diary June 18, 2008

Shabby Chic

Folkestone, UK

“A walk from riches to rags” is how Folkestone Triennial curator Andrea Schlieker described the event she has been working on for the past three years. It was Friday, the exhibition’s opening day, and we were standing at the “riches” end: the sunlit ballroom of the Metropole Hotel, a luscious relic of the Kentish coastal town’s Edwardian boom years as a holiday resort. As David Batchelor’s Disco Mechanique—comprising dozens of motorized faux glitter balls made from thirty-four hundred interlaced pairs of colorful Brazilian sunglasses—twirled in the room’s center, Schlieker promised “a string of

print May 2008

Paul McCarthy

FOUR DECADES IN, Paul McCarthy’s art might easily be considered repetitious, overblown, big-budget, anxiously relentless. Is that his problem, or is it America’s? The question is worth asking, if only because McCarthy, like Warhol before him, totes a get-out-of-critique-free card: His art is a mirror to his homeland’s times, at best the convex type that allows a view around blind bends—though should it descend into costly gibbering spectacle, there are always enough analogues and portents in the parent culture to still render it defensible. Even so, there are inevitably qualitative variations

print April 2008

PUBLIC RETRACTION: BRITISH ARTS FUNDING

EVER SINCE WORLD WAR II, the arts in England—as elsewhere in Europe—have been generously if variably funded by the government, by means of the Arts Council of Great Britain, which was split into four independent organizations, for England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, in 1994. If not quite the envy of the world, the level of funding provided by Arts Council England has certainly been the envy of America, where investment in the arts is largely a private affair. Whereas the Arts Council will invest £417 million ($836 million) in the arts this year alone, the United States (federal,

print March 2008

“The World as a Stage” and “A Theatre Without Theatre”

ONE WOULD THINK I’d have been ready. Performance has become such a catchword in contemporary art circles, as artists and critics alike seek to characterize the current shifts in production toward acting out or interacting with audiences—frequently in order to intersect artistic practice with political agency and redefinitions of protest—that I ought to have entered Tate Modern’s “The World as a Stage” with ears prickling and eyeballs peeled. Yet here we were: The museum attendant, handing me the exhibition pamphlet, looked me straight in the eye and said, “Saturday night parking.” And

print January 2008

FILLING THE VOID: THE ART OF MUNGO THOMSON

MUNGO THOMSON’S The Collected Live Recordings of Bob Dylan 1963–1995, 1999, is a compact disc with a hole in the middle—not just literally, but metaphorically, too. For while the recording encompasses, in chronological order, all the live albums made by the Minnesota-born singer-songwriter for Columbia Records over the course of thirty-two years, one crucial component is missing: Dylan’s music. Every song has been edited out, leaving a twenty-five-minute flow of crowd noises that rise, like grit-filled waves, in gently clattering crescendos, then break, recede, and build again, sometimes

previews January 2008

“Double Agent”

Reflecting the thematic hook of “art in which the artist uses other people as a medium,” this exhibition will be a roll call of key players: Pawel Althamer, Phil Collins, Dora García, Joe Scanlan, Barbara Visser, Artur Zmijewski, and theatrical firebrand Christoph Schlingensief—and behind them, a shadow squad of auxiliary producers.

Despite the title, put aside thoughts of espionage. In the sense intended by the ICA's Mark Sladen and guest curator Claire Bishop—who has written eloquently on participatory aeshetics for this magazine and elsewhere—“double agent” instead connotes “doubled agency.” Reflecting the thematic hook of “art in which the artist uses other people as a medium,” this exhibition will be a roll call of key players: Pawel Althamer, Phil Collins, Dora García, Joe Scanlan, Barbara Visser, Artur Zmijewski, and theatrical firebrand Christoph Schlingensief—and behind them,

previews January 2008

“Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art”

The opening chapter of Thierry de Duve's 1998 Kant After Duchamp—which inspired this offbeat group show—is a rare example of art theory as seen through the eyes of a Martian anthropologist. Here, that approach gets refashioned as a curatorial principle: Aliens, we're told, have acquired some 150 works by practitioners as diverse as Cai Guo-Quiang, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Cornelia Parker, and have categorized their artifacts according to presumed function rather than the earthly codifications of contemporary art.

The opening chapter of Thierry de Duve's 1998 Kant After Duchamp—which inspired this offbeat group show—is a rare example of art theory as seen through the eyes of a Martian anthropologist. Here, that approach gets refashioned as a curatorial principle: Aliens, we're told, have acquired some 150 works by practitioners as diverse as Cai Guo-Quiang, Thomas Hirschhorn, and Cornelia Parker, and have categorized their artifacts according to presumed function rather than the earthly codifications of contemporary art. This sculpture-dominant exhibition—a

performance September 2007

“Il Tempo del Postino”

For a joint commission between the Manchester International Festival and the Théâtre du Châtelet, Paris, curator Hans-Ulrich Obrist and artist Philippe Parreno orchestrated a series of performances by artists, which premiered last July at the Opera House in Manchester, UK. Artforum asked two of its regular contributors to give their impressions of the works presented onstage.

MARTIN HERBERT

FOR “IL TEMPO DEL POSTINO” (The Time of the Postman), which took place on three evenings this past July in Manchester, curators Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno offered contemporary artists not previously

previews September 2007

Biennale de Lyon

Some forty curators and critics each have selected an artist who best represents “The 00s” (included are Ryan Gander, Mai-Thu Perret, and Thomas Bayrle); meanwhile, about twenty artists will design, in various media, a system or “set of strategies” to define this decade in progress.

Past Lyon Biennales have frequently felt like think tanks devoted to how biennials might best operate—a trend this ninth edition, titled “The 00s: The History of a Decade That Has Not Been Named,” looks likely to continue. Promising “a history and geography manual in the form of a gam,” the curators have asked international art-world players to give form to this period: Some forty curators and critics each have selected an artist who best represents it (included are Ryan Gander, Mai-Thu Perret, and Thomas Bayrle); meanwhile, about twenty artists

previews September 2007

Trisha Donnelly

What Trisha Donnelly's feels like, though—as her first major UK show, consisting entirely of one large, interlinked installation, will likely evince—is the output of someone who, not content with bookish chatter about the economy of desire, instead strategizes to register its effects on our shortchanged selves.

Trisha Donnelly tends to deal in displacement, homing in on barely communicable transcendent or liminal experiences. The San Francisco–based artist’s work includes video of herself performing a rain dance and imitating a rock star’s onstage euphoria; blunt, documentary-style photographs of the dancer Frances Flannery enacting a baffling ritual; allusive yet maddeningly obscure semi-abstract drawings; and such interventions as sounding two brief cascades of organ music at the start and finish of gallery hours, thereby opening up a caesura. Accordingly, churls might call

print May 2007

Steve McQueen

FOR THE PAST thirty-five years, the Art Commissions Committee of London’s Imperial War Museum has invited artists to make work responding to the activities of British and Commonwealth troops, whether they be engaged in combat or in peacekeeping missions. This privately run successor to the country’s official war artists’ program (which was created in 1916, partly for propaganda purposes, and dismantled in 1972) has thrown up the occasional attention-grabbing artwork—notably, Langlands & Bell’s interactive digital animation, The House of Osama Bin Laden, 2003, a detailed re-creation of the

previews May 2007

Lucian Freud

Eighty-five this December, Lucian Freud remains portrait painting’s point man—even Elizabeth II allowed him to portray her, in 2001, as a fretful housewife in a diamond diadem. Artists canonized in their lifetime risk being taken for granted, however, making a retrospective such as this necessary to remind audiences of Freud’s work’s piercing, undomesticated effect. The exhibition will show seventy works, among them several new canvases, including an intricate view of the artist’s garden. Rehearsing Freud’s progression from finicky pairings of people and plants to

previews May 2007

Martin Boyce

Martin Boyce’s shape-shifting art brings back the ghosts of modernism: battered replicas of Eames cabinets; nighttime city scenes evoked in sketchy, shadowy installations of chain-link fences next to trees made from fluorescent tubing; noirish phrases such as OVER YOUR SHOULDER glimmering on the walls in a Saul Bass–esque font. This show, the Scottish artist’s most extensive to date, is loosely inspired by Haruki Murakami’s hallucinatory novel The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997). It immerses visitors in a series of six large installations featuring fragments of the

print February 2007

OPENINGS: PABLO BRONSTEIN

PABLO BRONSTEIN KNOCKED DOWN London Bridge and commissioned two architects—ostentatious postmodernist Terry Farrell and eighteenth-century purveyor of Neoclassical elegance William Chambers—to collaborate on its replacement, a passé riot of disharmonious ornament crowned with a giant precariously balanced globe. He seated Filippo Juvarra, Baroque pioneer of illusionistic perspectives for theater sets and designer of basilicas, at a draftsman’s desk beside Michael Graves, architect of Disneyland’s resort hotels, and left them to foment an unholy mix of elegant piazzas and pyramid-topped

previews January 2007

Gavin Turk

Gavin Turk notoriously concluded his MFA at the Royal College of Art in London with a cocksure forecast of future esteem, installing in an otherwise empty room an English Heritage plaque, BOROUGH OF KENSINGTON / GAVIN TURK / SCULPTOR / WORKED HERE / 1989–1991.

Gavin Turk notoriously concluded his MFA at the Royal College of Art in London with a cocksure forecast of future esteem, installing in an otherwise empty room an English Heritage plaque, BOROUGH OF KENSINGTON / GAVIN TURK / SCULPTOR / WORKED HERE / 1989–1991. That Turk has since burned less brightly than many of his YBA contemporaries is possibly the price of being a gadfly: His investigations into how artistic value gets conferred—particularly through the cults of originality and personality, which he evinces through fusions of existing iconographies, from Warhol’s

print October 2006

Christopher Stewart

It’s estimated that there are some twenty-five thousand private military personnel currently in Iraq, collectively comprising easily the second-largest fighting force in the country (the largest being of course the US Army). Employed by firms with names like Custer Battles, Global Risk Strategies, and Blackwater USA, they are mostly funded by US tax dollars and handle everything from training local forces to surveillance, weapons procurement, and on-the-ground fighting. But these mercenaries aren’t trained in US boot camps. They’re drilled in places like the one depicted in Christopher Stewart’s

print September 2006

KEEPING DISTANCE: THE ART OF MARINE HUGONNIER

MARINE HUGONNIER spent September 12, 2001, contemplating the immediate future. As did we all, you might say—but the Paris-born, London-based artist projected forward in a uniquely literal fashion. When the towers fell, she’d been on her way from the UK to the Alaskan village of Cape Prince of Wales, a little settlement notable primarily for its utterly remote location. There, at the narrowest point of the Bering Strait, you can look across the waters—as Hugonnier did, often through the viewfinder of a camera—and see Cape Dezhnev, the easternmost point of Asia, some forty miles

print September 2006

Jens Hoffmann

THREE’S A CROWD. That would appear to be the thinking, anyway, among adventurous international curators at London institutions. For no sooner than Hans-Ulrich Obrist arrived at the Serpentine Gallery and Ralph Rugoff settled into his seat at the Hayward Gallery (see Artforum, Summer 2006), Jens Hoffmann—whose audacious two and a half years as director of exhibitions at the city’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) arguably paved the way for them—announced his departure. In November the Costa Rica–born curator will become director of the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco.

previews September 2006

John Latham

With more than thirty works (including all eleven of his hanging sculptural “clusters” of books, plaster, and wire), this show should illuminate the fiercely individual thinking of one of the key British artists of the past century.

A decade before John Latham’s death last January at age eighty-five, I worked in his neighborhood bookshop in London, ordering the abstruse tomes on time and quantum mechanics that fed what this show calls his “unified theory of existence.” By then, he had gone from creating largely Conceptual work—like his 1966–67 action in which he literally chewed up Clement Greenberg’s Art and Culture—to making paintings, sculptures, performances, installations, and films, and his openness and iconoclasm had already influenced four decades of British artists. Touring from the UK’s John

previews September 2006

Jake and Dinos Chapman

The conspicuous void in this midcareer survey falls where the British brothers’ concentration camp–themed masterpiece, Hell, 1999–2000, should be (it was destroyed in the 2004 Momart fire). But the seventeen sculptures, two installations, and some three hundred paintings and prints made since 1992 will no doubt still offer a brilliantly assaulting display and a measure of our societal hang-ups.

One putatively verboten move after another, executed with fastidiousness and glee—that’s Jake and Dinos Chapman’s modus operandi. Retrofitting reverenced subjects with insolent supplements—such as giving child mannequins sexual organs for facial features, defacing original Goya prints in comically juvenile fashion, and creating faux-ethnographic displays with hand-carved McDonald’s logos—underscores the artists’ superiority to the scopophiliac hordes via fanatical attention to detail. The conspicuous void in this midcareer survey falls where the

Martin Herbert