Journal of Curatorial Studies, Volume 1 Number.1.

JCS 1 (1) pp. 101–116 Intellect Limited 2012

Journal of curatorial studies Volume 1 Number 1 © 2012 Intellect Ltd Exhibition Reviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/jcs.1.1.101_7

Exhibition Reviews

Christoph Büchel, Piccadilly Community Centre Hauser & Wirth, London, Piccadilly, 13 May–30 July 2011 Reviewed by Helena Reckitt

The Pay Day Loans branch in the lobby of the Piccadilly Community Centre had closed. ‘For Rent’ signs directed potential tenants of this prime West End real estate (across from Piccadilly Circus and a few shops down from the luxury grocer Fortnum & Mason) to the property consultant Christopher Cock. But making my way past the defunct ATM and the out-of-service bank counters, the mood inside perked up. A besmocked staff member offered me tea while I signed in and ticked the appropriate boxes about my gender, ethnicity and age (‘are you over 60?’). Across the hall an office crammed with new PCs hosted a computer class for older people. Upstairs, next to a sunlit ballroom where senior citizens enjoyed a tea dance, I booked a free aromatherapy treatment in the art and exercise space.

In summer 2011, as the United Kingdom reeled from the deep cuts to higher education and the public sector announced by the Conservatives, Hauser & Wirth’s Piccadilly branch opened its doors to local volunteer and non-profit organizations. Over the course of eleven weeks, the gallery hosted everything from fencing for seniors to ‘Baby and Me’ post-natal yoga, ‘Lunchtime Laughter’ sessions and ‘Knit and Natter’ socials. This well-resourced venue, staffed by gallery employees, included a ballroom with sprung wooden floor, a basement lounge with DJ tables, a stage and bar offering ‘Free Drinks on Thursdays for the Over 60s’, and an interfaith prayer room. The entire community centre was the work of Swiss artist Christoph Büchel, although neither his nor Hauser & Wirth’s names were visible. Even the website had been cleverly transformed to mimic the

101

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 101

2/3/12 4:42:46 PM

Exhibition Reviews

homely aesthetics of a volunteer-run organization and was updated with a changing programme of events.

Refurbishment in reverse, scuffed stairs and corridors replaced the elegant halls of the former bank building. The decor matched the ambience, with affirming posters – ‘If you judge people, you have no time to love them’ – dusty dried flowers and potted plants, an Evacuation Plan and a noticeboard displaying community fliers, amongst other signifiers of public space. Embodying Roberta Smith’s (2007) characterization of Büchel’s art as displaying ‘a sense of horror vacuii’, every space was occupied. Behind a basement door marked ‘Private’, a caretaker’s office/ crash pad evoked the obsessive psychology of a Depression-era hoarder, each surface filled with decrepit utilitarian items, thrift store chotchkas, postcards, diagrams and lists. The musty smell enhanced this oppressive atmosphere. The second-floor Geranium charity shop for the blind shared a space with the Conservative Party, whose display included mugs commemorating the 1978 election slogan, ‘Labour Isn’t Working’, the brainchild of former ad man and Young British Artist collector, Charles Saatchi, which won the Conservatives a landslide victory.

Piccadilly Community Centre (2011). Photo: Courtesy Piccadilly Community Centre.

102

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 102

2/3/12 4:42:46 PM

Exhibition Reviews

Every detail spoke of charity, volunteerism and thriftiness – the language of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Big Society in which acts of communal goodwill are claimed to replace public funding. Both an exhibition about and an example of the Big Society, the enthusiastic participation of community members embodied the spirit that Cameron both celebrates and exploits. But not all was bustle and buoyancy in Piccadilly.

Evidence of rough sleepers – in a squalid attic squat and in sleeping bags on the roof – recalled Piccadilly’s location in the Borough of Westminster where, in the 1980s, Conservative leader Shirley Porter initiated the mass sale of council housing into private hands and the removal of homeless people from the borough.

Symbols of bankruptcy and loss proliferated, including a floral and candle memorial outside the entrance with the handwritten note ‘Gone but not forgotten, Love forever’. Over-spending was woven into the fabric of an installation that seemed to spare no expense, either in hard costs or affective labour. Büchel has a reputation for demanding big budgets. His planned 2006 installation for MASS MoCA in Massachusetts ended up in the courts, with the project unrealized and the gallery suing Büchel for the right to exhibit the $300,000 of materials that they had purchased for his piece.1 Georges Bataille saw the potential for political liberation in excessive spending. In his ‘The Notion of Expenditure’ (1933), published in the wake of the 1929 Wall Street crash, Bataille speculated about the orgiastic revolt that could emerge from catastrophe and loss. Citing traditions of potlatch in West Coast First Nations societies where extravagant gifts by individuals or families put adversaries in their debt, Bataille celebrated extreme acts of generosity that risk self-annihilation. He hailed the ‘delirium of the festival’ in potlatch, where social divisions were strengthened but economic divisions shattered, to urge the working class to mock the bourgeoisie by appropriating and then rapidly dispensing its wealth. Skeptical about public welfare, Bataille thought such ameliorative efforts would trap the poor in abject dependency and push them towards revolution.

The Piccadilly Community Centre carries seeds of Bataille’s polemic, from its performance of extravagance to its critique of charity and its presentation of surplus human energy. Like the triumphant chiefs of potlatch, Hauser & Wirth gains in reputation for sponsoring an artwork that they can hardly expect to sell. A week after Büchel’s project closed, London erupted in riots. The rioters’ orgiastic looting, coupled with attacks on their own neighbourhoods, again brought Bataille to mind. As the Situationists argued when analyzing the 1965 Watts Riots, ‘real desires begin to be expressed in festival, in playful self-assertion, in the potlatch of destruction,’ and where ‘in the act of self-destruction a challenge is thrown down for the dominant powers to respond to’ (Bataille, cited in Noys 2000: 110).

Beneath its veneer of benevolence, The Piccadilly Community Centre is a deeply critical artwork. It raised numerous timely questions – about the state of public funding and communal resources, the gift and the charitable donation, participation and volunteerism, political agency, social relations and exchange. Büchel’s provocative intent was not lost on one gallery visitor, a self-styled veteran of the voluntary sector named Leslie Barson: she demonstrated outside the gallery for three days with a

1.

Although MASS MoCA won the case, they eventually decided not to exhibit the materials for Büchel’s project.

103

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 103

2/3/12 4:42:46 PM

Exhibition Reviews

2.

The Londonist announced it as an ‘interactive exhibition […] created in response to voluntary sector and arts funding cuts, and bank-related art installations will be scattered among the participatory sessions’ (Jemma 2011).

placard reading ‘This is NOT a community centre’ on one side and ‘This is an art installation’ on the other. In a blog posting titled ‘Famous Artist Exploits the Vulnerable’, Barson (2011) denounced the artist and gallery for duping innocent community members, and urged readers to demand that they donate to CRISIS, the charity supporting homeless people and squatters who the project had ‘disdainfully misrepresented’.

Whether participants were tricked or exploited, I’m not convinced.

Announcements of the project made its status as an artwork clear, even if this context was not apparent in the gallery.2 In any case, most people seemed to be having too much fun to care. But in other respects Barson’s attack hit the mark. For the irony of Büchel’s piece is just as she described: a seemingly thriving community centre, dedicated to the socially marginalized, would suddenly disappear. Like the UK public sector, all that seemed solid, melted into air.

References Barson, Leslie (2011), ‘Famous Artist Exploits the Vulnerable’, http:// www.peacenewslog.info/2011/08/famous-artist-exploits-thevulnerable/. Accessed 15 September 2011.

Bataille, Georges (1933), ‘The Notion of Expenditure’, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-39 (Allan Stoekl, ed.), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jemma (2011), ‘Preview: Pop-Up Community Centre at Piccadilly’, http://londonist.com/2011/05/preview-pop-up-community-centre-atpiccadilly.php. Accessed 15 September 2011.

Noys, Benjamin (2000), Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction, London: Pluto Press.

Smith, Roberta (2007), ‘Is It Art Yet? And Who Decides?’, New York Times, 16 September.

Move: Choreographing You – Art and Dance Since the 1960s Curated by Stephanie Rosenthal, Hayward Gallery, London, 13 October 2010–9 January 2011 Reviewed by Milena Tomic

Given the ongoing interest in histories of action-based art, Move: Choreographing You – Art and Dance Since the 1960s is another ambitious exhibition that transforms the visitor into a participant by emphasizing the embodied aspect of participatory practice. Somewhat aggressively, the title compels movement. But why submit? In those cases where visitors are called upon to dance in the context of a historical work, are they to copy the documentary models or to disregard them in favour of choreographing their own entry into the lost work? Far from presenting untouchable relics of actions past, curator Stephanie Rosenthal proposes

104

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 104

2/3/12 4:42:47 PM

Exhibition Reviews

that the historical objects on display can indeed be reactivated in the context of a choreography defined as ‘any descriptive notation’ (Rosenthal 2010: 10). If the recent vogue for re-enactments made the rediscovery of dance all but inevitable, the historical link with participatory art is here developed in the most sustained way in recent memory.

The exhibition explores familiar conundrums facing curators of live art’s histories. Beginning with Allan Kaprow’s 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (1959), the exhibition traces the beginnings of a concern with ordered movement to the unique event that took place on six nights at New York’s Reuben Gallery.

The performers used improvised instruments, slide projections, sound tapes, plastic partitions, moving assemblages, and multiple props to realize the meticulous score. Here that same event is ‘reinvented’ in a way that that deliberately misreads the source material and stretches the concept of dance to its limit. As part of the accompanying performance series at the Southbank Centre, choreographer Rosemary Butcher reduces the post-medium complexity of the happening and transforms it into something recognizable as dance. This extension of choreography beyond its proper realm becomes a shared concern for a number of unlikely works. Bruce Nauman’s Green Light Corridor (1970) beckons entrance into the space between two plywood

William Forsythe, The Fact of Matter (2009), choreographic object: plastic rings, textile webbing. Photo: The Forsythe Company with the Biennale Art, Venice and the Ursula Blickle Foundation, producer: Julian Gabriel Richter, courtesy the Hayward Gallery.

105

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 105

2/3/12 4:42:47 PM

Exhibition Reviews

Mike Kelley, Adaptation: Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (Full Cast) (1999/2010), colour photograph 28 × 49 inches. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen, courtesy of Kelley Studio and the Hayward Gallery.

panels and then induces a sense of confinement and apprehension. Lygia Clark’s The House Is the Body: Penetration, Ovulation, Germination, Expulsion (1968) digests and expels people as they move through the different ‘rooms’, each one of them an immersive environment unto itself. William Forsythe’s The Fact of Matter (2009) asks visitors to negotiate a passage through a forest of gymnastic rings without touching the ground.

Move: Choreographing You builds on the groundwork laid down by several past exhibitions but overturns their framing assumptions in surprising ways. In 1998, Paul Schimmel’s Out of Actions: Between Performance and the Object, 1949−1979 at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art featured over 150 artists, many of whom were working on the margins of the international scene. Schimmel had asked Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy to co-author an introductory statement for the Visitors Gallery where a number of still-living artists were invited to create something new. What Kelley and McCarthy produced was an indictment against the ‘fetishization of [...] material left-overs’ as well as a reminder not to forget the ‘time-based nature of these practices’. Explicitly positioning the remnant as a relic and a fetish, Eric Mangion circumvented this problem in his 2008 exhibition Don’t Play with Dead Things at Centre National d’Art de la Villa Arson. In contrast, Move encourages visitors to play with objects but offers very little in the way of contextualization, which is perhaps a strategic move on Rosenthal’s part. Choreographers like Yvonne Rainer and Simone Forti are here grouped with sculptors that ‘choreograph’ social situations as a means of illuminating the manipulation of the body occurring unnoticed in everyday life. First conceived as props for Simone Forti’s Five Dance Constructions and Some Other Things (1961), Robert Morris’ interactive structures quickly became vehicles for everyday gestures. Their carnivalesque quality resulted in a few visitors

106

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 106

2/3/12 4:42:48 PM

Exhibition Reviews

suffering minor injuries when Bodyspacemotionthings was briefly exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1971, though nothing so dramatic happened when the wooden structures were recreated for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall in 2009. Of the two structures recreated for Move, the huge seesaw represents a kind of degree zero of participation: its reappearance is another instance of highly supervised museum entertainment.

It is in this sense that the exhibition shares an affinity with relational aesthetics, to invoke the strand of collaborative practice identified by Nicolas Bourriaud in the late 1990s. Relational aesthetics gained prominence by offering a more democratic paradigm of practice wherein the visitor had a hand in completing the work. Move responds to this muchcriticized tendency with a number of works that approach movement’s various histories more critically. For example, Kelley’s Adaptation: Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (1999/2010) draws on research into primate affection based around object-surrogates while referencing Isamu Noguchi’s stage props for Martha Graham. The brightly coloured set is displayed alongside films that feature dancers performing Anita Pace’s choreography and actors who respond to the objects in a more ‘primal’ way. In the catalogue text, Isabelle Graw reads into Adaptation a critique of the emphasis on ineffectual community building that defines relational aesthetics (Graw 2010: 89).

Dramatizing a kind of anti-relational aesthetics, the objects in Kelley’s set are the recipients of aggression inflicted by costumed actors and modelled upon observations of primate behaviour and psychological studies of the effects of violence on children.

This focus on the more sinister side of participatory art is implicitly reflected in the organization of the gallery space, which is subdivided by large, undulating paper partitions. The same partitions are echoed in the structure of the interactive archive consisting of ‘140 artists, 175 works, 20 scores, 13 photographs, 147 films’ which can be navigated in a number of non-chronological ways (the catalogue text also shifts and undulates, causing the eye to ‘dance’ across the page). Enacting a metaphorical folding of one work into another along a series of surface affinities, the archive is divided into categories such as ‘tracing movement’, ‘sculpting dances’ and ‘gravity/falling’. Even as it provides an invaluable resource, it points to the difficulty surrounding re-enactments of avant-garde events that were not necessarily meant to be formalized and repeated beyond their historical moment of inscription. It is here that the exhibition poses its most intriguing question: if the goal is to reconnect with the past in some meaningful way, to reanimate a particular (embodied) mode of relating to the world, is it enough to enact something materially, to simply go through the motions?

The ambiguity surrounding the exhibition’s framing concept invites scrutiny of the uses of ordered movement wherever it may be encountered.

References Graw, Isabelle (2010), ‘Mike Kelley: Adaptation: Test Room Containing Multiple Stimuli Known to Elicit Curiosity and Manipulatory Responses (1999/2010)’, in Stephanie Rosenthal (ed.), Move: Choreographing You, London: Hayward Publishing, pp. 86−89.

107

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 107

2/3/12 5:06:29 PM

Exhibition Reviews

Rosenthal, Stephanie (2010), ‘Choreographing You: Choreographies in the Visual Arts’, in Stephanie Rosenthal (ed.), Move: Choreographing You, London: Hayward Publishing, pp. 8−31.

E-mail: m.tomic@ucl.ac.uk

MMX Open Art Venue Seven exhibitions by Rebecca Loyche, Jonathan Gröger and Jason Burgess, Berlin, 29 January 2010–19 February 2011 KW69 Various curators, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, 28 October 2010–23 October 2011 squatting. erinnern, vergessen, besetzen Curated by Tilo Schulz and Jörg van den Berg, Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin, 2 April–24 May 2010 Reviewed by Sven Christian Schuch

The figure of the artist-curator merges two activities into a hybrid role that, for most practitioners, only lasts for the time it takes to curate one or several exhibitions. In Berlin during the past two years, individuals occupying this hybrid position have been actively sought out and admired for creating innovative exhibition formats that call attention to and disrupt institutional frames.

Even though the artist-run-centre movement started over thirty years ago, the concept of artist-curator renews itself continually. At the MMX Open Art Venue, for example, located in the heart of Berlin and curated by the artists Rebecca Loyche, Jason Burgess and Jonathan Gröger, the tradition of artist-organized exhibitions continues. Their projects over 2010−11 were numbered serially and characterized by a site-specific, non-theoretical approach, which aimed to provoke an ‘unmediated’ experience of art. Since the art was mostly produced or modified specially for one particular room in the gallery, installation dominated the series of exhibitions. The restructuring of space significantly challenged viewers’ perception through the use of light, acoustics and/or sensory stimulation. For example, How to Build a House (Jeongmoon Choi, 2010) – made of nothing more than threads and black lights – completely redefined the space through a geometric pattern and delivered a disturbing linearity. Another impressive example by Valentin Hertweck, Untitled (2010), consisted of two white cubes made up of loosely interlocking walls that pivoted when pushed. By ‘pushing their way into’ the cubes, visitors unwittingly fashioned new spaces within the room, trapping and releasing other visitors at various times. Overall,

108

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 108

2/3/12 4:42:48 PM

Exhibition Reviews

Jeongmoon Choi, How to Build a House (2010), installation view. Photo and © Jeongmoon Choi, courtesy of MMX Open Art Venue.

the curatorial process foregrounded the opportunity of free and experimental space for the artists.

In a similar vein, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art also organized an ongoing open cycle of exhibitions, entitled KW69. The central idea rested on the premise that one artist would be invited to curate an exhibition, and then he or she would choose one of the participating artists to curate the next, and so forth. Angela Bulloch curated the first show, which was governed by an inquiry into artistic thought and alternative approaches.

It featured the work of Jean-Michel Wicker, whose works were combined with those by Roberto Matta and Dominique Gonzalez Foerster, among others, in the exhibition Molecular Etwas (‘Molecular Something’), all of which focused on aspects of materiality. Subsequently, the different artistcurators of KW69 developed individual ways of dealing with the task of curating. Jean-Michel Wicker, for instance, hired a co-curator and divided the exhibition space into horizontals and verticals to obsessively structure the show’s contents. Kerstin Cmelka selected artworks that appealed to the theme of ‘Stolen from My Subconscious’ – referring to an anecdote from Salvador Dalí who was furious at Joseph Cornell for seemingly committing such a crime with his film Rose Hobart (1936).

And, finally, Judith Hopf consulted the ideas of anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss during her stint as artist-curator to set up a ‘cold society’ of art. Interestingly enough, all of these exhibitions basically appeared as an

109

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 109

2/3/12 5:07:24 PM

Exhibition Reviews

squatting. erinnern, vergessen, besetzen (2010), installation view, from left to right: Gitte Villesen, I Will Arrange Everything. It Will Be the Best Film Ever (2008/09), video installation; Antje Majewski, The Royal Mummies (2006), oil on aluminum panels; Sejla Kameric, I Remember I Forgot (2008), posters; Carsten Fock, Untitled (2010), framed drawings; Olaf Nicolai, Extraterritorial (2001), tape, information sheets; Simon Wachsmuth, Barrikade (2008), metal fences; and Manfred Pernice, Haldensleben (2005/2010), various materials. Photo and © Werner J. Hannappel, courtesy of Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin.

accumulation of artworks, as ensembles of equals in a democratic order, without an overdetermining or even visible theme, thus leaving the audience to draw their own connections between the individual pieces.

The Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin offered a third example for the continued pertinence in artist-curators. After a year of uninspiring solo shows by internationally-known artists organized by established curators, in 2010 the Kunsthalle presented exhibitions curated by artists, such as squatting. erinnern, vergessen, besetzen/squatting: remembering, forgetting, occupying by artist Tilo Schulz and curator Jörg van den Berg. During their years of collaboration, they established a curatorial concept of ‘iconic staging’. Here it manifested as an open stage, connecting the artworks exhibited inside the white cube of the Kunsthalle with the urban context of Berlin. While viewers were confronted with art works dealing with acts of remembering and forgetting, they were constantly reminded of the outer world and its effects. This was accomplished by trisecting the exhibition space with white fences. To visit all three areas, one had to constantly leave and re-enter the Kunsthalle through different entrances. Through

110

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 110

2/3/12 4:42:49 PM

Exhibition Reviews

this process of moving in and out, the interior art space was united with its exterior surroundings, which foregrounded numerous historical and political memories. Such activity compelled the audience not only to consume, but to co-author the interpretation of the work in the Berlin context, thus effectively demonstrating a curatorial method based on Jacques Rancière’s ‘emancipated’ viewer whereby results are left open-ended and entrusted to the skills of the audience.

Although all artist-curators are not the same, and neither are the settings in which they work, it is nevertheless striking that artist-curated shows often experiment with open arrangements that encourage or even force the audience to stake out their own position and to find individual ways of approaching the art. It is here that artistic thinking and curatorial practice meet, intertwine and become inseparable, influencing and enriching each other.

E-mail: svenschuch81@googlemail.com

Carlos Bunga, Simultâneo, fragmentado, descontínuo Curated by Moacir dos Anjos and Agnaldo Farias, 29th São Paulo Biennial, 25 September–12 December 2010 Reviewed by Marta Jecu

Starting from an inquiry into the expressive and philosophical potential of space, Spain-based, Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga enacts spatial processes of construction and deconstruction. Through an improvisatory technique, he superimposes large-scale cardboard forms over existing constructions.

His architectural thinking, concerned with the emergence of space out of a conjunction between temporal cycles and spatial hypostases, manifests in experiments with documentation, colour, ephemeral materials and fragmentation. The work gains relevance as a critical confrontation with art historical models, institutional critique, reconsiderations of conceptualism, and investigations into the invisible side of representation.

Bunga’s work in the 29th São Paolo Biennial, Simultâneo, fragmentado, descontínuo/Simultaneous, Fragmented, Discontinuous (2010), seemed to cite various architectural paradigms of different epochs, and yet preserve a floating, atemporal character in its monumentality: a row of columns made from cardboard, stuck together with tape, over-painted in white and unfinished on the sides and back. Situated on the ramp of the existing building, it conferred a sense of movement and reconfigured its own architectonics.

The work recalled the artist’s earlier constructions built inside galleries and institutional edifices: labyrinthine compartments in fragile cardboard, painted in monochromatic pictorial planes, which after completion are cut down and collapsed, leaving a deserted landscape of remains. This new spatial experience intermixed construction with deconstruction, which

111

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 111

2/3/12 4:42:49 PM

Exhibition Reviews

Carlos Bunga, Simultâneo, fragmentado, descontínuo (2010), site-specific installation, 29th São Paulo Biennial. Photo: José Eduardo Giannini Ortega, courtesy of Elba Benítez Gallery. should, as Bunga explained, be understood as simulations or re-creations, meant to superpose different reference-frames (Bunga 2010).

‘Há sempre um copo de mar para um homem navegar’/‘There is always a cup of sea to sail in’ served as a title for the Biennial, curated by the Brazilians Moacir dos Anjos and Agnaldo Farias. The phrase came from a verse by the poet Jorge de Lima (b.1895−d.1953) in Invenção de Orfeu/Invention of Orpheus (1952), which expressed an attempt to reunite experimental poetics and politics. The curators sought to blend an activist, conceptual attitude in art with qualities like tangibility and poetic materiality. Here experimentation

112

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 112

2/3/12 4:42:50 PM

Exhibition Reviews

was understood as a political vector – literary references were strategically designed to break the hermetic, conceptual language of art and bring forward sensory-based experiences. While the curators intended to crystallize a new sense of politics, one which was not separate from art and yet expressed the utopian power of art, they also aimed for a greater democratization and inclusion (by abolishing national presentations, working with a team of curators, and increasing the contacts with Latin America and Africa). However, their discourse seemed to be the priority, rather than practical efficacy. When 159 artists from all over the world came together, in a highly heterogeneous exhibition, it was impossible to discern a singular political stance. The architectural organization apparently recognized this by fragmenting the exhibition space into six Terreiros, which evoked Brazilian plazas, squares, terraces and inner courtyards, with their specific atmosphere and conviviality, corresponding further to six thematic issues (for instance ‘I Am the Street’ or ‘Remembrance and Oblivion’), which again carried a certain poetic resonance, yet lacked precision and concreteness.

In this curatorial context, the work of Bunga detached itself from most of the other documentary, analytical works, constructed as they were around specific social and political subject matter such as economic recession, migration, the labour market, repression and exclusion. Instead, Bunga incorporated a more practical repository for value and meaning that conformed to the thematic of the 29th Biennial without being literal. In the institutional context of the Biennial – itself a solid structure overloaded with sedimented practices which sustain the edifice of global artworld – Bunga re-cast the building itself in fragile, perishable material, depriving it of its inherited connotations. His colonnade, only apparently sustaining the ramp, could be considered a fake, but also a fragment that by abandoning its context expressed an absence. In this sense, the work’s polemical institutional context re-enacted iconoclastic confrontations with the ‘image’ – as an expression of power, status and authoritarian meaning.

Without adhering to a particular aesthetic of a style, Bunga’s colonnade seemed to cite the idea of historical vestige or ruin while at the same time representing a construction of the future. It contradicted its context by bringing spatial ambiguity and the presence of foreign temporal cycles with a slight fictionalizing impulse. In this way, his process of reconstruction, while initially implying destabilization and disorder, avoided dogmatic politicization, used the means that the Biennial curators designated as experimentalism, tangibility, and utopianism to induce a poetics of loss, abstraction and laconicity. He in effect mirrored the curatorial goals to test the potency of their rhetoric. By depicting an essentialized architecture or scenery, he freed and made visible the space itself as a potential generator of critical meaning. Political in a more subversive way than it first appeared, Bunga’s work proposed a shift to thinking differently about the context of architectural reference, a perspective that negated the roots of a whole system of representation while, in turn, manifesting the power to regenerate it.

Reference Bunga, Carlos (2010), interview with the author, Lisbon, March.

E-mail: kerosinee@gmail.com

113

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 113

2/3/12 4:42:50 PM

Exhibition Reviews

Fokus Łódz´ Biennale 2010: From the Liberty Square to the Independence Square Organized by Ryszard Was´ko (artistic director) and an international selection committee (Mirosław Bałka, Gabriele Horn, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Angelika Stepken, Jarosław Suchan, Richard Vine, Gregory Volk and Ryszard Was´ko), Łódz´, Poland, 11 September–10 October 2010 Reviewed by Joanna Szupinska

Strong, unison voices weave their song through the halls of the Old Philharmonic, a building dating from the People’s Republic of Poland (PRL) era and abandoned by the municipal orchestra as soon as their current home was completed in 2004. The many layers of paint on the walls, unassuming shades of brown and tan, are peeling. I follow computer-printed arrows to installations in once-bustling dressing rooms, offices, coat check, and – powerfully confronted by an auditorium of empty seats – out onto the orchestral stage itself. Having just walked the length of Piotrkowska Street in a scavenger hunt-like search for artworks, map in hand, I find myself in the most compelling grouping of works of the Łódz´ Biennale. The ‘Old Philharmonic’, as it has come to be known, is hardly mentioned in official histories of the orchestra – two decades not worth remembering; the art event reactivates this otherwise unappreciated space.

The folk voices, similarly conjuring a tradition deeply affected by the doctrines of the People’s Republic, belong to the choral group Jarze˛bina from the village Kocudza, one of the most recognized regional folk ensembles in Poland. The audio emanates from Płaczki/Weepers (2010), a paradocumentary by Anna Molska, installed in its own room. The video depicts a rehearsal of Jarze˛bina in a collaboration with Molska, staged and recorded in the Polish Sculpture Center in Oron´sko. Bundled in their winter parkas, the singers gather in the one-time orangery and artist atelier of this readapted nineteenth-century Italian neo-renaissance manor house. They are surrounded by a snowy landscape just outside the glass panels of the gallery as they rehearse for a funeral, focusing their professional mourning skills on a makeshift corpse they construct from a sheet. Here, their song succinctly serves as lament for a multitude of disparate concepts – from gentry, village life and early capitalism, to comrades, minimalist sculpture and the PRL. In this layering of rich references, Molska’s contribution – while not produced especially for the Biennale – stands out as a most successful response to the organizers’ charge for site-specific works.

Several other works also take up this task seriously. Tacita Dean’s The Postcard Project (2010) resonates with considerable honesty; the artist sent a postcard to every address on Piotrkowska Street, in a simple gesture acknowledging complexities of tourism such as the inclination towards collecting such souvenirs, and the ability to only partially understand a place or culture. Karin Sander engages the histories of earthworks and minimalism, and offers a concise critique of the massive French-funded factory-complex-turned-commercial-Mecca ‘Manufaktura’ in her work

114

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 114

2/3/12 4:42:50 PM

Exhibition Reviews

Karin Sander, Darn´ /Pieces of Turf (1997–2010), installation view. Photo: Tomasz Matuszak, courtesy of the Łódz´ Biennale, Łódz´ .

Darn´/Pieces of Turf (1997–2010). Just at the façade of the main shopping mall, a two square-metre piece of artificial grass replaces a corresponding piece of natural turf removed from a pristinely manicured lawn. Often placed on Soviet-era bloc housing balconies to simulate nature, here – among and in place of a portion of its referent – it is purely synthetic.

Meanwhile Grzegorz Klaman’s contribution, Giving In (2010), can be sighted at the textile museum and elsewhere in the city. The white flags at once symbolize surrender – what are we surrendering from, and to? – and refer to the raw product that built this city, the one-time textile capital of the Russian Empire.

These artists successfully negotiated the remit of the Biennale, but others contributed works less accurately responding to the call for site-specificity.

Cao Fei’s videos The Birth of RMB City and Opera RMB City (both 2009), based on the online world of Second Life that take as their subject China’s relationship with the outside world, is decidedly site-less. Other artists took the assignment too literally. Marek Wasilewski’s video Adam (2010) documents the nude artist walking the length of Piotrkowska Street and into the city cathedral in an interrogation of nakedness. O Zhang’s interactive project, The Dove of Łódz´ (2010), was certainly specific to local history, but predictable in that it only referenced the Holocaust, too often the lone subject that comes to mind when one hears the word ‘Poland’.

The inconsistency of works is due to the open-call nature of the exhibition.

One step towards a more cohesive show might be to categorically enable

115

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 115

2/3/12 4:42:51 PM

Exhibition Reviews

an authorial position, appointing a (group of) curator(s) and reframing the role of the selection committee to that of an advisory group. Until some movement is made in this direction, it is doubtful that the Biennale will ever outgrow the feeling of a juried show, no matter how good the individual works may be.

The focus on site-specificity of the Łódz´ Biennale, made explicit in the promotional materials, is largely the result of the organizers’ retroactive honing of their motives of the first iteration of its predecessor, Construction in Process, in 1981. Construction in Process brought together work by 54 international artists in an abandoned nineteenth-century textile factory, and some works were indeed created on site and in reaction to the factory space, the city, and the particular political situation in Poland. As the many anecdotes recount, artists created work with the help of students and Solidarity union members, stayed up long nights talking and drinking, and in a show of support sat in on workers’ protests. The experience of that exhibition is clearly irreproducible, but the Biennale persists in an attempt to relive the charge of 1981 Poland.

The 2010 Łódz´ Biennale was organized along the central Piotrkowska Street. The brochure map directed viewers to listen for sound works installed on the street by Kamil Kuskowski, enjoy videos by Zuzanna Janin in beer gardens, find publically-displayed posters by Clemens von Wedemeyer and Arthur Zalewski, and pass through brick gates to a mural by the collective Grupa Twoz˙ ywo, thereby revealing magnificent views of factory ruins otherwise hidden from the street. Łódz´ does provide a fascinating site for an exhibition. It was once a thriving, diverse capitalist city. Many of the factories built during the industrial revolution still stand and have accumulated new layers of historical significance. They were looted during the World Wars, repurposed for modern use in Communist Poland, and are presently empty, too expensive to demolish. Alternately, some have been transformed into hybrid commercial-cultural complexes like ‘Manufaktura’.

As far as embracing a fully articulated and compelling curatorial model, the Łódz´ Biennale hovers in a state of partial development for its faithfulness to replicating the site-specificity of Construction in Process.

The attempt to recapture the original moment of 1981 is complicated by a wholly new historical circumstance – artists are jet-set into Łódz´ for the duration of the Biennale ‘workshop days’, or finished works are simply shipped in, so the exchange among local and foreign artists cannot be what it once was at that radically different historical moment preceding the instatement of Martial Law. As such, the current situation does not allow for works to actively interrogate the fascinating past and capitalist present of this historically rich place.

E-mail: j.szupinska@gmail.com

116

JCS_1.1_Exhibition_Reviews_101-116.indd 116

2/3/12 4:42:51 PM