There is of course nothing essentially ‘German’ or ‘French’ about the companies that are poised to buy infrastructure or public services in Greece – they are just companies, most of them multinational. But the fact that a promotion of their interests forms a part of political negotiations, which determine the fate of Greece, a sovereign state, clearly means that the projection of power that safeguards these interests is very much understood along national lines. It means, furthermore, that a certain notion of economic and political ‘unification’ – and even ‘solidarity’ – is being employed to force a sovereign state to abandon essential interests, at the expense of the well-being of its citizens, effectively transferring power not to supranational governing bodies in Brussels, as was the much debated case with EU legislation in previous years, but to other seats of national sovereignty.

Some supporters of current European policies argue that such observations are ‘nationalist’, a trait of Greece’s overall ‘backwardness’, which is after all the reason this country fails to keep up with the pace of ‘European modernisation’. What they fail to acknowledge, however, or they purposefully obfuscate, is that this loss of sovereignty is not conceived of as an attack on abstract national pride, but as an attack on the democratic process: we are not governed by those we have elected, and those we have elected are no longer accountable to us. And we need to point to this reduction of accountability in order to understand how, in these years of crisis, the values that were assumed to be the backbone of ‘union’, and which were in Greece, as in other countries, considered solid for a time, values such as the rights to due process, fair trial, assembly and protest, protection from cruel and unusual punishment, protection from excesses of state power, and even the right of self-determination, have been so aggressively undermined.

To sum up these introductory remarks, although the ‘European Project’ still inexplicably retains for some a progressive, even emancipatory, meaning, it has to be said that there is an unbridgeable gap between a ‘United Europe’ as a guiding concept, and the actual reality on the ground: i.e. national antagonisms, generating policies that produce stunning inequalities, rapid impoverishment, and an erosion of democratic liberties. If a ‘United Europe’ has for a time been a political expression of humanist values, it has now come to represent their debasement.

So, in what sense should we conceive of resistance in the field of cultural practice, as we have come to know it in the last couple of decades? Could we aspire to a practice that contributes to such resistance, or gives meaning to it, or forms part of a public discourse that seeks to, as it were, speak truth to power? In order to outline some elements that I believe an answer to these questions should include, I will bring us a rather long way around: firstly, I will give some examples of the political situation on the ground, as my colleagues and I have observed and reported on it in Greece, so that the dark reality of what we are up against becomes a little more defined.1 Secondly, I will try to establish a relationship between the current political situation and the prevalent political narrative of the period between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, the so-called ‘period of prosperity’, a narrative that I will term the ideology of modernisation, and which largely still provides the dominant description of current political events. And lastly, I will argue that this ideology is central to the way in which cultural practice was (and is) shaped in its more visible forms, and that any concept of resistance should acknowledge the operation of this ideology, and include an active quest for conflict and destabilisation of the very structures on which cultural production has come to depend.

Em Kei: Monument to the Unknown Hooligan (2006-2009). Bronze, marble, concrete. Installation view, 2nd Athens Biennale 2009 (Heaven).

Concentration Camps, Police Torture, and a ‘Health Bomb’

Seventy, eighty, sometimes a hundred people are bundled into a holding cell. They stay there for up to ten months. They are not allowed out in the open at all. They shit in plastic bags. If they protest, they are beaten. Others are squeezed into containers, seven or eight people at a time. Rows of containers are fenced off with barbed wire, guarded by special police with submachine guns on makeshift towers. They are only let out for one or two hours a day. There is hardly any air conditioning in the containers, and the summer is hot. They cannot wash their clothes. Psoriasis is rampant. If they protest, they are beaten.

All this would be horrific if it were the punishment of convicted criminals. These people have not been convicted of anything at all. Most of them are not even charged with any crime. All they’ve done is ‘be’ immigrants, whose bad luck has landed them in Greece. They were rounded up in Athens and other cities, in so-called ‘sweep operations’, collectively named – in a grotesque euphemism – Operation Zeus Xenios, after the ancient Greek god of hospitality. As has been pointed out by lawyers, such incarceration of immigrants is unlawful, except in very specific cases, to say nothing of mass detentions, or incarceration in inhumane conditions, without charge or legal representation.

Concentration camps for immigrants, drug users and homeless people were first talked about in pre-Olympic Greece, in 2004, with the purpose of ‘improving’ the image of the streets of Athens. The Olympics were planned by the government of Kostas Simitis, who was elected with the PASOK party, and took place during the government of Kostas Karamanlis, who was elected with the New Democracy party. The first concentration camp was to be constructed in the old NATO army base, in Aspropyrgos, near Athens. The plan never materialised due to the reaction by NGOs and leftwing parties and organisations. It was discussed again when Christos Markogiannakis of New Democracy took over the Ministry of Public Order, in 2009, but once more was not put into practice. The individual who finally gave life to the idea that a modern democracy should imprison immigrants without due process or trial in containers fenced off with barbed wire was Minister of Public Order Michalis Chrysochoidis of PASOK, currently Minister of Transport. He did it in the run-up to Greece’s 2012 national elections – the elections that were to decide, according to most European media, whether Greece would remain in the bosom of its European family by electing the moderate pro-European New Democracy party, or embrace the dreaded isolationist radical leftwing SYRIZA (in reality a moderate left-wing party).

During the same days, before the elections, TV stations all over Greece suddenly started blurting out that at first one and then a group of prostitutes were detained by the Greek police and forcibly tested for HIV by a special contingent of the Ministry of Health, while in custody. When found positive, their mug shots and full personal data were published on the Internet within hours, and they were carted off to prison and charged with grievous bodily harm with intent, for purposefully infecting customers with HIV. For days on end, the media spoke of the ‘prostitutes that dealt out death’. Talk show hosts congratulated the authorities on their crackdown on illegal prostitution, even if carried out with much delay. The Minister of Public Order Michalis Chrysochoidis went on TV to say that immigrants and homeless persons should at last be subjected to the rule of law and healthcare regulations. The Minister of Health Andreas Loverdos insisted that his new provision for arrested persons to be subjected to forced tests was necessary, indeed vital, to protect us from a ‘health bomb’ that was about to explode in our midst. And he continued to make the assertion he had been making for almost a year at that point, that the ‘Greek family’ was in danger from ‘African immigrants who brought over HIV’. Hundreds of women were detained and forcibly tested during the police operations of those days.

However, of the 32 women finally arrested, publicly exposed and charged with a felony, only one was found to be a prostitute, possibly a victim of human trafficking. The others were mostly drug addicts, picked off the street. Most of them were Greek, and none were African. In any case, epidemiological data on HIV in Greece show that women are a minority among those infected. There is no ‘health bomb’. The data shows an increase of infections among intravenous drug users – some argue as a result of increased drug use during the crisis. Nothing was presented either by the Ministry of Health, nor that of Public Order, to support their claim that the publication of the women’s photos was necessary for the protection of public health. Of those who supposedly contacted the authorities, after the arrests were made public, in order to get tested for HIV, no one ever maintained that the women arrested infected them, purposefully or otherwise. Instead, the story just gradually faded out, as the media concentrated on the post-election political challenges. The felony charges were quietly dropped, even though the women spent months in pre-trial incarceration. Eight of the women have been acquitted since then; others still face reduced charges. Their photos and personal information were taken off the police website, but, as would be expected, they are still all over the Internet.2

The Greek police have continued to publish photographs and personal information of citizens arrested on various charges, asking the public to provide additional information on other crimes they may have committed. Greek law states that the publication of photos or data of arrested persons awaiting trial is prohibited, except in cases of public danger. One is hard pressed to understand what sort of ‘public danger’ is averted through the publication of photos of arrested demonstrators – let alone HIV positive women – nevertheless the police keep doing it and the judicial authorities keep supporting the practice.

In February 2013 the practice was taken to a new level. The police published photos of four youths arrested on robbery and terrorism charges. When reporters and members of the public pointed out that the photos had evidently been photoshopped, and rather crudely for that matter, the police finally released several unaltered photos of those arrested. The second set of photos made it clear that the arrested men had been brutally beaten. The Minister of Public Order Nikos Dendias was then asked why the first series of photos had been altered. His reply was that it was done so that the accused would be ‘recognisable’.

Internal Affairs were quick to clear the police of any wrongdoing. A hasty inquiry found that the accused had been wounded during the struggle that led to their arrest. This was hard to believe. For one, the accused were armed with assault rifles and the police disarmed them, which makes it implausible that the arrest led to the kind of prolonged fistfight that could have resulted in such beatings. Secondly, before the Internal Affairs inquiry was undertaken, local police authorities where the arrests took place gave a press conference in which they mentioned nothing about a struggle during the arrest. On the contrary, they pointed out that no one was hurt. And the lawyers for the accused subsequently reiterated the sadly not unheard of police practice of beating handcuffed detainees. These incidents appear against a background of a torrent of complaints for abuse and torture by the Greek police, as reported by Amnesty International, which also documents 12 cases where the European Court of Human Rights has convicted Greece for police crimes.3

In June 2013, the Greek government suddenly announced it would be shutting down the national TV and radio broadcaster, ERT. The reasoning was that it was ‘corrupt’. Indeed, a couple of hours after the announcement, the switch was pulled, and TV screens just went black. Riot police were sent to guard the transmitters. This unprecedented shutting down of a national broadcaster by a democratic government did not go through Parliament. It was done by decree. Greek law stipulates that in certain cases of emergency, the government may legislate by decree, but it is still obliged to subsequently bring the new law to Parliament for ratification. This has not been done. It isn’t the first time. The Greek governments of the past four years have been legislating by decree in dozens of cases. It is not an exaggeration to say that Parliament is gradually becoming irrelevant.

The Extremism of the Centre

The instances of authoritarian tactics by the Greek government, including the internationally reported brutal suppression of demonstrations, are so numerous that it needs to be pointed out at this stage that the political parties and politicians who designed and implemented these policies are not what in traditional political terms one would call ‘extreme’. Rather they belong to the so-called moderates; they belong to the political centre. PASOK is an acronym of Panhellenic Socialist Movement, a party that emerged from socialist groups of the 1970s, but was squarely centre-left in government through the 1980s and 1990s. New Democracy is a centre-right party, whose leader, the prime minister from 2004-2010 Costas Karamanlis, championed the term middle space for that area of the political spectrum inclusive of all moderates, from both Left and Right.

The architect of the concentration camps, Michalis Chrysochoidis, is a socialist. Andreas Loverdos, he of the HIV immigrant ‘health bomb’, who also hailed the creation of the camps as a major breakthrough, is another socialist. And Minister of Public Order Nikos Dendias of New Democracy, who brought the practice of herding immigrants into camps to full bloom, is a self-described ‘liberal’. Let’s hold on to the fact that it was the centre and not any political extremists who made these policies – it will come up again further on. In any case, it is, I believe, not an exaggeration to call these policies – concentration camps for immigrants, HIV witch-hunts, torture of arrested persons – fascist. All the more so, since they did not come without an associated rhetoric that sought to legitimise the practices as integral parts of the political outlook and a necessary tool of state administration. It was, after all, our current Prime Minister Antonis Samaras who said, before the 2012 elections, that he sought to be given ‘the power of a nation’, right before he also stated that our cities were under occupation by immigrants and we should ‘reoccupy’ them.

This is why, incidentally, the targeting of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party, as directed by the Greek government only after its many attacks and murders of immigrants led to the murder of a Greek, must be transparent. It is not just that having Makis Voridis, the New Democracy spokesman, call Golden Dawn a ‘criminal organization’ is the height of hypocrisy, as Mr Voridis was formerly a leader of the extreme nationalist party Greek Front, and before that had served as secretary for the Youth Organization of EPEN, a fascist party, having succeeded in this position Nikos Michaloliakos, the current leader of Golden Dawn. Neither is it just that Golden Dawn’s crimes and collusion with parts of the Greek authorities, particularly in the police and the judiciary, were so well documented by independent journalists for so long that there could be absolutely no excuse for the murderously delayed reaction by the Government. It is that it should become clear to all that in the erosion of Greek democracy, Golden Dawn never was the principal culprit, it was only the most brutal: this honour belongs to those who have been governing Greece.4

The fact, however, that the governments of Greece have retreated from democracy to such an extent as to implement fascist policies, should not lead us to believe that the historical example of the rise of Fascism in the 1930s also holds true in our time. The policies may be comparable – and thus merit the designation – but the idea that radical right extremist policies have come about as a result of the inaction – economic and political – of the moderate centre does not provide a useful description for contemporary Greece and Europe. The truly radical actor here is the moderate centre.

The Ideology of Modernisation

After the mid-1990s, the concept of modernisation, which has featured powerfully in political discourse in Greece ever since the founding of the modern Greek state and even earlier, underwent a crucial transformation. The political centre, spearheaded by new PASOK leader Kostas Simitis and a new generation of politicians associated with him, branded ‘the modernisers’, proposed that modernisation should be thought of as exempt from any ‘traditional’ political antagonism: they rearticulated it in effect as an ‘apolitical’ concept. The governments that followed, including the opposing centre-right party New Democracy of Kostas Karamanlis, followed by the crisis governments of George Papandreou, Loukas Papademos, and Antonis Samaras, have all subscribed to the same doctrine, according to which modernisation is neither ‘left-wing’ nor ‘right-wing’, it is simply the implementation of tangible, ‘realistic’ measures in order to bring about ‘development’, it is a matter of wanting ‘progress’ as opposed to ‘stagnation’. There is no left-wing or right-wing progress, they argue, there is simply progress.

The political divide, therefore, is not between Left and Right, but rather between those who support modernisation and those who resist it. This apolitical concept of modernisation is related to developments in European politics in at least four ways. The first is historical: the real or imagined conflict between modernisation/Europe and provincialism/the Orient has deep and obvious roots in modern Greek political discourse. The second is its promise of stability and prosperity through ‘European integration’: the mighty post-war European democracies and prosperous markets, with their undisputed records of functional social contracts and unimpeded economic development, acting as a shield against a repeat of Greece’s turbulent, undemocratic history of the 1950s-1970s. The third is the way it reflects the gradual dominance of a post-political paradigm: the notion of modernisation in Greece was constructed in ahistorical, essentialist terms, much in the way that the notion of Western democracy was constructed as a haven of pluralism, the champion of human rights, the fearless foe of all totalitarianisms, defining itself in opposition to this essential enemy (despite evidence of collusion and support, from the rise of totalitarian regimes to the present). And the fourth – an extension of the third – is the way in which it foreshadows the conclusion of Europe’s increasingly post-democratic outlook: any articulation of an alternative, left or right-wing, that posits the welfare of the people as taking priority over technocratic orthodoxy is deemed populist, thus excluding the notion of the people as a legitimate concept in democratic political discourse.5

The centre was thus refashioned into the true radical political force, effecting real change in society, and all opponents, whatever their political rationale, became by default conservative or reactionary: the religious, nationalist and/or extreme Right, communists, the militant Left, anarchists of all persuasions, peaceful or militant, the moderate Left, and even such things as ecology activists and the anti-globalisation movement. The interesting fact is that this new radicalism of the centre is not a lie. It is indeed the moderate centre that articulated a ‘positive’ – in the formal sense – discourse, one arguing for change, implementing an attack on established social relations. This logically relegated the Left to a socially conservative role, as it now had to fight for such matters as worker’s rights and democratic protections of liberties not to change.

As for the Right, it was faced with the same predicament as the Left for a while, its nationalism and its insistence on traditional values appearing parochial when examined against the new social description articulated by the modernisers. The 1990s and early 2000s saw many apparent battles between the moderate centre and the ‘antiquated’ views of those still adhering to notions of a national identity or official religion. Such views – mostly characterised, at the time, as ‘obsolete’ rather than right-wing or nationalist – were marginalised for some years. But the crisis brought a new reality to light: the key to being a legitimate interlocutor, for any and all parties and individuals, was now nothing more than the acceptance of ‘modernisation’ as the fundamental concept arbitrating conflicting social interests. Apart from this super- or non-ideology all other ideologies and beliefs were unimportant, and thus acceptable. Suddenly it wasn’t a problem for large sections of the Right and extreme Right to re-include themselves in the political process, especially since the basic policies of deregulation of markets and labour – so central to the austerity programme of Europe after the crisis, but also key concepts of the modernisation doctrine – were in no way opposed to their outlook.

This is the explanation for the seemingly perverse coalition of ‘socialist modernizers’ and far-right nationalists, who banded together to form Greece’s crisis coalition governments, ostensibly to safeguard its ‘European perspective’. The ideology of modernization, with its central doctrine of apolitical progress, has in recent years succeeded in redefining a number of ideas that were previously dependent on very different viewpoints within the political spectrum. Most important among those ideas is that of privatisation, which was relaunched – in truly meta-Thatcherite terms – as an issue pertaining to ‘administrative efficiency’ rather than to relations of production or even to plain access to goods and services. Assets were to be privatised because private management was by definition more efficient than state management, so any proposal to improve state administration was simply irrational; what had to be done was to appeal to people who ‘knew how to do the job’, and ‘knowing how to do the job’ was a technical, not a political matter. In real terms, of course, very little was done. The efficiency of the state was not improved, but neither were large state assets initially privatised (there were a few exceptions). But the foundations were laid for an ideological dominance that by the time of the crisis had full descriptive control over the social landscape.

This control is evident in how the total, fast-track privatisation programme imposed by the Troika found a willing ally in the class of oligarchs, who already owned large sectors of the Greek economy, and their political champions. On the one hand, the ideology was ready to provide a rationale for an immense operation of transferring public wealth to private ownership. On the other, there was an organised system of related interests that could implement the operation.

Let’s briefly look at a case in point: The goldmines of Chalkidiki, a province of rare natural beauty in Northern Greece, were owned in the early 2000s by a company called TVX Gold. The company was hit with a ruling by the Council of State due to its lamentable record of environmental pollution, and declared bankruptcy. The Greek government, in a rather shady agreement, wrote off the fines that had been imposed, and bought the mines for 11 million euro. It then proceeded to sell them, within a couple of days, to a company called Hellas Gold, which had been founded only days earlier with a capital of 70,000 euro. The mines were sold at exactly the price they had been bought, 11 million, with the Greek state not making a single cent out of the deal. The two people that headed the new company were high ranking employees of AKTOR and ELAKTOR, two major construction companies controlled by the Bobolas family, who also owns newspapers and shares in Greece’s largest TV channel. Years later, after several transfers of shares, it emerged that the largest shareholder of Hellas Gold was Eldorado Gold, one of the largest mining companies in the world. The Bobolas family kept 5% of the shares, and has also been promised the contract to build the new mines, in large areas of mountain and forest that the Greek government now proceeded to grant to Eldorado for a conveniently low price. Incidentally, the current Deputy Minister of Development, Notis Mitarakis, is a former employee of Fidelity Fund, one of the shareholders of Eldorado.

The proposed expanded mining in Chalkidiki iscertain to irreparably injure an area that should enjoy environmental protection. Apart from that, though, it is also a blatantly bad deal: Greece is to get no royalties for its gold, and the only serious revenue is expected to be taxes, though various legal tricks are being used to keep even those as low as possible. Needless to say that any voice that dares to say that Greece could very well mine its own gold, is laughed at. And when the villagers of Chalkidiki started staging protests against the planned open-pit mining, riot police were sent to the area, teargas thrown in the local schools, children were detained and questioned without their parents present, police broke down villagers’ doors in the middle of the night to haul them off for questioning without legal representation, and DNA samples were taken without consent.

The Bobolas family’s interests do not stop with gold mining or construction. They also bid for water privatization, and other soon to be privatized assets and services, such as local airports, usually as a front for major multinationals. The same goes for most of the ten or so big Greek business families. The operation is always the same: the media blurt out the prescribed line on the need for modernization and progress, which will come about as a result of the greater efficiency of the private sector. Then, a series of assets, such as natural gas, water, transport, ports, airports, etc, is offered up. The Greek businessmen provide the political connections and take a share in the consortium that is set up by multinational companies to buy up what is offered. When the deal meets with public opposition – demonstrations, occupations, or strikes– the government calls in the police.

What is crucial to understand is that in Greece, the ideology of modernisation has provided, by means of the crisis, a way to reshape an entire political and social landscape: the political system, the authoritarian brutality of the state, and the interests of business oligarchs, work together to refashion the entirety of productive relations and wealth distribution in the country, while rearticulating the way that this violent change is perceived.

We Are All On the Same Side

What does all this have to do with art and cultural production? It all turns on whether we believe that they form part of a wider public discourse in the political sense, that they are things that formulate positions within political space. Arguably, the whole process of ‘opening up’ associated with contemporary cultural production, its seemingly limitless interdisciplinarity is based on just such a claim (hence, the profusion of ‘political’ artworks, artists, curators, and exhibitions.) At the same time, though, it was the ideology of modernisation that largely shaped the way high-visibility cultural production has been conceived of in the last fifteen years or so, but particularly after 2000. This phenomenon is by no means unique to Greece, and is certainly related to the onslaught of neoliberal policies in the 1980s. What is crucial here, however, is to understand that it is not simply a set of practical restraints that Greek cultural practice been operating under – as in reduced state subsidies – but an ideology in the full sense of the term: a mystification of actual conditions.

How is it possible that these two affairs – the claim to be a ‘political’ art, and adherence to an ideology of apolitical ‘progress’– coexist? Let me tell you a brief story:
A couple of years ago I was invited as an art-critic to a show of the Dimitris Daskalopoulos Collection in Guggenheim Bilbao. Dimitris Daskalopoulos, apart from being a high profile collector of international contemporary art, is a former dairy industry magnate (he has sold most of his business interests and is now active in the investment market), and President of the Association of Greek Industrialists. On the day after the opening of the exhibition, there was an artists’ panel discussion, where several of the participants were to speak about their practice. Thomas Hirschhorn, a political artist par excellence, chose to speak, among other things, about the protest against working conditions in the construction of Guggenheim Dubai, which was going on at the time, and said that he had signed a petition to boycott the new museum. The first audience member to speak was the owner of the collection himself, Dimitris Daskalopoulos. After reminding everyone that he served as a member of the Guggenheim Foundation Board, he said that he of course had to acknowledge that there was an issue with working conditions in Dubai, but that he disagreed with the boycott, because Guggenheim was not the culprit, rather it was the ‘agent of change’. He ended his brief statement with the phrase ‘we are all on the same side’.

There were a lot of things said after that, none of which in my opinion posed the essential question: Who are we? Who are we, who are on the same side? And this of course begs the further question: Why wasn’t this crucial question asked? I believe it wasn’t asked because, in a way, Dimitris Daskalopoulos was right. There is a ‘we’ in the contemporary art world, forged through the shared ideology of modernisation, a ‘we’ that might be in one sense artificial, but in another is very real, the most important acting agent in the process of artistic production and distribution.

Let us look at it another way: I was a co-founder of the Athens Biennale, and its co-director between 2005 and 2010, taking part in the production of two editions, one in 2007 and one in 2009. Alongside my curatorial responsibilities, I also worked as one of its fundraisers. I am proud of several moments in the two shows – titled ‘Destroy Athens’ and ‘Heaven’, respectively – and I think it is pretty safe to say that in recent decades biennales have been one of the most successful ways of showing contemporary art – at least in terms of variety, proliferation, volume and impact. Their theory is well known: biennales bring localities in touch with each other through international networks, providing at the same time a platform for local talent and an international showcase of established reputations, thus creating spaces of unimpeded discourse between various forms of production, while being highly visible by both local and international publics, and so on…

This theory, though, takes on a different guise when one tries to communicate it to public authorities and other funders. When we talk to them, biennales become a strong vehicle for the promotion of the contemporary identity of cities, an agent of urban development, even a creator of a secondary economy in the service sector (e.g. hotel rooms, meals, coffees and taxi rides). What is more, they become a shining example of the collaboration between ‘public’ and ‘private’ – that is, between state funding and private donors and corporate sponsorship – a model for revitalizing urban life, encouraging investment, in fact, for moving away from ‘stagnation’ and towards ‘progress’. In short, biennales are to function as symbolic occasions of collaborative modernisation. What is assumed to be a space of unimpeded discourse becomes a space of unchallenged consent, a space for cohabitation of divergent social interests, where the fundamental reality of their conflict is mystified by an apparently shared common enterprise.

What is true of biennales is also true, with little variation, of museums and art centres, but also of theatres, orchestras, independent cinemas – and, increasingly and alarmingly, universities. This is the ‘we’: artists, curators, theorists, critics, politicians, advertisers, marketing departments, middle-class audiences and world-class collectors, consumers, corporate officials and industry magnates, all ‘on the same side’. This is how one gets a ‘political’ – even, at times, polemic – art to become a tool of an apolitical ‘progress’. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that an ideology that has succeeded in depoliticising much of public discourse has also permeated what is perhaps the most suitable terrain for articulating a progressive vision. Yet, I have to admit that until the crisis came I could not see it. Perhaps my personal lack of intuition was to blame, though I would arguethat a lot of people, me among them, who considered ourselves of a ‘progressive’ persuasion, found in the pre-crisis years that this large ‘middle-ground’ was the natural space from which we could wage our war against the ‘old’, against established social relations. We relished the luxury of being free to do it in whatever way we wanted – however provocative or disdainful of public norms – within the confined liberty afforded us by our participation in the common vision of ‘development’ and ‘progress’.

As things have turned out, the ‘new’ isn’t what we had imagined it would be. We are now living in a Europe where a notion of unity conceals a reality of national antagonisms, and a notion of solidarity conceals a reality of neo-colonialism. In Greece, democracy has been undermined beyond belief. If anyone had told me five years ago that I would be reporting today on concentration camps and police torture in a European Union member-country, I would have laughed them off. We have to admit that we were unprepared for this. But we have to finally see that it was the gradual but complete establishment of an ideology and a total way of operation that made the erosion of democratic rights and liberties possible, and that it is the space of manufactured consent – the ‘we’ that we in the artworld helped to forge – that is masking the reality of debasement. And so, it is now impossible to articulate any sort of meaningful critique without rejecting the very structures that perpetuate this ideology, the structures that until now have enabled and shaped our public articulations. In a most profound and most debilitating way, anything we say within the current conditions of cultural production simply will not matter.

In this sense, I believe that no possibility of resistance exists unless we choose to not be a ‘we’. Unless we successfully short-circuit not only the narratives of apparently shared visions, but also the machines that generate and feed them – whether they are funding structures, networks of distribution, or political relations; unless we actively seek out conflict, and bring disunity and rupture, rather than consensus and harmony, to light.

NOTES
1. For reports on the situation in Greece in English, more often than not passed over by the European media, see borderlinereports. net.
2. A documentary about this affair, Ruins: Chronicle Of an HIV Witch-Hunt, directed by Zoe Mavroudi and produced by Irate Greek, OmniaTV and Unfollow magazine, premiered in Greece in September 2013. See ruins-documentary.com.
3. See Amnesty International, ‘Police Violence in Greece –
Not Just “Isolated Incidents”’ (http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/asset/EUR25/005/2012/en/edbf2deb-ae15-4409b9eeee6c62b3f32b/eur250052012en.pdf).
Accessed 13.11.2013.
4. For Golden Dawn and its relationship to the Greek government and state apparatus, see ‘Golden Dawn, 1980-2012: The Neonazis’ Road to Parliament’ and ‘The Problem Is The Greek Government, Not Only Golden Dawn’, both at borderlinereports.net.
5. See Populism, Antipopulims and Crisis by Yannis Stavrakakis and Nicolas Sevastakis (Nefeli 2012, Greek only). English speakers can look up ‘Populism, Anti-Populism and European Democracy: a View from the South’ by Giorgos Katsampekis and Yannis Stavrakakis at opendemocracy.net.

Gioni’s biennale suffered from a similar sense of bathos. Inhabiting the Central Pavilion of the Giardini and the enormous Arsenale, it contained a vast range of interspersed artefacts and artworks, ranging from key pieces by contemporary masters, to collections of objects by past artists, to what are best described (with due attention to the problems of the term) as examples of ‘outsider’ art. However, beyond a few abstract themes, it was hard to grasp what stakes were raised by this exhibition in relation to the wider world of contemporary art; it felt as though this was an exercise in inclusion and display rather than a coherent and conceptually robust proposition.

An interest in both spiritualism and the unconscious dominated Gioni’s curatorial interpretation of ‘The Encyclopedic Palace’. This dual theme came together in the opening gambit of the exhibition: pages from Carl Gustav Jung’s Red Book displayed in an octagonal room at the entrance to the Central Pavilion. Jung did not intend for his book to be exhibited as an artwork; instead it was a record of his own personal cosmology, a document of his visions and fantasies that laid some of the groundwork to his theory of individuation. Bright and intricate, a relationship to illuminated manuscripts is clear. The pages include legible, figurative drawings, and feature images of the natural world made strange: the sun explodes in pointed and twisting rays, and fire spews from the earth. After this introduction, the threads of the unconscious and spiritualism are present throughout the exhibition; work such as that of Hilma af Klint, Harry Smith, Dorothea Tanning, Augustin Lesage, Arthur Bispo do Rosário are just a few examples.

The display of Rudolf Steiner’s blackboards near the entrance to the Central Pavilion, together with Jung’s manuscript, sum up the kind of spirituality that is central here. Neither representing institutional religion, nor New Age spirituality, this is a somewhat outdated mysticism, prevalent at the start of the twentieth century, which considers investigation into the spiritual world through imagination, creativity and visionary experience to be a scientific endeavour. This implication of some kind of scientific approach permeated the organisation of the exhibition and its accompanying literature, and it felt as though objects were presented to us for assessment, but without the classifying system being made clear.

In parallel with this, Gioni’s curatorial attention to the darker drives of human sexuality spoke to the complementary theme of the unconscious, which avoids the spiritual and instead places human psychology under pseudo-scientific investigation. The works associated with this topic, which are in a minority compared to those allied with Jung, connected more closely to a Freudian tradition, which posits a mind that is riven by psychosexual drives. Hans Bellmer’s series of prints, Petit traité de morale (1968), are beautiful and unsettling, the intricacy of the engravings meaning that body parts emerge from a tangle of lines and colours. Evgenij Kozlov’s ink drawings illustrating his fantasies of sexual encounters during his teenage years show a latent adolescent curiosity that verges on the misogynistic.

Exhibited in the same room, Kohei Yoshiyuki’s series The Park focuses on voyeurs spying on couples engaged in sexual activity outdoors. The pictured intrusion into a private moment, which is in itself extreme, is made worse by our own voyeurism as exhibition viewers. We see the bodies of the lovers in near-graphic detail, and as such our viewing did not feel much better than that of the leering and reaching men who sit a few feet away from the couples. The theme of a sexualised and deviant unconscious mind felt more pertinent in the context of the biennale and its relationship to the art world than the emphasis on Jung, in that Freudian psychoanalytic theory has had such an influence over twentieth century artistic practice and arguably resonates more keenly with contemporary cultural production.

Gioni’s biennale included works made by professional artists, amateurs and people who never considered the work they made to be art, describing this inclusion as “tak[ing] an anthropological approach to the study of images, focusing in particular on the realms of the imaginary and the functions of the imagination.” On display were a variety of found ‘artworks’, the inclusion of which did not seem to follow specific criteria but instead welcomed an array of different types of making. These consisted of crafted relics, such as the Shaker Gift Drawings and Haitian Vodou Banners, but also Morton Bartlett’s uncanny dolls that he made as a hobby, and which were found amongst his possessions after his death, and Oliver Croy’s and Oliver Elser’s collection of architectural models (originally the creation of Peter Fritz) purchased from a thrift shop. Artefacts of devotion, of craft, of personal entertainment and of fetishistic indulgence were embraced.

The inclusion of Ed Atkins’ video work The Trick Brain (2012), which examines André Breton’s collections of books, artefacts and paintings, Cindy Sherman’s found photo albums, and Roger Caillois’ collection of stones seemed to be a gesture of justification for the inclusion of these artefacts not made to be art: if past masters can find inspiration in the (extra)ordinary then so can we.

Although there are fascinating objects and images that come into this category, the way in which art objects and non-art objects intermingle felt unsatisfying. This can be elucidated by returning to Auriti. The catalogue entry accompanying his model for the Encyclopedic Palace of the World states that “Auriti’s dream remains a timeless one: to embrace and encompass the unruly, multifarious universe, and to give it form.” It is precisely this giving form that made the double exhibition feel distant and to some extent insubstantial. Because of what felt like an open and genuine curatorial impulse to include both art and non-art works on an equal footing, the context that normally gives us coordinates was lost. We know the feat of collecting and organising is impressive and we know that there is much of interest included, but here it felt inaccessible. Fascinating objects and artefacts from the past lost what makes them interesting, and artworks became just more stuff: neither enhanced the other. Instead what was revealed was a collector’s urge at work: more things, more inclusion.

The sheer volume of work bears this out: Gioni included nearly double the amount of artists as were involved in either of the last two biennales, meaning it was easy to feel lost among his presentations. More importantly, without context the political power of some of the artefacts was removed. This felt like a remarkably apolitical exhibition for one that is at the centre of the art world. Even explicitly political works became curiosities rather than statements. Dahn Vo’s imported church is a good example. Installed in the Arsenale the colonial era church was transported from Vietnam and reconstructed. Hanging from the walls were cloths imprinted, through years of being bleached by light, with the silhouettes of religious artefacts. The result was a kind of Turin shroud of religiosity; it felt as if we are looking at something mysterious, ancient and distant from the contemporary world. However, despite its obvious resonances of colonialism and evangelism, these themes were minimised and the piece became another part of this mammoth collection. As with those objects shown by Atkins’ camera, things that were designed to be affective and effective were reduced to the quality of trinkets.

By contrast, politics abounded amongst the national pavilions and associated venues. Ranging from surprising interventions to practices that straightforwardly attack the viewer with a blunt and uncomplicated message, a number of countries presented work motivated by the wish to communicate a specific political point. The Maldives pavilion examined environmental change and rising sea levels, including impressive work by Sama Alshaibi, which was both formally interesting and thematically complex. Lebanon presented a piece by Akram Zaatari entitled Letter to a Refusing Pilot: aimed at the subject of Middle Eastern politics, it was aesthetically convincing but not subtle. Scotland’s presentation included work by Duncan Campbell, which examined the appropriation of artefacts by Western institutions such as the British Museum. Shown alongside Chris Marker’s and Alain Resnais’s Les Statues Meurent Aussi, it felt worthy and blunt.

The British pavilion’s immediately problematic English Magic by Jeremy Deller felt like politics filtered through Britpop. A painfully smug and unselfconscious collection of works, it alluded to the political without seeming to think about the implications of those things that it included. For example, in images from 1972 that were posed alongside photographs of David Bowie’s tour of England and Wales, there were more pictures of the troubles in Northern Ireland than of any other subject. Ex-army members draw pictures of politicians; Russian oligarchs are lampooned. After watching a video that takes a pop at the royal family – proposed as the ultimate symbols of privilege and therefore all that could ever be wrong in the world – we went and drank a cup of milky tea from a porcelain mug, in what was apparently being presented as an unironic symbol of good, normal Englishness. To underline this straightforward dichotomy of ‘aristocracy bad/normal English people good’, there was a scene of regular folk bouncing on a bouncy-castle version of Stonehenge. It felt shallow and determinedly uncomplicated.

In comparison, Richard Mosse’s The Enclave in the Irish pavilion, addressed in some detail by David Brancaleone in ER8, was substantial. In some ways it was deeply problematic. Its inclusion of documentary footage of people living in war zones and dealing with the consequences of violence both as actors and victims, was painfully voyeuristic, but the artist seems fully aware of this. The work is beautiful to the point of being sickly. The exceptional richness of the photographic prints is brought into relief by Mosse’s trademark pink colouring, which is at once artificial and grotesquely bodily. At some points it looks like blood, at others like plastic. This felt like a practice that was proposing something morally complex, a practice that is worth arguing with.

In addition, there were works that deserve particular mention. Although quite different in their conception, all felt ambitious in terms of their conceptual and aesthetic propositions. In An Immaterial Retrospective of the Venice Biennale by Alexandra Pirici and Manuel Pelmus in the Romanian pavilion, performers re-enacted artworks from biennales past. The result was witty and absorbing. Alfredo Jaar’s Venezia, Venezia presented a scale model of the Giardini that slowly sank below a murky green pool of water, only to rise again, repeatedly. Aesthetically imposing, the movement of the water spilling from the model as it rose and fell created a sense of the world being under the threat of nature. Berlinde De Bruyckere’s Kreupelhout – Cripplewood in the Belgian pavilion consisted of a wax cast of a fallen tree, its materiality creating a compelling and evocative presence. The Netherlands showed Mark Mander’s Room with Broken Sentence, which surveyed his work from over a period of twenty three years. The newspapers that cover the windows of the pavilion, constructed so as to include every word in the English language, were a highlight.

Best of all was Bedwyr William’s The Starry Messenger, which addressed space both as a mysterious outside to be studied, but also as present in the world around us and in our very fibre. An adventure through seven rooms, it was part sci-fi exploration, part domestic scene, and part science museum display. The first room contained a model of an observatory, scaled down to slightly larger than human proportions, which was lit in such a way as to evoke model making and TV specials. In another room, with large pillars at strange angles, it seemed as though you had wandered into an episode from the first series of Star Trek, seeking exit through a small and extremely dark corridor pinpointed by stars. The video work towards the end of the piece, which riffed on the experience of the figure of a dentist in a mosaic, was carefully conceived, surprising and entertaining in the best way. Considering matter as both an astronomical enormity and a microscopic foundation, it was thought provoking, occasionally grotesque and clever. The video pulled out threads present in the installation as a whole, which was carefully constructed and sharp, treading a line between the mysterious and witty that was both complex and satisfying.

That this pavilion represented Wales, exiled from the central Giardini to a separate space in the city, brings us back to the tension between the art/ world politics perennially on view in Venice, and the flawed nature of any type of totalising encyclopedic claim. In the form given to the biennale – the curated and national pavilions – there is an implicit claim to represent everything. However, this was brought into relief by the graffiti that daubed the area around Castello and the Giardini, which read, ‘Anonymous Stateless Immigrants Pavilion’. Seemingly a hangover from a project by Ehsan Fardjadniya for the 2011 biennale, it was repeatedly stencilled onto bridges, pavements and buildings. The stencils have arrows on them that point you in differing directions, although the paths they suggest lead nowhere. Despite the two-year delay, when brought into relation with the concept of the encyclopedic, this seemed all the more appropriate. Unofficial voices are not and cannot be represented here. The art world, particularly in this manifestation, is a place of officialdom, supported by national governments, or at least national art institutions, working for their own ends, which is to promote a particular political or artistic view of themselves on an international stage. The money and the power associated with the art world are in full view in Venice, entirely appropriate given the nature of the event and the reality of funding behind such a spread.

However, with the presence of so much political work in the national pavilions, and the claims made for the central exhibition, it is important to bear in mind the way that politics works at this level. It is here that the art world’s collusion with power is at its most problematic. Official versions are the order of the day, and even those things that seem to be critical are often bolstering some form of propagandistic promotion for their institutional backers. Art’s ever-murky relationship to politics is again brought into focus: Venice shows us myriad ways to approach and avoid culture and society with art. However, and Deller’s crushed Landrover is firmly fixed in my vision as I say this, there is a strong sense at present of art quashing the urge to real political activism by means of small gestures of resistance. Even with so many different approaches present, no one tactic – not even Fardjadniya‘s unofficial intervention – seems effective. Maybe Gioni’s curation bears on this.

Just as the socio-cultural concerns of objects are neutered by their display, perhaps the consideration of complex political questions in art spaces allows those questions to be separated from everyday experience: a further degeneration into segmented and detached neoliberal existence. It is hard to imagine that a political message can be effective at changing anything within a context as officially endorsed as the Biennale, and the super yachts that line the quays near the Giardini certainly do little to mitigate this suspicion.

Oddly enough, it was this notion that I thought about as I traversed Sam Keogh’s solo exhibition, Mop, recently on view at the Kerlin Gallery. The exhibition takes as its starting point the figure of Oscar the Grouch, Sesame Street’s most idiosyncratic character. The show comprised video, sculptures, and found objects, all placed on the floor, which in turn was covered by a harlequinesque vinyl overlay. The objects ranged greatly in size, but all were united by a certain barely made quality: they had the look of objects that once performed a use, but were now estranged from it, in decay. Indeed, the entire exhibition didn’t really comprise singular objects, but rather lots and lots of stuff, underfoot and all around you: to consider one object as autonomous was to somewhat miss the point.

A central video work, Taken out of/put into Oscar’s Bin (2013), provided some context for the cacophony of things surrounding it. In it, Keogh reads aloud a text, a disjointed reflection on Oscar. The camera slips and shakes, perhaps as people move around the cameraman. Keogh is in a crowded place, possibly an art opening, yet there doesn’t appear to be much of an audience: people continue to chat all around him, indifferent. The text is tightly scripted, and his recital a persistent monotone. In Oscar, Keogh senses a figure emblematic of non-normative behaviour, his defiant abjectness acting as a veritable two-fingered salute to established norms of behaviour. Sesame Street appears as a microcosm of the wider world, where ‘tolerance quarantines non-normativity in a cheap bin bag.’ The figure of Oscar, Keogh believes, articulates the contingency of normativity, and of things like good taste and manners: his modus operandi is based on the desire to ‘deface the currency of custom.’ His refusal is not determined by antagonism, it would seem, but by an extreme laziness: he simply couldn’t be bothered. This gesture holds the same import – perhaps even more – as a gesture of concerted action: as Keogh says in the video work, ‘a tonne of laziness weighs the same as a tonne of enthusiasm, but it smells worse.’

In Oscar, the abject is made visible and given a voice. The inherent shitness of the world is rendered palpable: in such a way, he might be construed as an innately moral being. As I stepped around the stuff of Mop, I began to think about ‘things’ themselves. Here, the found objects occupied the same space as the sculptural works. This lack of hierarchy produced an equivalence based on the fact of their material being, their unavoidable addition to the realm of ‘things’. An artwork, like a tatty shoe, just takes up space. Thus, if Western capitalism is based on accumulation – specifically, of things – then artworks fuel this system in tandem with other, more banal commodities. Viewed in this way, Keogh’s work performs a paradoxical critique of itself: like the obsessive-compulsive, his work constitutes the performance of a kind of ill-fated hyper-morality.

Oscar is recalibrated as a kind of messianic antihero, an unlikely avant-gardist. Keogh, however, is acutely aware that art no longer has the ability to shock. Art is now a space where bizarre or repulsive occurrences are actually anticipated. Artists, in turn, lose the ability to enact any real response, and are recast as what the artist collective Claire Fontaine calls ‘whatever singularities’, resigned to the impossibility of the ‘New’. In this knowledge, Keogh looks to Oscar as one might Duchamp, yearningly and not without a hint of nostalgia. If, as Jacques Rancière says, the aesthetic regime is predicated on the fact that, ‘everything is equal, equally representable’, then Mop’s work appears to be made in the doomed hope that there exists something that eludes representation.

In the video work, Keogh casts a self-critical eye on his creative co-option of Oscar the Grouch. Aware of the parasitical relationship he has entered into with this character, he also knows that this relationship effectively tempers Oscar in the pursuit of his own personal gain. By adopting the figure of Oscar, Keogh places him into a context also governed by its own models of normativity, with its own specific conventions of behaviour and taste. The art-world doesn’t even blink at his arrival, but simply flattens him within a system of ‘mall-like’ equivalence. Keogh is certainly conscious of the de-radicalising potential of art, and of his own complicity within it. By writing about it, also, I only serve to further placate Oscar’s essentially unreasonable nature. Like the artist, I simply take him out of one bin, only to put him in another: this is the double bind Keogh successfully navigates in Mop. And yet, aware that Oscar’s power is predicated on his refusal to be within any one system, Keogh wilfully places him there anyway.

By this action, the exhibition offers a messy – yet intelligent – summation of the problem of artistic practice in a world where everything and anything – however sacred – is vulnerable to appropriation.

We might like to imagine artists trawling for ideas in the depths of the psyche and then looking for buyers when they come back to dock, but it doesn’t necessarily work like that. Very often, classical composers have worked to the instructions of patrons or employers, whether religious or secular. The need to work within certain restrictions and conditions may sometimes be frustrating; it may also be a stimulus to the imagination and ingenuity of the composer. And what do liberated artists do but imprison themselves in structures of their own devising so that the imagination has something to work against? In Thomas Tallis’s case, in the second half of the sixteenth century, it seems that the stimulus to creation was a challenge from an English patron on hearing that an Italian composer, Striggio, had written a work for forty voices. Tallis couldn’t simply break the forty voices into sections that would sing in unison; the task he set himself was to manage forty individual voices within the conventions of the time. (Free or atonal polyphony was not an option.) Tallis had therefore to find a way to allow those voices to maintain their identities and not to dissolve into a vocal blur.

If we are to believe Thomas Wateridge, a student of the day, Spem in Alium ‘was songe in the longe gallery at Arundell house’, an aristocratic residence in London. According to Philip Legge, a recent editor of the piece, the owner of the house also had a country residence, Nonsuch Palace: Nonsuch also possessed an octagonal banqueting hall with four first-floor balconies, which intriguingly suggests the architectural features that Tallis incorporated into his composition: it is conceivable he designed the work to be sung not only in the round, but perhaps with four of the eight choirs singing from the balconies.

The idea is both attractive and plausible. We don’t need to insist on the balconies in order to appreciate the beauty of Tallis’s formal solution. If the singers are grouped in eight sets of five (each encompassing voices from low to high) and then deployed around the performance space, the spectators can experience an extraordinary range of effects: a single voice, music being passed from group to group in rotation, music crossing from one side of the space to another, multiple balanced sets of voices sounding together from all sides… In a space like the Église Saint-Louis-en-l’Île where I first experienced Spem in Alium, the church setting, the appropriate scale of the building, the beauty of the music, the quality of the singing and the acoustic (all, from my point of view, the happy outcome of a glance at a poster a few hours earlier as I stepped off the bus from Charles de Gaulle Airport) combined to create what I can only call musical ecstasy.

I had arrived in after most of the relatively modest audience and so, by chance, was seated in the very centre of the church. We had heard classic English choral music from the Oxford Voices and a range of Russian Orthodox works sung by the New St Petersburg Voices. One piece began with a mass of resonant Russian basses: it was as if the sound rose into audible existence from the depths of the earth, from somewhere below human hearing, from the home of unindividuated sound. The concert concluded with the two choirs coming together and taking up positions all around the church to perform Spem in Alium. The sense of perfection that was offered was not a denial of my position as an audience member on a particular wooden seat, but to the individual on that wooden seat the technical resources and resourcefulness of the composer, in the service of an aspirational music, offered a sense of what human imagination and existence at its finest can construct and be: the joyous experience may well have been intensified by a counterpointed awareness, conscious or unconscious, of the fragility and rarity of such perfection. For someone of a religious disposition, as Tallis was, music such as this is as far as human creation can go in reaching towards the transcendent.

The decision to go to see the installation at once raised the question of how the memory of Tallis in Paris could be conjugated with the Tallis in Carlow. Would Cardiff’s treatment of Tallis in Carlow’s version of the white cube – the stripped-down, undecorated space that seeks to induce an intense contemplation of the art-work – have the power to assert its own reality? If sports stadiums are today’s cathedrals, art centres retain a suggestion of the cloister. The self-mutilation and shock tactics of some artists might seem to run counter to this idea, but there is a curious line that connects them to the torn and greenish flesh of Grünewald’s dead Christ or (we may imagine) the lurking awareness of the virtual audience beyond the cell-wall in the drama of self-flagellation.

The main gallery in Carlow is perfect for Cardiff’s purposes. Visitors encounter a white, high-walled space into which only diffused sunlight enters. Forty speakers – eight sets of five, each one on its own tall stand – are deployed in an oval formation that surrounds two plain-white, backless benches. When there are few visitors, the atmosphere is coolly contemplative. There was nobody in the gallery when I arrived. Having taken my bearings, I sat, with my eyes half-closed, and let the music happen around me. This resembled the Paris experience, but in a different key: the music was (more or less) the same but the light and the whiteness, not to mention the fact that I knew that I was listening to recorded voices, induced a feeling of disembodiment. At this preliminary level, the experience of Forty Part Motet could be described as an abstraction or de-realisation of a piece of music written to be performed by forty voices emanating from living, breathing human beings.

This would not be very different from listening to Spem in Alium in the house of a rich modernist architect with an outstanding sound-system. There is more to Cardiff’s work than this. Just as the music itself is on a loop, the work triggers a kind of mental looping – an unresolved to-and fro between embodiment and disembodiment – for listeners who stay with it and explore its possibilities. Let’s imagine that you enter the room while the music is playing. Almost as in a church, you sit and listen, allowing the music to wash over you, noticing perhaps how the sound moves around the space. The music ends. After a significant pause, you hear various sounds: loud throat-clearings, bursts of laughter, humming, snatches of conversation; then the forty singers are called to order and the performance begins again. The effect is to remind you that this abstract musical design is woven from the voices of forty individuals, variously young, less young, older, gregarious, hesitant, confident, eager, blasé…

At this point, you may be approaching the installation with less reverence: you feel free to go to a speaker and listen more closely to check why someone is laughing, or hear a hesitation between the terms toilet and lavatory as boys joke, or hear someone older fantasise about dying on the glorious ultimate chord of the piece, or catch a boy asking for advice on how to avoid a recurrent mistake… You become an invisible eaves-dropper on the performers, an auditeur rather than a voyeur, except that the former word doesn’t have the same associations. The thought that this reminder of the singers’ individuality and concrete existence is also mediated in disembodied form through the speakers may vaguely trouble you. You have now been moving around the space, making your own decisions about which person/speaker to focus on. When the music resumes, you may feel inclined to continue your wandering.

In effect, Cardiff is not just presenting the music in a different context and with a reminder of the world surrounding the music, of the reality of the performers, of the curious moment of transition when forty individuals suddenly become servants of an artistic design or that other moment of transition when the music stops. Because of the one-to-one correspondence between singer and speaker (the work, we are told, did not involve giving each of the forty singers a separate microphone during a collective performance: it was recorded voice by voice and then constructed), Cardiff’s work offers intimate experience of the grain of particular voices, the tiny flaws that were less audible first time round: a wobble on entry here, a touch of shrillness there. This makes the experience of listening, even from a central position, subtly different: in a church or hall, a sung note may register amid the after-life or echoing of earlier notes. Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet lends itself to use as an individually regulatable tool for understanding how the music works; in effect, it proposes a kind of spatial or spatialised score.

Thinking perhaps of those Russian basses in the Église Saint-Louis-en-l’Île , I stood by a speaker from which a fine bass voice had sounded earlier. Now I was able to hear in close-up the richness of the voice, the confident striking of the note on entry and the firmness and clarity with which the words were intoned. I could experience the whole work from the point of view of this one singer: I could follow the role of ‘my’ voice, see how it fitted into the whole, how it sometimes dropped out for entire passages and then (I found myself becoming almost nervous…) had to surge precisely into action. This kind of listening, briefer samplings of individual voices, walks around the work, walks in and out of the work, a return to a seat in the centre for another immersion in the whole – these are all at the visitor’s disposition.

While the level of choice involved suggests that the installation must have a distancing effect, this does not appear to be inevitable. The piece has been travelling the world for over a decade and has been set up both in church and in art contexts. There are many reports of intense audience responses, of people needing to sit down, of weeping, of near-religious experience. It is likely that most of those who visit the installation will not have heard Spem in Alium before or will not have grown up in familiarity with the English choral tradition or its affiliates. Regardless, then, of the estranging possibilities inherent in Cardiff’s work, a section of the audience will give themselves to the music or find themselves overwhelmed by it in a way that is clearly more transcendental than analytical. This points to a very significant aspect of the installation.

Cardiff’s sub-title describes it as a treatment of Tallis’s Spem in Alium. In one sense, and almost literally, this is a very conservative work: Tallis’s music is not chopped up, rewritten, transposed, mocked, parodied or pulverised: with whatever qualifications, with whatever reframing, it retains its integrity. The relative popularity of The Forty Part Motet, we may surmise, lies in the way it offers an unthreatening, non-institutional avenue towards the transcendental. Or we might say that, in a secular art institution, the nature of this work and the conditions of the moment may induce an experience that is felt as unselfconsciously transcendental or sublime. I would be very surprised to learn that all this was foreseen by Janet Cardiff as she planned the piece. The trajectory of her work before and since – marked more by subtle unease than by a desire to comfort – clearly indicates otherwise. (In Irish literary terms, an imaginary equivalent might be Trevor Joyce’s The Poems of Sweeny Peregrine somehow becoming the Anam Chara of its generation but with no effect on the writer’s subsequent explorations.)

Cardiff produces installations that combine, for example, quiet tellings of sometimes disturbing dreams, music and recorded sounds. In A Murder of Crows, one of a number created in collaboration with her husband, George Bures Miller, the disjunction between the banal objects in the room and the experience of sitting through the work strikes a more sinister note. Thus, one reviewer, Marion Lignana Rosenberg, writes that some reporters, clearly suffering from ‘cognitive queasiness’, quickly took refuge outside the ring of loudspeakers. What had disturbed them?

Almost immediately, a woman’s voice seems to emerge from the gramophone horn, recounting three dreams (or three episodes of one dream). The royal road to her unconscious takes listeners to places where cats and babies are ground into a bloody pulp, an enslaved young man is threatened with dismemberment, and the dreamer stumbles upon a severed leg. […]

Hundreds of layers of ever-shifting channels make up Murder’s sound-world. Operatic song morphs into noise and then into bird shrieks; a loud, rushing squall (a tornado? a tsunami?) and other nameless dins crash against listeners. The feeling of vulnerability brought on by the immersive experience, the blurring of inner and outer limits, explains some of this spellbinding work’s immense power.

While The Forty Part Motet and The Murder of Crows might seem as different as a Victorian melodrama and a Japanese Noh play, they both offer the possibility of an immersive experience, greater or lesser interpretative freedom for the audience/participants, and an experience that engages with a defined space while at the same time blurring, playing with or otherwise questioning definitions and boundaries. In this sense, Janet Cardiff’s work is part of a significant tendency in contemporary art. What really matters, however, is not up-to-dateness or adaptability to current artistic or academic fashions, but the artist’s engagement with the materials, the power of the poetic imagination at work, the construction of something that survives, that defies analysis and renews wonder.

Those who drift in and out of the gallery are unlikely to return. Some are gone before the singing stops and do not hear the other three minutes on the tape. Those who remain will make their own discoveries or come to their own conclusions regarding the effect of repetition. Would it be possible, for example, to sit in the gallery on a quiet day and, in the space of an hour, have three eleven-minute transcendental experiences separated by pauses and three-minute sessions of chat and noise? Surely, an awareness that this is a product of the age of mechanical reproduction would begin to worm its way into even the most innocently ecstatic listener’s consciousness? Would the memory of the first listening be sullied in some way by such rapid repetition?

The concert that I attended in Paris was repeated (though with a change of conductor for Spem) the following evening. Fearing disappointment second time round, I hesitated before deciding that the twenty-four hour gap would allow me to recharge and that the music was in any case strong enough to withstand repetition. Arriving early, I had time to read about and identify the English works in the first half and to increase my appreciation of the Russian style. Obviously, there was less sheer surprise at the power of Spem in Alium but, performed in ideal conditions, it gripped and moved again. When living, breathing human beings are performing a work that we love, with the possibility of failure, inertia or surpassing achievement remaining open from moment to moment, repetition does not feel like repetition. In the greatest works (even in recordings), repetition is like deepening love, like a face or voice more loved than ever. Repetition is inherent in Janet Cardiff’s Forty Part Motet (down to the repeated absence of a hyphen between Forty and Part). It makes itself repeatedly available as a tool for exploring Spem in Alium; and because it is impersonal, because it is on a perpetual loop, it is (at least for those who are not undergoing an entrancing first encounter with Spem by means of it) a tool that can be dropped in mid-cycle simply by wandering away. And the first-time entranced, too, have to walk away at some point: lingering may easily provoke unwanted dis-entrancement. To walk away in mid-course from the fragility and glory of a live performance of Spem in Alium is unimaginable to anyone who has opened up to its power.

Forty Part Motet, then, along with its own fascinations, can enrich but not displace the full experience of Spem in Alium. I may well revisit Forty Part Motet in Carlow before it closes. I am curious as to how that might feel but, though grateful for what the work has revealed to me, I will not be too disappointed if I don’t make it a second time. If I heard that I had missed a performance of Spem in Alium in a church or hall near where I live, the feeling would be deeper than disappointment. The difference must matter, if art matters.

In this, Starting Over recalled another celebrated artist-curated show of recent years, Simon Starling’s Never the Same River (Possible Futures, Probable Pasts), which took place at Camden Arts Centre, London, in the winter of 2010-11. Starling’s exhibition demonstrated that this concern with looking back in order to move forward is indicative of today’s renewed sense of temporal instability, as reflected in the practices of numerous contemporary artists, Starling himself included. The strength of Starting Over lay in its conceptual coherence and its relevance to such broader shifts in artistic practice. The existing discourse on archiving as artistic method points to its symptomatic nature: as a mode that exposes problematic technological developments, such as the ascendency of the digital (as argued by Hal Foster in his essay, ‘An Archival Impulse’, 2004), and advancements in technological warfare and science (as articulated by Starling in his aforementioned exhibition). While drawing on this discourse, O’Kelly’s project avoided being derivative by effectively refocusing this archival concern away from outside influences and in towards the more enduring and insular conditions of the artist’s studio. The works in this exhibition were offered up to the viewer as material remnants of the process by which an artist thinks through their own practice. As O’Kelly asserts, this gesture acts to bring ‘poignant focus to the ways in which the passage of time transforms the interpretive meanings of artworks…as life brings us further and further away from the initial moment of making’.

The relationship between the presentation of a finished artwork and the often unseen preparatory work, relegated to the confines of the studio, was alluded to formally throughout the exhibition, as scrawled notes, erasures and hasty diagrams were coupled with unveiled material supports, such as Post-it notes, blackboards and the backs of canvases. The first works encountered in this small exhibition space were Alan Brooks’s series of primitive looking drawings that are derived from rubbings taken from graffiti found on the city streets. The imagery is mostly made up of human heads as well as sexual organs and scrawled expletives, which often become titles of specific works, as in Portrait of jw the cunt (2007) and Shithead (2010). Contrary to appearances, Brooks does not present us with the original rubbings, but meticulously repaints them onto archival-prepared Post-it notes. These surfaces make discernible the artist’s method as these small and delicate supports bear no marks or indents of the pressure required to make a rubbing. Rather, each miniscule mark is reproduced obsessively by the artist’s own hand. Brooks’ work serves to introduce a concern with both the indexical mark, as a found material trace of the past, and the graphological gesture.

Tacita Dean’s Sixteen Blackboards (1992) couples this emphasis on mark making with themes of departure as it pinpoints the beginnings of her artistic career. Sixteen Blackboards is composed of 16 photographs of the same blackboard which has been erased and drawn over. These surfaces contain drawings, notes and photographs that display numerous leitmotifs and references to later works (for example, we see many drawings of feet and references to the act of walking or limping, a theme Dean explores most explicitly in her 2003 film Boots). In 2006, Dean herself reflected on this early work saying, ‘What staggered me looking at myself is, how much of the subject matter in those drawings in that period of time are the ideas that I’m still working on’ (Tacita Dean: Analogue). This act of departure and revisiting was replayed in other works, as can be seen in the photographic documentation of Mark O’Kelly’s and Gerard Byrne’s joint visit to the site of Byrne’s earlier work, Temple Bar Music Centre site-specific commission, 1993. This same emphasis on the return journey was evident in Scott Myles’s Everything Inbetween, Dundee, Scotland Oct 2 1996, Everything Inbetween, Monument Valley, USA, Mar. 23 1998 (1996- 1998). This latter work consists of two almost identical photographs of the artist pictured in the same clothes against the backdrop of Monument Valley; however, on closer inspection we see that the artist is older in one of the images.

This theme of departure and revisiting, which recurred throughout the exhibition, was solemnly concluded by Myles’s The Lecture (2010-2013). This free-standing, aluminium-backed mirrored screen print shows the back of a poster taken from one of Felix González-Torres’s stack pieces, Untitled (1992/3). On the face of the mirrored surface we see the swipe of a roller and the marks left by the adhesive previously used to stick up the poster. These marks could be read as the brushstrokes of a large paintbrush as this work resonates with a series of black and white photographs by Gerard Byrne depicting the backs of Old Master paintings. On the other side of Myles’s work, which the viewer was free to walk around, is a reproduction of González-Torres’s black and white print of a lone bird ascending through a cloud-streaked sky. As is well known, González-Torres’s stack pieces often invited the viewer to take something away, in this case a print. These works all related to the grieving process and the death of the artist’s lover from AIDS in 1991. This work acted to bring the exhibition’s themes of mark making, departure and reclaiming the past full circle, by referencing the act of mourning and of letting go, a necessary part of the process by which we start over. O’Kelly’s impressive curatorial debut seeks to anchor the transience of the present moment in the context of the recent past as these four artists turn back to old works, an older generation of artists, and their younger selves in the hope of facing the future with a firmer footing.

This text was written to accompany an exhibition organised by Charlotte Schepke at Large Glass, London, which set examples of Shearer’s output in conversation with six other contemporary artists. The essay is the first to explore Trevor Shearer’s work, and owes a great debt to conversations and correspondences I had with the artist Alison Turnbull, who was a very close friend of Shearer’s for many years, and who knows his work better than anyone.

Universal Fragments
With scientists’ wire frame mock-ups in mind, Trevor Shearer made Universal Fragments (1998) by casting a bathroom sink using strips of graph paper.1 Graph paper is most often used as a tool of abstraction: of plotting, diagramming and quantification. Here, however, the grids have been torn and bent in the process of being held to the surface of a plain piece of plumbing. Like the tattered remains of that perfect but useless map conceived by Jorge Luis Borges, which had coincided with the territory it described point for point, Shearer’s ragged-edged parts appear as fragile remnants of a representational system exposed to the inclemencies of the elements.2 ‘In spite of my initial reference to computers,’ Shearer wrote of this work, ‘I hadn’t realized that, paradoxically, these fragments would appear archaic, like the remnants of some less advanced technology or maturing big picture.’3 Mounted on the wall, these paper cast-offs are reconfigured, afforded a new sculptural presence and organised into a spiraling formation. The slips and shards of the graph paper fan out and fold back, lining up and overlaying. It is not clear whether they are following a complex orbit around an invisible centre, or whether they have merely been driven into contingent movements by a sudden gust of wind. And so, in a move characteristic of Shearer’s work more broadly, Universal Fragments brings together a series of opposed formal and conceptual terms: archaic and futuristic, fragment and whole, structure and contingency, flat surface and three-dimensions.

The fragments that constitute Mental Exercises (2001-2) refer to a different kind of whole. Consisting of plaster casts of fingers, palms, toecaps and bootheels, which protrude from the wall at precise points, the work engages the viewer’s desire to make sense of the dispersed body parts by imagining an absent figure beyond them. Technically demanding to make, the casts are struck at unusually oblique angles, with unfamiliar sections of hand or boot projecting out an inch or so from the wall. Mental Exercises proposes the body as an object of thought rather than of erotic attachment. Shearer’s toecap is closer to Kahnweiler’s necktie in Picasso’s celebrated cubist portrait from 1910, than to Duchamp’s sexualized casts: it constitutes a brief clue to the disposition of an otherwise invisible body that can take form only in the mind. Indeed, for Shearer, looking always involves a work of intellection, although a part of the thinking that is interwoven with vision is its imaginative and desiring aspect: its fascinations, anticipations and projections. The casts of bodily extremities in Mental Exercises tempt but ultimately frustrate our attempts at what Gestalt theory calls ‘reification’, that constructive aspect of perception that wants to fill in gaps to generate perceptual wholes: finally, these fragments do not quite tally.

Moons

It must be said that the sky’s blue has veered successively towards periwinkle, towards violet … and each time the whiteness of the moon has received an impulse to emerge more firmly… What remains uncertain… is whether this gain in evidence and (we might as well say it) splendor is due to the slow retreat of the sky, which, as it moves away, sinks deeper and deeper into darkness, or whether, on the contrary, it is the moon that is coming forward, collecting the previously scattered light and depriving the sky of it, concentrating it all in the round mouth of its funnel. Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar, 19834

As a sign, the Moon has suffered from over-use: its address to mystery, changeability, femininity, wonder and the like, is as familiar as Stéphane Mallarmé’s worn coin, launched into the night sky. It is difficult to bring it down to earth, but to do so might be the only way to launch it again. In a rebus-like gesture, Trevor Shearer’s Partial Eclipse (of ‘The Riddle of the Universe’) (1999) succeeds by way of a deadpan but enigmatic marriage of the cosmic and the comic. A semi-spherical paper cast swells outwards from the face of an astronomy book opened at its central pages.5 The book and cast are hung vertically on the wall; the cast is as tall as the book and its strange grey objecthood obscures the photographs beneath. Shearer’s work sets in train a series of semiotic games, played out against that interstellar backdrop. Objects from different universes collide: open book and hollow cast; the fantastical orders of magnification required to picture a spiral nebula and the one-to-one literalness of the moulded form.

The lumpen semi-sphere is not all recalcitrance, however: its resemblance to a full moon, with its texture of craters and sea floors, is dumb, obvious, funny.6 The illustrated pages would transport us into space, but the rude object holds us up. In this Partial Eclipse feels of the same spirit as Pense-Bête, the work with which Marcel Broodthaers announced his move from poetry to visual art in 1964 (its title means both aide-mémoire and ‘silly thought’ in French). Broodthaers wedged the fifty remaining copies of his last book of poetry into a ball of plaster, setting up a comic tension between the legibility of the book and the obduracy of the sculptural object. To read would be to destroy the sculpture; to keep the sculpture means foregoing access to the poetry. The tension for Shearer, however, is less between text and object than between object and image: Partial Eclipse signals the reciprocal and contrapuntal relationship between the thick heft of things and imagination’s mobile capacities.

A side note concerning the subtitle: ‘The Riddle of the Universe’ is how the German Die Welträtsel is usually translated. With rather portentous connotations, this conceptual enigma fascinated the likes of Ernst Haeckel, Friedrich Nietzsche and (via the latter) Richard Strauss. Indeed, in Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra (1896) the lack of resolution between the keys of B and C, aimed at representing Man and Nature respectively, has been interpreted as figuring such a fundamental enigma.7 Strauss’ tone poem was famously used by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a film of considerable importance to Shearer, whose unassuming, even deflationary rhetoric nevertheless counters the kind of bombast exemplified by Strauss’ music (Shearer’s preference in that regard was for the Second Viennese School).

Doubles
There is something archaic about the cast, a kind of double achieved by way of a dumb imprint. But doubling can also link up to a futuristic imagination: in cloning and replication, for example. In Plant Casts (1998), Shearer employs several modes of doubling to strange, ricocheting effect. The work is composed of two parts, each of which is a resin cast comprised of two sections made from everyday flora, joined at the stalk. As casts they double the real leaves and flowers from which they derive; each is also a two-part hybrid creation; and, most obviously, there are two of them. Although there is a relation to Vija Celmins’ painted bronze casts of rocks (To Fix the Image in Memory, 1977-82), and to Giuseppe Penone’s model of sculptural work as replication of natural processes (Essere Fiume [To Be River], 1981), these doubles do not compete with the reality of their originals. Shearer’s impossible, spliced hybrids are at once delicate and unsettling. The translucency of the thin resin maintains a relationship with the way that sunlight passes through leaves, but the texture, sheen and almost sickly, otherworldly beige and olive green hues position the Plant Casts as decidedly ‘after nature’.

One of a cluster of Shearer’s works involving doubling, Two Discs (1998) is at once a farewell to vinyl and also suggestive of planetary rings and orbits, lending it a futuristic aspect.8 Two low-fi cardboard discs, each about twelve inches in diameter, are mounted perpendicular to the wall so that they project outwards, one a few inches above and to the side of the other. Each is rendered black with graphite but scored with a set of concentric white rings, made using a turntable, which radiate outwards from the centre, as on an LP record. The doubling of the discs might recall the mechanical shuffle of the jukebox as well as cosmic orbits. The lower disc is less densely packed with lines, and some of the circles orbit a different central point so that they run out of kilter with the rest. An aside to Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs (1935), which themselves were presented on moving turntables, the gyrations of Two Discs are syncopated. Two parts create relations: of harmony and discordance, regularity and divergence, above and below. Here, Shearer uses characteristically simple means to conjure a kind of ‘thinking in circles’, which sets remembered music against the silent trials of sculpture.

Elements

Now, various components of the automatic orchestra were made of bexium, a new metal, chemically endowed by Bex with a prodigious thermal sensitivity… [A]s a result of continuous alterations, the fragments of bexium, acting violently on certain springs, set in motion, and then stopped, one of the claviers, or a group of valves on a horn, and they in turn, at a given moment, were caused to vibrate in the ordinary way by grooved discs.
Raymond Roussel: Impressions of Africa, 1910

Shot in 2009 and re-edited in 2011, the 10-minute looped video Elements, presented on a small monitor, or projected at a similar size onto the wall, shows a close-up of the surface of an electric hotplate on which some water droplets leap, bounce and then vanish.10 The event takes about 35 seconds to elapse. In a suggestive unpublished statement, Shearer described his work in the following way:

The ten-minute video comprises an edited sequence of ever-shortening versions of the event, which then gradually lengthen, like a mirror image in time, and enable the loop to begin again… The sustained, graphic image of the surface of the hotplate reinforces its sculptural dimension in relation to a screen. The elliptically indented surface also suggests, because of its close framing, other stranger associations – lunar crater, amphitheatre, alchemist’s crucible. The structure of repeatedly shortening the filmed event over time is intended to mirror the decay of the droplet itself – perhaps the recorded image is about to disappear as well? When the sequence gradually lengthens the anticipation of the droplet’s returning position is a bit like a child’s memory-game where one attempts to recall objects on a tray that has been removed. These aspects contradict the quasi-scientific language of the filmed event and add another dimension. Watching something exist then cease to exist, and the turbulent changes in between, is engaging, heightened, perhaps, by the event’s transience and scale. The desire to want to see it played out again seems only natural – Elements represents, therefore, a kind of machine that plays with the fulfillment of that desire.11

The luminous brevity of the event, transpiring within this shallow, searing hollow, is captivating. The alchemist’s crucible becomes a dramatic stage on which the spectacle of an elemental gymnastics of extraordinary complexity unfolds. Shearer’s video recalls Étienne-Jules Marey’s photographic experiments presenting the entropic disordering of plumes of smoke as they unfurl around simple obstacles. Here, however, the isolation of a single scene of contingent dynamism offers the raw material for a more complex and reflexive formal structure, which frames, mirrors and augments the original event. The progressive diminution and subsequent re-lengthening of the shot provides a striking formal complement to the diminution of the droplet itself. The intense formal clarity of the video responds qualitatively to the luminous perfection of the droplet, and provides a counterpoint to its chaotic Brownian movements. The quotidian banality of the event – just some water evaporating on an electric hob – is transfigured into a perfect, jewel-like piece of formal construction.

Another aside: in making work, Shearer was fascinated by the possibilities afforded by the adoption of systems of arbitrary constraint. He particularly admired Raymond Roussel’s experimental ‘writing machine’, as well as the formulation of technical constraints, often mathematically derived, by OuLiPo writers.12 Shearer’s library included copies of Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947), as well as eight books by Georges Perec, and twelve by Italo Calvino. Indeed, the development of systems that could provide forms of ‘random order’ to structure the arrival of aleatory phenomena was of particular importance to a series of Shearer’s last works: Dust Music (2012), Forest Film (2012), and 2 Pianos Track Numerous Insects (2012/13). The latter was left unfinished at the time of Shearer’s death.

Animation
In 2010, Trevor Shearer completed Bosch TV, a work consisting of a futuristic casing of laser-cut anodized aluminium housing the looped digital animation of a detail from a painting by Hieronymous Bosch.13 The Bosch painting in question is the left-hand panel of his triptych The Hermit Saints (c.1493), which depicts Saint Anthony of Egypt. The creature that Shearer extracted is a strange, spoon-billed hybrid sporting knee-length black boots and jauntily engaged in catching a lizard. Shearer presents this little monster, now a white figure on a black ground, endlessly walking in a circle around the screen, repeatedly scooping up its prey and shooting the viewer a quick glance before continuing along on its looped perambulations.

Joseph Koerner has described Bosch as having articulated his fantastical inventions with remarkable precision:

[Bosch’s] objects seem somehow carefully observed, even when they cannot be, since there is no real-world prototype for them… By engaging with how a thing is put together, Bosch can rebuild it as he wishes, constructing especially those places of improbable but somehow visibly plausible attachment whereof his hybrids consist… Bosch makes exact fantasies.14

Shearer shared in Bosch’s fascination with how things were put together, and with the minutiae of technical problem solving; the sheer volume of drawings, drafts, maquettes and calculations that preceded the final execution of this work attest to this enthusiasm. Here, painting is transmuted into animation, which is then hybridized with sculpture. Bosch TV arrives as a capsule in which discrete layers of historical time have been superimposed.

Much earlier, in 1998, Shearer described his works as ‘fictions that I hope connect with the idea of a mutable and slightly vertiginous reality.’15 The Borgesian resonance is apt here, as this animated creature could happily find its place in the author’s The Book of Imaginary Beings (1957).16 The protagonist’s endless and pointless circulation might suggest a bleak outlook, a pessimistic statement of the impossibility of breaking out of repetitive, creaturely patterns of existence. However, not only is Shearer’s creature evidently not unaware of its viewer, but the very fact of this extraordinary work of re-imagining is eloquent of an inventive power that works against the kind of circularity it stages.

Light
It would be too grand and declarative to say that there was a ‘return to painting’ in Trevor Shearer’s work over the last years of his life. Although painting gained a renewed prominence in his output after about 2004, it was a constant reference point since he studied painting at art school in the 1980s. The immediate, emergent responsiveness of painting – as opposed to the necessity of calculating all the specifics of a work before it was fabricated – became of particular importance to him.17 Indeed, as a side note, while I have largely been situating Shearer’s practice in relation to moments from the history of avant-garde art and literature, it is important to keep in mind that his work also emerged out of more immediate, intuitive responses to the physical environment of East London, where he lived and worked.18

An important moment in painting’s return to prominence within Shearer’s output seems to have been a series of works that he made on sheets of acetate in 2004, perhaps with Jasper Johns in mind.19 Shearer’s working title for these experiments was The Clearing, which he described in this way:
The Clearing is a provisional title that links with:
i) clearing the decks – the making way for new things.
ii) an opening in a forest – an expansion spatially.
iii) the idea of transparency, materially and conceptually, in relation to looking through and beyond.20

In a note from 2005, Shearer described his work as concerned with ‘the possibilities that arrive through improvisation. Not knowing is a part. Lightness is a part’.21 Here he was referring to a lightness that enabled the ‘freeing up of information – and ideas’, but in considering two of his most fully realized recent works in painting, Yellow Painting (2011) and Silver Birch (2012), it is the effects of the curiously unplaceable light and hue that are arguably the most striking elements.22

The means of making light strange are very openly declared in Silver Birch. A vertical stand supports a lamp that shines a circular beam of ultra violet light onto the centre of a canvas painted silver. Down the middle of the picture runs a meticulously rendered section of a silver birch trunk. Shearer takes this wintry emblem of archaic myth and pagan lore and lends it the quality of a futuristic enigma, the canvas reflecting back a light that is at once cool and hot, illuminating and obscuring. Yellow Painting derives from the meticulous translation of a sustained perceptual engagement with a crumpled sheet of A4 paper the colour of a Post-it note. The depicted creases construct a tectonic landscape of articulated planes, with something of the ridged hardness of a rock face made over into an alien yellow. In his celebrated long poem, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, which sets off from an encounter with the eponymous painting by Parmigianino, John Ashbery describes ‘A perverse light whose / Imperative of subtlety dooms in advance its / Conceit to light up’.23 That is what Shearer’s painting seems to aim at: light made strange as it reflects from the most banal, throwaway object subjected to an unusually prolonged effort of attention. The paper sheet will be scrunched up and discarded, and Yellow Painting’s anchorage to the world of visible and tangible things will be loosened. What is left are the variations of an other-worldly yellow, like that of Caspar David Friedrich’s Large Enclosure (c.1832), which continues to emit the strangeness and opacity of a world from which the veneer of familiar human consolations has fallen away.24

NOTES
1 Trevor Shearer, ‘Notes on Work’, 5 January 1998 (unpublished).
2 Jorge Luis Borges, ‘On Exactitude in Science’ (1946), Collected Fictions. Translated by Andrew Hurley. London: Penguin, 1999, 325.
3 Trevor Shearer, ‘Notes on Work’, 5 January 1998 (unpublished).
4 Italo Calvino, Mr Palomar. Translated by William Weaver, London: Random House, 1985, 31-2.
5 The book is W.M. Smart’s The Riddle of the Universe. London: Longmans, 1968.
6 A related work is Shearer’s Moon (1998), which is comprised of a disc of stretched white vinyl, which buckles and warps as if viewed through water.
7 See Norman Del Mar, Richard Strauss. A Critical Commentary On His Life and Works, Volume 1. London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1986, 132ff. In 1927, Strauss told his friend Romain Rolland that he was aiming to express ‘the hero’s inability to satisfy himself, either with religion or science or humour, when confronted with the enigma of nature.’ Quoted by Michael Kennedy, Richard Strauss: Man, Musician, Enigma. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, 112.
8 Shearer made numerous works involving the act of doubling. These include an earlier series of painted mirrored duplications of postcards (Merimbula, Needles and Wooler, all ca.1992-93), and two later works more closely related to Plant Casts and Two Discs: Losing My Grip (2001) and Calocoat (2002). Shearer was also evidently fascinated by artworks involving mirror images, writing a short commentary upon Michel Foucault’s famous discussion of Velázquez’s Las Meninas (unpublished note, 2008), and expressing particular admiration for John Ashbery’s long poem, ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’, which he included when asked by artist Kathryn Faulkner to name his twenty most significant books. See Kathryn Faulkner, Bibliography 2 (Artists Writers Photographers). London, 2009, unpaginated.
9 Raymond Roussel, Impressions of Africa. Translated by Rayner Heppenstall. Richmond: Alma Classics, 2011, 30.
10 At his death, Shearer also left some unedited digital footage of an electric bar fire. Related to Elements, this footage was also shot in a defamiliarizing close-up, the stationary camera recording the increasingly chromatic intensity of the bars as they heat up.
11 Letter to the author, 30 October 2011. This aspect of anticipation and desire in the viewing of the moving image was approached from another angle in an unrealized proposal for a short film entitled Cinema from 2003: ‘I am interested in the feeling of anticipation that cinemas generate before a performance and the atmosphere that is created. The idea for the film is to evoke this in as simple a way as I can… The very short films (3-5 minutes) will focus on the curtains, lighting, incidental music and the variety of fade-outs that lead up to the revealing of the screen… Each film will consist of one centrally fixed shot, with no camera movement… Despite these restraints, but perhaps because of them, I think the cumulative effect of these repetitions will be interesting and show something of the seduction of the cinema environment in a focused way.’
12 In the same statement quoted above, Shearer wrote, ‘At the time of making [Elements] I was rather obsessed with the strange and experimental literary machines employed by the French writer Raymond Roussel.’ Letter to the author, 30 October 2011.
13 The working title of this piece had been ‘History’ (conversation with Alison Turnbull, 27 July 2013).
14 Joseph Leo Koerner, ‘Bosch’s Equipment’, in Lorraine Daston (ed.), Things That Talk – Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books, 2004, 54-5.
15 Trevor Shearer, ‘Notes on Work, 5 January 1998’ (unpublished).
16 Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings. London: Penguin, 2006.
17 In an email to Alison Turnbull in November 2004, Shearer wrote, ‘Sometimes when there have been scrappy things (bits of acetate tests) in situ the full, ‘finished’ thing seems too complete – too much. Adapting to that I find difficult… [B]ut that’s the good thing about painting – things emerge, you don’t have to live quite so anxiously in the world of ‘projections’?’
18 Shearer’s working notes and photographs attest to his responsiveness to this urban environment, with particular places and details around Hackney, Mile End and Morning Lane, for example, prompting ideas for new and ongoing projects.
19 Shearer owned a copy of the 1996 volume, Jasper Johns: Writings, Sketchbook Notes, Interviews (ed. Kirk Varnedoe, New York: The Museum of Modern Art). In a list entitled ‘Things to think about’ dated July 21 2004, Shearer wrote ‘Johns’ ‘Watchman’ detail (3 rectangles?) – images on acetate, copies of images (painted) on acetate.’ This note relates to a three-part work on acetate from 2005 entitled Ice/Medusa/Iraq, in which Shearer over-painted printed images of Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1823-24), Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818-19), and a photograph from the most recent Iraq War.
20 This unpublished note is titled ‘The Clearing’ and dated 2004/5.
21 Trevor Shearer, unpublished note, 2005.
22 This was evidently something that tended to strike Shearer in the work of others too. Having just seen Giotto’s fresco cycle in Padua for the first time, for example, he remarked on how the paintings ‘exude light in an unpredictable way.’ Email to Alison Turnbull, 4 November 2003. Indeed, Shearer displayed his interest in recording his sustained perceptual engagements with
the natural world in a series of texts, written towards an ultimately unrealised project entitled ‘Silent Pool’, in late autumn 2001. One
text, ‘Silent Pool: Friday 2.11.01 3.35pm – 4.50pm’, ends in this way: ‘The fallen leaves that lay against the few clumps of reeds are also gaining in brightness. Their colour is becoming richer too as a slight, almost imperceptible, amber glow is coming from the sky behind. Strangely this glow is much more noticeable when looking at the gravel path than at the sky. The debris of partially rotting leaves that are trampled into the path on the right now seem to be glowing, even the dark gravel path itself is changing. The far end of the pool is now a dark green black. It has become very cold.’
23 John Ashbery, Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1975, 70. See note 8.
24 According to Alison Turnbull, Shearer’s 1998 visit to the eau de nil room of Friedrichs in the Staatliche Kunstsammlungen in Dresden, where this painting is housed, provided him with one of his most inspiring and sustaining encounters with art. Email to the author, 22 August 2013.

The galleries were punctuated by some extraordinary juxtapositions of Venetian masterpieces with major paintings by Manet. The most feted of these, arriving in Room 2, saw Manet’s Olympia (1863) finally hang next to its most explicit point of art historical reference, Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538). When Olympia was first exhibited, at the Paris Salon in 1865, it precipitated a notoriously violent public reaction; since being acquired by the French state in 1890 it had not left Paris, so its presence in Venice was a major coup. The comparison of Olympia with Titian’s Venus has long been fundamental to the teaching of Art History, and the prospect of seeing the two paintings side by side was exhilarating. All of Manet’s most celebrated interruptions and subversions were of course in evidence: the direct but inscrutable gaze replacing the enticements of Titian’s Venus; Olympia’s famous left hand, transformed from autoeroticism into a sign of self-possession, disbarring access; the startled cat substituting for Titian’s sleepy symbol of fidelity; the black maidservant’s presentation of a client’s gift of flowers, casting Olympia as a modern prostitute and upending the meaning of the Titian’s marriage chest.

With the actual paintings before you, however, other less familiar details become newly visible: the slight increase in scale of Manet’s painting, and his distancing of the figure from the picture plane; the luminous pink of the black maidservant’s dress, rendering Olympia’s flesh flatter and greener by comparison; the studied way in which Olympia’s hair is a slightly redder brown than the background panel, indicating that she wears it down, which brings with it associations of female sensuality; and the way in which the pink toes of her right foot poke out from behind the left, an odd and almost caricatural detail.

Olympia was one of Manet’s most aggressive moves, and the one that had the most dramatic contemporary impact. The precision with which he both evoked and cancelled key aspects of Titian’s iconic portrayal of an available, desirable femininity revealed by precise interruptions the sexualized economy of viewing in the 19th century Parisian Salon. The magnificence of Titian’s painting, while undeniable, is re-cast by Manet’s move, and is not in a position to provide answers to this particular kind of interrogation (not that Titian is under attack here; it is rather the endless parade of 19th century academic nudes at the Salon that Manet’s painting exposes).

Other juxtapositions were less familiar, however, and all the more energizing for their suggestiveness and originality. For me, the most compelling of these was found in Room 7, where Manet’s Portrait of Emile Zola (1868) was placed next to Lorenzo Lotto’s extraordinary Portrait of a Young Gentleman in his Study (c.1530). The latter normally hangs in the Accademia in Venice, and we can assume that Manet had seen it on at least one of his three visits to the city (in 1853, 1857 and 1874). If Titian provided a paragon to be subverted, Lotto’s less famous and more enigmatic painting offered instead a kind of aesthetic and conceptual companion, and the juxtaposition reminds us of the wealth of conventions on which Manet could draw for the depiction of the male intellectual. Zola’s recently published pamphlet on Manet’s art was displayed together with some other contemporary publications in a cabinet nearby, an example of the discrete but precise way in which historical connections were drawn by the curators. (Manet’s exquisite diminutive portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé [1876] was also brilliantly placed close by, on a wall adjacent to the Zola).

The relationship of Manet’s Zola to Lotto’s painting is more oblique and glancing, usefully suggesting that Manet’s absorption of art history operated by way of allusive assimilation as much as by direct quotation. The comparison seemed precisely aimed, though, however speculative a claim for specific lines of influence might be. The comparison rendered certain details strangely resonant: the brightly lit foreheads in each case, a sign of a capacious intelligence; the way in which Lotto’s window, opening onto a landscape beyond, is replaced in the Manet by a Japanese screen which also represents a landscape; and, in particular, the extraordinary chromatic rhymes across both canvases, of the most subtle powder blues, sweeping from the bottom right to top left of Lotto’s painting, returning in the pictures and pamphlets in the top right of the Manet, and again in the border of the Japanese screen to Zola’s left.

This way in which the precise calibration of formal and aesthetic elements (and their relationships) functions to establish painting’s particular form of intelligence – an intelligence from which sensuous moments have not been expelled – was also demonstrated by Manet’s stunning Le Balcon (1868- 69). Although the juxtaposition with Carpaccio, while intriguing, was not perhaps as compelling a comparison as those already discussed (the prime importance of Goya’s The Majas at the Balcony is hard to displace here), Manet’s painting was beautifully integrated into the exhibition more broadly. Again, chromatic repetitions are striking: in the unreal intensity of the emerald green describing the balcony, the shutters, the parasol and Berthe Morisot’s neck ribbon. One particularly resonant detail when face to face with the painting was the relationship between the three main characters’ facial expressions and their by-turns tense and truant hands. The right hand of the central figure as he clutches his lapel; the oddly taut fingers of Morisot’s left hand; and, especially, the involuntary burrowings and fumblings of the gloved hands of the woman on the right, rendered by Manet in an extraordinary salmon pink. These details, brought out by Manet’s painterly facture, augment the sense of dislocation here: not only are the figures lost to each other, but they somehow feel internally dissociated, the body absently engaged while the mind is elsewhere.

These exceptional moments were joined by others: a room of spare and lovely still life paintings, a powerfully grouped set of works relating to the last ordeals of Christ, and a room acknowledging the profound influence of Spain (dominated by the striking Fifer of 1866). But Manet was not always great, and this exhibition was nicely unprecious in its inclusion of weaker moments, moments when we feel the artist less invested, less concentrated, less innovative and stringent.

The show begins and ends rather modestly, for example: Rooms 1, 8 and 9 did not deliver the kind of riveting encounters available in the other rooms (Room 9, entitled ‘The Boundless Sea’, for example, was really only an occasion to present Manet’s one great painting of Venice itself, The Grand Canal, Venice [1874]). But in a way this measure of inconsistency seemed to suit the presentation rather than detract from it: Manet’s lack of aesthetic preciousness and consistency felt experimental, inviting, invigorating.

It is perhaps true that Manet: Return to Venice benefitted from what was a rather underwhelming Biennale this year. Such foils not withstanding, however, Manet’s oeuvre continues to prove able to yield fresh insights and unexpected encounters. The Palazzo Ducale show was particularly original and effective in this respect, and made the Royal Academy’s Manet: Portraying Life, staged in London earlier this year, seem unfocused and even a little opportunistic by comparison. In the current show Manet’s extraordinary combination of disruptive criticality, aesthetic richness, conceptual sophistication, historical acumen and technical bravura were amply and inspiringly demonstrated.

Manet: Return to Venice was organized in collaboration with the Museé d’Orsay and the Fondazione Civici Musei di Venezia, and was on view 24 April – 1 September 2013. Ed Krčma is Lecturer in History of Art at University College Cork, and co-editor of Enclave Review.

For example, Cotter’s Once More With Feeling (2013), a scaled-up wastepaper bin that stands like a skinny Claes Oldenburg, is composed of a delicately linear frame tipped in pale pink and complete with its own super-sized bin bag made from cloudily translucent plastic. The material quality of the ‘bag’ is the most compelling element of the piece, specifically the way in which the air and light contained within gains a certain density. The plastic billows gently in the shifting air currents created by the viewer’s movements around the work, so that at times it almost pulsates slightly, like an opalescent jellyfish held in a tank, while nevertheless remaining obstinately literal in its waste basket-ness. Perhaps more successful is A Solution Is in the Room/4, (2013) which also plays with opacity and transparency, this time using ribbons of corrugated cardboard layered into spheres. Two of these spheres sit facing each other in slim neon orange frames, like a pair of fat babies in highchairs, while the honeycomb structure of the card allows a shimmer of the vivid orange to glow through the airy bulk of each form.

As a counterpoint to the allusive whimsicality of Cotter’s two pieces, Karl Burke’s Taking a Line (2012), a fold-out screen made of bisected mild steel frames that march across the concrete floor of the massive space, is resolutely abstract and linear. Moving around the work, the viewer is presented with a shifting series of visual effects, as the intersecting bars of Burke’s concertinaed structure appear to expand and contract. It is a simple and fantastically effective piece that literalizes planes and lines and eloquently dramatizes the dimensions of the gallery. Burke’s take on the severe language of high Minimalism is, at times, inflected with a certain bone-dry wit, as in Arrangements 4 (2013), where two shallow open-ended rectangles leant against the gallery wall become an abbreviated frame, surrounding nothing. However, his linear compositions are most successful when exploiting the architectural conceits of acute angles and wedges.

Sited in the upper gallery, Burke’s Poetics of Space (2013) is composed of two lofty rectangular steel frames – each bent at an angle and with squared-off corners – and frames a pathway from the entrance of the small anteroom to the tall slice of window diagonally opposite. With great economy of means, Burke’s minimal arrangement exerts a subtle tyranny over the viewer, compressing our experience of the space, almost herding or funneling the viewer to the far corner of the room. This type of work, extending drawing into three-dimensional space, is not new: it was explored by Marcel Duchamp with his Mile of String in 1942, by Eva Hesse in the 1960s, and by Gego, Gordon Matta-Clark and Fred Sandback in the 1970s. But Burke’s ascetic sculptures are nonetheless elegantly effective, particularly when drawing our attention to the ways in which architecture directs or dictates our movements.

In contrast to Burke’s steely abstraction, Cotter’s sculptures almost flaunt their domestic origins in the form of bins, sieves or vessels, which she then expands in scale or reduces to whip thin frames. Measure (2013) recalls a line drawing of a pint glass in flamboyant Schiaparelli pink, the spare graphic form made of mild steel so slender it almost quivers as
the viewer walks around the piece. Her idiosyncratic containers also draw the viewer’s attention to air, as a substance or an element suffused with light. Capture (2012-2013), for example, is again a riff on the shape of a wastepaper basket, this time with a small plastic bag of water caught like a lens or a jewel at its base. The bag of water catches and holds the daylight, but the piece also creates drama with shadow play – the fine metal and transparent, fluid-filled sack casting a shadow almost denser than its own material presence. Her use of fizzing neon accents provokes strange and almost surreal optical effects. Capture is sprayed a stinging Day-Glo yellow, which oddly flattens the sculpture, so that it appears that the skeletal structure almost reverts back to a drawing in two dimensions, as if scribbled over a photo of the interior.

For all of the visual effects detailed above, The Air They Capture Is Different is a resolutely serious show, which, although beautifully choreographed, verges on the ascetic. However, both artists’ conceptual explorations of internal volume or the architectural interior are absorbing, and bring to mind the French theorist Henri Lefebvre’s model of space, which counters the commonly held notion that space consists of the empty areas between objects, or, ‘that empty space is prior to whatever ends up filling it’ (The Production of Space, 1974 ). Burke and Cotter’s works don’t so much occupy space or contain a spatial volume, as themselves hold, demarcate, and structure space as both volume and atmospheric medium. Rather than space being something that we experience passively, these two sculptors, in their best moments, make the viewer physically conscious of its presence. They offer us, in the words of Juhani Pallasmaa, a ‘strengthened sense of [the] materiality and hapticity, texture and weight, density of space and materialized light’ (The Eyes of the Skin, 2005).

For Monomania, three components were installed in the long, narrow gallery space. 1) On the end wall: a projection with sound. 2) In the corner, at the opposite end of the room: A 26-minute music video sequence. 3) Between them: A sculptural object. This layout demands that we encounter the videos—aurally if not visually— first. We start there.

7/31/99

1 A man reverses into a garage. Gardening implements hang against a freshly plastered wall. The floor is clean. Something is about to happen. But first, before the camera opens on this shrine to domestic order, we catch what passes as a slice of accidental filming—a mechanical shriek and a partially occluded sliver of a bicycle wheel or its shadow, even. It lasts just an instant. Then the screen goes black and opens again on that utilitarian interior. In the apprehension of what follows, we might well forget we ever saw this but the 30 videos that follow it are rife with such moments of apparent accident and error. They establish the register for the entire exhibition. Though it never comes back into view, that bicycle wheel (an object hardly devoid of art connotations), is pressed into performing a crucial sonic service. Its squeaking revolutions, which grow increasingly cacophonous, soundtrack the whole piece, making what looks only strange into something which registers aurally as deeply unsettling.

Back in the screechy garage, a figure (McCann himself) is reversing into the frame. He takes up position before a rake with the kinetic precision of one relocating a pre-designated chalked mark. Taking a deep (eye-widening) breath, he steadies himself. He adjusts his footing and then, raising his hands to waist-height, begins to twirl. The effort he expends in doing so seems incongruous. His movements are painfully deliberate; his expression an agony of proprioception. On the second revolution, he covertly wipes his forehead. Gradually gathering speed, his arms are pulled higher; his gait grows less clumsy and his footwork more deft. But all the while, his pained facial expression sets the tone of this balletic whimsy curiously askew. Once having achieved a critical velocity, there is grace—or something approaching it. Then, some inscrutable lesson learned or a secret battle won, the dance ends. He holds his final stellar position for a moment, then turns and reverses back out of the frame. The camera lingers a while on the space he has just vacated, and the wheel screeches on until, via another glimpsed swipe of a hand across the lens, blank blackness is restored. And, all the while, since ever the spinning man found fluid movement, the word ‘PARADOX’ has been flashing in rainbow polychromy across the middle of the screen.

[Direct cut]
2 All the screen is a face. An electronic track loops a stately bounce with springs and a barbiturate-infused raspberry sounds like a helicopter. Lips move, immense and undulant.
[Blackness; sound outlasts vision]
3 The word ‘nothing’— digitally rendered into a percussive bark— is repeated over (and over) a series of regularly-spaced sharp claps. Footage of an upturned hand bursting from fist into open (empty) palm is spliced into images of water glancing off a knife held under a running tap. In the interstices, a black screen announces the same nihilist mantra in an invocation of tautological overkill.

[Direct cut]
4 In the American accent common to mass-produced automata, an answering machine plays back the message: ‘We find camaraderie in the mundane. The more mundane, the closer we get. Our love is like fucking in a call centre. Our love is literally fucking in a call centre’. The adverb, inflected with the slightest tonal emphasis, pushes an otherwise affectless machine delivery into deadpan comedy.
[For the briefest instant, ‘Nothing’ is re-instated]
5 Jonas’s Vertical Roll is remade, en bref. In place of a feminist critique of the fetishizing atomization of female flesh, we watch a bouncing still of the male artist’s face, caught here in an expression of supreme ignominy. The incessant clang of the original has been replaced with an equally aggressive, though much less minimalist, dance-track.
[No interlude]
6 The camera pans across a murky field. Hearing only the amplified near-white noise of wind in a microphone, wrecked cars are seen through a wire fence. Over all of this is printed the incongruous legend: ‘GLORY OF THE LORD’.

[No interlude]
7 Behind a semi-solarized hand, the artist’s face shows through in a pixellated blur. Having been displaced earlier, Jonas’s industrial clang (or an indirect sonic citation thereof) arriving here, two video-tracks too late, and quickly disintegrates into something else. The outstretched hand reaches towards a sun which repeatedly cedes opacity to an eye that breaks or burns through it. Watching, we are watched. We will be watched again.
We’re not yet nine minutes in, and we’ve watched just 7 of the 31 videos. The pace, acidic palette and uneven texture of the sequence makes for exhausting viewing as we are forced to recalibrate eyes and ears 30 times in 26 minutes. Sometimes the sound stops before the image vanishes; sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes a black screen marks the end of one and the start of another; sometimes they directly abut in jarring tessellation. Often, we need to look away. And since the music videos shown here represent just a part of the much bigger 99 music videos project, this seems as good a place as any to stop and appraise that project at large.

The 99 Music Videos are defined (in terms of form, concept and content) by their simultaneous alter-existence as a series of sporadically released numbered uploads in what Sabine Maria Schmidt has called the ‘transgeographical exhibition space’ of the Internet (‘At the right place at the right time? A brief report on current video art’, 2006). Specifically, McCann promulgates this project via Youtube: natural habitat, in the post-MTV-epoch, of the music video form. Though embedded here within a specifically curated installation, the videos are available for consumption in as many formats, locations and even configurations as the camera-wielding Youtuber seeks to sample. In a subversion of artworld conventions, the mass mediatization of these video artworks took place not subsequent to, but before, the show’s opening. The edit incarnated in the exhibited DVD object enjoys no hierarchical privilege over the freely available video singles on McCann’s channel. Furthermore, representing just a fraction of an eventual 99, what we get in the gallery is not alone a multiple, but further auratically compromised by its metonymic relation to a still-growing whole.

Categorically music videos, they are videos for sound. However we might, in the gallery context, privilege the visual experience to the neglect of what is happening aurally, ‘watching them’ on mute deprives them of their motive power. Installed on a small television with low-grade integrated speakers, the videos act in the gallery much as music-videos used to do in the home: as a flickering, peripatetically attended to or distractingly intrusive stream of audiovisual output. Made to sell singles and ads, the return on the energy and expenditure involved in the production of commercial music videos is an index of viewer-numbers –an economy made publicly explicit by Youtube’s derivation of advertising costs from the numbers displayed on the onscreen view-counter. Although music videos may be free-to-view, the function of the form is still (perhaps even moreso) inherently commercial.

Cognizant of (and, in the 9th video, directly referencing) this money-spinning motivation, the 99 Music Videos simultaneously invoke the other side of Youtube: its domestic interiors, lo-fi DIY production, homemade tutorials, mimed paeans from fans to their musical heroes and virtuosic displays of minor talent. At the same time, McCann’s videos draw attention the diaristic focus on the video-maker—and on his/her body: the solipsism common to Youtube content and the history of video art. McCann’s intervention into the discourse on our status as what Kate Mondloch calls ‘screen subjects’, is neither naïve nor cynical. Establishing their frame of reference from the outset in the intersection of art-historical and pop-cultural axes, these videos articulate a challenge to Rosalind Krauss’s hasty diagnosis, in her 1976 essay ‘Video: The Aesthetics of Narcissism’, that the artworld ‘has been deeply and disastrously affected by its relation to mass-media’. Contra her despair, this work playfully critiques video’s diaristic impulse—as it manifests variously among video-artists and the video-ing public at large.

Untroubled by anxiety at the prospect of an institutionless, curatorless, collectorless global web as art venue, McCann exemplifies the form’s formal potentialities. Claims made in the 1970s and ’80s regarding video’s emancipatory capacity to attack ‘two critical targets at once: the elitist, middle-class concept of the originality of fine art, and the deadening consumption of mass media’ (Dieter Daniels, ‘Video/Art/Market’, 2006) are dramatically outdone by Youtube’s global accessibility—both to producers and consumers. Youtube’s immediacy and its democratic porousness to amateur, inexpert production makes it a true medium of the masses.

McCann’s videos are all identifiably shot on a camera phone. The audio production is similarly lo-fi and homemade. A small keyboard constitutes his house-band. Beyond delimiting (or, rather, unlimiting) its audience, the Youtube platform also imposes a constraint that is extrinsic—even inherently at odds with-the corporeal, performance art-invested history of video art. In marked contradistinction to the contemporary art gallery, the use parameters of Youtube forbid nudity. Conspicuously devoid of any inherently provocative or disturbing images, the considerable visceral impact of these videos is achieved entirely formally. The shock it provokes—the work it does—happens in the conjunctions (alienating, humorous, unsettling) it constructs between sound and image.

Notwithstanding this stricture, the (appropriately clothed) body of the artist (or part thereof) is the sole near-constant across the videos. His voice, often heavily distorted, is further entfremdet/made strange by its ventriloquization via answering machines, voicemail functions and vocoders. When a voice is relayed reasonably directly—as when a closely miked but otherwise un-manipulated voice sings ‘If I could make up a war, to make you move a bit faster, Then I would make up a war and you would fight it perpetually’ to a small plastic figurine—it arrives (even out of these basic TV speakers) as rawly intimate. Visually as well as aurally, the videos are conspicuously highly processed. This homemade aesthetic is specifically not a naturalistic one. Images overlay others, fragments of the underlay break through, are erased and recur; a glitch page surfaces beneath an image of an outdoor scene. Starter-package editing effects adulterate most of the footage. In these videos, as in McCann’s extensive sculptural practice, what is superficially whole is repeatedly revealed to be thick with and leaking alternative images, and replete with traces of its manufacture. Nothing is ever complete or closed off. Through the deployment of an arsenal of blunt processing tools, the seamless fictions of pictorial illusionism and diaristic truth are systematically undone.

In her aforementioned essay on video art, Krauss identifies in it ‘a narcissism so endemic to works of video that I find myself wanting to generalize it as the condition of the entire genre’. McCann’s videos are only too (painfully) aware of this, the historical hamartia of the medium. His artist’s eyes and hands repeatedly loom into view from behind other images, shimmering incongruously in the background or interjecting, with apparently careless casualness, into filmed material. They irrupt openly into their products. If, as Krauss argues, ‘video’s real medium is a psychological situation, the very terms of which are to withdraw attention from an external object—an Other—and invest it in the Self’, then McCann’s attention is dedicated to a knowing conceptualization of the mediated Self as Other within the 21st-century exterior of the digital-domestic. In place of the narcissism which Krauss attributes to performance videos, in particular, the 99 Music Videos represent the artist as a hapless, fumbling failure—a figure deliberately inexpert in his various performed functions. This preoccupation with the bathetic banalization of the artist—his subjectivity, his body and his occupation—is endemic in McCann’s performance and production.

THE FRAME
A large gold frame hangs from the ceiling. It is empty but encloses what is projected on the wall behind it. It stands both as an independent sculpture (a frame to look at) and a device (a frame to look through) via which the projection’s cyclical metamorphoses are viewed. The armature from which it is suspended contrasts dramatically with the object itself. Bald links of brushed steel clipped around the ceiling beams hold the frame at eye level, provoking a clash between the utilitarian pragmatism of these chains and the ornate but functionally void, vacant frame. Traditional display conventions, as embodied in the frame, and the alternate, though equally constricted aesthetic of the contemporary white cube—with its poured cement, brushed steel and blank walls—here collude in the hanging of a void. In addition to allowing the frame to serve the projection, its placement in mid air also invites us to view it in the round. The disparity between the aspect that presents itself to the public attention and its reverse is startling. Evoking classical allegories of deception—in which beautiful surfaces give way to obscured ugliness and decay—the unsprayed back of the frame reveals the impoverished means and materials of its manufacture. A vision of opulence gives way to rough wood, chicken wire, a fabric that is evocative of bandages, and effusions of spray insulation all of which (on one side at least) has been coated in bubbled and cratered layers of gold spray paint.

If McCann’s practice is driven by any monomaniacal tendency, perhaps it is most apparent in his repeated selection of building materials, found objects and detritus as materials for the construction of distinctly unsettling objects—such as the Seraphim (2010), Monomania objects (2010) and O (2011). Other works deal directly with the deviant mechanics of obsessive cognition. In These cunts are controlling my mind (2012), obese, defaced and faceless bodies are painted over, scribbled upon or dripped over with a sticky whiteness and interspersed with images of cemeteries, phone-box advertisements and the obsessively repeated drawings and phrases of McCann’s Bastard diagrams (2009). Gleaming porn-pink bodies are blurred or obscured into anonymity or rendered into Bellmerish configurations of breasts and genitals. Another prototype for an eventual large-scale production, this book presents a sort of physical manifestation of the compulsive, paranoid conflation and collocation of disparate concepts which drives the editing of the videos. Aggressive framing strategies make heavily worked-over pages into cage-like grids. Mischievous aesthetic analogues are pulled together, coherencies are forged between unrelated things. As in the videos, the base found materials that compose the work are laid identifiably close to the surface. Throughout his entire practice, impoverished, industrial and ugly materials—things designed with strictly utilitarian concerns in mind— are conscripted into conspiring in the construction of objects that are, in spite of themselves, freakishly appealing.

Returning to the golden frame, its colour, tarnished in patches with a black patina, connotes the ancient and precious. However, upon closer scrutiny, extravagant decoration betrays itself as a massing of organic forms: a tumorous excrescence. Knotted ropes and swags loop from horizontals and twist around verticals. Beaded skeins stretch between peaks and over crevices. Globular drips fall in suspended animation from every surface. Thus colonized, the frame exceeds its own borders—its outermost edges encroaching into the gallery space just as its interior edges invade the potential picture space. Introducing this empty frame into the installation space simultaneously invokes the picture-frame’s sanctification of illusionistic space and launches an affront to its primacy in art. If the frame is the traditional transmitter of the claim ‘This is art’—an object whose very embrace conveys Art status—then the empty frame is an allegory for the bathetic proposition that the transcendental signifier ‘Art’ is, in fact, an empty one. And yet, all around it, art (albeit of a sort that seeks to do down, undermine, to problematize its own value) is going on.

THE PROJECTION
A black dot appears at the centre of a soft ball of light, its circumference delineated by an infrathin line of light. Smoothly, this dark circle expands until it has blotted out the light—leaving only that tiniest sliver of an outline. For a moment it appears to pause. We wait. There is a momentary illusion of stasis. Then, at the centre of the black circle, a tiny dot of light appears. Developing at the same even pace, this light expands until only the slightest trace of an outline remains. Again, there is a moment’s pause before a black dot appears at its centre and the whole sequence begins again. It is an eclipse, an aperture and its reverse; the dramatization of a mechanical, Sisyphean tournament between dark and light. Throughout the lifespan of Monomania’s installation, this doubled duel replays ad infinitum on the wall-cum-screen. Its rehearsals of the same action—now rendered positively, now negatively—are soundtracked by the vaguely subaquatic ululation of a slowed-down siren-whine. Emanating from two speakers behind the gold frame, this sound piece is an aural analogue for the oneiric panic at once urgent and bizarrely decelerated; for catastrophes experienced at an excruciating half-speed. Indeed, like most dreams, this projection produces a lingering temporal disorientation.

Projected in an infinite loop onto the bare wall of a gallery space naturally lit by overhead skylight windows, the installation necessarily existed at all times in an interrelation with the diurnal passage of light across the room. However hermetic its own choreography might have been, the programmed sequence was always subject to the vagaries of light and dark as they acted upon the gallery space. Prolonged exposure to the projection provokes an unsettling claustrophobia. The audio track makes of the potentially meditative cycles of black on white on black a cosmic agony of inevitability.

For Margaret Morse, the circumscribed temporality of installation art, with its necessary implication of eventual de-installation, is implicitly bound up with ephemerality (Margaret Morse, ‘Video Installation Art: The Body, the Image, and the Space-in-Between’, 1990). Here, the frame that marks the absorption of a piece of art into the institution—temple to enduring value—frames a paradoxically ourobouric projection of endlessness that itself exists only in the temporal circumscription of its installation-duration. Similarly, the videos being televised in the corner are part of a whole that is, as yet, inscribed only in the future anterior and, on Youtube, in the continuous present.

IN-BETWEEN
Entering Monomania, we are immediately suspended between components which exist in a triadic interrelation. In order to attend to the video piece installed on the floor, we must turn our backs on both frame and projection, and vice versa. Our contemplation of any single component is always divided: distracted, enriched or complicated by its co-habitants. In devious illustration of the viewing regimes imposed by media screens in installation art, this configuration of exhibition-elements demands that we turn our backs on Art to watch telly. The art audience is made complicit in Monomania’s challenge to art’s primacy over mass culture. Forced to choose between visual spectacles, the opposite injunction pertains at the aural level. One set of speakers broadcasts the projection’s drone, while across the room the videos cut rapidly between violently variegate song units at intervals of 30-90 seconds. Between them, the frame alone hangs mute; its aperture the site of a clamorous performance of sonic double-penetration. The visitor’s desire to ‘see the show’ entire is delayed or denied by their entrapment within an aural crossfire.

McCann’s Art Man video-as-artist’s-statement is comprised of still, largely found images, which are narrated by a vocoded voiceover and soundtracked by vague keyboard noodling and the barking of a dog. Fierce and funny, its subversive charge inheres in the juxtapositions it creates between machinic statements and ascerbic images. In a riposte to the posturing rhetoric of the artist’s statement form, McCann mutely mocks the claims made by his ‘art man’ contemporaries: claims to involving communities, challenging preconceptions and pushing the boundaries of aesthetics and politics. He ridicules the automatic, almost unconscious citation of references to Greek mythology and political activism as a means to shorthand relevance. The artist’s status—the value of the proposition ‘I am an art man’ is broken down in a sequence which collages Margaret Thatcher, Britney Spears, an ad for Domino’s pizza, a sculpture by Donald Judd, the apparent live birth of an infant mannequin, and a display of dog faeces on that ground zero of banality, a kitchen floor. In the background of no.14, the artist’s voice is heard to ‘confess’: ‘Yeah I’d like…I just…Yeah, I set myself goals, deadlines, and y’know … I’m not great at keeping them.’ To this faux-plaintive lament, comes the response: ‘That doesn’t mean you’re mental though—it just means you’re a fucking flaky artist, like.’ Preoccupied with prodding the messy borders between art and pop culture, art and rubbish, fascination and revulsion, McCann’s work is inherently antagonistic and compellingly interrogative. This is an art that seeks to divest itself and its entire art-historical context of po-faced gravity, that attempts, even, to escape the gallery. And yet, in doing so, it achieves a formal and conceptual potency that secures the continuous failure of its own mission.

Monomania was on view 20 – 27 July 2013. McCann’s 99 Music Videos can be viewed online at http://www.youtube.com/user/jimmyfitzpants on.

‘What do you think of the biennale?’
‘Biennale? It’s like “tsunami”, no one knew what a tsunami was, but then we had one, and now everyone knows what a tsunami is.’ (Moosa Bava, rickshaw driver and part-time caretaker for the Kochi–Muziris Biennale)

Biennales have become quite commonplace, which is especially strange when one considers their history: to begin with, how an event in Venice in 1895, aimed at stimulating the contemporary art market through a focus on the decorative arts, quickly became politicised by the early twentieth century by inviting economically powerful countries to install nationalist pavilions. By the nineteen-thirties the fascist government had taken control of the Biennale from the local council and quickly established parallel festivals of music, film and theatre. Remaining under fascist control until 1942, the Biennale became a major instrument for propaganda, transforming the exhibition into a national celebratory event. It is perhaps little wonder that in the last sixty years, countries on the so-called margins have begun initiating their own biennales, usually with the aim of challenging this model, such as Dakar, Istanbul, Gwangju, São Paulo, Sharjah, Taipei, and now Kochi-Muziris.

Curated by two locally born artists, Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, the first edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale opened in December 2012. Spread over fourteen venues and featuring works by over ninety artists, the event was marketed as the first of its kind in the country. This of course meant overlooking the now defunct Triennale-India, first organized in 1968 by the novelist and art critic Mulk Raj Anand, not to mention initiatives along the lines of the Delhi Biennale, undertaken by noted art critic Geeta Kapur and artist Vivan Sundaram, and planned for 2005. This event never came to pass, due to a lack of support referred to by Kapur as a matter of government apathy.

Krishnamachari and Komu succeeded where other efforts had failed by securing funds from ‘the politically progressive state of Kerala’ (http://johnyml.blogspot.nl/2012/01/fault-lines-in-geeta-kapurs-support-for.html). Describing their biennale model as an ‘artists’ biennale’, and making a clear link to the city’s colonial history and the real or mythical cosmopolitan past of Kochi’s predecessor, the ancient port of Muziris, it aimed to reconnect art and society through politically engaged artistic practices and provide an enduring platform for art in the region.

The aims of KMB were certainly worthy, even noble, but can the biennale model, even an artists’ one, ever be capable of countering or overturning a one hundred year old tradition? Strangely the KMB didn’t hide from this history, but instead proudly announced it was modelled on the Venice Biennale, which was perhaps only attractive to the much-needed investors. The reality of Kochi, however, with its dilapidated colonial buildings and layers of Arab, British, Chinese, Dutch, Greek, Jewish, Roman, and Portuguese histories, created a visible confrontation between the Venice concept and the day to day reality of the Kochi people. Coupled with the do-it-yourself ethic towards curating, the event presented something very different from the polished, best of the best line regrettably propagated internationally. In addition, a fortnight before the biennale opened, the Kerala government withdrew a substantial portion of the funding. This was largely due to a protest campaign initiated by local artists, led by sculptor Kanayi Kunhiraman and art teacher C.L. Porinchukutty, who called for more transparency in KMB’s use of funds. The organisers suddenly found themselves in a desperate fight to keep the biennale afloat by seeking out new investors, while simultaneously trying to quell the dispute. To their credit, with mounting costs, the hard working team led by Krishnamachari and Komu persevered, and later even managed to overturn the government decision.

Though it undoubtedly put undue pressure on a group of organisers who had already taken on a momentous task to realise an extraordinary event, I found the protests to be an important aspect of the biennale – an event that aimed, after all, to connect art and society. Unquestionably it created a space for critical reflection, perhaps otherwise missing from Kochi-Muziris: in fact, giving such criticality a louder voice within the biennale could help inform future editions.

One of the KMB’s key aims, as presented in its press release, was to stimulate cultural tourism, revitalising the local economy, which in turn would make it more attractive to investors. This perhaps points to what is really at stake in contemporary biennales: not so much the art (was it ever primarily about the art?) as the effect on diplomatic and international relations and the plans for urban regeneration, going on in the backrooms of the corridors of power. Art and associated criticism can sometimes act as a smokescreen for what is really at stake – that is: new infrastructures not just for art but for housing; urban planning; and jobs – all of which are very important for Kochi, which is avidly seeking new companies and investors. As an inter-state comparison published in The Hindu (February 27 2013) showed, the unemployment rate for Kerala was one of the highest in the country.

During my time in Kochi I was quite surprised at how many people I met who were there for purely political purposes: an environmental group, for instance, who used the international scope of the biennale to gain the attention of politicians, directing it towards local issues, in particular to the pollution levels generated mainly by the various multinational companies in Kochi’s industrial sector. It is by no means a small matter—in 2012 Kochi was also rated among the most heavily polluted cities across India (The Hindu, August 20 2012). It seemed fitting that in the Pepper House, one of the buildings next to the main biennale complexes and overlooking the waterfront where goods were once unloaded, local artist K P Reji decided to paint a mural entitled ‘Thumbingal Chathan’, based upon a folklore protagonist popular in the state of Kerala. The legend speaks of a local boy who falls in love with a member of the ruling class. The rulers, enraged, kill him and bury his body inside a dyke. Of this KP Reji says, ‘the good old tale surrounding him seeks to portray Chathan as a tragic victim. In my work, he is a hero.’ For Reji, Chathan positions his own body in the dyke so as to avert the disaster of a flood.