Adel Abdessemed at David Zwirner, London

A giant, golden urn ‘Le Vase Abominable’ dominates this exhibition of recent work by Adel Abdessemed and matches the height of the artist. Strapped to the base are a series of gas tanks and explosives with a digital clock counting down to zero. It is a confrontational object marrying craft, luxury and danger. Operating as an absurd self-portrait, the object embodies both aggressor and victim. An ostensibly ‘Orientalist’ and desirable artefact is transformed into something to fear. This satirical thrust characterises the rest of the works on show and they are invested with historical and contemporary resonance. The exhibition does not illustrate a reassuring ‘hybridity’ across cultures but rather produces jarring encounters expressed in diverse media such as drawing, assemblage and animated film.

A series of smaller vases made of clay, salt, rubber, gold and marijuana sit on empty ammunition boxes like trophies of war rather than commodities or vessels. This thematic interest in aggressive acquisition and projection of power permeates the exhibition. And upstairs we meet a rendition of a naked child running from horror, ‘Cri’,  which appropriates an iconic scene from the Vietnam and translates it into opalescent blocks of carved ivory. Despite the gallery’s assertion that the ivory is ethically sourced, it is still a gory representation of human agony using a material associated with illegal animal slaughter. Naturally this confers an added frisson to the figure. Subtlety is neglected and instead Abdessemed sets up intentional provocation.

Charcoal drawings of singular unidentified soldiers achieve a universal summation of modern warfare. These young men hide beneath their uniforms and equipment, exempt from responsibility, appearing life-size as if standing a few metres away in real time and space.

As a nod to the host city, the artist has a made a drawing of the historic British, throne housed in Westminster Abbey. It represents archetypal power, faceless and unaccountable, casting a long shadow across a bleak landscape.

Abdessemed demonstrates technical skill and wryly addresses contemporary anxieties about the instability of the modern world. The exhibition manages to feed a prevailing paranoia and unease, but what’s missing is any confident ethical or political position. Instead, he tends to fall back on mocking subversion to achieve a rather theatrical and ultimately ephemeral effect. 

Robert Rauschenberg’s Jammers at Gagosian, Britannia Street

What a pleasure it was to see an exhibition in King’s Cross that reinvigorates one’s love of art with its potential to engage the senses. Such a show has just finished at Gagosian on Britannia Street with a collection of Rauschenberg’s Jammers available to see as a group of sculptures largely made with textiles arising out of his travels and changes in his life. Taking inspiration from Jammer sailing boats in Florida and fabrics that he saw on a residency in India during the 1970s, the artist shifted direction from his seminal combine paintings.

These soft, draping sails dispense with Rauschenberg’s early humour found in the rather jaundiced and ironic assemblages. The Jammers feel more invested with romance and an unrestrained enthusiasm. As such, they seem more instinctual and less premeditated. The hand seems to determine the outcome rather than a thought process. Stemming out of twin activities of sailing and weaving, the works assume an autonomous quality without wholly dispensing with reference to practical activities. Essentially, these works possess an open inquisitive quality that invites you to simply enjoy their material richness of texture, colour, overlay, crease and rhythmic threading. By turns limp and taut, the Jammers cross the line between image and object. In assembling materials together such as muslin, silk, rattan, tin cans and mud, Rauschenberg begins to construct assemblages of spare rigour and aesthetic power. On a cold, bleak day in central London these Jammers hint at tradewinds and spice, of tropical life determined by movements of the sun and wind and colours derived from earth and plants.

Perhaps the most seductive piece shown in London was a ‘jammer’ made from moulded grass and mud that carried its organic origins in the scent gently emitting  from the object propped against the gallery wall like a talisman. It hinted at farmyard dung but Rauschenberg has crafted this unidentified base material into a sculpture redolent of the elements of earth, wind and water that retain their raw presence in the gallery despite the sculptor’s intervention.

Gerard Byrne's A State of Neutral Pleasure at the Whitechapel Gallery

Is it possible to resuscitate the past and re-animate it? Gerard Byrne is interested in trying to restage forgotten conversations. He makes films with actors speaking the text of old seminars and debates retrieved from publications. The film ‘ A Man and a Woman Make Love’ reproduces a conversation among male Surrealists in 1928 which was first printed within their magazine, ‘The Surrealist Revolution.’ Examining erotic and romantic love between the sexes, these avant-garde dandies veer from analytic curiosity to the smutty humour of a team changing room. All through this re-enactment Byrne signals the contrived quality of the project. Sometimes the camera shot pulls back to reveal a live audience in a Dublin television studio. The actors stray into the declamatory ‘hammyness’ of amateur dramatics.

I saw this film at Documenta last year staged within the modest space of a post-war hotel ballroom erected in bomb-damaged Kassel, temporarily hosting Byrne’s enquiry about how a contemporary audience might consider Surrealist theatrics. In Whitechapel Gallery’s largest room, the film lost some of its incongruous peculiarity. What connects the film to Byrne’s other work in the show is the artist’s consistent curiosity about attitudes and belief across recent history.

Upstairs, two further films revive old discussions from Playboy magazine addressing sexuality in the 1970s and futurology from 1964 leaving the viewer to witness the ironic predictions of an era long since overtaken by the anticpated future. Accompanying these Playboy re-enactments is an advertorial conversation between Frank Sinatra and the Chairman of Chrysler published in National Geographic Magazine in 1980 and presented on the page as if it were a piece of genuine journalism. We see the new car carrying the hopes of a company struggling to survive. But Byrne shifts the action within the film to a grimy New Jersey diner. The aspiration symbolised by the luxury car bearing the latest technology is undermined by the industrial decay lying around the performers. Hopes for the future may well become ambushed by crisis.

These films suggest an easy flow of ideas but the audience is ‘alienated’ in a Brechtian sense by their artificiality and awkwardness. Byrne revels in the tension prompted by these debates re-offered to us across time. Perhaps the most successful works in the exhibition are the three black and white photographs of newsstands in Paris evoking the timeless romance of the city’s characteristic street design. Each work is titled according to the gap between the moment they are hung and the date when they are photographed. So the images are permanently in flux and are intrinsically unstable. They suggest a timeless and unchanging Paris sought by the tourist and the hunter of ‘authenticity’ but these photographs will continue to slip away into the past on each occasion they reappear on exhibition.

Byrne is one of the most intellectual artists working today and demonstrates a genuine enthusiasm for opening up a dialogue with history. We accompany him on these disorientating excavations. As we watch these films, the content recedes further away from us across an unbridgeable chasm and yet we can’t quite pull away.

Michelangelo Pistoletto at Luxembourg & Dayan

Historical conflict dominates this exhibition of work made in the 1960s and 1970s when Italy faced the emergence of armed guerrilla groups. Michelangelo Pistoletto does not offer ideological positions but instead examines intense passions and high stakes during Italy’s  ‘Years of Lead’. Employing his now familiar polished steel panels, the artist incorporates and implicates the viewer within the charged image. As the context recedes into the past, he establishes a dramatic irony whereby the viewer is increasingly removed in time but remains formally present on the surface of the picture and thus our place within a social discourse becomes explicit.

‘La Gabbia’ (The Cage) 1965 survives as four panels from of a former New York exhibition of 29 pieces on which prison bars are screen-printed. Paradoxically the viewer assumes the role of both prisoner and guard. The eyes gazing at this sequence of bars are reflected back from beyond the grill. As our physical presence animates the work, ‘La Gabbia’ entraps us in ideological and political debate.

Within ‘Comizio’ (Rally) 1965, a newspaper photograph of two middle- aged men in suits standing amidst an invisible crowd is copied onto tissue paper and applied to the polished stainless steel. Such scenes would have been familiar to Pistoletto within his native Turin. One figure holds a red flag crowned with a star and such iconic images of revolutionary agitation will undoubtedly resonate for an older generation. This appropriation describes historic struggles for a better world but which now seem anachronistic and tainted with failure. Moving from the street to domestic life, a found armchair (Mobili Capovolti) is turned upside down and a mirror is attached to the underside. What is usually hidden is violently exposed to scrutiny while the viewer is pulled into something that can no longer be narrated at a distance.

Mounted on a modest scale, this show revisits Pistoletto’s incisive use of contemporary motifs to analyze social crisis. Today these loaded artworks have become oddly estranged from their origins as they sit within a commercial setting offering the promise of lucrative investment.