TARYN SIMON Folder: Accidents, 2012 Taken from the Picture Collection
Archival pigment print

Archiving systems impose an illusory structural order on the radically chaotic and indeterminate nature of everything.
—Taryn Simon

Anton Henning

Talbot Rice Gallery

5^th August – 22^nd October, 2011

As part of Talbot Rice Gallery’s education and events programme, the venue hosts a course entitled Postmodernism in Art: Bad Painting and the Work of Anton Henning. Where postmodernism is now a household term applied to every kind of contemporary excess, from internet pornography to reality television, it’s likely the mainstream still finds the notion of bad painting a little hard to swallow.

Despite being an instance of newspeak, a course teaching us the inverted codes of postmodern aesthetics alongside Henning’s show at Talbot Rice, is in no way coincidental. Throughout, Henning’s exhibition is a lesson in bad taste. The gallery has been turned into a gauche bachelor pad, complete with carpet, a stylish couch and pictures of naked ladies. The paintings, rendered in various styles, hung on brightly painted walls, are ghastly. Appropriating elements from various milestones in the history of modernism, from abstraction to minimalism, the show is a lively jumble of painting, sculpture and video. 

At its best, the exhibition brings to mind the Vienna Secession, where design, painting and eroticism were stable allies. The series of paintings entitled Pin Up – showing women with no clothes on, often lying submissively or posing seductively – is at times funny. One assumes that these ill-proportioned depictions of women are unlikely to arouse even the most visually-starved of teenagers, and are merely bad jokes – more likely to provoke us than appeal to our desires.

The series of abstract paintings called Interieur perhaps best exemplifies what the gallery terms “bad painting”. Looping lines and triangular planes are rendered in often bright colours, bringing to mind the work of Dadaist Francis Picabia and German artist Martin Kippenberger – both harbingers of bad art. But where the radical impetus is clear with Picabia, and Kippenberger’s humour more than apparent, with Henning it’s unclear what exactly he aims to achieve. In the end, the work is simply not bad enough to be radically anti-art or clever enough to be particularly funny.

Curiously, we find ourselves in this postmodern paradox: uncertain how to judge something that is knowingly bad (against what are we to measure its success?) we nonetheless find ourselves weighing it against its own absurd idiom. Put simply, he is not good enough at being bad enough. By baiting us into such an absurd conclusion, the show is in every way a success.

____

Andrew Cattanach 

An Interview with Tamsyn Challenger, creator of 400 Women

4^th August – 4^th September

Canongate Venture, 5 New Street, Edinburgh

First it was the author, then art itself (tricky), then painting, and now even emotions are kicking the art-world bucket. Shame is dead - or so proclaim some recent artistic productions.[1] The argument goes something like: the ruling discourse (consumerism) forbids us to feel shame; profanity is impossible as there has been a leveling out across culture to include the profane. We therefore accept into the sphere of culture with no religious or puritan discernment, pleasure at every opportunity.

Against this claim, however, stands 400 Women: Five years work (mostly in isolation) towards the production of 175 portraits of raped and murdered girls and women from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico by 175 different artists invited to contribute. Its creator, Tamsyn Challenger, attributes all this action to an initial feeling of intense shame which sparked the project. Travelling alone in Mexico, Challenger met Consuelo Valenzuela, a women whose daughter, Julieta, had gone missing at the age of 17: ‘When I was just about to leave her she pushed these postcards with a picture of her daughter on them into my hands. The translator was shouting, “she wants you to give these to anyone, anyone you know, so that she might be found!” It was quite a scene she created, we were in a public place, and I felt very frightened…I didn’t take the postcards. Almost immediately after that I felt a horrible sick, sick sort of a shame at the fact that I had just wanted to get away from this woman.’

Conversation with Challenger is riddled with these descriptions of heart-breaking experiences, to the point that the art she has created out of these encounters seems secondary in discussion to them at times. It becomes apparent that the portraits created are the girls or women depicted for her; not merely representations of lives, but surrogate lives. When asked about this Challenger replies, ‘That’s true. It was vital that each work was individual – each girl somehow brought back. And maybe I shouldn’t say this, but there are works that I am not as keen on as others, but that’s what it’s like with people.’ As it was for feminist artists in the ‘70s, for Challenger ‘political work comes from a personal core’. Taking a critical mass of 175 cases of brutal gender violence for which justice is yet to be achieved, Challenger lives up to her name by bathing these cases of injustice in light for all to see, metaphorically and literally in the show’s Edinburgh venue, Canongate Venture. The window sills of this dilapidated former school are littered with dead butterflies.

It is clear making this work has been Challenger’s raison d’etre for the last five years; living with the weight of sadness each portrait of each murdered girl embodies; she knows each girl’s story by-heart. It is curious that the artist has taken the task of representing these girls upon herself: an atheist, westerner, living in London with “no need” to confront this level of anguish on a daily basis. She could have returned from Mexico and selectively forgotten like everyone else. But as she says, ‘gender violence is not just something going on “over there”. There’s an unspoken acceptance (of gender violence) and exposing that was something that was very important conceptually. One in four women suffer domestic violence in this country and it’s the same sort of figure in the U.S..’ Her reasons for bringing a show about Mexican women to Edinburgh, Amsterdam and hopefully the U.S. and Australia next year become clearer. ‘It is not about ensuring respect for the life of “the other” in these countries’, Challenger remarks, ‘it’s about valuing the life if the “any”. 400 is about our similarities to these women as opposed to our differences from them.’ This belief in the value of ‘bare life’ to use the term coined by Giorgio Agamben for those people who live without basic human rights attributed to them is what the show also represents.[2] 400 exposes the fact that though these women were living in Mexico with the supposed rights attributed to any human being in this country, the fact of their gender left them unprotected, rendered ‘bare’. 400 displays the poverty of female life in not just certain impoverished countries, but globally, on a scale of achievement with “one in four women suffering gender violence” coming top – a worrying winner.

Of course, the information impressed upon the viewer as they enter Canongate Venture in the form of action cards printed by Amnesty International, the curator, Gemma Rolls-Bentley’s essay in the accompanying exhibition guide, and the tragically long list of names of the girls pictured constructs the perspective from which one views the show. The artist and curator work together to cleverly enforce a way of seeing these strikingly diverse portraits/surrogate lives which makes the viewer feel ashamed to “have a favourite” – as if picking the prettiest prisoner in the firing-line out only to see them blasted to pieces all the same. And so Challenger accomplishes that which recent contemporary art had declared impossible.

What is also interesting is the artist’s working relationship with the curator of 400 Women and the degree to which it differs from the contemporary norm. Challenger explains this relationship by quoting John Baldesarri, ‘”What disturbs me is a growing tendency for artists to be used as art materials, like paint, canvas, etc. I am uneasy about being used as an ingredient for an exhibition recipe, i.e., to illustrate a curator’s thesis. It’s sandpapering the edges off of art to make it fit.”’[3] 400 Women resists this sort of co-option; the curation is made to fit the work rather than the work being forced to fit the curation. The artist is, for once, queen of her castle. 

One question remains in this interview and it is markedly more important than “which is your favourite?” What can, and has, 400 Women achieved and does the artist believe it can create change? ‘I never made the work thinking that men were going to stop hitting women because they’d seen it, that that was going to be an achievable change. I hope, if anything, that 400 could potentially inspire other people and then grow in momentum, because I think to make real change you have to have not just one individual: I think you need politicians, writers, philosophers, artists, and obviously you need the public to engage, producing a ground swell. I do believe that justice can still be achieved somehow for these women and girls, however; some recognition of what has been happening for nearly two decades can, I hope, be attained. I believe in the power of art, and I believe in the power of object. These women’s lives have been disregarded in a way that this work hasn’t been, and each portrait in the 400 installation hasn’t been, so it’s a sad irony of our times that these objects have more significance than each of those young women’s lives had.’ 

The “change question” is a horrible one: the problem not least being that the people most likely to see this show in the Edinburgh Art Festival, for example, are less likely to be ignorant wife-beaters, despite the high percentage of men who seem to fit this category statistically-speaking. For this show to have the capacity to effect change the audience for art needs to be modified first: augmented to include more areas of society. This is not to say, however, that this sort of art should not be made. On the contrary; it is ‘vital’ for gender violence to be acknowledged so that action can be taken by the very same people who can do something about it: and we are back to those middle-class viewers of art it currently seems to reach so many of.

Asking Challenger about the slightly controversial issue of whether the mothers of each of the girls all know that their images have been used she cannot answer positively for certain. Some will find this ethically dubious. One thing for me, is certain, however, I have never seen an exhibition of portraiture that breathed so much life into its sitters. There is some comfort for the mothers in this perhaps: these girls, taken cruelly and too young, live on, and see the world, through art. And crucially, the world sees them; no longer ‘bare life’.

____

Sarah Hardie

[1] This idea was the core statement of Via Negativa’s theatrical production, Via Nova, performed in the C.C.A., Glasgow as part of the New Territories International Festival of Live Art, March 2011

[2] Giorgio Agamben in T.J. Demos’s Life Full of Holes, published in Grey Room, no. 24, Autumn 2006

[3] John Baldessari in Jens Hoffmann’s project, The Next Documenta Should be Curated by an Artist, 1993