Sequential art at the 58th Venice Art Biennale, 2019
Posted: October 13, 2019 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, contemporary art, exhibition, photography, Venice Biennale 1 CommentThere isn’t much on display resembling comics at this year’s Biennale (May 11 – November 24) and no participation of a famous comic artist as in 2017 or 2013. Here’s what caught my eye:
Darren Bader (not to be confused with fantasy illustrator Daren Bader) set up a comic book vending machine at the Arsenale. Somehow I failed to get a comic out of the machine, but there are pictures online that show that there are copies of an actual comic inside.
Also at the Arsenale, an episode of Ian Cheng‘s comic Life After BOB is displayed on large backlit panels. Not the ideal form of presentation, as the lower portions are hard to read. A printed pamphlet version is sold at the Biennale shop at an outrageous price. An interactive video installation based on the titular character is shown at the Giardini.
Many of Igor Grubić‘s photographic tableaux at the Croation pavilion can be considered sequential art. In this example, the accompanying text mentions first the floor tiles and then the step at the entrance, so the photos are best read from top left to bottom right (or clockwise). In others, the photos form a sequence from exterior to interior, or from wide shot to close up.
Anne Kuhn‘s photographic diptych in the pavilion of Mozambique, Seychelles and Kiribati is based on a scene in Marguerite Duras’s novel, The Ravishing of Lol Stein. In an earlier edition of the book, “ravissement” was translated as “rapture”, and Kuhn’s work is a convincing illustration of this state: in one moment, the young woman is standing in a room full of people, and in the next she experiences a rapture that makes her feels as if she is levitating and she becomes oblivious of everyone around her. This diptych is part of Kuhn’s Héroïnes series in which only some works follow this action-to-action transition pattern.
As always, there are those artists who use comics only as a quarry from which they incorporate bits and pieces into their works, but the results are not sequential themselves. One such artist is Christian Marclay whose Scream series is shown at the Arsenale. These prints are composed of wooden planks and manga character close ups. (Another artist working with images from comics is Goo Sung Kyun at the Mozambique/Seychelles/Kiribati pavilion.)
Sequential art at the 57th Venice Art Biennale, 2017
Posted: November 1, 2017 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, contemporary art, exhibition, Joe Sacco, Venice Biennale 1 CommentThis year’s Biennale is once again a spectacular art show and, like the 2013 Biennale, counts a famous comic artist among its participants (see below). It is still open until November 26. These are all the sequential artworks I’ve seen there:
At the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, Kosovan artist Petrit Halilaj has made a wallpaper (ABETARE, 2015) out of his old Albanian alphabet book. On some pages it contained picture stories such as this one of the fable of the fox and the crow.
Abdullah Al Saadi keeps Diaries (2016) in the form of leporellos stored in metal boxes, ostensibly inspired by the Dead Sea Scrolls. Some of his notes contain possibly sequential images.
In his All Images from… series (2015), Ciprian Mureşan copies pictures from books – monographs of painters such as Correggio or Giotto, or museum catalogues – on a single sheet of paper, thus juxtaposing (and overlaying) formerly separate images. It would be interesting to find out if the arrangement on the sheet of paper corresponds to the sequence of pictures in the book, or to the order in which Mureşan drew them.
Our Naufrage 1-10 (2014) by Hajra Waheed apparently tells the story of a shipwreck of migrants. Maybe this arrangement of the paintings on a shelf is already sufficient to speak of juxtaposed sequential images.
Some of the exhibited works were rather old, such as this sequence of photographs taken by János Vető of a performance by Tibor Hajas from 1978.
At the national pavilions in the Giardini, we find a work that isn’t sequential itself but includes an actual comic: in Takahiro Iwasaki‘s Tectonic Model (Flow) from 2017 at the Japanese pavilion, one of the books is a copy of the second volume of Katsuhiro Ōtomo’s Akira.
At the Hungarian pavilion, these two sequences by Gyula Várnai are meant to be part of the same work, E-Wars. One shows photographs of an ISIS missile attack overlaid with a mathematical formula supposed to represent an “algorithm also used by Google to collect user information” (pavilion leaflet). The other sequence adapts the animated opening of the Soviet children’s science television show Хочу всё знать (“I Want to Know Everything”).
At the Arsenale, we find works by the only famous cartoonist at the Biennale: excerpts from The Unwanted (2010) by Joe Sacco, mounted on large boards, arranged with some other artworks, and dispersed throughout the room that accommodates the national contribution of his native Malta. I’m not sure if reproductions of a rather old comic displayed in this way contribute to the acceptance of comics into the world of ‘high art’, but maybe it’s better than nothing. The whole story can be read at The Virginia Quarterly Review where it was first published. There you can see how entire panels were cut off from the page as displayed at the Biennale, pictured above.
Jean Boghossian‘s exhibition at the Armenian pavilion is distributed between Palazzo Ca’Zenobio and Santa Croce degli Armeni. At both sites, his Livres brûlés can be seen (and one even flipped through) – paper objects with marks made by fire.
It’s no coincidence that the drawings by Radenko Milak at the Bosnian pavilion look like film stills, as he also directed an animated film which can be seen as well at Palazzo Malipiero.
EDIT: I just remembered there’s one more comic. While The Aalto Natives by Nathaniel Mellors and Erkka Nissinen at the Finnish pavilion is an animatronics installation, the pavilion leaflet contains this one-page wordless comic which sums up the plot of the installation.
Sequential art at documenta 14
Posted: October 15, 2017 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, contemporary art, documenta, exhibition, Kassel Leave a commentThe 2017 edition of the documenta art show ended on September 17 with a slight increase in visitors, but also a financial deficit. While the danger of a discontinuation of the exhibition series seems to have been averted, many visitors (including this one) felt disappointed or at least underwhelmed with regard to the majority of art that was on display.
Like five years ago, the documenta didn’t include any proper comics as far as I could see, but lots of sequential artworks that fit Scott McCloud’s definition of comics. Here are some of them (only from the Kassel portion of the show, not from Athens which co-hosted this documenta):
The Fridericianum venue was almost entirely taken over by works from the National Museum of Contemporary Art (EMST) in Athens. This array of 192 inkjet prints is XYZ 1550 – Placebo 97 from 2015 by Lucas Samaras. Their arrangement implies a vague sequence, and each of them is composed of multiple panels.
Most works from the EMST were rather old, though, such as this painted Newspaper Book from around 1962 by Chryssa.
A clever piece of conceptual photography in which two photographers pass by each other on a staircase, also out of the EMST collection but by Belgian artist Danny Matthys: Brabantdam 59, Gent, Downstairs-Upstairs from 1975.
Another Greek work in the Fridericianum: Diary (Robinson Crusoe) from 2008, a book with sewn lines by Nina Papaconstantinou.
Prints of photographs from documenta 2 (1959) by none other than Hans Haacke.
Images in Matter from 1995 by Rena Papaspyrou. On closer inspection, these ‘books’ made of stone, metal and wood bear faint ink drawings.
Over at the documenta Halle, the long embroidered canvas Historja (2003-08) by Britta Marakatt-Labba supposedly tells the history of the Sami people.
At the Neue Galerie, a kind of storyboard (Atelierul: Scenariul, 1978) by Geta Brătescu is exhibited next to the corresponding video.
Grimmwelt Kassel is the successor of the old Brothers Grimm museum and was used as a documenta venue for the first time. The primary exhibit here was The Blind Merchant (1989-91) by Roee Rosen, a kind of revision or reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice with illustrations, some of which consist of multiple panels.
Sequential art at the 56th Venice Art Biennale, 2015
Posted: October 11, 2015 Filed under: review | Tags: comics, contemporary art, drawing, exhibition, Italian, photography, Venice Biennale Leave a commentLast time at the Biennale, Robert Crumb’s Genesis was prominently exhibited, which was already a pleasant surprise from a comics perspective. But who would have thought there was going to be a comic specifically made for the Biennale (Francesc Ruiz’s, see below) this time?
As always, there are probably works of sequential art that I’ve missed, so the works featured here (click images to enlarge) are just an incomplete selection. All works are from 2015 unless indicated otherwise. The Venice Art Biennale still runs until November 22.
A Small Guide to the Invisible Seas, an artist’s book by Aikaterini Gegisian, is on display at the Armenian pavilion on San Lazzaro degli Armeni island. It consists of collages of photographs – juxtaposed images, as it were – arranged on top of or within each other, so that the chronology of placing the pictures into the collage (from back to front) implies a sequentiality. Another sequentiality is suggested by the ostensibly different times at which the photographs were taken (e.g. black-and-white followed by colour images).
Also exhibited at the Armenian pavilion is Rotolo Armeno from 1991 by Yervant Gianikian and Angela Ricci Lucchi. It is a large paper scroll (17 × 0,8 m) filled with watercolour drawings in vertical tiers, which are to be read from top to bottom and left to right. The drawings re-tell ancient Armenian fairytales.
Moving on to the central exhibition at the Arsenale, one of the first works exhibited there is Terry Adkins‘s Liquid Gardens from 2012. A rack similar to those displaying posters for sale holds photographs of parachutists. Apart from the “first” and the “last” one, these pictures can only be seen in pairs – juxtaposed –, and their similarity of form and content hints at a possible chronological relation (i.e. McCloudian closure).
Zwischen Lagos und Berlin by Karo Akpokiere, also part of the central exhibition at the Arsenale, is a series of fifty framed pictures of equal format. Some of them are single image drawings, some are text-only, and some contain multiple images which form little comics, like the one pictured. In his pictures, Akpokiere reflects on life as a Nigerian immigrant in Berlin.
Several large glass cases at the Arsenale are filled with diverse works by Ricardo Brey, including some leporellos (from around 2011). It’s hard not to think of such a leporello as a comic (in McCloud’s sense): no matter how you open it, you will almost always see juxtaposed images, and ideally the cover tells you where to start reading it, thus suggesting sequentiality.
William Kentridge is better known as a creator of animated films. However, his Omaggio all’Italia charcoal drawings shown at the Italian pavilion are preparatory sketches not for a film, but for a large-scale frieze to be realised in Rome next year. The figures are taken from Italian history, but arranged in non-chronological order. The arrangement is not quite random, though: “It proceeds through a series of free associations of images where the past enters into dialogue with the present”, says the accompanying text. “Distant episodes are linked. Differences are connected. Unexpected analogies lead the way. We are invited to retrace the decisive moments in the history of Rome. In a journey that goes from Remus to Pasolini.”
At the pavilion of Macao, next to the Arsenale central exhibition area, Mio Pang Fei has arranged several items of everyday use on a table, forming the installation The Special Era (II). Among them are three traditional Chinese comic books (lianhuanhua). All objects are from the times of the Cultural Revolution, and the installation is meant as a critique thereof.
Factory of the Sun is a short film by Hito Steyerl shown at the German pavilion in the Giardini. Part of it is animated, with characters drawn in manga/anime style.
The aforementioned “actual” comics by Francesc Ruiz are shown at the Spanish pavilion in the Giardini. Titled Il Fumetto dei Giardini, this series of black-and-white pamphlets places pre-existing gay comic characters into photographed backgrounds of the Giardini. It might not be the most beautiful comic ever made, but still: a comic made specifically for the Biennale is quite a sensation. Related to this comic is another work exhibited in the same room, a newsstand stacked exclusively with gay comics.
Not officially part of the Biennale, but concurrent with it (September 1st – November 1st), is the exhibition “Imago Mundi – Map of the New Art” on San Giorgio Maggiore island. It consists of thousands of artworks in the format of 10 × 12 cm by different artists from all over the world. Among the German artworks, I was delighted to discover a panel by Simon Schwartz.
Sequential art at the 55th Venice Biennale
Posted: October 17, 2013 Filed under: review | Tags: C. G. Jung, comics, contemporary art, drawing, Evgenij Kozlov, Georgian, Italian, Matt Mullican, museums, paño, performance, photography, Robert Crumb, Venice Biennale, Yüksel Arslan 3 CommentsLast week I visited the Biennale di Venezia, which still runs until November 24th. There seem to be far more comics-related artworks there than at the documenta last year, possibly due to this year’s topic of the Biennale, “The Encyclopedic Palace”. Here are some that caught my eye (click on images to enlarge):
At the Arsenale, one of the two central exhibition spaces, the first work that bears some resemblance to comics is Yüksel Arslan‘s series of drawings. Most of them are from the 1960s and 80s already. They are quite enigmatic, but at least some of them seem to be arranged in sequences on the same sheet, not unlike panels in a comic.
Then there’s Robert Crumb, of course. The inclusion of his Genesis isn’t that much of a sensation, as his work was exhibited at art museums before. Furthermore, the display at the Biennale (all of the original drawings in a long row) didn’t invite people to read much of it. Still, it’s good to see a proper comic at such an art show.
Comics theory usually negates the role of writing (as in script) in order to account for wordless comics. The drawings of Matt Mullican might pose a challenge to that point of view, as they consist of letters and numbers only. At the same time, they can also be regarded as images, which form deliberate sequences.
Some of the paño (“cloth”) drawings by Mexican American prisoners seem to tell a story in several distinct images, even though there are no panel borders. The order of the images and the overall story remain somewhat vague.
This photo book in the Georgian pavilion documents a performance. But is this photo comic a work of art in itself, or just a medium of the actual artwork, the performance? The same doubts apply to the photographs documenting Fabio Mauri’s performance Ideologia e Natura at the Italian pavilion (not pictured, but see the installation view here or here (websites in Italian)).
Carl Gustav Jung is better known as a psychoanalyst, but as his Red Book shows, he was also an accomplished artist. Some of the drawings are abstract, some figurative, some are combined with text and some are not. And some of them undoubtedly are connected to sequences. In this case it is a pity that not all of the pages are exhibited, as it is hard to figure out the narrative by reading only the short segments on display.
Finally, mounted on a large wall are the erotic drawings made by the teenager Evgenij Kozlov in Leningrad in the 1960s and 70s. Some of them form little stories extending over several sheets. There’s also some writing on them, albeit in Russian. Regardless of what one might think of their individual quality, the inclusion of such older works (also Jung’s, Mauri’s, Arslan’s and others) in a contemporary art show strikes me as a condescending rather than reverential gesture. It’s a gesture that basically says: these works are only worthy to be exhibited because of their age, out of historical interest. But it’s not as if there wasn’t enough good and interesting art produced today that could have been exhibited instead, as the rest of the Biennale amply proves.
Raymond Bellour’s fragmented perception – in comics?
Posted: August 16, 2013 Filed under: review | Tags: art history, comics, contemporary art, film, polyvision, Raymond Bellour, reception aesthetics, Subnormality, theory, video, webcomics, Winston Rowntree 1 CommentRaymond Bellour’s essay “Of an other cinema” (PDF) was first published in French as “D’un autre cinéma” in 2000. While parts of it read like merely a review of video installation works at the 1999 Venice Biennial, the article has become an important contribution to the theory of video art. Bellour’s main point is that video installations are a different kind of cinema, and they (often) transform cinema by “dividing and multiplying” the image in several channels. Because of the difficulty to keep track of what’s going on on multiple screens at the same time, Bellour characterises the video art recipient as a “dissolved, fragmented, shaken, intermittent spectator”. Other terms used by Bellour to describe such phenomena are: “aesthetics of confusion”, “expansion of projection”, “segmentation”, “exploded story”, “explosion of perception”, or (after Abel Gance) “polyvision”.
This fragmented perception that Bellour describes is specific to (and characteristic of, maybe even defining for) video installation art. But isn’t there something similar in comics? In a way, such experiences of fragmented perception occur quite often when reading comics of several pages length: as you flip the comic open to start reading it from page 1, you involuntarily glance at another page, say, page 42. You can force yourself to continue reading from page 1, but you cannot forget what you have already seen on 42. It’s as if something is already happening in the story on page 42, at the same time that you’re reading page 1. In this respect, each comic page (or each double page) is like a screen or a channel in a video installation, as only one can be perceived at a time, while on each another segment of the story unfolds simultaneously.
But there are certain comics which are even closer to what Bellour describes. I’m thinking of experimental comics, particularly “choose you own adventure”-style comics with parallel story branches. As an example, I initially wanted to dig up a particular episode of Winston Rowntree’s Subnormality that employed this method, but I discovered that the latest episode, 214: “Accidentally Insulting a Friend”, serves this purpose just as well. Instead of embedding the original image of this webcomic here, I suggest you follow the link to read it.
For the first five panels, this comic is relatively traditional, as we follow the conversation of the two young women in a car. Then, by the sixth panel, things get interesting. Which is the sixth panel, actually? Which is the seventh? The reading order up to this point was left-to-right and top-to-bottom, but that wouldn’t make sense at this point anymore, as the comic is split into a left branch and a right branch, which show what’s going on inside each protagonist’s head (plus the middle branch with the traffic light panels). The branches unite again towards the end of the episode, but in the middle, they unfold in parallel, both spatially and chronologically. You can start by reading the left branch first and then scroll up to continue with the top panel on the right hand side, or vice versa. However, while you’re reading the branch you’ve chosen to start with, you’re missing out on what’s happening at the same time in the other one. Thus, as the story of this comic “explodes”, the perception of it is fragmented, not unlike that of a multi-channel video installation.
Stencil graffiti website goes semantic
Posted: April 21, 2013 Filed under: street art | Tags: age, art history, chronology, contemporary art, Freiburg, geography, German, graffiti, Linked Data, Linked Open Data, painting, RDFa, semantic web, spray painting, stencil graffiti, street art, website Leave a comment
As a first step towards releasing the information on my stencil graffiti website as Linked Open Data, I have now created XHTML+RDFa files for all graffiti. They can be found in the directory http://graffiti.freiburg.bplaced.net/lod/, or by clicking on the RDFa icon in each entry. These files contain only two pieces of information so far (not counting ID and licence): place and date. Now that they have been normalised (to the W3C Basic Geo and Dublin Core vocabulary, respectively) and cast in standard RDFa syntax, it should be easy to query and analyse this data, and to re-use it in mashups.
I did a short presentation on this conversion recently, the slides of which can be found on SlideShare (in German). The next steps are obvious: there is still a lot of information on the website that could be normalised, expressed in RDFa, and added to the XHTML files. Once I’ve got round to that I’ll post about it. As a good resource for getting started with Linked Open Data, I recommend Ed Summers’s recent paper “Linking Things on the Web: A Pragmatic Examination of Linked Data for Libraries, Archives and Museums”.
A rose is a rose: flower photography by Luzia Simons and Sarah Jones
Posted: September 22, 2012 Filed under: review | Tags: Brazilian, British, contemporary art, flowers, German, Goslar, Luzia Simons, Mönchehaus Museum, museums, photography, Sarah Jones, still life 2 Comments
Sarah Jones, The Rose Gardens (display: II) (III), c-type print, 152 x 122 cm, 2007
The poster (PDF) advertising the exhibition “Lost Paradise: Blumenbilder in der Fotografie der Gegenwart” (“Flower pictures of contemporary photography”, Mönchehaus Museum Goslar, 11.8.-23.9.2012) shows an arrangement of flowers in front of a black background. Now if that isn’t by Sarah Jones, I thought. Jones’s series The Rose Garden (or Gardens) is exactly that: brightly lit rose bushes standing out against an impenetrable darkness. When I learned that the photograph used for the poster was by one Luzia Simons instead, I was even more intrigued to go to Goslar to see the show, amazed that two different but contemporary photographers could come up with such similar pictures.
Of course, flower still lives with black backgrounds have a long tradition – in oil painting. Simply recreating such paintings in the medium of photography isn’t what Jones does either: her roses are not arranged in vases or on tables, but blossom on living shrubs, which she encounters in public parks, apparently. In the Goslar exhibition, where six works from Simons’s Stockage series are displayed, it becomes clear that her approach is different from both the old masters and Jones. Simons doesn’t just shoot photographs but makes scanograms: she places cut flowers (tulips, not roses, by the way) on the glass of a customized scanner, which then produces a digital image of them.
Luzia Simons, Stockage 99, LightJet print, 160 x 236.5 cm, 2011
One of the results is the luminosity of the flowers in contrast to the completely black background, just as in Jones’s works. Other effects mark a clear difference: you can see where pollen has fallen on the glass plate, petals and leaves bend against it, and the arrangement of the flowers is unlike that in a bouquet or shrub; they seem to grow into the picture from all directions, leaving the beholder puzzled about whether the laws of gravity are still in effect here.
Both Luzia Simons and Sarah Jones draw attention to their respective production process. They make the beholder wonder how they could achieve this contrast in lighting, and at the same time they manage to create beautiful pictures. The “Lost Paradise” show (which Jones isn’t part of, unfortunately) is an impressive proof that flower still life is a genre of surprising timeliness.
Sequential art at documenta (13)
Posted: June 18, 2012 Filed under: review | Tags: Amar Kanwar, art history, Caricatura, comics, contemporary art, documenta, drawing, German, Gustav Metzger, Kassel, Khadim Ali, museums, Nedko Solakov, Neue Galerie, painting, photography 2 CommentsComics will be part of documenta when hell freezes over. However, there are some works at this year’s documenta (Kassel, June 9 – September 16) that come quite close to the McCloudian definition of comics. The following list is just a personal selection and by no means meant to be exhaustive.
The very first work I’ve seen at documenta could actually be called a comic, sort of. In the Ottoneum, Amar Kanwar has several books (and other things) on display. One of them, Photo Album 1: The Lying Down Protest, documents a protest action in India through a series of photographs, sometimes with captions added. There is one photo on each page, on both sides of the leaf, resulting in a layout similar to that of Martin tom Dieck’s hundert Ansichten der Speicherstadt (cf. my essay).
For an exhibition of contemporary art, there is a lot of old art to be seen, e.g. a sizeable collection of abstract drawings from the 1940s and 50s by Gustav Metzger in the Documenta-Halle. Some of these drawings are arranged like comic panels, i.e. in different sizes, with clear borders, on the same sheet of paper. Are these drawings meant as independent sketches which Metzger placed closely together on the sheet only to save paper? Or is there a relation between adjacent drawings, maybe even an intended sequence?
Another example of a not-quite-contemporary exhibit is Charlotte Salomon’s widely publicized Leben? Oder Theater?
Khadim Ali‘s four-part painting The Haunted Lotus in the Neue Galerie is reminiscent in style of traditional East Asian religious paintings, but at the same time the framing makes it look like a panel sequence in a comic: the continuous background evokes a “tracking shot” from left to right or vice versa, so that each of the four parts can be seen as one point in a chronological sequence. The figures in the foreground remain largely the same in all four parts of the painting, thus giving the impression that some figures move between the “panels” while others stand still. Another comic-like feature is the writing next to the figures’ heads.
Then there’s Nedko Solakov at the Brothers Grimm Museum. Among many other works, some drawings are shown in several display cases. Their arrangement in two horizontal lines suggests a sequential relation between them, but although each drawing has a handwritten caption text on it, it’s hard to make out any order in which they could form a narrative. Still, the surrounding works by Solakov strongly suggest a narrative reading, since they are all about his dreams and fantasies of medieval knights in shiny armours.
All in all, while not completely absent, sequential art is sadly underrepresented at documenta (13). Unfortunately, the exhibition of comical art, Caricatura VI, which is on in Kassel at the same time, doesn’t show many comics either, although it contains cartoons by comic artists such as Guido Sieber, Harm Bengen or Nicolas Mahler.
Review: Michael Fried’s Four Honest Outlaws
Posted: February 24, 2012 Filed under: review | Tags: Anri Sala, art history, Charles Ray, contemporary art, Douglas Gordon, Michael Fried, reception aesthetics, sculpture, theory, US, video, Yale University Press 2 Comments
Title: Four Honest Outlaws. Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon
Language: English
Author: Michael Fried
Year: 2011
Publisher: Yale University Press
Pages: 245
Price: $45
Website: http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300170535
ISBN: 978-0-300-17053-5
I consider some of Michael Fried’s previous writings (especially Art and Objecthood, Absorption and Theatricality, and Why Photography Matters…) to rank among the best works in the field of reception aesthetics, or at any rate to be highly relevant for my own current research. Consequently I thought I’d read his latest book too, in which he applies his theory to individual works of video art and, again, sculpture and painting.
The objective of Four Honest Outlaws is modest: Fried’s “intention from the first was simply to write four essays (originally four lectures) about contemporary artists whose work [Fried] had come to regard as remarkable.” (201) So why were these four lectures collected into a book? Are the four artists covered in them really united by a common trait (apart from the liking that Fried has taken to them)? Fried says, “each of my four artists lives outside the law in that he has found his own unsanctioned path to highly original achievement, and each is honest in that he has done so in part by refusing to succumb to a cultural consensus that has lost almost all sense of artistic quality, philosophical seriousness, and, it sometimes seems, hope for the future.” (204) – hence the title of the book. I say, Fried wanted to publish another book without having to actually write one, and Yale UP let him get away with it.
That being said, each of the four essays is interesting in itself alright. Fried has chosen his artists wisely: their popularity is of such an intermediate degree that the reader might have already seen some, but probably not all of their works discussed in the book. At least that was the case for me. In any case, the book comes with a DVD with examples of the works by the two video artists, Anri Sala and Douglas Gordon, which is not only a helpful, but an essential element of the reading experience. Generally, Yale UP once again did a good job in the design of the book, although some readers might find the “square” page layout (i.e. all four margins are roughly equal) a bit too daring.
What I like most about Four Honest Outlaws are the parts where Fried deals with his own theoretical terms – absorption and theatricality, to-be-seenness, strikingness, facingness, presence and presentness, etc. In fact, he discusses his previous publications in the entire foreword (although I’m not sure if this would be a sufficient substitute for actually reading them). However, for large parts of the book, Fried seems to wear his art critic’s hat. By that I don’t mean his praise of his favourite artists, but his vitriol for others: he makes several ‘offhand’ remarks on artists he apparently doesn’t like (Bill Viola, John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage), but he doesn’t say why. He even calls an installation by Sam Taylor-Wood “idiotic” and says the participating performers “should be ashamed”. Maybe they should, but Fried should be ashamed as well for such coarse bashing.
There are other parts of the book in which Fried is surprisingly superficial. I grant Fried that he’s more interested in form than in content, but when he talks about content, he really should do it more thoroughly. For instance, in the chapter on sculptor Charles Ray, Fried ignores any ethical implications. Is Ray’s Oh Charley, Charley, Charley… really a depiction of “group masturbation”, or could it be also seen as homosexual group sex? Why is the four-year-old boy in The New Beetle naked? Why is the nude portrait sculpture of fellow artist Jennifer Proctor titled Aluminium Girl? What became of the chickens which Ray raised in his studio for his work Chicken? It looks like such questions were too uncomfortable for Fried to even raise, let alone answer them (though he does touch upon the subject of animal exploitation when discussing Douglas Gordon).
Still, I can’t deny that Four Honest Outlaws is an interesting read, but I would have expected more from a Michael Fried book.
Rating: ● ● ● ○ ○
The 650-Cent Plague 