CONVERSATION WITH WIM DELVOYE

ART WORLD / WORLD ART NO:7 JUNE 2011

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We are happy to share with you the June 2011 issue of RES, which features stimulating artist

conversations, exhibition reviews, interviews and essays. RES is welcoming back contributing authors

to its previous edition: Burcu Yuksel sits down to talk with Gary Hume in his studio, while Didem Yazıcı

catches up with Daniel Birnbaum and Donatien Grau.

At this critical time for the Arab world RES includes two contributions that focus on artists from Egypt:

Hans Ulrich Obrist interviews Wael Shawky during his Edgeware Residency at the Serpentine

Gallery in London and H.G. Masters’ presents his critical take on Hassan Khan’s work in “Basically

Your Mentality is the Mentality of Servants”; in addition art critic Rachel Withers talks with Abraaj

Capital Art Prize 2011 winner Jananne Al-Ani.

Other essays include Grit Weber’s view of Harun Farocki’s work, artist Erda€ Aksel travels to

Belgium to chat with Wim Delvoye, and director of the 2010 film The World According to Kapoor,

Heinz Peter Schwerfel prepares a special essay for RES on Anish Kapoor.

RES also features DVD and book reviews as well as a very special piece by Barbara J. Scheuermann

on the two video art exhibitions Paradise Lost at Istanbul Modern and Big Picture at Kunstsammlung

Nordrhein-Westfalen.

You can subscribe for a hard copy of RES or access the PDF version of the current issue as well as

previous issues by visiting the website www.resartworld.com

We hope you enjoy the read.

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HANS ULRICH OBRIST IN CONVERSATION WITH WAEL SHAWKY

INTERVIEW CONDUCTED IN ENGLISH, TRANSCRIBED BY ATT‹LA PEL‹T

HANS ULRICH OBRIST Let’s begin with the beginning. I’m very curious as to how it all started. How did you

become an artist, or rather, how did art come to you?

WAEL SHAWKY I lived and studied in Saudi Arabia as a child. I lived there since age four, half the year in

Mecca, the other half in Alexandria, Egypt. I started doing drawings when I was at school.

HUO Did you have any kind of epiphany? What about teachers or mentors?

WS I first received professional guidance when I was at Alexandria University. But my gift for drawing

was already known at least within my family.

HUO So you were always drawing...

WS Always drawing, exactly.

HUO And you’re still drawing?

WS Yes, of course.

HUO So there’s a daily practice of drawing.

WS Almost, yes.

HUO Where do you draw, in notebooks?

WS I draw in anything I can find. It’s not something I really prepare for. If I’m going to be a part of a

show, I request that I live in that city for five or six days and I make drawings particularly for that show.

HUO If you were to make a catalog raisonne of your work, where do you think would be the beginning?

WS If it were retrospective, the beginning would be Frozen Nubia. It’s an installation that I did for the

1996 Cairo Biennale.

HUO Yes, that’s the one where you built houses out of cement, correct?

WS That’s right. I was 24 years old then, and I think it was the beginning of many things.

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HUO Can you tell me more about this piece? You stated in an interview with Hassan Khan that you “got

the conceptual references through a belief in the chemical content of the cement, however when you

actually looked inside the houses you could not see the materials, only figurative representational

elements, so that there was a kind of translation through the figurative.” Can you expand on that?

WS It was a way of fabricating a certain type of housing. It’s supposed to be a mud house, but instead

it’s made out of cement. The view is just from one perspective, one angle, so that somehow the interior

appears flattened. It’s just from one perspective, one angle, so that somehow flattened the image inside.

The image inside is lit by fluorescent light and all the objects were painted in white and silver. So it

looks two-dimensional. Back then I was just discovering how to translate such a political event through

a completely visual aspect.

HUO So it was actually a political event which triggered the ‘96 piece?

WS Yes, because it’s based on the emigration of the people in Upper Egypt after and during the building

of the Aswan high dam in the 1960s. After building the dam, all the villages flooded with water, so they

moved people from one location to another.

HUO So they were displaced, basically.

WS Yes. I was just fascinated by the idea that the entire culture had changed just by relocating these

people a few kilometers. The cement is, of course, a reference to the new housing the government built

for these people and this new culture.

HUO What was your next epiphany? What happened after 1996?

WS I did a lot of drawings and paintings, but I didn’t keep them. In fact I think I destroyed most of them. I

also went to the U.S. and studied at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999.

HUO What kind of paintings and drawings were they?

WS Most of them were figurative, generally a mix of animals and people... Anyway, when I went to study

in Philadelphia I began to work with asphalt. From ‘99 onwards I started to work a lot with materials like

tarmac, liquid tar, asphalt, silver paint, graphite, etc., mostly in installations, but also in painting.

HUO Do you have heroes in Egypt or abroad?

WS Yes, I used to see a lot of Joseph Beuys when I was living and studying in Alexandria. He wasn’t so

famous in Egypt, but we knew about him, about his professionalism, about the Düsseldorf Academy in

particular...

HUO So the Düsseldorf Academy had a kind of aura?

WS I had a professor by the name of Farouk Wahba. Wahba studied at the Düsseldorf Academy under a

professor called Gotthard Graubner. So he was the one who introduced this world to me when I was very

young. Graubner was his hero.

HUO Are there any Egyptian or other regional artists who’ve inspired you, or have you been inspired

mostly by Western artists?

WS There are some figures we respect like al Gazzar and Hamed Nada. I liked their work a lot. Al Gazzar is

extremely important. The thing is that there is a very big gap between that generation and what we are

doing now. There is no in-between.

HUO So there are no conceptual heroes?

WS No, not at all. I think that our generation, is the generation that tried to build a unique language

without any references. We had nothing to build on, either in Egypt or in the region. We had to create it

from scratch.

HUO Do you think it was an advantage to be the first ones?

WS Yes, maybe.

HUO You mentioned some artists like Hassan Khan and others. How would you describe your relation to

Egyptian artists of your generation? Is it a group? Is it a movement?

WS No, it’s neither of those. There seems to be a disunity here in Egypt in comparison to, say, Lebanon,

where they are more united than us. The Lebanese movement seems like a group of members presenting

one big project. Our movement is more focused on individuality and even the topics are completely

different to each other.

HUO Who are some other artists you’re close to?

WS Besides Hassan Khan, there’s Amina Mansour, Hazem El Mestikawy and Lara Baladi…

HUO So there is a generation of artists with no connection to artists from the ‘50s or ‘60s, but are there

any kind of interdisciplinary connections, between philosophers, public intellectuals and artists, say?

WS Yes, sort of. It’s hard to say, because like I said, we’re not a unified movement with a leader or

anything. But there is somewhat of a connection with the literary world. There were also influential

writers that many of us read like Sonallah Ibrahim, Abdelrahman Munif, Naguib Mahfouz, Mohamed

Hassanin Haikel, Gamal Hamdan, They are thinkers, novelists and short story writers. Over ten years

ago we had only one institution that controlled everything in Egypt: the government. We all had to deal

with the government. It was a very very closed circle. But then with the creation of Townhouse Gallery,

the whole art scene shifted completely.

HUO That’s when you started doing your installations?

WS I was already doing installations since 1991. I received the grand prize for Frozen Nubia at the 1996

Cairo Biennale. After that I had a lot of trouble with the government. There is a hierarchy, of students

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HUO How did your work change in America. It seems you started working with a lot of different

materials and then you moved on to video installations. How did that transition happen?

WS I have many installations that are a combination of videos and installation. One example is

The Green Land Circus, which is a huge piece I made in Cairo in 2005, and also a piece called Sidi El

Asphalt’s Moulid from 2001, which is also a combination of many things. The problem with these

works is that I can’t really move them. What’s traveling everywhere is the video, but the rest of

these big installations cannot travel. I’m trying to make my work more practical, however, like with

Cabaret Crusades...

HUO Yes, Cabaret Crusades was a Gesamtkonstrukt, a total installation?

WS Yes, in my solos at Cittadellarte Foundation in Beilla, Sfeir Gallery in Beirut, and Nottingham

Contemporary. I think I will have another very big installation in KW, probably this summer, but

I’ll try to postpone it if they agree.

HUO The western art world saw a very reduced version of your work. These videos traveled through

different group shows, and I started to believe you were a video artist. But then I saw Cabaret

Crusades, and in Biella I understood that you actually do complex installations.

WS Yes, that’s the main thing, I love to work with material.

HUO Tell me more about Sidi El Asphalt’s Moulid.

WS It means “The Day of Birth of Saint Asphalt.” In Egypt we have something called “moulid,” which

means “day of birth.” The main moulid we have is the day of birth of the prophet Muhammed. Each

member of his family also has a moulid. Each moulid is a celebration day. Usually when we use the

word moulid in Egypt, it signifies “chaos.” It’s chaos to the degree that things can happen at the

same time without affecting each other negatively or positively. It harbors extreme contradictions

to the point where you can’t make any comparisons. So in this piece, Sidi El Asphalt’s Moulid, I was

trying to scan the period that I lived and my generation, which was Sadat’s time. I didn’t live in

Nasser’s time, I was born in 1971. For me Anwar Sadat was a very important figure. That’s why I

made the piece Telematch Sadat. While Sadat was in power, there was an economical transformation

that happened in Egypt. Before Sadat, Nasser focused more on a socialist system. But Sadat was

more pro-capitalist, friendlier towards America. He opened the country to travel and immigration.

But it was also the beginning of serious corruption too. Nevertheless, there was a new hope in

the time of Sadat. It was also a time when Gulf countries began hiring many people from Egypt,

especially Saudi Arabia. Egypt had the professionals they needed: doctors, engineers, teachers,

etc. My family was also one of those families who went there. They went there for work, and when

they returned it changed the social structure of Egypt, because of the money they had and also

because of the religious influence that they brought back from Saudi Arabia to what was a much

more secular society. Before their influence Egypt had what I call an “agricultural Islam.” After the

return of these Egyptians from Saudi Arabia, a kind of nomadic Wahhabi Islam predominated in

Egypt. That’s when the veil started to appear in Egypt. So both the Sidi El Asphalt’s Moulid and the

Telematch Sadat piece have to do with this period.

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Stills from Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show FileVideo, 31:49 minutes, 2010Courtesy the artist

Cabaret Crusades: The Horror Show File2010, Fig #073Courtesy Galerie Sfeir-Semler, Beirut & Hamburg

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Telematch suburb drawings (1- 54)Graphite, silver pigments, ink and oil on paper2008Courtesy the artist

Right pageStills from Telematch SadatVideo, 14:00 minutes, 2007

Courtesy the artist

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HUO Are these pieces also related to history-painting?

WS Yes. Going back to the chemical content of the material, I think this also has something to do with

my fascination for Joseph Beuys at that time. I always felt that the way he used his material was very

religious. It requires the audience to believe in the chemical content of it, otherwise it wouldn’t have any

conceptual references.

HUO So there is a kind of Beuysian alchemy at work?

WS Yes. In the first piece I was just collecting doors and windows from demolished buildings in Cairo.

I built a huge alley out of them, and it’s all covered with liquid tar and asphalt. Then inside the black alley

I presented sound and videos.

HUO You mentioned the paradox of how your videos were embedded in installations. In his interview with

you, Hassan Khan says he sees a contrast in your work between the object of the video image and the

physical presence of the video image itself. So this idea of video and physicality is interesting because

you say “Timing is what I find in video that is not in the other elements. At the same time it has a higher

ability at hiding the process when you have all these differences in the medium you are using. You

can achieve what I have been speaking about more efficiently, dealing with the video itself the content

becomes more visible, the video is also an element in the bigger context, a completion of the balance.” I

would like to know more about this, about how the videos are embedded in a very physical environment,

like in Cabaret Crusades.

WS I think the most important factor is that you can’t really see the process. It’s a limitation I found in the

finality of an installation, because whatever I do, I will also still show the making of the work.

HUO In these installations you show the making of, and then there’s also The Green Land Circus which we

haven’t spoken about. That’s another big installation.

WS Before The Green Land Circus, there was another huge installation called Asphalt Quarter. That was in

2003 and it was presented at the Venice Biennale. This is important for me because it represents a shift in

how I think of the word “translation.” The Asphalt Quarter is based on a novel by an Iraqi-Saudi novelist

called Abdel Rahman Munif who wrote Cities of Salt. That’s what the piece is based on. It’s a series of five

books explaining the beginnings of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The first chapter starts off in a Bedouin

nomad village by the sea. A British oil company enters the village and starts to build platforms for the oil

industry. They hire members of the local community to build those platforms. So the first chapter explains

the relationship between these Bedouin nomads and these “blond, white” people. They don’t understand

them and see them as aliens. They don’t speak their language and in fact they worked on these platforms

for four years without even knowing exactly what it was they were doing. I thought that was a very

interesting chapter, because they were building their own history without knowing what they were doing

or understanding anything for years. So I tried to translate this in Venice. I went to a very small village

in the western desert in Egypt and asked parents if I could take their kids to shoot a film in the desert. In

the film we asked them to build an asphalt runway for an airplane. We only told them that we had to finish

this runway within one day. We brought tons of asphalt that doesn’t require heat. They loved working with

the asphalt and incredibly they finished it in a day. We documented the making of that runway. It was a

recreation of that first chapter in Cities of Salt. Since then I began to work with kids a lot.

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The Cave (Amsterdam)Video, 12:49 minutes, 2005Courtesy the artist

HUO After having done these installations which include videos, some of those videos started to

appear on their own. When did that start? Was it with Al Aqsa Park, or was it before?

WS For example, the one in Venice was a huge installation made out of asphalt, and inside the

installation are four screens that show the process by which it was made. The first one that was

ever shown separately was a piece called Dodge Ram in 2004. It was two channels showing a Dodge

truck. I filmed this truck “mudding,” basically doing circles in mud and spraying the mud around.

That was one screen and everything was black and white and slowed down. I filmed the truck as if

it were an animal, in exactly the same way they would film an animal on the Animal Channel. In

another screen you see an eagle and myself wearing a mask with a costume that looked like a cliché

of a Saudi Arabian. You see asphalt, you see liquid tar. That’s perhaps the beginning of not seeing

the process, actually. It’s filming the process but not seeing it.

HUO I saw Al Aqsa Park in London. It’s an animation... there somehow you don’t see the process.

I guess that’s where we see a new epiphany that influenced your work. The link to architecture is

still there but in a different way. What happened?

WS In Al Aqsa Park I tried to make it more like a religious experience. When you look at it it’s hypnotizing

somehow. The main idea behind it was to refer to a ride at an amusement park which people get on and

wait till it’s over and which is usually controlled from outside. The model is exactly the same model of

the Dome of the Rock. The only thing I invented in this is the scenario of the movement of the animation.

As for the mechanism, I had to try and find the right kind of mechanism from research in amusement

parks. There’s no story to this really, it just works by itself.

HUO It’s almost like a “perpetuum mobile.”

WS Yes. There is another video before this piece which is called The Cave, from 2005. This piece

involves me reciting a chapter of the Quran inside a supermarket.

HUO What triggered that idea?

WS Istanbul, basically. I had a six-month residency at Platform Garanti (which has since closed and

the same building has been renovated and reopened as SALT Beyoğlu), which eventually lasted seven

months. I was there in 2004, and Turkey was trying to become a part of the European Union and there

were demonstrations and political confrontations between secular and religious parties, etc. Turkey

is actually 97% Muslim, which is a higher percentage than in Egypt. So while I was there I went into

a mosque to see people praying, which is of course in Arabic, and it seemed very strange to me that

Turks wouldn’t have been understanding what they were saying in the mosque, unless they happened

to speak Arabic. So that brought a lot of questions to mind. I questioned myself as a Muslim artist who

lived in Mecca and Egypt and who went to Istanbul, etc. So I think The Cave, which I did during that time,

was a self-portrait for me. It not only described my experience in Istanbul, but it was also somehow a

translation for my situation as an artist that comes from a religious background and travels all over

the world. Also, I chose to title the work The Cave because most Islamic scholars believe that this sura

I’m reciting is to encourage Muslims to emigrate from Mecca to Medina in the beginning of Islam. Islam

began in Mecca, where the Prophet Muhammed was persecuted, so that he and his followers had to

emigrate from Mecca to Medina. There are seven stories inside The Cave, sometimes referred to as the

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Seven Sleepers. The link between all those stories is that they deal with knowledge and power. As a

Muslim, if you are somehow weak in your country, you are required to emigrate to gain power and

knowledge from abroad. Then you have to return to your country to share your knowledge and

power and spread its goodness to people.

This piece reflects this idea about the artist and how he travels everywhere. Also, the supermarket

can be a very visible metaphor for capitalism, as well as the cave.

HUO I was wondering whether there was any epiphany between Al Aqsa Park and Cabaret Crusades

where something new entered your work?

WS There is a link between Al Aqsa Park and Cabaret Crusades. I think using kids in my work also

has something to do with this, which is the concept of control in general. Kids don’t yet have a

gender identity, and also they don’t act. When I asked them to take part in this film about the

assassination of Sadat, they didn’t know what that was or what it meant. They just followed orders.

I think this is also what happens when you use marionettes. They don’t act. You’re detached

from any kind of dramatic memory. It’s totally pure. I think this is also what’s happening in this

animation and another animation called Larvae Channel Two, this idea about control.

HUO It’s like a panopticon...

WS Yes. This Al Aqsa Park piece is about control also, but it’s not controlled from the inside, it’s

controlled from the outside. You always see someone in a cabinet controlling the people on the ride.

When the people inside the ride scream the controller lowers or raises the speed, etc. It always has

something to do with external control. That’s the link, I think.

HUO How did the project the Crusade start? With previous pieces you had an interest in history

books and stories... you talked about the Cities of Salt, and the Crusade is related to Amin Maalouf.

Can you tell me more ?

WS I’m fascinated by this idea of translating history. I don’t believe in history that much. It’s called

“The Crusades Through Arab Eyes.” It was collected from the accounts of Arab historians at that

time. I’m not stating that there is a truth or a lie. It’s just another way of seeing things. What’s also

very interesting about his book is that it shows all the aspects: the Muslim side, the Arab side, the

Christian side. He doesn’t go into which side is right or wrong, which side is bad or good. He himself

is a Christian, which I think is also very interesting.

HUO So you read the book and then started to make the puppets? How did it go?

WS There was a preparation for that. The beginning happened in Lamu, Kenya. I was invited by

Nicholas Logsdail to do a project in Lamu, in his space in Kenya. I went to Lamu and didn’t know

what I would do there. Then I heard about the history of Lamu, about how the town used to be run by

Arab Muslims who originally came from Oman. They used to trade slaves there. And according to

these stories I heard in the streets, the “Americans” which I think means Portuguese, came to free

them. Today Lamu’s population is over 85% Muslim. So I needed to translate this image for these

Arabs who suddenly heard about the Crusades. In this story I always feel that the Arabs are the

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Crusaders. So I brought a hundred kids and a hundred donkeys, and I made an army out of them,

with flags and everything. The film was nine minutes. In it the children move along the beach

and then surround a Crusader fort, a fake fort in Lamu. Also many of the books that I read about

the Crusades at that time mostly just talked about sieges. Sieges were the main action in those

wars. And that’s what you see in this film called Telematch Crusades. After that I got the idea of the

marionette.

HUO The idea of the marionette obviously made Cabaret Crusades an incredibly big and complicated

piece. In Biella it was an incredible installation that involved earth, soil, video... again you have

materiality and the moving image, and it’s very epic. That must’ve taken a long time. Can you tell

us about it?

WS I think it was very important to make Cabaret Crusades with the Pistoletto Foundation. I don’t

know how I could’ve made it any way else, because it needed a lot of support. I think it was

the biggest project that I made with a real organization. Before that it was always a matter of

improvization and having to finish quickly because of money issues. But this time I had more

money and I had a space to organize it all. I was working with over 35 people in total. Also the

way we found the marionette... I’ve seen many different collections and none of them had the

expressions that I found in this collection.

HUO Yes, apparently you found the collection in Torino from a very passionate collector of puppets...

WS Yes, it was incredible. That’s something else I wouldn’t have managed by myself, because in

the end the Pistoletto Foundation made all the agreements with the museum to lend us this

collection. It would’ve been extremely difficult to do it any other way. So they played a big role

for sure. Then once we had the collection of marionettes, we worked on the costumes for these

marionettes to change everything, sometimes even the make-up. That took about a month and a

half of work. It took another month and a half to finish the scenography.

HUO The beauty is that it ties in with your earlier installations...

WS Yes, that’s also the first time I ever wrote a script...

HUO Based on the book by Maalouf...

WS Yes. That’s why it’s also in a very classical Arabic, because in Maalouf it was based on the real

writings of historians. Going through different things like music, script and voiceover... for

example, after we finished the filming I had to go to Egypt to do the voiceover. That was something

I didn’t expect. I always knew of people who had been in radio and who used to act, but I had to try

and make them sound like they weren’t acting. I tried to make it extremely narrative and rigid

most of the time. I also didn’t expect that it would end this way. I was expecting that it would be

more surrealistic. In the end it became more realistic, but it had something weird in it as well. In

the beginning though, I was expecting to have flying marionettes. I think it turned out close to my

piece The Cave. In The Cave I was somehow trying to be neutral. Not just like a TV reporter, but also to

make sure that my ideological and political position is not clear to the viewer: that it’s not cynical

or anything, that it remains ambiguous.

HUO Does it connect to the politics of our time?

WS Yes, it does. It has all these strategies, cheating, collaboration between kings... It was shown in

a contest called Contemporary Myths. The second chapter, the second Cabaret Crusades is called

The Path to Cairo. It has many more stories that are connected to things happening today. It’s not

actually set in Cairo. In the first part the main location is Istanbul, in the final part it’s Jerusalem,

that’s the grand prize. In the second part, which is called The Path to Cairo, the whole shift of Arab

power will go from places like Edessa or Antioch to Aleppo and Damascus. This is a preparation for

Nureddin Zengi, and will bring in Saladin also. The development then focuses on the shift of power

to Cairo that happens in the third part.

HUO How many parts are there?

WS Four. All related to Maalouf. The same chronology and stories from Maalouf’s book. From the

Arab point of view, the end of the Crusades comes with Saladin, because that’s the victory and that’s

when Jerusalem goes back into Muslim hands. But actually they will lose it again. That’s why the

last chapter will just include the capture of Jerusalem.

HUO In Biella you worked in Pistoletto’s school, and you’ve had your own school in Alexandria for

the last five months. Can you tell us about how your own school works?

WS Originally it was my studio. It’s a very big basement, about 400 m2. I decided to turn it into a

studio for young artists. I invite every six months 12 artists to stay there. I also invite professors,

artists, critics, to give workshops, etc. The staff changes every six months. It’s like an alternative

academy. There will be a big show at the end of six months, but it’s just for students.

HUO Were you involved with the whole revolution?

WS Yes. I was in Alexandria, not in Tahrir Square. They cut the roads, so you couldn’t go. But it was a

great time. In Alexandria they didn’t have media coverage like in Cairo.

Wael Shawky lives and works in Alexandria, Egypt. Last year he launched MASS Alexandria, the first Independent Studio Program for young artists in the city. Shawky has received international acclaim for his work as an artist and filmmaker and has had numerous international solo shows including: Citta Dell’Arte, Italy (2010), Gentili Apri, Berlin (2009), Kunsthalle Winterthur, Switzerland (2007), and Ludwigsburg Kunstverein, Germany (2005). His work has also been shown at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and 2005. In February 2011, he was awarded the Ernst Schering Foundation Art Award.

Hans Ulrich Obrist (b. 1968, Zurich) joined the Serpentine Gallery as Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects in April 2006. Prior to this, he was curator of Musée d’Art Modern de la Ville de Paris since 2000, as well as curator of museum in progress, Vienna from 1993-2000. He has curated over 200 exhibitions internationally since 1991, including do it, Take Me, I’m Yours (Serpentine Gallery), Cities on the Move, Live/Life, Nuit Blanche, 1st Berlin Biennale, Manifesta 1, and more recently Uncertain States of America, 1st Moscow Triennale, 2nd Guangzhou Trienale (Canton China), and Lyon Biennale. In 2007 and 2009, Hans Ulrich co-curated Il Tempo del Postino with Philipe Parreno for the Manchester International Festival. He was also awarded the New York Prize Senior Fellowship for 2007-2008 by the Van Alen Institute. Obrist is the author of 50 books, most recently, A Brief History of Curating.

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CONVERSATION WITH WIM DELVOYE

ERDAĞ AKSEL

I A R R I V E I N G E N T, Belgium late in the evening. I leave the hotel to take a

short walk in the city. The weather is unusually warm for this time of the year

and the cafés on the sidewalks are full of young people in shorts and T-shirts

drinking beer and eating Belgian fries by the river. “To go to the city center,

just follow the towers,” said the desk clerk; I basically use this advice to find

my way in this city of gothic towers.

In the morning the cab drops me of in front of the large rusty ornamented

iron gate. While waiting to meet the artist Wim Delvoye, I drink coffee and

walk around the studio observing a multitude of drawings, small sculptures

and maquettes.

I had many conversations with people. However I had certainly never recorded those conversations to

be printed. The outcome may just be gibberish. Of course, another possibility was that I might meet with

Delvoye and instantly hate each other. Though rare, things like that sometimes happen.

Fortunately, that did not happen. We ended up spending the whole day going around the studio looking,

talking. We sat around his house laughing a lot and doing art-gossip. We sobered through a good long

lunch and we drove to the vast grounds around the impressive castle nearby Gent, that Delvoye actually

is about to transform into a real, not virtual, Wim-City. He was kind enough to drive me to the Brussels

Airport. We continued our conversation until we got to the airport, barely in time for my flight to

Istanbul.

I certainly enjoyed a day of seeing good art but, more important than that, I had the pleasure of

spending hours talking to an extremely intelligent artist. Though art is very important for me, I am quite

aware that it isn’t the most important thing in the world. I admit, sometimes I find intelligence more

fascinating than art.

After returning home,, listening the conversation or reading the deciphered texts, I realized that one

certainly would have a hard time to understand much of what we were talking about.

So, I decided to sit down and write a text about my day of conversations with Wim Delvoye. I will use the

sound files as much as possible. Moreover, I can and I will also write about some of the unrecorded parts

of that wonderful conversation since I still vividly remember it.

We began the conversation by talking about my trip from Istanbul and my walk in the city of towers.

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WIM DELVOYE I was also in Brussels last night with the director of the theatre La Monnaie (De Munt).

They want me to do the décor. I told them I want to direct a play. They asked me whether I went to

theater. I told them I had only been to theater once and to opera once, but I want to direct. It’s a

way of saying “no.” It is like when they ask you to do an exhibition and you ask a lot, “I want an

elephant, etc.” So, they say “no.”

ERDAĞ AKSEL Just hope that they don’t say “yes.” Have you been to Istanbul already?

WD Yes, I love it. I love Istanbul.

EA Istanbul has become a very sexy city.

WD I really like it. It’s a Beijing in Europe. People are building everywhere. People are very wealthy

and they love to spend. There is a certain dynamic.

EA Since we always talk with forewords, I am going to start this conversation with a foreword. That

is, I am not a journalist, or an art critic, nor am I even a good talker. So when they asked me to do

this conversation, I mainly accepted it because I got interested in your work.

WD Lots of people have no eyes you see. People who write often miss the eyes.

EA Well, I don’t really write and since I am not an author, I accepted to come here and talk to you

mainly because I could relate to your work. To tell the truth I related to your work through my own

work. So, there may be a lot of “I’s” in this conversation. That is not because I am a megalomaniac,

but because that is how I related to your work.

WD Understandable.

EA I actually said, “no” to this proposal at first. At the beginning, it was kind of like your response to

the theater director.

WD I see. Also, as an artist, you are naturally a perfectionist. You are more aware that this thing will

live and that people will read it. There is a certain pride as the producer of that product, and when

you are not doing it every day, you are worried about the product. There’s a risk involved. It feels

commissioned. When you’re in your studio you don’t feel commissioned to do something, but here

you feel commissioned.

EA When looking, studying and relating to your work, I, of course, got jealous of your work.

WD Oh, that’s the biggest compliment!

EA I realized we thought of similar things at times. There was a time in the 80’s when I had doctors’

offices near my studio and I played around with dirty hand signs in their X-Ray machines.

WD Yeah, how?

Wim Delvoye and Erdağ Aksel

Here, Wim and I go into a whole discussion of different ways of “giving the finger” in various cultures.

Since this part of our conversation involved so many hand gestures, the recorded version doesn’t make

much sense. We move around the studio looking at gothic works of Delvoye. On the counter there is a

tabletop-size version of his well-known gothic Cement Truck and a tabletop-size architectural gothic

Pergola that is less known.

EA It makes so much more sense to see this truck after seeing Gent, the city of gothic towers.

Wim moves towards the Pergola.

WD This is one of my first pieces that is not ironic. It’s a piece of architecture. It’s also confusing

sometimes for diehard fans because it’s not a gothic truck, it’s a pergola, and it really is a pergola.

There are no second layers or other meanings to it. Some people love to differentiate, but maybe this

piece is not so good, because it’s not so much art anymore. It is more like a design piece. I am very aware

of that. Plan is that this work is going to be a pergola in a beautiful garden. I always worry later about

whether it’s good or bad or important or not.

We move on towards a different sculpture that is part of another series that involves beautiful twists and

distortions of classical sculptures.

WD This obviously will be regarded as an art piece. It’s a nautilus, like a shell and it’s a very classical

sculpture.

EA So you reserve the right to beautiful things...

WD Yes, more and more. In the early days I would make sure it was a bit clumsy, because I was still enjoying

this 20th century aesthetic of something not perfectly made. The whole 20th century seemed to be about that.

I liked that unprofessional, imperfect style. Like Picasso once said that he wanted to get to the point where

he was painting like a child. It is a funny idea to do all that work just to be able to arrive at a level that

you once had. It is very 20th century. But this piece is not 20th century; it could be more related to the 18th

century.

EA This pergola, I think is more of a 21st century work.

WD Yes. And there are other things too. For example, in the 21st century, size doesn’t matter anymore,

people spend more effort on smaller and detailed work, more precise work. However you feel the 20th

century is still around you. The galleries are still large with big walls... When they ask me to make a show,

I cannot make 20 of these like this. I can’t even fill up 50% of the space. So I need to say, “please give me a

small space.”

We are planning to do this in gold, because the price of gold isn’t even very important amid all the other

costs. To cast it is already so expensive that we said “then we don’t do it in bronze, we do it in gold.” Sure, it

would be twice as expensive, but the difference between a metal like bronze and gold is not so astonishing.

In Delvoye’s studio there is a large room with nine people working on computers, many of them doing 3D

modeling of Gothic ornaments? Wim takes me around this room introducing me to these young assistants.

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Cloaca Professional, 2010Mixed media, 710 x 176 x 285 cmMonasism, MONA (Hobart, Tasmania), 22.01.2011-19.07.2011

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Skull/ Jesus Inside, 2007Tattooed pigskin. 149 x 93 cm

Art farm Beijing, 2004-2010Live tattooed pigs

Wim Delvoye, 2005Stuffed Tattooed pig, 142 x 37 x 64 cm

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Suppo (scale model 1:2), 2010Laser-cut Corten steel587,5 x Ø 75 cm (soccle: 80 x 80 x 80)

Pergola (scale model 1/10), 2011Laser-cut Corten steel, L 82 x B 44 x H72 cm

Dump Truck (scale model 1:6), 2011Laser-cut Stainless steel

WD This is Madalina; she leads the army of the ornaments, the army of the flowers. She gives geometrical

structures to a lot of plates. These plates are all two-dimensional, so she draws them in a two-dimensional

way. Later, they are installed in a three-dimensional way. Different projects are going on at the same

time. Some are already in their final stages, some are in a very early stage... This is a young project, but

already starting to develop into its final stages. It is astonishing how quickly we did it this time. This is

also a functional object, but in between an artwork and design. The Pergola is really purposely trying to

be a design object. This is already a design object that serves art pieces that we did. Ten years ago, I did

stained glass windows. I sold a few, but I never pushed it. I thought it was a bit stupid, because you can’t

really sell a window without the walls. So now we are doing the walls for the window, and we have in mind

a gothic-style design -- although I have to say the gothic style is already infected by a fascination for

the Mooresque (Moorish), Hindu style and other styles. I see a lot of 19th century art nouveau in it. In the

Pergola, I see Indian/Hindu styles, and a little bit of Thai lines. We started out with pure gothic but now

these other influences have been slowly added.

EA Hello Madalina, I also observe a very Belgian feeling of lace here...

WD Yes, I can see that... I saw that in India too. I just came back from there. The lace of course gives your

eyes pleasure in a different way, with colors, shapes, etc.... But there’s another quality to the eyes that

most art pieces neglect: the stereoscopic quality, which is beyond just color and shape. We have two

eyes and can thus enjoy an enormous depth in things. You see this in landscaping where they know

how to place plants in a way that gives the beholder a pleasure of depth. Here you see holes in holes

and other holes, and it takes days to absorb, to actually understand how it is structured. It’s like a very

complex piece of music that you have to listen over and over to hear all its subtle nuances. So this is very

architectural, which is a recent thing.

EA I was thinking of the transparency issues in these. I see a close relationship between these ornamented

gothic structures, the x-rayed stained glass windows and even the shit machine Cloaca, because in all

of them transparency reigns. We are seeing what’s inside or we see through something: the human body,

lace, or an x-ray machine. So perhaps transparency also is a reflection of what’s going on in the 21st

century. I am thinking of Wikileaks. All of a sudden these have become rather updated.

WD That’s correct. I also have works that reveal transparency within the system. For example, I made

artwork from real shares of Cloaca that we got listed on the stock market, and we made some bonds, like

a real company. Of course the stocks and bonds themselves are not transparent; they’re made of paper,

but...

EA They are showing what’s inside something else, the global economic system…

WD Yes, the confusion between the vehicles of investment...

EA Yes, in that sense I’m sure Cloaca isn’t very transparent either... maybe it shows the shit but I know

there are non-transparent parts to the machine. However it tells about part of what’s inside human

beings. I feel it’s also very related to this idea of expressionism. In Turkey during the effort to Turkify the

language, one of the terms they Turkified was the artistic term “expressionism” which when translated

literally means to “put out” (Dışavurum). It suggests something inside us being expelled outwards. It

always made me wonder if what artists put out always smells better than what lawyers or economists put

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out. When I was looking at your piece I thought, “this is one of the most expressionist pieces I’ve seen.”

It really puts out what’s inside, and what’s inside doesn’t necessarily smell good.

WD In a sense it’s also anti-expressionist. Manzoni showed own shit in a can, and he underlined the idea

that the artist feels something special, puts out something special... that if it comes out of the artist’s

body, it’s special, or holy. My Cloaca is the opposite of Manzoni’s project because it’s not even a human

being. The most individual and intimate human activity, shitting, is stolen... like Prometheus stole fire

from the Gods.

EA I found that the most expressionistic video I’d ever seen was when I was in hospital where I was given

an endoscopy and I could see my insides on a screen as the doctor explained to me what was going on.

I remember mumbling to the doctor how it was a true expressionist video piece. I often tell this to my

students that come to the studio so eager to express what is inside them. What’s inside us doesn’t always

smell good and it also includes shit and puke...

WD That does sound expressionistic.

EA Let me ask you what you think of video art. I have a problem with it, because I respect film too much.

I have a friend who’s both an artist and curator - which you know is the latest trend - and he said “I don’t

like video art, but I show it a lot because it’s easy to show and cheap to transport”. What do you think

about that?

WD I’ve always been astonished that they get away with so much without dealing with the medium. For

example, when I look at a Lady Gaga video on MTV, say, I find that even though it’s not art and just a bit

of entertainment, that video is so much better than any art video I see in Amsterdam or in Tate. I see

stuff there that really tests my patience. Some girl washes a car; the other one throws a ball repeatedly

until you just get bored. Andy Warhol 40 years ago did an eight hour film of the Empire State Building,

and it was wonderful. I loved it. But today a lot of those videos are considered “art,” when we even debate

whether Hitchcock or Blade Runner is art. For me Blade Runner is art. But they would say it isn’t, they

would think the stuff that passes off as art today is art. I think that’s what the next trend in art videos

will be: videos that are actually good, well produced, well acted, and well done. Something that gives value

for money. So many people are only focused on socializing and networking in the art world, in fact 90%

of an average artist’s life is only that. And the networking overtakes the working. The work is just done

hurriedly or in a mediocre way so that it doesn’t take too much time out of the networking and socializing.

What’s written in the catalogue doesn’t mean anything either, nobody buys the catalogue. In the art world

there is a newspaper called Gazette, about old artworks and auctions. I still buy it occasionally. I know

many people who buy that catalogue, they would go to bed with it and read it when they wake up first

thing in the morning. It is full of 18th and 19th century art and collectors would pore over it passionately.

So when I make a catalogue, a video, a presentation or a website, I think of this problem and I don’t worry

whether it’s art or not, I worry whether it’s good or not. But a lot of artists today don’t try to do something

good; they try to do “art.” But art starts to look like an apology, like they’re saying, “I know it’s not good,

but it’s art.” The reasoning goes: we cannot compete against Madonna and Lady Gaga, they have millions,

and so we may as well make “art.” Also, most of the public is still in the 19th century when it comes to their

taste in art. For example, they will find a 19th century landscape magnificent, but they won’t like Joseph

Beuys, say, and will say “well my six year-old can do that too.” So the public still needs to catch up and be

brought in the 20th and then the 21st century.

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Our tour of the studio continues and we move towards the stuffed pigs as well as stretched pigskins that

all have been intricately tattooed.

EA The only works from you that I have trouble relating to are the pigs. Tell me about them.

WD But it’s very close to Cloaca. It’s also a kind of capitalist and economic logic. You put many in a small

painting and the painting grows for you. Then you have a larger painting that everybody wants to buy.

They don’t want to buy an art piece because they think your work is going to be cheaper next year. They

buy it because others whisper to them that the work is going to be more expensive next year, whether

symbolically or financially. They’ll buy it as an investment assuming that the world will one day catch

up. Again, that modernist idea of “catching up” is at work. So people come and buy a work not just

because they like it, but also because it’s an investment, like a piggy bank. That’s what my pigs allude

to. Here it’s not getting financially more expensive; it’s just gaining weight and kilos. So you don’t have

more art, you have more kilos. Also, you don’t produce paintings but harvest them. The moment that I

want this painting is when I kill it. Of course, I don’t kill it; I have assistants to do that.

EA Do you stuff them when they are killed?

WD Depending on the tattoo. Sometimes I like the tattoo more than the rest.

Our next stop is the well-known machine that is called Cloaca. Lately Wim is also busy preparing for

a show in the Louvre, Paris. He showed me a model of a twisted gothic tower that will be visible inside

Louvre’s glass Pei -pyramid. It was a very beautiful steel work. The only nasty thing related to Cloaca

was its title that came from its shape. It was to be called Suppository. When exhibited Cloaca is fed twice

a day and it simulates the human digestive system producing the end product seven hours later. My son

who likes biology was very interested in this contraption and supplied me with various questions about

it. We stop in front of the smallest version of Cloaca. The Portable-Cloaca is the size of a large suitcase

and looks like an extremely neat and clean machine.

WD This one is so neat; we never tried to make it shit. It’s the only clean Cloaca.

EA My son who is extremely interested in biology wanted to ask a question to you. He told me about

intestinal villus. Apparently shit is produced in the first ten inches of the small intestines, and as it

travels the rest of the way through the intestines, the villus sucks out the nutrients that the body needs

from the shit. So he asked how you deal with it. Human beings, when they eat something, shit a lot of it

out, but they also take some of it. He wants to know what it is you take. He asked me: “Does he not have a

villus?”

WD Well, to make good shit, we don’t need to take it out. A lot of it happens in the first parts, but then a lot

of it is taken care of by bacteria. If we don’t take it out, it won’t affect the outcome. It would be beautiful if

we could take energy and take something grow out of it, make it energy efficient.

EA What about having Cloaca gain weight? Just like when the villus sucks out the nutrition and in the

end gives us a big fat belly?

WD Oh, I never thought of this one!

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EA My son also said that the chewing process happens both in the mouth and in the stomach. How did

you resolve that?

WD That’s true. The stomach also churns. This, for example, is the chewer for the mouth, and it’s a little

bit based on what they use in the meat industry and also what they use under the sink. In the stomach

you have a magnetic stirrer that makes a constant movement and a less aggressive movement.

Moving along the studio we come in front of various three-dimensional images of Jesus, all somehow

distorted or twisted

WD This first model is a twisted pieta. After the Cloaca came the twisted works which also resembles the

movement of our sphincter.

EA You know just like you grew up among Catholics, I also went to a Catholic school and I did several

works with crucifixes as well... I was surprised to see that we had both played around with the image

of Jesus. I stretched their arms; made them jump off the crucifixes into swimming pools, using plastic

pietas that I buy from Spain, Italy, and Mexico... the good plastic ones are in Mexico and Naples.

Catholicism really gets under your skin and you always live with that sense of Catholic guilt...

WD It also has a superficial influence, like the Russians who’ve seen so much of Lenin and Marx since

they were little. They don’t like or hate those images, they’re just fascinated by them. A hundred years

ago a painting of Jesus would’ve been a lot more expensive than a painting of flowers, but that’s not the

case anymore. These days, a painting of flowers can be much more expensive, and a painting of Jesus

might well be worthless, even if it’s painted by a very good artist. Nobody values the image of Jesus

anymore.

EA It’s a similar situation with images of Ataturk in Turkey.

WD This is a generation that has been playing with meanings and symbols, stripping them of their

meanings and symbolism.

EA When I went to school in the U.S., getting a masters degree in art meant painting the same painting

or doing the same sculpture over and over 20 times. If you did 20 different things you didn’t get your

degree.

WD Yes, you were considered to be unsure of what you wanted to do and considered not to have found

your own personality.

EA Much later, I did an exhibit and called it Objects of Hesitation, because I realized that my hesitations

were like jewels, I had to keep them. I don’t want to be certain; I don’t want to be decisive. I want to be able

to change and go in different directions, so I am a product of that 70’s art school, which is now criticized

a lot. There was a lot of dogma in it.

WD True. And art was always defined from a negative perspective. There were a lot of people with fists on

the table. The idea of emancipation is interesting for us. Artists doing their own galleries would be a step

toward emancipation.

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Terpsichore, 2001-2002Steel, x-ray photographs, lead and glass, 200 x 80 cmEdition: 4/4

Pieta Twisted, 2005Bronze, H 20 x 17 x 18.5 cm

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EA Perhaps. I once asked my artist-friend why he was doing curating as well as art. He said it was

because he thought curating was too important to leave to the curators.

WD A lot of art from the past shows the artist as a monkey. For example, Jackson Pollock or Willem

de Kooning type of 20th century art. It’s a bit like the artist as a monkey. So you could not think of

emancipation, you had galleries in New York that would talk for the monkey, who would be busy doing

his gestural abstract painting and drinking his head off.

EA Yes, and we are somehow expected to be thankful for showing or selling our art. I personally refuse to

be a “thankful artist.” I’d make art whether they bought it, sold it, showed it or not.

WD A lot of work today is interesting because it has more to do with the emancipation than the work

itself, like Damien Hirst. It’s not the work in itself that I like , but I like it when he auctions his works,

because it shows his emancipation. Another artist has two magazines and curates the Biennale in

Berlin. A lot of artists are taking their future in their own hands.

EA I was thinking about what you said before about how art should be subversive, well done, or beautiful,

and if possible all three...

WD What’s important is to question the criteria we lived with. We were brought up with a certain kind of

criteria and when we see new things come out, we think, “That’s not art!” So before we rule out an artist,

we should always do our utmost best to try and like them and understand them. That’s what I try to do.

Art today is so shockingly different. I don’t know when the change happened...

EA Art fairs have become much more interesting than Biennaless and other grand exhibitions...

WD And the catalogues of auction houses like Christie’s and Sotheby’s are actually more interesting and

more discussed by people than Art Forum is.

EA I returned to Turkey from the United States with an Art Forum under my arm and a subscription for

the next three years. I was reading all those texts in that familiar incomprehensible language.

WD Now it’s completely different. A guy who used to be considered a crook but becomes rich, nowadays is

called a genius.

EA It’s very trend-based. Rich people always want something new and different, not last year’s stuff.

WD Yes, they’re actually buying fashion, not art.

EA What happened in New York City, why did you move to China?

WD New York is a city of “has beens.” There is a lot of nostalgia. People talk about this place where Warhol

used to hang out, or that place where Yoko goes. They show you another site where Woody Allen shot

this or that particular scene of a film from 15 years ago. I didn’t want to be in a place where history

happened. I wanted to go somewhere where history is happening.

Marble Floor© Studio Wim Delvoye

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All that you read was really a collage of what we talked all day with Wim Delvoye. It is probably not a

very good collage yet it is sincere. Wim Delvoye is very well known within the art world. Obviously, any

artist would enjoy the justified fame. However, throughout our conversations with Wim what I observed

is that rather than having this fame go over to his head he is busy seriously analyzing what it means

to be famous within the trend-based art world. I truly enjoyed listening to his remarks and extremely

insightful analysis of recent art historical trends. The planned Wim-City on the château grounds near

Gent, very similar to his website, is an obvious attempt to be emancipated from the perils of that trend

based art world.

Wim Delvoye, based in Ghent, Belgium (b. 1965) employs media spanning drawing and sculpture to concrete mixers, stained-glass windows, X-ray images and live tattooed pigs. Throughout his work, Delvoye realizes outrageous notions through earnest endeavor, all the while merging high and low, decorative and mundane, biological and industrial; his Cloaca machines produce human excrement via mechanical means. Delvoye has exhibited widely, including Documenta IX, at Sonnabend Gallery (New York), Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris), New Museum (New York) and the Guggenheim Collection (Venice).

Erdağ Aksel, born in 1953 received his Fine Arts degree in West Virginia University’s Creative Arts Center. He then completed his graduate degree as an assistant at the same school. After working in Bilkent University for ten years, he then joined Sabancı University’s Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences as Founding Faculty where he currently works. He’s had various solo exhibitions in Turkey, U.S.A., Poland and UK. Aksel’s also been featured in the (2nd) Istanbul Biennial, (45th) Venice Biennale, and has contributed to numerous group exhibitions in Turkey, U.S.A, Germany, Italy, France, Denmark, Hungary and Japan. Aksel’s works are in various private collections as well as in museums such as Istanbul Modern and Tate Modern.

THE PAVILION OF TURKEY4 JUNE – 27 NOVEMBER 2011ARTIGLIERIE, ARSENALECURATOR

FULYA ERDEMCİCURATORIAL COLLABORATOR

DANAE MOSSMANwww.planb-venicebiennale.com

SPONSORED BY

UNDER THE AUSPICES OF

ORGANISED BY

WITH THE CONTRIBUTION OF

RES JUNE 2011 36

CONVERSATION WITH JANANNE AL-ANI

RACHEL WITHERS

RACHEL WITHERS Jannane, you’ve been working for the last three years on a project that you’ve called

The Aesthetics of Disappearance: a Land without People. It comprises both still and moving-image

works, and I’d like to invite you to talk about three of the moving-image pieces: Shadow Sites I (2010),

Excavators (2010) and Shadow Sites II (2011).

The earlier of the Shadow Sites works comprises a series of fourteen filmed aerial sequences.

All were made using a camera mounted on a light aircraft and angled directly down at the earth

below, and when you first described the procedure to me I imagined that this point of view would

be familiar, at least to an extent. But when I saw the screened work with its unwavering downward

point of view, I realised that its cinematic perspective is actually quite unfamiliar and unusual,

and also really mesmerising. Can you start by describing the nuts-and-bolts of this project: how

you shot the footage and what it shows?

JANANNE AL-ANI Well, aerial filming can get very technically complicated, involving elaborate rigs,

gyroscopic mounts and helicopters to achieve complex takes. But in this work I was interested

in going back to the fundamentals of film and photography and so my approach was really quite

simple. I’d been looking at early reconnaissance photography and film: in particular material in

the Smithsonian Institution archives shot in 1918 by Edward Steichen, while he was serving in the

US Aerial Expeditionary Force. The unit, which Steichen headed, was responsible for photographing

the Western Front towards the end of World War I, and I was amazed at the strange beauty of the

photographs, taken by cumbersome large-format cameras mounted on small biplanes. I wanted to

recapture that simplicity. So on Shadow Sites II worked with a small crew including an aerial film

and photography specialist and using relatively simple equipment: a Super 16mm film camera

fixed to a purpose built mount which was attached to the wing of a small Cessna, a light aircraft

that’s in widespread use internationally.

The terrain you are looking at is in southern Jordan, an extraordinary place that is particularly

interesting to me because it sits in a pivotal position, in between incredibly contentious and

contested locations — just east of Israel and occupied Palestine, and sharing borders with Iraq,

Saudi Arabia and Syria. It’s a very recently created nation state, yet historically it’s been a major

crossroads for both trade and warring empires and thus it’s incredibly rich in archaeological sites,

some very ancient. And so that’s what you see in the films, from prehistoric remains, to World War

I trench systems via Nabataean and Roman sites, to present-day roads, buildings and agricultural

developments. The trenches — built by Ottoman troops under German orders — are visually very

distinctive and I used them to refer back to the Steichen images.

RW The trenches are perversely very decorative — a striking moment in a succession of intriguing

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details that pique one’s curiosity. Thinking about the work in total, though, what intrigues me is

the disembodied feeling of its point of view. Given the historically and politically loaded nature of

the territory it’s showing, how might we interpret that perspective?

JA Although in earlier film and video works I’ve adopted some methods that might be described as

deconstructive filmmaking, where the viewer is made aware of the “constructed” nature of the film,

in this new work I’m more concerned to replicate the more “objective”, mechanical view presented

by reconnaissance footage. The point of view of the drone or the unmanned spy plane, for instance:

an ever-present all-seeing eye surveilling terrain or moving over a battlefield. And that consistent

look persists over many radically different types of site: from contemporary industrial farming

facilities to exquisite ancient archaeological remains. Maintaining that regular, disembodied

quality was key. In the back of my mind when making this work was Lessons of Darkness, Werner

Herzog’s 1992 documentary on the first Gulf War, which includes dramatic, sweeping aerials

shot from a helicopter showing the burning Kuwaiti oilfields. It’s an epic view of a catastrophic

landscape. In a similar way, I was seeking a kind of seduction or beauty in the work. But on the

other hand I wanted to avoid anything that felt too operatic or over-indulgent.

RW Can you contextualise this piece as regards the overall project, The Aesthetics of Disappearance:

a Land without People? How does it reflect the key themes?

JA The project takes the first part of its title from an essay by Paul Virilio in which he recounts how

the early cinematographer George Méliès was filming in the street when his camera unexpectedly

jammed. He managed to get it moving again, but by that time the people he’d been filming had

moved on, so when he reviewed the footage he found he’d accidentally discovered a way to

magically turn men into women or to make people disappear altogether. The optical effect made

it possible to depopulate the image, removed its inhabitants. So my project has to do with the

relationship between cinema and photography, and war, because as Virilio demonstrates, most of

the advances in lens-based processes have been a result of developments in military technologies.

Virilio has also written about the use of digital technology, aerial photography and satellite

imagery during the 1991 Gulf War, which was a turning point in the history of war reportage. For

me, the relationship between the long distance, ‘cartographic’ and depopulated images produced

during that conflict and the 19th century Orientalist vision of the desert as an empty, unoccupied

place was overwhelming. More generally, it’s the language of occupation and colonisation,

expressing the idea that the target territory is empty available space. So the second part of the title

comes from one of the most enduring and contested mythologies of the early Zionist movement,

that of Palestine being “a land without a people for a people without a land”.

Lastly I should point out that the title Shadow Sites is also a quote— it’s borrowed from the book Shadow

Sites: Photography, Archaeology & the British Landscape 1927 – 1955, by the historian Kitty Hauser,

a fantastic find for me. Although her focus is the British landscape and the crisis over constructions

of national identity in the inter-war period, much of what she covers in the books regarding the

development of aerial photography and its impact on the work of British artists has been of great

interest to me. The actual term “shadow site” is taken from the field of aerial archaeology and refers to

the practice of surveying landscapes from the air at dawn or dusk when the raking light serves to reveal

low lying features on the ground that would otherwise remain invisible.

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Shadow Sites I & II2010/11Photography Noski Deville

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Production StillsShadow Sites I, 2010Single Channel Digitised Super 16mm FilmCourtesy the Artist and Rose Issa ProjectsPhotography Adrian WarrenArts Council England Collection

Frame Grab from Excavators, 2010Single Channel Digitised Super 16mm FilmCourtesy the Artist

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RW In the light of that, your piece Excavators has an almost playful element, in that it shows ants as

“archaeologists” maybe.

JA Yes; it’s another aerial view, but this time onto a tiny “site” in comparison with the Shadow Sites

footage, and it is shown on a very small, postcard sized monitor. We rigged a camera directly over the

entrance to an ant colony, and in the final film you see the ants at work around a tiny hole in the sand –

moving in and out of the hole and shifting grains of sand around.

In that work and other experiments I was doing at the time, I was seeking ways of bringing together

long-distance shots and micro details, the very large and the very small. I wanted to find ways of

merging the two and creating ambiguities of scale. And although there may be something quite

endearing in the tiny ants and their labours, my experiments with scale were informed by research I’d

been doing into representations in the western media of the 1991 Gulf War: for instance, from looking at

aerial footage shot by US fighter pilots of trucks being targeted and blown off roads, the scale effectively

reducing the targets to tiny, insect-like life forms. I wanted to look again at that mechanism and how it

allows for the de-humanisation of the subject.

RW Which Shadow Sites II clearly does. Can you describe it for us and sketch its many differences from

the first Shadow Sites film?

JA Shadow Sites II also shows images of landscapes but unlike the earlier work it’s constructed from

a series of high-resolution digital photographs rather than film. Its point of view moves into rather

than across the plane of the image: the camera zooms in, dropping continuously into the stills. Each

zoom ends with a dissolve into the next image, so it’s almost as if one was continuously boring into the

landscape. Colour-wise as well, Shadow Sites II is different: it’s not in full colour but graded so that each

image is almost a sepia-toned monochrome.

My intention was to introduce further layers of ambiguity around geography and the material status

of what one is looking at. The images might show snow or equally sandy desert. Some pictures feature

autonomous objects in the landscape that are obviously contemporary; others look like archaeological

sites, while others still show ploughed earth or rough terrain, which are much more abstract. In those

images in particular, an ambiguity of scale is much more present than in Shadow Sites I: the objects

shown might be very large, or equally micro photographs of something very small.

Shadow Sites II is screened in a self-contained “back box” and the projection fills the entire wall,

floor to ceiling, side to side, without any gap or frame. It generates an odd, vertiginous, sensation of

descent or falling, a big contrast with the floating quality of Shadow Sites I. It’s a lot more immersive

in its effect.

Both Shadow Sites pieces have soundtracks. In the first film, you hear subtle ambient sounds such as

wind blowing and aircraft engines rising and falling in volume. Shadow Sites II has a more complex and

less gentle soundscape, which includes recordings made on location such as industrial and mechanical

sounds collected in and around the airport, and more natural sounds (wind blowing across sand, for

instance). These were in turn mixed with a variety of other appropriated material, including audio

recordings of contemporary military skirmishes and aerial bombing raids plus a range of animal

sounds such as cattle, deer, vultures and other birds. Running through the entire film is a mechanical

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Production Stills from Shadow Sites II Single Channel Digital Video Courtesy the Artist, Abraaj Capital Art Prize and Rose Issa Projects Photography Adrian Warren

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THE ULYSSES SYNDROME ANISH KAPOOR IN INDIA

HEINZ PETER SCHWERFEL

TEXT IN GERMAN, TRANSLATED BY JEREMY GAINES

A S K E D W H Y he was mounting his first retrospective in his hometown of Piraeus on a ship of

all places, Jannis Kounellis, who had lived in Rome since the end of the 1950s, explained that he

simply thought like a modern Ulysses. He was only returning home, he said, in order to leave again

immediately. The same is true of Anish Kapoor, who was born in Mumbai in 1954, and at the end of

November, 2010, opened his first retrospective in his native country – simultaneously in Mumbai

and New Delhi. The Indians truly celebrated the homecoming of their prodigal son, who has lived

in London since the 1970s, and leader of the opposition Sonja Gandhi was at hand in person to

open the show at Delhi’s National Museum. The proud local press went wild and Bollywood starlets

besieged the artist at the preview. Yet Kapoor refused to be referred to as an Indian artist in an

interview with TIME Magazine - a brusque statement that flabbergasted the patriotic Indians. That

said, does an artist even need a home country? Do discernible cultural influences not suffice for

us to assign an artist to a nation? For example, in the case of painter Georg Baselitz the “tradition

of ugly German paintings, from Cranach to Caspar David,” as he himself puts it; in the case of

Joseph Beuys the Celtic mysticism surrounding materials and German memories of the Nazi Army;

in the case of Kounellis the Mediterranean in Classical Antiquity; in the case of Jackson Pollock

the American expansiveness of space; and in the case of Daniel Buren the talent of the decorative?

But what about Marcel Duchamp and America? Pablo Picasso and France? Olafur Eliasson and

Scandinavia?

HOME PLACE AS THE NO-PLACE, AS U-TOPIA

In 2003, in the form of My Red Homeland Kapoor began a completely new series of complex works.

Having come to fame with abstract miniatures made of color pigment, with monochrome perforated

sculptures that played with ideas of emptiness, and with large mirrors that reflected the sky and

the viewer, but distorted them, Kapoor created a mountain of dark red, slightly moist wax that a

metal blade, driven by an electric motor, incredibly slowly cut into a smooth disc. One association

that comes to mind is a watch face, a perpetual, self-satisfying mechanism that endures without

the artist’s assistance. Another is organic material such as blood or feces, artistic waste

discharged by an animal machine. And then that title of all things! One immediately remembers

that at the end of the 1970s Kapoor invented his pigment sculptures (and with them came his

breakthrough as an artist) after a trip around India. And later he emphasized on several occasions

that in India the existential equation is simply Color = Life. But can we really deduce from this that

My Red Homeland has something to do with the place he was born? With a rascally smile he replies:

“My Red Homeland has been interpreted as referring to India. As far as I am concerned, it may or

may not. It’s not really the point. My homeland IS red. And it is red, because red is not a color just

like any other color. When you really think about it, WE are red. And it’s that redness that the title

of the work refers to.”

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Exhibition poster outside the Mehboob Studio in Bombay

Detail from ‘Stack’

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Exhibition view, Mumbai

Three ‘Non-Objcts’: Spire (2007), Door (2008), Pole (2008) plus Shooting into the Corner, 2008-09

S-Curve, 2006

Non-Object (Door), 2008, Non-Object (Pole), 2008, Non-Object (Mirror), 2009

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Put differently: Kapoor is interested not just in the color red, but in blood. The focus is not on a

cultural feeling but on physical feeling. On a leitmotif that has defined his work ever since he

studied art in London and first tried his hand at staging performances. And as he connected

the title My Red Homeland playfully and with a profound feel for provocation with his purported

nationality. The human home is the body, not a place where one is born. Identity is a matter of the

mind, not a passport. And even blood can be mixed – Kapoor’s mother was a Jewish Iraqi.

CULTURAL TOURISM THROUGH THE EXOTIC

Red wax plays a decisive role in the hall at the Meehbob film studios in Mumbai’s Bandra district,

which was emptied specially for the exhibition. Kapoor assembled there his painting artillery

first shown in 2009 and entitled Shooting into the Corner. Every 20 minutes an assistant wearing

blue overalls walks to the cannon, loads a cartridge of red wax, waits briefly for the compressor

to be at full pressure and then, with a big bang, fires the wax high into a corner of the hall.

The countless members of the Indian public, who had to register online beforehand to attend,

jumped at every shot. Symbolically speaking, the idea was also highly charged. A machine that

is clearly phallic in structure ejaculates a massive amount of paint that smacks against the wall

like plaster and then slowly drips down to the floor. Abstract, i.e., gestural painting is created

here mechanically without any gesture by the painter. A shot across the bows of art history, of

an understanding of painting, of customary aesthetics. Here he shows a form of art that was

hitherto never on show in India …. and caused just as much of a stir elsewhere, in Vienna, London

or Bilbao, as it did in Asia.

Kapoor’s art remains unique in any country, and this is an important statement to retain

in order to dispense with the legend of the artist’s home country; as well as the ongoing

pigeonholing among art critics and the art market that contemporary art can be carved up

into cultures, countries, and territories. Such suggestions may boost sales and be applicable

to the Western idea of art, but Kapoor himself objects: “There has always been this sort of idea

that there is a fundamental difference in view between East and West. I am not sure that it is

really true. In many different directions, what we have to do is to understand that we have to

decompartmentalize our way of thinking of people and culture. It is too easy to say ‘oh, all that

stuff in the East is all spiritual, there is some materialistic reality here in this cold world of the

West. Don’t think it’s true! We have to break that compartment, because what it does is exoticize. It

sets some exotic place out of which people from wherever else come. That’s too touristic a view, too

simplistic.”

In India, Kapoor did not put a single new work on show, no installation created on site. Instead, he

offered an overview of his entire career – in Mumbai alongside Shooting into the Corner, as well as

mirror sculptures such as the 2006 S-Curve, were positioned in the middle of the large film hall,

capturing the space and viewers depending on the angle of vision, making them smaller, tilting

them, distorting them. Or Plane, a portrait-format mirror made in 2010, previously only exhibited

once, in Germany. In the far more difficult rooms of the Delhi National Museum, he presented both

early pigment sculptures such as To Reflect an Intimate Part of the Red (1981) and, placed in the

middle of the room, Here for Alba, an opening cylinder with a polished red interior. Plus a 2006

piece with the telling title Past, Present, Future, another machine that shapes red wax into a semi-

sphere that stands vertically against the wall.

To Reflect an Intimate Part of the Red, 1981

Detail

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Model for Cloud Gate, a model I never could identify

Models for Subway Station, Monte San Angelo (under construction)

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TIME AS UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE

Cannon shots every 20 minutes, silent electric motors, reflections in the rhythm of movement – Kapoor’s

two Indian exhibitions were skillfully staged ideas on the theme of time. He included the fourth dimension

more obviously than in many of his European retrospectives, activated a feeling of time and space,

something that remains the most difficult feat for a sculptor, and in this way also referenced his own

career and lifespan. This aspect was especially apparent in the National Museum’s old exhibition hall,

where he installed some two-dozen models, designs and miniatures for monumental projects that were in

part never realized. Here, the reflection on the dimension of time was extended to incorporate a further

aspect, namely impossibility. What utopia, non-topos is to space, existence is to time, as it exists only in

the imagination as an idea or precisely as a model.

Thus, Kapoor subtly and respectfully alludes to his home country of India, which would only be too happy

to proclaim him its son, which he is not, because he does not want to be and cannot be – an Indian artist.

Just as little as he can be a British or Western artist. Because he has long since overcome all national

borders, just as he has cultural domains or the contradictions of old and new, abstract and biomorphic,

body and mind. Or, to say it with his own words: “My work as an artist over many years has been to

say: Please, stop thinking of me as an Indian artist, because it is not helpful. What’s important is to say

that artists search through all sorts of languages, whether they are so-called languages to the East or

languages to the West, to find to speak as an individual.”

Kapoor as an individual thus also undermines the purported logical system of cultural history. The most

important artists were not necessarily men, and they did not necessarily come from Europe or via the

Western hemisphere. Long before the current topicality of a globalization that under the sign of purported

information exchange and cynical market expansion places that which can be marketed universally over

that which is relevant locally, there was already a language that, while not being comprehensible globally,

was certainly valid globally, namely art. “All the artists that we recognize as the great artists of our time,

or even the previous times, are all Western. No exception. Now, that just can’t be true! We have yet to

discover that they are not all Western and not all men! We have yet to discover what that means really. It’s

as if someone like me might be a kind of weird talisman for something that is occurring in a much bigger

cultural frame. I am not planning it, at all, but it is a much bigger cultural frame. What I know is that I

am determined to be the most playful with whatever talent I have got and try to be as open as an artist

as I can possibly be. That is to say: Just because I make art like that, it doesn’t mean that it’s not possible

to make art in some other way. I try to open myself to the possibility that there is another way. Always. I

think that’s a very important thing. Because it is fundamentally creative. That’s all I can do.”

Anish Kapoor, born in Mumbai in 1954, has been based in London since 1973, when he left India to pursue his art education in London, firstly at the Hornsey College of Art (1973-77) and then at Chelsea School of Art (1977-78). Kapoor quickly gained recognition as an artist with a unique style and character, coupled with a new, non-Western visual language helped to situate him as one of the most vibrant and unique sculptors working in the UK. By 1985, only seven years after graduating from Chelsea College of Art, Kapoor had produced solo shows for major galleries in Paris, London, Rotterdam, Liverpool, Lyon, New York and Basel and his notoriety on the world stage continued to expand. In 1990, Kapoor was awarded the prestigious Turner Prize and in 1991, he was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, where he was awarded the Premio Duemila prize for the best exhibition. Recently, he had major shows in museums such as the Royal Academy in London, the Guggenheim Bilbao, or the Grand Palais in Paris.

Heinz Peter Schwerfel is born in 1954 Cologne, Germany. He is the founder of Artcore Film in 1985. He is a journalist and filmmaker, founder and director of the artists’ film festival KunstFilmBiennale (until 2010). The retrospectives of his films have been shown, among others, in Paris (Centre Pompidou), New York (MoMA), Mexico City (Cinemateca), Helsinki (Ateneum) and Buenos Aires (Malba). He lives in Paris and Cologne.

Copyright for all pictures Schuch Production, Paris

Detail from model for Tarantara

Here for Alba, 2008

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ARCHITECTURE VERSUS ART?

ÖZGE ERSOY

S C H O L A R S A N D C R I T IC S have long been concerned about the ways that architecture takes on

a major role in framing the identity and the role of art institutions. One of the prominent examples

of the changing relation between museum design and function is the Pompidou Center, designed by

Richard Rogers and Renzo Piano, in Paris. The cultural complex hosts exhibition spaces along with

a library, film center, restaurant, bar, store, and a public plaza. The strategy that the Pompidou

adapts turns the museum into an entertainment destination. It also integrates high and popular

culture, while democratizing the museum experience for larger audiences. Another controversial

example of the dominance of museum architecture is the Guggenheim Bilbao (1997), which serves

as a historic novelty in the art world. Designed by Frank Gehry, the monumental architecture of the

new Guggenheim building set the stage for the “Bilbao Effect”—based on the success of the museum

in generating publicity, rejuvenating the city’s economy, and also helping the Guggenheim to

recover from its debts.

In her seminal essay “The Cultural Logic of the Late Capitalist Museum,” (1990) Rosalind Krauss

discusses the implications of the spectaculatization and the increased scale of museum buildings;

the museum experience, Krauss argues, adopts a spatial rather than a historical character. As

the physical space and public imaginary become integral parts of the museum experience, the

design not only competes with the art, but it often upstages or interferes with it—a change that also

reflects fundamental transformations in the role of the museum.

More recently, museum architecture is under scrutiny as many new large-scale projects are on

their way in the United Arab Emirates and Qatar. Examples include the Museum of Islamic Art in

Doha (2008) designed by I.M. Pei, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Museum (est. 2014) by Frank Gehry,

and the Louvre Abu Dhabi (est. 2013) by Jean Nouvel, among others. These institutions have been

criticized for hiring international architects and using grandiose designs to create momentum for

their programming and promotion. It is indeed necessary to be critical about the prominence of

the museum designs, yet the opposition of art versus architecture should be further complicated.

The major concern is not whether architecture dwarfs art works or takes the attention off what is

displayed inside; it is rather to analyze how the architecture supports or intrudes into the museum

experience. This idea is revelant for both permanent museum projects and temporary art events.

This year, the 12th Istanbul Biennial has commissioned Ryue Nishizawa, an internationally

renowned architect based in Tokyo, to design the exhibition building. In the Biennial’s promotional

materials, curators Adriano Pedrosa and Jens Hoffmann emphasize the exhibition as “the

primary format of artistic and curatorial expression,” and hint at the reason for why they work

with an architect to think about the exhibition space. Whereas the previous curators have used

existing sites in the city, it is striking how the newly constructed space by Nishizawa will change

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the experience of art works at the Istanbul Biennial. Here the question is whether architecture

will aim to be a neutral and unscripted background, or a creative partner for art works. Does the

exhibition’s structural design isolate art works from the city and create a space that could exist

anywhere in the world, or does it foster new relations between art works and the local context?

Favoring a strong connection to the city, curators of the Istanbul Biennial has never aimed to offer

a quiet refuge for contemplation. Nishizawa’s work will therefore open up new conversations—how

does the exhibition space affect the display of art works? And how can architecture complicate the

biennial experience?

INTERVIEW WITH RYUE NISHIZAWA CONDUCTED VIA EMAIL IN MAY 2011

Japanese architect Ryue Nishizawa is a founding partner, with Kazuyo Sejima, of SANAA (Sejima

and Nishizawa and Associates), established in 1995, and the founder of the Office of Ryue

Nishizawa, which began its projects in 1997. Recipients of the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize,

SANAA is renowned for international institutional projects including: the Zollverein School of

Management and Design in Essen, Germany (2006), the Toledo Museum of Art Glass Pavilion in

Toledo, Ohio (2006), and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City (2007). Nishizawa’s

independent office has also worked on museum projects, such as the Towada Art Museum (2008) and

Teshima Art Museum (2010), both in Japan. Nishizawa holds a Master’s degree in architecture from

Yokohama National University in Tokyo, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard Graduate

School of Design, Princeton University, University of Southern California, Yokohama National

University, among others.

ÖZGE ERSOY You have designed many international museum projects in collaboration with your

partner Kazuyo Sejima of SANAA. This time, as the Office of Ryue Nishizawa, your starting point

is a biennial—a temporary structure by default. How does the ephemeral nature of this art event

affect the design process?

RYUE NISHIZAWA It is a great opportunity for me to work on this project. I have a big interest in

working on a temporary art project, because it is elusive, fast, ephemeral, and light—everything

looks different from the museum projects that I have worked on so far.

ÖE As opposed to permanent museum buildings, you also worked on projects like the Serpentine

Gallery Pavilion—an open structure with an ad-hoc, three-month life span. What will be the life

cycle of your work for the 12th Istanbul Biennial—will it be a permanent structure, or will it be

destroyed after the biennial? How does this affect the architectural identity of the work?

RN The design of this project is based on the existing building situations of the Biennial. So it can

be called a site-specific project. For the moment, we don’t have any plans to bring the buildings to

somewhere else after the Biennial. But, I think, if someone wants them, it could happen that they

will be brought to somewhere to be rebuilt again.

ÖE The curators of the 12th Istanbul Biennial express an interest in reclaiming the exhibition

format, which, they argue, has been sidetracked in favor of supplemantary events and

programming. How do you think a single, newly contructed exhibition space could help generate a

renewed interest in art works and the strategies of display? What are the other mediations that you

envision to happen between art works and a new architectural space?

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Towada Art CenterCopyright by Office of Ryue Nishizawa

The 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art Kanazawa Copyright by SANAA

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The Toledo Museum of Art Glass PavilionCopyright by SANAA

Teshima Art MuseumCopyright by Office of Ryue Nishizawa

RN New construction can be made for the newly commissioned art pieces, and also artists can create

new works based on the newly constructed space. I hope that many dialogues will happen between

them.

ÖE What are your priorities and criteria for choosing a site for your work for the Biennial? What are

the idiosyncrasies of working in this environment in particular and in Istanbul in general?

RN I try to create spaces that fit to the art pieces and encourage them in the existing building. The

size of those rooms can be different, and they can take many shapes. Another idea that we have is to

give independent rooms to each artist for their privacy and independency. It’s a very flexible idea.

I hope that we can find the best relation between the architectural spaces and the art pieces.

ÖE From 1987 to 2005, with the exception of the 3rd edition, the Istanbul Biennial put art works into

dialogue with old architecture, including Byzantine structures and former national industrial

sites. With the 9th edition, the Biennial moved the exhibitions and events outside of the historical

sites, and positioned them in the Galata/Beyoğlu area—a busy trade and commercial zone that has

recently turned into an arts and culture hub. This spatial transition marked an ideological shift

that favored putting art works in close connection with the public sphere. With your work for the

12th Biennial, the exhibition moves, for the first time, to a newly constructed space. How do you

think this symbolic transition will change the relation of art works to urban masses in Istanbul?

RN Industrial areas in the city are among the most beautiful archeological records of the modern

age. They provide great spaces and atmosphere, not only for industrial uses but also for art

activity. As we try to reuse the industrial area in a way that people in the modern period have never

done, especially for contemporary art activities, we can now readdress to these archeological

assets in our contemporary period. Also, I think this will give the people in the city the opportunity

to find another charm of the contemporary Istanbul.

Özge Ersoy is a curator and critic based in New York and Istanbul. She received an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, NY, and holds an BA in Global and International Affairs from Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, and Binghamton University, NY. She recently edited How to Begin? Envisioning the Impact of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, which investigates the artistic, cultural, and social implications of the planned museum.

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RES JUNE 2011 66

FRITZ HAEG ON GARDENS, EDIBLE ESTATES AND SALT

RES What have you been doing since you got back to Rome from Istanbul?

FRITZ HAEG I’ve just been getting used to returning to life back here in Rome. It’s a very particular

kind of life here at the The American Academy in Rome where I am in residence for a year. I kind of

have a year off to work on whatever I want. Since I’ve been back from Turkey I’ve been in and out of

town a bit, worked on my own garden, done some reading... so it’s been nice.

RES Can you tell us a bit about your projects the American Academy?

FH I’m on a Rome Prize Fellowship, a program that has been around for over a 100 years, which

is awarded to about 30 people a year from different disciplines. Half of them are academics and

scholars, the other half are artists, musicians, designers and architects.

RES Which you are? An architect, an artist, an activist...

FH I guess it depends on who I’m talking to. The fellowship I have this year is in gardens and

landscape architecture, though I was nominated as an artist. I’ll take whatever lable is most

convenient, because I’m purposefully straddling a lot of camps. Most of the fellows are here for a

year with a monthly stipend. It’s a lovely compound located in the hills overlooking Rome where we

have amazing communal meals every day. The artists have big studios with lots of light, and I also

happen to have this beautiful terrace by my studio.

RES Have you turned that terrace into an Edible Estate?

FH Yes, it’s my own personal Edible Estate. It’s kind of different from the Edible Estates series that

I’ve been working on with various people around the world, transforming the space between their

front door and the street into highly visible gardens” where food is grown. in the middle of cities,

from council housing estates in London to front lawns in Los Angeles. It also includes this garden

here which is, like I said, a departure from my usual work, but it’s also kind of my luxurious year

of being able to garden myself because it’s my own garden - something I rarley have the time to do

when I am on the road all of the time. It’s my opportunity to experiment and be outside gardening

every day on a rooftop with very minimal means and modest materials, so it represents a different

kind of garden to the other ones I’ve done. Every garden I’ve done in the series is in a different city,

and also a different kind of garden with different possibilities for growing food where you live in

the city.

RES So what about the Istanbul garden at SALT?

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FH That is also a different iteration of the project as well. I was presented with the opportunity to work

in this amazing new space, a newly constructed greenhouse on the top floor of SALT. We started to

install it while I was in Istanbul for ten days, and I made plans to work on it and develop it during

the time that I was there with whatever materials we could gather or scavenge from the construction

site. It’s being developed as an edible garden in the hot house that will also be a meeting location for

local organizations that are interested in pursuing this kind of work, that are interested in urban

agriculture and urban gardening. It’ll probably take a while for it to be established and have people

aware of it and feel free enough to use it. We just developed the bare bones of it, with a meeting area and

a conference table, the whole floor has been covered with gravel, there’s planters around the perimeter

and an installation of modest plantings throughout the center which can change over time as different

organizations want to take over the space and use it for projects, for installations, to start seeds, to have

meetings, events, etc. I’m hoping that it appeals to groups that already exist in the city, but also inspires

other people in the city to experiment with work like this, knowing that they have a space to do it in.

Also because having a hothouse in particular climates is very helpful; it provides a space to grow seeds

before the whole spring or summer growing season.

RES Is it weird that you won’t see the results of your work, that the garden will grow without you seeing

your work sprout?

FH This is the 11th garden I’ve done, and I always go to a great effort to find the right location and the

right families and people to be involved. So when we have the planting weekend, which is a very long

weekend of three days with a lot of help from local volunteers, and once the garden’s established, my

work is over, I leave, and it’s now their garden, not mine. From then on it’s up to the estate owners to

decide how the project will move forward, what they’ll do with it, what they’ll plant, what they’ll change,

etc. The gardens I plant are always a mix between perennials, plants that will be in and out through

the seasons, trees and vines that will be permanent structural parts of the garden, and annuals, which

disappear at the end of the season and are reseeded the following season. There’s a structure that’s

established that’s somewhat permanent, but then there’s also a lot of room for things to change in the

seasons. That’s up to the people who are there and whose garden it is. And that’s the special challenge

of this garden in Istanbul. I started something and it’s not exactly clear who’s going to take over. I

don’t live there, it’s not my garden, and I won’t be responsible for the daily life of it. I’ll come back in

September for the official opening. At that point it’ll become more clear if there are local people who want

to take it on.

RES Have you been involved with other projects similar to the one at SALT?

FH Most of my gardens are produced and commissioned by art institutions, but this is a unique situation

where I’m making the garden at the institution itself rather than out in the city somewhere. Actually I

had done one other garden like this at a museum in the U.S. It was just for one season, for the museum

staff to grow food that they would be eating all season. It was very successful because it was right

outside their offices and they passed it everyday as they came into work, so it became a big part of the

culture there. In the case of SALT, we’ll see what happens. I think this kind of activity is very new to

Istanbul, especially in comparison to cities like London or L.A. where there’s a lot of work being done in

terms of growing food locally in urban environments. I guess part of that has to do with the fact that

there just aren’t many green spaces in the city. But I think they can be found and created, and part of

my project is to show people what it’s like to see food that actually grows on plants.

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Edible Estates Regional Prototype Garden #11: Istanbul, TurkeyPhoto by Fritz Haeg

RES How did you get started on this edible estates project?

FH The project started in 2005 and it started simply out of my own pleasure in gardening. That’s it. Since

moving to LA 11 years ago I became obsessed with gardening. I found so many aspects of growing food

to be not only so pleasurable but also so human. It was at a time that I felt that we as people had been so

disconnected from it. When you see a garden that produces food in the middle of the city, that changes

the way you think about food and the city, as well as your relationship with your environment and the

people around you. I’ve wanted to make this more prominent in the public consciousness. As you know,

in the U.S. issues of food have become very primary in mainstream conversation. Growing food in the

city or in your own garden enables us to experience the broad spectrum of food from sheer survival to

luxurious pleasure, and also from the sciences to the arts. It’s a very complex and fundamental human

activity and when you have a garden producing food, it encapsulates all of those aspects and puts them

all in front of you in a way that’s very clear and in a way kids can also understand. I think it’s especially

important for kids in cities who don’t even really know where these things they eat come from.

RES These projects are also interesting in the sense that they blur the boundaries of public and

private space.

FH That’s right. One of the things that I’ve done is made these gardens extremely public and built them

in the most visible parts of the city, and yet they’re on private property. That calls into question the

very binary nature of public and private, because it isn’t really that simple. I think there’s something

really meaningful at those thresholds of things that we’re used to thinking of simplistically in terms of

black and white. When you make something that lies in that small space between them, you open up new

possibilities on how to approach things we once took for granted. This project, for example, questions

our traditional view of cities and how we’re supposed to use cities.

RES Going back to cities, this project of yours is about Rome, is it not? It’s supposed to be a

choreography of the city?

FH My time here has gone through various iterations of ideas about the work I’ve been doing.

Currently I’ve been focused on the garden, which is part of my daily life here, but separate from

that I’ve been working on a book called “Rome Eats Rome” (Roma Mangia Roma). The book will

feature protraits and interviews with about 35 people who live in the city, from five generations,

people in their 90’s down to kids in their early teens. It aims to find out what they think about

food, what they eat, how they organize their homes and lives around food. In the processproviding

a snapshot of the city at this point in time and how it’s changing by looking at the memories of

someone in their 90’s and contrasting it with young people today. We’re trying to include a broad

cross-section of people and we’re about half way through our interviews. The book should hopefully

come out in the fall. This year has also given me a lot of time to read, travel, do research. There’s a

whole agricultural tradition here in Italy that’s very fascinating, and I want to spend more time

studying that.

RES Tell us about your movement project.

FH Dance is something I’ve always been interested in, even though I never studied it. I’ve done

various projects integrating movement and dance and have worked with friends of mine who

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are dancers. The first one was four years ago at the Whitney Museum which was a series of free

movement workshops that were led by 30 professional dancers in New York. Most recently there

was a series of workshops in LA where I was at this art space every day for two hours where anyone

could come and teach and anyone could follow different forms of movement. I feel like my interest

in dance is very related to my interest in gardens. These are activities that are so fundamentally

human and yet which we’re not really comfortable with in our daily lives so that we have to

separate them out to a separate space rather than having them directly in the middle of our daily

lives. They are also similar in that they’re kinds of ephemeral human activities in a capitalist

society that doesn’t really value or take seriously things that can’t be bought and sold easily. Every

project I start is about something I’m extremely curious about and which gives me pleasure in

some way. They’re also often the kinds of things I think other people are searching for or needing,

and that also guides the kinds of work I do. Not that those movement workshops saw a lot of people

attend, usually they were small and intimate groups of people, but they were all people who really

wanted to be there. That’s what interests me the most, not so much the numbers, but the quality of

the dialogue I have with the people around me.

RES Can you talk about Animal Estates a little.

FH That’s another continuing series of projects. Most of them happened in 2008. There’s one that’s

on view now in the Presidio, San Francisco. There’s a hope that there’ll be another one in Rotterdam

soon. The aim of the projects is to create forms of modest animal architecture in cities with the

aim of welcoming particular urban wildlife back into the urban sphere. I worked with urban

wildlife experts to identify animals we might want to welcome back and then designed particular

structures for them that anyone can easily install on their own property. Six or seven editions

were done so far and hopefully the series will continue. My background is in architecture, and

this project was like having animal clients instead of people clients, trying to determine animals’

needs, especially animals that had been marginalized by people’s needs and urban development.

RES What’s next for you?

FH I’m not sure. After this year I wanted to leave some things up in the air. My biggest desire right now

is to find a piece of land somewhere and pursue some subsistence farming projects, lay down roots both

literally and figuratively. I want to be more in touch with plants and animals, and not necessarily in a

big city. My fantasy now is to find some place in Italy, but it’s just a fantasy at this point.

RES So I guess we’ll see you here in September for the opening of the garden...

FH Yes, it opens around the time of the Biennial. I can’t wait to see how it all turns out.

On the fourth floor of SALT Beyoğlu, what was once an open roof area has been renovated to form an

enclosed greenhouse Garden. In order to make the most of SALT’s Garden, artist/architect Fritz Haeg

has been commissioned to develop an edible planting project that will act as the hub of an on-going

education and cultural program. Since 2005, Haeg has been creating a series of gardens that produce

food -vegetables, fruits, and herbs- in unlikely urban spaces known as Edible Estates, in partnership

with local families and organizations.

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Fritz Haeg works between the urban ecology initiatives of Gardenlab, including Edible Estates; the domestic social activities of Sundown Salon and Sundown Schoolhouse; the designs and scores of Fritz Haeg Studio, including occasional buildings and even parades (though his currently preferred clients are animals); and other various combinations of building, composting, cultivating, dancing, designing, exhibiting, gardening, housekeeping, organizing, talking, teaching, and writing. His home base since 2001 is part subterranean and part geodesic dome in the hills of Los Angeles.

RES JUNE 2011 72

Edible Estate Regional Prototype Garden #10: Rome, ItalyPhoto by Fritz Haeg

YOKUŞ BOYUNCA AHMET ÖĞÜT

modern denemeler 1İSTİKLAL CADDESİ 136, BEYOĞLU İSTANBUL

16/06/11 – 01/10/11

ACROSS THE SLOPEAHMET ÖĞÜT

modern ESSAYS 1

SALTkurucu Garanti Bankasıİstiklal Caddesi 136Beyoğlu 34440 İstanbul Türkiye T +90 212 377 42 00saltonline.org

SALT_ahmetogut_190x250_res.indd 1 12.05.2011 15:58

RES JUNE 2011 74

INTERVIEW WITH GARY HUME

BURCU YÜKSEL

THE WORLD-RENOWNED ARTIST Gary Hume is a relaxed, unassuming guy with a brilliant sense of

humor. One can feel this as soon as meeting him. Upon arriving to his studio, I discover that his working

space is just as welcoming. In a two-story building in East London, Hume has a spacious working area on

the ground floor. A large table sits on one side, its surface barely visible covered with paint cans, there

are several sculptures, maquettes and paintings standing around, some finished, some ‘waiting,’ one of

which is a large gloss on aluminium painting propped against the far wall on a row of empty paint-pots.

Tucked away in one corner there is a comfortable living area with a light airy kitchen, at the end of which

sits a bookshelf stuffed with exhibition catalogues and art publications. Hume makes us some tea, and we

sit down for our chat.

Hume is among the YBAs who dominated the London art scene in the 1990s but while his friends were

working with sharks, unmade beds and bullet holes, Hume was busy painting. His career took off

straight after leaving Goldsmiths - Charles Saatchi bought two of his door paintings from the infamous

exhibition Freeze and commissioned another four. He represented Britain at the 1999 Venice Biennale,

was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1996 and is now represented by some of the top contemporary

commercial galleries in the world. Last year a major book was published that covered the development of

his career starting with his famous door paintings through to his pictures of flowers, hats, babies, birds

and body parts.

Hume is currently preparing a selection of paintings and drawings for a solo exhibition in London that

will open in January 2012, which he says is his only focus. Scattered around in the studio I notice several

works he has made on cardboard with chalk and paint. These are what he calls his “quick paintings.”

Although his imagery is similar to his gloss paintings, these are much speedier renditions and they

stand out as more painterly with visible brush marks. I ask if these will be included in his show.

GARY HUME Hopefully, I don’t know. I’m enjoying making them. They may turn out to be great or I may say

“It’s a nice idea and good for me but not right to show them.” I’m going to wait and not pre-guess it. I will

see what happens, virtually on the day! Obviously I want everything to be as good as I can make it but I

don’t want to start worrying about it being an issue of is it “within my career” sort of thing. It is difficult

to make something that you don’t normally make. The problems are different so you are solving them

differently. And you are not used to solving problems in that way. You are not always 100% sure about

trusting it.

BURCU YÜKSEL Is this the way you keep your work both challenging and exciting for yourself?

GH Excitement is always the problem. It’s not the problem to get excited, but you get excited by a problem.

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Cuckoo in the Nest, 2009Gloss paint on aluminium, 63 1/2 x 96 in. (161.3 x 243.8 cm)© the artistPhoto: Todd-White Art Photography Courtesy White Cube

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American Tan XXIV (Gloss), 2006-07Gloss paint on aluminium78 3/4 x 63 in. (200 x 160 cm)© the artistPhoto: Todd-White Art PhotographyCourtesy White Cube

American Tan III (Gloss), 2006-07Gloss paint on aluminium74 x 52 in. (188 x 132.1 cm)© the artistPhoto: Stephen WhiteCourtesy White Cube

American Tan XIX (Gloss), 2006-07Gloss paint on aluminium37 3/8 x 26 in. (95 x 66 cm)© the artistPhoto: Stephen WhiteCourtesy White Cube

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Paradise Painting One, 2010Gloss paint on aluminium77 15/16 x 151 15/16 in. (198 x 386 cm)© the artistPhoto: Stephen WhiteCourtesy White Cube

Yellow Bird, 2009Gloss paint on aluminium

72 1/16 x 59 1/16 in. (183 x 150 cm)© the artist

Photo: Stephen WhiteCourtesy White Cube

Cheerleader II, 2005Gloss paint on aluminium59 x 38 1/2 in. (149.9 x 97.8 cm)© the artistPhoto: Christopher Burke, New YorkCourtesy White Cube

GH At the time I was really feeling like a cave artist. If I was alive then, that’s what I would be doing.

But I’m alive now and the principle is the same. I’m still there only with a different setting; I’m in

my studio in Clerkenwell, getting a taxi to the National Theater. This is an ancient activity and I’m

an ancient person. When I go to museums and look at the works displayed, I think that they are all

me. Every artist, I am them and they are me. There is no sort of separation. We are the same being

trying to make work.

Hume takes inspiration from nature which has a powerful influence on him. Although he spends

most of his time in London, and in his studio working, he and his wife also have a farm in the

foothills of the Catskills in upstate New York where they spend about four months a year.

When he decided to have a house in the country, Hume was nervous about feeling completely

relaxed so he did not want to be in England. Instead, he wanted to be an immigrant and experience

what it was like to be one so he chose upstate New York. It turns out, this wasn’t necessary.

GH At the time, I wanted it to be a bit uncomfortable and alien. Later I realized even if I had done it in

England, it would not have been relaxing because nature is so all encompassing and powerful that

it would still have been weird for me and overwhelm my fantasies anyway. Also you always take

yourself with you, and don’t actually ever escape. You are just there, with all the anxieties and the

drives. The great difference is the peace, you just get a lot of peace.

Without the daily social responsibilities of being in London he can focus on gardening and making

paintings. The unfinished works in New York then remain in place until he later returns to work on

them again. I wonder how that makes him feel?

GH Terrible! You can’t remember what the hell you were doing. You just got some weird monster that

doesn’t work. You can’t recall why you even made it.

BY Do you go back to those paintings to finish them?

GH You have to start fresh and after a while you remember. If you touch it, you can generally

remember what the hell it was and maybe go back to it. But then you have moved on! Maybe your

palette has changed and so you are not in that world anymore.

Hume’s transatlantic experience has inspired a phenomenal new body of work, that bursts with the

bright iconography of American culture – pompoms and cheerleaders, flags and sneakers. These

were put on view in his solo show, American Tan. He chose this title because “when the American sun

shines we are all in its light, getting a tan or a sunburn, depending on how you look at it.”

Despite the complexity and long process involved in making his signature gloss paintings, he

usually prefers to work by himself in his studio. Given Hume’s solitary nature, this doesn’t come as

a surprise.

GH I have an assistant two days a week, she’s been with me for several years and she is absolutely

fantastic. Basically she does everything that is very boring so I don’t have to! She cleans the

brushes and does all the boring building up. Because I have five days a week just by myself, I don’t

mind the company for the two days. We sit and have lunch, have a nice chat.

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BY What do you mean by a problem?

GH Well you can’t solve a painting! It is just not working. Then you are excited about trying to figure

out how to make that painting work. Which is why you sometimes go off on a tangent. You really try

to solve one painting that is clearly your type of work, then you go off to make these other things

and to see whether by making those things, you can actually go back to that painting and solve the

problem. Maybe that is what these quick cardboard paintings are; attempts to solve the problem of

regular Gary Hume paintings. Or it’s actually a thing in itself, but I don’t want to prejudge that.

Hume’s love for problem solving played a big role when Sir Elton John asked him to make a work

for his shower at home. Although Hume said to him, “of course, what a nice idea,” he was in fact

thinking “of course I don’t want to make anything for your shower, how insulting!” Over the next

few years, John kept asking about the piece until Hume finally confessed that he didn’t want to

do it after all. So John said “Why don’t you get a can of spray paint and write ‘Elton’s a cunt’ in my

shower and I will buy it.” Perhaps it was this attitude that finally got Hume to make a marble piece

inspired by William Blake’s gravestone but he obviously enjoyed this challenge: how do you make

something beautiful and worthwhile for a shower room? He was pushed to create a work that he

would not have thought of and was pleased with the result.

Hume takes his inspiration from his surroundings, whether it is popular culture or nature.

When he has creative blocks, he paints his way out of them. On his bookshelf, there are several

books on birds and flowers that he picked up in search of inspiration. In a previous interview he

explains; “If I’m feeling desperate I go out image-hunting. I will go to newsagents and stand at

the racks flicking through magazines or I go to second-hand bookshops. And then, bit by bit, like

concrete poetry, I start to realize that I am drawn to particular things and then I start wondering

why that is.”

Hume will then come back and start drawing, which he traces on to acetate and projects on the wall.

He arranges and simplifies the image until he is happy with it, then transfers it on to aluminium

and builds up the lines with draught excluder that he will use as dividers between different areas

of paint. After he brushes the paint in, he cuts the draught excluder away, leaving a sharp edge.

Hume loves gloss paint because of its ability to reflect light and the way it changes color under

different conditions and at different times of day. And he prefers aluminum because of its smooth

and polished finish.

Although gloss paint remains his preferred medium, throughout his career Hume has

experimented with different materials. There was a series of pictures made in marble and stone for

his 2006 Cave Paintings show at White Cube, and the sculptures he made in painted bronze using

the arms from shop mannequins as legs for the subsequent year’s American Tan show. For him, it’s

interesting to see what happens to his work when the materials change.

BY With your Cave paintings, you are obviously looking at the beginnings of human history and

using ancient materials such as marble, chalk and lead. Could you explain how these paintings

came about?

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BY Do you prefer to be on your own while making your paintings and if so what about collaborations? Have

you ever collaborated?

GH No, I find it virtually impossible. I have tried collaborations because it seems cool and fun, but to have

enough confidence in your own opinion to be able to then bounce around and take someone else’s and not

feel that yours is being dissipated seems virtually impossible.

Hume may not like collaborations but he doesn’t mind requesting the help of other’s expertise and asking

for advice when he doesn’t know something. For example he just made a series of wallpaper, a process

which he knew nothing about. He found the best wallpaper designer in the country who explained to him

how wallpaper is made. “Then I give him some ideas, and the designer explained to me how they would

turn out. So learntfrom him – I’m very happy to learn but I’m not collaborating.”

In the past year Hume has also worked with the Italian brand Marni to create T-shirts. How does he feel

about these types of projects?

GH They are half fun. I bring in people who are really good at it to help me because I am a painter. I’m not a

designer, or an interior decorator and when I try to do it by myself, the results are terrible. It’s to know my

own limitations and where other people excell and try to bring them in.

BY As a disciplined and productive artist, do you ever wonder or care about who buys your works?

GH Who knows who buys my stuff! I’m not interested because they obviously have to be rich and if they

are rich, they are probably not the nicest, loveliest people in the world. They are proper capitalists,

making money, making a profit out of anybody else’s labor. It’s how they work. You have no control over

what people do with anything. Saatchi was a good example, he buys things, which is completely brilliant,

but then he sells things. One can only rely on the work. You don’t go to a museum and look at a painting

with a list of owners representing the rise and fall of capital. That is not how art is studied. It’s a whole

kettle of fish that I just don’t really care about.

BY What about the critiques and reviews of your works?

GH If someone says something nice of course it is absolutely fantastic but I got a few critics who loathe

my work! – I can’t believe they could loathe it so much, how can you hate it that much?! When they really

hate it, it doesn’t really matter because it seems to have gone past a sort of aesthetic judgement. You are

actually listening to them rather than their attempt to understand the work. Of course you want good

criticism, but you have no choice anyways. I don’t really worry about things that I have no power over. I

will get upset but I can’t carry that because there is nothing I can do apart from making another painting!

Hume is also not fond of the whole process of being chosen for public commission. He would love for his

works to be in the public space but is not interested in competing for it.

GH I have absolutely no desire to be interviewed, to be on a shortlist, or to tell a committee what my work

is. I don’t want to say why and how my work is inclusive, why it is not offensive, etc. Once I turned up to

a panel I had been invited to, and no one knew who the fuck I was! And I thought to myself “I’ve got

things to do!”

Milk Full, 2006Marble and lead96 7/8 x 72 13/16 in. (246 x 185 cm)© the artistPhoto: Stephen WhiteCourtesy White Cube

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Untitled, 2008-2010Charcoal on paper, UV Perspex and gloss paintFramed: 32 11/16 x 24 13/16 in. (83 x 63 cm)© the artistPhoto: Todd-White Art PhotographyCourtesy White Cube Untitled, 2010 (tbc)

Charcoal on paper, UV Perspex and gloss paintFramed: 51 3/16 x 35 7/16 in. (130 x 90 cm)© the artistPhoto: Todd-White Art PhotographyCourtesy White Cube

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Four Coloured Doors II, 1990Gloss household paint on four canvases83 11/16 x 231 2/16 in. (213.4 x 589.3 cm)© the artistPhoto: Stephen WhiteCourtesy White Cube

Four Doors I, 1989/90Oil on four panels94 1/8 x 233 7/8 in. (239 x 594 cm)© the artistCourtesy White Cube

Mother Mortality, 2006Marble and lead96 7/8 x 124 13/16 in. (246 x 317 cm)© the artistPhoto: Stephen WhiteCourtesy White Cube

Burcu Yüksel is an assistant director at Derek Johns, dealers in Old Master paintings in London, a member of AICA Turkey and acts as a Curatorial Liasion for PERFORMA, New York. Her diverse working experiences include museums, auction houses, and contemporary art galleries. She holds an Art History and Economics degree from Brandeis University and Masters on Arts Administration from New York University. Burcu is a contributor to Turkish and Israeli publications. Among her published interviews of contemporary artists are Anselm Kiefer, Gilbert&George, Marina Abramovic, Halil Altindere and Tayfun Serttas.

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Having been one of the golden artists of the Goldsmiths generation who emerged from the Freeze

show of 1988 to become known as a YBA, I ask him what it was like to be part of that group? Looking

back, how does he position himself within this group and the London scene?

GH I mean it is real! It really happened, it really was a moment and those moments are rare. I was

just very fortunate to be in a moment when this was all happening. There were enough artists who

were engaged, all at the same time, and most of them knew each other and you could be elevated

with everybody! We were all virtually good friends, obviously rivalries and loathing and things

like “oh you slept with my girlfriend” would occur, as they would in any small community.

BY When did you realize that this group and the timing were quite significant?

GH Really right from the very beginning because it was a very different world. It’s hard to believe

what it was like then compared to now. We had absolutely no power and there was no way for

us to have any power. When you have no choice, you take anything. At the time there were two

galleries, you could maybe show at the Lisson and then Karsten Schubert was starting. It meant

that there was this enormous vacuum that could be filled. With Damien’s overwhelming charisma

and entrepreneurial sense, and his desire for fun, he could blow into that balloon and we all sort

of gathered around it. As with any creative act, you can only do with what you have; both your

personality and the physical things. Then you just have to have the courage to live with your

personality; take the pig’s ear and make a silk purse out of it!

Since then British art’s so called enfants terribles have become contented figures of the

establishment, Hume was the first of the group to be welcomed into the Royal Academy in 2001.

We go back to discussing his latest experimentation, the quick paintings. He finds it challenging to

be making these works that are deviating from his signature style of gloss on aluminium.

GH I’m now making paintings other people make! To find out whether these are any good, I have to

look at how they are in the realm of everybody else who paints in this manner but I’m only here all

the time and I go to friends’ exhibitions and museums. The answer is, I don’t know whether these

are any bloody good or not. They sort of sit and wait, and eventually we will see whether they can

hold themselves. It’s complicated when you are painting them because my judgments about what

to do are being lead by vague memories of people who paint like that all the time. So I’m thinking,

that would be nice but after I do that and I go “no wonder it’s nice because it’s like so and so!” That’s

useless to me, I want to make my paintings, not other people’s. So we will see.

While he is welcoming and generous with his time during our chat, I feel that I’m interrupting his

usual routine. It is time to leave Hume with his work and I am now even more curious about his

upcoming show, but I need to be patient.

Gary Hume was born in Kent in 1962 and lives and works in London and upstate New York, USA. He is renowned for paintings distinguished by a bright palette, reduced imagery and flat areas of seductive color. His work is strongly identified with the YBA artists who came to prominence in the early-1990s. Hume was elected a Royal Academician in 2001.

The Sisters, 2006Marble and lead

82 11/16 x 46 7/8 in. (210 x 119 cm)© the artist

Photo: Stephen WhiteCourtesy White Cube

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HARUN FAROCKI AND THE RELATIONSHIP OF WAR, THE MEDIA, AND ART

GRIT WEBER

TEXT IN GERMAN. TRANSLATED BY JEREMY GAINES.

F O R W E E K S N O W , images from Libya have been flickering across our

screens: wherever the rebels rise up against Muammar al-Gaddafi, his

government troops are at hand, firing on rebels and civilians alike. The

West sent in NATO, who attacked from the air, and the world sat before

millions of screens following the military developments that turned a

democratically motivated movement into a bloody war. Images on war are

suddenly very much the rage again.

Before war returned to our living rooms with the media coverage starting

January of demonstrations in several North African countries (and the

military reprisals they encountered), the workstations in the office of

German filmmaker Harun Farocki were busy with preparations for an

exhibition dedicated to war and the media from the viewpoint of art. The show has now opened at

the Mathildenhöhe in Darmstadt, curated by Wilhelm Loth Prize winner Farocki, together with

artist Antje Ehmann. It features contributions by over 20 artists and was greeted with strong

critical acclaim. Alongside pieces by Peggy Ahwesh, Oliver van den Berg, Kota Ezawa, Walid Raad

and Fazal Sheikh it gives prominent space to Harun Farocki’s filmic oeuvre. He shows four parts

of his latest work Serious Games, which provides the title for the overall show and also presents a

series of his earliest political films, which he produced in the late 1960s. As such, the visitor not only

encounters the personal view of Farocki and Ehmann of art production on the topic but also a small,

retrospective show within the exhibition Serious Games.War-Media-Art.

For four decades Farocki has engaged in visual explorations via the making of his films. The films

derive their functional-objective character from the documentary tradition, but through subjective

arrangement and added montage they reveal the fascinating power of images. For his multi-part

piece Serious Games Farocki employs film footage used by the U.S. Army to train their soldiers. It

is intended to prepare them for warfare before deployment – in this instance in Afghanistan. The

military trainers use the same digital material that industry makes available for computer games.

The first part of Serious Games, a two-channel video installation comes with the subtitle Watson

is Down. In the exhibition two film images run across the corner of a room. On the one side we see

a digitalized landscape of the Near East, complete with barren desert, sandy hills, no vegetation

and a sky whitened by the heat, through it roll U.S. Army armored tanks. The images are absolute

duplicates of the images in the war games and although they appear fictional given the computer

animation, the topography and the position of the sun refer to real coordinates and an exact time.

The visual aesthetics suggests reality, but in reality fictional and factual visual data are mixed.

Later we see a trainer placing digital explosives, obstacles and suicide bombers. The second side of

the film installation depicts three young soldiers from a documentary viewpoint, each sitting at a

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computer workstation in a room. They are the drivers and gunners of the armored tanks and are

engaged in training. Their cockpit exists as three computer workstations. At the center sits gunner

Watson, who at the start of the film does not know that his digital ego will soon die. At the end of the

film a bleeding U.S. soldier lies next to his armored tank, the fade in explains: Watson is Down.

In its composition as a two-channel video the installation underlines the strange overlap of

documentary and fictional images, reality and fabrication. But also when war reality and media reality

merge into each other in contemplation, and in their interactivity at the end of the film, Harun Farocki

allows the two differing visual characters to stand alongside each other as contrasting manifestations.

While the fascination of computer games lies precisely in the deliberate merging of fictional and factual

elements, Farocki’s film montage works to counter it. A long film-take circles around the body of the

dead computer image of Watson and suggests an “out-of-body experience.”

American artist Allen Sekula features in the current exhibition with a photo series entitled War without

Bodies. Depicting people holding the barrels of a weapon, the artist responds to the absence of bodies

from war images. Farocki comments: “Sekula calls it the ‘war without bodies’ because in the press

coverage of the war against Iraq in 1991 we only see images taken from a great distance – deserted

operations. In Sekula’s works men – and children! – take hold of aircraft cannon in order to understand

war. They attempt to feel their way into the situation.”[1]

However, aside from the simulated out-of-body experience of the computer animation, Farocki’s Watson

is Down offers very little that is physical. But what we do experience is the clicking of the mouse key

and the nonplussed faces of the soldiers sitting at their computers once after Watson’s death the game

abruptly comes to an end. No one really grasps war here, let alone the opportunity to experience it

emotionally; instead what is taken away is a sense of alienation at the sudden divergence of the visual

experiences. You can say the viewer of Serious Games watches himself watching and also sees when the

actors fall out of their roles.

In Part II to IV[2] of Farocki’s Serious Games the subject is also the overlap and divergence of

documentation and fiction, which occasionally take a humorous note. Farocki’s camera is present

when in Part Three “immersion” psychologists conduct further training for the U.S. Army. Their task

in psychological therapy sessions is to confront traumatized soldiers who have returned from the

war with the awful encounters they experienced and to help them deal with these memories better.

Again, computer games are used as tools, but this time there is a cheaper version without the animated

shadows. We see someone telling a therapist about a shocking war experience, the death of a comrade.

It is a moving, highly emotional situation for the viewer who is exposed to the voice of the traumatized

soldier relaying what sounds like a chaotic situation following the suicide attack, and his description

of the dead soldier’s mangled body. In addition this individual describes his haunting feelings of

shame and guilt towards his superior who accused him of having failed. the psychologist supports him

with sympathy and yet objectivity, helping him work through the images. Then the patient suddenly

stops and abruptly changes roles. The man who a moment ago was a traumatized soldier has suddenly

become a psychologist who introduces his colleagues to the confrontation situation and imitates

a patient with great conviction. He also mentions how his colleagues are to operate the computer

animation. What follows the initial horror of the soldiers’ suffering is offset by an abrupt dismantling of

the melodrama. Farocki denies us movie-screen emotions and no identifications can occur. The observer

remains outside the events.

Harun FarockiCopyright/Author: Hertha Hurnaus

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Serious Games 4, A Sun with no Shadow© Harun Farocki 2010

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Serious Games 1, Watson is Down© Harun Farocki 2010

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WITHDRAWAL OF AFFECTION AND THE DRAMATURGY OF NARRATION

Farocki’s soldiers are not heroes but either young men who cannot cope with the material or simply

young men who would like to imitate heroes. Farocki is by no means concerned with enabling us

to feel our way into a war in which we have not ourselves taken part. He does not avail himself

either to the hero or the anti-hero fiction about the simple soldier, who is seemingly destined to

become a victim in war and to whom the public develops a lasting empathy and identification. On

the contrary, asked about his artistic roots Farocki refers to Berthold Brecht and his handling

of dramaturgy: “It is the Brecht alienation effect in which you should also see the construction

of a dramaturgy. ‘Don’t stare so romantically,’ Brecht shouted into the theater. That was the

one profound influence on me and then there was Pop Art, which only makes a small shift and

then you look quite differently at things. I can see now that this is a very consistent legacy.”[3]

Farocki disturbs the sequence of events in a narration by leaving in comments and interruptions.

According to Bertold Brecht this results in “the viewer no longer seeing the people (on the stage)

depicted as being wholly inalterable, not open to influence, at the mercy of their fate.”[4] And

should Harun Farocki elicit emotions from the viewer in some sequences he deprives him of them

in the next one, pushed the viewer back into a detached attitude in which he looks from outside at

events which now come across like modern parables, and observes himself.

THE EXPOSED IMAGES

In the fourth part of Serious Games Harun Farocki subjects the computer landscape to an exact

examination. Following the observer analysis what now follows is the image analysis: In the training

animations real topographical data and time units are included. However, in the animation of treating

post-traumatic stress disorders in homecoming soldiers the therapist in charge can individually adjust

the lighting. In a matter of seconds the light of day can be turned into twilight or night. All the objects

and persons lack a shadow. Farocki calls this the “asymmetry of images.” More attention and digital

care is devoted to preparation for war, but the therapy support for survivors should not cost as much.

Farocki uses exactly the same material but complements it by adding his own documentary shots, his

editing - and montage technique counters fiction by using reality as an alternative to turning it into

a myth. He distances the viewer from the film’s emotional aspects and the data-based war preparation,

he looks at how it is “made,” and guides our attention to the mechanisms of production. The computer

game industry has become a flourishing branch of the war industry. It may not provide weapons, but it

certainly provides colorful images.

HARUN FAROCKI BETWEEN ART AND THE DOCUMENTARY IMAGE

“ ‘Where are we when we think?’ asks Hannah Arendt. Does it help thinkers to have a table of

precious wood in front of a window looking onto an exquisite landscape? Where are we when we

look at moving images? Cinemas are dark so that we see nothing but the screen. Generally, it is not

completely dark in art rooms; and for a projection the issue is how it responds to the room, how to

other projections in the same room and how to those in adjacent rooms. But when we follow moving

images are we then still in the room?”[5]

Since around 1995 Farocki has found a new means of production for himself in the context of art

and the exhibition business, and there he has found new ways of exploring images. Previously, he

largely worked for public service broadcasting stations in Germany. “...then around 2000, the non-

commercial TV channels began to imitate the commercial stations. That was when I knew it was no

longer for me.”[6]Serious Games 3, Immersion© Harun Farocki 2009

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However, as regards current events in Libya and evaluating changes in parts of the Arab world

Harun Farocki exercizes restraint. “When some huge event happens I never have a clue how

to approach it with film. It was not until later that I addressed the upheavals of 1989, taking

Romania as my example. In such a radical moment the simplest journalistic things are much more

important. It is also good not to always compare but to recognize that it goes beyond something, it

is something completely different from what you already know.”[7]

ENDNOTES[1] Harun Farocki in interview with the author in March 2011 during the exhibition “Serious Games. War-Media-Art“, Mathildenhöhe Darmstadt, Germany. See.: Kunstbulletin, no. 5, 2011, pp. 22-29.[2] Serious Games II: Three Dead, 2010,video, color, 8 min. Serious Games III: Immersion, 2009. 2 channel video installation, video, color 20 min. Serious Games IV: A Sun without Shadow, 2010,2 channel video installation, video , color 8 min.[3] Harun Farocki in interview[4] Bertold Brecht quoted from Wikipedia on the “alienation effect“[5] Harun Farocki quoted from: Harun Farocki. Rote Berta geht ohne Liebe wandern. Publication for his exhibition from October 2009 to March 2010 in Museum Ludwig, Cologne.[6] Harun Farocki in interview[7] Harun Farocki in interview

Harun Farocki, 1944 born in Nový Jicin (Neutitschein), in the then German-annexed Czechoslovakia. 1966-1968 studied at the German Film and Television Academy Berlin (West). Since 1966 over 100 productions for television or the cinema: children’s television, documentary films, film essays, story films. Since 1996 numerous group and solo exhibitions in museums and galleries. 2007 at documenta 12 with Deep Play. Since 2004 guest professor, since 2006 full professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Grit Weber, born in Dresden in 1970, studied art history, art education and cultural anthropology in Frankfurt/Main from 1995 to 2001. Besides being involved in numerous art projects, she frequently writes exhibition reviews for a variety of newspapers and art magazines, including “Kunstbulletin” and

“Journal Frankfurt”. Since 2006, she has been editor-in-chief of “artkaleidoscope”.

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“BASICALLY YOUR MENTALITY IS THE MENTALITY OF SERVANTS” HASSAN KHAN

HG MASTERS

WHAT IS CRONYISM? Cronyism is two old friends in a room, smoking, drinking coffee, and arguing

with themselves over and over. Where is corruption? Corruption is in the dark office with a man behind

a desk laughing maniacally. What does disenfranchisement look like? A young woman holding her head

in her hands. What are the benefits of globalization? Swedish furnishings and ethical double standards.

How do you imagine nihilism? Picture two men flailing ecstatically.

Look at ourselves; in Hassan Khan’s videos we are pitiable, miserable, and laughable only on occasion.

Since the late 1990s, the Cairo-based artist—he’s also an electronic musician, curator and a forceful

writer with contrarian tendencies—has produced bleak portrayals of psyches disfigured by a despotic,

dysfunctional and amoral economic and political system. The backdrop for Khan’s narrative works is not

only modern Cairo and the Egyptian regime of former president Hosni Mubarak—even when it is—but

the ideological vacuum of post-Cold War societies that neither won nor lost the conflict: a pessimistic

period of popularly elected undemocratic governments, authoritarian-sanctioned capitalism, messianic

liberation movements and their supposed antidote of state-subsidized mass consumerism.

Correspondingly, the moods of the dispossessed—rage, cynicism and fear—run deep in Khan’s videos

from his earliest pieces. The heavily condensed, rapid-fire footage comprising the one-minute-long

this is THE political film (1998) shows a gun pointing at a television screen, the entrance of a crowded

mosque, men lifting a TV set showing pornography, a shadowy figure at a desk, the distorted image of a

deranged-looking man, a digital timer counting off the minute, and a slab of pounded meat into which

someone nails an Egyptian one-pound note. Near the video’s end, the figure at the desk throws up his

hands, yelling (in Arabic) “This is the political film!”, followed by a crazed laugh whose sinister, darkly

ironic tone suggests only regressive destruction.

Embodying this lack of political agency is the figure of the young man—the primary protagonist of

Khan’s videos from the late 1990s—who veers between romanticizing his existential struggle and

flat-out resignation. Of the former tendency is the eye struck me and the lord of the throne saved me

(1997), which captures the desperate spirit of the street. A voiceover speaking in cryptic, mythical

rhetoric relates a story about a mother and son’s struggle to survive (“a life of pain is fated for him / he

awaits salvation from one moment to the other”). Khan pairs this allegorical tale with images of a gray

cityscape, a crowded shopping road, excerpts of TV commercials, before ending with the inspection of a

humble cemetery.

Whereas the probing, narrating voice in the eye struck me [ . . . ] finds himself caught up in morbid

poetic reflections, in other early works by Khan the male protagonist’s brimming anger inhibits

perception. Fuck this film (1998) opens with another eye, this time distorted by a lens, accompanied

by the sound of laughing and a voice slowly saying in Arabic “nothing . . . NO thing . . . nothing.”

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The eye struck me and the lord of the throne saved me, 1997Color video transferred to DVD, sound 3 min 50 Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

Khan then cuts to a filmmaker raging through his apartment, banging and pushing aside objects,

complaining out loud about his contrived premise: “What should I do with this film? It’s not a bad idea. A

camel living in a paradise, but who is unhappy.” He contemplates other subjects including documenting

kids in Heliopolis getting high on cough syrup (“the real nightmare”), an idea he then rejects before

dismissing filmmaking at large (“narrative and dramas are just ways of manipulating images / to allow

the audience to feel safe”), his own thoughts (“what the fuck is this bullshit that I am saying???”) and

finally, after a few beers with a friend, the project itself (“Fuck this film”).

Speaking about his own artistic practice, Khan has never romanticized the potential of the individual

as a self-styled political radical or avant-garde formalist. In a recent interview with curator Mayssa

Fattouh, published by the web-based project Art Territories, he lays out his objections to these

approaches: “Artists pick a model [tormented romantic, activist, nationalist, trend-setter, avant-gardist]

that best suits their sensibility and they work through it only to be left with a work whose sole function

is to notate this idea. It basically means that it’s completely narcissistic; we end up with an image of the

artist as a hero.”

This refusal to be a specific kind of artist, even against charges of being reactionary or politically

detached, has allowed Khan to reinvent himself. By the early 2000s, the frustration and stymied

ambition of the characters in his early videos yielded to more expressly empathetic, humanistic

endeavors. 100 Portraits (2001) opens with a view of large apartment blocks on top of which are

superimposed short, one-second-long portraits of men and women of all ages, with a voice reading their

names. This same concern for a citizenry recurs in tabla dub no. 9 (2002), which shows a concrete tunnel

overlaid with footage of people from the street including a man carrying a cardboard box and a woman

selling objects, accompanied by Khan’s fusion of electronica and popular Egyptian music.

The second evolution in Khan’s work is a move to explicit humor. Conspiracy: dialogue/diatribe

(2006/2010) features two middle-aged men sitting and talking in an archetypal middle-class living room.

It quickly becomes evident that they are not actually speaking with one another and that Khan has

spliced together footage of two separate diatribes in which each man spouts abuse, flatters the other,

reminisces, gossips, and criticizes the furniture and the other’s career. This motif of two men sharing a

space yet not actually communicating with one another recurs in Jewel (2010). The video opens with a

series of flashing lights in the dark and then zooms out to reveal luminescent anglerfish in a suspended

box, around which an older and younger man are flailing hysterically to Khan’s rhythmic soundtrack.

However absurdist and laughable, the solipsism in both works is pure pessimism. Even if you can get

two men to dance simultaneously around a talismanic flashing coffer, can you say that they share their

reasons or the experience? Khan has written in his 2010 essay In Defense of the Corrupt Intellectual,

published in e-flux journal #18: “The crowd is where a seething mass with a unified understanding of its

own presence is born, a conglomeration of frictions and tensions that manages to resolve itself into an

identifiable entity.” But two remains one short of a crowd.

The lack of dialogue between the figures in Conspiracy and Jewel is in stark contrast to the over-

inscribed discourse of the art context where these videos are shown—where it is commonplace to speak

about neoliberalism and postpolitical democracy as matter-of-fact abstractions, to accompany every

image with an annotated text, to conclude presentations with Q&A sessions that evolve into commentary

forums. Khan himself contributes his share of editorializing to such public conversations. As a writer,

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This is THE political film, 1998Color video transferred to DVD, sound 1 min Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

100 portraits, 2001Color video transferred to DVD, sound Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

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Jewel, 201035MM Film transferred to FULL HD Video, Original Music by the artist, Suspended Screen, Projector, Audio System, Room painted according to certain specifications 6 min 30 Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

Fuck this Film, 1998Color video transferred to DVD, sound 4 min Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

Conspiracy, 2006-2010Color video transferred to DVD, sound Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

tabla dubb n°9, 2002Color video transferred to DVD, sound

3 min 40Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris

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he exhibits an almost neurotic self-consciousness to the compromised position of the artist who, from

arrogance, attempts to speak on behalf of the masses or to promote others’ ideologies. His denial of

“artist as ___” is a choice not to traffic in pirated discourse or easily appropriated, regime-friendly

avant-gardism.

As a skeptic rather than a partisan, Khan, in his own artworks, constantly returns to representing

the individual’s experience, which no matter how limited in its vocabulary provides testimony to

larger systemic and societal deprivations while remaining intrinsically resistant to co-optation. Rant

(2008), for example, is a largely wordless portrayal of a young woman’s despair. The video depicts her

seated at a white desk in a white space, with only her despondent gestures and body language, facial

expressions and a few muttered words (“I’m fed up” or “So what should I do now?”) to betray her thoughts

on subjects that remain unknown to us. During the video’s almost seven minutes, Khan’s soundtrack of

ambient tones is occasionally punctured by the woman’s laconic phrases or discreet notes on a piano.

Metaphorically, Khan’s music describes the steady formlessness of emotions broken by a rare utterance

that in its rudimentariness could not be appropriated for any other use. Rant doesn’t deny the potential

for communication, but it does acknowledge the infrequency and simplicity of most human exchange.

That worldview, neither condescending nor idealistic, makes Khan a realist. It can be an undesirable

role when others expect you to perform critically and speak revolutionarily, and you refuse to be the

next dictator of others’ experience.

HG Masters is editor-at-large for ArtAsiaPacific magazine and editor of the 2010 and 2011 editions of the ArtAsiaPacific Almanac.

K21 StändehauSdüsseldorfwww.kunstsammlung.de

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Jason Rhoades, Mark Lewis, Rodney Graham, Shirin neshat, dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Corinna Schnitt, natacha nisic, Paul Pfeiffer, Steve McQueen, Kimsooja, thomas Steffl, Richard t. Walker.

(Orte/Projektionen)19. 03. – 14. 08. 2011

Big Picture

K21_BP_190x250_01.indd 1 05.05.11 13:58

RES JUNE 2011 110

CONVERSATION WITH DANIEL BIRNBAUM AND DONATIEN GRAU

DİDEM YAZICI

DİDEM YAZICI Regarding exhibition-making, Harald Szeemann referred to “visual poems” and you have

said that exhibitions are like visual essays. What makes an exhibition a visual essay, and what is the

analogy between essay and exhibition structure?

DANIEL BIRNBAUM It is exactly what Donatien Grau and I were talking just before

you came. We were just talking about the idea that even thinking itself, I mean

philosophy, well it sounds pretentious and bombastic but still that philosophy

itself often goes in exile and formulates itself with help of other modes of

expression and other fields of knowledge. Philosophy has been in close dialogue

with many things, with sociology in the Frankfurt School and Marxism all of

that, with literary models in structuralism and post-structuralism, in Derrida,

in Lacan and etc. with ideas about the image, certain ideas about the simulation

and simulacra. Then, in the middle of everything one could perhaps also think

that thinking has been in a dialogue with the production of space and that could

be many things that could relate to urbanism and architecture, it could perhaps

relate to exhibition making.

The person who, I think did that in the most ambitious way was maybe Jean François Lyotard. He

was many things, but maybe one could say he was the philosopher of exhibition-making. He claimed

the exhibition as a spatial medium, and this is perhaps too ambitious to start a dialogue about

exhibitions, but it is one way to look at an exhibition as medium for itself. Not every exhibition can be as

philosophically ambitious as that, not at all. As you say, Harald Szeemann saw his exhibitions as poems

in space—he said in an interview I think. There are so many ways to look at exhibitions, but at least the

ones that in the end reason to exist other ones that try to express something that is maybe only possible

to say in the medium of exhibition. It was interesting that Lyotard had written already plenty of books

and he was invited to do something in Pompidou. I am sure he saw this moment as something that could

be done only as an exhibition. Otherwise he would have written an essay. In that sense, it was a uniquely

interesting moment when a major philosopher decided not to write another book, but to do an exhibition,

and about new materials, new technologies, and in the end about perception and the change of what it

means to be in the world of these immaterials.

It’s a very long answer to your first question, but I think that’s one place maybe just to start if you want

to think about the exhibition as a unit, a medium itself. We were talking about many people who come

from somewhere else and used the exhibition. Donatien, you mentioned many examples yesterday,

maybe you can add some of your ideas?

DONATIEN GRAU Yes, there are many academics, philosophers and writers who have done such projects,

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like Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco, and many others. The idea of creating a comparison between the reader

and the viewer is fundamental. In the tradition of French structuralism and postmodernist thought,

the reader makes the book as much as the writer himself, which should also be linked to the idea of

exhibition as a visual essay. The viewer reenacts the work in a much more intense way than the reader,

because when he sees or hears the work, he is physically and spatially involved in the process, whereas

a reader simply reads—which has very different implications. Of course, it requires a huge deal of

attention from the reader to make his own book, which is exactly what Proust stated in In Search of Lost

Time. In a parallel fashion, one could say that each viewer creates his own work of art. When it’s visual,

there is a much more immediate and acute need for attention than when you read. Indeed, when you

read a book, you can go through pages. Exhibition-making relates to the idea of the viewer as a reader of

the space, which is epitomized, in terms of curating, by the concept of the visual essay.

DB Is it also intersubjective space? You can read a book and normally you’re alone with the text, but

exhibitions tend to be intersubjective in an interesting way. At least most of us, when looking at

exhibitions you walk around with someone and you talk about it. It is a space for dialogues, and even

critical dialogues. It may be complex, as you look at things in different ways. In that sense, it is perhaps

a critical space. There is an interesting new book, that maybe we should look at in our seminars, by

German art historian Charlotte Klonk, who we mentioned once earlier.

DY It’s called Spaces of Experiences.

DB Yes, it is a new book about the history of gallery spaces. Her basic idea is that there was a moment

in 1920s in Bauhaus and Russian constructivism that emphasized a kind of intersubjective critical

space, whereas most of the German and European museums had emphasized the individual viewer. This

is maybe a simplification, but she thinks that, and maybe she is right, you can read the architecture

of the modern museum in Germany and then the United States as a space for exclusion, emphasizing

the individual viewers in dialogue with one piece of work. Then, she sees certain moments where you

can see that this is no longer the case, the moments when the street and public sphere and the kind of

conflictual critical dialogue and subjective space were allowed into museum.

Her example is Russion constructivism, El Lissitzky and the German museum director called Alexandra

Dona, who did a kind of cabinet of the abstracts with Russian constructivists. That was very much about

the inter-subjective, that you can enter with others and see the space with different approach, and you

can have a dialogue about it or you can have a fight about it. It was critical subjectivity rather than

about being an individual bourgeoisie subject. Her idea is that this was when they were centered in the

Bauhaus but then when Bauhaus went to America and it was introduced to MoMA in 1939 where it was no

longer the critical, intersubjective, more-or-less progressive socialist viewer that was expected, but kind

of an advanced consumer. And there consumerism took over, which I think this is big simplification.

But, still I can see what she means: that the American museum, which became the prime role models for

museums, and MoMA as the most influential museum as a consumerist space rather than a critically

reflective space.

I come back to your idea: If you see the exhibition as a critical visual essay, it is not just for the

individual viewer. It is maybe a dialogue and maybe more than a dialogue, kind of intersubjective

exchange that is made possible inside this essay. So it is not just for one reader, it is a kind of a

collective critical space.

Daniel Birnbaum © Moderna Museet

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3Tomas SaracenoGalaxy forming along filaments, like droplets along the strands of a spider´s web2008Elastic rope, dimensions variables Photo Giorgio ZucchiattiCourtesy La Biennale di Venezia

John BaldessariOcean and Sky (with Two Palm Trees)2009Photo: Giorgio ZucchiattiCourtesy: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia

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Olafur Eliasson, Light Lab, Test 12, Portikus 2010, Photo: Katrin Schilling

Interior Moderna Museet Malmö © Photo: Åke Hedström

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Bookshop - Rirkrit Tiravanija Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Giardini, Venezia2009Photo: Giorgio ZucchiattiCourtesy: Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia

DY And also different understandings, and different readings for each viewer.

DB Roland Barthes’s idea of the productive readers, so to speak, the reader as someone who writes

and someone who reads, and maybe as with Duchamp, the reader produces the work just as much as

the artist. So what is the difference between them? You refer to these literal examples, and I think

it is interesting to think what happens if we see the exhibition as a kind of intersubjective medium;

the book maybe is also an intersubjective medium.

DG It does relate to different schemas. In a note that was published in the French review La Règle du

Jeu, the Director Emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philippe de Montebello, describes the

experience of contemplating an artwork as a conversation à deux, something that happens between

two people. As far as the book is concerned, most of the time, when you read it, you are by yourself.

As Proust said: books are produced in silence. You can read it, and then discuss it. Or maybe you

read it and discuss it at the same time. But generally speaking the temporality is not the same as

when you visit an exhibition with someone at the same time in the same place.

DY In the case of reading, you’re alone with the book.

DB On the other hand, maybe the book is just so much more liberating anyhow. We should remember

that one can read a book in the subway, or at the airport or in your bathroom. And you can meet

with other people through this book, which is maybe only 10 euros, and you can discuss it. So

maybe the book is actually even intersubjective, too. I mean, I am just thinking that we try to

introduce ideas into the exhibitions, and we force them in there. Of course it’s interesting that the

expectation of a critical subjective viewer is an not isolated bourgeoisie subject but maybe that the

book is a better vehicle. I mean, I am just thinking out loud now.

DG I think it also realizes the idea of connecting curating and exhibition-making to rhetoric.

Because at the end of the day, when you consider a book as an exhibition, you can also perceive

it as an exhibition of ideas. The word “exhibition” comes from the idea of showing something. In

French, we say “exposition,” which actually finds its roots in “expositio,” a specific term of rhetoric.

“Expositio,” for Cicero, is a part of the discourse, which consists in the moment when you just

expose the facts. In the case of a curator such as Hans Ulrich Obrist, it really has to do with the idea

of an “exhibition of ideas.”

DB I think that will happen here tomorrow. There is a discussion with Hans Ulrich Obrist with all

the intellectuals of Frankfurt. Hans is not a TV moderator and he is not a journalist, and he is not

an academic. He himself is a curator. He tries to take the curatorial possibilities beyond what we

know. You should do your own conversation with him, but I think he would agree that he sees these

marathons as these big conversations.

DY As a form of exhibition perhaps?

DB Exactly! That is a kind of rhetorical form like Donatien says. It is more or less a democratic

forum, to introduce into spaces that are theater, or the exhibition space, or the gallery, or wherever

he does it, that kind of rhetoric.

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DG It relates to Bruno Latour as well, with his idea of “Making Things Public.” In 1999, Hans Ulrich

Obrist asked Latour to be a part of Laboratorium, and then he started to be interested in curating.

And at the same time, Latour has always been interested in rhetoric. “Making Things Public” is an

exhibition that has to do with this idea of curating outside of the art world, but also of going back to

rhetoric. It also relates to what you were saying about creating a new form of public space, which is

also the topic of a dialogue between Latour and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

DB It is interesting that the public space becomes such a fetishized almost, attractive thing at the

moment it is being destroyed by commercial interests. Now we are longing for public space. We need

to reintroduce it to museums, and theaters and insist on the possibility of it at the moment that we

all feel kind of commercial grip on societies.

DG This is what conversation is all about. It is particularly interesting to see how important it is for

Hans Ulrich Obrist’s view on curating.

DY What I find interesting in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s Marathons is that it is an interdisciplinary

platform. The participants are not necessarily from the art scene; they are often mathematicians,

poets and scientists.

DB I agree. One could perhaps now—just to think a little bit not self-critically but critically

about what’s going on Charlotte Klonk’s idea—that the idea of intersubjective space returns

in the exhibitions in 1990s. One could say Liam Gillick and other such artists were producing

platforms with discussions and conversations. Hans Ulrich Obrist is doing these things in an

interdisciplinary mode. I am now returning to the idea that the moment when the public space

looked like it was threatened through commercialism rather political interests. It is almost

nostalgically reintroduced in the art world. Ideas about social turning in art and relational ideas

would be introduced in the moment when it disappears from the rest of the society. I don’t know if

this is right, I am just saying what I am thinking about right now.

DG It is interesting that the world of art is a place that seems to be adequate for reintroducing

everywhere the idea of Gesamtkunstwerk, which was so important for Harald Szeemann. Having a

place where every form of creation finds a way to exist is very rare, and, when you think about it,

there is no other world that could allow it. What Hans Ulrich Obrist does takes its roots inside of

the art world, and, since there are so many things in the artworld, it also connects to other fields.

When people ask him, “You curate ideas, do you still work in the arts?” he replies that he is indeed

a curator, coming from the arts and connecting it to so many other things, which is necessary,

since artists themselves are connected to many different forms of thought and creativity. We just

discussed Les Immateriaux, and it is fascinating to see how learned some artists are, and often well-

versed in philosophy. That is the reason why it is possible to create a space that could be a suitable

for this permanent creative invasion.

DB One should maybe not over-emphasize the importance of these things that happened in the

90s. That is perhaps the limitation of the book by Charlotte Klonk. It’s the last thing that I’ll say

about this book. It is a good book, but she somehow—if you simplify what she says—one could say

that she sees this moment in 1920s and early 30s, Bauhaus and Hannover and so on, and then it

disappears before they pop up again in 1990s. That’s of course very limited reading. Maybe, not

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so much at MoMA, where is the early years of Pompidou? Where is the Fluxus moment? And the

curatorial visions of Harald Szeemann or Pontus Hulten and Poetry Must be Made by All such things

in Stockholm, Stedeljik in Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Bern . . . they were all about such things. Open

critical zones of production and sites of experimentation, rather than limited museum shows. One

can introduce the 60s, the early 70s and all of that into this and problematize her schema a little bit.

Donatien, you mention Latour. If we see this thread of intellectuals, even philosophers, who used

the exhibition as a kind of format, I would say Lyotard was the first person who kind of triggered

this possibility, or saw it.

DY Can you specify what kind of format you are referring here?

DB The exhibition cannot be just an interesting place for different visual essays as a philosophical

format. I think it was prepared in his books, and there is one book called Figure de discours which

is very much about the limitation of the book. One could see that the book is not enough for this

moment in philosophy, one could even see it in Derrida and in other texts from that period. Lyotard

talks about the end of the book in writing. One could perhaps say that it is the end of the book

and beginning of spatialization and the exhibition is one possibility for that active productional

space. In this book from 1970s, Lyotard is already talking about his thoughts in kinaesthetic

possibilities—visual touch and all of that. It is clear that he sees that he cannot quite do what he

wants to do in the book format. So, the exhibitions maybe were prepared by some of these texts.

There was no exhibition by Theodor Adorno, or there was no exhibition by Ludwig Wittgenstein,

there was no exhibition by Martin Heidegger, so Lyotard was opening a new door there. Since then,

we could list some many names: Julia Kristeva, Arthur Danto, Umberto Eco, and the last person,

who seems to be the most ambitious now, is Bruno Latour.

DG I was aware of that, because I talked with him about it. It is very ambitious because, Latour

does not like the art world and what he calls its “scenery.” On the other hand, he does have a long-

term conversation with Olafur Eliasson. These days, he is working on a new project in Paris called

School of Political Arts which is fascinating because he doesn’t limit exhibition-making to the art

world, but reinvents the concept in order to have it find its own identity as a rhetorical tool, even

as a political tool. It all comes from the fact that the current world does not always have enough

attention to read a book carefully. In this context, there is a need for a reinvention of formats

inside of politics. It also relates to the idea of exhibiting knowledge, which is what we discussed

earlier. Bruno Latour is trying to discover it by using tools that are from the art world, and by

transforming the format of knowledge. The idea is that you have to use the things that are visual

to translate certain ideas. It relates to the eagerness of finding a new format. It is also interesting

to think about limits: What is the limit of this model, which is based on sharing ideas through an

exhibition?

DB I think that you are right. Latour is not so interested in individual artists. He sees exhibitions

as rhetorical and even as a political tool. And he is not someone who follows individual artists

so closely. He has been close to Olafur Eliasson, and now he is actually close to someone who

used to be the assistant of Eliasson, Tomas Saraceno. At the center of the bienniale that I did, we

had the biggest thing he had ever done, which was like a network, a spectacular work. But not so

many people thought so much about what it could be. But, I know that Latour and Sloterdijk had a

discussion in there. It was about philosophical paradigms that do not fit.

On the one hand it is a sphere and on the other hand a network, and somehow—this is of course

silly simplification—but, is the sphere more fundamental than the network? Yes, Sloterdijk would

say. No, Latour would say. Here, Latour kind of won, because he could see that the sphere was made

possible through the network. It could have been nice philosophical conversation to record inside

Saraceno’s space.

Daniel Birnbaum was the director of 2009 Venice Biennale, and is now director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm. Until recently he was the rector of the Städelschule Art Academy and director of Portikus, both in Frankfurt am Main. He was co-curator of 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and co-curator of the first Moscow Biennale in 2005.

Donatien Grau graduated in Classics from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, where he currently teaches. He is a member of the editorial board of the French reviews La Règle du Jeu and Commentaire, a contributing editor of Flash Art International and a member of the Proust research team at the CNRS. He has edited a collection of essays on tragedy: “Tragédie(s),” Editions Rue d’Ulm/ Théâtre de l’Odéon, 2010.

Didem Yazıcı is a freelance writer living in Frankfurt am Main. She holds a BA in Art History from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul, and attended the MA program in Art History in Istanbul Technical University (2008-2009). Currently she is doing a Masters degree in Curatorial and Critical Studies at the Städelschule, Staatliche Hochschule fur Bildende Kunste and the Goethe University, Frankfurt. Her texts have been published in catalogues, books and art magazines such as Nowiswere, Artam Global Art, the Turkish daily newspaper Radikal, and Sanat Dunyamız.

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BEAUTY, PESSIMISM, HOPE

BARBARA J. SCHEUERMANN

THERE ARE CURRENTLY two exhibitions on view with different titles, in different museums,

developed by different curatorial teams, and even in different countries, that nonetheles both touch on

similar points and deserve to be considered within the framework of a bigger picture. The one on view

at Istanbul Modern, curated by Paolo Colombo and the museum’s own Levent Çalıkoğlu, is somewhat

dramatically titled Kayıp Cennet / Paradise Lost. The other exhibition, presented at the Kunstsammlung

Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf, Germany, curated by Doris Krystof in collaboration with Maria Anna

Bierwirth, has the broad title Big Picture. Both shows are focused on video or, more accurately named,

time-based artworks. Content-wise they both examine aspects of nature and humankind’s relation to it.

The results couldn’t be more different, and it’s worth a closer look in order to find out why that is. Let’s

start with Istanbul’s Paradise Lost. The title already says it all; an optimistic worldview is not what this

exhibition aims to get across. On the contrary, “the disordered and damaged state of the environment

today has been […] under our very eyes in the most flagrant way all the time,” writes Colombo in his

introduction to the catalogue. Çalıkoğlu seconds him by writing in his own essay: “Rational planning,

which was sustained for the sake of a livable future, a safe urban life, and a modern level of comfort,

has pitted nature against culture. We still have not found a way to coexist with nature.” That might

be a bit thick, given that worldwide millions of people live in peaceful coexistence with their natural

surroundings and other thousands of people dedicate their lives to developing alternative ways of

generating energy and benefitting from natural resources without eventually annihilating them. No

doubt however, Çalıkoğlu and Colombo have a point: We all know what they are talking about, and clearly

their questions are crucial to our existence and to the lives of our descendants. We immediately accept

that, as Colombo writes, “Not surprisingly, the issue of an entity—Nature—whose laws we no longer

abide by and whom we have in large part destroyed or irreparably changed, is an issue that has been of

particular interest to visual artists in the last decades.” Sure, artists tend to make all aspects of life and

society part of their case, so it is indeed no surprise that environmental matters make an appearance in

contemporary art.

Paradise Lost gathers some 20 works by a wide range of artists, such as Doug Aitken, Ergin Çavuşoğlu,

Emre Hüner, Rivane Neuenschwander, Tony Oursler, Bill Viola and Kiki Smith, with Pipilotti Rists’s large-

scale video installation Herbstzeitlose (Saffron Flower or Fall Time Less) (2004) as something like the

centerpiece. The layout of the expansive show is a little confusing, with some hidden extra rooms, but

maybe this was on purpose. On the first view, not all of the presented works make sense in the context of

the show—some of them not even on the second or third. For example it is really difficult to see why Laleh

Khorramian’s I Without End (2008) is part of this show, a beautiful visual poem about two lovers made of

orange peels, which get then burned in a fire, or Bill Viola’s comparatively dated Anthem (1983), which

shows a single scream by a young girl stretched to more than 11 minutes.

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Quite a few works can only so vaguely be connected to the subject of the show that their selection

unfortunately seems a little random. In fact, there are quite a few works with wild creatures in the

presentation: wolves, foxes, birds, kangaroos, lions, ants, to name only a few. However, there are brilliant

works to be seen in the show—not least the ones with the animals —which reconciles with the unclear

parcours and the usual acoustic interferences in a video art show. For example Doug Aitken’s Migration

(2008) is a masterpiece that captivates viewers despite its length and silence. It shows, one by one,

several North American animals —among them a horse, a deer and a buffalo—in ordinary motel rooms

where we watch them as they adjust in one way or the other to their new surrounding. The rampaging

buffalo, the shy deer, the perplexed owl, they all make for a pregnant and enduring image of the tension

between culture and nature, as Çalıkoğlu has put it.

Installed very near to Aitken’s is Francis Alÿs’ Nightwatch (2004), part of the Seven Walk project by Alÿs

in collaboration with Raphael Ortega. A fox released into London’s National Portrait Gallery is the main

protagonist of Nightwatch. We can watch him straying around, probably looking for an exit to freedom

and not paying the slightest attention to the artworks on the wall—of course not, one might like to add.

It seems a little incomprehensible that Aitken’s Migration and Alÿs’ Nightwatch are shown so close

together—or in the same show at all —because the viewer becomes overly aware of the similarities

between the two projects, which doesn’t provide further insight into either.

This seems to be a problem of the show in general: the selection of the art work is not really precise,

which, no doubt, has its reason in the fact that the subject of the show is not precisely shaped—it is

about nature and culture and technology and labour and paradise and dystopia and environment and

politics . . . . this just seems to be a bit too much. The enthusiasm for each single works seems to have

carried away the curators. One understands their wish to bring them all in this show, yet isn’t it a

main aspect of curating a group show to carefully work out a theme, ideally evolving from art itself as

opposed to being grounded in theoretical ideas, and then to diligently select the works?

The atmosphere in Big Picture at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf couldn’t be more

different. In the wide and high basement gallery only 12 installations are on view, smartly fitted in a

custom-made architecture. Six of the works are part of the museum’s collection, among them by Steve

McQueen, Jason Rhoades and Kimsooja, and the other six are loans for this occasion, by artists such

as by Thomas Steffl, Natacha Nisic and Richard T. Walker. Unlike Paradise Lost this exhibition focuses

on “cinematographic installations,” that is, on technique and presentation rather than on subject. The

importance given to the medium and the technique is highlighted in different aspects: Co-curator Maria

Anna Bierwirth is a video conservator, so it is no surprise that each work is exactly described, indicating

if it is HD, 16mm, video or another format, the duration, sound, number of channels, projection size,

dimensions of the installations etc. You can find all of these details in the catalogue as well as floor

plans and architecture models of the exhibition layout. This not only keeps the exhibition alive as a

spatial presentation, but also puts emphasis on the complexity of installing works that each time have

to be built up again according to more or less precise installation instructions and in relation to the

respective space. It becomes apparent that time-based artworks are highly complex and very special

artefacts that can be challenging to install.

Besides this theoretical base coat—which probably pleases mostly the true video art fiend or, rather,

the nerd—the exhibition shows beautiful images of the landscape, the outdoors and, yes, nature, which

is where both exhibitions Paradise Lost and Big Picture meet. Colombo and Çalıkoğlu develop their

theme from sociopolitical obervations and insights and illustrate it with very strong images of very

different things, whereas Krystof and Bierwirth elicit images of beauty and sublimity through the

authentic installing of the respective work. Paradise Lost is a solid thematic video group show with

some highlights and some aspects to contemplate. But one cannot help thinking that the presentation

of Big Picture at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, with its accurate spatial settings and its precise

theoretical foundation points into the future of video art presentation. It seems as if the exhibition

started from the wish to revive beloved works in this particular context—the opposite approach to using

artworks for illustrating a particular thesis—and it just happened that something like a garden of

images evolved from it, a reference to the garden in Jason Rhoades’ Big Picture (2000), which served as a

point of origin for this exhibition.

The parcours starts with a veritable wow-effect: Mark Lewis’ Forte! (2010), projected on a huge five-by-

nine meter screen, in a big, dim, yet open space. The six-minute-long single-channel film installation

begins with a long still shot that shows a snow-covered mountain range in the Italian Alps, just below

the treeline. The quality of the image and its sheer size are overwhelming, and one immediately gets

drawn into the film. The camera circles a fortress on a mountain until one can discern in the inner

courtyard little figures, visitors o the castle, who eventually leave the fortress for no obvious reason

in a mass-movement. The curators describe what happens as follows: “Even when using choreographed

extras, Lewis focuses on an analysis of the moving image which, compared to the static tableau of a

panel painting, always entails a paradox: it is screened as a film image that attempts to remain as

immobile as possible but also one which has to move in order to be noticed in the first place.” One might

need a second read to understand what’s said here, but it certainly touches a crucial point: many of the

works shown in this exhibition use very long shots and calm tracking shots, very subtle sounds or, as

in the case of Mark Lewis Forte! no sound at all, and pin sharp images of sometimes an even painterly

quality. Compared to the common video-art exhibition, Big Picture is extraordinarily pleasant for the

eyes, ears and the mind, and it almost leaves the impression of a painting exhibition.

A discovery is The Hierarchy of Relevance (2010) by Richard T. Walker. Shot in the Californian desert,

the HD video might remind viewers of Land Art performances from the 1970’s. Yet, unlike the huge

monuments of that era, Walker’s works are rather small-scale. The artist always approaches the

environment cautiously, respectfully, eventually entering a dialogue with the plants and stone

formations of the desert by providing each of them individually with a musical performance. During the

editing of the film these different songs are combined to create a devoted “song of distraction”—this is

heartbreakingly earnest and dreamily romantic. A bit silly too and utterly useless in the battle against

ecologigal destruction, one might argue, but, after all, but what does “human” mean if not being hopeful,

earnest, dreamy, and at least a little bit romantic?

Barbara J. Scheuermann works as curator in Berlin and Brussels. In Berlin she runs the art project space Babusch. Before she moved to Berlin in November 2008, she had worked as curator of contemporary art at Tate Modern, London, and earlier as assistant curator at K21, Dusseldorf, and Haus der Kunst, Munich. Her doctoral thesis (2005) analyses narrative structures in contemporary artworks using as example works by William Kentridge and Tracey Emin. In her curatorial work and her writings she mainly focuses on video and installation, questions of narrativity, performativity and gender as well as on the discourse of postcolonialism and multiculturalism. As independent writer and art critic she has contributed, and still contributes, to numerous international art magazines as well as to exhibition catalogues and other publications.

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KAYIP CENNET / PARADISE LOST

Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, Istanbul

until 24 July 2011

www.istanbulmodern.org

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9Ali KazmaObstructions Video SeriesRolling Mills, 2007 9 min.Single channel video with soundCourtesy of the artist

Ali KazmaObstructions Video SeriesStudio Ceramist, 200717 min.Single channel video with soundCourtesy of the artist

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1Doug AitkenMigration, 2008Single channel video on Blu-Ray DVD24:22Courtesy of 303 Gallery, New York; Galerie Eva Presehuber AG, Zurich; Victoria Miro, London; Regen Projects, Los Angeles.Courtesy of Desertmed

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3Laleh KhorramianI Without End, 20086:35Time-lapse animation Courtesy the artist and Salon 94

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5Rivane Neuenschwander & Cao GuimarãesQuarta-Feira de Cinzas - Epilogue, 2006High definition Video, 5:44 Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça

Rivane Neuenschwander & Sérgio NeuenschwanderSunday, 2010 HD digital video, dolby digital 5.1, 5:17Courtesy of Galeria Fortes Vilaça

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7Shaun GladwellApologies 1-6, 2009HD video, 16:9, stereo sound, 27:10Cinematography: Gotaro UematsuCourtesy the artist & Anna Schwartz Gallery, Melbourne & Sydney

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BIG PICTURE

Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf, Germany

until 14 August 2011

www.kunstsammlung.de

Photos: Achim Kukulies The images are © free in context of the journalistic report

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Shirin NeshatThe Shadow Under the Web

Richard T. WalkerThe Hierarchy of Relevance

Paul PfeifferPerspective Study After Jeremy Bentham

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Rodney GrahamPhonokinetoscope

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EXIT THROUGH THE GIFT SHOP TONIGHT THE STREETS ARE OURS, WHAT ABOUT TOMORROW?

ASLI ÇAVUŞOĞLU

AUTHOR OF THE Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger’s rejection of being interviewed for 25 years and his

solitary retirement to his farmhouse engendered a cult effect. The more he hid himself, the more tourists

got on buses in order to camp around his farmhouse, armed with binoculars so that they might catch a

glimpse of him. Most probably taking inspiration from Salinger, Don DeLillo’s protagonist in his book Mao

2 does the same by not allowing his photograph to be taken. After he eventually changed his mind and

his first photograph was taken, he says: “I am now a photograph, as flat as the bird crap on a Buick...”

Before Exit Through the Gift Shop premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2010, the question the film

aroused was: Has the most notorious clandestine street artist Banksy, who has successfully hidden

behind a cloak of anonymity for years, decided to be the “crap on a Buick?” Well, he bewildered his

audience again with a film whose genre slips away from any attempt to be categorized, as it manages to

exist in the space between being a documentary and a monumental con.

Banksy states in the beginning scenes, his voice carefully distorted, that the film is not about him.

It’s about Thierry “Terry” Guetta, a Frenchman living in Los Angeles, an outgoing “dude” who is

obsessed with documenting everything in his life. Because of the death of his mother when he was a

child, Guetta becomes terrified with the idea that the “present” is slipping through his fingers. Via

his cousin, who is a street artist himself, Guetta becomes obsessed with street art and sets out to

video every major practitioner he can befriend. Famous street artists such as Shepard Fairey and

Space Invader agree to let him follow their crusades. But Guetta’s big planned scoop was Banksy,

whom he met in 2006 and attached himself to like a particularly persistent, camcorder-wielding

clam. Guetta gathers a massive collection of footage after working continuously for 8 years and

Banksy put up with it, hoping that Guetta’s mooted documentary might one day be a valuable record

of his and other’s work. After Guetta finally finishes editing, he gives a copy of his documentary

Life Remote Control to Banksy. Disappointed with the result, Banksy decides to make a film about

him not being capable of making a good film. That’s how Banksy takes over the camera and Thierry

becomes the subject of the film. As a subject he appears to be a zealous street artist and eventually

starts putting his first enormous exhibition together and without hesitation he is quick to utilize

the power of the media and every outlet of advertising he can imagine.

Banksy doesn’t reveal his face throughout the film, neither to Guetta’s camera, nor the camera of the

main film; instead he shows the absence of his face: a complete darkness contained under a hoodie.

Contrary to the image-less Bansky, Guetta is over-exposed. Guetta’s undecisive attemps at determining

the motive of his filming as well as his unorganized editing make him nothing but a receiver through his

camera. He comes across as a keen but naive viewer of mass media and this seems to be why he chooses

the title Life Remote Control for his documentary, which is essentially nothing but a one and a half hour

long trailer.

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From Thierry Guetta’s exhibition

Banksy

Thierry Guetta’s movie

Exit Through The Gift Shop © 2010 Paranoid Pictures Film Company Limited

The title Exit Through the Gift Shop is in fact never referred to

throughout the entire film. Considering the notion that street art is

a “gift” to the public and their domain, the title could be suggesting

that even a “gift” finds its value in the market whether it is intended

to or not. This contradiction seems to be well “digested” since for some

years now many works of street art have been selected sold by some of

the biggest auction houses.

In 2010, citizens of Detroit recognized Bansky’s arrival in town

because of his signature scribbled work on a street wall depicting a

boy holding a can of red paint next to the words “I remember when

all this was trees.” A couple of days later, some local artists had

excavated the wall and moved it to another location, where it could be

exhibited. The incident evoked many questions over authorship, the

legality of street art, its value, and the odd decision to re-locate a site-

specific work of graffiti. The ironic response of one of the re-locaters

of the wall was: “The work can now live on for many years.” While

preventing the work to remain in its ephemeral sphere, the intended

act of “vandalism” has also been eliminated.

Other examples of the contradictions applied to street art include the Geffen Contemporary Art

Museum in LA’s painting over of the graffiti scrawled on its back wall, at the same time that they

were about to open a major exhibition of “street art.” It seems that Graffiti is something that

the museum celebrates only on other people’s property, not its own. The City of Helsinki on the

other hand, started zero tolerance campaign against graffiti in the 90s. This included wiping

out all graffiti and tags from the streets by directing money to private security companies that

specialized in clamping down on graffiti artists. Those who were caught faced huge fines for

damages and even jail sentences. After street art found its place at established art institutions the

argument of what is “good” and what is “bad” street art is even more complex. Who among us can

make the decision that “good” street art should be permitted, treated as a gift and hence those who

create it applauded, yet that which is deemed ugly creates a case for fines and imprisonment?

Well, what would happen if we catch a glimpse of Banksy?

Aslı Çavuşoğlu (born in Istanbul,1982) is an artist/writer. A great bulk of her work stems from experimental narrative exercises working around mechanisms of erasure, repetition, replicas and narrative interplay. She uses various mediums such as artists’ books, videos, installations.

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NANCY SPERO: THE WORK

NAZLI GÜRLEK

NANCY SPERO WAS a first generation feminist artist who placed women at

the center of her work, and an activist who fought for women’s rights in New

York during the early 1970’s. While many of the artists of her generation who

made feminist work in the late 60s and 70s employed photography, costume,

performance, film and video to emphasize political action, sexually-charged

subject matter and self-portraiture, Nancy Spero was, quite unusually,

preoccupied with myth and painting. She developed innovative techniques and

methods to produce paper friezes and murals, many of them epic in both scale

and content, featuring images of women from all ages and cultures past and

present. The retrospective catalog Nancy Spero: The Work explores the artist’s

immense body of work via its development from the beginnings of her 60-year-

career until death of heart failure in New York in Autmun 2009.

Writer Christopher Lyon introduces his book by way of describing Spero’s special relation to time

and history. The introductory chapter opens stating:“Nancy Spero’s goal was to put history into art

and to put herself and other women into history”, the text then goes on to describe alucid picture of

the persona and art of Spero, analysing her artistic thought, ideals and personal story in depth. He

traces the critique of power that Spero developed both within and beyond the art world, what marked

her ethical and political responsabilities as a postwar American artist, feminist and leftwing

activist, in quest for self-expression and for making her voice heard in a male-dominated art world.

The book also tells of her 60-year-long solidarite relationship with husband, Leon Golub, who was

also an artist.

Spero’s aspirations for learning and self-exploration as a young student at the Art Institute of

Chicago in the 1940’s, allowed her to spend a year at Ecole des Beaux-Arts and at the atelier of Andre

Lhote in Paris. Yet, it was in New York in the early 1950’s that her “first crisis of artistic identity”

occurred. There she spent almost an entire year working on a single canvas, which she painted over

and over again, like many other young painters of the time she was willing her work to be liberated

from the weight of art history and painting, It was in Chicago the same year, where Spero and

Golubhad moved after a tough year spent in New York, that she encountered the artist Jean Dubuffet

who became a remarkable influence onthe new direction of her work.

Spero’s paintings were then dark with a predomination of human figures that were either protective

female characters, mothers feeding children, embracing couples, standing figures, or column-

bodies. These influences came from the tradition of primitivism, Greek vases and Picasso’s work

from the 1920’s. Spero declined the dominant 1950’s and 1960’s post-war movements Abstract

Expressionism and Minimalism, as she considered that “big canvases carried the male look”,

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Nancy Spero in her Studio, 71st Street, New York 1973 Pictured in background: Codex Artaud II (top), Codex Artaud I (bottom) Photograph: Susan Weiley

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Female Bomb, 1966 Gouache and ink on paper, 86.4 x 68.6 cm Collection of Barbara Lee, Cambridge, MA, USA

Artaud Painting: This Crucible of Fire..., 1969 Gouache, ink and collage on paper 63.50 x 50.20 cm Courtesy of Galerie de France, Paris

La Folie II, 2002 Ink, handprinting and collage on paper 184.2 x 47 cm Courtesy of Estate of Nancy Spero and Galerie Lelong

Azur, detail 2002 Collage with paint and hand printing on paper 39 panels, 64.5 x 8567.4 cm overall Centre Pompidou, Musée National d’Art Moderne / Centre de Création Industrielle, Paris Loan of Harriet and Ulrich Meyer through the Centre Pompidou Foundation, 2007

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beside functioning as a cover up for all that was going on in the world. Hence, from the mid 1960’s

on, although she did not abandon painting, she rejected the canvas, and decided to work solely

on paper. This decision was a form of resistance to the dominance of the art market that had long

ignored her, but also a way to make work that was not “important” considering that work on paper

was not valued as highly as that on canvas, and nothing could be as important as the xploitation

and suffering of fellow humans. Spero’s first works on paper focused on war - in reaction to the

American incursion in Vietnam. “An exorcism” was taking shape and the horror of war was

identified with the representation of the male body. “Bombs are horribly phallic and sexual – much

exaggerated – representations of the penis with their head sticking its tongue out and their violent

description of the human (especially male) body” said Spero in an interview. Male and female

bombs, huge penises, bloody colors, spatters of gouache paint and lots of rubbing were her subjects

and materials during that period.

The influence of Antonin Artaud’s writings and theories on Spero’s thought and work have been

immense. Spero has inserted quotations from Artaud’s work about a “theater of cruelty” collaged

into her paintings on paper known as the Artaud Paintings and the Codex Artaud series. This was a

means for her to externalize her voice as an artist, and articulate a philosophy of rage through the

words of the playwright. These two series with various combinations of quotes by Artaud, disparate

images on found pieces of paper and painted or typewritten surfaces were her first “scroll works.”

From that moment on Spero worked on this highly personal system of visual narrative which was

later to be recognized as her signature style. The adoption of the format of Egyptian wall painting

came in the same years of intense philosophical enquiry as the sole inclusion of images of women

in her work. The female actor as a protagonist of Spero’s theater culminated in the monumental

1976 work Torture of Women, and all the others that came after that. She featured La Liberté of

Delacroix; Celtic goddess Sheela-na-gig; the Phryhian mother goddess Cybele, next to a prehistoric

African figure; Josephine Baker; a Greek dancer with dildos; Marlene Dietrich; Yvette Guilbert;

a Greek maenad; a Japanese go-go dancer and many other female charcters from every age and

every culture around the world.

Lyon draws a genuine portrait of Spero, as an artist who did not shy away from being categorized as

marginal or being understood as an outsider. He reveals Spero’s passionate sense of the social and

her art’s infinite expansiveness, and the ways in which she managed to break down the stereotype

of feminist art as essentialist and humorless.

Nazlı Gürlek (b. 1981, Istanbul) is independent curator, critic and editor of contemporary art based in Istanbul. She obtained an MFA in Curating at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a BA in Painting and Art History at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence. Curated exhibition include the Pavilion of Turkey at the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009, assistant curator); A Fine Red Line Live (176 Project Space, London, 2008, co-curator); Fold (Elgiz Museum of Contemporary Art, Istanbul, 2011, curator); Rehearsal (Gallery NON, Istanbul, 2011, curator). She is co-founder of and editor at the independent publishing hosue IMpress.

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ME, MYSELF AND MY COLLECTION

JULIA STOSCHEK

TEXT IN GERMAN. TRANSLATED BY MICHA O. GOEBIG.

T H E D E C I S IO N T O B U I L D my own collection was a long process. But there were certain events that

strengthened this desire. Most significant of all, there was my first visit to a private collection back

in 2002: the Falckenberg Collection in Hamburg. I was so fascinated how Harald Falckenberg talked

about the works in his collection and his dedication to art. For me, this visit was a life-changing

experience. I couldn’t imagine doing anything else any longer. That was the moment in which I

realized that I wanted to do something similar.

My great interest in contemporary media art is certainly also part of my biography and inherent to

my character. I grew up with the media—MTV and TV in general— but my perception has also been

shaped by how my family used their video camera (almost all important events were videotaped). This

is why I identify strongly with this kind of art production.

In retrospect, the early days of building my collection were rather intuitive and spontaneous compared

to how I now work and collect. Today, I have a much more conceptual approach toward the process of

collecting. It is my aspiration, firstly, to make the development of the medium video comprehensible

and, secondly, to actively trace young positions and to establish meaningful interconnections within

the collection.

Furthermore, the exhibitions are always programmatically defined by my personal situation. In this

sense, they are—to a certain extent—a mirror of my psyche. I put this forward and stand by it. My first

exhibition, titled NUMBER ONE: Destroy, She Said, whose concept I consider rather “brute” from today’s

point of view, included works which focused strongly on themes of construction/deconstruction but

also on the creation of spaces. Psychological and interpersonal limits were equally broached.

The 40 presented works included: the two-channel installation that gave the exhibition its title,

Destroy She Said (1998) by Monica Bonvicini, which broached the issue of the role of women and the

predominant gender-specific clichés; and the bizarre photography of Adam McEwen, which literally

turns the world upside down and displays the corpses of Benito Mussolini and Clara Petacci hanging

in front of a gas station at a square in Milan. There were strong reactions to many of the exhibited

works, such as Robert Boyd’s four-channel video installation Xanadu (2006), which demonstrates the

self-destructive impulses of our society. Boyd does so by condensing various elements of mass culture

such as news, documentaries, cartoons and pop music and strings them together in a quick sequence

of images of random interfaces of our brutal and cruel media reality. The dissonances and content-

specific conflicts, which arise from such a composition and might also be shaped by very subjective

criteria, inspire me and are essential driving forces of my work.

During the preparation for and the duration of the second exhibition, I developed a strong wish to include

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more physicality and sensuality. This next exhibition

was once again, in a way, a reflection of my emotional

state and, in my perception, the consistent continuation

of what was shown in the first exhibition. The main

focus of the exhibition, entitled NUMBER TWO: Fragile,

was the aspect of physicality in video, installation and

photo art, which body art and performance artists in

particular have been experimenting since the 1960 and

70s. Self-portrayal, pain, transformation, physicality

as a plasticity that takes on a real outside form, as

well as fragility were key priorities employed in the

selection of 54 works. From works by Marina Abramoviç,

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller with their Killing

Machine (2007) to Paul Chan and Hannah Wilke, the

exhibition transmitted an intense feeling of tension. It

was highly emotionally charged, also for me personally.

The decision to present not only my own collection but

to give room to research projects and to open the house

for new and external projects can also be seen as a

result of the previously ongoing, intense process. This

is why, in 2009, I made the decision to develop a new

take on the life in the house and invite young as well as

established artists to give performances in my space. It

is a lucky coincidence that this idea led to a cooperation

with MoMA/P.S 1 and the performance art biennale Performa, and the creation of an exhibition about the

history of performance art, happenings and action art. Irrespective of my program, there is currently

a strong revival of this kind of artistic experience. I am incredibly fascinated—also given the story of

my own family, as my grandmother was an actress—by the participation of the audience and also by

the transitory character of this art form. The program NUMBER THREE: Here and Now was a very special

experience for me and the entire team—exhausting but at the same time extremely exciting. Working

together so closely with the artists was one of the most important insights that I have experienced in

connection with my activities as a collector.

With the fourth exhibition, NUMBER FOUR: Derek Jarman-Super8 in September 2010, we took the

exact opposite approach: For the first time since its opening, we opened the house for a monographic

exhibition. Another important experience for the entire team was the cooperation with Derek Jarman’s

archive, as we had never before worked with the work of a deceased artist this intensely. It was and is an

honor for me to have provided one of Great Britain’s filmmakers a posthumous platform in Germany for

the first time.

So, my collection has not been on display in my own house for two years. However, some parts of my

collection were shown last year not in Düsseldorf, but in Hamburg. Entitled I want to see how you see, a

representative selection was shown in the Deichtorhallen exhibition space from April 16 to July 25, 2010.

What great fortune for my very young collection to be on display at such a renowned art institution at

such an early stage!

Julia StoschekPhoto: Max von Gumppenberg and Patrick Bienert/Colorstorm

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Robert Boyd, Xanadu, 20064-Channel-Video installation, 22 min., Installation view Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf Photo: Achim Kukulies

Adam McEwenUntitled (A-Line)C-Print , 305 x 177 cm Photo: Achim Kukulies

NUMBER ONE: DESTROY, SHE SAID NUMBER TWO: FRAGILE

Paul Chan, Happiness (Finally) After 35,000 Years of Civilization (after Henry Darger and Charles Fourier)2000-2003Digital video projection on sparkle vellum screen17:20 Min.Installationshot Julia Stoschek Collection, DusseldorfPhoto: Achim Kukulies

Hannah Wilke, Through the Large Glass, 1976Video, 10 Min.Installationshot Julia Stoschek Collection, DusseldorfPhoto: Achim Kukulies

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Simon Fujiwara, The personal effects of Theo Grunberg, 16.07.2010, 19.00h, Performance

Allora & Calzadilla, Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy, No.3, 2008, Modified Bechstein Piano, 03.07.2010, 11.00h/13.00h, 10.07.2010, 13.00h/16.00h, 17.07.2010, 13.00h/16.00h, 24.07.2010, 11.00h/13.00h, Performance

Jen DeNike, Scrying, 24.04.2010, 19.30h/20.30h, Ballett

Keren Cytter, A man is a museum, 26.03.2010, 19.00h, Performance

NUMBER THREE: HERE AND NOW, JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION, Dusseldorf. Photo: Yun Lee, Dusseldorf

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1Blick in die Ausstellung, 100 Years (version #1, Dusseldorf, 11.10.09-31.07.10)Julia Stoschek Collection, DusseldorfFoto: Yun Lee

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3I WANT TO SEE HOW YOU SEE, Deichtorhallen HamburgInstallation shots of the exhibition JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION

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This is why I am so excited about the next exhibition here in Düsseldorf, which will open on June 25,

2011. It is the third presentation of my collection and I am sure that the public’s expectations—with

regard to the collection but also to me—have surely not decreased in the past two years in which I

have not shown the collection. This time, I have deliberately decided against setting a theme for the

show and tried to work with an associative approach, similar to the first exhibition of my collection.

Nevertheless, the show, entitled NUMBER FIVE: Cities of Gold and Mirrors, will focus on certain

thematic areas and be dedicated to socio-critical issues, such as the relationship of urbanism and

modern society or the questioning of identity and self-reflection. I have put together a selection of

works that disrupt the range of time-based media art and also in formal terms. The show includes

sculptures, installations, new acquisitions and site-specific space interventions by young

artists such as Christoph Westermeier from Düsseldorf and Simon Denny, as well as established

practitioners such as Francis Alÿs, David Claerbout, Mark Manders and Keren Cytter.

Besides the exhibitions, another focus of my work is preserving and protecting the works. The

acquisition is the first step in the “administration” process and it should not be underestimated.

The works then have to be archived, conserved and administered adequately. This is an essential

foundation of my collection and contributes strongly to establishing the great trust my collection

has with artists and gallery owners.

Another important principle in my family is “social responsibility.” I have always considered

the growing prosperity of our family business a social responsibility. I don’t sell pieces from

my collection, I don’t regard art as an object of speculation or an investment, and I have never

been interested in money as an end in itself. I hope that, in future, I will be able to maintain my

independence and my collection’s authenticity. I still work without an art consultant who would

advise me in matters of acquisition strategy. The collection is supposed to grow over decades, and I

hope will be passed on to the next generation!

Notwithstanding the euphoria, it should be said that no collector is forced to present the collected

pieces to the public. This requires a certain degree of vanity and exhibitionism; I am willing

to admit as much! This is why I consider it all the sadder that other private collections demand

an entrance fee, particularly in times of limited funding and tight budgets. Because private

collections are self-supported, I have actively taken on the task to serve as a moderator, as well as

the responsibility to make art accessible for everybody, similar to the approach common in Great

Britain. I hope that my commitment will allow me to create a cultural added-value in the long term.

This is what I firmly believe in. There have always been people in our society committed to the

arts. But don’t get me wrong: I would never consider myself a patron of the arts. I would rather call

myself a philanthropic producer.

Naturally, I do have plenty of self-doubts, wondering whether what I do is the right thing and

whether it has been the right decision to begin with. But in the end, what I get back is so valuable; I

would never want to miss it.

I WANT TO SEE HOW YOU SEE, Deichtorhallen HamburgInstallation shots of the exhibition JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION

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Julia Stoschek, born in 1975 is an art collector who has acquired a comprehensive selection of contemporary art, and distinguished herself through generous and targeted artistic patronage. Julia Stoschek is shareholder of the leading Bavarian automotive supplier, the Brose Group and made her private collection open to the public in 2007. The Julia Stoschek Collection is thoused in the former residence of the Conzen picture-frame factory in Dusseldorf, a building designed by the Berlin-based architect Kuehn Malvezzi.

Time based media forms the central focus of the collection which currently comprises around 450 items, including works by Marina Abramoviç, Doug Aitken, Francis Alÿs, David Claerbout, Thomas Demand, Dan Graham, Douglas Gordon, Christian Jankowski, Jon Kessler, Adam McEwan, Paul Pfeiffer, Mika Rottenberg, Andro Wekua, Tobias Zielony.

Victoria and Albert Museum, LondonThe world’s greatest museum of art and designwww.vam.ac.ukThe Medieval and Renaissance Galleries at the V&A. Photography by Peter Durant

Inspiring BeautifulFree

I WANT TO SEE HOW YOU SEE, Deichtorhallen HamburgInstallation shots of the exhibition JULIA STOSCHEK COLLECTION

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TWILIGHT OF THE GALLERISTS: YVON LAMBERT

J. EMIL SENNEWALD

TEXT IN GERMAN. TRANSLATED BY JEREMY GAINES.

HE IS NO LONGER one of the top 100 most influential people in contemporary art.

According to this year’s rankings by Journal des Arts (and they don’t include him), he

is more of a dinosaur. He started out in 1966. And not in Marais, that former thieves’

district, where today he showcases the art-market heavyweights.

Yvon Lambert, the man from the South, opened his first gallery in Paris in what was

then the artistically vibrant district of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, at rue de l’Èchaudé –

it’s an arrondissement that has since been lost in its slumbers. His program included:

art of the 1930s, Robert Malaval, Jean Hélion, and Theo van Doesburg. He had a good

feel for things and at the end of the 1970’s switched to Minimal and Conceptual

art, relocated frequently and finally, in 1986, as by then a leading gallery for

contemporary art in Paris, to the rue Vieille du Temple. Today, Galerie Yvon Lambert

offers a broad spectrum of committed, conceptual, poetic works: new artists such as

Mircea Cantor, Bethan Huws, David Shrigley are part of the program, stars such as

Andres Serrano, Anselm Kiefer or Barbara Kruger, and established greats such as

Lawrence Weiner, Joan Jonas, and Jenny Holzer.

Now, almost half a century since he started, he is withdrawing from the market. In part at least. In April

2011 he closed his New York gallery, after eight good years and despite prime sales figures, as Director

Olivier Bélot emphasizes. Lambert wants to “continue pursuing projects in the framework of the gallery”,

but above all “to keep his love of the artworks and relationship with the artists intact”. And he only recently

put this to the test on behalf of Andres Serrano in his collection in Avignon – where, since 2000, his 1,200-

plus artworks have been on public view. Two of Serrano’s purportedly blasphemous glossy photographs

were destroyed by wild-minded integralists. Lambert, who is already being defamed in the Net as a “Piss

Christ gallerist”, defended Serrano and sharply criticized the lack of security provided by the city.

The story has been going for some time now. At the beginning of the year he threatened to remove his

collection from Avignon as the municipal authorities did not ensure the due maintenance of the building.

Hôtel Caumont, built in 1720 and the pride and joy of Avignon, had been poorly restored, an entire ceiling

fell to the ground in the middle of the Miquel Barcélo show, for which works had been obtained on loaned

from the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay. Lambert brought glamour, visitors and tourists to the city, boosted its

value and reputation – and his own pocket. The public coffers paid the collector 440,000 Euros for 2010-

2013 and at the end of 2010 committed another 45,000 Euros on top. Yet Lambert continued to cuss and

threaten. In France it is quite usual to finance a private collector’s thirst for exhibitions and to care for

his collection, and thus indirectly give him a competitive edge – in April 2011 Agnès B. received a subsidy

of 50,000 Euros from Institut Français for her Haiti show. Lambert, however, went for the poiliticians’

jugulars.

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Yvon LambertPhotograph: Didier Barroso

Andres Serrano, Piss Christ, 1987Cibachrome, Collection Lambert en Avignon

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What is driving this successful gallerist and energetic collector? The first time I spoke with

Yvon Lambert he claimed to be a painter. It was on May 28, 2010 at the buffet after the preview for

the Jason Dodge show I woke up. There was a note in my pocket explaining what had happened at

the La Galerie art center in Noisy-le-sec on the outskirts of Paris. While this minor masquerade

could have been seen as a witty continuation of the Minimalist/narrative approach preferred by

Dodge (Lambert represents him), it soon developed into an unpleasant battle of minds. The elderly

gentleman who claimed to be a painter, who spoke swiftly and condescendingly, as though nothing

could contest his view of art, wanted to have a bit of a game. He responded to criticism of the current

hype surrounding Anselm Kiefer in France by declaring: “The greatest painter of all time! The

same stature as a Wagner, a Nietzsche; anyone who doesn’t know them cannot understand his

oeuvre.” Lambert was exhibiting Kiefer at his gallery at the time. And Jason Dodge? “One of the most

important artists today.” Yvon Lambert certainly knows his superlatives. When content is called

for, he attacks swiftly, with massive statements.

A gallerist who prefers deeds with an intuitive mind, both of which helped him back in October

2008 when deciding to open a 650 sq.m. gallery in London on the occasion of the then so hip Frieze

Art Fair. He closed it again only six months later, the word being the economic crisis had hit his

enterprise. “It was an experiment,” confirms Belot, his faithful director for the last 18 years.

And the closing show in London was incidentally Serrano’s Piss Christ provocation, without any

incidents. If we judge by the titles of his exhibitions, Lambert likes to play with symbolic gestures,

and the scandal surrounding the Serrano show will no doubt mean Avignon is once again fearing

that he will take his collection elsewhere. All these hard-nosed decisions leave one asking: So who is

Lambert? What are his motives and his current intentions?

I reach him by phone, shortly after his return from the 26th Art Brussels. Was the fair worth

while? “Brussels is a sound fair, a little provincial, but with important galleries, a little too long

and slow, but things went well, we worked well.” “New markets are there to be discovered,” he

continues, including the Internet, such as the VIP Art Fair, the first edition of which did not really

come up roses (Lambert was the only gallerist to ask the organizers to give him his money back).

Is the Internet a market he intends to tap? “Well, we work a bit with the Internet, but I could not

really claim we do that much. Our clients prefer to see the works, to come to the gallery, to have

real contact with us,” but he did not see any point in any further discussion of the banalities of

fairs. Good, then what about his current show, an all-over installation by Douglas Gordon rich

in images – how does he see his role as gallerist given the ongoing flood of images and art? “I

don’t understand your question, I’ve been working as a gallerist for 40 years now.” Okay, okay.

Douglas Gordon concerns himself with how we approach images, with our relationship to the

influence of images. Has he talked about this with the artist? “I’ve worked with Gordon for some

time, we decided over a year ago to hold the show, the artist selected what he wanted to exhibit,

we talked it over for months, then he came over and hung up the 400-odd photographs.” Aha. So

how does he see his role as gallerist? “Sir, that has been my role for 40 years now. I have been

organizing exhibitions for 40 years now. In a gallery, you organize one show after another, talk

to the artist, decide, usually jointly, what will be shown.” Yes, okay, but how does he see himself

now, as a partner for discussions, as a gallerist and collector? “I started from an early date to keep

works from my gallery shows. It swiftly assumed massive proportions as I have been working as

a gallerist for a very long time now. The selection is that of a gallerist and collector.” Astonishing.

Well. So it’s a personal selection, exclusively, and never one that considers market forces? “Never.”

Douglas Gordon Phantom Installation View Courtesy lost but found, Yvon Lambert Crédit photo: Didier Barroso

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Lawrence WienerDown And Out, Out And Down, 1971Adhesive letters Photography Franck CouvreurView of the façade of the hôtel de Caumont at Avignon

Douglas Gordon Phantom Installation View Courtesy lost but found, Yvon Lambert Crédit photo: Didier Barroso

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So what prompts him to choose his artists, what moves him in art today? “You can see that from the

selection of artists I have made for 40 years now.” Oh dear. So to rephrase it: What specific plans

does he have for the future. “Listen, I have been a gallerist for 40 years now and will not suddenly

start selling clothes.” No, of course not. So what projects are on the cards, with his Parisian gallery?

“I will be having some conversion work done to the gallery, and will inform everyone about my

projects when I have decided on them.” And that is all that was to be got out of him. So it remains

to be seen what will happen to the Parisian Galerie Yvon Lambert and the Lambert Collection in

Avignon. Maybe Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols has consolation to offer: “Our true experiences are

not at all garrulous. They could not communicate themselves even if they tried: they lack the right

words.”

Yvon Lambert was born on February 9, 1946 in Vence in the south of France, here finding his avenue into the art world; he speaks of meetings with Robert Malaval and Jean Dubuffet as a child. Coming from a middle-class family, he fared poorly at school and wanted become an artist. Realizing, however, that his skills in talking about art far outweighed those in creating it, he opened his first gallery in 1958 in Vence using his mother’s money, eschewing modesty to christen it ‘From Modigliani to Picasso’. He sought the company of artists, cultivated his relationship with them and in 1960 moved to Paris, where, as a gallery owner, he launched many artists’ careers who were then unknown in France. He discovered his passion for collecting late in life, showing the fruits of his labor for the first time in Villeneuve-d’Ascq in 1992, before moving them permanently to Avignon in 2000. www.yvon-lambert.com

Dr. J. Emil Sennewald, as a publicist, art critic and member of AICA France (www.aica-france.org), works in Paris predominantly for German-language magazines, among them Kunstbulletin (Zurich), springerin (Vienna), Kunstzeitung (Regensburg) and Kunst&Auktionen (Munich). At the same time, also as a member of the research group EA 182 at the University of Paris III, he conducts research into theories of criticism, the interplay between text and images, visual space and drawing. Alongside his daily work, he publishes catalog texts, essays, anthologies, and makes public appearances at lectures, events and roundtable discussions. With his wife Andrea Weisbrod, he heads the project space café au lit (cafeaulit.de). Numerous articles and recent publications at weiswald.com.

CONVERSATION WITH WIM DELVOYE

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