For years, the Swiss artist duo
Peter Fischli and
David Weiss have also been pursuing the question of what happens to people
as time passes. All their work appears as one loose sequence of images
borrowed from situations in which nothing really happens. It is the
persistent accumulation of this lack of occurrence, however, that goes to
the viewer's head in Fischli & Weiss' videos, photo works, and
projections. This is also the case with the installation Untitled
(questions), in which five slide projectors simultaneously shine
question after question in white letters onto the darkened walls. "Will
they find out?" appears for a moment in the left-hand corner, and a little
while later the merry sentence "Will happiness ever find me?" winds its
way throughout the room (
images). In a short period of time, the viewer is bombarded with hundreds
of questions of this kind. Any time he wants to ponder one of these
bizarre sentences, another, no less existential problem appears to take
its place. Fischli & Weiss are cleverly pitting the sluggishness of
reflection against the spontaneity of thought here. And evidently with
success: they were awarded this year's Golden Lion for their installation.
Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Untitled, 1991
©Deutsche Bank Collection
Fischli & Weiss' overblown self-encounter slide carousel is part of the
section entitled
"Delays and Revolutions" curated by Francesco Bonami and Daniel
Birnbaum. It is quite rightly situated at the center of the gardens, in
the Italian Pavilion. On the roof of the building,
Isa Genzken installed bamboo shoots that are visible from afar. Hair
grows the way it wants to, as the installation is called, is a playful
and yet deliberately brittle appropriation of the existing architecture.
In her work, Genzken breaks the modernist rigidity of the pavilion built
under Mussolini while countering the building with an exotic sense of
things growing wild, transplanted onto the austere regularity of the white
columns and the massive letters spelling out the word "Italia."
Isa Genzken, Untitled, 2001
©Deutsche Bank Collection
This is the kind of criticism – formulated in passing – that Birnbaum likes.
The curator, director of Frankfurt's
Städelschule for the past two years, has turned his attention to the
effects of a globalized "visual culture." If the world is constantly
forming itself anew, then where is artistic transformation still possible?
Even Warhol's15 minutes of fame have shrunk down to one-second TV camera
sweeps or a snapshot in some art magazine.
David Hammons, Praying to Safety, 1997
©Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago
For Birnbaum, the result is a broad field of "retrospect and delay" in which
art might indeed be produced with the present in mind, but only acquires
duration in temporal delay, far from the spectacle. In this vein, Birnbaum
combines old-school heroes such as the African American conceptual artist
David Hammons or
Dan Graham, represented by his video loop happening from 1974, with the
Brazilian
Rivane Neuschwander, born in 1967. For her work Globos,
Neuschwander had various sporting balls printed in national flags as
though the market battles waged by Nike and Adidas had long since been
replaced by the nation's logos.
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Richard Prince, Untitled (Cowboy), 1989
courtesy Barbara Gladstone, New York
The
mutual penetration of advertising and everyday life is a phenomenon
Richard Prince has already been treating with irony since the early
eighties. In Prince's work, one image devalues another: the Marlboro ad of
the smoking
cowboy doesn't lead us to the Western myth of freedom and adventure, but
to Easy Rider biker trash and their
girlfriends. It's only after an acid bath of marketing that the
(sub)cultural niches become icons: this is why his archaeology implements
the detour of re-photography to arrive at American symbols. Prince
photographs details from ads in order to call attention to gestures – as
in cigarette advertising, for instance – that have inscribed themselves
into a society's subconscious as attributes of cultural identity. That's
how we ride, that's how we smoke.
Richard Prince, Cameron Diaz, from "all the best", 2000
©Deutsche
Bank Collection
Richard Prince,
Denise Richards, from "all the best", 2000
©Deutsche Bank
Collection
Prince appropriates these motifs without altering
them, photographing them 1:1; in the process, however, their context
shifts. Suddenly, the advertising image reveals itself to be the original,
"discovered" to a certain extent in art's copying process. In the Italian
pavilion, the panoptical display of cowboys and rockers is astonishingly
reminiscent of Romantic landscape painting, yet at the same time it looks
as though it had been borrowed from a series of studies on an imaginary
"American Way of Life."
Thomas Bayrle, Untitled, 1965
©Deutsche Bank Collection
In a similar manner,
Thomas Bayrle's Autostrada module next door seems like an ornament
from the faded myths of mobility, and even
Franz Ackermann, with his wall painting in hues of blue and green – a
fractured urban space spreading around the room in a mix of big city
chaos, surveillance fantasies, and scenes of leisure – comes close to a
state in which reality and nightmare can no longer be clearly separated.
Ackermann has condensed what Birnbaum in the catalogue calls a "temporary
polyphony." He is not concerned with simultaneous occurrences – that
continuous strip of text running across news broadcasts suggesting a
never-ending up-to-the-minute report, but rather with the simultaneity of
ways of seeing.
Franz Ackermann, Untitled (mental map: nest), 1994
©Deutsche Bank Collection
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