THE FE Ephemeral Jun 09:2008 FEATURE TEMPLATE 6/9/09 2:46 PM Page 2 THE FE Ephemeral Jun 09:2008 FEATURE TEMPLATE 6/9/09 2:46 PM Page 3 ARTnews J U N E 2009 Allora & Calzadilla’s performance Stop, Repair, Prepare at Gladstone Gallery, You New York. Had to wandering “It’s not an artwork,” curator Laura SAY YOU ARE through a Hoptman told visitors on opening night. museum and the guards suddenly start “It’s a conversation starter. That’s all.” It hopping around you and singing, “This is so Be did get visitors talking, and not just to one contemporary, contemporary, contempo- another. Two “experts” at a time with ex- rary!” You may laugh—and then, a moment perience in Iraq—among them, ex-soldiers, later, realize that the encounter is actually a refugees, journalists, curators, and transla- living artwork choreographed by the tors all chosen by Deller and the museum Berlin-based British artist Tino Sehgal. There staff—made themselves available during Or what if a museum stages an exhibition prescribed hours to answer visitors’ ques- of unscripted meetings between visitors tions one-on-one. “How often do we get to and total strangers? More and more hear the firsthand experience of those who There is only one way to identify such have been to Iraq?” asks Deller, who ad- experiences as art: be there when they hap- artworks exist not mits to having an obsessive interest in the pen. Of course, that applies to any live war and the misinformation surrounding it. performance—or work of art, for that mat- as objects but as Deller did not film or record any of the ter. If you didn’t see it in person, you didn’t show’s conversations. “If you walk in and really get it. don’t talk,” he says, “you’re missing out on But today, just being there is not enough. ephemeral the experience.” In a spate of recent exhibitions, an increas- On the day I visited, a 29-year-old Iraqi ing number of artworks have been taking events—a surgeon who had volunteered for Deller’s shape more as singular events than as show (only months after having been unique objects, and almost all lead the granted political asylum) took the floor in a viewer into assuming an active role in the conversation, carpeted lounge area that Deller had out- K R O proceedings. One must take part, or the sit- fitted with comfortable chairs surrounding Y W E uation cannot fulfill the transformative a thunderclap, a a coffee table. Describing his experience N , Y R function of art. growing up in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq as one E L L A In February, Jeremy Deller, who won the of terror and enslavement, the doctor was G slow-motion kiss— E Turner Prize in 2004, collaborated with the fiercely supportive of the American role in N O T S New York public-art agency Creative Time Saddam’s demise. When asked if the war D A that insist viewers L to bring It Is What It Is: Conversations was worth all the spilled blood and chaos, G Y S About Iraq to the New Museum. On the the doctor gave the gathering crowd an E T R U floor within the exhibition space was the take part impassioned speech on the price of free- O C / twisted, rusted-steel hulk of a car salvaged dom. (“A CIA plant, obviously,” groaned A L L I D from a suicide bombing on a street of one spectator.) A Z L A booksellers in Baghdad. In the context of a B Y L I N D A YA B L O N S K Y When photographer Susan Meiselas took C & museum, the wreck looked very much like A R O a sculpture. It was both horrifying and Linda Yablonsky is a contributing editor of L L A © beautiful. ARTnews. ARTnews June 2009 71 THE FE Ephemeral Jun 09:2008 FEATURE TEMPLATE 6/9/09 2:47 PM Page 4 THE FE Ephemeral Jun 09:2008 FEATURE TEMPLATE 6/9/09 2:47 PM Page 5 the doctor’s place, the conversation turned first to the experi- and show you something you weren’t expecting, that’s good,” / altered by drilling an 18-inch hole in the soundboard, cutting what way. Observers reported that audience members pierced S E I ences of the Kurds and then to the personal lives of the audi- Deller says. “What interests me is a person becoming the art- L the strings to the middle two octaves of the keyboard. (Made her skin, cut her clothes, drank her blood, and would have shot U F K R U ence members, who said their families came from Honduras, work and the art becoming the person.” O in an edition of three, it had a six-figure asking price.) One at a her if they hadn’t been restrained. K D L M I E Cuba, England, and elsewhere. The dialogue then veered to- Around the time Deller’s show opened, another participa- S time, the young musicians—three men and three women re- “Brecht said it was impossible to look at objects and not H S C Ü A : ward revolution, insurrection, and cultural attitudes dividing tory performance was taking place, at Gladstone Gallery in D cruited for the show—essentially costumed themselves in the think of them as events,” explains Peter Eleey, curator of visual T , H E K G generations. Altogether, it was one of the most fascinating af- New York. For their first solo exhibition in the city, collabora- I instrument, climbing inside the piano and playing the keys at arts at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Eleey has in- Ö R H ; 9 + 8 ternoons I’ve ever spent in a museum. tors Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla installed the 2008 either end, upside down and backward. And that was only half cluded several of Brecht’s event scores in “The Quick and the 9 S 1 E I , S D Not long afterward, New York Times critic Ken Johnson piece Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on Ode to Joy for a the job. Dead” (on view through September 27), a historical show of Y N S U E F panned Deller’s show, calling it “therapy for our national post- Prepared Piano. Visitors who arrived at the top of every busi- While improvising their performances, plucking strings and decidedly ephemeral, conceptual artworks that seem to be T E R S U A traumatic stress” masquerading as art. “I’m all for using the ness hour did not merely see and hear one of six rotating O using the dead keys as percussive accents, they had to roll the made of, or do, nothing. The exhibition checklist includes a H C C / R Y public space of a museum as a platform,” Johnson said in an musicians play the final section of Beethoven’s Ninth Sym- piano slowly through each of four exhibition spaces in the human skeleton by Belgian artist Kris Martin, but it is buried U N P A L M interview, “but grassroots political activity is not art.” phony on a vintage Bechstein piano. They became a physical A gallery. Astonished audience members followed, surrounding somewhere out of sight on the museum grounds and repre- R I E C G E , (Following the New Museum show, Deller and two of his ex- part of the show. P the piano and taking pictures with camera phones, unwittingly sented by a certificate stating its GPS coordinates. Robert D S L R E E perts, an Iraqi artist and a former army specialist in psycho- The artists deliberately chose “Ode to Joy” for its many and F collaborating in the performance itself. Barry’s electromagnetic transmission operates invisibly. Han- E K L L E A logical warfare, took the bombed car on the road across the conflicting historical references. The Nazis had adopted it as a I nah Rickards is responsible for an extended, and shattering, B W , , H S country, conducting conversations in both outdoor places and kind of theme song. In the film A Clockwork Orange, it is the I participation in art is not new, of thunderclap. ”I wanted to do a show that is more than meets C L S O L P Ö art centers.) sound of evil, the trigger for the principal character’s outbursts A course. Robert Rauschenberg’s Ex- the eye,” says Eleey. “But there is a lot to see.” K E AUDIENCE N R N A “Jeremy Deller provided a window on how war affects real of violence. Leonard Bernstein chose to conduct it as part of I periments in Art and Technology involved spectators in a series Sehgal’s works, which the artist calls “situations,” are at M M K , L people who aren’t just fleeting shadows in burkas on the six the celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall. And now it is the R of dance, music, and theater pieces in 1966, around the same the forefront of the new wave of immaterialization. Performed O E V T N o’clock news,” countered New York Magazine art critic Jerry anthem of the European Union. D time that Fluxus artists like George Brecht and Yoko Ono were by “interpreters” who act according to his oral instructions, E N C A T Saltz in response to my e-mail asking what he would have said When Stop, Repair, Prepare was first performed, at the Haus F making a practice of it.