art review 2009 summer

8/20/2019 Art Review 2009 Summer

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BRUCE NAUMANWHY THE ARTWORLD WORSHIPS HIM

MARINA ABRAMOVICON WHY PERFORMANCE ART SHOULD BE LONG AND PAINFUL

THE MOST RELEVANT ARTIST IN BRITAIN

PER KIRKEBY THE ANTI-INTELLECTUAL

TEVE M QUEEc

VENICEBIENNALE

A USER’S GUIDE


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DISPATCHES 25

CONTENTS


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FEATURES

STEVE MCQUEEN 74

BRUCE NAUMAN 82

VENICE:A USER’S GUIDE 88

MARINA ABRAMOVIC 98

REAR VIEW

REVIEWS 119

BOOK REVIEWS 150

THE STRIP 154

ON THE TOWN 156

OFF THE RECORD 158

CONTENTS


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BEIJING: 09.05.09 – 12.07.09

CHEN HUI CREAMY STRAWBERRY

L/B I‘M REAL

LUCERNE: 18.04.09 – 04.07.09

I WROTE DOWN SOME OF MY THOUGHTS

LIU DING

ART40BASEL

10.06.09 – 14.06.09

HALL 2.1 / BOOTH P5ART UNLIMITED: LI DAFANG

Liu Ding, “Descriptive, Narrative, Descriptive, Narrative“ 2009 wood, porcelain, 84 x 36 x 38 cm

Beijing: 104, Caochangdi Cun, Cui Gezhuang Xiang, Chaoyang District, PRC-100015 Beijing/China

Lucerne: Rosenberghöhe 4, 6004 Lucerne/Switzerland

[email protected], www.galerieursmeile.com

53RD VENICE BIENNALE

07.06.09 – 22.11.09

LIU DING: CHINESE PAVILION

ANATOLY SHURAVLEV: RUSSIAN PAVILION


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EDITORIAL

CONTRIBUTORS

ART

SUBSCRIPTIONS


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JUERGEN TELLER

GEORGE STOLZ

CONTRIBUTORS

GOSHA OSTRETSOV

VINCENT KATZ

JAMES WESTCOTT


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DISPATCHESSnapshot

UK/EuropeTopics

USA Top Five

DesignConsumed

An Oral History of Western Art

On View

SUMMER

snapshot J.H. ENGSTROM


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WALKING IN MY MIND

ARTVILNIUS 09

Visual Column

No. 6

The sixth in a series of visual columns,

by artist DEAN HUGHES


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CREATIVEDESTRUCTION

‘THE REAL CHALLENGE for the arts sector is not to ask“What is the government going to do to help us?” but “What

can we do to help the country weather and recover from

this downturn?”’ You might wonder why Liz Forgan, newly

appointed chair of Arts Council England, felt it necessary to

go for this ‘JFK moment’ in a recent speech announcing new

funding to help arts organisations survive the recession. After

all, the stakes were £40 million of extra cash for the arts – not

exactly ‘a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny,

poverty, disease and war itself’.

But Forgan’s exhortation to serve the country at least

throws up a few questions about the current vision (or lack of)

for publicly funded arts in Britain. Still lurking in there is that odd

assumption that the funded art sector can somehow contribute

to assisting the country out of recession, whereas it is becoming

more than clear that the arts, and visual art particularly, are

very much dependent on the health of the broader economy to

thrive. The art market, for example, is never really a generator

of wealth (except in the narrow sense of the wealth it generates

for artists and gallerists) but exists because of wealth generated

elsewhere. Yet since our current government came to power

12 years ago, it has been unshakeably convinced that what

came to be known as the creative industries could be a major

contributor to the British economy. This was the fantasy of

the ‘postindustrial’ economy that New Labour pinned itspolicy hopes on – that and a quiet acceptance of the financial

sector’s very real contribution to the national wealth. That New

Labour’s tenure coincides with what (in retrospect) turned out

to be the decade of the credit bubble is instructive: much of the

‘creative industries’ – advertising, design, marketing, fashion –

thrived on the back of the credit boom, both through providing

services to the financial sector, and through the broader growth

in consumer spending. Seen through New Labour’s rose-tinted

spectacles as a distinct economic sector, they appear to be

contributing billions to the economy.

It was the creative industries’ apparent contribution to

the economy that provided the justification for big increases

in public funding for the arts. While this fantasy is becoming

increasing difficult to sustain in the face of economic realities,

it doesn’t deter our public servants, who seem to want to stick

stubbornly to what’s left of the mantra; Forgan insists that‘showing that we can make a real contribution in even the most

difficult of times will be the best case we can make for continued

public investment in the arts’.

But what exactly is the ‘real contribution’ of the arts? And

how exactly is spending on the arts an ‘investment’? Rehashing

the pseudo-language of the arts as economic value doesn’t

help make sense of the current problems of the real economy,

while exaggerating the ability of the creative sector to assist in

economic recovery clouds the relationship between culture and

prosperity. In reality, our current political class and its cultural

policymakers continue to hold on to the dream of the ‘creative

economy’ for the simple reason that they long ago abandoned

any pretence of being able to influence the development of the

real, productive economy. The Conservatives, now gleefully

waiting for Gordon Brown’s administration to expire, seem to

have no better ideas about how to revitalise Britain’s economy,

instead looking to convince us of the need to accept more

austerity and cuts in public spending.

Unfortunately, it is in the real economy, not the ‘creative’

one, that these problems need to be addressed. Rather than

being thankful for a few extra quid from the Arts Council to keep

us going in the depths of the downturn, the arts sector, like the

rest of us, should be calling our politicians to account for why

our economy has tanked so spectacularly on their watch, and what they propose to do about it. Perhaps Forgan and others

need to recall another part of JFK’s inaugural: ‘Together let us

explore the stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the

ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce.’ …The arts

and commerce.

words J.J. CHARLESWORTH

Does a government bailout ofUK arts organisations make anyeconomic sense?

TOPICS


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EUROPE

ParisOur national academician Marc Fumaroli makes a determinedstand, in a 600-page book, against a French state in which‘a substantial part of its civil servants have passed on topostmodernism – to say things elegantly’. Extremely attachedto ‘defending French cultural heritage’, the academician strivesto distinguish ‘modern art, heroic art… and contemporary art,

which no longer fights against anything’ and which ‘tends todestroy the necessary conditions for a pleasant life’. A marvellousformula that I have just stuck on my fridge.

Dinosaurs like Fumaroli are becoming an endangeredspecies. The role of cultural politics in France (since Malrauxat least, in the 1950s) is to tirelessly educate the public on itsown era. This is how an elite group of enlightened civil servantsinstalled Jeff Koons in the Château de Versailles last autumn.

This exhibition (a staggering success) was controversial: not because public money was supporting contemporary art, not because Versailles could have been disfigured (how can anything be more kitsch than Versailles?), not even because Koons isn’t

French; the controversy concerned the fact that he is certainlynot the artist most in need of public money.

Sarkozy is not a man of culture, except when it issuccessful. His way of being modern means ‘work more to earnmore’, his most famous slogan. Art, literature: how much willit bring in? His mockery of the seventeenth-century novel La

Princesse de Clèves launched an incredible series of protestdemonstrations, and even a badge with ‘I read La Princesse deClèves’ written across it.

For the moment, however, there is still a (small) budgetfor culture in France. The ambition of La Force de l’Art 02 ,the second showing of a triennial organised by the Ministerof Culture, is to ‘offer a stage for contemporary creation andartists in France’. In this fishbowl of light at the Grand Palais,one can see, among other works, Anita Molinero’s burnt bins,Giraud and Siboni’s dancing black cube, Wang Du’s giant kebab,

Alain Bublex’s fictive town, Le Gentil Garçon’s igloo, FayçalBaghriche’s ghost flags, Pascal Convert’s stele of broken glassand Virginie Yassef’s pterosaur scratch (a veiled message toFumaroli?). Philippe Rahm, the exhibition’s designer, proposesa ‘white unfolded cube’ from which works flow out like objectsin a landscape. Their tectonic force of deformation allows themto create their own spaces in hills and valleys according to their

dimension and weight. Now there’s something to leave Fumaroliaghast. But the bold knights of the state take their missionseriously, the proof being that 60 (60!) ‘mediators’, everytalkative one of them wearing a blue T-shirt, explain absolutelyeverything to a trusting public.

words MARIE DARRIEUSSECQ

MCDERMOTT &MCGOUGH

MOMENTUMNORDIC BIENNIAL


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‘What’s good for General Motors is good for the country.’ In April, President

Obama at long last forced the resignation of Rick Wagoner, the CEO ofGeneral Motors, who took the helm of this former industrial powerhouse in2000 and has, since 2004, racked up losses of $82 billion. Wagoner was not, ofcourse, solely responsible. By the time he arrived, decades of lousy decisions

had crippled the company – industry analyst John A. Casesa noted that GM‘lost its way in the 70s but… didn’t know it until 20 years late’ – and he wasleft to work with many of the executives and board members responsible forthese choices. That Wagoner had spent his entire career at GM suggests just

how blindingly insular its culture was.Much of the country seems to have worked in similar ways, from the

interlocking boards of our investment firms to our cultural institutions. Where Wall Street – abetted by lax management – hitched the economy toa Ponzi scheme of ever-increasing home values, the latter invested majorcapital in grandiose new buildings dedicated to increasingly large audiences.

The equivalent of the gas-guzzling clunkers that finally sunk GM, they havesaddled museums with enormous fixed costs while not, judging by the endlesscriticism MoMA has endured, satisfying public demands for how art should

be presented or experienced.Ill-positioned for leaner times, institutions are now laying off staff,

reducing programming or, in the case of Massachusetts’s Brandeis University,selling off nonproductive assets such as the Rose Art Museum. These movesresemble the plant closings and division restructurings GM undertook duringits relentless slide. And to extend the analogy, while core businesses areslashed, executive perks remain: curatorial travel budgets may have vanished,

yet a roster of patrons and museum directors still found the funds to traipsethrough the recent Dubai art fair.

Those effecting such policies are the very same people who championedthe model of big buildings and biennial hopping. Their thinking is not only asinsular as, but directly derives from, that of the business world. The trusteesof our institutions form a wide but tight-knitcircle, from the financial advisor J. Ezra Merkin(disgraced in the Madoff affair), who sat on the

boards of, and invested money for, NYU and Yeshiva University, to Kathy Fuld, a major patronand vice-chairman of MoMA, and incidentally also

wife of former Lehman Brothers CEO RichardFuld.

Not all of their decisions have been bad;neither were Rick Wagoner’s. But expecting themto develop the new models necessary for advancingour cultural institutions, and our culture, may be

like leaving GM in the hands that killed it.

words JOSHUA MACK

New York

JIRI KOVANDA

EUROPE / USA

GLENN BROWN


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WAYNE THIEBAUD

While New York’s story is that of money, Los

Angeles’s is one of lifestyle. This oft-deridedconcept has as much to do with how others seethe city’s myth of sunny beaches and apocalyptic

weather as it does with the ways we see ourselves. While Bret Easton Ellis looked at one aspect oflifestyle, that of the wealthy and morally dubious,even our tougher observers, writers such as JohnFante and Charles Bukowski, are as much about

how they chose to live their lives as the work thatreflected these choices.

These choices define and are defined by LA,and artists, always the canaries in the coal mine,are still choosing to live here. Even now, with thefledgling market scrambling in, and with galleries

closing, cutting staff or just switching to cheaperdigs, the artists are still here. In many ways, thecollapse has returned much of the influence tothem (and perhaps the critics); with no money to

be made, there’s nothing to lose.The gallery neighbourhood having the

most difficulties with shifts and changes in LAis Chinatown, yet the last set of major openings

brought out an army of artists in support of oneanother. Openings by Henry Taylor, Candice Lin,and Erik Frydenbourg attracted the kind of people

who prove that LA is still an artist’s town, and a vibrant one at that.

Lifestyle and money are not mutuallyexclusive, however, and for every Bukowski, there’san Easton Ellis. Culver City, long the economicpowerhouse of Los Angeles art (though 6150

Wilshire and one-offs such as Regen Projectsaren’t to be sniffed at), appears to have a fewcracks: people are still moving, but a few seem to be

wringing their hands. Blum and Poe’s new gallery building, a museum-quality space unmatched inLA, is opening in June on the gallery-crowdedLa Cienega Blvd. It seems like a monument to adifferent era, and for that alone will likely anchorthe neighborhood through a generation of shiftingfortunes. But Culver City, MOCA and the rest of

the art spaces – whether institutional, alternativeor commercial – with troubles will only surviveand perhaps even thrive because artists like livingand working here. Apocalyptic weather aside, askany artist, and you’ll hear that life in Los Angelesis pretty good.

Los Angeles

words ANDREW BERARDINI

MOMA


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S T U T T G A R T

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ANDREAS UEBELE»SCHRIFT IM RAUM«


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4 ALEXANDER CALDERAND KANDINSKY

TOP FIVE

WHAT TO SEE THIS MONTH BY

SAMUELKELLERDirector, Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel

5 GIACOMETTI

2&3 ART BASEL ANDTHE VENICEBIENNALE

1 PHILIPPE PARRENO


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ZEALOTSTHERE IS WAR in design heaven – or at least a rift behindthe vitrines in Milan. This year’s most exciting presentations

at the Salone del Mobile mustered along two technical axes.

Along the first were designers whose shtick fell into the modern

craftsy template – ‘It took fourteen years to source an artisan

who could still splice authentic Swiss shingling, but alas by then

the urushi lacquer master had passed away’. From the other

came conversation peppered with references to CNC milling,

Selective Laser Sintering and nano-level fibre treatment.

It was one more battle in the old man vs. machine struggle,

and there were zealots in both camps who believed they held

the key to loveliness and higher purpose. As to loveliness: any

fool, regardless of whether he’s working with a laser cutter or

chip of flint, can make hideous, pointless designs (and indeed,

many did). Higher purpose is another matter, since in the

current design climate the concept pretty much boils down to

sustainability and environmental friendliness. The hand-of-

man axis considers this home territory. In these days of craft

chic, anything involving artisans carries a misty aura of makers

living at one with materials, recuperating what they can and not

overburdening the world with mass-produced goods.

The new-technology camp possesses a fighting rejoinder.

It is they who use the materials and methodology most fit for

the job, and computer-controlled manufacture is not only

perfectly adapted to small production numbers but also allowsdesigns to be sent electronically for manufacture in situ, rather

than shipped over as finished objects. Thus Ponoko, a custom

manufacturing company in New Zealand, commissioned

a plywood shelf unit for its collection from designer Steve

Watson in London. It arrived as nothing heavier than the email

attachment that provided the template for individual laser-cut

batches to be popped out each time the piece is ordered.

The two camps provided the inspiration for a pair of

shows, each with its share of thrills: Craft Punk, a live-makers’

workshop produced by Fendi in collaboration with Design

Miami; and Senseware, Kenya Hara’s new-materials-meet-

creative-ideas display at the Triennale Design Museum.

Over at the Fendi space, Raw-Edges (who are Israeli

designers Shay Alkalay and Yael Mer) confirmed their

reputation for intelligent, counterintuitive design with chairs

upholstered in pleated Tyvek (DuPont’s polyethylene paper

synthesis), which they filled with quick-setting foam to create a

sort of giant-origami-water-balloon effect. (The pair produceda quiet moment of poetry elsewhere in Milan, with a tiny

installation of interlocked rotating paper trees that magically

grew out of a pile of papers at Spazio Rossana Orlandi).

Other neocrafty thrills at Fendi came from Studio

Glithero, who impregnated ceramic vases with photosensitive

chemicals, strapped wildflower sprigs to the side, then skewered

them on an apparatus resembling a doner kebab, the grill

replaced by a UV lightbulb. The rotating exposure left the vases

embellished with spriggy blueprints expressing the haphazard

energy of bursts of sunlight.

Senseware took its title from a term describing new

materials cool enough to induce brainfreeze – from light-

transmitting concrete to nanofibres with a diameter 1/7500th

the thickness of a human hair – which were transformed forthis show by architects, flower designers, artists and industrial

producers. Fukitorimushi – Panasonic’s robotic floor cleaner

that resembled the disembodied, nappy-clad bottom of a

crawling baby – stole hearts as it polished the parquet. Above

it floated the unbowed expanse of Jun Aoki’s six-metre-long,

ultralightweight hollow cantilever beam made from a new

carbon fibre material stronger than steel.

“Like a stone of the Stone Age or paper in the paper age,

today’s artificial fibres stimulate our new creativity”, curator

Hara explained, emphasising his desire to bring Japanese

technology into the practice of creative minds outside his

country. “In using this Senseware, we’re entering a new field of

creation; I wanted the world to contribute to it.”

Senseware may generate a new field of creation in

functional terms, but it still tickled the old-school aesthetic

sensibilities with Makoto Azuma’s sunken moss garden, which

ran through the centre of the exhibition space like a spiritual

anchor. Sure, it was planted in biodegradable polylactic acid

fibre mats, but the installation was there to provide a natural

balance and harmony that had little to do with its precocious

material underlay.

The idea of split sensibilities in the design world is

driven by a fear that as we embrace the new, we forget and

denigrate the old. There is concern that computer designprograms are producing a generation that lacks respect for the

laws of physics and forgets that just because something looks

good onscreen doesn’t mean it’s necessarily fit for production

outside of Second Life. It may not have been the intention of

either show, but both Craftpunk and Senseware demonstrated

the exciting potential of that creative point where the two sides

are reconciled, and where new techniques and materials can

both inspire and serve.

words HETTIE JUDAH

Two exhibitions at this year’sMilan Furniture Fair showcase,in thrilling fashion, the age-oldman vs. machine design debate

DESIGN


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CONSUMED

£300

£375

$49.95

$25


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AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART

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

Sir Peter Paul Rubens (28 June 1577 – 30 May 1640) was a baroque genius who worked for several courts in Italy before setting up a workshop in Antwerp.He painted Counter-Reformation altarpieces as well as portraits, landscapesand mythological and allegorical subjects. He was knighted twice: by Philip IVof Spain in 1624 and Charles I of England in 1620.

interview by MATTHEW COLLINGS

NO 9:

RUBENS


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ARTREVIEW It’s great to meet you. You are fantastic. I prettymuch worship you. I think the first thing the contemporaryartworld ought to be told about, so they really get an appropriatefeeling of awe about it, and they aren’t allowed just to go oncomplacently assuming you’re someone from the past that Glenn

Brown or John Currin is wittily ‘influenced’ by, is the wholeRubens skill thing, the incredible mastery of it all.

SIR PETER PAUL RUBENS Actually, I think Glenn Brown israther witty about me. Or at least about the kind of thing I standfor, which is a tradition of art that no longer exists in your time,

because society isn’t set up in the same way – so the workshopsystem that formed me, and that I did so much to advance, doesn’texist any more. Movies and photography have pushed art furtheraway from the centre of society, so it no longer has a function.Or at least its functions have become esoteric. Philosophisingis really the main one. But on the other hand there’s no agreedoverarching discipline that all the different artistic lunges atphilosophical profundity have to answer to – so it’s a pretty open

matter as to what ‘philosophy’ might mean in a contemporaryart context. I like John Currin, too. I think he can be surprisinglysophisticated about colour. He knows what it is. Of course, that’sa side issue with him. His main thing is something else. I don’t

know what you’d call it. Certainly not ‘mastery’ – that would bea ridiculous anachronism. Plus he sometimes churns the workout. So you get a good show at Gagosian in New York with apornographic theme and then soon afterwards a show with asimilar theme at Sadie Coles in London, but now it’s not worthlooking at, even though the PR for it is all about trumpeting thesame virtues that made an impact at Gagosian. He’s just doingthe stuff without thinking. Where was I?

AR What Currin is good at?

SIR PPR Yes, he makes you look and at the same time thinkabout your looking. China plates, smiling women, their vaginasand mouths, the patterns on the plates, the placing of key hotsights within a single rectangle – he really is some kind of geniusat arrangement. A genius in a comic mode: comic philosophy. Thepaint handling is part of the joke: a reference to what an educatedaudience knows is supposed to be important about Courbet, say,or a Flemish master from the century before mine, rather thana real tapping into those skills. I don’t object to the looseness ofthe use of terms in gallery promo-talk. Everyone’s got somethingto sell, after all. We all have to live. But it’s useful to think aboutthem seriously sometimes. Earlier you satirised the lazy use of

the word ‘influence’, for example. The way influence works iscertainly complicated. There are so many questions. And levels.

AR What about skill?

SIR PPR Well, what was it for me? This changeable approachto form in the different stages of my career, Roman Renaissance-influenced, then Venetian Renaissance. But also the use of otherpeoples’ skills, the assistants I used, who were themselves oftenextremely skilful – very advanced artists with independentcareers. And for certain big projects I had every artist in Antwerp– where I lived, in a self-designed Italianate palace full of classicalstatuary – working for me. And after a certain point hardly

anything by me is wholly by me, and there’s a whole system ofprices I had where the more something was by me, the more youpaid, because of the relative rarity. But at the same time you’vegot to remember that everything started with something by methat was very much by me: the initial rough sketches that I’d

do to show the clients. Skill is always connected to expressionand sensibility. Those oil sketches still survive, they’re full ofautographic energy, the sincere me in the raw form. But how‘insincere’ are the major workshop productions, which could

be huge, or multipart – one project incorporated 25 paintings,all very big, allegorising the reign of some queen or other? Andevery one of those projects is so amazingly complex and detailed

but broad and beautifully designed at the same time, and frankly built like a brick shithouse if you’re talking about structure: Imean that stuff is architecturally staggering, the sheer solidityand strength of it. And that’s all my sensibility and my skill. Andthen there are the skills of those who hired me, the heads of the

various orders of the Counter-Reformation, and the courtiers ofEuropean royalty, and their ability to think in complex allegorical

terms and to make all that literary cleverness work in the contextof the painter’s studio. And then my own skills that are not all thatdifferent to any other artist of my era, honed since childhood,skills of drawing, handling of paint, the ability to composedynamically: these are deployed in a way that’s very confusingfor your time, in that they’re so developed and competent thatpeople seeing them in museums, say, don’t even really see themas skills. They just think they’re looking at subjects: classicalnudes, cherubs, kings, angels, a horse or a candle and a bottle of

wine.

AR Philistines!

SIR PPR Well, it would have been different for Picasso, who would think about the inner mechanics of the painting. So you’vegot skills and expression, but also general cultural ideas, the bigtransitions over time in how people think. Modernism demandsa very advanced level of looking and thinking about art, whichpostmodernism has gradually relaxed. The audience in my time

wouldn’t have thought about the inner mechanics either, butabout the subject matter; they’d have exclaimed at how lifelikeI’d made a scene, and how beautiful or terrifying or elevating it

was, because they were already tuned into the subjects as ideas.In your time people aren’t tuned into the ideas in the same way– not to their heat, only to their vague fallout, the vague moral

In your time people aren’t tuned

into ideas in the same way –not their heat, only their vague

fallout – your time sees angels

and nymphs and redeeming

saviours in old art in museums,

but it’s all just a vague generality


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AN ORAL HISTORY OF WESTERN ART

of the past is that he wants to be compared to them. But thedifference between him and Glenn Brown and John Currin is notreally that he’s like Rembrandt, or like me, but that he’s not beingironic. He’s sincere about flesh, about surfaces, about the pose ofthe model, and he genuinely sees himself as a sort of continuation

of the greatness of the past. But the continuum he inhabits is a bit more indebted to Cubism than his audience – which is often visually lazy and conservative – realises.

AR Wow, it’s so great having you really here to talk about thesethings. What was it like being a diplomat and halting the war

between Spain and England for two years?

SIR PPR Very interesting. I also liked being guided around theKing of Spain’s art collection by Velázquez. I loved marrying asixteen-year-old when I was very old, too.

AR It must have been awful dying of gout. I didn’t even know youcould die from it. What is it, anyway? What about landscapes?

You practically invented them – you’re so clever. Do you likeanything in art now besides Glenn Brown? What about CecilyBrown?

SIR PPR I think she’s good, yes. It’s good that you can have a woman doing brush strokes. I like modernist abstract painting, which is mostly the realm of men. It’s good for a woman to do it.She deserves her reputation.

AR What do you think is the best thing about her?

SIR PPR Mark making – the energy – I like her big brushes, she has them specially made, maybe, I don’t know. I saw some in aphoto in a German magazine the other day. They made me wantto paint again. But really what I want to do is direct Hollywoodmovies.

AR Where are you off to right now?

SIR PPR The opera. I like huge, magnificent, mighty things.

AR OK, let’s call it a day.

SIR PPR Ciao.

Next month: Rembrandt – the eyes really do follow you round

the room

implications of the former hierarchical structure of society thatreligious art in my time allegorised – your time sees angels andnymphs and redeeming saviours in old art in museums, but it’sall just a vague generality. That’s the general audience goinground the National Gallery, feeling a bit glazed over and tired

when they come across a room full of my stuff. ‘Skill’ is prettymuch a negative for them, because that’s all they see, and there’sno hardwiring to things they’re personally involved with. Andthen there’s the art milieu in your time: for this crowd ‘skill’ canmean anything. It’s a different world for you and Glenn than it

was for me: simplified in many ways, not least in the changedrelationship to buyers and patrons. But also more complicated,in the opening up of ordinary peoples’ expectations of art, andtheir understanding that it’s somehow got to be responsive totheir inner psychic makeup – and they’re not a handful of bigwigs,

but everyone, the general audience, those very same touristslurching up to pictures in the National Gallery. So skill for Glenn– well, he’s expressing the moment by giving some original livelyelectricity of his own to something that the sensibility of the

moment actually finds rather dead.

AR What about Jenny Saville and Lucian Freud? Art historianslove to say they’re just like you, because they paint fleshy nudesand they’re full of sincerity. It makes me fume!

SIR PPR Yes, you fuster away, don’t you, but I don’t see theproblem. You want people to be careful what they say and put a

hold on the streaming mindless bullshit, but I don’t see the harmin it. In my work painterliness is never anything to do with thepastiness that you find in Freud and Saville, but a sort of cookeryto do with layers of paint that are liquidised to different degreesand used transparently or opaquely in the aim of certain effects,and also there is a constant drive to both merge and separate,so as a viewer you are manipulated to almost believe that fleshis like air, for example, that they might be interchangeable andthat everything is in a state of flux. It’s not just that you can’t see

how illusions are done. There’s something about the way texture works, how figurative forms appear to emerge from a meredisturbance of texture, a tiger formed from a mist. Of coursedrawing and colour are operating, too. Looking at it happening,looking at all that great difference in The Drunken Silenus, forexample: grass, metal, flesh, fur, eyes – a guy buggering a fat guy,and a nymph suckling a baby and masturbating it at the sametime – it’s very important to the narrative metaphor with all itspoetry and philosophy that you’re visually confounded and youcan’t see how the loose wisps of paint are causing such an illusion

of solidity. Suckling fat nymphs, animals, drunken men, fat gods,the glinting eyes of fat mad classical beings, vegetation sproutingeverywhere, it’s part of the vibe of sexy menacing deliciousstrangeness that the handling should be melting and subtle. WithFreud and Saville, they’re more like inheritors of Modernism’struth-to-materials ethos, where it’s important that you do see

how it’s done: lively plastering. Only with them, Modernism’s visual purity is distorted in the service of populism. I find it greatthe way he’s such a YBA sensationalist, showing everyone thefannies of aristocratic ladies who believe art is important, andshe’s saying all sorts of things about fatness: she’s saying it’s afeminist issue, it’s an art issue, and she’s saying it’s delicious andalso it’s disgusting. And what Freud is saying about the artists

It’s good that you can have a woman doing

brush strokes. I like modernist abstract

painting, which is mostly the realm of men.

It’s good for a woman to do it


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ON VIEW

IT IS, I THINK, FAIR to say that Per Kirkeby doesnot like talking about his work. In fact he opens ourinterview with those very words: “I don’t like talkingabout my work.” Which is a shame, really, becausethat work isn’t just deeply compelling but intensely

articulate, and because Kirkeby talks about otherpeople’s work – that of Delacroix, Picasso, hisdear, dead friend, Poul Gernes – cleverly and withcompassion. But that’s artists for you.

If you don’t know Kirkeby – pronouncedKYER-ke-boo – then you soon will. Seventy now,and the unchallenged grand old man of Danish art,

his paintings and smaller sculptures go on showat Tate Modern this month. An air of myth clingsto these, as to him. Trained as an arctic geologist,Kirkeby still goes on field trips to Greenland. On theparquet floor of his drawing room in a grand suburbof Copenhagen – a working-class boy, he grew upon a housing estate nearby – is a polar-bear skin, its

teeth bared in taxidermic rage. “I had an incident with one of these once”, says Kirkeby, a small, neat,rather beautiful man who draws obsessively as hespeaks. “You can’t believe how fast they move, likea cat. I said to my assistant, ‘Maybe you should deal

with this’, but he had just a pistol. The only way youcan kill a polar bear with a pistol is by shooting itin the eye, so he did.” Pause. “The left eye.” JosephBeuys? Ha!

Actually, Kirkeby knew Beuys and, it is fairto say, doesn’t much like talking about him either.There is a history here. During the early 1960s, adegree in geology and a field trip to Narssak under

his belt, the young art student joined Copenhagen’sEks-Skolen – a loose band of the fervently avant-garde, grouped around Poul Gernes. In 1966,Beuys came to address them; Kirkeby did a coupleof performances with him. It was the man hecalled Uncle Poul who really fell under Beuys’sspell, though, and not in a good way. The German,Kirkeby says, was “fatal” to Gernes, infecting him

with a “mixture of Steiner-esque global philosophyand radical politics… Poul became very ayatollahthen”, he recalls. “He developed this belief in A-

artists and B-artists that I found nasty. I had, and have, a strong belief that just one work of art, justone form, carries value.” The two men fell out, Poulaccusing Per of class treachery.

Which makes a couple of things about theroom we’re sitting in surprising. One is a workpropped against the wall of the studio next door,a modern extension to Kirkeby’s neoclassical

villa. The work is a square of MDF, matte black with chalky-looking graffiti that includes the half-erased words ‘chaos reigns’. Which is to say thatit is possible to mistake it for a work by Beuys, asuggestion Kirkeby receives with a wince. “The

blackboard didn’t belong to Beuys”, he says.“Adepts have spent the past 40 years saving it from

him. I use these works to doodle around, to teach– but to teach myself, not others. There’s nothingdidactic about what I do.”

The night before, I saw another blackboardlike this, at a gallery where Kirkeby is arranginga show of Gernes’s work. That blackboard hada yellow hut chalked on it, and what looked likea green snake. These forms have a pedigree inKirkeby’s art, as has the blackboard.

Both Kirkeby and Gernes worked onsquares of Masonite – the MDF of its day – inthe mid-1960s, although in different ways. Takingup the Beuysian cross, Gernes brought colourto the masses by painting his Masonite squares

with Pantone stripes and posting them off aroundDenmark. By contrast, Kirkeby used his squares tomeditate on the art unfolding around him. The Tateshow will include some of his earliest Masonitepieces, stuck with Pop-ish bits of wallpaper anddecal cartoons. Not long after, the squares turned

black, graphic and MDF, which is how they havestayed for 40 years now.

As to their derivation from Beuys, youmight see Kirkeby as omnivorous rather thancannibalistic. He is fond of the word ‘shit’, andthat, perhaps, is apt. In the past he has written ofthe impossibility of seeing art other than through‘historical spectacles’, the histories in question

being various and intertwined: his own, culture’s,the history of art. Every Kirkeby is the digested sumof all previous Kirkebys, and, with luck, somethingmore. Knowing of the artist’s geologist alter ego,critics have seen his canvases as geological, their

Per Kirkeby may like to boast about shootingpolar bears, but he doesn’t like talking about

his work. So when ArtReview went to visit him,

he wasn’t having any fun at all

words CHARLES DARWENT

I’M NOT ANINTELLECTUAL!


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encrusted surfaces and half-erased forms erodedstrata. (“People like literal answers”, Kirkebygrimaces at this.) Shit – great, beautiful, visceral,Freudian shit – is probably a better analogy.

Take the large canvas, 3 x 4.5 metres, hanging on the wall of Kirkeby’s Copenhagenstudio. (He also paints on the island of Læsø and in

what a friend calls “a small castle” in Italy.) This is both new and not, having taken a year of the artist’stime so far. The canvas is also old in the things itdoes: we’ve seen its horses in earlier takes on HansBaldung Grien’s woodcut Stallion and Kicking

Mare with Wild Horses (1534). Grien seems anodd place for Kirkeby to start from, but then he hasalways relished the shock of the old: “In the 1960sin London, the Tate was my museum”, he beams.“Rossetti and Burne-Jones were the ultimate

forbidden art, so I studied them closely.” Encodedin the canvas is a fallen tumbler, Kirkeby code forthe still lifes he likes to slip into his landscapes.

Which is to say that this canvas, as yet unnamed,seems a deeply literary work; a suggestion that

wipes the Pre-Raphaelite smile off Kirkeby’s face.“I’m an intuitive artist, not an intellectual”, he says, drawing furiously. “I’m not a sculptor, not a writer: I’m a painter. ‘Collapse’ is a key word for me– my paintings have to collapse. What do they say?‘You have to kill your darlings’, to get rid of the things

you love. It’s like with the first Grien – I thought,‘I’m going to do something I’d never do – paint a

horse!’ I mean, a horse: come on. And yet it comesout as a Kirkeby. I’d really like to do a monochromered painting, but I don’t have permission for that.I’d like to paint figures, a naked woman. What isit that prevents me? I don’t know. I would like it,

but the painting wouldn’t like it.” He stops to weigh

his sketch, one of the tree stumps that recur in his work. “This I can control, more or less”, he says.“What I can’t control” – he jabs a thumb over hisshoulder, to the crisp beds of clipped box outside– “is that that gets greener and greener, and I hategreen. That I can’t control. And it’s shit.”

Now, let’s consider the word. ‘Shit’, inKirkeby’s book, seems to be a broad synonym fordisorder, that chaotic half of any artist’s workinglife. Another odd thing about his library is thatthere is a late Poul Gernes hanging in it, behind thechair where Kirkeby draws. “That’s full of shit, too”,

he says, pointing over his shoulder. “Emotional shit.So were Poul’s stripes. You know, Barnett Newmanused to stand in front of his stripes and say, ‘I wantemotional excess’. The question is how.”

And that, maybe, is what makes Kirkebyextraordinary. It is common to lump his canvasesunder the generic (and Germanic) heading of NewPainting, alongside those of his contemporariesBaselitz and Polke. All three men are represented

by the German gallerist Michael Werner, and it is,perhaps, in Werner’s interest that this should be so.

A little internal competition never hurt. But it isalso not quite the whole truth. Unlike the other twomen – perhaps more Danishly – Kirkeby seems onan endless quest for modesty: the hut from which

palaces derive, a way of reconciling the obduracy ofgreen, ruptured friendships, childhood and old age.If anything, his nearest artistic relation is another

Werner painter, the younger Peter Doig. “Theproblem is, you’re never free”, Kirkeby says, hisunstoppable pencil sketching tree rings, tree bark,root. “I wake up in the morning and I think, ‘I’vegot the solution’. All the time I’m getting dressed,I’m thinking about what it is, how it’s going to work.Then I get to the studio and there is no solution.”

Per Kirkeby is on show at Tate Modern, London, from 17 June to 6 September


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Petry is represented by

Westbrook Gallery, London

www.westbrookgallery.com

Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York

www.sundaramtagore.com

Devin Borden Hiram Butler Gallery,Houston

The NETWORKA new permanent glass installation by

MI H EL PETRYFor the IVY Restaurantprivate room


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ON VIEW

Zilvinas Kempinas’s exploration of videotapeas a sculptural medium has won himmany admirers, and as he prepares to showa monumental work in Venice, ArtReview caught up with him to find out why he can’tsimply leave his tape in the videocassetteslike everybody else

CAUGHTON TAPE

“WHEN I WAS A KID in school, I used to entertainmyself by seeing how quickly I could run downthe stairs”, Zilvinas Kempinas recalls. “But thenI became curious about which leg went first. Andso the next time I decided to pay attention to this

particular ‘problem’. I almost broke my neck.”Kempinas is trying to explain the impulsethat led him to create Tube, a 26-metre horizontal

walk-through cylinder made primarily of parallelstrips of videotape stretched lengthways acrossthe space, for his exhibition in the LithuanianPavilion at this summer’s Venice Biennale. Andthe story of his near-fatal childhood accident isdesigned to illustrate the fact that he learned animportant lesson: to trust his instincts. “I realisedthat sometimes analytical process can affect yourspeed and can even be harmful. It’s good to turn off

your knowledgeable reasoning sometimes in orderto become more open to things that lie beyond the

reach of our intelligence.”Magnetic tape is a frequent component of

Kempinas’s work (in fact, it might be described as his signature material), and he is best known forcreating sculptures such as Flying Tape (2004–7),in which floating loops of tape are kept swoopingand spinning by fans – a display you mightalmost describe as a sort of lyrical minimalism.The effect is part science, part voodoo: the dark,shimmering loops of tape hover in a ghostly way,and it is impossible while watching them not to feelsomewhat anxious that, in the context of the fragileecosystems the artist creates, they’re just about toflutter down to the floor. Incremental changes onsuch minimal work create dramatic effects; thesimple doubling of Double O (2008), for example,in which two touching tape loops are held together

by two facing fans, immediately brings to mindthe fragility of relationships, while in Lemniscate (2008) two fans support a length of tape loopedinto the mathematical symbol for infinity.

Kempinas employs tape to a variety ofends: creating shimmering columns recallingFred Sandback, or hanging hundreds of lengthsof tape in front of lightboxes so that they fizz liketelevision’s white noise, or even pulled taught,in mathematically precise stripes, like glossy,

sculptural Bridget Riley paintings.Kempinas developed Tube during a recent

residency at Atelier Calder, the house and studiosof Alexander Calder in rural Saché, France, a periodthat he describes as a “dream exile” (although headmits that it was “extremely difficult to stay inthe French meadows for six months after livingin Manhattan for a decade”). He was eager to usethe enormous space provided by Calder’s studio,and the assistance provided by the residency, to


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its full potential, creating Tube and some otherlarge-scale works that could not have been madeotherwise, including Tripods (2008), an outdoorinstallation of crisscrossing aluminium rods that

was installed in a field next to the Atelier, set off bythe intertwining clumps of trees nearby.

For Venice the work will be transported to theScuola Grande della Misericordia in Cannaregio.Begun in the sixteenth century by a young JacopoSansovino, the building was never finished, due toa lack of funds, which creates a suitably limbo-likeatmosphere for Kempinas’s immersive sculpture.“Videotape is an old-fashioned data carrier whichis about to become obsolete”, the artist points out.“Ironically it was designed to preserve momentsof time, but it’s doomed to vanish itself as a media,overtaken by new technologies.” The mediumitself, then, is a crumbling, unfinished palace oftechnological dreams.

While Tube, and many of Kempinas’sother sculptures, contain mathematically preciseelements – here circles, squares and lines – theshimmering, otherworldly effects of light on darktape is intrinsic to the experience of the work. Ina recent sculpture shown in Bolzano as part of last

year’s Manifesta 7, lengths of tape were hung highfrom a factory roof around a skylight, both blockingthe passage of light from the ceiling and activatingit, creating the impression of a cascading black

words LAURA MCLEAN-FERRIS

waterfall. The shimmery surface of tape, blowingin light breezes and breaths, constantly rippling,reflects light in a similar way to water, anotherfeature of the material that might be seen to makeit particularly appropriate to Venice. “Water andlight are two elements we always associate with

Venice”, says Kempinas. “I am hoping to use naturallight coming through the windows. The sun movesaround, and the light is always different. I wouldlike to save this natural passage of daytime, sinceit would change the space and my piece along withit; every time you come here, it would be a slightlydifferent atmosphere inside.”

Kempinas tells me that one of the mostcommon questions people ask him concerns whatis recorded on the tape he uses. “Sometimes I saythat it has everything you could possibly imagineon it. But then later I say it’s blank, and people donot seem to be disappointed either”, he says, before

adding, “I guess it doesn’t really matter after all.”Perhaps the best answer to that oft-posed question

would be to say that what plays on the tape is theimagination. Like the television, which the title ofthe sculpture brings to mind, it might be that thistube of tape plays images to the eye.

Zilvinas Kempinas, Tube , is on show at the Lithuanian Pavilion at the 53rd International Art

Exhibition, Venice Biennale, 7 June – 22 November

“


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ON VIEW

WHEN MARK LEWIS FOUND OUT that LiamGillick’s project for this year’s Venice Biennaleinvolved reviving a 1950s project to replace the

bombast of the Nazi-era German Pavilion with amodernist building, an idea occurred to him. The

Canadian Pavilion, neighbour to the German, was built during the 1950s, to a modernist design. TheGerman, a tall cavernous space, is the perfect venuefor projecting films, whereas the smaller, hard-edged Canadian lodge might be ideal for Gillick’sutopian models and interventions. One email later,and Lewis had proposed a swap.

Lewis made the proposal lightheartedly, butit underlines some of the pitfalls that come with theprivileges of the Biennale gig. History looms likean immovable Cyclops, its avid eye the judgementof your peers. The artist has to negotiate nationalmythologies and unyielding pavilions. Do you makea splash with something unusual or grandiose,

risking bathos? Or do you assemble some recent work to create an exhibition representative of why you were chosen in the first place? Mark Lewischose the latter route, producing a group of fournew films, all in the short looped format that is hissignature. He has made more than 30 since 1995.

Lewis’s films share formal characteristicsthat originate in a set of rules within which he works.First, a film should be based on a single take andtherefore short. A commercial reel gives you aboutfour minutes of film, and so most of his films werefour minutes or under before he started working inHD, which has the capacity for much longer takes.Not surprisingly, he has started to break his ownrules, but he still keeps the films short and, with afew exceptions, silent. While he considers his workdistinct from cinema, titles such as DowntownTilt, Zoom and Pan (2005) and Spadina: Reverse

Dolly, Zoom, Nude (2006) indicate how importantthe formal language of filmmaking is to his work.Despite this immersion in cinema, he considersgalleries places for looking and thinking, withoutthe messy intrusion of noise. A Lewis film sits

happily on the sharp edge of the fence of pictorialtradition, somewhere between dream anddocumentary. Thus places and memories usuallystir in him a desire to make a film.

Cold Morning, the work that lends its titleto the Venice exhibition, depicts a homeless man

bundled up against the grip of a Toronto winter. Herises and starts to organise his few belongings, thenshifts around, seeming to make his bed – a coupleof sleeping bags – and sort his few belongings. Inthe foreground, two pigeons warm themselveson a steaming grate. Someone turns up with a

bag of food; the homeless man handles the bagawkwardly, as if he’s not quite sure what to do withit. Cars and pedestrians rush past unresponsively.He brings some stuff to a bin at the roadside. A

woman, glowing warmly in a golden winter coat,

LOOP DREAMSCinematic and photographic, durational buttimeless, Mark Lewis’s work wilfullydefies categorisation. Which we took as achallenge


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kicks a couple of chunks of detritus down the vent where the pigeons were warming themselves, andthe loops ends.

Cold Morning is straight photography: Lewisset up a stationary camera and shot the events that

unfolded in front of the lens. This is unusual forthe artist. Most of his films involve the recreationof something he witnessed, a process that reflectsthe influence of his friend and mentor Jeff Wall.Indeed, when Lewis came across the man who

would become the subject of Cold Morning, whileshooting a large-scale production nearby, he

happened to be writing an essay about Wall. In itLewis argues that there is an important absenceof hierarchy in Wall’s work, and in photography ingeneral. A snapshot, in other words, is the equal toa complicated, layered production. The fact that he

was making this argument while making his filmeased the discomfort he felt about making a more

straightforward piece of street photography.Meanwhile, not far away, he was in the

middle of the more intricate production of Nathan Phillips Square, A Winter’s Night Skate, also for Venice. For this film, he hired a bunch of people toskate leisurely around this Toronto landmark while

he set up a camera on skates, with motion-controltechnology, moving it around as if it were anotherskater. He then took the footage to Los Angeles,

where he set to work suturing this background to aforeground he shot in a studio: two actors skating ona rotating turntable – an inner loop – performing a

kind of courtship on ice. He fused these two with anoutmoded cinematic conceit, the rear projection, atechnique he had used before in Rear Projection(Molly Parker) (2006).

The film, on one level, is a genre scene,familiar to most Canadians, but it also addressessome fundamental issues about pictorial art:illusion, borders and frames, how the viewernegotiates subject matter and background orsetting, and the tensions between what is essentialand what supplemental to a picture. The skatingcouple in the foreground is clearly the focus of the

work, or seems to be, but one is just as likely toconsider the sense of pictorial displacement. Theillusion of the setting is at once convincing and a

flagrant bit of artifice. A fruitful context for this work is Hendrick

Avercamp’s A Winter Scene with Skaters Neara Castle (c. 1608), a small tondo in London’sNational Gallery, and one of Lewis’s favouritepaintings. Countless skaters stretch into thedistance, their bodies and the horizon made softand pale by the milky haze of winter chill. In thecentre of the painting, a couple loses their balance,and others around them seem to reach out withconcern. The decentred composition creates analmost cinematic flow of time, and the circularshape accentuates this absence of focus, as if the

composition could spread like a ripple, infinitely,into space. As in a Lewis film, the viewer perceivesa loop and a sense of events co-existing outside any

binding narrative.Lewis plays with the importance of these

framing devices in TD Centre, 54th Floor , a filmthat depicts a creepily slow walk along the windowsof a modernist tower in Toronto, the camerapointed down to the antlike traffic far, far below. Asthe camera moves along the floor, one is as awareof the window frames as of the vertiginous view.The frames keep changing, and yet the picture,

because of the extreme perspective, changes verylittle as cars zip up and down the roads, pausing atthe intersection. TD Centre, 54th Floor is a kindof pictorial sublime about the terror of continuity,the vertigo of the never-ending picture. When thecamera hits the wall, an obvious physical border,it has nowhere left to go to look for a new picture,

so it retreats, slowly, like some dozy machine. Thecamera settles between window frames and takesin the traffic, then the loop starts again.

Without a narrative to determine how a film begins and ends, a moving picture could become,theoretically, an endless unfolding of events – anillustration of Zeno’s paradox. Compared to astill photograph, films admit change, and yet if wemake time the frame in Lewis’s work, then film isunchanging, looping continuously from start tofinish to start again until those very terms fadeaway. The man in Cold Morning repeatedly wakesup and makes his bed, the character or camera in

TD Centre roams the 54th floor looking down,seeking a picture, and the couple in Nathan Phillips

Square swirl eternally on some interminable date.In repetition lies the desire to do something better,to exist more fully in time. The looped film triesto outmanoeuvre transcendence, to be instead a

hymn to immanence.Lewis uses rear projection to startling effect

in The Fight , the fourth work that he will show in Venice. The content is based on something Lewis witnessed: a heated episode of argy-bargy thatnever explodes into full-scale violence. Lewis shotthe background of The Fight in Vienna, and theforeground – a group of actors pushing each other

around – in the studio. On the one hand the filmcaptures a social condition observable anywhere inthe world: people fighting, seemingly about nothing,

without beginning or end. But these squabblersalso enact the agon of the Lewis mode: the movingpicture longs to become a stable composition ornarrative, but is suspended forever in anticipationof an event or an ending.

By the way, Gillick said no thanks.

Cold Morning is on show as part of the 53rd International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale,

in the Canadian Pavilion, 7 June – 22 November

words CRAIG BURNETT


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Hall 2.1 Stand K4

P e r t t i K e k a r a i n e n : T I L A ( Y e l l o w D

i a g o n a l ) , 2 0 0 9 , c - p r i n t , d i a s e c , 1 9 5 x 1 6 4

c m


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MANIFESTOby SUSAN MACWILLIAM


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PARIS. ZURICH. BERLIN.


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A COUPLE OF YEARS AGO, WHILE I WAS TALKINGTO STEVE MCQUEEN ABOUT QUEEN AND

COUNTRY (2007–), HIS RUN OF STAMPSFEATURING THE FACES OF BRITISH SERVICEMENKILLED IN THE IRAQ WAR, HE MENTIONED INPASSING THAT HE WAS WORKING ON A FILM

ABOUT BOBBY SANDS. I PICTURED ADOCUMENTARY ABOUT THE ICONIC IRA HUNGERSTRIKER, NOT THE FEATURE FILM THAT WOULDCONSEQUENTLY MAKE MCQUEEN THE

ONLY PERSON ON THE PLANET TO HAVE BEENAWARDED BOTH THE TURNER PRIZE ANDTHE CAMERA D’OR (FOR BEST FIRST FEATUREAT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL).

FEATURE:

words MARTIN HERBERT portrait JUERGEN TELLER


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I COULDN’T SEE HIM USING DIALOGUE – speech, or even sound, hadtroubled his short films only intermittently until then, and aside from

a lengthy centrepiece exchange between Sands and a priest, Hunger (2008) is powered predominantly by images and actions – andgenerally the project sounded like a body-swerve, the act of a wilfullymoving target. I was half-right, I think. Hunger put McQueen in a placewhere it is genuinely hard to categorise him. (Admittedly the projectsthat immediately preceded it, the politicised philately of Queen andCountry and a stark, unflinching film of a dead horse attracting flies,Running Thunder , 2007, hadn’t hurt that process either.) But thediversity of such works feels, in retrospect, deliberate: it leads a viewerto ask what ideas and issues might bind them together.

We had talked a lot about death that day: about its increasedpresence in McQueen’s work since the 30-minute Caribs’ Leap/ Western Deep (2002) – his first film for cinema presentation – withits narrative of seventeenth-century Grenadian suicides in protest

against French occupiers and exploration of brutal Johannesburg goldmines: its shots of black workers, of open caskets in funeral parlours.We talked about cultural attitudes and unhealthy squeamishness inthe face of extinction. When that film is taken alongside Hunger andQueen and Country , however, the terms of discussion naturally shiftsomewhat. What these works share, it’s apparent, is a controlled fury– expressed through austere and concentrated images and scenarios– at the mortal price of empire-building. Does that, then, makeMcQueen a capital-P political artist? Not exactly, for it’s possible tooto argue that geopolitical strife merely presents, writ large, the broadpower dynamics and, at its most fatalistic, a sense of the inevitabilityof human conflict that have run through all his work. And it’s possible,further, to suggest that how McQueen treats these dynamics speaksmore consistently of an artistic than an antagonistic mindset, ora fusion of both for tactical reasons: because overtly espousing aspecific position is a way of asking to be classified and contained.

This is the artist, remember, who announced himself with Bear (1993), a film in which he and another naked black man are engagedin some sort of ambiguous combat-cum-mating-ritual. They spar,they smile, they approach each other, they grapple, they springback. The body, here, is slippery; a potential site of more than onething, sex or pain or both. (It’s worth noting that McQueen, in hisgender-fucking with regard to the machismo of black male identity,has located a kindred spirit in the English musician Tricky, who hasintermittently dressed in drag; in 2001, McQueen made Girls, Tricky ,a film of the singer recording a vocal track whose lyrics revolve aroundabsent fathers, urban pressure and crime, the vocalist’s body shaking

as if possessed while he sings.) Six years after Bear , in Cold Breath (1999), McQueen again returned to the question of male sexuality,and the intersection of sex and pain, via an 18-minute film of the artistfingering his nipple: restlessly tweaking it, rubbing it, strumming it,pinching it, lubricating it with spit. The male nipple, seen close up, isa strange, near useless, vestigial thing. Held in view, it starts to lookdisturbingly like an eye.

In the red-tinted, faintly nightmarish Charlotte (2004), there’sa close-up of an eye that doesn’t look like an eye, after a while – orbehave much like one. It’s Charlotte Rampling’s eye, and McQueen ispoking it with an outstretched finger. Rampling’s aged eyelid doesn’tspring back: it wrinkles and puckers in an alien fashion. This is an actof distant, exploratory tenderness and of veiled aggression all at once,

FEATURE: STEVE MCQUEEN

It speaks volumes about McQueen’s refusalto play to received ideas


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Towards the end o our meeting, Steve McQueen suggests that I let you know that heis a “reluctant interviewee”. He even preaces his request with a “please”.

During the past 12 months or so, he’s been subjected to countless interrogations while promoting his irst eature ilm, the award-winning Hunger (2008). So whileon the one hand I’m sympathetic towards an artist who suggests an obvious truth– that his work speaks or itsel – on the other I’m now wondering precisely how bada job I did. But on urther relection, McQueen’s request throws up some intriguingquestions, perhaps the kind o questions I’ve been trying to ask him during thecourse o the interview, but never actually managed to articulate. They begin withsomething basic, almost existential: why do people like me interview artists likeMcQueen? Why do people like you want to know what artists have to say when theyought to be saying it through their works? Do I want to connect my experiencesas a viewer with his experiences as an artist, and hope that the latter in some way

validates the ormer? In conjunction with that thought, does he, I eventually ask,have some message in mind that he wants his audience to take away rom his work?“No. They have to make their own minds up”, is his deinitive answer. I wonder, then,

what he eels when he looks back over his work? Does he ever think about somelinear procession that leads to the construction o an ‘oeuvre’, an output that mighteventually take the place o a ‘real person’ when we reer to Steve McQueen (in the

way we reer to a Picasso or a Turner and have a particular image in mind)? Does helook back over previous works while making works now? “No. I’m not interested”,he says irmly. “I’m not thinking about yesterday.” That said, he does concede thathis work is produced ater long periods o gestation. “[Today] I’m thinking about aquestion I had ive years ago”, he says, “and only now it’s been answered. In a way,I’m in 2004 right now.”

Ahhh… there’s the catch. Even i he is working ive years behind the times,I, as a viewer, am behind him. There’s a lag between what’s on his mind and what

works o his I’ve got on my mind. Without wanting to drop into Bret Easton Ellis-style musings about the impossibility o anyone ever ‘knowing’ anyone else, and theconsequent ridiculousness o interviewing artists, I can’t help eeling that a pair o

McQueen’s more intimate works, Bear (1993; in which McQueen and another nakedman eel each other out in an erotically charged wrestling match) and Charlotte (2004; in which McQueen’s inger extends to poke and eel Charlotte Rampling’seyeball and lid), somehow speak o the diiculty and ambiguity o similar relations.

And yet despite that, and the act that he’s never deployed the animal-pickling, bed-unmaking and diamond-encrusting sensationalism that has marked out thetraditional route British artists take towards gaining a wider audience or their

work, McQueen remains an artist whose output manages to work its way deep into

Steve McQueen:The reluctant subject

an argument for the potential obliquity of powerrelations. (Rampling, you have to remember,played Lucia Atherton in Liliana Cavani’s 1974 filmThe Night Porter , a concentration-camp survivorengaged in a sadomasochistic relationship with aformer SS officer. It’s hard to think that McQueen,so versed in cinema, doesn’t intend the reference.)Later, one of the most indelible shots in Hunger will be the lingering view of Bobby Sands’s faceafter he has been brutally beaten by guards. Helooks beatific in his martyrdom, as he will whenhe dies; but he also, unless I’m projecting wildly,looks virtually postorgasmic. It’s an extraordinarilyuneasy image, hard to parse or reduce to language,and speaks volumes about McQueen’s refusal tobe glib about the body, to play to received ideas.

Towards the end, his camera again closes in on a single,quivering, almost inhuman eye: that of Sands, as he struggles to focuson a visitor while in the terminal stages of starvation. Hunger , here

and elsewhere, is concerned with the physical corpus

art review 2009 summer

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