhibition in Amsterdam in 1974 turned out to be a rather traumatic experience, to the point of prompting you to declare that you would never show your work publicly again.

Do you think that particular episode played a part in your desire to be anonymous?

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Imponderabilia, 1977 Performance Galeria Arte Moderna, Bologna Courtesy the artists

U I think so. I was already working on my Polaroid self-identity research at the time. T hey were pre tt y far out pictures. R eally far out. T here was a commercial galler y called Ser iaal in A msterdam. T he y used to work w ith great ar tists like Sigmar Polke and R ichard Hamilton but the y wanted to do some thing else and do per for mance, actions, films, e tc.

T he y asked me to show my Polaroids. I ref used three times but the y kept insisting so e ventually I said yes. I was a bit hesitant, you k now. T he y ’re ver y intimate, pr ivate and per sonal images but the y are also about disabilit y, marginalization, transgender ism, all sor t of things. We installed the show and it was amazing. We covered the whole space and put each Polaroid into an empt y Polaroid casse tte w ith magne ts on the clips on the wall. T he y looked like sentences in a book . T hen there was the opening of cour se, and the y sent out an inv itation say ing ‘ T he ar tist w ill be present’. At the time it was customar y to say ‘ T he ar tist w ill be present’. Even later, when M A [ Mar ina A bramov ic] and me were work ing toge ther, doing live per for mances, the inv itation card would say ‘ T he ar tists w ill be present’. Isn’t that f unny ? A ny way, I was present, and the reaction of the crowd at the galler y the day of the opening was so bad, I promised myself I would ne ver, e ver, make an ex hibition again. I walked away from that ex per ience w ith a little scar. I might be a per for mer but I ’m not an enter tainer.

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First Act – There is a Criminal Touch To Art (Berlin Action Series), 1977 film stills, P.E prints, hand-coloured (18 pieces) 72 x 52 cm each Courtesy of the artist and MOT International London & Brussels

113 U I think the audience was awful. T hey came for the glam. T hey wanted to meet the star. She is an ar t star. A nd she is doing an amazing job in that respect. A nd people want to be close to her. T hat’s why they stand up in line waiting for hours. I’m not talking about the quality of the performance, I’m just saying that the public attending those events is awful.

MR How did you feel when, after 12 years of collaboration with Marina, you had to star t again on your own?

U It wasn’t easy. For some time I returned to photography because it was an old time favourite of mine and I was good at it. Still, it was performative photography, a bit like in the early works. I had a dark period, I felt like I was in a vacuum. A nd then I came out of it. Actually, whenever I see those images now, I think they look great, but I can clearly tell that I was in an abyss. It was just unavoidable. T he collaboration, the togetherness, and the performances were so intense. Dropping off that degree of intensity is difficult. It’s not like changing a t-shir t. T he interesting thing is that during our performances, we were opponents, but in private life, we were together. It was a bit schizophrenic.

MR You exhibited ‘Retouching Br uises’ (1975) for the first time last June in Basel. W hat made you think it was the right time?

U I exhibited single images from ‘Retouching Br uises’ here and there before, but never the entire sequence. It’s made of 100 single-framed images. T he whole installation looked like a beautiful panorama. T he funny thing about what I do is that although I enjoy anonymity, the work is ver y recognizable. A nd that’s a paradox, if you make ar t. W hen I worked on my book ‘Ulay on Ulay’ last year, I had to take a trip down memor y lane. I had to go back and open crates and boxes I haven’t touched in ages in order to get out what I needed for the book. I tremendously disliked the process and if it wasn’t for Lena Pislak’s help, I would have never done it. I was a bit of an asshole the whole time. I just don’t tr ust that kind of linearity.

Histor y is not linear. Life is not linear. Progress is not linear.

MR I think it’s interesting in this sense to compare what you were doing in the early days with Polaroids w ith the state of photography today. Both Polaroids and digital cameras give you immediate results. T he dif ference is that a Polaroid generates a uniq ue image. It’s like an object.

U Digital photography is fabulous. You can do it ver y economically – cameras are clean, immediate, but the physical relationship you have with it is ver y different. You cannot touch a digital picture. Perhaps this explains why so many ar tists involved with digital photography are making these gigantic, larger than life images. T hey feel pressured into making something out of it. I was deeply involved with photography and the histor y of photography, but I haven’t spent a single minute of my time theoretically analysing digital photography so far. You can’t think about digital and analogue photography in the same way.

T hey’re just different worlds.

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MR W hat do you think of Marina’s performance ‘ T he A r tist is Present’?

MR One thing I find fascinating about digital photography is the possibility of editing out images you are unhappy with on the spot. With analogue photography, those mistakes would have to be printed out any way, occasionally turning into something unexpected and special.

U My biggest pleasure is to use the delete key on my computer and cell phone. T hat’s the only power I have over it. We don’t have that option as people. Ever y thing we have experienced in life, whether dramatic or pleasurable, is stored in our memor y. T he delete button is fantastic.

In the old days, when we were using typewriters and the clatter would provide this beautiful rhy thm, I wouldn’t erase any thing. I would just type over again or on the side. I’m still typing like that, with two fingers hitting the keyboard really hard.

MR Do you think the awareness of not being able to easily rectify mistakes could contribute some sor t of mental clarity?

U Yes. It’s the same as with analogue photography. You need to work on your compositional abilities, you need to train, you need to know a lot about how it works. With digital photography, all this becomes meaningless. You get the wrong picture, you just erase it

S’he, 1973 Auto-portraits from the series Renais sense Polaroid type 107 8.5 x 10.5 cm each Courtesy of the artist and MOT International London & Brussels

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115 RES NOVEMBER 2012 S’he, 1973 Auto-portraits from the series Renais sense Polaroid type 107 8.5 x 10.5 cm each Courtesy of the artist and MOT International London & Brussels

and tr y again. A nd look at all these people taking selfies. You see them all the time, walking around the world like that. [ Holds an imaginar y phone in front of his face] T he only reason why they do it is to prove their friends at home that they have been somewhere. T hey hold those sticks to make themselves par t of the scene...

MR I know. I was at the Mauritius in T he Hague recently and tourists were taking pictures of themselves in front of Vermeer’s ‘ T he Girl with the Pearl Ring’ without even looking at the painting. T hey would just take a picture and walk away.

U Yes. T he painting is nothing more than a backdrop for their ego.

MR T he introduction of photography in the early 1900s forced painting to reinvent itself. Do you think what is going on with photography today, with the proliferation and accessibility of images forcing photographers to renegotiate their relationship with the media, is remotely comparable to what happened to painting back then?

U T hat’s a difficult question. I like the idea of photography reinventing itself. A r t as a whole should probably reinvent itself. But who has the intelligence to do that? W ho has the courage to say that? T he only person I knew that could have done it has passed away two years ago – T homas McEvilley.

I think photography has to be redefined. A r t has to be redefined. As for painting, I don’t know.

It would be great if all these disciplines would be redefined. A nd then you star t from zero, and a new generations of pioneers emerges.

MR Don’t you see yourself as par t of a generation of pioneers?

U Maybe. Maybe the day I w ill have a re trospective, someone w ill say that I helped redefining per for mance and photography. T hat would be the biggest compliment anybody could e ver pay me.

MR You recently returned to performance with ‘Skeleton in the Closet’ (2015) at the Stedelijk Museum. W here does the title come from?

U We all have skeletons in the closet. We all hide something. I haven’t disclosed what I was hiding in this case yet, and I don’t think I ever will.

MR If one looks at ‘Skeletons in the Closet’, ‘Project Cancer’, the Ear th Water Catalogue (2002), down to the early Polaroids, it seems that the quest to find your own identity is still ver y much going on. Do you see it as a life long project?

U Unfor tunately not too many people, if any at all, question their own identity. T hey see identity as a national flag. It is something that has to do with education, nationalism, schools, systematization of young people that don’t voluntarily adopt their identity and it just gets forced into them. If you can walk away from it and accept your status as an outsider, there is no need to push it. I think identity is a ver y frail, elegant, tiny sailing boat on a big ocean with an anchor the size of a tanker.

MR T hat’s a ver y nice metaphor.

U T hat’s my metaphor about identity. I think you’re right though – if I look at it now, the whole identity issue hasn’t been worked out yet. I think it has to do with my personal histor y. I’m a typical product of the 1960s generation and the Provo movement. Be free. Don’t follow leaders.

Don’t be this, don’t be that, just be yourself. Don’t hur t anybody. Don’t take any thing from anybody. Just stay out of it. A nd I think I managed until today

Ulay (b. Frank Laysiepen in Solingen in 1943) is a visual ar tist. Formally trained as a photographer, he transitioned to performance ar t in the early 1970s, eventually forming a successful par tnership with Marina Abramovic from 1976 to 1988. His work is featured in many institutional collections around the world, including the Stedejlik Museum in Amsterdam, Centre Pompidou Paris and the Museum of Modern Ar t in New York.

After several long-term ar t projects in India, Australia and China, and a professorship of Performance and New Media Ar t at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung in Karlsruhe, Ulay currently lives and works in Amsterdam and Ljubljana.

Michele Robecchi is a writer and a curator based in London.

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CHEN WENLING

ALP ERİM ÖZERDEM ALP ERİM ÖZERDEM T he sculptures in the ‘Red Memor y’ series look ver y realistic. It’s as if they inhabit the environment – they are a mixture of organic and conceptual living. T he viewer’s most of the times react to such work by touching them, miming them or interacting with them as if they were real. Was this something you wanted to accomplish when you begun?

CHEN WENLING T he sculptures in the ‘Red Memor y’ series are biographical works. I was born during Mao’s cultural revolution and as such I have vivid memories of red politics. Chinese people were ver y poor at the time – there was a significant shor tage of basic goods. Yet, these things cannot defeat the innocent happiness of a child. I tr y to express humanity’s vir tuous nature when faced by adversities through my childhood experience. My work provides a vehicle where one’s soul is able to breathe and perform.

AEÖ You also like to be critical with your work. It is pretty visible in ‘ W hat You See Might Not be Real’ and ‘God of Materialism’. However ‘God of Materialism’ evokes a different emotion. It reminded me of Qin Shi Huang’s Terracotta army, primarily due to the power of representing a large population of any kind with an ar twork but most impor tantly due to the organization of figures around a similar feeling/reality of paranoia and power-related anxiety. Even though in ‘God of Materialism’ the small pigs are positioned around the giant pig as intoxicated worshippers and the soldiers of the Terracotta army are aligned straightfor ward ready to march at command, the face of the pigs display feelings of anxiety and paranoia similar to Huang’s feelings towards human mor tality. Do you think you have restated a 2000 years old fear in a contemporar y form?

CW Good, actually there are some answers in you question. A r tists generally are not the best inter preters of their own work. I tr y hard to make my work open and provide a broad vision to the audience. T he Pig is a symbol of wealth in Chinese traditional culture. Nowadays people are proud of having material rather than spiritual wealth. T he pig sculpture I created is a symbol of worshipping proper ty. It looks like a miniature of fetishism. It is also a review and a reflection of Chinese society. It’s unconsciously influenced by Qin Shi Huang’s Terracotta army, but the inbeing is far away.

AEÖ I have seen you working with fibreglass, bronze and stainless steel. Do you have a preference in terms of materials?

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CW In contemporar y ar t, material is not the core par t. T he spiritual direction and ideas expressed by the work are more impor tant. I only use a few materials. I believe that all sor t of old and traditional materials can be used to create works to express some form of

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119 AEÖ W hat is your vision of modern ar t for China? W here do you think Chinese contemporar y ar t is heading in the world nowadays?

CW T here are only a few modern ar tists in china. Chinese modern ar t was still rooted in traditional ar t when Western modern ar t movements were in full swing. Chinese contemporar y ar t is practically a thir ty years old phenomenon. Initially, ar tists would mainly imitate what already existed in the West. Chinese contemporar y ar t became an autonomous and independent entity over the past ten years. If Chinese contemporar y ar t wants to earn international favour and respect, it should lean towards more oriental, Chinese elements in order to develop an universal language.

AEÖ W hat are your plans for future? A re you working on any thing specific at the moment?

CW My future plan is no plans. Having no plans is my plan. I like to be sur prised by my own work. Sometimes planning means constraint. Freedom and creation are the foundation of ar t. A bout a year ago I got seriously ill, but I have recovered thanks to my strong will and optimism. T he series of works called ‘ Tree of Life’ and ‘ T he Paradise’ I am working on at the What You See is not Necessarily True, 2009.

Bronze, H:600 × L:1100 × W:500 cm Courtesy of the artist.

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spirituality in contemporar y ar t. Materials should be slaves to the ar tists, but many ar tists become slaves to materials nowadays. Materials are only tools necessar y to satisfy personal expression.

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The Suspense Part, 2010 Bronze, H:490 x L:830 x W:230 cm.

Courtesy of the artist.

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Valiant Struggle, 2006 Bronze, H:750x L:480 x W:210 cm Courtesy of the artist.

moment are about the transformation and sublimation of my experience. I tr y to transform my life experience into a universal experience of social or even human nature. It is a pain memorial as well as a wake up call for me. I hope that through these works the public can be made aware of how uncer tain and impor tant life is.

AEÖ Does the issue of the audience concern you? W ho is your ideal viewer?

CW Opinions from like-minded people can be revelator y to me, but I tend to ignore the majority of comments on my work. T here is no right or wrong in ar t, and ever yone has his/ her own point of view. How to express your inner spirit is the most impor tant thing. I don’t know who is my ideal audience. My work is not made with anyone specific in mind, when you work thinking about what the public will say, the work’s value and the social significance of it inevitably descent. If you think about it, all great literar y works weren’t made with a specific readership in mind.

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AEÖ W ho were your influences when you star ted?

CW My father and my grandfather.

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AEÖ Why do you think your work is so successful?

CW I think it’s because there are many different themes in my works – they move on a wide field. I don’t belong to any doctrine, I don’t feel like I have to protect existing artistic symbols. I am also quite prolific – I create many works every year. Picasso and Gerhard Richter are my favourite artists. They weren’t afraid of doing pratfalls. You might see thousands of different style and forms in the future. My art career has just begun and hopefully it will go far.

AEÖ You mentioned early on that your work is biographical…

CW That’s right, my work is a biography of my spiritual life. I hope this biography will prove to be both personal and universal Chen Wen Ling (born in Fujian in 1969) is a Chinese ar tist based in Beijing. He graduated from Xiamen Academy of Ar t and Design in 1991 and completed the study in the Sculpture Depar tment at the Central Academy of Fine Ar ts in Beijing. His work has been exhibited in many internationally renewed exhibitions, including the First China Ar t Triennial at Guangzhou Ar t Museum (2002): the Beijing International Biennale (2003); the Taipei Biennale (2009) and the Busan Biennale (2010).

Alp Erim Özerdem lives and works in İstanbul.

God of Materialism, 2008 Bronze, H:200 × L:365 × W:252 cm Courtesy of the artist.

Childhood: Horizon, 2010 Bronze, plastic bottles H:210 × L:280 × W:220 cm Courtesy of the artist.

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Red Memory: Shy Boy, 2002 Bronze, H:163 × L:40 × W:38 cm Courtesy of the artist.

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127 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Red Memory: Smile , 2007 Bronze, H:270 × L:150 × W:220 cm Courtesy of the artist.

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Community N. 1, 2014 Bronze, H:242 x L:442 x W:138 cm Courtesy of the artist.

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129 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Reincarnation of Mammoth, 2012 Bronze, H:600 × L:920 × W:282 cm Courtesy of the artist.

Ark of Transcendence, 2012 Bronze, H:405 × L:748 × W:460 cm Courtesy of the artist.

The City Bull, 2012 Bronze, H:406 × L:1305 × W:258 cm Courtesy of the artist.

Community N. 3, 2014 Bronze, H:242 x L:442 x W:138 cm Courtesy of the artist.

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131 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Heterogeneous Space, 2012 Bronze, H:77 × L:171 × W:107 cm Courtesy of the artist.

Building the Garden, 2012 Bronze, H:255 × L:828 × W:725 cm Courtesy of the artist.

INTERVIEW WITH ESTHER SCHIPPER

MARK PRINCE MARK PRINCE You have a multinational background. You were born in Asia, and grew up in Paris, but your parents are Dutch. What is your first language?

ESTHER SCHIPPER French.

MP You began your career in Cologne in the 1980s, but then returned to France to attend one of the few curating courses that existed at the time, in Grenoble.

ES Yes. People tend to think that I’m German but I didn’t speak German until I was 19.

MP You did an internship at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London around the same time. Was that when Nicholas Serota was the director?

ES Yes. I was there in 1987 when he received his announcement that he was taking over as head of the Tate.

MP It makes sense that the backbone of your gallery’s program reflects this trail because galleries, at least in the 1990s, were very place-specific.

ES Absolutely.

MP Information was more limited and gallerists were sourcing their programs from where they happened to be. I take it you met Philippe Parreno while you were studying in France and Liam Gillick while you were interning in London.

ES Yes. And then I decided to open a gallery. I arrived in Cologne in the early 1980s, when I had just finished high school, and started to work for Monika Sprüth when she opened her gallery.

But I was just somebody sitting there answering the phone. It wasn’t like it is for the people who are now working for me. And then I went back to France because I was invited onto the course at Grenoble, at L’École du Magasin, which was a precursor of all the current postgraduate curating courses. It just happened that Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Philippe Parreno were studying at the Beaux Arts in Grenoble, and we all met each other within a year and a half or two years.

MP Why did you decide to open a gallery rather than going into an institutional context?

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ES The school at Grenoble wanted to open itself up to all the new possibilities in contemporary art, and how it had been transformed since the 1970s. Conceptual artists required different ways of

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133 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Karin Sander Umgelegt, 2012 Pre-existing wall Variable Edition of 3 + 1 artist’s proof (KS 079) Karin Sander, H = 400 cm, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2012 Courtesy: The artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin Photos: © Andrea Rossetti

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Karin Sander Umgelegt, 2012 Pre-existing wall Variable Edition of 3 + 1 artist’s proof (KS 079) Karin Sander, H = 400 cm, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2012 Courtesy: The artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin Photos: © Andrea Rossetti

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Ugo Rondinone Primal, 2013 Esther Schipper, Berlin Courtesy: The artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin Photos: © Andrea Rossetti

working. There was time-based art, artists working with film and video. These practices asked for very different skills than a classic art historian’s upbringing. At some point there was a need for a skilled person who could deal with different kinds of format and technique.

MP But that could have happened in an institutional context?

ES There are some exceptions, the most famous of which is probably Kasper König, but at the end of the 1980s in France or Germany it was generally impossible without an academic background.

And there was so much more challenge and openness in the market at that time. There was no such profession as an independent curator. Today, the function of curator has been entirely assimilated.

MP Gallery programs then tended to be place-specific. You discovered your artists on the ground, where you happened to be, as Tim Neuger met many of the artists that he was going to represent while working for Max Hetzler in California. Has that pattern changed now that everything has become so visible on the internet?

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ES My feeling is that many things are changing right now with information travelling faster but also with working possibilities. If you have no financial background, only a bunch of artists you believe in, you can’t now open a gallery in Paris or London.

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137 ES I think it’s easier now to open a gallery if you have the money but not the artists than the other way around. And although it’s very difficult in Berlin, I think it’s still one of the few places where you can do it without substantial backing.

MP Were you conscious of attempting to develop a program with a coherent narrative?

ES Yes, we were looking to dealers, such as Konrad Fischer, whose program signified a historical step, a movement, so that it was about creating a market for a different kind of work.

MP In the work you were showing, the exhibition became the medium, rather than the medium being what the exhibition contained. I assume that must have meant an expansion of the role of the gallerist. She would not be merely a dealer, but a collaborator, a facilitator, a producer. Were you aware that the work you were showing challenged the conventional role of the gallerist?

ES Yes, that was what made it so interesting for me. It was like being a partner in the development of a new practice. It was important to establish a market for very unconventional work. Many of the artists I now work with are making ephemeral or performance-based work. Previously, Ugo Rondinone Primal, 2013 Esther Schipper, Berlin Courtesy: The artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin Photos: © Andrea Rossetti

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MP But having the artists is the first prerequisite, isn’t it?

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Pierre Huyghe Umwelt, 2011 Ants, Spiders Variable Unique (PH 049) Pierre Huyghe, Influants, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2011 Courtesy: The artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin Photos: © Andrea Rossetti

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139 MP It is one of the paradoxes of early conceptual art that the artists intended to make a dematerialised art which would evade its commodification, but if they had fully succeeded the work would not have survived to gain the influence it has had.

ES But a lot of these artists didn’t have a market at all.

MP But it somehow survived and found a way to be propagated. There had to be ways to sell the work. For the dealer, isn’t there a contradiction in denying the anti-commercial intent of the artists in order to extend the life of the work?

ES It’s an interesting thought. I think the dematerialisation of the artwork does not imply that there’s no market for it. Decommodifying does not mean you can’t sell an idea. The question is how you sell an idea.

MP Such as the virus of Pierre Huyghe, for example. [For Huyghe’s most recent exhibition at Schipper’s Berlin gallery, one of the artworks stipulated that one of the gallery workers be infected with a virus.]

ES That’s a work we have not sold, but we sold the name announcer twice from that exhibition.

[Another work in the exhibition consisted of someone from the gallery’s staff standing at the entrance announcing the name of each visitor.] But if you came and wanted to buy the virus we would sell you a protocol and you would have the choice of how want to have the work exhibited.

For me, it’s a political work. It makes you think about what it means to contain a virus, to be someone who has been declared the carrier of a virus in an environment. When we showed this work in the gallery, a couple of people said that they were sick after having visited the gallery.

They got the flu.

MP The piece is a metaphor for evading commodification, evading being contained, because after all what is a virus but something that is contagious, which escapes its form. So when you say it’s political, I can see that it’s critical of its context, and even of you and your role.

ES We are living in a global digital era in which we are increasingly talking about non-physical presences. We multiply ourselves in space and time digitally. But the market, and indeed the industry, we are a part of, is antique.

MP Based on objects?

ES And on physical trade. I have an object and you give me something in return. My five potatoes for your three bananas. While we’re surrounded by a rapidly changing non-physical-based society.

MP A dematerialised society. Which makes the early conceptualists seem prescient.

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there was never much thought of such work being for sale. It was considered to be inherently uncommercial.

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Pierre Huyghe Umwelt, 2011 Ants, Spiders Variable Unique (PH 049) Pierre Huyghe, Influants, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2011 Courtesy: The artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin Photos: © Andrea Rossetti

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ES Yes, and I think all these ideas we are dealing with concern how the idea of uniqueness, or something special, is exchanged. I mean we are not making a pilgrimage to someone’s house to see a fresco on a wall, but to live with something created by an idea, or it could be a situation, or a film. Something which is rare and special but maybe doesn’t involve this aspect of physical exchange.

MP Because the idea we still have of the art object, despite editions, despite the Warholian image, despite Benjamin’s theory of reproduction, is still essentially about uniqueness. You’re saying that you’re working with artists who are challenging that assumption?

ES No, the virus is an edition of one, or maybe two. And we had a conversation with Philippe Parreno not so long ago about making unique films.

MP As a Super-8 film is not made to be copied.

Tomás Saraceno Comet 11 Cyrtophora citricola, 2013 Spider web, carbon fibre, dedolight 650 Watt, Manfroto tripod 90 x 90 x 90 cm Unique (TS035) Tomás Saraceno, Social ... quasi social ... solitary ... spiders ... on hybrid cosmic webs, Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2013 Courtesy: The artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin Photos: © Andrea Rossetti

ES And you could make a digital film which is unique. You would have different copies and it could be shown around the world at the same time, but only one person owns it.

MP Doesn’t that contradict the nature of the digital?

ES No, you distribute the film but you are the only owner of it.

MP But surely as soon as it’s been distributed it becomes potentially capable of being distributed a million times, so you’re up against the same problems of ownership as the producer of a piece of music in the current culture of file sharing.

ES Yes, but the quality deteriorates.

MP Well, there’s a single root, and that is what matters.

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ES There’s a root. There are so many works we are dealing with that you can see on YouTube. It’s not comparable to the experience you would have in going somewhere to see the film.

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143 ES No, it’s the exhibition. The exhibition as a medium means that you have to be in the exhibition to experience it.

MP So it’s a question of primary experience, which is also contrary to reproduction. I’d like to return to the question of what it means to be a gallerist now. Gallerists seem to be expanding, opening second gallery spaces, occupying larger premises, and even taking on the role that is traditionally associated with institutions, such as making historical and research-based exhibitions. Simultaneously, institutions are behaving more like gallerists, exhibiting younger artists, opening spaces like the ‘Art Now’ room at Tate Britain, which looks like an off-space run by a gallery, and has a program of solo exhibitions by emerging artists. It seems that gallerists have increasing influence and power. Does that entail more responsibility for you, and if so what form does it take?

ES Absolutely. We only live from the market, we are running a business that is based on the sales we make. We don’t receive any subsidies, we don’t provide any services. We sell art. So in a program such as mine there are artists who are bestsellers and others for whom it is much more difficult. But these things also tend to change. Artists who made the gallery the most income ten years ago may produce much less income now. I think it’s a large part of our responsibility to see all of these artists at exactly the same level. We have to have a program that is balanced between artists who are eventually very much in demand and others who are less so but we believe are Tomás Saraceno Social ... quasi social ... solitary ... spiders ... on hybrid cosmic webs Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2013

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MP The higher resolution is synonymous with the original.

important. So our approach must be about the work, not about the market. Although I tend to say that a gallery should be constructed like any other trade company, and the fact that what we are trading is art does not make it an exception, this might make it different from any other trading company, because we have to think about the work before we think about how much money the work can bring us.

MP I think of you as a gallerist for whom the site must be very specific. When you moved into your current premises at Schöneberger Ufer, you converted the space with an architect to your own specifications, and this specificity corresponds to how your artists work. They have been interested in adapting the space as a painter might alter his canvas. Karin Sander actually gutted the space. Ugo Rondinone altered the space quite radically for his most recent show. So it seems you’re creating a site-specific, occasion-specific program. It is therefore frustrating to have to exhibit at to more art fairs as they proliferate, and present your artists in a generic environment, in anonymous spaces?

ES No, it’s not a contradiction. It’s a bit like merchandising. It also brings us a lot pleasure to conceive these booths. We always have a theme and try to find a good balance. The fair context is so evidently only a marketplace. Sometimes it can be interesting to pervert its expectations, but in the end you have to play the game. We’re trying to work through the ideas on another level.

Two years ago at Art Basel we showed a work by Pierre Huyghe called ‘L’Ecrivain Publique’ (1995), which consists of a writer you hire to write down his experience at an opening. They might tell a Esther Schipper, Art Basel, 2015 Works by: Liam Gillick, Tomás Saraceno, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Thomas Demand, Roman Ondák, Ugo Rondinone, Angela Bulloch & Liam Gillick Courtesy: The artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin Photos: © Andrea Rossetti

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completely different story, but so far they have written about what they are seeing and hearing.

We had a lot of success with this work when we showed it in an art fair context – the work was shown previously in a retrospective and various institutional exhibitions – because collectors suddenly understood how they could buy a work that only exists on paper but allows them, every time they show their collection or lend the work, to accumulate writings about every time it has been exhibited.

MP Like a provenance list that is part of the work.

ES Like a book, like a recording.

MP I assumed that by ‘merchandising’ you meant that the fair context creates a two-tier system.

There’s the gallery where you are able to show more ephemeral, site-specific works, and the art fair where things have to become more objectified. But that’s not the case.

ES It is, but if you show works which are more ephemeral in the art fair context it may become clear that they are purchasable works.

MP So the context spurs you to find ways to make the ephemeral sellable. It’s an occasion for inventing ways to do that.

ES Yes. For our Tomas Saraceno exhibition, the gallery was painted black and it was difficult for visitors to abstract from the setting and identify every spider cube as an object one could purchase. If you paint the corner of an art fair booth black and light the work properly, it makes it clear that you can have a spider cube in that corner.

MP In which corner?

ES I mean in the corner here, for instance [points into a corner of her apartment].

MP So the generic nature of the space allows the collector to abstract the setting and imagine the work in their own space, which would be more difficult for them through the sitespecificity of a gallery installation?

ES Yes. And we make very few group exhibitions in the gallery, so art fairs are where we allow work to form a dialogue, and the juxtaposition of different kinds of work allows you to read them differently.

MP Speaking of the program’s spectrum, you are currently in the process of merging with Jörg Johnen’s gallery. What does this mean for the program you have been building for 25 years.

Is it a concern for you that if you were to absorb another program there would be certain artists – perhaps Anri Sala or Jeff Wall or Rodney Graham – which might fit very well in your existing program, but others less so. Does that involve you in an awkward selection process to avoid dilution?

ES Some artists who may not seem superficially to fit in the program, when you come to know the work better, you see there are dialogues.

MP It could also be a means of redefining your program?

ES I’ve been mainly following one path for a long time. Working with Jörg allows me to add some positions, especially some very important artists from the 1990s or early 2000s, which are very close to those of artists I have always been working with. It’s a chance to bring a generation together. Jeff Wall is an artist who has been extremely important, not only to me but to many of the artists I work with, in teaching us to apprehend things differently. Jörg also has several positions which are very unique. Martin Honert is an artist I am only discovering now. It is also a way of opening things up for me. The gallery is reaching a certain age and this process will allow me to rethink.

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MP There’s a term that’s often applied to artists of a certain age – ‘mid-career artists’. Perhaps one could say that you’re a mid-career gallerist. Gallerists at the beginning of their careers often have a close relationship to artists of their own generation and that’s how they build their programs. As they get older and become more successful, several things can happen. One is that they stop expanding their program; another is that they try reaching out to a younger generation to which they have a less instinctive connection than they did to their own, and the results can be awkward. Your last gallery show was of a young Brazilian artist who is new to your program. How has your approach to taking on new recruits changed?

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147 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Philippe Parreno exhibition at Esther Schipper: Flickering Labels, 2013 Quasi Objects: My Room is a Fish Bowl, AC/DC Snakes, Happy Ending, Il Tempo del Postino, Opalescent acrylic glass podium, Disklavier Piano, 2014 Various helium inflatable float balloons in the shape of fish, electrical plugs and adapters, lamp with Arne Jacobsen lampshade, electrical system, electrical wire and plug, magnifying glass, opalescent acrylic glass podium, LED lights, 6 plugs.

Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin Photo Š Andrea Rossetti

Jörg Johnen and Esther Schipper Photo © Regina Schmeken Courtesy: Esther Schipper, Berlin / Johnen Galerie, Berlin

ES I’ve been busier over the past two or three years with structure, organisation, strategy. How to transform us into a highly performing company without betraying the work of the artists we represent. I haven’t had so much time for discovering artists. But I have a great team. You can only be as good as you are in this business if you have good people behind you. So there are people who will say to me, ‘You have to look at this, this is something for you’. Ten years ago I would probably have been much more alert. I hope that those times will come around again. But at the moment, with the step of taking on Jörg’s gallery, I am more involved in structural and management questions than in artistic ones. But I hope very much that after the mid-career, midlife period, I will return to that.

MP At the end of the 1990s, you were one of the first of many gallerists to move to Berlin.

ES We moved at the end of 1996 and opened in 1997.

MP The Berlin contemporary art world was then small but concentrated and of a relatively high standard. There were only three or four good galleries. You have been here throughout the period since then, as it has expanded. How do you feel about how Berlin has changed?

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ES This is a difficult question. What we had here in the 1990s was very exceptional. There was space for anybody who arrived with great ideas and nothing else. The city, not only the art world, has changed tremendously and really not only for the better. A lot for the worse. Nevertheless,

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149 MP We talked about the place-specificity of the gallerist. But in business terms your relation to where you are based is very non-place-specific.

ES If this doesn’t change, when you look back in fifty years time, there will not be any historical traces of what we’ve done here. Because we don’t have the support of our community. I have the support of people coming to enjoy the exhibitions, coming to the openings, being part of what we’re making, but we can’t make our living from that. But we are living in a global society. And it’s not only a problem here. I think one of the few place in the world where you have a community of art dealers living from the place they are operating is New York. Probably Japan and South Korea are also places which have a very strong supporting community. But there’s nowhere in Europe.

MP Does that incline you to relocate, or open a second gallery in another city, as many other gallerists have been doing? Have you considered that?

ES Yes, a lot.

MP But you haven’t done it.

ES No, I took on Jörg’s gallery.

MP But that’s here.

ES Yes. I was interested in trying to build up something here first, something of another size and substance, rather than trying to have a foot here and a place there. But we’ll have to see Esther Schipper is a gallerist based in Berlin. After opening her first gallery in Cologne in 1989, she moved operations to Berlin in 1997, quickly establishing herself as a one of the driving forces behind the blooming post-Berlin Wall art scene. A co-founder of Berlin’s Gallery weekend and ABC (Art Berlin Contemporary), she also served on the Art Basel committee for ten years. In 2015 Schipper took over the majority of Jörg Johnen’s gallery shares with a plan to merge in a shortcoming future.

Mark Prince is an English writer living in Berlin. He writes about contemporary art for various publications.

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it’s still a very good place for artists to live and work, and also for dealers, even if none of us is making money here. What we are selling to this city or even to this country would not even pay for my salary.

MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART YINCHUAN / HSIEH SU CHEN RICCARDO LISI RICCARDO LISI Can you tell me about the or igins of MOC A Yinchuan and the people involved in this project?

HSIEH SU CHEN MOC A Yinchuan is located in the Hua xia-He tu Eco-Tow n in the Ning xia Hui Autonomous R egion. T he museum is suppor ted by the Ning xia Minsheng Culture Fund, but it is, in essence, a ‘ pu blic / pr ivate’ project. With an overall investment of 3 49 million R M B, t wo year s of planning, and three years of constr uction, this was a long project. It was finally comple ted in June 2015. T he people involved include L iu Wenjin, who is both the pr imar y investor and director of the museum, architect Z hang Di from WA A ( We A rchitech A nony mous), who designed the museum, curator and consultant Lu Peng, me as ar tistic director, and of cour se the indispensable suppor t of the local gover nment and ar t scene.

RL T he architectural design of the museum is ver y interesting. How did the WA A project come about?

HSC It was inspired by the layered tex ture of sedimentar y rock s, which tell us of the f low of time and the accumulation of histor y. T he r ippling lines are the result of a clash be t ween the accumulating sediment and the Yellow R iver. T his architectural design incor porates these histor ic and geographic elements. T he building’s ex ter ior sur face consists of roughly 1600 independently produced GR C (Glass fibre R einforced Concre te) panels, which w ill take on traces of the dr y, w indy env ironment over time.

RL MOC A Yinchuan has a par ticular focus on ar tists from Islamic countr ies. Could you ex plain why ?

HSC MOC A Yinchuan is located in China’s only autonomous region for the Hui e thnic group.

Histor ically, the Hui people were a large group of Muslim Chinese who migrated to Ning xia af ter the fall of the Wester n X ia dy nast y. By the Qing dy nast y, Ning xia had become the largest Hui autonomous region. T hroughout histor y, Yinchuan has been an impor tant por tal for East-West exchange along the Silk R oad, leading us to define the museum as a platfor m for exchange be t ween China and Islamic countr ies.

RL Could you elaborate on the connection be t ween Ning xia and Turke y, par ticularly Istan bul and A natolia?

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HSC T he Islam of Ning x ia has played a ver y impor tant role in China’s cultural de velopment. Istan bul is the largest cit y in Turke y. It’s so f ull of histor y – a sy m bol of the

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151 RES NOVEMBER 2012 MoCA Yinchuan, external view, 2015 Very Contemporary Jordan: The Contemporary Art in Jordan, 2015 Exhibition view. Curated by Suchen Xie.

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153 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Between East and West: Chinese and Islamic Contemporary Art, 2015.

Exhibiton view. Curated by Lu Peng.

The Outline of Territory: Historical Maps Collection, 2015 Exhibition view. Curated by Guo Liang.

splendour of the Ottoman Empire. A natolia is the A sian par t of Turke y. Since prehistor ic times, it has ser ved as the br idge be t ween Europe and A sia, enabling cultural f usion. It has also ser ved as a hu b lin k ing Chinese and Wester n culture, and has always been open to both Easter n and Wester n civ ilization. R ooted in these t wo connections, we hope to see more spark s in the cur rent age of civ ilization and more connections w ith Turk ish culture, presenting the diver sit y of Islamic ar t on a global scale.

RL Some of the work s presented in the museum are q uite old, but other s were made over the past fe w year s. Do you thin k it is impor tant to lin k ancient and moder n ar t? Do you thin k this is a ke y point of the museum’s appeal?

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HSC T he large time span covered by the museum’s collection is not a strateg y to attract v isitor s. Our objective is to be a w indow onto exchange be t ween Easter n and Wester n

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155 RES NOVEMBER 2012 culture, and to present exchanges be t ween Chinese and Islamic ar t. We ex hibit 16th centur y maps and late Qing dy nast y oil painting as histor ical sources to present achie vements in the research of Easter n and Wester n culture and to fill gaps in Chinese ar t histor y. T his presentation of the roots of cultural exchange be t ween China and the West ser ves as a g uide and reference for the research of contemporar y ar t. T he theme of cultural exchange be t ween East and West req uires a histor ical foundation in order to cast a light on the diver sit y of the museum’s collection.

RL MOC A Yinchuan also deals w ith other cultures, such as Wester n X ia, He tao and Dang x iang. Could you ex plain why ?

HSC To answer this q uestion, we must go back in histor y. T he He tao Culture occur red be t ween 30,000 to 50,000 year s ago, in the middle of the Paleolithic Era. He tao is an

Tale of Dolls: Magic Hall of Mirrors, 2015 Exhibition view. Curated by Suchen Xie.

i mpor ta nt par t of the Yel lo w R iv er r eg ion . He tao Cu ltu r e ar ose at the con f lue nce of the cu ltu r es of the Yel lo w R iv er a nd the Ste ppe, a n a m a lga m of ag r ar ia n a nd pastor a l civ i lization . Da ng x ia ng was one of the e th n ic g r oups i n Nor ther n C h i na i n a ncie nt ti mes. It ar ose a long the Yel lo w R iv er i n what is no w the South E aster n Q i nghai P r o v i nce.

T he Da ng x ia ng people w er e pastor a lists at f ir st, but g r adua l ly, as politica l a nd h istor ica l tides sh if ted , the y got toge ther w ith other peoples. A thousa nd y ear s ago, the Da ng x ia ng people fou nded the f ir st dy nast y of C h i na’s m idd le a ntiq u it y per iod – the Wester n X ia dy nast y. T h is dy nast y had Yi nchua n as its capita l , a nd co v er ed pr ese ntday Ni ng x ia as w el l as par ts of Q i nghai , Ga nsu , I n ner Mongolia a nd S haa n x i . It was one of the th r ee m ajor po w er s of the ti me, a longside the Song a nd L iao dy nasties. T he He tao, Da ng x ia ng a nd Wester n X ia cu ltu r es ar e i nteg r a l par ts of C h i na’s civ i lizationa l de v elopme nt.

RL W hat ar e y ou r e x h i bition pla ns for the ne x t fe w months?

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HSC Ou r f utu r e e x h i bitions w i l l a lway s be li n k ed to the muse u m’s m ission . T he cu r r e nt e x h i bition w i l l be on v ie w u nti l Dece m ber 6 , 2 015. A f ter th is, w e w i l l be br i ng i ng C h i nese ar tists i nto Wester n C h i na , because Wester n C h i na doesn’ t hav e much of a n ar t sce ne at the mome nt. I n or der to pr omote closer ties w ith the loca ls, w e w i l l be w ork i ng on models for i nter action be t w ee n C h i nese ar tists a nd the ar t of Wester n C h i na be t w ee n

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157 RL W hat is MOC A Yi nchua n’s str ateg y for e xcha nge w ith its col lection? A r e y ou i n conv er sation w ith other i nstitutions a bout or ga n izi ng tou r i ng e x h i bitions?

HSC T he muse u m’s cu r r e nt col lection e xcha nge a nd col lection goa ls ar e focused on Re-Folk: Transformed Traditional Elements in Contemporary Art, 2015 Exhibition view. Curated by Suchen Xie.

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the 12th a nd 2 nd months of the C h i nese lu nar ca le ndar. We w i l l a lso be hosti ng a tou r i ng e x h i bition of m aster s f r om the Nationa l A r t Muse u m of C h i na col lection , a nd w i l l use th is oppor tu n it y to r ese nt ar t w ork s b y y ou ng ar tists f r om acr oss w ester n C h i na , f r om X i njia ng to G u iz hou . Ne x t y ear w i l l see e x h i bitions on w ome n ar tists a nd a n i m ation ar t, fol lo w ed b y a n i nter nationa l e nv ir on me nta l ar t tr ie n n ia l ne x t October, wh ich cor r esponds to the e nv ir on me nta l focus of th is com mu n it y. A f ter that, w e ar e pla n n i ng e x h i bitions of photog r aphy a nd ca l lig r aphy b y ar tists f r om C h i na a nd var ious Isla m ic cou ntr ies, wh ich w i l l be pr ese nted i n the for m of conte mpor ar y ar t. Fr om Se pte m ber 19 to 22 th is y ear, the muse u m w i l l be hosti ng the C h i na P r ivate A r t Muse u m De v elopme nt For u m , wh ich w i l l be at te nded b y 14 0 pr ivate ar t muse u ms a nd featu r e spea k er s f r om se v er a l fa mous i nter nationa l pr ivate ar t muse u ms. I n education a nd outr each , the muse u m w i l l d r aw on the r esou r ces of loca l schools, pr o v id i ng the m w ith lectu r es, ar tist for u ms, ar t e v e nts a nd w ork shops, w ith the hope of at tr acti ng mor e v isitor s f r om the loca l popu lation .

conte mpor ar y ar t f r om C h i na a nd some Isla m ic cou ntr ies. Ou r col lection cu r r e ntly consists of on ly 4 0 0 ar t w ork s. We hope to esta blish a mor e compr ehe nsiv e platfor m for ar tistic e xcha nge be t w ee n C h i na a nd Isla m , wh i le a lso br i ng i ng ou r late Q i ng oi l pai nti ngs a nd a ntiq ue m aps to mor e cities for tou r i ng e x h i bitions. We hope, th r ough mor e compr ehe nsiv e r esear ch , to esta blish a n i nstitution e xclusiv ely ded icated to tou r i ng e x h i bitions.

RL W hat ar e y ou r v ie w s on the cu r r e nt state of cu ltu r a l ar ts i n Yi nchua n? Do y ou th i n k the muse u m ca n assist i n the cit y ’s de v elopme nt?

HSC Yi nchua n is r elativ ely lack i ng i n the f ield of cu ltu r a l ar ts, but the natu r a l sce ner y of the Yel lo w R iv er has m ade it i nto a q u ite e ncha nti ng place. We hope to cr eate not just a n ar ch itectu r a l site but a v i br a nt cu ltu r a l or ga n ization that ca n cata ly ze the o v er a l l cu ltu r a l de v elopme nt of Yi nchua n . T he muse u m’s at te nda nce f ig u r es hav e a lr eady m ade ne w s, a nd ou r educationa l activ ities hav e bee n me t w ith much e nthusiasm a mong the Accomodation of Vision: Early Chinese Western-Style Paintings, 2015.

Exhibition view. Curated by Lu Peng.

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159 Hsieh Su Chen (born in 1964 in Kaohsiung, Taipei) is Ar tistic Director of the Museum of Contemporar y Ar t of Yinchuan. After Obtaining a MA in Curatorship and Ar t Administration at the Goldsmiths University in London and a PhD of Ar t Histor y at the China Central Academy of Fine Ar ts in Beijing, she has taught at the Institute of Fashion and Communications Design of Shih Chien University and Taipei National University of the Ar ts.

Formerly Deputy Director of the Mountain Museum in Kaohsiung, Hsieh Su Chen has also held directorial posts at the China Central Academy Museum, the Mountain Ar t Foundation and the Today Ar t Museum in Beijing.

Riccardo Lisi is a curator and critic based in Switzerland, where he is Ar tistic Director of the Contemporar y Ar t Centre of La Rada in Locarno. From 2001 to 2007 he was Ar tistic Director of La Fabbrica in Losone. He has penned catalog essays for ar tists such as Vanessa Beecroft, Enzo Cucchi, Mario Giacomelli and Ivo Soldini, and contributes regularly to magazines and periodicals.

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loca l r eside nts. We f ir m ly belie v e that MOC A Yi nchua n ca n m a k e e v er y one i n Yi nchua n pr oud , a nd w ith the help of the med ia a nd the activ e par ticipation of loca l r eside nts, w e ca n m a k e a positiv e contr i bution to the cit y ’s cu ltu r a l life a nd shape the f utu r e of its de v elopme nt. We ar e hopi ng, w ith the suppor t of the go v er n me nt, to play a sm a l l par t i n shapi ng Yi nchua n as a gate way cit y

KUN AND QIÁN IN AN AQUARIUM– ROOMS OF CHANGES AN ENCOUNTER WITH HANNAH WEINBERGER’S SHOW AT KUNSTHAUS BREGEN

FATUMA OSMAN

A s kûn we walk into this room in expectation.

Take a breath to be equipped with what is required of any diver because in water you are in a state of encounter - of get together

and

after some time in silence and motionlessness let go of a different kind of a ir – qiá n.

Qián is always in every space with his air of her breath of her air of his breath... with and without culture.

So what seems to be a surprise in this empty room is only the absence of the expected exhalation – artificial fish missing in this empty yet fully equipped aquarium. And as we are diving in this watery state of encounters and get together we hear and

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make the sounds of the missing fish and their amplification fills this aquarium.

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161 RES NOVEMBER 2012 Stones foundlings uncultured yet carrying traces of primordial exhalation.

Don’t leave the aquarium in reduced expectation and automated classification they remind us and through their humming we see the artificial fish expected inside and through their humming again we hear the subaqueous sounds of qián and again they create the underwaterworld of encounters and get together outside while kûn inhales.

You create a space above the qián and kûn

equipped

for

potentiality

allowing

preferences and a will but never restricting the parallax of the present where you can always choose but where you have to breathe to find - le moi du toi le toi du moi.

All images: Hannah Weinberger Image (Filmstill), 2014 Courtesy of the artist.

Fatuma Osman is a writer and curator currently based in Zurich and Galkayo. She studied Ar t Histor y, Philosophy and Comparative Literature at the University of Zürich. From 2011 to 2013 she co-hosted the cinema and exhibition space AP news in Zurich together with friends.

London Regent’s Park 14–17 October 2015 Preview 13 October Tickets at friezelondon.com

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GERALDINE JAVIER WISE AND UNWISE MESSAGES FROM ANDREAS SLOMINSKI INTERVIEW WITH ACHILLE BONITO OLIVA ROBERT SMITHSON THE ART OF KIKI SMITH COPY+PASTE: THE COLLAGISTIC QUALITIES OF THE DESKTOP AESTHETICS INVENT THE FUTURE WITH ELEMENTS OF THE PAST WILLIAM ANASTASI: RADICAL INVENTIONS, CONCEPTUAL INTENTIONS IDA APPLEBROOG ULAY CHEN WENLING INTERVIEW WITH ESTHER SCHIPPER MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART YINCHUAN / HSIEH SU CHEN KUN AND QIAN IN AQUARIUM – ROOMS OF CHANGES

Chen Wenling, 2002 Red Memory: Shy Boy Bronze, H:163 × L:40 × W:38 cm Courtesy of the artist

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