Art Press

OK/OKAY: Recent Art From Europe

July-August, 2005.

There may be some veterans of the planet known as contemporary art who can recall the birth, here in New York, of a special kind of exhibition. Twenty years ago this post-Szeemannian genre that would spread far and wide was sired by the tandem of Collins & Milazzo. You knew it by its extravagant titles, its rummage sale contents and its clubbish co-opting of mates-oh yes, and the star status outrageously accorded to the curator. As we know, this kind of show has prospered and grown and now it's everywhere, and underpins today's reign of the curator-artist, the prominent new breed of culture kings. OK/Okay. it sounds like exactly the kind of mean-nothing or (same thing) mean-everything title that would brand one of these same exhibits, the conversation-piece show cobbled together to legitimize its curator ("my world view, my fave artists, my play list, my moods, etc."). Wrong. Both the pretext and the title of this show turn out to be very relevant. So, "OK": surely the most frequently spoken word in the world. While it usually signals agreement, it can also signify its opposite: exasperation, giving up, especially when the sound is dragged out (Okaaayl. And, as we are informed by the lexical list included in the catalogue for this show by its organizer, Marc-Olivier Wahler, the very effective artistic director of New York's Swiss Institute over the last ten years, the actual word "OK" has no certified linguistic origin. Funny that the most commonly used word in our vocabulary should also be one of the most intriguing.

Quite literally, the exhibition OK/Okay sets out to illustrate this semantic hesitancy. By definition, art is spectacular, a visual statement in the mode of the obvious. And it is this obviousness, which in fact is rather unclear, that is explored in this exhibition, laid out in two distinct spaces (which it uses at times with considerable subtlety: see the series of paintings by Gabriele di Matteo, with the original and copy presented side by side). Each of the works here allows (at least) two semantic approaches. Valentin Carron, for example, exhibits canvases by Mondrian and Leger in all their glory but has had them reproduced on pieces of leather and presents them to us in the unexpected form of Indian trophies. In Gabriele di Matteo's hundred or so small pictures relating the key moments of human history from the origins through to the present, we see that all the figures are naked, from Caesar assassinated to John-Paul II on his deathbed, from Charlie Chaplin on roller skates to Che Guevara and Silvio Berlusconi. Leopold Kessler exhibits some very ordinary ready-mades: a refrigerator, a television, etc. But the way they work is weird: the fridge opens when visitors approach and peremptorily expels its contents, and you have to bang hard on the television to switch it off or on. The airlocks devised by Bob Gramsma are fascinating, like sumptuous spaceships. Curiously enough, though, they open onto nothing, except themselves. Christian Andersson's work on lighting brings to mind Michel Verjux: big round patches of light, almost transcending their plastic form.

Except that when you stand in front of Andersson's light circles, you note the absurd, total lack of shadow on the lit surface. Even Ben Woodeson dark "techie" installations are disturbing: the appearance is a red thread wrapped around a metal column, the reality: a beam that heats the metal and very slightly increases its size.

What we can sense behind this exhibition, like a kind of background noise, is Duchamp's infra-thin. And, to put it simply, it's rather good. By nature, art produces forms that distort: it tells true or truly false lies, sometimes both at once. And so it can only simulate what it represents and play games with reality, its decidedly asymmetrical other. With OK/Okay, Marc-Olivier Wahler aims to reaffirm the relativity of the meaning of art, plus the crazy pretentiousness of any reading that is not open. As opposed to "hard" or would-be definitive expressions, this approach approves the fecundity of the aesthetics of the "and" or, as Umberto Eco defines it, of the "etc.": the work of art as artifice which means this plus this plus that, and so on. This demonstrative attention to art as a potential (rather than acquired) formula and, by extension, to the virtues of polysemia, is far from innocent. It both pleads for the suspension of judgment from the spectator and valorizes aesthetic surprises, which are always on the margins and always ahead of us.

Paul Ardenne 

Translation: C. Penwarden