REVIEWS

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

SEVILLE

THE UNHOMELY: PHANTOM SCENES IN GLOBALSOCIETYMONASTERIO DE LA CARTUJA, CENTRO ANDALUZ DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO AND REALESATARAZANAS

2A BIENAL INTERNACIONAL DE ARTE CONTEMPORANEO DE SEVILLA (BiACS 2)

In his mission statement, Okwui Enwezor describes the second International Biennialof Contemporary Art in Seville (BIACS 2) as "a specular and spectral enterprise."Perhaps even more so, it seems an essentially speculative one. His first large-scaleexhibition since Documenta 11, the Seville biennial obviously offered a radicallydifferent platform in terms of reach and scale. Compared with the gargantuanmachinations of Documenta, BIACS 2 was relatively intimate, serving a mainly localaudience, with a little more than 80 artists spread out over only two locations, theReales Atarazanas and the Monasterio de la Cartuja. More striking, however, was amarked difference in tone. Where Documenta 11 was emphatic and uncompromising,almost hostile to the viewer, BIACS 2 drew its strength from a more open-ended,contemplative mood. In Enwezor's words, this biennial aimed to investigate "theconstant transformation of modes of recognition into forms of nonrecognition"because of profound "disturbances in world social formations." The essential

unsettledness Enwezor previously attributed to the postcolonial experience hereenveloped the entire experiential realm, a type of permanent impermanence of things.

The work of Chris Marker seems paradigmatic to this biennial. Marker oncedismissed the term "documentary" as "a trail of sanctimonious boredom," and itseems exactly in the shift from the documentary impulse so definitive of Documenta11 to Marker's more rhizomatic approach to history and representation that theSeville biennial finds its poignancy. Marker was represented by two works in theReales Atarazanas, a highly theatrical, sprawling structure dating from the MiddleAges, with cavernous spaces and earthen floors. The 2004 film Chats perches (The

Case of the Grinning Cat) revisits his obsession with comprehending history via awandering approach. "Staring Back" (2006), Marker's most recent body of work,clusters black-and-white photographs of protesters and riot police spanning severaldecades, from moody images bathed in a '60s patina to contemporary shots, hurried,pixelated, of the cell-phone variety. The layering of present and past imbues this

political standoff with both the metaphysical and the concrete.Some of the best work in the Reales picked up on the threads originating in

Marker's work, bypassing trite documentary statement with complex investigationsof the representability of history and lived reality. There was, for instance,November (2004), Hito Steyerl's video meditation on how the romantic clich6s offilm, feminism, and revolutionary struggle mingle and bleed into personal life,and the striking installation Invisible Film (2005), by Melik Ohanian, centered on

the sound track of Peter Watkins's 1971 film Punishment Park (withdrawn fromUS cinemas only four days after its original release). Tony Labat presented anintriguing 2006 multichannel video installation, Day Labor: Mapping the Outside(Fat Chance Bruce Nauman), showing images of day laborers waiting to be pickedup, filmed from the artist's studio. The work offers a layered critique of how theeconomic realm inflects spatiotemporal experience; its title, a smart riff on BruceNauman's Mapping the Studio (Fat Chance John Cage), puts Labat's lingering inthe studio in a dialectic relationship with the lingering of his subjects in the street.Other works tested the limits of documentation, like the reified madness of ThomasHirschhorn's RE (2006), a strange documentation-cum-installation of his earlier

Mus6e Pr6caireAlbinet (2004).The free-form, associative quality of the exhibition in the Reales gave way to a more

directed experience in the corridors of the second site, the Monasterio de la Cartuja,a reconverted monastery home to the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporinco.This section seemed bracketed by Gerhard Richter's three stunning abstract worksAbstraktes Bild (Abstract Painting) (1999-2000) and the film projection Charlotte(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 thefinger reaches toward her eyeball is excruciating and emphasizes with a visceral panghow 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'stouching 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 asatisfying biennial. Enwezor placed it under the sign of the contingent, aiming toexplore themes of adjacency, neighborliness, and the asymptotic as a counterpointto the increasingly claustrophobic identity discourse that characterizes so muchcontemporary politics. The "phantom scenes" refer to "disfigurations, lapses andoutright antagonisms which have been generated over such wide scale that theyhave affected both the conception of time and space." When one names thesedisfigurations-Guantinamo, Abu Ghraib-the political clout of this mostaesthetic of Enwezor's exhibitions to date becomes more than evident. There isurgency in unsettling. -YASMINE VAN PEE

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

PARIS

GARY HILLFONDATION CARTIER POUR L'ARTCONTEMPORAIN

A critique of Americas grip on world oil

was the driving factor of Gary Hill's twoastounding new installations created lastyear for this show. Frustrum featureda projection of a computer-generatedeagle trapped inside an electricaltower. As it struggled to break free andfly- conceivably toward a bar of gold atthe bottom of a vat of black oil placed on

the floor of the gallery-loud electrifyingsnaps reverberated throughout the

gallery. Placed in an adjacent room, Guiltconsisted of five evenly spaced telescopes,each trained on five slowly rotating goldcoins. The political turned personal:one side of the coin depicted the artist'sface being pummeled by his own hand,while the other portrayed a bare derriere.Above each viewing position was a low-volume recording of the artist's voicelambasting his own practice; Hill's self-indictment is, in the end, an indictment

of the viewer herself. -JILL CONNER

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

MATHIEU MERCIERCHEZ VALENTIN

Out of such everyday materials asindustrial carpeting, wood, and plastic,Mathieu Mercier fabricates objects

that evoke the Duchampian readymadeand the reductive abstraction ofMondrian, among other modernisticons. A good example of this strategy

is the combination of a dark bluecarpet intersected by a yellow woodplank, Untitled (2006), which createsa sculptural rendition of an abstractpainting. Yet this is not mere copycat

appropriation or flippant citation (noris it derivative of Jessica Stockholder,

although there is a resonance betweenthe artists). With wit and conceptualrigor, Mercier gives new life to theseforms through the synthesis of DIYaesthetics and slick design. Hisresuscitative gesture-along with thework of so many contemporary artists,including Liam Gillick, Jan de Cock,and Rirkrit Tiravanija-participatesin a revived debate about whether theutopian aspirations of the avant-gardeare still relevant. For this to be possible,Mercier suggests, the object must berecuperated from the grasp of brandingand fetishism and transformed into asubject of interpretation and criticalreflection. -NUIT BANAI

MATH IEU MERCIER, INSTALLATION VIEW - COURTESY GALERIE CHEZ VALENTIN, PARIS

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 ArteContempor%aneo and Reales Atarazanas

SOURCE: Mod Painters Mr 2007

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