sound sculptures at the bargain Basquiat

Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller: Dream Machines

Tinguely Museum, until September 24

Canadian artist duo Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller began officially collaborating almost by chance, despite being married and helping each other in their individual practices for over a decade. Cardiff had been invited to do a show in Vancouver in the mid-1990s, after working in their joint studio on what would become The dark pool (1995). “We couldn’t remember who the idea was,” she says. “So we asked the organization, ‘Can we do this as a collaboration?’ The fruits of three decades of collaboration have been brought together for a new exhibition at Museum Tinguely, which will include 14 multimedia works.

In addition to being a collaboration between two artists, the works also rely on the attention and participation of the public. “Some spectators or participants have a magic that allows them to see things that others do not see,” explains Cardiff. Whether it is a table covered with speakers activated by the movement of visitors (Experiment in F# minor2013), or intricate details that may be missing inside the diorama windows of escape room (2021), the presence of what Cardiff calls “talented participants or talented spectators” can really make the works sing.

The Basel exhibition came about after the artists received the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Prize for Sculpture in 2020, which led to an exhibition at the Lehmbruck Museum in Duisburg, Germany, which has now traveled to Basel. The award might seem like a bit of an odd choice, given that while Cardiff and Miller’s work has sculptural elements, their practice is much broader, embracing elements of theatre, video and sound design. But Cardiff sees it differently. “I’ve always considered sound as a sculpture,” she says.

For example, the artist cites The Forty-Part Motet (2001), an installation made up of 40 loudspeakers arranged in an oval shape. ” For me, it’s [is] completely a sculpture,” says Cardiff. “The sound becomes so physical, the way it hits you and moves.” She also says that “many of our pieces are stand-alone sculptures, although, like The killing machine (2007), they move and are robotic. She adds that “The killing machine is most similar to Tinguely”, an artist whose work is “not necessarily inspirational” but shares a “connection” with that of Cardiff and Miller.

“We are hybrid artists. We have always loved contemporary theater that pushes boundaries, we love all mediums that push boundaries,” she says. “My biggest influence in the beginning was The Pier by Chris Marker,” she says, referring to the experimental 1962 feature made mostly from stills that pushed the boundaries of cinema. “We just follow what’s interesting.” JS

Basquiat: the paintings of Modena

Beyeler Foundation, until August 27

The Beyeler Foundation in Basel is revisiting the story of Jean-Michel Basquiat this week by presenting Basquiat: The paintings of Modenawhich brings together eight large-scale works made in Modena, Italy, in 1982. The paintings, including gold teeth guiltare now housed in eight separate private collections in the United States, Asia and Switzerland.

The Italian gallery owner Emilio Mazzoli invited Basquiat to produce the works for a unique exhibition, providing work premises and painting equipment. The graffiti artist painted on abandoned canvases used by another artist, Mario Schifano, scribbling “Modena” on the back. But complications over paying for the works led to the cancellation of the planned exhibition in Europe.

In a 1985 interview with the New York Times, Basquiat underlined how much he disliked the Modena experience. “They set it up for me so I had to do eight paintings in a week.” During this time, working in the warehouse premises made available to him was “like a factory, a sick factory. I hated it.” The works found new buyers through Basquiat’s New York dealer at the time, Annina Nosei.

Sam Keller, director of the Fondation Beyeler, tells The arts journal“With each new generation, the importance of Basquiat’s work increases further. Its combination of images and words referencing high and popular culture, history, science, social and economic injustice was truly ahead of its time and more relevant today than ever.

Keller adds: “The Modena paintings were created over 40 years ago and have never been shown together before. It’s going to be exciting to finally bring them together. The average insurance value of each of these works is $100 million, with the group of eight works totaling $800 million.

The market boom for Jean-Michel Basquiat continues, with major works by the late American street artist dominating the New York sales season last month. View of the moon (1984) from the collection of late music mogul Mo Ostin went to the block at Sotheby’s on May 16, selling for $10.8 million, while Christie’s sold El Gran Espectaculo (The Nile) (1983) from the collection of Italian fashion designer Valentino Garavani on May 15 for $67.1 million. GH

Messeplatz project: Latifa Echakhch

Messeplatz, during Art Basel

Latifa Echakhch wants it to be a surprise. The Swiss-based Moroccan-born artist’s work for this year’s Art Basel Messeplatz commission is an empty, deconstructed stage. “It will look like a big empty installation, a silent installation,” she says. The arts journal. That is, until the performers show up. The work – titled Allplatz, loosely translated as “space for all” – will host intermittent performances of experimental music. While the fairgrounds of the square meet partners or the public awaits one of the Basel trams, musicians including guitarist Rhys Chatham, electronic musician Jessica Ekomane and cellist Leila Bordreuil will bow out.

Echakhch also hopes the sounds will be just as unexpected as their performance, recreating her own epiphanic feeling of stumbling to this “strange music” when she was 21. She names Pierre Henry, Terre Thaemlitz, Mika Vainio, Ryoji Ikeda as some of the artists she found early on. She is curious how the music will be received by people who happen to hear it. Indeed, the artist began to work on this project after the closing of his exhibition at the Venice Biennale. The concert (2022). In a radical departure from her previous work, she approached it as a ‘musician’ rather than a ‘visual artist’, filling the Swiss pavilion with experimental sounds, harmonies and dissonances. She wanted visitors to leave with “the same feeling as when leaving a concert”.

The difference between now and then, however, is that by the time visitors arrived at the Swiss pavilion, they at least partially knew what to expect. At Art Basel, however, “people are ready to see art, the most difficult thing about this commission is that people, even those in the art world, may not be ready to hear this that I’m going to present,” she said. Indeed, this is the essence of work; how a space, much like a musical composition, can be pushed beyond the limits of expectation.

Above all, the stage – with its 360-degree view – is free and open to everyone, even those without tickets. It was important for the artist who specifies that the Messeplatz does not belong to the fair. “It’s part of the Allmend [or the ‘common’, meaning it belongs to the canton of Basel],” she says, “literally translating to ‘that which belongs to everyone’.”

Disorientation will be at the heart of these unpredictable reactions. You have before you a semi-collapsed scene, Echakhch reminds us. Some people may be wondering if it’s over or if they’re supposed to wait for something else, she adds. But this disorientation is meant to elicit feelings of “unease” and “catharsis.” Discomfort because the project asks the spectator to do a job of waiting, to face his imagination or to launch into a “projection”, as Echakhch describes it. And catharsis, since in the socially demanding and etiquette-laden world of the art fair, discomfort is perhaps what visitors crave. CJ-N.

Ready to use: 20 years of Schaulager

Schaulager, until November 19

Video art is more than just a series of zeros, waiting to be called into existence. The physical space in which video, film, or other time-based media is displayed is an essential part of the experience.

“Every artist who starts working on a work of art based on film or video always has this notion of space in mind,” says Isabel Friedli, the curator of Schaulager’s new exhibition. out of the box. The work cannot exist without the room in which it is presented, and for the most part these spaces are carefully controlled by the artist to meet the specifications of the work. “Created to measure, these works are singular, a bit like a custom-made garment”, as the text of the exhibition says.

out of the box presents these “boxes”, showing the work of twenty artists through the large spaces of the Schaulager. Some works have been reconfigured by the artists for this new context. For example, the audiovisual installation by Anri Sala Ravel Ravel was presented for the first time at the 2013 Venice Biennale in a soundproof space six meters high. Even the Schaulager’s hangar-like rooms could not accommodate his presentation, so Sala created a new version of the work for the exhibition. Alongside the time media are sculptural works and installations that also fit the theme, including one of Monika Sosnowska’s crumpled metal boxes crammed into a corner of the building “as if by a giant” and the banana building sculptures by Jean-Frédéric Schnyder. boxes.

Of course, the phrase “off the shelf” has a deeper meaning for the Schaulager: it opened its doors 20 years ago as an early example of the type of open-air storage institution that has become popular in recent years, literally showing art out of its packing cases. It houses the 90-year-old Emanuel Hoffmann collection, and when the mostly contemporary works are not on loan, they are installed in the Schaulager, remaining in view of visitors and researchers. The Hoffmann Collection has been acquiring temporal media works “ever since this type of art has existed,” says Freidli, but the pace has picked up in recent years. However, the difficulty of showing these works on a continuous basis has meant that many have remained in their “boxes”.

As new museums, including the Depot in Rotterdam and the V&A East in London, embrace the open storage model, what have the Schaulager’s 20 years of experience taught them about the benefits? “People are always so amazed and surprised to see works in warehouses,” says Friedli. “The works are installed as if they were in an exhibition, but there is no given context. People can really concentrate on a work, look at it, contemplate it and experience it in a different situation. CL