Review: Amy Sillman & die Sammlung - Kunstmuseum, Bern
★★☆☆☆
New year, new saltzpeter. As I engage more purposefully with traditional art criticism I’ve decided to switch to directly posting my reviews on substack - partly so I don’t have to wait for an editor to commission or approve my work, and partly to combat the supposed ‘crisis of art criticism’ envoked by so many towards the end of last year. Please bear with me as I get used to the new format; I will continue to post regular thinkpieces but will likely be experimenting with the configuration, tone and length of these kinds of articles until I’m happy. My Grand Tour ends tomorrow, so expect more London-based reviews soon (if anybody can smuggle me into the PV of the Billy Childish show at No.9 Cork Street later this month I will be eternally grateful).
The Kunstmuseum Bern’s collection contains some 4,000 paintings and 70,000 drawings, prints, videos, installations and photographs, presumably at least some of which are quite good. Miraculously, Amy Sillman’s selection appears to have bypassed all of them.
Sillman claims to have “re-thought abstraction not chronologically or thematically, but with a greater and more daring interweaving of epochs, continents and media” which isn’t terribly surprising, or indeed helpful. At Basel Miami this year Taylor Ervin played a game of spot-the-millenial; Sillman’s art sets the rulebook for spot-the-American-boomer. The stilted murkiness of 80s abstractionism was present in her Artist’s Choice curation at MoMa in 2019 and it’s just as present here, poking through between the era’s discourses on postmodernism and the half-successful publicity stunts around figurative painting – and, of course, the sanctimonious O'Dohertian desire to rip the white cube apart by becoming a part of it.
Being the oldest art museum in Switzerland, it’s not like Sillman was starved for choice when the Kunstmuseum asked her to curate an installation alongside her exhibition Oh, Clock!. The sammlung houses heavy hitters from Toulouse-Latrec to Oppenheim, and is also currently hosting an extremely good historic exhibition about the wartime Kanhweiler-Rupf partnership featuring some lesser-known but really gorgeous works by Kandinski, Klee, Picasso and Andre Masson (on permanent loan courtesy of Kanhweiler’s descendants). The upper floor of the museum’s modern wing, however, is littered with the kind of stuff that will send even the most ardent defender of contemporary art running for the Gauguins.
The installation opens with Franz West’s Galerie (1992), consisting of a sofa, a CRT TV1, and a mini cardboard labyrinth housing a large papier maché worm (or cigar, or pillow, or gun, or penis, whatever, it’s a long white round metaphorical thing) on a metal stool. On the television is a video of West doing things with the thing: picking it up, putting it down, waving it about. You are presumably meant to take this as an (ironic?) instruction manual and potter off inside the cardboard structure to do the same – and who knows, maybe if I had indulged in this Grapefruit-esquery I might have undergone some monumental mental/spiritual shift and suddenly have been in the right state of mind to enjoy the rest of the installation. As it stands, however, my co-visitor and I simply stood there, dumbfounded, at the sheer absurdity of the work. “I genuinely thought we outgrew this.” says my companion, who is the same age as Sillman and witnessed the worst of the eighties (art world and otherwise).
The lack of engagement in chronology is perhaps the installation’s biggest flaw. I’ve worked with and in enough museums to understand that there were almost certainly some conditions set in place when Sillman was approached to pick out her featured artworks – insurance, transportation and conservation likely limited her options to anywhere between 30 to 60 percent of the actual collection. The vast majority of the final chosen works are from the mid-60s onwards, with a few pre- and inter-war paintings grouped together towards the middle. The modern pieces are generally the sort of things that Sewell would have dubbed as part of the Serota tendency2: mini cardboard metropolises covered in luxury brand magazine cutouts (Thomas Hirschhorn, Buffet, 1995), glass mannequins dress in shoddy Schiaperrelli replicas (Mai-Thu Perret, Flow my Tears I, 2011), DIY feminist video art (Ericka Beckman, Cinderella 1-5, 1986). The 50s stuff is also pretty unremarkable (artists like Christian Boltanski, forgotten by art history for a reason). But even if there are some diamonds in the rough, they are presented in a way that is so random, so unconnected, so overly-self referential that their allure is drowned out. Much of the work is way more interested in asking stupid questions than providing interesting answers (and is so ill-fitted to the geometry of the space, but more on the architecture of the Kunstmuseum later).
The museum is trying very clearly to find its footing in terms of how and why it wants to display contemporary art: its last two exhibitions were of nineteenth-century painters, presumably trying to balance out the hyper-modernity of its 2022 shows featuring the photography of Tracey Rose and the sculpture of Markus Raetz. The downstairs gallery is hosting an architectural competition for a future wing, all of which lean towards the Brutalist minimalism of Atelier 5. This is an institution trying very hard to embrace the aesthetics of contemporary movements without attempting to understand the ethos.
The situation, naturally, is made all the more embarrassing by the fact that Bern really does have a good contemporary scene. I was recently put onto Kendra Jayne Patrick, an exceptionally fresh gallery with some great artists, and the tiny Schlachthaus Theatre has been putting on better contemporary theatre than all of the London scene combined. The Kunstmuseum is also competing with the Kunsthalle, which despite having half the resources and a quarter of the history still manages to scrape together some very decent shows, mostly by focusing on local Bernese artists. I’ll take any chance I can to complain about the Swiss-Germans but this is one occasion where my grievances can’t be chalked up to sheer sectarianism.3 When Sillman does try to interact with “between art objects and the architecture of the Kunstmuseum itself” it’s in a very clumsy, absent-minded manner: there’s a Man Ray photograph of Oppenheim doing art stuff, but it’s placed too arbitrarily placed in relation to the other Oppenheims in the exhibit (Regenbogen, 1974 – a slightly meek attempt at bringing Hilda af Klimt into the realm of mural sculpture, and Unter der RegenWolke, 1961-64, part of her disappointing late-career return to gouache and cosmic symbolism) to be of any real interest.4 The works in between are far too random and ugly to draw out a narrative or even a visual story, and none of this is helped by the viciously unattractive blobs of paint dragged across the walls (especially the snot-yellow that the National Portrait Gallery employed for their Yevonde exhibit).5 I’ve never been a big fan of this “spill-over” approach; if the art is good enough then it should be able to exist within its own space.
The embrace of entropy is an outdated aspect of contemporary curation. Putting a load of ugly shit together and asking the audience to figure it out themselves is the pinnacle of the sort of lazy, Barthesian, decontextualist ethos that permeated the visual culture of YBA-era sensationalism (you can still find this sort of forced randomness in places like Newport Street Gallery, but it’s more endearing — and beautiful — coming straight from the horse's mouth). Irritatingly, Sillman’s solo Oh, Clock! exhibit on the floor below just about avoids this thematic Pharisaism. I enjoyed her interview with Bomb magazine from 2013, in which she demonstrates remarkable lucidity concerning the fact that many artists get their best work out after a retrospective because they feel that they’ve already appeased the academic standard. The work on display in Oh, Clock! occasionally falls into the category of art that is well informed by a its creators background and experience; most of it is from the past decade or so and there’s a pleasant, almost clever satirical re-appropriation of the anti-fragmentism so common in post-pop American art (presumably influenced by her zine work) that the artist simply fails to carry through to the upper-floor installation. I want to like Sillman’s work, I really do. But there’s a time and a place, and that time and place is neither Bern nor the twentieth century.
My advice (directed at the Kunstmuseum, not Sillman, who should continue doing whatever she likes) is to stick to what you’re good at. Exhibitions like this only help perpetuate the view of contemporary art as disconnected, pretentious and nonsensical and it’s exhausting for both audience and artist to pretend otherwise – and, for all its faults, Bern deserves better.
Artist Tom Furse shared an incredible anedcote with me, wherein someone who worked at a gallery showing a lot of video art asked ‘why is video art always on old CRT televisions?’, to which the gallerist responded ‘well, that’s how you know it’s art.’
When do we start using the term Balshaw tendency?
I very much enjoyed J Lee’s latest tirade against the hell that is Teutonic cuisine. However, if you think German food is miserable, wait until you’re stuck in fucking Gündlischwand and the only hotel in town serves nothing but Berner Platte, a chillingly Cronenbergian melange of dead meat and damp potatoes that makes you really, genuinely grateful that the British won the war.
The reason I return to Oppenheim so much is a) she’s one of the few famous contemporary Swiss artists and b) because Sillman is very clearly inspired by her work. One of the best pieces in the entire wing is Sillman’s Mouth (2011), a charmingly transformative reference to Oppenheim’s A Distant Relative (1966). This just furthers the shame that somewhere along the line the Kunstmuseum did not encourage or allow for the opportunity to appropriately explore the interaction of the two artists.
I’d be interested if any curators can tell me why this particular shade has made such a resurgence recently – it’s not the Minions franchise, right?
This is so brilliant…. Also, that first footnote is GOLD.