Yoyoi Kusama, Aggregation: One Thousand Boats Show (1963)

As if to save those analysts the bother, Yayoi Kusama has already labelled Aggregation as part of her Sex Obsession series. She describes the white growths as so many phalluses.

So you might see her boat as a metaphor for the conscious mind, floating above unconscious depths. Except here, the mind has been overrun by erotic symbolism.

Not only has the rower lost control, she has vanished, leaving behind a single shoe. Her sexualised world view appears to have swallowed her up.

At the risk of pathologising, this work could well dramatise one of the breakdowns which have kept Yayoi Kusama resident in a mental hospital since the late 1970s. Certainly, it is frightening.

Whatever the artist’s actual condition, one might employ a phrase once suggested by psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. He called schizophrenia a “theatre of terror”*.

And this trauma scene is theatrical. The scene is wallpapered with images of the boat. So the boat itself contrasts with its diminished image and appears live and auric**.

The other protagonists worth mentioning are Donald Judd, who helped Kusama salvage the boat, and Andy Warhol, who three years later was to follow her lead and produce wallpaper.

Such decorative repetition might also draw medical attention. But you can be sure it has nothing to do with the boat, and everything to do with what might be in that dark water.

Aggregation can be seen in Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern until June 5 2012. See gallery website for more details. References: * cited in Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition; ** idea explored in Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

Lygia Pape, Livro do Tempo (Book of Time), 1961-63

Lygia Pape, Livro do Tempo (Book of Time) 1961-63, Installation view, Magnetized Space, Serpentine Gallery, London, (7 December 2011 - 19 February 2012) © 2011 Jerry Hardman-Jones

This semaphore frieze will stop you in your tracks at the Serpentine. Lygia Pape calls her epic a (the) Book of Time. Well, it both is and it isn’t.

Yes, it has 365 elements which might be called pages. They are made from wood, which is related to paper. And they have a colourful grammar all of their own.

But this work may just be an echo of the real thing. It hints at an invisible 365 page book which could govern all of our days.

If time‘s tome is anything like Pape‘s we should be this happy. Bold colours, dynamic shapes, fresh possibilities are all in store. No two days are the same.

So Livro do Tempo is an antidote to the daily grind, a funhouse mirror to most folks’ experience of time. No Outlook calendar, you can enter or exit wherever you like.

And at the risk of some national stereotyping you might say the Brazilian artist here takes Russian constructivism on a carnivalesque parade.

But Pape loops her garland of abstraction around a whole year. So we should rather hope that the Ur-book of time, if it exists, feel the influence of this one.

And if as novelist Thomas Mann says, “only the exhaustive is truly interesting”, could this work at Serpentine be anything else?

Livro do Tempo (Book of Time) can be seen in Lygia Pape, Magnetized Space at Serpentine Gallery, London, until February 19. See gallery website for more details.

Also, read what blogger Chloé Nelkin had to say about the rest of the show.

Interview: Liliane Lijn

Liliane Lijn is such a hands-on artist that, within two minutes of arriving at her North London studio, my own pair were enlisted to help lift a Poem Machine from the floor onto a well-worn work surface.

There was an issue with this kinetic, text-bearing sculpture. It creaked as it rotated, so Lijn and a more capable assistant than myself were examining the drum, sketching the mechanism and muttering things about radial bearings.

It is the last place you might expect an artist with a background in Surrealism and Beat poetry to be. The workshop smells like a hardware store. Tooling machinery lies dormant on all sides.

There was barely enough time to note the spools of wire on the shelves or identify the pieces of industrial machinery. Lijn’s latest technical challenge was too baffling.

“I find engineering interesting, yuh,” says the American émigré, with an accent that belies her teenage move to Europe.

“If you make something, you’ve got to get it to work. I’ve never been the kind of artist who says, ‘I’ve got this idea, now who’s around to get it to work for me?’.”

This even holds true of a scheme to project text onto the moon. Lijn and scientific advisor John Vallerga have considered lasers, kites and lately heliostats for a project called Moonmeme. For recent work Solar Hills, they have even developed spectroheliostats to beam colour distances of 5km around the earth, .

The physics goes over my head, but Lijn points out: “I’ve been working with prisms for years. So I’m used to thinking about colour, refraction, the spectrum, what that is and how to deal with it.”

Moments later she demonstrates a wound copper sculpture and this is a wonder. As it rotates, a point of light rides up and down the column, like watching a vertical oscilloscope.

“The spiral does something weird,” the artist points out, seeming as confused as me by the two-directional waves. But today the penny drops. “I’ve figured it out,” she says. “It’s the direction of rotation.”

“Everything has an explanation,” she concludes. As the interview progresses, more and more of her sculptures come to life as Lijn moves around the studio switching them on at the wall.

In addition to Poem Machines and the tube of copper wire, the less industrial end of her workshop is home to rotating cones which are hooped with neon and a column made of solvent barrels. This rumbles away in the background as she talks.

Holes are punched in the side of these drums to spell out five words which fans of William Burroughs may recognise from Naked Lunch: “Way out is way in”.

It should be noted that the impetus from this piece came from a meeting with the Beat author, who “intimated” Lijn might draw on his work for a kinetic piece. (It was years before the artist came to the task, so sadly we cannot know Burroughs’ response.)

Soon it becomes clear that Lijn is as happy to discuss poetry as engineering. “The only people who liked these [Poem Machines] in 1962 when I first exhibited them were artists and a few poets.

“Though not many,” she adds with a laugh, “because they didn’t like the idea you couldn’t read their poems.”

Lijn moved to Paris in the late 50s and, along with Burroughs, got to know Sinclair Beiles, Brion Gysin and Gregory Corso. And whether they did or not, she still likes “that idea of words floating into your head and not being linear”.

If this is what she took from the beats, a crash course in automatic drawing was what Lijn came to through a meeting with the few remaining surrealists who André Breton had not expelled from the group.

“I’d done drawing at school and I never liked very much doing drawing from reality. So I started – which is probably a fault – doing drawings from my head.”

Now she says: “Drawing is very much about controlling the instrument that you’re using. It is, of course, an eye to hand thing, but it could be an inner eye to hand thing.

“You do have to control your hand and it’s very difficult; you find you’re thinking one thing and your hand is doing something completely different.”

As the many finished sculptures suggest, Lijn has got to grips with many instruments in her time. And as the odd creaking Poem Drum suggests, she may still not have total control, but practically speaking, she’s there.

Written for Culture24. Moonmene by Liliane Lijn can be seen in Republic of the Moon at FACT, Liverpool, until Feburary 26 2012. Read more about the artist’s work on her website.

Agnes Meyer-Brandis, The Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Bird Migration (2011)

The ideal place to relate this piece of art might be in a pub. You could try a dinner party, but you may not get the requisite howls of disbelief.

“There’s this German artist, see, who wants to fly to the moon. No she’s not in a space training programme. She’s going to let herself be towed there by geese. Bear with me.

“So she’s got these eleven geese in a specially built lunar landscape in a place called Pollinaria. That’s Italy. She reckons it will get them used to the idea.

“She’s also been educating them. Teaching them about flying in a V, about space junk, orbits, etc. They’re all named after astronauts and the like. Like Yuri, etc.”

Such is the way with urban myths. Agnes Meyer-Brandis has taken a 17th century story by English bishop Francis Godwin, and turned it into a 21st century anecdote.

The original text is called The Man in the Moone and features the world’s first, goose-powered, spaceman. You could call it early sci-fi, and continue thus:

“Cut a long story short, she is their mum now. She imprinted herself on them by hanging out with the eggs and then 24/7 when they hatched.

“She even read Kurt Schwitters to them, some performance poem without words. No don’t ask me who he is. I don’t know either. Same again?

“Anyway my mate told me about it, knows someone who saw it in a gallery. They’ve built a sort of mission control. You can switch views of the geese on six screens.

“Swear by God, it’s true. You can watch them waddle in and out of the craters. It’s like they’ve already made it. Just imagine, hitching a lift with some geese.”

If you want a less bibulous experience of this work, make your way to FACT. There you will find the control room and a 20-minute film about the ’journey’.

Watching this reel in a sort of decompression chamber, it is hard to say where the art is located. Is it in Italy? Is it in FACT? Or is it simply in the mind, or in conversation?

Brandis-Meyer’s work can be seen at FACT until 26 February. See gallery website for more details. And read an interview with the artist on the Liverpool Echo website.

Liliane Lijn, Moonmeme (1992-2011)

Installation view at FACT as part of Republic of the Moon Photographer: Brian Slater

Investigations have taken place as to the feasibility of projecting a single word onto the surface of the moon. But Liliane Lijn is still waiting for a technical solution.

In the meantime, we can make do with a simulation. And the word which appears on the virtual moon, both online and at FACT Liverpool, is simply “SHE”. What else?

At time of writing, moonmeme is in near total darkness. So right now it works like a sound piece, the word ‘she’ breaking in layers of foamy sibilance.

Lijn and a co-conspirator take turns to utter the three letter word. It is purred, growled, sang, said any which way which reminds us of the essential strangeness of language.

Every 26 hours the piece updates to reveal a different phase of the moon. When it is full we can read the moon’s gender writ large across her face.

But when it is two thirds full we can read, ‘HE’ or even ‘SH’. It is curious that a male pronoun is contained in the female, stranger still it contains a prescription of silence.

Our creeping shadow (it is the Earth after all) connects moonmeme to earlier works by Lijn in which she made experiments with spinning words and kinetic texts.

The tidal motion of the soundtrack and the lunar motion of the visuals put the meaning of this tiny word into reserve. The feminine principle is everywhere, but nowhere.

Here we find only the reflection of reason, as we find ourselves washed ashore with only moonbeams to guide us. Moonmeme is as bewildering as a birth.

This work can be seen in Republic of the Moon at FACT, Liverpool, until Feburary 26 2012. See gallery website for more details. Alternatively, you can experience the project online, in realtime at www.lilianelijn.com.

Ximena Garrido-Lecca, The Walls of Progress: Project Country (2011)

Amidst the bright, shiny things one could take home from Frieze to put on your wall was this: a structure of mud, daring collectors to take it back to their bright, shiny homes.

Hand made from adobe bricks and modelled on an original in the highlands of Peru, this sculpture brought the outside world into artworld via the Frieze marquee.

As a 6m wide wall, it echoes the countless partitions which separated the 173 galleries who showed up to sell work. It suggested that was all capitalism amounts to, divisions.

But Project Country also had a resonance from the cultural exterior as well. In the outside world, such walls in Peru demonstrate a close relationship with the earth and veneration for nature.

That’s an angle for the jet-set to consider, for many of whom art is surely a ‘fragment shored against ruins’ of industrial or ecological collapse. In other words, it’s an investment.

And yet exterior is the wrong word. Like 48-sheet posters at the nearest tube, these walls now carry murals advertising consumer brands, or in this case a now-defunct political party.

And just as there might be no escaping the marketplace in the wilds of Peru, so there is no escaping from progressive politics in the heart of a lucrative art fair.

To purchase this crumbling structure from Revolver gallery at the fair would be as absurd a gesture as those tales of Americans shipping home English castles brick by brick.

It would cost a packet and serve as a constant reminder of all those peasants or serfs who cannot buy blue-chip art. And Peruvian or not, that’s most of us.

Project Country could be seen last week at Frieze Art Fair. There’s more about Ximena Garrido-Lecca on her website or in this interview in Momardi blog.

Hala Elkoussy, Al-Khawaga and Johnny Stories (2011)

A film in the back room tells the story of Sein, who seems to be in perpetual flight around the city of Cairo. In piecing together her story, the artist may also be piecing together ours.

Like Sein, we find ourselves lost in the city or at least the shop at 87 Sandgate Road, in which the memories pile up on the wall. In places the postcards, adverts and photos are ten deep.

The colonial past is everywhere: in adverts for stationers and soap, in baroque architectural flourishes, in notices for travel agencies selling us the pyramids.

Egypt has just had a revolution, but this was not its first. It was not even its second. But with each convulsion of revolt, the country tries to move away from British or Western influence.

The 1,000 killed in Tahrir Square might not have even been there were it not to mark so-called Black Saturday, and the 1952 murder of 50 Egyptian police by our occupying forces.

Given the amount of blood shed during the Arab Spring so far, it is embarrassing to look from the walls to the collection of books which Elkoussy has laid out on a central table.

Thrillers and travel yarns tracked down on Ebay and via the British Library catalogue remind us that Egypt has long been considered a playground by the West, albeit a mysterious one.

So her installation implicates. If you’ve ever enjoyed a film about mummies or a visit to the British Museum, there are mirrors on the wall in which you see yourself.

The surrounding ephemera points to at least 1,001 stories in this Arabic city. And it may come as a surprise to find how many of them involve Johnny, in other words you or me.

This work can be seen at Folkestone Triennial until September 25 2011. See organisers’ website for more details. And read my interview with Hala Elkoussy here.

Tracey Emin: Love is What You Want

Unrelated photo: Piers Allardyce

In her much-talked about retrospective, the first piece of art is not by Tracey Emin. Nor does it seem much like a work of art. Despite the frame, it is clearly also a letter from her father.

Halfway through the show is another work in which the art is hard to discern. This is a video piece called Conversation with my Mum (2000). It does what it says on the tin.

It’s been noted elsewhere that Emin is the subject of Emin’s show. Most surely know by now most of her biography. And that biog is the message, however impressive the range of media here.

There could be something in the water near Margate. Despite differences and the accusations of copying, the outputs of Emin and onetime lover Billy Childish appear to run parallel.

First there is the confessionalism, an impulse you surely either have or you don’t. It cannot all be learned behaviour. Then there is the gesamtkunstwerk of painting, drawing, writing, film, etc.

But the reason Emin is now the bigger player in the art world is not just because she moved into the conceptual arena but, equally, because she wears the former tendency better as a female artist.

Personal statements and feminist art have gone together since (at least) the 1970s, when Mary Kelly made her landmark work about pregnancy and the early years of motherhood.

Of course, we now have some real artists of autobiography, the non-conceptual celebrities who spin out their life stories in regular installments to an eager audience. It’s a thin line.

You may point out that Emin can draw and has read some philosophy. The Exhibition Guide says so. But what a strange and interesting show this would be if she couldn’t or hadn’t.

Love is What You Want is at Hayward Gallery, London, until 29 August 2011. I got the above image from Wikipedia Commons licence as photography was not permitted. But it seems to fit.

Mark Leckey, GreenScreenRefrigeratorAction (2010)

Mark Leckey, Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London (19 May – 26 June 2011) © 2011 Mark Blower

The fridge looks nothing like my fridge. In truth it is more like a “dark mirror”, a “walled garden” or a “monstrous insect”, all comparisons made by an anguished, robotic first person voiceover.

Manufacturers Samsung surely realise they are in the business of fabricating metaphors. How else could they justify a $1,799 price tag for a basic function which could cost you less than 100 notes.

To make their point, they’ve painted it black. The 30 cubic foot machine comes in the same colour as a limo. Its resemblance to the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey goes without saying.

Flanking Plasma screens build on this cosmic potential by juxtaposing the fridge with, at one point, a soup of fossilised sludge and, at another, the Northern Lights.

Animated coolant passes through the condenser, narrated with reference to the moon and the sun. Like a cruel god, the machine is said to “torment” and “humiliate” the liquid.

Our own hunger for the hi-tech is suggested by a cropped shot of the artist’s knees, rubbed in anticipation as lavish food shots fill the background behind the immobile, yet sentient unit.

The fridge onscreen soon attains more presence than the fridge in the room. After 20 minutes, the real thing starts looking very finite against the gallery’s green screen infinity cove.

Less affluent folk would normally come across this appliance on an advert or as a piece of aspirational product placement in a movie. Our present view from behind the camera punctures that.

In fact the more reverence which smooth marketeers and satisfied customers give to their smart goods, the funnier this piece becomes. Because green screen action cuts both ways.

Mark Leckey: SEE, WE ASSEMBLE is at Serpentine Gallery until 26 June 2011. See gallery website for more details. If you’re thinking of buying the fridge, it’s a Samsung RFG293HABP.

Ben Ashton, 01:23 Monday, 13:30 Sunday, 13:04 Sunday, 23:39 Wednesday, 20:00 Thursday, 15:37 Sunday, 13:35 Sunday, 04:23 Saturday and 17:45 Tuesday (2011)

Although there may be no candles in these painted scenes, there is arguably candlelight. There is certainly romance and the echoes of a nocturnal interior by, say, Georges de la Tour.

And in this light the vulnerable nudes, of which there are three, also call to mind Rembrandt. It may be worked out they are Ben Ashton’s wife. Other panels show them together and him at work.

But whereas a gilt frame might invite you in to an intimate scene by a baroque master, Ashton has crafted three-dimensional wood panels which throw these domestic scenes into relief.

Six of the paintings are on trapezoid blocks which look like inversions of sacred icons. Three are on roundels or plaques which look designed for the exterior of a building, not a gallery wall.

These intimate scenes have not been casually thrust upon us. The rightmost panel shows the artist hard at work sawing and planing the rest of the piece. But he looks unaware of the end result.

The leftmost panel shows his wife (we can work out the relation between them) bent over a screen. It is one of the nudes, lit by the glow of a laptop rather than a secretive 17^th century candle.

It is tempting to say that here it is the internet which has turned the modern home inside out. But painters have long revealed their interior life and the life of their interiors.

In the flanking panels of this installation, Ashton appears to set the old and new technologies in opposition. Perhaps that is why in a self portrait in panel eight he looks so full of doubt.

But since each element of this wall is titled with a day of the week and a time from the 24hr clock, it suggests he too embraces digital technology. Just as in panel three he embraces his wife.

As this all suggests, the piece has a creeping sense of drama. Two of the most engaging panels show the pair denuding themselves with, respectively face cream and shaving foam.

In other words, it is a soap opera. Where painters once used candlelight to heighten the pictorial drama, in a digital age they can (must?) use irony and art historical references.

Ben Ashton’s work can be seen in group show Shifting Boundaries at Phoenix, Brighton, until 12 June 2011. See gallery website for more details. And read an interview with the artist on london art.