The journal on portikus.de operates as an extension of the exhibitions at Portikus themselves. A wide spectrum of contributions including essays, interviews, fictional writing or photo- and video-contributions provide a closer look on artistic interests and reflect on topics that concern our society, politics and culture.
On the occasion of Amy Sillman’s exhibition the ALL-OVER at Portikus Bernard Vienat talks in the following interview about the artists early years and her artistic practice.
BERNARD VIENAT: You started your career around the 1970s, at the same time that John Baldessari burned all his paintings. So it was certainly a time of hostility towards the medium. What was your survival strategy?
AMY SILLMAN: I didn’t have a “career” in the 1970’s, I got out of school in 1979. And the idea of a professional “career” was not what how were thinking back then. But for survival I had a day job: in the 80’s I worked at a couple of magazines, doing what was called “paste ups” back then, we fixed the pictures and type in place with wax. I wasn’t a punk with a Mohawk, but I was certainly spirited in a punk way. I think that underneath a lot of what I was doing was a “fuck you” attitude. Like, “I’m not supposed to paint anymore? Fuck you!” “I’m supposed to try to be famous? Fuck you!” So I would say I had a strong sense of negation. That was the ethos of the time, and I persisted in painting, as a pleasurable reversal to what we were supposed to do.
VIENAT: How did you first come to the idea of wanting to be an artist? And moreover to paint?
SILLMAN: I came to New York, not to do art, but to study Japanese at NYU. I had been on a wild trip to Japan, and was interested in studying a foreign language, one that was utterly undecipherable to most people I knew. I was interested in the idea that I could write in a code. So I studied Japanese, but I took a drawing class on the side, from an “action painter” teacher who literally played jazz in the classroom and taught us to look at a nude but draw it with turpentine-soaked rags. In this drawing class, I suddenly thought: “Oh my god, this is another kind of code language!” It wasn’t what I was thinking originally because I didn’t have any role models to be able to imagine that artist was something I could do. So in a weird way, I backed into it via the brush.
VIENAT: What other kind of teaching were you exposed to afterwards?
SILLMAN: Well, after the action painter, it was all these 1970s types: feminists, conceptual artists, filmmakers and post-studio people. I would say 95% of my friends had abandoned making paintings because of the bad politics that painting seemed to embody, the neo-expressionist critique was in full swing. All my friends were in class with either Joseph Kosuth or Hans Haacke. So it was really not cool to be painting, but I guess I was always interested in doing it in spite of itself.
VIENAT: You started your career after really important theorists had spoken about painting and the way to perceive it. How do you react for instance to Greenberg’s theories? Speaking about a punk attitude, didn’t you think: My father said so, so I’ll go against it?
SILLMAN: But Greenberg wasn’t my father! If anything he was more like a grandfather. No one I knew read Greenberg then, and I didn’t really understand the politics of art history. I was curious about his article on kitsch and the avant-garde. But we did not read much theory of painting back in the 70s. Painting was already dead on arrival. I described it once to a friend as like squatting an abandoned building. I got all my ideas from elsewhere: dance, performance, experimental film, and writing. I was not able to work within the logic of painting, neither from OCTOBER nor Greenberg
Amy Sillman, Draft of a Voice-over for Split Screen Video Loop, in collaboration with Lisa Robertson, Installation view, 12.05.–28.06.2012, castillo/corrales, Paris
Amy Sillman, the ALL-OVER, Installation view, 02.07.–04.09.2016, Portikus, Frankfurt/Main. Photo: Helena Schlichting. Courtesy: Portikus, Frankfurt/Main.
Amy Sillman, the ALL-OVER, Installation view, 02.07.–04.09.2016, Portikus, Frankfurt/Main. Photo: Helena Schlichting. Courtesy: Portikus, Frankfurt/Main.
Shahryar Nashat, Present Sore, 2016, video.
Shahryar Nashat, Hustle in Hand, 2014, HD video, 10 minutes
Courtesy Rodeo, London; Silberkuppe, Berlin.
Shahryar Nashat, Present Sore, 2016, video.
Shahryar Nashat, Factor Green, installation view, 54th International Venice Biennial, 2011
Courtesy Rodeo, London; Silberkuppe, Berlin. Photo: Gaëtan Malaparte.
People are standing in the shade of a petrol station. Dark smoke is rising. A young man waves a slingshot in a circle over his head. It is 1:45 pm on May 15, 2014 in the West Bank. A male wearing a backpack enters the picture. A few seconds later, a bullet hits him from behind. He falls to the ground. Helpers rush to his aid. It is 2:58 pm on May 15, 2014. More gray smoke is billowing upwards. From the right, a man enters the picture. He is shot in the chest and falls to the ground. People rush to help him. This footage by a security camera shows the killings of Nadim Siam Nawara, age 17, and Mohammad Mahmud Odeh Abu Daher, age 16, which were committed during the demonstrations on Nakba Day near Ofer Israeli military prison by Ramallah.
“The images captured on video show unlawful killings where neither child presented a direct and immediate threat to life at the time of their shooting. These acts by Israeli soldiers may amount to war crimes, and the Israeli authorities must conduct serious, impartial, and thorough investigations to hold the perpetrators accountable for their crimes,” Rifat Kassis, the spokesperson of the human rights organization Defence for Children International, declared soon thereafter to the public. In addition to the surveillance videos, there are also audio recordings taken by a television crew at the scene of the crime that will be used as evidence in an audio-ballistic analysis to clarify how and from what direction the two unarmed Palestinian teens were fatally shot. The key question here is whether the soldiers and border police officers fired live ammunition or rubber bullets, as the Israeli security forces stated in their own defense. An investigation now aims to solve the murders.
Two years later, artist Lawrence Abu Hamdan develops Rubber Coated Steel, an extensive video installation at Portikus that reconstructs the events and makes the sounds recorded at the crime scene visible as images. His mixed media work consists of visualized frequency bands of the tracks and found video materials which, arranged within the architecture of a shooting range, also document the course of events. However, before the video work Rubber Coated Steel was created, Hamdan’s findings and the reports drawn up together with the London Institute of Forensic Architecture were used as legal evidence against the Israeli soldiers to prove their violation of the arms agreement with the United States before Congress in Washington, D.C.
The interpretative force of the auditory material in this particular case can also be found in the significance Hannah Arendt ascribed to listening and seeing for the process of comprehension. In 1961, she wanted to personally witness the trial of SS Obersturmbannführer Adolf Eichmann before the Jerusalem district court and thus proposed to The New Yorker that she serves as an observer of the court proceedings. She justified this decision in a letter to her former teacher Karl Jaspers, writing, “I would never be able to forgive myself if I didn’t go and look at this walking disaster face to face in all his bizarre vacuousness, without the mediation of the printed word. Don’t forget how early I left Germany and how little of all this I really experienced directly.”1 In Jerusalem, Arendt was prepared to encounter a vicious monster. During the trial, however, her expectations were not met, instead she experienced a person who followed and issued instructions from behind his desk and seemed barely conscious of the consequences of his actions. Therefore, in her final report Arendt developed the mental figure of the “banality of evil” 2 , for which she was criticized sharply from many sides, but which today largely influences our understanding of the brutality of the crimes committed against the Jews.
Adolf Eichmann, Photo: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., Photograph #65268, Courtesy of Israel Government Press Office
Similar to Arendt, for Hamdan, precise observation and analysis are the keys to comprehending the inconceivable. His examination of the audio material and precise evaluation of the results are an attempt to actually prove that live ammunition was fired to shoot the teenagers and to justly solve the crimes. As Arendt clearly defined the subjectivity of her report, Hamdan, too, reflects the conditions of his analysis by exhibiting the technological apparatus operating between the incident and the judgment. At Portikus, he shows the visualized frequency bands, presents the relevant video clips, and makes the shots audible over and over again. The situation that we experience in the exhibition is not only a meticulous reconstruction of the incident, but it also offers the chance to understand how the available body of evidence was analyzed, evaluated, and interpreted. Rubber Coated Steel seeks justice while reflecting, as legal reports can never do, on how fragmentary pieces of proofs are shaped to form a conclusion.
Translated by Faith Ann Gibson
Since the end of the nineteenth century, the Statue of Liberty has stood before the coast of New York guarding over freedom and its observance in the nation. The colossal statue was shipped in pieces from Europe to America. Both the Statue of Liberty and the written Constitution of the eighteenth century, which Lady Liberty holds in her hand, embody and symbolize a Western concept of freedom that remains valid today. This also encompasses the constitutionally safeguarded freedom of individuals to express their own opinions in words and images. In Germany, freedom of expression is anchored in Article 5 of the Basic Law. Nowadays more than ever, this is an essential right that demands protection, but is constantly being stretched to its limits.
Danh Vo, WE THE PEOPLE, 2011, Copper, 223 × 155 × 107 cm, Kadist collection, Photo: Helena Schlichting
Danh Vo, WE THE PEOPLE, 2011, Copper, 223 × 155 × 107 cm, Kadist collection, Photo: Helena Schlichting
What might a minor history of Portikus told through video look like? Helke Bayrle’s Portikus Under Construction (1992-Present) gives this history its images, building an institutional memory and body of artworks out of what is almost always erased and obfuscated: work left outside of finalized and public-facing installations within the main gallery. Though the artworks in this screening program are by no means minor in and of themselves, they work outside of the limits of these artists’ previous contributions to the exhibitionary legacy of Portikus. Almost none of these films and videos have been shown within Portikus before, yet they provide a vehicle for reflection through their addition and deviation. In an effort to let these relations permeate the methods of this program, groupings of films and videos will together assert the value of lack, the uncertain, the secondary, the obscured, the forgotten, and the unclassifiable. Inspired by Bayrle, this project attempts to build a minor history of Portikus from these foggy positions.
Program:
19.07.2017
1. Filming Lack
-Martha Rosler, Secrets From the Street: No Disclosure (1980)
-Thirteen Black Cats, Corpse Cleaner (2016)
26.07.2017
2. Dara Friedman
-Dara Friedman, Dancer (2011)
Dancer was presented at Portikus in conjunction with the installation of segments of the video at the Frankfurt Airport on the occasion of Portikus XXX, curated by Fabian Schöneich and Franz Hempel.
02.08.2017
3. Procession/Parade
-Dieter Roth, Dot (1960) and Pop 1 (1957-1961)
-Josef Strau, Untitled (slide projection) (2012)
-Nina Könnemann, Pleasure Beach (2001)
-Mike Kelley, Bridge Visitor (Legend-Trip) (2004)
-Jimmie Durham, Smashing (2004)
09.08.2017
4. Sound Bleed
-Minouk Lim, New Town Ghost (2005)
-Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Collapse (2009)
-Lawrence Abu Hamdan, The All Hearing (2014)
-Dan Graham, Minor Threat (1983)
-Dan Graham & Glenn Branca, Performance and Stage-Set Utilizing Two-Way Mirror and Video Time Delay (1983)
16.08.2017
5. Non-work
-Frances Stark, Cat videos (1999-Present)
At Home 1999/1999 (w/ Stephen Prina’s The Achiever) (1999)
Thinking About Writing (w/ Joan Didion interview on public radio) (2001)
At My Desk (w/ Björk’s “Pluto”, circa 1997) (2002)
-Helke Bayrle, Portikus Under Construction (1992-Present)
Frances Stark (2008)
Morgan Fisher (2009)
-Morgan Fisher, Standard Gauge (1984)
A book of Mike Kelley’s writings bears the title Minor Histories: Statements, Conversations, Proposals.1
These texts are secondary works in that they did not feature as the central objects of display within his exhibitions. They are more of a textual infrastructure for art objects and videos. If Kelley’s sculptures and videos are given primacy within the space of exhibitions where the presence of text is reduced or rendered totally absent, then these texts could be said to be secondary (or made secondary) even if they might be integral to Kelley’s art making. Forced into the periphery of one’s consideration, that which is secondary in these ways is also minor. The minor is what is comparatively lesser in significance when held against a major event; an exhibition of artworks in this case. But one might reconsider the significance of major works through the framework laid by minor materials. Kelley’s Minor Histories inflects the perception of his major works through texts that affect his works in retrospect by providing a previously inaccessible supplement. This move – from major to minor, from macro to micro – is also characteristic of “microhistory” as a method of historical research. In a preface to the Italian edition of The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (a founding work of what has come to be known as micro-history), the Italian scholar Carlo Ginzburg writes this:
In the past historians could be accused of wanting to know only about “the great deeds of kings,” but today this is certainly no longer true. More and more they are turning toward what their predecessors passed over in silence, discarded, or simply ignored. “Who built Thebes of the seven gates?” Bertold [sic] Brecht’s “literate worker” was already asking. The sources tell us nothing about these anonymous masons, but the question retains all its significance.2
This is the ethos of micro-history and also that of Minor Histories and this screening program, built up through the centralization of the minor and the secondary and the modes of historical re-assessment that they enable.
In continuing to use the terms “minor” and “secondary,” I do not mean for these nominative classifications to reassert a hierarchy of value that makes such materials as subservient to a main event, whatever that might be. This screening program intends to think through the value of working with/in the secondary or minor, making them the central subjects and methods of inquiry, despite the denigration of materials categorized as such. These terms are always relative anyway.
In the context of this screening series, galleried exhibitions at Portikus and the specific artworks they contain become the “main event.” That which rests outside of this (e.g. the artists’ other artworks, art programming that occurs elsewhere in the institution’s architecture, and presentations that sit out of line with the normal temporal constraints of the exhibition) becomes minor or secondary.
Helke Bayrle’s ongoing video project, Portikus Under Construction (1992-Present) operates through the staging of strange paradoxes in this schema. Her videos capture the pre-exhibition installations at Portikus, where scaffolding is erected and dismantled, artworks are crated in, and plans are carried through or changed to accommodate some unforeseen hiccup. Though these events and processes are foundational to the staging of exhibitions in the gallery, they are secondary to a finalized presentation of artworks. On Bayrle’s project, Kirsty Bell writes:
Helke Bayrle trains her eyes on peripheral details, on discreet gestures, on banal activities, in order to get at exactly these parts of the creative process: the things “taken for granted but not said.3
Helke Bayrle, Portikus Under Construction (Frances Stark), 2008.
Thirteen Black Cats, Corpse Cleaner, 2016, Courtesy the artists.
Morgan Fisher, Standard Gauge, 1984, 16-mm, color, optical sound, 35', Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York.
“Tails” by Levi Easterbrooks
“Heads” by Janique Préjet Vigier
Moyra Davey, Hell Notes (still), 1990/2017.
Moyra Davey, excerpt of Hell Notes, 1990/2017, Super-8 film with sound transferred to HD video, 26 min. 16 sec.
Skin covers the surface of the human body, shrinking or expanding as the body moves and bearing the marks of its actions and the impacts it has suffered. Objects that cling to the skin, that are used or worn by the body, influence its posture and the way it moves and conversely adapt (or are adapted) to its characteristic movements. Clothes, shoes, furniture, and prostheses add to the body’s repertoire of forms and functions. They endow it with abilities that, in and of itself, it possesses only to a degree; for example, they enable it to withstand cold without feeling it, to sit elevated above the floor, or to walk with a single leg. Even when they are not in use, these objects evince the traces of their application: they are virtual images of their wearer.
The pedestal is a body in space. When it appears in the context of an art exhibition and supports an object, that is a choice made by third parties (artists/curators). This choice stands for the duration of its presentation. It prompts contact between two bodies, the supporting body and the one being supported. The pedestal adds several functions to the object to be supported: it sets it apart from the space around it and elevates it; the floor on which the beholder stands is no longer the ground on which the object rests, this provokes a distance that brings the perception of its surface into focus. That distance elevates the object both in fact and in the idea. Things reduced to the purpose of being beheld become (virtually) untouchable and no longer belong to the realm of objects of utility.
Edgar Degas, Petite danseuse de quatorze ans, 1878/1881, by M.T. Abraham Center - Provided by copyright owner of both photograph and artwork, CC BY 3.0, Wikimedia Commons
Michelangelo Pistoletto, Vetrina-Specchio, 1966
John McCracken, Minnesota, 1989
Shahryar Nashat, Chômage Technique (A,B,C,D,F,G,H), 2016
Spotting the Shottspotter: photograph of Shotspotter microphone installed on the top of a street lamp. Courtesy of the artist.
Future, March Madness [prod by Tarantino], from the mixtape 56 Nights 2015.
Eight square aluminium bars of different lengths lean – at regular intervals – on the white wall of Portikus. The smooth polished surface reflects the light and the surroundings, wrapping it in a silvery white shimmer. On each of the long sides of the bars, a verse of poem number 1695 by Emily Dickinson, “There is a Solitude of Space,” can be read in black, vinyl, sans serif capital letters:
THERE IS A SOLITUDE OF SPACE
A SOLITUDE OF SEA
A SOLITUDE OF DEATH, BUT THESE
SOCIETY SHALL BE
COMPARED WITH THAT PROFOUNDER SITE
THAT POLAR PRIVACY
A SOUL ADMITTED TO ITSELF—
FINITE INFINITY. 1
Roni Horn, When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes: No. 1695 (There is a Solitude of Space), 1993, Installation view, House of Commons, 03.12.2016–29.01.2017, Portikus, Frankfurt/Main, Foto: Helena Schlichting.
Roni Horn, When Dickinson Shut Her Eyes: No. 1695 (There is a Solitude of Space), 1993, Installation view, House of Commons, 03.12.2016–29.01.2017, Portikus, Frankfurt/Main, Foto: Helena Schlichting.
In many ways, the 1960s were revolutionary and groundbreaking for the visual arts. It is therefore not surprising that artists’ use of many previously unconventional materials in the work process originated or experienced a great upsurge during that decade in particular. Artistic boundaries disappeared or were re-explored and materials such as textiles soon became “autonomous artistic materials.”1
One of the best-known pioneers of this development was surely the German artist Joseph Beuys, who acquired an international reputation not least with a focus on the materials of felt and fat. Beuys’s American colleague Robert Morris is also known for his work with felt, although the two artists’ underlying intentions in their work with the material differed greatly.
The fact that textiles played a rather marginal role in art for quite some time before this can also be explained from a technological point of view. Ultimately, a certain type of machine was needed to weave large-scale ornaments and complicated textile designs. Although Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752-1834) demonstrated his famous loom for the first time in 1801, for a long time this technique was by no means freely accessible or it was horrendously expensive, making it difficult for artists to produce certain fabrics at all.
Jacquard looms are mainly characterized by the fact that they were the first of their kind that wove on the basis of punch cards, thus making complicated patterns possible. Each warp could thus be worked individually or in a small group per weft, which was impossible with previous mechanical models. “Acquired Nationalities” by Rosella Biscotti in the exhibition House of Commons at Portikus showed that this methodology is still relevant in the artistic production process.
Jacquard loom, filmed at Paisley Museum (© National Museums Scotland)
Rossella Biscotti, Aquired Nationalities, 2014, KADIST collection, Installation view, House of Commons, 03.12.2016–29.01.2017, Portikus, Frankfurt/Main, Photo: Helena Schlichting
Willem de Rooij, Taping Precognitive Tribes, 2012 , Courtesy: Friedrich Christian Flick, Photo: Axel Schnider, Quelle: Mousse Magazine)
Thomas Bayrle, All-in-One, Installation view, WIELS Contemporary Art Centre, 09.02 – 12.05.2013, Brussels, 2013. Quelle: WIELS
From time immemorial, one of humankind’s most important missions has been to preserve knowledge. We do so not only by passing on oral traditions to subsequent generations, but above all with memory institutions. This collective term unites all those institutions whose goal is to preserve and convey knowledge. While libraries and archives may come to mind first, they also include museums. They are places that administer bits of contemporary evidence and seek to protect what constitutes the identity of a society: its cultural heritage.
Sirah Foighel Brutman & Eitan Efrat, Printed Matter, Installation view, Slide show, 29.04.–11.06.2017, Portikus. Photo: Helena Schlichting.
Sirah Foighel Brutman & Eitan Efrat, Printed Matter (Still), 2011.
Sirah Foighel Brutman & Eitan Efrat, Printed Matter (Excerpt), 2011.
PORTIKUS
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PORTIKUS is part of Städelschule Frankfurt:
Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule
Städelschule Architecture Class (SAC)
Curatorial Studies – Theorie – Geschichte – Kritik
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