Best of 2011: Part 8

We asked a number of artists, curators, critics and frieze contributors for their picks of 2011.

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Gabriela Jauregui

Gabriela Jauregui is a writer living in Mexico City.

The bizarre juxtapositions in the Coyote Pact blog; the Tunisian revolution; Pedro Friedeberg’s Memorias no autorizadas (Trilce, Mexico); elnicho’s aural festival (especially every pore tripping out on Maja Ratkje’s witchy voice); Nguzunguzu’s Timesup EP (out on Fade To Mind); the Asco show at LACMA in Los Angeles; the gift of Jorge Luis Borges’ Rose et Bleu (first edition); Boardwalk Empire‘s second season (and yes, The Walking Dead, too); Estrella Cercana (both the publication and the exhibition at kurimanzutto gallery); Julia Loktev’s films; Cult Cargo: Salsa Boricua de Chicago (out on vinyl on Numero); the sometimes absurdly hilarious tweets by @preteengallery in Mexico; Robert Smithson’s Hotel Palenque (Alias, Mexico); music, mixes and more at Stop Making Sense blog; two books by two great friends – Repulsión by Tatiana Lipkes and Between Page and Screen by Amaranth Borsuk; Peter Brook at the Cervantino Festival; The Turin Horse by Béla Tarr and Agnes Hranitzki; the re-release of The Raincoats’ Odyshape (remastered 180-gram vinyl with Kim Gordon liner notes, thanks to We Three Records ); the FICUNAM film festival; Mexican premiere of Francis Alÿs’s The Guards at the Museo Experimental el Eco and his retrospective at WIELS, Brussels; watching Juan Cirerol play live in Mexico City; and Omar Souleyman’s collab with Björk.

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Katie Kitamura

Katie Kitamura is a critic and novelist based in New York, USA. Her second novel, Gone to the Forest, is published by Free Press in 2012.

Because my cultural intake is increasingly tending toward the monomaniacal, much of the past year has been spent reading or watching the work of single authors. This year it was, in particular, Javier Marias, Jules Dassin, Alberto Moravia, Ingeborg Bachmann – none of whom have been especially active in 2011. But here are some things I loved, that came out in the last calendar year, more or less:

China Miéville’s Embassytown, Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station, Hisham Matar’s Anatomy of a Disappearance, Teju Cole’s Open City, and Michel Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory.

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, Lee Chang-dong’s Poetry, Goran Olsson’s The Black Power Mixtape 1967–1975, Sean Durkin’s Martha Marcy May Marlene, and Wynn Chamberlain’s Brand X. Also, Ryan Trecartin’s ‘Any Ever’ at MoMA PS1, New York.

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Silas Martí

Silas Martí is a writer based in São Paulo, Brasil.

This year São Paulo saw a wave of big-name retrospectives and survey shows and also revisited the legacy of some names that had been under the radar for some time. Perhaps the best surprise was Paulo Herkenhoff‘s selection of young and largely unknown artists shown in the basement of Itaú Cultural (a cultural centre owned by the biggest bank in the country), with an unforgettable site-specific performance that covered everything in black grease; ‘Contrapensamento Selvagem’ featured artists from north, northeast and midwest Brazil, their identities for this performance blurred. It was hard to digest, unbearable to tolerate for more than a few minutes and yet one of the boldest displays of art the city saw this year

Fernanda Gomes: her solo exhibition at Centro Cultural São Paulo, and her recently opened retrospective at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio, shows the artist at her best, creating minimalist landscapes of immaculate objects strewn across the floor.

Louise Bourgeois: the power in the sculptor’s work was clear in this massive exhibition that tried to link her formal approaches to psychoanalysis. Her spider, displayed outside the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio, was a fantastic sight.

Giuseppe Penone: his gigantic bronze tree in the middle of a barren stretch of land at the Instituto Inhotim – Bernardo Paz’s private museum in Minas Gerais – was a fresh and beautiful reminder of what Arte Povera stood for.

Olafur Eliasson: for his first solo presentation in South America, the artist transformed the exhibition spaces in São Paulo that his work occupied. From the atrium at Paulo Mendes da Rocha’s Pinacoteca do Estado to the renewed warehouses at Lina Bo Bardi’s Sesc Pompeia, Eliasson created a clever and provocative melange of art and architecture.

Also at Itaú Cultural, a show of work by José Leonilson – delicate, autobiographical sewn pieces and drawings – made for one of the most poignant exhibitions last year.

Jac Leirner – her work profited from a wider reading in her survey show at Estação Pinacoteca, which made clear how a conceptual approach does not necessarily undermine formal preoccupations. She is an artist who needs
to be remembered and this show did the job.

Bienal do Mercosul – the eighth edition of Porto Alegre’s biennial featured a careful, critical and thoughtful selection of work, including pieces that came together for a powerful reflection on the geopolitical turmoil of today’s world.

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Sean O’Toole

Sean O’Toole is a writer and journalist based in Cape Town. He is co-editor of CityScapes, a magazine project of the African Centre for Cities.

The enduring tyranny of the breaking news feed during 2011, marked by its trackless narrative and immersion in an imprecise, unfolding actuality, was hard to resist; it however also prompted me to turn to the stillness and fixity and rigidity of a different kind of image regime. Take the white tendrils of Hokusai’s woodcut, The Great Wave off Kanagawa (1832), which I repeatedly looked at after seeing the televised image of a black-lipped, garbage textured The Pilgrim wave consuming great swathes of northern Japan. Two months later, I gaped at Marlene Dumas’ stoic portrait of Osama bin Laden, comparing it to a fake news photo purporting to show the Al-Qaeda leader dead; I had initially accepted its veracity. Actual photographic proof of Bin Laden’s death is said to exist, but has been suppressed: ‘We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies,’ stated President Barack Obama.

Guy Tillim, ‘Second Nature’, Stevenson, Cape Town, South Africa: Orange, yellow and pink recur throughout Paul Gauguin’s portraits from French Polynesia. Returning to the island 120 years later on his yacht, Cape Town photographer Guy Tillim largely ignored the local inhabitants and suggestions of congested human settlement, preferring instead to look at the lush and operatic landscapes, which, as things turned out on his four-month stay, were often presided over by cloud formations, some as wispy as those shown on Gerard Richter’s remarkable Tate retrospective, yet others grey and endless, like a Berlin winter.

Olga Chernysheva, In the Middle of Things, BAK, Utrecht, The Netherlands: The post-perestroika prole was the defining leitmotif of this exhibition, which included an elegant sequence of documentary watercolours of food sellers, road workers and Russian nationalists thronged around a flag. The standout work, though, was The Train (2003), a black and white film in which a camera tracks down the centre aisle of successive train carriages; punctuated by Mozart’s Concerto for Piano No. 21, the film culminates with an elderly figure reciting Pushkin.

Summiting Kilimanjaro in Tanzania with artist Jacques Coetzer’s performance prop, an aluminium ladder, then scaling the thing, in effect journeying an extra metre and a bit higher into the thin atmosphere than every other climber. Sadly, the artist behind this good-natured prank (rivalled only by author Douglas Adams summiting in a rhinoceros suit) couldn’t make it: altitude sickness. Bummer.

Nathaniel Mellors, Ourhouse, in ‘ILLUMInations’ at the 54th Venice Biennale, Venice: ‘Undocumented experience is life thrown down the lavatory!’ blurts Charles Maddox-Wilson aka Daddy (actor Richard Bremmer). By turns laugh-out-loud funny, adroitly critical and perplexingly weird, Gwendoline Christie as Baby Doll on sculpture was a treat. She also laid down the gauntlet: to write art criticism denuded of adjectives and adverbs.

Santu Mofokeng, Chasing Shadows, Jeu de Paume, Paris, France: An undated letter, one of many remarkable items of ephemera included on this career recognising retrospective, says it all: ‘He has a rare sensitivity to the nuances of photography and the document; in my opinion this will enable him, more than most others, to pinpoint in his quest that work which is likely to be of enduring interest.’ David Goldblatt, circa mid-1990s.

Faustin Linyekula/Studios Kabako, ‘More more more… future’, Dance Factory, Johannesburg, South Africa: The Democratic Republic of Congo is on the edge of a precipice, again. Embracing the spirit of punk, but refusing its language (‘There’s no future, no future, no future for you’), Congolese dancer and choreographer Faustin Linyekula enacted a night of agitation, dreaming and unbridled dancing. The score, a chaotic, psychedelic swirl of bass courtesy of guitar legend Flamme Kapaya, included the poetry of Antoine Vumilia Muhindo, a political prisoner accused of plotting to kill President Laurent-Desire Kabila. ‘Look at the flags,’ reads a line of Muhindo’s writing, ‘clumsy Fauvist paintings for the half blind’.

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Mitch Speed

Mitch Speed is a writer and artist based in Vancouver, Canada. A regular contributor to frieze, he is one of four editors and designers who recently launched a small-run publication, called Setup.

• ‘The Power of Giving: Gifts in the Saxon Ruler’s Court in Dresden and the Kwakwaka’wakw Big House’ – U’mista Cultural Centre, Alert Bay, British Columbia, Canada
This exhibition took place simultaneously at the U’Mista Cultural Centre, in a small community on Cormorant Island, 450 kilometres north of Vancouver, called Alert Bay, and the Kunsthalle im Lipsiusbau in Dresden, Germany. In Dresden, U’Mista mounted a show of recently repatriated Kwakwaka’wakw – a group of tribes indigenous to the North West coast of Canada – art objects. In turn, the Dresden museum loaned Alert Bay a stunning collection of gifts from the court of Saxon rulers – porcelain figures, goblets and swords.

• Page One: Inside the New York Times
The documentary Page One is a fascinating window into the newspaper’s dense structure, and the fluid, flexible system of interactions facilitates its operation. In an intense scene, David Carr – a reformed crack addict turned star reporter – showed his teeth as he grilled the brass from Vice magazine during an interview concerning their recent collaboration with CNN. The film also gave a grim picture of the state of print media in a digital age, to the extent that it followed the newspaper’s executives as they carry out a purge of employees, in order to cut costs.

• Werner Herzog – _Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Shedding light on the 32,000 year old drawings in the Chauvet Cave in France, Werner Herzog’s film drew its affect from the combination of unprecedented access to the earliest known cave paintings on earth, and a whimsical, un-authoritarian style, which left the subjects’ meaning an open question. Bonus highlights included footage of a French perfumer who uses his highly calibrated olfactory senses to sniff out caves, Herzog’s poetic waxing, and a bizarre, eccentric conclusion linking a nearby population of albino crocodiles into the film’s narrative.

• Show and Tell: The Politics of Silence and the Power of Discourse
Featuring a series of interviews conducted by Canadian artist Derek Brunen, this short documentary (first screened in Rotterdam in 2011) saw a dynamic cast of artists and writers – including but not limited to Jeff Wall, Martha Rosler, Olaf Nicolai and Monika Szewczyk – give themselves over to questions concerning the relationship between art and discourse. From time to time, the otherwise generous interviewees simply refused to answer. Those moments spoke eloquently to the project’s theme. The participants’ often contradictory opinions constituted a wealthy cache of knowledge.

• The Ultimate Fighting Championship
Fights such as Muhammed Ali vs. Joe Frazier – ‘The Thrilla in Manilla’ – have been deeply woven into the fabric of American history. 2011 saw the first cable broadcast of the current manifestation of violent sports entertainment – the UFC. Here, singular greats have given way to a constantly cycling roster of super humans, who knock one another’s lights out – and snap one another’s limbs – with a metronomic regularity to match the torrential speed of the sport’s context – pop culture. No longer a fringe entertainment, the bloodsport has become a mainstream spectacle. And what a spectacle!

• Robert Orchardson: ‘Endless Façade’, Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver, Canada
Orchardson’s exhibition is housed within a cavernous white cube of a gallery, which is often well used, but rarely transformed. Here, faux concrete panels created a trompe l’oeil effect over two of the space’s four walls, transforming the space while barely altering its proportions. The rest of the show – which re-interpreted stage sets designed by Isamu Noguchi for a 1955 production of King Lear by the Royal Shakespeare Company – was an ambitious effort populated by objects that appear to be the extremely sexy offspring of a hot affair between a science fiction world, and utopian Modernism.

• Not the 1s – Why You Cryin? This album is the first release from Bay Area rap duo Not the 1s, comprised of Cuzzo (aka Eric Steuer of Wired Magazine and Creative Commons) and Mawnstr. Oddball drum samples and science fiction sound bytes drop in from the ether to annunciate dense, layered beats. The album’s title track – produced by Mexicans with Guns – opens with a jarring sample which stops almost before it starts, manically stuttering several times before leading into two minutes of teeth chattering double time battle raps wherein the two emcees lay down the many reasons why they ‘really aren’t the 1s you wanna fuck with.’

• Jack Layton’s letter to Canadians
If I had to compile a list of the most profound cultural texts to be absorbed on a mass scale by Canadians in 2011, the letter written to them by recently defeated New Democrat candidate for Prime Minister, Jack Layton, in his final hours before succumbing to cancer, would be at the top. In that letter, he pleaded with Canadians to forgive, understand, and hope. Without a trace of cynicism, he told them that in doing so, they could change the world. His words reverberated with a heartbreaking warmth that is seldom articulated in politics of any kind.

• Intangible Economies Forum – Vancouver
Presented by Artspeak and Fillip, this symposium took place from 18–20 November at ‘The Grey Church Collection and Project Space’ in Vancouver. It was the live action epilogue to a series of texts published in Fillip, that sought to ‘broaden the notion of economy beyond it’s financial dimension.’ Content ranged from densely researched essays – Candace Hopkins – to exuberant presentations which bordered on theatre – Hadley and Maxwell – or comedy relief – Jan Verwoert. Controversy arose out of the creative use of historical data, and the ensuing question periods were filled with rigorous conversation.

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Annika Ström

Annika Ström is a Swedish artist based in UK. Her play, The Swede, opens at Gerhardsen Gerner in Berlin on 20 January.

• AK Dolven’s Untuned Bell at the Folkestone Triennial, UK
• Book publisher Onestar Press and bookshelves at Galerie Perrotin, Paris, France.
• Eva Grubinger at Kerstin Engholm Galerie, Vienna, Austria.
• Ryan Gander, ‘Locked Room Scenario’, Artangel, London, UK.
• Elizabeth Magill, ‘Green Light Wanes’, Towner Contemporary Art Museum, Eastbourne, UK
• Susan Hiller, Tate Britain, London
• Gerhard Richter, Tate Modern, London
• ‘MOVE: CHOREOGRAPHING YOU’, Hayward Gallery, London
• Gillian Wearing, Self Portrait of Me Now in Mask, Frieze Art Fair, London
• ‘Song as a Force of Social Transformation’, CAAC, Seville, Spain
• And finally, my own show at Die Raum in Berlin, which I didn’t see due to my performance ‘Seven Women Standing in the Way