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TALES FROM THE CITY: Berlin
words J.J. CHARLESWORTH A scrawled equation on the poster for camp absurdity; jerking off against the
Thomas Hirschhorn’s May Arndt + Partner image of defeated tyrants, themselves
exhibition, Stand-alone, declared humiliated and forced to play the bitch
‘Energy = Yes! Quality = No!’ Opening to domineering, propagandist media,
alongside 28 other Berlin galleries Snow dramatised the artist’s (and the
taking part in Gallery Weekend Berlin, artworld’s) sense of impotence before
Hirschhorn’s installation had the the big issues of the day. Dismayed at
energy of a bomb going off: giant the realisation that art can’t change
cardboard trunks, collaged with images anything, you might as well party.
of the mangled, exploded corpses of
victims of unnamed conflicts, bore In his accompanying notes, Hirschhorn
through an installation of media declared that Stand-alone was ‘to be
slogans, graffiti declarations, a work that does not just address and
photocopies of radical texts, packing- appeal to an initiated, pre-informed
tape-covered sofas, defunct computer audience’ and challenged himself
hardware and a pile of giant pills with the question, ‘How can I in the
all marked ‘You’. In Hirschhorn’s context of today – my historical
case, even in denial, energy became context – make a super-historical
a quality, substituting excess and work?’ Directness and big ideas were
cold rage for polite intelligence at the heart of both Hirschhorn’s
and modest visual excitements. and Snow’s exclamations, though if
Hirschhorn’s mission of directness was
With Gallery Weekend Berlin in its driven with a cool theoretical logic,
third annual incarnation, excess, Snow’s came from a more recognisable
energy and rage stood out among countercultural existentialism. It
the more considered, cooler work wasn’t as if they were short of big
of big-name artists being wheeled ideas, either, going by the amount of
out by galleries keen to court rich books on show. Hirschhorn is never shy
visitors. Nowhere more so than with about bulldozing the viewer with his
the glamorous eruption of New York reading list, though it always seems
prodigy Dash Snow, in his first solo to be that of an unnervingly trendy
show at Contemporary Fine Arts. Snow’s cultural-studies lecturer, while Snow
grungy mix of angst, hedonism, self- had built himself a Book Fort (2006)
indulgent despair and self-righteous – four walls of yellowing paperbacks
fury invaded CFA’s big gallery, every from the four corners of subculture’s
wall covered with dozens of framed esoterica, a hideaway from the world.
collages and photographs excoriating
the American-dream-turned-nightmare. But in reality there were big ideas
everywhere: in Franz Ackermann’s
expansive and intricate installation-Energy = Yes! Quality = Yes!
drawing-painting, crawling with maps
and lines of transit memorialising
time and geography; even more so
in Angela Bulloch’s show at Esther
Snow’s discoloured, beautifully wasted Schipper, a meditation on the
worldview could do no wrong with vagaries of astronomical knowledge
the huge opening night crowd, who, and representation, a video-projected
champagne glasses in hand, indulged world turning slowly, a ceiling of
in the spectacle of this wunderkind’s constellations twinkling in LED. There
prolific assault on the decadent too in the work of younger artists
body of American society. Snow’s – in Haegue Yang’s elusive objects at
biographical intensity resonates with Barbara Wien, in Elena Bajo’s edge-
the anxieties of the current moment: of-sculpture narratives at Klara
in a bank of frames, American tabloid Wallner Plus, to name but two. What
covers from the invasion of Iraq all they shared was the way art carves out
pictured Saddam Hussein under various a different space of knowledge and
vindictive, bloodthirsty and triumphal experience, channelling that energy
headlines. In Dead Man (2006), Snow into alternative places and forms.
had apparently adorned the page with a While there’s a very real urgency
blast of his own semen, subsequently among artists to respond to the
coated with glitter. Like much of bleak scene of life now, unmediated,
Snow’s work at CFA, the fury and unformed fury always threatens to
frustration of Dead Man balanced lose whatever good that remains.
precariously against a sense of its own Energy = yes. Quality = yes… also.
ARTREVIEW four.linfour.lin
p044 Dispatches AR Jul07.indd 44 6/6/07 21:38:10
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