Hans-Peter Feldmann: The Hugo Boss Award

The quote, or more properly, misquote (probably), is from Thomas Bernhard: In one of the books he wrote that getting a prize is society's way of shitting on you. It has been many years since I first encountered what is probably a genuine misread, yet in whatever error it exists in my memory, it has somehow stayed with me, as a call to stoicism contra the capricious vulgarity of any sort of award.

At this point I am from an older generation when awards had a clearer caste system: When Pia Zadora getting the Golden Globe was kitsch both for Zadora AND the Golden Globe, for example (& one could appreciate Pia Zadora even more for being such an ebullient prize winner, but of what?). Awards add luster & validation to the most routine entertainments - my sense is in the future the database of awards will function as a social mirror much in the same way that advertisements can, as embodiments which seem full in their time, & afterwards act more as a graph of lost illusions.

Last week I saw the Hans-Peter Feldmann installation at the Guggenheim Museum, New York, in conjunction with his award of this year's Hugo Boss Award, which comes with a grant of $100,000. Feldmann's installation is lining the walls & posts of the gallery with 100,000 US dollar bills, pinned in even rows, floor to ceiling.

The gallery is large. Before I saw the installation, I had wondered if 100,000 dollar bills covers a little or a lot. There is some overlap involved which makes me think that it did involve some creative geometry to include all the bills. US money is remarkably drab - the neo-classical graphics are lugubrious both in dull, narrow monochromic tones & in all-too-official, historicizing imagery. The sober tonalities line what is otherwise a brilliantly white cube contemporary gallery. The dollars look like some dull reptilian scale. That week, my friend S. whose interests are in the realm of haute couture & what he terms luxe, told me about a $40,000 handbag made of wild crocodile he had seen. Unlike such a luxe handbag (well, at least for some), seeing $100,000 pinned to the walls is extremely static & uninteresting, which is I am guessing, precisely the point, or a point - I think there's a lot going on with this installation.

The Hugo Boss Award is a global art prize: it presupposes a globalized art economy, presumably without national borders. There's a lot of conceit in this: one could still stake out borders within this magical Everywhere. "Global" is for a "global" class which excludes most of the globe. A "global" award functions like any global corporate action. It is not art which is the global Esperanto linking all, but the economy itself, & in things like the Hugo Boss Award, or the Guggenheim franchise (from NYC to Abu Dhabi), it is all luxe decoration, & perhaps not as satisfying as a wild crocodile handbag. One looks sadly for more purpose than that, & come up short. It reminds me of a visual pun in Jacques Tati: an office lined with travel posters for far-flung places of the world, all of which look identical.

The installation was remarkably empty, in fact it was downright peaceful. Other than seeing 2 boys stopped from photographing one another posing with wide-open arms in front of the plenitude of dollars, there isn't much to do in the gallery per se, although I found it remarkably moving, perhaps because of its visual spareness, & that it could function without the existence of any art object. If anything, going into the next gallery, for an installation of post-Impressionist paintings from the Thannhauser Collection, which included, immediately, a spectacular Van Gogh of the mountains of St Remy, & a Gauguin Tahitian fantasy of a near-nude boy with a horse in a jungle, both of which I could describe flippantly as masterpieces, was quite jarring. & if anything, $100,000 could buy a few inches of these paintings at best. & masterpiece quality aside, these paintings looked like psychedelic posters in comparison.

Feldmann's installation made $100,000 look insubstantial, even a bit unreal - excuse the pun, but it just didn't "add up." It was not like seeing the interior of Fort Knox like in Goldfinger - it had nothing precious or prized about it at all. & it was neither cynical or ironic - if anything it reminded me more of simply pulling a few dollars out of my pocket, when that is all there is, rather than any artistic strategy.

There were crowds, mostly of tourists, going into the Guggenheim, most of which was closed for the Lee Ufan show. A well-dressed woman pushed past me in the revolving door saying she was here "FOR THE FELDMANN!" as was I - & I never saw her in the gallery, either. The more show-stopping Van Goghs & Gauguins were mere steps away, after all.

The quietness of Feldmann's gesture of the installation impressed me, as well as the larger issues at hand: the airy symbolism of money, its teetering between worth & worthlessness, its use as a kind of black mirror in which one could see the commodity of art reflected in it. Money has a different presence for those with or without it. Given that almost any thing per se can be used in art-making in a "post-medium" art world (which is also global, of course), it still has a sense of being artless, even with the methodical if not decorative mode of pinning the dollars to the walls. The greenish tones of the dollars made the gallery feel like one were at the bottom of a very still pool.

I think of Feldmann's books & collections of ephemeral images - all of them modestly scaled. One of my secret tests with my professors & colleagues is to see how they react to Feldmann's work - does it have any impact or not? Feldmann is not that well known in the US & the only large-scale show with his involvement that I know of is The Last Picture Show which I saw at the Walker Art Center. I have a few rumpled issues of Ohio Magazine as well - another litmus test. Perhaps in the US the everyday is supposed to be be more special, & it can be jarring to sense that it actually not, visually, or otherwise.

The Hellfire Club episode of the Avengers 2011

The current show of Karen Kilimnik's work at 303 Gallery includes a reconstruction of the installation The Hellfire Club episode of the Avengers, along with some photos of a girl posing a l'Emma Peel, and paintings of more "traditional" subject matter - dogs, landscape, portraits in heroic style (I can hear my Aunt Lucille imitating the movies here, pronouncing it "veddy English"), which relate in a kind of thrift store Anglophilia all around.

I find myself able to relate to it, both in terms of it as an art practice, as well as something (maybe not even art per se) which interfaces with media, with pop culture, which casts the experience as a kind of internalized subjectivity from which there is no discernible awakening. It's like a dream, the nature of which cannot be easily determined. It can be both gorgeous & terrifying. It's as if one's ego is nothing, supplanted by floating images from elsewhere, which are eminently desirable, yet it's awful too, sometimes.

There's a lot of art which deals with media images directly, with celebrity as a kind of mirror of whatever. & I get a sense that there really isn't much irony or depth in some of the work, or that there is meant to be (such as Elizabeth Peyton or Richard Phillips), & I'm not intending to suggest that there has to be. It doesn't mean much to me, but these images have had at least a contemporary resonance, for some. They show in galleries (what does that mean?). What I am intrigued with in the work of Karen Kilimnik, continually, is its morbid, romantic obsessiveness, its attachment to fantasies both grand & cheap. The work has a kind of entropy in its attachments, it is abject, it is kind of falling apart - & as such it resonates with a psychic landscape laid out like copy in a fashion magazine. The work picks up on the invasiveness of media, its aggressions.

But I am missing something here too: a figure like Emma Peel, especially in The Hellfire Club episode, is also a very empowering figure. She's tough, hot & self-possessed. We should all take some lessons from her, this fictional sylph. The photos of the girl posing with images of Emma Peel/Diana Rigg pick up on this, in a very direct way. The photos are wonderfully not-fine. They are simple; if they were in an envelope from a one-hour lab they would seem like someone's ordinary caprice, a scenario of "this is me, like the picture." The "amateur" can be theorized as a hapless consumer, as an absolute in passivity, however it could be seen as a much more complicated interchange. There's a murky deliriousness in the contemplation of these materials. There are intimations of violence - violence in cheap toys & decorations, in tinsel & gilt, in dupey Xeroxes, in not-so-secret yearnings for a world much richer than our own.

Signs on the Road

Artists often fixate on particular found material (imagery, objects, quotes, fragments of text, etc.) that reveals no direct connection to their practice but that possesses for them an enigmatic, resonant meaning. This material may serve as a beacon for their practice, suggesting an unrealized and indeterminate potential for future work. Perhaps this material is the uncanny of artistic practice.

For this exhibition we collect such material from over a hundred and fifty artists, each invited to submit a single-page digital file to be printed on an 8×10-inch sheet. This small archive will be handed over to three curatorial collectives, each of whom will mount a treatment and exhibition in the diminutive (10-foot by 10-foot) Curatorial Research Lab at Winkleman Gallery. Despite the collection's necessarily small scale, we hope for a different order of insight than can be derived from primary artistic production. What if, for a moment, we treat such secondary material as primary? We are curious to see what tentative and comparative understandings can be drawn regarding a collective sensibility of the moment. Could organizations of this archive serve as signs on the road toward something beyond its constituent parts?

Workroom G is Michael Ashkin, Leslie Brack, and Joshua Geldzahler

Gogue Projects is Matt Freedman & Jude Tallichet

Camel Collective is www.camelcollective.org

Cathouse FUNeral is David Dixon, Karen Miller, Pete Moran

ARTISTS:

David Adamo, Alyson Aliano, Greg Allen, Meredith Allen, Robert Andrade, Mirene Arsanios, Michael Ashkin, David Atkin, Nancy Baker, Conrad Bakker, Michael Ballou, Sarah Bedford, David Benforado, Annie Berman, Eric Ross Bernstein, Roberto Bertoia, Mary Walling Blackburn, Lee Boroson, Leslie Brack, David Brody, Monica Burczyk, Pam Butler, Sharon Butler, Holly Cahill, Zachary Cahill, Tiffany Calvert, Francis Cape, Zhiwan Cheung, Piotr Chizinski, Jennifer Coates, Elisabeth Condon, Anne Connell, Diana Cooper, Daniel Cosentino, Amie Cunat, Elizabeth Dadi, Iftikhar Dadi, Jennifer Dalton, Donna Dennis, David Dixon, Ben Draper, eteam, Julie Evans, Anna Faroqhi, Anoka Faruqee, Renate Ferro, Paul Festa, Matt Freedman, Carolyn Funk, Lee Gainer, Joshua Geldzahler, Benj Gerdes, Lindsey Glover, DeWitt Godfrey, Maximilian Goldfarb, Edward M. Gomez, Anthony Graves, Lisa Hamilton, Shadi Harouni, David Hartt, Kirsten Hassenfeld, Jennifer Hayashida, Eric Heist, Amy Helfand, Alika Herreshoff, Clara Hess, Bob Hewitt, Susan Homer, Bettina Hubby, David Humphrey, Gabriela Jimenez, Christopher Lowry Johnson, Ron Jude, Martine Kaczynski, Efrat Kedem, Christine Kelly, Daren Kendall, Baseera Khan, Elke Krasny, Larry Krone, Lasse Lau, Jill Lear, Ronna Lebo, Diana Seo Hyung Lee, Karen Leo, Jason Livingston, David Lukowski, Pauline M'barek, Rose Marcus, Justin Martin, Mark Masyga, Graham McDougal, Todd McGrain, Doug McLean, Vincent Meessen, Danielle Mericle, Elisabeth Meyer, Andrea Minicozzi, John Monti, Pete Moran, Ray Mortenson, Erik Moskowitz & Amanda Trager, Carrie Moyer, Nicholas Muellner, Chris Nau, Yamini Nayar, Gregor Neuerer, Jennifer Nichols, Meredith Nickie, Marty Ohlin, Chris Oliver, Craig Olson, Ruth Oppenheim, Maria Park, Ahndraya Parlato, Ditte Lyngkaer Pedersen, Liza Phillips, Anna Pinkus, Maggie Prendergast, Johannes Paul Raether, Paul Rajakovics and Barbara Holub, Cuba Ray, Dylan Reid, Thomas Rentmeister, Noah Robbins, Christopher Robinson, Kay Rosen, Douglas Ross, Benjamin Rubloff, Kathleen Rugh, Faride Sakhaeifar, Rachel Salamone, David Scher, Mira Schor, Peter Scott, Dennis Sears, Daniel Seiple, Rachel Selekman, James Sheehan, Buzz Spector, Suzy Spence, Liz Sweibel, Stan Taft, Jude Tallichet, Nick Tobier, Nathan Townes-Anderson, Jeanne Tremel, Lauren Valchuis, Chris Werner, Leslie Wilkes, Sammy Jean Wilson, Karen Yasinsky, Bernard Yenelouis

Unpunished

PRESS RELEASE

In the Kabinett:
Unpunished, curated by Nayland Blake

January 20 – February 27, 2011
An opening reception will be held on Thursday, January 20 from 6-8pm.

Hello –

I've been asked to curate a small sort of cabinet de curiosité space in New York's Sue Scott Gallery as part of a show that opens on January 20th, 2011. So I've decided to put together a zine of the queer artists whose work I respect, with the title and theme of UNPUNISHED. You're invited to include a piece in the following format: two black and white 8 1/2 x 11 inch pages. Your name should be on one of them somewhere. The idea is that the two will be Xeroxed back to back to form one sheet, and then the copies of all the pages will be displayed in plastic sleeves, available to be compiled by each visitor. If you want your page to be copied onto a specific color paper, please indicate that. The cover will be the image that accompanies this email.

Thematically, I'm thinking Queer, unfettered exuberance, a bit of Juissance in the midst of our postmillennial winter. Don't fear the goofy, the groovy or the grungy. Two pages, so maybe: before and after, above and below, losers and finders, pitchers and catchers, all things bright and beautiful, questions and answers, fast and slow, inside and out and inside out?

Finally I trust your taste, so if there is someone else you think of who would be a good inclusion, feel free to pass this invitation on to them! I really hope you send something in, but thanks for even contemplating it and one last apology - since I haven't coordinated all my contact lists you may get this in a couple of locations, sorry about the duplication.

All the best,

Nayland

Cc: Ronald Abram, Darryl Alvarez, Kim Anno, Chris Bogia, Rob Clarke, Liz Collins, Robert Crouch, Pradeep Dalal, Kerry Downey, Simon English, Bruno Fazzolari, Avram Finkelstein, Amanda Greenberg, , Daphne Gottlieb, Erik Hanson, Lee Harrington, Geoffrey Hendricks, Matthias Hermann, Hermes Payrhubur, Mena Kamel, Arnold Kemp, Daniel Lang Levinsky, Phoebe Legere, Sioban Liddell, Daniel Luedtke, Carlos Motta, Keith Meyerson, Midori, Nanney, Jeanine Oleson, Alice O'Malley, Uzi Parnes, Jennifer Rodewald, Christopher Russell, Gwenaël Rattke, Sue SaintSur, Odanjide Shabaka, Amy Sillman, Marc Swanson, Joshua Thorson, Carmelita Tropicana, Ela Troyano, Joey Veltkamp, Tobaron Waxman, David White, Jim Winters, David Yarritu, Bernard Yenelouis, Quito Ziegler.

For additional information, please contact Steven Stewart at Sue Scott Gallery by calling
212-358-8767, faxing 212-358-8785 or emailing info@suescottgallery.com.

From Here to There: Alec Soth's America

The Walker Art Center exhibit, From Here to There: Alec Soth's America, is up until January 2nd. I haven't seen the expression used in any of the ephemera from the Walker, but in NY terms this would be a mid-career retrospective - a vague term which isn't meant to be the mid-point of someone's career (or one hopes it isn't). At first I thought the exhibit seemed rather small, but when I tried to make a general count of the images, there's a LOT.

My guess is that the initial minimal effect was the result of deep-seated memories of images from the books Sleeping by the Mississippi & Niagara, which were missing. Although both bodies of work are well represented - less can equal more in this case. & while the books can be the defining forms for groups of images, there are very cogent relations between all the various projects, in discreet mural prints on the white cube walls of the museum.

The writer Marguerite Young would pontificate about the Midwest as a psychic landscape, as being one step away from a great void, on the edge of a sea of nothingness. Civilization is thin and provisional. One is cut off from one's home or past, yet one always in proximity to them.

Marguerite Young comes to mind in looking at Alec Soth's work, as I find it suffused with a great deal of anomie, a sense of dread even, although usually balanced with amazing arrays of resilience. Another title I could give to the work, cribbing from Ken Jacobs, would be Little Stabs at Happiness.

Soth's projects are given provisional geographic barriers. Besides the Mississippi & Niagara work (both sites more prominent in 19th century culture) there is a very sad little book, of 4x6 prints with text, entitled The Loneliest Man in Missouri, which was shot in parking lots, in motels, outside strip bars - the landscape one could find in the Maysles Brothers' film Salesman. In tandem with the book there is also a video of a middle-aged man reading aloud The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, with a stripper next to him, with overlaid sound of a recording by T.S. Eliot (a St. Louis boy after all) reading the poem as well. As absurd as the video is, it still carries a great deal of intensity - that sort of paradox, which can make me laugh as much as sense a great emptiness all around, seems the general theme of the work.

The work is full of a great deal of wit & observation, so perhaps my description of its existential cries can seem ridiculous, but I think the tension between levity & gravity are what inform it.

I was also struck by the language of the ephemera from the museum stressing the "eccentricity" of the "outsiders" portrayed, like the cast in a film. "Different" in the Midwest can be synonymous with wrong or bad or just plain crazy. I guess what seemed odd about that to me as I have always been struck by how deeply ordinary the people in Soth's photographs are - my sense is he just listens better than most people, & he's not interested in people clinging to convention as much as mutating in them. Each person can narrate a different cosmology. There is something very sensitive about how the people are photographed - the photographer is very present in the images, the interactions are apparent. In various interviews Soth describes himself as shy. Which doesn't mean uninvolved. I don't know if any of this means much - institutions like the Walker have to frame their artists in a general way, so the viewer can make a meta-narrative of the excesses of work.

The most anomalous image is of William Eggleston at home - anomalous in his fame, that is - Eggleston is also at home in Memphis, on the Mississippi, after all. Given the various celebrity treatments of Eggleston, this is immaculately composed, but shot from the shadows, behind French doors, almost like a surveillance image. It shows us an Eggleston who is very elegant, but not there to engage with the viewer or to enact himself for the camera. It reminds me of the last line of Touch of Evil: What can you say about a man? He was some kind of a man.

The last body of work is for the upcoming book Broken Manual. The images are not geographically bound, but all involve an idea of leaving society, going to the woods, running away, for contemplation, safety, disappearance. Monks. Conspiracy Theorists. A nude guy w/ a swastika tattooed on his shoulder. Treehouses. Graffiti. The books will be small books concealed inside large books, hidden, like their subjects, like contraband.

If I think about what is in the show - isolation, anguish, boredom, frustration, depression, rebellion, destruction, aversion to the social or the status quo; all are dealt with in a contemplative manner which give it all a curious lightness.

I've been isolated for the past 4 months, high above Cayuga's waters. Happy am I to have found this show.

greetings from Ithaca, NY

What hath God wrought? was the message Samuel Morse telegraphed between Washington DC & Baltimore in 1844 to demonstrate the efficacy of the technology. The telegraph lines were built by Ezra Cornell, who built a great fortune from such construction, which, in turn, funded the university where I will reside for 2 years.

RIP Christoph Schlingensief

22.08.2010
Germany mourns loss of director Christoph Schlingensief

A day after the passing of divisive and provocative German director Christoph Schlingensief, the country's art and culture communities continue to mourn the loss of a truly innovative artist.
The eclectic and influential theater and opera director Christoph Schlingensief died on Saturday, August 21, at the age of 49, after a two-year battle with lung cancer.

Schlingensief directed numerous movies, plays and operas, including an internationally recognized production of "Parsifal" for the Wagner summer festival in the southern German city of Bayreuth in 2004.

He was a star of Germany's state-funded theater world who gained a name for himself with guerrilla-style performance art on city streets by his own acting troupe that puzzled shoppers.

Complex artist

The divisive figure often sought out controversy in his works, and was considered "one of the most important artists in the country," according to the director of the Museum for Modern Art in Frankfurt, Susanne Gaensheimer.

Germany's state commissioner for culture, Bernd Neumann, also recognized Schlingensief as among the most multi-faceted and innovative artists on the country's culture scene. He said that Schlingensief had had an immense influence on German-language film and theater.

"Provocation was not a rare part of his stylistic device," Neumann said. "With this he sought to trigger controversy and irritation."

Berlin's mayor Klaus Wowereit said on Saturday that "a major talent in theater has left the stage."

Works remembered

Meanwhile, the Berlin Academy of the Arts, which recently assumed control of Schlingeneif's archived works and was planning a public exhibition with the artist, has spoken of the loss of a man who wove together the many fabrics of German society.

Schlingensief contained an "immensely explosive force, artistically and politically," said the academy's president, Klaus Staeck.

"In all his works, beginning with his first cinematic attempts right up to his great opera stagings, it was about the exploration of the relationship between politics, art and society," Staeck said. "And so we are now responsible for his archive, which has found a place in our academy."

Life dedicated to controversy

Schlingensief made headlines after casting neo-Nazi skinhead amateur actors in his rendition of Shakespeare's "Hamlet," burning an effigy of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, and wearing a placard with the message "Kill Helmut Kohl," in reference to the former German chancellor.

In Vienna, Schlingensief created a television show called "Auslaender Raus!" ("Foreigners Out!") which denounced the rise of populism and racism.

The program was a send-up of the Big Brother reality TV show in which asylum seekers lived inside containers similar to those that deported Jews during World War II. Every week the public would vote to evict an asylum seeker not from the show, but from the country.

In 1998, Schlingensief founded the political party "Opportunity 2000" and took part in national elections, asking people to vote for themselves.

He also invited people to join an anti-chancellor swim in the then-chancellor Helmut Kohl's holiday retreat in Lake Wolfgang in Austria. His aim was to cause the lake to overflow with six million people in it, the number representing Germany's unemployed at the time.

Author: Darren Mara (AFP/dpa)
Editor: Toma Tasovac
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