John Isaac
WENDT AND FRIEDMANN GALERIE
Heidestrasse 54,
January 15–March 6
John Isaacs, It is for you that I this (hippy scalp), 2009, wax, oil paint, human hair, wood, glass, steel, velvet, 20 x 20 x 71".
The centerpiece of “Tears Welling Up Inside,” British artist John Isaacs’s darkly witty solo exhibition, is titled It is for you that I this (hippy scalp), 2009. Here, a delicate Victorian-looking wood and glass vitrine at the entrance of this charming town-house gallery holds a grotesque form––a meaty, veiny scalp streaming platinum-blond hair. Despite the title, the scalp looks exactly like the head of one of the blond nihilists in The Big Lebowski (1998), and in that echo, it seems, is embedded the gritty tension of Isaacs’s work.
In an adjacent room there is a massive, meticulously crafted sculpture that depicts a pile of feces overflowing from a box made of bathroom tiles. Another sculpture consists of a weathered wooden armchair with a sallow floral print sitting on top of a complicated contraption with mismatched wheels. The piece recalls a homemade wheelchair or, perhaps, a set piece from Monty Python. On a wall are notebook pages with ink drawings in which a black blob surrounds the word LOVE, a reference to Robert Indiana’s iconic 1964 work, except that Isaac’s version is made up of clippings from a hard-core porn magazine. In a similarly punky gesture, a careful doodle of a disembodied eyeball and lettering re-create the style of 1960s psychedelic posters but convey a profane message closer to a saying from a crotchety Bukowski. But within all the subversion of iconography there is an endearing, cheeky joy that evokes the flaws and virtues of an idealistic era. Fundamentally, Isaacs, like the Coen brothers’ nihilists, seems to happily believe in nothing––least of all his own cynicism.
— Ana Finel Honigman
Manuel Graf
JOHANN KÖNIG
Dessauerstr. 6-7
January 15–March 6
View of “Manuel Graf,” 2010.
What is work? Today’s art world isn’t good at drawing a clear line between professional, social, and personal activities or interchanges. In “Buchtipp 2,” Manuel Graf’s deceptively casual installation for his third solo exhibition at this gallery, the artist succeeds in exposing tensions and confusions among different forms of art, work, and play, which might be reason enough to applaud his effort.
For the show, Graf has arranged two large, flat yellow sofas around a small wooden coffee table, which faces a television that plays a video of couples discussing sections of Rudolf Steiner’s 1919 lecture series on education, work, and identity. The table also offers an arrangement of Polaroids that show pretty, hip young women cheerfully posing while wearing unusual laced-up platform wedges. These colorful, attractive shoes are bespoke art objects produced by Graf after he trained with shoemakers in Istanbul’s Galata Beyoglu artisan’s quarter. Though the shoes are unrealistic everyday wear, the Polaroids are evidence that they have the playful allure of fashion pieces produced specially for photo shoots, as well as for rare, brief presentations.
Because they are one-off objects shown in an art gallery and made with an artisan’s techniques, Graf’s shoes blur some of the divisions between art, craft, and high fashion. However, these themes are not new. Where “Buchtipp 2” becomes particularly engaging is Graf’s introduction of Steiner’s still-controversial ideas about the role of play in children’s intellectual and social development. The casual, intimate setting that the artist creates here encourages viewers to relax and develop their own intellectual discourse. Yet whether this is work, art, learning, or all three remains an open question.
— Ana Finel Honigman
“Conversation Pieces: A Chamber Play”
JOHNEN GALERIE
Marienstrasse 10
January 9–April 17
Rodney Graham, Fantasia for Four Hands, 2002, two color photographs, each 102 3/8 x 72".
Before the recent onslaught of curatorial-studies programs, curators were typically educated in art history, literature, or––as in the case of Jens Hoffmann––theater. Drawing on Hoffmann’s biography and his thoughtful, self-conscious approach to exhibitions, “Conversation Pieces” is a three-part show modeled on the structure of a chamber play and divided into “Acts,” each of which presents works by six artists, which are distributed into pairs and exhibited in three different rooms, or “Scenes.”
“Scene One” of “Act One,” which is on view until February 6, couples Tim Lee with Hans-Peter Feldmann in a dialogue between Lee’s photographic reenactment of the supine, pathos-filled pose with which Neil Young began every concert on his 1978 concert tour (Rust Never Sleeps, Neil Young, 1979, 2010) and Feldmann’s appropriation and restaging of ordinary objects in two witty but slightly melancholic sculptures: Robert, 2003, and Eiereimer auf Stuhl mit Pappsockel (Bucket Filled with Eggs on a Chair on a Cardboard Base), 2003. In “Scene Two,” four identical versions of Rodney Graham, playing the part of piano virtuoso, perform in a diptych titled Fantasia for Four Hands, 2002, while the three desynchronized metronomes that compose Martin Creed’s Work No. 223, 1999, fail to provide a consistent tempo for a genre (the fantasia) that by definition is improvisational and doesn’t require one anyway. This room also includes a selection of artifacts from chamber-play performances at the Deutsches Theater, including a poster from Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkmann, the first play Hoffmann attended as a young student in Berlin. The final room, “Scene Three,” is organized around Anri Sala’s Agassi, 2006, a still projection of the tennis player as his eyes just miss an oncoming ball. Across the space, a curious group of spectators snarl, cringe, and even drool as they peer out from a selection of Roger Ballen’s weird and beautiful black-and-white portraits of rural inhabitants in South Africa, in what is perhaps the most unpredictable and refreshing inclusion in the show. If it’s true that “the second act is always the best,” there are surely more clever conceptual antics to come.
“Act Two” of this exhibition opens February 13, with “Act Three” premiering March 20.
— Michčle Faguet
“Berlin 89/09: Art Between Traces of the Past and Utopian Futures”
BERLINISCHE GALERIE
Alte Jakobstrasse 124-128
September 18–February 15
Tacita Dean, Palast, 2004, still from a color film in 16 mm, 10 minutes 30 seconds.
In Berlin, where the past is omnipresent, and the assimilation of the city’s many histories is still very much in play, this year’s twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall begs for widespread reassessment. Surveying art in and about Berlin over the past two decades, this exhibition affirms the electrifying tension between history’s tenacious grip and the city’s constant regeneration.
Efforts to preserve material traces of these early post-wall years emerge as a recurring strategy, whether realized through the relics themselves or through their representation. Fred Rubin’s light-fixture installation—comprising large ’60s-era glass orbs salvaged from a disused government building—foregrounds evocative traces of East German society. Elsewhere, Sophie Calle’s The Detachment, 1996, suggests memory’s fundamental unreliability through an image-text juxtaposition, in which residents’ recollections of removed East German monuments don’t necessarily correspond to contemporary visual records.
Other highlights complicate the dominant celebratory narrative of 1989. Bjřrn Melhus’s video Jetzt—Now, 1993, disrupts the official reunification party at the Brandenburg Gate in 1990 by rerecording and decelerating his own Super 8 footage so that heavily pixelated fireworks seem like military fire. Made a decade later, Wolfgang Tillmans’s cynical video Wind of Change, 2003, suggests the failure of 1989’s potential by pairing the 1990 rock anthem—here played for tourists on panpipes by street musicians—with footage of the Mercedes-Benz star logo slowly rotating atop a West Berlin high-rise, long a symbol of Western capitalism. More lighthearted, Norbert Kottmann’s Build Tatlin, 1989–93, documents the artist’s failed campaign to construct Vladimir Tatlin’s skyward-spiraling tower in Potsdamer Platz. One isn’t sure whether to take the proposal seriously, but given the site’s subsequent transformation into a commercial center, this suggestion of its early promise reads as impossibly naive. While an assembly of diverse approaches is one of the show’s strengths, its breadth seems to necessarily limit its depth. A stronger point of view might be more productive, but its absence reflects the inherent challenge of historicizing art of the present moment.