Installation view, Clapping with Stones: Art and Acts of Resistance at the Rubin Museum. August 16, 2019-January 6, 2020
Architectural models turned on their head, or their sides, ash spilling out of them. My Place is the Placeless (2016-2019) is a set of 15 glazed stoneware objects. With them, Shahpour Pouyan transforms architectural form into personal relics. This installation is part of the exhibition Clapping with Stones: Art and Acts of Resistance on view at the Rubin Museum through January 6, 2020.
Installation view of Shahpour Pouyan, My Place is the Placeless (2016-2019)
The objects are neat but handmade, finished in a neutral palette yet rough edged. Each is unique, and displays the roof of a different type of building, which might be round or pointed. Thick red earthenware walls peak out of the unglazed edges. Ash spilling out makes them feel a little less static, a little more in process of coming together or falling apart. What brings these miniature domes together in a vitrine?
Installation view of Shahpour Pouyan, My Place is the Placeless (2016-2019)
Shahpour Pouyan made this body of work in response to the results of a DNA test, which informed the New York-based, Iranian-born artist that his genetic heritage came from far-flung parts of the world such as Scandinavia and South Asia. The artist created architectural forms based on the indigenous architectural practices of those disparate places, uniting them just as he in his person unites such a heritage–a kind of architectural genetics. Only later did Pouyan learn that those results were a mistake, and some of those connections were false. As he continued making this group of work, he added ash. The ash serves as a reminder of past histories, which may or may not have been real.
Installation view of Shahpour Pouyan, My Place is the Placeless (2016-2019)
The ash transforms the little vessels into urns, while the form recalls the idea of dwelling and home. Pouyan materializes the forms of home and the past but is distanced from it. The title of the work, “My Place is the Placeless,” comes from a poem by Rumi:
I am not from the East
or the West,
not out of the ocean
or up from the ground,
not natural or ethereal,
not composed of elements at all.
I do not exist,
am not an entity in this world
or in the next,
did not descend from Adam and Eve
or any origin story.
My place is placeless,
a trace of the traceless.
These little monuments of poetic form mark what could be as much as what is. In doing so, they question any kind of origin story.
Installation view of Shahpour Pouyan, My Place is the Placeless (2016-2019)
Pouyan’s work resists the easy and straightforward identities that we give to ourselves and others, offering a multi-valent mode of being instead. From onion dome to stupa, one can draw formal parallels between the rounded and pointed tops as well. Artmaking in this case is an act of reconciliation, imagining all the heritages together at one table. Such a syncretic understanding of culture is amplified by the view of the installation just beyond Pouyan’s vitrine.
Installation view, Clapping with Stones: Art and Acts of Resistance at the Rubin Museum. August 16, 2019-January 6, 2020
272 suspended red lanterns act as a central visual point for the installation Lotus: Zone of Zero (2019) by Kimsooja, from which comes the layered sounds of Tibetan, Gregorian, and Islamic chants. The lanterns visualize the lotus, a motif of contemplation in the Buddhist tradition that here presents a call for unity even while it visually unifies the space around a central point.
Installation view of Shahpour Pouyan, My Place is the Placeless (2016-2019)
The exhibition moves succinctly between the work of many artists–from Nari Ward and Hank Willis Thomas to Kadar Attia and Lida Abdul–and it can be difficult, even jarring, to move so quickly between strong perspectives that require understanding a local context. Within his own work, Pouyan makes it seem both natural and mythic.
Driekopsieland (Île à trois têtes) (2019). Mild steel, wire, steel wool, steel pot scourers, cardboard. Installation view at Biennale de Lyon, Lyon
Bronwyn Katz is a South African artist who frequently turns to metal, found metals, and other objects to consider structures of place and language. These resonant and unruly materials bring specificity and context to the minimalist forms. In this Phone Tag interview, Bronwyn describes her family connection to metalwork, the importance of sustaining networks, and how the different environments of Capetown and Johannesburg shape her practice.
Phone Tag is a generative interview format, where I ask each participating artist five questions (plus others as the discussion meanders). At the end, I ask him or her to introduce me to an artist whose attitude and work they find interesting and/or inspiring, who I then interview with the same five questions.
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Linnea West: You mentioned that you are recently back from a project in Lyon. What were you working on there, and what are you working on now?
Bronwyn Katz: Currently I’m working in my studio. I’m preparing work for a solo show at Peres Projects in Berlin. While I was in Lyon, I was preparing work for the Biennale. I spent three weeks there preparing the work for the Biennale.
LW: Were you in Lyon for so long because you were making work there, or because it just takes that long to install, or…?
BK: For the Biennale it was important that all of the artists make new works. Most of the works that were on show were new works created specifically for the Biennale. It was also important for the Biennale that we collaborate with local factories and local artisans. Many of the artists ended up producing the work from start to finish in Lyon.
Driekopsieland (Île à trois têtes) (2019). Mild steel, wire, steel wool, steel pot scourers, cardboard. Installation view at Biennale de Lyon, Lyon
LW: What did you make?
BK: I created an installation out of wire and steel wool. The installation is called Driekopsieland. Basically, it’s a continuation of work that I’ve done before, but on a larger scale. I was trying to also shift some of my previous thoughts and ideas about what I was making. Most of the work that I made for the Biennale is very similar to work that I made earlier, where I was working with the idea of language, language formation, and the possibility of creating an alternative language with material. Also sounds. I created sounds.
For the Biennale, using the same material, I was still interested in the sound but also in trying to create a landscape. I was also reflecting upon the fact that the Biennale was being held at an old washing machine factory, and so I wanted to create a type of metal landscape. The installation looks like a fuzzy cactus metal forest, and the wire extends from nine meters up so that it begins to look like a type of water source or rainfall.
LW: That sounds amazing. The first image on your website is of some sculptures made out of steel wool. When I first looked at those, I didn’t know what that material was, and it almost looks like it could be soft instead of sharp. Why do you like working with steel wool? Where does that interest come from?
BK: I think I’m generally interested in metal. Growing up, my father was a metal worker. He made gates and burglar bars, and I’ve always had a relationship with metal. I think that the work comes out the way it comes out, because I try to find alternative, quirky ways of working with the material. Instead of spending time welding a large structure, I’m more attracted to softer metals and also found metal.
Untitled, notes on perception (i) (2018). Wire and rope from used beds. 186 x 250 x 23 cm, 186 x 127 x 5 cm. Image courtesy of André Morin and the Palais de Tokyo
LW: That’s sounds like it has been an interesting influence. I wonder who else or what else influences how you work now?
BK: I’m not sure. I’m very influenced by my community that I grew up in, but also the community of artists that I practice with currently—my network basically. Also what’s happening in the country, in South Africa, but also the rest of the world. It’s difficult to point out one specific thing. It’s more about the way I’m living at the time, how the city works, or just what is around me and the space that I’m living in. So many things. I think place would be the number one influence on the work.
LW: You mentioned working in a community of artists. Is that a community in Johannesburg? What’s that art scene like?
BK: I’d say it’s a community between Johannesburg and Cape Town. I spent a lot of time in Cape Town. I studied in Cape Town. After studying, I spent two extra years in Cape Town. Most of my community is in Cape Town. Now, having moved to Jo’burg, I’ve been able to broaden my network and expand my community.
In Cape Town, I was part of iQhiya, a collective of 11 women. We all met at university, at different stages of university, and we decided to come together as a network to support each other’s practices. When I speak about a community or network, that was a very structured community-network.
In Jo’burg it is more fluid. There are artists in similar positions of their career that I’m engaging with. I’ve also recently joined a reading group called the Lessor Violence reading group. Just being able to share ideas with people on a regular basis is important for my practice.
LW: Absolutely. I’m interested in this collective in Cape Town that you were part of. You mentioned that it was 11 women. Is it a coincidence that they all happen to be women, or was it specifically women coming together?
BK: It was very specific. Like I said, at the time we were all studying together but at different stages. We were all black women students at the university, and the way that we were taught about art, the art world or just who was able to have a successful career or who was acknowledged within the institution… it was almost never a black woman. Coming together, we wanted to create that space where we give each other the attention and support that we were not finding within the university.
Droom boek (2017). Salvaged bed springs and mattress. 180 x 150 cm
LW: It’s wonderful to make spaces like that. When did you first think of yourself as an artist?
BK: I’m not sure.
[laughter]
LW: Do you think of yourself as an artist?
BK: I do, but I can’t think of a point where I didn’t think I was an artist or a point where I started to think that I was an artist. I’m not answering your question well. [laughs]
LW: Well, one of the things it seems to me, from the outside, is that you’re younger and you’ve already been quite successful. That you have galleries in different places, and you’re showing work all over. Maybe you haven’t had to wrestle as much with that identity because you’ve been able to show work.
BK: I agree with you. I was on a residency just outside of Jo’burg with an older artist a few years ago, and she was telling me every five years she had to make a decision to continue being an artist. In my career, this is something I haven’t experienced because my career has been so short. Maybe that’s a question for the future.
Untitled, notes on perception (iii) (2018). Wire. Image courtesy of André Morin and the Palais de Tokyo
LW: Do you have a studio? What is an ideal day like in your studio?
BK: Yes, I do have a studio. An ideal day is me waking up on time, going to studio, maybe reading for a bit, working on a project I’ve been working on, and hopefully somehow magically discover a breakthrough.
[laughter]
Or discover something that I haven’t seen in my work before or just lean something from the material. I think most days, I go to studio and I try and find something that I haven’t found yet. The ideal day would be finding something that I’m looking for.
LW: You mentioned that you recently moved to Johannesburg. Do you think it’s important for an artist to be in a big city where there are galleries where you can see art, where you can make connections but where it’s often expensive or chaotic, or better to be somewhere smaller or quieter, where it’s a little easier to make?
BK: Basically, this is my second time coming back to Johannesburg. I lived in Johannesburg in 2017 for a few months. I had moved from Cape Town to Johannesburg to test out how it would feel to live in the city. Then in February this year, I moved back to Johannesburg. I would say that there is a lot going on in Cape Town, in terms of cultural institutions. My gallery, for example, is not in Johannesburg; It is only in Cape Town. I don’t know if you’ve ever been, but the cities are on opposite ends [of South Africa], and they’re very different from each other.
My main reason for moving out of Cape Town was that Cape Town is a very expensive place to live, because it’s a tourist destination. It’s a lot cheaper to live as an artist in Johannesburg, especially in the center of the city. Most of the center has moved to other parts and the center has sort of been abandoned. The center is poor in Johannesburg, whereas in Cape Town the center is very wealthy. The poor in Cape Town are outside of the center, pushed out far outside of the center. It’s much more affordable to live in Jo’burg, and I would say it’s much more interesting to live in Jo’burg as well. I think Cape Town has the potential of becoming a bubble. There can be a disconnect from what’s actually happening in the rest of country.
But in comparison to a place like Kimberly, which is a smaller city, where I’m from, that’s a different aspect of your question. I think it would be very hard at this stage of my career to live in a place like Kimberly where there is no art market. I think that maybe at a later stage of my career, that would be possible, but at such an early stage of my career I think it’s important that I live in either Cape Town or Jo’burg. And for the way that I wish my practice to grow, Jo’burg makes more sense.
LW: That makes sense. It was great speaking with you—thank you!
BK: Thank you.
Driekopsieland (Île à trois têtes) (2019). Mild steel, wire, steel wool, steel pot scourers, cardboard. Installation view at Biennale de Lyon, Lyon
Since 1989, with few exceptions, the Philadelphia Museum of Art has featured Cy Twombly’s massive cycle of ten paintings in a gallery at the very end of the Museum’s modern and contemporary art galleries. 50 Days at Iliam tells the story of the end of the Trojan War. The paintings fill the large gallery and its antechamber with a swirl of chaotic action. It is only since spending more time with the work that I realized what is happening; much like Homer’s Iliad, the viewer is dropped in medias res into a story of rage and war that is as relevant today as when it was first told.
Entering, large white canvases covered in scribbles and scratches vie for attention. A huge canvas with three large color clouds anchors the facing wall. Penciled in names and painted texts run over and on top of each other; large color splotches in reds and greys and blues take up vast territories; black lines mark out triangles and phalluses and circles while scratching out other symbols and names; white paint partially or fully effaces the rest. The names of some gods, goddesses, and heroes stand out. The effect is chaotic with no immediate sense of narrative. In place of it, there is a sense of momentum–a rush of red clockwise across the room.
The most arresting canvas to me is the fourth from the left–a giant fireball of red-orange that seems to have exploded, hovering above red script spelling out the phrase “Like a fire that consumes all before it.” In the context of battle it reads like an epic emphatic bloodsplat. While it works on that register, it works more subtly to link the story being told across the canvases as well.
Homer’s Iliad dates to roughly the 8th century BC, and Twombly–enamored with Greco-Roman mythology–closely read Alexander Pope’s 18th-century English translation. In the last fifty days of the Trojan War, the battle between the Greeks and the Trojans comes to head. The great Greeks warrior Achilles refuses to fight because he is enraged that his war booty has been taken from him by his king. The Greeks start to lose. But the Trojan prince Hector kills Achilles’s close companion Patroculus in battle. Achilles wants vengeance and returns to the fray, killing Hector and winning the war for the Greeks. In Homer’s Iliad, the Greek Army is like a fire that consumes all before it. In Pope’s introduction to his translation, Pope compares Homer’s poetry to a fire that consumes all before it. Twombly’s red paint moves across the canvases on the left side of the room, spelling out the name of Achilles and the other Greek heroes and the painted works also consume what is before them–both clockwise, as the red colors fade into the blues and greys of the dead souls of the Trojans on the right side of the room, and on the facing canvases. The Fire that Consumes All Before It faces The House of Priam, and indeed that fire, of the Greek warriors, will consume and destroy the members of the Trojan king’s house just as it visually does in the installation that Twombly creates.
The artist advised the museum on how to install his 10-painting cycle, and the current gallery has been carefully modified to fit the artist’s requirements. The first painting in the cycle–The Shield of Achilles–hangs immediately outside the gallery. It represents the gift that the nymph Thetis made for her son Achilles to protect him in battle and which was famously described in intricate detail in Homer’s Iliad. Upon entering the room, bold red script lists out the Greek army in Heroes of the Achaeans, with the words Achillles and Achaens being most prominent. Achaens are Greeks, and Ilians are Trojans. Twombly uses Greek and Roman naming conventions, and deliberately subverts conventional spellings in other ways, substituting the Greek Delta for As and mispelling “Ilium” in the title of the cycle as “Iliam”–the extra A intended as a reference to Achilles.
Even while the large white surfaces are covered in text, much of that writing is deliberately painted over or scratched out. Heroes of the Achaens is the second painting in the cycle, but Twombly pairs it visually with the last painting in the cycle, Heroes of the Ilians, by placing it on the same wall. It is thematically linked. Heroes of the Ilians is also a roll call of the characters who played a part in those last fifty days, this time those on the Trojan side. Their defeat and demise is denoted by the many erasures and the use of grey, white, and blue to evoke the cool shades of death. So too does the shamrock-like outline which recalls the color clouds that Twombly uses elsewhere to evoke shades. Shades, in the ancient Greek conception, are souls of the dead that inhabit the underworld.
Facing the red rage of the left-hand side paintings, full with the names and stories of the Achaean warriors, is a line up of the Trojan side, its warriors and goddesses and battle positions, but Twombly uses a light cyan and grey, a color linked to death, for the panels on this side. The two armies are facing off on the opposing walls. At the same time, the emotional arc of the room cycles from left to right, from rage to death. In Achaens in Battle, Twombly paints the word “artist” above what looks like a painter’s palette at the very bottom of the canvas. To me, this suggests that the artist is putting himself in a spectator’s seat for the battle, and by proxy, so are we the viewer in prime seats to watch the climax of The Iliad unfold.
Twombly paints abstract portraits of the characters in the form of color clouds in the central painting Shades of Achilles, Patroculus, and Hector. Shades of Achilles, Patroculus, and Hector hangs on the back wall, facing the viewer as you enter the gallery. It represents the culmination of the plot and the events that led to the fall of Troy, and it mediates between the red rage of the Greeks that moves toward it on the left and the blue shades of death that moves away from it on the right on the Trojan side. It is the death of Patroculus by Hector that brings Achilles back into the fray. Achilles then kills Hector, knowing that by doing so he fates himself to die.
Alexander Pope’s translation begins with the words:
Achilles' wrath, to Greece the direful spring Of woes unnumber'd, heavenly goddess, sing!
But in Homer the poem begins with the word μῆνιν, or rage. Rage is the driving force of the story, and it unfurls across the Twombly’s painting like a vengeful river on the left-hand side of the gallery until it transmutes into blue-grey death on the right-hand side of the gallery. Twombly takes the gestural marks of action painting and the lessons of abstraction and applies them to a Classical theme, reopening this subject matter for contemporary art at a time when the impetus for painting was thought to come from the artist’s psyche. The old story becomes distilled to the emotional forces at work, creating a meditation on war and its causes, the grievances and vengances its nurtures, and the implacable way it moves forward once it starts. Then and now, the end is the same: Shades of Eternal Night await the warriors of those fifty days battling on the plains of Troy.
