Process as a Guiding Line: Dóra Maurer at Tate Modern

Dóra Maurer, Overlappings 38, 2007

Two sheer and twisting rectangles fly across the wall, casting a shadow. Yellow seems to overlay the blue layer to create a green swath down the front. The work Overlappings 38, in the final gallery of the Dóra Maurer exhibition at Tate Modern, seems to take the history of geometric abstraction and do a joyful grand jete. How did we get here? The 35 works in this retrospective chart a processual and conceptual path across approximately five decades of making to reach the joyful state of this 2007 work. Form and color seem to float, transcending repressive policies of the Socialist Hungarian government in the earlier half of Maurer’s career and the ongoing understanding of abstraction today as a legacy of a Western, male-dominated Minimalism.

Installation view, Dóra Maurer at Tate Modern, August 5, 2019 – July 5, 2020

The exhibition manages to tell the story of Maurer’s long career with a relatively tight selection of work. Maurer is known as a Conceptual artist, working in Hungary in the Socialist period when such approaches (or anything not Socialist Realist) were not supported by the state. The first gallery presents Maurer’s wry humor in response to the repressive environment, her process-based work–obsessed with perception, and the milieu that she worked within in Budapest. Hidden Structures I-VI shows the elegant and minimal forms that Maurer’s processual structures often take in this early period of her career, where she was settling into a life making and teaching art in Budapest. Hidden Structures consists of six white sheets of paper, folded and then rubbed with graphite across the top third. Each one is folded like the one before it, plus one additional fold. The folds create the impression of lines in the absence of mark making, and the composition grows in complexity as this process is followed. This reductive approach–exploring what could be done with simple pieces of paper and graphite in the absence of drawing–becomes elevated through precision and care into an elegant, almost metaphysical, consideration of what a drawing can be. The light and tangible presence of the works, encased so that their delicate three-dimensionality comes through even framed, makes them feel like an embodied thing rather than an act of representation. 

Dóra Maurer, Hidden Structures I-VI, 1979

Beautiful, surely. What kind of otherworldly realm does it operate in? Certainly not one that evokes the Socialist context of Budapest at the time, and the restrictive view of what art should look like (representational, populist) as determined by official government ministries. To make art so otherworldly in a system that demanded the production of Socialist Realist images is in itself a rejection of that political system and its demand on art making. In the same room, we also see a clear engagement with the political context: KV’s 1st of May Parade on Artificial Ground from 1971 is a sequential series of photographs focused on a young pair of legs coming out from a skirt to walk in a circle in a room, trodding over a rectangle of mushed paper for a quarter of that repetitive journey. You see that it is repetitive because of the depth of the path through the paper and the wet, dark marks tracked over the rest of the circle. Maurer photographed a young neighbor walking over newspapers inside a room, in contrast to the customary marching in the public celebration of International Workers Day on the streets outside. The red ink used in the newspapers on this day tracked into a red circle, not registering as such in the black-and-white photographs but hinted at in the red border the photographs are presented in. This benign action confronts many expectations of the socialist society, by privileging a private singular experience over a public experience and by walking over the channels of official communication and their rhetoric rather than reading them.

Dóra Maurer, Timing, 1973/1980

The second room introduces us to Maurer’s work in film, produced concurrent to and in fruitful juxtaposition with her practices in other media. Given the sequential manner of Hidden Structures and 1st of May Parade, it makes sense that Maurer was interested in experimenting with film, a medium that it literally comprised of a series of stills. Three films of the 1970s–Troilets, Relative Swingings, and Timing–are on view in one darkened gallery, creating a dizzying experience for the visitor. These works retain an experimental quality and indeed were not shown as art works per se. Films like Timing, which depicts a pair of hands unfolding a light cloth in an otherwise darkened room until the cloth takes up the whole screen, relates to the folds and sequential structures of Hidden Structures closely, as if Maurer could effortlessly transition her experiments in process across medium. Spare and elegant, this seminal body of work from the 1970s–largely on paper or film, in black and white–is what is deservedly known and lauded today. What is exciting is the way that the exhibition continues into the present, giving testament to the evolution of the study of perception and process and to Maurer’s more recent commitment to painting.

Installation view, Dóra Maurer at Tate Modern, August 5, 2019 – July 5, 2020

The next gallery jumps through space and time in a fragmented, truncated way. Mirrors in cut wooden frames in 4 Out of 3 (1976) hang in front of a similarly disjointed wall composition 5 Out of 4 (1979), chopping up the space visually. Even here, the fragmentation of space is arrived at methodically, driven by an internal order. Both works challenge borders and where the visual experience starts and ends. This idea is perhaps best exemplified by the Buchberg experience of 1983 that shifted Maurer’s practice, allowing her process of displacement–a method where one color determines the next–to move on to a bigger scale.

Installation view of Dóra Maurer, Space Painting, Buchberg Project, 1982-3. Photo: Dóra Maurer. Kunstraum Buchberg. Image here.

In 1983, Maurer painted the tower room of the medieval Buchberg Castle in Austria from floor to ceiling, applying her process of displacements onto an architectural environment with sloped ceilings and changing natural light. Maurer describes this project as a key work in her practice. The displacement of color and line create the sensation that everything is off kilter–that there is no perspectival viewing point. In the exhibition, this project is represented in drawings and a fantastic Super 8 film that Maurer made to document the process of painting the tower room. The perspectival distortions spawned a new practice of “space paintings,” where Maurer projected grids onto folded photographs, creating overlays of pure color according to her system.

Dóra Maurer, Stage II, 2016

The final gallery shows work made as recently as 2016. Sweeping arcs and shapes come across the wall, with some overlapping of hue that further suggests a light, ethereal quality. The dynamism and seeming motion is generated internally by a logic that Maurer has been chasing for much of her career. Like kites in the sky, there is a freedom to these paintings that is ever so gently tethered to the earth. They seem to almost come off the wall or have been painted on a three-dimensional surface rather than a flat canvas. As someone previously familiar with the Maurer’s early work, one of the wonderful things about this exhibition is that it continues through to the present, giving a sense of the ongoing depth of Maurer’s artistic practice. Here as earlier, Maurer’s work is marked by a nuanced attention to perception and a combination of elegance and playfulness that is well worth a long look.

Dóra Maurer is on view  at Tate Modern until July 5, 2020.

Monuments of Latin America, reconsidered, at the Museo del Chopo

Pablo Helguera, O gran Tlatoani, aqui esta el plan de arte publico, 2009

The exhibition Monuments, anti-monuments, and new public sculpture opens with a joke: Pablo Herlguera’s Artoon about a fictitous pre-Columbian ruler’s plans for a new monument ends with the punch line: “public art is not for the public but for the government.” A healthy skepticism runs throughout the exhibition at the Museo del Chopo in Mexico City, whether looking back at the optimistic modern sculptures erected along the 1968 Ruta de la Amistad for the Olympics games in Mexico to a critical reappraisal of the monument among a later generation of artists across Latin America.

Helen Escobedo & Paolo Gori, exhibition copies from Monumentos mexicanos. De las estatuas de sal y de piedra, 1980

A selection of photographs from a photo book published in 1980 introduces the turn toward critical reappraisal of monuments in public space. The black-and-white images of public sculptures across Mexico suggests their plethora and diverse contexts. In the range of historical figures represented, it also begs the viewer to question the history that it represents: why these men (and they are mostly men), and why these moments from Mexican history? Looking at their dynamic, impressive poses in a serial fashion, one after the other, each becomes less individually powerful. It creates the impetus in the viewer to question the root of society’s desire to memorialize personages who are tied to conquest, now-defunct political parties, and war as well as the manner and style in which the statues are made.

Exhibition view of models for the Ruta de la Amistad

The ambitious project of building monumental sculptures along the Ruta de la Amistad in Mexico City is represented here through models, photographs, and a 1970 dance video with Raquel Welch dancing in a space-age bikini in front of the sculptures. The ebullient tone of the colorful models and the gyrating dance both speak to a hopeful future. The different ways of learning about the Ruta de la Amistad show not just the sculptures, but their reception and later their fall into neglect. Care of public sculpture can easily become a monumental task as well.

Installation view with sculpture by Juan Fernando Herrán and photographs by Iván Argote

As the show broadens out, into the present and beyond Mexico, curator Pablo León de la Barra asks us to rethink the real and symbolic occupation of public space in Latin America. Occupation is a key word for these countries with their colonial histories. Juan Fernando Herrán’s series A Thousand Heroes is represented here with a rough wood base for an absent sculpture. Its function, to subvert the basic mechanism of power on which such monuments rely, speaks to the particular context of the artist’s native Colombia. Many of Colombia’s 100-year-old statues were imported from Europe, so that its nation-building project was made through the techniques and hands of its colonial masters. At the same time, Herrán’s empty pedestal speaks across that particular history to any society where heroes and leaders are absent from memory. Two photographs by Iván Argote, from a series called Turistas, likewise questions the stone leaders of Bogota. Argote photographed sculptures of European leaders, carved in western attire, wearing traditional ponchos. Below, Christopher Colombus points south, but the gesture is hollowed out by the poncho he is wearing. The colors of the poncho echo the colors of the graffiti that has accumulated at the statue’s base.

Iván Argote, Christopher pointing out the South, at Bogata, 2013

Across the course of the show, the optimism of the massive modernist sculptures created for the Olympics in Mexico city in the late ’60s gives way to criticality and suspicion in several works that consider the destruction and movement of monuments. The shows ends on a political jab, bringing the monument, or a satirical reversal of it, into the present moment with a grotesque plaster form of a florid Donald Trump laying on the floor. Created by a collective of Puerto Rican artists in the past year for an exhibition at Proyectos Ultravioletas in Guatamala City, Radamés “Juni” Figueroa, Melvin Laz, and Rafael López use the opposite of the glory and power of the monument by putting a form of the current U.S. president on the floor, shirt unbuttoned over a protruding gut, tongue sticking out. It is titled Bad hombre.

Installation view featuring Radames Juni Figueroa, Melvin Laz, and Rafael Lopez’s Bad hombre (2017)

 

Repetitive Affect: Ragnar Kjartansson at the Reykjavik Art Museum

Ragnar Kjartansson, God I feel so bad, 2008

In addition to the many treats of my recent trip to Iceland, the Reykjavik Art Museum had the exhibition Ragnar Kjartansson: God, I Feel So Bad on view, the first museum exhibition of the performance artist in his home country. The extensive exhibition ranges over time and medium, from early drawings to elaborate recent performances. Its title, selected by the artist, comes from a 2008 drawing that is on display and suggests the mood of playful pathos that finds more performative expression in other works on display. Kjartansson says: “I like that title a lot. It’s both true and ironic, precisely the way I feel everything is. Duplicity is everywhere. The works all revolve around how bad I feel and how everybody feels bad, and how you try to giggle when you face the abyss.”

Woman in E, 2016-7 

Woman in E, 2016-7 

Cue the music. The tenor of the show is struck–literally–in the live performance Woman in E. I could hear the E-minor chord, resonating through the space, when I first entered the museum. As I made my way toward it, in one of the first rooms of the exhibition, I was confronted by fluttering gold steamers. They obscured my view of the plaintive noise source. Parting the gold curtain and entering, I discovered a woman in a gold-sequined gown standing on a rotating plinth of more gold streamers. At regular but not rhythmic intervals, she struck the E-minor chord of her gold Fender electric guitar. The jolt from each note is strong and individual rather than forming a melody. E-minor has thoughtful, melancholic connotations. The statuesque presence of a women on a pedestal and the title suggest a synesthesia between music and visual art, between the works of classical composers and classical sculpture. A rotating cast of local performers enact this spectacle until September 3, when it will be replaced by another performance.

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Kjartansson is an increasingly well-known artist internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., Palais de Tokyo in Paris, New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, and the Guggenheim Museum Balboa. In 2009, he became the youngest artist to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale, and his S.S. Hangover project sailed across the Harlem Meer as part of Creative Time’s 2015 “Drifting in Daylight: Art in Central Park” exhibition. Kjartansson’s work has been said to combine theater with experiments in repetition and endurance, as a piece like Woman in E suggests. Affect can mean an instinctual reaction to stimulation rather than the result of a complex intellectual process, and it suggests the sensory and emotional realms. The works on view in the exhibition are often repetitive but always affective. The combination productively undermines, intensifies, and calls into question the relation of the one quality to the other. Does the repetition nullify the affective qualities? Or does it mount to an ever more intense catharsis? Is the work of art a saving grace or a hollow gesture?

Installation shot, World Light – The Life and Death of an Artist (2015), Four-channel video

Installation shot, World Light – The Life and Death of an Artist (2015), Four-channel video

Kjartansson himself has said: “All the longing to make something great — but it’s never great; it’s always mediocre. And I just love that. I just love it when human beings are trying to achieve something and it sort of doesn’t happen. I think it’s the ultimate human moment.” That ethos is on view upstairs, in the most complex work in the show, World Light – The Life and Death of an Artist. Filmed in Vienna in 2015 with a crew of friends and family, the four-channel video installation documents some twenty hours of an attempt to perform Halldór Laxness’s novel World Light. Against handmade backdrops, we see actors waiting, idle chatter, the rap of the clapperboard starting a scene, the performance of the scene until finished–or until a line is flubbed, a laugh erupts, and the scene begins again. Kjartansson is there too, seen in shots directing or interrupting the scene, in a trademark white tux, with hair slicked back, like a 1950s crooner. Happening concurrently on four large facing screens in a darkened room, its impossible to watch them all, much less discover the plot. The action is that of the group filming rather than the novel itself, but even that lacks a narrative arc. Rather, it shows the seemingly endless process of filming. It’s point is perhaps that flawed striving for an elusive transcendent, in this case the transformative art experience. The human realm reaches up for the exalted work of art, but it lies just beyond the grasp, like the plot of the novel for the viewer.

In the final room of the show, whose noise echoes out into the hallway where it competes with the softly throbbing E from the other part of the building, is an ongoing screening of A Lot of Sorrow (2013-14). It is a recorded performance of the band The National playing their 3-minutes song “Sorrow” for six hours in front of a live audience at MoMA PS1, and it solidifies the idea that endurance is required. The experience of watching it is like having an earworm (a song that gets stuck in your head). You kind of like it, then you tire of it, but it keeps popping back up. It begins to sound different and you start to hear all the possible nuance and inflection. Sorrow is a conceit that Kjartansson has tackled before. Is it cathartic to repeat the exploration of such full-fledged emotion? The emotive lyrics of the song become emptier, as with repetition one is reminded that they are sung by rote rather than by real feeling. It reminds how lyrics are indexical, a pointing back at some original feeling, even if they feel real when performed. And yet, to keep going, to keep singing, suggests a kind of faith in absolution, a belief in the act of singing and the artifice of catharsis as truly valuable.

On view at the Reykjavik Art Museum through September 24, 2017.