A
good fair needs a combination of quirky or spectacular extras, good location,
plus of course quality art in the main section. Add that the cool yet comfortable Citizen M hotel helped my mood, and Rotterdam
delivered well...
The Extras
Leonard van Munster: Ein Goldener Berg
The extras may seem an odd place to start. but first thing I saw as I entered the fair grounds was Leonard van Munster’s golden mountain – set back where no-one else seemed to notice it, but very popular with the geese! The Dutch artist has made several striking public commissions, but is probably best known for his kinetic self-portrait The Dancing White Man, 2012. Here his intervention is made of lifesaver foil – as used to wrap people in post-traumatic situations – and so brought in all sorts of current affairs associations beyond the initial epiphany of its improbably aureate presence. And it was hard not to think of what I was soon to see: Bosch’s great triptych in which hay stands in for the gold which the foolish pursue at the cost of their eternal damnation.
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| Bosch: The Haywain Triptych, 1510-16 (detail) |
Other
less predictable presences included a house transported from Detroit by Ryan
Mendoza; live baking, photographing and consumption of bread; a mysterious
cordoned-off corner protected by a VIP-style bouncer which - if you were
persuasive enough – turned out to lead to a studio visit by Skype with an
artist; and a the programme of 56 one minute videos curated by the impressive trio
of Cécile B. Evans, Nathaniel Mellors and Shana Moulton. Off
site was the chance to see Erik van Lieshout’s new installation in a church and
to visit the Atelier Van Lieshout studio, so putting an end to any danger of
confusing Rotterdam’s most famous artists. And a bus would take you to various
institutions, the hardest to ignore being the Museum Van Beuningen (Mike Nelson
plus a spectacular if not fully persuasive Ugo Rondinone show featuring life-sized clowns in a rainbow of colours)
and Michael Portnoy’s compelling two hour series of linked performances using a
troupe of actor / dancers moving around Witte de With and having no problem
taking the audience with them).
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| Children loved mimicking Rondinone's clowns |
Slightly further afield, the Stedelijk Museum in neighbouring Schiedam mounted an excellent Jan Schoonhoven survey. He'd be an auction star has he been Italian. I was surprised - given that Schoonhoven (1914-94) was a career civil servant who made papier mache constructions in his spare time - to find photographs of him being painted with spots by Yayoi Kusama at the Museum in 1967, then dancing naked save for those embellishments, glasses and socks.
From this...
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| Jan Schoonhoven: R 71 - 20, 1971 |
To this...
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| Kusama and Schoonhoven |
Of course, I didn't like everything: also at Witte de Witte, obsessive teddy bear collector Charlemagne Palestine delivered one of the most self-indulgent and vacuous whole floor displays I’ve ever seen. Ulay is embroiled in a court case to obtain a fairer share of earnings from his collaborations with Marina Abramovic, so I guess he could do with more substantial recognition of his solo photographic work, but his his Polaroids at the Netherlands Photo Museum fell some way short of making the case (though the 'Quickscan' survey of new Dutch photographers was good), Then there's the Rotterdam Contemporary Fair, which is such a consistent festival of bad art it maybe deserves some credit for clarity of vision (though the organisers slipped up with a pretty good video programme, and by allowing interesting artist Martijn te Winkel to take a stand); and opposite that the Kahmann Gallery somehow got away with charging an entry fee for a what turned out to be simply a display of its own artists.
Hironimus Bosch: Visions of a Genius at the Noordbrabants
Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch
You could cheat slightly this year by counting the
convenient fact that the 500th year since Bosch’s death is being
celebrated – as the centrepiece of a year-round festival - by a stunning, if
unsurprisingly crowded, show in his home town 80 km away (13 Feb – 8 May) . The vast
majority of Bosch’s known panels and drawings have been brought together* from around the world, and the combination of a medieval worldview with what can
seem a proto-modern way of envisioning it remains startling. Culled from Bosch’s less well-known drawing practice, the central image above didn’t feed into a known painting, increasing the fresh impact of a typically
bizarre scene: a man armed with a lute is about to try to bash back the birds emerging from the anus of figure immured in a basket.
* though not without its issues around cost, attributions, withdrawn loans etc, as set out at http://theartnewspaper.com/news/news/prado-pulls-two-works-from-landmark-bosch-exhibition-/?utm_source=daily_feb15_2016&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email_daily
The location and its ripples
Rotterdam
is a dynamic background city, and the Van Nellefabriek factory - a modernist
icon which swallows the fair easily enough - has the added advantage of giving
work a characterful context to play against. That’s something artists don’t
really have at Frieze, for example.
Valérie Kolakis: Almost Familiar Place, 2016
Greek-born Montreal based Valérie
Kolakis had a solo booth (for London’s FOLD) which
collapsed modernism by unbuilding elements of a house in quietly uncanny style.
More strikingly, she had covered the entrance area’s extensive glass doors and
windows with an intricate lace-like pattern of Vaseline. I say ‘strikingly’,
but those who didn’t know the building may not have suspected unless they
spotted a smeared section, so convincing was the way an aspect quite other had
been slid onto the Van Nellefabriek. Whether noticed or not, I like how the entrant above has clothing transformed on pushing through the doors...
Richard
Woods at WORKS | PROJECTS, Somerset
It’s hard not to enjoy Richard Woods’
sassy melding of art, design and architecture, and this mixture of old and new didn’t buck the trend. It included the seasoned Leaning
Wood and Light Sculpture, 2011, a Dan Flavin rendered satisfyingly absurd;
and the sappy wall painting Duck
Weave, 2016, which jazzes up what Woods says is an ancient
rush-based method of constructing houses, but is also bound to trigger an art
association with cotton duck canvas. Either way, a tidy contrast to Leendert van der Vlugt’s highly rational building.
Pierre Derks at LhGWR, The Hague
Dutch video artist Pierre Derks navigates wittily between the personal and the collective as aspects of our identity construction through two main approaches. First, found scenes which fit his agenda, such as what I'm assured was the remarkable coincidence of how a passing party's coats matched a less nuanced piece of modern architecture than the Van Nellefabriek's (Here We Are Now #1, 2016 - still above); second, photographing the same scenes at different times and overlaying them so that, for example, commuters emerging from a subway feature in phone adverts behind them, or passers-by walk seamlessly between a quiet street and a protest march.
Joep
Van Liefland: Video Palace #41-
Corrupter, Orbiter, Eraser (Lost Archive 1) at Van Zijll Langhout
Contemporary, Amsterdam
I
was amazed to find that this shrine to discarded technology set up in a
building which preserves a different moment was former punk musician Joep van
Liefland’s 41st iteration since 2002 of his ‘Video Palace’ project. The
Berlin-based Dutch artist uses cathode ray TVs and video cassettes and their
players as his building blocks: some cassettes are arranged in painted grids, and
apparently abstract stripe paintings depict the red, green,
and blue light of analogue TV signals. He was a frequent
viewer of low budget movies on VHS who saw them as ‘a sort of punk… low budget, improvising, but also creative in their
solutions’. He then developed the idea of ‘exploring and collecting the
lowest segments of the culture industry’, hinting through posters declaring its
wonders at how ephemeral our superior digital means will also prove to be.
Indeed,
much of the best work saw the artist, like van Liefland, put forward a
distinctive view of the world, often with a focus on the mediation between
human / technological and animal / natural. Bosch would have fitted right in, if you count
God as technology instead of technology as God…
The World Between Nature and Technology
Bram
De Jonghe at Billytown, The Hague
Perhaps
the most eccentrically interesting stand was the Belgian Bram De Jonghe’s. A
neighbouring gallerist told me she’d been pleased to find considerable greenery
was to be introduced, and was disappointed to find that the substantial hedge
in front of Billytown’s booth remained shrink-wrapped, in line with much of De
Jonghe’s work (Untitled, 2016). Perhaps the artist was blocking off any rash short-term
acquisition by hedge fund managers of the sculptures which he makes out of
fired tar, alluringly shiny black shapes which retain slow motion liquid
properties, and so will return to a pooled state in ten years or so.
David
Jablonowski: Two of the Replica series at Fons Welters, Amsterdam
David Jablonowski, a Dutch artist who examines the evolution of
contemporary communication technologies in sculptures, videos, and
installations, has moved into somewhat painterly territory in his new high-tech-meets-nature
series ‘Replica’. Not, of course, that any paint is involved: computer-cut
aluminium forms the iconic minimalist grid, on which what looks rather like a
motherboard traps the chromatic flare of a parrot’s wings. Might this be the back
of a computer revealing that the dreams of freedom once epitomised by flight
have migrated to the virtual world? Or is there something more sinister in how
beauty is pinned down here?
Pentti
Sammallahti: Helsinki, Finland, 2002 at Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen, Amsterdam
How
come Finland has produced so many good photographers? Pentti Sammallahti (born
Helsinki, 1950) has travelled widely to make landscape images which are often literally
animated by the fleeting and humorous role of non-human presences. Most famously
he’s used dogs (emphasised by William Wegman’s canine oeuvre being shown
nearby) but the best images here set their scale and temporal atmosphere by means
of avian punctuation – one was of two birds on a Houston sidewalk. Yet Sammallahti
retains a particular affinity for the almost visible silence and cold of the
north, as in my choice of silver gelatin print, in which it's hard to resist the ridiculous impression that a balancing act is going on.
Paul
Kooiker: Nude Animal Cigar, 2015 at
Kromus + Zink, Berlin
Paul Kooiker (born in Rotterdam itself in 1964) subverts the tiresome coding of sepia-tinted photography as nostalgic by using filters to make contemporary riffs on the form. His Berlin gallery showed 7 of the 66 triptychs which form his recent project and book Nude Animal Cigar. Each conjoins impersonal female art subject (voyeuristic, geometrically emphatic faceless nudes) with fully visible animal (much more engaging, taken in zoos) and personal if burnt-out male art maker (remnants of some the countless cigars Kooiker has smoked in the studio). The typology yokes genres to an effect which, absurd as it is, puts various possible contrasts and equivalences crisply into play.
Mikko
Rikala at Rotwand, Zurich
The Finnish artist Mikko Rikala is nothing if not ambitious, his goal being 'to understand the world beyond the rational mind'. Whether or not he succeeds, that leads him to make varied, thoughtful and elemental works: he covers a kilometre with meditative slowness by drawing it in 1,000 parallel one metre lines; has water write to the clouds; overlays the sea at different points to condense time into too-intricate waves (Water Equals Time, 2016, shown above); and makes a sculptural play on Venice as representing the paradox of wood holding up stone.
Persijn
Broersen & Margit Lukács: Establishing
Eden at Akinki, Amsterdam
Margit
Lukács (Amsterdam, 1973) and Persijn Broersen (Delft, 1974), who
live and work between their two home cities, featured in the separate
Projections film space with Establishing
Eden. Referring to the shots used to establish a landscape location, and to New Zealand’s iconic role as a setting in recent cinematic history, Broersen
& Lukács have reshot the original places, only to present them as moving
collages of overlapping flatness which return the world-be-Eden to its status
as illusion. The result is an effective new twist on the popular theme of how
the mass media confuses reality and fiction.
Olivier
Mosset: Untitled, 2016 at Galerie
Van Gelder, Amsterdam
Finally,
a special prize for courage goes to Kees van Gelder, who may have been the gallerist posing himself the
most problems. First, he had to recruit students to make the commercially
unavailable grey confetti with which Olivier Mosset planned a floor piece. He
then attempted to open with the floor unprotected, but as the odd trample
occurred, was driven to increase the piece’s protection incrementally until it
was cordoned off fully by the time I arrived: on the one hand less pure, on the
other emphasising the value created – it was for sale at some £30,000 - by its
status as the work of the veteran Swiss-born conceptual minimalist (Mosset, with Daniel Buren, Michel Parmentier
and Niele Toroni, was a mid 60’s founder member of
the BMPT group, which famously challenged traditional means of making and
personalising art).
