Picabia recommended Man Ray’s art to the gallery in Cannes. In his Self Portrait book Man Ray recalls the show (which is not dated and took place in late ’20 or during ’30):
In the spring I drove down to Cannes but instead of taking my paintings with me, I selected about fifty of my most representative photographs. Cannes would be filled with rich society vacationing during the Easter holidays; my painting would be no interest to them. I might get some sittings for portraits, and so brought my camera with me. When I arrived, I explained my attitude to Picabia, saying it was about time that photography should be presented as art, hung in the galleries devoted to painting and sculpture, beside I consider Cannes and its people too superficial to be exposed to our sort of painting. Picabia agreed with me, saying that the dealer was not too well-informed on contemporary work, handled mostly old masters and better known moderns. […]
I fixed the photographs on the four walls in a single row well spaced, giving each one the importance needed to carry out my idea of presenting it as a work of art. The show looked very impressive; the owner was reassured and optimistic in this new venture […]. Of course, one could not expect to sell the prints themselves as one would paintings or drawings, a photograph had no investment value. I did hope to sell individual prints, which was secretly the real object of the show, but I said nothing.
The exhibition opened next day as announced by the invitations and the posters. I arrived early to receive the first visitors. After an hour or so no one had entered the gallery. I fidgeted for a while, went to the office of the director to verify the date on the invitations – there might have been a mistake, but no, everything was as scheduled, all cards had been sent out four days before. Back in the gallery a couple of lone visitors attracted by the poster on the outside were wondering about. Presently Picabia’s wife appeared, alone. Picabia was ill, she said, and kept to his bed. She apologized profusely for him. Two or three other visitors came in, strayed about and left; that was all.
Additional passage:
Drawing and painting for me were a relief form my photography, but I had no intention of substitution. It irked me when I was asked, according to my activity at the moment, whether I had given up the one for the other. There was no conflict between the two – why couldn’t people accept the idea that one might engage in two activities in his lifetime, alternately or simultaneously? The implication, no doubt, was that photography was not on a level with painting – it was not art. This has been a moot question since the invention of photography, in which I had never been interested, and to avoid discussion, I had declared flatly that photography is not art, publishing a pamphlet with this statement as the title, to the dismay and reprobation of photographers. When asked more recently if I still hold to my opinion, I declared that I had revised my attitude somewhat: for me, art is not photography.
These notes will focus on three artists – one fictional writer and two real visual artists. The writer’s name Fenig and he appears in Don DeLillo’s novel Great Jones Street (1973). Two other artists are Jake and Dinos Chapman.
In DeLillo’s novel Fenig comes up with a new genre called ‘pornographic children’s literature’. Brothers Chapman did a lot sculptures in ’90 with a figures of children transformed into an appalling mutants, naked bodies fused into one, genital organs growing out of faces.
A main protagonist of Don DeLillo’s novel- an elusive rock star Bucky is listening to his neighbour Fenig. He is telling to Bucky:
- I’m working on a whole new area. I guess that’s why it’s coming so slow. Pornographic children’s literature. But serious. Not some kind of soft-core material in a comic vein. Serious stuff. Filthy, obscene and brutal sex among little kids.
- Is there a market?
- I think it may be the only untapped field in all of literature. Although you never know for sure. Maybe there’s somebody working away right now, trying to pre-empt a corner of the market. Once you pre-empt, you’re good for years. Send them bird shit wrapped in cellophane, they’ll buy it. So I may be too late. There are people typing away all over the place, trying to wedge themselves into little corners of the market. But to get back to your question, the answer is yes. Everything is marketable. If not present market exists for certain material, then a new market automatically develops around the material itself. My own brand of porno kid fiction is pretty specific. It has no adults. It is sexy-brutal in a new kind of way. It panders to the lowest instincts. It is full of cheap thrills. It has elements of primeval fear and terror. It has titless little girls saying bad words. It has an Aristotelian substratum.
- If you know this much about it, why can’t you get started?
- I know too much about it, he said.
- No room for discovery.
- No room for discovery and I spent too much time making and taking notes. My energy is pretty much sapped. But the theme lives in my mind. The central motivating force is there. The trust is a genuine thrust. Little kids sucking and being sucked, fucking and being fucked. No grownups anywhere in sight. Kids obsessed by their magical abilities and appetites. Kids and only kids. Without grownups there’s a purity, I feel. The thing is kept pure. Tremendous sadism in evidence. Really vicious stuff. All rendered in terms of classical forms of reversal, recognition and the tragic experience. But I’ll tell you what the clincher is.
- Okay
- They organs are extremely sensitive. Small maybe but developed way beyond our own spigots and drains. I plan to hint that this sensitivity is present in all children. A freshness. An innocence. Kaleidoscopic sex organs. Capable of wild fiery pleasure. What we’d all be capable of if we were as pure and sex-obsessed as these children of mine. There are obsessed beyond belief. I can’t wait to start writing. But that’s not the real clincher. The real clincher lies in another direction.
- Which direction?
- […] The clincher is writing style itself. That’s it, that’s it. I’m doing it like I’d do a second-grade reader. Simplest style imaginable. Easily understood by any seven-year-old kid. In other words I’m not just writing pornography about kids. I’m writing pornography for kids. A fantastic concept in my opinion. I have no doubt there’s enough marginally weird people who’ll buy books like this for their own kids. Most people will get the books for themselves, for their cataleptic wives and so on. But there’s that book-buying minority that’s just weird enough to give their kids pornography for Christmas. I have no doubt of this. I think the son of a bitch’ll sell.
In the end Fenig says: I failed at pornography because it put me in a position where I the writer was being manipulated by what I wrote. This is the essence of living in P-ville. It makes people easy to manipulate. It puts people on the level of things. I the writer was probably more aware of this than whoever the potential reader might be because I could feel the changes in me, the hardening of mechanisms, the subservience to lust-making and lust-awakening. You have to be half-mad to be a great pornographer and half-Swedish to expose yourself repeatedly to outright porn without loosing a measure of whatever makes you human. Every pornographic work brings us closer to fascism. It reduces the human element. It encourages antlike response. I the writer suffered these things myself. As my child-characters whipped and raped each other around the clock, they began to fall apart in my fingers, and I myself slowly began to fall apart in my fingers, and I myself slowly began to fragment. Pornography’s limits and stereotypes worked against me from the very beginning and yet just beyond some last line or boundary I could imagine a new kind of P-ville full of characters who never even touch each other. But I’m not going anywhere near it. I’m not half-mad and I’m only one-eighth Swedish so obviously this is the wrong genre for me. The market wasn’t very lucrative anyway.
Fenig did nor succeed but DeLillo came back to theme of pornography with the Running Dog novel, about the journalist trying to trace a rumoured pornographic film of Adolf Hitler, supposedly made in his bunker.
On the contrary brothers Chapman probably made profits with their provocative sculptures of kids transformed into bio-mutants. Their stuff is labelled by their gallery as Mannequins and the term of course brings to mind Hans Bellmer and his life-sized dolls of pubescent girls made during ’30.
Chapman’s titles are directing reading their works: Tragic Anatomies, Zygotic acceleration, Biogenetic de-sublimated libidinal model (enlarged x 1000), Two-Faced Cunt, Return of the Repressed, Platinum Joey. Biogenetic, wigs, trainers and additional elements suggest a rather Pop version of Hieronymus Bosch’s hellish sceneries. Seems like Bosh and Goya influenced Chapman’s sculptures and graphic works from the beginning of their collaboration. They bought a mint collection of Goya’s Disasters of War prints and changed all the visible victims’ heads to clowns and exhibited the result calling it Insult to Injury. Not sure Chapman are aware of DeLillo’s novel Running Dog but in 2008 they did a show called If Hitler Had Been a Hippy How Happy Would We Be and they used Hitler’s 13 watercolours and add to them psychedelic rainbows, stars and love hearts, and placed them back on the market for £685,000.
TRISHA BAGA Rock
5 April – 19 May 2012
Vilma Gold
6 Minerva Street
London E2 9EH
Trisha Baga (b. 1985, Venice, Florida) presents two new video installations and a series of arrangements with paintings, objects and packaging. The set of various objects and materials is being exposed to video projections – a very non-linear stream of images, colours and moving shapes.
One of the installations is 3D and features a floating box and various objects randomly thrown around. Those objects are chipped tacky stuff, a broken statue, a dog toy, a shoe and more. Other incorporated items are: a painted CD player, various wires and cables, a phone, a bubble wrap, a mirror, a book and more.
Size Matters Re-imagining frame and scale
19.04 – 19.05.2012
Daniel Blau
51 Hoxton Sq N1 6PB
Tue – Sat 11-6pm
Selection of images from various periods of time – there is for example a very tiny image of a man with a pipe standing on the field among skulls and bones. The image is pale, about 5x5 cm. Other media are: Polaroid prints (more than 50 x 60 cm), a photogram, silver gelatine prints of astronauts, c-prints of Earth and Moon and albumen prints. One print is of the planet Mars, a very pixelated landscape.
A very eclectic compilation of images on the show pose following questions: What the image represents? What tell us captured image about events? Additionally the physical aspect of the prints – type, size, tonality and condition of photographic paper- all of them create relations (suggestions?) about the object and circulation of time around them.
Jakob Malek / Nicole Prutsch / Billy-Paul Rousseau / Patrick Rowen
The Nunnery Gallery, Bow Arts, 181 Bow Road, London, E3 2SJ
18.04 – 22.04.2012
The group show Panopticon presents works of 4 artists.
Jakob Malek’s work is a graphic projection of waves captured live by the microphone installed in the gallery. Two separate waves intertwine and vibrate. There is a scientific quality to the image and the installation is called Echo (2011).
Billy-Paul Rousseau’s work is a sound piece called Hospital (2012) and according to the artist his electronic music links to the Victorian mechanical/electrical experiments and possible cruelty involved in that.
Patrick Rowen’s video piece Observance (2011) emulates a vision through a pair of binoculars. A ghostly figure is wondering around a derelict cemetery and it is not known if he is the ghost or maybe in search of something. The figure sometimes multiplies and has a very erratic way of walking.
Six-channel video installation Mirror Stage by Nicole Prutsch documents her series of performances on London buses. She stands on the upper deck of the bus and brushes her hair. Her action is recorded on different monitors installed on those buses. Artist’s statement references Lancan’s term of gaze and Abramovic’s piece Art must be beautiful, Artist must be beautiful.
Edie would still vacillate between enjoying the camp of making movies with us and worrying about her image, and by vacillate I mean she’d go back and forth from hour to hour. She could be standing, talking to a reporter, and she’d look over at us and giggle, then tell him something arch like “I don’t mind being a public fool – as long as I’m communicating myself and reaching people.” That was one side of her, putting the media on like that. But then fifteen minutes later, she’d be having a dead serious tantrum that she wasn’t being taken seriously as an actress. It was a little insane.
Extract about Edie Sedgwick in: Andy Warhol and Pat Hackett ‘POPism’, p. 161
[ space ] 6 April – 20 May 2012
129—131 MARE STREET LONDON E8 3RH
There are three presentation at the [ space ] gallery:
I.
Stewart Home presents his work and this is a part of a touring exhibition Again, A Time Machine organized by Book Works. Plagiarism is mixed with and a ideological critique, there is a lot of magazines/zines produced by Home: Smile, the Neoists zines, and The Art Strike.
II.
Bernadette Corporation presents a selection of films
An artist collective Bernadette Corporation worked from 1995 to 2005, they worked under the guise of a fashion label (BC), directed an art magazine (Made in USA) and published widely, including the multi-author novel Reena Spaulings (Semiotexte).
III.
Primary Information present a library of books they have not yet read but wish to read soon in relation to their new Artists Writings publication series. Visitors are invited to read portions of the books and write down their impressions.
The Primary Information was formed in 2006 and has three distinct components: (1) the publication of lost or unpublished material still vital to contemporary discussions, (2) the publication of books by contemporary artists, and (3) the publication of editions that function as publications, though may take the shape of say a record or poster.
Work & Leisure
Mark Leckey
17.02 - 18.03.2012
Manchester Art Gallery
During the the 4-week show Mark Leckey presented especially commissioned for Manchester a series of live performances for the installation called BigBoxIndustrialAction. A giant soundsystem faced a three-tonne low pressure steam chest on loan from Ellenroad Engine House, near Rochdale, Greater Manchester. Each week the performance took place and every time different sounds were immersing the space and the steam chest. Pictures from one performance here.
Additionally the film Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999) was presented. The piece incorporates a found footage from the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s party scene in the U.K. One single music track unites the bricollage video a very much influenced by William S. Burroughs’ the cut-up technique. Images of the piece here.
Mark Leckey won the Turner Prize in 2008. He works with sculpture, sound, film and performance and explores the potential of the human imagination to appropriate and to animate a concept, an object or an environment.
Global Local Transmission Connection Centre
Lucy Woodhouse
5–29.04.2012
Zabludowicz Collection, Thursday - Sunday 12 - 6pm, 176 Prince of Wales Rd, London NW5 3PT
In April 2012 the TV signal in UKis switched from analogue to digital one. This switch over and balancing between digital and analogue broadcasting plays important role for Lucy Woodhouse. Her installation Global Local Transmission Connection Centre presents a set of projections of live video chats together with footage of TV screens recorded around the gallery’s neighbourhood. Two analogue aralias will be used to broadcast the work into the local pub, located100 meters down the road. It is that transit of the analogue/digital content from the exhibition space to other premises (local facilities/businesses) which very much interests the artist.
She hopes that some people she interacted early on will come down to her live event host on the route gallery-pub, she hopes maybe the guy from the local kebab shop will come down. The performance/broadcast will take place on 21st April.
Danse-moi vers la fin de l’amour
Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski
6.04 - 13.05.2012
Open Friday - Sunday 12 - 6pm & by appointment
French Riviera 309 Bethnal Green Road London E2 6AH
Dance, dance, dance. Dance on the carpet, dance in the corner, blinking colour lights around, silver surface, a ritualistic music, flickering figures. Sounds spiralling down down down.
The new show by Levack and Lewandowski revolves around dancers and a mood of trance. The gallery space is divided, carpeted, decorated with patterns, there is a lot of silver surfaces with vertical darkorange stripes. Videos, photographs and graphic works blends semi-abstract imaginary with video clips of dancing endlessly friends of artists. The music, performed by the duo, has the psychedelic quality, repetitive tones and vocals remind Broadcast and The Focus Group’s ‘Investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age’ album.
