Anri Sala, Le Clash,
2010 (still). Photograph: © Anri Sala/Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris;
Marian Goodman Gallery; Hauser & Wirth; Johnen Galerie, Berlin; and
kurimanzutto, Mexico City
This is a cunning and occasionally
glorious retrospective from one of the most important artists in Europe,
exploring communism through video and music.
If America’s enervating
presidential election has sapped any remaining esteem you had for politicians,
might I suggest booking the next flight to Tirana? For the last two and a half
years, the west Balkan nation of Albania has been governed not by some
philistine crusader promising divinely inspired corporate tax cuts, but by a
bona fide artist: the painter-turned-prime-minister Edi Rama, elected in a
landslide in 2013.
Anri Sala, Answer Me, 2008 (still): ‘Dreams in
which politics and aesthetics informed one another and then collapsed into
ruin.’ Photograph: © Anri Sala/Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery; Hauser &
Wirth; Johnen Galerie, Berlin; Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich; and Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris
Rama came to prominence
a decade ago, when as mayor of Tirana he ordered the dilapidated communist-era
towers of the capital repainted in wild colors – chevrons of red and yellow,
zigzagging blue and green stripes. The painted facades are hopelessly
inadequate to repair the crumbling architectural legacy of the last century.
But after a previous century of politicians brought a city to decay, surely an
artist at least deserves a shot.
Rama spent much of the
1990s in Paris, where he lived with another Albanian: Anri Sala, a documentary
film-maker turned video artist. “This is more an avant garde of
democratization,” he tells Sala in his 2003 film Dammi i Colori, a nighttime
escapade through the Albanian capital and its parti-coloured apartment blocks.
It’s this seductive tour of Tirana, a midnight reverie of past and present, by
which Sala eases us into the grand, busted dreams of the 20th century:
modernist dreams, communist dreams, dreams in which politics and aesthetics
informed one another and then collapsed into ruin. And Rama’s proposition –
that (abstract) art might be your best bet for courage after the failure of the
communist dream – ripples throughout all the works that constitute Anri Sala:
Answer Me, a cunning, musical, and occasionally glorious retrospective of one
of the most important artists in Europe, east or west.
Anri Sala, Tlatelolco Clash, 2011 (still): a
Mexican street performer plays the Clash’s Should I Stay or Should I Go?
Photograph: © Anri Sala/Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris; Marian Goodman
Gallery, New York; and Hauser & Wirth
Sala was born in 1974,
when an isolated Albania was under the thumb of the pitiless, paranoid dictator
Enver Hoxha. He shot to prominence with his first film, the documentary
Intervista (1998), made while he was still a student in France. (It’s not
properly included in this show, but the curators have at least decided to
screen Intervista once a week in the New Museum’s theater.) Sala comes across
footage of his mother speaking at a conference of the Party of Labour of
Albania in the late 1970s, but the audio is lost. His mother can’t remember
what she had said. So Sala takes the footage to a school for the deaf, where
the students read her lips and help the artist subtitle the interview. It turns
out she was just spouting party-line claptrap about young people’s allegiance
to Marxism-Leninism, which Sala’s mother can hardly believe. Her voice, her
language, was not her own.
With Intervista and
Dammi i Colori (the latter’s Italian title, literally Give Me the Colors, is
borrowed from an aria in Tosca), Sala established himself as one of the
shrewdest artistic interrogators of the legacy of communism, on both personal
and urban planes. But after his film with Rama, Sala stepped back from his
engagement with Albania and began to make more poetic, plangent films and
videos – looking obliquely at recent European history, and making heavy use of
music.
Four of these later
video works are presented here in a single gallery, on a half-hour loop, and
you’ll want to watch them all, although the sound is occasionally tinny in the
New Museum’s hostile building. The best is Long Sorrow (2005), shot at a
massive housing estate in west Berlin, in which a free jazz saxophonist on the
roof plays an improvised dirge to the drab buildings below: a eulogy for
modernism, and for the hopes that artists and architects could transform our
lives. Answer Me (2008), filmed in a cold war listening station, depicts a
woman struggling to speak to a man, who responds only with cacophonous
drumming.
Almost all the last
century’s aesthetic dreams came to grief. Utopian tower blocks rotted into
periurban ghettoes; modernist painting, delusionally imagined as an accelerator
of revolution, has become an asset class for a global crew of financiers and
rentiers. Rama’s painting of the facades of Tirana appears almost a parody of
modernist urban planning, a charming but woefully insufficient aesthetic
bandage for one of Europe’s poorest capitals. But music, that most abstract of
all art forms, seems to hold for Sala some little bit of hope. As words are
replaced by sound in Sala’s later works, music ends up both reflecting the sorry
history of 20th-century Europe – and also offering a possible means of
redemption.
The newest pair of
videos here, both entitled The Present Moment, feature a string sextet playing
Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht. Sala has modified the score: in one video
the musicians only play the note B-flat, in the other only D. (He originally
showed the work in Munich’s Haus der Kunst, which was initially built as a Nazi
show palace; Sala’s work served as a stinging rebuke to the Nazis’ designation
of Schoenberg as a degenerate composer.) The two modified sextets are projected
simultaneously, and Schoenberg’s late Romantic score devolves into a dissonant
muddle. And yet the profound concentration on the musicians’ faces, their
anxious attempts to play this deformed opus, bespeaks an abiding faith that art
might yet live after the dreams of transformation we ascribed to it have died.
Anri Sala, 3-2-1, 2011/16. Live performance
featuring André Vida on saxophone responding to Long Sorrow. Photograph: ©
Anri Sala/Courtesy of the artist
I remain unconvinced by
Sala’s occasional sculptures – notably his motorized snare drums that play
themselves, which to me seem like souvenirs of his major music-backed films
rather than fully formed artworks. (There are also some unremarkable works on
paper in the show; some were done in collaboration with Rama, who has a
penchant for doodling on printouts of his prime ministerial Outlook calendar.)
But on the whole this retrospective affirms Sala’s unrivaled capacity to
excavate the sullied dreams of modernism, and to imagine a future on the ruins
of the recent past.
In his masterpiece
Ravel Ravel Unravel, first seen at the Venice Biennale in 2013, two pianists
play Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major, composed for the
Jewish pianist Paul Wittgenstein (the brother of the philosopher Ludwig), who
fled Austria just before the Anschluss. The two renditions are slightly, deliberately
out of sync, and Ravel’s concerto sounds curiously rowdy; on a third screen a
DJ tries to mix the two together, with only some success. Tempo itself has lost
its meaning; time has been disjointed, history is a collection of shards. But
the DJ keeps spinning her records, and scratches a new concerto.
Anri Sala, Unravel, 2013 (still): a DJ scratches
together two performances of Ravel. Photograph: © Anri Sala/Courtesy Galerie
Chantal Crousel, Paris; Marian Goodman Gallery; and Hauser & Wirth
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