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J E F F K O O N S  – o u t t h e r ei n a f i e l d o f h i s o w n

A N T O N Y G O R M L E Y c o m ed o w n o f f h i s p e d e s t a Can artists be loved too much? ART & FAME (part plus CARTER, JAMES TURRELL, RICHARD TUTTLE

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1 6 M O U N T S T R E E T L O N D O

W 1 K 2 R H U N I T E D K I N G D O

M A R K G R A F E N S T R A S S E 4

1 0 1 1 7 B E R L I N G E R M A N

S T R Ö N W A I 8

2 5 9 9 9 K A M P E N G E R M A N

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Keizersgracht 82, 1015 CT Amsterdam, The Netherlands, www.grimmfineart.com, Tel +31 (0 ) 20 4227 227, Fax +31 (0 ) 20 3301 965.

HUMA BH ABHA

SEPT 5 - OCT 7, 2009

MATTHEW DAY JACKSON

OCT 10-NOV 21, 2009

DANIEL RICHTER

NOV 28- JAN 9, 2009

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PAINTINGS AND SCULPTURE

SEPTEMBER 2009

CATALOGUE AVAILABLE

LEE UFANL E E 

 UF A N

R E L A T  U M- S I  L E N  C E  ,1  9 7  9 –2  0  0  9 

PARIS FRANCE 7 RUE DEBELLEYME TEL: 331 4272 9900 FAX: 331 4272 6166 WWW.ROPAC.NET

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September – October 2009

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2

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DISPATCHES 25     

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

CONTENTS

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FORMS DERIVED FROM A CUBE

SEPTEMBER 8—OCTOBER 17, 2009

32 EAST 57TH STREET NYC

LARGE HOLOGRAMSSEPTEMBER 10—OCTOBER 17, 2009534 WEST 25TH STREET NYC

THREE WAYS OF LOOKING AT THE EARTH

SEPTEMBER 10—OCTOBER 24, 2009

545 WEST 22ND STREET NYC

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FEATURES

CARTER 74  

RICHARD TUTTLE 80  

GUSTAV METZGER:ON COMING IN FROMTHE COLD 85

CAN ARTISTS BE LOVEDTOO MUCH? 90

    

 JEFF KOONS 92  

ANTONY GORMLEY 96  

ART PILGRIMAGE:SEOUL 108   

CONTENTS

 

REAR VIEWREVIEWS 119

 

BOOK REVIEWS 142  

   

THE STRIP 146  

ON THE TOWN 148

OFF THE RECORD 150  

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THE ORIGINAL. 

HANDWOVEN FROM WEATHER-RESISTANT DEDON FIBER.

DEDON Collection SEASHELL. Design by Jean-Marie Massaud.

DEDON worldwide: www.dedon.de · office@dedon.de

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EDITORIAL

 

 

CONTRIBUTORS  

 

 

 

 

ART 

SUBSCRIPTIONS

 

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    h  S  w  

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 Pe ter  Co f fin

 Fa b iana de  Barros

 E CA L E lga land-

 Varga land

 Cao  Fe i

 Ro ber t  F i l l iou

 C la ire  Fon ta ine

 Ho lger  Fr iese &   Mon

a Jas

 R yan  Gander

Andreas  Go l ins k  i

 Fa br ice  G yg i

 Cars ten  Hö l ler

 Genera l  Idea

 Lang  /  Baumann

Jérôme  Leu ba Lo k a l- In t

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 K a t ja  Sc hen k er

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 S ta te o f  Sa bo tage

 S te iner &   Len z l inge

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Andrea  T ha l &   Sas k  ia  Ho lmq v is t

 Ta t iana  Trou vé

 Transna t iona l  Répu b

 l ics

 C lemens  von  Wede

me yer

 W+ W,  René  Zäc h

Andrea  Z i t te l

 Zorro e t  Bernardo

 Eur y t hm ie  Zucco l i

 36 0 °and  2 0 m

 icrona t ions

 Cura ted  b y  S imon  L

amun ière

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 e r  l a n d

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PUBLISHING

PRODUCTION

MARKETING 

 

DISTRIBUTION 

FINANCE

ARTREVIEW LIMITED   

    

 

GALLERYADVERTISING

 

 

 

CORPORATE / LIFESTYLEADVERTISING 

 

 

 

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NIRU RATNAM

  

MARTIN HERBERT

 

 

  

CHRISTIAN

VIVEROS-FAUNE

 

  

CONTRIBUTORS

DAVID BENJAMIN SHERRY 

 

 

HETTIE JUDAH

 

WASSINKLUNDGREN

 

  

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DISPATCHESSnapshot

Now See This

The Free Lance / London Calling

Top Five

Design

Consumed

 An Oral History o Western Art

On View 

SEPTEMBER

 

 

snapshot TONY COX 

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DISPATCHES

Neal Tait (White Cube Hoxton Square, London, 2 September– 3 October, www.whitecube.com) 

Kandinsky  (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 18 September – 13 January,www.guggenheim.org)  

Modernologies (MACBA, Barcelona, 23 September – 17 January,www.macba.es)

Deterioration, She Said (Migros Museum, Zurich, to 8 November, www.migrosmuseum.ch)

NOW SEE THISwords  MARTIN HERBERT 

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Satire is in the eye o the

 beholder. The most cuttingpolitical satire, i misread,

risks cutting both ways and

appearing to endorse the very

things it set out to assault.

Might resurrecting ugly racist

imagery to condemn racism

also serve to perpetuate

that visual poison and eed

prejudices urther? Or can a

postmodern rereading give

it added potency to shock

and shame? These questions

cannot have escaped Anton Kannemeyer, a white cartoonist-

provocateur rom South Arica who has been ierce and earlessin skewering his homeland’s politicos and bigots and the broader

legacy o colonialism since 1992. That year, Kannemeyer and

pal Conrad Botes were students at Stellenbosch University

and together started  Bitterkomix , the sort o uncensored, truly

underground anthology which, under the oppressive apartheid

regime, could only be privately printed and circulated discreetly.

 Assuming the pen name Joe Dog (which sounds like ‘you dog’ in

 Arikaans), Kannemeyer looked beyond South Arica, a nation

 with little comics tradition o its own, and began reerencing

 Americans Crumb and Clowes and Europeans Hergé and

Moebius.

For example, in this issue’s strip,  Pappa and the Black

 Hands, he reinterprets an old, environmentally incorrect‘comedy’ hunting scene rom Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo,

the second book in the series, rom 1931, when the country

 was a Belgian colony. Kannemeyer ages the boy reporter into

a balding, black-haired ather igure and blacks up Snowy.

 Whereas Tintin keeps shooting at what he thinks is a single

‘indestructible’ antelope, only to ind that he has killed a whole

 herd, Kannemeyer’s Pappa slays not one but nine black Aricans,

 beore strolling o with a sackul o their severed hands. Beneath

the outrage in his racially and sexually challenging work runs a

dark autobiographical current, the ‘bitter’ in Bitterkomix . Beaten

 by his ‘papa’ as a boy, Kannemeyer lays into the indoctrination

o white superiority, conormity, masculinity, puritanism, the

 whole middle-class Arikaans culture which he was raised on

and rejected. In a 1999 story, ‘Why Bitterkomix’, he explains,teeth clenched, ‘In retrospect, I guess I must thank these

people or my ucked-up childhood. They gave me inspiration

and taught me empathy. But I will always run away rom them.

I will never stop.’ Living in today’s democratic ‘Rainbow Nation’,

Kannemeyer sees no reason to stop antagonising anyone, no

matter what colour, who abuses power.

words  PAUL GRAVETT 

Stripped Bare

  

Thomas Hirschhorn (DundeeContemporary Arts, 19 September – 29 November, www.dca.org.uk)

 

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THE PRICEOF THEHANGOVER

‘THE PRESENT IS COMPLEX because of all the unsettled

issues.’ This typically laconic formulation penned by Lawrence

 Alloway in 1979 goes a way to describing that peculiar day-after-

the-morning-after feeling that appears to cover everything

today. The wave has broken, the sea is calm; everything has

changed, yet, at bottom, nothing has. Firstly – at the very least –

it is necessary to pass through a bitter, unredemptive purgatory.

If things don’t get worse soon, or conversely, much better (and who’s to say now which it will be?), culture and everything that

 hangs from it will keep floating in the same stale Belvedere-

and-Cristal-soaked limbo of punch-drunk reckonings. (NB

conscious readers: uncertainty and poverty do not on their own

displace crappy old ideas, breed artistic renaissances or usher

in new paradigms.) Check, please.

For all those folks – and New York publications have

 been full of them – who continue to celebrate the demise of

an art market they barely understand, three words: shame on

 you. The notion of money being poisonous to art was trashed

decisively 25 years ago by Robert Hughes, a critic who, despite

colossal lapses in judgement, certainly understood the market

and its essential role as a motivator of good art: ‘Picasso was a

millionaire at forty and that didn’t harm him… Some painters

 whose names I will leave to your imagination are millionaires

at thirty and that can’t help them.’

It’s nearly inconceivable that experts in other arenas

– medicine, say, or economics – could insist on the salutary benefits of poverty with a straight face. The idea is gross – not just

antiart; it is as fundamentally alien to the moth-eaten tradition

of artistic humanism as the repressive dicta of Iran’s Supreme

Council. To paraphrase Hughes: the idea that one benefits from

an uptick in automated calls from debt collectors is very much

like the belief in the reformatory potential of stoning.

But don’t let me get off track. What I mean to

underscore is not the confusion sown by the messengers but

the confoundedness – in medium, message and situation 

– of our global slow boil: our times are not just uncertain, but

chronically, pressingly unresolved. ‘Every generation needs to

 know its face’, R.B. Kitaj once said, anticipating generations

that might not. It turns out he didn’t know the half of it.

Our ‘future has no future’, a remarkable politicalmanifesto, enticingly titled ‘The Coming Insurrection’, recently

declared. Authored by a group of French thirtysomethings

calling themselves the Invisible Committee, its NYC summer

launch provoked Situationist happenings (one was bizarrely

conducted inside a cosmetics store) and even an on-air rant

 by Fox News’s Glenn Beck. Leaving aside the ludicrousness

of a manifesto as a communicational form some 40 years after

the summer of 1968, its message turns out to be as concise as

the oppressive slogan it cribs from the shoemaker Reebok:

‘I am what I am’. A cogito, ergo sum  that captures a growingpopulation of economically swindled, politically disaffected and

tautological individuals – a condition the manifesto’s authors

further describe as characterised by ‘the individualization of

all conditions’ – ‘The Coming Insurrection’ lifts the veil on

a cultural massif that art will have to negotiate to regain any

traction with itself and its public. Like all efforts to name some

persistently obvious Everest, this won’t be easy.

Predictably, the current economic fallout plays itself

out in New York according to scripts of earlier crises, just

in fast-forward: galleries close (especially primary ones),

indictments are handed down (Larry Salander), museums

revisit Minimalism and povera (the New Museum), hipsters

 bemoan the passing of yet another junkie-artist (Dash Snow).

 We seem to suffer not only from a crisis of memory, but a crisisof imagination.

Still, there a few unflappable folks out there for whom

the shock has worn off. Take the artists Jonah Freeman and

Justin Lowe: their recently constructed environment at Deitch

Projects plunges down a rabbit hole and lands where flyover

 America gets its tweak on: a meth lab. And then there is the

Bruce High Quality Foundation. A collective committed to

frustrating received art conventions, their film  Isle of the Dead  

(2009) haunted Governors Island all summer. A movie about

an attack of artworld zombies, it draws a fair portrait of New

 York and does exactly what we should demand of young artists

now: make art through which we can see into tomorrow.

words CHRISTIAN VIVEROS-FAUNE 

New York artworld: stop eelingsorry or yoursel and move on

THE FREE LANCE

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DISPATCHES

Monica Bonvicini/Tom Burr (Kunstmuseum, Basel, 5 September

– 3 January, www.kunstmuseumbasel.ch) 

Dalí DalíFeaturing Francesco Vezzoli (Moderna Museet, Stockholm, 19 September – 17 January, www.modernamuseet.se)

Paris We are not alone. Animals, too, live on this planet. La Maisonde la Chasse et de la Nature (the House o Hunting and Nature)

is neither a museum o hunting nor a museum o ecology.

It’s more like a museum o myriad orms; where the animals

are stued, their extraordinary bodies displayed as unexpected

treasures, ingenious resolutions to problems, antastic tricks

o equilibrium ound between a long neck and a short limb,

 between wrinkled skin and big ears. The scope o a  Star Wars 

imagination is limited compared to the reality o the animal

 world. In glass cube no. III, a wolverine bares his teeth: the

most ormidable carnivore o the northern hemisphere, says

the notice – a species somewhere between cat, dog, bear and

mythological creature. I was also ignorant that I share the earth

– on an unequal basis, o course – with the gerenuk and the

peaceul oribi. In the curiosity cabinets, you can open drawersin which the droppings o various mammals are immortalised:

a sureire success with visiting little ones. A sublime video o a

unicorn (by Maïder Fortuné) convinces my children that the

 beast exists (and that you can barely ever catch a glimpse o

it). What is astonishing is that such a simple animal – a horse

endowed with a horn – doesn’t exist, whereas the phacochoerus,

 with our antlers, the painted wol, the kudu, the lechwe, the

 bubal, the caracal and the topi are all actually living with us.

Contemporary art is everywhere among the beasts. The

oetus o a unicorn, in ormaldehyde, closely resembles a teddy

 bear. A ox sleeps in an armchair, monkeys have a picnic with

plates decorated with lowers, Rebecca Horn’s owls wink at us

and a wild boar automaton watches us pass by. At the end o acorridor, my daughter almost knocks over a wol on the lookout.

“Watch out or the wol!” It’s in this jungle o a museum that I

can pronounce such an atavistic sentence.

Beorehand, I quite stupidly ignored the existence o

this museum, since I’m not exactly Chasse, Pêche, Nature et

Traditions (an extreme-right-wing party). But ar rom having

anything to do with those cretins, this old hôtel particulier  in the

Marais area is a marvel o antasy and hospitality. Right now,

one o the oremost members o the New Figuration movement,

Gilles Aillaud (1928–2005), is exhibited, and his painted

animals in zoos hide in cages and paintings.

 Varlam Chalamov wrote that ‘bears never appear more

real to me than in the zoo’. Here, in their home, the animals –

 hooves on the waxed wooden loors and horns in the woodwork– seem both more real and more marvellous than those that lie,

somewhere, in nature.

words  MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ

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 AlejandroJodorowsky’s ‘Dune’: An Exhibitionof a Film of a Book That Never

 Was (Drawing Room, London, 16 September – 25 October, www.

drawingroom.org.uk)  

Sally Mann (Gagosian Madison Avenue, New

DISPATCHES

New York As the artworld was gearing up or Venice and Basel, DavidCarradine, star o the 1970s TV serial  Kung Fu, was ound

dead in a Bangkok hotel closet. Believed to have been the result

o autoerotic asphyxiation or other etishistic sex-play gone

 wrong, the actor’s death set o a voyeuristic media binge in

 which his ex-wie claimed he was into ‘aberrant’ practices and

the New York Post  headlined with the delicious quip ‘Hung Fu’.

Forget the leading economic indicators: these prurient and

prudish reactions give the pulse o our politics and culture,

 wide swathes o which have become as arcical and onanistic as

Carradine’s demise. Voters in Caliornia, or example, recently

rejected spending cuts and tax increases, leaving their state

$21.3 billion in the red and scrambling to pay or things like

prison terms mandated by past voter initiative. In New York,

two Democrats – one indicted earlier in the year or slashing his girlriend with broken glass (he pleaded not guilty and is

awaiting trial) – jumped ship, turning the State Senate over to

the opposition in a revolt encouraged by the upstate billionaire

Tom Golisano, who had apparently became rustrated with

the Democrats ater meeting with the senate majority leader

and inding himsel competing or attention with the senator’s

BlackBerry. Meanwhile, reports arrived rom Basel o starry-

eyed collectors thronging record producer and musician Pharrell

 Williams as he discussed The Simple Things – his collaboration

 with Takashi Murakami. Parsing the jewel-encrusted sculptures

o a bag o Doritos, sneakers and other ‘things in lie that get

overlooked’, Williams reportedly philosophised that ‘the taste

o a cupcake is worth more than diamonds’. This days aterthe US unemployment rate hit 9.1 percent. Thank you, Marie

 Antoinette. The narcissism – and disconnect – that leads

collectors to battle over this $2 million version o lie’s simple

pleasures also lies behind many private-museum acquisitions.

This becomes relevant as public museums suer a decline in

donations and inluence; megacollectors increasingly use their

institutions to present us with what they deem to be worthy in

contemporary culture, and curatorship and scholarship give way

to personal whim – subsidised, o course, by the tax exemptions

granted to charities. None o this is surprising; it’s been me,

me, me  over here ever since the ‘Reagan revolution’ ushered

in deregulation and put paid to the idea that government and

society were common responsibilities. So voters in Caliornia

can’t even igure out that they have to pay their own bills, and Williams need not ear the tumbrils anytime soon.

words JOSHUA MACK 

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York, 15 September – 31 October, www. gagosian.com) 

Lisa Anne Auerbach (Nottingham Contemporary, 12 September – 18 October, www.nottinghamcontemporary.org) 

BerlinNot much is going well at the Temporäre Kunsthalle in Berlinthese days. At the time o writing, the institution’s ourth

exhibition, o work by Allora & Calzadilla, was installed,

 but with no indication about what will ollow or who will be

responsible or programming the second and inal year o this

temporary institution. All in all, the Kunsthalle’s depressing

tale should serve as a warning or contemporary art institutions

– especially those in Berlin – thinking o opening new venues

 without appropriate unding and the clearest o visions.

Many people, o course, had great ideas or the Temporäre

Kunsthalle: Constanze Kleiner and Coco Kühn, who initiated the

project; Dieter Rosenkranz, ounder o Stitung Zukunt Berlin

(the Kunsthalle’s main inancial backer), and retired politician

 Volker Hassemer, its chairman; and an artistic advisory board

consisting o Katja Blomberg (Haus am Waldsee, Berlin),Julian Heynen (K21, Düsseldor), Dirk Luckow (Kunsthalle zu

Kiel) and Gerald Matt (Kunsthalle Wien). Originally planned as

a platorm or promoting international artists who live and work

in Berlin but are not visible via the city’s existing institutions, the

Kunsthalle was quickly torn apart by the conlicting demands o

market considerations, varying notions o artistic quality and

personal interest. When the Kunsthalle opened last September,

Kleiner was its managing director; a second MD, the artist and

 writer Thomas Eller, was hired three months later. Kleiner

let the Kunsthalle in April, and Eller ollowed suit in June,

 whereupon the advisory board resigned. Board members had

 been complaining privately about the state o the institution or

awhile, but because they were eectively curators o its irst- year programme, they chose not to go public, planning instead

to resign ater their our shows had inished. Fortunately or

them, the conlict accelerated their schedule.

Despite its prime location, opposite where the Palast

der Republik once stood, the Kunsthalle has never attracted

 high visitor numbers. The exhibitions – eaturing works by

Candice Breitz, Simon Starling, Katharina Grosse and now

 Allora & Calzadilla – were rather ill-suited to a more casual art

audience. Visitors were upset about paying an entrance ee to

see our paintings by Grosse, or example, and the recognition

Rosenkranz sought or the project never materialised (Allora

& Calzadilla’s brilliant new show could not have helped, as it

consists o little more than a lowered ceiling – on which dancers

are moving about, creating a marvellous soundscape). What happens now? Well, or the time being, the entrance

ee has been abolished. Rosenkranz and his oundation have

assumed control o the Kunsthalle, installed a new managing

director with little experience in the arts and are looking or an

artistic director to devise a popular programme or the coming

months. Yet it remains quite maddening to think what could have

 been done in some o the city ’s other institutions – Hamburger

Bahnho, KW, Berlinische Galerie or Künstlerhaus Bethanien

– with the Temporäre Kunsthalle’s budget and support.

words  AXEL LAPP 

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DO NOTREENACTTHIS AGE

 ANOTHER NIGHT AT THE ICA, another art reenactment.

It’s not every day I wear a white tuxedo, but here I am, in a ring

of onlookers rubbernecking the card players sitting around a

long blue-baize table, watching a reenactment of  Power Game,

a performance by Liliane Lijn, first staged in 1974. The game

 being played out by the invited guests involves them betting on

cards that bear words, rather than symbols, in which the valueof a card is assessed according to how much ‘power’ the word

it bears is held to possess. On a projection screen above us is a

live feed of the event, being transmitted to the overspill in the

 bar; on another screen is faded, black-and-white video footage

of the original event. A few figures are recognisable – a young

Derek Jarman, a cigar-smoking Michael Kustow, director of

the ICA from 1967 to 1971.

So here we are, restaging something that only a few

people knew of or cared about 35 years ago. And at the end of

the noughties, it’s surprising how ubiquitous the reenactment

form has become. Take the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s ‘short

 history of performance art’ seasons – ‘authentic’ reenactments

 by artists of old performance artworks – which ran from 2002

to 2006. Remember Jeremy Deller’s The Battle of Orgreave 

(2001), a reenactment of an episode from the 1984 miners’

strike. And then there were the rock-concert reenactments

pioneered by the duo of Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard during

the late 1990s and culminating, again at the ICA, with their

reenactment of a 1978 Cramps concert. Jo Mitchell’s ICA

reenactment of Einstürzende Neubauten’s 1984 ‘Concerto for

 Voice and Machinery’. And last year’s restaging (yes, at the

ICA) of Mark Boyle and Joan Hills’s 1965 ‘happening’, Oh

What a Lovely Whore.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I need to get out more. Yet

 walking down the street the other day I came across a poster

advertising a tour by one of the more respected tribute bands,Letz Zep. It features an endorsement, apparently from Led

Zeppelin’s Robert Plant: “I walked in – and saw me. Awesome.”

 And I started to wonder at what point in the future I’m going to

 walk into some gallery private view, which will turn out to be a

restaging of some gallery opening from 1997 – and see me.

Don’t get me wrong. This is not about the unique problem

of how to preserve performance art which, hey, can’t be put in a

crate and stored in the basement of the Tate for eternity. Nor is it

 just that all culture can now be digitised – big music companies,

for example, punch-drunk from falling sales of recorded music,

are busy buying out live music venues.

Neither of these sufficiently explains why the past,

present and future are merging in this way. In Tom McCarthy’snovel Remainder (2005), the traumatised protagonist survives

an accident and spends his injury compensation obsessively and

meticulously recreating a particular moment of his past, as if it

 were authentically happening, right now. If there is a trauma in

our current culture, it’s something to do with not having much

personal control over the present, and the fact that past culture

seems more alive, spontaneous and anarchic than the stultified

terms of social and cultural life today, coded and controlled, as

they are, by an ever-expanding set of petty and authoritarian

regulations.

But if individual life is increasingly leached of its

spontaneity, of its liberty of speech and action, this is the fitting

cultural outcome of a politics from which big alternatives and

the possible existence of anything other than the status quo have

long since been banished. Maybe, then, this recent obsession

 with reenacting the events of the past hints at a perceived loss of

freedom in the present and an inability to imagine the perceived

freedoms of the past. ‘Those who cannot remember the past are

condemned to repeat it,’ George Santayana famously wrote in

1905. Today, it seems, those who cannot remake the present are

condemned to repeat the past.

words  J.J. CHARLESWORTH 

Is the current obsession with

restaging art events anythingmore than a sign o our lacko imagination in the present?

LONDON CALLING

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TOP FIVE

WHAT TO SEE THIS MONTH BY 

MARINEHUGONNIER Artist

5 IN-FINITUM

2 MAX ERNST  

 

3 PHILIPPE PARRENO

1 WALID RAAD

4 CHEYNEYTHOMPSON

 

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CAMPANA-ING IT UP

SITTING ON THE SHUTTLE BUS from Weil am Rhein

 back to Basel, I asked the Swiss slicker beside me what he made

of the show we had visited at Vitra, a retrospective of 20 years

of design by the Campana Brothers. “Seen it all before,” he said,

 with the shrug of one who’d been drawn to the late-nighter more

 by the promise of mojitos and Brazilian totty than a passion for hybrid design works. “All those lights made of plastic bottles

and stapled-together chairs – I’m bored of that stuff.” It was a

fair point – one can barely swing an ethically sourced plank at

a design fair these days without hitting a sideboard made from

offcuts, chairs woven out of tangled rope or a fugly PET-bottle

lampshade.

 Approximately zero of them will have been designed

 by Fernando and Humberto Campana. They may have been

nominated Designers of the Year at Design Miami 2008, but the

Campana Brothers also hold the unofficial award for World’s

Most Ripped-Off design studio. See that Favela chair? The seat

assembled from little strips of wood? People have built whole

careers ‘inspired’ by that chair.

The Campanas’ most recognisable style is an eye-

popping bricolage, in which everything from plush toys to carpet

underlay to rope to plastic bottles is fair game as a furnishing

material. They also weave, knot and tangle pretty much

anything that is available in flexible strips, from wire to garden

 hose. This amalgamation of scrap and kitsch, skill and chaos,

is inspired by their ‘laboratory’; the shantytowns of São Paulo.

There are personal elements, too; designs are often described

as the result of a dream, or a traumatic experience in one of

the brothers’ lives; but the absolute key point of inspiration

for their postapocalyptic steam-punk aesthetic is the hunger

for beauty that inspires people scavenging the detritus of thecontemporary urban environment to decorate their homes.

There are some tricky points to make about the effect

that the Campana look has had on the design world these last

 years. They have certainly contributed to the acceptance of

a more omnivorous style, one that affords the ugly and cheap

equal status as it rubs against the sleek and luxe, and they have

opened the market for design that takes its inspiration from

fields beyond Europe, North America and Japan.

Nevertheless, there is still something slightly creepy

about the way this very particular style has been co-opted by

‘green’ designers, who present a Campana-esque favela style

as if it were a sustainable approach to furniture production.

The Campanas do green, but it’s political rather than practical,

such as their TransPlastic  series, with its hunks of polyethylene

enveloped in the woven fibres of traditional Brazilian materials,

as if nature were overpowering junk.

Some of the Campana Brothers’ furnishings are produced

commercially – notably by the Italian firm Edra – but often

production is the labour of a strange and logic-defying love;

the Vermelha chair, for example, involves knotting cord around

a frame in a more or less chaotic fashion. It’s commercially

produced, but not mass-produced; the mainstay of their output

is limited editions for the collectors’ market. It doesn’t take a

government directive to point out that the Campanas’ style

is only sustainable if we all start to make our own furniture –

 which rather takes us back to life on the streets in São Paulo.

It’s odd that designers so often fight against association

 with the country they live or work in; few architects would

debate the importance of local light, living conditions and

geography. There’s no shame in local context; indeed, for the

Campanas, engaging with local context has helped make them

glorious. They have championed design with big personality, in

 which context and history both play a role, which is why there’s

something plumb wrong and naive about other designers

thoughtlessly transplanting their São Paulo style to theneighbourhoods of Sint Paulus or St Paul.

words  HETTIE JUDAH 

‘Green’ designers across theglobe are taking the Brazilianavela aesthetic as their own,

 but is this actually sustainable –

or even desirable?

DESIGN

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CONSUMED

£200

$250–$500

£100

£260–£650

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CONSUMED

$25,000

£295

€9–€15

$1,000

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25–27 September 2009Admission free

Whitechapel Gallery 77–82 Whitechapel High StreetLondon E1 7QXT +44 (0)20 7522 7888

thelondonartbookfair.org

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AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART

In this ongoing series, the real people who created thehistoric styles give their eyewitness testimony 

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–69) was a Dutch painter and etcher.He painted commissioned portraits and biblical scenes, though he is perhaps best known for his great volume of profoundly humanistic self-portraits. He hada dramatic, tragic life, achieving great wealth and fame, and then falling intopoverty and relative obscurity. His children, and various wives and lovers, all died before him. He was buried in a pauper’s grave.

interview by MATTHEW COLLINGS

NO 10:REMBRANDT

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 ARTREVIEW  Tell me about the socioeconomic background to

 your work.

REMBRANDT  Wow, these aren’t the things one necessarily

thinks about a lot when working. But this morning I looked my

name up in Julian Bell’s new book,  Mirror of the World: A New History of Art , and it says that in the 1610s artists like mysel in

Holland started homing in on Amsterdam and Haarlem because

there was reer trading there, and as he puts it, there was ‘a new

urban public with money to spare or commodities to hang on

parlour walls’.

 AR Yes, I’ve read that book. Under a picture o The Jewish Bride

(1667) it says you only let one written statement about ultimate

aims – you write to a patron that you want to represent ‘the

greatest and the most natural emotion’. Where do you think the

emotion is?

R I think in The Jewish Bride a lot o it is in the sleeve. But I never

 know what anyone means when they use the word ‘emotion’.

 ARBut you used it!

R Yes. But you know, we’ve all got to negotiate with our audience.

To be rank, I can’t remember what I was thinking when I wrote

that letter. On Wikipedia it says that the phrase could just as

easily be translated as ‘the greatest movement’ rather than ‘the

greatest emotion’. That makes more sense to me now, looking

 back: I’m very interested in the ugitive eects o light. Julian is

egging the pudding, really, to please his readers. It’s great in the

 book when he starts quoting Simon Schama: a luvvie meltdown!

For my part, the kind o thing one says to a buyer – who isn’t

necessarily inormed about what a painting actually is and how

it works, its inner mechanics – well, this kind o thing I might

 have said or not said is just what one says to suit the context.

It’s not what I mostly remember rom my studio existence, and

the work I did every day, with my assistants milling around, and

a lot o artworks I’d acquired all scattered about – bric-a-brac

o all kinds, rom vases and medals to paintings by Rubens and

Titian. All this stu I bought and sold, because I was a dealer as

 well as an artist: it’s a usual tie-up in the seventeenth century, not

so much in your time, o course. So what was I saying? Oh, yes, how you explain yoursel ater the act isn’t that important. And

in act it’s pretty arbitrary and changeable, depending on who

 you’re talking to and what you’re trying to achieve when you’re

doing it. Since we’re talking now, and I’m not trying to sell you

anything, I’d say the account o ‘emotion’ as it might apply to, say,

The Jewish Bride, would work i the painting were cropped to

 just the aces. Emotion isn’t necessarily the whole story or the

 heart o the matter. In any case, emotion is ampliied and made

a lot richer by the rest o the picture. So the sleeve actually is as

emotional as the aces. And once you start talking like that, based

on actually looking in an unusual way, at least, usual or a painter

 but not or a nonpainter, then the word ‘emotion’ becomes less

and less helpul.

 AR  Don’t you think mysteries are important in art? Do you think

only gnarly painters with painter-knowledge can really see art?

 Are ordinary people’s desires or mystery and emotion, and so

on, just deluded and naive?

R  You mean, do I paint rom experience and knowledge, or is

it rom eeling? Feeling being more mysterious and thereore

 valuable – well, I think it’s more realistic to say experience. The

emotional content that a painter eventually arrives at is only

proound because o the experience and knowledge that’s gone

into the work. I think about the way things loom out, how reality

looks, how light breaks things up, how objects by candlelight

are revealed and not revealed. And it’s the same whether theobject is mythic or a real tabletop or my own real relection in

a mirror. These things are much more oten done without the

setup in ront o me. Most o the time I’m inventing. I do my

 work, and while I’m doing it, I’m looking at what I’m doing.

I make adjustments, and I change and alter, all based on critical

 judgements that don’t come easily exactly, but are natural to me

– because o experience.

 AR  So you’re always doing something and then correcting it?

R  Yes. I’m making abstract relationships work. Or concrete ones.

They’re all abstract, really. On the other hand, what goes into

them comes rom an artist’s heightened visual awareness o the

look o the objective world: you look, and you make decisions based on your looking. So the architectural relationship between

lecks o paint in a depicted shadow, which has come about

largely unconsciously, is as signiicant and meaningul as the

rest o the arrangement o the picture, which has much more

conscious components. That’s what a painting is – the last thing

o any real interest is the narrative. A Jewish wedding or Jesus

on the cross – what does it matter? When these relationships

 work, you could say it’s emotion or you could say it’s whatever

 you like. The particular space between the hands in The Jewish

 Bride  is important. That’s something I certainly considered a

lot. The balance between empty space and solid orms in the

picture as a whole, their equality as areas, that’s important. The

The emotional content thata painter eventually arrives at

is only profound because of the

experience and knowledge that’s

 gone into the work. I think

about the way things loom out,

how reality looks, how light

breaks things up, how objectsby candlelight are revealed

and not revealed 

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AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART

 blur-meisters; Caravaggio – Mr Black; Poussin – Mr Intellectual.

 And yet we’re all doing ‘emotion’, o course, whatever that is

– Vermeer, too – Mr Light. Or Mr Light-Light (I’m Mr Heavy-

Light). All the seventeenth-century painters – antastic.

 AR  Have you seen Classified  at Tate Britain?

R   Yes, I thought those two early-1990s paintings by FionaRae were good. I’d just been to the Liz Peyton show at the

 Whitechapel, which came over rom the New Museum, and the

dierence is very clear, in my opinion. It lies in the relationship

to the whole painting thing o tradition and discipline, and so

on. Actually I’m not sure what the ‘thing’ is, or how one should

reer to it – i ‘tradition’ and ‘discipline’ aren’t misleading. But

perhaps the dierence is the willingness to build a structure that

answers to itsel and has classic elements o internal abstract

drama. What you’ve got instead is the current alternative-to-

the-thing, represented by Liz. She only seems to be entering

the thing. Actually she remains outside. She’s making some kind

o point about something completely irrelevant to the thing,

or the beneit o an audience that is indierent to the thing.But we get used to the airming culture surrounding this new

ironic hal-thing or semi-thing, blithely treating it as i it were all

Rembrandts, as i butter wouldn’t melt in the airming culture’s

mouth.

 AR   Ha ha – I see what you mean. Well thanks a lot, it’s

 been real!

R  You’re welcome, Matthew.

 Next month: total emotional distance, the great mind of Poussin

 blackness o the groom’s hat, to relieve the monotony o the even

tone o the parts o the solid orms in the picture where light alls

– that’s deinitely important. But I wouldn’t say the spaces and

the hat are emotional. But then, is the look in their aces really

emotional, exactly?

 AR  How did you get so good?

R  I was inluenced by Caravaggio, through copying prints by him,

and I copied pictures by various other people, plus I had a bit o

practical teaching. I learned how to do chiaroscuro, I did it really

 well mysel, in an original way, with a lot o movement and energy

– eects o lie or movement or whatever. And rom those skills

and talents I built up my general approach over the years.

 AR  Why did you dress up like Raphael in your sel-portraits?

 Were you pitting yoursel against the athers?

R   Well, that’s right, yes, it was Freudian, in a way: you want to

assert yoursel. But I wouldn’t say that’s the main point onecould make about a sel-portrait. Their main purpose is that

they show what the artist does. I mean, I really am talking in a

socioeconomic way now: my sel-portraits had the unction o

advertising ‘the artist’, whose job is looking. But then there’s the

philosophy o looking. I you think o the one in Kenwood House,

in London, Self-Portrait with Two Circles (1665–9), the curves o

the circles are crucial even though there’s no literal explanation

or them. They’re structural. They make important rhymes with

the curve o the top o that white smock I’m wearing, where the

light catches, and the curve o the white hat as it meets the top

o my orehead. Somebody who appreciates art stands in ront

o that painting, the eye registers those relating curves, and they

give pleasure, but the mind doesn’t necessarily struggle to workout how the pleasure is happening – you just eel moved. Art is its

own emotion. It’s the same with the one in the Frick Collection,

in New York,  Self-Portrait , 1658 – I look at that now and I’m

impressed: the composition is great, the weight o everything,

the gloom.

 AR  The gloom?

R  Yes, there’s a gloom to all the 50 or so painted sel-portraits

that have survived, except when I’m deliberately laughing, which

is the exception that proves the rule. And this gloom is actually

the blues – like Son House: he says that when he plays the blues

it’s internal. You’re in a room on your own. You don’t need anyone

else’s company right now. You don’t hate them. But you don’t want them around. You need to be within yoursel. That’s what

those sel-portraits are about. That’s why you, Matthew, and all

the ArtReview readers, can look at the picture in Kenwood House

or the one in the Frick Collection and see the ace o someone

ordinary-looking rom three and a hal centuries ago looking out

at you. And in that ace you see ageing and you see incredible

painterly skill, and you’re impressed and you go all internal.

 AR  I do eel that! I love your etchings, too, the lines, the stylistic

shortcuts, the expressive scribbles: you really are amazing.

R  I think it was a good period: me, Velázquez and Rubens – the

There’s a gloom to all the 50 or so

 painted self-portraits I did… And

this gloom is the blues –

like Son House: he says that when

he plays the blues, it’s internal 

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 Toronto’s free all-night contemporary art thing

October 3, 2009 - sunset to sunriseFor one sleepless night experience Toronto transformed by artists.

Discover interactive art in galleries, museums and unexpected places—

from churches and grocery stores to chimney stacks and bus stations.

Choose from 130 projects created by more than 500 artists

including world renowned names such as Jeff Koons,

Santiago Sierra and Rebecca Belmore.

One night only. All night long.

 For more info on the event and special travel deals:

scotiabanknuitblanche.ca

416.338.0338

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53/154TUE - FRI 1 - 6 PM SAT 12 - 5 PM OR BY APPOINTMENT PICASSOPLATZ , 20 METERS FROM KUNSTMUSEUM BASEL

B E H R O U Z R A E

Untitled, 2009

( from IN BIMESTER WE TRUST )Ribbon, glue, fabric, permanent marker

21.5 x 29.5 cm

L A L E H  J U N E  G A L E R I E

SEPTEMBER 4 - OCTOBER 3, 2009

B E H R O U Z R A E

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PICASSOPLATZ 4

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INFO@LALEHJUNE.COM

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T. + 41 61 228 77 78

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ON VIEW

EN ROUTE TO THE NEWLY OPENED James

Turrell Museum, located in a remote vineyard in

the oothills o the Andes in Argentina, the sturdy

 vehicle in which I am travelling becomes enveloped

in a thick, soupy cloud. With no concept o what

might be outside the careering vehicle, I eel asthough the car is loating. I consider this queasy

 journey later, ater I arrive at the minimal sand-

coloured building dedicated to the Los Angeles

conceptual artist, as he describes the disequilibrium

that is oten caused by his light and space works:

“It’s like when pilots ly by instruments and they

can’t see out o a plane, or when you’re stuck in

a cloud and can’t see anything. You go down into

it, you sink into it. Those are important physical

sensations.”

Turrell’s work – indeed the entire process

o arriving at the museum, which has been

commissioned and built by Swiss vintner and

art collector Donald Hess – deals in heightenedsensations. Turrell’s light and space installations,

 which are dotted around the world in private and

public collections – or, in the case o his uninished

Roden Crater project, secreted or the past 30

 years in a dormant volcano in the Arizona desert

– orce us to reevaluate the space we occupy. The

museum presents a miniretrospective o his output

since 1967, albeit with works already owned by

His Roden Crater project still to be completed,James Turrell surveys the first museum

devoted solely to him, in the rolling foothills ofthe Argentine Andes

FRONTIERMAN

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words  LAURA ALLSOP 

Hess. The centrepiece o the museum, however, is a

specially commissioned skyspace entitled Unseen

 Blue (2002), which oers a view to the sky through

the museum’s ceiling.

The idea or the museum came up seven

 years ago: Hess had been collecting Turrell’s worksince the 1960s but had never seen them properly

realised – the works were packaged away in so-

called grey books, with instructions on assembly

and display; it was up to the collector to carry these

instructions through. Originally they were to be

shown in a museum in Napa, where Hess owns

another winery. But ater being reused planning

permission, he took his plans to the wilder and less

travelled area o Molinos, Argentina.

 While Hess is rank about Turrell’s

intentions or agreeing to the project – to inance

Roden Crater, which the artist has been working

on almost as long as Hess has been collecting his

 work – nevertheless the location o the museum isin act much in keeping with his philosophy. “I like

places like this”, Turrell says. “I’m an artist who has

 his works in out-o-the-way places. You have to

take a journey to see it. That it’s ar away makes it

special, because you give time to it, and this is really

a work that requires time and I’m not sorry about

that.” Indeed, there is something o the rontierist

about Turrell, not least in his dress – all-black

Quaker garb capped with a Stetson. He legendarily

located the site or the Roden Crater project ater

lying over the Arizona desert repeatedly in a light

aircrat, sometimes taking reuge under its wing at

night and carrying on in the morning. His attraction

to deserts is unwavering. “In the desert you havethe opportunity to do things, and some o them are

crazy. When you think about the desert, you think

about all the Prophets wandering, Joshua, Elijah,

even Christ. There’s a tradition o people being a

 bit out o the ordinary in the desert.”

The works inside the museum are split

 between those that utilise the natural surroundings

and those relying on dark, windowless spaces and

artiicial light. The irst major installation in the

museum is City of Ahirit   (1976), which Turrell

explains means ‘city o cosmic light’, and is a tunnel

through several connected chambers throbbing

 with coloured light. Most o it is artiicial, but some

natural light creeps in rom small windows in theexternal wall. This blend gives the light a velvety

quality, which obscures basic space delineators such

as corners. Turrell describes the piece as a journey

through colour, but it is also a journey through

memory: “We don’t hold colour. It’s very strange. In

a colour ield, the colour starts to leave immediately,

and so in about iteen seconds you’ll notice that it

isn’t nearly as saturated as when you irst came in.

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ON VIEW

But you’re also building an aterimage – red colour

saturation will give a lime-green aterimage. And

then you move on to a green light-illed chamber…”

 And so on, through numerous rooms, with colour

and aterimage intricately layered, the artwork an

increasingly internal experience.

Ideas about time and memory are closely

 bound up with the light and space works. Theyrequire time to be ully appreciated: both the

central skyspace, Unseen Blue, and Lunette (2005),

a site-speciic corridor with a portal to the outside,

capitalise on the shiting movements and changes in

colour o the sky or their visual eect. Both call or

at least an hour o peaceul viewing. But the other

 works deal with duration, too: how long it takes or

the eyes to register light in a pitch black room, or

example, or how quickly the memory o light can

ade. Allusions to prehistory contribute towards a

sense o timelessness: the newly installed  Spread  

(2003), or example, eatures a light o pyramidal

steps leading to a deep blue chamber that strongly

suggests an ancient place o worship. Entering

the chamber yields urther disorientation, with

its slight incline leading down to a ield o misty

 blue light. “I think o colour as a mystical og that

 you could touch or breathe”, Turrell says. “ When

 you walk to the space, you see a room illed with

emptiness, a void illed with the sort o purple you

see in meditation. It’s the colour you see when your

eyes are closed”, he explains. As such it is revelatory work, showing us things we know to be true but

rarely stop to consider. “Actually”, he says, “I think

this is very emotional work.”

That evening, those who have come to

Colomé or the museum’s opening gather at sunset

to watch the light show that is Unseen Blue. An

aperture in the ceiling, bordered by Greek-style

columns, provides a portal to the heavens. Turrell’s

assistants activate a series o sot lights that turn

the sunset into an hourlong display that leaves the

 viewer dizzy, eyes burning. At points the sky seems

to advance towards the straining viewer beore

retreating again, while the changing textures andcolours bring to mind a host o paintings rom art

 history, not least Rothkos and Maleviches. It’s

spectacular work, theatrical as well as meditative.

 Yet it is also diicult to accurately explain, something

Turrell’s work (which is also notoriously diicult to

photograph) generally seeks to encourage. “I don’t

use image, and there’s no thing or object other than

that made by the light”, he explains. “Oten there’s

not even a place to ocus or to look. So i you have

no image, no object and no place to ocus, what do

 you have let?” What remains is an experience,

though one diicult to relay with words.

Meanwhile, Turrell’s magnum opus in the

 Arizona desert is approaching completion. It isnever quite out o his mind, and his message in the

James Turrell Museum’s visitor book conirms this.

Careully written across the irst page is the artist’s

motto: ‘Sooner or later, Roden Crater.’

The James Turrell Museum is located at the

 Estancia y Bodega Colomé, Molinos. An exhibition

of new large-scale holograms by the artist opens at

 PaceWildenstein on 25th Street, New York, on 10

 September  

 In the desert

 you have the

opportunityto do things,

and some of

them are crazy” 

“ 

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ON VIEW

 AMONG EXPERTS in the recently revived

technique o 3D cinema, there are reportedly two

schools o thought. For some, a ilm should create

the eect o depth by presenting the screen as a sort

o container, its images held within the rame. For

others, objects should project outwards, emergingto meet the viewer head on. One school, that is,

 values distance as an integral part o illusion; the

other seeks to immerse the viewer in the image.

 What is true o 3D mainstream ilm also

stands or 2D auteur cinema; here, too, the

opposition is between distance and immersion. This

 year in Cannes, the key ilms in competition oered

extreme examples o the drive to detachment on

one hand, immersion on the other.

This year’s Palme d’Or went to The White

 Ribbon  (  Das weisse Band  ) (2009), by Austria’s

Michael Haneke, a director who has made

detachment in ilm something o an exact science.

In The White Ribbon, Haneke adds a urther layero distanciation – historical this time, as well as

ormal. The setting is Austria on the eve o the

First World War, in a village beset by unexplained

crimes. Watching the ilm, we instantly become

aware o the temporal estrangement that aects

us when watching any period drama, but Haneke

accentuates this element by making his iction, and

the world it represents, insuperably remote to us,

despite the vividness o his evocation. Not only are

the characters alien to us in their rigid observation

o archaic social and amilial codes; we also know

 we are watching them through a urther distancing

optic: the grid o scrupulous pastiche, namely o the

 black-and-white photography o period chronicler

 August Sander.

O all the entries in competition, Haneke’s

subtle, complex ilm may well be the likeliest to

endure. But its impact as cinematic event was

drastically overshadowed by the competition’s

two scandals, both o which made their mark by

enguling, even assaulting, the viewer’s sensibilities.

 Enter the Void  (2009), the long-awaited new eature

 by France’s champion extremist Gaspar Noé, was

cinema imagined as out-o-body experience, a hardcore twenty-irst-century update o the 1960s

ideal o cinema as trip.

Noé’s protagonist is Oscar, a young man

 who gets killed in a Tokyo police raid and inds his

consciousness embarking on a posthumous journey

that – as a character explains early on, helpully

outlining the story arc – is described in detail in the

Tibetan Book of the Dead . The premise o the ilm

is that, or some 160 minutes, we are Oscar  – rom

the very start, in act, when he takes a digitally

generated acid trip that resembles a deluxe screen

saver. Mainly looking through Oscar’s eyes, the

Usually a film’s intensity is measured by whether moviegoers have forgotten wherethey are, but sometimes it’s the veryawareness of being trapped in a cinema seatthat delivers the impact

CANNES 2009:THE CINEMAOF IMMERSION

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words  JONATHAN ROMNEY  ilm contains interminable-seeming stretches (no

exaggeration, since Noé is out to distort our senseo time) in which Oscar’s restless spirit whizzes

over the streets o Tokyo and in and out o windows,

plugholes and ashtrays en route to eventual (and

 bathetic) reincarnation.

The eect is certainly immersive, as i Noé

 had taken the ‘star gate’ sequence rom Kubrick’s

 2001: A Space Odyssey  (1968) – his avowed

inluence – as the basis or an entire ilm. But

lacking the narrative power o Kubrick’s space

drama, Noé’s ilm achieves exactly the opposite o

 what it attempts, alienating rather than submerging

us. Distracted by the constant movement, we end

up wondering exactly how Noé managed to get his

camera through that wall, down that tunnel. Themore Noé attempts to make us eel we’re there, we

remain nowhere but in our cinema seats.

But sometimes the most intense experience

to be had in a ilm is precisely that o knowing we are

in a cinema, and eeling as i we have been locked

in by a malevolent presence – that is, a director

determined to show us a really bad time. This is one

 way to describe Lars von Trier’s Antichrist  (2009),

an unpleasant but undeniably overwhelming

drama that is one part Gothic horror, one part

Bergman-esque anatomy o marital hell. While it is

the grisly violence and renzied sexuality that make

 Antichrist   so provocative, the ilm’s true capacity

to disturb lies in the enclosed, unhealthy-seemingatmosphere created by cameraman Anthony Dod

Mantle, especially in the eerie orest images.

Even i you elt – as I did – that Antichrist  was

ultimately hollow horror-kitsch, you could hardly

deny the ilm’s power to overwhelm, not i you were

 watching it in an evening press show surrounded

 by several hundred other critics variously gasping,

shuddering or hooting derisively. This says nothing

about the quality o  Antichrist , and a great deal

about von Trier’s ability to muster a cinematic

phenomenon o startling intensity – even i that

intensity is ated to last or only a single screening.

The estival debut o a succès de scandale  always

generates its own sealed microclimate, and– ephemeral as its eect is – such a screening is

arguably the most genuinely immersive experience

that cinema oers.

 Antichrist and  The White Ribbon are released in

the UK by Curzon Artificial Eye 

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MANIFESTOby DR LAKRA

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    G   o   r    d   o   n    C    h   e   u   n   g ,

   T    h   e    G   u   a   r    d    i   a   n   s ,

   2   0   0    8 .

    C   o   u   r   t   e   s   y   o    f   t    h   e

   a   r   t    i   s   t .

    N   e   a    l    R   o   c    k    i   n    h    i   s   s   t   u    d    i   o    i   n   L   A ,

   2   0   0   9 .

    C   o   u

   r   t   e   s   y   o    f   t    h   e   a   r   t    i   s   t   a   n    d    f   a   p   r   o    j   e   c   t   s ,

   L   o   n    d   o   n .

Gordon CheungThe Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Neal RockFanestra & Other Works

7 August — 1 November 2009

01922 654400

thenewartgallerywalsall.org.uk

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EATURE:

‘CARTER’ – THE NAMEALONE HOOKS YOU IN.

THE VERY FACT THAT IT’S

A NAME, ALONE.WHY IS IT UNQUALIFIED?WHAT HAPPENED TO

THE FIRST BIT?OR IS IT THE SECOND

THAT’S MISSING?OR MAYBE IT’S NOT REALLYHIS NAME AT ALL.

words MARK RAPPOLT portraits SHARIF HAMZA

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that Rauschenberg perpetrated. In any case one quick hop-click-and-jump to Wikipedia reveals Carter’s other name.

In Carter’s most recent solo show,  And, it, the, constant,although  (at London’s Hotel gallery this summer), there was asculpture titled Likeness (2009). It comprises two similar-lookingbusts, one black and one white, on wooden stools at either endof the gallery, a train of carpet running between them. “I’m reallyinterested in forensic artists, not in the aspect of their relation to

the law but in the way in which they find, say, a skull and then haveto recreate, through clay, glass eyes and fake hair, the identity of amissing person: a loss that someone’s trying to address. And thishalf-assed artist-slash-law-person constructs this thing and theyhope that someone will recognise it; but it never looks like theperson they find. But there’s still this care and interest in trying tosolve the loss, and it produces this weird sculpture that’s kind ofbecoming but doesn’t quite make it, that’s almost there. I find thatreally interesting: trying to reconstruct something that you onlyhave pieces of.”

At times that’s exactly what it feels like to experience hisart. Take Untitled, (area)  (2009): on its surface float amoebicforms suggestive of faces, which, together with some cubiform

ON  THE  FACE  OF  IT,  Carter’s body of work to date, spanningpainting, photography, sculpture, sound works and video, feels

 just as enigmatic. In general – and this is to offer anything but acomplete overview – you could say that the New York-based artistseems to have a predilection for representing mysterious heads

and faces. These crop up, most often covered in hair (in a CousinIt kind of way that stops just short of suggesting obsession; there’sa wig thing, too) most often in drawings and paintings, reducedto outlines or rendered, as in the paintings in his latest Londonshow, as floating blobs with creepy, staring eyes. There are equallystrange Polaroids of shiny shop-dummy arms ‘making’ the otherworks (preparing the background of a painting, for example, orpoised over a drawing), which, as much as anything else, serve toredouble the mystique of their maker. The loose-limbed themeis repeated in video, photographic and sculpture works (notablyin a 2008 exhibition at Yvon Lambert in Paris) featuring solitarylegs arranged in some sort of homage to Robert Gober. And,in the background to many of his paintings and the set-up of hisexhibitions, there’s a more widespread interest in modernist interior

design (and, perhaps, the domestic setting).In recent months, Carter’s Erased James Franco  (2008)

– a 63-minute film in which the titular actor reprises fragments ofdifferent scripts and scenarios from all his film roles, collaged into abewildering, yet mesmerising whole – has brought the New York-based artist to a more general, less artworld-specific attention.The film’s title is a tribute to Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased DeKooning Drawing  (1953). Famously, Rauschenberg went over tothe master painter’s studio and said he’d like to erase one of hisdrawings as a work of art. De Kooning agreed. It took one monthfor Rauschenberg to complete the act and no record exists ofthe pre-erased drawing. On the other hand a glance at the listedmaterials –‘traces of ink and crayon on paper’ – seems to indicate

that somehow it’s still a drawing, but a drawing stripped down tothe bare minimum of existence, an Ur-drawing. Carter’s video, asyou watch it, appears to bear no connection to this work.

Just as Rauschenberg selected de Kooning because he wasa star, you watch Carter’s video with the knowledge that Francois one too. But in Franco’s case the so-called erasure serves tohighlight his celebrity – a reminder that the subject is, on somelevel, important enough to merit the labour of the ‘erasure’. Theresult: you’re more conscious of Franco than you might ever havebeen before. To some extent, as he spins out disjointed dialogue(in particular one-sided telephone conversations that served somesort of linking purpose in the films from which they are extracted,but blur into incoherent babble when stitched together in Carter’sscript), Franco appears a bit like a remotely controlled dummy.

Yet he simultaneously becomes a maximal presence: Franco,apparently, unmasked (there are no costumes, just jeans and a t-shirt). The erasure itself seems to be erased.

But back to unmasking Carter. The name thing’s no big deal,the artist says. But not before he tells the tale of how the invitationcard for one of his first New York shows featured a photographof his sister’s head, covered by her luxurious and abundant hair.“People who didn’t meet me thought that was me,” he says withevident glee. Still, let’s not get carried away: Carter is simply whatpeople have been calling him since he was a kid. “Once you stickto something there’s no going back,” he says with the same airof fatalism that wafts though the Franco film. You can’t erase aHollwood star, just as you probably can’t now repeat the erasure

It really is all about portraiture; although it’s probably more

 about self-portraiture than I’mwilling to admit”

“ 

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It’s important to build uponthings that are already done

 for you and to referencethem and to honour them”

“ 

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WORKSIN ORDER OF APPEARANCE

Untitled, (area), 2009, digitally altered and dated interior on foldedand defaced laser prints, acrylic ink, paint, pencil,

coloured pencil, and gel medium on paper and on canvas, 107 x 135 cm

 And, it, the, constant, although, 2009 (installation view, Hotel, London).Both images courtesy Hotel, London

Constant (James Franco As Inanimate Object As Robert Gober Sculpture) No. 4,2008, cast of James Franco’s left leg (polyurethane elastomer, synthetic hair), 56 x 12 x 31 cm (leg)

Erased James Franco , 2008 , DVD, 63min, 34 sec. Edition 2/5.Both images courtesy Yvon Lambert, Paris

FEATURE: CA

geometric studies and a couple of botanical drawings, are set inmodernist interiors, bizarrely equipped with Rococo furniture, all ofit greyscale with random splashes of rouge and Lichtensteinesquepaint flourishes splattered about like so much jism or broken shardsof china. It’s as if the busts from Likeness  (and there’s a profile

outline not dissimilar to that of the busts lurking to the left of thepainting) have been expanded and collapsed at the same time.The connections between one work and another are an

important part of a Carter show. And certainly he sees his workas part of a connected linear flow: “Growing up I thought: ‘Doesn’tevery artist work in the same way? Doesn’t every artist make onepiece and they’re all related and they’re all about creating andyourself?’” he says. “But artists all work very differently. Which isodd, because I always think that’s always the way you should makeart: it should be very personal and it should be very linear andconnect.” At last, the ego has landed.

So, given that, and the name business (which, howevermuch I want it to go away, cannot help but be an elephant inthe room) it’s no surprise that the artist, talking about his work in

general, states: “It really is about portraiture; although it’s probablymore about self-portraiture than I’m willing to admit. Everythingis about self-portraiture to some degree. Even the film I did withJames.”

At this point he decides to talk me through the evolution of apainting, Area with tree and Picasso (2009). He starts with the imageof a room, he says, then there’s a lot of Photoshop work, then thedrawing and then the painting. The paint is very specifically placed,the outlines around the brush strokes consciously referencingLichtenstein, the splatter effect reminiscent of Pollock. “I want tobe both poetic and cold,” he says. “There’s this cold computer workand then this warm paint-work.” There’s also a Picasso painting onthe wall and a shape reminiscent of a Henry Moore: anything but,

it seems, Carter. It looks like a psychiatrist’s waiting room, full of theghosts of art history. “It’s important to build upon things that arealready done for you and to reference them and to honour them.”

So is Carter’s art a form of therapy or an attempt to locatehis absent self? “I hate to say yes on that, because I can’t stand thatconnection,” he replies. “But I have to say yes. Although in the day-to-day making of it – no.” Erased again.

Carter’s next solo show is at Salon 94 Freemans, New York,9 September – 17 October 

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EATURE:

RICHARD TUTTLE  ,  Walking on Air, C5 (2009):  two panels of thincotton fabric, each a foot high and a few inches over ten feet long; thetop panel bears two rows of grommets placed at regular (15 and 3/8of an inch) intervals that pierce and hem its upper and lower edge;the bottom panel has only one row of grommets along its upper edge;a running stitch hems the lower one. The grommets allow the panelsto be hung together at eye level on a double row of nails, with the top panel overlapping the bottom by an inch (the grommet width), whilethe lower edge of the bottom panel hangs free. This loose hangingcreates a pattern of subtle billows that reads like a diagram depicting

forces on a load-bearing beam. The left and right edges of each panelare hand-cut and unfinished. The top panel is dyed a faded tangerine; some slight discolouration occurs just left of centre. The bottom panel bears a series of irregular red stains that bleed a watery pink intotheir vicinity; the densest stain resides just under the discolourationof the top panel. Though asymmetric in intensity, the regular verticalcreasing of the bottom panel suggests a symmetry of distribution,like a Rorschach blot with uneven inking. Other ‘x’-patterned creasesaccompany the vertical ones across the bottom panel, but theseappear unrelated to the stains in any way. Two horizontal creasesmark the middle of the top panel and are flanked by two more ‘x’ patterns; again, no relation to the panel’s colouring. The lower edgeof the bottom panel is hemmed with an orange thread.

AS Richard Tuttle PREPARES FOR HISFIRST SOLO SHOW IN LONDON IN 12 YEARS,

 JONATHAN T.D. NEIL ASSESSES THE AMERICAN’SCONTRIBUTION TO SHAPING WHATEVER IT IS THAT WE MEAN WHEN WE TALK ABOUT ‘ART’

Why have I stopped here? What licenses the end of sucha description? Consideration of the reader’s tolerance for tediummight be one excuse. But were I really that considerate, I wouldhave cut the paragraph above by half (or more; in any case, makingassumptions about others’ tolerance is always ill-advised). No, thequestion I am interested in, the question that Richard Tuttle’s recentWalking on Air  series (seen at PaceWildenstein in New York earlierthis year and at Modern Art in London this month) asks – indeed,what all of Tuttle’s best work asks – is what exactly can be countedas part of the work of art? What, that is, properly belongs to thework as a bearer of meaning, and what is merely incidental to it?

These are not new questions, of course. At least sinceliterary critics W.K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley published the

‘The Intentional Fallacy’ in 1946, and so formalised (which is to saytheorised) the major tenets of the New Criticism, the matrix of theartist’s intention, the work’s autonomy and the viewer’s share haslargely shaped methods of critical assessment and, by extension,the contest of artistic meaning.

Tuttle’s art matured at the moment when the final of thosethree ideas, the viewer’s share (and all that it entailed), was justbeginning to trade up for a bigger property within the criticalenclave. For a while Tuttle was associated with Minimalism, andthen with Postminimalism, the arts of which, so understood,placed great store by the audience as executor of the work –phenomenologically, epistemically, discursively. But Tuttle’s gambitnever played well within the minimal and postminimal arenas.Though the Constructed Paintings and the Wire, Cloth and Rope

Pieces from the 1960s and 70s were easily assimilated to debatesregarding medium specificity – the ‘neither painting nor sculpture’of Donald Judd’s ‘Specific Objects’ (1965); as Tuttle quite seriouslynotes, he sees his work as legible within a continuum describedby calligraphy at one pole and architecture at the other – thosedebates never exhausted the kinds of questions these works wereasking, and which the Walking on Air  series continues to do.

In asking what properly belongs to the work and whatis incidental to it, Tuttle’s art does not do away with the limits ofautonomy, intention and aesthetic experience bu