James Coleman

James Coleman, Slide Piece, 1972-1973

I have been reading about James Coleman's work for almost thirty years, but have seen very little of it in that time. The small, but superbly curated exhibition at the Pompidou is as challenging as it is welcome. Coleman's is a provocative body of work that has fascinated some of the most prominent figures in the worlds of experimental film, art and photography studies. And with good reason.

The work is challenging because it doesn't fit into the neatly arranged categories that we give art and visual culture today. Coleman's work characteristically occupies the interface between still and moving images. He also plays with the relations between photograph and cinema, art history and cinema, and more recently, the spectacular visual culture of advertising, television, fashion photography and police imaging. Known for his use of transparent images projected through multiple stacked slide carousels, sometimes accompanied by audio tracks that don't describe what's in the image, Coleman's signature works are also about the tension between image and word. We are sure to come away wondering about the efficacy of words and images as modes of communication.

James Coleman, Retake with Evidence, 2007

In one piece at the beginning, Harvey Keitel stands on a stage, intermittently backgrounded by a plain white stage, archaeological ruins, monumental columns, antique sculptures that might be in a museum. Keitel delivers a monologue from Sophocles that is about as impenetrable as the Greeks get. Keitel is not preened and prissed for the camera, but wears a sweatshirt and perspires under the lights. Sophocles text is focussed on questions of social violence and democracy, but it's the contexts and modes of presentation that draw our focus. Issues of performance, staging, frustration of viewer expectations through fragmentation and repetition are brought to the fore. Even if they don't watch the entire performance, viewers will understand they are watching their own process of watching. 

James Coleman, La Tache Aveugle, 1978-1990

Also towards the beginning is a signature Coleman slide projection with synchronised audio, Slide Piece. The voice describes the most important aspects of the image before us: a drab, nondescript square in Milan. Each time the slides move past the light source, a new description begins. But the image is the same, even if it is a new slide. And the audio simply describes different aspects of this same drab square, honing in on what might be important to different viewers. Over time, our eyes will have moved around the image having noticed a window above the awning, the pylon behind the cars, and other innocuous details. The work gives the idea that what is in the image depends on who is looking, and what's important to that viewer. 

James Coleman, Charon (MIT Project), 1989

In other works, such as Charon, the slides are self-conscious performances of the way that moving images are constructed. Even if the images are not moving. Thus in Charon, a synchronised audio tells stories about the people who are in the image, but again, the slides don't fully correspond to the stories we hear. However, there are just enough details—the presence of a child, a hotel room, a window, a fancy outfit—to keep our desire for a sound/image link alive. Unlike the construction of narrative desire that promises an ending, here it is the promise of audio that goes with the image before us. Again, we are faced with images about the frustrations of viewing the moving image, even if we look at still images. Likewise, a piece such as Charon thrusts the difficulty of an image's communication into the foreground. We are made aware of all the elements that aid (and ultimately manipulate) our understanding and consequent interpretation. We start to become cognisant of the influence of things like the title, the descriptions, the uses to which the image is put, who takes the photographs, who directs the set, who dresses the models. 

James Coleman, (Documenta 11 Project), 2002

In a work such as (Documenta 11 Project), Coleman removes the title altogether. Thus, we are left looking at some kind of transient shape in the light that is presumably moving slower than the human eye can perceive it. And we have no idea of what we are looking at because he has removed the title. That said, the work has a title, even if it has been untitled: it is given (Documenta 11 Project) as title.  The work was commissioned for Documenta 11 by Okwui Enwezor in 2002, a Documenta that had its unique identity. Coleman's work in turn takes on that identity. In other words, we are never left to fall into the illusion of the works.

James Coleman, Still Life, 2013-2016

Even when illusion motivates the representation, we are confronted with the exposure of inauthenticity. In Still Life, Coleman plays with the French translation of dead nature. The poppy has been pulled out of the ground, thus destroyed, and is re-animated by Coleman's camera when the flower makes minuscule movements. The piece is projected on the black wall without a sound. Given the looping of audio tracks in other works, the silence of Still Life is itself somehow frustrating. So used to playing games with the audio/image relations, it's difficult to stand still and watch the flower which may or may not be real, in absolute silence. 

James Coleman, Lapsus Exposure, 1992-1994

Ultimately, this exhibition requires a lot of energy, but it is richly rewarding. Time spent with each work is revealing of our expectations of images, and the relations we take for granted. The bonus reward comes when we stand for long enough and find that we are watching ourselves watching, or at least, we are confronted with the processes with which we engage and the expectations we bring to looking at still and moving images.

All Images courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery © James Coleman

Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes @ Palais de Tokyo

Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes
Installation

It took a while for me to work out what was going on in Anne Imhof's latest exhibition, Natures Mortes, at Palais de Tokyo. This is not art that necessarily puts the viewer in awe or happily consuming its beauty. It is, first and foremost, a cerebral experience. As we wandered around the sprawling spaces of the Palais de Tokyo, there were moments when my friend Nicole and I were not sure if we were looking at the exhibition or the desecrated walls of the museum. Imhof's installations are designed to blur the line between art and its context (here the Palais de Tokyo). They go further when it becomes unclear if the structures are to be looked at, stepped on, sat on, or if they are designed to direct our movement through different spaces. For example, in one section of the exhibition, black and white photographs of warehouses on lower Manhattan peers are juxtaposed with an industrial plinth topped with a white mattress. Similar mattresses are scattered throughout the exhibition, but on first encounter, it's impossible to know if it is intended for visitors to sit on while watching an adjacent film. Or is the mattress in the "do not touch" vein of an artwork in installation. We tried our luck and were promptly approached by the guards and told to get off the artwork.

Anne Imhof, Natures Mortes
Installation

In the same way, Imhof creates a fluidity between modern art and street graffiti, railway yards and, depending on the visitor's imagination, torture chambers in the gallery. Beds made of steel girders will remind some visitors of torture tables and others of a feature found in an S & M club, and still others of a NYC loading dock. Throughout the spaces, smoked glass - or perspex, it's difficult to say - panels are desecrated, scratched, graffitied and then juxtaposed to form curved walk throughs, walls, mirrors, or objects that might be part of the architecture. They can be around the corner from a drawing by Piranesi or Géricault, a painting by Cy Twombly or Joan Mitchell. Ironically, the guards were huddled around panels of what looked like spray-painted metal sheets and scratched glass walls, ensuring that visitors stood well clear. The Mitchell painting and the Géricault drawing, however, were there to be examined and no one would have known if they were touched. It's impossible to know what we are meant to be thinking or to give these works a definitive meaning. 

There are works by Sigmar Polke, Adrián Villar Rojas, Wolfgang Tillmans, and others sprinkled throughout the exhibition. However, again, it's not always obvious that we are looking at works by different artists. The environment created in the bowels of the Palais de Tokyo is one of curated exchange rather than one that singles out works to be applauded by unique individuals. The use of other's works also functions as an admission of Imhof's debt to art history. She is anything but a lone, romantic artist to be revered. In another installation, a fridge full of plastic decomposing food faces a Mitchell painting hung on bare, warehouse walls. Around the corner from the fridge is a Cy Twombly painting and some photographs. My first reaction was to wonder what on earth these works were doing there. But of course, Imhof has curated works by herself and other artists to fashion a world through which we walk, wander and discover, rather than a conventional gallery exhibition.

Anne Imhof, Installation
Palais de Tokyo

The sea is everywhere in this exhibition. It is photographed at night, in the day time, in film and evoked in other images. In the two works titled Nature Mortes, Imhof has scratched the surface of a light-charged red, Sugimoto-esque seascape. Like Sugimoto's romantic photographs, the horizon is blurred. But, in distinction, we lose sight of the overwhelm and power of nature thanks to the distress to the surface, often at the place where the horizon would be. Imhof's own gender fluid body stands on a beach where two images of the sea intersect. Her body repeatedly whips the sand, body and movement of her arm with the rope as an extension in come together in a mesmerizing movement. But in this film, shod footprints in the sand suggest the presence of a man, a threat. Is Imhof whipping this place in the sand to fight off danger? The ambivalence of what happens at the sea is typical of Imhof's exploration of the tensions in an otherwise sublime nature.

Anne Imhof, Installation
Palais de Tokyo

Each piece is matched or echoed, repeated throughout the exhibition by something not always its double. In a film on a monitor, a different woman makes the same movement as Imhof with the whip at the sea. However, on the monitor, the woman is violently attaching a bike. Ironically, in relationship to the other film, the bike poses no threat. The bike is already dead matter. Again, typical of Imhof's constructed environment, life is always juxtaposed with death, nature with culture or industry. 

The set up of the exhibition was also impressive for its showcasing of the Palais de Tokyo as a space that emanates decay of the past, itself like a Piranesi ruin. Visitors were invited to wander the exhibition and discover the building crumbling, as much as the significance of Imhof's art. Architectural features, eroded floors, and exposed bits and pieces are as fascinating as Imhof's walls. Thus, if the exhibition is about death and destruction (still life/natures mortes), it is also about walking and discovering. Each object and installation runs effortlessly into the next, even if appearing somewhat haphazardly placed. Thus, the exhibition encourages us to move rather than look.  And because there's little enticement to look and ponder, the experience is one of ideas and associations coming to us as we wander - in itself a Romantic pursuit.

Ultimately, this is an exhibition about contradictions and tensions in the urban environment. The composed music is beautiful and romantic, rising above and falling below the crashing and banging that can be heard throughout. As we walk through the detritus of capitalism, we are in the presence of great works of art on crumbling and stained walls, sprawled across the wartorn floors of the Palais de Tokyo. 

Hito Steyerl, I will Survive Physical and Virtual Spaces @ Centre Pompidou

Hito Steyerl, Hell Yeah, We Fuck Die, 2016

After months without museums and galleries, I am now overwhelmed with choice for exhibitions to visit. After sitting in my apartment since last October, I am being reminded of why I live in Paris—and it's not because my apartment is anything special. Despite booking a ticket for the Women and Abstraction exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, this afternoon I ended up in the Hito Steyerl "retrospective in reverse," as the museum calls it. Other than the fact that the most recent works are shown at the beginning of the walk through and Steyerl's 1990s German films are at the end, there's nothing particularly radical about the decision to move from the present to the past. 

Hido Steyerl, How Not to be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational.MOV File, 2013

Steyerl is one of the art world's most celebrated contemporary artists. Her high impact videos are politically outspoken and raise issues that get people talking. In addition, her work is often about making visible the invisible contradictions driving the power structures of global capitalism. The odd piece included in group shows at the Jeu de Paume aside, Steyerl's work is rarely shown in Paris. My suspicion is that this might be because it's very much in the tradition of German documentary film of the 1980s in particular. Especially the early essayistic work which might not have so much appeal to a French audience. Reasons aside, it was a treat to see the exhibition which has come from K21 in Düsseldorf.

 

Hito Steyerl, Liquidity Inc., 2016

Steyerl's best work creates connections where we least expect them. Liquidity Inc., for example, is a video that follows a man who is made redundant from his job in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. The man takes up martial arts. You would think there couldn't be two activities more different, but Steyerl connects them through water! The liquidity and unpredictability of the financial markets are likened to the need to be flexible, always on one's toes, prepared to react, and to re-establish equilibrium following an opponent's surprise attack move. As viewers, we sit in rubber rings on a raked floor, already on our life boats as the man in the video attempts to get back on his feet. The video floats through a stream of references, images from the media, pop art, high art from different cultures such as Hiroshige's famous waves. Images from the media, GIFs, memes, hashtags, documentary films flow into each other suggesting the liquidity of everything around us. Before the screen, judo mats and pieces of broken raft are littered. They are the only concrete material objects in the piece.

Hito Steyerl, In Free Fall, 2010

In another video, In Free Fall, 2010, Steyerl films an ex-airline pilot who talks about making movies using mangled airplane bodies that he locates in a desert graveyard for airplanes. What's so perverse about the practices of recycling is that after the metal is no longer needed for the movies, it is recycled to make DVDs. Ironically, they too are now objects that are all but obsolete, like the airplane wreckage. A young Israeli man tells the story of crashing 707s as it is reported in the Israeli press. They considered the crash a success: the statistics are manipulated to make the government look good. The fact that the only thing left lying beside an airplane carcass are all the dead bodies that have fallen from the sky is nowhere mentioned by the Israeli press. No one survives an airplane crash. But the body of the airplane can be recycled without a problem. The young Israeli man and Steyerl herself perform the airline stewards saying their familiar safety routine. It is shown as the performance it is with lines such as the reminder to put your mask over your own mouth first being accompanied by images of the plane exploding into fire. Such is the show put on to make us all feel good within capitalist consumerism. Again, the force of the video comes in its juxtaposition of unlikely faces and voices, images and texts.

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Hito Steyerl, The City of Broken Windows, 2018

Another fascinating work The City of Broken Windows sees two facing video installations at either end of a long hall-like space. On the one end, sound engineers smash windows and record sounds for clients to download onto their devices (presumably as an app). Armed with these sounds, the wealthy home owners will be alerted and know if someone breaks into their house. It's a violent, if precisely carried out process, in which destruction is enacted in the name of technological advance. The engineers are more interested in the replication of the sounds than they are in reflecting on the aggression of their method of smashing sledge hammers into glass panels. At the other end of the corridor, The City of Unbroken Windows shows a second video documenting a diametrically opposed practice . Members of a community organization in New Jersey paint the boards that have been used to replace broken windows. One of the men was an army officer charged with dropping bombs during the Iraq war. And here he is decorating once vandalized windows as a way to stop violence through beautification. This half of the installation is about real people, addressing the problems that have come with capitalism, urban crime and vandalism. The other one shows the implications of technology, at a remove from the violence needed to advance it.

Hito Steyerl, Guards, 2012

Ultimately, the exhibition is a compelling walk through of Steyerl's practice. It is particularly rewarding if viewers sit in patience to watch and wait for the revelations that reveal themselves over time. The videos are satisfying because they are easy to understand, even if we do find ourselves laughing in horror at the secrets behind how our power structures operate.
 

Sean Scully, Entre Ciel et Terre @Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

I had seen this exhibition in its online version on Thaddaeus Ropac's website during the confinement. Alas nothing about the online version could have prepared me for the experience of being in the presence of these magisterial paintings. The works in the main gallery are huge, filled with energy, but quietly understated, drawing us into their reflective world. The paint is luscious, at times thick and sinewy, at others thin and transparent. It seems as though each band is applied differently to create various effects across each work. This sense of repetition is continually established across the exhibition only to be withdrawn upon reflection

Sean Scully, Entre Ciel et Terre
Installation @ Thaddaeus Ropac, Marais

Each of the five paintings in the main gallery is a huge steel-supported stack of horizontal bands. The paint races across the metal surfaces with a feeling of urgency and intensity, a combination not often seen in contemporary abstract painting. The constantly moving paint flows, weaving strokes as if we are watching the brush dance across steel, rarely pausing for breath. The movement of paint across steel makes for restless, sometimes even agitated scapes of colour, turning from green to brown, catching some orange and blue on the way to make a rainbow that, together with the steel underneath sees them shine and sparkle. 

Detail

The panels in the main gallery are doubled, communicating in pairs created in the same palette, even when the colours are varied on either side of the centre. Up close we note that a multitude of colours have been used to make up the range, even when it looked from a distance to be limited. A strip of steel is left bare on the left hand side and in the middle of each. Scully explains in the online video that he deliberately left these spaces bare so that each work would resemble a book with a gutter. 

Sean Scully, Black Window Pale Land, 2020

Two smaller works are hung in the gallery's portico space. Both are on a copper coloured metal. One is black, white, grey, the bands not touching and the steel underneath shining through. It is as though each band has been very hastily applied, using a few short strokes.The merging of the industrial metal and the paint is like a coming together of different worlds. In those works where the steel support becomes a visible part of the painting, I was reminded of the title of the exhibition: Between Heaven and Earth. The bringing together of different worlds is a feature of the exhibition: beyond colour and steel, the industrial and the natural merge in works that resonate with seascapes and landscapes, and as is always the case with Scully's work, the geometrical patterns of the natural world. On some of them the paint is calm, like waves and on others there are storms tossing the ocean. On still others, a square in the middle of the painting makes them resemble windows, even when nothing can be seen on the other side.

Sean Scully, Landline Star, 2017

If the bigger ones are reminiscent of landscapes, the smaller ones are like puzzles in which no two bands of colour are the same. Again, this changes up close where we see that the colours don't meet, and drips interrupt the rational organization of colour bands. Up close, the rhythm and energy changes to a force field of moving colours.Scully talks about being at the intersection of European and American abstraction. The catalogue likens them to the work of Cezanne and Scully himself has talked of the influence of Van Gogh's bedroom chair. Equally, abstract expressionism, minimalism, the American painting's turn inwards to refer only to what lies within its own frame is everywhere identifiable Between Heaven and Earth.

Sean Scully, Star, 2021

The question I often ask of Scully's painting is "Why is he not doing the same thing over and over again?" After all, he has been painting bands of colour in different shapes and sizes, made into stripes, stacks and building blocks for over fifty years. But, of course, every series explores different colours, materials, sizes and arrangements on the support. In Between Heaven and Earth, the colour schemes, application of paint, the relationship of thick oil paint and the metal support changes everything. Like the natural world to which they speak, even if he changes a single element, these paintings are in constant motion.