Archive for December, 2003

BANALITIES for the East Cape (by Ruark Lewis)

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Lucas
on December 9, 2003
in Writing by others
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BANALITIES for the East Cape

1. she flies over the molten lava and looks out to sea

2. the bird is accustomed to headaches, yet no one acts naturally. when the car rounds the corner expecting collision. heartaches, clenching teeth, shortness of breath or far-off something that sounds like a skidding snake

3. when the fire burns it follows orders. it makes no mistake by diverting attention or lowering its heat

4. where food is beside sleep nothing is resolved, nothing except a fart

5. movements open the door to the face without translation. kiss my teeth to whisper . . . . . I say nothing then I ask, would you leave and you don't

6. the soup is customary, like tidal lagoons it has something to say to the sun

7. the trees disappear, they simply leave a gap of broken teeth

8. this surface makes a trace, a space between rivers, between land plates for grazing cattle and tracks for explorers. it is about proximity, about length and breadth, over time and space hillock and mound are turned to acres then to shires their measure of weight and height we sell abstractly full of weeds

9. in the course of the day, eros and desire, urgency and gaze pushes me ‘til I sleep

10. nothing follows, things follow things where a thing seems to move round and round and is followed around then turns and having followed it again when they have followed all day long looking for a voice that persists - in time these things come and go and then they turn. their beauty has no order. their being has no movement outside where a bird is literally caught in flight – and squeezed to death

11. sound. my ears are made of deafness in the roar of reckless care

12. beside this measure where else is the edge or morsel beside taste and food?

13. the application in itself goes against the tide, and that line yawns absentmindedly, that's how conversations circle one another, in time and after, a beautiful intelligence with nothing to say, that things end sometimes before the next phase of time exists at all, or perhaps way after it should – given time I think I would settle for charming you

14. but trees are like that - they rarely risk attack

15. the uneasy condition sore and broken has fallen from a mighty height

16. to get it on. to lose the plot. to never reach the end. to drown here where it is shallow

17. size sets elements to organise old Greeks and Egyptians, but now in the age of everything things are elementary, they are full of principles and coordinates

18. around and around sent off spare the wool drawn up against your hair

19. in crime as in freedom honesty is pretty universal

20. in sea myths storms are synonymous

2003

……
…for more Ruark Lewis please visit:
http://groups.msn.com/TheSilhouettes/shoebox.msnw?Page=1
http://www.cottier.com.au/justfornothing
http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/

Martha Rosler, Carey Young at the Whitechapel Gallery

Published
by
Lucas
on December 6, 2003
in performance art and re-enactment
. 3 Comments

On Thursday night (Nov 20th 2003)– Martha Rosler presented a remake of her “Semiotics in the Kitchen” video from 1975. It’s the video in which she pretends to be a cooking show presenter, and goes through an a to z of kitchen implements, waving them to the camera, and sometimes brandishing them threateningly. She’s trapped inside the tv, inside the kitchen, inside the structure of language (that’s how she talks about the piece herself).

 

The idea of re-enacting, live, a performance originally made for video was a bit odd, and I think she dealt with it as best she could – by creating a kind of “audition” situation where a couple of dozen young women (who had been recruited from the local art scene) queued up to take a role in the kitchen, going through the alphabet of implements. There were 3 “kitchen sets” where this process was going on simultaneously, meaning that the huge crowd that had assembled at the whitechapel had a higher chance of “getting close” to the performance. It was pretty messy and unruly, but not a bad way to bring a certain intimacy (most of the other pieces this week have used the "auditorium" set-up, which was fine for their work, but Rosler’s needed that closeness between audience and performer). It felt a bit like being in a shopping mall, looking at a (very odd) product demonstration, rather than watching a tv show (although the action was transferred live to tv monitors within the room). Some of the performance participants hammed it up, others were deadpan, I think they all got a kick out of taking part. Rosler acted as a kind of director for the piece, even giving instructions sometimes as it was in progress.

 

"Semiotics in the Kitchen" came after Carey Young’s “Optimum Performance”, which took the ambiguous meaning of the word “performance” (meaning either “a piece of performance art”, or “a level of achievement within the business world”, similar to “effectiveness” or “efficiency”) and transformed the gallery into a motivational business seminar. She hired an actor to present the piece, which he did very well indeed, in front of a set consisting of grey felt-lined panels and indoor plant. The speech itself was all about how we can all "achieve better performance by having regular reviews". It was very funny, and cleverly written and crafted.

 

However, I would not make any claims for the effect of the work beyond being a (in-)joke or stunt…unfortunately, that’s just what Young did in the discussion panel session at the end of the night, jargonistically telling us what the piece was “about” (“soft architecture” “soft business”, (whatever that means) and “creating a space of ambiguity”) and so on. She told us that she had worked in the business world for some years, and that she felt it was important for artists to develop the ability to speak corporate language and operate within a business environment. She even mentioned that art was being considered as a diplomatic tool for international trade deals, and that it could therefore be a powerfully subversive element in world politics.

 

Young's argument was utterly unconvincing, especially after the Morris lecture from the previous night, which had hammered home the way that large artworks have constantly been used as an unconscious tool of capitalist imperialism. Young was also disappointing for her lack of commitment to any "actual" real life politics – she said that she had used the business sphere as “research” for making artworks. Contrast this with Rosler, whose work and life deals with labor and gender in a direct and concrete way, and, as Rosler said, maybe there was a “generation gap” issue going on between the two artists. Young came across as a caricature of the late 80s artist-entrepreneur (Koons et al), whereas Rosler presented as a throwback to a forgotten generation of outdated and somewhat unfashionable politics (unionism and labour conditions etc). The final question from the audience was “besides being two women, why are you both presenting work on the same night?” – Rosler, who had been holding back up til then, leaned into the microphone and droned “actually, I had been wondering that myself.”

Inventory at the Whitechapel Gallery

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Lucas
on December 6, 2003
in audio and performance art
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…had a stack of radios of all shapes and sizes piled up like a Cash Converters display window. We sat in chairs surrounding the radios, and the artists, after a minor attempt at tuning some of them in, retreated and we were left alone with the technology. A broadcast ensued, generally in the form of guitar music overlaid with a text read aloud, about architecture, life in the city, civil disobedience. Some of the texts were clearer than others, both in diction and content, but the work was just not engaging enough to captivate an audience, and after less than half and hour people began to wander off, and chat amongst themselves. I didn’t find the work interesting enough to warrant staying around for discussion afterwards, and went off to the pub with friends. (Nov 21, 2003)

Atlas Group and Mark Dion at the Whitechapel Gallery

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Lucas
on December 6, 2003
in performance art and re-enactment
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Saturday night (Nov 22, 2003) was dominated by Walid Raad's tour-de-force powerpoint presentation about the activities of The Atlas Group. The Group’s archive deals with "the situation" in Lebanon, especially since the civil war in the mid 1970s. It is a fictional archive, (sometimes a fiction based on true documents and events), which attempts to make sense (and even poetry) of the constantly unstable political climate within Lebanon. It does so by utilising the minutiae of everyday life, and this is important for both the archive’s intrinsic content, and its apparent authenticity.

 

By concentrating on vast quantities of very minor information (such as the make, model, and colour of every car used for a bombing in Lebanon between 1975 and 1989) we are swept into a world enormously different from our own (in terms of daily personal danger) and yet incredibly similar and banal at the same time (ordinary cars, in colours we might choose ourselves). In this, The Atlas Group consistenly proves that it is in masterly control of the craft of its fiction – the overwhelming quantity of detail which makes us swoon, and forget the fact that it might actually be all just made up.

 

Raad extends this performance craft even to the point of planting questions in the audience, for which he has answers ready-prepared. In response to one of the questions, “can you give us some background information about the situation in Lebanon?” Raad sighs, and opens up the directory of his computer (visible to the audience on a data projector), revealing countless filenames for documents on the history of Lebanon decade by decade for the last five hundred years. By this strategy, he can reveal the breadth of the answer to that question, without actually needing to answer it directly.

 

For as he said, “when you talk for too long, people will try to make you shut up. But when you are asked a question, you have permission to talk for a long time”.* As both me and a friend commented at the same time, he is one clever cookie.

 

*…however, it should be noted, that this information about questions and answers was volunteered by Raad, and not given in response to any particular question. (Perhaps he wants to hammer home just how clever he really is, and why not, we all got a kick out of it anyway).

 

Mark Dion, prior to Raad’s presentation, showed old-fashioned slides, and gave an entertaining A-Z of extinct animals, and biological nightmares of our times. In moments, it was very informative (especially in relation to biological facts), yet, as my friend Tom pointed out, the tone of the lecture was "more catastrophic than critical", and therefore not very useful for instigating concrete change to the problems it described. However, the scope of the lecture was modest, and I don’t believe it set out to achieve more than it did - therefore it was nowhere near as irritating as the Carey Young performance (and the claims made on its behalf) earlier in the week.

Joseph Beuys at the Whitechapel Gallery

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Lucas
on December 6, 2003
in performance art and re-enactment
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(Nov 23 2003)

Egad! The cult of Joseph Beuys lives! Today’s so-called “symposium” on the late artist was pure hagiography. Three of the office-bearers of the JB Fan Club were up on stage, and there was no shutting them up, nor was it possible to get through to them with an even slightly uncelebratory remark (let alone critical). Richard DeMarco, Robert McDowell, and Ken McMullen released so much hot air it seemed for a moment that they meant to exhort the young audience to march en-masse and exhume Beuys from his grave (wherever that may be).

 

(Excuse some of the following, as I can't remember which of the experts said what. Sheesh. I am trying to find out for the purposes of not appearing sloppy). - see below for comment about the 3 "experts"…

(?) was the director of the ICA during the 1970s, and also ran the Edinburgh festival, organising several Beuys shows during that time. (?) was a gallerist who now runs the Royal Academy Gallery, and (?), an artist who was involved with setting up the International Free University together with Beuys and others in the early 1970s. All three speakers reported at length on their personal relationships with the artist, emphasising his charisma, his inspirational presence and his ability and willingness to teach, as an integral part of his art practice. All agreed in one way or another that he was a genius, a Da Vinci of the 20th century (in fact, one of the speakers even claimed that Beuys was “the first artist of the 21st century”, whatever that could mean, given that he died in the 1980s).

 

With all this eulogising, you might expect that the discussion might eventually turn to the work itself, or even his teachings, or exactly what influence or impact that he has proved to make on the (art)world. But despite obvious and insistent interest from the audience, and an evident desire to dwell upon more critical responses to Beuys’ ouvre and aura, those with the microphones constantly returned to focus upon just how much “LOVE” this man had for the world. Jesus Christ himself hasn’t had such a glowing review as this, possibly since Vatican II.

 

And as for the show itself, which was a temporary installation set up in the Whitechapel gallery downstairs, it consisted of “performance relics” such as blackboards mounted behind perspex, as works of art, seized and “fixed” the moment that Beuys’ various lectures were over, as well as video and film documents of discussions between the artist and various audiences between 1972 and 1980. Only the videos yielded actual information about Beuys’ work of teaching, for they showed him in intense and earnest discussion with students and artists, genuinely trying to answer questions and nut-out a way forward, developing as he went, his now-famous notion of the “social sculpture”. The preserved blackboards, I must say, nauseated me – contrary to what (which one of the "experts"?) had said in his speech, I did not find them to be “fascinating drawings in themselves”, nor did I find them to yield any but the most rudimentary information that may assist us to pursue Beuys’ arguments further. By being encased in plastic glass, they were converted to the status of religious relics, and (worst of all) lost their very nature as blackboards, that is, as mutable surfaces for the transmission of information. Certainly, it can be argued, that Beuys cleverly exploited the fetishising nature of the artworld, in selling the blackboards (and other relics) in order to fund his more expensive, and progressive projects (such as the 7000 oaks in Kassel) – however, we must not be fooled by this into granting them more importance than they would have had at the moment of inscription – that is, they are as useful as any filled blackboard from a previous lesson, upon entering the lecture theatre (ie not very useful).

 

One astute audience member pointed out that, until 1983, the Tate Gallery's Beuys Lecture Blackboards had been in the archive of the gallery, whereas, in that year, they were transferred to the “art collection storage area”. What change had occurred, she asked, in respect to these objects, that they were suddenly transfigured from one category of object into another? No answer from the fanclub.

 

Full respect to Whitechapel director Iwona Blazwick, who chaired the discussion, for her attempts to bring some critical points to bear in relation to Beuys, and whose voice was ignored and drowned out by the fan club. Both she and Gustav Metzger, a contemporary and friend of Beuys, urged caution when considering the charisma of the artist, for it was a charisma, they argued, that he cultivated and nurtured, and which ultimately took control of him. Blazwick referred to two texts, critical of Beuys and his aura, and they were by Benjamin Buchloch, and Kristine Stiles. I have not read either of their arguments, but after today’s love-in, am keen to get my hands on both of the essays.

Andrea Fraser at the Whitechapel Gallery / Art Quiz Night

Published
by
Lucas
on December 5, 2003
in performance art
. 1 Comment

On 18 Nov, I went with my friend Lilly to an “art quiz-night-” in a pub near East London's famous Whitechapel Gallery. This was a really interesting event, and made me think about the kind of social structures Bourriaurd writes about in Relational Aesthetics. Here we were in a kind of low key performative atmosphere, engaged with the esoteric minutiae of the history of art, drinking beer in a pub. It was hilarious. I think it would work well in Sydney's Hollywood Hotel with the Briefcase Gallery. Questions ranged from “what is the title of the Duchamp readymade of a snow shovel?” to a “name that monochrome” test based on a handout of black and white photocopied images, to “what was renaissance artist Donatello’s full name”. It was hilarious and infuriatingly difficult at the same time, since it showed how little “detail” we know to precision about art historical “facts”. I thought of my friends Elaine and Angel’s "slide recognition tests" they had to do at the National Art School in Sydney. Rote learning is really out of style now…

 

………..

 

 

At the pub, I also met Andrea Fraser, who had done a performance at the Whitechapel Gallery earlier that night. I really liked her piece, which was called "Official Welcome", in which she created a fictional opening speech for a museum or gallery. Fraser is a good actor, taking on several different roles during the performance, alternating between gallerist/director and artist on show, navigating the clichés of that (usually incredibly tedious) ritual. Yet her “speech” was not tedious at all, she weaved close enough to the art world figures we know and love/hate, without ever making explicit parody of any one person. I thought I detected Vito Acconci’s stuttering New York drawl in one of her characterisations (in fact, later in the pub she said it had been a combination of Shirin Neshat and Cy Twombly). And I could have sworn it was Tracey Emin she was lampooning in her faux-impersonation of an artist being honoured for her gritty, truth-telling work, having been through rapes, abortions, suicide attempts. And surely in there was a joke about Vanessa Beecroft and her designer-underwear-supermodels performances. But none of it was clear-cut. My guesses about the sources for her succession of “take-offs” could be totally off the mark – it could be that in five years time, the exact same performance would seem to ape a completely different set of artists/gallerists. Perhaps the "types" stay the same, but are occupied by different real people. At the pub I suggested she should come to Sydney with her piece, I would love to see it at the MCA, where Liz Anne MacGregor is routinely drowned out by the loud conversation of alcohol-guzzling guests not at all interested in hearing her say yet again, “the work can be understood on many levels.” I mentioned this MacGregor classic to Fraser, she said it was a good one and maybe she would try work it into her next piece.

 

 

Fraser’s previous work has included similar “institutional critique”, including pretending to be a museum guide, and focusing visitors’ attention on “peripheral areas such as the museum’s canteen rather than its collection” and “incorporating references to class, sexual and cultural difference that are generally elided by official histories”. (Quotes from Whitechapel catalogue spiel about Fraser). In another piece, she visited the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, borrowed the official audio tour guide, and proceeded to respond to its “lyrical and sensual” descriptions of the building by rubbing her body up against “the curvaceous walls”, all documented by a hidden camera. In an earlier work, she pretended to be a museum director - (from the Whitechapel catalogue) - “taking the podium unannounced during the opening of the triennial art event in San Diego, inSITE, Fraser surprised the crowd with an oration that went well beyond the limits of accepted protocol, weaving references to the NAFTA trade agreement into the exhibitions rhetoric about supporting cross cultural activity. The real inSITE director was then required to take to the stage and, rather awkwardly, deliver the real speech in a very similar vein.”

 

 

When I spoke to Fraser in the pub, I realised that I had misinterpreted the framework of her performance pieces. I had assumed, through reading the text in the Whitechapel Gallery catalogue, that her “interventions” were unauthorised, mischievous (but ultimately harmless) actions. No, she told me, the catalogue was slightly misleading, and the works were presented in collaboration with the venues concerned. My friends Lilly and Will had suspected as much - they said they had seen the hidden video documentation of the Guggenheim piece, and they thought that it was “too high quality” and “the angles were too good” for it to have been a "real" guerrilla action within the museum.

 

 

So the “institutional critique” she makes is carried out with the permission of the very venues she lampoons. Why shouldn’t I have expected that? Naturally, museums must be clamouring for her to grace them with a work, hungry, self-centred attention-seekers that they are (the museums, that is). As one of her collector-characters said in her “Official Welcome” speech, “we mainly collect art about sex and excrement. We’ve always loved her work”. Is Fraser any more than the art-world’s stand up comic? Could it be possible that her work has the potential to transform the institutions which smile politely and lap up the attention, as she sends them up? Perhaps that’s not important, or maybe it’s too much to ask anyway. With “Official Welcome” she is telling it like it T-I-S, exposing the spurious prestige-swapping relationship between artists and the gallerists and museum staff who “(re)present” them. I had a hearty laugh, and that’s rare enough in art these days.

 

 

Robert Morris lecture at Whitechapel Gallery

Published
by
Lucas
on December 5, 2003
in performance art and re-enactment
. 2 Comments

Morris gave a lecture entitled [something like]

Notes From a Chomskian Couch – The Imperialist Unconscious

(on 19 Nov 2003)

 

Morris spoke on contemporary "image making". Specifically, his point was about how (what he calls) the "mega image" ( or "megig") is complicit with the American project of cultural imperialism. According to Morris, this was the case with large abstract painting through the 60s, and in earthworks, and through to large "multi-screen-video-installations" (or "muscrvit") today.

 

Very few (famous) artists escaped Morris' web of "the imperialist unconscious" he slammed the big video men - Bill Viola, Doug Aitken, etc, the big painting men - Pollock, Barnett Newman, etc. His exceptions included Jasper Johns - he maintained that Johns always maintained a resistance to American imperialism, (and what's more, Johns' paintings were small) - and Ad Rheinhardt also, who, apparently, "was at every peace rally, every anti Vietnam march". (How does going to marches change the nature of his work though, I wondered, since it still looks like monochrome painting?)

 

Morris presented the text of his lecture in the form of a psychoanalytic encounter between himself (the patient) and Naum Chomsky (the analyst). "Chomsky's" role, however seemed rather minor, and his comments and interjections were only punctuations within Morris’ tirade. They helped, certainly, with maintaining the attention span of the audience, since otherwise the talk may have seemed somewhat monotonous.

 

[By the way, Morris’ said that his performance pieces from the 1960s were originally conceived as “dances”, in a La Mont Young vein - where the ordinary movements and actions of everyday life might be regarded with the same level of interest as “expressive” movements usually associated with the work of trained dancers. This is the context of his piece  "21.3", where he lip-synchs a lecture by Erwin Panofsky called "Studies in Iconology"...apparently, all the minor movements (a cough, a sip of water, shuffling papers) were "choreographed" in advance, and noted on the "performance script". I felt that the Whitechapel presentation of "21.3" was a bit unconvincing in its realisation, as a video recreated by somebody else (an actor re-enacted "21.3" for video in the early 1990s). I wonder why he did that, rather than videotaping himself doing it.]

 

At the end of the lecture, Morris stated that he would take 10 questions. He then proceeded to re-enact a performance by John Cage from the late 1940s or early 1950s (?) - at the end of a lecture on chance, Cage took questions from the audience, answering them with pre-scripted texts pulled at random from a hat. In Morris’ case, the audience played along marvellously, their questions moving quickly from the serious ("you mentioned you were going to present some exceptions to the project of imperialist unconscious as embodied by image-art, but I must have missed it, can you tell us what those examples might be?") to the absurd ("what will you have for breakfast tomorrow?", "did anyone ever tell you you look like Sigmund freud?", "how many questions are left?")

This humourous end to an otherwise pessimistic lecture lent a certain lightness, (what relief!) since, within the lecture itself, Morris had not left much room for examples of artwork that could escape the net of the "imperial unconscious" (or "impunc").