Failure

Whitechapel: Documents of Contemporary Art

by Lisa Le Feuvre (Editor)

Amid the global uncertainties of our times, failure has become a central subject of investigation in recent art. Celebrating failed promises and myths of the avant-garde, or setting out to realize seemingly impossible tasks, artists have actively claimed the space of failure to propose a resistant view of the world. Here success is deemed overrated, doubt embraced, experimentation encouraged, and risk considered a viable strategy. The abstract possibilities opened up by failure are further reinforced by the problems of physically realizing artworks--wrestling with ideas, representation, and object-making. By amplifying both theoretical and practical failure, artists have sought new, unexpected ways of opening up endgame situations, ranging from the ideological shadow of the white cube to unfulfilled promises of political emancipation. Between the two subjective poles of success and failure lies a space of potentially productive operations where paradox rules and dogma is refused. This collection of writings, statements, mediations, fictions, polemics, and discussions identifies failure as a core concern in cultural production. Failure identifies moments of thought that have eschewed consensus, choosing to address questions rather than answers.Artists surveyed include Bas Jan Ader, Francis Alys, John Baldessari, Chris Burden, Phil Collins, Martin Creed, David Critchley, Fischli & Weiss, Ceal Floyer, Isa Genzken, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Wade Guyton, International Necronautical Society, Ray Johnson, Mike Kelley, Martin Kippenberger, Michael Krebber, Bruce Nauman, Simon Patterson, Janette Parris, Yvonne Rainer, Robert Rauschenberg, Dieter Roth, Allen Ruppersberg, Roman Signer, Annika Strom, Paul Thek, William WegmanWriters include Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Beckett, Daniel Birnbaum, Bazon Brock, Johanna Burton, Emma Cocker, Gilles Deleuze, Russell Ferguson, Ann Goldstein, Jorg Heiser, Jennifer Higgie, Richard Hylton, Jean-Yves Jouannais, Lisa Lee, Stuart Morgan, Hans-Joachim Muller, Karl Popper, Edgar Schmitz, Coosje van Bruggen "

Genres: Art, Nonfiction, Art History, Theory, Philosophy

238 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 2010

About the author

Lisa Le Feuvre is a curator, writer, editor and public speaker.

Le Feuvre is the inaugural Executive Director of Holt/Smithson Foundation, an artist-endowed foundation that continues the creative and investigative spirit of the artists Nancy Holt (1938-2014) and Robert Smithson (1938-73).

Focusing on art as a powerful force to retune perceptions, Le Feuvre has a track record of world-class programming and effective leadership. At the core of her work is a dedication to supporting artists and inspiring audiences. Between 2010 and 2017 Le Feuvre led the Henry Moore Institute, a centre for the study of sculpture, as Head of Sculpture Studies. A part of The Henry Moore Foundation, the largest artist endowed foundation in Europe, the Institute expands the understanding and scholarship of historical and contemporary sculpture, presenting a year-round programme of exhibitions, conferences and lectures, as well as developing research, collections and publications.

Prior to this she co-curated the quinquennial exhibition British Art Show 7 (2009-10, with Tom Morton) taught on the post-graduate Curatorial Programme at Goldsmiths College (2004-10), led the contemporary art programme at the National Maritime Museum (2005-09) and until 2004 was Course Director of the post-graduate Arts Policy and Management course at Birkbeck College, University of London. She regularly contributes to journals, publications and exhibition catalogues, as well to academia. Editorial work includes the Henry Moore Institute's journal 'Essays on Sculpture,' the MIT Press compilation 'Failure' in the Whitechapel Art Gallery's 'Documents on Contemporary Art' series and the second issue of 'NOIT,' the journal of John Latham's Flat Time House, on the topic of burning.

Le Feuvre served on the 2018 Turner Prize Selection Committee and the 2019 Arnaldo Pomodoro Sculpture Prize; the selection panel for the 2015 British Pavilion at the Venice Biennial; and the jury for the first Hepworth Sculpture Prize in 2016. She sits on the Advisory Committee for Artists' Lives, a part of the British Library's National Life Stories oral history program, and is a member of the Advisory Board of Tate Etc. She has written on artists that include Katrina Palmer, Gunter Förg, Alberto Giacometti, Anne Hardy, Katie Paterson, Fred Sandback, Jiro Takamatsu, and on her two long-term research projects - the topics of failure and relationships between art and prosthetics.

Reviews

[Christin · Rating 4 out of 5]

A majority of this book focuses on critics and colleagues interpreting the nature of other artists' work. I felt some essays are more honest than others. As case studies the individual incorporations of entropy, deterioration, and incompletion by particular artists through the lens of an observer is mesmerizing and a kind of post-modernist resistance to institutionalizing artists into collectivized methods or movements. However, I would have enjoyed more essays that placed these artistic practices within a socio-politico-cultural perspective. What does work that uses or is about failure (not) accomplishing, how do viewers engage with this art in a meaningful way, how does its sometimes self-professing failure contribute or undermine our ability to receive its messages. These essays skirt around what I feel is the tantamount issue--why is failure and art that acknowledges failure so important?

There are many ways to approach these questions and I would suppose many kinds of responses to it. We owe it to ourselves to first articulate the question, as I'm sure many of these artists are doing, before attempting and perhaps failing to formulate the answers.