Rubbish

Currently watching: Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010) dir Sophie Fiennes.

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These remains; his artistic leftovers that are individual site-specific works in their own right but also a mega sculpture park of one man’s practice in a defined period of time, have been abandoned. He has reportedly left them to the French state to do what they wish, currently fenced off from the public with a security guard and 3 dogs to keep watch. This film documents the making of Kiefer’s ruins.

Ruins seems the most appropriate category for this sculptural paradise Kiefer has left behind. On the one hand his artistic style renders the specifically made objects to look ruined (and hence the initial reason I was reluctant to categorise his work as rubbish at all) and on the other hand they have been abandoned to become overrun with weeds and returned to the former wasteland.

Kiefer cites mythological Lilith as being particular inspiring for the great concrete towers. Originally Lilith was a Jewish folktale and according to Isaiah xxxiv. I4-I5, Lilith dwells among the desolate ruins in the Edomite Desert where satyrs (se’ir), reems, pelicans, owls, jackals, ostriches, arrow-snakes and kites keep her company. The Bible mentions the Lilith only once, as a dweller in waste places (Isaiah 34:14) (ref Jewish Women’s Archive).

The film title is derived from the Lilith story. In 2001 Ardi Poels curated a show at Hidde Van Seggelen Gallery, London, with the same title Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow and says this: “Our understanding of Lilith’s words when Adam expulsed her from Paradise, evokes a twist: Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow once meant to be an apocalyptic threat, can also be interpreted as an Arcadian prediction. In this scene from the Old Testament we can discern the three components of a dynamic triangle in the history of art: Lilith (the individual), Paradise (nature) and the city (the collective).”

Kiefer’s installation La Ribaute translates roughly to The Holliday (googletranslate) as in holyday noun. a day on which a religious observance is held (OED). The complex is also reportedly near a road called La Riboute in Barjac according to a blogger who tried to track La Ribaute down in an aptly named blog apieceoplastic.

Although this film remains as a trace of the process, I think Kiefer left La Ribaute to ultimately be discovered at a much later date, when, as the film title suggests in a literal sense, grass has overgrown to artist’s ‘city’. The French state could turn it into an amusement park of sculpture tourism if they wanted but I guess he was banking on them doing nothing in his lifetime. Kiefer in interview sounds keen to observe natural processes at play in his art and leaving elements to chance (such as the way a piece of glass shatters as he throws it to the ground or the way acid drips down the giant lead books). What could be more chance than letting nature and the elements take hold in amongst the concrete, lead and glass he has left?

Currently watching: Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow (2010) dir Sophie Fiennes.

“OVER YOUR CITIES GRASS WILL GROW bears witness to German artist Anselm Kiefer’s alchemical creative processes and renders as a film journey the personal universe he has built at his hill studio estate in the South of France.

In 1993 Kiefer left Buchen, Germany for La Ribaute, a derelict silk factory near Barjac. From 2000 he began constructing a series of elaborate installations there. Like a strange, sprawling village, La Ribaute extends over 35 hectares and is composed of old industrial buildings and working studios that link to a network of underground tunnels dug out by Kiefer, which run underneath pavilions built to house paintings and installations. An underground pool at the cul-de-sac of a tubular iron tunnel is embedded within a crypt which backs onto to a 20 m tiered concrete amphitheatre. There are caves and woods, an open landscape of concrete towers – assembled like so many card houses – and secluded, private spaces. Traversing this landscape, the film immerses the audience in the total world and creative process of one of today’s most significant and inventive artists.

Shot in cinemascope, the film constructs visual set pieces alongside observational footage to capture both the dramatic resonance of Kiefer’s art and the intimate process of creation. This polarity – in terms of scale, sensibility and time – animates the film, creating a multi-layered narrative through which to navigate the complex spaces of La Ribaute.

Here creation and destruction are interdependent; the film enters into direct contact with the raw materials Kiefer employs to build his paintings and sculptures – lead, concrete, ash, acid, earth, glass and gold. Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow gives privileged access to Kiefer’s last days at La Ribotte prior to his move to Paris, where he now lives and works.”

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zf63U1Rk0w

My friend bought my this film for my birthday after I mentioned it had come up through my preliminary rubbish research it but wasn’t quite sure if it was that relevant. Having seen a lot of Kiefer’s work mainly in Berlin I knew there was a link to remains and ruins but not sure any of his individual works would fit my rubbish categories. The aesthetic of his work is rubbish-y: broken glass, dirt and ash, acid-ruined lead, but the raw industrial materials he uses are not rubbish to begin. The scenes he depicts are also those of ruins, remains and wastelands so there is certainly a link but not quite my criteria that the materials used a rubbish to start with.

I finally got round to watching the film yesterday which is the product of Fiennes’ 2 year film study of Kiefer in his Barjac studio complex (in the South of France) after he decided to leave for the Périphérique of Paris. The film is comprised of many slow pan shots of the major building-installation project La Ribaute in Kiefer’s Barjac complex, without narration, cut to shots of him working in his massive studio with his assistants, and with him directing cranes to construct the concrete structures featured on the cover, plus an interview in the Barjac library. The interview reveals a little about how he made the huge studio complex from wasteland (taking a bulldozer through the wasteland marking up where buildings were to be in chalk) and also how he views his work as he pulls bits of theory from astrophysics and religion (The Bible is a major influence).

It’s not clear when Kiefer decided to start making the massive installation-structure of tunnels and various buildings that each house a piece of his work – whether it was before or after he decided to move studios – but it is clear he was keen to create a legacy of his time there. He moved 110 container trucks of his work and equipment to his new studio the outskirts of Paris and left behind several pieces in the complex. Each work is installed as he intends them to be viewed as the film beautifully illustrates, mixing panning and tracking techniques to give the viewer a 3D sense of the sculptural configurations.

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Currently Reading: Vitamin 3-D: new Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation. Ellegood, Anne. 2009. Phaidon, London.

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The book itself, it’s worth mentioning, is a huge mid-green tome with a wedge of cover front and back held together with a soft spine. The edges of the pages are a metallic green, giving the effect of a massive square green vitamin pill that once consumed the reader will be more enriched in the knowledge of all the best sculptors.

The main body of the book is the alphabetised selection of the 117 sculpture stars. This is clearly meant to be a reference book, or dictionary to sculpture today (in 2009). The oversized pages and glossy full page photographs give a pictorial and brief introductory account of the individual practices that have been brought together as le crème de la crème in sculptural medium (which Ellegood practically denounced as redundant, antiquated museum-esque filter in her introduction as if in self-reflexive criticism).

Of these 117 sculpture stars, I found 4 applicable to my rubbish research: Christoph Büchel with Dump (2008) (I had already included his LAST MAN OUT TURN OFF LIGHTS (2010) which I saw at Tramway but Dump seems now much more relevant), Jedediah Caesar’s Californian (2008) comprised of collected detritus of his house and studio (a focus that a number artists have employed akin to a survey of their wordly (studio/life) possessions – Schabus, Dupont, Emin, Ross-Ho, MacRaild, Shapiro, Dong), Jim Drain with iii open iii closes (2007) comprised of scraps and Ruben Ochoa’s Extracted (2006) which includes dirt in the material specification.

In some ways I’m slightly surprised that in 2009 there are not more inclusions of rubbish artists, but on the other hand it’s just a sample of 117 out of 500 nominees. Although the quotidien everyday/recycled object was cited in Ellegood introduction as a key theme, it could clearly not dominate such a diverse field as sculpture/installation. However, it is clear that sculpture (in the expanded field) is a main historical basis for rubbish, a pretty obvious conclusion for me having come from a sculpture background to study rubbish as a distillation of many of my main critical concerns.

Currently Reading: Vitamin 3-D: New Perspectives in Sculpture and Installation. Phaidon (eds.). 2009. Phaidon, London.

This survey of contemporary sculpture conducted in 2009 spotlights 119 prominent cross-generational artists from 27 countries, introduced by Anne Ellegood. The criteria for inclusion to this survey was that from the 500 nominated by ‘significant’ critics, curators art historians and creative writers, they have made a ‘significant’ contribution to sculpture and installtion in the past years.

Ellegood starts with Rosalind Krauss’ major essay Sculpture in the Expanded Field (1978) and looks at the transition from modern to postmodern in the medium of sculpture. A major notion she identifies is medium specificity to material specificity; from talking abut sculpture to talking about its constituent parts.

This shift had already occurred when I was at art school (as an undergraduate 2003-2006) where artworks were described as comprised of the material components as opposed to merely ‘sculpture’, ‘painting’ or ‘print’. Indeed these categories were merely academic – quite literally as the fine art course was divided into these sections at the time. The argument of what constituted sculpture was no longer of concern; anything could be sculpture. It was this basis which we build our practices upon. From this material specificity, I have come to rubbish-specificity.

Ellegood goes onto to cite (p.007) Samuel Beckett saying that it is the artist’s task to find a form that accommodates the mess; finding order in chaos, although she contrasts this notion in the footnote with Theodor Adorno’s notion that “The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.” Minima Moralia. Adorno. T.W., 1978. Verso, London.

As Ellegood weaves together some fundamental concerns in the ‘expanded sculptural field’ of the day, she brings into the fore the notion of abundance (p.008); the embrace of disorder and precariousness which she notes as a move away from minimalism and towards construction and assemblage based practices. She says this is a “consistent acknowledgement and mirroring of how the excesses of visual, physical and sensory input increasingly characterizes contemporary life.” She derives the recurring approach for contemporary sculpture to employ everyday materials and found objects not historically associated with sculpture. A perceived alchemical life of materials and disposition towards recycling brings us neatly to the use of rubbish in contemporary practice and Ellegood quotes Douglas Heubler: “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting. I do not wish to add any more.” – a notion shared by several ‘rubbish artists’ I have interviewed. In this context, Ellegood also mentions Even Holloway’s use of discarded batteries and Jedediah Caeser’s use of studio detritus cast in blocks of resin. Other artists Ellegood cites in reference to rubbish include Mike Nelson who “salvages his materials from the enromous debris in the city” for A psychic vacuum (2007). She also mentios David Wilson’s Museum for Jurassic Technology which sounds worthy of further research. (both p.010)

In a wrap up of her key themes, Ellegood points out “We no longer find a roomful of dirt […] to be a dubious sculptural gesture. (p.012)

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Currently Reading: Gabriel Orozco – Asterisms (exhibition catalogue). 2012. Guggenheim Museum Publications, New York.

Nancy spector (curator)’s essay begins by comparing stroturf Constellation and Standstars – two rubbish collections from a playing field in America and beach in Mexico respectively; two areas where Orozco splits his time between.

Spector mentions a few previous rubbish projects: Penske Work Project (1998) which “involved a performance process in which the artist drove around New York City in a rented moving van, stopping at dumpsters to rummage for materials from which he crafted on-the-spot sculptures that he stored in the back of the vehicle. […] A year later, Orozco embarked on a similar project of retrieval and display by gathering the rusted cans that littered a beach in the Mexican state of Oaxaca and transforming each one with a label from the local beer, Carta Blanca. Corroded beyond use value, these cans found renewed purpose when exhibited at Portikus in Frankfurt as part of Carta Blanca (1999), an installation pairing beer, industrial decrepitude, and sand. (p.68)

In footnote 6 (p.69) Spector cites Benjamin H. D. Buchloch on Orozco’s work comparing Schwitters and Arp: “The affirmation of an object’s presentness and use value was countered by … Dadaists Arp and Schwitters with an emphasis on obsolescence, the object’s slow deterioration, or its inherent, increasingly rapid disappearance. Once of the precarious tasks that Schwittters and Arp confronted was of course to distinguish the obsolete object from mere detritus. That is, to transfigure an object, merely freed by time from its deployment in the production of use and exchange value, so that it could become a mnemonic object, engendering a reflection on the imaginary status not only of a future object, but also of future subject/object relations freed from all elements of production. What we perceive as aesthetic mastery in Schwitters and Arp originates first of all in their ability to rescue the fragments as mere junk, and to imbue the obsolete within an act of redemption.” – quoted from Gabriel Orozco: Sculpture as Recollection. 2006. Mexico City Museum del Palacio de Bellas Artes/Turner. p.168.

As I do with the Museum of Contemporary Rubbish photographs; “He isolated every item against a neutral backdrop, focussing it in the center of the frame.” p.69

Ans also in parallel with my notion that classification systems (including classifying something as rubbish) are human constructs: “The centrality of man is also obvious when it comes to taxonomic thought, given that all classified systems are ultimately subjective and arbitrary. They only exist as reflections on our heuristic perspectives on the natural world. With Asterisms and its taxonomic inflection, Orozco has emptied the archival model of its tacit authority by veiling his voice, his own subjectivity, behind the overarching logic of categorization – no matter how contrived the system – no ultimately reveals its artificiality.” (p.70)