hoelscher, jason. "occupy space/time - time-folding in contemporary art"

8/12/2019 Hoelscher, Jason. "Occupy Space/Time - Time-Folding in Contemporary Art"

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Front cover:Ai Weiwei, Stacked,2002, 680 stainlesssteel units. Installation view Prez ArtMuseum Miami. Photo: Daniel AzoulayPhotography.

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KETTLES WHISTLEBased on a True Story / By Michele Robecchi

PUSH TO FLUSH

Pop Culture Versus High Art (Reflections about an UndialecticalDialectics) / By Paco Barragn

FEATURES

Occupy Space/Time: Time-Folding in Contemporary ArtBy Jason Hoelscher

Lari Pittman: Rotten America / By David PagelNicole Eisenman: The Relevance of 21st-Century Expressionism/ By Stephen Knudsen

Diversity and Collaboration: An Interview with The island6 Art

Collective of Shanghai / By Andrew Nedd

Visual Narratives: An Interview with David HumphreyBy Craig Drennen

Subaltern Identities: A Conversation with Patricia VillalobosEcheverra / By Kristina Olson

Consider This. An Interview with Gregory CoatesBy Jeff Edwards

PhD in Philosophy for Artists. A Conversation with George SmithBy Stephen Knudsen

Ai Weiwei: According To What? /By Heike DempsterDIALOGUES FOR A NEW MILLENNIUM

Interview with Francesca Bonazzoli and Michele Robecchi

By Paco Barragn

ART CRITICS READING LIST

Yasmeen Siddiqui

Vincent Honor

REVIEWS

Performa 13, by Vanessa Albury(Various venues, New York City)/ Ilya& Emilia Kabakov, by Stephanie Buhmann (Pace Gallery, New York)/ Hermine Ford and Joan Witek, by Stephanie Buhmann (OUTLETFine Art, Brooklyn) / Eugene Von Breunchenhein, by Paul Laster(Fleisher/Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia) / Ryan McGinness, by PaulLaster (Bridgette Mayer Gallery, Philadelphia) /2013 Carnegie Interna-tional, by Kristina Olson(Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh) / JaronChilds, by Christina Schmid (Minneapolis Institute of Arts) / Eleanor

McGough and Claudia Poser, by Christina Schmid (Inez GreenbergGallery, Bloomington Theatre and Art Center, Minneapolis) /The SilentShout: Voices in Cuban Abstraction, by Margery Gordon(ArtSpaceVirginia Miller Galleries, Miami) /Manuel Mendive, by Irina Leyva-Prez(Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami) / Shepard Fairey, byHeike Dempster(Gregg Shienbaum Fine Art, Miami) /Sandra Ramos,by Irina Leyva-Prez (TUB Gallery, Miami) /Humberto Castro, by IrinaLeyva-Prez(Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, Miami) /AlexanderCalder, by Megan Abrahams (Los Angeles County Museum of Art) /Karin Apollonia Mller, by Megan Abrahams (Diane Rosenstein FineArt, Los Angeles) / Robert Minervini, by Megan Abrahams (MarineContemporary, Venice, CA) / Tierney Gearon, by Scott Thorp (JacksonFine Art, Atlanta) /Matt Woodward, by Jeriah Hildwine (Linda WarrenProjects, Chicago) / Jeffrey Beebe, by Jeriah Hildwine (Packer SchopfGallery, Chicago) / Waltercio Caldas, by Garland Fielder (Blanton Mu-seum of Art, Austin) /A Hole in the Wall Is Nothing to Worry About,

by Jason Hoelscher (Galerie Richard, Paris).

NO. 18 | VOLUME 5 | YEAR 2014 | WWW.ARTPULSEMAGAZINE.COMKristina Olson

Heike Dempster

Jeff Edwards

Andrew Nedd

Christina Schmid

Margery Gordon

Paul Laster

Irina Leyva-Prez

Scott Thorp

EDITOR IN CHIEF

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SENIOR EDITOR

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CONTRIBUTING EDITORS

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Michele Robecchi

David Pagel

Jason Hoelscher

Craig Drennen

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OCCUPY SPACE/TIME:

Time-Folding in Contemporary ArtBY JASON HOELSCHER

Because no work of art exists outside the linked sequences

that connect every man-made object since the remotest antiq-

uity, every thing has a unique position in that system. This posi-

tion is marked by coordinates of place, age and sequence. The

age of an object has not only the customary absolute value in

years elapsed since it was made: age also has a systematic value

in terms of the position of a thing in the pertinent sequence.

George Kubler, The Shape of Time

The ambiguity and unfinal izable aspects of artarguably the veryqualities that make art art as opposed to something elseseemto create an urge for classification and categorization. Entire eras,

diverse in temperament and geography, are subsumed under thelabel of Renaissance, or the work of artists as disparate as Bar-nett Newman and Willem de Kooning are grouped under the labelof Abstract Expressionism. While such information streamliningshears off much nuancewhich Renaissance? Italy in the late14th century or England in the late 16th?it is undoubtedly avaluable shorthand if we are to be at all able to discuss art withoutendless qualifiers and details.

What, then, does it mean to discuss contemporary art? Un-like the periodization of eras such as fin de siclemodernism,contemporary art is slippery in terms not only of definition butalso regarding what it even refers to in the first place. The word

contemporary, like the word I, is what Russian linguist RomanJakobson would call a shifter, a signifier detached from a stablereferent, applied contingently and changing in meaning accord-ing to who uses it and when. In practice it comes to mean lesswith each usage: contemporary now refers to a range of artworks,whether those created at any time since 1960as at auction hous-es like Christies or Sothebysor those created last month.

The condition and meaning of the contemporary takes on a stilldifferent set of complications when considered in light of threeexhibitions that took place in Europe during the summer and au-tumn of 2013, namely When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, at the Fondazione Prada in Venice; Les Papesses ,at the Palais des Papes in Avignon; and Paris Tour 13, which

took place in a ten-story derelict housing project building in Paris.All three of these exhibitions were quite extensive, occupying en-tire buildings ranging from palaces to projects, and shared highlyproblematized relationships to space, time and presence. Thesecomplex temporal entanglements operated in three distinct, ifoverlapping ways: time-as-collage, artistic re-temporalization,and the exhibition as chronotope.

When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, cu-rated by Germano Celant with input from Thomas Demand andRem Koolhaus, was a reiteration of Harald Szeemanns seminal1969 exhibition, Live in Your Head: When Attitudes BecomeForm. Szeemanns exhibition featured a range of conceptual,

post-minimal and anti-form artists such as Joseph Kosuth, EvaHesse, Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Richard Tuttle and oth-ers, and is often credited with bringing such work to internationalprominence. Exhibited at the Bern Kunsthalle, a large warehousespace, much of the work was made of evanescent and imperma-nent materials like sound, wire, felt, and lard. The recent iterationof the show in Venice not only sought out and re-staged theseephemeral artworks but re-created the warehouse space itself in-side the cavernous rooms of the Ca Corner della Regina, an 18thcentury palazzo along the Grand Canal in Venice.

The Venice exhibition thus operated as something of a remake, afairly common event in popular culturethink of movie remakes,

dance remixes or cover songsbut one not so common in fine art.To use the example of cover songs, new versions of old tunes tendeither (a) to remain note-for-note true to the original, such as thecurrent vogue for classic rock tribute bands, or (b) are used as aninterpretational jumping-off point to create a quite different song.When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, intrigu-ingly enough, managed to pull off the latter interpretational featby strictly adhering to the note-for-note methodology of the first.In other words, by meticulously researching and re-creating suchdetails as the precise placement of the original works relative toone another, the re-creations fidelity to the original was an impor-tant component of the exhibition: if a work in the 1969 iteration

happened to be 44 inches away from another work, and arrangedat a 70-degree angle from the wall, that relationship was carefullyreconstructed in Venice in 2013.1

So far this is fairly analogous to the note-for-note re-creation ofan older song. Where Venice 2013 differed, however, was in thecareful reconstruction of the original in such a thoroughly differentcontext, from the industrial space of a warehouse to the aristocrat-ic environment of a palace. Beyond the precise replacement of theworks in their original configurations within a vastly different typeof spacean interesting conceptual tactic to begin withthe spaceand feel of the warehouse itself was re-created 1:1 within the pala-zzo, up to and including the walls and floors. Overlaying blueprintsand diagrams of the two distinct spaces, the curatorial team had

plain white walls inserted into the palazzo, a radical superpositionof not just architecture and functionality but also of class impli-cations, juxtaposing sheetrock with fresco. Mitered and cut whennecessary to flow around such distinctly non-industrial accoutre-ments as 18th century columns and balustrades, the juxtapositionof wall types was a detail considered crucial enough to the showsthesis that it came to represent the exhibition in advertisementsand on the cover of the catalog. Such strict adherence to historywas complicated still further when, to take but one of many ex-amples, a reactivated anti-form scatter piece rested directly below acenturies-old fresco, thereby creating a contextual, experiential andtemporal collage of otherwise discordant elements.


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To return to the cover song analogy, the precise note-for-note recon-struction of the artworks and their placement, when juxtaposed with thestrange surroundings, created a far more dynamic tension than wouldhave been the case had the artworks simply been exhibited in the palazzowithout the strict fidelity to the original. For that matter, the attempt tore-situate the Bern space in Venice, building warehouse walls jigsaw-cutto fit 18th century architecture, served to create strange asymmetries intime, space and context. More than just a re-creation or re-situation,

the complex folding, mashing-up and interlacing of timesan exhibi-tion from the relatively recent past rebuilt in the present into a mucholder settingcombined with the radical shift in context to present theexhibition as readymade: a double-occupancy of space and time thattransformed one artifact into anothernot by modifying the thing itselfbut by drastically changing its situation.

When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013, then, is inmany ways about the complications and asymmetries of reenactment,dislocation and re-territorialization. Re-territorialization, a term usedby Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari to describe the re-placing of asystemsuch as a species or a languageinto a new situation or envi-ronment after being uprooted from its previous territory of influence,2can be applied also to Les Papesses, a concurrent exhibition that ran in

Avignon from June through November, curated by ric Mzil, direc-tor of the Yvon Lambert Collection.

Exhibited in the Palais des Papes, a Renaissance castle that housedthe popes during the Catholic schisms in the 13th and 14th cen-turies, Les Papesses featured the work of Camille Claudel, Lou-ise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Jana Sterbak and Berlinde De Bruyckere.Made up primarily of monumental sculpturethe smaller work wasexhibited across town at the Lambert Collection buildingthe pal-ace was filled with works such as the massive Spidersculptures ofBourgeois and Sterbaks The Real Princess, a stack of mattresses thatreached nearly to the ceiling of a grand hall. While the exhibitionwas curated around the medieval legend of a 9th century female

pope known as Pope Joan, what is of interest here is the juxtaposi-tion of space and time as an incongruous collision of art and place.At the most basic level, seeing the work of an artist like Louise Bour-

geoishumorously described in the exhibition catalog as the anti-Papesswithin a papal palace in a medieval walled city is itself some-thing of a shock: what the popes and clergy who lived and worked thereover centuries might have thought is an interesting mental exercise. IfWhen Attitudes Become Form drew much of its power from its exhi-bition of itself as itself in quite different spatiotemporal circumstances,Les Papesses pulls off a similar feat by taking one situationmod-ern and contemporary works by womenand superposing it into theextremely unlikely context of a 700-year-old papal enclave, inhabitedfor centuries almost exclusively by men. These re-territorializations, of

gender, aesthetic priorities and power relations, also serve as what wemight call re-temporalization, the transfer, recalibration and re-situationof time relationships: both artwork and exhibition space take on quitedifferent implications when set against, aside, and with one another.Whereas the Venice exhibition managed to create a differential tensionbetween like to like, Les Papesses created a compelling friction be-tween very different spatial and social systems.

A different approach to temporal complication took place withthe exhibition Paris Tour 13, a temporary installation that tookplace inand in fact took overa derelict ten-story building inPariss 13th arrondissement during the month of October. Orga-nized by Mehdi Ben Cheikh of Galerie Itinerrance, Tour 13 fea-

tured the work of 80 street artists from around the world whowere invited to paint the buildinginside and outhowever theywished. As elaborately overloaded with visual incident as any pal-ace or chapel, practically every surface of the buildings 36 apart-ments, from walls to ceiling and from fixtures to exterior faade,was covered with paint or wheat-pasted paper.

While Tour 13 was visually impressive, even overwhelming attimes, adding to the force of the exhibition was the fact that it hada very firm and definitive closing date: at the end of the month thebuilding was scheduled to be demolished. Complicating a typicalexhibition scheduleonce over the artworks are taken down andremovedthe closing date of Tour 13 marked the irrevocable end

of both artwork and exhibition space. An example of the exhibi-tion of art as the exhibition itself, via a total fusion of artwork withsurface of display in three dimensions, inside and out, Tour 13offered a twist to the relationship of art to site: if the site-specificnature of When Attitudes Become Form relied on the ephemeraquality of the art transposed and re-created in a different site inspace and time, and the site-responsiveness of Les Papesses oper-ated by way of forced sociocultural and spatiotemporal incongru-ity, the site-responsiveness of Tour 13 relied on the aggressivenature of the exhibitions end, a definitive deconstruction in a veryliteral sense: present for a very specific, pre-defined period, after thedeadline both art and site would be gone for good.

Louise Bourgeois (Spider, 1995, steel).Installation view from Les Papesses at Col-lection Lambert, Avignon, (June 9 November 11, 2013). Photo: Kory Kingsley.


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Installation view from When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013 at Fondazione Prada, Venice (June 1 November 3, 2013). Photo: Tullio M. Puglia/GettyImages for Prada. Courtesy of Fondazione Prada.

Jana Sterbak (The Real Princess, 2013, mattresses). Installation view fromLes Papesses at Collection Lambert, Avignon, (June 9 November 11,2013).Photo: Kory Kingsley.

El Seed. Exterior view of Paris Tour 13, an abandoned building called Habitat de laSablire (October 1-31, 2013).Photo: Laila Kouri.


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This highlights the importance of presence and presentness inthese three exhibitions: in Venice, the presence of a past exhibi-tion as itself, situated in a thoroughly different context in the pres-ent;3in Avignon, the rather transgressive presence of a new thingin an old context now known largely for the presence of popesnow long absent, returned to the Vatican; and in Paris the momen-tary presence of art and site in a highly particularized, temporallyconstrained setting. Even the term presence suggests the notionof the present, a contingent moment in time that, like the wordcontemporary, has a shifting meaning that defines nothing more orless than a subjective interface between past and future.

This fluid, shifting quality proposes a way to consider theTour 13 exhibition overall, as an example of a specific type of

time/space relationship known as a chronotope. A term coinedin the 1920s by literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin, a chronotopedefines not only a specifically charged intersection point of spaceand time but also the way the context and language of an eventis understood and represented by a culture. Described by Bakhtinas an intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relation-ships [in which] spatial and temporal indicators are fused intoone carefully thought-out, concrete whole,4 the term chrono-tope describes quite well the compelling nature of Tour 13: thespectacle of the work itself, combined with the knowledge that itwould soon be gone, clarified and defined its position in time ina highly charged and gripping manner.

That such different, high-profile exhibitions as these three weremounted concurrently is interesting in implication. Though verydissimilar in feel and lookfrom anti-form scatter pieces to elabo-rate street art, from the clash of contexts across centuries to anexhibition closing date enforced by a wrecking ball and demoli-tion crewthe exhibitions charged relationships to duration andinstantaneity suggest that our own cultural moment is complexlyrelated to issues of presence, absence and presentness as well. Inour everything all the timeinstant-access culture, in which the to-pology of our planet has been mapped and photographed down tothe square inch, perhaps the next stage of the contemporary willbe a series of paradoxical, ever-intensified explorations, remixes,reiterations and reconstitutions of an interlaced past and present.

NOTES1. This marks an interesting progression in the relationship between art and record, from

art >documentationto art >documentation >art: If much of what we know about late1960s art comes to us only from documentary photographs and video, Venice 2013carried the sequence a step further, using the documentation to reconstruct or repli-cate the arrangements of works that had, in many cases, been created with impermanence and dematerialization in mind. Further complicating this agenda is that fact thamany of the works had long since been taken apart or thought lost.

2. Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (University of Minnesota Press, 1987). See in particularchapters 1, 4 and 5.

3. Not to mention the instantiation of absence, by demarcating lost or destroyed artworks with dotted lines to highlight where they would have been placed within thecontext of the exhibition.

4. Mikhail Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel, in The DialogicImagination: Four Essays, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 84.

David Walker (foreground), Jimmy C. (background). Interior view of Paris Tour 13, an abandoned building called Habitat de la Sablire (October 1-31, 2013) . PhotoJessica Hernndez.


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In his most recent solo exhibition, A Hole in the Wall Is Nothing to

Worry About, German artist Sven-Ole Frahm deftly articulated and

navigated some of paintings many binary oppositions, among themflatness and extension, surface and surroundings, art and support.

Comprising works that extended forward into space, were pierced

through with tunnels, or were sewn combinations of multiple can-

vases on the same stretcher bars, Frahms work posed a number of

challenges regarding how the art object operates in relation to accu-

mulated painterly discourse about boundary and physicality.

By one reading, Frahms work can be considered an updating of old-

school Greenbergian Modernism, albeit with a few strange twists. For

Greenberg, painting was about the specific qualities of the medium

itself, purged of non-painterly attributes or of external referent. The

goal of painting, it was claimed, is to attain flatness, because two-

dimensionality was the only condition painting shared with no other

art, and so Modernist painting oriented itself to flatness as it did tonothing else.1A problem with this notion, however, is that flatness

is neither inherent nor specific to the medium of paint, but rather a

quality of the surface onto which paint is applied, the space on which

paint happens. Flatness, then, is not an innate quality of paintand

therefore is not medium-specificbut of topology, of surfaces.

If Greenberg espoused a painterly focus on surfacealbeit mi-

sphrasing the goal as one of flatnessFrahms use of stitching,

holes and extensions that poke the canvas out from the wall cer-

tainly do the trick. In a compellingly perverse way, Frahm thus

manages to amplify and dtourneto rerouteGreenbergs me-

dium specificity: the works are [a] very much about color and sur-

face, and [b] devoid of pictorial illusionism, but [c] are definitively

not flat planes. For example, a work like Untitled (#161) (2013)

with its multicolored circus tent-like conic extrusion of canvas out-ward from the wall, created a literally spatialized picture plane,

pushing neither illusionistically behind the surface nor merely lat-

erally across the surface, but forward, into the space of the viewer

Taking an alternate approach, Untitled (#163)(2013) had tun-

nels built into its surfacenot merely cut openings but sewn tubes

of canvas inserted perpendicular to the picture plane. To compli-

cate things further, what at first appeared as painted stripes were

in fact sewn-together sections of canvas. Very tricky in the way the

painting simultaneously revealed and concealed both itself and the

wall behind, the work functioned as a dense aggregate of object,

picture space and actual space, blurring the boundaries between

front/back and inside/outside as it staked out its position between

viewer, artwork and background.Frahms work, described on the checklist as paint on canvas

might better be described as paint andcanvas: In these artworks

the canvas served not just as passive planar support, but as an

active component of the paintings presence and extension into

spaces both optical and literal.

(September 7 - October 19, 2013)

NOTES1. Clement Greenberg, Modernist Painting, in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Es

says and Criticism, Volume 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957-1969, ed. JohnOBrian (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 87.

A HOLE IN THE

WALL IS NOTHING

TO WORRY ABOUT

Galerie Richard - Paris

By Jason Hoelscher

Sven-Ole Frahm, Untitled (#163), 2013,acrylicon canvas, 49 x 49 x 4. Courtesy of GalerieRichard, Paris.

hoelscher, jason. "occupy space/time - time-folding in contemporary art"

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