Interview

Although Brussels-based, French artist Pierre Bismuth is perhaps best known as a screenwriter and an artist preoccupied with the moving image, he's not tied to any particular format. Bismuth is fascinated with the transfer of images from one medium to another, and delights in the hiccups between them. Bismuth once ate a hamburger in a deadpan live performance (above), a re-enactment of a short film in which Warhol eats one in isolation. Eating a hamburger is an activity of a modern man in which the ordinary becomes  performative, but would we care if any person other than Warhol was depicted doing something so utterly banal—YouTube has logged nearly half-a-million hits for Warhol's five-minute film! Apparently we do, as the audience claps at the conclusion of Bismuth's performance. Bismuth's strongest work creates unforseen consequences, and endows appropriated material, from film to printed matter, with retroactive significance.

For his current show at Team Gallery, "Following the right hand of...," Bismuth renders visible what generations of rapt viewers inevitably missed, while paying attention to other features of the stars of the silver screen. Bismuth traces the movement of an actress' hand on a piece of plexiglass for the duration of a film or scene. He then inverts the plexiglass and frames it overlying a film still to face the visage of the actress. The resulting effect is like a long-exposure photograph where the movement of the hand is recorded in a sinuous, meandering marker line. Gjon Mili's iconic photographs of Picasso for Life Magazine come to mind, where the elderly master, holding a light source, makes a series of rapid gestures and the final, stroboscopic photograph reveals a spectral drawing. Bismuth's series of drawn, photographic assemblages illuminate the interstice between performer and performance, between the gist of the whole film's action and the jest of the moment. It's not surprising that he won an Academy Award for co-writing the ultimate tale of erasure, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, or that he returned to fine art to achieve distance from Hollywood culture.
 
 
 
STEVE PULIMOOD: You went to school for graphic design. When did the transition occur to art making?
 
PIERRE BISMUTH: Yes, when I went to Arts Decoratifs I wanted to become a graphic designer. I started to make art very late and was not interested in making objects. I remain far more interested in the process. Art is something that is being constantly redefined. It is the perfect way for us to understand our world. I think Carl Andre said, "Artists just make things. Other people make it art."
 
SP: The series at Team deals with overtly cinematic subjects. How do you relate the film practice to your work?

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The Manchester International Festival, which takes place July 2–19, in England's Second City, is like Paris Fashion Week, where a week isn't a week unless it's ten days. After all, there a lot of premieres to pack into those two weeks, and they're headliners: Rufus Wainright, Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson, Damon Albarn, Zaha Hadid, Steve Reich, and Marina Abramovic. It's even got the reclusive Hans Ulrich Obrist, who will host a symposium, this one on Abramovic. (LEFT: LOU REED AND MARTHA WAINWRIGHT. PHOTO: ZEV GREENFIELD)

Festival organizers are already getting ready for the second installment of its cultural biennial: Monday the coffered ballroom of the W Hotel in Union Square (had you dared enter before?) hosted a preview of its programming. Naturally, Rufus Wainwright took center-makeshift stage to tell VIPs and press gathered why Peter Gelb, Director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, aborted plans to host the premiere of Wainwright's debut opera. Gelb insisted on an English libretto; Wainwright, a native of Montréal, declared "Prima Donna" must be in French. It will premiere, a la Francaise, in Manchester. A sedate, black leather-clad Reed applauded the determined singer songwriter. Although Reed looked comfortable in the hotel's ballroom, a temple to late-1990s luxury, I wondered what he thought of the deep-fried cubes of macaroni and cheese! Alex Poots, the Festival's director, concluded with a reminder that even if one does not know where Manchester is in the world, there are direct flights available from New York. Noted.

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For a life-long Londoner, Gavin Turk has a noteworthy history in New York. His American debut at the "Sensation" exhibition a decade ago at the Brooklyn Museum was "Pop," Turk's self-portrait as Sid Vicious drawing a gun from his hip. While it was Chris Ofili's black Madonna cum elephant dung portrait that sparked Giuliani's rage, "Pop" (1993) was a subtle stab at Warhol's iconic Elvis-as-cowboy. Since then Turk has expanded his embrace of high and low material culture, cheekily selecting subject matter that when it comes out the other end as a Gavin Turk it is inevitably transformed into a humorous object. Nothing—from a discarded toilet paper roll tube cast in bronze to a glossy-black metal sculpture of a trash bag—is ever actually a ready-made, save for the idea: His art is in fact quite labor-intensive. During Armory week the Fine Art Society in London and Galerie Krinzinger from Vienna exhibited a range of Turk's work from his take on Warhol piss paintings to a new sculpture directly inspired by Duchamp's Fountain. Turk's art seems as if it could emulate anyone or anything. For his current exhibition "Jazzz" [sic] at Sean Kelly Gallery, Turk has boldly taken on Jackson Pollock, creating a body of work that not only looks the part but he's photo-documented himself with a balding head of hair in poses ripped from Hans Namuth's famous photo series. It's a reminder that Pollock's supposed liberation of painting's skill with the randomness of the drip was in fact artfully contrived. Without Turk we might not have anyone to excoriate the cult of artistic celebrity with such wit.


STEVE PULIMOOD: I remember when I first flipped to the back of the ‘Sensation' catalogue I thought: Here's the avant-garde and they all have resumes! When did you decide you were an artist? Was art school an important experience for you?

GAVIN TURK: In England you always had to keep the fact that you are an artist a secret. It was something that you did on the side. I eventually went to the Royal College of Art and after two years I put up this blue heritage plaque, which said "Gavin Turk, Sculptor: worked here 1989–1991", and I did not end up receiving my degree. The tussle over this work of art managed to get in the press. I don't think I ever really decided I was an artist. I went to college to learn how to think and look at art. In the end, I developed a more sophisticated misunderstanding of art.

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Rachel Beach makes sculptural abstractions for which Tomma Abts' art is a relevant comparison, although their working methods are vastly different. Beach, a Yale MFA in painting, relies on marquetry: She cuts various shapes into wood, covers them with veneers, and then paints their edges. Beach's paintings are often biomorphic in shape: some are reminiscent of an aged cheese rind; others more complexly capture design motifs; still others are fantasies that conjure rabbits' holes—or rosy sphincters, depending on your persuasion. Beach's playfully amoebic forms are painted with color gradients that transform her compositions from flat planes to fleshy three-dimensional objects. Allan McCollum's "Shape Project" (2005) explores similar territory, but in Beach's hands the challenge of discovering new forms is delivered in a shock of color. Each composition is a living organism, not a blank-faced conceptual meme. The latest body of work "Towers and Portals", her strongest material to date, is a pleasurable medley that cuts at the core of a half century of abstract painting: What comes first in the process of making an image? Color or shape? Scale or proportion? Composition or detail?


STEVE PULIMOOD: Was wood-working always a part of your artwork? Or did you paint similar abstractions on canvas first?

RACHEL BEACH: I began learning wood-working through building painting stretchers. As the disconnect between what's on a painting's surface and the physical object-ness of the painting itself became increasingly frustrating, my stretchers became fatter with exposed wood sides... I was becoming a 'craftsman', but I was also getting an idea about the relationships between image and object.

SP: Would you return to a blank canvas?
 
RB:  I was taught how to build painting stretchers, from there I am self-taught. I have worked in the architecture/construction field where building objects is part of the skill set and there was some osmosis of how to build. Conceptually I branched into sculpture with a series called "Pairs" where I was combining a traditional painting with a sculpture—trying to make a connection between the form, the material and their meanings. I hadn't yet figured out how to get image and object into one thing. I can't see myself making a plain ol' painting—though I don't mean it disparagingly—unless I can find a very compelling reason.

SP: When I first saw one of your wall-hanging pieces I immediately thought of Tomma Abts...  but for her all the paintings are the same size, and scale is a real constraint. Now I'm considering the early minimalist paintings of Frank Stella, especially when he was struggling to create the perfect picture-as-object and a whole range of shapes, sizes, and colors emerged as potential resolutions.

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