ArtReview April 2016 by ArtReview

Eva Kot’átková

H A U S E R & W IR T H

FAUSTO MELOTTI CURATED BY DOUGLAS FOGLE 20 APRIL — 18 JUNE 2016 32 EAST 69TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10021 WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

GIUGNO (JUNE), 1974 BRASS, PAINTED FABRIC, GLASS 116× 112× 50 CM / 45 5/8× 44 1/8×19 5/8 IN PHOTO: FRANCO ABBONDANZA, MILANO © FONDAZIONE FAUSTO MELOTTI, MILANO

ACCORD I, 1962 OIL ON CANVAS 173 × 198.4 CM / 68 1/8 × 78 1/8 IN

HA U S E R & W IR T H

PHILIP GUSTON PAINTER 26 APRIL — 30 JULY 2016 511 WEST 18TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10011 WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

John Latham Spray Paintings London

Richard Hamilton Cadaqués

8 April - 28 May 2016

David Zwirner London

Richard Hamilton and Sign (1975) at the Bar Melitón, Cadaqués, Spain, 1975

ROBERT STURM KERAMISCHE PLASTIK 1969 – 1993 MARCH 12 – APRIL 16, 2016 MARTIN HONERT APRIL 26 – MAY 28, 2016 — JOHNEN GALERIE MARIENSTRASSE 10, D – 10117 BERLIN WWW.JOHNENGALERIE.DE GALLERY WEEKEND BERLIN APRIL 29 – MAY 1, 2016

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BRENT WADDEN Soft Peace April 14 - May 28, 2016

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Installation view of Travel, 1996–2013, in Days of Endless Time at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC, 2014. Photo: Cathy Carver

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APRIL 2016 MILANO PALAZZO BELGIOIOSO NEW OPENING MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS A SECOND EXHIBITION SPACE IN MILANO.

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ROB PRUITT, SAFE AND WARM, 2009, GLITTER AND ENAMEL ON CANVAS, 183 X 138 CM (DETAIL)

MASSIMO DE CARLO OPENS HIS FIRST GALLERY IN MILANO WITH AN EXHIBITION BY OLIVIER MOSSET.

OLIVIER MOSSET, UNTITLED, 1987, ACRYLIC ON CANVAS, 132 X 216 CM

1987 MILANO

ArtReview vol 68 no 3 April 2016

Shake it up is all that we know… It’s tough being an art lover these days. You would not believe the things that are covered under the general heading of ArtReview’s ‘duties’. This month, it barely had time to pull a cooked chicken out of the half-smashed ear of Hans Ulrich Obrist (in clay-effigy form, part of a ‘performative dinner’ that took place in Dubai – something to do with smashing your idols, although given the absence of the requested clay chicken-pot effigy of Hall & Oates, ArtReview was left to believe that the organisers had confused Oates with Obrist and assumed a Peyton-Jones where there was once a Hall, thus confounding the true object of its idolatry) before it was asked to help the lingerie-mogul son of the late Sex Pistols’s manager Malcolm McLaren to burn his collection of punk memorabilia (estimated to be worth £5m). The pyre was in protest of punk’s legacy being co-opted by the mainstream – inasmuch as it’s the subject of exhibitions designed to attract tourists to London and people like the queen and Boris Johnson are now saying they’re fans of the whole punk enterprise. The panty man was inspired by the rumour that every time ArtReview was referenced by The New Yorker or The Sunday Times, it burnt a section of its archive (normally the bits from the 1980s – dark, dark times) in protest of the ways in which it’s being co-opted by ‘the squares’ and their right-angle ways. Yet ArtReview has got other things to worry about: it’s currently packaging up an old office chair so one of ArtReview’s ‘assistants’ can repatriate it to a Croydon squat, from where it had been taken, in a shabby, unauthorised form, by one of the ArtReview delinquents from the 1950s (former scribes Banham, Berger or Alloway are the usual suspects), who had pretended they were ‘borrowing’ it for a ‘shoot’. This gross colonial exploitation of the estuarine south (an undoubted part of the Global South) must not go uncorrected. A supermarket sits on the site of the squat now, though, so ArtReview suggested that the ‘assistant’ drop it off in the fruit-and-veg section. Then everyone would be able to feel good about themselves, sit down and contemplate the wisdom of the aubergine, and ultimately move on.

John Oates

Given all that, you’ll not be surprised to hear that the subject of oppression, protest, change and speculative thinking have been on ArtReview’s mind this past month (it’s even thinking of moving to Athens ‘to keep it real’, like all its curator friends). So, in the wake of Ai Weiwei’s controversial ‘space blanket’ demonstration at the opening of a display of his work at the National Gallery in Prague, it asked art historian Tomáš Pospiszyl to consider whether or not the Czech art scene produced its own form of ‘activist art’ (and maybe while he was at it to propose some sort of framework that might account for what people actually mean, other than that they’re moving to Greece, when they talk about activist art). Reaching out for something to hold / Looking for a love / where the climate is cold… Makes you want to weep, doesn’t it?… Must get someone working on that clay effigy. Now, where was ArtReview? Ah, yes… alterity and an interest in it. That’s something that both Czech cover artist Eva Kot’átková and Swedish-Argentinian Runo Lagomarsino share, particularly in terms of the confrontation with and reworking of sites of historical and institutional power. Where do you dare me / To draw the line / You’ve got the body / Now you want my soul… Aaaargh! So good… The way in which power operates in a more networked and symbolic form is one of the things we look at in the work of Thomas Bayrle, an artist who has influenced generations of artist, both via his artistic output in and of itself and in terms of his lengthy spell of teaching at Frankfurt’s Städelschule. And finally, talking of lengthy spells, you’ll notice that Gallery Girl, who graced ArtReview’s back page for the past eight years, with her unique blend of sartorial excellence, a passion for obscure martial-arts forms and a similar dedication to even more obscure midcareer painters, is no longer ‘in the saddle’, as she used to call it. Mainly because that’s all she had to sit on (when the international editor could be bothered to strap it on) during the rare occasions she visited ArtReview’s premises. Still – life goes on, and as is the case with most things these days, ArtReview has replaced Gallery Girl with a moonlighting curator (who is eager to work his way towards a yearlong stay in Athens). Don’t let his day job put you off! ArtReview

The boys are back in town

INAUGURAL EXHIBITION IN OUR NEW SPACE AT

537 WEST 24TH ST NEW YORK THROUGH APRIL 23, 2016

Counterclockwise

TIM HAWKINSON

RUNO LAGOMARSINO We s t i s eve r y w h e r e yo u l o o k 16 March - 6 May 2016

Francesca Minini, Milan

Art Previewed

Anthony Trollope on the art collections of billionaires Interview by Matthew Collings 54

Previews by Martin Herbert 33 Points of View by Jonathan T. D. Neil, Maria Lind, Marie Darrieussecq, Mike Watson, Jonathan Grossmalerman, J. J. Charlesworth 43

page 34 Horst Ademeit, 5805, 24.9.2003, 2003, Polaroid, 11 × 9 cm. © Delmes & Zander, Berlin (participating in Berlin Gallery Weekend)

April 2016

Art Featured

Eva Kot’átková by Mark Rappolt 62

Thomas Bayrle by Martin Herbert 74

How to act: art and activism in the Czech Republic by Tomáš Pospiszyl 68

Runo Lagomarsino by Oliver Basciano 82 Artist Project by Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski 87

page 68 Ai Weiwei, The Circle of Animals / Zodiac Heads, 2010 (installation view, 2016). Photo: Jan Hromadko. Courtesy National Gallery, Prague

ArtReview

w w w.bjergga ard.com

brigitte waldach UntoUched by echoes 08/04/16–18/06/16 Per KirKeby / sUnday PictUres 17/03/16–21/05/16

Art Cologne 14 –17/04/16 MArket Art FAir 22–24/04/16 Art BAsel 16–19/06/16

Art Reviewed

Erin Shirreff, by Bill Clarke Photo-Poetics, by Siona Wilson Laura Poitras, by Dan Udy David Adamo, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Amy Sillman, by Laura McLean-Ferris Sandra Cinto, by Claire Rigby Marrakech Biennale 6, by Oliver Basciano

Exhibitions 96 Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966), by Helen Sumpter Steve McQueen, by Christopher Mooney Rolf Julius, by Robert Barry Tobias Madison, by Raimar Stange Panos Papadopoulos, by Michelangelo Corsaro Erik van Lieshout, by Dominic van den Boogerd Margrét H. Blöndal, by Markús Þór Andrésson Judith Hopf, by Barbara Casavecchia Alicja Kwade, by John Quin Pipilotti Rist, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Michael Simpson, by David Trigg Katrina Palmer, by Susannah Thompson Michael Joo, by Mark Prince Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa, by Kiki Mazzucchelli Stan Douglas, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Things Fall Apart, by Lara Pawson SOS, by Lauren Dyer Amazeen Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, by Andrew Berardini Margo Wolowiec, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Bea Fremderman, by Stephanie Cristello

Books 126 Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century, by Kate Eichhorn The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians, by Annebella Pollen Industry and Intelligence, by Liam Gillick Drinks, by Dike Blair THE STRIP 134 A CURATOR WRITES 138

page 116 Margo Wolowiec, A sometime thing (detail), 2016, handwoven polyester, linen, dye sublimation ink, acrylic paint, powder-coated steel, 221 × 145 cm. Photo: Michael Underwood. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

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Unsolicited AlterAtions, 2016

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Art Previewed

e-zine This shorthand for an electronic fanzine is not yet recognizable enough to style it without the hyphen 31

Previewed DAS INSTITUT Serpentine Galleries, London through 15 May Gallery Weekend Berlin 29 April – 1 May 8 × 8 Mah Jong Re-imagined Roche Bobois Chelsea showroom, London 5–10 April

Wasteland Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris Pantin, and Mona Bismarck American Center, Paris through 17 July Tomi Ungerer Museum Folkwang, Essen through 16 May The Promise of Total Automation Kunsthalle Wien through 29 May

Erika Verzutti Pivô, São Paulo 3 April – 28 May The Propeller Group James Cohan, New York 8 April – 15 May Marco Basta Monica De Cardenas, Milan through 7 May

Art Sheffield 16 April – 8 May

1 DAS INSTITUT with Kathrin Sonntag, Am Sonntag, 2015 (from When You See Me Again It Won’t Be Me), slide projection. Courtesy the artists

April 2016

1 DAS INSTITUT is a tricky proposition, calculatas well as pieces by filmmaker Alexander Kluge, Tuskany Zeidler, Mark Wallinger at Carlier/ edly so. Established nine years ago, it’s the on/off Sergei Tcherepnin, Ei Arakawa and Allison Katz. Gebauer, Jim Lambie at Gerhardsen Gerner) collaborative project of Kerstin Brätsch and Meanwhile, back in the city where Brätsch to the rising (Ed Fornieles at Arratia Beer, Adele Röder, who both also maintain inventive and Röder met as students but where neither Megan Rooney at Croy Nielsen), to the revelatory 2 now lives, it’s Gallery Weekend Berlin time solo careers. It’s a faux import/export agency (cosmic-ray-obsessive Horst Ademeit at Delmes whose products include trouser suits, decor once again. The present writer used to live & Zander). The present writer, on reflection, and paintings designed by Röder but made by in an English town where, to boost trade, would like to withdraw his analogy with the Brätsch. It’s a sidestepping of the cult of singular one shopping street would host a fortnightly hopeful cheesemongers of Tunbridge Wells. personality and a self-reflexive investigation ‘Ich bin hier (Aiee-Ah!) / Und du bist mein organic-food street market; gallery weekends, into teamwork itself, where artistic proposals Sofa’, sang Frank Zappa on Sofa No. 2 (1975). with their bells and whistles (parties and reflect, as the Serpentine puts it, ‘the intuitive, What he meant, of course, is ‘I am here (Aiee-Ah!), dinners) are the artworld equivalent, jazzing irrational element of human experience and and you are my sofa’, and ArtReview will now up the familiar. But they’re also very handy: proceed to make its greatest previews link ever relationships’. It’s uncommonly smart, strategic swoop in, take a creative city’s temperature as it vaults from Germany to its own charity and feistily eye-strafing contemporary art, and swoop out again. Enough low-watt snark, in short, and it’s now in a former gunpowder 3 auction project, 8 × 8 Mah Jong Re-imagined, though, as this one has an almost comically store in Hyde Park. Here Brätsch and Röder will, in which eight contemporary artists have promising lineup, from the reliable (Wolfgang typically, complicate matters by showing both been commissioned to, yes, reimagine French Tillmans at Galerie Buchholz, Carsten Nicolai joint and solo work, including paintings and furniture designers Roche Bobois’s Mah Jong at Galerie Eigen + Art, Christopher Williams light-based interventions keyed to the body, modular sofa system. Collectors weary of at Capitain Petzel, Rachel Harrison at Kraupa-

3 Pio Abad, Study for a Grotto, 2016, Mah Jong seat cushion and backrest, 3,500–4,000 seashells, silicone adhesive, gloss varnish, 97 × 97 × 55 cm. Photo: Pierrick Mouton. Courtesy the artist

2 Ed Fornieles, Reveal Yourself, preview image. Courtesy the artist and Arratia Beer, Berlin

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4 Analia Saban, Draped Marble (Fior di Pesco Apuano), 2015, marble slab on steel, on wooden sawhorse, 99 × 178 × 91 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers, London, Berlin & Los Angeles

5 Tomi Ungerer, The Bait, 2010, collage, 45 × 33 cm. © and collection the artist

matching possible paintings to their daybeds can now, you will grasp, do the reverse, via modified settees – variously functional, nonfunctional and conceptual – sourced from eight artists, including Peter Liversidge, Cornelia Baltes, Pio Abad and Larry Achiampong. The works will be on view at Roche Bobois’s Chelsea showroom and, excellently, sales will profit Vital Arts (Barts Health NHS Trust, which commissions art for the well-being of patients) and London’s indefatigable Gasworks gallery and studios. All together now: ‘Wir sind hier (Aiee-Ah!) / und hier sind unsere Sofas…’ and here endeth the public service announcement. Get your defence in first, Shamim Momin 4 clearly decided with regard to Wasteland, the show of 14 Los Angeles artists she’s curated for two Paris venues under the aegis of Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. Yes, Los Angeles is, in the

cliché view, a cultural wasteland ringed by 5 illustrator Tomi Ungerer, whose oeuvre since the 1960s improbably spans illustrated children’s a wasteland of desert and scrub whose main books, political satire and sexually explicit industry in turn cranks out rote cinematic drawings. Fury: asked, at a children’s book visions of postapocalyptic wastelands. More convention in 1969, how he could write for classily, the show also refers to T.S. Eliot’s 1922 children and produce his adult works, Ungerer poem The Waste Land (and, we note, will be on – dressed as a robber – bluntly pointed out that in April, the ‘cruellest month’ of the poem’s opening line). Between them, a cream-skimming if people didn’t have sex there’d be no children. This went down badly and the artist was effeclist including Lisa Anne Auerbach, Math Bass, tively boycotted in America for decades. Of late, Mark Bradford, Amanda Ross-Ho, Analia Saban though, thanks to the omnivorous curiosity of and others will start ‘a reflexive, complex, multicurators and, perhaps, an increased acceptance dimensional conversation about the poetics of of multifaceted creativity, Ungerer’s varied gifts despair, the search for true connection, the tenhave been embraced again, leading to gallery uous state of morality, and the uncertainty, shows and institutional retrospectives (even in yet necessity, of the future’. Which, incidentally, America, with a show at the Drawing Center, sounds to us a lot like Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). in New York, in 2015). This one is dedicated Madness: ‘I am a self-taught raving maniac to his sculptures, assemblages and collages, but not as crazy as Tomi. Or as great as Tomi,’ focusing particularly on his work in this last Maurice Sendak once said of French artist /

ArtReview

Cécile B. Evans via, among others, Athanasios medium, which tends towards the lonesome former industrial buildings per se. Expect, amid this, a focus on what grew out of the South Argianas, Mark Leckey, Magali Reus, Peter and the absurd – and, aptly for Ungerer, often Yorkshire city in the Thatcherite/Cold War era, Halley and Melanie Gilligan, The Promise… ought emphasises human/animal hybrids, neither particularly the electronic music scene of to illuminate not only where we’re at but also fully one thing nor another. the 1980s, from Cabaret Voltaire et al to Warp how we – and those robot waiters now enter‘Have technical devices, originally designed Records, and the politicised scratch video taining diners in the Far East – got there. to satisfy our desires, enslaved us already, or will they enslave us in the future? Or rather, do they 7 contemporaneous with it. Expect too that Art Sheffield takes place in a city famously open new ways of thinking, acting and creating?’ the locations, each spotlighting a single artist, retooled by industry – specifically its material Search us. Still, that’s the animating inquiry of will add up to what Clark calls ‘an exploded relationship with steel – and then transformed group show, exploring the dream life of the city’. 6 The Promise of Total Automation. The 36-artist again by the fallout of the postindustrial era. Brazilian-born and Goldsmiths-educated, group show at Kunsthalle Wien takes the timeThat’s a process which artistic director Martin span from Fordism to the Internet of Things Clark, who now directs Bergen Kunsthall but 8 Erika Verzutti neither hews to tropes of tropical modernism nor fabrication-driven concepas a backdrop for practices in which ubiquitous studied in Sheffield and curated his first show tualism. Instead, as Swan, cucumber, dinosaurs at mechanisation is not necessarily a calamity there, is marking by setting works by his chosen Pivô, São Paulo, will confirm via four sculptures but, at best, an opportunity, a counterpoint artists (including Trisha Donnelly, Florian dating from 2003 to the present, she’s a confito ‘improvisation and a sense of wonder’ that Hecker, Beatrice Gibson, Charles Atlas, Richard dent fantasist, delving into both the past and perhaps even makes explicit how necessary Sides, Hannah Sawtell and Michel Auder) in not those human qualities are. A cross-generational a pastoral imaginary. Her small sculptures in only the city’s institutions, but also suggestive affair that stretches from Thomas Bayrle to concrete and bronze nestle little egglike forms sites including electricity substations and

7 George Barber, Absence of Satan (still), 1985, video, 4 min 50 sec. Courtesy the artist and LUX, London

6 Magali Reus, Leaves (Amber Line, May), 2015. Photo: Plastiques Photography. Courtesy the artist and the Approach, London

8 Erika Verzutti, Swan with Stage, 2015 (installation view, Sculpture Center, New York, 2015), styrofoam, iron, polyurethane, fiberglass, acrylic, 369 × 350 × 350 cm. Photo: Jason Mandella. Courtesy Galeria Fortes Vilaça, São Paulo

April 2016

and cast fruits, suggesting rustic Hans Arp works, or sit propped on wheellike geodes; elsewhere, she arranges cobblestones and coloured rocks into querulous faux cemeteries, and the results – ‘denizens of alternative worlds located somewhere between the real and the fantastic’, says the Guggenheim – have an ethereal charm that descends from multivalence. Here, claybased sculptures refer to Tarsila do Amaral’s 1929 painting Sol Poente, with the modernist painter’s view of a tree trunk transforming into cucumbers and swans’ and dinosaurs’ necks. In other words, they’re archetypal Verzutti: funny, sociable, sometimes sexualised, ominous and timeless-feeling due to their use of classical materials and natural forms, and yet, within contemporary art, a new wrinkle. Staying with the funerary, Ho Chi Minh City9 based trio The Propeller Group – formed in

2006, operating as a fake media agency, sending out deliberately garbled brand messages 10 while exploring the concerns of contemporary Vietnam – here returns to New York, where for the 2012 New Museum Triennial they hired an ad agency to market communist ideas as filtered through capitalism. ‘We like to let ourselves get ingested into the bellies of big social beasts such as television, advertising, or the various manifestations of pop-culture,’ they’ve written. For the 21-minute film The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music (2014), set to show at James Cohan, they return to contemporary Vietnam, the country’s tradition of spectacular funeral processions and specifically a wake lasting several days: we encounter street performers, brass bands, mediums and ‘professional criers’ through a classily shot, wrong-footing mix of fluent documentary and reenactment, reality and illusion.

We’re not foolish enough to end this column with Marco Basta just because his name means ‘enough’ in Italian: it’s a total coincidence. Anyway, in his mixed-media solo show Green, Blue and You, the rising thirty-year-old Milanese looks likely to continue his already-established scenography of restrained gestures, in which isolated forms and specific tints – orchids, hands, feet, solitary doughnuts, often inked on warmly yellowed paper – associate with discrete emotional states. In this case, underwritten by colour associations with tranquillity and melancholy, some works allude to the containing form of vases; glazed ceramic sheets offer hints of a landscape; and a circular neon suggests antique lace embroidery. It might not sound like much, but because Basta understands the weight of restraint and the orchestration of mood, it’s enough. Martin Herbert

9 The Propeller Group, The Living Need Light, The Dead Need Music (still), 2014, video, 21 min 15 sec. © the artists. Courtesy James Cohan, New York

10 Marco Basta, Cosmic Apple, 2015, inkjet print on Japanese paper, 32 × 21 cm. Courtesy Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan

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Maciej Urbanek So there would be no thoughts, 2016 Archival digital print. 80 x 110 cm. Edition of 40 £800 © Courtesy of the artist

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Points of View

The European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) just published its recap of the art market in 2015 and it’s not pretty. Global sales were down 7 percent from the previous year. The Chinese are to blame (their sales were down 23 percent), as are the British (down 9 percent). We in the US are trucking along with our heads under the dash – sales are up 4 percent! But Sotheby’s has been losing staff at the same rate as its stock has been losing value. During Asia Week in New York, Christie’s got caught preparing to trade in stolen Indian sculptures. Its Post-War and Contemporary chair is reportedly mounting a sale this May titled ‘Bound to Fail’. (We all know that 4 percent increase in US sales just indicates the continuation of asset transfers out of the country.) Is it this grim everywhere? Yes. Commodity indexes are down about 18 percent from this time last year. Crude oil is now one of the least expensive liquids for sale anywhere, which means no more Gulf State petrodollars in the art marketplace (not to mention the decimation of alternative-energy investments). The only thing propping up the S&P 500 is corporate buybacks, which will taper off as earnings continue to decline through 2016. The luxury real-estate markets in New York and London, which saw modern and contemporary art-scaled sales in 2015, are facing gluts of their own. Properties are taking longer to sell, inventory is growing and prices are dropping. Granted, hearing about how some fellow from the City or Wall Street has had to drop the ask on his luxury condo from $40 million to $28 million isn’t going to make most of us tear up in sympathy, but it’s a sign of things to come. Wall Street bonuses were down, which makes

impotence cure In the face of radical politics and slowing markets, Jonathan T.D. Neil says it’s time for people to be brave Bernie Sanders voters happy, but art markets and art institutions alike need liquidity, and it looks like there is going to be less of it around. Then there’s the political scene, in the US at least, where it’s hurry up and wait, with teeth clenched and white knuckles wrapped around a smartphone bearing the latest election results. Apocalypse now has a double-digit lead on cataclysm, and that’s just the Democratic race. On the other side, what to call it? Fascism doesn’t quite capture the aggressiveness of this American variant of macho populism. An electorate that denounces not just ‘political correctness’ but ‘correctness’ of any sort is one whose moral centre just woke up from a threeday Vegas bender with a tattoo of Vladimir Putin on one arm, David Duke on the other and the congregation’s Christian children’s relief fund long ago lost at the tables, stuck into a passing G-string and blown up one nostril or another. And all this without apology. The scene in Europe is no better, with rightwing parties

April 2016

cynically exploiting the real migrant crisis to gain power and parliament seats. How should the arts respond? How can the arts respond? Take it to the streets? Mount a show? Make a sign? So far the only aesthetic response to the current situation in the US has come from the brave and foolish (hand-in-hand walk these traits) protesters who have dared to challenge the xenofascism on display at the populist ‘rallies’. These protesters have put their bodies in space and in the way. They have been assaulted – punched, shoved, screamed at, called disgusting names. They have elicited the authentic character of the foot soldiers of reaction. Their art is our experience. We should learn from it. When the big May auction sales roll around, my prediction is that we will see more of the same. Nothing horrible. Probably a little worse rather than better. Many of the wealthy are holding back, holding their breath or holding their noses. The May fairs will come and go with the usual artificial pomp. Dealers will say there was ‘strong interest’ and ‘very positive responses’ to their wares. I expect a few more panel discussions and presentations in the museums and alternative spaces, with more handwringing about art and agency – we all confront our own impotencies in different ways. Yet all eyes in the US will be locked on the political horizon and on the macro indicators of social implosion. When an electorate gets this angry and orthodox in its belief in its own rectitude, when any kind of reason is cashiered for the reptilian mind, one can’t but be a bit afraid. Markets aren’t brave. Only people are. Let’s hope the latter rise to the occasion.

Aspirations for fashion, for an artistic career and even for an alternative form of citizenship – it is all incorporated into Christopher Kulendran Thomas’s work. Among other things, he is drawing on a claim that sociology professor Alain Quemin made five years ago, namely that regional art markets would grow rapidly and simultaneously be relatively separate from the otherwise dominant Western commercial circuit. When Thomas recently showed a work from the ongoing series When Platitudes Become Form at the distinctly international Dhaka Art Summit in Bangladesh, his work played into both the regional and global circuits, into some of the crucial ways in which art is being distributed today and into how capital networks affect situated politics. Thomas’s method is metabolistic: he buys inexpensive artworks by artists from Sri Lanka whose commercial careers are developing fast and incorporates them into his own work. Take for example Awake III (2015), by Kavinda Silva, a black-and-white naturalistic drawing of the face of a young person that Thomas has mounted on a green Nike running-vest stretched on a thin fluorescent yellow frame. It is all held together by a thin fishnet grid. The A4 drawing was purchased by Thomas from the online platform Art Space Sri Lanka, itself an example of how, due in part to economic liberalisation, Sri Lanka’s creative industries in general and the contemporary art sector in particular have blossomed since the genocidal 2009 ending of the 25-year civil war between the Tamil minority and the Sinhalese majority. The picture with the drawing and the shirt is in turn hung on top of a large image of the profile of a man that has been glued onto the wall. The oversize man appears as a backdrop to all pictures in this presentation, like a bodyguard ready to swallow the display. This South Asian model will eventually be introduced by Thomas to TurboSquid, an online marketplace for 3D models used for all kinds of animation purposes and so far lacking types from this part of the world. The model is also part of a related venture initiated by the artist, New Eelam. New Eelam is an attempt at reimagining the defeated Tamil homeland of Eelam as a distributed network rather than a territorially bounded nation. Based on technologically enabled global citizenship and collectively

Networked nation In the second of her ‘Gwangju series’, the biennale’s artistic director, Maria Lind, looks at an idea of homeland as a distributed network

both images Christopher Kulendran Thomas, from the ongoing series When Platitudes Become Form (installation view, Dhaka Art Summit). Photos: Jenni Carter. Courtesy the artist and Samdani Art Foundation, Dhaka

ArtReview

co-owned housing all over the world, this postcapitalist startup plans to make it possible to live across multiple cities by disrupting traditional forms of property relations. Thus far, the version of When Platitudes Become Form in Dhaka is fairly freefloating, as is common with works with such a postInternet look. However, in addition to a small generic sculpture, a scent dispenser and a pot plant, Thomas’s installation features an Ikea shelf that sits in the middle and holds a pile of catalogues from the Dhaka Art Summit. This is an anchor to the here and now, which happens to be ‘the world’s largest research and exhibition platform for South Asian Art’. Initiated and organised by the Samdani Art Foundation and its founders, Nadia and Rajeeb Samdani, it was both a generous and generative event, full of contrasts and tensions between rich and poor as well as local and global participants and visitors, with a number of strong art projects and subcurated thematic, historical and architectural exhibitions. Notably, it also included work by artists from Pakistan. According to the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, aspiration, together with imagination and anticipation, are the vital human preoccupations we need today in order to make ‘the future a cultural fact’. Without them, he says, the future is a blind spot and missed opportunity within Appadurai’s own discipline, which tends to be busy with ‘pastness’. Instead, he propagates an engagement with times to come, with aspirations for a good life, for existence without imminent risk and for stable living conditions. My feeling is that Thomas with New Eelam, and its aspirations, wants to combine two conflicting sides of ‘the technologies of prediction’ that Appadurai mentions, ie simultaneously to encompass ‘the ethics of possibility’, which is often found in art and other imaginative activities, and ‘the ethics of probability’ championed by everything from neoclassical economy to risk management within the insurance business.

I am a French intellectual living in Paris in 2016 under a state of emergency. I have a column in Charlie Hebdo. When I come by the magazine’s offices, I pass through multiple control gates, security checks and exchanges of small talk with the guards, into an atmosphere that is warm and studious; spatially, however, I feel like I’ve just entered a parallel universe. Even in this article, I am not able to provide details of the space and its security system. It’s something straight out of a novel, but at the same time dizzying. I’m confronted by a paradox: it’s better not to talk about that which protects my freedom of speech. This paradoxical security generates an aesthetic – ‘the bunker’, as it’s known, is beautiful, white, bright and as isolated as a space capsule. At dusk the guards close the blinds, as the opaque and – of course – armoured windows let the electric light through. The guards act stealthily, like cats: we go to work in civilian clothes; they work in bulletproof vests. I would never have thought that one day an armed guard would be watching over me while I write. I can’t get used to it. Meanwhile, I’m also an adviser on the Paula Modersohn-Becker exhibition that will take place at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (mAm) from April to August. The first thing one sees upon entering mAm’s offices is a ‘how to react in case of a terrorist attack’ poster, which is present in all public spaces in France. With a strangely dated look, like some 1970s Air France flyer on plane-crash measures, it recommends that you 1) escape 2) hide 3) raise the alarm. What does the museum have planned in case of an attack? “The subject of security being a very sensitive one since the attacks, we do not wish to communicate on that matter,” the communications department tells me. The subject can’t be addressed. The communications department won’t communicate. As for me, I think I’d rather not talk about it either – out of superstition. Escape. Hide. Don’t talk about it. I don’t know how many more attacks it will take before Parisians feel besieged. For now, no one I know is considering leaving. But if people were prevented from going out – galleries, theatres, ballets, cinemas, etc – morale would

lA noUVEllE liBErTÉ Novelist and Charlie Hebdo columnist Marie Darrieussecq on how FrEEDom oF SPEEch has become a process of GiVE AnD TAkE in the French capital

Sign of the times: a French Government antiterrorist security plan

April 2016

collapse. It’s the possibility of going out that defines the city’s inner freedom. Wolfgang Werner is one of Paula Modersohn-Becker’s biggest gallerists. This elegant, rational and Buddenbrook-like man was born in Bremen – also the artist’s hometown – in 1944. He used to play, as a kid, among the ruins. He shows me, casually, black-and white photographs of the artist’s missing works, which disappeared during the air raids. This man tells me he doesn’t know whether the show will take place – I worry: is there a problem with the loans of the paintings? No, he says, it’s just that “anything could happen”. Over the past three years, I have been going to Bremen quite often. In Paris we don’t notice the refugees, because physical types and their clothing are varied and cosmopolitan: undocumented migrants mix with ‘documented’ citizens, no visible signs of legality in either group, state of emergency or no. But in Bremen… Blond families with children. Hardly any tourists. And young men, in groups of two or three, walking around wrapped up in their coats. They are mostly Syrian. The city had been managing to accommodate them, but with the recent influx, they are now being sheltered within gas-heated beer tents. By the cathedral, on the Marktplatz, some 50 demonstrators hold a sign that reads: ‘Frau Merkel, unsere Toleranz hat Grenzen.’ Mrs Merkel, our tolerance has borders. It’s 24 January, three weeks after the New Year’s Eve assaults on women in Cologne, Hamburg and other city centres across Germany. I don’t know what will become of that tension, that imbalance. I know some of the Paris attackers were born in France. I know it’s the possibility of coming and going that defines the inner freedom of our planet. I know it’s the possibility of welcoming the other that defines the inner freedom of each earthling. We are living in tragic times. Translated from the French by Louise Darblay Paula Modersohn-Becker: An Intensely Artistic Eye is on view at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris from 8 April to 21 August

陈文骥作品 · 台北展 CHEN WENJI: SOLO EXHIBITION IN TAIPEI

温度 | Temperature 2014 141cm × 66cm

铝塑板上油画 Oil on Aluminum Panel

策展人：冯博一 CURATOR: FENG BOYI 策展助理：叶人瑜、高森信男展期 : 2 0 1 6 年 5 月 1 3 日 - 7 月 1 0 日 DURATION: 13TH MAY – 10TH CURATORIAL ASSISTANTS: YE REN YU, TAKAMORI NOBUO 地点： 1 1 2 台北市北投区学院路一号，关渡美术馆 1 0 2 / 1 0 3 / 1 0 4 厅 VENUE: HALL 102&104&104, KUANDU JULY, 2016 MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, NO.1 HSUEH-YUAN ROAD, PEITOU, TAIPEI 112 主办：关渡美术馆 ORGANIZER: KUANDU MUSEUM 协办： A Y E 画廊 CO-ORGANIZER: AYE GALLERY OF FINE ARTS 媒体支持： MEDIA SUPPORT: 展览总监：曲德益 PROJECT DIRECTOR: CHU TEH I

As Britain prepares for a referendum on its EU membership, the issue of what it means to inhabit an independent nation has been brought to the fore. This coincides with a rise in nationalism across Europe, which in turn has led to the increasing prominence of the symbols associated with identity, whether they be spoken, written or visual. In times of relative instability, the mechanisms of power – which are themselves in constant movement – are revealed. In the process, the similarity between power statements and artistic statements also becomes clear, as the status of a nation or region is backed up by utterances and images used to underline the credibility of a given claim to power or sovereignty. Put simply, the statements ‘this is a nation’, ‘this is a government’ or ‘this is a legal currency’ are similar to the statement ‘this is art’ or ‘this is a landscape’. Both the political declaration and the artistic declaration depend on an original founding statement and on the acquiescence of the public to that statement. This is achieved with the support of other actors who back up the original declaration. In the case of the creation and maintenance of nationstates, these actors include a judiciary, a police force, a civil service, a national bank and, crucially, an army. The affirmation that something is ‘art’ depends, similarly, on the support of critics, curators, art historians, collectors, gallerists and dealers. What this tells us is that neither the definition of a given territory or object as a nationstate or artwork is immutable. Both statements require constant reaffirmation and maintenance as boundaries and tastes shift. Clearly the relationship between statecraft and art production is not parallel: the nationstate can exert a powerful influence over art production via its governmental representatives and its legal apparatus, while the politically engaged artist can do little to challenge or destabilise state power. However, art can mimic the processes of power, thereby throwing them into question. In this light, Spanish artist Santiago Sierra appropriated the image of the flag as a symbol of individual national sovereignty by hoisting two black flags at, respectively, the North Pole, on 13–14 April 2015, and South Pole, on 14 December 2015

nationbuilding and artmaking In which

Mike Watson finds in some of the most simple of gestures a way of understanding the most complex of things

top Flags of the 12 original signatories to the Antarctic Treaty, South Pole bottom A raised anarchist flag, April 2012. Photo: Christopher Lucka. Licensed under Creative Commons

April 2016

(the anniversary of the day that Norwegian Roald Amundsen arrived at the South Pole in 1911, weeks before the ill-fated Robert Falcon Scott ‘of the Antarctic’). This logistically tough project – which was entitled Black Flag (Part 1 and Part 2) and required the cooperation of international scientists to make the expeditions possible – serves to underline the transient nature of the nation-state, which is arbitrary and manmade. The black flag itself is the symbol of anarchism, a system of thought resistant to centralised power. Being an anarchist symbol negates national interest by exactly the same mechanism that national flags, currencies, monuments and ceremonies aim to reinforce it. Yet, further, undertaken as an art statement, such a gesture exposes the mechanisms of state power as being no more solid or enduring than the artist’s declaration. This occurs as the nature of artmaking is seen to be the same in essence as the processes that contribute to the making of nation-states. The placing of the flags at the two poles serves to negate the symbolism of the national flag and is particularly significant due to the specific political arrangements used to govern the Arctic and Antarctic. The former, being composed completely of ice, is considered part of the high seas and is accordingly divided among the neighbouring countries: Canada, Norway, Russia, Denmark (which governs Greenland) and the United States. The latter is governed by the terms of the Antarctic Treaty, which was signed by 12 nations in 1959, came into effect in 1961 and now has 53 signatories. The treaty, which is similar in form to a national constitution, stipulates, among other things, that: ‘Antarctica shall be used for peaceful purposes only (Art I)’ and that, ‘Scientific observations and results from Antarctica shall be exchanged and made freely available (Art III).’ Sierra’s artwork revisits the spirit of that treaty, which recognises, however unwittingly, the fact that the world need not be divided into competitive nations, but could instead be shared for the common good.

Pulling statues down, removing sculptures from display, forcing cultural institutions to break off relations with elements of society that don’t fit your own narrow moral outlook. No, it’s not life in the Islamic State, it’s Britain, which is fast becoming a strange place when it comes to the way culture gets politicised. The last few months have been busy for an emerging new generation of ‘radical’ protesters, whose targets have been statues, sculptures and museums. First up was another demonstration by the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, started at the University of Cape Town and picked up by students at Oxford University, with the common call to pull down a statue of Victorian colonialist and benefactor Cecil Rhodes, from a building of Oriel College in Oxford and at the UCT campus, along with a more sweeping, if abstract, demand to ‘decolonise the university’. (Students at Cape Town have gone further than their Oxford peers, burning paintings they deemed symbolic of the institutional racism of the university there.) In February, a similar campaign popped up at Cambridge, where student activists passed a motion demanding that a Benin Empire bronze statue of a cockerel, looted by the British in their sacking of Benin in 1897, be taken down from its place in Jesus College and sent back to where Benin used to be: present-day Nigeria. In early March, the college authorities caved in. And one week later, environmentalist protesters celebrated as BP announced it was ending its longstanding sponsorship deal with Tate, after years of dogged protest and interventions by protest groups Liberate Tate and Platform. Now, although I might risk coming across as ArtReview’s resident apologist for everything from white privilege to colonial expropriation and climate-change denial, there’s something disturbingly regressive about the tendency to demand the stripping out, from the public realm and from public institutions, of any trace of injustice, contradiction or conflict, whether historical or contemporary. What’s particular about such protests is their common attitude that the institutions of culture and academia are places that need to be cleansed, purified of any manifestation of past injustices or present differences of opinion. So the Rhodes Must Fall and Cambridge campaigns turn on the idea that while an academic institution may have once benefited from the iniquities of colonialism, the hand-me-down leftovers of these – in the form of a statue, or a scholar-

Culture of Shame The New Puritans are going after soft targets, says ArtReview’s resident apologist for bad things, J.J. Charlesworth

ship programme – are, in some almost superstitious way, the continuation of that iniquity. Meanwhile, the continuous hectoring of an institution such as Tate for keeping company with an oil company itself turns on the motif of purification, with its rhetoric of ‘reputational laundering’ and ‘greenwash’, of the gallery becoming tainted by its complicity in making

Courtesy Oxford Pan-Afrikan Forum

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clean its sponsor’s dirtiness. Today’s cultural protesters, it seems, want nothing more than to think public life must be kept pure and innocent, everything boiled down to a simplistic script about ‘how things should be’ – according to them, that is. That these new, narrow and self-righteous protests should take over so much of public debate is peculiar, since such campaigns struggle to inspire and enthuse anything like a broader public. Rather, they prey on simplistic moralisations that unravel when confronted. To which state, for example, should the Benin bronze actually be returned, since the civilisation that created it is long gone? The broader rhetoric of repatriation of cultural artefacts is itself questionable, suggesting that current nations, peoples or cultures have a sort of ‘blood right’ to objects. So while everyone can comfortably agree that historical European colonialism was a catastrophe for millions, and while wiping the historical record clean might make you feel good about yourself, such backwardlooking campaigning has nothing substantial to say about global power and privilege as it exists now. And when it comes to the claims of eco-protesters, there are still some of us who don’t agree that climate change is the worst and biggest problem that society faces right now; that perpetual war, emergency migration and economic stagnation might need addressing with more urgency. But these new puritans never really want to have a real argument in public, since they are dependent on making symbolic gestures in the view of the media while relying on that other hallmark of puritanism, the ceaseless shaming and castigation of those you don’t agree with, not letting up until everyone concedes to you. That their targets are cultural – artefacts and institutions that don’t fit their intolerant opinionating – also points to how, in the absence of any bigger positive political vision of the future, protest latches on to the local, close-at-hand, easiest to target. That institutions which have a responsibility to a broader cultural debate capitulate at the first sign of controversy only emboldens such protests. The irony is that this isn’t a culture of radicalism, it’s one of conformism – of demanding that everyone submit to the same view, the correct cultural and political script. You might as well close universities, close galleries – since there’ll be nothing left to disagree about.

STEPHEN NEWTON Abstract Realism

STEPHEN NEWTON Birthday Party 2016 oil on canvas

18 May - 26 June 2016 Art Bermondsey Project Space 183-185 Bermondsey Street (adjacent to White Cube) London SE1 3UW

A NOT-FOR-PROFIT LONDON EXHIBITION PLATFORM SUPPORTING THE FUSION OF ART, PHOTOGRAPHY & CULTURE Telephone 0203 441 5152 abps@project-space.london www.project-space.london

Ah! It’s good to be back in the game! My wilderness years were long and, frankly, boring. Oh, how good it feels to be in from the cold. It’s terrible out there. Grim, even. But that’s all over now, and the good times are here forever. Of course, it must be said that with all the good that is happening, there is also the bad. For instance, I must now make hard decisions again. The difficult choices that used to be a daily exercise. Like, for instance: do I go to the parent/teacher meeting at my daughter’s school or attend a curators’ dinner at MoMA? After all, Tracie seems to be doing fine. I mean, last time I checked she was as moody, food-measuring and death-obsessed as any other eleven-yearold. And a free dinner doesn’t happen every night. Right? Perhaps it is time I take care of my own needs for a change. And since I’ve never fared well with all these highminded curators, now is my chance to give them a little bit of the old Grossmalerman magic! The exciting stuff is coming so hard and fast, I’m having trouble keeping up! In fact, I recently scheduled two solo shows to open on the same night… on opposite sides of the country! TWO! One in LA at the venerable Abrishamian & Dardashti and one in New York at the not-quite-Hauser-&-Wirth-but-will-dofor-the-moment Husthauzer & Wack. Which, at the very least, has the same initials. I’m sure I wrote them down as being on different dates on the paper scraps I keep on my desk, but someone I won’t name (my idiot assistant Neal) moved them, and now I have no proof and only found out about the scheduling conflict when I got the invitations! I’ve developed a new painting technique that really speeds up production. I call it Thin & Sloppy, and boy does it get the job done! So I’ll definitely get all the paintings out in time. That’s not the problem! I just have no idea how I’m going to get myself to both openings. I’d postpone one, but I feel like it’s a little late in the game to do that, so now I really have to come up

the judgement of solomon, and how i deferred it by

Jonathan Grossmalerman

with a contingency plan. Probably a very complicated one that takes advantage of the three-hour New York–LA time difference. Unfortunately the flight is six hours, so I still end up with a three-hour deficit. I just can’t seem to make it add up! I could just show up really late and say I got the hours mixed up, but sooner or later they’re going to see some press and figure it out. If they haven’t already! Good God! What if they already know and haven’t said anything? Maybe they’re just waiting to see which gallery I choose! Am I walking into some terrible trap? No! I simply must make this work. Since LA is three hours behind, maybe I can suggest that the New York gallery make their opening earlier and then sneak out, jump on a plane and voilà! That probably buys me a couple of hours! Provided there’s no traffic! Oh, who am I kidding? This is LA we’re talking about! It’ll probably take three hours just to get into town. Good God, this is frustrating. Does it make any difference if I fly against the turning of the globe? If not, why not? How the hell does Ai Weiwei do it? He seems to be able to make an ass of himself on several different continents concurrently. Is he magic?

Or has he simply reached a level of shamelessness I have yet to scale? The Kapoor Summit, as it’s called. Peak McCarthy! Perhaps these arms are too short to box with God, but I shall continue to study at the hem of the masters. Did I mention both exhibitions open on my daughter’s birthday? I think she’s turning twelve.

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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 CRONE CROY NIELSEN DELMES & ZANDER GALERIE EIGEN + ART KONRAD FISCHER GALERIE MICHAEL FUCHS GALERIE GERHARDSEN GERNER GALERIE MICHAEL HAAS GALERIE MAX HETZLER JOHNEN GALERIE KEWENIG KICKEN BERLIN KLEMM’S HELGA MARIA KLOSTERFELDE EDITION KÖNIG GALERIE KOW

KRAUPA-TUSKANY ZEIDLER TANYA LEIGHTON DANIEL MARZONA MATHEW GALLERY MEYER RIEGGER GALERIE NAGEL DRAXLER 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 BARBARA WIEN ŻAK I BRANICKA

Roger Hiorns Untitled, 2016 (detail) Acrylic and latex paint on polycarbonate 170 x 120 cm

www.corvi-mora.com

Abel Auer

Aisha Khalid

Adam Buick

Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen

Brian Calvin

David Lieske

Pierpaolo Campanini

Jason Meadows

Simon Carroll

Jennifer Packer

Anne Collier

Monique Prieto

Andy Collins

Imran Qureshi

Rachel Feinstein

Andrea Salvino

Dee Ferris

Glenn Sorensen

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

Julian Stair

Richard Hawkins

Tomoaki Suzuki

Roger Hiorns

Naoyuki Tsuji

Jim Isermann

James and Tilla Waters

Colter Jacobsen

Sophie Wiltshire

Dorota Jurczak

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye

Walter Keeler

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art

Magical Surfaces The Uncanny in Contemporary Photography 13 April - 12 June 2016

Image credit: David Claerbout, still from KING (after Alfred Wertheimer’s 1956 picture of a young man named Elvis Presley), 2015 - 2016. Single-channel video projection, HD animation, black-and-white, silent, 10-minute loop. Courtesy of the artist and galleries, Sean Kelly, New York, and Micheline Szwajcer, Brussels.

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Great Critics and Their Ideas No 46

Anthony Trollope on the possible moral dubiousness of the art collections of billionaire hedge-funders being showcased in posh old museums Interview by

Matthew Collings With Doctor Thorne, the third novel in Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire, having recently been adapted for television, our intrepid interrogator takes the opportunity to ask the onceunfashionable author about a few things that are happening in the artworld today Anthony Trollope was born in 1815 into an impoverished upper-middle-class family. At the public schools he attended he was bullied by the pupils and despised and neglected by the teachers because his parents couldn’t afford proper clothes or tutoring. He eventually wrote 47 novels and became one of England’s most popular writers. He died in 1882.

ArtReview

ArtReview Do you think art leads to a better world? Anthony Trollope People’s desire for it to do that is a good subject. If I were still alive I’d use it as the starting point for a story. I heard the other day that there’s this hedge-funder who was in the news a few years ago trying to secure a $100 million bonus, who’s got 100 Andy Warhols he owns about to be displayed to the public in the oldest museum in England. I thought, Oh, it’s a typical billionaire socialclimber scenario. He’s making a fragrant public image for himself. They’ll probably get a tame windbag promoter in to trumpet the event and pretend it’s important. No judgement here – it’s a perfect scenario of what contemporary life is like. And there are all sorts of pathways for the narrative to go. You might start off thinking we’ve been saturated by Warhol and who’s this money-guy kidding with his cultural pretentions? But then the Warhol theme could take over unexpectedly. In fact that’s exactly what I thought yesterday when I saw a show featuring him. He was paired with Richard Avedon. The greatness of the result made me look forward to the upcoming one. I lost my sense of jadedness about Warhol. The impression was a sort of modern Pantheon, and a rerun of the whole history of art where gods and power people are the subject: the Shah of Iran, notorious for torturing political enemies, takes his place with 1960s gay superstars in the Factory with their genitalia as visible as their eyeliner. AR What was your main subject as a writer?

AT I wrote about politics, relationships between the sexes, power in society, how social groups tussle for dominance, how individuals are destroyed in acts of social hypocrisy, about unfairness, but primarily about the power of money and the complexity of people’s relationship to it.

‘the usual’ 150 years ago is now the exotic, a world of phantoms. But the urgency remains, since so much of what we do now is what we always did. No generation is cleverer than another and no age is more capable of seeing past the surface of things. No age is more humorous than another.

AR Were you always popular?

AR Are you funny?

AT I wrote an autobiography at the end of my life, which was a time when my popularity was in decline. And after I died, this book was really the cause of my reputation plummeting. I was frank about writing for money and keeping to a strict word quota every single day. It seemed unvisionary and unromantic.

AT If there’s humour in my work it’s in the roundabout way of stating a situation. I describe a conversation, and while the words spoken by the characters are straight, the description is full of irony. In fact the books are full of irony generally. They’re also full of obviousness, I admit. There’s usually a Bad Hat and a Good Egg. It takes time for an honourable young woman to work out that the Egg who’s unexciting but loves her profoundly is actually better than the sexy Hat who weighs up her annual income while wooing her. The Hat has to rip off all her money and her father’s money, ruin her life and dishonour her before she gets the message. With some of these plotlines you can easily nod off. That’s a big difference between, say, Karl Marx and me. His prose is amazingly illuminating about a point in history (the same period I wrote in), but also generally agitating, whereas mine is consoling. What keeps you awake in my case is the animation of characters, by all sorts of means, and the layered nature of the stories: this and that happening and different social worlds colliding. I wrote a lot on trains, in boats and stagecoaches, travelling

AR Was it just being practical that critics disliked? AT Henry James objected to my authorial chitchat, and habit of butting in, as if I’m telling a story but also commenting on it, saying things like, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised, reader, if Lady Omnium at this point thought so-and-so’. Anyway, I was eventually rehabilitated probably because of something James, in another context, praised as the great virtue of my work: its ‘complete appreciation of the usual’. I think what he meant by ‘the usual’ was what goes on, the feeling of life. Of course, above Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Good and Bad Government (detail), 1338–9, fresco, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena facing page Anthony Trollope

April 2016

everywhere, all over Britain but also Europe, Australia and America, observing as I went. I worked for the Post Office for years; I rose to the top; I introduced the post box to England. I ran for Parliament. I understood the workings of Victorian society so I could paint an accurate picture. And from the perspective of today, I think you could see the Bad Hat/Good Egg scenario as a critical proposal rather than a tedious affirmation of a fantasy status quo. AR What do you mean? AT As the reader you accept that, yes, OK, it’s a conservative message in the end. But you are also aware that it’s not the message exactly that’s the gripping thing but the time travel. Here I am, you think, in the twenty-first century, but transported, because of this book, to a world that really existed, and from the fragmentary remains of which my own was created. The fact that the baddie is a foreigner, and the duped victim is a woman, could be said to be nailing a cultural expectation that should be overturned.

They have a message of a returned, radical, primitive Christianity: a religious social order that never existed but that destroys all selfserving illusions. It isn’t familiar to the reader, it’s peculiar: it’s not a package; it’s a challenge. You could never be sure how an existence like that – Christ instead of the tsar, or Christ instead of socialism – could work out or what the texture of it might be. With my gentlemanly values you feel on firmer ground. The reader is familiar with the values. But as well as fulfilling the logic of the moral universe it describes, it poses a problem. What if you are the woman, or the foreigner? How does that work out? If you think of Joseph Conrad, a bit later, a transitional figure, from realist to modernist, he’s, again, more like Dostoevsky. In Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent, Conrad describes a sinister

AR What was it like trying to get elected to the House of Commons? AT Complex. In fact I often wrote about the complexity of governing and being governed. I think the visual subtlety of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s allegory of Good and Bad Government, his set of frescoes in a fourteenthcentury building in Siena, is an absolute visual analogue for the attractiveness and importance of politics in all periods. The tyrant, with all his lumbering evil obviousness, that Lorenzetti presents is just as relevant as the delightful rhythmic interactions of forms and colours he deals with, on a rather abstract level, and politics certainly has all that intricacy and delicacy. AR Can you say a bit more about affirmation and questioning in nineteenth-century literature? AT There’s always a message and it’s a basic one. It is that the values of an English gentleman, although they’re certainly tested in my narratives, are on the whole the best values, and the English hierarchical social structure makes sense. I might be sympathetic to struggle and poverty, I can see why people behave badly and the bad characters are often the sexiest, but the virtuous gentlemanly message will always come through. It’s consoling because it’s a message that is already thoroughly known by the reader. It’s the opposite to, say, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.

world, he highlights something Victorians sensed to be true but didn’t want to hear about. They didn’t want to believe horror might be the inescapable essence of modernity, not just an occasional shadowy aberration. AR You’re saying these writers are unlike you? AT They’re not consoling. They’re revolutionary despite their opposition to a leftwing view of any kind. In contrast to them I’m conservative, even though when I ran for Parliament it wasn’t actually as a Conservative. But that’s something else. When you’re talking about imaginative art, then the left versus the right doesn’t have the same meaning as when you’re dealing directly with politics. Something Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Good and Bad Government (detail), 1338–9, fresco, Palazzo Pubblico, Siena

ArtReview

is revealed in a book as with a work of visual art. It becomes part of your resources for making political decisions. But the political nature of the artwork itself is not the most essential aspect of whatever it is that enters and becomes part of you. In my view, confusion on this issue can lead you up many a cul-de-sac. But even a wrong turn can produce fun of a kind. AR No one knew what socialism could be. AT That’s true. It’s true with Marx, in fact. He’s good on what’s unlikely about the various airy visions of it that existed in his time. Actually, socialism remains a mystery in the intimations of it that you find in current thinking in an art context. Take the painter Merlin Carpenter, posting essays on his website about his own self-examination and inner ruminations. A new one popped up recently after a great stirring of his thoughts lasting years. I look forward to his pronouncements, like my readers looked forward to my biweekly chapters published in popular magazines. With him, you’re confronted by an ever-expanding, glamorous reading-list as much as by a reformed world: these authors then and those ones now – Homi Bhabha 15 years ago and The Making of the Indebted Man now. And others in between, perhaps rather predictably interconnected. The limitation of his liveliness is that the thoughts of others are expressed undigested, always revolving around a core theme never stated as such: why am I not more regarded by the artistic hierarchical powers that be, why is it other artists, what corruption causes that? However, as I was saying about fun arising in unlikely places, you can see the self-serving element but also an element of genuine excitement: after all, that reading list is great. It’s the same as the hedge-funder and his art collection I was talking about earlier, where something that sounds like rubbish initially turns into something great. Remember I suggested the collector was whitewashing his image? But that led me after certain twists and turns, including encountering the Warhol/Avedon event, to fresh thinking about Warhol’s iconic brevity, the way he makes an image impactful. Next month Savonarola on exhibitions that combine Old Masters with art by hot trendies

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Bang Slang for exclamation point 61

Eva Kot’átková On and Off the Page by Mark Rappolt

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above Untitled (Circus), 2013, collage on paper, 30 × 45 cm facing page Not how people move, but what moves them, 2013, collage, framed, 45 × 30 cm

April 2016

Untitled (Theatre of speaking objects), 2012, collage on paper, 50 × 35 cm

ArtReview

It all starts on the page. At least it seems to in the work of Czech artist heads of people interacting with these last through holes in the Eva Kot’átková. Not only because so much of her two-dimensional plinth, seeming to animate the display. output, which is characterised by equal measures of surreal perverAnd when it comes to pages, here’s a thing. You get a book in the sity and darkly comic humour, comprises adapted and collaged post. It’s heavy. You unwrap it. It turns out to comprise two volumes. images and diagrams extracted from textbooks, magazines and The first contains 267 collages, images and drawings created by photo albums, but also because of the prominent role that books Kot’átková between 2013 and 2015. The second contains 22 sets of themselves have played in her artworks. The connection is literal in exhaustive regulations – relating to everything from the operation an image documenting a performance from the series House Arrest of children’s homes to the management of cemeteries – issued by (2009), in which textbooks are piled up around the artist’s body as she Czechoslovakia’s communist regime between 1961 and 1989. These stands against a white wall such that a vacant silhouette remains once were gathered by the artist following extensive archival research, she walks away. Confronted with that image, you’re left to wonder: or ‘archaeology’, as she sometimes calls it (in a way that brings to did the person shape the books or did the books shape the person? In mind the analytic methods deployed by the French philosopher either case the books have become a carapace or sarcophagus, a theme Michel Foucault – with whom Kot’átková shares an interest in the picked up in later works such as Parallel Biography (Speaking Library) and educational system, the clinic, the prison and the asylum as loci of Mobile Library (both 2012). social control). Collectively, these lists of rules describe the central theme of Another early, untitled work from Kot’átková’s works: the regulation of House Arrest features an apparatus incorporating seven metal arms projecting your person, and of persons relating out of a metal stomach-plate (the latter to each other within a social group, from the cradle to the grave. And even looking like a spare part from a suit of armour) and seems designed to enable beyond: ‘After one year has elapsed after the wearer to read seven books at once, the dissolution of the right to the burial as if they were so many open windows site, these items [the accessories to the on a computer screen. It’s a homegrave] will be handled as though they did not belong to anyone’, reads one made tablet, if you like. The possibiliof the operational rules for cemeteries. ties for page-turning look awkward; Some elements of these lists have been the metal plate and the harness that supports it appear slightly uncomfortredacted. It’s not clear by whom. able; reading anything seems imposOn the back of both books is the sible; indeed brainwashing could be a warning that this is ‘a book that is not more likely use for this device. Perhaps intended to be read and contains but few words’. There are more than 200 rather than enabling contemporary-style pages of text in volume two. But even reading, it has been designed to force its before you’ve opened the books, you’re wearer to engage in that. Needless to say, wondering about what kind of person implicit violence is also a running theme ’ publishes books that are not intended in Kotátková’s work, most obviously in to be read. Once you have opened them, Sit Straight with your Arms Behind Your you’re also wondering about the kind Back (2008), a video of seated children of person who would wish to mislead enmeshed in various wooden contrapyou about the number of words their tions that force them to assume the published book contains. Given the ‘correct’ bodily position of the attentive Czech context, you might even think pupil, or in another photograph from House Arrest in which a male actor is inserted headfirst, arms by his of the opening lines of Franz Kafka’s The Trial (1925): ‘Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K.’ Perhaps, deeper down, you sides, into a steel cage that has been driven through a wooden table. Indeed, many of the themes introduced by this series can be seen, are wondering about the existential status of a word that is printed, in greatly evolved form, in Kot’átková’s more recent multimedia but not intended to be read. And perhaps, in the light of that backproductions, which incorporate some or all of drawing, photog- cover warning, you’re feeling somewhat unclear as to for whom these raphy, video, collage, sculpture, installation, live performance and texts were written, without the intention of any reading of them theatre. A riff on the multiwindow display, fused with the formal taking place: the people operating children’s homes and cemeteries language of museological presentations, informs installations such in Czechoslovakia during the era of the Warsaw Pact, or yourself, the as Asylum (2013, exhibited as part of The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th contemporary art lover. Perhaps ultimately, the whole enterprise is a Venice Biennale), which explores the dreams and visions of psychi- warning about and an undermining of the power of words. atric patients. In that work a single mid-body-height plinth, or stage, The two volumes are collectively titled Pictorial Atlas of a Girl supports a series of objects that include cages, photographs, draw- Who Cut a Library into Pieces (2016), and its two volumes (the second of which is subtitled Institutional, Operational ings, diagrams, miniature architectural elements and Organisational Rules and Regulations 1961–1989) (which had been used, at full scale, in previous Untitled, from the series House Arrest, 2009, comprise 703 pages. Kot’átková was seven when works), gibbetlike structures and the arms and c-print. Photo: Jiří Thýn

April 2016

Asylum, 2013 (installation view, The Encyclopedic Palace, 55th Venice Biennale). Photo: Michal Czanderl

ArtReview

the last of the regulations were written, and she doesn’t have particuWhile that student work might immediately conjure associations larly fond memories of her time in school in Prague, despite its coin- with Rebecca Horn’s Pencil Mask (1972, in which the pencils are on the ciding with her country’s transition from communism to democ- wearer’s face, rather than her back), it also speaks to a more immeracy. Or perhaps her sceptical take on systems of education is both diate artistic heritage upon which Kot’átková’s work builds. For there’s because of that and a false hope of liberty upon which Czech educa- certainly an echo of a work by fellow Czech artist Jiří Kovanda: XXX tional institutions didn’t deliver. Whatever the case, this publication Pressing myself as close as I can to the wall, I make my way around the whole is in many ways Kot’átková’s most ambitious work to date, featuring, room; There are people in the middle of the room watching… November 26, among other things, installation shots of her exhibitions, anatom- 1977, Hradec Kralove (1977). In it, the older artist (who taught Kot’átková ical drawings, maps of interpersonal relationships, photographs while he was an assistant in the painting department at the Academy of social-housing blocks, educational facilities, various cages, birds of Fine Arts in Prague), having announced his performance, slowly with structures drawn onto them to bind their beaks, a child’s head navigates the boundaries of his performance space while ignoring those who have gathered within it to emerging from a snail shell, a drawing of You’re feeling somewhat unclear as watch him. That work’s exploration of books used as stilts by a person without a head, bizarre prosthetic arms and legs, to for whom these texts were written: perversity, regulation, a naive and childand a loudspeaker system designed to be the people operating children’s homes like shyness, the communicative potential of small gestures and a measuring used by groups of schoolchildren that and cemeteries in Czechoslovakia of space and sociability’s limits obvimight best be described as something the English cartoonist William Heath during the era of the Warsaw Pact, or ously runs through Kot’átková’s output Robinson could have produced had he yourself, the contemporary art lover as well. Her early works, such as the series been into S&M. It’s as if the regulations Behind Between, Over and Under in (the Room) and restrictions of volume two have been translated from words to (2007), in which, among other things, the artist installed a false floor, images in volume one, rendered visible, everywhere, ridiculous and under which she crawled and made her nest, in her grandmother’s terrifying, exploded into space. apartment in Prague, focus on personal space. Her real achievement is And for the record, there are even pages of text, written in a vari- to have moved on from the truths of her own experiences (at school, in ety of hands, littering the collection of collages: ‘is obliged to remove, social housing), via her research into archives (and recently completed is obliged to clean up, is obliged to sprinkle, is kept, is forbidden to doctoral research into the framing and exhibiting of ‘outsider’ art) and place, mean, one collected, applies, are placed, is organized…’ starts direct exposure of hidden regulations, to create works that speak to one such scrawl, as if litanising aspects of the rules in volume two. the structures of power and find their truths in a more universal way. Despite what the artist asserts about reading not being the intended The page becomes a structure, the structure governs a perforresults of these pages, before you’re even halfway through them you mance, the performance makes the structure seem real and provides start to believe that everything, not least her own work, begins with a a ‘truth’ of what was on the page. Repeat and find a different truth. written trace on the page. And on the wall as well: as seen in Drawing Feel a loosening of structure and the potential for alternative behavExercise (2006), an early work in which the artist, iours. Then start again. ar Storyteller’s Inadequacy, 2013–14 wearing a set of coloured pencils projecting hori(installation view, Modern Art Oxford). zontally out from a homemade back harness, A solo exhibition of work by Eva Kot’átková Photo: Stuart Whipps draws blindly on the walls of the gallery space as will be on view from 3 May to 18 June all images Courtesy Meyer Riegger, at Maccarone, New York she shuffles around it. Karlsruhe & Berlin, and Hunt Kastner, Prague

April 2016

How to Act by Tomáš Pospiszyl

With debates about the causes of and solutions to Europe’s migrant crisis dominating Czech headlines, and Ai Weiwei’s recent actions in Prague courting further controversy within its artworld, where does the notion of the activist artist sit in the nation’s art scene? 68

ArtReview

The Czech Republic is not a country of advanced artistic activism. No for T-shirts (worn by models at the private view of a show by the artist wonder, then, that one of this year’s most anticipated art events took at Prague’s Galerie Display in 2003), and in Hail to the Chief (2003), local audiences by surprise. The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei displayed the American presidential seal, embroidered onto the meshes of a his 2011 Zodiac Heads in front of the National Gallery in Prague. Just 3 × 3 stack of Marshall amplifiers, proved a fitting aesthetic complebefore the opening on 6 February, though, the artist wrapped the ment to the opening riff from Black Sabbath’s Iron Man (1970), which animal heads in gold space-blankets, which are today most recog- blared out of the stack. Likewise the radical Russian artist Avdey nisable in connection with their use by refugees travelling through Ter-Oganyan, who has lived in Prague since 1999. Ter-Oganyan fled the European Union. This reference to current events provoked reac- Russia and sought political asylum in the Czech Republic after his tions of incomprehension and dissent. Without wishing to evaluate 1998 performance Young Blasphemer, in which he defaced cheap relithe quality of this gesture (plenty of others have), the specific context gious icons with nails and fake excrement before totally destroying of the Czech Republic – which spent a substantial part of the second them with an axe. The artist has now become a demanding mentor half of the twentieth century under a totalitarian regime – is one in in his adopted country, embodying a critical attitude towards art. which we might expect a more receptive attitude towards such a polit- Both Kotík and Ter-Oganyan, in their own way, shifted the local scene ical intervention. But the negligible response evoked by the current towards a greater social engagement. humanitarian crisis in Czech art in general and the generally cautious The transformation of the Czech art scene was also influenced relationship with artistic activism are, however, to some extent conse- by global artistic trends. Participatory practices that are inextricably quences of that history. linked to the work of Brno-born Kateřina Šedá demand the analBefore 1989, the majority of Czech art carried a latent political ysis of specific social conditions and a plan for their positive transstatement: every genuine expression was a call for freedom. The role formation. Šedá advocates a change in thinking via shared activities, of the artist was associated with the notion of revealing the truth binding together atomised individuals by means of joint journeys or about social issues. Paradoxically, however, many artists deliberately synchronised tasks. She has, for example, convinced neighbours in a steered clear of explicitly political small village to let her take the direct statements. Free creative work, liberroute home from the bus stop, even if Before 1989, the majority of Czech art it meant climbing fences and crossing ated from politics, was regarded as the carried a latent political statement: properties (Over and Over, 2008); made supreme value. Openly dissident or every genuine expression was a call inhabitants of a large housing project even activist art occurred only excepwear identical shirts, designed by the tionally within the Czech art scene, for freedom. The role of the artist was artist (For Every Dog a Different Master, even though dissidents and activists associated with the notion of revealing 2007); or relocated residents of a small were to be found among artists. After the truth about social issues South Moravian hamlet to London, 1989, one of the expressions of the where they carried out their habitual newly acquired freedom was the rejection of the role of public speaker: the majority of artists concentrated daily tasks (Bedřichovice Upon Thames, 2011–15). These activities in on private themes. It seemed, for the moment, as though the trium- themselves do not solve the issues, but they do point to the possibility phant capitalist system and liberal democracy did not need criticism of a different perception of everyday life. Šedá focuses on precisely or alternatives. circumscribed communities, and her work is therefore closer to group Interest in public affairs did not return to the Czech environment therapy than political activism. in general until the beginning of the new millennium. During the On the other hand, protests – whose motivation is primarily International Monetary Fund meeting in 2000, Prague was shaken political – can also acquire the character of unspectacular yet moving by massive anticapitalist protests. As a result, environmental issues, works of art. Since the autumn of 2014, a variable group of volunteers awareness of gender inequality and acknowledgement that deep- associated with Memorial, an international human-rights organisarooted racism was being directed against the Roma population increas- tion, has been mounting a performance every Thursday at Prague ingly came to the fore. The younger generation, with customary local International Airport with the title Waiting in Vain. When flights irony, began to draw attention to the soulless consumerism of post- are arriving from Russia, the participants hold up banners with communist society, which was spotlighted, for example, in the 2004 names of people who will never arrive, because they are either dead documentary Český sen (Czech Dream). Its directors, Vít Klusák and Filip or have been incarcerated in Russian jails, among them journalist Remunda, perpetrated a large-scale hoax, creating a massive adver- Anna Politkovskaya, Ukrainian soldier Nadezhda Savchenko and tisement campaign for a fictional discount hypermarket. When thou- Ukrainian filmmaker Oleg Sentsov, Pussy Riot and the passengers of sands arrived for the grand opening, instead of a vast new shop they shot-down Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17. found only a canvas facade. A work labelled as artistic activism, which last year attracted Around the same time, the connection between art and politics in perhaps the biggest response so far in Czech mainstream media, was the field of fine art in the Czech environment was stimulated by the a happening staged in September 2015 by the group Ztohoven, whose example of personalities who came from abroad. In 2000, the Czech- members (in the guise of chimney sweeps) climbed the presidential American artist Jan Jakub Kotík, a pupil of Hans Haacke and a critic of palace of Miloš Zeman and replaced the Czech leader’s insignia with rightwing ideology, moved to Prague. In his installations, he analysed a pair of giant red shorts. The piece undoubtedly made an impresthe rhetoric of US foreign politics, blending it sion with its practical execution, but its facing page Český sen (Czech Dream), 2004, dir Vít Klusák impact is debatable. Those who do not care with heavy-metal aesthetics. ‘War on Terror’ and Filip Remunda, 87 min. Photo: Karel Cudlín. or ‘Axis of Evil’ turn out to be great slogans for Zeman were amused by the joke, but such Courtesy Taskovski Films, London

April 2016

Jan Jakub Kotík, Hail to the Chief, 2003, mixed media with audio, 270 × 240 × 35 cm. Photo: Martin Polak. Courtesy Hunt Kastner, Prague

ArtReview

Kateřina Šedá, From Morning Till Night/Bedřichovice Upon Thames, 2015. Photo: Martin Hlavica. Courtesy the artist

April 2016

Tomáš Rafa, Competition for the Czech-Roma Flag, 2013 (installation view, Letná embankment, Prague, after it was vandalised). Courtesy the artist and Artwall Gallery, Prague

ArtReview

an intervention is hardly likely to change the minds of his committed theorist Václav Magid pointed out, art should not play the role of a supporters. Crucially, Ztohoven’s piece does not depict Zeman’s popu- convenient cover for artists who defend bad work from criticism by appealing to freedom of expression and the political seriousness list politics nor reveal his support of Vladimir Putin. Artist Vladimír Turner has collaborated with the Ztohoven collec- of the topic. At the same time, Magid rejects activist art-projects in tive in the past, but soon abandoned similar media-friendly events. For which politics is not a subject of active engagement, but becomes a him, the conduct of life and of his artistic work are inextricably inter- mere pretext for contemplative observation. connected. He participates in the activities of the Prague community Such reasoning explains why we find many artists in the Czech centre Klinika (Clinic), which, in addition to cultural programmes, Republic who do not mix artworks with political activism. Many organises aid for refugees. But only a small part of Turner’s artistic of the top representatives of contemporary Czech art, among output can be found in galleries. He creates performances and installa- them Pavel Sterec, Vasil Artamonov, Alexey Klyuykov and Barbora Kleinhamplová, participate in demontions in public spaces in which he often changes the function of commonplace As Václav Magid pointed out, art should strations, take part in the activities of autonomous associations or travel infrastructure: he transforms rotating not play the role of a convenient cover as volunteers to the Balkans to aid billboards into carousels and banners for artists who defend bad work by migrants. Their own artistic work is into improvised dwellings. Turner based on their political views, but does also shoots documentary films and appealing to freedom of expression not take the form of overt activism. film essays, in which he analyses wider global issues, including colonialism, perhaps the only Czech artist to Rather, it represents an independent creative commentary on the do so. His White and Black Film (2014) captures his confrontation with world, which is not primarily focused on a direct transformation of the lives of Australian Aborigines, whose values have been disrupted the state of affairs. by Western civilisation. To return to Ai Weiwei and his wrapped zodiac heads: for the A 2013 project by Tomáš Rafa spurred a formative debate on politically conservative Prague public, unaccustomed to such artistic artistic activism in the Czech Republic. For the Artwall Gallery in statements, this gesture constituted an obstacle to an unimpeded Prague, the artist organised a tender for a Czech-Roma flag, which viewing of art, the essence of which the public still associates with some members of the artistic community ranked as a fruitless prov- the categories of beauty, skill or narrative inventiveness. For the local ocation. Rafa’s objectively artistically weak and, in terms of antira- socially engaged artists, in turn, the gold blankets only highlighted cism, toothless work provoked a debate about the conflict between the surface of an issue that must not only be depicted in art, but must the autonomy of art and its engagement. Perhaps, as the artist and also be actively dealt with. ar

Avdey Ter-Oganyan, Young Blasphemer, 1998, performance. Courtesy the artist and Ivars Gravlejs

April 2016

Transcendent Boredom by Martin Herbert

Caravaggio Meets iPhone, 2015, acrylic digital print on canvas, 270 × 179 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York & Rome

ArtReview

In works that employ extreme repetition as an allegory for human existence, the German artist Thomas Bayrle makes his case for hope and faith

Galaxy Windscreen Wiper, 2011, Mao portraits by Andy Warhol, windscreen wiper, sound. Courtesy the artist

April 2016

Mercedes Madonna, 1989, silkprint on laid paper, 159 × 118 cm. Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York & Rome

ArtReview

Renault, 2002, cardboard, foam, model cars, 70 × 60 × 10 cm. Courtesy the artist

April 2016

On a rainy morning in Frankfurt, Thomas Bayrle is sitting in his and think about when, how early and from what unlikely combinakitchen over espresso and seed-shaped seedcake, variously describing tions of sources art can transpire. himself as “nothing special”, a “very repetitive artist”, “luckier than “After the war,” says Bayrle, as the coffee machine gurgles, “we I was intelligent”, “a local guy”, “a middle-class boy” and “not revo- lived in a super-orthodox Catholic village and I was Protestant, and in lutionary at all”. The artworld begs to differ, and at seventy-eight hot afternoons in summer, when I was about twelve, I sneaked into the Bayrle is enjoying a late-career renaissance. He’s prepping two retro- church and saw this mountain of old women, all in black, praying the spectives, two more on the horizon. Modish yet credible galleries rosary very fast: ‘bababababa…’ I brought it together immediately with such as Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in New York, Air de Paris, Barbara the sound of engines, with the repetition of machines. And it’s not just Weiss in Berlin, and Dépendance in Brussels represent him. Someone in Catholicism, it’s everywhere, in mantra for example, a kind of world from Sweden just phoned to say that a six-week summer school he reality. I thought, no I felt, that our existence is built on billions of repeco-organised at the 1970 Frankfurt Art Fair was one of the first social titions, heartbeats, breathing, eating, shitting, anything in the body artworks. The painter Jana Euler, one of many former students itself, endless repetitions, to keep us alive. Later, when I apprenticed imprinted by Bayrle’s industrious quarter century and more as a at a weaver’s, using the Jacquard weaving machine, I just connected professor at Frankfurt’s Städelschule, was here before me, showing that sound and reproduction thing together automatically with this Bayrle and his artist/archivist wife, Heike, images from her latest rosary. For me it was absolutely normal.” Berlin show. It features a nestled tribute to his work from the midDuring the late 1950s, Bayrle began to hallucinate the sound of the 1960s, before he embraced an industrialised aesthetic and, as he says rosary in the sound of the weaving machines as they reached a specific cheerfully, “my style stopped”. pitch. “I realised I needed to get out,” he says, and went to train as a More generally, Bayrle’s hybrid of Pop and systems thinking, commercial artist prior to making his Abstract Expressionist-inspired which has moved freely and inventively through silkscreen, sculp- paintings and reactive kinetic works. In 1967, having reached a crossture, film, computer animation and graphics, soundwork and more, roads, he would be advised by artist Peter Roehr (a key figure in German is increasingly recognised as anticipating the network- and circu- postwar art who died aged twenty-eight, “more intelligent than he lation-centric practice of many young artists (among other things). was lucky”) not to forget the lessons of that particular job. Bayrle, who In 2012 London’s Frieze Art Fair invited him to supply critical decor now wanted “neutral production, as if machines could have done it, for sites including its entryway: Bayrle’s fulfilling a plan”, began making the first I thought, no I felt, that our existence acid-bright corridor, floor and walls, of the endlessly repeating, initially handdecorated with relentlessly repeating drawn and silkscreened weaves of ‘superis built on billions of repetitions, red, green and yellow patterns of loafers forms’, from cars (American Dream (Chrysler), heartbeats, breathing, eating, in a poker-faced elicitation of substan1970), to masturbating women (Onanie, shitting, anything in the body itself, 1971), to dancers (Ballerina, 1972), to the tial footfall, looked contemporary and retro at once. When we speak, a booklet endless repetitions, to keep us alive Christian iconography in iPhone pictures, before us shows images of a work-inthat are his oeuvre’s mechanical heart. progress, one of Bayrle’s signature micro/macro ‘super-forms’ given Germany is a country where much of the population works for a twenty-first-century upgrade: a section of Caravaggio’s The Calling relatively small, family-run companies, like weavers, and also the of St Matthew triptych (1599–1600) in Rome composed of thousands Western society that most deeply enshrines the inextricability of the of tiny, digitally torqued repetitions of iPhones that each contain on individual and collective, the former serving the latter: with, histortheir screen a miniature of the very image into which they accumu- ically, unquestionably mixed results. When, in 1963, Bayrle first saw American Pop, out went Cy Twombly-influenced canvases such as late, industrial-pointillist style. Bayrle, pondering this work and its overtones of a surrogate belief Neapal (1962) and in came motorised reliefs like Nürnberger Orgie (1966), system, pronounces himself hesitant to jump on any tech band- its giant Nazi-uniformed arm rising over myriad tiny figures, and Ajax wagons. Yet he recognises that as an icon of global society the smart- (1966), a cleaning-fluid bottle blazoned with regiments of scrubbing phone is “the new car” and points out that this image of a Baroque housewives. Such early work, made in Bayrle’s late twenties and still painting, which countless Chinese tourists have photographed, potent, reappears in his retrospective in Wiesbaden, Seniors Ceremony, would invariably be emailed back to China five times over – people which also revives the fine Francophile modernist paintings of his operating mechanically and using machines to circulate religion artist-anthropologist father, Alf Bayrle. Collectively it audaciously itself, which Bayrle sees as already a globe-girdling machine and, aligns Nazism, Germany’s hygiene obsession, postwar Germany’s closing the circle, as a projective model of the human organism. This Wirtschaftswunder or ‘economic miracle’ and capitalist production has been a longstanding position in his work: see for example his 2014 under the signs of conformity and cleansing. (According to Bayrle, installation for the Jesuit Church of St Peter in Cologne, including Ajax’s American manufacturers exploited the German love of cleanlithe screenprint Madonna Crochet (1988), a Madonna and Child made ness to the point of creating an iconic hausfrau to sell their product.) up of a humming flow of tiny crucifixes as if charged with perpetual Here black humour and calculated exaggeration allowed the artist to electrical energy, and Stroke by Stroke: The Wiper (2012), a half-disassem- approach something his countrymen might not have wanted to face. After his decision to incorporate the lessons of weaving into his art, bled Asian windscreen wiper mechanism whose rhythm blends with recorded rosary chanting in Korean. We’re jumping the gun, though. however, Bayrle’s work changed, deepened. The industrialised society What led up to this point began long ago, circa 1949. Bayrle has told was still there, but his mixed feelings about it – “always 50/50”, he interested parties the details many times before, but it’s a good origin is fond of saying – became more emphatic. In the variably coloured story, plus it changes a little every time. Let’s hear it again (or newly), Bügelman (Coat Hanger Man, 1970) series of screenprints, a human head

ArtReview

Documenta 13, Kassel, 2012 (installation view). Photo: Nikolaus Schletterer. Courtesy the artist

April 2016

Mao, 1966, oil on wood, engine, construction, 145 × 148 × 32 cm. Photo: Axel Schneider. Courtesy the artist and Museum für Moderne Kunst MMK, Frankfurt

ArtReview

is made up of innumerable hangers. “The Bügelman is in a big store selling coats, waiting for the next customer,” Bayrle explains, “and after a thousand times of selling the coat, he only sees the hanger. I saw this boringness of the profession, but I didn’t comment on it like the left, to fight against it – I saw a sad poetry in it. A pessimistic dream: this is my life, I’m a clerk at the warehouse. It was very important to me not just to criticise. We all suffer, somehow, and have nice days and bad days. For the left, it was not consequent enough.” I ask him if he sees, in the same way as counting rosary beads, a kind of transcendent boredom in such a job. He agrees, and augments: “Awfulness is necessary for our comfort. I worked a lot with leftist groups and students and they always said, you are a reactionary, and it’s been like that since. You never fit, but I didn’t want to fit. I wanted to still give a chance that this so-called capitalism has also some good sides. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t follow it.” Ironically, if Bayrle’s vision didn’t work for partisans it may have been because that vision was far larger than politics, which is where works in which the tiny makes up the whole become allegorical, their referential framework stretching across centuries to what Bayrle considers the beginning of our modern condition. “We have many problems, we divide them into smaller ones – I see this in the miracle of our body, thousands of functions all divided under smaller functions. And this miracle, this beauty, is where religion starts: you can fix a lot, but you cannot even make one cell, and we have to recognise that this is a super-miracle.” Relatedly, Bayrle – a longstanding fan, he’ll later say, of rhythm-and-blues and jazz – recognised that within religion since the Middle Ages a relationship to the heartbeat, rhythm and countless small repetitions is evident. Not just in rosary chanting (and parallel procedures like mantra), and in prayer rituals in monasteries, but in church architecture and even the development of industrialised society, our culture is interlinked to our very bodies, our very molecular structure. From circa 1200, he notes, preshaped stones and a different system of building per se allowed cathedrals to be built in 12 years rather than 120. “Gothic,” says Bayrle, “is already the beginning of the conveyor belt.” There are corollaries to this: Bayrle believes, following the thoughts of early-twentieth-century philosopher Wilhelm Worringer, that the mechanistic vigour of the Gothic and everything afterwards is a Northern European ‘overcompensation’ for not being able to achieve either the deep abstraction of Egyptian culture or the pleasure and joy of life attained by the Ancient Greeks. But since European technological culture became, effectively, that of the world, the upshot is that one can critique the reality we have, but it’s inseparable from what we are. It is terrifying on one level (it leads, at worst, to totalitarianism) and mind-bending when we consider the impossible wonder of the human body. It also makes our machined experience, and our religious systems, and all of these aspects connect. As collective life has become more globalised, wired and interconnected, Bayrle has tracked it. During the mid-1970s he began making silkscreen images of highly complex metropolises, cities as machines (see, as one guesses the artist Paul Noble has, the silkscreen Hauptstadt (Schreibmaschine) (Capital City (Typewriter), 1976). The road, around this time, becomes Bayrle’s go-to cipher for interconnection, perhaps not surprising given the primacy of the autobahn in the German imagination. In works like the Autobahn-Geflecht (Motorway-Weave) series of 1979, roads and weaving are literally intertwined, painted strips of ersatz roadway interwoven in an image of a hypertrophic circulation system that nods back to

Bayrle’s apprenticeship at the loom. By the five-panel acrylic-oncanvas Spaghetti alla Carbonara (1986), the roads are the kind of throbbing tangle known best to the citizens of Birmingham. By Autobahn (2003), the roadway has become a sculptural funfair ride that loop-theloops through the gallery. While pursuing these thematics, and crucially in terms of how he’d later be seen as being ahead of the game, Bayrle on a technical level was attempting to “have fulfilled what wasn’t technically fulfillable – printing on latex and distorting on [photocopy] machines, imitating computers that didn’t exist”, in order to realise works like Mercedes Madonna (1989), in which myriad miniature Mercedes both make up another Madonna and Child and appear to drive endlessly within it. (Around the same time, from 1988 to 91, Bayrle was working with one of his students at the Städelschule on an Atari computer to produce related effects.) Bayrle had been in communist Russia, he remembers, in Novgorod, and had been impressed by the icon paintings, how constructed in their proportions they were – machines to inspire faith – and how consistent: “There was an art that has been strong over hundreds of years and had almost only five-percent freedom. The rest was determined. Like cars: you can have a green one, blue one, but it’s the same. The sameness is a standard of solidity, for me, and the individualism is tiny but very important. The one percent” – which, indeed, can be seen in the aspects of manual production within Bayrle’s effortful, machinelike aesthetic – “is as valuable as the 99 percent.” It is this, and Bayrle’s perpetual desire not to be doctrinaire but to see both sides, that pulsates humanely through his work. The work, that is, of an artist who’s seen the Jacquard loom develop, as it famously did via the punch card system that powered it, into the computer and the interlinking Internet; and whose career stretches from the Warholpredating Mao (1966, the leader’s face made up of tiny Chinese faces) to Galaxy Windscreen Wiper (2012), two of Warhol’s Mao images accoutred by Ford Galaxy windscreen wipers ticking back and forth. Again: the mechanised society, if more humane than Mao’s, is now a global reality, his art attests, one of ordered, top-down circulation systems, products replicated like DNA (or, in Bayrle’s preferred analogy, like frogspawn), whose systems of meaning like religion are also expansions of our very heartbeats. And even if humans, like cars rolling off a production line, are all very, very similar, the scintilla of individual difference – particularly within strictly regimented societies – is vital. “I believe”, Bayrle says, “in freedom even in dictatorship. It’s very explosive, and they fear it very much, so they reduce it, push it inside. And we may be forced in our surveillance world to be pessimistic and say everything is lost. Sure, a lot is lost, but I don’t believe it’s gone. It is there and can come back. I have hope.” Well, yes: Bayrle is, after all, an artist. “Yeah,” he laughs. The son of two anthropologists, the man whose Documenta 13 presentation in 2012 – almost half a century after his first – included a thundering aeroplane engine blended with the immemorial sounds of rosary intonation, thinks about it. Then he considerately ties up with a bow everything he’s been saying about society, embattled optimism and endurance, perhaps even his own career. “When I had my childhood dreams, I was always flying over a river. A black river, in the night, but I never touched it. I was always just over – so close to the water, but I didn’t hit it. I survived,” says the local guy. “And it was beautiful.” ar

April 2016

Thomas Bayrle: Seniors Ceremony is on view at Museum Wiesbaden through 26 June

Loaded Narratives by Oliver Basciano

Runo Lagomarsino sharpens his attack on European paradigms in works that make the personal highly political 82

ArtReview

Runo Lagomarsino has something of the nineteenth-century survived the journey make for a minimal work, titled Trans Atlantic Romantic tradition to his work: there lies in his films, slideshows, (2010–11), in which each element, in a varying state of discolouration, sculptures and actions (of which mostly just the remnants or docu- each marked with white straplines, is a memorial to the crossing. mentation constitute the work) an interest in nature and the ravages Two years later Lagomarsino again made his family background an of time; a melancholia, or rather, to use the Brazilian Portuguese explicit part of the thinking behind a work. Crucero del Norte consists of term, saudade; a yearning; a sense of distance travelled, geographical 25 sheets of photographic paper that the artist carried in his luggage on a 2,700km bus journey from Buenos Aires to Rio de Janeiro, replior temporal. The work has a hard-bitten edge too. A political sharpness, one cating the journey his father had made in 1976 to join his mother and that’s feeling sharper as Lagomarsino’s personal interests in ques- sister before their transatlantic escape. Once at the bus station the tions of colonial heritage, migration and borders are increasingly artist stripped off the papers’ protective film, exposing them to the those that prominently concern the press and its audiences. Yet while Brazilian light, a photographic ‘portrait’ of the moment of arrival the artist’s work looks at the mass social effects of the movement of similar to that shared by so many immigrant families. people between countries, across nation states and cultures, it is also It might be hard for the lay viewer of much of Lagomarsino’s concerned with the process of migration itself and how that might work to glean the loaded narratives of their production purely from change the individual. This is not surprising given the artist’s family the end products; yet the artist provides tantalising hints in both his history. Lagomarsino’s parents left Argentina after the 1976 military titling and caption information. Aside from the title, Trans Atlantic, coup, travelling to Sweden, where the artist himself was born a year for example, there is the suggestion that the production of the work later. His parent’s continental migration was, with bitter irony, the may have involved some hazardous process by the artist’s inclusion reversal of the earlier emigration Lagomarsino’s Italian grandpar- of the 17 sheets that did not survive the journey in the accompanying ents had undertaken following the First World War. Taking inspi- caption information, noting them as a constituent part of the project. ration from this history, in 2010, and now himself based transatlan- Crucero del Norte takes its title from the name of the Argentinian longtically between Malmö and São Paulo, the artist undertook one of distance bus company that provided Lagomarsino’s passage, a strong the first in a series of works that involved the Atlantic in its produc- suggestion of the idea of a journey involved in its production. The tion. At Lagomarsino’s behest, a solo sailor, navigating the breadth of artist also gives the work’s production dates as 1976–2012, a reference the ocean, secured 49 sheets of blank newsprint paper provided by to the fact that, within the 24 prints, glossy black rectangular voids the artist to the deck of his vessel. During the but for a shaft of white light on the lower side of above Trans Atlantic, 2010–11, crossing, the paper, open to the elements, was around half of them, there is a greater narrative 32 sun drawings and 17 unrealised sun drawings, newsprint paper, 33 × 48 cm (each) bleached by the harsh sun. Once framed indihistory at play and the work is the product of an vidually and hung as a grid, the 32 sheets that aspect of Lagomarsino’s biography. facing page Trans Atlantic (detail), 2010–11

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Similarly, when Lagomarsino makes reference to the colonial line of Elizabeth Bishop’s 1935 poem ‘The Map’). A handheld digital histories of the South American continent, as he has done in more camera captures Lagomarsino and his father in the Parque de San recent works, moving away from migration as his central theme Jerónimo in Seville unwrapping two parcels the artist has brought (though of course the two subjects are entwined, as both involve some to Spain from Argentina. The packages contain boxes of eggs, which aspect of travel), he does so in a manner that expresses the ways in the two are shown carrying as they approach the park’s monstrously which the artist himself, and therefore to a large extent his autobio- giant sculpture depicting Columbus inside an egglike structure (by graphical work, are products and manifestations of colonisation and artist Zurab Tsereteli). Lagomarsino and his father take the carton’s contents out one by one and start to its aftereffects. Lagomarsino’s parents left Argentina hurl them at the monument. The There is an apocryphal tale that video is often installed alongside a concerns an argument Christopher after the 1976 military coup, travelling half dozen eggs on a shelf against the Columbus had with a nobleman who to Sweden, where the artist himself was artist’s 2013 wallpaper EntreMundos, claimed that the ‘discovery’ of America born a year later. His parent’s continental which sports repeating symbols of was hardly a great feat, and that someone else would have landed on conquest: a knight and a galleon. migration was, with bitter irony, the continent sooner or later. By way of Lagomarsino cites the Argentinian the reversal of the earlier emigration reply, the explorer is said to have asked semiotician Walter Mignolo and Lagomarsino’s Italian grandparents had his concept of ‘decoloniality’, theofor an egg and wagered that his interlocutor would not be able to balance undertaken following the First World War rised in his 2009 essay ‘Epistemic it on its end. Once this nobleman had Disobedience, Independent Thought failed to do so, and to demonstrate that something only seems easy and De-Colonial Freedom’, in relation to this and to his more recent retrospectively, Columbus tapped the egg’s bottom flat and stood it work. In attacking the giant edifice of Columbus, and the European upright. Lagomarsino’s 2013 inkjet print Europe is Impossible to Defend colonial power-nexus it represents (and perhaps even celebrates), features William Hogarth’s 1752 etching of this moment (Columbus Lagomarsino is enacting, albeit to an extent symbolically, Mignolo’s Breaking the Egg), with Lagomarsino’s damning titular phrase silk- call for a rejection of traditional Western supremacy and a ‘de-coloscreened across its centre in gold. The story of the explorer’s egg nial de-linking with all its historical, political and ethical consequences’. (Mignolo identifies decoloniality surfaces again in the video installation More More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colours, as differing from the more familiar ideas delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ 2012–13, HD video, 6 min 42 sec, 16:9, variable dimensions, Edition 1/3, 1 AP of globalisation and ‘de-Westernization’ by colours (2012–13, the title taken from the last

ArtReview

noting that these last two are essentially processes in which neolib- gallery floor, and in Blind Spots (2013), photographs of the museum’s eral capitalism levels the playing field between the former coloniser blackened or burnt-out bulbs in situ. and former colonised, whereas decoloniality seeks to do so outside the Working within a zone of decolonised knowledge seems to be the ‘primacy of the production and reproduction of goods’). One method- challenge the artist has set for himself of late. In Sea Grammar (2015), an ology Mignolo notes as a means to achieve his aims is ‘disobedience’. identical photograph of the Mediterranean Sea is loaded into each slot The petty vandalism in More delicate than the historians’ are the map- of a slide carousel; each successive image, however, has an increasing makers’ colours and the basic impotence of Lagomarsino and his father’s number of holes pricked through it, so that by the end of the loop, actions – some of the eggs don’t even hit their target and are not likely the original idyllic picture, which had the aesthetic of a holiday snap, to inflict much damage – only serves to demonstrate the might of the appears to have been riddled with bullet holes. Lagomarsino writes Western monolith. This small act of criminality can be recalled also that the work seeks to compare the traditional European image of the in works in which the artist has engaged in petty theft. Over a series Mediterranean as a symbol of tourism and leisure with that of those on of visits to the Ethnological Museum of Berlin, which houses one of its other coastlines, who see it as a dangerous, deathly space (though Germany’s most important collections of non-European artefacts, one to be traversed for economic or political reasons). Mignolo again: Lagomarsino stole several lightbulbs and tubes. When exhibited, ‘Civil disobedience… could only lead to reforms, not to transformathe slightly blackened fittings are laid out neatly in a vitrine and the tions. For this simple reason, the task of de-colonial thinking and the nearest wall is covered entirely in goldleaf. With this reference to the enactment of the de-colonial option in the 21st century starts from gold of South America and its colonial exploitation, Lagomarsino’s epistemic de-linking: from acts of epistemic disobedience.’ The instacomment in Stolen Light / Abstracto en Dorado (2013) is clear: the artist bility of perspectives that Lagomarsino is attempting to instigate with thieved these bulbs from a place that is itself a repository of colonial Sea Grammar is perhaps part of a greater future project for the artist in loot as a small act of retribution and reparation, a protest against which his work aims at moving beyond the power structures of the colonot just the economic and political power wielded historically niser’s knowledge and language (structures upon which conceptual art, by Europe, but also the colonisation of knowledge of which the as a European invention, is founded, of course) and towards something museum is symbolic. The work is recalled that is a truer expression of the kind of global Pergamon (A Place in Things), 2014, incandescent bulbs, again in Pergamon (A Place in Things) (2014), in hybridity of which the artist is a product. ar fluorescent tubes, halogen lamps and other light which more bulbs, this time coming from the devices from the Pergamon Museum, Berlin, Pergamon Museum, Berlin, which exhibits Runo Lagomarsino: West is everywhere 500 × 600 × 75 cm reconstructed buildings and interiors from you look is at Francesca Minini, Milan, all images Courtesy the artist; Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo; and Nils Stærk, Copenhagen beyond Europe, are neatly arranged on the through 6 May

April 2016

FESTIVAL AN EXHIBITION BY KATIE PATERSON AN ALIGNMENT OF CELESTIAL BODIES

Timepieces (Solar System), photo © John McKenzie, courtesy of the artist and Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

THELOWRY.COM/WEEK53

www.macbirmingham.co.uk Cannon Hill Park, Birmingham, B12 9QH

Image: Barbara Walker, The Big Secret (2015) conte on paper - IWM (AUS) 2078.

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FRI 29 APRIL - SUN 17 JULY

Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski

In an ongoing series of commissions, Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski reflect on their concerns about the place of the artist in contemporary society. The texts on these pages explore the physical and psychological landscape of the area around a temporary studio overlooking Canary Wharf, a wintry backdrop against which to plan a tour of Los Angeles and Joshua Tree with their band, Das Hund

April 2016

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ArtReview Asia Xiàn Chǎng, a new initiative, brings special projects by leading artists from around the world to locations inside and outside the West Bund Art Center, 9–13 November Curated by ArtReview Asia for West Bund Art & Design West Bund Art Center 2555 Longteng Avenue, Shanghai www.westbundshanghai.com

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Grok A verb meaning to scan all available information regarding a situation, digest it, and form a distilled opinion 95

Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966) Whitechapel Gallery, London 29 January – 15 May That the invention of computer and networked technologies has impacted on our lives is a given. Looking at how artists have responded to this is a far more complex proposition, and one of which Electronic Superhighway, despite featuring work spanning five decades by 100 artists, can only offer a snapshot. Employing a reverse chronology, the show opens by immersing the viewer into a scattergun selection of works from the past 15 years that touch on, but go no deeper into, themes of interactivity and virtual community, authenticity, information overload and surveillance. Olaf Breuning’s giant cutout of a woman’s bare backside overlaid with phonetext speech bubbles, Text Butt (2015), jostles for attention with James Bridle’s holographic installation Homo Sacer (2014), which spouts diktats on citizenship, and Trevor Paglen and Jacob Appelbaum’s Autonomy Cube (2014), an open, Tor-routed wifi hotspot. As on the Internet itself, breezy pop-culture banality butts up (quite literally) against serious concerns about transparency and control. Camille Henrot’s 13-minute video Grosse Fatigue (2013) attempts to explore the impossibility of encompassing the story of creation through the impossibility of focusing on the sheer volume of information about the subject. This work, having won the Silver Lion at Venice, may have been shown many times before, but that didn’t excuse the visitors sitting in the video’s

booth on my visit, who, rather than focusing on the video, were busy scrolling through emails on their smartphones. Perhaps though it did strengthen Henrot’s point. There is more scrolling in Evan Roth’s long printout of all the images searched for by the artist in a day, Internet Cache Self Portrait: November 24, 2015 (2015). If Roth’s gesture seems a simplistic one, it’s because many of us don’t need to be shown the time and space that this type of activity takes up in our everyday lives; we’re more than aware of it. As the exhibition travels back in time, the more outdated the technology featured in the works, the more aesthetically appealing the works can become. This can detract from their meaning, particularly when URL-based Net artworks from the 1990s, such as Heath Bunting’s _readme.html (1998), trigger a sense of nostalgia in the same way that playing early computer games like Pac-Man or Pong can do. Focusing on the late 1960s to the early 1990s, the latter part of the exhibition (in terms of visitor journey) is in some ways the more interesting. This is not only because it gives equal importance in the show’s overall narrative to pioneers of video and screen-based art, such as Nam June Paik and Lynn Hershman Leeson, as to the post-1980s, digital-native generation, but also because there’s an energy and enquiring engagement in these works that seem missing in the selection of works from 2000 onwards.

facing page, top Ulla Wiggen, Den röda Tv:n, 1967, acrylic on board, 89 × 116 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Moderna Museet, Stockholm /Asa Lunden

Lesser-known artists given space in this section include Stockholm-based Ulla Wiggen, who painted cross-sections of the inside of electronic machines during the 1960s, and who participated in interdisciplinary art and technology group E.A.T.’s (Experiments in Art and Technology) 9 Evenings performances in New York in 1966. Documentation from those events, where a sense of excitement again seems more palpable, marks the exhibition’s chronological starting point. Another artist deserving of the attention she gets here is Hungarian-born, Paris-based Vera Molnar. Now in her nineties, Molnar was one of a group of artists who used computer algorithms as a tool for creating beguiling geometric drawings during the 1960s. ‘The computer helps, but it does not “do”, does not “design” or “invent” anything,’ Molnar stated in 1990. ‘This machine, as impressive as it may be, is after all merely a tool in the hand of the painter.’ It’s this message that the exhibition leaves me thinking about most. Without even touching on advances in Artificial Intelligence, one only needs to rewatch Eva and Franco Mattes’s video installation My Generation (2010), showing its grainy clips of monitors, keyboards and consoles being smashed to bits in frustration by their enraged users, to feel that maybe none of us are any longer fully in control. Helen Sumpter

facing page, bottom Electronic Superhighway (2016–1966), 2016 (installation view). Photo: Stephen White. Courtesy Whitechapel Gallery, London

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April 2016

Steve McQueen Marian Goodman Gallery, Paris 9 January – 27 February Steve McQueen’s first solo show since 2014 contains only two new works: Moonlit (2016), two silver-painted rocks; and Remember Me (2016), 88 repetitions of the title in white neon. Sculpture is a rare medium for McQueen, and by no means his strongest – I can barely remember the elements of only two previous works, both shown in his ICA show in London in 1999, the year of his Turner Prize. These new ones are scarcely more memorable, at least on first viewing. Moonlit is especially mute, while Remember Me’s repeated phrase, which probably comes from Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689), specifically, ‘Dido’s Lament’ – ‘Remember me, remember me, but ah! forget my fate’ – only (at first) makes me reflect upon, but not exactly lament, McQueen’s fate: a gallery-based artist whose best-remembered early works include two short films where he wrestled naked (Bear, 1993) and pissed onto the camera lens (Five Easy Pieces, 1995), now a Hollywood A-lister writing, directing and producing a TV series for HBO. The third piece on the gallery’s main floor, Broken Column (2014), last seen just over a year ago at Thomas Dane Gallery in London, doesn’t move us much, either: two black Zimbabwe granite columns, one brilliantly polished, a little over two metres high and perched

on a wooden pallet; the other, identical but a quarter the size, caked in clay and housed in a Perspex box on a white plinth. The columns appear to riff off similarly named works by Frida Kahlo and Barnett Newman, perhaps, or pay funerary homage to the lives and lands destroyed by granite mining in Zimbabwe. Three works that leave us cold. So on we go, down the stairs, past another element from the Thomas Dane show, a stack of double-sided posters, with, on one side, a grainy image of a bareback young black man in white shorts sitting on the bow of an orange boat at sea; and on the flip side, the same image covered with white text about a man’s murder. Reaching the basement, we see still one more element from the earlier show: the same man on the same boat, now a moving image projected on a standalone screen in the centre of the room. He is facing the camera, smiling, mugging a little, happy to be the focus of our attention. The endless horizon bobs up and down in the background, waves slap the hull and a voice, in thick Caribbean patois, says the words transcribed on the poster: “They shoot him in the back and when he fell one of them guys went over to him and shoot him up around his belly and his legs and thing. And that was about it…” We hear, too, incongruent scraping and banging, metal on stone.

Remember Me, 2016, acrylic paint on 88 neon borosilicate tubes. Photo: Rebecca Fanuele. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

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Circling the screen, we see projected on the other side another moving image, in both senses: men in a cemetery constructing the young man’s tomb. McQueen shot the boat footage in Grenada in 2002, six years before his Caméra d’Or at Cannes, 12 years before his Oscar, and two months before the young man’s murder and subsequent burial in an unmarked grave. McQueen learned of the man’s fate – shot and killed over a drug stash – in 2009. Four years later he resurrected the boat footage, added the voiceover, titled the work with the man’s name, Ashes (2014), and showed it in Japan and London. Last year, he disinterred Ashes’s body, gave him a proper burial and premiered the double-sided projection of him (Ashes, 2002–15), alive and in death, at the 56th Venice Biennale. From potter’s field to Paris gallery, Ashes to Ashes and dust to dust. We climb back out of the ground, up the stairs, back past Remember Me, Ashes now haunts the room. Dido’s lament elicits an electric chill. Moonlit is gloomed in melancholy. Broken Column radiates mourning and loss. My dismissive disdain leaves a bad taste, all my trust and travail is but waste. Life is short, and shortly it will end, and McQueen’s memento mori will outlive us all. Christopher Mooney

Rolf Julius Music for the Eyes Galerie Thomas Bernard – Cortex Athletico, Paris 12 December – 6 February Sound art has come a long way in the five years since Rolf Julius died. After the Turner Prize awarded to Susan Philipsz in 2010 and the almost contemporary publication of Salomé Voegelin’s Listening to Noise and Silence (2010) and Seth Kim-Cohen’s In the Blink of an Ear (2009), and up to recent excitement over the work of Christine Sun Kim, the genre seems to have expanded and reoriented itself – and in many ways it has done so in directions that had been already indicated by Julius. For 30 years following the completion of his first soundworks of the early 1980s, the German artist continually developed points of intersection between acoustic phenomena, visual imagery and bodily experience that feel at least as pertinent today as they were when he plotted them. Though Kim-Cohen’s book scarcely mentions Julius, the writer’s call for a ‘non-cochlear’ sonic art seems to be directly addressed by a work like Music for the Eyes (1981), which preceded it by a quarter of a century. Recreated for the present show, the work asks its audience to lie down on some carpeting and place two small loudspeakers, connected by a strip of felt to

resemble spectacles, over their eyes. Long thin wires trail from this apparatus to a CD player at the end of the rug. Being brought into direct contact with the sound source engages a mode of listening radically different to the reserved connoisseurship of stereo hi-fi. Quoted in an interview for The Wire in November 2005 as saying that he hoped this piece would allow audiences ‘to look into the sound’, Julius himself would appear more interested in the quasi-synaesthetic metaphor and the physical situation itself than the delicate scuffling and howling sounds emitted (very quietly) from the actual speakers. This is far from the only piece to work on its listeners’ bodies. Upon entering the gallery, you might think the various exposed speakers spread about the place were silent. But once you have heard them, Julius’s small musics will stay with you, even if they never cease to interact with the ambient sounds around them. The gallery staff told me that since the exhibition opened they had seen visitors squatting down, craning their necks, bent double and generally assuming all manner of unusual

(for a gallery) physical postures in order to catch the subtle noises being emitted from Julius’s artworks. In order to experience Two Large Blacks (2005) I soon found myself crouched down on the floor, leaning perilously over the work to get a better earful. The title of this work could allude either to the two different speaker cones involved, or the sounds coming out of them, which – though still whisper-quiet – possessed sufficient heaviness (in a rumbly, gurgling sort of way) to make the graphite powder sprinkled on top of them dance just perceptibly in an everchanging animated drawing in the air. Elsewhere in the show, a series of roughly fringed red-and-black ink circles and squares on Korean paper are presented as a Score (2000) for some possible future concert, and, tucked away on a shelf in the office, a small bag of paint pigment with a speaker partially buried in it emits a continuous sizzling sound, like shortwave static or a high-speed data transfer (Echtgrün–hell, 1994). In each case, the dialogue between sound and vision points towards some pure conceptual poetry hovering between the two. Robert Barry

Music for the Eyes, 1981, 3 pairs of speakers, felt, audio cables, CD player, dimensions variable. Photo: Rebecca Fanuele. Courtesy Galerie Thomas Bernard – Cortex Athletico, Paris

April 2016

Tobias Madison das blut, im fruchtfleisch gerinnend beim birnenbiss Kestnergesellschaft, Hanover 6 February – 24 April From the street you can already see that Tobias Madison has adhered red foil to all of the windows of Kestnergesellschaft as part of his exhibition das blut, im fruchtfleisch gerinnend beim birnenbiss (which translates as ‘blood congealing in the flesh of a bitten pear’). As red is the trademark colour of the exhibition space, is this some sort of institutional critique? Or is the Swiss artist’s intervention perhaps playing on Kestnergesellschaft’s location in Hanover’s red-light district? In any case, the entire house is flooded in a seductive and sensual pale-red glow. This ambiguity between art and the wider world traverses this compelling exhibition like a red thread. Inside, the exhibition begins in a room that again shows red-paned windows, this time not fitted into the wall but in the form of four square paintings of windows that Madison has hung on the wall. These red-painted window images do not allow one to see the world outside the white cube, and it’s precisely this impossibility that defines the artist’s interaction with the artworld. This hermetic insularity he criticises via these pseudo-windows, however, is reflected broadly across the spectrum of art; Madison knows that all artistic endeavours attempt to break out of the confines of this world, but ultimately land squarely within it. And so he opens parts of this

gallery building – such as the delivery areas – that would normally be concealed from visitors. In various places his cleverly staged exhibition includes pallets holding bags of sand, hinting at the process of constructing his exhibition. Both are strategies we recognise from the history of institutional critique, yet here they are coupled with hybrid works of art that perpetuate Madison’s ambiguous game of high and common culture. Aside from the reference to brothels, for example, one of the two main rooms of the gallery shows the facade of a ghost train. On one side of this readymade are the usual motifs – a medieval castle, a frightening skeleton and bloodthirsty mythic creatures – while the back side is a flat white surface, at once symbolising the return of the white cube within the exhibition and exposing the illusionistic character of the ghost train. Also referenced here is Vapour in Debri (2014), a work conceived with Emanuel Rossetti and Stefan Tcherepnin, and Elaine Sturtevant’s installation The House of Horror (2013), which she constructed for Hanover’s Sprengel Museum. Passing through the backdrop of the ghost train, the visitor reaches a final room showing the exhibition’s title video, das blut, im fruchtfleisch gerinnend beim birnenbiss (2016).

This work was created in collaboration with a range of fellow combatants, actors aged six to thirteen, who are attendees of a childcare centre in Hanover. (Tcherepnin contributed the music.) The video approximates a remake of Shūji Terayama’s experimental film Emperor Tomato Ketchup (1971), about children rebelling against the world of adults: a multilayered parable of leftwing groups in Japan in which the children, once assuming power, operate no less authoritatively than the deposed regime. Madison’s trashy remake, shot in amateurish DIY style, shifts the message to, if nothing else, a criticism of pedagogy. The children in the video ‘play’ more than ‘act’; they do their own thing. Heavy-handed directing was out of the question. Fun was the task. Here, then, the artist immerses himself in an intertextual discourse, and simultaneously couples his institutional critique with a critique of pedagogy. This matters because art pedagogy – educational programming aimed at integration into existing systems – is well known as a form of mediation that promises to lend societal acceptance to art in lieu of any genuine criticism. In this way, and twice over, Madison disavows the possibility of art really connecting with the world outside the gallery. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Jonathan Lutes

das blut, im fruchtfleisch gerinnend beim birnenbiss, 2016, promotional photo. Photo: Mathilde Agius. Courtesy the artist

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Panos Papadopoulos Narcissism-Masochism-Fetishism Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens 5 February – 26 March The title of one of Panos Papadopoulos’s paintings, Design chair and expensive painting (all works 2015), recalls the free and straightforward speech of children. At the same time, it makes me think how important it is to describe things as they look, without too many acrobatics. The painting, as one might anticipate, represents an empty room containing a chair and another painting: the artist has depicted some objects on canvas and listed them in the title, adding uncomplicated adjectives. This approach, recalling as it does the stage of psychological development in which discoveries are made by learning to name things, could be called infantile, but also extremely astute. In other words, Papadopoulos’s paintings – which, in the past, have quoted Ludwig Wittgenstein – use language with precision to investigate reality at its most basic degree: what is the logical relationship between words and images? The results, although expressing straightforwardness, are not necessarily naive, and this is probably most evident in Weisswurst selfie. This work demonstrates a rather juvenile temper, especially in its insistence on rejecting good manners. The painting represents a naked

man with a generously sized, floppy white penis taking a selfie in front of the mirror. The title roughly translates as White sausage selfie. Bridging the gap between these two works, Papadopoulos’s solo show Narcissism-MasochismFetishism might be considered to be filled with witty remarks, essayed in a style halfway between Francis Bacon’s less finished works and the expressionist brushstrokes of Otto Muehl. The large canvases, barely sketched with a few essential marks of dripping paint, hang composed one next to the other in a white cube space, making fun of potential buyers and romantic art-lovers alike. A few more examples should suffice to prove that literally nothing is taken seriously here. Collector’s interior represents a spacious room with a red stool, a cactus, a sofa for three and a small abstract painting – I’ll spare the reader any pun about the interiority of the typical collector. In Intimacy fear a naked woman leans against the wall next to a cactus; her body is profiled with a few swift lines, a blotch of white paint on her crotch trickles down between her legs. Toilet with a view depicts, once again, the interior of an empty room, this time with a toilet and a window: is the toilet a privileged

place for the contemplation of the outside world, or does the view outside the window somehow inspire the use of the toilet? Papadopoulos’s propensity for jokes could be pinpointed as a natural inclination towards irony as an instrument for contemplation. We might hear, echoed, the words of Wittgenstein, who reportedly claimed (see Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 1958) that ‘a serious and good philosophical work could be written that would consist entirely of jokes’. And in fact Papadopoulos seems to appreciate the wit of the Austrian philosopher, whom he did abundantly quote, together with Charles Bukowski and the Austrian popstar Falco, in a big mural painting for Vienna’s Palais Weihburg in 2013. The same Wittgenstein who appears to support the artist’s facetious use of language might, however, himself eventually fall victim to the artist’s all-inclusive humour: is he the protagonist of Philosopher, a painting that represents a urinal on an empty beige canvas? Whether Wittgenstein is actually referenced by this work is not to be decided here. Irony has already taken over, as we contemplate a thinker portrayed in the guise of a latrine. Michelangelo Corsaro

Collector’s interior, 2015, oil on canvas, 150 × 150 cm. Courtesy Eleni Koroneou Gallery, Athens

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Erik van Lieshout DOG Pauluskerk, Rotterdam 27 January – 14 February Mister Bruha’s eyes are ablaze. An escapee of the bloody war in his native Sierra Leone, and having witnessed the most atrocious things, he has now been in the Netherlands, illegally, for ten years. Work comes to him occasionally and he tries to look after his young daughter. But the immigration authorities should not mess him around. Because, he says, if you deprive him of his future, “I chop you!” This man is one among a parade of people who get their say in Erik van Lieshout’s latest video installation, the two-channel DOG (2015). We are introduced, elsewhere, to Boom, an explosive type with tattoos, gold teeth and no job. We meet a corpulent chain-smoker who wants to start a dating agency next to a reception centre for asylum seekers so that disadvantaged Dutch men or women can find a spouse, and an older gentleman, himself the child of people who went into hiding during the Second World War, who felt it incumbent upon himself to give shelter to the homeless. Van Lieshout records the tough reality of illegal residents, immigrants and asylum seekers in his local area of Rotterdam with his customary boldness and flair. Many scenes have been filmed with the camera

positioned on a table or chair, as if this were undercover journalism. On the second screen, the artist talks to Occupy protesters about the Russian rocket scientist Aleksandr Dolmatov. On the run from the Russian secret service, Dolmatov sought political asylum in The Netherlands. His application was mishandled on multiple fronts, which led to him being classified as ‘to be deported’. On 17 January 2013, three days before he was due to be expelled, he hanged himself in his cell in the Zestienhoven detention centre near Rotterdam. Brainstorming, the artist and the Occupy protesters discuss a possible monument to him. Van Lieshout, for his part, offers to crawl like a dog on hands and knees to the scene of the disaster, the so-called ‘deportation location’, like Russian artist Oleg Kulik, who during the first Manifesta biennial, in 1996, caused quite an uproar when he crawled like a dog, on a lead, stark naked, through the streets of Rotterdam (Pavlov’s Dog) (van Lieshout not only frequently refers to current political events but also to Dutch culture: in earlier exhibitions Gerrit Rietveld, Joris Ivens and Rem Koolhaas were all referenced). Next we see some volunteers with rattles and whistles

demonstrating outside the detention centre, in order to inspirit the condemned inhabitants. Gruesome, rough, ugly, desolate: this is what the European refugee and asylum policy looks like on the streets of Rotterdam. Feelings of impotence and outrage battle for precedence. The two video loops are projected simultaneously, their soundtracks blasting across each other and the images creating a maelstrom that intensifies the sense of hopelessness. The location, too, smells of desperation. The exhibition, organised by art centre Tent, is held at the Pauluskerk (St Paul’s Church), a renowned centre for the homeless, addicts and asylum seekers whose application procedures have been exhausted. Dozens of them, having escaped the February cold, hang around in the hall sipping warming tea from plastic cups. The videos can be seen in the chapel on the first floor, to the left and right of the altar. On the wall, the homeless centre’s motto is displayed: ‘Do to others as you would have them do to you’. This is not always what happens in immigration cases. As Mister Bruha snarls at us with ill-concealed anger: “No one is illegal. We are all born naked in a pool of blood.” Dominic van den Boogerd Translated from the Dutch by Suzanne Jansen

DOG, 2015, two-channel HD installation, colour, sound, 11 min 20 sec and 12 min 3 sec. Photo: Aad Hoogendoorn. Courtesy the artist; Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam; Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin; and Tent Rotterdam

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Margrét H. Blöndal i8 Gallery, Reykjavík 21 January – 5 March Over the last decade, Margrét H. Blöndal has increasingly chosen to exhibit drawings, with or without her better-known sculptural assemblages. The Icelandic artist has explored various ways of displaying the two-dimensional works, debuting in 2007 with an organic wall grouping at the Reykjavík Art Museum. At the 2011 Nordic biennial Momentum, they appeared sporadically on walls and floors as a site-specific installation where the paper was slit into boxlike acrylic compartments. In this exhibition Blöndal introduces a novel, if nevertheless somewhat conservative display. Each drawing elegantly blends into a painted frame that mimics the colour of the paper, simultaneously extending the picture plane out into the gallery space while enfolding it. Together with the methodically rhythmic and horizontal arrangement, this encourages a systematic reading between the individual visual statements. Fifteen untitled drawings are presented in the pristine gallery space, a symmetrical 8m by 8m white box, 4.5m high, with daylight flooding through the large storefront windows (yes, there is daylight in Iceland in winter, albeit not much). The drawings are identical

in size, all portrait format, with a concentrated gesture either centred on the paper or passing over its edge. Dating from 2013 to 2016, the works are made with watercolour, olive oil and pencil. Rendering the paper semitransparent, a stain of olive oil marks the watercolour’s perimeter, which is conveyed in a linear entanglement or a cluster of shapes. Each drawing seems to suggest a specific form or material, even space, without ever fixing upon a reference point. This balancing act between the abstract and the figurative corresponds with Blöndal’s sculptural work. It is bold of her, though, not to avail herself of the playful gusto she has mastered after years of experimenting with found material and space, and instead to explore solely the dynamics of drawing. The eye drifts around the space in search for something hanging from the ceiling or popping up from the floor, as the arrangement is somehow not what one would expect from this artist. The exhibition demonstrates a resolute attitude wherein Blöndal embraces drawing as an indelible part of her oeuvre. A rich publication coinciding with the show presents

dozens of drawings that the artist has worked on over recent years and suggests a watershed in her progress with the medium. Blöndal’s two- and three-dimensional practice reflect her highly developed, intuitive modus operandi. Each is in its own way generous towards the viewer if he or she takes on the play embedded in the work. This play may come across more subtly given the strict form of the drawings, but it is certainly present. Read as a language or universe in itself, Blöndal’s work reveals correspondence and emotions, a feeling for being in the world. As a key to this attractive universe, the artist has oftentimes made use of photographs from her personal archives, displaying people close to her or intimate encounters with her surroundings. A few such everyday snapshots are accessible in a room adjacent to the current exhibition, in which, for example, you can see images of a bumblebee resting from its flight and a person washing their hair. Allusions to such serene situations finetune a level of attention useful for meeting Blöndal’s drawings on the appropriate terms and being rewarded with their charm. Markús Þór Andrésson

Untitled, 2015, watercolour, pencil and olive oil on paper, 35 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist and i8 Gallery, Reykjavík

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Judith Hopf ! Hear Rings ! Kaufmann Repetto, Milan 21 January – 26 March The exhibition starts outside the gallery, in the yard, with a couple of oversize feet. Each is titled Brick-Foot (all works 2015) and made of hollow bricks, roughly sculpted with an angle grinder. Graceful and delicate despite their uneven surfaces, they recall a contemporary ruin, akin to ancient fragments of vanished colossi like the female Piè di Marmo (‘Marble foot’) close to Rome’s Pantheon. At the crowded opening, these sculptures disappeared among visitors’ boots and stilettos, whose owners risked tripping on them, going head over heels. Feet of clay – the latter being the material bricks were traditionally made from – of course imply fragility, collapse, crumbling to pieces, descents from high places and positions. With her usual wit, Judith Hopf turns a linguistic idiom into a concrete object of attention. She loves wordplay. The exhibition title, ! Hear Rings !, is a small masterpiece of enigmatography, where the homophones ‘earrings’ and ‘hear rings’ doubly signify the piercing of ears. Hopf reverts to clay again for her installation Self Portrait with Problems, a group of small, individually titled sculptures in brickwork, some of them painstakingly sandpapered to obtain perfectly rounded forms. On the ground she positions Ball in remembrance of Annette Wehrmann, with which Hopf pays homage to the oversize

and adamant brick Fußball series created during the early 1990s by one of her best friends, the eponymous Hamburg-based conceptual sculptor, feminist and campaigner for ‘useless time and space’. The other three sculptures rest on white pedestals: another compact Brick-Foot, a deadpan Brick-Trolley with handle and wheels, and Personification of a Problem, where the artist, by adding two arms in red clay to a bollardlike shape, creates a tongue-in-cheek version of herself as brick R2-D2, the Star Wars droid, slow on the ground but superfast in interacting with other machines. All the objects of this small quartet evoke movement but cannot perform it: they are thick as a brick, unable to realise where the real problem of our apparent ‘mobility’ may lie. In the catalogue for MORE, Hopf’s recent solo show at Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, the artist declares her ‘fear that politically relevant information and news, which I have understood as mobile within democratic structures, are conveyed to me almost contemporaneously with the events, but at the same time lose (civic) mobility’. MORE is titled after an article of Hopf’s Contrat entre les hommes et l’ordinateur (2010): ‘We are capable of producing more than we perceive and indeed more than we are capable of perceiving. In this manner,

! Hear Rings !, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy Kaufmann Repetto, Milan

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we have become slaves – not of our own machines, as one generally tends to believe, but rather of our assets of perception. We are at the mercy of each and every new instrument.’ Across the gallery spaces, related to this, zigzag four works from the series Untitled (Serpent), also exhibited in Kassel. If her previous Flock of Sheep (2013, not on show) epitomised herding, these schematic snakes made of concrete, bent at right angles like diagrams and decorated with funny paper tongues and teeth cut out of printed emails from the artist’s mailbox, evoke the self-inflicted rigidity of our patterns of thought and conduct. Hopf has a gift for associating social behaviours with animal symbolism, as well as for laying bare, with sharp irony, the repressive sides of our present technological condition and ‘post-capitalist self’. In Untitled (Email Lines), three strings of LED, coloured in purple, blue and green, pour from the ceiling, signalling the artist’s intolerance of the tyranny of instant emotional responses and limited thinking induced by information overflow. From the wall on the left, up high, protrude a couple of maladroit thin arms in clay, open-handed, titled Untitled (Pair of Arms): too short to reach out to the installation, they seem to stretch out from behind invisible bars. And maybe reach out for help. Barbara Casavecchia

Alicja Kwade Nach Osten TRAFO, Szczecin 29 November – 28 February The huge main hall of TRAFO, a building dating from 1912 that formerly housed electrical transformers and was renovated as an arts venue in 2013, is a fittingly impressive space for Alicja Kwade’s Nach Osten (2011/2013). Featuring a single lightbulb suspended from a height of 14 metres, the sculpture is a reconstruction of a Foucault pendulum – the nineteenth-century device that made visible the rotation of the earth – and is powered to swing to and fro. A second motor, however, counters the movement of the pendulum induced by the earth’s rotation from west to east: hence the title of the work, which translates as ‘Eastward’. The pendulum is thus static on its axis. The thing moving in space, though you can’t feel it, is you. And this sense of displacement in turn ironically references the movement of German people after the Second World War from what was then called Stettin, a westward reversal of Hitler’s notorious Drang nach Osten (drive to the east). The swooping of the sculpture is freakily accompanied by an amplified soundtrack of its swishing. To stand at the apex of the arc is an unnerving experience, the bulb missing your face by inches as it arches back into the darkness. The shadows of the stairwells that flit across the emptiness in turn recall the Expressionist cinema of F.W. Murnau and his untethered camera. Kwade’s work is literary too; the dark mythos of Poe and his pit (and, of course,

pendulum) are clearly referenced. Meanwhile, rooms leading off the main hall contain several videoworks. No Light Left (2007) features lightbulbs shot out with an air rifle. The explosions, flames and flying glass are accompanied by synthesised noises of frightening intensity. Given the history of Allied bombing on Szczecin, it is impossible not to associate this work with the dreadful events that befell the city. The key to the show is thoughtfully introduced upfront by another film located in the entrance hall: Alice (2001) splices together movie scenes that feature characters repeatedly saying the name ‘Alice’, as if heard in a hypnagogic trance. We see the cartoon child heroine with her headband and then Nicole Kidman in Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999). We are in Lewis Carroll’s playfully topsy-turvy wonderland where logic, mathematics and physics are all questioned, toyed with; here is our spooky world as Kwade perceives it. In the dimly lit lower hall (this is a dark show despite majoring on light as a theme) is Thoas, Agrios, Gration (2009) – three screens featuring what appear to be asteroids moving slowly and serenely through space, sometimes including closeups of their surface structure, like that of the moon taken by the Apollo team. And yet these are mere stones found by Kwade and transformed into rotating obelisks with the creepy power of Kubrick’s Monolith from 2001, A Space Odyssey

(1968). (Continuing the Homeric allusions, the title refers to three giants killed in the Gigantomachy.) In Space Zimmer (2003), another Murnau-esque unchained camera swoops around a darkened room, picking up on flashes of LEDs from answering machines, printers and modems. The effect stimulates the imagination to picture a journey into a cosmic void, a domesticated version then of the Star Gate sequence from the aforementioned 2001. Elsewhere Ein Tag in 7 Minuten und 23 Sekunden (2006) presents us with excerpts from 24 movies involving shots of timepieces, a work that amply demonstrates Kwade’s perspicacity by clearly anticipating Christian Marclay’s The Clock (2010). Finally Lichtgeschwindigkeit (2004) is a stopmotion film of lamps moving with humanoid interrogatory menace, recalling the intimidating opening sequence of the British TV thriller Callan (1967). The British novelist Adam Thirlwell, praising the Kiev-born writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, suggests that the latter wanted to ‘perform imaginary experiments with the nature of time and space… a method for investigating how much unreality reality can bear’. Kwade’s works with ‘elec-trickery’ (the splendid term used by that other children’s fictional hero, the medieval wizard Catweazle) call such literary speculations into being. John Quin

Nach Osten, 2011/2013, five speakers, microphone, amplifier, electric motor, pendulum, lightbulb, dimensions variable. Photo: Roman März. Courtesy TRAFO, Szczecin

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Pipilotti Rist Your Saliva is my Diving Suit in the Ocean of Pain Kunsthaus Zürich 26 February – 8 May Pipilotti Rist’s survey exhibition opens with the four oval videos of Administrating Eternity (2011): meandering sheep, foliage, fruit, loops of refracted light and devouring mouths projected onto several dozen white-gauze strips suspended from the ceiling. With images broken and visitors continually walking through the beams, the chaotic presentation is a world away from Rist’s breathtaking, meticulous and sensual installation on the ceiling of the Chiesa San Stae at the 2005 Venice Biennale, where she represented Switzerland. But it is a statement of intent; this show does not offer immersive escapism, the lush surrealism of Rist’s visuals notwithstanding. The installation that follows this opening statement places more than 30 works in a pseudo-domestic setting, the sophistication of which gradually emerges. In a side gallery a row of small monitors shows early works that established Rist’s reputation among filmmakers: I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986), for example, her lunatic singing rant of John Lennon’s lyric, which embraces a subjective position (in the Beatles song, Lennon sang, “She’s not a girl…”) as well as video’s potential for glitches and frenetic editing. Mutaflor (1996), a short loop around the artist’s body, into her mouth and out through her anus, should dispel any

doubt that Rist has always done female (and male) representation on her own terms. From this point onwards in the exhibition there is no chronology, but clusters of smaller works scattered throughout the dimly lit space, divisions blurred between installations and seating. Tu mich nicht nochmals verlassen (Do Not Abandon Me Again, 2015) is projected onto an unmade bed on which the viewer may lie while human figures tumble through space over them, liberated from earthly gravity as people often are in Rist’s work. Close by is Schminktischlein mit Feedback (Little Make-Up Table with Feedback, 1993), in which a mouth pouts back from a small monitor in the mirror, the table surface scattered with makeup and laboratory glassware. Diminutive screen-based works are to be found in handbags and shells, with projections on pillows, paintings or rubbish bins as well as sculptures. Pieces of typical Swiss secondhand furniture pepper the space, armchairs have darned armrests, shoes are scattered on the floor, ceramics are stacked, and books, some inscribed to the artist, pile up on occasional tables. The books include artists’ catalogues (eg Urs Fischer and Miranda July) and another from Josef Frank’s contemporaneous show Against Design, while the February 6th Economist issue (cover story: ‘How to manage the migrant

crisis’) was on top of a prominent pile on my visit. There is cross-pollination of light from projector beams, of paint and plastics that have dripped and pooled over monitors and tables, and the books must shift around the space as people leaf through them. Yet just one principal soundtrack loop accompanies the whole show: a brief track of drips, birdsong and part of Rist’s cover of Chris Isaak’s Wicked Game (1989, which she used in the 1995 work I’m a Victim of This Song). Despite expectations that a Pipilotti Rist survey show would entail large-scale audiovisual spectacle, there is but one huge projection (instead, the virtuoso achievement lies in successfully uniting so many smaller works). Over two walls, Worry Will Vanish Horizon (2014) is a haptic and visual exploration of internal and external landscapes, cameras brushing leaves, stroking the walls of internal cavities or buoyant on a water’s surface. It offers a pre-Anthropocenic landscape you would like to plunge into to forget where you are. But by this stage Rist has made it clear that her perspectives on feminism, family, history, art history, politics and the environment are entrenched in the absurdity and mess of real life and the home. This experience is about awareness, not avoidance. Aoife Rosenmeyer

Your Saliva is my Diving Suit in the Ocean of Pain, 2016 (installation view, Kunsthaus Zürich). Photo: Lena Huber. Courtesy the artist; Hauser & Wirth, Zürich, London, Somerset, New York & Los Angeles; and Luhring Augustine, New York

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Michael Simpson Flat Surface Painting Spike Island, Bristol 16 January – 27 March If medieval theology, sixteenth-century philosophy and renegade monks don’t grab you as particularly contemporary, you’re not likely alone. You’d be mistaken, however, in supposing that Michael Simpson’s work, which is informed by all these and more, is soporific. For the paintings displayed here, in the artist’s largest exhibition to date, are truly remarkable. Perhaps the only thing more extraordinary is that, despite devoting himself to the discipline of painting for more than 50 years, he remains relatively unknown. The same is not true, of course, of some of his Royal College peers, such as David Hockney and Patrick Caulfield. Yet Simpson has, until recently, seemed content to remain at the periphery of the artworld, eschewing trends in favour of pursuing a highly personal vision – one dripping with references to fifteenth-century Venetian and early Flemish painting, Minimalism and Brutalism. Between 1989 and 2009 Simpson dedicated himself to a series of vast canvases depicting benches. That epic project yielded nearly 80 works, of which five late examples are included here. Benches, in the guise of huge black slabs, sometimes empty, sometimes draped with

shroudlike cloths, hover impossibly in a shallow, nondescript space. These austere yet elegant paintings memorialise Giordano Bruno (1548– 1600), a Dominican friar known for his cosmological theories who was burnt at the stake for heresy by the Catholic Inquisition. Today he is considered a martyr for scientific progress and free thought. For Simpson, a faithful atheist, Bruno is a channel through which he expresses his antipathy towards organised religion. But spotting the enigmatic references – such as an inscription bearing the monk’s execution date in Bench Painting 67 (Bruno Resurrect) (2008), or a title from one of the monk’s many books in Bench Painting 77 (2009) – is not necessary to appreciate these paintings, for they also speak to universal themes. The bench motif, for instance, connotes waiting, the passing of time and the transient nature of existence. Indeed, these particular benches can be read as sarcophagi, or mortuary slabs. They are, then, a kind of memento mori. ‘The infamy of religious history’, as Simpson puts it, is further explored – albeit more subtly – in the recent Leper Squint series (2012–). Here, small black apertures painted towards the top of each canvas are accompanied by various types

of ladder. Like the benches, these solemn objects are perfectly modelled with the minimum of flourish, reduced so that they hover between functional device and minimal sculpture. Leper squints were small windows built into the exterior walls of medieval churches that allowed the sick and other undesirables to observe the services from outside. Simpson transposes this architectural legacy of ecclesiastical exclusion into his ascetic realm. His ladders are a mocking invitation to ascend, that perhaps through physical striving one may win favour with the Almighty. This recalls another excommunicated monk – Martin Luther – who, in 1510, while devoutly scaling Rome’s Scala Sancta (Holy Stairs) on his knees, received an epiphany causing him to reject Catholicism and the notion of pleasing God with acts of devotion. In these paintings, viewers are placed firmly on the outside, left to wonder what, if anything, lies beyond the squint. Simpson too is something of an outsider, though his exclusion from the artworld’s limelight has been largely self-imposed. With this welcome exhibition, easily his largest in the UK for many years, Simpson finally offers us a greater glimpse into his curiously hermetic practice. David Trigg

Squint 20, 27 and 18 (2015), oil paint on canvas. Photo: Stuart Whipps and Spike Island, Bristol. Courtesy the artist and David Risley Gallery, Copenhagen

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Katrina Palmer The Necropolitan Line Henry Moore Institute, Leeds 10 December – 21 February In a 2004 catalogue essay for the Henry Moore Institute exhibition With Hidden Noise, Jon Wood noted that ‘what is striking about much of the daily language used to describe our encounters with sculpture is how often the metaphors of vocal sound and aurality are used’. So, too, Katrina Palmer’s work, this site-specific installation in particular, embodies the way in which the sculptural qualities of voice – in spoken and written form – can become the most experiential, resonant and emotive aspects of a work that appears, at first, to be another object-based, static installation. On entering the gallery spaces, the scale of ‘things’ is arresting. Large, illuminated, monochrome images of railway tracks and signalling function as elusive waiting-room posters (date, place, photographer unknown). Immovable, hard, weatherproof stainless steel benches offer a place for visitors to sit, and most monumentally of all, a short station platform connects between the two ‘waiting rooms’. To move between spaces we must follow the ramp and its industrial yellow handrail onto the platform or walk along the implied ‘track’ at floor level, below the platform edge, flanked by the gallery wall.

But beyond the liminal, associative space of the station, it is voices, spoken and written, fictional and real, that imbue this work with its true imaginative power. Taking Cross Bones Graveyard as a point of departure, Palmer weaves together tales of anonymous disinterred bodies, third-class corpses shifted by train, ghosts in machines and a ‘dead man’s pedal’. An unconsecrated burial ground for London’s outcast dead until its closure in 1853, Cross Bones was the first stop on what became the ‘London Necropolitan Line’, a dedicated service that transported coffins, funeral processions and mourners from the city to a newly built necropolis at Brookwood in 1854. In part, Palmer’s narratives here are revisionist feminist histories, giving voice to the poor, euphemistically named ‘single women’ and their unborn or unwanted children, whose bodies formed the mainstay of Cross Bones’s inhabitants. But The Necropolitan Line is also an examination of the limits and properties of sculpture and an exercise in wordplay and self-referentiality. A resurgence of interest in narrative and sound in sculpture provides the conditions for art writing as art to flourish

here. In Palmer’s work, writing, history and sound are as sculptural as the material, physical properties of the exhibition’s objects. Rather, the rooms, benches and platform act more as stage sets or props for Palmer’s (and our own) stories. In The Line, an eight-page broadsheet newspaper accompanying the installation, copies of which are available for the visitor to take home, macabre humour abounds in countless puns on sex, death and railway Polari. Both here, and in the audio sculptures, history and fiction intertwine in stories of coupling and uncoupling, brief encounters, final destinations, one-way tickets and shifting man-machines (the ‘arms’ of a semaphore signal, the ‘moving’ dead). The centrepiece, though, is the boxy, disembodied voice of the automated platform announcer who begins to broadcast human emotion, startling conductors and passengers with her implied consciousness and disjointed, fragmented retellings of the tale of Cross Bones. The otherworldly and the everyday alternate in these announcements, as grave historical accounts give way to platform safety notices and repeated apologies for delays. Susannah Thompson

The Necropolitan Line, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Jerry Hardman-Jones. Courtesy Henry Moore Institute, Leeds

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Michael Joo Radiohalo Blain/Southern, London 10 February – 9 April When postmodern painting, from Warhol to Richter, imitates photography, it is usually extending its reach and relevance by borrowing, even if only by analogy, photography’s objectivity – what Roland Barthes called its ‘evidential power’. The American-Korean artist Michael Joo reflects on this history by painting with silver nitrate, a reflective compound used in analogue photographic processes and the surface of mirrors: a material we use to confirm our subjectivity. But the primary historical model for these paintings is modernist abstraction, which compresses complex effects into simple, nonnarrative forms. Joo’s art sometimes seems to overcompensate in its attempt to interweave as many layers of implication as possible into the simplest gestures: the print of a silver rectangle, of a faint line of numbers. The three largest paintings in this exhibition, each over 3.5m tall, dispense with his photographic silkscreen technique, but not the single, squeegeed sweep of paint associated with it. Alluding, intentionally or not, to Gerhard Richter’s Abstract Paintings (particularly the black-and-white ones of the late 1980s and early 90s, which most directly correspond to the ‘photo-paintings’ with which they were often juxtaposed, and produce an alternative metaphor for the shutter’s instantaneous click), Joo has dragged a liquid suspension of silver nitrate vertically down the canvases in

what appears to be one broad gesture. The effect is spectacular, grave, seductive; a seduction that he both exploits and qualifies. The viewer is a shadow in the streamed surface. This attenuation of image is a metaphor for photography’s limitation: its mere illusionism; the way in which its effects are always contingent upon concealing the processes that realise them. Joo’s image vehicle, however, is self-declaring; it offers itself as a high, slippery wall shaped by the gesture that deposited it. The enveloping illusion of photography and film distracts us from our bodies in order to allow us to imaginatively enter another place. Joo reverses this trope. He claims that he would like his viewers ‘to leave the body in order to make sense of the place they are in’. His silkscreen paintings are silver nitrate prints of the image of a baking tray printed with the number of calories the body expends in a second while performing basic tasks: lying, standing or driving, for example. The viewer finds himself blurrily reflected in the glow of what resembles a framed mirror, its surface stubbly with the canvas’s tooth, and tarnished by the ink wash that partially absorbs it, while the calorific numbers reiterate, from a different angle, a reminder of his body. This insistence on time as an index of corporeal function is as inimical to the dematerialising bent of photography as Joo’s Beuysian

fetishisation of natural materials, which intimates a geological time transcending the duration of a human life. His art is balanced between the postmodern ephemerality of disposable images and transient lives, and the macro-temporality of basic elements and materials and the landscape from which they are extracted. The tension is manifested in his description of Prologue (Montclair Danby Vein Cut) (2014–15) as ‘a marble billboard’. Raised on a steel hoarding, the back of a white marble slab is coated with silver nitrate, rendering its matt surface a grey mirror, and seeping through a crack to its front side down which it drips, creating what looks like a cave painting of lightning or rain evacuated by a cloud and striking or seeping into the earth below it. The two sides might be two forms of landscape image – one consisting of the body of the landscape (stone) converted into an image, the other of a landscape representation applied to the stone’s surface. It is as though this ‘image’ were facing both ways: back to the landscape from which it came and out to the landscape that it pictures. Significantly, its reflective, modified side is on the back (the paradox of a billboard that effaces itself), as the slab is raised just over human height so we are excluded from being drawn into this dichotomy, except, crucially, as the perception for which it is obliquely staged. Mark Prince

Prologue (Montclair Danby Vein Cut) (detail), 2014–15. Courtesy the artist and Blain /Southern, Berlin & London

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Naufus Ramírez-Figueroa God’s Reptilian Finger Gasworks, London 26 November – 7 February A couple of years ago, during a residency in a remote German town, Naufus RamírezFigueroa spent a lot of time obsessively watching conspiracy-theory videos on YouTube. Inspired by conspiracy evangelist David Icke’s ideas about a reptilian shape-shifting race that manipulates humanity by occupying the highest echelons of power in our society, the newly commissioned sculptural installation Babylonian Fantasy (2015) occupies the first room at Gasworks. The work is formed by four large, minimalist polystyrene volumes coated in gold paint that nest maggotlike forms covered in a thick layer of transparent resin. Ramírez-Figueroa has been working with polystyrene for some time, and as the artist explained during my visit to the exhibition, he is particularly interested in the inherent qualities of the material: relatively cheap, endlessly polluting and easy to carve, polystyrene is widely used in artworks but often concealed by layers of nobler materials. In Babylonian Fantasy, polystyrene is clearly exposed in the unpainted sections of the sculptures where the worm-shaped elements emerge, yet it has more deceptively solid and grand appearance in the golden geometric areas. These works

are almost like theatrical props that create a particular ambience, one permeated by the narrative elements suggested both by the installation’s title and the formal elements that constitute them. This theatrical quality is even more pronounced in the second part of the exhibition, where the artist creates a hallucinatory installation, also based on a conspiratorial tale, but this time referring to the supposed presence of Mormon ancestors in the Americas. According to the artist, God’s Reptilian Finger (2015) draws on an episode from the Book of Mormon where God sends the Jaredites to colonise the Americas in wooden submarines. However, their journey seems jeopardised by the fact that the vessels have no light, until God’s finger suddenly appears and touches some rocks, which magically begin to glow and are taken inside the submarines. In God’s Reptilian Finger, this precise moment is recreated in a dark room where a massive finger is surrounded by several glowing rocks. Hanging suspended in midair, these elements are also made of carved polystyrene, but here they are painted in bright fluorescent paint brought to life by UV lighting. This is an enthralling work, which conjures up strange

images that are at the same time beautifully crafted and reminiscent of low-budget horror movie aesthetics. To date, Ramírez-Figueroa’s practice has been largely informed by the episodes related to the civil war in Guatemala that marked his childhood, but even when dealing with a personal history affected by violence, humour has always played an important role in his work. In this exhibition, he starts to move away from explicit references to the politics of his home country while maintaining his tongue-in-cheek approach and a certain stage-setting methodology that vaguely insinuates a narrative element. In both of the installations on show here, underlying conspiracy theories seem to matter less in terms of their context or specificity than as fascinating examples of how people embrace absurd belief systems supported by fabricated evidence. In the end, rather than signifying a clear departure from Ramírez-Figueroa’s political work, the ideas behind God’s Reptilian Finger could be seen as allegories of the political belief systems that supported Guatemala’s proxy war for more than three decades. Kiki Mazzucchelli

God’s Reptilian Finger, 2015, polystyrene, fibreglass, fluorescent pigment, resin, UV blacklight. Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist

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Stan Douglas The Secret Agent Victoria Miro Wharf Road, London 2 February – 24 March ‘Madness alone is truly terrifying,’ the diplomat claims, before casually ordering his employee to bomb Greenwich Observatory. The exchange, and the attempted bombing itself, take place in Joseph Conrad’s 1907 novel The Secret Agent, one of the first literary works to deal with terrorism, and apparently the book most cited by American media following the September 2001 attacks. In Stan Douglas’s almost hourlong, six-screen video adaptation of the story, the setting is transposed from late-nineteenthcentury London to 1970s Lisbon; the aloof Russian diplomat attempting to induce British police to crack down on political dissidents has become an impatient American CIA agent trying to bring Portugal ‘into line’ with Cold War binaries. The new goal is no longer an assault on the meridian, but on a more twentyfirst-century totem: the cables crossing the Atlantic connecting North America and Europe. “Bomb modernity itself,” the American spits: “an assault on communication.” Douglas’s adaptation is cool and assured, despite feeling like a TV drama; Portuguese actors angularly wrap their mouths around the verbose dexterity of the script, wandering stiffly through meticulous, overlit sets. Douglas’s Secret Agent is easily the best adaptation of Conrad’s book,

and not for lack of trying: Conrad himself wrote a theatrical script of the story, Hitchcock’s Sabotage (1936) was a fast-and-loose take on the plot, the BBC made a series of it in 1992 and there was even the 1996 turkey with Gérard Depardieu, Bob Hoskins and Robin Williams, with an appropriately overwrought arpeggio soundtrack by Philip Glass. Conrad’s book is about terrorism, but only just. It’s more a tragic comedy of errors, the bombing attempt gone wrong portrayed as a domestic affair. It’s slow-paced and mannered, the action largely off-page and usually revealed through internal monologues. Douglas’s version exists more on the surface, and is all in all pretty calm for a story about supposedly revolutionary acts, cutting between long conversations about bombs, anarchy and investigative procedure. The six screens are often used three at a time, trapping the viewer between closeups of the person speaking and medium shots of the intensely coloured settings. In Conrad’s book, it’s all mental conjecture; in Douglas’s video, it’s all talk, but they both seem to agree: politics are simply ideals mired in petty personal concerns. So why now? Douglas made a film in 2015 set in 1973, based on a book written in 1907 that was itself set in 1886 and inspired by an event that occurred in 1894. Is it just to say that,

despite historical contexts, people and politics are always the same? That, as in the story, any act of terrorism is at its core a misled attempt at self-actualisation? In Miro’s downstairs space, the video is complemented by four photographic works, large black-and-white prints of impossibly detailed night scenes. These are digital reconstructions of long-gone Vancouver neighbourhoods and buildings, Lazy Bay (2015) depicting a quiet set of roughly made beach-shacks facing off against a factory across the bay – a squatting community, bulldozed during the 1950s. All four scenes are abandoned, not a person visible; though in Hogan’s Alley (2015) you can just make out on the ground a shadow cast of someone standing on a porch. The images work more quietly and insistently than the slick 1970s panache of the video, but both exemplify Douglas’s chronoscopic vision, with one eye on a detailed reassessment of a forgotten past and the other on an unravelled present. We’re caught in between – the shadow in the digital photo, the other person in the room in the video, haunting these visions of the past and left with the question of whether we ever move on. Or the more terrifying proposition: that we never change. Chris Fite-Wassilak

The Secret Agent (film still), 2015, six-channel video projection with sound. © the artist. Courtesy the artist; David Zwirner, New York & London; and Victoria Miro, London

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Things Fall Apart Calvert 22, London 4 February – 3 April The idea of ‘art for art’s sake’, wrote Chinua Achebe, ‘is just another piece of deodorised dog shit’. On these terms at least, the late Nigerian author might well have welcomed the political thrust of Things Fall Apart, an exhibition titled after his first and most famous novel, originally published in 1958. Whereas the book tells the nuanced but ultimately tragic tale of an Igbo leader’s fight to defend his village from British colonialism in the 1890s, the show explores what curator Mark Nash calls ‘a similar loss of utopian perspective’ in Africa following the Soviet Union’s collapse almost a century later. The comparison is clumsy, if not entirely surprising considering the mission of the Calvert 22 Foundation – to enrich perceptions of the former Eastern Bloc. In this show – ‘the highlight’, according to the blurb that accompanies it, of Calvert’s Red Africa season – pursuit of that ambition not only undermines some of the more considered works on display, but also simplifies the intricate and often contradictory history it seeks to examine. The limited selection of contemporary photographs of Angola produces an excessively ideological interpretation of the country’s recent history. The first images you see on entering the gallery are Kiluanji Kia Henda’s Karl Marx, Luanda (2005), a photographic triptych of the wreckage of a Soviet ship that has long been resting and rusting on a beach on the city’s northern outskirts. Close by is another triptych, the black-and-white inkjet prints Mural depicting Fidel Castro, Agostinho Neto and Leonid Brezhnev, circa 1975, Viriambundo (2009) by South African Jo Ractliffe. Some visitors might be aware of the tension that often shaped relations between the Cuban, Angolan and Soviet elites, but this

exhibition – hinged on the idea of utopia – fails to explore that. This matters because it risks presenting African leaders as passive receivers for foreign ideals, which was never the case. Angola’s President Neto and GuineaBissau’s liberation hero, Amílcar Cabral, were proud and complicated men with strong ideas of their own. Yet Filipa César’s 10-minute 16mm film, Conakry (2012–13), tips into hero worship of Cabral and ends up feeling thin. This is disappointing: the Berlin-based Portuguese art-activist has done vital archival work as part of a team, rescuing and digitalising fascinating footage by Cuban-trained filmmakers from Guinea-Bissau. Snippets from several other archival research projects are included in this exhibition: like César’s, you wish they had been given more space. Comprising over 200 images of Soviet representation of Africans and AfricanAmericans across seven decades, perhaps Moscow-born Yevgeniy Fiks’s untitled collection, The Wayland Rudd Archive, slots in most easily on a small video-screen. But Travelling Communiqué – an extraordinary project conceived in 2012 by staff of the Museum of Yugoslav History, curator Doreen Mende and artists Armin Linke and Milica Tomić – is so squeezed, it feels like a very short history lesson on Josip Broz Tito and the Non-Aligned Movement. What a relief, then, to encounter Ângela Ferreira’s maquettes with small black-and-white photographs which form part of Study for Monument to Jean Rouch’s Super 8 film workshops in Mozambique (2011–12). Encouraged by Malian scholar Manthia Diawara, this Portuguese artist dug out 16 films made during the 1970s by Mozambicans working with the French

facing page, top Ângela Ferreira, Study for Monument to Jean Rouch’s Super 8 film workshops in Mozambique no 3, 2012, wood, PVC, torch light, photograph, 147 × 80 × 40 cm. Courtesy Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon

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ethnographer and filmmaker Jean Rouch. These images are not of political leaders, but of ordinary people, many of them women, who attended Rouch’s workshops in order to pursue their own dreams and further their agendas. At last we get a sense of the agency, vision and imaginings of everyday Africans. This optimistic aspect of socialist engagement is reinforced by juxtaposing Ferreira’s contribution with Cinema Cinema and Place des Cinéastes, two photographic works from Isaac Julien’s larger multimedia installation Fantôme Afrique (2005), both deliciously glossy large-scale images from Ouagadougou, the home of African cinema, and the truly radical Marxist revolutionary, pan-Africanist theorist and president of Burkina Faso, Thomas Sankara. Just as riveting is the three-screen documentary Mansudae Master Class (2015), by South Korea’s Onejoon Che. Focusing on the massive monuments built by a North Korean company in several African cities and at considerable expense, Che adopts a critical approach to the idea of socialist friendship. The sheer scale of the monuments is astounding, yet one question keeps returning during Che’s discussions with African artists, curators, journalists and political figures: why weren’t local artists employed to build them? This feels particularly pertinent given the title of this show. One of the reasons Achebe’s novel remains vital is because it tells the tale of the colonial encounter from a rural Nigerian perspective. An equivalent exhibition – especially one that so boldly claims the tag ‘utopian’ – might have included more black African artists, especially those working beyond the metropolis and the prevailing global market. Lara Pawson

facing page, bottom Onejoon Che, Mansudae Master Class (still), 2015, three-channel HD video, 40 min. Courtesy the artist

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SOS Koppe Astner, Glasgow 20 February – 19 March The French poet and musician Henri Chopin, who died in 2008, experimented with concrete poetry, using a typewriter to create visual patterns through the overlapping and repetition of certain letters, punctuation marks and symbols. These typographical experiments challenged, obscured and played with literal meaning, producing visual poems whose composition revealed new interpretations. In SOS = Tapis de Secours (1985), Chopin deployed the letters SOS and through their typed repetition and overlap, in red and black ink, formed the shape of an intricately patterned blanket or rug. At the bottom of the poem, Chopin has handwritten the titular phrase (French for security blanket). This work, wall-hung behind Perspex next to the artist’s similarly constructed Victoire dans l’azur (1985), serves as the reference point and title for Koppe Astner’s exhibition, which brings together the works of artists who probe a continuous fluctuation of meaning and perception. Anne de Vries, known for remaking everyday objects with new materials, technologies and printing techniques, chose a pair of 1960s-style rose-coloured hippy glasses as the basis for Places

to See (2013). Appropriating the familiar shapes of the glasses’ nose pad, curved earpiece and a portion of a pink lens, de Vries enlarges their scale and reconfigures them to form an elegant wall sculpture. A turquoise drinking glass sits on top – a whimsical reference back to the eyeglasses and to the glass material of the sculpture itself. The work is reflective, both as glass surface and, more poetically, in pondering the hippy spectacles. Corin Sworn’s Meditations to make love rust, Despite plenty of gathering, Where were the stairs? (2015) is a formal, elegiac work comprising three panels – each a contemplation of the crab apple. The first is a photographic image of crab apple branches with the fruit and leaves lying on the ground; the second and third panels are each solely composed of crab apple-dyed silk, their shades differing slightly. The suggestion is that Sworn has rescued the fallen crab apples to make natural dyes. This sense of preservation and transformation is recalled in Alex Frost’s reuse of Toby and Character jugs – ceramic pitchers and mugs with caricatured features (some rude) – as well as piggy banks and teapots shaped like houses or snails, for his three sculptures from the Property Guardian

Henri Chopin, SOS = Tapis de Secours, 1985, ink on paper, 30 × 21 cm. Courtesy Koppe Astner, Glasgow, and Supportico Lopez, Berlin

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series (2015). Breaking them apart, he has reconfigured the pieces and roughly stuck them together with thick white plaster so that these whimsical sculptural collages resemble cartoon explosions. Ryan McLaughlin’s exuberant oil paintings are mostly abstract, covered with thick painterly marks; yet, at the same time, his usage of logos and a lack of pictorial depth edges towards signage. There is a compatible tension throughout. In Metro (2015) the logo is an aesthetic component of the artwork – the text is cursively handwritten, and one of the letters is twisted around, facing in the opposite direction, adding to the sense of movement in the piece. An exploration of the malleability of meaning over time emerges through the works. There is a desire to bring objects and processes from the past forward, to reconfigure, repurpose, allow new perspective. Reaching back, Chopin’s concrete poetry serves as the artistic keystone. Like the tensile meanings he played with in his work, the connections in this show are at times obscured. In the end, what becomes evident is that this approach to repurposing is not so much to create something new as to preserve something essential. Lauren Dyer Amazeen

Matthew Lutz-Kinoy To Satisfy the Rose Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles 24 January – 12 March A cool wash of blue. In stockinged feet, tiptoe through a canvassy wave tunnel patched with stretched denim, patterned with an expressive sea-spray of blue and billowing with every step, the whole contraption held up with rickety bamboo poles (Ocean Essays, 2016). Peekaboo glory holes plucked in the drapey fabric give tiny frames of what lies beyond: a small photocopied snap of surfers, ceramic masks and glazed pots, découpaged plinths clad in foam, a series of oceanic adventures playing on video overhead and a crumpled watery painting of a rose dangling from the ceiling, which points to the show’s title: To Satisfy the Rose. Matthew Lutz-Kinoy, in his second solo show at Freedman Fitzpatrick, clearly loves the loose, wet smack of water and all its slippery possibilities, a promiscuity that can sensually touch all media and ideas, flow over and immerse the high and low of life. The accompanying press release, an artist-authored prose-poem, channels the traditions of James McCourt’s wildly flamboyant opera novel Mawrdew Czgowchwz (1975) and more recent art-critical musings, such as the high-minded chattiness of Bruce Hainley, a sensuous style that is more

for the texture of the words and the shotgunning of referential nouns than any prosaic reading might easily allow: ‘Wet is a science fiction place, water world, damp damp.’ The rose and its garden seem emblematic of a set of controlled aesthetics that require the wild liquidity of water to exist. Moving easily from theatre to poetry to video to dance to ceramics, Lutz-Kinoy’s œuvre thus far finds its fullest form in expressive paintings and all-over canvassed environments like this one, where vaguely neoclassical figures often prance nakedly through; they’re almost like Japanese rice-paper paintings in their collapsed narratives. Call it ‘soft expressionism’, if it needs a name, which may be found elsewhere in the works of Mira Dancy and a host of others, who ditch all the butch machismo found in the 1980s wave of neo-expressionism and dudes like Julian Schnabel. Here there is a dollop of the more fanciful Transavanguardia of Francesco Clemente, Sandro Chia and the gang. A movement more sneered at than beloved (even mentioning it here I feel like I’m whispering “Tristero” in Thomas Pynchon’s 1966 novel, The Crying of Lot 49), Transavanguardia

still finds collectors to be sure, but hardheaded intellectualism and brute formalism have pushed it out as something frivolous and easily picked over by marketeers (though this dismissal has been growing fainter with each passing season). Lutz-Kinoy’s wet-wash feels clever as hell and clearly draws from a queer aesthetic of the handmade, the frilly, in a palette not far from Pantone’s corporate attempt at binary-breaking and softness in its colours of 2016: Rose Quartz and Serenity (a hard steal from the Internet microcultures of seapunk and vaporwave, as well as an attempt to claim the ascension of trans-rights as a trademarkable trend). These sea-kissed colours, without their corporate earrings, make up a cultural movement towards the emotive, towards softness as political gesture, hybridity and liminal spaces as centre rather than margin, all ideas easily found here. In all its bustling energies and political pleasures, Lutz-Kinoy’s show is utterly charming, with all the compliment and baggage that adjective can carry, a diaphanous practice that comprises everything its spreading colours wetly touch. Andrew Berardini

Ocean essays, 2016, acrylic on canvas, linen, fabric, single-channel audio and video, 3 min. Photo: Michael Underwood. Courtesy the artist and Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles

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Margo Wolowiec Double Blind Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles 30 January – 12 March There is something discomfitingly familiar about Margo Wolowiec’s woven, image-transfer works, and this feeling has little to do with their imagery, which is culled, algorithmically (and so somewhat randomly), from the Internet. If you’ve come across just these pictures before – big red lips, sharpened coloured pencil tips, apple cleavages, fingertips and painted nails – you’ve likely spent too much time in the depths of a Google image search of one kind or another. But no matter. The nonimages of the web are familiar in an anodyne way. They purport to carry information, but are in fact mute and dumb. A web search is itself an algorithmic procedure, only the first half of which is machine executed; we humans still have to parse the results, and make further selections and assessments. It’s a give and take. Wolowiec presents her works in two formats: freestanding in large metal frames and hanging on the wall. The freestanding works play up the transparency that results from Wolowiec’s woven medium. Every work (all 2016) is composed of polymer threads onto which the web images are transferred using a dye-sublimation process; the weave is loose, evoking a celluloid translucence. The images are legible from both front and back, where

the horizontal striations of the fabric are more pronounced, the images more muted. Those images mostly adhere to a stable grid, either creating bands that reach across the entirety of the works, or blocks that stack up two-by-two to fill the dimension, as if the grid of the fabric weave were itself the organising logic of the work. This band and grid organisation moves Wolowiec both towards and away from collage. Towards, because the juxtaposition of discrete images suggests some kind of narrative intention, some voice speaking behind the scenes; away, because the grid arrangement and horizontal banding look like the material manifestation of a 1970s television broadcast viewed on a set with vertical-hold problems. This is where the familiarity of Wolowiec’s work can be found. The television and collage characteristics of the panels recall Robert Rauschenberg’s Thirty-Four Illustrations for Dante’s Inferno (1958–60) and other solvent transfer works of the 1960s. The striated, veiled and diaphanous aspect of Rauschenberg’s images, achieved through the rapid rubbing of the back of a solvent-soaked image to execute the ink transfer, share a lot with the form of Wolowiec’s technique, from the back and forth of her

handweaving to the transfer process itself. For both artists, the image is present and absent at once, both there and not. But Rauschenberg was confronting the onslaught of commercial imagery that television, newspapers, magazines and billboards were carrying in ever-greater amounts (James Rosenquist is another important precedent here). Wolowiec is confronting the onslaught of web-ready imagery that is neither purely commercial nor solely personal, but rather some synthesis or conflation of the two (and in which commerce always tends to dominate). Though Wolowiec’s imagery is updated and her technique is a bit more ‘crafty’, her art seems to circle the same set of coordinates that occupied the genesis of Pop 50 years ago. For Rauschenberg’s generation, the challenge was just to capture the image itself, to get it down in order to contend with it and, if possible, to recode it. For Wolowiec’s generation, capturing the image is simple, and recodings occur with every like and share. The challenge appears to be how to slow the image, to check its promiscuity. Wolowiec’s solution is to tie it down with threads, which is an effective, if ultimately conservative, strategy. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Double Blind, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Michael Underwood. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

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Bea Fremderman Solastalgia Born Nude, Chicago 30 January – 27 February The disaster whose aftermath is suggested by Bea Fremderman’s solo exhibition is left unnamed. Many of the works on view look as though they are overgrown with moss; nature has overtaken all. In Untitled (Clothes) (all works 2016), a laundry-line bearing blue jeans, a grey hoodie and a long-sleeve shirt is suspended along the walls of the gallery; the garments are covered with patches of green growth, which are contoured by the folds of the material. The clothes have a texture similar to that which one might find on a damp forest rock after exposure to months of humid temperatures. Here the flora is in fact chia sprouts, which grow impressively on the draped structures. The effect is one of some future time, as if the world’s landscape had been waterlogged some time previously, and this is what remains: a domestic ruin. The exhibition’s press release, written in the form of a first-person letter, similarly traces a postapocalyptic narrative. Using vague references to a state of emergency, the letter, addressed to an unnamed other, describes the difficulty of communication between the protagonists: the shortage of paper, the lack of cables, the closing of the city borders. In addition to the clothes, there is a collection

of bowls and ceramicware fashioned out of laundry lint stacked on a pedestal made of cardboard – Untitled (Bowls on Artist Pedestal) – and a brick wall made out of compacted newspaper, mortared together with dirt, which closes up the space’s rear doorway – Untitled (Brick Wall). The ecological affect of the sculptures, which traces the recycling of one material as its function is transformed, takes on the quality of necessity within this context. Although as a whole, the content of the exhibition is presented under the guise of privation – as if these makeshift objects were the only remains of some encampment, some piece of civilisation – its approach feels contrastingly ornamental. While everything seems requisite, everything is adorned. These are postapocalyptic props. The aesthetic of conservation, of postdisaster provision, is meticulously created out of new materials. In Untitled (Scattered Fruit), a variety of citrus fruits, cut in half and sewn together with medical-grade sutures, are scattered throughout the floor of the space. They become fleshlike stand-ins for warm bodies, just as the clothes hang as if waiting to be worn again. All of the objects on view are in various states of decay, with some further

advanced than others. An implied absence of human care is the only constant. Solastalgia, a neologism coined by Glenn Albrecht, an environmental philosopher, at the turn of the millennium, is a mixture of two words: ‘solace’ and ‘nostalgia’. As opposed to nostalgia, which mourns the absence of the past, solastalgia specifically affects those missing home while they are still in their home environment. This condition is echoed throughout Fremderman’s installation – an environment that carries the affect of absence while still being present in the space itself. The domestic quality of the sculptures appears at once at home and estranged, forever trapped in a cycle of belonging and abandonment. Each viewer that enters becomes a surrogate protagonist, returning to a home once it has been destroyed. Perhaps the perfect metaphor for Fremderman’s work would be one we see often in urban environments: a chainlink fence absorbed by the bark of a tree that continued to grow despite the presence of a metal border, subsuming the manmade material into its own. For Fremderman, human history is trapped within nature – our best hope is to be absorbed into its path in due course. Stephanie Cristello

Untitled (Clothes), 2016, found clothing, chia seeds on wire. Courtesy Born Nude, Chicago

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Erin Shirreff Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo 23 January – 8 May Brooklyn-based Erin Shirreff produces work that encompasses photography, sculpture, installation and video. Her wide-ranging practice is characterised by references to analogue methods of image-making, and an overarching interest in how the presentation of three-dimensional objects in two-dimensional formats complicates our interpretation of them. This survey, co-organised with the ICA Boston, where it appeared last autumn, focuses mainly on projects developed between 2008 and 2015. Shirreff often employs found images, or photographs of objects she’s made herself, as starting points. Here the show opens with three prints from the Relief series (2015). Each is a composite of two abutting photographs of small sculptures made out of cardboard and foamcore that the artist photographed and then printed at a large scale. A similar approach was used to construct Monograph (no. 3) (2012), a set of five prints found later in the exhibition. One can’t discern the actual size of Shirreff’s rephotographed sculptures, situated as they are against neutral backgrounds: the forms might either be the size of tabletop tchotchkes or of a midsize Richard Serra sculpture. Shirreff also folded or rolled the Relief images and creased the Monograph photos through the midpoint of the prints, evoking the gutter of a book or magazine in which visual information spans and gets lost. This impedes our ability to read the images in full, demonstrating how our

understanding of many three-dimensional objects is shaped by imperfect two-dimensional reproductions. Two of the videos featured here, Roden Crater (2009) and Medardo Rosso, Madame X, 1896 (2013), build on this idea. An image of James Turrell’s massive Land art endeavour found on the Internet acts as source material for the first video, while an image of a sculpture by Rosso, a postimpressionist Italian sculptor, is used for the second. Over the course of 15 minutes, Roden Crater presents sequential images – sort of like a slideshow – of the now-extinct Arizona volcano captured under what appears to be different atmospheric conditions. Shirreff created the video by hanging the original picture in her studio, and repeatedly photographing it as the light quality in her studio changed. The overall effect is sublime, especially since the video is projected at an enormous size. We almost feel like we can step into the landscape. The 24-minute Medardo Rosso, Madame X, 1896, meanwhile, is projected against the flat surface of a vertically oriented white box jutting from the wall. As with Roden Crater, the photo of Rosso’s sculpture has been rephotographed several times under different lighting conditions and organised sequentially using computer software. Over the course of 24 minutes, the sculpture fades into darkness or very slowly becomes obscured by a halo. The irony at the centre of both videos is that despite being

presented with multiple visual impressions of the artworks, we remain unable to grasp what they actually look like. Appended to this version of Shirreff’s survey is a small display of archival photographs from the museum’s library, selected by the artist. The images – photographs of curators plotting out exhibitions using maquettes, or museum visitors looking at sculptures – illustrate how our interaction with objects is shaped by the museum setting. This is a clever addition, considering that Shirreff’s precarious-looking tabletop assemblages and wall-based sculptures in the exhibition’s main space make us selfconscious as we move around them. Of these, the large Drop (no. 14) (2015) is the most successful, because it looks the most likely to cause injury. Consisting of several irregularly shaped hotrolled Corten steel forms, which were derived from scraps of paper lying around the artist’s studio, the assemblage brings into three dimensions the small-to-large size adjustments of the sculptures pictured in the Relief and Monograph prints. Given the range of work presented here, and the many tangential threads that run throughout Shirreff’s practice, it’s remarkable that this exhibition feels as cohesive as it does. Although Shirreff’s art sometimes reveals itself at a glacial pace, patient gallerygoers are rewarded with viewing experiences that stimulate and challenge the eye. Bill Clarke

Monograph (no. 3), 2012, set of five black-and-white inkjet prints, 94 × 123 × 8 cm (each). Collection Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York

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Photo-Poetics: An Anthology Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 20 November – 27 March Two of New York’s modern art museums have exhibitions framed by the enormous transformations in photographic culture of the last ten to 15 years. In contrast to the confusing melange seen at the Museum of Modern Art (Ocean of Images: New Photography 2015), the Guggenheim’s Photo-Poetics: An Anthology is certainly more coherent, politically engaged and art-historically grounded, but it sets up camp on the dangerous terrain of nostalgia. In a reversal of Lucy Lippard’s influential characterisation of the ‘dematerialization of the art object’ during the 1960s and 1970s, the Guggenheim’s curators, Jennifer Blessing and Susan Thompson, identify various attempts to ‘rematerialize the medium’ of photography on the cusp of its ‘digital oblivion’. This apocalyptic language invites an understanding of the various approaches to the materiality of the image offered by the ten exhibiting artists as a melancholic defence of the practices, aesthetics and processes of an earlier era. Several artists make very direct reference to the strategies of appropriation developed by the so-called Pictures Generation. This comparison is explicit in the exhibition catalogue, which includes an ‘Afterword’ on artists such

as Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, Sarah Charlesworth and Sherrie Levine, who are all associated with this earlier moment. But when artists in Photo-Poetics do reference this generation’s work, it falls a little flat. Take for example Anne Collier’s stylish studio shot of stacks of Italian Vogue showing Cindy Sherman on the cover, May/June 2009 (Cindy Sherman, Mark Seliger) (2009). Like Kathrin Sonntag’s photographs of the Guggenheim Museum’s sales offerings in a 2005 Christie’s auction house catalogue (her response to receiving the prestigious Guggenheim fellowship), the ironies of commercial complicity seem a little self-indulgent. These works appear less than exemplary of concerns about photographic materiality and more like academic in-jokes tinged with lament. The modes of rematerialisation offered in this show follow two quite different patterns. One is related to subject matter, the other to form, use and process. Leslie Hewitt, Claudia Angelmaier and Sara VanDerBeek are representatives of the former approach in their highly crafted – not to say technically fetishistic – photographs that represent bygone tactile, vernacular and commercial images. Lisa Oppenheim

and Moyra Davey, however, make use of older technologies including slide projectors. In the case of Davey, the photographic prints are no longer pristine but tattered and crumpled after being turned into foldable mailing envelopes and sent through the post. Davey’s ‘mailer’ series, Trust Me (2011), might evoke analogue technologies, both in terms of the photograph-as-object and the mail as a physical system of communication. But if we look beyond the horizon of a narrow analogue/digital divide, these works suggest important continuities with our present. The explosion of vernacular photography has newly charged the image as a mobile unit of communication for a whole new population of amateur practitioners. Looking with a friend at photographs on a cell phone is certainly more immediate than Davey’s photographic mailers, but embodied communication is nonetheless also part of the experience. Digital photography is rarely as dematerialized as the rhetoric suggests. In fact, the flawless fine-art prints in Photo-Poetics might offer us a fantasy of, rather than a counterpoint to, a ‘digital oblivion’ that doesn’t really exist. Siona Wilson

Moyra Davey, Les Goddesses, 2011, HD colour video, sound, 61 min. © the artist. Courtesy Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York

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Laura Poitras Astro Noise Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 5 February – 1 May Having won an Oscar for Citizenfour (2014), her film about the Edward Snowden leaks, Laura Poitras continues her efforts to expose covert government operations during the ‘War on Terror’ with Astro Noise at the Whitney Museum. This is Poitras’s first solo visual-art exhibition, and it signals a departure from her documentary work. With Astro Noise, she reverses the frequent co-option by artists of other professional roles – archivist, historian, investigator, etc – but ultimately struggles to move beyond a journalistic mode of didactic storytelling. Displayed just outside the main exhibition, ANARCHIST (2016) consists of several large inkjet prints showing partially descrambled signals collected by GCHQ. These panels of pixels and text promise an intriguing synthesis of aesthetics and data in the darkened rooms ahead, but the rest of Astro Noise is quickly undermined by Poitras’s heavy-handed approach. In O’Say Can You See (2001/2016), for example, one side of a hanging projection screen shows the faces of onlookers at the site of the World Trade Center shortly after the 2001 attacks. On the reverse, grainy footage depicts the brutal interrogation of two men who would later be transferred to Guantánamo Bay, while a surreal modulation of the US national anthem plays over the top. The message is simple, and painfully obvious: the US government has used

the horror of 9/11 to legitimise its human-rights abuses, and patriotism can blind us to these sinister operations. Other works deploy a similarly literal approach to their content. For Bed Down Location (2016), viewers are invited to lie down on a carpeted platform and to look up at video footage of the skies over countries in which drone killings have taken place (Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan). Poitras chooses for a soundtrack radio noise and chatter among drone pilots, and the title is the military term for the location of a sleeping target. Next one encounters Disposition Matrix (2016), which takes its name from the database of people on the US government’s ‘capture/kill’ list. It consists of a corridor in which small viewing windows contain leaked documents, video interviews and intercepted data. Throughout Astro Noise, Poitras tasks her viewers with finding glimmers of truth in the lightboxes and video screens that punctuate the dark. Her use of space and light as metaphors for secrecy, though, is clumsy at best, and undermines the richness of the material at hand. The political implications of her work are self-evident, and the damaging nature of her findings – that the US government continues its active surveillance of its own citizens, that its drones regularly execute extrajudicial assassinations, that it sanctions torture for

intelligence gathering – is plain to see. Yet most Americans know and accept much of this now. The question is ‘Why?’ Perhaps by leading with more ambivalence, Poitras might have achieved a more nuanced read on our conflicting desires for privacy and security, our acceptance of compromised moral ideals. In the final installation, November 20, 2004 (2016), Poitras describes how she has been repeatedly detained at the US border since 2006. After suing the government in 2015 in order to access her files, she discovered that she had been placed on a watch list after having been witness to a US Army raid in Iraq while filming My Country, My Country (2006). Copies of these heavily redacted documents, the few minutes of offending footage, an explanatory wall text and audio of Poitras reading that text are all crowded into a small corner. The result is overwhelming, and the continuous loops of sound and video at different lengths quickly fall out of sync. At the exit, an infrared-video feed shows viewers back in Bed Down Location, and another screen logs the signals from their wifi-enabled devices. We were being tracked all along, it turns out. But in the aftermath of the Edward Snowden revelations, most people assume that they are being watched. Ultimately, it seems that Poitras has missed the opportunity to say – or show – something new. Dan Udy

ANARCHIST: Data Feed with Doppler Tracks from a Satellite (Intercepted May 27, 2009), 2016, pigmented inkjet print mounted on aluminium, 114 × 165 cm. Courtesy the artist

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David Adamo Peter Freeman, Inc, New York 26 February – 9 April ‘Go for the sculptures, stay for the sawhorses.’ I’m tempted to leave any assessment of David Adamo’s recent installation at that. Because, for all of his earnest grappling with the history of sculpture and what it means to make such stuff today (a set of worthwhile questions to be sure, just ones that are often drowned in all of the ink spilled on the relative status of painting), a grappling that has Adamo making big, bold gestures (a two-metre-high block of red cedar with three holes roughly carved out of it; Untitled, 2016) alongside cutesy tongue-in-cheek ones (Prada green-painted plaster-cast packing peanuts; Untitled (12 packing peanuts), 2014) and enigmatic conceptual ones (dozens of handmade metronome cases with no timing mechanisms; Untitled (Poème symphonique), 2012), the pieces that come off as most authentic, as the least mannered and positional, are the custom sawhorses that support various of Adamo’s carved figures and ‘vessels’. This is not meant as a ‘dig’ at Adamo. The sawhorses are every bit a part of the works on display, as are the more adamant ‘sculptural’

components. (There are even a pair of handmade adjustable-height rotating stools that function as pedestals in Untitled (vessel and M&M), 2014–16, which are equal in elegance to the sawhorses.) Like Brancusi, the supports here are equal to their various figurative partners, mostly roughly carved wood elements, all vaguely evocative of bodies or decorative objects. It’s important that the pieces and supports are carved and constructed from the same type of timber as well. Adamo means us to make the association, to note how ‘this’ and ‘that’ issued from the same origins. It’s figure/ground play of a sort. Adamo’s heavily carved timbers echo this condition. The series of five (Untitled, 2016) that lie on the ground in this installation have each had their midsections aggressively excised, so much so that any structural integrity that the timbers once possessed is surely compromised – lift up one end and the centre will crack and break. Visually, the timbers flip back and forth between strength and weakness, between mass and absence, and there is something compelling to the simplicity of Adamo’s gesture here.

But it’s not enough, at least not on its own – and Adamo seems to sense this. The bronzecast peanut M&M, the plaster-cast packing peanuts, the deflated balloons made of aluminium, the glazed ceramic geometricised dog figurine and the papier-mâché Robin perched on high – all are subtle, elliptical and rather wry insertions into a field of muscular, confident sculptural work. These little Pop follies signal that Adamo doesn’t want us too heavily invested in the woodwork, or he does want us invested, only to have us snap back to our own reality when we come across some reproduction of the minor mundane. ‘This is also that’, Adamo seems to keep saying. Which is why I like the sawhorses (and the stools). In them one can see the intersection and integration of Adamo’s dual sensibility, but doesn’t feel toyed with. Of course these supports need the polarised works around them, the pop follies and the adamant carvings. They only function within this field. But the supports point to a way forward, or a way out, of the self-consciousness that pervades Adamo’s practice. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Untitled (vessel and balloon), 2014–16, western red cedar in two parts and pink acrylic paint on aluminium, 178 × 80 × 109 cm (overall). Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc, New York

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Amy Sillman Stuff Change Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York 4 February – 12 March The spirit of Amy Sillman’s paintings – large, semiabstract compositions – might be personified by Jennifer Lawrence walking up the stage stairs to receive her Oscar, tripping and falling on her face. Like the actress and her tumble, the paintings are skilful, assured and attractive, but they remind you that they are earthbound, likeable, plain-speaking comics, down in the dirt of messing up. In particular, Sillman’s work displays a heightened awareness that making paintings (or having a body) is a kind of tragicomedy, an unlikely joke of a Ponzi scheme, but one in which she has nonetheless decided to invest. Such is the requisite level of self-delusion one must entertain to continue painting in 2016. The artist’s latest exhibition is titled Stuff Change, and the press release makes much of the metabolic (the colloquial translation Stoffwechsel, the German word for ‘metabolism’, provides the title of the show). Yet digestive processes and associations seem to describe the appetite and the processes of being a painter far more than they speak to most of the actual paintings in the exhibition, which are spatial and leggy. By this I mean that these compositions combine large areas of shapely forms in strongly defined colours that command the composition at a scale

suggesting a room or some other large space. These are accompanied by the occasional discernable object or part-object, which is often a kind of leg (belonging to a human or to a piece of furniture) or leggish thing (trousers or leggings). In Tough Girls (2014–15), a violet-grey and pink painting, three large limblike objects are described with black outlines in the semigraphic style that is common in Sillman’s work. The two on the righthand side, with black hooflike elements, could be an upturned plump cow’s or horse’s legs. And yet they might also be the legs of a particularly baroque piece of furniture. Something has been overturned, but whether it’s animal, human or table we don’t know. The limb on the left most resembles a voluptuously rounded human leg, and is joined to a peachy cleavage, kind of asslike, which rains red colour down the lost limb. I briefly think of menstrual blood, and then I reject it, and then I think of it again, which is the kind of ontological dilemma that keeps people in front of these paintings. Sillman once remarked that she was trying to make something that isn’t comfortable in its own skin; in such moments we see what she means. Elsewhere one might register grubby, fleshy sleeves or leggings

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hanging from a piece of furniture, as in Table 2 (2015), or the floppy, dangling green object of Back of a Horse Costume × 2 (2015–16), in which we see the hooflike feet-shapes again. Sillman has for years now been making funny, self-deprecating zines and diagrams to accompany her shows (there is one here from a recent show at KUB Arena in Bregenz; there are also several works on paper and two animations). In a back room is Panorama (2015), a work on 15 panels printed with images of paintings that have been overpainted and reworked so much as to function almost as large animation slides. Areas of colour seem to drift in and out of each panel, creating almost an architectural experience of Sillman’s panels. It seems like an interesting direction for the artist. However pleasing these may be, the exhibition has only a vague sense of purpose and doesn’t resolve into something more than the sum of all these parts. I remain confused about what all these pieces mean together, and how this language relates to what exactly is going on in the gallery. In the end, if you set up your stall with these props and scripts, then, like a comic actor, you have to put on a show, pratfalls or no. Laura McLean-Ferris

Sandra Cinto Acaso e Necessidade Casa Triângulo, São Paulo 5 March – 2 April Crystallising the soul of water, and flinging its blue heart against the wall in the form of two immense canvases, each 7.5 by 3 metres, this new series of works by Sandra Cinto moves on from her meticulous, formal drawings of waves developed in the last decade or so, also often carried out on a grand scale, to home in on the colour, sense and sheer freedom of the element itself. In shades ranging from the almost imperceptible azure of a hazy, hot sky to the profound turquoise of millennial glaciers, the towering forms surge across two facing walls of the gallery in jagged frequencies, like sounds registered on a monitor, roughly. In making the giant washes of blue acrylic paint, diluted and poured onto buffed canvas prepared with gesso and casein, Cinto first gives in to the ‘chance’ of the exhibition’s title, Acaso e Necessidade (Chance and Necessity), directing the pigment’s flow but accepting its route across the canvas; and then, in thousands upon thousands of tiny lines drawn in black pen, she commits to the shapes as they are, and – ‘necessity’ –

constructs intricate structures around the blue. Up close, the lines seem to describe crevices and contours in rock, sometimes wood grain, giving the blue shapes the appearance of water pouring over cliffs and stones. Though etched in later, the ink lines nevertheless underpin the blue, making concrete what was random, intangible – like the waves in works such as Cinto’s many painstakingly drawn previous pieces: Encontro das Águas (Encounter of Waters), her 2012 installation at Seattle Art Museum, for example; or indeed, akin to the precise, spare strokes of Hokusai Katsushika’s Great Wave off Kanagawa (1829–32). In Cinto’s new works, the pen comes to anchor the meandering shapes, fixing them in space and time like the stories people tell – the cause and effect we overlay on life, coincidence, accident and tragedy, imbuing everything with meaning after the fact. In a series of six smaller works (2015–16), Cinto’s fine lines encircle the pigment to make shapes that look like clouds, meteors, a jellyfish. These works are the genesis of the exhibition,

the fruit of a 60-day residency in Aomori, northern Japan, in late 2015, where Cinto intensified her years of research into Japanese painting and printmaking, extending her interest to the indigo dye made in the region. Returning to Brazil with a series of new untitled works on thick, water-loving washi paper, their blue tinged, in some, with dark blushes of sepia, Cinto was invited to create the inaugural exhibition at the immense new home of her longtime gallery, Casa Triângulo, one of a number of São Paulo’s galleries with previously farflung locations to have come to roost recently in this wealthy, centrally located neighbourhood. In the centre of the echoing new gallery, a curving white wooden bridge sculpture, A Ponte (The Bridge, 2016), ends in a rocking horse at one end and a rocking chair on the other, each reared back, in suspension, as if in midflow. On either side and on the floor beneath the structure, pure nothingness – an absence of river; walls like fresh canvases; invisible water under the bridge. Claire Rigby

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Marrakech Biennale 6: Not New Now Various venues, Marrakech 24 February – 8 May Perhaps more than many biennials, Not New Now takes from the complexity of its surroundings, a city so close to Europe (with a recent history of Western colonialism and rampant tourism), but whose identity is split between Arab and African. Reem Fadda, the associate curator of Middle Eastern art for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, builds a slow-burning, studied show involving the work of over 40 artists, mostly Middle Eastern and African, with just a handful of European and North and South American names (including The Otolith Group, Melvin Edwards and Oscar Murillo) spread across the former imperial city’s museums and tourist destinations. It’s an exhibition that raises questions concerning authenticity, the position of the tourist, the opacity of borders, the diversity and synchronicity of cultures, and the line between decorative and fine art. To wit: a series of works, installed in consecutive chambers of the Palais El Bahia in a manner that encourages a narrative thread, draws the viewer’s attention to a form of twentieth-century Moroccan abstraction that developed outside the Western canon. In the late Farid Belkahia’s Le droit à la dignité de l’homme (1994), stitched panels of animal hide are stretched over a triangular frame; on the leather, in henna, the artist has drawn a border of symbols, inside of which a large arrow points upwards. The meaning of the composition is obscure, but the materials, common to the tanning workshops and hawkers of temporary tattoos that populate the souk and squares beyond, affirm the Moroccan artist’s historic interest in developing a local aesthetic. In fact Belkahia, together with Mohammed Chabâa and Mohammed Melehi, the authors of the works hung in the neighbouring rooms, was one of the 1960s reformers at the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Casablanca, as demonstrated by a vitrine of archive documents. They believed that the artistic integration of vernacular culture and Western avant-garde was impossible, and that a modernist movement, cohesive

within the decorative traditions of Moroccan craft, must be independently formulated. Such knowledge changes the contemporary perspective: one might pin Melehi’s 1971 Untitled painting on wood, in which parallel blocky squiggles of green, grey, red, orange and yellow stretch across a blue background, a shaft of colour crashing into one side, to the history of Colour Field painting. Yet a glance down at the palace’s diamond-shaped floor tiles, or the original frieze that runs around the room, indicates the lineage in which the artist intended the intricate patterns to operate. Indeed much of the work by the trio, as documented in sepia photographs, was originally commissioned by the hotels that sprang up during the mid-twentieth century as Marrakech became a tourist destination. The works were intended to be uniquely Moroccan, but ironically made specifically for the gaze of holidaymakers from afar. Nonetheless the inclusion here is indicative of Fadda’s concept, undermining the Western notion of an artistic hierarchy in which the decorative arts are perceived as lower than the conceptual. Through these works, and this history, an idea of complicated (though nonmono-) cultural authenticity is introduced. Motifs of travel and displacement recur throughout the exhibition, from Djibril Diop Mambéty’s hourlong film featuring a man riding Dakar’s buses (surprisingly engrossing), to Mona Hatoum’s Baluchi (blue and orange) (2008), a woven doormat overlaid with a map of the world. There is a sense of alienation and abandonment in Ahmed Mater’s installation, throughout several subterranean rooms of the Palais El Badi, of decorative panels, discarded during renovations in Mecca, transported to Morocco by the artist and stacked against the rough walls. With the architectural elements stripped from their original (religious) context, they make a gloomy sort of display. 3600 (2016), Radouan Mriziga’s beautiful durational performance in the palace’s courtyard, also possesses a degree of poignancy. Four performers build a low-walled circular

facing page, top Farid Belkahia, Le droit à la dignité de l’homme, 1994, dye on skin. Courtesy Marrakech Biennale

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structure with clay bricks, carefully measured out and made in no hurry, topping out the construction with a moment of choreographed dance movement. And then they go on to dismantle their handiwork, stacking the bricks in neat piles, before starting again, rebuilding a variation on the same form. The Sisyphean performance is hypnotic, especially in the context of the venue’s sixteenth-century ruins; a work about the passing of time, analogous to the rise and fall of cultural empires, perhaps, that one could watch for hours. The underlying politics of nation building and identity coalesce decisively in two film installations in the cisterns of the twelfthcentury Koutoubia Mosque. With rich cinematography, SUPERFLEX’s Kwassa Kwassa (2015) depicts, over 20 minutes, the building and launching of a fibreglass boat from the archipelago of Mayotte into the Indian Ocean. A narrator describes the islanders’ 2014 decision (in a referendum) to become a département of France, making it the most southerly outpost of the EU. With explicit reference to Zeus’s abduction of Europa, and implicitly to the tragedy of the European migrant crisis, the sea is portrayed as a politicised zone, one that is both barrier and route of opportunity. Kader Attia’s Reason’s Oxymorons (2015) plays out over 18 monitors, each showing interviews with psychiatrists who relate their experience with patients whose mother tongue is different from their own or who are from another culture. “We must assume the language of psychology as universal,” says one interviewee, but goes on to note that it is always expressed through a “cultural framework” in which ideas are formulated differently, concepts are untranslatable. How a culture understands itself and the way in which it understands the ‘other’ is the ultimate missive of Not New Now. Not new questions for a biennial admittedly, but ones nonetheless expertly pushed to the fore by an exhibition that delivers with often moving clarity. Oliver Basciano

facing page, bottom Superflex, Kwassa Kwassa, 2015, video, 17 min. Courtesy the artists and Marrakech Biennale

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Books

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Adjusted Margin: Xerography, Art, and Activism in the Late Twentieth Century by Kate Eichhorn MIT Press ($26.95/£18.95) In 1968 the Australian conceptual artist Ian Burn placed a blank sheet of paper under the hood of a Xerox 720 machine and pressed ‘copy’. As the xerographic reproduction issued from the machine’s rollers and onto the out tray, he took the copy and replaced it for the original white sheet under the lid. Again he pressed copy, and again, going on to repeat this process until he was left with a volume of 100 pages showing a gradually deteriorating clear surface, steadily being overcome by the artefacts of the reproduction process until the last few pages become completely black. By the time of Burn’s now classic Xerox Book, Dick Higgins and others associated with Fluxus had already been using the same technology to expand the notion of the book with the evergrowing collection of cheaply photocopied event scores that would eventually be anthologised in Ken Friedman, Owen Smith and Lauren Sawchyn’s Fluxus Performance Workbook (2002). And if Seth Siegelaub and John Wendler’s untitled collection, known as the Xerox Book (also 1968), would finally prove cheaper to reproduce using more traditional offset printing, the persistence of its common name nonetheless indicates, as Kate Eichhorn suggests in this insightful new volume, something of ‘the optimism artists and writers of this era felt about xerography as a medium with the potential to radically change the conditions of artistic production’. Still, in 1971, the noted Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan’s publisher William

Jovanovich would insist (partly in response to the enthusiasm of his client) that xerography ‘is not a medium of art’. If Adjusted Margin goes some way towards rebutting Jovanovich’s claim, arguing for a radical reappraisal of the underappreciated office equipment as a machine that has helped redefine entrenched notions of authorship and copyright, destabilising in the process the centralised imagined communities of print culture, it may still not go far enough. An associate professor of culture and media studies at New York City’s New School, Eichhorn is at her most persuasive in her arguments for the photocopier as a device that reshaped urban life in the late twentieth century, making the streets themselves into a ‘canvas’ of copied sheets ‘pastiched’ in overlapping layers up to several centimetres thick. Even as Jovanovich dismissed the copier, finance grad Paul Orfalea was already looking to expand his Kinko’s reprographics store from its Santa Barbara base, making a tool that had been the privilege of white-collar officeworkers into something open to all, at just four cents a copy. Unlike previous forms of reproductive printing, like the mimeograph or photostat, the Xerox corporation’s invention required no master copy, practically eliminating distinction (for most practical purposes) between an original and its copy. And unlike later digital copiers, xerography left no trace of its use behind in the machine itself. Both of these aspects made the machine ideal for samizdat publications

of all kinds, such that the photocopier became a ubiquitous – if oft-neglected – medium both for the New York downtown scene and the ACT UP campaigns around the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s. Given such associations, it is unsurprising that, even as they were initially corralled by social media, activists pouring into Zuccotti Park to Occupy Wall Street in 2011 did so bearing flyers and placards imitating the washed-out greyscale of Xerox toner cartridge running on empty (now carefully imitated with digital printers). On these developments, Eichhorn is lucid, engaging and persuasive. But though she quotes somewhat critically ACT UP campaigner Maxine Wolfe saying that ‘the men have always been the graphic artists and we do the xeroxing and typesetting’, the book fails to properly disturb the distinction between productive and reproductive labour that Wolfe’s statement implies. The likes of artists Higgins and David Wojnarowicz get a mention for their xerographed texts and photos, but Burn’s Xerox Book does not. Klaus Urbons’s photocopier collection at the Deutsches Technikmuseum in Berlin is visited, but Urbons’s artworks, which take advantage of the peccadilloes of the copier to produce uniquely xerographic images, are not. So though Eichhorn may regret the failure of designers to aestheticise the photocopier in the manner of old radios and typewriters, she herself ultimately fails precisely to locate the distinctive aesthetics of xerography as medium. Robert Barry

The Kindred of the Kibbo Kift: Intellectual Barbarians by Annebella Pollen Donlon Books, £35 (hardcover) The origins of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, an enigmatic early-twentieth-century youth movement, can perhaps be found in the First World War trenches. John Hargrave was a stretcher-bearer, and after witnessing the horrors of battle, he returned to England deeply affected by the experience. One of the results was his growing disdain for the more militaristic side of the Scouts, in which he had been a leader, bemoaning that founder Robert Baden-Powell was only interested in forming ‘little soldiers’. The Kindred, which Hargrave was to establish formally in 1920, placed greater emphasis on outdoor life, dressing up and woodcraft. They were, to take the lyrics of their marching song, ‘A Brotherhood of strong /

Hale, hearty men and women / Who hike the roads along’. While Annebella Pollen’s meticulously researched book, generously illustrated with archive photography, is a history of all aspects of the Kindred (including their politics – the group was accused of being both communist and, with its appreciation of nature, purity and health, fascist), the author, a lecturer in the history of art and design, pays special attention to the myriad costumes, totems, banners and handmade tents the group produced. What emerges is an aesthetic, developed by Hargrave and other senior Kindred – not least Angus McBean, who would go on to be a leading figure of British Surrealism – that combines

April 2016

a sense of the modernist avant-garde with a love of medieval pageantry and pagan ritual (their garb was not always practical for hiking and the like, but discomfort was seen as character-building). The Kindred had all but disbanded by 1931, first morphing into the Green Shirt Movement for Social Credit and latterly the Social Credit Party, neither of which continued the rich flamboyance. So, a strange short chapter in British alternative culture? Perhaps, but what is striking is how archaic the idea of a utopian movement of the land seems now, and how in today’s political and cultural environment its spirit of idealism seems an impossible, even absurd, dream. Oliver Basciano

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Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820 by Liam Gillick Columbia University Press, $35/£24.60 (hardcover) There is a special kind of frustration that comes with reading Liam Gillick’s new collection of essays, structured around the Bampton Lectures, which the British artist delivered at Columbia University in 2013 under the heading of ‘Creative Disruption in the Age of Soft Revolutions’. Even as they gesture at a genuine theory of and genealogy for advanced art today, Gillick’s essays don’t amount to much in the way of argument, save one for ‘artistic licence’, or what Gillick would call the ‘supersubjectivity’ of the artist. For Gillick, 1820 marks the first in a quartet of years of ‘soft revolution’, in which various less-noticed events are offered as initiating the conditions of possibility for our present. The other years are 1948 (when we witness the ‘emergence of new structures in the wake of war…’), 1963 (the ‘arrival of the conscious agent’) and 1974 (‘the collective and the problem of increasing ennui’). In Europe, the rise of new technologies alongside new modes of commerce and political action in 1820 began to ‘disrupt’ the conventional patterns of social organisation. In the interstices, the new spaces of ‘demonstration and display’ as well as the ‘convivial places of exchange’, there appeared ‘secondary individuals’ and ‘specialists’ possessing a new selfconsciousness and capacity for ‘free thinking’ – autonomy, in other words. Readers familiar with Gillick’s work and milieu will recognise the tracing of his own lineage here, as these passages offer historical precedents for the kind

of ‘relational’ work and aesthetics that were the context to Gillick’s early activities as an artist. Gillick notes that 1820 is also the year that Friedrich Engels was born and that HMS Beagle was launched. These events are treated as symbolic markers that offer purchase on the nineteenth-century political and scientific upheavals that would appear 20-plus years later. The logic is: if no Engels, then no Marx or Communist Manifesto; if no Beagle, then no Darwin or Origin of the Species. But such retrospective cherry-picking is more opportunist than historical or genealogical, and neither ‘event’ is given anything more than a mention. Why not, for example, note that 1820 saw the reduction of timber tariffs on Baltic imports and so the first successful instance of British laissez-faire economic policy, a development as important for British shipbuilding and so the Beagle as contemporary market fundamentalisms? Even the title of this chapter, ‘1820: Erasmus or Upheaval’, is a feint: ‘Erasmus’ points both to the Dutch humanist and, presumably, to Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s older brother and the subject of one of Gillick’s early artist books, except neither Erasmus actually shows up in the text of Industry and Intelligence. Reading Industry and Intelligence, one gets the sense that Gillick is performing an almost wilful act of elliptical argument, that the promiscuity that the labels ‘art’ and ‘artist’ allow – entrance into any field, occupation of any space,

appropriation of any material – paradoxically gives protection from any assessment as to whether what Gillick offers is true. If there is an argument within Industry and Intelligence, it is one for the market-resistant enterprises of discursivity and research, which explains both the prominent place given to Michel Foucault at the outset of the text and the strategies that Gillick often deploys in his own art. Towards the end of an essay titled ‘The Complete Curator’, Gillick writes: ‘Discursivity is excessively verifiable and formed a partnership with research as domains that appeared to resist the reach of capital or at least keep precisely priced exchange moments at a distance.’ Further on, Gillick writes that ‘research carries a scientistic authority. Research implies an evacuation from zones of commodified exchange and directs us toward the apparent authority of the institutional library or laboratory. Alone it cannot build better systems or structures. Yet it can point out how far away they still appear to be.’ Discourse and research may point the way out of or away from the market, but they can’t do it ‘alone’, they cannot be merely presented, which is the logic that Gillick appears to favour here. Discourse and research require argument and demonstration if they are to point to anything at all. They require, in other words, both the ‘industry’ and ‘intelligence’ of Gillick’s title, just not in name only. Jonathan T.D. Neil

Drinks by Dike Blair Secession, €27 (hardcover) Drinks is an ‘artist book’ published to accompany Dike Blair’s exhibition (closing 3 April) at Vienna’s Secession. Titled Floors / Doors / Windows / Walls., it features the American’s almost-photoreal small-scale gouache paintings of just that subject matter. Drinks is a collection of 29 paintings (executed between 1989 and 2015) accompanied by related photographs and bar receipts that are similarly true to the book’s title. It’s unclear what exactly the self-declared designation ‘artist book’ means here: does it allude to the fact that the publication is produced in a limited edition (of 400 copies)? Or that it offers limited information beyond the images of works reproduced on its pages? Or simply that it’s more playful than the dry combinations of text and image that we have become used to being presented within the catalogue format?

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Presumably, one thing we’re meant to feel is a sense of intimacy: that we’re being given access to the artist’s private passion. Or as private a passion as a person can have these days: look online and you can find Blair’s recipe for Bloody Marys; videos of Blair and his wife marvelling at a Japanese barman in action; and accounts of the martinis (and only martinis) served at the opening of another show by the artist, that one actually titled Drinks (2015). The solitary text in Drinks (the book), Luis Buñuel’s homage to his favourite beverages (mainly the gin martini), is extracted from the Spanish-Mexican’s autobiography and begins with the words, ‘I can’t count the number of delectable hours I’ve spent in bars’; the images of various drinks in this book suggest that Blair can, whether that

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bar’s in Kyoto, Providence or the seat of a Continental Airlines aircraft. One of the receipts reveals that at the Odeon, in TriBeCa, on 26 April 2010, someone (perhaps Blair and a friend called Kiri, whose name is scrawled on the receipt) drank one Plymouth Gin martini up and two Jevers (Frisian beer). There’s no indication as to why that’s significant. Nor can we tell if any of the drinks Blair painted were more worthy of commemoration than any of the others he drank. Perhaps Blair wishes to propose that art galleries are interchangeable with bars, which Buñuel characterises as ‘the perfect places for the meditation and contemplation indispensable to life’. Perhaps like many painters before him he just appreciates a drink. Mark Rappolt

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For more on Alexander Tucker, see overleaf

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Contributors

Tomáš Pospiszyl is an art historian and writer based in Prague. He teaches at the Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts and at the Academy of Fine Arts, both in Prague. His latest book, a collection of essays titled An Associative History of Art, was published in 2014. This month he surveys recent examples of activist art in the Czech Republic. Martin Herbert is associate editor of ArtReview. He has also authored three books: Mark Wallinger (2011), The Uncertainty Principle (2014) and Tell Them I Said No, which is out shortly and concerns artists who’ve either retreated from the artworld or adopted combative attitudes towards it. He has sat on the acquisitions committee of Arts Council England for the last three years and lectures at De Ateliers in Amsterdam, but mostly he roosts in Berlin, working on his lifelong aim of becoming a table-tennis hustler. Martina Hemm is a photographer who also occasionally writes. She has a BA in international relations and an MA in fine art photography. These academic qualifications have fed into her current project, flashednews.com, a website that combines the stories making headlines internationally with nude photography. This month she photographs Eva Kot’átková for our cover.

Lara Pawson is a freelance writer based in London. She was formerly a BBC correspondent in Angola and several other African countries, and is the author of Name of the People: Angola’s Forgotten Massacre (2015), out this month in softcover. She was longlisted for the Orwell Prize in 2015. Her next book, This Is the Place to Be, will be published by CB Editions in the autumn. This month she reviews Things Fall Apart at Calvert 22, London.

Contributing Writers Markús Andrésson, Robert Barry, Andrew Berardini, Barbara Casavecchia, Bill Clarke, Matthew Collings, Michelangelo Corsaro, Stephanie Cristello, Marie Darrieussecq, Lauren Dyer Amazeen, Chris FiteWassilak, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Grossmalerman, I. Kurator, Kiki Mazzucchelli, Lara Pawson, Tomáš Pospiszyl, Mark Prince, John Quin, Claire Rigby, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Raimar Stange, Susannah Thompson, David Trigg, Dan Udy, Dominic van den Boogerd, Mike Watson, Siona Wilson

Marie Darrieussecq Contributing Editors is a French writer born in the Basque Country in 1969. She lives mainly in Paris. Her first novel, Pig Tales, was published in 1996 and subsequently translated into 35 languages. All told, she has authored some 15 books published in numerous countries around the world, including novels, short stories, a play and a work of nonfiction. In 2013 she was awarded both the Prix Médicis and the Prix des Prix Littéraires for her latest novel, Il faut beaucoup aimer les hommes. She is a regular contributor to Beaux Arts Magazine and Charlie Hebdo. This month she writes a column on freedom and security in today’s Paris.

Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Ewa Axelrad, Martina Hemm, Cynthia Kittler, Samuel Levack & Jennifer Lewandowski, Alexander Tucker

Alexander Tucker (preceding pages)

By 2000, four years of studying painting at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, were enough to alienate Alexander Tucker from the artworld. “Comics were not accepted as a legitimate artform by the tutors or my fellow students, except for painters Luke Caulfield and Djordje Ozbolt, who are both still avid comic readers,” Tucker says. “My returning to comics was a reaction against the art establishment.” As a boy, he had made small comic strips called ‘The Artist’ for his local parish magazine in Dungeness, Kent, but embarking on Shandor as part of Sylvia Farago’s anthology Sturgeon White Moss #4 in 2003 marked his first time creating cohesive sequential stories. Parallel to this, Tucker began recording his solo music. “I was struck by the similarity of recording with a digital 8-track to the layering process of painting,” he says. “The placing of individual tracks next to each other to create a whole picture mirrors the glazing techniques I’d employ to build up texture and light within a painting.” Depressed and displaced at the time from family and home, Tucker found making music a way of channelling

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what he was feeling, while the fantastical worldbuilding in his ambitious Shandor comic helped to visualise it. Both media would eventually merge into the finished hybrid piece, partly exhibited in 2014 at the British Library’s Comics Unmasked exhibition. What began as a series of single-page episodes as a distraction from the demands of the Shandor epic has culminated this year in a new graphic novel, World in the Forcefield. “I started working in a more unconscious way, without planning or pencilling,” Tucker explains. “But soon narrative themes presented themselves, and before I knew it a story started to unfold.” The strong inspiration of the nineteenth-century French artist Gustave Doré is evident here. “I was buying the Doré books from Dover. I’d get stoned and lie on the floor poring over each engraving. The individual plates created a comiclike experience. Doré’s illustration of Dante’s Inferno is my favourite. The character of Virgil crops up in Shandor, and Blondy and Wold in World in the Forcefield are based on Virgil and Dante.” Tucker’s latest book is daring and eerily affecting, from his striking mythical tableaux, especially

ArtReview

of the giant godhead figure Gwilam, to the way he undercuts the loftier pronouncements with colloquial or cynical everyday speech, to sequences without words or explanation. “I’ve enjoyed leaving a lot of the imagery open-ended, it leaves lots of room for movement and future ideas. I’ve tried to rely on my unconscious process to generate ideas, which is proving difficult when trying to tie up loose strands but presents an interesting challenge to forming the narrative.” Running through much of World in the Forcefield, and of his new Strip overleaf, introducing the character Mattheworld, is an undertow of separation, loss and longing, perhaps for transformation or transcendence. Tucker recalls, “While beginning the comic, I witnessed the death of my ex-girlfriend’s father. It was the first time being so close to the process of someone passing away. This profoundly affected me and the direction of the comic. I’ve always had this sense of melancholia. Decay and transformation are part of the cycles of life, something I’m still trying to get my head around.” Paul Gravett

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Art and photo credits

Text credits

on the cover and on page 132 photography by Martina Hemm

Phrases on the spine and pages 31, 61 and 95 are from Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, ed Constance Hale, 1996

on page 126 photography by Ewa Axelrad on page 138 illustration by Cynthia Kittler

April 2016

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A Curator Writes April 2016 “So, a curator takes over from Gallery Girl. That’s a novel idea, don’t you think?” I hardly hear Maria’s question. The disjuncture between the Moroccan spicing and the buttered mushrooms in my Champignons Sauvages Parfumés au Ras-el-Hanout Fenouil is upsetting my disposition. It reminds me, more than anything, of that novelty pairing of Poussin and Twombly at Dulwich Picture Gallery five long years ago. I look up at Maria and feel a wave of melancholy. Once a distinguished art historian, she suffered an almost total nervous breakdown after spotting her monograph on Enzo Cucchi in a remainder bookshop in Soho just a month after its publication (shame on you, König !). I remember a lovemaking session with her in Seville’s Hotel Alfonso XIII after an all-day seminar held 15 years ago to discuss Catherine David’s ‘Contemporary Arab Representations’, which I took Maria to in order to revive her morale. “Enzooooo!” she yelled at her climax as she rode me vigorously, her raven-black hair billowing behind her. We hardly talked in the years that followed, as she painstakingly pieced her shattered mental landscape back together. And now she’s an art-market reporter, of all things: a ghastly end as purveyor of gossip and auction results. A more British, more ladylike version of Kenny Schachter. “To be honest,” I continue, “I’ve never seen myself as a curator,” pausing for dramatic effect. “If Harald Szeemann described himself as an exhibition-maker (or Herr Ausstellungsmacher, as I always called him), I see myself as merely a ferryman, humbly transporting the ideas of artists to the modestly informed art viewer. Herr Fährmann, Harald would call me during our work on the 2001 Venice Biennale. And not without some rough fondness, I like to think, although perhaps it was also the effect of my then slim physique and fondness for wearing cloaks that reminded him of Charon.”

Maria has stopped paying attention. “Two thousand and one? Isn’t that when we…” she trails off. I smile and casually flick a stray piece of pasta off the tablecloth so that I can consider the exquisite patterning of the grease stain it has left behind. “I always thought you might be gay after that,” she adds eventually. “Anyhow, on to the proper questions for this interview.” She opens the textured-leather notebook that sits next to her plate of halfeaten Tarte Tatin de Légumes. “So,” she says finally. “Do you think there’s a major downturn coming in the contemporary art market? People are talking about a 20-percent correction.” I’m absolutely baffled. “Well… to be honest, I have no idea. Why on earth would you ask me that? I humbly put together exhibitions in galleries and of course in spaces beyond the gallery – ” I stress the ‘yond’ of ‘beyond’, as I have grown to do over the last few months. “The spaces that I compare to Malraux’s Musée Imaginaire, which I prefer to creatively mistranslate as the gallery of life,” I conclude triumphantly. “Of course, I’ve occasionally flirted with the commercial world. Art Basel’s Parcours kept calling for a while. I told them it was a post for a younger man. Leuenberger deserves his chance. He got his masters degree from Sotheby’s Institute, you know.” “But you’re a columnist now. You’ve taken over from that unfortunate Gallery Girl. She was into fashion and climbing up art’s greasy pole, you are into more permanent things, real things, poles without the grease: values, if you like. You should have views on things like this. This is what the feature I’m writing is about: ‘ArtReview’s New Face’. Although I don’t think anyone would describe your face as ‘new’.” She laughs, but I sense an underlying hostility. “Yes, well, 20 percent? Hmm…” I say, snorting derisively to buy some time. I need a robust and compelling answer: “As Baudrillard noted, consumption is a myth, my dear. Form is temporary. Class is permanent.” “Isn’t that something football commentators say?” Maria rudely interrupts. “Great art will survive the fluctuations of the market, Maria. And when I talk about great art, I don’t just mean Clemente, Gormley, Stingel and those other giants. I see greatness all the time in the many small project-spaces I unceasingly visit. The smaller the better. Literally off the map; the kind of space that Trevor Paglen might celebrate in an artwork. For there I see artists who, to paraphrase Lacan, are in the process of becoming great. As Louise Bourgeois observed, beauty is a series of experiences. And I can tell you I’ve experienced quite a lot in some of the converted railway arches that these project spaces are in.” I lean forward and deliberately place the bent second finger of my left hand against my chin.. “In fact, this correction, which as you say is inevitable, will give these artists the precious space they so need to grow.” Maria’s eyes narrow but I note that she seems to be writing at least some of what I say in her notebook. Suddenly I realise this new role, a Clem Greenberg figure to this emerging generation of artists, is something that I was always meant to inhabit. I. Kurator

Basim Magdy The Stars Were Aligned for a Century of New Beginnings 29.4.—3.7.

»Artist of the Year« 2016 Deutsche Bank KunstHalle Unter den Linden 13/15, 10117 Berlin 10 am—8 pm, Mondays admission free; deutsche-bank-kunsthalle.com