ArtReview December 2018 by ArtReview

Zoe Leonard

Magali Reus Rachel Rose Simone Forti

Ceal Floyer LONDON

MONUMENTAL MINIMAL

CARL ANDRE . DAN FLAVIN . DONALD JUDD . SOL LEWITT ROBERT MANGOLD . ROBERT MORRIS PARIS PANTIN DECEMBER 2018 – MARCH 2019 ROPAC.NET

Mendes Wood DM is pleased to announce the representation of Rubem Valentim.

A major solo survey of Rubem Valentim is on view Afro-Atlantic Constructions Museu de Arte de São Paulo – MASP São Paulo, Brazil 13/11 2018 – 10/03 2019

Mend e s Wood DM

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

Julia Scher Wonderland December 14, 2018 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; February 9, 2019

Potsdamer Strasse 81E D â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 10785 Berlin www.estherschipper.com

ArtReview vol 70 no 9 December 2018

I want to be alone Museums in the desert, exhibitions under the seas, biennials at the world’s frigid poles… sometimes it seems as if no part of the planet has been untouched by the trace of human ‘creativity’. And sometimes even ArtReview needs a break from the signs of human ingenuity. So, a few years ago, it went in search of a place on this earth that was unspoiled by art. It studied maps, spoke to experts (that is to say non-art-experts) and read around the subjects of desertification and remoteness. There were times when it thought that this might be an impossible endeavour. But finally it came to the conclusion that, perhaps ironically, the place where it might find the least trace of human intervention was one in which humans had previously intervened the most. And then, at last, having trekked through the Transcaucasian mountains along the disputed border of South Ossetia and Georgia, through villages abandoned and bombed out during the Russo-Georgian War of 2008, it stood in an empty – or rather emptied – landscape. Five years had passed since the war, and weeds had forced themselves through the foundations of the derelict houses, moss had grown over pathways and nests had been built in the eves. ArtReview sat for lunch on the crumbling steps of a house whose ethnic-Russian residents must have fled, and it swore – perhaps it was feverish or tired – that the footsteps of insects could be heard, so quiet were the surrounds. ArtReview walked for several hours each day, indulging its fantasy of isolation (ok, to be clear, it had met two nuns holed up in holy isolation, some soldiers on bored patrol at the barbed-wire front and a boy with a donkey during its time in this desolate place – oh yes, and an overground oil pipe ran through the landscape, the phone signal kept up and ArtReview knew that its chain-smoking fixer, and eventually a hotel bed, were waiting for it several kilometres away). ArtReview will leave it to you to decide

Ashes

whether or not it may have been kidding itself, but as far as it was concerned the trip was a success, and that is the delusion to which it is sticking. All this came back to ArtReview recently on searching through the archive of the bbc’s long-running radio programme Desert Island Discs and chancing upon an episode from October 1979 on which Wilfred Thesiger was the guest. The British adventurer admitted at the outset of the broadcast that he didn’t much like music – he had never “owned a wireless set or record player” – something of a problem for a programme in which the interviewee, a person of note, is asked to choose six pieces of music they would not want to live without. For Thesiger, who famously hankered for a pareddown existence, technology – or any type of creative adornment – was anathema, something to escape from whether it be by crossing the Empty Quarter of the Arabian Desert by camel with the Bedouins during the late 1940s or living as one with the Marsh Arabs of Iraq for months at a time during the 1950s. Yet increasingly, if contemporary theories concerning the Anthropocene teach us anything, it is that the world, this hyperobject, as it were, has irrevocably been remade by our presence. The air we breathe and the earth we tread are the product of human ‘creativity’ (even Thesiger’s beloved Mesopotamian Marshes are gone, drained by Saddam Hussein in order to exert better control over the boat-dwelling population). It has been since the first civilisations. Art then is the opposite of the desert. It’s the act of making something from nothing, filling space, changing, tinkering: no coincidence that the typical place in which to show it desperately apes an airy-white void, all the better to boast art’s presence within. The thing remains king even 50 years after Lucy Lippard and John Chandler’s clarion call for a future without objects. We can’t seem to help it: carbon footprint, creative footprint, we are producing machines. Emptiness is impossible. ArtReview

to ashes

ArtReview.Magazine

artreview_magazine

@ArtReview_

ARAsia

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

Brent Wadden sympathetic resonance

22 November 2018 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 11 January 2019

6 Burlington Gardens

LONDON

Art Previewed Previews by Martin Herbert 19

The Mounds of i-55 by Sam Korman 30

Populism and Pluralism by Mike Watson 26

Simone Forti Interview by Ross Simonini 34 Art Featured

Zoe Leonard by Fi Churchman 42

Rachel Rose by David Trigg 62

Magali Reus by Rosanna Mclaughlin 52

Under the Paving Stones: Warsaw by John Quin 70

Katharina Grosse by Mark Rappolt 58

Under the Paving Stones: Pittsburgh by Cat Kron 74

page 19 Guan Xiao, Weather Forecast, 2016, three-channel video, colour, sound, 12 min 48 sec. Courtesy the artist and Guangzhou Triennial

December 2018

Art Reviewed

Raúl de Nieves, by Cat Kron Hairy Who? 1966–1969, by Sam Korman Charline von Heyl, by Joshua Mack Christopher K. Ho, by Owen Duffy 16th Pacific Meridian, by Tom Jeffreys

exhibitions 80 Rasheed Araeen, by David Trigg Could you visit me in dreams?, by Max L. Feldman Maria Toumazou, by Thea Smith Teamlab, by Mike Watson Omer Ba, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Franz West, by Jeppe Ugelvig Performance and Poetry: The Eastern European Perspective, by Olga Stefan Gunter Reski, by Moritz Scheper Stuart Brisley, by Phoebe Blatton 4th Istanbul Design Biennial, by Beatrice Galilee Shahpour Pouyan, by Anna Wallace-Thompson Mika Rottenberg, by Louise Darblay One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, by Ashton Cooper

books 100 Turbulence, by David Szalay The Counsel of Spent, by Inventory Berlin, by Jason Lutes The Progressive Revolution, by Zehra Jumabhoy and Boon Hui Tan

page 96 Suellen Rocca, Bare Shouldered Beauty and the Pink Creature, 1965, oil on canvas, on two joined panels, 212 × 152 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the Art Institute of Chicago

ArtReview

last words 106

Producing Futures – An Exhibition on Post-Cyber-Feminisms 16.02 – 12.05 2019 Cécile B. Evans, Cao Fei, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Juliana Huxtable, VNS Matrix, Mary Maggic, Shana Moulton, Tabita Rezaire, Gavin Rayna Russom, Frances Stark, Wu Tsang, Anna Uddenberg, Guan Xiao, Anicka Yi

STEPHEN Languages 25.05 –

WILLATS of Dissent 18.08 2019

United by AIDS – An Exhibition about Loss, Remembrance, Activism and Art in Response to HIV / AIDS 31.08 – 10.11 2019 LILY 30.11

VAN 2019

DER STOKKER – 23.02 2020

Limmatstrasse 270 CH–8005 Zurich migrosmuseum.ch migros-culture-percentage.ch

AN INSTITUTION OF THE MIGROS CULTURE PERCENTAGE

Art Previewed

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s outstanding what dignity they achieve, these things that men have made 17

Previewed 1 In the 2014 Whitney Biennial, Kevin Beasley Whitney for his first museum show in New presented Untitled (Jumped Man): two floor-based York and ostensibly most ambitious piece yet, sculptures embedding Nike Air Jordans in rocky A View of a Landscape, the Virginian artist unveils chunks of resin – the shoes very much earthanother unorthodox sound-generating device: bound, unlike Michael Jordan – miked to pick a cotton gin motor from Maplesville, Alabama. up the footsteps of visitors and kinaesthetically While from 1940 to 1973 this ran the ‘gins’ that evoking racial violence. A year later, at the divided cotton seeds from chaff, it’s here used Guggenheim, another installation combined as a musical instrument of sorts, further emphareferences to the 1937 antilynching song Strange sising division by separating the machine from Fruit, more Air Jordans and amplifications of its amplified sound, and summoning a spectral the gallery ambience. Now in his early thirties, history of ‘land, race, and labor’. The Whitney also owns one of only two operating fleetly across sculpture, sound and 2 versions of Friedrich Kiesler’s Endless House performance, and seemingly one of the key (1950–59), his extraordinary largescale curving artists of his generation, Beasley works with model showing an architecture based on endwhat’s in the American atmosphere: namely, less circulation and flow, the living spaces the toxic continuum of racism. Back at the

a series of loops. The other model was gifted, alongside 30 other works, to Mumok in January 2017 by a collector couple, and is now being presented alongside further pieces by the influential Austrian-American architect, artist, stage designer and theorist. Not only does Kiesler’s polymorphous practice predate the flexible working styles of many living artists – he avowed that there shouldn’t be division between disciplines – but he pioneered, during the 1940s and 50s, a form of multimedia installation in a series of expanded painting works called Galaxies, which look strikingly contemporary today. This column usually steers away from deceased artists, but a substantial display of Kieslers is the sort of show that is likely

1 Kevin Beasley, Rebuilding of the cotton gin motor, 2016. Photo: Carlos Vela-Prado. Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York

2 Friedrich Kiesler, Endless House Galaxy, 1959, coal, ink on paper on four-layered cardboard, laminated, original frame, 121 × 153 cm (each). Courtesy Mumok, Vienna

December 2018

to impact on young artists, while also registering as alive in its own right. The sixth Guangzhou Triennial isn’t a 3 show you’re going to pin down from the subtitle, As We May Think: Feedforward. This may be a good thing: it could have been something blindingly obvious about borders. What that moniker refers to, apparently, is the technologically constructed nature of our sense of space and time, and in practice it brackets a show split into two discretely curated main parts: an ‘archive’ section (courtesy of Wang Shaoqiang of the Guangdong Museum of Art, and of which no details yet), and a main thematic exhibition curated by Angelique Spaninks, Zhang Ga and Philipp Ziegler. The 49-artist list mixes

major and emergent Chinese names with international figures – Feng Chen, Yang Jian, Liu Wa; Pierre Huyghe, Oliver Laric, Addie Wagenknecht, Lynn Hershman-Leeson – and, since this autumn, Guangzhou is accessible by high-speed train from Hong Kong, a machine technologically altering our sense of space and time, so here’s to synergy. Earlier this year, in the Bellelay Abbey near 4 Bern, Switzerland, Mirko Baselgia installed a pattern carved from stone pine and raised on sticks 22cm above the floor, its lines conforming to an 1873 map of the American railway network: a symbol of progress and manifest destiny that speaks, now, to human domination of the land rather than living in harmony with it, and the

unhappy arc of the country itself. Parts of that installation, framed and relocated to the wall, recur in the Swiss artist’s solo show Habitat, where they fit into an intricately researched narrative concerning humanity’s place on Earth. A series of sculpted pomegranates, for example, are made of volcanic stone culled from Vesuvius – a reminder of nature putting humanity in its place – and referencing the mythological story of Persephone, who was imprisoned by Hades and given pomegranate seeds to eat. (This story, without going into the details, becomes an origin myth for the seasons). Another body of work involves prints made from birds’ nests, made from impressions of actual nests on the metal plates. There’s a fair bit to unpack in

3 Yang Jian, Forest of Sensors, 2017, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou

4 Mirko Baselgia, Purscheida, 2018, volcanic stone from Vesuvius, eruption of 1944, 11 × 11 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing & Lucerne

ArtReview

6 ooiee, Skyways furniture, 2018, wood, metal, aluminium, glass. Photo: Daniel Shinbaum

5 Armen Eloyan, Natur und Kultur 4, 2018, oil on canvas, 240 × 180 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tim Van Laere Gallery, Antwerp

Baselgia’s work – it’s a show where you’ll keep the handout to hand – but it operates primarily on the level of poetics: a melancholic expression of mankind overstepping natural laws that, for all the history encoded in the work, is clearly concerned with where we are now, as the planet attempts to kick us off. Successful artists meet a lot of people and it’s hard to keep track of all their names. 5 Why not follow Armen Eloyan’s example and choose gallerists with the same forename? (Between shows at Timothy Taylor’s galleries in London and Manhattan, the Zürich-based Armenian painter reverts, as here, to Tim Van Laere in Antwerp.) Eloyan is consistent in other ways too, pursuing a long-running line of what

feels like darkly philosophical inquiry in his bravura paintings. Initially, these seemingly led back through Philip Guston – and a parallel fascination with warped cartooning – to existentialism per se. Of late, though, and even while not classifying himself strictly as a painter (he began his career as an animator, painting directly onto celluloid film), Eloyan seems ever more enmeshed in art history. The New York show last year saw him making 40 portraits, pressured halfway-human faces, in explicit conversation with the rich, juicy tones and textures and squishy figuration of midcentury Willem de Kooning, and the invited comparison didn’t embarrass Eloyan at all.

December 2018

During the 1960s, the city of Minneapolis – which gets icy cold in winter – constructed a futuristic, 18km long gangway and pedestrian bridge network linking its downtown office buildings, sheltering workers from the chill; it remains the longest structure of its kind in the world. A public art project for this space 6 entitled Goethe in the Skyways may seem like a leap, but the connection made via the writer is to Germany, the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the triumph of capitalism and, by extension, corporate politics and the parlous state of America today. The period over which Goethe… stretches, 2018–19, is also, we should add, the ‘Year of German-American Friendship’, and fittingly, nodding again to

8 Bojan Šarčević, ahtParis250/Differentcorner (detail), 2018, freezer, ice, audio, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Stuart Shave / Modern Art, London

7 Margaret Salmon, production still, 2018. Courtesy the artist

9 Peter Liversidge, Postal Objects, 2018, objects sent at the post office on 14 February 2018, dimensions variable. © and courtesy the artist

the writer, another aspect of the project is where she’s lived. Her new filmic installation language and posttruth. All these thematics will work, Hole (2018), continues her considerate lean: it’s designed as a warm zone in the winter be explored in a space that stands for ‘public’ life months, using light, colour, heat and sound, and in America, via a sharp list of artists including centres on a 16mm film that ‘uses a female erotic Lili Reynaud-Dewar, Liz Magic Laser, Christine gaze to look for places where love might be Sun Kim, Laure Prouvost and Philipp Rupp, and found in contemporary life and to explore what a host of local artists and printmakers. As an artist-filmmaker, Margaret Salmon’s 7 might constitute supporting, loving relationbig subjects are intimacy and empathy: while ships today’. As research continues to affirm the incorporating techniques drawn from the realist deleterious effects on human empathy of living filmmaking tradition and avant-gardism, the behind screens, such a project – expressed Glasgow-based artist’s 16mm and 35mm films via very analogue media – feels wholly timely. zoom in on the texture of ordinary life, often Bojan Šarčević’s shows aren’t easily second8 featuring individuals on low incomes, and skewguessed. The Belgrade-born artist’s last show ing to the local: the 2014 film Oyster explored the at Modern Art built like a piece of music, from ecosystem of oyster fishing in Whitstable, Kent, small, fluttery sculptures incorporating plastic

ArtReview

bags at the beginning to a big, hulking, obtuse, semiarchitectural sculpture appearing out of nowhere at the end. Music, too, ghosts Šarčević’s fourth show at the gallery, Sentimentality is the core, with refrigeration units emitting distorted snatches of emotive 1980s pop music. For the artist, the freezers – in which mountains of frost are growing – point to consumerism and the interplay between supermarkets and the music (that used to be) played in them to chivvy buyers along while touching their heartstrings. As such, the show flashes back icily to the beginnings of our neoliberal present, though typically for Šarčević it offers less a diagnosis than a series of involving cues: coldness, commerce and the spectre of feeling.

Years ago, I was awoken by a mighty crash. It turned out to be something posted through the letterbox and hitting the floor: a thick chunk of orange plastic, a fragment of a life9 buoy. This was a mail art project by Peter Liversidge, one of the diverse threads of the British artist’s work, which have ranged from tiny faux-naif paintings, begun during the 1990s, of American landscapes he’s never visited, to largescale choral works for amateurs, to gin stands, to political banners, to filmic backdrops for bands and, perhaps most notably, to his long-running series of ‘Proposals’. In these, pecking away at a manual typewriter, Liversidge comes up with quixotic

ideas, tests of the possible: from building a pizza oven or a dodgem arena next to his exhibiting venue, to abstract, poetic proposals such as ‘I propose to wait long enough’. Some of them inevitably get realised, as they will in Stockholm, where one can also expect ‘performances’, ‘interventions’ and all manner of things that Liversidge, from his London base, has sent through the post in advance. Iris Schomaker makes paintings, on big 10 sheets of paper, that veer unpredictably between figuration and abstraction, bodies fading out into fields of blackness or colour, or tightening into geometry. There’s a provisional, drawinglike quality to her work, so where the line

is between a drawing and a painting show is anyone’s guess – but this latest one is, we’re told, a drawing show. It’s titled Walking the Line, and the balance evoked is both a formal and a philosophical one, such that where Schomaker’s figures tightrope-walk between looking like people and dissolving into pictorial structure, there’s some analogy at work concerning how we’re to find daily equilibrium. Faces are often obscured in the service of identification with the figures; to engender, says the gallery, ‘moments of quiet reflection [that] are, though often overlooked, of utmost importance, as it requires solitude and silence to truly know oneself’. Preach, press-release writer. Martin Herbert

10 Iris Schomaker, Untitled, 2018, crayon, charcoal, oil and watercolour on paper, 60 × 55 cm. Courtesy Reflex Amsterdam

1 Kevin Beasley Whitney Museum, New York 15 December – 10 March

4 Mirko Baselgia Galerie Urs Meile, Lucerne Through 2 February

8 Bojan Šarčevic´ Modern Art, London Through 21 December

2 Friedrich Kiesler Mumok, Vienna Through 31 December

5 Armen Eloyan Tim Van Laere, Antwerp 6 December – 19 January

9 Peter Liversidge Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm 5 December – 17 February

3 Guangzhou Triennial Various venues, Guangzhou 21 December – 10 March

6 Goethe in the Skyways Various venues, Minneapolis Through September 2019

10 Iris Schomaker Galerie Alex Daniels / Reflex Amsterdam Through 12 January

7 Margaret Salmon Dundee Contemporary Arts 8 December – 24 February

ArtReview

2018/19

Meiro Koizumi Battlelands 22 November 2018 – 12 January 2019 Meiro Koizumi, Battlelands, 2018, Single screen video installation, 45’00”. Commissioned by Perez Art Museum, Miami, USA. Courtesy Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam.

47 Mortimer Street London W1W 8HJ

white-rainbow.art +44 207 637 1050

With Brexit having dominated the political landscape in the uk for over two years, President Trump in his second year of office, and the anti-immigration Five Star-League coalition governing Italy since May, rightwing populism has established itself as a legitimate, if not credible, political force. The success of populist politicians has come about as they aim, at least superficially, to represent the will of the working classes. In the artworld we see this tendency towards horizontalism mirrored in attempts at inclusivity embodied by open-selection processes for artists and employees. In modern times, such efforts can be traced back to the Salon des Refusés, a largescale exhibition held in Paris in 1863, displaying works by artists – among them Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet and Paul Cézanne – who had been refused entry to the Paris Salon on the grounds of quality, an annual exhibition selected by members of the Academy of Fine Art, which was famously out of touch with emerging trends. The refusenik show – as Émile Zola vividly conveys in his novel The Masterpiece

populism and pluralism by Mike Watson

above Alessandro Bulgini, Opera viva, luci d’artista, 2015, performance. Photo: Giorgio De Finis facing page, top Alice Pasquini, Untitled, 2013, mural, dimensions variable. Photo: Giorgio De Finis facing page, bottom Gian Maria Tosatti, L’Hôtel sur la lune, 2011, metal and lens, 420 × 100 × 250 cm. Courtesy Lia Rumma Gallery, Milan & Naples

ArtReview

(L’œuvre, 1886) – represented rather more than a simple challenge to the cultural order as embodied by the Academy, with its preference for staid history painting and academic portraiture. As Zola stated, ‘Here one found the smell of battle, of cheerful battle, given jauntily at daybreak, when the bugle sounds, and when one marches to meet the enemy with the certainty of beating him before sunset.’ The ‘battle’ the novelist describes was not fought merely over representation or stylistic preferences – though these factors were instrumental – but continued the perpetual work of social levelling in a land that had little over 70 years prior to the Salon des Refusés seen its ruling elite (and a higher number but lesser total proportion of working class ‘antirevolutionaries’) butchered during the revolutionary Terror. That historical episode, responsible for the death of between 17,000 and 40,000 people by guillotine, firing squad, drowning or poor prison conditions, took a number of artists, poets, academics and workers from all backgrounds.

December 2018

Today, political and artistic tendencies towards democratic expression clearly still exist parallel to one another, as could be seen, for example, in last year’s #MeToo and #NotSurprised campaigns that aimed at drawing attention to sexual harassment of women working in the media and arts. Such movements, which emphasise the importance of pluralism rather than populism, demonstrate the lengths we need to go to assure the inclusion and care of people from all backgrounds in the arts over 150 years after the Salon de Refusés. In Rome, the latest incarnation of the macro (the Municipal Museum for Contemporary Art) aims to take artistic inclusion to its extreme, continuing a battle for social inclusion. The museum relaunched on 30 September as the ‘Macro Asilo’, with Giorgio De Finis as its newly appointed director. De Finis, who since 2011 has been director of maam (Museo dell’Altro e dell’Altrove, or the Museum of the Other and the Elsewhere), a large occupied former slaughterhouse on Rome’s periphery, has pledged to bring his ‘anything goes’ curatorial policy to the venue, with an open selection policy, meaning anyone can exhibit, perform, screen, present or otherwise express themselves in the museum space, alongside programmed shows of recognised artists, for the duration of the experiment, which will end on 31 December 2019. His project finds itself peculiarly bound up with the current political situation, as De Finis was selected by the city of Rome’s minister of culture, Luca Bergamo, himself

appointed by Virginia Raggi. Raggi, Rome’s first female mayor, ran for the Five Star Movement, which forms one half of the ruling coalition government. That government has been known for, among other things, closing ports to migrant ships, such as in June when it refused – illegally – to let the ngo ship Aquarius’s 629 migrant passengers, who were rescued from the Mediterranean as they tried to reach Italy from Africa, disembark. De Finis’s maam, by contrast, is perhaps best known for housing a number of immigrants on its premises, who regularly participated in and contributed to the maam’s programme, which has included projects by Simone Bertugno, Mauro Cuppone, Gian Maria Tosatti, Alice Pasquini, Michelangelo Pistoletto and Sten&Lex, among others. It is early days for the revamped macro, though indications demonstrate that the open policy has been a success with visitors: 6,000 people attended Macro Asilo’s inaugural night on 30 September. Its success will depend on how deftly De Finis manages to balance the forces of political populism at the municipal and national level with the need for pluralism in the arts. This would be best demonstrated by an adequate inclusion and fair treatment of women and minority groups within Italy’s art scene, and a promotion of minority rights within wider society.

top Canemorto, Combo with Ema Jons, 2015, mural, dimensions variable. Photo: Gian Andrea Montanino above Gregorio Pampinella, Le space est a nous, 2013, mural, dimensions variable. Photo: Giorgio Benni

ArtReview

Japan House offers a gallery, events space, library, shop, cafĂŠ stand and AKIR A restaurant. JapanHouseLondon.uk | @JapanHouseLDN | High Street Kensington

Art Art Review Review Advert Advert 2.indd 2.indd 1 1

15/11/2018 15/11/2018 13:41 13:41

Located three-and-a-half hours north of St Louis is one of the few major examples of twentieth-century Land art in the entire American Midwest: Michael Heizer’s Effigy Tumuli (1983–85). The work was commissioned by the Ottawa Silica Company, which had been mandated by law to do something about a former strip mine scarring the banks of the Illinois River. Conveniently, the company’s ceo was an art connoisseur, and assessed that the right environmental art project would turn this wasteland into an attractive extension to a neighbouring state park. This also meant that Heizer’s project had to be site-specific: paying homage to Native American mounds that once covered the region, it would take the form of five earthen knolls each in the shape of an indigenous animal – a catfish, frog, turtle, water strider and snake. The resulting landmarks are way too large for the visitor to appreciate their zoomorphic form from the ground – the longest, the snake of course, stretches over 630 metres – but their topography makes for some adventurous hiking obstacles. Unfortunately, shortsightedness vexes their reception in a different way, too. They may hark to an ancient, indigenous history, but it primarily obfuscates the full scale of the cultural – and actual – genocide of indigenous peoples that happened between ancient history and now. Bright-eyed for the ways midcentury trends in American art had reached and been translated through regional dialects, in 2012 I eagerly accepted a job in St Louis, even forgoing a preliminary visit. My curiosity was partly kindled by Effigy Tumuli, and though no one seemed to visit any of these things regularly, the locals knew where they were, and all the stories about them. Nor was this the only substantial public art around. Downtown St Louis is home to Richard Serra’s Twain (1982), which made local headlines when vandals labelled it ‘La Grand Pissoir’, the misgendering ironic, considering the miscreants were pretentious enough to write in French. Later, white dots were defaced on the steel plates to make them ape dominoes, though, by the time I saw it, the graffiti’s tone was less playful: ‘Get Rid of This Thing’, someone had simply daubed. Famous visitors were also commemorated. Dozens of corporate plazas are adorned with Ernest Trova sculptures, a self-trained artist who became known

the mounds of i-55 by Sam Korman

Effigy Tumuli, 1985, Buffalo Rock State Park, Ottawa, Illinois

ArtReview

internationally in the 1960s for his ‘Falling Man’, a pot-bellied figural motif (which became so iconic it merited a satirical takedown by writer Donald Barthelme in a 1968 issue of The New Yorker, ‘The Falling Dog’). Unfortunately, though, access to these histories is not always guaranteed and local heroes are sometimes forgotten. Trova made a gift of 40 works to boost the ailing Laumeier Sculpture Park in 1976, but, without ever having properly maintained them, the institution attempted to deaccession the works in 2013. Cross-purposes also befell Effigy Tumuli. A rifle range was opened near Heizer’s project, forcing Buffalo Rock State Park to close the earthwork to the public for fear of stray bullets. “Oh, I’m sorry,” was the most frequent response of random Missourians when I explained that I had just moved to St Louis from New York. “But I just love it,” they would add. “I hope you’ll manage to find your way.” These passiveaggressive sentiments needled – didn’t they know I was here to appreciate the city’s trove of artworks, architecture, monuments and various other artefacts of International Modernism? Who else knew what they were? I was unaccustomed to local traditions – or forms of recreation – and the patina of ruin helped to mask how these public works operated a form of economic statecraft here – a fact, perhaps, we are finally learning across the entire world. Still, I found the contradictions thrilling, and even found art where it was not: a municipal asphalt dump near the Mississippi, where a few friends took me off-road trucking, helped relive Robert Smithson’s famous Asphalt Rundown (1969), in which a dumper tipped a load of bituminous pavement down a quarry wall near Rome. On 15 March 1972, the effects of systemic racism, municipal corruption, white flight and deindustrialisation all came to a head with the controlled implosion of the Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project just north of downtown St Louis, a drastic solution to the violence, vandalism and anarchy that blighted the estate. The architectural theorist Charles Jencks called it the day that Modernism died. By the time I had moved to the city, however, further civic antipathy and outright neglect had allowed the ninehectare site to blossom into an impromptu nature preserve, boasting some of the area’s largest collections of native flora (the Pruitt-

Igoe Forest also became popular as a dumping ground). Though most would look at these events as the city’s ongoing ruin, the native ecology didn’t seem to mind. Similarly, though a once-in-a-century drought stole the headlines during my first summer in town, I found an epidemic of brick theft to be the more telling news. Like mushrooms decomposing a stump, enterprising thieves stole the facades of abandoned houses, leaving only the buildings’ interior wooden skeletons. City officials were aware of it, but the penalty was typically as low as $50. I soon realised I didn’t have to look as far afield as Heizer’s project to delve into the past. There were some authentic mounds much nearer, and, anyway, the local ethos was about making do with what you have. Drive west on i-64 through downtown to cross the river. Dip through the industrial wasteland of East St Louis and Granite City on i-55, and you’ll soon arrive at the Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, an 890-hectare park dedicated to the preservation of the largest pre-Columbian settlement north of Mexico. Now considered extinct, the Cahokia tribe’s empire once connected the entire Midwest, spanning the full length of the Mississippi and its tributaries, the Great Lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. Thousands of earthen mounds rose across the landscape. Today, Cahokia’s boundaries are formed by i-55 to the north, a railroad to the

top Ernest Trova, Falling Man, 1970, sculpture, Laumeier Sculpture Park, St Louis, Missouri above Aerial view of Cahokia Mounds, Collinsville, Illinois. Photo: William R. Iseminger. Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Illinois

December 2018

south and Collinsville Road, a busy commuter route, which bisects it. To be clear, Cahokia was a city by any modern assessment. It was an agrarian society, and agricultural surplus helped it to grow into the regional locus of power, spirituality and trade. With a third of residents hailing from elsewhere, at its peak, between the eighth and fourteenth centuries, Cahokia’s population numbered 10,000 to 20,000, surpassing that of London. There is evidence of a clear division of labour, and class distinction also helped establish the dominant social order. Depending on your politics, the thousands of mounds represent either the byproduct of this economic system, or its great works. Regardless, nearby depressions still exist where the dirt was excavated, lending additional testimony to the thousands of man-hours necessary to complete them. Impressively, these mounds were built by hand. Today, the historical spectacle is reserved for the occasional picnickers, who frequently make use of the lush meadows or the few prefab gazebos the park installed among the ruins. Stairs were cut into the southern face of Monks Mound, an imperious earthwork that was once the seat of power for Cahokia’s entire world. Local runners and dog walkers use the steep incline to crosstrain (perhaps for Cahokia’s annual 5k). Others have made more nocturnal use of them. Taken from a distance, nothing differentiates a view of the mounds from a neighbouring grassedover landfill – another local irony, that trash piles eventually replaced the originals (and will eventually be subject to future reclamation projects). Much like the corporations that found themselves responsible for the waste

they produced, the 1970s witnessed cities and towns littered with abandoned industrial sites. Little was understood about how to conserve, let alone protect what a city still had. Recreation became a quick and clean way to do it. Cahokia was protected under the auspices of a state park in 1923, though it would take another 40-plus years before it received special protections from the federal government. The place didn’t even get a visitor centre until 1989. The building is a sweeping concrete structure that houses, among its various displays, a lifesize immersive diorama in which Cahokia residents hunt, make fires, wash clothes, care for children and perform other necessary chores. As with most period

top L.K. Townsend, Central Cahokia with the Twin Mounds, Grand Plaza and Monks Mound, undated artist rendering above William R. Iseminger, Aerial Perspective of Cahokia, undated artist rendering both Courtesy Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, Collinsville, Illinois

ArtReview

pieces, it emphasises labour, though Cahokians are known to have played ‘Chunkey’, a sport combining elements of bocce and javelin. Elsewhere, kitsch prevails in the special attention given to the archaeological digs themselves. Sure, displays like this are meant to elicit a sense of discovery, but comparing the jobs of the archaeologists and the Cahokians only reinforces the latter’s otherness. To this end, an incidental trip to the giftshop was just as informative, because that’s where I learned about Cahokia Mounds’ 1982 unesco World Heritage Site designation. The things you learn from a commemorative baseball. Brick theft continued unabated for the two years I lived in St Louis, though a suite of nineteenth-century daguerreotypes at the Missouri History Museum leads me to believe that it was not unique to this era. Had I arrived 150 years earlier, I might have witnessed an early example of this local pastime. The photographs record the demolition of the last great earthwork in St Louis city limits, ‘The Big Mound’, a three-storey structure razed to make way for downtown. It took place gradually: in one image, a pushcart barely reaches the first soil strata; another shows men climbing atop the half-excavated mound; and in a third, a small crowd of workers surround the last shard of earth. The images not only include the labourers for scale, but also to hint at the massive undertaking. Indeed, how the Big Mound (and the hundreds of others like it) was built and taken apart exhibits a disturbing symmetry. Hundreds of years after construction, the labour of one man was undone by another. These photographs confirm my suspicion that between the efforts of artists, builders and diggers, archaeologists, joggers, dog walkers and thieves, history similarly gets around to recycling itself. But mostly, it just keeps us busy.

Gasworks’ Editions offer an opportunity to own artworks by some of today’s cutting-edge artists from around the world.

Ad Minoliti Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa Kemang Wa Lehulere Candice Lin Monira Al Qadiri and more...

Available exclusively from gasworks.org.uk/shop Ad Minoliti, Nightlife, 2017. Edition of 50. Digital print. Courtesy of the artist.

Art Review Editions Ad Dec 18 V3.indd 1

15/11/2018 16:27

Interview

Simone Forti by Ross Simonini

“I feel we’re on the crest of a wave and I feel it in my body that we’re going to fall over and down and the wave is going to break” 34

ArtReview

This summer, Simone Forti attended her first proper artist residency, at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, California. This was only a few miles from the legendary dance studio of Anna Halprin, where Forti studied for five years during the 1950s and where she began to break down the fundamental syntax and grammar of human movement. Forti lives in Los Angeles, but she had come north to spend a week in the sublime fog of the Headlands to focus on her writing. At the residency, she read some new work aloud in a show-and-tell forum to the other artists-inresidence, a process she found “very helpful”. Like many dancers of her generation (Trisha Brown, Yvonne Rainer), Forti has often used writing as a way to notate her philosophy of movement. Her best-known book, Handbook in Motion: An Account of an Ongoing Personal Discourse and Its Manifestations in Dance (1974) distils the first few decades of her life and art, including her time at the Woodstock festival, her lsd experiences and her studies with Pandit Pran Nath and Merce Cunningham. During those years, when Forti was still in her twenties, she made some of her most historically significant work: the Dance Constructions (1960–61). These nine works created a relationship between functional movements and minimalist objects made of rope and wood: a seesaw, a slanted board, a box on wheels. The sculptures suggest simple activities, like climbing, leaning and standing, and the performances sought to demystify dance by focusing on quotidian movement, stripped of style. The Dance Constructions were acquired by moma in 2014 and are described in written instructions by Forti, but also require what the museum has called ‘body-to-body transmission’, from one performer to another, as the primary means of keeping the work alive. During the 1980s, Forti introduced what she once called her “seemingly infinite” News Animations series, in which she translates current news stories into improvised actions. She speaks the stories aloud, or listens to the radio, and moves her body in response to world events. Around that same period, she also moved into Mad Brook Farm, a remote artist community in Vermont, where she lived for a decade before moving to Los Angeles to teach at ucla for 17 years. Now, at eighty-three years old and trembling with Parkinson’s disease, Forti continues to publish, perform and exhibit. In 2014, she held her show Thinking with the Body: A Retrospective in Motion at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg. In 2018 she performed a News Animation at the Castelli gallery in New York and released her book The Bear in The Mirror, a collection of ‘stories, prose poems, drawings, photos, letters, notes

and memories’. The book traces her family genealogy back to Italy in 1938, when Mussolini was at the height of his power, along with some of her anecdotes about bears – “because”, she says, “I just like bears”. I spoke to Forti in her temporary Headlands studio, which was quiet, large and empty, except for a few simple elements: sawhorse, mirror, desk, notebook. We ate chocolate chip cookies, drank tea and spent a lot of time gazing out the window at the extraordinary view. I asked questions and she introduced each of her responses with an expansive, thoughtful moment of silence. ross simonini Are you focusing on writing these days? simone forti I think so. Every once in a while I kind of come to the end of a series of works or the end of a way of working – or I think I’ve come to the end – and I’m looking around for what my new focus might be. And I’m really interested in writing right now. rs Has that been a pattern for your writing? Does it come between other projects?

“I feel that movement’s really good for me, that it’s a medicine, I really need to be moving. It’s changed my self-image. I’ve really accepted this shakyold-woman image, which I enjoy. It has a Samuel Beckett edge to it, which I feel I can exploit” sf The end does not always come with writing. But for a long time I’ve been performing improvisations that I call News Animations and I’m talking and moving and I’m working with thoughts about the world, details of history. And I’m relating it to my movement. I’m interested in mental models of energies in the world and how I feel them through my body and in space. Sometimes I think of the words I speak almost as cards that I put faceup. Anyone listening and watching can partly see where I’m going with the thought and partly wander off in their own thoughts, stimulated by the connections I’m making, or the gaps I’m finding. And right now I just don’t know what to say about the world. It feels like we’re all holding our breath. And everything’s changing in so many ways and I’m having a hard time thinking about doing any more News Animations. facing page Simone Forti performing La Monte’s 2 Sounds, 1961, at moma, New York, in 2009. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu. Courtesy the artist

December 2018

rs On writing your first book, you said you were afraid to write about your lsd experiences, because you believed a demon would attack you. sf Yes. rs Any fears like that now? sf Yes. But not demons, just that the writing might be really stupid [laughs]. rs You’ve often connected language with movement. Have you come to any conclusions as you’ve worked this way? sf Well, one is that blocks of thought don’t necessarily take the form of language, but they can. But really, I don’t know what have I understood about language and movement. Right now my consciousness is floating around trying to see how to answer that or whether I’ve found patterns and there’s that flitting that’s almost visual in space. Like sometimes when you hear music you can kind of visualise space in certain shapes or organisations. Thoughts are kind of like that. And then you can try to translate it into language. rs What are you thinking about with your body these days? sf I feel we’re on the crest of a wave and I feel it in my body that we’re going to fall over and down and the wave is going to break. rs As a culture, you mean? sf Yeah. rs Did it feel similar in the 1960s? sf It feels different. I’ve been very interested in ethology in evolution of behaviour and I’ve read quite a bit of the work of [zoologist] Konrad Lorenz. He isn’t taken terribly seriously, I understand, but I take him quite seriously. And one of the things he wrote about was he had this fish tank and he had populated it with a certain kind of fish that supposedly have a very complex social structure. And in the fish tank he built a physical environment comparable to the coral reefs. He made it out of plastic blocks or something. And they were just hanging out there. They weren’t doing any of the things that they supposedly do. They weren’t organised. And then he dropped a predator in there. And zoom, they organised immediately. So I think when there’s enough to go around you get one kind of politics and when there’s the fear that there’s not going to be enough to go around, you get another. People organise in a different way. And to some extent and the more our environment degrades, the more there’s not going to be enough to go around. rs Threat is beneficial to society –

sf Well, yeah, if you value organising. rs Right. But it’s not necessarily beneficial to the fish, just to society. Do you think much about organisation in your work? sf Yes. How I’m doing this writing now, is I started by talking about the studio I’m in: the peacefulness, the light, the ease to concentrate. And then I start writing. I’ll put a paragraph above it and the paragraph below it and then the paragraph above and then a paragraph below. I’m writing thoughts so that they’re not in order. And it gives me a sense that I don’t have to start with a beginning and state something and try to lock it down and be convincing. I can just put it there. And while I’m doing this, I keep coming back into the studio to move the furniture around. Not a lot but a little. Just certain things, like this sawhorse, and that pedestal, near that little mirror that’s at an angle. Kind of activating the space. Then coming back to writing about particular memories of leaving a husband or of hearing from a friend that our mutual friend had died. rs A lot of people talk about memories being stored in the body. Do you feel that way? sf Some of them, yes. I can’t tell if they’re fresh memories or if I’ve reviewed them many times. Like a particular slide when I was five years old.

It was built like the face of a clown and then you’d slide out the clown’s mouth. And I remember that slide. Do I remember sliding? Do I really remember it now at this moment or am I remembering that I’ve talked about it before, that I’ve told that story before? Remembering dreams is another theme I’m picking up in this writing. It’s a recurrent dream where I’m among people and it’s just like a normal day and then I realise that people are looking at me like I’ve done something terrible and then I remember I’ve done something terrible and I’ve no idea what. I can get back into that feeling. It’s in the chest area. And I’d like to find words to help someone else have some sense of how I feel when that happens. rs Does art often evoke dreaming for you? sf Well, my mind goes to William Carlos Williams and to his long poem, Paterson [1946–58]. He doesn’t seem to worry about using language that someone else might use. But he talks about this figure lying along the banks of the river with the falls at its head. And it’s dreaming the falls. rs Do you read often? sf I’m reading some Jonas Mekas. There’s a book called I Had Nowhere to Go [1991] and it’s about his experience after the Second World

Slant Board, 1961, performance during Thinking with the Body: A Retrospective in Motion, 2014, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg. Photo: Rainer Iglar. Courtesy Museum der Moderne, Salzburg

ArtReview

War as a displaced person. You get the feeling that as he’s experiencing his environment, he’s writing about it. And then I’ve got with me Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons [1914], which is like, how’s she doing that? rs Do you think about movement differently now than when you were younger? sf I don’t think so. I always worked with different aspects of it. Like with Anna Halprin, I was working with her way back in the 1950s, exploring weight. Like taking an area of your body – maybe the shoulder – and exploring weight-taking in that arm and moving it so then the whole body gets involved in supporting that exploration. So it’s a lot of exploring the basic elements of experience with movement. Then in New York when I did the Dance Constructions I was interested in just looking at movement that was not stylised in any way. So, setting up structures or tasks to do. It wasn’t really pedestrian because you wouldn’t climb around on a 45-degree incline plane in your pedestrian life, but if you had to do it you could do it without trying to stylise it in any way. It’s not easy to stay on that inclined plane, to use the ropes to get back and forth, up and down. I was looking at photographs of animals, people, somebody chopping wood, and then for years I was going to the zoo and observing how an

News Animation, 2009, performance at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Photos: Alastair Fyfe. Courtesy the artist

December 2018

Zuma News, 2014 (stills from nonfictions â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Gorbachev Lives / Zuma News / Questions, 2014, a joint work by Jeremiah Day, Simone Forti and Fred Dewey). Video: Jason Underhill. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

animal’s body is structured differently from mine. But I can try some of those ways of moving, like a bear will change direction by swinging its head and neck, and that weight pulls the body into the new direction. There’s enough weight momentum to then pull the limbs into place and continue the walk and then change direction. The young ones that are growing up – like a puppy or a kitten – will play with movement. And I was looking at some of those games and starting to think about what I was calling the roots of dance behaviour. rs What is the natural dance behaviour for humans? sf A human kid will walk down the street and if there is a little ledge to jump on, they’ll jump on it and then jump off and then they might touch something and twirl. And I think as artists, we give ourselves a situation where you can do that. It’s fun to run around. rs Do you think the jump-on-the-ledge impulse stops for adults?

to shake throughout the day: for stress, to shoo a fly, to dry off. sf Yeah, I remember seeing a documentary in which a deer gets attacked by a lion, but then something bigger than the lion scares the lion away. And so the deer is saved and it goes into this shaking and it shakes for a while and then it stops shaking, gets up and runs away. rs It’s dealt with that fear now. sf Yeah, shake it out. The kind of movement is important to me. I do a lot of tai chi, and in the last eight months, I’ve started doing push hands. It’s a sparring form of tai chi, and the way I do it with the people I do it, we try to get the other off balance. Your feet are on the ground and you’re trying to get the other person to have to move their feet and get off balance. It happens very fast. You see two people like this and then boom, one of them has flown off of the circle that limits their space. I love competitively working with a partner. rs What kind of movements are you thinking about now?

sf I don’t know. What do you think? rs I think as you get older you become more aware of conserving your energy. So you start limiting extraneous movements. sf In Mekas’s book I’m amazed how everybody was always singing. He really picks up on that. He’s Lithuanian and all these displaced Lithuanians, they’re singing wherever they go. rs Do you feel like the experience of having Parkinson’s has changed your ideas about movement? sf That’s an interesting question. For one thing I feel that movement’s really good for me, that it’s a medicine, I really need to be moving. It’s changed my self-image. I’ve really accepted this shaky-old-woman image, which I enjoy. It has a Samuel Beckett edge to it, which I feel I can exploit.

sf Well, I recently made three videos together with [filmmaker] Jason Underhill and I’ll briefly describe the three. The first one is called Zuma News. I take a stack of newspapers to Zuma Beach and put them in the water and I’m trying to not have them carried out to sea or blown away so I can be proud I didn’t leave a mess. But I have a stack of wet papers that I’m wrestling in. And then there’s a heap of seaweed and I pull that in and just get in the stuff and get soaked and am

rs In society we suppress the experiences of shaking or twitching. It’s less accepted as a form of movement. But when you look at animals of all kinds, they tend

reading the papers. Then a wave comes and I’d have to catch the paper and the wind comes and I have to catch the paper. That’s the first movement. Then I put flags in a tributary to the Mississippi River. I had these two canvases, big canvases, one with red stripes and one with blue stars, and I got into the water with them and I drifted with them. I found myself really drifting down the tributary towards the river. (We were right where it meets the Mississippi.) I felt that I could get away with taking something as obviously symbolic as a flag and getting in the water with it because I didn’t know what I was doing. I wasn’t making a statement. And I think it comes across. So it’s the woman in the water, you know, with Parkinson’s. And then I come out and I’ve been drawn quite a way with the current and then I get on this trail back up and I’m soaked and this clothing is sticking to my body and I’m a mess and I’m walking up the trail. That’s the second movement. And then recently I did a performance at the Castelli gallery in New York with a bunch of felt that was all leftovers from Bob Morris’s felt sculptures. Bob and I were married when we were in our twenties and that lasted as long as it lasted, but we’re still friends. And so we’ve talked about maybe doing something together. So what we did was that he provided me with this environment of a lot of felt scraps. There were weird shapes and ones where he cut out letters and words. They were heavy. And I just dealt with the felt. The rolls were heavy and I picked them up and let them fall down and engaged with how this felt behaves in relation to gravity. I wrapped myself in them. And I talked, like I’ve done with the News Animations, but maybe if I didn’t, I could have really gotten into the felt a lot more. I could have not been worried about the world. But mostly, I wrestled on the floor with these scraps. It seems like the older I get, the more I just feel like wrestling with stuff. Ross Simonini is an artist and writer living in New York and California

From Instructions, 1961, installation for performance during Thinking with the Body: A Retrospective in Motion, 2014, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg. Photo: Rainer Iglar. Courtesy Museum der Moderne, Salzburg

December 2018

Ernst Caramelle Ein Résumé

30.11.2018–28.4.2019 MuseumsQuartier Museumsplatz 1 A-1070 Wien www.mumok.at

Ernst Caramelle, Untitled, Ausstellungsansicht South London Gallery, 2010, Courtesy der Künstler und Mary Mary, Glasgow, Foto: Andy Stagg

The ArtReview Newsletter Your weekly guide to the best shows, the latest news and fresh ideas you won’t want to miss artreview.com/subscribe

Art Featured

They are not always beautiful; more trash of dubious origins finds its way in here 41

Zoe Leonard by Fi Churchman

Untitled, 1989/2008, gelatin silver print, 94 Ă&#x2014; 66 cm. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth

“Where you look from is always half the picture”

Untitled Aerial, 1988/2008, gelatin silver print, 86 × 61 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Hauser & Wirth

Detail (Tree + Fence), 1998/1999, gelatin silver print, 30 Ă&#x2014; 21 cm. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth

Tree + Fence, Out My Back Window, 1998, gelatin silver print, 47 Ă&#x2014; 34 cm. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth

ArtReview

For the past 12 years, the photographer and sculptor Zoe Leonard developing process) around each of these, as if to remind the viewer – has divided her time between New York City and West Texas, close and maybe herself – that these are compositions: the world framed by to the border between the us and Mexico. Her latest series of photo- another’s viewpoint. Put simply, all perspectives are constructs. graphs charts the course of the Rio Grande from El Paso/Ciudad Leonard says that before she began the Rio Grande series, she Juárez, the point at which it becomes the ‘natural border’ between was due to spend some time in West Texas (and more specifically the two countries, down to the Gulf of Mexico. This 2,000km stretch Marfa, where she has made a number of works) after the 2016 elecof river, defined as a border between the countries in the 1848 (Article tion. Although the results caused her to hesitate about returning to 5 of ‘Peace, Friendship, Limits, and Settlement’) and 1889 (‘Water & the south, she tells me that she soon discovered that the same issues Boundary Commission’) treaties has, since the end of the Mexican- shaping New York were at play in Texas. Moreover that the different American War that deprived the former of over half of its prewar terri- perspectives and framing of those issues in that landscape have taught tory, described a line that meanders through the scorched landscape her much about the country she lives in. even as it is pulled taut by the political The idea of ‘perspective’ as a personal Leonard leaves a thin black frame tensions on either side. (that’s to say emotional and sociopolitical, for as Leonard puts it, “We This natural border continues to of unexposed negative film, don’t have the luxury to say politics define the region’s culture and politics as if to remind the viewer that doesn’t matter… it’s right here on our (the voters of West Texas, a Republican these are compositions. Put simply, doorstep”) or formal position from stronghold, played a significant part in which to look at Leonard’s works is a holding off the insurgent challenge of all perspectives are constructs recurring feature. In 2016 she presented the Democratic candidate for the us Senate, Beto O’Rourke, a supporter of more liberal immigration a new collection of photographs of found family snapshots that, as reforms, in the recent midterm elections), and the state has in the she earlier described, present ‘statelessness as both an individual past two years, Leonard tells me, “become a flashpoint. I think it’s experience and a shared social condition’. Crossing the Equator (2016) an area that’s very little understood. There are a lot of platitudes, is a series of five photographs of three family snapshots taken in clichés and even caricatures about that part of the country, of the the years following the Second World War, when Leonard’s mother, people who are living there, and about what it means to be Texan or grandmother and great aunt were displaced from Poland and were Mexican.” The confluence of social, political, geographical and histor- eventually able to emigrate to the us. Rephotographed by Leonard ical tensions and disputes in the Rio Grande presents a challenge and on a black background that then becomes part of the new image, this serves as a point of reference for Leonard’s new series. Until recently, collapse in distance both alludes to the fact that the us as a country in an oeuvre that has consistently addressed issues of borders, limits, – as a concept – was constructed by immigration, and that the same migration, environment and marginalisation, she had never photo- issues surrounding borders and migration are playing out today. graphed the deserts of West Texas. To avoid the aforementioned cariThe use of found materials as a means by which to reframe our catures required her to find a way of representing the area that didn’t perspective is demonstrated, in a formal sense, in You see I am here after all fall into the tropes of either nineteenth-century American landscape (2008), a several-thousand-strong installation of found vintage postphotography, with its celebration of ‘manifest destiny’, or those of cards depicting Niagara Falls that, when exhibited as an installation the contemporary news media, with its at Dia:Beacon, New York, were arranged Using both formal and subjective ason the walls to reflect the vantage point compulsion to sensationalise. Prologue: El Rio/The River (2018), cur- pects of her photographs, she not only from which they were taken. Spanning rently on display in the Hall of Sculpture the early 1900s to the 1950s, the postcards invites the viewer to consider their at Carnegie International, marks the also show the transformation of a natural position in relation to the subject, but first chapter of Leonard’s Rio Grande form (falling along the border between series. Unframed and pinned to the wall the us and Canada) into a tourist site, at also always questions her own that circuits the hall’s balcony level, each once a critique of what consumer culture of the 70 photographs is a closeup shot of the water’s surface. Opaque does to landscape and an acknowledgement of photography’s role in with silt, split currents whorl and clash into splashes, form disrupted the mass-production of images, and therefore stereotypes. eddies or force ripples on the surface where the flow runs into backEarlier photographs by Leonard like Niagara Falls no. 4 (1986/ water. Leonard says she has been photographing the river from both 1991 – she includes the dates on which the image was taken and sides of the bank, and that she prefers to keep the camera moving, in on which it was printed) and Untitled Aerial (1988/2008) show the order to “upend either set of clichés”, taking photos off the side of artist’s preoccupation with shifting the angle from which we, and she, look at the subject. The former shows the curve of the waterboats to capture the water from above. If this sounds like a metaphor for seeing Mexican-American rela- fall’s crest – cut off at the frame – reaching around a tourist boat tions ‘from both sides’, that’s because it is. But Leonard’s works can’t made tiny by distance; in the latter, part of a series of photographs be reduced to straightforward representations of isolated political, taken from an airplane in which a river appears as a thin rivulet or social or ecological issues: what you read into her photographs made visible by the light that flashes off its surface, the viewer is situdepends on your perspective, and even that should ated by the curve of the passenger window through facing page Prologue: El Rio / The River, be interrogated. As with all of her photos, Leonard which the photograph is taken. In both examples, 2018, c-prints. © the artist. Courtesy leaves a thin black frame of unexposed negative there is the unsettling effect of giving the viewer the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, film (which is normally cropped out during the a god’s-eye perspective while at the same time, with Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth

December 2018

February 12, frame 6, 2011, gelatin silver print, 30 Ă&#x2014; 44 cm. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth

August 6, frame 19, 2011/2012, gelatin silver print, 62 Ă&#x2014; 42 cm. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth

above 100 North Nevill Street, 2013, lens, darkened room, Chinati Foundation, Marfa. Photo: Fredrik Nilsen. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth

ArtReview

a nod to the Burkean sublime, alluding to the insignificant scale dark room letting in rays of light to project an upside-down image of the outside world onto the far wall. Titled 100 North Nevill Street (2013), of the human against nature. Leonard’s works resist the genre of ‘ landscape photography ’ in it was the final instalment of a series shown in New York, Venice, the traditional sense that early proponents such as Timothy London and Cologne, and unlike its previous iterations, depicted O’Sullivan (who documented the American Civil War and, during the a primarily natural landscape. By presenting an inverted image of 1870s, photographed the landscape of the Southwest) and, later, Ansel the world outside as it carries on and placing the viewer inside the Adams (best known for his iconic photos of Yosemite Valley) made camera, Leonard disrupts normal patterns of looking, and instead popular. Indeed, rather than subscribing to the trope of ‘capturing’ offers, as she put it in an interview with Elisabeth Lebovici, a way of the sublime – which you might say is an act of domestication – ‘photographic seeing as… a space that can be entered and inhabited’. Leonard’s photographs often depict moments of conflict between the Inviting viewers to inhabit the spaces she creates is central to natural world and the manmade, be it the growth of trees through Leonard’s method of installing exhibitions: “I’m consciously making the confines of fences in urban New York (Tree + Fence series, 1998), space for the viewer and unfolding a kind of visual and spatial essay produced shortly after spending two years living alone in Alaska, for them, in the hope that the viewer responds with their opinions, experiences, emotions. It’s not about or of the camera as a tool, the limits of which Leonard underscores by leaving “I’m consciously making space for the trying to convince you of mine, but to the black frames on her photographs. viewer and unfolding a kind of visual elicit yours.” She says that critics often comment on how sparse her exhibitions More defiant still are her Sun Photoand spatial essay for them, in the hope can be, but she likes the ‘negative spaces’ graphs (2011–12): flouting the rules of phothat the viewer responds with their tography, Leonard points her lens to the because they allow room for the viewer to sun, shooting the source of light itself respond to her work, and for the exhibiopinions, experiences, emotions” and creating a series of black-and-white tion to become a meeting point. photographs that are at once luminous and melancholic. The harder It’s this last that brings all the perspectives – formal, personal, you look at these photographs, the less focused the sun appears; as the political, geographical – that Leonard has spent over three decades levels of light blend into a uniform grey, each photograph becomes exploring, together: the meeting point, or negative space, is where an abyss that gazes back. Using both formal and subjective aspects of photographer, viewer, subject and camera converge. For Leonard, her photographs, Leonard not only invites the viewer to consider their “making work is about opening a dialogue so that we can think and position in relation to the subject, but also always questions her own. talk about who we are, how we got here and where we want to go next. When I ask what drew her to the wilds of West Texas and what that Where you look from is always half the picture.” ar meant for her work, she tells me that it’s the first time since spending two years in northern Alaska during the mid-1990s that she felt she Zoe Leonard: Survey is on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, was in a truly wild place – and that it’s the feeling of being off grid, the Los Angeles, through 25 March, while Hauser & Wirth present two solo exhibitions: Analogue (Los Angeles, through 20 January) and Aerials sense of wonder, fear and scale, and of being very small, that she missed. (London, through 9 February). Leonard’s latest series on the Rio Grande For an exhibition with the Chinati Foundation in Marfa she transis on view at Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, through 25 March formed an entire gallery space into a camera obscura, a 15cm hole in a

Crossing the Equator, 2016, five pigment prints, 22 × 27 cm each. Photo: Genevieve Hanson. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth

December 2018

Magali Reus The Everyday, Stranger by Rosanna Mclaughlin

“Why won’t you admit that we’re standing in a cruise ship?”, says my communicate looks more like uncle John or cousin Rob. Because, in wife. We are at Magali Reus’s exhibition As mist, description, held at the Hand Towel vs Firehose debate, what we were both unwilling South London Gallery in the spring of 2018, and we have reached an to admit was that an unfamiliar object existed beyond our capacity impasse. She is also indignant that the gallery has failed to mention to comprehensively account for it. (That evening I google reviews of this crucial information in the literature. In the assemblages around the exhibition, and find it confidently summarised as the interior of the room I see the ghosts of many familiar things. Gas meters, the inte- a whale, and a London Routemaster bus. Apophenia, it seems, is a rior design common to corporate lobbies, flower pots and vases, plastic common condition.) toy model kits with snap-off parts. What I do not see is a cruise ship. Nobody wants to be that tourist. As mist, description had made me “You can at least agree that this is an onboard firehose,” she says, aware that I’d been harbouring an overfamiliarity with the material directing my attention to a length of red, white and green striped fabric world. During the coming weeks, in an attempt to rectify the problem, coming out of a dispenser on the wall. The end of the fabric is carefully I try to embrace a state of not knowing, turning to the philosopher folded on a separate shelf, wedged in position by two pieces of serious- Graham Harman as an aid. In his 2010 book Towards Speculative Realism, looking metal hardware – the Harman argues against anthroAs we leave the exhibition, I’m facing the realisasort of parts you don’t want pocentrism, the tendency to coming off in your hand when tion that my wife and I have become the art-viewing perceive phenomena primarily attempting diy plumbing. based upon their value to huequivalent of provincial tourists – the kinds of I inspect the objects before mans. Instead, he makes the people who will go to any length to maintain me, and find their flawless case for considering objects as surfaces, and the pernickety, autonomous entities, beyond a delusion of authority, insisting that the street demonstrative manner of their the limited scope of their role as on which they are lost looks just like home display, unnervingly cool, as if a tool or possession. ‘To create they have travelled from design software to factory to gallery without something’, he says, ‘does not mean to see through to its depths.’ coming into contact with anything warmblooded. “More like the reus- Harman’s point appears to be simple: just as a child must learn that the able hand towels you get in public loos,” I counter, less from a place of world does not disappear when they close their eyes, we must also learn conviction than from a reluctance to admit defeat. She sighs, looks at that the products of human endeavour move beyond our control and me with a one-two punch of pity and incredulity, and delivers the final knowledge. Applying this theory to everyday life, however, is considerblow. “It’s just so… obvious.” ably more difficult. When I open the fridge one morning to get the milk By the time we leave the exhibition I’m facing an unattractive for my cereal, the appliance I once considered primarily as ‘mine’ is realisation: my wife and I have become the art-viewing equivalent instead an assembly of rubber seals, plastic casings, welded and coated of provincial tourists. We are now the kinds of people who will go steel, and other alien parts, each the product of different economic, to any length to maintain their delusion of authority, insisting that material and labour ecosystems, each with a language, history and the street on which they are lost looks just like their hometown, and lifespan profoundly other to my own. I close the door on this chasm of squabbling over whether the waiter with whom they’re failing to estrangement, and opt for a banana instead.

ArtReview

facing page Sentinel (Vesuvio), 2017, mixed media, 145 × 145 × 35 cm

above Leaves (Peat, March), 2015, mixed media, 47 × 38 × 11 cm

December 2018

preceding pages Crane, 2017, mixed media, 125 × 400 × 130 cm

above Dearest (Alibi), 2018, mixed media, 235 × 104 × 102 cm. Photo: Lewis Ronald. Courtesy the artist and Hepworth Wakefield

facing page Hwael (Fully Automatic Time), 2017, mixed media, 235 × 340 × 205 cm

ArtReview

all images but one Courtesy the artist and The Approach, London

To the question ‘What kind of art do you like?’ I am yet to reply, any moment I will be able to. When Leaves was installed at Hepworth ‘Anything that makes me feel fundamentally alienated from the Wakefield in 2015, as part of Reus’s exhibition Particle Of Inch, it was world in which I live every time I open the fridge’. This, however, is shown alongside In Place Of (2015). A series of floor-based sculptures, precisely what I admire about Reus’s work. She keeps the chasm open. In Place Of demonstrates Reus’s unsettling ability to stretch the possiI consider this to be a type of realism: an attempt to speak of the mate- bilities of classification in multiple and contradictory directions at rial world, not as we would prefer to see it, but in its own tongue. once. Each work is a variation on a theme: a low, fastidiously well Today this is no easy task. Little wonder there has been a resurgent turned-out structure that could convincingly pass as a maquette of interest in handmade arts and craft histories, for nostalgic practices a modernist villa or car park, a plinth, a coffee table or even a giant that affirm the primacy of the human touch. The industrial, global circuitboard, and upon which a variety of miscellaneous and equally and often unknowable life of today’s object offers little in the way of fugitive items are displayed. succour, to artist or to viewer. To view In Place Of is to succumb to an anxiety of taxonomy: the Exemplary of this realism is Leaves, a series of sculptures for more credible explanations that emerge, the less I feel capable of which Reus won the Prix de resolving the nature of the When I open the fridge one morning to get the Rome in 2015. At first glance object in question. This combithe objects appear to be overmilk for my cereal, the appliance I once considered nation of uncertainty and selfsize padlocks, with metal primarily as ‘mine’ is instead an assembly of rubber possession is what gives Reus’s shanks protruding from the work its distinct psychological seals, plastic casings, welded and coated steel, top, and parts of their internal profile. It also puts me in mind mechanisms exposed. Yet the and other alien parts, each with a language, history of Julia Kristeva’s theory of shanks are incomplete, and the stranger. The Bulgarianand lifespan profoundly other to my own in a number of the works, French writer believes that we the body of the object is produced from multiple layers, making it are all, to varying degrees, strangers to each other and to ourselves, impossible to consider the lock as a single, unitary entity, or even as and that we cover over our inner turmoil by creating an outer shell, a lock at all. Leaves sets in motion a type of semantic entropy: just as learning to ‘settle within the self with a smooth, opaque certainty – repeating a word over and again distances it from its referent, each an oyster shut under the flooding tide, or the expressionless joy of iteration of the ‘lock’ further erodes my ability to quantify it. The warm stones’. Just as strangers go unnoticed when dressed in familiar effect is rather like misplacing a familiar phrase, only to discover clothes, in Reus’s sculptures, ontological disquiet is presented with that you’ve lost an entire language. the blank confidence of commercial finishing techniques. A portrait Part of what makes viewing Reus’s sculptures so disorientating of the object for the present day. ar is that despite their alienness, they also appear to be entirely plausible. Surfaces are cast, milled and powder-coated, colours unremarkWork by Magali Reus appears in The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, at Hepworth Wakefield, through 20 January ably schematised, each assemblage evidently the result of purposeful design processes. Their familiar, professional bearing is such that my Rosanna Mclaughlin is a writer and editor based in London inability to define them is matched by a persistent sensation that at

December 2018

Katharina Grosse and the origins of art by Mark Rappolt

Das Bett, 2004, acrylic on wall, floor and various objects, 280 × 450 × 400 cm. Photo: Nic Tenwiggenhorn. © the artist, Nic Tenwiggenhorn and vg Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2018.

ArtReview

Untitled, 2016, acrylic on wall, floor and various objects, 600 × 1500 × 3500 cm, moma ps1’s Rockaway! series, New York. Photo: Pablo Enriquez. © the artist, Nic Tenwiggenhorn and vg Bild-Kunst Bonn, 2018. Courtesy Gagosian

December 2018

Katharina Grosse is a painter and iconoclast. From 2010 until earlier this year she was professor of painting at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, but is recognised within the wider artworld for pushing painting beyond its traditional definition as a discrete medium confined to a frame. In her works, paint is applied (using a spraygun) as abstract explosions of colour or as stencilled imprints, to all aspects of space and to the extent that Grosse’s work might be described as sculpture, installation and, to a certain degree, interior and exterior architecture (in a series of untitled works on the facades and interiors of corporate headquarters, university buildings and infrastructure hubs). So much for the order of things. On the one hand, Grosse works in her Berlin studio spreading acrylic paint over canvases; on the other, she goes beyond the atelier to spray it over bedrooms (Das Bett, 2004), over the structures and landscape of abandoned military bases (Untitled, 2016, from the Rockaway! series) and even over national coastlines (as is the case with Asphalt Air and Hair, 2017, in Aarhus, Denmark). She’s part of a tradition and apart from it at one and the same time. Everyone knows that painting, as it is understood through the history of Western art, was invented sometime around 650 bce, thanks to an anecdote famously reported by Pliny the Elder (in his Natural History, 77 ce), in which he describes how Kora of Sicyon traced the outline of her lover’s shadow on a wall shortly before he left for battle. Painting was invented by a woman as an expression of love. Shortly afterwards, her father, Butades of Sicyon, who made clay tiles for

a living, modelled the outline in clay, inventing moulded sculpture and subsequently a new business of moulded tiles. A man then turned it into a commodity and initiated the art market. The wall was destroyed by fire around 200 years after Kora left her mark on it. And Butades’s relief sculpture vanished in 146 bce, when Lucius Mummius destroyed the entire city of Corinth (where Butades and Kora had lived) during the Achean War. So we have to take Pliny’s word for it when it comes to all the inventing stuff. And as Pliny wasn’t really into dates, we have to accept that ‘around 650 bce’ falls somewhat shy of being a fact and is rather the product of later guesswork by historians. Pliny wasn’t really familiar with cave paintings either, which were the kind of thing that later works such as E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1950), in which the Austrian invents art history, used to put at the beginning of their histories of painting. Moreover, earlier this year a group of scientists who subjected the carbon crusts of a number of cave paintings to uranium-thorium dating suggested that painting wasn’t even invented by Homo sapiens at all. Rather, Neanderthals may have painted symbols in caves in Spain more than 64,000 years ago: that’s 20,000 years before prototypical modern humans even bothered to show up in Western Europe. Pfff… This is art and we shouldn’t let an article published in a magazine titled Science (23 February 2018) get in the way of a romantic tale. Grosse herself is no stranger to the romantic origin story. Talking to Emily Wasik in Interview magazine back in 2014, the artist described

ArtReview

the origins of her own drive to make art: ‘As a child, I would play a game with myself where before I got up, I had to first erase the shadows on the wall. I invented an invisible paintbrush to paint over the shadows of the windowsill or the lamp or whatever was there. It became like an obsession.’ Intriguingly, and perhaps typically, while there’s an echo here of Pliny’s originary tale, Grosse locates her own artistic beginnings as being rooted in erasing the very thing that Kora sought to preserve. Grosse’s work is currently on view at the Chi k11 Art Museum in Shanghai, a city in which she lived while her father was teaching at Tongji University in 1981. There she explores some of the myths about painting’s beginnings and ends via a largescale installation split into five sections, or episodes (the journey takes place over time as well as space), titled Mumbling Mud, which both conjures the origins of pigments and the use to which painters put them, and the Cantonese expression for mumbling or slurring, gwai sik nai, which literally translates as ‘a ghost eating mud’. The first section, Underground, consists of messy piles of accumulated soil and building materials that have been spraypainted by the artist, a wasteland that is also a site of creative potential, that suggests a dialogue between the building blocks of painting and of the city. The second, Silk Studio, deploys curtains of silk printed with images of Grosse’s studio complete with works in progress. The third, Ghost, comprises a large, skeletal white Styrofoam sculpture that looks – from the model version at least – like a structure from the set of Alien (1979)

or The Predator (1987), or perhaps like a scholar’s rock incarnated from an early Chinese painting, or like a splash of paint captured midflight. Or, maybe truer still, it is a blank object onto which audiences will project their own colourful narratives. Stomach is a colonic labyrinth of hundreds of metres of white fabric, hung from the ceiling and sprayed with Grosse’s signature bright colours in such a way that its folds and undulations are highlighted and viewers sucked in. Whether visitors are consuming art in this Gesamtkunstwerk, or whether art is consuming its viewers, remains to be seen. The final stage of the journey, Showroom, comprises a set of living-room furniture (complete with the image of a stacked bookcase, a reminder perhaps of the links between Chinese painting and calligraphy, of painting as a space of signs and symbols) over which Grosse has sprayed paint in a manner that recalls the disruptive and vandalistic nature of graffiti: art projected over life in a scene of order and disorder that equally acknowledges the fact that the k11 galleries are located in a shopping mall, and that it is to this environment that the viewer is about to be returned. And that art is at once apart from and a part of contemporary consumer culture. From Kora to Butades in five easy steps. But then again, China’s painting traditions are thought to have been developed around two centuries before those of Pliny and the West. ar Mumbling Mud is on show at the Chi k11 Art Museum, Shanghai, through 24 February

Mumbling Mud – Silk Studio, 2018, digital print on silk, 350 × 1375 cm. © and courtesy the artist

December 2018

Life After Life Rachel Roseâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s videoworks explore the edges of human experience in the modern age by David Trigg

“Try to stop death.” This quixotic suggestion is uttered, stilted and Farnsworth House. After opening with a YouTube clip of terrified autotuned, by Rachel Rose in her first videowork, Sitting Feeding Sleeping Serbian beachgoers caught in a freak hailstorm, there follows a remark(2013), a dense, jump-cut collage of found and original material that able sequence in which an ageing vhs recording of Johnson touring muses on mortality, temporality, technology and evolution. Such his house is digitally fused with Rose’s own film of the sleek structure. weighty themes are a preoccupation of the young American artist, who As Johnson’s blurred and ghostly figure roams to and fro, the builddespite having completed only six videoworks, has rapidly established ing appears to disintegrate in a hailstorm of pixels. The modernherself as a prominent figure in contemporary moving image practice. ist dream of stability and balance literally shatters before our eyes. Whether meditating on the roots of our culture’s current malaise, the For Rose, the Glass House presents as a mausoleum of a decaying threshold between life and death or her own experiences of disquiet, ideology, a utopian vision that isn’t quite dead, but not exactly alive Rose’s short yet compelling videos attempt to give form to the mani- either. Existing in a state of constant repair, the vulnerable building fold anxieties of modern life. With each of her projects employing and its contents are regularly attended to by conservators. These differing production techniques, it is easy to overlook that which include Nicolas Poussin’s The Funeral of Phocion (c. 1648–49), which unites her stylistically disparate work – namely a concern with limi- is installed in the house as part of its permanent collection and nality and those hard-to-define interstitial situations and conditions which appears in the latter half of A Minute Ago. The painting depicts that stem from the dislocation of established structures. the body of the Athenian statesman being carried to burial. Like Rose came to video via painting, initially studying at Yale under Johnson’s foggy image, and indeed the Glass House itself, the corpse the rigorous tutelage of Robert Reed. is betwixt and between, existing in a As Johnson’s blurred and ghostly figure state of suspended animation, or as But finding pigment and canvas too restrictive, she almost gave up art Rose suggested to critic Wendy Vogel, roams to and fro, the building appears altogether: ‘I didn’t understand how I ‘infinitely paused’ like a freeze frame. to disintegrate in a hailstorm of pixels. could be an artist and also care deeply The formal construction of Rose’s The modernist dream of stability and about the things around us that first videos provoke comparisons with affect how we live and think,’ she told balance literally shatters before our eyes artists such as Elizabeth Price, Laure curator Aily Nash in an interview for Prouvost and Ben Russell, not to bomb in 2015. Seduced by the creative possibilities of digital video, mention the experimental works of Stan Brakhage, Leslie Thornton Rose produced Sitting Feeding Sleeping as a means of exploring what she and Paul Sharits from the 1960s. But with each new work, her exploterms ‘deathfulness’, the numb, liminal state she experienced after ration into liminality becomes more deft and inventive, making her abandoning painting. The unnerving sensation of being suspended practice harder to pin down. A case in point is the oneiric video animasomewhere between life and death became a springboard for the tion Lake Valley (2016), which grew from her enquiries into the fuzzy mesmerising audiovisual mashup, which connects the dots between line dividing childhood from adulthood. The visually and sonically cryogenics, artificial intelligence and zoological parks. In examining rich eight-minute video is painstakingly assembled from thousands the nature of mortality in the twenty-first century, it inevitably also of colourful images scanned from vintage children’s books; slipping probes definitions of life. In a way, the video revitalised Rose’s ailing between figuration and abstraction, the collaged fragments coalesce into hallucinatory landscapes, cityscapes and domestic scenes. The practice, and so death, it seems, was averted after all. The nagging disquiet of Sitting Feeding Sleeping is similarly felt in loose narrative follows a hybrid family pet – a mix between dog, fox A Minute Ago (2014), though here Rose dwells on modernity’s fading and rabbit – yearning for attention. Hand-drawn using traditional promises of unfettered progress and wellbeing with evocations cel animation, the black-and-white creature is met with indifferof anthropogenic climate change and the jaded rhetoric of high ence; forlorn and rejected, it ventures into hostile woodland, where Modernism. The video pivots on Philip Johnson’s famous Glass House, it is further beset by alienation. Compounding the melancholy mood a building the American architect modelled after Mies van der Rohe’s is the delicate soundtrack, which mixes ambient electronics with

ArtReview

above A Minute Ago (stills), 2014, hd video, 8 min 43 sec. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

facing page Lake Valley (still), 2016, hd video, 8 min 25 sec. Courtesy the artist and Pilar Corrias, London

December 2018

preceding pages Everything and More, 2015 (installation view, Kunsthaus Bregenz, 2017). Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brownâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Enterprise, New York & Rome

above and facing page Wil-o-Wisp (MoirĂŠ Installation), 2018, hd video (colour, sound, 10 min), double-lined mesh scrim, carpet, projection screen and semitransparent projection scrims. ÂŠ the artist. Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin

ArtReview

sampled snippets to form an atmosphere of swirling unease textured short ditty in iambic pentameter composed by poet Josh Stanley and with ominous breathing sounds, distant whispers and animal calls. musician Isaac Jones for the film. All in all it is a convincing metaphor for coming-of-age anxieties and As the exhibition publication reveals, Wil-o-Wisp grew from a masterful example of the way Rose balances line, form and colour copious research, yet historical realism is evidently not intended. Playing like a curious docudrama-cum-period fantasy, the video with her intricately crafted soundscapes. Rose’s formal concerns are not confined to the screen; she also exudes an aura of enchantment engendered by postproduction carefully tailors her video installations to their physical surround- effects including unnatural colour saturation, the overlaying of ings. By incorporating plush carpets, conspicuous loudspeakers and abstract moiré patterns and other signs of digital manipulation. In subtle alterations to gallery architecture, she creates site-responsive Turin, Wil-o-Wisp is presented in a large, grey-carpeted room hung situations in which viewing becomes an experience. Take Everything with layers of mesh scrim. The shimmering fabric-covered walls and More (2015), which meditates on isolation and alienation via the produce the same moiré pattern as in the video, troubling the line experiences of American astronaut David Wolf. His recollections of between the filmic and the real. Most incongruous is a large projecthe disorienting effects of reencountering Earth’s gravity are accom- tion screen that occasionally appears in the video, mirroring the panied by shots of a nasa training facility and strange, swirling one in the gallery. By emphasising the constructed nature of her imagery evoking deep space. At the Whitney Museum of American work, Rose calls for a metafictive awareness on the part of viewers. Art, Rose projected the video onto semitransparent scrim adjacent to History is itself revealed as a liminal discipline, operating somewhere between objective facts and the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling windows. In Wil-o-Wisp, history is itself revealed Wolf’s bewilderment was amplified as their mythic representation, between empiricism and imagination. the distinctions between interior and as a liminal discipline, operating exterior were blurred; viewers caught Significantly, Wil-o-Wisp is set somewhere between objective facts and against the backdrop of the English glimpses of the New York skyline amid their mythic representation, between enclosure movement, a period when what appeared to be swirling nebula common land was privatised for the and distant galaxies, but were in fact empiricism and imagination purposes of capital accumulation homebrew effects concocted in Rose’s kitchen. However, the effect was less apparent in London, where the and which Karl Marx identified as integral to the transition from work was shown as part of the Hayward Gallery’s 2016 pop-up exhibi- feudalism to capitalism. In the context of Rose’s wider practice, a tion The Infinite Mix. Such are the challenges of allowing works to exist tacit parallel is drawn between that tumultuous era – marked by mass displacement of people, environmental destruction and the in multiple permutations. Exhibition design is also integral to Wil-o-Wisp (2018), co-commis- oppression of women and nonconformists – and our own precarious sioned by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Turin’s Fondazione age. Notably, Elspeth doesn’t actually die at the end of Wil-o-Wisp. Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. The ten-minute video installation is her Rather, her executioners dissolve into thin air before she, too, fades most ambitious to date, employing for the first time narrative story- away. The final shot shows her family home, intact and unharmed. telling and a full cast and crew. Set in Somerset in 1570, it tells the With death averted once more, Rose again suggests that the hope of story of a fictional peasant woman, Elspeth Blake, who vanishes from an alternative future should never be forsaken. ar her village after her daughter accidentally burns down the family home. Reappearing 30 years later as a healer, she is soon prosecuted Rachel Rose: Wil-o-Wisp is at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo for witchcraft and apparently led away to her death. The mysterious in Turin through 3 February tale, shot at a living history museum in Plymouth, Massachusetts, is relayed via a series of fleeting vignettes, female narration and even a David Trigg is a writer and critic based in Bristol

December 2018

Miami Beach, Dec 5,6,7,8,9, 2018. San Francisco, Jan 18,19,20, 2019.

untitledartfairs.com

Under the Paving Stones

Machine-made imports from the northern countries 69

Under the Paving Stones

Warsaw reacts to the reactionaries by John Quin

More Palm Trees in Art Blue sky and bright sun, buildings with pink stucco exteriors, a tall palm tree and folks sitting at pavement cafés sipping an Aperol Spritz with a slice of orange after lunch at Nobu – yes, it must be Warsaw’s Gallery Weekend. The city has indubitably changed since my last visit. That 15m-high palm tree at the Nowy Świat junction may be inauthentic (it’s a sculpture by Joanna Rajkowska titled Greetings From Jerusalem Avenue, 2002), but the flash and cash on display in the city are no illusion. In a recent New York Review of Books article, Timothy Garton Ash notes that real wages have risen at least 50 percent since Poland joined the eu in 2004 and that income inequality has fallen. Does this newfound prosperity mean that the city is a happier place? And, either way, how are these changes reflected in the city’s art scene? Dodging the wasplike irritant of overgrown schoolboys darting around on Segways, I stride down Krakowskie Przedmieście and see flyposters on columns advertising a new Johnny English movie – the James Bond spoof entirely appropriate to these Brexit times, with its easy-totranslate strapline: licencja to nie inteligencja. More banners further down the avenue as part of a gesture of gratitude to America blare out the message ‘From Poland… With Love’. These feature President Herbert Hoover, who was deeply involved in aid relief for the country in the last century, and are a quick reminder of the currently cosy – some might say suffocating – relationship between Poland’s leadership and Trump’s America. Near

below Tram and palm

top Banner in memory of us President Herbert Hoover above Segways in Warsaw

ArtReview

from the city’s Umschlagplatz, the departure point for Treblinka. Incredibly, posters from the era feature cartoon-caricatured Jews being swept aside by a giant broom. And then, dispiritingly, there are much more recent magazine covers with provocations from our own time, such as ‘Soros puppets, get out of Poland! We will replay March 1968’. It is hard not to be reminded of the recent controversy at home – that is, the uk – concerning the Labour Party and allegations of anti-Semitism. But what is ‘home’?

Take me home, country roads What indeed. That’s the key question for Michał Iwanowski as we take a hike out of the city centre to his show at the Fort Institute of Photography. Iwanowski is a Pole with a British passport who has lived in Cardiff for many years. In the aftermath of Brexit, he read some graffiti in Wales that said ‘Go home, Polish’ – and so he did just that, walking the whole way across Europe and documenting his journey to the town of Wałbrzych. The people he meets and the stories they tell form an entertainingly poetic photographic essay that cautiously blends his sadness at the uk’s political decision with a quirky optimism about the residual kindness of strangers. above Bogusław Lustyk, katyn, 2018

the art deco splendour of the Hotel Bristol, there’s another call from the past. Here we see a pile of what look like old railway sleepers and a set of upright wooden boards bearing an evocative place name painted in bold black blocks: katyn. This is an installation of the same title (2018) by poster artist Bogusław Lustyk, who has left a little note on the ground saying that he is ‘looking for a possibility to show this installation at other countries’. Given that (for those who don’t know) ‘Katyn’ refers to the site of the 1940 massacre where over 22,000 of the Polish elite were executed by the Soviet Union’s nkvd, you can’t imagine Putin’s Russia rushing to take up his offer.

Speak, Memory Memory art, then. (As a colleague has it, is there any other sort from Poland?) At Foksal Gallery, Zuzanna Janin’s show Home Transformed into Geometric Solids is a reflection on the history of her family domicile, a · modernist construction from the 1920s in the Zoliborz district of Warsaw. We learn it was the site of literary soirees starring the likes of the polymathic ‘Witkacy’ – Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz. The house was wrecked in the 1944 Uprising, rebuilt after the war, and regained its function as an open house for artists. Here, Janin scatters artefacts such as period light switches from the house in the gallery space and includes a series of images called Builders (2018), photographs of those now-forgotten figures from the Communist era who were tasked with the renovation and who, their faces here excised, are now rendered truly anonymous. We head next to polin, the Museum for the History of Polish Jews, on the site of the Warsaw Ghetto. The exhibition Estranged: March ’68 and Its Aftermath presents a fascinating and sorry tale concerning the events in Poland from that year and a significant exodus of Polish Jews in the aftermath of the Six Day War. The subsequent anti-Semitic commentary by the Communist authorities was grossly insensitive. Then-president Władysław Gomułka asked, ‘Are there any Jewish nationalists in Poland, proponents of Zionist ideology? I am sure that there are. As before, today we are happy to provide those who consider Israel their homeland with emigration passports.’ How extraordinary to see footage of him making this incendiary statement on the screen here only a few hundred metres

December 2018

top Zuzanna Janin, Builders, 2018, at Foksal Gallery above National flag

to the wall – think of a mobility handle for the disabled wedded to a Prince Albert-style penis appendage. Advanced consumerist indulgence in twenty-first-century Warsaw has another side effect: obesity. The cheerfully lardaceous are featured at bwa Warszawa in Zuza Krajewska’s sequence of photographs Graceful. Botero Girls (2018). Here corpulent women sprawl on sand by a lake, proud of their pendent aprons of abdominal adiposity. Susie Orbach told us more than 40 years ago that fat is a feminist issue, but the triumphant women in Krajewska’s images have clearly liberated themselves from fear of appetite, dietary fads and fashion fascists. If they were inclined to join the ranks of those who exercise, maybe they could take lessons from Zbigniew Rybczynski’s hilarious Oscar-winning short film, Tango (1980, also screening back at Zaçheta): a loop of animated figures caught in a mad commotion of pointless repetitive gesturing in a cramped room. Here, Rybczynski succinctly captures the directionless tone of modern life.

Men have had their shot With the world going bonkers, it’s no wonder that Ivor Cutler’s plea – “Women of the world take over” – gains traction daily. The Polana Institute arguably goes one better, with Wonder Woman, a show that champions the ultimate female superhero. Dara Birnbaum’s entertaining cutup film sequence Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978–79) features the actress Lynda Carter as she twirls and turns herself from her mundane secretarial existence as Diana Prince into the mighty Princess Diana of Themyscira, daughter of Hippolyta, complete with breastplate and star-spangled pants. Here too are painterly metamorphoses of the same heroine in Mikołaj Sobczak’s canvases and in his watercolour Wonder Woman (2018), where her form takes on a distinctly hirsute, masculine aspect. Transformations can be more poignant, as with David Wojnarowicz’s Beautiful People (1988), a monochrome video of a drag queen dressing up as for a night on the town and then wading out into a lake.

top Maurycy Gomulicki, Tats, 2018 (installation view at Zachȩta National Gallery of Art) above Zuza Krajewska, Graceful. Botero Girls, 2018, at bwa Warszawa

below Dara Birnbaum, Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978–79, at the Polana Institute

If contemporary British and Polish societies share the taint of xenophobia, they are cursed too with a common taste for inebriation. At Raster, there’s If I Were the Moon, a sobering thematic show about vodka and drunkenness. The title comes from a line in a 1955 poem by Władysław Broniewski that imagines the moon quitting booze and how its light would be split ‘among the sober and the lit: to the drunks I’d be bright, to the sober – not quite’. Here we find Wilhelm Sasnal’s Fire (2007), where the apparently crapulous artist has rescued a spanking new jacket that was trashed by flames on a drunken night out and then coated the now repurposed garment with swirls of black oil paint. Here too are frightening photographs of drunken car crash scenes taken by Jerzy Lewczyński during the early 1980s. These outdo in horror both Warhol’s Death and Disaster series (1962–65) and Arnold Odermatt’s decades-long traffic accident documentation, given their gruesome scenes featuring bisected corpses lying beside wrecks. That the twin perils of alcohol and addiction can lead to self-mutilation and the lunacy of getting a truly crap tattoo is photographically evidenced by Maurycy Gomulicki in his show at Zachȩta National Gallery of Art. Here we see a startlingly horrible blue ink sketch of John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John in that iconic clinch from Grease (1978) stencilled on the back of some old lag. Over at Piktogram there are more references to dubious body decoration via Zuza Golińska’s stainless-steel sculpture series Piercers (2018), where interlocking rings hang from rails attached

ArtReview

Shoes for Your Foot (Tribute to Stopa) (2018), a neat installation about a Warsaw work cooperative that manufactures shoes but is currently on the verge of bankruptcy. A record book of their designs can be carefully perused with white gloves; the sketches of the different shoes look like early Warhol drawings. The work is a meditation on a vanishing world: we learn from the wall text that similar workshops in Warsaw, with more than 100 years of artisanal tradition (glovemakers, milliners, etc) are in comparable financial straits.

Catholic guilt The new Warsaw, then. Grotty old grey stuff is out, eu investment and tall blue glass skyscrapers and insolently frivolous modernity are in. Relatedly, at Rodríguez, Michał Martychowiec’s cheeky show Everything about the contemporary is panda nods to conceptual masters through rather slight tributes to Marcel Duchamp and Piero Manzoni, the latter referenced in a work featuring a marble memorial tablet to the man who gave us canned shit. A label tag of something called ‘poopoopaper’ is attached to the stone with a picture of a panda and the logo – ‘we take the oo out of poo’. Yuk. There’s more bull over at Foksal’s other venue, the Fundacja Galerii, as students clamber over Paweł Althamer’s new work Ochse (2018), a largerthan-lifesize sculpture of an ox. The kids are alright. Or are they? Because despite the fun and games here, there is a distinct sense that the artworld of Warsaw, for all its energy and antipathy to the rightwing raging of Jarosław Kaczyński’s Law and Justice party (PiS), is up against it right now. The reversion to a traditional obsequiousness towards the establishment of the Roman Catholic Church is not good news for the arts. Public subsidies are being withdrawn. Nevertheless, there are grounds for longer-term optimism in that this smothering conservatism faces serious challenges, with the likelihood that trust in its strictures will ultimately be undermined. Given the recent revelations of clerical crimes against children in Chile, Ireland, Germany and the us, it seems inconceivable that Catholic Poland does not contain similarly hidden horrors and will, quite soon, be dealing with another round of traumatic historical memories. top Jolanta Marcolla, Small Curls, 1975, at lokal_30

John Quin is a writer and critic based in Brighton and Berlin

above Zbigniew Rybczynski, Tango, 1980, at bwa below

Once there, colour suddenly erupts and the figure, now seen in a red dress, sinks ever deeper until totally submerged. Elsewhere Maya Deren’s film At Land (1944) is a revelation, a surreal journey that sees a woman meeting versions of herself as in a dream. We watch her crawling over a table as other male diners ignore her. You might see this as a feminist mutation on Malcolm X’s words, “I’m not a diner until you let me dine”. Women artists also major at lokal_30, in Prêt-à-Porter, a group show that unsurprisingly zones in on clothing as expression. We learn that during the Communist-era women viewed wearing top gear as a mode of rebellion. Jolanta Marcolla was early to point out the risks of objectification: Small Curls (1975), a photography-and-text-driven work that tells women how to style their hair with lacquer spray so that the eponymous twists can be glued to forehead or cheek. Two more photo-sequences, Trial 1a and Trial 1b (both 1972), show Marcolla wearing various types of spectacles and sunglasses that make her look as scary as a member of the Red Army Faction. Here, too, is a brilliantly rendered oil painting by Ewa Juszkiewicz, Untitled (2018), a meditation on fashion as a tool of oppression showing a figure who recalls one of Glenn Brown’s monstrous creations swathed in bows and constricting frills; and Alicja Wysocka’s

December 2018

Chocolate from E. Wedel

All photos Courtesy the author

Under the Paving Stones

Pittsburgh strides on by Cat Kron

There goes the Neighborhood I sense that steel baron Andrew Carnegie would disapprove of my scootersuitcase. A handoff from a friend, with a plastic body and leather cover, its primary metal component (the ball bearings controlling the popout scooter) jams en route to the industrialist-cum-philanthropist’s adopted city of Pittsburgh; it’s subsequently mangled by well-intentioned airport security until nothing but a shattered mantle remains. Lugging this failure of industrial design across multiple terminals leaves bruises that will run down my legs for the remainder of the trip. Fortunately I have trousers. Otherwise, like the rest of us dropping in from an unseasonably steamy New York, I’m comically unprepared for this brisk Mid-Atlantic fall weather. “Put on a sweater,” a woman calls from across the street as I attempt to photograph the neon Heinz Ketchup display outside the Heinz History Center next to our hotel. I’m reminded of the revered children’s television host and local celebrity Fred Rogers (an exhibit dedicated to whom is installed inside the Center) sensibly slipping into his cardigan during the opening sequence to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (1968–2001).

Joy to the world

top Neon sign on the facade of the Heinz History Center centre Selfie with Mister Rogers above Cycles only

We’ve assembled for the Carnegie International, an undertaking whose sprawling ambitions match those of its benefactor. The United States’ longest-running contemporary arts survey takes place every three to five years (according to its curators’ preferences, to allow adequate time for research) in the Carnegie museum complex, which encompasses the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Music Hall. Works – some created directly in response to existing displays – are spread throughout all three locations. In lieu of a catalogue, the current International’s curatorial team, led by Ingrid Schaffner, has made a pocketsize guide to the exhibition. This petite linen-bound book, designed to recall a turn-of-the-century traveller’s guide, provides a sketch of the show’s past iterations and descriptions of the works on view, as well as some less expected features. An exquisite object, it’s also, ironically, profoundly disorienting. Why is there a glossary featuring words like ‘companions’ (aka curatorial advisers) and ‘guide’ (the guide)? Why, in the guide’s ‘notes’ section, am I tasked by participant and ur-Conceptualist Mel Bochner with drawing something prompted by ‘word as image / image as word’? What is this foldout charting connections forged, ‘with varying degrees of certainty’, by curators involved in past and present iterations of the survey? This last addition, perhaps most perplexingly, is a line map seemingly meant to demonstrate where the team has travelled in pursuit of ‘internationalism’, but its preemptive disclaimer neatly undermines its ability to impress. I can’t decide if I feel coddled or charmed by this riff on the exhibition-catalogue format, in on the joke or its butt.

ArtReview

The show itself, however, is as unequivocally delightful as the slogan on its tote bag – ‘Museum Joy!’ – suggests. We pass through the hall that joins the museums of art and natural history, and encounter, at the entrance to the former’s Hall of Sculpture, the arresting nineteenthcentury diorama Lion Attacking a Dromedary. Fittingly for the occasion, this fascinating work of ‘taxidermy art’ was first shown at the 1867 Paris International Exposition, where its composition of two lions pouncing on a camel-mounted rider earned it accolades as a ‘masterpiece of art and science combined’. Inside the vaulted hall, an installation by indigenous American collective Postcommodity has transformed the floor into an homage to fallen industry. From Smoke and Tangled Waters We Carried Fire Home (2018) resembles from afar a giant Hard-Edge abstraction; up close its angular forms reveal themselves to be composed of white glass, coal and rusted iron remnants from Carrie Furnace, the city’s last active iron factory, which shuttered in 1982. Ducking into a darkened side gallery, we discover tiny reproductions of interiors from the residence of Sarah Mellon Scaife, to which British artist Jeremy Deller has added a tiny flatscreen television that plays Revolutionary War documentaries on a loop. Much could be extrapolated regarding this insertion’s political implications, but its impact is subdued by the sheer charm of these tableaux, nestled, like apocryphal jewel boxes, inside this contemporary art survey. Sagely, the curatorial team has installed Yuji Agematsu’s shelves of tiny cellophane assemblages just above this room. The snarled masses of Agematsu’s methodically collected detritus throw delicate shadows on the wall.

Wind Beneath My Wings Beyond the Carnegie, and specifically this once-every-few-years show, Pittsburgh’s cultural footprint tends to get brushed aside like so much beach sand on a windy day. Yet the city has plenty of points of interest, as well as a cosy collegiate setting in which to enjoy them. I break away from the International and wander to nearby University of Pittsburgh, where the Cathedral of Learning (‘Cathy’ to her friends) looms against the grey sky. The second tallest educational building in the world, completed in 1937, its Gothic Revival exterior sheathes over 2,000 classrooms and administrative offices. The wind has picked up, so I walk around the corner to Hemingway’s Café, where a beer costs $2.75. Later in the weekend, after a late night and in need of an altogether different respite, I take a car to the National Aviary, the us’s only zoo devoted solely to birds (and three

top Lion Attacking a Dromedary at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History above Postcommodity, From Smoke and Tangled Waters We Carried Fire Home, 2018

below The Cathedral of Learning

above Jeremy Deller, Historic wars on tiny tvs, 2018

December 2018

sloths). Structurally similar to a botanical garden, the aviary comprises several greenhouses and adjacent netted outdoor environments in which birds fly, swim and peck about freely. In the Cloud Forest exhibit, resident sloth Wookee is visible napping in the high branches, and I briefly envy him.

W.A.G.E. Against the Machine Part of Pittsburgh’s visibility problem, suggests locally based artist Jon Rubin, is that the city’s art scene lacks a middle tier. It has immense institutions like the Carnegie and universities like Carnegie Mellon, where Rubin teaches, that foster emerging young talent, but it’s still developing a network of midlevel galleries and nonprofit spaces that might keep them there once they graduate. As is so often the case, the arts community here presages the vast economic disparity between upper and lower. For the International, Rubin and his partner Lenka Clayton have taken over an entire first-floor gallery and set up a provisional studio. Here, hired painters hand-letter the titles of the over 10,000 rejected works from the International’s first 35 years (1896–1931), after which the show was made invitation-only. Foregrounding the labour of these would-be participants, the project,

below The dinosaur sculpture looming over the Carnegie Museum of Natural History above Devan Shimoyama, Anthony ii, 2018, and February, 2018, at the Andy Warhol Museum

titled Fruit and Other Things (2018) after one rejected work, both signals a legacy of aesthetic exclusivity and challenges it. To its credit, this 57th Carnegie International has taken significant steps to rectify the standing tradition of museums that devalue artistic labour by expecting artists and galleries to shoulder the costs of production in exchange for wall space. It is the first biennial-style exhibition to have received W.A.G.E (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) certification, which ensures that all participants are compensated equally for their time regardless of the size of either the work or its maker’s stature.

Notes on camp Near where the Allegheny and Ohio rivers converge is the Andy Warhol Museum, where collaged portraits in oil and glitter by the young artist Devan Shimoyama have just been unveiled. Shimoyama guides press and museum benefactors on a tour of the bedazzled exhibition, largely devoted to scenes from African-American barbershops reimagined as sites of queer adolescent desire and internal conflict. The optics here are unsettling: a young gay black man shares difficult childhood memories while predominantly middle-aged white men in suits nod and writers dip distractedly in and out. The work is intended to operate in dialogue with Warhol’s Ladies and Gentlemen portraits of drag queens (1974–75), installed two floors above. And to underscore this point, a celebrated drag performer emerges from outside the gallery and poses briefly with Shimoyama. I’ve been meditating on camp since the morning’s presentation of painter Karen Kilimnik’s frothy new contribution to ballet – an artform whose swanning waifs and preponderances of floral garlands

ArtReview

(among other things) earned it special mention in Susan Sontag’s ‘Notes on “Camp”’ (1964). ‘The Awakening of Flora’ (Excerpts) by Marius Petipa, Reconstruction by Sergei Vikharev, and Excerpts (‘Le Talisman,’ ‘Pas D’Esclave,’ and ‘Animated Frescoes’) on the Occasion of the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of Marius Petipa (2018), sparked by a montage of favourite clips from the Russian choreographer’s oeuvre and performed by members of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School at the Carnegie’s Music Hall, seems like a logical extension of Kilimnik’s interest in hyperstylised representations of femininity. But this appropriation feels winkingly decorative in ways that Shimoyama’s paintings, for all their sparkly surfaces, don’t. Perhaps that’s why the Warhol Museum’s decision to insert a drag performer into his vip tour felt so stilted. ‘To camp is a mode of seduction’, as Sontag wrote, and there is nothing seductive about Shimoyama’s work, which reads instead as a Glitter Strip covering a wound.

above Friends making star with their legs

It’s you I like

above Bird at the National Aviary Museum below Performance still (balcony) from Karen Kilimnik’s ‘The Awakening of Flora’ (Excerpts) by Marius Petipa, Reconstruction by Sergei Vikharev, and Excerpts (‘Le Talisman,’ ‘Pas D’Esclave,’ and ‘Animated Frescoes’) on the Occasion of the 200th Anniversary of the Birth of Marius Petipa, 13 October 2018 All photos Courtesy the author

Alex Da Corte’s video installation Rubber Pencil Devil (2018) has arguably garnered the most attention of any works included in the 57th Carnegie International. The one-to-one-scale neon-tube outline of a cottage provides a framing device for 57 video vignettes – Pittsburgh is also the 57th exit off the interstate – spanning two and a half hours. These video shorts, shot against richly saturated monochrome backdrops, feature performers in costume as Pittsburgh icons like the Heinz ketchup bottle (another serendipitous reference given the brand’s iconic ‘fifty-seven varieties’ slogan) alongside other familiar characters from twentieth-century cartoons and children’s shows. The programme is ‘hosted’ by a Mister Rogers-like figure played by Da Corte himself. Da Corte explains the reasoning behind this reference as follows: I went to the post office the day the [commemorative Mister Rogers] stamp came out to buy some for my friends, and I was shocked that he was on the stamp with King Friday – a tyrant – and not someone more loveable, like Daniel the Tiger. It struck me that Mister Rogers’s project was actually about empathy. The whole point of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is to recognize difference and learn how to bridge the gaps between differences so we can progress respectfully and peacefully – together in our differences. That for me became the goal of the videos: to recognize difference, strangeness, complications, queerness in culture and in the places I walk. Quirks and all, the Carnegie International strikes me as equally dedicated to making the museum a more inclusive and joyful place. Shortly after this article was filed, Pittsburgh became the most recent locus of hate-fuelled violence when a man opened fire in a neighbourhood synagogue during services – a chilling reminder of the perils of fear of difference, and the real stakes of combating it with empathy. The 57th Carnegie International is on view at the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Carnegie Music Hall through 25 March Cat Kron is a writer and critic based in New York

December 2018

16 â&#x2020;&#x2019;20.01.19 Islington N1 0QH

BOOK TICKETS londonartfair.co.uk

EXCEPTIONAL MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY ART UNVEILED

Art Reviewed

But they still present themselves in the old way 79

Rasheed Araeen A Retrospective Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead 19 October – 27 January “People are really rather afraid that this country might be rather swamped by people with a different culture.” These infamous words, spoken by Margaret Thatcher in 1978, seem strikingly current. They appear almost verbatim in Rasheed Araeen’s Look Mama… Macho! (1983–86), an arresting mixed-media piece comprising three large photographs intersected by geometric lattice reliefs. The Pakistani-born British artist, who is pictured gagged in its central panel and flanked by priapic goats, created the work to register his disgust at the attitudes towards immigrants and ethnic minorities in Britain. Its deployment of political and formalist concerns typifies Araeen’s approach to artmaking, the full spectrum of which is presented at the Baltic in what is, remarkably, the first comprehensive survey of the octogenarian’s 60-year career. Opening the chronological show are the artist’s experiments as a young painter in Karachi during the 1950s and early 60s. It’s a motley collection in which formative landscapes and portraits give way to tentative forays into abstraction, yet even the earliest works display his hallmark concern with geometry and line. Packing a punch upstairs is a colourful selection of his better-known minimalist works, made after he arrived in London in 1964. Formed from interlocking

lattice cubes and rectangles, these muscular structures evoke Sol LeWitt’s geometric vocabulary, though stem from Araeen’s background as a civil engineer and his encounters with Anthony Caro’s coloured metal sculptures. Particularly compelling is the optical buzz of BoO (1969), an orangeand-blue wood relief selected as a runner-up in the 1969 John Moores Painting Prize. Despite this early success, Araeen found himself increasingly sidelined by the artworld establishment. Rejection coupled with experiences of racial prejudice led to his politicisation during the 1970s. Works from this period addressing racism and colonialism include the biting fourpanel collage For Oluwale (1971–1973), dedicated to a Nigerian immigrant who was found drowned following systematic police harassment. Nearby, photographs show officers protecting the National Front in When they meet (1973), while the slideshow‘Paki Bastard’ (Portrait of the Artist as a Black Person) (1977/2016) documents Araeen’s stirring 1977 performance where he was gagged, ostensibly attacked and left for dead. But without the artist’s presence, the power of the original is barely approached. Araeen’s convictions regarding cultural imperialism led him in 1978 to found Black Phoenix as an outlet for his critical writings.

ArtReview

Relaunched in 1987 as Third Text, the journal was soon leading the debate on postcolonialism and art. An entire room of back issues is presented here (The Reading Room, 2017), highlighting the importance of writing in Araeen’s expanded practice. Indeed, the scope of his activities is intriguing, pivoting on a conspicuous vacillation between aesthetic sensibilities and political consciousness. Occasionally the two meld elegantly, as in the lesser-known Cruciform series made between 1985 and 1996. These slick, nine-panel grids – incorporating photographs, Arabic texts and green monochromes – interrogate the economic, military and cultural hegemony of the West and its relationship with the Middle East. White Stallion (1987–91), which combines images of Saddam Hussein, ‘Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf and us aircraft, is a standout work. Conversely, the recent Opus paintings (2016–17) in which configurations of coloured diamonds attempt to reposition geometric abstraction as a product of medieval Islam, separate from modernist discourses, appear as second-rate Op art. Not that it really matters at this stage, for although Araeen has been subject to the blindness of Eurocentric institutions for decades, this considered exhibition offers a timely corrective, assuring his oeuvre takes its rightful place in a revised canon. David Trigg

all images A Retrospective, 2018 (installation views). Photos: Jonty Wilde. ÂŠ and courtesy the artist and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

December 2018

Could you visit me in dreams? Galerie Nathalie Halgand, Vienna 14 September – 13 October This year, the organisers of the annual ‘curated by vienna’ festival, the Vienna Business Agency, decided the theme should be defined by the neologism ‘Viennaline’. With Could you visit me in dreams?, curator Attilia Fattori Franchini asks what it means to feel at home in this city – or any other – by exploring the unseen alienation felt by outsiders. The seven-artist exhibition’s centrepieces are three screens playing videos from the ‘travel notes’ – fragmentary reflections on contemporary politics, Viennese history and music culture – written by artist Tony Cokes during his last visit to the city 20 years ago. His observations ring true for foreigners living here, whose outsider status is often reasserted. ‘Many here are strangers,’ reads one such fragment, flashing up onscreen in yellow Helvetica against a black background, ‘like me.’ Franchini introduces a conflict into her interpretation of the wider festival theme by using the whole space. She uses works placed on the walls and floors, and makes the location a part of the drama, which contrasts with Cokes’s outsider status as an African-American man in a place ill at ease with its own narrow version of multiculturalism. The works are divided across two rooms (labelled A and B), and Franchini emphasises the fact that Galerie Nathalie Halgand is in a typically Viennese first-floor apartment – huge and light, with

Jugendstil door handles and parquet floors. The space itself stars in Michèle Graf & Selina Grünter’s Eine Stadt wird gebaut, man benennt den Ort, der bedarf an nicht einsichtiger Konstruktion (2018), framed drawings of isometric views of Room B, hung in the very room they depict. The works on the floor and walls are Nik Geene’s Only Planet (2018), L-shaped patterns made of copies of German travel magazine Merian, from 1969 to 1983, spread across the floor of both rooms, and Darren Bader’s Lawrence Weiner study/encomium (2018), Lawrence Weinerstyle murals painted directly on the walls. The wall in Room A announces, ‘I had too much to dream last night’, while ‘mette spazio tra le cose’ (‘it puts space between things’) is written around the splendid doorframe into Room B. Cokes’s videos are simple and stylish, but they tell nonlinear stories that ask for multiple viewings to get a sense of how they overlap. Each video is three minutes 14 seconds long, the length of a typical radio-friendly popsong, accompanied by the music of British acts Burial, Mount Kimbie and Scritti Polliti. This not only reflects Cokes’s obsession with music, but emphasises how even the British, always ‘ex-pats’ and never ‘immigrants’, are deeply foreign here, strangers in a strange land. The videos’ texts, taken from Cokes’s 2018 book The Vienna Guide, published by local imprint

Could you visit me in dreams?, 2018 (installation view). Courtesy the artists and Galerie Nathalie Halgand, Vienna

ArtReview

Sax Publishers, appear against bold red, yellow, black and blue backgrounds, and seem to shift almost randomly between subjects. Comments about Scritti Politti lead singer Green Gartside’s interest in Jacques Derrida are, for example, juxtaposed with an account of the Gestapo’s 1938 raid on Sigmund Freud’s Vienna home. The officers, we are told, maintained their classical Viennese obsequiousness even as they robbed and harassed Freud, referring to him ultra-politely as ‘Herr Professor’. Cokes’s global outlook on local insularity is reflected in Gilli Tal’s Our Creative Heart (2018). This collection of flyer racks from newsagents, theatre foyers and Viennese café entrances contains leaflets for theatre and musical productions currently on show in the city, advertised as if brand-new even though widely performed elsewhere (the 1999 abba musical Mamma Mia, for example). Tal’s flyers, Bader’s murals and Cokes’s choice of music decentre us by reminding us that Vienna is not the whole world. Graf & Grünter’s drawings are, however, self-referential all the way down (space, gallery, city). Observations like Cokes’s give outsiders a rare, and essential, opportunity to understand how they fit in here. ‘In a foreign place with non-native people you feel totally safe,’ reads one note, ‘like you’re in the future. In a new, other Vienna’. Max L. Feldman

Maria Toumazou Fair-face Elysée Various venues, Nicosia 30 September – 24 October Maria Toumazou’s double-site exhibition is an ambitious deconstruction of contemporary and traditional Cypriot working culture, embodying personal and politically charged themes. The works vary from delicate solar-powered assemblages to cement blocks and boulders, but hold up a light to an artist’s practice on an island where ancient history rubs up against brazen capitalism. Toumazou took part in Cyprus’s presentation at the 2017 Venice Biennale with her collaborators from the collective Neoterismoi Toumazou (who from 2015 to 17 ran a project space in Nicosia). Fair-face Elysée, meanwhile, is the first offsite exhibition by Nicosia-based Thkios Ppalies, an artist-run space focusing on emerging Cypriot artists. The exhibition takes you from the working headquarters of a consultancy firm in an industrial business park on the edge of the city, to a field formerly used for snail farming six kilometres away along dirt roads. At the first site, hanging high above a standalone photocopier, is Light design… (all works 2018), a three-metre-high metal assemblage covered with cob, a traditional

building material made from straw and dirt. Attached to it is a small propeller that replaces the hands on a clock mechanism. The seconds ticking away become meaningless, and as a fan it is useless, if not outright threatening, hanging at head-height above the photocopier: ‘work accident’ is listed as one of the materials used. The most intriguing installation is Hand…, a three-part sculpture made in collaboration with #hack66, a Cypriot hacker space and innovation centre. The three Arduino-powered hands – metal constructions with fingers made from melted mini Zivania bottles (a traditional Cypriot spirit used to toast at celebrations) – raise and lower kitsch tapestry bags collected by Toumazou while on European residencies: one a souvenir from Venice, another a collage of dogs found in Glasgow, the smallest a medieval-style purse. If the ineffectual fan hanging from the middle of the room addresses the labour practices of both artists and office workers, the hands and handbags implicitly comment on modern rituals and fashion in a society at risk of losing its traditional industries in the face of globalisation.

The second site is right on the cusp of the buffer zone dividing the Republic of Cyprus from the Turkish-occupied north. Here, Cement block walls used for hideouts, transferred from nearby military post… are monolithic ersatz canvases for huge spraypainted Chinese characters, which seem out of place and require examining the handout to understand. It’s perhaps a layer too far to add onto a site already overflowing with large local sociopolitical concerns. Much more tender are the artist’s Ex snail farming greenhouses now for stray dogs. The roofs of the arched metal structures have been replaced with ironed-together white shopping bags, uniform except for a single rust-tinged square on each side which have the appearance of sinister, bloodlike stains, a jolt on the otherwise clean surface insinuating that something unpleasant has occurred. As a whole, then, Fair-face Elysée is multilayered, perhaps too much so at times; yet Toumazou’s irreverent humour and wit shine through. The sacrifice of the best part of the afternoon and a drive along dusty roads is worth it. Thea Smith

Ex snail farming greenhouses now for stray dogs, 2018, plastic bags, sheets, metal, chicken wire, metal buckets with water. Phot0: Panagiotis Mina. Courtesy Thkio Ppalies, Nicosia

December 2018

teamLab Massless Amos Rex, Helsinki 30 August – 6 January Amos Rex, Helsinki’s recently inaugurated private museum of new media art, opens with Massless. The institution, formerly called the Amos Anderson Museum and housed from 1965 to 2017 less than a kilometre away from its new site, opens with five interactive works by teamLab, a Tokyo-based interdisciplinary art collective boasting 500 members. Comprising computer programmers, artists, animators, architects, graphic designers and writers, the group resembles a videogame production company more than an artists’ cooperative. Indeed, the sense of audience immersion in their audiovisual works might best be described in terms of a kind of ‘affect’: a term deriving from media theory that describes the sensation of being immersed within a digital space. At Amos Rex, the results both complement and contend with a cavernous subterranean space excavated beneath Helsinki’s 1930s Lasiplatsi building, a sleek functionalist former office complex containing a still-operating film theatre and several restaurants. Descending a staircase into the basement, the visitor first enters one of three purposemade, largescale, black-box installation rooms adjacent to the museum’s collection of PostImpressionist art, and finds themselves in front of Black Waves (2016): a projection of a rough sea on a concave wall, hauntingly soundtracked

by Hideaki Takahashi. The sea appears at points to almost spray outwards as it ebbs and flows, seemingly both real and idealised. The animation is based on the movement of actual water, the pixels charting its flow overlaid with lines that resemble those in premodern Japanese printmaking (Hiroshige, Hokusai). The result is a sea as if drawn from the collective imagination, more real perhaps than one simply captured on DV camera or iPhone. Next comes Graffiti Nature: Lost, Immersed and Reborn (2018), a kind of psychedelic garden replete with multicoloured fauna, lizards, frogs, birds, butterflies and even a large whale, covering floor, walls and ceiling in constant creaturely movement. Mirrored surfaces give the space an endless dimension, and extending the work further, in a number of connected ‘drawing rooms’ visitors are invited to colour in templates of the featured animals on paper, scanned by an assistant to appear in the installation proper within moments. This interactive experience places the user at the centre of an ecosystem where animals are eaten by predators, which then multiply. Animals that don’t eat for a while become extinct. Such an environment ports pet- and agricultural simulator games like Stardew Valley (2016) into virtuality, the visitor parachuted into a computer-generated natural world for which they are in part responsible.

Amos Rex’s main exhibition room, in turn, contains the site-specific digital installation Vortex of Light Particles (2018), the domed ceiling leading to a circular skylight that, blacked out, acts as a kind of vortex drawing in computerised light particles. Evoking water running down a huge planetary drain seen from upside-down, the works engender awe. The individual human is secondary to nature, albeit a nature created digitally. Aside from a corridor-sited video loop, Enso (2017), based on a spatial rendering of traditional Japanese calligraphy, there is one last major installation, Crows are chased and the Chasing Crows are Destined to be Chased as well, Transcending Space (2017). Referring to the cyclical tendencies of nature, this surrounds the viewer with erratically moving three-legged crows, a symbol from Eastern mythologies representing the sun. Leaving traces of light, they scatter upon impact with one another, turning into flowers. The effect of the darting crows and the weave of lights behind them delivers an intense feeling of being at the centre of a furious, beautiful battle, a mesmerising cataclysm. Together with the other works that make up Massless, Crows… uses digital technology to revisit pre- and early modern explorations of sublime nature. Together, the works here point to a possible future for art, one that looks both pretty and awe-inspiring. Mike Watson

Graffiti Nature: Lost, Immersed and Reborn, 2018, interactive digital installation. Sound: Hideaki Takahashi. © the artists

ArtReview

Omar Ba Autopsie de nos consciences Galerie Templon, Paris 8 September – 27 October As one enters Omar Ba’s first solo show at Templon in Paris, the extraordinary luxuriance of the painter’s expressionist touch and the sociable sharpness of his reduced colour palette catch the eye before anything else. Yet the Senegalese artist’s recent ensemble of 28 mixed-media figurative paintings on canvas, cardboard and paper is also thematically loaded, touching upon gloomy notions of power and sacrifice in Africa, as well as discrepancies of perception and memory between the continent and the West. Often hybrid, the figures inhabiting Ba’s enigmatic visions emerge from an all-over haze of abstract ornamental motifs – mostly white, blue and red highlights. From afar these evoke both iridescent nacre and lush vegetation, while a closer look reveals a profusion of frantic brush, pencil and ballpoint strokes. Some of them pierce the pictorial supports onto which the artist systematically paints a plain black background to begin. (Otherwise, as he explained at the opening, the brightness of a blank canvas or piece of paper fogs his imagination.) Both literally and figuratively, Ba’s art thus demands from viewers that they adapt to a certain obscurity.

Plunging into his highly symbolist world feels like intruding on the chaotic thoughts of someone caught up in a trance, an attempt to conjure, perhaps, postcolonial traumas. The first painting to meet the visitor, War Junkie (all works 2018), indistinctly raises issues regarding corruption and Western interference in Africa. Portrayed between two palm trees whose leaves have been replaced by giant beating hearts, a halfhuman, half-hyena creature threateningly holds a rifle, as if to claim or defend a territory of its own. It hides, though, behind various foreign forces: the weapon’s stock is decorated with the flags of many Western and Middle Eastern countries including the United States, Great Britain, France, Iran and Palestine, suggesting ongoing international conflicts and more or less distant wars. The current European migrant crisis also pervades some of the works in the show, hinting at the dreams and disillusions of Africans who venture on perilous journeys across the Mediterranean Sea to meet (or not) better fates. In Same Dream, a group of confident young black men sit on an imposing, baroque-looking throne, sharing a unique body like a multi-

headed deity, which incidentally brings to mind the mythic iconographies of Ancient Egypt and even Hinduism. In Plaidoyer d’une jeunesse (Plea for a youth), a similar group more fiercely overlooks the viewers, ready to march out of the pictorial frame with black Dr Martens and, this time, exotic palm trunks for legs. In Clin d’oeil à Patrice Lumumba – aux tirailleurs (Nod to Patrice Lumumba – to the Tirailleurs), Ba pays poetic tribute to the Congolese independence leader, who was assassinated in 1961, and the Senegalese Tirailleurs – the African soldiers from the former French colonial empire, who fought in both World Wars. In the painting, Lumumba is represented next to a skeleton in a wild, translucent field of poppies – a powerful symbol of remembrance for the people who died for peace. That being said, it would be a mistake to reduce Ba to simply a politically engaged artist. He is first and foremost an outstanding painter, and actually started off as an abstract one. As haunted as he is by the past and present of Africa, his practice doesn’t offer any specific commentary about them, but rather a pure chaos reminiscent of the intensity found in the work of German expressionists at the outset of the Great War. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Plaidoyer d’une jeunesse, 2018, acrylic, oil, pencil, Indian ink and Bic pen on cardboard, 199 × 195 cm. Courtesy Galerie Templon, Paris & Brussels

December 2018

Franz West Centre Pompidou, Paris 12 September – 10 December Emerging in an early-1970s Viennese art scene dominated by the legacy of the Wiener Gruppe and the meteoric rise of the Actionists, Franz West, unsurprisingly, was a loner for much of his career. A great believer in the potency of pleasure, he approached artmaking with a playful, mind-drifting everydayness, fusing it with social functionality – hardly in line with the heroic expressivity of the Wiener artists’ post-Dadaism nor with the severe, messianic existentialism of Actionism. The first largescale institutional retrospective of West’s work – coproduced by Centre Pompidou and Tate Modern, to where the show travels in February – serves most of all as an exhaustive archival mission, setting out to catalogue a vast body of work that defies any standardised categorisation. Of West’s identified corpus of nearly 6,000 works, a couple of hundred are present here. The scenography, devised by longtime friend Sarah Lucas and containing drawings, videos, outdoor sculpture, paintings, furniture, etc, is realised in a carefree, pleasantly cluttered manner, vaguely resembling an artist’s studio or home, with discrete environments located in corners, passages and plinths bringing the viewer into the artist’s hard-to-explain but instantly recognisable aesthetic universe. Organised chronologically – with the exception of the installation Auditorium (1992), consisting of 72 rugged divans in the entrance hall on which visitors are encouraged to sit, first presented at Documenta 9 – the exhibition begins with West’s Mutter Kunst series (1970–73): unassuming little ballpoint drawings conceived

to please his mother, who wanted to see him doing something productive with his life. While formally occupying the extreme poles of the artist’s oeuvre, the blatantly utilitarian purpose of both the installation and the drawings – to rest, to please – feels illustrative, and bleeds nicely into West’s most famous body of work, the Passstucke, or Adaptives, which he started in 1974; smallish, organically shaped sculptures devised as removable prostheses to be picked up, carried and walked around with in and outside the exhibition space. What perhaps seem like a redundant gesture in today’s post-relational aesthetics institution feels surprisingly effective still, audiences improvisatorially engaging the objects like toys or fashion accessories. Indeed, not only did West with his Passstucke reintroduce the corporeal into sculpture, renegotiating its relationship to the human body; he contested the medium’s modernist claim to autonomy and clashed it (rather absurdly) with the formal language of interior design. Touching up against such antithetical realms of aesthetics makes West’s objects all the more transgressive, as well as cognisant of the sensorial porosity between such categories. The body doesn’t discriminate between toy and artwork, divan and sculpture, but looks always for pleasure and comfort, as Freud – West’s longtime hero – once posited it. West’s extensive sculptural repertoire is wonderfully elaborated in his monochrome papier-mâché sculptures as well as those that organically engulf found objects such as bottles (the Labstücke series, 1986). His colour work is another important topic: from loud sensuous

ArtReview

reds to questionable murky greens and browns, West plays deliberately on the immediacy of corporeal responses to various hues. Indeed, as apparatus, image and form, the body emerges as a driving force for West: a body that eats, drinks, pisses, sleeps, reads, converses. Although a devout Viennese intellectual, much of his work escapes classic psychoanalytic readings. For example, Serie: ‘Die Sexualität’ (1975) – ballpoint cartoons of mundane heterosexual intercourse – critiques bourgeois sexual comfort more than it explores deeper Freudian themes of desire. Satire is a difficult rhetoric in art history, particularly when embroiled in some of the most genuine and human explorations into shape and form seen in twentieth-century art, and it’s this tension that makes West’s sculptural strategy so alluring. Add a Wittgensteinian engagement with language and syntax in his titles, which point to deeper or contradictory meanings: the steel sculpture Causeuse (1988–89), for example, suggests a small double-seated sofa but also a woman who chats, while Deutscher Humor (1987) – a freestanding cluster of papier-maché and metal wrapped around a broomstick – reveals a buttholelike crevice, perhaps referencing the German proverb of having a ‘stick up one’s ass’. Engaging these corporeal, psychic and linguistic registers of sculpture-making with an amateur’s irreverent enthusiasm, West emerges here as a truly remarkable maker of his time, a predecessor to a whole range of later practice, not least Gelitin and the aforementioned Lucas. Defying all heroism, West’s avant-gardism approaches art as a system that life both fits into and overflows. Jeppe Ugelvig

facing page Franz West, Plakatentwurf (Gagosian Gallery), 2001, acrylic paint and collage on cardboard, 104 Ă&#x2014; 152 cm. Photo: Markus Schauer

December 2018

above Franz West, 2018 (installation views). Photos: Philippe Migeat. Courtesy Centre Pompidou, Paris

Poetry and Performance: The Eastern European Perspective Shedhalle, Zurich 16 September – 28 October How can we connect to past artistic happenings or performances that responded to a specific time and place? A related question: how can we understand an artistic action as political when the circumstances have drastically changed from those in which it was made? The challenge has been taken up by curators in recent decades through exhibitions of documentation in the form of photographs, videos and writings, with varying results: some didactic and dry, others more engaged and interactive. Poetry and Performance: The Eastern European Perspective extends and builds on this tradition through a vast but incomplete combination of the two modes. Here in its second iteration (following a showing earlier this year at Zilina Synagogue in Slovakia), Poetry and Performance is the result of a multiyear research project at the University of Zurich. Focusing primarily on Soviet-era Poland, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Russia and Hungary, with a few artists from other former Eastern Bloc countries, it uses original films and writings, photographic and other forms of documentation of performed events, and audio recordings, to compound effect. Bringing together a total of 45 artists, poets and collectives from the socialist era with a few contributions from contemporary practitioners such as Pussy Riot, the show explores how lan-

guage was deconstructed and poetry used as a form of resistance against the totalitarian system in which these artists operated, and also reveals parallels and links across these socialist countries and even beyond the Iron Curtain. The exhibition is divided into sections that can more easily facilitate a reading, so to speak, of the displayed works. In ‘Writing –Reading Performance’, Russian artists Lev Rubinstein, Andrei Monastyrski and Dmitri Prigov and Slovak artist L’ubomír Ďurček reflect on the performative character of poetry. ‘Audio Gestures’, meanwhile, recounts how a collective of Czech artists including Václav Havel experimented with recorded sound at a radio studio, highlighting the complex – but not entirely contradictory – relationship between official and underground practices that were tolerated yet surveilled in most of the countries represented here. Poland’s Ewa Partum and the Zagreb-based Group of Six Artists reflect on the body and the relationship to the public space in ‘Interventions in the Public Space’, a section that, unlike the others here, includes highly charged political works critical of their respective contexts, combining work from the 1960s and 70s with contemporary reflections on related themes. In the 1960s, the performative and ephemeral strategies used by artists to represent the revolutionary social changes taking place in

Ewa Partum, Active Poetry (still), 1971/1973, Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

the West were embraced by contemporary artists in the East, as ‘the great thaw’ (aka Khrushchev’s de-Stalinisation policies) allowed a certain freedom of poetic if not concretely critical expression. Poetry and Performance does not clearly separate by nationality despite the specific conditions in which some artists functioned and managed to produce: the artist list does not even mention each artist’s country of origin. Maybe, as the text explains, this was in order to ‘not imply a territorialisation of the topic’. The exhibition architecture, designed by rcnksk Architekti, is delicate and fragile, paper-covered cubicles inside which films are projected or ephemera displayed. Though there is clearly a connection between the show’s mode of display and its concept, it also feels a little forced. Perhaps the paper falling off the metal frames serves ironically to symbolise the historical fate of the work on show. While the number of artists in the show is large, and might have been more tightly edited, one wonders why certain countries in the region are not represented. The answer might lie in the fact that the specific conditions prevailing in each state shaped the creative experiments that took place within them, not all of which fit the curators’ parameters. Instead, they prefer to present a more universalising Eastern European perspective. Olga Stefan

Gunter Reski Organwanderung jetzt Nagel Draxler, Cologne 8 September – 20 October Gunter Reski is easily overlooked – so far he has been rather sparsely taken up by important institutions and galleries – and yet he is one of the key figures within the German discourse on painting. This is mainly because of his writing: temperate, cryptic exhibition reviews in which he feels for a language to adequately describe painting. That the Bochum-born, fifty-something artist’s own painting practice is far from insignificant, though, is once again highlighted by Organwanderung jetzt, his first exhibition with Nagel Draxler. In particular the exhibition highlights how Reski sees the separation between talking and writing about painting and painting itself as obsolete, manifested in the way the works are displayed as a gigantic, floor-to-ceiling pseudonewspaper: every bit of wall is covered in text columns into which Reski inserts a mass of his own paintings and works on paper. The overloaded and erratic flood of images characteristic of a salon hang thereby gains an underlying composition, acquiring not only structure but also a certain logic. Contentwise, the ‘newspaper’ is explained in the text as the creation of a single fictitious person who produces it, daily, against boredom: an eccentric monologue, which the unnamed author deems an absolute necessity. It is surely

not too farfetched to read Reski’s placement of his work within this format as an allegory of the contemporary painter. The wall newspaper serves not only as a simple display device but aims at the mutual annotation of text and image, and this naturally guides the gaze towards paintings closely linked to the narration: Staubfussel (Dustball, 2018), for example, an elegantly painted, highly magnified dustball with some entangled hairs, the writing proximately talking about a messy apartment. The painting is more than an illustration, though, linking directly to the painterly discourse of the Rhineland. The graceful, vague physicality of the dustball, with its mauve shadowing, is reminiscent of Gerhard Richter’s cloud paintings; the hairs’ wild lines recall certain works by Albert Oehlen. The thematically related painting Abflussfussel (Drain Lint, 2018) depicts a filthy tangle of hair, again blurred in a Richteresque manner, but more harshly and against the background of a specific blue that, to a trained eye, immediately connects to Markus Lüpertz. Yet Reski doesn’t do this primarily to plant references for an informed public. Rather he thematises style as such, by trolling and splashing together the stylistic signatures of other painters. He does position himself

as a repertoire painter, though since he has been doing this for a long time, a number of styles are now noticeably Reskian. The grisaille Kühlschrank mit Heizung (Fridge with Heater, 2018), painted with heavy strokes, in which a heater jumps out of a fridge, is part of his sequence of broadly painted tautologies in kitchen spaces. Plus there’s a multitude of typefaces, sometimes added to the painting as a quasi-architectural moment, as in Nudeln mit Teller (Pasta with Plate, 2013), on which a bunch of spaghetti hovers above a brown plate that belonged to the artist’s dead mother, as the text framing it informs us. Sometimes the text is the only element, as in one piece of cardboard with threedimensional letters mounted on it or the crumpled, unstretched canvases, whose sprayed folds of fabric reveal short texts such as ‘I always hear you inhale’ (Ich höre dich immer nur einatmen, 2016). Together with Reski’s stylistic pluralism, this extension of writing into painting pleads for a style that does not end in a single canvas but only reveals itself in an exchange. Since, for Reski, this exchange should be as linguistically precise as possible, he still clings to German as ‘his’ language. This, incidentally, may also be a reason why he is not so well known abroad. Moritz Scheper Translated from the German by Liam Tickner

Organwanderung jetzt, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Simon Vogel. Courtesy the artist and Nagel Draxler, Cologne

December 2018

Stuart Brisley Decisions Galeria Teatra Studio, Warsaw 21 September – 9 December It’s the opening night of Decisions, an exhibition focused on Stuart Brisley’s art of the 1970s and 80s, when he formed close ties with Poland. The crowd is encouraged to pass from the gallery through to an auditorium illuminated by sickly lighting, where copies of Dylan Thomas’s 1951 poem ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’ are distributed among the audience. Waiting between the stage and the seats is the ‘godfather of British Performance Art’ himself, now in his mid-eighties. Behind Brisley, the deep and shadowy stage suggests a performance already ended, the dark infinity of ‘that good night’. Stages also loom large in the story of why he originally came to Warsaw. In 1972 Studio’s experimental director Józef Szajna produced his play Replika at the Edinburgh Festival. A review of the disturbing, practically wordless production caught the attention of Brisley, who travelled to Warsaw to seek him out. The rapport between them (selected letters and documents are presented in the exhibition) led to an invitation to perform at Studio in 1975, and an enduring relationship with Poland. Brisley included many Polish artists, such as Ewa Partum and Zbigniew Warpechowski, in the exhibited film Being and Doing (1984, with Ken McMullen) about the preindustrial origins of performance art. The gruelling six-day action Moments of Decision/Indecision (1975) saw Brisley attempt to scale the wall of Studio’s gallery in various states of undress, drenched in black and white

paint that symbolised an abstracted reality, impossible to breach. Here, the mesmeric, saturated photographs taken by Brisley’s friend Leslie Haslam convey an intimacy surely informed by Haslam’s responsibility in directing Brisley as his ‘decisions’ became hindered by the paint, not to mention their experience of driving to Warsaw together through the Iron Curtain (the journey inspired the action). A similar sensitivity to the corporeal essence of this work is conveyed in curator Barbara Piwowarska’s decision to hang the prints closely together, summoning Muybridge’s studies of motion. Likewise the dimensions, larger than in previous incarnations, draw out the elongation of the images, almost mirroring the viewer’s torso. Back in the auditorium, where the doors linking theatre and gallery are symbolically kept open, a new action commences as Brisley draws a cardboard tube up under his chin, at once suggesting a garotte or the edge of a starched bedspread, as he inhales and exhales in excruciating rattling gasps. His voice is amplified to a level that, while not overwhelming, would resonate strongly with any witness to someone in the last throes of life. Brisley’s long history of making disturbing physical performances is unquestionably anchored in radical resistance to convention and hierarchy, but he knows that his body – that of a now older, white man – isn’t neutral. Viewing this performance today, not least in a Poland governed by hardline Catholic conservatives, Brisley seems to literally gargle

Thomas’s good, wise, wild and grave men, at one point lashing the tube against the back of a seat, later spitting out a gulp of water as though parodying an old fountain statue in a European town square. The action ends after 30 minutes, but the endurance is as felt as it ever was in a work such as And for Today… Nothing (1972), when Brisley lay submerged in a bath of black water over a two-week period, with rotting offal heaped on the shelf at the foot of the bath and in the basin. The work is represented in two small, subtly divergent photographs of the bath, one a little closer than the other, suggesting the anxiety inherent in such a scene. The exhibition reminds us that during Brisley’s visit to Poland in 1975 the British ambassador, Norman Reddaway, was horrified that British Council money had been awarded to Brisley, and interventions were made to have the artist deported. The influence of the Second World War on the Polish avant-garde at this time was immense, and Brisley’s aforementioned collaborator, Szajna, who had survived Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was no exception. The gall of a British diplomat suggesting that his wife’s watercolours of Polish landscapes would ‘flatter’ the Poles, whereas Brisley’s art was an offence, ironically evokes the Nazis’ concept of ‘degenerate art’ and exemplifies ‘The Establishment’ against which Brisley has always raged. No wonder that, in Poland, he found allies in his exploration of horrors that were far from being tamed. Phoebe Blatton

Moments of Decision/Indecision, 1975, fine art prints of an action at Galeria Studio, Warsaw. Photo: Leslie Haslam. Courtesy the artist and Galeria Teatra Studio, Warsaw

ArtReview

A School of Schools 4th Istanbul Design Biennial 22 September – 4 November The sight and sound of luggage clunking onto the dusty black rubber belts of carousels is one of many familiar and forgettable airport experiences. At Istanbul Atatürk, however, the backdrop to bags snaking around the arrivals hall is an array of black-and-white advertising billboards publicising the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial and asking, in very large Turkish letters, ‘What Can You Learn from a Suitcase?’ As a counterpoint to other cyclical exhibitions of contemporary design, the biennial operates at arm’s length from starry names and the manufacture of objects, mass-produced or otherwise. The seemingly oblique enquiries (‘What Do I Learn from Taking Care?’, ‘What Can I Learn from the Streets?’) that plaster the city’s public spaces and highways make a collective point: before we add more stuff to the world, should we not first understand what we already have? As if to further underline that critical distance from market forces, this year’s edition, A School of Schools, is presented as a series of lessons, each expanding fluid thematic and political territories – migration, blockchain, attention spans – for a new generation of designers to annex. Led by Jan Boelen, chair of social design at the Eindhoven Academy and artistic director of both the research foundation Atelier Luma in Arles and z33 House for Contemporary Art in Hasselt, the biennial began as an open call for new projects; some 120 are included. The themes that emerged became topics that its six venues circulate around. The global refugee crisis, disaster relief and climate change are dealt with in the

‘Earth School’; postlabour, posthuman design practices and future material cultures in the ‘Unmaking School’; information networks, spheres and connection in the ‘Currents School’; the fluctuating concept of a global standard in the ‘Scales School’; the distractions of late capitalism in the ‘Time School’; and colonial relics of food production and the politics of distribution in the ‘Digestion School’. A simple but clever exhibition design – oily metal, uncoated mdf, hundreds of prefabricated bolts – creates a flat value system for all the objects. The selection, made along with cocurators Vera Sacchetti and Nadine Botha, slants heavily towards the eastern and southern Mediterranean region. Also, over 70 percent of participants are female. In one poignant work in the Currents School, young Turkish designer Ebru Kurbak presents a Lonely Planet Guide to Syria & Lebanon with her 2018 edits, updated interviews with residents she had conducted herself. A page that once recommended the short bus ride for a day trip to Damascus from Aleppo, for example, was redacted and replaced with details of the 100 deadly checkpoints that mark that rarely trodden road today. The many similarly lo-fi projects and robust locally oriented public programmes and workshops are complemented by serious research endeavours. In Blooming Algae (2018), by Boelen’s Atelier Luma Algae Lab, a team of scientists and designers present ethereal greenishyellow 3d-printed objects made from algae polymers, proposing an alternative to synthetic or oil-based plastics. Design collective åbäke

offers Fugu Okulu (2018), centred on a Japanese fish – its stomach contents more deadly than cyanide – that has been seen in Turkish waters: in Japan it is a rare delicacy, in Turkey a threat to national security. The fish becomes an educational tool, explaining a complex weave of geopolitics and global warming that connects the two countries by way of graphic posters appropriated and painted over with graffiti, an infomercial-style video and two taxidermied blowfish, borrowed from a private collection in Istanbul. Earthquakes appear both as a point of cross-border collaboration in The School of Earthquake Diplomacy in a series of beautiful circular paintings created in workshops by Navine G. Khan-Dossos, and as a major policy-planning gap by Istanbul-based so? Architects, who discovered that all public assembly points allocated as safe places to gather during an earthquake in Istanbul have been built over by commercial developers. In their Hope on Water, they’ve designed a temporary floating city in the Bosporus as an alternative way of highlighting these potentially deadly public policy gaps. This year’s biennial is excellent – a socially conscious startup platform for many brilliant young makers and thinkers – but its underlying quandary is that without the mechanics of cultural production or academia, many of these designers have no economic basis for their practice. The world has not caught up. Can there ever be a market? Will the suitcaseproduction industry care to listen? Perhaps that is the task of the next edition. Beatrice Galilee

Atelier Luma Algae Lab, Blooming Algae, 2018, exhibited at Arter as part of Earth School at the Istanbul Design Biennial. Photo: Kayhan Kaygusuz. Courtesy Istanbul Design Biennial

December 2018

Shahpour Pouyan Wūshuı̌ Copperfield, London 31 October – 15 December In Persian legend, Mount Damavand was the site of fantastical battles, immortalised in the national epic, the Shahnameh (c. 977–1010 ad). Its white peak dominates the Tehran horizon and is even found on the back of the 10,000rial banknote. Safe to say that the mountain is a fundamental part of Iranian cultural identity. One can only imagine how the Iranian artist Shahpour Pouyan felt, then, when he noticed that a billboard welcoming visitors to Tehran airport was not, in fact, emblazoned with an imposing image of the aforementioned Damavand. Rather, in what can only be described as an epic fail, it depicted Mount Fuji, iconic symbol of another country entirely. In Pouyan’s painting-meets-installation (a canvas hung by one of its edges perpendicular to the wall, entitled Damavand, all works 2018), he explores this amalgamation of Iranian and Japanese national iconography by painting Fuji upside down, thus inverting it into a valley, before ripping it in half – exposing the framework of the canvas, and transforming the hanging part once more into mountain peak. Damavand acts as both thematic and physical entry point into Pouyan’s second show at Copperfield, in which he continues an on-

going investigation into the role of landscape, and its ability to carry various political and social metaphors. As such, the conflation of Damavand/ Fuji continues in Sunday Painting, in which he takes on another cultural icon – Winston Churchill – to examine the power of landscape painting through the lens of Persian miniatures (which, historically, were purely narrative – the ‘landscape’ merely background filler). Sunday Painting features Churchill’s home in the English county of Surrey, a corner of the house breaking out of the edge of the picture plane, as it would in a Persian miniature. It is accompanied by After ‘Ruhham carries away the severed arm of the Turanian sorcerer’, a reworking of a sixteenth-century traditional miniature in which the hero (a star of the Shahnameh no less) has been scrubbed out of the flat, stylised landscape. In both pieces, the removal of the national icon, or ‘hero’, imbues the landscapes with a power of their own. Pouyan pushes this further in After: ‘Portrait of Fath Ali Shah Qajar’, another miniature appropriation. Where his depopulated backgrounds previously appeared flat and two-dimensional, Pouyan has here chosen a work from the early nineteenth century, when miniaturists were

Damavand, 2018, oil on canvas and wood stretcher 4 × 53 × 178 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Copperfield, London

ArtReview

increasingly influenced by Western painting and its depth of field. And so the removal of the highly stylised traditional depiction of the Shah in the original reveals something close to a European landscape painting of the Romantic era: deep, bruised pools of colour evoking the kind of inky moor on which William Wordsworth or Percy Bysshe Shelley might have found themselves at home. This slipperiness between meanings is embodied by the show’s title, Wūshuı̌, or ‘polluted water’ in Chinese (a play on Shan Shui, ‘mountain water’). The Chinese connection emerges in the final installation, Authentic. At first the story told in the work seems incongruous: a painting commissioned for the Beijing Biennale that the artist created by picking an image off Google (based on keywords the biennale used to describe Pouyan’s own practice) and then outsourcing its fabrication to a painting workshop in China. The painting, displayed in its crate, is presented with certificates and shipping papers all attesting to its ‘authenticity’. Like that Mount Fuji billboard, it is government-sanctioned as a work of art, a slightly unnerving testament to how fiction can become fact. Anna Wallace-Thompson

Mika Rottenberg Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London 8 September – 4 November It’s hard to figure out where to start or to stop, really. The videos in Mika Rottenberg’s installations tend to run on endless loops, following seemingly nonsensical narratives with no beginning or end, in which a cast of apathetic (mostly female) characters participate in absurd cycles of production. What exactly is the end product is never clear to us, or to them it seems, yet we find ourselves unable to look away, so compelling are those zany assembly lines. And so we keep waiting in vain for some sort of resolution or ultimate end, we ourselves caught in a Beckettian limbo. The Argentinian artist has developed over the past two decades an idiosyncratic, instantly recognisable visual language that channels the dynamics and contradictions of a global, capitalist and hyperconnected world, in rich and quirky works that push those social, political and economical logics to the point of the absurd. And though she has participated in major international exhibitions including the 2015 Venice Biennale and Documenta 14 in Athens last year, this is Rottenberg’s (overdue) debut in London,

which fittingly marks the inauguration of Goldsmiths cca – another much-anticipated addition to the city’s cultural landscape, established in former baths owned by the art college and refurbished by Turner Prizewinning collective Assemble. Rottenberg’s installations adapt to the space they inhabit, the sculptural elements luring us into the worlds depicted in her videos: a narrow tunnel leads the viewer to Cosmic Generator (Variant 4) (2017–18), echoing the difficult onscreen circulation of men through an endless network of underground passages between the Mexico–us border; a revolving door with a bingo counter matches the one in the shabby game room of Bowls Balls Souls Holes (Bingo Variant) (2014), filled with women frantically stamping numbers with their colour dabbers; and part of the underground workshop of mass-produced cultured pearls featured in NoNoseKnows (Artist Variant) (2015) is replicated at the entrance of the gallery in which the videowork is shown. While these ‘portals’ serve to blur the line between fiction and reality in the exhibition

space, in the videos they are metaphorical devices. In Cosmic Generator, for instance, the tunnels connect a border town in Mexico to the packed stalls of the Yiwu International Trade City, a temple of wholesale ‘made in China’ commodities, pointing to the paradox of a world in which Mexicans are having to dig down in order to cross a physical border while elsewhere such barriers are becoming ever-more fluid waypoints for the export of goods. Ultimately, what runs through Rottenberg’s show is a sense of perpetual, inevitable motion – in the repetition of the tasks performed by the characters, the cause-and-effect unfolding of events or our own circulation dictated by the mechanics of the installations – which so imaginatively mirrors, in all its absurdity, the relentless cycles of a capitalist world. While undeniably offbeat and comical, the fantasy of these works rests on their connection to a more tangible reality: unable to contemplate an alternative or a way out, we, along with Rottenberg’s resigned characters, just keep on going. Louise Darblay

Mika Rottenberg (installation view), 2018. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Goldsmiths cca, London

December 2018

One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles 14 October – 11 March Helen Molesworth’s last show for la moca is devoted to painter and film critic Manny Farber, a painter’s painter who, in a 1962 essay, theorised the term ‘termite art’. It’s a slippery concept, but termite art might be best explicated by thinking about precisely what a termite does. Farber writes: ‘it goes always forward eating its own boundaries, and, likely as not, leaves nothing in its path other than the signs of eager, industrious, unkempt activity’. The termite is an agent of entropy, not just spawning decomposition, but chewing along with an absence of order or predictability. Termite art is also stay-in-your-lane work (or ‘run your own race’, as Oprah would say), not concerned with the ‘self-aggrandizing masterwork’ but more with the minutiae of ‘small pleasures’. Putting Farber’s theory into practice, Molesworth has combined this survey of Farber’s paintings from the 1970s, 80s and 90s with a wide-ranging group show of artworks that she has grouped under the heading ‘termite art’. Molesworth has interpreted Farber’s essay and artworks as emphases on the everyday, and consequently many of the artworks on view depict still lifes, interiors or accumulations of household objects. In the catalogue, she writes, ‘The exhibition is also my most personal because it speaks to an idea, and perhaps, more importantly to a way of being in the world that goes to the heart of one of my

deepest motivations for being interested in art: I am a student of the everyday, the mundane, and the transitory. As a feminist, I am interested in what can perhaps best be described as the minor.’ In Molesworth’s formulation of termite art, stressing the quotidian is a feminist gesture. Here, ‘the personal is political’ might be more specifically revised to ‘the everyday is political’. Farber’s imperative to ingest the ‘world through a horizontal coverage’ also dovetails with Molesworth’s longstanding interest in rhizomatic and antihierarchical methods of curating. In her 2010 essay ‘How to Install Art as a Feminist’, Molesworth asks, ‘Is there a way to install works of art so that the artist and the art historian do not experience the space of the museum as the site of one triumph over another? What of the artist who experiences a sisterhood of artists, in which sameness and difference are attributes in constant (pleasurable?) friction with one another?’ In Molesworth’s model, each room in the show functions as a kind of chosen family brought together in their difference. A favourite gallery is devoted to artworks that variably and obliquely address the floral still life, including works by Farber, Jordan Casteel, Rachel Rose, Maurice Harris and Becky Suss. Casteel’s painting of a giant pink-and-white funeral wreath propped up against a garbage can on a Harlem street corner hangs alongside sculptorturned-florist Harris’s outsize floral arrange-

Becky Suss, Bathroom (Ming Green), 2016, oil on canvas, 213 × 152 × 3 cm. Private Collection, Brooklyn

ArtReview

ment – replete with hot pink nerines, crystals and shimmering champagne-sprayed plumosa ferns – titled Protect My Opulence (2018–19). Disrupting the alliance of good taste and the understated, Harris’s arrangement is a celebration of excess (calling to mind Janet Mock’s words, ‘People try to put us down by saying “she’s doing the most” or “he’s way too much”’). When I visited, Harris’s flowers were slightly wilted, in the process of dying. The clever inclusion of the bouquet, which is replaced with a completely different arrangement weekly, distinctly transformed my relationship to the painted flora in the room. Standing beside actual fragrant, decaying flowers, one can’t forget that the painted flowers too are transitioning quickly between the states of life and death. As Barthes would have said, they are dead and they are going to die. As such, the bouquet and the other works in the room crystallise Farber’s vision of termite art. These works are not devoted to the eternal monumentality of the masterpiece, but bring attention to the intertwinement of small pleasures and the termite’s act of deterioration. As Molesworth writes, ‘Farber’s pictures are about the timelessness of change’. Termite art posits that death is not a teleological endpoint, but confirmation of the eternal condition of unpredictability, messiness and variation. Termite art urges us to pay close attention to the small pleasures along the way. Ashton Cooper

Raúl de Nieves The Guide Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles 20 September – 3 November Just as Raúl de Nieves’s acetate window treatments, reminiscent of stained glass, transformed the Whitney Museum’s fifth floor into a sacred space for last year’s biennial, the artist’s new show casts a kaleidoscopic pall over Freedman Fitzpatrick’s East Hollywood gallery. Here, six jumpsuited, platform-shod sprites, each covered in brightly coloured plastic beads, pose as if frozen in the middle of The Hustle. These self-standing sculptures are presided over by Psychopomp (all works 2018), who kneels, encircled by a skirt of stones, in the far corner of the compact maroon-walled gallery. As any goth could tell you, psychopomps guide the recently deceased to the afterworld, and while this spirit, clad in beads, rhinestones, tassels and other notions meticulously affixed to its blue plastic mannequin armature, stands only a few centimetres taller than its metre-high wards, it possesses enough gravity to convince the viewer that it could subdue a jittery corpse.

In de Nieves’s first solo exhibition at Freedman Fitzpatrick, these figural sculptures are framed by four collage wallworks named after the four seasons and three drawings of clowns titled Fool i, Fool ii and Fool iii. The latter set of works, in charcoal on vellum, extend the theme of the Fool previously explored in the artist’s 2014 chamber opera, made in collaboration with composer/choreographer Colin Self and reprised at New York performance venue The Kitchen last February. A trickster androgyne, whose madcap demeanour belies a highly astute and calculating mind, this archetype is a convincing avatar for de Nieves himself: the self-taught sculptor also fronts the raucously gender-queer noise band Hair Bone (formerly Haribo) with artists Jessie Stead and Nathan Whipple. Archetypal storybook characters are additionally present in the suite of seasonal wallworks. This quadriptych, whose complex patterns made from thousands of glued beads

give its surfaces the appearance of millefiori – de Nieves has a penchant for rendering glasslike surfaces from humble plastic craft materials – feature appearances by the detached heads of Snow White (Summer), a pencil-moustached red devil (Autumn) and a pointy-hatted witch (Winter), along with that of one of the artist’s Teletubby-like balaclava’d figures (Spring). De Nieves is hardly unique in rendering precious objects from humble pop materials. Yet what sets his work apart is its defiantly celebratory spirit. These objects evoke the meticulously crafted Day of the Dead shrines of the artist’s native Mexico, a nation whose cultural attitude towards death is markedly different from the country where he now resides. Like disco revellers dancing in spite of (or to spite) the impending last call, these works suggest veneration of those passed while inviting the possibility of new beginnings, however (and wherever) they might take place. Cat Kron

Psychopomp (detail), 2018, vintage millinery trim, rhinestones, plastic beads, treads, glue, cardboard, mannequin, zipper, 112 × 38 × 64 cm. Photo: Marten Elder. Courtesy the artist and Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles & Paris

December 2018

Hairy Who? 1966–1969 Art Institute of Chicago 26 September – 6 January Vibrant and vulgar, the Hairy Who’s irreverent, Pop-like paintings were inspired as much by commercial culture as by what they found on Chicago’s city streets. From 1966 to 69, its members – Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellen Rocca and Karl Wirsum – developed a libidinous and deeply idiosyncratic approach to artmaking. Then, after six exhibitions together, they broke up. And here’s where things get blurry: former members joined new collectives, and this widening circle of artists, which included aesthetic sympathisers like Roger Brown, Ed Paschke, Christina Ramberg and Barbara Rossi, became known collectively as the Chicago Imagists. What then makes the Hairy Who the Hairy Who, and not the Imagists? Hairy Who? 1966–1969 attempts to answer this question by restaging all six of the group’s exhibitions. The first three originally took place at the Hyde Park Art Center on the Windy City’s South Side, then under the curatorship of Don Baum, a key figure in the Hairy Who’s rise to cult stardom. On the evidence of these shows, the group seems to have emerged fully formed, with each member working a complementary aesthetic. Gameplay is at the heart of Rocca’s Bare Shouldered Beauty (1965), which insinuates a female figure into an inscrutable boardgame motif;

the same absurdist logic also underpins Green’s Consider the Options, Examine the Facts, Apply the Logic (1965), his ironic takedown of former secretary of defense Robert McNamara. It’s satisfying to see Nutt’s drawing study for Wiggly Woman (1966) next to the painting itself: his careful modulations between media appear coolly undisturbed by the figure with an outrageous blonde bouffant and protruding tongue. Nilsson may have abandoned toxic paints for watercolours early on, but a few of her quixotic Plexiglas works are present. The pudgy and dimpled figures in Candy Outside (1966) are as bright as Pepto-Bismol. By the third show, the Hairy Who had mastered the use of installation and began to spoof their own success. Department store price tags dangled from some of the paintings, and this retrospective recreates a bright linoleum backdrop on which Falconer hung paintings; meanwhile, Wirsum’s Untitled (1967), a throbbing, veiny skull-and-crossbones, is displayed above this set piece like some perverse emblem. Geographic distance seems to have constrained their fourth show, in San Francisco, and a janitor accidentally threw out a whole crate at their fifth in New York. Their sixth and final exhibition, at the Corcoran Art Gallery in Washington, dc, demonstrates, however, that their jokiness never subsided. It includes a 1969 set of painted metal

Art Green, Consider the Options, Examine the Facts, Apply the Logic (originally titled The Undeniable Logician), 1965. © the artist. Courtesy Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago

ArtReview

lawn chairs by Nutt and Wirsum. The former’s is the funnier: a putrid yellow liquid rains from a wrinkled pair of boxer shorts painted on the seat back, with the work’s title – I’m Wet – appearing on the seat itself. The curators also dug up all of the Hairy Who’s self-produced exhibition ephemera. Unable to afford catalogues, they designed and printed comic books for every show, perhaps the only objects the entire group signed their name to. The six exhibitions show a handful of middle-class Midwestern white kids who were preoccupied with their hometown, and who possessed a formal rigour beyond what might be expected from their youth (the youngest members were twenty-three when the first show opened). That said, considering that little changed between their first exhibition and last, there also appears to have been a limit to their ideas, and the number of combinations between their works. So, what makes the Hairy Who the Hairy Who? Is it this collection of a few dozen works? The show makes a compelling argument for an art history that is painstakingly precise, but, based on the inscrutable quality to their work, I suspect most of the artists would tell you that the question is unanswerable. That that is what motivated them in the first place. Sam Korman

Charline von Heyl New Work Petzel, New York 6 September – 20 October Seventeen recent paintings at Petzel Gallery, all but one dated 2017 or 2018, distinguish Charline von Heyl as a master of contemporary painting and mark a newly mature synthesis of the issues and devices she’s advanced since her student days in Germany during the 1980s. Interested in bringing together elements that, as she explained in a 2008 interview, ‘couldn’t work out, and on top of that forcing them to work with grace and ease’, von Heyl has over the course of her career developed a method that is at once calculated and hamfisted, mixing-and-matching motifs and styles in order to subvert artistic traditions and create fresh visual possibilities. In a group of early-1990s paintings shown here in 2015, for example, flat planes were overlaid and interrupted by loosely applied brushstrokes and combined with motifs such as palettes, dresses and mushrooms. Paintings of the last decade might include wonky grids, squiggles, stripes, zigzags, intentionally painted drips

or schematic figurative elements such as a bottle, a brick or a face. The nods to Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism were clear, as was a penchant for kitsch, a source for von Heyl of ‘raw emotion’. But these works remained reliant on graphic elements and on a disparate, though intentional, quirkiness too easily seen and overthought. The same devices persist in these new paintings: there are stripes, and stars; a schematic female profile repeats in three works. A scrawled rotary phone sits at the lower right of a yellow field. It devolves into a deadening cliché reinforced by the piece’s title: Dial P for Painting (2017). Other works evince a more nuanced and catalytic handling of paint and composition. The central portion of Corrido (2018) glows with layered purples and greens. Repeating, overlapping and echoing curves and festoons that seem to dance across the canvas unite flat patterns, long feathery brushstrokes and drippy washes. A new looseness and freedom pertain.

In Mana Hatta (2017; the title nods to the Native American name for New York and to Walt Whitman’s 1860 ‘Mannahatta’, which celebrates the diversity of the city named thereafter) drawn and painted squiggles repeat in the outline of rabbits leaping across the lower third. Red dots, reminiscent of Roy Lichtenstein’s, fill their bodies and reappear here and there across the composition. Splotches of red and concentric circles that recall Robert and Sonia Delaunay’s shimmering discs and Jasper Johns’s targets create other visual and historical equivalencies. All seem to swirl and overlap within and around what might be read as a head, a motif that seems to imply, as another of Whitman’s poem does of the individual self and of the United States, that painting contains myriads. The elements von Heyl uses cohere, despite their diversity, forcing a readjustment of expectations about what might be whole or beautiful. Joshua Mack

Dial P for Painting, 2017, acrylic and oil on linen, 152 × 127 cm. Courtesy the artist and Petzel, New York

December 2018

Christopher K. Ho Aloha to the World at the Don Ho Terrace The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York 3 October – 6 January Throughout the 1960s and 70s, Hawaiian crooner Don Ho’s easy-listening hit Tiny Bubbles (1966) lulled mainlanders into a fantasy world of tropical leisure. Assisted by the advent of affordable air travel, and the soundtrack of tunes like Ho’s, Hawaii became a popular and accessible arcadia. On the occasion of his show Aloha to the World at the Don Ho Terrace, artist Christopher K. Ho, who as a child was often mistaken for a relative of the middlebrow musician, has rechristened the Bronx Museum’s outdoor exhibition space the ‘Don Ho Terrace’. In doing so, Ho inaugurates a site in which he reimagines aspects of a nowdemolished hotel, the Miramar at Waikiki, located in the beachfront neighbourhood where the famed singer once held court. An 11.5m banner cascades down the museum’s exterior, unfurling a pixelated and skewed image of the Miramar, a place where the artist stayed in his youth while shuttling between Hong Kong and Los Angeles. Built in 1961, the Honolulu hotel functioned as an object of globalisation par excellence, imbued with the type of cultural hybridity that white nationalists decry today. The Hong Kongese

owner of a Hawaiian hotel commissioned an Italian craftsman to furnish the building’s facade with a ceramic mosaic of the Bodhisattva Guanyin, a composition lifted from the Gobi Desert caves of Dunhuang, China. The distorted image of the Bodhisattva and the hotel’s Chinesestyle eaves demonstrate how the business wilfully performed culture decades ago to lure American clients in search of an exotic (but not too exotic) paradise. By reproducing the facade as a retractable banner, Ho introduces another veneer of simulation to this story, framing the hotel – and by extension his own work – as a type of postmodern export art that self-stereotypes for marketability. A sense of artificiality and the performance of culture is amplified through the addition of faux-granite-and-coral speakers that pipe the sounds of an erhu. Inside the museum Ho has placed a grey acrylic vitrine, seemingly stained with the smoke of the hotel’s long-departed guests, and angled to mirror the boxwood hedge in his outdoor installation. Here, the artist has arranged a plethora of Don Ho and Miramar memorabilia for our contemplation, displaying the singer’s vinyl alongside hotel menus,

Aloha to the World at the Don Ho Terrace, 2018 (installation view). Photo: Mario Babbio. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

an ashtray with a lone cigarette, swizzle sticks and a bamboo mug, among other kitschy bric-a-brac. These curated readymades function as a time capsule of sorts, cultivating the nostalgia central to Aloha to the World at the Don Ho Terrace. The exhibition alludes to and yearns for globalisation’s early years, a time of ascendant multiculturalism in America, when borders first confessed that they were imagined. By resurrecting elements of the Miramar from decades past, and reconstituting them in the present, Ho succeeds in drawing parallels between a hotel of yesteryear and art institutions today, framing them as liminal contact zones where disparate cultures converge. Yet, hotels and museums also function as destinations of leisure and privilege, and, in the twenty-first century, as cultural funding dries up and economic inequality swells, art’s institutions increasingly parrot the operations and priorities of commercial enterprises through austerity measures and revenue creation. Ho generously offers up a gift that eludes capital: a conceptual space through which to encounter the world. Owen Duffy

16th Pacific Meridian Various venues, Vladivostok 21–27 September A 79-minute film with no dialogue, almost no music and hardly any plot to speak of is an unexpected highlight of Pacific Meridian, the annual international film festival of Vladivostok. The festival was the occasion of the Russian premiere of The Night I Swam (2017), a Franco-Japanese collaboration between directors Damien Manivel and Kdhei Igarashi. The film follows a six-year-old boy, woken by his fisherman father heading off to market in the middle of the night and unable to get back to sleep. Exhausted, the boy skips school and wanders the snowy streets of a nameless city, boards a train, eats an orange, loses a glove and periodically falls asleep – in a heap of snow, on the backseat of a stranger’s car. The result is strange, funny, beguiling and ultimately – in the implication that working life will continue to thwart the possibility of a meaningful fatherson relationship – crushingly forlorn. Films from Vladivostok’s neighbour across the East Sea feature prominently throughout the weeklong festival, with an especially strong selection of shorts and animated works. The diverse programme ranges from Koji Yamamura’s 2002 classic Mount Head about a cherry tree growing from the head of a miser to more recent works such as Kazuki Sekiguchi’s tale of Day-Glo bunnies, Self-Honest Me (2017), and the hand-drawn love stories of Honami

Yano’s Chromosome Sweetheart (2017). Russian animation is also well represented, in particular by Nina Bisyarina’s Bus Stop (2016) and Roman Sokolov’s The Theory of Sunset (2017). Both enact very different explorations of human conceptions of time. In the former, an impatient young woman and an impassive man (and his dog) wait for their bus against skies of darkly delicate watercolour. In the latter, Time is personified as a stick-man cyclist pedalling through the day from sunrise to sunset. The film contains some glorious images: a long-limbed Sun sidling out to sea or Death kneeling to help repair a puncture to the tyre of Time’s bicycle. As the largest naval base of Russia’s Pacific Fleet, Vladivostok – along with other cities of strategic significance – was completely closed to foreigners during the Soviet years. Since the collapse of the ussr, something of the city’s old cosmopolitan confidence has returned, and initiatives like Pacific Meridian, now in its 16th year, are valued drivers of international cultural exchange. Recent major infrastructure investment into Vladivostok has also underscored the city’s increasing importance as a centre not only of military but also economic power in the region. China, Japan and South Korea are Vladivostok’s major trading partners, so it is not surprising to see Pacific Meridian showcasing the filmmaking creativity of the Asia-Pacific region.

More surprising is the openness of political discussion, both in the programming and among attendees. But Vladivostok has always been a long way from Moscow’s eagle eyes. Among some well-made, if straightforward cinema such as Spike Lee’s 1970s AfricanAmerican detective movie BlacKkKlansman, Vera Glagoleva’s cheerless family drama Clay Pit and Viktor Alferov’s brilliantly acted Seabuckthorn Summer about Russian playwright Aleksandr Vampilov (all 2018), the experimental uneasiness of Extinction (2018) makes it one of the standouts of the festival. The work of Portuguese filmmaker Salomé Lamas, the film follows the convoluted border-crossings of a young man who identifies as a national of Transnistria, an unrecognised state whose territory lies within Moldova on the border with Ukraine. Part road movie, part documentary, part essay film, Extinction combines documentary footage and surreptitiously recorded audio with carefully composed black-andwhite shots of crumbling Soviet architecture and eye-to-eye closeups with the central character. An anxious, dreamlike probing of the violence of constructed bureaucratic realities, Extinction continually teeters on the brink of collapse. The film’s form therefore provides adroit echoes of its subject matter: the potency and fragility of identities and nationalities, and the powers that police them. Tom Jeffreys

The Night I Swam (still), 2017, dir Damien Manivel and Kdhei Igarashi

December 2018

Books Turbulence by David Szalay Penguin, £9.99 (hardcover) This new sequence of vignettes by the British writer describes a relay race of 12 individuals as they fly around the globe. For the duration of this book, we are orientated not by personal or geographic histories but by the poetics of the voyage and the landmarks of detail: brands, road names, security, airlines, airplane models, taxis and the fallen leaves of frangipani trees. Yet in all this voyaging there is no tourism or heroic quest for treasure, acquisition, investment subjugation or other such staples of fictional journeying. Nor are these travellers dazzled by their destinations, but rather left dazed by the dislocated sites French anthropologist Marc Augé has called nonplaces; and by the carousel of international air travel. The first unnamed character’s anxiety about flight is bound up with the imagined imminent death of her son: ‘There was, from somewhere, a quiet ping. She did not know whether it soothed her or not, that ping. She wondered what it meant.’ Each miniature retains its imagistic integrity while zigzagging into the greater narrative that structures the novel. Liberated by the 12 narrative perspectives from the necessity of main-

taining a consistent voice, Szalay instead develops a narrative style that passes like a contagion from one protagonist to the next. Turbulence was conceived with radio serialisation in mind (the author is a veteran of radio scriptwriting), while novelistic unity is emphasised by the baton-passing between the protagonist of each chapter, who encounters the next within their story, with a mere eight pages to each leg of the journey. Among our companions are Cheikh, returning home exhausted to an unrevealed disaster, ‘as if he was going to his own death’; Werner, trapped in a taxi, the long-ago death of his sister unexpectedly rising up to disturb him again; and a journalist so fixated on her long flight to Toronto to interview a writer that she misses the possibility of genuine human connection in front of her. The absence of a conventional narrative arc effects an uncanny sense of being held captive on a global fairground ride. Turbulence slowly reveals its circular form, and in each leg of the journey, as it was for Odysseus, identity is constituted through the relationship to, and distance from, home.

Szalay enacts this temporal and spatial return through the repetition of phrases and words, like tics in a shared consciousness. Szalay’s style is direct, unsentimental and evacuated of artfulness, yet its goal is to move us. We are conducted quickly through these stories, given only minimal backstory in short sentences. This streamlined narrative voice prioritises the immediate truth of what characters are doing and thinking, giving the illusion that the author has submitted to a kind of realist, almost nonfictional survey of what we are uncomplicatedly like. Turbulence is like a film made entirely from time-out-of-time montage sequences; in an interview for The Paris Review in 2016, Szalay said of All That Man Is, his Man Booker Prizeshortlisted novel published that same year, that these are ‘moments when characters catch a glimpse of something else, something outside this inevitable process of ageing and dying’. Here in his latest book, Szalay extends this sentiment to his audience by disrupting the shortstory form, locating it somewhere between novel and collected stories. Ian Whitfield

The Counsel of Spent by Inventory Book Works, £12 (softcover) Cussed intellectuals, self-taught theorists, artists, troublemakers – the British art group Inventory were never smooth operators in the British artworld of the 1990s and 2000s. Through art shows and the pages of their eponymous journal, Adam Scrivener, Paul Claydon and Damian Abbott revelled in an anarchistic, politicised erudition steeped in Marx as much as Bataille, issuing diatribes against the relentless, inhuman banality of capitalist society. Abbott died in 2010. With The Counsel of Spent, Claydon and Scrivener return to the scene of capitalist culture in the decade-wake of the financial crash. In contrast to the credit-fuelled, feel-good economy of the 2000s, their motif here is that of exhaustion: ‘at the end of the tether, at the end of the rope that binds, a revolutionary subjectivity can only come from a strength that

100

paradoxically realises that it has nothing more than can be extracted, nothing else that can be exploited… this is the counsel of spent’. Throughout 21 variously polemical, reflective and caustically funny sections (peppered with images of urban tedium, surveillance and riot), Inventory grapples with how to shape a radical subjectivity when capitalism has further invaded the informal spaces of human sociability, which austerity has hollowed out, and from which the Internet monetises whatever is left. It’s a style that jumps from analysis to anecdote to insurrectionary manifesto, attacking, among others, networked culture (which ‘does not extend the reach of the human mind… it merely reformats it’), the pretensions of an increasingly narcissistic middle-class gen-Z (obsessed with ‘cooking

ArtReview

and baking programmes, supper clubs, pop-up cafes’), Berlin-dwelling ‘international artists’, Wetherspoons pubs and the posthuman cant of accelerationism (‘self-loathing whimsy’ intent on destroying ‘any image of “human” agency’). Clearly, this isn’t about making friends. Shut out by an artworld composed of an ‘exclusive brethren’, they throw in none-toocomplimentary anecdotes about Daniel Birnbaum, Norman Rosenthal and Artangel. Life’s too short to worry about careers, and such everyday truculence is part of The Counsel of Spent’s bigger question – how to live, think and decide to risk all against the cynical acceptance of capitalism’s inevitability; how, ‘as a species… to take control of our continued evolution’. It’s a good question, and a critical moment to ask it. J.J. Charlesworth

December 2018

101

Berlin by Jason Lutes Drawn & Quarterly, $49.95/£35 (hardcover)

Referencing the Weimar Republic has become something of a cliché recently, and so it is important to highlight that Jason Lutes started work on Berlin, his impressive graphic novel about life in the city between the wars, over 20 years ago. Serialised as 22 individual comics, we now have the collection in a handsome brick of a book. This monumental effort is rewarded by arriving when a warning about the far-right could not be timelier. The story begins with a nod to cinema when, as in Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927), a train approaches the outskirts. Marthe Müller, a young woman artist keen to try her luck in the metropolis, meets the journalist Kurt Severing. They fall in love, but the story is soon complicated by the political heat of the day. Marthe attends art school and learns about Neue Sachlichkeit (the New Objectivity) but struggles to find meaning in her own drawings in an age of rapidly evolving media, specifically radio and the movies. Kurt is the hardboiled hack who chronicles the steady decline of Germany into barbarism. Real-life figures pop up, such as Kurt’s boss, the editor Carl von Ossietzky, soon to die in Nazi custody despite his being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Marthe befriends the androgynous Anna and finds herself introduced to a secret Berlin of underground clubs where she jives to jazz. One

of the many entertaining subplots features an Afro-American band in exile struggling to make sense of the troubled city. These night scenes are atmospherically rendered and recall the shiny surfaces of reflected neon seen in films such as Joe May’s Asphalt (1929). The beams of streetlighting and ubiquitous advertisements on the Litfaßsäule columns help conjure the glamorous appeal of glittering nocturnal escapades. Given Marthe’s vocation, it is appropriate that there should be numerous references to artists of the time. More bolts of light burst over a scene in Alexanderplatz recalling Lyonel Feininger’s woodcut Cathedral (1919); war cripples on the streets resembling those painted by Otto Dix typify what we hear labelled as ‘the sourness of neglect’. We also encounter swinish industrialists like those depicted by George Grosz, and other dodgy characters similar to the freaks hanging around The Rooftop Studio (c. 1922) by Rudolf Schlichter. In a bar Marthe meets a top-hatted beauty taken directly from She Represents (Carnival Scene) (c. 1928) by Jeanne Mammen. She exemplifies the new women in the city – die Neue Frau – empowered by the mass demasculinisation of the First World War. Lutes documents the success these women have in their new roles and delights in drawing their fashions and their bubikopf – the groovy geometric hairstyles of the day.

Lutes is attentive to period detail as culled from photographs of pre-Nazi Berlin, as seen in his evocative image of a shiny Potsdamer Platz before it was trashed. In contrast he shows struggle in the desperate poverty of the Mietskaserne, the tenement slums and rental barracks found in Communist districts like Wedding. We are not shown a swastika until page 506, as if the Nazi threat was in a sense unseen, naively dismissed, by the privileged before Hitler’s ascension to power. Lutes outlines too how life was incrementally made more difficult for Jews, homosexuals and people of colour, and, with particular contemporary relevance, for Anna, the trans character. Lutes is deft at handling a complex story. Comic books can play with the limits of language, and he is eloquent in his use of silent speech bubbles that scream with frustration. He pinches Wim Wenders’s idea from Wings of Desire (1987) that we can hear a character’s thoughts as they ride the S-Bahn. The influence of Art Spiegelman and Chris Ware is acknowledged, but Lutes’s work has its own punch. Berlin catches the descent into disaster without falling into overt toadying before its illustrious literary predecessors. And Lutes captures the calamity of losing a society to fascism. John Quin

The Progressive Revolution: Modern Art for a New India by Zehra Jumabhoy and Boon Hui Tan Asia Society, $65/£49.99 (hardcover)

The issue of how a desire for contemporaneity of form fits together with the traditions of place is a hot topic in art history right now. In this, the work of the Progressive Artists’ Group (pag), founded in Bombay shortly after India’s independence (and the subcontinent’s partition) in 1947 with the goal of promoting a new art for a new country, is certainly relevant. Although the work of its six founding members (male artists F.N. Souza, S.H. Raza, K.H. Ara, M.F. Husain, S.K. Bakre and H.A. Gade) and the wider group of artists associated with the project has been (to the disdain of some) anything but lurking in the dustbin of history over the past several years. Published to accompany an exhibition at the Asia Society’s New York outpost (on view through 20 January), this book fits the standard catalogue format: thanks to supporters, introductions from managers, essays, plates and

102

chronology. The design is pedestrian, which wouldn’t be a problem were it not for the fact that this book costs a staggering $65 and almost £50 and leads you to wonder who such publications are aimed at (other than libraries). Still, if you can get hold of a copy, the catalogue’s efforts to locate the work of the pag in equal (as opposed to derivative) dialogue with modern movements in Europe and America (in this respect, a sidenote in Jumabhoy’s essay concerning Asia Society founder John D. Rockefeller’s decision to fund Indian artists during the 1950s so that the ussr and China didn’t get there first, seems worthy of further exploration) is certainly of interest, as are the efforts it makes to place the work of painters such as Husain and Akbar Padamsee (the latter was a student when the pag was formed, but later became associated with it) with traditional cultural

ArtReview

artefacts (a tenth-century copper statue of Shiva and Parvati, for example, is placed alongside Padamsee’s Lovers, 1952 and Husain’s Eternal Lovers, 1988). So too are the initial efforts made to trace the career of the pag’s one female member, Bhanu Rajopadhye. Given the rise of Hindutva in contemporary India and the trials and tribulations of the Muslim Husain in relation to complaints and lawsuits concerning his representations of naked Hindu deities (he eventually went into self-imposed exile in Qatar) during the mid-2000s, the pag’s status as a religiously and ethnically inclusive group (gender, though, is a whole other issue) that envisioned a new secular India built on those terms also has a particular resonance today. Ultimately, however, this catalogue is less a definitive summary of the pag and more a stimulus for further research. Nirmala Devi

organiza organised by

— 3+1 ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA Lisbon — — 80M2 LIVIA BENAVIDES Lima — ABRA Caracas — ADN Barcelona — ALARCÓN CRIADO Seville — — ALEXANDER AND BONIN New York — ÁLVARO ALCÁZAR Madrid — ANA MAS PROJECTS Barcelona — ANCA POTERASU Bucharest — ÀNGELS BARCELONA Barcelona — ANHAVA Helsinki — ANINAT ISABEL Santiago de Chile — ANITA BECKERS Frankfurt — ANITA SCHWARTZ Rio de Janeiro — ANNET GELINK Amsterdam — ANNEX14 Zürich — ANNIE GENTILS Antwerp — ARCADE London — ARRÓNIZ Mexico City — AURAL Alicante — BARBARA GROSS Munich — — BARBARA THUMM Berlin — BÄRBEL GRÄSSLIN Frankfurt — BARIL Cluj — BARÓ São Paulo — BARRO Buenos Aires — BENDANA PINEL Paris — BOMBON PROJECTS Barcelona — BRUNO MÚRIAS Lisbon — CAR DRDE Bologna — CARLIER | GEBAUER Berlin — CARMEN ARAUJO Caracas — CARRERAS MUGICA Bilbao — CASA TRIÂNGULO São Paulo — — CASADO SANTAPAU Madrid — CASAS RIEGNER Bogota — CAVALO Rio de Janeiro — CAYÓN Madrid — CECILIA DE TORRES LTD New York — CHANTAL CROUSEL Paris — CHERT LÜDDE Berlin — CLIMA Milan — COPPERFIELD London — CRISIS Lima — CRISTINA GUERRA Lisbon — CRONE Vienna — DANIEL FARIA Toronto — DEL INFINITO Buenos Aires — DEL PASEO Lima — DENISE RENÉ Paris — DÜRST BRITT & MAYHEW The Hague — DVIR Tel Aviv — EASTWARDS PROSPECTUS Bucharest — EDWARD TYLER NAHEM New York — EL APARTAMENTO Havana — — ELBA BENÍTEZ Madrid — ELVIRA GONZÁLEZ Madrid — EMBAJADA San Juan — ESPACIO MÍNIMO Madrid — ESPACIO VALVERDE Madrid — ESPAI TACTEL Valencia — ESPAIVISOR Valencia — ESTHER SCHIPPER Berlin — ETHALL Barcelona — F2 GALERIA Madrid — FEDERICA SCHIAVO Milan — FERNÁNDEZ - BRASO Madrid — FILOMENA SOARES Lisbon — FORMATOCOMODO Madrid — FORSBLOM Helsinki — FORTES D'ALOIA & GABRIEL São Paulo — FORUM Lima — FRANCISCO FINO Lisbon — GALERÍA ALEGRÍA Madrid — GALERÍA DE LAS MISIONES Montevideo — GARCÍA GALERÍA Madrid — GENTILI Florence — — GINSBERG Lima — GIORGIO PERSANO Torino — GREGOR PODNAR Berlin — GUILLERMO DE OSMA Madrid — HAUSER & WIRTH New York — HEINRICH EHRHARDT Madrid — HELGA DE ALVEAR Madrid — — HENRIQUE FARIA Buenos Aires — HENRIQUE FARIA FINE ART New York — HORRACH MOYA Palma de Mallorca — HOUSE OF EGORN Berlin — IMPAKTO Lima — INSTITUTO DE VISIÓN Bogota — IVAN Bucharest — JACKY STRENZ Frankfurt — JÉRÔME POGGI Paris — JOAN PRATS Barcelona — JOCELYN WOLFF Paris — JOCHEN HEMPEL Leipzig — JOEY RAMONE Rotterdam — JORGE MARA - LA RUCHE Buenos Aires — JOSÉ DE LA MANO Madrid — JOSÉDELAFUENTE Santander — JUAN SILIÓ Santander — — JUANA DE AIZPURU Madrid — KEWENIG Berlin — KLEMM´S Berlin — KÖNIG Berlin — KOW Berlin — KRINZINGER Vienna — KROBATH Vienna — LA ACACIA Havana — LA CAJA NEGRA Madrid — LEANDRO NAVARRO Madrid — LELONG Paris — LEON TOVAR New York — LEYENDECKER Santa Cruz de Tenerife — LMNO Brussels — LOUIS21 Palma de Mallorca — LUIS ADELANTADO Valencia — LUISA STRINA São Paulo — MADRAGOA Lisbon — MAI36 Zürich — MAISTERRAVALBUENA Madrid — MARC DOMÈNECH Barcelona — MARC STRAUS New York — MARILIA RAZUK São Paulo — MARLBOROUGH Madrid — MARTA CERVERA Madrid — MARTIN JANDA Vienna — MARUANI MERCIER Brussels — MAUBERT Paris — MAX ESTRELLA Madrid — MAYORAL Barcelona — MEESSEN DE CLERCQ Brussels — MEYER RIEGGER Berlin — MICHEL REIN Paris — MIGUEL MARCOS Barcelona — MIGUEL NABINHO Lisbon — MOISÉS PÉREZ DE ALBÉNIZ Madrid — MOLNÁR ANI Budapest — MONITOR Rome — MOR CHARPENTIER Paris — NÄCHST ST. STEPHAN ROSEMARIE SCHWARZWÄLDER Vienna — NADJA VILENNE Liege — NF / NIEVES FERNÁNDEZ Madrid — NINO MIER Los Angeles — NOGUERAS BLANCHARD Madrid — NOSCO Marseilles — NUEVEOCHENTA Bogota — NUNO CENTENO Porto — OPERATIVA Rome — P420 Bologna — P74 Ljubljana — PARAFIN London — PARQUE Mexico City — PARRA & ROMERO Madrid — PASTO Buenos Aires — PATRICIA READY Santiago de Chile — PEDRO CERA Lisbon — PELAIRES Palma de Mallorca — PETER KILCHMANN Zürich — PM8 Vigo — POLÍGRAFA OBRA GRÁFICA Barcelona — PONCE + ROBLES Madrid — PPOW New York — — PROJECTESD Barcelona — PROMETEOGALLERY DI IDA PISANI Milan — PROYECTOS ULTRAVIOLETA Guatemala — QUADRADO AZUL Porto — RAFAEL ORTIZ Seville — RAFAEL PÉREZ HERNANDO Madrid — RAFFAELLA CORTESE Milan — — REVOLVER Lima — RICHARD SALTOUN London — RODEO London — RODRÍGUEZ Poznan — ROLANDO ANSELMI Berlin — — ROLF ART Buenos Aires — ROSA SANTOS Valencia — RUTH BENZACAR Buenos Aires — SABRINA AMRANI Madrid — SÉ São Paulo — SENDA Barcelona — SINDICATO Santo Domingo — STUDIO TRISORIO Naples — T20 Murcia — TAIK PERSONS Berlin — TATJANA PIETERS Gent — THADDAEUS ROPAC Paris — THE GOMA Madrid — THE RYDER London — THOMAS BRAMBILLA Bergamo — THOMAS SCHULTE Berlin — TIM VAN LAERE Antwerp — TIMOTHY TAYLOR London — TIZIANA DI CARO Naples — TRAVESÍA CUATRO Madrid — TWIN GALLERY Madrid — VAN DOREN WAXTER New York — VERA CORTÊS Lisbon — VERMELHO São Paulo — WALDEN Buenos Aires — WILDE Basel — — WU Lima — ZAK BRANICKA Berlin — General Programme — Dialogues — Opening — Perú

Reach higher artreview.com/subscribe

104

ArtReview

Editorial

Publishing

Advertising

Production & Circulation

Editor-in-Chief Mark Rappolt

Associate Publisher Moky May mokymay@artreview.com

uk, Ireland and Australasia Jenny Rushton jennyrushton@artreview.com

Associate Publisher Allen Fisher allenfisher@artreview.com

Benelux, France, Southern Europe and Latin America Moky May mokymay@artreview.com

Production Manager Alex Wheelhouse production@artreview.com

Editor David Terrien Editor (International) Oliver Basciano Senior Editor J.J. Charlesworth Editor, ArtReview Asia Aimee Lin Associate Editors Ben Eastham Martin Herbert Sam Korman Jonathan T.D. Neil

Finance Finance Director Lynn Woodward lynnwoodward@artreview.com Financial Controller Errol Kennedy-Smith errolkennedysmith@artreview.com

Assistant Editor Louise Darblay Editorial Assistant Fi Churchman

Northern and Eastern Europe Francesca von Zedtwitz-Arnim francesca@artreview.com North America and Africa Debbie Hotz debbiehotz@artreview.com Asia Fan Ni fanni@artreview.com Fashion and Luxury Natalia Gandurina nataliagandurina@artreview.com

Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn Brian Dillon Chris Fite-Wassilak Maria Lind Joshua Mack Laura McLean-Ferris Chris Sharp

Distribution Consultant Adam Long adam.ican@btinternet.com Subscriptions To subscribe online, visit artreview.com/subscribe ArtReview Subscriptions Warners Group Publications The Maltings, West Street Bourne, Lincolnshire pe10 9ph t 44 (0)1778 392038 e art.review@warnersgroup.co.uk ArtReview Ltd ArtReview is published by ArtReview Ltd 1 Honduras Street London ec1y oth t 44 (0)20 7490 8138 Chairman Dennis Hotz

Design

Managing Director Debbie Hotz

Art Direction John Morgan studio Designer Isabel Duarte office@artreview.com

ArtReview is printed by Micropress Printers Ltd. Reprographics by phmedia. Copyright of all editorial content in the uk and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview (issn No: 1745-9303, usps No: 021-034) is published monthly except in the months of February, July and August by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London ec1y oth, England, United Kingdom. The us annual subscription price is $64. Airfreight and mailing in the usa by Worldnet Shipping Inc, 156–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, ny 11434, usa. Periodicals postage paid at Jamaica ny 11431. us postmaster: Send address changes to ArtReview, Worldnet Shipping Inc, 156–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, ny 11434, usa

Art and photo credits on the cover Zoe Leonard, Crossing the Equator, 2016, one of five pigment prints, 22 × 27 cm each. © the artist. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, and Hauser & Wirth

Text credits

Words on the spine and on pages 17, 41, 69 and 79 are from Elias Canetti, The Voices of Marrakesh, 1982 (Die Stimmen von Marrakesch, 1967)

on page 101 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

December 2018

105

Last Words December 2018

Nighttime panorama looking north across Pakistan’s Indus River valley, where the border between Pakistan and India is lit by security lights. Courtesy nasa / Earth Observatory

‘So much for the order of things,’ was the pithy phrase used, 60-or-so pages ago, to summarise the difficulty in categorising the work of Katharina Grosse. The phrase alludes – as anyone who, like ArtReview, enjoys pretending that they have a grasp on Continental philosophy right up to the point they find themselves in a public discussion with someone who has a grasp on Continental philosophy will know – to Michel Foucault, and his challenge to the assumption that truth exists independently of context. ArtReview doesn’t want to get into the details here, for its own sake, but it’s unlikely that anyone in the era of fake news will need convincing, regardless of their intellectual pretensions, that Foucault opened up a whole can of worms. Indeed, it’s easy to read that challenge as opening the door to the cynicism currently poisoning the global political discourse. If truth is always qualified by perspective, then it’s better simply to appeal to the prejudices of those you want on your side, right? Power is more easily gained by playing on people’s basic emotional impulses than by appealing to their reason. Artists, too, might be advised to pander to the predilections of their audiences, to give them what they want and to affirm what they already believe, on a ‘deeper’ and it is presumed hardwired level, to be true. And, no doubt, there’s plenty of that going on. But those convictions, it seems to ArtReview, are precisely the forms of knowledge that it is necessary right now to interrogate. To be willing to test our basic assumptions is not to surrender to cynicism but to take the first steps towards resisting it. Hoping to undermine the stereotypes attached to the landscape and people around the us–Mexico border, Zoe Leonard creates images that are not only about seeing things ‘from the other side’ but which also make clear that every act of seeing is constructed. By reproducing the negative space beyond the edge of the film, Leonard, like Magritte, takes pains

106

to remind the viewer that this is not a landscape. It is a landscape reimagined and retold through a camera. Edward Said drew attention to such ‘imagined geographies’ when, drawing on Foucault, he described the mechanisms of identity formation (for example that Europe was forced to invent Asia in order to define itself against it). Benedict Anderson developed this insight to describe how nations were ‘imagined communities’ made possible, in large part, by the advent of print capitalism and the images that it produces. Nations invented themselves through images – stereotypes – with which its citizens were encouraged to identify. To recognise that nations are constructs, and relatively modern ones at that, isn’t to deny that they ‘exist’ or to pass judgment on those who feel that they belong to them. But it does diminish the ease with which those feelings can be manipulated. But just go back there a minute, ArtReview hears you saying, to the bit about print capitalism. Isn’t ArtReview a product of the same? Which is a question ArtReview hadn’t, it confesses, anticipated when it began writing this column. The answer is yes, it supposes. But it will counter by saying that it is committed to the publication of images and ideas that, like Leonard’s, complicate received wisdoms. As Leonard forces us to look again at geographies that we imagine we know, so Magali Reus renders the most familiar objects strange, while Rachel Rose alerts us to how our experience of the world is constructed through our senses. And here we might point out that the French title of Foucault’s 1966 essay is ‘Mots et choses’, words and things. It is through words and things that the dominant stories about people, nations and history are constructed, but it is also through the creative production of words and things that they can be contested, retold and reinvented. Which is something, perhaps, to believe in.

ArtReview

Palexpo / 31.01-03.02.2019 / artgeneve.ch

Grimaldi Forum Monaco / 26-28.04.2019 / artmontecarlo.ch