Tobias Putrih/MOS
wexner center for the arts
Introduction
This presentation of Tobias Putrih and MOS’s Majestic is part of Six Solos, a suite of six discrete exhibitions each featuring the work of a rising international artist. Since its inception in 1989, the Wexner Center has embraced a strong commitment to the work of younger artists engaged in pushing their practice in new directions. For many of the Six Solos artists, this marks their first solo exhibition in a U.S. museum, and for all of them, their presentation at the Wex offers a welcome chance to introduce their work to broad and diverse new audiences. Each artist has taken the center’s invitation as an incentive to broaden their scope of address and expand their already ambitious repertoire of forms and ideas. We believe that all six artists are on the cusp of greater achievement and renown, and we are particularly pleased to be able to include them in the programs and festivities marking our 21st anniversary in November 2010. As we now leave adolescence behind, we’ve undoubtedly gained a modicum of professional and institutional maturity, but Six Solos remains true to the energetic, irreverent spirit of artistic exploration and discovery that has marked the Wexner Center throughout its first two decades. That sensibility will certainly remain embedded in our DNA for years to come. Sherri Geldin, Director Christopher Bedford, Chief Curator of Exhibitions Wexner Center for the Arts The Ohio State University
Generous support for this project is provided by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.
COVER, OVERLEAF, AND FACING
Majestic, 2010 Site-specific installation for the Wexner Center Aluminum, plywood, foam, and mixed media Courtesy of the artists
Screening Schedule
november 9–28 screens continuously Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba Happy New Year: Memorial Project Vietnam II, 2003 Single-channel projection on DVD Dimensions variable, 15 mins., looped Courtesy of the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery november 29–december 26 11:15 am, 12:55 pm, 2:35 pm, 4:15 pm ( + 6 pm thu–sat) Abbas Kiarostami Shirin, 2008 Video, 92 mins. Courtesy of MK2 december 28–january 23 tue, wed, sun: 11:15 am, 12:35 pm, 1:55 pm, 3:15 pm, 4:35 pm thu, fri, sat: 11:10 am, 12:35 pm, 2 pm, 3:25 pm, 4:50 pm, 6:15 pm Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige I Want to See, 2008 Video, 75 mins. Courtesy of Films Boutique Distribution january 24–february 13 11:15 am, 12:55 pm, 2:35 pm, 4:15 pm ( + 6 pm thu–sat) Leslie Thornton Peggy and Fred in Hell, 1985–2010 7 video episodes, appr. 90 mins. total Courtesy of the artist
Cinema Aground Bill Horrigan
In a preparatory stage of what would become
expressive potential of moving images in the
Majestic, his project for the Wexner Center,
gallery than he is in evoking a specific physical
Tobias Putrih produced several sketches of a
space: not the public space a person occupies
wooden structure, powerfully horizontal, that
outside before entering a cinema, and not the
first reminded me of a large-scale sukkah. A
collectively experienced projected flat image on
sukkah is a modest temporary dwelling, semi-
view inside, but the viewing space in-between.
enclosed, that is built, typically using natural
As Jean-Luc Godard, among others, have argued,
materials, and inhabited by observant Jews
it’s there in that in-between space that cinema
during the annual Sukkot harvest festival. As
exists: not in the projection booth, not in the
Putrih proceeded to refine his conception of the
light beam it directs at the screen, nor in the
architectural sculpture he would build in the
projected image, but in what transpires in the
Wexner Center’s first gallery, in collaboration
middle, the collisions ensuing from a room full
with Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample from
of subjective spectatorships.
the New Haven architectural firm MOS, the
Versed in the vernaculars of classic movie
specific visual evocation of a hand-made dwelling
palaces no less than in the often-visionary
mutated into something more enigmatic and
alternative cinema constructions within the
commanding. But the structure still honors the
historic avant-garde from Frederick Kiesler to
contract to support human inhabitation and
Peter Kubelka, Putrih envisioned his project for
ritual. In the case of a sukkah, it’s a place to sleep,
the Wexner Center as a species of functional
to eat, to pray; in Putrih’s case, it’s a place for
ruin, figuratively comparing it to a “collapsed
cinema, a place where the play of cinema beckons
spaceship covered with foam sediment (or
its legions to assemble.
maybe as a sunken ship covered in shells
Putrih’s practice is made manifest in
and seaweed)…[and] in that sense watching
sculptural creations within, and adjustments to,
a movie within such a structure is more like
the built environment, and one strand of that
adventure.” Meredith, while pursuing the
practice has taken the form of constructing
limits of the design software he and his office
cinema-viewing conditions within the
were using, wrote that “it’s not like we’re just
framework of a museum or gallery space: for
making a picturesque image of a ruin, we’re
example, A Certain Tendency in Representation:
trying to use a rigorous methodology of logic/
Cineclub at Thomas Dane (2005), a project at a
rational processes but for other ends, producing
Atmospheric, the de facto Slovenian “pavilion” for
rational/constructive processes to produce
commercial gallery in London, and Venetian,
the ruin through logic…. We’re using logics/
the Venice Biennale (2007). In these and other
form.” As Meredith later described it, “this is a
projects, produced sometimes in partnership
rectangular box room with a raised floor, and
with Meredith and Sample and sometimes
two square-ish doors to move through the
autonomously, Putrih is less interested in the
cinema…. It’s rotated on the Wexner grid.”1
For Putrih and MOS, as for many artists
A cinema structure wants moving images;
working in the Wexner Center’s galleries, the
to satisfy that desire, four screening programs
building’s taunting, implacable grid has provided
reverberate within the shell of this structure run
a hard ground to resist. One of Putrih’s and
aground in the gallery.
MOS’s strategies is to conceive a “parallelogram cinema [that] mirrors the angles of the Wexner
Born in Tokyo to a Vietnamese father and a Japanese mother, largely raised in Texas and
Center,” as Meredith notes. That form “produces
graduating from American art schools, and living
this ‘slightly off’ or off-center view of the film,
in Ho Chi Minh City since 1997, Jun Nguyen-
where there is no idealized vantage point. It
Hatsushiba drew international attention in 2001
destablilizes the viewer, just a teeny bit.” It’s
with Memorial Project Nha Trang, Vietnam: Towards
an aspiration underlying Putrih’s previous architectonic sculptural projects, both cinematic and secular. Born in Slovenia in 1972 to a family
the Complex—For the Courageous, the Curious, and the
Cowards. It visualizes an indelible hallucination,
as though literalizing a nonexistent idiom
of sculptors, Putrih came of age as an artist
about unlikely struggle and endurance: six men,
himself armed with the memories of a relatively
working in pairs, clad for swimming, endeavor
benign Socialist culture, one opening up in 1991
to advance bicycle taxis—cyclos—across the
to fuller access to the imperatives and trade-offs
ocean floor, laboring as long as they can before
of the culture of the Western art world. The clash
propelling themselves upward for air, only to
of those differences, those tectonic chafings,
sinkingly return to the task, hoping to fail better.
deeply informs his work’s skeptical mode of
Nguyen-Hatsushiba has used cyclos frequently
inquiry into differences between the ideal and
in his work, a continued urban presence as a
the achievable, between the idea and its always-
form of transport in Vietnam but regarded by
already inadequate actualization, between the
some as disquieting residue from the colonial
inevitability of the ruin and the bewildering
era, hence a mark of embarrassment within a
pathos of imagining it could ever have been (or
country (since becoming a member of the World
be) otherwise. When Argos, in Brussels, decided
Trade Organization) aiming to recalibrate itself
to mount a group exhibition in 2007 inspired by
as a twenty-first-century economic and cultural
Chris Marker’s epochal 1962 film, La jetée, there
could have been no artist more aligned in affinity
with Marker than Putrih, who designed the
contender within the global marketplace. Cyclists and cyclos return in his Happy New Year: Memorial
Project Vietnam II (2003), the work screened here.
cinema space in which the film was constantly on
A poetic rumination on North Vietnam’s Tet
view: a cheaply crafted structure in its elements
Offensive from 1968, the film is again visualized
and idioms beckoning not to a specifiable past
by Nguyen-Hatsushiba as a subaqueous eruption
and embodying no blue-print for the cinema
of carnivalesque color. Realpolitik commentary
of our successors, but hovering in their middle
set to one side, Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s project takes
tension, in the here and now (more exactly, in
to water as the only medium through which his
the where or when), a memory space understood
country’s legacy might begin to be fathomed, an
by Marker no less than by Putrih to cease to exist
opaque curtain haze suspended between colonial
once it’s pronounced as existing at all, an avowal
yoke and self-determining destiny.
of a “cinema” fated to evaporate even as its light beam pulses over our heads.
Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin (2008) approaches mesmerizing spectacle
Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba Happy New Year: Memorial Project Vietnam II, 2003
Abbas Kiarostami Shirin, 2008
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige I Want to See, 2008
head-on, producing a radically distilled take
circulate within a moviegoing universe, albeit
on the notion of a reaction shot. Here, the
within an art-house satellite in that universe.
“event” to which, one by one, a hundred and
But in its secret life, it comports itself as though
fourteen women are seen to be reacting,
it were a gallery installation all along, a “what
remains completely unrevealed, not to them
if ?” proposition in extremis: what if someone
but to us. Seated in an Iranian cinema, they’re
made a movie consisting solely of faces of women
purportedly watching a film also called “Shirin,”
watching a movie? Directed by Kiarostami to
a melodramatic adaptation of a well-known
look slightly away from his camera, his actresses
Persian love story (that film doesn’t actually
(among them many well-regarded Iranian
exist, Kiarostami having produced only the
performers, plus the unexpected presence
audio track of dialogue and music, plus some
of French luminary Juliette Binoche, star of
often violent sound effects—in effect, a radio
the director’s recent Certified Copy) mark the
play). An inquiry into the poetics of spectatorship,
movement of the unseen narrative through what
Kiarostami’s project was intended to be screened
flits across the surface of each’s face: amusement,
in conventional cinemas—a real movie meant to
engagement, boredom, wonder, tear-inducing
Leslie Thornton Peggy and Fred in Hell, 1985–2010
empathy. We’re assigned to be looking at these
Fred approach this flattened spectacle like one
moviegoers as they look; in the shot/reaction shot
would any desert—they keep moving.” They
dyad, we become the event to which they react:
move across and within the ruins of twentieth-
the cinema is us. “I’m not sure I’ll understand much, but I
century culture and consumption, channeling border radio, puzzling over film fragments,
want to see.” Thus Je Veux Voir/I Want to See (2008)
misdeciphering signs and objects, as free as Adam
is launched, either a semi-improvised fiction or
and Eve to name the brave new world as they
a slightly scripted documentary about Catherine
stumble through it. As their creator understands
Deneuve, the French actress of rare sensibility
them, their souls are kept alive by “television…
and wit. Directed by Lebanese filmmakers Joana
part of the Artificial Intelligence network. AI
Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, I Want to See was
keeps Television on all the time and so do Peggy
conceived specifically as a vehicle for Deneuve,
valued in Lebanon and in the Arab world for her
and Fred.” 2 Thornton labored on Peggy and Fred
for almost twenty-five years, interspersed with
support of human rights generally (via UNESCO)
other projects and with teaching film at Brown
and of francophone film production in that
University, and in a certain sense it was widely
region. The narrative, such as it is, hangs on the
assumed the cycle would deliberately never be
slightest of conceits: Deneuve is in Beirut for a
“completed” but merely continue in picaresque
humanitarian fund-raising gala in the evening;
fashion, on and off. But with the “Expiration”
before that, elle veut voir [she wants to see] the
episode (2008), Thornton noted, “I would say it
ravaged landscape of the country to the south,
has been a quest which began to close down after
scarred by its war with Israel in 2006. Against
9/11, when the pretense of the work’s ‘future
the caution of her handlers, a driver is arranged
tense’ (its undefined apocalypse) dissolved into a
(played by the actor Rabih Mroué), and the film
more disturbing presence and then even a past.
chronicles their day-trip (pursued by a film crew)
Peggy and Fred was set in the detritus of the Cold
to his grandmother’s village, reduced to rubble
War. In the last few episodes, the serial project
in the event. Constantly smoking cigarettes and
finds its narrative arc, ending on a note strangely
mocking the infantilizing regime of seat-belts,
optimistic, though post-human.”3
the thoroughly domesticated Deneuve and her slightly star-struck driver traverse a landscape harboring memories of what it’s witnessed. More than just postwar, it’s a
It’s doubtful that the experience of watching Thornton’s masterpiece could ever occur in a more hauntingly wrecked viewing environment than Putrih and MOS here provide.
postapocalyptic landscape on which Leslie Thornton’s Peggy and Fred in Hell plays out. An
elaborately experimental science fiction serial
produced between 1984 and 2008, and starring real-life siblings Janis and Donald Reading, Peggy and Fred follows the two children, sole
residents of planet earth. As Thornton describes their situation, “Every day they go out looking
for a better place to live. In the evening they come home. They go out often…. Peggy and
Bill Horrigan is the Wexner Center’s curator at large and former director of media arts.
Notes 1 These comments from Tobias Putrih and Michael Meredith, along with a subsequent remark from Meredith, come from email exchanges with Wexner Center staff. 2 The passages from Thornton originated in a grant proposal she submitted to the Rockefeller Foundation in 1988, from which I quoted in “A Note on Peggy and Fred in Hell/Adolescent Junglebook overschrijdt Scenic Paradise,” an essay published in Mediamatic, vol. 4, #1–2, Fall 1989, pp. 65–68. 3 Thornton’s comment appears in “Peggy and Fred in Hell: The Expiration,” a program note by Steve Polta in the brochure Leslie Thornton: Tuned Always to a Shifting Ground produced by the San Francisco Cinematheque to accompany a series of the same title presented in spring 2008.
About the Artists
Six Solos Erwin Redl Megan Geckler Tobias Putrih/MOS Gustavo Godoy Katy Moran Joel Morrison
Born in Kranj, Slovenia, in 1972, Tobias Putrih
November 9, 2010–February 13, 2011
graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts and Design
Six Solos is organized by the Wexner Center, with Chief Curator of Exhibitions Christopher Bedford as the overall curator for the series and project curator for Tobias Putrih/MOS. The film program was selected by Chris Stults, the Wexner Center’s associate curator of film/ video, and Bill Horrigan, the center’s curator at large and former director of media arts.
at the University of Ljubljana in 1997. He also studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf in Germany in 1997– 1998. Putrih first attracted international attention in the 2002 edition of the Manifesta European art biennial, held that year in Frankfurt. He represented Slovenia
at the 2007 Venice Biennale and participated in the 2010 São Paulo Biennale in autumn 2010. Other recent presentations of his work have taken place at Mass MOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, and Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris during 2010; Musée d’art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg and the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, Poland, during 2009; and the Hayward and White Cube in London, England, and Galleria Civica di Modena in Modena, Italy, during 2008. Putrih currently lives and works in Boston. MOS, a collective of designers and architects
All exhibitions and related events at the Wexner Center for the Arts receive support from the Corporate Annual Fund of the Wexner Center Foundation and Wexner Center members, as well as from the Greater Columbus Arts Council, The Columbus Foundation, Nationwide Foundation, and the Ohio Arts Council. © The Ohio State University, Wexner Center for the Arts. Wexner Center for the Arts The Ohio State University 1871 North High Street Columbus, OH 43210-1393 wexarts.org
responsible for a growing roster of innovative spaces, is led by Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample and based in New Haven, Connecticut. The collective represented the United States at the 12th International Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy, in fall 2010. Frequent collaborators, artist Tobias Putrih and the design firm have previous developed projects at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, the BALTIC Center for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, England, and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, Netherlands.
Photo credits: Cover and overleaf, Sven Kahns; center panel, from top, Jay LaPrete, Kevin Fitzsimons