Nina Beier
Represented by:
Laura Bartlett Gallery, London
Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City
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For duo activities with Marie Lund see:
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THE INCANDESCENCE OF GRAY
This text should translate the experience of not seeing Nina Beier’s ‘On Teasers and Tormentors’, and be situated as the farthest station from what it can articulate as the exhibition’s core – it should, therefore, construe its object as doubly out of interpretive reach. My position tests the maximum extension of ‘critical distance’, or, perhaps more to the point, prolongs and complicates a sequence of removals the exhibition itself deploys, as it modulates the artistic object across a spectrum of conditions, ranging from intention to decay. The task, as I understand it, is to rescue the object – of the exhibition and my imagination – from that which threatens it with too much distance or non-existence, or perhaps to make it co-extensive with my remoteness from it. At Monitor, Nina has assembled an archive of withdrawals and obstructions that defer the meeting with the Original, and through it, the art-historical experience founded on this encounter, as endlessly reenacted primal scene. The exhibition that this exhibition almost dispenses with is the temporary armistice of divergent impulses and protocols for their negotiation, white-cube ideologies and anxieties; we might concur that Nina’s take on institutional critique is not geared to expose the complicity between art and other configurations of power. It instead engages a discourse at least as venerable as the museum, and at least as successful in presenting its capta as data: the institution of art history.
The ‘center’ of exhibition and experience – that which the artist is trying to say and the viewer is trying to view – is to be grasped via that which deflects from it, by the centrifugal movement it generates and by the obstacles which fill its structural place. The repoussoir is a painterly device which blocks edges of the frame, takes attention into the perspectival system and to the center, that makes attention stare into the vanishing point. Correspondingly, a repoussoir creates the depth of historiographic immersion, takes the historian into a formerness of work and time itself, from where he or she will return with an ideological demonstration in the guise of a visual one. Being pushed away or held at a distance coincides, to a certain, psychological, extent, with my first experience of Nina’s work, with my own missed primal scene. The kind recommendation of a common friend was followed by a failed meeting in London, visits to Nina and Marie’s website, Google searches and the combination of embarrassment and audacity in my subsequent email. The works I had come across pushed and shoved at the notion of ownership: objects mainly preoccupied to be nobody’s, situations designed to ensure those objects cannot be possessed. ‘(Calling) Loss and Cause’ and ‘Raising Dante’s Rig’ (both with Marie Lund), ‘Non-Finito’ or ‘Spectacle #1’ work between destroyed, burnt, stolen, dislocated, manipulated original and copy in ways that suspend access to both. Their relationship between original and copy evacuates truth, authenticity, stability – everything that would correspond, in the object, to being owned and figured in an archive where it would communicate with all other objects. The expulsion of value, or infinite delay of worth, the art-historical opacity, matches the separation between the beneficiary of this object and his or her object of desire. Artist and collector/ curator act as quasi-custodians of a permanent transaction, played in reverse on the dark screen of possession: the somber, strenuous literalness of possession, gesticulating awkwardly towards that which escapes it. While what is to be collected is the simultaneity of non-object and non-work, the possibility of ownership and its stringent interruption, what is to be interpreted is the ellipsis of tropes of inspired, transparent artistry – disarticulated, recreated, concomitant.
The existence of the art work recedes into its definition: if it is to re-emerge, work is the contestation of the historical definition of work. Work is if it escapes consumption by the definitional apparatus, leaves categories feeling bloated and hungry, and does not lose itself in their infinite symmetry. If the mirror game commonly referred to as art history is to have a future, or at least stop resembling an award ceremony, the art object is to negotiate its historical inscription: to take something and make it its own, in exchange of this inscription. To participate in its own interpretation, maybe lay it out as dispute, as an imagination of what more forms of interpretation can achieve in tandem. The future available to art is not futuristic, but the future of interpretation, the extent to which the art object is already what it will mean. Its own rules articulate its incomplete commensurability with other works and with the current protocols of art history. At Monitor, seen from here, this seems to happen as an apotheosis of mediation. I use ‘apotheosis’ in the context of a question triggered by Nina’s ‘Permanent Collection’, a question which cannot be resolved from here: whether we can imagine a sublime of the small and infinitely intricate, whether the sublime needs to be very big and incandescent, or it can be compression and collapse, the endless reorganization of disjunctive rules of experience, whether vertigo can manifest itself only towards a vanishing point, or also towards its reversal, in the blind spot.
Mihnea Mircan, December 2009
'Spectacle #2' and 'Background', 'On Teasers and Tormentors', Monitor, Rome, Dec 2009
'Spectacle #2' and 'Background', 'On Teasers and Tormentors', Monitor, Rome, Dec 2009
'Spectacle #2' and 'Background', 'On Teasers and Tormentors', Monitor, Rome, Dec 2009
'Spectacle #2' and 'Background', 'On Teasers and Tormentors', Monitor, Rome, Dec 2009
'Spectacle #2' and 'Background', 'On Teasers and Tormentors', Monitor, Rome, Dec 2009