REVIEWS

STEVE MiCCUEEN, CHARLOTTE, 2004 * 16 MM FILM, CONTINUOUS PROJECTION - COURTESY BIACS 2, SEVILLE

SEVILLE Case ofthe GrinningCat)revisits his obsession with comprehending history via a
wandering approach. "Staring Back" (2006), Marker's most recent body of work,
THE UNHOMELY: PHANTOM SCENES IN GLOBAL
clusters black-and-white photographs of protesters and riot police spanning several
SOCIETY decades, from moody images bathed in a '60s patina to contemporary shots, hurried,
MONASTERIO DE LA CARTUJA, CENTRO ANDALUZ DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO AND REALES
ATARAZANAS pixelated, of the cell-phone variety. The layering of present and past imbues this
2A BIENAL INTERNACIONAL DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO DE SEVILLA (BiACS 2) political standoff with both the metaphysical and the concrete.
Some of the best work in the Reales picked up on the threads originating in
In his mission statement, Okwui Enwezor describes the second International Biennial Marker's work, bypassing trite documentary statement with complex investigations
of Contemporary Art in Seville (BIACS 2) as "a specular and spectral enterprise." of the representability of history and lived reality. There was, for instance,
Perhaps even more so, it seems an essentially speculative one. His first large-scale November (2004), Hito Steyerl's video meditation on how the romantic clich6s of
exhibition since Documenta 11, the Seville biennial obviously offered a radically film, feminism, and revolutionary struggle mingle and bleed into personal life,
different platform in terms of reach and scale. Compared with the gargantuan and the striking installation Invisible Film (2005), by Melik Ohanian, centered on
machinations of Documenta, BIACS 2 was relatively intimate, serving a mainly local the sound track of Peter Watkins's 1971 film PunishmentPark (withdrawn from
audience, with a little more than 80 artists spread out over only two locations, the US cinemas only four days after its original release). Tony Labat presented an
Reales Atarazanas and the Monasterio de la Cartuja. More striking, however, was a intriguing 2006 multichannel video installation, Day Labor: Mapping the Outside
marked difference in tone. Where Documenta 11 was emphatic and uncompromising, (FatChanceBruce Nauman), showing images of day laborers waiting to be picked
almost hostile to the viewer, BIACS 2 drew its strength from a more open-ended, up, filmed from the artist's studio. The work offers a layered critique of how the
contemplative mood. In Enwezor's words, this biennial aimed to investigate "the economic realm inflects spatiotemporal experience; its title, a smart riff on Bruce
constant transformation of modes of recognition into forms of nonrecognition" Nauman's Mappingthe Studio (FatChance John Cage), puts Labat's lingering in
because of profound "disturbances in world social formations." The essential the studio in a dialectic relationship with the lingering of his subjects in the street.
unsettledness Enwezor previously attributed to the postcolonial experience here Other works tested the limits of documentation, like the reified madness of Thomas
enveloped the entire experiential realm, a type of permanent impermanence of things. Hirschhorn's RE (2006), a strange documentation-cum-installation of his earlier
The work of Chris Marker seems paradigmatic to this biennial. Marker once Mus6e Pr6caireAlbinet(2004).
dismissed the term "documentary" as "a trail of sanctimonious boredom," and it The free-form, associative quality of the exhibition in the Reales gave way to a more
seems exactly in the shift from the documentary impulse so definitive of Documenta directed experience in the corridors of the second site, the Monasterio de la Cartuja,
11 to Marker's more rhizomatic approach to history and representation that the a reconverted monastery home to the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporinco.
Seville biennial finds its poignancy. Marker was represented by two works in the This section seemed bracketed by Gerhard Richter's three stunning abstract works
Reales Atarazanas, a highly theatrical, sprawling structure dating from the Middle Abstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting) (1999-2000) and the film projection Charlotte
Ages, with cavernous spaces and earthen floors. The 2004 film Chats perches (The (2004), by Steve McQueen, perhaps the best work in this exhibition. McQueen's

100 MODERN PAINTERS I MARCH 2007

 REVIEWS

hauntingly intimate pan of actress Charlotte Rampling's face, drenched in red light,
the creases and folds of her skin prodded then smoothed by the finger of the artist,
underscores how even bodies cannot escape unsettledness. The moment when the
finger reaches toward her eyeball is excruciating and emphasizes with a visceral pang
how every memory is ultimately registered in the body. This recalibration of history,
representation, and the body retroactively colors the rest of the exhibition, creating a
dialogue between problematizations of the documentary format, like Lamia Joreige's
touching video piece Objects of War (2000-2006) and Yto Barradaýs intriguing quasi-
anthropological studies, and investigations of the spatiotemporal disjuncture of the
body, as in the architectural works by Absalon and Manfred Pernice.
On the whole, apart from the sometimes sloppy installation, a smattering of
truly awful painting, and a pronounced lack of new commissions, this was a
satisfying biennial. Enwezor placed it under the sign of the contingent, aiming to
explore themes of adjacency, neighborliness, and the asymptotic as a counterpoint
to the increasingly claustrophobic identity discourse that characterizes so much
contemporary politics. The "phantom scenes" refer to "disfigurations, lapses and
outright antagonisms which have been generated over such wide scale that they
have affected both the conception of time and space." When one names these
disfigurations-Guantinamo, Abu Ghraib-the political clout of this most
aesthetic of Enwezor's exhibitions to date becomes more than evident. There is
urgency in unsettling. -YASMINE VAN PEE

GARY HILL, GUILT(DETAIL), 2006 ° TELESCOPES, GOLD PIECES, AND OTHER MATERIALS.
DIMENSIONS VARIABLE • COURTESY FONDATION CARTIER POUR L'ART CONTEMPORAI N, PARIS

MATHIEU MERCIER although there is a resonance between

CHEZ VALENTIN the artists). With wit and conceptual
rigor, Mercier gives new life to these
Out of such everyday materials as forms through the synthesis of DIY
industrial carpeting, wood, and plastic, aesthetics and slick design. His
Mathieu Mercier fabricates objects resuscitative gesture-along with the
that evoke the Duchampian readymade work of so many contemporary artists,
and the reductive abstraction of including Liam Gillick, Jan de Cock,
Mondrian, among other modernist and Rirkrit Tiravanija-participates
icons. A good example of this strategy in a revived debate about whether the
is the combination of a dark blue utopian aspirations of the avant-garde
carpet intersected by a yellow wood are still relevant. For this to be possible,
plank, Untitled (2006), which creates Mercier suggests, the object must be
a sculptural rendition of an abstract recuperated from the grasp of branding
painting. Yet this is not mere copycat and fetishism and transformed into a
appropriation or flippant citation (nor subject of interpretation and critical
is it derivative of Jessica Stockholder, reflection. -NUIT BANAI

GERHARD RICHTERABSTRAKTES BILD, 1999 *OIL ON CANVAS, 4 X 4 FT - COURTESY THE ARTIST AND
MARIAN GOODMAN GALLERY, PARIS

PARIS the floor of the gallery-loud electrifying

snaps reverberated throughout the
GARY HILL gallery. Placed in an adjacent room, Guilt
FONDATION CARTIER POUR L'ART consisted of five evenly spaced telescopes,
CONTEMPORAIN
each trained on five slowly rotating gold
A critique of Americas grip on world oil coins. The political turned personal:
was the driving factor of Gary Hill's two one side of the coin depicted the artist's
astounding new installations created last face being pummeled by his own hand,
year for this show. Frustrum featured while the other portrayed a bare derriere.
a projection of a computer-generated Above each viewing position was a low-
eagle trapped inside an electrical volume recording of the artist's voice
tower. As it struggled to break free and lambasting his own practice; Hill's self-
fly- conceivably toward a bar of gold at indictment is, in the end, an indictment MATH IEU MERCIER, INSTALLATION VIEW - COURTESY GALERIE CHEZ VALENTIN, PARIS
the bottom of a vat of black oil placed on of the viewer herself. -JILL CONNER

MARCH 2007 1 MODERN PAINTERS 101

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TITLE: The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society:

Monasterio de la Cartuja, Centro Andaluz de Arte
Contempor%aneo and Reales Atarazanas
SOURCE: Mod Painters Mr 2007

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