“AN EXPERIMENTAL, RAREFIED FIELD FOR THE ART EXHIBITION”

OR: MORE ADVENTURES IN PRESS RELEASE ARTBOLLOCKS

“An art exhibition which collapses form (the collectivity requisite of the Chain and any performative work) and content (collective consciousness).”

While Lewisham Arthouse seems like a fine place, a press release about a day of performances there has once again brought out my inner English professor. I assume curator/perpetrator Candida Powell-Williams also wrote the press release, in which case she’s evidently not averse to blowing smoke up her own arse in the third person. All grammatical errors, faulty reasoning and bad writing are in the original text. I’m not making this shit up. I wish that was the case.

“Chain is a seven hour series of multi-disciplinary performances by artists, musicians and poets at Lewisham Art House, brought together by artist Candida Powell-Williams to investigate collective consciousness. Each participant, prior to the event, has provided the following with a word/ object/ sound or image stimulus to be integrated into their performance creating the Chain. By engaging the practitioners through this arbitrary relation the event will mirror our everyday encounters with one another in the city, it will drive the practitioners’ responses together in a stream of collective consciousness as we interact as individuals within the collective of the city.”

“Investigate collective consciousness”? Please artists, stop saying you’re investigating or questioning things. Questions are what you used to get on your exam papers, but you’re not at school doing your GCSEs now. Most of the supposedly vexing so-called investigations or questions of dim, pretentious artists have already been answered decades (or centuries) ago in an entirely satisfactory and conclusive manner by other artists, by writers, scientists, sociologists and philosophers, by womens’ magazines and by the manufacturers of fortune cookies. Artists have subject matter or areas of interest or aesthetic concerns, they’re not just ticking off a series of answers on some list. How is a day of performance art investigating collective consciousness, anyway, even if it were possible to investigate consciousness?

The second and third sentences are a grammatical, semantic and conceptual bramble that may or may not have some coherent thought process underneath. Engaging the practitioners through what arbitrary relation? What is arbitrary and what is the relation? Each participant has provided the following what? Saying “prior to the event” is redundant because of the past tense “provided”: one cannot “provided an object” after an event that has not yet taken place.

I think the rest of this gibberish is just an extremely puffed-up and pretentious way of saying “we will do stuff and people will look at us.”

COMMITTING A MASTERPIECE

“Is it art? Well, how is it valued? The value depends upon opinion, opinion depends on the experts, a faker like Elmyr makes fools of the experts, so who’s the expert? Who’s the faker?” Orson Welles in F for Fake.

F for Fake* is Orson Welles’ experimental 1974 documentary “about trickery and fraud, about lies… and any story is almost certainly some kind of lie.” It focuses on three fakers with deep conceptual connections, as seen through the lens of Welles’ own admitted penchant for telling self-aggrandizing lies in real life. Of course he can’t avoid mentioning in particular the huge trouble he got into as a result of drawing reality into his fiction (or vice versa) with Citizen Kane and his notorious War of the Worlds radio broadcast. “I didn’t go to jail,” he says sardonically, “I went to Hollywood!”

This is by way of contrast with one of the film’s other subjects, the art forger Elmyr de Hory, who did go to jail several times for his efforts. He was wanted by Interpol and various other law enforcement agencies for most of his life. It’s hard not to suggest that Interpol perhaps needed to sort out their priorities and do something more important instead of hounding an elderly man who painted unauthorised copies of expensive paintings and apparently did no harm to anybody who wasn’t a greedy, ignorant fool, especially if we also bear in mind that de Hory was driven to suicide two years after this film was released because he was about to be extradited to France (and probably given a long prison sentence) for some of his “art crimes”.

PIPILOTTI RIST: EYEBALL MASSAGE

Hayward Gallery, London, 28th September 2011-8th January 2012

Pipilotti Rist (whose work appealed to me at this year’s Venice Biennale) is now the subject of a retrospective at the South Bank including dozens of video and performance works going back to the late Eighties. Personally I’d find such a prospect horrifying if it was my work: who wants everyone to see the dodgy things they were doing as a kid twenty or thirty years ago? Unless it’s all been downhill from there, obviously, in which case you probably should rest on those early laurels and hope that nobody notices you’ve made anything new because your new stuff is nowhere near as good. Unfortunately this happens, too. I’m not saying that Rist’s new work is crap, I think it’s quite the reverse in fact: I just mean that if she’d died or her video making arm had been amputated in a freak museum of modern art accident or something so she’ll never make a film again, then there might be some justification for the context provided by showing some of her juvenilia. Her old stuff has not aged well at all, though. Some of it made me cringe on her behalf but presumably she doesn’t care or she’d have omitted it, so good for her I suppose if she’s been brave and decided that we must see her entire career, warts and all.

Her appearances in her own works suggest that she’s an absolute nutter who seems to have more than a passing acquaintance with psychedelic drugs, which locates her a very long way from the pomposity and arid conceptualism that’s the boring norm in video art. In fact she seems to do exactly what she wants without much regard for looking cool, for art world orthodoxy or for standing apart from her own ideas. She seems very willing to embrace her own ridiculousness and narcissism. That’s both admirable and much too unusual in performance and video art.

CENTRAL PAVILION: ILLUMINATIONS AND PLASTICINE

The official gloss on Maurizio Cattelan’s contribution is worth quoting almost in full: “[He] has surprised Biennale organisers by re-creating ‘Turisti’, the work he produced for the 1997 show featuring 200 stuffed pigeons and fake pigeon shit on the floor.”

Either that or he’s twigged that the curator is a dimwit with no sense of quality control whatsoever, and Maurizio thought he could get away with just handing over some old thing that was only clogging up his studio anyway. So, thanks to him there are stuffed pigeons everywhere. These ‘turisti’ are certainly an apt dig at the actual turisti who perch in pestilential flocks all over the Giardini and whose presence seems hard to fathom given that they don’t seem the slightest bit interested in art. Most of them sound as if they couldn’t think about one thing at a time, let alone operate on any kind of complex intellectual level. Or maybe these people know exactly what they’re doing and they’ve found in the Biennale the perfect place in which they’ll go entirely unchallenged by art or ideas.

SHOW

Jerwood Space, 16th March-21st April: Edwina Ashton, Jack Strange, Bedwyr Williams

I attended the opening of Show, “an exhibition of newly commissioned performances” which was perpetrated by Sarah Williams. There was a considerable period of aimless meandering among bovine art preview people, queueing for the overpriced bar behind about twenty people who thought it was a good idea to bring infants to an art preview and who furthermore thought it was a good idea to bring infants to the bar at an art preview, combined with unfocused faffing about by gallery people, so I had time to overhear several beautiful gems of London art fart idiot talk:

“I thought I would curate it in more of a, you know, normal way.”

“We need to set up a meeting about that budget because there’s definitely budget in our budget for that.”

“Usually it’s really boring in here, they’re trying to jazz it up. I don’t know if they have.”

<One posh man to another, both with wives/partners in tow> “Hello, we’ve met before, we met at the docks.” <Wives studiously pretend they didn’t hear what they just heard.>

I also had ample opportunity to observe a middle aged white woman apparently dressed as Yul Brynner playing the King of Siam in The King and I the beardy man who modelled for the illustrations in The Joy of Sex (he hasn’t aged a day!) and numerous girls in gigantic black glasses.

Note to numerous girls: spectacles should not cover more than half a person’s face, especially if you have a particularly miniscule, pinched and ratty art student’s fizzog.

I was also totally blanked by two people I know, but I wasn’t upset because saying that the feeling is mutual is probably an understatement.