Must be
the Season of the Witch Review of the 11th Biennale of Contemporary
Art at Lyon, France:
A
Terrible Beauty Is Born
September
15th to December 31st, 2011 at La Sucrire, the Fondation
Bullukian, the Muse dart contemporain de Lyon, and the T.A.S.E.
factory.Victoria Noorthoorn: curator
Floor and
strings: CILDO MEIRELES\ LA BRUJA 1 (THE WITCH), 1979-1981
In A
Terrible Beauty Is Born, Argentine curator Victoria Noorthoorn
displays a distinctly dark female aesthetic taste that struck me by-and-large
as Romantic Hispanic Goth. One feels particularly in the Muse dart
contemporain, an intelligible emphasis on the hand-made black line within a
general crotchety and slightly surreal aesthetic of accumulation. For me the
general artistic vibe is one complimentary to that of the Chilean filmmaker
Alejandro Jodorowsky, the work of Annette Messager and the writings of Jorge
Luis Borges.
While the
scruffy aspect of much of the work at times reminded me of nightmare BFA studio
visits, the exhibition succeeds within the unrestrained challenge of
festivalism through Noorthoorns coherent combinational dexterity. Noorthoorns
witchy web discernment remains apparent even as she mixes a brew of diverse
generations and media. She also succeeds through the equality of representation
of women present here and by making available new art from outside the
well-worn regional art centers. There are many unfamiliar women artists from
Latin America, Africa and Eastern Europe, for example, mixed in with some
well-known western male modern masters: John Cage, Samuel Beckett, Buckminster
Fuller, Robert Filliou, Morton Feldman and Alberto Giacometti.
My quibble with the shows
contextualization under the transformational line of poetry A Terrible
Beauty Is Born from William Butler Yeats poem Easter (1916) is
precisely its emphasis on beauty, for little is to ascertained.
The work here is mostly human (all too human) to have touched me as truly
beautiful. Yes, the handmade feel was sometimes charming and frequently
enchanting, but the lack of aloofness in the room denies access to the
beautiful heights of the romantic sublime. More the pity, as the handmade feel
gave the show a distinctly low-tech craft mood at times coarsely ugly. But
alongside the sloppiness were some really terrific drawings, most notably by
Elly Strik, Robbie Cornelissen, Christian Lhopital, Virginia Chihota, Alexander
Schellow, Marlene Dumas, Morton Feldman (1984) and the exquisite Alberto
Giacometti (1947-1965). Much of these drawings were tied together (almost
literally) by the massive six thousand kilometer web La Bruja 1 (The Witch)
(1979-1981) by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles; a monstrously stunningly black
wool immersive installation. Its web structured nearly the entire third floor
of the museum in which other artists are also exhibiting (many of them also
line drawings).
Robert Fillious Fluxus work Recherche
sur lorigine (1974) serves much the same function in the other major space,
the La Sucrire. Recherche sur lorigine depicts
Fillious reflections upon various scientific theories, from the birth of the
universe to the origins of human consciousness, in terms of the equivalence
between Far Eastern philosophy and scientific knowledge. It expresses the
result in a modest pastel narrative on a winding piece of unbleached canvas
84.845 metres long and 2.71 metres high. Placed within and without this
narrative flow were clunky funny sculptures made of plaster and cloth by Marina
De Caro and the concrete wall poetry of Augusto de Campos. Campos, his elder
brother Haroldo de Campos, and Dcio Pignatari had launched the literary
magazine Noigandres in 1952, introducing the international
movement of Concrete Poetry to Brazil. The young poets searched for a
verbivocovisual poetry that was a radical fusion in which conventional syntax
and versification would be abandoned. There are numerous concrete poems applied
directly to the wall throughout the exhibit, that I enjoyed.
Of course, within the work of the
70 artists on display at the Biennale, other values in the spectrum of being
are remarkably evident. There is video, painting, performance art and audio art
also in the brew. However, there was a distinctive lack of photography that I
found merciful. Certainly I was impressed by The Bothers Quay-like assemblage
installation by Eva Kottkova called Re-education Machine. This
immersive installation incorporates fragments of an old printing machine from
1960s Czechoslovakia. In it, we are subjected to mechanisms that, according to
the artist, serve only to unify communication patterns and force opinions;
allocating specific social norms to people. The individual is trapped in the
net of mutually repressive dependencies which are no longer invisible they
become wooden cages, metal scaffolding, isolated rooms, and rope shackles. So
here again the web (or net) is evoked, even while the digital basis of todays
net environment is ignored in the show at large, as there is no digital art in
this brew at all.
Other
stand-out work for me was Elly Striks drawing series The Bride Fertilized
by Herself where she revisits Marcel Duchamps masterpiece The Bride
Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even also known as Large Glass
(1915-1923). Her series was a sequence of drawings that bordered on the erotic,
portraying the ecstatic suspension of time and refers to the dynamics of the
artistic process itself in which every artist is his own bride and every
female artist her own groom, as Jean-Christophe Ammann said, in reference to
this series. Morton Feldman, a pioneer of indeterminate music, was
represented by Anecdotes and Drawings, thirty diagram
improvisations performed at a lecture Feldman gave at the Theater an Turm in
Frankfurt in 1984. Supposedly discussing the future of local music, Feldman
created a visual synthesis of his total oeuvre that also included the erotic. A
feel of total oeuvre was also evident in the room of embroideries by Brazilian
Arthur Bispo do Rosrio that he created in a psychiatric asylum called Colnia
Juliano Moreira near Rio de Janeiro. Bispo endlessly listed every single person
he met, and his works incorporated every element he came across in his daily
life. He declared his belief in God, but still criticized dogmatic stances, in
hundreds of texts obsessively rendered in innumerable embroideries.
But Alexander Schellow created my favorite piece in the show,
called Untitled (Fragment). It is a drawing-based animation
he did after several visits to a 96-year-old woman who lives at a clinic for
Alzheimers patients in Berlin. Schellow meticulously re-creates the subtle
movements of her face after-the-fact. I also admired his room of tiny drawings
called Storyboard that he started in 2001, in which the artist
reconstructs from memory specific encounters. It is almost the equal to the Alberto
Giacometti series of drawings that were tangled up in Cildo Meireless La
Bruja 1 (The Witch). Must be the season of the witch.
Still
from Alexander Schellow's Untitled (Fragment)
RETURN