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ALEXANDRE DA CUNHA REAL [07.04 - 23.05.15]
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Rua da Consolação 3358 Jardins São Paulo SP 01416 – 000 Brazil + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com facebook.com/mendeswood @mendeswooddm R. Marco Aurélio, 311 Vila Romana São Paulo SP 05048 – 000 Brazil
Daniel Steegmann Mangrané 2015 Triennial, New Museum, New York Sonia Gomes, Runo Lagomarsino, Paulo Nazareth 56 Biennale di Venezia
Institutional Solo Exhibitions Lucas Arruda Pivô, São Paulo Neil Beloufa Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin Mariana Castillo Deball Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca Michael Dean De Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam Extra City Kunsthal, Antwerp Runo Lagomarsino Malmö Konsthall Leticia Ramos CAPC Musée d’art Conteporain de Bordeaux :52 %LHQQDOH :URFãDZ
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Against Onanism Now, ArtReview knows that there are some of you who will say that the reason there’s a Japanese man on the cover of an issue that is loosely themed around artists exhibiting in Germany this month has more to do with the fact that it’s been hanging out a bit too much with its sibling publication ArtReview Asia recently than the fact that artlovers will be descending on various parts of the Bundesrepublik for art fairs (Cologne) or gallery weekends (Berlin) in the very near future. Everyone knows what a bad influence ArtReview Asia is once it’s stuffed ArtReview with a couple of servings of put chai ko and waited for the sugar rush that follows. Err… ok, yes, ArtReview has been spending a bit of time in Hong Kong… and yes, it has enjoyed the odd delicately sweetened sticky rice pudding along the way… What’s that you say? Ah… yes, it has also been hanging out a little with some of the ‘playas’ on the Tokyo artscene on their home turf… but that’s not what’s important here. This issue is not some sort of celebration of the range of ethnic and cultural diversity that contemporary art affords Europe’s major art centres. (After all, ArtReview’s hq is located in the country of Nigel Farage’s populist, rightwing, scaremongering immigration-phobic uk Independence Party – and ArtReview’s publisher is always insisting that it keep one, or preferably both eyes on popular trends and ‘what the people want’, while at the same time muttering things about trying to ‘attract’ new readers and ‘pump up the volume’ of newsstand sales – hey, if you are reading this at a newsstand, why not actually buy it, and perhaps a spare copy too, just for the sake of ArtReview’s poor abused eardrums.) But enough about ArtReview, let’s get back to the real issues… Ha, ha, ha, only joking, what else would ArtReview use an editorial to talk about apart from itself? So, back to the subject of ArtReview’s cover. It’s not about trying to suggest that contemporary art is a form of communication that erases all cultural boundaries. Nor is it about trying to place an artist in a framework that trumpets the benefits of cultural exchange or the warm embrace of contemporary art’s traditional centres and its perceived peripheries in one big naked, indistinguishable fleshy mass of linked limbs, leaking fluids and err… other things.
‘Boom Boom’
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Ultimately, this issue is about the particularity of certain bodies of work. You see, ArtReview was interested in the fact that most of the artists it’s been thinking about this past month produce work that comes about as the result of specific responses to particular contexts. More than that, it wanted this issue to look at a range of artists who are producing work that is inspired by, plays with or questions the world around them: whether it’s Koki Tanaka’s responses to Japanese art history and the social consequences of the Fukushima disaster; Renzo Martens’s wilfully problematic mirroring of the exploitation of people and resources in the Congo and related institutional mechanisms within contemporary art; Gregor Schneider’s and Renata Lucas’s very different manipulations of an audience through an environment and its connections to social and political histories; or Ibrahim El-Salahi’s responses to Sudan’s dictatorial regimes, art doesn’t just pop out of nowhere and plonk itself on the walls of a white cube. Rather, at its best (and yes, this is ArtReview’s subjective opinion rather than a matter of fact, although if anyone wants to debate that they are more than welcome to contact its Twitter flunky via @artreview_), art presents itself on its own terms and in the context of the particular circumstances that inspired it in the first place. So this issue is about art that doesn’t just sit there, but by having itself actively engaged with a subject matter, it actively engages an audience, even if, in the case of some of the artists ArtReview is featuring, this happens whether that audience likes it or not. But, hey, most of the pleasurable things in life involve some degree of pain (at least that’s what the scantily clad girl who was just wandering out of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Hong Kong at 2.30 am promised ArtReview should it wish to take her up to its room as it was wandering in). Of course lying behind all this is a more general concern, one that often haunts ArtReview after it visits an exhibition, about the question of what art does (just as ArtReview was rather worried about what the girl who propositioned it at the Mandarin did) in the world. And the belief that one of the reasons that people continue to make all this art is that the answer is that it might always do more. And what ArtReview is really interested in is what that ‘more’ might be. ArtReview
‘Pop pop’
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James Siena New Sculpture
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ArtReview vol 67 no 3 April 2015
Art Previewed 31
Previews by Martin Herbert 33
Jean Baudrillard on Chinese art depicting Mao ironically Interview by Matthew Collings 58
Points of View by Laura Oldfield Ford, J. J. Charlesworth, Maria Lind, Sam Jacob, Laura McLean-Ferris, Mike Watson, Lucas Ospina, Jonathan Grossmalerman & Karen Archey 43
Jessica Morgan Interview by Tom Eccles 62
page 36 Peter Land, Boy & Girl, 2012. Photo: Erich Malther. Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen
April 2015
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Art Featured 71
Koki Tanaka by Hou Hanru 72
Renata Lucas by Oliver Basciano 88
Gregor Schneider by Ory Dessau 80
Africa: Art in Context Ibrahim El-Salahi Interview by Mark Rappolt 95
Renzo Martens by J.J. Charlesworth 84
page 80 Gregor Schneider, Keller, Haus u r, Rheydt, 1985–. Courtesy the artist/vg-Bild Kunst, Bonn
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ArtReview
FLOWERS FOR POUL
A DIALOGUE BETWEEN WORKS BY CONTEMPORARY ARTISTS AND POUL GERNES
APRIL 23 — JUNE 20 2015
ART COLOGNE APRIL 16–19 / MARKET ART FAIR APRIL 17–19
W W W.BJERGGA ARD.COM
Art Reviewed 101
Charles Atlas, by Laura McLean-Ferris Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook, by David Everitt Howe Carlos Bunga and Olivier Mosset, by Ed Schad Michael Parker, by Andrew Berardini Amilcar de Castro, by Claire Rigby La Llamada del Dios Extraño, by Gabriela Jauregui Gary Carsley, by Sherman Sam Come to [what] end?, by Robert Barry
exhibitions 102 Adventures of the Black Square, by Oliver Basciano Koen van den Broek, by Sam Steverlynck Mathieu Mercier, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Et in Libertalia Ego: A Project by Mathieu Briand, by Christopher Mooney Darren Almond, by Mark Prince Ákos Birkás, by John Quin Angelo Plessas, by Michelangelo Corsaro Sanja Iveković, Franco Vaccari, by Barbara Casavecchia Ana Prada, by Keith Patrick Chromophobia, by Robert Barry Daniel Silver, by Pavel Pyś History Is Now: 7 Artists Take On Britain, by Helen Sumpter Nil Yalter, by Gabriel Coxhead Marlie Mul, by Sean Ashton green postcard, by J.J. Charlesworth Luis Camnitzer, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Ryan McNamara, by Brienne Walsh Lucy Skaer, by David Everitt Howe Alec Soth, by Siona Wilson
books 130 Leonora: A Novel, by Elena Poniatowska Room 225-6, by Karsten Schubert The Long March of Pop: Art, Music and Design 1930–1995, by Thomas Crow Facing the Music, a project by Allan Sekula, edited by Edward Dimendberg
page 107 Darren Almond, Fullmoon@Theodul Pass, 2014, c-print, 180 × 180 cm. Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
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the strip 134 off the record 138
20/21 Design Day & Evening Sale Paris . 19 May 2015
Viewing 15–16, 18–19 May 9, avenue Matignon, Paris 8e France
CARLO MOLLINO (1905–1973)
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BERNAR VENET 03.21.2015-05.24.2015
OPENING OF THE EXHIBITION BERNAR VENET AND THE INAUGURATION OF GALERIE BERNARD CEYSSON’S NEW SPACE
GALERIE BERNARD CEYSSON WANDHAFF / WINDHOF 1 3 - 1 5 R U E D ’ A R L O N W A N D H A F F / W I N D H O F, L - 8 3 9 9 K O E R I C H , L U X E M B O U R G | w w w . b e r n a r d c e y s s o n . c o m
Art Previewed
A plaintive “eem”, with alarm note “whit-whit”
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Simon Periton: Celestial Agriculture
Simon Periton, design for new work, 2015
28 March - 17 May 2015
Roche Court East Winterslow Salisbury, Wilts SP5 1BG
T +44 (0) 1980 862244 F +44 (0) 1980 862447 nac@sculpture.uk.com www.sculpture.uk.com
NewArtCentre.
Previewed William Pope.L Geffen Contemporary at moca, Los Angeles through 28 June Daniel Steegmann Mangrané Esther Schipper, Berlin 13 April – 30 May Liz Larner Modern Institute, Glasgow through 23 May
kriwet Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles 2 April – 3 May
Cathy Wilkes Tate Liverpool through 31 May
Frances Stark, Greengrassi, London 30 April – 20 June
Athanasios Argianas On Stellar Rays, New York 2 April – 3 May
Richard Prince Blum & Poe, Tokyo 3 April – 30 May
Jan Fabre mukha, Antwerp 24 April – 26 July
Peter Land Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen 24 April – 6 June
5 Frances Stark, Untitled, 2014, collage on paper, 76 × 56 cm. Photo: Marcus Leith. Courtesy Greengrassi, London
April 2015
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1 William Pope.L has crawled the length of Manhattan’s Broadway, chained himself to a Chase bank via a length of Italian sausage while wearing a skirt made of dollar bills, and sauced and eaten The Wall Street Journal before vomiting it up again. As that work suggests, the pivotal American performance/body artist has long refused to ingest the narrative put forward by the powers that be. And in the wake of the Eric Garner case in particular – see Pope.L’s 2008 performance of self-asphyxiating via white plastic bag, which graced the cover of another art magazine recently – his moca show couldn’t be timelier. His largest retrospective thus far convokes several large-scale installations, including Trinket (2008/15), a 15 by 6 metre bespoke American flag blown by industrial fans and appearing, we’re told,
to fray at the edges in ‘a potent metaphor for the clear overlaps with object-oriented philosthe rigours and complexities of democratic ophy, Steegmann Mangrané nests more individengagement and participation’. ualistic thinking about humans, nature and Segueing into less threatening headsystems into his work and is too subtle an artist coverings: viewers at the New Museum Triennial to be boxed within a trend; his wobbly, willowy, can currently don an Oculus Rift headset that linear sculptures, in particular, engage satisfyingly without exegesis. transports them into Brazil’s Mata Atlântica Wobbly linearity is one of Liz Larner’s 2 rainforest, courtesy of Daniel Steegmann 3 Mangrané. Forests have been a locus for the Riomodes too, though she’s worked in a wild variety based Catalan artist’s animist perspective for of ways over the last few decades. She often pulls a while now, and the title of his show for Esther together shapes, textures and colour schemes Schipper, Spiral Forest, suggests they remain so. that don’t seem like natural bedfellows, leading It also signposts his yen for geometry, previously the brain to forge new synaptic connections to expressed via all kinds of reworked and distendcountenance them. Some of the American artist’s ed grids and nature/culture interfaces, as in linear sculptures look like multicoloured scribPhasmides (2012), his video wherein a stick insect, bles in space – like a kid doodling an Anthony emblem of nonhuman agency, traverses geoCaro with every colour in the pack, perhaps. Other works have been made from false eyelashes, metric obstacles in his studio space. Despite
1 William Pope.L, Trinket, 2008 (installation view, Exhibition Hall of the Municipal Auditorium, Kansas City), mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: e.g. Shempf. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York
2 Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, scanning process for Phantom (Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name), 2015, virtual reality environment. Photo © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin
3 Liz Larner, ii (inflexion), 2014, ceramic, epoxy, pigment, 47 × 86 × 27 cm. Photo: Joshua White. Courtesy the artist, Regen Projects, Los Angeles and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow
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4 kriwet, Text-Dia, 1970, silkscreen print on PVC, 336 × 340 cm.Photo: bq , Berlin. Courtesy Cherry and Martin, Los Angeles and bq , Berlin
6 Richard Prince, Untitled (portrait), 2014, inkjet on canvas, 167 × 124 cm. ©Richard Prince. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe
still others from aircraft cables. Fairly consistent, rendered as a video using computer-generated moving field of information, which is perhaps nevertheless, is a gleefully associativity, Larner speech and comically basic avatar-modelling. why his work has ranged widely around that Self-consciousness is the la artist’s main proceeding from formalism as if testing how field, from club design to radio texts and films material, which she’s continuing to explore many thoughts and issues it might, heretically, about the first Apollo landings, happenings, ‘poem paintings’ and books without capitalisathrough her primary medium, drawing and lead to. The field is wide open for this show, in tion or punctuation. In his first West Coast show, collage, sometimes edging into abstract poetics: other words – what we saw last were wall-based, when people talk about the recent importation the gallery has the unenviable task of parsing glowing ceramic lozenges, thoroughly Larner of the literary, the overflowing textual, into that fizzing sprawl, though the chaos – the travin barely recalling her earlier work at all. Few postwar artists have been as expansive, ersal of fragments – is its own painful-pleasurable contemporary art, Stark was there very early 4 ambitious yet underrecognised as kriwet, reward, a percolating picture of the overheated and is likely to still be there in this, her fifth show with Greengrassi. whose career in early-1960s Dusseldorf found informational world. Richard Prince’s Instagram-themed him emerging from concrete poetry and transSome artists, of course, see technology less 6 lating cybernetics into art (on the basis, as Cherry as a stressor than an opportunity – certainly that’s artworks, a Jerry Saltz review suggested recently, 5 the case with Frances Stark, whose modern and Martin notes, that ‘art is information and are ‘genius trolling’, irritating some by appearing classic My Best Thing (2011), a feature-length video, utterly easy, sexist, celebratory of banality and information is art’), with a particular focus on found her probing the world of online flirting tossed-off: big, low-res, pixelated prints enlarging the effects of overstimulation. It’s taken until the source and revealing its technical shortvia an extended, sometimes filthy, sometimes recently for the world to catch up with him. comings, these works gave Peter Schjeldahl, as he tender conversation with an Italian stranger, For the German artist, reality is a continuous
April 2015
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8 Cathy Wilkes, Untitled, 2011, oil on canvas, 18 × 25 cm. Photo: Tom Little. Courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow, The Henry L. Hillman Fund, Carnegie Museum of Art
7 Peter Land, Boy & Girl, 2012. Photo: Erich Malther. Courtesy Galleri Nicolai Wallner
wrote, something resembling ‘a wish to be dead’. 7 Historically, many of Peter Land’s artworks to show at Nicolai Wallner, we’d rather not haven’t been complete without a hitch. Ahead Their irritant value is high, certainly. As is the spoil the surprise. of the curve of art-as-slapstick (though a little One might not necessarily think of Cathy unassuming complexity of the comments, which 8 behind that of Bas Jan Ader), the Danish artist Wilkes as a neo-surrealist, but that’s seemingly Prince – playing some sort of ambiguous hipster dirty old man – both takes part in and reprohas, in his films from the mid-1990s onwards, how Tate Liverpool is presenting her, exhibduces. As, too, is the variety of the source feeds, fallen down a flight of stairs and off a stepladder, iting a decade’s worth of the Irish artist’s work played the cello naked, climbed into a boat alongside shows by Leonora Carrington which ranges from those of selfie-posting teen girls to those of Prince’s artist friends. Not long and shot a hole in it and sat there sinking, filmed and György Kepes in a season entitled Surreal Landscapes. It makes some sense. Wilkes’s ago he was suspended from Instagram for posting and drawn himself drunk, and offered whiskey his notorious 1983 image of a nude Brooke Shields, to gallery visitors. More recently, he’s focused tableaux of mannequins and sketchy environSpiritual America. More recently, he got in trouble ments, which she has said are populated by on drawings and paintings that suggest creepy again when Gagosian exhibited one of his Instaboth the living and the dead, have the mixture children’s book illustration, and strange realist sculptures featuring, say, people in bed with of specificity and incomprehensibility that gram pictures, featuring an image – this one of a Rastafarian, in a strange echo of his feud with characterises first-wave Surrealism. Bits enormously distended limbs trailing on the of biblical narrative, for example, intertwine photographer Patrick Cariou – uploaded without floor. Land, who’s had an up-and-down career, seems genuinely touched by mayhem and, one with workaday items such as baby buggies accreditation/permission, and the photographer in question sent a cease-and-desist. Let’s see and apricot jam, toy rabbits and electric kettles, suspects, gives about as much of a fuck as Prince if this show can somehow go off without a hitch. while Wilkes installations in turn intersect does. Even if we did know what he was going
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ArtReview
VITALY KOMAR
ALLEGORIES OF JUSTICE
MARCH 28 - MAY 2 RONALD FELDMAN FINE ARTS NEW YORK WWW.FELDMANGALLERY.COM BROKEN BALANCE, 2010-15, TEMPERA ON CARDBOARD, 40 X 30 INCHES
with her abstract paintings. Her art sits, in fact, strangely close to the edge: if she didn’t have a stated interest in intentionality per se, in refusing responsibility for readings (and, of course, if she didn’t have an art-school background), her work could fit into the canon of outsider art. As it is, she’s way inside; but nevertheless the work retains its power to perplex. Athanasios Argianas started out with 9 a recognisable format, one that he sometimes still uses, while evolving it: his Song Machines, elegantly curving linear sculptures, now strung with thin lengths of brass, engraved with lyric- 10 al phrases. These suggest analogues for music that unfolds in space, leaving the viewer to move along the object, read and, perhaps, inwardly hear something. The Greek artist, who lives between London and Athens, has long made work that revolves around types of translation
and situational adaptation (the latter, of course, particularly an issue in his unsettled homeland), perched midway between sound and space, language and object. Here, alongside several linear sculptures, poetic lines concerning colour and bodies will be etched onto finger cymbals. If neither of the latter will be physically present, they become present in thought: the realm of sculpture, within Argianas’s pointedly open-ended programme, seemingly extends inside one’s mind. We began with performance and end with it – specifically that of Jan Fabre, who may not have crawled the length of Broadway but did, for three days in 1980, have himself locked in a room, in which the now-veteran Belgian artist spent his time drawing on things with Bic pens. Indeed, deep-blue Bic hatching is one of his artistic signatures, alongside his fascination
with beetles, which he has used to encrust various surfaces. (And one can discern parallels between his relentless line-making and his application of countless bugs’ wings.) He’s made drawings with his own blood, produced 24-hour endurance theatre events and claims everything he does is related somehow to metamorphosis and the human body – even, one would guess, the scarabs, which have shown great capacity for adaptation over millennia. At mukha, expect ‘a veritable sea’ of glass-topped tables to feature a huge diversity of mementoes from his performances between 1976 and 2013, and expect it to look gratifyingly off-beam, perhaps not surprisingly given Fabre’s asserting, a few years ago, that ‘an artist should not think about things that are fashionable or actual at the moment. He should simply create.’ Word. Martin Herbert
9 Athanasios Argianas, Song Machine (A Chair For Your Memory) series, (vs 3 4 and 5 ), 2015 (installation view), steel, text engraved on brass. Photo: Nick Koustenis. Courtesy On Stellar Rays and the artist
10 Marina Abramović, Virgin Warrior 1, Pietà (with Jan Fabre), 2005. Courtesy & collection Arsfutura-Serge Le Borgne, Paris. © the artist / vegap, Madrid.
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ArtReview
Future Greats 2015 Every March, in a feature made possible by the support of EFG International, ArtReview invites a panel of artists, critics and curators each to select an artist they think people should be looking out for in the coming year. Not necessarily a young artist, or anything that might come under the heading ‘emerging’; rather someone whose work is worth following but who is less well known to an international audience. This year, that feature has been extended in a series of additional profiles, or introductions, as ArtReview likes to call them, throughout the coming months.
Unsaid 26, 2014 (installation view, Space In Between, London, 2015), concrete and paper, 10 × 10 × 10 cm
Practitioners of the craft of private banking efginternational.com
Lucas Simões selected by ArtReview
Empty 04, 2014 (installation view, Space In Between, London, 2015), concrete and paper, 34 × 28 × 5 cm both images Courtesy the artist and Galeria Emma Thomas, São Paulo
For an artist living in a city where the legacy of Modernism is ever present, São Paulo-based Lucas Simões’s works are not just formal adventures, testing and juxtaposing materials – though this is important – they also question our relationship to material outside the gallery, in the everyday built environment, asking: are we in control of what we have constructed or does it control us? Within a few hours of the opening to Simões’s exhibition at London’s Space In Between in March this year the cracks had already begun to appear in the show’s title work, Perpetual Instability (2015). The thin layer of concrete almost covering the entire gallery floor was splintering under the weight of the private view crowd. The damage was of course intentional. Simões, whose work poetically considers ideas of architectural voids, negative space and gravity, had first laid an underlay of foam, subsequently covering this with poured cement and aggregate.
With no foundational support, each new step on the concrete caused another hairline rupture and by the end of the evening it seemed an earthquake had taken hold of the once impassive expanse of grey. Perpetual Instability is one the artist’s biggest works to date. More typical are Simões’s maquettelike sculptures. Akin to designs for impossible monuments, they typically combine geometric concrete forms with stacks of paper. In Unsaid 25 (2014) for example, two concrete blocks, 11 cm in height and each functioning like a square bracket, hold a neat pile of paper in place between them; the softer material filling the gap between the harder. In the larger 34 × 28 cm Empty 04 (2014) a triangular void is created at the centre of another concrete block; a folded swathe of paper, secured at the top, hangs pendulum loose. These may be small-scale feats of engineering but they are engineering at its most beautiful.
April 2015
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Points of View
London 2015 – conjuration of empty apartments – spectral dromes; from Qatari enclaves in the Olympic Park to vitric apparitions in Nine Elms, they emerge across the city as glowing husks. Networks of property developments create zones of control, landscapes pulsing with symbolism and intent. Squares and plazas shimmer in the haze of international finance, money sparkling in water features, private cinemas, rooftop gardens. The signs are everywhere – you hear the faint crackling of power, notice where it lies… encoded, encrypted… not concentrated in the City of London or Canary Wharf, but dispersed, iridescent in Italianate gardens, chequerboard paving, columns and neoclassical facades… We search for thresholds, tissuelike walls – as public space is enclosed, so protest shifts into the realm of the private – it regains potency by interrupting and rerouting channels of commerce and consumption. We occupy by haunting. aylesbury estate // carpenters road // guinness trust Vast estates like Ferrier, Trowbridge, Aylesbury and Heygate rose in the embers of postwar consensus. These abandoned sites are reliquaries, walls are imbued with skeins of memory. Landings and stairwells are the crystallised fragments of another time. Spectral channels wait to be activated – militancy, the commons – subterranean potentials on the brink of realisation. February 2015, occupation erupting from a Saturday afternoon housing demo, two shimmering threads, one spooling from the New Era estate in Hoxton, the other from the Aylesbury Estate in Elephant & Castle. The planned convergence point is the mayor’s office, conveniently close to that other contested site, One Tower Bridge. The march splinters, shards piercing the side streets of Southwark, breaking open the Sitex walls and barriers of the Aylesbury; in that panicked moment of spontaneous occupation, steel-encased flats are activated.
spectral developments – haunted schemes A new columnist joins our happy crew bringing with her a vision of Saturday afternoon housing demos taking place amid the haze of international finance, albeit with a hint of mandarin, patchouli, vanilla and the chemical stink of a burning warehouse. logophiles – watch out for a new definition of ‘decanting’ or
occupation as a way of life by
Laura Oldfield Ford, artist and author of Savage Messiah all images Courtesy the artist
April 2015
Gate kicked in, surge into empty buildings, – a legion of plattenbau blocks connected by aerial walkways – the fabric of the architecture is charged with desire, flats become prismatic, avenues of rose and amber. Notes of mandarin, patchouli, vanilla. Glittering tableaux rising from incense burners – cigarette smoke… woodsmoke, chemical stink of burning warehouse. Waxy police, out of condition, can’t keep up. Boys in tracksuits running in and out. Ground shifting, sub-bass tremors… juggernaut sound system… the effect is petrifying, a total reordering of space… shuddering, low-end pileup. carpenters road, e15, southwest of Stratford City, marooned in the hangover of 2012. Maisonettes form a transient zone – a crucible, proliferation of new occupations cascading from multistorey point-blocks. Residents were told by Newham Council they’d be ‘decanted’ to ailing estates in Birmingham and Manchester. The destruction, the apocalypse, has happened… social housing destroyed in the 1, 2 and 3 zones – councils ‘gutting’ estates – smashing up plumbing, driving through walls, puncturing ceilings with the zeal of the idf.
Decanting = class cleansing – but with disappearance comes haunting. The tactic of occupying estates is remembered, reactivated. During the 1980s and 90s, vast estates were deliberately run down in a Thatcherite drive to malign the commons. Groves of brutalist blocks like the North Peckham and Stamford Hill estates became militant sites where architectural détournement was deployed as a tactic.
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All the rooms spilling out, interconnected, strings of coloured lights, stacks of tyres. Alcoves replicating, yards leading to lost parks and meadows. Empty council blocks are important sites for occupation, they are concrete reminders of what we have lost, but surely we need to reroute the libidinal channel of capitalism, to occupy the luxury dromes, not just the gutted and dilapidated estates. We need to take the empty towers bought off-plan in overseas auctions, be delirious in acts of audacity, deflect the cascades of psychic platitudes. It’s what you’ve been waiting for, what you always dreamed of. Carries hedonism at its heart, seizes the attention. After a decade of sustained social cleansing, inner London is a gated matrix – pages of a-z sinking into property empires in China, Malaysia, the Middle East. In the 3 and 4 zones, places become contingent, they unravel under a confusion of ownership, the interstices between boundaries become sites of conflict, entropy and confusion. Architecture becomes nomadic, there are encounters, the splintering of ideologies, beliefs and desires. Crystallised fragments scuttle back to the central zones – we lace them together, necklaces of bruising gems glistening in loading bays, containers and service tunnels. Portals, soft points – the porosity of the suburbs seeping back in. On zero-hours contracts in the service sector, on construction sites, in airports and shopping malls – we hold the keys.
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On construction sites, in Travelodges , we succumb to the pleasure of power – a sudden cataclysmic inversion – spooked markets, anxious investors – we need to recognise ourselves as articulate, nomadic, on the brink of power.
inside//outside recoded … It is only by visualising ourselves inside and outside simultaneously that we can prepare for occupation, for taking a city that has been colonised. Our strategies should have more in common with perfume adverts than articles in Socialist Worker – promises of elevation, spellbinding intoxication, infatuation and mad love are the tropes we should to collapse into. Uninhabited acres of ‘investment opportunities’, with their bespoke kitchens, designer bathrooms, underfloor heating, are the zones we should occupy. Security guards paid to sit around in kiosks of boredom are strategically placed – Berkeley, Ballymore, Barratt, Lend Lease, St Modwen.
IMAGINE AN ORGANISED PRECARIAT FIRING ROUNDS OF CLASS HATE____
ArtReview
one commercial street, echo of Ballard’s High-Rise – economic apartheid, two doors, marble-clad lobby at front, bin yard at back – 2015 promotional video pans around American Psycho-style, high above the antagonisms of the city. Every week the building is vexed by a voluble, aggressive presence, the burning of effigies, the assault on image. Lobby is rushed, concierge submerged in a melee of class anger. Hear the tannoy. The tension, palpable in the alleyways, feel it rising, hallucinogenic hate….
Pressure on investors, negative ambience… a detrimental and aggravating presence… We should appropriate Bateman, the suave yuppie, with his smooth tan and Savile Row suit – we should cloak ourselves in haute couture, the most exquisite scents and become an elegant, ruinous presence.
one tower bridge/// Private rooftop gardens commanding spectacular views… an extraordinary opportunity. Its reconfiguration, its occupation, should emerge as a virulent strain under the skin of the development. We need to mentally prepare ourselves for taking over these luxury dromes. We need to think how we will repurpose them…
vauxhall – nine elms – battersea power station Inversion, sleight of hand, projection… Mass building of council housing in the uk would solve the housing crisis – it would end the speculative free-for-all that is the uk property market. Imagine the boldness and intoxication of European apartment blocks, lawns and orchards, the swoop and magnificence of Lubetkin’s Clerkenwell.
We should visualise empty apartments as labyrinthine palaces with vast dining halls, opulent bars, hexagonal dance floors, prismatic walls of stained glass… We need to think of occupation as not just strategy but new mode of living – a return to collectivity – not to create ‘pockets of resistance’ but to hijack libidinal channels… not to disavow luxury lifestyle but to reject deleterious individualism, neoliberal self-interest.
The desire for more is there… the yearning for transcendence. This isn’t enough – we’re not getting what we want. A radical reordering, the scrambling intoxication of love. You feel the exquisite rush of anticipation… Chalk marks on walls, staircases and landings… Saturated inscriptions, crossing, looping, overwriting. Beautiful views. Magnificent apartments. ready for immediate occupation/// -
April 2015
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This past January, Tate finally divulged the figures of its sponsorship deal with oil giant bp, having lost its appeal of an information tribunal ruling from the previous December. That followed a long campaign by anti-oil protesters against bp’s sponsorship of Tate and other big uk arts institutions. Over 17 years, from 1990 to 2006, as it turned out, bp handed over £3.8m, or on average £224,000 a year, in its sponsorship deal with Tate. Small beer, declared protesters such as Liberate Tate and Platform, who argued that with that kind of sugar daddy, Tate could surely forego the odd quartermillion, compared with the ethical cost of being associated with a big, bad, carbon-spewing, oilspilling monster like bp. Easily enough said if you’re a protester, but as Tate’s public funding has dwindled, maybe the only scandal is that Tate isn’t asking for a lot more from such miserly corporates. After all, if you’re an anti-bp critic, trying to put a price tag on reputational whitewashing is a nonsense – there’s no ethical difference between £1,000 and £1 million – while the argument that Tate could ‘do without’ comes from those who have never had to fundraise. Tate was of course founded by private, not public philanthropy, its own sugar daddy being the, well, Victorian sugar magnate Henry Tate. Now it is funded and thought of as a ‘public’ institution. The Tate–bp campaign tracks the growing tendency to highlight the financial relationships public cultural institutions have with corporate and other private benefactors. On all kinds of divisive social and political issues, from big oil and climate change to the Israel– Palestine conflict, the involvement of sponsors and patrons deemed by campaigners as unethical is leading to calls for cultural institutions to be more ‘transparent’ about their dealings with private sponsors, and not to hand the latter the reputational credibility that comes with the ‘brand’ of the art museum or public gallery, as ‘pr whitewash’ for their possibly contentious activities in the wider world. Indeed, ‘transparency’ has become something of a motif over the last six months. As I noted last October about the anti-Israel artists’ boycott at the São Paulo Bienal, curator Charles Esche and his cocurators were quick to try to turn the campaign against Israeli Consulate funding of the Bienal into a bigger call to scrutinise the sources of their support, demanding, in their public statement, that the Bienal Foundation ‘revise their current rules of sponsorship and ensure that artists and curators agree to any support that is forthcoming for their work and that may have an impact on its content and reception’. Quoted in an article on patronage in the arts in the Financial Times shortly after, Esche reiterated that ‘transparency is essential’, while complaining that ‘so far it’s happening as a struggle rather than a protocol. It needs to become a protocol.’
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sugar, oil and small beer waylay our (clearly ravenous) critic J.J. Charlesworth as he battles the big-butsurprisingly-ungenerous beasts of corporate sponsorship and
pauses to admire the impossible heights of Scandinavian new institutionalism before continuing on his quest for a true and honest path through the thorny vale of public/private funding partnerships
Liberate Tate’s Hidden Figures, performance at Tate Modern, 2014. Photo: Martin LeSanto-Smith
ArtReview
But should transparency of patronage become an institutional ‘protocol’, simply at the insistence of those campaigners with an axe to grind? The idea of artists and curators demanding a veto on certain sponsors is, at a practical and political level a recipe for intractable disagreement, between institutions, sponsors, curators and artists. In a fantasy world maybe, every museum, every biennial, would be funded by blameless governments and exemplary corporate sponsors. But in the real world, the demand for transparency is, in part, one of the knock-on effects of the failure of alternative models of institution that thrived on public-sector funding during the last decade. It’s no coincidence that Esche should be preoccupied with the relations of patron to curator. It was he, along with a number of now-prominent curators and theorists such as Maria Lind and Nina Möntmann, who throughout the 2000s led the experiment in a network of European museums and art centres in what has come to be known as ‘New Institutionalism’ – a rethinking of the public art institution that turned it from a showcase for orthodox forms of artistic presentation into a site for socially engaged experimentation – ‘part community centre, part laboratory, part school’, as Esche put it in an interview for the journal oncurating.org last year. What finally undid institutions such as Esche’s Rooseum in Malmö, though, were the hostile interventions of politicians and the heavy cuts in public subsidy that progressively closed down the possibility of such experimental spaces. Those problems aren’t going away, and demands for ‘transparency’ are a reaction to the perceived corporatisation of large institutions, as the opportunities for artistic and curatorial practice outside ‘the market’ and the publicly funded mainstream dwindle. They reflect the frustrations of artists and curators who have come to see artistic practice as political intervention – ‘a device to install other forms of democracy than the ones we had’, as Esche put it in the same interview – while having become career-dependent on public patronage in order to do so. Demanding that big institutions conform to possibly unattianable ethical standards suggests that many artists and curators have given up on making their own spaces, their own networks, even creating their own institutions, becoming fixated instead on berating the shortcomings of the existing structures. Art, conceived as nothing more than a form of social activism, will want to fight these battles. But therein lies a serious question: does contemporary art do anything that is valuable or significant for its public, valuable or significant enough that it might be worth the inevitable conflicts and compromises of its patronage? Maybe it doesn’t. But if it doesn’t, then the only options left to curators and artists might be to abolish those institutions, or abandon them.
One of the last lines in Anton Vidokle’s new film, This Is Cosmos (2014), continues to resonate with me: if energy is truly indestructible, where did all the energy that went into the radical social and political experiment known as the Russian Revolution go? Spoken by the artist himself with an ever-so-slight trace of a Russian accent, the line is part of a complex narrative weaving together occult ideas about the cosmos as expressed in ‘cosmism’ by the nineteenthcentury Orthodox Christian philosopher Nikolai Fyodorov, with Soviet Futurism and facts about how light, including that emitted by computer screens, affects our health. Where is this energy now? Stunning imagery filmed in Kazakhstan, Siberia and Crimea, showing cemeteries full of crescents and crosses and electrical power lines on vast steppes, rivers cutting deeply through rocks and the interior of the dome of a seventeenth-century wooden church, is combined with closeups of faces from those places. The artist’s painter-cum-pilot grandfather and one of Ilya Kabakov’s characters – ‘the man who flew into space’ – are mentioned. Throughout the film there is a buzzing sound, like that which signals the presence of high-voltage electricity. People swimming in a river, two restless elephants in a zoo and a glance of architect, engineer and scientist Vladimir Shukhov’s famous 160-metre-tall Shabolovka radio tower (completed in 1922) in Moscow are offered too. Based on non-Euclidean hyperbolic geometry, this cone-shaped diagrid structure is an early example of advanced Soviet technology reaching far beyond the surface of the earth. Cosmism is the theory of universal emancipation translated into eternal life for all human beings who have ever been alive. The logic goes something like this: death is a mistake and should be overcome. If the achievement of true social equality is the goal, then eternal life must be for all. Like energy, human life should be indestructible and will always evolve but will need more space and new living conditions for vast amounts of individuals: those who have been alive, the ones who are alive now and those who will be born in the future. Spaceships and other planets will be necessary for this. Here, the energy of love will flourish, as the expected overcoming of sexual distinctions will mean a tremendous release of energy. A consubstantiation will then take
an ominous buzz proves a distraction
to curator Maria Lind as she admires footage of the
kazakh steppe, leading her to ponder the marvelous qualities of energy – and how the same might power revolution, cure the dread malaise of northern darkness and perhaps conquer death
Anton Vidokle, This is Cosmos (stills), 2014. Courtesy the artist
April 2015
place with God, the creator of the cosmos. It is not the holistic, Christian mysticism mixed with transcendental materialism that makes cosmism curiously interesting at this moment; rather it is the idea that at the same time that some things change dramatically, others are constant. And of course, this type of theory was also put forth by Albert Einstein in terms of energy. Today, maybe we can think of it in terms of a significant difference between the bursting kind of energy that Russia experienced in 1917 and afterwards, and a sort of ‘slow’ energy. A slow energy that furthermore is dispersed and that is seeping and trickling rather than gushing forth. Nowadays the former can be discerned in engaged, localised work done by all kinds of people, ranging from activists and academics to workers and artists, who in many places seem to move towards soft mobilisation, alliances and other ways of interlinking. Even within politics there are some such signs, for example Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece. Could it be that some of this slow energy finds an outlet in contemporary art too? There is certainly a lot of energy and light – plenty of suns, mirrors and lights; shiny and shimmering solar energy; and energy generated in other ways – in the art that is around right now. But what goes around comes around, and we have seen some of this before. The part of Vidokle’s beautiful film that deals with light and computer screens recalls Apolonija Šušteršič’s installation Light Therapy (1999). Made in Stockholm for Moderna Museet Projekt (which I curated), it is a fully functional light therapy centre to which art aficionados and others come to feel better in the midst of northern darkness; at the same time they are also encouraged to ponder the functions of art institutions. Just like electromagnetic hypersensitivity, a condition reported by many but not scientifically proven to be caused by electricity, light therapy is not fully accepted as a medical treatment for sad (Seasonal Affective Disorder), or winter depression, although it is known to give results at least as good as antidepressants. Like Vidokle, I really don’t know what energy actually is, but I have a sense of where it might have gone. I am not surprised when the buzzing sound in his film does not disappear when I switch off the computer.
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“Welcome to your new ecosystem,” says Klint Janulis, former Green Beret and Oxford PhD candidate in Stone Age archaeology. He’s with a group of 20 Britons representing, according to the production company, a cross section of twenty-firstcentury society. They are gathered in a Bulgarian forest ready for Channel 5’s latest ‘social experiment’ reality tv show, 10,000 bc. “Can twenty-first-century people”, asks a narrator in breathless tones, “live like cavemen?” Well, that’s one way of looking at it. And it’s the way that the earnest expert Janulis would like us to. Some of the participants seem to think it’s time travel, though, as if the fleet of Bulgarian minicabs that had delivered them to the forest had been modified with Doc Brown’s flux capacitor. The show’s producers though are perhaps more interested in the arguments and romances that are reality tv’s bread and butter. But there’s something else at stake, something that’s not real history or contemporary entertainment formula. It’s that strange part, deep inside us, that wonders what we really are, what it is to be human. Are we, in short, formed by culture and experience? Or is there some innate humanity that runs, like a golden thread, right back to nature? The biblical version tells it through Adam and Eve’s eviction from the Garden of Eden. But there’s a secular version of the same story, a hippy fantasy of stripping away the trappings of contemporary life: the perpetual immersion in the warm bath of media, the constant nag of consumerism, the perversion of behaviour by capital, the psychic manipulations of society. Strip it all away, says this fantasy, and there, standing naked, would be our essence, the raw kernel of unadulterated, innocent humanity. We need only think back to The Flintstones (1960–6) to see how the representation of prehistory narrates a commentary on the present. It wouldn’t be a surprise to discover that Bedrock was actually cia-funded propaganda intended to fuel the argument that, deep down, humanity has always harboured the soul of 1960s suburban America, in love with automation, drive-ins and the social structures of the golden age of us consumerism. So how do they fare, these ordinary Brits, in their Bulgarian time-warp? From the get-go,
the raw kernel of man is revealed,
not very well. Someone burns the mallet in the fire. A daughter says to her mother, “You’ve only been here ten minutes and you’ve already eaten a worm!” Given a ‘caveman’ starter pack, a member of the tribe collapses before she even gets the furs on. She’s carted off by a medical team, who will find themselves a lot busier than they might have imagined. The starter pack includes several huts, a dead deer and some apples and berries. But the real problem is what on earth to do with it all. The participants find it almost impossible even to light a fire – the thing that Janulis describes as ‘the machine’ at the heart of Stone Age society. There is a gigantic mismatch between the kinds of tasks they need to do and the skills they have, but it’s the moments when the twenty-first century and the fiction of the prehistoric reenactment intersect – the safety team bustling into the hut to take someone’s blood pressure, producers in Puffa jackets discussing pulling the show or four-wheel drives zooming into the Stone Age clearing – that are the real revelation. It’s the assorted present-day characters – the club promoters and digital-content creators of our own age – demonstrating their inability to knap a flint while talking to camera in therapy-speak about their inability to knap a flint that somehow touches. Shows like this might dress themselves up as something to do with history, but they can’t escape the very contemporary nature of their own staging. Instead, we could understand them as surreal performance art, where contemporary myths about nature and origin are performed. In 10,000 bc, it’s a life without objects brought to you by series sponsor Kellogg’s Krave (“When you want tasty breakfast, nothing hits the spot like chocolate…”). Can we even imagine alternative ways of living, now that alternative lifestyles are instantly co-opted by the mainstream? Can we imagine life without Krave? Or at least a world where the endorsement of a breakfast cereal far removed from nature allows us to send a bunch of people to fend for themselves in historic drag for our own edutainment? Welcome, as Janulis might say, to our very own asynchronous, multiple-narrative ecosystem, the point to which the 12,015 years of human toil since 10,000 bc have brought us.
not when the fashionable few fixate on caveman cuisine, but when processed choco-cereal Kellogg’s Krave sends the hapless and halfwitted back in historic drag to survive in a simulated stone age. The resulting reality tv mashup of the pop-cultural and paleolithic has built-environment sage Sam Jacob asking if The Flintstones was cia propaganda
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10,000 bc. Photo: Channel 5
ArtReview
The marble ballroom is a space into which we enter primed for social drama. We take our positions on the periphery of the dancefloor, an act that marks us as an audience, the social wallflowers. As we do that, five dancers (two men, three women) wearing bright white sneakers and tight black costumes, the latter embellished with sequins and fringes for shimmying, take their turns at the centre of the floor to perform introductory solos. A soft brushing sound accompanies their sweeping feet through a repeated sequence of precise, geometric steps and glissades that register subtly with a rectilinear gridded pattern in the marble beneath their sports shoes. Thus we were introduced to Moriah Evans’s Social Dance 1–8: Index (2015), the last performance to take place at issue Project Room’s home in a former jewel-box theatre in downtown Brooklyn, before the space closed to undergo a major refurbishment due to be completed in 2016. As they moved through each sequence, Evans’s dancers performed energetic, supremely technical routines until sweat dripped visibly down their cheeks. The impression was nonetheless minimal, appearing drawn from a stripped-back choreographic grammar gathered from dancehalls, discos and ballrooms – line dancing, grapevines, circles, triangles, waltzes and so on – and set to a slow synth sound, reminiscent of echoing folk pipes that had been extended interminably. Perhaps in response to the fact that socialising online is a pastime that is choreographed by unseen, algorithmic forces, lately I’ve seen a smattering of performances that make social operations manifest. Evans’s training is split between dance and art history, and it seemed that the intersection of these practices, a performance of choreographed sociality, were most compelling here. The dancers performed as a tight social group that would split off into efficiently articulated couples, schoolyard allegiances, factions, friendships and other dynamics less easy to articulate. At one point in a duet danced by a male/female couple, after much peacocking, each cheerfully reached around and squeezed the other’s buttocks. The interlinked dramas of the entire group, however, were never so clear as in the moment when the performers held hands in a circle, each smiling with flirtatious, barely concealed mirth, at another member of their circle. Following the eyeline of each, however, it was clear that each dancer was looking at another who was not returning their gaze. The great ballroom scenes of literature are just a heartbeat away – think of the way a humiliating misplaced look during a waltz in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) temporally bloats a single moment: ‘long afterwards – for several years after – that look, full of love, to which he made no response, cut her to the heart with an agony of shame.’
swipe right or
How social media might take some of the horror out of social dance in which
Laura McClean-Ferris, a writer accustomed to the moments of social awkwardness that come with attending performance works experiences a work by Moirah Evans and seeks
to mitigate the unease
Moriah Evans, Social Dance 1-8: Index at issue Project Room, 2015. Photo: Paula Court
April 2015
Indeed, whether it takes place among lovers or strangers, there was still embarrassment in this social theatre when it comes to participation from the sidelines. Though any embarrassment is localised, the dancefloor remains a more daunting space on which to perform than an online platform. The handholding dancers moved to the sidelines, extending a hand to a gentleman audience-member in invitation. “No… thank you”, he blurted in sheer terror, presumably fearing that he would be dragged towards the floor to dance. The dancers gently, smilingly, persisted, taking his hand. The relief was palpable as they simply continued to dance in their circle while parasitically glommed onto the hands of he and another audience member. Google’s persistent, somewhat pathetic insistence that we join ‘Google Circles’ drifted through my consciousness. It wasn’t the only platform that Evans’s work would bring to mind. Later, reading a defence of Tinder in The New York Times by psychology professor Eli J. Finkel, Evans’s choreography returned to me. Finkel’s assessment is that the swipe-right-for-yes, left-for-no app is, in certain aspects, a return to a pre-Internet model of romance. While it might simultaneously operate as an ice-cold, mechanistic hookup app, Finkel suggests that Tinder and the like expand the dating pool to encompass strangers once more, as balls and other organised dances did in previous eras. The social dance with proximal strangers returns then: dance card for iPhone, sweeping feet for a finger sweeping right: mutatis mutandis. Both are forms of coded conduct, though digital codes are marginally harder to see in operation, and thus to manipulate. I write this from a café, where my current assessment is that the couple on the next table are on a Tinder date. Then again, maybe it’s a work meeting. Who can tell? Only they and the algorithms.
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in defence of crapstraction
In 1975 Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote, ‘At the beginning of the sixties, the fireflies began to disappear in our nation, due to pollution of the air, and the azure rivers and limpid canals, above all in the countryside. This was a stunning and searing phenomenon. There were no fireflies left after a few years.’ These reflections – which appeared in an article entitled ‘Il Vuoto del Potere in Italia’ (‘The Power Void in Italy’) in Corriere Della Sera – were intended as a metaphor for a changing political culture which came about both as subtly and as suddenly as the disappearance of fireflies. At that point Pasolini bemoaned the abstraction of political dialogue which had become ‘as incomprehensible as Latin’, allowing those in government to ‘retain power at all costs’. Pasolini’s essay is celebrated in Gianni Dessì’s solo show Dentro e Fuori (Inside and Outside) at Fondazione Pastificio Cerere, in Rome’s San Lorenzo neighbourhood, with the work Lucciola (Firefly, 2012). The ceramic piece depicts two hands held tightly and leaving just a small opening through which a dim intermittent light can be seen flashing. For the artist this represents the possibility of nurturing some kind of positive future, reflecting that ultimately, ‘fundamentally, artists do no more than search to possess these fireflies’. The exhibition is the first of six that make up Sei di Nostri (Six of Our Own), a cycle celebrating the tenth anniversary of Fondazione Pastificio Cerere and the 110th anniversary of the building (an ex-pasta factory) that hosts it and which has housed artist studios since the postwar period. A traditionally leftwing district that houses Sapienza University’s faculty of psychology, San Lorenzo remains true to the spirit of Rome as an unruly city marking the beginning of Southern Italy. Its chaotic mix of students, immigrants, pushers and leftwing skinheads holds a beacon for a sense of disorderly humanity that is being purged year on year in Italy by a new wave of politicians speaking an abstract language of commerce and gentrification. At an international level, much is made of the apparent lack of a viable political response from the art scene in face of the abstraction of mainstream politics on a global level, with critics frequently bemoaning the prevalence of ‘crapstraction’ and ‘zombie abstraction’ at art fairs. Though it is worth reflecting that the current prevalence of abstraction in
A Gothic Romance in which
painting may be a perfectly adequate and rational response to an irrational society, with its roots in the history of painting. Artist Gianni Politi, who has a studio in the ex-Pastificio, recently showed a body of 18 paintings at gnam (the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome) in an exhibition entitled Tra Queste Sale (Malandrino). The show saw Politi’s works – comprising collaged painted papers on canvas – placed above and beside gnam’s permanent collection of nineteenth-century Italian painting dedicated to myth, history and landscape. The interaction between Politi’s works and the works of, for example, the realist painter Giuseppe Abbati demonstrated both the genesis of abstract mark-making in pre-abstract movements and the kernel of abstraction that has always been present in painting. The way in which, for example, a masterfully rendered realist landscape gives way on close inspection to a series of marks of tightly meshed coloured strokes was reflected in the abstract marks of Politi’s works, which – conversely – evoked and suggested some kind of formal sense. It is unlikely that painters prior to the advent of abstraction in the twentieth century were unconscious of the effect of their carefully crafted figures falling away into an abstract mesh of pigment, linseed and cotton duck canvas. One can only assume that the abstract messages left for the viewer in the works displayed at gnam – which came to the foreground alongside Politi’s outright abstract works – were intentional attempts to make sense of the abstract and unfathomable core of work, nature and love. As social life becomes more and more abstract and work relations in the twenty-first century become more and more separated from nature, it is hardly surprising that a generation turns to direct abstraction to make sense of it all. We can choose to ridicule this generation as a byproduct of the abstract finance mechanism that has taken hold of the artworld and forced it to produce same-y abstract works en masse. This, however, would be a little unfair to the history of painting that the current generation of abstract artists has inherited. Politi recalls walking the galleries of the gnam as a five-year-old with his late father. He is surely not the only young abstract painter with a personal and historical connection to the discipline.
our hero Mike Watson, tireless artworld campaigner for an urgent and meaningful response to everything going to hell in a handcart, pauses to question whether zombie abstraction really is the result of a denatured and vacuous sociopolitical landscape or whether therein, too, lies love?
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Gianni Dessì, Lucciola, 2012. Courtesy Galleria Alessandro Bagnai, Florence
ArtReview
A Google image search for ‘abu ghraib’ results in a mosaic of 500 or so thumbnails. Almost twodozen of these come from the series that Fernando Botero created, in 2004–5, from the infamous events encompassed in this term. A significant quantity, considering that no more than a hundred photos taken by us soldiers and military contractors in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq in 2003 show up online. (A 2006 report in Salon magazine on the number of records relating to sessions of human-rights violations at Abu Ghraib revealed the existence of more than 2,000 extreme images and video files of suspected detainee abuse and its aftermath, the great majority of which were never published.) Images of this American military infamy tend to disappear from Internet searches, or to be substituted by results increasingly far removed from the graphic nature of the acts, as seen in the growing number – almost 25 – of references to a 2014 film that, under the cowardly title Boys of Abu Ghraib, presents a sweetened portrait of a soldier of the occupying forces and features the sentimental formulas, predictable plot twists and generic conclusions of a made-for-tv melodrama. It is possible that in the near future, as the Google grid fills with replacement images, Botero’s works will become the only ones recalling the actual events in Iraq. In his text ‘The Body in Pain’, published in The Nation in 2006, Arthur C. Danto writes that this series of paintings succeeds in establishing ‘a visceral sense of identification with the victims’, and quotes something the artist once said: ‘A painter can do things a photographer can’t do, because a painter can make the invisible visible’. In effect Botero painted these portraits to distance them from the photos and centre attention on the victims. Botero has said that he is ‘addicted to news, to newspapers and to magazines’, stating that he looks at ‘the Internet’ daily. Just as the photos of Abu Ghraib prison disclosed in the press showed us soldiers toying with and stacking Iraqi prisoners in jumbled heaps as though they were still lifes, or posing as proud hunters or expert players of a videogame that raises torture to an artform, Botero took this information and, to paint it, went beyond the jailers’ art brut postcards, saw the scene with his mind, imagined it and exhibited it in this series that he refers to as a ‘permanent accusation’. Danto – American, heartbroken, culpable – picks up on Botero’s comparison of his own works to Guernica and writes that, in contrast to Picasso’s 1937 painting (a ‘Cubist work that can serve a purely decorative function if one is unaware of its meaning’), with the Abu Ghraib series, the Colombian artist ‘immerses us in the experience of suffering’. He concludes, ‘The pain of others has seldom felt so close, or so shaming to its perpetrators.’ But more than the content of Botero’s work, it is the artist’s fame that made the series well known; it’s his name and reputation for rendering
the guernica effect by which
a celebrated artist might more effectively memorialise a brutal and abject episode of human history than the multitude of images proliferating across google, thereby cementing it and causing it to live on in the popular imagination by
Lucas Ospina (not coincidentally) an artist
Fernando Botero, Abu Ghraib 64, 2005, oil on canvas, 34 × 46 cm. Photo: Ben Blackwell. Courtesy the artist
April 2015
cheerful, chubby compositions that give these allegedly solemn and dramatic works such resonance. Although Danto may have misunderstood it here – guilt does not give good advice – something similar may have happened with Guernica. Picasso’s composition, commissioned by the Republican government for the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 International Exposition in Paris, received a weak-to-chilly reception from critics and intellectuals when it was first exhibited; Spanish officials found it too timid and cryptic for use as propaganda, though they tried it anyway, given the echo chamber of an association with Picasso. The work toured in various exhibitions for years, and was consigned to moma, New York, for safekeeping during and after the Second World War. There it matured, along with the reputation of its creator, becoming an icon of fragmented child, adult and animal heads among lightbulbs and lamps, a collage in different shades of grey serving to record the German air force’s bombardment of the Basque town and, at the same time, represent any cause in which an oppressed population is at the mercy of fascist forces. (Guernica was returned to Spain in 1981 and is now in the collection of the Reina Sofía, Madrid.) Such is the symbolism of Guernica that a copy, rendered as tapestry and hung prominently in the Security Council of the United Nations, was hidden behind a blue curtain when Bush administration officials stood before it and justified their war binge in Iraq, lest the Guernica effect highlight any uncomfortable associations. It’s possible that Guernica is not Picasso’s greatest work, or that Botero’s Abu Ghraib series is just one more of the many circus works this esteemed artworld caricaturist has produced. What’s certain is that when a famous artist pours his celebrity into the shell of a work, the spin of the high-profile moment produces a commemorating effect that would otherwise have been lost between our forgetfulness of the past and a present that lies hidden in the mass of images. The strength of the Guernica effect is seen, for example, in works such as Tania Bruguera’s voluntary – and involuntary – performance these past weeks, including the Kafkaesque detention the Cuban regime subjected her to in December, as well as in Ai Weiwei’s continuous clashes with Chinese authorities. The activities and works of these two artworld celebrities can be inane, derivative and unimaginative, but in the future such work, and the lyrical journalism it performs, may be all that survives as icons capable of reminding us that something was rotten in Cuba and in China in 2015. This is the difference between the work of a famous artist – through which a news item becomes historical fact – and the efforts of hundreds of quasi-anonymous activists. Translated from the Spanish by David Terrien
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New York is an unforgiving town… And by that, I mean it holds a grudge. Since what was left of my collector base recently found themselves on the wrong end of a Gazprom shake-up and were summarily executed in full public view on the Nevsky Prospect (wtf Russia?) I’ve had to become more discerning regarding how I spend my money. Gone are the days of ‘one-wear’ Guccis and wiping my ass with the downy neck of a goose. (So unbelievably soft!) My pressed jeans are faded at the crease line and some of the ‘turmeric-infused foam’ I had for dinner at Momofuku’s got on my favourite hand tailored shirt the other night… and I’m wearing it anyway!!!! Insomuch as I’ve been down in the dumps, I decided to attend this year’s Armory Show assuming that misery loves company and hard-luck stories would abound. That is, if any of the stories I’ve been hearing were true! Like about how smaller galleries were being forced out of existence by bigger galleries, and hushed tales of bounced cheques, and smallish tips left at restaurants and also, of course, all of those unexplained murders. I arrived looking forward to some good kibitzing, maybe a few hugs, meaningful glances and wistful smiles at how we were all surviving, all these years later, in this mixed up, crazy world of contemporary art. I ran into the lanky Casper Grünbaggerwert of Neue Immer Tunnel, Frankfurt & Toronto. I had heard that he’d recently lost his entire roster of artists and I couldn’t help but notice the contusion on his left cheekbone. “Hi Casper!” I said hugging him. I whispered in a concerned and friendly voice with my hands clasping his arms in the manner a real friend might do. “How is the fair going?” “Oh! It’s going great! We’ve sold out the booth!” he exclaimed. “Oh, but what about the artists who left the gallery?” “Not a problem! I got new ones!” I looked around. Yes. He had found new ones. Terrible, terrible new ones. “That’s great Casper!” “If you’re interested in one of these I can maybe get you one!” “I thought they were all sold?” “Of course, just, you know, in case, one becomes free… for some reason.” “Thanks Casper, I’ll think about it… great show!” I waved goodbye.
the age of austerity or
is it only me? in which
Casper waved back “You know where I am!” I moved on to booth 673 and saw Jayne Cobett of Mattatuck & Tyler Gallery, New York, Paris & Berlin. She appeared to be crying and I wasn’t surprised. Her booth, in all honesty, looked awful. Anonymous process paintings hastily arranged on the wall. A real hack job: a dirty hobo covered in his own shit would have looked more compelling. I moved to comfort her. “There, there Jane… I’m sure it’s going to be fine…” “What are you talking about?” she said. “I’m crying with happiness! I just sold out the booth!” “What? You did?” “In the first two hours of the fair!!! I have to get more work here!” She blinked nervously. “That’s great Jane.” “Do you like them? They’re good right?” “Congratulations… looks great!” And I retreated from the stall. She called out “If you want one let me know… I can give you a good discount,” and returned her face to her handkerchief in order to continue bawling. I walked past the miles of art shambles through busy, smiling faces. The miserable Nigel Wigerberry of Gristle&Windsor, London, New York & Leipzig, smiled and waved. A visibly shaken Marian Pitchacouskiarian of relentless Gallery, Zurich, Essen & Chicago, smiled and waved and the always near death Gunther Kamchuckowsky, grumbleheim Galerie, Rostock, Copenhagen & Wolverhampton, propped himself on an assistant and smiled and waved. Finally I came upon a gallery I knew was in terrible financial trouble. Not only was he being investigated by the French government for shady dealings, but his wife had recently died in a cooking accident – with her lover – and his daughter had just run away to go fight with isis. Thomas Vitrineoux stood at the edge of his empty booth gazing nervously at the crowd. “Jonathan Grossmalerman!” He yelped and threw his arms around me. “How good it is to see you!” “How’re you doing Thomas?” “Pffft! Never better! Sold out the whole booth! I’m selling all my art like, ’ow you say? Like hotcakes!!” I looked around his stall at the paltry offerings on display and had a horrible thought. Am I the only one doing terribly?
everyone’s favourite painter of the female anatomy abandons his wildfowl-based sanitary practices and attends a popular art fair to sample the prevailing mood
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by
Jonathan Grossmalerman, donations welcome
Courtesy the artist
ArtReview
Robert Fry Partners
April 25 –June 20, 2015
titel
GALERIEKORNFELD Fasanenstraße 26 | 10719 Berlin Tue – Sat, 11am – 6pm | www.galeriekornfeld.com
Berlin’s Kreuzberg is similar to New York’s Lower East Side or London’s Hackney in that they all house avant-gardes of the recent past. These locales once provided a low-cost alternative to the Mittes, Chelseas and Mayfairs of the West, but have now become subsumed by gentrification and overcrowded, as trailblazers venture elsewhere. Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff started the Kreuzberg outpost New Theater in August 2013, after a successful stint as bar owners in the adjacent neighbourhood Neukölln. Unlike Times, their previous bar effort owned with artist Lindsay Lawson, New Theater is a proper theatre that stages infrequent, intimately scaled but wildly inventive amateur plays. These plays feature a rotating cast of friends filling several roles, from acting and set and prop design to scriptwriting. The resulting plays, which often centre on a social space such as a restaurant or bar, are as goofy and endearing as they are incisive, and sometimes feel like a very sophisticated artworld version of dress-up. Apartment (2014), for example, found a gaggle of artists living in postapocalyptic New York running a ramen noodle shop, with a wardrobe by up-and-coming designer Nhu Duong. Hotel Moon, New Theater’s first musical, opens next, featuring a libretto written by Henkel, Pitegoff and writer Pablo Larios, with music direction by crooner Dan Bodan and Trevor Lee Larson. Like so many New Theater plays, the cast for Hotel Moon could double as an emerging-talent search, and includes artists such as Amelie von Wulffen, Grayson Revoir and Simon Denny. Opening in a central area like Kreuzberg was tactical on Henkel and Pitegoff’s part, as they knew their ragtag theatre was out-of-the-box and not sure to bring in a crowd. Two years later, New Theater has become so successful – drawing in visitors ranging from greasy-haired Neukölln artists to artworld notables such as Josephine Pryde or new Stedelijk Museum chief curator Bart van der Heide – that the shows either immediately sell out or are completely packed. They’ll close in June of this year, citing a strained relationship with their landlord, who was initially reluctant to give them a two-year lease in such a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood. Henkel and Pitegoff are also artists, primarily photographers, in their mid-twenties, whose likely-not-incredible income funds New Theater. Because it’s not
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off-space: new theater In this twenty-seventh such investigation into those sites of art as are grand of spirit but alas too often slender of means, our correspondent Karen Archey takes a trip to the theatre, subsequently
suffering some confusion as she proceeds along her daily round of the Berlin artworld, in determining where the performance ends and where it begins
Georgia Gray and Maximilian Zentz Zlomovitz, poster for dd Mood, 2014.Courtesy New Theater, Berlin
ArtReview
a nonprofit and receives no state funding, New Theater is totally autonomous and quickmoving – but the payoff is destitution. Henkel and Pitegoff clearly pour every ounce of their energy and resources into this project, while maintaining separate artistic practices. When I asked how New Theater and their artistic practice is connected in a recent phone interview, Henkel said, “We’re interested in working with other people in our artistic practices, and photographing performance, so there are threads of similarity.” Thinking about collaboration, documentation and audience is what initially brought Henkel and Pitegoff to the structure of theatre. “We’ve always been involved with performance, and questioning how to use the space of an institution. In these types of spaces you really have to beg for audience. The audience has to be converted by the performance itself to really watch,” say Henkel and Pitegoff, oftentimes respectfully finishing each other’s sentences. (Audience conversion is an unfortunate truth. The attention span of most people, myself at times included, for performance and video in museums and galleries is no more than one minute.) Henkel and Pitegoff continue, “We were also thinking about what it means to work with so many people, and so the structure and hierarchy of theatre made a lot of sense for us.” And they do work with so many people, many of them friends and their lovers, former lovers that have become friends and the whole range of permutations of acquaintanceship that makes up a social circle. In fact, I was at a dinner party in Kreuzberg last summer and spoke most of the night to a man I thought I had surely befriended in New York, but whose name escaped me. It turns out I had never met him, just started talking to him, having seen him a few weeks earlier acting as the narrator of a New Theater performance. Oops. This intimately scaled level of celebrity is an uncanny thing. I remember now looking at him and others I vaguely recognised from around Berlin, wondering – worrying – if they’d remember their lines. “I think it’s a weird space where you’re allowed to stare at your friends or people you know onstage,” says Henkel. “There’s a type of embarrassment you have I think that’s a really helpful emotion. This fear that you have, it’s a really deep love when you see someone onstage and feel afraid for them and it makes you connect in this bizarre, fucked-up way. I think this generosity happens more in this space where people don’t really know what they’re doing.” After New Theater closes in June, Henkel and Pitegoff have no immediate plans to reopen – at least not in Kreuzberg. So catch them while you can.
Time Out
Evening Standard
Until 17 June 2015 The Sackler Wing Friends of the RA go free Additionally supported by
Richard Diebenkorn, Seawall (detail), 1957. Oil on canvas, 50.8 x 66 cm. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Gift of Phyllis G. Diebenkorn. © 2015 The Richard Diebenkorn Foundation
Great Critics and Their Ideas No 37
Jean Baudrillard on Chinese art depicting Mao ironically Interview by
Matthew Collings The divisive fetish-figure of latetwentieth-century cultural theory herewith
fights to get a word in edgeways proceeding thereafter
to engage with the immaculate nothingness of Warhol, the unintentionally hilarious and commercially complicit in contemporary art, photographing absence, criticism as anthropology &
his interlocutor’s interviews with the dead
Jean Baudrillard was born in Reims in 1929. A sociologist and anthropologist influenced by pataphysics and the Situationists, his first book, The System of Objects, came out in 1968. Later publications announced pessimistic concepts of the end of art, end of reality and end of origins, and contemporary culture as an endless procession of simulacra. He became a cult figure for the artworld during the 1980s, but by 1996 he had published a notorious essay, ‘The Conspiracy of Art’ (published in English in 2005), in which he denounced contemporary art’s irredeemable nullity. He died in Paris in 2007.
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ArtReview
artreview What do you think about art being flipped at auction?
jb That’s well put. I suppose it’s why I liked the Impressionist show so much. It was incredibly visually rich, even though it was repulsively lit with angry spotlights in a nasty dark subterranean basement.
jean baudrillard Why should I think anything about it? ar Because you’re a thinker and you’ve written about art. jb I never wrote about it from the point of view of enthusiasm. So if something cynical is going on with it, it’s no surprise to me. ar Do you secretly like any art? jb When I was alive I made no secret about admiring Warhol. But it’s not ‘liking’ like saying, ‘Hurray!’ I believed he showed the nothingness of art in a ruthless fashion. The first time I saw a lot of Warhols as opposed to reproductions was at the Venice Biennale, in 1990. I met you at the same event, Matthew. I have followed your interviews in ArtReview with the dead, in which you get great minds of the past to speak the things you think yourself. ar Thank you. Once a religious guy on the tls emailed to complain my tv programmes were nothing but a postmodern hall of mirrors. It made me think of you as the cliché figurehead of this pessimistic image in which there is only endless relativism. But in fact you are saying that absolutes ought to be delayed a bit, sometimes, not denied altogether. During the 1980s I read your books and was daunted by their extremely jaded and sardonic air. It never occurred to me that you didn’t really know anything about art. But later I realised your conclusions about it were right anyway. By then no one cared what you used to think. Your old enemies in the world of intellectual thought, English philosophical positivists, hardened old Marxists, are not necessarily riding high now. But when they say you are nothing but a mystifying joker, no one shouts them down. jb I create my own systems, and they are not there to be admired but to be engaged with as arguments. ar No one thinks about Warhol either. It’s taken for granted that he’s great because of the market prices. It’s no longer the age where there are important seminars discussing him. jb Well, c’est la vie. ar Have you seen any good shows? jb Yes, I liked Inventing Impressionism at the National Gallery, London.
ar God yes, it was fantastic. I mean, not the theme, Paul Durand-Ruel, the art dealer, ‘inventing’ Impressionism… jb No, not that. That’s just cultural business as usual. The elevation of commercialism to the highest value, as if Monet putting colours side by side is on a lower level than Durand-Ruel at the top of the value system putting consortiums of buyers together, and evolving new strategies of art display and art publicity. ar The interviews with you that followed the publication of ‘The Conspiracy of Art’ are funny examples of cross-purpose conversation. The interviewers want to sound as if they are part of something they imagine is important: the artworld. They’re shocked that you could be indifferent to it. In the meantime, in your answers to their questions you clearly also don’t have any knowledge of what you’re attacking, and yet what you say sounds powerfully feasible. You say the whole world becomes a readymade. Art becomes anything and anything becomes art. Everything becomes Disneyland. The whole world gets transformed into aesthetics and aesthetics gets transformed into the whole world, and aesthetics can’t be meaningful when that happens. The only thing I think you put rather misleadingly is your notion that art is traditionally expected to reveal ‘reality’ or ‘truth’. I mean, that might be part of the rhetoric of art appreciation, but truth and reality are not what art reveals so much as it does another kind of reality than the one that, without encountering art, we would normally inhabit. The disrupting of habitual ways of seeing that art accomplishes – its surprise effect – alerts us to possibilities of life experience beyond what we would otherwise accept as the only life there is. In that sense an aesthetic kind of art is potentially revolutionary. above Jean Baudrillard, Saint Clement, 1987. Courtesy Marine Baudrillard facing page Jean Baudrillard in France, June 1987. Photo: Louis Monier. Courtesy Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images
April 2015
ar Yes. Impressionism is the moment when independence becomes the big theme in art. Art becomes its own drive. It offers aristocratic meanings of sensitivity and heightened seeing, but the artists themselves actually range in social status from aristocrat to worker; the audience is bourgeois; and the mood of the whole interaction between a free art and an audience prone at first to hostility and then to scandalised curiosity is democratic. You don’t need to be highly educated. You only need to have cultivated your responses to art. You need to have had the time in which to do that and the sensibility to wish to do it. Not everyone can or wants to. Most people in the artworld as it is today certainly don’t have the sensibility that can appreciate the jostling microcosms of buzzing energy that make up an Impressionist painting, whether it’s Renoir or Monet, Pissarro or Cézanne. But in any case, at that time, when the movement began, this rich independent artistic meaning was all conveyed via the reduction of everything in life to light: so there’s the question of whether the Impressionist ‘turn’ is an isolating move or a compressing one. Is ‘everything’ (the world; reality) somehow there but transformed into an image that ostensibly conveys only fleeting light effects? Or have most things been left out in order to concentrate on the charm of light effects alone – in order only to be charming? jb Impressionism certainly is charming. ar The mental framework doesn’t exist in art presently where charm can be put together with critical power and genuine sensual impact, as they go together in Impressionism. Anyway, anything else you’ve seen? jb Yes, I saw a show by the Israeli artist Yael Bartana. It consisted of two films. One was immediately idiotic and I wanted to leave. But when I saw the other one it was immediately very funny, and I was forced to question my responses to the first one. I realised that was funny too, but the humour was so subtle and clever I hadn’t been able to gauge it. This brilliant artist genuinely challenged me. However, I looked her up and it turned out both films are as solemnly pretentious as each other and her motivations are dull as ditchwater. If you make
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the mistake of going, only watch the second one and see it as a comedy. It’s called True Finn. Actors impersonate different ethnic types who all think of themselves as equally Finnish. A sociological experiment brings them together in a commune for a short time, where they have regular earnest discussions about national identity. Passive-aggressive narcissism reigns in every scene. Every now and then a few frames from stiff, old-fashioned Finnish films about folksy authenticity are cut into the film, to add to the hilarity. ar But you said it wasn’t funny in reality? jb Don’t bother with the reality. The protagonists are not actors at all. Instead, they really are different ethnic types whose unbearable emotional fakery in the film, which had seemed very funny, is in fact their true fakery. ar What’s the first film? jb Actors pretend to have emotions in relation to typical Hollywood disaster movie specialeffects. The context is something to do with the full-size replica of the Temple of Solomon recently built in São Paulo. The film has no redeeming features. Naturally art critics are breaking down in tears being deeply moved by it. ar In ‘The Conspiracy of Art’ you denounce art’s complicity with the powers that be. jb It was nothing new for me. My book For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (1972) includes the statement that contemporary art is fatally ambiguous, part terrorist critique and part de facto cultural integration. And in The Consumer Society (1970) I said there wasn’t anything subversive about Pop art, ‘its cool smile no different from commercial complicity’. I always say contemporary art is nothing but ‘the art of collusion’. It’s much more blatant even today, long after my death, when art either frankly colludes or else frankly denies its own reality. ar You only look at the art power scene. jb There exist many attitudes towards art – takes on it that don’t conform to the artworld attitudes I attack, and that attack them for the same reasons I attack them. ar But they’re not having much effect? jb Exactly. The artworld that dominates does so because it entirely reflects movements in society to which we are all now subject. Art only reflects them and is complicit with them. Art that wishes to be seen as something else, more hopeful and beautiful, is an art of complicity all the same, because it simultaneously strives to be applauded by the system it flatters itself it’s turning its back on. The problem,
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as with culture and society generally at this stage, is that there isn’t any other system. The whole point about the ‘hyperreal’ and the ‘succession of simulacra’ and the end of any possibility of the ‘real’ – these terms from my books – is that there is no real art somewhere behind this spectacle of inanity that contemporary art presents. Nostalgic reactionaries pretend to seek this real object. They pretend to seek truth. ar I can’t think of any photos by you that I’ve seen, but I know I must have seen some. They are of things like swimming pools, or deserts, or rearview mirrors, I think. Do you like your own photos? Do you say they’re just as inane as anything else? You agreed to exhibit them in an art context. jb Yes, I liked taking them. I agree it’s a bit up-in-the-air for me as to what I thought I was doing when I exhibited them. At the moment I took them I was capturing a certain light, a colour disconnected from the rest of the world. I felt it was even disconnected from myself. I was
Art that wishes to be seen as something else, more hopeful and beautiful, is an art of complicity all the same, because it simultaneously strives to be applauded by the system it flatters itself it’s turning its back on capturing my own absence, making other things appear. I never thought aesthetics were involved. I never cared if anyone judged those photos to be beautiful or not. I must say I like your collaborative paintings with Emma Biggs for the same reason. It’s clear that aesthetic issues are not possible at the moment in the sense of them being at all effective in relation to a wide audience. So in effect they are unreal. They are fetishistic only. But I appreciate that in your paintings there is an impersonal logic of different visual orders that have equal authority even though they cannot be seen at the same time. In other words they displace each other without any of them seeming more or less important. Of course it’s of no use to anything going on at the forefront of the art scene now. And its use or point in the world generally is dubious at best. It was my friend Paul Virilio who said aesthetics only develop if there’s a more or less common view of the world. ar Yes, he said it in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, shortly after that time we met in Venice. ‘At present this is, however, not the case,’ Virilio says. He continues: ‘Our seeing is done separately, individually. An aesthetic of seeing does not exist in reality. Here we are faced with a basic change, a mutation of life.’
ArtReview
jb Good point. I read a good interview with you once, Matthew, in which you seemed to want to elevate only embarrassment as far as the art scene is concerned, and you seemed to be opposed to any kind of enthusiasm. ar Yes, I know the one you mean. It’s funny; the interviewer sent me an email with questions supplied by the editor, but he didn’t seem to notice – or thought I wouldn’t mind; or it didn’t matter if I did – that this editor had written in a covering letter that it was well known I would write anything for money and I should be challenged about that. Here I was, making anouncements perceived by the art powersthat-be to be career-suicidal, like saying Greenberg and formalism aren’t so bad; and overlooked British abstract artists are just as worthy of attention as spotlit, overindulged pets like Jeremy Deller; and the commodity critique needn’t be the be-all and end-all of how art is understood. And at the same time I’m being accused by the same powers-that-be of thinking only about my career. In makes me think of you and your indifference to scorn from what was, at the time, thought to be your most important professional sphere. Just now you mentioned the concepts in your books with which the artworld in New York during the 1980s became infatuated. After ten years of being praised, you turned round and said contemporary art passively and collusively repeats what goes on in Western society anyway, it doesn’t criticise it or see it in some specially transcendent prophetic way. Once that message of yours was received, you were quickly forgotten as a guru. jb I was forgotten in the days of Sherrie Levine and now I’m still forgotten in the days of Chinese contemporary art endlessly depicting Mao ironically, as if by doing this they believe something important could be happening. And the time of sleazy art advisers on Facebook dictating the shallow and ignorant levels at which art is discussed. ar Wouldn’t you have liked it if the artworld responded to your message in 1996 by actually setting about changing its act? And you were appreciated as the cause of a new genuine optimism of art? jb That’s a hypothesis that could never be a reality. My point of view is anthropological. From this point of view, art no longer seems to have a vital function; it is afflicted by the same fate that extinguishes value, by the same loss of transcendence. I’m a critical writer. I don’t have any interest in art, why should it have any in me? It was a mistake when that interest started up, and within a short time the mistake was realised.
next month Sir Kenneth Clark on hipsters queuing half a mile to get into private views at Chisenhale Gallery
Wojciech Fangor S P E C T R A
A R T
S P A C E
M A S T E R S
April–July 2015 Starak Family Foundation www.starakfoundation.org
Other People And Their Ideas No 21
Jessica Morgan is director of the dia art foundation, a role she took up in January of this year, having previously curated last year’s 10th gwangju biennale and
been Daskalopoulos Curator, International Art, at London’s tate modern, an organisation she had worked for in various curatorial roles since 2002 Interview by
Tom Eccles
Dia was founded in New York City in 1974 by Philippa de Menil, Heiner Friedrich and Helen Winkler. The foundation seeks ‘to help artists achieve visionary projects that might not otherwise be realized because of scale or scope’. Among those is The Lightning Field (1977), completed by Walter De Maria near Quemado, New Mexico, which Dia commissioned and maintains, and Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in Great Salt Lake, Utah, which came to Dia as a gift from the estate of the artist in 1999. More recently, in 2013, Dia presented Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument in the Bronx, New York. Its permanent collection is housed at Dia:Beacon, which opened in Beacon, New York, in 2003. Having closed its primary New York City venue in 2004 and controversially deacquisitioned a series of works in 2013 to raise funds, the organisation is aiming to break ground on a new building in New York City within the next couple of years.
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ArtReview
artreview Having started only a few months ago, you must be just finding your feet. But it's been a long time now, since any of us knew in what direction Dia was going, and so I wanted to begin by asking what – in broad strokes – are your aspirations for the institution? Because I think many people are hopeful that you can put it back on the map, so to speak. jessica morgan Having arrived from a very large national institution (Tate Modern), which has a responsibility to be many things to many people, I find the clarity of Dia an inspiration rather than a limitation. The directive of Dia – its commitment to artistic practice, to the legendary sites, to the collection and of course to the unique space of Beacon – has allowed me to think very clearly about what should be done. With Dia it is always necessary to look back in order to move forward, and among the ideas that emerge from this great history are not only the necessity of reconnecting with aspects of our past – we have a long history of sound and music in the programme, for instance, as well as the potential to increase the number of our permanent sites – but also the expansion of the collection with a few carefully chosen artists. Dia’s commitment to its artists is a remarkable and ongoing relationship that features talks, research, publications and discussions, and so the addition of new figures brings in-depth, lasting attention on a unique scale. It is not about amassing hoards of work, but rather it’s about developing a lifelong relationship with an artist’s ideas. I am keen both to further our already existing ties as well as thoughtfully to expand this. Additional artists will of course allow for new thinking around Dia:Beacon, where the lower galleries in particular offer extraordinary potential. I ‘grew up’ as a curator in the us during the 1990s, so the history of the Dia:Chelsea projects is one permanently etched in my memory. Of course establishing a space for Dia in Chelsea is a top priority, but so is the commitment to contemporary production that can happen now – and will happen in the future – leading up to an expanded presence in the city. ar A former director of Dia once told me ( jokingly) that he introduced entrance fees to keep visitor numbers down. Dia was (and in Beacon maybe still is) a place to be alone with art. Coming from the Tate, which is busy to say the least, what is your attitude to audience numbers? Can you run an arts organisation today without a large crowd? And does the popularity of art come at a price?
jm It is vitally important that there are different models of museums and, with that, alternative types of experience for art. Dia – which includes all of its sites as well as Beacon – has always been about a journey and not simply about a visit. The atmosphere that is part of this experience is crucial and sustainable in certain circumstances. Given that there are so few places now devoted to a singularity of vision, it seems all the more important to think not only about the number of people who come but the type of experience that can be offered. ar ‘Sustainability’ is a word that haunts every not-for-profit director. Dia is an interesting case in point, having experienced a dramatic moment during the 1980s when Philippa de Menil was forced to reduce her financial commitment to the project and annual expenditures dropped dramatically. Patronage
of many of Dia’s chosen artists, not least Donald Judd and his Marfa project, suffered what might be called an ‘adjustment in expectations’. It also led to gallerist and cofounder Heiner Friedrich leaving Dia. Today Dia continues to maintain a number of sites throughout the United States (Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room in Chelsea and The Lightning Field in New Mexico, both 1977; Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, 1970, in Utah; and the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton, New York, among them). And the biggest ‘off-site’ project is Dia:Beacon, which houses the collection. Dia recently sold a number of works from the collection to create an acquisition fund, a move opposed by three of the founding directors, including Friedrich. How would you explain the need for another Dia building, this time in Chelsea?
above Dia:Beacon, Riggio Galleries, 2003. Photo: Richard Barnes facing page Jessica Morgan. Photo: Douglas Lance Gibson
April 2015
jm Dia’s connection to Manhattan and Chelsea has always been a defining part of its identity and arguably there are works in the collection that need to be seen in the city, such as Blinky Palermo’s 1976 work To the People of New York City. The need to share with the public works such as this and the extensive collection we have of works by artists such as [Alighiero] Boetti, [John] Chamberlain, [Hanne] Darboven, [Dan] Flavin, and [Fred] Sandback also calls for additional space in the city. Dia’s mission has always been actively to commission new works by living artists, and while some may be ideal for the unique setting in Beacon, others will be better suited to a Manhattan site. ar When one walks through the spaces at Beacon with rooms of Donald Judd, Carl Andre, Imi Knoebel, Gerhard Richter et al, one becomes very aware of walking among men. Of course, there is also Louise Bourgeois (and Agnes Martin), but the Bourgeois come across, in this company, as the mad woman in the attic. When you say that you will consider adding other artists to the Dia canon, how might you complicate this story? jm Let’s not forget Hilla Becher, Hanne Darboven, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Louise Lawler, Vera Lutter and Bridget Riley in the collection and on display in Beacon! Dia has also had a very active commissioning programme that has featured many women artists (Koo Jeong A, Trisha Brown, Tacita Dean, Jo Baer, Rosemarie Trockel and Joan Jonas, to name but a few). That said, much of my work at Tate has been involved with researching and acquiring artists for the collection, many of whom were female artists who had been gradually excised from art history, and I see no reason why I would change direction now. ar You were also curator of international art at Tate Modern. That meant shifting beyond the parameters of ‘Western’ art. What challenges did that present at Tate, and are there lessons you learned there that will influence what you do as director of Dia? jm My 12 years at Tate allowed for an intensive process of research in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, and South Asia in relation to the collection as well as work in Latin America, Asia and the Nordic countries for an upcoming exhibition. It was an incredible privilege to establish connections with the artists, independently run spaces, curators, academics and others who are the leading voices in these regions, and, as a result of the work of my colleagues, Tate has an excellent network for discussion, collection
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activities and most importantly research and publication. It was a steep learning curve, and I cannot profess any expertise in these areas, but the process has taught me invaluable lessons in regard to questioning a given history, the necessity to establish primary sources for information, the importance of always viewing works and the unrivalled benefit of speaking directly to artists in order to understand the context and complexities of a given time. For Dia no doubt I will continue to encourage this process of research, which also entails questioning the given history with which we are presented. I am quite sure we will be able to bring new light and perspectives to the period with which the collection is most closely associated. ar How would you describe your ‘curatorial signature’? jm I have always been drawn to areas or artists where I feel there is a contribution to be made – whether it is about bringing attention to work or media that has been overlooked or lost,
or to highlight practices that for various reasons have not been celebrated or studied. That said, it’s always an immense pleasure to work with artists on new works, and I have been extensively involved in commissioning and production with artists both known and unknown. The manner in which work is presented is of great interest to me – the haptic, experiential quality of art encounters. Of course this makes working at Dia an incredible privilege. ar Other than money, what do you think are the biggest challenges facing museums, and where should we look to find the answers? jm The threat of uniformity seems an urgent one to address. The increasing similarity of collections and programmes at many institutions could be the result of many factors: market pressure; the fashion-driven consequences of the availability of information; the demand for popularity; a desire to satisfy the vox populi. I think strength of character
left Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, 1970. Photo: George Steinmetz. © Holt-Smithson Foundation/Licensed by vaga, New York right Walter De Maria, The Lightning Field, 1977. Photo: John Cliett
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in resisting the trend towards increasing similarity is essential. ar Dia is built upon art that grew out of the mid-tolate 1960s and matured in the early 70s. Could you see the Dia Foundation expanding its permanent collection to include works from, say, the 1980s or 90s? Would you consider, for example, a major gift of works from the ‘Pictures Generation’? jm I think that because there is so much still to be done in that period of time in which Dia’s collection is embedded, for the time being this is really the priority for the collection. Once again I would also return to the need for distinction: there are other museums far better suited to covering the terrain of the 1980s and 90s and no need for us to duplicate their work. Every artist added to the collection – necessarily through a body of work, an installation or some sizeable representation of their practice – is a deep commitment through talks, publications and ongoing research, so it is not a decision to be taken lightly.
28–31
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2016
artgenève is pleased to announce the launch of art/monte-carlo 30.04.–02.05.2016
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Slavs and Tatars
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AN INSTITUTION OF THE MIGROS CULTURE PERCENTAGE
Lektor 25.04.15 – 12.07.15
XANTI SCHAWINSKY
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21.02.–17.05. Image credit: Hung and Tart (acacia), handblown glass, 12 x 34 x 16 cm, 2014. Courtesy of the artists. Lektor is a co-commission with Kunsthalle Zurich, NYU Abu Dhabi, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, and Blaffer Art Gallery, the University of Houston.
TOYS REDUX —ON PLAY AND CRITIQUE
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The new fair for contemporary art in Cologne,The New Yorker | DOCK.ONE Hafenstrasse 1 | 51063 Köln | Germany Thu – Sat 13 am – 9 pm Sun 10 am – 6 pm with ArtBrunch Ticket incl. brochure 13 € | red. 9 € Opening April 15th 6 pm
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Going Going Gone 22nd May – 28th May 13th June – 19th June A temporary exhibition of work by graduating students from Leeds College of Art 2015 www.leeds-art.ac.uk/goinggoinggone
Bethan Jones - BA (Hons) Fashion
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A rippling, tittering call, rendered “titterel”
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Koki Tanaka Interview by Hou Hanru
As the Japanese artist prepares to celebrate being named Deutsche Bank’s ‘artist of the year’ with a survey exhibition in Berlin, he discusses the pressures of art history, working with communities, the ‘Fukushima effect’ and how to sell palm fronds 72
ArtReview
hou hanru Can you describe your generation of Japanese artists? You were born during the mid-1970s and I guess you have a very different outlook to the generation born during the mid-1960s – I’m thinking of artists like Tsuyoshi Ozawa… koki tanaka Midori Matsui, an art critic, questioned why our generation doesn’t touch on ‘bigger’ issues or themes – the older generation, for example, was still struggling with the question: what is ‘Japanese’ art in a global age? She thought that because we grew up during the recession period in Japan we didn’t experience the economic bubble of the 1990s: we never spent a lot of money to produce physically big works. It was quite similar to the art bubble in China of the last ten years: Japanese artists who were active during the 1980s and 90s were making large-format sculptures, paintings or installations. When I was in art school I felt like everything had been done already by great artists. The artworld was somehow already completed. So it’s not just that we grew up in an economic depression; even in art we felt there was nothing we could do. I was a painting major: in Japan that was the only way to do contemporary art. But even the painting professors encouraged us to do something else. I tried many different things at art school. I guess the professors expected us eventually to go back to painting, but most of us didn’t. However we still wanted to do something, to make something. So I started looking at everyday objects, the kind that could easily be found in 99-cent stores. hh It seems that those were mainly household or kitchen objects. kt For me the everyday is related to the daily routine. That’s why I used things physically close to me. hh Do you think this use of everyday objects is also a way for you to go beyond the reference of art history? kt I think so. I was looking at everyday objects and playing with them to see how I could view and use them differently: this was the way I could escape the seriousness involved with the perspective of art history.
hh It seems also to be present in some recent works. Especially the political dimension of art history: in the case of Japan, the effects of the military occupation by America. Do you also think this is a change in your work? kt Yes, it’s a quite recent thing. But I should first talk a bit about the drawing series History Is Written from Someone Else’s Perspective, Someone You Don’t Know. Making Our Own History Requires Each of Us to Rewrite It from Our own Point of View [2010–], in which I document various milestones in the history of twentieth-century Japanese art, from the 1950s to the 70s. This wasn’t so much something that came from me, but actually more something that related to my experiences of meeting foreign curators. Because postwar Japanese art is becoming quite popular right
now, they often ask about the relationship between my work and the Gutai or Mono-ha groups of the 1950s and 60s. Although they probably only know these two groups, there were actually many other Japanese artists whose works are related to actions and performances. I wanted to show another aspect of Japanese postwar contemporary art. And to demonstrate that I wasn’t only influenced by Japanese postwar contemporary art. We are living in a global age, we are influenced by so many things: a Japanese person could be influenced by any other regional art history. I thought it would be nice to react above Chu Enoki, Went to Hungary with hangari, 1977, drawing on paper, 23 × 30 cm, from the series History Is Written from Someone Else’s Perspective, Someone You Don’t Know. Making Our Own History Requires Each of Us to Rewrite It from Our Own Point of View, 2010– facing page A Behavioral Statement (or an Unconscious Protest), 2013. Photo: Takashi Fujikawa
April 2015
to such expectations, not just by showing people what they wanted to see but also by showing another flow of history. As for a project related to the us occupation force, it was by chance that I found out a museum history connected to it. I was invited to do a project for Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015. One of their venues is the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art. When I visited the museum with the curators, they explained that after the Second World War, when the us occupation force came to Japan, they occupied the museum as their barracks. The biggest gallery space was used as their recreation room. They even installed a basketball hoop on the wall. Also I heard that in 1970, a legendary exhibition travelled from Tokyo to this museum: the show was called Between Man and Matter, curated by art critic Yusuke Nakahara. The selection of artists and the ideas were quite similar to Harald Szeemann’s Live in Your Head. When Attitudes Become Form [1969] and to Anti-Illusion: Procedures/ Materials [1969]. Of course he saw both and mentioned that in his curator’s statement. He invited artists like Richard Serra and Hans Haacke, but also Mono-ha artists, Jiro Takamatsu and On Kawara. We could say this was an alternative art history of 1960/70. There were documentation photographs of the show, and the biggest gallery space, where the basketball court had been, was used for Christo’s installation, which involved covering the floor with fabric. I was interested in these totally different moments related to the same space. As part of my upcoming project I will do workshop-type events reflecting on those moments. hh When it comes to moments in your own career, you’ve said before that 2009 marked a turning point. Why? kt That’s when I moved to Los Angeles. After spending more than ten years in one place – Tokyo – I felt free and was able to think about something different from my previous practice. Previously, I was more focused on movement and our reaction to everyday objects. And in doing that, somehow my practice became detached from social or political issues:
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bigger things, let’s say. As I said earlier, I think Japanese artists of my generation all had a similar tendency. You rarely found political artists of my generation in Japan around that time. But when I moved to la I felt freer to do anything, because, in a way, I became a nobody. A key project from around that time might be Someone’s Junk Is Someone Else’s Treasure [2011]. I set up a booth at a flea market to sell palm fronds. I tried to bring something very extreme into the flea-market context. I picked the palm fronds because they are the most useless things in California – they’re what we have to sweep away after a windy day. It was an experiment in registering people’s reaction to a fundamental question about the value of objects. And I was referencing two historical pieces: David Hammons’s Bliz-aard Ball Sale [1983], where he sold snowballs during winter in New York; and a Japanese manga called Munou no Hito [A Worthless Person, 1985], in which the protagonist sells stones by the riverside – stones being sold alongside stones. So both shared quite similar ideas. hh Did anyone come to buy the palm fronds? kt This project was created with the box Gallery [directed by Mara McCarthy], so Paul McCarthy came and bought one – I guess as an insider, in a way. So I would say that no one really wanted to buy them. I started at around seven in the morning, but around noon the head of the flea market came to kick me out. I think some of the vendors complained. They might have thought I was not serious. hh ‘The everyday’ is a very popular subject matter for a number of artists today. What is your particular approach to it? kt I don’t know if my approach is different to other people’s, but I am curious about our behaviour, actions and reactions in everyday life. Previously my interest hinged on objects; more recently it hinges on people. But perhaps I should talk about 3/11 – the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis that took place in 2011 in Japan – because this event pushed me to think further about the everyday. Before, I thought the everyday was just the ordinary: merely things that we could access easily – the endless repetition of peaceful but boring time. That’s why people overlook it and lose the sensibility to look at life afresh. With my art I tried to bring a different point of view on the everyday in order to make us sensible of it. But when I faced postdisaster society in Japan I found out that this was just one aspect of thinking about the everyday. The meaning of ‘everyday’ had changed. In part this was because the Fukushima nuclear crisis meant that the postdisaster (originally an earthquake
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and tsunami) crisis has lasted a long time. It cannot be solved quickly. So unusual situations become ‘everyday’ in Japan. And I noticed that such a flipped ‘everyday’ could be everywhere – like in parts of the Middle East, where the threat of war might be a usual ‘everyday’ situation, while to us it is a remote or unusual one. When I went back to Japan after the disaster, people’s thinking was strange to me, because even experiencing the disaster from a distance can make people fall apart. If you were in Tokyo, you were away from Fukushima, and far away from the area where the tsunami hit. So you felt like you were not fully involved in the event, and you started to compare the experiences you had at the time; you even compared how often you went to the area to help; or even maybe just how close you went, especially to Fukushima. The quantity and the location of the visits: those things became important to you. But from my perspective, because I was in la, I felt like Japan as a whole was fully involved. The distance had
Activism relates to the hope of provoking direct change. But for my art practice there cannot be an immediate effect. Rather the effect is small but long-lasting – something that slowly affects society a strange effect on people’s understanding of boundaries. And experiences divided us. I was thinking about how this type of perspective affects us. Looking back, this experience was the main reason why I started several projects, including the one for the Japanese Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale. hh From what you are saying, it seems as if the disaster made things more urgent – almost like a political situation – and in this context people express their political and social concerns in a very straightforward way. But your work is not very straightforward; it seems to involve shifting the everyday – the codes of everyday life and meaning – by incorporating relationships with other people within it. kt My practice is ambiguous. I try to keep wondering, because such an attitude keeps me thinking. I was actually quite late to respond to the Japanese postdisaster situation. In 2012 I started a series of projects titled Precarious Tasks (one of the actions and situations was scripted as a response to the ongoing antinuclear protests on Fridays in Tokyo, and designed to test the idea that if we are conscious of doing something symbolic – like wearing yellow – in order to
ArtReview
participate in the protests from afar, then the everyday itself can become a political action), but many Japanese artists responded much more quickly. The artist collective Chim Pom did a project involving neighbouring communities about a week after the disaster and made strong political statements [documented in videoworks such as 100 kiai, 2011, in which the participants cheer everything from “Here we go!” and “We’re going to rebuild!” to “I want a girlfriend!” and “Long live nuclear disasters!”]. But even though I was late, this distance in time was important. I don’t think I’m doing activist-type projects. Activism relates to the hope of provoking direct change. But for my art practice there cannot be an immediate effect, rather the effect is small but long-lasting – something that slowly affects society. hh Of course you can see the contrast with artists like Kenji Yanobe, for whom the dangers of nuclear power have long been a subject matter and who went to Chernobyl with his Atom Suit Project in 1997. His work is very evident and straightforward. Chim Pom did this very funny piece around Fukushima which is a little bit ambiguous. Also there are many artists and architects who have been working directly to propose solutions for reconstruction. It seems that you have a very different role in this case. kt I think so. Toyo Ito did a project called Possible Here? Home-for-All, for the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. It’s a series of buildings, community housing for Rikuzentakata, where the tsunami washed away the entire city. He asked three architects to collaboratively build a house for the local community, directly linked to the site, the situation and people. They showed their process through a lot of architectural models, and I was impressed. But my conception of the Japanese Pavilion for the Venice Biennale the following year was abstract. The idea was conceptualised with Mika Kuraya, the curator of the pavilion. It addressed how we can share someone else’s experience as our own. This issue was raised after the disaster in Japan. I aimed to capture the utopian moment of the postdisaster situation that happened, even in Tokyo, after the earthquake. This was the moment we didn’t have compassion for others but simply shared uncertainty, and people started to help each other to get over that uncertainty. I focused on the collective and collaborative aspects of such a moment, and brought it into different situations, such as collaborative creations. In the show there was the video documenting how five poets could write a single poem together, or another showing how five potters could make a work of pottery together, and so on. It shows the beauty of people’s collaboration but at the same time the ugly side of human nature – the battle of ‘egos’ – and collaboration’s failure.
above On Kawara, I Got Up At…, 1974–5, drawing on paper, 23 × 30 cm, from the series History Is Written from Someone Else’s Perspective, Someone You Don’t Know. Making Our Own History Requires Each of Us to Rewrite It from Our Own Point of View, 2010– overleaf Someone’s Junk Is Someone Else’s Treasure, 2011, action, hd video documentation, 11 min, two pencil drawings, palm fronds and blanket at Pasadena City College Flea Market
April 2015
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top Precarious Tasks #7: Try to Keep Conscious About a Specific Social Issue, in This Case ‘Anti-Nuke’, as Long as Possible While You Are Wearing Yellow Color, 2013, action bottom A Pottery Produced by 5 Potters at Once (Silent Attempt), 2013, action
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hh It’s interesting to see, in your work before and maybe especially after the earthquake, that there is a tendency to embrace the idea of a collective ritual. It’s almost like a tea ceremony (although the tea ceremony is definitely its own thing). Do you think your work has something to do with this traditional idea of coming together to do one thing, like a ceremony? kt Yes, it could be a ritual action. In a contemporary society we can live without engaging with a community. We can live in isolation. And if a city is big, we just ignore other people. But if unusual things happen, we suddenly communicate with each other and try to find out about and even help each other – as with the postdisaster in Tokyo. Last week the area in which I live [in la] had an accidental blackout in the evening: we went outside and started chatting with neighbours, trying to find out what was happening, and later someone brought beers and even started an open-air fire. I’m interested in those moments of temporary community. As I said, it’s related to recovering social bonds. hh Temporary communities happen in many different ways. Some are a really direct collaboration; some are debates, exchanges; but also some people in the end choose not to collaborate. Let’s take, for example, one of the works from your Venice pavilion – A Behavioral Statement (or an Unconscious Protest) [2013] – which involves a group of people on an external fire escape of an office building. I imagine you used this setting because it is directly related to the idea of disaster, but rather than practising an emergency drill, the people in it are talking and reading… kt Most of them experienced the earthquake in Tokyo. I asked the participants to bring their favourite books. Some of them did bring their favourites; some of them brought books they made in relation to their profession; and some of them brought the book of the evacuation plan. But one of the reasons I asked them to bring books was because when you read the book in a public space it represents you. If you are reading philosophy, that shows you are a smart guy. There were two groups. I asked one to stay at the top of the building and the other at the bottom of the building for a little while. They started to read their books and some of them talked about their books with others. Later they started moving towards the staircase. Why two groups: one going up and one going down? It reflects
the postdisaster situation in Japan – falling apart into two groups, one that says we still need nuclear power and the other that says we don’t. I tried, symbolically, to mix up two extreme groups. hh Let’s talk about your upcoming show in Berlin and what you will do there. You’ve said that your work, your life and your exhibitions are ever-changing situations: like travelling – they recycle, so they change. So to show a retrospective is kind of tricky. How can you stop the flux or evolution of the work? kt The show at Deutsche Bank KunstHalle is supposed to travel to other cities, and I’m interested in the travelling aspect of the show. We travel and we change. So this is one way I can keep changing and developing for the next
couple of years. I am particularly hoping that the show travels to other cities in which I used to live or at least have visited several times, so that I can make different shows by reusing previous projects that I made in each city. hh You are travelling a lot and you have this tendency to involve more and more people in your work. How do you convince people to take part, how do you choose those people? kt I am not really convincing people to participate. It is rather an open call, as it was for Precarious Tasks – one time ten participants, another time 60. But even if I only have one participant, Hi-Red-Center, Dropping Event, 1964, drawing on paper, 23 × 30 cm, from the series History Is Written from Someone Else’s Perspective, Someone You Don’t Know. Making Our Own History Requires Each of Us to Rewrite It from Our Own Point of View, 2010– all images Courtesy the artist, Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, and Aoyama Meguro, Tokyo
April 2015
I think it’s fine. I don’t have any expectation of numbers. The process itself is also precarious. Take a project like A Pottery Produced by 5 Potters at Once (Silent Attempt)[2013]. In this case, I needed to meet all of the participants beforehand to talk about what they were going to do, even if they couldn’t fully imagine it, because when they were working together, the filming situation was going to be quite intense for all of them. Once it starts, actually the process is quite open-ended. I withdraw from my position and leave the participants to decide everything. Because they have to do so, they need to talk to each other. In the process of sculpting clay they were slowly facing the differences in their profession. And that goes even deeper – based on what they have done previously in ‘pottery’, what they think about ‘pottery making’.In the end they start to realise who they really are… This in itself was a kind of a social experiment. But Precarious tasks #10 Go to a bar located over 20 km from a museum to drink, discuss and watch a film about nuclear power problem [2014] did not go so well. It was probably too educational or too straightforward. I programmed a film screening about nuclear waste and a lecture on the situations in Europe and Japan given by an antinuclear activist during a dinner. I enjoyed it a lot and the participants seemed to do so too. The action of travelling 20km (the distance of the exclusion zone imposed around Fukushima) by bus from the VanAbbe museum was quite nice, because we were just going through the middle of nowhere in the Netherlands, arriving at a bar in Middelbeers that opened in 1973, the year the second nuclear reactor in the Netherlands entered service. The nuclear reactor is still in use today. Later, I thought it would have been enough to go there, have a drink and come back. I am still not sure, but it was all a bit too much. hh Too clear? kt Maybe I just wanted to go, drink and come back with the participants. This was already a learning experience about ‘distance’… ar Koki Tanaka’s ‘Artist of the Year’ 2015 exhibition is on show at Deutsche Bank KunstHalle, Berlin, until 25 May. Parasophia: Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture 2015, until 10 May
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In the beginning there was Haus u r – an abandoned residential house The fundamental inner split of Haus u r, whereby each room is also in Gregor Schneider’s hometown of Rheydt, which he occupied from the room into which it was inserted, and the space – the difference – 1985 until 2001, all the while continuously reconstructing its inner between them; whereby self-affirmation is self-negation, and vice structure as a discontinuous, unregulated typology of rooms built versa; whereby presence is absence, and absence is presence, and so inside the house’s preexisting rooms (with windows in front of forth – this inner split situates the event of Haus u r, the outcome of windows, walls in front of walls, floors on top of floors, etc). Repeating its ontological inconsistency, beyond perceptibility, where opposites the architectural elements and materials that were already there, are indistinct. Haus u r was realised as an indistinguishable duplicate of the original, At the 2001 Venice Biennale, after 16 years of psychophysical one that assimilated it. Under these circumstances, each room was investment, Schneider further repeated the underlying repetition of doubly defined as both an overdelineated, isolating container and an Haus u r when he dismantled its rooms and reconstructed them in the external boundary indicating the inaccessible and unseen spaces and German Pavilion in the Giardini, under the title Totes Haus u r (Dead objects beyond it – in the remaining gaps between the primary rooms House u r) (which won Germany the Golden Lion for best national participation). With that came the shift from the living realm of the and those they were penetrated by – without exposing them. As an ongoing process lasting for more than a decade, Haus u r private to the dead realm of the public: that which up until then had rejected architecture’s pretension to offer permanence and distinc- been visited only by a few guests under Schneider’s guidance and tion in favour of a fundamental indeterminacy. Rooms such as the commentary became a massive attraction for the many; that which up Kaffeezimmer (Coffee Room, 1993), Total Isoliertes Gästezimmer (Completely until then was discrete, introverted, contingent and organic became Insulated Guestroom, 1995), Liebeslaube (Love Nest, 1995) or Keller (Cellar) exemplary, propositional, calibrated and purged. The title Totes Haus were repeatedly implemented within configurations of conscious/ u r addressed the implications of objectifying Haus u r, objectifying unconscious, seen/unseen and higher/lower. Their structural net of 16 years of a total way of being, as that of killing and revivifying, of concealed gaps, holes, recesses and abysses, through which a person lethality and redemption. After Venice, Totes Haus u r began travelcould have disappeared; the effects of sensory deprivation, disorienta- ling the world by ways of physical dislocation or technological reprotion and seclusion they produce; the walls behind which figures and duction (uprooted in its entirety, in single rooms and segments, or personal photographs of ancestors were hidden; the covert rotation in photographs), and its body became distributed and dispersed in an mechanism under the floor of the Kaffeezimmer by means of which it extensive event of self-displacement and amputation. unnoticeably revolved around itself; and the all-over dissemination of In 2014, Haus u r symbolically returned to Rheydt and reappeared blind windows and false doors guaranteed the house’s ambiguity as in the guise of the birthplace and childhood home of Joseph Goebbels an unfixed intersection of a petit-bourgeois dwelling, hostel, squat, – the Reich Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany – which stands Duchampian bachelor machine, haunted house, spatialised subjec- a short distance away. Deciding to present Goebbels’s house as the tivity, family genealogy, memorial site, tomb, clone of his own house, Schneider had acquired trap, dungeon, sadistic institute, behaviourthe property (along with its contents at the time Haus u r, ist experiment and phantasmatic scenario. of purchase) a while before from the family that Rheydt, Germany, 2014
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was then living there. Immediately thereafter, in order to incorpo- outside Cologne. Synagogue Stommeln is one of the very few synarate the house he had just bought into his own universe, he started gogues that was not destroyed by the Nazis. The German farmer to destroy it, dismantling and completely removing its inner struc- who bought it from the local Jewish community in 1937 convinced ture and all architectural elements, up to the point where it became the Nazi authorities it was no longer a Jewish place, and there was an empty cube. In November 2014 the ruins of Goebbels’s house were no reason to burn it down. During the 1980s the synagogue was stacked in a truck that drove all the way from Rheydt to Warsaw, restored, and since 1991 it has functioned as an alternative art space where it was parked in front of Zache˛ta – National Gallery of Art whose programme includes unique projects by artists such as Maria during the opening days of Schneider’s unsubscribe exhibition. Inside Nordman, Rosemarie Trockel and Daniel Buren, among many others. Zache˛ta, Schneider scattered unexceptional items and materials from Schneider’s project in Stommeln pursues the history of the place, the house – among other things, a pile of wooden studs and plates, yet avoids memorialisation. His gesture there can be described as sand and dolls on top of an empty newspaper basket, books, shelves, sealing the synagogue building and concealing it under the complete, a full jar of jam and a usb stick – staging new covering of a spotless, untouched suburban family house. As curator an arena of unrevealing evidence that After its erasure was made Ulrich Loock writes in the press text, emphasised its inability to testify about untraceable after the war, Schneider Schneider’s Stommeln project ‘not only the historical rupture with which it erases the erasure of the erasure was provided. In an adjacent dark space consists in making the synagogue disapSchneider displayed four projections, depear, but at the same time in blending in picting him drinking soup and sleeping in a bed inside the Goebbels with its surroundings to such an extent that it is not conspicuous or house, the Goebbels house when empty and the process of its dis- recognizable as an artwork. Along with the synagogue, the artwork mantling. Comparable to his Amateur Videos (1998–2001), in which he itself is thus also being made to vanish.’ Schneider evokes the Jewish shot himself going through the concealed spaces – the escape routes past of the place by erasing it once more. After its erasure during the – of Haus u r, this video footage validated the connection between the Second World War, and after its erasure was made untraceable after two houses; it grounded their interchangeability. the war, Schneider erases the erasure of the erasure. Goebbels’s house is the follower of Haus u r – it repeats it – and Schneider’s family house in Stommeln is like a 1:1 model of a its precedence is repeated by it. They turn each other into a sort of a house: new, untouched and lifeless. Unlike Haus u r and Totes Haus u r, Nazi monument, a property of historical incommensurability. In this which denoted human presence through traces of disappearance, context, the inherent imperceptibility of Haus u r becomes a form of Hauptstrasse 85a articulated human absence by the lack of any signs negative representation, referring to that which transgresses verbal of former life. In this sense it recalled Schneider’s Weisse Folter (White and visual signification in terms of what it is not. Torture, 2007), the dehumanised total installation he produced during Earlier last year Schneider expanded his self-initiated connec- the eccentric worldwide odyssey of Totes Haus u r. As with other works tion to the history of Nazi Germany when by Schneider, Weisse Folter is a duplicate without Rheydt, 2014 he launched Hauptstrasse 85a (85a Main St) in origin, whose origin is inaccessible. It was based (installation view, unsubscribe, 2014, Zache˛ta – National Gallery of Art, Warsaw) on images of Detention Camp 5 in Guantánamo Synagogue Stommeln in Pulheim, a small town
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Bay naval base, and was organised as a mazelike sequence of shiny grey soundproofed hallways, lined with deep-red doors and small spotless white cells with a built-in bed, a one-piece stainless steel cast of sink/toilet and an opaque vertical window slit; after escaping these sequences of hallways and cells, one was caught in an unregulated movement of sharp transitions between different climaxes and sensorial stimulations – a constellation of a metal room filled with hot air, a dark room filled with cold air and a triangular white room, which suggested (as the title declared) practices of stealth interrogation and clean torture designed to break the subject’s protective shields while leaving no visible marks. Experienced as a breached facility in which the visitor is an unauthorised intruder and a violable bodily sovereignty, Weisse Folter was a blind authoritarian architecture of a public institution, where isolated personae were suspended from their place in society and from everyday concepts of time and place. Political theorist Suzy K. Freake considers Weisse Folter an embodiment of the concept of ‘statelessness’, which Hannah Arendt first outlined in her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. The term ‘stateless’ describes the various groups of uprooted persons who had lost the protection and representation of their nation-state within interstitial spaces of legality. Weisse Folter, Freake claims, takes statelessness from the field of subjugation and weakness to the field of resistance. By recreating Guantánamo Bay halls, rendering them available to public experience, and consequentially ‘foregrounding the stateless persons residing there’, it seemingly undermines the power of the nation-state seeking to reproduce the obscurity of the camp; and by emulating the state’s practices of ‘clean’ torture, it deconstructs the law’s monopoly on violence.
If Weisse Folter turned its visitors into dehumanised detainees who experienced its spaces while keeping their surfaces pristine, who suffered simulated clean torture with no traces, and were denied representation due to isolation, then Kunstmuseum, the installation Schneider launched in August 2014 in Kunstmuseum Bochum, performed progress from anonymity, detainment and permeability towards integrity and personhood. Kunstmuseum was a dark walkthrough metal pipe tunnel, accessible via only one entrance from outside the museum building and, like all of Schneider’s major installations, by only one visitor at a time. As one walked through the dark tunnel, one’s ability to act freely was neutralised, one’s sense of sovereign bodily separateness was lost. It enforced a regression to precoordination, until it discharged the visitor into an illuminated industrial space with two metal doors. While gradually regaining their self-identity, the discharged visitor was able to open the unlocked door, behind which a corridor led to an abandoned room, titled Archiv (Archive), consisting of ring binders on shelves, a desk with a computer, a locker, a ventilator and a kitchenette. Inside Archiv, the visitor, who was up until now an animal, infant or slave, slowly conceived the function of the archive, of stored knowledge and descriptive language, as if for the first time. Next was a white hallway with two white doors, behind one of which was another abandoned setting of a room, titled Büro (office), where the visitor, still under the oppressive impact of the tunnel, confronted the role of the missing manager as a preliminary manifestation of division of labour, relations of production and social alienation. Then was another white hallway, this time with three doors, behind one of which awaited catharsis as the visitor left the installation and returned to the world – the oppressive setting of history. ar
Weisse Folter (installation view, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2007), 2005–2007, 1225 × 200 × 230 cm all images Courtesy the artist/vg-Bild Kunst, Bonn
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Renzo Martens How the Dutch provocateur launched an independent cultural economy with plantation workers in the Democratic Republic of Congo by J.J. Charlesworth
above The Institute for Human Activities’s new conference centre in exile, undisclosed location, dr Congo, 2014 facing page Emery Muhamba working on a self portrait, Institute for Human Activities, dr Congo, 2014
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In a nutshell (there are many long essays written on Martens’s film A few years ago, I was talking with some Indian artists, who were active on what could be called the ‘international biennial circuit’. Out already, most of them worth reading), Episode III follows the artist as of curiosity, I asked them if, since the cost of living and production he travels the towns and backwaters of the drc, in his mission to costs were lower in India than in Europe or America, they expected encourage poor Congolese plantation workers to ‘exploit’ their own to get paid less by Western biennials than their Western peers. They suffering and disadvantage by becoming photojournalists; to become looked surprised and affronted by the question, answering – quite commercial image-makers of their own experience of malnutrition, disease and conflict in their country. After all, concludes Martens, rightly – that no, they didn’t. It’s not surprising that they took the question the wrong way. Who local Congolese photographers can only earn so much by photothe hell was this white British art critic guy to ask an Indian artist graphing weddings or doing portraits, since their clients are also about whether they should accept to work for less than their peers in local. By comparison, the white, Western journalists who profit from the wealthier economies? Yet while they were right to expect equality selling their images of African poverty back to the wealthy Western within the economic circuits of the global artworld, the bigger under- media earn a packet. So why not try to get a piece of that action? lying reality of the question – that of global On the surface, there is something economic disparity and how this intersects faintly disturbing about Martens’s bizarre The white man missionary, come, with the cultural economy contemporary recreation of the white man missionary, this time, not with the message art now inhabits – can’t simply be wished come, this time, not with the message of of God, but instead with the creed God, but instead with the creed of capiaway. Because wherever they exist in the world, artists (when they start to become talist self-improvement (not least because of capitalist self-improvement successful) are usually part of the class of Martens somehow resembles a less crazed better-off ‘cultural workers’. And in an artworld that operates across version of Klaus Kinski, in his signature roles in Aguirre, Wrath of God, distant economic centres, in which money circulates internationally, 1972, or Fitzcarraldo, 1982, Werner Herzog’s epic assaults on European contemporary art cannot help but to dramatise the stark differences colonial hubris and delusion). It seems wilfully cruel and provocative: between wealthy and poor economies, as well as between the fortunes but why? Maybe because it forces us to face the uncomfortable quesof ‘creative workers’ and those low-paid wage-earners everywhere tion of the balance of economic power that continues to condemn many Africans to a life of subsistence labour and grinding poverty, across the world. Nowhere are economic inequalities more stark, perhaps, than somehow regardless of the countless millions in aid, and the thouin Africa, and that old conversation with the Indian artists comes to sands of aid workers and ngos that have come to Africa to do ‘good mind as I listen to the Dutch artist Renzo Martens, describing himself work’. If, on the surface, Episode III, seems unsettlingly cruel, it’s peras a ‘slightly overweight, middle-class, middle-aged, European white haps because it makes literal, for the Western viewer, the ambiguous guy’ to a conference audience in Cardiff in January, held during the realities of the rich North’s unequal relationship to the poor South, Artes Mundi prize exhibition for which Martens had been short- while disrupting the one-sided view we would prefer to maintain of listed. With a strangely shifting mix of missionary-man visionary ‘our’ benevolence; we’re on the side of aid and economic assistance, conviction, ted-talk professionalism and art-critical impassivity, but we tend to avoid the harder questions of the global economy’s he’s steadily working through the unsettling, snare-like logic of his abandonment of poor countries, and of the riches that wealthy econoartistic interventions in the Democratic Republic of Congo: the 2009 mies derive from often abject exploitation, often in mining and agrifilm Episode III: Enjoy Poverty, and the most recent developments of his culture. The wealthy world likes to give with one hand, but usually five-year project there, the Institute for Human Activities. takes with the other.
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But while there’s a political, perhaps even moral side to Martens’s plantation formerly owned by Unilever in the drc, 800km from work in addressing such inequality, there is a parallel aspect to it that Kinshasa. In June 2012, Martens’s Institute hosted a seminar on gencomplicates it, since Martens implicates not simply Western audiences trification, inviting international curators, activists and theorists to in general, but also the particular audience of Western contemporary present their ideas to an audience of local plantation workers. (Richard art. And within this, he turns a harsh light onto the question of ‘critical’ Florida, the go-to theorist of gentrification since his controversial 2002 art, seeing that art’s claim to operate critically on questions of social book The Rise of the Creative Class, gave a Q&A by video link.) The idea, and political reality tends, paradoxically, to absolve it of a responsi- as with Episode iii’s take on the global economy of photojournalism, bility to examine the grounds from which it operates. Martens has was to drag the economic opportunity of gentrification from its consistently argued that what are deemed to be ‘critical’ art practices wealthy Western, service-economy centres into the low-wage economy are critical only inasmuch as they bring our attention to their object of of the Congo – aiming to turn poorly paid plantation workers into criticism, rather than expose their own relationship to their object to potentially better paid cultural workers. critical scrutiny. So in a 2010 interview with Art Papers, he observed that A year later, the Institute was forced off the plantation by its ‘something that is often missing in contemporary art’s documentary owners, Feronia Inc, the Canada-based palm oil company which had practices … [is that] the position of the piece vis à vis what it’s depicting bought the plantation from Unilever in 2009. Undeterred, Martens has re-established the Institute at an undisclosed location, this time is often not included into the equation.’ To deal with this problem means, for Martens, to position himself buying the land for the Institute’s site. And with it, Martens has and his work in an ever-more-explicit articulation of the connections pushed on with his ‘gentrification programme’. At its new location and relationships between art, culture and economics. To which end, the iha has begun to deliver its ‘critical curriculum’, in which local in 2012, Martens established the Institute for Human Activities, an palm oil workers have attended lectures and screenings on contemorganisation-cum-art project whose aim is to highlight the distance porary art (a lecture on the history of the white cube by Dutch critic between socially minded ‘critical’ art’s object of attention and the site Laurens Otto, screenings of video works by Bruce Nauman, John of its reception. As the Institute’s mission statement puts it, ‘art may Baldessari and Dan Graham). Importantly, the Institute hosted the expose the need for change in Nigeria or Peru, but in the end it brings inaugural meeting of the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League opportunity, improved living conditions, and real-estate value to (cpwal) and began a sculpture workshop, out of which members of Berlin-Mitte or the Lower East Side.’ the league have developed and produced sculptural self-portraits. Here, Martens’s sardonic take on the pretensions of critical art Which brings us to now. Those sculptures, digitally scanned, alights on the reality of cultural ‘gentrification’ – the transforma- transmitted and turned into moulds back in Europe, are now being tion of post-industrial neighbourhoods in say, New York, London or reproduced, in chocolate supplied by Belgian chocolate producer Berlin, by successive waves of ‘creative’ people and activities – artists, Barry Callebaut, for sale by the iha (chocolate that in fact comes designers, galleries and so on – in which art and culture is promoted by from the cocoa plantations for which some of the members of the Art political interests because, as the iha suggests, ‘[politicians and busi- League also work). All the proceeds return to the plantation workers nessmen] know art will make their cities more competitive in the battle who, as the iha wryly puts it, are making the transition, ‘from lowly for attention, high net-worth individuals, and capital investment.’ paid plantation labor into more lucrative post-Fordist affective labor.’ To turn this on its head, to expose what Martens refers to as art’s As Martens points out, currently one of those workers is lucky if they ‘Terms and Conditions’, the iha set out on can earn £13 in a month. In Cardiff, the iha was Jan Willem of the Dutch pastry team its own ‘gentrification programme’, by estabselling the chocolate sculptures for £39.95, contemplating the work of Mbuku Kipala, Netherlands, 2014 lishing itself on a tract of land in a palm oil roughly the equivalent of three months’ pay.
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Martens is preparing for exhibitions of the sculptures and the iha’s of precarity, of poverty – of those who would have previously not had activities at Berlin’s kow and at Amsterdam’s Galerie Fons Welters, a voice within its ambit. Here, the artwork, rather than merely critiwhile organising an ‘office’ which will fundraise for and promote the cise the limitations and complicities of its institutional context from iha at Kunst-Werke in Berlin. Martens explains that the goal is to within – as with so much of the art associated with ‘institutional increase sales of the sculptures to a level at which their production be- critique’, from Hans Haacke to Andrea Fraser – reverses the direction comes self-sustaining, and their producers might finally swap grinding of critical art’s relationship to its subject, exposing the artworld’s toil for a more comfortable existence (‘finishing a day in the studio to privileged site to the workings of the global commodity economy relax with a cold beer’, as he wistfully puts it), becoming equal partici- on which the immaterial labour of all ‘cultural workers’ is based: no pants in the global creative economy. Whether this is a realistic busi- lattes without Brazilian coffee growers, no laptops without Chinese ness model is a serious question here, and if it were merely a matter of assembly-line workers. Martens ‘fronting’ such a product then the relationship between artists Yet what is perhaps most radical about Martens’s project is its of the cpwal and Martens, and the unequal distribution of ‘cultural optimism. Unlike international aid, which expends itself with little capital’, would be contentious. In the history of socially engaged artistic to show in terms of raising the living standards of those in the global practice, divisions between the ‘professional’ artist and those they seek South, and unlike fairtrade, which prides itself merely in paying a to engage from outside of the official art system often produce tensions bit more to wage-labourers who nevertheless stay wage-labourers, – I’m thinking, for example, of American Tim Rollins and his many Martens’s position demands far more, namely the transformayears of work with his group K.O.S., whose collective reading of litera- tion of commodity labour into cultural, service-sector, ‘immaterial’ labour; and not through some slow process of gradual ameliorature results in a studio practice of painting that sells in galleries. But perhaps Martens’s approach most resembles – albeit on a very tion but through the sudden, stark, short-circuiting of critical art’s different footing – that of American Theaster Gates, whose shrewd subject with its object: to turn workers from the objects of Western manipulation of the gallery system and its market feeds directly back exploitation or Western pity into the subjects of ‘affective labour’, into his ambitious and multiple community-based initiatives in his and the makers of culture. If many over here, in the Western ‘critical’ hometown of Chicago. Gates, also shortlisted for Artes Mundi, was artworld, bemoan the commodification of cultural work in the postthe winner of the £40,000 prize, gleefully messing up the formality industrial landscape of cognitive capital, maybe they should ask themof the award ceremony by splitting the prize money with his peers. selves if they would swap their working day for a day pressing palm oil, for £13 a month. No? Then maybe it’s time to buy a sculpture by Martens funnelled his share back to the artists of the cpwal. Converting cultural capital into non-artworld resources, what the artists of the Congolese Plantation Workers Art League. They’re Gates and Martens share is a rethinking of the critical approach to made from cocoa, but the special ingredient, Martens suggests, the institutions and economics of the artworld. Rather than simply might be a blend of ‘feeling and critical thinking’. And since that’s produce a ‘critical’ art product which will eventually be reassimilated what we, in the artworld are selling to each other anyway, maybe it’s into the artworld’s increasingly accommodating circuits, here the time that closed market opened up. ar resources generated are redirected into other activities, and visibly so. The iha’s ‘critical curriculum’ seeks not only to develop its collaboRenzo Martens / Institute for Human Activities is on view at kow, Berlin, 2 May – 25 July, and rators’ understanding of the workings of the Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam, 2 May – 6 June. contemporary artworld, but conversely, as Artes Mundi 6 (installation view, National Museum Wales, Cardiff), 2014 Renzo Martens: The Matter Of Critique is Martens argues, to open up the artworld to the all images Courtesy Institute for Human Activities at Kunst-Werke, Berlin, 2 May – 7 June knowledge and experience – of globalisation,
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Renata Lucas by Oliver Basciano
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If there’s something strange in your neighbourhood…
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above Kunst-Werke (Cabeça e cauda de cavalo), 2010 (installation view, kw Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin). Photo: Uwe Walter. Courtesy the artist previous spread The Museum of the Diagonal Man, 2014. Commissioned as part of the artist’s 2013 Absolut Art Award winning project. Photo: Roberto Chamorro. Courtesy the artist and Absolut
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to its new cultural role. If her use of the museum motif shows that she is not oblivious to the fact that art is one the biggest instruments of gentrification, used by local government and developers alike, it’s a fact Lucas has been at pains to acknowledge before. With Atlas, a 2006 Gamboa had been a typical Rio de Janeiro neighbourhood: bearing exhibition at Galeria Millan Antonio, São Paulo, she satirised the architectural remnants of a faded colonial past, noisy with music trend for commercial galleries to take over previously industrial and and the calls of hawkers plying their trade, abundant in graffiti. The light-industrial spaces, inviting a bodyshop from across the street to announcement, however, that the area – near the city’s historic port annex the space, painting the gallery façade to complement the repair – would be the site of the athletes’s village for the 2016 Olympics has shop’s own exterior. brought the theatre of regeneration to the streets. The former police If a city in the throes of regeneration is a perfect picture of late building, port superintendant’s office and the bus station have been capitalism’s ideological health – as capital moves from the public to redeveloped under one undulating roof to become the new Museu de the private spheres, and the rich appropriate space from the poor – Arte do Rio; five steel-and-glass towers backed by Donald Trump are then Lucas’s public works can be seen not only as commentary but planned for the port area; swathes of once public land have been given also as attempts to disturb the scenario. Perhaps the most effective over to private developers in preparation for the global spectacle. The audience for her acts of insurrection, therefore, is the unwary one changes in this area have been accelerated by the Olympics, but the – the surprised passerby who can see something is amiss, but can’t story is a familiar one the world over, regardless of the particular stim- immediately explain that ‘something’ with the label of art. Lucas does ulus at play here. The effects of the capitalist narrative – hoardings, undertake gallery shows, in which, ironically, she will often require wrecking balls, marketing suites and civic masterplans – are univer- the active participation of the viewer: her exhibition at Galeria Luisa sally recognisable, from Berlin to Melbourne, Oslo to Singapore. Strina last year involved multiple movable internal walls that the public were invited to push and In September last year the pull around, a callback to one streets of Gamboa also hosted of her most famous and mosta project by Renata Lucas, the often shown installations, Falha latest instalment of the Rio-based (Failure, 2003), in which galleryartist’s year-long series The Musegoers can reconfigure sections um of the Diagonal Man (2014). Like of hinged plywood floorboards. many of Lucas’s interventions But often when asked to exhibit into public space over the last 15 years, the individual (otherin an institutional or commercial wise untitled) elements of this gallery setting Lucas will take her work outside the confines project sketched links between of the building – outside, that the urban fabric and politicalis, the space ordained by society economic power. In some cases, for the spectacle of art, in which the criticism was overt: for example, a turntable embedded in the history of Conceptualism has the concrete floor outside a warereadied visitors for the odd, or house, a record spinning and the everyday made odd. the muffled sound of one looped line from Sinal Fechado, a 1970s laDuring Tate Modern’s 2007 exhibition The World as a Stage, for ment by Chico Buarque, coming through the exterior wall. The example, Lucas’s work was situated on a strip of green space outside lyric – in translation, “I vanished in the dust of the streets” – in this the museum, where she planted an unruly mass of trees, countering context felt like it should be a rallying cry for locals displaced by the the neat rows of existing birches. Regular visitors would recognise Olympic development. these trees, titled The Forest (2007), as a new addition, but even the dayOther interventions proved harder to differentiate from the visitors and tourists might have registered a feeling of discombobuexisting urban fabric (no map or interpretation was provided). When lation over the irritatingly messy planting in this otherwise formal pushed, a graffiti’d but otherwise anonymous section of the external landscape. It was a neat burlesque of the themes of The World as a Stage, wall of a disused warehouse swung on a central pivot to reveal a secret in which many of the works inside the building (Sweeney Tate, 2007, entrance. In another work, mimicking the white paint that had been for example, a recreated barber shop by Mario Ybarra Jr., or Rotating applied to the former bare concrete bus station in the development Labyrinth, 2007, an architectural mirror installation by Jeppe Hein) of the Museu de Arte do Rio – a manner of signifying the building’s flaunted a theatricality which the viewer, in turn, was prepared for new sophistication, the artist says – Lucas painted three columns of by the very fact of their presence in a gallery. Encountering Lucas’s a nearby office block white, leaving the rest as they were. She also out-of-place planting, visitors became engaged in the ‘fictional’ space made the museum the object of her attention by employing, like of art, long before they were expecting it. Confusion as a means of Baker Street Irregulars, a group of hawkers whose trade had other- radical co-option of space and public attention is a leitmotif for the artist. Take the early work Cruzamento wise mostly been stopped by the clean-up above The Museum of the Diagonal Man, 2014. (Crossing, 2003), for example, in which Lucas operation in the area; Lucas had them selling Commissioned as part of the artist’s lenticular prints in which the image moves hijacked a crossroad in Rio by laying swathes 2013 Absolut Art Award winning project. from a vision of the old bus station building Photo: Roberto Chamorro. Courtesy the artist and Absolut of plywood over the asphalt. While not ‘All materialization is provisional: cutting, bending, tearing, coating: construction has acquired a new softness, like tailoring’ – Rem Koolhaas, ‘Junkspace’, 2001
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exactly constituting a plaza, the material led to uncertainty amongst motorists and pedestrians alike concerning whom this space now belonged to. People strayed from the pavement into the middle of the intersection; cars slowed, unsure of the right of way. Such interventions obviously have an art-historical pedigree. A work for Lucas’s 2010 solo exhibition at kw Institute in Berlin, in which the artist shifted the paving stones outside the gallery to create a glitch in the surface (as if, as the artist described it at the time ‘the terrain had been rotated 7.5 degrees counterclockwise’) recalls Gordon Matta-Clark’s architectural ‘collages’ – Circus, or Caribbean Orange (1978), for example, in which the American artist shifted whole sections of a building next to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. One can also trace a lineage within the context of the twentieth-century Brazilian avant-garde. Lucas’s method of disturbing the day-to-day activities of the public is akin to the work of Artur Barrio, particularly the older artist’s series from the 1970s Situação (Situation) in which he left bundles of bones, blood and excrement on street corners of affluent areas in an attempt to shock those encountering them out of their acceptance of the political status quo.
Yet despite their heritage Lucas’s works feel particularly pertinent to contemporary times. Matta-Clark and Barrio were working prior to Francis Fukuyama’s arguable ‘end of history’ (that is, the American political scientist’s 1989 assertion of the total triumph of neoliberal capitalism) and, in their very different ways, were looking at destruction (the former’s destruction of buildings; in Barrio’s case the use of ghastly materials as emblematic of the destruction of life) as a means of anarchism. Like Rem Koolhaas’s description of architecture under late capitalism, Lucas’s modest yet vastly more unheimlich incisions into the urban fabric can perhaps be thought of instead as hacks to the socio-political matrix – purposeful, disorientating attempts to puncture the apparently inescapable veneer of capitalist realism. In this manner – as with her movable gallery works – she leaves the effect of her work in the hands of the viewer, challenging us to take the moments of discombobulation she provides as an impetus to enact more lasting change. ar A solo exhibition of work by Renata Lucas is on view at Neugerriemschneider, Berlin, 2–30 May
Cruzamento, 2003 (installation view, intersection of Rua Dois de Dezembro and Praia do Flamengo, Rio de Janeiro), plywood on concrete. Photo: Beto Felício. © the artist. Courtesy Galeria Luisa Strina, São Paulo, A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro, and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin
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PHOTO LONDON 21–24 May 2015 Somerset House, London
Exhibitors list as of 13/03/2015
Over 70 galleries have decided it’s one of the cultural events of the year. Amana (amanasalto / IMA) Tokyo Atlas Gallery London Ayyam Gallery Beirut, Dubai, London Ben Brown Fine Arts London Bernhard Quaritch Ltd London Bernheimer Lucerne, Munich Blanca Berlín Galería Madrid Camera Work Berlin Caroline Smulders Paris Christophe Guye Galerie Zurich Crane Kalman Gallery Brighton Danziger Gallery New York Edwynn Houk Gallery Zurich, New York Eleven Fine Art London Eric Franck Fine Art London Flowers Gallery London, New York Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire Paris Galerie Lumière des Roses Paris Galerie Pavlova Berlin Galerie Polaris Paris Galerie Thomas Zander Cologne GALLERY FIFTY ONE Antwerp Gazelli Art House London Grimaldi Gavin London HackelBury Fine Art London In association with
HADA Contemporary London Howard Greenberg Gallery New York Ibid London, Los Angeles in camera Paris Ingleby Gallery Edinburgh James Hyman Gallery London Kahmann Gallery Amsterdam Kasher|Potamkin New York La Galerie Particulière Paris Les Douches La Galerie Paris Lumiere Brothers Gallery Moscow Michael Hoppen Gallery London Michael Reid Gallery Sydney Nailya Alexander Gallery New York Paul Kasmin Gallery New York Peter Fetterman Gallery Santa Monica Pi Artworks Istanbul, London Purdy Hicks Gallery London Ravestijn Gallery Amsterdam Robert Hershkowitz London Robert Klein Gallery Boston Robert Morat Berlin, Hamburg Roland Belgrave Vintage Photography Brighton
ROSEGALLERY Santa Monica SCHEUBLEIN + BAK Zurich School Gallery / Olivier Castaing Paris Steven Kasher Gallery New York Taka Ishii Gallery Tokyo, Paris Tasveer Gallery Bangalore The Little Black Gallery London The Photographers’ Gallery London The Wapping Project Bankside London Timothy Taylor Gallery London Tristan Hoare Gallery London Wilkinson Gallery London Yossi Milo Gallery New York
Discovery Section A.I London Edel Assanti London G/P Gallery Tokyo Galerie Vanessa Quang Paris IBASHO Antwerp PUG Oslo Roman Road London Tiwani Contemporary London
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Photo London will be a unique event. Featuring an innovative public programme supported by the LUMA Foundation, the fair will host talks and lectures on collecting photography, an ambitious installation programme, and a series of evening sessions on music and photography. Buy Tickets Now ticketmaster.co.uk/photolondon photolondon.org
Art in Context
Sad musical call “keir-lee”; it has a low liquid, bubbling trill. The alarm-note is a sharp “whoo wee” repeated
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Art in Context
A yearlong survey (in monthly instalments) in which artists, curators and cultural commentators explore the question of what African art (of the contemporary flavour) does or can do within various local contexts across the continent
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ArtReview
v Ibrahim El-Salahi The Sudan-born artist discusses the role of art in the social and political life of his homeland Interview by Mark Rappolt
Ibrahim El-Salahi was born in Omdurman, Sudan, in 1930. His studies in painting at the School of Design at Gordon Memorial College were followed by a scholarship to the Slade in London, after which he returned to teach at the College of Fine and Applied Arts in Khartoum, becoming a leading figure in the movement later known as the Khartoum School. During the 1960s he was closely associated with the multidisciplinary pan-African Mbari Artist and Writers Club based in Ibadan, Nigeria, of which fellow associates included the novelists Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe, and the artist Jacob Lawrence. While maintaining an interest in the graphic forms of Sudanese calligraphy, El-Salahi’s work has evolved through a number of distinct phases over the course of his six-decade-long career. At the Slade he had studied European art history going back to the Renaissance, as well as the work of modern masters, but on his return to Sudan, El-Salahi spent a significant period engaging with the natural colours, symbolism and decorative traditions of his home country. In 1975, while working at the Department of Culture, he was incarcerated for more than six months at Cooper Prison following false accusations of antigovernmental activities. Following his release he left Sudan, living in exile in Qatar and the uk. Between the late 1970s and mid-90s, influenced by his experiences in jail, El-Salahi focused on composite, multipanelled works in black and white, of which perhaps the best known became the monumental nine-panel ink painting The Inevitable (1984–5). Since 1998 he has lived and worked in Oxford, England. El-Salahi’s works form part of notable institutional collections, including those of moma, New York; the Smithsonian Institution, Washington; IwalewaHaus, Bayreuth; National Gallery of Victoria, Sydney, and the Newcastle Art Gallery, Australia. In 2013 he was the subject of a major retrospective at Tate Modern, the first such dedicated to African Modernism. artreview Do you think there’s a difference between making art under a democracy and making art under a dictatorship? ibrahim el-salahi Working in a democracy is a lasting experience; working under a dictatorship is an incentive for doing something – sometimes you can be afraid of the consequences, but sometimes you have to say you have a definite message. There is a large work that I did that is now at the Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca called The Inevitable and that was a reaction to
a political situation. I had to make a statement, particularly as I was working in a safer place outside the country. ar Did you feel guilty about being in a safer place? ies No, I wished to be there, because when I came out of jail, I never wanted to leave Sudan at all. I thought of staying until I saw that regime down and out for good, but I had been invited to go to Qatar to help establish the Department of Culture – the same thing that had brought me back to Sudan after working in London as an Assistant Cultural Attaché [at the Sudanese Embassy]. ar What kind of role did art play in society in Sudan then? Was it something that people engaged with, did it have an impact? ies It took time, particularly as there was no interest from the state in culture. It would only give a sort of lip service, but there was no real interest at all. So the artist is really left alone and trying to create his own public by him or herself continuously. It’s not like in a democracy where there are artistic institutions that help, and you get support from the authorities. That was not created. The difficulty we had when I was asked to set up the Department of Culture (later on subsumed into the Ministry of Culture and Information) in the country was immense. We had to ask for a budget at the end of the year, to cover what was needed to help cultural development in the country. I was only given £2. The main items required were a bicycle and a messenger, but the top man in the country at the time, General Nimeiry, said that because there was a shortage of funds and so on, any ministry should only have 10 percent of its budget. So the budget for the bicycle was supposed to be £20, and they gave us £2. The man in charge of the accounts said, “Culture can give, because now we can buy a bicycle pump!” ar When you were setting up the Department of Culture in Sudan, did you have to put your own tastes and interests as an artist to one side? facing page The Inevitable, 1984–5, indian ink on Bristol board, nine panels, overall 532 × 604 cm. Courtesy the artist and Vigo Gallery, London
April 2015
ies I had to stop [making art], because I knew that the job would need work day and night: we had to travel throughout the country to get to the sources of cultural heritage and find out where it was still alive so that it could be built upon. It was a period that was very, very difficult for me and I had to stop work. The same thing happened when I was working at the embassy in London between 1969 and 72: then I also had to stop work, except for a very, very few things. I left no time for myself at all; it was a drab period. ar Obviously you have a commitment to a kind of public service, is that something you see as the role of art as well? Does the art you make reach out to a public? ies By necessity. I think it’s wrong for the artist to be put in any situation, but he has to do something other than: ‘What is three plus four?’ But I think if the artist is in some sort of institution that is very well established, then the artist is free to be left on his own to do whatever… For an artist, it’s much better to be left on your own to do your work and then see what happens. ar When you were painting The Inevitable, what impact did you hope that would have? Is it designed to be an inspiration, to make people aware of something? Can art change the political or social structure? ies I hope so, because the message I always have is something to start people thinking. I’m not working to give a direct message, but I want the people to absorb it from the work itself. I believe in the fact that the message from the artist to the public is to let them think and develop their own idea about the work. The message that I put in The Inevitable was that someday, sooner or later, people will rise against tyranny, and that is up to them as a group, and they have to have what it takes, what is needed, to work together and to have force enough to make the changes necessary. The message is embodied in the work itself. ar How much can you as an artist be involved in the actual rising up and the getting together? ies I think you have limits. As a painter, as an artist, you have to go to a certain point and then leave it.
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ar Do you think the role that art plays has changed in Sudan over the last 50 years? ies I think so. In terms of numbers, in terms of movements, in terms of attitude, in terms of facilities. It’s still very difficult, but relatively speaking there’s quite a lot. Of course now we have artists who are starting their own galleries and then other elements, foreign elements – the French Cultural Centre, American Cultural Centre, the British Council – and they are improving facilities with art exhibitions. Gradually they’re developing. ar Do you think that those agencies have their own ‘foreign’ agendas? ies True, because these are people with their own programmes and their own agendas who wish to expand their own nature and influence – using art for a creative link with their own countries. As far as the artist is concerned, it’s a matter of necessity, they have no place to go to except those facilities, and they have to use them. I remember when there were very, very few art students: people preferred to go into other sorts of work – to do engineering, medicine, law and so on. Because people used to say that being an artist was a waste of time. Now large numbers attend the art college. So the awareness about the importance of art in society has been expanded, there are different subjects within it. That tells of the development that has taken place, which is important. ar Why do you think that development has happened? ies By sheer necessity and the fact that afterwards they found that art – for instance graphic art – has a marketplace: the calligraphers all studying at art college, they are finding a big market. The fact that it can pay back, that it can give you something to live on, is important. ar How was it when you were studying? ies Well, at that time there were very few [students]. The art college started in 1960, the School of Design in 1946. At the time when I joined the college I was in the third batch. Before there were two batches: the first lot was only two students; the second about six or seven. In our time, there were about 16. Now hundreds
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attend art college. Not only this, but one of our colleagues who was in the first batch to study art in the School of Design, he started his own college, which is far more thriving than the official college – totally different, it’s changing. ar What sort of things did they teach you? ies In the School of Design, it used to be painting, drawing, clay modelling, bookbinding, calligraphy, that kind of thing. On the side, a little bit of architecture, but it wasn’t a proper study. Now the college itself has expanded and besides painting has textile design, electronics and computer studies and interior design and so forth. It has expanded itself definitely. ar How is it for you now that you’re famous and people know your work? Is it harder to work when people have expectations of what your work should be?
do this for me,’ but they had a big celebration. They were happy and proud that one of them has made it outside and become well known and so forth. I think it’s something that is appreciated very much indeed as far as the public are concerned in the country. Not the government: the government, until now, has no interest at all in culture or heritage except as far as it concerns tourism, not aesthetics. ar What are you working on at the moment? ies Right now, I’m just thinking. I keep changing continuously, because I don’t want to be put inside a style or a method. The work also changes because my body is changing. Also I don’t want to be caught by what I’ve done in the past. For instance with this so-called School of Khartoum, my relationship was only in the first three years, from 1959 to 62: only that period, then I changed continuously. ar Do you think art historians like that? Maybe it’s not your choice – it’s not you who gets to decide which box you get put in.
ies It is harder, because of all this responsibility, which I try to keep away from as much as possible, but in other words, it becomes inevitable, because people think that I have made it. It’s quite a responsibility, which puts you in a situation where you become very careful about what you say and what you do. And you get criticism, sometimes for or against. I find I’m a kind of a role model for something that I never asked for at all. I get people coming into the studio and writing papers and so on. I go to Sudan usually every year: I go when I have spare time, and I spend about a month or a month-anda-half there. When I come back from Sudan and I start my work, I always tell my wife that I need a holiday. Well after midnight I will have visits from people who are concerned. I appreciate their concern and their appreciation. In my hometown, Omdurman, they did a huge celebration in my honour. I told them, ‘Please don’t
ArtReview
ies Yes, I mean, the box is always there. For art historians and art analysts and people who try to categorise things, it’s much easier, but when they tie you to a certainty [that no longer exists], then that’s a problem. That’s quite a misrepresentation of what you are as yourself, as a whole. You are only linked up as a small part of what you were before and what you left behind. That said of course, I do understand it personally as a whole, and my work, no matter how different it is, is still me, little old me. ar Yes, and you recognise it? It never seems that an older work might have been made by another person? ies It has happened to me sometimes, because I used to draw continuously and in a different style. Many times if it’s put in a different light or a portion of it has been shown as a detail, I ask myself, ‘Have I done that really, I don’t remember?’ If it’s the whole thing, then it falls in place – then you know exactly that you’ve done that kind of thing and relate to the body: you’re the same person and the work is only a part of you at that level. ar What kind of artists inspired you in the early days? ies I heard about crazy old Van Gogh – this excited me very much indeed – his sunflowers
and his brushstrokes. I hadn’t seen it, but I used to hear of it from a friend of mine. He used to study in Egyptian secondary school and they were lucky enough to have someone who was clued up about art and artists and he used to come tell us about it. We lapped it up, excited about the work of an artist who was supposed to be mad and cut off his ear and was in the fields and had those sunflowers. That to me was quite exciting. ar Yes, was that the idea you had of what it was to be an artist? Do you have to be slightly mad? ies No, at that time, no, no not particularly. I knew that I was mad already. But I think of it in terms of adding something of a flavour of yourself and your ideas. The other person who I grew very interested in, somebody in the past – pure Renaissance – was Giotto, but mainly because he turned a new leaf from the Gothic art into the beginnings of the Renaissance and to using the third dimension, the raw vision. Others like Alberti, Brunelleschi, the architects who made the visual and theoretical perspective, I got very much interested in them. I went to a course in Italy at that time, way back in 1955, on the background of the Renaissance, which had been run by the British Institute in Florence. That gave me a chance to go tour around all of the school of Giotto. And I find artists like Grünewald quite interesting, because he’s quite individual, he doesn’t follow any school at all. The whole thing is a matter of give and take. Sometimes there are some people whose work you see and you like: it doesn’t mean that you are copying them, but you draw a parallel, you try to bring something of your own. Somehow you relate it to what you have seen and that goes for everything that you see – whether it’s an old artist or a contemporary artist that is interesting and excites our mind – and you do something in response. That’s the kind of thing you could say I’ve been influenced by. Lately, The Inevitable was shown in Barcelona at the Museum of Picasso. One of the presenters of the tv station asked me, ‘Have you been to inspect Picasso?’ She was quite shocked when I said, ‘No, I haven’t been inside.’ She said, ‘But how?’ I said, ‘Well, actually what you see here is something derived from our own culture,’ it’s the rhythm of calligraphy and African motifs. This is what excited me and why I did that work.
It might look to your eye like something related to Picasso, but I assure you it’s not, but it’s up to you if you see it. If you see it as something influenced by Picasso, let it be, because I present the work and my job has been finished, when the work is finished you can interpret it the way you want, it’s a free world. ar A lot of your own work seems to grow organically… ies Yes, I work on a new piece, and because I do not know what shape it is going to take, I add pieces. This is something that I learnt in jail. In jail, if someone was found with a pencil or paper, then something terrible would happen. So I used to have smaller sheets of paper and I used to draw small embryo forms. Then I added little bits and I used to bury it in the sand outside the cell, just for fear of solitary confinement for
and that’s why I start a new piece. Each piece [of the work] has to be framed separately, because it’s an embryo of an idea that I’m not aware of completely. Then when it grows together it creates a whole. This gives to me a relationship between the particle and the whole, between the individual and society, which is upmost in my mind. Until it reaches the whole, which is the human being. So the same thing in the relationship from a religious point of view: you can get the created and the creator. ar Did you study physics? ies No, because I know my limits. ar Ah, but you’ve been talking like someone who did. ies No, I wish I had, but I didn’t. There is a saying in Arabic: ‘He who works with what he has learnt, God will reward him with knowing what he does not know.’ If you are limiting yourself to what you know and use it to the maximum extent, then you will be rewarded with something else. That is my cup of physics for the future. ar During the Arab Spring you created drawings in a notebook. Was that about hope or frustration?
15 days. Anyway, when I came out, I recalled the same idea of making, and each work [within a group that constituted a larger whole] was framed separately. If you see it as only a particle of a whole, it has the whole in it as well. That kind of thing took me time. After I left jail, it took me 17-and-a-half years – from late 1970s up to the mid-90s – following the same trend, of this idea of the particle and the whole in black and white. It’s quite different to the European way: having this sketch, then you add things and you take things out of it and so on until it takes a form which this sketch suggested in the beginning. With my work I do not know what form, what shape, what size the work is going to take, facing page Still many chains to shed, 2011 above Some things never change, 2011 both images © the artist. Courtesy the artist
April 2015
ies That was because I felt held back by the flu, a terrible flu and couldn’t go to the studio, so I worked at home on this small notebook. I wished I was there to celebrate and to give a hand. The only way I could give a hand was just to make drawings and little things, because I couldn’t get out. It was to celebrate the fact that this kind of idol, this kind of tyrant had fallen down, but I was afraid that other people might come and replace them and do the same if not worse. ar The drawings that you made in the prison, were you able to take them out or did they just stay in the sand? ies No, I left them in the sand, because when they called your name that means one of four things: either they’re going to send you to another cell within the jail, or they’re going to send you to another jail somewhere else in the country, or they’re going to set you free or they’re going to chop your head off. When they called my name, I just got my things and stood there until they took us to the security and left me and said, ‘Go.’ ar
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New York Randall’s Island Park May 14–17, 2015 Preview Day Wednesday, May 13 friezenewyork.com
Participating Galleries 303 Gallery, New York Miguel Abreu, New York Acquavella, New York Altman Siegel, San Francisco The Approach, London Art : Concept, Paris Alfonso Artiaco, Naples Elba Benítez, Madrid Bidoun, New York Peter Blum, New York Blum & Poe, Los Angeles Boers-Li, Beijing Marianne Boesky, New York Tanya Bonakdar, New York Bortolami, New York The Box, Los Angeles The Breeder, Athens Broadway 1602, New York Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York Buchholz, Cologne Shane Campbell, Chicago Canada, New York Gisela Capitain, Cologne Casa Triângulo, São Paulo Casas Riegner, Bogotá Cheim & Read, New York James Cohan, New York Sadie Coles HQ, London Continua, San Gimignano Pilar Corrias, London Raffaella Cortese, Milan CRG, New York Chantal Crousel, Paris Massimo De Carlo, Milan Elizabeth Dee, New York dépendance, Brussels Eigen + Art, Berlin frank elbaz, Paris Derek Eller, New York FGF, Warsaw Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo Marc Foxx, Los Angeles Fredericks & Freiser, New York Carl Freedman, London Stephen Friedman, London Frith Street, London Gagosian, New York gb agency, Paris A Gentil Carioca, Rio De Janeiro Gladstone, New York Goodman, Johannesburg Marian Goodman, New York Alexander Gray Associates, New York Greene Naftali, New York greengrassi, London Grimm, Amsterdam Karin Guenther, Hamburg Hauser & Wirth, New York Herald St, London Xavier Hufkens, Brussels Hyundai, Seoul
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Ibid., London In Situ - Fabienne Leclerc, Paris Taka Ishii, Tokyo Alison Jacques, London Rodolphe Janssen, Brussels Casey Kaplan, New York Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm Karma, New York Karma International, Zurich Paul Kasmin, New York Sean Kelly, New York Kerlin, Dublin Anton Kern, New York Tina Kim, New York Johann König, Berlin David Kordansky, Los Angeles Tomio Koyama, Tokyo Andrew Kreps, New York Kukje, Seoul Lehmann Maupin, New York Lelong, New York Lisson, London Long March Space, Beijing Kate MacGarry, London Matthew Marks, New York Fergus McCaffrey, New York McKee, New York Greta Meert, Brussels Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo Kamel Mennour, Paris Victoria Miro, London Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London The Modern Institute, Glasgow MOT International, London Taro Nasu, Tokyo Franco Noero, Turin David Nolan, New York Lorcan O’Neill, Rome Overduin & Co., Los Angeles P.P.O.W, New York Pace, New York Maureen Paley, London Peres Projects, Berlin Perrotin, New York Gregor Podnar, Berlin Simon Preston, New York Project 88, Mumbai Rampa, Istanbul Almine Rech, Paris Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg Andrea Rosen, New York Salon 94, New York Esther Schipper, Berlin SculptureCenter, New York Sfeir-Semler, Beirut Jack Shainman, New York Sikkema Jenkins & Co., New York Skarstedt, New York Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv Sprüth Magers, Berlin Standard (Oslo), Oslo Stevenson, Cape Town T293, Rome The Third Line, Dubai
Vermelho, São Paulo Susanne Vielmetter, Los Angeles Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen Wallspace, New York White Columns, New York White Cube, London Wilkinson, London Jocelyn Wolff, Paris Zeno X, Antwerp David Zwirner, New York
Focus Algus Greenspon, New York Jessica Bradley, Toronto Bureau, New York Carlos/Ishikawa, London Chi-Wen, Taipei Clearing, New York Clifton Benevento, New York Lisa Cooley, New York Croy Nielsen, Berlin Foxy Production, New York Freymond-Guth Fine Arts, Zurich Frutta, Rome James Fuentes, New York François Ghebaly, Los Angeles Laurel Gitlen, New York Hunt Kastner, Prague Instituto De Visión, Bogotá Kraupa-Tuskany Zeidler, Berlin Le Guern, Warsaw Limoncello, London mor charpentier, Paris Night, Los Angeles PSM, Berlin Ratio 3, San Francisco Real Fine Arts, New York Silberkuppe, Berlin Société, Berlin Simone Subal, New York Take Ninagawa, Tokyo Travesia Cuatro, Madrid
Frame 80m2 Livia Benavides, Lima Sergio Zevallos Antenna Space, Shanghai Liu Ding Johan Berggren, Malmö Eric Sidner Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami Beach Georgie Nettell Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles Mathis Altmann Dan Gunn, Berlin Alexandra Navratil JTT, New York Anna-Sophie Berger Koppe Astner, Glasgow Charlotte Prodger Jaqueline Martins, São Paulo Martha Araújo
Mathew, Berlin Than Hussein Clark Barbara Seiler, Zurich Cécile B. Evans Tif Sigfrids, Los Angeles Zachary Leener Jessica Silverman, San Francisco Dashiell Manley Gregor Staiger, Zurich Lucy Stein Sultana, Paris Walter Pfeiffer Supplement, London Philomene Pirecki Temnikova & Kasela, Tallinn Kris Lemsalu Tempo Rubato, Tel Aviv Lital Lev Cohen Kate Werble, New York Ken Tisa Leo Xu Projects, Shanghai Aaajiao
Spotlight Aicon, New York Rasheed Araeen Paule Anglim, San Francisco Lynn Hershman Leeson Hervé Bize, Nancy André Cadere David Castillo, Miami Beach Rafael Ferrer espaivisor, Valencia Hamish Fulton Henrique Faria, New York Anna Bella Geiger Garth Greenan, New York Howardena Pindell Hales, London Carolee Schneemann Ivan, Bucharest Geta Bratescu lokal_30, Warsaw Natalia LL Franklin Parrasch, New York Joan Snyder Nara Roesler, São Paulo Antonio Dias Richard Saltoun, London Shelagh Wakely Vigo, London Ibrahim El-Salahi Waldburger Wouters, Brussels Lynn Hershman Leeson Zürcher, New York Regina Bogat
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Art Reviewed
A generally silent bird, it has been heard to utter such sounds as “louey louey” and “kirruc”
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Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015 Whitechapel Gallery, London 15 January – 6 April The list of artists, from Anni and Josef Albers to Heimo Zobernig, whose works are included in Adventures of the Black Square, is enough to tell you that the exhibition promises great things. The densely packed downstairs gallery is a monument to the history of geometric abstraction. Form and colour cascade down on the eyes, ebbing and flowing deliriously. Each work is as radical as the next. The ‘black square’ that opens the show is actually Kazimir Malevich’s Black Quadrilateral (undated), borrowed from the Greek State Museum of Contemporary Art, and painted around the same time as Malevich’s Black Square (1915), making this a centennial survey of geometric abstraction. Black Quadrilateral’s relatively diminutive proportions (17 × 24 cm as opposed to the more famous version’s 79.5 × 79.5 cm) do not detract from its status as a kind of ‘year zero’ totem for Modernism. Briony Fer has written that Malevich’s square ‘stood as a utopian gesture pointing the way to the future’, while Donald Judd again emphasised the idealistic nature of the work, describing it as ‘like a single malt whiskey: pure and simple’. Max Bill’s Simultaneous Construction of Two Progressive Systems (1945–51), encountered moments after Black Quadrilateral, is equally extraordinary. Black lines in oil paint, differing in thickness, slash across a painted cream canvas. A series of red squares punctuate the composition to the right of the painting. It’s poetic, powerful – an arrangement that, oddly simultaneously, is both violent and sensual. The curators, Iwona Blazwick and Magnus af Petersens, respectively director and curator-at-large of the Whitechapel Gallery, use the work to demonstrate abstraction’s travels southwest, across the Atlantic, to Brazil. Hung alongside, in art-historical order, is Judith Lauand’s wood, acrylic and metal wall-sculpture Madeira Gravada e Pintada (1956) and Waldemar Cordeiro’s Untitled (1958), a deep red oil-on-canvas plotting a landscape via an arrangement of orange and red triangles and blue squares across the centre. These examples
of Concretism are followed by one of their successors, Hélio Oiticica’s neoconcretist gouache on board Metaesquema 464 (1958). This enjoyable but not particularly illuminating ‘adventure’ along the well-trod routes of geometric abstraction’s global spread continues apace via the usual suspects: the Bauhaus, modernist architecture and a link into Minimalism via Carl Andre’s 1967 floor piece 10 × 10 Altstadt Lead Square are dutifully covered. The works, as independent entities at least, are roundly excellent, but the curating is breathless. One of the most innovative parts of Blazwick and af Petersens’s narrative, for example – containing examples of geometric abstraction from Asia, the Middle East, Near East and Eastern Europe – gets squeezed into a small corner. Herded together (ghettoed?), these include Rasheed Araeen’s Chaaryaar (1968/2014), a sizeable sculpture of different-coloured cubeshaped wood frames; Hassan Sharif’s series of documentary photographs with the selfexplanatory title Drawing Squares on the Floor Using a Cube (1982); Saloua Raouda Choucair’s small carved-wood sculpture Poem (1963–5); and Dóra Maurer’s Seven Rotations 1–6 (1979), an infinitymirror-like set of photographic self-portraits, in which Maurer starts by holding a blank square, which in the second in the series is replaced by the previous photograph, and so on. These works happily take the narrative away from the much-mapped idea of geometric abstraction being essentially mechanical or mathematical, to look instead at a possible relationship to ritual and performance and the political context of its production. More new insights such as this would have been welcome. While the dense hang downstairs is successful – the individual historical works hold their own against neighbours, the clutter lending the show itself a certain abstract quality in which form and colour between compositions seem to overlap – this device of overfilling the space falls apart upstairs. Amassed like junk in an art fair,
facing page, bottom Saloua Raouda Choucair, Poem, 1963–65, wood. Photo © Tate, London 2014
facing page, top Max Bill, Simultaneous Construction of Two Progressive Systems, 1945–51, oil on canvas, 145 × 201 cm.Courtesy Annely Juda Fine Art, London
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the heavy hang does these contemporary works no favour. It is hard to discern the curators’ point with this part of the exhibition. Either they are throwing a (mightily odd) curveball at their audience, presenting a show of works that demonstrate where the original impulse of the black square died; or this is just a genuinely facile grouping. The inclusion of Andrea Fraser’s May I Help You? (1991) in the corridor before one enters the upper main gallery space hints at the slightly extraordinary thought that the curators themselves might not be behind the work they are showing up here. In this video, a monstrous artworlder walks around an exhibition of black monochromes by Alan McCollum, the performer suggesting, in a script sewn together from auction catalogue texts, museum guides and press interviews with dealers, artists and collectors, that contemporary geometric abstraction merely fulfils the role of taste signifier and investment opportunity. The inclusion of two photographs of office lobbies by Hannah Starkey, seen just as one enters the main space, continues this point. Half the work here would look perfectly at home in the bland spaces of the capitalist sublime. Falling into the realm of logos and corporate design, for example, Sarah Morris’s dully inoffensive Olympic ring painting 2028.07 (Rings) (2008) and Peter Halley’s glib neo-geo Auto Zone (1992) fail to rise above the models they are critiquing. Other works merely use geometric abstraction as a means to a conceptual end (Willem de Rooij’s wax-print-on-cotton floor work, Blue to Black, 2012, for instance), and it’s hard to determine their exact relevance to the story of this type of abstraction. If this idea of a curatorial self-critique is a conspiracy too far, then the alternative, given the predominance of pastiche and works in which the aesthetic is coincidental, concocts a sorry end to this once glorious art-historical line and an abysmal close to this wayward institutional adventure. Oliver Basciano
ArtReview
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Koen van den Broek The Del Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels 6 February – 4 April If you are an artist and you happen to have success with a certain body of work, what to do? Some would keep on repeating the formula, cashing in. Others decide to take a risk and go for something different. Initially, the Belgian painter Koen van den Broek might appear to belong in the first category; on closer inspection, however, he evidently belongs in the second. Van den Broek was only twenty-seven when he was picked up by London’s White Cube. In 2001 he had a solo exhibition there, where he presented, among others, paintings in which he rendered fragments of generic urban landscapes, like cracks in pavements and kerbstones, in a style between figuration and abstraction. These works were based on pictures the artist took during his many trips to California, sometimes also from within the perspective of a car in motion, which reinforces the already strongly present cinematographic approach of his output. The work is not only grounded in the imagery of American cinema but also in the history of abstract art, making reference to artists such as Ellsworth Kelly, Clyfford Still and Barnett Newman, but also – and first and foremost, van den Broek being European, after all – Henri Matisse.
For his previous exhibition at Greta Meert, in 2013 – part of a trilogy of shows at, elsewhere, Marlborough Contemporary in London and Friedman Benda in New York – van den Broek reinvented himself by reassembling, scanning and then superimposing these images to create new ones. Verging on pure abstraction and occupying bigger formats, the paintings were very different from those to which one had become accustomed. With The Del, van den Broek at first sight seems to return to the work with which he broke through. Again, the artist depicts his characteristic fragments of kerbstones and pavements. This time, however, the point of departure is the so-called ‘colored curb zones’ painted on the roads and pavements in Los Angeles to indicate traffic regulations. These can be found, for example, in the area of Hotel del Coronado (aka ‘The Del’) on the Pacific coast, where Billy Wilder shot Some Like It Hot (1959), an anecdote – explaining the show’s title – that could not escape a film buff like van den Broek. This colour-coding system triggered the painter in him. As a result, he has made a beautiful series of compositions of these kerbstones with their various
The Del, Kelly, 2014, oil on canvas, 88 × 115 cm. Courtesy Galerie Greta Meert, Brussels
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successions of red, blue, yellow and green, like variations on the same pictorial theme. In these, the artist leaves out as much as possible, hence creating a striking balance between figuration and abstraction. In his framing, he also often opts for bends, which lend his compositions more dynamism. As in his previous work, van den Broek still engages in a play with shadow – in Louis Kahn (2014), for example, only a fragment of the shadow of the architect’s Salk Institute for Biological Studies building in La Jolla can be seen on a diagonal yellow kerbstone. This work, which is still a rather realistic depiction, chimes more with his earlier paintings, illustrating that, with this body of work, van den Broek has moved his familiar subject matter more in the direction of abstraction, while still not abandoning representation completely. The brushstrokes are more gestural, preceding layers of paint and stains can still be seen, while the perspective is deliberately flattened: a coherent development in a practice where representation is suggested through a play of composition, colour and form. Less, here, is clearly still more. Sam Steverlynck
Mathieu Mercier Sexe, Béatitude et Logique Comptable Mfc-Michèle Didier, Paris 13 February – 7 March Following their collaboration on Mathieu Mercier’s Journal (2015), the independent publisher of artist books Michèle Didier invited him to curate an exhibition based on her catalogue of printed works. Two seemingly opposite motifs in Didier’s editions immediately caught Mercier’s attention and became the poles of his show Sexe, Béatitude et Logique Comptable (Sex, Beatitude and Accounting Logic). On the one hand, along with his Journal, he selected works expressing bare lust: Annette Messager’s Mes Dessins Secrets (published 2011) and Leigh Ledare’s Double Bind (2012). On the other, he chose highly conceptual and serial pieces: On Kawara’s Trilogy – I Got Up (2008), I Went (2007), I Met (2004) – and One Million Years (1999), Allan McCollum’s The Book of Shapes (2010), and Robert Barry’s One Billion Colored Dots (2008). Beatitude, of course, is common to and can be reached through both categories, ie, the body and the mind. I could attempt to draw parallels between sexuality and serial art, and come up with a thoughtful aphorism about how they both produce difference within reproduction, but I’d rather tell you how this exhibition indeed led me to beatitude – or more accurately, frenzy – in presenting you with a system of classification that consists in qualifying each artist with a hypothetical vice, one that I got from the
experience of the works on display. In doing so for the sole yet opportune pretext that it greatly satisfies both my piggery and my stubbornness, I will borrow from the obsessive character demonstrated by all the artists here, whether they translated it through raw sensuality or concept. My list will unfold as the severity of my euphoria progresses. Before going any further, know that the prints pertaining to Sex are for the eye only: laying flat within low vitrines, you have to bend over significantly to sneak a peek at their goods. Conversely, you can touch as you please the books pertaining to Accounting, which are all installed on shelves at your disposal, and yes, this is how logic suddenly becomes enticing. My list begins with Mercier, or as I see it, ‘the exhibitionist’, not that he shows his family jewels here, but he is the curator, after all: his Journal presents a series of 28 black-and-white female nude photographs coming from his private collection. Next is Messager, or ‘the libertine’: Mes Dessins Secrets is an album gathering in bulk the reproductions of 76 erotic drawings, which were all sketched on whatever piece of paper she could grab in moments of need and depict just about any position of which she could daydream. Next is Ledare, or ‘the pervert’: the first two volumes of Double Bind (Husbands and Diptychs) confront 371 photographs that
he took of his ex-wife (Meghan Ledare-Fedderly) with 371 that her current husband (Adam Fedderly) made of her in the same secluded hotel room a few weeks later. In the third volume (Ephemeras), which reconstitutes, layer after layer, a pile of images that the artist cut out and accumulated from magazines, you may stumble upon a lot of hairy smut. Leaving erotica behind, next is Kawara (rip), or ‘the predator’: the three series of 12 volumes of his Trilogy document, for every single day between 10 May 1968 and 17 September 1979, all the postcards he sent out to inform people of the time he woke up (I Got Up), all the places he went to (I Went) and all the persons he encountered (I Met), which partly explains what he was up to between 1969 and 1993, the 24-year gap that separates the two volumes of One Million Years. Next is McCollum, or ‘the utopian’: The Book of Shapes, which presents in two volumes a system for producing over 31 billion different shapes, promises to everyone on earth and beyond a unique, personalised artwork. Last but not least, Barry, or ‘the monomaniac’, concludes my account with One Billion Colored Dots in 25 volumes, each its own colour: the 40 million indiscernible white dots printed on 2,000 white pages in volume 24 are about where beatitude lost me for good. Violaine Boutet de Monvel
On Kawara, One Million Years, 1999, 2 volumes, total 4,024 pages, 14 × 11 cm each, slipcase, 12 × 9 × 16 cm. © 1999 the artist and Editions Micheline Szwajcer & Michèle Didier, Paris
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Et in Libertalia Ego: A Project by Mathieu Briand La Maison Rouge, Paris 19 February – 10 May The artist as pirate – not lame-ass ‘appropriator’ but genuine shiver-me-timbers lawless adventurer – this is the subject of Et in Libertalia Ego. The title nods to Nicolas Poussin’s Arcadian Shepherds (1637–8) but the ego in utopia here is not death, it is art – which the show abounds with (four giant rooms of videos, sculptures, paintings, photos and installations) – by more than a dozen artists including Pierre Huyghe, Thomas Hirschhorn, Damián Ortega, Mike Nelson, Grégory and Cyril Chapuisat and Francis Alÿs. The show’s core, however, doesn’t hang on a wall or sit on the floor; it is the picaresque adventures of the French conceptual artist that conceived, commissioned, curated and/or cocreated every work in it. In June 2008, Mathieu Briand swam from a small island next to Madagascar to an even smaller island off its coast. His quest: a safe haven for contemporary art, far from the ken and the cry of the market, where he and others – artists, dancers and writers – could make, show and discuss art for the pure sake of making, showing and discussing art. An artist’s utopia, then: not a boring, institutionally compromised artist’s colony or residency, but a true ‘Libertalia’, modelled on the fabled eighteenth-century pirate paradise of that name, also off the coast of Madagascar, described in the General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724),
by Captain Charles Johnson. Some believe Daniel Defoe the true author of the Johnson book, and there is indeed a bit of his Robinson Crusoe in Briand’s yarn (the accompanying artist book is a real page-turner, replete with machine guns, a coup d’état and Western tourists burnt alive on a beach). Briand, however, is a Crusoe in reverse, intentionally marooned, free to do what he pleases. His Libertalia, with its parallels to Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti, resonates with absurdities and contradictions, and itself describes, metonymically, another reversal (or is it a loop?), that of conceptual art production itself: he starts with a photograph of the island sent in an email by his sister – their aunt lives on the island facing it – which evolves into a point in mental space, barely a dot on a map, and then, once he lands on its shore, exhausted, having misjudged the distance and the tides, a physical reality. And it is here, in the manifest physical that the tale becomes infinitely richer, and more magical. For, like Crusoe, Briand soon discovers he is not alone on the island; it is home to a Malagasy family, whose patriarch, Papa, is guardian of the family’s animist, Christian and Muslim rituals, which include animal sacrifice and the worship of a sacred tree. Colonialism and exoticism now colour every surface: Briand’s tricorn hat, which he wears in the video component of this show, denotes Bonaparte as much
Et in Libertalia Ego (detail), 2015. © the artist. Courtesy la Maison Rouge, Paris
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as buccaneer, and the points of reference switch from Johnson/Defoe to Jean Rouch’s ethnographic documentary The Mad Masters (1955) and René Girard’s anthropo-philosophical theories of the sacred, sacrifice, scapegoating and mimetic desire. Briand dons ‘native’ garb, pours libations, consults with a medium, eats sacrificial oxen and so on. To help the desperately poor family, he rents land from them and builds an artist’s studio, which they can use as a bed-andbreakfast in his absence. The Gauguin-like dream devolves into ecotourism. Years pass, artists come and create things that puzzle the family – why all this energy and money to produce such useless things? Nature and time swallow some works. Papa’s son, Saïd, convinced the art possesses black magic powers – why else make it? – destroys others. Doing so makes the separation of profane and sacred slip a bit. Can art, even highbrow conceptual art, become magical again? Can it be ripped loose from its traditional economic contexts of production and circulation and pirated into new ones? That this Paris show exists suggests no, of course not; or not entirely. But that Briand tirelessly pursues the dream – dares even dream it – conscious of its registers and ironies, and relishing in its complexity, is laudatory. If I wore a tricorn, I would lift it now with a flourish, shout “Yo-ho-ho!” and bow. Christopher Mooney
Darren Almond Works on Paper Darren Almond / Carl Blechen Landscapes Galerie Max Hetzler, Goethestrasse and Bleibtreustrasse, Berlin 17 January – 28 February Darren Almond’s landscape photographs are hard to look at, not because they are deceptive or concealing, but because we know what they show us would be invisible: time compressed into the apparent instantaneity of a photograph. This disjunction is manifested as the difference between darkness – they are taken at night – and the eerie, silver light a long exposure makes of it. There are other clues: rocks are in focus but leaves are blurred, while shadows seem invested with a spectrum of movement. This sounds like photographic structuralism and, given the landscape motifs, the structuralism of early British conceptual art – such as the work of Richard Long or Ian McKeever – with its allegiances to the tradition of British landscape painting. Almond is torn between a conservative impulse to produce pictorial spectacles and a conceptualist desire to dematerialise the art object by making his subject what is absent or could not be seen. These tensions are confirmed by his presentation of photographs taken in Alpine landscapes portrayed by the German Romantic painter Carl Blechen in his ‘Amalfi Sketchbook’ of 1828–30, samples from which are hung in a separate room. The Blechen sketches are themselves poised between eighteenth-century Romantic landscape painting – with its grottoes, overhanging trees and distant castles – and the new realism of plein air oil sketching. In England, Constable was developing a similar technique. Blechen’s meticulous Zwei Grüne Blätter (undated)
has the empirical fervour of a Constable cloud study. He seems to be discovering at the end of his brush that the facts could suffice. The tree at the centre of Blechen’s Landschaft mit Burg (undated) is even less idealised, its gestural application registering the blur of unpredictable perception, even as the mountain in the background, with its obligatory castled peak, might belong to a repertoire of Romantic backdrops. Almond’s photographs resume this dialectic, their blurred passages a realist index of a long exposure’s betrayal of the illusion of photographic instantaneity. Thrillingly, the exhibition intimates two manifestations of realism, separated by two centuries, each imposed upon an existing convention: in Blechen, on the artifice of Romantic landscape; in Almond, on the evidential claims of documentary photography. This would be mere self-negating irony but for an existentialist dimension. The sense of the pictured place as a figment casts doubt on its existence. This uncertainty makes a photograph of an unexceptional bend in a river (Fullmoon@ Spreewald, 2014) continuous with Almond’s early live-feed installations of the mid-1990s, in which an image of the interior of his unoccupied studio, projected in a gallery, brought the convention of live footage to spooky life, showing it to be unable to confirm the coexistence of a remote site. Ghosted by their unreal lighting as by the history they reiterate, Almond’s photographs combine spatial and temporal
indeterminacy by connoting Blechen’s recording of the same views. Photographs of glacial tracks resemble the surface of another planet, their otherworldliness another sign for the unverifiability of the elsewhere that a photograph inconclusively witnesses. Thirty-seven drawings of constellations also prove to be evidence of nothing but process. Here, Almond uses a dropper to place dots of acrylic onto black graph paper. With their grids signifying mathematical veracity, the drawings show the temerity of representing the universe reduced to arbitrary clusters of hand-painted dots. But the mind-boggling range of permutations in which the dots could be arranged is a metaphor for the limitation of what physicists call the ‘naked-eye universe’ – what we can see (and therefore draw) as distinct from what we know to be there. This distinction cuts both ways: as a critique of human credulity as well as of knowledge not based upon firsthand perception. Almond activates the cusp between the Romanticism of painterly abstraction – Malevich’s Black Square (1915), Pollock’s drip paintings – and representational realism. The series template is a mainstay of modernist painting, which here functions representationally by relativistically proliferating cosmologies, as though the exhibition pictured a series of parallel universes. That the drawings are also sellable works on paper, hung in a blue-chip gallery, adds another facet to Almond’s contrasting of materialism and idealism. Mark Prince
Fullmoon@Theodul Pass, 2014, c-print, 180 × 180 cm. Courtesy Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin
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Ákos Birkás The Shadow of the Other Eigen + Art, Leipzig 10 January – 7 March As you’d expect, the generous proportions of Eigen + Art’s Leipzig hq are ideally suited to show large canvases by the gallery’s wellknown stable of German painters (among them Martin Eder and Neo Rauch). If those artists are renowned for both their provocations and their technical ability, then, on the evidence of this, Ákos Birkás’s tenth show for the gallery, those talents are something the veteran Budapestborn painter shares. After a long period of calm abstractions – for example his ovoid Heads series of the 1990s (some of which resemble squashed Kenneth Noland targets) – Birkás’s most recent canvases are realistic and troubled. And they arrive at a crucial point in Hungary’s politics since the collapse of the Berlin Wall. His heads now have faces and stare out at us. Birkás is not interested in capturing moments of unawareness, of blissed-out states of absorption. Contra Michael Fried, the paintings of Birkás are all about theatricality: the theatre that is modern political struggle. Birkás is fascinated by cultural conflict. He is more than aware of the troubles that immigrants to Hungary face in this time of resurgent rightwing revisionism inspired by the populist prime minister, Viktor Orbán. These tensions are reflected in the title of his show. We begin at
the frontier, a border zone, Grenze (Frontier, all works but one 2014) – a grim, grey street scene with signs pointing to what might be a ‘ruin bar’ similar to those popularised by the EasyJet set in contemporary Budapest. Baldessari-style bright coloured dots hint at the delirious delights within, which aim to blur any discomfiting confrontation with historical truths. Another strategy of avoidance in painful times is that of the ostrich, and Birkás depicts heads buried in the sand, sleeping with the sandman in several images here, as with Der Traum der Populistischen Odaliske (The Dream of the Populist Odalisque). Here there are two figures, the painter asleep, his head resting on a pillow with a simple blue leaf pattern, while above him his more successful alter ego lies naked save for a pair of George Smiley glasses, brown brogues and a pair of black socks. This avatar poses with legs bent, akin to Matisse’s Odalisque in Red Culottes (1921), while behind him are blocks of colour not a million miles away from the French master’s The Snail (1953). In Anderswo, Schnell (Elsewhere, Quick), the painter is again in the land of nod, desperate to be elsewhere, shoes untied at his side as he lies on cobalt-painted floorboards, zooming off to a vanishing point in some dream-bright future.
Lastly Kleiner Traum von Revolution und Konterrevolution (Little Dream of Revolution and Counter-Revolution) features the artist huddled up under a pink duvet, dreaming of a ghostly well-intentioned face from the past that appears on his mattress. In a neat touch, smacking of humility, the titles of the paintings are scrawled in pencil on the wall beside each canvas. Birkás, like Luc Tuymans or Marlene Dumas, uses photographs with political import as inspiration, though he is arguably more focused than they in his desire to awaken the viewer from distraction. In Lauschen (Listen), for example, two African immigrants dance in front of a gaudily painted psychedelic wall and confer worriedly, maybe about paranoid rants of Pegida or ukip. These recent paintings are in step with an Arte-tv interview with Birkás from 2010 and are targeted at both Birkás’s homeland and its international visitors. Rather than directly depicting the dirt behind the daydream of Budapest, his visions confront the enveloping delusions that currently typify the neoliberal, nationalistic fantasy world of his capital. Birkás, with his snoozing figures, wants to shake the somnambulant mass and ask his people – in the words of that great old hippy dreamer Kevin Ayers – why are we sleeping? John Quin
Grenze, 2014, oil on canvas, 80 × 100 cm. Photo: Uwe Walter, Berlin. Courtesy Galerie Eigen + Art, Leipzig & Berlin
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Angelo Plessas Mirage Machines The Breeder, Athens 19 February – 28 March On the Internet one can find an ignorant creature with a strange beak that is compelled to chase the cursor on the web page, while walking in an endless landscape that is reminiscent of the reconstruction of a mescaline trip. This artwork by Angelo Plessas is titled after its url: MetaphorsOfInfinity.com (2012). Installed at the Breeder gallery, it is part of Plessas’s solo show, Mirage Machines, together with several other websites realised by the Greek-Italian artist. In the darkened space, a few computers and as many beamers rest on the floor or on some plastic boxes. Kept functioning by a tangle of cables, they cast on the walls a disorderly display of projections, creating an otherworldly atmosphere worthy of a digital temple. Images on the walls feature an explosion of coloured balls (BeforeEverything.com, 2014) and a big spinning flower that changes colour and shape at every click (BonjourTristesse.com, 2014). In the basement of the gallery, the setup is similar but things get more obscure, with mysterious diagrams inscribed into planets that produce randomised piano notes (OnceInAThousandYears. com, 2010) and lifeless mannequins that
we can toss onto pyramidlike constructions (SymmetryOfChaos.com, 2009). These pieces of software are populated by curious inventions and weird critters that inspire a playful techno-animist sentiment when poked or disturbed with a click of the mouse. Confronted by the electronic autism – the restriction and repetitiveness that comes with experiencing Plessas’s automata – would it be legitimate to wonder whether the increased intensity of connections between humans makes machines more intelligent, or whether it is the other way around? The same applies to a number of deadpan faces, which are possible to identify in a series of abstract shapes that we instinctively recognise as eyes, noses and mouths. The face is a recurring theme for Plessas, who often indulges in the solaces of electronic portraiture – where the avatar is the symbolic attempt to transcend into a virtual ‘someone else’. What comes after is the ambiguous interfacial relationship with an entity that looks in our direction from the other side of the screen: is the screen itself a quasi-face that we address most of the time, or are avatars
an expansion of subjectivities into an endless series of digital multiples? In his seminal book Expanded Cinema (1970), Gene Youngblood argued that the art of the so-called ‘new media’ was taking a step towards the development of a new consciousness. ‘It is the belief of those who work in cybernetic art that the computer is the tool that someday will erase the division between what we feel and what we see.’ Youngblood believed that the computer would evolve into an aesthetic machine or, in other words, a means to achieve a new consciousness for a new cybernetic environment. While interacting with Plessas’s websites, we are encouraged to perform basic gestures for the exploration of this environment. A whole choreography of tactile investigations is created with simple tools such as a mouse and a screen. Swiping, dragging and dropping seem to be gestures of an augmented perception through which we learn, we question and we probe. How many colours – an artificially small amount here – do we see when we look at a screen? How do objects fall when gravity is simulated by an algorithm? How does the Internet feel? Michelangelo Corsaro
Mirage Machines (installation view), 2015. Courtesy the Breeder, Athens
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Sanja Iveković, Franco Vaccari The Opening p420 Arte Contemporanea, Bologna 20 February – 30 April The Opening is faithful to its title. These eight works by Sanja Iveković and Franco Vaccari, ranging from 1969 to 1978, are based on actions they carefully orchestrated during their own vernissages. Both Iveković (Croatian, b.1949) and Vaccari (Italian, b.1936) were pioneers in experimenting with new media, and used photography and single-channel video as devices for activating social interaction and including audience response in their works, instead of merely recording it. Both, and well before the digital era, confronted the issues of surveillance and expanded narcissism that such devices implied. In the early stages of their careers, documented by this exhibition, they also employed the standardised Narrative Art format of typewritten text and black-and-white photos to plan and record their actions, so that their formal correspondences are evident. It is thus quite surprising that Iveković and Vaccari had to wait over 40 years to be asked – by curator Marco Scotini – to exhibit together again. The last time had been in Graz, in 1973, during the audiovisual biennale Trigon 73, involving artists from Austria, Italy and what was then Yugoslavia. A young and smiling Iveković, wearing a black T-shirt with the Trigon logo and a miniskirt, can be spotted in one of the pictures (printed here for the first time) shot by Vaccari
inside Secret Communication, his environment at the city’s Neue Galerie: it consisted of two spaces linked by a camera mounted atop a monitor and a magnetophone – an ancestor of Skype, one thinks. Obvious similarities makes differences more visible: those, for instance, in attitudes to shaping a relation with viewers. Vaccari was mostly interested in exploring real time and the connection between ‘photography and the technological unconscious’, as he titled his excellent 1979 book on the subject. To place the public centre stage, he often removed himself from it. On show here is documentation of Exhibition in real time N.1, staged in Modena in 1969, the first of a long series of durational ‘events’ that Vaccari refused to label as happenings or performances. The best known of these was Exhibition in real time N.5, held at the 1972 Venice Biennale, where the artist installed a photobooth and asked visitors to ‘leave a photographic trace of your passage on these walls’, and hence to contribute to the work’s collective authorship. During the seventh, Instantaneous Myth (1974, at Gallery 291, Milan), some viewers were portrayed via a Polaroid; when their image, blown up to monumental dimensions, was projected on the walls, Vaccari took a final picture of each subject and its magnified double.
By contrast, Iveković aimed at establishing a contact with the public focused on her body, as her radical feminist works of the following decade would demonstrate. In the single-channel video Inter Nos (Between Us, 1978), we see her exchanging kisses, caresses and intimate gestures with men and women attending her exhibition at the Students’ Gallery of Multimadijski Centar (MultiMedia Centre) in Zagreb, 1978. She touched them only virtually. Again, the space was split into two rooms connected by cctv cameras. Iveković sat alone in the first one; when a viewer entered the other, she started to play with his/her screen image, while the audience outside could see only the visitor’s face and expressions. A few days before, during another opening at Tommaseo gallery in Trieste, Iveković had greeted her guests with her mouth taped, but also with the request that she meet them one by one behind a curtain: during the encounter, the artist’s heartbeat was amplified live, as well as recorded on tape, while a photographer chronicled the scene. In the following days, the gallery presented the tapes as ‘captions’ for each image. I’ve probably grown a tad too cynical, but while listening to Iveković’s heart, I found myself wondering when and if, today, I would have a chance to experience such an emotional, unfiltered interaction with art by attending an opening. Barbara Casavecchia
Sanja Iveković, Beogradski Performans (First Belgrade Performance), 1978, 8 b/w vintage photographs, 40 × 26 cm each, drawing with text. Courtesy the artist and p420, Bologna
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Ana Prada Don’t Escape the Ordinary Galeria Estrany de la Mota, Barcelona 24 January – 28 March Ana Prada’s work is, quite literally, off the wall. After two decades of producing labour-intensive wall works – in which the work is manufactured during the installation process, often involving multiple tacks or staples – her production has recently diversified to include freestanding sculptures, photomontages and graphics, which radically extend the complexity and narrative scope of her oeuvre, while at the same time elucidating and augmenting its reading. Most critical texts on the Spanish-born, London-based artist place her in the context of Minimalism, but the repetition of basic units aside, the artist has little in common with the predominantly male ethos of the 1960s movement. Unlike the sculpture of, say, Donald Judd or Carl Andre, Prada rarely respects the integrity of the readymade but rather deconstructs the everyday objects that form the dna of her work to the point where they pass almost beyond recognition. Small, mass-produced objects such as plastic clothes-pegs, false nails, hair curlers, combs, tights, teabags or electric wires, not to mention more substantial items such as mortars and pestles, are dissected with an almost surgical precision, before being assembled in geometric
or organic formats as wall or floor sculpture. This is approached with the exactitude of Crick and Watson’s pursuit of the double helix, yet reveals a regard for an aesthetic that is closer to the Oriental tradition than the values of the materially-orientated West. The very fact that dismounting an exhibition essentially destroys much of the work places it more on a conceptual footing, yet that is again to deny the purely visual delight the artist weaves around the commonplace. Prada’s work is like a detective novel, full of false leads that frustrate our initial reading and demand closer inspection. Depicting robust yet surreally deformed objects, the ragged lines in her graphic works initially hint at the grain in Japanese woodcuts, but in fact largely originate in fragments culled from commercial illustrations and comics. These Robert Crumb-like images have been photographed, rescaled and computer-manipulated, before being retouched by hand on the final printout. Similarly, when an oversize bubblegum ‘balloon’ seemingly adheres to the gallery floor, all is not what it seems: the bubble is simultaneously present and absent, the voluminous pink mass a photomontage of an actual gum
bubble mapped onto a photograph of the empty gallery space in which we are standing. By setting the fantasy within the real space inhabited by the viewer, we are invited to do a double take, a device akin to the ambiguous reflection of ourselves as the royal couple in Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656). As an earlier catalogue essay remarks, Prada’s work elicits comparisons to Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871). Prada’s is a world of surprising inversions, where nothing is quite what it seems and the mundane reality of the everyday is transformed into an aesthetic wonderland: such as the electric-toothbrush heads in the T.B Creator series (2015) that, released from their familiar context, combine and multiply to evoke a subatomic microcosm or crystalline growth. As the artist herself says, the work is essentially about realising the visual potential of the commonplace. And as Crick and Watson claimed of the double helix, the discovery of its structure was only made possible by the a priori conviction that the answer to their quest would be both simple and beautiful – despite the complexities of their discovery that continue to unfold with the passage of time. Keith Patrick
T.B. Creator Red, 2015. Photo: Víctor Pérez Ballestero. Courtesy the artist
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Chromophobia Gagosian Gallery, Geneva 27 January – 27 March Logging onto a wireless network near Davide Balula’s wall-mounted sculpture Coloring the Wi-Fi (with Dark Green) (2015), you find yourself automatically redirected to a mysterious new address. The whole page is a monochrome dark cadmium-green. In the top left corner, words in small type identify your new location: ‘Davide Balula, Coloring a Wi-fi Network (with Dark Green), 2014’. In the context of this exhibition, the webpage offers the visitor practically the only glimpse of pigment in what would otherwise be an almost entirely black-and-white world. Significantly, even this colour exists only virtually, hovering in a locative netspace, at once inside and outside the gallery walls. Taking its title from David Batchelor’s 2000 book of the same name, Chromophobia decks the white walls of Gagosian’s Geneva space with yet more white, along with the occasional shade of grey. ‘Since Antiquity,’ writes Batchelor, ‘colour has been systematically marginalized, reviled, diminished and degraded.’ This antipathy the Scottish artist and writer names ‘chromophobia’. Surveying the history of art and literature, he sees colour ‘routinely excluded from the higher
concerns of the Mind’. When art looks to the very essence of things, it invariably does so in black-and-white. So here Sterling Ruby’s Stove 3 (2013) abstracts its subject to a series of simple shapes in all-matte black as if to grasp at the Platonic ideal of a stove, only reachable once purged of hue. Canvases by Dadamaino (Volume, 1959) and Wyatt Kahn (Eh-Em, 2012), each in their different ways, exhibit less their own painted surface (or in the latter case, unpainted surface) than the holes they delimit and encircle, gesturing towards some metaphysical void at the centre of the subject. And after all, what better defines that ‘pure… generalized white’ (for Batchelor, ‘essentially a Western problem’) than the cold, hard semiotic vacuum of gallery walls? But in Robert Ryman’s Untitled, Bruxelles (1974), in which acrylic paint is applied to a black vinyl panel, a different kind of whiteness is broached. As Batchelor notes in the book, Ryman’s whites are ‘specific’: not pure, not abstract. They do not ‘involve or imply the suppression of colour’. Likewise, in Piero Manzoni’s Achrome (1958) we see less the whiteness of the canvas, more
Sterling Ruby, Stove 3, 2013, stainless steel coated with high temperature paint, 139 × 36 × 84 cm. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy Sterling Ruby Studio and Gagosian Gallery
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the folds across its centre, creating zones of shadow and impurity. Another work of Balula’s, Artificially Aged Painting (Wet, Dry, Wet, Dry, Wet Dry) (2014), with its cracked and yellowing surface, introduces corruption into the very white surface that has historically stood as a bulwark against the debasements of colour. Against what he regards as the chromophobic colourlessness of much contemporary conceptual art, Batchelor trumpets an ‘impurism’ that draws on the ‘commercial and contingent’ tones of Pop and Minimalism, pushing them to a point of excess. Few contemporary artists represent this impurism better than Blair Thurman. The latticed neon of his Cool White Frame II (2015) takes a shape at once singular and loaded with personal meanings; its referent feels familiar but unplaceable, like something glimpsed in a dream. Like the remnants of a dream upon waking, the fluorescent tubes spill light onto the surrounding surfaces, adulterating the sheen of the gallery walls. In such ways, writes Batchelor, ‘the isolation of local colours is countered and put into reverse. Colour begins to regain its excessiveness.’ Robert Barry
Daniel Silver Rock Formations Frith Street Gallery, Golden Square, London 16 January – 28 February Over the past two decades, Daniel Silver has repeatedly returned to the sculptural representation of the human head, testing the boundary between raw material and sculpted image. Rock Formations, the artist’s first exhibition at Frith Street Gallery, presents nine works (all Untitled, 2014), each the result of making and unmaking sculpture to question where value and meaning lie. Occupying the back of the gallery are four marble heads, some purchased and some sculpted by assistants to resemble classical portraits. Each is then reshaped by Silver, who obliterates their patiently copied features. One head (possibly Brutus?) bears the impression of a hand pushing down as if into a soft piece of clay, while elsewhere eye sockets and hairstyles are made smooth and barely discernable. While familiar, the faces are ultimately anonymous, divorced from the subjects they ostensibly portray. Cracks and the colouration of the stone are celebrated in Silver’s mark making, which seeks to return
these portraits back to their original status as lumps of marble. An artifice is at play, as if time itself aged these new sculptures. In the front of the gallery, a group of four sculptures juxtapose readymade material (quarried Carrara blocks left outdoors to weather) with the manmade (gestural, bronze portraits). There is a clear visual divide between the two components – marble bases are cut flat at the top to provide a support for the bronze portrait heads. The separation is kept clean in one sculpture, while others are necessarily stabilised at their base by flat steel plates or mounted to solid cement blocks. Drawing attention to these various display solutions risks pedantry, yet seen together they blunt the clarity of the natural/ human binary Silver sets up. In his past works, plinths were often made of roughly hewn wood slathered with paint, and were as much part of the sculpture as whatever occupied them. Those seen in Rock Formations are made to evoke typical exhibition furniture found in the
National Archaeological Museum in Athens, a site whose collections inspired many of the works on view. Silver’s most recent sculpture is by far the strongest – two hulking pieces of marble, one balanced on top of the other, and both mounted to a concrete block. The bottom half twists like a torso, while the ‘head’ turns to the left, as if looking out. While some chip marks betray Silver’s hand, it’s impossible to attribute the work’s overall shaping to either the artist or nature. A single red spray mark recalls the marble’s past life in the quarry, yet also points to the future, to the possibility of being worked further. Cleaner surfaces might seem recently exposed, but only those familiar with working in marble could make a claim with authority. Suspended between figuration and abstraction, the finished and unfinished, the forces of nature and culture, this sculpture distils the essence of Silver’s project – the act of charming images out of stone. Pavel S. Pyś
Untitled, 2014, bronze, Carrara marble, 170 × 70 × 60 cm. Photo: Alex Delfanne. Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London
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History Is Now: 7 Artists Take On Britain Hayward Gallery, London 10 February – 26 April Anyone hoping for a pre-general election uplift, or bunting, may be disappointed by History Is Now. ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ it isn’t. What it is, is a theme-and-decade hopping journey through objects and artworks from British postwar history, as seen through the personal perspectives of seven artists-as-curators. The first display, by Simon Fujiwara, employs the artist’s faux-archaeological approach to address the rise of celebrity culture and the aspirational ideals epitomised during the 1990s: ideals as shallow and fake as New Labour’s ‘Cool Britannia’ and as devoid of content as the row of ten empty Waitrose Cooks’ Ingredients herb packets that, along with artworks including Sam TaylorJohnson’s video of a sleeping David Beckham, form part of this selection. There is veiled irony in the juxtapositions, but as a critique it’s a subtle one. On to Jane and Louise Wilson’s more cohesive theme of the relationship between architecture, location and the body in sites of conflict – scaled-up photos of women breeching the fences at Greenham Common in the 1980s, models
of Victor Pasmore’s contested utopian Apollo Pavilion from the mid-1960s. Politically pertinent, although as a grouping somewhat dour. With its occult, Kenneth Anger overtones, Penelope Slinger’s surreal psychosexual film Lilford Hall (1969) has frisson, but by now I’m wanting more of a counterpoint, akin to the rawer aesthetic of punk. Hannah Starkey’s impassioned plea to reinvigorate the photographic image goes some way to providing this. Starkey highlights the Arts Council’s support of ‘noncommercial’ photography during the 1980s and 90s through gritty images from the Arts Council Collections (acc) by Paul Graham and the Hackney Flashers, among others, and contrasts these with sexist and stereotyped advertising imagery. Also drawn from the acc, John Akomfrah’s selection of 17 films performs an almost identical function in relation to the moving image. But Akomfrah foregrounds two welcome but absent-until-now aspects of British culture – multiculturalism and eccentricity, the latter evidenced in works by Gilbert & George and the Lacey Family.
Penny Slinger, Corpus, 1977. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Riflemaker, London
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A detailed chronology of variant cjd (Mad Cow Disease), Roger Hiorns’s section is the most focused. Fascinating, horrifying but so overwhelming in its detail of dates and data that the artworks, including Damien Hirst’s pair of pickled cow heads, Out of Sight. Out of Mind. (1991), are rendered incidental. Which leaves Richard Wentworth, who takes on Britain’s island mentality, translated into a coastal theme. With the majority of art and objects originating from the 1940s and 50s, in terms of age this is the most dated section in the show, yet it also feels the most alive. Containing Paul Nash’s fizzing Second World War paintings, Totes Meer (Dead Sea, 1940–1) and Battle of Britain (1941), helps, but it’s the integration of objects that relate to conflict, postconflict austerity and optimism – Robert Capa’s photographs of the Normandy landings in 1944; a gas- and space-saving double saucepan from the 1960s; a small Pye television, the model on which the nation would have watched the Queen’s coronation in 1953 – that makes this feel both the most historical and the most now. Helen Sumpter
Nil Yalter mot International, London 6 February – 28 March Nil Yalter’s installation La Roquette, Prison de Femmes (1974, in collaboration with Judy Blum and Nicole Croiset) presents the testimony of a former convict in France’s once-notorious women’s prison – and initially it resembles a relatively straightforward, sociological-style display. There’s a video with a voiceover that describes the routines and rituals of incarceration; on the wall behind are grids of panels containing monochrome images and handwritten texts that, together with a folder you can flip through, give shape to more detailed episodes: the woman being instructed to strip on arrival, for instance; or being given a sackcloth dress to wear; or sharing a cell with an evident pyromaniac. So far, so typical – and so grimly dispiriting. Certain aspects, however, stand out as altogether more curious. One panel tells how the prisoners would eat pictures of salads, chicken and other meals snipped from recipe magazines, as a substitute for the real thing. And there’s a parallel kind of substitution, a sort of confusion between differing levels of representation, in the work’s very structure – with the panels on one side all featuring photographic images, while those opposite have been translated into naive,
slightly clunky drawings. Even more jarring are the occasional moments where the accompanying texts bizarrely repeat across successive panels, like a sort of narrative stutter or glitch. Gradually, the sense develops of some kind of semiological slippage having occurred, of the usual workings of signification fraying at the edges – so that signs sometimes get treated as things; and conversely, things become signs, as when the prisoners write messages in pen across their bodies. Indeed, the longer you spend with the installation, the more complex and contradictory it seems – both presenting an ostensibly factual, documentary account of prison life while revealing those documents as somehow flawed, or merely aesthetic constructs. All of which means that while Yalter is often characterised as a feminist artist, it’s really quite a different sort of feminism compared to that of many other female artists who were working during the 1960s and 70s. Looking around this first London show of her work, with its small selection of early pieces, it becomes clear that her main concern is less with representing marginalised perspectives than it is with problematising the nature of representation
itself, upsetting the certainties of any one, single perspective. Nor is her focus purely on female identity. As a Turkish artist based in Paris (where she continues to live and work), much of her practice deals with concepts of ethnicity and migration. In Rahime, Kurdish Woman from Turkey (1979) – the other large, multipart installation here – the eponymous subject swaps the poverty and political violence of her rural upbringing for a different kind of oppression in the slums of Istanbul. Again, though, the video, photographs and drawings serve to undermine any sort of totalising perspective, offering only fragments, differing versions, recursive variations. And these sorts of ideas reach their apogee in a third work, Harem (1979), a long, meandering, but oddly captivating video based on accounts of concubines working in an Ottoman palace – and whose climactic scene involves an appallingly gruesome description of a eunuch’s castration. Such barbarities, the voiceover declares, “correspond to the absurd logic of a despotic and decadent power” – and also, by implication, to the logic of a single, centralised perspective, brutally reordering the world to its sole satisfaction. Gabriel Coxhead
Nil Yalter (with Judy Blum, Nicole Croiset), La Roquette, Prison de Femmes (detail), 1974, video, photography, drawing. Courtesy the artist and mot International, London & Brussels
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Marlie Mul Arbeidsvitaminen Vilma Gold, London 14 February – 21 March An air of provisionality pervades Marlie Mul’s show at Vilma Gold: three of the five sculptures use cardboard boxes as presentational devices. The largest work, ‘Ug’ (Ug), ‘Duh’ (d ė), ‘Muh’ (mєхѱ), ‘Bam Bam’ (bæm bæm) (all works 2015), features 13 of them, haphazardly stacked, some closed and some open. The contents, 25 caveman clubs made from an amalgam of polyurethane, paper, sand, glue and varnish, spill out onto the floor or poke up into the air from snug nests of polystyrene loosefill. Some of the clubs have been removed and positioned alongside the packaging, while others appear to have been dropped in disappointment. The notional recipients of two other cardboard-packaged works, tech (#1) and tech (#2), have shown less patience, ripping the front faces off the wall-mounted boxes to reveal a complex system of steel cogs welded together. These ‘consignments’ represent man’s technological odyssey, from the Paleolithic to the industrial era, perhaps presenting themselves as artefacts rather than artworks – though that is deliberately undercut by the cartoon slickness of the clubs and the nonfunctional status of the cogs. Mul’s central conceit is to look back at the folly of the Anthropocene from an unspecified
future. ‘It can only be hoped’, runs the last sentence of her slightly rebarbative press release, ‘that one day future generations will look back at us with as much contempt as we do our troglodyte former selves’. I’m not sure contempt is what I feel for my less privileged ancestors – neither does any of the work here, considered without this Cassandra-like strapline, seem to excoriate man’s fecklessness. Would it be better if it were more palpably antihumanist? Actually, I’m glad it isn’t. The two other – for me, more accomplished – offerings, Nicotine Patch Panel (Healing #1) and Nicotine Patch Panel (Healing #2), seem to leap forward from the industrial era to the neurotic present. In both works, images of nicotine patches are silkscreened onto two-metre-square Plexiglas sheets, held in vertical position between two steel supports. Blown up, these medical appliances take on a votive feel, sacraments of an epoch defined by rituals that oscillate between self-harm and self-help. Again, there is a hypothetical recipient of the knowledge encoded here – but we are not it. This is the most interesting aspect of Mul’s approach. Her objects present themselves as starting points for an epistemological game,
one in which we are asked to think about the traces our current material culture may leave behind. That may sound like a familiar artistic ploy, but her presentational rhetoric – the idea of positing a work as a consignment of goods – adds another axis. Clearly there is an interest in how the cooption of an object into the world of commerce alters its meaning. The prosaically welded cogs in tech #1 and tech #2 look like pastiches from an outfit specialising in neo-dada assemblage, while the caveman clubs resemble film props. Central to the appeal of both works is the mystery of who might have sent these objects and to what end. Perhaps this strategy is in its early stages. There is a whole category of contemporary art that uses the language of sculpture while simultaneously disavowing it by assigning the material a loosely defined conceptual status. I would suggest that there is a disconnect between Mul’s abrasive critical agenda and its playful material outcomes. If future projects in this vein can lighten the critical payload, finding their subject matter through formal inquiry rather than through prior thematic stipulation, the results might be more consistently seductive. Sean Ashton
Nicotine Patch Panel (Healing #2), 2015, Plexiglas, steel, silkscreen, 122 × 212 cm. Photo: Mark Blower. Courtesy Vilma Gold, London
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green postcard Ibid., London 14 January – 2 March ‘The exhibition green postcard considers the eponymous John Baldessari short film (1971) as a meme painting in today’s era of the meme,’ starts the exhibition text, somewhat gnomically. And since the Baldessari work isn’t here, who knows what that means? That quibble aside, green postcard clearly does want us to consider something of the historical process of technical obsolescence – painting made obsolete by the advent of photography, then photography made obsolete by the advent of digital imagery – and where that might leave the value of the physical artwork, and its relationship to images. And like Baldessari’s absent work, it’s the absence of images that looms large. That this doesn’t end up as another slightly defensive show of nondigital artworks seeking to recuperate materiality from the depredations of the all-consuming digital is credit to its curator, New York poet and critic Max Henry, who stages works by nine artists with a theatrical precision that mutually reinforces such apparently slight and sullen wall-based works. Fronting the show with Untitled, a remarkable 1986 film by Mark Dion and Jason Simon, is an inspired choice; Untitled mimics po-faced art documentaries, but it’s really a satirical prod
at the art restoration business, with a young Dion lifting the lid on the scandalous practices of unscrupulous art dealers and the painting restorers they employ to recut, cannibalise and repaint deteriorating antique paintings. Untitled (or Artful History: A Restoration Comedy, as the film is in fact titled) has an early postmodern preoccupation with the truth and falsehood of images, and the confidence tricks of historical provenance, but its particular effect here is to sensitise us to the surface of painting, as something that is no longer the carrier of an image but is instead a crumbling skin slowly fading into cultural insignificance and archaeological decay. Seen through the lens of Untitled, green postcard becomes a meditation on the ruin, or redemption, of representation, somewhere between the surface of painting and photography. There are plentiful gestures of negation here, and exotic chemical techniques: Mandla Reuter’s two large-vitrined sheets of creased canvas serve as the mounts for a dense black surface of lightsensitive diazotype; Michael Part’s murky glass panels are coated in glittering, oily blue-black, apparently ‘silver and selenium toning’ – photographic chemicals stripped of their purpose. Rey Akdogan’s scuffed-up Plexiglas panels bear
the traces of a contact-transferred motif, though legibility is less important than the evidence of such a mechanical process. Meanwhile Julia Haller and Anita Leisz’s white melamine panels are host to inset black-framed surfaces on which trail metallic filigrees, representing nothing much. These works share a theme of withdrawal from the surface-scene where the image should be, back into the raw materials of canvas, photochemistry or reprographics that normally produce the image. Beautifully insular, they trade in their obsolescence for a dandyish selfsufficiency. So what looks like a small, monochrome canvas by John Henderson (Type, 2014) is covered with blank brushstrokes that appear crazed with age. It turns out to be an electrotype – a facsimile cast by copper electroplating, a perfect copy of a surface, not an image. Elsewhere Pieter Vermeersch’s painting Untitled (2011) offers a trompe l’oeil chromatic gradation that appears to relate to the distribution of light in the surrounding space, but is sheer simulation. If there are no images here, these are nevertheless works that continue to demand something of representation – that it still might hold the possibility of an authentic, indexical relation to the reality of things. J.J. Charlesworth
Rey Akdogan, Episode vi (gf), 2014, Rosco paint, image transfer on Plexiglas, 61 × 46 cm. Photo: Oskar Proctor. Courtesy Ibid., London & Los Angeles
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Luis Camnitzer The Mediocrity of Beauty Alexander Gray Associates, New York 19 February – 28 March What keeps the work of art from becoming didactic, that bitter put-down? (We’re meant to learn from art, yes, but we’re not meant to know it’s teaching us.) Luis Camnitzer’s answer would likely be ‘elegance’. For more than 40 years Camnitzer’s work has escaped the fate of what we could call the ‘teacherly’ by courting simplicity and economies of means in works that range from the archly self-reflexive (note the artist’s ‘self-portraits’, one executed each year for five years between 1968 and 72, in which Camnitzer offers only a stencil drawing of his own name and the word ‘selfportrait’) to the slyly poetic (in Seven Virtues, 2014, Camnitzer inserts definitions of seven cardinal virtues – charity, humility, patience, etc – into the pages of Dorland’s Medical Dictionary). The Mediocrity of Beauty, then, which is the title of a 2010 essay in which Camnitzer pits the concept of elegance against beauty, is as much an argument for Camnitzer’s own approach to artmaking, and thus his own work, as it is an argument about the stakes for art in general. The elegance that Camnitzer appreciates, and which his work strives for and often achieves, is not the kind that we could confuse with matters of taste. There are no elegant interiors to
be admired here, only solutions to conceptual problems, some of which deserve the modification of ‘elegant’, and others which don’t. Of the latter category, Please Look Away (2015) is exemplary. A matrix of black vinyl bands that crisscross the gallery’s floors and walls and that bear awkward and sometimes ominous sentences and phrases – ‘Prowling bacteria everywhere’, ‘I’m peeking through the holes of my eyes’ – Please Look Away, one senses, is meant to confront us with the visceral affect of language, but it bears nothing of the spark to one’s thoughts that comes with reading the definition of ‘hope’ among those for ‘hordeolum’ (a staph infection at the edge of the eye) or ‘Hong Kong foot, influenza’. Is ‘hope’ just another malady? Is it a cure? What doctor would come across the word and need to look it up? And where is the entry for ‘hope, caution against’? It’s thoughtprovoking, not a prompt. (Really, ‘prowling bacteria everywhere’ only puts me in mind of Internet chatrooms and comment boards.) In a recent lecture, Camnitzer said that ‘art is the ultimate tool for critical thinking’. Though he subordinates science to art (science requires logic and empirical repeatability, art does not, so it naturally constitutes a greater set
Please Look Away, 2015, adhesive vinyl, dimensions variable. © 2015 the artist / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York. Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York
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of possibilities and outcomes), science remains the model for Camnitzer’s concept of elegance. The well-posed problem, the elegant solution – this is the game he is after, even if the game he is playing doesn’t have the same kinds of rules, the same kinds of collective commitments that scientists do. What is one to make of beauty, then? The two works that tempt this mediocre category are Symmetrical Jails (2014) and Jane Doe (2012/15). Jane Doe gives its audience a digital composite portrait of a woman’s face, the constituents of which have been drawn from newspaper articles, legal documents and police reports. Text from these sources scrolls along the bottom of the screen, suggesting an at-turns horrific or banal or bizarre narrative to go with the unremarkable visage. The composite photograph would seem to be an odd choice for a contemporary take on beauty, and too literal a manifestation of ‘mediocrity’. Today the mediocrity of beauty, in photography at least, is the province of the retouch artist. Composites are too nineteenth-century. But in Symmetrical Jails, for which Camnitzer composites all the letters of the word ‘symmetry’ in seven different languages, the results are far from mediocre, and yet beautiful nevertheless. Jonathan T.D. Neil
Ryan McNamara Gently Used Mary Boone Gallery, New York 8 January – 28 February In Gently Used there’s a work that playfully projects the artist’s future significance. Hanging to the left of the main door of the gallery, T-Shirt Retrospective (all works 2014) consists of seven framed T-shirts imprinted with stills from Ryan McNamara’s performances and rehearsals, along with one of James Franco making a zombie face (ugh). The term ‘retrospective’ seems intended to add historical weight to what would otherwise be mere collectibles lacking any. Known best for performances that employ dance, props and group participation – meem: A Story Ballet About the Internet won Performa’s 2013 Malcolm McLaren Award and was commissioned in a different iteration by Art Basel Miami Beach in 2014 – McNamara’s potential is such that if you haven’t heard of him yet, you probably will soon. The static objects in the exhibition, however, don’t live up to the hype. Pointing to past performances, they read less like artworks than very expensive souvenirs (they range in price from $4,000 to $25,000) – mementos from an unmatchable live experience. Without the context of McNamara’s career, they could just as well be artefacts from, say, a drug-fuelled
Saturday night arts-and-crafts party at a loft in Brooklyn, one hosted by a banker moonlighting as a pornographer (I was at that party; I don’t want a memento from it). In the galleries hang, at intervals, delightful little monsters including Performance Plaque (bear), constructed from a hockey mask stuffed with fur, a plastic bear snout, a plastic cat’s mouth and reptilian, sluglike tail, which are combined to form a face. Performance Plaque (mouth) consists of a black-and-red string of pennant flags held up by a set of chattering teeth emerging from an orifice constructed from silver-lamé fabric, and resembling a Lee Bontecou sculpture. The general theme of the souvenirs is that they are horrible – in the sense that they are frightful rather than awful, and frightful in a benign, entertaining sort of way, like characters in a cult horror film rather than an isis video. Lit by bright spotlights, the works would have been better if hung in a spooky funhouse’s maze of dark rooms. Ghosts seem to inhabit other works. Performance Plaque (French manicure) consists of a red-and-white-striped shirt twisting away
from the wall. From one sleeve emerges a plastic hand with a French manicure, which creates the impression that there is someone that cannot be seen inhabiting the shirt. This is also the case with People Mover, a floor piece consisting of an inflated maroon sweatshirt whose arms are bent in an unnatural way and pushing a cart bearing a tangle of sunsetprinted leggings that unmistakably recall dismembered limbs. Throughout, works are covered with decoupage of stills from McNamara’s performances. meem (silver) consists of individual dancers swirling around a flat plane slashed by primarycoloured lines – less a canvas than a $15,000 poster. In Still (2012), McNamara’s last solo exhibition, at Elizabeth Dee gallery, the artist invited visitors to take silly photographs with props and backdrops, which he then used to decoupage sculptures for sale. It was a democratic approach to artmaking, one that has been lost in the lofty heights of Mary Boone, where a set of framed T-shirts, with their embedded memories of a party you were never invited to, will run you a few months’ rent. Brienne Walsh
meem (silver), 2014, fabric, wood, 183 × 122 cm. Courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York
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Lucy Skaer Sticks and Stones Murray Guy, New York 10 January – 21 February Random House Peter Freeman, Inc, New York 8 January – 21 February For Lucy Skaer, rarely is an object simply ‘as is’. Rather, there’s usually a curious backstory that exceeds the work’s formal qualities, a subtle gesturing towards larger, intertwined histories of art, economics and geopolitics. Take the twin flitches of mahogany wood resting rather simply on Murray Guy’s gallery floor, Sticks & Stones I (2013–15). The wood was submerged in a Belize river for roughly 150 years (hence why it’s called ‘sinker mahogany’). This period coincided with the time when Great Britain was the colonial occupier of that Central American country, plundering its forests and floating the lumber downstream. How Skaer got her hands on the wood nobody knows, not even the gallerist. But here it is, this brute stuff, which Skaer has replicated four times out of other materials – ceramic, marble and malachite, aluminium and gunmetal, and various woods – each slightly more ‘off’
than the other. The original mahogany pair is inset with casual items from the artist’s studio: a formerly-used lithographic stone, a blue chunk of ceramic, parts of blackwood sculptures she terms ‘lozenges’, a little piece of American walnut at the tip of one of the fletches, into which tiger’s-eye and carnelian gems have been inset. Skaer used this little wood piece for an earlier series, Us to Them (2012), holding it up to an Edouard Vuillard painting at the Met, which it matched perfectly. Vuillard’s work makes an appearance at Skaer’s sister show at Peter Freeman, abstracted in a series of large lithographs by extreme closeup and large rectangles of blue and red patterning. It’s this recycling and repetition of work, objects and motifs that keeps the proceedings interesting. The embedded lithographic stone in Sticks & Stones I is smooth and small; at Peter Freeman there are three in American Images
(2014), and they’re literally boulders, their smooth tops and rough, untouched sides in nice counterpoint. These stones were sourced from a place called Lithograph City, Iowa, which sounds like the most boring place in the world. A once-thriving First World War boomtown, it has subsequently been abandoned, a casualty of shifting global economics. More current international developments are similarly referenced, though ultimately occluded, in a series of 51 lithographs, all printed from The Guardian newspaper’s discarded printing plates. Large swaths of the plates’ imagery have been rubbed out. Only an arm here or part of a headline there can be seen, as if Skaer, in a fit of perpetual indecision, can’t decide whether to resuscitate the past or erase it entirely. Perhaps it doesn’t matter; if she proves anything, it’s that history is only as lasting as the objects conveying it. David Everitt Howe
Sticks & Stones i, 2013–15, sinker mahogany, Burmese blackwood, tin, coins, lithographic stone, ceramic, copper, American walnut, tiger’s-eye, carnelian, 384 × 75 × 6, 359 × 55 × 6 cm. Courtesy Murray Guy, New York
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Alec Soth Songbook Sean Kelly, New York 30 January – 14 March Songbook, a series of large-scale black-and-white photographs taken during Alec Soth’s twoyear-long roadtrip through the United States with writer Brad Zellar, has typically been seen as a reaction to the ubiquitous banalisation of contemporary culture in the age of social media. Even so, it is a project imagined through a longer history of American photography, from the defining moment of documentary in the Depression era to the 1960s turn to vernacular weirdness. Songbook feels like Diane Arbus working for Roy Stryker off the books. Like Arbus, Soth has an eye for the off-kilter oddity revealed through doubling. This is most clearly marked in the portrait form for which he is best known. The alliteration of the two names in the title of Cade and Cody. Au Gres, Michigan (2012) offers repetition as consonance, a linguistic echo of the photographic scene. Two shirtless youths in near-identical spandex American football pants stride across a car park toward the photographer in dance-step synchronicity. The incongruity of Cade and Cody’s stockinged feet – one wears a matching pair of white socks, the other an odd
pair of black and white – is the first hint at the kind of offbeat pairings that proliferate throughout the scene. Doubles within photographs are combined with a doubling logic that plays out across the sequencing of the installation as a whole. Two claustrophobic scenes of sweaty dancing teenagers at a prom show us the sociopolitical questions hovering at the edges of this work. In each photograph the crush of individual bodies surrounds a single dancing couple. Two embracing white boys in Prom #2. Cleveland, Ohio (2012) are paired with their heterosexual counterpart in Prom #1. Cleveland, Ohio (2012), a black boy and white girl. One cannot but read these two couples as reflections of the visible shifts in the sexual and social life of contemporary America. Aside from this and a few other hints, the America of Soth’s Songbook is more often a bygone Americana. Though contemporary, these seemingly anachronistic spaces persist in the flyover territories of a nonmetropolitan usa. Soth’s view of such ongoing but marginal
culture is a hair’s breadth from being nostalgic. Yet though he manages to conjure with cliché, he produces something stranger by far. Soth and Zellar moved through small-town America adopting the fictional guise of a local reporter and newspaper photographer (some examples of their independently produced newsprint publication, The LBM Dispatch, are on display in vitrines), and this investigative persona saves Soth from a patronising view of the out-of-date hairdos and yesteryear fashions that he pictures. Zellar’s reportage for its part provides explosive fragments of humour in a quintessentially American matter-of-fact style. The proprietor pictured in Abbot’s Magic Company. Colon, Michigan (2012) dishes out a line of colloquial poetry in response to Zellar and Soth’s request to peek into his file cabinet of $3 jokes and tricks: ‘I ain’t telling unless I’m selling’. This collaborative format, with its nod to the 1930s photobook, reinforces the sense that this work reasserts the significance of vernacular culture against the ever-advancing standardisation of contemporary life. Siona Wilson
Bil. Sandusky, Ohio, 2012, archival pigment print. © the artist. Courtesy Sean Kelly, New York
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Charles Atlas The Waning of Justice Luhring Augustine, New York 7 February – 14 March The fading firmament over the twinkling seas: ‘quinoa hoodoo’, says the sky. The waves roll gently towards the shore: ‘wartime paisley’, is the flat conclusion. The unequivocally beautiful Florida skies, in soft shades of tangerine, forgetme-not and buttermilk, are projected large on four walls of Luhring Augustine’s main gallery space for Charles Atlas’s The Waning of Justice. In a two-screen video projection, Ethel’s Fortune or The Waning of Justice (2015), large all-caps words appear, letter by letter, creating commanding pair-terms, many of which have a pejorative, declarative tone that seems pointed at a contemporary urban sensibility. Are we living in ‘glitter utopia’ or ‘decade asshat’? Both, probably. Each letter is made of footage from another sky, though the sky-on-sky aesthetic summons to mind motivational posters in miserable corporate offices and gyms. ‘boring because’? Atlas is right. Of course there’s something boring about beautiful ocean sunsets – no matter how much we enjoy them. The artist shot footage of the horizon while on a residency on Captiva, the island to which Robert Rauschenberg moved to find some calm and warmth – think of his resultant Jammers series (1975–6), those flutteringly light fabric works in optimistic,
beach-bright shades – and where there is now a foundation and a residency in his name. Atlas approaches the seascape as a metaphor for a fading age. A two-sided, somewhat apocalyptic countdown clock is installed in the centre of the gallery, as a kind of signpost. On another two walls, Kiss the Day Goodbye (2015) offers a changing collage of multiple sunset fragments, using a transition between slices of footage that gives the impression of multiple blinds being drawn. A bleak, ominous soundscape of slow, synthy minor chords accompanies the imagery, until mournful bagpipes play us out, and the sequence ends. Critics and historians hold much affection for Atlas, particularly for his collaborations with choreographers such as Merce Cunningham and Michael Clark, though here any choreographic directions are made with sound and video. The suns set and the sound of music hustles us through to the next room, where drag performer The Lady Bunny is singing a melancholic, uptempo disco number. Her rippling blonde wigs defy gravity; her many outfits are a riot of sequins. The song speaks of lost love, though her delivery is nothing to write home about. The next sequence has Bunny giving a disordered political
rant that covers everything from Black Lives Matter to 9/11, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, wmds, an operation she might have had to install a vagina in her asshole, peak oil and Jon Stewart’s pro-peace marches. Her main throughline is that there’s no movement for peace, that people need jobs, that men run everything. Some of Bunny’s words begin to disappear, and little by little her words are silenced, screened out, as though by the force of some omnipresent surveillance state. The audio returns as she struggles to regain her train of thought – what was I saying? Unfortunately, the relationship between the sunsets and Bunny’s confused tirade seems arbitrary. While Bunny’s cognitive dissonance and struggles to pick her way through a multitude of political discourses might mirror some confusion of her own, her silencing doesn’t make enough of an intervention into the footage. It’s a workaday confusion, conveyed in a style that is aesthetically banal. Perhaps this is a work or a thought in progress, but in the end it’s a good deal more boring than the sunsets and the authoritative hysteria that Atlas manages to pull from them: ‘martian yellow’. ‘history shadow’. Laura McLean-Ferris
Ethel’s Fortune or The Waning of Justice, 2015, two-channel video installation with sound by Helm, 19 min 15 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York
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Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook Sculpture Center, New York 25 January – 30 March I’m guessing Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook isn’t really a cat person. She’s really, really into dogs, though, which form the beating heart of the Thai artist’s first major museum retrospective in the us. Like a crazy dog lady, she cares for dozens of stray canines (she currently has 17) at her home and at Chiang Mai University in Northern Thailand, where she teaches. Sometimes maimed, sometimes awkwardly wearing big paper lanterns to send off the recently deceased, the dogs run around her backyard and swarm around Rasdjarmrearnsook at a barbecue in the video Pray, bless us with rice and curry our great moon (2012). One trots around with a gimp leg, blissfully unaware of the camera, in Some unexpected events sometimes bring momentary happiness (2009). Others become subject to diy bottling in Kaidown, Karong, Lam, Long, Masee, Mee, Mommam, Ngab, Nuanoi, Nudee, Peuy, Plakem, Rambo, Rublor, Sibsee, Sornrak, Sua, Tao, Tualek, Tun, Yon (2015), which features a little glass vessel for each of her pets, stuffed with their hair and a little printed photograph of their face. Ngab looks straight
at you with stereotypically sad puppy-dog eyes in the print Ngab (2012), his head surrounded by a plastic cone, legs wrapped in bandages. Pluck those heartstrings, Araya! There’s never been a better tool for coercion. More than just the plight of street dogs, Rasdjarmrearnsook’s work elicits sympathy for the voiceless: animals, of course, women, the mentally ill, the deceased – to whom she talks directly in a moment of deadpan humour. In a series of videos titled The Class (2005) and Conversation (2005), the artist engages rows of corpses in a generic schoolroom setting, asking them about death. They don’t really participate much. And with dry wit, she notes that the class is especially quiet and moves on, directly addressing mortality in larger philosophical terms. In an adjoining room, another group of videos document the stories of women institutionalised as a result of drug use and other crimes. With their features blurred out, the women speak frankly about addiction, infidelity and the loss of their family. In the process, patriarchal
and conservative cultural codes come into sharp relief. As they pertain to Buddhism, these codes are addressed in another work, Village and Elsewhere: Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Beheading Holofernes, Jeff Koons’ Untitled, and Thai Villagers (2011), in which a bald Buddhist monk turns Koons’s Untitled (1988) and Gentileschi’s Judith Slaying Holofernes (c. 1620) into moral parables; the former shows Koons surrounded by two scantily clad 1980s beach babes in bikinis, one holding an inexplicably tawdry cake. The latter depicts a gruesome, bloody murder. As part of his pseudo art-history lesson, the monk demonstrates to the locals (and their dogs, of course) which aspects of each painting will send them straight to hell; namely, their depictions of lust and murder. By any indication, Koons not only has a first-class ticket, but his own special circle there. It’s these bitingly humorous cultural contrasts that really lend frisson to Rasdjarmrearnsook’s work, which is both compassionate and critical in equal measure. David Everitt Howe
Pray, bless us with rice and curry our great moon, 2012, video still. Courtesy the artist and Tyler Rollins Fine Art, New York
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Carlos Bunga and Olivier Mosset Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles 17 January – 14 March More than 30 years separate the birthdates of Olivier Mosset and Carlos Bunga. The former grew up post-Second World War France, was a member of the famed bmpt art group and came into art when divisions among practitioners of abstract painting were trenchant and, at times, political. Bunga, born in 1976 in Portugal, has come into his own over the past decade, a period during which it has been difficult to gain any orientation at all, much less a stance, about abstract painting, in which old styles are redeployed and gustily sold without concern for the history that initially compelled them. It is a provocative pairing, and not Mosset’s first collaboration with an artist significantly younger than he (as recently as 2011 Christopher Grimes had Mosset paired with the custom motorcycles of artists Vincent Szarek and Jeffrey Schad). This time Mosset deploys two large wall paintings, one appropriated from a mural design the artist saw on a wall in Mexico, but both as anonymous and as stark as any other Mosset
painting. In firm contrast with Mosset’s work are Bunga’s handmade objects and architectural interventions, artworks made with a style (at least according to the gallery materials) all Bunga’s own. The death of author versus originality, politics versus romance, historical mediations on the monochrome and pattern versus the ahistorical warmth of raw materials: it is all very tidy. Mosset’s large paintings are confident and strident in the space, and it comes through with great irony that they do not conjure as many direct influences as Bunga’s work. Mosset’s large diamonds of blue and yellow, massive across the first wall one sees in the gallery, appear as though apropos of nothing. The painting owes no allegiances and actually resists art-historical referents, causing one to think less of colour field than of homeowners wanting to add a little colour to their garage doors. Bunga’s work, on the other hand, leads one to Arte Povera and even Surrealism, perhaps mixed with more than a little Doris Salcedo. Though humbly
made (almost to the point of demanding that a viewer acknowledge its humility), Bunga’s work is intent on being art. In the end, Bunga’s works almost seem sacrificed to the higher purpose of understanding Mosset. The Frenchman’s work is difficult, and taken in isolation, little can be gathered from its deployment of flat monochromes and stripes, especially not the sensation that such gestures were pictorially revolutionary. Mosset’s paintings often feel empty, which can drive one to the wall label for help. Yet next to Bunga’s very specific and perhaps derivative practice, one senses the nature of Mosset’s original refusals, his resistance to playing ball with the typical arguments for abstract painting and art history. The Mossets at Christopher Grimes feel both local and strange, as if taken from the suburban strip mall or the retaining walls next to highways and placed in the gallery. Here they are, deadpan and nondescript, with no explanation needed. Ed Schad
Olivier Mosset, Untitled, 2010–13, latex on wall, dimensions variable. Courtesy Christopher Grimes Gallery, Los Angeles
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Michael Parker Juicework Human Resources Los Angeles 6–10 February The splurt of wet, sticky juice dribbled from clenched fingers as a motley crowd gouged out the guts of another fruit into rough stoneware mugs. Citrus after citrus fell under the knife: sour lemons and sweet limes, plump-nippled tangelos and thick-skinned pomelos, massive grapefruit and tiny kumquats, oranges both navel and blood. Over a thousand pounds of fruit juiced with almost as many handmade ceramic tools. This was Michael Parker’s Juicework. Under the soft glow of lamps cast from watermelon gourds, on long tables made of raw sliced timber, still barked on the edges, sat wide-round baskets, plumped with fruit. Spread around them glistened legions of ceramic juicers: a pyramidal dagger on one end, a long phallic handle on the other, each a glazed and iridescent sea-creature. Tiny tools for the kumquats, medieval torture devices for the grapefruit. A few had blowholes. Those juicers were ocarinas. Drying along one wall hung the rough, white handtowels soaked with sticky pulp, along another a long shelf piled with extra citrus. A threepooled fountain for washing the instruments
tinkled in the background. Otherwise, the only sounds were the hushed exchanges and the squelch and drip of juice being made. Incidental confluences and conversations occurred with a certain mischievous glee, as if we were all getting away with something. Though the door wasn’t too clearly marked, this juicery was open to all comers. Workers volunteered. Fruit was donated from or traded (in exchange for Parker’s ceramic works) with a couple of the best organic orchards. The artist who crafted it all asked not a nickel from the assembled crowd. Though one suspects if the whole kit and caboodle had a patron, it might go as an installation lock-stock-and-barrel, but for now not even the alluring implements were for sale individually. Inevitably someone yearned for some vodka to pour into their melange of wet and aromatic citrus juice, but no one obviously broke out a bottle in this chaste orgy, at least while I was there. Parker has mixed wellness, pleasure, community and art before. For a couple of springs out of his downtown loft he hosted weekly
steams in an egg-shaped sauna arrayed with disco mirrors and lit for effect. Every week a different artist or musician would choose the music (often live performances) while another would choose the scent. Half-naked and naked humans, slippery with sweat, eased in and out of the egg, drinking cucumber water and beer, herbal tonics and whisky between steam sessions. Over the four days that the juicery operated out of a former Chinese movie theatre, the fruit rinds piled high, their desiccated skins a riot of colour alongside that of the tools they were emptied with. An ocarina performance happened one evening, a concert of avant-garde music the next. Supplies didn’t hold out and reinforcements were gathered from the trees of friends. In colder climes this winter, the dirty snow puddled in hidden potholes waiting for a loose foot to get cold-soaked, but in California the fruit trees heaved and a few lucky souls sitting around an art gallery smacked their lips with tart citrus still warm from the winter sun. Andrew Berardini
Juicework (detail), 2015, stoneware, porcelain, tree slabs, salvaged wood, redwood, cotton, vinyl, steel, plumbing, foot pedal, electronics, wire, cable, bulbs. Courtesy the artist
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Amilcar de Castro Galeria Marília Razuk, São Paulo 31 October – 10 March ‘Drawing is a way of thinking. It is a thought about space.’ Amilcar de Castro, who wrote those words in 1976, made a life’s work of drawing, painting, sculpting and thinking about space, in works whose graceful simplicity leaves much of the richest thinking to the viewer. The act of walking around one of the weathered steel sculptures in de Castro’s Cut and Fold series (1951–2000), to which he devoted much of the last decade of his life, is a 360-degree education in mass and geometry; in the heft and weight of steel; in rust and the passage of time; and in light, shadow and the exquisite forms that can be conjured with the simplest of gestures. In one of three untitled 1995 sculptures set on the wooden floor at Galeria Marília Razuk and surrounded by de Castro’s paintings, two cuts have been made, forming an acute angle in a circular slab of steel 80 cm in diameter and some 5 cm thick, with the resulting triangle bent away from the disc. In a pas de deux between hard metal and thin air, the sculpture morphs through dozens of unexpected shapes as you circle it. ‘I want to show the space that has not yet been seen’, wrote de Castro, in an undated poem reproduced in the 2010 book Amilcar
de Castro. ‘Reinventing space in wonder and without fanfare / But which is new, always new.’ The act of ‘folding’ these monumental pieces of steel was immensely difficult, even when success brought better resources, including the use of a large, well-equipped work space in Nova Lima, in de Castro’s native state of Minas Gerais, where the iron-rich earth cycles through rusty hues like those of de Castro’s sculptures. In a 2002 interview with the art historian Marília Andrés Ribeiro, de Castro described how he first sketched, then modelled his cut-and-fold sculptures in paper. If he liked the result, he would create a small version in metal; and if he liked that, he would increase the size. ‘At first we used a huge metal folding machine,’ de Castro explained, ‘but today we are able to do it without a machine. The plate is placed on top of a rack, and the area of support is heated. The weight of the plate causes it to bend at the same angle as the rack.’ This exhibition of works, brought from what is now the Instituto Amilcar de Castro in Nova Lima and almost all previously unexhibited, includes a set of smaller, stockier sculptures from the 1980s Cut and Displace series, shown
along one wall in juxtaposition with a set of complementary paintings, some of which apparently rehearse the same shapes as the sculptures. As is visible in these and the rest of the 19 paintings featured in the show, de Castro bestowed an intimate, gestural quality on the geometric shapes he was painting, or ‘drawing’, as he insisted on referring to his practice. Using an eclectic collection of domestic and industrial brushes and brooms, he produced single, continuous movements over and over again, looking for the shapes that pleased him and discarding the rest. An undated 1970s painting that takes pride of place on the back wall was the first in which Castro incorporated colour, filling the gaps between his thick strokes with slabs of deep butter yellow. Some of the other, smaller paintings have slices of colour too, in sea-green, sun-yellow and dull cobalt-blue, but most are monochrome exercises in shape and form; and with their sweeping gestures, intuitive geometry and raw, imperfect edges, they are little revelations in abstract art and in painting, whatever de Castro preferred to call them. Claire Rigby
Untitled, 1995, corten steel, dimensions variable. Photo: Everton Ballardin. Courtesy Galeria Marília Razuk, São Paulo.
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La Llamada del Dios Extraño Diéresis, Guadalajara 5 November – 27 February Ideally, curating is always a gesture of generosity – the creation of a dialogue where none existed, or the revelation of an ongoing conversation. And perhaps never more so than when an artist curates other artists, as Daniel Guzmán has done across generations for La Llamada del Dios Extraño. He invites Esteban Aldrete, Bayrol Jiménez, Cristian Franco and José Luis Sánchez Rull to collaborate and create works together (as well as to show their own bodies of work). Taking as a pretext Hans Jonas’s The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God & the Beginnings of Christianity (1958), the work here emphasises the alien, the strange or foreign otherly nature of God as well as all the related pop-cultural phenomena (demons, angels, ufos, ghosts and experiences with the so-called afterlife). Starting with the idea of duality and the ancient battle of wills that dominate the world, in Guzmán’s own words, “this exhibition explores the ways in which art has found a way to make manifest this encounter with the face of this alien God and the accumulation of phenomena associated with the otherworldly”. And so, for the opening, one could witness the artists and their collaborators at the mortuary across the street from the gallery, dressed up in beige costumes and masks (halfway between prison inmate and Ku Klux Klan
member, with a fake hair weave hanging in the back for good measure), singing, in a Robert Johnsonesque way, “Death don’t have no mercy in this land, Death never takes a vacation in this land…” (a very accurate way of describing the current state of affairs in Mexico), and shuttling large wooden slabs with parts of the lyrics and collages by all the artists, from the mortuary, stopping rush-hour traffic as their chains (yes, they were chained, like prisoners in a chain gang) clashed against the pavement, and into the gallery, where later two of the artists were on a gallows, one playing a guitar while wearing the noose, and the preacher-type performer screaming the song into a loudspeaker. As all the wood slabs were brought in, the rest of the performers danced, chains a-clanging, around the gallows. Aside from this collaborative ritual – and it was actually a ritual more than a performance – documented on video, as well as the gallows and wooden slabs with digital collages, the exhibition comprises several sculptures made collaboratively by all five artists, exhibited on shelves as if they were artefacts or vestiges and objects of worship of some alien god religion (and including parts of the ritual costumes). In the projection room are films to accompany
the show – spanning from Joel and Ethan Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), and Walter Hill’s Johnson-inspired Crossroads (1986) to Kenneth Anger’s work and Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb (1994) documentary – and in the foyer one can see Sombras (2014), the beautiful and eerie blackand-white collage series by Aldrete, as well as the larger and more grotesque pieces by Franco from the series Golden Dawn (2014; he also has some black-and-white drawings upstairs). In the second floor of the gallery are two more collaborative sculpture-installations, and a grouping of drawings by Jiménez (mostly acrylic and ink with some wax colour) portraying different kinds of gods, idols and arcane figures, followed by a grouping by Guzmán, from the series The God Without a Face (2014), made with graphite on kraft paper, adding some wax colour details here and there, a series that epitomises and distils his economy of line, which starkly contrasts with the very colourful drawings by Sánchez Rull (La Llamada del Dios Extraño, 2014) and some more collages by Aldrete (this time also in colour, Colgados, 2014). The interconnections are fluid, there is an ease in the dialogue between the works, which never repeat but rather complement each other, both formally and thematically. Gabriela Jauregui
Gabinete h-e (Daniel Guzmán, José Luis Sánchez Rull, Esteban Aldrete, Bayrol Jiménez y Cristian Franco), Death Never Takes a Vacation, 2015, performance. Photo: Omar Chuil. Courtesy the artists
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Gary Carsley For and Against Nature Grey Projects, Singapore 8 November – 24 January Situated in an old walk-up apartment block in a quiet suburban neighbourhood, Gary Carsley’s latest exhibition lends another sense to the notion of the contemplation garden. Here an ikea Gilbert chair – selected for its playful link to Gilbert & George, who in Carsley’s words “make works that allowed the viewer to be with and in the art” – sits in front of a round Chinese garden gate, Astria Portia 4 (Moongate/Stargate) (all works 2014); this lifesize lambda monoprint and chair is situated directly opposite another, similar gate, but one with a changing projection of various gardens, Moongate Singapore Chinese Garden. The former, taken from a gate at the Chinese Scholar’s Garden on Staten Island, contains a view of the pagoda from Kew Gardens in London, while across the gallery 26 changing images from different Chinese gardens around the world (eg, San Francisco, Brisbane, Singapore, Bangkok) are projected onto a Singaporean moongate. On the flanking walls are four lifesize silhouettes of garden statuary, cut out of store-bought wallpaper. The statues are selected mostly from the Chinese garden in Singapore
and one from Potsdam; they depict legendary heroes from ancient Chinese culture (Hua Mulan, Yue Fei and Guan Yu). The wallpaper is from a Chinese copy of a chinoiserie interior from Brighton Pavilion that dates from approximately 1819 – the founding year of Singapore. Larger versions of this project, Sciencefictive, have been shown at the Institute of Modern Art in Brisbane, for which it was originally commissioned, and the Kunstverein in Ulm, Germany. There, as in Singapore, there were ‘Stargates’, the name taken from the eponymous sci-fi film and tv series about space travel through wormholes, which Carsley elides with ‘moongates’, and both together signify portals to other realities or thinking. Carsley’s work takes place at several intellectual intersections, not to mention hints at travelling to different times and spaces. In his words, it is a “mappa mundi” that connects Chinese cultures and diasporas across the world. Given the historical references in most Chinese gardens, it would also refer to the imagery of different eras – the statues are a good example of this. For Carsley it seems
Moongate Singapore Chinese Garden, 2014. Photo: Grey Projects, Singapore. Courtesy the artist
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that the Chinese garden itself is a signifier of this mass movement of culture. So far so artificial, and yet this show’s topic is nature, or at least a window onto nature. Carsley seems to be asking if nature, or more precisely the garden, can be a construction of the mind. Or at least to suggest that it is an entirely human artifice. But can this artifice still bring one back to a certain notion of contemplation? It would seem that he connects cultivating gardens and vistas as a metaphor for art and artifice, rather than an experience of nature. He may be also suggesting that art is another kind of cultural construction akin to the garden, and thus functions like nature. The chair here is an object to sit on, and viewers are encouraged to do so, and hence it creates the possibility for some sort of meditation, or at least a moment of thoughtfulness. This would seem to suggest that the gallery itself is another kind of garden; which leads us back to the idea of contemplation… Perhaps in the end one doesn’t really need a walk in the park. Sherman Sam
Come to [what] end? Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City 6 November – 30 January On the top floor of the Reunification Palace in Ho Chi Minh City, in what was once, 40 years ago, the South Vietnamese president’s personal suite, a series of animal skulls, gifts from foreign leaders, hang from the wall. Coming across these remains during a visit to the palace upon commencing his residency at Sàn Art, Nguyẽˆn Tràˆn Nam saw in them the very essence of the trophy; its sanguinary core. In a sense the palace itself has become just such a trophy, its furniture and fittings preserved – as if in aspic – since the North Vietnamese tanks rolled into the palace grounds in 1975. But it was a symbol from the historical museum in his hometown of Hanoi, a relic of French occupation later put to bloody use in the South during the American War, that Nam chose as the key signifier around which his works for this installation circulate: the guillotine. In a room darkened as if for the display of ethnographic treasures, the floorspace is dominated by a 120cm-long granite sculpture, reworking the guillotine’s blade into a kind
of religious iconography (A Part of the Structure, all works 2014). In a small display case hung on the wall, a like image of the executioner’s tool, its mechanism simplified into something between an Egyptian ankh and an American military medal of honour, is rendered in tin, small enough to be pinned to the breast of a uniform (Like a Variant). Between these two icons, death becomes both monument and commemorative badge. As if to nail the point, a vitrine at another wall contains three small rough-hewn mounds: one of stone, one of tin and a third composed of the artist’s own congealed blood (Endless Loop). History is made not only of the first two. Another room, containing the work of hcmc resident Phȧm Ðình Tiéˆn, is stuffed with images of aircraft, inspired by Malaysia Airlines flight 370, whose disappearance last spring coincided with the beginning of Tràˆn’s residency. But the first thing to catch one’s eye is a video triptych (Yesterday). All three frames appear at first to contain the kind of drifting cloud images
you might acquire by pressing your smart phone to the window of a jumbo jet. Closer examination reveals something more sinister. On the left: a baby’s head, modelled on a found image of mh370’s youngest passenger; in the centre, a sugar cube at 1/35th human size; and on the right an aircraft. All three are modelled in sugar, slowly dissolving in water: a haunting image of the transience of existence. On the floor, more planes; 16 of them this time in chrome-plated plastic, flying in diamond formation (When). Again, it’s only with a closer look that we catch what is so unsettling about this work: the strangely fleshy armature of the jets. Like something out of a David Cronenberg film, these aircraft seem to be formed of muscle and bone, their aerodynamic sheen suddenly revealed to be as tender and vulnerable as we are. The accident, as in the philosophy of Paul Virilio, then seems to be inevitable, encoded in the design. Another ‘endless loop’ besides Nguyẽˆn Tràˆn Nam’s: along with the impermeable hard surfaces of history, its flesh and blood. Robert Barry
Nguyẽˆn Tràˆn Nam, A Part of the Structure, 2014, granite, 120 × 80 × 20 cm. Courtesy Sàn Art, Ho Chi Minh City
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Leonora: A Novel by Elena Poniatowska Serpent’s Tail, £12.99 (softcover)
At some early juncture in the reading of this book – perhaps when its heroine sees ‘horses made of ice between the trees’ – you might like to check if you’re dreaming: welcome to the unaccountably strange life of Leonora Carrington. Painter, writer and subject of a spring retrospective at Tate Liverpool, she’s also one of the oddest figures to emerge from England in the last century. From her birth on a Lancashire country estate in 1917 to her death in Mexico 94 years later, she remained a magical, faintly disconcerting presence, defiantly attached to the weird familiars and phantoms of her imagination through spells of obscurity or madness. This book is a tender portrait that, according to its author, ‘has no pretensions whatsoever to being a biography’ yet supplies the most authoritative account of her life you can find. As the contents of Carrington’s life can seem fantastical, Poniatowska knows that paradoxically the best method for accurately capturing its real texture is to transform it into a mysterious fable, a surrealist trick first taught by André Breton’s Nadja (1928). Echoes of Carrington’s own books abound, too, hallucinatory memoirs full of wolf-headed women, drugged fudge and Gnostic prophecies that are seemingly intended for the oddest children imaginable. In this more prosaic retelling, Poniatowska never responds to her subject with self-consciously freakish treatment or slack-jawed fascination, and even at its most outlandish, the story is luminously told.
An aristocratic changeling, Carrington first appears as a child roaming an empty landscape that forecasts the haunted terrain of her paintings. Ghostly boys cavort under the full moon, goblins sneak through her hair, and folklore, learnt in the lap of her beloved nurse, sets her mind ablaze. Soon she grows into a wildeyed debutante, rebuffing her father’s fortune so she can drift to Paris and fall under the spell of Surrealism. It remains wonderfully difficult to tire of tales about the Surrealists’s antics, and Poniatowska supplies them in a mad abundance that makes the clock melt: Luis Buñuel wonders aloud if there are any dwarves in Mexico – someone affirms their presence – Breton cuts an oracular dash through cosmopolitan Paris, acting with all the horny insouciance of a Greek god, while Picasso snakes around a party, that month’s lovestruck mademoiselle in tow, telling everyone that Antonin Artaud’s teeth have fallen out. Amidst the lunacy, Carrington falls head-overheels for Max Ernst, who appears as a character possessing all the sinister inscrutability of the birdmen that he compulsively drew and collaged. Following a delirious honeymoon phase where their involvement seems almost animal and imbued with mutual clairvoyance, all comes undone as various horrors strike. Ernst endures wartime internment and Carrington suffers her first psychotic collapse awaiting his return; and later, when they attempt to begin again,
the intensity of their obsession has waned. Much of the book is dedicated to chronicling this supreme example of amour fou, powered by an electric sexual connection and an occult atmosphere, until Leonora delivers the immortal kiss-off, ‘I cannot live frozen in your shadow.’ Who do you think will play her in the movie? She escapes the creepy domination games that trap other muses in the doll’s house of male desire, bolting for Mexico where she makes her greatest paintings. Poniatowska never attempts to puzzle out any pieces, favouring short phases of lyrical attentiveness to their peculiar climate. Carrington’s work still supplies a cornucopia of untamable astonishments, going far beyond the textbook breed of Surrealism we’ve learned to understand with its schooling in psychoanalysis, Catholic mischief and the tricks of convulsive juxtaposition. Hers is a far more private art that wanders through Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights (1490–1510) into the darkness of Kabbalah and emerges in the looking-glass world of Lewis Carroll, all bound together with an air of gently unsettling innocence. Those hunting for explanations are in the wrong dream. But Poniatowska’s book assures us of how startling Carrington’s flesh-and-presence was, too, while drawing us back to the magnificence of an oeuvre so strange you can scarcely believe it was accommodated by the waking world. ‘I’m inventing all this,’ she once playfully claimed, ‘and it is about to disappear, but it does not.’ Charlie Fox
Room 225-6 By Karsten Schubert Ridinghouse, £15.95/$25 (softcover)
The gallerist and publisher Karsten Schubert wrote this ‘novel’, published by his own imprint, Ridinghouse, during (and concerning) his days convalescing in a suite at Claridge’s Hotel after an operation to remove thyroid cancer. Schubert is fully recovered and all profits from the sales of Room 225-6 are to be donated to the Oracle Cancer Trust. So, tremendous news. That said, I’d urge you to take £15.95 and send it direct to the charity, without worrying about reading the actual book, packed full as it is with self-indulgent jokes and supposedly self-referential, tiredly postmodern, paragraph-long descriptions that describe writing those very same paragraphs. Titled after the room that Schubert holes up in (paid for by a couple of wealthy friends) while he entertains a rotating circus of well-wishers, there are shows of occasional promise, with
Schubert likening his actual illness to the ‘cancer’ of the stinking rich. Schubert does not exempt himself from criticism, and makes no attempt to come across sympathetically. He has a major strop at hotel staff, which is played out in horrifying detail when they lose a dinner reservation, for example. Yet Schubert’s peers are worse. At dinner with two art collector friends, ‘Victoria and Albert’ (Schubert intersperses obvious fiction with apparent fact throughout), the couple moan about their private jet having been stuck in a holding pattern over Basel, causing them to miss the essential opening hours of Art Basel, and about how they can’t find a decent home in London to go with their other four elsewhere. Even the outwardly nicer ones have flares of arsehole idiocy. On a visit to a Mayfair gallery
April 2015
another friend gets ‘snappy’ when an assistant points out that a Mondrian painting is from the artist’s pre-Paris phase because it’s signed with two As in the surname. ‘What a patronizing little shit,’ she rages. There’s a hint that it has taken his health scare to sharpen Schubert’s mind to this rotten sense of privilege. He says the Mayfair hotel is ‘the epicentre of it all’, and later, during a minibreakdown, which a therapist blames on the trauma of recovery, Schubert writes, ‘Suddenly to my inner eye the whole edifice of Claridge’s comes crashing down’. Yet most of these occasional sparks of what could have been an intricately woven evaluation of a life and career serving the rich and getting rich sadly just get lost among the wisecracks and gimmicks. Oliver Basciano
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The Long March of Pop: Art, Music and Design 1930–1995 by Thomas Crow Yale University Press, $45 (hardcover)
Today’s artworld, in which art and mainstream culture are in relentless gaudy interchange, isn’t so new. Thomas Crow, now in his late sixties, has lived amid such fluxions for decades, and traced them back further: his Modern Art and the Common Culture (1998), for example, is one broad tapestry of relativist crossovers spanning mid-nineteenthcentury Paris to the time of its writing. The American art historian’s most recent book takes the antihierarchical movement par excellence and inflates it so that, rather than being a 1960s phenomenon, Pop fills two-thirds of the last century. In discussing its roots in the 1930s induction of American folk-culture into American museums, its containing of ostensibly non-Pop figures such as Billy Al Bengston and designers such as Milton Glaser and Rick Griffin, and its delayed renascence in Jeff Koons, Damien Hirst et al, though, Crow has a larger agenda. He wants to tell the story of how avant-garde art took root in America, leveraging ‘folkloric authenticity’ in order to legitimate itself. Crow’s method is to set a host of satellites in orbit, each chapter taking a specific focus while nevertheless segueing into the next. He explores how, during the 1930s and 40s, folk culture was temporarily imported into museums like moma as a way of shoring up political consensus. He compares the recombinant pre-Pop of Jasper Johns and the activities of the great, wayward
ethnologist and anthologist Harry Smith, noting that Johns’s motifs of flags and targets were found also in earlier folk-art reliefs and sculptures. He forensically reconstructs Roy Lichtenstein’s development from Picasso wannabe into young Pop master, complete with Mickey Mouse-related iconographic detective work. He nests Andy Warhol’s and James Rosenquist’s career shifts in and out of advertising within larger narratives of the ‘creative revolution’ in 1960s advertising and the artworld’s shifting terms. Testing the edges of the Pop continuum leads Crow inevitably to Los Angeles and London: to wave-riders and hot-rodders in the former and the Independent Group in the latter, via consideration of changes in the education systems of both countries. Crow, at points, is pretty much waving his library pass and his press pass in the air. He’s ostentatiously at ease with recounting signal changes in surfboard technology and Bengston’s transmuting of a surfboard logo into luminous abstraction; in several consecutive sections, he brings comics, graphic posters and rock album art under Pop’s rubric, showing a sociological grasp of their interrelation. By the epilogue, which skids through the 1980s and 90s, Pop is a flickering ghost, appearing here in Raymond Pettibon’s album covers, there in Marcus Harvey’s Myra (1995). The endpoint is Hirst, who Crow appears
to grudgingly admire for having shifted the terms of a relationship between art and the mass media – turning his celebrity into art – that American artists see in more defeatist, immutable terms. Make no mistake, though, this is an American narrative, since Hirst’s art is seen as owing much to us precursors. Its cutoff date means that Takashi Murakami – who one might logically see as a continuation of Pop – doesn’t get a mention. In its grand approach to American culture, this book seems, slightly weirdly, to be Crow’s attempt to turn himself into music and cultural critic Greil Marcus. Structurally, The Long March of Pop is effectively Marcus’s Invisible Republic (1997) – which took Bob Dylan’s 1960s music and traced it, again via Harry Smith, back to the 1920s and 30s – crossed with his earlier Lipstick Traces (1989), which similarly expanded punk into a century-spanning history of negation and dissent. Crow mentions Marcus early on, and says he’s not going to try and tread on his territory. And indeed he doesn’t, precisely; he just does something parallel – minus the hog-riding-professor verve – since you don’t hear Dylan or the Sex Pistols the same way after those aforementioned books and you won’t see Pop the same way after The Long March of Pop. As seen here, it’s murkier, richer, more ragged, and evidently the art that a nation congenitally suspicious of the highfalutin was destined to create. Martin Herbert
Facing the Music: Documenting Walt Disney Concert Hall and the Redevelopment of Downtown Los Angeles A Project by Allan Sekula, edited by Edward Dimendberg East of Borneo, $54.95 (hardcover) Facing the Music is a project that occupied (albeit not to the exclusion of everything else) the late Allan Sekula from 1985 until his death in 2013. So it’s a key, if incomplete, work. At its centre is the construction and opening of the Frank Gehry-designed, Disney family-funded Walt Disney Concert Hall, which opened in 2003 in the Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles. Following the impact of Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, the Concert Hall was touted as a project that would reshape and regenerate the image of civic Los Angeles. Perfect fodder for an artist and writer whose reputation rests on his documentation of large economic systems. Initially this book was to be a catalogue accompanying an exhibition that took place at CalArts’s redcat Gallery (also funded by the Disney family) in 2005. The ten-year delay in its appearance suggests that documenting his
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hometown was something that had become Sekula’s personal ‘Moby Dick’. Sekula’s exhibition had featured both his own work and that of four others – photographers James Baker, Anthony Hernandez and Karin Apollonia Müller, and filmmaker Billy Woodberry – whom he had invited to join him on a five-year project documenting the construction, its effect on the communities around it and la civic society in general. Their works and the exhibition are documented in the present book, and suggest that one of the problems of documenting ‘the real’ Los Angeles is that you are often creating an image of a carefully constructed image (rather than a reality): whether it is Gehry’s shiny architecture or the people who see themselves in it. (Stills from Sekula’s Gala, a 2005 film documenting the Concert Hall’s opening, are particularly relevant in the latter respect.)
ArtReview
There’s a sense that Sekula is relentlessly struggling to reach some sort of truth. Not the one presented to him in Bunker Hill in 2003, but something more ‘real’. And he’s taking a punt, of course, on the fact that such a thing exists. If architecture critic Reyner Banham’s influential Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (1971) or Ed Ruscha’s photobooks seem to make Los Angeles more easily graspable in word and image respectively, then it’s the fact that Sekula clearly struggled in his attempts to depict the place he knew best (see his lecture ‘Los Angeles: The Graveyard of Documentary’, included here) that makes this book worth reading. That and a facsimile of one of the texts that was important to Sekula himself: Louis Adamic’s 1930 essay, ‘Los Angeles! There She Blows!’. Mark Rappolt
ARRATIA BEER GALERIE GUIDO W. BAUDACH BLAIN | SOUTHERN GALERIE ISABELLA BORTOLOZZI BQ GALERIE BUCHHOLZ BUCHMANN GALERIE CAPITAIN PETZEL CARLIER | GEBAUER MEHDI CHOUAKRI CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTS CROY NIELSEN GALERIE EIGEN + ART KONRAD FISCHER GALERIE GERHARDSEN GERNER GALERIE MICHAEL HAAS GALERIE MAX HETZLER JOHNEN GALERIE KEWENIG KICKEN BERLIN JOHANN KÖNIG KOW KRAUPA-TUSKANY ZEIDLER TANYA LEIGHTON MEYER RIEGGER GALERIE NEU NEUGERRIEMSCHNEIDER GALERIE NORDENHAKE PERES PROJECTS GALERIA PLAN B GALERIJA GREGOR PODNAR PSM AUREL SCHEIBLER ESTHER SCHIPPER GALERIE MICKY SCHUBERT GALERIE THOMAS SCHULTE SOCIÉTÉ SPRÜTH MAGERS SUPPORTICO LOPEZ GALERIE BARBARA THUMM VW (VENEKLASEN/WERNER) GALERIE BARBARA WEISS WENTRUP KUNSTHANDEL WOLFGANG WERNER WIEN LUKATSCH ŻAK | BRANICKA DELMES & ZANDER
HALEH REDJAIAN ERIK VAN LIESHOUT FRANÇOIS MORELLET CALLA HENKEL & MAX PITEGOFF BOJAN ŠARČEVIĆ ISA GENZKEN WILLIAM TUCKER LAURA OWENS MARIA TANIGUCHI N. DASH TAL R; MARIANNE VITALE OLGA BALEMA; DARJA BAJAGIĆ & ALEKSANDER HARDASHNAKOV MARTIN EDER; ROSS CHISHOLM GIOVANNI ANSELMO PER INGE BJØRLO FRANCIS PICABIA; FRANZ GERTSCH IDA EKBLAD, NAVID NUUR ROMAN ONDÁK; TINO SEHGAL PEDRO CABRITA REIS HELMUT NEWTON KATHARINA GROSSE; JEPPE HEIN MARIO PFEIFER; RENZO MARTENS/INSTITUTE FOR HUMAN ACTIVITIES DANIEL KELLER GROUP SHOW CURATED BY SANYA KANTAROVSKY ROSA BARBA KLARA LIDÉN RENATA LUCAS; MICHEL MAJERUS, ALBERT OEHLEN & LAURA OWENS SIROUS NAMAZI MARK FLOOD NAVID NUUR TOBIAS PUTRIH DANIEL JACKSON DAVID SCHUTTER DANIEL STEEGMANN MANGRANÉ BENEDICTE GYLDENSTIERNE SEHESTED JUAN USLÉ; RICHARD DEACON TIMUR SI-QIN MARCEL VAN EEDEN; CYPRIEN GAILLARD ATHENA PAPADOPOULOS VALÉRIE FAVRE ELLIOTT HUNDLEY THOMAS BAYRLE; BERTA FISCHER GREGOR HILDEBRANDT FONTANA, VON GRAEVENITZ, GRAUBNER, MORELLET & POHL HAEGUE YANG AGNIESZKA POLSKA; MAGDALENA ABAKANOWICZ HARALD BENDER
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For more on Malcy Duff, see overleaf
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Contributors
Laura Oldfield Ford
Hou Hanru
Contributibuting Writers
is a London-based artist and writer. She lectures and teaches across the uk and internationally on issues surrounding urbanism, architecture, protest and memory. Recent exhibitions include Ruin Lust at Tate Britain, London, Anarchy Unmasked at the British Library, London, and a solo show, Seroxat, Smirnoff, thc, at Stanley Picker Gallery, London, all in 2014. Recording Britain, an exhibition in which she participated in 2012 at the V&A, London, is currently touring. She is the author of Savage Messiah (2011). This month she begins a regular illustrated column derived from her drifts through London, picking up themes of gentrification and the housing crisis. For further reading she suggests Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (2014).
is a writer and curator based in Rome, Paris and San Francisco. He is currently the artistic director of maxxi, Rome. After working as an independent curator and critic based in Paris, he became director of exhibitions and public program, and chair of exhibition and museum studies, at San Francisco Art Institute from 2006 to 2012. He is the author of several books and has curated and cocurated around 100 exhibitions across the world over the last two decades including the Shanghai Biennale (2000), Gwangju Biennale (2002) and 10th Istanbul Biennial (2007). This month he interviews Koki Tanaka.
Karen Archey, Sean Ashton, Andrew Berardini, Robert Barry, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Barbara Casavecchia, Michelangelo Corsaro, Matthew Collings, Gabriel Coxhead, Ory Dessau, Tom Eccles, Charlie Fox, David Everitt Howe, Gallery Girl, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Hou Hanru, Sam Jacob, Gabriela Jauregui, Maria Lind, Laura Oldfield Ford, Lucas Ospina, Keith Patrick, Mark Prince, Pavel S. Pyś, John Quin, Claire Rigby, Sherman Sam, Ed Schad, Sam Steverlynck, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson, Siona Wilson
Motoyuki Daifu is a Tokyo-based photographer. He has had several solo exhibitions including Still Life at Misako & Rosen, Tokyo in 2014; and My Family is a Pubis, so I Cover it in Pretty Panties at Little Big Man Gallery, Los Angeles in 2014, and Vacant, Tokyo in 2009; Lovesody at Lombard-Freid Gallery, New York in 2012, and Family at Nikon Salon, Tokyo, in 2008. This month he photographs Koki Tanaka.
Contributing Editors Laura McLean-Ferris is a writer and curator based in New York. Recent exhibitions include Geographies of Contamination at David Roberts Art Foundation, London, in 2014, and Till the Stars Turn Cold at S1 Artspace, Sheffield, in 2014 and Glasgow Sculpture Studios in 2015. She has also curated performances for Performa 13, New York, and Glasgow International 2014. Her new exhibition Columbidae, on the subject of office labour, is on view at Cell Project Space, London, to 17 May. This month she writes the first of a regular column on performance. For further reading she suggests E.J. Finkel’s February 2015 New York Times article ‘In Defence of Tinder’, and Maurizio Lazzarato on machinic enslavement in Signs and Machines (2014).
Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Motoyuki Daifu, Malcy Duff, Mikael Gregorsky
Malcy Duff (preceding pages)
Not uncommon in modern manga, the three dots of an ellipsis are used inside an otherwise blank thought balloon to convey a person’s innermost, inexpressible thinking process. In I Trimmed A Tree So A Lorry Could Pass (2015), Malcy Duff takes the dots from balloons above his character, first seen brushing his teeth, then standing on his lawn, and enlarges them so they occupy a whole page. These three dots perhaps symbolise the Edinburgh-based artist’s own associative approach to stretching, deforming and even breaking the medium’s visual storytelling. “Narrative is a very dangerous thing,” comments Duff. “So it is gravely important we continually blow it to smithereens and play with the rubble.” Since 1997 Duff has been detonating comics into unexpected shapes, eager to let the reader join the dots together in their own fashion. In Duff’s practice, he sees “The first stage is that ‘pop’ of the initial idea, with all its energies and possibilities. The second stage is to translate that idea as close to the ‘pop’ as possible. The third, and most important, is leaving enough room for interpretation so the reader can create ideas themselves. This is the only way a comic can have any life, make babies.”
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Some of that life gets sparked by Duff’s penchant for optical and perspectival puzzles, perhaps inspired by “something I see which I would like to see drawn, and haven’t seen drawn before.” His nine-page webcomic for TopShelfComix.com, Will I Ever Travel as Far as a Guitar String When It’s Played? (2008), opens with black geometric shapes on what may be an audio monitor, the volume rising on the left and one black square perhaps denoting a note, hovering before it bursts and collapses. Later, Duff freezes our view onto a receding path, as a figure vanishes behind a wall. Duff makes us anticipate for 23 panels, until someone appears in the distance and rapidly paces past us. This man rings a doorbell and enters a room with two silhouetted figures visible through a window, their three forms finally coalescing into a slightly imperfect black square. Duff sees such repetitions and variations as making his comics almost musical. (Another of Duff’s hats is one half, with Ali Robertson, of the band Usurper.) “It’s how a piece of music floats around a room, without an obvious logic. It taps into feeling and emotion, which I think can be closer to a truth
ArtReview
than constructing panels into a finished Rubik’s Cube.” Duff has experimented with comics as filmed readings with his dvd Snowcone (2014), or as live stage readings, mixing drawing, sound and performance in the 2013 work Beetle Drive. Since 2003, he has tried making the object element, the physicality, key to the reader’s experience in his series Rrobots (2003–), which includes one issue composed of 27 individually drawn badges and another with a cover that rubs off on your hands. There’s no avoiding a certain grotesquerie to his drawn figures and animals, but these are not mocking but make us empathise with bodies’ vulnerable meat, their skin taut, hairs astray, bones fragile, their frailty indicated by Duff’s quivering motion lines. So his 2008 booklet A 52 Second Silence For Topsy serves as a graphic memorial to the Coney Island amusement park’s elderly elephant, electrocuted in 1903 by Thomas Edison, its demise deforming across 52 illustrations, one per second. Doubters complain that the specificities of comics delimit the reader’s imagination; as his new piece for ArtReview confirms, in Duff’s hands comics become overripe with suggestive ellipsis… Paul Gravett
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on the cover photography by Motoyuki Daifu
Phrases on the spine and on pages 31, 71, 95 and 101 are from Birds of the British Isles, written by F.W. Frohawk and published in 1957 by Ward, Lock & Co, London, Melbourne and Cape Town
on pages 130 and 138 photography by Mikael Gregorsky
April 2015
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Off the Record April 2015 “Nehmen sie das medikament!” the German gallerist yells at me. As I squint up at her through teary eyes and the chokehold she has me in, I’m distracted by the Anja Gockel Amadeus cashmere pullover she is wearing, but my reverie is soon broken as she tries to stuff a teaspoon in my mouth. “What are you doing? You know I can’t speak German!” I splutter. “My apologies,” she says quietly before suddenly switching to a loud shout. “Take your medicine! I know that you’re Greek! There will be no more handouts while you proclaim to the scum who voted you in that you are going to drop all the wise fiscal reforms that we have forced on you!” “For the last time, I’m not Greek, for fuck’s sake! I’m just wearing an Angelos Frentzos T-shirt. I’ve been working here for three months! You know I’m from Huddersfield in the north of England! I don’t need medicine!” Ursula relents. There’ve been more than a few moments like this in the past three months, particularly during the current exhibition, Sail Storfing/Whale Morphing, a three-person show that segues unevenly between installations about urban space through to moving film work about the gentle king of the ocean. I blame the total lack of collectors for the legendary gallerist’s mood-swings. I sit back up in the Mies van der Rohe Brno chair, running my hands slowly along its tubular arms. “You know,” I muse, “some days I think I prefer the flat-bar versions of the Brno.” Ursula doesn’t reply. I realise she’s weeping. “Look, Ursula,” I say urgently, “you employed me specifically to bring a little bit of British market-savviness to your clapped-out German business model. We need to get some more collectors in. We’ve got to sell stuff on the secondary rather than aimlessly waiting for the Gallery Weekend and abc berlin! You might be ficken-ing the Greeks in Euroworld, but in the artworld you’re being well and truly ficken-ed by us Brits and our American cousins.” “Nein! Nein!” Ursula sticks her fingers in her ears and rolls about next to the sculpture about urban space. “Our business has an aura, and you are destroying it when you talk about business stuff!” “Hold on,” I reply, sensing a familiar routine. “You’re merely paraphrasing the Cologne dealer Anne Aebels – but she said that in 1965!”
Ursula stares at her Jil Sander black leather sandals. “We have to change! Drop these conceptual sculptors!” I gesture around the expanse of the gallery. “Instead let’s get in artists like Parker Ito. He could do one of those funny things where he slightly changes his name and it’s just brilliant! He could be Parker Hito here! Much more serious and German, it’ll lure our three collectors in, and then wham, we hit them with his shiny reflective stuff that’s got something to do with the Internet!” Ursula looks upset but bravely smiles back at me. “And then you stop paying the estates of all these dead artists who are on the roster. Who cares if they were in the first Documenta? Who remembers them hanging out with Beuys or Kippenberger? Stop paying the debts and put these on!” I pass a box to her that I’ve been keeping under the Brno. She refuses to take it. “Then get an investor,” I continue. “A serious backer! The kind who will pour money into the gallery, subject to really strict guidelines on how they get their returns, and then we take the money and give ourselves huge pay rises and pensions, and stop working between 1pm and 5pm. You know the sort of financial backer I’m talking about! Somebody who can bail us out.” “There is no such thing as a bailout. These people who get bailouts are not solvent. You cannot pay your bill tomorrow,” she says mechanically. “Take the box!” With sadness she takes the box and opens it. She slips off the Jil Sander sandals and, looking me firmly in the eye, slowly and silently puts on the pair of Astrapis by Ancient Greek Sandals that I’ve bought for her. Gallery Girl
Kerlin Gallery Isabel Nolan Bent Knees are a Give 1 April –16 May 2015 Art Cologne Hall 11.2, Booth C-009 16 –19 April 2015 www.kerlingallery.com
Reproduced by permission of the Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral