Jankowski was influenced in his thinking by the number of Zünfte or Guilds which still exist in this city and many of the newly commissioned works are built upon a collaboration between artist and non-artist. Manifesta 11, has been divided into four primary outpourings, which occur in different collections of venues or collections of work. The first concept is The Historical Exhibition: Sites under Construction, part A at Löwenbräukunst and part B at Helmhaus, the 2nd section is called Satellites and these thirty works are scattered at different sites across the city. In this section we witness the collaborative workings of artist and work professional. Artists such as John Arnold, Maurizio Catalan, Ceal Floyer, Santiago Sierra etc. have made works which are housed in multiple locations or focus on different points of interest such as Arnolds, Friends Corner and Palestine Grill or Ceal Floyer’s sound installation at Universität Zurich. Part C and the 3rd section of Manifesta is the newly built Pavilion of Reflections, a wooden structure built in Lake Zurich, which hosts a screen with seating, a bar and cafe, viewing platform and a swimming area with changing rooms, where you can simultaneously swim and watch art documentaries. Part 4 or the D section is titled Caberet Der Kunstler – Zunfthaus Voltaire. In order to witness this program in the Performance Hall at Caberet Voltaire, which runs throughout the duration of Manifesta, you have to become a member of the Artist Guild. To become a member you have to submit a concept for a Joint-Venture Performance, this team comprising an artist and a non-artist. Thus in order to access this section of the event, you must become a participant and performer. Alongside these sections, there are also a number of Parallel Events of which 38 projects were shortlisted out of 340 submissions, with eleven receiving funding support from Manifesta. Some of these projects include the launch of issue 30, Work, Migration and Personal Geopolitic from OnCurating, published by Zurich University of the Arts and an exhibition by Palais de Tokyo at production space Acrush called Your memories are our Future.

This edition of Manifesta has a number of stand-out features; the most significant is the physical display structure employed by Jankowski to curate groups of work under specific thematic headings; memorable pieces of new work including Jon Rafman’s Open Heart Warrior video and Jon Kessler’s, The World is Cuckoo (Clock), which comprises a number of elements, as well as recent  work including Mark Leckey’s Degradations 2015, a digital animation, Wermke/Leinkauf video work Symbolic Threats, 2015 and historical works including Chris Burden’s TV Commercials 1973 – 1977 and Michael Smith’s, How to Curate your Own Group Exhibition, 1996. An element of this Manifesta, which became increasingly important over my three day visit was the video-documentaries made with as Jankowski titled them, Art Detectives. These works involve young people with different backgrounds interviewing key artists and documenting the concepts behind works and the progress between the artist and their selected professional. These docu-works give real insight into the collaborative process, the views of the participants and the curious questioning and summations of the art detectives. They become a nuanced device and voice with which to mediate the works and inform audiences from art professionals, to young people and the wider community. It works also because there is a deliberateness to whom the art detective is and the project they investigate; for example in the work Nesting Box, the detective was herself a student of Latin, so had an array of knowledge which she could draw on to discuss and contextualise the particular area of knowledge that this coupling, artist Shelly Neadashi and Margaretha Debrunner a high school teacher of Latin and Greek working in Zurich, had in common.

The Historical Exhibition: Sites under Construction – Contextualising the display strategy

Co-curator Francesca Gavin

I made a decision to see the Pavillon Le Corbusier, whilst in Zurich. This was the final building he designed and was purposed as the ideal space for the architect to exhibit his art. It became apparent that Jankowski was clearly influenced for his Historical Exhibitions: Sites under Construction structuring device by both this buildings design and function as an exhibition space. The pre-fabricated materiality of Le Corbusier’s steel and glass elements and the inter-changeable display potentials, clean, grey, linear lines, bolted together, was too much of a coincidence to ignore. The panels, in Le Corbusier’s building, red, yellow, grey, black and white, whilst not as a colour-way adhered to by the curator here, are used by Jankowski to create visual excitement, breaks, gestures in the open modular form and the structure of the display. Jankowski in his series of exhibitions for Manifesta, uses works instrumentally as colour marks, within the groupings of collections. It is when truly committed to a painterly practice and a ‘pick and mix’ approach to the selection and arrangement of the works upon the physical structure that the collections of works operate not just as singular concept, but also have aesthetic coherence, even if in the process the individual works lose most of their autonomy. This is also more profound in the rooms of Helmhaus, where the ceilings and floors are also painted white.

This gesture and instrumentalisation of the works of others, can clearly be a problem, even more so for someone who is himself an artist, so used to the negotiations with curators around the displays of artwork. Is the willingness to work with Jankowski at such a prestigious large European exhibition worth the risk to the individual work? As with any group presentation of artworks, it becomes a contest as to who’s work can survive the juxtapositions outside the studio space. There are also other interesting questions regarding the potential hierarchies at play here (Diagramme: Jankowski concept and aesthetic device – works given their own space outside of the physical structure – the group collection – individual works within the collection) such as the relation between the collections and the non-group, individually installed works. This is an interesting problem in terms of the flow of the exhibition. These works do provide pauses in the pace of viewing. This reminds me of the viewers retinal, time-based scanning of the paintings of Mondrian, where our eye is held for periods of time on a block of colour, depending on its scale and tonal weight in the composition. But unlike Mondrian, we are not working with a receding and protruding depth of field, but like Mondrian we are given in this arrangement a linear, shuttling experience, with a full-stop. The decision to include Mark Leckey in one of the HE (Historical Exhibition) sections is interesting in that Leckey himself plays with the staging of collections of work (for example see exhibition The Universal Addressability of Dumb Things, Nottingham Contemporary, 2013). The presentation is also strongly reminiscent of Richard Hamilton’s, exhibition Man, Machine and Motion, shown originally at the ICA London, in 1955, at Dover Street and then re-presented more recently in the current ICA premises in 2014. Hamilton’s installation was a devised, steel, hanging structure and support for photographic prints of images taken from media and categorised under the headings, Aquatic, Terrestrial, Aerial and Interplanetary. The modular system suggests and allows for a flexibility in the arrangement of the print elements. The potential for interchangeable components but within a structured system is enabled. Hamilton too was influenced by Dada, the Bauhaus and Le Corbusier. Within Jankowki’s approach we can see many similarities, in terms of exhibition design and the creation of a number of discreet thematic groupings. The mechanics of the HE structures also suggest the possibility of other works in the world, taking the place of the selected works, if they have the right credentials, i.e. theme, colour and scale. The world is potentially full of other replacement options which alludes to a certain homogenization of artwork depending on their conceptual and aesthetic currency. The other point worth addressing here is the articulation of the various HE structures within the rooms of the gallery spaces. They are sometimes short straight lines, sometimes they are made up of 2/3/5/or 6 structured arms. They for the main part replace the existing walls of the spaces and speak to a determination to not be limited by the buildings architectural elements. The other advantage of this approach is the inevitable looking thought the metal lines (a type of rude screen) to other works behind or the interruption of other work in the visual reading of the foregrounded collections. This creates a ‘behind’ the primary frontal view, where we can see the mechanism of attachments, the script of work details, the technological requirements. We are been shown the gallery wall again but through the arrangement of forged steel bars, similar to Lucio Fontana’s canvas slice invite to look at the space beyond the surface. Two of the most successful renderings of this approach were the sections Art as a Second Profession and Professions Performing in Art in that they both realised very successfully the ideas above.

The HE (Historical Exhibition) themes

The Manifesta umbrella concept of What People do for Work, is divided into a number of proposals, which could be retro-active research possibilities for further more extensive development and future exhibitions. Some of the sites under construction are individual historical works, some new works and of course collections of works from different moments in history. Groupings of work exist under titles such as Portraits of Professions, Break Hour, Professions in the Art World, Working Worlds, Art as a Second Profession, etc. The labelling system become very important in the mediation of both the collections and the individual detailing of the work within the grouping. It is the individual labelling process which enables the work to shift back to an unstable autonomy. The echoing museological approach, demonstrating the concept of the collection of individual elements as the generator of taxonomies.  Artists adopting Professions, is one of the group shows within the exhibition and looks at the reality for artists of having to do other kinds of work in order to make a living. From artmaking alone, are only so few able to survive. That art is made not in a vacuum but enhances and provides content which is expressed in the artwork is also crucial to this section. Here we see artists such as Fatima Al Qadiri (musician and artist) & Khali Al Gharaballi (fashion stylist), with their video work of a well-known Kuwaiti actor who plays the role of mature women at a time when it was unacceptable for women to perform in public. Taocheng Wang’s beautiful fleshy watercolours depicting scenes and narratives from the massage salon. The lobster paintings of Evelyne Axeill, who was originally an actress and screenwriter and in later life turned to painting representations of female sexuality before her death in 1972. Other artist whose works are in this section include Vuk Cosic, Steven Clayton and Kim Gordon. Each of the categories here include works by artists who epitomise art historical moments, well-known artists, little known and occasionally anonymous makers. So whilst hierarchical structures exist within the show overall, the selection of a work from an oeuvre and its placement alongside the work of another artist (variously placed on the professional ladder), provides a counter argument and great leveler.

Individual Works of Note:

HE 1. Jon Rafman – Open Heart Warrior, 2016, Video commissioned by Manifesta 11 with support from Seventeen Gallery, London, UK.

“Your idols are dead and your enemies are in power”

“You are wandering in a remote empty space”

“Pretend you are a moth flying”

This is some of the dialogue that you hear as you slide into the low slung body hugging chair sited on the ground of this three screen video and sound work. There is one seat, one opportunity to be immersed in, surrounded by digital imagery, which runs from the symbolic, disturbed shaven headed man knocking his head over and over against a door to lush seasonal landscapes, snow, sun, autumnal leaves and so on. Breaking through the narrative and disrupting these beautiful, clearly digitised landscapes are the things that lie beneath, other worlds are hinted at, darker, moodier images interrupt and break through the surface. Increasingly we are being shown another world, bloodied bodies, ribcages, distorted carcasses on the streets. “You are a slave to your body” have we entered the consciousness of our minds, is this the transition from the need for bodies to a virtual world, where bodies are no longer required? “Do you hear that – it’s the knowledge you seek”. Our view is perceptually shifted from one world to another. From landscapes where we are induced by the female voice, to enter into a meditative state and relax our bodies, the back, the torso, shoulders, arms and so on, to the insistent toiling of a bell and a male voice asking us “what year is it anyway”. The transition from bodily worlds to mind – virtual worlds is going to happen whether we want it to or not, “it had to end and it did”. This is a fantastic work, never mind that as an installation it sits alongside several surreal sculptures of animals devouring other animals. The call to experience the potential of the digital image, its power to seduce and evoke, whilst reminding us of the ugliness, the Frankensteinian layers underneath, the real brutal world, which is still yet a digital construct, shows us both the power of our subconscious minds and the ever evolving power and finesse of virtual and digital technologies. This work is pointing to a future in the making.

Andrea Tarkovsky – Of Hunters and Astronauts, Video

This work is made up of edits from Tarkovsky’s film Solaris and brings together the professions of ‘hunters’ as rendered in a painting by Brughel, called Hunters in the Snow (1565) and the astronauts and scientists as representation of progress. Here the historical and the futuristic merge together in a scene where the psychologist Kris Kelvin encounters the phenomenon of his dead wife, gazing intently at a number of paintings by Brueghel and one in particular. She is lost in the image, smoking and concentrating on the work as gravity is lost and objects float across the library space. Tradition and scientific phenomenon are encountered simultaneously. The couple embrace demonstrating an intense emotional connection. Gravity is restored, a container falls and breaks and the moment is metaphorically and literally shattered.

Jon Kessler– Various works including The World is Cuckoo (Clock) Slide Show, 2016, Slide projector, electronics at Löwenbräukunst and a proposal drawing for The World is Cuckoo (Clock), 2016 at Les Ambassadeurs watch shop, Zurich City Centre.

The works made by Kessler, bring together a variety of historical and contemporary technologies within its content and realisation. We move from a slide projection of images which reference birds, found images including cartoon birds, Birds the Hitchcock movie, the American Eagle, flying winged structures with which to help man fly, mechanical birds, taxidermy birds, to videos of drones in bird form and watch mechanisms in the kinetic sculpture realised for Les Ambassadeurs, one of the most prestigious watch makers in Switzerland.  The World is Cuckoo (Clock), is sited on the lower floor and you can see the craftsmen at work whilst you engage with Kessler’s sculpture. The electronics of the work appear to be powered and animated by the magnified innards of a watch mechanism, but this is a symbolic gesture rather than actual. The device itself is attached to a wooden table and consists of a number of television monitors on which we see a digital image of a drone eagle against the back drop of a fiery sky. It could appear as a phoenix rising out of the burning ashes and it is in this, the lure of the idea of time and the sign of the world as cuckoo, that we witness a poignant and poetic gesture. Historical production and craft, fakery, technology, imagery, combine to create an event, a moment, a machine where all these elements can be found working together in a grand a-ha

Wezmke/Leinkauf – Symbolic Threats, 2015, Video, 17 mins.

The power of the artistic gesture and the subsequent media frenzy surrounding Symbolic Threats are at question in this work, which began with a daring removal of two American flags on Brooklyn Bridge, New York and the erection of white flags in their place. The video documents the history of Brooklyn Bridge (from 1883) through an assemblage of historical photographic and drawn images and then moves forward in time to the 22^nd July 2014, when the dawn broke to the arrival of two new unnerving symbols and a contemporary media response. The proximity of the bridge to the site of the former Twin Towers is not lost in the media coverage, captured and documented by the artists as part of this work. The intervention is covered by local and national media, the police, NY Mayoral office, through to the capturing of the opinions of the person on the street. The majority of the coverage locates the ‘act’ as a terrorism, a way of undermining the degree to which the authorities say that they are on top of security. Only one commentator actually questions the decision around the flags been white. Are they a symbol of an American surrender or is it being used to represent an opportunity, a ceasefire and parle.

Mark Leckey – Degradations, 2015, Digital Animation, Colour, 31mins 21sec looped

This work is presented on a monitor in the section, Art Without Artists and consists of a lone, six teat, pink and headless, lion-human hybrid. A rubbery pink sphinx of sorts. The object is made animate through actions which involve its repeated suspension in air, then perpetual banging on the ground, over and over, resulting in various action articulations of the thing. Then it throws itself against the screen, towards us, the viewer, again and again in an attempt to break through the glass of the monitor, in its attempts creating residual marks which make us aware of both the depth of space behind the screen and the screen itself. The actions whilst reiterating the flexibility, elasticity and plastic nature of the hybrid also emphasis the cruelty against, the power over the thing (by the creator) that is the animation and the desire of the artist-creator. Its success is that it evokes from the viewer an empathy for the ‘inanimate-animate’ with the simplest of narratives. It re-iterates the suggestible power of pink fluffy cute things, think Disney animation films etc. to evoke emotions whilst simultaneously deconstructing the power of the formal aspects of an animation character. Mark Leckey is represented by Gavin Brown’s Enterprise

Author: Mona Casey