Suradnici i prijatelji divnog časopisa Frieze biraju svijetle točke protekle godine.
Izbor vrijedi već zbog tvrdnje (izvrsnog) književnika Neda Beaumana da je Sean Carruth (autor filmova Primer i Upstream Color) jedan od nekoliko najvažnijih živih umjetnika koji su ikada živjeli. Amen.
Highlights 2013 - Declan Long
Jesse Jones, The Other North, 2013, film stillQuite a lot of art that mattered to me in 2013 was shown in Derry, during its UK City of Culture year. Exhibition programmes there were consistently ambitious and involving, often dealing with complex legacies of conflict in powerful, unexpected ways. Jesse Jones’s ‘The Other North’ at CCA Derry/Londonderry (a gallery until very recently led by the hyper-energetic curatorial duo of Aileen Burns and Johan Lundh) was an undoubted highlight. Jones took the transcript of an ‘encounter therapy’ group from 1970s Northern Ireland and transported it to South Korea, where local actors re-staged the conversation. The resulting film was a captivating, radically estranging account of ‘Troubles’ trauma. Santiago Sierra’s ‘Veterans and Psychophonies’ at Void Gallery was another jolting address to these histories. His response to the aftermath of violence in Northern Ireland was – guess what? – manipulative and provocative. But it was a forceful response to military force that kept some of us debating for days. Best of all though was Willie Doherty’s ‘Unseen’ at the newly created City Factory Gallery. This stunning survey of the Derry-native’s stark and unsettling photographs and films gathered key works from the past 30-or-so years, as well as presenting Doherty’s extraordinary recent film Remains for the first time in Ireland. The latter is a culmination and intensification of many of Doherty’s ongoing obsessions – it’s a masterpiece of anguished post-conflict storytelling.
Phil Collins, The Meaning of Style, 2011, 16mm film still
Sarah Lucas. ‘SITUATION Absolute Beach Man
Rubble’, 2013, installation view, Whitechapel Gallery, London;
courtesy: Whitechapel Gallery, London; photograph: Stephen White
Nikolay Bakharev, Relationship #73, 1994-97, gelatin silver print; courtesy Julie Saul Gallery, New York © the artistAmong the alarmingly few books I made it through this year, two accounts by gifted literary stylists of the work of pioneering geniuses became summertime obsessions: T.J. Clark’s Picasso and Truth, and David Peace’s Red or Dead (on the life of paradigm-shifting Liverpool boss Bill Shankly). Newly published books of lectures and letters by, respectively, Borges and Calvino (Professor Borges: A Course on English Literature and Italo Calvino’s Letters, 1941–1985) will continue to be mined for insights for years to come. Similar value applies to Adam Phillips’s latest collection One Way and Another. Not all of these essays are new, but as he might well say himself, reading old essays by Adam Phillips is one of the ways that we find to discover what types of new essays we are really seeking… The too-sudden death of Seamus Heaney returned me and many people I know to his poetry – more complicated, uncertain and unsettling than the easy soundbites often suggest – but also to his essays. His wonderful analysis of Elizabeth Bishop in The Redress of Poetry is another ongoing touchstone.
Album cover of David Bowie’s The Next Day, 2013Highlights 2013: Sam Thorne
‘Manet: Return to Venice’, Palazzo Ducale, VeniceMy highlights of 2013, in alphabetical order:
A
Artist-curated shows: they were everywhere! Trisha Donnelly’s picks at MoMA, Cindy Sherman’s uncanny collections at the Venice Biennale, Alex Katz’s selections from the Tate collection at Turner Contemporary, plus touring shows devised by Rosemarie Trockel (‘A Cosmos’, organized with Lynne Cooke), Mark Leckey (‘The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things’) and Jeremy Deller (‘All That Is Solid Melts Into Air’).
Rosemarie Trockel, ‘A Cosmos’British architecture criticism: this year saw a garrulous essay collection from Jonathan Meades (Museum Without Walls); Owen Hatherley editing a new edition of Ian Nairn’s Britain’s Changing Towns (1967); Observer critic Rowan Moore’s book Why We Build; and plenty of smart writing from recently appointed Guardian critic (and occasional frieze contributor) Olly Wainwright.
C
Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland: in the summer I visited this pioneering Californian art organization – it works with adult artists with developmental, mental and physical disabilities – for the first time. In a year when ‘Outsider Art’ was the subject of several large-scale exhibitions (as well as much handwringing), Creative Growth’s 40 years of work felt more crucial than ever.
D
Dean Blunt, The Redeemer: frazzled Gainsbourg, a curious and addictive concept album from one half of Hype Williams, who had an equally curious exhibition at SPACE, London, in March.
EPs: this was a good year for short-format releases. I came back over and over to things by FKA Twigs (EP2), DJ Rashad (Rollin’) and Nguzunguzu (Skycell).
F
FT: the newspaper’s long-running series of interviews, ‘Lunch with the FT’, is just about the only reason to buy it every weekend. My favourites from this year were lunches with Jeremy Deller, Kim Dotcom and education reformer Michelle Rhee.
G
Grizedale Arts, Lake District: my late-autumn visit was a head-clearing couple of days of honesty shops, Ruskin, home-cooking and an ill-prepared hike. To paraphrase the title of their 2009 book, Grizedale are continuing to add complexity to confusion (or should that be the other way around?) in the best possible way. Also check out their contribution to ‘Museum of Arte Útil’, currently at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
Home Workspace Program, BeirutHome Workspace Program, Beirut: September saw the third year of Ashkal Alwan’s art school, an open curriculum organized by resident professors Anton Vidokle and Jalal Toufic, plus an Adam Curtis retrospective curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist. As vibrant an art school as I saw this year.
I
Ibrahim Sonallah, That Smell: a new translation of the Egyptian writer’s coruscating novella from 1966, accompanied by his prison notes.
Jai Paul, leaked demo tapes: it was hard to get to the bottom of what went on here – a stolen laptop? A feud with the record label? Either way, hidden deep below unmixed queasiness, this was some great off-kilter R&B in a year that was awash with the stuff.
K
Koya: maybe the best udon in London?
L
Lofoten Islands: in September it took me three flights from London to get to this archipelago off the north-north coast of Norway, way up in the Arctic Circle. The nearby whirlpools were the inspiration for Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘A Descent into the Maelström’, while the islands themselves have hosted the teeny-tiny biennial LIAF since the early 1990s. A compact exhibition about crisis, on Europe’s furthest edge.
M
‘Manet: Return to Venice’, Palazzo Ducale, Venice: Olympia hung next to Titian’s Venus of Urbino? Makes the Giardini hard to remember.
N
Numbers titles: Jonathan Crary’s 24/7 and Ben Davis’s 9.5 Theses on Art and Class are both slim, urgent books about an increasingly standardized, commodified life, while in Madrid the Reina Sofía’s revelatory survey ‘1961’ gestured back to a time when the avant-garde still seemed to promise a way out.
Pierre Huyghe, Centre Pompidou, ParisPierre Huyghe / Philippe Parreno, Pompidou / Palais de Tokyo, Paris: concurrent museum shows from two former collaborators, ex-Relational Aesthetics poster-boys, also provided two completely different ways of thinking about what a mid-career retrospective might look like. The flickering lights! Human the dog! The secret Merce–Cage show!
Q
Queens Museum, New York: next year I can’t wait to visit the newly reopened Queens Museum, who are marking the way for how an arts institution thinks about community – not outreach, but organizing.
R
Renata Adler, Speedboat (1976): much of the best fiction I read in 2013 didn’t at all resemble fiction. Written by the onetime New Yorker staff writer, this novel in fragments – for which David Shields was a major cheerleader – was republished by New York Review Books, who have had a pretty much peerless year.
S
Sturtevant: the summer saw a smartly put-together show of mostly recent work at the Serpentine, a warm-up to Bruce Hainley’s dizzying, recursive biography-cum-essay-collection about this most difficult of artists, Under the Sign of [sic], published by Semiotext(e).
T
Tinashe, Black Water: a beautifully produced mixtape, the third from Tinashe, one of the best in that post-Weeknd / alt-R&B / what do you call it? scene.
U
Unknown artist: listening in the dark. So much in my iTunes library has no metadata, a lot of the time I find myself wondering not only who something is by, but where it’s from and when.
V
VIRGINS by Tim Hecker: yet more perfection from the Montreal-based musician.
‘Wenu Wenu’: the single from Omar Souleyman’s eponymous new album stretches out to seven minutes, and is as riotous as usual, but its precision and sheen – c/o production from Four Tet, a safe pair of hands – is new for Omar.
X
XLR8R podcasts: particularly Oneohtrix Point Never’s sprawling two-hour mix, which stumbles from classic house to Wu Tang and Meredith Monk, introducing me to early computer music guy Paul Lansky’s remarkable track ‘Notjustmoreidlechatter’ along the way.
Y
Yosi Horikawa, Vapour: full of warmth, the debut LP from this Japanese producer shaped field recordings into gorgeous new shapes.
Z
Anna Zemánkóvá: the Czech artist’s botanical drawings were some of the many wondrous things that were new to me in Massimilano Gioni’s Venice, an exhibition that – despite my misgivings, and I had a lot – was probably the year’s most important. With Okwui Enwezor at the helm in 2015, I’m looking forward to seeing what’s next for a format that in recent years has felt like it’s been running out of steam.
Highlights - Sarah McCrory
Stephen Sutcliffe, Outwork, 2013, installation view, Tramway, GlasgowLucy Skaer / Stephen Sutcliffe, Tramway, Glasgow
Lucy Skaer’s beautiful installation Exit, Voice and Loyalty at Tramway managed to instil a sense of delicacy into a behemoth of a space. Stephen Sutcliffe’s Outwork in the same gallery some months before saw his film about the framing devices of film framed by further films. Meta.
‘Interwoven Connections: The Stoddard Templeton Design Studio and Design Library, 1843–2005’, Glasgow School of Art
This exhibition includes books, samples, folios and designs produced by Stoddard Templeton from the mid-19th to early 21st century. Block- and screen-printed in luscious colours, these designs found their way into the White House and Glasgow Cathedral.
Isa Genzken, MoMA, New York
Undoubtedly joining the ranks of many on this year’s round-up lists, Genzken’s retrospective at MoMA is a delirious kind of alchemy. Employing an installation logic that, on paper, shouldn’t work, this beautifully overhung assault leaves you breathless – until you’ve caught your breath enough to go round again.
Concrete Invention, Patricia Phelps de Cisneros Collection at Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid, 2013This collection exhibition of Latin American geometric abstraction included a body of work that, embarrassingly, I had a poor knowledge of. Curated around the location and year of production, the exhibition highlighted affinities and relationships between artists, and was a brilliant example of a collection with direction and commitment. There followed a trip to Brazil.
Jimmy Merris, Bloomberg SPACE, London, installation view, 2013Jimmy Merris’s film LONDON is a riotous rollick through his home city for ten days in a rented camper van, accompanied by Phillip, a German driver with no bedding or towel, and Paul Pieroni, the curator who organized this exhibition on behalf of SPACE. Following a timeline which takes in Rock Steady Eddie’s Rock ‘n’ Roll Café, a Toby Carvery, the ICA and Hampstead Ponds, the trip documents occasional encounters and some of London’s oddities, but is firmly rooted in an underlying feeling of affection for both the city and the friends that become bit-part participants in the expedition. The film is a very narrow view of the city, but it is Merris’s view – and a funny and tender one at that.
‘Soma – Nao Zero’, Phosphorus + Jaqueline Martins, Sao Paulo
This group exhibition in Phosphorus, Sao Paulo, was a collaboration with Jaqueline Martins, a superb gallerist in Sao Paulo who is a pioneer of under-represented or overlooked Brazilian artists. Phosphorus is a converted house in downtown Sao Paulo, which hosts exhibitions and events, manned by Maria Montero. In the show I found two collages, and next to them the artist, Hudinilson Jr. He showed me three books crammed with collaged notes, pictures snipped from catalogues and newspapers. Further investigation revealed a huge archive of beautiful works, made with a certain economy of means but nonetheless wonderful for it. Hudinilson Jr sadly passed away in August. Hopefully posthumous recognition of the incredible body of work he left behind will come quickly.
Notable mentions include Ed Atkins at CCA Glasgow; Jonas Mekas at the Serpentine; Dorothy Iannone at Camden Arts Centre; Martin Creed at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York; Ad Reinhart at David Zwirner, New York; Nicholas Deshayes at S1 Artspace, Sheffield; Tom of Finland at MOCA, Los Angeles (OK, I confess I haven’t seen this, but its existence is still a highlight).
Poisonous Relationship – Men’s Feelings from Jamie Crewe on Vimeo.
Music
Haim at the O2, Glasgow – GIRLS! Start a band!
The Breeders at The Forum, London – LADIES! Start a band!
Numbers – Glasgow’s resident club mavericks have been going for ten years, but they’re still raving like they’re 20.
Fade to Mind records – STILL.
Beyoncé – visual album, no PR, no hype. Genius. Although I could go for less writhing on the beach, it’s SO Mariah 1997.
Poisonous Relationship – after being played this in my office I set about finding what I thought was the LA-based Jamie Crewe, only to find he lives up the road and studies at Glasgow Art School. Somewhere between Azari & III and Hercules and Love Affair with some great performance thrown in. Hot stuff.
People
Ian White. He’ll be so sadly missed.
Hudinilson Jr.
Looking Forward
Obviously Glasgow International 2014. No apologies.
Scottish Independence Referendum. It’s going to be fascinating.
2014 Whitney Biennial. Grigely! Aran! Von Heyl! Durham! HUP HUP!
The Commonwealth Games Artistic Gymnastic finals for which I have tickets.
Highlights 2013 - Aoife Rosenmeyer
Willie Doherty Without Trace (2013) single channel HD video projection, installation view Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich
Steve McQueen, installation view of Bear (1993) and Just Above My Head (1996) Schlauger, Basel
Pablo Bronstein Pavilion (2013), installation view Lismore Castle Arts
Jessica Jackson Hutchins Symposion, 2011
Haris Epaminonda Cyprus (2012) production still; photograph: Javier Folkenborn © Haris EpaminondaCopyright © artdaily.org
Of the discussions I’ve been party to, one of the most memorable was prompted by an evening spent reading suicide notes within Andreas Golinski’s exhibition in Florian Christopher’s intimate off-space. And, finally, I was immensely proud of the participants in the Art + Argument debate I organized in October in Zurich. The motion was ‘art is a luxury’. It’s rather an absolute necessity, insisted the opposition – the only job creation scheme for the otherwise unemployable, the insane and the criminal.
Highlights 2013 - Carmen Winant
Bennett Simpson speaking at 'Blues For Smoke', the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, L.A.‘Blues for Smoke’
This Bennett Simpson-curated exhibition, which considered the ethos and aesthetics of blues music through the lens of contemporary art, did what so few other group shows venture: have a palpable thesis, however complicated and contradictory (the 48-artist exhibition opened with a monitor playing Richard Pryer’s 1979 Live in Concert; both the cutting racial jokes and the staccato delivery set the tone for the surrounding work). More group shows should follow this example, challenging the art and the viewers to confront, conform, reject, or otherwise be informed by an idea that stakes a real, if risky, claim in the world. The best artists have opinions and the best curators should too.
Doris Lessing
There has been a resurgence of interest in Doris Lessing occasioned by her death this year. I’m glad because she is vivid and skeptical and fearless.
Detail of the cover of Wayne Koestenbaum’s My 1980s & Other Essays In this collection of essays written over the past decade, Koestenbaum continues to stretch the limits of criticism. He deals in human subjects more than topics, and in this book they include Susan Sontag, Frank O’Hara, Lana Turner, Brigitte Bardot, Cary Grant, Roberto Bolaño and Debbie Harry, among others. Koestenbaum loves the concept of celebrity, though mostly as site through which to channel our simultaneous desires for attention, privacy and humiliation (a WK favorite). Even more importantly, Koestenbaum challenges the relationship between criticism and art − or, rather, the manner in which we so linearly use one to read the other − by bleeding together creative, esoteric, diaristic, and academic forms. (Zadie Smith is the only other essay writer that I can think of working in this elastic mode at the moment.) He takes big risks, and occasionally the center doesn’t hold. For the most part, Koestenbaum, who is also a painter, asks that his writing behave like visual art rather than describe it.
Janet Cardiff The Forty Part Motet, 2001, installation view, the Fuentidueña Chapel in the Cloisters, New YorkI’m not breaking the mold here. Ad Reinhardt at David Zwirner, Ed Ruscha at Gagosian, John Divola at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and Janet Cardiff at The Cloisters were all outstanding. Some were even moving.
Brock Enright, Copper Spit, 2013, copper, plastic spitThe work of several artists stayed with me this year. Each person really deserves their own category but I’ll collapse them here for the sake of space: Carey Denniston and Strauss Borque-LaFrance at KANSAS, Mike Womack at ZieherSmith, Becky Suss at Fleisher Ollman Gallery, Brock Enright at Kate Werble Gallery, Ander Mikalson at Temple Contemporary, Sarah Mattes at Bull & Ram, Chris Domenick, Milano Chow, Julia Bland and Michael Berryhill at Vox Populi, Ofer Wolberger at Printed Matter, Ryan Mrozowski at Pierogi, Zarouhie Abdalian at the MATRIX gallery in the Berkeley Art Museum.
‘Chances With Wolves’ on East Village Radio. Try it out when you’re all alone.
Highlights 2013 - Chris Wiley
Amie Siegel Provenance, 2013Amie Siegel Provenance, Simon Preston Gallery, New York
Amid the churn of New York’s largely market-driven landscape, where one can barely swing a dead cat without hitting another anodyne chuck of chicly distressed ‘50s and ‘60s redux art, Siegel’s cerebral show was a cool, clean kick in the head. The show focused almost exclusively on a single video work, which unspooled the lives of various pieces of furniture designed by Le Corbusier for his utopian city project in Chandigarh, India in something like reverse chronological order, from their tony confines in collectors’ homes (and on one mega yacht), through the auction houses that placed them there, the restorers who gussied them up for show, and, finally, the tumbledown city for which they were designed. From the pithy press material (and perhaps this description) the conceit sounds like a fairly dull one, which fits into the mold of countless hoary allegories of Modernist utopianism’s demise. However, the video itself proved unexpectedly poignant, using lush cinematography and careful pacing to embody the elegiac narrative, rather than simply illustrate it.
Mike Kelley, installation view, MoMA PS1, 2013 © MoMA PS1; photograph: Matthew SeptimusAfter being roundly disappointed by the iteration of Kelley’s posthumous retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, I found myself questioning the quality of his work as a whole, even against my better judgment. Thankfully, PS1’s epic, compendious exhibition set me right. Could there have been a better venue for this show, after all? For all the show’s triumphs, however, it remains crushingly sad that Kelley couldn’t stick around to see it.
Pierre Huyghe, Centre Pompidou
Unfortunately, I can’t say much about Huyghe’s mid-career retrospective, because I didn’t see it. But it’s certainly the only show this year that had me thinking that it might just be worth the trans-Atlantic flight to go see. Unluckily for me, but luckily for my bank account, reason won out in the end. Huyghe continues to daringly expand the boundaries of artistic possibility, and we are all the poorer in the US for not having a venue in which to watch him do it.
*Other Best Shows I Didn’t See: * *‘Speculations on Anonymous Materials’ Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel; ‘The Whole Earth: California and the Disappearance of the Outside’ Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. *
‘James Turrell: A Retrospective’, installation view LACMA Far superior to his showing at the Guggenheim, which felt like an Instagram-ready big top circus, Turrell’s survey at LACMA was thoughtful and thorough, and left me something of a believer. While you may not find me loitering around your friendly neighborhood Quaker meeting house any time soon, it was certainly a welcome relief to see an artist earnestly attempting to make spiritually inflected, affective work and managing to pull it off — most of the time — in a manner that made me gasp a little with wonderment, rather than cluck dismissively at its corniness.
New York’s Summer of Los Angeles: Paul McCarthy at the Park Avenue Amory, Robert Irwin at The Whitney Museum of American Art, James Turrell at the Guggenheim, Lynn Foulkes at the New Museum, Ken Price at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Though the shows varied vastly in quality, this summer’s storming of New York’s venerable institutions by artists either based in Los Angeles or, in Turrell’s case, inextricably intertwined with it, signaled that the much-maligned city of the terminal West has finally gained the respect it deserves. Now, perhaps its just the sun stroke talking, but as New York begins to feel more and more like a international playground for the obscenely wealthy, it might be time for artists — especially those who have already managed to gained a foothold in our cut throat industry — to start thinking about getting out of town. The studios are cheaper, there’s sun and sand, and the sushi, when not throbbing with Japanese radiation, is to die for. Sadly, you will have to learn to drive.
Lucas Blalock, Edge of Town (knife block), 2013, archival inkjet print; courtesy Ramiken Crucible, New YorkThis fall, as evidenced by the lengthy list above, was a huge one for photography in New York. To make matters even better, almost all of the shows were extremely strong. Among the best: Lucas Blalock’s carefully thought, modest show, whose pleasingly awkward exhibition architecture mimicked his purposely ham-fisted Photoshop manipulations and John Houk’s digitally layered still lives of resonant objects from his past that recall the work of late Jan Groover, updated for the digital age.
The Eric Andre Show, Season 2 Finale
A faux public access talk show beamed in from another dimension, The Eric Andre Show inevitably begins with the show’s namesake kamikazing his way through the set in an explosive of jolt self-destructive physical comedy that leaves you wondering how he avoids landing himself in the hospital. (Answer: he doesn’t.) Generally, when Andre’s Dervish act whirls to a halt, the ravaged set regenerates around him, leaving him huffing an exhausted, all of his efforts seemingly for naught. For the final episode of the show’s second season, however, he is allowed to go on a truly epic tear, which consumes the entirety of the show’s eleven minute run time. Spoiler alert: by the end, Andre winds up crumpled on rubble-strewn floor, having recently been pummeled by a bevy of professional wrestlers, surrounded by competing groups of Crips, Krumpers, and Samba dancers, a buttoned up professor delivering a TED talk, a viral YouTube star vomiting strawberry Quik, an old friend of his from high school who appears to have wandered bleary-eyed onto the set from out of his parent’s basement, and Kato Kaelin, the 1990s most infamous house guest, doing a stand up routine. If you can show me a more anarchic slice of television, I’ll eat my hat.
Laura Owens, ’12 Paintings’, 356 Mission, Los Angeles
Arguably the most important non-museum show mounted in Los Angeles this year, Laura Owens’ blockbuster, which featured 12 monumental new works that deftly mashed up painterly abstraction with Photoshop aesthetics and signaled a radical shift in the artist’s work, also inaugurated one of Los Angeles’ newest and most promising independent spaces. I have artist friends who pilgrimaged to the show perhaps a half dozen times during its lengthy run, finding it alternately quarrelsome (the paintings seemed somehow too ‘correct’, too ‘now’) and inspiring (the optical pop of her faux drop-shadows alone were enough to stand your hair on end), but never boring. I, on the other hand, didn’t make it to the show until the closing party, where I found myself disappointed that I couldn’t make a return trip.
Highlights 2013 - Helen Marten
Jana Euler, Try one in abstraction with manpower under control of aesthetic decisions, 2012, oil on canvas. Photograph: Mark BlowerThomas Lanigan-Schmidt, MoMA PS1, New York
This is work that demands hours: both to look at and to make. Assembled with painstaking deliberation, the surface detail coupled with rampantly appropriated and remixed iconography is astounding. Religious opulence arcs via shiny foils and hanging plastic into glittering homosexual fantasy. Pornography, saints, hilarious audio and tin-foil rats assemble themselves into pockets of installation that resemble tableaus or the staggered antechambers of a cathedral. But despite decorative exuberance, the implements of making are humble: glue, staples, trash, candy wrappers. It’s like Susan Sontag’s Notes on ‘Camp’ (1964) marched oiled and bare-chested into cruciform position, bending over to release a fabulous spray of homespun yet earnestly dedicated eroticism.
Rosemarie Trockel, New Museum, New York
This show made me weak with admiration. Very few artists can merge material touch, emotive tenderness, technological process and stylish heterogeneity into a language that is consistently acerbic, brilliant and frighteningly contemporary.
Jordan Wolfson, Raspberry Poser, 2013, film stillI’d watched Jordan’s Raspberry Poser (2012) in progress sections on my tiny laptop screen before seeing it installed in full at REDCAT. If I’d loved it in fragmented miniature, then sitting there, my chest exploding from the booming vibrations of Beyoncé’s ‘Sweet Dreams’, was nothing short of apocalyptic. This is an amazing work. The elastic inventions of animation warp themselves around human darkness in a rhythmic gravitational swirl that levitates and sags with equal volatility. Sitting there in the most immaculately installed media environment I’ve ever seen, I felt alienated, in love, possessed with jealously, and all accelerated in a confusion of hieroglyphic approximations and linguistic shorthand only just in reach of my grasp. Jordan is a troublemaker and this video is parasitic and obsessive, but wonderfully, perversely, outrageously under the skin. (And it’s great at Chisenhale, too!)
Uri Aran, Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland
There is nothing more exciting than travelling to see a friend’s show and being knocked speechless with pleasure upon exploring it. Entering first into the square, semi-blacked-out space of a large-scale video was a formal move approximate to being dunked into a shower booth before entering a giddy laboratory of both graphic and laboriously human touch. The pleasure of the fingertip is so evident here, a place where pouring, cutting, splashing and measuring all collide into beautiful portions of repetition, logic and education. Grapes, varnish, plaster and cardboard have never looked so beautiful!
Manet, ‘Return to Venice’, Palazzo Ducale, Venice
I only had a chance to speed round this, so dashed in search of the asparagus and the masked ball. These two paintings are a gorgeously fleshy explosion of texture and bizarrely skewed proportion. There is the asparagus, languid and swollen with its terrible pinky fluorescence; it could burst or steam or roll over or puddle paint into rot before our eyes. If the title wasn’t so definitive, the asparagus could equally be a penis, a bloodied finger or some other atrocious appendage. I’m fascinated with this painting because its content is so silent, whilst the rainbow magnificence of paint suggests a more displaced vibrancy of animation. Masked ball intrigues for similar reasons. All that black! And the magnificent velvet sheen of the top hats – an enormous seething sea of them – sunk in what I imagine to be the heady din of a ballroom. But, like with the asparagus, expectations of movement and perspective are warped: these figures are curiously static, sound is absorbed, and there is not one body that is singular or fully depicted amidst the wallowing mass of shared blackness.
Paulin Olowska, Crochet coat, 2010, oil on canvasA neatly joined, but simultaneously agitated combination with the Malevich survey, this installation was alive with political and personal enigma. Sharing its title – ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’ (‘The Ladies’ Delight’) – with a Zola novel, the exhibition similarly bundles works together in a zig-zagging oscillation between conflict and jubilation. Graffiti, neon and knitwear are theatrical to almost bombastic proportion, but maintain a coquettish honesty that sets just the right tone for alternative viewing of our contemporary worlds of designer ideology.
Jana Euler, Cubitt, London
Jamie Stevens is a brilliantly inventive curator, and Jana Euler’s works turn me rigid with jealousy! These are paintings that are infused with breath: the fouled, steaming-genie kind of breath of an opium den, alongside the fuzzy, minty-fresh aqua mouth of tangled muscles and cold blue water. ‘Under Abstraction’ felt like a shyly but rigorously calculated offering of narrative and optical focus (and un-focus), with each separation of the plastic-sheet-divided installation plotting vectors between a manically off-balance kind of realism. There was the masked and the un-masked, the backs turned and the bodies cropped, but always a set of quiet eyes or geographic coordinates unmistakably, lucidly, present to bear witness.
Juergen Teller, photograph from Eating at the Hotel Il PellicanoWhen I imagine certain foods, my salivary glands burn with anticipation. In this publication – simultaneously cookbook, ecstatic bible of cuisine and celebratory documentation – my mouth is paralyzed with possibility. The colours are nothing but fabulous, the styling graphically but lightly exquisite and the photography saturated with an erogenous pleasure that is more right in front of you than on the page. I want to eat everything in this book, but there is a vampish baroque impulse that terrifies me too. Froth, broth and mousse have a devilish vibrancy. Things literally sprout, spew and fornicate underneath, between and alongside other things. There is so much here I can’t name with certainty. Food I imagined to be white is here black, eggs are impossibly sexy and meat is more alive than the animal from which it is hewn. One of my favorite images is the Saffron Risotto with Tuna Tartare, an exquisitely fun plate of graphically flirtatious dots on a meaty red bed of sauce. Of course I want to imagine that this is the surrealist outcome of a traffic light popping its dots in close-up over the bloody scene of a car wreck, but I also want to eat it, too.
Magali Reus, Parking (Window), 2013, mixed media. Photograph: Gert Jan van Rooij‘Highly Liquid’ was fantastically fraught with tension, with a kind of muscle-fibre confusion that leaves you wondering whether you are sprinting or moving in a jellied haze of slow motion. The detail of both the sculptural works and the video is obsessively sanitized, but animate with an attention to material surface and its way of suggesting a hotness of human presence that is only just beyond visibility. Sculptures painstakingly cast from polyester resin to resemble flip-down chairs hung around the peripheries, coloured with a kind of Japanese graphic elegance both sexy and hermetic in perfectly modular optical rhythm. This was an excellent linguistic anagram of all the things we think we can name with certainty, but here cannot.
George Saunders, Tenth of December: Stories (Bloomsbury)
SO MANY GORGEOUS WORDS! This collection of short stories is mind coagulating. Escape from Spiderhead is a ruthless and hilarious electrocution of the nerves that left me positively jangling with the possibilities of narrative.
Olivetti Showroom designed by Carlo Scarpa, Piazza San Marco, Venice
If contemporary Venice were ever looted, I would head directly here with various pneumatic implements and plunder from floor to ceiling.
Style.com
Undeniable guilty pleasure
Looking forward:
Mike Bouchet and Paul McCarthy, Portikus, Frankfurt
Camille Henrot, Chisenhale, London
Ed Atkins, Serpentine/Kunsthalle Zurich
Richard Hawkins, Tate Liverpool
Alina Szapocznikow, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Sarah Lucas, Tramway, Glasgow
Trisha Baga, Gio Marconi, Milan
Elizabeth Neel, Pilar Corrias, London
Rachel Harrison, Greene Naftali, New York
And, speculatively, a David Hammons retrospective that I hope might come to London…
Highlights 2013 - Isobel Harbison
Gerard Byrne, A man and a woman make love, 2012, film still2013, in pictures:
– The British Library just consigned one million archive images as ‘free’ stock to Flickr (owned by Getty) but, ultimately, at what cost?
– Most highly paid photographer of 2013, Terry Richardson, or ‘Uncle Terry’ as he purportedly likes to be called by his young female subjects, frequently couches his lecherous photographs with highly contestable claims about ‘art’. Supermodel Rie Rasmussen went public about his exploitative behaviour in September. Brava.
– Singer to signer, Obama-mime-crime: from Beyoncé’s lip-synced anthem at the American president’s inauguration, to the South African sign-language interpreter, Thamsanqa Jantjie, mistranslating his speech at Mandela’s funeral, Obama must really be asking himself what the hell is going on. Why did these two extraordinarily confident performers choose to disregard the world’s gaze and legitimate expectations, and opt instead for mime-crime? Or were they hallucinating? This year politics was, quite literally, a charade and the charade, political. Thinking, The Truman Show yet, Obama?
– Too many front-page witch-hunts
– As impressive as Katniss Everdeen’s on-screen archery were Jennifer Lawrence’s quick-fire comebacks. See her riff with Jack Nicholson, post-Oscars 2013 (from 0:38):
– #SFbatkid. The best use of social media yet? (Obama, again.)
2013, in art:
I was impressed by a strong, well-timed retrospective of Gerard Byrne’s work at the Whitechapel Gallery in London; Anthony Huberman’s sensitively and intuitively curated group show ‘Detouched’ at Project Arts Centre, Dublin; Sophie Michael’s optical and cleverly made film Attica at Seventeen Gallery, London; Mark Leckey’s display-moxie in ‘The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things’ at Nottingham Contemporary (among other venues); Samara Scott’s unique sense of material inquisitiveness manifesting in deliciously eccentric sculpture at Rowing Gallery, London; in Venice, ‘Manet: Return to Venice’ at Palazzo Ducale, was so positively Venetian and, equally and opposite, the Lithuanian Pavilion seemed exquisitely lunar; Fergus Feehily’s carefulness in his solo show ‘Disappearance’ at mother’s tankstation, Dublin, was bewitching, as were the existential, theatrical and often funny sculptures of Michael Dean at Herald St, London; in London, the group show ‘The Slip’ at The Approach paired some fantastic and unexpectedly complimentary corporeal works; films from the ‘Centre for Visual Music’ mesmerized when projected at Tate Modern and Raven Row (in ‘Reflections For Damaged Life’); Aaron Angell’s ‘Model for Gallery Peacetime – Boat Burial’ was an aquarium attended by the creepiest four-legged-fish (or axolotls) I’ve ever seen, circulating around another of his fictional clay-scapes, a smart mise-en-abyme at the art fair Sunday; Clunie Reid’s piercing and unapologetic GIF-orgy, In Pursuit of the Liquid, incited and invigorated at MOT International; John Giorno’s poetry recital at Max Wigram was energetic, sharp and thoroughly entertaining; Rachel Reupke’s ‘Wine and Spirits’ at Cell Projects was suitably inebriating; Amalia Pica’s performance and installation at Herald St, A ∩ B ∩ C (Line), was a vivid example of her intellectually compelling and visually appealing forms; Reto Pulfer’s first solo show at Hollybush Gardens provided temporary escape, where, engulfed as we were in his lopsided linen tomb, confronted by his painterly apparitions, something changed.
Mike Kelley The Mobile Homestead in front of the abandoned Detroit Central Train Station, 2010; © Mike Kelley Estate, courtesy Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts; photograph: Corine VermuelenElsewhere, Open School East, a residency, school, artists’ studio, public programme [co-founded by associate director of frieze Sam Thorne], community centre and gallery, defied classification and I hope keeps going long into the future. I also appreciated the ambitious and energetic programming by various non-profit and/or curatorial enterprises, Akerman Daly, Arcadia Missa, Auto-Italia, Banner Repeater, Chewdays, Enclave, Flatness, and X Marks the Bökship, among others.
In 2014, I look forward to seeing Caroline Achaintre’s drawings at Arcade Gallery, Aaron Angell’s Troy Town Art Pottery at Open School East, David Robilliard’s ‘The Yes No Quality of Dreams’ at the ICA in April, Emily Wardill’s new film, When You Fall into a Trance? (premiering at the Sydney Biennial, and later touring the UK from the Collection Museum, Lincoln), LUX’s second Biennial of Moving Images, Ericka Beckman’s retrospective at Le Magasin, Grenoble, and Duncan Campbell’s first major solo exhibition at IMMA, Dublin.
And finally, a tribute to Ian White, the indelibly clever, creative, funny and wise man who this year, we lost forever. I am one of very many that will miss him.
Highlights 2013 - Jason Farago
Wentke (Coat) (detail), Netherlands, mid-18th century, included in 'Interwoven Globe', Metropolian Museum, New York, 2013The most contemporary exhibition I saw this year was of art three or four centuries old. ‘Interwoven Globe’, the Met’s current show of trade textiles of the 17th and 18th centuries, is an Internet-age triumph without any screens, a landmark in the history of exhibitions that puts almost all other putatively ‘global’ enterprises to shame – and an unparalleled deployment of art to map a world in motion that every historian, critic, or curator of contemporary art should take as a model for practice. Sounds like hyperbole? That means you haven’t been yet, so call me! You have until 5 January, and lately I’ve taken to dragging my friends along on repeat viewings. On visit four or five I went with the initially skeptical director of a certain big Chelsea gallery, who broke down in tears.
Thinking about art in global terms is very hard, and not cheap either. But Amelia Peck, the curator who led a team drawn from nine (seriously, nine) of the Met’s departments, is far too serious to dress up a principally Western show with a few ‘exotic’ outliers or, worse, to dabble in the Google-and-FedEx dilettantism we see at too many supposedly global biennials and fairs. Instead, she insists that forms gain power not from what they look like or where they come from but from how they move. So a painted soldier’s jacket, with a Chinese collar but made in India for the Thai market, features on its back a fearsome goblin that fuses religious figures from across Asia. Or a furiously messy tapestry from the early 17th century, made in China to be sold in Portugal, depicts the abduction of Helen of Troy with lions and dragons and Manchurian waves. (Like much of the show, that tapestry is in the Met’s own collection, though its hybrid character means it usually sits in storage since neither the Asian nor European galleries will hang it. That’s the other virtue of ‘Interwoven Globe’: it’s a quiet attack on obsolete museum structures.) Most impressively, Peck never allows us to forget that art occupies aesthetic and economic planes at once. That’s especially clear in the brutal gallery devoted to the slave trade, in which textiles functioned both as an index of cruelty and a currency to barter for human beings. Admittedly easier to see with decorative arts, this double valence inheres in fine arts too: a number of paintings, not just by major artists such as Joshua Reynolds but by obscurer figures from Jamaica to Iran, testified to the workings of globalization centuries before the word was coined.
Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue, 2013, film still
Isa Genzken, Schauspieler (Actors) (detail). 2013.
Mannequins, clothes, shoes, fabric, and paper, dimensions variable;
courtesy the artist and Galerie Buchholz, Cologne/Berlin © Isa Genzken;
photograph: Jens Ziehe, BerlinOn the road: at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, the exhibition ‘Carbon 14: Climate Is Culture’ took on the most important and least hopeful issue of our time through the art of Myfanwy MacLeod, Zacharias Kunuk, and others.* ‘Losing the Human Form’, at the Reina Sofia*, was a fantastic introduction to Latin American art and activism of the 1980s: under multiple dictatorships, the show argued, the difference between the two was negligible. Ida Ekblad, subject of an early retrospective at Oslo’s national gallery, is fearless. Also, I am not ashamed to say that I liked Andreas Mühe’s ‘A.M. – eine Deutschlandreise’, a Berlin exhibition of photographs of (ostensibly) Angela Merkel staring out of her government Audi at Friedrich-style landscapes of mountains and sea. The artist convinced several newspapers that he’d collaborated with the woman who shares his initials; the chancellery denies it.
Parsifal, directed by François Girard at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, 2013The most important book I read in 2013 was Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea, by the Scottish political economist Mark Blyth – an indictment of our age’s fiscal insanity that laid out how austerity does not just fail on its own longue-durée terms but doesn’t even work in the short run, except as a means to enrich those in power at everyone else’s expense. It’s essential art world reading, for as multiple economists have shown (and as Andrea Fraser has loudly reiterated) art is one of the few sectors to thrive in these sickening conditions, and there’s no divorcing the art world boom from a larger economic disaster that, more than five years after Lehman’s collapse, shows no signs of reversal. There was more hope, at least, to be gleaned from László Krasznahorkai’s novel Seiobo There Below, released in English this year, that is one of the most beguiling books on art I’ve ever read. The Hungarian author, in sentences that spiral for 20 pages or more, looks at both real and fictional artists wrestling with creation in their studios, as well as gallery-goers struggling to experience art while the world outside roars with such ferocity they can hardly concentrate. (I sympathize. One chapter takes place at Venice’s Scuola Grande di San Rocco, to which I escaped in May when the biennale got to be too much and where people kept texting me regardless.) I also dug deep into JM Coetzee’s The Childhood of Jesus, a head-scratching non-allegory of socialism and the afterlife, and his best book since Disgrace; as well as *Albert Camus’s newly translated Algerian Chronicles, which Claire Messud, herself the daughter of a pied-noir, beautifully dissected a few weeks ago in the 50th anniversary issue of the New York Review of Books. That publication’s birthday celebrations were a necessary reminder that for all my hometown’s Singapore-on-Hudson gilded lifelessness, sometimes New York still gets it right.
Things to look forward to in 2014? I am limbering up for* ‘Marcel Duchamp: la peinture, même’ at the Pompidou* – a deliberately paradoxical attempt to look at Marcel as a one-medium artist. Beyond that there’s Lygia Clark at MoMA, Camille Henrot at Chisenhale and the New Museum, Michael Snow at the Philadelphia Museum, the good folks of Triple Canopy in the Whitney Biennial, Stéphanie Moisdon’s exhibition ‘1984–1999’ at the Pompidou Metz (with scenography by Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster), Sasha Waltz’s Tannhäuser at the Staatsoper, Olivier Py’s first season as head of the Festival d’Avignon, the promising Sydney Biennale under the direction of Juliana Engberg … and the inauguration of Bill de Blasio as mayor of New York, whose only drawback is that my London friends will now be subjected to Michael Bloomberg at the Serpentine.
Highlights 2013 - Mark Prince
Merlin James Harbour (2011), acrylic on polyester with wood frame; courtesy: Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York and the artist © Merlin JamesAlthough diversity was the key note of Merlin James’s exhibition at Parasol Unit in London this Summer – it spanned three decades of work covering landscape, architectural, portrait and abstract modes – this was not postmodern relativism, but a demonstration that a personal painterly language can comprehend a complex context and changing circumstances. The narrative of a painting’s evolution, over years of non-linear decision-making, may supersede the pretext of its image, but the selection still combined into a singular vision of a lost world.
Franz West Where is My Eight? (2013), installation view, MMK, Frankfurt; photograph: Nils Bremer
Joel Sternfeld Egg Harbor, New Jersey (1972); courtesy: the artistHighlights 2013 - Morgan Quaintance
Jay Z and Marina AbramovicFor me 2013 was the year ‘performance art’ and pop music fused completely via the rubbery, botoxed visage of Marina Abramovic. Whether she was eye-shagging Jay Z during his ‘durational’ masterpiece ‘Picasso Baby’ (so intense), teaching Lady Gaga how to ‘find her centre’ or entering Kanye West’s dreams every night (I just made that up), Marina and performance art sort of became the new Kabbalah for this decade’s narcissistic and yet pathologically earnest top-tier celebs. Elsewhere, British comedy (perhaps a joke in itself) and critical theory got close via randy dandy and cultural studies undergrad Russell Brand. ‘It’s the narratives Jeremy’, he screeched on BBC2’s Newsnight. Oh, and what about Rob ‘I’ve got enough to eat at home’ Ford? That was an amazing media moment. Would you have believed anyone who told you this year a Canadian mayor would deny and then admit to smoking crack, knock down an elderly councilwoman and talk about ‘eating pussy’ on air? It’s about as improbable as Guggenheim Abu Dhabi opening with a General Idea retrospective. Actually, it’s about as improbable as Guggenheim Abu Dhabi ever opening. Anyway, here’s my cultural best-ofs for this year.
ART CONTROVERSIES
Glafira Rosales and her legal team leave court after she admits fraud, 2013Bonkers art dealer Glafira Rosales was exposed as a fraudster on a massive scale. Rosales admitted she’d sold a large multi-million dollar cache of fake Abstract Expressionist paintings to rich/dumb New Yorkers and Europeans.
The Nazi Hoard
A massive stash of modernist paintings, seized from their original owners during World War II, was found in a German apartment. Cornelius Gurlitt, the owner of the flat and nephew of Nazi art dealer Hilderbrand, was unrepentant and basically said ‘they’re mine I won’t give them back’. I’m still waiting for the inevitable Downfall reaction videos to surface.
Downfall memeDean Blunt – SPACE, London
While the UK Garage nostalgia trip ramped up a notch, Blunt’s criminally short-lived exhibition captured the darker, more disorientating side of late ’90s urban culture and the fake consumer-driven myths it pedaled.
Willie Doherty – Void, Derry~Londonderry
Northern Ireland’s premier psychogeographer, Doherty’s compelling retrospective of photographic and moving image works explored the unsettling resonances of Derry’s streets, alleys and green expanses.
Bob Parks – Grand Union, Birmingham
The first time I met Bob we were both stewards at the Royal Festival Hall in the early noughties. One night, between directing startled OAPs to their seats, I remember him telling me about the relative merits of using dildos in autoerotic performance. At Grand Union his retrospective was an ecstatic and at times heartwarming experience.
THE MUSIC
Sons of Kemet (l–r): Seb Rochford, Shabaka Hutchings, Tom Skinner and Oren MarshallAll awards ceremonies are crap (unless you win), but the British Music of Black Origin awards is a particularly risible, borderline racist, backslapping procedure for commercial pop. That said, way back in 2006, me and a load of jazz musicians demonstrated outside the Royal Albert Hall and then went on Newsnight to protest against MOBO culling their ‘Best Jazz Act’ category. Surprisingly they kept the category and this year the incredible experimental group Sons of Kemet won. Plus, the group’s BBC Radio 3 live session last year is still one of the best things I’ve hear this year. Check it here.
Autechre – L Event
It was heartening to hear Authechre are still worlds away from the awful, clock-driven, Urban Outfitters deep house that drowned the blogosphere this year. L Event is an extraordinary exploration of abstraction and baroque digital signal processing.
THE BOOKS
Tao Lin – Taipei
This is absolutely not a glimpse into the reality of our modern, socially networked lives. Well not mine anyway. It’s a story filled with people interacting in a kind of painfully autistic, emotionally detached, hipster limbo. Kind of like Daria: The MFA Years. Still, some incredible writing going on here.
Dave Eggers – The Circle
This is a scarily good book from Dave. His story of a digital communications company/cult who demands its employees and the rest of the world expose themselves via social media is terrifyingly believable.
Chimamanda Ngozi AdichieAmerica and Americans, despite protestations of a post-Obama, post-racial consciousness, are obsessed with race and the preservation of retrograde essentialisms through the thin veil of ‘respecting cultural difference’. At least that’s the vibe I got from reading Adichie’s amazing tale of a Nigerian in New Jersey. The withering social mores of hip, young Americans (of all races) are so keenly observed that you almost feel… like… so totally sorry for them?
John Lindsay – No Dope Here? Anti-Drugs Vigilantism in Northern Ireland
Lindsay’s spectacularly well-researched book delves into the lesser-known world of paramilitary punishment beatings and killings in Northern Ireland. There’s some striking imagery within its pages and the chapter on rave culture and ecstasy in the midst of the troubles is a real eye-opener.
BEST GIF
This one
Highlights 2013 - Orit Gat
Trevor Paglen, The Last Pictures, 2013For me, 2013 is coming to a close with the announcement by New York Magazine that it will be scaling back print operations and the many pieces published in response to it, ranging from sentimental nostalgia for some heyday of print to a commitment to technology that almost reads as a Marinetti-like ‘print magazines, cemeteries!’ More than anything, I thought this letter from the publisher of Harper’s was brave, generous, and incredibly illuminating in its consideration of the relationship between the magazine, its readers, and advertisers: ‘Until recently, the rush to appear modern, the peer pressure to accept the inevitability of print’s demise, and the supposed virtues of writing for free have dominated what passes for a discussion.’
Screenshot of Art Papers websiteOnly slightly less obsessed with publishing, ‘Ed Ruscha Books & Co.’ at Gagosian was by far my favorite exhibition this year. As much as I’m curious to see more artists’ e-books (shout out to the series of e-books Brian Droitcour curated/edited for Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery and to The People’s E-Book, which launched its beta version very recently), flipping through the numerous examples of works following Ruscha’s brilliant use of the book format made me feel hopeful.
Virginia Overton, Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 2013The best thing about 2013? It’s that it stretches into 2014. A number of the artists whose works I was interested in this year are presenting large-scale projects in New York in 2014 – Katrin Sigurdardottir is bringing Foundation (2013), her Venice Biennale piece to Sculpture Center; Turner Prize winner Laure Prouvost, whose Before Before and After After (2013) were some of the highlights of the Lyon Biennale is showing at the New Museum in February; and Ragnar Kjartansson is also scheduled to have a solo exhibition at the New Museum. I’m particularly curious about that one because I thought The Visitors (2013), shown earlier this year at Luhring Augustine, was one of the most poetic and beautiful artworks I’ve seen in a long time. I’m also looking forward to seeing – or at least hearing about – the exhibition ‘Art Post-Internet’ that Karen Archey is curating at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, as well as Anne Collier’s show at the Hessel Museum in Bard College, and Manifesta 10 at the Hermitage, St Petersburg.
Highlights 2013 - Silas Martí
Centro Cultural São Paulo, one of the venues of the 10th Bienal de Arquitetura de São Paulo, 2013; photograph: Carlos Rennó While this will be remembered forever as the year the crowds took to the streets of Brazil in the June uprisings, 2013 wasn’t the most memorable in the art scene here. But a few exhibitions gave it some lustre. Without the Bienal de São Paulo, the art circuit in the country’s biggest city becomes a little lazy, as museums and galleries prepare their blockbuster shows to coincide with the big exhibition next September, but some jewels could be found in the white cubes around town nonetheless.
Ending a cycle of lethargy, the Bienal de Arquitetura de São Paulo this year had its tenth outing – and what an outing. For the first time in its history, the show left the domains of Ibirapuera park to sweep across the city, occupying a range of venues, from the Centro Cultural São Paulo, a sprawling underground gallery nestled between two huge traffic corridors, and even a quaint little apartment with a view of the Minhocão, the overpass that some want to convert into a ‘Paulista’ version of New York’s High Line. The show, which centred on the discussion of urban mobility, was a major success, especially following the heated protests with concerns over the crisis in public transportation.
Sticking to architecture, the controversial edition of the Panorama da Arte Brasileira was another highlight. Curator Lisette Lagnado did away with the usual survey show of emerging artists to create instead a provocation disguised as an exhibition. She attacked the fact that the Museu de Arte Moderna, which hosts the show, has for the past 40 years occupied a building that was meant to be temporary by asking architects and artists to come up with projects for a new museum building, one capable of finally showing its entire collection, mostly invisible due to lack of space. And she got the point across by removing the building’s walls and changing the position of the entrance to reflect the original proposition by Lina Bo Bardi, the architect who refurbished the space three decades ago.
Sesc Pompeia, the venue for the 18th Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc Videobrasil, 2013
Maria Martins, O impossivel lll (1946); photograph: Vicente de MelloTwo other historical figures were also remembered. Waldemar Cordeiro and Geraldo de Barros, the masterminds of concrete art in São Paulo, had simultaneous exhibitions. While Cordeiro had his biggest retrospective to date at Itaú Cultural, Barros had his classic 1980s ‘Jogos de Dados’ series displayed in its entirety: 55 works hanging back to back, at Sesc Vila Mariana.
Waldemar Cordeiro, Valentine’s Day, 1973 Another show that opened recently is as cerebral as it is enchanting. The Centro Universitário Maria Antonia commissioned a new work by Cildo Meireles. At first glance, it’s an empty room, but once inside one starts to notice the floor isn’t quite flat and the corners of the room are slightly twisted, giving the impression the entire space is being crumpled up. The installation sits between two other shows. One is a retrospective of modernist architect Gregori Warchavchik’s oeuvre and the other is made up of photographs by Mauro Restiffe of the Cícero Prado, one of Warchavchik’s biggest apartment buildings in downtown São Paulo. It’s Brazilian modern architecture rehashed in a single, powerful blow.
And let’s not forget Rio. The Museu de Arte do Rio, which opened this year as the first in a wave of museum inaugurations that will take over the city in the coming years as a countdown to the World Cup and the Olympic Games, has staged some noteworthy shows already. Solo exhibitions by Yuri Firmeza and Berna Reale were both breathtaking, the first for opening a new stage in this artist’s restless research into architecture and performance, and the second for giving this newcomer from Belém a major show in the country’s former capital.
Also at MAR, a massive show narrating the development of experimental art in the northeastern state of Pernambuco (‘Pernambuco Experimental’) is one of the most amazing experiences of the year in Rio. In a sense, this seems to be the moment for Pernambuco to shine, not only in the visual arts but also in film.
Hilton Lacerda, Tatuagem, 2013, film stillSo what am I looking forward to next year? For one thing, I’ll be keeping my eyes open for whatever next comes out of Pernambuco. Second, the Bienal de São Paulo, curated by Charles Esche, promises to be the next big thing on the horizon here.
Highlights 2013 - Timotheus Vermeulen
Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity, 2013Art
Tomás Saraceno, installation view K21 Ständehaus, Dusseldorf, 2013Ever since I moved to Dusseldorf last year, there have been a number of exciting shows: Thomas Saraceno at K21 Ständehaus, Ed Atkins and Frances Stark at the Julia Stoschek Collection, Rob Voerman at the Weltkunstzimmer, Daiga Grantina at Max Mayer (all in Dusseldorf), as well as Christian Falsnaes at Raum Drei in Cologne, and Timur Si-Qin at Bonner Kunstverein. Also good was the group exhibition Drawing a Universe at Dusseldorf’s KAI 10. Elsewhere, I really enjoyed Arnout Mik’s solo show at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. One other show that left its mark was Andy Holden’s exceptional exhibition MIMS! at the Zabludowicz Collection in London, a moving exploration both of youthful idealism and contemporary uncertainty and irony. It is a rare thing, at least for me, to be moved to tears at a contemporary art show, but this one did the trick.
Literature
Adam Thirlwell’s 2012 novel KapowI am always late to the literary scene, so technically I am cheating when I say Adam Thirlwell’s 2012 novel Kapow is the absolute highlight of 2013, but I will say it anyways. It is an amazing little book, which I recommend to everyone. The rediscovery of John Edward Williams’ Stoner (1965) was a nice surprise, though the novel is certainly not as fantastic as some critics make it out to be. Slavoj Zizek’s latest, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, is very clever, albeit clearly hurried. I loved Joris Luyendijk’s analyses of the banking system in The Guardian. As far as criticism goes, I very much enjoyed reading Emily Nussbaum’s TV reviews in The New Yorker.
Film
Joshua Oppenheimer, Christine Cynn and an anonymous co-director, The Act of Killing, 2013Gravity was a highlight, obviously; but otherwise, it has been a bleak year for cinema I feel (especially in comparison with 2012, which saw the premieres of brilliant docs like The Act of Killing and The Invisible War). It may be, however, that I watch the wrong films. A sucker for over the top slapstick comedies, I cannot wait for Anchorman 2 to come out here in Germany, for instance. Not a joke: I really can’t wait.
TV
Jane Campion, Top of the Lake, 2013This year wasn’t as good a year for TV as last year, but there were some pretty wonderful moments. Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake was amazing, for one. Christopher Guest’s Family Tree was very sweet, touching and funny. Mad Men was great again. The Good Wife is having a very decent season. Arrested Development, though not as hilarious as I would have hoped, definitely worthwhile. Veep was very OK. Non-fiction highlight: Russel Brand’s appearance on Newsnight. He received a lot of slack, but I thought he was brilliant, the embodiment of politics 2.0: just because we don’t know what the alternative looks like does not mean it doesn’t exist.
Highlights 2013 - Ana Teixeira Pinto
Yakov Khalip, Mayan Language Unraveled. Punch Cards (1962), included in the Bergen Assembly 2013After being asked to write this list it slowly started to dawn on me none of the films I enjoyed this year were released in 2013 and the two books I most wanted to recommend – Oxana Timofeeva’s History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom (Jan van Eyck Academie) and Hito Steyerl’s The Wretched of the Screen (Sternberg Press) – both turned out to have been published in 2012. So there, I just smuggled them in anyway, but promise I will stick to the rules from now on …
Eleanor Antin Merrit from California Lives (1969/98); courtesy: Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, New York 
Magdalena Abakanowicz, Zespół Czarnych Form Organicznych (Team Black Organische Form / Group of Black Organic Forms) (1974); photograph: Achim KukuliesIn the absence of a new season of Game of Thrones, and after I lost my local video rental store to Prenzlauerberg gentrification, I’ve taken to following Vdrome, an online platform curated by Edoardo Bonaspetti, Jens Hoffmann, Andrea Lissoni and Filipa Ramos. Every film is introduced with a short q&a and stays online for a brief period only –an exhibition format that meets the distribution potential of digital video without compromising the artists’ income. Yes I know what you are probably thinking, but I am not a hi-res fetishist, and the project allowed me to discover the work of Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc and Marcus Coates, which I probably wouldn’t have came across otherwise.
Leonor Antunes a linha é tão fina que o olho, apesar de armado com uma lupa, imagina-a ao invés de vê-la (2013) installation view Kunsthalle Lissabon
Jutta Koether, installation view PRAXES, Berlin, 2013
Karl Holmqvist Untitled (Checkerboard Painting Black)(2013) vinyl on wood
Jaron Lanier Who Owns the Future, 2013Highlights 2013 - Sean O’Toole
Launch of Ruth Sacks’s group
exhibition and intervention 'Regions A-G', held at the Johannesburg
Public Library; photograph: Sean O’TooleRambling through my 2013
Raúl Cárdenas Osuna outside the Germiston Civic Centre; photograph: Sean O’TooleEkurhuleni, the larger municipality of which Germiston forms a part, has the second-highest number of informal settlements in South Africa after Cape Town. Addressing the need for housing and social justice in this spatially fragmented country starts in Ekurhuleni settlements like Gabon and Freedom Square, provisional settlements not at all dissimilar Tijuana’s impoverished slums. ‘No-one is from Tijuana,’ remarked Cárdenas Osuna, who was born in the Atlantic city of Mazatlan. A data-interested, solution-driven artist, his Torolab collective radically extends Joseph Beuys’s twee notion of social sculpture.
Mandarins would probably pigeonhole Torolab’s activities, which extend to social landscaping and food growing schemes, as engagé art. Whatever. ‘The time for protest has ended; the time for proposal has begun’, Cárdenas Osuna told the LA Times in 2001. Not that protest is irrelevant to this talkative artist: ‘Part of our work is diagnostics, and protest is a diagnosis of something,’ he told me.
While wandering along Germiston’s main street one day I encountered a mural by Cecily Sash. Trained under Henry Moore, Sash was a key part of Johannesburg’s artistic avant-garde in the 1960s and ’70s. Her strong opinions, sexual choices and ethical values – she emigrated to the UK in 1974, where she continues to paint in Wales – saw her being nicknamed ‘the Tarantula’ by heterosexual female students. In a 1968 interview Sash remarked on how South African artists were failingly engaging the emergent urban attitudes of the recently rural white republic. ‘[O]ur urban society has a particular flavour,’ she remarked, adding that it was a ‘curious compound of freedom and straight-lacedness’. It bears noting that real only freedom came in 1994.
Pieter Hugo, Hillbrow, 2013, c-type print; courtesy: Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town/JohannesburgHugo’s show included a photograph of Hillbrow, an agitated epicentre of cosmopolitan manners explicitly name checked by Sash in 1968. Built on a northern ridge overlooking Johannesburg’s CBD, Hillbrow was in the 1960s likened to the Latin Quarter in Paris and New York’s West Village; it’s a bit more ramshackle these days. Jazz photographer Basil Breakey memorably recorded the brief residency of the mixed-race Blue Notes jazz sextet here in 1963, before its members – like Sash a decade later – emigrated to London.
Keeping Time: 1964 – 1974 The Photographs and Cape Town Jazz Recordings of Ian Bruce Huntley, published by Electric JiveAnother notable new photobook is Transition, which compiles the work six South African and six French photographers. Hugo worked with French photographer Raphael Dallaporta. He choose to make a formal landscape study of a sulphurous yellow mine dump in Ekurhuleni, while Dallaporta preferred to float a camera over a bunch of them using a remote-controlled helicopter and then digitally suture the results together. ‘You pretty much feel you are on another kind of planet,’ says Dallaporta of his surreal but true composite studies.
For the most part, it has been social theorists, architects and urban planners – not curators – who have tried to fathom and visually explain Johannesburg’s idiosyncratic character. In 2007 the Tate Modern hosted ‘Global Cities’, which included Guy Tillim’s striking essay on inner-city neglect and anxious domesticity. In June, La maison rouge, a private contemporary art museum in Paris, hosted ‘My Joburg’. Given the lack of precedents, the outcome fairly represented the sprawling, apparently borderless city it set out to survey. Standout works included a new wall drawing by Kemang Wa Lehulere. Joint winner of the 15th Baloise Art Prize at Art Basel in June, Wa Lehulere’s early practice was shaped by his ongoing manner of working collectively – like Cárdenas Osuna, just differently. Ruth Sacks, a Johannesburg artist associated with the recently defunct Parking Gallery, also works collaboratively. In November, at the same time Cárdenas Osuna was in town, Sacks launched her adaptation of Jules Verne’s evergreen classic, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under Seas. In the manner of Rodney Graham and others, Sacks makes books.
Ruth Sacks, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under Seas (Garamond Press, 2013)Highlights 2013 - Tyler Coburn
Kristin Sue Lucas performing a reading of Refresh (2007) at 'Visions of the Now' festival, Stockholm, 2013. Photograph: Märta ThisnerOn Saturday, 25 May 2013, Kristin Sue Lucas performed a cold read of Refresh (2007), her successful petition to change her name to Kristin Sue Lucas. Facing the audience of the Visions of the Now festival in Stockholm, the artist recited her appeal to the Supreme Court of California, and (rather appropriately) Robert Whitman phoned in the judge’s replies. The cold read offers a reminder of the prescience of the petition, as Lucas’s submission to legal process for the purpose of self-renewal not only reflects a desire consigned to speak in the voice of a juridical subject, but a desire already delimited by the parameters of the online world. Writing about the project in Fillip, Chris Fitzpatrick and Post Brothers read Refresh as a parasitical work, noting that ‘in its noisy obstruction, the parasite reinvents the host, becoming an integral part in the system by forcing it to reorient whatever message the host transmits.’
This argument effectively captures Lucas’s engagement with statutory procedure; making a case for her parasitism vis-à-vis the Internet, however, requires a redrafting of our conception of the host. If the critical dissonance of the parasite stems from its status as an uninvited guest, for example, then what relevance does this figure hold for a field in which we are always invited, necessarily welcome: when the very sustenance of the host depends upon our inclusion?
Lucas’s piece thus provides a helpful ground to consider recent attempts by artists to render themselves uninvited, unwelcome – to assume a mode of relation that, via Fitzpatrick & Post, might ‘reveal the system’s dependency on logics of exclusion.’ This claim by no mean presupposes a standard tactic, though overinvestment and obfuscation have been among those recently discussed. Erica Scourti’s Life in Adwords (2012-13) pursues the former: over the course of nearly a year, the artist e-mailed daily diary entries to her Gmail account, later making webcam recitations of the suggested keywords that each entry generated. Scourti’s flat performance reiterates the affectless operations of the Google AdWords algorithm, even as periodic mention of stress, anxiety and romantic ails allude to an ever-more tenuous subjectivity.
Human Readable Type, developed by Julieta Aranda, Fia Backström and
R. Lyon as part of the exhibition ‘尸Γσ₠§§㏌⅁’, ‘The Ends of the Library’
series, Goethe-Institut Library, New York
Erik Wysocan, (By whom will these keepers be kept?), 2013, installation view at Laurel Gitlen, New YorkHighlights 2013: Ned Beauman
The Last of Us (2013), video game stillThe Last of Us
So frustrating – this was the most moving experience of narrative art I had all year, and yet it was both impossible for me to debate it with anyone and pointless for me to recommend it to anyone, because you can’t play it unless you own a Playstation 3. Well, just trust me: The Last of Us is the best video game ever made and, God willing, the start of a new era for the medium. Games have always had a unique potential to plug in to your emotions, because the longer you hold the controller in your hands the more you begin to identify with the protagonist at the level of your sinews. But I don’t think that potential had ever been adequately realized until it was married for the first time to such superlative scripting, plotting, voice acting and music: a hackneyed premise (somewhere between The Road, The Walking Dead and Children of Men) elevated into a 12-hour masterpiece.
Shane Carruth, Upstream Color (2013), film stillHaving set fire to my critical credibility by praising a video game so highly, I’m now going to make a claim which would seem like empty hyperbole even in the best of circumstances, which is that on the strength of only two films Shane Carruth is one of the most important living artists working in any medium. Fuck it, though – I really think he is. 2004’s Primer was like no film I’ve ever seen, and Upstream Color is also like no film I’ve ever seen, but in a completely different way. (Primer, for instance, is exceptionally wordy, whereas Upstream Color has no dialogue at all for its final third.) Carruth is a true avant-gardist, seemingly intent on (and capable of) rebuilding cinema from scratch, and yet his films are also suspenseful and intimate, which is a miraculous combination. What’s it about? Pigs, mind control, sound art, love.
Highlights 2013: Quinn Latimer
Pierre Huyghe, installation view, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 2013My artistic and literary crushes this year were numerous, and despite being exhausted by best of lists by early December, here are a few things that blew my mind/heart/etc. in 2013:
Pierre Huyghe, Pierre Huyghe, Pierre Huyghe currently at Centre Pompidou, Paris. I went for the bees and hot-pink-streaked dog, I stayed for the orgy scene. I fell in love in between.
Lutz Bacher, Snow, installation view, Kunsthalle Zurich, 2013; © Stefan Altenburger Photography Zurich
Camille Henrot, Grosse Fatigue, 2013, film still
Isabelle Cornaro, installation view, Kunsthalle Bern, 2013
In the Heart of the Country, installation view, Museum of Modern Art, Warsaw, 2013The books that spent the most time in my bag this year were Emmanuel Hocquard’s The Invention of Glass (Canarium); Chris Kraus’s Summer of Hate (Semiotexte); Anne Carson’s red doc > (Knopf); and Lisa Robertson’s R’s Boat (University of California Press). Also exemplary is castillo/corrales’s ‘The Social Life of the Book’ pamphlet series, particularly Louis Lüthi’s Infant A (Paraguay Press), which uses a Wallace Stevens poem to frame an imaginary conversation with conceptual artist, writer, and bookseller Ulises Carrión (1941–1989). In terms of critical writing, Kaelen Wilson-Goldie’s criticism for Artforum and Frieze made me hopeful of the field’s continuing possibility as a space of literature, feminism, style, and aesthetics.
Blood Orange, Cupid Deluxe, 2013Online, I was super happy with the bag of deftly curated film programmes streaming through my laptop this year: the Agnes Varda retrospective at Doc Alliance Films, (dafilms.com), in February; the estimable monthly short film programme www.Vdrome.org, curated by Filipa Ramos; and Jennifer West’s Warm Bodies in a Room: A Derive/Drift Through 80 Films that I saw on http://vimeo.com/jenniferwest in November. Also fantastic: the online Interview with Chantal Akerman, by Ricky D’Ambrose, from November, in which the seminal filmmaker talks revealingly about her early film, News From Home (1978), a personal favorite, and wears a shirt held together by exactly one button, as someone adroitly pointed out on Twitter.
Hagar Schmidhalter, 197, 2013, inkjet print; courtesy the artist
Nema komentara:
Objavi komentar