More from Berlin, 2009

A visit to Berlin is not defined by art fairs alone. Though I was introduced to one new and interesting gallery, Feinkost, at Art Forum, Berlin was its usual dependable self in providing a variety of satisfying experiences away from the fairs.

I guess it's no surprise that I had not been to Galerie Feinkost before. The gallery is in a converted convenience store directly across from a northern border of the Berlin Wall quite a distance from any of the standard gallery districts. But their Art Forum booth was one of the true successes for me this year. They showcased two artists, Ignacio Uriarte and Arcangelo Sassolino, to exceptional effect.

Mr. Sassolino makes sculptures that have at their core some kind of mechanical or engineering component. These mechanical components are used to destructive ends, usually interfering with the environment in which they're placed. Noisy and dangerous, I found the work completely engaging. The work at Art Forum was relatively mild for this artist consisting of a 9 bar air cylinder connected via a computer to a small plastic water bottle. The computer directed the cylinder to alternately inflate or deflate the bottle. When inflated it was somehow perfect and unharmed. When deflated, it was always a different, disastrous deformation of itself. One could not imagine how it would re-inflate to its former self. Inflation and deflation was a deafening crackle of plastic.

The gallery invited me to a concurrent exhibition at the only-in-Berlin exhibition space Micamoca:

There I found a more typical example of Mr. Sassolino's in that it existed solely to destroy it's surrounded space:

Detail of it's clawing effect:

The Sassolino work I didn't see was A huge wall of cor-ten steel held in place by a massive magnet. At rare intervals, a computer would tell the magnet to fail allowing the steel wall to fall a few inches to the floor. Over time, the wall would pound deeper and deeper into the floor; a testament to the inexorable march of time and mass.

Ignacio Uriarte was the other artist Feinkost was showing at Art Forum. Mr. Uriarte exploits office materials for his practice. Other artists have plumbed this territory before -- pens, typed pieces, faxes, etc -- but Mr Uriarte explores new corners of the office both with his diverse materials and single-minded practice. I was impressed again and again what this artist achieved with extremely simple materials. At the fair, I was caught by a Sandback-like display made only from folded paper:

Detail:

I bought a typewriter piece that used only the left and right hand quotation marks. If you weren't told how it was made, the mark-making technique of the piece would be a mystery.

This artist also works with office paper, office software, and printer ink among many other media. Take a look.

I always go to Daimler-Chrysler Contemporary when I'm in Berlin. the shows there are always smart and concise. Thios visit didn't disappoint. Continuing with the them of fabulous work acieved with spare or simple materials, I loved Georg Herold's untitled piece using particle board bookshelves and cinderblock bricks. While not as explicitly destructive as the Sassolino pieces, I was mesmerized by how the piece seemed to balance on the point of failure. There was incredible tension in such a static work:


I made a first time visit to the About Change Collection on Museum Island. They had a text heavy group show that was sure to appeal to me. My favorite was a Gonzalez-Torres-like piece by Vincenzo Latronico in which the public is invited to take away parts of the work. Unlike Gonzalez-Torres, in which each piece in the paper pile is identical, each piece of paper in Mr. Latronico's work are unique. Each page you take with you deletes that page from an awesomley varied whole. I quote from the About Change website:

The Italian Vincenzo Latronico explores the various ways of interpreting and composing a text. Beginning with eight text sequences, each comprising five parts, the young author has written down all the possible combinations thereof, yielding a total of 32,768 short stories, or 32,768 variations of a love story—each independent of the other, and utterly unique.
Latronico’s debut novel Ginnastica e Rivoluzione was released in 2008 by the Italian publishers Bompiani. For Next time, perhaps (2009), he drew inspiration from the French author Raymond Queneau (1903–76), who in 1961 published One Hundred Thousand Billion Stories, an experimental ensemble of ten sonnets. Queneau constructed the book so that the fourteen lines of each sonnet can be individually turned over, and consequently combined with the lines of the other sonnets. Thus, potentially, this thin booklet of 14 sonnets contains “one hundred thousand billion poems.”
Whereas Queneau’s one hundred thousand billion combinations and various poems could never be actually seen in its entirety, Vincenzo Latronico sought to render visible the sheer volume of his 32,768 love stories. Each story was printed on a single page, resulting in a total of 32,768 pages which—each containing its own love story—are now stacked in the About Change, Collection . Visitors are also invited to take a page, as a variation of the piece Next time, perhaps. The English version of the work Magari la prossima volta (2009) is now on view for the first time outside Italy, and has been adapted especially by Vincenzo Latronico for the About Change, Collection.

So, despite wan or meager offerings at the fair, Berlin remains a vibrant and eclectic place to see art. Count me in for Gallery Weekend next May.

Dispatch from the Berlin art fairs

First, apologies for such a long break since my last post. There has been plenty to write about, but I just haven't seemed to find the time. Sorry. There will be plenty of posts in the coming weeks.

As I have for the past 3 years, I went to Berlin for their collection of Fall art fairs. The main event is the Art Forum at the Messe Halle with the usual attendant satellite fairs Berliner Liste, Kunstsalon, and Preview augmented this year by newcomer, Art Berlin Contemporary.

Berlin is famous for its contemporary art scene and artist rich landscape. In past years, this has resulted in a collection of art fairs that rewarded the patient fair-goer with artists and artwork not to be found in the more homogenized fairs of Basel and New York. It seems that this pleasure is reaching the end of some natural cycle. Art Forum was as staid and conservative as many of its sister fairs have become, perhaps in reaction to a tighter market and perhaps just because taste is turning in some ineluctable way. On the other other hand, the satellite fairs are just becoming bad. Where Liste, Kunstsalon, and Preview were once highly uneven yet rewarding experiences, they have morphed into embarrassing collections of I-don't-know-what. Maybe it is my taste that has morphed, but it seems to me that, for example, the Kunstsalon in which I first saw the work of Thorsten Brinkmann has been MIA for some time now.

But I swore when I first starting writing this blog that I would focus on the positive. Of all the fairs, the only one with a frsh perspective and more than a handful of engaging work was the Art Berlin Contemporary (ABC). The full name of the fair was ABC DEF (Defining Emerging Future) which asked of its exhibitors to limit their display to one artist's work which could fit on a standard folding table. In addition, each work should be a model or maquette for a public art work.

This is not exactly a new idea, but it's a new manifestation of the art-fair-as-curated-space idea. Volta Fair's New York incarnation the last year mandated single artist booths and is an example of the trend. While some gallery owners groused about the limitations of only having a table to work with, I, for one, loved the clarity of purpose and attendant power of focus. Certainly there were failures and miscues, but I think this kind of creative fair structure will be the wave of the future. The art-fair-as-supermarket model seems to be having hip and knee pain as it struggles with both size and age. ABC seemed lean and fresh and it's best examples were a delight.

Galerie Krinzinger from Austria showed Werner Reiterer's "Draft for an Altar". It consisted of a halo-shaped ring of neon, a cell phone, and note that read, "back in 5 min, God". I was sold just from that, but I chuckled with evil pleasure when the cell phone would ring for no one in particular every few minutes.


Galerie Albrecht was showing Dennis Oppenheim's "Proposal for a Building Complex". Probably best seen from above:


Galerie Nordenhake had a more challenging display by artist Johan Thurfjell. "Eight Dreams and the places dreamt about" featured a fairly conventional forest diorama complete with cabin, lake, boat launch, etc with colored pins marking certain spots. On the wall, color coded to the pins, were eight "dreams" which allegedly happened in the places described in the diorama. I was taken by the supposed specificity of the work which seemed to show all of its hand, but obviously everything about this work is subject to speculation and interpretation. Apologies for the not-so-great small pictures:



Dominik Lejman was the choice for Berlin's Zak-Branicka Galerie. As one would expect from this clever artist, his video was calculated to display around the mandated table, not on it. This cheeky detail would not have mustered a passing comment at a normal fair. At this one it was high cheek.

As I mentioned above, I see the art fair model that we have lived with for the last few years to be open to change if not actually under attack. Fairs with a unifying theme or raison d'etre seem much more lively and worthwhile than a huge building crammed with as much art as it can hold. Even more timely in my view is to abandon the fair entirely in favor of gallery oriented events that having been gaining favor around the world. For example, Gallery Weekend Berlin has been a go-to weekend for some years now. I went in 2008 and found it to be an extraordinary way to be introduced to the artistic life of a city. Dozens of galleries had new show, museums times their programs for the weekend, and collections and studios opened their doors. This is just like the ancillary activity during a fair except that by going to the galleries themselves, one is introduced to a much more comprehensive view of that gallery's program (or better, the work of an artist in whom you are interested). New York has tried this on for size in the recent 57th St Gallery Night and the upcoming New Yorker Passport to the Arts. While both are smaller in scale and scope to the Berlin weekend, I can easily see the trend moving in that direction. At least for me, I would rather visit the city and an actual gallery rather than an antiseptic convention center ill-suited to show art.

"Emerging". A challenging term not just for the visual arts

Check out this New York Times article from September 18th talking about a definitional fight over the term in a theater setting. Once again, we see that this term has no core meaning. I vote to submerge the use of the term emerging....

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/theater/18award.html

Avedon musings one year later. A reappraisal.

A little over a year ago, I wrote a posting on this blog about the Richard Avedon show I saw in Paris at the Jeu de Paume. You can read it here. It was not complimentary. Since then, I have reevaluated and reconsidered what I wrote many times. A friend of mine once said to me, "You learn more from art that you hate than from art that you love", and sure enough, I have learned from Richard Avedon.

I can't say that my arguments have changed too dramatically, but my overarching view of this artist has had a sea change. I attribute that change primarily to curator Carol Squiers and her show of Avedon's fashion work that just closed at ICP. More on this later.

I continue to hold many of the complaints about Avedon's work that I voiced a year ago. For example that Avedon was capricious and often cruel in his treatment of the sitters for his portraits, that his artistic claims didn't match the content of his work, and that his photographs represent a blatant commercial formula than he endlessly reworks still ring true for me. Obviously, others disagree. Geoffrey Dyer in his essay in the book "Avedon 1946-2004"says: "It has also been suggested that the photographs of crumpled, ageing faces were in some way Avedon's revenge on the fashion and glamour business in which he made his name, an explicit rebuke to the claim that his work was all surface and no depth. This opposition cannot long be sustained." And yet the opposition is sustained. Many learned people with whom I've discussed this topic agree with my heterodoxical view. I also found it interesting that Mr. Dyer compares Bill Brandt's portraits to Avedon's using the same quote I did to compare them negatively. He believes that Avedon's portraits positively embody the Brandt challenge that a portrait "physically and morally predicts the subject's entire future". I still believe that Brandt meets his own challenge while Avedon does not.

Perhaps this is a funny, roundabout way of offering a changed mind. Please bear with me. There were a couple of key figures who led me down this path.

The first is a former colleague, Adolfo Bornstein, who had counsel for me when I was about to go to Pittsburgh to take a job under the baton of Lorin Maazel. Adolfo was a well-known conductor basher. We were both working at the time under Charles Dutoit, a conductor who inspired near universal derision from his orchestra. I expected Adolfo to send me off with words of revolution and resistance against Maazel, but I was wrong. He said, "There are figures in the world who have forged an intellectual place for themselves in which their opinion cannot be ignored. It may ultimately be disagreed with, but it cannot be simply dismissed. Their resumé of scholarly discourse or public performance at a certain plane guarantees them a voice that must be listened to". He mentioned Pierre Boulez and Zubin Mehta as other examples of musicians whose intellectual rigor and professional accomplishment demanded respect. Should I apply this lesson to Richard Avedon?

Then I read the Roberta Smith review in the New York Times from May 14, 2009. Ms Smith's gimlet-eyed reviews are not famous for gushing praise so I was somewhat shocked to read:

Avedon’s fashion photographs from the late 1940s to the early ’60s are everything you want great art to be: exhilarating, startlingly new and rich enough with life and form to sustain repeated viewings. Their beauty is joy incarnate and contagious. The best of them are as perfect on their own terms as the best work of Jackson Pollock or Jasper Johns from that era, and as profoundly representative of it.

As with these painters Avedon’s work represents an important turning point and a new kind of self-consciousness of his medium. He makes us aware of its process on different levels, while also questioning its values and deflating its pretensions. His images have a new tautness; you see them as energy-producing wholes in which every detail and bit of surface is articulated. Like Abstract Expressionist painting, they show us an art form learning from and then moving beyond European conventions.

What!? Roberta Smith is comparing Avedon to Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock? I was deeply challenged by this contention. What could I be missing if a critic famous for her toughness had that kind of praise for the work? My own take on the show was pretty girls in pretty dresses shot in clever ways. Jackson Pollock? I struggled to keep an open mind and continued to question my own assertions and the assertions of my friends who were Avedon devotees.

Full of questions, doubt, skepticism, and pessimism, I went to a curatorial walk-through with Carol Squiers. I should say here that I have endless respect for Ms Squiers. I know her as a consummately informed and scholarly art professional who has had an impact on the art world through her articles, her teaching, and her curatorial practice. I have had the pleasure of many long discussions with her about photography and art; conversations where she has guided me patiently and expertly through ideas and philosophies about art and artists. Despite my respect for her, I have to confess I was on the attack that night. I peppered her with questions challenging the authority of Avedon's reputation from every angle I could think of. I questioned the veracity of his innovations when compared with Munkasci or Penn, I questioned the impact his celebrity has had on his value as an artist, I questioned whether he would be remembered favorably once the sycophantic adulation for his memory had died with the people who knew him personally, I questioned what effect Avedon's endless self promotion and self-aggrandizement had on a curatorial assessment of his work.....I questioned, and questioned, and questioned.

For her part, Carol parried my attacks with calm and patience. Sometimes she disagreed, sometimes she didn't know, sometimes she attacked back with her own well-defended assertions. Clearly I wasn't going to move her position, but she hadn't moved mine either. But just at the end of the tour, as folks were beginning to disperse and the whole thing was winding down, I sent out one last riposte. I don't remember what it was but it was some kind of intellectual assertion that I thought could score a point. Her response ended the attack and changed my mind. She said (if I remember correctly), "Listen, all I know is that I've been looking at these photographs for 30 years and I've never gotten tired of them. Some of them are my favorite photographs in the world and I look at them again and again and again".

Peter Schjeldahl in his June 1, 2009 New Yorker review of the Francis Bacon show said: "It's unseemly to stay mad at an artist whose canonical stature, as graphed by the fervor of intelligent admirers, not to mention market value, has only grown since his death.....". Carol Squiers is the epitome of an intelligent admirer, but it was not her intelligence that carried the day. It was her emotional and personal response to this work that stopped me dead in my tracks. It did feel unseemly in the face of this informed passion to stay mad at the work and at the artist. While the work still leaves me empty in many ways, it doesn't piss me off quite as much as it did before. Perhaps I've been chastened by Ms Squiers and her cadre of intelligent admirers, or perhaps I just can't stay mad at an artist who has inspired a hagiocracy from a population known for its atheism. In the end, I guess none of it matters. The positive result is the debate and discussion the work has generated. Unlike before, I can approach the subject calmly. Who knows? In a year I may be writing about what genius the work is with all the zeal of a convert. Things change.

Tara Donovan at Lever House in NYC

To those of you who are in New York City or who will visit before the 5th of September, I urge you not to miss the Tara Donovan installation currently installed at Lever House in midtown Manhattan. Lever House is at 390 Park Avenue, between 53rd and 54th Streets.

Like the sculpture of Pedro Cabrita Reis and Alyson Shotz, both of whom I've written about in this blog, Ms Donovan uses quotidian materials to stunning and surprising effect. Her sculpture bends our perceptions in two ways: it transforms the space in which she has placed them, and it bends the space around it when you look through it. This piece rewards multiple viewings as it shifts according to the time of day, the amount of sunlight, and the ratio of sunlight to artificial light. It also rewards multiple perspectives. Up close, the work is a maze of mini kaleidoscopes and restricted vistas. from farther away, the work acts as a distorted lens through which we see a world that is recognizable but seen through a funhouse mirror. That one simple material used in a unique way can yield all of these new ways to see a familiar space points to Ms Donovan's brilliant eye and creative energy.

A must see.

Arles addendum: Guillaume Chauvin & Rémi Hubert

While in Arles this summer I was introduced to two young men who, with the intention of upsetting the powers that be in French photojournalism, seem to have delivered a smack to that particular wasp's nest. Except it is French photojournalism that appears to be feeling the stings. I wanted to write a short post because it seems that many of my most in-the-know photo friends on this side of the Atlantic have not heard about the story.

Guillaume Chauvin & Rémi Hubert decided to enter the prestigious Grand Prix Paris-Match du Photoreportage Etudiant after being entirely dissatisfied with last year's winners. They felt that photojournalism was limited and full of cliché. They set out to stage a photojournalism "story" using a well-worn style that they felt would be appealing to the judges. It worked. They won.

But when they stepped to the podium to accept the award, they revealed that it had all been a set-up. I think this absolves them of any kind of accusation that this is a fraud. They had a goal to shine a light on a problem that they felt the world was not seeing properly, and revealed their plan as soon as the moment was right. Their point was to be exposed, they weren't waiting to be found out or to steal the prize under false pretenses. This is not the French Jayson Blair of the NYTimes or Janet Cooke winning the Pulitzer with a faked story. In both of those cases, the point was to get away with it. The authors really wanted the prestige of winning the prize. Chauvin and Hubert wanted to mock the prize and the work it was promoting.

I think this project neatly straddles the two worlds of photojournalism and art photography. As photojournalism, it uses visual tools to address a problem that the artists felt needed to be brought to light, which is the very definition of photojournalism. As art, it falls in a grand tradition of contemporary art which creates faux mise-en-scéne in order to illustrate an artistic narrative. I think of An-My Lê, Sherry Levine, and Gregory Crewdsen as examples in this lineage.

Controversy and condemnation have followed the pair since their public admission of the project. I fall on the side that hails the success of the project, that applauds their initiative to alter the status quo, and that sees the project as successful work of art. Others are not so laudatory. They feel that it is "merely" the work of copyists (how many Picture Generation artists have heard that?), that the project was professionally and emotionally dishonest, and that Chauvin and Hubert have no real creativity.

Who knows what will follow for these two? Some of their detractor's questions will be answered in time. Perhaps this was their one-time hit. Perhaps they don't have a grand creative spark. But perhaps they do. I prefer to give them the benefit of the doubt. They hit the bullseye so perfectly with their first arrow, I can't help but be curious to see where a few more arrows will fall. Smart, focused work like this doesn't happen by accident. I, for one, will be curious to follow their trajectory at least for a little while. If you're curious to read more, including some opposing views, and to see some photos, here are some links:

Jinphoto blog

thisphotothat blog

horses think blog

Kate Day's blog at the Telegraph.uk

Guillaume Chauvin's website (In french)

Rémi Hubert's website (In french)

Studio Visit, Bela Kasa

I discovered Bela Kasa (pronounced Kasha) when I was browsing through a Hungarian online photo auction. I didn't feel quite adventurous enough to bid online, but I did want to learn more about the artist. I asked around to my Hungarian photographer friends, and I was lucky to find that Balazs Turay knows him. Since I was going to Budapest to support a show that was the net result of a sale of Capa photos by ICP to the Hungarian government, I thought this would be a great chance to meet the artist in his home and to see more work.

It turns out that Bela does not live in Budapest. He told me in an email that he was about an hour out of town and easily reachable by train. When I told my friends in Budapest where I was going, they likened my trip to "going to New Jersey". Indeed the train trip was not the most scenic I've had in my life, passing many nondescript, rundown suburban villages and some industrial parks, but I was excited by the spirit of adventure. Plus, it was a treat to leave out of the aging, distinctly "eastern" train station where all signs were in Hungarian. I wondered how much I seemed out of place to the local population.

Bela was there to meet me when I arrived in Martonvasar train station. We got in his car to drive the 10 minutes to his much smaller village where he's had a house with his family for decades. The Kasa family has a small, tidy compound in a modest, rural sort of way. After entering through a steel gate, I could see a few small buildings on the right and the main house on the left. This all framed a few dozen acres of lawn, fields, and well-tended garden. We sat down on the patio overlooking the garden and fields and started to get to know one another.

Bela went to school for photography in Germany. He worked for years as an advertising photographer both in Germany and Hungary. He is a trim man with short cropped hair, and intense, deeply focused eyes. He's had an interest in Hungarian/Gypsy folk music for years, and he's a capable musician on a number of instruments. He began traveling to the Hungarian, Romanian, and Transylvanian countryside in the 70s looking for Gypsy musicians to meet, make music with, and to learn about. The resultant photographic essays he's produced document a very personal vision of a world few see, and a world which is quickly disappearing. He noted to me that many of the musicians in his photos are already dead, and that the communities are dispersed or dwindling. You can see some of his images in the book "Hungarian Folk Instruments" by Robert Mandel. Otherwise the printed versions of his work are simply not available.

His perspective is one that is particularly seen from the inside. he knows the the whole story of everyone he photographs; fathers, wives, uncles, cousins, nephews, etc., these are not anonymous portraits. He participates in wedding ceremonies, funerals, village festivals, and more. Some of these, he told me, last for days. For example, the photograph I bought from him shows a wedding band playing after more than a day of festivities. He told me he took the viola from a sleeping band member and joined the other musicians. After a time, he put down his instrument, and took this photo.


Though it's visual syntax doesn't break any new ground photographically, I think it's a remarkable picture. I don't believe there are many vintage copies of his images, but in the case of an artist like Mr. Kasa, I don't think that's the point. His view of this insular and misunderstood culture deserves to be seen and to achieve a wider distribution; probably in the form of some kind of publication. Take a look at his website to see a broad cross section of his work.
Bela Kasa website

After we had looked at a few folders of his work, Bela treated me to a delicious country lunch: chicken sautéed with Hungarian paprika, a loaf of hearty, fresh bread, and a salad composed of vegetables mostly from his garden. The Hungarian style peppers were just coming in. Yum. After lunch, Bela drove me back to Martonvasar to catch the train back to the city. It was a pleasure to have such an intimate introduction to an artist and a place that are so distinctly and beautifully Hungarian. It's what makes the soul of travel worthwhile for me.