Frieze Magazine | Shows | Daniel Malone
http://www.frieze.com/shows/print_review/daniel-malone/
Daniel Malone
About this review
Galeria Foksal, Warsaw, Poland
Published on 05/03/13
By Krzysztof Kosciuczuk
‘You know what the funniest thing about Europe is? It’s the
little differences,’ says John Travolta to Samuel L. Jackson in
Quentin Tarantino’s 1994 film Pulp Fiction as they cruise in
the car. This could also serve as an ironic yet apt tagline for
the recent solo exhibition by New Zealand-born Daniel
Malone, who has been exploring the legacy of the Polish
avant-garde, digging in perhaps the best possible spot. For
‘The Proof Reader’ at Foksal Gallery, Malone (who recently
relocated to Poland) came up with a combination of
performance and objects that look at the shifting history of
this highly influential site from a seemingly laid-back but
refreshing perspective.
Winter Assembly—It Begins Again
in the Garden, 2013, performance
(photograph: Bartek Górka)
Back to the main site
As part of the opening performance Winter Assembly (all
works 2013), Malone had the audience wait outside in the
winter chill as he removed the posters he had covered the
gallery’s windows with, and proceeded to open them up to
the small exhibition room. Malone’s gesture mirrored that of
the artist Zbigniew Gostomski, who opened up the view from
the archive of Foksal Gallery onto the adjacent courtyard in
1969. If, however, Gostomski’s piece could be seen as
highlighting the presence of the network of power, which the
gallery was part of under the People’s Republic of Poland (the
Fine Art Workshop had its offices just across the yard),
Malone’s performance abruptly confronted his audience with
a different scene. The windows on the other side of the
gallery overlook a huge and unimpressive pavilion of glass
and plastic – home to a music club and a fitting testimony to
the changes that have accompanied the maturation of
capitalism in Poland.
The works presented inside seemed equally inconspicuous.
In his characteristic tongue-in-cheek manner, the artist
quoted various aspects of the gallery’s interior and past
displays: printed on a roller-blind and mounted on the wall
was the original herringbone pattern of the wooden floor in
(Blind) Can’t See the Wood for the Trees, which was replaced
with new panels in the early 1980s. Next to it sat an
installation – at first glance a faithful remake of a section of
the celebrated ‘5x’ show held in 1966 – an audio-visual
session involving a number of artists and the audience who
performed inside the gallery using a variety of objects and
musical equipment. Malone’s rendering, The Meal of a Diver
With Eyes Wide Open (GOOGLE), lacking any sound-making
instruments, pointed to the apparent inaccessibility of the
historical event, but also established a somewhat unexpected
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Frieze Magazine | Shows | Daniel Malone
http://www.frieze.com/shows/print_review/daniel-malone/
link. Here, the massive iron rings hanging from the ceiling
that formed part of the original installation were substituted
with CDs containing the artist’s remix of The European Son
– an homage to the composer La Monte Young, recorded by
The Velvet Underground the same year that ‘5x’ opened at
Foksal, which likewise included a musical performance
devoted to Young.
‘The Proof Reader’ was, at the same time, a comment on
Malone’s own practice as a freelance subeditor, which he has
been employed as by galleries and museums since his move
to Poland. For this show, the artist prepared a publication
bringing together the first 15 publications released by Foksal
Gallery from 1966 to 1968, corrected or edited by Malone in
what was meant to be a new, possibly more accessible
reading of the gallery’s output. In an ironic allusion to the
well-known statement by Mladen Stilinović that ‘an artist
who cannot speak English is no artist,’ Malone is reading for
mistakes, but also for proof – historical evidence and latent
references that can be found in minute details.
The leaflet announcing the exhibition featured a photograph
of the cover of Jean Plaidy’s It Began in Vauxhall Gardens
(1968). Once more, Malone not only pointed to an iconic
conceptual piece by Gostomski (It Begins in Wrocław, 1970),
but also, and more importantly, to an often overlooked and
wonderfully productive shift: the historical name of the street
for which Foksal Gallery was named becoming associated
with the identity of one of the key galleries on the map of
Polish avant-garde art. Again, it’s the little differences.
Krzysztof Kosciuczuk
Frieze
3-4 Hardwick Street, London EC1R 4RB, 020 7833 7270
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