Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Showing posts with label review. Show all posts
Texte zur Kunst no. 94: Superflex
Label:
contemporary art,
review
History in Motion review
Texte zur Kunst 89: Mike and Oskar
Label:
review
Asger Jorn
Label:
review
Let's Fake History
Image: A relaxed moment after the Battle of Berlin, which (in its reenacted form) raged for a full twenty minutes.
Label:
review
Texte zur Kunst no. 84: Melancholia
www.textezurkunst.de
Label:
review
Texte zur Kunst no. 83: Richard Prince
Texte zur Kunst no. 83 (September 2011) is dedicated to the collector—or more particularly that new breed, the contemporary mega-collector, a global player in an expanding market—going hand in hand, in Europe, with shrinking public funding--that has transformed the art world beyond recognition. I contributed a review (pp. 237-241) of Richard Prince's exhibition American Prayer at the Bibliothèque Francois Mitterand—the BnF’s sprawling fortress by the Seine. While this review is not part of the thematic section, it complements, for Prince's show showcased the artist-as-collector of books, manuscripts and cover art. From the review:
Label:
contemporary art,
review
Texte zur Kunst no. 82: The Forgotten Space
In related news, New Left Review no. 69 (May/June 2011) contains some of Sekula and Burch's notes for the film, and issue no. 21 of Open, which is dedicated to the topic of (Im)mobility, features an essay by Brian Holmes on containerization which is accompanied by stills from The Forgotten Space.
The film's official web site is here: www.theforgottenspace.net
Label:
contemporary art,
review
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
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
Texte zur Kunst no. 71
Issue no. 71 of Texte zur Kunst (September 2008), which is largely dedicated to "artists' artists" and "referentialism" in recent art, also contains my review of David Joselit's Feedback: Television Against Democracy (English version pp. 186-189; German 201-206).
http://www.textezurkunst.de/71/
http://www.textezurkunst.de/71/
Label:
review
Artforum, March 2008
The March issue of Artforum contains a short text on Werner Herzog, in particular his new film on Antarctica, Encounters at the End of the World (pp. 117-118). The text was and should be titled Encounters in End Time, but Artforum changed this to the cringeworthy Truth and Beauty.
Some extracts:
"In one scene, the director tries to make a reputedly increasingly misanthropic and shy scientist relax by asking him probing questions about sexual deviancy among penguins. The bemused expert ventures that, while he knows of no gay sex, there is some evidence of threesomes and "prostitution." This all-too-human behavior leads Herzog to ask whether there are cases of mental derangement among these birds. Some penguins, it turns out, become insane and abandon their group; we see footage of one penguin who stays put as others go on their way, and who eventually waggles, alone, toward the bluish-white horizon-where, Herzog's voice tells us with a hint of barely suppressed
glee, "certain death" awaits. This brings to mind various other Herzog protagonists, those played by Klaus Kinski in particular, who subordinate everything to some overriding vision and therefore act in socially unproductive ways. If anything, such "deranged" outsiders allow us to see the insanity of business as usual more clearly. [...] But in a film that repeatedly gives voice to the concern of scientists over global warming, the larger implication is that humanity itself, like the deranged penguin, is marching toward certain death.
"Indeed, although Herzog is highly critical of Al Gore's pimped-out PowerPoint presentation, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Encounters takes up many of the same motifs, albeit in a more imaginative way. In what may well be one of the staged scenes that Herzog includes in his documentaries in order to go beyond what he has, speaking of cinema verité, called "superficial truth, the truth of accountants," Encounters shows a marine biologist and his colleagues watching the trailer for the 1954 film Them! on a computer monitor. In Them! natural history is out of joint, as nuclear explosions beget a race of giant monster ants. All of Herzog's sci-fi films in fact have similarities to this film-they are disaster (if not monster) movies, showing landscapes full of industrial junk or otherwise ravaged. [...]
"Media coverage of global warming often implies that the process is so radical as to be all but unstoppable, and thus it often serves to breed passivity, even when accompanied by ostensibly actionist rhetoric. This is the effect of one scene in Encounters, in which a computer screen displays a time-lapse animation of icebergs moving northward, where they will inevitably melt. The film as a whole, however, opposes such intimations of inevitability with a rich and varied rhythm, a temporality that counters linear scenarios with spiraling movements between men and penguins, between the "cathedral" under the ice and the edge of an Antarctic volcano. By proposing time as something malleable, Herzog suggests that today's unnatural natural history is still open to intervention-that there are possibilities for action in and beyond entropic end-time."
http://www.artforum.com/
Image: Werner Herzog, Encounters at the End of the World (2007), production still.
Some extracts:
"In one scene, the director tries to make a reputedly increasingly misanthropic and shy scientist relax by asking him probing questions about sexual deviancy among penguins. The bemused expert ventures that, while he knows of no gay sex, there is some evidence of threesomes and "prostitution." This all-too-human behavior leads Herzog to ask whether there are cases of mental derangement among these birds. Some penguins, it turns out, become insane and abandon their group; we see footage of one penguin who stays put as others go on their way, and who eventually waggles, alone, toward the bluish-white horizon-where, Herzog's voice tells us with a hint of barely suppressed
glee, "certain death" awaits. This brings to mind various other Herzog protagonists, those played by Klaus Kinski in particular, who subordinate everything to some overriding vision and therefore act in socially unproductive ways. If anything, such "deranged" outsiders allow us to see the insanity of business as usual more clearly. [...] But in a film that repeatedly gives voice to the concern of scientists over global warming, the larger implication is that humanity itself, like the deranged penguin, is marching toward certain death."Indeed, although Herzog is highly critical of Al Gore's pimped-out PowerPoint presentation, An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Encounters takes up many of the same motifs, albeit in a more imaginative way. In what may well be one of the staged scenes that Herzog includes in his documentaries in order to go beyond what he has, speaking of cinema verité, called "superficial truth, the truth of accountants," Encounters shows a marine biologist and his colleagues watching the trailer for the 1954 film Them! on a computer monitor. In Them! natural history is out of joint, as nuclear explosions beget a race of giant monster ants. All of Herzog's sci-fi films in fact have similarities to this film-they are disaster (if not monster) movies, showing landscapes full of industrial junk or otherwise ravaged. [...]
"Media coverage of global warming often implies that the process is so radical as to be all but unstoppable, and thus it often serves to breed passivity, even when accompanied by ostensibly actionist rhetoric. This is the effect of one scene in Encounters, in which a computer screen displays a time-lapse animation of icebergs moving northward, where they will inevitably melt. The film as a whole, however, opposes such intimations of inevitability with a rich and varied rhythm, a temporality that counters linear scenarios with spiraling movements between men and penguins, between the "cathedral" under the ice and the edge of an Antarctic volcano. By proposing time as something malleable, Herzog suggests that today's unnatural natural history is still open to intervention-that there are possibilities for action in and beyond entropic end-time."
http://www.artforum.com/
Image: Werner Herzog, Encounters at the End of the World (2007), production still.
Label:
review
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
Artforum, September 2007
The September 2007 issue of Artforum contains my review of a Thomas Demand exhinbition in Venice (pp. 403), as well as Event Horizon, a short essay / review of Gerard Raunig's book Art and Revolution (pp. 83-87). I titled the piece Retro Revolution, but evidently Artforum considered that title to be inferior. The opening paragraphs:
"Revolutions are short-lived, ephemeral events that shatter the continuity of history yet persist in acts of remembrance—official or alternative, pro or contra, systemic or incidental. However, the recent surge in 'revolutionary' pop-cultural iconography, from the ubiquitous Che to the imagery and slogans of May ’68 and the Red Army Faction, seems designed to sabotage, rather than perpetuate, remembrance. In contrast to the nostalgia culture of the ’70s and ’80s, as analyzed by Fredric Jameson, which focused on pilfering the popular culture of earlier decades, today’s nostalgia industry also embraces more political material, but with a similar end result: amnesia masquera
ding as anamnesis. Fragments of history return as decontextualized signifiers that suggest little more than fashionability—until, that is, they end up in a situation in which they regain something resembling actual meaning, as when Cameron Diaz explored new dimensions of obliviousness by sporting a bag with a red star and the Maoist slogan SERVE THE PEOPLE (in Chinese) during a visit to Peru, a country still scarred by the Maoist insurgency of the Shining Path.
"In the context of this nostalgia culture, which locks possible futures safely in an unretrievable past, the always-slippery relationship between 'art' and 'revolution' feels more vexed than ever, and in need, once again, of reconceptualization-particularly since two once-dominant narratives of this relationship are now thoroughly discredited. First there was the notion of formal revolution, the transposition of Hegelian-Marxist principles to art, as evinced in the criticism of lapsed Trotskyist Clement Greenberg and his pupil Michael Fried. In the 1960s, Fried claimed that the 'dialectic of modernism' amounted to 'nothing less than the establishment of a perpetual revolution-perpetual because bent on unceasing radical criticism of itself. It is no wonder such an ideal has not been realized in the realm of politics, but it seems to me that the development of modernist painting over the past century has led to a situation that may be described in these terms.' This formalist formulation was challenged by another: the neo-avant-garde dream of a fusion of art and life, which necessarily presupposed the imbrication of art production and political action and, in its seemingly most radical version, proposed the abandonment of artmaking in favor of revolutionary activity. With its naive conviction that the revolution is just around the corner, and with its willingness to throw out the baby of art with the bathwater of capitalism, the latter variant now seems at least as unconvincing as the modernist narrative. And yet, no coherent new theorization has appeared to take its place. Austrian philosopher Gerald Raunig's Art and Revolution, published in German in 2005 and now available in English, represents to date the most sustained and substantial—although substantially flawed—attempt to fill this vacuum. "
http://www.artforum.com/
"Revolutions are short-lived, ephemeral events that shatter the continuity of history yet persist in acts of remembrance—official or alternative, pro or contra, systemic or incidental. However, the recent surge in 'revolutionary' pop-cultural iconography, from the ubiquitous Che to the imagery and slogans of May ’68 and the Red Army Faction, seems designed to sabotage, rather than perpetuate, remembrance. In contrast to the nostalgia culture of the ’70s and ’80s, as analyzed by Fredric Jameson, which focused on pilfering the popular culture of earlier decades, today’s nostalgia industry also embraces more political material, but with a similar end result: amnesia masquera
ding as anamnesis. Fragments of history return as decontextualized signifiers that suggest little more than fashionability—until, that is, they end up in a situation in which they regain something resembling actual meaning, as when Cameron Diaz explored new dimensions of obliviousness by sporting a bag with a red star and the Maoist slogan SERVE THE PEOPLE (in Chinese) during a visit to Peru, a country still scarred by the Maoist insurgency of the Shining Path."In the context of this nostalgia culture, which locks possible futures safely in an unretrievable past, the always-slippery relationship between 'art' and 'revolution' feels more vexed than ever, and in need, once again, of reconceptualization-particularly since two once-dominant narratives of this relationship are now thoroughly discredited. First there was the notion of formal revolution, the transposition of Hegelian-Marxist principles to art, as evinced in the criticism of lapsed Trotskyist Clement Greenberg and his pupil Michael Fried. In the 1960s, Fried claimed that the 'dialectic of modernism' amounted to 'nothing less than the establishment of a perpetual revolution-perpetual because bent on unceasing radical criticism of itself. It is no wonder such an ideal has not been realized in the realm of politics, but it seems to me that the development of modernist painting over the past century has led to a situation that may be described in these terms.' This formalist formulation was challenged by another: the neo-avant-garde dream of a fusion of art and life, which necessarily presupposed the imbrication of art production and political action and, in its seemingly most radical version, proposed the abandonment of artmaking in favor of revolutionary activity. With its naive conviction that the revolution is just around the corner, and with its willingness to throw out the baby of art with the bathwater of capitalism, the latter variant now seems at least as unconvincing as the modernist narrative. And yet, no coherent new theorization has appeared to take its place. Austrian philosopher Gerald Raunig's Art and Revolution, published in German in 2005 and now available in English, represents to date the most sustained and substantial—although substantially flawed—attempt to fill this vacuum. "
http://www.artforum.com/
Label:
history in motion,
review
Texte zur Kunst 66: Kurzführer / Short Guide
In an attempt to reconsider terms that are used more or less habitually in current art criticism and theory, issue no. 66 of Texte zur Kunst (June 2007) consist of a critical glossary of terms ranging from “autonomy” to “dinner” and from “multitude” to weird”. I contributed the text for “event” (pp. 65-70). An accompanying volume contains exhibition reviews, including my review of Karen Kilimnik’s exhibition at the Serpentine gallery (pp. 54-58). Here is the shortish event text in full:
EVENT
It is a truth universally acknowledged that we live in an event culture. The large installations in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and the media attention lavished on them; the “museum nights” staged regularly in Germany and other countries; the grown importance of art fairs and of “art fair art”: all of these phenomena contribute to making the term “event” ubiquitous. The events devised in the early 1960s by George Brecht and other artists associated with Fluxus seem far removed from such contemporary cultural events. Nonetheless, such events prefigured and indeed helped to inaugurate “event culture”, signalling the increasing importance of immaterial commodities in capitalism since the 1960s – the partial transition from commodity-objects to services and beyond, to services-become-events. But if the term “event” now triumphs as omnipresent label for this apparently dematerialized capitalism, in the 1960s it was the notion of the “happening” that proliferated. “Hippie groups, discotheques, PTA meetings, Rotary Club outings, a popular rock-and-roll band, a hit record by the Supremes, a party game kit, and at least to regular-run movies – all are called Happenings”, Allan Kaprow noted with wry amusement in 1967. (1) While the hippie-ish connotations of “happening” limited its life span, “event” had no such drawbacks. Once everything was a happening, now everything is event.
Notwithstanding the understated nature of many Fluxus event scores and some of their realizations, Fluxus concerts could garner significant controversy and media attention, while Dutch Fluxus artist Wim T. Schippers even had a TV crew record his “Event on the Beach at Petten”, which consisted of Schippers emptying of a bottle of Green Spot lemonade into the North Sea. This event was broadcast in a 1963 TV programme on new art masterminded by Willem de Ridder and Schippers himself; in making a deliberately understated and uninteresting act the subject of media attention, he suggested a fundamental complicity between artistic events and what
Daniel J. Boorstin characterized as mediated pseudo-events. In 1961, Boorstin attacked the rise of news created especially for the press by politicians, corporations and their spin-doctors; such news he called pseudo-events. Defining a pseudo-event as “a happening” that is not spontaneous, but planned and planted “for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced”. (2) However, the events of Schippers and other Fluxus artists call the very possibility of drawing clear distinctions between authentic events and pseudo-events – a given for Boorstin – into question: by focusing attention on far from extraordinary acts and objects, they found Cagean truth in planned and scored events.
Fluxus events substituted the supposedly timeless, instantaneous perception demanded by Clement Greenberg with a work that unfolds in time; paradoxically, this temporalization of the work of art was also a de-historicization, and thus another form of “chronophobia”, as the historical succession in which Greenberg situated his “timeless” works was abandoned. (3) If Greenberg’s quasi-logical historical narrative was eventless, George Brecht in particular kept history at bay by focusing on ephemeral occurrences that might as well not occur, and need not be recognized or experienced by another person. By contrast, since the 1980s Alain Badiou has sought to move beyond impoverished notions of historical necessity – which characterized the thinking of some of the protagonists of the political movements of the late Sixties just as much as that of Greenberg, the former Trotzkyist – by focusing on “historical” events. Badiou mentions his “incorporation” into the event of May 68 as a decisive factor in propelling to elaborate his theory of the truth-event that shatters a situation, a status quo ruled by a certain order of knowledge. (4) Such events cannot be predicted or brought about intentionally; one may find oneself in an event, or more likely after the event, but in both cases one has to decide that the event is taking place or has taken place. As an event that upset the symbolic order of the time, May 68 continues to demand loyalty – fidelity to the events – from those who choose to accept it as event, and in this way constitute themselves as subjects.
However, May 68 seems to question one of the central tenets of Badiou's overtly Platonic philosophy, namely that truth-events are only enabled within one of four “generic procedures”: politics, science, art and love. While one may well argue that, from the French Commune to May 68, revolutions have tended to marginalize artistic production sensu strictu, one of the aims of the event(s) of “1968” was precisely the total reconstruction of politics, love, and art – as well as science, which had to be politicized and socialized. While the problematic nature of such a project is now clearly apparent, it is nonetheless telling that “May 68” continues to haunt at least the domains of art and politics – the former in films such as “Les Amants réguliers” and exhibitions and publications concerning the Situationist International, the latter in endless debates about the alleged damage done to society by the “generation of 1968”.
As nostalgic as some of these discussions, films, exhibitions and books may be, they still retain some memory of attempts to transcend Badiou’s cherished divisions. The same can be said of art-world events like Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall installations and nocturnal openings of museums: even in the compromised and instrumentalized forms of sociability thus generated, the improbable possibility of a more than purely artistic event is commemorated. The distinction between art events and other events may be as treacherous as that between genuine events and pseudo-events.
Notes
1 Allan Kaprow, “Pinpointing Happenings” (1967), in: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (ed. Jeff Kelley), Berkeley / Los Angeles / London 1993, p. 84.
2 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), New York 1992, p. 11.
3 See also Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, Cambridge, Mass./Boston 2004.
4 Alain Badiou in conversation with Lauren Sedofsky, “Matters of Appearance”, in: Artforum XLV, no. 3 (November 2006), p. 253. See also Badiou, L’Être et l’événement (1988) and Logique des mondes (2006). Žižek has emphasized that there are also “historical pseudo-events”, such as the rise of Nazism, which preserve the extant power relations even while appearing revolutionary; see Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London/New York 1999, p. 131.
http://www.textezurkunst.de/66/
Image: Wim T. Schippers, Event on the Beach at Petten (Manifestatie op het strand te Petten), 1963.
EVENT
It is a truth universally acknowledged that we live in an event culture. The large installations in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and the media attention lavished on them; the “museum nights” staged regularly in Germany and other countries; the grown importance of art fairs and of “art fair art”: all of these phenomena contribute to making the term “event” ubiquitous. The events devised in the early 1960s by George Brecht and other artists associated with Fluxus seem far removed from such contemporary cultural events. Nonetheless, such events prefigured and indeed helped to inaugurate “event culture”, signalling the increasing importance of immaterial commodities in capitalism since the 1960s – the partial transition from commodity-objects to services and beyond, to services-become-events. But if the term “event” now triumphs as omnipresent label for this apparently dematerialized capitalism, in the 1960s it was the notion of the “happening” that proliferated. “Hippie groups, discotheques, PTA meetings, Rotary Club outings, a popular rock-and-roll band, a hit record by the Supremes, a party game kit, and at least to regular-run movies – all are called Happenings”, Allan Kaprow noted with wry amusement in 1967. (1) While the hippie-ish connotations of “happening” limited its life span, “event” had no such drawbacks. Once everything was a happening, now everything is event.
Notwithstanding the understated nature of many Fluxus event scores and some of their realizations, Fluxus concerts could garner significant controversy and media attention, while Dutch Fluxus artist Wim T. Schippers even had a TV crew record his “Event on the Beach at Petten”, which consisted of Schippers emptying of a bottle of Green Spot lemonade into the North Sea. This event was broadcast in a 1963 TV programme on new art masterminded by Willem de Ridder and Schippers himself; in making a deliberately understated and uninteresting act the subject of media attention, he suggested a fundamental complicity between artistic events and what
Daniel J. Boorstin characterized as mediated pseudo-events. In 1961, Boorstin attacked the rise of news created especially for the press by politicians, corporations and their spin-doctors; such news he called pseudo-events. Defining a pseudo-event as “a happening” that is not spontaneous, but planned and planted “for the immediate purpose of being reported or reproduced”. (2) However, the events of Schippers and other Fluxus artists call the very possibility of drawing clear distinctions between authentic events and pseudo-events – a given for Boorstin – into question: by focusing attention on far from extraordinary acts and objects, they found Cagean truth in planned and scored events.Fluxus events substituted the supposedly timeless, instantaneous perception demanded by Clement Greenberg with a work that unfolds in time; paradoxically, this temporalization of the work of art was also a de-historicization, and thus another form of “chronophobia”, as the historical succession in which Greenberg situated his “timeless” works was abandoned. (3) If Greenberg’s quasi-logical historical narrative was eventless, George Brecht in particular kept history at bay by focusing on ephemeral occurrences that might as well not occur, and need not be recognized or experienced by another person. By contrast, since the 1980s Alain Badiou has sought to move beyond impoverished notions of historical necessity – which characterized the thinking of some of the protagonists of the political movements of the late Sixties just as much as that of Greenberg, the former Trotzkyist – by focusing on “historical” events. Badiou mentions his “incorporation” into the event of May 68 as a decisive factor in propelling to elaborate his theory of the truth-event that shatters a situation, a status quo ruled by a certain order of knowledge. (4) Such events cannot be predicted or brought about intentionally; one may find oneself in an event, or more likely after the event, but in both cases one has to decide that the event is taking place or has taken place. As an event that upset the symbolic order of the time, May 68 continues to demand loyalty – fidelity to the events – from those who choose to accept it as event, and in this way constitute themselves as subjects.
However, May 68 seems to question one of the central tenets of Badiou's overtly Platonic philosophy, namely that truth-events are only enabled within one of four “generic procedures”: politics, science, art and love. While one may well argue that, from the French Commune to May 68, revolutions have tended to marginalize artistic production sensu strictu, one of the aims of the event(s) of “1968” was precisely the total reconstruction of politics, love, and art – as well as science, which had to be politicized and socialized. While the problematic nature of such a project is now clearly apparent, it is nonetheless telling that “May 68” continues to haunt at least the domains of art and politics – the former in films such as “Les Amants réguliers” and exhibitions and publications concerning the Situationist International, the latter in endless debates about the alleged damage done to society by the “generation of 1968”.
As nostalgic as some of these discussions, films, exhibitions and books may be, they still retain some memory of attempts to transcend Badiou’s cherished divisions. The same can be said of art-world events like Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall installations and nocturnal openings of museums: even in the compromised and instrumentalized forms of sociability thus generated, the improbable possibility of a more than purely artistic event is commemorated. The distinction between art events and other events may be as treacherous as that between genuine events and pseudo-events.
Notes
1 Allan Kaprow, “Pinpointing Happenings” (1967), in: Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (ed. Jeff Kelley), Berkeley / Los Angeles / London 1993, p. 84.
2 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), New York 1992, p. 11.
3 See also Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s, Cambridge, Mass./Boston 2004.
4 Alain Badiou in conversation with Lauren Sedofsky, “Matters of Appearance”, in: Artforum XLV, no. 3 (November 2006), p. 253. See also Badiou, L’Être et l’événement (1988) and Logique des mondes (2006). Žižek has emphasized that there are also “historical pseudo-events”, such as the rise of Nazism, which preserve the extant power relations even while appearing revolutionary; see Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London/New York 1999, p. 131.
http://www.textezurkunst.de/66/
Image: Wim T. Schippers, Event on the Beach at Petten (Manifestatie op het strand te Petten), 1963.