Apt Insight - Vol. 3 - Spring-summer 2008

Vol.3 Spring/Summer 2008 A quarterly publication of the Artist Pension Trust

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Letter from the Editor

Creativity is the crucible of transformation and possibility. And inherent to creativity is invention and risk— without which we would not have progress in science, industry or society. This issue of APT Insight takes a look at how artists have creatively approached performance to transform the viewer’s experience of the world through interactive, real-time events. Global access through the Worldwide Web has resulted in a virtual explosion of innovation in the field. The merging of film, video and performance with refashioned ideas about painting and sculpture has given way to interdisciplinary practices that might nearly characterize a new class of art. It is an exciting time. Festivals centered on performance are showing up everywhere—PERFORMA in New York City, Khoj Art Center’s first performance event KhojLive08 in New Delhi, Verbo Festival in São Paulo and Momentum in Brussels, to name only a few. APT has taken a supportive role by inviting a number of performance artists from around the world to participate in the APT program. Artist Shaun El C. Leonardo’s piece on his performative intervention in Mexico’s lucha libre wrestling world, Defne Ayas’s article “A New Kind of Performance in China?” and Beth Citron’s contribution on the KhojLive08 festival point to how remarkably international performance has become.

2. A New Kind of Performance in China? 11. Discipline Without Restraint 22. Experiencing Performance Art in India 31. Time to Play? 34. Performance: When the Result Ceases to be Important 38. Life on Mars 48. Insight/Art Fair

The APT Web Gallery will launch in August with our first commission exhibition curated by Miki Garcia, currently the director of the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in California. Comprised exclusively of work from the APT Collection, this world-class exhibition is the first of many that will showcase APT artists and their works. We have a viewpoint piece on Douglas Fogle’s “Life on Mars”, the 55th Carnegie International, and an opinion page that invites artists and curator/ facilitator Paco Barragán to share their thoughts on the ubiquitous art fair. Our next issue welcomes our APT Los Angeles Director, Irene Tsatsos, as our guest Associate Editor, who will bring a fresh perspective from the Pacific Rim and around the world. Finally, watch for the new APT Blog, where leading topics will begin flowing in September. Yours sincerely,

Pamela Auchincloss _ Editor, APT Insight

Publisher

APT Holding Worldwide Inc. (BVI) Editor

Pamela Auchincloss Creative Director

Jin Jung Managing Editor

Michelle Mounts Contributing Writers

Pamela Auchincloss, Defne Ayas, Beth Citron, Vicky A. Clark, Shaun El C. Leonardo, Carolyn Yuen Administrative Assistant

Yonni Walker Copyright (c) 2008 APT Holding Worldwide Inc. (BVI) All rights reserved. Annual subscription US$40/€28 Individual copies US$10/€7 Plus shipping and handling. Contact: [email protected]

Defne Ayas

A New Kind of Performance in China ?

_ Xu Zhen, In Just a Blink of an Eye, 2007. Performance, Photo by Paula Court. Courtesy of PERFORMA, Long March Project and James Cohan Gallery

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The history of Chinese contemporary art is quite young, and the role of performance art within that history has rarely been investigated in depth. Many Chinese artists who have come to be known as major figures in the art world today have created influential works in the form of performances. 3

_ Qiu Zhijie, The Thunderstorm is Slowly Approaching, 2007. Photo by Elizabeth Proitsis. Courtesy of PERFORMA and Long March Project.

No U-Turn (1989), for instance, carried all of the characteristics of a number of avant-garde collectives and movements that is now referred to as the ’85 New Wave. This exhibition displayed an extraordinary range of openminded, ephemeral experiments by collectives such as Xiamen Dada movement, led by Huang Yong Ping, and Pond Society, formed by Hangzhou-based Zhang Peili, Wang Qiang, Song Ling and Geng Jianyi. When artist Xiao Lu fired a gun into her installation Dialogue (1989) with two shots, not only did her action break some of the eggs that artist Zhang Nian had prepared for hatching at the exhibition (without permission from the authorities), but also lead to the closure of this historical exhibition. At about the same time, in Shanghai, the exhibition “M Conceptual Art Performance Show” (1986) featured performances from over a dozen artists, including an act of self-crucifixion by Yang Xu, who was beaten until his back bled. In the Last Supper – Second Concave Show (1988), 11 artists, including Li Shan, Sun Liang, Li Xianting, Yu Sen, Yang Zhanye and Pei Jing, dressed in robes and sat around a long table scattered with Coca-Cola drinks and food.

In the early 90s Beijing’s East Village was the site of continuous actions by artists such as Ai Weiwei, Zhang Huan, Rong Rong, Ma Liuming and Danwen Xing (APT Beijing). This charged art scene eventually stirred up contentious debates not only about the place of performance in Chinese art history but also about authorship issues concerning the act of performance and its documentation. It was at this time that artists such as Song Dong and Yang Fudong chose to create quieter actions in their respective locations. Song Dong began his Water Diary series in 1995. As he wrote in water, he left no traces, and the only remaining proof of his work was the unmarked stone upon which he had written. One of Yang Fudong’s first works was a performance during which he stopped speaking for 3 months.

“Post-Sense Sensibility: Alien Bodies and Delusion” (1999) and “Post-Sense Sensibility: Spree” (2001), both organized by Qiu Zhijie (APT Beijing) in Beijing, set the bar for what a radical underground performance scene in China could be like. At “Post-Sense Sensibility: Spree,” Qiu Zhijie asked visitors to arrive at 3pm sharp to a theater in Beijing, after which no one was allowed to enter or leave the venue. The audience was forced to engage in performances involving food, spirits and pig’s blood, while live chickens and rats ran around the theater causing mayhem. All of the performances were filmed and broadcast onto a video screen outside the entrance door. For his performance Let’s Get Happy Together (2001), Liu Wei hired a professional female striptease dancer, and together they danced inside a 2 square meter glass box. As their dance became more erotic, Liu Wei began splattering the glass walls with pig’s blood, creating a sexual scene at once obscure and vulgar.

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Until the early 2000s, most of the aforementioned artists were not interested in creating objects but in creating indelible experiences for the audience, and in exploring their most trenchant, and oftentimes radical, ideas. With art market prices now soaring, hundreds of new studios, Western private art galleries and Chinese-owned private art museums are opening in big cities like Beijing and Shanghai, there is a great deal of pressure on artists to create objects and not performances. He Yungchang’s performances were also quite radical and placed exceptional physical demands on his body, in terms of both strength and endurance. He suspended himself from a crane by his ankles over a river, which he “cut” with the same knife he later used to slice his arm. He Yungchang was part of the infamous “FUCK OFF” (2000) exhibition, organized by Stars Group (active from 1979-83) member Ai Weiwei, together with the critic Feng Boyi. This exhibition featured many shocking projects, including a bloated horse cadaver, placed inside the main exhibition hall by Yang Maoyuan, and Sun Yuan’s sealed glass case containing a skeleton of a large dog and, according to the artist, a type of nerve gas that would instantly kill everyone in the exhibition space if the glass were broken. Zhu Ming floated down the Huangpu River in a plastic bubble wearing a diaper, and in his performance Eating People (2000), Zhu Yu showed photographs of himself boiling and eating what is alleged to be a human fetus.

_ Lin Yilin, Safely Manoeuvering Across Lin He Road, 1995, Performance, Duration: 90 min

Zhu Yu, along with other artists of his time, were instrumental in creating the association of performance art with blood, still-born babies and human fluids, leading to political repercussions such as censorship and even more stringent punishments. In Shanghai, less volatile and more conceptual performance exhibitions occurred. “Art for Sale” displayed not only massproduced objects made for sale but also performance works by artists such as Song Dong, Yang Fudong, Yang Zhenzhong and Liang Yue, which took place at a shopping mall. “Fan,” an exhibition that looked at the “doppelganger” concept, is where Xu Zhen (APT Beijing) created his psychological work March 6 (2002). This work involved two people (one working-class, one university student, both in pajamas) following each exhibition visitor from the entry of the show to the site of his installation. Dial 62761232 (2008), a courier-delivery “service” for exhibitions, was Xu Zhen’s comment on the quickie nature of art shows in China.

Zhang Huan, one of the country’s seminal performance artists, in the last few years ceased with performance art and began to produce large-scale paintings and sculptures made out of temple ash and animal skin. Wang Jianwei, who is often considered the renaissance performance artist of China for pioneering the conceptual integration of new media into performance and theater— and who also worked with filmmaker Wu Wenguang on Bumming in Beijing (1989), as well as with choreographer Wen Hui—has recently turned away from performance to the creation of large-scale objects. An actionist in his own right, and also a founder of Big Tail Elephant Collective, an artist group known for its public interventions in the hidden pockets of Guangzhou in the1990s, Chen Shaoxiong’s (APT Beijing) Seven Days Silence (1991) was a performance about a unique domestic space within the confusion of China’s cities. Constructed in Chen’s home city of Guangzhou, the artist built a small triangulated space out of plastic and other temporary materials where for seven days straight he doggedly painted out the surrounding environment. Isolated and silenced by the din of the city around him, this performantive intervention can be seen as a comment on China’s failure to meet the housing needs of the growing urban landscape. Currently, his continuing investigation of China’s rapid urbanization is through video and installation. His most recent animation videos are based on Chinese ink paintings and provide a humorous take on the aesthetics of globalization. Another member and co-founder of the Big Tailed Elephant group in Guangzhou, Lin Yilin (APT Beijing) made striking performative works in which he used sculptural architectures as the framework (literally framing his body in a wall of stone blocks) for this work. These works are as much about the labor associated with constructing— and deconstructing as in his work Safely Manuevering Across Lin He Road (1995)—the work as they are about the setting/backdrop around which Lin Yilin performs. Like Chen Shaoxiong, however, he has gone on to expand into video, installation works and photography, while consistently inserting his commentary into the public domain.

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There are, fortunately, a great number of visual artists in China who are eager to explore the crossdisciplinary boundaries of the visual arts. There are those who collaborate with musicians, such as the painter Yan Lei, who created collaborative performances/installations with the punk band Brain Failure throughout Istanbul during the 10th Istanbul Biennial. Or those, like Zhao Bandi, who dare to create an art-meets-fashion show such as “Panda Fashion” (2007/2008); this couture project involved models catwalking during a two-hour cruise down Shanghai’s Huangpu River, dressed in panda-inspired attire, respectively, as a teacher, a cop, a judge, a migrant worker, a corrupt official, a real estate developer and a street sweeper. And then there are those who articulate strong cultural positions and conceptual strategies, through their work, such as Qiu Zhijie. In November 2007 in New York, he presented The Thunderstorm Is Slowly Approaching (2007) as part of PERFORMA07, the city’s second visualart performance biennial. Working with a ceremonial 10-member dragon dance team and wearing a camouflage costume, the artist used the traditional Chinese dragon dance, and a festive public gathering in Chinatown, as the starting point for investigating the pressure to hide national identity within a host culture. Under the same umbrella presentation realized in collaboration with exhibition space and presenting organization Long March Project, Shanghai’s art scene mover-and-shaker Xu Zhen, known for his psychologically potent installation, video and performance work, presented In Just a Blink of an Eye. The artist created an optical illusion that made it seem as though an empty room of a Chelsea gallery were completely tilted, and viewers could see migrants recruited from Chinatown lying upon metal frames inside this tilted room.

Finally, there are those whose video and installation works have the potential to become wonderful performance art. Kan Xuan’s (APT Beijing) work, for instance, records daily situations in minimalist and ephemeral ways. Her bodyoriented performances are carried out for video recording, and multiple viewings, yet they seem singular, conveying a kind of a Zen Buddhist beauty and spirituality. Chen Xiaoyun’s anarchic, haunting video assemblage LASH (2004) flashes images of a naked man carrying a sawedoff tree along with fireworks, to a background noise of loud industrial music. His more recent video work, DRAG (2006), which shows a man pulling with all his might on a rope whose end is fixed to a wall, has the characteristics of a new kind of performance, one that includes live music as well as dance. Beijing-based artist Yu Ji’s (APT Beijing) performances and photographs navigate the uncomfortable margins of ambiguity and violence. In his work Fang and Fang’s Doll (2007) a very pregnant woman wanders a desolate street, naked and apparently disoriented. In the background, from a smoking car a half visible figure has fallen from the car door. The most anticipated performance of this year was probably the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympic Games opening ceremony, organized by a core group of artists and planners including Cai Guo Qiang and Jennifer Wen Ma as well as Zhang Yimou. Perhaps this event, along with the Ai Wei Wei-initiated form in the background, will provide an optimistic climate for discussion of Chinese contemporary art, and the opportunity to encourage visual artists to further explore the potential of performance. In a recent student show in Hangzhou, where the academy’s New Media Department Head Zhang Peili has started offering courses on performance, promising young artists born in the 80s, such as Huang Liya and Sun Huiyuan, are experimenting with the medium and bringing new energy to the field. Teachers at Hangzhou Academy agree that the range of what performance is and can be, in China, is quite broad, and it is time for artists to branch out in new directions. Defne Ayas is an independent curator and educator based in Shanghai. _ Yuji, Fang and Fang’s Doll-1, March 2007, Photograph, 120 X 150 cm

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Discipline Without Restraint It takes only a brief survey of galleries, museums, alternative art spaces and art publications to note that artists no longer employ a singular practice in the delivery of their ideas. By

Pamela Auchincloss

_ Erick Beltran, Twijfel(Doubt), 2005, Performance in Ghent Belgium

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In Performance Art: From Futurism to the Present, published in 1979, RoseLee Goldberg provided the comprehensive documentation and critical context performance art needed to be fully recognized as a distinct art practice. Academic interest followed and performance was soon integrated into art school curriculums. The publication and wide circulation of Goldberg’s book, perhaps more than any other single event, influenced what today has become an explosion and expansion of the medium. Yale, Columbia, CalArts, UCLA, California College of Art and Design and Pratt Institute, to name a few, currently offer courses on the interdisciplinary. It is an extraordinary paradigm shift, from the classic art education model of the academy to a widespread acknowledgement of the complex possibilities of expression in the 21st century. During the late ’60s and ’70s, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Marina Abramovic, VALLE EXPORT and Joseph Beuys, to name only a few, pushed the undisclosed secrets of private life into full view. These constructed, liveaction tableaus presented real-time events in which piercing, binding, exposing and depriving their bodies, often as acts of performative endurance, made for charged and powerful statements. At times political in content and shocking in its brutal display, performance art carried the countenance of human emotionality and experience that pictorial and sculptural representations could only allude to. In January 2008, during a three-month residency program at the La Curtiduria in Oaxaca, Mexico, Shaun El C. Leonardo (APT New York) inserted himself into the spectacle world of lucha libre fighting as a way of commenting on culture’s distorted practice of hero-creation in the guise of good vs. evil. In the performance El Conquistador vs. The Invisible Man, Leonardo’s persona fights an invisible opponent as a metaphorical and literal representation of cultural stereotypes and masculine identity. However, in Oaxaca the performance took an unscripted turn when Leonardo entered the ring with a professional fighter. Leonardo took punishing blows fueled by the frenzied chants of the spectators. As Leonardo recounts in this issue (“Performance: When the Result Ceases to be Important”) the line between performance and reality was quickly blurred (if not entirely lost) as El Conquistador entered the public domain of the luchadores and lucha libre.

Artists have begun to reach across the spectrum of possibilities in search of the right medium for the message.

_ Gelitin, Sweatwat, 2005, Installation, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, London

Painters and sculptors have long moved freely between their respective disciplines, and photographers and media artists have easily commingled still photography with video. But performance art has remained, until recently, a singular and somewhat specialized practice on the periphery of the visual arts. During the past ten years, however, artists have begun to reach across the spectrum of possibilities in search of the right medium for the message. Performance and installation art have flourished in this cross-disciplinary environment.

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_ My Barbarian, You Were Born Poor & Poor You Will Die, 2006, Performance

_ Fallen Fruit, Double Standard, 2008, A two channel hi-definition video on a single screen with text overlay, Duration: 30 minutes

Adrian Piper’s radical idea of performance in the late ’60s was not unlike Leonardo’s though Piper’s created persona in no way sought to integrate into her community. In her Catalysis Series (1970) Piper altered her appearance to present an image of the grotesque and walked, unceremoniously, through the crowds of New York City. This act of artistic intervention moved performance from a staged event in which the audience chooses to participate to an open-ended, interactive and spontaneous venue —the street.

an alternative, cruelly critical narrative to the events narrated in the raw footage, with crude, homophobic and racist comments mixed in with a few acute observations. In its play between action and commentary, Double Standard challenges the simultaneity of the viewer’s experience, creating a displacement between the “real” and the “realtime.” The awkward and slippery space between these two narratives begins to probe at the question of authenticity or authentic experience as well as casting a new look at the issues of public and private.

Piper’s performance, and others like it, was unprecedented in the art world at that time. Today many artists use the street and society as the backdrop for their work. Double Standard (2008) by Fallen Fruit (APT Los Angeles), the artist collective David Burns, Matias Viegener and Austin Young, takes the viewer (in real time) through a tour of Fallen Fruit’s home neighborhood in Los Angeles. The two channels are overlaid with a text block of comments from a public television video of a recurring intervention work titled Fruit Forage recently posted on YouTube. The comments create

Many seminal works of contemporary performance art from the ’60s and ’70s went no further than the curious and dedicated audience that saw them—largely undocumented other than through critical writing or, on occasion, photography. Today performance is largely centered on the documentation and sometimes stands solely on the post-event medium of video. The introduction of the hand-held video camera quickly moved performance beyond an attendant, event-driven audience to a collectible artwork no different from

painting, sculpture, drawing, photography or any other art form presented in galleries and museums. And the reception across the art world of video as a credible and collectible art form has enabled artists to move fully and exponentially into performance as a viable—which is to say a means to make a living—medium. Coupled with the reach of social networking sites and internet platforms such as YouTube and MySpace, the extensive possibility of video art in our hyper-mediated world is producing a surge of performance as artists step out from behind the camera onto center stage. Both museums and galleries are aggressively incorporating performance into their exhibition programming. This spring both the Whitney Biennial and Berlin Biennial had dedicated programs centered on performance. More and more galleries are presenting performances at their opening receptions and hosting events through out the week. (I have counted at least twenty opening receptions including performance since the beginning of the year.)

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In 2006, P.S. 1 introduced a performance, within the broader context of their first “Greater New York” exhibition, by a young artist who was just finishing a residency at the Studio Museum in New York City, Clifford Owens (APT New York). The performance, titled Tell me what to do with myself (2006), was presented over the course of the exhibition. In four, two-hour-long segments the artist, who is out of view, is told by his audience through a small peephole what to do. His actions are then transmitted via video to monitors outside the closed room. Following each live show, what remains in the room is, as exhibition curator Amy Smith-Stewart explained, “an accumulative trace of each performance,” but the clues are so vague the viewer is forced to come up with his or her own narrative of what happened in the virtually empty space.

_ Kalup Linzy, All My Churen, 2003, DVD, Duration: 4:30 min

_ Alex Schweder, Flatland, 2007, Various construction materials, household appliances, 5 People, 2 x 32 x 24 ft, Duration: 3 weeks

Also performed during the run of a curated group exhibition at New York City’s Sculpture Center, Alex Schweder’s (APT Los Angeles) Flatland (2007) was an extraordinary example of architecture as sculpture, anthropology, intervention, performance and endurance. Schweder’s objective, in this work and much of what he produces, is to examine how environment shapes behaviors and societies within a controlled setting. Five individuals were invited to live together in a confined space, which stood 24 feet high by 2 feet wide by 32 feet long, for two weeks during which they built upon and refined their personal living areas. All plumbing, cooking and sleeping needs were serviced within the space, restricting the participants to the controlled environment over the two-week period. The walls were transparent allowing the visitors to the Center a clear view of the activity within. Additionally, a live-feed web camera made it possible for anyone anywhere with a computer and an Internet connection to view the performance, dramatically expanding the potential audience.

The political remains very much a part of performance today. In Plante Bandera (I Planted the Flag), a multi-media work by Carolina Caycedo (APT Mexico City), the artist refers to a hypothetical experience of crossing borders and claiming a territory by planting a flag. In Caycedo’s symbolic performance the artist swam one and a half hours, approximately 3 miles, from Crashbot Beach to Aguadilla Town along the northwest coastline of Puerto Rico. The act was a personal test of endurance (and, perhaps, an homage to the perilous feats of many undocumented immigrants), but more significantly a symbolic representation of reclaiming the territory. Caycedo often uses music to weight the subtext of her work. Her soundtrack choice, “Plante Bandera” by Tite Curet Alonso—who is famous for a style known as “salsa with a conscience”—draws further attention to Puerto Rican pride and nationalism.

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Collaborations such as Gelitin’s often generate performance-based works as also seen in the works of Los Angeles-based My Barbarian (APT Los Angeles). Since 2000 My Barbarian, founded by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade, has captivated audiences with their musical spectacles known as “showcore.” Using allegory drawn from history and mythology in a quasi musical theater setting, the group addresses contemporary social and political conditions. Not exactly your average rock ‘n roll show, the trio’s selfstyled costumes are a blend of sources as diverse as Renaissance Faire, Studio 54 and Louise Bourgeois. Their nerdy-yet-sexy exhibitionism and bawdy, Rabelaisian humor work well with their play list that includes Solid Gold, American Bandstand and Isadora Duncan. Christodoulos Panayiotou’s (APT Dubai) Slow Dance Marathon (2007) examines the engagement of “slow dancing.” Panayiotou considers slow dancing radical in comparison to other social dances given its emotional familiarity and intimate space without the constraints of any prescribed dance techniques. Slow Dance Marathon involves a chain of people dancing to well-known love songs. Each individual participates for one full hour, with partners alternating every 30 minutes. The first rendition occurs during a period of 24 hours, and the second during a period of 48 hours. Panayiotou is interested in the sociological interactions created by the situation. He wants to create a relational space, and the way people act within that space produces an opportunity for him to analyze a spectrum of “amorous dialectics.”

Video and how artists employ this ubiquitous medium can now move performance from the anecdotal experience of a room full of spectators to a broadly available medium that is comparable to feature-length films. This year’s 2008 Sundance Film Festival featured 18 visual artists, including Robert Boyd (APT New York), Ravi Agarwal (APT Mumbai), Koken Ergun (APT Dubai), Surekha (APT Mumbai) and Abbey Williams (APT New York). Many of these artists perform for the camera creating powerful personal statements as well as abstract metaphors for broader issues that touch upon the environment, race, feminism, gender, homosexuality, war, conflict and, of course, information technology. In every case, editing plays a critical role as they craft a “picture” out of the moving image. Other interventionists that call upon the viewer’s direct participation to activate the work include: Sean Duffy’s (APT Los Angeles) installation The Grove (2007), a roomsized installation strewn with light bulbs, turntables and hundreds of albums that the viewer is invited to play and Erick Beltran’s (APT Mexico City) provocative city-wide papering of the streets with paper handbills carrying the words MEZOGNA (lies) in Lucca, Italy (2004), TWIJFEL (doubt) in Ghent , Belgium (2005) and the word STRAFE (punishment) in Herdford, Germany (2005)—a sort of call to action to think about these simple but meaningful states of the conscience. We are only just beginning to enjoy and comprehend the ways in which this interdisciplinary medium has changed the visual-art landscape. With the reach of the Internet and the access to larger and larger audiences, performance stands to eclipse more traditional, static mediums. Video art and performance may well have the potential, more than any other art practice, to popularize art making until each one of us is an artist as we step out from behind the camera and, yes, onto center stage.

_ Sean Duffy, The Grove, 2007, 18 turntables, 18 tables, 18 amplifiers, 36 lamp speakers, 324 speakers, approximately 200 lps, 4 be, Variable

Gelitin (APT London), a well-known artist collective that includes artists Tobias Urban, Wolfgang Gantner, Florian Reither and Ali Janka, creates elaborate, interactive installations that require the audience’s active participation to make the work whole. Sweatwat (2006), constructed from what at first glance looks to be everything and anything one might leave at the end of the drive for the rubbish collector, required the viewer to sign a liability release and remove his or her shoes before entering. Cedar Lewisohn described the experience: “It’s a cacophony of anarchy. You have to climb up and over little mountains of old sofas and armchairs to move forward. There are men walking around in hula skirts, women drinking cider and a strolling minstrel strumming his guitar.” In these extravagant and imaginative installations everyone has a part defined and determined by the artists, despite the self-consciousness one is bound to feel wading through 6 inches of water.

Pamela Auchincloss is CEO and Director of APT New York

Kalup Linzy (APT New York) is the protagonist in all of his performative videos with occasional supporting characters. In All My Churen (2006), Kalup plays out an exchange between two black women (grand mother and daughter) as a humorous —and tragic—pastiche on the seemingly scripted dialogue that defines the relationships and culture in black America today. Hidden within the self-deprecating humor is a layered subtext about the entrenched behaviors and complacencies that complicate and shape issues around race, class, sex, love, family and stereotyping.

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Experiencing Performance Art in India

By

Beth Citron

_ Surekha, Untitled, 2008, Performance at KhojLive08

Alongside the explosive growth of painting, sculpture, and installation objects in India’s contemporary art world during the past decade, performative art practices have experienced a tandem, if less publicized, launch into the international public sphere. _ Mithu Sen, Tattoo, 2007, Video installation, Duration: 10minutes, Courtesy Bose Pacia Gallery, NY, Photo Credit: David Flores, 2007

Though often perceived as an isolated and recent phenomenon, context for performance art today lies in seminal pioneering developments by leading artists of the 1970s. Beginning in 1970, Bombay and Baroda based artist Bhupen Khakhar began to integrate Pop and Nouveau Realiste modeled “happenings” into his artistic practice. Among his boldest gestures, in 1971 Khakhar staged an opening of one exhibition of his paintings to simultaneously mimic the rites of an Indian marriage procession and a governmental inauguration. Poking fun at the overblown excessiveness of wedding celebrations and at the formality of official public ceremonies, the event generated polemical media publicity that questioned the role of the professional artist in Post-Independence India. In transforming his artist friends like Vivan Sundaram and Nasreen Mohamedi into participants in the event, Khakhar became the first artist in India to challenge the conventional interaction between artist and audience, subverting the presence and necessity of spectators to come.

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Throughout 2008, Khoj is celebrating its historic 10th anniversary, kicking off events with KhojLive08, an unprecedented six-day international performance festival in New Delhi, from March 25-30, 2008. Artists from India including Sonia Khurana, Neha Choksi, and Nikhil Chopra joined a diverse contingent of international artists and media practitioners that included Steven Cohen from South Africa, Doug Fishbone of the United States and London, and Da Motus!, a Swiss troupe. Chopra performed the latest unfolding of a narrative centered on his fictitious character Yog Raj Chitrakar, based loosely on the identity of his grandfather as a member of the landed gentry in colonial Kashmir. After leading his audience on accelerated foot from Khoj Studios to the top of a nearby mosque, Chopra created a live charcoal drawing of the surrounding landscape while transforming from the male Chitrakar into a costumed female empress. This followed up on Chopra’s breakthrough 72-hour open performance in Mumbai in December, in which the artist enacted a series of physical transformations while creating a room-size drawing of the city harbor over the course of three days. While drawing on personal and national historical paradigms, Chopra’s acts more broadly question the boundaries inherent in the mediums of both drawing and live art.

Beyond live events, Indian artists have broadly incorporated performative gestures into artistic practices that rely on traditional media like photography and painting. Most prominently, Pushpamala N. (APT Mumbai) has canonized the medium of photo-performance by casting and posing her own body in various characters and personae, which are then incorporated into groups of photographs that invent layered narratives. Among her most well-known works has been the series Phantom Lady or Kismet, a photo romance (1998) in which the artist, dressed in a black mask and costume, staged various moments of an action thriller, performing the archetypal role of “good girl-bad girl.”

_ Atul Bhalla, I Was Not Waving but Drowning, 2005, Archival pigment print, Edition 1 of 5, 12 x 18 in

After a recession in the exposure of performance art in the 1980s, Khoj International Artists’ Association launched in New Delhi in 1997, providing an alternative institutional face to foster and promote experimental art practices in India. Founded by a group of artists that included Subodh Gupta, Bharti Kher, and Anita Dube (APT Mumbai), along with curator Pooja Sood, its longterm Director, who is now also the Director of APT Mumbai, Khoj has focused especially on creating opportunities for the often marginalized practices that comprise contemporary performance art. This has been especially critical because of the continuing lack of venues and institutional support for the creation and exhibition of alternative art media in India.

_ Ravi Agarwal, The Shroud, 2007, Photographic inkjet prints on Epson archival paper, 60 x 36 in

Other artists have used photo-performance to address the critical problems and politics of life in urban India today. Ravi Agarwal (APT Mumbai) and Atul Bhalla (APT Mumbai) have both enacted performances that reflect the dire pollution and scarcity of water in the capital city of Delhi and many other areas of India. Agarwal developed Shroud (2006) following a series of visits to the contaminated Yamuna River between 2004 and 2006. Standing near the river, which can appear almost solid and stagnant in the places where it is thickest with pollution, he cloaked himself head-to-toe in an opaque shroud, which was then covered in a transparent cloth and bound with rope. As an ardent environmentalist, Agarwal was articulating his concern for the physical degradation of the river and for Delhi as it globalizes; and as an artist, the work represents a struggle with his own alienation in a city he had always known. In Agarwal’s own words, “Shroud represents an immersion and emergence. It is my relationship to the dirty, polluted, but holy river which is also the life-line of the city of 15 million people. At another level, the mythical river is intimately linked to the Hindu idea of life, death and rebirth. Upon dying, the cremated ashes of the ‘mortal’ body are immersed into the holy river, back to the five elements of nature. The soul is reborn, in a new body, and the river becomes the carrier of the emergence.” Environmental issues and the urgent scarcity of clean water in Delhi have been recurring and dominant trope in Bhalla’s work in various mediums too, fashioning sand from the polluted Yamuna River into water carriers in his sculptural installation Immersion. In his photo-performance work, Bhalla has explored the broad significance of water to Indian culture and history, reflected in the importance of rivers like the Yamuna and Ganges, which are at once sacred and contaminated. His series of photographs I Was Not Waving but Drowning speaks to the transcendent importance of water and echoes Hindu ritual bathing practices in documenting 14 stages of the artist’s submersion into a still body of water.

Primarily a painter and installation artist whose work narrates issues of personal migration, Hema Upadhyay (APT Mumbai) integrates performance into her mixedmedia canvases by attaching miniature photographs of herself in various poses and guises onto the painted surface. Upadhyay inscribes a performative gesture into the work itself in the painstaking fabrication of installation projects like Dream a Wish, Wish a Dream (2004-6), in which the artist reconstructed a detailed, meticulous microcosm of Dharavi, the largest slum in Bombay and all of Asia. In using images of her own body and by the physical making of her installations, Upadhyay challenges the viewer’s anticipated dialogue with painting or installation works. Similarly, Surekha (APT Mumbai) highlights femininity and a feminist position through strategies that turn a two-dimensional surface into the trace of a performative action, for example by stitching flowers onto fabric in They Grow Everywhere (2007; shown during her exhibition at Chemould Prescott Road, Mumbai, in August). Works like The Shield (2007) highlight Surekha’s concern with the physicality of the female body through an object that is meant to be conventionally beautiful and protective, but which is left slightly vulnerable to the viewer because it is permeable. Recently, Mithu Sen (APT Mumbai) has questioned her categorization as a drawing specialist through video works like The Tattoo (2007, displayed at her solo exhibition “Half Full” at Bose Pacia, 2007), which shows the artist’s upper body as she wincingly withstands the pain of her hand being tattooed. With characteristic wry humor, Sen has scheduled a public performance, this spring, that will document her attempt to “fly” above New Delhi’s India Gate to wipe the dust and grime off the top of it because, she suggests, it has probably never been cleaned; she will ask passersby to attach a balloon to her arm to help her achieve her goal, and at the end of the event, she will gift a balloon to them in return. In this way, just as she has always extended her drawings beyond the edge of the paper onto surrounding walls, Sen hopes to reach beyond the conventional gap between artist and audience through her performative practice. Reflecting an accelerated moment of critical transformation and expansion in India’s art world, these artists, through their dynamic and inventive engagement with performance, are ready to lead us into new experiences of viewing art itself.

Beth Citron is an independent curator living between Mumbai, India and New York City

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Time to Play?

By

Carolyn Yuen

APT’s New Virtual Gallery

This gallery not only gives us the ability to explore and research work that we might not otherwise know,

Contemporary artists continually push their limits with new forms of art practice. As many gallerists and curators investigate how to best present these works, and as the art market rapidly globalizes, we, too, are called to consider new ways of reaching the audiences of visual art. Artist Pension Trust® (APT) has developed a new exhibition space accessible through the APT website: The APT Web Gallery. This online gallery will present 4 exhibitions per year selected by professional curators, and will draw from the extensive APT Collection.

but allows us to think and produce imaginatively,

web gallery exhibition, “Time to Play?,” the viewer walks through a variety of subtle but complex structural spaces, such as Erik Benson’s Diversion #4 (2004) (APT New York); Shana Lutker’s House #2 With Art that I Dreamt Made (2006) (APT Los Angeles); and Sangil Kim’s Mode: College of Economics & Commerce (2006) (APT Beijing). The viewer is not only exposed to the exterior façade, but also enters the interior lives and spaces to question the notion of style over substance, seen in the works of Miranda Lichtenstein, The Wave (2005) (APT New York); Dan Holdsworth, Untitled 10 (from the series ‘No Echo’) (2003) (APT London); and Tilman Wendland, Schaumkopf (Bubble head) (2001) (APT Berlin). “Time to Play?” gently and humorously asks the viewer to break out of the role of static observer, to actively experience and play along, in a world in which we both observe and perform.

Curated by Miki Garcia, Executive Director at the Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum in Santa Barbara, California, “Time to Play?” features 30 works by 27 APT artists. Influenced by the 1967 film Play Time by French filmmaker Jacques Tati, Garcia’s “Time to Play?” invites the viewer to contemplate many of the same themes the film investigates, such as obsessive materialism, feelings of displacement, and the utopian ideals promised by spaceage technology. In the film, a group of American tourists navigate a futuristic Paris, breathing nonconformity and love for beauty into the sterile environment. In the

As part of APT Curatorial, the APT Web Gallery is yet another platform by which APT will promote APT artists and the APT Collection to new curators and museums around the world. When we asked Miki Garcia to curate our first APT Web Gallery exhibition she responded, “APT’s collection is vast, informed, and current... making it a rare pleasure to be able to work with material from the world’s leading contemporary artists. This gallery not only gives us the ability to explore and research work that we might not otherwise know, but allows us to think and produce imaginatively, without the practical restrictions of wall space, schedules, shipments and so on.” The APT Web Gallery is accessible through the APT website or directly at www.aptglobal.org/WebGallery/TimetoPlay. The gallery will feature an online exhibition and a video screening room selected from the APT Collection, both of which will be changed on an ongoing basis.

without the practical restrictions of wall space, schedules, shipments and so on.

Carolyn Yuen is APT Director of Operations

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Performance: When the Result Ceases to be Important I was awarded an Art Matters grant for travel to La Curtiduría residency in Oaxaca, Mexico for the following proposal:

By

Shaun El C. Leonardo

In 2006 what began as an annual teachers’ strike over wages grew into a grass-roots social movement that temporarily took over the state government of Oaxaca, Mexico. After an overly aggressive response to the teachers’ strike, traditionally divided leftist movements from across the state unified under the banner of the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) to oust Governor Ulises Ruiz. By staging civil acts of disobedience, rioting, and even barricading the outer city limits, the popular movement gained national and international recognition as a revolution with growing strength. Soon enough, however, the federal government sponsored state-police-organized paramilitary counterattack units to kill and torture leaders of the APPO. Weeks of disappearances and violent repression followed, culminating in an open battle between protesters and the Federal Preventative Police (PFP) in the narrow streets of Oaxaca’s historic center. While federal police continue to carry out house raids and tactics of intimidation against APPO’s leaders and supporters, the APPO insists that its presence will remain, demanding the removal of Governor Ruiz and the withdrawal of federal troops from Oaxaca. I passionately believe, in light of the revolutionary spirit thriving in Oaxaca, that the time is ripe to bring performance art to the Mexican community.

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In collaboration with La Curtiduría, a live/work residency program located in the heart of Oaxaca, I intend to develop and continue two performance projects that poignantly speak to the area’s rich yet conflicted history while attempting to make connections to its current political situation. The 3-month residency will take place toward the beginning of 2008, which will allow me the time to seek the proper avenues for holding the two performances in the community. Furthermore, by modifying the costumes and movement of the performances, I will be able to make the work more culturally specific. Most importantly, I plan to introduce new work to the immediate community in a way that will foster relationships between myself and Oaxaca’s citizens.

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El Conquistador vs. The Invisible Man is a reoccurring wrestling event in which I portray a Mexican wrestling luchador in order to fight invisibility both metaphorically and literally. During more than three years of this performance, the match has become a physical manifestation of not only a battle against societal obscurity but also an internal struggle with the complexities of my own masculine identity. In Mexico, however, where lucha libre wrestling originates, the concept of fighting invisibility will carry much more meaning. My goal is to completely immerse and stage the project within a lucha libre arena, in effect stripping the performance entirely from an art environment. The audience will arrive expecting a traditional lucha battle of good versus evil, and instead they will see an invisible opponent. After the initial shock and humor of what they are witnessing, The Invisible Man may take on a larger significance in the eyes of the Mexican audience. He will not only embody a history of imperialism and struggle; he will symbolize their current battle against political forces, a system of repression so strong it seems almost intangible.

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Luchadores are more than iconic pop-cultural heroes. This proposal did not happen as planned. Upon arrival, I quickly realized that it would be far more complicated to execute performance art in the communities of Oaxaca than I had assumed. There were cultural specificities I believed I understood when envisioning the projects, but that I soon learned I did not fully understand. I decided to put my plans on hold and spend a bit of time absorbing my surroundings. But this limbo period did not last very long. During the first week of my 3-month residency, I approached a wrestling promoter and asked where I might train. Perhaps because I have wrestling experience and am a LatinoAmerican artist, somewhat of a novelty within a Mexican wrestling context, I was invited to train with Oaxaca’s local luchadores.

They have surpassed their role as spectacle and gained a place in society only definable in Mexican terms. As El Conquistador, I had to learn and strictly follow a number of cultural subtleties — rules that have been discreetly constructed and obeyed by both wrestler and viewer in the lucha world. The audience truly completes the performance of lucha libra.

After a grueling, two-out-of-three fall match, El Conquistador was defeated and verbally berated by his opponent — Oaxaca’s own Juventud Audaz. Later, in an unscripted portion of the evening, El Conquistador returned to the ring to save the fallen Oaxacan champion — a luchador by the name of Lalo El Loco — from a beating at the hands of The Ice Eskeletors. With emotions and tempers in the audience running high, chants to remove El C. from the ring (along with requests to kill him) brought the three rudos back to battle El C. Occupying a space somewhere between spectacle, reality and art, El C. was actually physically abused, demasked and publicly embarrassed. In fear, the curator of La Curtiduría called for a stop to the event.

My experience as El Conquistador was an indelible one, and certain aspects of that experience stand out in my memory. I jumped off the top ropes to the outside of the ring, something I have always dreamed of doing. There were nights I could not sleep due to the daily punishment of the ring, and a moment at which I may have become addicted to painkillers. I was interviewed on television, and newspaper articles were written about me. I was reprimanded [by my trainer?] for revealing my lucha identity — an unacceptable slip — to a 7-yearold spectator. I worked with some of the most talented wrestlers in the region — veterans and youths alike — and was eventually accepted as one of the group, forming professional bonds and friendships that may last a lifetime. And during the very last week of my stay I was invited to lead the training session — in my eyes, the highest honor.

Shaun El C. Leonardo (APT New York) is a painter and performance artist who resides in New York City.

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82 11/16 x 70 7/8 x 1 3/8 in (210 x 180 x 3.5 cm), La Colección Jumex, Mexico City

_ Daniel Guzmán, Batalla (Battle), 2005, from the series La búsqueda del ombligo (The search of the navel), 2005-2007, Ink on paper on wood panel

82 11/16 x 70 7/8 x 1 3/8 in. (210 x 180 x 3.5 cm), Private collection, Cologne

_ Daniel Guzmán, Tristessa, 2007, from the series La búsqueda del ombligo (The search of the navel), 2005-2007, Ink on paper on wood panel,

“Life on Mars” Vicky A. Clark

The First Carnegie International with a Theme

Are we alone in the universe? Do aliens exist? Or are we, ourselves, the strangers in our own worlds?

These are the questions curator Douglas Fogle asked in the 55th version of the Carnegie International, the second-oldest ongoing, international survey of contemporary art and the only one so intimately tied to an art museum and its collection. Established in 1896, its goals embody founder Andrew Carnegie’s positivist attitude. The exhibition was to establish parity between American and European art; educate and uplift visitors, especially those living in Pittsburgh; and spread peace and goodwill throughout the world. Carnegie also saw it as the vehicle to secure the Old Masters of tomorrow, turning to the future instead of to the past as his former partner Henry Clay Frick did by collecting the Old Masters. From Winslow Homer’s The Wreck in the first annual to Vija Celmins’s Night Sky #12 in the current version, the museum has purchased from and for the show.

_ David Shrigley, Finger, 2008, Painted polyester, Courtesy of the artist

17 Countries, 40 Artists, 204 Works of Art _ David Shrigley, I’m Dead, 2007, Taxidermy kitten with wood sign and acrylic paint, Overall: 37 x 20 x 20 in. (94 x 50.8 x 50.8 cm), Courtesy of the artist and the David Roberts Collection

Known as the Carnegie International since the 1980s, the exhibition is rarely truly international in scope. In the early years, only European and American work was included; a wider geographic representation is expected these days, but, as others have already pointed out, the majority of the work this year does come from the US, Britain and Germany. The number of women artists is still sadly low, and most of the artists are known entities. Some work dates from more than 25 years ago, which is a divergence from past selections. All of this said—and we could repeat the same concerns for most of these international extravaganzas—this International does, in fact, move in a new direction: for the first time, it has a stated theme.

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In recent memory, themes have characterized certain shows. In 1988 a millennial angst emerged from the works themselves. Subplots were evident in 1991, when several critiqued the Smithsonian-like institution housing the show. In 2004, “the Ultimates,” a term applied by philosophers to the unknowable, served as a subtext. “Life on Mars” serves as a fertile starting point for an exhibition that ebbs and flows through the galleries like a fascinating conversation concerning curator Fogle’s key question: What does it mean to be human in an increasingly complex and unstable world? Fogle has, in a sense, installed an op-ed piece, giving his interpretation of art, culture and life in the first decade of the new century. From the shimmering gold paintings by Rudolf Stingel in the lobby to the raucous street environment installed by Barry McGee (APT Los Angeles) in a corridor to Mike Kelley’s spectacular models of Superman’s Kandor, the works act in isolation and within the larger context. Some think that a theme places art in a box, limiting possible meanings, but here the works seem to gain from the thematic context.

_ Richard Wright, No Title, 2008, Gouache on wall, Dimensions variable, Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery, New York; The Modern Institute, Glasgow; and BQ, Cologne, Commissioned by 2008 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Photo: Tom Little

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Courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; and STORE Gallery, London (floor installation); Wilhelm Sasnal, a selection of paintings

_ Ryan Gander, A sheet of paper on which I was about to draw, as it slipped from my table and fell to the floor, 2008, Forty 15 cm crystal balls, dimensions variable,

Fogle’s thoughtful installation includes sensitive juxtapositions, such as Maria Lassnig’s Bacon-inspired figural distortions placed next to Daniel Guzman’s (APT Mexico City) comic-book Boschian figures, both of which speak to the human condition. The next room, one of the best in the show, is filled with Matthew Monahan’s faux caryatids. Carved out of foam and bound with moving straps, the caryatids struggle like Michelangelo’s slaves to escape the bloc and as contorted human specimens recalling the existential angst of Giacometti figures. The eerie spectral figures of Bruce Connor’s life-size photographs complement the museum’s casts of classical sculpture, fusing fact and fiction and creating a bridge between past, present and future. The quiet night skies in Vija Celmin’s paintings are echoed in nearby galleries by the fragile web of Ranjani Shettar’s map of the universe and the vibrating wallscape by Richard Wright (APT London). Mario Merz adds his obsession with the Fibonacci sequence as a path into the unknown. The artists’ effort to explore the human condition and imagine the unknown through sculpture, photography, painting, maps and even mathematical formulas all add to the scope and depth of Fogle’s endeavor.

Three artists reflect the diversity of that endeavor.

Daniel Guzman uses the simplified drawing style of the comic book to address phobias, fears and lusts; at times, his work approaches the scatological and the abject. He fuses comic books, graphic novels, zines and paintings in a new hybrid form in which Boschian images frequently float in an unarticulated field. These are visual manifestations of dreams or nightmares of the everyman trying to make sense of the world in which he lives. Other artists included in the exhibition are Mark Bradford (APT Los Angeles), Ryan Gander (APT London), Richard Hughes (APT London), Wilhelm Sasnal (APT London) and Haegue Yang (APT Berlin). David Shrigley (APT London) shares Guzman’s interest in comics and cartoons, and his installation in the museum’s Treasure Room, a small space usually filled with decorative-arts objects, provides comic relief or release. A taxidermied kitten stands on its hind paws, holding a sign announcing, “I am dead.” Shrigley’s work moves beyond the humorous gag, however, to thoughts about knowledge, communication, assumptions and the futility of much of the human endeavor.

Richard Wright’s (APT London) contribution moves into the realm of an imagined landscape as his straight lines of red painted golf tees create optical illusions, leaving the viewer unsettled and dizzy, near vertigo. Grounded in the traditions of minimalism and conceptualism, Wright’s work takes off, into outer space, perhaps, as he transforms an unremarkable site into a mesmerizing world.

_ Haegue Yang, Three Kinds, 2008, mixed media (venetian blinds, light, and mirror), Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Barbara Wien, Berlin, Commissioned by 2008 Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh

It is always easy to criticize a large group show like the International, but this version is both satisfying and challenging, from Doug Aitken’s projections on the front and rear facades to the crystal globes scattered on the floor by Ryan Gander. Anchored by Douglas Fogle’s ideas about the meaning of life, this International is both of and about our times. Vicky A. Clark is an independent curator and writer based in Pittsburgh.

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OPINION “Art Fair” For this issue of Insights we asked artists and curators to submit their thoughts on art fairs. The artists are largely weary of the demands made upon them to produce work for as many as four or five art fairs per year. Often cutting into their output for a gallery exhibition, the work shown at fairs is not reviewed nor contextualized within a season of gallery exhibitions. While it is absolutely clear the audience reached through an art fair is exponentially greater in scope than that of a regional gallery, thereby enhancing the possibility for sales and new exhibition opportunities, the artist often feels shortchanged. During a solo gallery exhibition an artist can stand apart from their work and take a measure of their achievements— not possible in an art fair. The regional scene an artist participates in provides emotional, critical and largely unconditional support—again, not available in an art fair. Where art fairs are concerned, business comes first. Independent curator Paco Barragán offers a distinct counterpoint argument. As a curator and art fair organizer (CIRCA in Puerto Rico and photo MIAMI) he has a viewpoint that is informed and visionary, in its own right. The art fair becomes a platform for curators and ideas that might not reach more conventional institutional venues such as museums and Kunsthalles. In Barragán’s words the art fair is a place where “relational curating” occurs, allowing for far more variables, relationships, experimental solutions and unscripted events. What do you think?

Paco Barragán The Art Fair Curator, “New Fairism,” and Relational Curating From the “biennalization” of the ’90s we have moved towards the “fairization” of the world at the beginning of the 21st century. Art fairs, just like globalization, are neither good nor bad; it simply becomes what we make of it. Current critique of art fairs is merely based, I’m afraid, on preconceived and boring notions we all know too well. Why don’t we try to find an explanation of why art fairs are so booming instead of judging the present with the ideals of the past? In this “new spirit of capitalism” so accurately described by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, modern society offers an oneiric and emotional quality with different types and levels of experiences. The art fair as a concept represents, par excellence, the paradigm of this so-called “experience economy;” a center where a limited offer of artworks on sale allows one to transcend the mere category of “spectator” in order to become a “role-player” through research, bargaining and (though not necessarily) buying a work of art. Art fairs exist not only for the quality of art displayed but also for the quality of experience offered. Unlike biennials and museums, the visiting public of art fairs is not a passive entity allowing large layers of society to access the latest art in a more democratic, less intimidating and more anonymous manner. NEW FAIRISM New times suggest new contexts, which in turn demand new curatorial approaches. It’s a fact that art fairs have existed, such as we know them today, for already a few decades, but it wasn’t until relatively recent times that we witnessed the “category of the new” in the shape of the arrival of the curator in the world of art fairs, and the consequent promotion in the media of some of them as “curated fairs.” Thus, the art fair is resorting to the curator to act as an enabler or facilitator of a “positioning” via projects that are specifically created for the fair—Frieze Projects for example—in order to stand out among the mass of fair proposals. In this type of entente cordiale the fair benefits from the prestige, know-how and contacts of the curator. The curator, in exchange, gets access to a new curatorial platform. Besides, more curators are progressively finding a place in selection committees, which stems from a sense and desire for “transparency” in order to avoid polemics directed at the selection process.

Why not believe that we are facing a new development in some curatorial practices, which are expanding from a museum or institutional sphere towards a much more commercial sphere, where they seek to reformulate the art (market) system? Why insist on the idea that a fair must only give priority to economic matters and not to cultural and social ones? Why not resort to the term “New Fairism” in a speculative as well as practical manner? Isn’t the art fair similar to Malraux’s “Museum Without Walls”? Isn’t an art fair a “cultural house” that takes art from city to city? During a brief period and within a very specific space and time, elitism becomes popular. And thus, the relationship of the art professional with popular culture, as well as his participation in the art market, is called into question. If art fairs have always been limited to merely commercial exchanges, I don’t see why a curator, in collaboration with the artist and gallery owner, shouldn’t be capable of relaunching and reformulating the art fair as institution and artistic structure in an attempt to make it more arresting and interesting, that is, to turn it into an aesthetic or intellectual experience. RELATIONAL CURATING I have always been a firm believer that if one participates in certain international circuits—be they museums, biennials or art fairs—he/she should question the context and not take anything for granted. If “institutions,” as Iwona Blazwick tells us, “will tend towards systems of display that reflect the complex socioeconomic and geopolitical contexts within which they operate,” it is logical then that art fairs will represent their highest expression. “Can we combine,” Blazwick wonders, “continuity with the flexibility to embrace new modes of artistic production and reception?”

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Art fairs provide the possibility of working “on the spot” with works exhibited at the art fair or presented to specific projects facilitating an instant, riskier and more experimental feedback in a context where conceptualization, selection, production, exhibition, inauguration and social interaction—unlike what usually happens in a museum or a biennial—are all compressed into 4 or 5 days. On the other hand, exhibitions curated by the art fair curator bring the advantage that the selected artworks are not subordinated to the concept, something that group exhibitions are normally accused of; the artworks themselves bring the concept to a less intimidating and canonized place. We could call this curatorial practice of dealing, exchange and social correspondence “relational curating,” given that this is the original and pre-Bourriaudian meaning that the adjective implies. However, we could also interpret it mutatis mutandis in terms of “relational aesthetics,” in the sense that it is about a criterion of artistic curatorship or a lecture about certain works, which facilitate an immediate and experimental exchange of ideas among the people who are present and involved. In that way, the art fair curator appeals in his thematic exhibition to concepts like “spectator’s participation” and “live experience.” Art fairs present very hectic logistics and production schedules that generate fast, sexy and arresting art that requires a high level of concentration, which we are not always able to attain. Undoubtedly there are still other exhibition contexts that are very necessary and capable of generating significance! But we can’t any longer deny that art fairs have now become cultural events with their own status, and being against art fairs, as Amanda Coulson points out, is akin to being against art and artists.

_ Michelle Grabner, Untitled 2, 2006, Etching on paper, 28 x 22 in

Paco Barragán is Independent curator and author of “The Art Fair Age,” 2008, CHARTA.

Michelle Grabner

Pedro Vélez Art fairs have become just as much of a hassle for artists as they have become an essential social tool for the art business. Although fairs, unlike prepackaged biennials, are great platforms for underrepresented artists and regions to showcase work, the institutionalized and predictable fair ecosystem is diluting the experience of viewing, understanding and making art. At a fair, artwork can be appreciated only in a fast frenzy; you have to experience it and grasp its meaning, if you can, amidst the suits, the partying and the schmoozing. Then there’s the question of which fair to attend. With so many fairs taking place at so many venues simultaneously, how does an artist on a limited budget decide where to expend his or her energies and funds? Such decisions are usually made in the same way mainstream audiences tend to go for the generic blockbuster movie in summer: by following the pack.

One can only imagine the witticisms Oscar Wilde would levy on contemporary art’s abundant trade shows. Perhaps something like: “The art collector is the man who knows the price of everything but the value of nothing.” Or: “A work of art is the unique result of a unique dealer.” But I think Wilde’s brilliantly succinct “Everything popular is wrong” is most befitting when considering the phenomenon of art fairs today. Well, certainly wrong for artists, anyway. Fair organizers have tried to make art fairs artist friendly with symposia and other art world sundries. Yet pedagogical marketing is really unnecessary, because it is the promise of networking that makes art fairs irresistible to artists. And that is a great shame. Artists today don’t know how to value their work unless they can see it on shoddy temporary walls in an exposition hall while rubbing shoulders with art world players.

There are a few exceptions in the US; take, for example, the Milwaukee International, photo MIAMI, VOLTA and the upcoming FAS/ Sound Art Fair in Puerto Rico, just to name a few. These fairs are somehow accessible economically for exhibitors, artists and collectives, and are organized as curated events that cater not only to the market and art advisors but to the broader public.

Paradoxically, the art market has given artists the freedom to explore a wide range of mediums and approaches— yarn, clay, wood grain; figuration, abstraction, narrative structuralism. But artists today have a difficult time understanding the significance of their exploration unless it sells or catches the eye of an international curator. This parallels our wider cultural predicament that has many of us constantly online, accumulating Facebook friends, and the like, to establish our personal and professional relevance.

Amongst artists there exists an anxiety to be included in at least one fair every year. When I started working and showing in art fairs in ’99, it was tacky for an artist to list art fair exhibitions on their CVs. Today, however, an artist must take credit for art fair inclusion because it gives the impression that he or she has made it in the art market, or that his or her gallery is doing its job properly. Participating in an art fair is becoming more important to an artist’s career than is participating in a biennial or museum show.

Art fairs—big or small, in geographical centers or in the margins, satellites or the main event—are the mastheads of art world trade today. They are where dealers try to earn their keep. I, like many artists, just stay away, unless it is, for example, a metafair project sponsored by the good folks who run The Milwaukee International. John Riepenhoff, Nicholas Frank, Scott Reeder (APT New York), Tyson Reeder (APT New York) and Elysia Borowy-Reeder have pulled off transforming an art fair into a giant sculpture, a two-day performance and a scathing critique while still providing a setting for commerce and mastering an impressive public relations stunt. Their Dark Fair at the Swiss Institute during this year’s Armory show was both brilliant and ridiculous. Everything art should be. Michelle Grabner (APT Los Angeles) is an artist and critic who lives in Oak Park, Illinois, where she also runs The Suburban, an artist project space (Thesuburban.org).

I think remote-control curators, desk curators and institutionalized curators that double as advisors for collectors and their artists are responsible for breaking the market, not fairs. Sadly, the role of the artist is at the bottom of the food chain. Art fairs are a self-sustained business that keeps growing on demand and the artwork is the colorful wallpaper decorating the circus. My main concern is this: How can we artists make meaningful work that cuts through, or bypasses altogether, art fair frivolity, while managing to pay the bills at the same time? _ Pedro Velez, CORRUPTED FDR WALL OF COLLAGES, 2007, 12 collages in mixed media - (found book pages, paper, ink, acrylic, colored push pins, photographs), Dimensions variable

Pedro Vélez (APT Mexico City) lives and works in Puerto Rico, Chicago and New York City.

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Artist Pension Trust ® (APT) is the first investment planning product, dedicated and tailored to the needs of emerging and mid-career artists - a group whose career trajectories and employment patterns make existing long-term investment programs inaccessible. The program, which is globally patented, is centered on the collective long-term investment of the participating artists’ works thereby providing artists with the opportunity to invest in their financial future as well as that of other selected artists. Artist Pension Trust ® 298 Fifth Avenue, 4th floor, New York, NY 10001 212-871-1011 t 212-871-1015 f [email protected]

www.aptglobal.org

Front and Back cover : My Barbarian, You Were Born Poor & Poor You Will Die, 2006, Performance