Galleries and Museums and other spaces.
Monika Sosnowska untitled, 2006.
Monika Sosnowska (floor, foreground), Georg Herold (cases), Maarten Baas (floor, left), Martin Boyce (hidden, left), Andreas Slominski (top of door frame and left on the back wall), Spartacus Chetwynd (floor, middle background), Tony Conrad (back wall, right), Michael Fullerton (plinth, right), Abraham Cruzvillegas (hangin, in background), Jeroen de Rijke/Willem de Rooij (midground, middle)
I’ve yet to visit this show myself, so the following may seem quite harsh given I have no personal experience of the projects, but these are just my initial thoughts, reflecting a review and information from the show’s website.
Apropos my continuing investigations into (the state of) institutional critique, I came cross a review of the RCA MA in Curating Contemporary Art, entitled Various Small Fires. The review was posted on Art Reviews’ mySpace blog, by James Westcott (aside: I have a real problem with the fact that mySpace layouts look awful in the Safari browser, to the extent that I think it reflects really badly on any site using this service. But getting back to my original subject . . .).
Towards the end of his review, James Westcott critically contrasts this set of fledgling curators’ efforts with those of previous graduates of the course. And not only their peers but also other artists who have worked in the same space or with the same ‘material’.
Initially, though, he makes the connection with Yves Klein’s Le Vide, the empty gallery as void as object to be displayed, undoubtedly a seminal piece for the practice of institutional critique, and one which the present set of curators are perhaps being unfairly compared to. I don’t think there’s much to gain using Klein as a point of comparison for any recent curators, especially given the actual content of the current RCA degree show. While you can’t get away from the knowledge of Klein’s act, there’s been so much water under the bridge since then that I don’t think it’s possible to extricate these current examples from every other influence that has appeared since Klein.
The introduction to the show from the RCA website aligns itself with a practice very much concerned with the physical spaces involved:
The exhibition hinges on the use of the galleries’ architecture and what emerges through the bare coexistence of the different artworks. Another concern of ours has been to expose the galleries’ interior architecture . . . 1
And as Westcott highlights, this is an ambivalent solution:
Reacting to the given space is an elegant solution to the potential organizational and aesthetic problems of a group of curators (all of them with something to say and something to prove) putting together a group show. But it is just that: a solution, a kind of expedience, rather than a demonstration of inspiration, or an assertion of something.2
I also wonder how this is in any way radical? The obvious rejoinder to that question would be, why should it be radical at all, and what would ‘radical’ look like in this context?
The “bare coexistence” mentioned in the introduction to the website just seems to be a license absolving the curators of any requirement to assert their own presence with the works they’ve picked – although that’s perhaps not what one would want anyway, it’s a common complaint to say that the curator has hijacked a particular show of another artist’s works.
Well, perhaps this license allows them the freedom to depart from any over-bearing structure of narrative and theme, but where does that leave us? I’m left wondering what this adds to discourses which took place in the 90’s, which dealt with apparently similar concerns?
Must find out more . . .
I missed the previous two installments of this, the final part of a trilogy of works by Tino Sehgal. The piece is called—at least for the day I went to see it—This Success (2007), but the next time I visit it may be called This Failure. I’m not sure what criteria are being used to judge whether it’s a success or a failure that particular day.
The piece takes place in the main room at the ICA, and when you enter you’re presented with various groups of children generally doing what children do, i.e. running around, playing, talking and shouting. Immediately you’re approached by a small group of children and one by one they announce:
Hello, my name is —, and I think this show is a success.
before returning to their games.
In addition to the children, there seemed to be a small group of adult supervisors plus some other people who may have been other visitors to the show, talking with the children.
We went through the room to the exit at the other end, and found that the upstairs galleries were all closed. A very helpful invigilator let us know that the room we’d just passed through was the full extent of the exhibition – he also gave us a potted summary of the history of the pieces which I’ll expand on here. I missed the previous works, so I’ve quoted others for accounts of the events.
In 2005 Tino presented This objective of that object (2004) – here’s an account from Art in America at the time:
When I entered the gallery, two other visitors were sitting near the entrance, and as the interpreters’ voices began to rise, one of them started to interject a question, at which point the actors excitedly exclaimed “we have a question, we have a question.” The visitor, who apparently knew “how to play,” asked, “what do you think of Henri Bergson’s theory of creative evolution?,” prompting an interpreter to knowingly (perhaps too knowingly) expound on the philosopher’s treatise, which somehow led to musings on music, and back to the group’s initial misunderstanding of “creative evolution” as “creative revolution.” At the end of one long digression, the group simultaneously leaned back on their heels, let out a whoop and bounced around the space, pogo-like, changing positions with each other. It was utterly silly. (Cash, 2005)
The next piece–This Progress—took place in 2006 and consisted of a series of conversations with progressively ageing ‘performers’, starting with a child and ending with a 70-year-old. The Independent newspaper judged the piece to be “. . . both condescending and emotionally directive and implies the superiority of the artist, while actually being cod philosophy. . . . lacking in real intellectual or metaphoric content . . .” (Hubbard, 2006)
My experience of the latest piece, the last in this ‘series’, proved to be underwhelming in comparison to these accounts of the earlier pieces. I’m not a great chatter, especially with children. The invigilator mentioned earlier encouraged us to interact a bit, but I didn’t feel comfortable trying to strike up a conversation with them.
However, beyond my own experience, it also has to be judged as a completion or resolution piece, given its place at the end of the series of three works produced for the ICA.
The long-term aspect of the series is particularly significant, I think, and leads to questions like: were the formats of all the pieces decided in advance? did the reactions to the previous pieces affect later works? if so, it would obviously be interesting to know how, as this would cast light on the nature and meaning of them as well as on Tino’s work process.
The works seems to draw on aspects of institutional critique in its reflexive posing of aspects of the reception of the work back onto the audience. What are we thinking as we look at art? What if the art just asks us the same questions back at us?
All artworks implicitly give us the tools with which to judge them. They position themselves in a space of meanings, in relation to all other objects or artworks that we know of, providing methods by which we make our meanings from them.
Tino’s work seems to work on a similar level to Joseph Kosuth’s definition works, where there is an attempt to investigate the structures society uses to present knowledge and create meanings. Tino’s work uses the medium of conversation to present his meanings, thus fitting into the more recent conception of a relational aesthetic (Bourriaud, 2002) but also as part of an attempt to problematise the transmission of meaning, and hence the nature of the author’s rôle, a subject that could be fruitfully explored in relation to the post-structuralist writings of Foucault and Barthes.
I’ll pursue this line of thought in an essay I’m writing for my course. This is due for completion on the 1 May 2007, so I should be able to post it here soon after.
We were asked to visit the Freud Museum as part of the Framing Art course and in the process think about and try to articulate our responses to it.
At the same time as being the home of Sigmund Freud for the last year of his life, with everything that that entails physically and symbolically, the Museum was also hosting an exhibition of contemporary artworks based on the theme of ‘paranoia’. This juxtaposition of two powerful, potential attributions led to some interesting situations and feelings in the house.
At first glance the house is a fairly typical suburban detached house, in a well-off neighborhood in North London. The first indication that all is not as it seems are the set of three wooden signs staked in the grass on either side of the path to the front door. On them are painted “NO ENTRY”, “NO TRAVELLERS” and “KEEP OUT”1 and—to be fair—caused us to think that there must be another entrance somewhere round the side of the house. If that’s not effective art, then I don’t what is.
Having negotiated our confusion over these messages, we were able to get inside the house. It’s really quite small, with 5 rooms on the ground floor and 3 on the first. The rooms are again styled in a fairly typical British suburban manner, all persian and chinese rugs throughout, and antique furniture. However interspersed amongst this are Freud’s large collection of antiquities from ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt and the Orient, which Freud used as symbolic of the activity of the unconscious: “They were, in fact, I said, only objects found in a tomb, and their burial had been their preservation”.
The objects also have a life of their own, beyond simply historical artifacts from Sigmund Freud’s life. Many of them are accompanied by small typewritten labels which give them further meanings relating to Freud’s psychoanalytic analyses. This makes the progress through the house somewhat unsettling, as one is forced to see the house through two sets of eyes concurrently, on the one hand regarding it as a historically significant residence, with all the social and quotidian meanings involved with that; and on the other as a screen through which to read each object as holding symbolic meaning.
The entry of the exhibition to the house add yet a further layer of meanings to the space. The objects are a mixture of photography, painting/drawing and free-standing objects. In many cases the objects are created to work with the existing milieus, and one finds oneself performing a process of double-take at certain points, to try and negotiate the potential readings of any particular view. Glass flamingos2 drink from antique bowls in the study, while others crowd round a table as ghostly remnants. Swimmers with missing limbs are projected onto the ceiling in the library3, as if we’re underwater, below them. Less effective for me were the myriad monitors placed around the house showing videos. Their lack of integration with the surrounding settings seemed jarring, they demanded you mentally remove yourself from the house and enter their little world. Many of these videos seemed trite, however Jean Gabriel Periot’s piece4 impressed me with its mélange of music and snapshots of roads leading to the gas chamber. Having just watched this me and my partner sat on a sofa in the next room and discussed in front of the beautifully effective wolf and deer video (with gunshot)5.
Overall the exhibition was pretty average, with a the few outstanding pieces mentioned above. The premise was a good one, but I felt not dealt with well by most of the artists. If I was to look at one aspect of the house from a Freudian perspective (not that I know much about Freud’s work) I’d have to draw attention to the pacing dog outside in the garden, trying to get in. I’m sure I could read something into that.
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