Indepth Arts News:
"Animal Instincts: Allegory and Anthropomorphism"
2007-09-22 until 2007-11-11
ATHICA, Athens Institute for Contemporary Art
Athens, GA, USA United States of America
Since the dawn of time, animals have inspired our artistic impulses. From prehistoric cave paintings to the half-beast gods and monsters of the ancient world, from medieval hunting scenes to the 19th century animalier tradition, and from the fables of Aesop to the corporate mascots and blockbuster animated features of contemporary popular culture, it is clear that the human-animal connection is one of the most primordial and persistent relationships in all of civilization. We lay our babies down to sleep with stuffed bears and tales of frog princes, hapless pigs, and the Big Bad Wolf. And it's no surprise that when a child first takes crayon to paper, animals are among their earliest discernible images. Included in the exhibition is Ellen Jantzen who has been a Premiere Portfolio Artist at absolutearts.com since 2003.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Kenny Aguar (Athens, GA), Matt Blanks (Athens, GA), Jill Carnes (Athens, GA); Andrew Cayce (Athens, GA); Louise Zjawin Francke (Efland, NC); Joe Havasy (Athens, GA); Ellen Jantzen (Valencia, CA); Heidi Jensen (Jacksonville Beach, FL); Billie Grace Lynn (Miami, FL); Jessica May (St. Louis, MO); Jacqueline Meeks (Nashville, TN); Rosemary Mendicino (Athens, GA); Diane Meyer (California); Blake Sanders (New Orleans, LA); Dorothy Schultz (Trumbull, CT); Dan Smith (Athens, GA); Beth Thompson (Athens, GA); Margi Weir (Placitas, NM); Jeffrey Whittle (Athens, GA)
Yet what is it about these furry, feathered, scaly, and slimy creatures that so captivates us—these supposedly senseless beings upon whose flesh we feast, whose labors we relied upon to build our civilizations and conquer uncharted lands, whose fangs and claws we fear, whose habitats we plunder and pave over, and whose antics provide us with endless entertainment?
From the wacky cartoony wonderlands of local Athenians such as Jill Carnes, Joe Havasy, Andrew Cayce, and Dan Smith to the creepy psycho-sexual situations portrayed by the likes of Heidi Jensen and Kenny Aguar, to the moral complexities of animal rights issues present in works by Jessica May, Louise Zjawin Francke, and Ellen Jantzen, "Animal Instincts: Allegory & Anthropomorphism" invites viewers to consider human-animal parallels from a fresh contemporary perspective.
WAR & ANIMAL ALLEGORY
The gallery is dominated by nationally renowned Miami artist Billie Grace Lynn's 30-foot inflatable, Dead Mouse. This absurdly oversized gory reinterpretation of an American icon offers a poignant statement on emptiness and innocence lost in an era of unrestrained capitalist imperialism and war. Yet despite the morbid overtones and pooling blood—which incidentally forms the shape of the continental U.S.— the work is overwhelmingly comical, an effect that enhances the allusion to desensitivity to violence that prevails in our culture. ATHICA is pleased to be exhibiting this ambitious work (see image this page), which Lynn submitted to our Annual Review Committee in 2006. (Her work was also included in ATHICA's January 2007 exhibit, "Transience: The Paradox of Being.")
Not surprisingly, war is an issue for other artists in our show. New Mexico artist Margi Weir weighs in with Tapestry of Flight. This 9-foot wide by 13-foot high vinyl decal makes allusions to the destructive proclivities of man-made contraptions. (Weir's similarly war-themed Screaming Wheel was a big hit at ATHICA in the fall 2006, "America on the Brink" exhibit). Although mankind's modern technology so often poses a threat to the survival of many species, animal abilities certainly serve as inspiration for some of our most miraculous machines. Tapestry of Flight explores our triumph over air and space with graphic patterns of birds, bees, airplanes, astronauts, and rockets woven together into something of a magic carpet chronicling the human desire to break free from gravity's bonds only to end up dropping bombs.
Connecticut's Dorothy Schultz also explores machines of war in Technological Evolution. Schultz's impressive body of performance, installation, and video work frequently addresses issues of authority and societal status quo from an absurdist perspective, and her video contribution to "Animal Instincts" is no exception. Technological Evolution stars a pack of hermit crabs outfitted in "shells" resembling tanks. The effect is both monstrous and comical as war games are played out amongst these clumsy and benign little creatures.
DYSTOPIC VS. UTOPIC VISIONS
Longtime Athenian Andrew Cayce's lurid, cartoonish, and surreal paintings also toy with the absurdity of authority, control issues, and vulnerability. In Bunch o' Bears, an army of fuzzy teddies marches along in an utterly unnatural Orwellian wasteland. Sluggy features a crowned and vested slug reigning over a sextet of snails, his shell-less status somehow elevating him to a position of authority. Princess and Frog offers a similar scene, this time between familiar fairy tale characters. Only in Cayce's interpretation, the conspicuously nude girl, seemingly out for a moonlit skinny dip, plays the dual role of princess and sorceress, wielding power as she waves her magic wand over the patient frog.
In contrast to the smooth surrealism of Cayce's work, Jill Carnes noodley-limbed critters exist in a quivering childlike world of rainbow-hued psychedelic pattern. Also a longtime figure on the Athens art scene, Carnes contributes three drawings to "Animal Instincts." Diplomatic Reasons plays out a benign scene in which a rabbit-eared alien is welcomed to Earth by a blue and purple polka-dotted elephant—an incident likely to turn ugly if the same visitor were to stumble upon human civilization. In What Shall I Wear? and Deadline, a goofy giraffe and a smiling kitty goodnaturedly toil away at the mundane tasks of everyday human existence.
ANTHROPOMORPHISM, EMOTION & PSYCHO-SEXUAL PROJECTIONS
Athenian, Matt Blanks employs a Japanime cartoon style in a vast body of work dominated by animalesque creatures. Blanks, who dabbles in textiles and ceramics as well, offers two touching paintings featuring fantastical beasts wallowing in the throes of human emotion. His Teodor, Winged Rabbit (Guardian the First) (reproduced on this page), is a melancholy monster displaying ragged patchwork wings; it comes across as more frightened than fearsome. Cockatrice and the Bear King of Sadness portrays another very blue critter whose candyland kingdom appears to have been overrun by a vicious though jovial mythical beast.
Heidi Jensen of Jacksonville Beach, Florida illustrates the not-so-uplifting side of human nature. Jensen's drawings, Leak and Blush, portray gruesome rabbit people with pendulous bellies who lose control of bodily functions. In scenes offering a Jerry Springer spin on a Watership Down world, Jensen's work addresses themes of domestic violence and societal roles thrown into chaos. In compositions of delicate candy colors, bunnies, normally considered among the cuddliest of critters, are transfigured into vile and loathsome humanoids capable of inflicting deep psychological wounds.
Native Athenian Kenny Aguar also employs animal imagery to illustrate the baser side of human nature. Aguar's alter ego, the monkey-suited 8-Track Gorilla, gained renown on the Athens music scene nearly a decade ago for his karaoke-style raucous reinterpretations of some of the bawdier hits from the late '70s and early '80s. An accomplished collage artist who draws inspiration from science fiction, vintage comics, B-movies, rock n' roll, and porn, Aguar's triptych, Forgive Us Our Debts, Impossible?, and Side-Show plays out a nightmarish narrative of apocalyptic lust and betrayal in an animal-filled Garden of Eden gone bad. (Tracking the Gorilla, a new documentary by local filmmaker Diane Campese about Aguar's 8-Track Gorilla will be screened as part of this exhibit's affiliated events.)
Athenian, Joe Havasy, also approaches the idea of animal-human lust, albeit from a much more innocent and comical perspective. A regular contributor to Athens' Flagpole magazine's comics page, Havasy's paintings, Trust and Buzz Off, are two in a series of paintings and comics which depict an ongoing theme of sexy/cute young women as the object of silly and seemingly harmless animal affections.
HUMAN IDENTITY THROUGH ANIMAL CHARACTER
Athenian Dan Smith utilizes a similar cartoon style and comical bent in alluding to issues of identity. An elementary-school art teacher by trade, Smith encourages the illustration of pure imagination. His Iconoclastamus is a portrait-like portrayal of a rather dignified hippo with an obvious admiration of Abraham Lincoln, while I am not a unicorn, I am not a narwhal, I am not a rhinoceros, for I am not a hero is a sweet, rose-colored monster who wrestles with the age-old question "Who am I?" And New Haircut #3 is a comical illustration of a sentiment shared by anyone who has ever walked out of a salon sporting a startling new 'do.
Hailing from Santa Monica, California, Diane Meyer's LVP1613, MLR1943, and AMW1048 are three selections from a larger photo portrait series of unmasked young men in mascot costumes. The images are intended to reference military portraiture and explore notions of innocence and vulnerability among young soldiers sent off to dangerous faraway lands, but anyone familiar with "Furries" may be reminded of the thriving underground culture of animal-suit enthusiasts who regularly gather in chat rooms and conventions to celebrate their inner animals.
MUTATIONS
An accomplished multi-media artist, Nashville's Jacqueline Meeks offers a selection from a larger series of drawings. Horse Girl 1 & 3 and Shark Boy 1 & 2, stylistically recall the notebook doodles of distracted adolescents (think of the "Liger" scene in the indie hit film, Napoleon Dynamite). Yet the grotesque morphing of human and animal forms and the graphic illustration of internal organs allude to darker themes of mutation, dissection, and psychological unrest.
Ellen Jantzen of Valencia, California also addresses mutation in her digital images, A Blind Trust, Carpio kallos, and Eye Witness. These sleek, symmetrical, mandala-like forms are made up of bits and pieces of flora and fauna from the natural world, yet they have become new and utterly unfamiliar, unnatural creations. Jantzen explores the idea of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), splicing and reforming images in much the same way scientists alter the DNA of experimental life forms. (Jantzen's work also appeared in spring 2007's Ruburbs exhibit.)
ANIMAL EQUALITY
New Orleans artist Blake Sanders employs animals to relate poignant socio-political truths. Created in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, New Neighbor shows a beaver setting up house in a badly damaged Crescent City neighborhood, alluding to the destructive and constructive forces of humanity that preyed upon that city after the disaster. A newer work, Dressed to Impress turns to prehistoric pterodactyls to illustrate the primordial male instinct which is shared by nearly all species who go to great lengths to attract a mate.
Louise Zjawin Francke of Elfland, North Carolina re-imagines the iconic works of the Great Masters with animal stand-ins to convey the preciousness of the Earth's threatened species. Rhino Lady as Vermeer's Girl with a Flute, New Kind of Marriage in Arnolfini's Wedding Chamber, and Puma as Ingres' The Princess Broglie all feature endangered animals in familiar costumes, poses, and scenes, offering an irreverent nod to art history and society's quest to preserve cultural icons while addressing serious issues of species preservation. (See Puma image this page.)
St. Louis artist Jessica May also alludes to the preciousness of animal life. May made "Odd News" headlines all over the internet earlier this year when she dressed up roadkill in human clothing, leaving it on-site to startle motorists throughout the southern Illinois area where she lived. (See blogs.usatoday.com /ondeadline/ 2007/05/woman_decorates.html for a news blurb on this project). Her photos, Opossum 1, Opossum 3.2, Raccoon 1, Raccoon 2, Raccoon 3, and Raccoon 3.2. provide darkly comical yet creepy evidence of this project and lead us to rethink the role of the mowed-down creatures strewn along our roadsides and our own callous lack of reaction as we speed by. (See Racoon image, next page.)
THE MYSTIC ANIMAL
Athenian Rosemary Mendicino's mechanized constructions, Butterflygirl and Minotaurman, incorporate original expressionistic ceramic forms as well as found objects—broken and discarded doll parts, rusty bits of metal machinery, yellowing scraps of printed paper. Profoundly influenced by the work of early 20th century American psychic/philosopher Edgar Cayce, Mendicino's creatures recall a prehistoric era in which evolved spiritual beings occupied animal forms. (Incidentally, fellow "Animal Instincts" artist Andy Cayce is a distant cousin of Edgar Cayce and admits to have found some inspiration in the ideas of his famous ancestor.) Calling to mind statues of ancient gods and holy saints, Mendicino's works meld elements from the natural world with the detritus of modern human existence, creating contemporary icons worthy of any neo-pagan altar.
Athenian Beth Thompson's 8 of Wands, 7 of Swords, and Ace of Cups are three cards in an ongoing series depicting the full tarot deck. These digitally manipulated photographic collages are the artist's personal reinterpretations of the traditional symbols of each particular card, often including animals as the embodiment of particular spiritual elements. The cards are arranged in a past/present/future reading of the artist's own life—her hand-written interpretation is displayed for the audience.
Athenian Jeffery Whittle also turns to animals as the incarnation of abstract spiritual ideals. Deeply imbued with a Zen-like calm, Whittle's work incorporates bits of aeronautical and oceanographic maps to reference concepts of journeying and the human desire to know where we're going. Birdland (see detail image next page) depicts tortoises and birds co-mingling as earth meets sky and flights of fancy seek a slow and steady pace, while his underwater cowboy scene, Yin-Yang Rounders, substitutes a pair of wizened catfish for bucking broncos in an illustration of the wild ride that is this life.
Highly varied in both style and thematic undertones, "Animal Instincts: Allegory & Anthropomorphism" explores individual and societal tendencies to imbue other species with purely human physical and psychological characteristics. The exhibit frequently reveals more about human nature and philosophical ideals than it does the increasingly precarious state of animal existence.
We hope that this exhibit will inspire viewers to explore their own inner animal metaphors and perhaps gain an increased appreciation for the physical existence of as well as the allegorical meanings inspired by the creatures with whom we share this Earth.
—Melissa Link, Curator
with editorial assistance by Lizzie Zucker Saltz, Director and Mark Watkins, Assistant Curator
Ellen Jantzen's work can be viewed here in her Premiere Portfolio at absolutearts.com.
Showing posts with label Articles. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Articles. Show all posts
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Friday, 2 April 2010
Use and Value - Frieze March 2009
Use & Value
Interview
Innovative and influential Swiss designer and artist Janette Laverrière turns 100 this year. She talked to Vivian Rehberg in Paris about politics, being a woman, utility, mirrors and her collaborations with artist Nairy Baghramian
Nairy Baghramian and Janette Laverrière, 'La Lampe dans l'horloge' (The Lamp and the Grandfather Clock) (2008). Exhibition view at the Schinkel Pavilion, 5th Berlin Biennial
Born in 1909 in Switzerland, Janette Laverrière studied in Basel at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule, where she learned the fundamentals of drawing and decoration. After training in her father’s architecture practice, she designed her first pieces of furniture in the late 1920s and until 1945 collaborated on designs with her first husband, Maurice Pré. Involved in politics all of her life, Laverrière joined the Communist Party in 1945. Since then she has designed rooms, affordable furniture and ‘useless’ objects. She began making mirrors in 1936 – an interest that has continued throughout her career.
VIVIAN REHBERG Could you talk a little about your career trajectory and whether or not you see a link between the first objects and items of furniture you designed in the 1930s and your most recent production?
JANETTE LAVERRIERE Up until recently I made objects that were useful to everyone. Then, suddenly, I stopped and said: I want to make something that pleases myself. But I do think there is still a link to my earlier work, perhaps the fact that, even then, the forms were not always driven by utility.
VR How did you get started as a designer?
JL I was a student in Switzerland, then I came to Paris for internships, and then – such is life – I started working. I wanted to make affordable, useful things for all, but nobody wanted them.
VR Throughout your entire career or only at specific moments? Was there no interest even after the Second World War?
JL Before the war, when my children were small, we were thinking about making affordable furniture, really affordable, but in France tastes leaned toward the luxurious. Well, the war arrived, and afterward I set off on my path and stuck to it and I found a clientele. I worked for people who asked me to make furniture, to design a bedroom, then an apartment, and so on. But at a certain moment, during the 1980s, I said to myself: I cannot continue doing these building projects like an architect. And then the idea came to me: I am going to make objects that serve no purpose whatsoever. And the difference lies there.
VR Is there a link between utility and uselessness?
JL Of course. It’s useful to have useless things.
VR Precisely – I agree.
JL So, I started anew by thinking about the oldest thing I could remember being inspired by. When I was 17, I really loved Jean Cocteau; I read a lot of his works. In 1989, I wanted to pay homage to him on the centenary of his birthday. So there I was in bed, thinking: I am not going to do anything useful anymore, I do not want to, I cannot, so I will do useless things. All of sudden, a new world opened up for me.
VR And this new world resides in useless objects? Is this where your elaborately designed and partly obscured ‘mirrors’ come in?
JL Yes, everyone calls them ‘mirrors’, which makes sense to some extent as I used to make actual, functional mirrors! But now I don’t want to make something useful – what I want is to tell a story.
VR You mean like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), or its sequel Through the Looking Glass (1871), which have both inspired art works?
JL I don’t want to tell a story literally; I want to remind people of one when they see the work. J’accuse (I Accuse, 2008) was inspired by the title of Émile Zola’s open letter to L’Aurore newspaper in 1898, when charges of anti-Semitism within the French army led to a miscarriage of justice and the Dreyfus Affair. Justice is frequently unjust. I wanted to make something that shows how justice hangs in the balance between fair and unfair, that’s all. The form? Useless.
VR J’accuse comprises single, crescent-shaped mirror – a scale – suspended by a delicate chain from a small round mirror. There is another aspect to this work, which is that its subject is very political. This is also the case with La Commune, hommage à Louise Michel (The Commune, Homage to Louise Michel, 2001) about anarchist revolutionary Louise Michel and the Paris Commune. Here, an exquisite varnished rosewood box holds a mirror shaped like a cherry in reference to the immensely popular song Le Temps des cerises (Cherry Blossom Time, 1866), which was adopted by the Commune. The mirror reflects an attached iron shutter riddled with ‘bullet holes’ – a tribute to combatants executed at the Communards’ Wall in Père Lachaise cemetery.
JL It is a political subject because I am a very political person.
VR Could you elaborate your political commitments?
JL My commitments are linked to the war, when I experienced firsthand the consequences of Marshal Philippe Pétain, who headed the Vichy Regime, betraying France in order to save the rich, out of fear of the Soviet Union. He chose the Germans and Hitler over the Soviets. I found out about it perhaps five days after France signed the armistice treaty with Nazi Germany. Can you picture me on Pétain’s side? No! So, I was working in a weapons factory, and we were told that half of France – the southern half – would be saved, since it was in the ‘free zone’. Then, four days later, the Nazis took control of the weapons factory. So, what I had been thinking was true. They had sold France out of fear of the Soviets. Little by little, I got to thinking, and I read Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (1848). But, since I am a critical person, I saw that the Soviets had betrayed Marx, and I know that Marx is outmoded. I live in my times.
VR An interest in social and political issues is consistent throughout your career.
JL Yes. My father was an architect and when I was a little girl, six or seven years old, while he was involved with a workers’ housing exhibition, I saw a cabinet for a sewing machine. I thought, ‘Well, right! Maybe what I want to do is to make things for everyone.’ Does that sound complicated?
VR Not at all. Since we are on the subject of social and political issues, would you mind speaking about your position as a woman in a very masculine profession and your role in establishing statutes for regulating the design professions in France?
JL Before the war, so-called ‘decorators’ worked for the rich, and that finished when the war ended. After the war, I knew so many wonderful intellectuals and artists, but one had to be more of a business person than an architect or a designer to succeed. I had become a communist, so I said, ‘Enough is enough!’ I invited four or five comrades and we founded the Front National des décorateurs (National Front for Decorators) in 1944, followed by the Union des artistes décorateurs et créateurs d’ensembles (Decorators Trade Union), that same year. After the trade union was formed and I had seen the lawyers about the statutes, I went to Switzerland for a few months. When I came back, I saw they had named me Fourth Secretary. Then they told me they did not want to show me the statutes. So, obviously I was very angry, and they finally agreed to show me. There were a lot of salons and exhibitions in France at the time. My work was always placed in some corner. I cannot remember exactly when, but I was asked to start designing interiors and architectural models. And why was I asked? Because my comrades and I were active in Leftist politics. Then, when I began teaching, men would laugh when female students would show their work.
VR Were there many girls studying interior design?
JL There were very few; I don’t remember exactly how many. At any rate, the boys would laugh. Then, ten years later, the boys had changed. Life had simply changed, that’s all. I once had the opportunity to exhibit an entire house in a salon, but then I was told there was no place for me because I was not commercial enough.
VR What does that mean? That your work wouldn’t sell?
JL It means that the others owned stores. I relied on honoraria, like architects did. In the end, they gave me a tiny spot, and I did what I could with it. It is always difficult to exhibit in salons if you are not doing very commercial work. So, I did what I could with very little money.
VR What kind of commissions did the salons lead to? Did they play a role in your private and public commissions or were you obliged to find work another way?
JL Well, firstly I would say that nobody is obliged to do anything they do not want to do. However, as an example of the way women were treated at the salons, I remember how once, at a national furniture salon, a friend told me that it had been decided to give me a very small commission, whereas all the men had substantial commissions. In fact, when I showed my project to the director, he said, ‘Well, aren’t we in for a laugh?’ When the salon opened, I took the friend to see that they had just put me in some corner again. He said he was shocked. That was good.
VR Men seem to have been quite paternalistic toward you. Did you ever feel that you were treated equally?
JL Yes, but I am not sure when it started: perhaps around 1968.
VR Would you like to speak a little about your project with the artist Nairy Baghramian in the Schinkel Pavilion at the 5th Berlin Biennial, La Lampe dans l’horloge (The Lamp in the Clock, 2008)? Was this the first time you had collaborated on a project with a woman?
JL Yes, and I don’t see how it could have been otherwise before; there just weren’t any opportunities. I met Nairy for the first time in January 2008, just a few weeks after she discovered my catalogue. I was fascinated by our new relationship. We recognized that, without knowing each other, we, and our work, have a lot in common – we are sisters in spirit. I was very pleased that she was interested in my mirrors and their enclosed political stories. I appreciate her way of working and thinking. She knew exactly how the Schinkel Pavilion installation should look, and her creation of the space added new meaning to my work. I was sure from the start that I could trust her, and I loved watching how our discussions culminated in that body of work. I am working with Nairy again for a forthcoming exhibition entitled ‘Entre deux actes: Loge de comédienne’ (Between Two Acts: An Actress’ Dressing Room), which is due to open at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in October. One night, very late, she came up with a fabulous idea for the show. She discovered an element of my work that she felt was special, without any knowledge that her discovery had been criticized in the past, just as the mirrors had been. In the 1950s, I participated in a salon with a dressing room I designed for an actress. Nairy is going to reinterpret that piece with me. Her interests in visible and invisible gender politics, in set design and interior design, are evident in works such as Fourth Wall/Two Female Protagonists (2005). I’m sure we will have an intense time together. I’m looking forward to working with her again.
VR You didn’t spend time with other female furniture designers earlier in your career?
JL Yes, two or three, but they also had their difficulties.
VR Were those relationships competitive?
JL No, there wasn’t any competition because we were all doing different things.
VR You have maintained this incredible desire to work, to create, throughout your whole life.
JL At the moment, I am full of ideas. There aren’t any projects I would have liked to do that I haven’t done. I would have liked more commissions, or to have fought harder for more opportunities. But I am not unhappy.
VR Do you think it is easier for furniture and interior designers today?
JL Things had to change. I have seen the difference. I have seen students change, although not necessarily for the better, but rather because they would like to earn more money.
VR Do you think you are too idealistic?
JL Perhaps. I don’t know. One has to change…
VR Always?
JL I cannot think of the right word … Surrender, that’s it! I will never surrender. I will never give up!
VR You prefer to speak of the future rather than the past.
JL What can I tell you about the past? I really struggled. I am appalling, because I don’t know how to earn a living.
VR But were you really interested in making money?
JL I wanted people to live well together.
VR Where does all your energy come from? Does it date from your childhood?
JL Yes, I think so. Even at school I thought I should revolt, fight, that teachers were unfair.
VR But others might turn this desire into something destructive. Your idea to revolt translated into creation.
JL For me, it meant changing the world.
VR Any regrets?
JL I regret that life hasn’t been easier. Maybe I did not have enough big projects. During the period of African decolonization, my designer comrades were granted a big palace commission, but I got nothing. The French offered me nothing, but the President of Niger, Hamani Diori, asked me to work on his palace at Niamey, which I did from 1961 to 1963.
VR What’s next for you?
JL In addition to the exhibition in Baden-Baden, in May, there will be a group show of female designers entitled ‘Elles’ at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Pompidou has also purchased some of my things. I thought about using Formica 50 years ago, and now it interests them. They want to put several of my kitchens in the show because other women designers weren’t interested in kitchens, and they plan to take photographs of my extant kitchens for the exhibition.
VR And what about your objects? What will you work on next?
JL The promise of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) for me is not exhausted yet. Lady Chatterley rejected tradition. Perhaps that’s where the man comes in – as a useful object!
Translated from the French by Vivian Rehberg.
Vivian Rehberg
Interview
Innovative and influential Swiss designer and artist Janette Laverrière turns 100 this year. She talked to Vivian Rehberg in Paris about politics, being a woman, utility, mirrors and her collaborations with artist Nairy Baghramian
Nairy Baghramian and Janette Laverrière, 'La Lampe dans l'horloge' (The Lamp and the Grandfather Clock) (2008). Exhibition view at the Schinkel Pavilion, 5th Berlin Biennial
Born in 1909 in Switzerland, Janette Laverrière studied in Basel at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule, where she learned the fundamentals of drawing and decoration. After training in her father’s architecture practice, she designed her first pieces of furniture in the late 1920s and until 1945 collaborated on designs with her first husband, Maurice Pré. Involved in politics all of her life, Laverrière joined the Communist Party in 1945. Since then she has designed rooms, affordable furniture and ‘useless’ objects. She began making mirrors in 1936 – an interest that has continued throughout her career.
VIVIAN REHBERG Could you talk a little about your career trajectory and whether or not you see a link between the first objects and items of furniture you designed in the 1930s and your most recent production?
JANETTE LAVERRIERE Up until recently I made objects that were useful to everyone. Then, suddenly, I stopped and said: I want to make something that pleases myself. But I do think there is still a link to my earlier work, perhaps the fact that, even then, the forms were not always driven by utility.
VR How did you get started as a designer?
JL I was a student in Switzerland, then I came to Paris for internships, and then – such is life – I started working. I wanted to make affordable, useful things for all, but nobody wanted them.
VR Throughout your entire career or only at specific moments? Was there no interest even after the Second World War?
JL Before the war, when my children were small, we were thinking about making affordable furniture, really affordable, but in France tastes leaned toward the luxurious. Well, the war arrived, and afterward I set off on my path and stuck to it and I found a clientele. I worked for people who asked me to make furniture, to design a bedroom, then an apartment, and so on. But at a certain moment, during the 1980s, I said to myself: I cannot continue doing these building projects like an architect. And then the idea came to me: I am going to make objects that serve no purpose whatsoever. And the difference lies there.
VR Is there a link between utility and uselessness?
JL Of course. It’s useful to have useless things.
VR Precisely – I agree.
JL So, I started anew by thinking about the oldest thing I could remember being inspired by. When I was 17, I really loved Jean Cocteau; I read a lot of his works. In 1989, I wanted to pay homage to him on the centenary of his birthday. So there I was in bed, thinking: I am not going to do anything useful anymore, I do not want to, I cannot, so I will do useless things. All of sudden, a new world opened up for me.
VR And this new world resides in useless objects? Is this where your elaborately designed and partly obscured ‘mirrors’ come in?
JL Yes, everyone calls them ‘mirrors’, which makes sense to some extent as I used to make actual, functional mirrors! But now I don’t want to make something useful – what I want is to tell a story.
VR You mean like Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), or its sequel Through the Looking Glass (1871), which have both inspired art works?
JL I don’t want to tell a story literally; I want to remind people of one when they see the work. J’accuse (I Accuse, 2008) was inspired by the title of Émile Zola’s open letter to L’Aurore newspaper in 1898, when charges of anti-Semitism within the French army led to a miscarriage of justice and the Dreyfus Affair. Justice is frequently unjust. I wanted to make something that shows how justice hangs in the balance between fair and unfair, that’s all. The form? Useless.
VR J’accuse comprises single, crescent-shaped mirror – a scale – suspended by a delicate chain from a small round mirror. There is another aspect to this work, which is that its subject is very political. This is also the case with La Commune, hommage à Louise Michel (The Commune, Homage to Louise Michel, 2001) about anarchist revolutionary Louise Michel and the Paris Commune. Here, an exquisite varnished rosewood box holds a mirror shaped like a cherry in reference to the immensely popular song Le Temps des cerises (Cherry Blossom Time, 1866), which was adopted by the Commune. The mirror reflects an attached iron shutter riddled with ‘bullet holes’ – a tribute to combatants executed at the Communards’ Wall in Père Lachaise cemetery.
JL It is a political subject because I am a very political person.
VR Could you elaborate your political commitments?
JL My commitments are linked to the war, when I experienced firsthand the consequences of Marshal Philippe Pétain, who headed the Vichy Regime, betraying France in order to save the rich, out of fear of the Soviet Union. He chose the Germans and Hitler over the Soviets. I found out about it perhaps five days after France signed the armistice treaty with Nazi Germany. Can you picture me on Pétain’s side? No! So, I was working in a weapons factory, and we were told that half of France – the southern half – would be saved, since it was in the ‘free zone’. Then, four days later, the Nazis took control of the weapons factory. So, what I had been thinking was true. They had sold France out of fear of the Soviets. Little by little, I got to thinking, and I read Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto (1848). But, since I am a critical person, I saw that the Soviets had betrayed Marx, and I know that Marx is outmoded. I live in my times.
VR An interest in social and political issues is consistent throughout your career.
JL Yes. My father was an architect and when I was a little girl, six or seven years old, while he was involved with a workers’ housing exhibition, I saw a cabinet for a sewing machine. I thought, ‘Well, right! Maybe what I want to do is to make things for everyone.’ Does that sound complicated?
VR Not at all. Since we are on the subject of social and political issues, would you mind speaking about your position as a woman in a very masculine profession and your role in establishing statutes for regulating the design professions in France?
JL Before the war, so-called ‘decorators’ worked for the rich, and that finished when the war ended. After the war, I knew so many wonderful intellectuals and artists, but one had to be more of a business person than an architect or a designer to succeed. I had become a communist, so I said, ‘Enough is enough!’ I invited four or five comrades and we founded the Front National des décorateurs (National Front for Decorators) in 1944, followed by the Union des artistes décorateurs et créateurs d’ensembles (Decorators Trade Union), that same year. After the trade union was formed and I had seen the lawyers about the statutes, I went to Switzerland for a few months. When I came back, I saw they had named me Fourth Secretary. Then they told me they did not want to show me the statutes. So, obviously I was very angry, and they finally agreed to show me. There were a lot of salons and exhibitions in France at the time. My work was always placed in some corner. I cannot remember exactly when, but I was asked to start designing interiors and architectural models. And why was I asked? Because my comrades and I were active in Leftist politics. Then, when I began teaching, men would laugh when female students would show their work.
VR Were there many girls studying interior design?
JL There were very few; I don’t remember exactly how many. At any rate, the boys would laugh. Then, ten years later, the boys had changed. Life had simply changed, that’s all. I once had the opportunity to exhibit an entire house in a salon, but then I was told there was no place for me because I was not commercial enough.
VR What does that mean? That your work wouldn’t sell?
JL It means that the others owned stores. I relied on honoraria, like architects did. In the end, they gave me a tiny spot, and I did what I could with it. It is always difficult to exhibit in salons if you are not doing very commercial work. So, I did what I could with very little money.
VR What kind of commissions did the salons lead to? Did they play a role in your private and public commissions or were you obliged to find work another way?
JL Well, firstly I would say that nobody is obliged to do anything they do not want to do. However, as an example of the way women were treated at the salons, I remember how once, at a national furniture salon, a friend told me that it had been decided to give me a very small commission, whereas all the men had substantial commissions. In fact, when I showed my project to the director, he said, ‘Well, aren’t we in for a laugh?’ When the salon opened, I took the friend to see that they had just put me in some corner again. He said he was shocked. That was good.
VR Men seem to have been quite paternalistic toward you. Did you ever feel that you were treated equally?
JL Yes, but I am not sure when it started: perhaps around 1968.
VR Would you like to speak a little about your project with the artist Nairy Baghramian in the Schinkel Pavilion at the 5th Berlin Biennial, La Lampe dans l’horloge (The Lamp in the Clock, 2008)? Was this the first time you had collaborated on a project with a woman?
JL Yes, and I don’t see how it could have been otherwise before; there just weren’t any opportunities. I met Nairy for the first time in January 2008, just a few weeks after she discovered my catalogue. I was fascinated by our new relationship. We recognized that, without knowing each other, we, and our work, have a lot in common – we are sisters in spirit. I was very pleased that she was interested in my mirrors and their enclosed political stories. I appreciate her way of working and thinking. She knew exactly how the Schinkel Pavilion installation should look, and her creation of the space added new meaning to my work. I was sure from the start that I could trust her, and I loved watching how our discussions culminated in that body of work. I am working with Nairy again for a forthcoming exhibition entitled ‘Entre deux actes: Loge de comédienne’ (Between Two Acts: An Actress’ Dressing Room), which is due to open at the Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden in October. One night, very late, she came up with a fabulous idea for the show. She discovered an element of my work that she felt was special, without any knowledge that her discovery had been criticized in the past, just as the mirrors had been. In the 1950s, I participated in a salon with a dressing room I designed for an actress. Nairy is going to reinterpret that piece with me. Her interests in visible and invisible gender politics, in set design and interior design, are evident in works such as Fourth Wall/Two Female Protagonists (2005). I’m sure we will have an intense time together. I’m looking forward to working with her again.
VR You didn’t spend time with other female furniture designers earlier in your career?
JL Yes, two or three, but they also had their difficulties.
VR Were those relationships competitive?
JL No, there wasn’t any competition because we were all doing different things.
VR You have maintained this incredible desire to work, to create, throughout your whole life.
JL At the moment, I am full of ideas. There aren’t any projects I would have liked to do that I haven’t done. I would have liked more commissions, or to have fought harder for more opportunities. But I am not unhappy.
VR Do you think it is easier for furniture and interior designers today?
JL Things had to change. I have seen the difference. I have seen students change, although not necessarily for the better, but rather because they would like to earn more money.
VR Do you think you are too idealistic?
JL Perhaps. I don’t know. One has to change…
VR Always?
JL I cannot think of the right word … Surrender, that’s it! I will never surrender. I will never give up!
VR You prefer to speak of the future rather than the past.
JL What can I tell you about the past? I really struggled. I am appalling, because I don’t know how to earn a living.
VR But were you really interested in making money?
JL I wanted people to live well together.
VR Where does all your energy come from? Does it date from your childhood?
JL Yes, I think so. Even at school I thought I should revolt, fight, that teachers were unfair.
VR But others might turn this desire into something destructive. Your idea to revolt translated into creation.
JL For me, it meant changing the world.
VR Any regrets?
JL I regret that life hasn’t been easier. Maybe I did not have enough big projects. During the period of African decolonization, my designer comrades were granted a big palace commission, but I got nothing. The French offered me nothing, but the President of Niger, Hamani Diori, asked me to work on his palace at Niamey, which I did from 1961 to 1963.
VR What’s next for you?
JL In addition to the exhibition in Baden-Baden, in May, there will be a group show of female designers entitled ‘Elles’ at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The Pompidou has also purchased some of my things. I thought about using Formica 50 years ago, and now it interests them. They want to put several of my kitchens in the show because other women designers weren’t interested in kitchens, and they plan to take photographs of my extant kitchens for the exhibition.
VR And what about your objects? What will you work on next?
JL The promise of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) for me is not exhausted yet. Lady Chatterley rejected tradition. Perhaps that’s where the man comes in – as a useful object!
Translated from the French by Vivian Rehberg.
Vivian Rehberg
Interview with Marina Abramovic - Frieze 2005
Do It Again
Interview
First published in issue 94 of frieze, in October 2005: Monica Bonvicini and Jörg Heiser in conversation with Marina Abramovic. 'The Artist is Present' runs at MoMA, New York until 31 May.
Marina Abramovic: Monica, I really like your piece Hausfrau Swinging [1997] – a video that combines sculpture and performance. Have you ever performed this piece yourself?
Monica Bonvicini: No, although my mother said, ‘you have to do it, Monica – you have to stand there naked wearing this house’. I replied, ‘I don’t think so’. In the piece a woman has a model of a house on her head and bangs it against a dry-wall corner; it’s related to a Louise Bourgeois drawing from the ‘Femme Maison’ series [Woman House, 1946–7], which I had a copy of in my studio for a long time. I actually first shot a video of myself doing the banging, but I didn’t like the result at all: I was too afraid of getting hurt. So I thought of a friend of mine who is an actor: she has a great, strong body – a little like the woman in the Louise Bourgeois drawing that inspired it – and I knew she would be able to do it the right way.
Jörg Heiser: Monica, after you first showed Wall Fuckin’ in 1995 – a video installation that includes a static shot of a naked woman embracing a wall, with her head outside the picture frame – you told me one critic didn’t talk to you for two years because he was upset it wasn’t you. It’s an odd assumption that female artists should only use their own bodies. I’m thinking of Yves Klein ‘directing’ naked women …
MA: Or Manzoni signing female bodies. I think it’s fine to use an actor. It’s like conducting, or choreographing.
MB: I never ask actors to ‘get into the role’ – I’m not interested in their interpretation of what they are doing. I just ask them to do something very simple, like fucking the wall or banging their head against it. It is nothing psychological.
MA: If you don’t feel that you’re a performer yourself, then it’s so much better to have the idea executed by someone else. And that relates to a question that interests me more and more: what do you do as a performance artist when you get old and you can’t do it any more? How can you transmit some kind of experience and knowledge to a younger generation? It’s important that my pieces can happen without me, because I have been a performer all my life, and I know that at some point in the future I won’t be able to perform, or won’t want to.
JH: But in your upcoming re-enactments of seminal performances by other artists from the 1960s and ’70s at the Guggenheim New York in November, isn’t it the point that you perform them yourself?
MA: I am doing them because I feel that I am the only one left of my generation who is still performing. And I feel that I want to set history straight, because there are so many commercial rip-offs, like Steven Meisel, for example – his recent fashion spread in Vogue is like Orlan with her plastic surgery. Fashion takes art out of context and uses only the surface. Theatre also rips off performance like you can’t imagine; and of course it happens in art too. A lot of kids are doing copies. So my attitude is, if you want to do a performance originally done by someone else, it’s fine if you treat it like, say, a musical score. But you have to have a few rules. For my re-enactments I have asked the artists or their foundations for permission. I asked Chris Burden for permission to perform Trans-Fixed [1974], the piece that involved him being nailed to the hood of a Volkswagen, and his assistant sent me a letter saying, ‘not this piece, not any piece’. And I replied, ‘great, I respect this, but tell me why’. The assistant wrote back saying, ‘Mr Burden doesn’t talk publicly’. And this pissed me off. Fine, but I think he should have explained his reasons. I am very disappointed about this, because I really wanted to do this piece. The woman crucified, finally. I wanted to do it on a Volga, which was designed in the Tito era, though, instead of a Volkswagen.
JH: Who are the other artists you contacted?
MA: I will be performing Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure [1974], which is like a script – a piece of paper that you can take home and which gives you instructions how to press your body against the wall, the floor, and the corners of the room. It’s kind of an in-between piece – he didn’t actually perform it; I doubt anyone actually did at the time.
JH: So it’s a score, an instruction piece in the sense of a work by George Brecht or Yoko Ono?
MA: Yes. I’m also doing Seed Bed [1972] by Vito Acconci – the one where he masturbates under a floor in the gallery. That will be followed by Valie Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic [1969], where she’s wearing a pair of trousers with the crotch removed. Then Gina Pane’s Self Portrait(s) [1973], where she’s lying on a metal bed above lit candles, and using a razor blade to make incisions around her fingernails and lips and How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare [1965], by Joseph Beuys. Bad videos or a few lousy photographs are the only documents remaining of so much of this stuff; the only image we have of the Beuys performance is of him with his face covered in gold and honey. You can’t imagine how differently this piece looks once you see more material. I went to see Eva Beuys, his widow, after I had sent her a letter asking for permission, but she had never replied. I showed up with my luggage; it was raining, I rang the bell, and she opened the door and said, ‘Frau Abramovic, my answer is no – but you can have coffee’. I went in, and we talked for five hours, about her 45 law cases against everything and everybody, about my reasons for redoing the piece, and we both cried and held hands and now everything is fine. She gave me an unauthorized video of the performance. It became apparent that Beuys never gave the photographers any instructions; the famous one doesn’t represent the piece well at all.
JH: Which of your own works will you be performing?
MA: Originally I wanted to do Rhythm 0 [1974] as the sixth piece, which involves me standing while the audience is invited to use all kinds of objects on me, but I went to every lawyer in New York and they won’t let me include a pistol with a bullet on display. So I will do Thomas Lips [1975] instead, which is a very ritualistic, complicated piece. The seventh and final piece will be the première of a new performance.
JH: Will you be doing these seven performances on seven consecutive days?
MA: Yes, and whether their original length was 15 minutes or an hour, I will perform them for seven hours each, because that’s how long most museums are open. The point for me is to show how you can pay homage to historical works. I have never seen the original of any of these pieces; I have no idea how it will feel to perform them, and that’s why I want to do it. With each of the artists or their estate, I have a contract where I specify that all the photographs of the performances will only be published in the book I’m making, that I will not make any art work out of it, or editions – except for my own performances, of course. So I don’t have any kind of gain – and I don’t want any fee.
JH: What if another artist wants to perform any of your pieces?
MA: That’s fine. I’m fed up with the Modernist attitude that nobody can ever repeat a piece because it’s an original touched by the divine artist. I’m not ready to see my performances die. In a work of mine for a theatre, The Biography [1992– ongoing], I act my own life; the idea is that every five or six years I will make a new version of it – it includes some of my performances, and now I have my students playing me in The Biography Remix [2004– ongoing, directed by Michel Laub]. Rest Energy [1980], which I made with my then partner, Ulay, is one of our most difficult pieces to perform – together we hold a bow drawn with an arrow pointing at my heart. I recently did it with Ulay’s son, who is the same age Ulay was at that time; after a while I stop and transfer the performance to one of my students.
JH: This touches on complicated issues of intellectual property –
the question of defining the differences between a legitimate
re-enactment, a quote, a distortion and a rip-off.
MA: Everyone has their own opinion on this. Like the bow and arrow piece – if somebody wanted to redo it, it’s very difficult to do it in any other way than the way I did it. In the case of Monica’s Bourgeois reference – that’s inspiration, in the way I was inspired by Yves Klein, or Fluxus, and performance, or noise music. But it’s different if you do it in exactly the same way. There was a couple in New Zealand in the 1970s who redid every performance Ulay and I were doing at the time, but they always did it a couple of months later, because that’s how long it took for information about our performances to get to them.
JH: There is a difference, though, between two New Zealand artists recreating your performances and a fashion photographer using your work for a commercial international ad campaign.
MA: Yes, the fashion aspect is worse for me, because the art is taken out of context. Meisel even recreated one image from Relation in the Space [1976], for Italian Vogue [November 1998], where I bump into Ulay and fall to the ground. He just added this empty fashion touch, which I can’t stand. When I sent a letter to him through my lawyer, the reply I got was, ‘he is very inspired by your work’.
MB: Today performances are becoming more and more specialized, staged, theatrical. What do you make of this development?
MA: In the 1980s there was a huge change, because the market became so much more demanding. For an artist to make performances for all of her or his life would be hell. Many performance artists from the 1970s went into architecture, like Acconci. Only a few artists, such as Beuys, did performances all their life. I will probably do performance for the rest of my life too. Also I don’t like seats – they give you expectations, as if you were in a theatre or cinema.
JH: Why are you doing the theatre piece then?
MA: That’s the only exception – it’s a work in progress, a staging of my life. And it’s going to keep going even if I have Alzheimer’s disease or I’m in a wheelchair.
JH: So the only place you can talk about your life is on stage?
MA: Yes, theatre is the only way for me to reveal things I am ashamed of – for example, my nose being too big and my ass being too large, and the war in Yugoslavia, which I left in 1975. People often see me as a tough, no make-up, spiritual girl, but I am not like that at all. I totally love fashion and bad movies and bad jokes and eat chocolate like there’s no tomorrow. My performances are always so heavy, though, which is why I put an image of me on the beach holding a beach ball on the cover of my catalogue Artist Body [1998]. Rebecca Horn said to me, ‘you’re crazy, people will think it’s an advert for a travel agent – no one will respect it’. But I need that lightness. Monica, why did you leave Italy for Berlin?
MB: I left in 1986 for many reasons, but mostly because Italy’s macho society was bothering me. I used to go to high school on my bicycle, and every day guys in their cars would yell things at me. Eventually I started to scream back, and once they stopped and slapped me. They were really offended.
JH: Monica, much of your work deals with architecture, which is a field very much dominated by men: the only really famous woman architect is Zaha Hadid.
MB: Like art, architecture is studied by more women than men, but it’s the men who tend to become the professionals. There are no comparable support structures for women.
JH: Marina, what is the relationship between your performances and architecture?
MA: Many of my 1970s’ performances concerned the body – often naked – in relation to architectural space. Many of my pieces have titles such as Expansion in the Space [1977], Interruption in the Space [1977], Relation in the Space [1976] or Relation in Time [1977]. I’ve never had an architectural space built, though – I either worked with given or pre-chosen spaces.
JH: You recently redid one of your pieces – Cleaning the Mirror II [1995; originally performed for video] – in the Art Unlimited section of Art Basel: a skeleton lies on top of you. This was not the first time you’ve done a performance at an art fair: in 1978 you performed Light/Dark, where you and Ulay slap each other’s faces, at Cologne Art Fair.
MA: It’s fantastic, because art fairs are the place where performances don’t belong at all. In the 1995 video I was just breathing with the skeleton lying on top of me. This time I cried for four hours.
MB: At one point you looked at me and maybe you didn’t recognize me, but I really felt touched, because nobody wants to see someone crying.
MA: When I do performances, I really go into another state of mind. I was worried about how I could start crying and not fake it – it had to be believable. Nothing happened for the first 15 minutes, but then this couple arrived – Eva and Adele – and after that I started, and I couldn’t stop. These people break my heart.
MB: What part of this work is for sale?
MA: All you can buy is the video of 1995. The proper documentation of performances on video has been an issue for a long time – in the 1970s, when Gina Pane did Self-Portrait(s), the only thing you see in the documentation is the bag of the photographer. If you have an audience, the camera’s viewpoint is often obscured. I remember the first time I used video was in 1975, to document Art Must be Beautiful, Artist Must be Beautiful [1975] in Copenhagen. I combed my hair violently for an hour in front of the audience and went back to see what the cameraman had shot, and he had been doing every kind of trick you can possibly do. So I destroyed this footage and made the same performance for him straight in front of the camera.
MB: Recently artists like Trisha Donnelly and Tino Sehgal have worked with performance and not allowed any documentation. How people tell each other about the performance possibly becomes more interesting than the visual documentation could ever be.
MA: With performance the narrative element is stronger than anything else. For example, I heard in Yugoslavia that the Volkswagen that Chris Burden was nailed to was driven around Los Angeles until the police stopped him. But actually it was just three people in a garage – they opened the door, pushed the car out, took a photograph and pushed it back.
JH: Perhaps this is why Burden felt that a re-enactment of his piece would destroy that piece’s legendary status?
MA: Maybe. I don’t get it.
MB: This reminds me of one of my favourite works – Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1976 piece Window Blowout, where he walked into the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and blew out the windows with an airgun. It is pieces like this that give people of my generation the idea that in the 1960s and ’70s you could do anything you wanted, but I guess this is a distortion. It makes me think of Bruce Nauman’s first solo show at Leo Castelli gallery in 1968: the hang was surprisingly classical, conventional.
MA: There were so many bad performances in those days I was ashamed to describe myself as a performance artist. It was like, if you piss against a tree, it’s a performance. At the end of the 1970s, though, all the bad performance artists became bad painters, which was great.
MB: You didn’t have a gallery for a long time, did you?
MA: I’ve been with Sean Kelly in New York now for ten years, but I didn’t have a gallery at all before that, even though I was approached many times. I lived for almost five years in a car, and went to deserts, stayed with Aborigines in Australia, and with Tibetan monks.
JH: How did you finance your life as an artist?
MA: I lived with my family in Yugoslavia until I was 29. I had to finish my performances before ten in the evening, because my mother forbade me to leave the house after that – I had a military regime at home. When I was a child, if my bed was messy when I was asleep, my mother would wake me up and tell me to sleep more neatly. So finally I escaped to Amsterdam. My mother went to the police and announced my disappearance, but when they asked how old I was and she said 29, they replied, ‘well, it’s about time’. Then I met Ulay – we were born on the same day and met on our birthday – it was a very crazy, romantic thing. All I had arrived in Amsterdam with was negatives of my performances – I didn’t even have any clothes. We bought an old Citroën from the French police and lived in it from 1975 to ’79. We lived in Sardinia and would wake up at dawn to milk the cows and the sheep and make pecorino cheese with the shepherds.
MB: You were a hippie.
MA: No, just two artists without money. And they fed us, and then we sat in the fields until we were asked to perform somewhere. In 1977 we were invited to a performance festival in Bologna. They promised to pay us what is today about 125 Euro, but we felt that if they hadn’t paid us before the performance they would never pay. We arrived penniless with our last drop of petrol. On the day of our performance the audience was waiting outside the museum and Ulay went to the office, completely naked, and asked for our money. The secretary was so shocked she gave it to him, but he didn’t have anywhere to put it. So he found a plastic bag, put the money inside, went to the toilet and put it in the cistern. We did the performance [Imponderabilia, 1977] facing each other naked for 90 minutes in the museum entrance, hoping that nobody would flush the toilet – at the end, thankfully, it was still there. It was only after our performance walk along the Great Wall of China [The Lovers, 1988] – which marked our separation – that I decided I needed a gallery. My friends said the only person who would understand the work was Sean Kelly, but he was working at the LA Louver gallery. It took me three years to organize a ‘spontaneous’ lunch with him. A friend of mine, Juliao Sarmento, was meeting him at Dean & Deluca, and we planned that I would pass by when they were eating. I was invited to sit down, and Sean finally said to me, ‘I would really love to work with you, but it’s the wrong time – today I lost my job and I have no gallery’. But we started working out of his loft, and then he opened a small gallery in New York on Mercer Street, and now he has a gallery in Chelsea.
JH: Everyone says the art world has become much more commercialized, but in one respect it really hasn’t changed at all: if you are in the film or book industry, it’s perfectly normal to approach a company to pitch an idea, and if it’s successful a contract is signed. In the art world it’s as if the artist is a Sleeping Beauty waiting to be discovered by the dealer or curator.
MB: What has changed is that the time span between studying and entering a gallery is getting shorter, but careers seem briefer too – some artists are lucky if theirs lasts for five years, and even luckier if they get a professorship.
MA: I always thought that nobody needs artists, which is precisely why you have to make yourself indispensable, so they can’t live without you. It’s not only important to make good work – it’s important that you put it in the right place at the right time. So many good artists don’t have the energy to do all this other shit because they are not communicative. I spend 20% of my time on creativity and 80% looking for ways of financing it.
JH: Your recent film Balkan Erotic Epic [2005] must have been quite something to organize: it involves numerous amateur actors performing sexual acts in folklore costumes. It’s hilarious – like a parody of the Shirin Neshat representations of cultures and gender.
MA: Neville Wakefield approached me and several other artists about two years ago to make a 12-minute film for a DVD compilation he’s putting together of contributions by artists who are working with erotic or pornographic elements in their work. I thought, the most interesting thing would be to think about my roots and how sexual organs are used traditionally in my culture, in the Balkan region.
MB: Thinking about your origins when it comes to porn – that’s psychologically interesting.
MA: In socialist Yugoslavia everything was about sex, drinking and politics, and I wanted to explore where this came from. I did a lot of research and came across ancient pagan rituals where sexual organs are used for various purposes. For example, in the old days a mother would protect her child from the Evil Eye by rubbing the child’s face with vaginal fluid. Or if a woman was having a difficult birth, her husband would take his penis out and make a cross on her breast; in the field, if a horse became weak, the man would touch it with his penis too; if there was a battle, the Balkan men would take the sexiest woman from the village, undress her and force her to perform obscene gestures to distract the enemy; alternatively, the soldiers would masturbate in the earth. There are hundreds of examples, all described in a very ancient Serbian language. One I thought was fantastic was that, if there was too much rain, the women from the village would run into the fields and lift their skirts and flash their pussies to the gods to scare them. So I went to Yugoslavia and talked to perfectly ordinary women from the village, between the ages of 18 and 75, into doing it. At first they were very shy and wouldn’t do it, and I thought I wouldn’t get anywhere. But after a while they ran into the mud and started showing their pussies like there was no tomorrow.
For another scene I asked men to be dressed in national costumes, and to unzip their trousers and reveal their erections; I asked them to stand very proud and look at the camera and not move. We shot 15 hours of that material. I don’t think its pornographic – anyone who sees this material bursts out laughing, but then looks at it for a long time, in silence. But at the same time there is something I can’t explain: the power of our genitals, and how we can use them for healing or against the forces of nature. But obviously even for this kind of film I can’t rub my vaginal liquid on the face of a three-year-old kid – I’d be put in prison. So I had a good solution – I made a cartoon out of this.
MB: Did you make the drawings for it yourself?
MA: No, I asked a Serbian cartoonist to do it. In the film these drawings will be shown by me, dressed as a stern teacher.
MB: So you’re skipping the whole notion of sexuality as a sociological site of power and politics.
MA: But it’s amazing when you see a 75-year-old woman showing her pussy in the rain. I don’t even know what this material means; I’m really touched by it.
MB: But isn’t it a bit like a fairy-tale? You don’t really believe that flashing will stop the rain, do you?
MA: Can the gods be scared? Of a 75-year-old pussy, maybe they can. But we should return to what we discussed in regard to using actors. It would be very different if I did this performance. This 75-year-old woman was a pensioner who worked in the post office, and this was one of the most exciting things she had ever done – she got so enthusiastic. And that comes across.
MB: Do you see this film as a reappropriation of pre-modern, ‘primitive’ sexuality, a power that doesn’t exist any more? Because now we are living in a strip-tease culture, where you are expected to be sexy as a woman, but it doesn’t even mean having free sex. You just have to be available, on display.
MA: Do I think an Italian weather girl on TV who looks like a porn star is healing somebody? No. But in regard to my film material, I don’t know yet what it means. Monica, do you ever get obsessed with an idea and know you have to do it, but you don’t know why? And then all of a sudden it seems so logical. That has happened to me so many times.
MB: Sam Durant once said to me that making art is a bit like keeping a diary, because at a certain point you develop your own language, so the next work inevitably relates to the one before. Even if you don’t know why, there is continuity.
MA: I’ve had problems with continuity. There have been periods in my life where I had absolutely no ideas and I would panic, but didn’t want to force it intellectually.
MB: I really love Waiting for an Idea [1991]; ‘what am I going to do next?’ is such a recurrent feeling for an artist.
MA: Nowadays I don’t care, because after working for 30 years I know I can’t force it. But when the idea comes, I get really afraid, although there’s an incredible feeling of relief after it’s realized. One thing I hate is when people come up to me after a performance and want to engage in a deep conversation when all I want to do is have an ice-cream and do nothing.
MB: But some of your performances are very heavy, even moral. For example, your performance in Basel – you were crying for hours.
MA: For me the public is a holy thing.
MB: How do you see performance developing in the future?
MA: I think that performance is very strange – it comes and goes. It was all over the place in the 1970s, but there was too much crap; then in the 1980s it was all about the self and the market, with the exception of the night-club scene and artists like Leigh Bowery – it was all connected to music and AIDS and the awareness of the body. In the 1990s many performances became an element in video installations, and there were lots of performance elements in contemporary dance – people like Jan Fabre, Pina Bausch, Jérôme Bel. Now I find it very interesting that a performance piece doesn’t have to be performed by the artist who created it. Any artist who has the courage to do a performance without documenting it is the most radical. But I can’t help it – I document all my performances, because my mother is such an orderly woman – I believe in KGB files. But in an ideal world, it should be just word of mouth.
Marina Abramovi´c’s series of performances ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ will take place 9 – 15 November at the Guggenheim Museum, New York and followed by a solo show at Sean Kelly Gallery from 9 December. Her exhibition ‘Balkan Epic’ will be held at Art for the World Project for Pirelli, Milan, from 19 January – 30 March 2006.
Monica Bonvicini is shortlisted for the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art 2005, on show at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, until 16 October. Her work is included in the Venice and Gothenburg Biennales (both until 6 November), and in ‘Centre of Gravity’, the inaugural exhibition of the Istanbul Modern museum.
Jörg Heiser
Interview
First published in issue 94 of frieze, in October 2005: Monica Bonvicini and Jörg Heiser in conversation with Marina Abramovic. 'The Artist is Present' runs at MoMA, New York until 31 May.
Marina Abramovic: Monica, I really like your piece Hausfrau Swinging [1997] – a video that combines sculpture and performance. Have you ever performed this piece yourself?
Monica Bonvicini: No, although my mother said, ‘you have to do it, Monica – you have to stand there naked wearing this house’. I replied, ‘I don’t think so’. In the piece a woman has a model of a house on her head and bangs it against a dry-wall corner; it’s related to a Louise Bourgeois drawing from the ‘Femme Maison’ series [Woman House, 1946–7], which I had a copy of in my studio for a long time. I actually first shot a video of myself doing the banging, but I didn’t like the result at all: I was too afraid of getting hurt. So I thought of a friend of mine who is an actor: she has a great, strong body – a little like the woman in the Louise Bourgeois drawing that inspired it – and I knew she would be able to do it the right way.
Jörg Heiser: Monica, after you first showed Wall Fuckin’ in 1995 – a video installation that includes a static shot of a naked woman embracing a wall, with her head outside the picture frame – you told me one critic didn’t talk to you for two years because he was upset it wasn’t you. It’s an odd assumption that female artists should only use their own bodies. I’m thinking of Yves Klein ‘directing’ naked women …
MA: Or Manzoni signing female bodies. I think it’s fine to use an actor. It’s like conducting, or choreographing.
MB: I never ask actors to ‘get into the role’ – I’m not interested in their interpretation of what they are doing. I just ask them to do something very simple, like fucking the wall or banging their head against it. It is nothing psychological.
MA: If you don’t feel that you’re a performer yourself, then it’s so much better to have the idea executed by someone else. And that relates to a question that interests me more and more: what do you do as a performance artist when you get old and you can’t do it any more? How can you transmit some kind of experience and knowledge to a younger generation? It’s important that my pieces can happen without me, because I have been a performer all my life, and I know that at some point in the future I won’t be able to perform, or won’t want to.
JH: But in your upcoming re-enactments of seminal performances by other artists from the 1960s and ’70s at the Guggenheim New York in November, isn’t it the point that you perform them yourself?
MA: I am doing them because I feel that I am the only one left of my generation who is still performing. And I feel that I want to set history straight, because there are so many commercial rip-offs, like Steven Meisel, for example – his recent fashion spread in Vogue is like Orlan with her plastic surgery. Fashion takes art out of context and uses only the surface. Theatre also rips off performance like you can’t imagine; and of course it happens in art too. A lot of kids are doing copies. So my attitude is, if you want to do a performance originally done by someone else, it’s fine if you treat it like, say, a musical score. But you have to have a few rules. For my re-enactments I have asked the artists or their foundations for permission. I asked Chris Burden for permission to perform Trans-Fixed [1974], the piece that involved him being nailed to the hood of a Volkswagen, and his assistant sent me a letter saying, ‘not this piece, not any piece’. And I replied, ‘great, I respect this, but tell me why’. The assistant wrote back saying, ‘Mr Burden doesn’t talk publicly’. And this pissed me off. Fine, but I think he should have explained his reasons. I am very disappointed about this, because I really wanted to do this piece. The woman crucified, finally. I wanted to do it on a Volga, which was designed in the Tito era, though, instead of a Volkswagen.
JH: Who are the other artists you contacted?
MA: I will be performing Bruce Nauman’s Body Pressure [1974], which is like a script – a piece of paper that you can take home and which gives you instructions how to press your body against the wall, the floor, and the corners of the room. It’s kind of an in-between piece – he didn’t actually perform it; I doubt anyone actually did at the time.
JH: So it’s a score, an instruction piece in the sense of a work by George Brecht or Yoko Ono?
MA: Yes. I’m also doing Seed Bed [1972] by Vito Acconci – the one where he masturbates under a floor in the gallery. That will be followed by Valie Export’s Action Pants: Genital Panic [1969], where she’s wearing a pair of trousers with the crotch removed. Then Gina Pane’s Self Portrait(s) [1973], where she’s lying on a metal bed above lit candles, and using a razor blade to make incisions around her fingernails and lips and How To Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare [1965], by Joseph Beuys. Bad videos or a few lousy photographs are the only documents remaining of so much of this stuff; the only image we have of the Beuys performance is of him with his face covered in gold and honey. You can’t imagine how differently this piece looks once you see more material. I went to see Eva Beuys, his widow, after I had sent her a letter asking for permission, but she had never replied. I showed up with my luggage; it was raining, I rang the bell, and she opened the door and said, ‘Frau Abramovic, my answer is no – but you can have coffee’. I went in, and we talked for five hours, about her 45 law cases against everything and everybody, about my reasons for redoing the piece, and we both cried and held hands and now everything is fine. She gave me an unauthorized video of the performance. It became apparent that Beuys never gave the photographers any instructions; the famous one doesn’t represent the piece well at all.
JH: Which of your own works will you be performing?
MA: Originally I wanted to do Rhythm 0 [1974] as the sixth piece, which involves me standing while the audience is invited to use all kinds of objects on me, but I went to every lawyer in New York and they won’t let me include a pistol with a bullet on display. So I will do Thomas Lips [1975] instead, which is a very ritualistic, complicated piece. The seventh and final piece will be the première of a new performance.
JH: Will you be doing these seven performances on seven consecutive days?
MA: Yes, and whether their original length was 15 minutes or an hour, I will perform them for seven hours each, because that’s how long most museums are open. The point for me is to show how you can pay homage to historical works. I have never seen the original of any of these pieces; I have no idea how it will feel to perform them, and that’s why I want to do it. With each of the artists or their estate, I have a contract where I specify that all the photographs of the performances will only be published in the book I’m making, that I will not make any art work out of it, or editions – except for my own performances, of course. So I don’t have any kind of gain – and I don’t want any fee.
JH: What if another artist wants to perform any of your pieces?
MA: That’s fine. I’m fed up with the Modernist attitude that nobody can ever repeat a piece because it’s an original touched by the divine artist. I’m not ready to see my performances die. In a work of mine for a theatre, The Biography [1992– ongoing], I act my own life; the idea is that every five or six years I will make a new version of it – it includes some of my performances, and now I have my students playing me in The Biography Remix [2004– ongoing, directed by Michel Laub]. Rest Energy [1980], which I made with my then partner, Ulay, is one of our most difficult pieces to perform – together we hold a bow drawn with an arrow pointing at my heart. I recently did it with Ulay’s son, who is the same age Ulay was at that time; after a while I stop and transfer the performance to one of my students.
JH: This touches on complicated issues of intellectual property –
the question of defining the differences between a legitimate
re-enactment, a quote, a distortion and a rip-off.
MA: Everyone has their own opinion on this. Like the bow and arrow piece – if somebody wanted to redo it, it’s very difficult to do it in any other way than the way I did it. In the case of Monica’s Bourgeois reference – that’s inspiration, in the way I was inspired by Yves Klein, or Fluxus, and performance, or noise music. But it’s different if you do it in exactly the same way. There was a couple in New Zealand in the 1970s who redid every performance Ulay and I were doing at the time, but they always did it a couple of months later, because that’s how long it took for information about our performances to get to them.
JH: There is a difference, though, between two New Zealand artists recreating your performances and a fashion photographer using your work for a commercial international ad campaign.
MA: Yes, the fashion aspect is worse for me, because the art is taken out of context. Meisel even recreated one image from Relation in the Space [1976], for Italian Vogue [November 1998], where I bump into Ulay and fall to the ground. He just added this empty fashion touch, which I can’t stand. When I sent a letter to him through my lawyer, the reply I got was, ‘he is very inspired by your work’.
MB: Today performances are becoming more and more specialized, staged, theatrical. What do you make of this development?
MA: In the 1980s there was a huge change, because the market became so much more demanding. For an artist to make performances for all of her or his life would be hell. Many performance artists from the 1970s went into architecture, like Acconci. Only a few artists, such as Beuys, did performances all their life. I will probably do performance for the rest of my life too. Also I don’t like seats – they give you expectations, as if you were in a theatre or cinema.
JH: Why are you doing the theatre piece then?
MA: That’s the only exception – it’s a work in progress, a staging of my life. And it’s going to keep going even if I have Alzheimer’s disease or I’m in a wheelchair.
JH: So the only place you can talk about your life is on stage?
MA: Yes, theatre is the only way for me to reveal things I am ashamed of – for example, my nose being too big and my ass being too large, and the war in Yugoslavia, which I left in 1975. People often see me as a tough, no make-up, spiritual girl, but I am not like that at all. I totally love fashion and bad movies and bad jokes and eat chocolate like there’s no tomorrow. My performances are always so heavy, though, which is why I put an image of me on the beach holding a beach ball on the cover of my catalogue Artist Body [1998]. Rebecca Horn said to me, ‘you’re crazy, people will think it’s an advert for a travel agent – no one will respect it’. But I need that lightness. Monica, why did you leave Italy for Berlin?
MB: I left in 1986 for many reasons, but mostly because Italy’s macho society was bothering me. I used to go to high school on my bicycle, and every day guys in their cars would yell things at me. Eventually I started to scream back, and once they stopped and slapped me. They were really offended.
JH: Monica, much of your work deals with architecture, which is a field very much dominated by men: the only really famous woman architect is Zaha Hadid.
MB: Like art, architecture is studied by more women than men, but it’s the men who tend to become the professionals. There are no comparable support structures for women.
JH: Marina, what is the relationship between your performances and architecture?
MA: Many of my 1970s’ performances concerned the body – often naked – in relation to architectural space. Many of my pieces have titles such as Expansion in the Space [1977], Interruption in the Space [1977], Relation in the Space [1976] or Relation in Time [1977]. I’ve never had an architectural space built, though – I either worked with given or pre-chosen spaces.
JH: You recently redid one of your pieces – Cleaning the Mirror II [1995; originally performed for video] – in the Art Unlimited section of Art Basel: a skeleton lies on top of you. This was not the first time you’ve done a performance at an art fair: in 1978 you performed Light/Dark, where you and Ulay slap each other’s faces, at Cologne Art Fair.
MA: It’s fantastic, because art fairs are the place where performances don’t belong at all. In the 1995 video I was just breathing with the skeleton lying on top of me. This time I cried for four hours.
MB: At one point you looked at me and maybe you didn’t recognize me, but I really felt touched, because nobody wants to see someone crying.
MA: When I do performances, I really go into another state of mind. I was worried about how I could start crying and not fake it – it had to be believable. Nothing happened for the first 15 minutes, but then this couple arrived – Eva and Adele – and after that I started, and I couldn’t stop. These people break my heart.
MB: What part of this work is for sale?
MA: All you can buy is the video of 1995. The proper documentation of performances on video has been an issue for a long time – in the 1970s, when Gina Pane did Self-Portrait(s), the only thing you see in the documentation is the bag of the photographer. If you have an audience, the camera’s viewpoint is often obscured. I remember the first time I used video was in 1975, to document Art Must be Beautiful, Artist Must be Beautiful [1975] in Copenhagen. I combed my hair violently for an hour in front of the audience and went back to see what the cameraman had shot, and he had been doing every kind of trick you can possibly do. So I destroyed this footage and made the same performance for him straight in front of the camera.
MB: Recently artists like Trisha Donnelly and Tino Sehgal have worked with performance and not allowed any documentation. How people tell each other about the performance possibly becomes more interesting than the visual documentation could ever be.
MA: With performance the narrative element is stronger than anything else. For example, I heard in Yugoslavia that the Volkswagen that Chris Burden was nailed to was driven around Los Angeles until the police stopped him. But actually it was just three people in a garage – they opened the door, pushed the car out, took a photograph and pushed it back.
JH: Perhaps this is why Burden felt that a re-enactment of his piece would destroy that piece’s legendary status?
MA: Maybe. I don’t get it.
MB: This reminds me of one of my favourite works – Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1976 piece Window Blowout, where he walked into the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and blew out the windows with an airgun. It is pieces like this that give people of my generation the idea that in the 1960s and ’70s you could do anything you wanted, but I guess this is a distortion. It makes me think of Bruce Nauman’s first solo show at Leo Castelli gallery in 1968: the hang was surprisingly classical, conventional.
MA: There were so many bad performances in those days I was ashamed to describe myself as a performance artist. It was like, if you piss against a tree, it’s a performance. At the end of the 1970s, though, all the bad performance artists became bad painters, which was great.
MB: You didn’t have a gallery for a long time, did you?
MA: I’ve been with Sean Kelly in New York now for ten years, but I didn’t have a gallery at all before that, even though I was approached many times. I lived for almost five years in a car, and went to deserts, stayed with Aborigines in Australia, and with Tibetan monks.
JH: How did you finance your life as an artist?
MA: I lived with my family in Yugoslavia until I was 29. I had to finish my performances before ten in the evening, because my mother forbade me to leave the house after that – I had a military regime at home. When I was a child, if my bed was messy when I was asleep, my mother would wake me up and tell me to sleep more neatly. So finally I escaped to Amsterdam. My mother went to the police and announced my disappearance, but when they asked how old I was and she said 29, they replied, ‘well, it’s about time’. Then I met Ulay – we were born on the same day and met on our birthday – it was a very crazy, romantic thing. All I had arrived in Amsterdam with was negatives of my performances – I didn’t even have any clothes. We bought an old Citroën from the French police and lived in it from 1975 to ’79. We lived in Sardinia and would wake up at dawn to milk the cows and the sheep and make pecorino cheese with the shepherds.
MB: You were a hippie.
MA: No, just two artists without money. And they fed us, and then we sat in the fields until we were asked to perform somewhere. In 1977 we were invited to a performance festival in Bologna. They promised to pay us what is today about 125 Euro, but we felt that if they hadn’t paid us before the performance they would never pay. We arrived penniless with our last drop of petrol. On the day of our performance the audience was waiting outside the museum and Ulay went to the office, completely naked, and asked for our money. The secretary was so shocked she gave it to him, but he didn’t have anywhere to put it. So he found a plastic bag, put the money inside, went to the toilet and put it in the cistern. We did the performance [Imponderabilia, 1977] facing each other naked for 90 minutes in the museum entrance, hoping that nobody would flush the toilet – at the end, thankfully, it was still there. It was only after our performance walk along the Great Wall of China [The Lovers, 1988] – which marked our separation – that I decided I needed a gallery. My friends said the only person who would understand the work was Sean Kelly, but he was working at the LA Louver gallery. It took me three years to organize a ‘spontaneous’ lunch with him. A friend of mine, Juliao Sarmento, was meeting him at Dean & Deluca, and we planned that I would pass by when they were eating. I was invited to sit down, and Sean finally said to me, ‘I would really love to work with you, but it’s the wrong time – today I lost my job and I have no gallery’. But we started working out of his loft, and then he opened a small gallery in New York on Mercer Street, and now he has a gallery in Chelsea.
JH: Everyone says the art world has become much more commercialized, but in one respect it really hasn’t changed at all: if you are in the film or book industry, it’s perfectly normal to approach a company to pitch an idea, and if it’s successful a contract is signed. In the art world it’s as if the artist is a Sleeping Beauty waiting to be discovered by the dealer or curator.
MB: What has changed is that the time span between studying and entering a gallery is getting shorter, but careers seem briefer too – some artists are lucky if theirs lasts for five years, and even luckier if they get a professorship.
MA: I always thought that nobody needs artists, which is precisely why you have to make yourself indispensable, so they can’t live without you. It’s not only important to make good work – it’s important that you put it in the right place at the right time. So many good artists don’t have the energy to do all this other shit because they are not communicative. I spend 20% of my time on creativity and 80% looking for ways of financing it.
JH: Your recent film Balkan Erotic Epic [2005] must have been quite something to organize: it involves numerous amateur actors performing sexual acts in folklore costumes. It’s hilarious – like a parody of the Shirin Neshat representations of cultures and gender.
MA: Neville Wakefield approached me and several other artists about two years ago to make a 12-minute film for a DVD compilation he’s putting together of contributions by artists who are working with erotic or pornographic elements in their work. I thought, the most interesting thing would be to think about my roots and how sexual organs are used traditionally in my culture, in the Balkan region.
MB: Thinking about your origins when it comes to porn – that’s psychologically interesting.
MA: In socialist Yugoslavia everything was about sex, drinking and politics, and I wanted to explore where this came from. I did a lot of research and came across ancient pagan rituals where sexual organs are used for various purposes. For example, in the old days a mother would protect her child from the Evil Eye by rubbing the child’s face with vaginal fluid. Or if a woman was having a difficult birth, her husband would take his penis out and make a cross on her breast; in the field, if a horse became weak, the man would touch it with his penis too; if there was a battle, the Balkan men would take the sexiest woman from the village, undress her and force her to perform obscene gestures to distract the enemy; alternatively, the soldiers would masturbate in the earth. There are hundreds of examples, all described in a very ancient Serbian language. One I thought was fantastic was that, if there was too much rain, the women from the village would run into the fields and lift their skirts and flash their pussies to the gods to scare them. So I went to Yugoslavia and talked to perfectly ordinary women from the village, between the ages of 18 and 75, into doing it. At first they were very shy and wouldn’t do it, and I thought I wouldn’t get anywhere. But after a while they ran into the mud and started showing their pussies like there was no tomorrow.
For another scene I asked men to be dressed in national costumes, and to unzip their trousers and reveal their erections; I asked them to stand very proud and look at the camera and not move. We shot 15 hours of that material. I don’t think its pornographic – anyone who sees this material bursts out laughing, but then looks at it for a long time, in silence. But at the same time there is something I can’t explain: the power of our genitals, and how we can use them for healing or against the forces of nature. But obviously even for this kind of film I can’t rub my vaginal liquid on the face of a three-year-old kid – I’d be put in prison. So I had a good solution – I made a cartoon out of this.
MB: Did you make the drawings for it yourself?
MA: No, I asked a Serbian cartoonist to do it. In the film these drawings will be shown by me, dressed as a stern teacher.
MB: So you’re skipping the whole notion of sexuality as a sociological site of power and politics.
MA: But it’s amazing when you see a 75-year-old woman showing her pussy in the rain. I don’t even know what this material means; I’m really touched by it.
MB: But isn’t it a bit like a fairy-tale? You don’t really believe that flashing will stop the rain, do you?
MA: Can the gods be scared? Of a 75-year-old pussy, maybe they can. But we should return to what we discussed in regard to using actors. It would be very different if I did this performance. This 75-year-old woman was a pensioner who worked in the post office, and this was one of the most exciting things she had ever done – she got so enthusiastic. And that comes across.
MB: Do you see this film as a reappropriation of pre-modern, ‘primitive’ sexuality, a power that doesn’t exist any more? Because now we are living in a strip-tease culture, where you are expected to be sexy as a woman, but it doesn’t even mean having free sex. You just have to be available, on display.
MA: Do I think an Italian weather girl on TV who looks like a porn star is healing somebody? No. But in regard to my film material, I don’t know yet what it means. Monica, do you ever get obsessed with an idea and know you have to do it, but you don’t know why? And then all of a sudden it seems so logical. That has happened to me so many times.
MB: Sam Durant once said to me that making art is a bit like keeping a diary, because at a certain point you develop your own language, so the next work inevitably relates to the one before. Even if you don’t know why, there is continuity.
MA: I’ve had problems with continuity. There have been periods in my life where I had absolutely no ideas and I would panic, but didn’t want to force it intellectually.
MB: I really love Waiting for an Idea [1991]; ‘what am I going to do next?’ is such a recurrent feeling for an artist.
MA: Nowadays I don’t care, because after working for 30 years I know I can’t force it. But when the idea comes, I get really afraid, although there’s an incredible feeling of relief after it’s realized. One thing I hate is when people come up to me after a performance and want to engage in a deep conversation when all I want to do is have an ice-cream and do nothing.
MB: But some of your performances are very heavy, even moral. For example, your performance in Basel – you were crying for hours.
MA: For me the public is a holy thing.
MB: How do you see performance developing in the future?
MA: I think that performance is very strange – it comes and goes. It was all over the place in the 1970s, but there was too much crap; then in the 1980s it was all about the self and the market, with the exception of the night-club scene and artists like Leigh Bowery – it was all connected to music and AIDS and the awareness of the body. In the 1990s many performances became an element in video installations, and there were lots of performance elements in contemporary dance – people like Jan Fabre, Pina Bausch, Jérôme Bel. Now I find it very interesting that a performance piece doesn’t have to be performed by the artist who created it. Any artist who has the courage to do a performance without documenting it is the most radical. But I can’t help it – I document all my performances, because my mother is such an orderly woman – I believe in KGB files. But in an ideal world, it should be just word of mouth.
Marina Abramovi´c’s series of performances ‘Seven Easy Pieces’ will take place 9 – 15 November at the Guggenheim Museum, New York and followed by a solo show at Sean Kelly Gallery from 9 December. Her exhibition ‘Balkan Epic’ will be held at Art for the World Project for Pirelli, Milan, from 19 January – 30 March 2006.
Monica Bonvicini is shortlisted for the Nationalgalerie Prize for Young Art 2005, on show at Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, until 16 October. Her work is included in the Venice and Gothenburg Biennales (both until 6 November), and in ‘Centre of Gravity’, the inaugural exhibition of the Istanbul Modern museum.
Jörg Heiser
Decline and Fall - Frieze 130 April 2010
Decline and Fall
Tracing the history of ruins in art, from 18th-century painting to 21st-century film
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Issue 130 April 2010 Decline and Fall
Tracing the history of ruins in art, from 18th-century painting to 21st-century film
Jane and Louise Wilson, Sealander (2006), production still
‘I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?’
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
In 1953, at a time when much of Europe still lay in ruins and the spectre of atomic war loomed ever larger, the English novelist and travel writer Rose Macaulay published Pleasure of Ruins, her classic study of the aesthetics of destruction.1 In a fastidious and, at times, eccentrically written book, she traces the development of a taste for desuetude from Renaissance dream narratives to the ‘heartless pastime’ pursued by Henry James on his travels in Italy. It is not until the final pages that Macaulay acknowledges she is writing among modern examples, and then only – in a short ‘note on new ruins’ – to claim that the wreckage caused by bombing in World War II lacks the proper obscurity to qualify as pleasing decay: ‘Ruin must be a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings.’2 According to Macaulay, the ruined houses, shops and churches of London, Hamburg, Coventry and Dresden would need to be softened by nature and time before being elected to a canon that includes Pompeii and the Parthenon. Macaulay’s language, however, suggests that the wreckage she sees around her enthralls her. Of a bombed-out house, she writes with some lyricism: ‘The stairway climbs up and up, undaunted, to the roofless summit where it meets the sky.’3
Macaulay’s ambivalence about the status of the modern ruin – her own home and library were destroyed in the Blitz – indicates a fundamental confusion at the heart of the Ruinenlust that gripped European art and literature for centuries. In a highly refined and historically precise form, a version of that admiration for decay seems to have seized artists internationally in recent years: we might think, for example, of works as diverse as Roger Hiorns’ Seizure (2008), installed in a decayed London flat, and Joel Meyerowitz’ frankly picturesque photographs of Ground Zero. In other cases, such as Runa Islam’s film of the Museum of the 20th Century in Vienna, Empty the pond to get the fish. (2008), the ruin in question is explicitly that of a mid-century Modernism. Some broad themes survive in this newly desolate but fantastical landscape: on the one hand, the ruin appears to point to a deep and vanished past whose relics merely haunt the present, reminding us of such airy and perennial themes as the hubris of Man and the weight of History. On the other, ruins seem to traffic with the modern, and with the future, in ironic and devious ways. At its height, for example, the ‘ruin lust’ of the 18th century cast itself imaginatively centuries hence: Hubert Robert painted the Louvre in ruins while Joseph Gandy (at the instruction of its architect Sir John Soane) imagined the newly built Bank of England laid waste as if by some future cataclysm. Ruins seem, in fact, intrinsic to the projects of modernity and, later, Modernism.
For sure, the past century did not lack for straightforwardly kitsch or nostalgic versions of the taste for ruins. The most notorious example is Albert Speer’s concept of ‘ruin value’, according to which the monumental architecture of Welthauptstadt Germania – Hitler’s projected replacement of Berlin as Germany’s capital city – was conceived with an eye to its future picturesque decay. In the realm of ruin theory, the sociologist Georg Simmel, in his 1911 essay ‘The Ruin’, still adhered to the Romantic notion that decaying buildings and monuments embodied a one-way slump of the artificial into the chaos of Nature.4 But as several contributors to Ruins of Modernity (2009) – a collection of essays published by Duke University Press and edited by Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle – point out, a keen interest in the art and utility of ruination was also essential to more than one strand of modern thought and practice. Revisiting the classical fragments drawn by Piranesi, Andreas Huyssen concludes that ‘a past embodied in ruined and memory-laden architecture seems to tower over the present of the Enlightenment’.5
But the more pressing instance appears much later, in the frank catastrophism of Le Corbusier. In his essay ‘Air War and Architecture’, Anthony Vidler avers of the projected ville radieuse: ‘The past was either eradicated or transformed, in an 18th-century manner, into ruin fragments in the park […] The city [had] become no more nor less than a cemetery of its own past.’6 In the immediate postwar period, Vidler argues, these vistas of rubble were realities, and the prospect of a vastly more destructive nuclear future consequently haunts the bunker-like Brutalist architecture of, among others, Peter and Alison Smithson.
Such retrospective diagnoses of Modernism’s reliance on ruins actually say little new, though, when viewed from the perspective of postwar art and – especially – in light of a certain contemporary ruin lust. The artistic, literary and theoretical touchstones of the renascent interest in ruins are perhaps too familiar, but worth rehearsing if one wishes to get some critical purchase on the most recent developments, newly invested as those are in a view of Modernism from the vantage of at least half a century. The pre-history of the current craze for modern ruins could be pinpointed to October 1967, with Robert Smithson’s Artforum essay on ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, a text (and photographs) in which the whole of Smithson’s cod-baroque melding of 1960s urban decay and industrial picturesque is forced into the ironic form of an excursion to the New Jersey hinterland where he was born.7 Smithson’s project in that essay (and others of the late 1960s) is explicitly allied with the fiction of J.G. Ballard, whose fantasias of high-rise anomie and ex-urban isolation have likewise not ceased to inspire enthusiasts of the modern ruin. Urban theorist Paul Virilio could join this visionary pairing; his Bunker Archaeology – published in France in 1975 and in English translation in 1994 – was inspired by his first tours, in the late 1950s, of the abandoned bunkers and gun emplacements that comprised the Nazis’ defensive Atlantic Wall on the French coast.8 Virilio treats these littoral relics as if they are both evidence of a lost civilization and avatars of his own avowedly Corbusian architectural practice. But they seem also to promise an alien architecture to come; they are, in short, ruins as much of the future as of living memory.
To a large degree, it was this trio of artistic and theoretical reference points that ghosted the ruin-fixated art of the last decades of the 20th century, though some of it engaged in a less mediated way the wreckage of the recent past. In a work such as Martha Rosler’s 1993 video How Do We Know What Home Looks Like?, the decayed and contested architecture of Modernism appears both outdated and up-for-grabs: a fading Utopian inheritance that barely hangs on to its (then routinely disparaged) potential for collective aspiration. Rosler’s intimate exploration of Le Cobusier’s Unité d’Habitation at Firminy-Vert, in south-central France, showed a dilapidated building that had been in part redecorated by its tenants (as per conservative clichés about the impersonality of high-rise living) with aspirantly bourgeois wallpapers and private souvenirs, but still retained a sense of embattled technological community, typified by the radio station installed on its roof. It was, however, among artists who referred, directly or obliquely, to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc that the theme of ruin flourished in the 1990s and beyond. Tacita Dean’s film Sound Mirrors (1999) broods over the remains of British prewar acoustic early-warning technology that seemed to presage the silos and satellite dishes of the Cold War, while later Berlin-based films such as Fernsehturm (Television Tower, 2001) and Palast (Palace, 2004) more readily reflect on the ageing or half-demolished architecture of the East. That strand of explicitly Ballardian ruin lust has continued, too, in certain works by Jane and Louise Wilson – notably, their treatment of Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion in the postwar town of Peterlee, UK, in A Free and Anonymous Monument (2003), and their own return to the Atlantic Wall in Sealander (2006) – and in the ambitious project of the Center for Land Use Interpretation to document (among many other types of landscape) the defunct sites and artefacts left behind by the US nuclear weapons and space programmes in the second half of the 20th century.
If such works courted a kind of military–industrial sublime, and risked at their most self-aware a type of nostalgia, it is surely this latter element that has come to the fore, in more or less self-conscious or critical forms, in the last few years. The variously thoroughgoing or superficial archaeology of architectural and artistic Modernism that has exercised so many artists in the last decade is patently, on one level, a discourse on ruins in a Romantic mode. At first glance, the assertion that ‘modernity is our antiquity’ (as one of the guiding rubrics of Documenta 12 had it) allows for a potentially endless poring over the rubble, and the discovery time and again of our melancholy distance from the formal ambition or political charge of the modern. There is a definite pleasure in this, and one not to be merely disparaged, even as group shows dedicated to the ‘modern ruin’ – the title itself has become ubiquitous – proliferate with, given their subject, a somewhat ironic energy. There is a lot to be said for wallowing, after all. But an attitude of mourning, or downright depressive longing, for the lost object of Modernism, is not the avowed aim of much of this work. Rather, so the curatorial language has it, what is called for is a re-animation (or maybe occult conjuring) of the corpse of Modernism – or, better, of the latent and so far unfulfilled life embodied in its ruins. This raises some taxing problems, not least the question of what one does with the fact, neatly adumbrated by Huyssen and Vidler, that the claim to revivify the ruins of the past was itself a stereotypically Modernist one. At every turn – even, or perhaps especially, when it asserts its hostility to mere revivalism – the contemporary ruin gaze is seemingly mired in a revivalist nostalgia.
One plausible route out of that predicament seems to lie in uncovering occluded aspects of Modernism, often in the form of structures and artefacts that either arise from alternative traditions in the last century or from complex sets of artistic and political relations at the edges of a Eurocentric or mostly masculine canon. The imbrication of Modernism in late or post-colonial contexts is one productive strand of such researches and practice. The photographs, drawings and scale models in Ângela Ferreira’s installation Maison Tropicale (Tropical House, 2007), for example, trace the design and deployment by Jean Prouvé, in the late 1940s, of prefabricated metal dwellings in Niger and in the Republic of the Congo. The post-colonial export of Prouvé’s Modernist housing is mirrored in its peremptoriness by the removal and sale of the prototype buildings on the art market half a century later. A project such as Ferreira’s acknowledges at once the Utopian impulse behind the design, its abstract imposition on the landscape and the depredations of a newly globalized economy that leaves in its wake only a vacant tract of rubble and rusted reinforcement.
Certain Modernist structures seem primed, in their very dilapidation and the fog of rumour and misinformation that surrounds them, for such recuperative and corrective treatment. E1027, the celebrated but still mysterious house that the Irish furniture designer Eileen Gray completed near Monaco in 1929, is a particularly resonant case in point. The building, badly decayed and only recently renovated, was for decades wrongly attributed to Gray’s lover Jean Bodovici: a mistake their friend Le Corbusier, who knew the truth, did nothing to correct. (Le Corbusier, in fact, bitterly coveted the house and, to Gray’s fury, personalized it with his own murals; he subsequently built a cabin nearby and died while swimming in front of Gray’s masterpiece.) The Irish artist Laura Gannon’s two-screen Super-16 mm film installation A House in Cap-Martin (2007) captured E1027 as a collection of mournful details – rusting window frames and spalling white render, a sunken solarium filled with autumn leaves – while Susanne M. Winterling’s Eileen Gray; The Jewel and Troubled Water (2008), installed at the 5th Berlin Biennial, combined a sculpture of Gray’s solarium, photographs of the designer and related artefacts, with two 16mm films of condensation on the windows of the atmospherically dysfunctional Neue Nationalgalerie where it was on show. Perhaps the most interesting intervention in Gray’s story, however, has been that of another Irish artist, Sarah Browne, whose installation for the Irish pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, Carpet for the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, included a searching letter to the deceased Gray, in which Browne explored the designer’s ambiguous place in the history alike of Modernism and Irish cultural heritage.
This kind of tangential address to the extant remains of architectural Modernism is another alternative to nostalgic rapture in the face of austere decay. Gerard Byrne, whose art has long evinced an interest in postwar Modernism, has, at the same time, almost wholly eschewed the sort of reverence that has become the reflex response to monolithic settings in melancholy distress. In fact, the buildings in which several of Byrne’s videos have been shot – notably New Sexual Lifestyles (2003), filmed in the Goulding Summer House, a restored Miesian glass-and-steel pavilion in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland – are not really ruins in the material sense; rather, they appear confusedly out of time, caught in the anachronic web of artistic, intellectual and pop-cultural history that the artist spins around them. His film installation subject (2009), shown at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds last year, was an oblique response to the architecture of the University of Leeds: a campus whose architects, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, are best known for the soft-Ballardian Barbican complex in London. Byrne’s Brechtian repurposing of texts from the university’s archives as naive acting exercises seemed to place the hushed lecture theatres and sparse plazas of the campus in a curious non-time derived from the postwar history of student activism and civic or institutional paternalism.
What’s clear from work like Byrne’s is that, at one level, the most sophisticated response to the modern or Modernist ruin is to neutralize its nostalgic charge with other modes of time travel. Though that is not to say that there is not still mileage in facing down the ruins of even the most familiar 20th-century iconography. Bernd Behr’s Weimar Villa (2010), for example, juxtaposes the construction of a Bauhaus-themed gated community in China (designed by none other than Albert Speer Jr.) with the exhumation of one of Walter Gropius’ Master Houses in Dessau, once inhabited by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. And Cyprien Gaillard’s film Pruitt Igoe Falls (2009) rhymes the 2008 demolition of the Sighthill tower block in Glasgow with the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1972: an event that Charles Jencks notoriously claimed marked the terminal point of the entire Modernist adventure. The most provocative recent take on that subject has been that of a critic, not an artist, and one who acknowledges that there may yet be some radical force left in the ruin-nostalgia that so many artists are so keen to disavow even as they mine the last seam of its art-world popularity. Owen Hatherley’s book, Militant Modernism (2009), is, among other things, an argument for the precisely political valence of a backward look at the ruins of Modernism, directed, in his case, at the ghosts of Britain’s postwar social-democratic romance with Brutalist housing.9 As Hatherley puts it in a passage that is both knowingly indebted to the ruin lust of the Romantic past and determinedly oriented to the future: ‘Brutalism is not so much ruined as dormant, derelict – still functioning even in a drastically badly treated fashion, and as such ready to be recharged and reactivated. This rough beast might still slouch towards a concrete New Jerusalem.’10 It remains to be seen whether, in contemporary art, the archaeology of modern ruins has exhausted its moment, or whether it’s exactly in its late phase that it may yet unearth traces of that future.
1 Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, Thames & Hudson, London, 1984
2 Ibid., pp. 454–5
3 Ibid., pp. 454–5
4 Georg Simmel, ‘The Ruin’, in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff, Harper & Row, New York, 1965, p. 259
5 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity’, ibid., p. 26
6 Anthony Vidler, ‘Air War and Architecture’, ibid., p. 34
7 Robert Smithson, ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic’, Artforum, October 1967. Reprinted as ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’, in Robert Smithson, Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996,
pp. 68–74
8 Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, trans. George Collins, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1994
9 Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism, Zero Books, Winchester, 2009. Hatherley’s more extensive and detailed treatment of the wake of that brief moment of official Utopianism is forthcoming in A Tour of the New Ruins of Great Britain, to be published by Verso later in 2010.
10 Ibid., p. 42
Brian Dillon
Brian Dillon is AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Kent. He is the author of Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005). A novella, Sanctuary, will be published by Sternberg Press later this year.
frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at editors@frieze.com.
About this article
First published in
Issue 130, April 2010
by Brian Dillon
Tracing the history of ruins in art, from 18th-century painting to 21st-century film
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Issue 130 April 2010 Decline and Fall
Tracing the history of ruins in art, from 18th-century painting to 21st-century film
Jane and Louise Wilson, Sealander (2006), production still
‘I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry, and time one livid final flame. What’s left us then?’
James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
In 1953, at a time when much of Europe still lay in ruins and the spectre of atomic war loomed ever larger, the English novelist and travel writer Rose Macaulay published Pleasure of Ruins, her classic study of the aesthetics of destruction.1 In a fastidious and, at times, eccentrically written book, she traces the development of a taste for desuetude from Renaissance dream narratives to the ‘heartless pastime’ pursued by Henry James on his travels in Italy. It is not until the final pages that Macaulay acknowledges she is writing among modern examples, and then only – in a short ‘note on new ruins’ – to claim that the wreckage caused by bombing in World War II lacks the proper obscurity to qualify as pleasing decay: ‘Ruin must be a fantasy, veiled by the mind’s dark imaginings.’2 According to Macaulay, the ruined houses, shops and churches of London, Hamburg, Coventry and Dresden would need to be softened by nature and time before being elected to a canon that includes Pompeii and the Parthenon. Macaulay’s language, however, suggests that the wreckage she sees around her enthralls her. Of a bombed-out house, she writes with some lyricism: ‘The stairway climbs up and up, undaunted, to the roofless summit where it meets the sky.’3
Macaulay’s ambivalence about the status of the modern ruin – her own home and library were destroyed in the Blitz – indicates a fundamental confusion at the heart of the Ruinenlust that gripped European art and literature for centuries. In a highly refined and historically precise form, a version of that admiration for decay seems to have seized artists internationally in recent years: we might think, for example, of works as diverse as Roger Hiorns’ Seizure (2008), installed in a decayed London flat, and Joel Meyerowitz’ frankly picturesque photographs of Ground Zero. In other cases, such as Runa Islam’s film of the Museum of the 20th Century in Vienna, Empty the pond to get the fish. (2008), the ruin in question is explicitly that of a mid-century Modernism. Some broad themes survive in this newly desolate but fantastical landscape: on the one hand, the ruin appears to point to a deep and vanished past whose relics merely haunt the present, reminding us of such airy and perennial themes as the hubris of Man and the weight of History. On the other, ruins seem to traffic with the modern, and with the future, in ironic and devious ways. At its height, for example, the ‘ruin lust’ of the 18th century cast itself imaginatively centuries hence: Hubert Robert painted the Louvre in ruins while Joseph Gandy (at the instruction of its architect Sir John Soane) imagined the newly built Bank of England laid waste as if by some future cataclysm. Ruins seem, in fact, intrinsic to the projects of modernity and, later, Modernism.
For sure, the past century did not lack for straightforwardly kitsch or nostalgic versions of the taste for ruins. The most notorious example is Albert Speer’s concept of ‘ruin value’, according to which the monumental architecture of Welthauptstadt Germania – Hitler’s projected replacement of Berlin as Germany’s capital city – was conceived with an eye to its future picturesque decay. In the realm of ruin theory, the sociologist Georg Simmel, in his 1911 essay ‘The Ruin’, still adhered to the Romantic notion that decaying buildings and monuments embodied a one-way slump of the artificial into the chaos of Nature.4 But as several contributors to Ruins of Modernity (2009) – a collection of essays published by Duke University Press and edited by Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle – point out, a keen interest in the art and utility of ruination was also essential to more than one strand of modern thought and practice. Revisiting the classical fragments drawn by Piranesi, Andreas Huyssen concludes that ‘a past embodied in ruined and memory-laden architecture seems to tower over the present of the Enlightenment’.5
But the more pressing instance appears much later, in the frank catastrophism of Le Corbusier. In his essay ‘Air War and Architecture’, Anthony Vidler avers of the projected ville radieuse: ‘The past was either eradicated or transformed, in an 18th-century manner, into ruin fragments in the park […] The city [had] become no more nor less than a cemetery of its own past.’6 In the immediate postwar period, Vidler argues, these vistas of rubble were realities, and the prospect of a vastly more destructive nuclear future consequently haunts the bunker-like Brutalist architecture of, among others, Peter and Alison Smithson.
Such retrospective diagnoses of Modernism’s reliance on ruins actually say little new, though, when viewed from the perspective of postwar art and – especially – in light of a certain contemporary ruin lust. The artistic, literary and theoretical touchstones of the renascent interest in ruins are perhaps too familiar, but worth rehearsing if one wishes to get some critical purchase on the most recent developments, newly invested as those are in a view of Modernism from the vantage of at least half a century. The pre-history of the current craze for modern ruins could be pinpointed to October 1967, with Robert Smithson’s Artforum essay on ‘The Monuments of Passaic’, a text (and photographs) in which the whole of Smithson’s cod-baroque melding of 1960s urban decay and industrial picturesque is forced into the ironic form of an excursion to the New Jersey hinterland where he was born.7 Smithson’s project in that essay (and others of the late 1960s) is explicitly allied with the fiction of J.G. Ballard, whose fantasias of high-rise anomie and ex-urban isolation have likewise not ceased to inspire enthusiasts of the modern ruin. Urban theorist Paul Virilio could join this visionary pairing; his Bunker Archaeology – published in France in 1975 and in English translation in 1994 – was inspired by his first tours, in the late 1950s, of the abandoned bunkers and gun emplacements that comprised the Nazis’ defensive Atlantic Wall on the French coast.8 Virilio treats these littoral relics as if they are both evidence of a lost civilization and avatars of his own avowedly Corbusian architectural practice. But they seem also to promise an alien architecture to come; they are, in short, ruins as much of the future as of living memory.
To a large degree, it was this trio of artistic and theoretical reference points that ghosted the ruin-fixated art of the last decades of the 20th century, though some of it engaged in a less mediated way the wreckage of the recent past. In a work such as Martha Rosler’s 1993 video How Do We Know What Home Looks Like?, the decayed and contested architecture of Modernism appears both outdated and up-for-grabs: a fading Utopian inheritance that barely hangs on to its (then routinely disparaged) potential for collective aspiration. Rosler’s intimate exploration of Le Cobusier’s Unité d’Habitation at Firminy-Vert, in south-central France, showed a dilapidated building that had been in part redecorated by its tenants (as per conservative clichés about the impersonality of high-rise living) with aspirantly bourgeois wallpapers and private souvenirs, but still retained a sense of embattled technological community, typified by the radio station installed on its roof. It was, however, among artists who referred, directly or obliquely, to the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Bloc that the theme of ruin flourished in the 1990s and beyond. Tacita Dean’s film Sound Mirrors (1999) broods over the remains of British prewar acoustic early-warning technology that seemed to presage the silos and satellite dishes of the Cold War, while later Berlin-based films such as Fernsehturm (Television Tower, 2001) and Palast (Palace, 2004) more readily reflect on the ageing or half-demolished architecture of the East. That strand of explicitly Ballardian ruin lust has continued, too, in certain works by Jane and Louise Wilson – notably, their treatment of Victor Pasmore’s Apollo Pavilion in the postwar town of Peterlee, UK, in A Free and Anonymous Monument (2003), and their own return to the Atlantic Wall in Sealander (2006) – and in the ambitious project of the Center for Land Use Interpretation to document (among many other types of landscape) the defunct sites and artefacts left behind by the US nuclear weapons and space programmes in the second half of the 20th century.
If such works courted a kind of military–industrial sublime, and risked at their most self-aware a type of nostalgia, it is surely this latter element that has come to the fore, in more or less self-conscious or critical forms, in the last few years. The variously thoroughgoing or superficial archaeology of architectural and artistic Modernism that has exercised so many artists in the last decade is patently, on one level, a discourse on ruins in a Romantic mode. At first glance, the assertion that ‘modernity is our antiquity’ (as one of the guiding rubrics of Documenta 12 had it) allows for a potentially endless poring over the rubble, and the discovery time and again of our melancholy distance from the formal ambition or political charge of the modern. There is a definite pleasure in this, and one not to be merely disparaged, even as group shows dedicated to the ‘modern ruin’ – the title itself has become ubiquitous – proliferate with, given their subject, a somewhat ironic energy. There is a lot to be said for wallowing, after all. But an attitude of mourning, or downright depressive longing, for the lost object of Modernism, is not the avowed aim of much of this work. Rather, so the curatorial language has it, what is called for is a re-animation (or maybe occult conjuring) of the corpse of Modernism – or, better, of the latent and so far unfulfilled life embodied in its ruins. This raises some taxing problems, not least the question of what one does with the fact, neatly adumbrated by Huyssen and Vidler, that the claim to revivify the ruins of the past was itself a stereotypically Modernist one. At every turn – even, or perhaps especially, when it asserts its hostility to mere revivalism – the contemporary ruin gaze is seemingly mired in a revivalist nostalgia.
One plausible route out of that predicament seems to lie in uncovering occluded aspects of Modernism, often in the form of structures and artefacts that either arise from alternative traditions in the last century or from complex sets of artistic and political relations at the edges of a Eurocentric or mostly masculine canon. The imbrication of Modernism in late or post-colonial contexts is one productive strand of such researches and practice. The photographs, drawings and scale models in Ângela Ferreira’s installation Maison Tropicale (Tropical House, 2007), for example, trace the design and deployment by Jean Prouvé, in the late 1940s, of prefabricated metal dwellings in Niger and in the Republic of the Congo. The post-colonial export of Prouvé’s Modernist housing is mirrored in its peremptoriness by the removal and sale of the prototype buildings on the art market half a century later. A project such as Ferreira’s acknowledges at once the Utopian impulse behind the design, its abstract imposition on the landscape and the depredations of a newly globalized economy that leaves in its wake only a vacant tract of rubble and rusted reinforcement.
Certain Modernist structures seem primed, in their very dilapidation and the fog of rumour and misinformation that surrounds them, for such recuperative and corrective treatment. E1027, the celebrated but still mysterious house that the Irish furniture designer Eileen Gray completed near Monaco in 1929, is a particularly resonant case in point. The building, badly decayed and only recently renovated, was for decades wrongly attributed to Gray’s lover Jean Bodovici: a mistake their friend Le Corbusier, who knew the truth, did nothing to correct. (Le Corbusier, in fact, bitterly coveted the house and, to Gray’s fury, personalized it with his own murals; he subsequently built a cabin nearby and died while swimming in front of Gray’s masterpiece.) The Irish artist Laura Gannon’s two-screen Super-16 mm film installation A House in Cap-Martin (2007) captured E1027 as a collection of mournful details – rusting window frames and spalling white render, a sunken solarium filled with autumn leaves – while Susanne M. Winterling’s Eileen Gray; The Jewel and Troubled Water (2008), installed at the 5th Berlin Biennial, combined a sculpture of Gray’s solarium, photographs of the designer and related artefacts, with two 16mm films of condensation on the windows of the atmospherically dysfunctional Neue Nationalgalerie where it was on show. Perhaps the most interesting intervention in Gray’s story, however, has been that of another Irish artist, Sarah Browne, whose installation for the Irish pavilion at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, Carpet for the Irish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, included a searching letter to the deceased Gray, in which Browne explored the designer’s ambiguous place in the history alike of Modernism and Irish cultural heritage.
This kind of tangential address to the extant remains of architectural Modernism is another alternative to nostalgic rapture in the face of austere decay. Gerard Byrne, whose art has long evinced an interest in postwar Modernism, has, at the same time, almost wholly eschewed the sort of reverence that has become the reflex response to monolithic settings in melancholy distress. In fact, the buildings in which several of Byrne’s videos have been shot – notably New Sexual Lifestyles (2003), filmed in the Goulding Summer House, a restored Miesian glass-and-steel pavilion in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland – are not really ruins in the material sense; rather, they appear confusedly out of time, caught in the anachronic web of artistic, intellectual and pop-cultural history that the artist spins around them. His film installation subject (2009), shown at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds last year, was an oblique response to the architecture of the University of Leeds: a campus whose architects, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon, are best known for the soft-Ballardian Barbican complex in London. Byrne’s Brechtian repurposing of texts from the university’s archives as naive acting exercises seemed to place the hushed lecture theatres and sparse plazas of the campus in a curious non-time derived from the postwar history of student activism and civic or institutional paternalism.
What’s clear from work like Byrne’s is that, at one level, the most sophisticated response to the modern or Modernist ruin is to neutralize its nostalgic charge with other modes of time travel. Though that is not to say that there is not still mileage in facing down the ruins of even the most familiar 20th-century iconography. Bernd Behr’s Weimar Villa (2010), for example, juxtaposes the construction of a Bauhaus-themed gated community in China (designed by none other than Albert Speer Jr.) with the exhumation of one of Walter Gropius’ Master Houses in Dessau, once inhabited by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. And Cyprien Gaillard’s film Pruitt Igoe Falls (2009) rhymes the 2008 demolition of the Sighthill tower block in Glasgow with the destruction of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1972: an event that Charles Jencks notoriously claimed marked the terminal point of the entire Modernist adventure. The most provocative recent take on that subject has been that of a critic, not an artist, and one who acknowledges that there may yet be some radical force left in the ruin-nostalgia that so many artists are so keen to disavow even as they mine the last seam of its art-world popularity. Owen Hatherley’s book, Militant Modernism (2009), is, among other things, an argument for the precisely political valence of a backward look at the ruins of Modernism, directed, in his case, at the ghosts of Britain’s postwar social-democratic romance with Brutalist housing.9 As Hatherley puts it in a passage that is both knowingly indebted to the ruin lust of the Romantic past and determinedly oriented to the future: ‘Brutalism is not so much ruined as dormant, derelict – still functioning even in a drastically badly treated fashion, and as such ready to be recharged and reactivated. This rough beast might still slouch towards a concrete New Jerusalem.’10 It remains to be seen whether, in contemporary art, the archaeology of modern ruins has exhausted its moment, or whether it’s exactly in its late phase that it may yet unearth traces of that future.
1 Rose Macaulay, Pleasure of Ruins, Thames & Hudson, London, 1984
2 Ibid., pp. 454–5
3 Ibid., pp. 454–5
4 Georg Simmel, ‘The Ruin’, in Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics, ed. Kurt H. Wolff, Harper & Row, New York, 1965, p. 259
5 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Authentic Ruins: Products of Modernity’, ibid., p. 26
6 Anthony Vidler, ‘Air War and Architecture’, ibid., p. 34
7 Robert Smithson, ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic’, Artforum, October 1967. Reprinted as ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’, in Robert Smithson, Collected Writings, ed. Jack Flam, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996,
pp. 68–74
8 Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, trans. George Collins, Princeton Architectural Press, New York, 1994
9 Owen Hatherley, Militant Modernism, Zero Books, Winchester, 2009. Hatherley’s more extensive and detailed treatment of the wake of that brief moment of official Utopianism is forthcoming in A Tour of the New Ruins of Great Britain, to be published by Verso later in 2010.
10 Ibid., p. 42
Brian Dillon
Brian Dillon is AHRC Research Fellow in the Creative and Performing Arts at the University of Kent. He is the author of Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009) and In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005). A novella, Sanctuary, will be published by Sternberg Press later this year.
frieze is now accepting letters to the editors for possible publication at editors@frieze.com.
About this article
First published in
Issue 130, April 2010
by Brian Dillon
The Return Of Religion and Other Myths: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art
The Return Of Religion and Other Myths: A Critical Reader in Contemporary Art
Books
Eds. Maria Hlavajova, Sven Lütticken and Jill Winder (BAK, Utrecht, and post editions, Rotterdam, 2009)
‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’ So declares the Second Commandment, forbidding not only images of God, but any images whatsoever – which means that, for the law on which the three major monotheistic religions are ostensibly based, visual culture is an abomination.
The critique of religion was central to modernity – Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche all treated religion as a symptom of a pathological condition that, they hoped, would be overcome. Yet it now looks as though the withering away of religion that the great thinkers of modernity sought to bring about never really happened. Did we ever reach the point at which religion disappeared sufficiently that it could now be described as returning? Yet the title of this enthralling book pointedly refers to the ‘return of religion’ as a ‘myth’. The question is: in what does this myth consist? Is the myth the claim that religion is returning, or that it went away in the first place? And if we have reached what Jürgen Habermas calls a ‘post-secular’ condition, then has modernity – and even the Enlightenment itself – definitively been defeated?
The Return of Religion ..., part of a project organized by BAK (basis voor actuelle kunst), Utrecht, between 2008 and 2009, deals with such questions with a seriousness that never precludes a lightness of touch. The contributors include artists (Paul Chan, Arnoud Holleman and Maria Pask), art historian Jorinde Seijdel and philosopher and art critic Boris Groys. Apart from Pask’s pointless ‘Beautiful City Book List’, all ten of the contributions – whether concerned with the meaning of the veil in Islam or the concept of iconoclasm – are informative, polemical and lucid. Egyptologist and cultural theorist Jan Assmann devotes his essay, ‘What’s Wrong with Images?’, to disinterring the motives for the monotheistic religions’ interdiction on images. Idolatory was sinful not only because it was false theology, Assmann argues, but because in ‘a disenchanted world, images are unable to establish any contact with the divine and turn into mere matter’. In a world dominated by advertising, Assmann suggests, it’s obvious what the problem with images is: they make ‘magical claims’ which can only be countered by the developing of ‘iconic literacy’. Philosopher Marc De Kesel’s essay, ‘The Image as Crime’, also examines the relationship between images and transgression, arguing that the work of the Vienna Actionists showed that ‘there is something beyond the image that remains inaccessible and prohibited to the image, and that images thrive precisely as a result of that ban’.
For writer Kenan Malik, the forms in which religion has ‘returned’ reflect the media values of consumer culture. ‘The new religions are crafted to help people feel good rather than do good,’ he acerbically remarks. ‘These are faiths fit for the age of Oprah.’ But Malik stops short of a full-on defence of the Enlightenment; its Utopian promise has soured, he claims, and what is required is a kind of neo-existentialist affirmation of human choice. Writer and curator Dieter Roelstraete is not half so ambivalent about the Enlightenment legacy. He admits that he has ‘long entertained the fantasy of switching the lights back on – in museums, art institutions and galleries around the world. Literally so, if necessary.’ Roelstraete makes a rousing call that we should ‘radically re-ignite the legacy of Enlightenment thought as that great unfinished project (or simply procedure) of disenchantment. A radical identification, that is, of art’s secular thought with a defiant, ruthless materialism, with scepsis and godlessness – a refusal of all transcendence.’ After the ‘return of religion’, is such a return to the Enlightenment possible?
Mark Fisher
Books
Eds. Maria Hlavajova, Sven Lütticken and Jill Winder (BAK, Utrecht, and post editions, Rotterdam, 2009)
‘You shall not make for yourself a carved image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.’ So declares the Second Commandment, forbidding not only images of God, but any images whatsoever – which means that, for the law on which the three major monotheistic religions are ostensibly based, visual culture is an abomination.
The critique of religion was central to modernity – Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche all treated religion as a symptom of a pathological condition that, they hoped, would be overcome. Yet it now looks as though the withering away of religion that the great thinkers of modernity sought to bring about never really happened. Did we ever reach the point at which religion disappeared sufficiently that it could now be described as returning? Yet the title of this enthralling book pointedly refers to the ‘return of religion’ as a ‘myth’. The question is: in what does this myth consist? Is the myth the claim that religion is returning, or that it went away in the first place? And if we have reached what Jürgen Habermas calls a ‘post-secular’ condition, then has modernity – and even the Enlightenment itself – definitively been defeated?
The Return of Religion ..., part of a project organized by BAK (basis voor actuelle kunst), Utrecht, between 2008 and 2009, deals with such questions with a seriousness that never precludes a lightness of touch. The contributors include artists (Paul Chan, Arnoud Holleman and Maria Pask), art historian Jorinde Seijdel and philosopher and art critic Boris Groys. Apart from Pask’s pointless ‘Beautiful City Book List’, all ten of the contributions – whether concerned with the meaning of the veil in Islam or the concept of iconoclasm – are informative, polemical and lucid. Egyptologist and cultural theorist Jan Assmann devotes his essay, ‘What’s Wrong with Images?’, to disinterring the motives for the monotheistic religions’ interdiction on images. Idolatory was sinful not only because it was false theology, Assmann argues, but because in ‘a disenchanted world, images are unable to establish any contact with the divine and turn into mere matter’. In a world dominated by advertising, Assmann suggests, it’s obvious what the problem with images is: they make ‘magical claims’ which can only be countered by the developing of ‘iconic literacy’. Philosopher Marc De Kesel’s essay, ‘The Image as Crime’, also examines the relationship between images and transgression, arguing that the work of the Vienna Actionists showed that ‘there is something beyond the image that remains inaccessible and prohibited to the image, and that images thrive precisely as a result of that ban’.
For writer Kenan Malik, the forms in which religion has ‘returned’ reflect the media values of consumer culture. ‘The new religions are crafted to help people feel good rather than do good,’ he acerbically remarks. ‘These are faiths fit for the age of Oprah.’ But Malik stops short of a full-on defence of the Enlightenment; its Utopian promise has soured, he claims, and what is required is a kind of neo-existentialist affirmation of human choice. Writer and curator Dieter Roelstraete is not half so ambivalent about the Enlightenment legacy. He admits that he has ‘long entertained the fantasy of switching the lights back on – in museums, art institutions and galleries around the world. Literally so, if necessary.’ Roelstraete makes a rousing call that we should ‘radically re-ignite the legacy of Enlightenment thought as that great unfinished project (or simply procedure) of disenchantment. A radical identification, that is, of art’s secular thought with a defiant, ruthless materialism, with scepsis and godlessness – a refusal of all transcendence.’ After the ‘return of religion’, is such a return to the Enlightenment possible?
Mark Fisher
Wednesday, 27 January 2010
interview with Laderman Ukeles
Mierle Laderman Ukeles with Bénédicte Ramade
Bénédicte Ramade interview with Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Department of Sanitation, New York, March 2007
Bénédicte Ramade: When you wrote the manifesto in 1969, was it in reaction against the modernist cult of the artist as a lonesome genius?
Mierle Laderman Ukeles: It was a year and a few months after my first child was born. I had struggle for many years to be an artist before I have a child. I actually became an artiste because I wanted to be free. My heroes were all male: Jackson Pollock because of his bodily freedom, Marcel Duchamp because he had the freedom to name the things, art, and Mark Rothko, because I felt that he had the freedom to move from one dimension into an other dimension. That really is the reason that I became an artist.
My paintings were very expressionistic works. Then, I had a baby. We wanted this baby. I felt out a certain picture. Because the repetitive task works I had to do to keep that baby alive. I had a huge long education in art, in international relation, very the best cause that you can find, but nobody, NOBODY, ever, taught any culture, of maintenance. Because it was not in the culture, it was excluded from the culture. You do all these repetitive works, not for yourself but works for the others. It has to do with not pursuing your own freedom but when you’re a maintenance worker, it doesn’t matter about your freedom, it matters with the person, or the city, or the building, or the anything, that the institution, or even the planet itself. The value system shifted. All those things that my all my life had been like a damn one road, it’s like a fell-off the path. And the path was western culture. I felt off, I felt out of that picture. On one hand, I , with my fancy western education, was in agony.
It also occurred to me that – it was the time of the Vietnam war – and the American lust/lost for progress. We were playing out a lot of our fantasies about power and freedom on the backs of people in other parts of the world. These issues of dependency, independence, and interdepence, those really had ended up being this big subject matter for me. And western culture that I received is about independence, that meant a male culture of autonomy where you don’t talk about all those structures that you’re dependent upon. You don’t talk about what enables you to be powerful. Because then, you sound weak.
This was of the time of the beginning of the feminist movement and the beginning of the feminist art movement which I cared about. The feminist movement was like too big for me, I did not have time, but the feminist art movement was my life, I mean it was my life like I discovered some people who were sort of in the same boat as me and who were angry as I was. I was just furious that my education let me down. I felt I was falling. And then it took like a year and a few months, I just sat down and I wrote this manifesto. I named necessity freedom.
BR: What was written in this Manifesto?
MLU: I had a few drafts. I was two pages of ideas about maintenance, about development and maintenance. And then, I made a proposal for an exhibition. The first part/floor is personal : that I would live in the museum, and the artwork would be my taking care of the museum, like washing, feeding people, sweeping, dusting. And that was art. I was saw this in the Whitney Museum. So one floor would be focusing on his personal dusting, feeding, washing the dishes. Then the second part/floor would be general : I would have interview many people : what do you do to stay alive ? Those will be posted up all over the museum. Also visitors who came to the museum, they would be interviewed. And then, the third floor, I saw, was taking care of the earth. That everyday, different kind of pollution would come into the museum. A container of one garbage truck, container of polluted air, container of polluted water. And they would be transformed by what I said were scientists and pseudo scientists by who I meant ‘artists’. What I was really saying that the museum is a place for transformation itself, that active transformation can occur in the museum itself. That’s where the culture reinvents itself. And actually, in my case, with what I was talking about, it is the culture that is going invent how we’re going to stay alive on the earth. People have misunderstood. They thought that maintenance art is about cleaning. But it was never just about that, it was about the personal, the social and taking care of the all planet.
BR: You faced the moral system?
MLU: Absolutely. That was what this revolution that I was trying to set out was about “what do you need to stay alive”. I wrote this, then I sent it to Jack Burnham who was a writer about Duchamp. So I thought “that’s the guy, he would understand what I am talking about”. I sent it to him and I got a letter back from Jack Burnham who said he was writing an article about the end of the avant-garde, he wanted to publish extra part of my manifesto in Artforum. It was 1971. He said “do you have any pictures ? ”, so I said yes. Then I hang up the phone and I said to my husband Jack “take some pictures !”. Lucy Lippart called me up. She said “are you real or did Jack Burnham make you up for that article ?” I said “I am real, it’s me !”. We met, she invited me to become part of feminist art group, that saved my life. It really did. And then she invited me to be in a show, and I started like this.
I sent also a letter to the Whitney where I wanted to do my show, I got a letter from the museum on a half piece of paper, they did not sent me a whole piece of paper, saying “try your idea on or in an art gallery first, before approaching a museum”, like slap.
BR: How did you begin to perform?
MLU: I, in New York, in this very repetitive life, trying to figure out how I am gonna do all this, I got very jealous of my work traveling. I started contacting the curators at some of the stops, “would you like me to come do a maintenance performance work ?”, they said yes, and then I started like that. Then I did about fifty/fifteen performances.
BR: Acting directly within the museum was about sincerity, the deep sincerity of your involvement ?
MLU: Absolutely. Performance as opposed to theater wants to grapple reality, or changing reality. The first work I did at the Whatsworth Museum, so I looked back now and that’s just amazing to me that they allowed me to those things. I made four works there and the idea of the four was a kind of analysis of the art institution. Also looking back now, I never pulled away from trying to reinvent the meaning of that art institution, that the first exhibition in the proposal in the manifesto would be played out in a museum, it would radically restructure the meaning of the museum.
Those are like dynamite, dangerous subjects that maintenance reveals.
BR: It was less a question of gender at least ? rather than power, and hierarchy of power in art institution ?
MLU: As a woman, I felt, specially when I became a mother, that I entered the maintenance class of women which is thousands of years old, the problem with it is that nobody invited the women class to be maintainers. No one said to these women other ten thousands years “would you like to take care of the home ?”.
For Touch Sanitation, I consciously selected those sanitation workers who at that point were all male because they were doing the female jobs for the city that the females were told “this is who you are inside”. They would say to me “you know why people hate us : because they think we are their mother !, because they think we’re their made”. I was looking at them and saying to myself “who are you telling this story to ?”. This would saying to me : if I were a woman this would be OK if the hated me.
The first performance dealt with worker and value, then the second performance dealt with “who has the key ?”, and really the keys, the guard, you don’t think of the guard so much is a maintenance worker but they are maintaining the system of power of the institution. They are guarding all these valuable things, the cultural artefacts. They are the people who are guarding them, protecting them.
Like the culture says, WE decide that this is important, this valuable, and then these people are the guardians of these objects. They are not the decision makers but they represent the decision makers. They are the visible manifestation of that power to decide and also to decide when you get in, when you stay out. What I did is that I moved to the all entire museum, room by room, gallery by gallery and I simply did what the guard could do, usually do during open hours, access hours, when anyone could come in, I locked the door. I locked people in and I also locked them out. So people got pretty upset you can imagine. They got scared.
I was invited back to the Wadsworth, they also gave me a show on the 25th anniversary of this performance work. I came, they had a lunch for me and the head of security was there and he looked at me and he says : “don’t even think about it. I don’t know why we ever let you do that before.” I just slipped through the crack. It just terrified them.
There were two other works which were much more simple maintenance works of cleaning outside, which is also has this reference to the edge between the institution and the world outside, and then cleaning inside.
BR: And the other performance was this one where you are sweeping at the entrance of the museum ?
MLU: I did it first in fact.
BR: The picture showing you cleaning with a broom became of the icon of feminist art. How do you react today about this particular picture ?
MLU: Fine!
BR: Isn’t it a reductive way to consider this performance ?
MLU: I am just not this happy cleaner. That is reduction. My intention was far, quite revolutionary. You think people read it as I am happy to do this?
BR: There is a confusion…
MLU: That’s terrible ! Why did I do for ? That is not what I am talking about.
BR: This misunderstanding about this famous picture of sweeping is amazing. People in Europe think that it is only a feminist subject.
MLU: No way ! Touch sanitation was because the female cleaners are all men ! It’s really much more critical and more revolutionary. I was talking about reorganizing the world. Not being happy with your broom. That’s a joke.
In that sense, what I was trying to deal with there was about the decision, their freedom to make a decision. This notion that people think of my work like the “happy cleaner”. I am talking about a world revolution!
back to SPEECH
Bénédicte Ramade: When you wrote the manifesto in 1969, was it in reaction against the modernist cult of the artist as a lonesome genius?
Mierle Laderman Ukeles: It was a year and a few months after my first child was born. I had struggle for many years to be an artist before I have a child. I actually became an artiste because I wanted to be free. My heroes were all male: Jackson Pollock because of his bodily freedom, Marcel Duchamp because he had the freedom to name the things, art, and Mark Rothko, because I felt that he had the freedom to move from one dimension into an other dimension. That really is the reason that I became an artist.
My paintings were very expressionistic works. Then, I had a baby. We wanted this baby. I felt out a certain picture. Because the repetitive task works I had to do to keep that baby alive. I had a huge long education in art, in international relation, very the best cause that you can find, but nobody, NOBODY, ever, taught any culture, of maintenance. Because it was not in the culture, it was excluded from the culture. You do all these repetitive works, not for yourself but works for the others. It has to do with not pursuing your own freedom but when you’re a maintenance worker, it doesn’t matter about your freedom, it matters with the person, or the city, or the building, or the anything, that the institution, or even the planet itself. The value system shifted. All those things that my all my life had been like a damn one road, it’s like a fell-off the path. And the path was western culture. I felt off, I felt out of that picture. On one hand, I , with my fancy western education, was in agony.
It also occurred to me that – it was the time of the Vietnam war – and the American lust/lost for progress. We were playing out a lot of our fantasies about power and freedom on the backs of people in other parts of the world. These issues of dependency, independence, and interdepence, those really had ended up being this big subject matter for me. And western culture that I received is about independence, that meant a male culture of autonomy where you don’t talk about all those structures that you’re dependent upon. You don’t talk about what enables you to be powerful. Because then, you sound weak.
This was of the time of the beginning of the feminist movement and the beginning of the feminist art movement which I cared about. The feminist movement was like too big for me, I did not have time, but the feminist art movement was my life, I mean it was my life like I discovered some people who were sort of in the same boat as me and who were angry as I was. I was just furious that my education let me down. I felt I was falling. And then it took like a year and a few months, I just sat down and I wrote this manifesto. I named necessity freedom.
BR: What was written in this Manifesto?
MLU: I had a few drafts. I was two pages of ideas about maintenance, about development and maintenance. And then, I made a proposal for an exhibition. The first part/floor is personal : that I would live in the museum, and the artwork would be my taking care of the museum, like washing, feeding people, sweeping, dusting. And that was art. I was saw this in the Whitney Museum. So one floor would be focusing on his personal dusting, feeding, washing the dishes. Then the second part/floor would be general : I would have interview many people : what do you do to stay alive ? Those will be posted up all over the museum. Also visitors who came to the museum, they would be interviewed. And then, the third floor, I saw, was taking care of the earth. That everyday, different kind of pollution would come into the museum. A container of one garbage truck, container of polluted air, container of polluted water. And they would be transformed by what I said were scientists and pseudo scientists by who I meant ‘artists’. What I was really saying that the museum is a place for transformation itself, that active transformation can occur in the museum itself. That’s where the culture reinvents itself. And actually, in my case, with what I was talking about, it is the culture that is going invent how we’re going to stay alive on the earth. People have misunderstood. They thought that maintenance art is about cleaning. But it was never just about that, it was about the personal, the social and taking care of the all planet.
BR: You faced the moral system?
MLU: Absolutely. That was what this revolution that I was trying to set out was about “what do you need to stay alive”. I wrote this, then I sent it to Jack Burnham who was a writer about Duchamp. So I thought “that’s the guy, he would understand what I am talking about”. I sent it to him and I got a letter back from Jack Burnham who said he was writing an article about the end of the avant-garde, he wanted to publish extra part of my manifesto in Artforum. It was 1971. He said “do you have any pictures ? ”, so I said yes. Then I hang up the phone and I said to my husband Jack “take some pictures !”. Lucy Lippart called me up. She said “are you real or did Jack Burnham make you up for that article ?” I said “I am real, it’s me !”. We met, she invited me to become part of feminist art group, that saved my life. It really did. And then she invited me to be in a show, and I started like this.
I sent also a letter to the Whitney where I wanted to do my show, I got a letter from the museum on a half piece of paper, they did not sent me a whole piece of paper, saying “try your idea on or in an art gallery first, before approaching a museum”, like slap.
BR: How did you begin to perform?
MLU: I, in New York, in this very repetitive life, trying to figure out how I am gonna do all this, I got very jealous of my work traveling. I started contacting the curators at some of the stops, “would you like me to come do a maintenance performance work ?”, they said yes, and then I started like that. Then I did about fifty/fifteen performances.
BR: Acting directly within the museum was about sincerity, the deep sincerity of your involvement ?
MLU: Absolutely. Performance as opposed to theater wants to grapple reality, or changing reality. The first work I did at the Whatsworth Museum, so I looked back now and that’s just amazing to me that they allowed me to those things. I made four works there and the idea of the four was a kind of analysis of the art institution. Also looking back now, I never pulled away from trying to reinvent the meaning of that art institution, that the first exhibition in the proposal in the manifesto would be played out in a museum, it would radically restructure the meaning of the museum.
Those are like dynamite, dangerous subjects that maintenance reveals.
BR: It was less a question of gender at least ? rather than power, and hierarchy of power in art institution ?
MLU: As a woman, I felt, specially when I became a mother, that I entered the maintenance class of women which is thousands of years old, the problem with it is that nobody invited the women class to be maintainers. No one said to these women other ten thousands years “would you like to take care of the home ?”.
For Touch Sanitation, I consciously selected those sanitation workers who at that point were all male because they were doing the female jobs for the city that the females were told “this is who you are inside”. They would say to me “you know why people hate us : because they think we are their mother !, because they think we’re their made”. I was looking at them and saying to myself “who are you telling this story to ?”. This would saying to me : if I were a woman this would be OK if the hated me.
The first performance dealt with worker and value, then the second performance dealt with “who has the key ?”, and really the keys, the guard, you don’t think of the guard so much is a maintenance worker but they are maintaining the system of power of the institution. They are guarding all these valuable things, the cultural artefacts. They are the people who are guarding them, protecting them.
Like the culture says, WE decide that this is important, this valuable, and then these people are the guardians of these objects. They are not the decision makers but they represent the decision makers. They are the visible manifestation of that power to decide and also to decide when you get in, when you stay out. What I did is that I moved to the all entire museum, room by room, gallery by gallery and I simply did what the guard could do, usually do during open hours, access hours, when anyone could come in, I locked the door. I locked people in and I also locked them out. So people got pretty upset you can imagine. They got scared.
I was invited back to the Wadsworth, they also gave me a show on the 25th anniversary of this performance work. I came, they had a lunch for me and the head of security was there and he looked at me and he says : “don’t even think about it. I don’t know why we ever let you do that before.” I just slipped through the crack. It just terrified them.
There were two other works which were much more simple maintenance works of cleaning outside, which is also has this reference to the edge between the institution and the world outside, and then cleaning inside.
BR: And the other performance was this one where you are sweeping at the entrance of the museum ?
MLU: I did it first in fact.
BR: The picture showing you cleaning with a broom became of the icon of feminist art. How do you react today about this particular picture ?
MLU: Fine!
BR: Isn’t it a reductive way to consider this performance ?
MLU: I am just not this happy cleaner. That is reduction. My intention was far, quite revolutionary. You think people read it as I am happy to do this?
BR: There is a confusion…
MLU: That’s terrible ! Why did I do for ? That is not what I am talking about.
BR: This misunderstanding about this famous picture of sweeping is amazing. People in Europe think that it is only a feminist subject.
MLU: No way ! Touch sanitation was because the female cleaners are all men ! It’s really much more critical and more revolutionary. I was talking about reorganizing the world. Not being happy with your broom. That’s a joke.
In that sense, what I was trying to deal with there was about the decision, their freedom to make a decision. This notion that people think of my work like the “happy cleaner”. I am talking about a world revolution!
back to SPEECH
Thursday, 14 January 2010
Spirit Guide, Dan Fox - Frieze article 128 jan 10
Spirit Guide
State of the Art
The many uses of the Zeitgeist
Everyone involved in contemporary art believes in a ghost, even if few admit to it. It’s called the Zeitgeist. Take a look around. Curators love a survey – maybe it’s a generational overview or a medium-specific temperature gauge or a set of snapshots organized along national or continental lines, or gender or sexual preferences. Critics and magazine editors chase it too: we can hang articles off it, or try and map the directions it’s been floating with entire issues (like this one). Even critics who hate contemporary art reckon on it – it allows them to use a small handful of particularly loathed examples in order to damn an entire system. Many dealers and collectors also believe in the Zeitgeist; you can sell things with it (press releases are, of course, the best place to find overblown claims to history made on behalf of artists by their representatives), or flatter yourself that you’re one step ahead by buying into someone else’s alleged intimacy with it. Market analysts believe it takes the form of numbers, and they scour the latest auction results for evidence of its mysterious ways. Artists might swear they’ve no interest in it (at least, the ones who aren’t career-obsessed egomaniacs do) but deep down in many of them rages a personal struggle with art history – otherwise known as documented collected sightings of the Zeitgeist.
Of late, the Zeitgeist has been lurking at the edges of conversation more than usual. Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘the crisis’, or more coyly – as if to acknowledge its complexity – ‘the current situation’. The economic downturn and all-out exposure of systemic avarice within major financial organizations initially generated mixed responses in the visual arts, with many talking piously, if vaguely, about ‘the crisis’ being ‘good’ for art – a bit like drinking cod liver oil or getting some fresh air. This was interpreted to mean a number of things: less silly money blowing after artists barely out of nappies; fewer low-concept/high-production spectaculars; cut-backs on lavish parties; no more galleries opening unnecessary ‘project spaces’; biennials opening every two years rather than seemingly every two weeks; fewer curators playing at being power brokers; and a halt to collectors opening narcissistic temples to their own acumen for acquisition. An upswing in thoughtful discussion and approaches to making art, and reinvigorated roles for criticism and educational institutions were forecast. Of course there would be some collateral damage; a few superfluous art consultants, dealers and artists (sadly some talented ones, as well as the careerist variety) would fall by the wayside, public funding purses would get tighter, art magazines would shrink, and there would be some facile articles in the broadsheets misinterpreting the demise of the market as heralding artists returning to their senses and making nice landscape paintings. But, on the whole, the losses would be for the greater good. A year on from the initial economic earthquake, where are we?
zeitgeist ‘So, team, how’s The Crisis going?’ zeitgeist area manager (arts division) ‘Business is slow today boss.’ zeitgeist ‘Oh that’s a shame. No seismic shifts in contemporary art production to report? No return to Enlightenment values of technical skill and transcendent moral values detected? No realization on the part of humanity that creativity is innate within them all and that its commodity role within the capitalist realist world-view is fundamentally wrong?’ zeitgeist area manager ‘’Fraid not, chief.’ zeitgeist At least tell me that Damien Hirst has retired or gone bankrupt?’ zeitgeist area manager ‘Sorry to report, captain, but in late 2009 he gained much attention for turning to painting awful pastiche Francis Bacons.’ zeitgeist ‘Bugger.’
Confusion reigns. Here’s an example: in New York at the end of October, Creative Time staged a day-long ‘summit’ at the New York Public Library on ‘Revolutions in Public Practice’, at which more than 40 speakers made presentations on art and community engagement. Less than a week later was a tongue-in-cheek but nonetheless exclusive ‘performance-based art work’ organized by Rob Pruitt as a fundraiser for the Guggenheim Musuem, White Columns and a youth arts scheme. It was an Oscars-style ceremony called the First Annual Art Awards, which included gongs for ‘Artist of the Year’ (Mary Heilmann), ‘Curator of the Year’ (Connie Butler) and ‘Exhibition Outside the United States’ (which just happened to be by an American artist: Jeff Koons at the Château de Versailles, France). I’m sure the award ceremony – a bit like the Hugo Boss or Turner Prizes, but with no pretense of gravitas – was way more fun than the nine hours I spent at the Creative Time Summit, but somehow the coinciding of these two events revealed the Zeitgeist to be a confused mess. There are certain sectors of the art world that crave a useful social role for art. Others see art as an activity making important contributions to intellectual discourse. Many look to art for pleasure. And then there are those who appreciate all of this seriousness, but crave the trappings of the entertainment industry too – fame, power, money, glamour, hierarchies, cultural parochialism. One year the art world is interested in this, the next year it’s interested in that. It wants to party, it wants to be scholarly. Markets go up, markets go down. At the same time as the Serpentine Gallery is showing Gustav Metzger, people are posing for photographs licking a giant chocolate facsimile of a Jeff Koons sculpture and throwing themselves on giant mounds of peanuts at the gala opening of PERFORMA 09. America elects a mildly progressive president and suddenly people scream ‘socialism’ as if the year is 1954 and Senator McCarthy is on the warpath. Everything changes and nothing changes. Feeling confused or anxious about contemporary art? Someone recently told me about a book they’d read, in which it was posited that the apocalypse happened before humans evolved and that everything humanity has done since has been in a post-apocalypse society. So don’t worry: the end has been and gone. Learn to love the confusion.
Dan Fox
Dan Fox is based in New York, USA, and is senior editor of frieze.
State of the Art
The many uses of the Zeitgeist
Everyone involved in contemporary art believes in a ghost, even if few admit to it. It’s called the Zeitgeist. Take a look around. Curators love a survey – maybe it’s a generational overview or a medium-specific temperature gauge or a set of snapshots organized along national or continental lines, or gender or sexual preferences. Critics and magazine editors chase it too: we can hang articles off it, or try and map the directions it’s been floating with entire issues (like this one). Even critics who hate contemporary art reckon on it – it allows them to use a small handful of particularly loathed examples in order to damn an entire system. Many dealers and collectors also believe in the Zeitgeist; you can sell things with it (press releases are, of course, the best place to find overblown claims to history made on behalf of artists by their representatives), or flatter yourself that you’re one step ahead by buying into someone else’s alleged intimacy with it. Market analysts believe it takes the form of numbers, and they scour the latest auction results for evidence of its mysterious ways. Artists might swear they’ve no interest in it (at least, the ones who aren’t career-obsessed egomaniacs do) but deep down in many of them rages a personal struggle with art history – otherwise known as documented collected sightings of the Zeitgeist.
Of late, the Zeitgeist has been lurking at the edges of conversation more than usual. Sometimes it’s referred to as ‘the crisis’, or more coyly – as if to acknowledge its complexity – ‘the current situation’. The economic downturn and all-out exposure of systemic avarice within major financial organizations initially generated mixed responses in the visual arts, with many talking piously, if vaguely, about ‘the crisis’ being ‘good’ for art – a bit like drinking cod liver oil or getting some fresh air. This was interpreted to mean a number of things: less silly money blowing after artists barely out of nappies; fewer low-concept/high-production spectaculars; cut-backs on lavish parties; no more galleries opening unnecessary ‘project spaces’; biennials opening every two years rather than seemingly every two weeks; fewer curators playing at being power brokers; and a halt to collectors opening narcissistic temples to their own acumen for acquisition. An upswing in thoughtful discussion and approaches to making art, and reinvigorated roles for criticism and educational institutions were forecast. Of course there would be some collateral damage; a few superfluous art consultants, dealers and artists (sadly some talented ones, as well as the careerist variety) would fall by the wayside, public funding purses would get tighter, art magazines would shrink, and there would be some facile articles in the broadsheets misinterpreting the demise of the market as heralding artists returning to their senses and making nice landscape paintings. But, on the whole, the losses would be for the greater good. A year on from the initial economic earthquake, where are we?
zeitgeist ‘So, team, how’s The Crisis going?’ zeitgeist area manager (arts division) ‘Business is slow today boss.’ zeitgeist ‘Oh that’s a shame. No seismic shifts in contemporary art production to report? No return to Enlightenment values of technical skill and transcendent moral values detected? No realization on the part of humanity that creativity is innate within them all and that its commodity role within the capitalist realist world-view is fundamentally wrong?’ zeitgeist area manager ‘’Fraid not, chief.’ zeitgeist At least tell me that Damien Hirst has retired or gone bankrupt?’ zeitgeist area manager ‘Sorry to report, captain, but in late 2009 he gained much attention for turning to painting awful pastiche Francis Bacons.’ zeitgeist ‘Bugger.’
Confusion reigns. Here’s an example: in New York at the end of October, Creative Time staged a day-long ‘summit’ at the New York Public Library on ‘Revolutions in Public Practice’, at which more than 40 speakers made presentations on art and community engagement. Less than a week later was a tongue-in-cheek but nonetheless exclusive ‘performance-based art work’ organized by Rob Pruitt as a fundraiser for the Guggenheim Musuem, White Columns and a youth arts scheme. It was an Oscars-style ceremony called the First Annual Art Awards, which included gongs for ‘Artist of the Year’ (Mary Heilmann), ‘Curator of the Year’ (Connie Butler) and ‘Exhibition Outside the United States’ (which just happened to be by an American artist: Jeff Koons at the Château de Versailles, France). I’m sure the award ceremony – a bit like the Hugo Boss or Turner Prizes, but with no pretense of gravitas – was way more fun than the nine hours I spent at the Creative Time Summit, but somehow the coinciding of these two events revealed the Zeitgeist to be a confused mess. There are certain sectors of the art world that crave a useful social role for art. Others see art as an activity making important contributions to intellectual discourse. Many look to art for pleasure. And then there are those who appreciate all of this seriousness, but crave the trappings of the entertainment industry too – fame, power, money, glamour, hierarchies, cultural parochialism. One year the art world is interested in this, the next year it’s interested in that. It wants to party, it wants to be scholarly. Markets go up, markets go down. At the same time as the Serpentine Gallery is showing Gustav Metzger, people are posing for photographs licking a giant chocolate facsimile of a Jeff Koons sculpture and throwing themselves on giant mounds of peanuts at the gala opening of PERFORMA 09. America elects a mildly progressive president and suddenly people scream ‘socialism’ as if the year is 1954 and Senator McCarthy is on the warpath. Everything changes and nothing changes. Feeling confused or anxious about contemporary art? Someone recently told me about a book they’d read, in which it was posited that the apocalypse happened before humans evolved and that everything humanity has done since has been in a post-apocalypse society. So don’t worry: the end has been and gone. Learn to love the confusion.
Dan Fox
Dan Fox is based in New York, USA, and is senior editor of frieze.
Talk,Talk, Robert Storr - article Frieze Jan 10
Talk, Talk
View from the Bridge
The trials and tribulations of the international lecture circuit
A while ago, on a bank of hard seats under anaemic lighting, I found myself in the same airport waiting-room as Oliver North. Readers whose awareness of art history dates to the ‘Sensation’ show, and whose sense of history reaches back to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, will recall that the affable, opaque, ever ‘gung-ho’ Colonel ‘Ollie’ North was the linchpin of an arms-for-hostages scandal in which the affable, opaque, ever ‘gung-ho’ President Ronald Reagan circumvented an embargo on selling guns to Iran in order to obtain the release of American hostages in Tehran while simultaneously funding US misadventures in Central America. After giving testimony before a Senate committee, North, the uniformed bagman, became the defrocked fall guy for this inoperable ‘op’. Since then, he has made the rounds of Neo-Con lecture opportunities to pay the bills his military pension doesn’t cover.
So there ‘Ollie’ was at 5:40am, waiting for a flight to who-knows-where, to give a speech about who-knows-what, most likely followed by a rubber chicken dinner, a half-night in a motel, and another pre-dawn flight to who-knows-where-else. And there I was supplementing my museum income by taking the red-eye to a college here or an Institute of Contemporary Art there. And, in the only circumstances possible, I felt a kind of Willy Loman-like solidarity with this icon of Reaganite black-market middle-management. Strange bench-fellows indeed!
Actually, we are legion. And if the ‘have-mouth-will-travel’ circuit-riders of the cultural industry are less numerous than pundits in other fields and, on the whole, less well paid – John Waters makes a bundle but he’s a Hollywood cross-over and, like Orson Welles, finances his marginally bankable films by cameo appearances on campuses and at art-world events – then the life of the professional talker is pretty much the same, no matter what the subject or the venue.
The most dependable but generally least lucrative art world gig is as a ‘visiting artist/critic’. It usually involves showing up in a place starved of information and contact with the wider world, giving a public slide presentation, a seminar and studio critiques – interrupted by breakfast, lunch and dinner – with local faculty, patrons and eager young artists. It can be fun if one savours the eccentricities of people and places as I do, but it is gruelling nevertheless. If one does not enjoy being ‘out there’ and, worse, if one is inclined to condescend to audiences assumed to be less sophisticated than those in big cities, then things can go very wrong. I have often been in the slipstream of certified Gotham players – the scold of a major daily paper, for example, or the gadfly of a glossy weekly – and listened to tales of their inattention to the hosts and their lazy performance of an overly familiar act, usually aggravated by glibness, snarkiness or outright arrogance. Roadshow hot-shots beware! Busy boom-towners flip through what you write and fear your power; out-of-towners read it and can quiz you on what you said and derisively repeat your shtick while ignoring the clout they’re sure you’ll never use to their advantage.
Visiting artists who are welcome on the tour give good weight. Those who make a lasting impact give much more than expected. Plus, they have a sense of timing with regard to what they offer. I still remember Lynda Benglis at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in the late 1970s ducking into virtually all of the studios after her lecture, and, a glass of Scotch in hand, spending most of the afternoon and much of the evening engaging one-on-one with every student who risked showing her their work. Nayland Blake did the same a few years later. Their insight and generosity changed lives.
Time will tell if Marina Abramovic´’s recent visit to Yale changed lives, but it should. This is a big year for the artist – a retrospective at MoMA, New York, a biography from MIT Press – though she nevertheless spent two days with students who sought her out because no formal performance curriculum exists. What they got was a full blast of her energy and a no-way-to-fake-it crash course in paying attention to mind and body. They also got to participate in a choral reading of her freshly penned ‘Artist’s Life Manifesto’, which effectively co-opted them into expressing ideals few budding artists dare proclaim in this sceptical age. It was like listening to some Utopian Youth League channel a Postmodern Ad Reinhardt. Abramovic´’s words to the wise included: ‘An artist should be erotic.’ ‘Suffering brings transformation.’ ‘An artist has to understand silence.’ ‘An artist should avoid his own art pollution.’ ‘The artist should give and receive at the same time.’ Amen to all, the last especially.
Robert Storr
Robert Storr is an artist, curator and Dean of the Yale School of Art.
View from the Bridge
The trials and tribulations of the international lecture circuit
A while ago, on a bank of hard seats under anaemic lighting, I found myself in the same airport waiting-room as Oliver North. Readers whose awareness of art history dates to the ‘Sensation’ show, and whose sense of history reaches back to the Monica Lewinsky scandal, will recall that the affable, opaque, ever ‘gung-ho’ Colonel ‘Ollie’ North was the linchpin of an arms-for-hostages scandal in which the affable, opaque, ever ‘gung-ho’ President Ronald Reagan circumvented an embargo on selling guns to Iran in order to obtain the release of American hostages in Tehran while simultaneously funding US misadventures in Central America. After giving testimony before a Senate committee, North, the uniformed bagman, became the defrocked fall guy for this inoperable ‘op’. Since then, he has made the rounds of Neo-Con lecture opportunities to pay the bills his military pension doesn’t cover.
So there ‘Ollie’ was at 5:40am, waiting for a flight to who-knows-where, to give a speech about who-knows-what, most likely followed by a rubber chicken dinner, a half-night in a motel, and another pre-dawn flight to who-knows-where-else. And there I was supplementing my museum income by taking the red-eye to a college here or an Institute of Contemporary Art there. And, in the only circumstances possible, I felt a kind of Willy Loman-like solidarity with this icon of Reaganite black-market middle-management. Strange bench-fellows indeed!
Actually, we are legion. And if the ‘have-mouth-will-travel’ circuit-riders of the cultural industry are less numerous than pundits in other fields and, on the whole, less well paid – John Waters makes a bundle but he’s a Hollywood cross-over and, like Orson Welles, finances his marginally bankable films by cameo appearances on campuses and at art-world events – then the life of the professional talker is pretty much the same, no matter what the subject or the venue.
The most dependable but generally least lucrative art world gig is as a ‘visiting artist/critic’. It usually involves showing up in a place starved of information and contact with the wider world, giving a public slide presentation, a seminar and studio critiques – interrupted by breakfast, lunch and dinner – with local faculty, patrons and eager young artists. It can be fun if one savours the eccentricities of people and places as I do, but it is gruelling nevertheless. If one does not enjoy being ‘out there’ and, worse, if one is inclined to condescend to audiences assumed to be less sophisticated than those in big cities, then things can go very wrong. I have often been in the slipstream of certified Gotham players – the scold of a major daily paper, for example, or the gadfly of a glossy weekly – and listened to tales of their inattention to the hosts and their lazy performance of an overly familiar act, usually aggravated by glibness, snarkiness or outright arrogance. Roadshow hot-shots beware! Busy boom-towners flip through what you write and fear your power; out-of-towners read it and can quiz you on what you said and derisively repeat your shtick while ignoring the clout they’re sure you’ll never use to their advantage.
Visiting artists who are welcome on the tour give good weight. Those who make a lasting impact give much more than expected. Plus, they have a sense of timing with regard to what they offer. I still remember Lynda Benglis at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in the late 1970s ducking into virtually all of the studios after her lecture, and, a glass of Scotch in hand, spending most of the afternoon and much of the evening engaging one-on-one with every student who risked showing her their work. Nayland Blake did the same a few years later. Their insight and generosity changed lives.
Time will tell if Marina Abramovic´’s recent visit to Yale changed lives, but it should. This is a big year for the artist – a retrospective at MoMA, New York, a biography from MIT Press – though she nevertheless spent two days with students who sought her out because no formal performance curriculum exists. What they got was a full blast of her energy and a no-way-to-fake-it crash course in paying attention to mind and body. They also got to participate in a choral reading of her freshly penned ‘Artist’s Life Manifesto’, which effectively co-opted them into expressing ideals few budding artists dare proclaim in this sceptical age. It was like listening to some Utopian Youth League channel a Postmodern Ad Reinhardt. Abramovic´’s words to the wise included: ‘An artist should be erotic.’ ‘Suffering brings transformation.’ ‘An artist has to understand silence.’ ‘An artist should avoid his own art pollution.’ ‘The artist should give and receive at the same time.’ Amen to all, the last especially.
Robert Storr
Robert Storr is an artist, curator and Dean of the Yale School of Art.
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