Sex and death, Eros and Thanatos, dominate Douglas Gordon and Tobias Rehberger’s collaborative exhibition “After the After” at the Museu d’Art Contemporani d’Eivissa (MACE) in Ibiza. And yes, the title refers to the comedown that follows the after-party, a time of “paranoia and emptiness”. The artists, friends and long-time collaborators, want to rehabilitate Ibiza as a refuge for renegades and bohemians – much as it was during the decades of Franco’s dictatorship. While Rehberger is a long-time Ibiza aficionado, Gordon is a recent convert who’s settling in by making honey from his own bees. Together they are showing the island a little bit of punk attitude as they create art for the exhibition, and collaborate by reworking and remaking each other’s pieces.
And while some residents and partygoers on the island may be familiar with their work, others might need an introduction: Rehberger is a Golden-Lion winning sculptor and the current vice-chancellor of the Städelschule in Frankfurt. Gordon is a native Glaswegian who has previously won the Turner and the Hugo Boss prizes, and currently resides in Berlin, where he has a large studio adorned with taxidermy. Both artists’ work is heavily collaborative and has little interest in traditional notions of authorship: while Gordon stretches time and medium in his appropriated films, Rehberger lends his hand to anything from cars to restaurants. In between setting up their exhibition, they talked to Sleek about collaboration, Ibiza and their personal “After the After”.
Taken from Sleek 48
Study for Sébastien Tobias Rehberger & Douglas Gordon, Lifshitz, Presque Rien, 2000/2015, copyright the artists
Sleek: The exhibition is about comedowns, and, as you’ve said elsewhere, “Hedonism, parties and decadence and their after-point.” Can you elaborate?
Douglas Gordon: We’re inhabiting an island which has something special, and it needs people like Tobias and me to twist it a little bit, because we’re not normal. During the Franco era this was the place for free spirits and free thinkers. So it’s not by chance that Tobias has been coming here for years, and I suppose what we’re trying to do here is get people ‘thinking free’ again, as generations of people that once lived here did before.
Tobias Rehberger: The MACE, where we’re exhibiting, is the oldest museum of contemporary
art in Spain. During the Sixties, Franco didn’t want to have it in Madrid, so they put it here so that it would be ‘invisible’. When we were on the island for a holiday last year we walked past it and thought, “Wouldn’t it be good to do a show here?”
DG: Yeah, and the show’s quite punk, too, but in the way that baroque music was punk because it created an opportunity for music to be presented to a general audience. We’re giving things to this island that it’s never had before. Do you know the Orson Welles movie, “F for Fake”? It’s a film about an art faker and a dealer, and it’s set in Ibiza in the 1960’s. It’s one of the most punk films I’ve ever seen.
We’ll have to put that on our playlist. However, don’t most people treat partying and hedonism as a release rather than as a way to intellectualise?
DG: Forget partying! I’m a hedonist and I like to party, but they’re completely different things. I think that people who come to Ibiza are generally hedonists: they can party if they want to, but Tobias and I want to offer them something else. That’s the thing about so-called hedonism: it’s fine to be hedonistic as long as you let the tears fall into your hand. I think it’s very important to be able to wander about this island and be confronted by something that might make you think about what you did yesterday and what you might do tomorrow.
You’re working with billboards and outdoor installations as well, extending the exhibition into the island.
DG: The museum is virtually invisible, and we want to take the museum into the island, and the island into the museum, so to speak, because that’s the way we work. We wanted to get Ibiza moving by giving people something to think about.
So it’s an exercise in reflection and assessment?
TR: As great as the energy is here, it somehow goes in strange directions, and we thought that it would be good to show an edgier side to it.
Douglas Gordon, Sleep, 2015, copyright Studio lost but found and VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015
Tobias rehberger & Douglas Gordon, Trying to understand himself, 2015 Copyright the artists, studio lost but found, studio Rehberger, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2015
What’s it like working together?
DG: We worked a lot with each other 20 years ago and this is the first time we’ve made it public. Honestly, I think my credibility level has shot back up.
TR: The show is about what kind of relationship you can have with another artist’s work, and how your own work reflects on the other’s work, which is integral to our art practice, too.
DG: Yeah, and the dynamic between us is the same as making dinner for someone else: sometimes you have to politely ask for a little more pepper, but you never tell someone to “get back into the kitchen and cook me a steak, bitch!”
The exhibition is staged around two key works. The first is Tobias’s “Presque Rien”, which is a large tiled mural of two men fucking on the exterior of the museum, and is based on the gay coming of age film of the same name by the French director Sébastien Lifshitz. The second is a film of the men’s moving legs by Douglas. Indeed, many of the pieces in this exhibition seem to be remakes of these two, which reflects the general theme of decay, sorrow and loss. Other than the film, what inspired you to take this approach?
TR: We started out with the idea that as an artist, you sometimes think about your colleagues’ practices and imagine what it would be like if they did this or that in their next work. So telling each other what kind of work we should make was our starting point. From there it grew and took on different levels of collaboration and reflection. The Lifshitz work, the mural, began like this. Douglas asked me to remake my favourite piece of his from memory. He then remade his version and from there it just spiralled.
Tobias Rehberger, B-Movie (club version), 2015 Single channel video installation without sound 35 x 45 cm Courtesy neugerriemschneider, Berlin Copyright Tobias Rehberger
Douglas Gordon
Tobias Rehberger
You also used Douglas’s study of a dying fly , 1995’s “B-Movie”, as the basis for another reworking called “Life”, which features a bronze cast of a hand festooned with fly corpses. Tobias then made the piece “B-Movie – Club Version”.
DG: Yeah, it’s been a great experience. One of the things that Tobi and I love doing is eating, and this is why I was using the idea of dinner as a metaphor. It was like, “Could you please make me that dish that you made me 5 years ago, but with a little less nutmeg in it?”
The exhibition is called “After the After”. What is your comedown routine?
DG: I usually just go home and cry and lose something, perhaps a little bit of my work or a telephone or something. Tears usually end up falling.
Interview by Jeni Fulton
Portraits by Lottermann and Fuentes
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