exhbition: christian marclay: musee de la musique

June 24 2007

Flaunting a knack for the wry détournement of found objects and images—specifically those related to the making, recording, reproduction, and visualization of sound—Swiss-American artist Christian Marclay illuminates some of the myriad ways in which music intersects with culture at large. This first survey of his work in video—curated by Emma Lavigne—includes documentation of various performances from the 1980s; the exuberant four-projector installation Video Quartet, 2002; and a trigger-happy new piece, Cross Fire, 2007. A veteran of New York’s postpunk and electronica scenes, Marclay brings an instrumentalist’s sense of rhythm and a DJ’s juxtapositional skill to the medium. The catalogue features essays by Rosalind Krauss, Michael Snow, and Jean-Pierre Criqui, among others.

image: telephones, 1995, still from a digital video in color with sound, 7 minutes 30 seconds

First Generation. Art and the moving image, 1963-1986: Susana Salinas

Curated by Berta Sichel at MNCARS, Madrid, Spain

Madrid hosts from the 7 of November of 2006 to 2 of April 2007 at the National Museum Center of Art Reina Sofia an extensive retrospective exhibition of the first 25 years of video art. First Generation. Art and the moving image, 1963-1986 is an exhibition curated by Berta Sichel, director of the new media department at the museum, and includes 32 installations, 14 video projections and 80 works of video in single channel.

Viewers can individually research through the work of some of the most important pioneers of video art in history. It covers the period from 1963, the year that the first installations with T.V. monitors where made by Wolf Vostell in the Smolin Gallery, New York and by Nam June Paik in the Parnass de Wuppertal Gallery, Germany, until 1986, the year that some of the most important artists from this first generation gain international recognition.

The two main purposes of this exhibition are to present to the public the new video art collection of the Reina Sofia which was initiated in 2005 and to recover a history of video that has not always been well taken care of. Apart from rescuing some of the most meaningful and interesting work from the first pioneers of video art, First Generation aims to bring to light why and how this medium has played such a relevant role in the artistic scene.

Despite video and T.V. being a medium conceived to store and reproduce moving images and sound, video art’s diffusion and preservation is very fragile. The work of many remarkable innovators of video art has often been lost, mainly because video technology has changed so quickly and the work that wasn’t transferred from outdated systems to a more modern ones was unrecoverable. Also, museums and galleries have paid less attention to video art than to other more traditional forms of art and have not adapted to the specific needs of displaying this new art form.

The National Museum Centre of Art Reina Sofia, as a centre for art responsible for spreading and promoting art and culture, recognizes the very important need of providing a proper space to view video art, as well as the unique and relevant role of video art has had in changing and shaping the history of art and humans during its short, but intense existence. As Martha Rosler said in 1986 in her article included in the catalogue of this exhibition, “There is already a history of Video but it must still be written and soon...”

At First generation you can not only view installations the way they were first conceived and enjoy a number of well-known video projections that haven’t seen the light for decades, but you can also watch individually in a single channel monitor different types of work as you please. The initiative of having an exhibition of this kind responds to the new political agenda of the Reina Sofia to create in their space a coherent exhibition context within a very precise conceptual frame.

Video since its birth has attracted artists, critics and activists non-stop. The possibilities and uses that artists and others saw in this new electromagnetic device differs and varies; it especially allows and elicits all sorts of contradictions and paradoxes to coexist without excluding each other. In First generation one can try to explore and understand some of those contradictions by walking through the exhibition, viewing videos and reading some of the most enlightening articles by some of the most important art connoisseurs and critics like Rosalind Krauss or Peter Frank; essays and personal testimonies of the people who lived closely those first years of video.

At first video and television were seen as electronic reproduction devices that were supposed to reach the masses. Paradoxically video became an ally of those artists who tried to respond to the mass production and consumption of art and were already working on alternatives forms of art such as Land Art, Performance art, Body art, Happening, Conceptual Art, etc....

This exhibition pays special attention to some of the most significant groups of the moment like Fluxus or Happening. Their members like Nam June Paik who is considered the father of video, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, Alan Kaprov or Takahiko Iimura have a very special place at this show.

Other performance artists like Carolee Scheemann or Rebecca Horn who explore in their performances their body and the space around it or conceptual artist like David Lamelas or John Baldessari are showing some of their most memorable pieces.

A lot of the work at this exhibition was produced during the seventies; this was a period in history when social and political movements dealing with minority rights, feminism, poverty, environmental issues, etc, organized themselves and took place in most societies around the world. Often video was there where the action was happening; it was used to document events, as well as to inform and educate.

Soon artists and activists decided to use these new portable video cameras, not only to document and record events, performances or happenings that otherwise would not have been seen or known, but also as a tool to change and challenge the way we think and see the world.

At First generation you can see a number of works with social and political content. Some examples are "The Ant Farm´s Cadillac Ranch Show" in which two artists, Chip Lord and Doug Michels make and document a gigantic installation, commissioned by a Texan millionaire, where they buried 10 Cadillacs in the middle of the desert land in Amarillo, U.S.A. and Max Almy´s piece "The perfect Leader" which was produced to coincide with the electoral campaign in U.S.A. in 1984.

Others critiqued the medium itself and the way the media controls information and manipulates the masses. Some of these artists are represented at this exhibition, for instance the catalonian artist, Antoni Muntadas whose four videos deconstruct the language of the media to detect its hidden mechanisms and criticize the domination of T.V. over society.

The same interests guide the work of other artists such as Eugenia Balcells, Dara Birnbaum, Roger Welch or Joan Rabascall. All of them use images from the news or commercials, films etc… to expose their internal codes and their real content and power.

In 1965 a portable video camera, Portapack, became accessible to the general public. The first to try it were mainly painters, musicians and performance artists, who quickly found a good use for these cameras. Groups that had historically been oppressed and marginalized from the mechanisms of production, such as women, had also a chance to access a technology that could potentially reach the masses.

Women, who were at the time incubating the first women’s liberation movements and gaining for the first time a very important place in the art scene, started to use video often in very subversive and surprising ways. At First Generation there is a strong presence of work by women. Many of them are feminists that try to give a voice to the female experience and empower it from a critical point of view; they use and show their body, they tell their stories and they make art. This kind of content is approached in the work of Ulrike Rosenbach, VALIE EXPORT, Martha Rosler, Linda Benglis or by other women involved in social and artistic contemporary issues like the Argentinean artist Marta Minujin with her nonconformist, political and social happenings.

If Video and the new technology was seen at first by many as a threat to art, soon this technology became more human and allowed artists to create a very intimate space for very personal and private confessions. One of the paradoxes of video as a medium is that it can be so public, but so private at the same time. It also was used to document daily life and as in Duchamp`s ready-mades where an ordinary object became art. Jaques-Louis Nyst documents objects such as a coffee maker or an egg providing them with a new poetic and almost transcendental meaning. In his piece "Le voyage de Christophe Colomb" an egg becomes the earth that we travel to discover a new world, all without leaving Nyst´s living room. Joan Logue captures a moment in Nam June Paik´s life as he goes up and down an old industrial elevator. Ana Mendieta takes us to some remote caves in Cuba where she makes us part of some obscure rituals. We follow Juan Downey in his personal journey through the American continent in a search of identity in his piece "Trans Americans".

Not until now have the presence of the artist, their body and their psychology been so central in a work of art as in these recorded performances and video works; nor has the presence of the spectator as part of the work of art been so relevant. In Peter Campus´installations at this exhibition the camera instantly feeds us back like a mirror with a projection of our own futile and evasive image; an image that escapes us. At "nem" and "dor", two of Campus´ video projections on the wall, the spectator moves around the space in a futile search for its own image; absent when it is present and present when it is absent. Campus here and now reminds the viewers of our own presence, he does not offer you anything but your own consciousness of your own existence as a natural reflection of Art.

One could look at this initiative by the media department of the National Museum Center of Art Reina Sofia of starting this video art collection of the dawn of video, as a kind of archeological endeavor, where what has been found are fragments of a history of outsiders, painters of light, the visionaries and the crazy; fragments of a civilization full of contradictions.

Looking at this work you may think that what these social activists, art lovers and cultural revolutionaries saw was that video could not easily become a commodity that could be bought or sold in a time when everything can be consumed. On the other hand at the same time we see a need to write its history, video has already written its own type of history. Using a medium that praises itself for the masses, video has written a new history; a history of the personal, of the individual that is not inscribed within the dominant discourse.

It is a non-written history that allows you to document and record very ephemeral events of groups like Fluxus and Happening or share very personal and intimate private rituals for instance such as Ana Mendieta´s work. Hopefully by creating a video art collection as this one the National Museum Center of Art Reina Sofia can remind us of the unlimited possibilities that we once saw in video and inspire us to continue creating a work as fresh and new.

image: wolf vostell

a rose has no teeth - bruce nauman in the 1960s: pamela m. lee

artforum april 2007

SOME FORTY-ODD YEARS after Bruce Nauman began tweaking the conventions of studio practice and the hallowed persona of the artist-as-seer, his station in postwar art history rests secure. His influence—whether through his affectless, task-based performances, his sculptural castings of negative space, or his intermedia mash-ups of language, video, and noise—is everywhere apparent in contemporary art. Nauman’s reputation is, in short, not at issue today; what remains unsettled is the specific nature of his contribution. Recent scholarship has made significant developments in complicating his particular story. Janet Kraynak’s 2005 collection of Nauman’s writings and interviews, Please Pay Attention Please: Bruce Nauman’s Words, for example, opposes the simplistic notion that Nauman is the pluralist artist par excellence, instead revealing him to be an artist systematic in working through problems of language. For the curator, however, such an interrogation brings with it a slightly different challenge: How might one stage an exhibition that says something new and concrete about such an established figure while simultaneously fulfilling the museum’s role in educating a broader public? And what happens, moreover, when that institution is a university museum, with its curatorial mandate tied closely to art-historical pedagogy?

These are the recurring questions raised by “A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s.” Organized by Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive senior curator Constance M. Lewallen, the exhibition walks a curatorial tightrope of sorts, teetering between a “greatest hits” survey of Nauman’s early work and an attempt to make an argument about the specifically Californian inflection of his practice during that period. As the promotional literature would have it, “This exhibition and the accompanying catalog are the first to explore in depth his relationship to the place where he created his earliest and often most innovative works.” In sharp contrast to the notion of “global Conceptualism” that has floated around the art world of late—a riposte to the sense that art historians have effectively limited Conceptual art’s purview to the United States and Western Europe—Lewallen stakes a claim for Nauman’s decisively local practice, a kind of West Coast Conceptualism of the Northern California variety. The trick, it seems, would be to reconcile the broad sweep of his famously wide-ranging practice with the relatively narrow optic of the exhibition’s argument.

To make such a resolution visually is no simple task, and on sight “A Rose Has No Teeth” is most likely to strike one as an early-career retrospective—an excellent one at that. Nauman’s work is presented in four galleries, from his first sculptures of 1965 to his groundbreaking video work at the end of that decade. And it’s plainly thrilling to see (especially for those who come armed with knowledge of ’60s art). The first gallery highlights Nauman’s process-oriented sculpture from mid-decade, with its attention to the subtleties of architectural context. Betraying the artist’s unorthodox approach to sculptural media, his equally unconventional methods of fabrication, and his tendency to internalize gravity in his sculptural compositions, these sinuous fiberglass forms and crumpled masses of latex directly align Nauman with Eva Hesse, Robert Morris, Richard Serra, and the other artists of the primarily New York–based anti-form generation. In the next gallery, Nauman’s “body measurement” pieces speak to larger issues of Gestalt psychology and phenomenology; hence we find Mold for a Modernized Slant Step, 1966—a peculiar and obscure device that resists any useful purpose—and renderings of his body in a variety of media, like the fiberglass sculpture Six Inches of My Knee Extended to Six Feet, 1967. In the remaining two galleries, black box installations featuring both video and holography demonstrate an insistent exploration of new technologies, and sculptures that use words as their principal media jostle up against the artist’s early forays into architecture (Performance Corridor, 1969). Throughout the exhibition, one encounters works that variously allude to the pantheon of intellectual figures that were influential among artists of the ’60s. (Take, for example, Nauman’s excruciatingly drawn-out video performance Slow Angle Walk [Beckett Walk], 1968, in which the artist carries out absurdly repetitive actions, à la Waiting for Godot’s Vladimir and Estragon, over the course of an hour—or, lending the show its title, his sculptural plaque, A Rose Has No Teeth [Lead Tree Plaque], 1966, with its nod to late Wittgenstein.) Works in neon, sound, and photography round out the offerings, which are all as witty and formally precise as their underlying thematics are deep-seated and serious. The selection, in turn, affords a perspective on Nauman’s early practice as largely continuous with the interests of his subsequent work. His investigations into both wordplay and what one might call the techniques of bodily coordination—the body’s subjugation to various task-based assignments and the sense of physical duress it endures in the process—find their thematic complement in later videos from the ’80s to the present, particularly those involving the studied repetition of sayings and gestures by their actors.

As a kind of survey, comprising so many of Nauman’s important early works and providing an entrée into many of his career-long themes, “A Rose Has No Teeth” is assuredly more focused than, say, Tate Liverpool’s exhaustive Nauman show this past summer or, more significantly for American audiences, the artist’s last full-scale presentation in the United States, which opened at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 1994. But the Berkeley show inevitably brings these other examples to mind, particularly the latter. Organized by Neil Benezra, then the chief curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, and Kathy Halbreich, director of the Walker, the 1994 show was monumental not only for the staggering length of its checklist, which spanned Nauman’s production from the mid-’60s to the mid-’90s, but also in defining, and thus entrenching, a corpus of work as an art-historical object. While “A Rose Has No Teeth” bears no pretension to compete with any such huge retrospective—and it would be ridiculous to expect it to—the exhibition nevertheless has to justify its vision relative to what we have seen before in museums and what might be completely new material for its target university audience. This, one gathers, is where Nauman’s peculiar “site-specificity” makes the most sense.

And yet the viewer finds relatively little tangible evidence in the museum to support and clarify the show’s thesis. In fact, save for the opening wall text, which mentions Nauman’s graduate work at the University of California, Davis, which he began in 1964, there is almost no explicit information throughout the galleries that might elaborate upon his art’s “California-ness.” Research into the proposed regional influence remains curiously off-site, displaced by Lewallen (most likely in the interest of giving the work some much-needed breathing room) to the brochure and catalogue. These are both, in fact, highly informative. One can read at length about Nauman’s graduate work, his storefront studio in the Mission district of San Francisco, and his relationships and collaborations with various artists strongly identified with the Bay Area, including William T. Wiley and William Allan. Who would have thought that Nauman’s 1967 output bore intimate ties to Mill Valley, a suburb just north of San Francisco? That Nauman lived and worked in Wiley’s studio there that summer, producing Art Make-Up—a multiscreen video installation that shows the artist covering his body in white, pink, green, and black paint—doesn’t jibe with that town’s current reputation as a most affluent enclave for the Marin County set, but it might prove useful in determining a Californian influence on the work. In their catalogue essays, Lewallen and art historians and critics Robert R. Riley, Robert Storr, and Anne M. Wagner make unimpeachable cases for the context of Nauman’s work, all the while hedging their bets against accusations of what Wagner refers to as “Bay Area boosterism.” In her text, Wagner attends very closely to the language of sculptural process that Nauman’s work systematically dismantled, and she does so with an eye cast toward the particular brand of studio pedagogy he underwent in Northern California. The material is fascinating and is driven both by the archive and by dozens of interviews (some forty of which, in total, Lewallen conducted while researching the exhibition)—and the implications are far-reaching not only for a historian’s understanding of Nauman’s practice but also for the prevailing Manhattan-centric conception of ’60s art.

One ultimately wonders, then, how “A Rose Has No Teeth” might have provided some comparative visual material against which its thesis could have better played out. The exhibition is a remarkable collection of objects but is nevertheless hermetic in terms of its underlying curatorial goals. Why not, for instance, install a few choice examples of Nauman’s Davis cohorts alongside his earlier work? The funk aesthetic we associate with Wiley, Wayne Thiebaud, and Robert Arneson—all of whom, having taught Nauman at UC Davis, played formative roles in his practice—might offer a radically provocative counterpoint to what we think of Nauman’s post-Minimal phase, not to mention the near-compulsory habit of understanding “process” art in relation to the artists in Robert Morris’s 1969 “Nine at Castelli” exhibition at the Leo Castelli warehouse. (In this regard, Lucy Lippard’s largely discredited rubric of “Eccentric Abstraction”—as put forth by her 1966 Fischbach Gallery exhibition and accompanying essay—gains something in explanatory power. Lippard proposed a far more inclusive notion of post-Minimalism that addressed the surrealistic and funkier elements of the process-minded work from that period. Nauman himself was featured in her show, and, while he would certainly reject being classified as a “funk” artist, the decisive influence of Dada and Surrealism on his work—most notably the photography of Man Ray—considerably shifts the terms of his art-historical evaluation.) Or why not screen footage of Anna Halprin’s groundbreaking movement workshops alongside Nauman’s task-based video performance? Rather than render Nauman a more provincial figure due to these influences (which might well be the charge directed at Lewallen’s thesis), such visual touchstones would only reveal him to be a more worldly artist because engaged in a social milieu with greater implications for the rewriting of the history of ’60s art.

These references would, in fact, go far in complicating the oft-told récits of Nauman’s studio investigations. The conventional wisdom holds that Nauman had to reinvent the activities of the studio because he had too much time on his hands and not enough money to hire an atelier to fabricate his objects. Hence, or so the story goes, the role of the artist’s body and other such unorthodox media progressively took center stage. And yet the extensive and impressive research behind “A Rose Has No Teeth” gives the lie to any notion of Nauman’s work as solipsistic, closed off as it might appear from a context formative to his practice. If only this extremely strong showing of Nauman’s early work had provided an overarching framework for gauging the centrality of his art in toto—actively explaining his importance rather than assuming it—perhaps the relevance of its more narrow argument would register much more clearly. Without such prior understanding of his practice, however, one misses both the declarative and didactic punch that would have stressed Nauman’s larger place within ’60s artmaking even while more tangibly relating his work to the Bay Area.

“A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s” remains on view at the University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive through Apr. 22. The exhibition travels to Castello di Rivoli, Turin, Italy, May 23–Sept. 9; and the Menil Collection, Houston, Oct. 12, 2007–Jan. 14, 2008.

Pamela M. Lee is an associate professor of art history at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA.

image: View of “A Rose Has No Teeth: Bruce Nauman in the 1960s,” 2007, University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA. Photo: Ben Blackwell.