Monday 22 June 2015

SMOKING HOT IN BASEL

SMOKING IN BASEL


Pavel Büchler: Work (All the cigarette breaks), 2007-14 (detail)


Smoking may seem to be on the way out (in the UK 54% of adults in 1948 compared with 19% now) and yet…  Maybe it was the more liberal view of smoking still evident in Switzerland and Germany; maybe it was the politics of smoking promotion in the third world, where sales are still rising; maybe it'spart of the general fascination for things retro whihc leads some artists to typewriters or analogue film; maybe it was the lingering influence of Pavel Büchler’s 1,156 photographs of Work (All the cigarette breaks), 2007-14, which currently fills a wall of the Ikon in Birmingham, so making a work out of not working… Whatever the reason, I spotted ten interesting works in which cigarettes were central, though I didn’t see any using e-cigarettes.



Neïl Beloufa: Untitled, 2015 at Balice Hertling, Paris

The skylights in Beloufa’s current show in Paris are covered by translucent resin panels into which Beloufa tossed the cigarettes he smoked during the making, so recording the time of production in the most direct parallel to Buchler’s record of downtime. Given the political tenor of the Frenchman’s work as a whole, we can reasonably read some defiance of expectations and empathy for the downtrodden, lifted above by a gesture which was transferred to the wall here, as one of the panels became a painting of sorts. 


David Hammons: Untitled (cigarette chandelier), 1994 at  Salon 94, New York in Art Basel

Maverick American David Hammons refuses conventional gallery representation, in line with his preference for street rather than art audiences, but his re-purposing of detritus has achieved iconic status nonetheless: Salon 94’s stand including his elephant dung sculptures was a big hit, and over $1m was being asked for this wall piece of half-smoked Lucky Strikes held on wires in front of a 17th century Buddhist monk’s robe. That makes it a chandelier, though I guess the smoke might offset the modest illumination. Some cigarettes were lit in advance of the (no smoking) fair in order to generate the ash which Hammons likes to appear below this mixture of street and spirit.

 

Marlie Mul: Cigarette Hedgehog, 2015 at Croy Nielsen, Berlin in Liste

Aluminium bucket, polyurethane foam, acrylic paint, varnish, cellophane, cigarettes 
30 x 25 cm

‘Cigarette will be gone soon’, said the Berlin-based Dutch artist Marlie Mul in her 2012 show ‘No Oduur (Your Smoke Draws Me In)’ – ‘Cigarette is guilty, has apologised a thousand times’. Mul is interested in communication systems and in how contingently-produced items can reflect the society which brought them about. Hence her sculptures of air vents – or, as here, a snowed-up bucket – pressed into unintended use as ashtrays. They reflect the shifting social relations attached to smoking now that the huddle has been driven out of the building. Perhaps smokers have a right to feel prickly…



Jesús 'Bubu' Negrón: Colillón de mala muerte, 2015 at Proyectos Ultravioleta, Guatemala City in Liste

Found cigarette butts and glue, 51 × 32 × 18 cm

Puerto Rican Jesús ‘Bubu’ Negrón collects fag ends via street cleaners, from which he has constructed an ornate carpet, but here made a giant cigarette stub, containing I would think 5,000 individual stubs in what Thomas Bayrle would call a ‘superform’,. The title could I think be fairly rendered as ‘pants caught between the buttocks on the seedy side of town’
 
 




Pae White: Smoke tapestry #1 (working title), 2015 at Neugerriemschneider, Berlin in Art Basel 
 
Cotton, polyester and trevira, 290 x 290 cm
 
Pia White’s tapestry is big and heavy enough, and the process of transferring from digital photographic plan to woven outcome substantial enough to give a weighty presence to the emphemerality of cigarette smoke, tying its illusive qualities firmly into the quotidian. This series follows on from previous tapestries the digital production and heroic scale of which were in the service of throwaway  consumer items.



 Dan Colen: Wild Irish Rose at Massimo de Carlo in Art Basel


At Massimo Carlo. There seemed to be party remnants in a space enclosed by large paintings by Jacob Kassay (as glipmsed above) and Gunther Forg (the latter, who died in 2013, was prominent on many stands). In fact, the scatter of bottles and cigarette ends were Murano glass castings and plastic-based sculptures by Dan Colen, also known for his series of paintings featuring burning candles from which the smoke emanating forms  disarming messages. Wild Irish Rose is something of a wake both for his friend Dash Snow and the party nights which changed following his death in 2009. The collection sold for a non-too-shoddy £70,000.




 

Sarah Lucas: Vlady Trotsky, 2012 at kurimanzutto, Mexico City in Art Basel

Cigarettes and wire on kraft paper

If any artist can be said to ‘own’ the cigarette as material, it’s probably Lucas who uses them as both a short cut to a laddish vibe (see their orificial placement in Venice) and to suggest, by drawing with them, that smoking and drawing are comparably inward and obsessive activities. Her Mexican gallery had this appropriately mural-sized head resulting from a trip to Diego Rivera’s studio. They are, therefore, Mexican cigarettes which make up her version of a portrait of Trotsky as drawn by Vlady during the exile in Mexico which may have included an affair with Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo, and definitely concluded with an icepick.
 

Raymond Hains: Mlle Z, 2004 at  Max Hetzler, Berlin in Art Basel 

Wood, resin, sandpaper, photographic print, 120 x 45 x 20 cm

Raymond Hains, one of the nine signatories of the declaration for New Realism in 1960, is best known for his torn poster works. Actually his practice was varied, and included pop-style enlargements of boxes of matches. These read as pregenitors for the spark of artistic inspiration, but were also a tribute to his gallerist Iris Clert, who was known as the ‘incendiary brunette’ and persuaded firefighters to guard Hains’ first matchbox show. The boxes feature Hains’ own designs, though sometimes under pseudonym chosen according to the supposed country of origin of the matches: here, it’s a semi-abstracted portrait.  


Thomas Demand: Daily #2, 2008 at Schaulager

Dye transfer print, 80 x 77 cm
The institutions joined in, too: the Schaulager was showing a cigarette partly-painted by Joseph Beuys as well as Thomas Demand’s less political, more everyday series of photographs, based not on news stories but on casual camera phone shots of his own posing as 'daily rushes' from filming. Having elaborated these into paper sculptures to photograph and then destroy in his usual way, Demand commissioned the images to be printed with the contrastingly permanent but increasingly rare dye transfer process.
Gavin Turk: Totem, 2013 at Larm Gallery, Copenhagen in Volta

c-type print, 172x120 cm,

Gavin Turk makes something more Freudian out of a source similar to Pae White’s, titling the large photograph of billowing smoke to suggest we might read something into it, given the chance we don’t normally have to take a fixed view in great detail rather than getting lost in its continual drift. Maybe you could read fixed smoke in the manner of tea leaves? The frozen smoke has a definite beauty, but is that just cover for its destructive undercurrent, whether following an explosion or with reference to our lungs?



Saturday 20 June 2015

SOMETHING FROM EVERYTHING: IN AND AROUND ART BASEL 16-21 June 2015

Something from Everything

Here’s a rather perversely democratic choice of just one piece each from a dozen categories: Art Basel’s gallery section; Art Unlimited (the main fair's hall of 74 separate installations); the Liste, Volta and Solo Project and Photo alternative fairs; the Art Parcours works out and about in the city; other external installations; the commercial gallery spaces in Basel itself; private museums; public museums; and the surrounding towns. That’s perverse because there is of course exponentially more good art in some categories (there were 287 highly-rated galleries in Art Basel against 32 more modest ones in The Solo Project) – but there were good things in all.

Art Basel’s galleries 




Wolfgang Tillmans: Sendeschluss / End of Broadcast VI, 2014
Inkjet print 171 x 252 cm  - Chantal Crousel, Paris

There were more spectacular pieces of course, I was struck by three photographic versions of time travel. 2000 Turner Prize winner Wolfgang Tillmans’ larger-than-life photograph of a TV screen had a peculiar allure. He took it in St Petersburg, while on a residency for Manifesta last year, and its intricate and subtly coloured patterns incorporate time travel of a sort. Russian TV is still issuing analogue signals, which Tillmans found were poorly tuned on his TV. He also found that his modern digital camera could capture those distorted signals with a clarity unavailable to a photographer at the peak of analogue broadcasting. Tillmans was sufficiently interested to ask for the room with the bad TV signal on future trips! Gillian Wearing showed a triple format self-portrait at Maureen Paley: as now, looking pretty good for fifty; as she expects to be at 70 through a computer projection, decidedly the worse for wear; and as she actually will be in 2035  – a space left blank for obvious reasons, but which Wearing undertakes to fill at the time.
  

Idris Khan alongside Nicholas Nixon's sequence of the Brown Sisters
Frankael had the neat conjunctions of Nicholas Nixon’s famous and ongoing series The Brown Sisters, showing his annual photographs of them in a set order from 1975-2014, with Idris Khan's layering of them into one photograph of the first 20 years…



Neo Rauch: Der Lehrling, 2015 - Oil on canvas, 300 x 250 cm - courtesy Galerie EIGEN + ART Leipzig/Berlin

Oh alright then, I’m cheating quite a bit already but my favourite new painting in the main fair was this three metre high slice of  'Criminal Minds' by Neo Rauch, with psychedelic colouring integrated with startling logic into his mysteriously dramatic intermingling of the old and new.  



Martin Honert: VSG Gruppe, 2015 at Johnen Gallery, Berlin

I’m tempted by a comparably-themed sculpture, too. Martin Honert makes 3D versions of photographs of personal significance to his own development, with enough attention to exactitude that his oeuvre develops slowly. His latest shows his father (centre) together with other veterans – albeit they were still young men - injured in World War 2. Once more, a modern technique facilitates access to the past through which we see our own times.


Art Unlimited



Kader Attia -  Spring, 2014

Art Unlimited was at its best this year, taking advantage of scale to make spectacle. One trend was towards presentation of manifold works in a room-like structure: 33 paintings by Hans Peter Feldmann, arranged to connected horizons, were a mere bagatelle; 110 large canvases by Emilio Vedova were stacked around variously; 196 somewhat smaller paintings by Jakub Julian Ziolkowski constituted Imagorea, his whole production in 2013-14 and enough to prove his unconscious has consistent weirdnesses; 200 collages by Tal R, memorialised his sources over the years; 500 studio nudes by Ryan McGinley (so many they colonised the ceiling). Then were accumulations: thousands of microphones, bicycles – and museum cabinets, smashed by the rocks still strewn around. Kader Attia’s Spring, 2014 seemed so well guarded that I asked what difference it would make anyway, were the work to get broken? Of course, the concern was the safety of the public rather than the work. Attia’s point was to reposition his established concern with breakage in a colonial context to the smashing and looting of museums in Egypt – in line with a pessimistic view of the likely long-term outcomes of the Arab Spring uprisings. Despite all which my favourite installations of new work were quiet studio-based rooms by Spencer Finch (recreating through shadowplay the light in his studio by night) and Roman Ondek (distributing the parts of a typewriter on found elements from his studio around a large room as an autobiographical readymade).


Liste





Feiko Beckers: A Conversation is a risk to lose your own opinion, 2015at Jeanine Hofland, Amsterdam

I could easily do with more effective humour, good writing and bite-sized narratives in video art – especially towards the end of a fair. Step forward Dutchman Feiko Beckers with a set of three four minute films in which he and a friend, dressed in  Malevich designs to signal idealism, discuss paradoxes such as:  how do I commend my old washing machine as worth giving to you without undermining my case to myself for spending significantly to replace it? Several plates, broken and fixed in tune with the changeability of his beliefs, provided more bite-sized flavours of his winning tone. Other Liste highlights included Alec O's screens of broken glass patched up,  Michael Rey's big oddly-shaped monochromes on plasticine over clay, and a complex film installation in which artist-partners Anna K.E. and Florian Meisenbergen produce an iterative double-selfie.






Feiko Beckers - from: Things I once believed in, that I then stopped believing in and that I now believe in again, 2015


Volta


Manabu Hasegawa: M60 - paper, pencil, coloured pencil, 145 x 55 x 55 cm

Manabu Hasegawa  at Tezuayama Gallery, Osaka

Here I liked plenty, such as Carina Linge's photo tableaux, Susanne Kühn's architectural presentation of paintings, Rose Eken's kooky yet real ceramics and Andrea Canepa's timeline of scenes of the future from sci-fi films. There was also Jeannette Ehlers  applying a charcoal-dipped bullwhip against white canvas for the performance Whip It Good! - the sound of which echoed louder than I'd expected through the Fair. Manabu Hasegawa makes innovative Trompe l'oeil use of frottage by creating 3D models, here including gold coins (for which he rubs the sides as well as front surface with a coloured pencil), a massive vault to hold them, and a wide range of knives and guns. Violence, greed and fragility: no surprise that  the Tokyo artist cites Buddhist sources, and specifically how what may seem permanent is 'as dust before the wind' (in the words of the 14th century epic 'Tale of the Heike').


Jeannette Ehlers  in performance
 
Reinoud Oudshoorn

The Solo Project 





Christoph Brünggel: For V, 2015 at Galerie Bob Gysin, Zurich

The Solo Project is always a pleasant viewing experience, having a generous layout, an excellent catalogue (as does Liste), good representation of a small number of artists, and no crowds. One impressively economical piece was Swiss artist Christoph Brünggel’s eleven part text work, which said ‘I still haven’t figured out how to deal with it inside’. The words were hard to make out, as the typing had overlapped them, suggesting that the inside not dealt with was literally the space inside the words. But once you knew that the quote was from a veteran of the Afghanistan War, the formal conceit read more darkly as a mind impacted.


Go figure: one page detail close-up 


Photo Basel



               


Flor Garduño - Eden, 2001 at David Guiraud, Paris 

This new venture was small and somewhat scruffy, but included a wall of surreally tinged images by the Mexican Flor Garduño, who trained with Manuel Alvarez Bravo. The mythic Eden is in line with her own description of her nudes as ‘a search for the people who inhabit my dreams’. I like the echoes of Maillol's sculpture, and how black and white replaces the expected male and female as the contrasted couple in paradise - or is it just that there would be no men there? I also liked Ishiuchi Miyako's highly atmospheric and grainy images of US bases in Japan after they'd been abandoned (at Tokyo's amanasalto).



Ishiuchi Miyako from Club & Courts (1988-1990)



Art Parcours




Ugo Rondidone: the gracious, 2015

At 10 metres, the most imposing work in the Art Parcors route of art placed in the environs of the cathedral was Ugo Rondinone’s stone sculpture which used modern quarrying and carving techniques to mimic a prehistoric monument. The figure rose to the level of surrounding four storey buildings. Yet I suspect the project for which plans could be seen in Sadie Coles’ booth might trump even that (despite the best pink and blue preview efforts of the local schoolchildren in my photo above). The New York based Swiss artist intends to build a mountain of sorts from hyper-intensely coloured piles of boulders. The gallery presented three of these in front of comparably hued work by Jonathan Horowitz to provide the chroma-spectacle of the fair.


Rondinone's will-be-mountains with Horowitz's Beyoncés at Sadie Coles' stand


Also in the city




Nevin Aladağ: Marsch, 2014 at Kunsthalle Basel, back wall

Berlin-based Turk Nevin  Aladağ was the discovery of the trip for me. I travelled via Stuttgart, where she was showing two captivating three screen film installations in which musical instruments were played by non-human processes, one urban and one set in the desert:  sand falling on drums, bells wafted by the tide, a violin bowed on each circuit of a roundabout.  The musical theme continued on the back wall of Basel’s Kunsthalle, where cannonball forms indicated the notes of Mozart’s Rondo alla Turka, the best-known example of Orientalism in classical music, whilst flagging the colonial basis of Orientalism and returning the military march to its origin as army signalling between the lines (of the army / stave).







The Public Museums

Martin Boyce: A River in the Trees, 2009


The Kunstmuseum, which covers something like 1500 – 2000 pretty comprehensively, is closed for restoration, so the focus shifted to the Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Museum of Contemporary Art), which rose to the challenge magnificently with a celestial choice of Frank Stella paintings; a curiously homonymic pairing with a floor each for Martin Boyce and Joseph Beuys; and a selection from the displaced collection. It's also worth mentioning the decidedly original and fantastically installed Haroon Mirza exhibition at the Tinguely Museum, which saw Mirza play off and collaborate with various other artists: Tinguely, of course, but also for example animating a Calder, using a Kapoor mirror  as a reverse readymade, deriving a sound installation from Channa Horwitz's Sonakinatography paintings and dedicating  three rooms to acoustics and light in response to a previous Eileen Gray show. 


Haroon Mirza: The System, 2014
The Private Museums

Tobias Rehberger: from 1661-1910 Nagasaki, Meiji, Setti, 2015 at Foundation Beyeler



Berlin’s Neugerriemschneider

Berlin’s Neugerriemschneider



The Foundation Beyeler can be relied on for heavy-hitting exhibitions, and this year there were two: Paul Gaugin and Marlene Dumas.  Less familiar, especially if you’d seen the Dumas at Tate Modern, was Tobias Rehberger’s takeover of the large basement space.  It was so spectacular it would have fitted right in to the Schaulager’s typically impressive retrospective of installations from Barney, Fischli and Weiss, Kabakov et al. The German artist has made a 26m-wide mural, using monochrome squares of wallpaper as pixel-like coloured tiles.  Vases (with plants) and benches sit in front with matched patterns such that they disappear if seen from the right angle, whereas the tiles come into focus, given distance,  as sex acts taken from Japanese manga. Thus disguise operates in two directions, and fine art is derived from what might be termed a combination of décor and the undecorous. In the fair, Berlin's neugerriemschneider had a less subtle version in which sex toys replaced the plants...




 Tobias Rehberger: Oki Nami Ura, Katsushika Hokusai,1832 and Manga Girl, 2015

Commercial galleries in Basel  


Superflex: installation view of Investment Bank Flowerpots, 2015 (photo Andreas Zimmermann)

Superflex at Von Bartha's Garage

Von Bartha has my favourite commercial space in Basel: it takes up most of a former garage, but there are still operative petrol pumps outside.  Inside, the Danish collective Superflex (perhaps you’ve seen their flooded McDonalds) brought their witty brand of anti-capitalist subversion to bear.  They included contracts requiring corrupt practices to be followed;   memorials to bankrupt banks; and plant pots in the form of the world’s top investment bank HQs in which psychotropic plants were growing, so suggesting that high finance dealings might be comparably addictive, euphoric and irrational. There was also a ten day film simulation of how an architectural ideal of modernism would deteriorate if left to do so over thousands of years, originally shown on a 40 m2 screen in front of its subject, the Stora Enso building in Helsinki.  



View in Helsinki of Modern Times Forever, 2011



 Outside the City








Saint-Louis, though in France, is so close to Basel that I usually stay there, Switzerland being rather expensive.  Ironically, I was too late to book this year and so was based in Germany during the first must-see show I can recall at the Fondation Fernet-Branca: a 35 painting career survey from 1976 onward of the hyper-inventive abstract process painter Bernard Frize. That was interspersed by way of  intensely-pigmented monochrome breathers with the object paintings of Günter Umberg, and there was also a spectacular retrospective of our own Queen of Dead Flies, Claire Morgan, on the floor above.

Bernard Frize: Quarante et un point quatre, 1999












About Me

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Southampton, Hampshire, United Kingdom
I was in my leisure time Editor at Large of Art World magazine (which ran 2007-09) and now write freelance for such as Art Monthly, Frieze, Photomonitor, Elephant and Border Crossings. I have curated 20 shows during 2013-17 with more on the way. Going back a bit my main writing background is poetry. My day job is public sector financial management.

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