His last show is the result of a choice he made more than ten years ago to no longer fill the entire pictorial plane with paint and to  renounce all figuration. He now  prefers to compose exhibitions with semi complete  elements leading to a whole rather than necessarily making each element a work unto itself.

This tactic is clear when we visit the studio. No paintings are on display. The sculptures are pressed up against the wall ready to be deployed, or not. Mair seems happy to leave them be and to deploy them in his head. He pulls some out for me and kind of throws them out on the floor like carpets. He arranges them and then arranges them again. There is no set arrangement. The spectator can meddle there as well, I guess. But who would ever dare rearrange a show? Well actually there is Captain Culture & Herr Doktor Kropp, a team of art consultants who will fix your show free of charge, but that is another story.

Taken together Mair’s work has an  IKEA quality to it  – decoration that is derived from a furniture sensibility. You  are always wondering about a work’s  possible function.

The objects are more or less flat. Volume is derived by assembling flat elements. There is always a painted edge or plane somewhere that suggests an orientation. Paint is applied in strips in an allotted space. It doesn’t transfer, travel or overflow.

Color is emitted and diffused on neighboring elements of the painted plane. The color becomes lighting and the art/ furniture combination is fulfilled (but do not try to read by this light). According to Mair the color is a  residue of a greater mass or color that was there before.

Enclosing colored planes gives the color mass.

His works often suggest that they were once bigger but that a part was detached and dispersed.

Mair’s work is a little messy. Canvas and wood meet imperfectly in a jury rigged fashion, painted edges are vague and fuzzy. A straight line misses its mark . . . there is a fuzziness which avoids a conclusion. It is a  controlled messiness which alleviates the seriousness that this work could deploy.

Mair likes to brush up against the line separating art and utility. Is this a bookcase I see before mine eyes? Its shelves before my hands?

You are also free to turn his pictures this way and that (look above and below).

The tug in two opposing directions — that of painting and sculpture — that many artists have felt is at work in Mair as well.

In one work the frame slides out from behind the canvas. In another the two vertical elements of the frame rise like goal posts out of the top of the picture.

Mair uses canvas and stretcher structures as the building blocks  for his objects. The canvas and chassis entente remains as a support and surface for the paint, but they have become objets d’art in their own right. This is a sly way of painting and sculpting.

The paint, however, cannot reciprocate. It is happy to lie ensconced in or on the object. It bends to the will of the canvas stretcher structure and from there it faintly diffuses itself onto the white planes of its keeper.  Overall there is a persistent flatness which means that Mair is still mostly painting.

Mair’s studio is on the edge of a long straight canal typical of the landscapes of northern Europe with their straight lines and flat lands. I ask him if his proximity to this cityscape has influenced his work and he professes that the open space is a pleasure to be in but he cannot point to any work that might be a result of this landscape.

Although Mair’s work calls to mind many other artists he himself doesn’t work within those references. He is looking to make art that can still serve a  purpose and open new perspectives. If he proposes a hint of utility it is in hopes that the spectator will go beyond that and confirm the object as art. Letting the spectator confer the status and value of the work is risky but honest.

There is a lunge towards the infinite here and it is achieved without a draughtman’s means. Mair has come far from the huis clos of the picture where all is controlled and described to a place where suggestion sets us in motion.

The bits and pieces add up to what most bodies of work are becoming: a set of  pieces to a board game that are looking to be deployed on the great board of the contemporary art game.

However it seems that the more artists create the more fragmented art becomes. The number of pieces needed for the game is infinite and their signage forever evolving. There will always be missing pieces.

I like the line that Mair is pursuing. It is  unhurried and consists of a few brush strokes and a few strokes of the saw combined with gravity’s will and a certain nonchalance. You can follow the signs or not.

Sans Titre by Tonico Lemos Auad. Made of sculpted brick.

The Bird nested in the steel and glass Grand Palais, with her blue chip eggs, while her attendant flock cobbled together tents to create ephemeral spaces in niches and alcoves around town. The artists and collectors that have the privilege to ride under her wing slid down to the Parisian soil to begin posing, hanging, leaving samples and creating  impressions.

Beneath the  din of chirping there was no buzz. It was all birds and no bees.There was a self-conscious tentativeness all about, as perhaps the art world sales people and collectors were dogged by the European financial chaos. This is in contrast to the exuberance that the FIAC as well as Frieze exhibited in the face of brewing financial storms in 2008, ’09 and ’10. Personnally I was surprised that no one stormed the fair in order to reclaim some art — to be redeemed for shelter and perhaps used for start up capital for a small business. Instead the line to get in on opening night wound its way around the palace like a long worm that was going to feed itself to the multi-materialed, multi-clolored shimmering Art Fair Bird.

Effet Pas D'Affect by Simon Nicaise. The table turns the track beneath the train.

The unheralded highlight of the fair was embodied by a drawing that was more a carte de visite or artist’s signature than drawing. A bird was drawn swooping down towards the bottom left of the picture. On the lower right was a hole left by the artist where he made a cut out on which he wrote his name and then pasted it by the bird’s beak. His name became the bird’s song. The bird sang “Marcel Duchamp”. For 385,000 euros this original Marcel Duchamp sheet music on show at the  UBU / Sophie Scheidecker space could be yours.

Trunk by Jonathon Callan consisting of previously soggy Reader's Digest.

If Cubism opened the door to infinite possibilities of form, shape and perspective, Duchamp certainly opened an even bigger door on the other side of which all and/or nothing could be art. Duchamp is the artist everyone has to deal with at one point or another. Part of knowing who one is as an artist and affirming that identity entails determining what is art and what art one is going to make . . .as well as what one will wear and what games one will play. This part of the artistic identity journey takes place on Duchamp Lane. We all pass through…and it is a toll road.

Dark Star by Pierre Besson

I am surprised that the drawing wasn’t sold the day before in the pre-opening where the millionaires get first dibs. What are collectors thinking? Is this reviewer stuck in pre-world-war-thought-mode admiring defunct prophets? Is the drawing just detritus? Are we in a post-industrial era where there will be no more readymades? Was Duchamp a charlatan and a hoax?  Do we really think that  Maurizio Cattelan is a deus ex machina phenomenon?

This sad gentle supine giant in a Moscow suburb moved me. Photo by Boris Mikhailov.

Any other Duchamp would be literally priceless on the open market. It is true that this drawing was little more than a signature . .. . and so lacked the heft of a pivotal art work such as the readymade urinal, aka Fountain.   Still, it was surprising to see a Duchamp for sale with an actual price. It somehow didn’t feel Duchampian . . . . In contrast consider Impressionism. Impressionist works continue to increase in price no matter what the economic climate. This  is because these works are caught in the buddy system where millionaires heap money on each other in an endless cycle of selling perpetually-appreciating goods to each other. They are like mother birds regurgitating food to feed their offspring and brethren.

Forking Circle In Pea Bog. Drawing by Robert Smithson which was not for sale.

Duchamp made too little to be a player in the art market. There aren’t enough works to go around. That that drawing was unmolested by a buyer infers a rewriting of modern art history, confirms a general blindness in the collectors’ ranks and a warp in the values conferred on art works today. Like a rippled 33 1/3 record warped by the sun, or a radiator, the resulting hump  distorts the music. The Art Fair Bird’s beak used to be the needle on this record which was her song. Now recorded music is all digital and warp has to be built in.

Best in show goes to Taysir Batniji principally for his admixture of humor and the history of destruction:

Sans Titre. Taysir Batniji. Photos of homes and land for sale that were destroyed by hostile forces.

For Taysir Batniji it's a free market. The Fiac crowd dialled in instantly to the real estate format.

On Monday morning I saw the Art Fair Bird spread her wings and preen herself while her passengers climbed onboard. She cocked her head for a bearing and then  launched into the air  to  soar towards her  next destination where the artists and the public  have prepared her a nest and her next meal.

Richard Jackson.

Last Tuesday a Degas painting was estimated to sell for more than twice the price it was bought for in 2000. It failed to sell. Always use the buddy system when buying and selling art.

Dan Walker's installation of his Moleskine collage books filled an entire wall in his Unstuck exhibition in Paris.

1. I remember meeting you about a year ago and you showing me a collection of your Moleskin book collage journals.  At the time your production was intense but limited to smaller works in these books.  Your exhibition Unstuck is astonishing for both the range, size and quantity of works.  What happened?

DAN WALKER: The Moleskine journals (exhibited as an installation in Unstuck) are an ongoing project. I fill about a book a week with a mixture of diary entries, collected scraps, drawings and ideas. They are memory maps but also a simple and effective way to record and grasp what goes on around me each day. They’ve become my hard drive and I’ve relinquished a large part of my memory to them. I wanted to liberate myself a bit and started making bigger and freer works. Ideas would often incubate in the books and I allowed myself to develop them on a larger scale and this became “Unstuck”.

2. There is a very clear poetic sense in your works; they read like poetic musings literally torn out of books.  What is the genesis of your texts such as SHOUT QUIETLY PLEASE or KEEP IT FOR LATER?

Most of the words and phrases came from everyday conversations going on around me. Living in France and being surrounded by the French language is wonderful but I miss the idiosyncrasies and idioms of English and when I hear or see words that have nice shapes or meanings I pluck them away and stick them down.

Walker's compositions riff off of the Affichistes from the early 1960s, but add a twist with his own idiosyncratic texts and close cropping of his found papers..

3. Like many collage artists you employ scraps of paper and antique or vintage books as your supports. Your use of rubber stamps to write your texts also follows from a long line of art creation in the collage and dada traditions.  How did you come to this aesthetic?

I’ve always collected junk of all kinds so when it came to making bigger works it seemed natural to use stuff that was already in the cupboard. I think we’ve lost the reflex to re-use and re-condition things for new purposes and that’s a shame. It’s often far more aesthetically pleasing than the new stuff. I’ve collected rubber stamps since I was a child and love their imprecise form and the fact that each impression is as unique as a fingerprint.

EMPTY brings together found wall paper, paint, rubber stamps in a simple, elegant pun about the past.

4. Your history is as a film maker and producer. Your company Force Majeure has produced several films. Have you put that career on hold or are you still engaged in the industry.

I still write and produce films but the nature of the industry is sporadic and frustratingly slow. I’m hoping to produce a film next year about a stay at home mum who becomes an undercover operative with Emma Thompson in the lead.

5. What is the role of film in the production of these works?  Is there a narrative you are exploiting?  Or is Unstuck a play on the word collage, which is French and indicates gluing.

I think the works are more graphic than filmic. Unstuck is a reference to glue and “collage” but it’s also about giving myself the freedom to make pictures. We tend to be very compartmentalized in what we do and who we allow ourselves to be and I wanted to “unstick” myself and start doing more of what I really love.

6. Your compositions also touch upon the Nouveaux Realistes, particularly the affichistes like Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé and Mimmo Rotella who recuperated the torn posters from Paris and Italian walls and made keen sense of the sorts of juxtapositions exposed when one image – or rather a part of an image – was removed, revealing the underlying image.  The results there were often surreal and implied a new urban folk art, presaging in many ways graffiti. What do you consciously borrow from this action of artists to take the real and recompose it into a pictorial fiction?

Dan Walker with his Keep It For Later collages at his Unstuck exhibition.

It makes a lot of sense to me to take the mundane and everyday and recondition it into something different and hopefully meaningful and engaging.  We’re given hundreds of pieces of paper each day that we hardly glance at and generally throw away: envelopes, tickets, bags, invitations etc. Every shop and café receipt now has an address and the exact time it was printed and that fixes you in time and space. We do hundreds of things each day and without keeping a trace of them I’d forget most if not all of it.

7. In your exhibition you exhibit a mini architectural model of the installation – it’s lovely in its brut form.  Was this part of the original concept for this show? And by the way, the idea of serving Mojitos for the entire duration of the show is a great concept, too.

The installation included a model of the exhibition.

Originally, I only had the gallery space for three days including setting it all up. So I needed to pre-prepare roughly where each piece was going to go and be ready to get it on the walls in a morning.  I made the maquette from an old cinema décor I’d saved from a film set. Happily, the show has now been extended until November 19.  Although I’m not sure if I have enough rum to pour until the 19th.

8. Tell us a bit about your history as an artist – education, background, where you grew up and if you walked around as a child with a book of Kurt Schwitters under your arm….

I’ve had no formal art education but when I was a child my mum forced me to keep diaries when we went on holidays. So I guess it’s all her fault! I dreamt of becoming an architect but at that time you needed to be good at maths and physics and I was hopeless. So I trained and worked as a lawyer. It took me about 15 years to realize I was miserable and that’s when I started writing and producing. But it was also a large step towards a more creative existence and the collages and artworks grew from that.

9. You produced a series of collage works that are both painted and rubber stamped in the form of a bottle. These are very simple and elegant works. In the one large grouping of the grid of eight bottles is significant because the one in the middle is missing.  The work that stands next to it on its own features the printed word EMPTY.  Tell me about the origin of this work.  It feels quite different from the others.

I’m renovating an old house in Burgundy and found rooms with remnants of 19th Century handmade wallpaper. It’s extremely fragile and disintegrates upon being touched but is the most amazing color blue.  I’d made a piece of work based on the idea of the glass/bottle being half empty/full which I ultimately threw away but I retrieved the preparatory pictures of bottles and dressed them in pieces wallpaper that I could keep intact. The “empty” picture made at the same time escaped the formal grid but wanted to stick around.

10. The entrance to the exhibition features several vitrines filled not only with your Moleskine collage books but a number of assemblages of wood and metal works as well as time pieces, clocks and other detritus…

A nod to Duchamp. Unstuck: Installation view from the street.

There are two travel books from Japan and New York that document trips I took. They felt too lonely on their own so I thought I’d make a “cabinet de curiosités” from bits and pieces of junk I had lying around.

10 1/2. Finally, now that you’re “unstuck,” what’s next for Dan Walker, artist?

Well all this activity has generated a whole new set of material, I need to clear out my cupboard again and probably load up on the Moleskine books and a few gallons of glue. Say, care for another Mojito?

DAN WALKER: UNSTUCK Galerie d’Architecture, 11 Rue des Blancs Manteaux 75004 Paris, France – through November 19, 2011.

Alfredo and Isabel AQUILIZAN's "Exodus"

The fair was spread out over 3 spaces. The Grand Palais was the central, mother ship, space and housed the blue chip galleries and works while to the west and east were her satelites.

To the West was Slick housed in a big tent and offering the youngest and rawest works of the fair. To the east was an open air sculpture area as well as the  Cour Carre housing the players whose feet are almost in the door of the Grand Palais. A quick survey proved this not to be a binding rule. Market value determined the grid.Though not as comic strip and drawing-oriented as in last years  the fair had a juvenile and even regressive undercurrent.

Notable tendencies were double-faced guitars, plastic objects deformed by heat, and muslim prayer rugs. With a smattering of  faux weapons the fair felt like The Bazaar of All Nations. A lot of works for under 10,000 euros were on offer. Your average artist can’t collect at those prices but the still-affluent can.

There were a few arab artists tackling Islamic subjects and calligraphy. The two notable ones were both women. Mounir Fatmi’s “I Like America” is an American flag transformed into a  giant Pick Up Sticks game

" I Like America" Mounir FATMI

and then Latifa Echakhch’s “Frames” which are Muslim prayer rugs with their centers cut out. Thus the praying must touch the “unclean” earth.

Bring the faithful back to earth.

The theme continued with Mounir Fatmi’s  prayer rugged skateboards in a traffic jam.

I can feel the Fatwa...

As a counterpoint is this carpet piece by Gedi Sibony that speaks above all about the sculptural process. Two pieces of the same  carpet underside to underside go  vertical and become like a door. The underside of the carpet,  ordinarily hidden, is the greater part of the piece. Both  strips are notched to create shoulders in proportion to their mass and suggests that they fit into a specific  place.  Where would that be? You can still feel its rolled-up-ness and smell the factory it came from. Simply flipping, notching and hanging prefab elements surprisingly and successfully confirms the sculptural process here.

Gedi Sibony

The door hits the floor  in this curious piece by Roman Ondak

" Door Leading To Many Directions"

I am always on the lookout for a potential boat. This inverted podium by Amalia PICA suggests that there cannot be winners without losers. Here the winner is the ballast.

Amalia PICA at the Galerie Diana Stigter

For as much as I love to find beauty in machines and the utilitarian I have yet to meet a beautiful weapon:

This year's gun by Frank Perrin.

But I am tired of seeing pictures of Taliban soldiers crouching on a craggy outcrop of rock.

Taliban Chair by Emeric Lhuisset and Afghan artist Aman Mojadidi. This presupposes a beach. If terrorists went on vacation they might change their point of view.

Otherwise just give me what appears to be artistic vandalism such as Mr. Kintera’s cut lamp post:

Kristof Kintera's lamp is from Prague.

Only time will tell what will become of the 26-year old FIAC and ages-old human art in general. My favorite work was the 1,000-year watch. Designed by Patrick Bernatchez  in collaboration with a Swiss  horloger the 1,000-year  watch will complete a 24 hour cycle in 1,000 years. The watch is ticking and yet the movement of the hands is imperceptible. A future centenarian may see 5 minutes fly by in his or her lifetime.

Self winding, I hope.

Meanwhile someone will need to take out the trash. We are what we throw out. The holy receptacle so hermetic, the psychopomp between the new and the used deserves the sarcophagraphic touch by Blokhin and Kuznetsov:

"Sarcophagus" by Blokhin and Kuznetsov.

At the Gagosian Gallery  ( Mr. Gagosian was awarded the French Legion d’Honneur on Monday the 19th of October for opening a gallery in Paris)  there was a guard assigned to protecting a delicate Giacometti bronze that was clamped down to its pedestal with two big pieces of steel. Everyone’s attention was turned towards the guard. The price for dismissing the guard — $10,000,000 for that little Giacometti. A small black and blue Warhol of Jackie Kennedy in mourning  hung on the same wall as a 1930′s Picasso portrait of a woman. Warhol’s shadowing created the signature Picasso  trick of putting a profile of the sitter down the middle of the sitter’s face seen frontally. No photos allowed. Everywhere else people snapped away with great abandon.

Art and Design continue to honeymoon together. One confounding piece for me was  Sleeping Hermaphrodite by Barry X Ball. It is a re-rendering, slick up  in black marble of the original white marble work housed in the Louvre. The body has been buffed to our teen magazine standard of physical beauty. This is art meets interior decoration and it went immediately for 450.000 euros. That’s a good deal compared to the one in the Louvre ( not for sale).

Or is this like when Picasso sits down to repaint Manet's Dejeuner sur L'Herbe?

While we are here let me thank all of the artists of the world who continue to work and produce culture fodder  for the world to engage and trade with on all levels. Most artists continue to do this against all odds and without going on strike ( because no one is asking them to work, really?). It is fairs like this that can fuel the hopes that at the end of the tunnel there could be cash.

"Erasure" by Adamo. The strikers believe that they'll get a stick like this for retirement. They're right.

Artists I spoke to said that it was getting harder and harder to get invitations to the FIAC while tickets cost 30 euros a piece. The FIAC is a real bazaar but you know it is an art fair when you ask “How much?”  The answer is never artist-as-collector friendly. Perhaps they should let artists shoot at pyramides of cans and fish for rubber ducks to try and win some tickets to redeem for high quality art?  Artists need other  artist’s art in their life spaces, after all.

At the FIAC it takes a leap of faith and bulging pockets to leave with anything . .  . and even with empty pockets  the guards asked us if we were stealing art as we left. This said, a gallery representing Louise Bourgeois was selling posters to some of her former shows for 35 euros. The Louvre Museum was taking orders for etchings by well known artists such as Tony Cragg and Guisseppe Penoni, price tag – 250 euros . . . unsigned of course. Worthless then? Yes. All the more reason, then, to buy one. It let’s you know what you like. I bought the Penoni.

Yves Klein Untitled Fire Painting (F 82) (1961)

For many people, situating Klein means reconciling the work with the man: a showman, self-mythologiser and polemecist. Fifty years later those concerns seem beyond the point. The work speaks for itself and coherently, and may well say more than its maker realized. Klein was a young man (the work was produced when he was 27-34 years old) making his way in an adult art world before the existence and sanction of youth culture. And his work is a major inquiry into how to create art in the shadow of the atom bomb, a world in which man had demonstrated an unimagined power of destruction and was further perfecting it. The Cold War may seem a distant memory, but the hysteria of that time was omnipresent.

Yves Klein Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 45) (1960)

Adorno famously wrote of the ethical obligation of art after atrocities which swept away all previous ideas of culture. Klein responded to the horrors of the bomb, if not the closer-to-home horrors of the Holocaust, by beginning at ground zero: monochrome abstraction. His notes (exhibited) show his concerns with Malevich and Kandinsky;  his ongoing mysticism (some of it drawn from communal sources such as Rosicrucianism and Zen Buddhism, some personal) aligns his art with one of the two fundamental justifications of abstraction at the beginning of the 20th century, the other being the analogy with music.

Yves Klein Untitled Anthropometry (1960) collection Hirshhorn Museum

This major retrospective was organized by the Walker Art Center in collaboration with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, where it is stunningly-installed. It is that ideal of an exhibition, greater than the sum of its parts, and although two hundred works sounds superfluous, it is not. While Klein is represented in most American museums that exhibit art of the 50s and later one generally sees but a work or two. To see an entire room of his Anthropometries, Fire Paintings, an assembly of the small sponge sculptures or a large sculptural installation only assembled twice before (in 1957 and 1961) is to gain an entirely different understanding of Klein’s achievement.

Yves Klein Untitled Monogold (MG 7) (1960)

Klein variously explored questions of artistic form, media, permanence and value.  The exhibition includes records of his early contractual piece in which the purchaser of a small gold ingot agreed to renounce all its non-material value before throwing the gold into the Seine, and then burning the contract. In a world where art’s value derived entirely from its non-material value (the artist’s ‘value added’ to his canvas and paint, priced according to the market) Klein’s response was, on the one hand, renunciation and on the other hand, to create work using the costliest traditional materials of art: gold and ultramarine (or in Klein’s case, International Klein Blue). His attempt to patent the pigment adds another layer of irony, as the non-material was the usual site of the artist’s work and the art’s identity.  His Monotone Silence-Symphony (1949) and the exhibition of the empty space of a gallery, The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void (1958) offered art as a frame for the perception of everyday reality that John Cage would later explore in his 4 minutes, 33 seconds for piano.

The best known of the Anthropometries were created as monoprints, with the inked bodies of Klein’s models (and in the case of the Hirshhorn’s work, above, the artist’s own body) used as the matrix. Some, however, employed sprayed paint to create silhouettes of the figures. To see these, followed in the exhibition by an entire room of  Fire Paintings inevitably brought to mind the silhouetted bodies of people immolated by the bomb that scarred the ground at Nagasaki.

Many of Klein’s paintings, with their delicate surfaces of underbound paint and barely-adhered gold leaf, present major challenges to exhibit;  I’m amazed, and grateful, that lenders would let them travel. The smaller ones in the beginning of the exhibition are stiffled by the plexi boxes that encase them, but the large, Monogolds transcend their protective casing; the paintings exhibited free of plexi give a much more accurate view of Klein’s extraordinarily tactile surfaces. But this is a minor problem inherent to the demands of safety. The exhibition is spectacular, and required viewing.

For research on the artist, the Klein Archive has a particularly useful website.

EXPLORING THE VOID

Yves Klein ‘Surfaces et blocs de sensibilité picturale - Intentions picturales’ Galerie Colette Allendy, Paris, (May 1957)

The Centre Pompidou, Paris, Kunsthalle Bern and Centre Pompidou-Metz organized an exhibition in 2009 that used Klein’s empty gallery exhibitions as the starting-point for the exploration of the void that followed. I didn’t see the exhibition and am fairly skeptical about museums’ re-staging time-bound and/or ephemeral art (as MoMA did recently with Marina Abromavic); some art exists only in the moment, and it’s re-staging conveys about as much of it as a specimen mounted on a pin in a natural history museum conveys of a butterfly. But the catalog makes for a very useful anthology of writing on the subject.

Voids: A Retrospective (JRP/Ringier, Affoltern: 2009) ISBN 978-3–3764-017-3 (English edition) surveys the empty exhibition spaces presented by Klein (1958), Art & Language (1966-67), Robert Barry (1970), Robert Irwin (1970), Michael Asher (1974), Laurie Parsons (1990), Bethan Huws (1993), Maria Eichorn (2001), Roman Ondak (2006) and Stanley Brouwn along with extensive illustrations and documentation, artists’ statements, contemporaneous and later published critical writings (including pieces by Allan Kaprow, Robert Smithson, Brian O’Dougherty, Lucy Lippard, and Robert Rauschenberg), and several new essays. At least thirty authors contributed the essays which are divided into sections covering the Void, Nothing, Vacuity/Empty, Invisible/Eneffable and Rejection/Destruction. More than fifty artists were each offered a page for a response to the subject;  some provided texts, others  images.  While the curators, Philippe Pirotte and Laurent Le Bon,  suggested that theirs is only the beginning of an investigation that should be taken further, they have certainly brought together a great deal of otherwise-dispersed material and made the subject readily available to anyone interested. This could certainly be the textbook for a graduate course on the subject.

Just off the entrance to The Serpentine Gallery stands a temporary pavilion in hospital white.  I approach the small building just as one of the last English heartbeats is recorded for posterity; that is, copied to a fat hard drive to be added to yet another fat hard drive then shipped to the uninhabited Japanese island of Teshima and digitally secured at the Benesse Art Site Naoshima…until Doomsday. This is the premise of the expanding and ongoing work of Christian Boltanski, Les Archives du Coeur, registering a rambling sample of the world’s pulse. 

Boltanski Beat: Charlotte Cooper with her heartbeat on CD, treasured souvenir of Christian Boltanski's Archives du Coeur

Charlotte Cooper, an English teenager who with her mother trained down from Bristol to have the sound of her heart recorded for all time, emerges with her dog Toffee (on a outfit-matching pink leash), tenderly holding the two-minute CD of her heart’s lively beat, (she’s no. 001449). Boltanski souvenir in hand, Charlotte and Mom Cooper chat with the amiable artist-musician-and-guy-who-looks-like-a-doctor-but-is-only-a-guide, Thomas Hawkins. Ms. Cooper is excited to have donated her young unbroken heartbeat to Boltanski’s project.  “It didn’t hurt,” she says. “It was fun.” Hers is one of thousands.

Charlotte Cooper, Toffee and artist-musician and heartbeat administrator, Thomas Hawkins, on the last day of Les Archives du Coeur. "I'm not a doctor," says Hawkins.

Boltanski along with his artist wife, Annette Messager, pass for France’s aesthetic power couple.  The artist maintains a studio near Paris in Malakoff, a self-styled communist suburb filled with old factory-turned-loft spaces, and easy access to the inside ring of Paris via Métro or side street. Arguably France’s most important artistic export after Yves Klein, Boltanski often wanders around my street, the rue Daguerre, window shopping, buying bread, enjoying a coffee on a café terrace, smoking his pipe and in general pretty quiet for such a famous guy.  During these walks, the artist says, he gets his ideas.  In the studio, he claims, he does nothing.  Yet for more than 40 years, Boltanski has been quite busy mining the detritus of the world in a “career-long examination of the issues of death, memory, disappearance and loss,” according to The Serpentine Gallery press release. Most recently, these examinations have involved tons and tons of clothes.

The Serpentine Gallery installation, however, has no clothes, unlike his exhibitions in Paris, New York and Milan; Boltanski’s effort in London was designed solely to gather heartbeats, like a mushroom picker in an English garden.

Christian Boltanski in the Grand Palais, Paris 2010 Courtesy: Kewenig Galerie and Monumenta 2010. Photo by Didier Plowy

In June 1992 when I flew up to Montreal from New York to participate as an art writer person in the opening of the new Contemporary Art Museum. I sat next to a man I was certain was the artist Leon Golub. I was too timid to start a conversation with Mr. Golub, besides punching out poetic jewels like “Excuse me … bumpy ride … hey, we’re here.” It wasn’t the American painter Leon Golub (1922-2004), I learned 10 years after I’d moved to Paris.

A few times I’ve sat with him at in a café, and it was one of those times, Boltanski told me that indeed he was on that plane jetting to Montreal. We had a nice laugh about that and I tried to account for their facial similarities but it made little difference. He enjoyed the case of mistaken identity. Then, about two years ago while walking towards Montparnasse from my studio, I heard a grumbling sound behind me, growing louder and louder. Whoa! A greenish Volkswagen was bearing down on me. My heart skipped a beat. “Hey!” I shouted at the driver, as I skittered out of the way. It was Boltanski. He laughed, gave that French shrug, waved and motored on. Art performance? No, Christian Boltanski doesn’t run over American artists in Paris, no matter how quaint that idea might be.

"No Man's Land," May 2010 at New York's Armory. Photo by James Ewing/Courtesy Park Avenue Armory.

What Boltanski does do is collect. He’s a collector par excellence, or better, an archivist on an ambitious and wonderfully absurd quest. Born in Paris in 1944, Boltanski has spent most of his adult life growing his installations into ever more enormous monuments of memory and loss. You had to be in a coma to miss the installation shots this past January of “Personne” (Nobody), the Monumenta exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. For this, Boltanski assembled piles and piles of used clothing in a tremendous grid on the floor, a poetic field intimating death, absurdity and anonymity. Worn out pants, ratty sweaters, kids’ t-shirts, out-of-fashion skirts and boots are laid out, as one writer said, “flower beds.” Or, let’s say, grave sites.  Clothes were lifted and dropped repeatedly, day in and day out, from a crane to the pounding mix of 15,000 heartbeats. Something Sisyphus could appreciate.

(Listen to the UK Guardian’s Adrian Searle and the heartbeats played at the Grand Palais during “Personne.”)

Read Max Mulhern’s artblog review of “Personne,”– Boltanski People – published on January 16, 2010.

This installation was repeated in New York’s Armory in May in a more spectacular display entitled “No Man’s Land.” This time, Boltanski employed a five-story crane to lift and then drop the used clothing onto a 25-foot pile.  In these exhibitions, Boltanski set up the Archives du Coeur as an ongoing heartbeat-gathering laboratory, but also as a counterpoint to the big bass sound of emptiness moaning from the hollow of these immense spaces. In New York, as in Paris, the heartbeats played in a pounding harmony of thousands.

While some may dismiss as slight or simpleminded, these large displays of tossed clothing roaming the world’s art spaces (Boltanski reprised this symphony of heartbeats and old clothes in Milan’s Hangar Bicocca Contemporary Art Museum) – and one can easily imagine comments like, “What is this a some new kind of French laundry?” – it impossible not to be moved by Boltanski’s vision, which is precise and all-encompassing even if it spills over across the floor. His is an art that touches an individual from afar – like a storm cloud – and from up close, like the pinch of a syringe. But instead of medical devices, he employs memory in the form of your father’s well-worn sport coat or your mother’s kitchen apron or your brother’s torn blue jeans – or your living heartbeat.

"Personnes" at the Hangar Bicocca Contemporary Art Museum on June 25, 2010 in Milan, Italy. Photo by Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images.

For some 40 years Christian Boltanski has arranged tin biscuit boxes, yellowed identity photographs, and now giant piles of Salvation Army discards into archives, presented in profoundly absorbing walk-through installations in order to examine, present and document the exacting sense of loss this world offers through the objects we use and to some extent, fetishize. It’s a personal project on many levels; it would have to be. One can only surmise that these works constitute the artist’s own deep confrontation of the consciousness of death.

I remember back in 1992 speaking with Rachel Stella (daughter of Barbara Rose and Frank Stella, currently director of Stellar Graphics), at her gallery/loft in Paris’s 16th arrondisement.  We talked about a number of artists and Boltanski’s 1990 work, “Les Suisses morts” (The Dead Swiss), came up.  Here the artist used photographs from from Swiss obituaries in an installation; photographs the family had chosen to publish – smiling studio shots, candids, graduation poses. The installation was funerary with the images affixed to a wall of tin boxes, and others, enlarged slightly larger than life beyond the wall of tins, were strung up of head shots of now-forgotten Swiss people; memorialized shadows of once very real lives.

Ms. Stella was furious, calling it a terrible violation of someone’s privacy. I was more shocked by her attack than I was by the artist’s work, but it stuck with me.  Death and art, are of course, old friends; indeed what would one be without the other? And now when I walk through the Montparnasse cemetery, where hundreds of France’s literary and artist greats endure the great sleep, I half imagine it all to be a Boltanski installation. Parisians and tourists wander through with their maps of the famous dead buried here, placing stones on the graves of Jean-Paul Sarte and Simone de Beauvoir or Métro tickets on Serge Gainsbourg in a similar fashion as those visiting a Boltanski exhibition – with reverence, melancholy and a wistful smile. You end up listening to your own heartbeat race in the presence this death. Wars and hospitals no doubt engender similar reactions.

Christian Boltantski's "Les Suisses morts" from 1990. Monumental funerary art, praised and criticized.

While Boltanski began his career in the 1960s as a painter – he says he still paints – his signature works are clearly these Mount Rushmore-sized installations. No, the installations aren’t amusement parks, but rather specific and sober experiences, like a cold bath and no towel. The undertakings are beautiful and breathtaking, and engagingly sad. There is a touch of the preposterous in it all as well, but Boltanski’s sweeping irony is apparent, too: his own dress rehearsal for death.

As I take leave of Les Archives du Coeur, I’m thinking that this is really all about something quite simple: eternal heartbreak.

[1] One should note that the word, “record” derives from the Latin (and thus Old French), recordari, based on cor, cord- “heart.” Remember by heart, commit to memory. The noun was earliest used in law to denote the fact of being written down as evidence.

Serpentine Gallery, June 26 – August 8, 2010.
http://www.serpentinegallery.org/
Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA

Matthew Rose is an artist and writer based in Paris. His next exhibition, Scared But Fresh, opens at The Orange Dot Gallery in London. His prints are available at Keep Calm Gallery.

Yuhsin U. Chang's "Poussière dans le Palais de Tokyo" 2010 (Dust in the Palais de Tokyo).

Typical of openings in Paris, one first notices the crowd – pretty young girls in party dresses, isolated young men searching for meaning (and girls), and groups of adults wandering in and around the installations trying to figure out exactly what the heck contemporary art is all about.

One installation, however, was unanticipated: Fresh white wall paint drying in the heat of of all those French bodies permeated the entire exhibition. Something of a cross between an explosion in  a Home Depot paint department and an experiment on group olfactory nerves, the effect was potent (and unintended) but made me think of Yves Klein’s forceful “Le Vide” 1959, a monumental exhibition of “nothing” at Iris Clert’s gallery in Paris that showed simply the white walls of the empty space “sensitized by the artist.”  (Idea: Hey! Palais de Tokyo connect with industrial air conditioner or freezer makers Carrier or Subzero to cool the place down, and offer them giant corporate logo in the entrance).

Among the artworks, however, several grabbed my attention enough to distract me from the faux Klein, even if they seemed to be ambitious remakes of other ideas that have coursed through art history.

Yuhsin U. Chang’s “Poussière dans le Palais de Tokyo” (Dust in the Palais de Tokyo), top picture, an enormous Loch Ness lint monster seemingly pouring out from a high wall, dramatized the exhibition like no other installation. Like a frozen waterfall, “Poussière” undoubtedly contained the microscopic history of any and all who have passed through the museum in the past year, a dry grey cocktail of DNA and pigeon feathers, molecular bits of car wheels, dog crap and the flotsam of the real world. I loved that the installation was marked with a card explaining: “Dimensions variable.” (Chang’s dustworks appear in both exhibition spaces.)

One should note that Man Ray famously photographed dust in a 1920 work Dust Breeding (Duchamp’s Large Glass with Dust Notes) and more recently Xu Bing used Ground Zero dust for a 2004 installation in Wales, Where Does the Dust Itself Collect? 何处若尘埃? (Bing won 40,000 pounds for his dusty piece).

Nicholas Milhé's "Untitled" 2009 brings taxidermy and dentistry to the artworld.

Taxidermy and dentistry also played a part in the exhibition.  Nicholas Milhé’s stuffed hyena mined the continued interest in dead animals (Hirst) and cranial surgery (Hirst again). Milhé, reports the info-card glued to the wall behind “Untitled” 2009, is an expert in the “aesthetics of disruption and contextual creation.”  He offers us a “sculpture” of a snarling beast quietly featuring a pair of gold molars in the hyena’s mouth. (Note bene: Price of gold as of this posting is $1247.76 an ounce and climbing!). Obviously the piece is a metaphor for the art world, the real world, artists and dealers and British Petroleum. On the Palais de Tokyo side, Milhé produced a kind of photo landscape “fortress” that reminded me of theater props; a long rectangular slit is cut into it, supposedly to shoot arrows from as in medieval times, but still clearly useful today.

Théo Mercier's totem, one of five, features two pairs of testicles hanging over the two branches.

Théo Mercier’s five totems comprised of dirt, skin, glass, wood and skin are minor gods the artist portends are deformed, decadent and borderline. And hey, they are fun for the family, too, in a weird Disney kind of way. On one – a tree stump, two pairs of testicles hang over the two branches. You could hardly tell they were composed of anything other than Disneyland dust and (probably drugs). His “Green with Anger” 2010, smiles from multiple pairs of teeth (yes, more teeth) from a vegetable green mass of face.  Across the way in the Musée de la Ville de Paris, Mercier’s “Le Solitaire” 2010, is another giant – this one nearly 10 feet tall sculpted from spaghetti.  The press on Mercier is that his work concerns waiting and sadness. Sounds like the 21st century to me.

The writer's shadow cast in Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni's equation for zero.

The French pair, Fabien Giraud and Raphaël Siboni, produced a pair of slow moving videos that hogged two entire walls in each exhibition space. I was too slow myself to discern, in the video “Untitled” 2009, the setting sun made without a lens.  The other large-scale video is a pattern of light derived from a computation that theoretically chugs along for a billion plus years crunching out a “zero equation whose outcome can only be zero.”  I stood in front of one of these giants and took a photograph of my shadow. At first, I thought that was, in fact the point. (Everyone has cell phone cameras). But in fact the point was zero.

Melanie Delattre-Vogt's odd, comic narratives showing how to stuff a chicken after you've defrosted it.

While painting was represented, like Raphaëlle Ricol’s large-scale canvases of heads exploding in graffiti, it seemed oddly old-fashioned, a relic from the 20th century. Small delicate drawings by Melanie Delattre-Vogt, showing how to stuff a chicken after you’ve defrosted it (that is indeed the title), issue from a French encyclopedia on the subject. The 21 drawings are elegant and muted in ochre and gray and sienna and arranged in a line; a sound track from the source book quietly explains the stuffing process. And, I should note, the French fascination with frozen foods: A Picard frozen food store, a chilly laboratory of iced boxes of lobsters, chicken and vegetables, dots nearly every neighborhood in Paris.  Dinner remains serious business in France.

If the twin showings showed me anything it was that there is an enormous amount of art being produced in France, a phenomenon reproduced mostly everywhere these days. And while the work itself is not easy (or even possible) to grasp, whether the pieces are large architectural structures or cartoon dieties or even dust, the show draws in ever larger crowds to figure it all out or just inhale the fresh paint.

While my take is subjective and a small slice of the exhibition, do take some time to view all the artists in the exhibition here: DYNASTY.

Info: Dynasty at the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, from June 11 – September 5, 2010.  13 Avenue du Président Wilson
75016 Paris, France.

When mentioning bagging a work of art we think of a collector shooting money at the latest work to come out of the hottest  studio. But Vincent Who’s work keeps this hunting metaphor in the studio where the artist is trying to capture, hold and materialize that moment when the art he or she has been tracking is discovered , shot and bagged. This isn’t recreational, catch and let go hunting. It is hunting for keeps. Like a hunter, the artist brings back the work from the wilderness, the wilderness of creation. By chance the work is hung on a wall or put on a pedestal as the prize and the result of relentless tracking. If it sustains us, the artist is a hero.

The works composed of wood have a peasant feel to them. They hint at a world without animals, or a world in which the animal has become a citizen with rights including the right not to be hunted–hence these sculptures. They are as basic as a log cabin. As opposed to the pig’s head in Lord of The Flies, there is no decay and there was no animal sufferring. They invoke stags and rhinos and derive their energy from this invocation. But there are no black beady eyes staring back at us and pulling us into other lights and times; just holes or knots of wood. There are no pelts, only bark and rubber skins. No animal died so that another might eat. Unless the artist is making sacrifices in order to bring this work to us? These details feed the idea that the artists creates his quarry with materials at hand and in so doing bags it.

The head composed of basketballs, a bucket and real (?) horns is especially intriguing. The choice of material suggests that Vincent Who has unleashed the animal in the objects of play. The trophy is not a silver cup but the ball transfigured into the beast the player became  during the match.

In a Damien Hirst gesture of sacralizing the object, gold leaf  cauterizes the extremities of these sculptures: a shovel’s tip, the cut  tip of a log, the point of a horn. The gold wraps these points of potential violence, growth and work in muteness and finality. It would have been fascinating to see these works flower. Because they won’t, the metaphor of  creation as a hunt returns. More meat and art are always needed and it needs to be fresh.

After the initial guffaw we see that there is a lot of wishful thinking going on here which is the result of an inner rhetoric of non violence.  Vincent Who cries out for immortality.   He plays at killing and, iconographically speaking, positions his work in the place of the kill and yet he wants eternal life. In a series entitled “Here and There” he mashes up national flags (i.e  the British flag becomes that of Belgium the Swiss flag that of Bolivia) and transposes national symbols suggesting cross pollination of nations without war.

Vegetal and animal energies are channeled by human sign language signifying deep cultural clashes between , literally, billions of people, and yet no blood is being spilled. In all fairness this could work over time by suggestion. The work is slick. Vincent seems to be a nomad rifling through debris on several different continents and the show is on a communication/web site design premises suggesting extreme symbolic control. And yet, contrived or not, there is a non-slickness to it  suggesting exuberant restlessness and well meaning naivite.

In any case, the heads recall Fall and the hunting season when proteins are trapped to round out the cereal and fruit that was stored after the harvest. Imagine. The branches of bare trees rustle in the artist’s face in the Fall wind. The artist has no gun and so, at the end of the day, of the hunt,  picks up sticks and goes home. The rest is an exhibition.

Alba is , in her words, obsessed with cancelling the usefulness of objects as well as with table legs and their standard 72cm length. A week earlier she had shown me a large wooden die and a faggot of table legs that were meant to be screwed into the die on each face. The number of legs per face were to correspond to the number on the face of the die.

This results in an object that evokes either a virus or a creature from the Burgess shale.

" I-de" pronounced ee-day which is a play on words between 'ee-day" which is french for idea and "day" which is french for die.

Luck is a fundamental component of every human enterprise. Behind every action a pair of dice is rolling. Machiavelli insisted that the Prince be aware that he was Prince mostly by luck. His job was to never admit it. Many artist have employed luck and randomness in their work. Here, Pistolesi has cancelled luck. First, one of the dice is missing. Where is it? Is it in use? Second, this die cannot be rolled. Its uselessness  stops time,  stops  gaming, and  reaffirms the non utilitarian nature of art. In this process “I-de” becomes art because it cannot function, even though the utility of the table legs remain whole. This die can stand on sides 4, 5 and 6. Standing on sides 1, 2 and 3 it will fall over unless supported by a wall. However, “I-de” invokes walls and/or flooring at the point of each table leg. It is easy to imagine it enclosed in an unmarked  box  like Schroedinger’s cat. We would always be uncertain of its position. Heaven forbid we should mark the box like a die and roll it. What would be the true roll? The internal or external result? Forget it. By the time you’ve boxed it it would be too big to roll anyway.

Where do people like to throw the dice? In games. Backgammon, for example,  presents the sublime opportunity to make the most of a roll. In board games  winning and losing are clearly defined and the game time is finite. Not so in art, if we consider it as a game. We can spend a lifetime rolling and never know what we rolled or if we have won or lost. There is no board but rather just one big slippery slope. “I-de” highlights one of the strategies that artists can employ to skirt appraisal and outcome in unfavorable or confusing  circumstances  and gain a home advantage in the process: change the rules and block the dice. Or, create a system wherein the element of luck and its properties are controlled by the artist. In other words, load the dice.

This piece is a progenitor of  Duchamp’s iron, of course and the joyful cheating that characterized his work (he loaded the dice, indifferently, of course). Use the iron and you’ll rip a shirt. Pistolesi’s die cannot tumble. The useless creates sacredness. Nothing will be broken or fixed which  is a pronouncement with an air of finality to it like that of a roll of the dice. Still, while  ”I-de” is stopped  other dice are rolling and contingency is still at work.

No Title. A table made only of legs would look great. In the meantime, we have useless tableware. A tabletop would have been too useful.

72 centimetres (28 inches) is the standard length for table legs in the human world. This measure creates a plane transiting human domestic space across the face of the planet. This notion of measuring human presence and needs as well as the notion of canons of ideal proportion was recently  encountered in this blog with the artist Antti Laitenen. Laitenen measures his existence on this earth via direct confrontation with natural forces such as tide and solid earth.

Does the natural world  roll dice ? It can. In a project entitled Aqua Dice I plan to set a pair of dice out at sea and have them rolled by wave and wind action. Nature won’t use them but maybe natural forces  will determine another probability curve for future rolls.

The old G blade?

Speaking of luck, I am glad that the guillotine has been cancelled in France! While walking through the Tuileries garden in central Paris I saw what I thought was a reminder of capital punishment a la Francaise when heads, in addition to dice, used to roll. In France when upper management messes up they still  say “Heads will roll!”. In fact these weren’t blades but rather the arcs of a circle. It was chilling to see such a formal coincidence near the Place de La Concorde where the guillotine was working overtime during the Revolution.

No! It's art! One of six "Arcs de Cercle Complementaires" by Francois Morellet.

" The Claw is our Master!" from Toy Story.

After we pass under elegant stone arches and through the filigree of the Grand Palais’ doors we hit a wall. Its height blocks our view of the Palace  and it consists of identical, stacked, rusting boxes each marked with a meaningless number. They don’t have openings. On top of the wall is a row of what appear to be reading lamps inviting us to look closely and become cozy with a source of information. But of course the lights are far too small to light the whole wall and at our level we are almost in darkness.  This is the Boltanski coda, compartimentalization , anonymity and humanity reduced to small homogenous spaces.

Pick a number. One person's secret is another's need to know.

We walk around the wall and seem to enter a factory. The wall of boxes has been replaced by a wall of sound. A most unexpected spectacle sits on the far side of the palace:  a 10 metre high mountain of colored shreds of fabric over which is a crane that plunges a giant red claw into the mound. The claw rises up with a mass of dangling shreds and when it reached the crane arm it stops for a moment before releasing the fabric  which falls with flapping grace back onto the pile.

To get to the pile we pass through a grid stretching from end to end of the palace. It consists of neatly arranged squares of jackets and other outerwear lying flat on the ground and on each other. It is a thin layer like a dusting. We have no idea who wore this stuff. Each square is lit with a neon light and contains its own soundtrack of industrial noise like a unique  workshop/ensemble within the factory . Is it trains or just machinery in general?

At the foot of the mound we realise that the shreds are all manner of used clothing. The claw descends and hovers over the apex not able to decide where to clasp next. There is no transfer from one pile to another. There is no further redistribution throughout the grid. The industrial action is Sisyphean and although the sound suggests heavy industry working at full capacity we  see nothing either being produced or destroyed. What kind of a factory is this? Who’s in charge?

Clearance.

To the side of the pile Boltanski asks us to participate in a paralell project. He asks to record our heartbeat so that he can compile the heartbeats of humanity. Here we learn that the industrial sounds are in fact a montage of human heartbeats.

The author becoming heartbeat number 000436.

Boltanski is fascinated with history and the Shoah in particualar. The Shoah was the first time that the killing of humans became industrialized. One of its legacies is the human quest to remember that such things happened in order that they may not happen again. But of course humans forget. They need to after such acts of folly otherwise they couldn’t continue to function. This show suggests that there doesn’t seem to be any more space available for us to remember the disappeared. There is no demand for this clothing or for the stories of those who wore it. We will buy new clothing which will be added to the pile . . .

The grid and its lighting evoke large  sorting centres ( aka refugee camps). These centers are the portals through which the displaced and disinherited usually pass. They are usually but not always gates to Hell . . . or to nowhere. Boltanski, aided by winter,  twists our concept of Hell. It is no longer a place where we burn but rather a place where we lose our heat. The coats on the cold cement floor promise warmth but the clothing is as cold as the ground. Humanity’s great disappearances become a thermal phenomonon.  Pictures of recent history flood the mind. All of these “no bodies” once stood naked in line somewhere, on the way to total heat loss.

The skins of human civilisation. Notice the fast forward sign suggested by the lighting.

This show pits our fascination with industrial processes against the horror of dehumanisation via the same processes. The great machine here is the human heart,  our metabolic furnace. This heat produces the zone of bodily heat in which we flourish. But it can be used to produce mortal cold as well. As long as our hearts beat this kind of factory will be running somewhere. Even though history furnishes us with large supplies of this kind of sordid history there will always be  some  kind of demand for this output.

In french "personnes' can mean either "people" or 'nobodies". Here we see the man himself.

‘Personnes’, Grand Palais, Paris, until February 21. www.monumenta.com