En 19.5.— 13.8.2017 Caroline You are greeted by gleaming technoid forms of ACHAINTRE vaguely human dimensions. Joachim Bandau’s Olga too long overlooked, but utterly contem- porary-seeming sculptures of the 1960s and BALEMA 1970s appear to be functional (note their Joachim quasi-industrial finishes, their wheels, han- BANDAU dles, tubes, and protective rubber casings), yet they are resolutely without purpose. They Trisha stand like alien devices, weirdly sensual and DONNELLY creaturely. Nearby, a recent composition invol- Marcel ving a thrift store blanket and textile scraps DUCHAMP by Eric N. Mack hangs limply; further into the exhibition, other examples of his textile collages Michaela are affixed to a curtain railing or swoon onto EICHWALD the floor. Without fixed shape or form and re- leased from the strict geometry of a stretched Florence canvas, Mack’s sewn and arranged material JUNG remnants are marked by their kinship to com- Eric N. modities and popular culture: street style, MACK Prince, greasy takeout food, a Harlem dog hos- pital advert, et cetera. Liz MAGOR You sense that these works engage a history of painting, just as Caroline Achaintre’s hand- Park tufted rugs do, the latter even more pro- McARTHUR nouncedly engaging with domesticity, with PAKUI “women’s work,” with a dirtiness (of the HARDWARE floors they allude to), and exhibiting a flaccidity that is neither genteel nor heroic. A yet Nathalie different engagement with the history of PERRIN painting is that of Michaela Eichwald, whose works feature abstract traces. Those gestural Tomo marks stick to cheap imitation leather on which SAVIĆ-GECAN the paint doesn’t dry as it would on canvas; it Lucie remains tacky for a long time, dust invariably STAHL clinging to the gummy surface. All of these works’ insistent materiality plays with that Alina most auratic of art history’s mediums, rendering SZAPOCZNIKOW it less noble—even debased somehow. Adrián VILLAR ROJAS And the vaunted tradition of sculp- role as both things in themselves and pream- ture, for its part, is made irrepressibly strange bles to another artwork beyond them. (Freud had a name for it, unheimlich, or They encircle a 1971 sculpture by Szapocznikow uncanny) by Liz Magor’s Sleepers. These works in polyester resin cast from body parts (a foot, are variations on a theme: a doll wrapped a breast), amalgamated with the ordinary in a rubberized silicone cast of a baby blanket, stuff of her studio (pantyhose, newspaper). “swaddled” so only the uppermost part of The Polish sculptor described her works from its forehead and hair spill out. “Creepy” is per- the late 1960s and early 1970s as nothing more haps the best word to describe them. They than “awkward objects,” which might have lie, casually but eerily, on the floor and in your been another way of calling them ungestalt. way (indeed, much of Magor’s materially Haunting, visceral, sensual, endlessly uncanny: confounding oeuvre operates this way, and Szapocznikow’s body casts, lugubrious forms, pieces are scattered throughout the show). and accretions of matter using unorthodox So opens the exhibition. materials, methods, and forms act, much as Duchamp’s works here do, as harbingers of the There is no easy way to account for a show absent but nevertheless disquieting (real) that goes by the title Ungestalt. The German body at the heart of the presentation. term signifies neither exactly the English “formlessness” nor the French informe, yet Populating this exhibition are exquisitely shares something of their essence. Indeed, ungainly, recalcitrant works that, each in their the rather arcane word conveys wildly different own way, refuse to be docile, stable, well- senses, which seems perfectly fitting for balanced. There is something obscene, unset- the present circumstance. It is a description of tling, or (quite literally) rotten about them, something that struggles against delineation— even when they might also be described indeed, against the clean, articulated wholeness as inexplicably attractive, even elegant. Some- suggested by Gestalt. It also describes some- times the artworks’ resistance is material: as thing clumsy and misshapen, even monstrous- with Olga Balema’s ever so slightly quivering, ly so. Under these rubrics, amorphous, gooey, mechanized and mysterious, or viscous and abject, and fugitive emanations might be dripping, always odd sculptural forms; Lucie described as ungestalt. Perhaps something that Stahl’s resin-coated photographs that depict both is a form, and actively undoes that form, hands grasping various dirty industrial or natu- comes closest to embodying a term that ral elements; the artistic duo Pakui Hardware’s itself escapes capture. But how might we ap- industrial shelves and trays with archival NASA prehend this notion not only materially, images of Mars imprinted on silicone so that but also perceptually and conceptually? And they look like diseased skin; or Park McArthur’s how might thinking about it offer a vehicle for upright, pocked, partially plastic-draped, understanding the divergent practices of scribbled-upon foam pieces that stand like the artists, living and dead, who made these strange sentinels or anti-monuments in the final works half a century ago—or as recently as room of the exhibition. last month? Sometimes the artworks’ resistance is more In the gallery’s second room and presented a bit perceptual than material, as with Trisha as if in the storage area of a Wunderkammer, Donnelly’s two filmic works, one an abstract pedestals abutting pedestals, sculptures, draw- moving image, the other a still projected ings, and photographs are positioned so image, each hovering somewhere between low that you must get on your knees to proper- analog and digital, and each appearing at once ly view them. Here works by Marcel Duchamp present and effaced, almost apparitional. and Alina Szapocznikow serve as core histo- Or Adrián Villar Rojas’s comestibles slowly ric elements. In the 1950s, long before it was rotting in a crammed refrigerator-freezer. possible to recognize them as “outtakes” of his His encased display of domestic entropy— final artwork,Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau neither entirely solid nor liquid, increasingly 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (1946–66), Duchamp oozing the more the audience opens its door produced a series of three strangely formed to take a look—creates not only a slippage objects, looking like body casts. Although they between luxury commodities (lobsters, cham- don’t immediately reveal their indexical pagne, scallops, pomegranates) and disgusting counterparts or their relationship to the nude waste, but also fills the air of the gallery with figure in Duchamp’s final installation, this its nasty, olfactive signature. trio of so-called “erotic objects” have a curious corporeality and take up an indeterminate 2 Sometimes the artworks’ resistance is concep- tual, as Tomo Savić-Gecan’s literally self- undoing works. For example the one that is nothing more than its value—a value declining every minute of the exhibition’s run. Set at CHF 100,000 at the opening of the show, it dwindles until it announces its own worth- lessness. Another piece by him quite literally changes the conditions of the exhibition, im- pacting humidity levels in the galleries according to unseen forces. Nathalie Perrin’s drawings, on the other hand, portray the chaos of a mind that sees connections between wildly divergent points of reference: classical music, military strategy, Russian novels, chess maneuvers, geography. To read them is to trace vertigo-inducing connections be- tween the incomprehensible plenitude of the world and Perrin’s scribbled attempt to in some way map it. Ungestalt brings together a subjective ensemble of newly commissioned and existing pieces of drawing, photography, sculpture, textile, and video by fifteen artists and one artistic duo, each of whom has responded to their moment with works characterized by a tantalizing, yet unnerving, volatility. In its amorphous excess, the show also poses the question: How can an exhibition itself become subject to a certain degree of unforming? One answer is: through some abdication of control. Accord- ingly, Florence Jung, known for her various acts of artistic evasion in which rumors or audience sequestration or counterfeit items replace art, was invited to exert her influence upon the exhibition. Her (possible) interventions into every aspect of the show’s preparation, presen- tation, and communication constitute her artwork, the details of which will remain con- fidential. Her imperceptible, incommunica- ble influence undoes the exhibition just as the shifting humidity levels and the rot wafting in the air subtly outmaneuver curatorial con- trol, rendering a show that is not quite govern- able, not quite containable, not quite able to itself achieve Gestalt. 3 7 6 5 9 LIST OF WORKS ROOM 4 5 Florence Jung 1 3 6 4 Jung52, 2017 Tomo Savić-Gecan Joachim Bandau Lucie Stahl Performance Untitled, 2005–2017 Fahrbare schwarze Spill, 2017 4 Courtesy the artist A mechanism recorded the entry times Sesselgruppe, 1971 Inkjet print, aluminum, epoxy resin 7 of visitors to the exhibition The One, held Anodized aluminum, C hose couplings, 167 x 120 x 2.5 cm 3 at the New General Catalogue Gallery glass fiber reinforced polyester, Courtesy the artist and 3 ONLINE in New York from October 15 to mannequin segments, rolls, Vacuflex Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles KUNSTHALLEBASEL.CH November 14, 2005; the data from that hoses, varnish mechanism is shifting the humidity 107 x 90.5 x 94 cm, 105 x 90.5 x 94 cm 7 2 Tomo Savić-Gecan levels at Kunsthalle Basel for the duration Courtesy Joachim Bandau; Alina Szapocznikow Untitled, 2007—2017 of the exhibition Ungestalt from May 19 Galerie Thomas Fischer, Berlin; Untitled (from the 10 The value of the artwork is the artwork; to August 13, 2017. and Galerie Mark Müller, Zurich Courtesy the artist Expansion series), 1968 11 the value is in a constant state of Polyester resin, polyurethane foam 6 devaluation, from the moment the 4 90.8 x 59.7 x 5 cm 2 exhibition begins until its closure, at 2 Joachim Bandau Courtesy The Estate of which point the artwork will be worth Pakui Hardware Flossenfuss, 1973 Alina Szapocznikow / nothing.