Midnight in the Kant Hotel

Art in Present Times

Rod Mengham

• Publisher: Little Island Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781800171480
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art Theory & Criticism

Midnight in the Kant Hotel is an absorbing account of contemporary art, composed over twenty years. The essays revisit the same artists as they develop, following them in time, changing perspectives as he, and they, develop.

Mengham is a significant curator, organising exhibitions: 'There is no more productive engagement with someone else's artworks than finding the right way to show it, since artworks are always direct statements or questions about articulations of space, and the curator's job obviously is to enhance such questions and statements.' This discipline gives the writer a series of uniquely privileged perspectives, touching, lifting, moving and re-moving the objects: 'nothing compares to living with art'.

The book opens with themes: what is domestic space? what does the atrocity exhibition tell us? what is the refugee aesthetic? Essays on particular artists follow, including Marc Atkins, Stephen Chambers, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley, Damien Hirst, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, Anselm Kiefer, Laura Owens, Doris Salcedo, Agnes Thurnauer, Koen Vanmechelen and Alison Wilding. Always, he is in dialogue with the work, rather than with the artist.

11

1.

INNER VISIONS:
CONTEMPORARY ART AND DOMESTIC SPACE

One of the most persistent and pervasive fascinations of the public art of the last decade of the twentieth century involved an assault on, a redefining of, and an effective relocating of the idea of domestic space. By the end of the nineties, work in this area had been carried out by numerous artists on both sides of an East-West divide, but the cultural differences between the capitalist First World and the countries of the former Soviet bloc produced widely divergent representations of the domestic interior. Nowhere was this more evident than among the installations of Documenta IX at Kassel in 1992.

Situated in a yard at the rear of the Museum Fridericianum, Ilya Kabakov’s installation consisted of a small whitewashed building that looked exactly like a simply constructed public toilet. Windowless, turned in on itself, available to any member of the public but designed to offer a temporary privacy of a highly personal nature, the purpose of this amenity, and of its very public sort of privacy, was effectively turned inside out for the visitor who stepped over its threshold. The interior was fitted out not with water closets and basins but with the conventional furnishings of a small Russian apartment. At a glance, domestic privacy was shattered by the exercise of public access, putting the viewer momentarily in the position of uninvited intruder, of the potential housebreaker who might even urinate over the furniture. This confusing of the categories of public and private space was further complicated by an awareness of the reproducibility of the basic two-room 12housing unit across Russia and other countries in Eastern Europe, of the extent to which the concept of ‘home’ may be standardised, de-privatised, rendered anonymous.

This critique of domestic space in Soviet culture has lost none of its force and urgency in the years since. A different tone was set in Kabakov’s subsequent Palace of Projects, installed at the Roundhouse during March and April 1998 and at the Reina Sofía Centre in Madrid later that year; however, the cultural historical coordinates remained surprisingly unchanged. The Palace, built with lightweight woods and plastics, resembled externally other spiraliform structures such as the Tower of Babel and Tatlin’s Monument. These emblems of ambition were alluded to in order to ironise the relations of communal and individual, and in order to question the grounds of cultural unity and disunity. The very title Palace of Projects recalls Soviet usage in reference to institutions such as the Palaces of Culture, designed to relocate power and authority in the culture of the people, or rather to produce the illusion of the people’s control over their own history and way of life. Inside the monumental shell, Kabakov’s installation was composed of a sequence of small rooms, each room housing one or more of the total of sixty-five projects intended to either ‘make yourself better’ or ‘make this world better’. The overwhelming majority of plans stemmed from, and sought to alleviate, the conditions of single lives lived out in extremely cramped quarters. The idea of the palace was made to collide with the claustrophobic habitus of the Moscow apartment block. The stereotype emerging from the viewer’s comparison between projects was that of a life lived entirely within doors. A number of projects even sought to make a virtue of confinement, by devising means of withdrawal even further within the space of the room; identifying recesses, corners, closets, to inhabit or to concentrate on. The palace itself was conceived of as an indoors installation, as a container that should itself be contained, ‘inside an enormous exhibition hall’. 13

Although a certain number of projects envisaged life within the family, or some element of communality, an extremely high proportion took for granted a life of solitude. Contact with others outside the apartment would be minimal, including the proverbial lowering of a basket containing money in exchange for food (Project 8). Time and again, the specifications for individual projects would stress the advantage of being able to realise the project’s aims ‘without leaving the confines of your room’. The counterpointing of private and public spheres took the form more often than not of counterpointing domestic interiors with a scale of operations that was nothing less than global, the latter including plans for the equal distribution of energy across the entire planet, proposals for the resurrection of all the dead (of all those who have ever lived) and schemes for the development of a common language that would unite humanity ‘with the environment from which we have been torn away’. This oscillating between the individual and the universal left no room – literally no space – for the elaboration of the social.

The most important principle of organisation across the whole range of projects was verticality. Doors in the ceiling and free-standing ladders typified the desire for upward movement that was a common response to the spatial restrictions of Soviet domestic life. Project 16 envisaged the use of a ladder 1,200 metres high, in an hyperbolical expression of resistance to the reality principle whereby the space above a Russian apartment was likely to be occupied by another apartment of exactly the same dimensions, and beyond that another, and another, and so on. Project 24 represented a compromise with the reality principle in its siting of paradise just below the ceiling, the paradisial inhering in a collection of objects of devotion placed on a narrow shelf running right the way round the tops of the walls. A down-to-earth paradise, approachable only by ladder. 14

A popular substitute for the ladder was a pair of wings, ideally angel’s wings, stored symbolically ‘under lock and key in a special soft case in a mirrored closet’: flight and restraint, held together in a perpetual tension. This fantasy of angelic flight came at the tail end of an eighties’ preoccupation with transcendence, figured most powerfully in Wim Wenders’ film Wings of Desire, where the all-seeing, all-knowing eyes and ears of surveillance were transfigured into a benign watchfulness. Kabakov’s dreams of winged flight were correlated ultimately with a much more Russian solution to the problem of dealing imaginatively with architectural forms of discipline. A surprising variety of the projects were captivated by the experience of the cosmonaut; the cosmonaut became an object of contemplation only ever referred to indirectly, but this obliquity of reference allowed the development of an astonishing equation between domestic space and outer space, confined space and infinite space. The cosmonaut’s rocket ship – specifically, his capsule – represents the ultimate in restriction: a situation of extreme claustrophobia which is paradoxically the condition of an unparalleled scope of movement. And the cosmonaut is also a rare source of national pride, an heroic figure who functions brilliantly as the means of glamourising the very principle of enclosure.

The imaginative necessity of verticality, of upward movement, was incorporated into the basic design of Kabakov’s Palace, which required the visitor to progress gradually up and around the spiral structure. Intriguingly, the same climbing motion was the primary means of experiencing Louise Bourgeois’s installation I Do, I Undo, I Redo at Tate Modern in 2000. But Bourgeois’s understanding of the dynamics of the spiral, of the forces it brings into play, is fundamentally different. In a series of numbered statements first published in 1992, the year of Documenta IX (at which she exhibited Precious Liquids), Bourgeois represents engagement with the spiral 15form as an instance of the inescapable ambivalence affecting all movement into and out of personal and social space:

9. The spiral is an attempt at controlling the chaos. It has two directions. Where do you place yourself, at the periphery, or at the vortex? Beginning at the outside is the fear of losing control; the winding in is a tightening, a retreating, a compacting to the point of disappearance. Beginning at the centre is affirmation, the move outward is a representation of giving, and giving up control; of trust, positive energy, of life itself.

10. Spirals—which way to turn—represent the fragility in an open space. Fear makes the world go round.1

At the Tate Modern installation, the spirals did not tighten and loosen in quite the way Bourgeois had in mind in 1992, but the use of a spiral staircase did keep in view that question of which way to turn, the question of retreat or advance, fear or trust, which the towers produced and kept in suspense. Fear or trust: the vocabulary is part of Bourgeois’s rigorous psychologising of domestic space which encrypts a personal history into the disposition of both vertical and horizontal dimensions. As with Kabakov, verticality, movement upwards, expresses a desire for escape, but escape this time is from the legacy of a classic bourgeois family romance. Bourgeois herself has constantly stressed the way her work concentrates on the inner spaces of fear, insisting on the encounter with the sources of trauma. And yet her first studio was reputedly on the roof of her own house, and her early work is frequented by images of women exiting a house through the roof, and even via the chimney.

16Bourgeois’s longevity (she was ninety-eight at time of death) contributes to the authority of her work which depends entirely on psychological roots reaching back to a time contemporary with the first great ascendant phase of psychoanalysis. The family relations of her childhood conform recognisably to the same sorts of permissions and prohibitions that comprised the Viennese culture in which Freud developed his theories. It is partly because the understanding of modern art has derived so much from this tradition, and partly because it is a tradition that may be about to crumble, that we invest Bourgeois’s work with as much significance as we do. Its vividness at the end of a long life and at the end of a long century makes it seem like the distillation of everything we might withdraw into or move away from.

The inner spaces of Bourgeois’s installations are inside the body itself. The interdependence of house and psyche predicates an aesthetic realised in a whole series of variations on the theme of the house with organs, or of the body with architectural prostheses. The early drawings are obsessed with versions of the ‘femme-maison’. Later installations, such as the Red Rooms of 1994, not only saturate the furnishings with blood- and flesh-colours, but also substitute organic forms for household objects. The titles which Bourgeois uses to link her installations in series preserve the sense of fragility and dilemma referred to in her statement on spirals. The frequently used title ‘cell’ connotes both vitality and confinement, since it is both an organism, the basic building block for life, and the basic unit of imprisonment, a space in which one is condemned to solitude. The alternative title ‘lair’ seems actively to express a desire for solitude, yet this involves a retreat imposed by the threat of danger, a desire born of fear.

Unlike Kabakov’s installations, that one must enter, traverse and leave, Bourgeois’s cells, lairs and rooms rarely permit entry. They are often almost closed spaces, with sight lines 17obstructed or arranged in a way that requires spectators to contort themselves and become peeping Toms; less intruders than voyeurs. The room becomes an historical tableau, an exhibition of personal history, which means that the viewer does not gaze into space as much as into time. The intimacy, the secrecy even, of what is so blatantly advertised effectively relocates the threshold between public and private. For Bourgeois, the private is embedded deep within the psyche, its perimeter marked by the body and its functions. The dividing line between one domestic space and another is identified with the violation of bodily integrity, as Bourgeois’s extraordinary statement for Documenta IX makes clear:

I remember when we were living at Stuyvesant.

There were two young girls who lived in the building. The mother was drunk

and the father had died.

The girls were loose in the building, looking for other children to play with.

They rang our bell and my husband opened the door. Suddenly

there was a puddle

on the floor.2

That involuntary breach, that failure of all one’s defences, allows the absorption of the private into the public. Against the supposition of Robert Frost that good fences make good neighbours, Bourgeois opposes the sentiment that good fences are obsolete. Her installations reconfigure the moment of invasion, the capitulation of the private, yet re-present the moment, restage it endlessly, rendering it inescapable. Bourgeois’s art is meant to confront fear and rebuild trust, yet the restoration of a perimeter, the repair of all the breaches in 18the fabric, is a work that is ravelled and unravelled repeatedly, like Penelope’s weaving. Bourgeois associates the project of reconstruction with the figure of her mother, who performed physically the family business of repairing tapestries. But tapestries are not executed on a domestic scale, they are works of art designed for display, in the kinds of houses where private life is lived in public. The demolition of the family home at Choisy allowed Bourgeois to reconstitute its spaces on her own scale, or rather on a variety of scales, where she could control the terms of a negotiation between private and public meanings that endlessly subvert each other.

The demolition of Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993–1994), by contrast, triggered a crisis of interpretation, where control over the meanings of 193 Grove Road was contested by art critics, local politicians and tabloid reporters, but not by the artist herself. Local residents were divided into those who wished to preserve the project, and those who wished to destroy it, often for identical reasons: it was felt that the terrace of which it had once formed a part epitomised a model of communal living that was now disappearing, and that House either commemorated this, or repudiated it. The issue of commemoration produced rival claims about what was being remembered: a cohesive, unified culture, or one that had always been under revision and hybridised. Paradoxically, this competition of meanings was the inevitable outcome of House’s formal resistance to interpretation; it served as a foil to Kabakov’s hectic, prolific devising of schemes to occupy and animate space, and represented the polar opposite to Bourgeois’s psychologically layered interiority. House’s brilliance inhered in the total inaccessibility of its content.

Its blankness and solidity refused all access to signs of personal history or social relations. Even though the casting process required demolition of the exterior walls, the result was a complete sealing off of the interior. The monumental 19solidity of the structure was, of course, an illusion, since in reality it consisted of a thin concrete ...