Catching up with Vasif Kortun

Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center

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In 2001, curator Vasif Kortun, former director of Bard College's Center for Curatorial Studies and curator of the 3rd and 9th Istanbul Biennials, founded Istanbul's Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center. Over the next few years, Platform offered an international residency program, visiting lecturers series, and open artists archive, all of which drew artists, curators, and scholars to the city. Locally, Platform acted as a social hub for an artist community historically devoid of a gathering place; it provided an alternate art education to that offered by Turkey's conservative fine arts universities; for some artists, it was a portal to the art world beyond Turkey's borders.

The Istanbul Biennial, founded in 1987, offered similar opportunities for exposure and dialogue on a two-year cycle. But as a permanent institution, Platform — and Kortun — has arguably influenced a local Turkish art scene more than any other.

In 2007 Platform closed its doors to the public to undergo a complete overhaul. By autumn 2011 — Biennial season around here — Platform will be reworked, renamed, and ready to transform the Istanbul art world for the second time around. By the Biennial clock, 2009 marks the halfway point of the institution's four-year revamp. Kortun is laying low during this week's Biennial, finishing up Platform's new mission statement, and continuing to work behind the scenes. I caught up with him at his office on Istiklal Caddesi, Istanbul's busiest shopping street, to talk about the new "encyclopedic institution" he'll be part of, and how to deal with the growing demand for Turkish art and its history.

Turkey's preeminent hub for contemporary art will combine with the local Ottoman Bank Museum, a historical museum on Turkey's 19th and 20th century social and economic past which hosts exhibitions based in its extensive archive, and Garanti Gallery, an architecture-, and design-focused gallery also funded by the Turkish bank which supports Platform. (The bank is called Garanti - hence the catchy shared name.)

"At the end of the day it is going to be more or less an encyclopedic institution," says Kortun, discussing the Ottoman Bank Museum's research center for economic and social history, a 27,000 sq. ft. contemporary art gallery, a permanent space for "visible archives" including architectural models and plans, and a public library. Ambitious? Yes, but as Kortun points out, they are taking their time. Maybe this is a lesson learned through local observation, since SantralIstanbul, an arts and culture campus of even vaster scope, burned bright at its opening during the 2007 Istanbul Biennial and has proceeded to sputter - though not die - in the following couple years. "Here usually it is the other way around," notes Kortun. "People do a big exhibition, but we are going the other way, taking our time to build up. That doesn't mean we are going to be boring and slow."

Los Angeles Highlights August 2009

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Rarely Seen Bas Jan Ader Film - David Horvitz - 2nd Cannons - Chinatown

Artist David Horvitz's "Rarely Seen Bas Jan Ader Film," on show in Second Cannons Publications' micro-gallery/public vitrine, includes a film clip, a newsprint photograph of the sea from the location of Ader's projected landing spot, and its own small myth. Uploaded onto Youtube in 2007, the film was deleted by the site at the request of the gallery calling the Ader film a hoax, ostensibly for copyright infringement. The scratchy, black and white clip – only a few seconds long – shows a young man bicycling directly into the sea. It cuts off just at the instant before we see him actually fall, reverting to a flash of blank film frames. Uncannily, the clip seems to provide the perfect missing link between the concept-images that are now emblematic of Ader's own life and death (a young man disappears into the sea); and several of his actual (all silent) films.



Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea

Go to the LACMA website and a wheezing chord welcomes you to a blank white screen. A large black text appears, read out with unexpected vehemence by a synthesized voice: Hey, where'd all the smart guys go? The self-doubting conspiracy theory which follows – the work of artist duo Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, commissioned by LACMA for "Your Bright Future: 12 Contemporary Artists from Korea" – is propelled along by sporadic drums and accelerating chords, in a series of short texts which gain in size and urgency.

You know the smart guys, the ones who are in charge?
Who are taking us places, who are telling us to sit back, to enjoy the ride?
Well, I've got news for you.
The smart guys have left us by the side of the road.


I feel that way too. The catalog to "Your Bright Future" self-consciously cites a number of the conceptual hurdles which an exhibition of this type must contend with. Curators are keen to avoid art as metaphor for national progression, the idea of nationality as a unified ethnic identity, or to promote an exhibition as 'exemplary' of the whole of Korean art. Then, the smart guys leave us by the side of the road, with few proposed alternatives. "Your Bright Future" proposes to let the artworks do the talking. Why them? Who knows. But the lucky twelve are here now, and the loose grouping of heavily video- and installation-based works speak in outsized voices.



New Histories for an Untutored Audience: Art on the Middle East in Los Angeles

Since April, L.A. has seen an unbroken stream of small shows on the modern and contemporary history of Lebanon and Iran, narratives positioned to resonate with those of other Middle Eastern countries or countries, like Venezuela, which have historically occupied similar geo-political positions on a world stage.

In three recent exhibits, the impulse to turn geographic units into analytical categories overlapped with a significant use of the heavily "factual:" architectural models, didactic texts, and documentary videos proliferated. What little manipulation there was was mainly a question of presentation. Sleekly documenting the material manifestations of individual and political power in locations where oil money, and center-periphery relations are particularly salient, all three share a common philosophy to "let the facts speak for themselves."

Why this particular congruence? Maybe it's as simple as the fact that all have taken it upon themselves to write essentially new histories for a relatively untutored general audience. They share a common impulse to simultaneously establish a record, and set it straight. Yet this redundancy is a little disappointing. The appearance of three exhibitions like this in the same city, at the same time, seems to point to a broader trend. And the trend itself engenders its own set of nagging questions – not only whether there might be other ways to write new histories, but why exactly this is an increasingly common goal in the contemporary moment: does it help?

11th Istanbul Biennial Preview

"What keeps mankind alive?"
September 12 - November 8 2009



Organized by the Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (IKSV), the 9th and 10th Istanbul Biennials, 2005's "Istanbul" and 2007's gigantic "Not only possible but also necessary: optimism in the age of global war,"—or NOPBAN:OITAOGW, as I like to call it for short—made a significant move from the city's "historic" venues (Hagia Sophia, the Basilica Cistern) into a series of old factories, crumbling apartment buildings, and former shops and offices. 2005 and 2007's manifestations sought to free the Biennial once and for all from the country's historic burden of defining itself through its ancient past, and redefine Istanbul as a(n EU-ready) site of "alternative modernities" with political potential.

Curated by the Zagreb-based curatorial collective What, How, and for Whom? (WHW), the upcoming 11th Istanbul Biennial is called "What keeps mankind alive?" The title is drawn from a line in Bertolt Brecht's 1928 musical The Threepenny Opera and delivers the Biennial’s requisite titular precociousness, albeit this time in a relatively sober voice. In the wake of 2007's effusion of roseate declarations, among them that the Biennial “is an non-stop machine for production of new urban life” [sic], and that “artistic actions, including the Biennial itself, can find their roles in prompting cultural and social changes through innovative forces of intervention – a form of the urban guerrilla,” WHW promises a tighter set of actions and meditations on contemporary political realities, with a scaled-down array of artists (sixty-nine from ninety-six) and venues (three from five). Exhibitions will take place in a former customs warehouse on the waterfront, an empty tobacco warehouse, and a Greek school that closed in 2003 for lack of students. As sites once central to city commerce, and a sustaining structure of a local ethnic minority, the Biennial venues are themselves manifestations of the type of political and historical circumstances under scrutiny.

"Red Thread," a four-part prologue of talks and exhibitions which took place in Istanbul and Berlin, mapped some of their primary areas of inquiry under a series of opaque thematic headings: geographically and theoretically non-central zones of the European modernist project; artistic practice and exhibition-making in the city; state secrecy and the limits of the visible. (It's worth noting that these are particularly contested questions in Turkey today). Three talks held at Istanbul Technical University's faculty of architecture and Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, were complemented by a related exhibition at TANAS gallery in Berlin (TANAS is “sanat,” Turkish for “art,” backwards: the gallery, run by former Istanbul Biennial curator Rene Block, primarily features Turkish artists).

The political realities at stake are largely those seen within, and from the vantage of, places that all too often play "periphery" to an Anglo-European (art) world. "What keeps mankind alive?" will gather a sizeable number of up-and-coming Turkish artists, a significant crowd from the curators' immediate region (Croatia, Serbia, Belarus, Lithuania, Slovenia, Romania), a body of artists working on or out of the Middle East and Central Asia, and a one-off grab bag of other nationalities. A cross-section of established artists – Yüksel Arslan, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Michel Journiac, Nam June Paik – reflects a turn to the past made explicit in WHW's curatorial statement. Though the majority of artists selected to represent an older generation pull from a Western center, the "typical" artist here cuts a very different figure than the European-American who has statistically dominated exhibitions of this magnitude and type – the question is what particular body of knowledge this [closely cropped / curated] array of perspectives will add up to.

Originally appeared Art in America online

Larry Johnson - Hammer Museum - Los Angeles

'Larry Johnson' is a sizeable survey covering some two decades of this Los Angeles artist's career (1985 - 2007, with a hiatus from 2001 to 2006). Evading the perennial hazard of pitting chronology and 'theme' against each other, curator Russell Ferguson doesn't 'trace' anything but rather takes a wander through, in, and around Johnson's oeuvre. The approach fits the nature of Johnson's body of work, itself a mythical compendium which, in an almost Barthesian fashion, takes on the intersecting worlds of American queer and mainstream celebritydom, L.A. as its heartland, and the ways we think our own lives through the changeable rhetoric and disappearing technologies of mass culture.

Johnson's works are characterized less by hysterical 'criticality' and more by the room they leave for the wry acknowledgment of the extent and type of one's own complicity. Johnson sidesteps the sort of Warholian appropriation of media iconography one might expect: not a famous face in sight, his colored, photographed texts and stilled, nearly empty animation cels only reveal more acutely the role of both language and our own imaginary in creating the flash and sparkle of such worlds.

Some of his photographs are so bound up in their own web of histories that they only come into sharp focus as a result of the wall copy or exhibition catalog: this includes his break-out Untitled (Movie Stars on Clouds) (1982/84), where deceased celebrities (Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo) are memorialized as printed names on a row of blue, cloud-dotted grounds: all of them played gay roles, were suspected of being gay, or were gay icons; all of them died early. With a number of longer, multi-colored blurbs on colored grounds, Johnson draws one into a slowed, halting reading of appropriated narratives written in what he has called the 'shorthand' of celebrity. In Untitled (Greek Tycoon) (1986), an abbreviated excerpt drawn from a morbid record of celebrity deaths called How Did They Die?, hinting at the unhappiness of Jackie Kennedy's marriage to Aristotle Onassis, is reworked as turquoise text on a deep blue ground which echoes the format of Josef Albers' modernist studies in color and optics. In Untitled (Black Box) (1987), a fragment of the black box transcript of the 1982 crash of Air Florida Flight 90 shows up in bright, confetti-colored letters whose mixed hues forestall quick comprehension despite their superimposition on a deep black ground.

One's own compulsion to read through these sensationalist bytes in spite of their difficult, even painful, visuality (pink on orange hurts, as Albers could have told us) provides an early clue as to what Johnson is about. But it is beginning in 1990, when Johnson begins to compose his own texts instead of using ones drawn from other sources, that our own desire for the text becomes the sub-text, implied in the language itself as much as the supposed 'subjects' addressed. Here Johnson goes beyond pastiche to create his own register of language, a register designed to catch us in our own desires, not as the commodified concept of a 'guilty pleasure' but as an inquiry: why so interested?

Ferguson's agile avoidance of the curatorial pitfalls of hindsight draws out one of the most compelling aspects of Johnson's work - his seemingly paradoxical use of countless time- and place-bound cultural references to make supremely present work. What gains increasing presence throughout the retrospective is our own desire, to consume the array of stories Johnson selects for us, glitzy, morbid, and tragically hilarious as they are. The texts penned by Johnson himself take up their place in empty winter landscapes, imbued with pictorial heft. In the clean winter air, the narratives take on a new lucidity: the way the words relish themselves; the way we do as well.

Also at Frieze.com.

Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect - Christopher Grimes - Los Angeles

Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck with Media Farzin


Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck and Media Farzin’s exhibition at Christopher Grimes Gallery, ‘Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect’, casts Alexander Calder and his docile abstractions as the unlikely protagonists in a tale of international intrigue, a tangled narrative tracing the twinned histories of the US interest in Venezuelan and Iranian oil following World War II. The story takes us from a Caracas hotel owned by Nelson Rockefeller to MoMA in the 1940s, from atomic test sites in the Bikini Atoll to Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art and housing developments by architect Carlos Raúl Villanueva. It threads through maps, photographs, Calder replicas and Calder-esque installations, a haze of scholarly quotations, and the pages of New York Magazine (which ran an article titled ‘Cultural Diplomacy: An Art We Neglect’ in January 1954). The catch, of course, is that none of this is fictional: Calder played a significant role in the large-scale propaganda efforts undertaken by the US as it sought to cultivate new diplomatic relations and gain oil reserves during and after the war.

The objects which drive Farzin and Yazbeck’s story are almost too good to be true, conveying a historical moment – and its ironies and tensions – with minimal means and maximum force. The miniature Model of Alexander Calder’s Tower with mobile, 1943 (2007-9) highlights a period in Calder’s career when he drew upon the hulking skeletons of oil derricks, of all things, as inspiration for his metal-frame sculptures.R.S.V.P, 1939 (2007-9) is a reproduction of an invitation conceived by former MoMA staff member Frances Collins and a professional printer friend. The expensive, flowery invite sarcastically invites guests to the opening of the ‘new museum of standard oil’. Its front is stamped with a small crown above the motto ‘Oil that glitters is not gold’ – a dig at Rockefeller (then president of MoMA). (Rockefeller may be the most infamous embodiment of the collusion between private and government interests that characterized the time: as the head of intelligence in Latin America during the war, he commissioned MoMA to arrange several art exhibitions which toured the region.)

Relying as it does upon historical narrative and extensive wall copy, this type of show – the critical presentation of information gathered through extensive research – risks becoming textually top-heavy. Visual material can easily become only illustrative, and is not always an adequate counter-weight to sheer factual overload. What saves ‘Cultural Diplomacy’ is its focus upon Calder’s artistic output as the ground for a particularly topical history lesson. If Calder’s work – unthreatening, expedient – is shown to have been uniquely suited to a specific Cold War political agenda, Farzin and Yazbeck take him up once again as a sort of blank slate.

The centrepiece in this exercise is Didactic Panel and Model of Alexander Calder’s Vertical Constellation with Bomb, 1943 (2007-9), featuring a miniaturized sculpture where a ‘constellation’ of bulbous white wooden forms seem to ricochet from the impact of a rocket which hovers just to the side. An accompanying textbook diagram is subtly altered: each of the sculpture’s forms are labeled, many in joking congruence with their shape. Churchill is bulbous, Stalin appears to wear a bulky hat, and the meeting of Einstein and Hitler in a distant corner transforms the entirety into a teasing conspiracy theory, still shaped by Calder’s unmistakable hand.

‘Cultural Diplomacy’ evades the convenient narrative structures of cause and effect, or the presentation of wrongs to be righted, for an earnest and even playful exercise in history-writing. In just one of the many instances in which Farzin and Yazbeck show how the vicissitudes of multiple historical moments – including our own – might cluster around a single object, in Didactic Panel a running narration of parallel events (1945: authorization of the Manhattan project) (2007-9) stands in quiet contrast to Calder’s ominously vague statements of the time: ‘the sculpture had the suggestion of some kind of cosmic, nuclear gases – which I won’t try to explain. I was interested in the extremely delicate, open composition’.



Also at Frieze.com.

Continental Rifts - Fowler Museum - Los Angeles

Contemporary Time-based works from Africa


A number of recent exhibitions have taken it upon themselves to complicate prevailing conceptions of Africa as a monolithic culture or ‘global problem’. Shows like the traveling ‘Africa Remix’ (2005) and last year’s ‘Flow’ at the Studio Museum in Harlem sought to combat misplaced generalizations with a barrage of specificities, bringing together large numbers of artists from across the continent in a celebratory display of Africa’s teeming heterogeneity. Such an approach largely reiterates a view of the continent as a singular whole – albeit one now appreciated for its diversity.

‘Continental Rifts’ smartly takes five artists who are cited as ‘deeply connected’ to Africa, yet who are positioned in, outside and around the continent in such a way that they can hardly be seen as part of an equation ‘adding up’ to an African whole. Alfredo Jaar, Berni Searle, Yto Barrada, Cláudia Crostóvão and Georgia Papageorge were born in Chile, South Africa, France and Angola, often to parents of different nationalities (Moroccan, Portuguese); they live and work in equally diverse locations. The artists’ repeated distancing from and returns to Africa have led to their common conviction that the place is fundamentally elusive, impossible to pin down.

The real strength of ‘Continental Rifts’ is its curatorial model. If each artist suggests that myth (both personal and public) is one way of understanding place, curator Mary Nooter Roberts utilizes myth to productively re-specify old disciplinary ‘spaces’ – the over-generalized concepts of both ‘Africa’ and ‘African art’.

The loose and allegorical video sequences of Searle and Papageorge benefit from company. The presence of other videos – that engage more explicitly with myths of family and media – show Searle’s and Papageorge’s works to be mythifying endeavours too. Home and Away (2003) shows Searle floating quietly in the Mediterranean strait between Morocco and Spain, embodying the fluidity of national identity; Papageorge’s Africa Rifting: Lines of Fire: Namibia/Brazil (2001) documents long strips of red cloth – indicated as symbols of ‘both rupture and reconciliation’ in the exhibition text – as they flap loudly in the wind along the Brazilian and Namibian coasts.

Africa consistently appears as the object of entangled fiction and fact. In Crostóvão’s short, two-screen video, The Imaginary Journey (2008), a young man wistfully recites an imagined trip to his birthplace, where his parents buried a family treasure before being forced to flee the country. He reminisces in the future tense: ‘To be able to say, “I was there, your house is still standing...’’.’ The accompanying video of city streets is punctuated with poignant images of an empty house which has filled almost entirely with sand. In contrast, in Fata Morgana (2005-6), Crostóvão interviews individuals born in Africa though who left as children. The documentary slides quickly into humour as people express the most ardent and incongruous of opinions regarding a place that they hardly remember.

Alfredo Jaar’s ten-chapter film Muxima (2005) takes on African histories of war, AIDS and the church – issues that the media routinely brings into distorted focus for a global audience. If the traditional Bantu song chosen by Jaar invigorates some scenes – a motor boat carrying five stoic men staring straight ahead seems to be driven forward by the music itself – it is completely unmemorable in others: a heart-in-mouth sequence which follows a young man as he hunts land mines in dense undergrowth is so riveting that the music hardly matters. In a similarly documentary vein, Barrada records an amicable garden meal in Tangiers (The Botanist, 2007); colour photographs trace the contest between iris tingitana (Moroccan iris) and encroaching commercial developments outside of the city (Iris Tingitana, 2007).

Also at Frieze.com.

Walead Beshty - LAXART - Los Angeles

In typical Walead Beshty form, 'Passages' imbues indexical traces with a conceptual heft and aesthetic appeal that is nearly impossible not to find seductive. X-ray lines relay an unexposed film's transit across borders; a mirrored floor's expanding web of cracks testifies to the passage of visitors through the gallery; a series of black and white slides bears witness to the demise of the American shopping mall; a billboard on nearby La Cienega Boulevard shows enlarged dust particles from Los Angeles' notoriously smoggy atmosphere. There are no loose ends here. Yet the overwhelming neatness of Beshty's presentation establishes an unsettling neutrality around the far more complex realities documented by his work.

In the series Passages, (2009) a series of nebulous large-scale colour prints confesses its trajectory through an airport X-ray machine in the form of blurred lines and hazy irregularities. Echoing the processes of fingerprinting and body scans used in the increasingly politicized zone of the airport, the images are an appreciable evocation of the legislative and ideological transformations of a post- 9/11 world, as felt by every traveler. (The project is an intentional exercise stemming from an earlier accident, when film Beshty had taken of the deserted Iraqi Diplomatic Mission in Berlin was run through x-ray machines during his travels - and later shown at the 2008 Whitney Biennial.) They are also thoroughly charming abstract fields of fading colour: the new systems of corporeal degradation exercized in airports since September 2001, which establish a state of exception as a civic norm, are rendered oddly palatable.

Beshty's accompanying projects similarly circle around the notion of 'having been there': Untitled (2009), a reflective floor of cracked, shatter-proof glass, progressively deteriorates as it is walked upon by visitors, in a reiteration of another of Beshty's Whitney Biennial installations, where cubes of glass were shipped in standardized FedEx boxes, gathering the marks of their journey as they went.

The slide projection American Passages (2001-ongoing) is a black-and-white eulogy to the deserted shopping malls of middle America. Beshty himself likens the series to the late-19th-century archives of Eugène Atget and Charles Marville, who created their photographic records of France's urban and architectural past on the eve of its disappearance. Beshty's dissolving slides are accompanied by a distilled version of the soundtrack to the shopping mall zombie film of 1978, 'Dawn of the Dead'.

As Beshty's emphasis on facticity - his unabashed fetishization of the indexical - becomes increasingly apparent, it becomes less clear as to exactly why he wants us to believe in the unaltered reality of his subjects. If Passages' large-scale photographs take on the airport as a newly important political terrain, it reflects no real desire to inspire political conviction. Beshty recently noted that, 'The prints are seductive, and there's nothing wrong with that. They'd look good over a couch: that's fine.' Nor does American Passages constitute a nostalgia-driven plea for the preservation of obsolete regional shopping centres: the malls shown as empty and unused often still function in new ways - as community gathering places where people exercise, eat at the food courts, or just hang out.

The trio of works at LAXART are at once rooted in fact and indifferent to it. Paradoxically, Beshty's romanticization of the index only distances us from its referents in the airport, the shopping centre, or the gallery. We are left uncomfortably unsure as to what extent to the artist engages with the situations he addresses; and yet, in provoking this shadowy dissatisfaction, Beshty challenges our notions of 'engagement' as an artistic obligation. His timely observations and dexterous manipulations of visual fact leave a lingering uncertainty: what kind of inquiry does 'Passages' actually make? Is it an inquiry at all, or an adroit exercise in deflection?

Also at Frieze.com.