There is not much talk in the West these days about revolution, but during the Cold War it was the watchword for Eastern Europe. In characteristic Soviet double-think, toeing the party line made you a revolutionary, the only requirement being a radical docility. The Soviet Union exported a one-size-fits-all Communism to its satellites, but Marshal Tito believed the system had to be tailored to fit Yugoslavia. This made for a curious self-referentiality and insularity even from the USSR, which found unhappy expression in bombastic public sculpture and clunky abstractions of Modernism. Marko Lulic uses these ponderous monuments, many of which remain scattered around the fragmented republics of the former Yugoslavia, as his point of departure. The loose, almost casual alterations he makes to the originals are reminiscent of Charles Simic’s poem ‘The Supreme Moment’ (1994), which speculates on the options available to an ant under a looming black boot ‘… so polished/He can see himself/Reflected in it, distorted,/Perhaps made larger/Into a huge monster ant’.
Lulic exhibited nine small ‘Improved Partisan Monument’ sculptures based on these ubiquitous ugly landmarks, his renditions composed of deliberately shoddy materials, their measurements lilliputian. Shrunken and deliberately insubstantial, Lulic’s table-top knock-offs convey the extreme earnestness of the original monuments, the thrust of their flat-footed abstract rhetoric crushed under its own weight. He also included two site-specific versions, Improved Partisan Monument (Donji Mihlojac) (2005) and Improved Partisan Monument (2005), both generically phallic shapes of rockets and exploding stars fashioned from varnished fibreboard. These were intentionally made a bit too large and installed like two insufferable bores at natural pausing spots. Even unlooked at, they were hard to avoid.
Lulic’s video Mysteries of Disco (2000) paid tribute to Dusan Makavajev’s film WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971), a huge sensation at the time of its release and almost immediately banned in Yugoslavia. As in Makavajev’s film, two women bicker about politics and freedom, although in Lulic’s version they’re still decked out in chic revolutionary fatigues. The film begins and ends in a deserted discotheque, as overblown and joy-killing in its way as the Titoist monuments. In its longing to beat the West at its own game, the Eastern bloc went massive, with grandiose interiors often not so much decorated as inundated. In Lulic’s video, rather than one mirror ball, for example, there are at least a dozen of different sizes, most of their dazzle lost in the process of reflecting one another. The soundtrack heaves and sighs with canned pop as the camera roams over the expectant booths and bar stools. The scene switches to the roof of a Lego-style apartment block, where the revolucionistas strut, smoke and harangue each other on the subject of free love, a reminder that sex was one of the few available pleasures the state could not regulate. ‘There’s no excitement that equals orgasm’, as one of the women proclaims with the certainty of a manifesto. In the late 1960s Wilhelm Reich’s revolution was the one youth wanted to join.
Two other videos ran simultaneously, each showing three people imitating the shapes of one of Lulic’s monuments, two of them holding the third just under his knees and armpits, his limp body slumped like a medieval painting of the Descent from the Cross. Casually dressed in hoodies, jeans and button-down shirts, all six of the men have the generic look of youth. Each loop shows the first two men holding the third and finally letting him down gently to the floor. Unlike the heroic supermen of the original monuments – there are a few glimpses of one in Mysteries of Disco – these fellows look emphatically ordinary. These darkly amusing videos reminded me of poses struck in the 1970s by Scott Grieger, using his body to mimic contemporary sculpture. Both artists play with the idea of provenance and its role in how art is perceived; like Grieger, Lulic adopts an exhilarating irreverence towards his subject matter and even towards a strict definition of art.
Reflecting on the pomposity of Communism’s claims on the future, its need to manifest its power and the final whimper of its demise, Lulic incorporates political ideas without addressing specific political situations. His references are specific, but his subject is universal: the failure of methods, systems and, finally, of ideals.
Megan Ratner
Showing posts with label Artists. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Artists. Show all posts
Wednesday, 29 September 2010
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
9333. Valdivia Stone Anthropomorphic Stele
Ecuador, Earliest Horizon, Ca. 2300 to 2000 BC.
Light gray limestone in stylized bird form; boldly cut lines delineating the wings, eyes and beak.
Condition: excellent with surface wear, abrasion and deposits, intact.
Size: 8-1/4 inches H. + custom mount.
Provenance: Private Texas collection.
Anslem Kiefer
Anselm Kiefer, Vue d'une installation d'Anselm Kiefer. Atelier de l'artiste, Barjac. Monumenta 2007
Monday, 3 May 2010
bea mcmahon at mattress factory
Bea McMahon mostly uses video, sculptures and drawings to articulate her ideas which weave a strange and boundless path between an inner reality of thought and the ordinary outside world. Although her practice does not subscribe to an obvious visual lexicon of science, it does rely on thought processes she learned through the study of mathematics – one which exists in a state of logic and before language.
The real time elements of the film, entitled InDivisible, were shot using two cameras simultaneously. During filming in Pittsburgh, the cameras were positioned on a devise that fixed them so that they replicated the distance between human eyes. This real time footage was combined with a number of animated sequences. The two pieces of film are displayed simultaneously and are superimposed causing a double image to occur. The footage is projected using two projectors through left and right circular polarizing filters onto a screen made from a mirror that is coated in milk.
Within this body of work the mechanics of production and the methods of display coalesce with the conceptual references and subject matter. Creating a situation where each element references and reveals elements of each other. Such is the manner in which much of the subject matter in the film work is presented as double images which reference both thinking about how our vision works and the stereoscopic method used to film this work.
In this film what appears in each eye is different. Subsequently, by shutting either eye the viewer is in control of the structure of what appears to them; a set of choices are available, making manifest the binocular vision inherent in human sight. The film functions like an allegory where references are eluded to but never clarified where, partial representations of a number of systems combine.
We are brought on a quest where many seemingly disparate characteristics appear and disappear, where representations of Dante in the year 2010 are superimposed upon images of him from 1465. It counts out a logical, complicated, unreasonable thing; an irregular set of possibilities which the secular capitalist system we live in does not allow, as it does not admit other myths - that leads toward its own conclusion, like a myth that has already been unfurled.
Recent exhibitions include: Reverse Pedagogy, Model Niland Gallery, Sligo; The Pleasure is all mine, Auto Italia, London; Gracelands, curated by Vaari Claffey, outdoor festival, Dromohair, Co. Leitrim; Into Irish Drawing, touring exhibition, Limerick City Gallery, Great Britain, France, The Netherlands, all 2009; Present, Green On Red Gallery, Dublin; The Curated Visual Artist Award, curated by Mike Nelson, Douglas
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
Bjorn Braun
Björn Braun
by Kirsty Bell
Are nature and civilisation doomed to be antagonistic forces or can they be coaxed into benevolent cooperation? Björn Braun takes the situation into his own hands in his collages and sculptures: their transformative interventions draw up a new alignment between the two in which art making itself becomes the agent of change. Winner of this year’s blauorange Kunstpreis, a solo show of his work will open at the Kunstverein Braunschweig in December.
In 1688, a Swiss doctor, Johannes Hofer, coined the term “Schweizer Krankheit” to describe a strange malady that was afflicting Swiss foreign legionaries: an overbearing longing for the Alpine landscape of their homeland that manifest itself in various physical symptoms and resulted, in some extreme cases, in death. It was made illegal to sing or even whistle traditional mountain folk songs, punishable by death, for fear that it would be unbearable for the Alpine legionaries and would lead to mass desertion. Such an extreme relationship to the landscape, as if it were a character, like a faraway lover or overanxious mother, inflects the work of German artist Björn Braun, and “Schweizer Krankheit” was the title he gave to his 2007 exhibition in his adopted hometown of Karlsruhe. His works suggest an indeterminate longing, for simple village life and bearded rustic folk, for wooden huts and looming mountains and the assurance of a benign, protective Nature. For a time, perhaps, when nature was respected and a landscape, like a picture, could simply be admired.
Björn Braun’s collages take photographs of landscapes from picture books from the ‘50s or ‘60s, usually black and white, and reassemble their parts to suggest a new alignment of nature and civilisation. In one collage, a group of three women traditionally dressed in embroidered tunics and woollen stockings chuckle amongst themselves, oblivious to the fact that the ground beneath their feet is full of irregular shaped holes, having been snipped free of stones. The cut-out stones, meanwhile, have been piled up in the background, building a giant manmade mountain on the horizon. In another work, the branches of two neighbouring trees have been cut out and used to form the rungs of a ladder between the trees’ parallel trunks. Here the natural landscape seems literally to provide an escape route, up into the tree tops.
Although we can assume Björn Braun to be a nature lover, this is not Land Art. We never get a sense of the artist himself in nature; his relationship to it is always articulated at a distance. Like a desk-bound Richard Long, he works rather with an already mediated landscape, rearranging stones into unexpected sculptures with scissors and scalpel rather than his bare hands. And rather than the immediacy of, say, Fischli and Weiss’s landscape photographs, the images he chooses for his collages have a remote otherworldliness, like those pictures of rustic Alpine utopias on the back of Artforum advertising Bruno Bischofberger’s Zurich gallery. There is something almost theatrical about these perfect visions of nature and rural life, as if staged for the camera’s shutter. In one collage from 2009, however, showing two tall slim tower blocks surrounded by plantings of trees and a water feature, two of the trees have been ripped out of the picture, and in the foreground, a small wooden hut has been constructed from their branches, such an alien idea of habitation in this modern “landscaped” setting that it appears like a rustic folly.
Björn Braun, Untitled, 2009
courtesy: Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe/Berlin.
Braun’s careful repicturings articulate a complex reciprocity between the forces of nature and civilisation. Like Long’s, his art has to do with an interrelation of man with his surroundings, rather than construing sharp divisions between nature and culture. But through the images he chooses, which seem locked in the past, it becomes a more cerebral longing, like a city boy’s dreams of a rural childhood, rather than a hands-on engagement with a landscape that is, after all, still out there. To paraphrase Robert Smithson, nature itself is nothing but a fiction of the 18th and 19th centuries. Braun’s images work alongside this to produce a kind of entropic reversal, where the artist has the power to restore a collection of scattered rocks into a mighty mountainside, or switch the seasons by decking the summer-time Matterhorn with a coat of white paper snow.
For Braun, then, it is not about place so much as the idea of landscape as a type of imagery and a symbolic entity that encompasses the whole heavily-laden romantic tradition as well as the idea of escape or utopia, and transformation. In a collage from 2008, the funnels and chimneys of an industrial compound have been cut away and rebuilt into a little chair, placed in the grassy foreground, presumably on which to sit and contemplate the new improved view. The cyclical transformatory action at work here similarly occurs an Untitled sculpture from the same year, in which, however, a physical transformation takes place. A wooden chair faces the wall on which a rough piece of thick brown paper is hanging. The chair is missing a leg and is splattered with paint, being borrowed from the Art Academy; the paper is also textured with little flecks of colour. This is because it is made from the chair’s missing leg: Braun cut off the chair leg, shredded it, boiled it for several weeks, and used the resulting pulp to make the piece of paper on the wall. Almost absurd in its literalness, it is a concentrated reflection on making and looking at pictures: hanging there, the piece of paper becomes a literal landscape of its own origins. The transformations that take place in Braun’s work are inspired by an almost ridiculously literal interpretation of facts, which refuses their logical reality. In his absurd über-logic, a photographed stone is assumed to have the same properties as real stone and used as such, within the picture plane. The wood that made the chair leg could, after all, just as well have been used to make paper.
Björn Braun, Untitled, 2008
courtesy: Courtesy: Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe/Berlin.
Adalbert Stifter, a 19th century writer, a classroom staple of German literature, well known for his books, which describe the Alpine landscape in extreme and vivid detail, was described by Hannah Arendt as “the greatest landscape painter in literature”. A series of works by Braun titled after his books take this literally and reverse Stifter’s power to “transform all visible things into words” by transforming each of his books into a kind of abstract landscape painting. Taking an early edition of each book, he stewed it for hours, then spread the resulting paste onto a canvas. The colour of each work is lightly inflected by the colour of the book’s linen dust-jacket, and a smattering of words is still visible in the picture’s surface. This gives a whole new meaning to the idea of digesting literature. Content and material collapse together in Braun’s consideration of the making of art. His image-making and object-making define their own internal logic, and the resulting works say as much about the thought process of the artist, as the laborious physical process of their making.
More recent sculptures could be seen as attempts to achieve a harmonious interrelation with the natural world and attempt the same reversals that occur in his collages, now in sculptural form. An intricately woven sphere of twigs interspersed with blue plastic, or a hollow ball made of yellow and white shredded plastic and lined with red wool are perplexing objects until you realise they are the results of his collaborations with birds, zebra finches to be exact, to whom he offered various manmade materials to build their nests: plastic bands, colored wool, magnetic tape. In a truly collaborative spirit, the very decisions about form and material have been designated to the birds, which simply chose what they fancied to weave into their small spherical habitats. Meanwhile, another recent work shows the reverse in action: a pullover in distinctive argyle pattern is lined with cuckoo feathers. Just who is feathering who’s nest here?
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Björn Braun, Untitled, 2009
Courtesy: Meyer Riegger, Karlsruhe/Berlin.
Sunday, 7 March 2010
Dominique Mazeaud
http://www.earthheartist.com/ceremonialist.html
The Great Cleansing of The River Grande
7 year performance going down to the river with garbage bags and cleaning up.
The Great Cleansing of The River Grande
7 year performance going down to the river with garbage bags and cleaning up.
Michael Heizer Double Negative
There is something deeply attractive about it and something totally abhorent
Saturday, 6 March 2010
Sunday, 28 February 2010
Santiago Sierra
Santiago Sierra is famous for his reproduction of the forms of exploitation that underwrite the privileged lives of art audiences. This fact often leaves the latter with no moral high ground from which to pass judgement on the artist or his work. How can you get mad at Sierra for using the undocumented or indigent to hide inside crates on which you sit at an art opening, or to work as human canvases onto which he tattoos lines or sprays toxic foam, when you accept much more violent forms of exploitation every time you buy a cup of coffee, drive to work or put your shoes on? The outrageousness of this work grows from the banality of the crime at its core: the ideological submission of the consumer who implicitly accepts the inevitability of these forms of inequity.
Sierra’s labourers work as dark cousins to Vanessa Beecroft’s waxed and manicured women who stand in formation for VIP-list crowds. We are, however, generally more comfortable with the exploitative dynamics of Beecroft’s work. These women look like fashion models and are paid much more than those whom Sierra exploits – when he pays them at all. The differences between them also register in how the works are photographed: whereas Beecroft’s images are airbrushed, choreographed, colourful, glossy – shameless commodities – Sierra’s borrow from the shy photography of Minimalist sculpture – black and white, grainy, anti-spectacular. They are embarrassed objects, more serious in their tone than Sierra, who positions himself as something of a moral trickster. This is an unresolved tension in his work, for, as openly as Sierra exploits the labour of others, he hesitates to turn the processes that define his practice into fetish objects in and of themselves. One might say that that hesitation is the most compelling aspect of Sierra’s work, not because it suggests a way out of the dynamics he explores but because in that ambivalence Sierra betrays what Theodor Adorno described in Minima Moralia (1951) as ‘the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell’.
New works presented at the Lisson Gallery showed the artist experimenting on different fronts – with the literalism that marks his practice and with the local resonance of his actions. One of the Lisson’s two buildings was dedicated to 21 Anthropometric Modules Made from Human Faeces by the People of Sulabh International, India (2007). The three gallery rooms were occupied by large black rectangular slabs resting on their sides on top of the remnants of the wooden crates in which they were shipped. Packing material was strewn across the floor, and the air was scented with the sharp smell of fertilizer. As promised by the title, the slabs were made from shit that had been collected by workers at Sulabh (a sanitation initiative in India) and left to mature for three years before finally being mixed with a plastic resin to form a surface that looked like chocolate. If placed on the ground, the slabs – flat on one side and recessed on the other – would form trays with more than enough room for a body: because of this, the shape suggests furniture (bed, couch, bench) or the lid of a sarcophagus. This installation was pleasurable – walking through the show with others, one couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief at being given objects to contemplate, at not having to wrangle with the live presence of the exploited body. Ultimately, we would rather keep company with this nicely packaged shit than with the bodies from which it came.
The second suite of galleries centred on the documentation of site-specific interventions – including an audio recording of the public recitation of the names of disappeared and murdered Mexican activists (1549 State Crimes, Mexico City, 2007). Large black and white photographs documenting Four Black Vehicles with the Engines Running inside an Art Gallery (Caracas, 2007) juxtaposed images of the galleried automobiles and the mind-boggling sprawl of the Venezuelan capital. This is a version of a more controversial piece in which Sierra filled a gallery located in a former synagogue in Pulheim, Germany, with so much toxic gas from car emissions that you couldn’t enter without a mask (245 Cubic Metres, 2007). That installation was shut down early by protest – Sierra’s comment on the ‘banalization of the Holocaust’ risked putting the gallery in jeopardy but opened up interesting questions about whether, and how, an artist might go about this kind of intervention in good faith. Also on view were two other projects realized in Caracas in 2006: photographs of Venezuelans’ backs, tracking Sierra’s Economical Study on the Skin of Caracans (which averaged the grey scale of the skin colour of 35 people and mathematically generated an economic value for white, black and grey) and a projection of Concert for a Diesel Electric Plant (in which Sierra hooked a generator to amplifiers and let it ‘play’ in the Chacao Foundation’s Experimental Room).
The Lisson’s basement housed a slide show documenting Sierra’s Land art project Sumisión (Antes Palabra de Fuego) (Submission, Formerly Word of Fire, 2007) and its setting, Anapra – an area a few metres from the US–Mexico border, on the west side of the infamous Ciudad Juárez. Here Sierra carved the Spanish word for ‘submission’ into the ground in four-and-a-half metre trenches, which were then filled with concrete. The words were to be set on fire in May 2007, but this last step was interrupted by local authorities, who censored the action. Ciudad Juárez is a site of profound toxic pollution, infamous for its sweatshops and for the serial murders of women working in them. The bodies of some of these women were found in the hills near Sierra’s site, and those hills, now known as Black Christ Mountain, have become a site of grim pilgrimage. Sumisión is itself part of Proyecto JUAREZ, organized by Mariana David. David enlisted 17 male artists (including Joshua Okon and Miguel Calderón) to explore the dynamics of the various systems (nationalism, capitalism, patriarchy) that bear down on this border town. This is perhaps Sierra’s most open-ended and challenging work. Sumisión is fully over-determined. As the wall text rightfully reminds us, from the position of the radically disenfranchised, the word is unthinkable, even as it appears to describe their condition. Submission is suicidal. Submission is murderous. Unlike the words of Ed Ruscha’s paintings, which hang in empty landscapes, the ground here is filled with corpses, and among them Sierra’s letters become fighting words in spite of themselves.
Jennifer Doyle
Sierra’s labourers work as dark cousins to Vanessa Beecroft’s waxed and manicured women who stand in formation for VIP-list crowds. We are, however, generally more comfortable with the exploitative dynamics of Beecroft’s work. These women look like fashion models and are paid much more than those whom Sierra exploits – when he pays them at all. The differences between them also register in how the works are photographed: whereas Beecroft’s images are airbrushed, choreographed, colourful, glossy – shameless commodities – Sierra’s borrow from the shy photography of Minimalist sculpture – black and white, grainy, anti-spectacular. They are embarrassed objects, more serious in their tone than Sierra, who positions himself as something of a moral trickster. This is an unresolved tension in his work, for, as openly as Sierra exploits the labour of others, he hesitates to turn the processes that define his practice into fetish objects in and of themselves. One might say that that hesitation is the most compelling aspect of Sierra’s work, not because it suggests a way out of the dynamics he explores but because in that ambivalence Sierra betrays what Theodor Adorno described in Minima Moralia (1951) as ‘the shame of still having air to breathe, in hell’.
New works presented at the Lisson Gallery showed the artist experimenting on different fronts – with the literalism that marks his practice and with the local resonance of his actions. One of the Lisson’s two buildings was dedicated to 21 Anthropometric Modules Made from Human Faeces by the People of Sulabh International, India (2007). The three gallery rooms were occupied by large black rectangular slabs resting on their sides on top of the remnants of the wooden crates in which they were shipped. Packing material was strewn across the floor, and the air was scented with the sharp smell of fertilizer. As promised by the title, the slabs were made from shit that had been collected by workers at Sulabh (a sanitation initiative in India) and left to mature for three years before finally being mixed with a plastic resin to form a surface that looked like chocolate. If placed on the ground, the slabs – flat on one side and recessed on the other – would form trays with more than enough room for a body: because of this, the shape suggests furniture (bed, couch, bench) or the lid of a sarcophagus. This installation was pleasurable – walking through the show with others, one couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief at being given objects to contemplate, at not having to wrangle with the live presence of the exploited body. Ultimately, we would rather keep company with this nicely packaged shit than with the bodies from which it came.
The second suite of galleries centred on the documentation of site-specific interventions – including an audio recording of the public recitation of the names of disappeared and murdered Mexican activists (1549 State Crimes, Mexico City, 2007). Large black and white photographs documenting Four Black Vehicles with the Engines Running inside an Art Gallery (Caracas, 2007) juxtaposed images of the galleried automobiles and the mind-boggling sprawl of the Venezuelan capital. This is a version of a more controversial piece in which Sierra filled a gallery located in a former synagogue in Pulheim, Germany, with so much toxic gas from car emissions that you couldn’t enter without a mask (245 Cubic Metres, 2007). That installation was shut down early by protest – Sierra’s comment on the ‘banalization of the Holocaust’ risked putting the gallery in jeopardy but opened up interesting questions about whether, and how, an artist might go about this kind of intervention in good faith. Also on view were two other projects realized in Caracas in 2006: photographs of Venezuelans’ backs, tracking Sierra’s Economical Study on the Skin of Caracans (which averaged the grey scale of the skin colour of 35 people and mathematically generated an economic value for white, black and grey) and a projection of Concert for a Diesel Electric Plant (in which Sierra hooked a generator to amplifiers and let it ‘play’ in the Chacao Foundation’s Experimental Room).
The Lisson’s basement housed a slide show documenting Sierra’s Land art project Sumisión (Antes Palabra de Fuego) (Submission, Formerly Word of Fire, 2007) and its setting, Anapra – an area a few metres from the US–Mexico border, on the west side of the infamous Ciudad Juárez. Here Sierra carved the Spanish word for ‘submission’ into the ground in four-and-a-half metre trenches, which were then filled with concrete. The words were to be set on fire in May 2007, but this last step was interrupted by local authorities, who censored the action. Ciudad Juárez is a site of profound toxic pollution, infamous for its sweatshops and for the serial murders of women working in them. The bodies of some of these women were found in the hills near Sierra’s site, and those hills, now known as Black Christ Mountain, have become a site of grim pilgrimage. Sumisión is itself part of Proyecto JUAREZ, organized by Mariana David. David enlisted 17 male artists (including Joshua Okon and Miguel Calderón) to explore the dynamics of the various systems (nationalism, capitalism, patriarchy) that bear down on this border town. This is perhaps Sierra’s most open-ended and challenging work. Sumisión is fully over-determined. As the wall text rightfully reminds us, from the position of the radically disenfranchised, the word is unthinkable, even as it appears to describe their condition. Submission is suicidal. Submission is murderous. Unlike the words of Ed Ruscha’s paintings, which hang in empty landscapes, the ground here is filled with corpses, and among them Sierra’s letters become fighting words in spite of themselves.
Jennifer Doyle
Monday, 8 February 2010
Tobias Putrih
Imagine a revolutionary artwork designed to enhance our lives. Tobias Putrih dreams of such things, as revealed in a survey of his terse, difficult early career now on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase.
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Multimedia
Audio Slide Show
Bursts of Creativity
In the Region
Long Island, Westchester, Connecticut and New JerseyGo to Complete Coverage »
At 34 years old, the New York-based artist is in demand. He is now representing his native Slovenia at the Venice Biennale; he has a show at the Max Protetch Gallery in New York and another in St. Louis; and he is doing a project for the Frieze Art Fair in London this month. That is a busy schedule for any artist.
It has always been this way for Mr. Putrih, who seemed to burst — fully formed — onto the international art scene in 2002. He had had some previous shows, mainly in Ljubljana, and in Berlin, but it was his involvement in 2002 in Manifesta 4, a European biennial for contemporary art held in Frankfurt, that really made his reputation. He exhibited small papier-mâché models of local cinemas; they worked both as attractive sculptural objects and as intellectual propositions, inciting viewers to think about relationships between reality and fiction.
Mr. Putrih’s cinema sculptures, which are showing here, are not exact copies of the cinemas. He invested them with imagination and invention, cutting up the paper representations of the projection screens as part of a wider proposal for reshaping the viewing experience. It was an interesting idea, suggesting the distortion of perceptions and its effects on the sensations of viewers.
Thom Collins, director of the Neuberger Museum, saw these works in Frankfurt and decided to give Mr. Putrih a show. Fast forward to 2007, and the show is perhaps more and less than Mr. Collins might have hoped. For starters it is enormous, with more than 50 works on display, many monumental in scale, almost everything crammed into the museum’s giant central gallery.
Mr. Putrih is a young artist, bursting with energy and ideas and a desire to show us everything he has made and is working on. That is understandable, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a terrific exhibition. All artists need to be edited, and this show could probably have been trimmed by about a third without any loss of focus. There are too many examples of the same sort of work, not all of them of equal interest or quality.
But cut away the superfluous and there is a great core here, beginning with a pair of interactive sculptures at the museum’s entrance. One of them consists of interlocking wooden planks creating an abstract structure that creeps up and over the museum’s reception desk; the other is a meandering, flexible floor sculpture made of aluminum poles attached together with little plastic clips in the shape of letters. Visitors are invited to adjust and modify both pieces.
Collaboration is a central tenet of Mr. Putrih’s art. In addition to interactive sculptures, the show features examples of his three “Macula” series, which are tall arrangements of circular shapes, cut out of thick corrugated cardboard by hand or a computerized saw. The sculptures were made collaboratively. The artist would draw a circle or another shape on a piece of paper and then invite volunteers to duplicate the design. Each volunteer’s drawing would be based on the one before it, gradually amplifying the deviations from the original. These shapes were then used as the basis for the series.
On another level, many of Mr. Putrih’s free-standing sculptures might be considered collaborations, for they seem to consistently take ideas and theories from the arts, architecture and the natural sciences as their point of departure. One of the works here is a model of an unrealized project proposed by the artist Robert Smithson before he died; another is a reworking of Buckminster Fuller’s model for the geodesic dome. Yet another explores the theories of the visionary Romanian theater designer, artist, theoretician and architect Frederick Kiesler.
Of course, knowing this and seeing the artworks are different things. Mr. Putrih’s sculptures are often flimsy and junky-looking, cobbled together from a hodgepodge of mundane materials like plastic foam, paper, packing tape, cardboard and twist ties. They look as if they may collapse at any minute. It also comes as no surprise to learn that several were badly damaged in transit and had to be repaired by the artist before the opening.
But in some ways the appearance of these sculptures is beside the point, for Mr. Putrih is a conceptual artist. He is interested in crazy, utopian concepts and propositions. I don’t think it is a coincidence that in addition to cinema, one of his other great passions and sources of inspiration is science fiction. Like that essentially futuristic genre, his artworks deal with what could be, not what is.
“Tobias Putrih: Quasi-Random,” Neuberger Museum of Art, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, through Dec. 9. Information: www.neuberger.org or (914) 251-6100.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Audio Slide Show
Bursts of Creativity
In the Region
Long Island, Westchester, Connecticut and New JerseyGo to Complete Coverage »
At 34 years old, the New York-based artist is in demand. He is now representing his native Slovenia at the Venice Biennale; he has a show at the Max Protetch Gallery in New York and another in St. Louis; and he is doing a project for the Frieze Art Fair in London this month. That is a busy schedule for any artist.
It has always been this way for Mr. Putrih, who seemed to burst — fully formed — onto the international art scene in 2002. He had had some previous shows, mainly in Ljubljana, and in Berlin, but it was his involvement in 2002 in Manifesta 4, a European biennial for contemporary art held in Frankfurt, that really made his reputation. He exhibited small papier-mâché models of local cinemas; they worked both as attractive sculptural objects and as intellectual propositions, inciting viewers to think about relationships between reality and fiction.
Mr. Putrih’s cinema sculptures, which are showing here, are not exact copies of the cinemas. He invested them with imagination and invention, cutting up the paper representations of the projection screens as part of a wider proposal for reshaping the viewing experience. It was an interesting idea, suggesting the distortion of perceptions and its effects on the sensations of viewers.
Thom Collins, director of the Neuberger Museum, saw these works in Frankfurt and decided to give Mr. Putrih a show. Fast forward to 2007, and the show is perhaps more and less than Mr. Collins might have hoped. For starters it is enormous, with more than 50 works on display, many monumental in scale, almost everything crammed into the museum’s giant central gallery.
Mr. Putrih is a young artist, bursting with energy and ideas and a desire to show us everything he has made and is working on. That is understandable, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a terrific exhibition. All artists need to be edited, and this show could probably have been trimmed by about a third without any loss of focus. There are too many examples of the same sort of work, not all of them of equal interest or quality.
But cut away the superfluous and there is a great core here, beginning with a pair of interactive sculptures at the museum’s entrance. One of them consists of interlocking wooden planks creating an abstract structure that creeps up and over the museum’s reception desk; the other is a meandering, flexible floor sculpture made of aluminum poles attached together with little plastic clips in the shape of letters. Visitors are invited to adjust and modify both pieces.
Collaboration is a central tenet of Mr. Putrih’s art. In addition to interactive sculptures, the show features examples of his three “Macula” series, which are tall arrangements of circular shapes, cut out of thick corrugated cardboard by hand or a computerized saw. The sculptures were made collaboratively. The artist would draw a circle or another shape on a piece of paper and then invite volunteers to duplicate the design. Each volunteer’s drawing would be based on the one before it, gradually amplifying the deviations from the original. These shapes were then used as the basis for the series.
On another level, many of Mr. Putrih’s free-standing sculptures might be considered collaborations, for they seem to consistently take ideas and theories from the arts, architecture and the natural sciences as their point of departure. One of the works here is a model of an unrealized project proposed by the artist Robert Smithson before he died; another is a reworking of Buckminster Fuller’s model for the geodesic dome. Yet another explores the theories of the visionary Romanian theater designer, artist, theoretician and architect Frederick Kiesler.
Of course, knowing this and seeing the artworks are different things. Mr. Putrih’s sculptures are often flimsy and junky-looking, cobbled together from a hodgepodge of mundane materials like plastic foam, paper, packing tape, cardboard and twist ties. They look as if they may collapse at any minute. It also comes as no surprise to learn that several were badly damaged in transit and had to be repaired by the artist before the opening.
But in some ways the appearance of these sculptures is beside the point, for Mr. Putrih is a conceptual artist. He is interested in crazy, utopian concepts and propositions. I don’t think it is a coincidence that in addition to cinema, one of his other great passions and sources of inspiration is science fiction. Like that essentially futuristic genre, his artworks deal with what could be, not what is.
“Tobias Putrih: Quasi-Random,” Neuberger Museum of Art, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, through Dec. 9. Information: www.neuberger.org or (914) 251-6100.
Psycho Buildings - Hayward Gallery
Rachel Whiteread, Place (Village), 2006–08, Mixed media: doll’s houses, crates, boxes, wood, electrical fittings and fixtures, electricity. Courtesy Rachel Whiteread. Photo: Stephen White
Above: Mike Nelson, To the Memory of H.P. Lovecraft, 1999, 2008. Mixed media. Courtesy the artist, Matt’s Gallery, London and Galleria Franco Noero, Torino. Photo: © Stephen White
Above: Michael Beutler, Sandwiches, dobbels and burgers, 2008. Paper and mesh. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Christian Nagel. Photo: © Stephen White
Above: Los Carpinteros, Show Room, 2008, Cinder blocks, fishing nylon, Ikea and B&Q furniture. Courtesy Sean Kelly Gallery, New York. Photo: Stephen White
Above: Do Ho Suh, Fallen Star 1/5, 2008. ABS, basswood, beech, ceramic, enamel paint, glass, honeycomb board, laquer paint, latex paint, LED lights, pinewood, plywood, resin, spruce, styrene, polycarbonate sheets, PVC sheets. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York. Photo: © Stephen White
Gelitin, normally, proceeding and unrestricted with without title, 2008, Mixed media. Courtesy the artists. Photo: © Stephen White
Slovenian artist Tobias Putrih is showing Venetian, Atmospheric (2007), a beautifully created 30-seat cinema. Designed with curved wooden walls and a ceiling onto which twinkling stars and moving clouds are projected, Venetian, Atmospheric places the spectator in an ever-changing environment. Situated on the sculpture terrace facing Waterloo Bridge, Putrih’s structure screens a specially-curated programme of films about artists and architecture.Outside on another of the gallery’s sculpture terraces, the Argentinean artist, Tomas Saraceno has installed a huge transparent dome Observatory, Air-Port-City (2008). Visitors walk onto a mirrored floor into a disconcerting space where they can observe the sky above their heads or reflected below their feet. Visitors can also enter the dome at a higher level and climb up onto its transparent air supported ‘pillow’ to observe the visitors below.
Korean-born artist Do Ho Suh is presenting a major new sculpture, Fallen Star 1/5 (2008). The autobiographical work features an extraordinary detailed 1:5 scale model of the artist’s childhood home in Korea colliding into the New England apartment where he lived as an art student, the intricately recreated contents of both houses merged together on impact. In the upper galleries he has created a second work, Staircase – V (2008), a ghostly evocation of the basement staircase in the artist’s apartment that he has fashioned from vibrant red semi-translucent fabric. Suspended from the gallery’s ceiling, the staircase hovers off the gallery floor responding to the slightest movement around it.
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!
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