Feuvre Failure

8/14/2019 Feuvre Failure

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tate etc.Issue 18 Sprin g 201 0

1

Essay: Failure


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If at First You Dont Succeed Celebrate

2

Roman

Signer.Courtesy

theartist

and

Hauser

and

Wirth,

Zrich

If at First

You Dont SucceedCelebrate

Peter Fischli and

David Weiss

Equilibres,

The Fart (1984)

C-type print

Dimensions

variable

Roman Signers

installation

Engpass at

Aussendienst,

Hamburg (2000)

Dimensions

variable

By Lisa Le Feuvre


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Uncertainty and instability characterise contemporarytimes. In spite of this, success and progress seem to endureas a condition to strive for, even though there is little faithn either. All individuals know failure better than we might

care to admit failed romance, failed careers, failed poli-tics, failed society, failed humanity, failed failures. Whathappens, though, when artists use failure to propose a re-sistant view of the world, when failure is released from be-ng a judgmental term, and success deemed overrated?

Such imperatives have long threaded their way

through the investigations of artists indeed, art-makingcan be seen as an activity where doubt lies in wait at everyturn and where failure is not always unacceptable conduct.There is the early nineteenth-century history painter Ben-amin Robert Haydon, for instance, whose refusal to com-

prise be it with his own partial-sightedness or his ambi-tion left him deemed a failed painter. In spite of this, hisself-willed notoriety has placed him firmly within history.Or there is Alberto Giacometti, who in 1959 bemoaned hisability to produce only a pale image of what he could seethrough his own eyes, leaving him believing that his ownsuccess would always be less than my failure or perhaps

equal to the failure. Of course failure comes into play else-where too: scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs experi-ment and court risk in order to progress or, in cringe-in-ducing 1990s speak, push the envelope. Artistic practiceand its surrounding discourses, though, operate somewhatdifferently: speculation here is not necessarily intent onreaching a goal, questions are no less powerful than an-swers and the production of ideas has no end point.

To talk of failure more recently, however, is not only todraw on melancholic radical doubt, but to embrace possi-bility in the very gap between intention and realisation.There is a pleasure in failure, and its potential, too. Roman

Signer, for example, courts failure just in case success un-expectedly turns up if not, though, it really doesnt mat-ter. His accident sculptures use experiments to test thingsout, with the proceedings documented as evidence. In56Small Helicopters (2008) he sets off a swarm of insect-likemodel helicopters in a room far too small for their move-ment to be unimpeded. One by one they collide, and failn a joyful choreography of not working. Or inBottleneck

(2000) a car was driven between two wedge-shaped con-crete walls, the architecture arresting movement and themoment of failure marking the point where the event be-comes sculpture. Think also of Fischli and Weisss film TheWay Things Go (1987), or their photographic seriesEquili-bres/Quiet Afternoon (1984). In the photographs, objectshover in configurations just at the moment of collapse. Inthe film, systems of objects tumble over like dominoes,trained objects using wheels, fire and ramps to performtheir roles. Fischli notes: For us, while we were makingthe piece, it was funnier when it failed, when it didntwork. When it worked, that was more about satisfaction.

Perfection is satisfying, but failure is engaging, drivingnto the unknown. After all, if an artist were to make the

perfect work, there would be no need to make another. Tocite Samuel Beckett: Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Tryagain. Fail again. Fail better. Dominique Gonzalez-Foer-stersDe Novo (2009), a single-screen black-and-white filmmade for the Venice Biennale, shows an artist, Gonzalez-Foerster herself, struggling with the significance of beinginvited to participate in the grandest and longest-runningperiodic exhibition for a fifth time.De Novo roughly trans-lates into English as over again or again, anew. The filmruminates on the ways in which any possible proposal is

informed by the history and failures of all those that mighthave gone before. It grapples with the unavoidable prob-lems of the spaces between artistic intention and realisa-tion, with the artist describing her past ideas as blackholes that always seemed unsatisfactory when realised.

John Baldessari states: Art comes out of failure. You haveto try things out. You cant sit around, terrified of being in-correct, saying I wont do anything until I do a master-piece.

Stills from

Dominique Gonzalez-

Foersters De Novo

(2009)


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2009

The

Felix

Gonzalez-Torre

s

Foundation.Courtesy

Andrea

Rosen

Gallery,New

York,

and

MoMA/Scala

Archives

cantly changed from his, probably in any case inaccumemory. Poussin, somewhat disastrously, elects his mtress for the purpose. Finally, with the younger painteticipating the pinnacle of artistic labour, the masterpirevealed. What is seen is not at all what was expectedpursuit of perfection has undone the representation: wall of paint, with a single perfect foot just visible athe mass of colour, shines from the canvas. Frenhoferto justify the work as an atmosphere rather than a deption, but ultimately, in this era of representational paiing, he believes it to be a failure, and evidence of his olost mastery.

Balzacs account is of the gaps between intentionpectation and realisation. Frenhofer is working from amemory, chasing the past in pursuit of perfection. Is pfection, after all, the most accurate route to the past, odeed, to perfection itself? Is there a method more pertto the ways in which we understand our place in the

world, and to the ways in which art can complicate wwe believe we know? Think of Felix Gonzalez-Torressfect Lovers (1991) a pair of cheap battery-operated clthat inevitably will fail to keep the same time. The pe

In 1831 Honor De Balzac penned a short story titledThe Unknown Masterpiece narrating a failure of belief, rep-utation and that very crux of artistic practice the art-ists realisation of his intention. The allegorical tale, set inseventeenth-century Paris, caught the imagination ofPicasso, Henry James and Czanne. Picasso, in fact, illus-trated a centenary edition of the story, and moved to ruedes Grands Augustins, where the unfinished masterpiece

was believed to have been produced. It was here, in his stu-dio, that he unveiled Guernica (1937). Balzac describes hisprotagonist, an ageing artist named Frenhofer, workingtirelessly on a painting, hidden from all until complete andperfect. Two painters one, named Franois Porbus, justestablishing himself and another, Nicholas Poussin, impa-tiently awaiting his first moment of validation seek outthe master and persuade him to let them be the first to seethe elusive canvas. Its ostensible subject is the artists pastmistress. He had been meticulously correcting his work formany years so that it would be indistinguishable from aliving body, but before revealing it, Frenhofer desperatelyneeded to check the painting against the real thing. Ithad taken so long that the former lover would have signifi-

Felix

Gonzalez-

Torres

(Untitled)

Perfect Lovers

(1991)

Clocks, paint

on wall

35.6x71.2 x7cm


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Woodshed (1970) is one such structural failure in both lit-eral and abstract terms. In 1970, at the height of the anti-Vietnam War movement, Smithson was invited to make a

work for Kent State University in Ohio. An abandonedwoodshed at the edge of the campus was piled over withtwenty cartloads of earth, stopping at the exact point whenthe central beam broke. In May the same year, four stu-dents demonstrating on campus in a rally against the inva-sion of Cambodia were shot by the National Guard. Short-ly afterwards May 4, 1970 was painted on the wall ofPar-tially Buried Woodshed, immediately bringing anothermeaning to the entropic monument one of a secondstructural failure. Some years later, Rene Greens PartiallyBuried in Three Parts (19961997) directly readdressedSmithsons work with remembered history. Her multi-partinstallation worked with interviews with local residents,activists, her family members and artists about their imag-ined and actual memories of America in the 1970s and ofthe Kent State incident. The charge in Greens work is inthe power of the failure to remember and in the failures forthe facts of events to be written into history, all the whilere-engaging Smithsons work through the present. As withGonzalez-Foersters recollections, the references build todraw attention to the moments of forgetting and to the

ways in which recollection is a process clouded by mistake,

tion lies in the failure of accuracy; anything else would beromantic fiction. Like these out-of-sync clocks, human be-ngs are all fallible; perhaps this is most explicitly revealed

to us in how we understand the past that is, throughmemory and imagination. Here failure abounds. Thethinker Paul Ricoeur considered in detail the processes ofmemory and recollection, noting that perfect memory, likeGonzalez-Torress clocks, is replete with both failure andperfection. He describes memory as always being at themercy of the powerful forces of distraction and influencefrom other experiences held in the mind. Pure memory issimply to recall; memory influenced by imagination an en-gagement. As with Gonzalez-Torress clocks, photographic,or indexical, recollection will never be the most truthful.Frenhofers recollections are not fulfilled in his painting interms of representation, but it could well be that his ab-straction really did capture the essence of his subject. Fail-ure is always relative, always comes with a context and spe-cific time frame. At another moment this might, indeed,have been a masterpiece.

Failure is endemic in the creative act, leaving the ques-tion not if something is a failure, rather how that failure isharnessed. Some failures are structural: in architecture thiswould be the moment when a supporting part of a build-ng meets its limits. Robert SmithsonsPartially Buried

Bas Jan Ader

Detail of In

Search of the

Miraculous (One

Night in Los

Angeles)(1973)

18 silver gelatin

prints with

hand-written

text in white inkEach 20.3x 24.4cm


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Estateof

Robert

Sm

ithson/DACS,

Londonand

VAGA,New

York

2010.Courtesy

James

Cohan

Gallery,New

York

View of RobeSmithsons

Partially Bur

Woodshed, Ke

State Univers

Kent, Ohio (1


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misrepresentation and the failure of verisimilitude.Failure can open a wormhole through which one can

travel to the past. If a recollection is represented as a per-fect point-by-point double of the past, it is time travelwithout knowledge of the present. A memory of the pastthat has been tainted by the imagination is a process pred-cated on engagement: the past becomes filtered through

the knowledge of the present. Mike Kelley addresses thefailure of forgetting as incidents of trauma. HisEducation-al Complex (19952008), for example, is a work consisting

of architectural models of every educational establishmentthat Kelley can remember attending, alongside a model ofthe house he grew up in. The blanks of the locations hecannot recollect are left, to recall Gonzalez-Foerster, asblack holes intensifying what can be remembered. There isan analogy here to the ways in which we gain knowledge:when starting to study at school, one learns by rote andrepetition. By the time higher education comes around, re-peating facts is not enough: what counts is synthesis andextending ideas. Like the building up of knowledge, en-gagement with artworks is not a static process, rather it isa productive and continuous process of re-readings and

misreadings across the narrative of history that are, in theirfailures, productive. As with Smithsons aforementionedpiece, artworks are constantly retroactively recharged.

Bringing the past into the present is to mine failure,potentially inducing nostalgia. Failure all too easily can be-come a wistful memory of what might have been see for

example Eugne Ionescos play The Chairs (1952), where acouple, now in their later years, are depicted constantlytalking about their failed plans. This absurdist play is a

warning to the nostalgic comfort that failure can bring.Bringing the past into the present through the power ofnostalgia, however, can be productive. Carol Boves accu-mulation of references and objects, for example, presentslifestyle commodities that embody past promises for thefuture in order to consider productively the ways that ourpresent desires will potentially fail in the future. Using ref-

erences that range fromPlayboy to Marshall McLuhan,Twiggy and Jane Fonda, via design classics and the sculp-ture garden of New Yorks MoMA, her compositions turnthese symbols of utopian desire into props for outmodedideological positions. Transported to the present, they actas reminders that if, somehow, things had played out asplanned in the past, a very different future might havebeen delivered. Boves assemblages, though, are not melan-cholic, rather they propose possibilities. As Gertrude Steinnoted: A real failure does not need an excuse. It is an endin itself. Between the two subjective poles of success andfailure lies a space of potential where paradox rules and

where transgressive activities can refuse dogma and surety.It is here we can celebrate failure.

Lisa Le Feuvre teaches in the department of art, Goldsmiths, andis co-curator of British Art Show 7.

Mike KelleyEducational

Complex (1995)

medium

dimensions


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Carol

Bove.Courtesy

HOTEL,

London

Carol

Bove.Courtesy

HOTEL,London

Carol B

Convers

with Lui

Borges

Mixed m

dimens

Carol B

Lisztom

(2004)

Assemb

with pe

and Pla

Octobe

issue

dimens

Documents

Feuvre Failure