Installation shot, Alex Katz, Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, September 5 to October 5, 2012

In keeping with Dave Hickey’s idea of art writing being commensurate with playing air guitar – “flurries of silent sympathetic gestures with nothing in their heart but the memory of the music” – then the appropriate motions for Alex Katz’s paintings would be a poetic finger-snapping ring-a-zing zing or lyric hip-wiggling. The words that could accompany Katz’s paintings include “lyrical,” “cool,” “chilled” and “rhythmic”: all modes that are equally used to describe music, and perhaps even being by the sea – the theme to one of his two shows on these shores. Recent paintings at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London followed by a compact collection in Margate’s Turner Contemporary provide a clearer view of the artist’s elegance.

At Turner Contemporary a corridor of small paintings is sandwiched by two big galleries with generally larger and more recent works. Flowers, landscapes, night themes and portraits in the corridor, spanning a forty-year period, offer a gemlike walk though various ideas in the artist’s career. This small grouping, in fact, becomes a retrospective within the exhibition demonstrating the breath of his themes but also the consistency of his vision through the years. A small early collage Sea Land Sky (1959) provides a glimpse of Katz’s reductive thinking early on. Essentially just three bands of color: a gray rectangle, a cool blue middle band, flat at the top edge and undulating at the lower edge, with a blue green bottom third implying the land. It evokes the simple, contemplative seascape that one imagines. Sea Land Sky is a good example of how Katz is able to use the bare minimum, color, line and edge in this case, to evoke place and mood.

During a talk at the gallery, Katz described the ethos of his work as having grown out of a response to the existential nature of Abstract Expressionism. In that regard, his light touch offers a strong counter solace to the action painter’s angst. Pleasure and ease, his painting seems to suggest is just as important a quality of life as the raw meditation on existence; and what better balm for raw existence than languishing by the beach. Give Me Tomorrow, a collaboration between Tate St. Ives and Margate Contemporary, two venues in English seaside towns, brings together predominantly large images of ocean themed paintings. In the large galleries at Margate, Katz’s subjects play, swim, sail, sit on the beach; they are entirely languid in their presentness, probably being caressed by a warm sea breeze. The most compelling piece actually offers very little in terms of image, or, for that matter, human beings. Beige Ocean (1999) is a painting of surf or waves. Composed of whites, creams, faint yellows, and a few diagonal brushes of paint to evoke the bubble and spray of surf and ocean motion. Here it is the faint gestures and close color tones that bring about the sense of fluid motion but also the emotional calm of the sea. This creamy painting is like a Chinese scroll offering nature for contemplation, and from that point of view, the Katz offers its viewer a foothold to being present.

Alex Katz, Sea, Land, Sky, 1959. Cut and pasted paper, 8-5/8 x 11 inches. © Alex Katz/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY Digital Image

Representing a place or time is not uncommon in figurative painting. But that impulse, when combined with the nature of Katz’s schematic approach (flat color, cool gesture), seems a world away from the plein air nature of, say, Impressionist painting. It is well known that his work is created through a methodical system, which involves a preparatory sketch, then a drawing, and a cartoon that helps to plan the painting. The actual painted act comes about rapidly with some improvisation, perhaps comparable to jazz where structure and improvisation work together. A twist of the hand, a moment in time, determine the tone of Katz’s efforts. His painted world though should be considered more than just luxe, calme et volupté, that hallmark of Matisse. It seems to me that the success and impact of a Katz painting depends on just this moment of presentness, what the artists himself calls painting in the “present tense.” Hence, being present, but one that is at ease, would seem to be his counter point to mere existential existence. His is a cool modernity.

Coda. The latest paintings, on view at Timothy Taylor’s in London, of flowers and portraits offers a new point of view for the octogenarian: a double portrait of the same person in a single frame. Take note that this is no Warholian repetition, rather the same model is depicted at close up and from distance, as well as from different angles. For example, a portrait of Ada, is a close-up of her glancing over her shoulder on the left, while there is a three quarter length view of her back on the right, or Chris, (2012), presents his subject nude on the left and her head painted on the right. Although apparently simple as an idea, given his conception of painting in the present tense, it subtly implies that two moments of time are presented in a singe frame. At least for this moment.

Give Me Tomorrow was at Tate St Ives, May 19 to September 23, 2012 and Turner Contemporary, Margate, October 6, 2012 to January 13, 2013.  Katz’s exhibition at Timothy Taylor Gallery, London, was September 5 to October 5, 2012.

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Sarah Lucas: Situation Classic Pervery at Sadie Coles HQ Off Site, December 1, 2012 through March 2013

Antony Gormley: Model at White Cube Bermondsey, November 28, 2012 to  February 19, 2013

Installation view, Sarah Lucas: Situation Classic Pervery at Sadie Coles HQ Off Site, London, December 1, 2012 through March 2013

In Terry Southern’s 1969 cult classic “The Magic Christian,” eccentric billionaire Sir Guy Grand (Peter Sellers) explains to his adopted son, Youngman (Ringo Starr), “sometimes it’s not enough merely to teach, one has to punish as well.”  Two exhibitions currently on view in London teach and punish as well: Antony Gormley’s Model at White Cube and Sarah Lucas‘s Situation Classic Pervery at Sadie Coles each follow the artists’ working process in a way that is less pedantic and more gritty.  And it’s important to remember that Seller’s Guy Grand is a classic pervert anyway: punishment as a “Fifty Shades of Grey” pleasurable episode of paddling and pinching.

Situation Classic Pervery is another installation in a series of Lucas projects (Situation Franz West, Situation Rose Bush, Situation Make Love, etc.) to inhabit the second floor of the gallery.  In each she chooses a basic theme and creates an environment populated with an occasional finished piece, but more often strewn with odd bits and pieces that are seminal parts of Lucas’ artistic vocabulary.  Toilets stand about, sometimes piled in the corner, but also outfitted with dainty cushions. A witty and seductive Untitled (tit chair) (2012) re-purposes as cushioning a multitude of yummy-looking artificial tits made from stuffed hose, a classic Lucas statement of both feminist defiance and self-abnegation in line with her Human Toilet Revisited (1998, not on display).

But the process of creation is not always pretty.  She toys with disturbing undercurrents, regardless of whether the viewer can stomach the results.  The freedom that lurks in this room is of a different variety than the perhaps more utilitarian frame of mind of an artist preparing for a staid museum exhibition. Soup is an entrancing wall mural of penis tips emerging from their foreskins, dotted over a background of bean soup—with a gleam and consistency chosen for maximum gross-out potential.  A similarly double edged work is an endearing “field-trip” vignette-a projection across the room features Lucas visiting a goat farm.  She seems to be wearing a coat of goat fur and her demeanor is one of cheery amusement as the goats jump and frolic around her and the farmer, but the references to perversity-bestiality, devils, satyrs, and the animals’ eventual fate as food and clothing, are all implicit within the context of the show.  Situation Classic Pervery has an unnerving brilliance as it skips mischieviously between clever DIY aesthetic and a profoundly poetic subtext.

Antony Gormley, Model, 2012. Weathering steel,
16’6” x 106’9” x 44’6”. Courtesy White Cube

Antony Gormley’s Model at the new and imposing White Cube in Bermondsey is just as concerned with the humanity of the artist’s subject, but less with our proclivities and secretions than would be the case in Lucas.  Instead the focus is on formal concerns.  The artist’s model, himself, which features so prominently in earlier projects such as Angel of the North, (1998) and the various Event Horizon  installations (2007-2012) has been reconfigured as a series of rectangular volumes with a pixellating effect.  These stolid, rust-color figures populate the gallery, attempting to negate the eponymous white cube.  One pair, Hinge II (2011) stands in the courtyard in front of the gallery, while others skulk in corners and sprawl across the massive entry hallway that stretches from the front door to the screening rooms at the back.  They have several rooms to themselves and grow progressively larger—striking curious poses that range from Michelangelo’s slaves to Degas’ dancers to Toltec Chacmools.

An entire room devoted to the process of generating Model, (2012) a giant, walk-through funhouse cum sculpture, is as rigorous, meticulous, and repetitive as a first year architecture final review.  Gormley presents every aesthetic step in the formulation of his golem, from a single block to spidery and nimble human form.  Amusingly, the largest rectangle of the composition becomes the knob–on that point both Lucas and Gormley would agree.  Though Gormley has embraced the new age of the 3D printer, a host of materials is on display—delicate bass wood matrices as well as blue foam carvings, for instance.  This army of little creatures has a market stall air about it, tempting the viewer to handle the works, a quality that is all but impossible in his giant steel works.

But tactility may be the new thing for Gormley: one exits The Model Room with a naughty hankering to touch the art, and down the hall, after completing a safety waiver, you climb in the foot of the sleeping giant.  Again the experience is about form: the body as house for living in.  It relates to a claustrophobic feeling we all get once in a while, thinking of ourselves as an even smaller person looking out through the windows of our eyes.  Gormley’s Model has windows too, a little interior stage and dark passageways as well, and is all about feeling one’s way-the steely resonance of the footsteps and the cold smooth metal that has to be touched, simply to avoid banging one’s head in the dark.  Both the Gormley and Lucas exhibitions come to a “head” with a head:  within Gormley’s leviathan you must retrace your steps after clambering from foot to crown, while Lucas’s (pre-Hirst) “skull” (2000) hangs over the well-upholstered tit chair.  Again delving into the perverse, Lucas has decided to give the dead bloke a set of gold teeth.

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Richard Hamilton: The Late Works was  at the National Gallery, October 10, 2012 to January 13, 2013

Richard Hamilton, The Saensbury Wing, 1999-2000. Private Collection. © Courtesy of the Estate of Richard Hamilton.

“Richard Hamilton: The Late Works” was conceived while its subject, who died in 2011, was still alive. Now, sadly, realized without the artist’s collaboration, the exhibition at the National Gallery is both different from and smaller than what was first envisioned; as curator Christopher Riopelle writes in the catalogue, “The scope of the exhibition [Hamilton] had hoped to mount could not be realized.” As a result, perhaps, this exhibition shows an artist of smaller compass than one remembers, for instance, from his 2010 show at the Serpentine Gallery, which was not a full retrospective but put the accent on the broadly political dimension of his work throughout his career. By contrast, “The Late Works”—something of a misnomer as several of the nineteen pieces shown date from the 1990s or even the ‘80s, though it’s true most were made from 2004 onward—is a selection oriented mostly toward Hamilton’s responses to the great tradition of European painting. There are specific references to masters ranging from Titian and Cranach to Matisse and (Hamilton’s great inspiration) Duchamp; the theme of the Annunciation is prominent. All this makes sense, of course, in the context of the National Gallery. The Saensbury Wing, 1999-2000, whose title is an excruciating pun, depicts the museum’s own Sainsbury Wing (designed by Venturi and Scott Brown), inhabited by a lone female nude, in a pastiche of the style of the Dutch specialist in church interiors Pieter Saenradem—as seen for instance in the National Gallery’s own Interior of the Grote Kerk at Haarlem, 1636-37; deep in the distance one spies hanging on a far wall one of Hamilton’s own greatest works, The Citizen, 1981-83, the depiction of an IRA prisoner at Maze Prison in Northern Ireland.

The inadvertent effect of the exhibition, however, is to show just how far Hamilton could slip from the moral and aesthetic intensity of a painting like The Citizen. Instead, what comes into view here is a rather academic artist preoccupied with a kind of commentary on the achievements of his predecessors rather than on anything like an urgent and unforeseeable synthesis. Nor does Hamilton’s fascination with combining painting with contemporary digital technology save the day; it only adds to the blandness of facture that casts a pall over some of these pieces. And like so many academic painters, Hamilton seems to use the female nude’s status as a culturally blameless motif—if it’s a reference to Titian, then there can’t be anything prurient about it, can there?—as a way to indulge a personal delectation while pretending to a high-minded disinterestedness; it’s not the indulgence that rankles, but the pretense. All the worse, the three final paintings on view, Balzac  [a] + [b] + [c], 2011 (printed 2012), the authorized remnants of an unfinished project based on Balzac’s story “The Unknown Masterpiece,” are far from the “profound meditation on art, beauty and desire” that Riopelle pronounces them. They are merely the most naked of the exhibition’s pastiches. In each three versions of the same image, citations of self-portraits by Poussin, Courbet, and Titian are shown as if earnestly discoursing on the seductively recumbent girl with dreamily closed eyes who stretches out so sensually in the foreground; she too is a quotation, from a photograph in the Bibliotheque nationale de France. Academicism says that if you combine great parts, you will make a great whole; but here is one more proof that the result can be much less than the heavy-handed sum of the all-too-obvious parts. What made Hamilton so different, so appealing, was anything but this.

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The Female Gaze: Women Artists Making their World  at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, November 17, 2012 to April 7, 2013.

Ann Agee, Birthing Class, 2001. Porcelain, china paint and gold luster, 15 x 15 x 24 inches. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

In his now notorious remarks in the New York Times,  Ken Johnson invited anyone with a theory about the kind of art “women tend to make” to test it out by visiting the exhibition, The Female Gaze, at the Pennsylvania Academy.  My 13-year-old daughter, who has attended many contemporary exhibitions, revealed her theory when she quipped, “Dad, are there going to be a lot of vagina paintings in this show?”

In fact, the sole match for her particular view of women’s art was an untitled test plate from Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party (1976).  The works in the show might fit any description or label that has been applied to art: abstract, representational, conceptual; personal and political; militant and conventional; academic and outsider. Anyone who attends this show with theories—or better put, stereotypes—of women’s art in mind is bound to be disappointed.

The Female Gaze celebrates an inspired addition to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts’ venerable holdings. Collector, philanthropist, and artist Alter Linda Lee Alter has donated over 500 works in every style and medium imaginable. In the same gallery one finds Daisy Youngblood’s gorilla sculpture; Barbara Takenaga’s swirling, jewel-like abstract painting; Catherine Murphy’s hyper-real painting of a gun target stapled to a tree; Kara Walker’s silhouettes of antebellum figures; and an enameled metal sign by Jenny Holzer.

The bequest is all the more important when understood side-by-side with the Academy’s existing collection, enshrined next door in its landmark Furness building.  Despite efforts to tout a 200-year history of friendliness toward women, the Academy’s past accessions are rather one-sided, and might just as aptly be called the Male Gaze.

During an interview, Alter explained to me that most of the institutions on the short list for this bequest were male-dominated. She believed, however, that her gift to the Academy would be transformative. The size of the existing collection meant that the donated works would be visible, and the bequest came with a commitment by the staff to take care of them and display them alongside existing art.

While Female Gaze reveals no clear tendency among women artists, it does evince the collector’s preferences. The persistence of painting, and especially figure painting, is deeply felt in this selection of work. Greeting us very directly at the entrance are Diane Edison’s painted Self-Portrait (1996) and pastel Nude Self-Portrait (1995). In this second piece the artist gazes down haughtily at the viewer from between her pendulous breasts.  The African American artist is known for her intense portraiture, and in this case gives us a rich expanse of brown hues rarely seen in museum nudes. Alice Neel’s palette is quite different in Claudia Bach Pregnant (1975), with contrasting pinks and greens representing flesh and fabric. The painter keeps the eye busy with a lively cadence of curved lines and culminating black tresses falling over the sitter’s shoulder.

Diane Edison, Nude Self Portrait, 1995. Pastel on black paper, 44-1/4 x 30 inches. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, courtesy of George Adams Gallery, New York.

There is also a strong interest in art which turn old idioms to new uses. Judith Schaechter’s stained glass works, for example, project nightmares of the contemporary urban world through the colors and graphic styles of this medieval medium. Like a cathedral window image of the baby Jesus, Child and Toy (1989) is organized according to the decorative geometry of its frame, with figures in the central space and a chain of symbolic elements on the periphery. The artist uses brilliant red and yellow glass to depict a doll-like child menaced by toys: candy and stuffed animals on the one hand, and the more adult amusements, money, drugs and guns on the other. Looking at an entirely different reality, Ann Agee uses the style of the ceramic tabletop knick-knack to commemorate a middle-class ritual in Birthing Class (2001). Colorfully dressed pregnant women listen to a demonstration by a nurse while their hipster-ish husbands look on with excessively cheerful smiles. Glints of light on the glazed surface underscore the overwrought optimism of the scene.

With the emphasis on representational work, the exhibition shows a clear bias toward the retinal and away from the conceptual. There are the occasional objects, however, that raise questions about the boundaries between art and life, image and representation. One is the 1993 painting Target by Catherine Murphy. Easily mistaken for a photograph, this bullet-ridden image brings an object into the gallery that, particularly amidst current debate over gun control, we would rather not see. It also offers a connection to the Academy’s nineteenth century collections, which include a section of tromp l’oeil painting, and a focus on the science of collecting and categorizing lived experience.

Finding other points of connection to the Academy’s historic collection will determine whether Women Artists Making their World is indeed transformative.  If the displays in the old gallery had a subtitle, it would be “Male Artists Making the World”—for the artists there, like Benjamin West, Gilbert Stuart, George Inness, John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eakins, have taught us how to see. The question for me, then, is not how women artists create their own world, but how they complete our picture of what the world looks like.

One indication of how this might be done is in Female Gaze’s inclusion of works from the Chicago art milieu of the late 1960s and 1970s. This radical scene saw the participation of men and women in collectives like the Hairy Who, and spawned the careers of artists such as Nancy Spero, Christina Ramberg and Suellen Rocca, alongside of men like Roger Brown, Ed Paschke, and Jim Nutt.  Ramberg’s painting Hereditary Uncertainty (1977), exhibited in Female Gaze, contains the jagged shapes and colors found in work by Roger Brown. Yet Ramberg’s subject, the straightjacketing of women’s bodies through clothing, is distinctly feminist. Significantly, this painting was also included in a 2012 Academy exhibit on the influence of famed Art Institute of Chicago teacher Ray Yoshida. It was displayed in the historic Furness building, only footsteps away from Thomas Eakins’ monumental surgical scene, The Gross Clinic. On that occasion, the female gaze revealed to us a way of hacking up a body that Eakins overlooked.

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Peter Doig at Michael Werner London, 22 Upper Brook Street, September 27 to December 22, 2012
Luc Tuymans at David Zwirner Gallery, 24 Grafton Street, October 5 to November 17, 2012

Installation shot of works by Peter Doig at Michael Werner Gallery, Mayfair, London

A confluence of events made London the place to see art this October, with the opening of three New York galleries in Mayfair at the same time as Frieze Art Fair. News headlines like “The Americans are coming” and “US art dealers invade London with massive new galleries” sounded almost nervous.

Why it makes market sense for international art dealers to come to London now, and why elegant properties in prime areas are suddenly affordable is easily explained by things like the world economy and where new rich buyers want to live. More interesting is the ascendancy of painting at all these venues.

David Zwirner opened in a five–storey Georgian townhouse with a show of paintings by Luc Tuymans; Michael Werner opened around the corner from the Dorchester with paintings by Peter Doig; and Pace has taken over what was once the Museum of Mankind – behind the Royal Academy – and opened with the late black and grey paintings of Mark Rothko juxtaposed with stark, dark photographs of water by Hiroshi Sugimoto. The juxtaposition took the edge off both artists, and the general mood was altogether too black.

Peter Doig’s exhibition, on the other hand, was filled with strong, perhaps Caribbean, color (the Scottish-Canadian artist left London for Trinidad ten years ago.) As a longtime admirer of Doig, I have to report that the show was a disappointment. Whether the huge price tags on his work have become an inhibition – White Canoe, a fabulous painting from 1990, was sold at auction in 2007 for an extraordinary $11.3 million – or whether Trinidad is not stimulating him, something is missing.

Peter Doig, Figure by a Pool, 2008-2012. Oil and distemper on linen, 98-1/2 x 78-3/4 inches. Courtesy Michael Werner Gallery, New York and London

In place of the old vigor, with the visceral use of paint and hint of menace in the subject matter, the work now seems passionless and thin. Poolscapes, colonial cricket pitches, a naked, long-haired figure riding through the sea on horseback, a boat floating past a cave – these may be a real part of Doig’s daily life on the island, but within his paintings these are still in the realm of romantic ideas that don’t seem visually or culturally digested. If– as they seem to be – the figures are self-portraits, there is something too comfortable and too easy about them. In the past, Doig’s palette has been awkward in a good way, as if referring to artificially created color, but the liberal areas of bright orange and yellow in the new paintings just feel fake and noisy.

A delightful, quirky exception is the small canvas, Lion in the Sand (2012). It could be a tricolor flag with aquamarine sea above the humanized, prancing lion and burning red below. Although I was later told that the drawings in the upstairs gallery were not supposed to be part of the exhibition, I was happy to find small, untamed works on paper, some of them sketches for the canvases below, which suggest the old vitality is not entirely lost. (The horseback rider in the sea, however, should have been scotched in both forms.)

There is an odd interaction between the exhibitions of Doig and Luc Tuymans, whose new series of paintings, Allo!, casts an ironic eye on colonialism and the much romanticized story of the painter who went to live on an island. Doig, who has been accused of doing a Gauguin, says he remains an outsider on the island and that his work would be much more romantic and myth-based if he were Trinidadian.

Luc Tuymans arrived late, bleary-eyed and grumpy for his press preview at Zwirmer, and used the occasion to slag off the “fucking Brits” for being “half-hearted Europeans”. He seemed reluctant to talk about his art that day: the quotes that follow were taken from his interview at Frieze Art Fair a week later. But the Belgian painter is viewed with such respect that he can get away with crass behaviour – and he certainly knows how to silence an audience. When questions were invited at the end of the Frieze talk he interjected: “Only intelligent questions please.”

The paintings in the first gallery are a preface to Allo! (a quote from the parrot which inhabited Tuymans’ local bar): washed out and distanced from the viewer as if seen through a fuzz of talcum powder or on a dim TV screen. Quiet as they are, they grab the attention. Peaches (all works 2012), for instance – a pyramid of bleached, sickly green spheres, which look a bit like cabbages and a bit like scoops of ice cream caught under a fluorescent light. Or Technicolor – a bouquet of flowers seen from above, aglow in a murky haze.

The Allo! paintings are based on stills from a 1942 Hollywood film – which is based on Somerset Maugham’s book, “The Moon and Sixpence.” The story of a middle-aged English stockbroker who abandons his wife and children to become an artist in Tahiti, it is in turn a romanticized version of Gauguin’s life. In the closing sequence, the film moves into Technicolor, showing fake, kitschy “Gauguins”, and this becomes the source of Tuymans’ paintings.

With thin washes of scarlet and blue, hints of yellow, smeared edges and areas of canvas left bare as if overexposed, there are a lot more luminous grays in these paintings than color. They are more about the crude technology of early Technicolor, broken down further by being screened on television, photographed and enlarged. The result is paintings that are complex and subtle.

Luc Tuymans, Peaches, 2012. Oil on canvas, 68-1/2 x 46-1/2 inches. Courtesy David Zwirner, New York/London

Tuymans photographed the film stills from the screen with his iPhone, catching reflected images of himself at the same time – which add a lurking element of autobiography. A lot, indeed, lurks in these strange, sinister paintings. The nostalgic beauty of floating female figures and Tahitian fabrics; the lonely prowling figure of a man in a hat who watches, cut off from the action; suggestions of a violent interface between primitive and colonial, and the violence in each.

Transparent as these works are – the pencil drawing is left visible and there is no feeling of change or cover up, just loose, light, searching brushstrokes – Tuymans says that for him the first few hours of a painting are an agonizing struggle. He also says that painting is all about time and precision, that a good painting is never finished and that it remains a one-to-one experience. He is a hard act to follow.

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April 29 to August 20, 2012
152 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012
(213) 626-6222

Installation shot of the exhibition under review with, center, Andy Warhol, Camouflage, 1986. Synthetic polymer paint and silk screen on canvas, 118 by 420 inches. Courtesy of The Brant Foundation, Greenwich, CT.

In reaction against Abstract Expressionism, Andy Warhol (and his fellow post-modernists, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg) inserted content into painting.

No wonder Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko were so personally hostile towards him: they believed that he had killed abstraction. More exactly, since a silkscreen may have either a figurative or an abstract subject, Warhol undercut the distinction between figuration and abstraction. That said, some of his subjects – of which the shadows, Rorschachs, and camouflages in this exhibition are examples – look abstract. But as the title of the show indicates, it’s not Warhol’s subjects but his industrial-style techniques of art production which have been taken up by the abstract painters in this show. Hence Rudolf Stingel’s impersonally finished oils and enamels on canvas; Christopher Wool’s blotches—anti-forms made by photographing and printing his earlier paintings on an inflated scale; and Glenn Ligon’s surfaces composed of acrylic, silk screen and coal dust on canvas.  And Urs Fischer’s presentation of gesso, arcylics, silicone and screws on aluminum panels and Mark Bradford’s mixed media collages, influenced by graffiti, on canvas. Julie Mehretu presents monumental abstracted images of urban experience; Tauba Auerbach creates images of folds with acrylic on canvas; Wade Guyton prints inkjet images on linen; Kelley Walker does explosive-looking digital prints on canvas; Sterling Ruby sprays paint on canvas; and Das Institute (Kerstin Brätsch and Adele Röder) creates oil on paper constructions: then they extend this style of abstraction.

Most of the eleven American or US-based artists in this show don’t use brushes. They employ silk screens, electric sanders and industrial sprayers. And they mostly do non-gestural painting. (Seth Price and Josh Smith are the exception to that rule. I like their art but they don’t really belong here.)  It is Warhol’s loss of direct contact with the subject, rather than his occasional use of abstract subjects that makes him a potential source for abstract art. Such factory made abstraction has some affinities with Robert Ryman’s minimalism, but little connection with Brice Marden’s recent gestural painting, Ellsworth Kelly’s clean design or Sean Scully’s romanticism.

Christopher Wool, details to follow

The essays in the usefully lavish catalogue are all over the map. There are proposals to link these artists to feminism or queer theory or accounts of race. But since just by looking it is hard to know that the paintings of Auerbach and Das Institute are by women, for instance, or that Ligon, Bradford and Mehrutu are of African origin makes this seem an unpromising approach. There are attempts to read these figures as political artists. When Goya, Manet and even Picasso painted political subjects, then surely their art was political. So was Warhol’s when he painted Jackie Kennedy and Electric Chairs. But contemporary abstraction resists politics. The desperate urge to make these paintings politically critical expresses the guilty conscience of art writers, who want to believe that praising art they, like me admire, is not merely to write at the service of the art market. But that hope is foredoomed, for it surely must occur to everyone that this is the ultimate capitalist art, arcane in its appeal, and so large that only grand collectors can afford to house it. The catalogue has many photographs of the artists’ enormous studios, which do look factory like.

Recently Jeffrey Deitch, LA MOCA director, has been under fire. Judging just by this brilliantly challenging show, which is highly adventuresome, those complaints are unjustified. MOCA has always puzzled me. In a city with intense natural sunlight, how perverse that this prominent museum is completely underground and so totally dependent upon artificial lighting. But it turned out to be the perfect venue for this exhibition of industrial scale art. Deitch and the curators have done something original and important. They have identified a challenging novel style of abstract painting and provided a genealogy linking it to Warhol’s art. What remains to be done, in my opinion, is to provide some account of the aesthetic pleasures of this art. Perhaps we should consider the ways in which the seemingly neutral or rebarbative structures of these pictures reconcile us to everyday post-modern industrial environments. How revealing that the most immediately accessible work is Rudolf Stingel’s wall to wall white carpets, which allow visitors to create an all-over work of art as they mark it while walking around viewing the paintings.

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David Reed Heart of Glass: Paintings and Drawings 1967-2012 at the Kunstmuseum Bonn
June 28 to October 7, 2012

Installation view of the exhibition under review: David Reed Heart of Glass at the Kunstmuseum Bonn 2012 Photographer: Reni Hansen © 2012 VG-Bild Kunst, Bonn. The work to the left is #457, 1999–2000 Oil and alkyd on linen 36 x 144 inches Kunstmuseum Bonn, Permanent loan from Sammlung Mondstudio

The generous – or, it could equally be said, overwhelming – skylit galleries of Bonn’s Kunstmuseum abound with natural light. In clear opposition to any classical use of such large white cubes, David Reed has installed his work with an impassive experience in mind. Some disturbance, it can be assumed, is desired to avoid each work becoming simply a Modernist trophy, a reliquary of pure formalist shape and color. Indeed, abstraction for Reed is very much connected to experiences of the real world.

In the central gallery – from which all others can be accessed and are frequently within view – long horizontal paintings with white grounds, appear as if subject to centrifugal force. One of them hugs the only corner of the gallery that is not also part doorway, while several others reach the end of a wall at the entrance/exit points. This induces a feeling of movement in rotation. With so much of the gallery wall free and with the gestural element of each painting itself on a white ground, the paintings seem to expand to incorporate the walls, rendering the gestures into a kind of graffiti that unites the pictorial with the architectural.

In #457, 1999–2000, the transparent green arabesque sweeping in from the right vertical edge of a two thirds empty, horizontal white canvas looks as if it could equally be in a state of evaporation or condensation. Either way, it remains a fluid line of buckle and curl.  The arrangement of paintings, installed as they are, do not so much echo the rectangular elements often found within the paintings as iterate their unbalance. Expectations of settled spatial relationships and composition are challenged inside the paintings through unstable geometries as well as color. The way they are placed here accentuates that instability.

Each gallery is made to feel very distinct by the selective groupings of work. For example, working drawings in one room,, paintings of related color in another, landscape paintings and a video in a third. Reed and his curator have obviously not opted for a linear, chronological path. In fact, in viewing much of Reed’s work from the 1980s onwards, presumptions of chronological time quickly become estranged, undermined as they are, by the fugitive action of chromatic effects and subtle material layering.  The reds and greens of #617, 2003–2011 are translucent and contain, as well as capture, subtle shifts of light (an effect of the fluctuating levels of actual daylight). The folds of color add to the Baroque energy of a turning and flexing motion.

David Reed, #350, 1996. Oil and Alkyd on linen, 54 × 118 inches. Courtesy Sammlung Goetz. Photo: Johann Koinegg, Graz, Austria

As real to the eye as it is fictive to thought, the effect here of Reed’s color and surface establishes a place only possible in painting. The physical layering of paint – its removal sometimes leaving an abraded surface in contrast to areas of paint applied by brush or knife and left as is – leaves time running in both directions. This process occurs in unknown sequence, directing us away from the certainties of unmediated paint accumulations. Often this feels unsettling and dynamic – like the staggered freeze-framing of the explosion in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970). Such a sense of this fractured cinematic process of delay and acceleration is typified in # 350, 1996, its color seeming to expand, both floating and falling in and across the painted surface.

Landscapes from the 1960s (painted in situ at Monument Valley) and a series of black and white paintings made during the mid-1970s that reference the scale and movement of the hand and arm make Reed’s early trajectory clear. Sometimes an artist – Jasper Johns comes to mind – seeks to erase the works prior to the epiphany that got them on the right track where others, like Reed, continue to focus on an approach to their subject from the start, excavating and building as they go. The black and white paintings consist of horizontally brushed black lines, each line a hand’s width and the length of Reed’s arm at maximum extension. The black is seen merging downwards into still wet white paint. This bodily gesture is gradually absorbed over the years until a dialectic of inside and outside is achieved – a mind thinking with the results of a body doing. It is not unlike Jackson Pollock’s desire for painting to be the landscape and for him to be part of that – not for him to be making a description of something distinctly other.

The Searchers, 2007 is a video that samples silhouetted figures from the closing minutes of John Ford’s 1956 film of the same name (shot in Monument Valley) together with close up surface images of Reed’s own paintings. But instead of the great outdoors of the American West, the film’s title song is now heard drifting through the expanses of the Kunstmuseum, Bonn.

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ALTERNATIVA: “Materiality” and “Wyspa: Now is Now” at The Wyspa Art Institute.

May 26 to September 30, 2012
Doki 1.145 B. 80-958 Gdansk, Poland.
open Tuesday to Sunday, 11am to 7pm.

Katarzyna Jozefowicz, Sights, 2010-12. Hand-stitched vinyl envelopes with cut images. Courtesy of The Wyspa Art Institute, Gdansk

Gda?sk is one of the 20th Century’s most pivotal cities. Strategically located along the placid waters of the Baltic Sea, it was here that the Second World War officially began.  In the 1980s this centuries old city (Danzig in its German incarnation) became a hotbed of revolutionary ferment. It was here in the hometown of Lech Walesa and the birthplace of Solidarinosz that a  major blow was struck upon the Iron Curtain’s seemingly impenetrable armor.

But now the vast Gdansk Shipyards, scene of the momentous  August 1980 strikes, stand idle, a crumbling red brick ruin, slowly being reclaimed by the forces of nature. Interspersed among the trees and tall grasses that make this former symbol of communist productivity resemble an urban park, the Wyspa Institute of Art stands defiant.

Wyspa’s history, like so much of its surroundings, is intimately tied to the 1980s. It was during this period that sculpture students from the Fine Arts Academy, among themGrzegorz Klaman, Kazimierz Kowalczyk and Beno Osowski, began exploring the ruins of Granary Island, a section of Gdansk untouched since its destruction by allied bombs in the 1940s. In their hands the island was clandestinely transformed into an open-air experimental exhibition and studio space.

This alternative space, where the history of the city is made palpable by the exposed layers of the ancient structures surrounding them, eventually gave rise to a more formalized vision: the Wyspa Progress Foundation.  A non-profit organization launched in 1994Wyspa is committed to exploring varieties of artistic practice and art in public spaces.

In 2004, the WPF founded the Wyspa Institute of Art in a former technical college in the shipyards. Since 2010, under the directorship of co-founder Aneta Szylak, this “laboratory of new thinking” has sponsored ALTERNATIVA, a series of large-scale international exhibitions, performances, publications, and meetings.

The current exhibition “Materiality” is a jointly curated investigation into how “different generations of artists, thinkers, and cultural operators have reconsidered their approach to materiality and its turbulent political history.”  Housed in the spectacularly renovated Hall 90b, over 30 works range from the coldly conceptual to the invitingly tactile, the massive space echoing  to the ubiquitous sound of clicking slide projectors.

Katarzyna Krakowiak’s Reconstruction of the Shipyard’s Broadcasting Center (2012), which involves the artist transforming herself into a human antenna, is part video documentary, part historical display. A slickly edited film features Krakowiak precariously balanced along the roof of Hall 90b. Clutching a hand-held transmitter, she broadcasts snippets of sound from the archives of a former shipyard DJ. The LPs, tape reels and other ephemera from the archive are tactfully arranged within a vitrine next to the video monitor.

Hiwa K., Nazhad, 2009-12. Video and (displayed in photo) digital prints. Courtesy of The Wyspa Art Institute, Gdansk

This fitting introduction to “Materialty” lays bare its central critical problem: How do artworks exist in the present tense? Like several of the pieces in the show, Reconstruction of the Shipyard’s Broadcasting Center assumes a documentary character that has problems transcending the weight of its own past. Hiwa K.’s Nazhad (2009/12) encounters a similar problem.  The film records the activities of an Iraqi man who melts the spent remains of military conflict into ingots to sell. The documentary, along with the attendant photographs of the craftsman at his forge, are thoroughly engaging. But the intense physicality of the process, the heat, sweat and hard work required to turn bullets into bars, are vaporized by the immateriality of the photographic medium. What remains underscores the fact that these moments are now lost in time.

Actuality in the past does not guarantee a work’s status as art in the present. Undoubtedly this sentiment is an intended consequence of the exhibition, but it gets repetitive. Even the most compelling documentary examples, such as Sally Gutierrez’s Organ Market (2009), a horrifying film that explores the market for paid organ “donation” in the Philippines, feel insulated from attempts to engage with attributes other than the ideas they represent.

To the curators’ credit, “Materiality” genuinely seeks a dialogue between multiple approaches to contemporary art-making. The show gracefully balances its more cerebral aspects with several beautiful displays that accentuate the physical properties of the artist’s chosen medium.

Lex Pott addresses the passage of time in the present tense in his simple but powerful work Transience (2012). A series of 14 silvered mirrors arranged horizontally across the wall, each section is progressively darkened by the application of sulfur as an oxidizing agent. The result is a color spectrum that ranges from silver through golden amber to a deep purple-blue. Its unit-based structure recalls Judd and Andre, but the stress appears to be less on the literalness of the object than its effects upon the reflected imagery. Gazing at the mirrors, one feels an increasing detachment from the reflected space as the oxidized surface darkens. Pott’s work strikes a somber tone.

Katarzyna Jozefowicz also applies a modular  approach to composition in her hanging installation Sights (2010/12). Composed of hundreds of hand-stitched, clear vinyl envelopes – each containing small images of homes, streets, or landscapes — the work is a rumination on dreams, a kind of scrapbook for events that have never occurred. Jozefowicz tackles time, space and material in subtle and sophisticated ways. By collapsing the distance between these elements and reordering them in a non-linear fashion, she allows for the creation of new narratives generated by the physical presence of the sculpture rather than merely by the artist’s claims on its behalf. Sights is one of “Materiality’s” most impressive statements.

Across the cracked pavement from Hall 90b, in the Wypsa Institute of Art’s rear gallery space, curators Ewa Malgorzata Tatar and Dominik Kurylek have re-imagined the WPF archives as the companion exhibition “Wyspa: Now is Now”.

Organized around four major themes  that define Wyspa as a cultural force — labor, location, meeting, myth — the films, photos, books, objects, and stories that represent 30 years of activity (including the decade prior to their foundation) are laid out in a series modular square sculptures. Theoretically this aids the viewer in experiencing “the archive as a present”. In practice, the materials used possess the patina and authority conferred by age and only act to assert their historicity.

This, of course, is not necessarily a bad thing. “Now is Now” may not live up to its curatorial premise, but the experience of the show is remarkably haptic. The darkened gallery feels damp and a faint musty odor permeates the space. The peeling walls and aging concrete floors set the stage for a thoroughly immersive experience of the past in space that exudes its own history.

It is tempting to label ALTERNATIVA as yet another festival that ends in ‘A’, but unlike dOCUMENTA or Manifesta, ALTERNATIVA bills itself as a kind of “anti-festival”, spread out over a series of years rather than days.  ALTERNATIVA is perhaps best envisioned as an ongoing experiment — albeit one that appears incredibly well funded — that began in the heady days of the 1980s. By emphasizing not just display, but also art’s social role in the accumulation and distribution of knowledge, “Materiality” and the Wyspa sponsored exhibitions that have preceded it remain true to the roots of its host city.

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Gillian Wearing approaches identity furtively.  This even applies to her self-portraits where she is rarely fully present, instead flickering in and out of the frame, oscillating between herself and an older self, or another family member, or another photographer.  It seems fitting, therefore, that the retrospective of her work at the Whitechapel Gallery, (March 28 to June 17, 2012) curated by Daniel Herrmann and Doris Krystof (it will travel to the K20 in Dusseldorf and then the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich) starts plaintively with a ceiling hung monitor showing Dancing in Peckham.  This seminal early work that so perfectly expresses alienation and the raw nerve of hidden, unspeakable secrets is not alone in the main ground floor gallery, but because the other films in the room have their own self-contained theaters, Dancing in Peckham dominates the room, and gives us our only glimpse of the artist, herself, doing a weird lonely dance in a crowded, South London shopping mall.

Gillian Wearing, Bully, 2010. Video for projection, 7 mins 55 seconds. Installation shot at Tanya Banakdar Gallery, 2011

Wearing’s most recent film on display, Bully (2010) is a staged performance of what might be either an acting exercise or some kind of psychological role-playing.  The question of what genre the films actually fall into is an important element of her work.  Most are interviews, but with whom?  Often the main character has been switched out with another, who lip-synchs their voice, or the speaker wears a mask.  The monologues are morbidly fascinating, but again, who they are aimed at is equivocal, as much of the time it seems the characters are more interested in seeking absolution than entertaining an audience.  The main protagonist of Bully coaches his fellow actors into re-enacting an altercation on the playground from his youth.  He then chastises those who intimidated him and those who stood by watching, but whether this is a cathartic release for a real person or a figment of Wearing’s imagination is never revealed.

Upstairs, the series of photographs,  Signs that Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs that Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say are virtually given a room of their own.  Even after numerous advertising campaigns over the years have borrowed or stolen Wearing’s imaginative vehicle of pure self-expression, these pictures of average Londoners, many again photographed in Peckham, retain their original energy and power.  The attractive young man in a suit holding the words “I’m desperate” or a man with facial tattoos whose sign reads, “Have been certified as mildly insane” are a tremendous leveler of humanity, in the face of superficial appearances.  The room also contains Crowd, a video on a small flat screen created in imitation of Dürer’s still life with weeds and wildflowers of 1503, a reenactment of sorts, and several small, precisely executed sculptures of individuals who have distinguished themselves: a rooky police officer, Gervais (2010) and Terri (2008) who was injured during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in September 2011 but still rescued several others that day.  In the sculptures, Wearing inverts the traditional tropes of heroism, instead creating a small delicate trophy-sized replica of an individual, rather than a large monument.

The exhibition ends with a series of self-portraits of Wearing as members of her immediate family, or masquerading as various members of the historical family of photographers.  The eerie portraits which strive for realism through prosthesis show Wearing as Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus , Robert Mapplethorpe and August Sander, among others, and as her father and brother, as well as a particularly disturbing image of herself as a chubby-cheeked toddler in Self Portrait at three years old, (2004).  These costume changes and disguises seek to question who Wearing herself is, literally referencing where she came from but also questioning where it is that the personality of the artist rests within the context of photography.

Installation shot, Sara VanDerBeek at The Approach. Courtesy of The Approach, London

Sara VanDerBeek’s exhibition at The Approach (May 24 to June 24, 2012;) follows a methodology of transmogrification between concepts and sculptural forms.  This may seem like one of the textbook definitions of sculpture, but for VanDerBeek, there is a poignant directness.    . Until recently the objects that she fabricated were at third-stage removed through the filter of photography.  Thus a sculpture that was a physical interpretation of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, for example, still did not exist in the viewer’s space (Sara Vanderbeek:  Of Ruins and Light, Whitney Museum 2010).  This lead to a seductively fictitious art practice that involved layers of creation that were in the end relegated to a two-dimensional medium, an art practice that functioned through traces rather than objects.  VanDerBeek’s exhibition at The Approach is a 2 stage process, the first involving a series of photographs the artist took working with   ballet dancers from her native Baltimore, and the production of cast and painted plaster sculptures based on these images.

VanDerBeek hurls herself into the debate as to whether architecture is actually frozen music as Goethe would have it.  The questions and criticisms that arise in deriving one art from another, in this case sculpture from dance/photography or in her past work, poetry, add up to whether the work stands on its own, references its origin point, or even needs to.  The black and white photographs are of dancers performing short choreographed interludes.  “Baltimore Dancers 10” is a stark white photo of a dancer flexing her leg, the contrast of the pale leg against velvety black background reduces the movement of the dancer to a series of stresses and vectors. It is a visually engaging image, but more mathematical than organic.

These images are then referenced by the cast plaster sculptures.  The totemic towers each have their own unit, stacked one on top of the other.  Untitled VII presents a column of plaster rectangles with a single transverse from corner to corner, to the best of it’s simple plaster capabilities mimicking the dancer’s calf and thigh in Baltimore Dancers 10.  In a very literal way the mass-produced units of these totems are reminiscent of uniformly garbed dancers in a corps de ballet, interweaving and executing identical movements.

The static white of the plaster, and the right angles and sharp corners of the simple geometric volumes bespeak the mathematical precision of choreography, and do form a palpable physical counterpoint to the clean lines and undulating shades of the dancers’ legs arms and backs.  While the dancers are soft and their bodies a mass of curves and shadows, living, breathing and in flux, the sculptures exist as the other side of dance, the rhythm meter and the absolute fact of ballet that it must be learned and repeated.  Though the sculptures have emerged from their original hiding place in the space of the photograph, they still engage the images of the dancers and their movements in the space of the gallery.

Whitechapel Gallery: 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX. +44 (0)20 7522 7888

The Approach: 47 Approach Road, Bethnal Green, London E2, +44 (0) 20 8983 3878

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Goshka Macuga, Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not 1, 2012. Photographic installation at Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich.

On June 6, the three-day preview of dOCUMENTA (13) officially began with an afternoon press conference with artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and an evening reception at Kassel’s city hall.  The world’s largest contemporary art marathon, the event will run for 100 days total, through September 16. In contrast to its humble post-war beginnings, recent editions have transformed Documenta, which takes place every five years, into a multi-million-dollar affair that is expected to exceed a million visitors this year.

dOCUMENTA (13) has a wider grasp on the city than any of its predecessors. In addition to the usual installations in such local museums as the Fridericianum, Ottoneum, Orangerie, Documenta-Halle and Neue Galerie, artworks are also shown in scattered pavilions in the Karlsaue (the old royal city park), the old train station, a hospital and various commercial buildings. dOCUMENTA (13) also embraces off-off sites in Kabul. In Kassel, over twenty venues showcase more than 160 artists, many of whom specifically created works for the occasion. To view this grand art discourse also means to explore Kassel and its rich historic make-up.

Kassel is indeed a place proud of its cultural heritage. The Fridericianum is the first public museum on the continent, established in 1779, and the Brothers Grimm lived and collected most of their fairy tales here in the early 19th Century. But Kassel has also been the site of utter destruction. A center of Nazi Germany’s war production, the city was a prime target for Allied bombing attacks and in 1943 ninety percent of its 1000-year-old center was erased. The establishment of Documenta in 1955 by artist and educator Arnold Bode marked an attempt to re-introduce culture.

This history all makes Kassel a particularly suitable venue for presenting art that looks at both the past and the future. In fact, various editions of Documenta have focused on cycles of creation, destruction and renewal. dOCUMENTA (13) is no different in this respect. It is the dominant theme introduced by Christov-Bakargiev, former chief curator at P.S. 1 in New York and director at Castello di Rivoli in Turin.

Rather than providing a curatorial statement, Christov-Bakargiev offered a storytelling “Letter to a Friend.” Part-travel diary, part-press release, her letter ponders the general importance of questions over answers. Her exhibition is also a multi-faceted, at times fragmented, and yet astonishingly cohesive meditation on how human tragedies can inspire individual mythologies that can then offer a wide discussion forum. It is a curatorial outlook that pays homage to the beloved Documenta director of the past, Harald Szeemann, who spoke of “individual mythologies” as a motif for his Documenta 5 in 1972. To Christov-Bakargiev as to Szeeman before her, it is important to allow for loose ends to linger.

The essence of this concept is well illustrated at dOCUMENTA (13) by the work of German-Jewish artist Charlotte Salomon (1917-43), examples of which are installed on the upper floor of the Fridericianum. While hiding from the Nazis and before being murdered in Auschwitz at age twenty-six and five months pregnant, Salomon created her epic “Life? or Theater?”, a body of work comprised of 769 gouaches. Layered with text and with musical and cinematic references, her drawings manifest as a personalized code. They meld political history with the artist’s personal memory and intimate thoughts. Though they express a sole individual’s tragic life, they have become a universally applicable song of suffering.

Installation of tapestries from the 1950s by Hannah Ryggen at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel. Photo: Photo: Roman März

Christov-Bakargiev does not shy away from including many works that traditionally would have been dismissed as craft, such as ceramics and tapestries. The rotunda of the Fridericianum, which she has described as the “brain” of the exhibition and which for many visitors is the first space to visit, offers an eclectic and well-integrated mix. A group of still life paintings by Giorgio Morandi and sculptures by Giuseppe Penone, for example, are contextualized with objects damaged during the Lebanese Civil War and ceramics by Juana Marta Rodas and her daughter Julia Isidrez, two ceramicists who live in a small village located in the countryside of Paraguay. One floor up, tapestries by Swedish artist Hannah Ryggen (1894-1970) radically comment on the political climate and social conflicts of her time. Her works from the 1930s, which tell of the rise of fascism in Europe, are part historic document and part general warning of society’s apathy.

Ryggen’s work finds an interesting counterpart in a large tapestry by contemporary Polish artist Goshka Macuga. Of what is, that it is; of what is not, that it is not 1” is based on a digital collage in which groups of people find themselves snowed-in amidst the ruins of a grand building. A strong sense of alienation colors the overall mood. None of the people are looking at each other or at the two obvious disturbances: the destroyed building and a threatening, larger-than-life snake. Woven and rendered in black, white, and shades of gray, Macuga’s collaged scene seems to stand particularly still.  Disassociation has become timeless and is therebyeven more oppressing.

Macuga’s tapestry sits well with Geoffrey Farmer’s monumental sculpture “Leaves of Grass”, which consists of thousands of cutout photographs from Life Magazine, images that span Life’s five decades (1935-1985), providing snapshots of what defined many Americans’ view of the world during that time. Displayed like finger puppets on thin wooden sticks and arranged in close proximity like a lush, overflowing bouquet, these political and pop-cultural images take on a sense of playfulness that liberates them from their traditional context and translates as a re-organization/re-thinking of history.

Two of the least predictable installations can be found in the Orangerie, Kassel’s Museum for Astronomy and Science. A main room features the technical engineer Konrad Zuse, who in 1936 constructed a “mechanical brain” in his parents’ apartment. His discoveries led to the invention of the computer, but he also created fine but hardly original paintings that evoke the architectural abstractions of Lyonel Feininger, an artist he admired. Simultaneously displayed, Zuse’s watercolors, paintings and machines pose the question that it might in fact be the imagination that is art rather than particular objects. Zuse’s true creativity unfolded when rethinking arithmetical concepts and in regards to his machines which is what really makes him an artist.

Nearby, an exhibition of sound machines, notebooks, records, and video clips of performances by Erkki Kurenniemi ponders this conundrum further. The Finnish mathematician, nuclear physicist and expert in digital technology was also a pioneer of electronic music. The installation centers on his Electronic Music Studio, which he had established in the Department of Musicology at Helsinki University in 1961-62. It served as an experimental laboratory of sorts, in which electronic sounds formulated a new language. Neither Zuse nor Kurenniemi would have viewed themselves as artists in the traditional sense. However, they both were innovators who opened paths on which many have traveled since. If the ability to open doors and point towards undiscovered territory is at art’s core how can we draw the line in Zuse’s and Kurenniemi’s case?

Much of dOCUMENTA (13) navigates in similar vein between past and present innovations, attempts at re-invention, and above all questioning our possibly antiquated understanding of art and artists.

One treasure is to be found at the core of Mark Dion’s project at the Ottoneum, Kassel’s Natural History Museum. Dion has build an elegant structure that houses the Schildbach Xylotheque, a wood library that is part of the museum’s permanent collection. It was crafted by Carl Schildbach between 1771 and 1779 and consists of 530 books made from and describing 441 local trees. These books, which are actually boxes, are made from the trees they specify. Their spines are shaped through pieces of bark while inside each box are three-dimensional representations of the tree’s life cycle composed of dried plant parts and wax replicas. Again, Schildbach would not have viewed his work as art but science. However, Dion’s structure has turned the library into the wunderkabinett that it is

Christov-Bakargiev has stated that dOCUMENTA (13) is not about destruction but healing. It is an exhibition that implies that art can be the medicine that can change us by altering our perception of the world. Because of its sheer size and international reach, dOCUMENTA (13) might be misunderstood as an assessment of current tendencies, styles and aesthetics. The works assembled certainly reflect many of the international political and social conflicts that have shaped recent consciousness, but this is only one aspect. In many ways, dOCUMENTA (13) is a love letter to the artistic mind, the inspired soul and the undefeated spirit.

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