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Jo Baer
STEDELIJK MUSEUM
Museumplein 10
May 16–September 1
Jo Baer, In the Land of the Giants (Spirals and Stars), 2012, oil on canvas, 58 1/2 x 58 1/2”.
For her new set of six large paintings, “In the Land of the Giants,” and her solo exhibition of the same name, Jo Baer travelled back to the Irish countryside, where she had settled after moving from New York in 1975, to re-encounter some of her sources of inspiration. She had never been able to forget the impressive Neolithic monuments she saw, scattered over the countryside as if a giant had thrown them there (as one local postal carrier had once quipped to Baer). One of these megaliths—the man-made, phallic Hurlstone, which measures five and a quarter feet tall and has a perfect round hole in its center of almost ten inches—forms the point of departure for Baer’s exploration, in these paintings, into matters like astronomy, skull cults, and ancestor worship.
Since her departure from hardedge abstraction in 1975, a move that she famously explained in her 1983 essay “I am no longer an abstract artist,” Baer has delved into myth and archetypes through figurative painting. But can an artist fully betray her roots? It is fascinating to see how in two paintings from the current series Baer arranges figurative elements around a void in the center of the canvas. A similar void characterized her pre-1975 abstract work and was framed, as it were, by lines acting as boundaries to the picture plane.
Reading the images in Baer’s current show requires a bit of a manual, and it is sometimes hard to follow her research into myth and cult. But her canvases, made with no stretcher and directly taped to the wall, nevertheless have a clarion monumentality. Take for instance, In the Land of the Giants (Spirals and Stars), 2012, in which Baer depicts herself as a tiny traveler under a spiraling universe—or an elegant Fibonacci spiral—with a black hole at the center. Here it seems that it is not the figurative elements but again the void in the middle that holds all the secrets Baer seeks to discover.
— Robert-Jan Muller
“Insomnia”
FUNDACIÓ JOAN MIRÓ
Parc de Montjuďc s/n
March 22–June 16
Lis Rhodes, Light Music, 1975, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view, 2013.
“Insomnia” is the result of yet another exhaustive, painstaking, and coherent research project by Catalan curator Neus Miró on the language of film. Not too long ago, she curated a well thought-out show (“The Times of a Place,” 2009) devoted to the concept that landscape, under the temporality of film, was to be understood not as a noun but as a verb. This is, beyond all doubt, a topic she masters. The title of this current seven-artist show stems from Hollis Frampton’s celebrated 1971 quotation: “Film has finally attracted its own Muse. Her name is Insomnia.”
Miró takes as a point of departure Frampton’s position on how the emergence of video in the 1960s favored film’s obsolescence, making it a form of art in itself. The exhibition thus seeks to set experimental film in the context of contemporary art while simultaneously exploring the shift from photography to the moving image. This transition is best epitomized by two of Frampton’s works in the first room of the exhibition. In A Visitation of Insomnia, 1970-73, he succeeds in representing movement within a single image of a naked body through the use of long exposures. In his acclaimed (nostalgia), 1971, however, the photographic image vanishes altogether as Michael Snow’s voice-over describes each still photograph as it slowly turns aflame, releasing narrative from the confinement of the captured picture plane.
Walking through each of the six rooms in the show, one is confronted with the ultimate dissection of certain properties of film, for example, those related to static viewership that expects the assisted unpacking of a plot. Lis Rhodes’s Light Music, 1975, places viewers in a spatial experience that requires their activity: The viewer-cum-participant is forced to stand and move between two abstract images projected against each other, where sound is determined by the visual developments created by each screen. If in her previous show Miró turned landscape into a living entity, “Insomnia” considers film not as a means of contemplation but as a physically engaging landscape.
— Javier Hontoria
Karl Holmqvist
MODERNA MUSEET | STOCKHOLM
Skeppsholmen
March 16–September 8
View of “Karl Holmqvist,” 2013.
“Give poetry a try” is the irresistible slogan chosen by Karl Holmqvist as the title of his exhibition at the Moderna Museet. It’s a slogan that Holmqvist has used before, and it is, as slogans should be, a straightforward, encouraging one. Holmqvist has dedicated much of his practice to both show that his slogan’s advice is possible and to suggest the extent of its possibilities. Almost everything he does, you can do yourself, in materials and techniques readily available.
The exhibition is divided into two rooms. The first contains several works, including a vitrine filled with innumerable pamphlets, leaflets, and books by Holmqvist dating back to 1991. While viewers are privy to some of the content via iPad slide shows and headphones, the encased presentation of the texts means that they’re visible but not readable. That it is all behind glass is a shame, but understandable, and now that Moderna Museet has added these pieces to its collection, it might manage to make Holmqvist’s publications more accessible in the future. Another piece, a text video titled I’m With You in Rockland, 2005, refers to Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” and in it there is a sentence that exemplifies Holmqvist’s frequent use of citations and allusions. Modifying Ginsberg’s famous opening sentence into “I saw the best minds, and the best bodies, of my generation wasted…” Holmqvist intriguingly evokes the original’s Vietnam War implications but also adverts to another, later crisis—the AIDS epidemic in the early 1990s.
The second room shows only the video A IS FOR A=R=A=K=A=W=A, 2012, a title which seems to refer to the artist Ei Arakawa, Holmqvist’s occasional collaborator. In it, following a brief sequence of images, the screen turns black except for lines of text that appear like subtitles, synchronized to Holmqvist’s reading voice. It’s hypnotic—and again, several parts are recognizable as text from various song lyrics, poetry, and films, as well as the writings of artists and philosophers, conjuring memories and ideas of other objects, places, and histories. In many ways the piece is a senseless yet meaningful collage of quotes and Holmqvist’s own writing. And the most successful moments of Holmqvist’s work evoke the words of critic and fellow pamphleteer Viktor Shklovsky: “A revolutionary poet is one that makes the stone a little bit more stony.”
— Theodor Ringborg
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