"Funky Lessons": Burofriedrich. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=1...

"Funky Lessons": Burofriedrich.

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Title Annotation: BERLIN
Author: Williams, Gregory
Article Type: Critical Essay
Geographic Code: 4EUGE
Date: Jan 1, 2005
Words: 577
Publication: Artforum International
ISSN: 1086-7058

Whenever anyone headed toward the exit during the daily run of "Funky Lessons," a
young woman startled visitors by melodramatically swooning at their feet and, with a
faraway gaze, uttering a few cryptic words before quickly rising and returning to the
reception desk. She spoke in a monotone of moving "beyond the cul-de-sac of a false
choice between harmless hermeticism and patronizing gestures," a dichotomy that
formed the premise of this show organized by German critic and Frieze editor Jorg
Heiser. Lifting lines from the show's press release, Tino Sehgal arranged for the
impromptu performances (This Exhibition, 2004) as his artistic contribution. In this vein
of comedy clashing with earnestness, Heiser also included twelve other artists who
combine humor and didacticism to confront the charge of pedantry frequently leveled
against conceptual art.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Even the show's title--adapted from Adrian Piper's well-known Funk Lessons, 1983,
projected here onto a large wall--has an amusingly forced ring to it, sounding like a
scene from Mike Myers's Saturday Night Live sketch "Dieter's Dance Party," though
unlike Dieter, Piper's poker-faced directives are contradicted by the surprisingly loose
and unselfconscious moves of her amateur dancers. The other historical anchor of the
exhibition was John Baldessari's Baldessari Sings LeWitt, 1972, a seminal black-
and-white video of the artist singing Sol LeWitt's instructional "Sentences on
Conceptual Art," 1969, to tunes like "Tea for Two" and "Camptown Races." His
hilariously deadpan performance confirms that the first-generation Conceptual artists
themselves had a sense of how funny their typically stern and sober language could be.

The bulk of the exhibition consisted of work produced after theory became firmly
entrenched in the art academies in the late '80s. Annika Strom's aphorisms painted in
colorful block letters on paper--for example, I have no theory about this text, 2004--treat
the emptiness at the heart of much "message-driven" art. Martin Gostner's series of
eight posters, "Festival of Fog," 2004, pairs fictitious ads for yoga and kung fu courses
with announcements for imaginary talks at BuroFriedrich. Eva Grubinger's Das
Diaphaidon oder die dezente Verwechslung der Gleichaltrigen (The Diaphaidon, or the
Discrete Mix-up of Contemporaries), 1991, shows the artist sitting before an unseen

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"Funky Lessons": Burofriedrich. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/_/print/PrintArticle.aspx?id=1...

audience with a film of a caged hamster projected behind her; while reciting a litany of
dry scientific texts, her High German gradually shifts to her less comprehensible native
Salzburg dialect, undercutting her pedagogical clout. In fact, it is the insertion of the
artistic self into the midst of an unassuming public that leads to situations of mutually
awkward edification in some of the more recent pieces. Passersby gawk as Andrea
Fraser, prompted by an Acoustiguide tour, rubs her body provocatively against Frank
Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim interior in Little Frank and His Carp, 2001. Aleksandra
Mir's roughly edited video Organized Movement, 2004, derives from footage shot at
parties, on the street, and in stores as the artist made her way through the urban
spectacle, coaching strangers to synchronize their movements or make spontaneous
commentaries. Erik van Lieshout's video LARIAM, 2001, projected in a low shack made
of cardboard and tape and resembling an upside-down pillbox, captures the artist in
Ghana asking locals to help him turn a hard-to-pronounce Dutch phrase into a rap
song. In all three, the artists themselves are caught up in an unpredictable exchange of
information that does anything but guarantee their didactic authority. Yet having learned
from their Conceptual-art predecessors, they do not completely abandon the goal of
criticality--its effectiveness is simply no longer taken for granted.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.

Copyright 2005, Gale Group. All rights reserved. Gale Group is a Thomson Corporation Company.

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