La Caixa is a collection of contemporary art in Spain. Throughout 2019 the Whitechapel Gallery has asked writers to make a personal selection from the La Caixa collection and accompany it with a new piece of fiction. The plan is to have four selections. This is the third selection, made by celebrated novelist Tom McCarthy (b. 1969).
It consists of just seven pieces, five in a gallery upstairs and two in the big underground space at the Whitechapel Gallery.
La Caixa
The La Caixa Foundation was set up in 1905 to do charitable works. It began collecting works of contemporary art in the early 1980s and in 1985 set up the La Caica Collection. The collection now includes more than one thousand works by leading contemporary artists such as Bruce Nauman, Cristina Iglesias, Doris Salcedo, Gerhard Richter, Joseph Beuys, Donald Judd, Mona Hatoum, Dora García, Juan Muñoz, Antoni Tàpies, Cornelia Parker, Juan Uslé, Sigmar Polke, Cindy Sherman and Paul McCarthy.
(The Foundation is connected to the the Spanish bank of the same name, in fact the full name appears to be the Fundación Bancaria Caixa d’Estalvis i Pensions de Barcelona, ‘la Caixa’.)
Tom McCarthy’s selection
Tom McCarthy (b. 1969) is a celebrated novelist who was invited to curate his personal selection from the La Caixa Collection.
He chose to base his selection on the theme of surveillance and control, and their malfunction and breakdown. McCarthy titled the show Empty House of the Stare, a quotation from the 1922 poem Meditations in Time of Civil War by W. B. Yeats.
The bees build in the crevices
Of loosening masonry, and there
The mother birds bring grubs and flies.
My wall is loosening; honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare…
McCarthy is quoted as saying:
‘My selection from ‘la Caixa’s’ collection is based on two premises. Firstly, that we live in an era of mass-mediation, mass-surveillance, mass-control – technological and visual systems that form the architecture within which we dwell. Secondly, that far from being a streamlined, perfectly-calibrated system, this regime is prey to glitches, malfunctions and perhaps even general collapse. It tends towards implosion.’
The works: upper floor
The first floor gallery contains five works:
This enormous photo of a metal object lying shattered in desert sands could be the wreckage of a futuristic society or a leftover prop from a Star Wars film. In fact it is titled Fait #60 and is part of a series of 71 photos taken in Kuwait in 1991 after the First Gulf War by Sophie Ristelhueber (b. 1949, France).
Some of the photos are aerial shots showing supply lines, trenches, vehicles in transit. These are interspersed with images of debris shot at ground level. After looking at it for a while I realised Fait #60 is an upturned tank turret. It made me realise how the Gulf War is fading into ‘history’…
Fait # 60 by Sophie Ristelhueber (1992) Courtesy DACS
Leaning against the gallery wall are some functional, unlovely metal bookshelves which were found on a lower Manhattan street after September 11, 2001, collected and assembled as a sculpture by Isa Genzken (b. 1948, Germany) and, seen from a certain angle, might just about be interpreted as a kind of sculptural echo of the collapsing twin towers.
It was first displayed in a collection of similar found objects, all of which resembled falling towers and titled Ground Zero and I imagine the proximity of other, similar structures gave it a lot of power which, all by itself, it doesn’t quite have.
Bookshelves by Isa Genzken (2008) © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2019
Spanish artist Aitor Ortiz (b. 1971) specialises in photographs of modernist buildings, ideally in a state of dereliction or abandonment, as images of decline and fall, such as this one from the series Destructuras which he began back in 1995.
Impressive, isn’t it? Hard to believe it isn’t a small model. Ortiz chooses simple, essential forms which allow him to refine real, existing architectural structures into abstract and almost fictional images, playing with scale, space and illusion.
Destructures 069 by Aitor Ortiz (2002) © Aitor Ortiz
Pedro Mora, also Spanish (b. 1961) is represented by an imponderable and puzzling collection of reels of old tape – maybe the kind of tape they used in big computers from the 60s and 70s – gathered as if in an archive of something important.
And yet the reels are made from zinc and cardboard and would never work in any computer. Along the tapes are sprinkled what look like letters but in no known language. If these mysterious tapes contain any recordings, the information and messages are forever irretrievable…
Memory Exercise by Pedro Mora (1991) © Pedro Mora
To one side is a film made by Steve McQueen (b. 1969, UK), Illuminer (2001), of himself clambering into bed in an anonymous hotel bedroom and watching on the hotel TV a report about troops training for possible military operations in Afghanistan. Several layers of alienation. Information in a vacuum.
The ground floor gallery
Entered through a big heavy door, this feels as if it’s an underground grotto and contains two works:
The visitor is confronted by a big image of a radiant portal by Eugenio Ampudia (b.1958, Spain) that might offer illumination and clarity. Or not.
Habitable Space (Day) by Eugenio Ampudia (2003) © Eugenio Ampudia
Walk behind the wall this is hanging on to enter a big blacked-out space with a couple of benches and a projection screen. On this is playing a film by Eve Sussman (b. 1961, UK) about a worker in a horrible, bleak, concrete Central Asia oil town whose daily life is subjected to heavy surveillance.
Apparently, sequences of the film are rearranged at every viewing by a computer algorithm, in a gesture towards the notion that even what we see is controlled, but this passed a little over my head.
Instead I was just truck by horrible horrible horrible human beings have made so much of their built environment and the grim ad crappy lives they contain and confine.
Thoughts
This is the third of four selections from the ”la Caixa” Collection guest-curated by leading writers. Would be good to make it along to the fourth and final one.
Purely as aesthetic objects, the opening photo by Sophie Ristelhueber is by far the stand-out image, with a toss-up for second place between the mysterious abandoned building of Aitor Ortiz and the luminous golden gateway of Eugenio Ampudia. Which one did you like best?
Related links
- ‘la Caixa’ Collection of Contemporary Art selected by Tom McCarthy continues at the Whitechapel Gallery until 5 January 2020
Books & Boots 