Until 28 November, Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam is showing Joep van Liefland's exhibition Black Systems (Extended Version), the latest installment in his ongoing series of Video Palace installations. Is discussed Van Liefland and Video Palace briefly in my essay "Viewing Copies" in the e-flux journal, and my text for the SMBA Newsletter takes up elements from this previous essay, while mirroring the increasingly elegiac qualities of Van Liefland's exercises in media archaeology. A digital version of the complete newsletter (in which some glitches from the print version have been fixed) is here:
http://www.smba.nl/static/nl/tentoonstellingen/b-joep-van-liefland-b/nieuwsbrief-118.pdf
Showing posts with label "contemporary art". Show all posts
Showing posts with label "contemporary art". Show all posts
Three Autonomies and More
Things are bit quiet on the publication front at the moment and they will remain so over the summer, until (to extend the military metaphor) the fall offensive kicks in. However, June does see the publication of the first issue of The Autonomy Project Newspaper, to which I contributed the text "Three Autonomies and More." The Autonomy Project is an initiative of the Van Abbemuseum, the equally Eindhoven-based art space and publisher Onomatopee, and a number of Dutch, German and British art schools and universities. I'm involved via the Platform Moderne Kunst, an initiative of the Onderzoekschool Kunstgeschiedenis (Dutch Postgraduate School for Art History).
Aimed at young and future practitioners, the Autonomy Project seeks to investigate the contemporary relevance of the notion of autonomy. Should it be dumped like so much Modernist toxic waste, or is a different conception and practice (or practical conception) of autonomy possible and indeed necessary? My essay in the first newspaper, published by Onomatopee in preparation for the Autonomy Summer School at the Van Abbe later this month, argues for the latter position by distinguishing between several different forms of autonomy. The text was written and edited under severe time constraints, which shows in a shockingly large number of glitches - which, ironically, can be seen as reflecting the text's content, emphasizing as it does the pressure to perform marking today's economy. I will develop elements from this text in an essay for the catalogue of a show taking place at Serralves later this year.
http://www.onomatopee.net/index.html#autonomy
http://platformmodernekunst.blogspot.com
Aimed at young and future practitioners, the Autonomy Project seeks to investigate the contemporary relevance of the notion of autonomy. Should it be dumped like so much Modernist toxic waste, or is a different conception and practice (or practical conception) of autonomy possible and indeed necessary? My essay in the first newspaper, published by Onomatopee in preparation for the Autonomy Summer School at the Van Abbe later this month, argues for the latter position by distinguishing between several different forms of autonomy. The text was written and edited under severe time constraints, which shows in a shockingly large number of glitches - which, ironically, can be seen as reflecting the text's content, emphasizing as it does the pressure to perform marking today's economy. I will develop elements from this text in an essay for the catalogue of a show taking place at Serralves later this year.
http://www.onomatopee.net/index.html#autonomy
http://platformmodernekunst.blogspot.com
Label:
"contemporary art",
essay
Texte zur Kunst no. 77: Harun Farocki
Issue no. 77 of Texte zur Kunst contains my review of the Harun Farocki exhibitions in Cologne and London (English version pp. 155-158, German version 233-239). Here are the opening paragraphs:
"Two simultaneous exhibitions of Harun Farocki’s video installations, at Raven Row in London and Museum Ludwig in Cologne, amount to two variations of a small-scale retrospective of this body of work. One show is, as it were, a replay of the other, swapping some elements for others and establishing a somewhat different constellation of works – creating a different diagram of Farocki’s pieces for art spaces. Both exhibitions are accompanied by screenings of Farocki’s films for the cinema and television, but the shows themselves focus almost exclusively on the gallery pieces he started making in 1995, in response both to the worsening conditions for independent film production and distribution and to specific possibilities offered by exhibition spaces. With a few exceptions, most of these gallery works consist of two or more channels (either projected or on monitors).
"The Raven Row exhibition is accompanied by a solid publication, with a number of insightful texts both by Farocki and others, that will remain a benchmark for some time to come. By contrast, the Cologne show comes with by a small cahier containing the German translation of an autobiographical text by Farocki from the British volume, with a fold-out poster that (on one of its sides) sports a diagram which can also be found on a wall in the museum. This diagram contains titles and images of the works in the Ludwig show plus the titles (but no images) of non-gallery films that are shown in the screenings. Most of these elements are connected by arrows pointing either in one or in two directions, though sometimes pieces are placed in each other’s vicinity without any such physical contact. Sometimes these connections are very direct: a gallery piece such as Auge/Maschine III/Eye/Machine III (2000), shown at the Ludwig, uses some of the same material, and covers similar ground to, the single-channel film Erkennen und Verfolgen/War at a Distance (2003).
In a less direct way, the recent double projection “Immersion”, which shows a demonstration of a computer program with which traumatized US soldiers can relive their experiences, is connected both to the documenta 12 installation “Deep Play” and to non-exhibition films such as Die Schulung (1987) and Die Schöpfer der Einkaufswelten (2001). With the former, they share the investigation of technology, with the latter, the element of the rehearsal of roles and the “programming” of behavior. The connections in this diagram do of course represent a choice, and thus a reduction; they make visible certain connections by obscuring others. A text analyzing the Farocki shows cannot help functioning in a similar way."
http://www.textezurkunst.de
Image: wall diagram at the Ludwig.
Label:
"contemporary art",
review
Texte zur Kunst no. 75: Thomas Hirschhorn review
Texte zur Kunst no. 75 (September 2009) contains my review of The Bijlmer Spinoza Festival, a project that took place in the Bijlmer (Amsterdam) during the summer of 2009, which involved daily lectures and performances taking place in a pavilion that also included a Spinoza exhibition and a library. The location, the Bijlmermeer or Bijlmer, is a post-war banlieue of Amsterdam with a large Surinamese population.
The review discusses this piece in relation to previous Hirschhorn works, such as his 1990 Spinoza Monument and the Bataille Monument at Documenta 11, as well in the context of the contemporary socio-political situation in the Netherlands.
"If Spinoza is currently something of an event in Holland, it is mainly because he is seen as a philosopher of tolerance and democracy. Ironically, in the current Dutch culture wars the accusation that Muslims cannot be proper democrats because they believe in the edicts of a radically transcendent God has become a favorite weapon for Pim Fortuyn’s heirs; right-wing populists like Geert Wilders, who are intent on aggravating oppositions and tensions as much as possible, are not above demanding a ban on Qur’an or the deportation of Muslims. Little wonder that Spinoza has been embraced by Amsterdam’s mayor, Job Cohen, who routinely gets flack from Holland’s strong right-wing populist front for not being “tough” enough on immigrants, especially Muslims. Cohen has been much maligned by right-wingers for stating that when his aim was simply 'to keep things together' ('de boel bij elkaar houden'), i.e. to prevent the city from imploding or exploding socially. It almost seems as if Hirschhorn translated this into literally making sure that things do not fall apart: every day, his signature brown tape was used to make sure that things (and, by implication, people) stick together.
"During the Q&A following his talk, [Toni] Negri was asked his opinion about Hirschhorn’s 'precarious aesthetics': Can such an esthetique de précarité bring art and politics together? The issue of the political connotations – let alone possible political efficacy – of Hirschhorn’s formal means is too complex for a succinct answer, which Negri consequently did not give. One the other hand, when arguing that from a Spinozist perspective the state is an expression of un pouvoir that comes from among us, Negri pointed around to the pavilion and said 'comme ici.' Things are perhaps not quite as clear-cut. Dutch public art ideology is based on the quasi-Schillerian desire to mediate between the abstract logic of the state and the realm of sensuous being, of people’s lives; however, critics argue that in the end public art often merely functions as symbolic flag that is draped over social problems, in lieu of an actual political engagement with them. That the state and its organs initiate so many public art projects seems to suggest that this state is precisely not 'comme ici', that it suffers from its lack of immanence. Seen in this light, Hirschhorn acts as the outsider who, as a free agent, helps the Dutch cultural bureaucracy to fulfill its fantasy—and who, in realizing the fantasy, goes beyond it."
http://www.textezurkunst.de
The review discusses this piece in relation to previous Hirschhorn works, such as his 1990 Spinoza Monument and the Bataille Monument at Documenta 11, as well in the context of the contemporary socio-political situation in the Netherlands."If Spinoza is currently something of an event in Holland, it is mainly because he is seen as a philosopher of tolerance and democracy. Ironically, in the current Dutch culture wars the accusation that Muslims cannot be proper democrats because they believe in the edicts of a radically transcendent God has become a favorite weapon for Pim Fortuyn’s heirs; right-wing populists like Geert Wilders, who are intent on aggravating oppositions and tensions as much as possible, are not above demanding a ban on Qur’an or the deportation of Muslims. Little wonder that Spinoza has been embraced by Amsterdam’s mayor, Job Cohen, who routinely gets flack from Holland’s strong right-wing populist front for not being “tough” enough on immigrants, especially Muslims. Cohen has been much maligned by right-wingers for stating that when his aim was simply 'to keep things together' ('de boel bij elkaar houden'), i.e. to prevent the city from imploding or exploding socially. It almost seems as if Hirschhorn translated this into literally making sure that things do not fall apart: every day, his signature brown tape was used to make sure that things (and, by implication, people) stick together.
"During the Q&A following his talk, [Toni] Negri was asked his opinion about Hirschhorn’s 'precarious aesthetics': Can such an esthetique de précarité bring art and politics together? The issue of the political connotations – let alone possible political efficacy – of Hirschhorn’s formal means is too complex for a succinct answer, which Negri consequently did not give. One the other hand, when arguing that from a Spinozist perspective the state is an expression of un pouvoir that comes from among us, Negri pointed around to the pavilion and said 'comme ici.' Things are perhaps not quite as clear-cut. Dutch public art ideology is based on the quasi-Schillerian desire to mediate between the abstract logic of the state and the realm of sensuous being, of people’s lives; however, critics argue that in the end public art often merely functions as symbolic flag that is draped over social problems, in lieu of an actual political engagement with them. That the state and its organs initiate so many public art projects seems to suggest that this state is precisely not 'comme ici', that it suffers from its lack of immanence. Seen in this light, Hirschhorn acts as the outsider who, as a free agent, helps the Dutch cultural bureaucracy to fulfill its fantasy—and who, in realizing the fantasy, goes beyond it."
http://www.textezurkunst.de
Label:
"contemporary art",
review
e-flux journal no. 8: Viewing Copies
Issue no. 8 of the e-flux journal contains my short essay "Viewing Copies: On the Mobility of Moving Images." These are the opening paragraphs:
"An artist once paid a critic back for lunch by handing him a viewing copy of a video work, adding that this should be more than enough—after all, the piece was worth 25,000 Euro. Both were in on the joke, of course; both knew that a DVD viewing copy of an art video is worth even less than an empty new DVD. In a way, viewing copies do not really exist—their spectral status is owed to the art world’s economy of artificial scarcity and the severe limitations it imposes on the movement of images. Aby Warburg once called Flemish tapestries—early reproductive media that disseminated compositions throughout Europe—automobile Bilderfahrzeuge. Later media have proven to be rather more
powerful “visual vehicles” capable of being produced on a Fordist assembly line. But rather than have the work travel to the viewer—an increasing tendency throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in the case of video or film pieces in contemporary art the viewer has to travel to the work, installed in a gallery or museum.
In contemporary art, even pieces produced in media that allow for infinite mass (re)production are executed only in small editions. In the age of YouTube and file-sharing, this economy of the rarified object becomes ever more exceptional, placing ever-greater stress on the viewing copy as a means of granting access to work beyond the “official” limited editions and outside of the exhibition context. The viewing copy is the obverse of the limited edition: as a copy given or loaned to “art world professionals” for documentation or research purposes, it can never be shown in public. The viewing copy thus widens the reach of the work of art, but confidentially and in semi-secrecy. It is precisely this eccentric status of the viewing copy within the economy of art—which itself has an equally exceptional status within contemporary capitalism—that makes it an exemplary object, a theoretical object par excellence."
The complete text is here: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/75
Image: one half of a viewing copy of Omer Fast's four-channel projection The Casting.
"An artist once paid a critic back for lunch by handing him a viewing copy of a video work, adding that this should be more than enough—after all, the piece was worth 25,000 Euro. Both were in on the joke, of course; both knew that a DVD viewing copy of an art video is worth even less than an empty new DVD. In a way, viewing copies do not really exist—their spectral status is owed to the art world’s economy of artificial scarcity and the severe limitations it imposes on the movement of images. Aby Warburg once called Flemish tapestries—early reproductive media that disseminated compositions throughout Europe—automobile Bilderfahrzeuge. Later media have proven to be rather more
powerful “visual vehicles” capable of being produced on a Fordist assembly line. But rather than have the work travel to the viewer—an increasing tendency throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—in the case of video or film pieces in contemporary art the viewer has to travel to the work, installed in a gallery or museum.In contemporary art, even pieces produced in media that allow for infinite mass (re)production are executed only in small editions. In the age of YouTube and file-sharing, this economy of the rarified object becomes ever more exceptional, placing ever-greater stress on the viewing copy as a means of granting access to work beyond the “official” limited editions and outside of the exhibition context. The viewing copy is the obverse of the limited edition: as a copy given or loaned to “art world professionals” for documentation or research purposes, it can never be shown in public. The viewing copy thus widens the reach of the work of art, but confidentially and in semi-secrecy. It is precisely this eccentric status of the viewing copy within the economy of art—which itself has an equally exceptional status within contemporary capitalism—that makes it an exemplary object, a theoretical object par excellence."
The complete text is here: http://e-flux.com/journal/view/75
Image: one half of a viewing copy of Omer Fast's four-channel projection The Casting.
Label:
"contemporary art",
essay
Texte zur Kunst no. 74
Texte zur Kunst no. 74 (June 2009) is largely dedicated to theses on contemporary art by a variety of authors. It also contains my review of the recent exhibition by Mathias Poledna and Christopher Williams at the Bonner Kunstverein (English pp. 121-123, German 162-166). The show, which consisted only of a number of mobile wall elements from various art institutions, was accompanied by an invitation/folder showing a photograph of three parrots peeping from a hole in a tree. Here's an extract from the review:
"The exhibition at the Kunstverein is a study in abstraction; after all, the walls are image vehicles in the service of an economy in which mobility—of walls and exhibition spaces, of artworks, of visitors—is paramount. At the same time, they make abstraction tangible with their disarmingly concrete, damaged surfaces and visible seams. It appears that, at a moment when the market-driven art frenzy of recent years is abating and art magazines lose weight in record time, Poledna and Williams have created a semi-furnished tabula rasa that once more focuses attention on the contradictory conditions of contemporary art. Recent discourse has a penchant for elevating specific tendencies or individual artists to paradig
matic status, thus sweeping the fundamental antinomies of artistic practices—of competing artistic practices—under the table. The absence of Poledna’s and Williams’s “actual” work in Bonn could also be seen as an invitation to think and act beyond the present deadlock.
"With its primary appeal, the parrot photograph seems designed to be the opposite of the exhibition: a colorful, highly saturated image, which is tied to the aniconic installation only by the use of the same 1970s typography. Used on the printed leaflet as well as in an e-flux announcement, it is as site-specific to such PR materials as the mobile walls are to the exhibition space; it is a PR image designed to attract attention. If one were so inclined, one could relate it to Poledna’s recent film Crystal Palace, shot on New Guinea, to Broodthaers’s parrots, or even to those on a Macke-designed pillow at the August Macke Haus down the street from the Kunstverein. If this play of references may seem disjointed and whimsical, perhaps this is precisely a quality of this invitation. In contrast to the way in which “official” texts ram the referential layers of a film such as Poledna’s Crystal Palace down the viewers’ throats, in the process infantilizing them more than any Hollywood product could hope to achieve, the parrot photograph is open to highly diverse readings and appropriations—as witnessed by drawings and collages made on its basis by children in the context of the Kunstverein’s educational program, KunstStück. In this way, this instrumentalized image functions as an anachronistic reminder of the aesthetic promesse de bonheur under the institutionalized conditions of contemporary artistic practice.
"The exhibition proper ultimately functions in a similar way; its mobile white walls delineate a void in which something or everything may be contained as possibility, in a state of potentiality. Such a move always runs the risk of remaining an empty gesture, an abstract potentiality that is all too content with its lack of realization, yet at this particular moment this intervention feels right. After all, this is a moment of indeterminacy, in which an old order crumbling and the contours of a new one are not readily apparent. The Bonn installation suggests that something further could and should follow this demontage—but not quite yet."
www.textezurkunst.de
"The exhibition at the Kunstverein is a study in abstraction; after all, the walls are image vehicles in the service of an economy in which mobility—of walls and exhibition spaces, of artworks, of visitors—is paramount. At the same time, they make abstraction tangible with their disarmingly concrete, damaged surfaces and visible seams. It appears that, at a moment when the market-driven art frenzy of recent years is abating and art magazines lose weight in record time, Poledna and Williams have created a semi-furnished tabula rasa that once more focuses attention on the contradictory conditions of contemporary art. Recent discourse has a penchant for elevating specific tendencies or individual artists to paradig
matic status, thus sweeping the fundamental antinomies of artistic practices—of competing artistic practices—under the table. The absence of Poledna’s and Williams’s “actual” work in Bonn could also be seen as an invitation to think and act beyond the present deadlock."With its primary appeal, the parrot photograph seems designed to be the opposite of the exhibition: a colorful, highly saturated image, which is tied to the aniconic installation only by the use of the same 1970s typography. Used on the printed leaflet as well as in an e-flux announcement, it is as site-specific to such PR materials as the mobile walls are to the exhibition space; it is a PR image designed to attract attention. If one were so inclined, one could relate it to Poledna’s recent film Crystal Palace, shot on New Guinea, to Broodthaers’s parrots, or even to those on a Macke-designed pillow at the August Macke Haus down the street from the Kunstverein. If this play of references may seem disjointed and whimsical, perhaps this is precisely a quality of this invitation. In contrast to the way in which “official” texts ram the referential layers of a film such as Poledna’s Crystal Palace down the viewers’ throats, in the process infantilizing them more than any Hollywood product could hope to achieve, the parrot photograph is open to highly diverse readings and appropriations—as witnessed by drawings and collages made on its basis by children in the context of the Kunstverein’s educational program, KunstStück. In this way, this instrumentalized image functions as an anachronistic reminder of the aesthetic promesse de bonheur under the institutionalized conditions of contemporary artistic practice.
"The exhibition proper ultimately functions in a similar way; its mobile white walls delineate a void in which something or everything may be contained as possibility, in a state of potentiality. Such a move always runs the risk of remaining an empty gesture, an abstract potentiality that is all too content with its lack of realization, yet at this particular moment this intervention feels right. After all, this is a moment of indeterminacy, in which an old order crumbling and the contours of a new one are not readily apparent. The Bonn installation suggests that something further could and should follow this demontage—but not quite yet."
www.textezurkunst.de
Label:
"contemporary art",
review
Deconstructing Liam
In collaboration with the Kunsthalle Zürich, the Kunstverein München, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Witte de With, Rotterdam, MIT Press has published a "critical reader" on Liam Gillick in lieu of a catalog. Expertly edited by Monika Szewczyk and titled Meaning Liam Gillick, the book collects texts by Peio Aguirre, Johanna Burton, Nikolaus Hirsch, John Kelsey, Maurizio Lazzarato, Maria Lind, Benoît Maire, Chantall Mouffe, Barbara Steiner, Marcus Verhagen, and myself. Oddly enough, the curators/directors Stefan Kalmár, Dominic Molon, Beatrix Ruf, and Nicolaus Schafhausen are listed on the book's cover in exactly the same way as the aforementioned authors and the editor, even though they only contributed a joint foreword of less than three pages. Only in the art world...
My essay, "(Stop) Making Sense", analyses the way in which Gillick employs discursive elements and the notion of the discursive itself. It also reflects on its own compromising context:
"In Fredric Jameson’s words, the public sphere constantly demands a traffic in tokens that it terms ideas, but which are really “idea objects,” commodified fragments of theory—a production of ideas along the lines of Fordist car production. Some forms of discourse offer less resistance to this mechanism than others; and are some not in fact tailor-made for this process? Can the three-dimensional textual
fragments exhibited recently by Gillick in the Guggenheim exhibition theanyspacewhatever no be read as accidental illustrations of Jameson’s point? Do they not seem singularly unwilling to function in any other way than as abstract advertising slogans for Gillick’s practice?
"It may seem willfully perverse and deliberately anachronistic to raise such questions—which may or may not be rhetorical—in the context of a publication on Liam Gillick. In contemporary art magazines, and even more in catalogs and related publications (even if they are termed “critical readers”), discourse is likely to be positive and celebratory; criticism tends to become highbrow copywriting. When debates do take place, they are often thinly disguised jockeying for positions and symbolic capital. Boris Groys has suggested that the only effective contemporary form of judgment lies in the decision whether to write or not to write about an artist since any published criticism is likely to be neutralized as proof that the artist’s work is “controversial” and therefore important or relevant—and if it is embedded in a publication sanctioned by the artist, its role is compromised from the outset. However, to join the conspiracy of silence seems the greatest compromise of all. Any text— or object—with discursive qualities is a message in a bottle, a missive to unknown addressees; potential discourse waiting to be actualized in the form of a response, a rebuttal, an appropriation or détournement, a sounding of its use value. Perhaps an art criticism that tries to think with as well as against and beyond its immediate object can still develop an efficacy of its own, sometimes."
http://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Liam-Gillick-Monika-Szewczyk/dp/026251351X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244462008&sr=1-1
My essay, "(Stop) Making Sense", analyses the way in which Gillick employs discursive elements and the notion of the discursive itself. It also reflects on its own compromising context:
"In Fredric Jameson’s words, the public sphere constantly demands a traffic in tokens that it terms ideas, but which are really “idea objects,” commodified fragments of theory—a production of ideas along the lines of Fordist car production. Some forms of discourse offer less resistance to this mechanism than others; and are some not in fact tailor-made for this process? Can the three-dimensional textual
fragments exhibited recently by Gillick in the Guggenheim exhibition theanyspacewhatever no be read as accidental illustrations of Jameson’s point? Do they not seem singularly unwilling to function in any other way than as abstract advertising slogans for Gillick’s practice?"It may seem willfully perverse and deliberately anachronistic to raise such questions—which may or may not be rhetorical—in the context of a publication on Liam Gillick. In contemporary art magazines, and even more in catalogs and related publications (even if they are termed “critical readers”), discourse is likely to be positive and celebratory; criticism tends to become highbrow copywriting. When debates do take place, they are often thinly disguised jockeying for positions and symbolic capital. Boris Groys has suggested that the only effective contemporary form of judgment lies in the decision whether to write or not to write about an artist since any published criticism is likely to be neutralized as proof that the artist’s work is “controversial” and therefore important or relevant—and if it is embedded in a publication sanctioned by the artist, its role is compromised from the outset. However, to join the conspiracy of silence seems the greatest compromise of all. Any text— or object—with discursive qualities is a message in a bottle, a missive to unknown addressees; potential discourse waiting to be actualized in the form of a response, a rebuttal, an appropriation or détournement, a sounding of its use value. Perhaps an art criticism that tries to think with as well as against and beyond its immediate object can still develop an efficacy of its own, sometimes."
http://www.amazon.com/Meaning-Liam-Gillick-Monika-Szewczyk/dp/026251351X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244462008&sr=1-1
Label:
"contemporary art",
essay
Texte zur Kunst no. 72: Design
Issue no. 72 of Texte zur Kunst has been guest-edited by Tom Holert - whose book Regieren im Bildraum has just been published by b_books, Berlin. The topic at hand is design, and one of the texts is my essay Under the Sign of Design, both in German (pp. 56-69) and in English (pp. 115-122). If the images of John Armleder's installation do not quite seem to match my description of it in the text, that's because the illustration show a later version (that I did not know existed until I saw the magazine in print) with completely different elements. Also, artist Mark Boulos's first name is misspelled with a c, and the distinction Bataille made between sociétés de comsommation and sociétés de consumation has evaporated during editing, the former term now being used exclusively. This text was written and edited in great haste by people who really needed some time off, and it shows. The text will be corrected and developed further in the near future.
http://www.textezurkunst.de/
http://www.textezurkunst.de/
Label:
"contemporary art",
essay
Online Texts on Publicness, Nostalgia and Appropriation
Here are some links to older writings that are online at the moment (December 2008), though one never knows how long this form of publicness will last.
010 publishers has put the entire book The Urban Condition (1999) online, including my article The Invisible Work of Art, on works of art in urban "public space":
http://books.google.com/books?id=-vbTkMuU9NkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=urban+condition
The somewhat more gothic essay The Conspiracy of Publicness from Open no. 7 (2004) is online at the official web site: http://www.skor.nl/article-2871-en.html
A 2004 essay on nostalgia, Happy Days Are Here Again, is still online at http://d396752.u88.clusternet.nl/page.php?node_id=113&l=nl. The text appeared in Metropolis M; at the moment I can't find the magazine in question, so I cannot check the number of this issue. I do recall that the design fascists who had free reign at the magazine thought it would be a cool idea to use different fonts for the names and bands, TV shows, and the like. These interventions are thankfully absent in the online version.
Someone at Berkeley put up a PDF (with some passages marked in yellow) of The Feathers of the Eagle (also known as Appropriation Mythology) from New Left Review no. 36 (November/December 2005): http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/cnm201/readings/Lutticken_Feathers.pdf
010 publishers has put the entire book The Urban Condition (1999) online, including my article The Invisible Work of Art, on works of art in urban "public space":
http://books.google.com/books?id=-vbTkMuU9NkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=urban+condition
The somewhat more gothic essay The Conspiracy of Publicness from Open no. 7 (2004) is online at the official web site: http://www.skor.nl/article-2871-en.html
A 2004 essay on nostalgia, Happy Days Are Here Again, is still online at http://d396752.u88.clusternet.nl/page.php?node_id=113&l=nl. The text appeared in Metropolis M; at the moment I can't find the magazine in question, so I cannot check the number of this issue. I do recall that the design fascists who had free reign at the magazine thought it would be a cool idea to use different fonts for the names and bands, TV shows, and the like. These interventions are thankfully absent in the online version.
Someone at Berkeley put up a PDF (with some passages marked in yellow) of The Feathers of the Eagle (also known as Appropriation Mythology) from New Left Review no. 36 (November/December 2005): http://bcnm.berkeley.edu/cnm201/readings/Lutticken_Feathers.pdf
Label:
"contemporary art",
essay
Omer Fast: The Casting
The MUMOK in Vienna has published a small book on the occasion of the exhibition Omer Fast: The Casting. For this book, Fast has once more collaborated with designer Manuel Raeder, resulting in a public
ation that functions like a typographic remix of Fast's new video installation, The Casting, which is itself a reenacted remix of two different episodes narrated by a US soldier: an encounter with a disturbed girl in Germany, and an ambush in Iraq.
The book contains an e-mail conversation between Omer Fast and myself, which focuses on reenactment in his work and in general. Exchanging these mails was very stimulating, and the text contains some suggestions that I hope to expand on next year, when the idolatry project is finished and I'll be able to focus on a new book. Publications (and the exhibition Life, Once More) that are labeled "History in Motion" relate to this potential book on the contempory production of history through film, TV, and other moving images.
http://www.amazon.com/Casting-Omer-Fast/dp/386560403X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244463825&sr=1-1
ation that functions like a typographic remix of Fast's new video installation, The Casting, which is itself a reenacted remix of two different episodes narrated by a US soldier: an encounter with a disturbed girl in Germany, and an ambush in Iraq.The book contains an e-mail conversation between Omer Fast and myself, which focuses on reenactment in his work and in general. Exchanging these mails was very stimulating, and the text contains some suggestions that I hope to expand on next year, when the idolatry project is finished and I'll be able to focus on a new book. Publications (and the exhibition Life, Once More) that are labeled "History in Motion" relate to this potential book on the contempory production of history through film, TV, and other moving images.
http://www.amazon.com/Casting-Omer-Fast/dp/386560403X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244463825&sr=1-1
Label:
"contemporary art"
Roy Villevoye: Detours
From June 14 to August 10, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen shows Detours, a retrospective of Roy Villevoye's work from the late 1980s to the present. The catalog includes numerous essays, including one by Villevoye's frequent collobrator Jan Dietvorst (a number of co-directed films are part of the show), and my own essay The Art of Exchange from Secret Publicity. It is unfortunate that it has not proven possible to have the show travel to other locations/countries, but hopefully the publication will find its way to some addressees outside of Holland.
Label:
"contemporary art"
Unknown Knowns
BAK, basis voor actuele kunst in Utrecht just published On Knowledge Production: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art (edited by Binna Choi, Maria Hlavajova and Jill Winder). This reader contains both newly commissioned and anthologized writings in art as a site for the production of knowledge. Included is my essay Unknown Knowns: On Symptoms in Contemporary Art, (pp. 84-107), which is a sequel of sorts to my earlier essay Theory and the Sphinx, and which discusses works by artists including Martha Rosler, Jeff Wall, Andrea Fraser, and Omer Fast. From the introduction:
"Artistic “research” often functions as a parody of instrumentalized academic knowledge production, falling short of even its eroding criteria. However, this may not be a bad thing, at least not entirely. The failure to meet a dubious standard always holds the potential to erupt into a questioning of that standard. In this respect, it is interesting to note the place held by the symptom in what passes for artistic knowledge production. While the rhetoric and practice of artistic knowledge production ca
n themselves be seen as symptomatic of the social constraints to which autonomous art is subjected, the work of some artists actively engages with the symptom as an alternative to the empire of signs created by academic disciplines—as pointing both backwards and forwards in time, beyond the current order of things.
"By definition, symptoms are unintentional and uncontrollable, unproductive and even counterproductive—the result of repressed drives seeking an outlet. Recent practices that stage physical or linguistic symptoms can be seen as undermining the sham logocentrism of contemporary discourse even while taking advantage of the symbolic status of theory and research. Such approaches need to be distinguished from historical modern art, especially Expressionism and Surrealism: if these movements simulated symptoms, it was because they valued symptomatic scribbles and movements as authentic and autonomous expressions, and sought to liberate the symptom from a clinical or analytical context. By contrast, today’s artists are not so much interested in using the symptom as a model for a quasi-symptomatic, expressive, and convulsive art, but rather a reflexive symptomatology that produces dubious knowledge about knowledge’s other.
"Building on a famously rambling epistemological statement by Donald Rumsfeld, in which the then US Secretary of Defense mused about the “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns” in the war on terror, one could say that such practices articulate the “unknown knowns” of society—its ideological unconscious, its repressed knowledge. Such active symptomatology is in contradistinction to the theoretical tendency to read art’s formal characteristics as symptoms of the conditions and contradictions of artistic production, revealing more about society than the artist may have realized. Symptomatological approaches in recent art depend on an actively critical role for the artist; however, it is important to remember that critical intentions have their own unconscious, their own unknown knowns."
"Artistic “research” often functions as a parody of instrumentalized academic knowledge production, falling short of even its eroding criteria. However, this may not be a bad thing, at least not entirely. The failure to meet a dubious standard always holds the potential to erupt into a questioning of that standard. In this respect, it is interesting to note the place held by the symptom in what passes for artistic knowledge production. While the rhetoric and practice of artistic knowledge production ca
n themselves be seen as symptomatic of the social constraints to which autonomous art is subjected, the work of some artists actively engages with the symptom as an alternative to the empire of signs created by academic disciplines—as pointing both backwards and forwards in time, beyond the current order of things."By definition, symptoms are unintentional and uncontrollable, unproductive and even counterproductive—the result of repressed drives seeking an outlet. Recent practices that stage physical or linguistic symptoms can be seen as undermining the sham logocentrism of contemporary discourse even while taking advantage of the symbolic status of theory and research. Such approaches need to be distinguished from historical modern art, especially Expressionism and Surrealism: if these movements simulated symptoms, it was because they valued symptomatic scribbles and movements as authentic and autonomous expressions, and sought to liberate the symptom from a clinical or analytical context. By contrast, today’s artists are not so much interested in using the symptom as a model for a quasi-symptomatic, expressive, and convulsive art, but rather a reflexive symptomatology that produces dubious knowledge about knowledge’s other.
"Building on a famously rambling epistemological statement by Donald Rumsfeld, in which the then US Secretary of Defense mused about the “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns” in the war on terror, one could say that such practices articulate the “unknown knowns” of society—its ideological unconscious, its repressed knowledge. Such active symptomatology is in contradistinction to the theoretical tendency to read art’s formal characteristics as symptoms of the conditions and contradictions of artistic production, revealing more about society than the artist may have realized. Symptomatological approaches in recent art depend on an actively critical role for the artist; however, it is important to remember that critical intentions have their own unconscious, their own unknown knowns."
images: pages from Manuel Raeder's typographic version of Omer Fast's Godville.
Label:
"contemporary art",
essay
Krijn de Koning
After spending more than two years in development hell, the monograph Krijn de Koning has finally seen the light of day, courtesy of Veenman Publishers. Designed by Simon Davies and Lauran Schijvens, the book contains an extensive image sequence documenting Krijn de Koning's installati
ons and sculpture in combination with his photographs of a variety of sites and structures—including miniature golf courses. The book also contains my essay Krijn de Koning: Ruining Representation, which was written at an early stage of the book's planning, and which therefore is not quite the text I would write today. It analyses De Koning's practice in the context of art institutions as spaces of representation and abstraction. Some samples:
"Krijn de Koning’s 2001 installation at Begane Grond in Utrecht was one of his most complex works. After the show, which included interventions in De Koning’s structure by other artists, this exhibition space closed in order to be completely renovated; it later reopened under the name BAK. Cutting away some of the raised floors of the main space and adding floors of his own making, De Koning made the space rather more difficult to navigate and to understand, with awkward differences in height and strange passageways. Such works by De Koning give an irrational, Piranesian twist to the work of post-Minimalist installations artists such as Daniel Buren and Michael Asher, who in the late 1960s and 1970s came to use the gallery space not merely as a medium in which to present works executed in other media, but as the primary artistic medium. Far from merely using this medium of representation, they reflected on it; the installation became a mise-en-abîme of the gallery space itself as the medium of representation. While obviously taking up aspects of such practices, De Koning seems less interested in analyzing sites than in ruining them. De Koning’s work is reverse archaeology: it does not peel away layers to lay bare buried ruins, it adds one or more layers in order to turn what is there into a ruin."
"Even though the white cube has become the primary artistic medium in the age of installation art, the art context is no mere constellation of gallery spaces; it is a discursive context, and as such it can be exported to non-art spaces. Artistic interventions transform these sites; the artworks function as de facto white cubes, abstracting and derealizing the site, transforming it into its own representation. As Bas Heijne has pointed out, the work in Hilversum is a reversal of the traditional ruin dear to the Romantics; rather than a human structure (such as a castle) being invaded by nature, nature itself is being invaded and ‘ruined’ by a human structure. However, De Koning’s works function in a similar manner in an architectural context, particularly in art spaces. The effect is that of one culture ruining another one: De Koning’s interventions literally turn sites into ruins, rather than constituting romantic and, in the end, comforting meditations on ruins.
"In 2001 De Koning created an installation for an abandoned hôtel in Metz, formerly a music school, which awaited its restoration as a FRAC (regional art centre). The building was already in ruins, but De Koning’s structure exacerbated this status by making it look like the relic of a long defunct culture with forgotten conventions. De Koning inserted a central yellow volume in the courtyard, with an open roof and windows looking out onto rather uninteresting walls; from this central body, red tunnels led into parts of the building, penetrating through doors and windows, and offering views of the dusty and empty interiors. In a typical De Koning gesture, a washbasin ended up under the tempo
rary floor, the boiler and tap now suspended over an abstract red plane. His floors and walls seem to take no heed of the existing fixtures and ornaments; they cut them in two or make them disappear, as if human use and occupation of the space are irrelevant.
"De Koning’s approach to this not-yet art space highlighted its impending transformation into a medium of representation by turning parts of the ruined hotel into framed images. The piece emphasized the ruined condition of the site by creating a structure that responded to it in subtle and intriguing ways while maintaining a certain bluntness and strangeness. If the building in Metz was still awaiting its transformation, the Fort bij Vijfhuizen had just been renovated and transformed into an art centre when De Koning’s Beeld voor Vijfhuizen (2005) was installed on top of this early- twentieth- century army barracks, part of a defensive ring around Amsterdam. On top of the concrete edifice, De Koning erected an equally grey temporary pavilion, a grid structure whose large openings turned it into a quasi-panopticon offering a variety of views of the surrounding landscape. While the spaces beneath—though stripped down and renovated—still betray their former function, De Koning’s structure took this process of abstraction, which is part of any transformation of non-art spaces into exhibition spaces, much further."
Meanwhile, Veenman Publishers has ceased its activities (that's the third time this sort of thing has happened to its director, or that its director has made this sort of thing happen), but the book is still available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Krijn-Koning-Bas-Heijne/dp/908690016X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244464253&sr=1-2
http://www.krijndekoning.nl/
Images: Installations at Begane Grond (2001) and Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (2005).
ons and sculpture in combination with his photographs of a variety of sites and structures—including miniature golf courses. The book also contains my essay Krijn de Koning: Ruining Representation, which was written at an early stage of the book's planning, and which therefore is not quite the text I would write today. It analyses De Koning's practice in the context of art institutions as spaces of representation and abstraction. Some samples:"Krijn de Koning’s 2001 installation at Begane Grond in Utrecht was one of his most complex works. After the show, which included interventions in De Koning’s structure by other artists, this exhibition space closed in order to be completely renovated; it later reopened under the name BAK. Cutting away some of the raised floors of the main space and adding floors of his own making, De Koning made the space rather more difficult to navigate and to understand, with awkward differences in height and strange passageways. Such works by De Koning give an irrational, Piranesian twist to the work of post-Minimalist installations artists such as Daniel Buren and Michael Asher, who in the late 1960s and 1970s came to use the gallery space not merely as a medium in which to present works executed in other media, but as the primary artistic medium. Far from merely using this medium of representation, they reflected on it; the installation became a mise-en-abîme of the gallery space itself as the medium of representation. While obviously taking up aspects of such practices, De Koning seems less interested in analyzing sites than in ruining them. De Koning’s work is reverse archaeology: it does not peel away layers to lay bare buried ruins, it adds one or more layers in order to turn what is there into a ruin."
"Even though the white cube has become the primary artistic medium in the age of installation art, the art context is no mere constellation of gallery spaces; it is a discursive context, and as such it can be exported to non-art spaces. Artistic interventions transform these sites; the artworks function as de facto white cubes, abstracting and derealizing the site, transforming it into its own representation. As Bas Heijne has pointed out, the work in Hilversum is a reversal of the traditional ruin dear to the Romantics; rather than a human structure (such as a castle) being invaded by nature, nature itself is being invaded and ‘ruined’ by a human structure. However, De Koning’s works function in a similar manner in an architectural context, particularly in art spaces. The effect is that of one culture ruining another one: De Koning’s interventions literally turn sites into ruins, rather than constituting romantic and, in the end, comforting meditations on ruins.
"In 2001 De Koning created an installation for an abandoned hôtel in Metz, formerly a music school, which awaited its restoration as a FRAC (regional art centre). The building was already in ruins, but De Koning’s structure exacerbated this status by making it look like the relic of a long defunct culture with forgotten conventions. De Koning inserted a central yellow volume in the courtyard, with an open roof and windows looking out onto rather uninteresting walls; from this central body, red tunnels led into parts of the building, penetrating through doors and windows, and offering views of the dusty and empty interiors. In a typical De Koning gesture, a washbasin ended up under the tempo
rary floor, the boiler and tap now suspended over an abstract red plane. His floors and walls seem to take no heed of the existing fixtures and ornaments; they cut them in two or make them disappear, as if human use and occupation of the space are irrelevant."De Koning’s approach to this not-yet art space highlighted its impending transformation into a medium of representation by turning parts of the ruined hotel into framed images. The piece emphasized the ruined condition of the site by creating a structure that responded to it in subtle and intriguing ways while maintaining a certain bluntness and strangeness. If the building in Metz was still awaiting its transformation, the Fort bij Vijfhuizen had just been renovated and transformed into an art centre when De Koning’s Beeld voor Vijfhuizen (2005) was installed on top of this early- twentieth- century army barracks, part of a defensive ring around Amsterdam. On top of the concrete edifice, De Koning erected an equally grey temporary pavilion, a grid structure whose large openings turned it into a quasi-panopticon offering a variety of views of the surrounding landscape. While the spaces beneath—though stripped down and renovated—still betray their former function, De Koning’s structure took this process of abstraction, which is part of any transformation of non-art spaces into exhibition spaces, much further."
Meanwhile, Veenman Publishers has ceased its activities (that's the third time this sort of thing has happened to its director, or that its director has made this sort of thing happen), but the book is still available on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Krijn-Koning-Bas-Heijne/dp/908690016X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1244464253&sr=1-2
http://www.krijndekoning.nl/
Images: Installations at Begane Grond (2001) and Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen (2005).
Label:
"contemporary art",
essay
Texte zur Kunst no. 68
Texte zur Kunst no. 68 (December 2007) contains my review of the exhibition Forms of Resistance at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (pp. 216-220.).
"Earlier this year, in a presentation that was part of its Living Archive series, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven exhibited a letter by Hans Haacke dated July 27, 1980, addressed to the museum’s director at the time, Rudi Fuchs. In it Haacke, who had exhibited at the Van Abbe in the previous year, criticized Fuchs’ increasing embrace of Baselitz, Kiefer, and Lüpertz, whose painting—so Haacke argued—combined derivative and regressive aesthetic strategies with loaded iconographic elements to a highly dubious effect. Haacke’s letter was duly archived by the museum, and Fuchs went on to make Documenta 7, in which the “new painting” triumphed. As a sobering reminder of the shaky position of any politicized practice in an art world ruled by the cyclical time of fashion, Haacke’s letter might have provided a much-needed element of reflection in the Van Abbemuseums’s show Forms of Resistance, which takes place at a moment when there are signs that the institutional possibilities for critical practices in the art world are dwindling fast.
"As its subtitle Artists and the Desire for Social Change from 1871 to the Present suggests, the curatorial team—current director Charles Esche with Will Bradley and Phillip van den Bossche—opted for a retrospective structure, selecting four crucial historical moments as markers: the Paris Commune (1871), the Russian revolution (1917), the Prague Spring (1968) and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). However, no real effort is made to articulate this chronology and go from a mass of data to something that could actually be called history; the relations of repetition and difference between these moments are hardly explored. [...]
"With its neo-bourgeois aesthetic, this year’s Documenta 12 was a clear indication of a changing climate, personified by the curator as latter-day dandy browsing through the world of forms, de- and recontextualizing them solely on the basis of his rarified taste and the alleged universality of various motifs. In a different way, Forms of Resistance is equally non-committal. The question of the form(s) of resistance is never really addressed; the Bauhaus is swell, but so are the Post-colonial and revolutionary African and South American figurative murals in one of the exhibition’s largest spaces. Anything goes. Rather than question various existing political and artistic strategies and explore their potentials, contradictions and failures, “Forms of Resistance” nostalgically presents even intellectual stagnation and political delusions as resistance."
One small addendum to this review: in the closing paragraph I praise the juxtaposition, on the walls of the central space with its reconstruction of Rodchenko's Workers' Club, of printed matter by Hans Haacke and activist posters, all pertaining to the Shah regime in Persia. In my righteous anger at this trainwreck of an exhibition, it somehow escaped my mind that another space, a far from successful assembly of 1970s and 1980s pieces including Hans Haacke's large Philips tritych, includes a similar montage on one of its walls.
"Earlier this year, in a presentation that was part of its Living Archive series, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven exhibited a letter by Hans Haacke dated July 27, 1980, addressed to the museum’s director at the time, Rudi Fuchs. In it Haacke, who had exhibited at the Van Abbe in the previous year, criticized Fuchs’ increasing embrace of Baselitz, Kiefer, and Lüpertz, whose painting—so Haacke argued—combined derivative and regressive aesthetic strategies with loaded iconographic elements to a highly dubious effect. Haacke’s letter was duly archived by the museum, and Fuchs went on to make Documenta 7, in which the “new painting” triumphed. As a sobering reminder of the shaky position of any politicized practice in an art world ruled by the cyclical time of fashion, Haacke’s letter might have provided a much-needed element of reflection in the Van Abbemuseums’s show Forms of Resistance, which takes place at a moment when there are signs that the institutional possibilities for critical practices in the art world are dwindling fast.
"As its subtitle Artists and the Desire for Social Change from 1871 to the Present suggests, the curatorial team—current director Charles Esche with Will Bradley and Phillip van den Bossche—opted for a retrospective structure, selecting four crucial historical moments as markers: the Paris Commune (1871), the Russian revolution (1917), the Prague Spring (1968) and the Fall of the Berlin Wall (1989). However, no real effort is made to articulate this chronology and go from a mass of data to something that could actually be called history; the relations of repetition and difference between these moments are hardly explored. [...]
"With its neo-bourgeois aesthetic, this year’s Documenta 12 was a clear indication of a changing climate, personified by the curator as latter-day dandy browsing through the world of forms, de- and recontextualizing them solely on the basis of his rarified taste and the alleged universality of various motifs. In a different way, Forms of Resistance is equally non-committal. The question of the form(s) of resistance is never really addressed; the Bauhaus is swell, but so are the Post-colonial and revolutionary African and South American figurative murals in one of the exhibition’s largest spaces. Anything goes. Rather than question various existing political and artistic strategies and explore their potentials, contradictions and failures, “Forms of Resistance” nostalgically presents even intellectual stagnation and political delusions as resistance."
One small addendum to this review: in the closing paragraph I praise the juxtaposition, on the walls of the central space with its reconstruction of Rodchenko's Workers' Club, of printed matter by Hans Haacke and activist posters, all pertaining to the Shah regime in Persia. In my righteous anger at this trainwreck of an exhibition, it somehow escaped my mind that another space, a far from successful assembly of 1970s and 1980s pieces including Hans Haacke's large Philips tritych, includes a similar montage on one of its walls.
Label:
"contemporary art",
review
The Lost Moment
The Lost Moment, a book published by Bik Van der Pol and Fatos Üstek (as part of a more encompassing project also titled The Lost Moment; http://thelostmoment.blogspot.com/) contains my text Morning of the Magicians (pp. 88-93). Since the book may be difficult to get hold of and the essay is relatively short, I put it up here in its entirety, in a somewhat edited version:
Morning of the Magicians
In a typically non-linear way, Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film The Prestige recounts the interlocked lives and careers of two Victorian magicians, Christian Bale’s Alfred Borden and his nemesis Robert Angier, a.k.a. the Great Danton, played by Hugh Jackman. Hardly rounded characters, these two magicians are little more than personified lust for revenge, always attempting to outsmart and hurt the other. Throughout the film their old mentor, played by Michael Caine, offers world-wise insights into the workings of stage magic. As he tells the young daughter of Christian Bale’s character, Alfred Borden: 'You’re not really looking. You don’t want to know. You want to be fooled.' The audience, in other words, does not really want to know the trick, which is usually disappointing, but it assumes that there is a trick. As Caine’s charact
er acknowledges in The Prestige, the greatest disappointment would be if there were no trick, if what you saw was real. This is what happens when Robert Angier has a machine built than can actually perform a miracle, a miracle of modern science.
Consumed by jealousy for a trick in which Borden disappears into one cabinet and immediately reappears from another, Angier travels to Colorado Springs to seek out inventor Nikola Tesla, famous for pioneering alternating current (AC) electricity, and for building a hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls. In a somewhat haphazard way, Tesla––who, performed by David Bowie, explains his lack of progress with the assertion that 'exact science is not an exact science'––constructs a machine that both makes a perfect three-dimensional copy of anything placed within it, and teleports this copy over some distance. For a hundred nights, Angier uses his Tesla machine to apparently transport himself magically to the back of the theatre; however the 'Great Danton' that shows up triumphant from the back of the theatre is a new copy, whereas the Danto who went into the machine has fallen through a trap door and drowned in a water tank. The next night, the 'New' Danton will go the same way, sacrificing himself to his obsession, yet living on in an identical copy. As Caine says: 'This was not built by a magician. This was built by a wizard.' [1]
This catchy expression presupposes that the term 'magician' denotes entertainers, stage performers—disenchanted wizards who cannot do any actual magic. Of course, the appeal of such magicians largely lies in the uncanny suggestion that they do posses magical powers, that they are true enchanters who just happen to profane their skills on stage. Yet this is clearly make-believe, offered to a complicit audience which is unlikely to regard the performer as a powerful wizard or dangerous sorcerer. While the enjoyment of tricks that are perceived as such is no historical novelty, the widespread acceptance of trick-magic and the creation of a mass audience for it are distinctly modern phenomena that emerged during the latter part of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth century. One contributing factor was the Enlightenment’s attacks on superstition, which led some—like the Göttingen professor Johann Beckmann—to applaud magicians for showing the common folk that magic is just a matter of trickery.[2] More generally speaking, the Enlightenment and its debunking of myths and long-held beliefs created a need for a new kind of disenchanted magic, for a fictitious Nachleben of sorcery that satisfy old mental habits, without actually regressing to discredited beliefs.
Living up to the hopes Beckmann set in them, magicians such as Harry Houdini – who named himself after Robert-Houdin, the man who pretty much defined what modern magic would look like in his triumphs of the 1840s and 1850s—saw it as their task to unmask spiritualist mediums and other alleged miracle workers as frauds.[3] The modern spiritualist, occultist and esoteric tendencies amply demonstrate that as-if magic did not satisfy everyone. Many hoped for a 'morning of the magicians'—to quote the title of the 1960s bestseller by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, in which 'magician' does not refer to stage performers but to supposedly genuine magi. Recently, the title has been appropriated by Joachim Koester as the title for a group of works about the Sicilian 'abbey' of Aleister Crowley and his followers. If Koester investigates a historical attempt at reenchanting the world, modern art itself has often been presented as a form of enchantment, and the modern artist as a magus.[4] Pauwels and Bergier presented their own magical-mythic take on history as the next step after Surrealism, and the catalogue of a late Surrealist exhibition from the same year as the original French edition of their book, Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain, contained a chart which places Surrealism in a genealogy of both 'historical' and fictitious enchanters—apparently a parody of Alfred Barr’s famous chart of Cubism and abstract art.[5]
Elsewhere in the catalogue, Simon Magus—a wizard who in apocryphal stories is said to have challenged Saint Peter by flying, only to crash to death after a prayer by the saint—is represented by a statue of the zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz at Stanford University after the 1906 earthquake, crashed with its head into the ground. Perhaps there is more to this illustration than the obvious visual pun; one can speculate that Breton and Duchamp, who masterminded the catalogue, were far from displeased with the suggestion that modern science is an inferior form of Ersatz magic that is headed for a dramatic fall. In The Prestige, by contrast, science is presented as being capable of real miracles. Before his transportation act, Angier tells the audience that “What you are about to witness is not magic. It is purely science,” but this is of course part of the game: the audience believes it is witnessing trick, whereas it is in effect being presented with Tesla’s technological wizardry. Interestingly, the historical Tesla in fact performed a kind of science-magic act on stage. Attacked by Thomas Alva Edison–who was himself dubbed 'the wizard of Menlo Park' by the press—over the alleged dangerousness of his alternating current, Tesla appeared on stage with a large light bulb in his hand, which started to glow without being attacked to a wire. Tesla’s own body conducted the electricity, thus proving the safety of the AC current even while mythifying Tesla as a magus who controls the elements.[6] However, more typical than this use of stagecraft by a scientist was the use of advanced technology, mechanical as well as optical, by magicians.
Modern magic is a form of special effects: it is not for nothing that Georges Méliès, the pioneer of special-effects film, was a magician and the proprietor of the Théatre Robert-Houdin. Méliès eventually fell by the wayside for refusing to adopt a less stagy and more 'filmic' approach, which he considered to be too manipulative; his use of trick editing as early as L’impressionniste fin-de-siècle (1899), which shows a stage illusionist who makes himself and a woman disappear and reappear, is distinguished from many later film effects by being a joyful celebration of trickery rather than an act of rhetorical manipulation.[7] The latter form of effects is dominant—and it is not less common in modern and contemporary magic than in effect-ridden blockbuster films, both programming our emotions with temporal tricks and traps. Is our joyful submission to such manipulation of our attention not all too similar to our consumption of politics in the post-democratic USA or EU? Norman M. Klein has characterized a special effect as a “technological marvel [which] controls an illusionistic environment. It has been set up to deliver elaborate shocks. Within these shocks, an allegory emerges. Staged as an epic journey, this script immerses the viewer in a reassuring adventure. This adventure is often about a “marvellous” power larger than life, larger than humans alone can ever hope to be.”[8]
Klein is concerned with the ways in which special effects are complicit with a 'neo-feudal' social and political climate, in which the election of an American president can be forced by an elite which claims that “the people” do not have the patience for a recount, first raising the suspense throughout the evening and then producing a surprising a outcome which seems as magical as the last act of a magic trick—an act called 'the prestige' in Nolan’s film.[9] If the world is enjoyed as special effect, surprising twists and turns need not be questioned, and there is no need to investigate the moment when the trick was planned and executed—what matters is the effect, the willing suspension of disbelief, the complicity with the trick and the trickster.
In his televised shows of the 1980s and 1990s, David Copperfield used television technology to his advantage, showing the apparent disappearance of a plane or even of the Statue of Liberty to large audiences. (Of course, such feats are dependant on the camera angles, the Statue of Liberty trick, which was performed at night, probably involving the imperceptible change in orientation of the platform Copperfield had erected in front of it.) Remarkably, these tricks have led to Copperfield’s inclusion in the weirder products of the self-styled 9/11 truth movement. Conspiracy theorists claim that the 9/11 attacks were feats of sinister illusionism; the theory goes that we are indeed being controlled by effects-masters, by political magicians whose machinations are as imperceptible as that of the magician who makes a bird disappear. Disillusionment with a society in which political events seem completely beyond democratic influence, in which non-elected presidents can wage war on a country with no discernible link to 9/11 to search for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, results in unwillingness to accept at least the physical events of 9/11 at face value. 9/11 becomes a special effect in a magic show.
While it is obvious that 9/11 and its instrumentalization by the Bush administration raise many questions, George Monbiot has rightly attacked 'conspiracy idiots' who destroy the credibility of those who oppose the Bush regime and the war in Iraq: 'To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile wile persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the twin towers with explosives without attracting attention and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes and induce them all to have kept their mouths shut, for ever.' [10]
If Monbiot polemically accuses the conspiracists of believing in actual wizardry, some conspiracy theorists actually believe that stage magic—as-if magic—may in fact have played a role: 'Advocates of the "blue screen" or "hologram" theory hold that the planes that hit the World Trade Center, or at least Flight 175, were ghost aircraft and that sophisticated image projection technology was used to fake the illusion of them entering the towers', in other words that 'some form of high-tech-hologram technology was utilized as part of a David Copperfield style sound and lights magic show.' [11] Trying to explain why so many people reported that the towers imploded after being hit by planes, whereas this is (according to the conspiracist) 'physically impossible', one author surmises that such delusions 'would be the result of some kind of trickery that remains hidden from researchers. The range of possibilities runs from an airplane fly-by of some kind coordinated with timed explosions inside the tower to David Copperfield on the scene.'[12] Elsewhere, a self-described 'conspiracy nutter' sees Dick Cheney as the evil mastermind behind 9/11, and 'begrudgingly applaud[s] him for his ability to David Copperfield this incident so well.' [13]
Although such explicitly “magic” versions of conspiracy theory are extreme, and absent from popular fare such as Loose Change, they are symptomatic for the failure of the '9/11 truth movement' to arrive at a valid and productive approach to history and politics. It is precisely to those who grandly uncover the conspiracy, those who refuse to be taken in, that Michael Caine’s words seem to apply the most: 'You’re not really looking. You don’t want to know. You want to be fooled.' Is there a surer way to breed political apathy than to create a woldview in which affairs are masterminded by magicians who are modern magicians only at first glance—whose powers are so absolute that their would, in fact, have to be old-fashioned wizards? But in the world of conspiracism, the real tricks pass unnoticed. Nobody is more thoroughly enchanted and complicit than the conspiracy theorist.
Sven Lütticken
[1] On internet forums, some fans fanatically argue that the machine is in fact not supposed to work, and that creating the suggestion that it does is Angier’s (and Nolan’s) ultimate trick. As with 9/11 conspiracy theories, this interpretation is upheld against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the ‘revelation’ of the truth behind the illusion becoming delusional.
[2] Milbourne and Maurice Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic, New York, Carroll and Graf, 2006,p. 7.
[3] Christopher, pp. 358-363.
[4] Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s Le Matin des magiciens, Paris, Gallimard, 1960; after a previous English edition under a different title, the 1971 American version was called The Morning of the Magicians; Koester’s 2006 works are called Morning of the Magicians, without the definite article.
[5] Exhib. cat. Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain, New York, D’Arcy Galleries, 1960.
[6] F. David Peat, In Search of Nikola Tesla, London/Bath, Ashgrove, 1993, p. 81.
[7] Birgitte Felderer and Ernst Strouhal use this fact to make exaggerated claims about the alleged incompatibility magic and filmic spectacle; David Copperfield would probably disagree. See their introduction to Rare Künste. Zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Zauberkunst, Vienna/New York, Springer, 2007, p. 14.
[8] Norman M. Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects, New York/London, New Press, 2004, p. 13.
[9] Klein, p. 387. For a different take on the manipulation of time by today’s politics and terrorists, see Sven Lütticken, “Suspense and…Surprise”, in: New Left Review no. 40, July/August 2006 pp. 95-101
[10] George Monbiot, “9/11 fantasists pose a mortal danger to popular oppositional campaigns”, in: The Guardian, February 20, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2017005,00.html
[11] Paul Joseph Watson, “Fringe Theories Harming 9/11 Truth Movement”, September 5, 2006, http://www.jonesreport.com/articles/050906_fringe_911.html
[12] Morgan Reynolds, “How They Did the Plane Trick at WTC2”, August 27, 2006, http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911&subpage1=plane_trick_wtc2
[13] http://www.videosift.com/member_comments.php?page=3&user_login=ren
Images from top to bottom: Still from Chrisopher Nolan, The Prestige (2006), cover of Randall Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park (2007), illustration from Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters' Domain (1960), and compelling proof of foul play on a conspiracist web site.
Morning of the Magicians
In a typically non-linear way, Christopher Nolan’s 2006 film The Prestige recounts the interlocked lives and careers of two Victorian magicians, Christian Bale’s Alfred Borden and his nemesis Robert Angier, a.k.a. the Great Danton, played by Hugh Jackman. Hardly rounded characters, these two magicians are little more than personified lust for revenge, always attempting to outsmart and hurt the other. Throughout the film their old mentor, played by Michael Caine, offers world-wise insights into the workings of stage magic. As he tells the young daughter of Christian Bale’s character, Alfred Borden: 'You’re not really looking. You don’t want to know. You want to be fooled.' The audience, in other words, does not really want to know the trick, which is usually disappointing, but it assumes that there is a trick. As Caine’s charact
er acknowledges in The Prestige, the greatest disappointment would be if there were no trick, if what you saw was real. This is what happens when Robert Angier has a machine built than can actually perform a miracle, a miracle of modern science.Consumed by jealousy for a trick in which Borden disappears into one cabinet and immediately reappears from another, Angier travels to Colorado Springs to seek out inventor Nikola Tesla, famous for pioneering alternating current (AC) electricity, and for building a hydroelectric power plant at Niagara Falls. In a somewhat haphazard way, Tesla––who, performed by David Bowie, explains his lack of progress with the assertion that 'exact science is not an exact science'––constructs a machine that both makes a perfect three-dimensional copy of anything placed within it, and teleports this copy over some distance. For a hundred nights, Angier uses his Tesla machine to apparently transport himself magically to the back of the theatre; however the 'Great Danton' that shows up triumphant from the back of the theatre is a new copy, whereas the Danto who went into the machine has fallen through a trap door and drowned in a water tank. The next night, the 'New' Danton will go the same way, sacrificing himself to his obsession, yet living on in an identical copy. As Caine says: 'This was not built by a magician. This was built by a wizard.' [1]
This catchy expression presupposes that the term 'magician' denotes entertainers, stage performers—disenchanted wizards who cannot do any actual magic. Of course, the appeal of such magicians largely lies in the uncanny suggestion that they do posses magical powers, that they are true enchanters who just happen to profane their skills on stage. Yet this is clearly make-believe, offered to a complicit audience which is unlikely to regard the performer as a powerful wizard or dangerous sorcerer. While the enjoyment of tricks that are perceived as such is no historical novelty, the widespread acceptance of trick-magic and the creation of a mass audience for it are distinctly modern phenomena that emerged during the latter part of the eighteenth and the first part of the nineteenth century. One contributing factor was the Enlightenment’s attacks on superstition, which led some—like the Göttingen professor Johann Beckmann—to applaud magicians for showing the common folk that magic is just a matter of trickery.[2] More generally speaking, the Enlightenment and its debunking of myths and long-held beliefs created a need for a new kind of disenchanted magic, for a fictitious Nachleben of sorcery that satisfy old mental habits, without actually regressing to discredited beliefs.
Living up to the hopes Beckmann set in them, magicians such as Harry Houdini – who named himself after Robert-Houdin, the man who pretty much defined what modern magic would look like in his triumphs of the 1840s and 1850s—saw it as their task to unmask spiritualist mediums and other alleged miracle workers as frauds.[3] The modern spiritualist, occultist and esoteric tendencies amply demonstrate that as-if magic did not satisfy everyone. Many hoped for a 'morning of the magicians'—to quote the title of the 1960s bestseller by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, in which 'magician' does not refer to stage performers but to supposedly genuine magi. Recently, the title has been appropriated by Joachim Koester as the title for a group of works about the Sicilian 'abbey' of Aleister Crowley and his followers. If Koester investigates a historical attempt at reenchanting the world, modern art itself has often been presented as a form of enchantment, and the modern artist as a magus.[4] Pauwels and Bergier presented their own magical-mythic take on history as the next step after Surrealism, and the catalogue of a late Surrealist exhibition from the same year as the original French edition of their book, Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain, contained a chart which places Surrealism in a genealogy of both 'historical' and fictitious enchanters—apparently a parody of Alfred Barr’s famous chart of Cubism and abstract art.[5]
Elsewhere in the catalogue, Simon Magus—a wizard who in apocryphal stories is said to have challenged Saint Peter by flying, only to crash to death after a prayer by the saint—is represented by a statue of the zoologist and geologist Louis Agassiz at Stanford University after the 1906 earthquake, crashed with its head into the ground. Perhaps there is more to this illustration than the obvious visual pun; one can speculate that Breton and Duchamp, who masterminded the catalogue, were far from displeased with the suggestion that modern science is an inferior form of Ersatz magic that is headed for a dramatic fall. In The Prestige, by contrast, science is presented as being capable of real miracles. Before his transportation act, Angier tells the audience that “What you are about to witness is not magic. It is purely science,” but this is of course part of the game: the audience believes it is witnessing trick, whereas it is in effect being presented with Tesla’s technological wizardry. Interestingly, the historical Tesla in fact performed a kind of science-magic act on stage. Attacked by Thomas Alva Edison–who was himself dubbed 'the wizard of Menlo Park' by the press—over the alleged dangerousness of his alternating current, Tesla appeared on stage with a large light bulb in his hand, which started to glow without being attacked to a wire. Tesla’s own body conducted the electricity, thus proving the safety of the AC current even while mythifying Tesla as a magus who controls the elements.[6] However, more typical than this use of stagecraft by a scientist was the use of advanced technology, mechanical as well as optical, by magicians.Modern magic is a form of special effects: it is not for nothing that Georges Méliès, the pioneer of special-effects film, was a magician and the proprietor of the Théatre Robert-Houdin. Méliès eventually fell by the wayside for refusing to adopt a less stagy and more 'filmic' approach, which he considered to be too manipulative; his use of trick editing as early as L’impressionniste fin-de-siècle (1899), which shows a stage illusionist who makes himself and a woman disappear and reappear, is distinguished from many later film effects by being a joyful celebration of trickery rather than an act of rhetorical manipulation.[7] The latter form of effects is dominant—and it is not less common in modern and contemporary magic than in effect-ridden blockbuster films, both programming our emotions with temporal tricks and traps. Is our joyful submission to such manipulation of our attention not all too similar to our consumption of politics in the post-democratic USA or EU? Norman M. Klein has characterized a special effect as a “technological marvel [which] controls an illusionistic environment. It has been set up to deliver elaborate shocks. Within these shocks, an allegory emerges. Staged as an epic journey, this script immerses the viewer in a reassuring adventure. This adventure is often about a “marvellous” power larger than life, larger than humans alone can ever hope to be.”[8]
Klein is concerned with the ways in which special effects are complicit with a 'neo-feudal' social and political climate, in which the election of an American president can be forced by an elite which claims that “the people” do not have the patience for a recount, first raising the suspense throughout the evening and then producing a surprising a outcome which seems as magical as the last act of a magic trick—an act called 'the prestige' in Nolan’s film.[9] If the world is enjoyed as special effect, surprising twists and turns need not be questioned, and there is no need to investigate the moment when the trick was planned and executed—what matters is the effect, the willing suspension of disbelief, the complicity with the trick and the trickster.
In his televised shows of the 1980s and 1990s, David Copperfield used television technology to his advantage, showing the apparent disappearance of a plane or even of the Statue of Liberty to large audiences. (Of course, such feats are dependant on the camera angles, the Statue of Liberty trick, which was performed at night, probably involving the imperceptible change in orientation of the platform Copperfield had erected in front of it.) Remarkably, these tricks have led to Copperfield’s inclusion in the weirder products of the self-styled 9/11 truth movement. Conspiracy theorists claim that the 9/11 attacks were feats of sinister illusionism; the theory goes that we are indeed being controlled by effects-masters, by political magicians whose machinations are as imperceptible as that of the magician who makes a bird disappear. Disillusionment with a society in which political events seem completely beyond democratic influence, in which non-elected presidents can wage war on a country with no discernible link to 9/11 to search for non-existent weapons of mass destruction, results in unwillingness to accept at least the physical events of 9/11 at face value. 9/11 becomes a special effect in a magic show.
While it is obvious that 9/11 and its instrumentalization by the Bush administration raise many questions, George Monbiot has rightly attacked 'conspiracy idiots' who destroy the credibility of those who oppose the Bush regime and the war in Iraq: 'To qualify as a true opponent of the Bush regime, you must also now believe that it is capable of magic. It could blast the Pentagon with a cruise missile wile persuading hundreds of onlookers that they saw a plane. It could wire every floor of the twin towers with explosives without attracting attention and prime the charges (though planes had ploughed through the middle of the sequence) to drop each tower in a perfectly timed collapse. It could make Flight 93 disappear into thin air, and somehow ensure that the relatives of the passengers collaborated with the deception. It could recruit tens of thousands of conspirators to participate in these great crimes and induce them all to have kept their mouths shut, for ever.' [10]
If Monbiot polemically accuses the conspiracists of believing in actual wizardry, some conspiracy theorists actually believe that stage magic—as-if magic—may in fact have played a role: 'Advocates of the "blue screen" or "hologram" theory hold that the planes that hit the World Trade Center, or at least Flight 175, were ghost aircraft and that sophisticated image projection technology was used to fake the illusion of them entering the towers', in other words that 'some form of high-tech-hologram technology was utilized as part of a David Copperfield style sound and lights magic show.' [11] Trying to explain why so many people reported that the towers imploded after being hit by planes, whereas this is (according to the conspiracist) 'physically impossible', one author surmises that such delusions 'would be the result of some kind of trickery that remains hidden from researchers. The range of possibilities runs from an airplane fly-by of some kind coordinated with timed explosions inside the tower to David Copperfield on the scene.'[12] Elsewhere, a self-described 'conspiracy nutter' sees Dick Cheney as the evil mastermind behind 9/11, and 'begrudgingly applaud[s] him for his ability to David Copperfield this incident so well.' [13]Although such explicitly “magic” versions of conspiracy theory are extreme, and absent from popular fare such as Loose Change, they are symptomatic for the failure of the '9/11 truth movement' to arrive at a valid and productive approach to history and politics. It is precisely to those who grandly uncover the conspiracy, those who refuse to be taken in, that Michael Caine’s words seem to apply the most: 'You’re not really looking. You don’t want to know. You want to be fooled.' Is there a surer way to breed political apathy than to create a woldview in which affairs are masterminded by magicians who are modern magicians only at first glance—whose powers are so absolute that their would, in fact, have to be old-fashioned wizards? But in the world of conspiracism, the real tricks pass unnoticed. Nobody is more thoroughly enchanted and complicit than the conspiracy theorist.
Sven Lütticken
[1] On internet forums, some fans fanatically argue that the machine is in fact not supposed to work, and that creating the suggestion that it does is Angier’s (and Nolan’s) ultimate trick. As with 9/11 conspiracy theories, this interpretation is upheld against overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the ‘revelation’ of the truth behind the illusion becoming delusional.
[2] Milbourne and Maurice Christopher, The Illustrated History of Magic, New York, Carroll and Graf, 2006,p. 7.
[3] Christopher, pp. 358-363.
[4] Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier’s Le Matin des magiciens, Paris, Gallimard, 1960; after a previous English edition under a different title, the 1971 American version was called The Morning of the Magicians; Koester’s 2006 works are called Morning of the Magicians, without the definite article.
[5] Exhib. cat. Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters’ Domain, New York, D’Arcy Galleries, 1960.
[6] F. David Peat, In Search of Nikola Tesla, London/Bath, Ashgrove, 1993, p. 81.
[7] Birgitte Felderer and Ernst Strouhal use this fact to make exaggerated claims about the alleged incompatibility magic and filmic spectacle; David Copperfield would probably disagree. See their introduction to Rare Künste. Zur Kultur- und Mediengeschichte der Zauberkunst, Vienna/New York, Springer, 2007, p. 14.
[8] Norman M. Klein, The Vatican to Vegas: A History of Special Effects, New York/London, New Press, 2004, p. 13.
[9] Klein, p. 387. For a different take on the manipulation of time by today’s politics and terrorists, see Sven Lütticken, “Suspense and…Surprise”, in: New Left Review no. 40, July/August 2006 pp. 95-101
[10] George Monbiot, “9/11 fantasists pose a mortal danger to popular oppositional campaigns”, in: The Guardian, February 20, 2007, http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,2017005,00.html
[11] Paul Joseph Watson, “Fringe Theories Harming 9/11 Truth Movement”, September 5, 2006, http://www.jonesreport.com/articles/050906_fringe_911.html
[12] Morgan Reynolds, “How They Did the Plane Trick at WTC2”, August 27, 2006, http://nomoregames.net/index.php?page=911&subpage1=plane_trick_wtc2
[13] http://www.videosift.com/member_comments.php?page=3&user_login=ren
Images from top to bottom: Still from Chrisopher Nolan, The Prestige (2006), cover of Randall Stross, The Wizard of Menlo Park (2007), illustration from Surrealist Intrusion in the Enchanters' Domain (1960), and compelling proof of foul play on a conspiracist web site.
Label:
"contemporary art",
essay
A Prior: Erik van Lieshout
Issue no. 12 of the magazine A-Prior, which was published in March 2006, contains my short text “Erik Van Lieshout’s Video Shacks” (pp. 6-9) discusses the installations in which Van Lieshout screens his videos. An extract:
“In the 1960s, the rise of Minimalism led to increasing references to 'the beholder', or sometimes the 'the viewer' or 'the spectator', in writings on contemporary art. Since the physical experience of the work was an essential part of Minimal art, art critics created a disembodied and universalized spectator to represent the 'typical' response to Minimalist works. An artist who not only participated in but also reflected on the emergence of art that demanded a physical response was Dan Graham: with his use of video cameras and monitors, glass, and one-way and two-way mirrors, Graham subjected the viewers to a series of tests, both making them aware of the other viewers and suggesting that
(post-)Minimalist art strives to create precisely the sort of homogenous, abstract and universal beholder referenced in art criticism.
Van Lieshout's video installation Happiness (2004) recalls some of Grahams work, especially his 1981 Cinema project and his pavilion structures. Van Lieshout's construction looks like a cheap knock-off combining elements lifted from Graham and Frank Gehry: it consists of a wooden structure supporting an undulating skin which is transparent from the inside but mirroring from the outside. Standing inside the structure, watching the video, one can also watch the surrounding area and see if anyone is approaching. The video focuses again on Van Lieshout and his brother; this time, the siblings are not on Rotterdam's mean streets but in the countryside, in the sylvan surroundings of a psychiatric institution, where they - especially the brother - are grappling with their dysfunctional behaviour. Standing inside, watching both the behaviour in the video and the highly codified and disciplined art space and art-world people surrounding it, one is in a strange limbo - Happiness is an impossible panopticon that shows two incompatible spaces at the same time. Like most of Dan Graham's works, and like most Expanded Cinema pieces, Erik van Lieshout's video pavilions are in fact seen by a relatively homogenous group of art-world denizens, but they also point towards the possibility a more inclusive audience.”
The complete text can be found here: http://www.aprior.org/lutticken_lieshout.htm
Image: Erik van Lieshout, Happiness (2004)
“In the 1960s, the rise of Minimalism led to increasing references to 'the beholder', or sometimes the 'the viewer' or 'the spectator', in writings on contemporary art. Since the physical experience of the work was an essential part of Minimal art, art critics created a disembodied and universalized spectator to represent the 'typical' response to Minimalist works. An artist who not only participated in but also reflected on the emergence of art that demanded a physical response was Dan Graham: with his use of video cameras and monitors, glass, and one-way and two-way mirrors, Graham subjected the viewers to a series of tests, both making them aware of the other viewers and suggesting that
(post-)Minimalist art strives to create precisely the sort of homogenous, abstract and universal beholder referenced in art criticism.Van Lieshout's video installation Happiness (2004) recalls some of Grahams work, especially his 1981 Cinema project and his pavilion structures. Van Lieshout's construction looks like a cheap knock-off combining elements lifted from Graham and Frank Gehry: it consists of a wooden structure supporting an undulating skin which is transparent from the inside but mirroring from the outside. Standing inside the structure, watching the video, one can also watch the surrounding area and see if anyone is approaching. The video focuses again on Van Lieshout and his brother; this time, the siblings are not on Rotterdam's mean streets but in the countryside, in the sylvan surroundings of a psychiatric institution, where they - especially the brother - are grappling with their dysfunctional behaviour. Standing inside, watching both the behaviour in the video and the highly codified and disciplined art space and art-world people surrounding it, one is in a strange limbo - Happiness is an impossible panopticon that shows two incompatible spaces at the same time. Like most of Dan Graham's works, and like most Expanded Cinema pieces, Erik van Lieshout's video pavilions are in fact seen by a relatively homogenous group of art-world denizens, but they also point towards the possibility a more inclusive audience.”
The complete text can be found here: http://www.aprior.org/lutticken_lieshout.htm
Image: Erik van Lieshout, Happiness (2004)
Label:
"contemporary art",
essay
Secret Publicity
My book Secret Publicity: Essays on Contemporary Art, a selection of texts from the preceding years, was published by NAi publishers in February 2006 (the book purports to be from 2005, but publication was delayed for a few months) . Through a variety of artists and theorists ranging from Broodthaers to Jeff Wall, Bik Van der Pol
and Tino Sehgal and from Bataille to Debord, as well as more obscure and less canonical artists and non-artists (David Thomas, Wilhelm Reich), Secret Publicity seeks to investigate the art world’s possibilities for creating forms of publicness beside and beyond the spectacle.
From the introduction:
“With Duchamp’s readymades, art began to admit that the spectacle is the more successful avant-garde, and that the commodity is the ultimate work of art, an endlessly fascinating mix of logos and mythos. A redefinition of art thus took place: no longer the production of totally independent highbrow goods, art became spectacle-consumption – or meta-consumption, as Boris Groys terms it. This particular form of consumption decodes and recodes the irrational rationality of the spectacle, thereby producing deviant commodities, which are more thought-provoking and productive compounds of logos and mythos.
"The problem is that such characterizations of the possibilities of art tend to degenerate into – or are confused with – an ideologization of art as intrinsically good and noble: the meta-spectacle as the good, critical spectacle. The modern ideology of the aesthetic, according to which art is a privileged domain distinguished in a positive sense from other sectors of modern civilization, has long deteriorated into a kind of good cop / bad cop routine: the ‘big’ culture industry is bad, but its artistic version is good for people, refined, complex – and critical. Just as the critical character of modernism served as a sales argument for medium-specific commodities, the same now applies to the generic commodities of contemporary art. Art may today absorb all the world’s garbage, but it rescues and ennobles the materials it consumes. It is clear that institutions like the Tate and the Guggenheim reduce such pretensions to hypocrisy. In comparison to these satanic mills of the artistic culture industry, Time Warner at least has a refreshing lack of pretensions. Yet the ideology of art, dulling and hypocritical though it may be, also enables practices that could not exist elsewhere. A truth may sometimes manifest itself under the cover of a lie – even if its existence is only ephemeral and marginal. The ideology of art has to be deployed tactically, and if necessary turned against itself [….]. ”
A review of Secret Publicity by Zoë Gray can be found here: http://fillip.ca/content/secret-svengali
A review by Andre Rottmann (in German) is here: http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1887&lang=de
Particularly interesting feedback came from Jan Verwoert, in Open, but that review is not online.
Although the publisher no longer has the book in stock, there are still copies available from amazon and other retailers.
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/9056624679/ref=s9_asin_image_1-serq_g1/102-0053096-3704163?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=1BHJKQJ2WSYGMTZ5834A&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=288448401&pf_rd_i=507846
and Tino Sehgal and from Bataille to Debord, as well as more obscure and less canonical artists and non-artists (David Thomas, Wilhelm Reich), Secret Publicity seeks to investigate the art world’s possibilities for creating forms of publicness beside and beyond the spectacle.From the introduction:
“With Duchamp’s readymades, art began to admit that the spectacle is the more successful avant-garde, and that the commodity is the ultimate work of art, an endlessly fascinating mix of logos and mythos. A redefinition of art thus took place: no longer the production of totally independent highbrow goods, art became spectacle-consumption – or meta-consumption, as Boris Groys terms it. This particular form of consumption decodes and recodes the irrational rationality of the spectacle, thereby producing deviant commodities, which are more thought-provoking and productive compounds of logos and mythos.
"The problem is that such characterizations of the possibilities of art tend to degenerate into – or are confused with – an ideologization of art as intrinsically good and noble: the meta-spectacle as the good, critical spectacle. The modern ideology of the aesthetic, according to which art is a privileged domain distinguished in a positive sense from other sectors of modern civilization, has long deteriorated into a kind of good cop / bad cop routine: the ‘big’ culture industry is bad, but its artistic version is good for people, refined, complex – and critical. Just as the critical character of modernism served as a sales argument for medium-specific commodities, the same now applies to the generic commodities of contemporary art. Art may today absorb all the world’s garbage, but it rescues and ennobles the materials it consumes. It is clear that institutions like the Tate and the Guggenheim reduce such pretensions to hypocrisy. In comparison to these satanic mills of the artistic culture industry, Time Warner at least has a refreshing lack of pretensions. Yet the ideology of art, dulling and hypocritical though it may be, also enables practices that could not exist elsewhere. A truth may sometimes manifest itself under the cover of a lie – even if its existence is only ephemeral and marginal. The ideology of art has to be deployed tactically, and if necessary turned against itself [….]. ”
A review of Secret Publicity by Zoë Gray can be found here: http://fillip.ca/content/secret-svengali
A review by Andre Rottmann (in German) is here: http://www.springerin.at/dyn/heft_text.php?textid=1887&lang=de
Particularly interesting feedback came from Jan Verwoert, in Open, but that review is not online.
Although the publisher no longer has the book in stock, there are still copies available from amazon and other retailers.
http://www.amazon.com/o/ASIN/9056624679/ref=s9_asin_image_1-serq_g1/102-0053096-3704163?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-1&pf_rd_r=1BHJKQJ2WSYGMTZ5834A&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=288448401&pf_rd_i=507846
Label:
"contemporary art",
book
Julika Rudelius
Julika Rudelius: Looking at the Other is the catalogue of the artist’s solo show at De Hallen in Haarlem, The Netherlands (December 2005-February 2006). It contains my essay “Cinema’s Doppelgänger: Remarks on Two Works by Julika Rudelius” (pp. 5-19), which analyses her work in the context of different forms of multiple projection, in art and film history:
“ Tagged (2003) and Economic Primacy (2005) are two closely related works by Julika Rudelius. Economic Primacy is a double projection in which Dutch businessmen expound their convictions and prejudices, whereas Tagged focuses on young men, mainly of Moroccan descent, and all living in Amsterdam. Tagged consists not of two but of three aligned and immediately adjacent projections, but the general structure of the works is the same. Both show members of a group who share certain values and a habitus, and in both cases the members of this group are shown in an abstract, generic space: a bare hotel room in Tagged, and a bland office in Economic Primacy. In both works, a shot usually shows only one person in this interior (in Tagged there are brief shots of two boys together). Double or triple projection enables Rudelius to practise a kind of synchronic montage that establishes connections between the various protagonists, between two or more images – in addition to the diachronic montage between two shots within one and the same projection. While the coexistence of these two forms of montage is by now rather common, as multiple projection is ubiquitous in contemporary video art, the way in which Rudelius deploys double and triple projection is specific to her practice.”
The catalogue is available from amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Julika-Rudelius-Looking-at-Other/dp/9078088052/ref=sr_1_1/102-0053096-3704163?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180885161&sr=8-1
Image on the right: Economic Primacy (2005), detail.
“ Tagged (2003) and Economic Primacy (2005) are two closely related works by Julika Rudelius. Economic Primacy is a double projection in which Dutch businessmen expound their convictions and prejudices, whereas Tagged focuses on young men, mainly of Moroccan descent, and all living in Amsterdam. Tagged consists not of two but of three aligned and immediately adjacent projections, but the general structure of the works is the same. Both show members of a group who share certain values and a habitus, and in both cases the members of this group are shown in an abstract, generic space: a bare hotel room in Tagged, and a bland office in Economic Primacy. In both works, a shot usually shows only one person in this interior (in Tagged there are brief shots of two boys together). Double or triple projection enables Rudelius to practise a kind of synchronic montage that establishes connections between the various protagonists, between two or more images – in addition to the diachronic montage between two shots within one and the same projection. While the coexistence of these two forms of montage is by now rather common, as multiple projection is ubiquitous in contemporary video art, the way in which Rudelius deploys double and triple projection is specific to her practice.”
The catalogue is available from amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Julika-Rudelius-Looking-at-Other/dp/9078088052/ref=sr_1_1/102-0053096-3704163?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1180885161&sr=8-1
Image on the right: Economic Primacy (2005), detail.
Label:
"contemporary art",
essay
In This Colony/In Deze Kolonie
Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, 8 May - 26 June 2005
Co-curated by Maxine Kopsa and Sven Lütticken
Participating artists: Danai Anesiadou and Alexandra Bachzetsis, Sven Augustijnen, Maria Barnas and Germaine Kruip, Stan Douglas, Chris Evans, Andrea Fraser, Ryan Gander, Laura Horelli, Twan Janssen, Krijn de Koning, Gabriel Kuri, Sean Snyder, Roy Villevoye, and Barbara Visser.
The Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, near Amsterdam, is a former army barracks—an early concrete construction from the beginning of the twentieth century that had just been renovated.
Even while participating in the rampant transformation of non-art sites into spaces for artistic representation, In This Colony seeks to question such process of decontextualisation and abstraction, which turn history into decor.
Participating artists: Danai Anesiadou and Alexandra Bachzetsis, Sven Augustijnen, Maria Barnas and Germaine Kruip, Stan Douglas, Chris Evans, Andrea Fraser, Ryan Gander, Laura Horelli, Twan Janssen, Krijn de Koning, Gabriel Kuri, Sean Snyder, Roy Villevoye, and Barbara Visser.The Kunstfort bij Vijfhuizen, near Amsterdam, is a former army barracks—an early concrete construction from the beginning of the twentieth century that had just been renovated.
Even while participating in the rampant transformation of non-art sites into spaces for artistic representation, In This Colony seeks to question such process of decontextualisation and abstraction, which turn history into decor.
2007 Postscript:
In June 2007, Barbara Visser's former assistant received an e-mail from a Mr Wilmink, working at the Cruquiusgemaal, a nineteenth-century pumping station which is now a historicial monument and museum. Visser's series of postcards De Groeten uit Vijfhuizen, which display alternative uses for the fort, and which were diplayed in card racks in the central hall during the run of the exhibition, contains a photomontage of a fictitious theme park, "Mini Haarlemmermeer", in which a small replica of the building is situated right in front of the Fort. The real De Cruquius is situated in the vicinity of the musuem; both buildings stand at the edge of the Haarlemmermeer, a former inland lake reclaimed in the nineteenth century through use of the Cruquiusgemaal and other pumping stations. Mr Wilmink complained that Museum De Cruquius had not been contacted in order to clear any copyright issues, before moving on to trying to bully Visser into donating cards to the museum:
Recentelijk viel mijn oog op een ansichtkaart, die een foto-montage toont van fort Vijfhuizen en De Cruquius. Op zich een goede zaak, dat Museum De Cruquius opduikt in het werk van een kunstenaar; maar anderzijds vind ik het wel jammer dat drukker of uitgever van de ansichtkaart nooit heeft geïnformeerd naar het gebruik van het beeldmerk van v.m. stoomgemaal De Cruquiu
s. Uiteraard wil ik niet lastig doen, want in zekere zin is de kaart een promotiemiddel voor het museum. Wel stellen wij het op prijs, indien deze ansichtkaart tegen kostprijs ter beschikking gesteld zou kunnen worden aan onze museumwinkel. Indien u meer werk heeft waarop De Cruquius prijkt, hebben wij hier mogelijk ook belangstelling voor.
s. Uiteraard wil ik niet lastig doen, want in zekere zin is de kaart een promotiemiddel voor het museum. Wel stellen wij het op prijs, indien deze ansichtkaart tegen kostprijs ter beschikking gesteld zou kunnen worden aan onze museumwinkel. Indien u meer werk heeft waarop De Cruquius prijkt, hebben wij hier mogelijk ook belangstelling voor. Well, Mr Wilmink, one would assume that in so far as there still is a public domain to speak of, this nineteenth-century structure falls well within it, and there is little to stop Barbara Visser from integrating a photo she took into this montage. As pathetic as this little incident is, it is nonetheless indicative of the increasing legal constrains imposed on artists in a culture in which the notion of "intellectual property" is given an ever more ridig and fundamentalist interpretation, usually in the interest of those who can retain the services of expensive legal teams.
Images: exhibition poster using a still from a video by Sven Augustijnen; Barbara Visser, Groeten uit Vijfhuizen (2005), one postcard from a set of five.
Label:
"contemporary art",
exhibition
Stan Douglas: Inconsolable Memories
The catalogue Stan Douglas: Inconsolable Memories accompanies the 2005 touring exhibition of Stan Douglas' film Inconsolable Memories and the accompanying photographs. Apart from the photographs, the film script, and a text by Philip Monk, the publication also contains my essay Media Memories (pp. 123-134).
Label:
"contemporary art",
essay