ARTPULSE

No. 18 | VOLUME 5 | YEAR 2014 | WWW.ARTpulsemagaZine.COM

EDITOR IN CHIeF Raisa Clavijo SeNIOR EDITOR Stephen Knudsen CONTRIBUTING EDITORs Paco Barragn Michele Robecchi David Pagel Jason Hoelscher Craig Drennen CONTRIBUTING WRITeRs Stephanie Buhmann Jeriah Hildwine Megan Abrahams Garland Fielder Vanessa Albury EDITORIAL AssIsTANT Diana Lee COPY EDITORs Gregg Lasky Brian Bixler Erin Christian TRANsLATOR Diana Scholtz Israel CONsULTING ART DIRecTOR Eddy Lpez GRAPHIc DesIGNeR Hugo Kerckhoffs PHOTO EDITOR Gady Alroy PHOTOGRAPHY Mariano Costa-Peuser - Charles A. Shaw BUsINess DeVeLOPMeNT AND ADVeRTIsING DIRecTOR Othn Castaeda othon@artpulsemagazine.com ADVeRTIsING AssOcIATes Carl Sutton Amy Beaumont DIRecTOR Jos Lpez-Niggemann ARTPULSE is published four times per year Subscriptions are: $30 USA / $50 Mexico & Canada / $60 International Editorial inquiries: editor@artpulsemagazine.com Advertising inquiries: advertise@artpulsemagazine.com General inquiries: info@artpulsemagazine.com Subscribe online: www.artpulsemagazine.com Publisher ARTPULSE LLC P.O. Box 960008 Miami, Fl. 33296 1-786-274-3236 ARTPULSE LLC, is not responsible for and does not necessarily share the opinions expressed by its contributors, nor does it assume any responsibility for unsolicited materials or contents of advertisements. No portion of ARTPULSE may be used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.

16 KETTLES WHISTLE
Based on a True Story / By Michele Robecchi

Kristina Olson Heike Dempster Jeff Edwards Andrew Nedd

18 PUSH TO FLUSH
Pop Culture Versus High Art (Reflections about an Undialectical Dialectics) / By Paco Barragn

Christina Schmid Margery Gordon Paul Laster Irina Leyva-Prez Scott Thorp

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FEATURES
Occupy Space/Time: Time-Folding in Contemporary Art By Jason Hoelscher Lari Pittman: Rotten America / By David Pagel Nicole Eisenman: The Relevance of 21st-Century Expressionism / By Stephen Knudsen Diversity and Collaboration: An Interview with The island6 Art Collective of Shanghai / By Andrew Nedd Visual Narratives: An Interview with David Humphrey By Craig Drennen Subaltern Identities: A Conversation with Patricia Villalobos Echeverra / By Kristina Olson Consider This. An Interview with Gregory Coates By Jeff Edwards PhD in Philosophy for Artists. A Conversation with George Smith By Stephen Knudsen Ai Weiwei: According To What? / By Heike Dempster

60 DIALOGUES FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM

Interview with Francesca Bonazzoli and Michele Robecchi By Paco Barragn

66 ART CRITICS READING LIST

Yasmeen Siddiqui Vincent Honor

68 REVIEWS
Performa 13, by Vanessa Albury (Various venues, New York City) / Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, by Stephanie Buhmann (Pace Gallery, New York) / Hermine Ford and Joan Witek, by Stephanie Buhmann (OUTLET Fine Art, Brooklyn) / Eugene Von Breunchenhein, by Paul Laster (Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia) / Ryan McGinness, by Paul Laster (Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia) / 2013 Carnegie International, by Kristina Olson (Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh) / Jaron Childs, by Christina Schmid (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) / Eleanor McGough and Claudia Poser, by Christina Schmid (Inez Greenberg Gallery, Bloomington Theatre and Art Center, Minneapolis) / The Silent Shout: Voices in Cuban Abstraction, by Margery Gordon (ArtSpace Virginia Miller Galleries, Miami) / Manuel Mendive, by Irina Leyva-Prez (Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami) / Shepard Fairey, by Heike Dempster (Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art, Miami) / Sandra Ramos, by Irina Leyva-Prez (TUB Gallery, Miami) / Humberto Castro, by Irina Leyva-Prez (Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami) / Alexander Calder, by Megan Abrahams (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) / Karin Apollonia Mller, by Megan Abrahams (Diane Rosenstein Fine Art, Los Angeles) / Robert Minervini, by Megan Abrahams (Marine Front cover: Contemporary, Venice, CA) / Tierney Gearon, by Scott Thorp (Jackson Ai Weiwei, Stacked, 2002, 680 stainless Fine Art, Atlanta) / Matt Woodward, by Jeriah Hildwine (Linda Warren steel units. Installation view Prez Art Projects, Chicago) / Jeffrey Beebe, by Jeriah Hildwine (Packer Schopf Museum Miami. Photo: Daniel Azoulay Gallery, Chicago) / Waltercio Caldas, by Garland Fielder (Blanton MuPhotography. seum of Art, Austin) / A Hole in the Wall Is Nothing to Worry About, by Jason Hoelscher (Galerie Richard, Paris). 14 ARTPULSElwww.artpulsemagazine.com

OccUpY SpacE/TIME:
Time-Folding in Contemporary Art
BY JaSON HOELSCHEr
Because no work of art exists outside the linked sequences that connect every man-made object since the remotest antiquity, every thing has a unique position in that system. This position is marked by coordinates of place, age and sequence. The age of an object has not only the customary absolute value in years elapsed since it was made: age also has a systematic value in terms of the position of a thing in the pertinent sequence. George Kubler, The Shape of Time The ambiguity and unfinalizable aspects of artarguably the very qualities that make art art as opposed to something elseseem to create an urge for classification and categorization. Entire eras, diverse in temperament and geography, are subsumed under the label of Renaissance, or the work of artists as disparate as Barnett Newman and Willem de Kooning are grouped under the label of Abstract Expressionism. While such information streamlining shears off much nuancewhich Renaissance? Italy in the late 14th century or England in the late 16th?it is undoubtedly a valuable shorthand if we are to be at all able to discuss art without endless qualifiers and details. What, then, does it mean to discuss contemporary art? Unlike the periodization of eras such as fin de sicle modernism, contemporary art is slippery in terms not only of definition but also regarding what it even refers to in the first place. The word contemporary, like the word I, is what Russian linguist Roman Jakobson would call a shifter, a signifier detached from a stable referent, applied contingently and changing in meaning according to who uses it and when. In practice it comes to mean less with each usage: contemporary now refers to a range of artworks, whether those created at any time since 1960as at auction houses like Christies or Sothebysor those created last month. The condition and meaning of the contemporary takes on a still different set of complications when considered in light of three exhibitions that took place in Europe during the summer and autumn of 2013, namely When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/ Venice 2013, at the Fondazione Prada in Venice; Les Papesses, at the Palais des Papes in Avignon; and Paris Tour 13, which took place in a ten-story derelict housing project building in Paris. All three of these exhibitions were quite extensive, occupying entire buildings ranging from palaces to projects, and shared highly problematized relationships to space, time and presence. These complex temporal entanglements operated in three distinct, if overlapping ways: time-as-collage, artistic re-temporalization, and the exhibition as chronotope. When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, curated by Germano Celant with input from Thomas Demand and Rem Koolhaus, was a reiteration of Harald Szeemanns seminal 1969 exhibition, Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form. Szeemanns exhibition featured a range of conceptual,
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post-minimal and anti-form artists such as Joseph Kosuth, Eva Hesse, Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Richard Tuttle and others, and is often credited with bringing such work to international prominence. Exhibited at the Bern Kunsthalle, a large warehouse space, much of the work was made of evanescent and impermanent materials like sound, wire, felt, and lard. The recent iteration of the show in Venice not only sought out and re-staged these ephemeral artworks but re-created the warehouse space itself inside the cavernous rooms of the Ca Corner della Regina, an 18th century palazzo along the Grand Canal in Venice. The Venice exhibition thus operated as something of a remake, a fairly common event in popular culturethink of movie remakes, dance remixes or cover songsbut one not so common in fine art. To use the example of cover songs, new versions of old tunes tend either (a) to remain note-for-note true to the original, such as the current vogue for classic rock tribute bands, or (b) are used as an interpretational jumping-off point to create a quite different song. When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, intriguingly enough, managed to pull off the latter interpretational feat by strictly adhering to the note-for-note methodology of the first. In other words, by meticulously researching and re-creating such details as the precise placement of the original works relative to one another, the re-creations fidelity to the original was an important component of the exhibition: if a work in the 1969 iteration happened to be 44 inches away from another work, and arranged at a 70-degree angle from the wall, that relationship was carefully reconstructed in Venice in 2013.1 So far this is fairly analogous to the note-for-note re-creation of an older song. Where Venice 2013 differed, however, was in the careful reconstruction of the original in such a thoroughly different context, from the industrial space of a warehouse to the aristocratic environment of a palace. Beyond the precise replacement of the works in their original configurations within a vastly different type of spacean interesting conceptual tactic to begin withthe space and feel of the warehouse itself was re-created 1:1 within the palazzo, up to and including the walls and floors. Overlaying blueprints and diagrams of the two distinct spaces, the curatorial team had plain white walls inserted into the palazzo, a radical superposition of not just architecture and functionality but also of class implications, juxtaposing sheetrock with fresco. Mitered and cut when necessary to flow around such distinctly non-industrial accoutrements as 18th century columns and balustrades, the juxtaposition of wall types was a detail considered crucial enough to the shows thesis that it came to represent the exhibition in advertisements and on the cover of the catalog. Such strict adherence to history was complicated still further when, to take but one of many examples, a reactivated anti-form scatter piece rested directly below a centuries-old fresco, thereby creating a contextual, experiential and temporal collage of otherwise discordant elements.

To return to the cover song analogy, the precise note-for-note reconstruction of the artworks and their placement, when juxtaposed with the strange surroundings, created a far more dynamic tension than would have been the case had the artworks simply been exhibited in the palazzo without the strict fidelity to the original. For that matter, the attempt to re-situate the Bern space in Venice, building warehouse walls jigsaw-cut to fit 18th century architecture, served to create strange asymmetries in time, space and context. More than just a re-creation or re-situation, the complex folding, mashing-up and interlacing of timesan exhibition from the relatively recent past rebuilt in the present into a much older settingcombined with the radical shift in context to present the exhibition as readymade: a double-occupancy of space and time that transformed one artifact into anothernot by modifying the thing itself but by drastically changing its situation. When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, then, is in many ways about the complications and asymmetries of reenactment, dislocation and re-territorialization. Re-territorialization, a term used by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari to describe the re-placing of a systemsuch as a species or a languageinto a new situation or environment after being uprooted from its previous territory of influence,2 can be applied also to Les Papesses, a concurrent exhibition that ran in Avignon from June through November, curated by ric Mzil, director of the Yvon Lambert Collection. Exhibited in the Palais des Papes, a Renaissance castle that housed the popes during the Catholic schisms in the 13th and 14th centuries, Les Papesses featured the work of Camille Claudel, Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Jana Sterbak and Berlinde De Bruyckere. Made up primarily of monumental sculpturethe smaller work was exhibited across town at the Lambert Collection buildingthe palace was filled with works such as the massive Spider sculptures of Bourgeois and Sterbaks The Real Princess, a stack of mattresses that reached nearly to the ceiling of a grand hall. While the exhibition was curated around the medieval legend of a 9th century female pope known as Pope Joan, what is of interest here is the juxtaposition of space and time as an incongruous collision of art and place. At the most basic level, seeing the work of an artist like Louise Bourgeoishumorously described in the exhibition catalog as the antiPapesswithin a papal palace in a medieval walled city is itself something of a shock: what the popes and clergy who lived and worked there over centuries might have thought is an interesting mental exercise. If When Attitudes Become Form drew much of its power from its exhibition of itself as itself in quite different spatiotemporal circumstances, Les Papesses pulls off a similar feat by taking one situationmodern and contemporary works by womenand superposing it into the extremely unlikely context of a 700-year-old papal enclave, inhabited for centuries almost exclusively by men. These re-territorializations, of gender, aesthetic priorities and power relations, also serve as what we might call re-temporalization, the transfer, recalibration and re-situation of time relationships: both artwork and exhibition space take on quite different implications when set against, aside, and with one another. Whereas the Venice exhibition managed to create a differential tension between like to like, Les Papesses created a compelling friction between very different spatial and social systems. A different approach to temporal complication took place with the exhibition Paris Tour 13, a temporary installation that took place inand in fact took overa derelict ten-story building in Pariss 13th arrondissement during the month of October. Organized by Mehdi Ben Cheikh of Galerie Itinerrance, Tour 13 fea-

Louise Bourgeois (Spider, 1995, steel). Installation view from Les Papesses at Collection Lambert, Avignon, (June 9 November 11, 2013). Photo: Kory Kingsley.

tured the work of 80 street artists from around the world who were invited to paint the buildinginside and outhowever they wished. As elaborately overloaded with visual incident as any palace or chapel, practically every surface of the buildings 36 apartments, from walls to ceiling and from fixtures to exterior faade, was covered with paint or wheat-pasted paper. While Tour 13 was visually impressive, even overwhelming at times, adding to the force of the exhibition was the fact that it had a very firm and definitive closing date: at the end of the month the building was scheduled to be demolished. Complicating a typical exhibition scheduleonce over the artworks are taken down and removedthe closing date of Tour 13 marked the irrevocable end of both artwork and exhibition space. An example of the exhibition of art as the exhibition itself, via a total fusion of artwork with surface of display in three dimensions, inside and out, Tour 13 offered a twist to the relationship of art to site: if the site-specific nature of When Attitudes Become Form relied on the ephemeral quality of the art transposed and re-created in a different site in space and time, and the site-responsiveness of Les Papesses operated by way of forced sociocultural and spatiotemporal incongruity, the site-responsiveness of Tour 13 relied on the aggressive nature of the exhibitions end, a definitive deconstruction in a very literal sense: present for a very specific, pre-defined period, after the deadline both art and site would be gone for good.
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Installation view from When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 at Fondazione Prada, Venice (June 1 November 3, 2013). Photo: Tullio M. Puglia/Getty Images for Prada. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.

Jana Sterbak (The Real Princess, 2013, mattresses). Installation view from Les Papesses at Collection Lambert, Avignon, (June 9 November 11, 2013). Photo: Kory Kingsley. 22 ARTPULSElwww.artpulsemagazine.com

El Seed. Exterior view of Paris Tour 13, an abandoned building called Habitat de la Sablire (October 1-31, 2013). Photo: Laila Kouri.

David Walker (foreground), Jimmy C. (background). Interior view of Paris Tour 13, an abandoned building called Habitat de la Sablire (October 1-31, 2013). Photo: Jessica Hernndez.

This highlights the importance of presence and presentness in these three exhibitions: in Venice, the presence of a past exhibition as itself, situated in a thoroughly different context in the present;3 in Avignon, the rather transgressive presence of a new thing in an old context now known largely for the presence of popes now long absent, returned to the Vatican; and in Paris the momentary presence of art and site in a highly particularized, temporally constrained setting. Even the term presence suggests the notion of the present, a contingent moment in time that, like the word contemporary, has a shifting meaning that defines nothing more or less than a subjective interface between past and future. This fluid, shifting quality proposes a way to consider the Tour 13 exhibition overall, as an example of a specific type of time/space relationship known as a chronotope. A term coined in the 1920s by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, a chronotope defines not only a specifically charged intersection point of space and time but also the way the context and language of an event is understood and represented by a culture. Described by Bakhtin as an intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships [in which] spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole,4 the term chronotope describes quite well the compelling nature of Tour 13: the spectacle of the work itself, combined with the knowledge that it would soon be gone, clarified and defined its position in time in a highly charged and gripping manner.

That such different, high-profile exhibitions as these three were mounted concurrently is interesting in implication. Though very dissimilar in feel and lookfrom anti-form scatter pieces to elaborate street art, from the clash of contexts across centuries to an exhibition closing date enforced by a wrecking ball and demolition crewthe exhibitions charged relationships to duration and instantaneity suggest that our own cultural moment is complexly related to issues of presence, absence and presentness as well. In our everything all the time instant-access culture, in which the topology of our planet has been mapped and photographed down to the square inch, perhaps the next stage of the contemporary will be a series of paradoxical, ever-intensified explorations, remixes, reiterations and reconstitutions of an interlaced past and present.
1. This marks an interesting progression in the relationship between art and record, from art > documentation to art > documentation > art: If much of what we know about late 1960s art comes to us only from documentary photographs and video, Venice 2013 carried the sequence a step further, using the documentation to reconstruct or replicate the arrangements of works that had, in many cases, been created with impermanence and dematerialization in mind. Further complicating this agenda is that fact that many of the works had long since been taken apart or thought lost. 2. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See in particular chapters 1, 4 and 5. 3. Not to mention the instantiation of absence, by demarcating lost or destroyed artworks with dotted lines to highlight where they would have been placed within the context of the exhibition. 4. Mikhail Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel, in The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84. 23

NOTES

A HOLE IN ThE WALL IS NOThING TO WORRY AbOUT

Galerie Richard - Paris
By Jason Hoelscher

Sven-Ole Frahm, Untitled (#163), 2013, acrylic on canvas, 49 x 49 x 4. Courtesy of Galerie Richard, Paris.

In his most recent solo exhibition, A Hole in the Wall Is Nothing to Worry About, German artist Sven-Ole Frahm deftly articulated and navigated some of paintings many binary oppositions, among them flatness and extension, surface and surroundings, art and support. Comprising works that extended forward into space, were pierced through with tunnels, or were sewn combinations of multiple canvases on the same stretcher bars, Frahms work posed a number of challenges regarding how the art object operates in relation to accumulated painterly discourse about boundary and physicality. By one reading, Frahms work can be considered an updating of oldschool Greenbergian Modernism, albeit with a few strange twists. For Greenberg, painting was about the specific qualities of the medium itself, purged of non-painterly attributes or of external referent. The goal of painting, it was claimed, is to attain flatness, because twodimensionality was the only condition painting shared with no other art, and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did to nothing else.1 A problem with this notion, however, is that flatness is neither inherent nor specific to the medium of paint, but rather a quality of the surface onto which paint is applied, the space on which paint happens. Flatness, then, is not an innate quality of paintand therefore is not medium-specificbut of topology, of surfaces. If Greenberg espoused a painterly focus on surfacealbeit misphrasing the goal as one of flatnessFrahms use of stitching, holes and extensions that poke the canvas out from the wall certainly do the trick. In a compellingly perverse way, Frahm thus manages to amplify and dtourneto rerouteGreenbergs medium specificity: the works are [a] very much about color and sur-

face, and [b] devoid of pictorial illusionism, but [c] are definitively not flat planes. For example, a work like Untitled (#161) (2013), with its multicolored circus tent-like conic extrusion of canvas outward from the wall, created a literally spatialized picture plane, pushing neither illusionistically behind the surface nor merely laterally across the surface, but forward, into the space of the viewer. Taking an alternate approach, Untitled (#163) (2013) had tunnels built into its surfacenot merely cut openings but sewn tubes of canvas inserted perpendicular to the picture plane. To complicate things further, what at first appeared as painted stripes were in fact sewn-together sections of canvas. Very tricky in the way the painting simultaneously revealed and concealed both itself and the wall behind, the work functioned as a dense aggregate of object, picture space and actual space, blurring the boundaries between front/back and inside/outside as it staked out its position between viewer, artwork and background. Frahms work, described on the checklist as paint on canvas, might better be described as paint and canvas: In these artworks the canvas served not just as passive planar support, but as an active component of the paintings presence and extension into spaces both optical and literal. (September 7 - October 19, 2013)
NOTES
1. Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. John OBrian (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 87. 91