ArtReview September 2020

Exploring the limits since 1949

Larry Achiampong

Sarah Cwynar, Trevor Paglen, An-My LĂŞ and the end of contemporary art as we know it

Haute Joaillerie, place Vendôme since 1906

9 NEW BOND STREET - HARRODS - SELFRIDGES Visit our online boutique at vancleefarpels.com Client relations center - +44 20 7108 6210

Alhambra, celebrating luck since 1968

ANSELM KIEFER

FÃœR WALTHER VON DER VOGELWEIDE SALZBURG SEPTEMBER 2020

ArtReview vol 72 no 5 September 2020

Are you sitting comfortably?

You certainly don’t need ArtReview (or Bob Dylan, for that matter) to tell you that the times are a-changing. Old ways of connecting with one another, old ways of behaving as a society, old ways of believing that how we exist in our respective societies is somehow out of our hands, controlled by hegemonies that dictate ideas about everything from race and class to gender, politics, economics and all the ways in which those intersect. Old ways of things just… being the way they are. That’s all been blown to smithereens. But you already know this. The question now is how that change comes about and what kind of agency we might have in it, both as individuals and collectively. Or whether we all want simply to go back to the way things were. This issue is, in part, about that. The first of those two things, not the second. ArtReview certainly doesn’t want to go back to that. Although it’s been a part of that system for 71 years, and is wondering whether or not it wasn’t enjoying it all too much at the time, and whether or not it questioned it in ways that were as purposeful as they were rhetorical. Even though questioning things is what ArtReview likes to think it has always done.

Still, you’re not its psychiatrist, and this is a magazine rather than a couch. Even if ArtReview hopes you’ll make yourself comfortable inside its pages. Not too comfortable, mind.

Che

9

As cover artist Larry Achiampong writes in his poetic script (for a new videowork, currently in the making), written during the covid-19 lockdown and addressed to the artist’s children: I think that is the problem of living or growing in the old world.

To have to try to be strong always.

To have to be consistently resilient.

To have to be so elastic as to repel all attacks.

Born into a machine that will try to turn your lights out at the hint of any resistance to its ways.

Before moving on to consider the ways in which viruses, technology and colonial architectures have impacted the postcolonial identity during the immediate present, and where this might leave future generations. Some of which themes are pursued by Trevor Paglen as he discusses his own lockdown experiences and the bodies of work that have evolved from them.

New York-based photographer An-My Lê finds a poetry written on the sides of empty movie theatres – content and communication where lockdowns say there should be none. J.J. Charlesworth and Liam Gillick attempt to dance on the grave of a late capitalist artworld and hope it doesn’t rise up to strike them down.

Ben Eastham examines the ways in which we might reconstitute and adapt the idea of what the late critic and curator Germano Celant termed a ‘poor art’ that’s fitting for our times. There’s more, of course, but if ArtReview summarised it all here then there would be no surprises. No ‘hidden gems’ to stumble across, as its Mario-addicted neighbour routinely cries, 12 hours into their marathon lockdown Nintendo session.

The truth is, of course, that no one can really predict what’s going to happen next. But another truth is that right now we have an opportunity to shape it.

ArtReview

Tree

ArtReview.Magazine

artreview_magazine

@ArtReview_

ARAsia

Sign up to our newsletter at artreview.com/subscribe and be the first to receive details of our upcoming events and the latest art news

10

Trevor Paglen Bloom September 10 – November 10, 2020 6 Burlington Gardens London @ PAC E G A L L E R Y PAC E G A L L E R Y. C O M

Mend e s Wood DM

Rua da Consolação 3368 01416 – 000 São Paulo SP Brazil 13 Rue des Sablons / Zavelstraat 1000 Brussels Belgium 60 East 66 th Street, 2 nd floor New York NY 10065 United States www.mendeswooddm.com info @ mendeswooddm.com

MARLENE DUMAS Double Takes

September 2 - October 10, 2020

ZENO X GALLERY

GODTSSTRAAT 15 2140 ANTWERP BORGERHOUT BELGIUM +32 3 216 16 26 INFO@ZENO-X.COM WWW.ZENO-X.COM

Art Previewed

Hollow Vessels

by Sam Jacob 22

The Interview Farah Al Qasimi

by Ross Simonini 28

Sounding Off

by Patrick Langley 25

page 28 Farah Al Qasimi, Shower with Lux Soap, 2018, archival inkjet print, 89 × 69 cm. © the artist.

Courtesy the artist and The Third Line, Dubai

September 2020

15

Art Featured

Reliquary 2

by Larry Achiampong 40

Very Poor Art

by Ben Eastham 68

The State of Things to Come

by Liam Gillick and J.J. Charlesworth 48

Kris Martin’s Idiot

by Martin Herbert 74

Sara Cwynar

by Chris Fite-Wassilak 54

An-My Lê Interview by Fi Churchman 76

Trevor Paglen Interview by En Liang Khong 60

page 60 Trevor Paglen, Bloom (#836c74), 2020, dye sublimation print, 50 × 66 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery, London

16

MuseumsQuartier Museumsplatz 1, A -1070 Wien www.mumok.at After Andy Warhol, Facsimile of Silver Clouds created by Andy Warhol in 1966, Refabricated by the Andy Warhol Museum, © The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. / Licensed by Bildrecht Wien, 2020, Art Direction: studio VIE, Photo: Daniela Trost Förderer Sponsor

Art Reviewed

comment, exhibitions & books 88 Gordon Parks, reviewed by Mark Rappolt New York, fresh out of lockdown, by Rahel Aima Rachal Bradley, Prunella Clough, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Renato Leotta, reviewed by Francesco Tenaglia Summertime and the livin’ is uneasy, by Martin Herbert Nora Turato, reviewed by Pádraic E. Moore Los Angeles galleries, by appointment only, by Cat Kron Hanne Darboven & Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, and Dom Sylvester Houédard, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Copenhagen’s midsummer mix of art, by Rodney LaTourelle

Lucifer Over London, reviewed by Oliver Basciano Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twentieth-First Century, reviewed by J.J. Charlesworth Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene, reviewed by Adeline Chia Wendy, Master of Art, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment, reviewed by Oliver Basciano The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, reviewed by Chris Fite-Wassilak back page 110

page 92 Bony Ramirez, La Tormenta (The Storm), 2020, acrylic, oil pastel, colour pencil and Bristol paper on wood panel, 122 × 91 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York

18

ArtReview

Frans Hals’s Laughing Cavalier won’t be the only masterpiece leaving you with a smile.

Open daily Visit wallacecollection.org

Last chance to see Forgotten Masters: Indian Painting for the East India Company On until 13 September 2020 Book online now

Art Previewed

And it was only because 21

Though they may be fuelled with a contemporary urgency, arguments about how we handle history are nothing new. Questions of ownership and restitution, to whom culture belongs and the ways in which history is used to construct wider contemporary ideological positions are not only part of postcolonial and postmodern interrogations of culture but have been for some time. They are an intrinsic part of culture itself.

These questions, to take just one example, have been part of the narrative surrounding the Parthenon Marbles for 200 years. Infamously, these were removed from the Parthenon, the most important building in ancient Athens, between 1801 and 1812 by the Scottish nobleman Lord Elgin. As ambassador to the Ottoman Empire (of which Greece was then a part) he was asked by the British Government to explore the possibilities of taking casts and drawings of the sculptures adorning the Athenian temple.

Elgin decided that he’d just go ahead and do it himself. Then decided he’d take the sculptures themselves, thinking that they’d be great to decorate his home in Dunfermline. Dreams of this domestic grandeur were ruined when divorce meant he had to offer his haul up for sale.

Eventually bought by the British Government, in 1816, the marbles became part of the British Museum collection, where they were first shown in a temporary room, then moved to a new gallery in 1832, and then, as they are now, to a room designed especially to house the marbles. At each juncture in this history there were arguments – about the legality of ownership, whether to display the marbles as archaeology or as art, as a singular entity or among other objects, dirty or clean. In other words, the problematics surrounding the sculptures became an integral part of the ancient stones themselves.

It was the gift of Joseph Duveen that ‘resolved’ these issues. Duveen, whose fortune was made as an art dealer selling the collections of impoverished European aristocrats to American industrialists, gifted the museum the funds to build a space to house the marbles.

But the money came with strings. And Duveen pulled them hard, appointing his choice of architect, his vision of the space and his understanding of the objects – even to the point of nefariously convincing workmen to scrub the stones as clean and white as possible. With Duveen’s gift, all of the doubts and nuanced questions were banished through a singular act of architecture. The room, he insisted, would be ‘one of the central places of earth’.

It’s never felt like that to me. Sure, it’s big, but the room’s stripped-back monochrome neoclassicism has always seemed boring.

If Duveen wanted a shrine, it feels more like a tomb. The setup asks us to look at the marbles

22

The Shape of Things

Sam Jacob thinks it’s time for a ‘postmuseum cultural space’

ArtReview

through the narrowest of Duveen-shaped blinkers, with a tedious reverence that sucks all the visceral experience out of the air. The room seems at once entirely empty and as if it’s so full you can’t move. Somehow, with the fragments of frieze pinned, propped and plinthed, it’s both impossible to look at them and impossible to do anything else.

But there is something even more weird happening too. An accidental product of Duveen’s diktat on the way the marbles should be shown. With the horizontal friezes displayed along the flank walls of this interior and the sculptures at either end, the whole offers an inverted version of the Parthenon, while pretending to offer an ‘authentic’ experience.

The gawping British public now occupy the space that would once, in Greece, have housed the divine. It’s an accidental piece of conceptual architecture that turns architecture (the architecture of the Parthenon itself) inside out: a replica of the Athenian temple remade as a void, as a negative space, recreated and destroyed at one and the same time.

And maybe that is the gallery’s real quality – a heightened emptiness. What the British brutalist architects Alison and Peter Smithson termed a ‘charged void’. There are other replica Parthenons – a concrete one in Nashville, for example, that feels both stenographically light and materially heavy – but there are no other ghost Parthenons, as far as I know.

If the marbles, over their two centuries in Britain, had not become so bound up with nationalism, so apparently central to the fabrication of British identity and culture, like so much of the other appropriated, looted or otherwise contested content of our museums, it would be easy just to give them back to Athens, where there is a space ready to receive them.

But could the emptying out of the Duveen Gallery provide an opportunity to create a space no longer dominated by narratives of imperialism and power? Or, more precisely, the place in which exactly those questions might be interrogated?

Void-as-museum is not a new strategy.

Think of the huge emptiness created in the heart of the old Bankside Power Station when it was converted into Tate Modern at the turn of the millennium. Excavating the already large turbine hall created a space in which the scale of old industrial production was transferred to cultural production. And in doing so, it demanded that a new kind of art emerge to respond. Two decades later, though, postindustrial cultural spaces don’t have the same spark. But a postmuseum cultural space, now that would be something.

Perhaps, indeed, it should be the next thing.

Since Tate Modern opened in 2000, the idea of the museum has been propelled by frantic expansionism: vast new acres of galleries, ever-bigger blockbuster shows, demands for ever-increasing visitor numbers and revenue streams. Much of this is propped up by individual benefactors, corporate sponsors with wealth derived from oil, pharmaceuticals, banking and cheap labour. This idea of growth – especially in a postpandemic world – has created structural tensions that threaten the very model of the museum they intend to support.

Even in its pomp, the museum as a form of spectacular entertainment, forever chasing something bigger, had become banal. It’s the other things that have begun to capture the imagination of curators – collection centres where the backstage machinations of cultural

production are made visible; engagement with communities and places outside of the museum walls all signs of a new emerging idea of what such an institution might be.

Duveen’s Parthenon gallery, with its intrinsic architectural reversals, might be the ideal place to start this experiment, using the architecture of the museum itself as the tool to unravel the embedded ideologies of the museum.

Recognising and rejecting, for example, its original ambition to be ‘central’, acknowledging that the institution and the ideologies that created it are now unsure of their place in the world. Released from its role as a patrician trophy cabinet and national treasure, its emptiness could become a space for other ways of reflecting on history.

But equally it might offer an opportunity to explore alternative possibilities of the museum: to reverse the Enlightenment trajectory of the museum as a site for the top-down production and policing of knowledge, as a public space, in which history is a spectacle, disseminating the aura of the authentic, so that the past is used to fabricate the future, a future fixated with objects. Most of all it offers the chance to accept doubt and to project questions into the spaces in which history is narrated. Which in turn might lead to a different kind of public space in which many more narratives might be explored.

facing page Parthenon Sculptures, British Museum. © and courtesy trustees of the British Museum top Kara Walker, Fons Americanus, 2019, (installation view, Tate Modern, London, 2019).

Photo: Ben Fisher. Courtesy Tate Modern, London above Parthenon Sculptures, British Museum. © and courtesy trustees of the British Museum

September 2020

23

4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art 181-187 Hay St Haymarket Sydney, Australia 4a.com.au @4A_Aus Current projects: 4a.com.au/4a-digital 4a.com.au/4a-kids Current exhibitions: Holding Patterns 9 JUL – 23 OCT 2020 4a.com.au/holding-patterns

Dean Cross: Monuments 13 AUG – 1 OCT 2020 4a.com.au/monuments

A few weeks into lockdown, I had a series of ocular migraines. Each progressed in a predictable way.

A hairline crack of iridescence would appear in whatever I was looking at before spreading over my visual field like a crystal growing in a Petri dish, staying there for up to an hour at a time. Pandemic stress was a likely cause. But so was my approach to relieving it. Keen to stay abreast of how artists were responding to lockdown, I’d developed a mothto-a-flame interest in the flat blue glare of online viewing rooms, video programmes and virtual exhibitions.

When short, regular eye-breaks proved an ineffective cure, I decided it was time for a sabbatical from seeing.

In the temporary absence of looking, I engaged with art by listening. The Serpentine Galleries’ podcast, hosted by artist Victoria Sin and curator Lucia Pietroiusti, proved indispensable. By bringing together newly commissioned audioworks, interviews and discussion between guests, the format disrupted boundaries – between music and art, artist and interviewer, ecology and art history – in fluid, off-the-cuff ways that too often elude the stuffy formats of in-person panel discussions and screenings.

This air of fluency was partly a technique of audio editing, which can seamlessly join otherwise disconnected voices and sounds, such that people separated by oceans appear to inhabit the same room. During quarantine, this illusion acquired an added emotional nuance, mimicking a closeness that was otherwise impossible. In one episode during lockdown, Pietroiusti remarked to Sin on the experience of cohosting from different locations: “You’re kind of here with me. I mean, you’re in my ears.”

I experienced a version of this sense of community as a listener. During a radio broadcast, simultaneous distribution of sound can approximate a sense of togetherness, in time if not space, that momentarily allows whoever is listening to transcend their geographical isolation and become a member of a dispersed audience. (I’m surely not alone in listening to the radio for precisely this reason.) That this feeling carries through on a prerecorded podcast suggests it may be connected to the feeling – if not the actuality – of liveness intrinsic to conversation. Before the pandemic, what often drew me to museums was being exposed to new ideas, or having preconceived ones tested. In my experience, this tends to happen outside of the relative hush of the galleries: at roundtables and live events, or in the bar afterwards. I wondered whether audio broadcasts could replicate such encounters, creating audiences at a distance when

Sounding Off

Patrick Langley argues that when we can’t look it’s time to listen

Omniaudience event, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, 2018.

Courtesy Nikita Gale

September 2020

future access to institutions was uncertain, and improvising accessibility for visually impaired people.

A lavish take on this idea arrived a few weeks later in the form of Simon Schama’s The Great Gallery Tours, broadcast in the uk on bbc Radio 4 as lockdown was beginning to ease – as, to my relief, were my migraines. In this series, the historian imaginatively reconstructs, without setting foot in them, four of his favourite museums: the Courtauld, the Prado, the Rijksmuseum and the Whitney. Guided by purling piano music, sound effects and the historian’s engrossing descriptions of his encounters with canonical paintings, the programmes had a floaty, nostalgic feel: I was moving through memory palaces, not galleries.

At times, I was reminded that John Reith, the bbc’s first director-general and the son of a Scottish Presbyterian minister, had conceived of radio as a vehicle for moral instruction. In the Prado episode, Schama pauses midway through a mellifluous description of Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656) to check we haven’t nodded off at the back of the lecture hall: “Still with me?

Head spinning, is it?” In the midst of pickets and protests against massive job losses and systemic racial injustice at major arts institutions internationally, the professorial approach felt out of touch.

A more exciting model for how institutions and listening publics might interact took place before the pandemic began. Starting in 2018 and running for a year, Omniaudience, organised by the artist Nikita Gale, was a series of listening events and live discussions at la’s Hammer Museum, coorganised by the magazine Triple Canopy, which published recorded extracts from the events online. Echoing the genre-agnostic approach of the Serpentine podcast, these events saw critics, artists and musicians examine acoustic biology, Tina Turner, protest music, nasa recordings and archives of Black music, the results ranging in sonic texture from twangy, improvised folk to cerebral discussions interrupted by blasts of jazz and soul. The project explored the idea that a given set of listeners can form what Gale terms ‘a congregation of listeners’ – which presumably includes those, like me, who access the recordings remotely, tuning in months later and from halfway around the world. Recognising that audiences are brought into being whenever sound reaches them won’t compensate for lost ticket sales or cuts to government funding. But it might help artists and institutions alike to counteract the atomising effects of a pandemic, and to continue to reach – perhaps even expand – their publics.

25

28–31.01.2021

artgeneve.ch

Farah Al Qasimi in her New York studio, 2020.

Photo taken by the artist

28

ArtReview

The Interview

by Ross Simonini

Farah Al Qasimi

“I’ve always identified as somebody who has a very thin outer membrane”

I spoke to Farah Al Qasimi a week into her coronavirus quarantine in New York City this spring.

As she has asthma, she had begun her personal lockdown earlier than most and had spent that time recording an album in her bathroom.

Al Qasimi is best known as a photographer and filmmaker, but she is also a musician, singing in punk bands, playing classical piano, writing schoolyard chants and composing synth-heavy film scores. She recently composed the music for her 2019 horror-comedy film, Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire), which is part fiction and part documentary, and investigates the mythological trickster spirits called jinn.

I first encountered her work two years ago, at her first solo show in New York, a collection of photographs at Helena Anrather. (Her second is up now, as I type this.) It depicted a contemporary, hypermasculine, Middle Eastern culture: guns, meat and beards. (In contrast, she has also documented salons, beauty pageants and malls.)

To my eye, many of her images function like paintings: textural and pop-vibrant. Others come together like collages, being meticulous compositions of hyperreal colours and constellations of patterns. The work is pure optical pleasure.

Al Qasimi was born in 1991 in Abu Dhabi and raised there for her childhood, but she

September 2020

has spent much of her life in the United States.

Her photos often depict the intersection of these two cultures. At the time we spoke, her work was featured on bus stops across New York City as a part of her project with Public Art Fund, Back and Forth Disco. This seemed to be her way of juxtaposing her two sensibilities: the startling and glittering Emirati aesthetic cast against the grey urban palette of New York’s sidewalks. These photographs remained up for several months during the lockdown and they served the public well, offering glimpses of exuberance amidst the culturally barren streets of the pandemic.

29

What Should I Believe? ross simonini What films are you watching during lockdown? farah al qasimi Lots of John Carpenter and horror B-movies.

I watched The Thing last week, which is one of my favourites.

I’m obsessed with horror, especially as a cure for anxious feelings. A couple of years ago, there was a lot of Daesh activity in the Arab world and I was having nightmares about them every night. I started watching horror movies as an experiment, to see if it would counteract the nightmares.

It’s been an addiction ever since. rs For you, does horror only purge fear, or does it also cultivate it? faq I have thought a lot about this. I have anxiety and depression, and occasional panic attacks and nightmare spells. And the theory I’ve arrived at is: as long as the source of horror in the film is separate enough from your own real-life horror, then you’re fine. For example: my brother made me watch Contagion a couple of weeks ago, and that was a huge mistake, because it was a fictional manifestation of our current reality, and it only amplified my fear.

So I tend to gravitate towards supernatural films.

Ghosts make me feel more comfortable.

I read a year ago. I had such a feeling of dread when reading it, maybe even anticipation.

Now I realise that’s because I was reading a premonition. rs You made a film recently that is considered, in some ways, horror. Does it operate in the same way as these books and films? faq I would classify it in the same genre as poorly filmed clips of ghost encounters on YouTube. You’re watching something, but you’re not completely sure how to categorise it. The film is part documentary, part fictionalised and comedic art piece. The premise of it is a reality show about a jinn, or Islamic spirit, who is complaining about the state of affairs in the Emirates since modernisation.

rs Is the same true of horror fiction? faq It’s funny, because I keep thinking about Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower series, which

30

As Reflection, 2019, archival inkjet print, 102 × 74 cm

ArtReview

A lot of the reactions that I’ve had to the film are questions: what parts of it are real?

What should I believe? And there shouldn’t be an answer to that.

I like tiptoeing that line between documentary and fiction; I think there’s so much of the world that is in it, unedited. For example, I was in conversation with people about their very real experiences with the paranormal. It has always been a part of our culture – believing in the spiritual world, communing with the dead for exorcisms – but as the country strives to modernise, it’s abandoning all of these older forms of knowledge, healing and faith. Exorcisms have recently been outlawed. So I had to go through all of these weird channels to meet one of the characters, Ahmed, who is still a working exorcist – and I asked him questions about the process. He allowed me to record his voice and his hands, but not his face. rs Do you believe in the supernatural? faq Yeah. Not in a sense that I’ve seen a ghost, but I’ve certainly sensed hostile energies.

My family is from the northernmost Emirate, Ras al-Khaimah, and it used to be a burgeoning maritime fishery. And we live on the edge of an abandoned town that is said to be haunted.

It’s called Jazirat Al Hamra, we’re right on the border, and I’ve definitely heard noises in our house and felt a presence. I’ve also had sleep paralysis, which a lot of people will describe as being haunted, possessed or crushed by a ghost.

Still Life for Painting, 2016, archival inkjet print, 114 Ă— 152 cm

September 2020

31

S Eating Melon, 2016, archival inkjet print, 114 Ă— 152 cm

32

ArtReview

I’m sure you could scientifically explain most paranormal events, but I like to believe that the world is endlessly complex, and that there are different kinds of knowledge. And I don’t believe in the total supremacy of Western medicine. I’m not that distant from my Dad’s generation, you know, who thought that letting blood or burning the back of your neck would fix a fever.

faq Yeah, I’m somebody who is very sensitive and that’s often a word that’s used negatively.

I’ve always identified as somebody who has a very thin outer membrane. I’m heavily affected by whatever environment I’m in. I think that it is what makes me a curious person, and an incredibly anxious one. rs Are you interested in using your art to scare people?

Crying for the Right Reasons rs Was the jinn mythos a part of your youth? faq Definitely. It was mostly used to design fables. One of them is Umm Al Dowais – she’s a jinn that will seduce you. And if you’re weak, and go into the desert with her, she’ll kill you.

She has a sickle for a hand and a donkey leg, in the version I’ve heard. There are different ideas around the jinn, but a lot of people still heavily believe in their existence. Like I said, these exorcisms still happen, even though they have to happen in secret. rs Was it effective for scaring you? faq Um, yeah. My grandma had some scary stories. One time she was walking home and there was a herd of camels walking alongside her. Then she looked up, and all of a sudden the camels had no heads.

But I was also scared of one of the bad guys from Power Rangers, who looked like he was made out of mahshi – a stuffed cabbage my

mom used to make me eat – and I used to have nightmares that he’d come out of my closet every night. I was a delicate kid with a robust imagination. But as an adult I’ve been more interested in seeking out experiences with the supernatural, because I have this need to know what else is out there that I’m not experiencing, that I can’t see. A lot of the time, when we hear ghost stories, they’re several degrees removed from us, so for the film I was trying as much as possible to really seek out people who had had things happen to them or who really embody a strong belief in the supernatural. rs Being an artist requires a strong imagination, which is often seen as a benefit, but if the mind flips to fear, that same tool can be weaponised in the service of fear, or anxiety, or depression.

After Dinner 2, 2018, archival inkjet print, 102 × 74 cm

September 2020

faq I’ve tried. I’m always curious about what elicits a response, especially as somebody who really loves movies, the whole combo of storytelling, music, effects, visuals and acting. I’m interested in how you use those tools to make people feel. I think that with each thing I make, I get a little bit closer to understanding that. I mean, I think it’s impossible. There’s always going to be a broken telephone game between what you imagine the work does and what it actually does when it’s out in the world. A couple of people said that they cried in the film, which made me really happy, because I think that they were crying for the right reasons.

A helpful rubric for me is testing whether kids like it. I will try and find a kid within reasonable age, usually my nieces, and show them the work, especially if it’s a video, and if there’s interest, then I’ve succeeded. I don’t aspire to make work that is overly self-referential or didactic, and that can’t be experienced or understood by everyone.

I appreciate a lot of work that doesn’t operate within those boundaries, but for me

33

it’s important. I mean, even thinking about humour and how to make people laugh, with horror, there’s a jump scare and then there’s a slow build, and with comedy, there’s the fart joke and there’s the knock-knock or situational joke. And I like to unlock some of those things through the work, rather than just intellectual interests. I like having fundamental experiences that are across the human experience. rs Fear brings us back to the childlike vulnerability of wonder. faq Exactly.

Fairies in the Garden rs Do you get much pushback about your looseness towards truth in your work? faq I think a lot of the photo community gets really bothered by it, and it’s kind of funny, but there’s been this longstanding intellectual tiff between the photography community with a capital P and the art community around the importance of truth. [People] like to control what they know. I think it’s a very human thing, but it doesn’t always serve us in the best of ways. rs What do you think about the old idea that photography steals the soul of the subject?

34

faq That makes me think of this Susan Sontag quote, from On Photography, where she compares the lens to a gun and talks about photography being an inherently violent act in which you’re taking something from someone. I mean, I’m extremely sensitive about the way that I get photographed. I can’t tell you how many times somebody will tag me in a photograph on Instagram and, you know, my face is not looking the right way or I have a double chin or whatever, and it just gives me the worst anxiety.

And then I think: wait a minute, nobody cares.

When I photograph people, I will always get their approval before they are shared. rs Does your photography cross over with the paranormal, too? faq Definitely. rs I’m down here in Florida and there’s this place nearby called the Skunk Ape Headquarters, which chronicles one of these cryptozoological animals. faq Oh yeah. I know all about the Skunk Ape. rs So you’ve probably seen these vaguely Bigfoot-like photos of a fuzzy figure in the distance. Now, in the age when everyone has a smartphone, it’s hard to believe that if the Skunk Ape does exist, there is no photograph of it, and yet it’s still compelling to look at these blurry images. The stillness of photography creates the illusion of the real. Is that something that you’re interested in?

ArtReview

faq Oh yes. I watch a lot of Ghost Hunters when it’s on tv, and it’s a terrible show, but I’m always interested in the kinds of ludicrous equipment they’re using. I also love the really terrible documentation of the Loch Ness Monster or the Yeti or fairies.

When I was a kid, my sister gave me this incredible book of fake [photos] documenting this young girl’s experience with fairies in her garden. rs The Cottingley Fairies. faq Yeah. I thought it must be real because it’s photographed. So, yeah, I do think about that a lot in my work. I don’t digitally alter, so I’m always interested in how to create the conditions for a magical experience that a photograph can then come out of. I think it’s about engineering a situation rather than an image, and then the image becomes evidence of the situation. So people often ask me: did that really happen? And to me that question doesn’t matter at all, unless I’m on a journalism job. Otherwise, my work is about these moments of fantasy and fear that are manifesting all around us, and for me the photographs are the evidence.

Ross Simonini is an artist, writer and musician living in New York and California

facing page Um Al Naar (Mother of Fire) (still), 2019, hd video, colour, sound, 42 min 7 sec

above Bodega Chandelier, 2019, included in Back and Forth Disco, 2020, a series of 17 works presented by Public Art Fund on 100 jc Decaux New York bus shelters

September 2020

all images Courtesy the artist, The Third Line, Dubai, and Helena Anrather, New York

35

#maspemcasa masp

@MASP 9+ 1. Amedeo Modigliani, Lunia Czechowska, circa 1918, collection MASP 2. Edgar Degas, Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, 1880, collection MASP 3. Artwork by Luciano Costa selected for MASP’s drawing at home challenge 4. Édouard Vuillard, The Flowered Dress, 1891, collection MASP 5. Abraham Palatnik (1928-2020) 6. Marta Ichakerian, Untitled (Glass Easels at MASP’s Picture Gallery), 1970s, collection MASP 7. Paul Cézanne, Paul Alexis Reading a Manuscript to Zola, 1869-70, collection MASP 8. Claudia Andujar, Yanomami, 1974, collection MASP 9. Rubem Valentim, Composition 12, 1962, collection MASP 10. Sandro Botticelli, Virgin and Child with the Infant St. John The Baptist, 1490-1500, collection MASP 11. Repost @bradesco MASP Áudios 12. Tarsila do Amaral, The Doll, 1928, collection Hecilda and Sérgio Fadel 13. Édouard Manet, The Amazon— Portrait of Marie Lefébure, 187075, collection MASP 14. Daniel de Paula, Field of action, field of vision, 2017, collection MASP 15. Arthur Timótheo da Costa, The boy, 1917, collection MASP

Av. Paulista, 1578 masp.org.br

Strategic partners

GALERIE RUDOLFINUM 13.8.– 29.11.2020 JOHN CAGE & CZECH PHIL, TOMÁŠ DŽADOŇ, PATRICIE FEXOVÁ, HABIMA FUCHS, TOMÁŠ MORAVEC, NICOLE SIX & PAUL PETRITSCH, UNCONDUCTIVE TRASH, RINUS VAN DE VELDE, LENKA VÍTKOVÁ UNPLUGGED LIKE A CONCERT PLAYED ON ACOUSTIC INSTRUMENTS. THE REDUCTION OF THE POSSIBILITIES ON OFFER. ENGAGING THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE LIFE CYCLE. TO REFUSE THE RAT RACE TO POSSESS AS MUCH OF EVERYTHING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. THE AWAKENING OF EMPATHY TOWARDS QUALITY TO THE DETRIMENT OF QUANTITY. TO SEEK HUMILITY. TO NOT BE AFRAID OF MAKING MISTAKES. TO NOT SEEK TO MAKE AN IMPRESSION. TO SEARCH.

ADMISSION FREE THANKS TO AVAST FOUNDATION. MEDIA PARTNERS: RESPEKT, FORBES, RADIO 1.

arsep20_rudolfinum_placed.indd 212

Distancing?

Isolated?

Never miss out Subscribe

artreview.com/subscribe

20/08/2020 16:29

Art Featured

I and they were giddy 39

40

Reliquary 2

by Larry Achiampong

41

Ancestry and familial relationships are integral to my examination of the postcolonial identity. Previously revisiting memories of the past with my mother, this piece is consciously projected towards the future, using the present to provide and shape a dialogue with my children. I am interested in how diasporic histories have been displaced by colonialism and postcolonial structures. In engaging an intergenerational dialogue, I aim to treat the present with a consideration and dignity, absent in the treatment of my ancestor’s narratives.

This work continues the themes of my Relic Traveller series, interrogating colonial architectures that have been divisive in dividing diasporic communities. The current lockdown poses a unique set of challenges to the postcolonial identity, denying it its innate sense of migration and dynamism. Agency and technology have been a primary focus in my practice and have eerie contemporary relevance, where imposed isolation has denied a certain corporeality and autonomy. Sensitive to the stasis this quarantine period has provided, the eventual film will trace how technology has become embedded within our daily lives, an intimate projection of the self.

42

ArtReview

preceding pages Reliquary Conceptual Imagery #5, 2020. Created by Larry Achiampong. Illustrated by Wumi Olaosebikan

The text that follows forms the script for a new and highly personal videowork continuing the artist’s ongoing Relic Traveller series, a multidisciplinary project manifesting in performance, audio, moving image and prose. Begun in 2017, this speculative project builds upon a postcolonial perspective informed by technology, agency and the body, and narratives of migration. Mixing the sublime with the traumatic, it explores past, present and future, through narratives of Pan Africanism and African diasporic identity in relation to colonialism, postcolonialism and the heightened nationalism of current times.

The text itself is based on testimonies to the artist’s children, composed in direct response to their enforced period of separation during the covid-19 pandemic.

I can only write at nighttime these days, when most things are asleep, on standby, still, numb, dead.

So much of life feels slow lately – it might seem odd, but my body is glad.

As I write this letter to you two, y’all are likely laying, dreaming, as youngsters should.

And I smile, thinking about all the kinds of possibles and parallels that await yourselves.

But I cannot hold those thoughts for long, they keep getting interrupted.

My mind is dizzying out and I’m traumatised at the imminent dangers we face.

All of a sudden so many of the comics or videogames I’ve consumed feel evermore prophetic to what is happening now.

I was meant to write to you both for a long time.

But the world was moving too fast.

Growing up in that toxic grip, you race hard or fall behind with the dust.

Countless souls trying to bend against the fierce current.

Without an understanding of the elements.

Resulting in masses of petrified bodies crushed beneath the wave’s momentum.

I think that is the problem of living or growing in the old world.

To have to try to be strong always.

To have to be consistently resilient.

To have to be so elastic as to repel all attacks.

Born into a machine that will try to turn your lights out at the hint of any resistance to its ways.

Yet here all of a sudden, time as we know it has become formless.

And the great Big Ben folds slowly like marshmallow, melting and flowing into itself.

Who’d have thought a disease would have the power to freeze the clock?

September 2020

43

Reliquary Conceptual Imagery #2 and #4, 2020. Created by Larry Achiampong. Illustrated by Wumi Olaosebikan

ArtReview

44

I wonder how you two will look back at this moment in the future?

I don’t think it’s over by a long shot.

The next chapter in this comic is just getting written.

And nobody’s laughing. Cos they can’t see the boogieman.

How do so many governments have capital, stockpiles and contingency for war?

But no real plan to protect the people they serve in the event of a pandemic?

This disease doesn’t care who its victims are.

Our government and plenty others continue to put profit over people.

Convincing us to go to restaurants.

While poorer families dealt the worst conditions are left to fend for themselves.

If this year were to be thought of symbolically, maybe the disease has exposed truths that have been long buried underneath the carpet.

Truths that might not be able to live in the old world we inhabited.

I am worried. As if life wasn’t hard enough for us before.

We make 3% of this island nation’s population, but we’re 4 more times likely to die from this disease.

How can that be anything other than the legacy of racism manifested?

How can anybody argue that what is seen on social media day-to-day aren’t snuff films?

Why has this terror become a normality delivered by vultures parading as journalists on the high-definition screens we own?

And still, justice is not finding its way to black people?

September 2020

45

I haven’t seen you in many months because your mother and I agree that we don’t know the true potential of this thing – but I have to help your Nana, also.

She asks when she will see you again.

The authority told us not to worry for children, and yet children have died.

They told us not to worry for people with breathing problems in the beginning, and yet those with such issues have died.

Our doctors and nurses are getting protected by Blighty with claps.

And our elders are being sold down the river.

We have never experienced anything like this beyond the fourth wall.

What will you make of all that has happened in these last few months, let alone years to come? Are the years to come?

I can no longer dive too far forward; the future is a big blurry grey.

But I have to believe that somehow there is a way, or I will descend further into the sunken pit.

And so, I think about you two.

The Furious Ocean wraps itself around the Kid Mountain – the Dynamic Duo. Your names were equally born from coincidences that have marinated beautifully with time.

Our pride, our love, our joy stands in the two of you.

We carry the honour to share another moment in this life cycle.

Ironically as it may seem – learning of my fragility has brought the hope of freedom ever-present.

Where you and I come from, we know that we are not here forever, at least not in the flesh-based forms we are told to believe in here.

Before the planet began to tremble, so many of us lived in a way that we believed we might exist forever.

Perhaps the promise that we will return to the red earth in the cycle is too chilling to comprehend.

46

ArtReview

Reliquary Conceptual Imagery #3, 2020. Created by Larry Achiampong. Illustrated by Wumi Olaosebikan all images Courtesy the artist and Copperfield, London

There is so much more I want to say.

There are many teachings that I hope you learn from my failures.

I pray that there will be a future for that.

But nobody owns time.

Protect your mother.

Stand for black womxn.

None of this is possible without them.

I sit here smiling, at the memories of joyous antics and laughter that bursts from your souls, as you share your gaming sessions upon lava-imagined space-fuelled adventures.

And my heart bursts with the stars.

This is where I can breathe.

This is everything.

A balm to my aura.

I am calm. Serenaded.

I am ready.

We are ready.

September 2020

47

The State of Things to Come Scenarios under which contemporary art meets its end

by Liam Gillick and J.J. Charlesworth

j.j. charlesworth If we’re in a moment of crisis right now – both ‘artworld’ – that planet no one admits to being involved with but a in the artworld and in the social, economic and political world lot of people seem to land on at one time or another – has a general – there seem to be two differing responses to it: there are those who new crisis different from all the other ones in the world but also quite look anxiously to the breakdown or interruption of the economy, of similar. We can say there is a concrete economic crisis in the art market cultural institutions, of social life, and hope that we might find our and the major art institutions. This is also true elsewhere. Think of way back to the ‘old normal’. Then there are those who cheer on the the ‘crisis of tourism’, if it has such a name – and it is deeply related to disruption, since it appears to (inadvertently) serve the purpose of the stress at most large art institutions right now. The recent crisis at accelerating tendencies that were already pushing towards a crisis, the Basel watch fair is also related to an ongoing battle over the sites and in which the ‘old normal’ was anyway unsustainable, regardless of high-end capital exchange that predates the pandemic. I think it of the appearance of a virus. But either way, the sense that we’re at can be agreed that the circumstances that led to this artworld being the end of something, or at the beginning of something else, is hard formed in the first place closely track and reveal changes in advanced to escape. capitalism over time.

But before trying to think about where this might be headed, it’s I am sure some people would like to go back to the point where worth considering where we’ve just been. Periodising can be tricky, the only crisis worth writing about was the endless ‘crisis of criticism’. but it seems necessary now if only because, for better or worse, it This present crisis for the artworld is specific, economic and struclooks like many of the infrastructures that have characterised the tural but also happens to coincide with a moment of great potenartworld of the last decades may tial to change a lot about the way not survive this disruption. There’s things have been organised up to “When you mix up the economic crisis of now, at least here in the us, where been much argument in recent years art, the scientific crisis of communication the legal frameworks for nonprofits about what makes art contemporary art, and part of that is an arguhelp perpetuate a double pyramid of and the desire for concrete social change, ment about periodisation – was power and exclusion – which I will you get a very complicated moment of contemporary art what came out of come back to later. potential that is not easy to navigate” the 1960s, with the first challenges When you mix up the economic to an institutionalised Westerncrisis of art, the scientific crisis of dominated modernism? Or was it post-1989, with the end of the communication and the desire for concrete social change, you get a Cold War and the beginnings of globalisation? I’m tempted to say very complicated moment of potential that is not easy to navigate. that we’re at the end of the period of contemporary art, which for me is But let’s imagine that there is an important ‘artworld’ and its most aligned with the era of globalisation. It’s during this period survival is at risk. What art is made on this ‘artworld’? We know that that: international networks are regenerated and facilitated, by new the artworld is the place where contemporary art goes to live once it opportunities for travel, but also new forms of communication; the has been fabricated. And we know that the people who make this artworld economy expands along the lines of exchange opened up contemporary art are known as contemporary artists. The term by the expanding global economy, producing the mushrooming contemporary artist is very convenient, as it does not describe any of art fairs; and in which, in parallel, institutional temporality is specific type of art but alludes to a certain way of being in the world. wired to a critical practice of curatorial event-making – the spread of There are no written rules or manifestos for contemporary art. That’s the biennial and ‘large international exhibition’, which outruns and why it can be co-opted and manipulated but also used as a free-zone of then retrofits the models of museum institutions, which themselves potential for people who don’t think much about art at all. have proliferated.

I think it is important here to hone things down and look at the structures that are currently ‘in crisis’ and try and establish how that liam gillick I think we might agree that many people were happened. Is it a bad thing? Are we at the end or the beginning of already struggling to function in states of crisis for varied yet very something? Have the cultural elite just gone into hiding for a while? concrete political, social and historical reasons for a long time. The Is it not true that some people have made more money than ever this

48

ArtReview

year and the rich grown richer while the poor grow poorer? I don’t see to fairs and biennales. When those event states stop, the soup doesn’t much change there. stop being made. But the consumption of the soup, and the endless Let’s say that the system of production and reception that we think negotiation over whether it is good or bad or even soup at all, stops. of as the contemporary artworld is definitely a post-1989 product. Its So too do the endless exchanges that take place in the context of primorspaces of exchange scattered once the original models of the Basel and dial soup. The discourse around art since 1989 is not decisive. This is a Cologne art fairs and Documenta and the Venice Biennale multiplied legacy of critical theory and postmodernism. It is why art has potenand replicated themselves at various other centres throughout the tial and the artworld is so elusive and meandering. Contemporary world over the last 30 years. These two aspects of contemporary art art is the result of theory and feeds theory. Maybe in fact we do actuconsumption and distribution are often spoken of together – as if they ally have a crisis of criticism after all. Without recharged theoretical were interchangeable. The problem is that the two just show us the models we cannot discover the nature of the crisis. different extremes of art’s economy. The art fair is a simple market for exchange. Art fairs elude the artist as exhibition maker and with few jjc I’m glad we’re discussing the possibility of regenerating theoexceptions are indifferent to curatorial advances. The economy of the retical models, and of the ‘crisis of criticism’, even if in the face of the fair is driven by rental income from galleries and admission tickets other crises it may sound trivial. I suspect it’s fundamental. There’s a joke in a Victor Burgin essay from sold to the public. Serious collectors do not contribute to ticket the 1980s that goes, ‘We don’t know income, as they are invited as vips. who discovered water, but we’re pretty sure it wasn’t a fish’. It’s a Biennales tend to be run by a Lacanian joke about subjectivity foundation or a city or a specific nonprofit organisation and exist and discourse. But it also applies to within a specialised cultural policy the formation of institutions that to promote a place, region or are generated by discourse, which abstract set of more or less worthy then reproduce the discourse social desires. They often have and determine who gets to be ‘in’ heightened progressive social it. Maybe it’s analogous to your aspirations, and the invitation to ‘primordial soup’. But since we’re talking about the interruption of curate one usually involves making institutions that are sites where some accommodation with polidiscourse is constantly being negoticians and cultural leaders who tiated, included or excluded, it’s have their own agendas.

Why am I writing of fairs and worth noting that there was already biennales? The pandemic has a crisis of discourse in institutions brought fairs and biennales to a before this current crisis. What’s sudden halt. The contradiction energising about this moment of the two often opposing aspects (though it’s frightening too) is that, of each is that the specialist audisuddenly, the ‘primordial soup’ of ence for them is often the same. discourse you’re referring to has, The sudden arrest of the art fair for a while, stopped being mediand the biennale has halted the ated by this material economy of momentum of those who are above institutions. or beyond such things but have What the onetime debate over tended to gather at them regardthe ‘crisis of criticism’ tended to less. These flaneuristic stages have miss is that its crisis was really to been shunted into the future. do with a redistribution of who had And with that has gone informal institutional power over critical moments of exchange that are hard to account for. At the same time discourse in art – and how contemporary artistic production became ongoing traumas and structural defects in the organisational aspect institutionalised after the 1960s, as public institutions of art began of contemporary art have grown raw and clear. I would argue that to produce a continuous exhibition culture of contemporary producthe suspension of informality, constant travel and contemporary tion. It’s in this same period that artists became closely involved in the art’s traditional ‘accommodation’ of that which is new has helped to formation of critical discourse around their work. Artists do not leave bolster and clarify institutional problems that are hardly new. the business of meaning to critics anymore. These developments go Let’s try not to be cynical for a minute and imagine that there is some way to producing the institutional culture we’re familiar with, something like a real critical discourse around art itself outside of so that extensive critical production is now a permanent feature of the journals and academia. Often this discourse is not about art but the biggest curatorial-institutional projects and the most influenis actually the things around art – what leads to tial artists. This is why the ‘crisis of criticism’ first it and sloughs off it. This amoebic discourse is appears during the 1970s, since it is from then on Liam Gillick, A Depicted Horse Is Not a Critique that critical discourse relocates to the juncture of fed by the primordial soup of art as it is delivered of a Horse…, 2018, matt black vinyl on wall

September 2020

49

Liam Gillick, Neo-Classical Economics…, 2018, matt black vinyl on wall

50

ArtReview

reflexive artistic practice and a new economy of reflexive institutional presentation.

But now, all that more complex critical division of labour has become disconnected from the accumulated quarter-century of evolving artworld economies – the international entanglements of funding, curatorial career-building, patronage resources, art markets, cultural policies and so on – which have suddenly become very fragile.

So the virus crisis highlights the already existing crisis in discourse, which tended to be contained and moderated by the functioning of the system. The lockdown and the Black Lives Matter protests have accelerated the battle over radical discourse, throughout the shifting constituencies of artists, just as much as among now-malfunctioning institutions; the politics of race, workplace diversity, decolonisation and restitution may have surged into the public conversation in the lockdown months, but they were there already, along with other issues such as climate crisis. Only a few months ago the agenda was Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg, after all…

So the question for me is whether this will lead only to the replacement of one set of discourses with another, while leaving institutional hierarchies, power structures and patronage largely unaltered. Which opens back onto the question of what is ‘progressive’, both in institutional terms, and in the discourses legitimised by institutions.

What confuses the issue a little is that the American system has ways to relieve stress and allow for nonprofit activity that has a tendency to soften various blows. One aspect of the American way that allows a delicate truce to exist between established institutions and radical voices is what could be pictured as two pyramids tip to tip. The double pyramid exists as the structure of a small radical nonprofit but is also the organising principle of the Museum of Modern Art. The base of the first pyramid is all the workers, educators, installers, guards and administrators – those who have been sacked first due to covid-19. Further up are the various curators of differing ranks, and finally at the apex is the director. At that point a new inverted pyramid begins and balances delicately on the first. At the tip is the president of the board of trustees. This inverted pyramid widens as it goes up, with the executive committee and various other committees, until you get to the base at the top with all the ordinary board members and financial patrons.

This model is what will need to be changed. This will take legal brains and tax expertise, because the current model is synchronised with the entire system of nonprofit organisation. This moment of radical rethinking must go alongside the creation of new organisational models that can reimagine how things can function on a daily basis.

In a political sense America is also influential. Calls for change lg Lasting change will not be achieved unless some structural in the us are based on clearly expressible, widely perceivable strucaspects of the way contemporary art is disciplined and managed are tural inequalities that cannot be denied. The demands are not new.

They are supported by an extenaltered. There have been ‘turns’ in sive literature and exist in a critthe last 30 years where the system “As someone who’s instinctively suspicious ical historically conscious context. was tested. We have seen the rise The clarity of American inequality of the curator – in the contempoof institutional power, and how it allows it to be perceived as a strucrary sense. The rise of research and assimilates once-radical energies, I think tural potential applicable to other the documentary as a model, and you’re right that institutions have to contexts with unique histories. But stressed battles over participatory practice. These ‘turns’ have generchange. Maybe, though, the change is that I am concerned that without new legal frameworks nothing lasting ally been intended to carve out new they have to disappear” semiautonomous zones of activity will come of this potential opportuthat bypassed accepted disciplinary nity. The pyramids will remain tip structures of the established artworld – sidestepping instead of to tip and the foundational assumptions about how art functions fundamentally changing. A good example might be the educa- as an economy will remain in place. This is not a question of private tional turn from the mid-1990s onwards with the establishment versus state funding; it is about organisation and the creation of of various free art schools, exhibitions as sites of education, and new models. general appropriation and redirection of educational models. It was a way to make more direct contact with a public rather than confer jjc If you’re right that there’s a legal-institutional formula to this, this model has evolved out of the economic conditions of the last with a specialist audience.

In relation to the idea of real change, we need to look at the way 30 years. But what’s in the institutions is the effect of the normalithings are currently organised and try and understand what could sation of a 50-year trajectory of ‘radical’ art. It is a historical period, be done instead. It is interesting that the two economically stressed and its dynamic period of contestation and assimilation is over, aspects of the artworld’s economy, the biennale and the art fair, are and its unresolved issues – of minority culture contradicting elite weakly expressed in the us. But what is happening right now is very culture, of its feudal organisation modes contradicting its commitmuch affected by American modes, habits and structural inequalities. ments to progressive politics – all seem to be pulling in opposite The American context is influential in two ways. America’s general directions. As someone who’s instinctively suspicious of institutional model of capitalism is incredibly powerful, particularly its enduring power, and how it assimilates once-radical energies, I think you’re consumer culture, of which art is just an elite part. At the same time right that institutions have to change. Maybe, though, the change is the country appears to have waned in terms of political influence. The that they have to disappear. What I see at the moment is a lot of big structuring of the grand economy of art is hypercapitalist in a way organisations, run by small cliques of senior managers and patrons that follows American principles of consumption. It would be point- who, having steadily lost view of their cultural or social mission, are less to call for change in such a simple system without changing the frantically trying to accommodate and recuperate the chaotic energies coursing through society outside. My worry is that this response whole of society – as many are demanding.

September 2020

51

above Liam Gillick, First Fully Automated Production Line…, 2018, matt black vinyl on wall

52

facing page Liam Gillick, Means of Consumption…, 2018, matt black vinyl on wall

ArtReview

will only result in the installing of another cadre of favoured artists, curators, senior managers, funders and patrons to replace the old ones.

At some point, we’ll have to ask whether there are not other formations of artists and supporters that could take shape elsewhere; something that isn’t the intensely hierarchical structure you’ve described (which, by odd coincidence, replicates all the worst characteristics of neoliberal societies – an insulated propertied elite, an interfacing managerial class and a wider population whose common experience is underemployment and precarity). But this may require a very different vision of the purpose of artistic activity, and of the nature of cultural freedom in an increasingly unfree society. Maybe it just takes a board of trustees to say, ‘This isn’t working. Let’s shut it down and maybe try something else.’

Somehow I doubt that. It would make more sense for artists to say this first. And then your question of ‘what constitutes a contemporary artist’ is up for grabs again.

that allows the closure of art departments in schools and universities that are otherwise costly to run and offer little in return that can easily be financialised or assessed. This process is a bit like the selling-off of school sports facilities that happened in Britain 30 or so years ago. Having a dedicated art department in a college or school suddenly seems a throwback to an earlier moment when competition was valued more than cooperation, and individual creativity was rewarded in a winner-takes-all way.

Art in its new contemporary form is about as relevant as some arcane forms of rock music would have seemed to a punk. The idea of teaching it without the ability to truly dedicate time to the supersubjective potential of any artist now seems laughable and impossible. Contemporary art becomes another historical style with a specific history for study – alongside Rococo and Fauvism. Art fairs become sales conferences akin to those that take place with new technology – selling systems, complexes and educational tools. Biennales become massive conferences where papers are read and poetry is recited on any subject that can be imagined.

Art as a material practice continues of course, but on a financial footing more familiar in the world of poetry today. And here is a parallel. In the 1950s and early 1960s, to be a poet was to operate within a world with self-described infinite freedom to tell a truth, and with that the ability to command respect. Those artists who filled the contemporary artworld in the last 20 years are no worse than any of the people who headed towards the Village or Haight-Ashbury in the 1950s and 60s, and no less deluded. At that time to be a poet was the thing.

It was a way of suggesting access to a world of ideas with little control or discipline, and even brought a little danger. The bloated indulgent onanistic rock star of the early 1970s begins as a poet and mutates into a coked-up Dionysian peacock before shrinking away once more. In this scenario the artist regresses in the face of infinite examination and resorts to showing their work to each other in some endless drunken studio visit. As the potential of poetry and status of poets declined over time, poetry remained. But its makers went back to what they had always been doing. They wrote poems and they talked to each other about them. They published them. And sometimes people read them. ar

lg During this exchange I wrote three different scenarios. I wanted to discount simple ideas – such as everything going back to the way it was. The first two were somewhat extreme, involving new viral strains, blindness, anger and selfdestruction. The final scenario seems less extreme in retrospect, where the virus and the calls for change are met by demographic shifts and political opportunism.

The final scenario is that a combination of things happen to the contemporary art system that has very little to do with covid-19 or the oppressive nature of white supremacy. Three different factors result in the complete diminution of the contemporary art complex.

Firstly a generation of people born between 1945 and 1960 begin to die in larger numbers. This is just what happens. It’s to do with the aging process and nothing to do with the virus. It is this generation who have been the collectors of contemporary art, and they begin to disappear. Along with them the last of the Baby Boomers, born in the early 1960s, start to leave their jobs in the cultural sphere and think of other ways to occupy themselves under a calmer tea-candle.

The remaining specific audiences for art – both producers and users – energise themselves in many different ways. Generally the spaces of contemporary art are now used for discussion and education rather than the display of complex installations or art-historical gags. This attracts more government funding and increasing official support, as it also begins all images Courtesy the artist to provide a parallel education system for art and Kerlin Gallery, Dublin

September 2020

Liam Gillick: It should feel like unicorns are about to appear is on show at Alfonso Artiaco, Naples, from 10 September to 24 October

53

The Art of Sara Cwynar

by Chris Fite-Wassilak

above Virginia from ssense.com in the Pink Rose Prada Skirt, 2020, metallic c-print mounted on Dibond, 76 Ă— 61 cm

54

facing page Tracy (Grid 3), 2017, pigment print mounted on Dibond, 76 Ă— 97 cm

ArtReview

True Colours and Bodies of Influence

Or how to hold on to a sense of yourself in this supersaturated sensory world September 2020

55

Odds are, you’re reading this on a screen. Maybe it’s late, and your and confusions of the superficial sensory world; but, Cwynar’s film phone or computer’s colour-temperature app has kicked in, giving seems to ask, how do we actually accept that task? the screen an orangey-yellow tint. Or you’re staring this down on You might call Red Film an essay film, or an audiovisual collage; a page through glasses or contact lenses of some fashion. Maybe a heartfelt, neurotic lecture; a feminist manifesto; a jumbled, extended you’ve had corrective eye surgery, or you’re relying on the unaltered elevator pitch; or a surreal, ironic advertisement. Or it is all of these lenses you’ve already got in your eyeballs. Your led daylight things. It starts off coherently enough: “I’m talking about American bulbs, imperceptibly dimmed, cast a cold light on the page. The patterns,” a male voice promises at the start. “And French painters,” point is that there’s no way for this text to reach you directly. There a female voice quickly adds. A set of four dancers, dressed in red is no unfiltered access. This isn’t a outfits, fingernails painted a vibrant secret, but it is something we are red, dip, bow and sway. He goes on: The point is that there’s no way for this pretty handy at ignoring, whether “I am talking about the new woman, it’s reading or watching a film, and a pattern which was invisible text to reach you directly. There is no or, say, interacting with other huunfiltered access. This isn’t a secret, but it is to the subjects when they lived it.”

But as the film quickly reels on, it mans. We’re pretending that we’re something we are pretty handy at ignoring, turns out that’s the closest we’ll piercing through life’s layers, get to an explanation. We’re left perceiving things properly, accuwhether it’s reading or watching a film, awash in lush imagery and verbose, rately, truly. Sara Cwynar’s short or, say, interacting with other humans Red Film (2018) doesn’t let us ignore momentary insights that are offered this: it’s all filter. Over 13 minutes, up only to be swept away by the two narrators barrage us with an overlapping tangle of thoughts on next, sometimes so quickly they overlap: “My mobile body makes a beauty, visibility and experiencing ‘the new’. They speak over snip- difference in the visible world”. “Nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian pets of imagery from various stages of product development in the face.” A parade of bodies and products flashes by, including a rotating beauty and advertising industries: makeup factories; a photography bottle with ‘Red Roses’ written in gold on it, filled with some viscous, studio teeming with shoes, perfume bottles and jewellery boxes; a vermilion liquid; a pink suede shoe; a red convertible; a woman set of women having makeup applied, posing or dancing; a printing having blush applied repeatedly to her cheek. Occasionally, Cwynar press. Everything is infused with intense greens, blues and, yes, reds. herself will appear, red-faced and apparently hanging upside down, loosely lip-synching to the voiceover. “There’s “A human being, a flower, a language, all have nothing you could have done differently,” she the task of wearing colour,” one narrator states Rose Gold (still), 2017, 16mm enigmatically. We live bound up in the facades mimes badly. “You are discovering yourself.” film transferred to video (colour, sound), 8 min

56

ArtReview

There’s a warm, faded tinge to all the footage, shot as it is on 16mm something; it’s just that all we’re ever seeing is another approximacelluloid and transferred to digital video. The haze adds to the famili- tion, and that the shadow’s caress is as close as we can ever get. arity of how it all sweeps over you, with the glamorous nonsense of Red Film is of a piece with Cwynar’s other film and photographic a makeup ad, and the sweeping breeziness of a car ad, and through works: meticulously staged, dripping with analogue nostalgia, overthis stream of hyperconsciousness we might be able to pluck out some flowing with ephemera that looks like it was forgotten in the back sense of what we’re actually being sold. Maybe you’d be interested in of your grandmother’s dresser for years. What look like mood boards a set of moisturisers and mascara that all bear the name Cezanne, or for photoshoots become works in themselves, and the trappings and a turquoise shade of eyeliner, or an idea that starts to unravel some staging of the photoshoots become another means of framing, say, of the basic premises of advertising a discussion of a colour trend in Rose and photography. “Remember that Gold (2017), or, as with Red Film, to try The faded photographs, the 1970s title font, and think about how we make sense all scanners and digital cameras have problems with highly satuof anything in a world of appearthe celluloid colour grading, all seem like ances and hyperrealities. Cwynar rated reds,” we’re told at one point. a means to indicate a deliberate distance, manages to combine a preinternet A pair of lips fills the screen, as to ask us to recognise that we, too, are demeanour with the overloaded bright red lipstick is applied with feeling of social-media browsing, a brush. “I’m telling you that these situated in a particular time that will, not with snippets of imagery and opinreds are not real.” The titular colour long from now, appear equally outdated of the film, it turns out, is a standions flying around you; some stick, in, an approximation. The realisasome just whizz by. The emphasis tion of this accumulates as the film progresses, as you watch Cwynar on older media – the faded photographs, the 1970s font of the titles, pose, deadpan, alongside a car, slowly caressing its headrests and door the celluloid colour grading – also seems like a means to indicate a handles. Watching rolls of printouts of paintings being folded over deliberate distance, to ask us to recognise that we, too, are situated in a each other, and then several framed paintings being wheeled out for particular time that will, not long from now, appear equally outdated. photographing, a hand holding out a light meter in front of them, only “Yes,” the female narrator admits, “I am looking for a shortcut drives it home further. We see most things indirectly, through repro- through the complexity and conditions of historicity of my own age; ductions, reprints and renditions. At one point, a woman’s hand hovers yes, there is some nostalgia here. I’m just trying to be my best self.” across Rubens’s Massacre of the Innocents (1612), Turns out your best self is made of many people its shadow caressing the painting. It’s not that anyway, as the closing credits reel off a 20-strong Red Film (still), 2018, 16mm these versions aren’t real – we are experiencing list of writers and thinkers whose words help film transferred to video (colour, sound), 13 min

September 2020

57

above Red Film (stills), 2018, 16mm film transferred to video (colour, sound), 13 min

58

facing page Louis Vuitton Jeff Koons Rubens bag, 2020, archival pigment print mounted on Dibond, 76 Ă— 91 cm

ArtReview

make up the script: Boris Groys, Bjørnar Olsen, Susan Stewart, Sylvia Wynter and a fair chunk of psychoanalytic and postmodern bigwigs, a ventriloquist’s collage of cultural commentary.

Red Film throws us into a sea of tchotchkes and stuff, awash with competing ideas, veering between, on the one hand, an idealistic hope for a democracy of choice and abundance, and, on the other, a more cynical wariness of drowning in the deluge. During the late 1960s, Italian-born Brazilian architect Lina Bo Bardi devised a display system for her open-plan designs for the São Paulo Museum of Art: concrete blocks, with glass panes that would hold paintings and drawings to face the viewer, with information on the back. The idea was to force viewers to look first, but also enable most other things hung in the room to be visible at the same time, to democratise art history. Cwynar’s incessant pans over layers of postcards and photos, conveyor belts of trinket boxes and toiletry bottles, hold the same levelling impulse: we each accumulate our own museum, a concise art history of its own, in our drawers and shelves. But the relentless commercialism of Cwynar’s subjects also implies a stasis, getting stuck in all that junk. In 2001 Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas wrote a gnomic text coining the idea of ‘junkspace’, describing the sort of ad hoc mallification of landscape that was taking over, the unthoughtout actuality that fills the majority of the built environment, ‘what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout’. Both Bo

Bardi’s pan-temporal vision and Koolhaas’s facile despair feel relevant here, not only as outdated ideas that still manage to have a pull and resonance to them, but also in describing physical spaces to be navigated, a problem that the film constantly poses: among such a jumbled accumulation, how do we each make our own way?

On the surface, Red Film seems to offer a touchy-feely solution to this in the tactile pleasures of the body. “The body is still centre, a constant measure,” we are told, as the dancers gather around one of their number, removing her red overcoat. Our final message before the film ends is simply, “The human body conserves itself. So does the society.” Though, despite this insistence, the thing that looks most fleshy, most bodily and real in this film, is the makeup: thick glops being squirted into pots on the conveyor belt, a brittle, leathery hide churning out of a machine, a tonguelike glistening slug of some product sitting on a roller. The last shot is of a splodge of thick red liquid, running slowly down a tray, like blood. This gloopy mass of dark red – burning into our retinas and still ungraspable – this, the film suggests, is our actual body, an artifice made up of shadow play, this imaginary red stuff pulsing rampant through our eyes and veins.

A body, built out of superficiality, that runs on the octane fumes of the anxiety of influence, for whom wearing colour is the only task. ar Chris Fite-Wassilak is a writer and critic based in London

all images © the artist.

Courtesy The Approach, London; Cooper Cole, Toronto; and Foxy Production, New York

September 2020

59

Trevor Paglen in Full Bloom Interview by En Liang Khong

How covid-19 has changed the way we look at the world 60

ArtReview

From training his astro-telescopic lenses on military bases (Limit Telephotography, 2005–), to launching an artificial star into outer space (Orbital Reflector, 2018), Trevor Paglen has always been fascinated by the politics of ‘looking’, the weaponisation of technology and alternative futures. Much of the artist’s recent body of work has turned to the ways in which our world is increasingly governed by forms of machine vision and data extraction – often, machines seeing for other machines – from facial-recognition technology to social-media advertising. It’s a throughline running across his new exhibitions at Pace Gallery, London, and at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

are used to being able to do that, in a way.

Having a sense of control, or at least guidance, regarding the relationship between an image and what its meaning is. During this time, there are such larger forces at play, determining the meaning of things: it feels like trying to swim in the middle of a giant storm, and all the waves are 50 feet high. Good luck with you deciding what you want things to be! ar The pandemic has also laid bare all kinds of inequalities – today, a scandal is breaking in

artreview Has lockdown changed the way in which you make art? trevor paglen I guess some artists are people who like to hang out in their studios and weren’t necessarily bothered one way or another. But I’m the exact opposite – so much of my work is going out, travelling places, looking at things and talking to people. That all became impossible. So, on the one hand, the logistics of the work had to change a lot.

The other part of it is that the things you’re thinking about change a lot. This time has been many, many things, but in terms of making art, it’s been a moment at which there’s been a huge change in the way that images mean things. Some small examples of that might be: suddenly an aeroplane in the sky takes on a different meaning; suddenly a handle of a gas pump takes on a different meaning; suddenly a runner speeding past you means something different. There’s a massive change in your relationship to the world around you, in terms of what kinds of associations you have, and in the meanings that you ascribe to different things and different kinds of images.

Working within that context is really intense – certainly in the way I approach making art, which means finding things that are familiar and then subtly shifting those connotations around. I think all of us, as artists,

the uk over students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds being awarded downgraded results following the cancellation of final exams, through an algorithm that determines grades according to schools’ historic results. And it reminded me of your work, which often examines the inequalities

facing page Bloom (#7f595e), 2020, dye sublimation print, 137 × 103 cm above Bloom (#7d5c52), 2020, dye sublimation print, 234 × 175 cm

September 2020

that are baked into these datasets and their damaging real-life implications. tp Yes, so the algorithm consistently overrides the human scores assigned to those kids.

For me, it’s been an intense time of, on the one hand, fear, and on the other hand, mourning.

Being in New York, there’s what you talked about – these inequalities laid so bare, and producing so much senseless suffering and death, visceral, nonabstractable. And then being disconnected from other people, with the only forms of connection through extremely mediated platforms such as Zoom or social media.

These are platforms that are basically weaponised against you, which are preying on your social interactions and transforming that sociability, mining and extracting value from it.

I guess the culmination of these factors is what’s behind how my new body of work came together. In the middle of all of this, in New York, especially in April and May, you’re totally locked down and you can’t interact with other people.

And at the same time, you’re afraid of the material world – as if all of its infrastructure is against you, in some way. But it’s quiet. You’re hearing sounds that you haven’t heard before.

Nature in springtime is blooming – it’s crazy, those smells and colours, partly perhaps because you’re not going outside very much. All of those sensory experiences are so much more intense. For me, it was looking at that, and thinking about flowers and art history. If you’d told me ten years ago that I’d be doing a show about flowers, I’d look at you as if you were out of your mind. The biggest cliché! But yes, flowers and skulls – these are the themes running through Bloom, the exhibition at Pace. Historically, these have been intensely allegorical images. ar The seventeenth-century vanitas painting tradition…

61

Bloom (#7b5e54), 2020, dye sublimation print, 66 ×50 cm

62

Bloom (#79655d), 2020, dye sublimation print, 66 × 50 cm

63

tp Yes, exactly. Even looking at baroque allegorical paintings and then at this moment, feeling very baroque, very dark at the same time. So I’ve been working with flowers and that tradition of imagery: life, fragility and death. And thinking about that in relation to ai, and the role of technology now, in how it shapes how we interpret things, shaping our sociability, shaping how we interact with each other culturally and politically. ar So in Bloom (2020), there’s this idea of machine vision, looking at flowers through the eyes of a system?

on social media, and then try to model your personality, which is used in everything from marketing to law enforcement.

And there is a larger theme in the exhibition that is about standardisation, and what kinds of abstractions are made of the world by technological systems. The Standard Head (2020) looks at the history of facial recognition. It’s specifically looking at the first attempt to do facial recognition with a computer, done by a guy named Woody Bledsoe during the 1960s – all funded by the cia. One way of doing facial

tp I’m taking photographs of flowers, and then using ai systems that do what’s called ‘deep saliency’. They are trying to use artificial intelligence algorithms to interpret what is going on in an image, to infer what the different kinds of objects are in an image, what the different kinds of textures are in an image and trying to figure out how closely related they are to each other. The colours and the images are coming from ai systems that are trying to interpret what the different parts of the image are.

ar And the exhibition will also be streamed online?

ar Similar to the ‘training sets’ your work has used before. tp It’s built on training sets. So these are ai networks that are trained on sets of thousands of different kinds of images, and then to use those sets to say: this is a flower, this is a leaf, this is a branch; this is a hard texture, this is soft, this is smooth.

And those neural networks are used to distinguish what the particular parts of an image are. ar Other artworks also look further back into the histories of these predictive models. tp There’s a skull, The Model (Personality) (2020), done in the manner of late-nineteenthcentury phrenology, a practice in which people would equate different parts of a person’s skull with different parts of their personality.

I’m looking at that in relation to personality models built into ai systems, such as ibm’s Watson, which will analyse pictures of you, analyse text that you’ve generated, your likes

64

model of a human head that he called ‘The Standard Head’.

That standardised face is just a mathematical abstraction of what a human face looks like. I was able to get hold of Bledsoe’s archives (through my friend, the researcher Stephanie Dick), of the measurements of ‘the standard head’, which I was able to reproduce in a three-dimensional model – this fictional, abstracted head that is the basis for the sculpture. I’ve been thinking about the origins of these standardisations, the cornerstones upon which these technologies are built.

recognition is you basically map out all the features of somebody’s face, as if it were a fingerprint – the corner of the eye, the corner of the nose, the mouth – you map out all these key points, or facial landmarks, and then you see what is the proportion of all of these landmarks to each other. Bledsoe created all of these keypoints in reference to an abstract Bloom (#a8866d), 2020, dye sublimation print, 137 × 103 cm

ArtReview

tp There’s this whole other part of the show, Octopus (2020), which is thinking about the situation we’re in. What does it mean to do an exhibition under these circumstances? Normally you do an exhibition, it’s assumed you go to the space, you see the show and a photographer documents it and that goes online. You see the ‘documentation’ online. Well, what if we thought about the exhibition neither being entirely in the space, nor entirely online, and use that as a foundational principle for thinking about what an exhibition is? So, what we did was take the equipment from a project I’ve been doing with the Kronos Quartet called Sight Machine (2017), which is a performance where we have all these cameras in a wild, crazy computer-vision system that surrounds the musicians. We adapted that and thought: what if we made an exhibition that was conceived of as being online in the first place? But not how art fairs have been building 3d models which you walk through. We’ll use streaming cameras as a paradigm.

When the show opens there will be 20 different cameras installed throughout the space, and the cabling comes from the ceiling.

If you go into the exhibition space, you’ll see cameras and cables coming from above, like a jungle. And all of those cameras are streaming

‘de Beauvoir’ (Even the Dead Are Not Safe) Eigenface (colorized), 2019, dye sublimation print, 122 × 122 cm

September 2020

65

ac, 2020, pigment on textile, 46 × 46 cm

66

ArtReview

images of the space onto a website, where you can see all these different views in real-time.

Some of the cameras are using object detection and tracking people walking around the space, which you can view from the online platform.

But the online platform will also ask you for permission to use your camera, which will then, with your permission, stream you onto monitors in the exhibition space – so visitors will look up and see the faces of people online looking at the exhibition. It will be really weird; it will feel like you’re in a model. I’m trying to play with this stuff about where the exhibition is – which is indicative of our times.

how to see a particular person. For example, Facebook has some of the best facial recognition in the world. Why? Because they have everybody’s pictures, and because everyone has labelled their pictures. So, to vastly oversimplify, say there are 10 pictures of you that your friends have dutifully tagged as belonging to you – Facebook will take these and abstract them into a metaportrait of you. And then take all the other portraits of other humans in the world. But what I do is take your metaportrait, and then subtract what you have in common with all the other metaportraits. What I’m left with is a portrait that is a signature of your face.

ar You’re also working on Opposing Geometries at the Carnegie Museum of Art, which continues this work you’re undertaking into machine vision. tp The Carnegie show is based on looking at the works I’ve done around computer vision systems and ai over the last decade, and their different approaches. Over the years, at my studio, we’ve essentially written a programming language that we can use to take images, or videos, and then look at them through the eye of a selfdriving car, or a guided missile, or a facial recognition system. And then it will draw a picture or representation of what that computer vision system is ‘seeing’ in a particular image.

A number of works reinterpret classical Western landscapes, which think about the relation between photography and colonialism, technology and power. And those are questions that are everywhere in this history of photography – so thinking about how you update those questions for computer-vision systems, which I personally think of as a kind of photography, actually. A kind of autonomous interpretation of photography.

Another thing we can do with this programming language is extract from computer-vision systems the images or models that the system is building for itself, in order to understand other kinds of images. In some versions of facial recognition systems, it will be trained, ‘taught’,

Samuel Beckett, all titled Even the Dead Are Not Safe (2017).

It’s interesting. One would imagine that you would end up with something very angular, or very sharp. In fact, the opposite is the case.

You end up with something very ghostly looking, very impressionistic. And the reason for that is that you’re seeing distributions of properties or values. In the metaportrait of your face, the region around your eyes is actually not a super-specific point as far as the metaportrait is concerned – it’s a range of distributions: most likely to be this proportion, a little bit less likely to be this proportion, could be this proportion.

It’s all gradients-based with different probabilistic values of where different things will be.

But when you translate that into an image you get something very blurry. ar It feels like there’s a connecting line – that haziness – from the clunky, racist classifications doled out by the facial recognition in your work ImageNet Roulette (2019), and even back to your earlier blurred photographs of drones speeding across night skies.

ar And what do you see? tp I did a series of works, training facial recognition software on the faces of revolutionary philosophers and artists, and making portraits of them based on this system. In the Carnegie exhibition, there’s a portrait of Simone de Beauvoir, as modelled by a facial recognition system, for example, and of Frantz Fanon, Sight Machine (performance still), 2017, performance in collaboration with Kronos Quartet and Obscura, Pier 70, San Francisco all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery, London

September 2020

tp I think, especially with the machine-vision work, but perhaps through all my work, so much of it is about uncertainty, and what meaning is, how meanings are generated.

What is an image, and what does an image say?

For me, that is a fundamentally unanswerable question and I think that’s where those forms of blurriness, physically and metaphorically, come from. The denial of that uncertainty is the bedrock of a lot of the ai and computer vision out there. And the denial of that uncertainty is weirdly where a lot of the politics of computer vision come from. It’s that fixing of meaning and that classifying of people; attributing certainty to things that are, fundamentally, amorphous. ar Trevor Paglen, Bloom, runs at Pace Gallery, London, from 10 September to 10 November 2020.

Opposing Geometries, at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, is on view from 4 September to 14 March

67

Really Poor Art When Germano Celant coined the term ‘arte povera’ during the late 1960s, he was calling for a cultural rebellion. Can a ‘poor art’ be retrieved and adapted to fit a new revolution today?

by Ben Eastham

In ‘Notes on a Guerrilla War’, published shortly after the 1967 exhibition that introduced Arte Povera to the world, Germano Celant called for a cultural rebellion. Artists had been reduced to the status of ‘jesters’ turning out ‘commercial merchandise’ to satisfy demand, wrote the show’s curator, and so a new form of art must elevate the individual above ‘cogs in a machine’. The ‘poor artist’ would resist the dehumanising logics of mass production, self-promotion and market branding; he would be committed to ‘contingency, to events, to the non-historical, to the present’; he would employ the guerrilla tactics of unpredictability, surprise and inconsistency; he would break the rules and, in doing so, break the system.

The heroic style, homocentric in both meanings of the word, is typical of the late 1960s. Yet from the midst of our own crises, Celant’s rhetoric reads against its leftist intentions, summoning the terminology of disruption, deregulation and dismantlement now associated with rightwing populism. We are living through the dissolution of systems from social democracy to juridical independence; the ‘will of the people’ has been reclaimed by the libertarian right and ‘freedom’ by corporate multinationals reluctant to contribute to the societies in which they operate. Masculinist fantasies of individual self-reliance have in recent decades soured into something more toxic. When Celant writes that ‘the important thing for [Jannis] Kounellis is to focus on the fact that Kounellis is alive and the rest of the world can go to hell’, my mind drifts, as it too often does, into speculations on how many times Dominic Cummings was humiliated at school to make him so desperate to take his revenge on the world in adulthood.

When the social structures being disassembled are in most cases those that constrain the privileged and protect the weak, and in the context of ecological collapse and species extinction, Celant’s call on artists to test the ‘breaking point’ of ‘the world itself’ rings cheap.

Progressive revolution is today framed in terms of collaboration, intersection, cross-connection, preservation and community, and so you wonder whether the ‘poor art’ that Celant championed is set to join its Italian predecessor Futurism in the category of movements that should have been more careful when wishing for the total annihilation of the structures – from state education to social security – that made it possible in the first place.

68

Yet there remains much in his formulation of a ‘poor art’ that is worth redeeming from the attitudes of its era and reconstituting for our own. Like the ‘poor theatre’ of Jerzy Grotowski, from which it took inspiration, Celant’s poor art would divest itself of the fripperies (lavish stage design in the first case, overblown production costs in the second) that made the practice of art seem inaccessible to all but a wealthy elite. Using ephemeral materials and industrial or craft processes with which a large part of the working population were familiar, it would radically reform the means and metrics by which we attribute value to objects and experiences. As we enter another period of social and economic crisis, in which the systems maintaining contemporary art’s value come under unsupportable strain, those principles are worth revisiting. Not to break the system, which needs no helping hand, but to imagine what a new one might look like. How might we reimagine how, to what and to whom we ascribe value? When the money runs out and the museums are impoverished, what might a ‘poor art’ look like?

Ten years ago, Hito Steyerl wrote an essay in defence of the ‘poor image’, a compressed, corrupted and shareable jpeg that, through its free circulation, might create an ‘alternative economy’. It is, by her analogy, a ‘lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances’: unassimilated, grey market and disruptive. The illegal circulation of these easily reproducible images functions like the samizdat publications through which dissent was spread in authoritarian societies, and so the ‘poor image’ is a means of moving disobedient information through unofficial networks. As Steyerl celebrates the jpeg, so Jace Clayton (better known as dj/rupture) states in a 2016 essay that his favourite type of music is ‘the 128kps mp3’. Like the lo-res jpeg, this is a file size compressed so that it can be attached to email, making possible the revolution in musical production and distribution that all but brought down the record industry in the first decade of the century. The medium, when the preferred type of music is the format by which it travels, becomes the content.

The processes of assemblage, collage and remixing that jpegs and mp3s make possible seem at first like a good model for a poor art.

The ubiquity of video- and music-editing software makes possible the participation of a much larger group of producers, the materials are cheap and the means of distribution are outside official channels. Indeed, it has become conventional wisdom, following the

ArtReview

An effigy of Dominic Cummings, chief adviser to the uk prime minister, as puppet master, People’s Vote march, London, October 2019. Photo: Clem Rutter

September 2020

69

CĂŠline Condorelli, 2014 (installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2014). Photo: Andy Keate.

Commissioned by Chisenhale Gallery for How to work together, a shared project with The Showroom and Studio Voltaire, both London

70

ArtReview

theories around appropriation first aired during the 1980s, that these their homes and put them to someone else’s work. A poor art today, processes of piracy and exchange unsettle established categories of if it is to be faithful to the idea of elevating rather than taking advaneconomic and cultural value, and that unexpected combinations tage of popular forms, must then actively redirect attention onto the generate hybrid forms that speak to a multicultural, polyvocal vision histories and structures that shape its production. of the world. So, is this what a poor art looks like?

If, as Steyerl writes, the poor image ‘tends towards abstraction’ One problem is that my own access to, let’s say, contemporary Arabic through its physical degeneration and cultural decontextualisation, polyrhythms is still being mediated by Clayton, a writer, artist and then the task of the artist might be to regenerate and recontextuglobetrotting dj who seeks out new sounds in Moroccan flea markets alise it. To embody rather than abstract, to enrich rather than exploit. and incorporates them into his own work. Rather than consign to Clayton redresses the balance by writing at length about where he history issues of authorship, intellectual copyright and cultural capital, finds his music and the cultures from which it emerges, and in doing as once seemed possible, the internet era has exposed the imbalances so offers a new or complementary idea of what a poor art might look of a supposedly level playing field. The author might be dead, but his like: it returns attention and value to the producers, to those whose reincarnation as treasure hunter and remixer brings its own issues. The labour is ignored or effaced, it privileges context and backstory. responsibility of artists to acknowledge their sources has, moreover, Let’s take Sondra Perry’s hd video and animation in the game ‘17 taken on fresh urgency as the politics of appropriation and ownership or Mirror Gag for Vitrine and Projection (2017), which grew out of the expeshapes the new culture wars. rience of the artist’s brother. A college Steyerl recognises that an ecoA poor art must not deny the system but basketball player in the United States, his identity was expropriated by a vidnomy in which images, people and doggedly draw our attention to it. It is eogame publisher for use as an avatar money move across borders is not a by this that we learn what must be swept in a sports game. Perry plays on the utopian field of perfectly free movement but based on ‘violent dislocaaway and what we must fight to protect fact that a simulacrum of her brothtion, transferrals, and displacement’; er’s body – and it is pertinent that it poor images are like poor people trafficked, exploited and denied is a young Black man’s body – is anonymised and alienated from the their rights to further enrich an elite. If the ‘poor art’ of Steyerl and value it generates. Perry’s art works to reconnect the two, telling the Clayton seemed to move beyond the heroic individualism exalted by histories of those bodies transformed into images in order to serve the Celant, it still leaves us in a situation where a named artist receives entertainment industry. If this is a poor art, then it consists in alerting the traditional garlands of originality, authenticity and genius while the viewer to the means by which value is created and distributed and standing on the shoulders of unacknowledged others. works against the tendency to abstraction that Steyerl identified.

The materials incorporated into digital video collages or music The research-laden work of artists including James Bridle, Trevor remixes are divested of their historical and cultural contexts in Paglen and John Gerrard documents the ‘heaviness’ of digital culture order to facilitate their entry into a hybrid form and dematerial- – its underwater cables, data centres and drones – drawing attenised economy. The risk is that this process denies or effaces the lived tion to invisible infrastructures in order to highlight that the human experience that created that sound or image in the first place, as both cost of maintaining it is unevenly distributed. Everything has a cost, Clayton and Steyerl acknowledge: the cultural history of Arabic pop and the ideal of perfect freedom is a function of privilege rather than reduced to a snappy cut in a diverse mix. To compress songs into a rejection of it. The light touch of Céline Condorelli’s 2014 exhibition snippets of digital information and move them around the world is at Chisenhale Gallery took a different tack to a similar end. Functional to abstract them from their contexts, to forcibly remove them from pieces of furniture – benches, stepladders – were repurposed as props

John Gerrad, Farm (Council Bluffs, Iowa), 2015.

Courtesy the artist, Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Simon Preston Gallery, New York

September 2020

71

Martin Creed, Work No. 227: The lights going on and off, 2000 (installation view, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007). Š the artist. All rights reserved, dacs 2020.

Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London

72

ArtReview

for performance and plinths for display. Foregrounding the ‘poor’ elements of our physical environment, the artist created a space for congregation and conversation rather than the solitary deliberation of auratic objects.

The effect of Condorelli’s intervention was to establish an analogy between the disregarded infrastructures of physical support – lights, chairs, bookcases – and the forms of emotional and communal support that they facilitate: friendship, interpersonal exchange, communication. If this resembles a more familiar version of poor art as cheap to produce, ad hoc and contingent, its attention to the structures on which it depends distinguishes it from the ‘break things’ machismo of its predecessor. Condorelli highlights the intangible but absolutely essential structures of care, community and fellow-feeling on which society is founded, and asks us to work to maintain them.

This focus on what is neglected offers an alternative way of reading as well as making art. Martin Creed’s Work No. 227: The lights going on and off (2000) might seem like an odd fit here, typically being figured as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of the principles of conceptualism and minimalism, staging an idea totally stripped of historical and cultural context. Yet this flickering light was first installed as a consciously annoying intervention into a group show, disrupting the viewer’s interaction with all the other works contained within. The effect was to make the viewer uncomfortably aware that their appreciation of art was made possible by the proper function of the room’s wiring, which is itself dependent on the national grid, a disintegrating state infrastructure contributing through its production of carbon dioxide to the destruction of distant landscapes. As such, Creed’s work gives the lie to the model of art as a 24-hour spectacle as recently advanced by collectives such as teamLab and enthusiastically adopted by institutions desperate to generate ticket receipts. You can’t separate art from, let’s say, climate change except by wilfully ignoring the latter, and so maintaining faith in the value of an escapist – euphemistically, ‘transcendent’ – experience of art is in the current circumstances tantamount to an abdication of ethical responsibility. In escaping the world, you’re tacitly colluding in its destruction.

Cameron Rowland’s exhibition 3 & 4 Will. iv c. 73 at London’s ica actively disavows spectacle in favour, as the title suggests, of a forensic

investigation into the injustices underpinning Western society and, by extension, its art. The visitor to the institution is provided with a handout containing a dense essay to assist their reading of the documents and artefacts alluding to the histories of slavery and racism – legal contracts, a mahogany desk, police searchlights – that are ranged around the gallery. These objects are not elevated into the symbolic field of art, but instead bound by the lengthy wall texts to the terrestrial histories that created them. The eighteenth-century brass manillas and Venetian glass beads arranged in a small pile on the floor (Pacotille, 2020) are not to be admired as aesthetic objects but instead treated as physical evidence of the European practice of using one-way currencies (given but never accepted) to ‘purchase’ African slaves. If human trafficking is among the worldly horrors that ‘transcendent’ experiences of art might allow us momentarily to forget, then Rowland’s show refuses the notion of museum as respite or refuge.

It’s important to the success of Rowland’s critique that he implicates himself in the system that generates it, rather than claiming to be independent or ‘free’ from it. Encumbrance (2020) is represented as a legal document confirming the mortgage of architectural elements of the ica – including its imposing mahogany doors – to a legal entity set up by the artist as ‘reparation’ for the slave labour that made possible their production. The artist effectively takes a very real stake in a building still owned by the British Crown. This is justified on the grounds that it serves a practical function, namely ‘limiting the property’s continued accumulation of value’ to the Crown Estate and ensuring that any future sale will legally entail the payment of reparations, which would constitute a precedent. However materially insignificant, this is more than a symbolic gesture.

If the idea of a poor art is to have any meaning today, then it must, like Rowland’s work, acknowledge its own implication in the structures. The system is society, which must radically be reformed but not transcended or destroyed. A poor art must not deny the system but repeatedly and doggedly draw our attention to it. It is by these means that we learn what must be swept away and what we must fight to protect. The rich kid themselves that their wealth and status was predicated on their genius; the poor know it’s always the system. ar

James Bridle, Drone Shadow 006, London, 2013.

Courtesy the artist

September 2020

73

One Work Kris Martin’s Idiot inspires a critic to rewrite his own story

by Martin Herbert

Idiot, 2005, ink on paper, 1,494 pages (each 28 × 43 cm).

Photo: Achim Kukulies. Courtesy Sies + Höke, Düsseldorf

74

ArtReview

On a sultry May evening in the vanished world of 2008, I was sat in on one evening in which he had every reason to be in a good mood to be the garden of a collector’s house in Bergamo, Italy, after a private a vehicle for a viewer’s soul-searching about their character flaws, but view at the city’s art museum of an exhibition by Kris Martin. art ends where it ends, and I can laugh about it now, sort of.

As dusk fell and the far end of the lawn lit up magically with fireWhat was at work here, perhaps, was what Harold Bloom called flies, the Belgian artist told me about a work he’d made three years ‘creative misprision’: misinterpretation that becomes productive. earlier in which he’d hand-copied Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1874 novel, And then it goes away, the transfiguring and vitalising effect; and The Idiot. Actually, he didn’t specify at the time that it was a work (as you need something else, or you get tired of bending your personopposed to an ascetic pastime), but there were several sculptural ality into a caricature. I said reading The Idiot via Idiot changed me for works in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea (gamec) a while, but it’s in the nature of afterglows to fade. One day you find show related to the same literary masterpiece. This project, however, the thing that inflected you doesn’t work anymore. To the extent that even in hearsay or perhaps because of that, struck me more deeply. art is functional, one function of it might be to irradiate and intoxiIt made me wonder what kind of person Martin was. Because he’d cate the viewer – I see the world differently after visiting the work of done the copying, he said – a daily act for months, one that sounded certain photographers, becoming attuned to the potential for beauty monastic, penitent – as an act of overt identification with the title and grace in the everyday – but, to mix metaphors, you have to keep character, the holy fool Prince Myshkin, and indeed had replaced going back to the well, failing better. every iteration of Myshkin’s name with ‘Martin’. And maybe it had When I do studio visits, I often ask artists if they feel they learn worked, because the artist, at least on that one encounter, seemed an things from looking at their own work. Many of them say yes, which uncommonly kind, soft-spoken, courteous type, his character later illuminates, I think, an underrecognised aspect of artmaking: that thrown into relief when I guzzled too much chilled Trebbiano and it can be physiologically transformative for the artist, too. Hiroshi my tongue sharpened into random bitchiness. “You were being so Sugimoto once told me that every time he looked at a seascape he was nice,” said Martin, dismayed. “powering up [his] eye”, that the act of looking improved his vision.

The next day I got up, hungover, and, reading in a guidebook There are numerous examples of artists who, at some point, have gone that Le Corbusier had described a particular square in Bergamo’s old tabula rasa – emptied their studio and built up again from nothing. town as the most beautiful in Europe, walked to the Piazza Vecchia. It In his 1982 book about Robert Irwin, Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of was covered in scaffolding; I felt toxic, ousted from goodness. When the Thing One Sees, Lawrence Weschler describes how Irwin, previously I got home I swiftly bought a copy of The Idiot. I thought about copy- an abstract expressionist, stripped his art back to a single line on canvas, which he would stare at and ing it out – I could write ‘Martin’ too, occasionally delete and reposition, I suppose – but settled for just read“You were being so nice,” said Martin, for hours and days. Tom Friedman ing. I loved it, and had some kind dismayed. The next day I got up, hungover once cleared his workspace, painted of afterglow; I became, for a while, gentler, kinder, if nowhere near everything white and stayed in saintly. The effect was a mixture of Myshkin and the memory of how there doing nothing until, finally, he poured a pool of honey on the Martin had conducted himself that evening. And how I’d conducted floor. He then started a jigsaw puzzle, which he spaced out into a grid; myself, too. By a weird process of displacement and mirror neurons from there, having reset himself inwardly, he could move on, reboot firing, I’d been inspired not by an artwork but a verbal descrip- his practice. Agnes Martin meditated before painting, which presumtion of one allied to a notion of its maker’s mien, which in this case ably led to a lot of meditation and the somatic benefits of same. is maybe as much as you need, because even when you see Martin’s So probably I should have asked Kris Martin if writing Idiot Idiot (2005) – which is currently on view in his show at s.m.a.k. in changed him, though I think I didn’t want to hear if it didn’t; that Ghent – you can’t read it. You can’t even know, aside from the descrip- there was no mechanical bridge, no shortcut, from one mode of selftion, that there is writing on all the 1,494 a4 pages stacked inside a hood to another, calmer one. But selfhood is also flux, a fact that vitrine. But Dostoevsky, I thought, had maybe changed him and, to we don’t always like to face. In one study, people were asked if they a person as dissatisfied with their own personality as I am, might thought they’d changed a lot in the past, and they mostly said yes, rewrite me: a sucker’s game that, historically, I’ve somehow never but when asked if they thought they would change a lot in the future, completely tired of. they mostly said no. We think we’ve arrived at our final self, just as Now, I don’t really know Kris Martin. From others who’ve met we think human evolution has ended. In 2010 Martin made a work him I’ve heard conflicting reports, and arguably you don’t copy out titled I Am Not an Idiot, a row of found pebbles whose markings looked the whole of The Idiot because you already think you’re like Myshkin; enough like letters to spell out the title. Maybe Idiot was a stabilising you might more likely make the commitment if you feel you’re very act, because another thing artists often have is a process that they much not, maybe if you’re seeking some stabilising, positive, ritual- can do almost mindlessly that keeps them ticking over in the studio. istic force in your life. (Martin is nevertheless, I should note, the only Maybe it was all of this or none of it. But this text is about what, and artist I’ve ever met just once who, months later, phoned out of the blue how much, it might be for someone else, once it enters the vicissitudes to see how I and my family were getting along. After that, we somehow of reception. Art shouldn’t be self-help, but among the things it can be lost touch.) I’ve never seen his Idiot in real life; and yet it affected me as is a temporary course correction – even if, ironically, it deflects attenan idea, filtered through circumstance, more deeply than many works tion away from itself and onto a deeply humane work of nineteenthI have seen. It’s an artwork with a performative level built into it, and century literature – or one of a lifetime of them. Which reminds me, there is nothing to stop you, the viewer, aspiring to that same level. I need to read The Idiot again. It’s been years, and I can’t remember Its maker, I would guess, didn’t intend his artwork or his behaviour a word of it. ar

September 2020

75

An-My Lê A photographer reconnects with her city via its arthouse marquees as told to Fi Churchman

These photographs were made in May when it was only beginning to feel safe to go out in the street during the pandemic here in New York City. This was fairly early on and there was hardly anyone around.

I had started venturing out to my studio after about two or three weeks sheltering at home. My studio is a 20-minute walk from my house, in an office building that was completely deserted at that time.

My space is perched in one of the rooftop towers, up 12 flights of stairs, so I felt fairly safe being there. Still, there was an incredible feeling of trepidation leaving the safety of my home to go on what seemed like a risky adventure.

Out there, at the time, I felt completely gripped by the lack of life in the street. I would be walking carefully and with intention. I would notice anyone moving perhaps too close to me. And I would pay attention to the smallest thing – like a piece of paper flying in the wind.

There was no traffic, and the silence was eerie. The moments of introspection were intense during these walks. I was in my head so much, processing my fears and insecurities about the future, hatching plans, yet I also realised that the city was speaking to me and I needed to pay attention to what it was trying to tell me.

Three quarters of the way home from the studio I always pass Cobble Hill Cinemas, my neighbourhood movie theatre. One day I noticed that the marquee carried messages: ‘We love you Brooklyn’, ‘Be well and safe’ (the message in the photograph here is, of course, more specific to ‘Jax’). Those lines made me feel seen and heard – the city was speaking to me and I needed to pay attention. I would see these messages regularly, and over time I realised that other small theatres also carried their own idiosyncratic messages. (Not the large chain cinemas, but the arthouses.) It wasn’t long before I photographed the Cobble Hill marquee. And then eventually I got on my bike and rode into Manhattan to photograph the other theatres. The

76

experience of riding my bike over the Manhattan or Brooklyn Bridges, the vastness and endlessness of the empty city, the nakedness of architecture in the deserted streets, all reconnected me to the city. It was a connection that I hadn’t experienced since I first got to New York in the mid-80s.

Movie productions and war reenactments have been important in my work for a while. Allowing me to consider complicated layers of history, they are the perfect foil for exploring what is real and what is fictional in photography, a paradigm that is inherent to the medium but that is never a concern for filmmakers. Usually a marquee will advertise the next feature – a promise of some spectacle, or a journey.

Movie theatres are like a secular place of worship. Now we have found ourselves without access to this promise. What the theatres gave us instead were these idiosyncratic messages which I thought were very moving – they spoke to me in powerful ways, during a time when I felt so uncertain.

In the last few years, for my project Silent General, I have found myself engaging with the idea of the American roadtrip, which was very unexpected. I never thought I had anything to contribute to that genre. Now, these movie theatre photos have something to do with the tradition of street photography. It’s a genre that I studied, and I think it’s wonderful, but I am also aware of its criticism – the idea that it lacks authorship, that there is no thinking behind it. So it is a challenge to find myself engaging with a process that tries to capture ‘everyday’ life in a moment that is so extraordinary. The Joyce Theater is a dance performance space. I was drawn to the scripted choreography of two firemen who were walking under the canopy of the building (9/11 is a distant past) while a man hoses the pavement.

On the right of the frame, two men struggle with what I assume are laundry bags, and ahead a masked man turns the block corner with

ArtReview

his beautiful dog. An everyday moment, set off in unexpected ways, feel that way in wartime. The big difference between a pandemic and I think, by the message that hangs over them all, ‘We will dance again’, a war is that if you prepare and know what your parameters are (of course at the beginning we didn’t know much about how this virus on the marquee.

One of the movies I watched with renewed interest during the was transmitted), and you follow the strictest rules, you could make second week of the pandemic was Contagion (2011), and it was as if it through. In war, there is only so much you can prepare for: a rocket what was in the theatre had been brought to life – and that made can fall on your home any time. the dichotomy even more interesting to me. The thought that this ifc Center, New York (2020) has the most obvious message: Black blockbuster had stepped out of the screen and onto the streets, and Lives Matter. This is one of the few photographs I’ve taken recently is now enveloping all of New York City, was surreal. Working with that has such a clear and direct message. the messaging on those marquees reminded me of Ken Lum’s brilI think there’s a shared anxiety among artists as we ponder about liant Shopkeeper (2001) and Strip mall (2009) series, which both subvert forms of direct political action and protest. Sometimes there’s a their anticipated transactional messages. I particularly love Midway sinking feeling about art’s usefulness, but for me, the spectacle of Shopping Plaza (created for the 2014 Whitney Biennial). He was protest, the voices, signage, performance and elocution, are lessons inspired by the Vietnamese businesses tucked in a shopping mall in humility. near his house in Philadelphia. He recreated the signage advertising Protest is a commitment to clarity, urgency and spontaneity. The these businesses but subverted the messaging by inserting impor- slogans and chants only work if they can be shared and invested with tant historical moments, places and people related to the Vietnam belief. I used to shy away from explicit language, political or otherWar, such as Thích Quang Ðúc’s name, a monk who self-immolated wise, as a subject for my work because I feared I would neither document nor reveal anything that wasn’t already there or already stated. in 1963.

With the sheltering-in-place order on the horizon, I developed Recently I’ve come to the conclusion that the language of protest and intense preparedness ptsd. I was brought straight back to my child- resistance is not complete without a response… It invites and demands hood during the Vietnam war. I had a conversation with the author a response. So, with these photographs, I’ve tried to present protest Viet Thanh Nguyen, who lives in California. He’s always prepared for and public address as intimate and integral gestures, within time and place, that hopefully push back at the an earthquake so lives with fear, but for me the following pages more predictable images and commentaries ptsd all started in February from watching Cobble Hill Cinemas, Brooklyn, New York, 2020; we expect. If these photographs contribute too much cable news about the outbreak in ifc Center, New York, New York, 2020; China. I made my son go to [the] cvs [pharanything… Maybe it’s to offer the view of poliNitehawk Cinema, Brooklyn, New York, 2020; tics as infrastructure and ideal within a culture macy] with me at 11:30 one night to stock up The Joyce Theater, New York, New York, 2020 on supplies. Once I had everything I needed, and city where everyone goes to the movies, all images Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London I felt safe and in control. It is impossible to everyone votes and everyone is a critic.

September 2020

77

78

79

80

81

82

83

84

85

Episode 3 Listen now Ross Simonini with Mason Currey Natalie Labriola CAConrad Candice Lin With new music by Astral Oracles and Sam Gendel

ArtReviewPodcast

Art Reviewed

That everything seemed to be in a whirl 87

Gordon Parks Part One Alison Jacques Gallery, London 1 July – 8 August Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957 Steidl and the Gordon Parks Foundation, in collaboration with moma, $40 (hardcover) There’s no doubt that the exhibition of photographs by Gordon Parks documenting segregation in 1950s Alabama and the us Black Muslim movement of the early 1960s at Alison Jacques Gallery in London’s genteel Fitzrovia has taken on added relevance in the context of the recent Black Lives Matter protests and the self-isolation (which at times seems like it might slip into various forms of segregation) imposed in the wake of the covid-19 pandemic. The exhibition is an absolute gimme for an art critic (or gallery) wishing to assert their awareness of societal struggles surrounding race, inequality and the systemic suppression of peoples considered other. This past weekendThe Sunday Times art critic Waldemar Januszczak dutifully (if clumsily) opened up his review of the show by remarking that he could feel ‘a powerful wind blowing across the land’.

‘It could be the wind of change…,’ he continued, presumably channelling memories of rocking to The Scorpions and the events of 1989. ‘What it certainly is is the wind of pertinence,’ he went on, starting to row back, to hedge his bets, before noting that ‘the most important and best art being made right now is being made by black artists’ (no further details given) and that it had been an effort not to ‘blub’ once he had encountered Parks’s works.

Parks, who died in 2006, was a photographer, writer, musician and filmmaker.

The first African American to direct a major Hollywood movie (The Learning Tree, 1969, which was based on his own novel, from 1963), he went on to inspire a new genre (blaxploitation) with the release of Shaft in 1971. He first rose to prominence, however, as a photographer, originally working for the Farm Security Administration photography project, based in Washington, dc.

The photographs on show in London were commissioned as stories for Life magazine: Segregation in the South in 1956 and Black Muslims in 1963. Despite Januszczak’s highly attuned sensitivity to shifts in the weather, they were as ‘pertinent’ then, if not more so, when they described the lived reality of their subjects. There’s no doubt that part of the point of Parks’s colour photographs

88

of the segregated South and black-and-white portraits of Malcolm X was to document and assist the whipping up of a wind.

Simultaneously with the exhibition, Steidl has published The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957, documenting another of Parks’s series for Life (the photographs themselves are now in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York). Parks was the first African American to hold the position of staff photographer (from 1948 to 1972) at the influential weekly magazine. The book documents his contribution to the 9 September 1957 edition of the magazine, titled ‘Crime in the U.S.’, featuring first the photographs themselves and then reproductions of the pages on which they originally appeared. The cover illustration, ‘A New York Street Gang’, looks like a scene from West Side Story (the first Broadway production of which opened later that month), suggesting the feature’s status as standing somewhere between reporting and entertainment. ‘On the surface, the world of crime is much like the world of honest men…,’ the Chandleresque text that introduces Parks’s contribution begins. ‘But underneath, this world has its own dark atmosphere.’

Sandwiched among adverts for Haggar Slacks, Bayer Aspirin, Metropolitan Life Insurance, Band-Aid plastic plasters, Gleem toothpaste, Fitch dandruff remover shampoo and Ford’s Edsel automobiles, there’s a sense of the feature titillatingly lifting the curtain on a life that Life’s largely white, middle-class, urban and suburban readers do not know.

It’s no great stretch to imagine that a whitecube commercial art gallery opposite a posh hotel in gentrified London offers a similar audience a similar service today. Though it is also good, of course, that Parks’s work is being seen – this is the first solo exhibition of his work in the British capital in 25 years.

Back in the book, a blurry nighttime shot of a group of men hanging out on a street corner is captioned, ‘A furtive poker game whiles away a hot summer night on a tough sidewalk in New York. The beat cop has just passed, and the youths have time for a few more hands before he returns to break up the illegal game.’ Given that it’s

ArtReview

hard to tell what exactly is going on, Parks’s image gently suggests a conflation of suspiciousness and crime, boredom and crime, a lack of places to go and crime. There are images of the aftermath of crimes – people being taken into ambulances, rooms being searched, but no images of crimes themselves (although the images not used by Life include a sequence showing a man shooting up – his arms at the moment of injection neatly mirroring other images of men’s arms in handcuffs).

Taken on their own, Parks’s photographs document a world of poverty, drug addiction and violence, the last being more apparent in images of cops gleefully kicking down doors and brandishing revolvers than in any ‘criminal’ acts. ‘Guns drawn, Chicago detectives break in the door of a suspicious room.

Surprise means safety. A quick kick follows a perfunctory knock,’ reads the caption (presumably written by reporter Henry Suydam, who worked with Parks on the assignment) that accompanies one of the photographer’s more dramatic images.

When they’re not breaking in, the cops in Parks’s images are booking in criminals, doing paperwork, hanging around and looking out for suspicious rooms and people.

Policework, as Parks records it, is a matter of bureaucracy, a symptom of a system.

The Life feature ends with a shot of prisoners going into lockdown in San Quentin, a burly guard dominating the foreground.

According to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (naacp), a shocking one in every three Black males born today in the us can expect, at some point, to join the prison population, which has itself increased by over 700 percent since 1970. (The figures for Latino males are one in every six, and for whites, one in every 17.) These days us prisons are part of an $80-billion industry, with the prison phone industry alone raking in $1.2b of that.

There are even dedicated prison trade fairs.

It is, as Roger Ross Williams’s 2018 documentary Jailed in America (more pointedly titled American Jail for those of you looking it up in the us) argues, an industry that has become too big to fail. It’s an industry

Untitled, Shady Grove, Alabama, 1956. © The Gordon Parks Foundation, New York.

Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation, New York, and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

September 2020

89

Untitled, Nashville, Tennessee, 1956. © The Gordon Parks Foundation, New York.

Courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation, New York, and Alison Jacques Gallery, London

90

ArtReview

that, in nascent form, Parks seems to have identified in The Atmosphere of Crime (a subject further explored in essays by Nicole R. Fleetwood, Sarah Hermanson Meister and Bryan Stevenson in the Steidl publication).

Like Parks, Williams is something of a pioneer, being the first African-American director to win an Academy Award (for Music for Prudence, 2009, best documentary short).

In a sense, Jailed in America feels like an extension of the sensibilities and some of the methods that Parks deployed in his own work, documenting personal stories (in this case the imprisonment and subsequent suicide of one of Williams’s childhood friends) and the expansive bureaucratic system that leads young African Americans

to jail and then keeps them there as the levers of power are used to grease the cogs of an industry that in turn supports those invested in maintaining their power.

That discrimination and violence are woven into the fabric of us society is something that Parks’s photographs of Black life in the South amply demonstrate. As with The Atmosphere of Crime, his Alabama photographs document scenes that are apparently ordinary and everyday: people sitting on porches, people talking to neighbours, people buying ice cream. Yet the bodies are Black, the houses are rundown and the ice-cream shoppers are standing at the ‘Colored’ window or drinking from the ‘Colored Only’ water fountain. What’s remarkable is the

dignity apparent in the three families Parks shot. The fact that they seem to be getting on with their lives despite the restrictions on how they are permitted to do that. A form of quiet resistance that seems all the more obvious when paired with the photographs from the Black Muslims series, which in itself attempts to record its subjects as a community as much as a movement or an existential threat to the us. What seems most remarkable now is that anyone put up with the shit that Parks recorded in Alabama. But flick back to The Atmosphere of Crime or open a newspaper today and you better understand the system that forced this compliance. And continues, in various less visible forms, to do the same today. Mark Rappolt

Raiding Detectives, Chicago, Illinois, 1957, pigmented inkjet print, printed 2019, 41 × 51 cm.

Published in Gordon Parks: The Atmosphere of Crime, 1957. © and courtesy The Gordon Parks Foundation, New York

September 2020

91

New York galleries fresh out of lockdown – the thrill of discovery?

Late in May, as New York City morgues reached capacity and bodies were relegated to refrigerated trucks parked outside hospitals, a corpse flower began to bloom for the first time. Located in the Barnard College campus greenhouse, its brief flowering – just 24–36 hours, once every decade or so – was broadcast on the institution’s YouTube channel. It felt a little on the nose, but what does a plant know? I tried watching the livestream, but I had had enough of staring at things, at screens of video art, of virtual anything.

Given all that, as galleries themselves started cautiously opening up over the last few weeks, you’d think I would have been hyped. But even as the worst is decidedly over in nyc – albeit just beginning in other states – the tide of police brutality continues unabated. The country is aflame with ongoing protests, unemployment remains rampant and a catastrophic eviction crisis looms when courts reopen this month.

Going out to see art felt a long way down the list of priorities. There wasn’t even all that much open: some spaces will remain closed until the art season’s traditional post-summer-vacation reopening in early September. Some are moving to cheaper neighbourhoods, or joining the new locus forming in TriBeCa. Some have closed permanently or, in the case of Gavin Brown, are ‘merging’ with Chelsea stalwarts like Gladstone to form new megagalleries. Nevertheless, at the end of July I dutifully called and emailed and made appointments (offered at 10- or 30-minute intervals), and hopped on the train for the first time since March.

There’s a particular way I like to see art in Chinatown and the Lower East Side. Get off the F train at East Broadway and hit up Reena Spaulings. Wind my way first eastwards then westwards, making hairpin turns to cover each street between Norfolk and the Bowery, Canal and Houston, stopping for bubble tea (almond, 75 percent sugar – liquid marzipan), snacks and later drinks, sometimes meeting others. Seeing absolutely everything that’s currently on. I never studied art history, see: for years I didn’t trust my own conclusions, and compensated by seeing everything, at least Downtown and in Chelsea.

Today, although I’m more sure of my convictions, the routine stands.

The first surprise was the subway. It came on time, it was spotlessly clean and everyone was wearing masks and observing social-distancing practices: a fleeting vision of what it might be like to live in a functioning city and not a failed state.

The second was realising that the safety-first, ‘by appointment only’ routines at the galleries were

92

mostly empty theatre. At one appointment, I arrived to find the gallery locked and the phone ringing unanswered. Others that didn’t require appointments were randomly closed despite their stated hours. Only two places asked me for my details, presumably to allow for contact tracing down the line. Not every gallerist or visitor was wearing a mask, though most of the time I was the only visitor. In the end, apart from the occasional bottle of hand sanitiser perched by the gallery guestbook, not much was different.

The biggest surprise, however, was how few of the shows I saw responded to the current moment. At most, there were awkward links to the ongoing Movement for Black Lives, as in Billy White’s solo at Shrine, which was postponed as a result of covid-19, but now, according to the gallery, ‘has taken on more poignant meanings and a sense of urgency in light of the recent calls to action’. Why this might be the case is unclear, but the loose paintings of celebrities depicted mostly in profile – Elvis, Eddie Murphy, Joe DiMaggio, Fred Flintstone with a bloodied mouth – and small melty ceramics are exceedingly charming nonetheless. The paintings in particular have a layered quality that suggests an accumulation of multiple characters painted over each other, like a time-lapsed face or a 1990s music video.

A number of untitled works feature a uniformed man in blue, which, along with a small ceramic police car, seems to hint at the complicated figure of the Black cop.

At Essex Street, Park McArthur directly addressed the twinned crises of breathing with a spare, sterile show that included a sculpture made from her ventilator’s filters – needed for reasons unrelated to the current pandemic – which hangs near the open gallery doors.

The bulk of the show features a framed printout, blue ink on white paper, installed by the gallery elevator and on the mezzanine floor below.

It depicts the markings on a device known as an incentive spirometer, which provides users with a volumetric measurement of their breath and encourages deep breathing. The text is rendered backwards, the way it might look if we were somehow inside the spirometer; the effect is to turn the gallery into a kind of breathing apparatus. Here too is McArthur’s characteristic emphasis on access: the exhibition also exists online, with robust, descriptive alt text captions, and as a described audio and video guide.

Elsewhere I found myself especially drawn to paintings that were subtly appliquéd, perhaps relishing the fact that they would read so

ArtReview

differently in jpeg form. In a group show at Thierry Goldberg, Bony Ramirez’s colourful paintings featured voluptuous, muscly figures in littoral or tropical settings, carrying swords, seashells and swans. Their curving hands and feet are especially memorable, suggesting a cross between webbed, amphibious creatures and Roald Dahl’s witches. But this is no Caribbean idyll: some figures are being stabbed in the head, in the manner of Peter of Verona, or in a hand.

In the compelling El Mar Que Extraño / I Miss The Ocean (2020), the figure walks on a bed of hobby blades stuck onto the canvas. Biblical themes also pervaded Emmanuel Louisnord Desir’s intriguing, sinewy wood-and-metal installations – and first-ever solo – at 47 Canal. For their fresh visual vocabulary and inventive use of materials, both are definitely young artists to watch, reminding me of that forgotten pleasure of discovery upon encountering a new-to-me artist. Is it just the thrill of novelty? I’m reminded why I love seeing art and being surprised by art despite everything else going on in the artworld, from the dirty money that funds it to the revelations of systemic racial discrimination and abuse, as documented by new Instagram accounts like @cancelartgalleries. That as nakedly calculating as galleries’ sudden interest in showing very young poc and especially Black artists is, audiences can only benefit.

In a two-person show at Rachel Uffner, Arghavan Khosravi’s muted paintings on canvas and fabric feature a photorealistic female subject, doubled or tripled as if captured with a stereoscopic camera. Sometimes the cloth is left unpainted – a busy paisley stands in for yoga pants, for example, and in one work, threads and the tassels of a printed cotton tapestry add textural interest. But it is the marvellously weird solo upstairs, of work

by Curtis Talwst Santiago, that really excites: glass noses – the kind that were once lopped off Ancient Egyptian statues to make them appear less African, apparently; paintings with incandescently red-faced knights; a tiny diorama in a box; and an enormous suit of arms made out of beadwork.

There were other shows in other galleries, but these mostly featured the usual end-of-term summer dross, or still had their prepandemic shows up. I thought about returning to the restaging of John Boskovich’s claustrophobic, fetishistic Psycho Salon at David Lewis, which both fascinated and repulsed me when I saw it in March. I sat in a park with bubble tea instead.

Rahel Aima

above Arghavan Khosravi, The Balance, 2019, acrylic on found fabric mounted on wood panel, 103 × 80 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York

top Emmanuel Louisnord Desir, Captivity of the Spirit and the Flesh, 2019, steel, bronze, cast iron radiators, wood, wood planks, 100 × 137 × 56 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse.

Courtesy the artist and 47 Canal, New York

September 2020

above Billy White, Untitled (man with mustache), 2019, acrylic on canvas, 122 × 91 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Shrine, New York

93

Rachal Bradley, Prunella Clough Piper Keys, London 25 July – 23 August Demands for art to be responsive to politics and society are not new. Although, right now, this might seem to be the only thing that matters.

But ‘gallery art’ that tries to align itself explicitly with politics risks coming across as overliteral, tokenistic or ineffectual. What can artworks do in the safe space of galleries while everything’s in turmoil outside?

Three paintings by Prunella Clough and three wall-hung objects by Rachal Bradley present us with translations of an outside world, rather than reflections of it. In a half-century of paintings, Clough, who died in 1999, forged her own path between the polarised debate that placed socially minded realist painting on one hand and abstraction on the other, arriving at a kind of cryptic figuring that short-circuited every argument for abstraction’s separation from connotation, and every claim for figurative

painting’s directness. The result is paintings whose elements are rich with significance and allusion – taking the industrial world of postwar Britain, its shapes, artefacts, moods, as their rightful subjects – while poised to dissolve back into fields, forms and colours. Industrial Plant ii (1954) is a grey, indefinite metal silo, hunched under pylon wires against a dull sky.

Industrial Interior v (1960) forces us to resolve a jarring rhythm of black and off-white forms into a junkyard, or a set of gantries or pipeworks. While the strangest – Inside and Outside (1970–75) – offers a dust-grey field with a two-toned reddish cross in one corner and a string of maplike outlines drifting across it, like dead leaves or a bacterial spread.

Rachal Bradley put the show together with Piper Keys, and her wall-objects (all 2020), made from woven Kevlar fabric made rigid by being

Rachal Bradley, Prunella Clough, 2020 (installation view).

Works by Prunella Clough on loan from Arts Council Collection, Southbank Centre, London.

Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy Rachal Bradley, estate of Prunella Clough and Piper Keys, London

94

ArtReview

soaked in resin, offer a different iteration of how art might put the ordinary world in parentheses.

Soft and hard, woven yet inflexible, Bradley’s immobilised textiles are exercises in arrested functionality. The deep custard-yellow All bathed in Golden Sunlight (after Lawrence) and the black Accusation Station are layerings of folds of Kevlar on larger pieces of the textile, their soft domesticity belying a mummified reality. The mirror-reflective black surface of gossip, with its wisps of frayed fibres, offers the lie of a deep void in its synthetic darkness. Kevlar is ten times stronger than steel, a product of high science, and Bradley’s objects strain informality against this high-performance utility. Clough and Bradley’s works absorb and suspend the world that is, or was – artworks as a place and moment of shifted perspective and indeterminacy, before we have to step back outside. J.J. Charlesworth

Renato Leotta Sole Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin 25 February – 30 September In Renato Leotta’s Sole, two dynasties intertwine.

One, the aristocratic House of Savoy, rulers of the Kingdom of Italy (1861–1946), who almost a millennium ago came into possession of the building that now houses Turin’s museum of contemporary art. The other, the Agnelli family, which, through fiat, radically shaped twentieth-century Italy. Leotta operates here with diplomatic finesse and great economy: his exhibition consists of headlights from various models by the car manufacturer, artificially dimmed into spotlights for a scenography and trained on works from the museum’s collection or architectural details bearing a ‘Piedmontese’ identity. Gleams skim an anthropomorphic black sculpture (Persone nere, 1984) and a stool (Untitled, 1979) by, respectively, the Piedmontese

Michelangelo Pistoletto and Marisa Merz; a fake moon hides itself in a medieval well; a timid Ducato truck vivifies a Savoy monogram on the fireplace; the eye of an Uno Rally shines on the local mud Richard Long used for a site-specific work (Rivoli Mud Circle, 1996).

One of the most ingenious inventions is the spot on a photograph (1/25, 1965) by the Genovese Giulio Paolini, highlighting an unassuming ‘Piedmont’ in an advertising banner for Galup, a popular confectionery company, recently bankrupt. Inviting an alternative route through the museum’s works in this fashion, emphasising potentially overlooked ‘nodes’, Leotta underscores the expatriation of fiat to the us and the encroachment of heavy industry into the cultural economy, alluding through the use of waste

material to another local specialty, Arte Povera.

At the same time, he perhaps also hints that sustaining Turin’s self-image, the preservation of a consolidated cultural splendour, has been supported by a less ‘noble’, evaporated industry.

Leotta, here, has managed to work on the passage of time. The intensity of each light is designed for each specific room and takes into account changes occurring in natural light. The artist, having relocated to Sicily, has followed a reverse path to the one that brought southern citizens, including his own parents, to settle in the richer north.

We may consider Sole the synthesis of a moment of passage – his own movement combined with Piedmont’s historical arc – delivered without didacticism and imbued with almost effortless elegance and clarity. Francesco Tenaglia

Sole, 2020 (installation view featuring detail of Giulio Paolini, 1/25, 1965). Courtesy Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Turin

September 2020

95

Summertime and the livin’ is uneasy in Berlin

On my bedroom wall in Berlin is a framed Lawrence Weiner poster, a typically artful fusion of poetics and graphic design whose text reads: ‘A simple vector in the realm of concentricity / the middle of the middle of the middle of’.

Sometimes, when I wake up, I ponder it awhile, wondering what I might be in the very middle of, and lately there’s been an obvious answer: pretty much nothing. When I moved to the city, eight years ago, I assumed the art scene would be humming, as it had seemed to be on the short trips I’d made before that point. Fairly soon, though, I was making invidious comparisons to London, where, on my return visits, there seemed to be far more risk and dynamism across the board – from fledgling galleries to the programming in institutions.

Over the ensuing years Berlin seems to have gotten sleepier still, and sometimes the signs have been explicit. At the end of 2019, after years of tinkering with the model, the Art Berlin fair was cancelled. Collectors with private museums are moving out, saying they feel unloved. And right now is the absolute still point of this barely turning world; after being involuntarily closed for months, Berlin’s galleries winked an eye open, noticed it was time for the annual ‘summer pause’ and promptly shut again.

That the aforesaid inertia is broadly the rule is proved by a noisy exception. In the last year or so, Johann König, scion of the venerable König art clan, has published an autobiography, boldly titled Blind Gallerist in reference to his historical eye problems; held his own art fair in his converted Brutalist church, St Agnes; announced loudly on social media that he was going to lead the way in the post-covid-19 artworld; and popped up endlessly on Instagram talking up his artists.

He also has his own in-house magazine, named – of course – König, which presumably is also available in the family-owned chain of art bookshops. This tireless hustle is entertaining

96

to watch, and creditable in its way. But it exists against a context in which even the bigger Berlin galleries seem content to cycle through the same artists in the same spaces they’ve been in for decades. (I’ve measured out my life, or the last half-dozen years of it, in shows by the same clutch of 1990s artists at Neugerriemschneider.)

I’m no fan of expansionism for its own sake, but stasis gets old quickly. The upside of all this, I guess, is that it has been useful training for the wider, hobbled artworld in 2020; my personal treadmill was already set to cooldown mode.

And sometimes said machine was completely off, because the one way I’ve managed to make Berlin relatively exciting is not to be there all that much, to be somewhere Dog days of summer, outside Berlin.

Courtesy the author

ArtReview

with a slower pulse. A few years ago my wife and I started spending more time in a gdr-era dacha an hour or so away from the city; on some level I wanted to do what a literary hero of mine, E.B. White, did when he left Manhattan in the 1930s to live on a farm in Maine, from where he wrote a series of columns later collected as One Man’s Meat (1944). I can’t afford a farm, but I did manage to get the same breed of dog. Country living, though not without its tensions – you can track the creep of ugly nationalism faster in the sticks than in the city – modulates, in its ungovernable slowness, the metropolitan experience. Just as when you look at minimalist art the smaller details carry more weight, if you spend enough time not seeing shows then when you come back and do – after doing what I did yesterday, which was to alternate editorial work with literally watching grass grow – it’s more intense.

I can’t make Berlin any livelier; but I can, to a degree, make my own life slack-jawed enough that the contrast is marked.

In any case, currently there is almost nothing to catch up on: again, it’s Sommerpause except for a few galleries including, yes, the indefatigable König. So not even much viewer’s guilt, and if there is any, it can be rationalised away with the previous paragraph’s sketchy arguments. There is, of course, an undertone of anxiety: this break could well be concealing the fact that some of these spaces will never reopen, such that right now Berlin’s artworld, like those in other cities, is Schrödinger’s cat, the box sealed. But if, looking for silver linings, we park that issue for a moment, then this recess-after-a-recess makes a kind of consolatory sense. While galleries being open right now would mean masks and appointments and hand sanitiser, their being closed for summer is the one possible move that feels like the old normal. I’m going to miss it when it ends. Martin Herbert

Nora Turato let’s never be like that LambdaLambdaLambda at La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels 21 May – 27 June Exhibitions at La Maison de Rendez-Vous are often something of a duel between the work on display and the gallery’s heavy wood panelling and parquet floors. In the case of Nora Turato’s solo show, the dissonance between her lurid wall painting and enamel plates and the timbered interiors is exhilarating in intensity. The enamelon-steel pieces evoke the plaques Marcel Broodthaers began producing during the 1960s by embossing ‘industrial poems’ onto plastic signage. Like Broodthaers, Turato is preoccupied with the power and mutability of language.

However, the multifaceted oeuvre of this Croatia-born artist could only have been created by a digital native au fait with the hyperaccelerated, media-saturated culture of the present.

A fundamental strategy in Turato’s methodology involves gleaning fragments of phrases

and quotations from a multitude of disparate sources: adverts, internet memes, songs, movies, occasionally her own unconscious. This raw material is amalgamated into ‘pools’ resembling data scrambled by viral malware. It is from these ‘pools’ that Turato extracts cutups for use in the formulation of performances and more durable artworks, such as the pieces featured here.

The textual delirium characterising this work is redolent of the phenomenon of spirit channelling, where discarnate entities ‘speak’ through a medium. In the wall-based pieces, different ‘voices’ or sources are distinguished by the use of various typefaces, each possessing its own semantic associations. One of Turato’s trademarks, for example, is her use of the instantly recognisable bold Helvetica framed

by a black border as used in tobacco-packaging health warnings. Less familiar – but more intriguing – is the longhand, partially made up of generic script font, that looks like automatic writing spewed out via a séance with Microsoft Paint.

Turato is masterful at ironically subverting canonical signifiers while fetishistically elevating detritus scavenged from the verges of the information superhighway. This show reminds one of William S. Burroughs’s notion that language can contain parasitic entities that rely upon unwitting human hosts to make possible their perpetual replication. But what makes this work particularly compelling is the ambiguity surrounding who – or what – is in control of authorship and where the artist’s subjectivity truly lies. Pádraic E. Moore

we’ve done so much with so little for so long we can do anything with nothing now / love what you do, 2020, vitreous enamel on steel, 37 × 37 cm. Photo: Isabelle Arthuis.

Courtesy the artist and LambdaLambdaLambda, Prishtina / La Maison de Rendez-Vous, Brussels

September 2020

97

Los Angeles galleries, by appointment only

A sensorial vertigo afflicts many of us East Coast transplants, enhanced by blinding sunlight and the ambient hum of air conditioners and helicopters. Early this spring, however, access to outside stimuli was cut around the globe.

Meanwhile water in Los Angeles was still scarce, and the air felt suddenly precious.

In March, soon after quarantine, I began taking drives to the only acquaintances it was safe to visit in close range. I counted myself lucky to have a means of escape from my apartment that most of my New York-based friends, and the less fortunate citizens of this city, did not. I drove a rinky-dink 2007 Prius Hybrid with reasonable fuel efficiency and thus allowed myself this luxury. The inviolability one feels in a car has long been passed off as an excuse for selfish behaviour behind the wheel; it took on an additional false sense of hermetically sealed security, as from behind closed windows I spent mornings observing and photographing notable trees of Los Angeles’s East Side. With galleries, libraries and other nonessential businesses and centres closed, these trees provided a respite from the visual monotony of unmarked days, just as driving provided a bodily reprieve from the confines of my apartment.

I made regular pilgrimages to a Moreton Bay fig in Pasadena. Brought to California from Australia during the 1870s as specimen trees to beautify and enhance rapidly developing urban landscapes, Moreton Bay figs revealed over time their ability to grow to more than 60 metres in height, their exposed ‘buttressed’ roots now sprawling across sidewalks. Pasadena, with its palatial estates, is one of the only residential neighbourhoods where this solemn, patiently elephantine tree is not in danger of being cut down. In the car I listened to Roberta Flack’s Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye (1969) on repeat.

Many loved before us. I know we are not new. In city and in forest they loved like me and you.

In May, la galleries began to cautiously reopen, adding appointment registries to their websites and implementing visitor caps and mandatory masks for entry. Then one more Black citizen was brutally murdered by a white law officer, and the scales tipped. I am not the right person to speak to this, and the piece I set out to write is about galleries and trees.

facing page, bottom left Van Hanos, Eagle, Crow, Snake, Fish Face, 2020, oil on linen, 31 × 26 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Château Shatto, Los Angeles

98

I am trying instead to listen to others, better versed and equipped.

The next month, amid protests, lockdowns and curfews, I registered to see Ricky Swallow’s Borrowed Sculptures at David Kordansky Gallery in Mid-City. The Australian-born Angeleno’s latest sculptures continue his work recreating domestic materials in cast and painted bronze, their impressive trompe l’oeil effect overshadowed by the delicacy of their readymade referents.

One lone form, Stringer (2020), whose motif suggested a stair rendered from coils of rope, graced the gallery’s southern wall like a Celtic knot. A bronze rocking chair, Rocking Chair with Rope (meditation chair # I) (2020), cast from a model in the artist’s studio, appeared to hang, as though suspended from bronze ropes strung to a nonexistent ceiling-mounted hook, with the tensile restraint of a Fred Sandback installation. I shared the gallery with only one other visitor. Another stood patiently at the door, waiting for one of us leave.

I made an appointment at Château Shatto downtown to see Van Hanos’s Interiors.

Characteristically virtuosic (the New Yorkbased artist, who recently relocated to Marfa, is among the most facile painters currently working) and teasingly referential, this new set of works demonstrated stirrings in the evolution of Hanos’s conflicted attitude towards the heroic oil painting. Among the exhibition’s largest canvases, Interior (2020) ensconced a deadpan ‘pictorial’ painterly view out from a paned window within a palette-knife-scraped frame that made explicit allusions to Gerhard Richter. The adjacent, modestly scaled Eagle, Crow, Snake, Fish Face (2020) took this reference to its art-historical endpoint: here the artist had used this chromatically striated scraped canvas as an underpainting, burying it beneath a coat of Ad Reinhardt-esque black before scraping a portrait onto its surface to reveal its base as if it were a Rainbow Scratch craft paper.

The appointment system was itself new and strange. I’d previously tried to see shows with as few preconceptions as possible. (Although with galleries strewn across miles and potentially hours of traffic, this had already proved somewhat impractical.) On the other hand, these restrictions were conversely appealing

when you remembered summer openings of prior years – edging past clots of sweaty revellers to see the work they were standing in front of.

An appointment made a visit intentional; the visitor cap created a dual sense of intimacy and urgency. Masks, on the other hand, are simply a present necessity as well as a gesture of respect and appreciation for the many people who make these visits possible.

I discovered a trio of shrubs pruned in the shape of giraffes in a garden I can only appreciatively describe as extremely whimsical, and was tipped off to the location of a yucca whose trunk resembled musculature riddled with bulging cysts. The days grew hotter earlier. On cool mornings, however, it finally seemed safe again to climb the 383 stairs off La Loma – huffing through a mask, passing a young oak whose bow had extended into the pathway and been tagged with a red ribbon so that walkers wouldn’t hit their heads. Like the Moreton Bay fig, the oak can grow to massive proportions. Unlike the imported tree, it is native to California, and its nutritionally dense acorns historically provided sustenance for indigenous peoples.

Among the venues that most nimbly adapted to the city- and state-wide ordinances was Parker Gallery, in Los Feliz. The residencebased gallery hosted a series of two-week-long outdoor exhibitions entitled Sculpture from a Distance (parts i, ii and iii), featuring celebrated la artists Melvino Garretti and Peter Shire and emerging artists including Alake Shilling and Anne Libby. Circumventing the need for reservations (although not masks), the shows were designed with comfort and safety in mind; one could wander freely through works installed on the grass and mounted to the sides of the building.

As of August, the trees continue their efforts to purify our air while cars (mine included) poison it. Leonard Cohen’s original lyrics to Flack’s cover were, “Many loved before us.

I know that we are not new. In city and in forest they smiled like me and you.” Flack’s rendition is better, but the poet knew what he was doing.

‘Smiled’ is both less expected and infinitely sadder than ‘loved’ while signalling essentially the same thing – even from behind a mask.

Cat Kron

facing page, top Moreton Bay fig, Pasadena.

Courtesy the author

facing page bottom, right Ricky Swallow, Rocking Chair with Rope (meditation chair #1), 2020, patinated bronze and oil paint, 172 × 61 × 89 cm.

Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles

ArtReview

September 2020

99

Hanne Darboven and Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt Sign of the Times / Times of the Sign Sprüth Magers, London 9 July – 19 September Dom Sylvester Houédard tantric poetries Lisson Gallery, London 12 March – 31 July Two shows in London this summer recreate the sense of exuberant experimentalism present in much art of the late 1960s and early 70s, made by artists who had little interest in the conventional mainstream of visual art, and operated in the wide, heterogeneous space for experimentation that the counterculture encouraged. Forms of writing or informational scripting are these artists’ focus, while implicit in the form of these works is the culture of networks of informal contacts between artists (often enabled by international postal communication) that grew up in the period, and how working on paper was the practical, transmittable medium for this culture, especially, as it turns out, when the Iron Curtain intervened.

At Sprüth Magers, with the pairing of the West German Hanne Darboven and her East German contemporary Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, the contrast between an artist who quickly began to make gallery-scale work and another working without access to that network is vivid.

Darboven had strong links with the New York conceptualist scene (living in New York during the late 1960s, she was connected with Sol LeWitt, Carl Andre and Joseph Kosuth). WolfRehfeldt’s was a very different context. Living in communist East Berlin and deprived of the freedom of movement available to Darboven, she became active in building the mail-art scene there. The show mostly comprises Wolf-Rehfeldt’s typewritten works on paper, counterposed with two of Darboven’s large wall-grids of framed serial drawings. In flat vitrines are ephemera and correspondence

evidencing the artists’ international connections and friendships.

This is really a show to generate interest in Wolf-Rehfeldt’s work (which is practically unknown, the artist having ceased working after the fall of the Berlin Wall). Darboven’s rigorous procedural works Ein Jahrhundert.1b (1971–74) and Untitled (1971) have little to do with the visual playfulness that runs through WolfRehfeldt’s many typewriter works, and a lot to do with conceptualism’s more fiercely rational splitting-off of aesthetics from cognition.

Ein Jahrhundert’s 100 framed pages, one for every year of a century, each presents a progressive variation of two forms of information: in the upper half of each, an increasing number of repeated calligraphic marks, with their total numbered; in the lower half, the typewritten version of each number – ‘eins, zwei, drei, vier’… – tracking the graphemes above.

It’s an exacting piece, marrying conceptualism’s preference for purely cognitive objects to a performative sense of time, rhythm and action, while stripped of anything smacking of subjective intent. By contrast, Wolf-Rehfeldt’s cascades of typewriter characters confine their parameters to a single page, which has consequences for how we experience the work, drawing in our close-to scrutiny. There’s a utopian vision here, balanced with pathos; the word ‘information’ emerges from a column of uniform, meaningless ‘O’s, like buds on a tree, in Information (informationsbildung) (c. 1970s), while in Limits Endlessness (1975) a tessellation of letters in diamond formation progressively transforms, line by line, the word

‘limits’ into ‘endlessness’. It’s hard not to read in this, and in Divided Planet (c. mid-1970s; a circular area made up of the letters of the word ‘planet’, partitioned down the middle), apprehensions about the divided state of Europe at the time.

Wolf-Rehfeldt’s type-works are studiously guided by the horizontal–vertical parameters of the typewriter, but the British concrete poet, beatnik, theologian and Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard took typewriter art into other dimensions. ‘dsh’, as he was known, was a dynamic figure in the internationalist counterculture of 1960s London. tantric poetries assembles a swathe of Houédard’s ‘typestracts’ – staggeringly intricate ‘drawings’, though they might be mistaken for early computer-generated 3d wireframes – made between 1967 and 1971.

These are portals to the beat monk’s esoteric and ecumenical interest in world religions and their philosophies. Along with linguistics and cybernetics, dsh poured these enthusiasms into extraordinary visualisations of spiritual concepts and entities, tuned in to the twin euphoria of 1960s counterculture – technology and transcendence. It’s an optimism that would steadily retreat through the 1970s, even if the dispassionate sobriety of Darboven’s longue durée attention to time and history holds on to the possibility of such a panoptical role for art.

Wolf-Rehfeldt stopped making work in the early 1990s; Houédard died in 1992, Darboven in 2009.

All three artists offer a reminder of times when artists still articulated big visions of history and optimistic thinking about the future, and of how absent these seem to be today. J.J. Charlesworth

facing page, top left Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Divided Planet, mid-1970s, carbon copy of original typewriting, 21 × 15 cm.

Courtesy the estate of the artist and Chert Lüdde, Berlin

facing page, top right Hanne Darboven, Ein Jahrhundert.1b, 1971–74, offset print, typewriter, ink on graph paper, 100 sheets (30 × 21 cm each) in 25 frames (30 × 85 cm each). © Hanne Darboven Stiftung, Hamburg. vg Bild-Kunst, Bonn. Photo: Ingo Kniest.

Courtesy Sprüth Magers, London, Berlin & Los Angeles

facing page, bottom Dom Sylvester Houédard, Untitled, 1963, typed page, 13 × 20 cm. © estate of the artist.

Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, New York & Shanghai

100

ArtReview

September 2020

101

Copenhagen’s midsummer mix of art, some timely, some timeless

Gallerygoing in person around Copenhagen in midsummer was not only a much needed psychic respite post-coronavirus-lockdown but also a profound confirmation of how essential art – even prepandemic art – is to picturing and processing our current crisesridden realities and bringing them to bear, both intimately and communally.

Located at Refshaleøen, a former industrial island in the city’s harbour, Copenhagen Contemporary is a relatively recent but welcome initiative in the city’s expanding art scene.

Using its unique location – a decommissioned ship-welding hall – as a base to commission large site-specific installations since 2016, the institution presents contemporary art of all dimensions and media. Delayed in opening, the planned exhibition In Focus: Statements was quickly reimagined in response to the uncertainties of covid-19 and in light of the global antiracist protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in America. The show, already a response to #MeToo, the rise of authoritarianism and other crises, was expanded with a number of outdoor public installations added to the indoor component (in which the curators utilised nontraditional locations such as stairwells and service spaces in addition to the galleries).

Specifically, In Focus: Statements is a potent reexamination of older, current and commissioned text-based work in a variety of media, increasingly relevant in the wake of shifting digital communication platforms that have transmuted written forms in the sociopolitical context, from slogans to hashtags and memes.

Including artists such as Zoe Leonard, Jenny Holzer, David Shrigley and Sam Durant, the exhibition emphasises the raw power of language through unexpected display contexts.

On a ragged hill behind the institution, for example, Marilyn Minter’s Resist Flag (2017), the command written in a spraypaintlike font, flies on nine preexisting flagpoles above Less Power Less (2020), a text-sculpture spelled out in used automobile tires during a performance

by Hesselholdt & Mejlvang in which the female artist duo’s constructed ‘goddess’ attire got increasingly dirty. Nearby, we encounter Dread Scott’s A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday (2015), in which the artist updated an naacp flag that marked lynching of Black people in the us between 1920 and 1938, adding the critical words ‘by police’.

In Kae Tempest’s moving performance of ‘Hold Your Own’, made during lockdown amidst the everyday surroundings of the poet’s studio,

102

the vulnerability and intimacy of the spoken word-style delivery is concentrated in messy details like wayward strands of unbrushed fabric clinging to their sweater. Tempest’s words echo from a monitor installed in a decaying bunker, located a brisk walk away from the institution on the edge of the Refshaleøen island, during which one passes a previously unrealised version of John Giorno’s bittersweet Rainbow Paintings (2015–17) that float sharp existential slogans (such as ‘Life Is a Killer’) over blissed-out colour gradients. Back inside the institution, Kahlil Joseph’s blknws (2018) reclaims ‘tv news’ from a Black perspective, taking back narrative control in a simultaneously political and entertaining montage, and Tony Cokes’s video The Morrissey Problem (2019) employs bare text on monochrome grounds for a pitch-perfect assessment of the singer’s slide from misfit hero to out-of-touch blowhard. What ties these works together, it appears, is their demonstration of how text can be activated in a sociopolitical context and, in civic space, in a direct address to the public.

In the centre of the city, at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, the exhibition dis presents: What Do People Do All Day? takes place over six rooms, each outfitted as a familiar environment such as a kitchen or living room that extends the videowork on display into three dimensions, effectively employing the screen as a sculptural element. Known for their internet-based ‘archeology of contemporary life’ that feeds on advertising, fashion and lifestyle tropes, the nyc collaborative dis selected videos from their streaming platform dis.art in sympathy with their current preoccupations, which centre on the nature of work, value and power amidst our technocapitalist present. Numerous videos are shown in the introductory room on screens incorporated into a wall-based entertainment unit featuring an electric fireplace and minibar, emphasising dis’s ‘edutainment’ sensibility.

In their General Intellects with McKenzie Wark (Paul B. Preciado) (2017), Wark’s disembodied head describes Preciado’s theory of the body as a mode of production itself, while dis and Hannah Black’s video What’s in the Box? with Hannah Black featuring Zahira Kelly & Precious Okoyomon (2018) presents a refreshingly irreverent interview in which Black female activist Zahira Kelly speaks to racial accountability online while countering notions of prescriptive privileged ‘radicals’.

Throughout the exhibition, a woven carpet by dis featuring a range of faux bodily stains, grease and tire tracks allows the visitor to comfortably recline and absorb the lengthy

ArtReview

videos at their discretion while concentrating the tensions between the simulated and the corporal, not to mention horror and leisure. The title of the exhibition, What Do People Do All Day?, comes from Simon Dybbroe Møller’s eponymous video series (after Richard Scarry’s children’s book of the same name) that explores contemporary notions of ‘dead labour’ in the context of the gig economy and the cinematic conception of sex and intimacy as freedom. In a reflexive gesture, lounging skeletons watch Møller’s video on a flat panel display as if screen time has immobilised their absent atrophied flesh, which in turn aligns with corresponding carpet stains. køs Museum of Art in Public Spaces [sic] is located in a renovated industrial hall just south of Copenhagen in the town of Køge. Unravel the Unfound examines the work of Gordon MattaClark from a social and political perspective, including an extensive range of photographic documentation, books, notebooks and artefacts.

An exceptionally articulate portrait of the American artist’s later work, the exhibition opens with a room devoted to film and photographs documenting the artist’s living artwork Food (1971–74), a community restaurant established with numerous collaborators that doubled as relational art work avant la lettre. Characterised

by Matta-Clark’s removal of the wall between the kitchen and dining spaces (a section of architecture later exhibited), the restaurant’s communal programme and crossing of traditional conceptual and architectural boundaries also prefigured the architectural-scale cuts that defined his later work.

While Matta-Clark became known for dramatic photos of surgically altered buildings, the films presented here, such as Conical Intersect (1975), Day’s End (1975) and Office Baroque (1977), document his process, illuminating the artist’s heartfelt focus on a political, antiobject and temporal practice. The artist’s politics were clear: evident in exhibited archival documents from 1971 relating to work made that year using found materials such as Jacks, a shelter made from an old car body; Fire Child, a wall made out of garbage; and Pig Roast, which invited local people, some of them homeless, to eat together.

Together with other documentation of projects, such as the antiauthoritarian Window Blow-Out (1976), which dealt with nyc gentrification, and Resource Center and Environmental Youth Program (1977), a community-based workshop focused on skills and materials for young participants to build for themselves, Matta-Clark’s oftenoverlooked dedication to social spatial practice is here made powerfully clear. Rodney LaTourelle

top Gordon Matta-Clark, Conical Intersect, 1975.

Photo: Harry Gruyaert / Magnum Photos. Š Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York.

Courtesy Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark and David Zwirner, New York

September 2020

above Simon Dybbroe Møller, What Do People Do All Day, 2020 (installation view, dis presents: What Do People Do All Day, Kunsthal Charlottenborg).

Photo: David Stjernholm. Courtesy Kunsthal Charlottenborg

103

Books Lucifer Over London

by S. Addonia, C. Aridjis, V. Bianconi, V. Di Grado, X. Guo, S. Moreira Marques, J. Walsh, Z. Zinik and W. Lehrner Influx Press, £9.99 (softcover) The immigrant experience in London provides the framework for this anthology, which contains a photographic portfolio and eight essays by writers born outside of Britain (mainly in Europe) but now resident in the capital. Yet what transpires is more a meditation on the culture of the English than on the condition of being an immigrant. Zhejiang-born British-Chinese novelist Xiaolu Guo takes the reader through her first arrival in the uk in 2002 to undertaking a citizenship test a few years later. One day she was sitting in a café, puzzling over the drama playing on the radio in the background. When asked, the owner of the cafe informed her it was The Archers, a long-running soap centring on the inhabitants of a rural village. ‘Their conversations seemed to be too indirect, touching on topics like climate change or organic farming, but never ever truly entering [them],’ Guo writes.

It was through listening to the series – rather than all the facts and figures the citizenship test required her to learn – that the writer came to understand her adopted country. ‘People often don’t think the English have ideology,’ she writes, yet she realised that ‘the most powerful kinds of ideology work by concealment.’

‘People say it takes three generations of immigrants to become native, or feel native,’ Guo continues. ‘In this case, I had to hope that

my grandchildren would feel less alien here, assuming they would be willing to stay in this country when they grew up.’ While my grandparents were Italian enough to be referred to as nonna and nonno, and my dad grew up in a North London house whose multiple rooms were home to a shifting cast of uncles, great-aunts and second cousins coming and going between the two countries, working in the West End restaurant trade, slipping between languages, my own trips to Italy are those of an English tourist, confused by the tongue, an alien in culture and law. So as a reader, I feel, usefully, under the microscope.

If any common theme comes out of the observations contained within this collection it’s that in London, perhaps more than any other part of Britain, a lot remains unsaid and unseen.

It is a sense of reservation that chimes personally.

In a list of things that Portuguese writer Susana Moreira Marques strives for, presumably with the aim of assimilation, she includes, ‘to learn invisibility’. The Russian-born writer Zinovy Zinik observes, ‘There are cities, such as Paris or New York, that look like their postcards, whose visage corresponds in reality to the image of them you had in advance constructed in your mind. London is not like anything you’d imagined it to be.’

There are moments when this collection, which has been published without introduction or other contextualisation, comes across as a slightly more literary version of Bill Bryson’s twee American-in-Britain travelogue Notes from a Small Island (1995). Bar Guo’s standout text, there is little that touches on the country’s resurgent nationalism, mainstream antimigrant rhetoric or even Brexit. While their nationalities are disparate, the writers mostly come from a certain privilege and stable economies, arriving in the uk by choice: to study or work, often in journalism or academia.

These are mostly personal stories, and lack the bite of, say, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth (2000) (or going much further back, Samuel Johnson’s descriptions of crime, corruption and squalor in his 1738 poem ‘London’), yet when Mexican writer Chloe Aridjis fondly describes passing London’s Animals in War Memorial as ‘a rupture in my journey, pulling me out of whatever mood’, or when Zinik recalls the secret drinking dens of Soho, there emerges an affectionate portrait of an adopted home that slowly, begrudgingly, gives back, or at least gives way, to those who live here. ‘By increments, each time revealing a bit more,’ as Moreira Marques puts it, until London belongs to you. Or at least to your grandkids.

Oliver Basciano

Sensoria: Thinkers for the Twenty-First Century

by McKenzie Wark Verso, $24.95 / £16.99 (softcover) McKenzie Wark opens her introduction to Sensoria by asking, ‘What is the point of scholarship?’ Wark’s answer is that scholarship ‘is about the common task of knowing the world’. This seems a sound definition as well as a worthwhile project for humanity in the twenty-first century, and Sensoria collects essays in which Wark summarises and reflects on the writings of 18 contemporary writers who are obsessed with the development and overarching influence of technology, of the future of global capitalism, how the two intertwine, and their effect on human life and human consciousness.

Sensoria is a wide view of the hybrid intellectual culture that has formed somewhere across cultural studies, philosophy, art and the internet in the last two decades. The fading (supposedly

104

Western) ideal of beauty is discussed: Sianne Ngai on the aesthetic categories of online attention, the ‘zany, cute and interesting’; while in Kodwo Eshun’s writing about Afrofuturism, Detroit techno and Black culture (in More Brilliant than the Sun, 1998), Wark finds a seminal example of an aesthetic that dissolves the limits of bourgeois (and white) humanism.

Here too are discussions of the history and future of China’s communist capitalism (in Wang Hui’s China’s Twentieth Century, 2016), and of planetary-scale models of information and governance driven by computational networks, not nation states (in Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty, 2016).

Running through many of the texts (or Wark’s attention to them) are two recurring

ArtReview

preoccupations: that we might be witnessing the end of capitalism; and that the status of human being and subjectivity is ambiguous in this tech-determined mutation of capitalism in which the machines are increasingly in control – or as Wark aptly summarises Eshun’s position, that ‘the tech itself authors ways of being’. In this, Sensoria is very much in thrall to an outlook in much contemporary thinking that is indifferent to human beings, or what we might want, since we’re really the product of processes – economic, technological and environmental – that we were never in control of from the start. The irony is that if that’s the case, scholarship, or the task of knowing the world, seems largely futile.

J.J. Charlesworth

September 2020

105

Eating Chilli Crab in the Anthropocene: Environmental Perspectives on Life in Singapore Edited by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson Ethos Books, sg$23.36 (softcover) This collection of essays, penned by Singaporeans or Singapore-based writers born between 1993 and 1998, can be firmly situated within the context of the current youth-powered global climate-activism movement. Its editor, Matthew SchneiderMayerson, is an assistant professor in social sciences at Singapore’s Yale-nus College; consequently the authors gathered here can be firmly situated among his course’s alumni.

But young people, whose lives will be most affected by the consequences of the climate crisis, speak plainly, in the vein of Greta Thunberg’s ‘Our house is on fire’.

This book, which Shneider-Mayerson says was written and edited in ‘a spirit of constructive and affectionate criticism’, has two primary thrusts. The first demonstrates the liveliness of thought in the fast-growing field of environmental humanities in Singapore, which links traditional humanities subjects – literature, philosophy and cultural studies – with environmental studies.

The interdisciplinary flavour is borne out in titles such as ‘An Oily Mirror: 1950s Orang Minyak Films as Singaporean Petrohorror’ (in local urban legend, the orang minyak is

an oil-covered sexual predator who eludes capture because of his literal slipperiness).

Elsewhere, a look at the invasive species of Javan mynahs leads into an examination of the desirable human citizen in Singapore, while a discussion of the manmade landfill island Pulau Semakau becomes a way of talking about the erasure of indigenous histories – the island was the last stronghold of the seafaring orang laut.

Besides its intellectual deconstruction of the complicated web of relations between nature and culture in Singapore, the book also has a practical component: to persuade more people to join the climate movement.

This forms the book’s second thrust. As such, the writing is accessible and persuasive, and the topics are framed as closely to life as possible. Take the title essay, which focuses on the ethics of an everyday choice: how acceptable is it to eat chilli crab (a local delicacy comprising mud crab stir-fried in tomato and chilli sauce) during a geological epoch marked by human activity on Earth? The essay then takes you on a meandering journey through historical crab-human relations, Singapore’s culinary tourism marketing, crab biology

and farming, and a brief David Foster Wallaceinspired detour into a discussion on whether crustaceans feel pain.

The book’s criticality is also balanced by its ability to provide alternative models. The last few essays suggest ways in which to build a better world for humans and nonhumans, such as by inculcating new values like collaboration and frugality in the young to prepare them for living in a climate-changed world (optimistic projection) or general civilisational collapse (less optimistic). The final essay maps out a systematic degrowth plan for Singapore that every politician should read.

This is a well-shaped book in terms of its content, which is testament to a good editor – my only quibble is that it might be too edited. The essays (by 12 different authors) are described as chapters (implying a consistent argument), and nobody disagrees with one another. Dumb as the conspiracy theory alleging that the global youth climate movement is manipulated by some sinister puppet master is, perhaps it would be more prudent to keep the voices a little uneven, a little more untamed. Multispecies flourishing, right?

Adeline Chia

Wendy, Master of Art

by Walter Scott Drawn & Quarterly, $24.95 (softcover) This is the third in Walter Scott’s collection of black-and-white ‘Wendy’ comic-strip collections. But it’s the first time I’ve met her.

At a Berlin fetish club. On page one. Holloweyed (she), her body bending itself improbably to the music, screaming about how high she is to a crowd of people wearing G-strings or less. You get the vibe that this is normal. For an artist, like Wendy, in the German capital. ‘I’ll just dance, in this club, in Berlin – forever,’ she squeals. Eight pages later our Canadian heroine has been accepted onto the University of Hell’s mfa programme in Ontario, swapped the fetish clubs for Yarn & Yarn (a wool shop), Craig’s Lighter (jazz club) and her favourite new haunt, the Y-Not Bar + Grill, and our story begins.

We’re introduced to Wendy’s classmates, the kind of stereotypes with which you’ll all be familiar: Eric, a seething ball of rage who’s constantly worrying that he has blundered

106

onto the wrong side of gender and identity politics; Maya, whose videos star people such as Chloë Sevigny, who is herself the subject of texts by supercurator Hans Ulrich Obrist and who is, between classes, travelling the globe exhibiting in one biennial to the next; Yunji, interested in the semiotics of pissing and thinking about really long pieces of string; Etienne, who chants, ‘Through indirect provocation my work questions the implicity of arts education in global capitalism’ while wearing a black polo-neck and standing in front of an image of someone taking a shit into someone else’s mouth; and Mahduri, working at the ‘intersection of fermentation, poetry and painting’. Their tutor, and permanent resident of Hell, is Cliff Masterson (‘You might remember me from my last solo exhibition, in 1998’). But you’d be wrong to think that Wendy, Master of Art is simply a mocking portrait of all the people you already know. Although it

ArtReview

is that too. ‘Do you know anyone here?’ Wendy asks her soon-to-be boyfriend (who already has a girlfriend, allowing Wendy to proclaim their relationship to be fashionably, if uncomfortably, polyamorous) at an exhibition opening. ‘Yes, actually everyone,’ he replies.

‘Every single one and soon you will too.

Nobody will be new. Nobody.’

Behind the posing, the pretentiousness and Scott’s sometimes unoriginal caricatures (at times the book feels like a poorer relative of Tony Hancock’s masterful 1961 artworld satire The Rebel), the author does manage to develop, in words and images, a very human story about people looking to connect with other people, trying to escape from existential precarity (on every level) and struggling with the fact that an ‘artistic’ life of relative freedom is one of which it can be very hard to make any sense. And, of course, that this last is true of ‘real’ life too.

With or without the freedom. Nirmala Devi

Great Demon Kings: A Memoir of Poetry, Sex, Art, Death, and Enlightenment

by John Giorno Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $28 (hardcover) spikier (and to my mind better) Poem Paintings are so indebted to this seemingly glamorous milieu that the division between life and art is negligible.

Take the 2014 screenprint We Gave a Party for the Gods and the Gods All Came, the line spelled out in white capital letters against a rainbow gradient background. Giorno paints the likes of Andy Warhol and William S. Burroughs as deities; the author, in his seventies when he died, was still clearly in awe. It is easy to link the work to the life, as Giorno makes explicit in the book, yet like the double entendre in the print, there was a sordid side to this supposed glitz. Warhol, for all Giorno’s repeated claims of genius, comes across as a pathetic figure, whether in

In the opening chapter of his autobiography, the late poet and artist John Giorno describes the visceral excitement of reading fellow poet Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956) for the first time.

Giorno’s own talent had been identified in high school in the early 1950s, but the raw emotion of Ginsberg’s generational ode to drugs, sex and social freedom was something else. At the time of this introduction to Beat culture, Giorno was, he says, ‘young and beautiful, and had all I wanted, and all I wanted was sex’. These attributes were a passport to the most fashionable parties and encounters with a who’s who of twentieth-century us culture, all of which Giorno describes here in somewhat exhaustive detail. Yet Giorno’s own poetry as well as his

his monosyllabic assessments of other artists (Stockhausen: ‘boring’, Ray Johnson: ‘so great’) or through the grisly tale of the poet waking to find a naked Andy, ‘a shoe fetishist’, slobbering over his trainers ‘with his little pink tongue’.

Giorno’s meeting with Ginsberg fell flat, the older poet ‘a complete disappointment… so straight’. Coupled with his intimate descriptions of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, both of whom he dated, and an account of a rendezvous with a washed-up Dalí , the artist having the ‘pale skin of an old man’, it becomes clear that Great Demon Kings is ultimately a useful, humanising corrective to the mythologising to which certain artists are subject, not least Giorno himself. Oliver Basciano

The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs

by Jason Diamond Coffee House Press, $16.95 (softcover) The city has apparently ‘lost its appeal’ during lockdown. No space; too many people. Those who can afford it are looking to get out, many of them to that place of supposed refuge – the suburb. For those wondering precisely where to move, Jason Diamond’s The Sprawl, a conversational, at times personal cultural history of the us suburbs, promises to be of help. Consider it a Sightseeing Tour of American Suburbia and its Famous Homes: highlights include the modernist Ben Rose House in Highland Park, Illinois, famous for its appearance in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986); the quaint town of Seaside, Florida, that provided the basis for the domed tv set of The Truman Show (1998); Bay City, Michigan, the quiet, neglected hometown of Madonna Louise Ciccone; or an unremarkable house in Lodi, New Jersey, where Misfits singer Glenn Danzig grew up. But beyond the famous, over half of the nation’s population already lives in what qualify as suburbs, and so, as the author asserts, we are ‘still very much in the middle of the suburban century’.

This is not just about pandemic property speculation. The wider questions of where culture comes from and what stories we pay attention to are among the most important of our time: looking beyond the noise and jostling of the city is a necessary part of that.

Setting itself primarily among the enclaves of the ‘Chicagoland’ area in which the author, now a journalist, grew up, the book is useful as

a primer on some of the policies and politics that shaped the American ’burbs. Diamond charts the origins of several suburbs, among them Zion and McHenry in Illinois, that all share the same fate: pastoral utopias designed to be an escape from the industrial grit of the city that soon became trapped within their own picket fences. William Levitt, one property developer he explores in detail, set up a series of planned towns across the us from the 1940s onwards, all of which had active policies to ensure that buyers would be Caucasians only.

Levitt, a Jew who claimed not to be racist, blamed his customers for the policy, describing it as ‘their attitude, not ours’. Diamond is keen to stress the tensions and shifting diversity of the suburbs, but his book never moves far beyond long-established (white) portrayals: the films of John Hughes (a biography of whom Diamond has previously written), the stories of John Cheever, the static images of the suburb in Blue Velvet (1986), The Virgin Suicides (1999), Back to the Future (1985). There are interesting asides – like Mr T getting into a landscaping dispute with his neighbours in the 1980s after felling a few oak trees that he claimed triggered his allergies – but their wider cultural and racial implications are never really followed up.

Perhaps this book’s most insightful contribution, whether intentional or not, is the way in which it embodies a suburban mindset: Diamond’s first points of reference and main

September 2020

focus are on well-known films, music, books – pop stuff made in places other than the suburbs. At one point he likens suburbs to Anakin Skywalker: full of potential, but also with a dark side. It is only once the author reveals a bit of himself – a practically homeless teenager drifting between separated parents – that this project achieves a greater resonance.

His previous posturing – hiding behind a ream of cultural references – is part of the suburban mask that Diamond seems reluctant to investigate. ‘It felt so surreal, like something out of a movie,’ he writes of a ‘McMansion’ his father has settled into. ‘But so did everything else, really,’ he shrugs, not examining any further that peculiar aspect of the snake eating its own tail.

But that’s part of the rub: the suburb is, at this point, primarily a cultural commodity, regurgitated and reingested in the us and exported internationally over generations.

While any examination of the suburbs has potential as a reflection on fringe conditions, on power and agency, reinforcing these familiar representations of the suburb only reinforces its role as a normative, Spielbergian vector that has infected large parts of the globe. ‘The future is still in suburbia. We just need to reclaim it,’ The Sprawl blandly concludes. Why not start by trying to find those stories and songs, dreamed up in some quiet, poster-lined basement, we haven’t already heard? Chris Fite-Wassilak

107

Don’t be distant just because you’re distanced Your weekly guide to the best shows, the latest news and fresh ideas you won’t want to miss Sign up now artreview.com/newsletters

ArtReviewNewsletter

ArtReview

Editorial

Publishing

Advertising & Partnerships

Production & Circulation

Editor-in-Chief Mark Rappolt

Publisher Carsten Recksik carstenrecksik@artreview.com

uk and Americas Morenike Graham-Douglas Associate Publisher morenikegd@artreview.com

Associate Publisher Allen Fisher allenfisher@artreview.com

Finance

Mainland Europe Moky May Associate Publisher mokymay@artreview.com

Editors David Terrien J.J. Charlesworth Director of Digital En Liang Khong Editor-at-Large Oliver Basciano Managing Editor Louise Darblay

Financial Controller Ying Liu yingliu@artreview.com

Asia / Asia Pacific Angela Cheung Media Sales and Partnerships angelacheung@artreview.com

Credit Controller Sneha Mehta snehamehta@artreview.com

Senior Editor, ArtReview Asia Fi Churchman Associate Editor Martin Herbert

Fashion and Luxury Charlotte Regan charlotte@cultureshockmedia.co.uk

Special Projects Ben Eastham Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn Chris Fite-Wassilak Laura McLean-Ferris Jonathan T.D. Neil

Production Manager Alex Wheelhouse production@artreview.com Distribution Consultant Adam Long adam.ican@btinternet.com Subscriptions To subscribe online, visit artreview.com/subscribe ArtReview Subscriptions Warners Group Publications t 44 (0)1778 392038 e art.review@warnersgroup.co.uk ArtReview Ltd ArtReview is published

by ArtReview Ltd 1 Honduras Street London ec1y 0th t 44 (0)20 7490 8138 e office@artreview.com

Design Art Direction John Morgan studio Designers Isabel Duarte Pedro Cid Proença Rémy Crettenand Albino Tavares

ArtReview is printed by Sterling. Reprographics by phmedia.Copyright of all editorial content in the uk and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview, issn No: 1745-9303, (usps No: 21034) is published monthly except in the months of February, July and August by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London ec1y oth, England, United Kingdom. The us annual subscription price is $50. Airfreight and mailing in the usa by wn Shipping usa, 156–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, ny 11434, usa. Periodicals postage paid at Brooklyn, ny 11256. us postmaster: Send address changes to ArtReview, wn Shipping usa, 156–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, ny 11434, usa. Subscripton records are maintained at ArtReview Subscriptions, Warners Group Publications, The Maltings, West St, Bourne pe10 9ph, United Kingdom.

Air Business Ltd is acting as our mailing agent.

Art credits

Text credits

on the cover Larry Achiampong, Reliquary Conceptual Imagery #1, 2020. Illustrated by Wumi Olaosebikan.

Courtesy the artist and Copperfield, London

Words on the spine and on pages 21, 39 and 87 are by Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), translated by Michael Hulse in 2009

September 2020

109

Hi there. I’m Raja Singa II, Emperor of Ceylon, King of Candy, Cota, Ceytavaca, Dambadan, Anorayapore, Jafnapatam, Prince of Uva, Mature, Dinavaca, the Four Corles, Grand Duke of the 7 Corles, Matale, Count of Cotiyar, Trinquemale, Batecalo, Velse, Vinatane, Dumbra, Panciapato, Veta, Putelaon, Vallare, Gale, Belligaon, Marquis of Duranura, Ratienura, Tripane, Acciapato, Lord of the Havens of Alican, Columbo, Negombo, Chilau, Madampe, Calpentyn, Ariputure, Manaar and the Fisheries of Gems and Pearls, Lord of the Golden Sun. At least that’s how I put it to the Dutch Governor of Paliacatta (in my day, that was a trading fort in Tamil Nadu, India) when I wrote to him back in 1636. I was twentythree or twenty-six (depending on who you believe) back then, had been king for about a year and wanted to remind him that I was the one who was wearing the trousers. And they were as magnificent as you’re imagining them to be.

Obviously, the Portuguese were occupying most of my kingdom’s coast back then, so the fisheries, gems and pearls and stuff were kind of off-limits in practical if not moral terms. And Jaffna had its own kings, most of them propped up by the Portuguese. Oh, and two of my brothers ruled Matale, and Vijaypala and Bintanne. I was mainly King of Kandy. But baggy trousers were a thing in my day. You had to wear them with pride.

Particularly when the fucking Portuguese were trying to turn them into children’s shorts.

But you didn’t come here to read about fashion; and I didn’t come here to write about it.

Over the past few months I’ve been reading, in these pages, the pathetic boasts and justifications of various colonisers trying to explain themselves. I’m sick of it. It’s time the boot was on the other foot. Kandy was the only independent kingdom in Sri Lanka and I’m known as the king who kicked the Portuguese off the island.

Although I half expect that the sick shits who edit this rag invited me to write this column because they want me to tell you about how I colonised myself. By which I mean my people.

But, you know, what’s the difference? None, if you ask me.

The Portuguese and me had been involved in what you people would call a game of cat and mouse since I got on the throne. They tried to tempt me into open warfare but I kept things on a hit-and-run basis. Things trundled along in this way for a bit, then they stole an elephant, so I stole some of their horses. The horse-loving fools got pissed and set out to Kandy to raze the place. I let them. And then wiped the arrogant fuckers out on their way home at the Battle of Gannoruwa in 1638. Only 33 of them made it out alive, the heads of the remaining 4,000 were piled up before me. It wasn’t all about my tactical genius, of course. The gods were on my side too. I’d stopped by the Dodanwala Devalaya

110

Back Page

In an ongoing series in which the great colonialists justify themselves, King Raja Singa II says: enough!

(you can get there by road from the turnoff at Kiribathkumbura on the Kandy–Colombo main road and then it’s around three miles in the direction of Muruthalawa town) on the way to the battle and promised the gods my crown and jewels if we won. We did and I became a charity.

(I’m a very spiritual man btw: my father was a Buddhist monk until he got lured into the ruling game; my mother was a Christian, but we don’t talk about that; I tended to play the field a bit when it came to religion – I was broadminded.)

The crown eventually ended up in the Museum of Kandy, until it got stolen in 1960. Now you careless fools get to see a fake. But I’m told (repeatedly, by the people who write for this magazine) that you live in a world in which everything is representation in any case, so you probably haven’t noticed.

Unlike you dirty bastards, I was a stickler for hygiene. Anyone serving me had to wear a muffler in case they breathed on my food.

I invented the facemask and lived a long and sometimes happy life (although I wasn’t walking much by the end of it, I had gout and stuff in my sixties and seventies, but that’s what bearers are for; I died on a couch). I hated the Europeans though. I made scarecrows of them to feed to my elephants.

I collected exotic animals. I was the Joe Exotic of my day, except I was the Lion King, which is better. There should be a Netflix series about me. And then, when I got bored of my animal zoo, I started a human one. (That’s called progress btw, or ‘season two’ if you’re a Netflix

ArtReview

exec.) And I was a dedicated collector, so there were examples of every race. People complain about my treatment of the Prince of Bengal, who was reduced to beggary to the point that he died, and the Europeans (a bunch of Carole Baskins) were none too happy about my execution of a Dutch tutor, even though it turned out he had been teaching me complete gibberish. Then they used to whinge about the impalings, the burnings, the tramplings by elephants and the chopping off of various limbs and appendages; but without discipline, what do you have?

The Portuguese, that’s what. Half our bloody language is polluted with their loan words!

Anyway, eventually I got the Dutch, via a mix of clever diplomacy and a bit of crop burning, to help me kick them out completely (that’s why the letter-writing and bragging about the size of the trousers I was wearing). The Dutch took Colombo in 1656. Boom! Sri Lanka decolonised! By me! But then – and you won’t believe this bit – instead of giving it back to me, their ally, their helper, their host, their enabler, they kept it for themselves! And set about recolonising all the Portuguese bits of the island we had only just decolonised. And they (the Dutch) called me a ‘horrible monster’ and claimed that I treated my pet people worse than a Turkish slaver (which, if you ask me, apart from being ironic, is doubly racist). Even though one of my ‘guests’, the English sailor Robert Knox (he escaped after 19 years, even though I had let him work as a pedlar), went on to write a popular account of his experiences in my kingdom that, in turn, inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe and introduce the English to the idea of the realistic novel. So, when you think about it, I invented that too. The only good European is a trampled one.

Artists Pio Abad Barby Asante Rasheed Araeen Ruth Beale David Blandy Electronic Sheep Adam Farah Lucy Fine FOR NOW Carl Gabriel Avant Gardening Brian Griffiths

Jaykoe Dawn Mellor Dan Mitchell Yasmin Nicholas The October Anthropologist & Abäke Paul Purgas Imran Qureshi John Rogers Dhelia Snoussi Jude Wacks Abbas Zahedi

BRENT2020.CO.UK