Sophie Calle - Exquisite Pain

The book, composed of photographs, reproduced love letters, air tickets and passages from remembered conversations, takes the reader through the 92 days leading up to her abandonment, and the three months of recovery that followed. Calle had won a young artist's travel grant in 1984 and chose to take a train from Paris to Japan, leaving her boyfriend behind. They made complicated arrangements to meet in India at the end of the trip, but he called her in a hotel room in Delhi to tell her that he had fallen in love with someone else.

Her method of getting over the shock consists of recounting her misery to everyone she meets - 99 times, with gradually diminishing emotion - and asking them to describe the worst moment of their lives in return. She taped every word of these gloomy, shared outpourings with friends and strangers, collecting 99 stories of powerful grief - the woman who is told she will give birth to a stillborn child, the boy who hears his father has died. For the Paris exhibition on which the book is based, she had the texts embroidered on to large wall hangings, which were placed next to her photographs and her assorted bits of break-up memorabilia (images of the clothes she was wearing on that day, the red telephone he called her on to say she was no longer the one).

Sophie Calle - The Sleepers

The Sleepers (1979), Calle's first fully realized installation, consists of one hundred and seventy- three photographs and twenty three explanatory texts that document a series of situations, orchestrated by Calle, in which people (friends, neighbors, strangers) allowed her to observe them as they slept. Calle photographed and interviewed these people-each of whom was allotted one eight hour sleeping period in Calle's own bed-over the course of an entire week. Such behavior, which might have seemed intimate or slightly titillating if photographed in a single episode, becomes, when it is repeated twenty three times, of little more interest than a clinical record. Although captured in the midst of their "deepest" reveries, the subjects' psychological states remain inaccessible to Calle's observation and to the viewer's gaze. Like Andy Warhol's minimalist films, Sleep, Eat, and Kiss, Calle's representations of the human body are aggressively anti-romantic.

Andrea Gursky - Chicago, Board of Trade II

Chicago, Board of Trade II was produced in an edition of six. Tate owns one of two artist’s proofs of the image. This large colour photograph depicts the trading floor of the Board of Trade in Chicago. Seen from above, the floor is a dense hive of activity. Brokers in brightly coloured jackets stand in groups around banks of monitors. Their flurried actions give the image a blurred quality; Gursky double exposed several sections of the image to enhance this sense of movement. Around the edges of the pit rise banks of desks, behind which are seated rows of figures hunched over telephones, staring at screens or gesticulating to their colleagues.

Gursky’s process often involves taking several pictures of a subject and scanning the resultant images into a computer where he can merge and manipulate them. His aim in using digital technology is not to create fictions but rather to heighten the image of something that exists in the world. He has said, ‘Since 1992 I have consciously made use of the possibilities offered by electronic picture processing, so as to emphasise formal elements that will enhance the picture, or, for example, to apply a picture concept that in real terms of perspective would be impossible to realise’ (quoted in ‘... I generally let things develop slowly’, Andreas Gursky: Fotografien 1994-1998, p.viii). By enhancing certain elements, he preserves the impression of something he has seen.

In this case the flat, all-over quality of the picture and lack of single perspective make the architecture of the room hard to read. The traders, banks of monitors and scraps of paper littering the floor become part of an overall patterning reminiscent of Abstract Expressionist painting. Rather than being a straight depiction of the trading floor as a place, Gursky’s image seems to depict the brash, exuberant and unfathomable activity of the stock market as a global phenomenon. Indeed, this is one of a series of photographs Gursky has taken of international stock and commodity exchanges, including the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Singapore Simex and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. He also made a previous image of the Chicago Board of Trade in 1997. In the earlier image, taken from a lower vantage point, one of the far walls of the trading room is visible, giving a sense that the activity of the trading floor is contained. In this version, made two years later, the overcrowded trading floor occupies the whole image. The colours have been digitally enhanced, adding to an intense decorative effect that mimics mosaic or stained glass.

Andrea Gursky, Kuwait Stock Exchange II

“I pursue one goal – the encyclopaedia of life.”
–Andreas Gursky

Andreas Gursky’s sensational depictions of stock exchanges, initiated in 1990 and repeatedly revisited throughout his career, are together one of the most arresting metaphors for the socioeconomic topography of our age. This sequence comprises a significant number of Gursky’s existing portfolio of stock exchange pictures and stands as the most significant and comprehensive ensemble of Gursky’s seminal cycle to exist in either public or private hands. Never before in Gursky’s ample and international exhibition history has such a large group of stock exchanges been publicly exhibited together.

Across the breadth of the present compendium, East and West do not so much collide as conform to a pattern, a cross-cultural social paradigm homogenised by the uninhibited accumulation of wealth. Dispassionately detached, the brilliance of Gursky’s artistic eye lies in the distillation of an essential geometry or pattern symptomatic for our global age.

Letter from Kenneth Armitage to Joan Moore

(Bio : He first attracted international attention as one of a group of young British sculptors, including Reg Butler, Lynn Chadwick, Eduardo Paolozzi and William Turnbull, who showed at the 26th Venice Biennale in 1952 and whose work signalled a new, anti-monumental, expressionist approach. Armitage's preoccupation was with the human figure, combined with an interest in vertical and horizontal structure. He created small-scale figures, full of droll humour, with broad, flattened bodies, pinheads and sprouting, stick-like limbs. The hieratic, frieze-like aspect of his work was also developed in such sculptures as Diarchy (bronze, 1.71×1.09×1.0 m, 1957; London, Tate). In 1955–7 he changed to working in clay, and in the 1960s he employed wax, resins and aluminium, and his pieces became darker in mood and more abstract. In the late 1960s and early 1970s he made a series of disembodied limbs and ‘furniture-figures'. He also experimented with drawn, screen-printed and photographic figural images on three-dimensional surfaces (e.g. Folding Screen, 1972; U. Nottingham A.G.). Between 1975 and 1986 he moved from the figure to nature in his series of sculptures and drawings of oak trees in Richmond Park, London.)

Recommended Reading

Bataille

A book I read

The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt

Experiment : Inspired by Sophie Calle

(Andreas Gursky - Cheops)

The Whitechapel Gallery

The Exhibition : The V-A-C Collection

Renowned for exploring the visual possibilities of language, British artist Fiona Banner (b.1966) chooses works of art from the V-A-C collection, Moscow, as part of the Whitechapel Gallery’s programme opening up rarely seen collections from around the world.

The display explores the blurred lines between language, photography and painting and includes Gerhard Richter’s Kerze (1982), a hyper realistic painting of a single, glowing candle famously used as the cover of Sonic Youth’s 1988 album Daydream Nation. While Andy Warhol’s Jackie (1964) based on photographs of Jackie Kennedy Onassis is shown alongside Stretch (1964), an optical black & white painting by Bridget Riley which appears to shift and vibrate.

Banner has devised an installation which reveals but also conceals the image. Rejecting conventional gallery lighting, instead she uses coloured light which flows gently through Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black in a direct reference to the CMYK system commonly used for printing images. She says:

“I want to make a theatre for the works to act in. It is a play on the act of looking, on our perception.”

The Whitechapel Gallery

The Exhibition : Bart Lodewijks - White Li(n)es

Armed with chalk and a spirit level, Dutch artist Bart Lodewijks (b. 1972) draws abstract white lines on everything from residential buildings in quiet suburbs to street surfaces in bustling city centres.

As part of the abstract art takeover at the Whitechapel Gallery, Lodewijks’ new commission for London draws from workshops with local young people, where he found out about their relationships to the spaces around them. He is interested in how drawing can be a social process built on trust and conversations with individuals or groups.

The exhibition includes a series of chalk drawings made in response to the Gallery and its surroundings, a newspaper designed in collaboration with Roma Publications and a display of material from past projects.

The Whitechapel Gallery

The Exhibition : David Batchelor - Monochrome Archive, 1997-2015

For nearly 20 years British artist David Batchelor (b. 1955) has been photographing his series of Found Monochromes – white rectangles and squares encountered on walks through cities from London to São Paulo. While he started looking at how abstraction is embedded in the urban fabric, the series has grown into a far more personal project: a psychogeographical map of each city he visits. He says:

“I often feel that abstract art is the art of the city and that the monochrome is its exemplary form”.

Now for the first time all 500 images – an explosion of white rectangles in the Gallery – are shown as a multi-screen installation, giving a spectacular counterpoint to the Adventures of the Black Square exhibition.

Tino Sehgal - This is Exchange

"There's also this work of mine from 2003 called This is Exchange. You come into a museum and a person comes up to you and offers to pay you half of the entrance fee if you tell him or her your opinion on market economy.

"It's a theatrical proof that even an opinion on the market economy, even a negative one, can be a product. That's the joke I guess. The market economy doesn't care; you can produce GDP by a nuclear bomb or by a negative opinion on the market economy, it doesn't matter, it all keeps the hula hoop thing running."

Behind Sehgal's work is also the increasing recognition that objects cannot make us happy.

He says western society became blinded by the success and status that could be achieved by wealth, but many were now starting to recognise that they have swapped meaningful relationships for money in the bank.

"As a culture or a civilisation we are a bit juvenile, it's like 'Oh, I have all this power, whoa, this is so cool, I can transform the earth and I can produce all this wealth'," he says "But we're blinded by our success in a naive way. There's more to life, actually, and I think the sustainability issue is also helpful in reminding us about that.

"There is developing this kind of boredom with this industrialised, materially orientated society; the idea that you can create yourself through attaching objects to yourself, via consumption.

"When I was young it was cars, and today it might be smartphones. I always found that boring. 'I want to transform myself on a deep level.' That seems much more interesting and much more ambitious."

Gianni Motti & Christoph Büchel - Capital Affair

For their project at the Helmhaus, the two artists decided to use the CHF 50,000 budgeted for their exhibition by hiding it in the galleries of the Helmhaus in the presence of a notary. The amount of the budget becomes the property of the person who finds it. Visitors do not find themselves confronted with a work of art, which has a use and exchange value, but rather with the actual production costs, that is, the budget of the exhibition: a work of art that is not there. Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti thus create an encounter with emptiness, with a work whose existence is still potential. The exchange that takes place among the visitors in the exhibition galleries becomes the raw material of this artistic project. The project not only poses the question of the value of art for society. It also poses, more generally, the question of the essence and value of art per se: what do we expect of an exhibition? Beauty, endorsement, social and political relevance? Christoph Büchel and Gianni Motti’s project is a caesura in the conventional cycle of changing exhibitions. Both generous and confrontational at once, the artists delegate creativity to the public. Thus activated, visitors generate their own performance. The (supposed) absence of art is compensated by social contact, by the traces left behind by the public, by mental and physical activities such as the intense study of the empty galleries. The question of money is a particularly explosive and political issue in Switzerland, the country of bank secrecy known for its discretion in dealing with finances. One week before the exhibition closes, on September 22, 2002, the people of Switzerland will go to the polls to vote on the use of the country’s surplus gold reserves.

Francis Alÿs - The Seven Lives Of Garbage

Enacted in the public realm, “actions” were historically the front line of assault on the barrier between art and life. When Alÿs arrived on the scene, however, that barrier was next to nonexistent, making his foray into the genre organic rather than ideological. If anything, art and life had become a two-way street. Just as art had found its way into life, so too life had found its way into art. In a manner beyond question, Alÿs’ ongoing photodocumentary slide shows of Mexico City denizens caught unaware in their quotidian lives (Ambulantes, 1992-present, Sleepers, 1999-present, Beggars, 2002-present) share equal billing with his actions whose subjects have included crime (Re-enactment, 2000); the economy of trash (Barrenderos, 2004, The Seven Lives of Garbage, 1995); and a vicious pack of stray dogs (Gringo, 2003). Despite the contrast between the actions, which have a strong allegorical bearing, and the photodocumentary work, which is grounded in transparency, both bodies of work signify a marginalized agency and subjectivity that is a staple of city life.
Alÿs has described his work as “a sort of discursive argument composed of episodes, metaphors, or parables, staging the experience of time in Latin America.” The idea of the "rehearsal," with its stops, starts and repetitions all aimed at perfecting a performance, is one such metaphor. As its title warrants, Alÿs has returned to it on numerous occasions and Politics of Rehearsal builds directly on three previous videos. Rehearsal 1, 1999-2004, recasts Sisyphus as a red Volkswagen Beetle that, syncopated to a musical rehearsal, repeatedly attempts but fails to ascend a hill on the outskirts of Tijuana. R.E.H.E.A.R.S.A.L., 2000, is a short, animated video featuring a hand spelling the word “rehearsal” across the top of a piece of paper. And Rehearsal 2, 2001-2006, is a 15-minute video in which a professional striptease is performed to a rehearsal of Schubert’s soprano/piano duet Lied der Mignon (Song of Longing). Alÿs describes Rehearsal 2 as: “a scenario in which the development of a mechanics — such as two steps forward, three steps back, four steps forward, three steps back — and in which, although the progression is not linear and occurs in a different temporality, there is some progress at the end of the day. It’s a different pace. Postponement or delaying does not mean stagnation. There is always progression, but through a different mode.”

Sophie Mallet - Sonic blind dates

A live, in-gallery edition of the weekly Resonance FM radio show. Sophie Mallett invites you to listen to records, mixtapes and recordings for the first time, with her, on air.

The Sonic Blind Dates Music Library contains records lent by all the RadioCityartists, so drop-in and get an insight into their music inspirations in this first RadioCity project.

The only rule of Sonic Blind Dates: you have to choose a record you’ve never heard before.

Sophie Mallett

Sophie is a sound artist and radio producer working in London. Her work uses sound and participation in an attempt to dilute and rebuild personal knowledge. As well as exhibiting she presents her radio show Sonic Blind Dates on Resonance FMevery week.

Art assassins and Recreative editorial board - Invisible Hours

The Art Assassins and REcreative Editorial Board have been invited to take over the first floor galleries, conceiving and curating their own exhibition, Invisible Hours.

An alternative archive room developed by the REcreative Editorial Board will illustrate and document the key themes behind their past projects, whilst exploring the future plans for the young people’s programme. A limited edition cassette, filmed interviews with art world experts, clips from live radio broadcasts and DIY video games are just some of the projects that will be displayed in the archive.

The second gallery is a workshop and printing room where the Art Assassins will be experimenting with creating their own branded merchandise. T-shirts, bags, wallpaper and trainers will be designed and produced throughout the show, transforming the gallery space over course of the exhibition.

The title of the show originates from discussions between the Art Assassins and REcreative Editorial Board whose aim for the show is to reveal ‘invisible hours’ they spend working on projects at the South London Gallery.

“After-school, between jobs, extra-curricular; young people find themselves in an ambiguous space, trying to work out who we are and what we are going to do 'in life' or in the art world. How can we measure those invisible hours spent in the gallery?” – REcreative Editorial Board.

Recommended Reading

EFlux Journal - Are you working too much

Sophie Calle - Blind

Appropriating the look and language of the forensic report, Calle presents evidence of her quixotic pursuits of the ineffable and evanescent. While obviously indebted to the deadpan phototext combinations of Conceptualism, her art is as purely French at its core as the novels of Marguerite Duras and the films of Alain Resnais—an intimate exploration of memory, desire, and obsessive longing. The structure of her work usually involves a perfectly calibrated interplay between narrative and image, both of which steadily approach their object of desire only to find another blind spot, that which can never be captured through language or representation.

For the Blind series, Calle photographed people born without sight and asked them to describe "their image of beauty." In this example, an adolescent girl moons over a voluptuous female form she once ran her hands over in the Musée Rodin. Juxtaposing front and back views of the sculpture, a photograph of the subject, and the printed quotation, the artist compounds various modes of apprehension in order to point out their inevitable lack. Cleverly undercutting objective notions of truth and beauty, Calle instead locates the meaning of art within the infinite, irreducible responses of the beholder.

Thomas Schütte

German sculptor and draughtsman. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (1973–81). His early work consists of simple architectural models that suggest both ideal and quotidian living environments and draw attention to the social engineering involved in post-war reconstruction. His work also rejected Joseph Beuys's influential dictate of artist as social leader, taking instead a detached and often humorous view of contemporary life. Although his work has often been characterised as non-developmental, a preoccupation with figuration and human conditions became increasingly evident throughout the 1980s and 90s. Both in the extensive series of free-standing heads from the late 1980s, and in the Large Ghosts (three figures, cast aluminium, h. 2.5 m, 1996), a monumentally scaled group of organic/robotic figures, Schütte developed the expressive potential of human physiognomy. Schütte's full-scale public sculptures, such as Cherry Column (painted cast aluminium and sandstone, h. c6m, 1987; Munich, Skulptur Projekte Münster, see J. Heynen and others, pp. 120–23), an enlarged pair of cherries atop a column situated in the Münster Harsewinkelplatz, reflect upon the difficulties of reconciling progressive art and the need for public symbols. His work for the Haus das Gedenkens (1995), on the site of the former Neuengamme concentration camp in Hamburg, in which he temporarily abandoned his status as an artist, raises more serious questions concerning the creation of monuments in a public and historical setting. Schütte is also noted for his drawings and watercolours that take a diaristic format and are often presented in books and exhibitions as such.

Chisenhale Gallery

The Exhibition : Caragh Thuring

Chisenhale Gallery presents a new body of work by London-based painter, Caragh Thuring, and her first solo exhibition in a public gallery. Through her paintings, Thuring examines the speed at which images are consumed, asking exactly how much information is required to satisfy intention and how slowly the process of looking can unfold. With this new body of work Thuring explores pertinent questions surrounding contemporary image making such as the value of time and how this contributes to the generation of meaning. Several paintings are derived from large picture windows in Dutch suburban homes, where idiosyncratic displays of vases, plants and knick-knacks are often arranged in pairs. Thuring perceives the windows as self-portraits of their owners. Considering the dual function of the windows as devices for observing and for being observed, in these works the objects become substitutes for traditional portraiture. The images are interrupted by reflection, surface and a constant reversal of interior and exterior space, disrupting straightforward readings of psychological perspective, as marked by the boundary of the window frame. Further works emphasise the canvas as a territory to be mapped. Two paintings, shown back to back, list all the churches within the Square Mile of the City of London. Each name is sprayed with industrial line marking paint and packed densely within the fixed limits of the canvas. The words sit solid and immovable as the churches: timeless and untouchable buildings, which appear as unintentionally rebellious spaces, standing defiant amongst the constant flux of London’s overdeveloped financial centre. Absent of hierarchy in subject matter or use of materials, Thuring’s paintings are loosely constructed exploring recurring motifs, including pyramids, brick work, volcanoes and the human silhouette. These speculative environments are rendered with an economy of means and leave large tracts of empty linen. For Thuring, the process of making work can be likened to editing film. Her paintings unfold in time: images stall and stutter, giving way to silence and space for thinking and looking.

Matthieu Laurette, Produits remboursés / Money-back Products

Matthieu Laurette’s produits remboursés/Moneyback products introduces a system enabling him to meet his main needs. His method of consuming without spendingis founded on the basic marketing system applied by major food corporations. He feeds himself free of cost by only ever buying products with the rider:“satisfied or your money back” or “Money back on first purchase”. He makes the most of invitations from the media to broadcast the instructions for his free consumer system. Simply by systematically operating an advertising gimmick, Matthieu Laurette symbolically challenges the capitalist mercantile system.

Gillian Wearing (the video 2 into 1)

The short video projection 2 into 1 (1997) features a mother and her two sons, one generation lip-synching the dubbed words of the other. It is hypnotically disturbing to watch a pair of 10-year-old twins take turns speaking their mother's exasperated love for them. "I think Lawrence is absolutely adorable, he's gorgeous, I love every inch of him," Lawrence says, in a slightly raspy woman's voice. "But he's got a terrible temper." Halfhearted affirmations of self-esteem also figure in the mother's monologue, along with deep fatigue, all sounding precociously sympathetic--if not a touch demonic--coming from her children's lips. Equally unnerving is the mother's mimed recitation, heard in the soft, clear voices of clever preadolescent boys, of her sons' accounts of her. We hear their criticism of her driving ("too slow") and clothes ("she doesn't dress too well"), and their complaint that she goes out to clubs too much (slightly disheveled and obviously anxious, she looks like she could use the break). For their part, the boys, baby-faced and natty but incipiently loutish, are hardly ingratiating. A dazzlingly deft expression of the complex pushes and pulls in the mother-son relationship, 2 into 1 is an even more concise articulation of the triangulated relationship between artist, subject and viewer. Treating emotional truth as if it were the coin under the three fast-shuffled cups of a sidewalk con artist, this video pictures the circulation of meaning as a kind of vaudeville act, fast, funny and a little cruel.

Kyle MacDonald - One red paperclip

If you dream of owning your own house, then trading a red paper clip over the internet might not be the obvious way of doing it. But Canadian Kyle MacDonald has achieved exactly that and will see his new home for the first time on Wednesday. It took Kyle exactly a year of 14 internet trades to move from the paper clip to a house on Main Street in the tiny town of Kipling in Saskatchewan province - a place he has never been to before. Now the 26-year-old is planning to write a book about the venture which saw him trade up through a novelty doorknob, a camping stove, a snowmobile, a recording contract, and an afternoon with rock star Alice Cooper. "I knew it was possible," he said on the BBC's Today programme. "You can do anything if you put your mind to it."

He got the idea from a child's game called bigger and better, but created a website devoted to the project and promised to visit potential traders wherever they were.

"My girlfriend and I paid rent for an apartment in Montreal and I'd always wanted to own my own house and this is how I decided to go about it. I think I may be the first to try it online," he told AFP news agency.

Originally from Belcarra, British Columbia, Kyle describes himself as having planted more than 100,000 trees, delivered more than 1,000 pizzas but "eaten only one scorpion".

Two Vancouver women first took on the challenge, snapping up the paper clip and swapping it for a pen shaped like a fish which had been found on a camping trip.

A sculptor in Seattle wanted the pen and gave him a humorous, hand-made ceramic doorknob in return.

The doorknob became a camping stove, which turned into a 1,000-watt generator that was swapped for a beer keg, which in turn was traded for a snow mobile.

The website started to attract a loyal following, with one reader delighted by the trade for a snow mobile prompted to comment: "Woaa dude, nice trade. If I had something bigger or more pricey I would exchange."

Isaac Julien - Playtime

The exhibition coincides with the UK release by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, of RIOT, the first publication to span the artist's trail-blazing career over the past three decades.

PLAYTIME will be presented across Victoria Miro's Mayfair and Wharf Road galleries and comprises the world premiere of the eponymous seven-screen installation featuring an international roster of actors: Maggie Cheung, Mercedes Cabral, James Franco, Colin Salmon and Ingvar Eggert Sigurğsson with Simon de Pury, playing himself. Also on view is KAPITAL: a two-screen documentary, which includes the artist in conversation with leading academics such as David Harvey and Stuart Hall. Victoria Miro Mayfair will present a suite of accompanying photographic works.
What drives people to cross continents in search of a "better life" is a question that has underpinned much of Julien's work over the past decade and in responding to the question he repeatedly returns to the same answer: capital. PLAYTIME thus follows on from Julien's acclaimed nine screen installation Ten Thousand Waves (2010) - currently on show at MoMA, New York - which offers a response to the Morecambe Bay tragedy of 2004, where twenty-three Chinese cockle pickers were lost at sea, and Western Union: small boats (2007), which explores the perilous voyages of those attempting to cross the Mediterranean from Africa to gain entry into "fortress Europe" a story that has tragically dominated the news headlines once again in recent months

PLAYTIME is set across three cities defined by their role in relation to capital: London, a city transformed by the deregulation of the banks; Reykjavik, where the 2008 global financial crisis began; and Dubai, one of the Middle East's burgeoning financial markets. Part documentary and part fiction, the work follows six main protagonists - the Artist, the Hedge Fund Manager, the Auctioneer, the House Worker, the Art Dealer, and the Reporter - interconnecting figures in the world of art and finance with the real stories of individuals deeply affected by the crisis and the global flow of capital.

Exhibited for the first time as a seven-screen work, PLAYTIME transforms the whole of Victoria Miro's upstairs gallery into a striking and immersive installation, montaging the work's protagonists and locations across multiple screens in reference to capital's potential to both facilitate global movement and to create its own barriers.

Martin Zet - Second Hand Money

If money becomes merchandise, then it is also dependent upon the person who assigns the price at which it will be sold. I first sold "SECOND HAND MONEY" in Omi, New York on the 26th of June 1998 - on an occasion when hundreds of people came there for an art event. Even though I took much greater care in the preparation - I was split myself perfectly in two in clothing that was on the right side wealthy and on the left side poor and I sold all money I had - I was not satisfied with the "artistic" context.