Paul Carter – Hotel (2009) at Matt’s Gallery
The melancholic fug of stale cigarettes and mouldy timber that hangs heavy in the air, produced by the salvaged walls and window frames from Paul Carter’s studio, the memory of months working on the installation, the empty beer bottles and fag ends, the roughly hewn plywood, is the first thing to hit you as you walk through the double doors of Matt’s Gallery’s large space. A daybed fashioned from found sash windows, complete with weights, and discarded sofa cushions half blocks the entrance, turning away from you as you enter. Indeed, Carter’s work seems to resist; a reluctance of form echoed by the near-ruin plasterboard walls, covered in scrawled pencil marks and old screw holes, that mark out the architectural intervention; a reimagining of the artist’s studio on Martello Street seen through the lens of a decrepit inner city hotel. The associations with a post-apocalyptic future are too simple for this beguiling exhibition; plywood hoppers that spew rubble and a metal goods lift indicate another space above or below, a nether world, yet even those implications are denied by the forms of Carter’s sculptures. The frayed wires of the lift purposefully lit from a light lodged in the false ceiling cast menacing shadows, this lift is going nowhere. And the hopper is built round an existing pillar, the rubble from it glued to the office carpet tiles beneath. These half attempts at fiction characterise the whole exhibition. The work balances precisely on the tipping point between dumb, hard worked, material and fictionalised installation. While reminiscent of Schwitters’ Merzbau, Hotel is an extension of Carter’s sculptural practice, a fascination with pure stuff, an interrogation of the forms of non-communicative, lumpen-shit. Narrativised, this detritus, is forced into uncomfortable half-forms, a sofa facing the wall as if cut off from the world, glassless windows opening on to blank expectant rooms, a cracked fluorescent sign, advertising the presence of a hotel, a site lamp on a timer, clicking on and off every half hour or so. This is dejecta irrevocably wrenched from life and thrust deep into fictive series of loose associations.
Rising vertically out of their own excessive decay, the modular sculptures that erupt sporadically within this installation, themselves containers or storage units, propped up, bodged, half screwed together half held together by chance, present the scene back to itself. Motifs reappear within these models; stacked spaces that repeat the space of the exhibition, repeat the vomiting wooden hopper, repeat the broken lift, the spread of detritus. A partial mise-en-abyme; a mere suggestion of the transcendence of material sequences by imagination, these forms are heaved into being, both in reality and in thought. This is hard work. Physical labour translated into psychical labour. Wrought from off-cuts and reused matter, the scars of years of use are worn heavy throughout this exhibition. Rectangles on the wall where large framed pictures hung, wall cavities stuffed full of rough chunks of wood, dusty carpet tiles, dark with years of use, and torn wallpaper create the sense Carter has been here for over a decade, manipulating and prodding this dumb stuff into life.
For Uriel Orlow’s exhibition Neither Fish Nor Fowl
“like with everything you have to be selective, and so much is repetitive, so much” (Volunteer archivist interviewed in Housed Memory 2000-2005)
This new selection of work, taken from Uriel Orlow’s material collection, what he calls purposefully obtusely ‘stuff’, focuses on two journeys. One north to the Arctic Circle, following in the footsteps of the French scientist and mathematician Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, who ventured there in 1736 to measure the shape of the Earth. One south to Benin retracing this time the Punitive Expedition of 1897 against the Benin Kingdom that saw the ransacking and looting of the royal palace. Over 3000 bronzes from this expedition were taken and auctioned by the British to recover the financial costs of the expedition. These two expeditions share the same goal; acquisition. One of knowledge the other of objects. And of both we can ask the question where should they be sited? Orlow’s video installations of the last few years have dealt in varying registers with this same question. Can and should information, knowledge, objects, things and stuff be held, horded or retained? And where is and should this repository be? However, his investigations go far beyond a simple empirical collection of data or a passive request for restitution. In fact, Orlow’s work refuses to make demands, operating instead within an economy of recognition and construction, oscillating between two poles of activity. On the one hand ‘the repeat’ on the other ‘the invention’. Orlow’s new exhibition, Neither Fish Nor Fowl, presents a body of work that is neither new work or old, both document and event. This double figure, both one thing and the other, but not fully either constructs an oscillatory structure that determines much of Orlow’s work. Operating as signposts into a number of his other projects, these works bring into question ideas and themes that have been of importance for some time, provoking a reassessment of his ongoing research based practice.
In Orlow’s video suite from 2008, In These Great Times, a long quote by Karl Kraus, whose lecture lends its name to the work, is exhibited as a vertically fading poster and read by a voiceover actor in a sound studio, the quote ends with the phrase “let those who have something to say come forward and be silent!”. This appeal to come forward and be silent demands a double action. That of standing up, speaking for, articulating in public and, yet, refusing to speak. A movement, seemingly contradictory, but nonetheless powerful. The ‘coming forward’ produces an instant community of listeners, formed around the expected articulation of a politics, but the ‘being silent’ withdraws the expected content, replacing the empty space of the political discourse not with a fullness but a loaded silence.
In Jose Saramago’s recent novel Seeing it is election time. Parliamentary officials wait expectantly in poll booths around the capital city, yet no-one arrives, the torrential downpour keeping them at bay. However, when they do arrive, and arrive they do, en masse at just after 4pm, and the votes are counted it is revealed that over three quarters of the populous have cast a blank ballot slip. Outraged and confused the local government stages the election again, but this time the number of blanks slips counted in the box at the end of the day totals 83% of the vote. This outlandish refusal to vote precipitates a series of increasingly ruthless and aggressive tactics by the government, first to try to account for the anomaly via interrogation and investigation, then to try to punish the city’s residents with a state of siege in a hope they would give in and universally confess their guilt in the matter and in the end, when both those methods prove fruitless, by moving the parliamentary seat of power out of the city and into another. In the face of a denial of the democratic ‘duty’ to elect a leader the government effectively elect a new population. The silence of the populous produces an evental rupture, exposing the true void of the situation. For the government in Saramago’s novel the right to vote has become a duty, the refusal of which reveals the truly un-democratic nature of power. Yet, of course, to post a blank ballot slip is both the refusal of choice, the false choice between one party and the next, and the choice of the refusal of choice. So, as non-choice as choice it is within the bounds of the democratic order. However, democracy demands that a positive choice be made, without which it cannot operate, it is bound by the need for fullness. Coming forward and being silent evacuates the expected full position of the decision, prolonging the art of the dialectician interminably. Slavoj Žižek makes a similar but significantly different point in his recent book Violence. Agreeing with Badiou’s theses on art, Žižek proclaims the lesson of Saramago’s novel is that it is better to do nothing as the nothing rejects the frame of the decision. However, and this is where we diverge from Žižek, the blankers in the novel are not doing nothing; their operation is a double move, standing up and saying nothing. The moment of articulation is performed publicly as an action and as such is a move of solidarity. For Žižek the posting of the blank ballots is an abstention, his project is specifically engaged with a non-active rejection of liberal ideology, private refusal, he makes only the second move, the saying nothing, but does not make the first move, the standing up. Žižek’s Bartlebian politics are a superficial reading of Saramago, overlooking the two fold move that makes public the refusal and thus invents a community sutured around a discursive point that is then necessarily emptied. Denying the active move of suturing, the formation of solidarity, that is standing up with and standing up for, Žižek can’t account for the publicness needed to make silence affective rather than just an a private symptom of apathy. Orlow’s work, in contrast, makes room for this double move.
The Kraus line in In These Great Times points to the two fold action of creative articulation and the emptying of the site of discourse. What, then, is put in the place of this empty place? Nothing but the place. The addition of the place, Orlow’s spatial practice, the silent repetition of the site of historical importance is a form of Nebenschauplatz – an addition to the scene. This marginal spatiality that replicates the scene with nothing but the place brings with it the grace of form. That is, from the margins comes the rupture. This rupture follows the logic of Alain Badiou’s event; that which presents the void of the situation, can never be anticipated or known before hand, it is the unprecedented and unexpected. In Saramago’s novel the blankers (those who turn in blank ballots) present the void in the democratic situation – the need for any decision, whatever it is, to be made. Interestingly this is the pre-requisite of neo-liberal democratic states; the proliferation of choice demands a decision be made, yet that decision is a madness, a false distinction between one choice and another, to post a blank ballot is to refuse that choice. This blanking is the event of Saramago’s novel. What follows, the investigations, the siege, the escape by the government, even the subsequent bombings are the truths created by the event once it is named. Silence itself does not replicate the Badiouian event, but the situated silence, the collective non-choice, in Saramago’s novel is evental.
Orlow’s work asks very specific questions of the event. As his camera traces endless shelves of books (Housed Memory), the surfaces of café tables and chairs (Ornament and Crime), the inner workings of a document retrieval system in the British National Archives (Satellite Contact), he asks if the event can be remembered, or sited, in place itself. Whether spatiality can account for a production of truth that arises from an event. If pure site is a repository of knowledge, if truth can be inferred from the place itself, Orlow’s practice puts in the place of this truth not truth, but place. An additional or supplementary placing that instead of exposing the ontology replicates the site with the site, re-posits the repository, not with its content, but with the eloquent silence of form. This practice of Nebenschauplatz, placing beside the scene, understands spatially the historical legacy inherent in any event. That acquired knowledge or artifacts are sited within state sanctioned, and therefore hierarchized, museums, galleries, collections, that record only partial accounts of the event. Yet, the other site, the marginal, or beside site, offers an account that although not officially recorded, is equally important. In Orlow’s work this minor historical setting is placed by the major, re-posing questions to the official documentation. In this move he doubles the original event not chronologically but spatially, proposing the re-mapping of history through a spatial practice that both repeats and invents; stands up to speak with the subjects of his work – the holocaust victims in Deposits, the Benin people in The Benin Project, the characters in In These Great Times – yet remains silent. This silence is exactly the invention we speak of, shifting the locus from chronology to spatiality allows Orlow to condense history into site as presentation not document, permitting a formal intervention that repeats differently the archive. The refusal of a narrative structure (that would just replicate existing discourse) is what takes Orlow’s work away from the category of demand for restitution and into the categories of solidarity and invention.
It is also what lends Orlow’s work its political nature. Coming forward and being silent is not an avoidance of or escape from political action, but a truly inventive political act. Not just a form of resistance to state power or normative discourse, but a creative articulation that undermines the formation of power as such by emptying out the place of power by refusing the insertion of specific content. Replacing political content with form (the empty act of standing up yet remaining silent) however, is a dangerous move. One which does not escape the totalizing desires haunting politics. As Badiou suggests the unnameable is the condition of a truth that prevents it from attaining totality. The part that resists incorporation by the truth procedure that has produced it is necessary to allow the truth procedure to continue not as a complete re-foundation of the world, but as an infinitely finite alteration of that world. Badiou asserts that a truth must never be total or complete, to attempt this would be evil. One must always hold back on one’s desire. Form then, must be understood not as a completion of or totalization of the place of politics, but as the initial and processural emptying of that space. Providing a place from which to act. The articulation of silence must not be continued ad infinitum, but be a rupturing point that operates eventally to produce a context or spatial practice that allows for a further investigation. Orlow’s work is exactly this movement, to read it in formal or spatial terms is to account for it in a political manner that produces a space for the future, the possibility of possibilities.
This revolutionary potential is expressed in Giorgio Agamben’s writing on potentiality, where he asserts that:
Of the two modes in which, according to Aristotle, every potentiality is articulated, the decisive one is that the philosopher calls ‘the potentiality not to be’ or also impotence. For if it is true that whatever being always has a potential character, it is equally certain that it is not capable of only this or that specific act, nor is it therefore simply incapable, lacking in power, nor even less is it indifferently capable of everything, all-powerful: it is capable of its own impotence… The perfect act of writing comes not from a power to write, but from an impotence that turns back on itself and in this way comes to itself as pure act (which Aristotle calls agent intellect). This is why the Arab tradition agent intellect has the form of an angel whose name is Qalam, Pen, and its place is an unfathomable potentiality. Bartleby, a scribe who does not simply cease writing but “prefers not to” is the extreme image of this angel that writes nothing but its own potentiality to not-write
(Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, pp. 79-83)
The potentiality to not-write, this pure act, coming forward and remaining silent then, is not normative, nor constative, but eruptive. Potentializing the terrain of articulated silence as unfathomably powerful, Agamben echoes the volunteer archivist in Orlow’s Housed Memory:
…one realizes that the lack of drama is the whole drama.
(Volunteer archivist interviewed in Housed Memory 2000-2005)
By choosing to focus on information and material gathered whilst pursuing other aims as well as what might be considered the ‘work’ of the journeys, Neither Fish Nor Fowl asks questions of the non-pertinent or marginalised elements of any expedition. Supplementing the place with the place, this activity refuses to decide what may or may not be relevant in a given situation, thus dramatizing the possible lack of drama and taking a sideways glance at not just the subject matter but the process of collecting information and making work.
Altermodern Review – An Economic Misadventure
A new modernity is emerging, reconfigured to an age of globalisation – understood in its economic, political and cultural aspects: an altermodern culture.
Increased communication, travel and migration are affecting the way we live.
Our daily lives consist of journeys in a chaotic and teeming universe.
Multiculturalism and identity is being overtaken by creolisation: Artists are now starting from a globalised state of culture.
This new universalism is based on translations, subtitling and generalised dubbing.
Today’s art explores the bonds that text and image, time and space, weave between themselves.
Artists are responding to a new globalised perception. They traverse a cultural landscape saturated with signs and create new pathways between multiple formats of expression and communication.
(Tate website)
Nicholas Bourriaud, currently Gulbenkian curator of contemporary art at Tate Britain, and curator of this year’s Tate Triennial, Altermodern, has developed not only an exhibition under this title but a concept. The above extract from the Tate website summarizes his position which is expanded in the catalogue for the triennial. Whilst an overview of the exhibition in relation to the concept is an important task, one which has been carried out by various reviewers to date, I have chosen to take seriously the claims made in the catalogue essay in relation to a more general idea of contemporary art practice.
Bourriaud suggests Altermodernism disassociates itself from what we might have termed the West, and instead formulates a global creolisation – the focus is not on origins, but on the current state of multiplicitous cultural positions as heterotopic, globally networked. It is not an essentialism of genre, ethnicity, sexual orientation or nationality, as was multicultural postmodernism, which, as Bourriaud points out, was a reduction of an individual’s being to identity and the stripping of significance back to their origins. Instead, it is the consideration of the subject free from those originatory moments, taking in common instead a globalised position. The Altermodernist focuses not on origins but on the freedom to travel, explore and move.
Bourraiud’s claim is an ethical one. He suggests we have an “ethical duty not to let signs and images vanish into the abyss of indifference or commercial oblivion”, he sees the position of the artist as nomad as a response to this demand. His suggestion is that the altermodernist sees the world as a ‘horizontalised’ base from which to build.
What is at stake in Bourriaud’s claim is a re-distribution of signs in relation not to a discourse of multiculturalism but to one of heterotopic ethics. This political statement of ‘horizontalisation’ or equalisation at the level of the cultural as described by Bourriaud is admirable. However, what is occluded in this project, what Bourriaud’s altermodernism lacks for all its ethical posturing, is a real understanding of what problems confront us in this globalised aesthetics. In relation to the real inequalities present today altermodernism seems to have no answer. What contemporary crises show is that inequality is more clearly drawn across an economic register than a cultural one. The great divide between the rich and the poor marks out a territory of political discourse that the altermodern seems to make no claims for in Bourriaud’s writing. In fact the homo viator of the curator’s introductory text to the exhibition occupies a privileged position not afforded to either those lacking the resources to travel, or those so economically destitute as to be forced to travel. The formation of global actors is developed around the accumulation of capital, still the poor have no access to the arrangement of the common modern. Yes, it is a migratory and lingua franca populous that now confronts us, yet this has been formed in part due to vast economic differences and not just a cultural predisposition to travel, or an ethical determination to promote a horizontal world. Yes, the contemporary is defined by a nomadic flux, but still the lines of agency in this flux are drawn around a very particular modern subject. Artists, curators and regular biennialists, as well as dealers, gallerists and auctioneers, and even, we might add, artworks, operate peripatetically, but at what cost?
This has to be the exigent criticism of Bourriaud’s new term; his telling of it focuses only on the cohesive potential of improved mobility, freedom for the few to determine their cultural experience through tourism (of whatever kind) without a coherent rendering of the cost to and restriction of the many. Bourriaud’s Altermodernism disassociates culture from economics. Claiming that the altermodernist operates on a horizontalised field presupposes an engagement with culture outside of economic restrictions. This replaces eurocentricism (altermodernism’s proposed enemy) with its historical counterpart, economic elitism and denies the very possibility that Bourriaud’s writing could take a radical position in relation to the West. Within altermodernism, then, the viatorisation of forms and the archipelago-isation or networking of distinct elements, produces an excluded economic ‘refugee’ out of those economically incapable to enjoy the privilege of free travel. The discourse of altermodernity not only rejects a vocalisation of economic difference but radically distracts attention away from it. The result is a valorisation of artist as nomadic producer which superficially attempts an equalisation, yet in its formation, this position misunderstands and, crucially, veils the importance of a critique of the effects of this globalised aesthetic, and indeed makes no attempt at a political assessment of globalisation in general.
What Bourriaud does not stretch to in his writing is a commitment to his term that would allow a radically different ethics to emerge. What could emerge from an understanding of the altermodern, but a position that Bourriaud himself does not occupy, is that it contains in it a revolutionary potential. That the verb form of alter, to change, could allow a radically democratic politics to determine the common ground of the modern. In fact, if we were to analyse the term altermodern the proposition would be significantly different.
If read as a demand to alter modernism, the altermodern is less description and more radical democracy. Jacques Rancière, writing on the subject of political emancipation, suggests that any politics worthy of the name concerns equality. An equality that arises only when traditional modes of operating are put into question. “Politics only occurs” he writes in Disagreement “when these mechanisms are stopped in their tracks by the effect of a presupposition that is totally foreign to them yet without which none of them could ultimately function: the presupposition of the equality of anyone and everyone”. This presupposition of equality is the rub, it is an active determination by the less fortunate to change their situation by acting as though they are equal, rather than a passive demand for equality. For Rancière radical democracy can only extend from a presupposition of equality and the activity based on that presupposition. The excluded economic ‘refugee’ reveals the lacunae in Bourriaud’s altermodernism; that it cannot account for an economic understanding of the movement of contemporary art. However, to shift Bourriaud’s claim, to propose its political potential, we can read it as follows. The excluded ‘refugee’ must read the alter of altermodernism in verb form, as a rallying call, and presuppose their agency in the constitution of modernity.
Bourriaud’s Altermodernism for all its claims of shifts of global perception and ethical refiguring necessarily favours nomadic figures that have the resources available to maintain that lifestyle, to say nothing of the correct visas. What his theory excludes however, is the artist, curator or spectator unable to, for whatever reason (usually economic), partake in the same global pantomime. This excluded element in his theory reveals the unthought gap that makes altermodernism just a modernism by another name. What, however, the very word allows us to construct is its own internal critique by suggesting a revolutionary potential in the idea of altermodernism, in this way, and only in this way can we rescue Bourriaud’s claims from their paradoxically unethical position.
Dear Art Monthly,
Whether or not we believe Dave Beech when he is proclaiming Postmodernism’s tendency to occult critique, and one would certainly not want to out and out refute this position, one thing is certain, his article Recovering Radicalism in last month’s Art Monthly heavily misunderstood certain of the theory he was both discrediting and allying himself with. Beech’s insistence that the critical terrain under the philosophical weight of Derrida, Lacan, Foucault et al. disintegrated during the eighties and nineties is not just simply erroneous but also does a disservice to those writers and thinkers’ long and diverse commitment to political critique, their fashioning of a radical political philosophy and their dedication to post-marxist thought.
Near the end of Beech’s text he reveals his allegiance to Laclau and Mouffe’s idea of angonistic democracy, yet this theory is founded directly on the philosophy he disassociates himself with. Beech has taken only one element of Laclau and Mouffe’s political ontology, agonism, and disregarded the rest, one imagines this is because he was reading it only through Claire Bishop’s essay rather than through their own writings. Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory exactly relies on the figure of the undecidable; the hegemonic suturing of society (the way discourses gain and lose their dominance over time) can only take place because we operate on a terrain of competing claims that aim to fill the empty space of the absent universal, yet these claims can only make a contingent appeal to dominance and as such will never fully totalise society. This theory is born out of Lacanian and Derridean philosophy. Beech’s proclamation, then, that maybe now critique is possible again is right, but only if it is understood in necessary relation to the contingency of the political terrain. Any critique that does not take this into account risks, as Mouffe suggests, almost immediate sedimentation.
Tom Trevatt
Laura Bartlett Gallery
One Year: November 2007 – December 2008
With the close of Lydia Gifford’s recent exhibition this November Laura Bartlett celebrated one year in existence in her narrow slice of space in Clerkenwell. Situated between two buildings this oddly shaped sliver is a seemingly impossible place in which to mount an exhibition, yet Bartlett has managed to make it work. Focussing on discovering younger or lesser known artists, she has carved out a dedicated stable of rising stars such as Becky Beasley, Nina Beier & Marie Lund, Lydia Gifford, Stefan Burger and Sophie Macpherson. Resistant to certain formal displays, the narrowness of the space has provoked some very specific responses from the artists invited to show there. Beier & Lund, for example, wedged a number of long objects between the walls; fishing rods, garden forks, walking sticks, bits of timber, all borrowed from a 68 year old man. One year’s programme at any gallery comprises such diverse operations and opposing forces that any survey resists homogenisation. One must be aware that an adequate reading of the accumulation of material and outputs produced during a year requires a plurivocal approach, not to mention an indepth analysis. What inevitably results from such an enterprise is a series of assumptions and part-truths alongside more informed judgments of what curatorial concerns the gallery owner herself has. However, given the strange relationship any commercial gallerist has to what might be named a curatorial practice, it seems inappropriate to assume such strategic authorship. Yet, especially with Laura Bartlett, I would argue this is not the case. One could argue that the commercial sector increasingly allows a much greater curatorial freedom than that allowed in public galleries and museums. As Bartlett herself proves what is called curation is not a universal paradigm; to argue she has a ‘practice’ as such would be wrong. Or, rather to argue she has a sustained investigation of particular claims, counter claims, hypotheses, theories, provocations and the like, would be wrong. What Bartlett does express in her role, however, is a sensitivity to specific situations. As she invites only a small number of artists each year we could embark on an adequation that would link these practices together, yet I would suggest that any such endeavour necessarily underestimates the diverse practices collected together. Bartlett’s position is a curatorial one, one with a particular freedom to manoeuvre afforded to her by the market, but not one that is determined either by specific requirements, due to funding for example, or institutional pressure, or more general requirements such as an answerability to a populous or the state. What is curious, then, about particular commercial galleries is their use of the relative autonomy granted to them by their position within the market. The freedom of capital gives them a very specific relation to art practice more in the model of a small independent gallery, but with an extremely inflated budget. How this is utilised critically is of real interest. Artists exhibiting within a commercial gallery, of course, have a bipartite relation to the art world; both within it and at the same time expected to be critical of it. But as commercial objects do their position within the market flatten or de-radicalize the critique? Adorno suggests that the solution of critical art is not to refuse commodity, as this would just weaken art, marginalising it in a world where commodity dominates, or positioning it as the yet to be commodified (to oppose the dominant ideology runs the risk of being recuperated into it). His argument would be that the artwork must mount a critique out of its role as commodity by a subversive mimesis of it. Adorno asserts that the art object is both autonomous art and commodity, both destroyed by and a product of capital, both its critique and its ideology. It is this exact possibility that commercial galleries such as Laura Bartlett provide. Today critique is no longer easy to spot. The political content of work is diminished, not so much because there isn’t the taste for it, but that the lessons of history have been learned. Capital is flexible, it is able to accumulate and accommodate. Any direct attack against capital merely strengthens it. What is required now is a different conception of critique, not dependent on direct opposition, radicalised politics or the anti-commodity. The space it would seem to embark on this is inside these small galleries. Exactly because they are involved in the movement of capital the artwork has the possibility to exist both as commodity and its critique.
Mie Olise Kjaergaard at Standpoint November 2008
The Ruins of the Future, with Mary Mattingly
Standpoint Gallery, October 24 – November 22 2008
Kjærgaard’s reclaimed timber plank construction leads mutely into the gallery. Elegant yet nebulous, the wooden alleyway describes an opening and a long deep recess rather than a pathway. Lodged in the back of the recess is the disproportionately large lift, still occasionally in use, utilised by Kjærgaard to house the small projection of her recent film work, Into The Pyramid (2008). Beyond the lift is a further construction out of the same timber planks, similarly horizontally slatted and screwed together with small black screws. Although neat and well made the whole structure is haphazard and precarious, threatening to fall and engulf you at any moment. At the back of the gallery the wooden slats give way to an amorphous tangle of material, rope, wooden fruit boxes, the legs of a strange figure, a badly made kite or small hang-glider model all sat atop a rusty bike. This element of Kjærgaard’s installation is in collaboration with the other artist in the show, Mary Mattingly, and engages in a very different register than her previous installations. Although seemingly chaotic and ad hoc, on closer inspection, Kjærgaard’s structures belie her architectural training. Carefully poised on the edge of collapse they suggest a hasty addition, the provisional and anxious constructions of humans on the brink of extinction, of fleeing tribes or dilettante tree house builders. However, despite not being fixed into the floor or ceiling at any point, these planks have been sawn specifically for this space and as such are wedged firmly and screwed securely to each other, producing a surprising rigidity. Accompanying the installation are four large scale paintings depicting further imagined wooden structures, a grand piano, a typewriter and one of her ongoing obsessions, a boat.
Arguably, the key to Kjærgaard’s practice lies in a conjunction between the sea and the land, the paintings of boats depict them left perched on high ground at low tide, and her wooden platforms and houses are shown balanced on precarious stilts or in the crooks of branches high in the canopy. In fact, one could go so far as to suggest that the sea and land in her work are conjoined also in their absences. Boats without water and houses without foundations suggest a fiercely fluctuating tide, the occupants of both caught short or wise enough to build high above land. But there is another element at play. Kjærgaard parasitically intervenes to create sculptural structures, employing short term and cheap constructions that go up and come down fast, resting in the space between architecture and object. Like a Scandinavian take on the favelas they are human in their materials yet aspire to gestalt greatness. Forever falling in on themselves yet simultaneously holding off the moment of final ruination, these architectural interventions develop temporally sensitive apocalyptic fantasies. Oscillating between utopian dreams and end of the world nightmares, the structure threatens to both thrust upwards of its own accord and collapse without warning.
The three minute long film, Into the Pyramid, is an edited series of still images of the abandoned Russian city on the edge of the arctic circle, Pyramiden. Becoming much more than a research trip, Kjærgaard’s exploration of this desolate ex-mining town on the Svalbard archipelago in Norway is a dispassionate yet engaged retrieval of visual language that feeds into her continued project. Boasting the most northerly bust of Lenin, Pyramiden was evacuated in 1998 by its Russian owners Arctikugol Trust because it was too expensive to maintain. Despite Pyramiden’s sad history, the film engages less in nostalgia than an aesthetic endeavour. Indeed one of Kjærgaard’s self-imposed rules is ‘no people’, suggesting an abandoned mining facility as the ideal location for the film. In fact, ruin as by product of lack of human involvement doesn’t seem to be Kjærgaard’s project at all, instead, she re-imagines the ruin as a productive or creative act. There is a play here between her intervention into ruin and her intervention as ruin. Take the title of the exhibition, Ruins of the Future. Ostensibly this suggests dismay at the failed utopian modernist dream. However, I would argue that this title names two distinct possibilities. Both the possibility of the ruination of existing buildings in future time and the ruins of the idea of the future. Or, the ruining of the future. But, to be clear, this work isn’t the representation of ruin as such, but what we could call adapted-ruin. Figured as personal dwellings amassing like favelas at the edges of state control, the structures are both utopian and at the same time antagonistic, a constant reminder of human endeavour in the face of government abandonment. Could one then read Kjærgaard’s work critically? As a strongly democratic or anarchist critique of statist visions of utopia? One could situate this work within the structure of an anti-regeneration argument. The adapted-ruin as an individually productive site of egalitarian resistance to dominant forces. Yet I am uneasy doing this. The strength of Kjærgaard’s work is that it rests only lightly and temporarily, constantly moving on, being constructed and destroyed at regular intervals, to be reduced again to its constituent parts. This throws the work into sharp focus. As architecture it is only temporary, and not nearly large enough or sturdy enough to house a family, yet as object it is too imposing and active in a way. It rests, then, between the two, like the conjunction of sea and land, Kjærgaard’s work acts doubly, at the edge of abandoned civilisation and at the height of utopian dreams.
Split Seconds from 3rd December 1919 – 3rd December 1989
written March 2008
@ 3rd Way Gallery
Curated by Sebastian Verner
artists:
Sophie Levitt
Ilya Efros
Jonathon Simons
On 3rd December 1989 the first President Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev declared the Cold War over. Over 40 years of opposition ended, the world teetered for a moment on the verge of destruction, but restrained finally by a summit on the island of Malta. On 3rd December 1919, seventy years earlier Pierre Renoir died, taking with him, some suggest the remains of the previous century’s painterly styles. The exhibition Split Seconds at 3rd Way Gallery, curated by Sebastian Verner, questions the plausibility of these two events in history. Bringing together work by three up-coming artists, Verner has worked closely with each of them to explore the two events and their seeming non-relation to each other despite their coincidence of date. The press release states:
The artists in this exhibition work precisely to uncover inconsistencies and non-compatibilities in history making and the establishment of discourses. Through a discussion of one particular date seventy years apart and two key events on these dates, this exhibition tries to understand time as a coagulation of events rather than an arrow.
By collapsing history and presenting these two events side by side spatially Verner has proposed an almost rhizomatic understanding of time. It is as if each significant event has enough eventness to transcend their place in history and resonate in the present and forever. Is this not the same for all events? They open on to the absolutely unthought, or unnameable as Badiou would say, in history to present us with the new. In Jonathon Simon’s video work, “Too Close, Almost Touching”, the moment of almost brushing hands with a stranger is frozen in an unending still. Although it is presented as a video in a black box, this is in fact a video of a still image, beautifully set-up and photographed digitally, then re-videoed. After a minute or two however, the hands seem to move, but it is only our perception of the passing of video, the interruptions in the information of the tape causing the sensation of movement, when in fact none occurred. Ilya Efros’ large scale diptych portraits of the current President Bush show an almost identical Bush stood on the deck of USS Abraham declaring Mission Accomplished. However, one has to be extremely good at spot the difference to notice Bush’s slightly raised eyebrow and curled lip in the second painting suggesting a dissatisfaction with something said, a distaste. For these paintings Efros took two near identical screen shots one just a second after the other and rendered them as accurately as she could large scale. The fact these are two images from the same event, or want to be event imagined and stage managed by Bush himself, suggests the mendacity of the presentation of facts. One Bush seems to be sneering at the other, doubting his own words. In a nod to the theme of the show the affect of low quality digital imagery downloaded from You Tube and painted large scale is not dissimilar, it seems, from Renoir’s style itself. Indeed, the curator has positioned this work opposite another video piece by Simon of a walk round the Louvre in slow motion. Various paintings by Renoir are captured in shaky digital video, creating an arresting dialogue between the two works.
On the back wall of this fairly small gallery is a series of newspaper headlines and reportage style black and white photographs by Sophie Levitt entitled “If What?”. She imagines what the world would be like if the tensions between the US and USSR had escalated into full scale war. Mocked up headlines from papers such as The Telegraph, The Sun, etc. stage the days leading up to and preceding the first devastating exchange of hostility between the two super powers. There are only five days worth of papers suggesting, perhaps, an apocalyptic event prevented the production of any more media. What is unsayable is said by the absence, then, of the reporting of the event.
The death of a painterly style then is juxtaposed with the very real possibility in the late eighties of the annihilation of the human race, or rather the truth of one event and the non-truth of another. For Renoir did die, as did impressionism, but the world was not quite doomed, the event of the Cold War never occurred. It was averted by the father of a man who has taken the world very close to a similar potential for destruction. The younger Bush it would seem desires the event more than his father. Simon’s “Too Close…” and Levitt’s “If What?” ask the question of the event of potential love between strangers and total war. Efros’ untitled Bush paintings present two moments of the same declaration of an event, which never quite was either, the mission never quite was accomplished.
Steven Claydon at Camden Arts Centre
written January 2008
In ‘Strange Events Permit Themselves the Luxury of Occurring’ Steve Claydon has permitted himself the luxury of the unapologetically grandiose task of cultural restitution. In his file notes Claydon asserts that ‘Strange Events…’ concerns itself with certain exceptions, flaws, aberrations, yawning apertures and flowering discrepancies inherent in taxonomic, historical, and aesthetic groupings. We shall begin by accepting Claydon’s claims to a redistribution of typologies and allow ourselves the luxury, indeed, to follow his curatorial argument.
Curation as happenstance; with a selection of objects and things that, through a process of becoming art (what he equates with the Heideggerian ‘Work-Being’), are selected purely for their ‘thingly’ character, Claydon comes to move away from two distinct curatorial models. On the one hand the more conservative method of selecting work to illustrate a theme or idea of the curator, to develop a narrative, on the other, the recent rash of curators that curate as artistic practice. This move, the curator suggests, is due to a pure love of the work. He has no thesis as such. His assertion that the show explores the problematic and elusive penumbra where the art object somehow distinguishes itself from the utilitarian or craft object through means of discretion or bombast seems to touch on what it means to exist on the discursive limits of art. However, the political move that Claydon makes here, whereby his questioning of modernism’s enunciation of the regime of art comes to bear on the specific objects he has selected for this show, is restricted to only objects he loves. This is the rub. Indeed, to say ‘I love you’ is immediately to cause violence, it is to say to all other things ‘I don’t love you’. What Claydon does then, put simply, is to form necessary limits of exclusion. By doing so he performs the very symbolic discrepancies within modernism that he flags at the beginning of his notes. The limits are necessary because any form of entering into an enunciation regime (as Latour calls it) unavoidably describes a closure of knowledge. Which is to say that to speak is to delimit. It is also, however, to speak for, to make oneself heard, to split the regime. And this split is the important moment here in representation. As we are aware, Bruno Latour, in his ‘From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik’, points to democracy’s etymology:
The word “demos” that makes half of the much vaunted word “demo-cracy” is haunted by the demon, yes the devil, because they share the same Indo-European root da- to divide. If the demon is such a terrible threat, it’s because it divides in two. If the demos is such a welcome solution, it’s because it also divides in two. A paradox? No, it’s because we ourselves are so divided by so many contradictory attachments that we have to assemble.
For the social field is absolutely split, ruptured, fragmented and to enter into discourse is to act within this field to produce this split. But re-presentation (for this is surely what Claydon is involved in above all else) inescapably relies on the distance between that that is being represented and that that is doing the representing, and at the same time relies on an absolute transparency that can never be achieved. In Emancipation(s) Ernesto Laclau proposes that ‘transparency requires full representability, and there is no possibility of achieving it if the opaqueness inherent in radical otherness is constitutive of social relations‘ (p.5) and i would propose the inverse, that full representation requires full transparency. Which is to say that the structure of democracy and representation operate in the same way; namely they both rely on a movement of radical difference and universality concurrently. There must be a commonality for difference to be constituted operationally within social discourse.
Steve Claydon’s exhibition, then, comes to bear on what we might know as a British modernist history by re-presenting artworks that have a thingly quality in common offering an entry into the regime. Our question would be, does Claydon’s selection have enough of a relation to modernity for his claims regarding the rehabilitation of them into the regime? Or more specifically, how does he read the exceptions, flaws, aberrations, yawning apertures and flowering discrepancies he sees in history? If on the one hand his selection is a means to set right an imbalance, to offer an alternative, then he is in danger of over simplifying the political in this problematic. However, if he suggests the show enacts a certain failing democracy, if he understands what we might call the dialectical nature of modernity (following Adorno and Horkheimer’s formulation of the Enlightenment as a dialectical process, haunted by the violence inherent in rationalism, rather than as the Kantian model of a linear process of perfection), then we may just allow him this one.
Anthony McCall at the Serpentine 2008
written January 2008
On the moment of death, when, as Blanchot might say, one is hung between existence and non-existence by the merest of threads, will the crossing be perceptible? Will the transcendental moment, the cut between two forms of discourse, between that that is sayable and that that is absolutely un-sayable, one cannot speak of death, be marked by a sublime experience? The ‘white light at the end of the tunnel’ as the imperceptibly thin plane that is passed through, just a few protons thick, reduced to a point by our position within it. As a metaphor for avant-garde art practices that surpass the discursive limits of their own particularities, that cross the boundaries between, say, art and the rest of society, art and non-art, this is rather blunt, but let’s run with it. In his seminar at the Whitechapel last year Robert Linsley picked out G. Spencer Brown’s idea that “when the frame is noticed it is crossed”, and suggested that “with reference to art we can probably also observe the opposite, namely that to cross the frame is to render it visible”.[1] His suggestion, that the very process of the crossing makes visible the boundary, and the imperative in Spencer Brown that one must cross the boundary once it is noticed come to act doubly on the discursive limits of art. Modernism is supposed to operate as such. A working through of its own presuppositions necessarily involves an investigation of its boundaries, as it is the boundary of the system that is the precise definition of it. This double movement, to notice the frame is to cross it, and to cross it is to render it visible, has the figure of the cleave. That to cleave is to both to cut apart and to bring together. In the crossing of the boundary one is both marking it and passing beyond it. The path breaking, then, that renders what is broken through perceptible also joins the inside to the outside. At the moment of my death then, I am not only crossing the Styx, I am a bridge across it.
With Anthony McCall’s recent retrospective at the Serpentine it is difficult not think of moments of death when traversing not just the space occupied by his solid light drawings, but the very planes of existence created by the solidity of the beams of light themselves. Refracted off smoke, the light comes to operate as solid form.
[1] http://discussion.systemsart.org/blog/_archives/2007/10/12/3287603.html
The Hayward Stairwell
written November 2007
Clusters of concomitant stairs dissect the upper and lower planes, rising and falling in folds. Twists of browngrey concrete. Cleaving floors; holding them apart and bringing them together in a diremptive and connective orientation. Navigation between spheres made possible by these brutalist coils scarred by years of hurried heels. The exhibition continues upstairs, the unceasing tramp of increasing audience figures. Figures of ‘appreciation’. Expansive yet simple modernist forms that scythe through white walled space, reminders of the external architecture. Brutalism in abundance on the South Bank, walled out by the requirements of the aesthetic project. What would it mean to strip back these walls? No longer would we find old render. Concrete, cold and unforgiving lingers in beautiful exigency. Concrete nothing but pure building, no adornment. But mendacious concrete. From distance this stairwell is wooden planks. Slats, greyed with the years, here a grain, a knot, there the mark of a saw. What mendacity, what lies this material plays. Concrete formed as blocks in wooden trenches take on the appearance of the wood. The modernist project, the stripping back to pure forms, the continuation of a certain enlightenment. How these constellations of buildings bear their late-modernist credentials with ease, yet the conceit runs deep. Examine the stairwell. At one point, halfway to the upper floor on the north side, between two flights of stairs there lies a knot in the wood/concrete, yet it is not grey like the rest of the stairwell. It is a rich cherry-wood golden brown. No more than an inch diameter this strange abhorrence offers nothing more than itself and its difference. How to understand this anomaly? It neither feels soft like wood or hard like stone, it is smooth but rippled. As though a knick has been had out of the wall and under lies the thing we though it was all along. As though the appearance was a double lie. A further inspection confirms the fact that the whole of the Hayward is not wood that looks like concrete that looks like wood. It is obviously real concrete. But were we to believe that we were standing on wooden slats, held together by hidden nails, then, surely our history not just the building would collapse.
