<h1>Archives</h1>
    contemporary art, philosophy, theatre of cruelty

    Nancy Spero, Maypole: Take No Prisoners II (2008)

    March 21, 2011
    Nancy Spero Maypole: Take No Prisoners II 2008 Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London (3 March – 2 May 2011) © 2011 Jerry Hardman-Jones

    Antonin Artaud only wrote one play, said to be impossible to restage. So we might now find the best example of the writer’s so-called Theatre of Cruelty at a Nancy Spero show

    Certainly, the only performance of Spurt of Blood which this blogger ever witnessed would be difficult to review. Shouts, cries and physical convulsions don’t bear much repetition.

    Spero’s fascination with this French writer is well known. Her current show at Serpentine features some 25 works which quote from him or name him in their title. This work, however, does not.

    But Maypole: Take No Prisoners II does come to mind after reading the following quote from French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau in which he calls for festivals with nothing to see:

    “Plant a stake crowned with flowers in the middle of a square; gather the people together there, and you will have a festival. Do better yet, let the spectators become . . . actors themselves.”

    So perhaps a gallery, where the visitor is surrounded by the action, where Artaud’s writing is screamed from the walls, is in some ways the antidote to classical spectacle Rousseau proposed.

    Both writers seem keen to get away from theatrical representation. And Spero, while providing theatre in the above work, gives voice to her muse’s radically incomprehendable scream.

    Btw, the quotation is from Letter to M. d’Alembert, which is briefly discussed by Jacques Derrida in his essay The Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation in Writing and Difference.

    For a more in depth discussion of Spero’s use of texts by Artaud in relation to Derrida, there is an interesting essay by Lucy Bradnock available here.

    Maypole: Take No Prisoners II can be seen in Nancy Spero at Serpentine Gallery until 2 May 2011. See gallery website for more details.

    contemporary art, lobsters, performance art

    Edwina Ashton, Peaceful serious creatures (lobster arranging), 2011

    March 18, 2011
    Edwina Ashton, Peaceful serious creatures (lobster arranging), performance, duration: three hours intermittently, 2011

    Most of those lucky enough to see Edwina Ashton’s performance at Jerwood Space in the next five weeks will be, presumably, non-plussed. How else to react to people dressed as lobsters?

    For three hour stretches the lobsters may be seen to rearrange objects. There may be more to it, but that’s the gist. It’s a response to the little known fact that real lobsters rearrange their caves.

    This is an extensive a tribute to a crustacean whose most famous fan was the 19th century French poet Gérard de Nerval. It was him that characterised them as  “peaceful, serious creatures.”

    Said term might of course also apply to artists. In which case, the piece is a good demonstration of “the choreography of positions between artist, artwork and audience.”

    It is only through this arrangement, according to Catherine Wood, that dancing lobsters and the like can be comprehended. This curator’s essay is well worth reading in the online catalogue.

    And this rule applies to painting and sculpture just as much as performance; performance merely foregrounds it. The implications are incredible and a little frightening.

    Positions on a dancefloor or indeed a stage change all the time. The movement of the audience will therefore determine the meaning and certainly the value of any piece of art.

    But of course we are being moved around in our turn by the artist, via whatever channels they hope to communicate, and the various appearances of the work.

    If proof be needed that the quality of your aesthetic experience boils down to social context, look no further than lobsters and a second essay, this one by David Foster Wallace.

    The novelist points out that until the 19th century, lobster was dished up in prisons. Many said it was inhumane to make the inmates eat today’s delicacy more than once a week.

    You would think that a taste for food might be less subjective than a taste for art. But as lobster numbers dwindled they became more desirable dance partners. Inevitable really.

    We can only be non-plussed for so long and no one can respond to a piece of art in isolation. Other people’s discourses are then part of what we are looking at. It’s lobster, after all. Eat it up!

    I haven’t even seen this piece yet, by the way. I’m planning to next week and will report back. It’s being performed at Jerwood Space  as part of SHOW, until April 21 (Tuesdays and Thursdays 2–5pm). See gallery website for directions.

    Advertising, contemporary art, fashion, global capitalism

    Coco Cartier and Ezili Lagerfeld, Voodoo Chanel (2011)

    March 15, 2011

    Brand power is interesting because brands are power. They can attract money and votes. They can set the conditions for certain types of behaviour. Even weapons have brands.

    This show makes a target out of one luxury fashion brand and at first you wonder why. It is after all only a designer label. Chanel is not slashing the NHS or sending people to war.

    What Chanel does, however, is create a market for luxury. It belongs to an elite and is one of the ways this elite recognise themselves. And the rest of us can just aspire.

    Subvert the brand and you subvert the hierarchy, at least that would appear to be the equation. But the project here seems also something of a celebration of this label, a tribute to its fetish power.

    This system of ours doesn’t run on a rational subscription to free market economics. Global capitalism thrives on magic and superstition, because people, being what they are, like such things.

    So it comes down to a choice between the high priests of the boardroom and the low priests of the shanty. And if the latter seem a frightening prospect, don’t worry. They’ve got a brand now too.

    Voodoo Chanel can be seen at Grey Area, Brighton, until 27 March. See gallery website for more details.

    anarchitecture, conceptual art, realism, urban intervention

    Gordon Matta-Clark, Reality Properties: Fake Estates (1973)

    March 11, 2011

    Reality can seem a debatable term. But is worth considering that the word came into use in the 1540s as a legal reference to a fixed property. Of course, the word realty still means possession.

    So you could make a case for Fake Estates being a realist artwork par excellence. Because Matta-Clark took ownership of 15 lots of real estate in New York.

    He did so via financial and legal means in the first instance, buying the untenable slivers of gutter space at auction and then collating the conveyancing paperwork.

    And then he took ownership in the way artists are wont to, by photographing and writing about the empty spaces. Art offers another way to come into possession of a subject.

    But reality, in the 16th century usage, has become a speculative business. Land is rarely purchased without a plan for turning a profit on it. In that sense, this project was fake.

    Matta-Clark’s awkward, inaccessible lots would have been impossible to develop, and ownership merely passed into the hands of the city after his death in 1978.

    Clearly, realist art does not speculate. It returns a form of ownership to the common purview. And such is the anarchic (and indeed anarchitectural) promise of Fake Estates.

    The above picture shows Reality Properties: Fake Estates—“Maspeth Onions,” Block 2406, Lot 148 (1973) which can be seen in the Barbican until 22 May. See gallery website for more details on current show: Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta Clark – Pioneers of the Downtown Scene, New York 1970s.

    Chicks on Speed, contemporary art, fashion, installation art, pop-up shop

    Interview: Melissa Logan and Nadine Jessen

    March 9, 2011

    There is something unholy going on, although it is not clear quite what, and there was nothing about bones and hair in the manifesto for the show.

    “Voodoofesto,” Melissa Logan corrects me.

    Stacks of folded t-shirts are laid out on a white shelf. The logos say Chanel, but the slogans add “voodoo”. I look around at gold bones, a staff with a head of hair and a skull in a makeshift water feature, submerged.

    Logan (alias Coco Cartier and founder member of Chicks on Speed) is as sharp as her orange painted nails. Her collaborator Nadine Jessen (alias Ezili Lagerfeld) is more shadowy, and indeed eye-shadowy. Even I can see they are well dressed.

    “It’s a project that started in Abidjan in Ivory Coast from these friends who were there and they saw graffiti on a wall at a market in Abo-abo,” says Logan.

    She tells me the Voodoo Chanel project spread from a to cafes, gigs and art venues around the world. The Voodoofesto is a call to hijack the world’s luxury brands, and one way to do so is to purchase one of the T-shirts or bags.

    “You can bring money and friends…” laughs Jessen, and her German accent gives the proposal an edge.

    Asked about their choice of target, Chanel, the duo fall over themselves to convey a real excitement about the brand.

    “They invest an extreme amount into their fashion shows,” says Logan.

    “It is really decadent,” Jessen confirms.

    Logan: “They brought an iceberg over, for example, from Greenland. They shipped over an iceberg for the Grand Palais show.”

    Jessen, in disbelief: “They had a whole orchestra playing live for the music.”

    This mixture of energy and elitism is what the current show hopes to chan(n)el back into street, or even the underground.

    Logan adds: “And Voodoo Chanel is also because voodoo is something very scary for the people who buy Chanel and, yes, they have a reason to be afraid.”

    There is laughter all round, mine being of the nervous variety. When Logan takes a call, Jessen offers me a tour of the darkest recess of the show, a narrow room which looks something like a shrine, except there are bottles of spirits and – my word! – a 10” long phallus sculpted from wood.

    “It’s an altar and a bar,” Jessen explains. “Ja, we have some specials, some Russian cocaine, but we also start to set up an aphrodisiac but this has to sit for one week so then you have to come back in one week and then you can get a bit.”

    “It’s like in fashion and also like in voodoo there are these rules but you can’t read them, and so it’s also kept secret and that’s why voodoo is also in a way elitist,” she adds more seriously. “So we really try hard to make it a little poppy and to make a possibility for sharing it.”

    Jessen patiently explains that Russian cocaine is a cocktail. “It’s medicinal,” says a voice behind me. Logan is back.

    “We just do cocktails and water – that’s it, you know. Like, what is the term for Rausch?” Jessen asks her.

    “Rausch is like to get into a state.”

    “Like a trip, so this is like medicine to help you.”

    “To get into a state,” Logan clarifies.

    By which point I’m clinging to my sobriety very tightly. Steering the conversation into safer territory, I ask about the procurement of the many diverse materials in what, pop-up shop and temple aside, is also a stunning mixed media installation.

    “Some of it’s real, some of it’s fake, some of it’s local, some of it’s from really, really exotic places,” says Logan.

    “It’s really growing, you know, so when we go somewhere and when we meet people and we talk to people and they bring stuff and we find stuff or stuff finds us,” Jessen adds.

    Logan: “Some of the things we don’t even know what they are because we brought them at markets and they’re like medicines that are supposed to do different things.”

    “There’s one thing I nearly forgot. Shall I show you?” Jessen’s offer sounds ominous.

    We part the trailing curtains and move back into the gloomy bar. The German clicks a lighter and sets two green candles ablaze. Logan watches as she reaches into a pot and takes out a cellophane sock filled with an unidentified herb.

    “This.” she announces. “I have no idea anymore what this is.”

    Logan just remembers you boil it. Next the pair coax me into sniffing a dubious looking granular substance. Hmm, woody.

    “And this…” Logan continues, “if you put this one in someone’s tea then they’re going to obey you and do whatever you want them to do.”

    At my lame suggestion that some of that might come in useful in an office, Logan says with dead seriousness: “Yeah!”

    “But be careful that it’s just one person,” Jessen warns me.

    Next I am persuaded to taste a chip of something I am told is “like” dried ginger. This tastes like bark. And the women exchange comments, in German.

    “This is from the barber,” says Jessen pointing at the wall behind me. My eyes widen slightly at a giant Chanel logo made out of human hair.

    “Here’s the last thing though,” says Logan. “We do have Karl.”

    Naturally, she now produces a voodoo doll of Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld. He is tied up with sandalwood beads and I am assured these are for a healing spell. When I point out they look like teeth, the artist merely agrees.

    “Yeah,” she says. “It looks brutal.”

    On my way out the door, I peer at some newspaper taped to a wall. A full page taken from that day’s Guardian recounts the murder of seven women in a protest march. It took place in Ivory Coast. The paper bears today’s date. Spooky indeed.

    This piece was written for Culture24. Voodoo Chanel can be seen at Grey Area, Brighton, until March 27 2011. See gallery website for more details.

    anarchitecture, architecture, conceptual art, contemporary art, modernism

    Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting (1974)

    March 6, 2011
    Gordon Matta-Clark, Splitting (1974). Image courtesy Barbican Art Gallery.

    Novelist Philip Roth is known for having said: “When a writer is born into a family, that family is finished.” And this work by Gordon Matta-Clark suggests a comparable model for artists.

    The house which he literally saws in two is described in a caption to the film of the event as a “typical family home”. It is then demolished in a total act of homewrecking.

    A certain level of violence is needed to complete this task and, as Matta-Clark bludgeons out the foundations with a sledgehammer, it looks pretty dangerous.

    According to an intriguing academic paper, just a year before this work was made the artist’s cousin was in the Broadway Central Hotel, speaking to his mother on the phone, when it collapsed.

    So it was Matta-Clark’s experience that the roof over your head and your nearest and dearest can, in a direct and indirect way, destroy. When anyone is born into a family, that person is finished.

    Of course, it was this person’s good or bad fortune to be the son of two more artists, Anne Clark and perhaps more significantly, Roberto Matta. That cannot have been too damaging to his own work.

    And from dad he inherited an antipathy towards conformist architecture. Matta worked for Le Corbusier and later rejected his ideas. His son also studied the discipline only to do the same.

    But their relationship appears to have been fraught, which may be another word for typical. Or maybe, this piece is just a comment on housing in New Jersey, where Roth grew up, incidentally.

    Film and photography documenting Splitting, along with four upper corners from the house itself, can be seen in at Barbican Art Gallery, London. The show is called Laurie Anderson, Trisha Brown, Gordon Matta-Clark: Pioneers of the Downtown Scene New York 1970s and runs until 22 May.

    You can read my review of this show on Culture24. And further reviews of shows which feature Matta-Clark can be found in Frieze and The New York Times. I also found this news piece about his show at the Whitney to be most informative.

     

    contemporary art, film, performance art

    Marcus Coates, The Trip (2011)

    March 3, 2011
    Marcus Coates, The Trip, 2010. Documentary photograph, Courtesy of the artist

    Towards the end of this 35 minute film, a horrible thought occurred to me. Maybe Marcus Coates is making the whole thing up and playing an unethical trick on a terminally ill man.

    In voiceover, with a view from a hospice room, he describes a trip up the Amazon in vivid detail. It is lush, green, benign, too good to be true, almost like a meditation tape.

    This is reminiscent of earlier films where Coates goes on imaginary journeys to commune with the natural world. Having put questions to animals, he now claims to put them to the Huaorani tribe.

    But despite the inclusion of ten inch wide dragonflies, this is no drug trip. It is a real life adventure-to-order for the pleasure of bed-bound Alex H. Intelligent, realistic, yet game, he is a good foil.

    Still unable to be sure this trip happened, I even wonder if Alex is in on the joke. Both he and Coates sound close to laughter as the trip gets recounted off camera. Is he even dying?

    This, however, may be what joy sounds like. Artist and subject have shared an amazing journey. And one person has gone well out of their way for another, evidently a good thing.

    Not a million miles from shamanism. But Coates here finds a less equivocal way that artists can be socially useful. This trip ends with a blackout and a song. Let us hope that is the way for all of us.

    Click here to read my interview with Marcus Coates from last year.

    The Trip can be seen at Serpentine Gallery, London, as part of their project Skills Exchange: Urban Transformation and the Politics of Care. See gallery website for more details.

    conceptual art, contemporary art

    Carey Young, Counter Offer (2008)

    February 27, 2011

    Not everything that gets hung on a wall purports to be art. Certificates, contracts, constitutions; all these have at one time or another been framed and put on display.

    Counter Offer is hardly an aesthetic statement. It comes across as a legalistic exhibit, a founding document of the type which reminds you how much weight words on paper can carry.

    Carey Young presents an offer of freedom followed by an offer of justice, with the proviso that the first offer will be “automatically withdrawn” upon the making of a second.

    This suggests more than 100 years of political history boiled down to a bloodless struggle between two pieces of paper. You have the freedom to spend money, but not if you agitate for equality.

    You might wonder why freedom is offered on the left and justice on the right. But then freedom could also be emancipation. Justice may take the form of fascism.

    The four ideals cannot co-exist. That paradox exists not merely as a sad fact of human life, but as a matter of law. And the legal framework accounts for all our freedoms and servings of justice.

    As for what underpins this framework, who knows? Just maybe, it is art, because this piece puts our rights and wrongs in the balance. And now we are stuck with justice, whatever that means to you.

    You can read an earlier post about Carey Young here, or go to Culture24 to read my review of her show at Cornerhouse, Manchester.

    Counter Offer can be seen there in the exhibition Memento Park until March 20 2011. See gallery website for more details.


    conceptual art, contemporary art, installation art, war art

    Mary Kelly and Ray Barrie, Habitus, 2010

    February 23, 2011
    Mary Kelly Projects 1973-2010, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester Photo (c) KP Photo 2011

    According to a 2003 book, there were 3.6 million Anderson Shelters in use during WWII. They must have been a common sight, as common as catching a glimpse of your parents having sex.

    Mary Kelly, b.1941, has spoken of the War as a political ‘primal scene‘ for people of her generation. And so into this sculptural shelter are carved the wartime memories of eight of her contemporaries.

    These are best read in the mirrored floor of the structure. So you have to get the angle right to read  the lived experience of war, although they are no less real for that.

    These memories have also punctured their stainless steel surrounds. Clearly these arrangements for protecting the next generation were only a partial success.

    And because the whole piece is reflective, atrocities such as the Holocaust or Hiroshima may yet be written on our own faces, dress, comportment, whatever our age and distance from the war.

    Witnessing this violence at whatever remove may lead to anger, confusion and a desire for revenge. If this was a Freudian case study, you could explain the events of May ’68 this way.

    But you might also wonder about your own political primal scenes. These will depend on your age and location, but chances are you can remember the terrors of your own childhood shelter.

    Habitus forms part of Mary Kelly: Projects, 1973-2010, which is on show at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, until June 12. See gallery website for more details and read my review of the show on Culture24 here.

    conceptual art, contemporary art, installation art

    Carey Young, Follow the Protest, 2009

    February 19, 2011

    Good news comes by phone, as the old adage goes. It has even been said more recently that it’s good to talk. So visitors to Carey Young’s show may already be keen to pick up this phone.

    In a gallery context it promises even more excitement. As Alex Farquharson points out in a highly informative essay about the artist, such a device recalls a well-known moment in conceptual art.

    (The 1969 landmark exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, which included a telephone on the floor. Artist Walter de Maria would occasionally call.)

    In this case we make the call, and after a brief ringtone the line goes through to an automated call centre system. And no matter how much enjoy art, it is hard not to hang up.

    The impersonal voice offers multiple options which let you access field recordings from the 2009 G20 protests in London. You can hear a range of chants, interviews, ambient noises and a speech.

    In one clip a passerby states that the atmosphere on the demo is “imbued with love”. But all of the fervour and the spirit of the event has been put at a safe distance by the hated interface.

    But then again, most mediation of the anti-globalisation movement is to some extent corporate. We are free to hop channels, switch papers, etc, but is it not all programmed?

    In the context of this somewhat kitsch office set, that may seem funny. Perhaps the best we can do is laugh at our predicament.

    Carey Young: Momento Park is showing at Cornerhouse, Manchester until 20 March. See gallery website for more details and check out the artist’s website here.