« Shelley and David at the Meat Market » by Carlos de Jesus, September 2012. Courtesy and Copyright Carlos de Jesus 2012.

Summer is over, and the weather in New York is getting colder…Even David is wearing long underwear (designed by Missoni!) as he hangs out among the crowds in the Meat Packing District of Greenwich Village.

So it is time for my Blog to come to an end.

For me, this assignment has been a terrific opportunity and a great privilege. Many thanks to Marta Gili, Adrien, Marta P. and Maurice at the Jeu de Paume, the wonderful friends and colleagues who have contributed so much to the success of the series, and to all of you who’ve been reading and commenting on what I’ve been writing for the past six months. May we meet again!

An Homage to Classic Sculpture by dEmo and Missoni was on view in New York, at the intersection of 9^th Avenue and 14^th Street, throughout the summer of 2012. The artists’ 24-foot tall rendition of Michelangelo’s David was previously exhibited in Madrid, Barcelona and Milan.

L’article « Farewell from the Big Apple! » by Shelley Rice est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

© Chris Killip, Le mur du grand amour, centre-ville de Gateshead, Tyneside, 1975

The British photographer Chris Killip made the decision to begin both his exhibition What Happened: Great Britain 1970-1990 at Le Bal in Paris (organized with the Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany by curator Ute Eskildsen) and his book Arbeit/Work (Steidl, 2012) with the following statement:

One night in 1994 my friend John Clifford, who owned the best bar in Cambridge, took me into the middle of Boston to where the civic center and other administrative buildings now stand. These buildings were built in the 1960s on top of the tough working class district of Scully Square, where John and his brothers were born and raised. John pointed out to me streets that no longer existed, telling me who had lived where and in which house. Who had died in Vietnam, who had worked for the mob, who had gone to prison or ended up in politics. When I interrupted his narrative to tell him how great it was that he was telling me the history of this place, he spun round, gripped me by the throat and pushed me against the wall. With his raised fist clenched he said, “I don’t know nothing about no fucking history, I’m just telling you what happened.”

After seeing the exhibition, and watching the accompanying 12 minute film from 1976, A Girl Chewing Gum by John Smith, the viewer begins to understand the relevance of this powerful anecdote. Personally, I had the sense that the entire show was a kind of personal struggle with meaning – in both art and life. Killip’s documentary photographs, about inhabitants, workers and others in Britain on the Isle of Man, Bury St. Edmunds, Huddersfield, Lynemouth and areas of the Northwest of England, portray, as David Campany wrote, people “exiled within themselves, incapable of finding their moorings, merging into a collective drift” as they are increasingly disenfranchised by the changing economic circumstances of a rapidly de-industrializing nation. The meaning of these peoples’ lives within the national economy takes a hit right in front of our eyes, but so does the concept of photography that allows an artist to interpret the conditions and destinies of others. This show and book are as much about Killip’s attempts to define his relationship with his subjects as it is about the subjects themselves.

Filatures, 1974, Courtesy of the Artist © Chris Killip

It is useful to understand that Killip’s influences include Paul Strand and August Sander, as well as Bill Brandt, Robert Frank and (especially, from my perspective) Walker Evans. Like Killip, Evans walked a thin and often tense line between the socially prescribed meanings of things and those in which he believed. Campany makes a case that Killip’s work has never been “of its time,” and in a sense this connects him deeply to his forbear. Working in America in the 1930s, where everyone “knew” how to define and pity a victim of poverty, Evans struggled to transcend the popularly accepted, simplistic and ultimately degrading definitions of those struck hard by the Depression. Committed to treating all humans, rich or poor, as complex beings and emotional equals, adamant that he would never allow political ideologies or economic hierarchies to stand between him and his subjects, he entered into continual conflict in his job at the Farm Security Administration because his superiors felt his work was “not political enough.”

Looking at the muscular black and white images in What Happened, it is easy to see Killip fighting the same fight, but this time his invisible adversaries were (are) the proponents of “Concerned Photography” in (and after) the 1970s. Those were the years when the International Center of Photography opened its doors, and the years when the liberal print media (and it was liberal sometimes in those days!) expected photographers to understand and to fight for the poor or for those disenfranchised by race, creed or religion. Nowadays, when every writer can be considered profound by adding “atrocity,” “violence” or “trauma” to the title of some academic text, and every photographer can become a politically correct activist by (once again) defining and visualizing victims, Chris Killip is trying to look clearly, respectfully and without prejudice at the lives of those who are struggling to survive a shifting and often merciless economy. “To the people in these photographs I am superfluous,” he wrote in 1988 in In Flagrante. He refuses to see himself as anyone’s savior, or anyone’s judge; the only activism he admits is his own aspiration to understand and record the life around him. Given the trendiness of political correctness in the theory and practice of photography in the USA (where Killip teaches at Harvard), it is easy to see that he too is shadow boxing the adversary of popular stereotypes and preconceptions, both human and photographic. It took a long time (around 30 years) for anyone to acknowledge that Walker Evans had anything important to say, about the Depression, America and the impact of money and machines on people’s lives.

Mr Johnny Moore, Ballaona, Michael, 1971, Courtesy of the Artist © Chris Killip

One of the first things to notice is that Killip, like Sander and Evans before him, has made the decision to shift the focus of his photographs away from the individual and toward a more socially contextual approach to human subjectivity. His early work, on the Isle of Man, consists mainly of portraits, with a strong Strand influence, of people who in the 1970s worked in traditional ways in occupations and on territories long considered to be their birthright. The instability of the economic context, the massive shifts in ways of working and economic possibilities and liabilities, begins to impact on the solidity of this long established situation, and the pictures continually emphasize the malaise of sitters trying to position themselves within a strange new environment. A man, standing to the left with his back to the camera, seems flimsy enough to blow away in the wind as he faces a brick wall; although his stance is firm, his white hair flies like the garbage surrounding him on the street, and his body has no more weight than his dark shadow mirroring him on the opposite side of the picture plane. This is an image of a tense detente, literally a stand off as this man tries to remain the still point in a turning world.

In other series, a shipyard that supports a community closes, forcing people to disperse; housing complexes filled with families and children are demolished from one photo to the next. Traditional occupations like fishing, lovingly described, suddenly become anachronisms. Demonstrators, punks and revolutionary slogans make their appearance. Killip’s insistence that people flourish or fail within a social world, that their sense of self is based on moorings that include work, place and community, makes him sensitive to the conditions that create, and degrade, human behaviors. Never perceived as arbitrary or extreme, his subjects are reactive to the times in which their lives are embedded. Their responses are neither programmed, programmatic or predictable. They just are what they are: “what happened.”

The Girl Chewing Gum, 1976, 12’ © John Smith

Which leads me to John Smith’s film, The Girl Chewing Gum, a hilarious and smart counterpart to Killip’s searching work. An extended look at an urban corner dominated by a store named Steele’s, this animated black and white street photograph is narrated in such a way that the questions of meaning discussed above become central to the activities of the most banal English passersby. Alternately acting like a Gregory Crewdson style directorial photographer, a choreographer, a traffic cop, a scholar analyzing the random actions or attributes of anonymous pedestrians or an increasingly bizarre interpreter of the visible (or invisible) evidence (which at the end includes descriptions of a black bird with a nine foot wing span and a man with a helicopter in his pocket), the narrator is constantly intervening in what we see and hear, embellishing documentary records in ways that sometimes establish and more often stretch credibility. The girl chewing gum is elevated to significant iconography in this context; English words when read backward transform into Greek ones, and disembodied pronouncements fly (through electrical lines, of course) between the city and a field with cows 20 kilometers away. This film is the best antidote I’ve ever seen to the pretentious certitude of aesthetic interpretation and academic analysis. Susan Sontag, eat your heart out: I want every student I teach to see John Smith’s master work at least twice before picking up a camera or an art history textbook.

SR
© Shelley Rice, 2012

L’article “On Meaning, Chris Killip and a Girl Chewing Gum” By Shelley Rice est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Strip, 2011 © Gerhard Richter

Up front, I want to say that I decided to write about Gerhard Richter because I am in love with Motifs, the artist’s book he conceived to accompany the retrospective “Panorama”, now on view in Paris. Organized by the Tate Modern (London), the Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen (Berlin) and the Centre Pompidou, the show is intended to celebrate the 80th birthday of this German master by exploring the complexity of his oeuvre both chronologically and thematically. While I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve, I should also confess that I love the exhibition – and not because I am a die-hard fan of Richter’s, a “groupie” like some people I know.

It was, in fact, a challenge to bring me into the Gerhard Richter fold. I’ve never been convinced by the strident — and too narrow, from my point of view — arguments of my peers on his behalf. First there are the conceptual, indexical, archival types, who surround me in Manhattan of course, and who pontificate endlessly about Richter’s Atlas as if it was the Holy Grail of contemporary visual representation. Then there are those who swoon over Richter “L’Artiste,” the painter in the old, male tradition who provides the world with a constant supply of abstract works embellished by squeegees and splashes galore. It’s not that I don’t appreciate these pictures (and these positions), but they’ve never succeeded in explaining to me (as a famous French intellectual friend of mine recently said) “why I need to see the works of someone who continually reproduces the whole history of art.” The exhibition currently on view at the Centre Pompidou does, in fact, explain just that, by brilliantly linking the various aspects of Richter’s oeuvre — abstract paintings, photorealist works, glass sculptures and everything in between — in ways that emphasize and communicate this prolific artist’s overarching aims.

“I pursue no objectives, no system, no tendency; I have no program, no style, no concern. I like the indefinite, the boundless. I like continual uncertainty.” This citation, used often throughout the show and its accompanying literature, becomes a rallying cry that allows the viewer to relax when confronted with such a diverse range of work. The decision to organize the oeuvre chronologically and thematically rather than into discrete formal units (sculptures, works based on photos, abstract paintings) allows meaning to circulate around and between objects, making it very clear that Richter’s ultimate aim is in fact to emphasize (continually, incessantly) that we humans always see the world through a glass darkly, a glass that can and will shift and change size, shape, perspective at any moment. The townscapes of Dresden – painted when the city had been rebuilt after the devastation of World War 2 – are described in such fluid strokes that the destruction seems to manifest itself again through the renovation. Picturesque landscapes of barns and forests and meadows in Italy or France — painted realistically, impressionistically, or with abstract strokes layered on top of representational depictions — are all described by the artist as dreams (“a type of yearning, a yearning for a whole a simple life, a little nostalgic”), while his layered abstractions are perceived as “more real… my presence, my reality, my problems.” Painted references to traditional religious symbols — skulls and candles and angels — take their place next to works mediated by public or private pictures of family, politics and war. Objects, places, people and paint strokes, photographed and projected, change scale; blown up, mirrored, juxtaposed, they morph into something else entirely. This is, in other words, a body of work bound together by Richter’s inability to believe what he sees, to believe in the ultimate and unchanging truth of the visual information he creates or receives through his eyes: whether those eyes are seeing a magazine, a political or iconographic sign, a loved one or the landscape around him. The blurs, the break-ups, the pictorial transformations are ways of visualizing this “continual uncertainty.” The mental images mediating our experience of the world and obsessively engaged by Richter are nothing more than the screens through which we perceive — and ascribe meaning to — the continually shifting shadows on the walls of Plato’s Cave.

Tante Marianne, 1965 © Gerhard Richter

One of my favorite such transformations, which involves some very contemporary working methods and media, resulted in the creation of Strip in 2011. In the process of making this work, paint moved through photographic reproduction into digitization – a movement in the opposite direction from many of Richter’s well-known canvases, like Betty or Aunt Marianne, where a photographic image is reproduced in oils. To produce Strip, Richter began with a photo of Abstract Painting (724-4) of 1990. This original image was then divided (using computer software) vertically in 2, then 4, then 8, 16 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048 and 4,096 bands. The process (comprised of 12 stages of division) produced 8,190 strips, each with the same height as the original image. At each new division, the bands became thinner and thinner, more and more minimal in detail. Eventually, these bands were used to create Strip, the huge, abstract laser print on paper that is one of the latest works on view in the exhibition.

Which brings me to the discussion of Motifs: Division, Mirror, Repetition, the bookwork Richter conceived as an accompaniment to the show. It is clear from the central importance of Atlas, and the existence of other volumes discussed in the catalog, that Richter enjoys working through ideas by making books, and these are often composed of photographs that are repeated, reversed or transformed. As the subtitle makes clear, Motifs is such a project, based on the transformation of Abstract Painting (724-4) into Strips. In the bookwork, the entire process of division is documented, and the bands produced by the 12 stages are mirrored and repeated in ways that give rise to the abstract motifs that are the central surprise of the book.

They are surprising for several reasons. First of all, as one flips through the 238 color images that comprise the volume, one watches subjective, expressionistic splashes and drips of paint, with all their physicality, transmute into cool, clean digital color bands. Expressionism and minimalism, handwork and computerized reproduction, no longer opposites, become part of a continuum that, once again, allows Richter to undermine the categories that define our ways of seeing. But the most beautiful surprises in the book are precisely the abstract motifs that emerge as the strips are mirrored, repeated and juxtaposed. In the center of the book, between expressionism and minimalism, these motifs propose another universe of forms. They echo the patterns of Tibetan painting, Islamic decoration, South American weaving and Indian metalwork; like jewels, like lace, like flowers they emerge from the fractured images of the painted surface, and echo the colors and forms of global culture. They are, in a word, wondrous — and from my point of view, they move Gerhard Richter’s work forward in more ways than one. The last room in the Pompidou exhibition is entitled “Continuing to Paint,” and the wall label discusses the paradox of painting in the digital age. Evidently, Richter has figured out a way to keep his medium relevant, and expansive. This master might be 80 years old, but it seems he is still standing in the vortex of contemporary expression — peering, as usual, through a glass darkly at the diverse shadows animating our visual environment.

© Shelley Rice 2012

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Museum Fridericianum, 2012, Museum Fridericianum, 2012, Photo: Nils Klinger © dOCUMENTA (13)

Along with thousands of others, I made the pilgrimage to Kassel, Germany this year, to attend the opening festivities of Documenta 13. There were, of course, obvious reasons to go, first and foremost the chance to see Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s impressive show. Sprawling all over Kassel and beyond (to Kabul, for example), the show includes work by over 200 artists (living and dead) and collectives from 50 countries, and aims to reveal how art both reflects and interacts with the world. Open without being ideological, the show includes a number of pieces specifically about wars and current events. But these are accompanied by other types of expressions, for example works by Song Dong, Theaster Gates, Susan Hiller and Zanele Muholi, that focus on different aspects of the art/life continuum. Starting at the Fridericianum and moving outward to public spaces, parks and train stations, the exhibition’s opening days attracted thousands of colleagues and friends from all over the world (which was, of course, another reason to go).

But in fact it was really the invitation of my friend Walid Raad that persuaded me to make the trek to Germany. Like me, the Lebanese-born artist lives in New York, and we teach at adjacent universities. We get together when possible, and recently I started pestering him about doing an interview – specifically, a session where he and I discuss the work of artists (like him) who do extensive scholarly research in order to prepare for visual projects. To flesh out my understanding of his process, he was anxious for me to see his exhibition in Kassel, the culmination of five years of thought and refinement.  Entitled “Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World,” the show was accompanied by a series of live performances by the artist which were among the hot tickets in Kassel during opening week. The works on view became, in this context, springboards for, and embodiments of, Raad’s concepts and ruminations. This was a Duchampian act for the 21^st century, but instead of a Large Glass and an accompanying book (Notes and Projects), we had a multimedia display (including photographs and video, drawings, texts, collages, sculptures and models as well as paintings and prints) accompanied by the explications of the moving body.

Walid Raad, “Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World”, installation view. Courtesy The Artist and gallery Sfeir-Semler Beirut Hamburg

Walid’s performances were so popular, and so crowded, that extra shows had to be scheduled, which made down time for an interview impossible. But his presentation – and it must be said that I’d seen a previous version, a slide lecture at the Institute of Fine Arts in March, so I’d had some time to think about the ideas – raised a lot of issues I’d like to discuss. Also, of course, since we are friends I’d heard about these projects over the years as they unfolded in his mind, and then transformed themselves into images. It is precisely this transformation that interests me about Raad, who has a tendency (he does have a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies from the University of Rochester) to do enormous amounts of reading, looking and archival research in order to arrive at a spare or surprising visual symbol: a field of blue, a green dot, a painted splotch of red. That Ur– image, whatever it is, then gives rise to other images, schemas and words, often lots of them, like those delivered in Kassel. Installations and performances grow up around a visual nugget, in other words, reversing the usual order of concept-based work. Is this indeed conceptual art – or rather visual thinking? The difference seems important to me.

The other thing that interests me about Raad’s art is its slippery slope between fact and fiction, which of course has become his trademark since the days of the Atlas Group. (This trait goes beyond art making. When I come away from a lunch with him, I am never sure if anything he’s told me is literally true – though it must be said that I’m always thoroughly convinced while he’s spinning his yarns. Over the years I’ve learned to take this ambiguity in stride.) Raad rode into the art world on the wave of Archive Art; one of the most interesting of the artists included in this trendy group, he used his youthful experience of the wars in Lebanon to drive a wedge between concrete evidence and the manipulation and reception of data. But there was a moment when the exigencies of this version of conceptual art began to constrict his creative process, and he started working with ideas that were more far reaching, amorphous and profound. Instead of focusing on truth and falsehood, he began obsessing over Jalal Toufic’s theory of  “surpassing disasters.” Described in the book Forthcoming, a “surpassing disaster” is one that literally affects tradition by making it “withdraw,” by rendering art works “unavailable to vision” and to the perception of sensitive artists. In other words, rather than deconstructing archival materials and intellectual strategies, Walid has decided to frame the history of Art in the Arab World by chronicling the inevitability of its material, aesthetic and conceptual withdrawal. Having grown up during a time of Civil War and terrorism, exiled by violence from his home and family at an early age, Raad’s own surpassing interest is in the affect of deep trauma: not only on “truth” but on the human spirit. How can an artist express what happens to people, to places, to societies, to civilizations when their experiences are so profoundly negative that normal paths to communication, empathy and sharing are blocked? The project in Kassel is about this state of affairs, and its consequences.

Walid Raad, “Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World”, installation view. Courtesy The Artist and gallery Sfeir-Semler Beirut Hamburg

Since we are discussing Walid Raad, of course, these consequences are never spelled out in a literal way. Topical political exegesis is not his style, though it is the focus of a number of projects on view in Kassel (like Rabih Mroué’s fascinating installation and performance, The Pixelated Revolution, about cell phone videos and violence in Syria). Instead, political and social truths are transformed into images in Raad’s work, and spun as tales told by cooks or dancers and perhaps embellished by psychics. This is, quite literally, mythmaking with historical pretensions and a theatrical flair. It is important to note that when discussing this project in 2009, Raad mentioned that its final form might in fact be a play, a “pièce de théâtre,” as the French would say. Seen in this way, the gallery becomes a world stage in the Shakespearean sense, a labyrinth of related projects that tell stories within stories, like the sprawling tales of the Arabian Nights.

The master storyteller William Kentridge also has a marvelous new piece (produced with Peter L. Galison) at Documenta 13. The Refusal of Time is a tour de force within the dilapidated spaces of the old train station. But Kentridge’s all engulfing style, his way of piling up films, animations, sculpture and music in a noisy aggregate, bears no resemblance to Raad’s minimal arrangement of interpenetrating theatrical “screens” like those that define the stage sets of Jean Genet. Upon entering the space, the spectator encounters a wall, a futuristic barrier of flashing lights that resembles nothing so much as a very high-end corporate presentation. Illustrated with what looks like a large-scale schematic drawing punctuated by video images, texts and visual documents, the tableau charts new art initiatives like the Artist Pension fund. Tracking the Dubai Branch’s complex relationship to the burgeoning infrastructures for the visual arts taking shape in the Arabian Gulf, the trail ends up at the doorstep of men trained in Israeli military intelligence. The “map,” with its constantly shifting (and hard to grasp) images and its data impossible to read, creates a claustrophobic vision of the symbiotic entanglement between politics, conflict and culture in the Arab World – and far beyond. It sets the stage for the other five projects on view, scenarios described in separate spaces, which Raad describes as “artworks and stories shaped by encounters on this ground with individuals, institutions, economies, concepts and forms.”

Walid Raad, “Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World”, installation view. Courtesy The Artist and gallery Sfeir-Semler Beirut Hamburg

These encounters take place as people living in this closed circuit attempt to participate in their new culture. But their access – to their peers, their predecessors, their institutions, their customary modes of expression — is always denied. The “surpassing disaster” of war in the Middle East has withdrawn their tradition from them, and the viewer moves from scene to scene to experience this state of affairs. Artists’ projects (like the Atlas Group exhibition on view) suddenly shrink to 1/100^th of their original size. Colors are no longer available for aesthetic expression in the future, since they have taken refuge in corporate logos, and paintings lack reflections. The names of historical predecessors, earlier artists in Lebanon, don’t show up in archives but can only be retrieved, inaccurately, by telepathy. A spectator attempting to enter a new museum of modern art in an Arab city is unable to proceed: he “hits a wall,” so to speak. With his entry blocked, he declares the world flat and is removed to a psychiatric facility.  All of these “scenarios,” of course, are visualized by sculptures, or paintings, or prints. The inaccessible entrances are made manifest by shifting mirages of architectural spaces, the shrunken photos are too small to read, the contrasts between splashes of spray paint and the flat hues of corporate prints become stark. The spectator “on the ground” begins to experience this world out of joint — which, surely, is Raad’s intention.

There’s another performance work in Kassel right now, a joyful piece by Tino Sehgal. The spectator enters a pitch-black room, filled with singing, dancing, clapping and people. In her review in The New York Times, Roberta Smith called Sehgal’s work the “beating heart” of Documenta 13, and I can see why. At the risk of spoiling any future viewer’s experience, I want to say that the intensity of the human contact that occurs when the lights go up is both surprising and overwhelming. It is just that human contact which is unavailable to the poor souls in Walid Raad’s airtight world. And since the circuits described in Scene 1 encompass the globe, this projected future must belong to all of us, everywhere, no matter how hard we try to “disavow” it. The pilgrimage to Kassel suddenly makes us players not only within Raad’s piece de theatre but also within the relentless wheel of culture, the flat world from which it grows.

(And, by the way, I haven’t given up on that interview. Stay tuned.)

Shelley Rice

© Shelley Rice 2012

L’article Post-Card from Documenta 13: Walid Raad, Arabian Nights and the Pitfalls of Pilgrimages est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Vue de l’exposition « La Triennale, Intense Proximité », 20.04.12 - 26.08.12, Palais de Tokyo (Paris). Photo : André Morin. El Anatsui, « Tiled flower garden » , 2012, Courtesy de l’artiste et Jack Shainman Gallery, New York.

This is what I wrote in my notebook upon leaving La Triennale 2012: Intense Proximity, curated by Okwui Enwezor (Artistic Director) with Mélanie Bouteloup, Abdellah Karroum, Émile Renard and Claire Staebler, at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris:

This exhibition is the future, and at the same time it is the end of the world.

This impression was certainly sparked by the first artwork I saw on entering the newly removed Palais: Peter Buggenhout’s The Blind Leading the Blind. An enormous, heavy and dark sculpture made out of metal, rubber, canvas, wood and fabrics, coated with blood, resin and dust and hanging from the ceiling, the piece is described in the wall label as a “monumental disaster.” This hyperbolic description is, in fact, perfect: I felt like I was standing under an airborne shipwreck. I am not entirely sure that Buggenhout’s piece is actually meant to be part of the show, but it set a tone that resonated with the powerful and altogether disconcerting renovation of the Palais (by Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal). By the time I had “descended” into the lower levels of the exhibition, I was sure I had somehow crossed over, and was traversing the scenography for the movie Blade Runner.

I begin my Post-Card this way because I want to emphasize that the Triennale is not simply an art exhibition. It is, rather, an experience of art, lots of (often very good) art, in a context that feels like an archaeological expedition through space and time. A stage set filled with high drama, the show does not aim to set off discrete objects or highlight artists, trends or movements. Rather, as Enwezor wrote in his introduction, it aspires to be “a zone of encounter… in which contemporary realities become immanent, visible, present…(as) a field of contending discourses.” Moving down and through the complex labyrinths of the building, with its unfinished walls and its stripped surfaces that boldly display their historical layers, the viewer sails through time as well as space. The flashy and extravagant convergences of sculptures and paintings, installations and media, sound works and films glowing in the dark are experienced as kaleidoscopic in nature. Expanding outward into global space and moving both forward and backward in time, filled with works by artists living and dead, young and old, from many continents and traditions, the exhibition EMBODIES rather than explains the notion of “intense proximity.”

Okwui calls this the “politics of anti-difference:” the collapse of the distance between the Self and Other, the recognition that now we live with disjunction, in “the thickness of ethnocentric and identity based processes.” The exhibition begins with works by Marcel Griaule, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean Rouch and Pierre Verger: classic ethnographers who traveled through space to bring news of cultural difference to their neighbors back home. For Enwezor, ethnographic fieldwork and curatorship have much in common. But with the collapse of spatial and temporal distances taken for granted by earlier generations, the contemporary curator becomes an ethnographer by definition – and field work begins at home, with the study of the stranger who, through migration, slavery, colonialism and tourism, has now become a neighbor. The exhibition, essentially, stages this collapse.

Vue de l’exposition « La Triennale, Intense Proximité », 20.04.12 - 26.08.12, Palais de Tokyo (Paris). Photo : André Morin. Sarkis, « La chorégraphie des Trésors de Guerre » , 2011 ; La Frise Trésors de Guerre, 1976-2012, Courtesy de l’artiste et Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris, Bruxelles. © ADAGP Paris 2012.

Everything is in motion in the galleries of the Palais de Tokyo. This is an exhibition, and a world picture, with no center or still point, only continually shifting parameters and peripheries bound together by fences (“frontiers”) designed by Daniel Buren. Time, space and generations are seen as contexts as well as potentialities; and all of us are tourists in someone else’s reality when we cross boundaries defined by geography, race, class or culture. African American women like Lorraine O’Grady and Carrie Mae Weems relate their experiences, respectively, to Ancient Egypt and 19^th century American slavery. Timothy Asch’s film from South America, showing an Ax Fight among Yanomami Indians, is juxtaposed with Helen Levitt’s record of children bashing each other in play on the streets of New York in the late 1940s. The German Lothar Baumgarten lived for a while in Brazil, Michael Buthe (also from Germany) learned from the North Africans and American Terry Atkins from the Inuit Eskimos of Alaska. Turkish born Koken Ergun’s video installation documents the subcultures and ceremonies of Pilipino workers in Tel Aviv, while Israeli writer Ariella Azoulay describes, through drawings and texts, the marginalization and effacement of Palestinian history in the national archives.

Thomas Struth and Guy Tillim take ironic looks at the exoticism of tropical paradises in their large color photographs, while Luc Delahaye finds a nature morte of war and death in Libya. Antoni Muntadas, Thomas Hirschorn and Alfredo Jaar interrogate the ways in which translation and media deflect and disable our ability to empathize and communicate while magnifying our terror of the unknown and each other. Fear Eats the Soul, in fact, is transcribed on one of the T-shirts pressed in the silkscreen printing workshop space of Rirkrit Tirivanija; and T-shirts, along with every other form of quotidian object, fill the ephemeral installation space of Georges Adéagbo. Born in Benin, Meschac Gaba married his blond Dutch girlfriend, and in his Marriage Room documents the experience in detail and shows us the cross-pollination of objects and people such a union makes possible. The young Polish artist Aneta Grzeszykowska’s terrific video – called Headache – was only one of a few fine feminist contributions from Eastern Europe; the older pioneer Ewa Partum also stood out in this context. Two of my favorite artists – El Anatsui and Nick Hlobo, born in Ghana and South Africa respectively  – both have works in the show, as do Chris Ofili and Huma Bhabha, Annette Messager, Wangechi Mutu and Yto Barrada, Hassan Khan and Trinh T. Minh-ha.

Vue de l’exposition « La Triennale, Intense Proximité », 20.04.12 - 26.08.12, Palais de Tokyo (Paris). Photo : André Morin. Au premier plan : Adrian Piper, « The Mythic Being », 1973, Collection et copyright Adrian Piper Research Archive Foundation, Berlin. Au second plan, de gauche à droite : Seulgi Lee, "BÂTON", 2009, Courtesy de l’artiste et Jousse Entreprise ; Victor Man, « Deposition » , 2008, Collection Ginette Moulin - Guillaume Houzé, Paris ; Meschac Gaba, « Marriage Room » , 2000, Courtesy de l’artiste et Stevenson, Cape Town, Johannesburg, ADAGP Paris 2012 ; Camille Henrot, « Est-il possible d’être révolutionnaire et d’aimer les fleurs ? » , 2012, Courtesy de l’artiste et Kamel Mennour, Paris.

The list might seem endless, but this is just the beginning. There are, in fact, 109 projects in the 5,000 square meters of exhibition space available in the renovated Palais de Tokyo. All told, I think I spent roughly seven hours in the building, and the Triennale continues in other Parisian venues like Bétonsalon – Centre d’art et de recherche and Centre d’art contemporain d’Ivry-le Crédac. Overwhelming? Chaotic? A bit, yes, but ultimately that is in fact the point. There are no neat edges or tidy isms in this show. There are only endless artists and images rubbing shoulders and trying to coexist in a space – real and conceptual — whose delineations are not, and may never be, clear. All in all, the 2012 Triennale is both a cornucopia of plenty and a deeply unnerving vision of dissonance, and I remain committed to my first impression: for me it represents, simultaneously, the future and the end of the world. As I see it, Enwezor’s ability to envision and shape such a complex and irresolvable experience is, indeed, a major achievement.

Shelley Rice
©Shelley Rice, 2012.

L’article Intense Proximity: An Archaeology of Space and Time est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.

Shelley Rice, "View from the Intercontinental"

On the 13th of May, a group of about twenty photography curators, critics, artists and historians from the Middle East, the United States and Europe met in Abu Dhabi at the Intercontinental Hotel for the first “Photography at the Arab Crossroads” colloquium. Sponsored by New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus and the Arab Image Foundation based in Beirut, the conference was convened by Shamoon Zamir (NYU Abu Dhabi) and Issam Nassar (Illinois State University). In the introduction circulated to participants, Zamir and Nassar wrote that the “colloquium is conceived as the first of what we hope will become a series of colloquia or workshops focused on the histories and forms of photography from the Arab world. While the primary focus will be on photography produced within the Arab world, the region is also conceived broadly and fluidly and is imagined as a cultural crossroads…The broad goal of the workshops is to establish a network of scholars and institutional partnerships that will enable the development of an ongoing plan of research and publication aimed at addressing both historical and theoretical gaps in our understanding of photography from and about the Arab world.”

Shelley Rice, "The Arab Photography Colloquium, with : Shamoon Zamir (front) and Zeina Arida (behind him)"

Toward this end,  Zamir, Nassar and Zeina Arida (Director of the Arab Image Foundation) invited a series of speakers and guests that included historians like Stephen Sheehi, editors and archivists Karen Davis and Jean-Gabriel Leturcq, artists such as  Yasser Alwan and Tarek Al Ghoussein, curators Catherine David and Martha Weiss and NYU Faculty like myself, Fred Ritchin and filmmaker/photographer Joanne Savio. Two solid days were spent in conversation; there was only a little time to see Saadiyat Island (future home of the Abu Dhabi Louvre and Guggenheim Museums as well as the NYU Abu Dhabi campus), the Emirates Palace Hotel (where one can buy gold from a vending machine) and of course the Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque (which holds up to 40,000 people).  Zamir ran a tight ship, and insisted that the event present an overview of the issues facing people involved in exploring this increasingly important subject. Nassar and Sheehi gave papers on the history and theory of photography in the region, while Arida, Mark Westmoreland and others described various aspects of the AIF and MEPPI (the Middle East Photography Preservation Institute). The background from the first day set the stage for artist presentations by Alwan, Susan Meiselas and Nadia Benchallal on the second day, as well as curatorial explanations of upcoming exhibitions (Weiss, from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London) and general issues involved in researching, writing about and exhibiting this material and all “off center modernities” (David). Between presentations, there was much lively dialogue and dissension, which was fascinating due to the varied backgrounds, situations and professions of the participants.

Nadia Benchallal : « Women in Algiers ", Algeria 1994, from the Series « Sisters », Work in progress, © Nadia Benchallal

I think everyone present agreed that the high point was precisely this conviviality and debate. All of us were all grateful for the chance to meet (or re-encounter) so many knowledgeable people from so many different countries, and to analyze these timely concerns from such varied points of view – either during the open forums or later among ourselves over coffee or meals. The politically correct, the essentialist, the isolationist and the cosmopolitan: all of these types of remarks surfaced during the lively discussions, and once on the table they could be examined, rejected, accepted or morphed into premises and possibilities more agreeable to everyone. The most heated debates, of course, were over the definition of an “Arab” photographer in the 21st century: is this someone who was born and remains within the region, or is such a definition too restrictive? (We noticed, of course, that if we upheld this restriction none of the artists – in fact almost none of the speakers – who had presented work at the conference could be invited back to speak or to publish their work in any resulting books!) Does the idea of a cultural crossroads mandate an open attitude toward those born in the Middle East who left for long or short periods of time (like Yasser Alwan or Walid Raad, as well as Issam Nassar himself), those from other countries or cultures who’ve done significant work in the region (like Susan Meiselas) or those born elsewhere because their parents emigrated, but whose work is about retracing their heritage within the Arab world (Nadia Benchallal, born of Algerian parents in France)? Evidently, this first colloquium was convened with an open attitude toward the mobility of 21st century life, and after much heated discussion the group voted to leave the initial definition in place for the next workshop.

Yasser Alwan : "Amm Abdu", Tanneries, Cairo, 1999, © Yasser Alwan

Similarly, Zamir posed questions about the organization of subsequent colloquia and books. How does one choose categories for contemporary research that are not based on previous Orientalist or Western centered attitudes? This was perhaps the most critically delicate issue, since of course “Calls for Papers” have a way of pushing research or artistic expression in certain pre-determined directions. The decision was made to leave the categories very general — Art Photography, Documentary, Vernacular Imagery and Collections – in the hope that these very wide fields can be filled up with many different and locally nuanced points of view, types of research, art and curatorial projects that provide multifaceted perspectives on these essentially universal aspects of the photographic medium. After two days, we left the conference – exhausted, but with a plan – feeling like something important had occurred in Abu Dhabi, and knowing that all of us were grateful to have taken part in laying the foundations of a project that will change the visual landscape of the globe yet again.

© Shelley Rice, 2012

L’article Post-card from Abu Dhabi: Photography at the Arab Crossroads est apparu en premier sur Shelley Rice.