ArtReview March 2022

Providing structure & integrity since 1949

The king is of all men

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Sacred Objects Vulnerable Bodies Good NFTs? 23/02/2022 16:21

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Erwin Wurm Skins Paris Marais March—April 2022

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Huguette Caland, Espace Blanc II, 1984. © Huguette Caland Estate. Courtesy Caland Family

Vessels

David Zwirner

March 2–April 2

24 Grafton Street, London

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PÉLAGIE GBAGUIDI March 12 - April 30, 2022

ZENO X GALLERY ANTWERP

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You see we are blind, 256 x 186 cm, oil on canvas

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ODD NERDRUM YOU SEE WE ARE BLIND PAINTINGS

FINEART OSLO

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TLF +47 92 08 59 07

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ArtReview vol 74 no 2 March 2022

On refuse…

Recently, over a camel burger, someone described these editorials, to ArtReview, as serving up the ‘takeaways’ of each issue. Obviously that someone was American, but that’s not important right now. (Although ArtReview, not so well versed in transatlantic parlance as it once was, did wonder, for a moment, whether the someone had suffered so much during pandemic-related lockdowns that they had been forced to eat their Grubhub deliveries off old copies of the magazine.)

Obviously that someone thought they were engaging in some sort of flattery (although ArtReview’s social skills may still be somewhat off-kilter after 18 months of lockdowns). Which is always pleasing (you readers really should do more of it), but equally unimportant right now.

What is important is that the someone regarded the whole ‘takeaway’ business as a positive thing. As something of value. As some sort of reader’s digest in which each and every article was reduced to some sort of essential point that occupied the same sort of space and attention that would otherwise be occupied by a tweet. Thus enabling readers to tweet and retweet it, whether or not they had read any of the actual articles in the first place. Ultimately, as far as ArtReview could figure out (like it said, things – when it comes to reading other people as opposed to pages – might be a little out of whack right now), the someone seemed to be suggesting that the thing about these editorials was that they existed to make sense of each issue of the magazine so that a ‘reader’ wouldn’t have to do it themselves. And that that was a really useful thing. So ArtReview’s not going to do that here.

The rise of the nonhuman entity

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That’s not because ArtReview has some militant eighteenth-century idea about art’s fundamental antipathy towards usefulness. It found reading and looking – and the thinking that resulted from it – rather useful during lockdown (albeit it didn’t have many other options). Or because it won’t admit, despite its obvious pretensions to cultural significance, that it’s in some way part of a service industry.

It’s more that magazines like this one, and artworks too, avoid any kind of essentialism when they are working well. (That’s not to say, of course, that ArtReview doesn’t have its own point of view.) They contain the voices of different people with different backgrounds and different ideas who are responding to a set of objects, material or immaterial, that are equally diverse. And there are many ways of reading or interpreting what they say, equally dependent on the subjectivity of its readers, however elegant or forceful or well-constructed a writer’s arguments may be.

The people who contribute to ArtReview believe in trying to make sense of the world around them. And in pointing out, and sometimes accepting, that much of it is nonsense. All of which is to say that any true attempt to make sense of this messy, fucked-up world is going to reflect a little, or a lot, of that mess. ArtReview’s not here to tell you what to think. On a day when its ego is feeling a little bloated, it might try to suggest how to think; but most of the time it’s simply revelling in the fact that we can create a space in which to think at all.

Perhaps, on reflection, the someone had simply forgotten how to cook. ArtReview

The eye of the beholder

ArtReview.Magazine

artreview_magazine

@ArtReview_

ARAsia

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James Turrell

© James Turrell

After Effect

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New York pacegallery.com

2/16/22 9:42 AM 17/02/2022 17:10

sharjahart.org

Khalil Rabah, Act 3, Molding, 2012, Neon, Neon, 120 × 400 cm, Courtesy of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi

KHALIL RABAH: WHAT IS NOT Also on view this spring at Sharjah Art Foundation

Lawrence Abu Hamdan: The Sonic Image

CAMP: Passages through Passages

4 March 4 July 2022

4 March 4 July 2022

Aref El Rayess

Gerald Annan-Forson: Revolution and Image-making in Postcolonial Ghana (1979-1985)

26 February 7 August 2022 Co-organised with Sharjah Museums Authority Supported by Aref El Rayess Estate and Sfeir-Semler Gallery

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4 March 4 July 2022

7 March 7 July 2022 In collaboration with The Africa Institute

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Art Observed

The Interview Tenant of Culture

by Ross Simonini 22 When Critics Use ‘I’

by Martin Herbert 32

The Magic Belt

by Hortense Belhôte 35 Around Tallinn

by Stephanie Bailey 38

page 22 Tenant of Culture, Eclogues, 2019, recycled garments and accessories, thread, human hair, hair accessories, plaster, epoxy clay, paint, varnish, 178 × 40 × 27 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening, London

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Art Featured

Sidsel Meineche Hansen

by Ben Eastham 42

Jesse Darling

by Louisa Elderton 62

Nairy Baghramian

by Evan Moffitt 50

Tales from the Token

by Jason R. Bailey, Eric Drass, Charlotte Kent, Rhea Myers 71

Gala Porras-Kim

by Oliver Basciano 56

page 62 Jesse Darling, Light Work (detail), 2018 (installation view, Horse and Pony Fine Arts, Berlin, 2018). Photo: Frank Sperling.

Courtesy the artist and Horse and Pony Fine Arts, Berlin

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Art Reviewed

EXHIBITIONS & BOOKS 80 The case for Artists’ Basic Income, by Declan Long Every Ocean Hughes, by Louise Darblay Teresa Gierzyńska, by Phoebe Blatton Francis Bacon, by Tom Denman Haig Aivazian, by Salena Barry Candice Lin, by Rachel Tang This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975,

by Ela Bittencourt Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings, by Frank Wasser Paul Fagerskiöld, by Martin Herbert Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, by Jamie Sutcliffe A new public art, by Dan Hicks Where Jellyfish Come From, by Travis Jeppesen Hugh Hayden, by Owen Duffy Draw Your Own Conclusion, by J.J. Charlesworth Nikesha Breeze, by Carissa Samaniego Koenraad Dedobbeleer, by Pádraic E. Moore Vogliamo tutto. An exhibition about labour: can we still want it all?,

by Martin Holman Future Generation Art Prize, by Rahel Aima Our Silver City 2094, by Amrit Doll

Fuccboi, by Sean Thor Conroe, reviewed by Fi Churchman Leelee Chan’s Art Journey: Tokens From Time, edited by András Szántó, reviewed by Nirmala Devi Run and Hide, by Pankaj Mishra, reviewed by Mark Rappolt Posthuman Feminism, by Rosi Braidotti, reviewed by Nina Power Diplomatic Gifts. A History in Fifty Presents,

by Paul Brummell, reviewed by Oliver Basciano André Butzer, reviewd by J.J. Charlesworth AFTERTASTE 114

page 87 Candice Lin: Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping, 2021 (installation view, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis).

Photo: Awa Mally. Courtesy Walker Art Center

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JAC LEIRNER US HORIZON MARCH 12 – APRIL 14, 2022 ESTHER SCHIPPER POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

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Art Observed

The most addicted 21

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Courtesy the artist

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ArtReview

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The Interview

by Ross Simonini

Tenant of Culture

“Fashion acknowledges its own instability and employs that as a system”

Tenant of Culture is the moniker of Hendrickje Schimmel, a Dutch artist working in the space between sculpture and couture. Her objects are assembled with the flying tempo of fashion production, but these garments are clearly not factory made. The hand is visible inside every cut, stitch and rip. The work has been gripped and jammed into itself.

Schimmel’s objects range from nearfunctional clothing to collaged tapestries of ragged fabric. The garments are provocations,

pointing towards radical futures, obscure historical movements and the strobing microtrends of the current moment. The footwear is abstract; the hats are speculative and the tops dystopian. It’s all patched together from upcycled scraps, and when I imagine the culture that might grow up around these outfits, I am impressed by its vision and concerned for its quality of life.

Until 2016, Schimmel studied fashion and art in undergrad and graduate school,

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respectively. Now she occasionally works with public workshops, as a nod to the mechanics of clothing production, but behaves like a solitary artist, working in the studio and showing in galleries. She is, by her own declaration, not a designer.

In our conversation, conducted over video, Schimmel was kind and ebullient. She responded to each question with earnestness, energised by her own practice and by the flitting vicissitudes of culture.

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The Mini Bag Trend Ross Simonini Where are you right now?

Tenant of Culture I’m in London.

I’m originally from the Netherlands, but I’ve lived here on and off for about seven years.

RS Will you stay?

TOC I think my departure is coming closer and closer, actually. I always say, next year I’ll leave, and then I stay another year.

RS Where would you go?

TOC Belgium or Germany. Somewhere where living is a bit cheaper.

RS Why did you move to London?

TOC I did my masters here and obviously it’s a great city for fashion.

RS Would you say London was the centre of fashion at that time?

TOC When I was studying, the centre for fashion was definitely Paris. That’s where all the high-end fashion houses were.

But London was more about street fashion and young labels.

RS Did you have the intention of working for a fashion house in school?

TOC No. I was never really looking to work for a big label. It’s funny that you say that, because the name of my practice actually makes a playful reference to the fashion house. You know, there’s lots of fashion houses that have Maison in their name.

RS Right, and your name suggests that culture is the house.

TOC It’s a bit of an open term, I borrowed it from [French historian and theorist] Michel de Certeau, who uses it as an allegory to reference the hierarchical relationship between producers and consumers. He uses that term to address the tactics that consumers employ to go against the strategies of producers through the misuse and reinterpretation of mass-produced goods. So it refers to that, but also to how lots of designers have a brand name, whereas in art it’s more common to use your own name.

RS You speak about theory often. Is your work grounded in theory?

TOC Theory is important to my practice, but when I make, it’s not theoretical at all. They exist

separately. I mean, there’s an exchange, of course, but I always really depart from the materiality of a garment and see what journey that takes me on. I start from the concrete object. I open the seams, read the labels. It’s a very tactile and multisensory process. My work should speak for itself visually, without theory.

RS Do you research much?

TOC Yeah, definitely. I’m always reading.

I read a lot of fashion magazines as well.

Recently I’ve mostly been researching the industrial history of the fast-fashion industry, and how this relates to globalised supply chains.

RS I’ve noticed that it seems near impossible to find clothing made in ethical ways.

TOC Yeah, it’s really virtually impossible. And I think working up against that impossibility is also what I try to do in my work, by using postconsumer waste from the industry. A lot of brands currently present themselves as ethical, but there are so many different ways in which you can be ethical. Like as a brand you can be environmentally aware but not have ethical labour practices, for example. There’s such a highly developed division of labour within the fashion industry, through subcontracting and

Cutting Stock (series), 2021.

Photo: Theo Christelis.

Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening Gallery, London

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globally scattered assembly lines, it’s really hard to track where and under what conditions something is made.

RS How do you deal with this in your own clothes?

TOC I make a lot of my own clothes, which is very fun to do. I also upcycle a lot of garments. I like doing little tweaks to a garment to personalise it. I use the same methods that I use to construct my work. It becomes a bit of a blur, and sometimes I wear pieces that I was going to use for my work as well.

It’s a real exchange.

Kind of a Sick Outfit RS Do you tend towards any particular personal style?

TOC That’s a good question. I don’t think I have one style. Sometimes it’s business casual, sometimes it’s sporty [laughs]. I enjoy following trends to try and understand why they emerged and identify with them on a personal level.

RS Are there any trends that you’re tracking right now?

TOC I’ve always been interested in trends that employ a sense of pastoral nostalgia in one way

or another, like the hiking gear trend, worn in a city environment, which entirely defies its utilitarian nature and instead becomes decorative. I’m intrigued by fashion trends that are very contradictory in the way they sit in the cultural landscape they operate in. Like, the mini-bag trend.

RS When you look at these trends, do you think about them in a sociological sense? Like, what does the mini-bag trend say about people?

TOC I’m interested in fashion’s semiotics, for sure. It’s an interesting dynamic, because as a phenomenon fashion is designed to escape analysis. A trend disappears as soon as you’re able to identify it as such, because for exactly this reason it has already lost its pull. People desire what they can’t grasp yet.

RS Fashion trends seem to move more quickly than art trends.

TOC Well, essentially fashion is the very definition of change.

RS While art often aims to create something timeless…

TOC Fashion acknowledges its own instability and employs that as a system. But somehow the idea of trendiness is looked down upon in art,

which is concerned with autonomy and the individual genius.

RS In the future, do you think your current work will look very 2022?

TOC I think it’s interesting to make things that look very current, and see how they age and what happens to their perception later on. That’s what fashion can do. When you look back at what you were wearing, you could really cringe, and then later on you can be like, actually that was kind of a sick outfit. It is cyclical.

RS What would be the closest thing to timelessness in fashion? Is there some kind of garment that you think hasn’t been affected that much over time?

TOC Maybe the white sneaker. Since its invention, it’s been an absolute staple. There are other iconic garments, too, like a beige trench coat, blue jeans, white T-shirts and black leather jackets, which never change much, but I wouldn’t say there’s a garment that escapes time altogether.

RS Socks?

TOC Yeah. Maybe because they’re not as visible.

Though I walked past a shop today that sells only socks: all colours, materials, shapes. I saw a bunch of police officers in there looking at socks.

Sample Sale (series), 2018.

Photo: Theo Christelis.

Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening Gallery, London

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RS I often base clothing choices on the feeling of the material. Do you?

TOC Yes. Synthetic clothing makes me feel really sweaty and trapped in it, if it’s for example 100 percent viscose. So I check labels.

I used to be able to wear almost anything as long as it looked good, but I’ve given up on that.

RS Do you identify yourself through what you wear?

TOC Yeah, absolutely. Everyone has to dress themselves in the morning, which is very much an intentional, sometimes even strategic act, and you can’t escape it. So when somebody says, oh, I really don’t care about what I wear, you know, that’s still a choice in a way. That’s why, when I show work, everyone has a very personalised opinion on it.

RS Can you give an example of an article of clothing that expresses identity for you?

TOC Perhaps the chore jacket. Inspired by the French farmhand’s jacket, cotton, with four pockets on the front and a flat collar, straight cut, not much shape in it. It’s currently popular among creative people here in London, often

in indigo blue. It is usually artificially faded as well, as if bleached by hard work in the sun. It’s very interesting to think about what that jacket communicates, because essentially it’s appropriating the clothing of the rural working class. And why would you wear that in a city environment when you probably work behind a computer? The jacket effectively communicates a kind of indifference towards fashion and a sense of uniformity, but actually is extremely specific from a design perspective.

RS When you make an object or garment, are you taking its demographic into consideration? For example, the jacket that you made out of straw hats…

TOC Definitely. I was interested in the appropriation of rural working-class dress in the cottagecore phase that was very evident on social media at that time. One aspect of this was the reemergence of the milkmaid look, which included straw hats and frilly tops with a bit of shoulder showing. It’s so heavily nostalgic. I found a book on this by Meredith Martin called Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to MarieAntoinette. This book is about how historically,

in the French courts from the sixteenth century onwards, the dress of milkmaids was employed to make women of the nobility who weren’t able to conceive or who were disobedient to appear more fertile and virtuous.

They commissioned dairy follies for the women, where they would act out this pastoral play, which was entirely for the purpose of restoring their reputation.

RS You often consider class in your work. Were you raised in a way to be made aware of class?

TOC Well, I think fashion relates very much to class and hierarchies, and I come from a very long line of Dutch farmers, so perhaps that explains the interest in rural dress.

The Instigator of Stylistic Newness RS You seem very productive to me. Does it feel this way to you?

TOC I can work quite fast, materially. That’s my fashion background. The speed of production is very different in a fashion context than in an art context, and that also determines what my work looks like. It is only the making

et al., 2021 (installation view, Kunstverein Dresden; all works made by participants in various workshops held at Kunstverein Dresden).

Photo: Alexander Peitz. Courtesy the artist and Kunstverein Dresden

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Eclogues (series), 2019.

Photo: Theo Christelis.

Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening Gallery, London

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Puzzlecut Boot (series), 2021.

Photo: kunst-dokumentation.com.

Courtesy the artist and Sophie Tappeiner Gallery, Vienna

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process in which I make quick decisions, the research and material sourcing takes much longer.

RS How much of what you make do you show?

TOC A small percentage. I make a lot of textiles rather than sculptural pieces. I was trained to work this way when I studied textiles, to make a lot of samples. So I have a pile of reject samples, which I often reincorporate into other pieces.

I also de-assemble a lot of work and remake it even after I’ve shown it.

RS Is your studio filled with clothing?

TOC Yeah, definitely, it’s like a carpet of discarded and secondhand clothing, an environment of endless piles of materials. I go to my studio to be in that chaos. Everything is just spread out over the floor or in open shelving.

So I have my eye on everything. And the process is almost like felting. Things meet each other on the floor of my studio, and they form this kind of visually interesting moment.

RS When you conduct workshops, how much of the work is being made by you and how much of it is made in a collaborative fashion?

TOC Yes, I host workshops where we re- and upcycle discarded clothing. This is something that I’m really experimenting with at the moment. I have done workshops where people made their own pieces and it’s their work.

In other workshops we collaborate on pieces.

I always wanted to be part of a collective experience of making. Which is also where the notion of the fashion house comes from historically: the concept of in-house production. Everything was made in-house, from the design to the execution, it was all done collaboratively under one roof. That is a bygone era, pre-division of labour. But I do think the principle of that can be very interesting.

I don’t think I would ever actually start a fashion brand, though.

RS Do you sew by hand or use machines?

TOC Mostly machines. I had quite a technical education and I have a few industrial sewing machines that I often use, that stitch through the thickest of fabrics. I also use a heat press.

I look at how a garment is produced and try to recreate that production method, to gain insight into its method of assembly. I’m not patient enough for hand sewing.

RS Since we discussed trends, do you see your art as a part of a trend of what’s going on in the artworld?

TOC I think, yes, absolutely. There are a lot of garments and fashion references in contemporary art these days. And I think perhaps that is because fashion is very interesting and worth examining as a phenomenon as well as an industry, but within the fashion world itself there is not much space or time to reflect on it.

RS Why do you think art and clothing are coming together in this way now?

TOC I think what we have to reckon with at the moment is overproduction, and fashion is one of the driving factors behind overproduction, because it is the instigator of stylistic newness.

Capitalism relies heavily on the system of fashion to always create a desire for something new. It is important that we collectively reflect upon this, and I think you can achieve this through the recontextualisation of garments in an art context.

Art obscures all this industrial reality more, where with fashion you can see it on everyone you meet.

Ross Simonini is a writer, artist, musician and dialogist. He is the host of ArtReview’s podcast Subject, Object, Verb

Flash s/s (series), 2020.

Photo: Theo Christelis.

Courtesy the artist and Soft Opening Gallery, London

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22/02/2022 14:39

A few years back, when I was teaching a class on art criticism in Salzburg, one of the participants said something that’s stayed with me: that art critics, as they get older, tend to use the first person more. On the one hand, I think that’s true – see this very column – and is something to do with confusing having your sketchy opinions published for years with them mattering much. For a useful corrective, a critic might pay attention to where they’re placed at the gallery dinner; enjoy getting to know the technicians. On the other hand, grizzled art writers starting every other sentence with ‘I’ are no longer the exception. If anything’s changed in art criticism within living memory, aside from the latter-day ‘crisis’ it seems continually able to stagger through, it’s that the first-person exhibition review has mainstreamed.

Now, I’ve commissioned reviews at ArtReview for years, and not too long ago, if someone filed copy in the first person I’d be like, ‘no’. It wasn’t just me: I remember a (relatively) lively letters-page exchange in another art magazine because a critic had prefaced his exhibition

Me, myself and…

Martin Herbert explores whether or not the critic’s ‘I’ has fundamentally altered the nature of art criticism

review with thoughts from a book that, he said, he’d happened to find on the train to the show.

But when virtually everyone – especially younger writers – is putting themselves front and centre in the text, and given that cultural forms (including relatively lowly ones like criticism) aren’t meant to be static, you have to ask if you’re right or they are.

Of course, first-person journalism, if not so much first-person criticism, is not new. It goes back at least to the Victorians, was updated (with, as Dave Hickey said, ‘neon punctuation’) by the so-called New Journalism of the 1960s and 70s, and hasn’t really gone away since.

A couple of months ago my social media feeds were full of responses to the death of Joan Didion, a key exponent of the latter style, and they made it clear that she was a figure of influence for a lot of people in the artworld.

Count the number of Instagrammers posting the cover of a recent reissue of her 1970 novel Play It As It Lays, with its oddly chosen image of Duchamp playing chess with a nude Eve Babitz – the Los Angeles novelist and sort-of rival of

Velvet Buzzsaw (still), 2019, dir Dan Gilroy.

Photo: Claudette Barius / Netflix

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Didion, who died, spookily, a week before her.

(My first edition of The White Album is in storage, so I couldn’t flaunt it.) Anyway, when I began reading Didion – in the 1990s, after writerly critics like Bruce Hainley kept shoehorning her into their texts – and her forensic accounts of her own reactions to the world, I thought, ‘I can’t do that’. But that was before blogs, and then social media, and the concomitant rise of the ‘personal essay’, encouraged everyone to see themselves as the centre of their own unique drama, and self-exposure became entangled with likes and squirts of dopamine.

As an editor working with various generations of contributing writers, I’ve seen this situation morph and complicate, with mixed results. Once it’s established that you’re talking about your experience, maybe you think it’s OK to talk about the private view too, or the conversation you had there with the artist. Maybe you want to quote them; maybe the review then ends up being partly your opinion of the work and partly the artist’s.

I typically put my foot down there (not to get into the whole conversation about the ‘critical’ element of critical writing, and the fact of writers who are also freelance curators, etc, trying to play nice). Then I go and see a show myself on a rainy day, or hungover, or after train delays, and don’t like said show, and wonder about objectivity.

On the upside, and relatedly, one thing that might feel appropriate about this centring of ‘me’ is the implicit avowal, or admission, of subjectivity in the critical act. Just as, in a substantial amount of twentieth-century criticism, the creator’s intentionality was discounted, now what’s emphasised is that one person, one ‘I’, saw this, and these are their thoughts on the art and whatever else flows

top Sigmund Freud, c. 1921. Photo: Max Halberstadt.

Licensed to the public domain above Anton Ego in Ratatouille, 2007. Courtesy Pixar

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across the brainpan. Some art writers who publish primarily online, and are freed from word counts, accordingly set off on untethered odysseys into how a given show made them feel (the current cultural emphasis on prioritising our own feelings isn’t irrelevant here either). Sometimes this leads to good and even great writing, sometimes not; but if you try and wish away this refraction of art through the prism of the self, you’re probably Canute. In any case, nothing lasts forever, and probably anything is preferable to the bought-off pabulum pumped out by gallery-owned magazines. Plus, in each moment of reification there’s an opportunity. Obviously, we’ve had – and still have, in abundance – first-person art writing.

We’ve had second-person art writing, in which the critic empathetically imagines ‘you’ experiencing the show (second-person writing was a Didion specialty, too, and Peter Schjeldahl has also done this a fair bit). Want a challenge, scribe? Third-person art writing.

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HEIDI VOET 海蒂 • 芙欧特

MICHAEL LIN 林明弘

22.3-22.5.22

Heidi Voet - Come play a game with us/We have no one to trust/Imagine lost at sea/Imagine you see me 158 x 48 x 48cm, 2020 Michael Lin - Untitled 122 x 244cm/each, 2020

doublespeak

mother of the world Vault: BUSUI AJAW 布苏伊 • 阿贾

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The painting features three pale-skinned, rosy-cheeked figures against a blue sky.

One of them, a blonde sitting on a cloud and naked but for the pink fabric lightly covering her legs, has slipped off her gold belt to hand it to a brunette standing beside her. The brunette wears a blue coat and a golden dress that serves only to reveal one of her breasts. Sitting between them, a familiar winged childlike figure looks out at us; there’s a mischievous glint in his eyes, as his index finger balances on the tip of an arrow. You know him: it’s Cupid. And here he’s mixing it up with Venus and Juno. It piques my curiosity, causes a blip on my gaydar.

The narrative of Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun’s Juno Borrowing the Belt of Venus (1781) – first recounted in Homer’s Iliad, later assimilated into Roman mythology, from which source Vigée Le Brun draws her version – relates an incident that took place during the Trojan War. With Troy besieged by the Greeks, Juno (goddess of marriage, wife and sister of Jupiter, and siding with the Greeks in this conflict) borrows a belt, woven with threads of desire and seduction, from Venus (goddess of love) in order to lure her husband, who’s backing the Trojans, away from

Buckle Up

The ‘queer gaze’ is nothing new, says Hortense Belhôte, it’s been present in art for centuries

the battle. The war, now in its tenth year, had been set in motion when young Paris, scion of Troy, was asked to select ‘the most beautiful goddess’ and chose Venus – over Juno and Minerva – who then promised him the love of Helen, the most beautiful mortal woman.

Albeit somewhat inconveniently married to the Greek king Menelaus. Given this history, Juno seems surprisingly close to her former rival in Vigée Le Brun’s telling. Magnanimity on the part of the winner, or suspect sisterhood from a bitter runner-up?

By choosing to represent this episode, Vigée Le Brun puts a significant spin on the traditional depictions of Juno. The faithful wife of Jupiter and victim of his indiscretions is usually described in literature as jealous and vengeful (unleashing her wrath on her husband’s lovers), yet here she appears independent, sensual and caring. Jupiter is absent. As Venus removes her belt and Juno prepares to don it, they pause to look at each other. Cupid blushes, his quiver of arrows resting in perfect alignment with the goddesses’ pelvises… I can’t help it… To me it looks like Juno is harnessing herself with a strap-on in preparation for sex with Venus.

Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Juno Borrowing the Belt of Venus, 1781, oil on canvas, 147 × 114 cm.

Licensed to the public domain

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In any case, there is reason to think that my interpretation might not be so farfetched.

The painting was commissioned by Charles Philippe, younger brother of the French king Louis XVI (1774–92), who was then aged twenty-four and notorious for his libertine lifestyle and collection of erotic paintings. And such interests were widely shared among the French court and artists at the time. Indeed, they came, in part – with painters like François Boucher and Jean-Honoré Fragonard embodying this taste for nudity and eroticism – to define the art-historical style known as the rococo (the late phase of which Vigée Le Brun is often associated with). In this context, the subject of Venus’s magic belt had become something of an artistic obsession: notably the subject of a comic opera by François Hippolyte Barthélémon performed in Bordeaux in 1769 and a serenade performed by Charles Dibdin in London in 1783. In fashion it resonated with the trend for dressing ‘à l’antique’, where high-waisted, breast-hugging gowns were edging aside the viscera-squashing corset.

Art historian Philippe Bordes has shown that historical focus on the figure of neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David (Vigée Le Brun’s contemporary) has had the effect of erasing a large part of the art from that period, Vigée Le Brun’s included. The narrative of a decadent and feminine eighteenth-century rococo (associated with the prerevolutionary monarchy) supplanted by a virile and revolutionary neoclassicism during the early nineteenth century has skewed our understanding. It’s time we took a fresh look and let go of this Napoleonic retelling of art history.

Recent exhibitions such as Peintres Femmes (2021) at the Musée du Luxembourg or the Vigée Le Brun retrospective (2015) at the Grand

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Palais (both in Paris), along with collaborative research efforts by academics such as Melissa Hyde, Charlotte Guichard and Martine Lacas, have highlighted the economic and artistic challenges faced by female artists at the time, including Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, MarieGabrielle Capet, Marie-Guillemine Benoist, Angélique Mongez – to name but a few. Their careers and aesthetic choices are now starting to be analysed in strategic terms, shaped by ‘safe transgressions’ and other ‘deliberate compromises’, in the words of Lacas.

Juno Borrowing the Belt of Venus could be described in those terms. Mythological scenes and allegories qualified as ‘history painting’, considered the most noble genre, yet forbidden territory for female painters since it implied the representation of male nudity and, by extension, real-life naked models – a violation of decorum. Vigée Le Brun found a way around the rule by depicting female-only allegories, allowing her to stake a claim in the ‘grand genre’ without compromising herself morally.

This art of bypassing and subverting the dominant norm through the creation of sexy imagery is reminiscent of contemporary strategies of expression in LGBTQIA+ movements. Vigée Le Brun didn’t run a drag club or direct sex-positive postporn short films, and she may never have had lesbian relationships.

Yet her painting relates to queerness in that it challenges a social and gendered prohibition with an iconography that complicates fixed sexual categories.

To see her work in this light can allow for a richer academic analysis, one that broadens its social and anthropological scope. If historians (Abigail SolomonGodeau, Mechthild Fend, Geneviève Fraisse or Bordes) have since the 1990s demonstrated at length the importance of gender studies in understanding social and aesthetic concerns during the French Revolution period, they have mostly stuck to the representation of male bodies. The historic and academic deconstruction of femininities is yet to be done, so let’s continue the journey: time to fasten your belts. Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Juno Borrowing the Belt of Venus (details), 1781, oil on canvas, 147 × 114 cm.

Licensed to the public domain

Hortense Belhôte is an art historian, actress and performer based in Paris. Her web series Look but Don’t Touch is currently streaming on Arte TV

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Eileen Mayo, Turkish Bath, 1930, 4 block print on paper. Private Collection.

Eileen Mayo

A Natural History 12 February to 3 July 2022 Free admission townereastbourne.org.uk @TownerGallery Strategic Partner

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In March 1912 suffragettes staged a windowsmashing campaign across London’s West End, aiming to demonstrate that the government placed a higher value on property than on the lives of women. Among their targets was the popular department store Swan & Edgar, as shown in an archival black-and-white photograph documenting the aftermath of the attack, with black-coated men – and a smattering of women – milling around the scene. That image forms part of Marge Monko’s Show Windows series (2014–21), on view in a two-artist exhibition titled The Great Pretender at Kai Art Centre in Tallinn. It introduces a sequence of c-prints of contemporary store windows – in this case, high-end shoe displays – bookended by another historical shot, this one of a shop destroyed by Soviet cannon fire in 1919, during the Estonian War of Independence.

The archival images included in Show Windows illuminate the ambiguous nature of seemingly apolitical commercial sites. Located on the threshold between private and public space, their glass barriers are the staging grounds for energetic outbursts of criminal activity, political protest and natural disaster – inanimate bystanders that act, in some instances, like bad reflections. In one archive photo, a woman reaches into a broken

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Mixed Signals

Desires refracted through window displays and vernacular art catch Stephanie Bailey’s eye in Tallinn

Marge Monko, Sheer Indulgence (still), 2021, 16mm film transferred to digital, 8 min. Courtesy the artist

store-window in Washington, DC, amid the civil unrest that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr in 1968. Caught by the camera’s incriminating lens, the figure is suspended in a thicket of conjecture – is this a protest, the seizing of an opportunity or a mixture of both?

The picture introduces four more Show Windows c-prints: a bland homeware presentation and three maximalist displays whose overload reflects an enmeshment of objects and projections. From a congested beauty-shop taxonomy to a row of niche toilet brushes – some in the shape of cats, one like a turtle – arranged below a 1980s-style neoclassical black-and-white image of a chiselled man holding a shower head over his naked body.

The Great Pretender’s other artist is Londonbased Gabriele Beveridge, who contributes sculptures consisting of chromed mannequin legs over which handblown pink glass orbs seem to melt, elevating the shop dummy into something totemic; and Fountain (2021), which, despite the reference in its title, borrows its central form from another Marcel Duchamp readymade, Bottle Rack (1914). The metal frame hangs from the ceiling like a chandelier, with breasty pink glass orbs slumping from each tip, as if to mirror the refractions of desire that are concentrated in Monko’s commercial frames. Here, the breast

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is objectified like any other industrialised mass-produced item, whether a designer shoe or basic household appliance.

The shop window and its medley of consumer items signals an entanglement of wants and ways of living. It makes visible societal stratifications that feed latent urges, and aspirations that lurk beneath the material veneers of necessity. Perhaps that’s why storefronts so often bear the brunt of unrest. To break the display is to rupture the facade of the status quo, which says a lot about the global designer stores that rushed to board their New York City storefronts ahead of the blm protests in the summer of 2020. But perhaps not so much about shopkeepers on the other end of the scale, for whom precarity is far more present than it is for brands whose inflated prices speak to marketing budgets more than function. It’s a knock-on effect, really. A sliding scale of dominoes, whereby a system predicated on desiring capital locks people into its thrust for more, such that those on one end of the scale can be taken as equal to those on the other, purely based on their function to buy and sell.

That spectrum between high and low, outside and in, one point and another, opens up in Otherness, Desire, the Vernacular, curated by Denis Maksimov at Temnikova & Kasela, the commercial gallery next door to Kai Art Centre. In this pairing, folk-inspired artworks by Jaanus Samma, including a bench installed with wooden tavern mugs, face six digital c-prints from Carlos

Motta’s The Psalms series (2018), in which a digitally rendered single black figure emerges from a black plane. Each form is based on bodies found in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts. One of them, Monstrum triceps capite vulpis, draconis, & aquilaue (2018), is taken directly from the 1642 book Monstrorum Historia, by Ulisse Aldrovandi, and depicts a human torso with dragon legs and the heads of an eagle, hound and dragon.

from top Jaanus Samma, Personal Mythology, 2021, wool rug, woven by Ingrid Helena Pajo, photo Roman-Sten; Carlos Motta, Vir Marinus Episcopi Specie, from the series The Psalms, 2018, 3d print, acrylic photopolymer. Both courtesy the artists and Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn

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Motta’s archetypal ‘others’ represent an enigmatic mystery, as is befitting of source material to which only the initiated had access. These forms exude the same kind of alien presence as Beveridge’s chrome legs in the gallery next door, whose limbic iconography is heightened by Monko’s short video Sheer Indulgence (2021), in which a closed frame of dancers wearing different coloured stockings move in a templelike white room to the timeless and ritualistic sound of beating claves.

Samma’s textile works, on the other hand, move from the speculative realm of legends and icons to grounded traditions passed on from person to person. Personal Mythology (2021) takes the form of a traditional Estonian rug, commonly used to commemorate a wedding, handwoven by Ingrid Helena Pajo according to Samma’s design.

On red ground, motifs repeat across the weave: a folk-art rendition of a jockstrap, a pair of topless men sawing wood and a church whose phallic tower spurts a white snake’s tongue. Each symbol draws from the artist’s work – most recently, jockstraps and briefs embroidered with patterns based on nineteenth-century coifs (tanu) traditionally worn by married women found at the Estonian National Museum. In these homages to village people, Samma queers folk traditions to confront traditional viewpoints in a common language – at once a challenge and a wink that seeks to bend rather than break.

Apprehension and wonder feed equally into Motta’s fantastical creatures, whose monochromatic digital renderings evoke ancient-futurist projections of a timeless hybridity, which in turn match Samma’s earthbound material remixes, where conservatism and fluidity come together as an incongruous fusion of handmade form.

In these expressions of materialist culture and its various spectacles, the conditions of necessity and excess emerge across temporalities and landscapes, opening up a continuum that likewise charges Monko’s photographic sequences and Beveridge’s mannequin-turned-totemicforms next door. As with Monko’s shop windows, the objects in these Tallinn galleries appear like indifferent yet potent thresholds; embodiments of that libidinal space from which a desiring culture – and in turn, its actions – erupts, as if poised for climax.

Stephanie Bailey is a writer and editor based in London

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Keith Cunningham The Cloud of Witness 16 February – 21 August 2022 Newport Street Gallery Newport Street London SE11 6AJ www.newportstreetgallery.com

Image: Keith Cunningham, Two Hanging Chickens, 1956

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Art Featured

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Sidsel Meineche Hansen

by Ben Eastham

DICKGIRL 3D(X) (still), 2016, CGI animation, HD video with sound installed on DIY BDSM structure.

CGI modelling and animation: Werkflow Ltd, London.

Soundtrack: Exotica by Nikisi, 3 min, loop

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The Danish artist’s work explores our bodies as the front line of resistance against a policed state

NO RIGHT WAY 2 CUM (still), 2015, VR production, CGI animation running in realtime (colour with sound), 1 min 11 sec

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‘Critical metaphysics’, wrote the French anarchist collective Tiqqun, eight-minute work is named after an antipsychotic drug that be‘is in everyone’s guts.’ Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s work starts from the came notorious after its manufacturer – the now household-name position that our bodies and minds are being shaped by surveillance AstraZeneca – was fined half a billion dollars for paying kickbacks to capitalism, pornographic spectacle and the pharmaceutical industry doctors who prescribed it to patients (including children, the elderly at the level of our cells, genes and chromosomes. Any coming insur- and prisoners) to alleviate conditions for which it had not only not been rection against the existing order must, by extension, begin at the approved but that were as diffuse as aggression, anger management, level of our nervous systems and bloodstreams. Their work asks what anxiety, depression, mood disorder and sleeplessness. Promotional this might look like and, in common with the revolutionary ideology material for a pharmaceutical company showing the passage of its advanced by Tiqqun, whether it could usefully be understood as the product through the body is spliced with scenes in which a female avatar experiences what is either a catastrophic breakdown (paradox‘accumulation of rage to such a degree that it becomes a viewpoint’. ically, the listed side-effects of Seroquel Working in media as varied as CGI What seems like an unambivalent include psychotic symptoms) or a liberanimation, woodcut, sculpture, installation and publishing, the Danish-born, ating transformation. In the context of expression of righteous anger is London-based artist critiques the mecha- more conflicted than it first appears work that foregrounds body hacking nisms of control that conspire to produce and physical metamorphosis as a means docile citizens. In doing so, they address many of the most baffling of escape, it might conceivably be both. questions of our time: why do we support economic structures that A voiceover read by the iconic New York singer and writer Lydia funnel vast power and wealth to a handful of people? Why do we Lunch – based loosely on a conversation between anthropologist so eagerly offer up our private information to corporations that we Gregory Bateson and his daughter Nora – discusses the means by know will sell it to third parties who will then use it to manipulate which capitalist society “produces” citizens to fit cybernetic systems our behaviour? Why do we continue to work in jobs that make us that are superficially dynamic yet always tend towards equilibrium sick? Why do we subscribe to pharmaceutical products that suppress and control. The dialogue describes a historic development in the the symptoms of that sickness to distract from its causes? Why do we operations of power that is at the heart of Meineche Hansen’s work: continue to live in cities that are, as one of Meineche Hansen’s narra- it’s a development that moves from the “disciplinary control” of legal tors puts it, “machines to collect personal data about its residents”? and political frameworks, through the “biopower” by which states intervene in the health of their citizens in order to maximise the Why, to paraphrase Rousseau, do we run towards our chains?

These preoccupations are introduced in the CGI animation efficiency of their labour force, to a present in which the tech, pharSeroquel® (2014), first exhibited at London’s Cubitt Gallery. The macological and pornographic industries mould our sense of self to

Seroquel® (still), 2014, HD video and CGI animation with sound, on flatscreen, 8 min

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their own ends. The law becomes less necessary as an instrument of was exhibited at London’s Gasworks, the work not only highlighted coercion when we are physically and psychologically conditioned to a state proscription on the representation of female desire but raised behave in ways conducive to the status quo. This, the voiceover tells the question of whether avatars are subject to the same regulations as the women they replace in the production of pornography. us, is “the industrial complex of your emotions”.

The entanglement of drugs and pornography is embodied in This contested boundary between supposedly free subjects and Seroquel® by EVA v.3.0, a free-to-use stock 3D-model designed for manufactured objects was further explored in the 2018 documentary deployment in CGI pornography who goes on to star in several of short Maintenancer, made in collaboration with Therese Henningsen.

Meineche Hansen’s animations. Her transition into the art industry We are introduced to the madam of a German brothel, Evelyn Schwarz, recalls Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe’s purchase of the manga who tells us about the increasing popularity of silicone sex dolls character AnnLee from a Japanese animation studio, with the differ- and their advantages as employees: they are never late, always presentable, don’t get sick, and so on. These ence that while the two male artists felt The work raised the question dolls seem initially to represent the apothcomfortable in stating that they were ‘libof whether avatars are subject to erating’ their conspicuously female muse, eosis of late-capitalist economic relations: Meineche Hansen makes no such claims. the same regulations as the women perfectly frictionless and transactional exchanges, unhindered by unreliable bodies.

Indeed, a woodcut reproducing the ‘morph they replace in pornography function’ of EVA v.3.0’s genitals as detailed Yet “aesthetic perfection”, Meineche Hansen in her user manual (HIS CORPORATE CUNT ART, credit Nikola Dechev, writes to me, “I associate with an erasure of the labour that goes into 2016) takes pains to credit her creator in the title. As elsewhere in capitalist production”, and soon Fräulein Schwarz is reminding the Meineche Hansen’s oeuvre, what seems like an unambivalent expres- viewer that these dolls are supported by a “different kind of work”. sion of righteous anger is more conflicted than it first appears: this act This is the labour of the titular ‘maintenancer’, the woman who of naming is both a calling out of institutionalised misogyny and an cleans the dolls in between sessions and performs various other ethical acknowledgement of the creative labour hidden behind open- forms of care. We see her disinfect a blonde named Anna’s orifices before tenderly repainting her nipples and vulva; we learn that she source software.

Rather than play out some imagined freedom, EVA v.3.0 tests the worked previously as a trained assistant in a care home. As she makes limits that constrain socialised individuals, and specifically women: a cup of tea to calm the nerves of a client, we learn that the men often in the VR work NO RIGHT WAY 2 CUM (2015), for instance, she mastur- thank her for having ‘taken some of the anxiety away’ from their bates and squirts onto the camera in defiance of the British Board of encounters. Nervousness, anxiety and anger are figured in Meineche Film Classification’s injunction against female ejaculation. When it Hansen’s work as natural physical responses to the social pressures of

NO RIGHT WAY 2 CUM (still), 2015, HD video and CGI animation with sound, on flatscreen, 1 min 11 sec

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His Head, 2014, clay and black epoxy, dimensions variable

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twenty-first-century life, and here we catch a brief glimpse of one way in which those feelings relate to an escalating crisis in masculinity.

While her labour is made visible by the film, the face of the ‘maintenancer’ is never shown, her name not given. This expresses another of the tensions that animate Meineche Hansen’s work: when so much capitalist exploitation is predicated on hiding the labour that underpins its production, there is a moral imperative to draw attention to those workers; yet to profit from the publication of an individual’s identity is to exploit them. Particularly in a surveillance society.

The emergence of ‘the artist’ in the West offers a useful historical model for this dialectic. A shift that began when workers started signing objects to secure recognition for their labour has led inexorably to a situation in which the object is subordinate to the individual’s ability to manufacture and sell themselves. Meineche Hansen’s Manual Labour series of expressionist woodcuts (including Tendinitis Freelance, 2013) dramatises the sense that, these days, the late-twentiethcentury utopian mantra that everyone is an artist might have been realised in a society where everyone now sells themselves (and far too cheaply at that).

This central issue of consent finds diverse expressions in Meineche Hansen’s work, ranging from a short animation in which an extravagantly endowed EVA v.3.0 fucks an amorphous biomorphic blob named iSlave (when I saw the work at Rodeo in Piraeus, the screen was suspended from a makeshift wooden BDSM structure) to the video installation End-Used City (2019). First exhibited at the Chisenhale Gallery, End-Used City is set in a dystopian near-future London that very closely resembles the present. Using an Xbox controller, the viewer gains access to the city by interacting with a monstrous animated

figure (their body a patchwork of the faces of tech billionaires). But the promise of choice is largely illusory: the viewer is simply led to three short videos in which a young woman moves through the city, her interior monologue delivered in the lilting Scottish accent of a programmable sex-robot named Harmony.

Over the course of the three instalments, this flaneuse reveals herself to be an agent harvesting data on behalf of the overseeing Leviathan, whose composite body alludes to the frontispiece of Thomas Hobbes’s notoriously misanthropic 1651 treatise. According to Hobbes – for whom human life is ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ and tends naturally to a state of ‘war of all against all’ – the only way to maintain order is through absolute power legitimised by a social contract between autocrat and citizens. This contract is implicit: by being born into a state you give it authorisation to withdraw your liberty if you break the terms to which you automatically signed up (by disrespecting private property, for example). This template for contemporary capitalism has obvious parallels with the operations of power online, in which we unconsciously sign away our freedoms by clicking cursorily through the various ‘end-user’ contracts that grant access to the internet’s resources.

Hobbes’s low opinion of citizens meant he believed that they could be corralled into a society only by incorporation into a body politic that concentrates power at its summit. This ‘problem of the head’ was theatricalised at the Chisenhale by the presence on the floor near to the video installation of a decapitated and pointedly male head in clay (HIS HEAD, 2014). If this sculpture suggests that in principle the problem is easily solved, then Meineche Hansen’s work also pursues some more practical strategies by which to resist our co-option into

Welcome to End-Used City, 2019 (installation view, Chisenhale Gallery, London, 2019)

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Tendinitis Freelance, 2013, laser woodcut on paper, mounted on aluminium under museum glass, 52 × 36 cm.

Photo: Lewis Ronald

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exploitative systems. In An Artist’s Guide to Stop Being an Artist (2019), (the snake nods to the serpent twined around Asclepius’s rod). a video monologue observed with professional interest by a ball- Meineche Hansen’s deeply ambivalent work suggests that if the insurjointed, sex-toy-compatible wooden figure lying on the ground of rection is coming it will take the form of a civil war: less a pitched battle Copenhagen’s SMK gallery, Meineche Hansen recommends tactics between two teams of sovereign individuals fighting on the streets including being “difficult to work with”. The advice to aspiring artists under the banners of Us and Them, more a long conflict within the might be laced with typically dark humour, but it also draws on the self to regain control of our own bodies and minds. history of micropolitical industrial action – slow-working, tardiness, To answer the question of what that might look like, Meineche illness – pursued by disenfranchised subjects with no other recourse. Hansen’s work insists that we take a look around. When populaces are The predicament in which both critical artists and critical citizens controlled through the body, civil disobedience might take the form find themselves is that to withdraw from the system is to be defeated of that dismantlement of gender binaries and ‘body hacking’ that theorists including Paul B. Preciado have by it. “I don’t think you can mentally avoid The predicament in which both advocated. But not all revolutions are the double bind,” Meineche Hansen tells critical artists and critical citizens find me, “because it’s part of how capitalism theorised or even conscious, and we might operates and how colonial logic is structhemselves is that to withdraw from equally cite the startling recent proliferation across society of those embodied and tured.” The alternative is that by “working the system is to be defeated by it rebellious feelings – depression, anger, though the double bind in ways that are analytical and material” it might be possible to raise awareness of those psychosis, exhaustion – that are threatening to make the capitalist internal contradictions in the hope, perhaps, that they might eventu- West unmanageable. In which case, Meineche Hansen’s work suggests, ally tear the system apart. The function of the artist is not, according to it might be that the revolution has already begun. ar this reasoning, to perform a romantic illusion of freedom – comforting Work by Sidsel Meineche Hansen is on view in ανάβασις*, Rodeo Piraeus, because it allows the viewer to believe that liberty is still possible – but instead to draw attention to irreconcilable conflicts within a system through 26 March, in *standstill, Rodeo London, through 2 April, and will be in included in The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art that constrains the viewer. The practice of freedom cannot be outsourced Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 23 April – 27 November. to artists, or activists, or anyone else. It is work we have to do ourselves.

ALIEN BABY 0 Rules for life, a vinyl record of music by Joanne Currently on display at Rodeo in Piraeus, the burned wooden sculpRobertson and Sidsel Meineche Hansen, was released in February ture ONE-self (2015) depicts a totemic figure that is part pornographic priestess and part snake-headed god. We are all chimeras, it suggests, Ben Eastham is a writer and editor based in Athens our conflicted selves constructed by spectacle and pharmacology

ONE-self, 2015 (installation view, Temporary Gallery, Cologne, 2015) all images Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, London & Piraeus

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Nairy Baghramian Art is about more than itself, says the sculptor; you can just about see her sculptures agreeing

by Evan Moffitt

Nairy Baghramian is a kind of surgeon. With exacting precision she peels away the layered contingencies of art and stitches them back together in sculptures that resemble human viscera or appendages. Like our organs, their soft organic forms depend on hard skeletons for support. Leaning on metal frames, gallery walls or doorways, each seemingly precarious construction is a synecdoche for the shaky systems that undergird our perceptions of art: the intentions of artists, the discourse of critics and curators, the architecture of museums and the experiences of viewers. Baghramian’s unruly works are often positioned at defiant odds with the spaces in which they are displayed, as if to suggest that all subjects, no matter how alienated, have power within the institutions they occupy.

For her contribution to the 2008 Berlin Biennale, for example, Baghramian installed La Colonne Cassée, 1871 (The Broken Column, 1871) on both sides of the Neue Nationalgalerie’s pristine glass facade. Mies van der Rohe’s monumental rendition of a Doric temple was punctured by a bent pillar, as if to mock the failed ambitions of ‘straight’ modernism. “Modernity is heterosexual,” she tells me. As for the claims to openness modern architects like Mies van der Rohe made with their frequent use of glass, she adds, their “assumption of transparency is really one-sided”. In the light of day, it’s easy to see out of the Neue Nationalgalerie’s windows but much more difficult to peer in. Baghramian’s Peeper (2016) takes this even further, cutting off a section of an open gallery with a taut steel cable. The work’s title flips the script on the viewer, playfully accusing them of a voyeuristic intrusion.

The problem of access is central to Misfits, a series of abstract sculptures that Baghramian displayed at Milan’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna in 2021. Smoothly sanded, pale pink and green marble lozenges were installed on the museum terrace, adjoining a park whose use is restricted to children and their families. The sculptures’ distended aluminium counterparts, meanwhile, surveyed through the gallery’s windows a playground they could not visit, like childless adults who had outgrown the sandbox. Baghramian was shocked that public space should forbid those unable or unwilling to procreate, a condition of legally enforced heteronormativity. “There’s queerness in my work that people don’t want to acknowledge,” she says. With cheery coats of blue and orange paint, her excluded Misfits seem much happier on their own.

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Baghramian was born in Isfahan, Iran, in 1971. When she was thirteen her family relocated to Berlin, where she has lived and worked ever since. As a teenager she began attending performances at Berlin’s Volksbühne, including plays by Bertolt Brecht. The verfremdungseffekt or ‘making strange’ for which Brecht is best known is also present in Baghramian’s sculptures: positioned at thresholds or in corners, they focus our attention on the spatial and cultural context of their display the same way that Brecht’s actors, by breaking the fourth wall, foreground the structural devices of theatre. An awareness of the way bodies perform in the world is also fundamental to queer modes of being. Baghramian is drawn to the ephemerality of performance, which encourages critical reflection: “When we turn our back on the stage, we begin thinking,” she says. Like walking out of a theatre, turning away from a sculpture is an expression of agency.

Baghramian welcomes that moment, for it indicates that neither the viewer nor the artwork is ever neutral.

In a 2012 talk at New York’s Vera List Center, Baghramian decried what she called the increasingly common perception of artworks as “autonomous entities” that can be considered apart from the context of their production and display. “I believe this work-turned-subject is a kind of monster,” she said. “Curators, art historians and critics sometimes nurse this monster by talking about the work as an isolated entity, thus effectively releasing artists from their responsibility to contribute to current discourse.” Art must be about something more than just itself. For Baghramian, hermeticism is a horror. “In its encounter with the beholder,” she continued, “the work of art exercises an indirect influence on cultural habits, drawing our attention by contradicting or rejecting them, and thus providing a frame for the transformative power of aesthetics and politics.”

Her sculptures therefore often assume forms that we take for granted, yet upon which we lean. Her 2008 exhibition The Walker’s Day Off, at Staatlichen Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, featured slender rods of painted steel and rubber resembling walking sticks enlarged to useless scale. Like the carved supports of classical marbles, they seemed at once a homage to the physics of sculpture and a colonnade of amputations. Meanwhile, Fluffing the Pillows, Baghramian’s 2012 Hector Art Prize exhibition at Kunsthalle Mannheim, included yellow aluminium hooks mounted to the walls that she called

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Misfits, 2021 (installation view, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, 2021).

Photo: Nick Ash

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above Misfits, 2021–22 (installation view, Nasher Prize Laureate Nairy Baghramian: Misfits, Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas). Photo: Kevin Todora

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top Knee and Elbow, 2020, marble, cast stainless steel, dimensions variable.

Photo: Thomas Clark

above Big Valve, 2016, zinked metal, painted polyurethane, polycarbonate, 149 × 195 × 75 cm.

Photo: Timo Ohler

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top left Misfits, 2021 (installation view, Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan, 2021).

Photo: Nick Ash

above Formage de tête, 2011 (installation view, ILLUMInations, 54thBiennale di Venice, 2011).

Photo: Francesco Galli

top right Mooring (hanging), 2013, cast painted aluminium, 101 × 52 × 21 cm Photo: Simon Vogel

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Misfits, 2021 (installation view, Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris, 2021).

Photo: Rebecca Fanuele

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Moorings and metal poles or Gurneys. Redolent of rigging devices on panes attached to painted polyurethane armatures; when installed commercial fishing boats, they propped up stuffed burlap sacks that in doorways, they channel viewers’ movements like police shields, sat flaccidly on the floor. The exhibition’s title referred to a domestic perhaps referring to visitors as the ‘blood’ of institutional (and chore that is equally sculptural and superfluous. Baghramian’s sometimes authoritarian) circulation. supports may not always be structurally necessary, but their intimaOther works, such as Chin-Up and Scruff of the Neck (both 2016), resemble medical prostheses or dental tools – mechanisms that both tion of balance makes us consider the firmness of our own footing.

At the centre of Formage de tête, her 2011 Venice Biennale pres- constrain and augment the human body, sculpting it into a new bionic entation, a slab of soft, moulded silicon atop a steel platform, form. (This is also a queer vision of how humans can transcend their like a tablecloth or cut of meat, acquired its potency only when biological limitations.) Their enhancements also indicate potential splayed out against the hard, flat surface. The work’s title, French deficiencies in the institutions upon whose walls they are mounted. for ‘shaping the head’, puns on a type of terrine, perhaps a nod to As Vincenzo de Bellis and Martin Germann, curators of Baghramian’s a sculptor’s labour for public consumption. Sculptures resem- 2016 Walker survey, acknowledge in the exhibition’s catalogue, bling kitchen implements (Rechauds and Capots) and photographs ‘Scruff of the Neck supported the museum’s architecture in an ironically of a figure in a chef’s jacket invoked the labour of the garde-manger suitable fashion, since museums are not infrequently regarded as or cold-food gourmet as a possible metaphor for the act of cooking being essentially toothless mouths’. up an exhibition.

Dentures and bones, gums and gristle: Baghramian’s unruly works For Baghramian, institutional support when evoking these body parts, Baghramian’s is not simply about the architecture of suggest that all subjects, no matter dissections of the medium of sculpture and museums but also crucially about the how alienated, have power within the institutions in which it is exhibited people who work in them. In its title, take on an especially surgical quality. Yet the institutions they occupy The Walker’s Day Off invoked the image of rather than cobble together a Frankenstein’s a male escort, hired to accompany a rich client to social functions, monster – her reviled ‘autonomous work of art’ – she sculpts and for her 2017 survey at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, their forms to more natural, and thus contingent, dimensions.

Baghramian asked gallery attendants to wear T-shirts printed with Combinations of contrasting materials – cheap and expensive, a photograph of a hustler. The move highlighted the essential yet glossy and matt, hard and soft, voguish and déclassé – could either overlooked labour of staff who guide visitors around museum spaces. be unstable or symbiotic, depending on their equilibrium within the Their presence in the galleries, meanwhile, subverted the original context of display. Many of them refuse to fully adapt. ‘[The body] show title, prompting the question as to when, if ever, they might cannot be isolated from the context in which it moves and through which it is being shaped,’ Baghramian said recently. Neither can her enjoy paid leave.

Baghramian has also turned to our own biological support sculptures, which although not living, are shaped by life. ar structures. The lacquered bronze ridges of Privileged Points (2017), bracketed by steel plates, resemble model vertebrae in a teaching Nairy Baghramian is the winner of the 2022 Nasher Prize; lab. Retainer (2013), a circular arrangement of thin, irregular silicon work from her Misfits series is on view at the Nasher Sculpture Center, shapes on polycarbonate stands, glow pale and fleshy in the light Dallas, through 1 May like magnified skin grafts. The monumental French Curve (2014), Evan Moffitt is a writer, editor and critic based in New York, meanwhile, has a gouged, Pepto Bismol-pink underside like a set and is the creator of the new podcast Precious Cargo of gums. Then there are the Big Valves (2016), comprising glass

Déformation Professionelle, 2017 (installation view, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2017). Photo: Timo Ohler all images Courtesy the artist

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The Wellbeing of Artefacts

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Museums, says the artist Gala Porras-Kim, have lost sight of the spiritual care their collections require

by Oliver Basciano

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preceding pages An Index and Its Settings, 2017 (installation view, Labor, Mexico City, 2017). Courtesy the artist and Labor, Mexico City above A terminal escape from the place that binds us, 2021, ink on paper and document, 186 × 267 cm. Courtesy the artist

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different types of institutions,” she says. If we think about what the The best artists often have doubts about whether their work has purpose of a museum object is – its current function – it would be as succeeded. That worry is not usually as existential as Gala Porrasa tool to help us understand a particular historical period, or to Kim’s concern, though. We’re in South London looking at a large paper marbling work, a swirling landscape of yellow, orange and demonstrate how a specific society lived or continues to live. Yet most green ink. “I don’t actually know how to contact the afterlife,” of the objects in institutions such as the British Museum were not created with that aim; they were conceived instead for either a very Porras-Kim tells me. This is her earnest attempt, however, using practical purpose (all those urns, weapons, clothes) or a spiritual one ‘encromancy’, an early form of ink divination, to communicate with (statues for veneration, religious icons and offerings). “Those functhe spirits of citizens of first-century BCE Shinchang-dong, an area of present-day Gwangju, whose bodies have ended up in the city’s tions did not have an end date built into it, so what happens when National Museum. That the resulting abstract painting has a geothat object gets accessioned into a collection? It’s a question of priorigraphical feel is a good sign of its success, ties. In the British Museum there’s so “When does a cadaver become old much Egyptian stuff, which was fasciI offer: Porras-Kim had asked the dead nating because the Egyptians planned where they would ideally have their enough to become an object? remains kept, given that they had been really well for their afterlife. If you have a At that point can it be removed from civilisation of people that had planned removed from their original burial places wherever it’s been left? Can it be to live on forever, then in their theory at and have, for centuries, been in storage least they do. We need to take that into and, more recently, on display in owned? How do you decide?” consideration. I mean, firstly we have no Gwangju’s institutions. Typically for her work, the Colombian-born, Los Angeles-based artist is displaying idea whether they are wrong or not, but also they are living on, at least in our memory. It is just a different type of living.” alongside her marbling work a copy of a letter she sent to the museum regarding the skeletons in their collection. ‘We, as living people, will Sunrise for 5th-Dynasty Sarcophagus from Giza at the British Museum have to negotiate between our desires to think of them as historical (2022) is a scale reproduction of one such ancient Egyptian object from the museum, except Porras-Kim’s version is on a turntable that allows objects, and the respect for the individual person and their desires for their afterlife,’ the artist writes. Of her divined map, she says, ‘The actual the tomb to be pivoted approximately 25 degrees. In Egyptian tradiplace remains illegible to us, and might not even exist on our planet.’ tion the dead faced east to the rising sun when buried. “It is supposed The work, titled A terminal escape from the place that binds us (2021), to be facing a specific direction, and [at the British Museum] it’s not. is part of Porras-Kim’s ongoing interest in the dual function or The work is just a proposal to rotate the sarcophagus, so it’s still on status of objects as they pass through history and are institutionalview, except now it’ll be facing the right way.” ised by museums. When actual human bodies enter such collections, “It is a question of care,” she continues. “So much of the instituthose questions of status and transformation are heightened. “In tional language about caring concerns the physical maintenance of objects, like the conservation and preservation of the physical things, different countries, they have different laws over human remains,” she but when there’s some other intangible function that might have a explains. “When does a cadaver become old enough to become an priority over the physical object, there is no space for this to be considobject? At that point can it be removed from wherever it’s been left?

Can it be owned? How do you decide? I’m interested in contract and ered. Could there be a department within the museum tasked with regulation, and how specific regulations provide the framework looking after the spiritual aspect of an item in the collection?” through which we view an object.” A work presented at the 2021 Porras-Kim wrote to the British Museum’s curator of bioarchaeology, asking just such a question. ‘Since [the dead] have expressed Bienal de São Paulo features a handprint made in ash on a tissue. and determined the way their material and spiritual parts were to be Here the letter, addressed to Alexander Kellner, the director of the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, queried the idea of trying kept, this provokes several questions about their current existence in to restore the remains of ‘Luiza’, the the museum – out of their final resting “If you have a civilisation of people oldest human fossil in Latin America, places – and a closer look at their condition in the current and ongoing afteran object/person mostly destroyed in the that had planned to live on fire that gutted the institution in 2018. life,’ Porras-Kim writes, admitting that it forever, then in their theory at The letter’s subject line (and title of the ‘could seem daunting to understand so least they do. We need to take that many people’s eternal plans’. Yet a work) pithily notes: ‘Leaving the institugesture such as the artist suggests – tion through cremation is easier than as into consideration” merely shifting the angle of one exhibit a result of a deaccession policy’.

– seems to offer a wider recognition of an individual’s rights or Porras-Kim and I are talking ahead of a new exhibition at Gasworks, at which both of these recent biennial projects are being a lost civilisation’s historic agency, however long ago they may have shown, alongside new works. Naturally, as an artist who explores the passed into history.

Sometimes, though, the impetus to care for the original spiritual or legal and moral status of museum objects and offers a critique, and indeed some possible answers, to current debates around national ritualistic function of an object risks undermining its physical care. collections, institutional care, restitution and decolonisation, her Harvard University’s Peabody Museum has a collection of around attention in London has turned to the British Museum. As Gala30,000 objects that were removed by the American archaeologist and Porras points out, it is, for better or worse, “the boss of collections”. diplomat Edward H. Thompson from the Chichén Itzá cenote, a sacred “My overall project is how specific a subcategory of objects, whose Mayan sinkhole on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, in the early twenoriginal function might still be ongoing, are living and stored in tieth century. The objects were likely placed there originally as an

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offering to Chaac, the Mayan god of rain and thunder. The museum stores these artefacts in a temperature-controlled environment, free from all damp. “The current idea of conservation, which is meant to keep things very dry, is in opposition to what their original relationship with the rain might have been,” Porras-Kim says. “The current methodology of the institution is getting in the way of that other type of caring. It’s not one or the other, I’m not saying these things should be thrown back, but maybe we can think about how much rainwater this specific object can be exposed to before it gets damaged. I think it’s so much about gestures. We have to acknowledge that its status as a historical object is not its only function.” For Precipitation for an Arid Landscape (2021) Porras-Kim combined copal, a clear resin from the copal tree and one of the main materials found in the sacred cenote, with dust taken from the museum storage in which the Mayan objects are kept, to create a slab of material that might serve as a proxy for the exhibits. Wherever the work is shown, curators must douse it with rain collected during the exhibition’s run. It too is accompanied by a letter to the exhibiting institution. I ask her if anyone has ever replied to these missives, mostly addressed to senior members of staff. Rarely, she says, but she does talk to researchers and registrars constantly.

“The registrars or just people within museums are often so excited to talk to me because they recognise that I want to talk about

stuff that they too think about, but that the institution provides no space for… Lately I’ve been reading a lot about ledgers, the beginning of things. There’s an existing cataloguing structure that only allows for pre-set subcategories. If you describe an object through those labels, then spiritual life doesn’t even exist. There’s no columns on the Excel sheet for that kind of information, so it disappears once the object is accessioned. They are classified in a very scientific way. But cultural objects are forever in flux; how do we reflect this empirically?” Porras-Kim says she began to be invited to make projects within museums as part of the recent drive for institutional selfreflection. “But they don’t have to bring in an artist. Just put an anonymous comments box in the staff lunchroom and then once every couple of months have a totally free discussion.”

In 2017 the artist became interested in a collection of burial figurines and vessels from Colima, Nayarit and Jalisco on Mexico’s Pacific Coast, dating from between 200 BCE and 500 CE, held by the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. In the museum’s catalogues, and in the display captions, they were grouped together under the name of their collector – and donor to the museum – Proctor Stafford. At LACMA itself, as part of her participation in that year’s edition of California art festival Pacific Standard Time, Porras-Kim offered, through a series of drawings, an alternative indexing method,

Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, 2022, graphite on paper, 207 × 147 cm, and sound (music composed and interpreted by Heidi Köpp-Junk). Courtesy the artist

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ordering them simply by scale. Alongside these drawings she showed a series of ceramic works, made in the style of the Mexican objects. Each was fitted with a GPS device, allowing the artist to track the objects as they continue their journey out of the museum, perhaps into a private collection, and life beyond. “When an institution says it wants to learn and teach people about objects, they often just focus on one original story,” she says. “We don’t get to hear about all the other actors on its historical paths very well. What would be interesting to me is interpretation that said how much tax write-off a collector got for donating something. What have been the various functions the object has performed before it arrived in the museum? Those things are interesting.” When the project moved to a solo exhibition at Labor, a commercial gallery in Mexico City, Porras-Kim researched all the locations where these burial objects were known to have been before ending up in the museum, and produced another series of drawings showing them in the cave where they were found, and on domestic mantelpieces. I wonder about the future lives of Porras-Kim’s works, as they enter the opaque world of the contemporary-art market.

There are many who might argue that gestures don’t go far enough, that these objects must be returned to where they were taken from. The artefacts at the Peabody, for example, were smuggled out of Mexico, and in the 1920s the Mexican government tried

to recover them. (Harvard University did return some items in the 1960s and 70s.) Even if many of the exhibits in the world’s museums weren’t looted as such, the history of colonisation and imperialism means that they are often symbolic of repression and power struggle.

Which could also be an argument for keeping them in place.

“You can’t escape history,” Porras-Kim says. “We have to think instead about how the objects inside a collection can change the building around it. Like the mummies, for example, their presence turns the British Museum into a literal tomb. Let’s treat it as that.

It’s still a museum, but that is its secondary function. Everybody is trying to decolonise the museum, but okay, then you’ll have to remove the whole thing. How do you have a decolonised museum when the building, the city, the country, itself comes from that history?

History is additive, so this building could have been colonial made, but you can change it and add to that. Things can be multiple.” ar Gala Porras-Kim’s solo show Precipitation for an Arid Landscape is on view at Amant, New York, through 17 March; her exhibition Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing is at Gasworks, London, until 27 March; and her Correspondences towards the living object can be seen at the Contemporary Art Museum St Louis from 25 March to 24 July

254 offerings for the rain at the Peabody Museum, 2021, colour pencil and Flashe on paper, 185 × 185 × 5 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Labor, Mexico City

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Searching for Salvation

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It’s a still winter’s night in Berlin and I’m on my way to meet Jesse Ribbons, includes signifiers of the damaged or disabled body, someDarling in their studio. But I’m having trouble finding it. I go to the times enhanced by prosthetics or machines. In a cultural moment wrong red entrance and make several circles before eventually discov- where identity politics is at the forefront of discourse, Darling’s ering the word ‘Darling’ handwritten on a doorbell. I press my cold work is regularly read through the lens of biography – like that of finger against the colder silver disk and hear a muffled voice. I’ll come many people who aren’t cisgender white males – citing their gender, down. Tony (my dog, now aged one, procured during a moment of disability, lovers and personal life. However, Darling emphasises lockdown loneliness) gleefully jumps up as Darling opens the door; that they are working towards a nonmacho sculpture practice a gentle hello in response; their soft jumper with fluffy arms its own shaped by making objects in narrative formulations. “I want to change the narrative and give the works the chance to show up in kind of animal.

As an artist concerned with the body in space, its inherent the one space, according to their own merits, on their own terms,” vulnerabilities and contiguous failures, Darling’s primary medium is they explain. sculpture. Comfort Station (2017), for example, is a bedside commode In their studio, Darling pours Tony and me respective receptathat has collapsed, crawling on steel and aluminium limbs that are cles of water, and then uses a spray bottle to hydrate the clay body bent out of shape; or there’s A Fine Line (2018), a steel-core washing they’re carving. Headless, it is modelled on a porcelain doll, with line from which the intimacy of a domestic life is hung out to dry gently curving shoulder blades and an exquisitely rendered spine.

– baby clothes, used shoes and tea towels as assorted commodities Darling’s interest in the human form sees it as neither perfect nor interspersed with barbed wire, all blowing in the breeze of a fan. imperfect, the saintly or godly collapsed into the mortal, which This is Darling’s wry acknowledgement of the ongoing crisis of life chimes with how they say, “I’ve been thinking about storytelling under capitalism, their sharp commentary on the violence of petro- for a long time”. Indeed, it directly underpins their ongoing referchemical modernity refuting the myth of progress: “I think about ences to myths or ecclesiastical stories of saints. Take their drawing modernity as a fairytale,” they explain. “It’s a thoroughly arbitrary on ripped brown paper secured with plasters and mangled parcel and weird situation that starts with the first colonial excursions in the tape, Lion in wait for Saint Jerome and his medical kit (2018), in which a 1700s – depending on where you begin – or the Inclosure Acts, and goes lion crouches fearfully upon a spear, longing for Saint Jerome (the all the way up to now. Capitalism, modernity and white supremacy story goes that when confronted with a ferocious lion, the saint are all part of the same story. Because I grew up acknowledged its pain, removing a thorn from above Lion in wait for Saint Jerome and his in that church… it seemed like this is how things its paw and gaining lifelong comradeship). are, but this is not how things are, it’s just how medical kit, 2018, paint pen on packing paper, gold Depicted with lustrous gold locks, the lion has leaf, plasters, parcel tape, frame, 115 × 180 cm. we’ve grown up and been educated… Progress its own sacred aura, suggesting dignity not in Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London the divine but in the broken or fallible. It is as and growth are lies used to justify violence.” facing page Crevé, 2019 (installation view, Triangle Their upcoming show at Modern Art Oxford France – Astérides, Marseille). Photo: Aurélien Mole. such that Darling tackles the question of faith Courtesy the artist and Triangle France and fetish, relieving saints of their halos and – Darling was born in Oxford – No Medals No

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bestowing them on the living, the strictures that bind bodies given on making sculpture with low-cost, everyday materials as far ranging a new logic or validity. as ring-binder files and pillows, mobility cranes and strap-ons, while Humans are all always telling stories: factual, fictional and the also welding and working with clay and jesmonite. Shown at Tate in-between. They are a way of making sense of the world through our Britain with The Ballad of Saint Jerome in 2018 and the following year relationship to that world. Sometimes stories are vocalised by tongue and in the 58th Venice Biennale, Darling’s works have been characterlips; sometimes they are scribbled; and sometimes they are expressed ised as wounded or unsteady over the past few years. Take the gaggle by objects, held as matter shaped by hands. We tell ourselves stories in of characters in March of the Valedictorians (2016) – red plastic school order to process what happens to us, but we too are bound by stories chairs with long, lanky welded steel legs warping and stumbling as imposed upon us. And it is in this sense that Darling is interested in one towards graduation, or Sphinxes of the gate (2018), which sees two what has been told, could be told and should be told, why and by whom. of the mythical beings encased in glass vitrines, jesmonite faces At Modern Art Oxford, the artist says, stories will be articu- affixed to a bare skeleton armature, one bound with a gag, the other lated through “fairytales and votives and tabernacles and dysfunc- sucking from some kind of surgical catheter bag. tional machines”. Certain themes or images keep emerging through Their nonmonumental assemblages conjure icons that are allthe exhibition, including crucifixes, aeroplanes and flowers, which too-human: fallible and beyond salvation, perhaps. Who needs salvaspeak to states of fragility or the contingency of the subject under tion anyway? Saint Batman (2016), included in the show at Modern capitalism. New and existing works from the past decade, including Art Oxford, comprises a bin bag for a body and a pink antivirus mask installation, drawing, sculpture, video and text (an aside: in 2021 for a mouth, plugged with a sugary lollypop. The saint hangs on a Darling published VIRGINS, their first collection of poetry), seek a welded steel cross, crowned with a halo of ivy. For Darling, “everyone space in which the notion of fixity or certitude is not only irrelevant, is failing and dying and fucking up. Everything is, everything will. but also ontologically impossible, by prioritising a sense of precarity. Nothing is going to last or get out of here alive. There’s no pure place, Twisting and turning and curving, Darling’s work is a generative there’s no utopia, there’s no time in the past or the future when everynetwork of associations that are intentionally “jumbled up together thing is just beautiful. It doesn’t exist.” And it’s in this spirit that this and messy”, and ultimately boldly disquieting.

Batman is saintly with imperfection, a mortal trying to navigate the Initially grouped with the postinternet movement – in which mire, finding a way to exist, despite it all. Darling further reflects, artists often made work that framed the internet and social media “Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do: mess around in the subconscious as a democratising tool that overturned the world’s hierarchies – of petrochemical modernity. You find all this extremely perverted, Darling’s works sometimes included several screens and projections goofy, loveable, absolutely violent wild stuff in its subconscious.” with pixelated videos. Not least because of the Other works in No Medals No Ribbons are March of the Valedictorians, 2016, plastic seat, algorithmically defined rise of the alt-right placed in such a way as to complicate readings, welded steel, etch primer, grosgrain ribbon, and white-supremacist patriarchy via this once associations becoming ever generative. A set dimensions variable. Photo: Italo Rondinella. of objects, which together create a scrambled ‘utopian’ space, they have subsequently focused Courtesy the artist and La Biennale di Venezia

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above Saint Batman, 2016, welded steel, sugar, antivirus mask, expanding foam, 159 × 61 × 27 cm. Courtesy the artist following pages ART NOW: The Ballad of Saint Jerome, 2018 (installation view, Tate Britian, London). Photo: Matt Greenwood.

Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London

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above Our Lady Batman of the Empty Center (Temporary Relief ), 2018 (installation view, Ora e Lege, Broumov Monastery, 2021). © The Educational and Cultural Center Broumov and Tomáš Souček.

Courtesy the artist and Arcadia Missa, London facing page Gravity Road, 2020 (installation view, Kunstverein Freiburg).

Photo: Marc Doradzillo. Courtesy the artist

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index of references, includes the figure of a foetus next to a plastic bag; a Hitachi magic wand held like the Statue of Liberty’s torch, suggesting a human’s body buzzing with the full force of the electrical grid when this famous sex toy is plugged into the mains; some things that are queer-coded through specific characters and then other things that aren’t, so that you never really know what you’re looking at, a purposeful strategy to evade singular or definitive stories. Darling’s is a lexicon that won’t be pinned down.

While Darling does not use scale in a monolithic sense, the exhibition’s largest work, Gravity Road (2020), expands into space as a vast anthropomorphic rollercoaster. The sculpture visualises the relationship between gravity and buoyancy, steel tracks that rise and fall, undulations giggling over sweeping bends. It has legs in three places buckling under their own weight and two outstretched poles that double as arms (reaching for embrace?). While on the surface, rollercoasters are indicative of fun, Gravity Road speaks formally to the history of the mining train, channelling stories of extraction, exploitation of labour and the locomotive in the context of industrial capitalist gain, as well as to automatisation and technologies that reduce human intervention in manufacturing and labour processes.

Darling describes how “it was joyful to make” because of the handson physicality of building something by eye, without drawings, measurements or plans, without “symmetry or precision” – the rollercoaster’s inherent alignment with pleasure-seeking seeping in. As a metaphor for the long curve of modernity, Darling has created their own monstrous dinosaur skeleton to channel “the full awe-fullness, horror and glory” of our petrochemical constitution today.

Conflating the museum with the mausoleum in their epistolary text for Gravity Road: A Rollercoaster Reader (2022), a forthcoming publication, Darling sees it as a space holding ‘dead’ objects that are elevated to sacred status. Indeed, they cite the museum’s ‘evolution

of the fetish, a concept invented by the colonial anthropologists to justify the violent deterritorialising theft of objects and artefacts’.

With a methodology that counters colonialism’s logic of decimation, ‘ripping worlds out of worlds’, Darling combines materials as a catalyst for the creation of worlds out of worlds, formulations that, rather than cleaving, open up possibilities. As a set of material relations, these generate futurities and multitudes in a process of thinking, being and – perhaps most importantly – becoming.

Considering the so-called universal and what could possibly bind us in a collective experience, Darling emphasises “everyone’s contingent position relative to everything else and their own messiness and morality: that’s the only ‘we’ that we can talk about”. No Medals No Ribbons aims to ask in what means systems of power harness and attempt to control such messy contingency, and how in reworking or reenvisaging how malleability, asymmetry and even fragility function they might become proponents of resistance. Such approaches look for expansive and unfettered subjectivities, chiming with a verse from Darling’s poem ‘After St Agnes’: I tell you what, let’s us play Eden.

I’ll be the snake or I can be Adam.

You can be Eve. No – you be the garden.

After all, there really is no singular straight path that can be pinpointed. As Darling says, “There are only cycles of life and death.” ar No Medals No Ribbons is on view at Modern Art Oxford through 1 May; a new ceramics commission will open at Camden Art Centre, London, on 29 April Louisa Elderton is a writer, editor and critic based in Berlin

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Tales from the Token

Botto, Aplomb Casual, 2022, fragment generated by decentralised autonomous artist

It’s been a year since The First 5,000 Days, by Mike Winkelmann (aka Beeple), sold at auction for the cryptocurrency equivalent of $69 million, making it the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction. But more importantly, it was an NFT – an artwork sold as a ‘nonfungible token’ – and its sale brought the growing craze for NFTs to widespread public attention.

A year of hype has ensued, with many in the artworld keen to jump on the bandwagon of these blockchain-based virtual rarities, while detractors have criticised NFTs and blockchain technologies for being everything from a vast Ponzi scheme, to a threat to the environment, to the cultural expression of the misogyny and racism of ‘white tech bros’.

But outside the hype and controversy, the growing popularity of NFT platforms and techniques has transformed the way artists of all kinds can create a market for their work. Whether these are digital artists who have been working with blockchain or artificial intelligence, or ‘traditional’ artists who have brought physical artmaking into contact with virtual online contexts, the NFT boom has opened new channels to audiences, collectors and markets. To explore some of the work that doesn’t fit the hype, ArtReview asked four artists, digital curators and critics to profile artists whose work explores the potentials and possibilities of digital art in the era of the NFT…

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Auriea Harvey

by Charlotte Kent NFTs bring attention to digital art and those artists, like Auriea Harvey, – itself based on the merging her own features with that of a minotaur – who have been innovating with emergent technologies these past 25 and produced the physical bust as she started experimenting with 3D years. Harvey is recognised as OG in the NFT community for her long- printing. The NFTs of Minoriea operate as a means of representing a standing digital and game-art practice. Trained at New York’s Parsons complex package of archival and interactive files that the collector School of Design, she mastered the careful modelling of 3D characters receives. From the 3D model, she made browser-based artworks that have in her subsequent career designing indie games. Harvey is truly post- an AR component. Blockchain platforms have different visual allowmedium: digital and analogue are two sides of the same art practice. ances, so Harvey’s environments for Minoriea depend on context. Each She first heard about blockchain from Ruth Catlow, artist and co- NFT is a new space in which Minoriea circulates. First introduced as an director of London gallery Furtherfield, and made her first NFT in 2019 NFT in April 2021 when Bitforms launched the NFT site bit.art, Minoriea with a2p, an artist-to-artist blockchain initiative of generative artist appeared a month later in Christie’s first NFT auction, Proof of Sovereignty.

Casey Reas that preceded Feral File, an important blockchain gallery Later that year during Art Basel Miami she released The Adventures that Reas launched in April 2021, and where Harvey has also shown. of Minoriea, four lifesize AR animations expressing a mood, activity Her historical work in net art and participation in Hic et Nunc, among or state, among them Minoriea is Dancing and Minoriea is Drunk. These other artist-led NFT communities, made her a key figure in the 2021 NFT NFTs were limited editions of five. Her play with self-portraiture is boom. This occurred simultaneously to her solo exhibition in March generative, with renditions unfolding across new developments and 2021 at New York’s Bitforms Gallery, Year Zero, in which she presented platforms. Her appropriation of classical mythology for these NFTs sculpture and prints appropriating and reimagining Hellenistic invokes a liminal realm, where fantastic archetypes represent real, mythic figures, some of them renditions of the statuary surrounding psychic impact. It speaks to our own hybrid moment negotiating the her daily life in Rome; accompanying NFTs dropped shortly thereafter. virtual and tangible. Despite some of the ethical and political ambiThe marblelike bust of Minoriea (2018), shown at Bitforms, exem- guities that critics attach to NFTs, they have made computer and codeplifies the iterative complexity of Harvey’s travels based art more prominent and enabled digital Charlotte Kent is an assistant professor and analogue work like Harvey’s to be seen as across the virtual and tangible. She extracted the of visual culture at Montclair State University (NJ) figure from her VR experience Minorinth (2017) equally complex practices. and an arts writer

Auriea Harvey, Minoriea v1-dv1, 2021, digital sculpture in HTML environment, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist

Auriea Harvey, Minoriea, 2018, 3D printed PLA and composite (PLA, bronze), self-hardening clay, epoxy clay, 39 × 24 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist

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24/02/2022 11:23

Norma Xelda Jara

by Jason R. Bailey

Norma Xelda Jara, Cryptodrama (still), 2021, animated gif. Courtesy the artist

Crypto-art culture was born out of the 2008 global financial crisis in the lower left of the frame, symbolising the common criticism and the 2009 invention of bitcoin. Shellshocked by the fragility of that NFTs are a thinly veiled Ponzi scheme. Juxtaposed against this a centralised monetary system, a movement emerged for the explo- negative signalling are words like ‘community’, ‘life’ and ‘interest’. ration of decentralised alternatives. Attempts to disintermediate Amid the noise sits the serene figure of an artist, perhaps Jara herself, banking inspired artists to attempt the same in the artworld. There summoning universal energy through introspective meditation. was plenty of incentive, as many artists felt the traditional art market Or perhaps the figure isn’t Jara, but rather a distillation of all artists either did not serve their best interests or ignored them altogether. trying to enjoy the opportunity of a runaway market without getting run over themselves.

One such artist is Norma Xelda Jara.

There is a long history of great artists capturing and reflecting the In a highrise apartment in Buenos Aires, Jara, a chain-smoking grandmother unafraid to speak her mind, has crafted a series of bril- world they live in using the tools of their time. Few have captured the liant animated gifs – pixel-art masterpieces that perfectly capture anxiety, FOMO and uncertainty of 2021’s manic crypto-art craze as pointthe zeitgeist of crypto art and NFTs. These tapestrylike animations edly as Jara. Living in Argentina’s fragile, inflation-wracked economy, interlace brightly coloured icons, glyphs and text within a matrix far from the geographical centrefold of the artworld, Jara has worked of pixelated tracery. They are flat, decorative and deploy highly styl- out that NFTs give her a shot at generating income from her art. She may ised imagery. The works are allegorical but read as a cross between a not become the next Beeple, but NFTs have changed who gets to partiSunday comic strip, a mid-1980s PC game and an ancient Mixtec codex. cipate by giving Jara and thousands of other artists globally a stage and In Jara’s 2021 Cryptodrama frenetic blinking phrases warn us that a new class of patrons. These are patrons with different baggage from the cryptocurrencies tezos, ethereum and bitcoin those of the traditional artworld; patrons willing Jason Bailey is a curator of digital art and to support, or at least take a chance on, previously are either ‘down’ or ‘dead’. The word ‘scam’ is the founder of the art and tech websites artnome.com marginalised artists like Jara. woven into its design, and three pyramids sit and rightclicksave.com

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Sarah Friend

by Rhea Myers

Sarah Friend, Lifeform #3 (detail), 2021 (installation view, Proof of Stake – Technological Claims, 2021, Kunstverein in Hamburg). Courtesy the artist

Artists’ engagement with blockchain technology predates the first ‘clicker’-style game in order to claim ethereum fungible tokens, NFT, which is generally regarded as new-media artist Kevin McCoy’s which turn out to be hyperinflationary as the game progresses.

Quantum (2014), a digital image with its ownership registered using the Lifeforms (2021), her latest project, disrupts the cryptographically Namecoin blockchain. Blockchain art started out as a critical engage- secured ‘true digital ownership’ of digital art and the economic ment with the hardware, software and culture of bitcoin and other rationality of investing in NFTs that their proponents tout. Lifeforms cryptocurrencies. These early blockchain artists drew on the prece- creates colourful, hypnotic, code-art organisms that you must give dents of conceptual art, net art and other moments of uncertainty in away within 90 days of receiving them. The ‘smart contract’ blockthe property regime of art to draw attention to environmental impacts, chain program that registers the ownership of each Lifeforms NFT also financialisation and the creation of new kinds of property. registers the date when each is transferred and refuses to list it in But it was not until the start of 2021, with the $69 million sale your blockchain wallet or to transfer them away from it if too much of the first NFT released by artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann), that a time has passed. This means that if you try to hold on to them any much wider audience became aware of NFTs. That audience has been longer they ‘die’ and disappear from your collection permanently, and almost universally hostile. cannot be revived elsewhere. Yet if you do give them away, they will no That’s a shame, because NFTs have brought attention, community longer dance engagingly on your screen for you. and much-needed revenue to a wide range of artists who don’t fit the Lifeforms is a finely tuned experience that uses visual appeal and planet-destroying, ‘crypto bro’ stereotype that draws such hostility. the psychology of gamification to pit social care and the circulation From infectiously enthusiastic young artists like FEWOCiOUS (Victor of gifts against the economic imperatives of ownership and profit.

Langlois) to important but marginalised figures in the history of We value the work because it is beautiful, and we come to care for it, glitch art such as Dawnia Darkstone, NFTs are bringing new artists but if we care for it, we have to let it go and we thereby lose possesand audiences together. Alongside these developments, through sion of that value in order to ensure its continued existence in the boom and bust and boom again, early blockchain artists have main- world. The affective and material tensions that Lifeforms translates tained their critical engagement with the technology and its newly into rhythms of satisfaction and loss bring the contemporary financial imaginary into focus for contemplation. In doing so it demonpopular expression as tokens.

Sarah Friend is one such artist. Her ClickMine (2017) focused on strates the lasting critical (and dare I say aesthetic?) value of artists working with the still-new technology of the the environmental impact, economics and posRhea Myers is an artist, hacker and writer. blockchain and NFTs as their chosen medium sible sources of technological failure of the blockHer work places technology and culture in mutual chain by requiring the player to engage in a over time. interrogation to produce new ways of seeing the world

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24/02/2022 10:39

Mario Klingemann

by Eric Drass One of the unexpected results of the NFT boom has been the surge These 350 weekly images are then voted upon by the community of interest in generative art and, in particular, AI-generated imagery. of people who hold Botto’s native cryptocurrency, botto. The votes of Generative art has been around for decades; art created by following a this decentralised group of real humans – whose collective decisionprogrammatic system of instructions, often performed by a computer making guides the direction and taste of the underlying system – lead – the role of the artist becomes ‘configurator’, and sometimes ‘curator’ to one winning image that is then minted as an NFT. The attributes of the outputs of these systems. By definition, generative systems can of the winning work are used to guide the style of future works, and potentially produce an infinite number of images that are ‘variations to finetune the system’s ‘taste’. There is no one single artist, or even on a theme’. Sometimes the generative systems themselves are offered collective, with agency over the work, nor does the community have as NFTs, allowing the collector to enjoy the variations produced. More any tangible control here – the ‘taste’ of Botto is driven by the demofrequently, the artist acts as curator, selecting (and perhaps manipu- cratic decisions of the audience. The profits made by the NFT sales are lating) specific results. The NFT ecosystem, being inherently ‘digital used to buy up and destroy the botto currency, hence increasing the first’, has provided a place for these (hitherto somewhat arcane and value of the voting stock. Because of the automated ‘smart contracts’ of the blockchain, all of this happens without the need for an agent, marginalised) forms of art to flourish.

The relationship between artistic intent and the output of AI gallerist or any other percentage-scraping art-market intervention. systems is often loose. The results may be unexpected, yet the autoAt the time of writing, Botto has made a total of $1,846,529 from mated nature of production means the artist can be presented with the first 17 sales. hundreds of variations before selecting ‘the best’. Often the influence The traditional artworld has long argued over the relationship of the human artist over the form of the output is minimal. But if this between artist and production. It feels important that the aura of the is ‘art made by computers’ with minimal human intervention, where artist is carried through to the resulting work, and conversely we like precisely does this leave the role of the artist? to be able to point to the human intent and agency behind it. Whether To address this conundrum head-on, German digital artist Mario Goya’s paintbrush ever touched The Colossus (after 1808) feels signifiKlingemann created Botto (app.botto.com), an automated artmaking- cant, but do the works produced by Botto differ fundamentally from machine that creates 3,000 images each week, which are passed to an one of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings lovingly executed by his studio internal AI judge, which selects 350 of them. The images themselves assistants? As the associated manifesto states: ‘We create our creators.

We do not follow the crowd because we are the are woozy, lysergic, semiabstract forms, someEric Drass (aka shardcore) is an artist making crowd. The idea of we is an illusion.’ Tellingly, times referencing the styles of notable human work at the interface of humans and AI. His most recent artists into the mix. the manifesto itself was cowritten by AI… project can be found at themachinegaze.com

Botto, Necktie Waver, 2022, fragment generated by decentralised autonomous artist

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Basic Income for Artists An Irish programme asks fundamental questions about what constitutes a life worth living Against the odds: some good news. From spring 2022, Ireland will pilot a ‘basic income’ plan for artists, offering weekly, no-strings pay-packets to painters, actors, poets, musicians and anyone else courageous enough for the stop-start, up-down struggle of artistic self-employment.

To begin with, a sizeable cohort of 2,000 artists will be supported. Criteria for inclusion are not yet clear, though means-testing is out, and random selection may well be the preferred approach – each golden-ticket winner receiving the same, standard subsidy of €325 per week, a financial arrangement that will last, in the first instance, for three years. This ‘basic income’ figure is certainly basic – close to Ireland’s minimum wage. But, in principle at least, the continuing, unthreatened reliability of these weekly deposits is the venture’s salient virtue. Whatever happens during this trial period – failed applications, disastrous auditions, loss-making commissions, sudden evictions – the cheques keep on coming.

In the grand, global scheme of things, all this might perhaps be no big deal. Basic-income initiatives, even those targeted at artists, are not new – and recent experiments with the concept have delivered mixed results, if they have delivered at all. A 2017–18 programme in Finland, embracing diverse representation from the general population, prompted largely positive responses from its 2,000-strong test-group. (Many participants spoke of improved proximity to that most prized and elusive of contemporary conditions: ‘wellbeing’.)

A Canadian version, the Ontario Basic Income Pilot Project, began brightly as an ambitious three-year study in 2017, only for the plug to be pulled ten months later as the Ontario Liberal Party was bumped from power by the Progressive Conservative Party. More precisely relevant to Ireland’s arts-centred pitch might be longue durée lessons from the ‘intermittents du spectacle’: a dedicated unemployment fund for performing artists and associated technical crews that has been available in France (in one

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form or another) since 1936. This state system of there-when-you-need-it support has served as an essential buoyancy aid for French artists – to muddle the metaphor, it is intended to keep cultural workers afloat during dry periods – but its significance has inevitably increased with one pandemic wave after another. Intended as occasional backup, the scheme has accrued value and meaning in times of recurring, comprehensive lockdowns.

This, then, is where the Irish plan comes in.

The Basic Income for the Arts proposition emerges in our current moment of enforced critical reflection – with the medical meaning of ‘critical’ never far from our minds. More specifically, the case for artists to receive a basic income has been recently and convincingly made by Ireland’s Arts and Culture Recovery Taskforce: a government-led working group Follower of Marinus van Reymerswaele, The Money Changers, c. 1548, oil on panel, 124 × 95 cm.

Collection Bilbao Fine Arts Museum

charged with assessing and addressing postpandemic cultural damage. Reporting on the extraordinary pressures felt by Ireland’s artists and arts organisations since COVID-19’s shocking first act in spring 2020, the committee stressed a straightforward principle: that of aspiring towards ‘life worth living’, whether as a sine qua non of artistic vocations, or as an understanding of art’s consequential importance to everyday life more generally.

Unsurprisingly, their proposed means to that end was the provision of sufficient financial means – with a basic income pilot as the lead recommendation. Surprisingly, the government agreed.

If, as Zadie Smith has put it, the pandemic has been a period of ‘global humbling’, one limited effect – let’s risk an optimistic view – might be political openness to new ideas, and readiness to rethink some basics. Ireland’s Basic Income for the Arts is a bold move in this regard: potentially leading – who knows? – to Basic Income for All. Yet in rolling out the plan, it would be impressive if its measures of success were defined in basic terms too: avoiding, in particular, any imperative to quantify levels of artistic productivity. Basic income can bring genuine benefits to the lives of artists – most of all, maybe, by taking pressure off, rather than presuming a need to be active.

As the psychoanalyst Josh Cohen writes in his book Not Working: Why We Have to Stop (2019), the ‘perpetual busyness’ of present-day existence is ‘fuelled by a culture that derides or trivializes the need to stop’; at the same time, he says, ‘the very fact that art exists attests to a dimension of us that rejects active, purposeful life, what we might call the tyranny of doing’.

A basic income might yet provide a platform for relatively hassle-free artistic endeavour – getting things done in your own time, thinking things through at your own pace – but it ought also to allow for a good degree of legitimate idleness. What is ‘recovery’, after all, without a serious commitment to rest? Declan Long

ArtReview

24/02/2022 10:43

Every Ocean Hughes One Big Bag Studio Voltaire, London 28 January – 17 April Charon, the mythological ferryman carrying the souls of the newly dead across the river Styx to the underworld, is most often represented as an irascible old man aboard a skiff. But Every Ocean Hughes’s immersive film installation One Big Bag offered me a new face: a charismatic young woman of colour (performed by Lindsay Rico) with a slight squint, whose words and physical presence are at once caring and practical, compassionate and professional – funny and deadly serious. In her 40-minute monologueperformance, she describes herself as a “death doula”: a guide to accompany you and your close ones through the end of your life and beyond, administratively, emotionally and psychologically. A holistic caregiver, if you wish, to compensate for deficient medical and death infrastructures.

“Grief comes through the hands… death has to be understood through the senses, the mind doesn’t get it,” she explains, moving across a room filled with various objects that hang down from ropes just above the floor, Cornelia Parker-style.

The floating objects – mirrored in the installation surrounding the film, dangling above visitors’ heads – are all the supplies and props needed for her job, and she uses them to take us through some of the gestures and ceremonies she’ll perform for the persons in her care: from the soap and makeup kit needed for the embalming, to the scents and fabrics to decorate the room in which the family will gather around the body, to the various rituals, real or imagined, to prepare death and accompany the living through their loss.

This inventory is interspersed with moving and cheeky personal anecdotes, philosophical

musings on death and grief, as well as cutting observations on the racism and gendernormativity of the healthcare and funeral industries. “Often with these big life events norms are recentred and the biological family becomes relevant again,” she explains about caring for LGBTQI+ people, “unless you’ve done the paperwork.” Staring into the camera now, she exhorts, “Do the paperwork”. For besides helping the living through grief, what this modern-day psychopomp brings to our attention is the possibility of agency in one’s own death, of choosing to be honoured and celebrated on one’s own terms. In times of ubiquitous yet ever-abstract morbidity and collective anxiety, One Big Bag offers a rare moment of poetic, bodily and personal grappling with death. Louise Darblay

One Big Bag, 2022 (installation view, Studio Voltaire, London).

Photo: Francis Ware. Courtesy the artist; Studio Voltaire, London; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles

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Teresa Gierzyńska Women Live for Love Zachȩta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw 9 December – 6 March After graduating from Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts in 1971, Teresa Gierzyńska exhibited only intermittently over the ensuing decades, during which she was married to painter Edward Dwurnik – with whom she had a daughter in 1979 – before divorcing him after 37 years.

But she maintained her practice throughout and acquired a quiet following. While her husband commanded the studio and public sphere, she was staging and developing photographic artworks in cramped bathrooms and shadowy bedrooms, interrogating the border between the body and its environs, and also that between the artist couple: in one photograph from 1980, a hand (presumably her husband’s) writes ‘Dwurnik’s’ (also the work’s title) on her sunscorched back (her lily-white bum in contrast

seems a deliberately droll yet affecting inclusion).

Significantly, the title of her first major solo show, Women Live for Love, is a quote from cultural theorist Lauren Berlant, who finished the sentence with ‘and love is the gift that keeps on taking’. Gierzyńska’s oeuvre is a study of that condition and what it means to maintain a sense of self throughout.

The dimensions of the works exhibited rarely exceed the limitations of domestic space.

The majority of them come from Gierzyńska’s autobiographical series About Her, which she has worked on since her graduation to the present day, the third-person title suggesting Gierzyńska’s ‘I’ cannot disassociate from the objective ‘Her’. These are shown in conjunction with transfer prints from The Essence of Things and

the Notepad series of the 1970s, in which she extracts and collages imagery from German women’s magazines. Sometimes employing Xerox, or a dusty plaster surface to ground her images, the results are almost archaeological, and the kineticism contained within her surfaces suggests a story that is mysterious yet refuses to lie dormant. Joanna Kordjak’s curating sensitively focuses the essential qualities of Gierzyńska’s work, and the display has an airiness that adroitly compensates for years of confinement, dispersed in a quiet yet emphatic exhalation through three grand rooms of Zachȩta. There is also wistfulness. This is one of the last exhibitions under director Hanna Wróblewska, soon to be supplanted by a stooge of the nationalist-populist government

Vulgar, 1981, from the series About Her, 1971–, gelatin silver print on matt paper, 20 × 9 cm.

Courtesy Zachȩta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw

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in its brazen attempt to hijack the agendas of the nation’s museums.

Only a handful of photographic works encircle the first room, the distances between them intensifying a sense of challenge and exchange. This mood and these works key the viewer into Gierzyńska’s world. One image shows a head turned away (surely a selfportrait, though the figure is cropped across the breast, their sex ambivalent), reclining on a surface that, as is common in Gierzyńska’s photographs, evaporates into blankness.

The figure is cramped in the top-left diagonal of the picture plane, but their unruly mass of dark hair floods the centre. The artist’s familiar technique of applying colour to monochrome is here concentrated on the hair, tinted in aniline. A red hue bleeds out through the hooklike curls at the edge of this ‘black hole’ and, contrasted against white, recalls Poland’s national colours. The picture’s disquieting title is inscribed along the picture’s bottom

edge in Gierzyńska’s fleet hand; ‘wulgarna’ – Vulgar (1981). Her titles, sometimes accompanied by a ‘studio stamp’ of a striding naked woman (inspired by Marina Abramović in her and Ulay’s 1976 performance Relation in Space), are as piercing as the decorative pin being pressed into a fleshy buttock in Caresses IX (1980). Revisiting and altering her approach to the same scenes, Gierzyńska conveys something of the claustrophobia, surveillance and obsession of the sociopolitical contexts in which she has worked, as well as her experience of the female condition, but ‘the world’ is only directly referenced through minor details, such as toiletries in a bathroom where the figure is a blur.

Another image from the first room augurs a different aspect of Gierzyńska’s terrain.

In the Window (1984) shows a woman from behind, at a large window, hands on hips as she looks out into a sunlit clearing between the forest that darkly surrounds her field of vision.

A dazzling blade of net curtain to the right side of the picture could have just been drawn back yet threatens to shift across and erase the whole scene. The figure’s reflection in the window becomes equally haunting as a pale blue tint subtly separates it from the monochrome whole.

Complementing Zachȩta’s exhibition, Warsaw’s Gunia Nowik Gallery (which represents Gierzyńska) is exhibiting another version of this image alongside a cloudlike arrangement of rural scenes from 1984 to 1993, capturing, as the titles read, Thaws, Muck and Wind.

Gierzyńska’s hyper­vigilance to ‘the outdoors’ is by no means the flipside to her more bounded environments, and here the tinted prints suggest a synaesthetic relationship to the furtive countryside of Central Europe. These thrumming vistas, a cascade of jewels or the colour-warps of a migraine, are best described by one title in particular: Anxiety.

Phoebe Blatton

Concerned, 1984, from the series About Her, 1971–, gelatin silver print on matt paper, 86 × 36 cm.

Courtesy the artist and Gunia Nowik Gallery, Warsaw

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Francis Bacon Man and Beast Royal Academy of Arts, London 29 January – 17 April A fresh curatorial premise can renew our experience of an artist’s work, which is especially welcome with an artist as iconic and mythically familiar as Francis Bacon. Curator Michael Peppiatt does this by homing in on the images of animals in his work, stating that Bacon ‘sensed how closely man and animal would interact, whether caged or uncaged, to the point where each depends on the other to survive’.

This statement feels forced, its ecological rhetoric ill-matched to Bacon’s nightmarish, often fantastical creatures, which defy taxonomy by being germane first and foremost to the paint.

Head I (1948), shown by itself in the opening room, both refuses and struggles to be, its only anatomical elements being a human ear and a chimpanzee’s mouth, locked in a contortion of existential agony. It is less of a literal interaction between human and chimpanzee, or their respective orifices, than a nightmare born of the painter’s skill in suspending resolution. We are left hanging, as though subjected to some Hadean punishment, which along with Bacon’s hardto-match virtuosity has its own morbid pleasure.

Despite Bacon’s evident interest in animals – stemming from his father’s profession as a racehorse trainer, the story goes – the human presence always predominates, animals coming second to the anthropocentric endeavour of art and image-making. Wildlife magazines and Eadweard Muybridge’s time-lapse photography were the mediated form of much of Bacon’s engagement with the animalistic. In Dog (1952)

and Man with Dog (1953) Bacon experimented with a single image captured by Muybridge, repeating it as compositional device to varied effects. In the former the dog functions as a kind of energetic motor, bringing antagonism to the otherwise serene, almost sterile composition.

In the latter it partakes in an experiment in tonality, fighting to prevent the image from disappearing into blurry nonexistence, while somehow speaking to the shadowy human legs behind it in a semiabstract tableau of urban, masculine loneliness.

The physiognomic, scrambled portraits and studies of the human body remind us of animality’s relationship with the well-established Baconesque tropes of carnality and mortality.

Two Studies from the Human Body (1974–75) look almost like apes in a zoo, but they are hardly zoological; the uncanny overlapping of familiar and strange is a psychic reminder of our animalness, provoking horror more than genetic discourse. The picture is funny, too. Putting a baboonish head on an athletic, all but classically proportioned body, with jets of semenlike paint shooting from the buttocks of the figure upstage, it pokes fun at humanity’s civilised pretensions.

Indeed, there is a touch of the camp in Bacon’s pink outline of an ape in ‘Pope and Chimpanzee’ (c. 1960), which he could have drawn from one of Charles Darwin’s diagrams, as if to mock the scientific establishment as well as the religious.

Many of the works reek of sex, the aesthetic tension between pain and pleasure, violence and

grace, suggestive of Bacon’s sadomasochistic predilections. Although his sexuality is touched upon – with reference to his overtly homoerotic Two Figures (1953) and Two Figures in the Grass (1954) – more could have been made of it (he did claim, after all, that he found the smell of horse dung ‘sexually alluring’). Bacon was openly gay when it was illegal to be so, for which reason this element of his life and work was wilfully overlooked in earlier criticism. By giving what feels like perfunctory attention to the issue, the exhibition tends to perpetuate this oversight.

Most of all, the show inadvertently reveals the futility of trying to taxonomise the subjects of Bacon’s work in any literal sense. It exemplifies the dangers of uncritically aligning ecotheory with artistic intention; the wall text often quotes from Bacon himself, without once considering his rampant tendency to selfmythologise. One of the highlights here is the appearance all three of his bullfight studies (all 1969) in a single room for the first time.

But more than ‘challenging a clear distinction between human and animal’, as the wall text argues, surely the noteworthy union here is the marriage between the subject matter and Bacon’s ability to choreograph ineffable formulations of elegance and machismo, movement, poise and stillness in paint. The distinctions are unclear, but they are felt, they are there – it’s just we don’t know how he puts it all together. In Bacon’s world, we are all paint. Tom Denman

Second Version of Triptych 1944, 1988.

Photo: David Parry. © The Estate of Francis Bacon, all rights reserved / DACS 2022

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Study for Bullfight No. 1, 1969, oil on canvas, 198 × 148 cm.

Private collection. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd. © The Estate of Francis Bacon, all rights reserved, DACS / Artimage 2021

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Haig Aivazian All of your Stars are but Dust on my Shoes The Showroom, London 26 January – 19 March Haig Aivazian’s first solo UK exhibition consists of a 40-minute loop of two films, Prometheus (2019) and All of your Stars are but Dust on my Shoes (2021). Both works are constructed by splicing and overlaying found footage from a range of sources, including VHS tapes, YouTube videos, cartoons and recordings from Aivazian’s phone.

The clips act as self-contained arguments feeding into a larger discourse on the power dynamics embedded in a set of interlinking binaries: light and darkness; visibility and obscurity; the watcher and the watched.

Prometheus presents an origin story for a new era of broadcast media, and ultimately surveillance: continuous live transmission. It showcases America’s cultural, political and technological dominance at a specific point in time through two events: the games played by the US men’s

Olympic basketball ‘Dream Team’ on its way to winning gold at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, which, in a first, were aired live and in their entirety by NBC and Cablevision; and the 1991 Gulf War, the first armed conflict live-broadcast as part of the 24-hour news cycle popularised by CNN. The sound of artillery jars with uplifting instrumentals and voiceovers from members of the Dream Team. At other points, ambient noise or narration is artfully superimposed over the found sound, and distinct clips transition almost seamlessly.

Flitting between footage including Olympic award ceremonies, airstrikes and notably dark heatmaps of the CIA and NSA headquarters, the work suggests that power, whether hard or soft, lies not in what is visible, but in deciding when to shed light.

Less linked to a particular time or place, All your Stars are but Dust on my Shoes meditates on the history and continuous development of surveillance practices in tandem with opposition to it. The footage alternates between examples of surveillance apparatuses and instances of individual and group resistance, most of which are seemingly shot on mobile phones. Among them is a striking recording of a woman lying in a hospital bed as she speaks out in Arabic against government officials.

It ends with her saying, “We will take our revenge with our own hands.” This, an exemplar of the film’s overarching themes, resonates as a call to resist surveillance by recreating it on one’s own terms – to make visible what states and other powerful entities would rather leave in the dark. Salena Barry

All of your Stars are but Dust on my Shoes (still), 2021, video, 18 min. Courtesy the artist

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Candice Lin Seeping, Rotting, Resting, Weeping Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge, MA 4 February – 10 April Outlines of a cat’s pawprints on the floor guide us towards a video of a feline demon who in turn entices us to join in the healing practice of qi gong. The demon’s body undulates to the cadence of steady breath, emphasising the preciousness of respiration, while frenetic internet memes infect the surface of the screen like a virus. This counterintuitive frantic slowness permeates Los Angeles-based artist Candice Lin’s multisensory exhibition, due perhaps to the ongoing pandemic conditions of anxious labour in which it was made.

Glazed ceramic cats, whom we are invited to rest our heads on, gather underneath a temporary indigo shelter fortified by Tang dynasty zhenmushou tomb guardians. Rescued from mere cuteness by its irreverence, another animated feline narrator muses from a small TV. The dreamy blue textiles

that hang overhead are laboriously ornamented with tsutsugaki and katazome designs, stencilling techniques using glutinous rice paste to draw dye-resists in indigo textiles. The show’s title comes from the process of fermenting indigo, a medicine, dye and colonial commodity that doubly recalls our emotional environment of pandemic isolation and loss.

Sitting humbly at the back of the gallery, though it feels the centrepiece of the show, is Lin’s A Journal of the Plague Year (Cat Demon Diary) (all works 2021). Flipping through its pages (visitors are encouraged – indeed expected – to touch the works on display), one finds visual rhymes that echo throughout the space: for instance, between an ink wash drawing of a COVID-19 testing tent and Lin’s sacred tent of respite. Interposed between cat portraits and textile samples, a drawing of a protest

against anti-Asian violence, accompanied by Lin’s flirtations with the grotesque, reverberates against racialised associations between Asian bodies, toxicity and virality.

Lin’s emphasis on the haptic returns in the form of concrete, corpulent Tactile Theaters that mimic the winding, Le Corbusier-designed Carpenter Center. Boundaries are dissolved as hands graze contours made by other hands across the room from a verdant dividing curtain, while animal-human hybrids look on. At its outset, the installation commits to surveying an expansive ecology of intimacies amid crisis, while simultaneously blurring lines. Yet these porous boundaries and connections are made most clear in its smallest moments, moments where Lin allows us to laugh, to shudder, to touch – to feel something. Rachel M. Tang

Millifree Work WearyTM Free Video (Qi Gong), 2021, video animation (colour, sound), 20 min.

Courtesy the artist and François Ghebaly, Los Angeles & New York

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This Must Be the Place: Latin American Artists in New York, 1965–1975 (Part II) Americas Society, New York 2 March – 14 May With vibrant counterculture, cheap rent, myriad art and gallery spaces, plus burgeoning experimental film, dance and theatre scenes, New York during the 1960s and 70s was an exciting, albeit gritty, place to be. Organised by Americas Society director Aimé Iglesias Lukin, with over 40 artists across three rooms, This Must Be the Place captures the city’s frenetic pulse. Its true revelation, however, is the sheer diversity of Latin American artists who visited the Big Apple, often to escape oppressive military regimes back home. Some, such as Luis Camnitzer, stayed on. Others, while not establishing strong local roots, used their sojourns to experiment in new methods and media – as Hélio Oiticica did with film. Though archival materials in the show touch on political

collective actions, its chief insight is that, as much as they were shaped by it, Latin American artists made New York a creative mecca.

This is the second instalment of a two-part show (Part I closed this past December), both of which feature minimalist and conceptual artists reckoning with Pop art. In Part II, Eduardo Costa’s Fashion Fictions (1966–), a 24K-gold wearable sculpture photographed for Vogue by Richard Avedon encapsulates this affinity with advertising and commerce. The spectre of Andy Warhol as the quintessential New York artist haunts the galleries. Carlos Irizarry’s serigraph Andy Warhol (1970) reads as homage to Warhol’s iconic self-image and multiples. But the way Irizarry forces Warhol’s garish palette into

a rigid grid and the smudgy Xerox-like surface subvert the originals’ mystique.

Self-reflexivity is a common theme in the minimalist works. Ana Maria Maiolino’s spare etching Escape Angle (1971), in which a white blob oozes out the corner of a black-outlined square, suggests a break with constructivist rigour.

Rubens Gerchman’s Pocket Stuff (1971), a wooden box whose compactness and portability embody the notion of living out of one’s suitcase, as an immigrant might, ironises painting as the last bastion of high art in its miniature deconstructivist plastic squares (white, engraved with the word ‘White’, cobalt-blue engraved as ‘Sky’, etc).

Similarly, in a series of etchings titled Envelope (1967), Luis Camnitzer wittily pairs a rectangle

Sylvia Palacios Whitman, Slingshot, 1975 (performance view, Evening, Idea Warehouse, 1975), gelatin silver print, 25 × 20 cm.

Courtesy Sylvia Palacios Whitman Archive

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with a series of words (‘window’, ‘box’, ‘painting’, ‘grid’). By resignifying the figure as conceptually charged yet commonplace, Camnitzer reflects on art’s adjacency to life, and exposes the falsity of treating them as binary.

A serialist logic underpins many conceptual works, including Osvaldo Romberg’s Body typologies (1974/2014), a series of stills scrupulously cataloguing male body parts; at times in a playful manner, as in Fake Estates (Queens Project) (1975), a video in which Jaime Davidovich captures Gordon Matta-Clark’s ‘anarchitectural’ interventions of buying and documenting unusable, odd-sized lots of land, or in Marta Minujín’s phallic paintings Untitled, from the series Frozen Sex (1973). Yet more often, particularly in works that comingle seriality with self-portraiture, an eerie temporality ensues. In Leandro Katz’s S(h)elf Portrait (1972), in which 50 silver gelatin prints form a frame-within-a-frame study of a bookshelf, and Anna Bella Geiger’s Passagens (Passages)

(1975), a photomontage inside an underground metro station, the human figure repeats obsessively, underscoring an anxiety, particularly acute in a metropolis like New York, of being one of many, a serialist iteration. The agon of exile, but also an existential one, injects psychology into minimalist, conceptual and process art.

As minimalist codes loosen, the show shifts from object to experience expanded into the environment. Maiolino’s Escape Angle already signals a spilling over. In the same gallery, there’s Oiticica’s nylon-mesh and vinyl Parangolé Cape 24 (1972). Inspired by Brazil’s samba schools, Oiticica’s capes were worn in Rio de Janeiro by residents of poor communities. Staged on the heavily graffitied New York subway, Parangolé 30 (1972) might recall insouciant scenes from New York Magazine’s street-fashion spreads. But the artist’s choice of a Black performer suggests Oiticica was keenly aware that New York, like Rio, was subject to racial and social divides.

Second and third galleries underscore New York’s primacy for performance and interdisciplinary arts, registered in the photographic documentation of events such as Fashion Show, Poetry Event, Center for Inter-American Relations (1969), by Costa (with John Perreault and Hannah Weiner), in which nude models strut sculptural pieces; Katz’s photographs of the burlesque, collected as Bedlam Days: The Early Plays of Charles Ludlam and the Ridiculous Theatrical Company (founded in the mid-1960s) that epitomise the city’s queer and experimental theatre; and images of Sylvia Palacios Whitman’s and Carmen Beuchat’s postmodern dance.

By including a vast array of experiential works, Iglesias Lukin makes a salient point that while we often view immigration as an isolating experience, Latin American artists fomented New York’s cultural boom through at times fleeting yet supple collaborative networks.

Ela Bittencourt

Carlos Irizarry, Andy Warhol, 1970, photo serigraph, 63 × 158 cm.

Collection El Museo del Barrio, New York

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Hannah Quinlan & Rosie Hastings Disgrace Arcadia Missa, London 16 September – 11 December The decision to make a body of work that draws from imagery associated with rightwing movements and conservative histories is a risky one.

Several exhibitions depicting such imagery have been shut down in recent years, most notably at LD50 gallery in London. However, the many works contained in Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings’s meticulously executed Disgrace, which comprises a fresco, a dozen etchings, two coloured-pencil drawings and a short movingimage piece, do not weaponise or antagonise in the same manner. Instead, through an array of materials, this exhibition obliquely explores the complex history of British feminism on the political right.

Small hard-ground etchings with aquatint form the main part of the exhibition, each

a vignette from a moment in history. The prints are organised into a linear form reminiscent of a musicological timeline: images seemingly depicting the radical actions of the suffragettes, eg For Ladies (all works 2021), narratively link to dystopian scenes far removed from ideas of emancipation, such as Women’s Police Volunteers and Blackshirt, the latter depicting women marching for the British Union of Fascists. The show’s centrepiece, in seeming contrast, is the fresco Republic #2, which depicts an imaginary moment, set in a 1970s modernist housing estate, wherein four women are speaking to each other. The near-lifesize figures, rendered in bright colours against the grey buildings in the background, seem impervious to the viewer’s gaze or scrutiny. In stark contrast to the etchings, the surroundings and

the histories in which these figures find themselves, the piece exudes promise.

The exhibition is accompanied by a comprehensive publication, Disgrace: Feminism and the Political Right, which viewers are invited to peruse on entering the gallery. The book, an extension of Quinlan and Hastings’s research, features texts from Akanksha Mehta, Juliet Jacques and Lola Olufemi that call into question the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s–80s. While the suggestion that one read before viewing might point towards a missed opportunity – directly utilising such material within the works – it nonetheless declares the responsibility that the artists are taking by informing the viewer of a wider context and sphere of thinking. Frank Wasser

Republic #2, 2021, pigment on plasterboard, 200 × 150 × 5 cm.

Photo: Rob Harris. Courtesy the artists and Arcadia Missa, London

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Paul Fägerskiöld 2100 Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin 28 January – 12 March If many gallery exhibitions nowadays consist of one work repeated with small variations, Paul Fägerskiöld’s 2100 initially appears to do so more than most. Ranged across two rooms are seven paintings of varying sizes, bijou to engulfing. Each is nearly black – the subtle colour variations establish themselves later – and pricked with whitish dots: night skies, then. Or rather, given that the base of each dark rectangle, framed by a bezellike enclosure of bare brown linen (and then a walnut frame), curves slightly, night skies as if seen on a monitor. Indeed, the Swedish artist has based these works on computer projections of how the stars will arrange themselves on 1 January 2100, with the speculative viewer looking variously south, east and north, in locations ranging from Berlin to Minsk, Venice to Kaliningrad.

You’d have to be a more expert stargazer than me to recognise these patterns: on a good night I can just about identify Orion’s Belt.

But the conceptual undertow becomes clear and persuasive enough while one moves from work to work, and simultaneously notes how materialist these paintings are – the tiny stardots, ringed with the colours of the work’s underpainting, are embedded in thickly impastoed monochrome fields built from febrile brushstrokes that nod back to Van Gogh’s 1889 The Starry Night (also the name of the predictive computer program the artist used) and range in shade from midnight blue to nearly brown.

Like looking at the real heavens on a clear evening, the longer you look, the more you see; and while that’s happening, the works accumulate associative depth.

For Fägerskiöld, after nodding neatly to the modern aesthetic past via Postimpressionism and all-over abstraction, is zooming past the present to do something that, seemingly, precious little contemporary art can find the wherewithal for: contemplating the future.

As the handout notes, this places the work in the predictive tradition of, say, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), whose narrative, we now know, wasn’t wholly accurate.

Fägerskiöld, by contrast, doesn’t postulate what’ll be happening on Earth in 78 years’ time. Instead he offers a prediction at once cold and strangely reassuring. In the worst-case scenario, there won’t be people here to see these diverse firmaments; but the stars themselves will still be hanging there, unconcerned.

Martin Herbert

Malé, the Republic of Maldives. View east. January 1 2100., 2022, oil on linen in walnut frame, 110 × 200 cm. Photo: Gerhard Kassner; Courtesy the artist and Galerie Nordenhake Berlin, Stockholm & Mexico City

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Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley She Keeps Me Damn Alive Arebyte Gallery, London 19 November – 5 March It’s a decade since the game designer Anna Anthropy published Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (2012), her retort to the quagmire of the corporate gaming industry. Ten years in which game production has (mostly) continued to disappoint with its absence of nuanced perspectives and recruitment reform. Conversely, it’s a period that’s seen the evolution of the technocultural phenomenon that spurred Anthropy’s bracing tract: an influx of homebrew practitioners and development tools attentive to a newly expressive, inclusive culture of game creation. In the opening months of 2022, this stark polarity persists: upper-tier developers Activision Blizzard heft legal weight against countless accusations of sexual assault

by former employees, while online ‘game space’ continues to function as an unmoderated frontier of hate speech. And yet, distribution platforms such as itch.io and Game Jolt provide vanguard spaces for the ludic exploration of stories and identities that counter normative media production and the reactionary tendencies of gaming fandoms, offering involving approaches to understanding-through-play.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s She Keeps Me Damn Alive is an uncompromising, necessarily unhinging and ultimately welcome eruption of this emergent attitude in game design into a gallery context. A game in the form of an exhibition, its central mechanic and integrated environment are sculpted explicitly around the

celebration and preservation of Black transgender life. Flanking the gallery’s entrance are hoardings depicting quasi-divine sentinels clutching alien weapons. Easily misread as the signage for an e-sports arena (for Fortnite tournaments et al), these displays are the first intimation that the ensuing exhibition space has mutated into a domain of play in which a visitor’s participation (or indeed passivity) might be scrutinised.

On entering, a ‘briefing’ area instantly recalls the joyous, cacophonous hellscape of an arcade (I’m reminded of London’s now defunct Sega World, with its blaring cabinets of The House of the Dead, 1996–, a legendary horror game and acknowledged influence upon the artist). The short film Health and Safety (2021) sets the terms

She Keeps Me Damn Alive, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Dan Weill.

Courtesy Arebyte Gallery, London

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of engagement, instructing players to ‘Shoot to protect Black trans people’ – a provocation tempered by the reflection ‘What gives you this power?’ – while opposite, a robed mannequin proffers screens detailing the statistics of the game’s bizarre antagonists: ‘Pretend Allies’, ‘Supremacy Agents’ and ‘Touristic Touches’ populating a rogue’s gallery animated by the misplaced energies of sanctimonious comradeship, hollow alliances and the spectral privileges of whiteness.

This horde poses a threat to ‘Dwayne’, ‘Marikiscrycrycry’ and ‘Ebun Sodipo’, avatars modelled on the artist’s friends using motioncapture data, and whom the player is expected to protect while traversing the exhibition’s main work, a ‘rail shooter’, or a virtual rifle range.

These ‘low-poly’ (a modelling technique using limited polygons) renderings of peers are integral to Brathwaite-Shirley’s archival approach. Acknowledging the absence of Black

trans people from many existing archives, they work to forge a new codex for previously excluded experiences. While academics such as Ruha Benjamin have identified the ‘coded inequities’ of facial recognition software and predictive policing applications, BrathwaiteShirley seems divergently focused on the precarity of more diffuse cultural milieus, in which hostilities seep into the very code upon which networked communications are built, and where the preservation of Black or trans identities – online, in games, IRL – isn’t guaranteed by a supposedly benevolent tech sector or its users. As such, the three biomes navigated during the exhibition’s game (an underwater temple, a dungeon and a city ransacked by white gentrification) form an occasionally euphoric yet always uneasy register of trans life.

Players are encouraged to listen, observe and respond to the predicaments of their denizens, curbing the encroachments of hostiles

with a strange firearm. A Cronenbergian agglutination of sculpted viscera and functional hardware, this ‘gun’ is uncannily weightless, a pink gimcrack that smelts the ergonomic design of gaming peripherals into a tumescent appendage. It’s embarrassing to wield, both impractical and unreliable, and I failed numerous attempts to play ‘successfully’, facing countless reprimands from the game’s narrator, which asked me to reflect upon my aggressions or evasions before ordering me to leave the gallery. Game Over? Not exactly. She Keeps Me Damn Alive’s accusations hit harder knowing that my time in the gallery was being broadcast live to a public Twitch stream, that the satisfaction of ‘accomplishing’ the work’s lessons of attention, responsibility and camaraderie wasn’t to be so easily gifted to me, but awkwardly oscillated through the conflicting and residual experiences of misapprehended entitlement and shame. Jamie Sutcliffe

She Keeps Me Damn Alive, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Dan Weill.

Courtesy Arebyte Gallery, London

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A New Public Art The artists recasting monumentalism as a collective project Before he switched to art history, the British sculptor Antony Gormley studied archaeology and anthropology. Obviously. How could any other training possibly have pushed what Skye Sherwin has called Gormley’s ‘one-size-fits-all universalism’ to such an extreme? Those twin Victorian disciplines claim as their mutual field of enquiry the humanity of everyone on the planet on the one hand, plus the entirety of the human past on the other. Think of these nineteenth-century academic subjects, steeped in colonial violence, as human subjects: their vampiric subjectivities exhumed at Oxbridge in the 1960s just as other structures of empire were falling away. Just in time to haunt Gormley’s generation of students for the rest of their careers.

Museums were constructed as the public spaces of these disciplines. Here, through displays like the Parthenon Marbles, their universalist worldview is presented as natural, immortal and eternally resistant to change.

I confess that I’d always drawn the same feeling from any Gormley. From Birmingham to Crosby Beach to Gateshead, his figures seemed to cling to a death-drive imperial masculinity, desperate to endure for posterity. Call it toxic monumentality. Fast-forward to May 2021 and Gormley’s brass-neck suggestion that Oxford must disregard the democratic decision of Oriel College to dismantle its protofascist, white-supremacist monument to mass murder and apartheid, and simply swivel Cecil Rhodes around to face the wall like a naughty schoolboy. ‘Public statuary becomes subject to collective amnesia extremely quickly,’ he told the Financial Times. ‘But by removing them you accept the amnesia.’

Testament, an exhibition currently at London’s Goldsmiths CCA, shows us that what’s presented as a risk of forgetting some ‘Great Man History’ is in fact about a collective right.

The right to choose what to remember. To reimagine monuments beyond nostalgia for colonial patriarchal iconography. In this respect, Testament is very different from how we might imagine a traditional exhibition of monuments. For example, a few weeks ago I visited the melancholy, carceral space of the Zitadelle, Berlin’s Renaissance fortress situated in suburban Spandau, where since 2016 the city’s outmoded memorials have been preserved in a permanent display called Unveiled: Berlin and its Monuments. Walking among the Prussian statues from the imperial Siegesallee (1898–1901), Arno Breker’s fascist

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Zehnkämpfer (1936) and the immense head of Nikolai Tomsky’s colossal Lenin that once stood in East Berlin (1970), there is a sense that the curatorial work of ‘recontextualisation’ is itself starting to show signs of fatigue.

What a contrast then for Testament to assemble 47 artistic responses to a brief that asks for proposals for future monuments, as yet unrealised. An anticipatory recalibration of the monumental is underway here that is about neither the counterinsurgency of putting fallen idols back on display, nor the centring of the negative space that’s opened up by an empty plinth. It’s as if the gap being opened up isn’t merely spatial but temporal.

I was reminded of something Achille Mbembe wrote after 2015’s Rhodes Must Fall protests in Cape Town. He called it ‘a negative moment’ – which he defined as a period in which ‘new antagonisms emerge while old ones remain unresolved’. A parallel ‘negative moment’ opened up for public art in Britain when the statue of Edward Colston fell in Bristol on that bright day in June 2020. We’re still in that moment. And we don’t know when or how it ends.

But Testament shines a light on how the principal task of public art today lies in removing one massive monument. It’s a removal not so much of the material as of the conceptual; of a subject rather than of an object.

The monument being replaced is the historical category of the human subject itself. What this means in practice is that artists are reclaiming monumentality as a collective project. There are echoes of human footsteps in Untitled (monument for Oxford Circus) (2021) by Tenant of Culture – a patchwork of foam, rubber and plastic from scores of discarded trainers proposed as a 20m-high installation. Invisible traces of the living, breathing bodies that once wore and used the clothes and domestic textiles unpicked, sewn up and rolled out in Stuart Middleton’s Motivation and Personality (2018). These statues to systemic obsolescence stand alongside Yuri Pattison’s remarkable Decommissioned Border Force immigration and passport control desk (Heathrow) (2018), the ‘found object’ presented as a kind of antimonument to the violence of border regimes. It is an artefact formed by the tens of thousands of human bodies that have been classified from behind its counter, and variously objectified or subjectified by its shattering text: ‘Please wait to be called forward. No phones. No photography.

Thank you for your cooperation.’ Some subjects

are newly remembered. Alvaro Barrington quotes Tupac: ‘Long live the rose that grew from concrete’. Jeremy Deller proposes a Tomb of the Unknown Refugee (2022). Other subjects are absent because they’re not yet here. Aaron Ratajczyk imagines ‘an inverted monument, a hole, a city cave’ without memory and with only possibility, the title of which he takes from the final line of Ben Okri’s poem ‘Turn on your light’ (1999): ‘Our future is greater than our past’.

The silk-satin patchwork of Elizabeth Price’s Renderer for an unspecified statue (2022) recalls the artist’s childhood memory of the seasonal veiling of Catholic church monuments during Passiontide. But the bodily form to be covered is absent here. Tai Shani’s NHA 7 (2021) meanwhile is a cursed neon hieroglyph that takes us beyond any sense of the mortal body towards the possibility of new subject positions, of realisms that are just as unpredictable as relativisms. Shani’s work enacts the partible, distributed personhood of a witch; their jesmonite hand, containing small niches and objects like organs, holds the promise of a bad trip. Insofar as the speculative, revolutionary work of recasting monumentalism involves taking stuff down, Shani tells me later over tea: “We need to allow the monolith of gender binarism and other oppressive monoliths to fall, as part of this more general collapse of what is perceived as a natural order.” Shani’s words are still in my head as I’m back on the train rereading the sociologist and Guardian columnist Gary Younge’s call last summer for us to imagine a realm of public art and public memory beyond human figures outlined and fixed in stone or bronze. It’s an argument that echoes the philosopher Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the overrepresentation of ‘monohumanism’.

The fabricated, patriarchal, idealised image of ‘Man’ in nineteenth-century liberal humanism has been presented, Wynter shows us, as universal and thus as naturalised, exclusionary, extractivist, militarist, dehumanising, woven into the fabric of cultural whiteness, toxic, enduring.

What’s the message? Liberal monohumanism dehumanises. Subjects are harder to topple than statues. Fallism was always about what can happen next: the negative moment, not just the negative space. For these reasons and so many more, in the 2020s artists are starting to rebuild new forms of collective monumentality.

Dan Hicks

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Testament, 2022 (installation views, CCA Goldsmiths, London, featuring work by Tai Shani, top left; Yuri Pattison, top right; and Stuart Middleton, above).

Courtesy the artists and CCA Goldsmiths, London

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Where Jellyfish Come From Antenna Space, Shanghai 8 January – 20 March Evolutionary biologists believe that jellyfish preceded the human race and, given their survival of every mass extinction, that they will likely outlive our species as well. As such, they are widely studied as harbingers of evolution and climate change, warriors of the Anthropocene in all its tragic dimensions. This exhibition – taking its inspiration from a fairytale sequence of the animated series Bee and PuppyCat (2013–) that imagines the jellyfish’s origin as the result of a fateful parting between a princess and an octopus, who is bequeathed with a gift of her hair after he helps her find her way home – elevates this incessantly nomadic creature to be its central mascot in positing a playful, queer ecology through the work of three artists.

The titular creature appears in a peachcoloured wall mural by Ad Minoliti that snakes

its way through the space, a swirling symphony of balls and spherical line. The princess manifests in the acrylic paintings of Liu Yin as a dejected version of Disney’s Snow White, perhaps most moving in Snow White Far Away From Home (2021), which finds our heroine looking forlorn as she gazes out over a seascape, the irises of her eyes turned copper by the sunset; an image of Edenic loss: you can never go home again. The spider – perhaps the jellyfish’s nearest land-based equivalent – dominates a rear corner of the gallery space in the form of a massive pink inflatable by Li Shuang. Though the clear referent here is Louise Bourgeois’s infamous sculpture Mother (1999), Li advised the gallery that the sculpture should only be partially inflated, so that the spider appears hunched over.

All three artists share a cartoonish emo aesthetic that is ultimately more convincing than the overall exhibition concept, for the three approaches are really exercises in self-portraiture via the mechanism of fantasy. This became immediately clear to those who attended the opening, which included a performance by Li that featured more than a dozen performers dressed in one of her classic punkish outfits – pleated Catholic schoolgirl skirt, My Chemical Romance sweatshirt, dark sunglasses, crimson lipstick – some of whom read personal letters in private to friends in attendance that the artist has been estranged from since the onslaught of the virus as a COVID-19 refugee stuck in Europe. One floating princess – or at least her avatar – finally made her way home.

Travis Jeppesen

Liu Yin, Snow White Far Away from Home, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 102 × 67 cm. Courtesy the artist and Antenna Space, Shanghai

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Hugh Hayden Boogey Men Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami 30 November – 17 April There’s a poetic moment – philosophical, even – at the end of every Scooby-Doo episode. The gang hogties a ghost, a demon or some other ghoul, and in an instant shucks their hood or mask to ‘reveal’ the ne’er-do-well, and their ruse. The supernatural immediately becomes profane; mystery solved. Hugh Hayden’s Boogey Man (all works 2021), the centrepiece of this exhibition, revels in the tension of the reveal – that moment in art when the artist’s material or conceptual sleight-of-hand presents itself to enchant viewers.

Boogey Man is a bedsheet-bedecked cop car, three-quarter-lifesize and fabricated in steel.

The hooded chariot equates the brutalities of the American police state and the Klan, but there’s a goofy softness to the work thanks to the hammered and painted metal of the bedsheet.

Evoking Guston’s bumbling Klansmen, Hayden’s use of a diminutive scale, rounded edges and big cartoonish eyes (dark mirrored pools, like little Gerhard Richter paintings) defangs the subject’s nefariousness. Yet this is a sinister caricature, and the baroque drama of matt drapery morphs into a skin of whiteness, the power that enables this ghost to diabolically hover. Hayden tempts viewers with the reveal, but never discloses who, or what, exactly, is under the hood.

The idea of skin shapes many of the objects in Hayden’s Boogey Men, and he nimbly works between the mass-produced and the handmade.

Example: a car seat, called Pride, reupholstered with zebra pelt, becomes an assisted readymade of sorts – alluring and soft, black and white – and sits across from High Cotton, an arched

section of fencing, deftly hewed from Gabon ebony. The latter work emphasises simple elegance, like the works of Martin Puryear.

Skin defines the experience of America one can have; materials become skins that define objects.

A lush expanse of grey carpet fills the exhibition’s second room, becoming a decisively domestic stage on which the exhibition is set.

A larger-than-life skeletal figure, Nude, carved from cedar, genderless and without attributable race, sprouts a host of branches. Vertebrae lurch forward, the being seated in repose and emitting a sense of prickly unease. The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty once said that painting can break ‘the “skin of things” to show how things become things’. Hayden’s sculpture pursues this endeavour. Owen Duffy

Boogey Men, 2021 (installation view).

Courtesy the artist and Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami

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Pas Besoin d’un Dessin (Draw Your Own Conclusion) Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva 28 January – 19 June The museum collection is now, more often than not, seen as something to overhaul, to correct the supposed failings and iniquities of its founding Western, Eurocentric, Enlightenment assumptions. Debates rage over demands to ‘decolonise’ collections assembled during the West’s colonial history, while art-historical collections are regularly the subject of reinterpretation by, for example, contemporary feminist and queer perspectives. Museum collections today are there to be remixed, invariably to politicised, didactic ends.

Though it avoids directly addressing such tensions, Jean-Hubert Martin’s remarkable ‘remixing’ of the collection of Geneva’s Museé d’Art et d’Histoire is a sort of provocation to those who want to impose their own critical

reinterpretations on historical collections.

Pas Besoin d’un Dessin (Draw Your Own Conclusion is the English rendering) is the result of Martin’s ‘carte blanche’ invitation by the museum’s recently appointed director, Marc-Olivier Wahler (onetime director of Palais de Tokyo), to select and present from the museum’s rangy and uneven historical collections of over 500,000 works and objects of fine art, decorative art, textiles, jewellery and antique weaponry.

Martin is no amateur when it comes to bold curatorial intervention: his controversial 1989 exhibition Magiciens de la Terre (at the Centre Pompidou) was a key moment in how Western curatorship would turn against the older Western-centric narrative of modern art, putting Western artists side-by-side with

contemporaries from the Global South and East. Even in 1989 this was a shock to a museum culture still clinging to the idea of non-Western art as either peripheral or only ‘traditional’.

Three decades later, Martin brings a similarly playful, mischievous approach to the taxonomical and pedagogical conventions of the historical collection. Rather than respect departmental or chronological niceties, Draw Your Own Conclusion groups rooms of works from across genres, periods and places, according to their visual and thematic affinities. The imposing first room, for example, brings together things that range ‘From the Cross to the Globe’, forms freighted with millennia of symbolism: a fearsomely long

Pas Besoin d’un Dessin (Draw Your Own Conclusion), 2022 (installation view, featuring the ‘Chromatic Scale’ presentation).

Courtesy Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva

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European medieval broadsword stands on its tip in front of the right-angled limbs of a Kanaga tribal facemask, itself next to a Suprematist Cross woodcut (1923) by Kazimir Malevich, before the selection segues into things that echo the circle and the sphere – eighteenth-century globes and astronomical clocks nearby the stone fragments of Richard Long’s Geneva Circle One (1987) laid on the floor.

It’s a kind of curatorial free association that relies on our propensity to make involuntary visual connections, and the curator’s willingness to exploit this. As an absurd counterpoint to the more solemn first room, ‘Keeping Count’ presents a group of paintings and objects whose only connecting logic is that they each contain an increasing number of human figures, one to twelve. It’s arbitrary and fun, like the breathtaking gallery of objects arranged in strict chromatic order, on a long plinth painted the colours of the rainbow (‘Chromatic Scale’).

These more spectacular assemblages, however, act as extremes to the show’s underlying proposition, namely how the viewing public’s capacity for aesthetic interest and pleasure grates against curatorial approaches that reduce aesthetics to little more than social history, in which all meaning is constrained to its own time and place. Such approaches wouldn’t allow, as here, a room of nineteenth-century Pennsylvania Amish quiltmaking, next to sixteenth-century Genevan infantry flags, next to a chequerboard painting by John M. Armleder (Untitled, 1986).

Their resemblances are superficial, of course, but bring us imaginatively through their distinctly different ‘life worlds’ to consider the varying historical sense and use of geometric form. Similarly, the room ‘From Love to Hate’ presents an astonishing arrangement of sculptures and paintings that, in barely detectible increments, shift from depictions of romantic love (all very baroque and chintzy)

to more disturbing depictions of sexual violence. Martin’s skill is in deploying these depictions to create an uneasy – and essentially aesthetic – experience of the ambiguities of pleasure and violence that lie between these extremes.

But the more fundamental issue here is how curatorial interpretation claims legitimacy. The work of history, the show suggests, is a form of knowledge and authority that, while necessary to locating human culture in its historical and cultural contexts, can reduce our looking to an exercise in responsible but lifeless compartmentalising that estranges us from what the past has to offer. The anarchic subtext of Martin’s reinvented wunderkammer is a critique of the still-existing power of the curator and historian: those functionaries who, however progressive or critical they might now think themselves, still end up as controllers and regulators of our freedom – as viewers – to draw our own conclusions. J.J. Charlesworth

Pas Besoin d’un Dessin (Draw Your Own Conclusion), 2022 (installation view, featuring ‘From the Cross to the Globe’).

Courtesy Musée d’Art et d’Histoire, Geneva

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Nikesha Breeze Four Sites of Return: Ritual, Remembrance, Reparation & Reclamation University Art Museum, New Mexico State University 21 January – 5 March There are powerful forces at work in Nikesha Breeze’s creative practice that activate the museum as a site for social change. Their work integrates autobiography, philosophy and theory to challenge colonial systems of knowledge and recorded history in a manner that recalls author and theorist Emma Pérez’s call to construct a ‘decolonial imaginary’. Here Breeze leverages the platform of an exhibition to centre voices and stories of the African diaspora largely excluded from Southwestern identity in the US. The exhibition finds its roots in the land of Blackdom, about 15 miles south of Roswell, homesteaded in the early 1900s by Black families intent on living a free life that was impossible in an American South indoctrinated by ‘separate but equal’ Jim Crow laws. As a descendant of Blackdom’s residents, Breeze

draws on their ancestry to explore methods that record new histories and heal past trauma.

Stages of Tectonic Blackness: Blackdom (2021) is an eight-hour collaborative performance onsite, presented in a two-channel video installation that shows performers moving around desert brush, touching the earth and responding to one another’s movements. A series of ceramic faces (108 Death Masks, 2018), sculpted from the artist’s imaginary to represent the generations of individuals subjected to the violence and oppression of white supremacy are hung at eye-level on all four walls of the gallery and consecrated with a ritualistic altar space.

Suspended from the ceiling is a large cluster of branches from which dozens of tiny white tags dangle; one of them reads ‘Breonna Taylor’, linking this symbolic installation with past atrocities and our present reality.

In Mutiny of Morning (2020) the act of critical thinking is presented as an artform. Using a ballpoint pen, the artist marks each page of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness (1899), circling words and crossing out others to foreground the African voice within the narrative of an essentially racist book. Breeze reworks text and image to highlight an Afrocentric theory in a work that reads like a critique of the novella and of the assumption that intellectualism belongs to the elite.

Breeze uses this exhibition to negotiate their own place in the world and disentangle themself from the dominant historical narrative that limits marginalised voices. Difficult to define and transformative to experience, Four Sites of Return proposes a shift in cultural memory with the power to shape our future.

Carissa Samaniego

Nikesha Breeze and Miles Tokunow, Stages of Tectonic Blackness: Blackdom (still from performance), 2021.

Photo: Monica Kennedy. Courtesy the artists

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Koenraad Dedobbeleer 1b Maniera, Brussels 16 October – 19 February Maniera was founded in 2014 with the aim of commissioning artists and architects to produce furniture and ‘functional objects’: each chapter of the exhibition programme varies in scope and can consist of anything from a single piece to a constellation of sculptures. The 25th ‘edition’ is by Koenraad Dedobbeleer and takes the form of a bar, titled 1b. The accompanying essay describes the Belgian artist’s work here as a ‘composition with fourteen objects of various scales’ – tables, chairs, lamps, side tables, tableware and more – and ‘composition’ feels like a particularly apposite description. For the overall appearance of this ensemble is particularly painterly; a harmonious arrangement of complementary colours and geometric forms.

Everything is framed by a digital photoprint of marble panelling that wraps around the

room like a wainscot and creates a sense of spatial unity while also screening off the street-facing windows.

The centrepiece of this elegant hostelry is Pussyfoot, a green and purple cocktail cabinet that would not look incongruous in one of the bohemian cafés associated with the Vienna Secession. Indeed, a touchstone in the conception of 1b was apparently Josef Hoffmann’s Cabaret Fledermaus, which opened in 1907 and was conceived as a gesamtkunstwerk within which artists could socialise and avantgarde performances be staged. All fittings and furniture at the Fledermaus were made by the Wiener Werkstätte, a cooperative founded upon aims that resonate with those of Maniera: to create utilitarian items that are also shaped by interdisciplinary artistic research.

Although references to twentieth-century design are prominent throughout 1b, they are balanced by the inclusion of ambiguous, outré elements. Steel chairs redolent of Memphis Milano creations are adorned with backrests of a distinctly orthopaedic or medical appearance. Such details lend a hybrid quality to these objects; they defy neat categorisation and appear entirely idiosyncratic. Also significant was the decision to devise a programme of public events (dinners, conversations and musical performances) that transformed 1b into a social space as opposed to a sterile stage set. These happenings interrupted the conventions that might usually hold sway in a furniture showroom and provided an opportunity to fully apprehend both the functional and aesthetic potential of Dedobbeleer’s objects. Pádraic E. Moore

1b, 2021 (installation view). Photo: Jeroen Verrecht.

Courtesy the artist and Maniera, Brussels

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Vogliamo tutto. An exhibition about labor: can we still want it all?

OGR, Turin 25 September – 16 January This show poses the same question chanted rhetorically by radical students and militant young autoworkers as their protests spilled from Turin’s FIAT factory onto the streets in the autumn of 1969: ‘Che cosa vogliamo?’ (What do we want?). ‘Tutto!’ (Everything!) The revolutionary poet and artist Nanni Balestrini adapted the slogan for his 1971 novel, Vogliamo tutto, which has come to symbolise this outpouring of industrial strife – a reaction to changes brought about by rapid industrialisation and mass migration from south to north. Balestrini’s characters wanted better conditions, higher pay and lower prices (the ‘all’ of this show’s subtitle).

Fifty years on, as this show intelligently investigates through the work of 13 artists, the struggle continues. So when Anglo-French duo

Claire Fontaine wrap a digital print of the book’s cover around a brick as one of their brickbat readymades (Vogliamo Tutto Brickbat, 2016), placed on the ground as if recently thrown, the gesture towards its explosive content seems current.

But as work patterns shift again and possessing ‘everything’ remains elusive, who is taking to the streets today?

The show examines how this tension between old and new ways of working finds a visual language. Indeed, the huge exhibition venue itself embodies this transformation in microcosm.

Built as Turin’s principal railway maintenance workshop during the early 1900s, it combines spaces for the arts and for startups. Pablo Bronstein’s We Live in Mannerist Times (2015), a wallsize, elevationlike mural of precisely drawn

lofty cast-iron columns and Victorian steam machines, interrogates such institutional redevelopment, one that wraps modern hi-tech creative uses in the veneer of old factory architecture.

The car noisily junked in Kevin Jerome Everson’s film Century (2012) offers a devastating metaphor for the crushing of traditional industrial production, and the communities it sustained, by globalised markets. In metal twisted beyond recognition, Everson depicts the materiality of labour transformed into abstract forms, devoid of function and prone to be aestheticised as sculpture, a perspective monumentalised in a later room by The Asset Stripper (2019), one piece of Mike Nelson’s multipart Tate commission, which hybridises

Elisa Giardina Papa, Technologies of Care, 2016 (installation view, OGR Torino, 2021).

Photo: Andrea Rossetti. Courtesy OGR Torino

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an art object from an outdated aeroengine, discarded sleeping bags and a plinth of wooden pallets.

A more searching treatment of the same theme animates Charlotte Posenenske’s Vierkantrohre der Serie D (1967/2018–19), richer in nuance now for originating in an era less ambiguous about its embrace of liberating automation. This configuration of ‘square tubes’, fabricated industrially as units of galvanised sheet steel, initially resembles misplaced warehouse ducting. But beyond its immediate properties, the work suggests its assembly by diverse minds and hands (the artist allowed parts to be reordered by her audience, whom she called ‘consumers’) – actions attested to in Sidsel Meineche Hansen’s prints from The Manual Labor Series (2013). These depict anatomical diagrams of hands injured by repetitive strain arising from desk work, tellingly reproduced by a mechanical process.

Andrea Bowers interweaves thought, art and activism in A Call to Arms: Building a Fem Army (2016), a monumental marker-pen drawing on cardboard reclaimed from shipping cartons. The three strong female figures are drawn from other artists’ agitprop graphics of the 1970s, their strident styles harnessed here for their expression of nonviolent political struggle. More resonant of the spirit of resistance to change imposed on communities by corporations is LaToya Ruby Frazier’s installation The Last Cruze (2019), which refers to the Chevrolet car assembled in one Rust Belt community in Ohio, where General Motors was the biggest employer when the steel mills shut during the 1970s. A red display structure imitates the assembly line cradles on which cars were constructed, its 18 partitions supporting text and photographs that narrate the town’s fate once the last car was completed. The plant closed, and families and support networks fragmented, as hard decisions were taken about moving elsewhere or quitting jobs, pensions and benefits.

In 2016 Forbes magazine reported on a survey of gig workers that concluded that choice of types of employment is highly correlated with satisfaction, whereas being forced into independent work did not, a viewpoint Liz Magic Laser’s multiscreen video installation In Real Life (2019) evidently shares. The five online workers taking part in her spoof reality show submit themselves to wellness-tracking apps and biohacking devices aimed at optimising their productivity and health in the remorseless hunt for gigs. The videos imitate their constant availability by playing their individual narratives over and over, in a marketplace where they assume all the risk.

Curators Samuele Piazza and Nicola Ricciardi’s admirable organisation of these disparate works elevates the show. Connections across rooms develop a momentum that evokes the pent-up feelings that culminated in events half a century ago. Plus ça change?

Martin Holman

Adam Linder, Service No. 5: Dare to Keep Kids Off Naturalism, 2018 (performance view, OGR Torino, 2021).

Photo: Luigi De Palma. Courtesy OGR Torino

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Future Generation Art Prize Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev 25 September – 27 February Spanning a wall opposite the reception desk of the Pinchuk Art Centre is an annotated world map charting applications to this sixth edition of the Future Generation Art Prize: 11,789 submissions from 181 countries, including two each from Swaziland, Suriname and Papua New Guinea, and one from Antarctica. Twenty shortlisted artists and collectives joined the Ukrainian winner of the 2021 Pinchuk Art Centre Prize in this group show. In December Afghan artist Aziz Hazara won the $100,000 award, which includes an unrestricted $60,000 cash prize and $40,000 towards the production of a new work, as well as a solo show at the centre. Up to five others will receive smaller cash awards.

The only condition for eligibility is that entrants must be thirty-five or under, although

shortlisted artists are often known entities, well established on the biennial circuit. The prize’s website proudly states that it is ‘the only prize for the young generation of artists with a global dimension and guided by an open, free, and democratic application process’. It tracks with the Pinchuk brand: the centre was founded by pro-EU businessman Victor Pinchuk in the wake of Ukraine’s Orange Revolution.

There’s an interesting historical context here. The associated Victor Pinchuk Foundation is behind what will become a mammoth complex memorialising the 1941 massacre at Babyn Yar (a ravine outside Kiev) and the Holocaust in Eastern Europe more broadly. The site includes numerous art installations and a synagogue built to look like a popup book, which is among the most stunning buildings I’ve ever seen.

Contemporary art features heavily here too, including Marina Abramović’s Crystal Wall of Crying (2021) – trios of crystals mounted along the walls supposed to align with your chakras – which opened in September and is exactly as trying as it sounds.

Back to the future: among the most compelling works at this year’s prize are those that, well, think of the children. In Hazara’s multichannel installation Bow Echo (2019), five young boys are filmed on a rocky outcrop overlooking Kabul, fragile and vulnerable as they are buffeted by strong winds. They struggle to play a toy bugle, whose reedy whine competes with a swirling storm and the insistent buzz of drones.

It’s the kind of work that should feel like a rather heavy-handed metaphor for Afghanistan and for childhoods marked by violent conflict,

Aziz Hazara, Bow Echo, 2019, five-channel digital video (colour, sound), 4 min 17 sec.

Courtesy the artist

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yet in its simplicity and gorgeous cinematography remarkably manages not to be. It was installed at this year’s Yalta European Strategy conference, also organised by the Pinchuk Foundation, ahead of this exhibition.

Lindsey Mendick’s Can’t Take My Eyes Off You (2021), inspired by David Cronenberg’s The Brood (1979), is a multiroom installation about societal pressures around parenthood, mental health and choosing to remain child-free. The surreal-grotesque romp plays out in a tworoom immersive installation of a playground, replete with puffy-clouded walls and artificial grass, and a 1970s-era living room. (Each artist, it should be noted, has their separate room(s), giving the exhibition an art-fair feel.) On an old TV, a woman narrates her own trials with child-rearing and sings a lullaby cover of the titular song over footage from 1990s Disney films. Its lyrics are made ominous by gnarlyfaced ceramic children populating the scenes, each one on the precipice of hurting itself by falling out of a playhouse, choking on

a chicken bone or jamming its fingers into an electrical socket.

Another highlight considers the reproduction of external power structures as well as queer utopias that wither on the vine as a result of austerity and gentrification.

Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings’s Public Affairs (2020), a series of paintings on board, addresses policing, prejudice and racial privilege in the queer community with scenes of meetups in public parks. In Public Affairs 1 a Black woman appears to be in an altercation; in Public Affairs 3 a pair of cross-armed officers are seen observing an encounter from behind a yellow fence. These are accompanied by the artists’ remarkable short film In My Room (2020), which draws parallels between menonly gay bars and cruising, and straight white men’s privileged access to private and public space. It all happens via a choreographed dance routine that extends nonverbal negotiation into a kind of gesture-performance of masculinity.

Also noteworthy is Pedro Neves Marques’s Middle Ages (2021), a short film about heterosexual infertility and queer reproduction.

It feels like a character-driven slice of life despite its fantastical narrative of male pregnancy, in which ovaries are implanted into a man who then partially gestates his future baby. A similar futuristic-but-utopian air pervades Rindon Johnson’s Clattering (2021), which unfolds from a sci-fi novel cowritten with Diana Hamilton, available in photocopied form as part of the installation.

It combines a stained-glass panel, pitted shell-rock benches and an animated digital vista, excerpted from a videogame, from the novel’s genderless, conflict- and hunger-free planet, which modulates with the time of day, suns and planets rising and setting on its horizon like a picture window onto a new world. But as with the show as a whole, there’s a feeling of trying to reach the future sooner by bypassing the present.

Rahel Aima

Rindon Johnson, Clattering (detail), 2021, mixed media, dimensions variable.

Courtesy the artist

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Our Silver City, 2094 Nottingham Contemporary 20 November – 18 April Developed by exhibiting artists Céline Condorelli, Grace Ndiritu and Femke Herregraven, this is an exhibition-as-sci-fi story, envisioning a not-sodistant future shaped by climate change; seasons have gone, fires decimate Sherwood Forest and Nottingham is reborn as the Silver City (itself further explored in Our Silver City, 2094, a novella written by sci-fi author Liz Jensen for this exhibition). Operating in a contemplative register, the show highlights collaboration as a mode of practice and deploys a wide range of artworks in parallel with speculative fiction to highlight some of the most pressing issues facing us today. In short, it’s an exploration of art in activist mode in which it serves to prototype and consider new ways of being.

The opening gallery delves into the central theme of change, with artworks and artefacts from different decades presented on chipboard stands, like a visual archive of proposals for the future. Maps of Nottingham from the 1800s to the 1980s illustrate a city in industrial flux.

Anthony McCall’s video Landscape for Fire (1972) shows a choreographed grid of fire set and burnt repeatedly in an airstrip field; Zara Zandieh’s video Octavia’s Vision (2021) captures queer liberation, decolonisation and environmental movements through the retelling of stories

by Octavia E. Butler.

A multimedia gallery considers the need to develop new technologies for a new city. Fossils

and fake rock clusters are mixed in with short films and a sound piece. Large textiles and a wall print by Condorelli explore colour-producing methods inspired by cephalopod mimetic abilities. Her printed fabric Resuscitated Aural Study (2021) drapes across the gallery on a series of metal bars like a drying skin, morphing from awning to stonelike table. The images of organic, cellular globs on a curtain and tentaclelike wall prints, however, are nondescript and miss the connection with the narrative.

Ndiritu’s and Herregraven’s immersive installations look for nonmaterial connections in community and the environment respectively.

Ndiritu builds community in The Temple (2021),

Our Silver City, 2094, 2021 (installation view).

Courtesy Nottingham Contemporary

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a lifesize model for a modern, circular museum that invites conversation and commonality.

Handmade goddess sculptures and weavings depicting fabric as an ancient technology feed curiosity for traditions. Herregraven’s Wet Spells (2021) is a serene, anachronistic weather lab premising a world from which supercomputers have disappeared, where weather is once again predicted through the use of our senses.

Weather lore is transmitted by crackly children’s voices over makeshift antennae, and new meteorological symbols line the walls. The brilliant addition of a curse tablet to the weather gods, a genuine archaeological find dating from 400BCE, grounds the farflung method.

Both installations develop a sense of spirituality through self-reflection and the ambition to find meaning and direction through inner knowledge, ancient wisdoms and the environment rather than through religion. It touches

on the rise of spirituality among millennials and Gen Zs, who, with little faith in patriarchal institutions, have turned to spiritual practices including Wicca, meditation and yoga to improve individual wellbeing. Our Silver City, 2094 suggests that the embodied connection and openness developed by spiritual practices can help build communities and promote positive coexistence with our surrounding environment. It’s convincingly enough executed to instil a sense of optimism about self-directed change.

Since it’s a fiction, the exhibition provides a narrative distance that avoids the eco-anxiety usually associated with climate change. The bleakest artworks, Ben Rivers’s Urth (2016) and Cauleen Smith’s Song for Earth and Folk (2013), short films that foresee humans becoming extinct, are offset by the exhibition’s themes of progress with positive intent and instead inspire a sense of agency.

Combining art, writing and historical archives to narrate a story, Our Silver City, 2094 demonstrates the potential of different artforms to engage with the looming climate crises positively while inspiring change. It educates without preaching and explores futures tangibly, removing abstraction, to encourage imaginative engagement.

Placing the exhibition 72 years ahead brings the future close enough to be relevant; it is not so far away that you cannot connect with it.

The conceptual time-jump urges you to consider what children of today may need to survive and how we impact that. Rather than make demands, the show asks only that you have listened to, seen and experienced what is possible.

That this is done without scaring people, without multinational COP agreements and without insisting that people change makes it a profound exhibition. Amrit Doll

Our Silver City, 2094, 2021 (installation view).

Courtesy Nottingham Contemporary

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Books Fuccboi

by Sean Thor Conroe Wildfire, £16.99 (hardcover) Fuccboi would want me to tell you that his debut memoir-novel is a masterpiece. That he’s some kind of literary virtuoso, genius. That’s exactly what he’d want. Or needs. Because Fuccboi needs to be loved. Needs that attention like he needs those hits to get lit and live in the moment, not think about stuff like responsibilities, or relationships; instead replace those with shrooms and Karl Ove Knausgård and which ‘bae’ he might hook up with next (baes being potential-or-not female love interests, because a fuccboi is very, very straight). Only he can’t stop thinking about those prior things. Those relationship-sinews that hold this autofiction – and Fuccboi – together.

Part of that anger comes from being perceived as straight white male (even though Fuccboi is mixed race, the ‘white-adjacent’ kind; mum Japanese, the ‘ole man’, who left them, white; still trying to figure out how to be hapa, like most of us with mixed heritage), in a culture that might be quick to attack him for being misogynistic, sexist or racist. And to be fair he often says some dumb stuff: in a conversation about the gender pay gap where a high percentage of women are paid 70 percent for the same job as a man, he responds, ‘Wouldn’t that incentivize employers to hire women?’ Though, under the guff, he doesn’t actually seem to be misogynistic or sexist – just afraid of being cancelled for such things. And that gender-pay-gap-response

is provoked by his current circumstance and his own self-hate (‘Unable to work. Holed up, stalled out, body fucked’), a sharp reminder that when people hit rock bottom, they lash out. Worried about seeming like a ‘predator’, Fuccboi goes through his ‘Walk Book’ (a publication about his failed attempt at walking across the US) and cuts out ‘every savage, ugly, testosterone-fueled, shameful thing’ he’d found most difficult to write even though the intention was to make others ‘aware of such flagrant tendencies in themselves’.

Another part of Fuccboi’s anger stems from the disenfranchised impotent feelings of dispossessed young males who see themselves as sidelined from mainstream culture: ‘When the convo flagged/veered woke towards the patriarchy and how women, in America, in 2018, were held down, I felt a rage bubbling. A rage I knew was sus but nonetheless couldn’t supress.

How tf was I privileged. I couldn’t do shit. Not only that, no one allowed me to show/admit I couldn’t.’ But this self-assessment isn’t totally convincing because Fuccboi is privileged: he’s got a family who saves him, friends who stick around for him. A top college education is revealed in his style of writing that is at ease referencing literary figures (namely Sheila Heti, Eileen Myles, Gina Myers) alongside rap artists (Lil B, Dr. Dre, Young M.A) and which moves seamlessly

between slang and his ‘School/Academic Voice’ – ‘This some hogwash yo’. Nonetheless, for a couple of years he is broke, can’t make rent, is constantly keyed, is out scraping $6 delivering 4am pizzas. Able to afford, at least, to be a fuccboi.

The rage that catalyses Fuccboi’s selfreckoning is formed of the stuff he tries to squash down – the shame, guilt, grief, for which he turns to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922) to explain the emotional/psychological traumas that can’t be assigned a language. Those things that he represses until they manifest, inflame, in his body. Leading to hospitalisation, emergency steroids and, eventually, lifestyle changes (kale juices, ‘hella broccoli’, yogi teas), during which time the relationship-sinews provide support. In an age of quick intolerance and polarised positions, Fuccboi delivers a nuanced account of the darker, more desperate attitudes of the young hetero-male today; those flagrant tendencies not excusable, but which might be understood as rooted in, say, insecurity and poverty (of the financial-social-educationalemotional kinds). People are like snowflakes, Fuccboi notes, each unique and constantly changing. And that ability to see things from another person’s point of view, not by silencing but by including in the dialogue, will determine whether in the end we’ll get our shit together.

Fi Churchman

Leelee Chan’s Art Journey: Tokens from Time Edited by András Szántó Tokens From Time is an account of Hong Kong sculptor Leelee Chan’s BMW Art Journey.

She describes her work as an ‘archaeology of the urban environment’ and it privileges the handmade and the found objects (old and new) and debris around her home, and, according to Chan, reflects the influence of growing up near the major international circulation hub that is Hong Kong’s container ports. The Art Journey is a prize awarded to artists exhibiting at Art Basel’s Hong Kong and Miami editions that enables them to

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Hatje Cantz Verlag, £30 (softcover)

produce a body of work or project based around travelling (not only by car) ‘almost anywhere in the world’. Chan is the recipient of the 2020 Hong Kong Award, which, in view of how that year unfolded might seem like something of a poison chalice. Indeed, in part, the book is a story about someone who circulated (from the summer of 2020 to the summer of 2021) at a time when human beings largely did not.

Her reason for doing this was to explore eight materials – obsidian, copper, silver, iron, marble, mosaic, concrete and mycelium – in terms of

their extraction and exploitation in order to reconsider, via encounters with a range of people involved in the past and future use of these materials – from artists and craftspeople to scientists and researchers – the way in which her practice participates in these processes. And how that might be improved in terms of its ethical and environmental impacts. It’s a project that seeks to expand the understanding of sculpture beyond the aesthetics of the finished artwork itself. Nirmala Devi

ArtReview

24/02/2022 11:24

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Posthuman Feminism

by Rosi Braidotti Polity Press, £15.99 (softcover)

Contemporary critical theory often recalls nothing so much as a bad trip – everything is connected, but nothing means anything.

The well-meaning (or perhaps anxious) attempt to incorporate the perspectives of every entity, living or dead, be it identity-group, nonhuman plant or animal, indigenous knowledge or disciplinary insight, culminates, ultimately, in a tepid literature review, an artworld-friendly glitter-bomb of the ‘right line’.

So it is with philosopher and feminist Rosi Braidotti’s new book. Braidotti seeks here to build on two of her previous works, The Posthuman (2013) and Posthuman Knowledge (2019), as well as her lengthy feminist commitments. Posthuman Feminism is thus partly a qualified defence of posthumanism – the idea that the human is being redefined by technology – combined with feminism, which, according to Braidotti, is the ‘struggle to empower those who live along multiple axes of inequality’. This definition of feminism is fashionably broad, incorporating ‘ecofeminism, feminist studies of technoscience, LGBTQ+ theories, Black, decolonial and Indigenous feminisms’. All of this in the context of the ‘Anthropocene’ – the era when homo sapiens has irreparably transformed nonhuman nature – and ‘increasing structural injustices’, ‘devastation of species’ and ‘a decaying planet’.

Technoscience is a double-edged sword of course, producing all manner of horror, as well

as some exciting new possibilities. It might have ‘subversive potential’ when it comes to gender identities (which are potentially ‘bio-hacking the future’), but it also exploits our genetic material and destroys the planet. Feminist technoscience studies, Braidotti unsurprisingly notes, is ‘often at odds with itself’. Nevertheless, Braidotti claims, posthuman feminism is a better lens for analysing power than competing perspectives because it has ‘relinquished the liberal vision of the autonomous individual as well as the socialist ideal of the privileged revolutionary subject’.

While Karl Marx will be turning in his grave at the idea that the class with ‘nothing to lose but their chains’ is somehow ‘privileged’ (perhaps she means privileged in the discourse, rather than in reality), and we might wonder what happens when we give up on the individual (must we upload our souls to the Borg, Daddy?), the main thing is to move beyond ‘Western humanism and anthropocentricism’. This desire to have done with the past – not only its history but also its thought – comes at a cost, however.

What is absent here, beneath the attempt to represent all right-thinking perspectives, is much argument. We are told, for example, that binary oppositions act as ‘instruments of power and governance’, but not why we should give up on binaries as such. Underpinning Braidotti’s assertions is a set of now-familiar assumptions –

that Eurocentrism exists and is bad; that the Enlightenment was a cover story for barbarism; that ‘Man’ ultimately means ‘white man’ – that are not questioned in their depths.

At moments Braidotti acknowledges that these legacies are contested, before returning to familiar and ritual depictions.

In her bid to separate posthumanism from bad transhumanism, for example, where the latter position remains indebted ‘to the Enlightenment project of social and political emancipation’ and to ‘liberal individualism’, she comes close to recognising some of the tensions of her own perspective: ‘the sheer reliance on technological mediation and the pursuit of a project of perfecting embodied selves through science and technology, brings queer and trans theories paradoxically closer to the Enlightenment project’. So which Enlightenment is it to be? Picking the one you like seems itself to be awfully dependent on a liberal notion of individual choice.

Braidotti’s vision comes in peace (‘What is ultimately at stake is a sense of futurity and love for the world’), but remains beholden to a theoretical and political eclecticism that lacks philosophical depth – perfect for today’s fuzzy art and lazy thinking, but unable to give enough critical distance from contemporary ideology to provoke much-needed fresh thinking. Nina Power

Diplomatic Gifts: A History in Fifty Presents

by Paul Brummel Hurst, £25 (hardcover) This fun compendium traces the history of diplomatic gifts, from the ivory statues the Pharaoh Akhenaten sent and received to neighbouring kingdoms in the fourteenth century BCE, to landmarks including the Statue of Liberty (an 1884 gift from the people of France to America). As the British ambassador to Latvia, the latest in a long career of Foreign Office appointments, Paul Brummell knows about diplomacy and the subtle political cues gift-giving can render. Evaluating whether a present is a true expression of friendship, a power play or a downright bribe is part of the job, and in his introduction Brummell delves into various anthropological studies that have helped him decide. One 1920s report for example observed that the people of the

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Trobriand Islands engaged in a complex system of present swapping in which the same gifts, a necklace and a bracelet, would be regifted constantly, presumably to ensure no one ever felt short-changed.

Art and antiques have often been diplomatic gifts, but given the pitfalls of an artwork being read wrongly, the more anodyne the better. Nonetheless David Cameron’s present of a painting by little-known street artist Ben Eine to Barack Obama in 2014 seems a national embarrassment given he received an Ed Ruscha in return. Animals provide superior publicity, with China’s ‘panda diplomacy’ being the most obvious example.

Following a ceremony in 1972 for the political elite, in which an orangutan named

Miyo pulled a string to reveal a banner welcoming two new pandas gifted by China (Kang Kang and Lan Lan), 20,000 members of the Japanese public queued to meet the black-eyed pair. Yet beasts present practical problems: while arrangements were being made to get a baby camel gifted by Timbuktu to François Hollande in 2013 to France, the animal was temporarily entrusted to a local family for safekeeping. Except, through some misunderstanding, they cooked it in a tagine. Indeed, the term ‘white elephant’ derives from the receipt of beasts from monarchs in Southeast Asia that were, and as gifts with strings attached continue to be, a burden hidden in an honour.

Oliver Basciano

ArtReview

24/02/2022 10:47

Run and Hide

by Pankaj Mishra Hutchinson Heinmann, £16.99 (hardcover) Pankaj Mishra’s second novel comes 20 years after his first. During that time, he has become, through a series of non-fiction essays and books, one of the most prescient and surgical deconstructors of the causes and lasting (and largely negative) effects of Western liberalism and imperialism, and the impact of both on his native India and more broadly the Global South.

Though there are, of course, those who are vehemently opposed to his analyses.

To a degree, Mishra’s return to fiction allows him more scope to explore, from a standpoint that is marginally less judgmental than his non-fiction work, both perspectives: broadly that of the victims and of the executioners in a world shaped by modernisation and globalism.

And angry, displaced, disaffected and often toxic masculinity.

The novel centres around the lives of three men from poor backgrounds – Arun, Vivendra and Aseem – who meet as roommates at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Delhi during the early 1980s and immediately endure a horrifying all-male sexual initiation into the world of elite study, organised by their seniors and ordered in terms of their victim’s place in the caste system (marked by their surnames). From there the trio embark on their respective processes of reinvention (or, as Aseem, channelling the author V.S. Naipaul, whose work haunts this book throughout, puts it,

‘trampling the past’): the ultimate promise of a new, modern India.

Aseem goes on to become an author and media celebrity with an appetite for rampant sex (with pretty young women), and for attacking India’s elites while wanting, nevertheless, to join their social circles; Vivendra, the lowest caste of the three, a Wall Street billionaire with a taste for blonde prostitutes, blowjobs and insider trading; while Arun, who already received a caste upgrade thanks to his father arranging for a school report that exchanged his son’s surname for one designating a position at the top of the caste tree, retreats to the foothills of the Himalayas, to translate unpopular Hindi books into less popular English books and look after his ailing mother.

Arun, moreover, is the novel’s narrator, addressing his tale to a dramatically abandoned (and younger) girlfriend, Alia, as a form of aggravated rationale for his actions and for those of his friends.

If the early parts of the novel focus on inequality, class and caste, the latter parts of it, in which Alia (who comes from a background of wealth) is present, introduce the themes of globalisation, diaspora and a generation born with a more fluid and contingent sense of social and national identity. For Arun, coming from a past in which the rules were clear, it’s a comfortable but uneasy encounter with

a present in which there are no rules. For Alia and her friends, travel and social media are a means of instantly switching one reality for another. Their focus is on changing the world rather than changing themselves: ‘social media forces everyone to become an operator… We all have to learn how to blend aggressive selfpromotion with sincere activism’. Even Arun’s abusive father, whose own reinvention has involved abandoning his family to start a new one, is at this last: spewing much ‘liked’ posts on Facebook demanding the deportation of Sonia Gandhi ‘back to the Vatican’ while hymning praises to India’s current Hindu nationalist leader Narendra Modi. ‘He imagines himself, like so many lately bewitched by the internet,’ Arun muses, ‘to be robustly participating in, not just passively living through great events. Perhaps this was another one of history’s cruel tricks: to forge dreams of agency and self-empowerment, of making history, among people who it has irrevocably unmade.’ Arun, via another form of retreat, ultimately choses to unmake himself.

Run and Hide is a clinical, riveting, at times excruciating, examination of the forces that shape society today; of the unrealities we create and the unrealities that are imposed upon us.

And whether or not there is any true sense of ‘we’ anymore. It doesn’t end well for anyone.

Mark Rappolt

André Butzer

by Hans Werner Holzwarth Taschen, £80/$100 (hardcover) André Butzer’s recent paintings of big, smiling, happy cartoon faces, looking sidelong at each other, some floating in bright monochrome backgrounds, others atop big, wobbly bodies on sausagelike legs, are like painterly cousins of today’s host of emotionally sincere emojis.

For two decades Butzer has made paintings that invent a kind of painterly utopia, in which all the dead ends of the modernist past, as much as the shadows of a particularly German history, are reconciled through bright, high colours wrought in life-affirming expressionistic vigour. It’s a happy place, that, in this coffeetable-defying monograph, could go on forever… which is perhaps the point.

Butzer’s ‘sci-fi expressionism’ emerged in the knowingly anarchic, somewhat blokey world

of German painting at the end of the 90s – younger painters who, picking up the postpunk license of elders such as Martin Kippenberger and Albert Oehlen, caught the wave of the art boom in postreunification Germany. The lysergic cheeriness of Butzer’s earlier paintings has a lot to do with that ‘end of history’ moment – scrawled references harking back to the Cold War cultural dominance of America and the vapid consumerist dream of postwar West Germany suggest the fading away of this prosperous but paranoid world. From its remnants Butzer fashioned a kind of ironic, infantile nostalgia which was also posthistorical idyll, articulated with the help of a dotty, DIY futurist mythos whose places were ‘Annaheim’ and its offworld colony ‘Nasaheim’ – the real

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Anaheim being the site of the original Disneyland, its creator Walt Disney a recurring reference for Butzer’s painterly dreamworld.

Painting’s history is gobbled up, Disneyfied and flung out in thick, crusted paint that might recall the untutored intensity of Asger Jorn, Mondrian-like rectilinear structured mashed in with smiley faces – ‘I think of my abstracts as being painted by Donald Duck and his friends, ’ Butzer says, in the brief, enthusiastic essay by Hans Werner Holzwarth. What makes Butzer’s work more than cool or indifferent pastiche is how it corrupts the weighty seriousness of art with the redemptive naivety of a cartoon world; a future place where all contradictions and suffering are gone, and which is always out of reach. J. J. Charlesworth

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Subject Object Verb Series 2 Episode 8 Listen Now Ross Simonini with Klein artreview.com/podcasts

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Art credit

Text credit

on the cover Sidsel Meineche Hansen, home vs owner 2, 2020, bricks and mortar, 60 × 60 × 120 cm. Photo: Lewis Ronald.

Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, London & Piraeus

Words on the spine and on pages 21, 41 and 79 are from Ibn Battutah (writing about Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughluq, ruler of Delhi), The Travels of Ibn Battutah, ed Tim Mackintosh-Smith, 2002

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You could say that such is the mythology of Guinness that a pint of the stout is to the Irish what steak frites is to the French. Or at least, that latter example was one that Roland Barthes wrote about in his 1957 collection of essays, Mythologies: ‘Being part of the nation, [steak frites] follows the index of patriotic values: it helps them to rise in wartime, it is the very flesh of the French soldier…’ (the rest of the book is about trying to decode the mythologies that are used to naturalise political and cultural ideologies).

The Guinness mythology is due in part to memorable branding. At more than 250 years old, Guinness has spent the last century honing the aura surrounding its stout via its advertising campaigns, from its first tagline ‘Guinness is good for you’ (1929) to those iconic 1930s posters designed by John Gilroy depicting a feckless zookeeper trying to reclaim his precious pint from a collection of animals, to its awardwinning television adverts, some of which turned the 119.5-second pour-time to its advantage.

Take ‘Surfer’. It opens with a black-andwhite closeup of a man’s face, brow furrowed; he’s looking up at something ominousseeming. His eyes quiver, then blink. “He waits,” a male voiceover says, “It’s what he does. And I’ll tell you what…” The scene cuts to a group of surfers on a beach who grab their longboards and gallop into the sea. “Tick followed tock followed tick followed tock followed tick…” As the surfers disappear behind the crest of a huge swell, a bass riff looms out of the silence, and an aerial view captures the four of them, tiny, paddling out towards a big wave. A really big wave. Which they catch, and as they ride (“Ahab says, ‘I don’t care who you are, here’s to your dream’”), giant white horses rise out of the water, seafoam turning into solid muscle.

“The old sailors return to the bar, ‘Here’s to you, Ahab!’, and the fat drummer hit the beat with all his heart…” One by one the surfers wipe out, tumble through the horses’ legs, vanish into the froth beneath trampling hooves. But one surfer, he bares his teeth in a snarl, stays low against his board, and gets barrelled in the curl of the wave. A horse crashes over, wild-eyed. And the surfer emerges. “…Here’s to waiting.”

That 1999 advert, directed by Jonathan Glazer and inspired by Polynesian surfers’ ability to read the ocean, Walter Crane’s 1892 painting Neptune’s Horses and Herman Melville’s fanatical Captain Ahab in Moby Dick (1851) (this last seeming an odd accompaniment, since Ahab is all revenge and bad vibes, and Guinness ain’t about that), brings together a trifecta of potent mythmaking ingredients.

Aftertaste

On the Gargle

by Fi Churchman

I could probably tell you that watching ‘Surfer’ had an immediate and profound effect on my drink of choice. That in that moment, hypnotised by the anticipation of ‘the wait’, the romance and danger of the ocean as Polynesian surfer Rusty K skims through the tube of that really big wave, and Leftfield’s heartbeat-in-thehead soundtrack spliced from their 1999 song Phat Planet, I turned for a pint of the ‘Black Stuff’; watched the downward surge of bubbles like it was liquid sorcery; then had a slo-mo tastebud revelation from that first buttery sip on the tip of the tongue to the tang of the liquid as it slips down to the bitter-buds at the back where the flavour of roasted barley blooms; and never looked back. But I was eight. And tbh, didn’t even register the surfers (or the beer for that matter). Rather, I was just really amazed by these giant white horses crashing out of the waves, and so obsessed with them that I tried to draw them for

months afterwards. And then for years after, I was conjuring those giant white horses during long, boring car journeys, watching them gallop alongside the road. I still see them sometimes, even now, the imagery stuck fast.

Back to that steak-frites-flesh thing: it brought up weird old memories of my nan insisting Guinness is “in the blood”, and then later learning that people really were given a free pint of Guinness for donating blood in Ireland (to ‘replenish’ lost iron). And then only while writing this, thinking about how she, an immigrant to the UK, might have said that sort of thing because she felt closer to home with a Guinness in hand, the same way a lot of people who are part of a diaspora feel connected to their ethnicities via familiar foods and drink. And the way in which the ‘patriotic value’ of Guinness is so habituated within the Irish psyche that its drinking has become synonymous with St Patrick’s Day; and as such, has done some denaturalising of its own by turning a Christian festival devoted to its patron saint into a (mostly) secular holiday that’s celebrated around the world. Maybe those giant white horses did have the desired advertising effect on me, or maybe it was just that the stout was as normalised a beverage in our household as tea and coffee, but if there was ever a cultural ideology to buy in to, sign me up! Because Guinness, after all, is good for you. Sláinte.

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White gold, pink gold, pink spinels, pink sapphires and diamonds.

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