Now in its 20th year, the 2013 edition of Sonar is a global celebration which began in Reykjavik in February and will culminates in Barcelona. The festival is a leading reference for international festivals with carefully balanced cultural programming, combining a playful nature, the avant-garde, and experimentation with electronic dance music’s newest trends.
Thursday, June 13, 2013 to Saturday, June 15, 2013
More than 170 galleries are calling Art Basel in Hong Kong home through the weekend. In this Eye on Art, Blouin ARTINFO's Matthew Drutt takes us on a tour of some of the hidden gems at Art Basel in Hong Kong, including Aaron Curry at Michael Werner Gallery, Asta Gröting at Carlier Gebauer an Francesca DiMattio at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery.
Watch other ARTINFO videos from Art Basel in Hong Kong 2013 here.
Glitz on glitz. It would have been most Liberace-like had the TV premiere of Steven Soderbergh’s HBO production, the Liberace bio-pic “Behind the Candelabra,” been presaged by the announcement that star Michael Douglas had won the Best Actor Award at Cannes. (In fact, it was another Hollywood vet, Bruce Dern, who was garlanded for his performance in Alexander Payne’s “Nebraska.”)
Soderbergh has announced that “Behind the Candelabra” will be his last movie. True or not, Douglas’s intensely focused turn as the caped, sequined piano-player known as Mr. Showmanship caps a directorial career that has been increasingly about the nature of “performance” — not least Soderbergh’s own. If “Side Effects” was a ’90s Michael Douglas thriller without Michael Douglas, “Behind the Candelabra” is the acting vehicle that the star never had. It’s not just that, for the first time, Douglas is playing an historical character but, for the first time, he’s playing someone other than himself. Or is he? If nothing else, Douglas is putting on quite a show — not to mention one that Mr. Showmanship never could.
Playing the part of Scott Thorson, the innocent young stud whom Liberace seduces, reduces, and abandons, Matt Damon more than holds his own against the scene-devouring Douglas. Indeed, the two-hour movie comes perilously close to becoming a dull morality tale until love-sickness kicks in and Damon gets his performance going. There are a number of striking supporting players as well, notably Dan Aykroyd (the rumpled manager), Rob Lowe (the sleazy plastic surgeon), and, best of all, Debbie Reynolds (all but unrecognizable as Liberace’s Polish mother).
Douglas humanizes Liberace even as he becomes part of the Liberace myth. “Behind the Candelabra” opens with a blast of disco and ends with a vision of Lee, as his associates call him, ascending to (show biz) heaven, while singing “The Impossible Dream.” Although a child prodigy who paid his dues in nightclubs for some decades, Liberace was significantly a creature of TV. Soderbergh brilliantly alludes to this by having beady-eyed Douglas stare into the lens and remark, “I was the first person on TV to look right into the camera.” Like, he engaged.
Liberace’s first Los Angeles-based TV show went national after one year, in 1952, and was widely syndicated through the mid ’50s. As Davy Crockett was for tots and Elvis for teenagers, so Liberace was for middle-aged women. His effect was not so much a craze as an example of mass reverse gaydar. Lee’s fans were pleased to deny that their idol’s flaming, campy persona had anything to do with homosexuality. (For a ridiculously credulous account of Liberace’s fabricated private life, see “The Loves of Liberace,” the “authorized” 1956 paperback original written by Hollywood Reporter staffer Leo Guild available in entropic thrift stores everywhere.)
Directed in a style that might be described as naturalized Baz Luhrmann, with an attitude that occasionally recalls that of Mel Brooks, “Behind the Candelabra” takes place mainly in the outsized beds and bathtubs of Lee’s personal Versailles. I was disappointed not to see Liberace’s trademark piano-shaped swimming pool, although the frequent side trips to Las Vegas are fun. Liberace anticipated Elvis as the personification of Vegas — a town Soderbergh has adopted as his own personal playground in the tedious “Ocean’s 11” franchise. In the ’70s and ’80s, underground cartoonist Bill Griffith deployed Liberace the same way, sometimes as a foil for Zippy the Pinhead. But “Behind the Candelabra” is an essentially serious movie, not least in its meditation on the uses of denial and the representation of camp.
Not long after Lee’s death (of AIDS related causes in 1987), a professor of performance studies, Margaret Thompson Drewal, published a detailed analysis of Liberace’s Easter 1984 performance at Radio City Music Hall. “What happens when Camp performance is detached from its gay identity?” the professor wondered. Or put another way:
If gay signifying practices serve to critique dominant heterosexist and patriarchal ideology through inversion, parody, travesty, and the displacement of binary gender codes, then what happens when those practices are severed from their gay signifier and put into the service of the very patriarchal and heterosexist ideology of capitalism that Camp politics seeks to disrupt and contest.
The basic idea is that capitalism can absorb anything, humans will gladly wear blinders when it serves them, consumption can be a vicarious pleasure, and that it was Liberace’s particular genius to realize this. Drawing on both Karl Marx and Bram Stoker, Drewal presents the caped, mock aristocrat Liberace as a sort of vampire. “As a conspicuous consumer supreme, Liberace made it clear that he thrived on the earnings of his blue-collar audience… Count Dracula aglitter.” Soderbergh applies a similar notion to Liberace’s private life. The scenes of the plastic surgery that His Showmanship uses to maintain his youth and turn Scott into his clone are horrifyingly graphic. In one humorous bit, the newly lifted Lee can’t even close his eyes to sleep; in another subtext, one is encouraged to ponder whatever work Douglas has had on his face.
“I’ve done my part for motion pictures. I’ve stopped making them,” Liberace joked during the course of the 1984 Oscar ceremonies. Funny but not true. Although “Behind the Candelabra” may be Soderbergh’s swan song, it’s an uncanny resurrection of the creature that was Liberace.
NEW YORK — Dallas-based Heritage Auctions, which claims to be the third largest auction house in the world, is making a move in the Big Apple. It has leased just over 5,000 square feet of additional space at its current Park Avenue location at Park Avenue and 57th Street, tripling the space of its Manhattan outpost. The expanded outpost includes space for transacting private treaty sales, showcasing future auction highlights, and a saleroom for holding smaller, on-site auctions.
As it has done since 2006, the company will continue to hold its major New York sales at the Fletcher Sinclair mansion on the Upper East Side, directly across from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The house specializes in such collectable categories as comic books, arms and armor, and meteorites, though it also sells some fine art. Last year it posted some $900 million in sales.
Heritage has “experienced exceptionally rapid growth in business,” according to Kathleen Guzman, the auction house’s managing director in New York. She added that the company was “hiring additional staff in many of our 35 different categories, especially jewelry, paintings, coins, and comics, trusts and estates, and luxury accessories.”
The new space expands a venue it has leased since 2010, though until now, Heritage has kept it mainly as a storefront showcase for a constantly rotating display of items coming up for sale. The annoucement seems to show that it has rather bigger designs.
A prize given to François Ozon during the Cannes Film Festival is not one the French filmmaker can put on his mantelpiece, if he has one. The French branch of the Ukrainian feminist protest group FEMEN has awarded Ozon the “2013 Golden palm of assholes” via a Tweet, according to the Hollywood Reporter. The organization Osez le féminisme (Dare Feminism) meanwhile described remarks Ozon made in an interview with the trade paper a week ago as “the spew of the day.”
Ozon brought to the festival’s competition “Young & Beautiful,” a drama about a 17-year-old Parisian high-schooler, Isabelle (played by 23-year-old model turned actress Marine Vacth), who, for unexplained reasons of her own, becomes a high-class call girl. She relishes the power Ozon gives her in relation to the johns, possibly very different to the power (or lack thereof) that prostitutes are normally expected to have. The trailer (below) suggests that, for the emotionally detached Isabelle, the actual sex is a blur.
Talking to the Reporter, Ozon responded to interviewer Rhonda Richford’s statement “Men and women seem to have different reactions to the film” by saying:
“I think women understand the film more than men. I think men are afraid because it’s like, ‘Oh, my God. There is all that in the head of a woman?’ She is very powerful. But I think women can really be connected with this girl because it’s a fantasy of many women to do prostitution. That doesn’t mean they do it, but the fact to be paid to have sex is something which is very obvious in feminine sexuality.”
When Richford disagreed, Ozon said: “I think to be an object in sexuality is something very obvious, you know, to be desired, to be used. There is a kind of passivity that women are looking for.”
It was the “it’s a fantasy of many women to do prostitution” comment that provoked the reaction from such media outlets as Metro News France. Placed on the defensive, Ozon tweeted in response, “Obviously I wasn’t talking about women in general, just the characters in my film.”
On Saturday, the Reporter noted the comments of French women politicians. Socialist Party spokesperson Laurence Rossignol tweeted: “Mr. Ozon, could you keep your fantasies to yourself and avoid assigning them to us? Thank you.”
Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, minister for women’s rights, said: “The movie presents us with his view of the world. François Ozon’s look at women seems reductive or too generalized. It’s terrifying to trivialize that there is a casualness in prostitution. This is not true. Casualness and prostitution are contradictory. This shows that it is also important that we hear the voices of women directors because women’s views of women are not at all the same as those of men.”
Ozon has said that, instead of prostitution, he could have easily explored “anorexia, drugs, suicide” in depicting the teenage need to purge “the violence inside you need to express and you don’t know how.”
He wanted to draw attention to Isabelle’s innocence, he added, “because she doesn’t realize the danger of this situation.” This aligns her with the two student prostitutes, the subject of an article by an Elle reporter played by Juliette Binoche, in Małgorzata Szumowska’s “Elles” (2011).
However, “Young & Beautiful” is more likely to draw comparisons (and has already done so) with Luis Buñuel’s “Belle de Jour” (1967), in which Catherine Deneuve’s frigid housewife entertains fantasies of degradation and becomes a brothel inmate, leading eventually to her husband’s crippling and emasculation.
That Charlotte Rampling, who starred as the fantasizing writer in Ozon’s “Swimming Pool,” shows up toward the end of “Young & Beautiful” suggests the director may be playing with levels of reality critics haven’t fully grasped. That’s just a suspicion.
Unlike “Belle de Jour,” “Young & Beautiful” apparently doesn’t offer clues to its young prostitute’s psychological motives or, unlike “Elles,” grapple with the sociological causes that turn beautiful young women into prostitutes.
It does, however, throw up a mass of ambiguities and provocations — enhanced by the director’s quotes — that will keep it in the public eye when it reaches theaters. Sundance Selects has picked it up for U.S. distribution.
Watch Marine Vacth in the “Young & Beautiful” trailer:
Each month we ask the editors of ARTINFO sites around the world to tell us the most significant work of art or art happening of the month, and gather them together for our column “Planet Art.” (NB: Since we have contributions only from where we have editors, this feature does not literally represent the art of the whole planet.)
Part of a group show, “Trisha Baga & No Brow,” this work by Modern Painters’s 2013 “Artist to Watch” Benjamin Hirte places two bottles of cough syrup — one a Vicks brand and the other an herbal expectorant called Sinupret — mouth-to-mouth in such a way the contents of both mingle in the larger Vicks bottle. The simplicity of this gesture may eschew pharmacological critique in exchange for a formal interest in the two layers formed by the cocktail’s varying density, but it still brings forth a grin weeks later. —Alexander Forbes, BLOUIN ARTINFO Germany
CANADA
Wanda Koop, “My mother lives on that Island (SEEWAY),” 2012 Galerie UQAM, Université du Québec à Montréal
Wanda Koop has long been haunting Canadian landscape painting with spectral, Baldessarian sun globes. In Galerie UQAM’s ambitious survey, “Painters 60,” however, we see Koop expand her margins (the horizon lines no longer legible in inches, but meters), and eclipse her orbs. In their absence are vast and loose cloud formations dripping lasciviously, though with melancholy, over color fields of sapphire blue. She is bringing landscape to the threshold of abstraction in a manner that feels fresh, aching, and much like progress. – Sky Goodden, BLOUIN ARTINFO Canada
CHINA
MadeIn Company, “Play — (201301),” 2013 Long March Space, Beijing (at Art Basel in Hong Kong)
This leather fetish-themed gothic cathedral was bound and strung from the ceiling at Art Basel in Hong Kong within the fair’s Encounters section. Although an outwardly “blasphemous” work — whatever that means in today’s China —MadeIn’s disruption of sexual and religious taboos here is just the latest means that the collective employs to get at its broader target: the fetishization of places, cultural practices, and colonial dynamics. — Sam Gaskin, BLOUIN ARTINFO China
Art critic Hemant Sareen’s decision to hold his first solo show at the non-commercial space that is artist Aditya Pande’s studio in Shahpur Jat was a commendable one, subversively reinforcing the subtitle of his show: “A subject for the next revolution.” “Zoopoetics,” a tightly curated, intelligently conceived exhibition of Sareen’s animal-centric photographs and videos, explores the conflicting relationship between man and animal that is informed, as Sareen believes, by the layered narratives of overlapping psychological, biological, linguistic, and environmental worlds inhabited by various species, including humans. This is no saccharine show featuring cats and peacocks in photogenic poses; it is, in fact, an intense commentary on exile, inspired in part by the artist’s deep communion with the cats he has known over the years. It is also a successful exercise in artistically documenting Baudrillard’s concept of the “non event” while simultaneously extending the notion of Zoopoetics that Derrida first apprehended in “The Animal That Therefore I Am.” According to Sareen, the term could be seen as “questioning the self-proclaimed privileged position of human faculty for language among animals” that results in a misplaced sense of entitlement. — Rosalyn D’Mello, BLOUIN ARTINFO India
KOREA
Jeamin Cha, “Fog and Smoke,” 2013 Kukje Gallery, Seoul
Emerging artist Jeamin Cha takes media cues from veteran Minouk Lim to create meandering narratives that explore critical views of modern, industrial South Korea. Her latest video work intersperses clips of a lone tap dancer weaving across the deserted streets of the Songdo International Business District (a new “smart city” under construction along the reclaimed land of the Incheon waterfront, to be completed in 2015), along with interviews with locals who have observed the bleak, changing landscape. —Ines Min, BLOUIN ARTINFO Korea
The Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas has been experimenting with destruction and its connection to creation since 2009. His series “Autoconstrucción” involves installations in which he analyzes the artistic possibility within scenes of wreckage, and takes its most recent edition at Museo Experimental El Eco in Mexico City. The work — made up of debris from his soon-to-be home — suggests that the possibility of creation through destruction in its process of reconstruction, and seeks to expand the definition of the conventional art object. His work, he says, appeals to the artistic sensibilities of the average citizen and applies to any object that can be modified. —Aline Cerdán, BLOUIN ARTINFO Mexico
USA
Valerie Hegarty, “Alternative Histories” Brooklyn Museum, New York
For an artist whose whole practice is based on the visual and thematic subversion of American art and American art history — by creating replicas of historic objects and artworks that have burned, melted, rotted, decomposed, sprouted branches, or been attacked by birds — fewer spaces may be as suited for an exhibition as the Brooklyn Museum’s rich period rooms. In a trio of interventions, one in a plantation house dining room and the others in an 18th-century captain’s house, Hegarty unleashes crows, woodpeckers, and other natural forces to underline currents of oppression and natural devastation running through U.S. history. — Benjamin Sutton, BLOUIN ARTINFO U.S.
– Panel Confirms Market Doesn't Determine Quality: During Art Basel in Hong Kong a debate staged by Intelligence Squared solicited attendees' vote on the proposition "The market is the best judge of art's quality," with 60 percent disagreeing at the beginning of the event, and a whopping 73 voting disagreeing by the end. MOCA Los Angeles director Jeffrey Deitch did his best in the opening remarks for the pro-market camp: "It is a complex open system that encompasses a giant web of information and disinformation and informed and misinformed opinions that influence our perceptions of quality and value." [South China Morning Post]
– Rubens Sketch Found in School Cupboard: A drawing purchased in the 1950s by a Reading University fine-art professor for "about £5 and £10" has turned out to be an authentic Peter Paul Rubens drawing of French Queen Marie de' Medici. "It was very exciting indeed," said Anna Gruetzner Robins, a professor at the university. "A Rubens in the cupboard! It is not what you expect to find." [Guardian]
– Rijksmuseum Uploads Masterpieces: Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum has recently posted 125,000 high-resolution images of works from their collection, which includes masterworks by artists such as Rembrandt, Vermeer, Mondrian, and van Gogh, on an interactive website called Rijksstudio. The museum plans to add 40,000 images each year so that the one-million-work collection will eventually reside online in its entirety. "We’re a public institution, and so the art and objects we have are, in a way, everyone’s property," said Taco Dibbits, the director of collections at the Rijksmuseum. [NYT]
– Criticism Surrounds Closing of Panama Biennial: It would seem that nearly everything went wrong with the first-ever Panama Biennial, which ends tomorrow, including controversy over the name, friction between the curators, installation problems, and a participating artist’s deportation from the country. The organizers appear to have decided against a second showing with a note on their website yesterday: "The Bienal del Sur in Panama has not authorized any institution, museum, gallery, cultural or artistic entity to convene a second biennial, either in Panama or in another country. Similarly, our organisation is not associated with any similar event where artists are being invited to participate in a second version." [TAN]
– Deal Reached in Munch Museum Mess: After years of squabbling between city politicians, Oslo has settled on a new building for the Munch Museum in the city's center, alongside its recently opened opera house. The new building, dubbed "Lambda," boasting a façade of crooked glass panels, and expected to cost $278 million, will replace the small and relatively inaccessible building that has housed the museum for more than a half-century. The new Munch Museum is due to open in 2018. [AFP]
– Sir John Richardson on Gagosian Gig: A profile of 89-year-old Picasso art historian and consultant to Larry Gagosian, Sir John Richardson, reveals that working with Gagosian isn’t half bad: "Larry respects scholarship, pays nicely, makes it possible for you as an art historian to borrow any work you want. I don’t like half of what he shows but he’s heaven to work for." [FT]
– Park Shows Signs of Gentrification: The New York City artist Kenneth Pietrobono is installing over 30 mock-botanical signs in a small West Village park inscribed with terms from the real estate and gentrification lexicon familiar to so many Manhattanites, like "(Re)Development," "Class Barrier," and "Displacement." "The attempt is really to try to give an accurate representation of the environment," the artist said of his Jackson Square intervention. "Aligning 'market growth' and 'comfort' with a tree or flower helps to present abstract notions in a neutral way." [DNAinfo]
– Polish Artists Disagree on Presidential Plane Crash: Since the 2010 plane crash that killed Poland's president and nearly 100 of the country's top politicians and military officials, the country's artists have responded differently to accounts of the tragedy. Some, like the filmmaker Antoni Krauze, suspect conspiracy and cover-up, while others, like the street artist Jacek Adamas, are adamant that it was an assassination. "Being an artist involves honesty, and in the current discourse in Polish arts, I’m not allowed to be honest," Adamas said. [NYT]
– Pussy Riot Member on Hunger Strike Hospitalized: Jailed Pussy Riot member Maria Alyokhina started a hunger strike last week after she was banned from attending a parole hearing. Reports now indicate that she has been moved to a hospital in the prison colony. [BBC]
– RIP Viennese Actionist Otto Muehl: The controversial Austrian artist Otto Muehl, whose visceral performances — or "actions" — typically involved sex, blood, other assorted bodily fluids, and multiple arrests, died on Sunday at age 87. He founded a pair of artists' communes in the 1970s, and was eventually arrested for activities conducted thereupon, including rape and indecency with minors, serving six years in jail. [Austrian Independent]
American installation artist Sarah Sze’s offering for the 55th Venice Biennale would make for a fantastic gallery show. It would make a great museum show too, save for the constraints of the relatively diminutive rooms of the neo-classical, Palladian-style United States Pavilion. As a national statement offered on the world’s largest stage for contemporary art, however, the pavilion leaves one with a slight feeling of anticlimax. The blame, however, rests less on Sze or her work than on the realities of biennale positioning, where quality often gets drowned out amid cacophony.
Commissioned by the Bronx Museum of the Arts and curated jointly by the museum’s executive director, Holly Block, and critic and independent curator, Carey Lovelace, “Triple Point” — a reference to the chemical stage at which a substance is simultaneously solid, liquid, and glass — presents a series of artistic experiments in Sze’s delicate, nearly obsessive-compulsive style of arranging quotidian objects. Vaporetto tickets, images of waterfalls, rocks, sand, jars, buckets and much more are brought into constellation by web-like forms of string, wood, and metal. Delicate in material and construction, the installations that Sze has developed over the past two months in Venice poses a refreshing weight and quietude.
Approaching the pavilion, more robust iterations on her signature sculptural forms appear to crawl organically up its surface and onto the roof. Boulders have been covered over with gravel such that only their crests appear, while faux rocks sit on the structure’s roof and in front of what has traditionally served as its entrance. Sze reroutes foot traffic in a clockwise half-circle starting at an entrance on the left wing.
Each room presents a unique experiment in formal construction and material investigation. The initial installation harks back to her 2010 Tanya Bonakdar show’s “360 (Portable Planetarium)” — the exhibition that largely brought Sze front and center as a force on the New York scene — in its orb-like amalgamation of objects, each of which offered a reference to the water cycle. A central sculptural molecule seems to be exploding, spurting rays of plywood and unprocessed sticks that draw the eye on a circular path through inkjet printed rivers, down into a glass oven baking dish on which lamps shine and a fan blows, metaphorically initiating the alchemical process once again.
The following room presents a laboratory-like environment in which stones, pebbles, and sand are arranged in piles and lines both on the fragmented lab tables and on the floor where outlines of painter’s tape seem to mark out the previous existence of solid forms in a manner reminiscent of a crime scene. A black T-shirt sits crumpled on one table next to an array of ampules holding orange and green granules. It’s as if Sze or her Venetian assistants may come back to continue their uncanny experiment at any moment.
In the room that is typically the pavilion’s entryway, a single boulder sits off-center, and one corner door is left open revealing a supply closet holding elements present in each of the exhibition’s experiments. An array of objects in the following space — stacks of jeans, cacti, water bottles, nails, tools, and yet more rocks among them — lay in a circular orientation around a pendulum, which rotates at varying velocities as if creating a centripetal force to order the knickknacks.
It’s in the pavilion’s final room, however, that Sze truly makes her mark. All the elements out in front of the pavilion, which from that viewpoint appeared entirely entropic, are here revealed to be an extension of an indoor installation, continuing along patterns on the glass-paned wall. The effect is to create a peaceful (and inaccessible) alcove. An array of bags of earth for gardening mark the transition from outside to inside, while shelves of further plant life, stones, and Ziploc-bagged artifacts wall off the recess.
In retrospect, Sze’s pavilion is remarkably good. So, why does it underwhelm to an extent that will likely be characterized as an overcorrection from Allora and Calzadilla’s bombastic 2011 U.S. Pavilion, “Gloria”? In an increasingly event-oriented art landscape, in which the glitz of each successive fair, biennial, or art week must be turned that much further past 11 to get a commercial response, a certain appetite — addiction, even — has been created for spectacle. It’s a lot easier to gush about your jaunt through the woods in pursuit of video or your cup of artfully brewed tea (elements of Jesper Just’s and Jeremy Deller’s pavilions both equally worthy of praise) over a Bellini in the evening than it is to rave about a nuanced and quiet encounter with a set of works that doesn’t readily tie itself up in a package of experience or narrative.
Bu, let’s not conflate showmanship with the creation of quality shows or forget the purpose, however anachronistic, of these pavilions in the first place: to exhibit a high quality artistic statement that on some level takes the temperature of a country’s cultural sphere. As the latter, Sarah Sze is right on point.
The success of Harlem rapper A$AP Rocky’s major label debut, “LongLiveA$AP,” meant that it was just a matter of time before the other members of his collective, A$AP Mob, struck out on their own. First out of the gate is A$AP Ferg, in possession of an enigmatic flow just as accessible as Rocky’s, but cockeyed enough to be unique. Though some may write off him off as simply riding on his comrade’s coattails, his solo output — including the club banger “Work” and a forceful guest verse on Bodega Bamz’s “Say Amen” — has proven Ferg to be an MC deserving of our attention. Any remaining doubts should be extinguished by the release of his highly anticipated upcoming mixtape, “Trap Lord.” ARTINFO recently sat down with Ferg for a glass of red wine at Manhattan’s Bowery Hotel to talk about the pressure of being a role model, his other artistic pursuits, and the power of personalities.
What sets you apart from A$AP Rocky and the other members of the A$AP Mob?
If we were to represent artwork, Rocky would be like pop, and I would be too, but more abstract. I say things with a little more pizzazz. People think I’m making up my own language. I want to be decoded. When you’re so simple and people get you, the allure stops. The seduction is over.
Do you see your upcoming mixtape, “Trap Lord,” as being different from everything else that’s going on in rap right now?
I always wanted to make soundtracks to movies. In the studio, I’ve never told anyone this, this is my creative process: I light candles, I dim the lights, and I put on movies with no sound. There’s a part in “Jungle Fever” where Gator and his girlfriend are in this place called the Taj Mahal, which was basically a crack house, a.k.a. Cocaine Castle. So I called the song that. When I was creating this I wanted you to get the feeling of that one scene of Wesley Snipes looking for his brother through the Taj Mahal.
What makes “Trap Lord” different from the other material you’ve put out?
I always just wrote verses and battled people. Now I’ve gotten really into song writing. And sonically I feel like the music is going to take me somewhere else emotionally. “Cocaine Castles” is about my trials and tribulations dealing with people on drugs. Where I grew up, Harlem, you see lots of people on drugs and selling them. I just wanted to put that out there that you can come out of that element. I feel like whether I want to be a role model or not I am responsible for my audience. My brother, he’s only 13, his friends look up to me. I kind of have to be mindful of what I’m saying. Even if I’m fucking up, they can learn from my fuck ups.
Do you find that responsibility limiting at all?
I just think you gotta be cool with yourself. And just be a leader. Once you’re a leader and stuck on what you’re doing, you can be cool. With whatever you’re doing. I don’t smoke weed, but I have other vices. Everybody has their demons they have to fight. You’re just going to hear about mine in my music, and I’m not afraid to speak about them.
Is it tough getting to that point of being comfortable with who you are as an artist?
Most artists think they’re here to talk about big booties and cars. That’s when it gets corny. It’s time for change. This is the revolution. A$AP Mob are the rebels. That’s why we hang our flags upside down. We’re here for change. I was missing the Missys, the Kanye Wests, the Pharells of the game. They’d just come out and be themselves. That’s all we’re trying to do. We’re just the new faces of it — me, Rocky, and [other rappers like] Kendrick Lamar. We’re just here to cultivate our crowd and stand up as one. We represent that. We don’t care about radio and any of that shit. We just want to be ourselves.
People are tired of the same thing. They need something new to follow. It’s like religion. If the preacher keeps preaching the same thing and you don’t feel a difference, then you must change the church. They found a new religion, which is A$AP.
One of your paintings appeared in a recent W magazine interviewwith Rocky. How long have you been painting?
I painted before I was rapping. That was my minor at the High School of Art & Design — fashion was my major. It’s another form of release for me. When rapping becomes too much, I can rely on going home, playing some Miles Davis, and just going in on the brushes.
So creating art, whether it be music or painting, has always been important to you?
Yeah. My father was also an artist. He went to Art & Design as well. We had the same teachers. He had his own clothing line called Ferg Apparel. He did the Bad Boy logo for [Diddy]. He did the Uptown Records logo for Andre Herrell, [Diddy’s] mentor. I felt like it was so natural for me.
What are you going for with your paintings?
Whatever I’m feeling at the time. It’s just the mixture of emotions. It’s sort of like Picasso, who I kind of compare myself to. The portrait I did for Rocky was John Lennon and Yoko Ono. At the time I was with my girlfriend, she inspired me to paint that. John Lennon and Yoko were so close. They represented us. And Rocky just loved that painting so he was probably just asking me and begging me for it.
Do you think having outside interests like painting and fashion make it easier for you to deal with the stress that sometimes comes with music?
Of course. I feel like with the music comes the visuals and the fashion goes with the visuals. In my dreams I see clothing and clothing lines way different from what other people see. It’s sort of like pop art. Like Jeff Koons doing exaggerated sculptures. That’s what I see in my dreams. Instead of putting cocaine on a mirror on a table for “Work,” I did a cocaine storm with a ballerina dancing in it.
Are there specific artists you draw inspiration from?
I love Salvador Dali. More his personality than his work. He was real spunky, real different. The mustache, flowers, and stuff like that. All the artists that I love, I’m addicted to their personalities. It’s not really the art that gets me, it’s the person behind the art. Like Andy Warhol — what made him take all these Elvises and put them up in a gallery that way? I want to be in their world, I want to see what they see. I went to Fab 5 Freddy’s house the other weekend. He was a very good friend of Basquiat. He showed me so many pictures of him. There were black and white photos of him just chilling in his kitchen with a painted refrigerator. I was just trying to get in his mind. Is he really like that? Was he putting on? How was this person, for real? What inspired him to draw like a little 3-year-old?
I’m always trying to figure people out. I want to know what people are drawn to. Why are people drawn to Michael Jackson, Warhol, and Basquiat? Why are people still talking about them? It’s not always the work, because there are better artists out there. It has to be their personalities that draw people to their work. The person behind the work who’s manipulating everything and making this whole whirlwind of things to happen. There’s something behind that.
“Work (Remix)” featuring A$AP Rocky, French Montana, Trinidad James, and School Boy Q:
I’d bark if I could. The reason my “woof” remains silent is that I’m a 100-foot-tall crimson balloon pooch, standing on a lawn outside something called the Frieze Art Fair. For the second year in a row, this fair is being held on Randall’s Island, or what New Yorkers call “the strip of land holding up the Triborough Bridge.” It’s also the place where the fire department comes for training — and yet somehow no one has had the decency to provide me with a giant fire hydrant. I held it in.
With my red balloon eyes, I gazed upon the funky white tent beside me, where a throng of the world’s wealthiest collectors and those chic enough to don the correct shade of black battled for pieces of pop art created by Warhol-esque alpha dogs to emerging Basquiat-ish boot-strappy pups. The art-historical influences I glimpsed in works going into the tent included Barney, Calder, Magritte, Mondrian, Rothko, and possibly a hamster wheel. (Unfortunately for my tastes, no artists appeared to be influenced by canine art great George Rodrigue.)
With my giant snout, I picked up the scent of Frieze’s famous food program — pure torture, I assure you, given my notably empty stomach. In addition to Mission Chinese and Roberta’s, there was a secret watering hole for those who could only enter upon receiving a secret key, and “Food 1971/2013,” a working homage to the long-defunct artist-run eatery. Alas, no one thought to throw this 400-pound pooch a bone, or a large biscuit-shaped pneumatic objet d’art, or indeed even one of Tom Friedman’s giant-sized Twinkie snacks, on view at Luhring Augustine.
With my sensitive 30-foot ears, I could also pick up the cacophony emanating from Frieze Sounds exhibit. “Hercules” by Trisha Baga sampled everyday sounds and smoothly transformed them into a rave-era club mix, culminating with an array of found clips and soundtrack scores. It was catchy, had a bouncy beat, and you could bug out to it. Or in my case, you could sway gently back and forth in the breeze to it.
After a few days of braving end-of-times weather and the speech pattern of young women? who speak? like they’re always? asking questions? I began to hallucinate. Sunday night I thought that an advertising blimp was a flying dachshund coming to sniff me.
But I digress. As I waited for the curator’s assistant to come deflate and pack me away, I couldn’t help but ponder my existence. Was my creator Paul McCarthy thumbing his nose at Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog” or the garden-variety birthday clowns by making me? These are questions I leave for ARTINFO to answer as I’m folded neatly away for my new owner.
All I know is that come Art Basel I expect Paul to blow up an enticing poodle or Chihuahua beside me. Even inflatable art starts to feel a little lonely at the fairs.
As far as biennial concepts go, the “encyclopedic palace” is a smart one. It justifies in one fell swoop the inclusion of pretty much anything that might tickle the curator’s fancy while knowingly nodding to the quixotic nature of the exercise — and the loaded history that comes with it (imperial or otherwise). The curator of the 55th Venice Biennale, Massimiliano Gioni, takes his cues from a utopian project devised by Marino Auriti, an Italian-American oddball, who, in 1955, patented the design for a Capitol-like building to host all human knowledge: Il Enciclopedico Palazzo del Mondo. Not unexpectedly, Auriti’s palace was never realized, but the concept provided Gioni with a metaphor for the unquenchable curiosity that has spurred artists, scientists, and enthusiasts of all stripes since the dawn of time. The curator is pointedly making no distinction here between visual artists and so-called outsiders, artworks and artefacts. It’s very much in keeping with the Zeitgeist: at the last dOCUMENTA, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev featured Batrician Princesses (stone sculptures from the 3rd millennia B.C.) at the conceptual core of her exhibition at the Fridericianum; at Margate’s Turner Contemporary, Cabinet editor Brian Dillon has just opened an exhibition based, like the magazine itself, on the cabinet of curiosity model; in Venice, the indefatigable James Brett has pitched the 7th version of his Museum of Everything (here, “Il Palazzo di Everything”) in the Giardini.
Gioni’s all-encompassing curatorial premise means he has included over 150 artists – almost twice as many as in “ILLUMInations,” the last Venice Biennale’s group exhibition curated by Bice Curiger. The risk was that he might end up with a wunderkammeresque assemblage of knick knacks, but Gioni has adroitly avoided that pitfall by favouring large pieces or full series of works, allowing for a satisfying experience of individual practices — both at the Arsenale, and at the International Pavilion in the Giardini, where the second part of “The Encyclopedic Palace” is staged. The curator doesn’t display one painting by Maria Lassnig — this year’s recipient, with Marisa Merz, of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement — but seven, spanning the German painter’s visceral struggle with mortality from 1972, Self Portrait Under Plastic, to the hauntingly emaciated bodies of Hospital (2005). Rather than picking just one picture from Imran Qureshi’s Moderate Enlightenment series — which portrays contemporary characters using the ancient Mughal technique of miniature — Gioni has selected nine of them, the sheer critical mass enhancing their unsettling qualities.
For an exhibition embracing the multifarious forms that knowledge and creativity can take, “The Encyclopedic Palace”is remarkably restrained, at least to start with. At the Arsenale, it opens with an elegant juxtaposition of Auriti’s original maquette with J. D. Okhai Ojeikere’s black-and-white photographs of women’s braidings and headdresses in Nigeria, documenting a changing tradition in the wake of decolonization. Artists’ psyches, governed each by their own logic, unravel room after room. Gioni places them under the aegis of Carl Jung’s Red Book (1914-30), the psychoanalyst’s iconic volume for which he drew his patients’ dreams and visions with the precision of a medieval monk. Lin Xue’s meticulous ink-on-paper abstractions (Untitled (Scroll No.2) (1995-98) reply to Roberto Cuoghi’s monumental rendition of the Assyrian demon Pazuzu (Belinda, 2013). Other highlights include a selection of Yüksel Arslan’s Artures (from “art” and the French écriture), a series of drawings combining elements of philosophical musings, medical treatises, botany, and biology; Eugene Von Bruenchenhein’s domestic erotica with the photographic series Untitled (Marie) (c. 1943-60), featuring his wife as a pin-up; and Papa Ibra Tall’s oneiric acrylics on board, which capture pan-African myths championed by the négritude movement, as conceptualized and promoted by his friend and mentor Léopold Sédar Senghor.
“The Encyclopedic Palace” effortlessly bridges periods and continents, teasing out affinities between artists with nothing more in common than a bulimic curiosity — and often prolific production. Several of the pieces on show defy the predominant aesthetic of their time. The large, rough-hewn sculptures of human figures by Hans Josephsohn resemble tribal statues from the Pacific — or perhaps sub-Saharan Africa — and Phyllida Barlow’s suspended polystyrene boulders nod to the archaic (untitled: hanginglumpcoalblack, 2012 and untitled: hanginglump 2, 2012). Paintings of monstrous creatures and hellish landscapes by the young Jakub Julian Ziółkowski hark back to Hieronymus Bosch. The clay bestiary by Shinichi Sawada, a severely autistic Japanese artist who started working on his phantasmagorical monsters at a facility for mentally impaired people, is a real gem. It shines all the more installed, as it is at the Arsenale, inside a rotunda, at the centre of a room otherwise dedicated to alt comics god R. Crumb’s cartoon version of the Book of Genesis.
As you trek through it, the show gradually progresses towards a more contemporary understanding of knowledge distribution. Albert Oehlen’s collages (all Untitled, 2009) reconfigure snippets of mass-produced images, and Pamela Rosenkranz’s Because They Try to Bore – Death of Yves Klein (2013) challenges the artist’s mystic idealism by presenting flawed versions of his IKB monochromes based on JPEGs found on the Internet. A trio of UK-based artists — the hotly-tipped Helen Marten and James Richard, shown alongside their predecessor in the rhizomatic exploration of information overload, Mark Leckey — offers a particularly strong moment in the Arsenale. Restaging an exhibition the artist curated at The Bluecoat in Liverpool which investigated what he calls “techno-animism” (a quasi-ritualistic power granted to everyday objects), Leckey’s The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things (2013) functions as a show-within-a-show, echoing and distorting Gioni’s “Encyclopedic Palace”.
This stretch culminates with a mini retrospective of works by avant-garde filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, installed as a kaleidoscope of simultaneously projected collaged and abstract pieces (a direct reference to his now-legendary “Movie Drome”). Most of these films are from the 1960s, yet — and despite their somewhat retro aesthetic — the ensemble feels very topical. VanDerBeek had a prescient grasp of the way images, information, and knowledge would come to be consumed, and this display would have made a perfect grand finale to “The Encyclopedic Palace.” But the show doesn’t stop there. Gioni drags the exhibition a little further along with Otto Piene’s Light Ballets, Bruce Nauman’s video installation showing his gyrating head Raw Material with Continuous Shift-MMMM (1991), and two walls of monitors featuring Dieter Roth’s Solo Scenes videos (1997-1998), which document the artist’s everyday activities from the creative to the trivial. The curator’s chosen grand finale is Walter de Maria’s Apollo’s Ectasy (1990), 20 solid bronze rods elegantly arranged on the floor in parallel diagonals. It’s a stunning piece of work. Yet with its Greek mythology reference and pure minimal aesthetic, it seems to allude to ideas of universality and transcendence that have been repeatedly undermined throughout The Encyclopedic Palace. With VanDerBeek’s filmic extravaganza, this vast show could have ended with a bang — instead, it trails off. Nevertheless, it is a testiment to the strength of the vision here that such a detail cannot undo the success of Gioni’s endeavour, which is no doubt the most successful Venice Biennale exhibition in recent years.
