CONTENTS:
Pavel Büchler - Interviewed by Patricia Bickers
Right Shift - Morgan Quaintance
Smithson’s Legacy - Paul O’Kane
Venice Biennale - Griselda Pollock • Shama Khanna
Interview
Honest Work
Pavel Büchler interviewed by David Briers
Czech-born conceptual artist Pavel Büchler has long been an influential figure beyond his role as a professor at Manchester School of Art. Here he discusses the value of uselessness and obsolescence, boredom and insincerity – and the avoidance of honest work.
'We live in a culture of jobholders (and jobseekers) where almost all identity is derived from what you do for a living. Within this culture the ambiguity of artistic practice as a job is what really creates a space for it and what gives artistic production a meaning as a kind of idle protest against the way things are, including the ways in which our professional and personal identities are formed, seen and understood.'
Feature
Right Shift
Morgan Quaintance on the end of post-internet art
The recent shift to the political right has been mirrored by a celebrated group of so-called post-internet artists whose work embraces an aesthetic that relinquishes criticality for a compliance with corporate thinking. Grab a bag of popcorn and watch as the movement implodes.
'Broadly speaking, from 2011 to 2015 post-internet art has been operating at varying levels of intensity around the "peak of inflated expectations". It is now descending headfirst into the "trough of disillusionment".'
Feature
Downtime
Paul O'Kane on Robert Smithson's continuing relevance
Robert Smithson's 'A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic' set the tenuousness of cultural meaning into a long history that stretched forwards and backwards through astronomical time. So what are contemporary artists unearthing as they continue to dig through his text almost 50 years on?
'Robert Smithson's text begins in that special, unorganised and uncommodified downtime, often gifted by chance and necessary to the artist, poet, flâneur or wandering photographer for an imaginative, inspired and individuated experience to occur.'
From the Back Catalogue
Robert Smithson Now For all its environmental, theoretical and literary significance Smithson’s work was above all visual insists Joseph Masheck
Comment
Editorial
Everything Will Be Taken Away
The Venice Biennale offers a chance to survey the civil rights gains that have been made over the years, but with a clear understanding of how precarious these gains are. Is the recent lurch to the right, with borders blocked and unions threatened, a sign of reversals to come?
'Adrian Piper herself, who is now based in Berlin, knows what it is to have things taken away from her: in 2008 she refused to return to the US from Berlin, where she was on unpaid leave from her post as a professor at the prestigious Wellesley College, because she was listed as a "suspicious traveller" on the US Transportation Security Administration Watch List; instead of supporting her case the college responded by terminating her contract.'
Artnotes
Protesters close the Guggenheim in New York; activist artists are blocked from entering the UAE; an arts patron and activist is assassinated in Pakistan; Christoph Büchel's Icelandic pavilion in Venice is threatened with closure by the authorities for being a 'threat to safety'; artists fail to get elected in the UK but succeed in getting their messages across – if they have one; the National Gallery strike turns even more bitter as the gallery sacks a union representative; the latest news on galleries, appointments, prizes and more.
Obituary
Chris Burden 1946-2015
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Exhibitions
56th Venice Biennale
various venues
Griselda Pollock
Shama Khanna
Modern History vol 1
Grundy Art Gallery, Blackpool
Bob Dickinson
Faiza Butt: Paracosm
New Art Exchange, Nottingham
Virginia Whiles
Maud Sulter: Passion
Street Level Photoworks, Glasgow
Ella S Mills
Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness
Whitechapel Gallery, London
Paul Carey-Kent
Carol Bove/Carlo Scarpa
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
Carol Bove: The Plastic Unit
David Zwirner, London
Martin Herbert
Cally Spooner: Post-production
Spike Island, Bristol
Lizzie Lloyd
Vong Phaophanit & Claire Oboussier: it is as if
Block 336, London
David Barrett
Magic Mirror: Claude Cahun and Sarah Pucill
Nunnery Gallery, London
Mark Harris
London Round-up
Maureen Paley • Victoria Miro • Frith Street Gallery • Maddox Arts
Keren Goldberg
Reviews
Artists' Books
Katrina Palmer: End Matter
Jamie Sutcliffe walks an artist's book
'It is imperative to read, listen and walk the narratives proposed by End Matter in order to understand the way it performs its absences sculpturally, something it does deftly through describing the peripheries of an absent whole.'
Reports
Film
Essay Film Festival
Alex Fletcher is posed the question: why the essay film now?
'Laura Rascaroli questioned whether certain historical moments necessitate essayistic practices, such as the emergence of critical documentaries in the 1960s, and how such auteurs reflexively inscribed themselves into the purported objectivity of the form.'
Letter from Berlin
Lament for the Void
Brian Hatton on the overbuilding of architectural voids
'But if Berlin was itself a void at the centre of Cold War Europe, the architectural void was Mies Van Der Rohe's Neue Nationalgalerie: a cultural zoo-cage at a time when the main station of West Berlin – itself an exhibit of capitalism – was Zoo Bahnhof.'
Contracts
Permission to Sell
Henry Lydiate on a new global register of art sales
'The inclusion of restrictive reselling conditions in a contract of sale is not a new practice in the western art ecosystem, especially for the first/primary sale directly by the artist or via an agent/dealer; gallerist Andrea Rosen told the Wall Street Journal: "I have used these clauses on every invoice since I opened in 1990."' |