109 | 2010

RIKE FRANK

A conversation with Sarah Pierce

The following conversation between Sarah Pierce and Rike Frank took place last summer in Vienna and early January 2010 in Dublin. It starts with “Any Questions”, a performance by Kevin Atherton from 1979 that Sarah Pierce executed again recently.

Rike Frank: So far performance hasn’t been part of your artistic practice, and as far as I can tell, your interest in “appropriating“ Kevin Atherton’s performance is neither about re-enactment nor about a re-reading of performance history – even though archives as well as the process of retelling play a central role in your work.

Sarah Pierce: Right, that is important. As a form of research, more than as a performance, it speaks to my project “The Metropolitan Complex”, which I began in 2003. Doing the performance reveals a generalised “tone” or “tempo” of certain audiences. What interests me about this particular performance is that it is based on the promise of a conversation without knowing where the conversation will go. It all has a potential to fall flat. All that sustains it is the audience’s interest in asking questions. I take long pauses when thinking about how to answer. The pauses carry the insecurity with them that I, as the performer, am not exactly in control, that I am not exactly sure what my next move is … Maurice Blanchot describes conversation as an infinite back-and-forth punctuated by interruptions or pauses. While many art projects take up conversation as an “improvisational” and therefore “free” form of social play, it is important to me that this performance, like Blanchot’s description of conversation, is not improvisational. The alternate patterns between speaking and listening are spontaneous and performative, but are not performed.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 109/2010, pp. 11–22.

MARIA MUHLE

Anna Artaker: History and Infamy

Anna Artaker’s works move between the theoretical complexes of recognition / identification and namelessness / invisibility developed in the realm of the historical. She creates a historiography that exposes the mechanisms of identification and visualisation as mechanisms of power – taking Walter Benjamin’s famous words seriously that “there has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism. And just as it is itself not free from barbarism, neither is it free from the process of transmission, in which it falls from one set of hands into another.” In opposition to this kind of “winner’s version of history”, Benjamin, along with numerous other intellectuals of the 20th century, sought to develop a “tradition of the oppressed”, of the insignificant and because of this ill-famed and ill-fated, the infâme subjects who have no place in the universal space of the grand narrative. In a similar vein, one could think in this context of Michel Foucault’s archeology of history, concentrating on the breaks and not the linear logic of the causality of events, addressing the paradoxical composition of the non-subjects of history: “The Life of the Infamous” is the product of a historiography that paradoxically makes the subjects of history visible while at the same time keeping them “beneath” the very same discourse:”This is the encounter with power: without this collision, no word would remain to remind us of their fleeting existence”. Here the intention is not to guarantee the nameless a place in history but rather to make us aware of the historical mechanisms of power that distribute and order what is visible and what remains invisible. (…)
Artaker’s works reflect the unstable constitution of the subjects of history, taking on the formal strategies of an infâme representation, as forms of excessive and in this way “lesser”mimesis calling into question the documentary pretense of history.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 109/2010, pp. 23–28.

ALLAN SEKULA

Condé and Beveridge: ...The Red Guards Come and Go, Talking of Michelangelo

The fact that Condé and Beveridge produce their works in multi-image sequences, based either on historical narrative or on thematic development, gives each of their staged and montaged “rooms” the aspect of a scene-setting within a multi-act play. Their sequential way of working also lends credence to my perhaps rather dubious rhyming use of the word”page” here, rather than “print” or “picture”, for the viewer is meant to turn from one scene to the next as in an illustrated book. In a bound volume, every recto has its verso. And as any reader of childrens’ books knows, every window depicted could be a hole through the other side, a preview of what is coming two pages hence, which is not at all the same thing as a Lucio Fontana painting, which is holed through to its own verso, and only obscure to the surface of the wall behind.
The occasion for the “Class Work” series was a collaboration with a rank-and-file education project sponsored by the Communications and Electrical Workers of Canada. The aim was to counter new management strategies now familiar within the broader agenda of neoliberalism: delocalisation of production, the “Japanese” team concept of work-group incentives, and the increasingly overt corporate hostility to unions. The fictional site is a dim-futured television tube factory, which allows yet more images to appear en abyme, filling the blank glass screens that have not yet left the assembly line.
“The Strike”(Robert Koehler, 1886) appears as a backdrop, first in digitised form, and then as a more realistic reproduction, as if it were being tuned in on an old-fashioned analog receiver, as if the noise accompanying the signal were being progressively reduced. This reversal of the characteristic strategies of Pop Art – witness Warhol’s earliest silkscreens – is important, for it manifests a return, not only to the nineteenth-century lineages of social realism, but to the long duration and vicissitudes of labor militancy itself.
This amounts to an imaginary journey backwards, down the hole with the Old Mole. All of the staging is hyperbolic: schematic and cartoonish, low budget and overblown at the same time. The wage-slave chains which are the “nothing but” of the last line of the Manifesto are here big enough to hoist the anchor of a mutinous battleship.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 109/2010, pp. 29–43.

HERTA WOLF

The Mazarine Blue. For Manfred Willmann

His photographs possess an extraordinary beauty, often paired with an extraordinary brutality, although this latter is only ever present in the form of traces and hints: the blood-smeared mouth of a cat, drops of blood in the snow, or the sad mouths of offended-looking fish in a pot of soup that appear to be gasping for air. Dead animals, blood, people captured in the late hours of parties, the barrenness of rural life in West Styria since the 1980s. These are the subjects of Willmann’s pictorial universe, and not only in “Das Land”. (…)
In this book published in 2000, containing photographs taken between 1981 and 1993, Willmann presents a selection from one of the most extensive and most written-about series in this oeuvre. Although labelled »the countryside«, as a type capable of generalisation, the pictures all show absolutely singular views of moments frozen in flux. As this description fits all photographic images, it would not constitute a peculiarity or specific quality of Manfred Willmann’s pictures – if it weren’t for the way the things he observes in the countryside are staged. This is what makes his photographs so unique. As outlined in my opening description of the Blue in the meadow, the fact that his colour photographs are taken with flash means that they are given a centre and thus an emphasis, an accent. On the other hand, however, it is the margins which, thanks to his extraordinary and masterful use of framing, set the scene for the centre of the image. Moreover, thanks to the often radical way in which he isolates his pictures from the continuum of reality, not only presenting his subject matter as cut out of this reality, but suggesting that we are only seeing part of the actual motif, Manfred Willmann creates a tension in his photographs between the centre and the edge of the image. Due to this compositional principle, his photographs “hint at” their subjects rather than “showing” them. As a result, the story they tell remains vague and becomes an allusion which – beyond the singularity of the slice of space-time – possesses a general, metaphorical quality. As I have already mentioned, however, this only works in the specific Willmann manner because the artist is so close to, or inside, the pictures he takes.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 109/2010, pp. 46–51.

JEFF DERKSEN

Art and Cities during Mega-Events. On the Intersection of Culture, Everyday Live, and the Olympics in Vancouver and Beyond. Part II

The Olympics in Vancouver began by marking itself as the “sustainable games”, but more pressing social issues around housing, gentrification, and displacement quickly moved to the forefront through the push of civil society groups and activists. (…)
In this scenario, artists are not the blade of bulldozer gentrification – in fact artists are not needed – but creativity as an economic engine becomes the rationale for gentrification. This marks a new role for culture in the new global stage of gentrification: culture is no longer only the accelerant – the starting fluid – of gentrification, leaving only a trace once its job is done, but culture is a spin-off of creativity refigured as an accumulation strategy.
Within this altered cultural landscape of the city, several new works of public art gain sharpened meaning from the Olympics context and disturb the intention of art in the public sphere within the creative city. The public sphere has been fundamentally rearranged here, existing more as a private-public amalgam, but it has been tightly squeezed by the restriction on public speech and anti-Olympics signage that comes from the IOC and the city. The IOC Charter bans any “demonstration or political, religious or racial propaganda in any Olympic sites, venues or other areas” and through clumsy city bylaws this seemed to extend to any statement negative to the Olympics, even if it was a sign in the window of this”city of glass”. A legal challenge to this closure of free speech was successful, but the threat is still potent. In a public art work in the window of the new Audain Gallery in the Woodward’s building in the heart of the Downtown Eastside – a site that is symbolic of the scale of the transformation of the city – Ken Lum has mounted a sly and effective textual work. “I Said No” is a powerful speech act of a negative public with twelve different exclamations of disagreement ranging from a simple “NO!” to “No Way José” and “No Bloody Way!” addressing the street. Contradicting the affirmative nature of most public art,”I Said No” amplifies the right to say no, the very right which the IOC and the city have tried to erode.

Text feature in Camera Austria International 109/2010, pp. 44–45.