Non More Black: a studio visit with Dick Evans

Without any artwork or a laptop to show images, the studio visit with London artist Dick Evans was all talk of the past, the possibilities, and production. Now, a meeting with an artist without any actual art could seem lacking or perhaps even terrifying, but this space created by the absence of realized work can allow budding ideas to flourish. It also lets the artist and the curator the chance to get to know each other.  And it’s this dialogue of what comes before the making that opens the realm of understanding in such an inclusive way that when Evans’ thoughts eventually do become things, they will be all the more personally intriguing.

Of course, there were still things to see. The studio itself, housed in the back corner of a warehouse behind the VW car dealership on Old Kent Road that’s shared with an artist-run space, is an ideal house of contrasts: the sharp lines of welding materials, electric saws, and metal mesh with the softer qualities of a Victorian-style chaise and stool, portraiture painting books, and even a model of a British ship. But this makes sense. Evans’ previous work exists in polarity, taking urban and cultural references and turning them into a slightly dark gothic narrative, one in which the works have feeling. Take for instance his recent work at URA Gallery in Istanbul, The Swan and the Spectre, where he reconstructed Cinderella’s castle as depicted in Diane Arbus’ A Castle in Disneyland, CA (1962). The black volcanic three-dimensional castle intertwines Disney’s fairy-tale with Arbus’ representation of the marginalized to reflect a darker narrative about the ruin and the failure of such a utopian ideal.

After a yearlong break from working, it’s taken Evans six months to get to the point where he can discuss three new concepts for pieces he’s conceiving. These include a large-scale ghost ship and two-dimensional series influenced by ballet that are visible only as sketched in a notebook or as a skeletal beginning framed on the wall. Still, that’s enough to grab attention. Not surprisingly the color black comes up a lot, questioning its cliché-ness or it being over-played, but it simply feels to integrate best with his work. It’s not metal like Banks Violette, it’s more of a haunting tale that casts darkness onto a familiar image. It’s also a useful strategy that cohesively binds the elements of the work.

Evans seems to be an artist who’s learned from success in his twenties. Slightly jaded he’s had experiences that are enabling him to make the necessary changes to let his practice develop and that allow the work to become something more than a saleable one-trick-pony. His usage of Romantic notions, aestheticism, and form are perhaps are more acceptable now than ever before but he’s still pushing, testing the boundaries of what he wants to do. Hearing of an artist taking some time to do this is refreshing and having a studio visit reveal the initial stages of the next chapter, it should be worth the wait.

Image: Dick Evans, Swan and the Spectre, 2009.

Everything is unpredictable

Everything is unpredictable

  A Studio visit in Gransden Avenue London Fields, 10^th November 2009  

Dan Wang

 

After two months’ trial and effort, I did not succeed in getting a working position in 1mile² project from Visiting Arts. However, I found alternative ways to find out more information about this project. Recently I made the acquaintance of a young artist called Shaw working in the 1 mile² in Waltham Forest. One week later, it was by chance that Shaw brought me to his friend’s studio in East London. This turned out to be an unpredictable studio visit.

I still remember the day: it was a freezing, rainy and windy evening. Shaw, another artist Chen and I were walking on Hackney Street and looking for their friend’s ‘home’. Heavy rain made the scene vague and obscured our visibility. Just then,    a lady in red came along walking her dog, smiling and waving her hand. This was their friend Anna Boggon, who came from Edinburgh, now based in London and teaching in Wimbledon College of Art.

After Several minutes’ walk, we arrived at her studio, which used to be a gallery and now is designed as a simple cosy home with three pieces of furniture: two chairs and a long white painted table and an old fashioned wood stove. We sat down, holding cups of hot tea with tasty chocolate biscuits. Anna gave us a brief introduction to the studio: Originally，many years ago there was no studio here，Instead there was a gap between two factory buildings, which it was not convenient for workers to cross between the factories. Consequently, workers built corridors between the two buildings and gradually this area was extended and built into a house. Anna did not expect to take this space as her studio and home after her exhibition in the same place last year. Anna felt life was unpredictable as she had just finished moving her studio from Oxford to the previous gallery she worked with. I had same feeling: although I did not work with the 1 mile², now I knew many artists with different art practices either involved in this project or unconnected to it.

We began to talk about Anna’s art practice and recent exhibition the other shadow of the city in Jerusalem Oct 2009. She worked in the Palestinian Artist Residency for several months and made a film. The film was about a pair of shoes that walked automatically at certain speed, step by step, and the soundtrack was bright, touristy and full of Islamic melody. The travel route of the shoes showed images of the urban city, religion, local people and their dairy life. The shoes also went to another country, Lebanon, across border from Palestine, about one hour’s driving distance, but local people could not visit it without a visa permit. So how could a pair of shoes cross the border between two countries? With help of Anna’s Lebanese friends, the shoes could be shown successfully in her film, providing an opportunity for Palestinians and Arabs to see the urban view of Jerusalem during the intense political conflict. Her work responded to people’s curiosities and dreams, testifying her idea that a city is a product of unconscious desire. Anna told us that the result of the work did match her exceptions and the initial proposal was changed several times because she was inspired by the separation war and national politics, and updated her point of view. Through her rich experience of international artist residences, she always approaches her art practices through historical research or her curiosity of objects, and her works relate to the context of space, both mental and physical.

After three hours’ chat, we had to say goodbye to her lovely warm studio. Outside raindrops were falling again. The weather in London is hardly predictable, just as it is same as meeting artists. You never know who is the next artist you are going to meet.  

Walead Beshty ‘Production Stills’ at Thomas Dane Gallery

Walead Beshty’s first solo exhibition in London, Production Stills at Thomas Dane Gallery, shows that he is the art world’s Wizard of Oz. The young British artist who lives in Los Angeles effectively pulls back the curtain to reveal how his art is made, installed, sold, processed, and shipped; rendering the prestige of the final art object obsolete.

Production Stills includes Beshty’s familiar clear shatterproof glass cubes exactly measured to fit inside a standard Fed Ex cardboard box for shipping to their intended destination. The result is a fortuitously damaged object with varied web-like crack formations throughout the exterior of the work. Situated on top of the cardboard box from which it was contained, complete with the shipping label, Beshty creates the anti-pedestal while adhering the history of its journey to display. The exhibition also debuts his copper boxes (20-inch Copper and 24-inch Copper). Similarly contextualized, these are shipped with the label affixed directly onto the piece meaning that the elements it encounters, ranging from the handler’s handprints to water to dirt, create a stunning random visual pattern of stains, bumps, dents, and patina.

In all their forms, Beshty’s wall works provide a literal background for his boxes rounding out the differing ways we can interpret art production. Slightly less obvious than the former, his brightly colored large-scale photograms anchor each room. Created by randomly folding paper to manipulate the design caused from light exposure, his two-dimensional works equally render and represent elements of chance. However, a more tactile approach is apparent in his Selected Works, 2008-2009 where a pulpy mass of paper remnants and a hidden button down collar shirt are shaped into a neat rectangle. Two ink jet print photographs are also featured, one showing Bard College (showing where art is made and discussed) and the other a clever image of his laptop placed underneath an Elsworth Kelly painting at the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (showing where art is displayed and discussed).

In his recent solo exhibition at the Hirschhorn, Hans Haake’s Condensation Cube sat in the nearby sculpture hall where the conclusion could be drawn that Beshty is part of a historical lineage of accessible, factory-made, conceptually intended cubes of made by Haake, Donald Judd, and Joseph Kosuth. Beshty is also situated amongst Allan Kaprow who would establish a set of rules for participants of his happenings and projects to enact at their own discretion.  Each artist exercises an authoritarian role while relinquishing control and it’s this tension between the controlled and uncontrolled elements inherent to Beshty’s process that makes the work truly alive. Importantly, his work is still firmly planted in the now by incorporating the familiar and superfluous materials such as fellow LA artists Jedediah Caesar and Kaz Oshiro.

Walead Beshty’s work is simultaneously abstract and minimal, constrained and free, rubbish and art, static and evolving. There are no bells and whistles here, no glamour involved in the artistic creation. Instead his work is the culmination of a controlled system that has uncontrollable circumstances purposefully built in. This results in an object without the obvious touch of the artist’s hand and one whose structure is intended to represent ‘what remains’ yet still holds a powerful aesthetic appeal.

Matt Collishaw – Hysteria (Freud museum, London)

Hysteric, photo courtesy of The Freud Museum

In a show in which the idea of hysteria seems to entail an interesting conversation on simulation – taking place, moreover, in Freud’s house, now a museum – Matt Collishaw’s latest works match almost perfectly, camouflaged within the myriad of objects collected by the Austrian psychoanalyst and displayed through the rooms. They pulse of their own lives, attracting visitors’ eyes and bodies towards them, machines in disguise fully intentioned to deceive and challenge senses and perception, blurring the distinction
between reality and illusion, between physical and immaterial.

The two works ‘Slipping Into Darkness’ and ‘Women Under the Influence’, respectively constituted by an antique sewing table and a large mirror, found their place in the house’s dining room on the ground floor. On the small table, lies an anamorphic render of a print depicting Martin Charcot in the act of showing his students a patient in a hysterical fit; in the second work, another mirror reflects distorted images of Charcot’s photographic case studies. In both these pieces, glass – the material at the core of any device of observation – changes the relationship between the viewer and the subject of these works: the cylindrical mirror positioned at the center of the anamorphosis has the function to restore the distorted image to its correct, lost, proportions, whereas the mirror of ‘Women Under the Influence’ showing photographs in constant process of distortion, plays the opposite role, making difficult the distinction between recognizable features of a face and the

smoke that generates/constitutes them.
In the zoetrope ‘Garden of Unearthly delights’ – shown in the room of Freud’s daughter
Anna, known for her  studies on childhood psychology – a series of three dimensional
sculptures of tiny imp children smashing eggs, killing snails and butterflies with sticks
and rocks are displaced on a rotating platform, lighted with stroboscopic LED-lights
producing the illusion of movement and recalling the father-daughter’s studies on cruelty
in childhood. The installation ‘Charcot’s case studies’, shown in the adjoining room, is a
slide projection of original photographs of Charcot’s patients on a wall covered with
photosensitive panels. The images remain impressed on the wall for a short time even if
the slide is not actually projected thanks to the peculiar material of the panels, able to
absorb and emit light in an amount equivalent to the intensity of the bygone image’s

shades of grays.
The works presented, question ideas of simulation and illusion by shifting the laws that
regulate various optical-physical effects such as retinal persistency outside of the viewer’s
body. If in ‘Garden of Unearthly delights’ the sculptures move because the persistency
takes place on the viewer’s retina, in ‘Charcot’s case studies’ a similar effect is enacted on
a wall, causing a short circuited situation in which it is no longer clear whether the cause of
the visible is mechanic or organic. Hysteria is a term that describes physical
manifestations not supported by organic causes, and the exhibition appropriates such
definition to extend the gap between order and disorder, that is, to highlight the conflict
between the rational, controlled analytic thought processing and the irrationality of
simulation.

MP

Damien Hirst: No Love Lost, Blue Paintings

Damien Hirst at Wallace Collection

No Love Lost, Blue Paintings

14th October, 2009 – 24th January, 2010

Rumors abound, of him and his lack of painterly skills abound.  His series of blue paintings are evidence to his self-acclaimed fear of the void space on canvas.  His creation lacks substance yet proclaims to be the symbol of the artists’ integral growth and a grand embarkation from his previous practices.  At most, the artist’s experimental approach to the two-dimensional plane seems to be present, however it only goes as far as emulating the convention of mark making, and his attempt to personify the soul of Abstract Expressionism is only subsumed by its own superficiality.  The artist is consumed by the end product, and not by the process of painting itself.  His compositions are shockingly poisoned by the aggressive central elements, mainly depiction of skulls and shark jaws, suspended in mid air, set against the deep blue background.  Half hazard white lines and dots spewed across the canvases appeal to be a pseudo mathematic/scientific diagram which, along with precariously rendered lemons and ash trays, detract and hinder the eyes from exploring the painting in depth.  The eyes have no-where to go, and his faintly layered green tropical leaves sadly become embarrassing eyesores.

There is, however, one painting that glows dimly in the room, and it seems to directly and rightfully translate the artist’s genuine transition, growth and passion for painting.  The modestly scaled painting occupies a small wall towards the entrance of the gallery room.  Hirst began his journey into Floating Skull in 2006 and it is by far the most ‘worked and re-worked, filled and refilled’, genuine piece of painting.  Confusion, progressive struggle, persistence and feeble spirit seep through and transcend the black paint, glossy and thick like crude oil.

The work has also been considered curatorially.  The spotlight is angled scrupulously at the fading skull, illuminating the bluish-white pigment which seems to absorb all light energy, while the gleaming black backdrop counteracts by jarringly refracting it, resulting in an atmosphere drenched in some dramatic romance.  Throughout the rest of the show curatorial decisions seem rather vacant and it presses the question of how well Hirst’s paintings are integrated, or how much creative tension is developed between the site and the art.  What is at stake here is the existence of the contemporary paintings within a historical collection, housed in a listed building.  Like an unfriendly flat mate, No Love Lost lives exclusively, and the temporary exhibition is divorced from its counterpart. The single bridge between the two worlds is necessarily erected through the pamphlet entitled Damien Hirst’s Wallace Collection Trail.  But the quest for seeking their relationship miserably fails, as it appears the leaflet is an assortment of Hirst’s ‘TOP 26 inspirational works’ drawn from the collection.  The caption on the front: “…have ignited Damien Hirst’s imagination. Text © Damien Hirst”, eludes to an ultimately fictional development, that the specific works within the Collection have a direct correlation to the making of his blue paintings.

All cynicism aside, I do believe Hirsts removal from the glamorous, shining and ‘Sensation’ revealed something of the artist and his production that has never been revealed before.  As much as I perceive Hirst’s incompetence as a painter (not necessarily an artist) I also believe in his honesty that seemed to bleakly shine through the exhibition, and his genuine interest or deep reverence towards these painters cannot be dismissed.  I say this with a certain amount of conviction, whether derived out of dogma or inclination, for this is what I felt Floating Skull spoke of, but not what the exhibition translates.

Am I pleasantly dissatisfied and challenged, or am I enduring an amusing yet critically unchallenged state?  Having visited the exhibition over a week ago, I still remain transfixed and haunted by it, as I attempt so often configure the show, asking what the right questions would be, if in fact there are any.

*Talks and discussions held at Wallace Collection, prominent speakers include: Michael Craig Martin, Richard Cork, Iwona Blazwick, etc. More info at http://www.wallacecollection.org/collections/exhibition/77

Tangier/Casablanca with Mohamed Arejdal, a Studio Visit on Track.

It’s about 9am at Tangier train station. Mohamed and I got in the crowded and already overheated train. Direction: Casablanca. We find an empty square of seats and sit down. We start talking about insignificant things. The travel is about to start. 7 hours, at least…

My phone rings. The TV is about to arrive at the exhibition. They want me to explain the project. “Why didn’t they warn us?” I ask Mohamed.
“Oh you know, the TV….” he says.
Alright, at least the artist is there. I phone him. “Mohamed – his name is Mohamed, too – the TV is on its way. They want to see the exhibition. They will interview you, ok?”
- “Oh, that’s nice, he says, but I don’t want to be on TV you know!”
I throw a desperate gaze at the other Mohamed, the one in front of me, who is actually the artist’s friend. He laughs. “Of course, he says, I knew he would refuse!”

The travel continues, as slowly as I calm down. Outside, the monotonous barren landscape unfolds, sometimes punctuated by characteristic small villages. “You want to see something?” Mohamed asks, probably feeling that I need some distraction. “Sure!” I say.  He takes a catalogue in his bag. I recognize the catalogue he submitted for his final graduation from Tetuan’s National Fine Art School. I remember his viva and especially one video, particularly insightful. I also remember his focused and charismatic attitude and the inadequacy of the teachers’ comments. “We can’t tell about your videos because we don’t know anything about video. We want to see some paintings.” they said. I remember how I so wished I spoke Arabic…

Mohamed starts turning the pages from the right to the left and translates the summary, from Arabic to French. I think to myself: “I should take a pen…this is going to be interesting” but I just cannot. I feel like it would break the casualty of this quite intimate moment. Things in Morocco never happen the way you have planned then, nor when you have planned them. They just happen.

Mohamed explains to me that art is for him a tool that helps him to go toward people; it is also a way for knowing himself better. He shows me several works following the unfolding of the book. One of them – or rather the way he talks about it – catches my attention. One day, he decided to ask the first person he met on the street to draw the way to the nearest pharmacy. The first man he crossed explained to him how to go there but did not take the pen. The conversation went on and on for about two hours. The old man had never had a pen in his hand. Finally he gave up and rather angrily drew a line and a dot. Mohamed followed the drawing of the man and stopped at a place he assumed was matching with the end of the line. There he asked the same question to the next person he met and followed the indications of the improvised “map”. The whole action lasted 3 weeks. At the end of the process Mohamed had met all sorts of people, persons who insulted him, who took him to the place he wanted to go, who could perfectly draw the way, some who are still friends with him today. He also possessed an incredibly wide range of drawings he started to organise and connect as to create a new map of the city.

Mohamed doesn’t really show works. He tells stories. Stories about himself, stories about his life, about his doubts, his hesitations and his joys. He told me how the sensation of being schizophrenic led him to create this strange bifid portrait where his left side shows a shaved scalp and a beard whereas his right side is beardless but with hairs. He told me how he went out like that, how he met the amazed gaze of people and listened to the ironic commentaries of his friends and of his family. He also explained to me the context within which he created the video I noticed the first time I met him. And I realised that my understanding of this particular work was really far away from his original intentions. I told him how this video evoked to me a critique of the religion’s omnipotence in Muslim countries and we discussed about the different interpretations one can have of a work depending on culture, sexual identity and experiences. We kept talking until he went out of the compartment for a cigarette. I relaxed on the seat. We had been talking for about four hours and we still had plenty to say. This is when the slow and repetitive rhythm of the train enveloped me and my eyes closed softly…

An afternoon tea chat with Burcu Yagcioglu

This was not a studio visit. The preparation for this meeting was more like a ladies’ afternoon tea chat rather than a studio visit. I did not even leave my house.

It’s a sunny afternoon, and home-bake chocolate muffins are sitting on the tea table. Burcu’s compliments on the house and muffins make the meeting more and more like a ladies’ home visiting. The conversation starts officially from showing the images of the exhibition space in Taiwan.  The gallery space in the Everspring Museum of Fine Art is on the first floor of the building. The huge French window and the dormer, which brings a lot of natural light into the space, is one of the features of the space. No plastering with the exposed form of the wall and floor is another feature of it. Burce loves it and is excited about exploring a new region.

When she brings out the small DVD player with a screen, once again, we become two friends enthusiastically discussing about how convenient it is and the difference between having a player and a laptop. However, business has to continue. I have seen the images of the installation view of her new video installation Subtitles of a Ghost’s Humiliations and Pleasures. Now, with my imagination connecting the video with the installation, I can almost feel the uncomfortably depressive atmosphere in the hotel room, where the work exhibited. While watching the video and waiting the impression of ‘please touch’ on her back to go away, I only wish the time can pass sooner. It’s not because I don’t like the video, but because the uncanny feeling. On the other hand, the second video creates an absolutely different sensation. Untitled is a one-minute video that records the process of a hair being pulled out of the skin, and somehow, I feel it very funny instead of irritating.

I apologize for my silly giggling reaction of the work. She laughs and says that she actually understands why I think it’s funny. While folding the DVD player, I ask about her idea of the show, yet she throws the question back to me and wants me to talk more about my initial thought of the title of the exhibition. ‘The Tender Touch’ addresses my idea of her practice of drawings, paintings, videos and installations. For me, her practice looks very feminine. It has the gentle and submissive impression, yet the sensitive, delicate approach expresses a tough concept in her works. Hence, ‘tender’ indicates the impression of her works, and ‘touch’ is an active movement from her. In a way, in my eyes, her works are like her, very graceful but always has a strong attitude about her idea or position, no matter as a female, an artist or a student. Burcu keeps smiling while I am trying to articulate my thoughts on her practice. Continuing, I say that sometimes I am like this as well, being gentle but having a tough character. ‘Yes, I think so.’ So she speaks. ‘I have the feeling for you too, and yes, that’s what I want my artworks show – gentle yet contain forceful messages. I really like the idea “touch,” but we can discuss about the term “gentle” more.’ Until now, I realise that it is a destiny to have this meeting as a ladies’ tea talk because we are two professional ladies sharing each other’s thoughts. ‘Sure, it’s just my initial thought, and it’s not grammatically correct so we won’t use it just like that anyway’ I say to her.

It was a sunny afternoon, we kept the information that we had exchanged for the show and said goodbye, looking forward to the next teatime.

Studio Visit: Eloise Fornieles

 

London, 26/02, Paradise Row

 

Having meandered through the East End, I arrive at Paradise Row Gallery for the private view of Eloise Fornieles’ ‘A Grammar of Love & Violence’. Upon entering the space, I discover a dimly lit room featuring an installation, within which Eloise’s performance is set. The context of the installation – scaffolding, kissing chairs, carpets, hair strewn across the floor – invokes a sense of eerie domesticity and intimacy. Atop a tower of scaffolding sits Eloise, sworn to a month of silence, inviting participants to climb up and share a story. Intrigued, I join Eloise and tell her about a strange dream I had. The experience is somewhat bizarre – having told a story, one expects immediate verbal reaction. And yet all Eloise could reciprocate with was body language, a quiet hum or miming a word. Conversation dissolved, turning to a monologue.

 

By the exit, I find a stack of blank envelopes and letters. I write to Eloise with a question, attaching my address. I go home eagerly awaiting an answer.

 

London, Mid-May

 

No letter arrives. I contact Eloise with a set of questions regarding my IRP-A – questions relating to her practice and the curatorial agenda of the project – applying William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s Third Mind to exhibition making. I receive an enthusiastic reaction, followed by a flash of realization – Eloise writes ‘believe it or not, I have been carrying your name and address with me for some time and it now finds itself in the far reaches of the Pacific’. Again, I find myself eagerly awaiting a letter.

 

Copenhagen, 01/07

 

A chunky envelope drops through the door. Excited, I notice ‘Nippon’ on the stamps – the letter arrived from Japan. After tearing open the envelope, I find the envelope I had myself addressed, this time ‘customized’ by Eloise with a bizarre dragon-like creature. Inside that, is a large pink sheet of paper, folded like a puzzle – a puzzle which holds the answers to my questions. Smartly folded, I carefully thread question to answer, inevitably becoming slightly lost. I flip the sheet to discover Bruce Nauman’s ‘Body Pressure’ on the other side.

 

London, 12/10

 

Having missed Eloise by two days in Istanbul, we finally meet in London. I stand outside her house, an old vicarage in London Fields, carefully inspecting the pink letter. Her bedroom acts as her workplace, adding another level of intimacy to the already peculiar notion of a studio visit. We sit back in large armchairs, sniggering at how posh we look drinking Lapsang Suchong and eating figs. ‘Courtesy of my dealer’ pips Eloise and laughs her head off. Her desk is littered with small, intricate watercolours of horses, surrounded by large coffee table books of recent exhibitions at the V&A – magnificent, embroidered dresses from the Russian court, Uzbek tapestries. Whilst discussing her performances The Oyster Bar and Senescence, I catch myself screening the room for clues – things, objects, pictures that in some way refer back to Eloise’s practice. As we discuss her Beijing performance which included Eloise walking naked on a treadmill, whilst carrying a dead, shaved goat (wild!), I notice a photo of Zinedine Zidane’s face covered in blood and a series of drawings of animals, their spines painted as red threads running through their bodies. We talk about family origins and Eloise’s Anglo-Argentinian heritage. As I notice a book on Bas Jan Ader, Eloise describes a project she would like to carry out which includes her travelling to Argentina by boat and forcing herself to learn to speak Spanish. We veer towards practicalities – the IRP-A, the upcoming 176 ‘Testing Ground: Live’ weekend, yet without loosing the informal, chatty nature of our encounter. We discuss the letter as Eloise elaborates certain points. As I get ready to leave, she apologizes – ‘I’m sorry about all the animals, there are also mice, a cat and a snake, but the snake is at work now’. I hesitate and wonder whether or not question what exactly the snake’s ‘work’ entails, but instead I take it as a given, having already teased Eloise for her family stories sounding too much like a Wes Anderson script.

Zhanghuan: Zhu Gangqiang

Zhang Huan: ZhuGangqiang in the White Cube

4 Sep—3 Oct 2009
Mason’s Yard 

What strikes you immediately when you walk into White Cube (Mason Rd) is that two live pigs have been put on show in the days of the spread of the Swine Flu. How could farm animals live in such a formal and “white’ gallery? Recently, Chinese established artist Zhang Huan presented his first solo exhibition Zhu Gangqiang (Cast-Iron-Pig) in the White Cube gallery. Following Zhang’s previous practical experience, he used to do performance by his own naked body in a masochistic manner, and tested human tolerance in adverse conditions.

As for this exhibition, Zhang depicted a story about how during the earthquake in Sichuan province on May 2008, 60,000 people lost their lives in the disaster. But it was a miracle that a pig was under a collapsed building and survived for 49 days on rotten wood, dirt and rain water. After the rescue, the pig became famous and was named Zhu Gangqiang, meaning a strong-spirited pig. Artist was impressed by the pig’s strong willpower and had an idea to exhibit this pig as a pilot experiment to present death and a belief of life, recalling Zhang’s previous spirit in his earlier performance.

The concept of his art work was quite simple, but the presentation was hard to achieve. Firstly, Zhu gangqiang was impossible to bring to UK because of the law of animal epidemic prevention. Instead the artist found two of the same species and size pigs and also built an ideal western style farm. It was controversial that the artist used all British materials to tell a Chinese narrative and it was hard to understand the concept at first glance. It seemed to be a happy farm for families to visit, which the context of his art work transformed from a memory of disaster into a sort of entertainment. Secondly, Zhang believed the Zhu Gangqiang survived by his spirit. But it was argued that animal sometimes live by their basic instinct in a biological way.

Zhang also created his paintings of Zhu Gangqiang and human skull using temple incense ash. From his idea, the incense ash was an element of collective fortune wish and attempted to show a life circle among hope, life and death. In fact, this style of paintings was not new and was based on previous resemblance. Compared to Zhang’s early work, for example 12 square metre, the artist himself, with honey all over his naked body, sitting in the dirty and smelly public toilet, was bitten by flies, and explored the relationship between artists and tolerance of the hard environment. This piece of work was impressive and considered as an avant-garde of Chinese performance art. However, nowadays Zhang, like other artists in China, is using Chinese elements and making a number of similar works as a factory production.

Following Andy Warhol’s saying, “Good business is the best art,” nowadays artists consider more about how they can run their own business. As for artist Zhang, who is based in Shanghai now and has more than 50 people working together in a factory size studio, does not only exhibit his work in the world, but also participate in other field of inter-culture. For example he also worked as a director of opera Semele in Brussels. The definition of ‘artist’ has already been widely extended; artists switch their roles in different areas, and witness the art world’s borders becoming vague and indivisible from the social order.

…and along came a ghost.

When arriving in Travessa Dona Catarina one forgets it’s location within the humming chaos of Botafogo – one of Rio de Janeiro’s busiest neighbourhoods. The quiet hill-like street feels like being in a small village, with charming little houses and small three-story buildings. It’s like being back in the 60’s. Ringing on the number 18 and waiting for someone to come and open the big blue door fills me with a mixture of apprehension and nervousness. I’m at Cildo Meireles’ Studio and he has just opened the door with the warm smile of a typical “carioca”. (That’s what you call people from Rio).

My visit had a reason. I was there to discuss with Meireles a project that will take place in Porto in June 2010 and invite him to take part in it. This exhibition is entitled Like Tears in Rain and deals with notions of death, memory and visibility/invisibility of traces. Its scope is to commission artworks that use the artists’ views on these subjects, working upon them together with the notion of the ephemeral nature of existence.

The method I chose to approach him, that of being on a professional studio visit, fails me (as it would fail anyone else). Meireles disarms any type of strict code of conduct one might try to have around him and from the beginning makes you feel comfortable and at ease, just like an old friend.

We come in to an amazing open space, with a 10 metre high ceiling. It’s like a workshop, in the middle there are tables, tools of all kinds, sketches and artworks. To the left side a huge wooden table that can sit more than 12 people is surrounded by summer stray chairs with flower patterned cushions. The table is filled with papers, books, cups, telephones and a whole other array of objects and ‘bric-a-bracs.’

Rosalind Nashashibi at the ICA

Walking through the crowded rooms of Rossalind Nashishibi’s ICA exhibition I kept thinking about a recent trip I made to the Freud museum. Freud’s original psychoanalytic couch is preserved in glorious technicolour. Strewn with brightly hued Persian rugs and luxurious chenille cushions, and encircled by a miscellany of archaeological artefacts – African, Classical and Prehistoric figures – the good doctor’s divan is an object so dense with auratic overtones – the incalculable influence of psychoanalysis on contemporary culture – I found it hard to breath.

Now in front of me at the ICA was a group of films deeply cognizant not only of Freudian thinking but also concurrent theoretical projects, structural anthropology in particular; bodies of thought so dissected and assimilated, even ossified, in art practice I wondered how Nashishibi could meaningfully retain a voice. Strands of cultural theory quietly percolate though the work – concepts of ‘ the double’ and ‘the gaze’ to name a few – but as I progressed through the show I began to see them as a loose and associative framework through which Nashishibi extends her own investigations.

On the ground floor three films are compellingly condensed into a single presentational arc: a pattern of formal congruencies and departures highlights the focused concerns of Nashishibi’s recent practice. The first film, Footnote, a minute long loop, reconstructs a late night vignette from Nashishibi’s life, with Helke and Thomas Bayrle playing the artist as she reads an issue of Afterall in bed, her boyfriend asleep beside her. The enigmatic image of a toy frog, resting on the ledge of a garden basin, cuts in and out, and the image is washed alternately in orange, yellow, blue and green tint.

Next, Eyeball – perhaps the most instructive of the three- is a progression of found images of human faces, physiognomic detail observed by Nashishibi in the architectural backdrop of New York City, interspersed with observational sequences of male police officers decorously parading outside the First Precinct Station in Tribecca. The observed ‘faces’ – three indentations in a wood panel, circular windows between a brick pilaster, for example – are an aesthetic recall of modernist painting, Picasso in particular, and the primitivist fantasies that inspired him. Sound – the macho bustle of a New York city street – is decoupled from the documentary footage, alienating Nashashibi’s characters from their own subjectivity. The unattributable visage prevails, overwhelming the depersonalised mass of individuals with a primordial archetype.

Last in the triptych, The Bachelor Machine Part 2, consists of three interpolated elements: two parallel screens and a sound recording of a public lecture by Thomas Bayrle during which he digresses to articulate a dystopic vision of technological society. On one-side Bayrle and his wife Helke replicate scenes from Alexnder Kluge’s 1968 Artists under the Big Top, a portrait of circus organiser Leni Peickert. On the bordering screen, blurred images from Nashishibi’s own films, obscured to basic shapes, confirm her ethnographic leanings.

In the upper galleries are Nashishibi’s two most recent works. The Prisoner restages a sequence from Chantal Akermans’ The Prisoner – itself a restaging of a Proustian passage – in which a vulnerable young woman is observered from a distance by a male pursuer as she traverses Paris. Two projectors in the centre of the gallery show the film simultaneously on parallel screens with a short delay between them, as film is thread from one machine to the next. The most consciously cinematic, Prisoner is a rehearsal of means, unpacking and re-presenting a potent moment in film.

Jack Straws Castle, the last and most complex work, opens with naturalistic shots of dense forest from which anonymous male figures emerge. Details from renaissance painter Piereo di Cosimo’s fantastical The Forest Fire – strange unresolved hybrids of human and animal – cut in and out. Night falls and the filmic register shifts, the forest is transformed to an orchestrated film set.  Nashishibi spectacularises the unremarkable actions of a film crew. Orders are remotely issued and obediently implemented, a community in service of cinematic artifice.

N’s hermetic films are never completely sealed off. In fact, intricacies of construction – offsetting the sound of the hollow clack of the protagonist’s heels in Prisoner, for example – paradoxically allow for greater freedom. The artist displaces the social with the anthropological, antique patterns of culture and quotidian social structures. But in framing the subjects of her films she also attempts to frame herself – her mother appears on the set of Jack Straw Castle and Footnote is autobiographical – dissolving, or at least broaching, any implied power asymmetry between artist and the people she observes.

The Posters Came from the Walls – A film by Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams, Prince Charles cinema, 17/10/2009

Still from the film courtesy of the directors

I

In St. Petersburg, Russia it is the 9th of May – Victory Day, a major holiday that marks the victory over Nazi Germany. It is also Dave Gahan’s – Depeche Mode’s lead singer – birthday. A large group of Depeche Mode fans are gathered amongst the rest of the peopl who are out to observe the military parades. They are so proud of the coincidence and they celebrate Gahan’s birthday with such fervour as the rest of the country’s who is celebrating winning World War II, declaring it ‘Dave Day’. They have their own banners and the hold their own parade, singing proudly. One of the Russian fans declares: “We are Depeche-ist. Like Communist, like Fascist”.

Depeche Mode are one of the most popular, succesful and influential bands of the last thirty years. They have a sacred status amongst both devoted fans and your average music listener. In their hometown of Basildon, Essex they are not known much today, not really and they never had a number 1 in the UK, however they have touched so many other places in almost undefinable but definitely diverse ways, as revealed by Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams’ film ‘The Posters Came from the Walls’. A film, shot exclusively on video, about the fans of Depeche Mode, it sets out to observe the effect that the band has had on people over the years. Their journey takes them – and us – around the world, in order to meet people who testify of their faith and devotion to Dave Gahan, Martin Gore and Andrew Fletcher.

I woke up early on a Saturday morning in anticipation and made my way to Leicester Square’s Prince Charles cinema for 10:30am where I would have the opportunity to watch this film. I have seen Depeche Mode live and I know of countless people who love them and enjoy their music. All these fans who I know personally and who are currently travelling around Europe to see Depeche Mode live, were on my mind whilst waiting to watch the film. The atmosphere was almost celebratory in the auditorium making the experience even more intense.