The curators acknowledge the continued possibilities of concrete and the legacy of the style which became known as Brutalism – an unfortunate translation of the French ‘béton brut’ or raw concrete. Brutalism came to signify the architectural intransigence of large social, educational and cultural complexes which were radical for their time but became jaded and fell into disrepute by the 1980s. With concrete currently experiencing a renaissance, the curators identified the duality of expressive aesthetics and ‘Human Modernism’ as an underlying concept of contemporary architecture. The exhibition was inspired by both the problematic legacy and the potential of concrete for the present. Ranging across all media, the works were installed in the rectangular, high-ceilinged Kunsthalle space. A number of approaches were discernable, from architectural and social legacies to more formal responses.

 
Large concrete buildings privileged circulation and functional uses for idealistic and practical reasons, but with negative social results. Tobias Zielony’s slow photo animation of the Le Vele di Scampia (2009) complex in Naples subtly revealed drug dealing and other covert activities. The Mexican collective Tercerunquinto’s photographs Gráfica reportes de condición (2010-2016) explored segregation in public and private spaces, with overlaid graffitied texts as an inventory of social discontent. Mona Bonvicini’s photographs of modified real estate advertising slogans into graffiti on boundary walls in desolate spaces. Add Elegance to Your Poverty (1990/2016) substitutes for ‘property’, highlighting psychological pressures in a divided city such as Berlin, which implicitly accepted social-deprivation chic as a marketable image.

 
Liam Gillick’s wall projection showed paired views of Thamesmead, a planned satellite town near London. Stanley Kubrick filmed key scenes of A Clockwork Orange (1971) here. That film reinforced the dystopian reputation of anonymous new suburbs. Gillick’s Pain in a Building (1999) video doesn’t point to anything specific, but hints that little has changed since this town was built. It remains a clean, quiet but slightly depressed place. Ingrid Marten’s video Africa Shafted: Under One Roof (2011) wore its pain more openly. The Ponte City Apartment tower in Johannesburg rises to 54 floors built around a hollow inner core. Eight soaring elevator shafts daily transport residents of many different cultural origins. Filmed in this claustrophobic space, the multitude of interactions, voices and languages, and the generally low-light edgy atmosphere, all point to the failed idealism of this building and stoic human resilience in a vulnerable, degraded, space. Also observing the urban terrain, Susanne Kriemann’s circular wooden panopticon showed aerial views of extensive Swedish post-war social housing projects interspersed with nature shots, taken with a Swedish Hasselblad. This iconic camera was first used for aerial reconnaissance, which the artist sees as mirroring the investigative gaze of modernity.

 
A more current re-imagining of urban space by Heba Amin used video and voice recordings of the Speak2Tweet platform, which enabled protestors in Cairo to post news before the overthrow of Egyptian President Mubarak in 2011. Tom Burr’s Brutalist Bulletin Board (2001) documented student unrest at Yale University in 1969, when Paul Randolph’s iconic Art & Architecture Faculty building was set alight. A contemporary essay by architectural historian Vincent Scully about the architect noted that a building which is ahead of its time ‘puts demands upon the individual user that not every psyche will be able to meet’. In Scully’s view, despite Randolph having introduced more varied materials and personal spaces than had his functionalist counterparts in the 1950s, the regulatory and restrictive character of such buildings ensured that they remained a space of political contestation. Burr’s visual narrative of revolt also contained images relating to Jim Morrison’s arrest for ‘offending public morals’ during a 1967 concert.

 
An interest in concrete structures per se inspired Werner Feiersinger’s photographs, which record the cosmopolitan commitment underlying 1960s / ’70s Italian architecture, focussing on both the massive sculptural qualities of bridge supports but also the overgrown barren undersides. Thomas Demand’s photomontage Brennerautobahn (1994), recreated these structures as pristine cardboard models, as if to suggest that imagined versions of great motorway flyovers won’t harbour the urban and social impacts that complicate the initial idealism. The idea chimes with those of Robert Smithson’s 1967 photo-essay ‘A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey’: structures which had become relics of a once dominant idea, could be reimagined through the passage of time. Annette Kelm’s photographs House on Haunted Hill (2005 / 2016) examine Ennis House (1923), a ruined Frank Lloyd Wright building near Los Angeles. Coated in textile-style blocks and built in the Mayan Revival Style, it is now considered a preservable ruin. Similarly, Isa Melsheimer displays a series of excellent coloured gouache depictions of now demolished or ruined modernist buildings by eminent architects of the era, including Stirling, Gordon, Kiessling and Bancroft. Her Possibility of a Ruin (2016) sculptures, in which fragile ceramic forms are placed within concrete moulds on plinths, are a part-homage, part-reinterpretation of these buildings.

 
Few of the works sought to actively reinterpret the theme in this manner, David Maljković’s slide projection with sound being another exception. A crudely built installation of grey shelving, photographs and projections, A Long Day for the Form (2012), set up photographic colour interventions against the uniformity of concrete structures in Novi Zagreb, a typical former Eastern Bloc city. Seeking a specific visualising role for the artist, his interventions emphasise the prevailing grey of the actual surroundings and show the ‘the emptiness of failed utopias’. This project pointed the artist-viewer to a way through the thematic material. A progression from paradise to total ruination was very well done in Cyprien Gaillard’s 16mm film Cities of God and Mirrors (2009). Filmed in a nostalgic 1970s glow, it recalls a spring break by American college students at a Mexican holiday complex, a modernistic building mimicking nearby Mayan pyramids. Dreamy footage of visual pleasure with disco-ball effects gradually descends into an all-consuming implosion, reinforcing the theme of ruination in an age of vacuous pleasure.

 
Focussing on play, Sofie Thorsen looked at the art-in-architecture playground projects of 1950/1960s Vienna, which were developed as a foil for public art-education. Most of these have disappeared. Modified steel play frames provided abstract-formal props for casually-wrapped inject prints recording the urban planning vision here. In a similar vein, Jakob Kolding’s installation addressed the ambitions behind political and social utopias. Cut-out montages of grey figures in glass cases hinted at masquerade and staged roles, while framed constructivist-style black and white collages depicted young people appropriating suburban areas for their own activities.

 
Several artists concentrated on the formal qualities of concrete. Isa Genzken’s Luke (1986), a punctured smooth block of concrete, stood elegantly on a metal stand. Olaf Metzel’s green egg-carton facade cladding recreated a similar project from Documenta 8 (1987). Heidi Specker’s photographs were minimalistic interpretations of EUR, near Rome, a fascist-era project which became a film location for Antonioni and Fellini, and is now a residential and business district. In Jumana Manna’s Government Quarter Study (2014), three circular stelae with reliefs were full-size jesomite reproductions of entrance columns in the brutalist-style Government buildings in Oslo. Symbolic of the optimism of the Nordic Welfare State, these buildings were targeted by Anders Behring Breivik in 2011. Debate continues on whether to preserve or demolish them. Manna also integrates the work of Mark Boyle, Secretions: Blood, Sweat, Piss and Tears (1978), four formally-staged photographic studies which emphasise the abject materiality of the body in allusions which could refer to the skin and life of such buildings. Kasper Akhøj’s chunky bush-hammered sculptures recall the socially radical approach of the Escola Paulista architects in Brazil in the 1950s and 1960s, whose ‘alternate discourse of concrete’ reflected the social and political revolution of the time. There were similar formal presentations of urban experience by Klaus Weber, Maximilian Pramatarov and Hubert Kiecol. Karsten Födinger pushed the sculptural aspect by inserting a complex wooden criss-cross frame within a large concrete mould, probing the relative weight of both materials. Idealism isn’t entirely secular either. Andreas Bunte’s two films were a panegyric to concrete as the raw material of many post-Vatican II sacred spaces. And then there is concrete’s blunt functionality, shown in Miki Kratsman’s photographs of Israeli security checkpoints and public safety shelters. Finally, Ron Terada’s double-sided billboards at nearby Karlsplatz (2006/16) drew attention to the signal effect of certain words or signs placed in an unusual context. The texts ‘Concrete Language’ and ‘See Other Side of Sign’ acted as a clever play on both the sign text and the material.

 
Given the original idealism underlying Brutalist architecture, a critical focus on its societal impacts was an obvious outcome of this exhibition. While this was well achieved, by choosing artists to address the theme it was also inevitable that the works would be assessed not only for their critique of the legacy of concrete, but also for its potential for new ways of making or looking at art or architecture. With a few exceptions, most of Béton’s presentations seemed satisfied to document this legacy and its impact. This seemed like a missed opportunity to reactivate the potential of concrete for the present, to find new crossover points between functional and aesthetic possibilities. A less comprehensive presentation might have assisted in leaving space for investigating new crossover points between art and architecture.

 
A more open-ended approach to the use of concrete was taken in Brute Clues at Project Arts Centre, Dublin. An awkwardly shaped, wooden platform accessed by four steps, was hemmed in by an angular concrete wall 80cm high. This structure occupied over a third of the gallery space from wall to wall. Behind the concrete wall, the wooden platform edged over a perfectly-still blue pool, which could also be viewed at water level through a narrow slit under the platform, by accessing a low-ceilinged undercroft through a trapdoor.

 
This was an uncomfortable experience as it wasn’t possible to stand up properly. The whole structure hindered the usual experience of the space, creating an autonomous new work with no apparently useful purpose. It could be contemplated from a slim raised plastered bench attached to the walls and spanning the opposite side of the gallery. The three artists – Tom Watt, Tanad Williams and Andreas Kindler von Knobloch – aimed to create, according to the exhibition’s accompanying text, ‘a structure for engagement and a repository for their own individual approaches to art-making’, setting out to upset ‘the hierarchies of display in a white-cube context’. Based on field work in the South-Western USA, unidentified, leftover structures and ruins in desert and coastal sites, led the artists to develop the theme around architecture. Built interruptions in the desert inspired the use of concrete, in particular a dam structure found in Joshua Tree. These were depicted somewhat obliquely on six postcards recording photographs taken at the visited sites. By not pointing to a definitive denotation of this structure as a piece of architecture – a stage, a dam, a platform or an excavation – a more open-ended interpretation, in terms of an object between art and architecture, was possible.

 
A ‘homage’ or ‘monument’ to time spent travelling in the USA, the ‘take it or leave it’ approach of this installation was refreshing in its optimistic use of concrete and other materials. Raising more questions than answers, this intervention was a timely experience in light of the Béton exhibition and a general revival of interest in Brutalist architecture (as witnessed by a Jonathan Meades’ 2014 documentary and a number of blogs). This otherwise functional platform seemed apparently useless in the gallery setting. A patio of pristine failure, it seemed to aim to be nothing more than an autonomous new structure confined within the space. The most useful conclusion of this collaboration is that it pointed to the value of an open-ended non-specific approach to future possibilities, in contrast with the often counterproductive functionality and ease of circulation aimed for in Brutalist architecture.

 
Béton was on view 25 June – 16 October 2016, Brute Clues, 2 September – 29 October 2016. The Béton exhibition booklet is available at http://kunsthallewien.at/application/files/2914/ 6667/6680/Beton_BOOKLET_EN.pdf).

Consistent with this theme, the works had an underlying element of transition, either actual or implied. For example, Meggy Rustamova’s five photographs of barely discernible green images Green black out ( 2014 ) were the result of an error during their chemical development, supplanting the artist’s memory of the original moment of what was being focussed on by the lens. Similarly, Dina Danish’s diptych – two framed papers of folded deep red geometric shapes titled Stop, Sun! Continue, Sun! (2010) – allowed for the possibility of one paper fading through exposure to sunlight during the course of the exhibition. This fading event was documented in the form of a dramatic dialogue between the relevant ‘characters’, the Director (that is, the artist), Paper One, Paper Two and the Sun, as they worked through the various steps involved. The dialogue could be read on the gallery window from the street and was an interesting textual transposition of the visual. Originating in a theatrical context, Christodoulos Panayiotou’s The End (2009) was visually striking. A framed poster depicted a black theatre backdrop, overlaid with the title and date/time of an event orchestrated by the artist at the Margravial Opera House in Bayreuth. The event consisted of a black backdrop occupying the stage of the baroque opera house for an hour, during which period people were invited (at the behest of the announcement poster displayed in the Project) to be present. Nothing happened and afterwards the backdrop was folded away for good, the poster being the only record of the event. The absent backdrop brought to mind Malevich’s Black Square (1915) – indeed all of the works making up The Centre for Dying tended to the monochromatic, and Dina Danish’s dialogue referred in passing to the Russian pioneer of abstraction.

The most prominent work in the space was Karl Burke’s Taking a Line (2011), which comprised four identical mild steel right angled frames. These open frames were re-arranged during the exhibition run, sectioning the space and requiring the viewer to negotiate their presence. The piece was arranged as a squared-off enclosure during the Dive Bar Programme. At Dina Danish’s event “A Simultaneous Poem”, the audience was seated inside the piece while artist participants acted out, repetitively, a fictional press conference involving Charlie Chaplin, Theo Van Doesburg, Kurt Schwitters and ‘the ridiculously good-looking Letterist International’. An exercise on the possibilities around constructing a performance, this event had an idiosyncratic and absurdist feel to it. Other Dive Bar events were presented by the exhibiting artists and collaborator performers, and included screenings, sound pieces and readings around the theme of interruption and performativity.

Another event included a discussion by Kevin Atherton on Dan Graham’s work as he experienced it as a live event in 1975. A similar Graham video-documentation piece, Performer/Audience/Mirror (1977), relayed a performance on 8 June 1977 at de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam. This piece involved a 17 minute exploration of the audience-performer relationship, filmed in a narrow white-walled space with a small audience reflected in a mirrored wall, in front of which the artist stood. The camera was first pointed at the audience who were self-consciously put on the spot, before being gradually redirected at the artist standing in front of the mirror as he narrated in detail his posture and movements, and the audience’s reaction to being filmed. The handout accompanying Centre for Dying on Stage stressed the importance of Graham’s video to the exhibition as a whole, going so far as to say that it was ‘the backdrop against which this exhibition [was] set’.

It is significant that Graham’s work at this time was exploring the boundary between minimalism and conceptual inquiry, addressing temporality, people and space. It was also noticeable that the other work on display was minimal in format or structure, as it was Minimalism as a movement which gave rise to a significant critical discourse on art objects and audience engagement in the 1970s, treated famously in Clement Greenberg’s essay ‘Recentness of Sculpture’ (1967) and Michael Fried’s ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) . Both criticised minimalist work for being literal and theatrical, having a kind of stage presence as Fried termed it. For Fried, minimalist art seemed to approach the condition of non-art, almost a new form of theatre, and therefore had become dependent on the viewer bringing a response to it for it to be complete. The work of art had become reduced to being an object in a situation, failing to attain the status of an autonomous work. Greenberg similarly contended that the borderline between art and non-art had been transformed into the frontline of a war waged between theatre and art as such. In contrast, what they termed ‘modernist’ work was considered by both writers to have properly addressed the issue of quality and medium in an aesthetic sense, and was therefore self-contained. It did not require the viewer to respond to its presence.

These criticisms were countered at the time by other practitioners, and it is in the tradition of these critics that Centre for Dying on Stage is itself ‘staged’. Apart from Graham’s experiments with performance, film and architectural sculpture, Robert Morris also addressed the issue of the viewers’ co-presence in his adaptable minimal form works, to which Burke’s pieces at Project bear a certain resemblance. Robert Smithson was particularly critical of Fried and used the forms of minimalism to address scale, entropy and human presence. Much of the work at the Project, while minimal in format, contained inherent qualities or propositions of change of a physical, spatial and temporal nature. The first impression of the work was relatively static and appreciation depended somewhat on the explanatory documentation. However, once the pieces’ status as bases of a series of prior theatrical manifestations was established, the exhibition succeeded in extending the boundaries of the crossover of minimal work with performativity and theatrical engagement with the audience. The exhibition was also marked by a strong sense of interactive openness and showed the potential of continued engagement with Minimalism’s critical legacy.

The Centre For Dying On Stage #1, installation shot. Project Arts Centre, Dublin, 2014. Featured works by (L – R) Meggy Rustamova: Green black out (2014); Dan Graham: Performer/Audience/Mirror (1977); Karl Burke: Taking a Line (2011); Dina Danish: Stop, Sun! Continue, Sun! (2010). Image © Project Arts Centre.

The Centre for Dying on Stage #1 was on view July 18 – September 13 2014.

At the rear of the space is Hopper’s House, multiple digital prints of Edward Hopper’s House by the Railroad (1925) arranged symmetrically and illuminated from below by a purple neon light placed behind a plywood barrier. The barrier appears to mimic the horizontal rail line at the bottom of the original painting, a distancing device Hopper used in his paintings. This work is installed beside a fine metal screen by the artist Mollie Anna King, a recent commission by The Black Mariah for this space.

Finally, speakers at floor level emit an intensely loud audio piece, which briefly recedes to a more ambient level (Drive Time 1 & 2 [2014]), while a continuous loop of photographs is projected onto the opposite wall to complete the picture. (It’s your Birthday [2013-ongoing]). The installation was presented in a semi-lit space, with individual works spotlighted.

The installation reflected on the experience of driving or, more abstractly, the concept of ‘drive time’. In their statement, the artists cite the pragmatic display formulas of the dashboard as an apt analogy for the idea of ‘being driven’, that is, artistically: committed to the mythos of artistic and cultural ambition. They also refer to Freudian exchanges through monologues and phrases snatched from one-way communications, with these drives articulated in the tracks emitted by the car stereo. I read the dashboard device as a choice of literal and metaphorical instruments to enable various themes to be developed.

The show took a cue from the Bacharach and David song, recorded by Dionne Warwick, ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose?’ (1968), whose lyrics are also displayed. The suggestion of failed ambition on the LA scene, and the wish to return home, seem to find a contemporary echo here. The readymades create an ambience of leftover nostalgia for 1960s Americana, reinforced by the simultaneously strange and familiar innocence of these lyrics. However, the impact of the audio piece and the projected photographs indicates that we have moved onto an altogether tenser, more anonymous and less pleasant driving space.

Faced with all these objects, I found myself best positioned between the audio piece and the projected photographs. The audio builds up to an uncomfortable, relentless, throbbing base sound. Intentionally or otherwise, this seems to mimic the famous bass drum in the Warwick song. The experience of the installation from this position, between the sound and changing images, was the most compelling one. Sound is emotive in a way that the visual cannot be and, fixated on the constantly moving photographs, I got a better sense of this collaboration from the intense audio effect. Marking time and the ordering of work by routine are explicitly referred to by the artists as having been key structural components of their collaboration: they mention how numbering systems, coded schedules and an improvised calendar model of the year 2013/14 were all utilised, presumably for the period of the exchange of ideas. I found the numbering and coded components difficult to gauge, but the sense of marking time in a routine way was clear, especially against the backdrop of the relentless, highly exaggerated, stereo sound.

The projected photographs reinforced this. These are mostly casually taken images of people in foyers, passing street scenes, moments caught in the mind’s eye, advertising signage – I noticed one for hypnosis services – and more personal interior places, taken during the daily routine. Interspersed with these scenes are certain iconic film personages which reference popular cultural takes on high art style. Throughout the sequence, the camera is deployed to capture anything that happens to provide a momentary distraction from the onward thrust of the day, before the moment passes to the next inevitable point of happening. These images have a faded quality and seem to have been taken with mobiles.

This ongoing project of ‘image exchange’ is a good metaphor for the trip the artists have embarked upon. It points also to the retro-consumer and arthistorical sourcing which is a feature of contemporary art practice. This particular combination of images is reminiscent of Wolfgang Tilmans’ approach, his stringing together of seemingly unrelated subjects, creating a deliberately banal feeling, a sense of faded glamour and even ennui at the lack of obvious connections. Viewed with the jarring audio sound, it suggests that the driving experience is both uncomfortable and directionless. Being alone is central to this Drive Time, the feeling of isolation alleviated only by announcements that punctuate the radio playlist on the repetitive to-and-fro daily routine.

The questioning of authorship and an exploration of the conventions attaching to the contemporary exhibition format were parallel themes here. The forcing together of stylistically unrelated objects brings this across, although the result was somewhat cluttered and dispiriting in the half-lit space.
Perhaps this is the point. O’Kelly’s well-established practice of questioning the role of imagery and representation plays a significant part in this, blurring the lines between originality and reproduction and generating a banal sense of disquiet in the process. McInerney’s technical experimentation extends this process of questioning on to a more interactive aural and visual level where the lack of a linear, fixed experience is well conveyed.

Drive Time was on view from 8 February – 13 March. Colm Desmond is a Dublin-based artist who has written reviews for Recirca.com and the Visual Artists News Sheet.