SUSAN PHILIPSZ | TATE BRITAIN

The grand space of the Duveen galleries, empty but for the melancholy sounds of 'War Damaged Musical Instruments'© Susan Philipsz - Installation shot by J Fernandes, Tate Photograph

Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries are currently filled with a hauntingly beautiful sound installation by Susan Philipsz (main picture). The Scottish artist won the Turner Prize in 2010 for a sound piece that didn’t really work at the Tate. Intended to be heard under the bridges spanning the River Clyde in Glasgow, the recording of Philipsz's fragile voice singing sad folk songs was largely drowned out by ambient noise.

This time, though, she has been able to design the installation especially for this awesome space, which stands empty for the occasion. A central line of speakers hanging from the ceiling is augmented by others attached to pillars to create an evocative 3D soundscape. Notes from “The Last Post”, familiar from Remembrance ceremonies and military funerals, are played on brass and woodwind instruments damaged in battles over the last 200 years.

The oldest are two bugles – one from the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, found beside the body of a 14-year-old drummer boy, and another from the Crimean War of 1854, blown by William Brittain of the 17th Lancers to sound the infamous Charge of the Light Brigade during the Battle of Balaclava. The most recent – a keyed bugle and two transverse flutes – were found in the Alte Münz Bunker in Berlin in 1945.

(Pictured below right: Klappenhorn [ruin])

Philipsz was curious to see what sounds could be elicited from these severely battered relics, all of which are housed in British and German military museums. On video, one can watch various musicians attempting to play them, often producing little more than the sound of their own breath being funnelled through mangled tubing. “I am less interested in creating music than to see what sounds these instruments are still capable of”, Philipsz explains, “even if that sound is just the breath of the player as he or she exhales through the battered instrument.”

Watching a young man put his lips to a crumpled instrument is a moving experience; it makes one aware of the damage that weaponry can inflict on metal and flesh and brings into sharp focus the moment when the original player was probably killed or wounded. But it's the sounds themselves that are the most evocative. They travel round the empty space paying melancholy tribute to all those who lost their lives. Commissioned by 14-18 NOW, a programme of events marking the centenary of the First World War, this wonderfully restrained piece would certainly have deserved the Turner Prize

Susan Philipsz: War Damaged Musical Instruments at Tate Britain until 3 April 2016

TUTTO VERO | CASTELLO DI RIVOLI

View of “Tutttovero,” Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli-Turin, 2015. Image courtesy of Castello di Rivoli. Photo by Andrea Guermani.

Turin Roundup November 25, 2015 It was difficult, having recently attended the opening of an art fair, to dispute Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev’s assertion that “we live in the age of oligarchs.” The recently appointed director of two of Turin’s most celebratedarts institutions(1) told me, as we meandered through the halfway re-hung galleries of the Castello di Rivoli, that one consequence of the international proliferation of private museums showcasing collections amassed by a small number of competitive collectors “with little interest in the past” is a phenomenon akin to cultural-historical amnesia. It is her responsibility, she said, to use the extensive public collections at her disposal to foster interactions between past and present, teasing out the connections between different eras rather than reinforcing the illusion that our times (and by extension our artists) are divorced from the past. The architecture of Turin provides a neat analogue for the productivity of such intergenerational dialogue. My taxi from Castello di Rivoli—situated in the former residence of the Royal House of Savoy on the city’s picturesque outskirts—to Artissima—which occupies a Renzo Piano-designed conference center in the heart of what was once the city’s industrial district—passes ancient Roman settlements, Guarini’s dome for the Chiesa di San Lorenzo, and, adjacent to the fair, the splendid Lingotto FIAT factory designed by Giacomo Mattè-Trucco in the Rationalist style, complete with undulating rooftop racetrack. In purely art historical terms, too, it seems appropriate that the spiritual home of Arte Povera, Alighiero Boetti, and Italy’s historical avant-garde should position itself as the city in which contemporary art draws upon the past to move into the future. This creative confusion of tenses was much in evidence at the fair, which presented two sections entitled “Present Future” and “Back to the Future.” The latter declares itself to be “dedicated to research,” on this occasion re-examining the period 1975–1985, but the bustle only serves to remind the visitor that the juxtaposition of past and present can be a market-based strategy as much as a purely curatorial one, premised upon the mutually beneficial exchange of canonical gravitas and contemporary glitz. Among the twentieth-century vanguards to have benefited from a recent critical and commercial resurgence is ZERO, represented here by Nanda Vigo—the curator of an influential exhibition of ZERO artists at Lucio Fontana's Milanese studio in 1965—in a joint presentation by Ca’ di Fra’, Milan, and Allegra Ravizza, Lugano. The neon wall piece, standing sculpture, and triangular mirror that comprise Vigo’s Frammenti di Riflessione (1979) elegantly conflate minimalist austerity with the weightless anti-materialism typical of the movement. Elsewhere in the same section, London’s White Rainbow shows a two-part photographic self-portrait by Japanese conceptualist—and founder of the Kobe chapter of ZERO—Chu Enoki (Going to Hungary with HANGARI, 1977). Inspired by a visit to the retrospective of Marcel Duchamp’s work at the newly opened Centre Pompidou, Enoki shaved one side of his body (“Hangari” meaning “half-shaved” in Japanese) in homage to the French artist, who had cut a star symbol into his hair on first visiting the United States (a further series of photographs shows the asymmetrical Enoki sightseeing in various European cities). The work is—in its execution and its aesthetic—unmistakeably of its time, but it’s a neat example of the currents of influence that run through even the most idiosyncratic practices. History and place combine in Hayv Kahraman’s series of large-scale paintings “How Iraqi Are You?” (2015), exhibited by Dubai’s The Third Line gallery in the Present Future section. Appropriating the visual language of the Maqamat al Hariri, a twelfth-century Iraqi manuscript illustrating scenes from everyday life, Kahraman’s paintings memorialize her childhood in Baghdad and Sweden. Yet they also serve as something like an instruction manual to the newly displaced, in which the artist is depicted in the process of making such adjustments to the local culture as learning the language. A refugee’s attempt to constitute a new identity by combining the fragments of a culture from which she is exiled by both time and place with the circumstances of her new life feels remarkably pressing, even amidst the frivolities of an art fair. Beyond Artissima, the compulsion to play eras and styles against each other was also apparent in “Tutttovero” [sic], a wildly eclectic, citywide exhibition spanning four venues. Curated by Francesco Bonami, the thematic show drew on four of Turin’s most prestigious collections—Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM), the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, the Fondazione Merz, and the Castello di Rivoli—to address the theme of truth though art accumulated in Turin over the past two centuries.(2) The presentation at GAM was soundtracked by John Baldessari’s deadpan video work I Am Making Art (1971)—in which the artistadopts a series of unchallenging physical poses while intoning said statement as mantra or defence. Yet even this broad invocation could not force coherence upon so disparate a selection, and works including Giovanni Anselmo’s Torsione (1968) were overwhelmed by their proximity to a muddle of objects ranging from Thomas Demand’s Grotto (2006) to nineteenth-century portraits. More successful was the remarkable installation at Castello di Rivoli, which brought around 50 sculptures into the long, narrow room that once served as the Savoy family’s picture gallery. Maurizio Cattelan’s Novecento(1997) and Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen’s Architectural Fragments (1985) dangled precariously from the ceiling; Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Venere degli stracci [Venus of the Rags] (1967) piled up against the wall; Gilberto Zorio’s giant, swinging broomstick Barca nuragica (2000) swept over the heads of visitors. Yet for all that “Tutttovero” promised, in Bonami’s curatorial statement, to “explore [the notion of truth] at a time when augmented reality and the faster communication of facts raises doubts on the credibility of any news,” the display was more effective as sheer spectacle. Indeed, it seems so obvious that art has always had a slantwise relationship to truth, irrespective of the speed at which news travels, that it was hard to find a firm theoretical foothold amidst the pageant. A more effective symbol of the unreliability of the image was provided, albeit incidentally, by the banner outside Parco Arte Vivente, host to “Earthrise: Pre-Ecological Visions in Italian Art 1967-73.” Curated by Marco Scottini and inspired by William Anders’s famous first photo of the Earth from the moon, Earthrise (1968), the exhibition presents a selection of pioneering Italian artists whose work during this period might be seen to have anticipated contemporary approaches to ecological and environmental art. Yet the written material nowhere acknowledges the misleading history of the titular photograph, which was not in fact taken from the surface of the moon (as one might assume) but in the course of Apollo 8’s orbit around it. Prior to its publication, the picture was turned through 90 degrees so as to satisfy the human assumption that the ground should run along the bottom of the frame, beneath one’s feet.(3) It’s a neat, if incidental, illustration of precisely the skewed relationship of image to truth that “Tutttovero” sought to interrogate. Featuring work made by Piero Gilardi, Ugo La Pietra, radical architecture group 9999, and Gianfranco Baruchello around the end of a turbulent decade, the exhibition proposes that Anders’s image of the Earth as a glowing speck precipitated a dramatic shift in human perspective.(4) With the recognition of our planet’s vulnerability came a new humility, a “return to the earth” that acknowledged and sought to counteract the widening gap between headlong industrialization and ecological sustainability: the 1971 manifesto published by 9999, for instance, warned that the “ecosystem is at crisis point” and urged its readers to respond creatively. It was a challenge taken up by Baruchello’s experimental farm Agricola Cornelia (1973–81) and La Pietra’s urban vegetable patches (both of which are documented here). “Return” is figured as an affirmative, progressive action, and it’s hard not to notice how much more pertinent to our time are these experiments in living than shinier, newer baubles on display elsewhere in the city. Sometimes, it seems, we might have to look backwards to move forwards. (1) Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev formally takes over as the director of Turin’s Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (GAM) and Castello di Rivoli – Museo d'Arte Contemporanea on January 1, 2016. (2) By the time of my visit, the iterations of “Tutttovero” at the Merz and Re Rebaudengo foundations had closed. (3) James Bridle addresses this in his short essay “Armies Will Vanish,” www.thewhitereview.org/white-screen/armies-will-vanish. (4) This shift in perspective is echoed by Katie Paterson’s Timepieces (Solar System) (2014)—on view at Parafin, London in the Present Future section of Artissima—which comprises nine clocks telling the time on our solar system’s planets. Ben Eastham is assistant editor at art-agenda, and co-founder and editor of The White Review. http://www.art-agenda.com/reviews/turin-roundup/

ENNESIMA | TRIENNALE OF MILAN

Vettor Pisani, L'eroe da camera. Tutte le parole dal silenzio di Duchamp al Rumore di Beuys (The Hero chamber. All the words from the silence of Duchamp to the Noise of Beuys), 1972.*

Ennesima. An Exhibition of Seven Exhibitions on Italian Art November 26, 2015–March 6, 2016 Triennale of Milan Viale Alemagna, 6 20121 Milan Italy

Triennale di Milano presents Ennesima. An Exhibition of Seven Exhibitions on Italian Art, curated by Vincenzo de Bellis, with the artistic direction of Edoardo Bonaspetti, curator of Triennale Arte. Not “one” exhibition of Italian art but, literally, an "exhibition of exhibitions" that, via seven paths, tries to explore the last 50 years of contemporary art in Italy, collecting more than 120 works and over 70 artists, from the early sixties through to the present day, in a display extending over the whole first floor of the Milan Triennale.

The title is inspired by a work by Giulio Paolini, Ennesima (appunti per la descrizione di sette tele datate 1973), the first version of which, dated 1973, is divided into seven paintings. This gives the number of exhibition projects included in de Bellis's exhibition for La Triennale: seven independent exhibitions, in the form of notes or suggestions that explore different aspects, links, coincidences and discrepancies, as well as the exhibition grammar in the recent history of Italian art.

Seven working hypotheses through which we can read, reinterpret and tell Italian art also through the analysis of some of the possible exhibition formats: from the solo exhibition to the site-specific installation, through to the thematic group show and chronological group show, the group exhibition on artistic movement and the medium-based group exhibition and on to the archive exhibition.

The path of Ennesima starts therefore with the thematic group exhibition entitled To Write an image, focused on the analysis of the centrality of iconography in the Italian artistic production from the sixties through to the present day, to continue with the group exhibition on an artistic movement entitled The image of writing: Group 70, visual poetry and verbal-visual investigations and dedicated to Visual Poetry, and then with Alessandro Pessoli: Sandrinus, the whole before the parts, the artist’s first solo exhibition in an Italian public institution. Central hub of the path is the medium-based exhibition The Performance Where Time Stands Still: Tableau Vivant between Reality and Representation​, hinging on performance, with the objective of presenting an analysis of its development by focusing on the tableau vivant sub-genre, followed by A Choral Archive: The via Lazzaro Palazzi Space, the Experience of Self-Management and AVANBLOB, the exhibition of documents that, 25 years later, pays homage to the activities of the artists working in Milan proposing a first attempt at historization. 2015: present time, indefinite mood, a generation-based exhibition ends the path, revolving around a selection of artists born between the mid-seventies and eighties. The whole project is finally studded with site-specific interventions at crucial points of the exhibition path, gathered under the title of Here, Now and Elsewhere: Site-specific and Thereabouts, that fit transversely in respect of the other six exhibitions.


Artists:
Vincenzo Accame, Vincenzo Agnetti, Alessandro Agudio, Mario Airò, Yuri Ancarani, Giorgio Andreotta Calò, Francesco Arena, Stefano Arienti, Massimo Bartolini, Gianfranco Baruchello, Vanessa Beecroft, Alighiero Boetti, Monica Bonvicini, Lupo Borgonovo, Ugo Carrega, Elisabetta Catalano, Maurizio Cattelan, Giuseppe Chiari, Francesco Clemente, Roberto Cuoghi, Danilo Correale, Gino De Dominicis, Patrizio Di Massimo, Luciano Fabro, Lara Favaretto, Vincenzo Ferrari, Linda Fregni Nagler, Giuseppe Gabellone, Alberto Garutti, Francesco Gennari, Paolo Gioli, Massimo Grimaldi, Adelita Husni-Bey, Emilio Isgrò, Jannis Kounellis, Ketty La Rocca, Via Lazzaro Palazzi Space (Mario Airò, Vincenzo Buonaguro, Matteo Donati, Stefano Dugnani, Giuseppina Mele, Chiyoko Miura, Liliana Moro, Andrea Rabbiosi, Bernhard Rüdiger, Antonello Ruggieri, Adriano Trovato, Massimo Uberti, Francesco Voltolina), Marcello Maloberti, Lucia Marcucci, Nicola Martini, Fabio Mauri, Mario Merz, Marisa Merz, Eugenio Miccini, Luca Monterastelli, Liliana Moro, Maurizio Nannucci, Alek O., Martino Oberto, Luigi Ontani, Luciano Ori, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Diego Perrone, Alessandro Pessoli, Lamberto Pignotti, Vettor Pisani, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Paola Pivi, Luigi Presicce, Carol Rama, Pietro Roccasalva, Andrea Romano, Gianni Emilio Simonetti, Rudolf Stingel, Santo Tolone, Franco Vaccari, Francesco Vezzoli, Luca Vitone

 

*Vettor Pisani, L'eroe da camera. Tutte le parole dal silenzio di Duchamp al Rumore di Beuys(The Hero chamber. All the words from the silence of Duchamp to the Noise of Beuys), 1972. Collection Mimma Pisani. Courtesy Elisabetta Catalano Archive. Photo: Elisabetta Catalano.





Art_prospect

ART REORIENTEDS | CENTRE POMPIDOU

Art and Liberty group members at their second exhibition of independent art, 1941. Gelatin silver print, 12 x 17 cm. Front (from left to right): Jean Moscatelli, Kamel el-Telmissany, Angelo de Riz, Ramses Younan, Fouad Kamel. Back (from left to right): Albert Cossery, Maurice Fahmy, Georges Henein, unidentified, Raoul Curiel. © The Younan Family Archive. Baby Elephants Die Alone Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1930s - 1940s) September 28, 2016–January 9, 2017 Musée national d'art moderne – Centre Pompidou Place Georges-Pompidou 75004 Paris France In 2017, the exhibition will travel to: Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen 20 (K 20) Grabbeplatz 5 40213 Düsseldorf Germany Tate Liverpool Albert Dock, Liverpool Waterfront Liverpool L3 4BB UK www.centrepompidou.fr www.kunstsammlung.de www.tate.org.uk

Curated by Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath About the exhibition "In this hour, when the entire world cares for nothing but the sound of cannons, we have found it our duty to provide a certain artistic current with the opportunity to express its freedom and its vitality." –Opening statement from the catalogue of Art et Liberté's first exhibition of independent art, February 8–24, 1940. Baby Elephants Die Alone: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1930s - 1940s) is the first ever comprehensive museum exhibition of its kind about the Art and Liberty Group (Art et Liberté—jama'at al-fann wa al-hurriyyah), a surrealistically inclined, politically engaged artist and writer collective living and working in Cairo mostly from the late 1930s until the late 1940s. Initiated by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, deputy director Catherine David has invited curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath to bring their ongoing research on the topic and work closely on developing this historic exhibition. Upon its conclusion in Paris, the exhibition will travel to the K20 in Dusseldorf and the Tate Liverpool. Founded on December 22, 1938 upon the publication of the manifesto Long Live Degenerate Art, the Art and Liberty Group sought to instigate a rupture within their cultural and political milieu. Through their bulletin, entitled after the group's name, and their two periodicals, Don Quichotte and al-Tatawwur (Evolution), all published in 1939–40, the several works of prose and poetry they released through their two publishing houses Éditions Masses and La Part du Sable, and the numerous interventions and exhibitions of independent art that they mounted, including five seminal group shows between 1940 and 1945, Art et Liberté provided a generation of disillusioned Cairo-based Egyptian and non-Egyptian artists and writers, women as well as men, with a heterogeneous platform for cultural and political reform. Through their negotiation of Surrealism, the group sought to achieve a contemporary literary and pictorial language that was as much globally engaged as it was rooted in local artistic and political concerns. Art et Liberté rejected what they perceived as an imported academicism endorsed by a propaganda-seeking State/Monarchy, rebelled against an oppressive colonial power, and broke away from a conservative bourgeois morality that celebrated "art for art's sake." A decade later, not without scandal, several of the group's members were already in prison or in exile. This, along with a formal letter dated July 26, 1948 from Georges Henein, one of the group's main protagonists, to André Breton declaring withdrawal from the Surrealist movement, signaled the beginning of the end. "Baby elephants die alone," Henein would declare years later when looking back at Art et Liberté's short-lived yet intense existence. In borrowing this statement for its title, and through the retelling of their remarkable story, this historic exhibition addresses the group's long lost, often misconstrued legacy. It explores at once the cultural and political background from which they emerged, as well as the impact they made on a younger generation of artists and writers who were to become some of the leading figures of Egyptian modernism over the decade that followed. Five years in preparation, curators Sam Bardaouil and Till Fellrath have consolidated the findings of their extensive primary research and hundreds of field interviews conducted in Egypt and worldwide. They have selected around 200 paintings, works on paper, and photographs dating from the late 1920s until the early 1950s along with an extensive body of archival documents, historical photographs and primary manuscripts that have never been exhibited before. The traced artworks are carefully drawn from over 30 public and private collections coming from Egypt and 15 other countries. In reuniting these artworks and documents, this historic exhibition charts a precise chronology of Art et Liberté making for the first all-encompassing museum presentation of the group to date. The curators' ongoing research on the subject was introduced in their acclaimed international touring exhibition Tea with Nefertiti (2012–14) where they dedicated a chapter to Art et Liberté in the exhibition and its respective multi-lingual catalogue. The lack of accessible archival documentation is often cited as the main justification for the incomplete art-historical chronologies of modern art from the Arab world. The exhibition Baby Elephants Die Alone, along with its accompanying publications, addresses this gap by showcasing a large number of mostly unknown artworks and primary documents, making them available for the first time to art historians and the general public alike. Set against the backdrop of the Second World War, the exhibition sheds light on Art et Liberté's stand against the alignment of art and political propaganda. Moreover, it highlights the group's rejection of fascism, which beyond its firm grip over Europe, had been on the rise in Egypt since the early 1930s and was beginning to pose a highly-felt threat at home. The group's entanglement with a complex network of diasporic artistic and literary hubs dispersed in cities as far-flung as Cairo, Beirut, Athens, Paris, London, New York, San Francisco, Fort-de-France, Mexico City, Santiago de Chile and Tokyo, just to name a few, challenges the regionalist approach to the study of modernity. These global networks and other aspects of Art et Liberté'sliterary and pictorial output will be explored, beyond the exhibition itself, through a number of public programs, academic symposia, forums of oral histories, film screenings and theatre productions. Publications A 450-page academic monograph on Art et Liberté authored by Sam Bardaouil and published by I.B.Tauris will be released. It will include a select anthology of literary works by various Art et Liberté members, transcriptions of rare primary documents, and a comprehensive visual inventory of artworks most of which have never been published before. The exhibition Baby Elephants Die Alone: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1930s - 1940s) draws on the wider research that is covered within this book. Given its breadth of scope, this monogrpah will be the first exhaustive academic work of its kind on the art, as well as the literature, of Art et Liberté. In conjunction with the exhibition, a fully-illustrated catalogue will be published in English, French, German and Arabic as separate editions, and will be available for international distribution. For Art Reoriented publications on The Art and Liberty Group: www.artreoriented.com/dada-surrealism-dirty-dark-loud-and-hysteric www.artreoriented.com/publications For more information: Art Reoriented, Munich / New York, info@artreoriented.com