SLEEK 30 SOUND | SILENCE by SLEEK Magazine

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sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

Content 63

104 deutsch

There are evenings when the bass starts thumping through the ceiling of our editorial offices from the club above as early as 10pm – during office hours, in other words. It can be infuriating but it can also inspire you. To play air guitar, to feel your head pounding – or even to come up with the theme for the next magazine. But the idea for »Sound/Silence« actually came from something much more obvious: »a picture says more than a thousand words« as the saying goes – but have you really heard a picture saying anything? The pictures that usually fill our magazine are as silent as fish. Ok, enough of that nonsense, but honestly, wouldn’t it be wonderful if pictures really could talk? We thought so. Which is why we decided to do make it happen. So this issue you have a magazine in your hand, which you can look at as well as listen to. Using the CD inside. And so you won’t miss out on the whole hearing-while-seeing experience, you should have the CD to hand while you read. And when you come across an ear like this one , then play the respective track. Lots of these tracks have been recorded exclusively for sleek and have never been published anywhere else – just in case you’re thinking that we’ve just rummaged through the archives like the major German weeklies do every now and then to help boost floundering sales... So what about the silence bit? Um... Long silence... Silence in editorial meetings on the subject of silence, resulting in intense moments of quiet contemplation. Or the silence of the people we were unable to get to contribute to this issue. Michel Houellebecq, for example, although we offered him a lot more than the 10 euro Prix Goncourt money he got for The Map and the Territory. Perhaps it wasn’t just a character with his name who died in the novel... although death does not necessarily condemn a person to silence, after all plenty of artists don’t get heard till they die. On the other hand, death can be a most uplifting experience. Marina Abramovi has a song to sing about this – which she will indeed do, in the opera that Robert Wilson is putting on this summer. She can also be heard on our CD, where she describes silence as pure energy. We’ll shut up now.

An manchen Abenden schallen aus der Clubetage über den Redaktionsräumen dumpfe Bässe, ab 22 Uhr, also während der Bürozeit. Das kann nerven, aber auch sehr inspirieren. Zum Luftgitarrespielen, zu Kopfschmerzen – oder zu Heftthemen. Zu »Sound/Silence« hat uns aber etwas viel Naheliegenderes inspiriert, nämlich ein Sprichwort: »Ein Bild sagt mehr als 1000 Worte«, heißt es immer so schön – aber wir hören Bilder nie reden! Die Bilder jedenfalls, die wir normalerweise im Heft haben, sind stumm wie die Fische. Natürlich stellen wir uns jetzt extra dumm, aber mal ganz ehrlich, wäre es nicht schön, wenn Bilder wirklich sprechen könnten? Fanden wir auch, und deshalb haben wir dafür gesorgt. Mit dieser Ausgabe halten Sie eine Zeitschrift in der Hand, die Sie nicht nur anschauen, sondern auch hören können. Mithilfe der beiliegenden CD. Damit Ihnen nicht das Hören beim Sehen vergeht, sollten Sie diese beim Lesen abspielbereit halten. Und immer, wenn Ihnen ein Ohr vor Augen kommt, nämlich dieses , den entsprechenden Track abspielen. Viele davon sind übrigens exklusiv für sleek entstanden oder noch nie veröffentlicht worden – nicht, daß Sie denken, es handele sich bei unserer CD um einen jener Griffe ins Archiv, wie sie große deutsche Wochenzeitschriften mit sinkender Auflage gern ab und zu tätigen... Und was haben wir unserem Sound an Silence entgegenzusetzen? Schweigen. Langes Schweigen. Schweigen in Themenkonferenzen, das zu intensiven Momenten der Stille und Konzentration aufs Wesentliche führte. Oder das Schweigen derer, die wir als Beitragende für diese Ausgabe nicht gewinnen konnten. Michel Houellebecq zum Beispiel, obwohl wir ihm viel mehr boten als die 10 Euro, die er als Preisträger des Prix Goncourt für Karte und Gebiet erhalten hatte. Vielleicht ist er ja nicht nur als Romanfigur gestorben... obwohl einen der Tod nicht automatisch zum Schweigen verdammen muß; so mancher Künstler ist erst nach seinem Tod gehört worden. Andererseits kann Schweigen eine sehr erhebende Erfahrung sein. Marina Abramovi kann davon ein Liedchen singen – wird sie übrigens auch bald, in der Oper nämlich, die ihr Robert Wilson im Sommer inszenieren wird. Sie ist auch auf unserer CD zu hören und beschreibt dort das Schweigen als pure Energie – gut, dann geben wir jetzt Ruhe.

Annika von Taube

Photo © Maxime Ballesteros.

English

23 Subscribe 24 Imprint 26 Contributors 28 Index 30 Shortcuts 54 Front Row

See/Say Follow in Ai Weiwei’s footsteps

Sound Silence

122

Glimpses into the curious world of sound-making in art

Dark Pop In fashion and music, women celebrate a return to the dark side

104

White Noise

116

Fashion photography by Markus Pritzi

116

New Wave Still-life photography by Martin Klimas

122 The Dude

Fashion photography by Markus Jans

Annika von Taube 18

sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

136

Festival Girl, Festival Boy Fashion photography by Leon Mark

152

Enjoy The Silence Fashion photography by Màrton Perlaki

164 Ghosts

Death can’t silence artists who really have something to say

170

192 164

Still

Still-life photography by Reinhard Hunger

176

Oh Lord, Won’t You Buy Me… A musical legend revisited

180

136

Don’t Look Now No buzz, no bang at this year’s Venice Biennale

186

Mistress of Metaphysics Marina Abramovi kept silent for months – now she will sing…

192 Secrets

Gillian Wearing knows why people just can’t keep them

195 Inventory:

196 Berlin People & Places Gallery Weekend Berlin, Gilbert & George, Raymond Pettibon, Based in Berlin et al. 210 Studio Visit 214 The Collector – A serialized novel 218 The Further Chronicles of Anthony Haden-Guest 220 Further Reading 226 Preview 20

180 170

sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

Music to your eyes! These sporty, eighties-style shield shades have long been known as the »Yoko Ono sunglasses«. Ono has made the Porsche Design classic her trademark by appearing in them regularly since 1979, and wearing them on the cover of Rolling Stone Magazine or the album sleeves of »Yes, I’m a witch« (2007) and »It’s alright« (1982). Now the Porsche Design P’8479 shades have been re-released and revamped using modern materials like beta-titanium for lightweight flexibility. And they can be yours if you sign up for a subscription. Sounds like music to your ears, right?

Irgendwann hieß diese Sonnenbrille, ein Klassiker aus dem Hause Porsche Design mit der Modellbezeichnung P’8479, nur noch »die Yoko Ono-Brille«. Ono trägt sie nämlich ständig, und das schon seit 1979. Auf dem Plattencover von »It’s alright« (1982) und auch auf dem von »Yes, I’m a witch« (2007), und auf einem legendären Titelbild des Rolling Stone. Genau dieses Brillenmodell ist jetzt wieder aufgelegt worden. Ein bisschen moderner ist sie jetzt, wegen des neuartigen, leichteren Materials (Beta-Titan), aber ansonsten immer noch die Yoko Ono-Brille! Wollen Sie so eine? Können Sie haben. Mit einem Abonnement von sleek. Klingt das nicht schön?

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sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

Contributors

Axel Boman Axel Boman really is a »top soundboy from Stockholm« as he self-ironically described himself on Soundcloud. Signed with DJ Koze’s Pampa Records and having recently founded his own label Studio Barnhus, he’s a regular on the international turntable circuit. Anyone who’s met him considers him one of the nicest people they’ve ever met and certainly one of the nicest people ever likely to grace the music scene. We can only confirm that. Check out the track he created exclusively for sleek under his moniker Man Tear (with Johan Jonason), inspired by and accompanying the fashion spread by Leon Mark.

Leon Mark London-based photographer Leon Mark works with Polaroid. The subdued and bleached colours of his photos suggest that the images were captured a long time ago and have all but faded from memory. But Mark only publishes his work in the most contemporary publications such as Dazed & Confused, i-D, L’Officiel Hommes, and Candy. For sleek, he staged his models offside the hustle and bustle of a music festival.

Reinhard Hunger Nomen est omen certainly applies to Reinhard Hunger (his last name being the German word for appetite) and his profession: the Hamburg-based photographer specializes in still life, and food in particular. At first glance his pictures look like classic Dutch paintings, but on closer inspection they are packed with humorous inconsistencies. For sleek, Herr Hunger has created some visual feasts that are far from still.

Justus Köhncke As a musician, Justus Köhncke (who is also increasingly successful as a visual artist) has inspired music writers to neologise wildly in an attempt to define his style. Instead of trying to find yet another term to suitably describe his musical output, we’d just like to point out that what marks his exclusive track for this issue, inspired by and accompanying the fashion spread by Markus Pritzi, is something of a rare commodity in the musical realms he occupies: humour. If you don’t speak German, the track’s vocal core – a remark made during Pritzi’s shoot, and probably just about every fashion shoot in the world – might be lost on you though: »Mach’ ma’ Haarspray«.

Left Photo© Haley Dekle.

Michael Azerrad, Michael Cragg and Rob Young We might know a thing or two about art, and maybe even a bit about Sound Art, but sound itself? We solicited the help of three experts. Since we have no idea how familiar our art and fashion-minded readers are with the world of music, we thought we should probably add that these are some of the world’s top music critics: Michael Azerrad is probably best known as author of Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground 1981-1991 (2001) and

Come As You Are: The Story of Nirvana (1993); Michael Cragg writes for The Guardian, Dazed & Confused and the BBC; and Rob Young is editor at large of The Wire, writes for numerous publications, and his most recent book is Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music (2010). They comment on some of the sound works in our »Sound Silence« feature presenting a wide range of sound making – some of it music to their ears, some of it little more than aural abuse.

sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

Index ABC Acne, www.acnestudios.com, +45 33 140030

Kata Szegedi, www.kataszegedi.com, +36 30 3760404

Anda, www.andaemi.com, +36 1 33 72354

Lanvin, www.lanvin.com, +33 1 44713335

Aquascutum, www.aquascutum.co.uk, +44 20 7938 1010

Lee, www.lee.com, Absolution PR, +49 89 5488960

Balenciaga Eyewear, Safilo Group, Leitner PR, +43 1 4029440 Beyond Retro, www.beyondretro.com, +44 20 77299001

MNO

Boss Black, www.hugoboss.com, Network PR, +49 89 20001180

Marni, www.marni-international.com, Karla Otto, +39 02 6556981

Boss Orange Eyewear, Safilo Group, Leitner PR, +43 1 4029440

Max Mara, www.maxmara.com, Schrader Consult, +49 89 46134540

Burberry Prorsum, www.burberry.com, Loews, +49 89 21937910

Mihara Yasuhiro, www.miharayasuhiro.jp, Purple PR London,

Camper, www.camper.com, +49 211 82823713

+44 207 4399888

CAT, www.catfootwear.com

Missoni, www.missoni.com, +39 02 6556981

Carven, www.carven.com, +33 1 44610207

Miu Miu, www.miumiu.com, Loews, +49 89 21937910

Cacharel, www.cacharel.com, +33 1 42683888

Nudie Jeans, www.nudiejeans.com, Articus & Stewens, +49 89 28729730

Celine, www.celine.com, +33 1 55890792 Chanel, www.chanel.com, +49 40 8009120

PRS

Christopher Shannon, www.christophershannon.co.uk, I PR London,

Paul Smith, www.paulsmith.co.uk, +44 20 72576664

+44 20 77390272

Paule Ka, www.pauleka.fr, +33 1 40290306

Converse, www.converse.com, Schröder und Schömbs, +49 30 3499640

Prada, www.prada.com, Loews, +49 89 21937910 Perret Schaad, www.perretschaad.com, +49 30 74749957

DEF

Rellik, www.relliklondon.co.uk, +44 20 89620089

DKNY, www.dkny.com, +1 212 7891618

Roland Mouret, www.rolandmouret.com, TCS UK, +44 20 79385048

Fay, www.fay.it, Fay Showroom, +49 211 458590

Stella McCartney, www.stellamccartney.com, +44 203 4021 925

Fred Perry, www.fredperry.com, Häberlein & Mauerer, +49 30 7262080 GHI

TUV

G-Star, www.g-star.com, Schoeller & von Rehlingen, +49 40 45 01 83-16

Tiffany, www.tiffany.com, Stefanie Wirnshofer PR, +49 89 39296472

Givenchy, www.givenchy.com, +33 1 44315000

Use unused, www.use.co.hu, +36 1 2158445

Gotti by Anda Atellier, www.andaemi.com, +36 1 3372354 H&M, www.h&m.com, +49 40 30393723

WXYZ

Hermès, www.hermes.com, +33 1 40174706

Weekday, www.weekday.com, Agency V, +49 30 42019200 Wrangler, www.wrangler.com, Schröder und Schömbs, +49 30 3499640

JKL

Yves Saint Laurent, www.ysl.com, +33 1 56626400

Jil Sander, www.jilsander.com, Loews, +49 89 21937910

Yohji Yamamoto, www.yohjiyamamoto.co.jp, +33 1 42789411

CD©: 1 AI WEIWEI Sound of footsteps on Ai Weiwei’s Sunflower Seeds, Tate, London 2011. Courtesy and © Tate, London. 2 ALLORA & CALZADILLA Excerpt from audio component of Algorithm, 2011. Presented by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Composed by Jonathan Bailey, produced by the artists and J. Bailey. 3 NIK NOWAK Pulsator, 2011. Composed utilising audio sculpture Panzer, 2011. 4 GRÖNLUND NISUNEN Excerpt from audio component of Untitled Still Waters, 2003. 5 AIDS-3D Janet Jonas, 2009. From the »World Dreams« collection, 2009. 6 NEPTUNE (Kevin Emil Micka, Mark William Pearson, Jason Sidney Sanford) Channeling, 2011. Improvisation with three-person string instrument, performed exclusively for sleek, recorded at Aviary, Boston. www.neptuneband.com. 7 JACOB DAHL JÜRGENSEN and SIMON DYBBROE MØLLER Excerpt from Flotsam and Jetsam, from the album »Flotsam and Jetsam«, produced in cooperation with Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, released on Apparent Extent, 2011. 8 MIKE TONKIN and ANNA LIU Excerpt from the wind playing with The Singing Ringing Tree, 2009. Produced by Sally Rodgers for Rodgers and Jones, amancalledadam.com. 9 MAIA URSTAD Excerpt from audio component of performance Cleopatra’s Needles, 2000. Saxophones: Bl!ndman Quartet. Maia Urstad is published by Touch Music [MCPS] 10 ALEX TYSON and VIVIAN CACCURI Excerpt from audio component of Submersed Songs, 2008. Recorded by V. Caccuri, edited by A. Tyson. 11 ZIMOUN Excerpt from audio component of 25 woodworms, 2009. 12 MAT COLLISHAW Excerpt from audio component of Total Recall, 2009. 13 JOHN BOCK Excerpt from audio component of Ohr-Walachei, 2011. Recorded by Anders Sune Berg. 14 CIRCLESQUARE (Jeremy Shaw), excerpt from 7 Minutes, 2003. 15 RUIN Satan Comes, Satan Leaves, from the album »1 / 2 Skull«, 2011. Released by VivaHateRecords, distributed by Cargo. www.ruinofficial.com 16 A KILLS B Excerpt from audio performance Yellow Monochrome, 2008. 17 DOUGLAS HENDERSON Excerpt from Music for 100 Carpenters, 2009. Sound recorded by Aaron Nevezi, mixed and mastered by D. Henderson. 18 BILLY CHILDISH AND THE SPARTAN DREGGS The Ocean River Runs Around The Edge, 2011. Written by Childish / Palmer, published by Mute Song. © Billy Childish and The Spartan Dreggs. 19 KARL HOLMQVIST Excerpt from Another War is Possible, 2010. From the album »The Weeping Wall Inside Us All. Readings by Karl Holmqvist«, © Neu 008, 2010. 20 ART CRITICS ORCHESTRA Die Straße ist naß, 2011. Original by Peter Weibel & Hotel Morphilia Orchester. © Braunsteiger / E gg / Weibel 1978. 21 CARSTEN NICOLAI future past perfect pt. 1 (sononda), 2010. 07:24 min. Published by Carsten Nicolai / Budde Musikverlag. Courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin, and The Pace Gallery, New York. 22 SUSAN STENGER Remix excerpt of Verse 2 of Soundtrack for an Exhibition, 2006. Production © 2009, © Susan Stenger 2006. 23 NINETEEN THIRTEEN Excerpt from Hurricane Noel, 2010. Produced by Victor DeLorenzo, engineered by Steve Hamilton. Performance © DEFENDIMUSICS (BMI). © Janet C. Schiff (ASCAP). 24 JUSTUS KÖHNCKE Mach ma’ Haarspray, 2011. Exclusive composition for photo spread by Markus Pritzi. 25 MAN TEAR Upside Down, 2011. Published by Copywright Control. Written and produced by Axel Boman and Johan Jonason in Studio Barnhus 2011, exclusively for photo spread by Leon Mark. 26 MARINA ABRAMOVI Audio excerpt of interview for sleek magazine, May 2011. 27 MORSE CODE A message to our readers

Shortcuts

sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

Shortcuts

The Silence of Sound

A mind-deafeningly soundless cacophony of quietly roaring, ear-splittingly subdued, silently blaring, screamingly inaudible, voicelessly screaming and blatantly noiseless things to help you tune into this issue’s theme.

Fig. 1

Quiet? Not quite.

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Fig. 2

Fig. 3

Some sound works are less about emitting sound than collecting or chocking it. Which doesn’t mean they don’t rock!

Well, the surroundings of this sculpture by Stefan Marx, located in the middle of a beautiful landscape garden turned contemporary sculpture park, might seem quiet, but actually Marx helps to fill houses and homes with music rather than stillness: he designs album sleeves and printed matter for the record label Smallville, making their wares only more attractive. Stefan Marx, »The Houses and Homes seem quiet«, Gerisch-Skulpturenpark Neumünster, November 2010, photo © Marianne Obst.

Fig. 1 Nina Canell, A bit…, and Uttermost Beat of the Heart, 2011. Courtesy Galerie Wien Lukatsch, Berlin. Fig. 2 On view at Automobil Forum Berlin until 5 September, 2011, Ars Electronica’s »Poetry of Motion« exhibition features Leo Peschta’s Chronograph (2010), which engraves the acoustic atmosphere of its environment onto the object on which it’s mounted. Photo © Claudia Larcher. Fig. 3 Susan Philipsz’s work is visually reduced and aurally opulent (here: view of »We Shall Be All«, MCA Chicago. Photo © Nathan Keay). Next, she will make water cry »Seven Tears« at Ludwig Forum, Aachen, 10 July – 25 September, 2011. Fig. 4 Kitty Kraus, Ohne Titel, 2008. Ink, ice, audio equipment. Courtesy the artist and Galerie NEU, Berlin.

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sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

For the Record

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Contrary to general fears, vinyl never gave way to CDs. Today, the revival of records is not only breathing new life into the music industry, but has also become a popular medium in art. An exhibition (which will include some of the works presented in these pages) at the ICA Boston has collected a record-breaking amount of about 100 record-related works: »The Record: Contemporary Art and Vinyl«, ICA Boston, until 5 September, 2011. Fig. 1 David Ellis, Mubarak, 2011. Album covers, resin, wood, 31.7 × 106.7 × 31.7 cm. Courtesy Joshua Liner Gallery, New York. Fig. 2 Jeroen Diepenmaat, Pour des dents d’un blanc éclatant et saines, 2005. Record players, vinyl records, taxidermied birds, and sound. Dimensions variable. © t he artist. Fig. 3 Dani Gal, Historical Records Archive (detail), 2005 - ongoing. Courtesy the artist and Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zurich. Fig. 4 Fatimah Tuggar, Turntable (detail), 1996. Courtesy the artist. Fig. 5 David Byrne, More Songs About Buildings and Food, 1978. Polaroid SX-70 prints (photomontage for album cover), 228.6 × 228.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Fig. 6 Gregor Hildebrandt, Kassettenschallplatte, 2008. Diameter 30 cm, 43 × 4 2 cm, Courtesy Wentrup, Berlin. Fig. 7 Sean Duffy, Burn Out Sun, 2003. 20 LP records, glue, metal tripod, 106.7 × 83.8 × 83.8 cm. Collection of Debra and Dennis Scholl, Miami Beach. Courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects. Photo © Gene Ogami. Fig. 8 Christian Marclay, Recycled Records, 1983. Collaged vinyl records, diameter 25.4 cm. © t he artist, courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York. Fig. 9 Jean Shin, Sound Wave, 2007. Melted 78 rpm records on wooden armature. 158.5 × 365.8 × 365.8 cm.

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Hearsee

Illuminated silence

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It’s past midnight. The world out there is dark and silent. Nothing disturbs your thoughts as you sit at your desk by the window. You like working at night, the darkness protects your thoughts and helps you focus. And why would you need any light anyway? Your notebook, the Sony VAIO CA, comes with an illuminated keyboard, and its colour is so bright it almost glows in the dark. In fact, it has a fluorescent effect when exposed to light. This 14” monitor beauty comes in five colours: pink, orange, green, and black and white if you prefer things more classical. It also comes with all kinds of technical improvements, but although we know that it’s inner beauty that really counts – it’s the colours that have us hooked, even at night. www.sony.de/vaio

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Fig. 1 Through investigating objects that demand human interaction, via touch, sound or movement, this exhibition explores the emotional, physical and social impact they have on modern day life »Talk to Me: Design and the Communication between People and Objects«, MoMA, New York, 24 July - 7 November, 2011. Evan Roth, Graffiti Taxonomy: AEIOU (detail), Paris 2009. Two-color screen print, 90.8 × 45.1 cm. © t he artist. Fig. 2 Who knew that fridges were so talkative! Mark Leckey, GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction, 2011. Performance and exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London 2011. Photo © Mark Blower. Fig. 3 Video might have killed the radio star but it definitely boosted the production of moving image in art, as »The Art of Pop Video« demonstrates. If you miss the show at the Museum for applied arts in Cologne, until 3 July, 2011, don’t worry: the wonderful catalogue comes with a DVD comprising the best pop videos of all times! Fig. 4 »Everything« is a series of events at ICA, throwing together upcoming artists, designers, musicians and everyone creative for a stimulating evening of performance, experimentation and creativity. For the next event, visit www.ica.org.uk. Photo © Benedict Johnson, taken at the event on 11 June, 2011. Fig. 5 Soundfair is a Berlin based project with a simple but rarely pursued aim: »exhibiting music«. A series of musical presentations in collaboration with gallery VeneKlasen / Werner in Berlin has featured such eminent music artists and art musicians as Arto Lindsay, Olaf Nicolai and (pictured with Hidden Track, 2011) Bo Christian Larsson. Next in line is Anri Sala. www.soundfair.net. Photo © Dorothea Fiedler, courtesy the artist and Soundfair.

Photography Attila Hartwig

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Listening to the Devil

A lone figure with a suitcase seems to play a solitary game of hide and seek in the twilit ruins of an abandoned U.S. listening station located on Berlin’s highest elevation, the Teufelsberg (»Devil’s Mountain«), which is actually nothing but a pile of WWII rubble. Shingo Yoshida’s cul de sac (Devil’s Mountain), 2011, is a beautiful homage to the crumbling tower nestled in the Grunewald forest, but we’re not sure if it makes us want to visit, especially if David Lynch’s plans to build a transcendental university on the premises go through.

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Festival Fashion

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Fig. 11 Fig. 6

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It’s festival season! If you want to attend any other festival than California’s Coachella, it’s time to pack your wellies, raincoats and other such practical stuff. Or follow our suggestions… they’ll certainly make festival life easier for you.

Fig. 5

Fig. 1 Bless, Headphones N°37, 2009. Available in men and women’s versions, they come with pockets to hold cash, keys and other valuables. Fig. 2 Boom! Peng! Whack! These shoes are made for shouting. Converse collaboration with DC Comics, www.converse.com Fig. 3 No need for mind-altering substances with this planetary dress by Stephanie Franzius (print design by Bureau Mario Lombardo). And if you get dirty (literally) it won’t even show! From the Spring-Summer collection. Fig. 4 This origami-inspired bottle cooler by Mathias van de Walle for Veuve Clicquot is cool, practically weightless and folds completely flat! Fig. 5 If you want the fabric you wear to be made by a fashion designer, why not apply the same standard to the fabric you sit on? Reality Studio, CODOMO Patch Blanket, Autumn-Winter 2011. Fig. 6 For at least three seasons now girls have been following in Kate’s footsteps – as far as rubber boots are concerned. In the future you’ll wear these: Ilse Jacobsen, Hornback rubber boots, Spring-Summer 2011. Fig. 7 Who could have more expertise in rough-weather clothing than the Scandinavians? Norwegian Rain, black Raincho, from the »Collection I«. Photo © Bent René Synnevaag. Fig. 8 »Very Important Plectrums« is a charity project that finds Ben Sherman partnering with Trekstock, an initiative in aid of teenagers with cancer. To find out how to get a plectrum signed by one of the gods of pop (Mando Diao, Coldplay, Paul Weller...), visit www.benshermanvip.com. Fig. 9 Record a message, spoken or sung, on www.trikoton.com. The frequency and modulations of your voice will be converted into binary codes for knitting patterns – if your voice is unique, why shouldn’t your garments be? Fig. 10 A collaboration between Melissa and Gaetano Pesce, you can cut these rubber boots to suit your needs. Fig. 11 Morphine Lips, lip balm with a tingling and numbing twist – either no one or everyone will want to kiss you. Fig. 12 What’s the best way to arrive at a festival, at least a British one? Like a rocket man of course! To great fanfare, with the LED lights blinking and the Union Jack on the glass-top roof glowing, and all the space you could possibly need – the MINI Rocketman is still a concept car, but will hopefully be reality very soon.

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Lay low and listen

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Marc Anthony

There’s no need to brave the smelly, swaying festival crowds this summer – if you’ve got this set up in your living room you can recline and rewind as you please. Fig. 1 Mikal Hameed, Dela knoll, 2010. Sound sculpture. Photo © Tono Radvany. Fig. 2 Avant Garde Acoustic, Shiny Citrine Orange Horn loudspeakers from the Trio series, 2010. 95 × 167 cm. Fig. 3 Delia Gonzalez and Gavin Russom, Fainting Couch 2, 2006. Mixed media sculpture with sound, 122 × 170 × 30.5 cm. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin. Fig. 4 Hermès La Maison, Amazone lounge chair, from the Matières collection 2011.

40 G a s s t r a s s e 2 22761 H a m b u rG t 040 8907747 w w w. m a r c a n tHo n y. d e

sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

Michael SailStorfer

Aural augmentation Fig. 1

Special edition

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Fig. 1 A car turned up-side down and playing 15 nostalgia-inducing tunes selected by Sascha Weidner leads the way to his exhibition at C/O Berlin and is the subject of an edition: Sascha Weidner, Golf II, Berlin, 2011. 30 × 45 cm, Ed. 20, € 390, available at www.co-berlin.info Fig. 2 »Part ornament, part warning sign«, David Shrigley says about his Wall Mounted Ear, 2011. Little & Large Editions, Ed. 40, € 495. www.littleandlargeeditions.com. Photo © Fred Pedersen. Fig. 3 These works (CD-print, LP, series of 9 unique pieces, 52.9 × 92.4 cm each), the result of a collaboration between Holger Hiller and Albert Oehlen, are too beautiful to play. Therefore, if you purchase one, you’ll get a separate audio track. Courtesy the artists and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin.

Special edition for diStanz publiShing Material: Styrofoam, fiberglass, polyester resin, iron, concrete ForMat: 88 × 30 × 15 cm edition: 10 (each in a different color) Price: 4.400 € now available at diStanz.coM

diStanz 43

BOROS

sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

www.artberlincontemporary.com

Partnering to great fanfare

Clockwise from top left: Terence Koh, Marina Abramovi , Daphne McGuinness; Chloë Sevigny; Yoko Ono, David Rockefeller Jr; Martin Winterkorn, Lucy Liu; Glenn Lowry; Kim Cattrall, Patti Smith, Klaus Biesenbach; Cindy Sherman, Agnes Gund, Katharina Sieverding; Martha Wainwright; Stefano Tonchi, James Franco; LCD Soundsystem. Photo © Billy Farrell Agency.

The new cooperation between MoMA New York and Volkswagen, a long-term scheme designed to foster innovation and support exhibitions and education programs, is the first partnership of this scale between the prestigious institution and a public corporation. The event celebrated in honour of this spared few expenses, and brought out the highest order of celebrities and museum support-

ers. Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1, proved a lively host, chatting with guests like Yoko Ono, Kim Cattrall, the inevitable James Franco, and Lucy Liu, who pulled up in a new Volkswagen vehicle to great fanfare. Terence Koh snuggled up to Marina Abramovi as Martha Wainwright serenaded the guests, just before LCD Soundsystem’s James Murphy took over the decks.

7. – 11. September 2011

Berlin Gallery Weekend

sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

On the QT

Smart drivers don’t tend to be swashbuckling types who like drawing attention to themselves. Smart drivers prefer subtlety, understatement, the small things in life. Which is why they have such an excellent eye for detail. And it’s the details that count, after all. Take the new smart service, »smart BRABUS tailor made« with its palette of customizing options for things like paintwork, seat covers and cabrio roofing. A customized smart doesn’t have to be as in-your-face as the disco ball version which the music-video art-performance quartet Apparatjik re46

cently toured in (here in front of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin), or the illustrator Sarah Illenberger’s smart, which was plastered with thousands of cardboard boxes. It can be far less ostentatious (and more roadworthy). With the paintwork, for example, where you can choose from literally thousands of colour shades, which means you stand a good chance of picking one that no one else has. Not that anyone else may ever notice – but then the quietest sounds often make the most beautiful music. 47

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sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

Beautifully RUINed! A Very Special Edition for sleek by Martin Eder

Dirt

Sweat

Achtung! If you’re a metal fan, kitten lover, or once-in-a-lifetime-chance capturer, this one is for you! Those who wonder about the dark side in Martin Eder’s paintings of kittens, pugs, crows and naked girls shouldn’t forget that he’s also the mastermind behind the band RUIN (see page 83) whose droning doom sound combines the morbid intensity of black metal with comatose-inducing electronic sound loops. And as such, he has made this extraordinarily special edition for sleek – for sleek readers, that is. Three of you have the chance to get your hands on one of these T-shirts, each standing for one of the three elements of metal: dirt, sweat and fire. They will sell on a first come first serve-basis – so you know what you have to do!

Martin Eder

sleek edition »Sound /S ilence« Edition of 3 uniquely treated T-shirts: Dirt, Sweat, and Burner, 2011 Handmade, signed on the inside

190

each (shipping within Europe included / € 12,- worldwide)

Burner Photographer Attila hartwig

To order, send an email to sophie@sleekmag.com 48

Model Denise Palma Ferrante

Art|42|Basel|15–19|6|11

Berlin Art Guide

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Enrico Centonze, Silja Leifsdottir, Despina Stokou, Grimmuseum

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Berlin Art Guide

A curAted selection of Berlin’s most influentiAl And exciting Art spots

sponsored By

Javier Peres of Peres Projects

Martin Kwade of Kwadrat

Gallerist Johann König

Gallerist Guido Baudach

Vernissage | June 14, 2011 | by invitation only Art Basel Conversations | June 15 to 19, 2011 | 10am to 11am Art Parcours | June 15 to 19, 2011 Follow us on Facebook and Twitter | www.facebook.com/artbasel | www.twitter.com/artbasel The International Art Show – Die Internationale Kunstmesse Art 42 Basel, MCH Swiss Exhibition (Basel) Ltd., CH-4005 Basel Fax +41 58 206 26 86, info@artbasel.com, www.artbasel.com

147

With exclusive photographs by Maxime Ballesteros 51 147

Wirt’s House

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Wirt’s House

Photography by Hadley Hudson If there’s one thing all cultures of the world have in common, it’s the urge to get together to drink and chat in designated locations. In each culture, though, these locations look different and are marked by a specific style and a set of rules sometimes inscrutable for those outside the immediate group. In your typical German Wirtshaus (tavern or pub) one of these rules is to keep things nice and gemütlich (cosy) by playing only the sort of music that would never be played in any other self-respecting nocturnal venue. But who said that those rules can’t be broken? Jägermeister, producer of a cordial legendary in Germany, is doing exactly that. The »Jägermeister Wirtshaus Tour« brings together traditional pubs and advanced indie and electro acts such as We Have Band, The Subs or Peaches, merging two worlds that normally keep a wide 52

berth. But it’s precisely the clash of apparent polar opposites – old and young, urban and rural, gemütlich and cool – that creates an awareness for the specific traits of each scene. One of the best things about this concept is that audience and performer meet at eye level, because there is no stage (except for a bar counter which might occasionally serve as such) to separate them. Take Peaches. More obviously associated with the opulent wasteland of Berlin’s Berghain club, in the cosy environment of a Stuttgart pub her vibrant energy comes across much more directly. Whenever a major event calls for a drink – birth, death, breakup, promotion – people gather at the local pub. It’s the place where they share the essential things in life. The Jägermeister Wirtshaus Tour is true to this spirit. www.das-wirtshaus.de 53

Front row

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Front Row The season’s most outstanding shows at just one glance!

Calvin Klein Collection

Thom Browne

It seems as if Francisco Costa is determined to tip fashion editors over the edge by giving them no opportunity to use words other than »neutral«, »minimal«, and the omnipresent »simplicity«. But don’t worry, collegas – simplicity is the new complexity.

An ambivalent phenomenon, Thom Browne is held responsible for bringing back formal attire to men’s fashion while at the same time considered unsellable. Maybe his models stepping out of astronaut suits in a fantastic Bermudas-and-socks-no-no-combination commented on that.

From the 2011 Spring-Summer collection.

www.calvinklein.com

www.thombrowne.com

From the 2011 Spring-Summer collection.

Front row

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Max Azria

Junya Watanabe

Since taking over Hervé Leger in 2007, Max Azria’s work under his own name has become more subtle and less body-con. »Simplicity« is what the fashion press lauds him for, but what’s simple about a collection that can so effectively capture the imagination as this one did ours?

We didn’t know Paris was by the sea not the Seine. Anyway, this is how we want our beau on the bateau this summer, clad in urban sailing gear with a dash of Marseille and Popeye. Considering this is a Watanabe collection, it’s a lot more real than surreal.

From the 2011 Spring-Summer collection.

www.maxazria.com

From the 2011 Spring-Summer collection.

Track N°01:

See / Say

01: Ai Weiwei – Sound of Ai Weiwei’s footsteps on his Sunflower Seeds, Tate, London 2011.

English

Deutsch

Ai Weiwei has never feared the consequences of outspoken social criticism. On his blog, shut down two years ago, he underlined his belief that the core value of an artist is to express oneself freely and to fight for the freedom of others. Weiwei is still being silenced by the Chinese authorities, who have yet to issue an official statement regarding his whereabouts or the reason for his detainment. In this section, we usually commission an illustration of a quote by a notable figure to introduce the theme of each issue. This quarter, however, the pages reserved for that particular feature will be kept empty. Silent. And yet, you can hear and maybe even see something. Track No. 1 on the CD accompanying this issue features the sound of Ai Weiwei’s footsteps walking on the bed of 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds installed at the Tate’s Turbine Hall in London last October. This sound is dedicated to all the activists who are following in his footsteps.

Ai Weiwei hat sich nie den Mund verbieten lassen. Er erhob die Stimme und ergriff das Wort für andere, wenn sie es selber nicht konnten. Immer wieder betonte er auf seinem Blog, der vor zwei Jahren der Zensur zum Opfer viel, was er als Kern des Künstlerseins begriff: die Freiheit, sich selber auszudrücken, und für die Freiheit der anderen zu kämpfen. Zum Erscheinungszeitpunkt dieser Ausgabe versucht die chinesische Obrigkeit immer noch, Ai Weiwei zum Schweigen zu bringen. Doch es ist nicht still um ihn. An dieser Stelle findet sich normalerweise die Illustration eines zum Heftthema passenden Zitats – sprechende Bilder, sozusagen. In der vorliegenden Ausgabe bleiben diese Seiten leer. Hören können Sie trotzdem etwas, vielleicht sogar sehen: Der erste Track auf der dieser Ausgabe beiliegenden CD ist die Aufnahme von Ai Weiweis Schritten auf seinem Bett aus 100 Millionen Sonnenblumenkernen aus Porzellan, das letztes Jahr den Boden der Londoner Tate bedeckte. Ai Weiwei selbst mag gerade schweigen. Aber wir danken all jenen, die in seine Fußstapfen treten.

sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

We hear all kinds of sounds every day: music, traffic, laughing, screaming, sounds both beautiful and terrible. In art, it’s no different. Not every work that emits sound can be defined as Sound Art, and on the other hand, it is impossible to give a full definition of all that Sound Art embodies, so we won’t bother trying. But on the following pages you’ll find some very diverse examples of sound making in art, from artist bands to munching woodworms, and corresponding audio samples on the CD accompanying this issue – all seasoned with comments by some of the world’s leading music critics.

sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

Track N°02:

Allora & Calzadilla

Many of us know the feeling of putting a bank card into an ATM machine and praying it will deliver what we need. Oh, the joy when it does, and oh, the despair when it doesn’t. An ATM currently installed in the body of a pipe organ at the U.S. Pavilion in Venice, aptly translates these feelings into sound. Each transaction causes the organ to emit a sound – sometimes menacing and atonal, sometimes hymn-like. However, »Algorithm«, as the work by Allora & Calzadilla is titled, is blind to the balance of those who use it. Whereas in math-

ematics, an algorithm describes a clearly defined set of rules for calculating a function, this machine is based on random programming. Still, the comments it makes are universal in nature: on the worship of wealth and our inability to deal with money in an emotionally detached manner. 02: Allora & Calzadilla – excerpt from audio component of Algorithm, composed by Jonathan Bailey, 2011.

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, Algorithm, 2011. Installation view U.S. Pavilion, Venice Biennale. Presented by the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Photo © Andrew Bordwin.

Track N°03:

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Nik NoWak

The world of high-fidelity sound systems is a universe in and of itself. The market spits out products uniting the latest in state-of-the-art sound technology and high-end glossy design, perfecting the apparatus of recording and listening in living rooms. After all, these fetish objects must also be aesthetically pleasing; the superiority of form and function needs to be clearly visible. Nick Nowak comments on our habits of consumption with his manipulated hybrids of SUVs and giant mobile boom-boxes. His kinetic devices for recording sound and giving it off, are absurdly impractical – maybe that’s why his tank looks a bit like a white elephant.

03: Nik Nowak – Pulsator composed on Panzer, 2011 »Pulsator takes inspiration from the ›christening‹ of his Panzer tank, a caterpillartracked sound system steered by Nowak from a sonic control cockpit. A champagne bottle is smashed against the hull, and the tank is jerked out of its sub-bass snoring. System startup begins with menacing digital crackle and hum, until a tiny piano sample ushers in some barbarian hip-hop beats amid a flurry of skip-tracer loops and noise-shrapnel. Finally the ignition fires up as the Panzer starts its mission. US tank drivers in the Middle East crank out Death Metal in their cabs while on duty; Nowak’s metal music machine generates its own brutalising aural assault.« Rob Young

Nik Nowak, Panzer, 2011. Mini dumper, sound, mixed media, 340 × 1 40 × 165 cm.

Track N°04:

Track N°05:

Grönlund Nisunen

Aids-3d

Water can heal, but it can also be used as an instrument of torture. The most agonising torture method is said to be the regular and continuous f low of individual droplets of water onto the victim’s forehead. The effect water can have on us also depends on the sound it makes. There are even CDs with water sounds for relaxation, mostly of waves gently rolling onto a sandy beach. But the sound of water can also be very unnerving. An installation by Grönlund Nisunen plays on the ambivalence of watery sounds. In a dark and acoustically dampened space, water drips from the ceiling into three circular alu-

minium pools filled with water. Underwater microphones record and amplify the sound. What at first seems like the ideal setting for meditation gradually takes on a menacing feel, that suggests being trapped in a flowstone cave and not knowing how to get out.

04: Grönlund Nisunen – composed excerpt from audio component of Untitled Still Waters, 2003.

The origin of »AIDS-3D«, the name of the artist duo Daniel Keller and Nik Kosmas, is allegedly that Keller’s mum, a branding consultant, used a proprietary algorithm to generate it based on their mutual interests in state-of-the-art technology and social activism. On their homepage two links lead to works in two different media – »JPG« and »MP3« – the creation of which is ultimately based on the same tools (and a healthy dollop of irony). But Keller and Kosmas are no computer nerds. Their technical skills are average at best – and deliberately poor at times. But their ability to worship the cheesy and degrade the sacred is unsurpassed. And thanks to sampling there’s no need for them to make everything themselves. This goes for their music and their art. Take these fountains, deco sculptures from a garden centre that celebrate water as the origin of life while mocking our inability to save the planet’s resources.

05: AIDS-3D – Janet Jonas, 2009. »Some pieces of music emerge calmly, swirling out slowly and drawing you into their world with a gentle hand. Janet Jonas is not one of those songs. Opening with thumping drum claps, machine gun beats and an oddly chopped and skewed vocal sample, it’s a visceral, almost joyfully aggressive burst of music. When the inevitable calm does arrive it does so via some creepy, slow-motion voices overlapping a backward synth line, to create the feeling of being sucked back into the song’s dark core. It’s almost a relief when the song splutters to an end but for those two minutes it’s like being transported into a beautiful nightmare.« Michael Cragg

Grönlund Nisunen, Untitled Still Waters, 2003. Water, pumps, sound equipment, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view Göteborg Biennale for Contemporary Art, Gothenburg 2003. Photo © Tommi Grönlund.

AIDS-3D, Clockwise: Aztec Open Back, Thalia Wishing Well, Harmonia, 2010. From the »World Community Grid Water Features« series, dimensions variable.

Track N°06:

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Neptune

When played on a piano tuned according to today’s standards, Bach’s famous »Well-Tempered Clavier« sounds quite different to how it would have sounded in Bach’s day, when instruments were tuned in the »well-tempered« mode to bring out the individual characteristics of each key. But what does this have to do with the band Neptune? Well, this Boston group are known for making their own instruments and these resemble conventional ones to hugely varying degrees. For some reason a lot of people, at least in the Western hemisphere, think that a piano is a piano – that a musical instrument can only be considered as such if it conforms to a predefined shape. Yet the sound of music has changed and become so diverse over the centuries only because people have created new instruments to play it on. Just as the translation of musical notation into sound is only an interpretation of the original composition, so are our instruments and the way we tune them.

06: Neptune (Kevin Emil Micka, Mark William Pearson, Jason Sidney Sanford) – Channeling, 2011. »This Boston quartet of instrument builders made a contraption especially for sleek, which involves each member donning a belt of guitar strings with a pickup, and chaining themselves together to a central steel triangle with four-metre cables. On Channeling, by leaning in and out to adjusting the tension, they alter pitch and timbre as they bow, strike and pluck, generating a visceral sonic grindhouse effect that scratches deep under the skull. A disturbed hornets’ nest of angry drones leads into a sequence of improvised clangs and thumps, aggravated by microtonal squiggles and twangs from the tortured strings. The mutual interdependence demands a physicality absent from much gallery based sound art.« Rob Young

Performing at Jamaica Pond, Massachusetts 2011. from the Neptune Series, Inkjet prints, 13 × 2 0 cm each. Photo © Mary Flatley.

Track N°07:

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Simon Dybbroe Møller and Jacob Dahl Jürgensen 07: Jacob Dahl Jürgensen and Simon Dybbroe Møller – excerpt from Flotsam and Jetsam, 2011. It’s standard to ask what you would take to a desert island, but have you ever wondered what you would bring back? Simon Dybbroe Møller and Jacob Dahl Jürgensen got together a group of artist friends and went scavenging for flotsam and jetsam on a small volcanic island. The bits of shipwrecks and jettisoned cargo they collected were then used to build musical instruments. None of the participants are musicians, but still they went on to record a session played on the appropriated debris. The experiment is captured on vinyl, and when shown in its entirety, includes an installation of the instruments, a soundtrack and a movie documenting the group’s desert island survival skills.

»There’s been so much stuff made already. It makes sense to just reuse and reconfigure what’s already here, and that’s happening in textiles and architecture. But while creating something out of garbage is a wonderful gesture, can it produce good music? Fortunately, this piece would be nice to listen to even without knowing the story behind it; the foghorn-like tones, the nautical clinking and the see-sawing motif add up to a pleasant and distinctly littoral sensation. It’s a charming piece, and its resourcefulness and invention embody a gentle refusal of the status quo — it’s actually kind of punk rock.« Michael Azerrad

Jacob Dahl Jürgensen and Simon Dybbroe MØller, stills from Flotsam and Jetsam, 2009. DVD, 13.44 min. Partcipating artists: Eleanor Vonne Brown, Kerstin Cmelka, Raphael Danke, Jens Carl Daugbjerg, Michele Di Menna, Daniel Müller-Friedrichsen, Emily Wardill.

Jacob Dahl Jürgensen and Simon Dybbroe MØller, Flotsam and Jetsam, 2009. One of 21 sculptures. Exhibition view Nicolas Krupp, Basel. Photo © Derek Li Wan Po. Courtesy Croy Nielsen and Galerie Kamm, Berlin.

Track N°08:

Track N°09:

Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu

Maia Urstad

In a site-specific performance at Bergenhus Fort in Norway, Urstad takes Cleopatra’s monumental obelisks from ca. 1500 BC as a point of departure to explore the two major manmade phenomena that define historical time: construction and technology. In the performance, a parade of dancers, gymnasts, saxophone players and motorcyclists converge – professionals whose work is all based on rhythm. Some are carrying cassette radios that are then used as building blocks in a modern obelisk, made of technology instead of stone. The cas-

If you happen to be wandering around the bucolic scenery of the Pennine hills overlooking Burnley in Lancashire, you might hear a penetrating choral sound blowing in the wind. Don’t worry, you’re not hallucinating, and no, God is not trying to send you a message. It’s The Singing Ringing Tree that you’re hearing, a 3-metre high construction of galvanized steel erected as part of a series of 21st century landmarks, or »Panopticons«, across East Lancashire to symbolize the

Tonkin Liu, The Singing Ringing Tree, 2009. Photo © Mike Tonkin (left), John Lyons (right).

sette recorders produce a soundscape of processed signals – a mash-up of Morse code, binaural beats, and a cacophony of languages from radio stations around the world. The 50-minute performance begins at dusk and ends at nightfall, and suggests an arcane ritual performed in honour of the god of technology. 09: Maia Urstad – excerpt from audio component of performance Cleopatra’s Needles, 2000.

renaissance of the area. Designed by architects Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu, the tree harnesses the energy of the wind to produce a slightly discordant sound covering a range of several octaves. 08: Excerpt from the wind playing with The Singing Ringing Tree, 2009.

Maia Urstad, stills from video documentation of Cleopatra’s Needles, 2000. Concert-performance at Bergenhus Fortress, Bergen 2000. 100 cassette-radio players, 5 dancers, 30 actors, 12 bikers, 12 veteran gymnasts and the saxophone quartet Bl!ndman Quartet. In collaboration with Svein Ove Kirkhorn (costumes and scenography) and Yngvar Julin (visual direction). Photo © Svein Ove Kirkhorn.

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Alex Tyson and Vivian Caccuri

Zimoun

Alex Tyson’s cross-media experimentations document attempts at visualizing music. In this sound installation, viewers are invited to play their own MP3s through an interactive sound system. But this is not your normal iPod DJ party; koi carps are remixing the tracks. The fish’s movements function as the parameters for mixing a pair of tracks. The animal carries the mashed-up sound around the space and alters its musical layers, modifying them to build continuity between the swimming and the levels of distortion. These can vary

from intense reverberation to a simulation of hearing underwater. Who said that fish were silent!

10: Alex Tyson and Vivian Caccuri – excerpt from audio component of Submersed Songs, 2008.

Alex Tyson and Vivian Caccuri, Submersed Songs, 2008. Multimedia installation, aquarium, Koi fish, digital mapping system, speakers, audio devices, HD video, 150 × 2 00 × 40 cm.

Science knows of about three hundred species of wood-boring insects. At their larval stage, they are commonly referred to as woodworms. Only when the larvae emerge (after two to three years of nothing but eating) and the insects leave the wood (a fatal decision as they will die shortly afterwards), are the characteristic holes created. Prior to seeing them you can hear them, and there are woodworm experts who can distinguish different species by their munching sounds. Sound artist Zimoun’s recording of woodworms at work is »natural«

in that it contains the genuine sound of live woodworms in an actual chunk of wood. But the focused set-up of the piece and the technical precision of the recording result in abstraction, and the crisp audio track is the aural equivalent of watching game through field glasses.

11: Zimoun – excerpt from audio component of 25 woodworms, 2009.

Zimoun, 25 woodworms, 2009. Wood, woodworms, microphone, sound system. Photo © the artist.

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Mat Collishaw

Matt Collishaw’s Total Recall was installed in Sigmund Freud’s study and consulting room, blending right in with the fin-de-siècle atmosphere at the Freud Museum. Somewhat surprisingly, perhaps, considering it comprises three gnarled tree stumps that seemed to have sprung out of a surrealist dream. Emerging from Persian rugs, the stumps double as record players emanating birdsong and woodland ambience. The needles on the records begin at the centre and spiral outwards, mimicking the rings that mark a tree’s age. Or underlining our inability for total recall: with the passing of time and with each recounting of a memory – with or without psychoanalysis – we change, embellish and obfuscate the already refracted vision we have of what happened. The record, by the way, ends with the menacing rattling of chainsaws…

12: Mat Collishaw – excerpt from audio component of Total Recall, 2009. Mat Collish aw, Total Recall 1, 2, and 3, 2009.  Resin, record-decks, 12” vinyl discs,  dimensions variable. Installation in Freud’s study. Installation view »Hysteria«, The Freud Museum, London 2009 / 10.

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John Bock

The slamming of doors is considered a heavy form of noise disturbance. It is generally induced by draughts of air or fits of rage, and less commonly by spiritual infestations. The same goes for windows. But if you encounter skirting boards slamming, you can almost certainly ascribe it to the supernatural. Or to John Bock. His installation Ohr-Walachei [Ear Wallachia] consists of doors, windows, door handles and skirting boards banging and squeaking as if moved by a ghost’s hand, in an otherwise empty gallery space. Apart from being a region of Romania, in German the term »Walachei« also refers to getting lost in the middle of nowhere and wanting to get out of there asap. At the gallery, the installation’s spooky and ceaseless rattling soon becomes nerve-wracking – quite a bold move, then, by both artist and gallerist, to present an installation no one can leave quick enough. 13: John Bock – excerpt from audio component of Ohr-Walachei, 2011.

John Bock, Ohr-Walachei, 2011. Motion-sensitive motors on windows, doors and skirting boards, dimensions variable. Installation view and courtesy Martin Klosterfelde, Berlin, and Anton Kern, New York. Photo © Nick Ash.

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Track N°15:

Jeremy Shaw

RUIN

The moment we discovered our parents’ CD and vinyl collection. The first kiss. The first time we drove a car alone, with the stereo turned all the way up. The soundtrack of our lives is a continuous playlist. Some songs remain, others are valid only for a certain period or a specific moment. Some we share with very few people, others with an entire culture. Jeremy Shaw, the brains behind the band Circlesquare and a visual artist first and foremost, often makes work that tackles ideas of preservation and limbo states, the fleetingness of things, be it feelings, youth, time, songs… He’s more lauded for his art than his music, but critics should take into consideration his ironic approach to music-making – Circlesquare make »Songs About Dancing And Drugs«, but the band’s name derives from a TV series for kids from Christian families.

Jeremy Shaw, 7 Minutes, 2003. Single channel video, 7.00 minutes.

14: Circlesquare (Jeremy Shaw) – 7 Minutes (excerpt), 2003 »Divorced from its place as the soundtrack to video footage, it’s little more than a subdued electronic pop song made by Circlesquare, a musical project which includes Jeremy Shaw. 7 Minutes is a slow-motion night-vision sequence of a girl fight at an outdoor party with this track laid on top. But the music doesn’t illuminate or enhance the film in any interesting way, nor does the film throw new light on the sound. So 7 Minutes is ultimately an artistic failure which would make more sense as a YouTube curio than a gallery piece.« Rob Young

Founded by artist Martin Eder, RUIN’s dark and eerie music has often been described as the sonic expression of Eder’s spectral paintings. And in his music as in his art the abyss is never far away. Eder is interested in the despair, self-abandonment and sound of Black Metal. Musicians like Attila Csihar of Mayhem, Sunn O))) and Jochen Arbeit of Einstürzende Neubauten have contributed to RUIN’s deconstructed pieces. Their new album »Half Skull« was recorded with the Solistenensemble Kaleidoskop, and the album’s artwork deserves a particular mention: the CD’s paper box also contains a physical representation of each of the 12 tracks on a square of paper covered with a thick sediment of different materials like vodka, bone meal, blood, ashes, fat and so on. A black mix of all of these adorns the cover.

15: Ruin - Satan Comes, Satan Leaves, 2011. »It’s obvious to think of an artist’s music as sculptural, but the tones here palpably scythe the air, and the piece progresses by fluctuations in noise rather than harmonic or melodic development, which seems painterly. It’s part of a line of contemporary art music that integrates the digital and the analogue in a harmonious way instead of exploiting the artificiality of the former and the ›warmth‹ of the latter; that distinction is no longer novel, useful or even necessarily true. The piece is a fairly effective reality soundtrack, colouring the moment with a reflective melancholy and subtle notes of darkness.« Michael Azerrad

RUIN & Solistenensemble KALEIDOSKOP at the Volksbühne, Berlin. April 2011. Photo © Elena Panouli.

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A Kills B

In one of their performances linking the concept of the monochrome to music, the collective A Kills B performed a music piece in a closed space, equipped with paint spray guns, gradually covering the entire space and everything in it in yellow paint. The audience watched on through a window, and the more paint was applied the less they could see – a brilliant comment on the composition of monochrome paintings which seemingly consist of one colour, but are actually built on a complex, multilayered concept. The Greek word »chroma«, meaning colour, can be found in music, too. In general, music and painting

share a common language. We speak of colour tones, and synaesthesia is a common phenomenon among musicians, who perceive each key as a different colour. A scale that spans each tone of an octave is called a chromatic scale. A gradual ascent, just like the gradual colouring of the performance space, and far from monotonous.

16: A Kills B – excerpt from audio performance Yellow Monochrome, 2008.

A Kills B, Yellow Monochrome, 2008. Performance and installation project (with Park Seung Jun and Lee Tae Yoon), Nam June Paik Art Center, Seoul 2008. Photo © André Gonçalves.

Photo © João Ferro Martins.

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Douglas Henderson

Having once worked as a carpenter himself, Douglas Henderson created a kind of homage to this profession, conceived as a theatrical surround-sound performance and involving not only 100 carpenters, but also their tool belts and lunchboxes. The sound of hammering nails into wood travels around the performance space, and with the »music« confined to a very limited sonic range, the architecture of the venue starts to take on a role in the unfolding of the aural experience. A little like a bat processing sonar data to create an acoustic image of space instead of a visual one. But Henderson’s acoustic image also paints another picture, one of man within the anonymity of production: the performers gradually stop matching the sound cloud they are generating and the performance’s structure falls apart.

17: Douglas Henderson – excerpt from Music for 100 carpenters, 2009. »As the title suggests, Music For 100 Carpenters involves a hundred people literally hammering nails into wood. 10,000 nails to be precise. At first, the layers and layers of sound are reminiscent of sheets of rain hammering down on a plastic roof, a sound that automatically transports me back to my childhood, sheltering under any bit of roof I could find. It’s an oddly sensory and textured sound – you feel like you might be able to touch it, that it surrounds you so completely that you could almost breath it in.« Michael Cragg

David Henderson, Music for 100 Carpenters, 2009. Performance / i nstallation, 14 × 10 × 1 1 m, 30 min. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Mario Mazzoli, Berlin.

Track N°18:

Billy Childish Billy Childish is an outstanding and oft misunderstood figure on the British art scene. His 30-year f lood of creativity spans art, novels, poetry, film and music. And in each of these disciplines, he has touched on almost every genre – Childish has made records of punk rock, blues, folk, experimental, spoken word and nursery rhymes. Childish is as explicit as he is prolific, his material often brutally honest. Shunning art school, he was close to many artists who would

Billy Childish and the Spartan Dreggs. © The Spartan Dreggs.

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18: Billy Childish and The Spartan Dreggs – The Ocean River Runs Around The Edge, 2011. later become known under the YBA label, and a relationship with Tracey Emin that turned sour inspired the formation of the anti-conceptual-art Stuckist movement. Childish left the Stuckists in 2001, but he still advocates amateurism and free expression. Playing with countless bands, Childish has appeared on over 100 albums. This year, he returns with new material under the guise of The Spartan Dreggs, with Neil Palmer, Nurse Julie and Wolf Howard.

Karl Holmquist

19: Karl Holmqvist – excerpt from Another War is Possible, 2010.

We weren’t sure whether Karl Holmqvist was really made of f lesh and blood because in his spoken word pieces, he makes himself sound like a cyborg from outer space. With a metallic voice, flat and electronically distorted, Holmqvist monotonously recites phrases like, »Another war is possible« over and over, as if this were the most banal thing in the world. But we may need visitors from other galaxies to show us what we really are, and even if they only speak in loops, it’s the repetition that exposes the cyborg’s discomfort at having to deliver his message. Holmqvist’s spoken art pieces are hypnotic, poetic and powerful, turning the listener’s gaze inwards, to where it really hurts.

Karl Holmqvist photographed at Kunst-Werke, Berlin 2011. Photo © Amy Binding.

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Track N°21:

Art Critics Orchestra

Carsten Nicolai

Some artists have become successful musicians and some musicians, successful artists. But while some artists turn into art critics (after failing to become successful artists), the phenomenon of art critics becoming successful artists or musicians is less widespread. Maybe this is because art critics are afraid of actively creating something that might expose them to criticism. The Art Critics Orchestra is the exception to the rule. Although the cast has changed several times over the years, since its inception in 2004 there’s always been at least one art critic in the band. Specializing in artists’ songs, many are composed exclusively for them. And although their music making is meant less as a comment on the nature of art criticism and more about just having fun, it’s interesting to note that by performing and interpreting these pieces, they are engaging in art much more actively and vulnerably than art criticism ever will.

20: Art Critics Orchestra – Die Straße ist naß (original by Peter Weibel & Hotel Morphilia Orchester), 2011.

»The Art Critics Orchestra like to borrow, re-appropriate or interpret what already exists or what is given to them. For a start their band logo is a homage to AC/DC, while the majority of their songs are written for them by artists of various disciplines. On Die Strasse Ist Nass, the five-piece band recall the laidback, almost slippery feel of Pavement, all spindly guitar lines and off-kilter drum patterns before a male voice intones lyrics about obsession. For the second verse, that voice is joined by a female singer, offering a cute juxtaposition between pained longing and coolly detached acceptance.« Michael Cragg

As a visual artist as well as a musician and label owner sometimes working under the moniker Alva Noto, Carsten Nicolai is interested not only in the audio but also the physical qualities of sound. This becomes especially apparent in sononda, the first part of a series of short films. Shot in a natural setting, the film focuses on the sculptural quality of light. Both light and sound consist of waves, but whereas sound requires some sort of medium – solid, liquid or gaseous – to transport it, light requires quite the opposite – empty space. Which means that

Art Critics Orchestra, founded 2003 in Berlin, and (as of now) consisting of Laura Oldenbourg, Raimar Stange, Judith Raum, Andreas Schlaegel, and Micz Flor.

ultimately the two cannot co-exist in their purest form under the same conditions; one of them always has to give. And yet, when looking at Nicolai’s work, the audio and visual seem to be a direct translation of one another.

21: Carsten Nicolai – future past perfect pt. 1 (sononda), 2010.

Carsten Nicolai, still from future past perfect pt. 1 (sononda), 2010. HD on Blue-ray Disc, 7.28 min. Courtesy Galerie Eigen + Art Leipzig / B erlin, and The Pace Gallery, New York. © VG BildKunst Bonn.

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Susan Stenger

A work of art is presented at a gallery; a piece of music is performed at a concert. But while it is generally agreed that a concert should only last as long as the audience, which is expected to remain present throughout, can physically endure, no exhibition visitor is expected to remain at a gallery for an entire exhibition period. There are music projects which exceed the limits of what can be listened to in one sitting – John Cage’s As Slow As Possible, comprised of just three notes played by an organ in the German town of Halberstadt and scheduled to last 639 years, is a case in point – but these explore ideas of speed and its interpretation. Music knows all kinds of terms and notations for duration and speed, but the difference between allegro and allegretto has no finite definition. Susan Stenger’s Soundtrack for an Exhibition is not so much a soundtrack accompanying an exhibition as a brilliant eye-opener to the fact that music can be exhibited just like art, and like the contemplation of an art work, there should be no prescribed beginning or end. Still, for sleek, Stenger took on the herculean task of remixing the 96-day composition into an excerpt of prescribed duration.

22: Susan Stenger – Remix excerpt of Verse 2 of Soundtrack for an Exhibition, 2006. »The drone is the most elemental tonal music; it threads through the folk music of virtually every culture, its ultimate limitation miraculously suggesting limitless possibility. The vocal parts on this piece were created independently of one another, and yet the urge to draw connections between them is irresistible: Kim Gordon’s insouciant call to ›shake it, shake it now‹ and Alan Vega’s mystical trill both summon up vibration, the root not only of music but of the physical universe. It’s as if composer Susan Stenger has zoomed in on a single, seemingly static musical moment and discovered all the idiosyncratic waveforms inside. It makes sense that this is a very brief excerpt from a vastly longer piece — it’s a miniature that taps into something immense.« Michael Azerrad

SOUNDTRACK : DAY 39 (13:00)

SOUNDTRACK : DAY 96 (13:00)

VERSE 2 : DAY 11 : D (electric)

TRACK V

V 12

VOX AND BASS: AT THE CROSSROADS (KG) [RANDOM]

SLO-MO-BO RHYTHM GUITAR

VOX: SHAKE IT (AV) AND ELECTRIC BLUES GUITAR

VOX: EPIPHANY WAY (AV)

VOX: EPIPHANY WAY (AV) AND ELECTRIC BLUES GUITAR

FLOATY BLUES SAX (UK)

ELECTRIC BLUES SLIDE GUITAR

MISSISSIPPI-STYLE SLOW-MOTION ELECTRIC SLIDE GUITAR

BASS DRONE LOOP

BARITONE ELECTRIC GUITAR DRONE TWANG

1+2

5th OCTAVE

3rd

B G

OCTAVE

5th 7th

E D C

OCTAVE

3rd

B G

3rd 5th

ROOT

5th

ROOT

DRONE: DOUBLE BASSES IN D

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1:00

2:00

3:00

4:00

5:00

6:00 ( x4 )

Musical score of a 96-day piece accompanying the exhibition »Soundtrack for an Exhibition« at the Musée d’Art Contemporain, Lyon 2006. Score covering day 39 (verse 2: day 11). Design by Susan Stenger with Mathieu Copeland, © 2006.

OUTRO : DAY 4 : G7 - C

PITCH

0:00 hrs:min

1:00

2:00

3:00

4:00

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6:00 ( x4 )

Track N°23:

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Nathalie Miebach

Whether the weather is »good« or »bad« is a subjective matter. Exploring this familiar topic, Miebach combines data from weather stations with notations of specific emotional experiences such as the death of her father-in-law. She takes note in the most literal sense – in the form of musical scores. This data is then turned into a sculpture and passed on to musicians for interpretation. While musical scores and meteorological data might initially seem to have little in common, they are in fact processed by the human mind in the very same way. Both types of information are based on a meticulously structured system but ultimately can be read and fully interpreted only by using something that cannot be objectively defined: emotion.

23: Nineteen Thirteen – excerpt from Hurricane Noel, 2009.

Nathalie Miebach, Hurricane Noel, 2010. Musical score, 27.9 × 35.6 cm. Sculpture, reed, wood, plastic, data , 91.4 × 81.3 × 81.3 cm.

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Dark Pop

Text by Colleen Nika

In fashion and in music, young women are embracing the dark side, emphasizing a return to the moodiness and intense individualism lionized by the goth-kissed kids of the nineties. In Musik und Mode zieht es junge Frauen wieder mal zur dunklen Seite der Macht – aber ohne die Launenhaftigkeit und den eitlen Individualismus der Goth-geprägten Neunziger.

English

Deutsch

Though black leather, attitude, and scores of eyeliner is a mythical trifecta that should never fade, wardrobing darkness these days isn’t necessarily about intimidation. It’s about constructing an intelligent facade that conveys aggression and concealment, strength and fragility all in one – the way lyrics, melody, rhythm do. The most musical of designers, the late, great McQueen understood this best: to embody darkness means playing in Pandora’s box on an emotional and aesthetic level – and living to wear the tale on your sleeve. Darkness means embracing fear, dwelling in hidden corners, adopting the alien, and transforming abstract vulnerabilities into enticing visual weapons. For a new generation of musical provocateurs whose lyrical themes already explore the nether regions of the human psyche, dressing with a sinister candour serves as a badge of modernity, and – as always – a way to stand out. In the eyes of Berlin-based singer Janine Rostron, who records unsettling, often surrealist electronic pop under the moniker Planningtorock, the pancultural visual shift towards darkness might have political stems. »Almost all governments are conservative right now«, she observes. In her own work, the personal can be political, too: Rostron’s clothing – and she works with clothes, not fashion, she emphasizes – relates very directly to the music she makes. »My approach is more like how you’d dress an actor – I’m working with character communicating sentiments«, she says. Rostron’s look mutates accordingly. There’s a haunting quality in her appearance, as in her music, but it isn’t because she’s cloaked in spectral black attire. Rather, she’s an all-around DIY distortionist. She went though a brave Elizabethan phase a few years ago, using

Schwarzes Leder, schwarzer Eyeliner und schwarze Stimmung bilden eine klassische Dreifaltigkeit im Stilrepertoire von Musikerinnen. Anders als früher geht es aber nicht mehr darum, einzuschüchtern. Sondern eher um die Konstruktion einer Fassade, hinter der sich unterdrückte Gefühle, Stärke und Zerbrechlichkeit gleichermaßen verbergen, genau wie in der dazugehörigen Musik. Einer der musikalischsten Designer der Modegeschichte, Alexander McQueen, verstand es wie kein Zweiter, die Dunkelheit Gestalt werden zu lassen. Seine Entwürfe erzählten von der emotionalen und ästhetischen Auseinandersetzung mit dem Inhalt von Pandoras Büchse. Denn Dunkelheit bedeutet, die Furcht zu umarmen, in düstere Ecken vorzudringen, das Fremde zu akzeptieren und Verwundbarkeit in verführerische und sichtbare Stärke zu transformieren. Für eine neue Generation musikalischer Provokateurinnen, die sich nicht scheut, mit ihren Texten in die niederen Sphären der menschlichen Psyche vorzudringen, ist der dunkle Auftritt ein Zeichen von Modernität und eine Möglichkeit, sich vom bunten Pop-Geträller abzusetzen. Die in Berlin lebende Sängerin Janine Rostron kennt man eher unter ihrem Künstlernamen Planningtorock und für ihren aufreibenden und surrealen Elektropop. Rostron sieht die Ursachen der pankulturellen Verschiebung hin zum Düsteren im politischen Klima: »Die meisten Regierungen sind zur Zeit konservativ«. Auch in ihrer eigenen Arbeit wird das Persönliche zum Politikum. Ihre Bekleidung – es handelt sich um Kleidung, nicht um Mode, das möchte sie betont wissen – steht in direkter Verbindung zu ihrer Musik. »Es ist, als ob man eine Schauspielerin einkleiden würde, ihrer Rolle entsprechend«, sagt sie. Dementsprechend verändert sie fortwährend

Planningtorock. 2011 Creative assistance by GFS. Hair by Micheal Forrey. Photo © Norman Konrad.

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Dark Pop

Planningtorock. 2011 Creative assistance by GFS. Hair by Micheal Forrey. Photo © Norman Konrad.

paper to create accordion-like sleeve accents and collar pieces. Now, she’s in favour of showing up in food-stained clothing onstage, not so much as a defiant anti-fashion gesture, but because it feels authentic for now. And anyway, it’s mainly her face that gets people talking: one of her trademarks is utilizing prosthetics, including a beak-like nose accoutrement (for the record: she was growing extra bones on her face long before Lady Gaga was »reborn« that way). »I bought some nose putty at the theatre store and started adding it to my face and suddenly things started to happen«, she reflects. »It was like the voice I’d created in the music was coming alive.« She believes her prosthetics enhance the nature of the live experience. Shape-shifting is her main aesthetic incentive: her ideal garment, she says, would be one that »washed itself, changed colour by thought, temperature according to the climate and could change shape.« At the core of all of Rostron’s eerie external permutations, though, is a strident individualism, a quality that seems slipperier than ever in an age of xeroxed pop culture. Every pop star wants to think of herself as unique and strange – while fewer than ever are even capable of assembling a look and sound that doesn’t seem contrived. While the mainstream may begrudgingly accept that originality in pop is in decline, plucky newer talents are combating it by simply opting out of that game altogether. »A new wave of bands is emerging that create pop music which has an edge or mystery that doesn’t conform to what the leading mainstream acts are making«, says Catherine Pockson of British electronic pop duo Alpines, who call their music »night pop«. Suitably, Pockson’s shadowy personal aesthetic coincides with that philosophy. She favours clothing in shades of night and dramatic silhouettes which lend to an atmosphere of heightened fascination and suspense. 98

ihren Stil, wenn auch ein Hang zu gespenstischen Wahrnehmungsverzerrungen in ihren Darstellungen eine Konstante bildet. Vor einigen Jahren durchlief sie eine Elisabethanische Phase, in der sie aus Papier Kragen und Ärmel faltete. Zur Zeit betritt sie bevorzugt in von Essensresten beschmutzter Kleidung die Bühne. Keine trotzige Anti-Mode-Haltung soll das sein, sondern es fühlt sich eben gerade authentisch an. Am meisten Aufmerksamkeit aber kommt ihrem Gesicht zu: Ihr Markenzeichen sind prothetische Aufsätze, wie zum Beispiel die schnabelähnliche Nase – übrigens, was Knochenauswüchse im Gesicht betrifft, war Rostron schon lange vor Lady Gaga da. »Ich habe im Theaterladen Knete gekauft und angefangen, damit in meinem Gesicht herumzukneten und meine Züge zu verändern«, erzählt sie rückblickend. »Plötzlich ist etwas passiert, als ob die Stimme in meiner Musik zum Leben erwacht wäre.« Die Prothesen verstärken ihrer Meinung nach die Bühnenerfahrung. Und da die Veränderung der Gestalt ihre ästhetische Hauptinspiration ist, würde das ideale Kleidungsstück »sich selber waschen, die Farbe je nach Stimmung ändern, je nach Klima wärmen oder kühlen, und natürlich wäre es in der Form wandelbar.« Im Grunde sind die gespenstischen, wenn auch nur äußerlichen Mutationen von Rostron Auswuchs eines scharf abgegrenzten Individualismus, der in Zeiten einer beliebigen und austauschbaren Pop-Kultur immer seltener wird. Jeder Popstar möchte einzigartig und besonders sein – selten allerdings sonderbar. Vielleicht schaffen es deshalb die wenigsten, einen Look und Sound zu produzieren, der unverkennbar ist und nicht künstlich arrangiert wirkt. Während der Mainstream widerwillig die Tatsache akzeptiert hat, daß Originalität ein seltenes und nicht massenkompatibles Gut geworden ist, tritt eine Reihe neuer Talente der Vereinnahmung mutig entgegen.

Planningtorock. Photo © Goodyn Green.

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Dark Pop

Natalia Kills. Photo © Tim Fahlbusch.

»At the moment I am only singing on stage and don’t play an instrument so I think it is even more important to have an outfit that is exciting to look at. It can become part of my performance and can enhance the way that I move around the stage.« She’s well schooled in fashion, having studied it alongside art at university. She considers herself »strongly involved« with Alpines’ art direction and style, often creating her own stage costumes and conceptualizing her look for videos and photo shoots. She namechecks McQueen and Westwood as her personal design luminaries, but is able to find suitable inspiration within the contemporary London fashion scene, mentioning Louise Amstrup, Phoebe English, and Charlie Casely-Hayford as some of her favourites. Alpines also recently collaborated on a Rankin-directed fashion film with Hannah Marshall – a British designer whose severe, noirish designs speak well to the contemporary music community. The admiration is mutual. »I absolutely love collaborating with music artists whose aesthetic is in line with mine«, says Hannah Marshall. »Alpines are quietly paving the way for slightly left of field yet beautiful sounds, and Catherine Pockson embodies not only a true talent, but she is an English beauty with a hint of otherworldliness. In a sea of clones we are the ones that should be creating ourselves; we are an extension of our work. Catherine understands art, expression, and identity.« Marshall also is a fan of Natalia Kills, the British-born singer whose hit video for »Mirrors« features one of the designer’s powerful designs. Kills, notorious for her »dark pop« sound and visual, identifies her look as »sleek and modern – not creepy!« »Horror shock value is big right now in pop«, she reflects. »One or two singers in particular play with themes of death, spikes, talons, and horns, like Marilyn Manson did in the nineties. It’s very Nosferatu – but set to a dance beat. That look definitely turns heads (and stomachs), but it’s not really what I’m going for.« Instead, Kills, whose favourite photo prop is an axe and whose videos often depict violent 100

»Eine Welle neuer Bands kommt auf uns zu, deren Musik aneckt, neugierig macht und sich nicht dem Diktat der Größen des Popgeschäfts unterordnet«, sagt Catherine Pockson vom britischen Elektropop-Duo Alpines. Ihre eigene Musikrichtung nennt sie »Night Pop«. Passenderweise spiegelt sich diese Richtung in der persönlichen Ästhetik der Musikerin wieder. Sie kleidet sich vornehmlich in den Farben der Nacht, die in Form dramatischer Silhouetten eine gespannte Atmosphäre erzeugen. »Auf der Bühne spiele ich im Moment kein Instrument, ich singe nur. Umso wichtiger ist es, ein aufregendes Outfit zu tragen, das Teil meiner Performance ist und die Wirkung meiner Bewegungen verstärkt.« Mit Mode kenn sich Pockson aus, die hat sie nämlich außer Kunst im Nebenfach studiert. Deshalb ist sie auch stark in die Artdirektion und den unverkennbaren Stil von Alpines involviert. Sie entwirft ihre eigenen Bühnenoutfits und konzipiert den Look für Videos und Photoproduktionen. McQueen und Westwood sind für sie die Götter des Designolymps, aber auch in der aktuellen Londoner Modeszene findet sie Inspiration: Louise Amstrup, Phoebe English und Charlie Casely-Hayford gehören zu ihren Favoriten. Und erst kürzlich hat Alpines mit der englischen Designerin Hannah Marshall an einem von Rankin gedrehten Modefilm gearbeitet. Die strengen und fast durchgehend schwarzen Entwürfe von Marshall kommen in der zeitgenössischen Musikszene gut an. Und die Bewunderung ist gegenseitig. »Ich liebe es, mit Musikern zusammenzuarbeiten, deren Ästhetik auf einer Linie mit meiner eigenen ist«, sagt Hannah Marshall. »Alpines ist Wegbereiter einer neuen Richtung, etwas schräg, aber wunderschön, und Catherine Pockson ist nicht nur wahnsinnig talentiert, sondern auch eine wahre Englische Schönheit, sie scheint nicht von dieser Welt zu sein. Sie versteht, daß wir dem Meer von Klonen nur entkommen können, indem wir uns selbst als Ausdruck und Erweiterung unserer Arbeit inszenieren.« Marshall ist auch ein großer Fan der englischen Sängerin Natalia Kills. In deren Video zum Song »Mirrors« hat ein Entwurf der Desi-

Natalia Kills, in a studio space in Brooklyn, 2010. Styling by Shibon Kennedy and Make up by Ralph Siciliano at Kate Ryan Inc. Photo © Victoria Stevens.

but glamorous scenes of revenge, comes off as a beautiful assassin. She’s aware that her »pop sniper« reputation precedes her. »I know the black and leather thing is the most obvious tough girl wardrobe choice, but it honestly feels the most natural to me.« She started wearing leather jackets in her teens, and hasn’t looked back. »I’ve basically been wearing the same things for ages, I just find ways to make it more aggressive now. You shouldn’t have to shop to look like yourself, you know?« Though she’s more of a fan of hand-customizing an old garment (studs are a perennial favourite), she notes that she did recently agonize over the purchase of a new leather jacket from

gnerin einen starken Auftritt. Kills ist bekannt für ihren »Dark Pop«, beschreibt ihren Look aber als »geschmeidig und modern – auf keinen Fall gruselig! Horror und Schockelemente sind zwar gerade angesagt im Pop, viele spielen mit Todessymbolen, Krallen oder Hörnern, ein bisschen wie Marilyn Manson in den Neunzigern. Das erinnert alles an Nosferatu, nur unterlegt mit einem Dance-Beat. Das fällt natürlich auf, ist aber nicht mein Stil«, sagt Kills. Trotzdem, ihr liebstes Requisit ist eine Axt, und ihre Videos inszenieren eine Mischung aus Glamour und Gewalt – sie selbst als schöner Rachengel mittendrin. Sie ist sich bewußt, daß sie als »Pop Ninja« wahrgenommen 101

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Dark Pop

Catherine Pockson of Alpines, 2011. Styling by Kim Howells. Photo © George Garnier.

high-end LA vintage emporium Decades Two. »Like my album title states, I’m a perfectionist and I have to rationalize every aesthetic decision I make«, she stresses. And while Kills’ immaculate modern noir wardrobe prowess puts most pop stars’ looks to shame, she’s already thinking of her next evolution. »I think it may be time to retire the black, as much as I love it«, she announces. »I want to do colour next. My challenge is to find how to make colour aggressive but obviously also keep it fun. My next phase will be loud: Jeremy Scott mixed with Clueless.« Luckily, with a strong individualist like Kills calling the shots, moderation will never be key.

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wird. »Ich weiß, Schwarz und Leder legen eine entsprechende Haltung nahe, aber ich fühle mich so tatsächlich am wohlsten.« Lederjacken trug sie schon als Teenager, und daran hat sich bis heute eben nichts geändert. »Ich trage seit Ewigkeiten die gleichen Sachen, mein Stil ist jetzt lediglich ein wenig aggressiver. Ich finde, man sollte nicht shoppen gehen müssen, um man selber zu sein, oder?« Obwohl sie Selbstgenähtes und Secondhand bevorzugt (Nieten sind ein Dauerbrenner), hat sie sich kürzlich beim Kauf einer neuen Lederjacke ertappt, bei Decades Two, dem luxuriösen Vintage-Tempel in Los Angeles. »Wie mein Albumtitel schon sagt, bin ich eine Perfektionistin. Jede ästhetische Entscheidung muß ich rational begründen können.« In der Tat stellt ihre Garderobe in ihrer makellosen Durchdachtheit den Kleiderschrank von so manchem Superpopstar in den Schatten. Aber Kills denkt mittlerweile über ihre Verwandlung nach: »So sehr ich es auch liebe, ich glaube, es ist an der Zeit, Schwarz an den Nagel zu hängen. Als nächstes mache ich was mit Farben. Die Herausforderung dabei ist, optische Lautstärke mit dunkler Aggressivität zu vereinen. Und es wird auf jeden Fall sehr laut, ich stelle mir eine Mischung aus Jeremy Scott und Clueless vor.« Egal, wohin die Reise stilistisch gehen wird, mit starken Individualistinnen wie Kills an der Spitze wird es Gott sei Dank zumindest immer extrem bleiben.

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White Noise

By Markus Pritzi

Photographer MARKUS PRITZI Fashion editor ISABELLE THIRY Hair/Make up NADINE BAUER at Ballsaal Model FLO GENNARO at Viva Paris Photographer’s assistants PASCAL GAMBARTE, FRANK MÜLLER Fashion editor’s assistant JOSEPHA RODRIGUEZ Support Paris ULI SEMMLER Digital service D-I-SERVICES Retouching PX 1 Special thanks to CHRISTIAN SCHÜTT, BETTINA HARST 24: Justus Köhncke – Mach ma’ Haarspray, 2011.

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T-shirt and floor-length skirt by Jil Sander, and turtleneck vintage.

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T-shirt and skirt by Perret Schaad, turtleneck, tights and striped belt vintage.

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White Noise

Dress by Prada, sunglasses by Balenciaga, and turtleneck and dotted belt vintage.

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White Noise

T-shirt and shirt with collar by Cacharel, and skirt by Carven.

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White Noise

Shirt and shorts by Yves Saint Laurent Homme, and shoes by Prada.

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Blue denim shirt by Stella Mc Cartney.

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White TheNoise Dude

Shorts by Boss Black, sunglasses by Boss Orange, belt by H&M, and turtleneck vintage. Left: Jumpsuit with zipper by Céline.

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White Noise

Photographer Markus Pritzi Fashion editor Isabelle Thiry Model Blindtext at Ford Models New York Grooming Blindtext at Bigoudi Photographer’s assistant Blindtext Fashion editor’s assistant Blindtext Digital service Blindtext Retouching Blindtext T-shirt and skirt by Perret Schaad, turtleneck, tights and striped belt vintage. Casting Blindtext Production Blindtext at JPPS

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New Wave

by Martin Klimas Première cuff in onyx, diamonds and 18-carat white and yellow gold, by Chanel.

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J12 Chromatic watch in titanium ceramic, with 54 diamonds, by Chanel.

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Blindtext New Wave

Clockwise from upper left: San Marco ring in 18-carat pink gold, set with diamonds and blue, pink and red spinels; Byzantine ring in 18-carat white gold, set with diamonds, peridots, iolites, and one amethyst; Mademoiselle ring medium model in 18-carat pink gold, set with yellow, orange and pink sapphires, an orange pearl, a facetted citrine and amethyst; Byzantine ring in 18-carat yellow gold, set with diamonds, amethysts, pink tourmalines and a citrine, all by Chanel.

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San Marco sautoir in 18-carat white gold, set with 347 diamonds, 33 sapphires, 35 acquamarines, 16 topazes, 15 South Sea pearls and 321 Akoya pearls, by Chanel.

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The Dude

The Dude by Markus Jans

Photographer Markus Jans Fashion editor Isabelle Thiry Grooming Troy at Bigoudi Model Jason Photographer’s assistant John Karsenty Fashion editor’s assistant Lorena Maza Shirt by Calvin Klein Collection. Right: Flowerprint shirt by Wrangler Blue Bell, and worker shirt by Lee.

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The Dude

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The Dude

Denim vest by Nudie Jeans, denim shirt and T-shirt by Weekday, and suit trousers by Boss Black.

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Denim shirt by Lee.

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Shirt by Jil Sander.

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The Dude

Denim vest by G-Star, and scarf by Hermès.

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Denim shirt by Lee.

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The Dude

Denim vest by G-Star, scarf by Hermès, and trousers by Fred Perry.

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The Dude

Leather jacket by Fay, and denim shirt by Lee.

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The Dude

Denim shirt by Lee. Right: Flowerprint shirt by Wrangler Blue Bell, and worker shirt by Lee.

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Festival Boy

Cape by Burberry Prorsum, T-shirt by Acne, and shorts stylist’s own.

by Leon Mark

Photographer LEON MARK Fashion editor RUBEN MOREIRA Model SASCHA BAILEY at Storm models Hair ANTONIO DE LUCA using Bumble and bumble Photographer’s assistant ANNA GOLENKO Fashion editor’s assistant MASAHIRO 25: Man Tear – Let me in your life (upside down), written and produced by Axel Boman and Johan Jonason, 2011.

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Sweat shirt by Mihara Yasuhiro.

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Festival Boy

Jacket by Mihara Yasuhiro, and necklace by Lanvin.

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Sweat shirt by Mihara Yasuhiro.

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Festival Boy

Hat by William Richard Green, T-shirt by Lanvin, shorts by Mihara Yasuhiro, and black boots by Martine Rose for CAT.

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Coat by Burberry Prorsum, blue knit by Jil Sander, ankle boots by Burberry, rucksack by Mihara Yasuhiro, and socks stylist’s own.

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Festival Boy

Shorts and rucksack by Mihara Yasuhiro, studded collar by Lanvin, and red boots by Martine Rose for CAT.

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Festival Girl

By Markus Pritzi by Leon Mark

Photographer Markus Pritzi Fashion editor Isabelle Thiry Model Blindtext at Ford Models New York Photographer Leon Mark Grooming Blindtext at Bigoudi Fashion editor Zoe James Photographer’s assistant Blindtext Hair Naoki Komiya atBlindtext Julian Watson Agency Fashion editor’s assistant Make Hiromi Ueda at Julian Watson Agency Digitalup service Blindtext Model Paige Young at Next Models Retouching Blindtext Photographer’s assistant Anna Golenko Casting Blindtext Fashion editor’s assistant Amber Production Blindtext at JPPS Little Felt blazer by Missoni.

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Festival Girl

Wool jacket by Paul Smith, dress by DKNY, and shoes by Marni. Right: Orange dress by Jil Sander.

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Festival Girl

Mac by Stella McCartney. Right: Leather top by Miu Miu, and skirt by Beyond Retro.

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Festival Girl

Jumper by Aquascutum, and string skirt by Rellik. Left: Dress by Roland Mouret, and blazer by Jil Sander.

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Enjoy The Silence

by MÁrton Perlaki

Photographer Márton Perlaki Fashion editors Ali Tóth, Anikó Virág Hair Tamás Tüzes at Hairclub using Bumble and bumble Make up Bernadett Titkos Model Ida at Attractive Photographer’s assistant Levente Kádár at Flashback Photo Studio Fashion editors’ assistant Panka Bojtor Production manager András Perlaki Dress by Yves Saint Laurent, and hat by Kata Szegedi.

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Enjoy The Silence

Left: Top and cape by Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci, and skirt by Anda. Right: Top by Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci.

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Enjoy The Silence

Left: Blouse by Anda, skirt and boots by Yohji Yamamoto. Right: Jumpsuit by Use unused, vest and boots by Yohji Yamamoto and hat by Kata Szegedi.

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Enjoy The Silence

Left: Jacket by Burberry Prorsum, and dress by Kata Szegedi. Right: Coat by Carven, dress and boots by Yohji Yamamoto.

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Enjoy The Silence

Left: Top by Max Mara. Right: Sleeveless jacket by Givenchy by Riccardo Tisci, skirt by Use unused, and bracelet by Gotti.

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Enjoy The Silence

Left: Trousers by Burberry Prorsum and boots by Yohji Yamamoto. Right: Top by Stella McCartney, trousers by Max Mara, scarf by Anda, hat by Kata Szegedi, and sandals by Bernhard Willhelm for Camper.

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Ghosts

Deutsch

James Lee Byars * 10 April, 1932 in Detroit † 23 May, 1997 in Cairo

English

Practice makes perfect. Yet can ritualizing death help us master our mortality? If anyone was prepared for death, it was James Lee Byars. The conceptual artist declared his art the »first totally positive questioning experience«, involving performances, monochromatic sculpture and minimalist memorials for himself including The Death of James Lee Byars, This is a Call from the Ghost of James Lee Byars and The Perfect Death. In these works, Byars strove to solve essential existential questions by proposing inquiry into what could come after. Here we ask the expert on death a few of our own questions. sleek:

What has death taught you? Nothing is perfect.

James Lee Byars:

sleek: Life is flawed too. What was surprisingly imperfect about your death? JB: Mine, like most, felt too soon.

Why do you think Dalì never responded to your invitation for him to film your death in 1979? JLB: I think he was superstitious. Aren’t you? sleek:

I hope not. I hope that you don’t mind chatting. I don’t know the etiquette with you spirits. Does The Death of James Lee Byars function as a suitable memorial for you? JLB: It is my most famous work but it failed as a rehearsal for death. Like Sylvia Plath, I believe ›Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well. I do it so it feels like hell. I do it so it feels real.‹ I did it well. But I didn’t succeed at making it feel real. It wasn’t hell either. It was wishful thinking. There is no perfect death or sufficient memorial. sleek:

ghosts A dead artist is not necessarily a silent artist. As long as posterity has an interest in their work they have a voice. Actually some dead artists are much more alive than living ones. Still, we don’t speak with them but about them and indulge in misinterpretations of their works, which they have no opportunity to correct. Here, as a compensatory gesture, we give three famous dead artists – all of them experts on the afterlife – their voices back. Ein toter Künstler ist nicht unbedingt ein stummer Künstler. Er hat etwas zu sagen, solange die Nachwelt über sein Werk spricht. Manch tote Künstler sind lebendiger als die lebenden. Trotzdem sprechen wir nicht mit ihnen, sondern über sie, und ergehen uns in Fehlinterpretationen ihrer Arbeit, die sie nicht mehr richtigstellen können. An dieser Stelle geben wir als kleine Wiedergutmachung drei berühmten toten Künstlern – alles Experten zum Thema Jenseits – ihre Stimme zurück. 164

Have you met anyone in the afterlife whose relationship to death was shaped by your work? JLB: A few people have commented that my work made dying seem more appealing but nothing can really prepare you for death. I tried to eliminate any trace of banality in my confrontation with the only truly universal experience. My former viewers appreciated how I urged them towards a perfect moment of consciousness. Mostly that experience was appreciated. However, Nixon thanked me for my invitation to the documenta 5 in 1972 but then muttered ›hippie‹ under his breath before he and Elvis drifted off together. sleek:

It’s surprising that people are still rude in heaven? I was just surprised to see him up here.

sleek: JLB:

Übung macht den Meister. Doch können wir uns durch die Ritualisierung des Todes über die eigene Sterblichkeit erheben? Wenn überhaupt jemand auf das Sterben vorbereitet war, dann James Lee Byars. Der Konzeptkünstler deklarierte sein Werk als »die erste, absolut positiv hinterfragende Erfahrung« durch sich selber gewidmete, minimalistische Denkmäler wie The Death of James Lee Byars, This is a Call from the Ghost of James Lee Byars und The Perfect Death. Auf der Suche nach existentiellen Antworten beschäftigte sich Byars in diesen Arbeiten mit der Frage: Was kommt danach? Wir stellen dem Experten zum Thema Sterben hier unsere eigenen Fragen. sleek:

Was hat der Tod Sie gelehrt? Daß nichts perfekt ist.

James Lee Byars:

Das Leben ist auch nicht gerade makellos. Was war denn an Ihrem Tod nicht perfekt? JLB: Er kam, wie bei vielen, zu früh. sleek:

sleek: Was denken Sie, warum hat Dalì nie auf Ihre Einladung 1979 reagiert, Ihren eigenen Tod zu filmen? JLB: Ich glaube, er war abergläubisch. Sie doch bestimmt auch?

Hoffentlich nicht. Und wir hoffen auch, unser Gespräch stört Sie nicht? Der Umgang mit Euch Geistern ist uns nicht ganz geläufig. Ist The Death of James Lee Byars ein passendes Denkmal für Sie? JLB: Es ist zwar meine bekannteste Arbeit, als Vorbereitung auf den Tod aber gänzlich unbrauchbar. Ich stimme Sylvia Plath zu, die gesagt hat, ›Sterben ist eine Kunst, wie alles andere auch. Und ich bin außerordentlich gut darin. Wenn ich es tue, fühlt es sich an wie in der Hölle. Es muß sich echt anfühlen.‹ Ich war gut. Aber nicht gut genug – es hat sich nicht echt angefühlt. Und auch nicht wie in der Hölle. Das war wohl eher Wunschdenken. Den perfekten Tod, das angemessene Denkmal gibt es nicht. sleek:

Haben Sie im Jenseits jemanden getroffen, dessen Beziehung zum Tod sich durch Ihre Arbeiten verändert hat? JLB: Ein paar Leute haben gemeint, meine Kunst würde das Sterben in ein besseres Licht stellen. Aber auf den Tod kann man sich nicht wirklich vorbereiten. Ich habe versucht, jegliche Spuren von Banalität aus dieser Begegnung mit der einzig wirklich universellen Erfahrung zu verbannen. Die Betrachter wußten es zu schätzen, daß ich sie zu einem perfekten Moment der Wahrnehmung geführt habe. Nixon allerdings bedankte sich zwar bei mir, daß ich zur documenta 5 eingeladen wurde, konnte sich aber nicht verkneifen, mich als ›Hippie‹ zu beschimpfen, bevor er mit Elvis von dannen schwebte. sleek:

Hat es Sie überrascht, daß manche Leute selbst im Himmel noch unhöflich sind? JLB: Eigentlich war ich nur überrascht, ihn überhaupt im Himmel zu sehen. sleek:

sleek: Lagen Sie eigentlich mit Ihren farblichen Vorstellungen vom Jenseits

On a surface level, were you right about the colour scheme in the afterlife? Are you surrounded by gold or were earlier Western artists accurate in their all-white depictions? JLB: The palette here defies anything that worldly words can express. My images of the afterlife were based on historical rituals and my own fantasies. But my imagination remained corporeal. This world is not a continuation or a concession after living. It is worth exploring. My work was, as I said in life, a representation of the un-representational. sleek:

richtig? Ist wirklich alles goldgetränkt, oder ist es eher unendlich weiß wie in den Darstellungen einiger westlicher Künstler? JLB: Die Palette hier trotzt jeder weltlichen Beschreibung. Meine Bilder vom Jenseits speisten sich aus historischen Ritualen und meinen Phantasien. Meine Vorstellung blieb allerdings rein körperlich. Diese Welt hier ist weder eine Fortführung des Lebens noch ein Zugeständnis daran. Lohnenswert, sich hier umzuschauen. Mein Werk ist, wie ich schon zu Lebzeiten erkannt habe, eine Darstellung des nicht Darstellbaren. 165

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Ghosts

Jeremy Blake * 4 October, 1971 in Fort Sill, Oklahoma † 17 July, 2007 in Rockaway, New York

Deutsch

English

Jeremy Blake and his wife Theresa Duncan were »preclear« when they committed suicide in 2007. Blake’s hypnotic video art and Duncan’s »girl power« video games enchanted the international art scene. But the couple’s conviction that Scientology was running a campaign to defame and persecute them only demonstrated their need for The Church’s help and enlightenment. Here, we offer Blake an opportunity to be audited with a selection of the questions formulated by L. Ron Hubbard and used in Scientology’s »auditing« sessions to guide subjects into higher spiritual echelons.

Jeremy Blake und seine Frau Theresa Duncan waren »Pre-Clear«, als sie sich 2007 das Leben nahmen. Blakes hypnotische Videokunst und Duncans frische Energie verzückten die internationale Kunstwelt. Die Überzeugung, von Scientology verfolgt und diffamiert zu werden, trieb das Paar in den Tod und veranschaulicht zugleich, wie sehr sich die beiden nach der Hilfe und Erleuchtung dieser, nun ja, Glaubensgemeinschaft gesehnt hatten. Wir geben Blake hier die Möglichkeit, sich einem »Auditing« zu unterziehen, jenem Befragungsritual, wie es Scientology durchführt, um Anhänger auf eine höhere spirituelle Stufe zu führen, auf Basis jener Fragen, wie sie von L. Ron Hubbard selbst formuliert wurden. Haben Sie jemals ein Volk versklavt? Nein! Einige Freunde behaupten zwar, die Loyalitätsverträge, die Theresa und ich sie unterzeichnen ließen, seien eine Form der Versklavung gewesen. Wir aber wollten lediglich einen klaren und fairen Beweis ihrer Freundschaft, die Gewissheit, von unseren Nächsten unterstützt zu werden, nicht diffamiert und gejagt. Ich bin nicht daran interessiert, anderen meinen Willen aufzuzwingen – allerdings kann Kunst den Betrachter fast wie bei einer Hypnose vereinnahmen. sleek:

Jeremy Blake:

Have you ever enslaved a population?  No! Some friends claim that the loyal contracts that Theresa and I asked them to sign were a form of bondage. But we were just asking for clean and clear evidence of the same things everyone wants from their friends. We wanted to know that the people near us support us, and are not conspiring to defame and hunt us. I have no interest in enforcing my will but I do feel that art can captivate and influence viewers to a point of near hypnosis.

sleek:

Jeremy Blake:

Haben Sie jemals jemandem die Zunge herausgerissen? Das tun wir uns alle selbst an. Theresas Blog hieß ›The Wit of the Saircase‹, nach dem französischen Begriff esprit d’escalier, ein ironisch eloquenter Ausdruck der tiefgreifenden Unfähigkeit, unsere Artikulation zu kontrollieren. Meine Zunge arbeitet oft besser als mein Gehirn. Ich mache eine sarkastische Bemerkung, realisiere aber erst im Nachhinein, wie ernst ich sie meine. Meine Kunst beginnt oft als ironische Geste, noch bevor ich die Ernsthaftigkeit darin entdecke. sleek: JB:

Have you ever torn out someone’s tongue?  We all do this to ourselves. Theresa’s blog is titled ›The Wit of the Staircase‹ after the French saying esprit d’escalier, an ironically eloquent expression of our profound inability to control our articulation. For me, my tongue often works better than my brain. I make a sarcastic remark and only realize that I’m sincere after I’ve uttered it. My art often begins as an ironic gesture before I discover my untapped earnestness.

sleek: JB:

Have you ever engaged in piracy? JB: As an appropriation artist, my practice naturally blurs the boundaries of these terms. sleek:

Have you ever disfigured a beautiful thing? I have altered and updated things that were once considered beautiful. My intention is not to disfigure but to disorient viewers’ expectations. sleek: JB:

sleek:

Waren Sie jemals in Piraterie verwickelt? JB: Als Appropriationskünstler liegt es in der Natur meiner Arbeitsweise, die Grenzen dieses Begriffs zu verwischen. sleek:

Haben Sie jemals etwas Schönes entstellt? Ich habe als schön befundene Dinge verändert und aktualisiert. Es ist nicht meine Absicht, zu entstellen, sondern die Erwartungen des Betrachters in die Irre zu führen.

Is anybody looking for you? Besides you and other Scientologists?

sleek: JB:

Have you ever sought to persuade someone of your insanity?  People keep trying to persuade us that we’re insane. We’re not.

Verstecken Sie sich? Warum sollte ich diese Frage ehrlich beantworten?

sleek: JB:

JB:

Haben Sie jemals versucht, jemanden davon zu überzeugen, daß Sie verrückt sind? JB: Die Leute versuchen ständig, uns davon zu überzeugen, daß wir verrückt sind. Sind wir aber nicht. sleek:

Verdienen Sie es, Freunde zu haben? Die Frage ist, ob unsere Freunde tatsächlich unsere Freunde sind.

sleek:

Do you deserve to have any friends?  JB: The question is whether our friends really are our friends. sleek:

JB:

Have you ever tried to make the physical universe less real?  JB: My work constantly involves the disruption of reality and the combination of abstract, fantastical, imagery with historic or contemporary cultural references.

sleek: Haben Sie jemals versucht, eine physikalische Gegebenheit zu abstrahieren? JB: Meine Arbeit beinhaltet den ständigen Bruch mit der Realität und die Kombination abstrakter und phantastischer Bilder mit historischen oder zeitgenössischen kulturellen Referenzen.

sleek:

Are you in hiding? Why would I answer that question honestly?

ing people’s motivations and psyches than representing or directing their actions.

JB:

Werden Sie von jemandem verfolgt? Abgesehen von Euch und den anderen Scientologen?

Have you ever philosophized when you should have acted instead?

Haben Sie jemals nur philosophiert, anstatt zu handeln? Kunst ist der Philosophie näher als der Tat. Ich bin in erster Linie daran interessiert, die Motivation und Psyche von Personen offenzulegen, nicht ihre Taten zu lenken oder darzustellen.

sleek:

JB: Art is more philosophy than action. I am most interested in show-

sleek:

JB: JB:

work. And my art uses mystery, wonder and dream-like qualities to enrapture my viewers.

sleek:

sleek: JB:

sleek:

Haben Sie vorsätzlich Geheimnisse?

JB: Ich untersuche in meinen Arbeiten das Geheimnisvolle. Mysterien,

Have you systematically set up mysteries? I investigate the allure of mysterious or traumatized spaces in my

sleek: JB:

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Wunder und traumähnliche Qualitäten ziehen den Betrachter in den Bann meiner Kunst.

Have you ever tried to give sanity a bad name?  People have accused me and Theresa of being crazy but anyone who has seen us together knows what we have is better than their version of sanity.

Haben Sie jemals versucht, gegen die Vernunft zu argumentieren?

sleek:

JB:

JB: Es gibt Menschen, die mich und Theresa beschuldigten, verrückt zu

sein. Aber jeder, der uns je zusammen gesehen hat, weiß, daß unsere Version der Vernunft die bessere ist. 167

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zweifel Tower

Ana Mendieta * 18 November, 1948 in Havanna † 8 September, 1985 in New York

Deutsch

Der Tod wurde zu Ana Medieta. Ihre Arbeit als eine der führenden feministischen Performancekünstlerinnen rang mit dem Schrecken der Gewalt gegen Frauen. Ihr mysteriöser Tod warf die Frage auf, ob nicht sogar sie selbst Opfer der Gewalt ihres Ehemannes Carl Andre geworden sein könnte. Dieser wurde vom Mordverdacht zwar freigesprochen, doch Zweifel bleiben bis heute. Hier bitten wir sie, die heutige, gewalterfüllte Zeit in Anbetracht ihrer eigenen Erfahrungen zu kommentieren.

English

Death became Ana Mendieta. A leading feminist performance body artist, her best-known work wrestled with the horrors of violence against women. Her mysterious death provoked inquiry into whether she was also a victim of violence at the hands of her husband, Carl Andre. Andre was acquitted of her murder but the reality remains unsettling. Here, we ask her to extrapolate from her own experiences towards insights into today’s hyper-violent culture. Do you worry that today’s culture is too flippant about death and violence? Ana Mendieta: I am sad to say that I think so. I searched for my obituary in the internet recently and I was repulsed to find ›Ana 4 Life‹ websites. It breaks my heart that young girls glorify their own self-destruction without real guidance or constructive introspection.

Finden Sie, daß die Haltung gegenüber Gewalt und Tod in der heutigen Zeit zu oberflächlich ist? Ana Mendieta: Traurigerweise muß ich diese Frage bejahen. Ich habe kürzlich im Internet meinen Nachruf gesucht und war erschrocken über die ›Ana 4 Life‹-Portale [die sog. Pro-Ana-Bewegung verherrlicht Anorexie], auf die ich dabei gestoßen bin. Es bricht mir das Herz zu sehen, wie junge Mädchen ihre eigene Zerstörung glorifizieren, gänzlich ohne Orientierung, ohne konstruktive Selbstwahrnehmung. sleek:

sleek:

Is there really Google in the afterlife? Not exactly. We can search anything without technological assistance. I was just especially interested in what information on my life and work is available for young women through the internet. Many of my projects involved nudity or sexualized imagery. I was concerned that your culture is casually re-contextualizing my work, thereby eroticizing women’s deaths without sufficient commentary.

sleek: AM:

What did you find? AM: My work seems be understood but I was distressed by the use of similar imagery elsewhere in your media. I hoped that young women like Rihanna and Lady Gaga would not glamorize domestic abuse and violence towards women. sleek:

sleek: Rihanna seems truly troubled but Gaga is a legitimate artist creating complex, exaggerated fantasies for potential discussion. AM: I think that Lady Gaga trivializes the themes that I, and other artists in my era, seriously tried to engage with and challenge. sleek: Are today’s artists perhaps too timid, smug or blasé about aggressively addressing the horrors of real violence? AM: Your culture is distanced from the reality of death. When I was alive, I tried to connect sensationalist news stories to physical realities but I fear that too many living artists stop at media commentary. My 1973 performance Rape-Murder re-enacted a violent rape on the University of Iowa campus because I resented the abstract representation of rape in the news media. Would today’s »Goth« artists actually bring their own bodies into their work or would they stop at appropriating news or mass-media imagery?

Do you feel that your work didn’t accomplish enough? My work was art, not activism. The fact that you’ve contacted me to ask for my insights into your world reassures me that my work lives on.

Es gibt tatsächlich Google im Jenseits? Nicht wirklich. Aber wir können nach allem suchen, auch ohne technische Hilfsmittel. Ich wollte herausfinden, welche Informationen über mein Leben jungen Frauen im Internet zur Verfügung stehen. Viele meiner Projekte beinhalten Nacktheit und sexualisierte Bilder. Ich befürchtete, Eure Zeit könne meine Arbeit ganz beiläufig in einen neuen Kontext stellen und so den Tod von Frauen erotisieren, völlig kommentarlos.

sleek: AM:

Was haben Sie gefunden? Meine Arbeit scheint verstanden zu werden. Allerdings war ich verstört über den Gebrauch einer meinen Arbeiten ganz ähnlichen Symbolik in Euren Medien. Ich hatte gehofft, junge Frauen wie Rihanna oder Lady Gaga würden häuslichen Mißbrauch und Gewalt gegen Frauen nicht dermaßen beschönigen. sleek: AM:

sleek: Rihanna scheint ernsthafte Probleme zu haben. Gaga allerdings gilt

als ernsthafte Künstlerin, die ihre komplexen und übertriebenen Phantasien auslebt und dadurch Diskussionen anstößt. AM: Ich glaube, Lady Gaga trivialisiert die Themen, mit denen ich und andere Künstler meiner Zeit uns ernsthaft beschäftigt haben. Sind die heutigen Künstler vielleicht zu befangen, zu selbstgefällig oder gar zu gleichgültig, um sich mit dem tatsächlichen Schrecken von Gewalt zu beschäftigen? AM: Eure Kultur distanziert sich von der Realität des Todes. Während meines Lebens habe ich versucht, sensationslüsterne Nachrichten mit der physischen Realität zu verbinden. Ich befürchte allerdings, daß zu viele lebende Künstler sich mit einem reinen Medienkommentar begnügen. Meine Performance Rape-Murder von 1973 stellte eine Vergewaltigung auf dem Universitätsgelände von Iowa nach, weil mich die abstrakte Darstellung der Vergewaltigung in den Medien sehr wütend machte. Trauen sich die heutigen »Goth«-Künstler noch, ihren eigenen Körper in ihre Arbeiten einzubringen, oder geben sie sich mit gemäßigten, massenmedientauglichen Bildern zufrieden? sleek:

sleek:

sleek: Haben Sie das Gefühl, mit Ihrer Arbeit nicht genug erreicht zu haben?

AM:

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Agathe Snow, installation view »All Access World«, Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin 2011. Photo © Mathias Schormann. ©the artist/Deutsche Guggenheim.

Meine Arbeit war Kunst, kein Aktivismus. Aber daß Sie mich zu meinen Ansichten über Ihre Welt befragen, bestätigt doch, daß meine Arbeit weiterlebt. 169

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Still

still

by Reinhard Hunger

Photographer Reinhard Hunger Prop stylist Anke Lachmuth at LigaNord SWAROVSKI ELEMENTS Wallpaper, design Ruffle Silk in Jaspe Red.

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Retouching sevengreen

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SWAROVSKI ELEMENTS Wallpaper, design Versailles in Gold.

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Still

SWAROVSKI ELEMENTS Wallpaper, design Feather Palace in Mauve Black.

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Oh Lord, won‹t You buy me...

... a Mercedes Benz! My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends, Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends, So oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz! Janis Joplin, Mercedes Benz, 1970

When Janis Joplin’s »Mercedes Benz« came out in 1970, it captured the mood of a generation. Joplin died just three days after recording the piece, but her music lives on. The song has lost none of its poignancy even today, and the car brand it refers to is still in existence, so it was time for a makeover. Back in February, Grammy-winning producer David Banner met up with British singer Estelle and Gorillaz collaborator Daley in a Los Angeles studio to record the new track, titled simply »Benz«, in a collaboration initiated by British Blag Magazine. Estelle’s reworked lyrics join Banner’s groovy beats and Daley’s crooning in a true mix of genres. Though none of the three was even alive when Joplin’s classic came out, they say they relate to it intuitively. And we in turn relate intuitively to the car used in the video, a 1971 Mercedes 280 SE convertible. Not that the Lord is likely to buy us one… 176

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Oh Lord, won‹t You buy me...

Grammy award winning producer, rapper and actor David Banner and Grammy award winning singer-songwriter Estelle at the recording session for the »Benz« song. Photo © BLAG.

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Daley, David Banner and Estelle with a Mercedes-Benz 280 SE Convertible at the video shoot in Los Angeles. Photo © David Robert Jones.

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Don’T Look Now!

Text by Annika von Taube

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English

Deutsch

The upshot and the most enduring impression of the opening of the Venice Biennale: too empty and too full. The former applies to content. Yes, so the overcrowding did make for some amusing moments – as when the owners of the sort of speed boats which are licensed to carry 3 passengers, suddenly decided to add a zero to that... But reporting was not helped by having to queue to get into some of the pavilions longer than you would for a Disneyland ride. Especially when if it weren’t for the wait, two hours would have been more than enough to take in the few things actually worth seeing. In the main »Illuminazioni« exhibition Franz West, Monica Bonvicini and Christian Marclay were genuinely illuminating; the rest have already slipped from memory, and we can only recommend four of the pavilions. Diohandi’s reductive water and light installation in the Greek pavilion could be written off as decor but the emptiness and clarity, together with the rough wooden boarding that clads the pavilion, make a bold comment on Greece’s current predicament. Marcus Schinwald has turned the Austrian pavilion into a magnificent and highly intimate stage; Thomas Hirschhorn in the Swiss pavilion succeeds in revealing all by wrapping it up; Sigalit Landau constructs an unsettling control system in the Israeli pavilion and the presentation by Allora & Calzadilla (see p. 64) benefits from the sizeable sum bestowed on the artists by Hugo Boss to allow them to realize their visions. Thank god the company didn’t sponsor the German pavilion, a truly tasteless, i.e. insipid display – Christoph Schlingensief it seems, is the only person capable of staging himself. While four years ago people were getting their knickers in a twist about Paul Allen’s mind-blowing yacht, this year’s megayachts including Roman Abramovich’s »Luna« and the spread of megacelebs from Courtney to Elton failed to raise an eyebrow. One outstanding event was undoubtedly the dinner held by Maybach for Julian Schnabel, while nearby, in what by Venetian standards was a huge garden, Schnabel’s son Vito waited with an astonishingly high quality guest appearance by Terence Koh and an installation by the Bruce High Quality Foundation. A nice contrast to the rather overbooked party held by Dasha Zukhova on the Bauer terrace. There was so much moaning and groaning about overfilled parties and over-saturated people that no one seemed to bother that James Franco had cancelled his »Rebel« project because, as the press release said, he did not consider that quality standards had been met in the realisation of his vision. A few other biennale participants would have done well to follow his example.

Prägendster Eindruck und Fazit der Eröffnung der Biennale in Venedig: zu leer und zu voll. Ersteres bezogen auf Inhalte. Auch wenn es der Überfüllung durchaus Lustiges abzugewinnen gab – immer wieder schön zu beobachten etwa, wenn Bootseigner erkennen, daß ihr auf drei Passagiere zugelassener Lagunenflitzer auch 30 faßt –, ist es der Berichterstattung abträglich, daß man auf den Einlaß in einige der Pavillons länger warten muß als vor der Achterbahn in Disneyland. Zumal man ohne Wartezeiten das wenige Sehenswerte eigentlich in zwei Stunden durchhätte. In der Hauptausstellung »Illuminazioni« wirken Franz West, Monica Bonvicini und Christian Marclay erhellend, den Rest haben wir vergessen, und von den Pavillons empfehlen wir auch nur vier. Die reduzierte Installation im Griechischen Pavillon von Diohandi aus Wasser und Licht ließe sich als Dekokunst abtun, aber die Leere und Klarheit zusammen mit der rohen Holzverschalung, welche die Pavillonfassade verdeckt, gerät zu einem mutigen Kommentar zur Lage des Landes. Der Österreichische Pavillon schafft es, Markus Schinwald eine zugleich großartige und intime Bühne zu bauen, Thomas Hirschhorn packt im Schweizer Pavillon mithilfe von Verpacktem so richtig aus, Sigalit Landau errichtet im Israelischen Pavillon ein verstörendes Leitsystem, und dem Auftritt von Allora & Calzadilla (siehe auch S. 64) merkt man das großzügige Budget an, mit dem Hugo Boss den Künstlern die Verwirklichung wahnwitziger Visionen ermöglicht hat. Gott sei Dank hat das Unternehmen nicht den Deutschen Pavillon gesponsert, einen im wahrsten Sinne geschmacklosen, weil faden Auftritt – Christoph Schlingensief funktioniert eben nur als Selbst- und nicht als Fremdinszenierung. Regte man sich vor vier Jahren noch über die blickverstellende Yacht von Paul Allen auf, wurde das Aufgebot an Megayachten wie die »Luna« von Roman Abramowitsch und Megapromis wie »Courtney« oder »Naomi« dieses Jahr mit Gelassenheit registriert. Als herausragendes Event kann sicher das von Maybach für Julian Schnabel gegebene Dinner gelten, während Schnabels Sohn Vito in einem für venezianische Verhältnisse riesigen Garten mit einem Projekt der Bruce High Quality Foundation und einem erstaunlich guten Gastauftritt von Terence Koh aufwartete. Ein schöner Kontrast zur leicht überbuchten Party von Dasha Zukhova auf der Terrasse des Bauer. Man stöhnte über zu volle Parties und zu volle Menschen, und es fiel garnicht unangenehm auf, daß James Franco sein Projekt »Rebel« abgesagt hatte, laut Pressemitteilung, weil er die Verwirklichung seiner Vision nach seinen Qualitätsmaßstäben nicht gewährleistet sah – daran hätten sich auch ein paar andere Biennaleteilnehmer ein Beispiel nehmen können...

Pop and other stars at Dasha’s bash: Courtney, Charlotte, Eugenie, Tatiana… © Billy Farrell Agency. Christoph Schlingensief at the German Pavilion. Photo © Roman Mensing / a rtdoc.de.

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Left: Diohandi’s Beyond Reform installation at the Greek Pavilion. © t he artist, courtesy Kalfayan Galleries, Athens-Thessaloniki. Right: Thomas Hirschhorn at the Swiss Pavilion. Photo © Romain Lopez.

Neville Wakefield with Olympia Scarry, Alex Dellal with Dasha Zukhova, and a couple of other people populating the Bauer terrace. © Billy Farrell Agency.

Julian’s Vito (right) at the Bauer, © Billy Farrell Agency. The Israeli Pavilion (see above). Agnes Husslein of the Belvedere and Karola Kraus of MUMOK at the Austrian Pavilion opening. Photo© Anna Blau.

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Press conference of the Maybach exhibition »Julian Schnabel – Permanently Becoming and the Architecture of Seeing« at Museo Correr. Photo © BrauerPhotos.

Allora & Calzadilla, Track and Field, 2011. Olympic gold medallist Dan O’Brien (Decathlon, 1996) performing at the U.S. Pavilion. Presented by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, photo © Andrew Bordwin.

Party guests at the »Maybach Night Honoring Julian Schnabel«, including Naomi Campbell, Vadislav Doronin and Arne Quinze. Julian Schnabel in front of his Maybach car. Photo © BrauerPhotos.

At the Hugo Boss reception at Palazzo Zen Ai Frari: Karla Otto and Philipp Wolff, Maggi Bult and Manfredi della Gardescha, a few other guests, and Alessandra Borghese.

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Mistress of metaphysics

With each performance, often involving violations of her body, Marina Abramovi has expressed a degree of willpower almost unbearable for her audience to witness, as demonstrated in her most recent performance that saw her sitting in motionless silence for months. Now an opera staged by Robert Wilson will speak of her life – and her death… In der Performancekunst ist niemand so weit gegangen wie Marina Abramovi . Sie hat sich selbst verletzt und von anderen verletzen lassen, ihre Willenskraft mit jeder neuen Performance gesteigert und zuletzt über Monate in regloser Stille verharrt. Eine Oper von Robert Wilson wird jetzt ihr Leben erzählen – und ihren Tod… Interview by Steve Pulimood English

Deutsch

The history of art is a silent and stuffy affair filled with paintings, drawings, sculpture and the occasional stitch of facts handed down in documents. Lost to us are the emotions, the fleeting instances of psychic power that willed artworks into being. Marina Abramovi takes inspiration from precisely that insensate means, the energy of the mind and its power to communicate. She invests less in material and more in the immaterial, creating a body of performance art that over the past five decades continues to test the limits of humanness. She has made a career of turning insecurity into feats of intensity, transforming private thoughts into public meditations. Her latest work The Artist is Present, presented at MoMA last year, was a tour de force of measured endurance, when she sat on a chair for months, facing changing counterparts, never averting her gaze. This summer she turns to her latest collaborative project, a performance with Robert Wilson, who has created a rendition of her life story for the Manchester Festival. At her Soho loft, she talked with us about the power of meditation, the problem of excess bad art, and her childhood obsession with Bridgette Bardot’s nose.

Die Kunstgeschichte spricht nicht viel. Die Kunst ist da, eine Menge Fakten und Überlieferungen auch, aber über das Wichtigste kann sie uns nichts erzählen: die emotionalen Einflüsse, geistigen Regungen und persönlichen Umstände, unter denen Künstler ihre Werke schufen. Das Werk von Marina Abramovi etwa läßt sich ohne dieses Wissen kaum erfahren oder gar bewahren. Es basiert auf der Kraft des Geistes als Kommunikationswerkzeug, sein Medium ist flüchtig, nicht materiell. Bei Abramovi wird Unsicherheit zu Intensität, intimes Denken zu öffentlichem Handeln, und was sie seit fünf Jahrzehnten an Kraftakten liefert, halten viele Menschen für nicht menschenmöglich. Ihr jüngster, die Performance The Artist is Present, im letzten Jahr im MoMA gezeigt, war zugleich ihr größter: monatelang verharrte sie reglos und stumm auf einem Stuhl im Blickwechsel mit jeweils einem Besucher. Sie senkte nie den Blick. Für das Manchester Festival im Juli bereitet Robert Wilson eine Oper über ihr Leben vor – und ihren Tod. In ihrem Loft in Soho sprach sie mit uns über die Kraft der Meditation, zuviel schlechte Kunst und über Brigitte Bardots Nase, von der sie als Kind besessen war.

sleek:

Is silence important to you? When you verbalize things and talk, you expend an enormous amount of energy. But if you don’t speak, the body generates a different kind of energy that you can radiate to the audience. For me, the highest form of immaterial art is music. In music there is no object between you and the public. The second on that hierarchy is performance, because performance is a kind of energy dialogue. When you don’t talk and there is no sound except for pure presence, then you can generate a kind of energy that the public can really feel. I’ve been thinking that if there is no time in life, we should have more time in art. If life gets shorter, then art gets longer. That’s why I’ve developed these very long performances, lasting ten days, fifteen days, and now the longest one of three months, in which I completely devote myself to that state of total silence, with no communication with the outside world. The entire new work is to create a silent state of mind, to be entirely in the present.

sleek:

Marina Abramovi :

Marina Abramovi : Zu sprechen, Dinge in Worte zu fassen, erfordert

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Wie wichtig ist Ihnen Stille?

eine Menge Energie. Aber wenn ich schweige, generiert der Körper eine ganz eigene Art von Energie, die ich an das Publikum ausstrahlen kann. Für mich ist die Musik die höchste Form der immateriellen Kunst. In der Musik ist kein Objekt zwischen Dir und der Öffentlichkeit. An zweiter Stelle kommt die Performance, sie ist wie eine Art Energiedialog. Wenn man nicht spricht und es auch sonst keine Geräusche außer denen der bloßen Gegenwart gibt, entsteht eine Energie, die spürbar ist. Wenn wir keine Zeit in unserem Leben haben, dann sollten wir mehr Zeit für Kunst haben, denke ich. Je kürzer das Leben ist, desto länger muß die Kunst dauern. Das ist der Grund dafür, daß ich diese sehr langen Performances entwickelt habe, die zehn, fünfzehn Tage dauern, die längste sogar drei Monate. Darin gebe ich mich diesem Zustand totaler Stille hin und kommuniziere nicht mit der Außenwelt. So entsteht ein stiller Geist, der nur im Hier und Jetzt existiert.

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Mistress of metaphysics

Ich hasse Ateliers. Eine Idee kann mich überall befallen, auf dem Weg zur U-Bahn, oder in der Badewanne, oder während ich Knoblauch schneide. Hat man eine Idee, muß man herausfinden, ob es eine potenziell wichtige Idee ist oder einfach nur eine nette Idee. Wenn es eine Idee ist, die einen beben läßt, eine, die Besitz von einem ergreift und die man tagelang nicht vergessen kann, dann ist es eine Idee, die man verfolgen sollte. Alles andere muß man ignorieren. Diese Umweltverschmutzung durch Kunst, das muß aufhören.

MA:

sleek:

Umweltverschmutzung durch Kunst?

MA: Ja. 375 000 Künstler leben allein in dieser Stadt, in New York, wäh-

rend wir sprechen. Und jetzt überlegen Sie mal, wieviel gute Kunst zur Zeit entsteht. sleek:

Schreiben Sie sich Dinge auf?

MA: Die Idee steht an erster Stelle. Dann schreibe ich oder mache eine

One thing that is very interesting, which you just referred to is the ancient concept »vita brevis, ars longa«, the idea that art outlasts life. Even before the invention of the computer, attention deficits were a problem… MA: I remember growing up in the former Yugoslavia where I could actually take a book by Dostoyevsky and read it from beginning to end. It would take me five days and I would never leave the house. The reality of the book would become more real than the life around me. I never have that kind of time anymore.

metro station, in the bathtub, or while chopping garlic. When an idea comes you have to recognize whether it is a potentially important idea, or just a nice idea. If it’s an idea that makes you tremble, something that obsesses you that you can’t forget for days and days then it is an idea to consider. All the rest you need to edit out. I really believe that we have to stop art pollution.

sleek:

But you meditate? MA: I do. I am very interested in Tibetan Buddhism. I have a living altar… Everything on this altar means something to me. For example, this is an image of my grandfather who was a saint.

sleek: Sie haben sich da gerade auf ein klassisches Konzept bezogen, »vita

brevis, ars longa«, die Idee, daß die Kunst länger Bestand hat als das Leben. Sogar schon vor der Erfindung des Computers kannte man das Problem des Aufmerksamkeitsdefizits... MA: Ich erinnere mich daran, wie ich in meiner Kindheit im ehemaligen Jugoslawien Bücher gelesen habe. Für Dostojewski habe ich fünf Tage gebraucht, dabei kein einziges Mal das Haus verlassen. Die Realität des Buches wurde realer als das Leben um mich herum. Diese Sorte Zeit habe ich nicht mehr.

sleek:

You said that part of the reason you are interested in performance is to engage the public, to have them be in the present. It is one thing for an artist to make us aware of the present, but there’s also the question of the power of the mind to focus on certain things. Are you interested in the benefits of this, or is your purpose to raise awareness of our collective attention deficit? MA: I’m interested in the benefits. I believe in a universal knowledge that we can tap into, knowledge that is already available to us. I lived with Aborigines in the central Australian desert for one year, with no money, absolutely in nature. I learned some of their language, but basically they communicate telepathically. They have an excellent sense of perception and have instincts that our rational brain can’t explain. Tibetan Buddhism uses meditation to figure out how to actually reach this point. Aborigine mythology is always set in the present. They never say, ›it has happened‹ or, ›it is going to happen.‹ There’s a thirty-thousand-year-old history that exists as an oral tradition and it has survived everything. It is a kind of immaterial form of art, which is stronger than any object. It’s pure energy. sleek:

How does this relate to your creative process? You showed me your altar. Is creating work and thinking of ideas born from those moments? Or do you have a traditional studio practice? MA: I hate studios. An idea can come from anywhere: on the way to the

Aber Sie meditieren? Das tue ich. Ich bin sehr am Tibetanischen Buddhismus interessiert, und ich habe eine Art lebendigen Altar… Alles auf diesem Altar hat eine Bedeutung für mich. Das hier zum Beispiel ist ein Bild meines Großvaters. Er war ein Heiliger.

sleek: MA:

Wie aufregend. Sie sagen, Sie wollen mit Ihren Performances die Öffentlichkeit zu einer intensiveren Erfahrung der Gegenwart bewegen. Als Künstlerin die Gegenwart ins Bewußtsein zu rücken ist das eine, die Fokussierung auf bestimmte Dinge das andere. Geht es Ihnen darum, ein Bewußtsein für unser kollektives Aufmerksamkeitsdefizit zu schaffen? MA: Ich glaube an ein universelles Wissen, und das können wir anzapfen. Es steht uns zur Verfügung, ohne daß wir uns dessen bewußt sind. Ich habe ein Jahr lang mit Aborigines in der zentralaustralischen Wüste gelebt, ohne Geld, in der reinen Natur. Ich habe Teile ihrer Sprache erlernt, aber sie kommunizieren hauptsächlich telepathisch. Sie haben eine ausgezeichnete Wahrnehmungsfähigkeit und Instinkte, die wir mit unserem rationalen Denken nicht erklären können. Die Mythologie der Aborigines bezieht sich immer auf die Gegenwart. Sie sagen niemals ›dies ist passiert‹, oder ›es wird passieren‹. Sie haben eine 30 000 Jahre alte Geschichte, die nur als mündliche Überlieferung existiert und trotzdem alles überdauert hat. Es ist eine immaterielle Form der Kunst, die stärker ist als jedes Objekt. Es ist pure Energie. sleek:

sleek:

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Art pollution? As we speak, 375,000 artists live in this city. I mean, how many good works can we make?

Do you find yourself writing things down? First comes the idea. Then I will write or make a drawing, and think about how I can realize it. I wanted to do a work for the MoMA retrospective where I was present seven motionless hours every day. Ten hours on Fridays. I was thinking, how I am going to do this? I had never done anything like this, and I prepared my body and mind as if I were travelling to outer space. Everyone was completely shocked. They underestimated the power of pure immaterial energy. We had a record number of visitors, close to one million. There were people waiting overnight just to sit there. At the end I removed the table so that it was just two chairs. The simplicity of things is so important. When you are a younger artist you need props, you need things to hide your insecurity. But actually, the mind is the most powerful tool. I could never have done this before. I needed to work for forty years to get this point.

sleek: MA:

What about the challenge of the discomfort and pain? There were moments when I could not even lift my hand to take my dress off. In the last months I could not even be touched because literally every molecule in my body was in pain. The body is not used to being static so it was rebelling.

sleek: Waren die körperlichen Beschwerden nicht eine große Herausforderung? MA: Es gab Momente, in denen ich außerstande war, meine Hand zu heben, um ein Kleidungsstück auszuziehen. In den letzten Wochen durfte mich niemand berühren, weil wirklich jedes Molekül meines Körpers schmerzte. Der Körper ist nicht für die Reglosigkeit gemacht, also hat er dagegen rebelliert.

Haben Sie Ihr Zeitgefühl verloren? Völlig! Am Anfang hat mich ein Wachmann gefragt: ›Sollen wir Ihnen wegen der Uhrzeit irgendein Zeichen geben?‹ Dabei saß ich ja dort, um die Zeit zu vergessen.

sleek: MA:

Macht Sie diese Arbeit besonders stolz? Ich versuche, mich ständig selbst zu fordern. Seven Easy Pieces, meine vorangegangene Arbeit am Guggenheim Museum, war ein sehr schweres Werk. Ich habe in den zehn Jahren, die ich in diesem Land lebe, nur drei Werke geschaffen. Jedes einzelne war härter als das davor. Jetzt arbeite ich an meiner Beerdigung. sleek: MA:

sleek: MA:

Did time disappear? Totally. In the beginning a guard asked, ›Do you want us to give you some kind of sign about the time?‹ I was sitting there to forget about time.

sleek:

Wie ist hier die Verbindung zu Ihrem kreativen Prozess? Sie haben uns Ihren Altar gezeigt. Entstehen Ihre Arbeiten und Ihre Ideen in Momenten wie diesen? Oder entsteht Ihre Arbeit ganz traditionell im Atelier?

sleek:

Zeichnung und denke darüber nach, wie ich sie realisieren kann. Für die MoMA-Retrospektive wollte ich eine Arbeit machen, in der ich jeden Tag sieben Stunden bewegungslos präsent sein wollte. Freitags zehn Stunden. Ich fragte mich, wie das gehen könnte. Ich hatte so etwas noch nie zuvor gemacht, und ich bereitete meinen Körper und meinen Geist darauf vor wie ein Astronaut vor einer Weltraummission. Alle waren total schockiert. Weil sie die Kraft der puren immateriellen Energie unterschätzt haben. Wir hatten Rekordbesucherzahlen von fast einer Million. Manche Besucher haben eine ganze Nacht hindurch gewartet, nur um mir gegenübersitzen zu können. Am Ende habe ich den Tisch entfernt, so daß da nur noch zwei Stühle standen. Die Einfachheit der Dinge ist so wichtig. Als junger Künstler braucht man Requisiten – Dinge, hinter denen man seine Unsicherheit verstecken kann. Aber eigentlich ist der Geist das mächtigste Instrument. Ich hätte das allerdings nicht früher machen können. Ich brauchte die Erfahrung von 40 Jahren Arbeit, um an diesen Punkt zu kommen.

MA:

Wie kam das zustande? 1988 habe ich mich im Alter von 40 Jahren von meinem Lebensgefährten Ulay getrennt, mit dem ich zwölf Jahre zusammen gewesen war, und bin die chinesische Mauer abgelaufen. Ich erinnere mich noch an einen Satz, den ich damals notierte: ›Ich fühle mich fett, häßlich und ungeliebt.‹ Zu diesem Zeitpunkt haßte ich das Theater. Aber ich dachte, daß der Schlüssel zu all dem Schmerz in meinem Leben meine Arbeit sein mußte. Um diesen Schmerz in etwas anderes zu übersetzen, muß man sein Leben auf eine Theaterbühne bringen. Das

sleek: MA:

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Mistress of metaphysics

eigene Leben als Zuschauer zu betrachten, befreit einen irgendwie davon. Als erster hat das Charles Atlas in Madrid 1989 für mich gemacht. Was genau hat er gemacht? Die Marina Abramovi -Biographie. Mein Leben als Theater. In einer Szene verabschiede ich mich von Ulay, und der echte Ulay saß gemeinsam mit seiner schwangeren chinesischen Frau im Publikum. Das war ein Moment, in dem Realität und Theater eins wurden. Das war ein so unglaublich befreiendes Gefühl, daß ich beschloß, mich nur noch auf ein einziges Theater einzulassen: das Theater meines eigenen Lebens. Deshalb bitte ich alle fünf oder sechs Jahre einen anderen Regisseur, mein Leben neu aufzulegen. Der letzte war Michael Laub, ein belgischer Theaterregisseur, der Biography Remix inszeniert hat. sleek: MA:

David Lynch könnte die nächste Interpretation übernehmen. Ich liebe David Lynch. Er hat eine neue Sprache fürs Kino erfunden. Außerdem interessiert er sich sehr für transzendentale Meditation. Ich würde ihn sehr gern mal treffen und mit ihm etwas erarbeiten. Aber unsere Wege haben sich noch nicht gekreuzt. Eines Tages vielleicht... ich bin jetzt 65. Vor ein paar Jahren bin ich auf Bob Wilson zugegangen. Während meiner Performances habe ich absolute Kontrolle über mich, aber im Theater gebe ich alle Kontrolle aus der Hand. Der Regisseur bekommt meine Tagebücher, private Briefe und Photos – er hat alle Freiheiten. Bob hat einen Blick auf mein Leben geworfen und gesagt, ›okay, Du wirst deine Mutter spielen‹. Und das, wo ich mich doch immer mit meiner Mutter gestritten habe.

sleek: From left: Willem Dafoe, Marina Abramovi , Antony, Robert Wilson, photographed during rehearsals for The Life and Death of Marina Abramovi at Teatro Real, Madrid in 2010. Photo © Antony Crook.

Is it the work that you are most proud of? I try to challenge myself. The work before was Seven Easy Pieces at the Guggenheim, which was a very difficult piece. I’ve been in this country for ten years and I’ve only made three pieces. Each piece was harder than the one before it. Now I am doing my funeral.

sleek: MA:

sleek:

How did that come about?

MA:

MA: After I walked the Great Wall of China and I split with my partner

of twelve years in 1988. I was forty years old at that time. I wrote this sentence, ›I feel fat, ugly and unwanted.‹ At that time I hated theatre. But I thought that the key to all the pain in my life is my work, and the way to translate that pain into something else is to stage your own life in the context of theatre. To play out your life in front of you somehow liberates you from it. Charles Atlas was the first one to actually stage it in Madrid, in 1989. He staged what exactly? MA: The Marina Abramovi biography. My life as theatre. There is one scene where I am saying goodbye to Ulay, and the real Ulay was in the theatre with his pregnant Chinese wife. It was a situation in which reality and theatre became one. It created such an incredibly liberating feeling that I decided the only theatre I am ever going to engage with is the theatre of my life. So every five or six years I will ask a different director to re-edit my life. Last time it was Michael Laub, a Belgian theater director, who made Biography Remix. sleek:

I nominate David Lynch for the next interpretation. I love David Lynch. He has invented a new language of cinema. Plus, he’s very interested in transcendental meditation. I would love to meet him and do something with him. But our paths haven’t crossed. One day… I am now sixty-five. A few years ago I approached Bob Wilson. In my performances I am in complete control. In the theatre, I give all my control away. I give my diaries, intimate letters, and photographs to the director. He has total freedom. Bob looked at me and looked at my life and said, ›Okay, you are going to play your mother‹ – I always fought with my mother.

Sie lebt nicht mehr? Nein. Sie ist vor drei Jahren gestorben. Als ich letzten September in Madrid mit Bob meine Rolle einstudierte, kam uns mein Bruder aus Belgrad besuchen. Er schaute mich an und sagte: ›Du bist genau wie sie.‹ Das war immer meine größte Angst! Das war ein fürchterliches Kompliment. Antony – von Antony and the Johnsons – ist ein toller Schriftsteller und Musiker, und er schreibt acht Lieder. Drei davon singt er auf der Bühne selbst, eines muß ich singen. Und William Dafoe ist der Erzähler und mein Vater. Er spielt viele verschiedene Rollen. Alles beginnt mit der Beerdigung, entwickelt sich in Richtung Kindheit und endet mit der Auferweckung der Seele und einer weiteren Beerdigung. Andere Regisseure haben viele meiner Arbeiten mit in die Geschichte hineingenommen, aber Bob läßt meine Arbeiten raus und fügt Geschichten aus meinem Leben ein. Verrückte Geschichten wie die mit der Nase zum Beispiel: Als ich zwölf war, fühlte ich mich furchtbar häßlich. Ich hatte orthopädische Schuhe. Ich hatte eine große Nase, die ich haßte. Ich war besessen von Brigitte Bardots Nase...

sleek: MA:

Weil Bardots Nase klein war? Genau. Klein und süß und stupsnasig. Aber jedes Mal, wenn ich meine Mutter um eine Bardot-Nase bat, hat sie mir eine Ohrfeige verpaßt und das war’s. Deshalb habe ich mit zwölf Jahren den perfekten Plan ausgeheckt: Ich wollte eines morgens, wenn niemand zuhause war, in das Schlafzimmer meiner Eltern gehen. Dort stand ein großes Ehebett mit scharfen Kanten. Dort wollte ich mich so schnell im Kreis drehen, wie ich nur konnte, dann mit dem Gesicht auf die Bettkante stürzen und mir die Nase brechen. Daraufhin würden wir ins Krankenhaus fahren – mit den Bardot-Photos in meiner Tasche. Irgendwann gehe ich also in das Zimmer und drehe mich. Aber ich verpasse die Kante und schneide mich an der falschen Stelle. Überall ist Blut, und die Photos fallen zu Boden. Dann kommt meine Mutter herein, verpaßt mir eine Ohrfeige, Ende der Geschichte. Bob wird diesen Vorfall auf die Bühne bringen. In dieser Szene werde ich von einem jungen Mädchen gespielt, und ich selber spiele meine Mutter – vor einer riesigen Brigitte Bardot-Projektion. Im Nachhinein bin ich froh, daß es

William Dafoe plays the narrator and my father and many other roles. It starts with the funeral then goes into the childhood, and finishes with the raising of the soul and another funeral. Other directors have put a lot of my work into the stories, but Bob is taking my work out and is putting my life stories in, crazy stories like the one about when I was twelve years old and I felt terribly ugly. I had orthopedic shoes. I had a big nose, which I hated. I was obsessed with Bridget Bardot’s nose... Because Bardot had a small nose? Right. Small and kind of upturned. Each time I asked my mother for a Bridget Bardot nose she would just slap my face and that would be it. So I created this perfect plan, at the age of twelve, that one Sunday morning when nobody was at home I would go to my parents’ bedroom. They had a big matrimonial bed with sharp edges. I was going to spin around as fast as I could and fall on the edge of the bed to break my nose. And then we would go to the hospital with the Bardot photographs in my pocket. So I go to the room, I spin around and miss the corner. I cut myself in the wrong place, there’s blood everywhere and the photographs fall to the floor. My mother comes into the room and slaps my face. End of story. Bob has staged this episode, with a young girl playing me and I play my mother in this scene, in front of a huge Bridget Bardot projection. Looking back I’m lucky that it didn’t happen. It is very scary to have a big nose on a childish face, but when you grow up your features all really fit with one another. I would look horrible with a Bardot nose.

sleek:

sleek: I love stories of artists when they were young, trying to fashion their image… though I don’t know whether you thought of yourself as an artist when you were twelve years old. MA: I had my first show.

You had your first show when you were twelve? I was always incredibly jealous of Mozart, because Mozart’s first concert was at seven. I was too late.

sleek: MA:

Explain why you hated theatre so much. Because theatre is a black box where people rehearse, where you have to pretend to be somebody else, where you have to play emotions… Performance was always about the real in real space and real time. I always use the example, the knife is the knife and the blood is the blood. It’s simple. In theatre, the knife is not the knife and the blood is not the blood. That’s the difference. Then theatre changed because it started taking from performance. I was studying Pina Bausch and Jan Fabre. Fabre has actually been influenced by my work a lot, we’ve collaborated, and Pina Bausch was one of my favorite choreographers. MA:

sleek:

MA:

190

MA:

sleek:

Erklären Sie uns, warum Sie das Theater früher so gehaßt haben.

MA: Weil das Theater eine luftleerer Raum ist, in dem Menschen Dinge

einstudieren, in dem man so tun muß, als sei man jemand anderer... Bei der Performancekunst geht es immer um das Echte, im echten Raum und in echter Zeit. Ich benutze immer folgendes Beispiel: Das Messer ist das Messer, und das Blut ist das Blut. Im Theater ist beides unecht. Das ist der Unterschied. Aber dann hat sich das Theater allmählich verändert und begonnen, Elemente aus der Performancekunst zu übernehmen, und ich habe mich mit Pina Bausch und Jan Fabre beschäftigt. Fabres Arbeit ist von meiner übrigens stark beeinflußt. Wir haben auch zusammengearbeitet. Und Pina Bausch ist eine meiner Lieblingschoreographinnen. Wie würden Sie Bob Wilsons Stil beschreiben? Es ist wunderbar, mit Bob Wilson zusammenzuarbeiten. Er hat eine neue Sprache für das Theater entwickelt. Es ist wirklich beeindruckend, wie viel Aufmerksamkeit er Zeit und Licht schenkt. Er malt förmlich mit Licht. Als wir das erste Mal in das Theater kamen, hat er Stunden damit verbracht, die Beleuchter zu instruieren. Alles mußte nach ganz bestimmten Vorstellungen penibel ausgeleuchtet werden.

sleek: MA:

sleek:

Wann haben Sie Wilson zum ersten Mal getroffen?

MA: 1971 in Belgrad. Er führte auf einem Theaterfestival Monologe auf.

Es war großartig, er war wirklich er selbst auf der Bühne. Ich erinnere mich daran, daß die Jugoslawische Presse schrieb: ›Ein Genie aus Iowa ist in der Stadt.‹ Später hat mir Bob erzählt, daß er in seinem Leben noch nie in Iowa gewesen ist. Die Vorstellung sollte eigentlich um elf Uhr enden, aber er hat immer weiter gemacht. Wir waren alle wie hypnotisiert, und niemand wollte gehen. Irgendwann kam der Nachtportier, hat sein Gewehr abgefeuert und gebrüllt: ›Alle raus hier!‹. Also sind wir gegangen, und das war das Ende.

How would you describe Bob Wilson’s style? Working with Bob Wilson is wonderful. He invented a new language for theatre. What is really incredible is Bob’s attention to time and light. He literally paints with light. When we first arrived in the theatre he spent hours asking light technicians to adjust various pieces of equipment to precise levels.

sleek:

She’s no longer alive? No. She died three years ago. Last September I was rehearsing the role in Madrid with Bob, and my brother came from Belgrade to see us. He looked at me and said, ›You are exactly like her.‹ This is my biggest fear! It was a horrible compliment. Antony, of Antony and the Johnsons, is creating nine songs, and I have to sing one of them myself.

Sie hatten Ihre erste Ausstellung als Zwölfjährige? Ich war unglaublich eifersüchtig auf Mozart, weil Mozart sein erstes Konzert schon mit sieben Jahren spielte. Ich war zu spät dran. sleek:

sleek:

MA:

Geschichten aus den Jugendjahren von Künstlern sind toll, wenn sie dabei sind, ihr Selbstbild zu entwickeln... wobei zu fragen wäre, ob Sie sich selbst mit zwölf Jahren schon als Künstlerin gesehen haben. MA: Ich hatte meine erste Ausstellung. sleek:

MA:

sleek:

nicht geklappt hat mit der Nase. Eine große Nase in einem Kindergesicht sieht sehr beängstigend aus, aber wenn man heranwächst, gleichen sich die Gesichtszüge an. Heute würde ich mit einer Bardot-Nase entsetzlich aussehen.

When did you meet Bob Wilson for the first time? I met him in Belgrade in 1971. He was doing monologues at a theatre festival. It was wonderful. He was totally himself on stage. I remember the Slavic press said that ›a genius from Iowa is in our town.‹ Bob later told me that he had never even been to Iowa. The show was supposed to finish at eleven o’clock, but he went on and on. It was midnight and the night porter wanted to close the space. Nobody was leaving because we were all mesmerized. So the night porter finally came and shot off his gun, yelling ›everyone out.‹ So we all ran out and that was the end.

sleek: MA:

26: Marina Abramovi – Audio excerpt of interview

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovi will premiere at the Lowry Theatre, Manchester, on 9 July, 2011, at the Manchester International Festival, 30 June - 17 July, 2011 191

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secrets

Gillian Wearing sheds some light on the human need to reveal our darkest secrets. Nicht nur Gillian Wearing weiß, daß es menschlich unmöglich ist, Geheimnisse für sich zu behalten.

Text by Hili Perlson English

deutsch

The Catholic Church offers its followers the ultimate spiritual cleansing. In an enclosed booth with a lattice obscuring their faces, believers can confess their sins and be granted absolution. Non-believers will have to spend years on the psychoanalyst’s couch for the same catharsis. Considered outside the ecclesiastical, confession taps into one our most basic needs – communication, and subsequently, stress relief. Idioms like »getting something off your chest« describe the very physical phenomenon of keeping secrets, and the relief of unburdening. Which is not to say that either therapy or regular confessions can solve all problems. Both institutionalized forms of revelation are often criticized for inducing fretting over dark secrets. Or deadly sins. Not everybody wears their heart on their sleeve, but most people can’t keep a secret. The Internet abounds with sites for anonymous, written confessions. And there’s a rise in news headlines mocking criminals caught after bragging on Facebook. Sharing secrets actually decreases the level of stress hormones in your brain. Keeping a secret does the opposite. In his recent book, Incognito: The Secret Lives Of The Brain, neuroscientist David Eagleman speaks of a biological struggle inside our heads: the part of the brain that wants to keep stress hormone levels low by telling all is constantly fighting the part that wants to keep incriminating information under wraps. So it comes as no surprise that when Gillian Wearing placed an online ad soliciting volunteers to confess all on video, she found what she was after. Her 2009 series Secrets and Lies is made up of nine close-up video portraits installed in booths not unlike a confessional, where participants tell all: one woman discusses the destabilizing consequences and social isolation experienced after killing her abusive husband in self-defence; another woman recounts a humiliating sexual experience; a hooded man tells the chilling story of a life of physical abuse that culminated in murder. As in many of Wearing’s works, the subjects’ identities are kept hidden behind latex masks and synthetic wigs. But even without exposing their faces, each expresses a longing for human contact through revealing their secrets. Nevertheless, the one-sidedness of their communication ultimately remains tragic. The mask, the digital avatar and, to a certain extent, the grid of a confessional help us to unburden ourselves of things that are otherwise better left unsaid. With our identities protected, we feel empowered to tell the truth. Even if we don’t have to repent.

Die praktischste Möglichkeit zur geistigen Reinigung bietet die Katholische Kirche. Als Gläubiger setzt man sich einfach für ein paar Minuten in ein stilles Kämmerlein, beichtet seine Sünden, ohne dabei jemandem in die Augen blicken zu müssen, und schon erhält man die Absolution. Dem Ungläubigen bleibt für diese Form der Katharsis nur jahrelange Psychotherapie. Auch außerhalb der Kirche kommt das Beichten dem menschlichen Mitteilungsdrang und damit einhergehenden Spannungsabbau entgegen. Der Ausdruck »etwas loswerden« beschreibt das beinahe körperlich spürbare Gewicht eines Geheimnisses und die Sehnsucht danach, es abzuwerfen. Nicht, daß Beichte oder Psychotherapie irgendwelche Probleme lösen könnten – im Gegenteil, beide Therapieformen stehen in der Kritik, Geheimnisse überhaupt erst zu ermöglichen. Vielleicht sogar Todsünden. Nicht jeder trägt sein Herz auf der Zunge, doch richtig sicher sind Geheimnisse bei fast niemandem. Im Internet gibt es unzählige Möglichkeiten der anonymen Offenbarung. Nicht umsonst werden immer öfter Verbrecher durch ihre Prahlereien auf Facebook überführt. Geheimnisse auszuplaudern reduziert nämlich den Streßhormonpegel in unserem Gehirn. Eines für sich zu behalten bewirkt das Gegenteil. Der Neurowissenschaftler David Eagleman spricht in seiner jüngsten Publikation Incognito: The Secret Lives Of The Brain sogar von einem biologischen Kampf, und fast immer gewinnt jener Teil, der für den Abbau von Streßhormonen zuständig ist. Es ist also nicht weiter erstaunlich, daß Gillian Wearing unzählige Zuschriften auf eine Onlineanzeige bekam, in der sie für eine Videoarbeit Freiwillige suchte, die vor laufender Kamera ihre Sünden beichten sollten. Ihre 2009 entstandene Arbeit Secrets and Lies besteht aus neun Videoportraits in Nahaufnahme, die in Beichtstuhlähnlichen Boxen aufgenommen wurden. Die Portraitierten nehmen kein Blatt vor den Mund: Eine Frau erzählt, wie sie ihren gewalttätigen Eheman in Notwehr getötet hat und seitdem in sozialer Isolation lebt; eine andere beschreibt ein erniedrigendes sexuelles Erlebnis; ein Mann erzählt die tragische Geschichte eines Lebens voller Gewalt und Mißbrauch, das in einem Mord gipfelte. Wie in vielen Arbeiten Wearings verbergen sich die wahren Identitäten der Sprecher hinter Latexmasken und Kunsthaarperücken. Doch unter ihrer Maskierung tritt ihre Sehnsucht nach menschlichem Kontakt hervor, und es wird deutlich: noch tragischer als das offenbarte Schicksal ist bei der Beichte die Einseitigkeit der Kommunikation. Dennoch, unter dem Schutzmantel der Anonymität läßt sich eine Last von der Seele reden, findet sich der Mut zur Wahrheit. Beichten tut also in jedem Fall gut. Auch wenn man danach nicht unbedingt Buße tut.

192

Gillian Wearing, still photographs from Secrets and Lies, 2009. Video for monitor with sound, 53.16 min. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York.

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Inv ent ory Berlin People + Places..................................................................................196 Biased in Berlin ..............................................................................................208 Studio Visit ..........................................................................................................210 The collector – A Serialized Novel .................................................214 The Further CHronicles of Anthony Haden-Guest .............218 Further Reading ...........................................................................................220

194

195

Berlin People +Places Normally, in this section we present people who enrich Berlin’s cultural life, and places which exude the Berlin spirit though located all over the world, not just Berlin. But in this issue we focus exclusively on our hometown, featuring two art events of international importance, one really good, one really – well, see for yourself.

196

Gallery Weekend Berlin

Alex Dellal »I’m presenting the work of Alex Hoda in Berlin because I want people seriously interested in art to see and get to know about it. Elsewhere, art events are all about celebrities, but in Berlin it is really about the art«, says Alex Dellal of 20 Hoxton Square Projects on his reasons for making an appearance on the Berlin Gallery Weekend exhibition schedule. It might seem odd to hear these words coming from someone who is probably better known for his high-society credentials than his work as a gallerist, but he’s obviously sufficiently savvy to want to build his artists’ careers on something more substantial than a social network. Few people in Berlin know that he’s actually the owner of one of Mitte’s most beautiful buildings, the former ironmongers on

Wallstraße (a fitting location for Hoda’s bronze sculptures and which housed Elizabeth Peyton’s show at last year’s Gallery Weekend). Dellal purchased it four years ago and eventually plans to install apartments and maybe a project space open to collaboration with the local scene. But he doesn’t feel the need to rush things, and as the Berlin real estate market is in his favour anyway, the building is still unrenovated. Since this is becoming an increasingly rare sight these days, we certainly hope it’ll stay in this rather beautiful state a little longer. We’ll be seeing Dellal again at the next Berlin Gallery Weekend at the latest. After all, he says that it has become one of his favourites dates on the international art calendar. 197

Gallery Weekend Berlin

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Raymond Pettibon Interview by Hili Perlson

We are sitting in one of Berlin’s largest galleries right now. Berlin is an amazing city in a lot of ways, I mean the Wall coming down? But don’t give Reagan any credit for that. And don’t give JFK any credit for anything, either, the Berlin airlift and all that. ›We are all Berliners?‹ Fuck that motherfucker, the guy was a dick. My idols are Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. Music-wise, I love German opera.

sleek: So a work showing Michelle and Barack Obama and George W. Bush

sleek:

snorting cocaine is not meant as political satire? [Part of the text in this drawing reads: I thought you people smok’d it!] Raymond Pettibon: I’m not down with Obama, he’s a very severe disappointment. He’s worse than Bush, which is a pretty radical thing to be. America exports violence. Obama affects lives and people die. I could say ›Who cares‹, right? But I regret that kind of thing. I’m for saving lives, not for killing, and killing is what Obama does. He’s a weak, punk-ass motherfucker who doesn’t have to do that, but he does. He does it to get re-elected. In America, foreign policy is domestic policy. I wish my work wasn’t about that. I’d rather not have to deal with politics.

RP:

sleek:

But you do. Do you think that this is the role of the artist in society?

RP: Artists can kiss my ass. They do it for their own careers. I don’t give

a fuck about clowning and careering. Fuck ‘em.

Does music influence your work? Do you listen to music when you draw? RP: Music doesn’t bother or distract me. I’m not easily distracted because I’ve lived in places where the traffic is incessant and loud, and coming from a large family… you get used to it. But no, I don’t necessarily listen when I work. I come from post- punk music, but actually more from rap ‘cause I’m from L.A. and that’s what it’s like there, living with gang violence. sleek:

Tim Noble and Sue Webster

Interview by Hili Perlson

Raymond Pettibon

Raymond Pettibon’s drawings are as rich in detail as they are in cultural references and, though not always immediately decipherable, social commentary. He often uses literary quotations in his works that don’t immediately relate to the imagery, lending his drawings an ambiguity that is at once challenging and intellectually provocative. Similarly elusive in person, Pettibon does not appreciate being pigeonholed with labels like »punk rocker« or »anarchist«, though he does little to shake these epithets. For this interview, Pettibon showed 198

up an hour late, after an assistant had been sent to pick him up from his hotel room. On arrival, Pettibon reeked of alcohol. It was noon. But whatever you do, don’t dare call his work »political satire«, at least not when he’s listening. »It’s not about satire,« he told sleek, »I don’t mind that word, but it’s more real life. I don’t know why journalists need these categories. Who the fuck cares? But what am I going to do, argue with them? It’s tiresome, a fucking waste of time.«

One of the most talked about exhibitions during Gallery Weekend was the sculptural installation Turning the Seventh Corner by Tim Noble and Sue Webster, created in collaboration with architect David Adjaye at the Blain /S outhern gallery’s massive new Berlin space. A pitch dark, intestine-like passage leads – after turning seven corners – to a gilded sculpture that casts a shadow in the form of the artists’ face-to-face profiles. The »heads« are made of mummified rodents that were collected by Noble’s mother’s three cats and tucked away under a comfy armchair in her country cottage. The labyrinthine tunnel takes after the Egyptian pyramids, whose riches were (somewhat ineffectively) protected by a malediction that would befall intruders who disturbed the peace of the pharaohs. Are the dead, mummified creatures in your sculpture a warning sign? Will something bad happen to those who enter the installation? Tim Noble: It’s not about the decay of the flesh or a curse; it’s about finding a secret. The gallery space seemed to suggest that a lot of objects should to be put in it, but we didn’t want to do that. We said to Harry [Blain], listen, this is a brilliant space, but how about we show in the dirty old shed over there? We wanted to create a personal, intimate encounter with just one piece. And we wanted to put a delay on getting to it. sleek:

This space, which used to house the printing presses of the German daily Der Tagesspiegel, is not easy to work with and will probably influence the art shown here. Do you think the gallery will now specialize in huge installations? Sue Webster: In a way, we influenced the decision of where to open the sleek:

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gallery, based on what we wanted to do with our installation, because we went with Harry to look at spaces together. We looked at a lot of locations, but this was the one we all wanted the moment we saw it. There was something going on in the building, a resonance which was tremendously exciting. So we were quite adamant that they should not make a gallery out of it yet. We wanted to keep it really raw. When Harry Blain and Graham Southern closed their former Berlin gallery, Haunch of Venison, nobody expected them to reopen a new space so soon. But here it is. Why the insistence on Berlin? Does the city have a special meaning to you? SW: Berlin was the first place I ever travelled to, my dad took me when I was 16. The Wall was still up, we stayed in the West and went on a tour to the East one day. As soon as we crossed Check Point Charlie I was struck by all the red communist flags. Everything was black and white, with a sea of red flags. Berlin still feels black and white to me. My favourite album cover of all time is David Bowie’s »Heroes«, persleek:

fection in black and white, recorded in Berlin. I’ve kept coming back year after year and I noticed that the parts that I liked about Berlin are slowly disappearing… TN: This was also one of our main struggles with this space. We asked them to keep as much stuff in as possible, but they want to turn it into a conventional gallery. Every day we came in we noticed that more and more things were missing, cleaned away. But we managed to keep quite a lot of stuff here. They’re probably just waiting for you to leave to change it all! It’s like anywhere else, anything that’s slightly edgy gets conventionalized, sanitized. Galleries, especially in London, have come to resemble shop windows. You can take it all in, consume the art quickly. We wanted to bring it back to the intimate experience of looking at art and thinking about it. We wanted to do something memorable that would haunt the viewers during a weekend where everyone is shopping around. sleek: SW:

Gilbert & George Interview by Hili Perlson

Are you excited about the wedding? It’s very interesting because at the moment all the street parties in England look like our pictures from the ›Jackfreak‹ series. The people are all dressed up in the Union Jack – they’re jackfreaks! George: The pictures came true! Art became life! sleek:

Gilbert:

And you find that scary? People ask us if we’ve been invited to the royal wedding and we say ›No, but we’re looking forward to being invited to Prince Harry’s coming out party.‹ Gilbert: It’s not a nationalistic thing in any way. This is a very rare occasion of glamour that happens only once every 20 years. It’s extraordinary. It allows you to go back to some antiquated tradition. sleek:

George:

Can you imagine Kate Middleton featuring on one of your postcard pictures in the future? George: Sure, Kate is so glamorous! Gilbert: Good smile. She doesn’t have to be more than that. sleek:

Gilbert & George

Why are you so obsessed with postcards? Other artists have pictures and drawings; we have pictures and postcard pictures. Gilbert: They’re like auras of the city, or chakras. Twenty years ago, we were able to find more varied postcards but now the selection is very limited. The same goes for the sex flyers, they hardly exist anymore – it all moved to the Internet, which is the new easy way of approaching people. The flyers are like antiques, and we like the dated graphics and the fonts they use. George: They are remnants from the golden age of telephone sex! sleek:

George:

A most charming addition to the Gallery Weekend’s social circuit, Gilbert & George didn’t just come to Berlin to be the photographers’ favourites at art events – which they were, regardless of all the other highly attractive people attracted by this event – but also to present their new series, »The Urethra Postcard Art«, at Arndt gallery. Nearly four decades after they first started making Postcard Art, the inseparable agents provocateurs returned to the medium, presenting a dazzling 564 new pieces made from London souvenir postcards and flyers arranged 200

in the form of the medical symbol for the urethra. It is a symbol not very common in popular culture so to fully enjoy Gilbert & George’s works you might want to keep in mind that it stands for a biological organ, or rather its tip, which in common parlance is referred to as »pee-hole«. While this organ is of great interest to us, our conversation was of a more general nature, touching on sex, money, religion and, most importantly, the royal wedding of William and Kate.

And why are all the cards and flyers arranged to form the shape of a urethra? Gilbert: They’re arranged like that because the urethra is the beginning of life. George: We have the urethra of Westminster Abbey, the urethra of the Queen, of the Punk, and also the sex flyers and cards. Tourists coming to London don’t just see Tate Modern or Big Ben, but might also employ the services advertised on these flyers. All elements together form the aura of London in some way. We’ve always had a big library of religious books, with a special section on Theosophy. It’s a religion that sort of died out but Theosophists were very progressive, One leading Theosophist, Annie Besant, was fighting to distribute condoms to poor families who didn’t know anything about family planning, and – at a time when enjoyment was not supposed to be part of intercourse for women, the dutiful wife was supposed to lie back and think of England – she went to jail for it. And then there’s Charles Leadbeater, who taught that male masturbation was a healthy thing, not a shameful sin. There were teenage suicides in the 19th century because of the shame and guilt attached to masturbation and he fought to change that. He came up with the sign of the urethra, and that’s what led us to these particular pictures. The urethra is a message, and our motto is: decriminalize sex. Gilbert: Once you see London through the eye of the urethra, you see it in a different way, don’t you think? sleek:

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Gallery Weekend Berlin 2011 Snapshots from one of the world’s best art world reunions

Photography by Nick Ash, unless credited otherwise.

Anna-Catharina Gebbers’ project »Wert / Sache« that involved giving away free limited poster prints by artists such as Alicja Kwade, Florian Slotawa and Katja Strunz was too much to take for some people. Other laudable shows included Kathrin Sonntag at Galerie Kamm. And not just at Neugerriemschneider (below) people were asking, »Where is Ai Weiwei?«

Having a laugh at their own opening at CFA: Nicole Hackert, Bruno Brunnet and Daniel Richter – wait, did Richter have an opening that weekend?

Probably the best show of Gallery Weekend (GW), even if did open three weeks beforehand: Sterling Ruby at Sprüth Magers. Those who visited the Schinkel Pavilion after GW were surprised to learn that John Bock wasn’t performing 24 / 7.

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GW’s opening drinks at the Italian Embassy saw them all: Martin Klosterfelde (caught with Montblanc’s Ingrid Roosen-Trinks); Alexander Schröder; Udo Kittelmann with GW’s figurehead Michael Neff, Michele and Elena Valensise – the hosts and Berlin’s most hospitable ambassadors; Vera Countess von Lehndorff; Christian Boros, and a tabletop fountain sculpture of unknown (non-artistic) origin.

Christophe Wiesner explaining office technology (by Gabriel Kuri) to Susanne Pfeffer, while the other guests had a blast (discreetly not pictured here) at the inauguration of Esther Schipper’s exquisite new premises.

Frank Stella making a stellar appearance in Berlin – unfortunately a couple days prior to GW, and David Shrigley – present during GW but captured here a couple of days afterwards at the presentation of his ears (the Little & Large ones).

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A balancing act: holding a welcome speech standing on a golf cart without looking embarassing. It worked. A logistical tour de force: serving dinner for approx. 1000 guests. Seated. It worked. A miracle: creating an inviting atmosphere at Berlin’s tradefair venue The Station. It worked.

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Biased In Berlin

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Biased in Berlin

From above: Ralf Pf lugfelder climbing, Mariechen Danz performing, Yorgos Sapountzis smiling, some DJing, and Tue Greenfort installing.

Photography by Amy Binding

Berlin is famous the world over for its vital art scene, fuelled by the enthusiasm of private initiatives rather than the state, and this enthusiasm is so strong that it has even managed to fill an institutional void brought about by a lack of public funding and competence. For years, public and private institutions and individuals in Berlin have tried to express their need for a local Kunsthalle, a public gallery for contemporary art that would ref lect what the world finds so appealing about Berlin-based art production. At long last, their calls have been heard: the city’s mayor himself, Klaus Wowereit, commanded a survey exhibition that was to demonstrate the existence of a contemporary art scene in Berlin worthy of its own public gallery... And all of a sudden the city had 1.7 million euro to throw at a single exhibition project, when the 208

city’s annual art budget totals just 4 million… Having been opposed the project since its inception, we have to admit that on inspection of the list of participating artists we were rather inclined to change our opinion. In keeping with the curators’ intention of capturing the diversity of local art production it lists some names that only those with insider knowledge of the Berlin art scene could know. But the result unfortunately looks more like a graduate show than anything that could legitimise the creation of a Kunsthalle… Why wasn’t the budget spent on this show used to build one? We can even suggest a suitable location: the main venue of »Based in Berlin«, the former atelier houses in Monbijou Park. The show’s opening party, by the way, was a good one. 209

Studio Visit

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Studio Visit You want to discover new artists? Then this one’s for you. We at sleek take you where no external market hype will confuse you: directly to the artists’ studios. In each issue we present three artists we think stand out with consistent quality and content. It’s up to you to make a studio visit – but with this section, you’ll never have a reason to complain that you should have bought XY’s art before XY became so famous and expensive…

Clockwise from top left: 60 seconds, 2005. Wristwatches, diameter approx. 400 cm / Two folds, 2009. Paper, 520 × 21 cm / Ignacio Uriarte in his studio. Photo © Maxime Ballesteros / Still from archivadores en archivo, 2007. Video, 8.21 min / A 4 cycle, 2004. Rolled up A4 sheets, dimensions variable.

Ignacio Uriarte Having worked in business administration before turning to art, Ignacio Uriarte appropriates standard digital and non-digital technology used in today’s office environments for his artistic production. His work should not to be misread as a critique of the monotonous structures typical of a nine-to-five environment, but as a critique of how people moving within these structures perceive and deal with them. Bringing out and celebrating the beauty inherent in such mundane

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things as a rolled up sheet of paper, Uriarte proves that dullness is not in the nature of ring-binders but in the office worker’s attitude towards them. This is not to say that any pen pusher could transform their workspace into something resembling an Uriarte exhibition simply by changing their attitude – but taking inspiration from the artist’s sense of humour would certainly make office life more entertaining. mail@ignaciouriarte.com 211

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Clockwise from top left: Still from Means and Ends, 2009. Video projection, 5 min., colour, silent / Tain, 2010. Colour photograph, 101.6 × 76.2 cm / B onnie Begusch at her studio. Photo © Maxime Ballesteros / In, On, Around, and Between, 2010. Wood shelves, paper, photographs, 24 frames / Still from Temporary Field, 2010. Video projection, 4 min., b / w, silent.

Clockwise from top left: Transformella, queen of debris (setting #2, The Thesis), performance, 2011. Photo © David Oliveira / Altar dem deutschen Polizei, installation and performance, 2008 / Johannes Paul Raether at his studio. Photo © Maxime Ballesteros / Black Carnation, 2010 / Kufiya Feigale (detail), 2007. Screenprint on bleached PLO scarf, 100 × 100 cm. Photo © Galerie September.

Bonnie Begusch

Johannes Paul Raether

Through variation and repetition, Bonnie Begusch investigates how information can be lost, obstructed or recombined to construct a message. She uses video, photography and text to explore the process of perception. In Means and Ends, an endless array of exclamation marks, semicolons, slashes, and other signs are displayed against a white background. The camera constantly shifts up and down along the sheets of paper, creating a sense of disorientation that stands in contrast to the 212

punctuation marks’ purpose, which is to give regulatory cues for logical text processing. Using imaging techniques that have their roots in radical abstraction and experimental film, Begusch creates representational systems to explore how meaning materializes within prescribed boundaries. In a practice that recalls McLuhanian communication systems, she puts the transmission of data at the centre of her work, in order to focus on the processing of the content by the recipient. b.begusch@gmail.com

Johannes Paul Raether is a German artist, and we don’t mean this only in the narrow sense of the word. His work – with titles impossible to translate from the German – scrutinizes symbols of German national identity and other quintessentially German phenomena. Special attention is given to authorities and bureaucratic absurdities. Which is not to say that his rehashing of these themes is not universal. In fact, Raether may be regarded as a cultural delegate of sorts,

refracting aspects of German society through his very specific lens. His polemics call forth the political satire of German agitprop theatre and the absurdist rage of Christoph Schlingensief, but these are veiled in the naiveté of the fantastical multicolored, full-body costumes he makes for his performances, complete with impressively impasto facial foundation in the brightest colours imaginable. jpr@johannespaulraether.net 213

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The Collector A Serialized novel by April Lamm

Part VI: Hurt people hurt people The last chapter ended with an urgent message, something Louise wants to tell Max. About Nico, he presumes. But why did she snatch Ruth’s cell phone out of her hand? What could possibly be so urgent? Has Louise told Ruth something about Nico? Or about the mysterious girl he woke up next to this morning? It’s making Max nervous. We’re still in the midst of the opening of the art fair and he has yet to see the artwork. His artwork. The artwork that the right people are all abuzz about for all the wrong reasons. There’s been a lot of sleeping around, regardless, thank god. It’s time for a sex chapter. 214

Hurt people hurt people. It was one of Ruth’s maxims and the reason why Max and Ruth had decided nearly a year ago to this date that they would keep their distance from Louise. Emotional distance. She had a splinter lodged deep and it remained unnamable. ‘I swear to you. She’s got two life-lines. I’ve seen them!’ Max pooh-pooh’d the idea of palm reading, but he believed her, in some way, nonetheless. What Max and Ruth shared was their belief in not making her into an enemy, no matter how vicious or depraved her crimes. She was smart, charming, but more importantly, slippery. She had a nose for who to know, what to know, and how to know it. It was with the danger of Being Louise in mind that Max cut her short on the phone, telling her to wait, he’d be there in two minutes. He was near enough to see who was in the booth. Whatever message she had for him, he’d rather hear it in person, and definitely not in front of his gallerist and that Chinese collector. Ruth grabbed her cell phone back from Louise’s grip, laughing nervously. - You remember the game we used to play? Remember the evening at the Paris Bar when you picked up Klosterfelde’s phone while he was talking to someone sitting to his right, who was it? I don’t remember. Anyway, you quickly typed in an SMS saying, ‘I don’t like you’, and then sent it to the first name in his address book. Who did you send it to? - Agatha. Agatha was worth a chapter of her own and perhaps she will get one. She was a special breed to the art world, shiny and new, she would have made the perfect dentist’s wife and somehow, now, in 2007, with her good looks and, it must be said, charisma she was able to hobnob with the best of them. Speaking of a famous husband-and-wife artist pair from Russia, she referred to them as ‘The Brothers Kabakov’ and when she mentioned the well-known institution Kunstwerke, she called it Kunstburger without the slightest hint of irony. - Is she still with whatshisname? - Do you really think she was ever really ‘with’ him? - You know what I mean. She was at least always ‘with him’ in the same room, and they always arrived and left around about the same time... - Right, but never really talking to him. No. Louise yawned. - He went back to his wife. Ruth was glad to hear of it, but she knew that it was better not to comment on it. To Louise. Whatever she said would be conveyed directly back to Agatha. It had taken Ruth a long time to learn just how much to parcel out to Louise to keep the conversation going without providing ammunition for future wars. Even a fish wouldn’t get caught if it kept its mouth shut. - Is she still in Berlin? - No. She finally got a job, if you could call it that. Director of a Kunstverein in Nicaragua… - Hard to believe she’d settle for that, or for that matter, that anyone would hire her with her reputation. She knows nothing about art. - Oh, she doesn’t. But don’t forget, she’s got great hair. I think it gets her places. Louise thumbed her phone, but carried on: - And she wouldn’t have taken the position if it weren’t for that panama hat-wearing gaucho who came with the package. She’s usually on the road anyway and the Kunstverein foots the bill. She needed that. What’s taking Max so long? The art world was small. Same people, different setting. Basel, London, Paris, you’d always end up in the same crowd of ac-

tors with the same props in different shapes – and in a different director’s film. Here she was in Basel chatting with Louise about a girl they knew mainly from art openings in Berlin, but even more so through art fair events, not so much Everywhere as Anywhere. Though truly relishing the gossip, Ruth was suddenly struck with the fear of seeing Max in front of the artwork he called his own – which he had yet to lay eyes on. She could see him weaving his way towards them. How would she slip away? ‘I’ve got to pee.’ A closed mouth, as she always said, catches no flies. With so much attention being showered upon him so early in the day, and with everyone making mention of some mysterious newspaper clipping tacked to the walls, en route to Galerie NN’s booth, Max fantasized the headlines: - Max Decker Makes His Comeback to NYC as Host of Saturday Night Live - Max Decker to Guest Star in Tatort - Max Decker Tours North Korea When he finally arrived at the booth, he felt he’d been made the fool. One look at this pile of destruction and he understood at last what the critic had meant by ‘investigating the possibilities of the “Broken Readymade.’” He walked over to the Italian newspaper clipping, kicking a few of the cigarette butts to the side. He looked at the text spray-painted red on the walls and shook his head. Only one question penetrated the moment, but he couldn’t bring it to his lips: Where’s Ruth? Louise pulled Max aside and into the aisle, dragging him to meet an artist who was a ‘dear friend.’ She said she had come to know him better when ‘visiting Tiji’, who had bought a large piece of land in Thailand. The artist had turned this land into a quasi-farm/residency for himself and his friends and then called it The Land. She said the word ‘land’ really loud and emphatically, but you could see that she was not saying it to impress Max, but a passerby who was even more important in the New World of titles and price tags. Out of her mouth flowed only first names, or worse, her own nicknames for them – with the assumption, of course, that Max could fill in the blanks. She knew that Max didn’t know them, knew that her knowing them would put her in a shining light. What she falsely assumed was that Max would know of them. Gavin, Larry, J.C., they were all anonymous personages who took on weight only through the drama Louise created by the nature of her telling. Blathering on about people he neither cared about nor particularly wanted to care about just now, Louise filled the air with her rapid chatter: - He was supposedly approached by Larry last year in Miami, but J.C. told me that he was sure that his artist wouldn’t leave him for a skunk like Larry, so I said, Larry is no skunk, he just makes artists rich, so what’s wrong with that, and J.C. said, nothing, it’s just that he poaches off all of the work that we’ve done together over the past 10 years... Anyway, I didn’t want to push the issue any further and Larry’s very close to Dasha, you know, so I thought I’d better not say anything more until Gavin arrived. Point blank, I asked him if he was upset about losing Alfred to Larry and he said, not all of my artists leave me. Those who decide to go are free to go. Gavin had a knack for making every situation look like he had kept to the high ground. Not unlike Louise, in that matter. Max looked back to the booth, thinking he’d seen the apparition of Ruth disappearing with the gallerist behind a door, a tiny box of a room for private showings. It was the way the gallerist had taken her elbow that made him feel the pang. He turned back to Louise who was still skating over superficial details, her red

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lips spitting out 360 details: - That beard looks so good on Gavin you know, like a sign of intelligence. He’s the only one I know who can carry a beard like that and not look like a cop from a bad TV show. - Louise, said Max, already on the impatient side, what was it you so desperately wanted to tell me? A few years ago, she would have held him captive with her know-how. But now that Max was going around with Nico, she’d fallen a notch or two. If she was a Porsche before, she was a Ford Fiesta now, and the only thing she had on him was hesitation, delay, mystery. She began to rustle through her bag, then told him that she had to make just one quick call, would he mind waiting? As he turned his back on her, he could hear her ask ‘Oh and what dinner will you be at tonight?’ but pretended he didn’t hear her and kept walking. Didn’t it occur to Louise that he might be attending his own dinner just this once? He waded his way through the masses of glittering people in the aisles back to the booth. Increasingly, his disappointment became more pointed. Snippets of conversations picked up along the way didn’t help assuage this sudden feeling of estrangement from the uneasy glitz sans sequins: ‘…the Steinbach, no, a frightfully difficult decision. In the end, we just didn’t like the Geraniums.’ He saw a handshake and a pat on the back. The gallerist’s eyebrows arched optimistically… - Max, let me introduce you! Horror of all horrors, please no, said his expression, which he tried in vain to suppress. Had the gallerist sold his work without having an inkling about what it might mean? Where was Ruth? She had some explaining to do. It was not that he didn’t like the damage she had done, but rather that he was irritated at the insouciant air of its being a commodity. The press text hadn’t changed, but it was vague enough to be read in a vacuum, he supposed. It was as if her changes represented a subliminal text between film frames. If there were 24 frames per minute, Ruth had found a way of creating a 25th without making it into a video. She’d done something new and instead of being happy about it, Max felt interchangeable, infinitely ersatzable. At this moment, he felt like a glorified interior decorator, a mere foot soldier in the service of wealthy excess. He fantasized that ‘his’ artwork would now end up decorating the foyer of some large glass and steel highrise in Shanghai. The definition of being an artist waffled in his mind. The next step, Max thought, was being commissioned to do the floors, the children’s room, the only empty wall in the hall. As always, when Max felt stilted, he took to the streets. Walking made it easier. En plein air, he could ponder the duplicity of art and its uneasy slip into decoration. He made a dash for the door. Past the mechanical bull underneath a chandelier, past the oversized sunglass stand, past the robot vacuum cleaners sucking up the glitter littering the floor. How had he completely missed Gallery Box’s most recent “Stressed Situationist” when he made his way down the aisle before? Basel was like that. You thought you had your exit strategy all laid out and then, boom, some booth you hadn’t seen before would throw you off the mental track. He had to get out of the fair and fast. The sun was pounding down, high noon. He looked to the pavement and saw a laminated piece of paper stuck to the ground announcing the title to the piece accosting him, “Insulting the Audience”. A performance artist standing on a makeshift soapbox was shouting out questions to the meager crowd of three in front of him – ‘What does art mean to you? Why are you here?’… Beyond that was a sculpture emitting a blaring horn at fif-

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teen-minute intervals, meant to ‘comment’ on the noise of urban life that ended up simply adding to it. Max chanced upon it at exactly the wrong moment (or right moment, if one believed in the artwork’s intention). He could see Nico and another woman getting out of a car that looked more like an armored tank. They were clutching their ears and making terrible faces. The one with the poodle perm must be Nico’s mother. What would he say to Nico? He had already said so much about the artwork that was plainly not there. And her mother, Frau Mutter Bibi von Stroheim? He had yet to meet her and this was bad timing. Something Nico had said to him in Venice while standing in front of the Hungarian Pavilion was still bothering him. They had just seen a video (labour practices in the third world) which they had both liked. At the same time, Max had just received a call from Pepe in Basel who was being paid 25 bucks an hour for sitting around and doing nothing, waiting for a crate which had yet to arrive, and it made Max worried. Back in the day when Max was an assistant, assistants commanded no more than 10 an hour. Now the good ones were so in demand, they cost what was a mini-fortune for Max. He had tried to get in touch with Ruth, but she had a different SIM card just for Italy and Max had lost the number somehow. In any case, a distracted Max was not the Max Nico wanted, so she said fleetingly, what Max perceived as rather harshly, ‘Don’t you have enough free interns to do this kind of work?’ It made Max swipe back: - You mean unpaid sherpas, like the ones we just saw in the film? He hopped on the first tram that came and took it just a few stops into the anywhere that wasn’t the fair. The shattered glass door of the post office – which looked like it had been penetrated by a gargantuan warring worm – seemed like the right place to get off. Who had wanted to rob a post office and, holy smokes, what sort of instrument had they used to penetrate its door? A barring ram in the middle of medieval ‘downtown’ Basel? It was only then that he began to read the signs, quite literally the shop signs lit up in neon at night, more closely. Whether the signs were a signal of insistence or indecisiveness was impossible to discern. On one short block alone, the signs seemed to double back on themselves, with a bumbling lack of commitment: Restaurant Café Bauernmensa Cafeteria (the farmer’s canteen cafeteria) Café Cucina (the café kitchen) Bäckerei Café (the bakery café) Grillhaus Bistro (the grill house bistro) Multi-shop Kiosk (not a freestanding ‘kiosk’ at all, but rather a 24-hour quick shop) At the Hoppe Repro Bistro Edel Café Bratkartoffeln Copyshop, he grinned: Why decide on what you want to be at all when you can be everything at once? Why only one girlfriend and not two? Somehow, he’d work out the details later. Not that he need advertise it, but he saw no reason not to delve into the multi-shop kiosk mentality at least for now, today, this afternoon. Why make a problem out of a situation? He saw the tram approaching. Halfway up the steps, he stepped out and hailed a taxi. ‘Kurzstrecke. To the Messe,’ he said. But even in the short time it took for him to arrive back at the fair, he’d had time to regress into the cabinet of second thoughts. From the taxi window he saw a bike leaning against a wall, a donkey bike bogged down with plastic sacks similar to the one that Nico owned (the 80,000 dollar artwork). Similar but not the same. The taxi driver pulled to a stop and Max asked for a receipt. For 4 euros. Before he could say ‘never mind’ the

driver handed him over the small slip of paper. To compensate, Max handed him over a 10 euro note as a tip while glancing at the glamour-seeking artist he could see in the distance. There he was, Edward Scissorhands, hard at work. The ancillary work necessary for an artist these days, courting collectors, seeking funding for larger projects. He was in the outdoor fair café having cappuccino with the collector Agnes Troublé (agnes b.) and waving to Courtney Love at a table nearby. She was being interviewed by a journalist who didn’t dress the part of a journalist per se, but the Art Unlimited bag handed out at the press office gave him away. Mid-sentence she returned Scissorhands’s wave with a blown kiss. Was this the kind of life Max yearned for? Or was it rather that he yearned for it out of spite? Out of spite for his more successful colleagues and former cohorts, the ones he drank with night after night at Bar 3, the ones like Edward who talked to Max only when he was a) talking to someone important, or b) scheduled for a show at a venue where Edward wanted to show too. Max showed the guards his pass while nodding to the fair director. Bald and definitely bored, his pale freckles gave him the air of eternal youth necessary to deal with the tedious art advisor rattling off to his client: ‘A foolproof colour would be something monochromatic: If your dining room is orange, then you’d want to pair the paintings with a hue and a shade from the same slice of the colour wheel. Again, I wouldn’t recommend anything flamboyant but those stripe paintings we’re about to see do match with a variety of interiors...’ Back at the booth of his own gallery, Max stared at the cigarette butts, evidence of Ruth’s digressions into four-and-a-half minute pleasures. Pauses for thought. Obviously, doing what she did was not an easy thing for her. She’d given up smoking, after all, some three years previously. Where was she now? He wanted to see her, to confess, to ask her for time, for permission to ‘pause.’ He couldn’t make up his mind now and surely she’d understand that. ‘I’m a multi-shop kiosk,’ that’s what he’d say. She knew the way he worked, better than he did himself. His meanderings, his inability to commit. ‘Channel-surfing even in your career,’ she’d once half-sincerely joked. Even preparing for this chance to show at Art Unlimited was marked by ambivalence. Was it too early in his career to be offered such an opportunity? In his studio, he’d dilly-dabble in one work, and then lose patience in lusting for the next, a series of repetitive one-night stands in which each night he’d eliminate all of the work from the night before. Each canvas, each sculpture, each piece was a chalkboard of equivocation. ‘That is not what I meant at all.’ Hurt people hurt people, he said under his breath before approaching Louise, who was still in limbo nearby Galerie NN. ‘No, she did not buy a cell phone for her dog, I promise you. Do not, I repeat, do not put that in print.’ With her telephone wedged between ear and shoulder, she thrust an envelope in his hand. He opened it thinking that he’d find the money that Louise owed him for the piece she sold nearly 18 months ago. Instead he found a riddle scribbled on the Trois Rois La La hotel stationery: ‘Tiger, tiger burning bright, ask the Lion who he slept with last night.’ He remembered back to the day not long ago when he had delivered Nico’s underwear and Louise’s warning, ‘I wouldn’t go up there if I were you.’ Slowly, paranoia set in. Recently, Nico had acquired a work from an artist who later won the Lion’s prize at Venice. Is sleeping with that artist, the ‘lion’, is this what Louise is hinting at? It could be true, he supposed. He and Nico had yet to have that discussion, the awkward one, the one about possible fidelity. At least for the short term. Not that vows had been

declared or needed to be, but they had exchanged a lot of I-likeyou-a-lots. His assumption that they were possibly beginning a relationship might have been just that: his assumption. He remembered back to her parting words in Berlin, the ones that had given him hope. I like you a lot, said she. I like you a lots too, said he. Lots? Yes, a lots! I like you a lots. Then I like you a lots too, said Nico with a giggle. Not that she wanted to emphasize the point, more that she was enjoying a private joke at the expense of her new German friend, repeating it often enough to make Max believe that she actually felt something large for him. He needed to find Ruth. The someone he had liked a lots for a really long time. Where had she gone? In search of sculptures, no doubt, for her ‘bad art’ collages. Paul McCarthy’s chocolate butt plug dwarf inside a James Turrell light projection? He was pulled out of his reverie by the sight of bad hair. Not his. Hers! The mysterious ‘her’ between Venice and Basel. Shit. ‘Hey du,’ she said cheerily, kissing him on both cheeks. ‘Looks like you didn’t get a haircut yet after all,’ she said, referring to his hair, not hers. He pulled back before her hands could reach up to ruffle his, yes, still uncut hair. How would Sheena know that he was feeling bad about having bad hair? And why was she being so cosy with him? It suddenly hit him. Sheena? It was Sheena’s hi-lited head that he had seen underneath the duvet. He remembered that she had been at the party that night, he remembered her lounging on a couch in a position not conducive to wearing a lycra miniskirt, no matter at what angle one was standing. But he could not remember the sex. If he had had sex with Sheena he would have liked to have at least remembered it – for the sheer horror of it. The memory had vanished in a vacuum. A vacuum sucking up glitter. Had he worn a condom? Oh Gott. He couldn’t believe that he had done something so bad and not remembered it at all. He’d strayed from the path dependency. The editor of his film had left a slice of his life on the cutting room floor. - Maxi, why are you being so distant? And what dinner will you be at tonight? Didn’t it occur to anyone that he would be given a dinner of his own by his own gallery? He stood silent, hurt. Sheena took him up by the arm and pointed in Larry’s direction. - I’m with Larry. Should I introduce you? He’s a huge fan of your work. Suddenly his having slept or not having slept with Sheena was not such a bad thing after all. If Sheena was sleeping with Larry too, it didn’t surprise him. What surprised him was that such a fact might even help him. Certainly Louise would know more. Not that he would ask her. He tried suppressing his worries about his erratic sex life and tried to ignore the number looming just behind his forehead: 90. He calculated a 90% chance that his first words with greenbacks Larry would botch his chances of showing at his gallery.

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The Further Chronicles of Anthony Haden-Guest

sleek N°30 Sound / Silence

The Further Chronicles of Anthony Haden-Guest

Hunting the Artbeast English

deutsch

A few years ago in the course of other assignments I started gathering material for a book that would provide a sense of the extraordinary metamorphosis of the art world, not just the artists, but the collectors, the dealers, the museum people – the entire menagerie. It would follow on from my 1998 book, True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World, which began in the mid 60s and ended in the early 90s. This one though would be almost wholly direct reporting. Easy, right? Wrong. I had immersed myself – am still immersed – in the global art world circuitry of fairs and auctions, foundations and fondaziones, grand openings, galas and god knows what, taking me from Moscow, Beijing and the Gulf States to squats in London and guerrilla actions in New York. In some ways it’s like being a war reporter – long periods of sluggish nothingness, then frenetic action – but I think I can best compare my working method with that of the great reportage photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson. I would prowl a potentially fruitful situation, waiting hours for… the Bressonian decisive moment. This could be a vignette, a conversation, or just an overheard fragment, the oral equivalent of a found object, anything that illuminated the Art Beast. And there were many fruitless hours… but then – ping! And a potential tile would click into place in the mosaic. You have to be on guard though and pick and choose the tiles. The art world is a Petri dish, always blossoming with juicy rumours, both freeform and cleverly targeted. I have been absolutely assured that such-and-such a distinguished collector made his pile on an Iran-Contra arms deal. Bizarre stories will bubble to the surface at times of stress. The success of the Damien Hirst auction in the teeth of the sub-prime induced recession was peculiarly fruitful. Distinguished dealers and collectors came up with thriller scenarios, involving cabals determined to prop up the market. »It’s bonkers, isn’t it?« Hirst said to me. Then there was a story that there had been a collapse at a London auction. The »collapse« had been that a painting of Kate Moss by her then beau Pete Doherty had failed to sell at a little-known auction house. This was picked up by Bloomberg news and a British paper, headlined »Mossacre«. Then the recession did hit. But the Kate Moss portrait was not its precursor. It won’t be in my book. Nor, sadly, will the Iran-Contra collector. Some of my investigations began on a highly promising note, as when it was guaranteed to me that the Tate Gallery’s three Turners which had been stolen while on show in Germany, along with a paint-

Vor ein paar Jahren habe ich angefangen, Material für ein Buch zu sammeln, das die Kunstwelt in ihrer ganzen Vielfalt zeigen sollte, mit Geschichten über Künstler, Sammler, Händler, Museumsleute, den ganzen Zirkus halt. Gedacht war es als Anschluß an mein Buch True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World, das die Zeit von den Sechzigern bis in die frühen Neunziger bespricht. Die Fortsetzung wollte ich im Reportagestil schreiben. Eigentlich ganz einfach. Von wegen. In der Welt, in die ich zu Recherchezwecken eintauchte, stecke ich heute noch fest, jene Welt aus Messen und Auktionen, Stiftungen und Spenden, feierlichen Eröffnungen und Galas rund um den Globus, Moskau, Peking, Golfstaaten, obskuren Kunsträumen in London und Guerillaaktionen in New York. Manchmal komme mir dabei fast wie ein Kriegsreporter vor. Quälend lange wartet man darauf, daß irgendetwas passiert, und plötzlich – Action! Am besten läßt sich meine Arbeitsweise vielleicht mit der des Grandseigneurs der Reportagephotographie vergleichen, Henri Cartier-Bresson. Genau wie er verharrte ich manchmal stundenlang in aussichtsreichen Situationen auf diesen bestimmten Bressonschen Moment. Ein Wink, eine belauschte Unterhaltung oder nur Gesprächsfetzen – die Umrisse der Kunstbestie gewonnen an Klarheit durch das orale Äquivalent eines object trouvé. Dabei vergingen viele ergebnislose Stunden... und auf einmal – zack! – fand ein neues Steinchen seinen Platz in dem großen Mosaik. Man muß allerdings ganz schön aufpassen, wie man diese Steinchen plaziert, denn die Kunstwelt ist ein Nährboden für blühende Gerüchte, ob aus freiem Wildwuchs oder gezielt herangezüchtet. So wurde mir des öfteren versichert, daß Sammler Soundso sein Vermögen mit illegalen Waffengeschäften im Iran gemacht habe. Absurde Geschichten wie diese tauchen immer in Zeiten großer Unsicherheit auf. Besonders viele rankten sich zum Beispiel um Damien Hirsts Auktion im Vorfeld der durch den Zweitmarkt verursachten Rezession. Gestandene Händler und Sammler verstrickten sich in Intrigen und filmreife Szenarien, um den Markt noch zu stützen. Hirsts Kommentar dazu: »Komplett meschugge.« Toll auch die große Story um den Kollaps in einer Londoner Auktion. Der Kollaps, in Form eines Portraits von Kate Moss, gemalt von ihrem Verflossenen Pete Doherty, fand in dem kleinen, relativ unbekannten Auktionshaus keinen Käufer. Bloomberg News und eine englische Zeitung erklärten diesen Umstand zur Sensationsmeldung: »Mossaker«. Danach ging es bergab. Allerdings war das Portrait von Kate Moss nicht der Grund dafür – und es wird auch nicht in meinem Buch auftauchen. Der Waffenhandel-Sammler übrigens auch nicht, leider.

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ing by Caspar David Friedrich, had wound up in the former Yugoslavia and had been used to generate funds by the late art-loving warlord, Arkan. That, incidentally, being why most stolen artworks remain stuck in the giant Museum of Lost Art. It happened that I knew somebody who was in those parts and in an excellent position to check, being an art entrepreneur with (cloudily explained) links to intelligence. He called me two weeks later. »You can take this as the most accurate and precise information which you will ever have,« he told me, meticulously. »Guaranteed, those paintings were never ever physically present in Belgrade or Yugoslavia. Nor did Arkan have anything to do with it. We know two Serbs and an Albanian have been involved. Two or three years ago there was an English guy, an insurance guy, who came to Belgrade and offered five million in sterling. He said we might even get more. Everybody became so eager to find out where the paintings were that they put a… lot of pressure on those guys. They disappeared. The Albanian guy they think he is dead. In the war. And one of the two Yugo guys has been killed as well. Since nobody knows where the paintings are nobody ever offered them. Definitely, they never crossed the border. Definitely. There is not even a rumour out there. And, believe me, a lot of people are chasing it… giving information… misinformation.« In July 2000 two of the Turners were »found« in Germany and handed back to Sandy Nairne, then of the Tate, now of the National Portrait Gallery. Now the third one has been »found« too. All this finding cost the gallery 3.8 million pounds. But the Caspar David Friedrich is still MIA. The significance is that the fetishization of art, its transformation into highly publicized »treasure«, can have unlovely consequences. But the Tate’s collective lip is understandably buttoned. And none of this will appear in the current book. Perhaps another. Also in the interests of knowing the world more completely I involved myself on occasion with actual dealing. In London I visited a British friend, now dead, John Jermyn, by now the Marquis of Bath, who had run through his substantial fortune and was complaining about his cash flow. I spotted an Andy Warhol on the wall, a silkscreen painting of a Studio 54 drink ticket and told him what one had fetched at Christie’s. His eyes lit up and he took it off the wall and handed it to me. I could see the light through several small pinholes. Bath, no artlover, admitted that he had been using it as a dartboard. I carried it to New York anyway, where the collateral damage was taken care of and the piece was sold. So that went well. But later I was brought in as middle-man in the sale of a $20 million postwar painting by a dealer friend, who wished to remain anonymous. As did the owner. And as will the artist. I did bring in another private dealer, who found two potential buyers. I was also told that there were only thirty people in the world who would be interested in such a piece at such a price. Within twenty-four hours the asking price went up $2 million. Within thirty-six hours everybody knew who everybody else was. And I was being threatened with a lawsuit. That deal did not happen. It’s a rich, intriguing world, the art world, filled with tremendous stories. And, most importantly, filled with tremendous art. Can’t wait to finish this book. And start another.

www.anthonyhadenguest.com

Manche meiner Recherchen schienen zunächst äußerst erfolgversprechend. So wurde zum Beispiel an mich herangetragen, daß die in Deutschland gestohlenen drei Turner-Gemälde aus dem Besitz der Tate Gallery zusammen mit einem Caspar David Friedrich im ehemaligen Jugoslawien aufgetaucht seien und dort für das nötige Kapital des Kunstliebhabers und Kriegstreibers Arkan bürgten. Dies ist übrigens einer der Gründe dafür, daß die meisten gestohlenen Bilder auf immer und ewig im Museum für Verlorene Kunst eingelagert werden. Jedenfalls rief mich eines Tages ein »Bekannter« von mir an, der sich zu dieser Zeit in dieser Gegend aufhielt, ein Kunsthändler mit mehr oder weniger undurchsichtigen Verbindungen zum Geheimdienst: »Paß’ auf, ich hab’ da was für Dich, absolut wasserdichte Informationen. Die Gemälde waren mit Sicherheit zu keinem Zeitpunkt weder in Belgrad noch in Jugoslawien. Und Arkan hat damit auch nichts zu tun. Wir wissen, daß zwei Serben und ein Albaner darin verwickelt sind. Vor zwei oder drei Jahren kam ein Engländer nach Belgrad, ein Versicherungstyp, und bot fünf Millionen Pfund. Mit Aussicht auf mehr. Das Interesse, die Gemälde so schnell wie möglich zu finden, war so groß, daß die Typen relativ... nachdrücklich dazu befragt wurden. Alle drei sind verschwunden. Der Albaner, tja, wahrscheinlich ist er tot. Kriegsopfer. Und einer der beiden Jugoslawen wurde ebenfalls getötet. Und weil niemand von nichts wußte, wurden die Bilder nie angeboten. Sie haben nicht einmal das Land verlassen. Glaub’ mir, da sind viele Leute involviert, und die streuen Informationen... Fehlinformationen.« Im Juli 2000 wurden zwei der Turners in Deutschland »gefunden« und gingen zurück an Sandy Nairne, damals noch an der Tate, heute an der National Portrait Gallery. Der dritte ist jetzt auch noch aufgetaucht. Der »Finderlohn« beziffert sich für die Galerie auf etwa 3,8 Millionen Pfund. Der Friedrich allerdings ist noch im Nirwana. Die Fetischisierung der Kunst, diese Transformation in einen Schatz öffentlichen Interesses, hat eben ihren Preis. Die Tate gibt sich verschlossen, verständlicherweise. Davon wird ebenfalls nichts in meinem Buch stehen. Im nächsten vielleicht. Meinem Interesse an dieser mysteriösen Welt ist es übigens zu verdanken, daß ich mich sogar im tatsächlichen Handel mit der Kunst versucht habe. Ein Londoner Freund, John Jermyn, mittlerweile tot und außerdem Marquis von Bath, hatte sein nicht gerade kleines Vermögen vernichtet und beklagte seine finanzielle Lage. Ich entdeckte einen Warhol an seiner Wand, den Siebdruck eines Getränkebons aus dem Studio 54, und ließ ihn wissen, was ein ähnliches Werk bei Christie’s erzielt hatte. Umgehend nahm er das Werk von der Wand und händigte es mir aus, mit leuchtenden Augen. Auch das Bild leuchtete: Lichtstrahlen fielen durch mehrere kleine Löcher in der Leinwand. Bath, nicht gerade ein Kunstliebhaber, gestand mir seine Schwäche für Dart. Ich nahm das Bild trotzdem mit nach New York, ließ den Schaden beheben und verkaufte es erfolgreich. Das lief ja wie am Schnürchen. Also vermittelte ich als nächstes für einen befreundeten, der Anonymität verpflichteten Händler den Verkauf eines 20 Millionen Dollar teuren Nachkriegsgemäldes. Der Besitzer wollte seinen Namen nirgendwo lesen, und den des Künstlers ebenfalls nicht. Ich fand einen privaten Händler, der zwei potentielle Käufer vertrat. Mir wurde gesagt, daß es auf dieser Welt gerade einmal 30 Personen gäbe, die an diesem Werk zu diesem Preis interessiert sein könnten. Innerhalb von 24 Stunden stieg der Preis um zwei Millionen. Innerhalb von 36 Stunden war es um die Anonymität geschehen. Und ich hatte eine Klage am Hals. Der Deal war geplatzt. Sie ist reich und faszinierend, die Kunstwelt, voller unglaublicher Geschichten. Und noch viel wichtiger: voller unglaublicher Kunst. Hoffentlich ist mein Buch bald fertig. Damit ich mit dem nächsten anfangen kann. 219