Manuel Graf

JOHANN KÖNIG
Dessauerstr. 6-7
January 15–March 6

View of “Manuel Graf,” 2010.

What is work? Today’s art world isn’t good at drawing a clear line between professional, social, and personal activities or interchanges. In “Buchtipp 2,” Manuel Graf’s deceptively casual installation for his third solo exhibition at this gallery, the artist succeeds in exposing tensions and confusions among different forms of art, work, and play, which might be reason enough to applaud his effort.

For the show, Graf has arranged two large, flat yellow sofas around a small wooden coffee table, which faces a television that plays a video of couples discussing sections of Rudolf Steiner’s 1919 lecture series on education, work, and identity. The table also offers an arrangement of Polaroids that show pretty, hip young women cheerfully posing while wearing unusual laced-up platform wedges. These colorful, attractive shoes are bespoke art objects produced by Graf after he trained with shoemakers in Istanbul’s Galata Beyoglu artisan’s quarter. Though the shoes are unrealistic everyday wear, the Polaroids are evidence that they have the playful allure of fashion pieces produced specially for photo shoots, as well as for rare, brief presentations.

Because they are one-off objects shown in an art gallery and made with an artisan’s techniques, Graf’s shoes blur some of the divisions between art, craft, and high fashion. However, these themes are not new. Where “Buchtipp 2” becomes particularly engaging is Graf’s introduction of Steiner’s still-controversial ideas about the role of play in children’s intellectual and social development. The casual, intimate setting that the artist creates here encourages viewers to relax and develop their own intellectual discourse. Yet whether this is work, art, learning, or all three remains an open question.

— Ana Finel Honigman

John Isaacs

WENDT AND FRIEDMANN GALERIE
Heidestrasse 54,
January 15–March 6

John Isaacs, It is for you that I this (hippy scalp), 2009, wax, oil paint, human hair, wood, glass, steel, velvet, 20 x 20 x 71".

The centerpiece of “Tears Welling Up Inside,” British artist John Isaacs’s darkly witty solo exhibition, is titled It is for you that I this (hippy scalp), 2009. Here, a delicate Victorian-looking wood and glass vitrine at the entrance of this charming town-house gallery holds a grotesque form––a meaty, veiny scalp streaming platinum-blond hair. Despite the title, the scalp looks exactly like the head of one of the blond nihilists in The Big Lebowski (1998), and in that echo, it seems, is embedded the gritty tension of Isaacs’s work.

In an adjacent room there is a massive, meticulously crafted sculpture that depicts a pile of feces overflowing from a box made of bathroom tiles. Another sculpture consists of a weathered wooden armchair with a sallow floral print sitting on top of a complicated contraption with mismatched wheels. The piece recalls a homemade wheelchair or, perhaps, a set piece from Monty Python. On a wall are notebook pages with ink drawings in which a black blob surrounds the word LOVE, a reference to Robert Indiana’s iconic 1964 work, except that Isaac’s version is made up of clippings from a hard-core porn magazine. In a similarly punky gesture, a careful doodle of a disembodied eyeball and lettering re-create the style of 1960s psychedelic posters but convey a profane message closer to a saying from a crotchety Bukowski. But within all the subversion of iconography there is an endearing, cheeky joy that evokes the flaws and virtues of an idealistic era. Fundamentally, Isaacs, like the Coen brothers’ nihilists, seems to happily believe in nothing––least of all his own cynicism.

— Ana Finel Honigman

Graham Anderson

NICE AND FIT
Brunnenstrasse 13
January 16–March 12

Graham Anderson, Untitled, 2009, oil on panel, 15 x 12 1/2".

With four small paintings and two drawings, Graham Anderson’s solo exhibition at this gallery is one of the more intimate and understated shows on view now in Berlin. The title of the show is “New Paintings and Drawings,” despite the fact that these works have emerged over a period of three years, and in 2008, one was exhibited at Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in Brooklyn, where the artist lives. Anderson’s pace is slow, however, and his rarefied output presents a considered and delicate process of making choices and execution.

Similar to the ways in which such painters as Gerhard Richter, Luc Tuymans, and David Hockney have explored the influence of photography on painting, Anderson’s pictorial style offers a digital or graphic imagemaking sensibility. His morphing forms, use of motifs, and flattened spatial dimensions bring to mind the stylized and reductive nature of classic cel animation and low-bit computer graphics. Untitled, 2009, a painting of a lone cloud rendered in scalloped brushstrokes, takes as its subject a popular muse for poets, landscape painters, and screen savers alike. While generating a tension between the man-made and natural realms, the work, like several others in the show, also points to oppositions between interior and exterior landscapes, figuration and abstraction, flatness and depth. Like minimal poetry, Anderson’s paintings are products of an economy of means, as well as of a restriction of expression.

— Genevieve Allison

“Auto-Kino!”

TEMPORÄRE KUNSTHALLE BERLIN
Schlossfreiheit 1
February 5–March 14

View of “Auto-Kino!,” 2010.

Responding to the psychic drain of Berlin’s unremitting winter, Phil Collins’s latest project, “Auto-Kino!,” transforms the Temporäre Kunsthalle into a playful drive-in cinema for which viewers reserve spots by the hour via a telephone hotline. The dusky gallery’s spectacular installation—fifteen vehicles facing a screen, complete with refreshment stand in the corner—lures visitors into a participatory realm only to permit an immediate withdrawal into the relative privacy of individual cars. The show is not all surface, however. In collaboration with Siniša Mitrović (his partner in the production company that administers his participant-based video works), Collins has curated a bursting program—timed to coincide with the Berlinale film festival—lasting approximately eight hours per day and comprising screenings of film and video by seventy-three artists and filmmakers from the 1930s to the present.

At the same time that he re-creates this iconic symbol of American suburban entertainment in the middle of Berlin, Collins also traces the city’s rich cinematic history. Berlin is the setting for several films screened, ranging from a feature set among post–World War II ruins to Marcel Broodthaers’s 1974 Berlin oder ein Traum mit Sahne (Berlin or a Dream with Cream), which records scenes from the artist’s daily life in West Berlin. Berlin-based filmmakers are also strongly represented, among them Harun Farocki, Christian Jankowski, Anri Sala, and Hito Steyerl. Some entries allude to the drive-in’s seamier side, including a world premiere from queer-porn cult fixture Bruce LaBruce. Acknowledging that viewers may visit with varying agendas, Collins says he hopes the venue will spur some to indulge their own lustful inclinations. Perhaps this highly produced festival is really an elaborate ruse to support the artist’s ongoing probe of the slippage between representation and the real.

An exhibition by Phil Collins is also currently on view at daadgalerie until March 20.

— Margaret Ewing

George Condo

SPRÜTH MAGERS BERLIN
Oranienburger Str. 18
January 30–April 1

George Condo, The Fallen Butler, 2009, oil on linen, 78 x 76".

You could almost say that George Condo has two solo shows going on at once in “Family Portrait,” his current exhibition in Berlin. On the surface, at least, the two series of paintings each seems created by a different artist. In the smaller first room hang four somber single portraits of strange, characteristically Condo-esque creatures against night-blue backgrounds. It’s all a bit Where the Wild Things Are gone awry: strange beasts with enormous jaw structures that double as necks, heads twisted like balloon sculptures into mutated shapes, each assigned the same stock of red hair and thus belonging to the same “family”—united by their freakishness.

In the second room, the paintings are larger, messier—yet also highly formal in their composition, despite the expressionist gadgetry employed (such as Twomblyesque crayon scrawls and cartoon graffiti faces à la Basquiat). Here, the figures are distorted and scrambled beyond recognition, grouped together in the center of the canvas as though posing for a family portrait. The most successful of these happens to be the messiest: The Fallen Butler, 2009, wherein Condo lets his palette guide him through a virtuoso performance of whites, pinks, greens, yellows, purples, and blacks. Yet another three paintings, again single portraits, seem to serve as “remixes” of those seen in the first room, with a quasi-Cubistic distortion of the figures’ facial features essentially reducing them to all eyes and teeth. But a fourth, untitled painting is the real freak here, owing to its comparative restraint. Its gray-outlined figures copulate maniacally against a pink background—yet another testament to the artist’s inspired elasticity.

— Travis Jeppesen

“Conversation Pieces: A Chamber Play”

JOHNEN GALERIE
Marienstrasse 10
January 9–April 17

Rodney Graham, Fantasia for Four Hands, 2002, two color photographs, each 102 3/8 x 72".

Before the recent onslaught of curatorial-studies programs, curators were typically educated in art history, literature, or––as in the case of Jens Hoffmann––theater. Drawing on Hoffmann’s biography and his thoughtful, self-conscious approach to exhibitions, “Conversation Pieces” is a three-part show modeled on the structure of a chamber play and divided into “Acts,” each of which presents works by six artists, which are distributed into pairs and exhibited in three different rooms, or “Scenes.”

“Scene One” of “Act One,” which is on view until February 6, couples Tim Lee with Hans-Peter Feldmann in a dialogue between Lee’s photographic reenactment of the supine, pathos-filled pose with which Neil Young began every concert on his 1978 concert tour (Rust Never Sleeps, Neil Young, 1979, 2010) and Feldmann’s appropriation and restaging of ordinary objects in two witty but slightly melancholic sculptures: Robert, 2003, and Eiereimer auf Stuhl mit Pappsockel (Bucket Filled with Eggs on a Chair on a Cardboard Base), 2003. In “Scene Two,” four identical versions of Rodney Graham, playing the part of piano virtuoso, perform in a diptych titled Fantasia for Four Hands, 2002, while the three desynchronized metronomes that compose Martin Creed’s Work No. 223, 1999, fail to provide a consistent tempo for a genre (the fantasia) that by definition is improvisational and doesn’t require one anyway. This room also includes a selection of artifacts from chamber-play performances at the Deutsches Theater, including a poster from Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkmann, the first play Hoffmann attended as a young student in Berlin. The final room, “Scene Three,” is organized around Anri Sala’s Agassi, 2006, a still projection of the tennis player as his eyes just miss an oncoming ball. Across the space, a curious group of spectators snarl, cringe, and even drool as they peer out from a selection of Roger Ballen’s weird and beautiful black-and-white portraits of rural inhabitants in South Africa, in what is perhaps the most unpredictable and refreshing inclusion in the show. If it’s true that “the second act is always the best,” there are surely more clever conceptual antics to come.

“Act Two” of this exhibition opens February 13, with “Act Three” premiering March 20.

— Michèle Faguet

Bruce LaBruce

PERES PROJECTS BERLIN
Schlesische Strasse 26
January 30–April 24

Bruce LaBruce, LA ZOMBIE, 2010, still from a color film in HD, 65 minutes. Installation view.

Francois Sagat, the star of Bruce LaBruce’s latest film and a series of monochromatic silk-screened portraits in his exhibition “LA ZOMBIE: The film that would not die,” has a gladiator physique and tattooed scalp that on first glance seem at odds with the usual flesh eater’s starved silhouette. But the French-Arab gay porn star’s sensitive face sets him apart from his role as the unseeing zombie obsessed with satiating unquenchable desires.

In the director’s sixty-five-minute film, LA ZOMBIE, 2010, Sagat appears as both an uncommonly comely homeless man scavenging for trash and an electric-blue zombie who finds murdered men and then penetrates their wounds with his massive pointed penis. After he ejaculates blood, the men are resurrected as fellow zombies. The young man who picks him up hitchhiking in the opening scene and whose heart he pumps after a fatal car crash sits on the wreckage lovingly and mournfully watching Sagat dress himself to leave him. The moment establishes Sagat as a romantic character, akin to the melancholy vampire rather than the amoral and greedy zombies who typically inhabit the genre.

By transforming Sagat into a mutant of his genre, LaBruce humanizes the actor and creates an odd but compellingly optimistic view of mankind. Those familiar with George A. Romero’s films will be particularly aware that we might be in the throes of a zombie society that mindlessly devours everything in sight. Even our appetite for Twilight and other vampire-themed pop is evidence of rampant consumer lust. But Sagat’s sensitive zombie seems to possess greater depth and existential self-awareness, more even than the mortal businessman whose dead body he defiles.

— Ana Finel Honigman

Beate Gütschow

PRODUZENTENGALERIE
Admiralitätstr. 71
January 1–March 13

Beate Gütschow, I#2, 2009, color photograph on light box, 35 1/2 x 26". From the series “I,” 2009.

“I.” That’s the title of a new body of work by Beate Gütschow; it stands for the word interior. She produces her photographs exclusively in series. The first was “LS” (as in landscape), 1999–2003, for which she assembled sweeping landscape motifs into digital collages that recall the compositions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings. In the following series, “S” (for Stadt, or city in German), 2004–2009, she collaged International Style architecture in cool black-and-white, forming fictional cityscapes that come across as sad contemporary ruins. Gütschow is adept at revealing the documentary as a construction of the gaze. In “I,” too, she pursues this implicit critique of the image. Immediately striking here is that for the first time she uses light boxes for display and returns to color photography. The new images present reduced arrangements of furniture often combined with sparse and unusual accessories. The works are as matter-of-fact as they are mysterious. Take, for example, the graphically suggestive I#1 (all works 2009), which depicts a car battery set on a kitchen counter; behind it stand a tiled wall and two hooks from which hang glaring yellow pieces of rope that stand out like signals.

With their sober stagings, Gütschow’s “I” offers something of the theatrical. In fact, this time the artist constructed her images in real space and not, as in the case of “LS” and “S,” with digital material on the computer. Several of the works make this theatrical-sculptural aspect explicit: I#2 presents two perfectly lit chairs and also directs the gaze beyond the boundaries of this staging. One sees the provisional piece of carpeting beneath the chairs, the partially painted back wall, and the lamp for the lighting. Here the stage ends right in the middle of the image.

Translated from German by Diana Reese.

— Jens Asthoff