a n y t h i n g

Phil Collins

2012-02-05T14:12:00.000-08:00

The word repeated most often in questions following artist filmmaker Phil Collins' talk at Goldsmiths' College this week was exploitation. Collins explained that he aims to put issues of exploitation at the forefront of his work, building on the historical association between film and the gaze. As a Briton, filming in locations such as Kosovo and Palestine, the political weight of observation, participation and spectatorship becomes even more apparent. Early on in the talk, Collins showed an extract of a film he made in Kosovo shadowing a group of British photojournalists. The footage is shocking because it reveals the extent of the photographers' ignorance and manipulation of events. A fifteen-year-old boy sits hunched on a couch, avoiding as best he can the gaze of the cameras. We hear the photojournalist and his assistant discuss the object of their gaze, and request the removal of the boy's shirt – so that a scar on his chest be revealed for the shot. They ask his name, and repeatedly mispronounce it, 'how do you spell that?' Collins' camera follows, complicit yet ashamed, zooming in to study the boy in an uncomfortably close close-up. This proximity draws the audience into the film: the footage is fascinating, but makes us shuffle and blush – as viewers, we are part of the exploitation.
Photojournalism is one of the many cultures Collins follows, others include Karaoke, disco dancing, soap opera and tele-shopping. Visiting places we usually only associate with BBC news reportage of humanitarian crises and political conflict, Collins questions our assumptions and images of places, asking why we know nothing of Palestine's disco culture or Aspen's Mexican immigrant workers' love of telenovelas. Not only does this approach dismantle our stereotypes of a place, it also uncovers the radical potential of popular culture. What can a soap opera or Karaoke event do? Though extremely invested in political and ethical considerations, Collins' work is also very funny. The auditorium is smiling for the majority of his talk, and the films are by and large positive, giving enjoyment to the participants (with the exception of the Kosovan boy).

Collins projects his films in real time, avoiding editing and condensing footage, instead preferring to let the audience approach the piece at any point and experience the situation at the same pace as the filmed subjects. In this sense, the films encourage the audience's empathy with the subject. They Shoot Horses is an 8-hour projection that records a disco dancing marathon organised by Collins in Palestine. Paying competitors an hourly rate, Collins set up his camera to film a planar shot comprising a candy coloured wall and strip of floor on which a group of five young Palestinians danced for as long as they could. For the purposes of this week's talk, Collins showed excerpts of the piece, and so we saw the group dance to Joy Division, Donna Summer and Olivia Newton John, and deteriorate into a depleted and exhausted pair of dancers, 8 hours later, slumped against each other on the floor, occasionally tapping a foot or finger. In the final minutes of the day and song, however, a sense of euphoric camaraderie takes over and the pair rises again to dance – and enrich the typical set of images of check-points and battered dwellings that we associate with The West Bank.

Likewise, although Karaoke is not British, it has come to be associated with British pub culture, and so Collins' project working with Karaoke, The Smiths' album The World Won't Listen, and young people in Indonesia is a similarly unexpected cultural mix. The album was released in 1987, its music and lyrics capturing the era's political and social unrest. Today, at a time of Neo-Liberalism, increasing privatisation, class division and recession, the album resonates loudly. Collins suggests that Karaoke singers sing towards something beyond the audience and camera, the political or associative in the song converting into an emotional response. Such a vernacular, misty-eyed delivery of songs (any song, though particularly The Smiths' brooding ones) cannot be but confessional on camera. Collins worked with local musicians to record the album and convert it into a Karaoke machine, which he then installed at a venue to which young people were invited to sing and be filmed. Again, the close-up shot emphasises the personal engagement the singers have with each song; a lone teenage boy sings 'sixteen, clumsy and shy, that's the story of my life'.

Class division and feelings of disparity also prompted Collins' project in which he filmed a pilot episode of a Mexican soap opera, using professional actors and a conventional studio set-up and running time. Visiting Aspen, Colorado, one of the richest places he has been, Collins realised that its cleaners and labourers were all Mexican immigrants who lived more than two hours outside the city, and would travel home everyday, exhausted, and escape into the fantasy world of the soap opera (or telenovela). Thinking about the division between Aspen millionaire and Aspen worker, Collins went to Mexico to recruit actors and film a soap based upon Jean Genet's play The Maids, which dramatises this upstairs/ downstairs power divide. The pilot episode features the expected mise-en-scène of the telenovela: a glamorous mistress and mansion, a gun, blood, a betrayal, and several kisses and tears. As with the way the Kosovan film captured the audience in the complex of relations between viewer and viewed, it is difficult to watch the soap opera without getting caught-up in its melodrama and aesthetic. Escapism vital for Aspen's workers becomes escapism for us.

Escapism and fantasy also play large parts in Collins' recent project of creating a tele-shopping programme for broadcast on German television. Like continuous advertisements, tele-shopping programmes manufacture desire. Rather than selling products, however, Collins' programme offered its viewers experiences: the chance to be interrogated by a professional interrogator; to be in a Victorian-inspired sex show; to pretend to be in hospital on your death-bed (€9.99). At a time when bands have to make their profits by offering fans increasingly theatrical performances and 'experiences' because material CDs no longer sell, and people buy their avatars virtual homes and holidays, notions of manufacture, selling and purchasing are shifting. Collins' experiment in selling experience not product is an interesting extrapolation of this.

Shopping, soap operas, Karaokes and discos concern performance, desire and fantasy. Collins takes them outside their expected context, and there they perform and expand our consideration of identity and spectatorship. Perhaps we were too quick to suggest exploitation: these films require a more complex form of looking and thinking.

A Visit to the Warburg Institute

2012-02-05T11:36:00.000-08:00

Before his death in 1929, German art historian Aby Warburg amassed thousands ofbooks and photographs relating to his field of research – namely, how ancientpathos, revealed in expressions and gestures, manifests in post-medieval visualculture. Warburg ceded his primogeniture rights to his younger brother,preferring to follow a career in art history than banking. He did this on thecondition that his younger brother funded his academic acquisitions. Hisbrother agreed, and eventually, not only had Warburg accrued a vast collection,but also a library in Hamburg was built especially for it. In 1933, Warburg'scollection was moved to London, and eventually to the purpose built institutein Woburn Square in which it lives today.

Warburg significantly influenced the theory and practice of arthistorical research, his work characterised by a cross-temporal and culturalviewpoint, drawing resources from high and low (Warburg's photographiccollection files images of Greek statues alongside photographs from newspaperclippings). According to Gombrich's biography of him, published in 1970,Warburg worked in this way so that he could survey types (archetypes, thoughWarburg did not use Jung's terminology) and primitive models that occur acrosseras and places. In the context of the turn of the century in which Warburg wasworking, theories of racial and social memory were prominent and inevitablyinfluenced him. Indeed, Warburg liked using the term saftesteigen (risingof the sap) to describe memory, and wrote that art was an organ of socialmemory. Gombrich quotes Rilke describing things 'long forgotten' rising like'blood that courses and [...] gesture that arises from the depths of time.' Thephotographic collection's arrangement in sections such as Gestures is also reminiscent of Darwin's TheExpression of Emotions in Animals and Men, an influence Warburgacknowledged.

For a visitor untrained in what is often quite arcane arthistorical knowledge, understanding Warburg's associations (and thus why imagesof Rome's Four Rivers carved fountain is in the Animals section, sub-divided Crocodiles, for example) is no easy task.Warburg's scholars and archivists are practiced in his method of tangentialassociation and tracing of origins. (The crocodile represents the Nile, one ofthe Four Rivers of mythology. Statues of the gods and personifications of theserivers often feature emblems of them. The Nile is represented by a male,holding a cornucopia to symbolise plenty, children to symbolise fertility, anda crocodile, native of the river.) Warburg encouraged peripheral reading,speaking of the exciting potential in picking up the book to the left or theright of the one searched for on the library shelf. Serendipity is crucial inthe research of many artists such as Tacita Dean, and it is not surprising thatthe Warburg Institute receives much interest from visual artists.

The arrangement of the collection is also attractive in a poeticsense, its contents reading like a list-poem of associations. From one sectionto another, Warburg's thinking process can be traced: Science and Magic– Alchemy – Medicine – The Humours – Charts and Calendars – Seasons –Time – Months – Days – Hours – Elements – Weather – Climate – Places –Cities... and so forth.

Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas

Artists are also drawn to Warburg because of his visual – entirelyvisual – project The Mnemosyne Atlas, described by Gombrich as 'a vastpictorial symphony'. Arranged andshuffled with pins on 40 black upholstered exhibition panels, the Atlas comprised around 1000 photographs ofdepictions of gesture throughout history. Warburg did not complete the project,and the only evidence of the panels are some photographs of them propped in Warburg's Hamburg library sometime before1933. In his essay Atlas: The Anomic Archive, BenjaminBuchloh likens the Atlas toBenjamin's Arcades Project becauseboth attempt to gather a collection without providing captions (in Warburg'scase) or additional commentary (Benjamin).

Buchloh also discusses Gerhard Richter's photographic Atlas that comprises hundreds of images of everyday German life, and far fewer (and as a result, extremely shocking) ones of the Holocaust. Rather like the way atrocious images appear in W. G. Sebald's books, each Holocaust image provides an overtly political 'punctum', to borrow Barthes' term, which startles us into a new understanding of the collective history and memory of a nation. Many historians, including Buchloh, however, are keen to point out the difference between Warburg's enterprise and that of Richter, Sebald, or collagists such as Hannah Hoch and Kurt Schwitters. While the latter group of artists and writers might share Warburg's aim and enthusiasm to forge unexpected associations between cultures and times in order to enrich understanding, their objective was more political and tied to particular contexts (such as a post-war German questioning of identity in the cases of Richter and Sebald).

The Internet adds a new lens through which we can view Warburg's collection. Now that we can Google an image using an image, the electronic search engine presents us with a seemingly infinite number of possible visual associations and tangents. The Warburg Institute plans to put its photographic collection online. Interestingly, this plan runs alongside its continuing acquisitions – many of which reach the Institute by post or are cut out of Sotheby's auction catalogues, and pasted onto A4 sheets, then tucked into files. These files are stored in boxes and metal filing cabinets that smell of a particular vintage of brown paper and dust. The language we use to describe virtual collections is extremely spatial and archival: we create files, click drop-down boxes and send folders to the trash. As Susan Stewart says in her book On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, 'the collection relies upon the box, the cabinet, the cupboard, the seriality of shelves'. Perhaps it is partly for its tangible and imaginative organisation that Warburg's collection continues to appeal to artists and scholars alike.

Observational Cinema

2012-02-05T09:01:00.000-08:00

To observe, as [Roger] Sandall made clear, involved attending to the world – actively, passionately, concretely – while at the same time, relinquishing the desire to control, circumscribe or appropriate it.

[Quoting Frederick Wiseman:] When the observational technique works, it puts you in the middle of the events and asks you to think through your own relationship to what you're seeing and hearing, which I think is more interesting for the viewer. The real film takes place where the mind or the eye of the viewer meets the screen and interprets, in a sense, participates in, what they're seeing and hearing.

from Grimshaw, A and Ravetz, A (2009) Observational Cinema: Anthropology, Film, and the Exploration of Social Life Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press

Patience (After Sebald)

2012-02-05T08:50:00.000-08:00

from Patience (After Sebald) dir. Grant Gee

Known for his documentary on Joy Division, director Grant Gee's film Patience (After Sebald) was screened last week at the ICA. A q&a in which Gee explained the shiftfrom music documentary to one about the late writer W. G. Sebald followed theFriday night screening. Gee had originally wanted to film grotty European hotel rooms, as if 'on tour' with his camera, but minus a band to feature. Indeed, the emptiness Gee hoped to depict in the hotel rooms is one of the elements that slid the project into Sebaldian territory. Gee proposed a voice-over accompaniment to the hotel room scenes: a voice reading excerpts of Sebald's books that discuss loneliness, wandering and European history embedded in its architecture.

What was eventually produced is essentially an expanded version of this proposal, with many voices reading Sebald in both senses – through his own words and their own. Gee decided not to film in Europe, however, but to undertake Sebald's walk around the Suffolk coast that features in his book The Rings of Saturn (the German original is subtitled An English Pilgrimage). Visually, we see many shots of anonymous lampshades, single-beds and radiators, paraphernalia of the everyday. There are also clocks, stations and barren streets, all filmed in an appropriately archaic format: a Bolex camera loaded with discontinued Kodak black and white film. The footage looks like Sebald's photographs, which he photocopied over and over until they became the dark and grainy artefacts he put in his books.

The German original of Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, showing the subtitle An English Pilgrimage

We hear writer/ walkers Robert MacFarlane and Iain Sinclair; translator, poet and friend of Sebald, Michael Hamburger; and artist Jeremy Millar, amongst others. These speakers appear on screen in somewhat cliched semi-transparent superimposition, suggesting Gee's simultaneous insistence and embarrassment in resorting to the talking-heads documentary format. Far more powerful are the times in which voice features without corporal accompaniment, particularly so when the voice is Sebald's own, speaking in interviews before his untimely death in 2001. His voice is very low and soft, running like an old but well-oiled cog, around and over the Sebaldian misty and monochrome shots. Given Sebald's use of unnamed narrators (in Austerlitz, for example) and very few images of himself or other people in comparison with images of buildings and plans, the film's use of 'disembodied' voice seems more appropriate to the subject matter than talking-heads. Music in the film is provided by The Caretaker (electronic musician James Kirby), whose soundtrack is characterised by white noise (the sonic equivalent to Sebaldian or Dickensian mist) and samplings of old opera, radio and piano music. Along with Sebald's faint German accent, the soundtrack implies a kind of translation – between here and there, past and present, this voice and that voice – translation being integral to Sebald's work. Iain Sinclair makes an interesting point in Patience regarding translation, saying that it adds a gloss to the original and thus transforms it into something else. He refers to Midsummer Murders, which is apparently popular in France. The dubbed French version has 'an existential gloss' lacking in the original. Sinclair suggests that part of Sebald's appeal is the gloss of distance – distance being associated with loss, fetishisation and longing according to Freud – that results not only in his work being translated from the German, but in its quotations from French, Dutch, Latin, Welsh and other languages.

from Patience (After Sebald) dir. Grant Gee

Artist filmmaker Tacita Dean, who has written about Sebald and made a film about Michael Hamburger, features in Patience. Her practice shares with Sebald's a collaboration with chance. 'You go along and then something happens and you go somewhere else,' she explains. The virtue of patience is fundamental to this: an ability to wait and let things unroll in their own time before the camera or the writer. Gee explains that the film's title derives from Sebald's eponymous character Austerlitz, who plays with an assortment of photographs on a table as if with the card game Patience. Like Aby Warburg shuffling images on his Mnemosyne Atlas exhibition panels, Austerlitz orders and reorganises his collection of photographs, making new connections and associations that arise unexpectedly and take him and the reader on tangents into the past. Gee's collection of images for the film also takes us to unexpected places, for instance the virtual terrain of Google maps employed by Sebald scholar Barbara Hui to trace all the geographical references in Sebald's books. While visiting Somerleyton Hall in Suffolk, for instance, Sebald discusses Kentucky: on the 'Litmap', therefore, a line shoots out across England westwards to the States. The juxtaposition of a colour screen-capture from Google with the black and white Bolex footage is pleasing because it offers a new reading of Sebald that does not try to impersonate his archaic aesthetic but instead uses new technology as an interpretive tool.

Michael Hamburger dir. Tacita Dean

Unexpected associations are the protagonists for The Rings of Saturn, for instance in its photographs of dead herring piled up in Lowestoft that, by way of visual association, refract the discussion to one of the Holocaust and victims awaiting burial in piles. A few pages on from the herring photograph (a few seconds on, in Gee's film), we see a photograph of piles of human bodies. In this sense, Sebald's method is close to Gerhard Richter's, placing the mundane or natural alongside the atrocious (Richter's vast collection of photographs, Atlas, contains tens of images of everyday German life, punctured by one or two of the Holocaust). Though sharing a visual commonality with Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas, Sebald's technique is closer to Richter's because of its political shock. Warburg's aim of forging new and oblique links between images, times and places to enrich our understanding of history is certainly shared by Sebald, but as Benjamin Buchloh writes in his essay Atlas: The Anomic Archive, the particularity of Sebald and Richter's post-war German identities, dealing with trauma and communicating a political message, albeit obliquely, distinguishes them from Warburg.

Barbara Hui's Litmap

Dealing with trauma in Sebald's case is inextricably bound with the act of walking. As MacFarlane points out in Patience, the English and European tradition associates walking with recovery, as opposed to an American notion of walking as discovery. Yet recovery is not achieved on Sebald's English Pilgrimage – on the contrary – the pilgrim ends up in hospital, overwhelmed by history, associations and memories prompted by the walk. Saturn is a planet associated in alchemy with bile and thus melancholy: one who senses an inexplicable sense of loss and sadness is 'saturnine'.

Gee says Sebald's walk through Suffolk is a MacGuffin, in that he might walk anywhere (or even conduct a purely psychic walk) for the associations and thoughts would remain the same. Gee's detection of arbitrariness in the walk's location reflects in the film's form, which runs with little variation in pace or discussion. This is not necessarily a negative criticism, and one could easily argue that viewers simply need patience to meander with the narrative, and not expect to be pulled through it. As a result, it is easy to feel lost in Patience, unsure how the sequence of scenes or speakers' readings have reached the current point of discussion or will progress from it. This feeling of being lost occurs in The Rings of Saturn itself, when Sebald becomes disorientated at Dunwich Heath and finds himself returning to the same spot again and again – an experience described by Freud as uncanny. This collocation of mental and spatial experiences is underlined by Sebald's statement that a labyrinth of which he dreams resembles a cross-section of his brain. The entire walk is a walk through the mind, and in this sense, Gee's film is an attempted representation of it.

A panel from Aby Warburg's Mnemosyne Atlas

Gerhard Richter's Atlas

Considering Sebald's footsteps, Sinclair discusses the current state of literature derived from walking. Now that Suffolk's coastal walks (or London's M25 walk, in Sinclair's case) have been 'written', and that much of the countryside has been homogenised into generic industrial and commercial parks (this being one of the main discussions in Patrick Keiller's Robinson film trilogy), Sinclair wonders whether one might have to walk 'the six orbital motorways of Beijing' in order to stand out from the crowd. But this sentiment of dissatisfaction and restlessness is typical of Sinclair, Keiller and Sebald's genre, and is what makes their voices so enjoyably melancholy. In their slow pacing they – and Gee in Patience – allow us some time and space to think.

From 'Change and Criticism: Consistency and Small Minds'

2012-01-31T09:45:00.000-08:00

The recompense of art criticism resides in the act of looking at a work of art and allowing oneself the time to experiment and re-experiment, to think, consider, articulate, vacillate and rearticulate. The critique of contemporary art is not an appropriate ambit for somebody who expects to be right all the time or on the majority of occasions. Rapid and not always significant change begs an illogical criticism that creates a dialogue between historic fact, the visual and opinion in an “open manner”, instead of trying to establish a pedantic system that permits no variations and that is only perfect with regard to its own limitations. The idea of self-correction is precisely what is most interesting about art criticism. Oscar Wilde said that criticism is the highest form of autobiography. I would like it not to be autobiography or self-expression, but auto-didactic, a printed record of the process of learning and, ideally, a demonstration that the art discussed is stimulating.

Lucy Lippard (1970) Change and Criticism: Consistency and Small Minds

on the ground of this day so beautiful

2012-01-30T02:27:00.000-08:00

Germaine Krull Metal 1927-1928

The photographer is a witness, the witness of his time. The true photographer is the witness of the everyday; he reports. That his eye does not always focus on what he sees three feet above ground is natural. But that he focuses consistently on the ground, on today's ground, on this morning's ground, on this Thursday morning's ground, or on the ground of this day so beautiful that he forgets what day it is. The world. The world of his time.

Germaine Krull 1897 – 1985

speaking, hesitating

2012-01-13T07:00:00.000-08:00

Lucy Clout 22 minutes [film still]

A static shot across a lawn. A suburban house. Shaded by trees, the house sits stocky, clapboarded and vanilla coloured. A car is parked to its left. Lucy Clout coughs from behind the camera, and begins talking.

The cough is a device to bring us back to the person behind the camera, speaking, hesitating.

This is the house in Evansville, Indiana, used as a location for American sitcom Roseanne. Clout's flat voice-over describes its use, Roseanne's audience ratings, and the roles of various producers and actors, as if reciting from a fan base article (though in fact it is she who has written the text). Suddenly she breaks into direct voice, presumably addressing the house as if it is a character: 'You are threatening, you are uninteresting, you are casual', then the flat reeling of information continues.

Repetition figures frequently in the text, minor sentences lacking verbs reminiscent of poetry, and therefore out of place: 'A blinding flash of Matt Williams' anxiety that the house is not external enough.'

At one point, the voice-over stops when a young woman exits the house with a dog on a lead and pulls it around the lawn. She re-enters the house and shuts the door. Clout coughs, and continues her monologue. 'You are a local, a regular, very discreet... [is she now addressing the house's occupant?] The house is symmetrical, but not too symmetrical... A blinding flash of Matt Williams' anxiety that the house is not external enough'. A car drives past as a butterfly flickers towards the camera. Nothing happens. This is the type of architecture we know from sitcoms and movies; here it is again, before us on the auditorium screen, running for the sitcom standard length of 22 minutes – yet nothing happens. The house is a screen itself, onto which we project our memories of film, and onto which Clout projects her speech. The combination of impersonal declaratives and slips into direct voice reflect Clout's interest in social conventions of intimacy, conversation and language.

Describing the making of 22 minutes, Clout says she stood behind the camera, pretending to read a book, and looked away when the woman with the dog looked; she seems to enjoy awkwardness. In an untitled film made on her web cam, she sits cross legged in a dressing gown. The carpet is beige, and a wall socket and Internet cables are visible behind her. 'Hello,' she greets the camera, and goes on to address the recipient of what we discover is an email video greeting. 'I'm going to show you some tricks,' she says. This is a visualisation of the mundane: on the floor, not-dressed yet, Clout tries to entertain someone elsewhere with banal tricks and chatting. The framing severs anything above her neck from the shot, causing us to feel stuck, lowdown inside the computer's web cam, like an interloper intercepting a skype call. The idea of a third person who is not necessarily supposed to be there intrigues Clout, suggesting voyeurism and an element of comedy. As viewers, we often feel like this third person encountering awkward exchanges. During a recent screening at the Whitechapel Gallery, Clout offered the audience a woolly tassel she had made, and held up a pair of plastic trousers printed with a pattern of snails. 'Treat it right,' she said, giving the tassel to an audience member at the back. It is unclear what the relationship between the tassel, the trousers and the films is, but it is exactly this ambiguity and clunkiness that makes Clout's work speak, unhesitatingly, about social conventions.

Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque (1969-72)

2011-12-19T02:47:00.000-08:00

Robert Smithson's Hotel Palenque (1969-72)

Photographic slides and spoken word/ photographs and text

In his photographic and written essay, A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, Robert Smithson visited industrial construction sites on the New Jersey shore, noting that they were 'ruins in reverse' that, in their nascent states, resembled moribund monuments. Visiting Mexico in 1969, Smithson photographed a hotel that performed a similar entropy, simultaneously decaying in parts and undergoing renovation in others. He delivered the slides in a lecture to students at the University of Utah in 1972, and the piece now exists as a slide installation with audio accompaniment.

2011-12-19T02:28:00.000-08:00

Ruins stand as reminders. Memory is always incomplete, always imperfect, always falling into ruin; but the ruins themselves, like other traces, are treasures: our links to what came before, our guide to situating ourselves in a landscape of time. To erase the ruins is to erase the visible public triggers of memory; a city without ruins and traces of age is like a mind without memories.

Solnit, R (2007) The Ruins of Memory

extracts from Jean Rouch

2011-12-16T14:54:00.000-08:00

For me, then, the only way to film is to walk about with the camera, taking it to wherever it is the most effective, and improvising a ballet in which the camera itself becomes just as much alive as the people it is filming. This would be the first synthesis between the theories of Vertov about the 'cine-eye' and those of Flaherty about the 'participant camera'. I often compare this dynamic improvisation with that of the bullfighter before the bull. In both cases nothing is given in advance, and the smoothness of a faena (strategy of play) in bullfighting is analogous to the harmony of a travelling shot which is in perfect balance with the movements of the subjects.

[... quoting Vertov from 1923] 'I EDIT when I choose my subject [from among thousands of possible subjects]. I EDIT when I observe [film] my subject [to find the best choice from among a thousand possible observations...]'

I see [with my camera] I write [record on film] I organize [edit]

[...] Music envelops one, can put one asleep, lets bad cuts pass unnoticed, or gives artificial rhythm to images which have no rhythm and will never have any. In brief, it is the opium of cinema and, unfortunately, television has exploited the mediocrity of this process. [...T]he musical sauce with which they are served. [...] On the other hand, we must value music which really supports an action, whether it be profane or ritual music, the rhythm of work or of dance.

Rouch, J 'The Camera and Man' in Hockings, P (ed.) (2003) Principles of Visual Anthropology (3rd ed.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter p.89-94

offstage

2011-12-16T14:23:00.000-08:00

Ilya Kabakov

The word obscene has an obscure etymology: it can be related to the Latin ob (on account of) and caenum (pollution, dirt, filth, vulgarity); but it can alo be related to ob (tension) plus scena (scene, space of communal ritual, enactment, sacred space). In this sense, obscene doesn't suggest anything vulgar, sexually explicit or dirty, but simply something eccentric, offstage, unfashionable or antisocial. It is similar to profane (outside but in proximity of the temple).

[... quoting Barthes' A Lover's Discourse] 'Whatever is anachronistic is obscene. As a (modern) divinity, History is repressive, History forbids us to be out of time. Of the past we tolerate only the ruin, the monument, kitsch, what is amusing; we reduce this past to no more than its signature'.

[...] Kabakov's nostalgic obscenity does not simply refer back in time, but rather sideways. In his artistic quest, Kabakov moves away from the much explored verticality of high and low towards the horizontal of the banal and its many invisible dimensions. Kabakov is an archaeologist and collector of banal memorabilia.

Boym, S (2001) 'Obscene Homes' in The Future of Nostalgia

Ilya Kabakov

in the anonymous biographies

2011-11-09T17:00:00.000-08:00

Hashem el Madani/ Akram Zaatari

How can we butsee in our taste for everyday life in the past a resort to the only remainingmeans for restoring the flavour of things, the slow rhythms of past times – andin the anonymous biographies of ordinary people the understanding that themasses do not allow themselves to be measured as a mass?

Pierre Nora

‘Diversity is the most importantfactor in resisting misrepresentation,’ says Lebanese artist Akram Zaatari,whose photographic archive features in Tate Modern’s current exhibition New Documentary Forms. Zaatari hascollected photographs taken between the 1940s and 1970s in Saida bystudio photographer Hashem el Madani. While one might expect el Madani’s studioportraits to be uptight pretensions, posed and conforming to conventions of aconservative society, they are anything but. His studio in fact offered anescape from external mores and customs; and his subjects sought refuge and funthere. Children play and scowl before the camera; best friends embrace; menwear dresses and pose as bride and groom. El Madani’s portraits are arranged according to subject – groups of children, couples, individuals. While this organization, along with the pristine wood and glassframing, dresses the photographs in an archival ‘uniform’, their contentsresist homogenising. A girl ina floral dress standing behind a patterned tabletop stares out of one photograph, towards somebody or thing behind us and to our right.The fact that her gaze misses us by this small but unmistakable margin, focusing intently on whatwe will never see, adds to the mysteriousness of the subject. She has the faceof a much older woman, her lips slightly pursed and her brow ridged inconcentration, yet her shoulders and arms are those of a ten year old. ElMadani’s portrait allows the girl to be both a child and a complex and developedperson. He does not force her into a cliched infantilepose, instead letting her keep her thoughts and secrets somewherebehind that tabletop and brow. ElMadani’s subjects are not celebrities, and it is safe to assume the costumesthey wear for him are not worn on the street. Indeed, these portraits might bethe only photographic record of some of the anonymous individuals archived andcelebrated here.

Hashem el Madani/ Akram Zaatari

Also at Tate Modern is A Living Man Declared Dead and Other Chapters, a solo show by American photographer Taryn Simon, whose photographs of hidden aspects of American culture featured in Denmark’s contribution to this year’s Venice Biennale. Tate’s show comprises eighteen research projects undertaken by Simon between 2008 and 2011. Simon investigated eighteen families’ bloodlines, uncovering their stories and contexts. Each bloodline forms one of her ‘chapters’, here presented in a highly systematic manner reminiscent of an archive. As with Zaatari’s collection of portraits, Simon’s meticulous framing and order (portraits fill frames on the left, textual information and captions are in the central frame, and additional photographic documentation relating to the family’s history fills the right hand frame) propose an order against which the subjects resist. The bloodlines all belong to families who have been involved in historical turmoil of some form or other, be it involvement with the Nazi regime, Brazilian feuds or Thalidomide births. As with Simon’s work at the Biennale, unacknowledged or obscure narratives are researched and brought to light, and as with Zaatari, diversity is presented in order to resist history’s standardising and amassing force. Having said this, the archival presentation of such diversity seems contradictory. One views each chapter as one might a catalogue of amusing and slightly freakish crockery sets, all packaged identically but cracked or fired in their own way. While raising awareness of history, peoples and identities is surely positive, the extent to which Simon frames and compartmentalises her subjects ultimately endangers their individuality and turns them into commodities of curiosity.

Taryn Simon

The obscure and overlooked also guide filmmaker Emily Richardson’s practice. Richardson’s film Memo Mori is currently on display at The Wapping Project, in the power station’s cavernous basement that was flooded with water for a Yohji Yamamoto dress installation earlier this year. Richardson has collaborated with Iain Sinclair for this film, a 23-minute documentary on the wastelands of east of London currently being developed for the Olympics. Sinclair provides the film’s malcontent and melancholy voice over, commentating on a kingfisher flying over a canal in the ‘blasted landscape’, before slipping into excerpts from his psychogeographical book Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire. The camera pans slowly in a circle, revealing the Thames’ tributes as they ooze past brick bridges and skeletal cars, or surveys allotment sheds using low-down and static shots. The sheds are portrayed as individual characters, each built in its own idiosyncratic style, from driftwood and car bonnets. We linger on a shot of a shed door numbered 33 and wonder at its extraction and former, tragically distant, neighbours. Indeed, though the shed shares some formal likeness with Heidegger’s homely hut, in Richardson and Sinclair’s rendering, it is far more forlorn. The allotments are abandoned and will soon be cleared, like the travellers’ sites and warehouses that stand in the way of Stratford’s Olympic development. The context of the film installation in Wapping Power Station, now largely taken over by its restaurant and bar, is important: Wapping, like much of east London, has a history of gentrification and redevelopment. Its warehouses are now bistros and apartments for city traders, and Stratford’s unique improvised homes and habitats will soon be paved over by computer-designed parks, stadiums and plazas. Sinclair’s monologue evokes Robert Smithson’s brooding over ruins in reverse on the New Jersey shore, and Richardson's shots of diggers and cranes echo Passaic's. Sinclair's voiceover is interrupted by a second voice, which expresses an opposite attitude towards development. The voice is that of a tour guide who accompanies bus visitors to the Olympic site. The tour guide boasts that Olympic catering companies will provide sixteen thousand litres of milk and 3.4 million eggs during the games, this information ironic considering the visuals of deserted fields and muddy riverbanks. Suddenly we jump to what appears to be a disconnected subject, though this is part of the Sinclairian genre of wandering narratives. A drone of insects – cockroach-like leather-clad Hells Angels – appears on screen. Sinclair explains that during filming in the east end, Richardson encounters a Hells Angel biker's funeral whose size rivals a Kray Twin’s. The Hells Angels’ head quarters is just off the Hackney Road, we are told, and the funeral procession will move north east, past the Olympic sites and up, further and further, towards Chingford. The bikers’ swarm therefore – peculiar, idiosyncratic and ugly though it is – is another example of individuality existing on the margins of society and capitalist redevelopment.

Emily Richardson

Monuments for a Walk

2011-11-09T10:05:00.000-08:00

[Influenced by Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory, a book that explores the ancient rhetorical device of using architectural space as a mnemonic, I am interested in interpreting routes through Venice using monuments to trigger memory. A monument, from the Latin monere ‘remind’, might be anything from a statue to pastries in a window.

Architecture can be thought of as an exteriorisation of psychological space. When we don’t know a city, it feels uncanny (from un ‘not’ + the Indo-European root of canny and can: 'to know’), and only once we commit it to memory can we interiorise it and gain a sense of inner order. Place names on buildings and bridges can be mnemonics too, and when foreign, often provide links to disparate and unanticipated ideas. With this in mind, it remains to be seen whether the content of the Venetian mnemonics will actually be Venice, or somewhere else and of another time altogether.

After building up an inventory of mnemonics, a route of memories formed.]

[Artist book formed of fifty photographs of daily route to work in the morning, and fifty of the return walk in the evening. To be read forwards, or rotated and read backwards. Concertina pages for diversions in route. Colour-tinted where colour forms the memory.]

2011-11-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

When it comes to film, whose material form is sequential – 24 frames per second, a reel of film spooling over time – we might assume linear narrative is inevitable. And it is; however, the narrative does not have to be diegetic and can be purely visual instead, operating on our unconscious. It can pile up image after image, creating visual echoes and parallels that accumulate in our minds until our synapses align – synapse, from the Greek to fasten together. Then poetic moment is achieved.

Nathaniel Dorsky

Pastourelle and The Return

Anri Sala

Le Clash, Tlatelolco Clash and No Window No Cry

Ben Rivers

Sack Barrow

2011-11-01T01:43:00.000-07:00

campo san lorenzo

2011-10-13T14:23:00.000-07:00

film installation

Allies & Morrison, 85 Southwark Street, SE1 0HX – Friday 2nd December 2011

During two months working for the Arts Council of Wales at the Venice Biennale this summer, I filmed everyday life in a neglected square called Campo San Lorenzo. The Campo contains a ruinedchurch, a lap dancing club, a house for stray cats, and a nursing home. Life inthe Campo seems to run at a different pace from that in much of Venice, and gradually I made a portrait of the space and how it operates at differenttimes of day and night.

On the 2nd December I will screen Campo San Lorenzo at Allies & Morrison Architects' office in central London. I am interested to see how my film about a peculiar and rather grubby square in Venice will perform in the context of the office, and alongside the practice's architectural models of spaces and buildings very different from those in the film.

R. H. Quaytman

2011-08-30T08:31:00.000-07:00

I began to think of paintings as objects that you passed by – as things you saw from the side, with your peripheral vision, and in the context of other paintings.[1]

We pass R. H. Quaytman’s paintings and something catches our eye. We stop. There is a glow radiating from an upper edge, and diamond dust winking from some. They simultaneously attract and blind us, as do the optical illusions painted and silk-screened onto some of them. Effects of light and vision are important here; and we oscillate between seeing and never quite getting.

Quaytman’s paintings belong together like sentences, forming a syntax of refined pastel colours, greytones and gesso on plyboard. Each group becomes a chapter, so it is possible to read Quaytman’s output like a literary collection. At least one painting from each chapter resembles a small black cipher, a punctuation mark leading us into the sequence. Like W. G. Sebald’s novels with embedded photography, we parse references in the paintings;[2] many leading to previous Quaytman paintings, and others – as in I Modi, Chapter 22, here at the Venice Biennale – to a wider history of painting and printmaking. Quaytman often silkscreens photographic images onto the plywood, using Polaroids she has taken – softly blurred, their colours muted. Reflections and doubles are frequent, again referring to the processes of photography and printmaking, but also suggesting a Sebaldian collection: the paintings are sets, to be collected, and their referents – torsos, balconies, bridges – come in pairs and groups. Like Sebald’s images too, Quaytman’s silkscreened photographs are grainy, operating on a semiotic rather than representational level.

I Modi, Chapter 22 draws its content from a series of pornographic sonnets in an engraved book from 1524. While some of the paintings in the chapter represent no distinguishable figure, others contain enlarged portions of the engravings, focusing our attention on fragments of bodies and gestures, as if building a vocabulary of sensations from the sonnets. Literally translated as The Ways, the title also evokes the various permutations for hanging and arranging the sequence of paintings in the chapter. Quaytman’s method of display complements this, many of the paintings arranged on shelves and inviting reconfiguration. Experimenting with archival display was partly brought about by Quaytman’s experience sorting the artwork and estates of her father and stepfather, and realizing the problems of keeping a collection of paintings. Thinking of a body of paintings as a literary collection – a visual library – is perhaps a way to overcome the worry of accumulation and lack of display. In shelving the paintings (and elsewhere Quaytman has used sliding racks to exhibit), the exhibition is anticipating the work of the archivist or librarian.

A sense of anticipation is also achieved through the space depicted in some of the paintings. Quaytman often makes an architectural model of the gallery in which she will exhibit, installs miniature paintings inside this model, photographs the model, and then uses these images as the basis of the final paintings. A Russian-doll type technique, this practice is similar to Vesa-Pekka Rannikko’s exhibition And all structures are unstable, over in the Finnish pavilion. We recognise and feel a spatial immediacy, and thus the past, with its sixteenth century characters from I Modi’s engravings, imperceptibly flows – glows – into the present space of the gallery.

While the effect of Quaytman’s concise library of paintings is pleasing, like Rannikko’s project, it feels rather too politically disengaged and unproblematic in comparison with projects at the Biennale that focus on particular contemporary issues or challenge existing art production. While it is important to value art that treads its own path, when we view Quaytman alongside Omer Fast’s exploration of witness accounts and America’s military impact in the Middle East, or Ahmed Basiony and Egypt’s uprising, her paintings pale. This, however, is more a curatorial problem of hoarding extremely different artworks into one space. And like any large library, surely there is room for Fasts, Basionys, Rannikkos and Quaytmans.

[1] ‘In the studio R. H. Quaytman’ in Art In America June/ July 2010 p.88

[2] Ibid. p. 92

Amalia Pica

2011-08-29T09:30:00.000-07:00

Argentinian artist Amalia Pica is interested in what makes an image nostalgic. When we remember a time and a place, our mental representation of it can be an inaccurate, abbreviated or extended version. Pica sees this symptom of nostalgia as inevitable and productive, though she accepts that historicisation can sometimes homogenise the past. In Untitled (fiesta lights) for example, a string of coloured light bulbs hanging outside the gallery continue inside into its interior through a letterbox, but inside the space (with its associations with collecting, archiving and display) all the bulbs are clear glass and thus devoid of lively colour.

Pica’s work often deals with nostalgia in relation to past politics and pedagogy. Spaces of education – or indoctrination – such as speakers’ platforms and classrooms are constructed and sometimes form stages on which Pica performs. In Babble, Blabber, Chatter, Gibber, Jabber, Patter, Prattle, Rattle, Yammer, Yada Yada Yada (2010), Pica projected a series of slides of herself wielding semaphore flags forming the title, and thus a somewhat pointless or circuitous task, reminiscent of political slogans that merely advertise the leader and announce their own vocality.

For her room in the IllumiNATIONS Pavilion, Pica explores Argentinean schooling in the 1970s and specifically, the state’s ban of Venn diagrams on the grounds of their propagation of subversive thought in schools. She uses two theatrical lamps that project the Venn interlocking circles of colour onto the gallery wall. Under the diagram is a statement about exclusion and inclusion, Venn and the Argentinean ban. On an exposed brick wall adjacent to the Venn projection hangs a line of paper bunting used for sporadic performances throughout the Biennale. For each performance, entitled Strangers, two actors ‘who have never met before’ hold the bunting ‘for hours at a time’. Similar to the semaphore performance Babble, Strangers is as much about the uselessness of collective political actions as it is their power. Form and structure in the action of holding bunting, messaging by semaphore, or organizing the school day is shown to be intrinsic to power and propaganda. Pica has placed a metal school bell on the floor opposite the Venn projection, and on the wall above it, a typed timetable that contains no subject titles, but simply class, BREAK, and * (denoting the bell). Not only do we think of meticulous time keeping, but also the experience of being a child not quite understanding the content of the school day or lessons, but only its authority. School sheets in adjusted scale is also an exploration of being small, and this time Pica has painted large imitations of school notebook paper, corresponding in scale with her size as a child. The pages loom large and dauntingly empty, simultaneously inviting and overwhelming in potential.

Five Thousand Feet Is Best

2011-08-29T09:10:00.000-07:00

So what do you want to talk about?//

[Beeping noise]

Are you alright?//

What’s the difference between you and someone who sits in an airplane?//

There’s no difference. We do the same job.//

But you’re not a real pilot.//

So what? You’re not a real journalist. I know what you’re thinking about. You’re thinking about bodies and places. Train drivers in the 1880s…/

,, ,, ,, bodies and trenches. World War One…/

,, ,, ,, Kitty hawk, The Red Barron…

Omer Fast’s film Five Thousand Feet Is Best takes its name from an excerpt of an interview between Fast and a Predator Drone aerial vehicle operator now based in Las Vegas and working as a casino security guard. The operator recalls his jobs in Afghanistan and Pakistan, activating the unmanned plane to fire at civilians and militia from the optimum height of five thousand feet.

As well as discussing his job, the operator talks of his current life. We learn that he has trouble sleeping – he plays video games for hours at night to unwind; yet the games have been the same ones, at the same level, for four years now. Like the video games that recur, forever the same, the film’s structure contains almost identical sequences and statements, suggesting an inability to process trauma on the part of the operator.

We see only the blurred form of the operator, and his voice is sometimes indistinct too (indeed, subtitles would have been of help in these parts of the film). For the large part Fast shows us reconstructions of the interview and memories, using actors and a more cinematic aesthetic. The re-enacted interview takes place inside a Las Vegas hotel room, the operator awkwardly propped-up on the bed, as if ambushed there by Diane Arbus for his portrait. There is no daylight or windows, and when the operator returns from gasping at a cigarette in the equally claustrophobic corridor, he becomes disorientated and knocks at the wrong door. The camera has been turned to point in the other direction so that we feel confused too; the space is identical to the left and the right.

Back in the room, we hear a painful beeping that is clearly experienced by the operator and not the interviewer. At each beep, the operator winces, and the interviewer asks him, ‘you alright?’ This question is just one of the recurring ones that structure the film. The actor operator is defensive, while the genuine one is more confessional: ‘there was such a loss of life as a direct result of me’, he says. Despite his frankness, we know that the operator broke off the interview with Fast, and often diverted the discussion to anecdotes from his current life policing the casino. His excuse was that ‘we tell these stories to make life a little less boring’, but it is clear that the stories offer an escape from memories and guilt rooted far from Las Vegas. This evasion technique becomes integral to Fast’s reconstructed footage, the interview constantly digressing into vignettes of casino fraud and robbery. Even in these episodes we encounter inconsistency, for example, in the story of a train robbery, we follow a black man up until the moment he gets caught. There is a jump cut back to the interview hotel room and the operator snaps ‘I didn’t say he was black. Who brought race into it?’ Then we jump back to the re-enactment, but the man acting the robber is now white. Fast is constantly provoking the audience’s certainty and empathy.

In addition to a constant undermining of what has been said, the film contains much ambiguity. As the operator describes a roadside bombing mission, we see an American family pack into a car and embark on a road trip. Leaving suburbia, they soon drive through terrain that might, it suddenly seems, be Middle Eastern. The voiceover offers no clarification; ‘In these parts of the country, it’s hard to get lost…’

Likewise, Fast interweaves aerial views from Las Vegas (including its version of Venice’s St Mark’s and Rialto, a disorientating experience in itself for those watching the film at the Biennale in Venice, Italy) with military aerial surveillance footage from the Middle East. This juxtaposition of pleasure and military flights only becomes more uncomfortable as we realise the American car trip narrative is about to collide with the Drone operation one. Thus the family’s car is caught in the fire from five thousand feet, and as the smoke clears, we see that its occupants are motionless and bloody.

Then, in a characteristic twist, Fast has the family get up from their slumped positions, clamber out of the wrecked car, and walk off set, exposing themselves as actors in the story. We watch, feeling duped and insecure – by now completely unable to trust what is shown us, and yet equally unable to feel nothing.

Fast’s 2007 film, The Casting, is a similar exploration of truth and reportage, this time of the American military presence in Iraq. Viewers are faced with one screen, and have to decide which side of it to watch: one side contains footage of Fast’s interview with a soldier, and the other, a re-enactment of the events discussed in the interview. The Casting becomes more complex, however, when we learn that the interview is also a re-enactment – as with Five Thousand Feet Is Best, we wonder what, if anything, we can trust. For a 2003 film, Spielberg’s List, Fast interviewed extras from Schindler’s List, many of who had lived through the Holocaust before re-enacting it in Spielberg’s film. The interviewees were thus both ‘real’ and actors. With this project too, an investigation of authenticity and witnessing was conducted through the context of film and its relation to trickery.

lieu de mémoire

2011-08-27T05:47:00.000-07:00

We may live without architecture and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her.

– John Ruskin

Exiled from Georgia during its civil war, artist Andro Wekua can only remember the architecture of his former home city, Sukhumi. Now working in Zurich and Berlin, Wekua has constructed fifteen architectural models based upon his memories and Internet photographs of buildings in Sukhumi. Much of his research has come from other Georgian exiles and their individual and collective memories of place. The models are arranged on a long platform that stretches through an entire room of the Arsenale’s Corderie, the space in which ropes were once corded and bound. We walk alongside the platform and Wekua’s constructed lieu de mémoire, piecing together facades, distortions and seeming absences.

Many of the buildings have the appearance of stage sets because Wekua remembers only their faces and most obvious details. Like Hans Op De Beeck’s film Silence, which explores the trickery inherent in scale models and theatricality, Wekua uses the inconsistency of memory to his creative advantage. Early in his novel Vertigo, W. G. Sebald discusses the unreliable and easily manipulated nature of memory, the character Beyle recalling ‘a valley unfolding before him in the morning sun.’ We go on to learn that, ‘with severe disappointment […] some years ago, looking through old papers, [Beyle] came across an engraving […] and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving.’[1] Wekua’s (re)constructed memories are perhaps equally mediated, but with them he has made a point of departure, a departure into a future, unknown and elsewhere.

[1] Sebald, W.G. (originally 1990) (2002) Vertigo (trans. Hulse, M) London: Vintage p.5, 7, 8

from archive fever

2011-08-21T07:02:00.000-07:00

It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place...

The dwelling, this place where they dwell permanently marks this institutional passage from the private to the public, which does not always mean from the secret to the non secret. (It is what is happening, right here, when a house, the Freuds’ last house, becomes a museum: the passage from one institution to another.) With such a status, the documents, which are not always discursive writings, are only kept and classified under the title of the archive by virtue of a privileged topology.

The archontic principle of the archive is also a principle of consignation, thatis, of gathering together. p.10

What comes under theory or under private correspondence, for example? What comes under system? under biography or autobiography? under personal or intellectual anamnesis? In works said to be theoretical, what is worthy of this name and what is not? the limits, the borders, and the distinctions have been shaken by an earthquake from which no classificational concept and no implementation of the archive can be sheltered. Order is no longer assured. p.11

According to a proven convention, the exergue plays with citation. [a small space or inscription below the principal emblem on a coin or medal, usually on the reverse side. late 17th cent.: from French, from medieval Latin exergum, from ex- ‘out’ + Greek ergon ‘work’ (probably as a rendering of French hors d'oeuvre ‘something lying outside the work’ ).] To cite before beginning is to give the key through the resonance of a few words, the meaning or form of which ought to set the stage. In other words, the exergue consists in capitalizing on an ellipsis. In accumulating capital in advance and in preparing the surplus value of an archive. An exergue serves to stock in anticipation and to prearchive a lexicon which, from there on, ought to lay down the law and give the order, even if this means contenting itself with naming the problem, that is, the subject. In this way, the exergue has at once an institutive and a conservative function: the violence of a power (Gewalt) which at once posits and conserves the law [...] What is at issue here, starting with the exergue, is the violence of the archive itself, as archive, as archival violence.

It is thus the first figure of an archive, because every archive, we will draw some inferences from this, is at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional. An eco-nomic archive in this double sense: it keeps, it puts in reserve, it saves, but in an unnatural fashion, that is to say in making the law (nomos) or in making people respect the law. A moment ago we called it nomological. It has the force of law, of a law which is the law of the house (oikos), of the house as place, domicile, family, lineage, or institution. Having become a museum, Freud's house takes in all these powers of economy. p.12

There is no archive without a place of consignation, without a technique of repetition, and without a certain exteriority. No archive without outside.

Let us never forget this Greek distinction between mneme [Mneme was the muse of memory] or anamnesis [recollection, in particular the remembering of things from a supposed previous existence] on the one hand, and hypomnema [a reminder, a note, a public record] on the other. The archive is hypomnesic. And let us note in passing a decisive paradox to which we will not have the time to return, but which undoubtedly conditions the whole of these remarks: if there is no archive without consignation in an

external place which assures the possibility of memorisation, of repetition, of reproduc-

tion, or of re impression, then we must also remember that repetition itself, the logic of

repetition, indeed the repetition compulsion, remains, according to Freud, indissociable from the death drive. And thus from destruction. Consequence: right on what permits and

conditions archivization, we will never find anything other than what exposes to

destruction, in truth what menaces with destruction introducing, a priori, forgetfulness and the archiviolithic into the heart of the monument. Into the “by heart” itself. The archive always works, and a priori, against itself. The death drive tends thus to destroy the hypomnesic archive, except if it can be disguised, made up, painted, printed, represented as the idol of its truth in painting. Another economy is thus at work, the transaction between this death drive and the pleasure principle, between Thanatos and Eros, but also between the death drive and this seeming dual opposition of principles, of arkhai, for example the reality principle and the pleasure principle. The death drive is not a principle. It even threatens every principality, every archontic primacy, every archival desire. It is what we will call, later on, le mal d'archive, archive fever. p.14

... the archive, as printing, writing, prosthesis, or hypomnesic technique in general is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without the archive, one still believes it was or will have been. No, the technical structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its relationship to the future. The archivisation produces as much as it records the event. p.17

Jacques Derrida 'Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression' Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Summer, 1995)

architectural mnemonics

2011-08-20T12:07:00.000-07:00

[I am currently working for the Arts Council of Wales at the Venice Biennale. Influenced by Frances Yates’ The Art of Memory, a book that explores the ancient rhetorical device of using architectural space as a mnemonic, I am interested in interpreting routes through Venice using monuments to trigger memory. A monument, from the Latin monere ‘remind’, might be anything from a statue to pastries in a window.

After building up an inventory of mnemonics, a route of memories formed.]

Danish Pavilion

2011-08-20T06:44:00.000-07:00

Agency

Curator Katerina Gregos focuses on the contemporary and contentious subject of freedom of speech. Speech Matters comes at a time in which we might appear to be free to say or publish what we want, but in reality are extremely restricted. Denmark is known for its liberality, and in 2005 cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad were published and caused a global political debate. More recently, Google has been suppressed in China, Facebook used as a tool in North African uprising, Blackberry messaging in English riots, not to mention headlines caused by News of the World phone-tapping and Wikileaks.

Gregos’ exhibition is powerful not because of any revelations of usually suppressed material, but because of its examination of the grey areas around freedom of speech. The exhibition demonstrates the impossibility of programmatic or prescriptive legislation when so much material exists on ‘borderline’ territory that is highly subjective and contextual.

The collective Agency presents an archive of material – text, clothing, logos, music records and currency – each of which has faced trial on the grounds of intellectual property violation. The items are arranged in shelved wooden boxes, which viewers can request to be put on display on one of the tables adjacent. The storage, tables and stainless steel hanging lamps recall Ikea rather than a traditional archive or a contemporary web archive. Overall, this aesthetic is too kitcheny, and the sides of the wooden boxes are frustratingly high, preventing us from seeing much of their contents.

The concept, on the other hand, opens a very worthwhile and complex debate around intellectual property, especially when the items under discussion are folk art – anonymously produced, untitled, and themselves often a melange of other influences. Considered in the context of much contemporary art that appropriates imagery and footage – Christian Marclay’s The Clock being a celebrated example here at the Biennale – Agency’s exploration raises a much needed question about the relevance of copyright laws, and their need of updating.

Agency

Chinese artist Zhang Dali has also created an archive, this time framed meticulously on the wall off to the left of Agency. Exploring the fabrication of memory during China’s Mao regime, Dali has collected original press photographs of political events, together with their retouched ‘doubles’. Often the original contains a person erased from the ‘official’ published copy – a person whose ideas or actions contradicted the state’s ideology. Both the large number of doctored images, and the extent to which they are altered makes the game of ‘spot the difference’ that we play very shocking. Of course, what Dali’s piece also provokes is a questioning of our own nation’s media as well as our personal use of Photoshop-style amelioration. To a lesser or greater extent, we all alter our memories.

Zhang Dali

Another interesting artist in Gregos’ show is Taryn Simon, who presents us with images usually suppressed in America. Here are photographs of Playboy in Braille, the contraband room at JFK Airport (a still life of bush meat, pig’s heads, eggs, mangos and African cane rats), and most disturbing of all, an inbred white tiger in Arkansas, his flat nose and pale eyes mad-looking. Indeed, the caption for this last photo explains that selective breeding results in tigers that are mentally retarded and suffer respiratory and joint problems. Through a simple format of image and caption, Simon reveals not only individual case studies but also a wider issue of a nation’s representation and projected self-image. If the uncanny is something usually hidden coming to light, then the appalling tiger seems to epitomise the uncanny in this exhibition. It is an exposition of what others have tried to hide.

Taryn Simon

Performing Writing

2011-08-15T10:26:00.000-07:00

'[Performative language] does not describe, in a narrowly reportorial sense, an objectively verifiable event or process but uses language like paint to create what is self-evidently a version of what was, what is, and/ or what might be.

'What I want to call performative writing (often felt in a flash or, per Turner, a "flicker") collapses distinctions by which creative and critical writing are typically isolated.

'...suggesting an in-between, "liminoid" field of possibility, a field of hybrid, mixed forms that exceed categorical distinctions...

‘[Performative writing] requires that the writer drop down to a place where words and the world intersect in active interpretation, where each pulses, cajoles, entrances the other into alternative formations, where words press into and are deeply impressed by "the sensuousness of their referents.”’

Pollock, D 'Performing Writing’ in Phelan, P and Lane, J (eds) (1998) The Ends of Performance New York: New York University Press p.80-81

Arsenale and elsewhere

2011-08-15T05:50:00.000-07:00

Gerard Byrne

Recalling aesthetics of Conceptual Art, Land Art documentation and archival practices, Gerard Byrne explores the myth of the Loch Ness Monster, and the conventions and contexts of exhibition. Byrne’s installation at the Arsenale comprises an audio text, 16mm projection, analogue photography and objects in a vitrine.

From the early 1930s, the tabloid media began publishing reports of Loch Ness sightings in a bid to increase newspaper sales. Byrne begins with this idea of (mis)use of images, and creates an installation that provokes conflict between belief and disbelief.

The installation is appealing because of its earnest concentration on what appears to be spurious and a subject of ridicule – a monster in a lake – but of course, one we view it through the contexts of historical media and a contemporary engagement in questioning images, then Byrne’s choice makes more sense. Nevertheless, there is a charm in viewing the work superficially, and a reading of this kind is part of the process of engaging with, disengaging with, and ultimately questioning, images’ reliability.

Gerard Byrne

Future Generation Art Prize – Ziad Antar

Lebanese photographer Ziad Antar’s film and photographic installation currently on show at The Future Generation Art Prize in Palazzo Papadopoli invites layers of interpretation in a similar way to Byrne’s. Terres de pomme de terre is an investigation of the potato industry in the Lebanon. Read simply as this, the subject matter appears pleasingly bathetic in comparison with the delicate 16mm projection and stills displayed in the Palazzo’s piano nobile. However, as with Byrne, there is a far more political investigation running through the work. Antar presents the images with little information, and it is exactly this understatement that encourages us to think of context – the global food industry, employment and the effects of war.

Ziad Antar

Fernando Prats

Chile Pavilion – Fernando Prats

For the Chilean pavilion at the Arsenale, Fernando Prats also employs a variety of media to present his investigations into three places and events: the Chaiten volcano in Chile, its earthquake in 2010, and the explorer Ernest Shackleton’s time in the Antarctic. Prats is interested in the inhospitable and sublime affects of these places on both people, the built and natural environment, and material itself (he creates ‘paintings’ by letting smoke or ash from the volcano mark paper and fabric). On the pavilion’s exterior gable Prats has hung a neon sign previously installed in the Antarctic region visited by Shackleton, which reads:

"Wanted: Men for a dangerous journey. Low wages, extreme cold, long months of total darkness, constant danger, safe return not guaranteed. Honour and recognition in case of success.”

This message was written by Shackleton, but here it reads as an equally effective introduction to the pavilion. In the first room we see a digital video of the Antarctic, shot from the air, and three maps that echo the video’s aerial perspective. The maps are smoke damaged and markings that indicate the locations of the earth’s plates and fractures. In the second room are two films projected simultaneously side-by-side, documenting Chile in the aftermaths of the volcano and earthquake. Houses are warped into uncanny shapes or floating amidst debris. Opposite the projections is a wall of smoke and ash paintings, and to their right, two large vitrines containing further examples of paper and cloth damaged by the elements, and the names of the victims of the disasters. The most poignant objects are the cloth ones, dresses and pillowcases are hung neatly on a line in one of the vitrines. The cloth is now smoky-white and not quite corpse-like, suspended in a tragic archaeological stasis contrasting the motion and residual life seen in the adjacent projections.

Fernando Prats

Instituto Italo-Latino Americano – Cuba – Reynier Leyva Novo

If Prats’ pavilion might be read as a large-scale vanitas, then the work of Cuban artist Reynier Leyva Novo for the Instituto Italo-Latino Americano produces a similar condensation of time and loss, here in a literal and alchemical process. Novo has collaborated with a historian and a perfume maker to create three scents that derive from Cuban battle sites in the 19^th century. The three battles were for the country’s independence, and Novo has chosen plants, soil specimens and water from their sites to recreate a sense of place and history. How far he succeeds in this is questionable however, in that the perfumes we smell (on sample cards placed before the bottles, which are themselves in vitrines) are delicious haute-parfums whose associations are more Harrods than battleground. While smell is one of the most evocative senses, the descriptions of the battles that hang above their respective perfumes are at odds with their smells and presentation. If the irony here is intentional, then Novo invites a debate around the commodification of history and glorification of war, but this is not wholly obvious and so the work feels somewhat unresolved.

Reynier Leyva Novo

Instituto Italo-Latino Americano – Chile – Sebastían Preece

Archaeology of the earthy and subterranean is Chilean artist Sebastían Preece’s subject for his contribution to the Instituto Italo-Latino Americano pavilion. Preece dug under the foundations of an adobe house in Southern Chile, hoping to find items that would inform him of the family history of its inhabitants. What he found, however, was a collection of books pertaining to the government and territorial policies of the country between the 1950s and 1970s, opening his investigation to a far broader and more political scale. The books are in various degrees of decay, and are displayed in a table vitrine like relics from the distant past.

Sebastían Preece

Dayanita Singh

Dayanita Singh

Indian artist Dayanita Singh also uses books and the archive as a subject, in her case in large format, square black and white photographs on display in the Arsenale. The series, entitled File Room, recalls Alain Resnais’ film Tout la Mémoire du Monde in its scenes inside the vast and Babel-like Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. Singh’s photographs depict an overwhelming accumulation of now decaying papers, the entropic process evoking a passage of W G Sebald’s novel Austerlitz in which the new and much sanitised Bibliothèque nationale is contrasted with its former building (more like Singh’s file rooms), and also with a depot of goods taken from Parisian Jews by the Nazis that was formerly on the site of the new library. By describing the new library in terms of what it is not, and what its forebears were, Sebald creates a double portrait of 19^th century collection and mid-20^th century tabula-rasa architecture and organization. Singh only shows us the former version, towers of amassed and forgotten information. Like Sebald, however, she implies obsolescence in this form of collection through the lack of people in the file rooms. Moreover, though the images appear to be full of information, we can make nothing out of what the files may contain, who may work there, or even how large the complex of rooms may be. There is a suggestion that, although it may still exist in India, this sort of archive is under-visited and moribund in the face of the country’s rapidly advancing Internet and organization prowess.

Elisabetta Benassi

Elisabetta Benassi 

Archaic archives also underpin Elisabetta Benassi’s installation of nine microfiche readers in the Arsenale. The readers show the reverse sides of iconic newspaper photographs from the 20^th century, including The Beatles, Gandhi, and JFK. All we see, of course, is the captions or shorthand details used by the press. The captions are often tantalising – often evoking in us a memory the photograph we feel sure is on the other side of the screen. Each reader is married to a motor that automatically changes its slide, so that the viewer has no control over what is seen or for how long. At certain points, the motors accelerate so that all the readers swish through their slides in a fury of incomprehensible whiteness. The effect of this is tantalising too, because if we were mid-way through reading a clipping it is highly unlikely we will see it again. A feeling of panic at the infinite amount of information is thus created, although the Internet is more overwhelmingly large in this respect. The installation is certainly mannered in a mid-20^th century style, both in its content and its microfiche readers. It would be interesting to have had a second installation, perhaps in an adjacent room, with contemporary images and data projectors because this would have explored the acceleration of images circulated today, and the radical change in their form – the collection might include twitter feeds during the Iraq war, images of Egyptian protests or English looting uploaded from mobile-phones, and actually very little photography of the traditional press kind, as is displayed on the microfiches.

Nicolae Mircea

Future Generation Art Prize – Nicolae Mircea

Nicolae Mircea combines old and contemporary photographs and footage from his family and Romanian television to create his film on display at The Future Generation Art Prize in Palazzo Papadopoli. Romanian Kiosk Company mixes the personal with the political, weaving together the story of Romania’s turbulent history with Mircea’s own. Mircea’s father manufactured kiosks for use as bus stops, storage and vending. Their utilitarian structures and function don’t prevent them from being monumental, however, and it is by viewing them in this light that Mircea accesses his father’s past and the wider history of his country’s attempted self-sufficiency, modernist architecture, poverty and hardship. Mircea has built several replica kiosks, one of which is on display in a room adjacent to the film projection. The kiosk is a dalek-type construction of grey and blue, comically out of place in the ornate surroundings of Palazzo Papadopoli. This contrast is very clever, though, because it echoes Romania’s history: crumbling wealth and poor modernist construction sit together as evidence of the nation’s failed economic policy and collapse. Palazzo Papadopoli evokes both pre-Ceausescu culture and that which he imposed himself, built to extraordinary scale in his Palace in Bucharest. The rooms that Mircea occupies in the Palazzo are somewhat battered, reflecting Romania’s own architectural state; and the kiosk – awkwardly geometric in comparison to the plaster and carvings around it – stands for the strange forms of late-Ceausescu block architecture constructed and still visible in Romania. The central motif used in the film is a shot that looks straight down at a Romanian carpet, quite close up, upon which is laid photographs that are described by the voice over. We see Mircea’s hand place each photograph down in turn, and from these ‘headings’, the film moves into sequences of archive news video (including that of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu’s execution), architectural photographs and scenes of the father’s kiosks standing today in their post-Socialist context.

Yto Barrada

French artist Yto Barrada lives and works in Morocco, and has created an exhibition that performs in a way not dissimilar to Mircea’s, in terms of its combination of personal and political history, family and ‘outsiders’. My Family and Other Animals has two parts, one film based, and the other photographic. Barrada studied political science, and began taking photographs as a way of documenting people she met on field trips. Here though, she has turned to her own family roots in Morocco. There are large-format photographs of an old recipe book used by Barrada’s illiterate grandmother to record the telephone numbers of relatives (she had twelve children). We see the tally-style notation of numbers and zeros, arranged vertically down each page and corresponding to a scrawled image – usually a stick figure – representing the family member. The technique, using systems of mnemonic portraiture and tally in a recycled book, is fascinating when we are so accustomed nowadays – and in developed nations – to speed-dials and more importantly, literacy. The film exhibited is a collection of sixteen family myths narrated alternately in English and French, entitled Hand-Me-Downs. To accompany the myths, Barrada uses footage from many different home-movies belonging to families across Morocco, thus widening our focus to a more general and national investigation of oral history, tradition and inheritance. The voice-over and blurred original 16mm transferred to digital film lend it an intimate and nostalgic quality, as do the telephone book images. However, what rescues the exhibition from being merely nostalgic is its concentration on the duality of positive and negative aspects of Moroccan life – on the one hand, we see a powerful and dynamic oral history at work, but on the other, a percentage of its populace at disadvantage through under-education, when it comes to modern communication technology and globalisation.

Yto Barrada

Instituto Italo-Latino Americano – El Salvador – Walterio Iraheta

Representing a slice of everyday life in another culture through photography is also what Walterio Iraheta does in his project Faraway Brother Style at the Arsenale’s Instituto Italo-Latino Americano pavilion. The title is a parody of Taschen architectural books with titles such as Paris Style or New York Style. Faraway Brother is the euphemistic term for a relative who has moved from El Salvador to the USA to find work and to send money back to his relatives. The photographs depict houses built in the rural and developing areas of El Salvador, houses that have borrowed influences from American penthouses (themselves often strange hybrids of French chateau, English manor and Greek temple architecture). As much as question the taste and location of the architecture depicted, the photographs provoke a debate around why we find it kitsch or ridiculous. Iraheta’s piece reveals a phenomenon in aspiration and architecture but also invites us to wonder how long developing countries such as El Salvador will continue to look towards the West when Eastern and South American nations are developing so rapidly and ‘old’ empires are declining. The piece also invites a comparison between Faraway Brother Style and the Giardini’s pavilions – even in Venice we see the technique of pastiche, collage and exotic pick-and-mix, and so eclecticism is not to be thought of as primitive or only occurring in a poor nation.

Walterio Iraheta

Instituto Italo-Latino Americano – Colombia – Juan Fernando Herrán

Juan Fernando Herrán’s photographic quartet Escalas hangs opposite Iraheta’s images, and also documents architecture from a developing nation, this time Colombia. Herrán photographs staircases of all pitch and material, which are constructed ad hoc in favelas/ villas/ barrios across South America. He uses them as a metaphor for Colombian people’s aspirations and the its cities’ expansion, similar in this respect to Song Dong’s para-pavilions, also at the Arsenale.

Juan Fernando Herrán

Song Dong

Song Dong has recreated labyrinthine constructions from his native Beijing, entitled Intelligence of the Poor. The first para-pavilion is made from salvaged wardrobes that are often to be found on the streets in Beijing, where people store possessions once they have run out of space inside their homes. The idea of bringing interior furniture and possessions outside of the home, turning the homely inside out, is unheimlich to our unaccustomed eyes, and the installation is thus a fascinating insight into another way of thinking about space and intimacy. However, there are no possessions or shelves present (apart from a Ryan Gander vitrine) and the idea is only fully expressed in the explanatory Biennale text. The second para-pavilion is a far larger and more conceptually satisfying piece that echoes Herrán’s concentration on staircases as symptoms of expansion, this time in its towering upstairs extensions. In Beijing, residents are not allowed to build themselves upstairs extensions apart from if the extension is only for carrier pigeons. As a result of this rule, many households proceed to buy pigeons and build them lofts in order to gain that space for themselves. Dong’s family home is an example of this ingenuity, and here he has rebuilt it for us. We are not told of what substitute Dong has provided for his parents or the neighbourhood while the house is a pavilion in Venice, nor whether he will return it or has built a more modern version in its place. It would be an interesting sequel to the project to see this.

Birdhead

A few rooms further into the Arsenale’s main exhibition, moving on from Song Dong’s constructions, is an exhibition of photographs by the Chinese collective Birdhead, which is based in Shanghai and known for its photographic documentation of popular culture and contemporary urban life. The photographs are divided into colour and black and white ones, and a variety of portrait and landscape format, all unframed and pinned to the wall. The aesthetic of makeshift spontaneity runs throughout the work, the camera’s time code left on some of the many seemingly mundane or kitsch images. There are bars, strange ornaments, rainy pavements and football matches, as well as Chinese characters from street signs, arranged to form a classical poem from the Song Dynasty era that, like the photographs of everyday life, is largely familiar to the Chinese population. It is interesting to see what feels like a largely untranslated or Western-mediated depiction of contemporary Shanghai, different from images produced by the government around the time of the Beijing Olympics, and different to films or fashion-shoots that use China as a scenic background. Relating an alternative history of the contemporary or very recent is a valuable move in the context of the Biennale and such a global audience, and this is also what makes filmmakers Emily Wardill and Nick Relph’s pieces in the Arsenale so interesting.

Emily Wardill

Nick Relph

Emily Wardill

Emily Wardill is interested in obscure narratives and histories, juxtapositions of over-acting, voice-over and historically weighty material, and the material potential of film. In Sick Serena and Dregs and Wreck and Wreck, itself a peculiar and lyrical title, Wardill combines shots of stained glass (with their historical role of narrating religious stories to the illiterate) with readings from Ruskin on Gothicism, repetitious colloquial phrases spoken hesitantly, and anachronism (a Yellow Pages is consulted in place of a medieval bible). The film is on 16mm and seems to skid precariously on its tracks, the audio blurry, sometimes madly skipping, and the image jumps one-third of the way off the projection screen. This material precariousness complements the conceptual ambiguity of the film – we are left unsure exactly what has been shown us, but feeling somehow transfixed by it.

Nick Relph

Nick Relph’s film in the Arsenale has a similarly strange structure, as well as title. Thre Stryppis Quhite Upon ane Blak Field is a collage that combines three projections of documentaries about Ellsworth Kelly, the history of tartan, and a profile of the founder of Comme des Garçons. The audio flits between all three documentaries, and each ‘channel’ has its respective colour, blue, green and red. Interested in creating ‘alternative’ documentaries inspired by Patrick Keiller and Ian Sinclair’s investigations into neglected aspects of British life, Relph documents subcultures from skateboarding to farming. The results are appealingly awkward and unexpected.

Elad Lassry

Israeli artist Elad Lassry’s film Untitled (Ghost) is also a peculiar and engaging film that locates its 1970s aesthetic in what appears to be a dance studio or theatre. The backdrop is a plain mustard-coloured wall with a blind looking blocked window and elegant wainscots. A troop of dancers stands for the camera, poses, relaxes, and poses again. Because the film is silent we hear neither the instructions given them or the music to which they then dance. This silence has an eerie and distancing effect only increased by the technique of superimposing one of the figures in a semi-transparent state so that she appears like a ghost. Lassry invites a contemplation of cinema’s theatricality through this, as well as through the dancers’ posing and fake smiles. The cinema and photography show us what their maker wanted us to see, and had he edited out the dancers’ relaxed poses and frowns, we would be fooled into believing their ‘staged’ presence. Likewise, viewed as a fictional film, the ghostly dancer who joins the troop could be taken as an uncanny double come to haunt the rest. But with Lassry, we know it is exposing the trickery and artificial in is media that is his aim. Outside the projection room is a selection of his colour photographs, and they offer further insight into his practice. Some studio portraits and still lives of kitsch objects such as a scarlet toadstool illustrate his exploration of the artificial, taste and convention. One photograph shows a young man, his form doubled in the reflection on the table upon which he leans. His form doubles and parodies itself, a ghost bending before him.

Elad Lassry

Annette Kelm

Annette Kelm’s photographs, also in the Arsenale, are similar to Lassry’s in their doubling and exploration of taste. A wooden lampshade is photographed against a stark white ground, surgically sharp in detail and coldness. It is depicted again and again in identical scale and frames, each time at a different and precarious tilt as if it occupies a zero-space devoid of gravity or context. Other domestic objects are also made strange, potted plants forced up against synthetically lurid patterned fabric, like Matisses on acid. All looks uncanny and as if it smells of plastic.

Campo San Lorenzo

2011-08-10T12:58:00.000-07:00

Some collections sit uncomfortably at the edge of town. Stray animals, strip clubs, invalids.

When something repressed is annexed beside the accepted,

or comes to light, awkwardly formed or lurid,

a cat sneezes.

A husband watches a stripper.

Ruins are nailed shut; brought closer to a comprehensible stasis.

Closed doors are social blinkers.

Eyes boarded-up;

ragwort and knotweed between the paving.

The drains smell but nobody notices.

Plugholes are feared.

Every night offers a transition. The dead and the sleeping swap places.

Buildings assume dimensions

to trap us

in mouse-hole openings,

or loom

all over the darkness.

On the hottest day of the year

2011-08-10T12:38:00.000-07:00

the rural seaside town held its pageant. The residents wore their favourite clothes, or dressed-up as school girls, bears and wrestlers. Land Rovers were made into floats. Everyone’s dog was judged in the ring until a ball brought the competition to a halt. Under the new sun, pebble dash terraces looked foreign. B&B signs became backdrops.

Here, any era or nation’s influence was choreographed into an event.

Wales Pavilion

2011-08-09T08:31:00.000-07:00

Tim Davies is interested in places invested with layers of meaning, valued, altered, visited, neglected. The location of his exhibition for the Welsh Pavilion in the deconsecrated convent of Santa Maria Ausiliatrice suits his practice. Many visitors still go to the stoup and make a sign of the cross as they enter, and indeed, the altar, frescoes and basin are all still present.

The monuments to Santa Maria find a correspondence with the monuments in Davies’ video projections. His project on war monuments, Cadet, is shown here in three parts, the most vivid of which is projected onto a vast canvas that stands diagonally across the altar, lighting the cavernous space. For this film, Cadet (Running at Cardiff), Davies strapped a film camera to his chest and charged around and around a monument in central Cardiff. The monument becomes a mass of grey streaking across the canvas, momentarily registering as a column, lettering, a pair of carved angel wings. The wind and Davies’ breathing buffer the microphone, hitting us as we enter the room, combining with the audio from Cadet (Parade at Cardiff), which is projected opposite the altar. In the parade projection, the camera is stable and takes in row after row of cadet, police officer and marching band as they circle the Cardiff monument. The perspective rakes the marchers as if they’re a little out of step, and their bobbing helmets and white gloves accentuate every shuffle and false start. Off to the left, through the darkness into the sacristy, plays a third Cadet film, this time silent and focusing on a single young girl cadet as she stands for a memorial at Aberystwyth. Her head is bowed, and she frequently shuffles, giving the impression – as with the marching cadets – that the memorial is a site of uncomfortable pageantry. The cultural weight invested in ceremonial architecture and events suddenly seems peculiar, futile in the face of war, and oddly humorous.

Presenting a situation from which we may draw our own conclusions is a practice central to Davies’ work. For Figures, an artist book made between 2009 and 2010, Davies wrote descriptions of newspaper images throughout the year (Day 151: Many, many figures queuing for food… Figure in his kitchen… Two figures in conversation…), again presenting material without an overt political siding.

Indeed Bridges, located midway through the exhibition, is made through a literal and metaphorical erasure of ‘sides’. Davies collected some sixty postcards of bridges from around the world, erasing them with sandpaper until all was blank save for the image of the bridge. Sides of rivers, countries and cities disappeared, and the bridges became isolated figures, uncomplicated by context, and inviting a broader political debate around division.

Simplicity is key to Davies’ work, not only in Bridges and its location at the exhibition’s quiet fulcrum, but also in the video piece that follows. Drift is a silent projection onto freestanding canvas, made specifically in and for Venice. Making site-specific work in a city so art historically rich as Venice is a challenge, and Davies has approached it through simple motion. Rather than depicting Venice’s crumbling architecture, Davies shows us its image only as it appears in water reflection. The camera glides above the canal, filming Davies’ hand as he drifts along in a boat, skimming the water so that ripples reconfigure the buildings in reflection. While Drift may be seductive in its HD image and contemplative mood (in comparison with the running Cadet), and some may enjoy the age and experience of Davies’ hand that speaks for the aging buildings around him, Drift feels rather self-indulgent. Frari, situated in the final room of the exhibition, is a more interesting exploration of Venice, this time engaging in a particular architectural location.

Filmed in the tower of Santa Maria dei Frari, Frari recalls Kilkenny Shift, and earlier work by Davies that explored a staircase in Kilkenny Castle, and its linkage of upstairs society with downstairs’ identity of submission. This time though, the staircase leads from the ground level of everyday life – we hear the hum of tourists’ voices – up the spiral ramp to the top of the tower, where its bell tolls and marks it as a space of spiritual illumination. Davies ran up the tower taking still photographs and recording both the rising sound of the bells and the diminuendo of the crowd below. The bells reach deafening levels as we, embodied in the camera, emerge at the top of the tower, our ears ringing. There is white light from over-exposure, as well as white noise. Gradually architectural details such as rooftops become apparent, and aeroplanes sound in the distance. Before we have time to adjust, the descent begins, down and down into darkness and back to the beginning. Frari is architecture experienced viscerally, a literal rush to the core of a building, and an exploration of religious and emotional place. In this sense, it brings us back to the first Cadet’s similar sense of rushing, to places’ cultural importance, and to Davies’ interest in why society has invested in them.

Olivetti/ Scarpa

2011-08-07T04:10:00.000-07:00

The Olivetti Typewriter showroom, designed Carlo Scarpa. 1958. Concealed side-door as if leading to an Egyptian tomb. Water-door to canal more Japanese, with teak grate and a lower floor level to allow for flooding. Pumping system installed. Murano glass mosaic floor in colours denoting areas and uses. Side entrance blue. Front entrance red. Aurisina marble, both polished and left unfinished by turn. Shadow-gaps. A space for promenading.

Floating staircase. Slidable shelving, delicately anchored.
Oval windows onto St Mark’s Square, with sliding teak and rosewood grates.

Liston, an afternoon stroll, takes place in the Square.

Liste – a strip of Istrian marble paving there.

Museo Fortuny

2011-08-04T08:17:00.000-07:00

Tra, Edge of Becoming is the title given to Museo Fortuny’s current exhibition. In Italian, tra means in between, inside, amongst or betwixt, and in Welsh, during or whilst. It is a common suffix – mantra deriving from man- (think) -tra (tool). With the subtitle Edge of Becoming, therefore, we sense an exploration of transitions and liminal states of enquiry.

Museo Fortuny, Spanish costume and theatrical designer Mariano Fortuny’s former palazzo, contains coloured glass windows, long daises, and hangings on rough plastered walls. Some of the hangings and wall parts are framed, joining the precious exhibits. The curation of the museum and Tra is very discreet, paintings hung almost invisibly from taut wires, or small hooks supporting fragments of ancient carvings. Fortuny’s own easels and shelves are used instead of plinths, their battered bodies at once characterful and discreet enough to fit into the setting. Cupboard doors stand open, discreet spotlights inside illuminating engraved artists books, Asian manuscripts, automatons and video screens. Abstract Expressionism sits alongside Muslim prayer rugs, contemporary films and ancient Chinese figures. The exhibition is syncretic, borrowing from a vast array of cultures and time periods. Theatrical lights illuminate some of the pieces, and set the scene for an exhibition and palazzo filled with theatre.

There are many model sets and theatres, inviting puppet shows and make-believe, many made by Fortuny during the 1920s. The larger models are parked like cinquecentos, round and robust. Their backs of plaster and wood are visible, as are their working mechanisms. Architectural models by Venetian Artisans from the 18^th century are also present, alongside costumes, including Fortuny’s crepe Delphos dresses, and a peacock feather dress from 1991 by Calugi E Giannelli.

Hans Op De Beeck’s film Silence (2009) is projected in HD onto a rough plaster wall above a doorway, literally on a threshold. A play with scale, in the film we see a hand arrange small scale furniture, trees or window frames on a white ground so that it looks like a real landscape or interior. The hand constantly alters the configuration, at one point pouring salt across the surface to imitate snowdrifts. The film’s playful music adds to its dynamic quality. Almost real, but constantly inviting the imagination, De Beeck’s film complements Marco Tirelli’s painting whose acrylic stain is barely visible as it mistily delineates the base of a doorway and a threshold – again recollecting liminal sites of transition and the Tra title.

A Matthew Barney print of a masked man on stage in an empty theatre, from Cremaster V: Her Diva joins the theatrical collection, alongside copies of Masters, done by Fortuny himself. There is a sense of conjuring beautiful or intriguing objects – Fortuny’s enjoyment in collection and display is continued.

Kim Sooja’s mysterious bundles of Japanese and Korean fabric dot the four floors of the piazza, and there is a room devoted to James Turrell’s light installation. The luxury of having such a rich collection – especially one filled with spectacles and curiosities – is apt for Venice and Fortuny.

A video entitled The Tenant by Rivane Neuenschwander and Cao Guimarães follows a bubble as it floats around a house, gracefully navigating corners and walls that threaten to burst it. The film is beautiful, but on the verge of becoming disturbing, as is Stromboli, Marina Abramović’s black and white film on display in the attic. We see her lying face upwards on a beach as waves near, sometimes making her gasp as they wash over her. Doris Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios, shoes inserted into the wall and covered by a gauze, appear at first gem-like. But as with the Abramović film, the piece soon becomes threatening, with its connotations of victims’ clothes in a collection. Atrabiliarios means defiant in Spanish, and the piece certainly defies settling into a merely decorative role.

With these pieces in mind, all the others in the exhibition take on a different role, slipping between readings and performing ambiguously – the museum is a theatre of imagination.

Great Britain’s Pavilion

2011-08-04T04:41:00.000-07:00

Mike Nelson has recreated the Büyük Valide Han, a vast 17^th century Istanbul caravanserai (inn with a central courtyard), filled with low ceilings, steps, and dusty darkroom equipment. We enter the British pavilion through its central door, but are immediately splintered off to the left, down a dim corridor and into a labyrinth of rooms – experiencing similar disorientation as with Nelson’s installation Coral Reef (2000) at Tate Britain.

The installation, entitled I, Impostor, is not wholly believable, its walls somewhat hollow, and its ceiling trapdoors opening into the backstage void of modern plasterboard and reinforcements (as demonstrated by an invigilator). However, the overall effect is impressive, and most exciting when considered for its exploration of fiction and authenticity. According to the New York Times, Mike Nelson’s exhibition for Great Britain’s pavilion is a feat of trompe l’oeil,[1] while Adrian Searle at the Guardian diagnoses it as the modern picturesque.[2]

While these comments seem appropriate enough, the media coverage of Nelson’s pavilion seems somewhat neglectful of its potentially problematic form. The issue at stake is that I, Impostor is a restaged work originally made for the 2003 Istanbul Biennale, yet many reviews judge it as if it were an original, made for the Venetian context. For the Istanbul Biennale, Nelson used the original caravanserai, instructing the visitor to enter it and follow the seemingly fresh trail he made that was supposedly that of a photographer who had been developing photographs there minutes before (the Impostor of the title might therefore be the photographer or the visitor). The effect, according to Charles Darwent of the Independent, was Mary Celeste-ish,[3] and the setting, that time, absolutely real. For Venice, however, the caravanserai is a set, immersive though it may be. Nelson wanted to realize his memory of the Büyük Valide Han in Venice, and therefore set about reconstructing it ad-hoc, with no drawn plans and in a manner he likens to method acting.[4]

While it is true that Istanbul has always had trading links to Venice, and therefore one can detect likenesses in their architecture, to correlate I, Impostor to Venice in this way, at the expense of reading it as an interesting experiment in restaging or duplication, is a pity. A more fruitful Venetian correspondence might be made, however, between the architectural fiction at play in Nelson’s installation, the Giardini and Venice itself – they are all facades of mixed styles, materials and details borrowed from abroad. The Giardini can almost feel like Venturi’s Las Vegas in this respect, each nation’s pavilion a different, stylized sign. Great Britain’s pavilion is its former teahouse, a colonial style building with pillars, front steps and a central courtyard. One might imagine that with Nelson’s help, Britain is continuing Venice’s and its own import and export business, and an orientalist taste for exotic recreation.

[1] Smith, R (08/06/11) New York Times [http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/09/arts/design/the-54th-venice-biennale-sedate-and-pumped-up-review.html?pagewanted=all]

[2] Searle, A (01/06/11) The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jun/01/venice-biennale-mike-nelson-british-pavilion-review]

[3] Darwent, C (05/06/11) The Independent

[http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/i-impostor-british-pavilion-venice-2293005.html]

[4] Withers, R (03/06/11) The Guardian [http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2011/jun/03/mike-nelson-venice-biennale]

Lithuanian Pavilion

2011-08-04T03:12:00.000-07:00

Ground floor entrance to the Lithuanian Pavilion at Scuola S. Pasquale.

Upstairs in the Scuola S. Pasquale at San Francesco della Vigna, Darius Mikšys’ exhibition Behind the White Curtain asks whether an exhibition can represent a nation and its art scene in a contemporary, globalised context. Drawing inspiration from a seminal survey of Lithuanian art held in 1907, Mikšys has gathered Lithuanian art from the past twenty years and stored it behind the white curtain that divides the exhibition room in two. The pieces are catalogued in thick white books available to the visitor who can then select pieces to be brought from behind the curtain and viewed. The survey Mikšys has gathered comprises artists awarded prizes and grants by the Lithuanian state, so in this sense, the curator is the state and not Mikšys. In pleasing contrast to this bredth and anonymity of the selection, the individual viewer can choose his or her choice and leave the other 170 or so artists behind the curtain. However, one is left with a feeling of artificial choice – what if one wanted to see Lithuanian performance art? Presumably the invigilators could not conjure a troop of performers from behind the curtain. The same problem of representation arises with site-specific and installation art, or artists who may not have wanted their work to become part of the state’s collection. Behind the White Curtain takes on more of an auction house atmosphere in this respect, with the artwork that is most easily transported and comprehendible in a short space of time becoming ‘the best’. Apparently many visitors enquire whether they can purchase the artwork, no doubt as a result of this.
Behind the White Curtain is fun, and an interesting concept, especially as it becomes performative once activated by the selection of the viewer (an invigilator makes a note of the selection, disappears behind the curtain, and then returns, his white gloves carrying the print, sculpture, video or painting). But the issue of representation – or a lack of representation – is left frustratingly unresolved.

Czech and Slovak Republic Pavilion

2011-08-03T08:05:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of W G Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, a depot of items taken by the Nazi party from Parisian Jews is said to be buried under the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. This fact resonates with the main character’s story, because Jacques Austerlitz is excavating his repressed memories and the collective past of his generation of wartime exiles. The depot’s subterranean collection feels at once familiar and utterly strange to him. His life is punctuated by encounters with photographs and fragmentary histories that perform a similar déjà-vu to the items in the depot.

Dominik Lang’s collection of sculptures made by his father in the 1950s is also both foreign and familiar to him – coming from an era other than his own (he was born in 1980), and yet intensely personal. The sculptures allow him to access his father, and they also activate themselves in their contemporary context, making us contemplate the passage of time between their creation and this year’s 54th Biennale in Venice. While Sebald’s novel involves a very particular Czech post-Holocaust experience that is not present in Lang’s work, its treatment of the past’s objects and monuments is the same, disturbing original contents and proposing new readings.

Here in the pavilion, the sculptures are arranged like tombs in Père Lachaise cemetery (the exhibition is appropriately entitled The Sleeping City) and we are invited to wander amongst them.

Austrian Pavilion

2011-08-03T07:42:00.000-07:00

Markus Schinwald is interested in legs. His exhibition for Austria radically disrupts the walker’s path through Josef Hoffmann’s original 1934 pavilion by adding floating walls that corridor the space, and a 7 metre high doorway at the entrance. As one navigates the labyrinth of white walls, a low-level view of other visitors’ legs becomes key to the exhibition. Their legs somehow look artificial and symptomatic of the manipulating space. Two films are projected in either flank of the building, and they too explore bodily discomfort produced by architecture. Characters located in a disused industrial structure and a domestic interior perform routines – raise legs, turn arms, become trapped in niches – which emphasise experiences of architectural uncanny. After watching the films, having entered the exhibition in such a constricted way, the 19^th century portrait paintings over which Schinwald has painted muzzles and braces continue our sense of unease. We find legs if we look up too, this time from chairs and tables – dismembered and hanging over the walls and window ledges.

Criticism of a 19^th century preoccupation in self-correction is explicit in the paintings and furniture, but where Schinwald’s exhibition is most interesting is in its contemporary implications. There is a widespread feeling that much modern architecture rejects the body as inspiration and client. In The Architectural Uncanny, Anthony Vidler discusses buildings that are either fragmented like a dismembered body, or estranged from any anthropometric proportions altogether. Such buildings can be difficult to navigate, rest in or even contemplate; they are unheimlich, unhomely, and uncanny, incapable of being understood. One leaves the exhibition with the impression that Schinwald is attacking 19^th century bodily restraint, and its equivalent in contemporary dehumanised architecture. But these two issues lie outside the Giardini, and if Schinwald is basing his exhibition on them, then his location in Hoffmann’s pavilion is problematic. The original pavilion feels comfortable and proportioned to the body, and in little need of an architectural intervention. However, it is perhaps exactly its spatial ease that Schinwald enjoys undermining, with the suggestion that all buildings, to a greater or lesser extent, manipulate our bodies.

Portugal and Cyprus Pavilions

2011-07-23T03:45:00.000-07:00

In a warehouse on the Grand Canal, beams of light shine through rafters, across each other and onto screens and tree branches. Francisco Tropa has created a laboratory of magic lanterns, a room of curiosities. Light shines through a bluebottle and magnifies it as large as a peacock. At another table, water from a pipette drips through the light beam, moving in curves on the wall opposite. Across the room an hourglass sifts minutes before its lantern, emptying load after shadowy load. Here in Portugal’s pavilion is an enquiry into scale, distances of space and time travelled, and a particular stillness that bounces, dances.

Francisco Tropa for Portugal

Cyprus’ pavilion is precise, framed, and lit like a theatre. On one hand, the presentation is pleasing, but on the other, frustrating. Elizabeth Hoak-Doering’s writing machines made from engines, furniture and graphite sticks make intriguingly organic marks, while casting angular shadows, but the upstairs space of Palazzo Malipiero is too low and narrow, and thus deprives them of much impact. Some marks evoke splinter-like lines on a map, and in so doing, complement Marianna Christofides’ maps, which are laser-engraved onto thick paper and placed onto tabletop light-boxes. Whether these maps are real or fictional is unclear, as is their purpose – they might be industrial, defensive, or utopian town planning. Certainly a twentieth century era of exploration, cartography and control is conjured, and continues in Christofides’ meticulously framed found photographs of railway systems and colonial territories. But as with the exhibition as a whole, these images are too easy to skim past because their neatness is a barrier between the content and our reception.

Elizabeth Hoak-Doering for Cyprus

Marianna Christofides for Cyprus

Scotland Pavilion

2011-07-23T03:43:00.000-07:00

Venice is full of masks. From facades of palazzos to carnival masks, a masked identity both flaunts and disguises. Karla Black’s nearly-objects – towers of polystyrene and pigment, tutus of pastel-coloured plastic, and blocks of soap – are masks. They flaunt their impracticality, like flamingos hanging over perfumed eggs; yet they conceal or refuse a meaning: there is no meaning, no metaphor, says Black.

Black’s explanations are nearly-explanations too, hovering between contradiction and reticence. While she is adamant her work is not symbolic or referential, and stands for nothing but itself, she sites psychoanalysis and theories of language for explanation, and titles her work with emotionally charged names (‘Expressions Are Hurting, Move Outside’, ‘At Fault’, ‘Help Is Not Appealing’, ‘Don’t Depend’). She says these names act as assertions that Black encourages the viewer to contradict, likening this experience of having a title ‘argue’ with its artwork to that of being taught the definition of a sculpture at art school, and wanting to contradict this ever-since.

Precarious and decadent, Black’s fake-tan sprayed sugar-paper and scattered soil fill the top floor of the palazzo. Black is an obvious selection for her curator, Edinburgh’s Fruitmarket gallery, given the Scottish Pavilion’s location in Venice’s Palazzo Pisani. Her work fits right in. Visitors ask whether Black has painted the panelled walls their baby-pink and pistachio colours, and stencilled the gold edging to the doors and fireplace, but in fact, the architecture is original. Black has also gleaned inspiration from a palazzo across the canal, supposedly once the house of Casanova. The scroll motif on its windows, combined with Palazzo Pisani’s fireplace surround, finds its shape in Black’s ripped brown paper hangings. As I walk home from the exhibition, meringues in a nearby bakery, and a papered-up window further along, remind me of Black’s nearly-objects. Venice’s crumbling walls and campaniles are also similar. And as the city has to be restored, its foundations strengthened here and there, its campos swept, so do Black’s pieces. Exhibition and city alike are impractical. The invigilators have powder brushes and hairspray for touch-ups, and two floor-based polythene sculptures filled with Vaseline leaked in the heat and damaged the floor. They were removed, but left two patches, pale and shiny. Unfortunately, the smell of Lush soap (Black’s sponsors) distances the work from its location, and deters the viewer from staying longer.

Papered-up window.

Meringue

Casanova’s house, perhaps.

Mexico and Singapore Pavilions

2011-07-23T02:59:00.000-07:00

For Mexico’s pavilion at Palazzo Rota Ivancich, Melanie Smith is exhibiting films, paintings and objects in vitrines. The most engaging piece is the 12-minute film showing on the piano nobile. ‘Xilitla: Dismantled 1’ made in collaboration with Rafael Ortega.

An assortment of battered dining chairs form an auditorium on the Palazzo’s parquet floor, beyond which are some curtains and panelling that suggest the space of a theatre. There are green gels on the windows, preparing us with their jungle light for the film that follows. A seductive combination of old and new technologies, ‘Xilitla’ is filmed on 35 mm and transferred to digital projection, with some burning visible at the bottom of the frame. Projected in a vertical format, the convention for landscape format is undermined, and in its place a format that better suits the peculiarly vertical statues that are the subject of the film.

La Pozas, Xilitla is a sculpture garden in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, made between 1962 and 1984 by artist and poet Edward James. Containing 36 concrete sculptures in 20 acres of tropical jungle, the garden is a celebration of entropy and surrealism. The film is as playful as James’ vision. At one point a finger is held up to the camera, the same size of the statue of a finger revealed to be towering behind it. At another point a woman in an orange swimsuit flashes onto the frame, goes, and then reappears equally quickly, this time with an old man standing behind her. There is no explanation for this kind of event, although visual parallels provide some form of narrative. For example, later in the film we see the woman, ghostly transparent this time, as if part of a double-exposure on our minds that will not fade away.

Although there is a voice element, it is not subtitled and as a result feels secondary to the non-verbal audio. The surround sound is integral to the film’s dynamism. The spoken voice fades into a chorus of crickets; fireworks bang and fizz, and it rains. Clanks of lights being switched on and off around the garden are timed perfectly to form a staccato rhythm. Sometimes non-diegetic and ominously low chords resonate, again, as inexplicable as the appearance of the woman in the orange swimsuit.

Some scenes are also visually rhythmic, echoing each other poetically: water is poured into an earth indent, and later, sand into sand. Each act of pouring is cut, and then repeated, achieving legerdemain by a ‘jump’ that plays with optics and timing.

A preoccupation with optics pervades the film. The camera’s lens focuses and unfocuses; the garden contains aperture-like holes in its architecture; mirrors are carried through branches and across a pool and waterfall. Sometimes we see a hand or a leg supporting the mirror, and sometimes it appears as an illusion, slicing a reflected image through the existing one. Mirrors hang from twines too, sweeping one image out and into another as the breeze moves them. At times we see through the mirror glass, and add yet another view to the collection.

Xilitla is a heterotopia: Foucault’s concept of a garden of contrasting places, styles and eras – here English poeticism meets Mexican jungle, European surrealism and tribal totems. The mirror too is a concept employed by both Foucault and Smith to explore a space that is both real and unreal, an ambiguous double that haunts and supports its original. A heterotopia is a built utopia; in becoming ‘real’ it loses its former ideal, and is pollinated by other influences. This fruitful transformation is evident not only in the garden of Xilitla, but also in the film, its location in Venice, and in the lives of both James and Smith, Britons relocated in Mexico.

Melanie Smith for Mexico

‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ is a film by Ho Tzu Nyen, projected in the upper-floor of S.S Filippo e Giacomo del Museo. The beanbags provided for the audience to flop on are of a similarly large proportion as the screen, and as luxurious as the surround sound. As in Melanie Smith’s film ‘Xilitla: Dismantled 1’ at the Mexican pavilion, sound is integral to Nyen’s film. Sharply edited, every breath and footstep resonates to the rafters of the ceiling.

Hyen explores the idea of the cloud as an impediment and aid to spiritual enlightenment. The film contains eight characters in apartments located in a deserted housing block in Singapore. When each of the characters encounters a cloud, their experience is immersive, rather than comprehensible, and this is also the experience for the viewer. Clouds, on screen if not above Venice’s rooftops, bathe us in a sonorous, opaque and haptic experience.

Ho Tzu Nyen for Singapore