Between the hand and the lip the morsel may sleep. A man must plough with such an axe as he has. You have a handsome head of hair; pray, give me a tester. Undone, as a man would undo an oyster. If wishes were thrushes, beggars would eat birds. Knit my dog a pair of breeches, and my cat a cod-piece. She was a neat dame that washed the ass’s face. Jack Sprat could teach his grandame.

Several of Mallarmé’s English proverbs turn out, for those who read beyond the index, to be examples of French proverbs quoted by Ray in English translation: the conceptual loops implied by this are dizzying, but Mallarmé probably didn’t mean them to be there. He kept his 600 franc advance.
 
The biblical story of Salome and John the Baptist held a lifelong fascination for Mallarmé. Neither of the gospel accounts gives the girl’s name, and Mallarmé preferred to follow an old tradition which called her by her mother’s name, Herodias:

The most beautiful page of my work will be the one which only contains this divine name Hérodiade. The little inspiration I have had, I owe to this name, and I believe that if my heroine had been called Salome, I would have invented this sombre word, red as an open pomegranate.

Mallarmé began his ‘Hérodiade’ in 1864, when he was 22 years old: it was conceived first as a tragedy, then as a poem, and finally abandoned in the years of deep existential crisis that left Mallarmé largely silent through the later 1860s. Only one fragment of the work was published during Mallarmé’s lifetime, a dramatic scene of 134 lines which appeared in Le Parnasse contemporain in 1871. The scene is a dialogue between Hérodiade and her aged nurse, in which the nurse makes three advances towards the girl, offering a kiss, a bottle of perfume, and to set a fallen lock of hair back in place. Each advance is repelled, and Hérodiade delivers a long soliloquy in favour of her own diamond-like virginity, furiously rejecting the nurse’s suggestion that she might one day marry. At the end, she asks the nurse to leave, and addresses her own lips:

O naked flower of my lips,
You are lying!
I await an unknown thing
Or perhaps, not knowing the mystery and your cries,
You emit the supreme, bruised sobbing
Of a childhood sensing among daydreams
Its cold gemstones break apart at last.

In the last few years of Mallarmé’s life, he took up the Hérodiade project again, under the title The Wedding of Hérodiade: a Mystery Play. These fragmentary and multiply-overwritten drafts are in Mallarmé’s most irreducibly complex and ambiguous late (in fact posthumous) manner, but the most remarkable thing about them is that he seems to have meant the dramatic scene, written in the 1860s and quite different in style, to be inserted unchanged into their midst. The Hérodiade of the 1860s asks the nurse to leave; the Hérodiade of the 1890s complains, in the barely-sketched ‘Intermediate Scene’ which follows, that she still hasn’t left:

Who has by no means legitimately as is fitting
(Dark empty secret still there on its feet)
Vanished like a century-old plumage
[ ] is becoming worn out
Silently but remains fixed
In this vain hesitation in taking leave
While around its sachet of old heavy black silk
Hovers, is formulated [ ] and falters
The message [ ] about the features
Of the fiancé [ ] I cannot well know.

On one level it’s a startlingly lazy gesture of selfrecycling. On another it’s one of the weirdest moments in all literature. It’s as if the curtain had never gone down on Clov’s failure to exit the stage at the end of Beckett’s Endgame, leaving him standing there in plain sight for thirty years. The thing that won’t leave the room is ultimately ‘Hérodiade’ itself, the work that wouldn’t allow itself to be abandoned. By refusing to paper-over the cracks that open up inside any voice which has had more than one occasion to speak, Mallarmé is both acknowledging how far he has come, and asserting a fundamental unity assembled from his fragmented, time-shifting selves. It may be as close as we’ll get to knowing what Le Livre, with its multiple demonstrations of unity-in-permutation, might have felt like.
 
There’s an obvious pathos, though, in the figure of the nursemaid who never leaves the room. It’s as if Mallarmé, whose mother died when he was five years old, can’t quite bring himself to cling to the memory of a real mother, only an almost-mother. The very naming of Hérodiade, daughter of Hérodiade, seems to minimise the possibilities of motherhood in favour of something more like cloning. I think the truth is more direct, though no less moving. Mallarmé had been put out to nurse: his first recorded memory is of being with his grandmother shortly after his mother’s death, and becoming aware that he wasn’t feeling the grief people expected from him. In his embarrassment, he decided to throw himself down on the tiger-skin rug and tear at his own long hair. His first memory of grief was of his own staging of its simulacrum; sometimes a nurse is just a nurse.

It’s a Magical World (2005), shown on the first night – presents a group of young children from Zagreb, rehearsing a song written in 1968 by Sidney Barnes of the band Rotary Connection. Billing might have devised the situation and chosen the song, but the work’s participations seem relatively unenforced. There is something raw and plaintive about the children’s open and unsuspicious involvement, in fact. Sung in a language that they barely understand, their lips following the song’s enchanted lyrics (‘Why d’you want to wake me from such a beautiful dream, can’t you see that I’m sleeping… I live in a magical world…’) – the film has the makings of a metaphor for Croatia’s new sense of future and impending Westernisation. It’s a Magical World, like most of Billing’s films, is looped without pause or break that induces the film to be seen more than once, indeterminately or otherwise. This sense of circularity not only emphasises the rhythmic patterns of the situation and song (their codependency, also), but somehow encrypts the sense of time passing; the magical world that the children sing of, kept perennial.

While the collaborative nature of the work and its quasi-documentary mode is both typical of Billing’s work, It’s a Magical World is something of an exception in the participation of young children. The greater majority of Billing’s work involves the participation of an older, more independent bunch. In works such as Project for a Revolution, we see a group of students listlessly and silently sit about a large room, as if waiting for something (a revolution, perhaps?). Or, I’m Lost Without Your Rhythm, featuring a group of similarly aged dancers in an experimental choreography workshop led by the eminent Anna Vnu.

Is it a cynical mis-appropriation to make anything of the cutely spectacled and quirky-fashioned students that populate these films? Is it a travesty on the part of this writer to be recognizing the good looks hidden behind the fringes of arty middle European boys and girls? In recognizing the way that Billing’s participants assert and submit their particular individuality in the dynamic of group situations, these questions might have some validity after all. The individualities and identities that are often present in Billing’s works are the modern, dialectical type. They are the fashions of new freedoms in one sense, but also fashions learnt from another generation’s coy aesthetics of arty collectivity. Billing’s films are delicate in how they involve participation, and though the situation is orchestrated by the artist (often in conjunction with musicians and other practitioners), it comes across that the participants do more than simply participate, but actively negotiate their subjecthood.

A similar negotiation takes place in Billing’s ongoing project, You Don’t Love Me Yet. Presented as an archive of documentary materials at the National Sculpture Factory for the entire three-day programme, You Don’t Love Me Yet is a multipart project that invites local musicians in different cities to perform a cover Rocky Erickson’s 1984 song of the same name. As the title suggests, it’s song about love and its anticipations of return, which in the different versions seems to renew its particular address. The documentation of these various performances might allow us to compare styles, instrumentation, and competency between one version and the next. And yet the project is less a musical typology, and more a conduction of the subjective spirit that lives and repeats through popular music.
Perhaps doubly because of its muteness and its focus on a single individual, Where She Is At first of all seems like a very different work. In the 7 minutes 35 seconds of the film’s duration, we witness the hesitation of a young woman at the high diving tower at the Ingierstrand Baths in Oslo. The diving tower itself is one of the last remaining examples of functionalist architecture in Oslo, designed in 1934 by Ole Lind Schistad and Eyvind Mostute. As the woman wavers at the edge of the board, deliberating the jump into the water below, we could read the situation as a metaphor for the historicity of individual action, set against the collective consciousness of the public architecture and baths. Like much of Billing’s work, Where She Is At postpones the delivery of what seems imminent. Eventually and significantly, she jumps.

Johanna Billing was on view at the National Sculpture Factory, 11-13 November 2011.

It has come such a long way in the last 20 years. In the beginning, there were certainly a small number of artists who could be called ‘contemporary’. Then, a whole generation of contemporary artists arrived. I can call them a generation, because they are almost all in their late 30s. We started to work with this group. There was a generation gap between us and them: we are from the 60s / 70s generation and they were considerably younger. Now an even younger generation has arrived: they are in their 20s; they are doing so well; they are well-exposed. It’s not local work, it’s quite international. I feel this is important. And Istanbul has become a centre of activity, drawing artists in. I am really happy about that.

Towards an Expanded Practice

I come from ‘painting’, I graduated from a fine arts academy as a painter. But this corresponded with a time of intense politicisation, the time known as the May ’68 period. And when I was a student, I found myself within this movement, the Turkish manifestation of a world movement. Back then to keep to the surface of the painting was political, and I was feeling a kind of power as a young person and as a student. I found this stressful: the surface of painting wasn’t enough. I tried to do other things: theatre, film, things like that. And back then, there was so much depression. Then Turkey was taken over by a kind of military regime. For five years I couldn’t really think or do anything. But when I returned to work, when I tried to express myself again, I found I had to do things differently. I felt I could not make ‘pure art’, art for art’s sake: there had to be something I could tell, I could express.

I looked for ways to do this and produced a painting that was about migration, movement, humanity. The subject seemed to naturally lead towards installation as a way of treating it –installation spoke more than painting – and then on to video. But I do not limit myself to one medium or another: I can do installation, video, video in installation, or even go back to painting. Whatever one I use it’s still contemporary art. They are just my means of expression.

From Trellis of Mind to Mystic Transport

First expression comes, and then form. Then they mingle. Mystic Transport was an installation, an installation that moved, kinetic in a way. But, Trellis of Mind was more in the tradition of painting, of wall painting. It was a wall-frieze, 20 metres long when it was first done in Kassel. I didn’t employ traditional ways of making a wall painting: it’s made up of transparent photocopies. When they overlap, they bring about a new kind of sense. What I was trying to combine were the various religions: mingling Christian, Jewish and Muslim images. The transparent photo copies, which I put together quite randomly, combined to make a really strong image that gave an insight into the different religions: I didn’t understand what crossed over between the different faiths, but all these religious stories seemed to be thinking about the same thing.

That’s what’s behind Trellis of Mind. Of course it’s also about the city I live in. If you walk around Istanbul you can easily find yourself in front of a Christian church, with a mosque on your right and a synagogue behind you. That was my starting point.

Mystic Transport is about moving, immigration, and constant travel. What the wire baskets contain are Turkish quilt blankets. In Turkish culture there is a saying about these quilts: ‘if you have one in your bag, you can go anywhere in the world’. They cover you and they keep you warm. And that’s all you need. My idea was that I put the Turkish quilts into the baskets, and as they were moved into the exhibition space, so they were free to move on to anywhere else in the world. I made that piece in 1992, but the quilts are still moving from one place to another to this day.

Transit Immigration / Unawarded Performances

I’m very attracted to the question of immigration, and I try to find out all I can on the subject, but I’m not sure how well qualified I am to speak on the subject: I speak about it through my art. The final decade of the 20th century was a very good time to think about the situation: there was a general reflection on what had happened as regards migration.

Transit immigration is a particular kind of immigration: the immigrants don’t stay in the new country, they move on again. They come and go: you find this kind of immigration from the early 90s onwards, when the Soviet Union fell and the regimes changed across Eastern Europe. Turkey was the most liberal and the richest country in the region, so you had a large migration into Istanbul. A whole new economy started out of their suitcases: prostitution, mafia – there was so much trafficking of women then.

The Moldavian situation was very meaningful because we hadn’t known for years that there was a community speaking Turkish in Moldavia (the Gagauz people). When the borders were opened, they began to arrive in Istanbul and Ankara, looking for work. Only women came, elderly women in particular: they came to work and save their money for when they returned to their families. The piece Unawarded Performances, about the Moldavian immigrants, was commissioned by projekt migration in Köln in 2005.

Prayer Rug with Elvis

There was a great amount of emigration from the Turkish countryside in the mid-80s. When I lived in Istanbul as a student, there was a population of 2 million; but by the end of the 80s it was 15 million. I was very interested in this migration from the countryside to the city: it wasn’t just a matter of moving but also of changing cultural scene, and I found this cultural change fascinating. Istanbul was changing: the scene developing, diaspora and immigration, something happening all the time. Then kitsch appeared, it was everywhere, and there were very few subjects not touched by it. So I thought, ‘why not?’ I made a lot of work with kitsch around then, including the carpet with an image of Elvis. Traditionally carpet-making is women’s work and I have no problem with that. So I wove it all myself.
 
10 November 2010

He is devoid of facial features or identity, his body hollow except for a crooked black line that runs from mouth to bladder, which drips a trail of droplets down the stairs behind him. These drawings are all simply executed in media found in any schoolbag. The simplicity of style combined with disturbing narratives packs a powerful psychological punch.

 
While other pieces are not so overtly critical, they each explore other aspects of the effect of institutional control upon education. A series of silkscreen prints by Christian Philipp Müller engages with the role and status of exhibition galleries in universities, rather than individual experiences of learning. The prints depict the ground plans of ten international universities in grey, overlaid with the plan of the University of Luneburg in red. This simple visual device reduces a discourse around the role of art and museums and their relationship to universities as systems of patronage, to vaguely pleasing abstract compositions. The accompanying text provides a context that changes the meaning of the prints from formalist compositions to visual manifestations of the relationship between museum and education, be it public or private.
 
Many of the works require time and close attention, which ensures that the message is not lost amidst the eclectic and aesthetically varied show. On the contrary, it is the variety of investigation that is the strength of this exhibition, from personal reflections on the impact of the school routine, to more political investigations into the operations of educational bodies, provoking the viewer to think about aspects of education usually hidden from sight.
 
 
School Days: the Look of Learning was on view at the Lewis Glucksman Gallery 1 December – 20 March 2011.

Is as much preproduction as it is postproduction: concerned less with absolute origins than with obscure traces (perhaps ‘anarchival impulse’ is the more appropriate phrase), these artists are often drawn to unfulfilled beginnings or incomplete projects – in art and in history alike – that might offer points of departure again.

The work of Galway artist Majella Dowdican plays through many of the possibilities outlined by Foster, engaging in a sustained way with many of its key themes, ‘idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects, and events’. In her mixed media work, comprising of pen and ink drawings, painting, sculpture, and installation, Dowdican presents the beholder with images of the already made, the already done. Her uncanny, humorous and illustrative drawings detail a world of bizarre little men at odds with the world. Her wall sculptures and installations are built from the leftovers of a bureaucratic world, such as paper and cardboard—the very medium of the traditional archive. Dowdican’s is a world of prefabrication, a world where we our left to deal with the already made, the ‘post-production’ of every little thing that we encounter. But what does it mean to prefabricate something?

To build, to make: to fabricate.
To pre-fabricate.
We arrive and everything is already done. It is already finished.
A queer, uncanny feeling.
A world where everything is already built. A world where we have space but we seem to have no space.

It is these, and other thoughts, which arise from the encounter with Dowdican’s work. All her work has the air of the recycled—especially her paintings, a semi-abstract world of an empty city, their surfaces scratched and gouged to reveal their significance of their content through their form. We can imagine perhaps that in these painted worlds, these painted buildings, that there are archives still, full of information, awaiting only some to encounter them, someone to sieve through there facts and fiction.
 
For Foster, the archive is a place where all appears ‘both found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private’. The archive is there for the artist to use, but it also precedes them. Dowdican’s is of course a private amalgamation of imagery, but it is as equally public. The exhibition details not only the way she makes art, but also the ways in which she collects various images and ideas from the bureaucratic world and incorporates them into her practice. The little paper world of her installation, spread out all over the gallery floor, is fictive of course, like a abandoned film set. But it also speaks to us of our own factual world— an Ireland of abandoned housing estates and empty building—a post Celtic Tiger world were we are left to sort thought the bureaucratic mess left over.
 
Fabricated and pre-fabricated: something simultaneously already made but always being made.
The prefabricated cardboard box.
The prefabricated cardboard home.
 
Dowdican treats her materials with both sincerity and delicacy, showing us how, both literally and metaphorically, we can perhaps step into these prefabricated worlds of hers and negotiate them with the little sovereignty we have left. Her world is a world where the unknown is nothing metaphysical, but rather just another possibility that we have yet to uncover. Simple works such as Settle Yourself (2010) – a small pen and acrylic drawing – show us a confused individual confronted by a giant cardboard box containing (it seems) a whole prefabricated city.

There is no scream.
Only an attempt at understanding. Where now. Who now. When now.

Other works are much more ambitions in their attempt to convey to us this feeling of the all readymade. Indeed, the mixed media works (and the one installation) seem to succeed better than the few paintings in the exhibition, such as Nowhere Everywhere (2010). Though this is perhaps a reflection on the precarious state of contemporary painting, and it says more about my own uneasiness in allowing the oil-on-canvas to remain something capable of producing ambitious art.
 
But AWOL (2010), a simple oil painting on linen, may seem to answer this call: it includes a little ladder, fabricated from thread and matchsticks, which descends from the representation of the painted building (is it factory or a school?—both sites founded upon archivization) on to the actual gallery floor. Is this our escape? From the endgame of each painted world? Or is it just another self-reflexive trick, taken form the modernist toolbox, a way to draw attention to the medium itself? As with much contemporary art, all of Dowdican’s mixed media works (and her single installation) court the strategies of post-minimalism and Arte Povera in that they are both interested in the semiotic possibilities of the materials, the feelings or desire that may or may not exude from our encounter with them, and also in their attempt to reach beyond their own frame.
 
The power of Dowdican’s art is that it does not just allow us to look at it. Many of the works are placed awkwardly before us—on the floor, above or below our eye level, out of reach. We need to lean into them, raise or lower ourselves to them, in order for us to think about them. It is a world gone slightly askew—a world where we have words but no things to receive them.
 
Take Tampered Territory (2010), for example. Two cuboids secured to the wall; inside them, a number of elegantly trimmed branches; tied to them and falling all the way to the floor, eight little pieces of string. A work such as this certainly asks us to contemplate both its construction and its meaning. But how does this work address the prefabricated conditions of our social situations? Is it through its juxtaposition of natural and constructed worlds?
 
While its process of production is indeed laid out before us (and indeed all of Dowdican’s work does this), the gap between idea (the presentation of an archived world) and object (a strange amalgam of found and construction things) is pressing. Dowdican’s work does not come easy to us in that we have to spend time with it, analysing the correspondence both between works and also reflecting on the relationship between her mediums and the content they purport to show.
 
But that is not to say it is not worth pondering over, in spite of the games it play with us, to us. All art, in the contemporary sense of the word, demands an effort from us precisely because it asks us to consider not only its own time (the time we spend in front of it) but also the historical time, the learned strategies, of all the art which precedes it—how did Dowdican get to this point, why does she use such as such materials, what are her own artistic influences?
 
For Foster, ‘perhaps the paranoid dimension of archival art is the other side of its utopian ambition’. And of course, we can see this in operation in Dowdican’s exhibition: her paper cut-outs, her cardboard cities; all of them they to try to rebuild themselves from the already broken—a paranoid world of paper words and worlds—a world so full of information, that it does not inform us.
 
 
Majella Dowdican’s work was on view at the Galway Arts Centre, 11-21 January 2011.

seizes the moment and leaps into the spirit of World Cup celebration, matching the excitement that is running like an electric current through this country. It is an excitement generated not only by the football, or the novelty of hosting hundreds of thousands of foreign visitors — it is the exhilaration of seeing ourselves with new eyes, as part of the larger world, and of standing together as one nation behind one team, the experience of national pride legitimated.

Can you hear the blaring vuvuselas? Crowded shows, however, are self-defeating. Most often, bloated themes and egos, universal clichés, or simple randomness define the selection. Art is transformed into tourism and the more there is to see the better. Looking at the art for any significant period is pretty much out of the question.
 
According to the press release, the show at Iziko had two primary aims: ‘[T]o show the Gallery’s permanent collection as well as a reflective selection of art from around the country’. A reflective selection? What about all the clutter then? Where, beyond disingenuous platitudes about ‘the soul of our nation’, was the lucid theme, the Ariadne’s thread, the astute discernment, the rhythm or rhyme? Showcasing art from ‘the length and breadth of this country’, against the backdrop of World Cup hype, smacked of political sentimentalism, hubris and blatant opportunism. The exhibition clearly catered for the expected influx of tourists to Cape Town during the World Cup, which is perhaps only good business sense. Although the initial plan was to stage a football-themed exhibition, this was scrapped late in the day in favour of the current exhibit. Either way, mass spectatorship was central to the exhibition and from this perspective, more is better, including more branding. But more is often less. And if curator Naidoo really wanted to make an entrance, he could’ve done better with a more thoughtful and careful show; one in which less was more. Instead of giving viewers the time to make mindful connections, the show reminded me of a cobbled together student art exhibition trying hard to make a big splash and to be revolutionary all at once.
 
In a recent essay on creative exhibition practices published in the journal PMLA, Dutch theorist Mieke Bal invokes four ‘conceptual metaphors’ to ‘discriminate between innovation and chaos’. She suggests that exhibitions might be structured like poems, narratives, theatre, or film. Exhibitions may be like visual poems, in terms of their regular contrasts and repetitions; subtlety, nuance, and sensory effect; subtle counterpoints, between quietness and loudness; coherence of the ensemble. Exhibitions produce a narrative, when the visitor ‘follows an itinerary with a beginning and end, one that develops over time, marked by specific rhythms and events that emerge in the interaction between visitor and the objects’. Narratological unfolding doesn’t presume chronology; but it does imply focalisation by ‘the expository agent’. Implicitly countering American art historian and critic Michael Fried’s notion of ‘bad’ theatricality, Bal appeals to ‘good’ theatricality. Exhibitions and theatre have in common the use of lighting and the emotional and intellectual response of visitors to what they see; acting and performance; fiction and artifice; the appeal to an audience. An exhibition is cinematic when its visual and spatial arrangement suggests animation through minute shots; dissolves and fades; close-up, medium and long shots; and cuts and pans.
 
The four conceptual metaphors usefully deployed by Bal — all of which imply composition, focalisation, rhythm, movement, unfolding in time and space, interaction and animation, push and pull — were absent from this exhibition. Other metaphors could also have been deployed, such as the zig-zag, morphing, extending and protraction, tracing and erasure of memory or even Michael Fried’s dialectical notion of absorption and theatricality, which could be a meaningful way to rethink big art shows. Opting to be ‘interesting’ at the level of docile information — on display were ‘important moments in South African history’ —the show simply lacked the finesse and dynamism of Bal’s conceptualising, while offering little conceptual and critical rigour of its own. The exhibition began confusingly, and ended with a whimper. What happened in between hardly managed to hold my attention for longer than it takes to skim through a ‘Best of’ record — except that this record clumped everything together.
 
The beginning of the exhibition augured the unfocused jumble that followed. The entrance foyer of the gallery was given over to a rather thin, narcissistic show within the show. Entitled Us, it was curated by Simon Njami and Bettina Malcomess and featured, amongst its lesser stars, the current, overrated art world fad Hasan and Husain Essop. To the right of this exhibition, the viewer was confronted with the tail end of the main exhibition, featuring, amongst other works, the irritating ‘talking’ Amanji Amdaka (2009-2010) by The Gugulective, who are referred to in the show’s title, as well as Andrew Lamprecht’s arbitrary if potentially self-reflexive ‘curiosity cabinet’, Meum et tuum (2010). Pierneef, the other name featured in the show’s title, hung next door, in the room to the right of the foyer. The easy display of one of Wayne Barker’s slick parodies of Pierneef’s ideologically motivated landscapes, next to a Pierneef, hardly made a postmodernist bang.
 
I felt fatigued, irritated, dejected, and frustrated wandering through the other rooms of the gallery, with their arbitrary arrangements and sudden inspirations. Let’s group a couple of portraits of Steve Biko together, here in the corner! Let’s have a room devoted to abstract art! Here, let’s hang a couple of landscapes together! Indeed, trying to see art or design in a crowded room soon became an exercise in futility, or, at the very least, star spotting.
 
Nevertheless, the show included some fine artworks, rescued from the hazy past. Kevin Atkinson’s dense, conceptual painterly abstractions, like White African Landscape (1982), demonstrates that abstraction was fruitfully explored in South Africa even when theorists who punted resistance art criticised it for being unengaged politically or, worse, complicit with a totalitarian regime. Brecht was then one of the models of criticism, rather than Adorno. Jo Ractliff’s haunting “drive-by” photographic strip Vlakplaas (1999) conjures the cloudiness and fuzziness of this disturbed site where currently incarcerated Eugene de Kock ordered the torture and murder of several ANC foot soldiers during apartheid. Noel Hodnett’s muscular, virtuoso Eastern Cape landscape oil painting, Euphorbias in Pluto’s Valley (1992), is painted in the mode of the ‘Grahamstown School’, whose emphasis on landscape painting during South Africa’s apartheid years seems so out of joint but worth revisiting. At the other end of the spectrum of criticism levelled against abstraction, Michael Goldberg, whose industrial grey and yellow killing machine From Here to There (1981), is on view, has been unfairly criticised for being too political, too heavy-handed, a ‘lefty’. In Sibusiso Duma’s thoughtfully modest painting When Father Comes Back (1997), the small father figure in the foreground, with his back turned to us like the monk in Caspar David Friedrich’s well-known painting of 1809-10, ambiguously serves as go-between and barrier preventing access to the tangled histories and stories of rural life in South Africa. If only the exhibition were as thoughtfully focalised around a similarly complex motif.
 
And there were some wonderful discoveries: Cape Town photographer Svea Josephy’s light jet prints Barcelona, Cape Town (Near N2) (2007) and Barcelona, Spain (Pool) (2007) are as crystal clear, immaculate, and absorbing as American Stephen Shore’s photographs. Were the exhibition as poetically and cinematically designed and accomplished — illuminating ‘the depths that [are] possible in the slowing of motion, the things to see’, to cite American author Don DeLillo’s novel Point Omega (2010) — it would have given time, space, and meaning to the time spent.
 

I am, however, deeply sceptical of big, blockbuster shows like this one. In a global art context, the free flow of information, in the form of vast collections of images intended for masses of spectators, perpetuates all too often the glut of commerce, denying time and space for thoughtful engagement, or for contemplating ‘the depths of things so easy to miss in the shallow habit of seeing’, to cite DeLillo again. While the buzz and tourist attraction of big art shows offer the viewer or customer ‘more and more’, so that he or she ‘can wish nothing further’ (to cite Umberto Eco writing about museums, in his essay ‘Travels in Hyperreality’), they in fact offer little more than arbitrary arrangements of arbitrary art. Even if the art is not arbitrary, the big show makes it seem so.

 
So, beyond ‘institutionalised cultural showmanship’ (Eco again, this time in ‘Culture as Show Business’), what is the point? Even if it is true that some models of contemplation were relegated to the dustbin of history a long time ago, along with Kant, Greenberg and Adorno, why are we here in the first place, if we can’t see the trees for the crowded art? Can’t we ask South African art exhibitions to offer us more occasions of quiet contemplation, time and space, and to engage with fluid, mobile and interwoven constellations of meaning – the kind of occasions and engagements that bring us to our senses?
 
 
1910-2010: From Pierneef to Gugulective was on view 16 April — 3 October 2010.

On the basis of this line-up it must be admitted that Terminal Convention will indeed be a, if not the major art event this year in Cork, at least. The premise, that a biennale-like event can be staged in an environment that, in theory, mirrors its activities, by means of commercial supports that operate in plain view of the event’s participants (that are, indeed, integrated into the event’s working), seems no less practical and inspiring for its opportunism. The event will be blind to many aspects of the building’s individual character and its relation to its locale, but then again, the old Cork Airport terminal, despite its parochialness and the bizarre sample of a gas fireplace that used to greet passengers in the baggage retrieval area, remained that exemplary social space, the international airport.

 
How exemplary was made clear to me as I sat in the waiting area of Heathrow’s Terminal 3, one afternoon in the busy Christmas period. The place was crowded, and in constant motion: a complex of commercial, biological and practical flows. In short, it was a largescale, enclosed organisation of people, a working, upto-the-minute social model. Its troubling aspects were easily discerned: the serviced democracy within was rigidly exclusive, citizenship here was offered only after intense security screening and credit approval – we were those who had submitted to examination of our identity and possessed, at least temporarily, a certain level of affluence. This ‘affluent’ status was reflected everywhere by the outlets for global brands, especially those dealing in luxury items. On the other hand it was hard not to perceive a utopian dimension to the same space: all the races and nations of the earth appeared to be represented, co-existing peacefully. More than that, a disproportionate number of the travelling families seemed to be of mixed-race: outside the Slavic-serviced Italian café my own Fenno-Hibernian trio was trumped by a South American-English quartet at the next table, and across the way a white North American with a partner from India tried to entertain two American-accented children. In this enclave of internationalism old identities seemed to be in flux, unforming and reforming. It occurred to me that my surroundings amounted to the imaginary of the nomadic contemporary artist, those who follow the credit-flows to their biennial poolings, maintaining studios in Jakarta and Berlin.
 
It was a space with a starkly functional, ahistorical shell, brought to social life by ubiquitous instructions and directions, post-literary symbols and slogans and the punctuation of identity by advertisement images: a supremely visual zone, in which the slippery, critical nomadic artist would have all the expertise of the ‘native tracker’.
 
Is this a ‘coming community’, to borrow Agamben’s phrase? Of course between the police-governed perimeter and the utopian congregation was all the banality of airport culture, the twin of biennale art in Byrne’s account. But I cannot imagine that such speculative thoughts will not also arise among the visitors to Terminal Convention – about a future that has been in operation in the present since at least the post-war construction of Idlewild. And what about the present possibility of the ruin of that futurity? What makes Terminal Convention possible, after all, is the redundancy of a building that, despite its parochialness, was once ahead of the contemporary.
 
 
Terminal Convention ran from March 17th – 27th 2011.

In terms of form, Beuys is clearly uninterested in the Platonic or technicist aesthetic possibilities of formalism. This, of course, is a trait held in common with many wartime and post-war artists –hence the elaboration of Georges Bataille’s concept of the Informe by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss. Beuys, however, is not an artist of the ‘formless’: what appears in his work is a combination of the half-formed and the post-formed, of objects, often made of clay, still bearing the artist’s hand-print, and seemingly on their way to some more distinctive shape, but caught at a moment of their development; and of objects that, by extreme usage or immersion in a space of violent conditions (a furnace perhaps), have lost their sense of final shape and readiness for use. In terms of materials, Beuys’ sculptural works can be divided roughly into two modes: the ‘grey-brown’ and the ‘black’. The former is the most familiar; I registered the existence of the latter for the first time at this exhibition – the shining black of bakelite and ebony giving an odd sense of ‘industrial luxury’, perhaps, in the surrounding pauperdom. My first thought was to the parallel with Arte Povera, and with a Jannis Kounellis piece I had seen at a Tate retrospective some years ago – to my mind a resistance to the commodification of the artwork by the presentation of basic materials of commodity culture – iron ore, coke, etc. – so fundamental to industry as to provide a limit point to its commodificatory action. Then it occurred to me that the materials and, indeed, class of industry evoked, were curiously anachronistic for an artist working in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Beuys was not only putting on show the bare rudiments of an industrial culture, but those of a particular industrial culture, that of the thirties and forties. In the context of the work of a German artist it was very hard not to sense that here was an art concentratedly working through the detritus of the war and the Nazi era.

 
I don’t think that this would have occurred to me had the retrospective been filled out by references to the non-material work: in restricting themselves to the ‘serious’ museum pieces the curators had amplified what the critic Gene Ray has referred to as ‘the work of mourning’.¹ I had a niggling misgiving about this recognition and especially its calling to mind of Ray’s account: was what affected me among these objects an ‘Auschwitz aesthetic’?Did I automatically sense a solemnity to the work because of an innate resemblance to the images I’d absorbed of the remains of the extermination camps? Ray is clear on this point: there was never any suggestion of Beuys’ exploitation of these images, he was at pains to keep mention of the camps at a distance in his scattershot of public pronouncements, only letting his awareness of a deep concern for that era slip out once or twice in his career. Beuys had no qualms about exploiting other affairs – the media-friendly character of his appearance, for instance – if it promoted the work; but when a number of others had set up their stall as ‘Auschwitz artists’ he remained rigorously silent on the subject.
 
But in bringing this essential ‘mourning’ dimension to our attention Ray is remiss in terms of what Beuys did articulate: in short, what has often been seen as his ‘clownish’ side, his relentlessly positive Steiner-influenced politico-artistic agitation. If the unvoiced ‘work of mourning’ has its formal equivalent in the ‘post-formed’ objects – bearing the blows and scorching of the preceding violence, then the ‘half-formed’ links to the constant, garrulous propulsion of the same rudimentary materials towards a future. Beuys, in short, is a Janus-faced artist, at once a late-modernist elegist and a post-modern impresario, the same ‘post-modernism’ revealing itself here as a relentlessly positive openness to whatever new social forms or opportunities appeared in the post-war course of north-western history. I don’t think the two sides can finally be separated, and in a work like Lightning with Stag in its Glare a sense of their conjunction, albeit with the stress on the side of retrospection because of its materiality, can be felt.
 
For some reason the piece didn’t come off for me in its position in Parallel Processes, but I’ve felt the energy and registered the inherent artist’s trace when viewing it elsewhere (originally at Frankfurt’s Kunstverein). It is, as his Belgian contemporary Marcel Broodthaers intimated, when he slyly identified Beuys with Wagner in a famous open letter published in the ‘Dusseldorfer Feuilleton’, a Gesamtkunstwerk, an all-embracing maximal artistic effort suggesting the artist’s status as quasi-spiritual genius, but, significantly, it fails as such. The narratives, symbolism and theatrical action having withered away we are left with the remains: an ‘unformed’ artwork, or rather, an energy-bound configuration of the half-formed and post-formed. With boundless optimism, using the most rudimentary, and grave, materials, the ‘genius’ has made a huge attempt to bring a work of regeneration into being, and has been forced to abandon the effort in a state of incompletion, casting doubt on the genius’ status, or the possibility of renewal, but not on the artist’s positivity, or the gravity of his subject. Without the former (the spirit that announced that ‘democracy is fun’) the latter would not be articulated; and without the latter (the silent absorption in the legacy of wartime Germany) the former would have evaporated off as another haze of half-focused utopianism, typical of its heyday in the sixties.
 
1 ‘Joseph Beuys and the After-Auschwitz Sublime’ (Joseph Beuys: Mapping the Legacy, 2001).
 
 
Parallel Processes ran from September 11th 2010 –January 16th 2011.

Broodthaers had consistently constructed an artistic persona based upon the assertion of his own insincerity. He relentlessly drew attention to the commodity status of art, to his own self-promotion, and to the discursive and institutional formations in which art operates. The project for which he is best known, Museé d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, was initiated in 1968 in his Brussels appartment, and led a sporadic and polymorphous life until it was officially closed in 1972. One notorious manifestation of this fictional Museum happened in this very building – the Kunsthalle in Düsseldorf – in an installation entitled ‘The Eagle from the Oligocene to the Present’. This contained over 300 objects and artworks borrowed from various national and international museum collections, from bottle tops to oil paintings to temple statuary. Contracting the lessons of Magritte and Duchamp, each object was displayed with a small plaque bearing a catalogue number and the words ‘This is not a work of art’. This complex work is regarded as a foundational moment in the history of Installation Art and of Institution Critique, probing as it did the assumptions, authority and expository function of public museums.

 
Particularly during the 1970s, Broodthaers took on his contemporaries, needling the assumptions of Conceptual Art and pointedly countering the shamanic utopianism of Joseph Beuys, by way of an ingenious open letter, published in 1972. His critiques of bourgeois indolence and his exploration of the discourses of colonialism and conquest became more sustained during the mid-1970s, although still in 1974 Broodthaers would affirm, ‘The way I see it, there can be no direct connection between art and message, especially if the message is political, without running the risk of being burned by the artifice.’ Broodthaers’ work insistently, if obliquely, pressed upon political questions, the artist constantly mindful of the discursive formations in which he was embroiled, and of how hungry the culture industry is for the image of artist as free radical.
 
The present exhibition features the work of ten artists in four main galleries, with works by Stephen Prina, Kirsten Pieroth, Henrik Olesen and Susanne Winterling appearing in more than one room. Reflecting the heterogeneity of Broodthaers’s own (postmedium) practice, there was huge variability in the form the works took: found objects, newspapers, assisted readymades, photographs, postcards, slide shows, projected images, sound recordings and constructed environments. Much of the work was provisional in feel, rather low-tech and unassertive, and the display certainly required knowledge of Broodthaers’ work, amongst other things, to give it coherence. The curation allowed for connections to emerge gradually between works, but to say that these were not forced would be an understatement. Nevertheless, Olivier Foulon’s presentation of Whistler’s Ten O’Clock Lectures, translated into French by Mallarmé in 1888, connect in both theme and protagonist to Wyn Evans’ appropriation of Un coup de dès upstairs. Pieroth’s concern with literary voyages and cartographic practices is also nicely introduced by Andy Hope 1930’s small painted version of A Voyage on the North Sea. Nevertheless, the range of cultural references proliferates in dizzying fashion throughout the show. Édouard Manet, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Mallarmé, Whistler, Maurice Lemaître and Karl Robert are all directly referenced, and my sense was that the exhibition required such a high level of spectatorial literacy that few viewers would feel fully adequate to it (which is not necessarily a criticism of the show). Several artists made explicit reference to specific works by Broodthaers himself: Prina to the aforementioned Eagles exhibition, Wyn Evans to his Mallarmé work, Andy Hope 1930 to A Voyage on the North Sea, and Pieroth to The Conquest of Space. These were subtle, elegant and exacting revisitings, with Prina’s Retrospection Under Duress, Reprise (2000) being a particularly sophisticated reflection upon Broodthaers’ achievement. Framed photographs of items catalogued in Broodthaers’ Eagles show were laid out on four long strips of packing paper, as if awaiting their hanging. Each was accompanied by a plaque reading ‘What else could this be?’ and, at the end of the fourth column were colour photographs trained upon the lighting apparatus used to illuminate the Acropolis in such spectacular fashion. Broodthaers’ 1972 exhibition subtly illuminated the ideological foundations of public art museums, flagging their association with the symbol of the eagle (and all its connotations). Yet the public museum remained the arena in which he chose to operate, as one of the few public arenas where this kind of complex, critical practice could still take place. Prina seems equally aware of this tension, balancing a critical attention to the power dynamics and spectacular effects of the culture industry with an assertion of the intelligence and subtlety that the spaces of art might still provide.
 

Nevertheless, Prina’s address to the question of art’s political role remains rather oblique. Indeed, aside from Henrik Olesen’s explicit queering of our vision of 19th century art, the address to politics is even less direct than in Broodthaers’ own work. Broodthaers had antagonists, and he also repeatedly held up the signifiers of colonialism and institutional authority to be thought through and puzzled over. Perhaps because a good deal of the lessons of Institution Critique have been internalized by contemporary museums themselves, these dimensions of Broodthaers’ practice are not foregrounded in this exhibition. That is not to say that the agency of symbolic systems, boundaries and currencies are not present here – Winterling and Tuerlinckx, for example, certainly dwell on the establishment of such frames and demarcations – but these tend to be abstracted from specific discursive structures and other social systems.

 
Broodthaers emerges here as a progenitor of refined, cryptic and highly culturally literate forms of artistic labour. He licenses certain demands to be placed upon the viewer and, despite (or perhaps because of) his acute critical intelligence, offers a deceptively ambitious sense for what resources are available to art in order to save it from its status as merchandise. Art’s status as commodity, however, is not a key concern (it seemed to me) for any of the artists here. Perhaps this aspect of art’s predicament now simply goes without saying: yes, art is a commodity, but it is not reducible to that status and does what it can to surpass it (although not, here, challenge it very explicitly).
 
Indeed, as Rachel Haidu, in her major new study of Broodthaers (The Absence of Work, 2010), has noted, much of the artist’s reputation rests upon his inaccessibility. Is there a way in which this work operates through a seduction by way of obscurity?As Broodthaers himself says, the viewer must want to figure out the rebuses he presents, to read them and turn them over as meaningful if elusive signs. Given the concurrence of the major Beuys retrospective held video in the opposite building, it is instructive to compare, as Broodthaers himself did, his mode of obscurity to that of Beuys. If Beuys, arguably, relied upon a suspension of the critical faculties of his audience – so that the myth of the shamanic artist and the almost ritualistic significance of his materials could be felt –Broodthaers refused the injunction placed upon the artist to offer clear messages and instead placed the emphasis upon the problem of how meaning is made, and on what (and indeed whose) terms. Without antagonists, however, this Bartleby-like refusal loses some of its purchase, which is not to detract from the sophistication of the assembled contributions here, aimed as they are in other directions.
 
 
Real Presences: Broodthaers Today was on view at the Kunsthalle, Düsseldorf, 11 September 2010 – 16 January 2011.