Anri Sala , livre ebook
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2023
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108
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English
Ebook
2023
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Publié par
Date de parution
04 avril 2023
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9780253068552
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
5 Mo
Anri Sala is one of the most gifted and accomplished visual artists of his generation. Michael Fried first encountered Sala's video, film and installation art in 2005 and has been following his work since. This collection of essays focuses on what Fried identifies as a few major and recurring themes in Sala's work, such as the treatment of absorption and the overarching issues of anti-theatricality and presentness. Throughout the book, which is illustrated with numerous colour stills from Anri Sala's videos, Fried pursues a highly personal approach of combining extremely fine-grained structural and thematic readings of individual works with philosophical and theoretical reflections often drawing on major thinkers in the Western philosophical tradition, including Ludwig Wittgenstein and the eighteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Schiller.
Fried also provides unique insight into his own renowned critical and theoretical work, which has exercised such great influence in art history and criticism for nearly sixty years. Employing in these moments a conversational tone, speaking directly to the reader in his own voice about his own work, he reviews the genesis and development of his theories and critical constructs in light of Anri Sala's videos, creating a highly productive back and forth between Sala and the contemporary art world on the one hand and Fried's often more historical studies and concepts on the other. For readers of Michael Fried, the result is not only a stimulating discussion of Sala and the artistic and theoretical tradition in whose light his work can be viewed, but also a vital reflection on Fried's own foundational ideas, how they came to be and how they are relevant today.
Epigraph Introduction 1 1. A Riff in Time: Le Clash (2010) and Tlatelolco Clash (2011) 16 2. Sala with Schiller: World, Form and Play in Mixed Behaviour (2003) 53 3. Improvisations (2010): A Conversation with Edi Rama 86 4. Presentness Found and Lost: Air Cushioned Ride (2006) and A Spurious Emission (2007) 99 5. After the Siege: 1395 Days without Red (2011) 147 Coda: If and Only If (2018) 197 Acknowledgements 221 List of Works 222 About the Artist and Author Colophon
Publié par
Date de parution
04 avril 2023
Nombre de lectures
0
EAN13
9780253068552
Langue
English
Poids de l'ouvrage
5 Mo
Contents
Introduction
1. A Riff in Time: LE CLASH ( 2010 ) and TLATELOLCO CLASH ( 2011 )
2. Sala with Schiller: World, Form and Play in MIXED BEHAVIOUR ( 2003 )
3. IMPROVISATIONS ( 2010 ): A Conversation with Edi Rama
4. Presentness Found and Lost: AIR CUSHIONED RIDE ( 2006 ) and A SPURIOUS EMISSION ( 2007 )
5. After the Siege: 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED ( 2011 )
Coda: IF AND ONLY IF ( 2018 )
Acknowledgements
List of Works
About the Artist and Author
Kino-Agora
Colophon
I started to get interested in something bigger than the image, something that prints the image rather than something that is printed in the image—something that answers to a necessity, an urgency, a drive that enables you to set up the world again through an image, even if only for one minute. Such precise moments make you feel right; they make you feel connected.
—Anri Sala
‘From Silence to Language and Back Again’ (a conversation between Lynne Cooke and Anri Sala), PARKETT 73 ( 2005 ): 76 . Quoted and briefly discussed in Michael Fried, ‘Introduction (Optional)’ in FOUR HONEST OUTLAWS: SALA, RAY, MARIONI, GORDON (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011 ), 24 .
Introduction
This book mainly comprises four essays on individual or pairs of videos (or films and videos, an original filming having been converted to video) by Anri Sala, plus a short Coda on an additional video, bringing the total number of works singled out in these pages to seven. In addition, it includes the text of a short conversation between Edi Rama, at that time mayor of Tirana, Albania and a close friend of Sala’s, and me, a conversation which, in the form of a recording, was part of an exhibition of doodles by Rama in Berlin in 2010 (arranged by Sala; more on this further on).
Sala, born in Tirana, Albania in 1974 , studied art in Tirana, Turcoing and Paris and has lived in Berlin since 2004 ; his exhibition history is extensive, with major shows in Paris, Munich, London, New York, Venice, Humlebaek (the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark) and Bregenz among other venues, and he has been awarded prestigious international prizes. I have written about Sala before: the first essay in my book FOUR HONEST OUTLAWS: SALA, RAY, MARIONI, GORDON ( 2011 ) consists in an extended discussion of his remarkable, not-quite-thirteen-minute-long video LONG SORROW ( 2005 ), filmed in Berlin, along with a shorter analysis of a seemingly simpler but no less sophisticated work, AFTER THREE MINUTES ( 2004 ). 1 Also, in a Postscript to that book, I offer some observations about his video TIME AFTER TIME ( 2003 ). 2
My acquaintance with Sala’s art goes back to the spring of 2007 , when I first encountered LONG SORROW at the Marian Goodman Gallery in New York. I had gone there to see an exhibition of recent photographs by Jeff Wall, but LONG SORROW was on view in a separate room, and as I was on my way out of the gallery it caught my eye. At first I was almost repelled by an extreme close-up sequence of the face of the free saxophonist Jemeel Moodoc fiercely improvising on his instrument on a small platform high above the Berlin streets, but then something about the video claimed my attention and I stood transfixed for about an hour, watching it over and over. By the time I tore myself away I was convinced that, on the strength of that single work, Sala was an artist of real significance.
Then in 2007–8 I spent a year on a fellowship to the Wissenschaftscolleg zu Berlin, in the course of which I got to know Sala personally. This came about through a prior friendship with the photographer Thomas Demand, who then lived in Berlin and introduced me to Sala; inevitably, conversations with Sala in his studio and elsewhere added greatly to my understanding of his project, and the years that followed have only deepened my appreciation of his overall achievement.
The essays that follow were written individually, at first with no thought of eventually gathering them in a book. Thus the first essay, on Sala’s LE CLASH ( 2010 ) and TLATELOLCO CLASH ( 2011 ), was published in the catalogue for Sala’s 2012 exhibition at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, 3 and the second, on the short video MIXED BEHAVIOUR ( 2003 ), appeared in the catalogue for Sala’s exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2011 and was then made available in the online journal NONSITE.ORG . 4 Then there is the transcription of my 2010 conversation with Edi Rama, the circumstances surrounding which will be explained by way of introducing the transcription. The third essay (chapter four), on AIR CUSHIONED RIDE and A SPURIOUS EMISSION (both 2006 ), the fourth essay (chapter five), on 1395 DAYS WITHOUT RED ( 2011 ), and the Coda on IF AND ONLY IF ( 2018 ), were written with no publication in view. At a certain point, of course, the idea of bringing all the texts together in a book became inescapable, which is what I am doing here and now.
As the above makes plain, the works discussed in the essays date from different moments in Sala’s career. There are, however, various emphases that the essays have in common, and it will be helpful to review these at the outset. I shall do this as economically as possible, both because the topics are taken up in the essays themselves and because they are dealt with at some length in FOUR HONEST OUTLAWS . I should also mention that there will be a certain overlap with regard to specific issues from essay to essay; I have chosen to let that overlap stand, rather than seek to impose a single argumentative structure on the book as a whole. The issues I have in mind are:
1. The relation of the image track to the sound track . In Sala’s works the viewer (more precisely, the viewer/listener, but for simplicity’s sake I shall refer mainly to the viewer) is frequently made aware of the independence or separateness of the two tracks, which the video proceeds to bring together, to conjoin, in various specific ways. No doubt significantly, this goes back to his earliest mature work (made when he was still a student at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris), the remarkable 1998 video INTERVISTA ( FINDING THE WORDS ), which begins with Sala discovering a reel of black-and-white 16 mm film from the 1970 s covering a Communist Party political rally featuring Enver Hoxha, then the absolutist ruler of Albania, as well as Sala’s then thirtyish mother Valdet, a Communist Youth leader, who afterwards takes part in an interview in support of the Party. It quickly emerges, however, that the film lacks a soundtrack, and Sala sets out to try to find it, even locating and visiting the original sound technician, who barely recalls the event and in any case is unable to help. This would seem to put an end to Sala’s project, but he brilliantly decides to take the film to a school for the deaf, where expert lip-readers provide the missing words. Sala then brings both film and reconstituted dialogue to his mother, who is stunned to discover that she ever uttered the conventional formulae that she is revealed to have expressed. This leads to a moving, beautifully filmed conversation between Sala and Valdet, which is of intense interest in its own right, but the point I want to make simply concerns the separateness of the two tracks, which INTERVISTA in effect allegorises. In subsequent videos the independence (or should one say interdependence) of the two tracks is declared in less explicit terms, but as will become clear in the pages that follow, this is one of the recurrent features of Sala’s art.
2. The question of absorption . In Sala’s videos the protagonists and even the minor characters almost without exception convey the impression of wishing to appear ostensibly or, say, nominally absorbed, psychologically caught up, in whatever they are doing, feeling, thinking. More precisely: they appear to wish to be understood as ‘performing’ absorption, which is to say as offering the outward signs of absorption—crucially, refusing to acknowledge the presence of the camera (also therefore of the viewer)—while in fact subtly conveying the impression that everything they do, every gesture they make and every expression that crosses their face, has the camera in view. (This is both true and not true of the actions of Moondoc in LONG SORROW , who on the one hand could only have been acutely aware of the presence of the camera directed point-blank at his face but whose seemingly totally committed improvisational playing has as a basic aim the neutralising or suspending of his awareness, not just of being filmed, but of his extreme situation eighteen storeys in the air.) This double valence as regards absorption picks up on an effect that marks some of the most important tableau-scale photography of the past decades, one that I characterise, in my book WHY PHOTOGRAPHY MATTERS AS ART AS NEVER BEFORE ( 2008 ), as ‘to-be-seenness’. Thus for example Jeff Wall’s exemplary photograph ADRIAN WALKER, ARTIST, DRAWING FROM A SPECIMEN IN THE LABORATORY OF THE DEPT. OF ANATOMY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA, VANCOUVER ( 1992 ) clearly alludes to one or another of the eighteenth-century French painter Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin’s paintings of absorbed draftsmen, but the tableau- scale size, palpably deliberate construction and also something of the expressive restraint of Wall’s photograph together with the fact that being a photograph it had an actual model, the person Adrian Walker, as its physical ‘source’, leave the alert viewer in no doubt but that Walker would have been aware of the camera (of the fact of being photographed), which is to say that his seeming absorption (or quasi-absorption) in his drawing was staged by him and Wall working together rather than captured by the latter as a ‘candid’ effect. 5
In a sense, to-be-seenness (dispensing with the quotation marks once and for all) amounts to a replay of a crucial sequence of episodes in the history of nineteenth-century French p
