September 28, 2018
Interview in Daily Star in Dhaka, Bangladesh:
The biennale is a weaving nest of experiments: Marek Bartelik
Dr Marek Bartelik is a Polish-born, New York-based art critic, art historian, and poet, highly regarded across the world for his nuanced understanding of art.
The former president of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) and AICA USA was an observer of the 18th Asian Art Biennale Bangladesh (AABB). In an interview with The Daily Star, he shares his thoughts on the recent biennale and his beliefs on art in general.
“The biennale is more a living thing and there are multiple factors to assess it. It serves different people in different ways. A lot of components had to be put together to arrange it on a scale such as this,” says Bartelik, who welcomed the decision of the biennale committee to go beyond borders, being confined to Asia and the Asia Pacific regions previously.
Marek believes the biennale has the potential to engage people and the city itself in a dynamic way, much like how the Havana Biennale exposes art to the city and its people instead of confining it to a designated place for spectators to observe.
” Next time I would like to see the building and the artworks ‘talk’ to each other. The building is unique; but the artworks exchange little dialogue with the aura.
Marek asserts that a close interaction between the artists, the audience and the artwork with connoisseurs is an important factor and this should be magnified in the biennale. “As you have invited people from all walks of life to experience your rich culture, it would be wonderful to display art properly,” observes the art critic.
On the topic of the contemporary global art scenario and the fierce competition in the art market, Marek says it is natural for everybody to want to be recognised. “But on the other hand, sharing a sense of community—like you and I sitting together and talking about something we both care about—is very special. My transition from civil engineering to art history, for example, changed my horizons. My initial career had very few surprises, but when I delved into art, the world opened to me.
“From my experiences, art is a kind of equaliser, which allows me to see a world that I would have never seen as a civil engineer. The art world is a rendezvous of different people and creative thought. For example, when we talk about art and illumination, light and colours of expressions lead to spirituality. It is universal. Light is a thing that interests a lot of artists so we find a common ground, which uncovers the paths of unity,” he says.
On the trends of contemporary art, Marek intimates, “I see a lot of it. There are many artists, who are interested in identity politics. As I grew up, I got interested in these works, which involved its share of commitments.
“In the biennale there are several works by local artists, whom I feel, are very committed. Most of these works are installations. One ceramic work seemed to me very grounded. It came with the understanding of the medium, scale and how parts fit into the whole of it. That’s very important. A lot of artists are very spontaneous nowadays. People are very quick to create art. It’s one kind of doing, but I like it when things come with research, responsibility and reflection. At first, you make a promise, and if you are lucky, you become a living legend.”
About the strength and weakness of the biennale, Marek says that its strength is that it is open and you see a range of experiments—from solid to whimsical. “The weakness to me is that I don’t think the artworks have been treated appropriately within the building,” he explains.
“The building itself is an incredible structure and the works don’t correspond to it. There is no dialogue between them. Next time I would like to see the building and the artworks ‘talk’ to each other. The building is unique; but the artworks exchange little dialogue with the aura.
“The art selection should have been thematic, research-based and meaningful. The standard of curated shows and retrospectives by contemporary master artists should be included on a larger scale. One thing which I wish to play with is the interior itself, so that the works can aesthetically mingle with each other,” he adds.
He also believes that a wall is not an empty space—it serves a greater purpose than simply being covered with paintings. The wall is part of the grand composition. In his words, “Space doesn’t swallow art—it makes art stand out in its own glory.” So, fewer, better curated works could have made the biennale a more superior affair.
Stay upda
November 2017:
New exhibition at GreenPoint Projects in Brooklyn, NY
A Walking Lesson: Abakanowicz/Markowski
Marek Bartelik
If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the opposite direction.
—Dietrich Bonhoeffer[i]
Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930-2017) and Eugeniusz Markowski (1912-2007) —these two artists are not an obvious pairing. She was a world-renowned sculptor known for works that communicate foremost the angst and pain of living under the dark shadows of a totalitarian regime and the Cold War, as well as broader personal traumas experienced after World War II in Poland and elsewhere. He was a painter, little known outside of his native country, whose highly expressive compositions of naked people spoke about human life in a highly satirical, but also humorous way, exposing its anarchical madness put in—to use the words of the art critic and poet Mariusz Rosiak — “a corset of mental stereotypes of his time and place.”[ii] What they shared artistically was their strong commitment to a figurative expressiveness with the uniquely Polish backlights on history.
Abakanowicz’s life and art have been discussed in numerous books and exhibition catalogues, in which they are always closely linked and politicized.[iii] She was still a child when World War II broke out, and studied at the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Gdańsk and the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw during the Stalinist period, when artists were required to follow the doctrine of Socialist Realism. She distinguished herself with her giant weavings, called Abakans, made from dyed sisal fiber, which won her a Gold Medal at the São Paulo Biennale in 1965, the same year that she started to teach at the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Poznań, where she would work until 1990. In 1982, soon after the imposition of martial law in Poland, she was given permission to travel to the French capital to install her new show at the Musée d’Art de la Ville de Paris, which included her emblematic works called “Backs,” 1976-80. More major exhibitions followed, including numerous shows at the museums in the United States: the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C., and the PS1 Museum and Metropolitan Museum, both in New York, among others. For her audience in the West she became a prime example of an artist who struggled to overcome the obstacles of living and working behind the Iron Curtain. However, in Poland she was just an artist who had skillfully, and successfully, breached the walls of the Velvet Prison (to use Miklós Haraszti’s expression[iv]), and was given a stake in the official culture, while at the same time she enjoyed a major career abroad. After the Berlin Wall fell, marking the end of communism in Eastern Europe, a significant shift in Abakanowicz’s art occurred. She distanced herself from political readings of her works, and shifted her focus to the growing concerns with ecological and environmental dangers posed to the natural world. Interestingly enough, with her new “organic structures” she returned to a preoccupation with nature similar to her interest in that subject at the very beginning of her career in the mid-1950s. When Abakanowicz died last April in Warsaw, her dramatic life, and its direct impact on her work, was emphasized in numerous obituaries. Today, she remains Poland’s most-exhibited artist, with works in almost every major museum in the world, where they are prominently displayed.
Eugeniusz Markowski’s life abounded in dramatic events as well. His biography has been mostly known from the laconic notes in his exhibition catalogues produced on the occasion of many exhibitions of his work during his lifetime, most of which took place before the 1990s.[v] Markowski graduated from the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts a year before the outbreak of the war and was wounded while participating in the defense of his country against the German invasion in the fall of 1939. After the Polish defeat, he escaped to Italy, where he actively took part in local artistic life, wrote articles for the Polish press, and worked for the Polish Embassy in Rome. He joined the Libera Associazione Arti Figurative (Free Association of Figurative Arts), which counted among its founding members the artists Gino Severini, Mario Mafai, Renato Guttuso and the architect Mario Ridolfi. The famous Futurist Enrico Prampolini authored an essay on Markowski’s art for a small book on him, in which the Italian stressed the atmosphere of irony and the grotesque in Markowski’s paintings.[vi] In 1950, Markowski moved to Ottawa, Canada, where he took on the function of the chargé d’affaires at the Polish Embassy, responsible for, among other duties, the repatriating of Polish art left in North America after the beginning of World War II. He also continued his journalistic career—as a correspondent for the “Polpress” established by the communist Union of Polish Patriots (ZPP) in the Soviet Union in 1944, which became the official press agency of the Polish government. After his return to Poland in 1955 he assumed the position of Director of the Department of Cultural Promotion Abroad at the Polish Ministry of Culture and Art. Between 1970 and 1984, he taught at his alma mater, as well as the State Higher School of Visual Arts in Poznań. In State Socialist Poland, Markowski achieved major artistic recognition, but when he passed away in 2007 his death was barely recorded in the Polish mainstream media, let alone the international press.[vii]
The biographies of these two artists—even if only presented in a significantly abbreviated form here—bear witness to the complexities of maintaining a successful artistic career in Poland, because art and politics there were often intertwined in a “schizophrenic” way.[viii] In fact, in State Socialist Poland (unlike in the Soviet Union or East Germany) the government allowed relative freedom to artists, at least in terms of artistic expression, as long as they refrained from overtly criticizing the political system, and both Abakanowicz and Markowski took advantage of that leniency from early on. Their embraced expressiveness derived in large part from art informel—as practiced by such diverse artists as Jean Dubuffet, Wols, Alberto Giacometti, Karel Appel, and Jean Fautrier, all familiar to many Polish artists. Art informel was influenced by post-war existentialism and that philosophy had a significant impact on Abakanowicz and Markowski as well. However, while Abakanowicz’s artistic language might reflect the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, Markowski’s seem to have been intellectually closer to the writings of Witold Gombrowicz, which, in such works as Ferdydurke, deliberately portrayed existence as an unserious, even funny, essence.
To me, Abakanowicz’s figures seem Nietzschean, Markowski’s—Don Quixotean. We may also say that they experience a Brechtian alienation while, at the same time, remaining committed to living individual lives.[ix] Such emblematic figures appear in each artist’s works with a stubborn consistency: as headless humanoids in the art of the former and as grotesque performers in that of the latter. And they return with obsessive repetitiveness. I find puzzling what Abakanowicz said about repetition, that it is “contrary to the workings of the mind, to its forward movement; it is contrary to the imagination.”[x] But she might have been right. As the theater director and artist Tadeusz Kantor astutely observed in 1955: “Any pressure coming from irrational causes is foreign to the modern man.”[xi] Abakanowicz’s work can be perceived as “unimaginative” in the sense that, indeed, it often comes with references to a specific memory, memory which requires being not just recalled, but, in fact, rehearsed in the artist’s studio before it can be given a final form. Emblematic for that approach are her “Crowds,” made since the mid-1980s on, which the artist called “brainless organisms.”[xii] For Abakanowicz, the headless, genderless figures arranged in different configurations in them—as if during a public demonstration, an execution, or a religious ceremony—speak the truth about human character much louder than faces: “The face can lie. The back cannot,” she argued, referring to her series “Backs.”[xiii] To further emphasize the proximity of her figures to real people, Abakanowicz made them step down from the traditional pedestal to assume positions directly on the ground, sometimes leaving them on a wobbly bench or a wooden trunk, where they became anti-monuments. And yet, despite their anti-monumental qualities, Abakanowicz’s sculptures were masterfully crafted, with full consideration given to the uniqueness, and mystery, of the materials—such as sisal, burlap, resin, bronze, steel, or wood—that she worked with, often using several of them in one piece.
What is “unimaginative” and yet depicted in Markowski’s paintings is the animalistic and animistic nature of his figures, which, in fact, as pathetic as it appears, is thoroughly human, even joyful, while animated by the winds of history and the wings of religion. They are his “aborigines” making dizzying somersaults in Space and his “worriers,” knights turned peasants, peasants turned knights, riding on the horses and bulls. “We are the homo sapiens species. But, we carry the same instincts as the animals. It is important to me to show how grotesque we become, when carried by emotions we reject culture. We are naked, without realizing it”—the artist explained.[xiv] He could have said: “The naked body can’t lie.” Markowski’s naked people fight with each other, haunt each other, debate, pray, play music, make love, and allow their backs to be used as benches for others to sit on. On the occasion of the artist’s major exhibition at the Zachęta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw in 1962, the art historian Zdzisław Kępiński praised Markowski’s innovation in the language of Marxist dialectics: “A merchant-usurer and a whore, a prelate and a Satan, a diplomat-official and a rabble proletarian feeding in the grounds of those with full bellies, timeless silhouettes from the theater of ludic imagination speak in art again, awakening echoes of the Last Judgments on Medieval portals, of plebian manuscripts from the peasant war in Germany of the Reformation period and French country fair farce from the time of the Hundred Years War. Markowski brings back literary content to painting, which it has been avoiding for a long time”[xv] The literary aspect of his paintings is important; Markowski’s paintings tell stories; and that literalness is reinforced by the incorporation of handwritten graffiti-style text and photographs. But, to pinpoint the originality of Markowski’s figures is not simple. The originality of his art should not be directly related to the disadvantaged socio-economic status of his characters (as Kępiński attempted), nor to formal innovation as far as the approach to figurative painting is concerned, which, to his admirers, made Markowski a pioneer of the neo-expressionism practiced in the 1980s. Today what strikes one in his art is its tragicomic eroticism, graphic and yet ambiguous, even, perhaps especially, in terms of the gender identity and roles reenacted—a subject that was not exactly a taboo in State Socialist Poland, but which was seldom addressed in a complex, non-didactic, “non-dialectic” manner in the visual arts. And, of course, Markowski was fully committed to his craft as a painter, making his expressive works fine examples of “slow painting,” that is, painted images that require great skill to make them, and which reveal their visual power over time.
As the figures in the works of Magdalena Abakanowicz and Eugeniusz Markowski keep on walking in the Greenpoint Projects in New York, over the crowded theatrum mundi depicted in their works looms the burden of World War II and its consequences. In that context, I picture these figures as the descendants of the people painted by Bronisław Wojciech Linke in The Bus (1959-1961). This truly horrifying image shows a crowd riding in a bus of Polish history, with half of its roof gone; among the figures shown are a mother with a baby, several zombie-like creatures, a large naked plastic doll, a headless man in a blue suit and a pink dress shirt, a sculpted bust of Stalin, a bottle dressed in traditional Kraków-region colorful costume, which includes a famous hat with a peacock feather. All of these characters resemble “human insects” from Kafka’s world, but they seem to be performing the dance macabre from Stanisław Wyspiański’s 1901 drama The Wedding.[xvi] They have survived another war, but have now found themselves caught in the giant spider web of post-war Polish reality, in a post-Apocalypse: They belong to the country after the thaw of 1956 that ended the era of Stalinism, but not the rule of the Communists. Their future remains unpredictable and, ultimately, extremely dangerous for those who disobey the authorities, including artists. Once they put their feet on the ground they will have to learn to live—and will keep on walking.
1 Quoted by Albrecht Schönherr, in I Knew Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reminiscences of his Friends, edited by Wolf-Dieter Zimmerman and Ronald Gregor Smith, translated from the German by Käthe Gregor Smith (New York; Harper & Row, 1966), 129.
2 Mariusz Rosiak,“Teatr wyzwolonych żywiołów;” quoted from http://www.arsenal.art.pl/wystawa/archiwum2272/, accessed on September 30, 2017.
3 Major studies devoted to her work and life include: Michael Brenson, Magdalena Abakanowicz: Recent Sculpture and Magdalena Abakanowicz: War Games, exh. cats. (1993); Barbara Rose, Magdalena Abakanowicz (1994); Joanna Inglot, The Figurative Sculpture of Magdalena Abakanowicz: Bodies, Environments, and Myths (2004); and Magdalena Abakanowicz, Fate and Art: Monologue (2008). Abakanowicz authored an autobiographical text, entitled “Portrait X 20” and dated on 1978-80, which was published in Magdalena Abakanowicz, exh. cat. (Chicago and New York: Museum of Contemporary Art and Abbeville, 1982). In addition to those studies, there are numerous monographs and exhibition catalogues published in Polish.
4 See, Miklós Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism,
transl. by Katalin and Stephen Landesmann with the help of Steve Wasserman (New York: Basic Books/ New Republic Books, 1987).
5 For information about Markowski’s life see the interview with him conducted by Krzysztof Stanisławski for Sztuka, vol 4, 1988.
6 Eugeniusz Markowski, published in the series “Documenti d’arte contemporanea” by the Grandi Edizioni Vega in Torino in 1947.
7 The art critic Monika Małkowska commented in the daily Rzeczpospolita on the occasion of two exhibitions following the artist’s death: “He died eight months ago, age 95. Almost no one noted it. We may say—bad lack again, which haunted his art; but not him personally. Eugeniusz Markowski had a life worth of a film script.” Monika Małkowska, “Zamieszany w sprawy świata”, Rzeczpospolita (October 23, 2007); quoted from http://www.rp.pl/artykul/64235-Zamieszany-w-sprawy-swiata.html#ap-1, accessed on September 30, 2017.
8 “Schizophrenic” was one of the most common words used to describe daily life in Poland under communism. Abakanowicz used it when talking to Suzanne Muchnic for the article “She’s Turned her Backs on the World,” The Los Angeles Times (March 25, 2001), conducted on the occasion of her exhibition at Grant Selwyn Fine Arts; quoted from http://articles.latimes.com/2001/mar/25/entertainment/ca-42311, accessed on October 1, 2017. Her series “Heads,” 1973-75, was originally called “Schizoid Heads.”
9 “We Are All Children of Don Quixote” was the title of one of Markowski’s drawings produce in Italy.
10 Barbara Rose, Magdalena Abakanowicz (New York; Harry N. Abrams Inc., Publishers, 1994), 20.
11 Tadeusz Kantor, “Z notatnika,” in Wiesław Borowski, Tadeusz Kantor (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Artystyczne i Filmowe, 1982), 161.
12 Muchnic, “She’s Turned her Backs on the World.”
13 Ibid.
14 Małkowska, “Zamieszany w sprawy świata.”
15 Quoted from unsigned biographical profile posted on http://www.galeriagiza.pl/wystawa_markowski/markowski_biografia.html, accessed on September 30, 2017.
16 The Wedding (Wesele, in Polish; 1901) is a drama based on a real-life event, which focuses on the wedding ceremony of a poet from Kraków with a peasant bride. The play has been interpreted as a symbolic and satirical portrayal of the national characteristics of the Polish society at the very beginning of the twentieth century, when the country was still under the foreign occupation.
IN MEMORIAM: DORE ASHTON, 1928–2017
“I am a proud philistine,” Dore wrote on a small piece of paper she gave me at her home in New York. It was one of those evenings we used to spend together discussing literature, poetry, and art. Of course, she was provocative—there are very few art critics I know, or read, who have had such a rich and idiosyncratic knowledge of world cultures and arts. In fact, I should have just written “culture,” for Dore perceived all cultures as equally important—those associated with “art centers” and those with “art peripheries.” She constructed a different, non–geo-cultural, hierarchy for herself, one based on what she considered universal excellence in art, not as a newly invented, or reinvented, set of formal rules or style, but as something belonging to the long tradition of art making. She simply stood for a commitment to everyday hard work, erudition, and remaining true to her own sensibility. “Tinkering” (as a form of “bricolage”) was her methodology. Of course, as a deep thinker, she was never totally certain of the results of her arguments, of how successful or convincing they were, but she used to repeat a famous phrase in French: “Quand je me regarde je me désole, quand je me compare je me console.” (“When I look at myself I feel sorry, when I compare myself I console myself).”
She was a passionate critic, meaning she stood firm behind her opinions, even—or particularly—when they appeared to be unpopular, which often put her in conflict with many fellow art critics. I often heard people saying she was out of touch with her time, belonged to a different era. But it wasn’t that simple: hard work, erudition, and sensibility do not obey time. One might say, she fit and, at the same time, didn’t fit into the New York art scene. For some people it was a paradox, considering that she was one of the main voices for artists associated with the so-called New York School, from which modern American art and art criticism developed as unique phenomena. I, who wanted to fit so badly as a young art critic and art historian, wondered why she was so confrontational, especially when voicing an opinion about the kind of academic art writing of which she was not an admirer at all. The reason might have been very clear: the writers who inspired her writing about art were Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, Philip Guston, Gaston Bachelard, and Octavio Paz.
Her home, which she shared for many years with her late second husband, Matti Megged, was an extraordinary meeting place in New York. Mark Rothko, Guston, Robert Motherwell, Antoni Tàpies, Pierre Soulages, Hedda Sterne, Antonio Saura … Lee Bontecou, Rosemarie Trockel, Miquel Barceló frequently came to visit—often staying for dinner. Among other regular visitors were important writers, poets, and philosophers, as well as her students from the Cooper Union, where she taught for many years. I particularly remember an “official evening” organized in Dore’s home in the mid-1990s for a Sandinista dignitary from Nicaragua, at which, to my delight, I saw Allen Ginsberg, who was my idol when I was a teenager growing up in Poland. Then there were the more private evenings reserved for conversations among family and friends about literature and poetry, from Dante to Heinrich von Kleist, from Miguel de Cervantes to Bruno Schulz. Speaking about Schulz, I remember once telling Dore that I was shocked to learn how many people in New York claimed ancestors who’d come from Drohobycz! She was not surprised, since so many influential intellectuals had come to New York from that part of the world, which the town in Ukraine symbolizes.
Dore has left many loyal admirers worldwide, in such places as Japan, Spain, Chile, and Hungary, as well as in here in the United States. I witnessed the breadth and depth of that admiration many times, including during a visit we’d made together to Budapest, Hungary, in 1998. There, after our public conversation about art held at the Ludwig Museum of Contemporary Art, a man approached her with a visibly used copy of one of her books and showed it to her with great pride. She has also left many friends in Santiago de Chile, particularly among the staff and visitors at the Museo de la Solidaridad Salvador Allende, where her name is prominently listed on a wall panel among the people who were instrumental in putting together the incredible collection of modern art, all works gifts of artists, gathered there.
From early on, Dore was a restless traveler, so I wasn’t surprised to learn that her last major trip had been to Cuba a few years ago. Clearly, that represented her “pilgrimage” to a country she considered a “spiritual place,” of course, not in a religious sense of the word, but in terms of providing a utopian model for her life and work as a leftist intellectual with Big Dreams. By the time she made that trip, we had “traveled” our separate ways, seeing each other infrequently. And yet, our paths crossed in a different way when AICA (the International Association of Art Critics), held its Congress in Cuba last fall. Although Dore didn’t attend it, she wasconstantly in my mind there.
New York, February 1, 2017
Marek Bartelik currently serves as XVth President of AICA International.
September 20, 2015
Pac Conference in Oaxaca, Mexico
January 29
La Segunda on line:
Marek Bartelik: “El arte contemporaneo se hizo mas burocrata”
El diadnostico del presidente de la Asociacion International de Critics de Arte.
| Una ventana al mundo del arte ofrece Marek Bartelik, presidente de la Asociación Internacional de Críticos de Arte. |
Polaco-estadounidense, Bartelik tiene una amplia formación en arte (ver recuadro) y estuvo en nuestro país a propósito de la exposición del artista venezolano Oswaldo Vigas (1943-2013), en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes.
“Merece atención internacional, es una de las grandes figuras en arte contemporáneo… Cuando la gente iba a Europa, él no era sólo venezolano. Para muchos europeos representaba todo el continente, esa idea de lo que era Latinoamérica, como Matta o Wifredo Lam”, comenta.
Bartelik plantea una visión analítica del arte contemporáneo, que a su juicio “se hizo muy conceptual”.
Todo parte de una herencia que se ha sobreexplotado. “No soy un gran admirador de Duchamp, reconozco su contribución al arte moderno y contemporáneo. No lo cuestiono, pero dio forma a una idea de arte que no considero revolucionaria. Su contribución se dio en un tiempo particular. Pero cómo lidiamos con el legado de Duchamp, creo que abusamos”.
En todo caso, para él, ¿qué es arte revolucionario?
“Creo que estamos esperando una nueva revolución en el arte, y que no estamos en una etapa revolucionaria. Históricamente tuvimos Renacimiento, Manierismo y Barroco… Estamos en una hibridización posmoderna… Creo que el nuevo Barroco va a llegar”.
Por otro lado, considera que “el arte contemporáneo se hizo más burócrata”.
“El curador, que es el hombre del medio, la persona que facilita las cosas entre la audiencia y el artista, está teniendo cada vez más poder… Cuando vas a una apertura,estás entre muchos artistas y dices «soy un crítico» la mayoría se va. Si dices que eres curador o coleccionista, se van a quedar contigo”, asegura.
“Los críticos de arte son menos poderosos que antes. Ahora son más los curadores y hasta coleccionistas quienes dicen lo que está de moda. Es una buena situación porque nos coloca en igualdad frente al artista… Los críticos podían hacer o destruir a alguien famoso. Creo que ya no tenemos ese poder. Eso está bien, para mí. No necesito crear artistas, los artistas se crean a sí mismos”.
El “arte con mensaje” de Jaar
Por otro lado, cree que “una gran parte del arte se hizo muy conciente a nivel social” y esto, a su juicio, genera arte caricaturesco. “Caricaturas de la realidad que no considero muy atractivas”, acota.
Un buen equilibrio en este sentido lo logra, a su juicio, Alfredo Jaar. “Tiene un lado muy humanista, no es la política por política. Creo que tiene todos los componentes del arte con un mensaje. Es hermoso y tiene un mensaje que no es didáctico, como «esto es sobre la miseria». Tiene un elemento poético que me gusta y es accesible porque tiene una presencia visual fuerte”, detalla.
A la vez, critica la falta de originalidad de muchos artistas y destaca que el concepto de copia es diferente en cada país, citando de ejemplo los chinos, que “no tienen vergüenza” de copiar.
“No estoy interesado en ideas perezosas. De los artistas espero inteligencia, no sólo poner cosas ahí y decir «ése es mi mundo». Todos tenemos un mundo, quiero que tu mundo sea especial de alguna forma y desafíe el mío”.
“El «no me gusta» es tonto”
Con interés monitorea los cambios en el quehacer de los críticos de arte, cuyo espacio en los medios, dice, está disminuyendo.
“Había críticos de arte funcionando entre historiadores del arte, escribiendo para publicaciones académicas, y había periodistas escribiendo críticas muy populares y perfiles de los artistas. Los críticos no eran historiadores del arte, pero tampoco periodistas. Tenían una función especial en la que tenías que estar informado, saber escribir y ser espontáneo. Ese espacio se ha encogido”.
“Uno de los problemas es que la crítica estaba alejándose lentamente del lector promedio, que no necesariamente está informado sobre qué es arte contemporáneo, pero está interesado… Tenemos que ver cómo podemos comunicarnos de manera que una persona promedio, que no sabe de arte, pueda entender”.
Insiste en que “mientras exista arte, la crítica será parte de la conversación”. Sin embargo, hay varios desafíos por delante.
“Les digo a mis estudiantes que es muy fácil rechazar cosas. Pero que no rechaces a priori: El «no me gusta» es tonto e infantil. Tienes todo el derecho de rechazar lo que quieras, pero debes estar involucrado en eso. Requiere conocimiento”.
Críticos del mundo
Bartelik estudió arte en la Escuela de Bellas Artes de París, tiene una Maestría en Ciencias en Ingeniería Civil de la Universidad de Columbia y un doctorado en Historia del Arte de la Universidad de Nueva York.
La asociación que dirige reúne a 4.500 críticos en 63 secciones nacionales en todo el mundo.
January 2015,
“arteallimite.com,” Chile, January 2015
Marek Bartelik: “La crítica de arte no es una profesión como tal, es más como un llamado”15/01/2015
Marek Bartelik, presidente de la AICA“La crítica de arte no es una profesión como tal, es más como un llamado”Será parte fundamental del conversatorio inaugural sobre Oswaldo Vigas en el MNBA. Marek Bartelik no cuenta las razones de su venida a Chile y profundiza sobre la labor del crítico, el espacio que ocupa hoy en el mundo de las artes, y el estatus que ha adquirido con los años.Durante la mañana de ayer, el presidente de la Asociación Internacional de Críticos de Arte (AICA), Marek Bartelik, sostuvo una interesante conversación con artistas chilenos en el Centro Cultural de Las Condes. Moderada por el crítico chileno, Ernesto Muñoz, la interacción tuvo como objetivo la pretenciosa intención de desplegarle a Bartelik el panorama del arte en Chile y, al mismo tiempo, brindarles a los artistas que asistieron una opinión contundente sobre sus obras.Entre los asistentes se encontraban Eugenia Vargas, Amelia Errázuriz, Pilar Mackenna, Carlos Navarrete, Hernán Gana y Alicia Larraín. Todos expusieron sus imágenes en una pantalla de fondo y desarrollaron sus temáticas frente a Bartelik. Finalmente, se refirió al arte en Chile en general, arguyendo que sabe “muy poco acerca de la escena artística de Chile, incluyendo la crítica de arte. Es por ello que estoy muy contento de venir a su país por primera vez en la vida”.
La razón de su visita es algo más relevante. Hoy se inaugura en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes la exposición Oswaldo Vigas. Antológica (1943-2013), con un conversatorio del cual Bartelik es invitado estelar. “Me he interesado mucho en el trabajo de Viga y he estado escribiendo acerca de él, especialmente de sus años en Europa como ‘artista Latinoamericano’ previos a su retorno a su país de origen, Venezuela, a mitad de la década de 1960”, explica.
“Es curioso como muchos artistas Latinoamericanos –agrega– han tenido que abandonar sus países nativos e irse a Europa o Estados Unidos para obtener reconocimiento. Venir a ver esta exposición debiese darme la oportunidad de ver muestras de artistas chilenos contemporáneos así como también, descubrir la escena artística local y conocer críticos de arte y artistas locales. Mi visita durará sólo cinco días, así que me estoy preparando para tener una agenda muy ocupada desde ya”.
Pese a que la crítica lleva décadas siendo criticada y que desde hace mucho se dice que la Academia va a desaparecer, ésta aún persisten y con mucha fuerza. ¿A qué se debe?
Durante mucho tiempo se ha sugerido que la crítica de arte podría desaparecer algún día. Creo que el que se acabe la necesidad de tener un “intermediario” que hable acerca del arte, dando paso a una comunicación directa entre artistas y espectadores, siendo estos últimos quienes lo juzguen por sí mismos, era un deseo para muchas personas. Desafortunadamente, el arte contemporáneo, por un lado, se ha alejado crecientemente de la experiencia cotidiana (incluida la experiencia estética) de la vasta mayoría de la gente, mientras que, por otro lado, se convirtió en una forma de entretenimiento cada vez más barata. De hecho, no es paradójico que el inestable escenario político, económico y cultural de la actualidad sea lo que mantiene vivo el acalorado debate respecto a la futura dirección del mundo y del arte. Esta situación ha expuesto la brecha entre lo que se piensa que es, parece ser, o debiese ser el arte en el mundo artístico y el resto del mundo; a pesar de que ambos mundos pueden estar de acuerdo en que el arte cada vez se parece más una forma de entretenimiento.
En mi opinión, hoy se necesita a los críticos de arte tanto como siempre, es sólo que estos deben redefinir su relación con el arte contemporáneo, lo que incluye una reevaluación, alejada de la crítica institucionalizada, de sus propios conjuntos de juicios evaluativos. Pero también hay un aspecto más práctico de esa supuesta desaparición. Las posibilidades que se abren para las críticas de arte disminuyen rápidamente debido a la reducción del espacio que se dispone para la publicación de estos textos en periódicos y revistas. Si este fenómeno persiste, y al parecer así sucederá, la crítica de arte podría tornarse al campo académico y a la teoría, lo que no era su objetivo original. También ocuparía cada vez más la forma más inmediata de blogueo, lo que pondría a la crítica en la dirección contraria, hacia la escritura conversacional y altamente casual.
¿Cuál crees que debe ser la función, en sociedad, de un crítico? ¿Cuál es su importancia?
Obviamente, desde mi perspectiva de crítico de arte activo, las críticas juegan un rol muy importante en la sociedad, no tan sólo como el “intermediario” entre el artista y el público, sino también, y quizás más importante que todo, como escritores que dan inicio a inteligentes y apasionadas conversaciones acerca de arte. La figura de crítico de arte se debería ver como representante de la sociedad en que él o ella vive, alguien que está genuinamente interesado en el arte contemporáneo y que siente la necesidad de hablar de ello.
¿Comparten los críticos de arte características en común, o cualquiera con la preparación necesaria puede ser crítico?
La crítica de arte no es una profesión como tal, es más como un llamado. Es por esto que tantos grandes críticos fueron poetas: Charles Baudelaire, Rainer Maria Rilke, Octavio Paz. Con suerte, la llamada llega cuando se tiene el conocimiento suficiente para comentar acerca del arte y la vida, y cuando se han desarrollado las pertinentes habilidades de escritura. Si uno se convierte en crítico demasiado pronto, se arriesga a transformarse en periodista, reportero, quienes utilizan distintas destrezas de escritura. De hecho, mucho de lo que hoy llamamos crítica de arte es tan solo periodismo, que es también necesario, pero que no debiese reemplazar la crítica de arte tradicional. Un crítico de arte debe, por sobre todo, tener buen ojo para el arte, algo que no es tan importante para otros escritores.
Esto es muy importante ya que la escena internacional del arte se asemeja a un escenario gigante, densamente “poblado” por artistas que están constantemente en movimiento, pero que, desafortunadamente, tienen una posibilidad cada vez menor de participar en la comunicación global. De hecho, al participar en el existente sistema de diseminación del arte pueden fracasar en desafiar lo que pueda dañar sus intereses en el futuro. Lo que importa es que unos pocos artistas “elegidos” se aparezcan para una bienal o una feria de arte, en lugar de lo que muestran como arte. Depende de un museo, galería, o un stand en una feria de arte justificar su importancia; el o la artista y su trabajo son relacionales. El crítico de arte debe seguir exponiendo este fenómeno, lo que daña a muchos artistas.¿Qué países están generando las mejores camadas de críticos de arte? ¿Han sido capaces de potenciar esa relación entre crítica e impulso a los artistas emergentes y al arte de un país?He tenido la suficiente suerte para viajar alrededor del mundo para ver arte. El mundo está lleno de artistas fantásticos. En la mayoría de los países que he visitado he escuchado el mismo comentario: “Tenemos muchos artistas talentosos pero el mundo no sabe de ellos”. Yo concuerdo con esos comentarios, por todas partes del mundo se está produciendo buen arte. Pero no creo que haya una nación que produzca más talento que otra hoy en día. El buen arte no tiene nacionalidad, a pesar de que hay algunos formadores de opinión que nos quieren hacer creer lo contrario. Recuerdo que, a finales de 1980, tuvimos un momento de descubrimiento del arte contemporáneo ruso en Occidente que le publicitó un interés que duró unos pocos años. Hablamos acerca del “Fenómeno Saatchi”, de la magnífica fotografía que llegaba de Sudáfrica…los brasileños han estado dejando su marca en la escena internacional hace ya un tiempo; entonces vinieron los polacos, coreanos, chinos. Pero, honestamente, esas opiniones no tienen ninguna validez ya que tienen como objetivo mantener a la gente “entusiasmada”, entretenida, interesada en lo más nuevo, lo actual y en el simulacro, crearles un interés en el mercado local. Pero hacer arte no es una actividad precisamente lucrativa, excitante o glamurosa; sino más bien, una que requiere trabajo duro y un compromiso a largo plazo (sin garantía alguna), y es aún, acerca de la individualidad, comunicación individual y el tener algo significativo para decir.
December 30, 2014
Obieg
Nowy paradygmat wyłaniający się na azjatyckich biennale?
Marek Bartelik29.12.2014. aktualizacja 29.12.2014 10:07
Mediacity Biennial (Seul), Busan Biennale (Busan), Gwangju Biennale (Gwangju) i Taipei Biennial (Tajpej), 2014.
„Czymże jest świat? Układem podatnym na nagłe zmiany, wskazujące na stałą dążność do niszczenia, zmiennym następstwem bytów, które przenikają się, wypierają się i znikają, przejściową symetrią, chwilowym porządkiem”.
Denis Diderot
„Uczucia, które skłaniają ludzi do pokoju, to strach przed śmiercią, pragnienie takich rzeczy, jakie są niezbędne do wygodnego życia, oraz nadzieja, że swą pilnością i pracą człowiek będzie mógł je zdobyć”.
Thomas Hobbes
Słowo „paradygmat”, które organizatorzy zadali mi jako temat mojej prezentacji w Muzeum Sztuki Współczesnej w Tajpej1, ma źródłosłów w odległej przeszłości,2 ale jego współczesne rozumienie często odnosi się do dobrze znanej definicji Thomasa S. Kuhna, sformułowanej przez niego w „Strukturze rewolucji naukowych” z 1962 roku. W książce tej Kuhn wymienia rewolucję i naukę jako dwa narzędzia postępu społecznego, opisując ten proces w następujący sposób: „kolejne rewolucyjne przejścia od jednego do drugiego paradygmatu wyznaczają normalny schemat rozwoju dojrzałej nauki”.3 Aby osiągnąć stan dojrzałości, nauka musi przejść trzy kolejne stadia: przednaukowe (prescience“, normalne (normal science; związaną z przeszłymi osiągnięciami) i rewolucję. Ostatnie osiągnąć może dopiero wtedy, gdy drugie wejdzie w stan kryzysu, następującego po okresie „kwestionowania paradygmatu”.4
Ów stan kryzysu wielokrotnie przywoływany jest w odniesieniu do współczesnej sztuki i kultury, szczególnie w kontekście ich znaczenia dla społeczeństwa. Problem kryzysu sztuki często analizowano w odniesieniu do upadku awangardy pod koniec lat siedemdziesiątych, w kontekście końca historii sztuki, a także końca samej sztuki.5 Obecnie coraz częściej w dyskusjach nad sztuką współczesną poruszany jest także problem nasilającej się instytucjonalizacji sztuki, w tym „instytucji krytyki”6, wynikającej między innymi ze zwiększającej się na całym świecie liczby biennale (i targów sztuki7). Dla wielu krytyków instytucji biennale najbardziej problematyczne wydaje się nie tyle samo ich istnienie, ile to, że zazwyczaj prezentowany jest na nich ten sam typ sztuki (często autorstwa tych samych artystów), oraz to, że z reguły ich kuratorowanie powierzane jest osobom z wąskiego kręgu kuratorów, którzy zawodowo powiązani są z czołowymi instytucjami sztuki na Zachodzie. Z drugiej strony zwolennicy zwiększającej się liczby biennale postrzegają ten wzrost jako oznakę demokratyzacji międzynarodowej sceny artystycznej i energetyzacji gospodarki, które według nich działają zdecydowanie na korzyść zarówno artystów, jak i publiczności, szczególnie w tych częściach świata, gdzie instytucje propagujące sztukę współczesną dopiero powstają. Są także tacy, którzy zajmują pozycję pomiędzy – i to ich najczęściej zaprasza się do kuratorowania biennale. Dla przykładu zapytany o to, czym jest typowe biennale, dyrektor artystyczny nadchodzącego Biennale w Wenecji, Okwui Enwezor, stwierdził ogólnikowo, że „stanowi strukturę wystawienniczą wykraczającą poza własne granice. Jest wydarzeniem, które pozwala na odwołanie się do bardzo zróżnicowanej tematyki. Według definicji organizatorów i kuratorów jego funkcja polega na tworzeniu kapitału intelektualnego, na rozważaniu relacji między przeszłością i teraźniejszością i eksperymentowaniu z różnymi wersjami prawdy”.8
SeMA Biennale MediaCity.“The Complete Map of the Celestial Sphere” (Hon-cheon-jeon-do),19th century, traditional paper,replica, 86.7×59 cm.Zidentyfikowano kilka kolejnych „fal biennalizacji” czy też okresów. Pierwszy z nich rozciąga się między pierwszym Biennale w Wenecji w 1895 roku (oraz Carnegie International w Pittsburgu w 1896 roku) a mniej więcej wczesnymi latami pięćdziesiątymi ubiegłego wieku; drugi trwa od lat pięćdziesiątych do osiemdziesiątych; trzeci natomiast zaczyna się od lat dziewięćdziesiątych.9Wraz z wielkim wzrostem liczby biennale na całym świecie wzrasta także intensywność poświęcanej im uwagi, rodząc pytania o ich rację bytu, a także zawartość; rośnie literatura, którą prowokacyjnie (a także na poły humorystycznie?) określono jako „biennalogię”.10 Nowa dziedzina badań obfituje w więcej pytań niż dostarcza odpowiedzi. Czym jest biennale? Albo czym biennale nie jest? Jaka powinna być funkcja biennale? W jaki sposób biennale wzbogacają współczesną scenę artystyczną w aspekcie międzynarodowym i przede wszystkim w aspekcie lokalnym? Czy gentryfikacja – słowo wymieniane często w odniesieniu do proliferacji biennale – powinna wzbudzać negatywne reakcje? Czy istnieją biennale bez granic? (pytanie retoryczne) i wreszcie, czy biennale sztuki azjatyckiej muszą odbywać się w Azji? To ostatnie pytanie wiąże się z tegorocznymi biennale w Azji, a dokładniej w Azji Wschodniej, stanowiącymi przedmiot refleksji tego artykułu.11
Inauguracja biennale w Azji Wschodniej zbiega się w czasie z dwoma ostatnimi okresami w historii ich rozwoju nakreślonej wyżej, to znaczy datuje się na wczesne lata pięćdziesiąte ubiegłego wieku. Od samego początku wydarzenie, które zainicjowało „biennalizację” sztuki współczesnej, czyli Biennale w Wenecji – „mapa w ramach mapy,” jak określił ją Artur Danto12 -odgrywało ważną rolę w określeniu sposobu, w jaki sztuka azjatycka była postrzegana i odbierana w środowisku międzynarodowym, co z kolei miało wpływ na to, jak przedstawiano ją na azjatyckich biennale. Ów pierwszy etap można zamknąć między Biennale w Tokio i Biennale Sztuki Współczesnej w Tajpej.13 Pierwsze Biennale w Tokio odbyło się w 1952 roku, tym samym, kiedy Japonia oficjalnie zadebiutowała na Biennale w Wenecji.14 Pojawienie się sztuki japońskiej na arenie międzynarodowej miało miejsce rok po tym, jak kraj ten podpisał Traktat z San Francisco, kończący oficjalnie okupację Japonii przez Stany Zjednoczone, choć oczywiście wojska amerykańskie nadal stacjonowały na wyspach. Biennale w Tajpej było owocem dwóch cyklicznych wystaw sztuki nowoczesnej i współczesnej organizowanych w latach 1984-1991, to jest Contemporary Art trends in the R.O.C oraz An Exhibition of Contemporary Chinese Sculpture in the Republic of China odbywające się w Muzeum Sztuk Pięknych w Tajpej (TFAM). W 1998 roku Biennale w Tajpej stało się wydarzeniem międzynarodowym. W latach 1995-2000 TFAM zorganizowało Pawilon Tajwański na Biennale w Wenecji jako pawilon narodowy, figurujący pod nazwą Republiki Chińskiej. W połowie lat dziewięćdziesiątych Chińska Republika Ludowa zaczęła wywierać silną presję na Tajwan z powodu jego uczestnictwa w Biennale jako „Republiki Chińskiej”; temu naciskowi zaczęła towarzyszyć seria biennale w Chinach.15, Tajwan pozbawiony został jego narodowego statusu przez organizatorów włoskiej imprezy w 2000 roku.
Busan Biennale. Gilles Barbier, “Man Still”, 2013, Mixed media (resin, oil paint, plastic plants, etc.), 157.5×141×114cm.To krótkie przypomnienie historii dwóch pionierskich azjatyckich biennale wskazuje na znaczące ich podobieństwo, to jest zależność od sił zewnętrznych, często interpretowanych jako sprzyjające globalizacji. W obu wypadkach ich istnienie (i ostateczny los) należy przeanalizować w odniesieniu do polityki zagranicznej (w tym do sposobu, w jaki sztuka współczesna stosowana jest jako narzędzie wpływu) krajów, które miały największy wpływ na suwerenność Japonii i Tajwanu – odpowiednio Stanów Zjednoczonych i Chin.16 Potwierdza to prawdę chyba oczywistą: za globalizacją stoją konkretne interesy polityczne, w które sztuka współczesna, szczególnie w momencie, kiedy wchodzi na scenę międzynarodową, jest mocno zaangażowana.
Drugie stadium rozwoju biennale w Azji łączy się z pojawieniem się kilku biennale w Korei Południowej w latach dziewięćdziesiątych ubiegłego wieku, w czasie, gdy kraj ten stawał się potęgą ekonomiczną. Krytyk John Clark opisał wystawy te jako funkcjonujące „na sposób transnarodowy, przekraczający dychotomię narodowy/międzynarodowy”.17 W tym miejscu należy ponownie podkreślić polityczne aspekty pojawienia się biennale, tym razem w Korei Południowej, które, powtórzmy, związane są zarówno z polityką wewnętrzną, jak i zewnętrzną.18 Te przemiany przyczyniły się do rozwoju gospodarczego Korei Południowej (a także popularności sztuki koreańskiej na Zachodzie), ale nie doprowadziły do zjednoczenia kraju z jego komunistycznym sąsiadem na północy. Choć kwestia ta wymaga dalszego zbadania, chciałbym w tym miejscu podkreślić fakt, że narodziny owych wielkich wydarzeń artystycznych zbiegły się w czasie z zakończeniem zimnej wojny, które, jak wskazują niedawne konflikty zbrojne, szczególnie ten na Ukrainie, okazało się złudne.
Gwangju Biennial. Edward Kienholz and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, “The Ozymandias Parade”, 1985, mixed media tableau, 386.1 x 886.5 x 457.2 cm (Detail); fot.: Marek Bartelik.Związek między nagłym wysypem biennale w Korei Południowej i problemami politycznymi tego kraju widoczny jest szczególnie w programie założycielskim Biennale Gwangju, zapoczątkowanego w 1995 roku, poprzez zaznaczenie w nim związku miejsca z ruchem wolnościowym z roku 1980, nazwanym Ruchem Demokratyzacji Gwangju (znanym także jako Powstanie Gwangju).19 Zwiększająca się świadomość polityczna burzliwej historii Korei w relacji do sztuki współczesnej stała się także istotnym czynnikiem w wypadku dwóch innych biennale koreańskich, które mnie tu interesują, to znaczy Busan Biennale i Międzynarodowego Biennale Sztuki Mediów w Seulu (inaczej zwanym SeMa Biennale Mediacity Seoul), choć ich związek z polityką jest mniej wyraźnie podkreślony w programie tych imprez niż w wypadku Gwangju Biennale. Jednak i tutaj wątek polityczny jest eksploatowany. Przykładem jest tegoroczne SeMa Biennale Mediacity Seoul. (Należy tu zaznaczyć, że było to jedyne w 2014 roku biennale w Południowej Korei, którego dyrektorem artystycznym był kurator lokalny, filmowiec i artysta Park Chan-Kyong.20) Wydarzenie zatytułowane było „Duchy, szpiedzy i babcie”, a jego tematem była Azja jako konkretne miejsce z własną kulturą i historią, ale także świadomością tego, czym jest dzisiejszy świat. Była to więc Azja zanurzona w tragicznej historii podziałów, której wpływ wyczuwalny jest na całym kontynencie.21
Uwaga ta wiedzie mnie do zagadnienia roli kuratorów biennale i dominującego modelu kuratorstwa, który wydaje mi się wskazywać na znaczące podobieństwa, bez względu na narodowość i kulturowe zaplecze poszczególnych dyrektorów artystycznych. Wybór prac pokazywanych na tegorocznych wschodnioazjatyckich biennale przypominał w najlepszym razie swoistą Foucaultowską „chińską encyklopedię” („epistemologię niekartezjańską”), a w najgorszym jakiś rodzaj nowego esperanto – co jest już obowiązującym schematem tego rodzaju imprez. To jednak całkowity brak czy też zdecydowanie ograniczony zakres krytyczności w stosunku do zależności od konceptualnej lingua franca jako nadrzędnej struktury teoretycznej czy też dominującegotekstu, wyznaczającego konceptualne ramy biennale, który praktykowany jest na Zachodzie, stanowi moim zdaniem największą słabość tegorocznych azjatyckich biennale.22 Można powiedzieć, że w adaptacji przez lokalnych kuratorów intelektualnego modelu eksportowanego z Zachodu zdradza inny, bardziej fundamentalny brak: historyczną nieobecność w Azji pierwszego stadium rozwoju biennale między końcem XIX stulecia a latami pięćdziesiątymi ubiegłego wieku, co w dużym stopniu odzwierciedla dynamikę kolonializmu i jego nagłe potraktowanie sztuki nowoczesnej i współczesnej jako narzędzia politycznego, ekonomicznego, kulturowego i artystycznego wpływu. Jednocześnie powolny zanik wpływów Zachodu w Azji czy, mówiąc precyzyjniej, coraz bardziej wyraźna obecność nowoczesnej i współczesnej sztuki i kultury o narodowych i regionalnych ambicjach nie prowadzi do innowacji, a w konsekwencji tego do wytworzenia nowego paradygmatu. Polityzacja sztuki w kontekście biennale azjatyckich zdradza nieobecność fundamentów, które decydowały o tym, czym właściwie są biennale: projektami par excellence oświeceniowymi, niepozbawionymi własnych cech szczególnych i wewnętrznych sprzeczności.23
Taipei Biennial. Po-Chih Huang, “Production Line—Made in China & Made in Taiwan. Denim Long Sleeve Blouse”, 2014, Courtesy of the artist, the Taipei BiennialKwestię tę podkreślała między innymi Caroline A. Jones, pisząc: „Lecz jeśli są one [biennale] naznaczone swym własnym episteme [biennale jest projektem oświeceniowym, który umacnia swoisty nacjonalizm poprzez sam fakt przekraczania go], inne tego typu wydarzenia na całym świecie nie są już zdominowane europejsko-amerykańską wizją Oświecenia. W rzeczywistości przywoływanie Oświecenia może się wydać perwersyjne, jeśli weźmiemy pod uwagę niedawny wysyp tej formy wystawienniczej w systemach monopartyjnych (Chiny) czy autokratycznych (Zjednoczone Emiraty Arabskie)”.24
Tegoroczne biennale w Azji Wschodniej wydawał się przenikać duch Oświecenia jako wyraz uniwersalnego porządku i uniwersalnego, świeckiego humanizmu, jakby sugerując, że tylko on jest gwarantem postępu czy nowoczesności w sztuce. Było to widoczne w wypowiedziach koreańskich kuratorów w związku z Busan Biennale. „[B]iennale jest książką… Zatem nie ma być ono oglądane, ale czytane”, pisał Lee Ken Shu w tekście „Voyage to Biennale – 50 years of Contemporary Art in Overseas Biennales”.25 Te proste słowa podkreślają intelektualny aspekt biennale, traktowanie go jako koncept. Zależność prezentowanej sztuki od dominującej koncepcji widoczna była szczególnie w dwóch innych wydarzeniach, których dyrektorami artystycznymi byli dwaj Francuzi: Olivier Kaeppelin (dyrektor Fondation Maeght w Saint-Paul de Vence we Francji), odpowiedzialny za program Busan Biennial, oraz Nicolas Bourriaud (dyrektor École des Beaux-Arts w Paryżu), kurator Taipei Biennial. Pierwsze z dwóch wydarzeń odbyło się pod tytułem „Inhabiting the World” [Zamieszkiwanie świata]; drugie – „The Great Acceleration: Art in the Antropocene” [Wielkie przyspieszenie: sztuka w okresie antropocenu].26 Oba podkreślają wpływ technologii i nauki (pojmowanej jako swoisty rodzaj futurologii) na nasze życie, zaznaczając dominację – mówiąc ogólnie – „idei” nad „formą”. Wersja zaproponowana przez Bourriauda wydaje się bardziej spójna wizualnie, przynajmniej pod względem tego, co można opisać jako angażujące doświadczenie estetyczne, podczas gdy „wizja” Kaeppelina była znacznie bardziej konwencjonalna.27 Poza tym podejście Bourriauda wydaje się ujawniać ważny zwrot w kuratorowaniu: odchodzenie od „przewagi relacji nad przedmiotami” ku kładzeniu akcentu na „przedmiot”, a nawet jego walory estetyczne.28 Było to widoczne także na Gwangju Biennale, którego dyrektorem artystycznej była Jessica Morgan, kuratorka z Tate Modern, niedawno mianowana na dyrektorkę Dia: Beacon. Jej teksty towarzyszące biennale zawierają dość żargonowe i ogólnikowe stwierdzenia.29 Mimo wyraźnych różnic w doborze artystów i w sposobie kuratorowania we wszystkich trzech wypadkach podstawa teoretyczna zdefiniowała zawartość artystyczną, co należy uznać za poczynanie na wskroś logiczne.30
Taipei Biennial. Po-Chih Huang, “Production Line—Made in China & Made in Taiwan. Denim Long Sleeve Blouse”, 2014, fot.: Marek Bartelik.Czy opisywane wydarzenia artystyczne miały w sobie coś szczególnie „azjatyckiego”? Być może przywołany tu ponownie argument Jones stanowić będzie częściową odpowiedź na to pytanie, jako że odwołuje się ona do źródeł nacjonalizmu jako „sprawy wewnętrznej” posiadającej misję wzmacniania nacjonalizmu przy jednoczesnym zachowywaniu pozoru „przekraczania” go czy raczej doprowadzaniu do jego wewnętrznej akceptacji przy jednoczesnym dostosowywaniu go do wymogów współczesnego świata, w tym świata sztuki. Nacjonalizm praktykowany w związku z azjatyckimi biennale wymaga optyki do wewnątrz, jak i na zewnątrz. Skutkiem tego coraz większa liczba kuratorów (i artystów) zakorzenia swoją działalność w kontekstach lokalnych, ale nadal opierają się oni na intelektualnej tradycji zachodnich teoretyków, co powoduje, że rozpowszechniają europejsko-amerykańską wizję Oświecenia.31
Na koniec powrócę jeszcze do słowa „paradygmat”, będącego słowem-kluczem mojej prezentacji. Wyłaniający się paradygmat azjatyckich biennale pokazuje, że jest on ciągle na etapie testowania. Aby posunąć się w rozwoju, może przyjmowany model wymaga najpierw zerwania, a przynajmniej zakwestionowania zasad Oświecenia, które nadal definiują filozofię kuratorstwa, wystawiennictwa i uczestnictwa w biennale na całym świecie.32 Warto chyba zastanowić się nad tym głębiej, a przy okazji poszukać głębiej źrodeł interpretacji sztuki, które wypływają z miejsca i tradycji gdzie ona powstaje – i jest wystawiana – Azji. Zadanie to może także wymagać nowego podejścia do „biennalogii”. W innym razie nasza debata na ten temat wystawia się na ryzyko pozostawania na etapie podtrzymywania i kontynuowania „normalnej nauki” jeszcze przez długi czas.
Gwangjou Biennale. Huma Mulji, “Lost and Found,” 2012, fiberglass, buffalo hide and yarn; Photo Marek Bartelik
Gwangju Biennale. Lee Bul, “Wearable Sculpture”, 2014
Gwangju Biennial; David Wojnarowicz, „Crash, The Birth of Language, The Invention of Lies”, 1986. Courtesy Gwangju Biennale Foundation
Taipei Bienniale. Surasi Kusolwong, „Golden Ghost (Reality Called, So I Woke Up)”. 2014 Photo Marek Bartelik
Taipei Biennial. OPAVIVARA!, „Formasa Decelerator”, 2014, transmedia, 220 x 1000 x 1000 cm. © Foto: Courtesy Taipeh Biennale 2014
Taipei Bienniale; Tara Madani, “The Swing”, 2014, Oil on linen, 96. 5 x 64.8 cm; Collection of Burger Collection Hong Kong
SeMA Biennale MediaCity.Truong Cong Tung, ‘Magical Garden’, 2012-2014, found photograph taken by the patients at “Magical Garden”, , Long An province, Vietnam. Image courtesy the artist and SeMA Biennale 2014.
SeMA Biennale MediaCity. Pilar Mata Dupont, “The Embrace”, 2013, HD video with sound, 5 min. 4 sec.. Photo curtesy of the artist
SeMA Biennale MediaCity.Haegue Yang, „Sonic Sculptures”, 2014, performative sculptures, metal structure, bells, metal rings, dimensions variable
- 1.An Emerging Paradigm Derived from the Asian Biennials”, referat wygłoszony w TFAM 18 października 2014 roku; we wcześniejszej wersji tekst ten został opublikowany w „Journal of Taipei Fine Arts Museum”, Vol. 28 (listopad 2014), s. 7-19.
- 2.Późnołacińskie słowo paradigma, z greckiego paradeigma,wywodzi się z paradeiknynai, czyli pokazywać obok siebie, odpara (obok, poza) + deiknynai (pokazywać).
- 3.Thomas S. Kuhn, „Struktura rewolucji naukowych”, przeł. Helena Ostrołęcka (Alatheia, Warszawa 2010), cyt. za wersją internetowąhttp://sady.up.krakow.pl
- 4.Kuhn postrzegał kryzys jako „»zasadnicze napięcie« towarzyszące rewolucjom naukowym”; tamże. Aby rozwinąć tę koncepcję, Kuhn czerpał z ukutego przez Gastona Bachelarda pojęcia coupure czy też rupture épistémologique, jak interpretował je Alexandre Koyré.
- 5.Wśród kanonicznych ujęć tego zagadnienia wymienić należy tekst Hansa Beltinga „Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte?” (1983), po raz pierwszy wygłoszony na konferencji na uniwersytecie w Monachium w 1980 roku; książka ukazała się w angielskim tłumaczeniu pod tytułem „The End of the History of Art?” w 1987. Zob. także, Arthur Danto, „The End of Art,” [w]: „The Death of Art” (New York: Haven Publications, 1984), s. 5-35.
- 6.Zob. Andrea Fraser, „From the Critique of Institutions to an Institution of Critique”, „Artforum” Vol. 44, No. 1 (sierpień 2005), s. 278-283.
- 7.To zagadnienie zostało poruszone przy okazji ostatniego Miami Basel. Zobacz na przykład http://news.artnet.com
- 8.Cyt. za: Carolee Thea, „On Curating: Interviews with Ten International Curators” (New York: D.A.P, 2009) s. 10. Fakt, że Enwezor użył sformułowania „kapitał intelektualny” zamiast, na przykład, „twórczość artystyczna”, mówi sam za siebie: wydarzenia w typie biennale dotyczą przede wszystkim koncepcji, a prace muszą je reprezentować, aby pasować do całości. Ambiwalentna natura wypowiedzi kuratorów, którzy są zarówno krytykami, jak i twórcami biennale, widoczna jest już w tekście Enwezora „Mega-Exhibitions and the Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form,” cytowanym często jako kluczowy tekst na ten temat. „MJ – Manifesta Journal”, No. 2 (Winter 2003/Spring 2004), s. 6-31.
- 9.Zob. na przykład periodyzację autorstwa Anthony’ego Gardnera: „trzy (a może nawet cztery) fale biennalizacji pojawiły się od czasów pierwszego Biennale w Wenecji w 1895 roku. […] pierwsza fala z końca XIX wieku, druga od lat pięćdziesiątych do połowy osiemdziesiątych oraz trzecia, której początek nastąpił na początku lat dziewięćdziesiątych, a jeśli istnieje czwarta, pojawiła się ona w ostatnich latach, kiedy to biennale zaczęły się pozornie chylić ku upadkowi i stały się dyskursywne, snując wraz z wiekiem refleksję na temat własnej kondycji”.http://culturalpolicyreform.wordpress.com/
- 10.Nazwę sformułowali redaktorzy „The Biennial Reader”, red. Elena Filipovic, Marieke van Hal i Solveig Øvstebø – wydanego przez Bergen Kunsthall w 2010 roku.
- 11.Moja wizyta na omawianych tutaj biennale zbiegła się w czasie z XLVII Międzynarodowym Kongresem AICA w Korei Południowej (Seul i Suwon) oraz post-Kongresem w Busan, Gwangju i Tajpej w połowie października tego roku.
- 12.Arthur Danto, „Mapping the Art World,” [w:] „Africus: Johannesburg Biennale”, (20 lutego-30 kwietnia 1995), kat. wyst., s. 24-27.
- 13.Należy zaznaczyć, że pierwszym „azjatyckim biennale” w latach osiemdziesiątych było Biennale Sztuki Azjatyckiej w Bangladeszu, organizowane przez Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, debiutujące w 1981 roku. Rozważając pionierską rolę różnorakich biennale, należy pamiętać, że europejskie biennale organizowane w różnych lokalizacjach, takie jak Manifesta, miały swojego poprzednika w Biennale Sztuki Arabskiej, którego pierwsza edycja odbyła się w Bagdadzie w 1974 roku, a następne w Maroku i Jordanii. W latach dziewięćdziesiątych, wcześniej niż biennale w Korei, pierwsze Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art (APT1) odbyło się w Brisbane w Australii w 1993 roku.
- 14.Biennale w Tokio przestało istnieć w 1990 roku, po osiemnastu edycjach, co zbiegło się w czasie z kryzysem japońskiej gospodarki. Fukuoka Asia Art Triennale zapoczątkowano w 1999 roku, zaś Yokohama Triennial w 2002 roku. Inne mniejsze biennale i triennale to: Kobe Biennale (zainicjowane w 2007), Kitakyushu Biennial (podróżujące; 2007), Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (2000), Setouchi Triennale (2010), Aichi Triennale (2010), Trans Art Tokyo (2012). Na temat historii uczestnictwa Japonii w weneckim biennale zob. „The Venice Biennale: 40 Years of Japanese Participation”, red. Harumi Miwa, przeł. Stanley N. Anderson (Tokyo: Kokusai Kōryū Kikin, 1995). Warto wspomnieć w tym miejscu, że Niemcy, drugi z krajów pokonanych w drugiej wojnie światowej, ustanowiły swoje własne artystyczne wydarzenie, Documenta, w 1955 roku, natychmiast nawiązując silną współpracę ze Stanami Zjednoczonymi i krajami Europy Zachodniej poprzez wybór artystów z tych regionów.
- 15.Biennale w Szanghaju ustanowiono w 1996 roku, natomiast Międzynarodowe Biennale Sztuki w Pekinie w 2003 roku.
- 16.John Clark zgłasza przeciwną opinię, twierdząc, że „przedwczesne byłoby przypisywanie wszelkich zjawisk »międzynarodowych« biennale i ich relacji wobec »lokalnego« świata sztuki »globalizacji« czy łączenie tych zjawisk ze zmianami w relacjach międzypaństwowych, czy też natury samej jednostki państwowej celem zrozumienia stosunków międzynarodowych. Zbyt wiele jest zjawisk związanych ze sztuką bądź instytucjami sztuki na biennale, aby takie wychodzące od teorii podejście było uzasadnione”. John Clark, „Biennials as Structures for the Writing of Art History: The Asian Perspective,” w: „The Biennial Reader”, s. 174. Niemniej jednak moje dość ograniczone doświadczenia co do ostatnich edycji biennale na całym świecie, w tym w Azji, ukazują rosnącą świadomość wśród rządów poszczególnych krajów i społeczności biznesowej, którą reprezentują, znaczenia sztuki współczesnej i wydarzeń artystycznych takich jak biennale dla wizerunku danego państwa. Stanowisko to wydają się potwierdzać niedawne kontrowersje wybuchłe przed rokiem 2014, kiedy to odbyło się kilka biennale w Korei Południowej, skutkujących kilkoma rezygnacjami z głównych stanowisk. Na temat dyskusji wokół niedawnych biennale w Azji zob. także: Marian Pastor Roces, „Cristal Palace Exhibitions (2005)”, [w:] „The Biennial Reader”, s. 50-65; oraz Richard Vine, „Asian Futures”„Art in America”, Vol. 86, No. 7 (lipiec 1998), s. 34-41.
- 17.Clark, „Biennials as Structures for the Writing of Art History: The Asian Perspective,” s. 165. Korea Południowa uczestniczy w Biennale w Wenecji od 1995 roku.
- 18.Historia biennale w Korei Południowej i uczestnictwa Korei w międzynarodowych wydarzeniach artystycznych coraz częściej łączona jest z kluczowymi wydarzeniami politycznymi w tym kraju, które sięgają późnych lat pięćdziesiątych. W publikacji „Voyage to Biennale – 50 years of Korean Contemporary Art in Overseas Biennales”, która towarzyszyła wystawom pod tym samym tytułem, kuratorowanym przez Gunsoo Lee, Lee Ken Shu odnajduje początki uczestnictwa Korei w międzynarodowych biennale w Międzynarodowym Biennale Współczesnej Litografii Kolorowej w Cincinnati Art Museum w Cincinnati w Ohio w 1958 roku, a także IIe Biennale de Paris at the musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris w 1961 roku. Aby umieścić przemiany artystyczne w szerszym kontekście, Lee Ken Shu omawia znane powstanie pod przewodnictwem grup robotników i studentów w 1960 roku, znane jako Rewolucja 19 kwietnia; wojskowy zamach stanu z 16 maja 1961 roku oraz wydarzenia październikowe, które doprowadziły do przywrócenia władzy dyktatorskiej w 1972 roku. Lee Ken Shu, „Meta-Biennale, Restructure of Biennale,” [w]: „Voyage to Biennale-50 years of Korean Contemporary Art in Overseas Biennales”, kat. wyst. (Busan: Busan Biennale Organizing Committee, 2014), s. 8.
- 19.Narodziny Ruchu Demokratycznego Gwangju związane są z demonstracjami studenckimi przeciwko rządom wojskowym, które miały miejsce 18 maja1980 roku, co doprowadziło do krwawej konfrontacji z policją i śmierci 200 osób; było też wielu rannych.
- 20.W 1995 Park Chan-Kyong ukończył Program MFA w California Institute of the Arts w Valencia, Kalifornia. Ma on związki ze środowiskiem artystycznym poza Azją, szczególnie w Niemczech.
- 21.Jak wyjaśnia katalog wystawy: „Kontynent azjatycki dzieli doświadczenie intensywnej kolonizacji, zimnej wojny, szybkiego wzrostu gospodarczego i przemian społecznych na przestrzeni krótkiego okresu, rzadko jednak odbywały się wystawy, które wątek ten traktowałyby jako temat główny. Zatem za pośrednictwem kluczowych słów, takich jak »Duchy, szpiedzy i babcie«, wystawa ta zaproponuje spojrzenie wstecz na źródła współczesnej Azji”. „Duchy” ucieleśniają „zapomnianą historię i tradycje Azji,” „szpiedzy” – „wspomnienia związane z zimną wojną,” natomiast „babcie” – obecność kobiet w społeczeństwie i ich wpływ na przemijanie czasu. http://mediacityseoul.krParadoksalnie to najbardziej azjatyckie z azjatyckich biennale w sensie podjętej tematyki okazało się najbardziej związane z „kapitałem intelektualnym” przede wszystkim ze względu na dużą selekcję prac wideo, wielu z nich mocno dydaktycznych, co skłoniło jednego z krytyków, by zwrócić uwagę na „brak rozpoznania roli wiedzy w naszym postrzeganiu”.W kontekście omawianych biennale Jean-Louis Poitevin przedstawił to jako stymulujące zjawisko w swoim wystąpieniu na konferencji w Busan, odnosząc się do pism Vilèma Flussera: „W rozdziale zatytułowanym »Księżyc« znajdującym się w książce »Eseje o naturze i kulturze« [Flusser] przywołuje fakt, że księżyc stał się satelitą należącym do NASA, podczas gdy my nadal postrzegamy go jako »naturalnego satelitę Ziemi«: Moja wizja nie bierze pod uwagę żadnej wiedzy. Ten brak zrozumienia roli wiedzy w naszej wizji jest cechą sytuacji określanych jako kryzysowe” Transkrypt referatu wygłoszonego na Busan Biennial, b.n.s.
- 22.Innym ciekawym aspektem najnowszej sztuki w Azji (szczególnie w Chinach) jest podejście artystów do zagadnienia plagiatu – „kopiowania” prac znanych artystów zachodnich.
- 23.Na temat oświecenia w Azji zob. J. J. Clarke, „Oriental Enlightenment” (Abington and New York: Routledge, 1997). Źródła podejścia zachodniej filozofii do jej chińskiego odpowiednika można szukać w Nicholasa Malebranche’a „Entretien d’un Philosophe Chretien et d’un Philosophe chinois sur l’existence et la nature de Dieu”, napisanej w 1707, a opublikowanej w 1708; Leibniza zbiorze listów i tekstów Jezuitów z Chin, opublikowanych pod tytułem „Novissima Sinica”w 1697 i jego artykułów na temat Chin, między innymi „Discours sur la theologie naturelle des Chinois” z 1716, oraz publicznych wystąpień Christiana Wolffa na temat praktycznej filozofii Chińczyków wygłoszonych w 1721 i opublikowanych jako „Oratio de Sinarum philosophia practica” w 1726. Jak uważa Young Ahn Kang, są to jednak podrzędne teksty tych filozofów. Kang wspomina także Kanta, który jego zdaniem interpretował Konfucjusza jako zainteresowanego w „walorach materialnych” i „porządku rzeczy”, a nie etyce i jej związkach z pojęciami wolności i samodeterminacji praktycznego rozumu.http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr
- 24.Caroline A. Jones, „Biennial Culture: A Longer History,” [w]: „The Biennial Reader”, s. 76. W tej samej książce John Clark łączy osiemnastowieczne oświecenie europejskie z „rozwojem edukacyjnych i ideologicznych struktur nowoczesnego państwa”, s. 174.
- 25.„Voyage to Biennale – 50 years of Korean Contemporary Art in Overseas Biennales”, kat. wyst. (Busan: Busan Biennale Organizing Committee, 2014), s. 9.
- 26.Jak wyjaśnia Bourriaud w broszurze towarzyszącej wystawie, „wystawa ta zorganizowana jest wokół zjawiska współżycia ludzi z wielką ilością zwierząt, przetwarzaniem danych, gwałtownym wzrostem roślin i powolnym ruchem materii. Przedstawia świat przed powstaniem ludzkiej świadomości, krajobrazy mineralne, transplantacje warzyw czy sprzężenie pomiędzy ludźmi, maszynami i zwierzętami”. Cyt. za:http://www.taipeibiennial2014.org/.
- 27.Wyjaśnia on: „Prace artystyczne nie są »optymistyczne«, ale też nie wyrażają zawodu światem nawet w jednym ulotnym momencie. Prace artystyczne są złożone. Stawiając pytania na temat wszechświata, bestialskości, architektury i wojny […], zwrócą uwagę widzów na koncepcję »zamieszkiwania świata« z innej perspektywy. Zamieszkiwanie świata na sposób »poetycki« jest tu pewnym modelem życia. Jest to jedna z pozycji, które można wliczyć w podstawową zasadę zamieszkiwania”. Cyt. za:http://artmu.mmca.go.kr/
- 28.Opis z: Graham Harman, „Art Without Relations,” „Artreview”;http://artreview.com
- 29.W pierwszych słowach „Wstępu” Morgan stwierdza: „Burning Down the House bada proces pożogi i transformacji, cykl unicestwienia i odnowy widoczny w estetyce, wydarzeniach historycznych i wzrastającym tempie procesów redundancji i odnowy w kulturze komercyjnej” , „Burning Down the House: Gwangju Biennale 2014″, przewodnik po wystawie, s. 8.
- 30.Inne podejście zakłada przekładanie procesu nad produktem, co było tematem dyskusji w artykule w „The Art Newspaper” przy okazji Shanghai Biennale, kuratorowanego przez Anselma Franke http://theartnewspaper.com
- 31.Podejście do Oświecenia w Tajwanie i Korei Południowej znacząco się różni. Niemniej jednak obecnie nacjonaliści z obu krajów wydają się robić użytek z europejskiego Oświecenia jako formy „filozoficznej tarczy” przeciwko komunizmowi, głównej doktrynie ideologicznej w Chinach i Korei Północnej.
- 32.Dalsze dyskusje na temat transformacji biennale w Azji można umieścić w kontekście pojęcia episteme w rozumieniu Michela Foucaulta, czy też wersji „teorii aktów mowy” Judith Butler. Niemniej jednak, zważywszy na to, jak bardzo ich koncepcje zakorzenione są w zachodnioeuropejskim dyskursie, ten kierunek może okazać się błędny przy rozważaniach nad wydarzeniami typu biennale w Azji.
September 30, 2014
Dave Hickey departs for the second time
Marek Bartelik01.10.2014. aktualizacja 01.10.2014 07:42
Art slows life down. Criticism slows art down. They both help.
– Dave Hickey, Facebook post on 11 September 2014
PL
The news that Dave Hickey “quit” writing about contemporary art reached me through his Facebook page several weeks ago: “Okay. My hour’s up. Bye bye.” It was concise enough for Twitter and an exact repetition of what he had said two years ago, which made it a quotation. The previous announcement was followed by a series of articles; MailOnline posted a long text about the event with an explanation of the reasons stated by Hickey, while The Observer titled its article: “Doyen of American critics turns his back on the ‘nasty, stupid’ world of modern art.” The British press used the occasion to attack local stars, Damien Hirst, Antony Gormley, and Tracey Emin, which, as it seems now, was futile. Already familiar with Hickey’s provocations, the American press was more reserved.
Dave Hickey. Photo.: Toby KampsA giant among American art critics leaves the profession, but, extraordinarily, he was neither fired from his position at a newspaper or magazine, nor was he in any way deprived of a space for publication – it was his decision. In his interview with The Observer, Hickey claimed, “Art editors and critics – people like me – have become a courtier class… All we do is wander around the palace and advise very rich people. It’s not worth my time.” He criticized the contemporary art world, especially its fascination with celebrities, many of whom contribute little to art; Hirst was the most salient example. Some of Hickey’s complaints may have seemed surprising, for on many occasions he defended the art market – seeing its lack of regulation as an important driving force behind art.
Hickey was seventy-one years old at the time of his resignation and had had a long career as an art critic. In 2001 the MacArthur Foundation awarded him the prestigious “MacArthur Fellowship,” commonly referred to as the “genius grant.” He achieved wide acclaim thanks both to his polemical texts on recent art and culture and his very particular style of writing, which is in opposition to the international lingua franca of art critics. His language is rich with vernacular expression – including expletives – and reminiscent of Beat Generation poetry, while his art criticism contains references to both art history and American pop culture, including music and especially rock-and-roll, the music of his youth (he used to write song lyrics and work for Rolling Stone). At the same time, Hickey’s writing is full of self-reflection and often ironic, as exemplified by his comment, “Rock-and-roll works because we’re all a bunch of flakes.” Consciously contentious “anti-intellectualism” gained him the status of an outsider and attracted many readers, both in the United States and elsewhere. Hickey’s admirers expected provocative statements and he never failed them. In a 1995 interview, the critic Saul Ostrow called him the cause célèbre of the art world partly because he was not afraid to speak about beauty using the capital B, seeing it as a social, “political” phenomenon. “Beauty’s not the end of art: it’s only the beginning,” he told Ostrow. At the same time, he questioned the role of the critic as a “high priest of art” and, in the same interview, quipped: “I’m a permissive, unfashionable commercial guy. I do retail.” In this context, he could be positioned among those American critics who strongly oppose “academic criticism,” its requirement to support given methodology, and the kind of writing on art that is nowadays widely practiced in art magazines, exhibition catalogues, and art history books, which, as Oscar Wilde put it, stems from the assumption that “only boring people are treated seriously.” He adheres to “popular” criticism that is “made in Las Vegas” (where he lived for many years) and accessible to an ordinary, non-professional reader who does not understand the jargon of contemporary criticism and does not read footnotes. This does not mean, however, that Hickey is not sensitive to the beauty of words or the logic of argument. He is, in total, a critic who records the Zeitgeist while most likely considering himself “a one-man Zeitgeist” (as he once termed one of his favourite actors, Robert Mitchum).
One may find Hickey’s provocative statements irritating – and, indeed, many “serious” critics have, in fact, been irritated. The opponents of his style of writing accuse him of using a vulgar strand of “metaphysics,” but no one can deny him his exceptional writing skills. Let us quote the following sentence: “They may live in the house of art and speak the language of art to anyone who will listen, but almost certainly the are ‘about’ some broader and more vertiginous category of experience to which art belongs-and that we rather wish it didn’t” (“Nothing Like the Son: On Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio“). One reads his essays with passion, enjoying each sentence, which, sometimes, does not invite deeper reflection, yet never fully dismisses it. One might say Hickey’s writing parallels Mapplethorpe’s process; namely, he talks to everyone about the kind of art that few want to know about and about which only few can talk without moralising or unnecessary theorising.
As Hickey stated two years ago, his decision to stop writing about contemporary art was caused by the fact that the art world became excessively bureaucratised, leading to stagnation; theMailOnline article compares this world to the 19th-century salon, which promoted mediocrity, awarded those who had the right connections, and thwarted progress. Indeed, it is hard not to notice the growing institutionalisation of contemporary art, and it is apparent in the fact that the central position in its promotion is occupied by curators, gallery owners, organizers of art fairs, collectors’ consultants, and even PR specialists. It is them who decide who is important and who is not in today’s art; artists or critics don’t have much say here. The often repeated argument that more people view exhibitions of contemporary art nowadays than ever before has very little to do with the real interest in art – attending exhibitions has merely become a “lifestyle.” It is enough to attend the Monday evening meeting for young “MoMA supporters” with its atmosphere of a cocktail party and Monet’s Water Lilies as mere decoration. “We live in the times of particular emptiness, when everybody speaks about art, but there are just a few who are actively engaged in it,” was a comment (quoted from memory) on Hickey’s Facebook page. In this respect, the art world has become a lot like the world of fashion, and in the world where glamour reigns, we’ve come to refer to artist-celebrities by their first names only: Marina, Jeff, Damien – like supermodels, film stars, or pop singers.
Of course, the culture of “stardom” is nothing new among artists. Yet, what makes Jeff Koons different from Jackson Pollock – or even Andy Warhol – is that “Koons, by contrast, has perfected the art of taking the same crap on offer at a big-box store – be it an ordinary pail or kitschy figurines – and making it better than anything you could ever own, so that the buyers of his art might feel superior to the plebs without having better taste than they do,” as Barry Schwabsky aptly observed in an article published in The Nation on the occasion of Koons’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Koons is a reactionary artist who legitimises all that is most shallow and cynical in our culture, an accusation that certainly cannot be thrown at either Pollock or Warhol. Koons’ recipe for success is nowadays repeated ad infinitum: provocation, another provocation (preferably one to provoke reaction of conservative segments of society) supported by self-promotion and, finances permitting, an advertisement in one of the major international art magazines. In the contemporary art world, success often translates into the amount of ads in Artforum, which Jerry Saltz calls the “porn of the art world” (and he writes extensively about it in a recent article on New York Magazine‘s entertainment news blog).
Indeed, the situation of contemporary art, with its cult of celebrities and colourful ads, does not fill one with optimism. However, as history teaches us, artists can effectively break away from the traps of crises, so perhaps one should not prematurely anticipate a new crisis or predict yet another end of art. Whether a similar situation concerns art critics is a different story. To answer this question, one should perhaps start from considering whether a suitable response to the malaise of art criticism would not be to stop writing about celebrities’ art, or at least writing about them more insightfully, as well as to direct the readers’ attention to the work of less well known artists (not necessarily the younger ones) or those who were unjustly forgotten… As we all know, there are many talents among them.
Of course, art criticism cannot exist in the void and has to react to the interests of the readers and to the Zeitgeist in which we live, as it undergoes significant transformations related to the changes of the media. The role of the critic is being transformed in response. Has he/she really become a “courtier”? That may be so, yet certainly for many more reasons than the ones mentioned by Hickey. (Is it not proved by the situation in Poland, where the art market is still undeveloped, there are very few collectors, and yet there are several local celebrities?) Following developments in contemporary art requires mobility. To get a panoramic picture of the crucial phenomena in art, it is not enough to just observe it from one place: be it New York or London, Las Vegas or Warsaw. One needs to travel around the world and open oneself to new artistic experiences, for, as Hickey admits after all, art criticism has to actively follow art. Yet, when he is constantly expected to vigorously and polemically react to what is happening in contemporary art, he becomes increasingly detached from it; a dynamic commentary is substituted by a “static” reflection, sometimes coloured by nostalgia for the times when there were many artists highly committed to their work. Yet, perhaps, it is not just nostalgia for the art world of the past; maybe his “detachment” comes from his growing disillusion about his own social role…
Hickey’s “departure” brings a more general reflection. History teaches us that critics who left a distinct legacy hardly ever considered themselves “art critics;” they simply wrote about art with passion, using lively (and sensitive) language that inspired the readers to further probe the mysteries of art, especially those that seemed very dark. Undoubtedly, Hickey does have this kind of talent. So, perhaps, he should continue writing without calling himself an art critic. After all, he has a singular literary talent, and it’s demonstrated by his collection of short stories titled Prior Convictions: Stories from the Sixties. It is where I see the point for his “departure.”
Hickey has almost two thousand followers on Facebook (and five thousand friends) who regularly engage in active conversations with him. The success of his page suggests that an informal, immediate communication between the critic and the reader is increasingly popular, and with readers from different generations. In the course of such a dialogue, Hickey’s style of writing – a mixture of in-depth reflection with brief comments typical for a diary – gains polemical character, encouraging readers to question the status quo and search for new meanings in art. Like the Internet in general, Facebook often produces unexpected situations, and which Hickey likes to provoke. Although the fluidity of information and comments on Facebook renders yesterday’s posts uninteresting, they do not die. One might say they are launched into orbit where they will stay forever. They may be retrieved later and with new meanings not so much as fixed knowledge, but as a constant exchange of ideas posing open-ended, “Socratic” questions on what art is and where it is heading. The immediacy of this kind of communication is, of course, important, yet the most interesting aspect of Facebook seems to be that at the time when popular art magazines, newspapers, or blogs are increasingly dependent on advertising and hence shifting towards providing “neutral” news, or even gossip on art, Facebook (despite the fact that it is closely monitored), becomes a forum for the expression of uncensored opinions. Paradoxically, then, what emerges is a kind of “slower conversation” about art in the form of a dialogue uninterrupted by pages and pages of ads.
Perhaps Hickey’s post in question was another “hoax,” as some have suggested. But each repetition brings something different (not so long ago the meaning of this phenomenon was the subject of an academic debate between Derrida and Deleuze; numerous philosophers had done it before them, as well), and Hickey skilfully used this repetition to say that he is “quitting” again – and that’s it. Does it mean this time that he considers further distancing himself from the traditional model of writing abut art represented by art magazines such as Artforum, The Art Newspaper, or Art press and focus on Facebook? Or, perhaps, does he mean to direct our attention to the fact that since he said it the first time, the art world has not changed for the better, but the significance of social media has increased? Regardless of the implications, it was simply another good post, which I “Liked.”
P.S.: “Warhol used to carry this cassette tape recorder around with him. It was always on and Andy carried batteries in his pocket. He called it his ‘wife’ and said it protected him. This was because, when the people in his vicinity knew the tape was on, they would forget their anger and unhappiness and try to make a ‘good tape.’ I was hoping Facebook would work this way, but….” Dave Hickey, Facebook post on 20 August 2014
Marek Bartelik runs an irregularly updated blog: marekbartelik.wordpress.com
A critic abroad
International Association of Art Critics president Marek Bartelik discusses his future goals for the UNESCO-affiliated body and Taiwan’s role in it
By Noah Buchan / Staff reporter/ Taipei Times
Marek Bartelik.
Photo courtesy of Vassiliki Lazarou
Marek Bartelik, president of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA), a UNESCO-affiliated non-profit of close to 5,000 critics writing about contemporary art, says art critics shouldn’t pander to the art market.
“Art critics [should be] independent, and not part of the market like artists and galleries are. They should be critical rather than confirming,” says Bartelik, who is a regular contributor to ArtForum International.
He adds that the AICA creates a platform where critics and artists can express their views free from political interference.
“Art should function independently of politics and artists must express their views no matter how controversial they might be,” he says.
AICA was founded in 1950 to revive art criticism which suffered under Fascisim during World War II. Its stated objectives include protecting the “ethical and professional interests of its members and co-operate in defending their rights” and defending “impartially freedom of expression and thought and oppose arbitrary censorship.”
Bartelik, who holds a PhD in art history and teaches modern and contemporary art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York and lectures internationally, was elected to the position two years ago. He was recently invited to Taiwan by Taiwan AICA, which has 15 active members.
I sat down with Bartelik last month to discuss concerns about the state of contemporary art criticism, AICA’s emphasis on Asia and how China’s possible entry into the organization could marginalize Taiwan.
Taipei Times: What are your goals in coming to Taiwan?
Marek Bartelik: I didn’t come here with a particular agenda. My agenda as president of AICA International is to help places that need this kind of presence in order to foster a stimulating discussion on the current state of art criticism and art. Asia has a rapidly growing contemporary art scene. We should have more representation here. Taiwan has a very visible section, I’m very happy that my colleagues here do a lot of work in terms of assisting the development of a vital art scene. We had a conference here in 2004, which was very successful, as my colleagues who attended it told me. Today AICA wants to reach out to as many places as possible and create a broad outreach in Asia.
CHINA’S ENTRY
TT: China isn’t currently a member of AICA, yet it has a growing number of art critics and its importance on the international art stage has also increased dramatically over the past decade. Have they expressed interested in joining the organization?
MB: Yes, but we haven’t got any specific proposals. It’s being discussed, several of my colleagues have visited China in the last few years, but we have not received any formal request from there to join our association.
TT: And some are concerned that this will affect Taiwan’s status. The concern isn’t so much that Taiwan will be kicked out of AICA as much as that it will be forced to change its name to Chinese Taipei if China joins, as it does, for example, with sports events.
MB: As I said, we don’t have a Chinese section so I don’t want to speculate. All I can say is that from my point of view, Taiwan has a section and it’s as important as the other sections. There is no such thing as first group or second group or third group in our association, in terms of how we make our decisions. Everyone has an equal status within AICA.
China is a big country, its art scene grows very quickly, and because of the complexity of the situation we are not rushing anything. We are just going to see how things will be done and evaluate it. One thing that I keep saying and I repeat it: When I was elected president of AICA in 2008 I said that there [were to be] no changes in terms of who belongs to AICA and who doesn’t belong to AICA.
I must add, we are not a political organization. We are an organization of art critics, we are about culture, we are about intellectuals, we are about art. We do not discriminate on the basis of political affiliations; we just want to make sure that our members follow professional standards and create freely.
FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION
TT: Your organization remains concerned about freedom of expression. For example, the letter AICA sent to China in 2011 after the detention and jailing of Ai Weiwei (艾未未).
MB: But what I am saying is that interfering with national politics is not our role. We are a professional association, representing nearly 5,000 art critics in 63 sections worldwide. As far as freedom of expression is concerned, we are concerned with defending it as much in China as in Sweden, Venezuela or France. When I went to Cuba last year I spoke to critics, museum directors, artists, curators and government officials — the only way we can establish a section in any country is based on freedom of expression which comes from the government or anyone who can prevent someone from joining. So that’s the kind of assurance I got from the Cubans, that anyone who qualifies as a practicing critic to become part of AICA should be able to join AICA. And that’s the only criteria that we use. We are interested in whether they qualify, whether they have credentials that allow them to join the organization and also whether the chapter that is being established is existing with enough freedom to function.
When we send letters to intervene in the cases of censorship of art, we do it very carefully. Ai Weiwei was one example, but we’ve done things in Sweden and South Africa. It had nothing to do with politics per se, it had to do with the way things work in terms of what contemporary art stands for. We are currently opposing censorship in Russia because there are a lot of questionable things going on there in respect of allowing artists to express their artistic views.
It’s more on the level of saying that we, as an art critics association, should function independently of politics and artists must express their views no matter how controversial they might be. In my opinion, it is up to the viewer to decide whether that kind of art merits our attention or not. There is good art with a social or political message and there is bad [art]. We discuss this during our annual congresses and symposia we organize around the world.
PRACTICE OF ART CRITICISM
TT: How is art criticism in Asia practiced differently than in Europe and North America?
MB: In terms of art criticism and how it fits into the global scene: it’s something that we need to discover because honestly I’m not familiar enough [with Asia] to speak about the local art scenes. I know some critics from different countries in this region but it doesn’t mean I can describe what constitutes Asian art criticism. All I know, is that Asia is becoming a very important place for contemporary art, and art criticism as well.
TT: Is this an issue of language?
MB: That’s one of the things we are working on, how to give voice to critics who write in different languages. For example, our congress next year will be in South Korea and one of the items when we organize the congress — since two years ago, when we decided to publish a collection of essays by the Paraguayan critic Ticio Escobar as a part of Distinguished Contribution to Art Criticism Award — is that the country that gives the congress in association with AICA publishes an anthology of critical writings by one of the distinguished critics from that country. And it is bilingual, in the case of South Korea most likely English-Korean. This gives a great opportunity to introduce critics that are well known in their country but not necessarily outside.
STATE OF ART CRITICISM
TT: What is the current state of art criticism in Europe and North America?
MB: On a practical level, today it is more and more difficult to find places for critics to publish because newspapers — most newspapers — have eliminated cultural news. As an association of critics we are trying to reignite interest in criticism and contemporary art so that our members have a place to write. And not just a few hundred words but maybe something longer. Your interview is a perfect example that it can be done, and I appreciate it a lot.
That’s really the issue that I’m most interested in and that’s the focus of our debates: what constitutes our profession and how we have to adjust to the times we live in. Obviously what happens now is much different than what happened 20 years ago, not to mention 50 years ago. So there is the political reality, and also the very practical reality, which is we have fewer and fewer daily newspapers publishing anything about art. If they do, it is profiles of artists, it profits our culture.
TT: But it also seems that finding that fine line between academic rigor and appealing to a broad audience and with critical theory, for example, it just seems to exclude average readers, rather than include them.
MB: That’s maybe where we are not being at our best. [Art criticism] has become such an isolated practice, with its own language and interests, that it’s easy to lose the average person, who otherwise could become interested in contemporary art. I think it’s our responsibility to reconnect with the broader audience, talk to them; if we fail to do so we risk to be just a small group of people talking to each other and nobody else. And that goes back to the issue of language. There is more and more translated into English but there might be brilliant critics writing in Chinese that are not translated and so are not part of the international network and therefore nobody knows about them. AICA wants to represent them, and in doing so contribute to the conversation about the meaning and the importance of contemporary art.
For me those are the crucial issues that we are facing: the place of art criticism in the current world, the issues of language, including critics’ responsibility to express themselves in a comprehensive way, to write well. It’s bigger than anything else. If we don’t adjust to the new conditions, we are not going to survive for a long time. So as an association, I’m not just worried about how local politics are played, but more our well-being and our “philosophy of writing.”
TT: How can Taiwan, whose critics write mostly in Chinese, broaden their audience and move out into the international stage?
MB: The possibilities seem to be endless, for instance organize international symposia, invite art critics to see your exhibitions and visit artists’ studios. I want to propose to our colleagues to start to publish an annual guide as to what happens in a given place in terms of exhibitions, art events and so on. So we would have 63 guides by critics from all countries and we could put it together as an aid to the understanding of the local art scenes. A yearly guide of what happens artistically in a given country. I think that would be a way to make it international and make it feasible because those articles wouldn’t have to be long, but, at the same time, written by the experts so-to-speak on the ground, who know the local scenes the best.
AICA has developed a new Web site which will be launched later this month. It will be much more interactive. We want to have forums where we will invite critics from different countries and we will say to them: you have a month to moderate any conversation you want on the subject related to contemporary art and art criticism. Obviously if it is a critic who writes in Chinese it can be in English and Chinese, with modern technologies we should be able to deal with the translations. There are ways to maintain that kind of conversation and that’s how I’m trying to bring people closer to AICA because otherwise we don’t offer enough activities to our members and the audience at large.
TT: Yes it sounds as though you are more proactive than your predecessors and are also cementing this community of members that you already have and get them speaking to each other.
MB: I see myself as extending the legacy of my predecessors. I also want AICA to become a truly global association. To do so, we do not always need to speak from, or through, New York, London or Berlin. We can speak to each other directly from one “periphery” to another “periphery.” A lot of exciting activities take place in those so-called peripheries. A lot of brilliant ideas develop outside of the “centers”— my present visit to Taiwan reinforced me in thinking this way.
— This interview has been condensed and edited
October 2013
Audience during my lecture in Caracas, venezuela
December 3, 2013
December 1, 2013
December, 2012: visit http://www.brooklynrail.org
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January 10, 2012
Новый президент Международной ассоциации художественных критиков
Ноя 2, 2011 0 229
Новым президентом Международной ассоциации художественных критиков стал польский искусствовед Марек Бартелик. Об этом сообщает Artforum. Бартелик сменит на этой должности своего предшественника Якубу Канате, занимавшего этот пост в 2008 года.
Фото / Marek Bartelik
Марек Бартелик – доктор философии (Городской университет Нью-Йорка), преподаватель Cooper Union, визитинг-профессор Йельского университета и Массачусетского университета технологий. Регулярно публиковался в журнале Artforum, а также в изданиях Art in America, Arts Magazine, Structurist,Gazeta Wyborcza и др. Автор книги о раннем польском модернизме (2005).
Международная ассоциация художественных критиков была основана в 1950 году. В ней состоят около 4500 профессионалов из 70 стран мира. Организация насчитывает 62 национальные секции. Президентом Российской секции является искусствовед Андрей Толстой.
September 22
My article posted on a website in Brazil (in Portuguese), see:
http://www.novoscuradores.com.br/artigo-blog/arte-polonesa-contemporanea-por-marek-bartelik
September 15
White Box
in cooperation with Galeria Arsenal, Bialystok, Poland www.galeria-arsenal.pl presents “Minimal Differences”
Curated by Denise Carvalho (USA) and Monika Szewczyk (Poland)
The artists includePawel Althamer (Poland), Azorro (Poland), Vesna Bukovec (Slovenia),
Jiri Cernicky (Czech Republic), Oskar Dawicki (Poland), Katarzyna Kozyra (Poland),
Zbigniew Libera (Poland), Joanna Malinowska i Christian Tomaszewski (Poland/USA),
Anna Molska (Poland), R.E.P. (Revolutionary Experimental Space) (Ukraine),
Slaven Tolj (Croatia), Marek Wasilewski (Poland), Julita Wojcik (Poland),
Martin Zet (Czech Republic)
“Minimal Differences” is a multimedia exhibition and panel discussion examining the effects of globalization in Central European culture, politics, and economics. Through the scope of contemporary artists working in video, performance, installation, and public interventions. “Minimal Differences” tackles issues of identity, stereotype, and self-stereotyping of former Eastern Europeans, the condition of post-totalitarian societies, as well as the specifics of art in post-colonial countries and its place on the global arts scene.
The panel discussion will be held at White Box, on September 16, 2010, from 6-8 pm
Panelists include
Jaroslaw Suchan: Director of Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz, Poland
Marek Bartelik: art critic, Professor at Cooper Union, New York, and President of the International Association of Art Critics-US section (AICA-USA)
Michal Kolecek: art critic, curator, and Dean of Faculty of Art and Design at Jan Evangelista Purkyne University in Usti nad Labem, Czech Republic
Izabela Kopania: Ph.D., art historian and art critic, independent researcher affiliated to The Institute of Art, Polish Academy of Sciences
Marek Wasilewski: art critic, artist, Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, Poland, the Editor-in-Chief of the bimonthly magazine Czas Kultury
Moderator: Denise Carvalho, art critic, curator, and Assistant Professor at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA), Portland
May 15, 2010
Second World Conference on Arts Education, Seoul, Korea, May 25-28, 2010
Workshop session will be held on the 26th of May on the topic of “Changes of social role and responsibility of cultural institutions and actors, including artists”. It is my pleasure to put you in contact with each other in this regard.
Moderator: Dr. Marek Bartelik.
Five presentations are planned to take place under this topic within the two hour and a half session (14:15-16:45), which are the following:
1) Laura Gander Howe (UK) – “Setting a 10 year Strategic Framework for the arts and children and young people”
2) Wahab Ademola Azeez (Nigeria) – “Politics without arts education: the nigerian situation”
3) Ho-Dong Kim (South Korea) – “Hub of Creation, Education and entertainment: Children Art-Culture Center, the Asian Culture Complex”
4) Gevorg Poghosyan (Armenia) – “Shifting the Arts education in Nowadays Armenia”
5) Daniel Garcia Andujar (Spain) – “Collaboration and education in the collective concept”
November 8
Max Bill: The Master’s Vision
Watermill, New York
Max Bill: The Master’s Vision (1908-1994), a film by Erich Schmid, moves between the dynamic fields of art, aesthetics, and politics. Max Bill was probably the most important Swiss artist of the 20th century and the most famous student to come out of the legendary Bauhaus in Dessau. He was an ardent anti-fascist and all of his work as an avant-garde artist, sculptor, architect, and typographer showed a social responsibility and environmental awareness throughout his entire life. His views have become incredibly topical.
Dr. Marek Bartelik teaches modern and contemporary art at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. He has also taught art theory at Yale and MIT. He has published articles on such artists as Cai Guo Qiang, Ilya Kabakov, Orlan, and Francisco Vezzoli and regularly contributes to Artforum. He is the Co-President of AICA USA and Vice President of AICA International. Dr. Bartelik is also a poet. His volume of poetry in English,East Sixth Street, was released in Brazil in 2007.
Dr. Bartelik will discuss the life and art of Max Bill in the context of the Swiss artist’s role in spreading the ideas of modernism, particularly those related to art and science, around the world. Bill will be presented as a “diagonal artist,” who both belonged to his time and remained outside of it.
For more information on the film please visit www.maxbillfilm.ch.
Please note: Fifteen minutes prior to the event, Watermill resident artists Sarah Ortmeyerand Alexis Kunsak will do a short reading of their work in progress, KANT ELEGANT.
October 2009
July 31
Invitation to Krzysztof Zarebski’s show in Bielsko Biala
July 20
My first article in Swedish:
May 1.
Painting on Both Sides of the Wall
from BRD-DDR: Pintura Alemã Contemporãnea em Colecções Portuguesas/Contemporary German Painting in Portuguese Collections
Lisbon: ARTing Editores, December 2008.
The story of painting presented in this book is a story of becoming, not of a sudden birth and an equally sudden death, and not of a rebirth, as the ongoing critical discourse on the subject sometimes suggests; rather, its presence is tautological, circular (ill. 1 [the Berlin Wall]). It is a story unveiling in the work of individual artists in a flatland of awareness and memory, and as such has no beginning and no ending—marks on top of other marks like in a palimpsest endowed with anamnetic functions. The idea of the palimpsest goes backto ancient times, when scribes would erase writings to write something new on the same piece of parchment.
Throughout the history of art, iconoclastic artists likewise tried to “erase” other artists’ works—to start fresh, or to forget, but very seldom to completely destroy. Robert Rauschenberg famously tried to erase a drawing given to him by Willem de Kooning (Erased de Kooning Drawing, 1953).Rauschenberg was unsuccessful—indeed, he was not the first to fail in his effort to “erase” the past. In this abortive action, he whispered his wish to become an innovative artist with his own élan vital (living energy)—a goal he ultimately managed to achieve. Jasper Johns called Rauschenberg’s act an “additive subtraction,” a practice that—as the British artist Richard Galpin astutely observes—“is a contradiction that suggests a play of differences, rather than an absence of a presence.” Using youthful bravura as a license for playing with differences Rauschenberg (and Johns as well) understood the need to link his art to that of the past as a springboard for subsequent artistic growth.
For the art historian, there must exist a palimpsest of thought. In Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson argues, “In reality, the past is preserved by itself automatically… pressing against the portals of consciousness that would fain leave it outside.” Friedrich Nietzsche once asserted thatactive forgetfulness functions as a “doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette: so that it will be immediately obvious how there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present, without forgetfulness.” Obviously, forgetting does not mean ignorance in an epistemological sense (of being about knowledge and knowing). In fact, it is the opposite of ignorance or total disappearance from memory: One has to know something to forget it; things have to exist in order to vanish. For Michel Foucault, “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are, but to refuse what we are.” It was Foucault himself, a rigorous theoretician, who was the first to acknowledge that we cannot refuse what we never learned in the first place.
Another French thinker, Jacques Derrida, states that what we acknowledge as truth in painting might reside in what he termed its “fiction-ness.” In Derrida’s words, “Once one has distinguished, as does the entire philosophical tradition, between truth and reality, it goes without saying that truth ‘establishes itself in the structure of a fiction’… common sense will always have made the division between reality and fiction.” Since Derrida wrote these words, we have gradually distanced ourselves somewhat from his definition of textuality and structure, but one thing remains the same, as Paul Crowther observes: “To Deconstruct history or texts… offer[s] an insight into, or partial presentation of, a totality which as a totality is unpresentable.” In fact, Derrida has helped us understand ourselves by telling the story of gradual becoming that is a goal, not a destination, with art perhaps being our sail on this mysterious voyage. The successive readings of painting as a metaphor for the window (Renaissance), the wall (modernism), and wallpaper (postmodernism) speak to painting’s journey toward becoming a medium independent of the direct representation of external reality, as well as toward liberation from direct association with other arts, such as poetry or literature. All those transformations have not made the accomplishments of earlier painters obsolete or unnecessary; quite the opposite, for they show just how much painting relates to our individual experiences, both belonging to the present and being a timeless and time-less expression. The flatness of the picture plane, or “fiction-ness of the medium,” might be the secondary aspects of painting’s essence.
Truth links us to the past, makes us understand that there is a continuum of experience, and, even more so, a continuum of desire to understand, a concept that—needless to say—needs to be treated with caution. As such, “truth”—an extremely loaded word—has perhaps been attached to painting more than to any other artistic medium. In fact, the history of painting is often linked to the idea of truthfulness, rather than “fiction-ness,” not only in a formal or structural, political, and cultural sense, but also in the Platonic sense of the importance of things that last as ideas, as if the flat surface always had to be inscribed with some kind of parallel Decalogue. In the field of the visual arts, painting has long been presented as a guardian or saboteur of the “unity of truth,” the “thing-in-itself,” and a representation of “the soul of Western visuality” (Thomas McEvilley’s expression).
With its emphasis on hybridity and heterogeneity of artistic expressions, so-called postmodernism has posed a challenge to the “unity of truth”—contained in the Greenbergian prescription that painting must remain attached to its essential formal characteristics—by, among other things, refusing to lock artistic practice into the specificity of a given medium. Today’s artists move freely among various media, stylistic conventions, and referents, redefining the meaning of individuality in relation to originality and significance. Such postmodernism aims at synchronizing artistic praxis with current thinking as to what constitutes art in a broader context, which also means going against the linear notion of history as it has been articulated in the West. But Hal Foster warns: “Postmodernism does exploit late-modernist dogma…. This is clearest as regards the mediums: identified with modernism, they are foreclosed with it. The fallacy here is to derive a logic of a medium from historical examples and then see it (the logic) apart from the examples as somehow essential to the medium.”That is, we need to see painting in its historical continuum, individual cases and all, rather than address its significance on purely formal grounds, a practice that promotes vagueness and partisanship.
Returning to the idea of the palimpsest, its third incarnation is the “palimpsest of the body,” which relates it to the presence of the viewer (and the reader). Art needs to be experienced both intellectually and viscerally—in the present. By providing a single viewpoint from which to ideally experience an artwork, the invention of linear perspective put the viewer in balance, but it also prevented him from moving. Many contemporary artists reject traditional illusionism for the sake of an active relationship with the viewer, deploying multiple vanishing points within one image, completely refusing to use linear perspective at all, or making their works directly interactive spatially, prompting the viewer to move “off-center.” New concepts of art offer new possibilities and impose new constraints, such as, for example, those revealed by Nicolas Bourriaud in his discussion of “relational aesthetics,” in which the French critic downgrades art to the status of a “pretext” (or “pre-text”), to a conversation or discourse, a sort of physical and intellectual prop, and in doing so puts unnecessary emphasis on the performative aspects of art. Motion in art also has to be internal, a process that, metaphorically speaking, is facilitated by the palimpsest.
I like to think of painting simply as a friend, like the great Italian humanist Leon Battista Alberti did centuries ago, as a poetic relationship that requires close affinity with the authorial presence of artists in their art. Such a relationship is built on a mutual respect for boundaries and individual freedoms; it celebrates the state of independence so indispensable for creativity in silence, far from any intrusive apparatus of surveillance. To paraphrase the writer Paul Auster: Every work of art is an image of solitude. As it parallels our experience, the movement associated with such an artistic process might be from something toward nothing, toward the ultimate absence of things from themselves, which constitutes an important aspect of meaning in art. As Jean Baudrillard writes: “Behind every fragment of reality, something has to have disappeared in order to ensure the continuity of the nothing—without, however, yielding to the temptation of annihilation, for disappearance has to remain a living disappearance.”
Nowadays, we don’t talk and write about painting with a capital “p,” as a noble form of expression, but rather in its lowercase incarnation, as a pluralistic, democratic activity practiced by artists. As mentioned above, for many painting as a medium stopped being a rarified unity, but instead became a heterogeneous expression, often merging with other media. Its new pluralism acknowledges une condition lourde (a heavy condition), which the Czech writer Milan Kundera described in a different context as the most mysterious and the most ambiguous because it is bound to the ordinary. “The Unbearable Lightness of Being” awaits those who escape from the “velvet prison” (Miklós Haraszti’s expression) to a seemingly free world, but moving to such an unresolved existence is the most open-ended and, therefore, potentially the most bearable state. Removed from itsprivileged position among the visual arts, “regressive” painting might become a more accessible medium than ever before. Its “object” quality might still contribute to its commodification (so much criticized in the 1980s) or promote escapism, but, paradoxically enough, it also endows painting with a portability that facilitates direct communication outside of the culture industry, represented by museums, galleries, biennials, as well as celebratory critical discourse. With the growing speed of life facilitated by modern technology, painting might serve as a slowing-down “device,” private but also communal. As such, painting celebrates a different kind of resourcefulness, an inner one, which aggressive media culture tends to devalue or trivialize.
Thinking about the condition lourde makes me realize that the reemergence of painting in the 1980s coincided not only with the intensification of reactionary politics or market manipulations, but also with the AIDS epidemic. This period witnessed the works of David Wojnarowicz (who died in 1992), one of the most provocative painters of that decade in New York, whose art remains underappreciated to this day. Assuming an activist role in opposition to existing power structures, Wojnarowicz’s oeuvre reflected the condition lourde of the existence of that time with incredible urgency, but also with great artistry, which distinguishes him from many other painters of his generation, who either retreated to a new formalism or endowed their work with political significance without, however, paying enough attention to their craft. It might be that in the face of death we often want to focus on expressing the essential; such was the case with Wojnarowicz, who “retreated” into painting. Today it is obvious that the story of art in the 1980s belongs as much to artists like him and Jean-Michel Basquiat, as to Julian Schnabel and Anselm Kiefer.
The early 1980s witnessed heated partisan debates about the new meaning of painting, which brings us to the subject of this book: contemporary German painting. In 1980, the art historian Benjamin Buchloh attacked recent European (German and Italian in particular) painting as decadent, “retrograde contemporary art,” steeped in the politics of modernism. He argued: “It is significant in this regard that the German neoexpressionists who have recently received such wide recognition in Europe… have been operating on the fringes of the German art world for almost twenty years. Their “newness” consists precisely in their current historical availability, not in any actual innovation of artistic practice.”That “newness” was interpreted as the skillfulness with which the Neo-Expressionists manipulated and reshuffled visual referents in order to create a feeling of continuity with the past, while paying no serious attention to its problematic historical legacy or political implications. The German-born Buchloh additionally warned against clichés of national characteristics perpetuated by many art critics writing about the new German art.
The critic and art historian Donald Kuspit objected to Buchloh’s arguments, stating, “[a] kind of artificial natural expression [in recent German painting] is used to lay bare the artificiality and abstractness of all expression, particularly our own modern abstractness.” What he was really arguing was that new painting was new, because it reflected the real human condition of the late twentieth century, rather than being a critical discourse in its “adversarial” form rooted in Neo-Marxism. He insisted that the modernist paradigm collapsed under its own weight, and not because of its complicity with autocratic political and artistic systems. For Kuspit, art’s return to nature was not a question of returning in the manner of déjà vue, but rather the acknowledgment of how both art and nature had become equally “artificial,” yet without succumbing to total abstraction and formalism, which he considered regressive. He writes: “Since we no longer know what it is to be natural, nature is no longer a norm, and there is no norm of what it is to be natural, only the deceptive possibility of being ‘natural’ through the release of repressed attitudes and gestures.” The emphasis on the repressed was supposed to stress the redemptive aspects of the new painting, while blending collective and individual consciousness with the unconscious.
Although the two writers opposed each other vehemently, their accounts of recent European painting acknowledge the impact (both positive and negative) of historical conditions, lending urgency to the presence of art in our lives. The “historical availability” of German art after World War II is bound to artistic and socio-political changes in Germany and elsewhere, whether as a concrete and factual political reality (as Buchloh has it), or nightmarish dreams about that reality (as Kuspit sees it). We should keep reminding ourselves that art captures experience beyond being a direct reaction to reality around us, but also that reality impacts and modifies painting in a significant way.
Widespread fascination with the history of Germany reflects our need to see it as punctuated by moments of “abnormality” and extreme irrational behavior, which are supposed to provide important insights into the meaning of our collective identity on a broader level than German nationalism. That history poses a significant dilemma: how does one reconcile the atrocities committed by that nation with its remarkable cultural flowerings? Relevant in this regard is the art historian William Vaughan’s identification of what he sees as “a particular German predicament: intellectual strength and political impotence.”Romanticism redirected the moralizing aspect of art by shifting responsibility from the collective self to the individual one, a shift that left lasting residues on Western attitudes concerning the artist’s role in society. In the early nineteenth century, German writers, poets, and painters perceived culture and the arts—while placing emphasis on the importance of the German language—as crucial binding forces for keeping the country (or Heimat) united, at a time when it existed as a loose geo-political union. They expanded the meaning of the subjective relationship of aesthetics to nature by searching for new spirituality and mysticism and reaching back to pre-modern times, especially the Middle Ages, which—as it was stressed—united people through faith. Romanticism, as an approach to art and life for dealing with the misty unrepresentable (exemplified in the art-historical context by Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings), rather than a coherent stylistic taxonomy, found its extensions in Symbolism and Expressionism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the meaning of inwardness and originality in art and literature underwent a major “shift of consciousness” (Isaiah Berlin’s expression) in a concrete but foggy world.
German Expressionism occupies the position of a “German” movement despite the fact that the use of the word “expressionism” in Germany was originally applied to French art. Academic disputes concerning the origins of the word aside, what the term’s fluidity suggests is that, generally speaking, it is used to characterize the work of artists (and writers) who applied various aesthetic (and linguistic) strategies to enhance expressivity in their art through predominantly realistic means; however, this tendency took a programmatic turn with the appearance of the Brücke and Blaue Reiter movements in early-twentieth-century Germany. Understandably, when Ernst Ludwig Kirchner talks about experiencing life on the Berlin streets, he wants to dissolve, rather than ground himself in, that specific urban environment, in order to arrive at an expressive mode of painting. He behaves, therefore, like the quintessential “stranger” described by the sociologist Georg Simmel, someone whose “position in this group [a group defined by boundaries similar to spatial ones] is determined, essentially, by the fact that he has not belonged to it from the beginning.” Simmel continues: “An estrangement—whether as cause or as consequence it is difficult to decide—usually comes at the moment when this feeling of uniqueness [for instance experienced by lovers] vanishes from the relationship.” Appearance in Kirchner’s works is linked to disappearance, a dialectical condition that later German artists like Gerhard Richter continued to associate with the inability to cope with the heavy condition of life.
Max Beckmann’s lithograph The Ideologists, from the portfolio Hell (1919; ill. 2), was produced by an artist considered a second-generation Expressionist, who reacted to the traumas caused by World War I, the traumas de facto experienced by all Europeans with virtually equal pain. In his work, the artist gathers together the war victims and the ideologues who theorize about their suffering—expressing the futility of politicians’ attempts to speak about true human experience. The absurdity of the depicted situation might be also important here because the aforementioned Buchloh-Kuspit debate tends to put too much emphasis on monolithic Germanness in relation to German art, past and present. And so did the Hungarian Marxist philosopher and literary critic Georg (György) Lukács in his sharp critique of German Expressionism by linking it to Fascism. Focusing on Expressionist literature, Lukács argues: “As a literary form of expression of developed imperialism, expressionism stands on an irrational and mythological foundation: its creative method leads in the direction of the emotive yet empty declamatory manifesto, the proclamation of a sham activism.” As various activist writers used Expressionism to argue on behalf of or against opposite camps, their writings confirm that the burden of history has so heavily impacted German art that it has been very difficult to see it outside of its historical significance.
The tragic ethos of the German artist implicated in the politics surrounding World War II found its symbolic realization in the life and art of the autodidact German artist and photographer Wols (born Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze), a peripatetic artist exiled in Paris during and after World War II. Jean-Paul Sartre describes him as follows: “I got to know Wols in 1945… bald with a bottle and a begging-bag. In his begging-bag he carried the world, his cares, while the bottle contained his death… he was a man who ceaselessly started over again, eternally in the moment.” During the war, Wols fled from both the French, who incarcerated him in 1940, and the Germans, when they occupied France. When following the war Germany was “expelled” from the European family, Wols became a quintessential homeless European artist, whose life paralleled his art. His work was aesthetically rooted in Expressionism, but, at the same time, escaped it (and its political implications) by turning to abstraction in the manner ofTachisme and Art Informel. Thus, although similar in its emotional content to Edvard Munch’s Scream (1893), Wols’s Painting (1946–47; ill. 3) portrays a moment of extreme anxiety experienced in a painterly void, rather than in front of overpowering, concrete nature. What made Wols’s case significant for the redefinition of German identity after World War II was the fact that both Germans and other Europeans perceived him as a non-guilty German, who was extremely traumatized by the war.
Theodor Adorno’s statement “Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” has been cited by so many critics that it’s turned into a catch phrase. Lisa Saltzman invokes it in her 1999 book about Anselm Kiefer, citing Paul Celan’s poetry as a poignant rebuttal of Adorno’s dictum. She argues that Kiefer’s work also strongly reacts to that statement by producing “the repetitive negations of a historically compromised national identity,” as she recalls Fredric Jameson’s maxim, “History is what hurts.” (One might say that the issue of creativity in the aftermath of a traumatic historical event did not lose anything from its past urgency; in fact, it might resonate with a new intensity in our time, given the renewed silent economic complicity with the powers that be adopted by many contemporary artists.) Obviously, Kiefer’s success as an artist with international appeal who ventures into painful aspects of German history would be difficult without other artists’ contributions to the re-examination and re-interpretation of Germanness in the second part of the twentieth century, as well as of those non-Germans whose art addresses the subject of the emotional pain and trauma caused by horrific events.
Joseph Beuys’s impact on twentieth-century art cannot be overstated. Being part of the wartime generation, in his art and life he also dealt with the subject of Germany’s guilt for the atrocities committed during World War II. Beside obvious formal differences, what distinguishes Beuys from Wols is not only the fact that the former speaks from within German society (both in terms of his direct involvement in the war and his place of residency), but, perhaps more importantly, because he actively questions the idea of the German individual being an “embodiment” of human evil in a specific historical context. Instead, he opts for a universal reading, one that takes into account both extreme weaknesses and strengths of human nature, while still rooted in a specific German experience. Beuys publicly objected to the idea of Germanness being abstracted and dematerialized, which for a long time occurred in West Germany to help avoid discussion of sensitive topics related to German culpability for the crimes of the war. In fact, he refused to eliminate visual and tactile references to the horrors of the immediate past, employing “abject” wire, clothes, and fat in his works. Aware of the difficulties facing the postwar German artist on the international scene, Beuys chose to redefine universality by aesthetically and conceptually linking it to the program of the neo-avant-garde as practiced by Neo-Dada and Fluxus artists, which was gaining ground among radical artists around the world. He presented his art and life as connected to the issues of spirituality, cosmogony, myth, ecology, and rebirth, while extending their meanings to a broader but specific social criticism. In fact, Beuys not only produced an original philosophy of art, but of a whole way of life, one imitated by many artists who saw him as a cult figure—the self-image that he methodically cultivated throughout his life. What unites Beuys with younger German artists such as his junior by twenty four years, Kiefer, is the recognition of the need to take a serious critical look at artistic practice, including the very condition of being an artist, while taking into consideration the legacy of a specific historical trauma and its post-traumatic consequences. Still, whereas the former embraces a Neo-Dadaist refusal to employ traditional modes of artistic communication like painting, replacing them with social sculpture, performance, and other ethereal media, the latter makes painting a pivotal aspect of his art praxis.
For the Germans, the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961 was a deeply traumatic experience. The wall divided Germany along ideological differences, while re-opening wounds regarding the role of its citizenry in World War II. Officially, that division was presented as a vital necessity by both sides, but it became clearly apparent that it was much more complicated than the political leadership of the FDR (Federal Republic of Germany) and the GDR (German Democratic Republic) wanted their peoples to know. It was as if the splitting of the country was supposed to guarantee its moral rebirth, which acquired dramatically different significance on the two sides of the Wall, intensifying the Cold War. After the initial shock, the new geo-political situation resulted in a surge of artistic activity in West Germany, and—to a certain degree—in East Germany as well. The surge in the FDR was further intensified by the dynamic radicalization caused by the student movement of the late 1960s, leading to the innovative writings of Peter Weiss, the brothers Christian and Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Grass, and Heinrich Böll, to name just a few; as well as the films of Alexander Kluge and Rainer Warner Fassbinder.
A number of German artists who reacted to that situation with urgency on both sides of the Wall saw moving from one side to the other as their only chance to make art. The most famous of those “fugitives” to the West is Gerhard Richter, who after crossing the border two months prior to the building of the Wall, quickly became a leading voice in German, and, later, international art. Richter is regarded as a true master of the mixing of reality with illusion, which he has done on both thematic and formal levels. He is viewed as an artist who elevated stylistic plurality (or the lack of stylistic identity or consistency) to a virtue by freely switching between figuration and abstraction, between the deployment of heavy impastos and the transparent stylization of photojournalism. In his words: “The blurring is always a kind of emergency butchering [Laughter]. It’s an emergency move at the end. To make the picture in some way attractive to look at, I blur it.” The first “blurred” pictures appeared in Richter’s oeuvre in the early 1960s in reaction to his fatigue for realism, but also—as he has explained—to cover up the misery and terror in real life, thereby perhaps acknowledging the presence of a new trauma caused by the Cold War on both sides of the Berlin Wall.
Around that time, Richter, together with Sigmar Polke and Konrad Lueg (born Konrad Fischer), developed the concept of “Capitalist Realism,” which ironically blurred distinctions, in this case between the aesthetics of Pop Art, rooted in advertising, and Socialist Realism, considered a form of political agitation. The two tendencies were seen as related to propaganda—for a consumer society in the West and Communist dogma in the East. Presented as a critique of the two systems, Capitalist Realism became emblematic of progressive German artists’ search for a third solution. As such, it revealed their wish to escape not only from a polarized identity, located within West German society, but also from the empty “psychological space” between the two Germanys—a rather impossible feat given that the zone around the Wall was the most dangerous, a place where many who tried to escape from East Germany died. Richter’s gradual refusal to attach any overt political reading to this work—even the ones like the series October 18, 1977 (1988), which deals with a specific political event, the imprisonment and death of the members of the Red Army Faction the Baden-Meinhof group—might in fact result from his inability to reconcile the questions of duality between the two parts of Germany and its impact on his art. Thus, he opted for a more open-ended “fiction-ness,” rooted, one might say, in a perverse approach to artistic creation that helped keep him outside of the heated debates about art’s responsibility vis-à-vis capitalist society, including its market-oriented goals. (It is fascinating that in the context of discussing his art, Richter proclaimed: “as a German, I was familiar with the idea of not being worth anything.”) At the same time, Polke’s critical approach to mass culture became transparent with its lack of overt criticism as he started simulating the dot patterns of the commercial four-color printing process, superimposing it on a vast range of subjects often compressed into one canvas. He is often credited with de-emphasizing the presence of the author in his work, a practice interpreted as a reaction against German culture’s heavy reliance on the Romantic notion of the artist or, rather, Artist.
The Germanness of German art found its new visualization in the work of the so-called Neo-Expressionists who established themselves as a crucial voice on the art scene in Germany in the 1970s and early 1980s, artists such as Georg Baselitz (born Hans-Georg Kern), Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz, and A. R. Penck (born Ralf Winkler). The 1981 exhibition A New Spirit of Painting, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, as well as Zeitgeist, which opened in Berlin the following year, placed those artists in the international context, but—as Buchloh reminded us earlier—their art was not entirely new, neither were their artistic programs. A district attorney’s confiscation of Baselitz’s Nackter Mann (Naked Man, 1962) on the charges of public indecency upon its exhibition in Berlin in 1963 has been regarded as a succès de scandale; however, it might instead be seen as an early instance of the overt extension of the political self into the private psycho-sexual self, which could be further perceived as a form of dissident behavior from within the increasingly polarized West German society. Similar to Richter and Polke, Baselitz engaged in a sustained dialogue with the medium of painting and its structural relationship to external reality, rather than their specific political implications. Beginning in 1969, the artist painted his figures upside-down, which for him served as a way of focusing on the pictorial and physical aspects of the medium, rather than the subject.
The anti-art aesthetics propagated by the Neo-Expressionists found its powerful manifestation in the oeuvre of A. R. Penck, an artist who resided in East Germany until 1980, while having an international career. Known for his distinct pictographic style that refers to the “primitive” and the archetypal, the artist mixes artistic idioms, echoing his own complex relationship to his private self, which he also conveyed by adopting several artistic pseudonyms before becoming “A. R. Penck.” His heterogeneous identity of a “New Wilde” seems to extend to the more mythical aspects of Expressionism than, for example, those of the Brücke, perhaps rooted in what Nietzsche once described as the Dionysian foundations of art, related to the unrestrained, “orgiastic” aspects of fertility (creation).
The Neo-Expressionist visual language has, in fact, been far from uniform, suggesting stylistic similarities not only with the works of early-twentieth-century Expressionists such as Kirchner or Beckmann, but also the legacy of the Berlin Dadaists, particularly their interest in collage and photomontage, one shared by many artists in the 1980s. As the politicized use of these techniques in the early twentieth century prompted a subsequent debate concerning artists’ responsibilities vis-à-vis heterogeneous society, a number of feminist scholars have positioned Hannah Höch as one of the paradigmatic artists committed to social causes, especially gender inequality. Höch’s works, such as Collage II (On Filet Ground), from ca. 1925 (ill. 4), reveal the subtlety of her visualization of such complex ideas in a historical context, an aspect of her oeuvre that has contributed to her lasting impact on twentieth-century art. Her collages and photomontages poignantly comment on the fragmented self, extending to both the physical process of art-making and the unstable socio-political conditions of her time.
After World War II, the immaterial and physical or structural aspects of abstraction were explored by the group ZERO (Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günter Uecker), who experimented with oscillating light and the interactive functions of art before turning to more concrete materials such as nails (Uecker), fire and smoke (Piene), and public spaces (Mack). This “apolitical” version of abstraction reacted to International Constructivism, which regained its popularity after the war, but also to such unorthodox practices represented, for example, by Kurt Schwitters’s Hannover Merzbau from the early 1930s. Geometric abstraction in Germany entered a new phase with Imi Knoebel (born Klaus Wolf Knoebel) and Blinky Palermo, whose interest in color and objectness were combined with the practice of “stitching” into their works subtle references to their Germanness and personal referents, viewed as forms of site-specificity. Nowadays, Franz Ackermann further fuses abstraction with representation, pushing the boundaries of site-specificity in terms of its relationship to installation art (including paintings), while connecting his art to themes of tourism, travel, and urban settings. Tatiana Doll endows her paintings of cars and trucks with the physicality of billboards or theatrical props installed in an urban setting. It was, however, the late Michael Majerus who pushed the limits of a poignant engagement with a historical site to a new level of interaction with the viewer in a public space in reunited Germany, when in September 2002 he covered the Brandenburg Gate with a giant image of a housing project several months prior to his death in a plane crash.
The term “Neue Wilden” (New Wild Ones) applies to a large group of prolific German artists located mainly in Berlin, Cologne, and Hamburg, who in the early 1980s passionately embraced Expressionism, while at the same time critically reacting to the then-already “serious” paintings of Baselitz, Kiefer, Polke, and Richter. Documenta 7, held in Kassel in 1982, acknowledged the presence of the new tendency by inviting Walter Dahn, Jiri Georg Dokoupil, and Salomé (born Wolfgang Ludwig Cihlarz) to participate. Two years later, the exhibition Von Hier Aus (Starting Now), at the Messegelände Halle 13 in Düsseldorf, surveyed the development of German art since the late 1970s, introducing to a broader public works by, among others, Günter Förg and Albert Oehlen alongside those by the well-known figures Richter, Baselitz, and Kiefer. The continuity of German art was subsequently celebrated in German Art of the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1905–1985, at the Royal Academy in London in 1985. Again, although labeled as “German,” the new artistic movement was far from coherent, reflecting the regionalism of German art along the lines of affiliations with local art academies, in addition to the varied cultural climates in different German art centers.
In Berlin, the most cosmopolitan of all German cities, the “instability” of the German artistic self was, for example, reflected in the alliance of art with various underground cultures with international appeal, such as Punk and New Wave music and the gay and lesbian nightclub scene. Artists like Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorff, and Salomé (the co-founders of Galerie am Moritzplatz) embraced scandalous behavior, immaturity, and banality; they celebrated the burlesque aspects of urban culture, but also the youth-based consumer culture. The new spirit of activism extended to an artistic “assault” on the Berlin Wall, as many artists on the West German side graffitied the 3.6-meter-high concrete wall erected in 1976 as a reinforcement of the original structure.
TheNeue Wildenlanguage was perhaps familiar, but its message was coded with new significance. Thus, while the dancer depicted in Max Pechstein’s woodcut Dancer in the Mirror (1923) looks like an awkward professional performing for an anonymous crowd of businessmen (with the same “lack of engagement” and mirrored presence as Edouard Manet’s barmaid in Bar at the Folies-Bergère [1882]; ill. 6), Salomé’s figures in Seiltänzer Michelangelo (1989) are portrayed as two androgynous Narcissi provocatively dancing in front of what appears to be a painting of a female nude by Michelangelo, thus in front of another work of art. In the latter painting, the Germanness of German identity finds its expression in the mapping of tensions related to the presence of the Other formulated along cultural, ethnic, and gender divisions, while indirectly linking these ideas to the writings of Derrida, Foucault, Edward Said, and Jacques Lacan. But the postmodern Otherness in the German context was also masterfully conveyed in Fassbinder’s movies such as Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974), Despair, and In a Year of Thirteen Moons (both 1978). Despair (ill. 4) is based on a Vladimir Nabokov novel about mistaken and switched identity, which Fassbinder transformed into a powerful metaphor about the inner and external perception of the self, and, perhaps equally importantly, about the “prismatic identity” (the historian Zygmunt Bauman’s expression, originally used in a different context) of Germans, which results in a distorted, often contradictory, perception of them not only by others, but by themselves as well.
European prismatic identity took on new form in post-Wall Europe. The “Luc Tuymans Effect” is an international phenomenon that united European artists like the Germans Eberhard Havekost and Magnus von Plessen, the Pole Wilhelm Sasnal, and the Belgian Tuymans himself under one rubric despite the lack of direct association between them. In one curator’s words, the artists who followed the Belgian have “inhabited Tuymans’s pictorial world and operational approach as a means to forge a distinctively individual body of work.” With their distinctive representational shorthand of a mostly monochromatic palette and abbreviated, “unfinished” forms, the works of those artists frequently recall underpaintings in their final stage. The artists are often hailed as a small “painterly international,” which, perhaps not surprisingly, emerged when Europe decided to undergo economic unification with the formation of the European Union following the end of the Cold War. As they frequently blend motifs and styles, moving freely between pictographic abstraction and abbreviated figuration with historic referents, they are perceived as commentators on “painting’s failure to provide a coherent worldview”—which seems to be a very narrow view of painting that not only is jargon-driven in its essence, but also forgets that the medium itself could be perceived as a worldview. These artists’ “restrained,” measured approach to painting is in contrast to that of a large group of younger German painters who include Martin Eder, Jonathan Messe, and Daniel Richter, and whose expressive stylization and kitsch in their paintings represents a bolder form of expressiveness currently explored in European painting.
Due to the politics of the Cold War, East Germany reduced its regular interactions with the West, a development that had a major impact on the nation’s artists. In 1989, at the very moment when Eastern Europe was ridding itself of Russian influences, an interesting show took place at the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard University. Entitled Twelve Artists from the German Democratic Republic, the exhibition featured works that appeared stylistically out-of-touch with the artistic trends in the West in the late 1980s. Despite the curator Peter Nisbet’s assurance that “[w]ithin the state’s [GDR’s] ideological rhetoric of a new conception of the human for example, such artists can address concerns that are not specific to any one country (least of all to one so artificially created as the GDR),” the exhibition could be fully comprehended only within the context of the cultural politics of East Germany, which resulted in East German artists’ specific attitudes vis-à-vis both reality and artistic praxis. On a general level, it looked like the experience of East Germans was not so much blurred as “frozen” in time, fostering the heroic attitude toward art already greatly questioned in the West. Indeed, as Herman Raum states in his discussion of Michael Morgner’s work in the GDR, “The long-suffering stand side-by-side with the revolutionaries in this art,” with the word “revolutionaries” having its clear ideological function. The exhibition focused on “suffering” (sometimes through just formal means) and contestation, in stark contrast to West German art, which was at that time usually discussed in terms of “mourning” and “redemption.” As the show and its catalogue (featuring an extensive timeline) demonstrated, the frozen life in East Germany was dynamic, for the state’s intervention into artistic practices in most cases led to a status quo within the “censorship without victims,” but also produced a growing silent resistance that ultimately resulted in the collapse of the system.
When the issue of East Germans’ cooperation with the Communist government became a serious preoccupation for many Germans after the unification, it resulted in more measured discussions of “collaboration” than those carried out during the Cold War period, as portrayed, for example, in the internationally acclaimed 2007 film The Lives of Others; the movie presents an agent of the infamous Stasi (the GDR’s secret police) as a highly conflicted individual, rather than a faceless oppressor. The film spans the periods before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, ending with showing the main protagonists seeing each other’s faces for the first time in reunited Germany, an encounter that remains inconclusive.
The success of the Leipzig School of the mid-1990s to the present is associated with one art institution: the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst, the city’s art academy dating back to 1784. But that success has also something to do with the recent interest in art from Central and Eastern Europe, which in large part results from a subconscious or conscious realization that the oppressive state socialism in the countries behind the Iron Curtain was perhaps ultimately not as terribly destructive as Cold War cultural politics suggested, because it produced both official and unofficial systems of acquiring general knowledge of culture and the arts that, in turn, helped painting retain its meaning and relevance without appearing too self-conscious or irresponsible. Acknowledging the constraints on art in the GDR, the artist Arno Rick claims: “If you want to talk of an advantage, you can say it allowed us to continue in the tradition of Cranach and Beckmann. It protected the art against the influence of Joseph Beuys.” Judging by the present critical discourse, the art world is increasingly willing to reconsider Socialist Realism on aesthetic rather than purely ideological grounds, which might be a more nuanced way of viewing that painting. As figuration maintains its strong appeal to younger generations of artists, other painters born in the former East Germany such as Norbert Bisky and Thomas Scheibitz opt for a freer blending of geometric and/or expressionistic abstraction and representation, which, in addition to Socialist Realism, references Cubism and Surrealism, as well as works of “classics” such as Polke and Richter.
The most successful artist from the Leipzig School, Neo Rauch, is fully aware of the visual potential of Socialist Realism. While using some of its elements as formal tropes, Rauch stages absurdist, dreamy-like scenes that prevent the viewer from reading them as narrative images—unpresentable in their totality. Instead, his paintings take us into enigmatic places, often claustrophobic, yet the only places to be—perhaps much like Leipzig itself, with its eclectic blending of architectural conventions, for Rauch and other artists from there. The strange presence of classically modeled figures that seem straight out of Socialist Realist art, but dressed like unorthodox dandies, does not address media culture à la Capitalist Realism. Rather, it alludes to the conflicted feelings about the tarnished state of current German reality almost twenty years after reunification, albeit tinted by a touch of nostalgia, as Rauch takes us into a labyrinthine world of locales with distinguished yet mysterious architecture, similar to that confronting the reader of Jorge Luis Borges’s short stories from the collection The Aleph (1949), set in a labyrinthine world that simultaneously extends in many directions.
“Seeing through Smoke,” the title of Gary Tinterow’s essay in the catalogue of the 2007 Rauch exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is a play on the name of the artist: the English translation of rauch is “smoke.” The polluted smoke in Rauch’s work is not the sublime mist of the Romantics or the myopic blur of Gerhard Richter, but rather a new chimerical expression of the ponderous condition that sensitive artists experience when confronted with the urgent current reality—refusing to be overpowered or seduced by it. Still, Rauch says: “It seems to me that I am drawn back further and further. That elements from distant periods are knocking on the door and want to be let in. That is also reflected in my dreams, that I am drawn back to earlier lives. The incarnation cycles are trying to reach formulation.”Given the international visibility of artists born in the former GDR, German painting might remain preoccupied with the question of its timeless Germanness. However, its very specific presence both in Germany and on the international scene confirms “the intellectual strength” of the German artist, rather than his/her real or alleged “political impotence.”
1 Richard Galpin, “Erasure in Art: Destruction, Deconstruction, and Palimpsest”; http://www.users.zetnet.co.uk/richart/texts/erasure.htm.
2 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henry Holt, 1911), as quoted in http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bergson.htm.
3 As quoted in the introduction to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976 ed.), XXXII.
4 Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Huber L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 216.
6 Paul Crowther, “Beyond Art and Philosophy—Deconstruction and the Post Modern Sublime,” in Andreas Papadakis, ed., Deconstruction (London: Academy Editions, 1989), 99.
7 Hal Foster, “Re: Post,” in Brian Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism: Rethinking Representation (New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984), 199.
8 Paul Auster, “The Book of Memory,” in The Invention of Solitude (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 136.
10 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Figures of Authority, Ciphers of Regression: Notes on the Return of Representation in European Painting,” in Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism, 120.
12 Donald B. Kuspit, “Flak from the ‘Radicals’: The American Case against Current German Painting,” in Wallis, ed., Art after Modernism, 138–39.
14 William Vaughan, German Romantic Painting (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1980), 3.
15 Furthermore, Donald E. Gordon argues that “[t]he actual inventor of the Expressionist label was Antonin Matejcek, a twenty-year-old student of art history, who was born in Budapest, briefly resided in Paris, and published his seminal essay in Prague. His thesis was that there was a new antithesis to impressionism in modern French art, which he explicitly labeled ‘expressionism.’ ” Donald E. Gordon, Expressionism: Art and Idea (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987), 175.
16 Georg Simmel, The Stranger, an essay included in his book Soziologie: Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Leipzig: Verlag von Duncker & Humblot, 1908 ), as quoted in http://www.ucc.ie/social_policy/the_stranger.htm.
17 Georg Lukács, “Expressionism: its Significance and Decline,” Intenationale Literatur (1934), as quoted in Rose-Carol Washton Long, ed., German Expressionism: Documents from the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (New York: G. K. Hall & Co, 1993), 316.
18 As quoted in Joan Marter, Abstract Expressionism: The International Context (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 99.
19 After Wols’s death in 1951, his reputation grew, and his works were featured in, among other exhibitions, Documenta 2 and 3 in Kassel in 1959 and 1964, the first of which turned into a belated homecoming of sorts for the artist’s work.
20 Lisa Saltzman, Anselm Kiefer and Art after Auschwitz (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1.
22 “Gerhard Richter: the Day Is Long (interviewed by Robert Storr),” Art in America (January 2002), no. 1: 73.
24 The name “Die Neue Wilden” (The New Wild Ones) was given to such artists as Lüpertz, Baselitz, Penck, and Salomé in connection with the 1980 exhibition Les Nouveaux Fauves—Die Neue Wilden at the Neue Galerie in Aachen.
27 Peter Nisbet, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Twelve Artists from the German Democratic Republic, exh. cat. (Boston, Mass.: Busch-Reisinger Museum, 1989), 13.
28 Herman Raum, “Concordia Discors: Common Elements among Incomparable Temperaments,” in ibid., 47–48.
29 For a discussion of the situation of artists behind the Iron Curtain, see Miklós Haraszti, The Velvet Prison: Artists under State Socialism (New York: Basic Books, Inc., Publishers, 1987).
30 Arthur Lubow, “The New Leipzig School,” New York Times Magazine (January 8, 2006); n.p.; accessed through http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/08/magazine/08leipzig.html?pagewanted=all.
31 Other artists associated with the Leipzig School, such as Tilo Baumgärtel, Tim Eitel, Martin Kobe, Christoph Ruckhäberle, David Schnell, and Matthias Weischer, explore their dystopian fantasies, while insisting that a painting’s integrity resides in the commitment to the medium itself.
32 Lubow, “The New Leipzig School.”
October 2008
Panel discussion at the School of Visual Arts:
October 2008
Inside a Whirlpool 
Exhibition catalogue, Museum of Modern Art in Caracas, Venezuela
“You have had a good look at the whirl now,” said the old man, “and if you will creep round the crag, so as to get in its lee and deaden the roar of the water, I will tell you a story that will convince you I ought to know something of the Moskoe-ström.”
–Edgar Allan Poe, Descent into the Maelström
Gabriela Morawetz’s works presented at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Caracas conceptually originated at the Kordegarda Gallery in Warsaw, Poland, in 2001, where the artist showed an installation centered around two flat, triangular containers filled with water dripping from the ceiling and flanked by two sculpted heads, which looked like they were satisfying anarcissistic thirst for self-reflection.
Paul Valéry has written, “As for the idea of a beginning —I mean an absolute beginning— it is necessarily a myth. Every beginning is a coincidence: we must imagine it as some sort of contact between all and nothing.” In Greek mythology, a whirlpool stands in for thesea-nymph Charybdis (or Kharybdis), a daughter of Poseidon and Gaia, who flooded land to enlarge her father’s kingdom. To punish her, Zeus turned Charybdis into a whirlpool, which, in return, mercilessly devoured everything and anybody who approached too closely. Consequently, the myth has mutated in art and literature in many directions. In the Odyssey, for example, Odysseus had to terrifysome of the members of his crew with thesix-headed monster Scylla to avoid their allbeing swallowed by Charybdis; and also —let’s not forget— to get the shades in Hades talk, he fed them blood. Nowadays, the saying “between Scylla and Charybdis” meansbeing caught between two dangers and having to choose one of them, negotiating between two extremes —to be able to survive, to be. Such a choice is a gamble with high unpredictability, one that, poetically speaking, takes place between the ocean and the sky, with or without a tempest. The whirlpool stands for nothing, rather than for being or becoming, as it takes theform of a spinning center that communicates the presence of a void. In existentialist terms, such a presence might cause nausea, not that different from the one described by Jean-Paul Sartre as spreading “at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time —the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain.” (In fact, at the present, the oil stain might be a relevant metaphor for a Homeric feeding of blood to ghosts.) Being between Scylla and Charybdis also can standfor the presence of a double, which is important in Morawetz’s work, for example, how it reflects on the past, directly and obliquely.
Stretching toward extremes yet highly intimate, the world in Morawetz’s art, in which the earth and people seem to be most immaterial and the sea and the sky most material, echoes Hieronymus Bosch’s dazzling The Garden of Earthly Delights,ca. 1504, in its indexical rather than anecdotal (be it moralistic, symbolic or theological) form. It is an inverted place, in which the earth floats upon a sea, and carnal lust —not insignificant here— is the “music of the flesh.” Being a timeless warning against the closeness between Thanatos and Eros, this highly unconventional tribute to life and death (blending and bleeding) reveals those aspects of thehuman condition that are bound to loss without becoming abject. But, as Geogre Bataille has argued,“Communication, in my sense of the word, is never stronger than when communication, in the weak sense, the sense of profane language, or, as Sartre says, of prose which makes us and the others appear penetrable, fails and becomes the equivalent of darkness.” In art, this particular condition of freedom in darkness has evolved from a demiurgic one to that what the Czech writer Milan Kundera has called in a different context “une condition lourde,” a heavy condition, which is the most mysterious and the most ambiguous because it is bound to the ordinary.
The Caracas exhibition, entitled Juegos de la mirada (Games of the Eye), included the multi-panel series Ojos del tiempo (Time’s Eye), 2005-06, which consists of thirteen mixed media, photography-based works in the form of large (100 centimeters in diameter) convexdisks. Etched with images that superpose partially clothed human figures in various positions over whirlpools, the works are “encrusted” with stones. Arranged in a galaxy-like formation, the works seemed to be spinning in a paralogic way, perhaps even analchemical one, and therefore—as Mircea Eliade defines it—concerned with the passion, the death, and the marriage of substances. Are they celestial constellations or colonies of organisms seen through an imaginary microscope? The question is irrelevant, for it has been often observed than the microcosm and the macrocosm resemble each other not only physically, but also in terms of their philosophical equivalence: they form an ontological reality, in which the maximum is identical to the minimum. Another piece in the show,
J’ai melé l’oeil au temps: Le vértige est au fond, 2004, was a double triptych displayed side by side, but with a deceptive linearity of its narrative. By pairing images of figures with close-ups of fantastic landscapes, the artist bypassed traditional illusionism, while directing our gaze in and out of the picture plane. The work, titled after a poem by Jean Tardieu (a poet associated with the edge of silence in the Theatre of the Absurd) addresses the subject of mobility of signs and simultaneity of viewings points: upward and downward, from above, from below, and in between. J’ai melé l’oeil au temps: Le vértige est au fond is punctuated with small glass pieces etched with images to suggest that the mega-picturing consists of smaller diverse views and as such offers a more holistic view of the universe, one with distorted perspective and built of fragments.
Most of Morawetz’s works are photograph-based, and as such register disappearance and absence, but also the presence of desire. Although they depict concrete people, the human presence is reduced to a flickering reflection, an index, both in terms of physical significance and raison d’être. Some of those images are “extracted” from the artist’searlier films or photographs —thus circulating on their own in the whirlpool of meaning— while other are based on photographs taken specifically for a given work. Playing with representations of the shadow, in her works Morawetz moves back and forth between figuration and abstraction, between the material and the immaterial, while reducing her chromatic spectrum to earthy grays, browns, and ochres. The space in her works suggests a map, a screen, a fantastic laboratory, a Wunderkabinet, and a Panoptic machine.
In Juego de miradas (Game of Glances), 2005-6, five tables —each equipped with one leg only and leaning for balance on large sheets of glass perpendicularly inserted into the wooden top— look like insecure pedestals for the bronze heads with conessticking from them, each equipped with a magnifying glass, to allow the viewer to “enter” their minds. As we move around the piece with multiple glass reflections, we are swirling like dancers, encountering the same, or similar, object in a multiplicity of positions, but also a multiplicity of significances: they are physical tables, imitations of tables, and the idea of atable,which lingers in our memory in its archetypal state. As a work of art, the table also stands for displaying knowledge in “a system contemporary with itself.” In Juego de miradas, touch and vision (the carnal and the retinal) are interdependent parts of an operation of combining elements executed with traditional techniques of modeling and the others based on Minimalist austerity.
Like the mountain nymph Echo, in the labyrinthine journeying in space we eventually arrive at a pool of water to confront our reflection. A pool five meters in diameterin Casi en la sombra (Almost in the Shadows), 2005-06, was annexed tothe gallery space in Caracas next to a nine-meter-long semi-circular screen with nine views of a naked woman searching for something undetermined in a landscape, which once again is represented as half-earthly and half-celestial. From the moment that the observer encounters this installation,Morawetz’s works seem to“dematerialize” even further into kaleidoscopic images and reflections, while doing what kaleidoscopes do—“fragmenting any point of iconicity and disrupting stasis.” The moon and the sun can be observed from videos transmitted inside two large conic sculptures made of wood, titled L’oeil de lune and L’oeil du soleil, both 2004, suspended from the ceiling. Interestingly enough, these most material pieces in this exhibition tuned outto be the most fantastic “cones of vision.” The video Uno (One) focuses on a Japanese dancer, Matsuo Shoji, a member of the Sankai Juku company, which is renownedfor its performances that explore the infinity of movement in relation to gravity as a propertyof the earth,but also of our habitat. (The piece provides another instance of graphological bracketing in the artist’s life: Morawetz saw the Japanese company for first time in Caracas in the late 1970s; then she saw them again in Paris, where she currently lives, few years ago). In this dreamy projection, which was doubled by its reflection in a mirror placed at a ninety-degree angle in relation to the screen, the dancer’s body turns into a human whirlpool. The classic dance performance in slow motion overlaps with phantasmagoric “visions,” taking us on a journey not unlikeLewis Carroll’s fall into the rabbit hole: “‘Well!’ Alice thought to herself, ‘after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs.’”
It must be intentional that the show concludes with Pozos (Wells), 2005-06, with three wall projections of whirlpools turning around and around, moving to the sound of water music that appears to come from a well. When the whirlpools reappear in the openings on the floor with more projections, figures return. These are friends, family, but also strangers encountered by the artist during her numerous trips to different parts of the world. An imaginary journey that required constant redirecting of thegaze invokes real people as “celestial bodies,” who might also function as our doubles, witnessing both the presence and the departure of the observer from Morawetz’s exhibition.
A whirlpool in multiple reincarnations, omnipresent in the artist’s new installations, sculptures and videos, for Morawetz stands for a model of inverted subjectivity, a circular, kinetic phenomenon with no beginning and no ending, but —perhaps more importantly— with a center that is both present and absent. It might also bea metaphor of the eye (both mechanical and metaphysical), and thus for vision, which produces theoptions of seeing. Creating his own Cherybdisian whirlpool of significance, Jean Baudrillard has observed, “illusion is not the opposite of reality; it is a more subtle reality which enwraps the primary one in the sign of its disappearance.” To comprehend the rich universe depicted in Morawetz’s work we also need to redirect out gaze and see what has been a part of our seeing for a long time, and so closely echoes Juegos de la mirada: “And the same object appears straight when looked at out of the water, and crooked when in the water; and the concave becomes convex . . . . Thus every sort of confusion is revealed within us; and this is the weakness of the human mind on which art of conjuring and of deceiving by light and shadow and other ingenious devices imposes, having an effect upon us like magic.” Reflecting Plato’s words, Morawetz’s introspective works radiate magic, while producing an enchanting whirlpool of significance.
© Marek Bartelik
Endnotes:
2 Paul Valéry, “On Poe’s Eureka,” in Selected Writings of Paul Valéry (New York: New Directions Books, 1964 ed), p. 125.
4 George Bataille, Literature and Evil, quoted in Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss, Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), p. 205.
6 Expression borrowed from Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1973 ed), p. 74. Foucault uses it in relation to modern sciences.
7 Discussion of the meaning of the kaleidoscope for Baudelaire in Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995 ed), pp. 113-4.
8 Quoted from the hyperlink: www.cs.indiana.edu/metastaff/wonder/ch1.html; accessed September 16, 2006.
visit also: http://www.gabrielamorawetz.com
October 2008
Brochure for Miguel Palma’s exhibition in Lisbon, see below:
visit also: http://www.mpalma.net
Art Fairs International
July 14, 2008
Notes on Logic Unleashed: European and American Abstraction Now at Mondrian House
Marek Bartelik©
Gathering together a group of internationally renowned artists¬¬, this exhibition explored the relevance of abstraction in artistic works while suggesting that despite its “limited” or “infinite” vocabulary—as well as the current interests in painting that seem to prefer figuration—original works in this mode continue to be made. The show argued that, for a number of contemporary artists and viewers, the appeal of abstraction lies in the fact that it conveys individuality while allowing a commonality of experience defined by shared universality and accessed transcendence.
The exhibition’s curator, Juliette Kennedy, (herself a mathematician), converged art and mathematics and approached aesthetics from a multidirectional standpoint. She stressed that her show existed “in the transcendent, semi-mystical space invented by Mondrian.” Logic Unleashed: European and American Abstraction Now featured works of Bob Bonies, Andreas Brandt, Kathrin Hilten, Wanda Kossak, Matti Kujasalo, Elena Lux-Marx, Marjatta Palasto, Steven Rand, Fred Sandback (1943-2003), and Remko Scha in different mediums. The work in the exhibition ranged from Kujasalo beautifully playful reductive paintings that tackle the problem of “inverted modernism,” to Sandback’s site-specific refine line “drawings” in space made of colored yarn. It then smoothly transitioned from Brandt’s optically regulated works to Rand’s mesmerizing “patchworks” of Formica sample chips. What connected all the artists in the show was their focus on the formal, systematic qualities of their work, rather than their attachment to specific, overtly spelled-out political agendas. Occuring in the Dutch artist’s birthplace—which can be viewed as “a semi-mystical space” itself—the exhibition provided a fertile ground for visualizing various ideas about contemporary abstraction without limiting them to an exclusive program. In conjunction with the show, a seminar on aesthetics and mathematics was held at the Utrecht University’s Philosophy Department.
In an e-mail sent to this author, Kennedy elaborates on the definition of transcendence that lies at the core of her concept of abstraction by connecting it to Husserlian phenomenology. This phenomenology suggests that “the world is constituted in the mind.” “This is paradoxical,” she writes, “because we too are part of the world, and thus equally so constituted. But this is the basic picture in phenomenology: a person is both an object in the world, that is to say an object among other objects; but at the same time the person endows the world with its meaning.”
In her approach to abstraction, Kennedy follows in the footsteps of the artists who, in the early twentieth century, defined abstraction in the context of modernity, while grappling with the issue of the individual versus the universal. The early modernists, such as Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian and Theo von Doesburg, agreed that despite or because of its intellectual rigor and reductive form, abstraction endows the visible with the invisible. As such, art reveals the transcendental aspect of reality, which on an aesthetic level requires moving representation beyond naturalism. Ultimately, the iconic art championed by Malevich and Mondrian became hermetic, yet the thinking behind it continues to evolve.
Our skepticism toward heroic approaches to the creation of art might spring from the fact that abstract art can be seen as devoid of contemporary punctum, to use Roland Barthes’s expression. Punctum, or an artistic “detail” that pricks our eye and “arouses great sympathy” in the viewer, conversely “shows no preference for morality or good taste.” Needless to say, most of abstract art projects the quality of “good taste.” However, as Kennedy observes, we are living in a world in “terrible trouble, which does not privilege—for a moment—any type of abstract thinking, even the noble one.” The great impact of current world events on our lives, (as well as a rather unstable state of contemporary art), might, in fact, be responsible for the phenomenon of attempting to reconnect current artistic expressions with broader ideas, be it sciences or cognitive philosophies.
The sublime aspect of abstract art can hardly be understood in abstract. It is a historical phenomenon, which locates its roots in the writings of the Greek poet Cassius Longinus. Kennedy’s complex weaving of the meaning of abstraction parallels the reasoning of contemporary thinkers, such as Jean François Lyotard, Fredric Jameson and Alain Badiou. Returning to Edmond Burke’s Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), Jameson distinguishes between immanence and transcendence and connects them to the concepts of beauty and the sublime. He views the former as “a self-sufficient experience of small scale objects, the small pleasures of the creation,” and the latter as “the pleasures of fear that it involves, the aesthetic appropriation of ‘pain.’” In the sublime, experienced objects are “pretexts” for the intuition to confront a “sheer unfigurable force”— only to be stunned by the realization that the intuition “finds no figure for that awesome power in and of itself.” One might argue that art in general might be a “pretext” for dealing with “pain” in one form or another, whether it is beautiful of sublime, or both. What is perhaps more important is that the meaning of art strongly resides in the consciousness of the artist which is a vital component of the experiential relationship between freedom of expression and its external conditioning. By inviting both European and American artists, Kennedy succeeded in blurring the boundaries between the beautiful and the sublime, (a sublime experience in itself), and by doing so, produced a disequilibrium. In our contemporary context, this disequilibrium offers a necessary component for expressing complexities of the “geometry” of our experience.
In the context of connections between aesthetics and mathematics that the symposium in Utrecht addressed, Alain Badiau’s writings appear to be particularly illuminating in terms regarding how these connections relate to contemporary abstraction. Badiau argues that mathematics and art are part of the same equation because they are rooted in our belief in the necessity of systematic thinking. Interviewing Badiou, Lauren Sedofsky voiced concerns about the danger of the return to order: “The return to systematic philosophy today might seem archaic, if not impossible. How do you explain your conviction not only that the systematic thinking that runs through the history of philosophy from Plato to Heidegger is still possible, but also that this architecture serves some purpose?” The French philosopher answered: “if by ‘system’ you mean, first, that philosophy is conceived as an argumentative discipline with a requirement of coherence, and second, that philosophy never takes the form of a singular body of knowledge but, to use my own vocabulary, exists conditionally with respect to a complex set of truths, then it is the very essence of philosophy to be systematic.” Stressing the importance of philosophy in the evaluation of time, Badiau sees it as crucial for comprehending “that this time, our time, has value.” Thus, the French philosopher connects ontology to mathematics. “If we take ‘ontology,’ as we must, literally or etymologically,” he reasons, “that is, as what can be said about being qua being, then we ought to say that it’s mathematics. Mathematics secularizes infinity in the clearest way, by formalizing it. The thesis that mathematics is ontology has the double-negative virtue of disconnecting philosophy from the question of being and freeing it from the theme of finitude. That’s why it represents a powerful break.”
Badiou avoids bridging philosophy directly with aesthetics, but one might argue that the question of how to endow our time with value remains central to our concerns about the relationship between contemporary art and life. How is one to deal with the finitude of such concepts as “it has been already done” and “the work of art as a commodity”? “What to do after an orgy?” Jean Baudrillard asked describing the postmodern condition. And how to make art in the time of war?
Contemporary artists may not philosophize about the questions posed above and they usually don’t study mathematics, but that does not mean that they don’t think about these concerns. This exhibition suggested that our thinking might be best expressed in much the same way that artists visualize systems, endowing art with an inner structure that derives power from “the double-negative virtue of disconnecting” it “from the question of being and freeing art from the theme of finitude.” Let’s recall that the English word “sublime” derives from the Latin “sublimes” which means “looking up from under the lintel.” For abstract artists, the question remains: how does one create a reasonable and sound “scaffolding” that connects the sky to the earth, while at the same time considering whether or not to touch the ground.
BAZIS 2 magazine
A Heavy Condition: the Art of Gorzo
“Iconoclasm and l’Art pour l’Art are different responses to the same unease.”
—T.J. Clark
The Romanian artist Gorzo distinguishes himself from the many East Europeans who frequently exhibit in New York today in a dramatic fashion: He plays with the outmoded, déclassé folklorization of art on both anecdotal and formal levels. By decorating a neutral gallery with flowers, he turns his new exhibition into a colorful visual spectacle, sort of an installation, endowing it with a mis-en-scène that provocatively dazzles our senses, transforming a neutral Chelsea space into a portrait gallery filled completely with large painted woodcarvings that depict Rumanian peasants.
Gorzo was born in a village called Leud, located in the Maramures region of Northern Transylvania, some 550 kilometers from Bucharest. Between 1993 and 1998, he studied painting at the Bucharest Art Academy under Florin Mitroi. Recalling his professor Gorzo observes: “Our relationship started in a classical way: he was the teacher, I was a rebellious student, who wished to reform painting at any price. While he was a decent man, I was an outspoken young person. . . . We were destined to become friends, which happened three years later. Today I recall how much he had believed in art as pure expression.” In a strange way, Gorzo’s insistence on questioning the established artistic norms while understanding their significance for urgency of communication appears to be in synch with provocative Dadaist attitudes toward making and disseminating art (despite, or perhaps because of, obvious formal differences); after all, as Tom Sandqvist and others have argued, “dada comes from the East” —indeed, from Rumania, to be precise.
Although passionately involved in the transformations of the artistic life of the Romanian capital, Gorzo retains an ambiguous attitude toward Bucharest in a fanciful manner by taking on the persona of a rustic rebel. His half-serous, half-humorous yearning for the simplicity of the“natural” rural life of his childhood, is not, however, a pure nostalgia for a paradise lost, but rather a form of distancing, a conscious strategy of contestation from within, which allows him to reflect on the confusing reality of post-Communist Romania. In fact, Gorzo is often viewed as a sharp, even cruel commentator on the changes he sees around him—political, economic, and cultural—which, as he is first to acknowledge, are not all for the better. His art seems to be saying: The Leud peasants might not be the most politically radical or artistically sophisticated people, but they are far from being fooled by the promises of an easy future packaged as bright advertisements produced and disseminated by media culture. Reacting to themodern world, they cling to their roots to remain people knowledgeable of their history and the agents of what Milan Kundera called “une condition lourde” (a heavy condition), which according to the Czech-born writer is the most mysterious and the most ambiguous of all states, since it is bound to the ordinary.
Artistically, Gorzo’s new works forcefully bridge high and low. His “low” wooden carvings reference Romanian rural tradition both as a material culture and asfolk tales (or rather bestiaries), blending fantastic dreams, desires and superstitions. Although highly moralistic in its insistence on traditional values, such a world is also one of bodily transgressions, which the artist exposes by making his curved background figures interact with the painted ones in the foreground in a highly eroticized fashion. Gorzo chooses photorealism as a high-art aesthetic that he contrasts to the low-art folk aesthetic of modern peasant life,which nowadays often incorporates realism as an expression of its own version of modernity. His photorealism is a form of contemporary craftsmanship. However, as if acknowledging the omnipresence of media culture even in the most remote Romanian villages, his silhouetted peasants (sometimes cropped to body parts) painted on top of wooden reliefs often resemble people in modern tourist brochures advertising Rumania as an exotic place; the ceremonial, “on-display” aspect of their presence is reflected in their beautifully patterned costumes. Their meditative, wrinkled faces give witness to their courage and endurance through daily hardship. Their shared fate is reflected in the quiet sadness of their eyes. Yet, despite their specificity, they increasingly look like bodies without history.
In fact, there is something highly “ahistorical” in Gorzo’s approach to style in his art, which seems to be quite puzzling considering how much eastern and central Europe has been steeped in history. This ambiguity toward the past has been explored by some of the most adventurous minds interested in the events that shaped the region, such as Kundera, Adam Zagajewski, or Slavoj Zizek, who exposed the totalizing aspects of that history as a form of oppression. Despite its global appearance, the current world continues to be fragmented, a situation that eastern European bodies have recently experienced in a tragic way during the war in the former Yugoslavia, Romania’s neighbor. But this fragmentation—as painful as it is—is also a form of resistance against both the dehumanization of the Communist period and uniformity inpresent life, which also threatens local contemporary art.
One might argue that Gorzo’s artistic attitude toward the past is essentially “postmodern,”but such a general term does not fully explain his work. Unlike many East European artists who opt for embracing the latesttendencies in high art—be it the “Tuyman’s effect” or excavating historical avant-garde—Gorzo chooses overt “stylization” (as opposed to “style”) as a weapon against the oppressive impact of history and of art history as well. By doing so, he allies himself with those modern artists, and some contemporary ones as well, who celebrate their status as outsiders coming from places considered peripheral. In fact, he reaches to the very basis of his peripheral status and exposes it. By doing so, he becomes his own mirror reflection, rather than seeing himself through the eyes of the center. (With his peripherality being abject, it is notsurprising that his works needed to be fumigated before being allowed to enter the United States, in compliance with Federal regulations to prevent potential spread of insects and disease.)
While Gorzo derives power from being a quintessential, “stereotypical” Romanian, he subverts obvious identity politics, whichhave turned a large part of contemporary art into a competition for the most politically correct Other. He might humorously ally himself with those who are getting tired of PC agendas in art. Involved in providing sharp criticism of thespecific, often contradictory, reality around him, Gorzo resists succumbing to the already stereotypical model of the Other by refusing to plug into the new formal “internationalism” in art in an obvious way. As he continues to play the role of a rustic rebel, he must still recall how much his former professor Florin Mitroi believed in the purposefulness of art as pure expression.
April 2008
Catalogue essay for: “Neo-Constructivism: Art, Architecture, and Activism,” Paul Robeson Galleries and the NJIT Galleries, Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey; opening february 9, 2008
From Politics to Reality: Constructivism in the United States
On the Internet, nowadays the fastest channel of communication, a message reads:
“For a moment, the illusion was complete—as I came out of the Arboretum Ramp at Hilldale [Madison, WI] and looked up at the roofline of the shopping center, backlit by the late afternoon sun, I thought for an instant I had wandered into the world of Russian Constructivism. Nearly all the elements were there in the decorative detail: the circle, the arcs, the geometric grid, the angled S-curve (granted, in true Constructivist fashion, it should all have been a bit more tilted and askew, but it was close enough).”
In the arch above me, the letters of the English alphabet had merged into illegibility with their mirror images, due to the translucent background, which allowed their reversed, backlit shadows to superimpose themselves. For one disorienting instant, it looked like Russia’s Cyrillic alphabet. I could only guess at what it said. Constructivist Theme Park, maybe[i]
Has the term “Russian Constructivism” become so esoteric, so imprecise and soahistorical that any presence of geometry, or the mere suggestion of the Cyrillic alphabet, is enough to assign the term to a building or an artwork? How has Constructivism blended with everything around us to become part of the “theme park” that our culture increasingly seems to resemble?
In the late 1960s, blurring the boundaries between the innovative art created shortly before and afterthe 1917 Revolution in Russia, the artist George Rickey observed the following in his book on International Constructivism: “Supposedly invented by the Russian artist Vladimir Tatlin, who assembled ‘corner constructions’ in 1914, it is one of those words which become technical terms without ever having been defined. It was carefully skirted by Tatlin’s compatriot, Naum Gabo, who always used the more generic term ‘constructive’ for his art instead of ‘constructivist.’”[ii] Forty years later, historians have corrected many early assumptions about the Russian avantgarde, but the dilemma of how to view Constructivism, particularly in relation to contemporary art, remains. The British artist Gavin Wade provided me with the following definition of Constructivism: “The highest springboard for the leap into the universal human culture.” Mentioning El Lissitzy as a Constructivist who has inspired him the most, Wade continued, “It is as much the incompleteness or failure to satisfy the constructivists’ ambitions perhaps that has always attracted me and set a challenge for how the ideas can work in different ways in different times.”[iii]
The origins of a gradual dissolution of Constructivism into an ahistorical aesthetic have been linked to the demise of the “historical avantgarde” in the 1930s, as discussed by Peter Bürger in his study Theory of the Avant-Garde.[iv] In this seminal book, he argued (via Benjamin and Adorno) that the attempts of avantgarde artists to subvert artistic autonomy by incorporating art into life praxis, and thus change the society, failed because the so-called “culture industry” (institutions and ideology in service of the bourgeoisie) succeeded in absorbing and disarming all kinds of political radicalism in art, doing it in the name of self-criticism. Mapping the “hidden dialectic among the avant-garde, technology, and mass culture,” important to the Constructivists, Andreas Huyssen argues that although the historical avantgarde vanished, its fate has not been completely sealed, following in the footsteps of those critics who questioned Bürger’s causal approach to art. He stresses that the avantgarde was suppressed differently in Russia and the West, because of the differences in political, economic, and cultural circumstances.[v] Expanding on Huyssen’s argument, one might propose that Russian Constructivism as a historical formation was, in fact, suppressed both in the Soviet Union and in the West, virtuallysimultaneously but differently, practically and theoretically. In Soviet Russia, Constructivism was castigated as a new form of decadent bourgeois formalism, out of sync with the new proletarian culture, and therefore forbidden. In the West it was gradually frozen in a formalist discourse, which stripped it from its original political significance and commitment, while transforming itinto a meta-language expressing a Great Utopia.
It has been argued that America’s special role in the depoliticization of modern art sprang in a natural way from its cultural specificity as a country, in which “the literary and artistic heritage never played as central a role in legitimizing bourgeois domination as it did in Europe.”[vi] But one might say furtherthat the United States might not be preoccupied with challenging bourgeois culture and politics simply because it inherited them with inbuilt conservatism. This became even more clear after the Second World War, whenthe United States, with New York as a new art center, turned into a generator of newness in art, which was instituted mostly under private, middle-class patronage-turned-market, organized around a culture industry. Such a “depoliticization” was de facto a new politicization of Constructivism, adversarial artistic engineering, which overall links it to specific ideology, although different from the original one proposed in Russia. Russian dystopia became American utopia, with topos in both cases meaning a standardized method of constructing an argument.
“The Old Believers”
The Machine Age in the United States, as the period of the 1920s and 1930s is often referred to, “was ultimately the product of business and the middle class.”[vii] That cultural and social subtext kept taking on different turns as the twentieth century progressed, while different art movements emerged under the administration of the culture industry. “Because they had borrowed a seemingly perfect method,” as John M. Jordan convincingly argues, “as the era’s material environment bore witness, these individuals [middle-class managers, journalists, and academics] and their organizations could claim a ‘scientific’ mandate to tell other people what to do, to force them, in the words of the Russian avant-garde novelist Evgeny Zamyatin [in his book We], to be happy.”[viii]
Originally, Constuctivism and politics were meant to be united, following the opening line in the “Program of the First Working Group of Constructivists,” published in Ermitazh in Moscow in 1922: “The Group of Constructivists has set itself the task of finding the communistic[my emphasis] expression of material structures;”[ix] which was echoed in Alexei Gan’s book Constructivism (1922). Although many Americans might have agreed that reality is socially constructed, in a new political paradigm for “the one best way” (the Taylorites expression) there was little room for “communistic expression.”
The Société Anonyme’s role in creating information channels and producing written records to propagate modern art in America has been well documented. While defining the meaning of modern art for the local audience, the societyproduced a new system, amodern doctrine for connecting modern art to the art market. Katherine S. Dreier, one of the founders of the society,was the first American collector to buy works by Lissitzky and Kazimir Malevich from the Erste Russiches Kunstaustellung in Berlin in 1922; soon after works by Russian artists appeared in various exhibitions in the United States. Upon Dreier’s return from hertrip to Europe, she wrote, mixing skepticism with enthusiasm: “The service which Soviet Russia has rendered to the rest of the world has been chiefly that it has scattered most of its creative and living spirits over the world.”[x] Thus, Russian artists, even those with deep political convictions, were categorized as free “spirits” living abroad, and the label stuck to them for a long time.
It would be an oversimplification to suggest that only a few people played crucial roles in shaping the reception of, and discourse on,Russian Constructivism in this country, for its fate in America was the result of a variety of factors, both inside and outside of art history. Needless to say, art historiography and criticism are often discriminatory. Still, it might be worth looking at specific individuals as dramatis personae to see how exactly Russian Constructivism was introduced into this country practically as soon as it occurred in Russia.
The Russian-born artist, writer and a fellow traveler Louis Lozowick has been credited with playing a critical role in introducing theRussian avantgarde to the American audience after his overseas trips, the first one being to France, Germany, and Russia in the early 1920s. Using publications linked to the Société Anonyme as a platform, he first discussed Russian Dadaists—focusing on Aleksei Kruchenykh, arguing that they “have been writing longer than their analogues in America and France.[xi] In 1923, in “A Note on Russian Modern Art,” published in Broom, Lozowick praised the Soviets for giving “a great impetus to artistic effort by inaugurating a program of reform on a scale hardly paralleled in any other modern State.” Mapping the development of Russian art back to the Wanderers, he credited Alexander Rodchenko’s three monochromes (blue, yellow, and red) from 1921 as forming “a passage into the open.” “It is the passage,” he further argued, “leading from art to production. Art should merge with life.” However, he also wrote that not all Constructivists were interested in strict utilitarianism, for some preferred to embrace “a romantic adoration of the machine.” For Lozowick, artists with strong personalities, such as Alexander Archipenko and Wassily Kandinsky, seemed to promise a great impact—potentially greater than that of the Constuctivists—on modern art.[xii] While Lissitzky’s design was featured on the cover of the same issue of Broom in which the American artist wrote“A Note on Russian Modern Art,”his text concluded by shifting itsperspective from artists living in Russia to Russian artists living in the West.
In the 1920s, Jane Heap, a fringe character by many standards, edited The Little Review, elevating it into one of the most progressive publications devoted to modern art. Since 1914, The Little Review (originally devoted to “literature, drama, music, and art”) gradually turned into a forum for discussing new trends in art. By the early 1920s, the review devoted articles to French Dadaism, Brancusi, Picabia, Léger, Gris—artists already highly regarded in Paris—as well as Joseph Stella. The presence of Constructivism was mostly reduced to visual evidences, be it a photograph of Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, 1919-20 (a canonical constructivist work reproduced in the Winter 1922 issue), or several of Lissitzky’s stage design drawings (in the Spring 1924 issue). When the Russian avantgarde was discussed in writing, Constructivism was gradually depoliticized, as, for example, in N. Gronovsky’s article “Aesthetics and Utility,” published in the Spring 1925 issue, in which he argued: “Many constructivists consider the term aesthetics and utility incompatible. This is a mistake, for beauty and use have a close organic connection and constitute attributes of every object. . . . The properties of materials determine the form of an object and the artist embodies a constructive idea guided by the laws of plastic arts.”[xiii]
Although the Société Anonyme was not the first American institution to host an exhibition of Russian art, it was the first one to do it in a manner similar to the displays of new art and architecture in the USSR. The Machine-Age Exposition in May 1927 focused on architecture, engineering, theindustrial arts and modern art from Russia, the United States, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, and Poland. The list of organizers included The Little Review and the U.S.S.R Society of Cultural Relations with Foreign Countries. Jean Heap proclaimed: “There is great new race of men in America: the Engineer.”[xiv] Lozowick argued that history of America is “a history of gigantic engineering feats and colossal mechanical construction,” and that art based on such an experience had a potential of attracting universal audience.[xv]
Strangely enough, if the Dadaists stripped artwork of its aura (as Walter Benjamin observed), the works of Russian Constructivists were in fact endowed with a new aura once they reached the United States. In the secularized industrial world, modern art required modern faith and modern icons of change. However, unlike the Communist revolution that was fought with guns, the engineering of Constructivism by the culture industry was mostly smooth. While in the Soviet Union the country’s dramatic political and economic changes had a great impact on the local avantgarde,their American audience followed those changes with both fascination and anguish. Ultimately, most American artists participating in the transformations of modern art agreed with evolution, but rejected revolution.
By the 1930s, Constructivism was largely equated with (presumably neutral) International Constructivism (also known as “idealist” or “intellectualist” Constructivism) and associated with the “Realistic Manifesto” (1920) by Gabo and Antoine Pevsner. Such Constructivism was promoted in Europe mainly by Abstraction-Création and Circe et Carré and in the United States by the American Abstract Artists (AAA, founded in 1936). It “merged” with other avant-garde tendencies, such as the ones propagated by De Stijl and the Bauhaus, as well as with Suprematism. Benefiting from the wide interest in Constructivism, Russian artists and writers, such as Lissitzky and Ilya Ehrenburg, played important roles in internationalizing the achievements of the Russian avantgarde while remaining supported by the Soviet authorities. The collaboration between the Western and Russian avantgardes flourished outside the Soviet Union. At the same time, orthodox Constructivism became synonymous with Productivism, first introduced by a group of INKhUK (Institute of Artistic Culture) artists around Osip Brik, which vigorously advocated total rejection of easel painting and adirect connection of art to industry. The movement itself was undergoing changes from within when Soviet Russia experimented with limited capitalism in the early 1920s. As a result, local Constructivists took a more “fluid” position vis-à-vis Communism, which might be symbolized by the fact that during that time Vladimir Mayakovsky and Rodchenko called themselves “advertising constructors.”
In America, the “institutional reality” of Russian Constructivism coincided with the emergence of key agents of the culture industry sponsored by rich industrialists, the Museum of Modern Art in New York in particular. Alfred H. Barr, Jr’s trip to Soviet Russia in 1927-1928, just prior to the founding of MoMA, has been viewed as a crucial moment in establishing the hierarchy of styles in modern art. Although Barr was interested in Russian art and culture (music in particular), as Benjamin H. D. Buchloh observes, “[t]he paradigm-change within modernism, which Barr witnessed from the very first hour, did not make a strong enough impression on him to affect his future projects. He continued in his plan to lay the foundations of an avant-garde art in the United States according to the model that had been developed in the first two decades of this century in western Europe (primarily in Paris).”[xvi] As American museums took a central position in influencing the development of modern art, the new artistic dogma was spelled out in such historic exhibitions as Cubism and Abstract Art (MoMA, 1936), and, earlier, Abstract Painting in America (Whitney Museum opened in 1931, 1935).
“How Modern Is the Museum of Modern Art?” asked a pamphlet (designed by Ad Reinhardt) distributed by the American Abstract Artists during the Cubism and Abstract Art exhibition, questioning MoMA’s choice of artists for the show. The AAA, which hold its first exhibition in April 1937, took on an ambitious role in reshaping the development of abstract art in the United States, while distancing itself from realism and surrealism (but only partially from expressionism, which was being redefined by Hans Hoffman, whom the organization championed). Throughout its existence, theorganization was too busy with factional disputes over the meaning of abstract art and its relation to social and political concerns to come up with a coherent program, but on important occasions it took strong political stands. As the heroic model of an artist as a defender of Communism was championed by the Soviet authorities. Political concerns were primarily addressed by figurative artists committed to art reflecting social facts, as well as by the Artists’ Union and by leftist publications such as Art Front, the New Masses, and the Daily Worker. Figurative art in the service of radical politics, representing national and/or international interests, brought—it is generally believed—a positive or partially positive resultin the United States (the WPA-FAP) and disastrous consequences in Europe (Stalinism and fascism). As far as the marriage of art and technology was concerned, A Century of Progress International Exposition in Chicago (1933-34) and the World’s Fair in New York (1939-40) made a point to further stress its importance, while deliberately obscuring the impact of sociopolitical upheavals on each of them.
In the United States, Joan Marter writes, “[s]uch artists as Alexander Calder, Theodore Roszak, Ibram Lassaw, Jose de Rivera and others assimilated Constructivist principles and created non-objective works which acknowledged modern technology, industrial methods and scientific discoveries.”[xvii] Marter credits those artists with a “more idealistic view,” which she associates with International Constructivism, and artists such as László Moholy-Nagy and Gabo.[xviii] However, Gabo’s artistic agenda did not escape close scrutiny from such politically conscious critics as John Berger and Buchloh, who disclosed his aggressive form of art engineering.[xix] Still, with its emphasis on constructed as real, Gabo’s “Realistic Manifesto” covertly reveals a shift toward abroader ideology than leftist politics, e.g. that of the relationship between art and reality (and knowledge), which in fact was central to modern art, regardless or because of its geo-political or cultural provenience. ”Gabo’s notion of ‘the real,’” as Rosalind E. Krauss observes, “was obviously directed toward the revelation of a transcendent reality rather than a manipulation of factual reality.”[xx]
“New Believers”
Constructivism ceased to be a formal model for most artists and critics after the Second World War; it remained as a part of their modern perception, but also consciousness. Constructing his influential theory, Clement Greenberg wrote in “Towards a Newer Laocoon” (1940): “It is quite easy to show that abstract art like every other cultural phenomenon reflects the social and other circumstances of the age in which its creators live, and that there is nothing inside the art itself, disconnected from history, which compels it to go in one direction or another. But it is not so easy to reject the purist’s assertion that the best of contemporary plastic art is abstract.”[xxi] A few years later, Greenberg “substituted” Dziga Vertov’s “Camera Eye” for Edward Weston’s “Camera Glass Eye.”[xxii]
As we know, with the center of artistic production moving to New York, Abstract Expressionism began to be viewed as homegrown American. Buchloh writes: “Between the ‘Triumph of the Will’ in 1936 and the ‘Triumph of American Painting’ in 1958 (the year of the European tour of the New American Painting), art history also witnessed a number of relative failures. One such failure was that of geometric reductivist abstraction—in particular, Russian and Soviet Constructivism—to reenter Western European and American reception in the post-World War II period.”[xxiii] The legacy of the movement, as diluted as it was, or appeared to be, was felt in America after the war, mainly because the strong presence of the followers of International Constructivism, especially connected to its Bauhaus version: Moholy-Nagy, Joseph Albers, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, to name just the most famous artists and architects associated with the former schools in Germany.
With the Soviet Union strengthening its doctrine of Socialist Realism, Western modernism appeared unchallenged, given carte blanche for formal innovation. In the Soviet Union, with the key avant-garde artists either dead or silenced, Constructivism entered a stage of forced hibernation. In the era of political confusion among the leftist intellectuals in the West, intensified by Stalin’s politics, the AAA’s book on Constructivism, which reinforced its most obvious, depoliticized and contemplative reading, could only have been seen as the swan song of such “old believers” as Gabo, Lassaw, or Ilya Bolotowsky.[xxiv]
The post-war period witnessed a transition from the “military” avantgarde to the “nonmilitary,” neo-avantgarde, Neo-Dada of John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg and others (but not Neo-Constructivism), which writers such as Bürger, as well as Hans Magnus Enzernsburger and Octavio Paz, chose to perceive as a rather empty, inauthentic, even phoney mirroring of the original. Huyssen, however, sees it differently: the neo-avantgarde became a vital force in art because it acknowledged the failure of the historical avantgarde and from that point was able to construct its own anti-modern originality, a postmodern one. He writes: “from an American perspective the postmodernism of the 1960s had some of the makings of a genuine avantgarde movement, even if the overall political situation of 1960s America was in no way comparable to that of Berlin or Moscow in the early 1920s when the tenuous and short-lived alliance between avantgardism and vanguard politics was forged. . . . My point here is that American postmodernism of the 1960s was both: an American avantgarde and the endgame of international avantgardism”[xxv]
Although Gabo’s universal transcendentalism might look suspicious to many American artists and critics, Malevich’s did not, particularly when it came to his reified monochromes. In a well-known cartoon How to Look at Modern Art in America, published in PM journal in 1948, Reinhardt puts the Russian artist’s name among major proponents of abstraction. The omission of other Russian avantgarde artists might look puzzling, remembering the American artist’s radical political views, but it is less so if we consider Reinhardt’s broader views on art.[xxvi] Art as an icon, like Malevich’s Black Square, his last painting fully endowed with the aura, invisible from within, perhaps felt from without, in sync with the pathos that surrounded its producer, whose credo was “[c]ontrol and rationality are part of my morality.”[xxvii]
Throughout the twentieth century, numerous American artists overtly and covertly addressed various aspects of the legacy of Constructivism in their work. Let us focus here on just one of them, monochrome paintings, which appear to minimize the material aspects of art and, perhaps, cast light on the argument advanced by contemporary theory, which suggests that if Constructivism “has an essence one should not look for it in the physical reality.”[xxviii] Monochromes were of interest to Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who were followed by a number of so-called Minimalists: Frank Stella and Robert Ryman, for example. However, few of those artists stressed their lineage going back to Malevich, or Rodchenko. “Of the abstract paintings and reliefs by Dutch, Russian or German of the early modernist period to which Ryman had ready access at The Museum of Modern Art,” writes Robert Storr, “none, surprisingly, struck him in this way. Thus it was Rothko, not the Neo-Plasticists, the Constructivists, or the Bauhaus artists, who taught him that paintings must be treated as integral physical entities.”[xxix] More importantly, Storr quotes Ryman calling himself a Realist. “With Realism,” the artist argued, “the aesthetic is an outward aesthetic instead of an inward aesthetic, since there’s no picture, there’s no story. And there’s no myth. And there’s no illusion, above all. So lines are real, the space is real, the surface is real, and there’s interaction between the painting and the wall plane unlike abstraction and representation.”[xxx] This statement still echoes Malevich’s, even Gabo’s, interpretation of artistic production as linked to transcendent reality, reflecting the mixture of pragmatism and idealism that seem to be at the core of American culture and arts.
Dissidents
The reception of Russian and Soviet Constructivism in the United States acquired new vitality with the influx of Russian émigrés after mid-1970s, among them a group of well-educated artists and critics. Originally, they did not challenge any major assumptions about the Russian avantgarde. The main reason for the Russian intellectuals to preserve the existing status quo was the fact that it was in their interest to preserve the rhetoric of the Cold War, if for no other reason, to justify and romanticize their emigration. In fact, owing to their presence in the West, Russian artists as diverse as Ernst Neizvestny, Rimma and Valery Gerlovins, Komar and Melamid, and Ilya Kabakov, as well as critics such as Boris Groys, Margarita Tupitsyn, and Svetlana Boym, reignited interest in Russian art, while theoretical discussions surrounding it entered mainstream art criticism and academia. These discussions took two directions, one that addressed the legacy of the Russian and Soviet avantgardes and a second that looked “backward” through Moscow Conceptualism (which was originally also called “Romantic Conceptualism”), a broadly defined non-conformist movement that occurred mainly in the Soviet capital starting in the early 1970s. It is fascinating, in fact, to follow those artists and writers’ public statements, whichframe their works around Russian-Western dialectics, at the expense of others who were silenced, wrapping them in a poststructuralist language.
Although exiled Moscow Conceptualists formed a rather exclusive circle, their voice was far from being homogenous. Still, most of them tended to diminish the immediate impact of artists and poets such as Malevich, Rodchenko, or Mayakovsky on their art, either by dissociating from them completely or mocking and appropriating their achievements. Kabakov rejected, for example, a suggestion that his artistic lineage might reach back to the Russian avantgarde. Asked by David A. Ross how much he was influenced by theradical art of the 1910s and early 1920s, such as Moscow buildings designed by Melnikov, Kabakov answered: “I didn’t see them. The problem was that I didn’t have any contact with this vanishing civilization. My perception of these buildings was like that of a dog running about the ruins of the Parthenon. I was on another level. For me it was the past; maybe it was beautiful, but it had nothing to do with me.”[xxxi] Although such apublic declaration of distance from the innovative artists and architects ofthe early decades of the twentieth century might seem unlikelyconsidering their popularity in the West, it reflected the common Russian view of the local avantgarde as an artistic movementassociated with the leftist radicalism and nationalism that had flourished before and immediately after the October Revolution, integral to social forces for which the Russians felt that they had paid a steep price until the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In his ongoing dialogue with Malevich, Leonid Lamm used the Suprematist black square as a background in his recent installation that deals with his incarceration in a labor camp in the mid-1970s. Lamm even suggested that: “Suprematist Abstraction and Socialist Realism are really just two sides of the same coin” and described geometry as “completely compatible with prison design.”[xxxii] Other artists, for example Alexander Kosolapov, appropriated Malevich’s iconography to demystify and deconstruct the uniqueness of modernism.
Defining, or redefining, the meaning of art became in fact part of artistic creation, a new self-referentiality that Russian émigré artists and critics breached for their own entry into the art world. For them, the hermetic language of Western Conceptualism, which was shifting back and forth its emphasis from the iconic to theideological, offered a tool to bypass historic concerns about aesthetic taste that, after the Soviet Union cut its ties with the West, continued to relegate their art to the status of second-rate Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, or Pop Art. Framing those arguments within then current scholarship, some Russian émigré critics argued that Sots Art (a version of Moscow Conceptualism) opposed Modernism by rejecting it as the type of creative expressiveness that “rejects history.”[xxxiii] What they accomplished as well was to obscure the real picture of Soviet art in a manner not totally dissimilar from Gabo’s.
The late 1980s and early 1990s witnessed unprecedented interest in Russian and Soviet art in the United States, which resulted in blockbuster exhibitions, among them Malevich’s first major retrospective in 1990 and the Great Utopia: The Russian and Soviet Avant-Garde, 1915-1932 in 1992. Major New York galleries, such as Ronald Feldman Gallery, Barbara Gladstone Gallery, Marlborough Gallery, and Sean Kelly Gallery, to name just a few, started to represent Russian émigré artists. Today, the international success of Kabakov matches that of Malevich’s and Lissitzky’s. In recent years, interest in contemporary Russian artists dramatically diminished, but their works continue to break auction records. At the same time, Komar and Melamid’s nation-wide polling of the “most wanted and most unwanted paintings,” conducted in different countries in the 1990s, has shown that thegeneral public still prefers postcard-type landscape paintings with human staffage over any form of abstraction. (Only Holland opted for abstract work as the “most wanted.”)
Pioneers of Today
Each generation tends to strip art of its existing aura in a new way, while producing its own icons. In the era of growing awareness of global warming, ecology becomes a central theme in art activism. What has been advocated as a way of linking the present to the past is, for example, a direction toward art as “archives.” We are told painting is back. A postmodern focus on “in-betweenness” and crossing the boundaries reignited interest in merging art, architecture, and design, which might explain the popularity of Lissitzky among young artists, such as Gavin Wade. New modes of communication, such as the Internet, expanded the original ethos of the machine. This spirit of plurality—in large part a legacy of the 1980s—persists, almost as a “natural” phenomenon in contemporary art, which has its positive, but also negative sides. The latteris probably reflected in a decreased visibility of activist art, which mainly remains a domain of older artists such as Hans Haacke, Alfredo Jarr, Barbara Kruger, or Krzysztof Wodiczko. Haacke’s boldnessin commenting on our current political reality as social facts is, in fact, a foundation for one of the most radical types of art produced nowadays.
At the same time, a revisionist approach to essentialist modernism that characterized the last two decades of the twentieth century has gradually made room for a less adversarial approach to modern art. This phenomenon derives from postmodern detachment, but—perhaps more importantly— reflects a desire to distance art from the omnipresence of hyperreality and media culture. Russian Constructivism is back, as a referent for anumber of younger artists, but its militant aspects have been relativized. “The impossibility of objective observation,” Vincent Pouliot writes, “is no reason for not trying pragmatically to interpret social reality with as much detachment as possible. . . . constuctivists have no need to be foundationalist because social agents already are.”[xxxiv]
To close this essay, here are a few examples of artists, whose work, directly or indirectly, relates to Russian Constructivism. In 2005 the artist collective known as Gavin Wade mit Simon & Tom Bloor appropriated Berthold Lubetkin’s abandoned structures when they took over two buildings, known as Kiosk 1 & 2 (originally used to sell sweets and ice cream), designed by the architect and his Tecton Group in 1937 for the Dudley Zoological Gardens near Birmingham.[xxxv] As the Bloors points out in the publication 34: What are Senses? Lubetkin’s architectural settings for the zoo suggest a circus more than a natural habitat. On their part, the artists turned the kiosks into temporary exhibition/space and meeting rooms, a “kind of philosophical system,” as they stated in one of their publications. They then duplicated the original ellipsoid concrete kiosk in plywood and exhibited it in their installations at various venues, including the island of San Servolo during the Strategic Questions exhibition curated by Wade at the time of the 2007 Venice Biennale.
Working in various locations in Kiev and Moscow, the Ukrainian artist Volodymyr Kuznetsov has been building his unstable and fragileTowers from recycled materials hugging walls and ceilings, works thatrecall Tatlin’s unrealized Monument to the Third International.
Right after graduating from Cooper Union in 1998, the American artist Yuri Masnyj traveled to his parents’ native Ukraine. When he returned he was full of enthusiasm for art, because he saw local artists making it from nothing, while working in an economically challenged environment. Soon, his drawings attracted attention of the curators and critics in New York. Expressing somewhat similar attitude to Constructivism as Gavin Wade, e.g. linking it to failure as a source of strength and rejuvenation, Masnyj recalls September 11, 2001, as a crucial date in his life. For him that day stands as strong as the October Revolution stood for the Constructivists. A Day that Shook the World. Echoing voices of the abovementioned artists, in the January 2008 issue of Artforum Hal Foster cites from the Situationist “Theses on the Paris Commune” (1962): “The apparent successes of [the classical workers’] movement are actually its fundamental failures (reformism of the establishment of a state bureaucracy), while its failures (the Paris Commune or the 1934 Asturian revolt [of miners in Spain]) are its most promising successes.”[xxxvi] It is, ironically, from the ashes of Constructivist failures that some contemporary artists have found new wellsprings of inspiration.
Endnotes
1 Madison Guy, “Homage to Russian Constructivism in Madison?,” http://letterfrom here.blogspot.com; accessed December 18, 2007.
2 George Rickey, Constructivism: Origins and Evolution (New York, 1967), p. VII.
3 E-mail from Gavin Wade sent to the present author on January 11, 2008.
4 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis, 1984); first published in German in 1974.
5 Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1986).
6 Ibid, p. 6.
7 Richard Guy Wilson, Dianne H. Pilgrim, Dickran Tashjian, The Machine Age in America, 1918-1941, exh. cat., The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, 1986, p. 271.
8 John M. Jordan, Machine-Age Ideology: Social Engineering and American Liberalism, 1911-1939 (Chapel Hill and London, 1994), p. 3.
9 Quoted from, Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds), Art in Theory 1900-1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford, 1994 ed), p. 317.
10 Quoted from, John David Angeline, Reassessing Modernism: Katherine S. Dreier and the Société Anonyme, Ph.D. dissertation, The City University of New York, 1999, pp. 55-56
11 Louis Lozowick, “The Russian Dadaists,” The Little Review, 7:3 (September-December 1920), pp. 72-73.
12 Louis Lozowick, “A Note on Russian Modern Art,” Broom, 4:3 (February 1923), pp. 200-204.
13 N. [Nachmann] Gronovsky, “Aesthetics and Utility,” trans. Louis Lozowick The Little Review, 11 (Spring 1925), p. 28. Gronovsky was an artist born in Ukraine, who moved to France in 1923.
15 Ibid, article signed “jh”, p. 36.
16 Ibid, Louis Lozowick, “The Americanization of Art,” p. 18.
17 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “From Factura to Factography,” October, 30 (Fall 1984), p. 84.
18 Joan Marter, “Constructivism in America: The 1930s,” Arts, 56:10 (June 1982), p. 73.
19 Ibid, p. 74.
20 John Berger “Naum Gabo” in Permanent Red: Essays on Seeing (London, 1960) and Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, “Cold War Constructivism,” in Reconstructing Modernism: Art in New York, Paris, and Montreal 1945-1964 (Cambridge, MA and London, 1990), pp. 85-112.
21 Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA and London, 1977; 12th edition 1998), p. 57.
22 Clement Greenberg, “Towards a Newer Laoccon,” in Clement Greenberg, Perceptions and Judgments, 1939-1944, Vol.1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London, 1988), p. 23.
23 Clement Greenberg, “The Camera’s Glass Eye: Review of an Exhibition by Edward Weston,” in Clement Greenberg, Arrogant Purpose, 1945-1949, Vol. 2, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago and London, 1988), pp. 60-63.
24 Buchloh, “Cold War Constructivism,” p. 85.
25 The World of Abstract Art was probably published in 1957.
26 Huyssen, After the Great Divide, pp. 194-195.
27 For Reinhardt’s political opinions see, Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt, ed. Barbara Rose (Berkeley, 1991 ed.)
28 Reinhardt quoted in “Art as Art: The Selected Writings of Ad Reinhardt by Ad Reinhardt, Barbara Rose and Complete Writings 1954-1975 by Donald Judd, book review by Benjamin G. Paskus, Art Journal, 36:2 (Winter 1976-77), p. 172.
29 Quoted from, Vincent Pouliot, “The Essence of Constructivism,” Journal of International Relations and Development, 7 (2004), pp. 319-336.
30 Robert Storr, “Simple Gifts,” in his Robert Ryman, exh. cat., Tate Gallery, London and MoMA, New York, 1993, p. 14.
31 Robert Ryman, original transcript of his “On Painting,” in Ibid, p. 32.
32 “David A. Ross in Conversation with Ilya Kabakov,” in B. Groys, D. A. Ross, I. Blazwick, Ilya Kabakov (London, 1998), p. 14.
33 Eleanor Heartney, “Leonid Lamm: Birth of the Image,” in Leonid Lamm: Birth of the Image, exh. cat., Duke University Museum of Art, Durham, 1998, p. 2
34 See, “Art as a Diary: Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid,” quoted after Carter Ratcliff, Komar & Melamid (New York, 1988), p. 40.
35 Pouliot, “The Essence of Constructivism,” p. 330.
36 Russian émigré architect Berthold Lubetkin (1901–1990), who opened his London practice in the early 1930s, helped endow British architecture with Constructivist rigor. But as time went on his design started to look dated to the proponents of postmodern architectureand some of his buildings were later demolished.
37 Hal Foster, “’Forms of Resistance’ Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands,” Artforum, 66: 5 (January 2008), p. 273.
Alejandro Kuropatwa: Museo de Arte Latino-Americano de Buenos Aires, Artforum International, November 2005
For Argentineans, photographer Alejandro Kuropatwa (1956-2003) embodied a new type of celebrity, born from the freedom and anxiety of the ’80s as the country emerged from military dictatorship. Eccentric, witty, and openly gay, he is remembered as a talented, capricious, and colorful “diva” who enjoyed night life in the company of artists, musicians, and writers, and, with them, members of local high society, all of whom he eagerly captured in his art. Two years after his death from AIDS, this exhibition, “Kuropatwa en technicolor,” paid tribute to this Argentinean original, but–as its curator Andres Duprat insisted–the show presented the artist as if he were still alive, thanks to the “optimistic” images that the photographer produced at the end of his life. Yocasta, 2000, named after Oedipus’s mother, consists of four large color photographs hanging over wall-mounted tables shaped like the sterilizers hairdressers use for their tools; it depicts the head of a robust beauty–a postmodern, pedestrian Helene Fourment with an elaborate hairdo. Headshots of this type can more easily be found on the walls of cheap, suburban beauty salons than in museums. “Flores” (Flowers; 2002), a series of gigantic close-ups of flowers and plants with evident sexual allusions, revels in baroque sensuality; bigger than life, they look exquisite in the gallery space.
Throughout his career, Kuropatwa photographed his friends with the sentimentality of a fashion photographer. As many of them also succumbed to AIDS, these portraits might be seen as a gallery of new desaperacidos, who died not because of the political violence so prevalent in Argentina’s history but of a deadly disease spreading globally. In the late ’90s, Kuropatwa sought out aging women from Argentina’s high society (“Marie Antoinette” [1998]) and photographed them with a stark sincerity verging on cruelty–as if they were relics of some ancien regime dressed in Prada. What’s so moving about these glamour-meets-decay pictures is the emotional fragility of the models, who, despite, or perhaps because of, their elaborate poses, elegant gowns, and expensive jewelry, look painfully sad once stripped of their celebrity status (which is, in any case, recognized only locally).
For all that, Kuropatwa was an artist with a predictable imagination. His theatricality and celebration of cliched gay identity can be irritating, as can his enthusiasm for the trite aesthetics of advertising and fashion. His brightly lit, lipstick-colored world often seems shallow or escapist; and yet behind that staged superficiality a real person keeps appearing in his work. After the 1996 World AIDS Conference in Vancouver, during which scientists announced the discovery of a combination of drugs for treatment of AIDS, Kuropatwa took pictures of the medicine he started taking on a daily basis. Known as the “Coctel” (“Cocktail”) series (1996) these works are like a contemporary vanitas, speaking of life’s fragility in the face of death. Dealing with reality as a predominantly tactile experience, in these works the photographer pairs colorful pills with a spoon, a shoe, a glass mug, and a rose–and records the reoccurrence of beauty in all of them.
“Carne viva”: Museo de Arte del Centro Cultural de San Marcos – Lima, Peru, Artforum International, February 2004
There are instances when life manages to imitate art without recycling cliches, and this exhibition was a fine example. Last August, the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its report on the tragic results of two decades of political violence in Peru, which, it is now known, claimed twice as many lives than the original highest estimate. “Carne viva: Partes de guerra 1980-2003” (Raw Flesh: Fragments of War 1980-2003), which opened before the report was published, provided artistic evidence for this violence by showing work with overt and covert political content by fourteen contemporary Peruvian artists. The curator, Gustavo Buntinx, started with the premise that indirect forms of resistance and underground activity, such as art, could counter political persecution. The best political art is never simply an illustration of a given event but aims instead at demystifying history and reflecting broader feelings, such as fear.
To suggest that the roots of political violence in Peru lie deep in the past, the exhibition included a large multipanel painting, Peru, pais del manana (Proyecto para hacer un mural, cuando tenga el dinero, manana) (Peru, the Country of Tomorrow [Project for the Making of a Mural When I Have the Money, Tomorrow]), 1981, by Juan Javier Salazar, which consists of forty-two portraits of Peruvian presidents from 1821 to 1980. Executed in a crude style and based on popular schoolbook illustrations, each image is inscribed with the word MANANA (tomorrow), thus alluding to the political rhetoric that so often invokes the future as synonymous with freedom and prosperity. Needless to say, manana never comes.
The exhibition argued that the challenge to repressive governments takes on various forms. Cuco Morales’s Ejercito rosa (Pink Army), ca. 1993–a miniature altarpiece with a photograph of Sarita Colonia, who is revered among the Andean peoples as a saint though unrecognized by the Catholic hierarchy, surrounded by figurines of toy soldiers painted pink–suggested that sexual differences could be perceived as vehement, politically charged protest, because totalitarianism suppresses any departure from uniformity. Morales’s message seemed straightforward: In the absence of full democracy, the gay identity is often considered as subversive as political dissent; when presented in art it can be a form of radicalism.
Oppressive regimes always look for aesthetics appropriate to their needs, and “Carne viva” indirectly commented on that aspect of ideology in an intriguing way by including works that referenced art aimed at disruption of the artistic continuum. Fernando Guerra Garcia echoed Duchamp’s Etant donnes, 1946-66, in which the French artist returned unexpectedly to illusionistic art, turning it into a voyeuristic experience. In Garcia’s El ultimo partido, por celebracion del gol por muerte subita (The Last Game, Due to the Celebration of a Score in Sudden Death), 1997, the viewer was asked to peek through peepholes into a reconstruction of the room in which the fourteen rebel guerrillas who occupied the Japanese embassy in Lima between December 1996 and April 1997 were all killed. The gray stone walls allude to the sacrificial pre-Hispanic god Chavin de Huantar, known for his cruelty. The dead bodies have been removed; the only sign of human presence is a soccer ball, with which the rebels were playing when they were killed. Looking through the peephole, we witness–as Buntinx hoped we would–a moment in the revolution of the imagination, expressed in a work of one of the fourteen artists who refused to be silenced.
Anna Bella Geiger, Paco Imperial, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Artforum International, January 2004
This exhibition, “Obras em Arquipelago” (Works in Archipelago), addressed how the language of maps and cosmological charts with which Anna Bella Geiger has been preoccupied since the ’60s could be extended to the “geography” of the human body. The artist has called that confluence “anthropomorphic cartography.” Juxtaposed with “camouflage” prints from the ’70s and paintings from the ’80s and ’90s loosely inspired by Mondrian’s “Pier and Ocean” series, 1914-15, was the recent “Fronteiricos” (Borderlines), 1995-, a series that takes the form of a sort of fantastic archive. Setting the tone for the whole exhibition, these works blur the boundaries between specific geographic territories and imaginary lands in a manner similar to the way magic realism mixes everyday reality and the fantastic. The “Fronteiricos” are made of old metal filing-cabinet drawers filled with hardened wax, onto which the artist inserted cookie-cutter forms in corrugated metal foil, often shaped to the contours of the map of Brazil. (In 1975 Geiger distributed cookies cut from similar forms at her exhibition at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio–before she was stopped by the museum staff.) Some of those works have metal springs and wires crisscrossing the drawer as if to simulate the network of meridians, and images grafted on the surface of the wax, such as a drawing of an arm made after Leonardo da Vinci. They reflect the artist’s interest in dissecting space (and body) in order to engage in an investigation of the structure of the unseen, as both an aesthetic and a political phenomenon.
References to other artists, from Nadar and Matisse to Duchamp and Beuys, were evident throughout the show. In a set of five collages entitled “Rrose Selavy, mesmo” (Rrose Selavy, Even), 1997-2000, Duchamp’s portrait in drag is superimposed on pages from newspapers in various languages, creating accidental juxtapositions of images and texts in which the French artist’s photograph serves as a camouflage printed over political reports. The exhibition also included ten minutes of footage from Geiger’s conversation with Beuys in New York in 1975, during which the Brazilian artist “interrogated” her German colleague about the meaning of tribalism. At a climactic moment in the interview, Beuys proclaimed that the world had finally become democratic, thus making a statement that totally contradicted the then-current situation in Brazil. As an astute commentator on the frequent indifference of the art establishment to the political fate of the peripheries, Geiger has often pointed to the fact that for Duchamp and Beuys ideologies seemed to be suspiciously amorphous.
Geiger belongs to a generation of Brazilians who endured extensive political and economic hardship, which has made her fully aware of the importance and pitfalls of producing art with political overtones. Her interest in politics might be described (to use Roland Barthes’s expression) as “discreet, but obsessed.” While critical interrogation is a vital part of Geiger’s outlook on life, she treats art as a reflective endeavor to draw an inclusive mappa mundi, on which Brazil occupies a central position as a heterogeneous “planet” magically yet very concretely floating out there.
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