Akimblog
Europe
posted by Clint Burnham - February 15th, 2007.
A week or so into the New Year, I went to Rotterdam to give a talk at the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art. My talk was part of Brian Jungen’s exhibition (a continuation of Jungen’s shows at the New Museum in New York and the Vancouver Art Gallery). The Dutch iteration has some new pieces as well, including a magnificent sculpture of a baseball glove, The Prince, and The Evening Redness in the Sky (2), an installation in which the soundtracks for western and war movies play in a room with skulls made of softballs and a thundering noise emerges from a saddle on a stool. Jungen’s art looked raw here compared to the VAG show; it reminded me of his earlier exhibitions at Vancouver’s OR and Charles H. Scott Galleries.
Still in Rotterdam, I visited the Boijmans Museum for a retrospective of Erik van Lieshout’s video works and paintings. Van Lieshout made his reputation with scathing takes on race relations, sexuality, and pop culture. He also constructs fantastic viewing environments for his videos. I had to duck under a papier-mâché doughnut for one piece. Another could be watched from my choice of wrecked cars, each of which had a drive-in-like speaker attached to the dashboard for the audio. As for the videos themselves, let’s just say that anything that combines two brothers French-kissing, interviews with crack addicts, samples from 50 Cent’s “In da Club,” and candid comments from supporters of far-right Dutch politicians Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh has my vote.
Ho Tzu Nyen, Bohemian Rhapsody, 2006, video
After a detour to The Hague to visit Mauritshuis - an intimate gallery with no less than 3 Vermeers (including Girl with a Pearl Earring) and a touring show of Rubens and Brueghel, I headed to Berlin. I stayed in the Alexanderplatz area of the Mitte district where there are any number of cool galleries including Sparwasser HQ, which opened its Glowing Whistle Festival with Ho Tzu Nyen’s Bohemian Rhapsody video. Setting a court room trial to Queen’s bombastic 70s hit, the artist matches juridical pomposity with Brechtian estrangement to great, and fun, effect.
The real prize show of my week in Berlin was Beyond Cinema, a magisterial survey of projected video and film curated by Stan Douglas and Christopher Eamon at the Hamburger Bahnhof. Showing the work of 27 artists, the exhibition seemed to go on forever and, indeed, I spent some six hours there on a blustery day. From Rodney Graham’s Edge of the Wood to Tony Oursler’s Criminal Eye, from Valie Export’s Adjunct Dislocation to Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Consolation Service, the works were as much about the machines that projected the images as the images themselves, addressing the ideologies of projection and the materiality of the gallery. The most haunting work – and not only because it took place in an unheated room (like Daniel Libeskind’s Holocaust tower in his new Jewish Museum) – was Paul Sharits’ Epileptic Seizure Comparison, which showed two men having induced fits accompanied by the music and colours that tap into the affected parts of their brains. (For a good guide to artist run centres and art in Berlin, check out the 12th issue of Rotterdam-based magazine Fucking Good Art at http://www.fuckinggoodart.nl/.)
Tim Gardner, Two Men on a Bus, Moving Through the Landscape, 2006
After enduring a record-breaking hurricane in Berlin – whilst wandering around the depressingly tarted-up Potsdamer Platz – I headed for London. There I started off by catching the last day of the Velázquez exhibition at the National Gallery, a wonderful survey that ranged from early still-lifes much indebted to the Dutch to his series of court paintings, depicting the Spanish rulers in all their Hapsburg Jay Leno-chin glory, dwarves, hunting scenes, and almost pedophilic portraits of princesses. Also at the National was Canadian painter Tim Gardner, incredibly the youngest living artist to have a show there. Gardner had done a residency at the National in the fall of 2005, but (I am sure to the chagrin of his London masters) his 14 watercolours and six (larger) pastels depicted Canadian scenes for the most part - from a basketball court in Victoria’s Oak Bay neighbourhood to Rocky Mountain vistas. After a day of looking at the dark, gloomy old masters in the gallery, Gardner’s paintings, with their snapshot-ish compositions, were a bright and light series of bijoux. As one woman said to another on departing his room, “A revelation!”
I hadn’t seen much photography yet on my trip so I was glad to go to the Barbican a day or so later and view their wonderful survey of 20th Century European photographers. A lot of the canonical artists - including Atget, Brassai, and Wolfgang Tillmans - were in this show but so too were photographers who were new to me such as SI Witkiewicz (who did wonderful self-portraits in broken mirrors or in drag), Josef Sudek (who for the most part just shot out his studio window), Boris Mikhailov (the Ukrainian dissident who shot a series depicting any patch of red he could find), and Inta Ruka (a Latvian who chronicled a country village over the period of twenty years).
Mark Wallinger, State Britain, 2006
The new work that captured the lion’s share of media when I was in London was Mark Wallinger’s State Britain at the Tate Britain. For this massive installation, some 30 meters in length, Wallinger recreated the protest of Brian Haw, an anti-war activist who had been encamped in Parliament Square since June 2001. Haw’s signs, petitions, and living quarters were removed by the police in May 2006, but Wallinger’s loving simulacra looks damned authentic, down to the grubby duct tape and grimy poster board. At once a political work of art and a screed against the state, Wallinger’s piece falls on the very edge of the one kilometer “exclusion zone” that Tony Blair (or “Bliar”, as Haw/Wallinger put it) enacted, forbidding protests too close to the Houses of Parliament. A thick black line thus runs through the Tate Britain, making manifest the proximity of art to power and vice versa.
Finally, these were three other shows that rewarded my time: Damian Hirst’s collection on display at the Serpentine (ranging from Sarah Lucas to Andy Warhol, John Currin to Francis Bacon), Carsten Höller’s magnificent slides at the Tate Modern, and Raymond Pettibon’s show of some 40 or so drawings (including a very nice Reagan in the director’s chair, and an acerbic, messy take on Abu Ghraib) at Sadie Coles HQ.
Clint Burnham is a Vancouver writer. His recent article on Weegee can be found at http://doppelgangermagazine.com/.
Witte de Witt: http://www.wdw.nl/
Brian Jungen continues until February 11.
Museum Boijmans van Beuningen: http://www.boijmans.nl/smartsite.dws?id=2039276
Mauritshuis Royal Picture Gallery: http://www.mauritshuis.nl/index.aspx?siteid=54
Sparwasser HQ: http://www.sparwasserhq.de/
Glowing Whistle Festival continues through 2007.
Hamburger Bahnhof: http://www.hamburgerbahnhof.de/
Beyond Cinema: The Art of Projection continues until February 25.
National Gallery: http://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/
Tim Gardner: New Works continues until April 15.
Barbican: http://www.barbican.org.uk/
Tate Britain: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
Mark Wallinger: State Britain continues until August 27.
Serpentine Gallery: http://www.serpentinegallery.org/
Tate Modern: http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/
Carsten Höller continues until April 15.
Sadie Coles HQ: http://www.sadiecoles.com/index-flash2.html
Raymond Pettibon continues until February 17.