ArtReview December 2014 by ArtReview

On the brink of burnout vol 66 no 9 AR-December-Cover.indd 1

…is art the end? Olafur Eliasson Rebecca Horn The New 14/11/2014 10:56

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PHILIPPE PARRENO QUASI-OBJECTS NOVEMBER 14, 2014 – JANUARY 15, 2015 ESTHER SCHIPPER, BERLIN

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH DECEMBER 4 – 7, 2014 BOOTH J06

ESTHER SCHIPPER SCHÖNEBERGER UFER 65 D –10785 BERLIN TEL: +49 30 374433133 WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

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Jockum Nordström For the insects and the hounds 28 November 2014 - 24 January 2015

David Zwirner 24 Grafton Street London W1S 4EZ 020 3538 3165 davidzwirner.com

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HA U S E R & W IR T H

BHARTI KHER THREE DECIMAL POINTS OF A MINUTE OF A SECOND OF A DEGREE 22 NOVEMBER 2014 – 10 JANUARY 2015 LIMMATSTRASSE 270 8005 ZÜRICH WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

HIRAETH, 2014 FIBREGLASS, WOOD, PAINT, ROPE, GRANITE INSTALLATION DIMENSIONS VARIABLE WOMAN: 185 × 35 × 75 CM PALANQUIN: 310 × 115.5 × 85.5 CM

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THE PRESENT MOMENT (IN B-FLAT), 2014 1-CHANNEL-HD-VIDEO AND 19-CHANNEL-SOUND INSTALLATION

HAUSER & WIRTH

ANRI SALA THE PRESENT MOMENT (in B-flat) 22. NOVEMBER 2014 – 10. JANUAR 2015 LIMMATSTRASSE 270 8005 ZÜRICH WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

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Jonathan Monk 14 November 2014 — 17 January 2015 27 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com AR-Lisson DPS.indd 10

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Art & Language Nobody Spoke

14 November 2014 — 17 January 2015 52 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com AR-Lisson DPS.indd 11

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MICHAËL BORREMANS DIRK BRAECKMAN ANTON CORBIJN RAOUL DE KEYSER JAN DE MAESSCHALCK MARLENE DUMAS KEES GOUDZWAARD SUSAN HARTNETT YUN-FEI JI KIM JONES JOHANNES KAHRS NAOTO KAWAHARA JOHN KÖRMELING MARK MANDERS JOCKUM NORDSTRÖM PIETRO ROCCASALVA GRACE SCHWINDT JENNY SCOBEL BART STOLLE MIRCEA SUCIU LUC TUYMANS PATRICK VAN CAECKENBERGH ANNE-MIE VAN KERCKHOVEN JACK WHITTEN CRISTOF YVORÉ

ZENO X GALERY Godtsstraat 15

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2140 Antwerp Borgerhout Belgium

tel: +32 3 216 16 26

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PIETRO ROCCASALVA The Queen of Gaps November 9 - December 20, 2014

ZENO X GALLERY Godtsstraat 15

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2140 Antwerp Borgerhout Belgium

tel: +32 3 216 16 26

info@zeno-x.com

www.zeno-x.com

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Adriano Costa

Lucas Arruda

Paulo Monteiro

Anna Bella Geiger

Mariana Castillo Deball

Paulo Nazareth

Cibelle Cavalli Bastos

Marina Perez Simão

Paulo Nimer Pjota

Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Matheus Rocha Pitta

Roberto Winter

Deyson Gilbert

Michael Dean

Runo Lagomarsino

f.marquespenteado

Neïl Beloufa

Sonia Gomes

Francesca Woodman

Paloma Bosquê

Thiago Martins de Melo

Leticia Ramos

Patricia Leite

Tunga

Mende s Wood DM Rua da Consolação 3358 Jardins São Paulo SP 01416 – 000 Brazil + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com facebook.com/mendeswood @mendeswooddm R. Marco Aurélio, 311 Vila Romana São Paulo SP 05048 – 000 Brazil

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i8 Gallery Tryggvagata 16 101 Reykjavík Iceland info@i8.is T: +354 551 3666 www.i8.is

ÓLAFUR ELÍASSON

Mat for multidimensional prayers

Grey wool

Mat for multidimensional prayers is a work by Ólafur Elíasson in collaboration with The Grey Sheep Company and i8 Gallery.

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Follow the Heart: The Art of Sean Scully 1964 -2014 Shanghai Himalayas Art Museum 23 November 2014 –25 January 2015 Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing 13 March–23 April 2015

Timothy Taylor Gallery www.timothytaylorgallery.com Kerlin Gallery www.kerlingallery.com

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Sean Scully Landline No Place, 2014 (detail) oil on aluminum 215.9 x 190.5 cm 85 x 75 in © Sean Scully

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From top to bottom: Gelitin, Untitled, 2004, Mixed media, 172 x 80 x 60 cm / 67 23/32 x 31 1/2 x 23 5/8 inches. | Andrea Zittel, A - Z Wagon Station at A - Z West, Joshua Tree, California. | Ettore Spalletti, Installation view at Massimo De Carlo, Milan, 1994. All images: Courtesy Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London MDC_1994_OURS.indd 17

In 1994. May When the first genetically modified tomato becomes available on the market in the United States, in Austria the artists group Gelitin fights against mass-produced food.

October The Joshua Tree National Park in the Californian desert is proclaimed a nature reserve. Years later Andrea Zittel moves there to live and work.

September First show at MDC of a great Italian master: Ettore Spalletti. In 2014 we continue this tradition by representing Gianfranco Baruchello.

www.massimodecarlo.com info@massimodecarlo.com

@mdcgallery

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In support of

Time for life—with two limited edition timepieces in support of Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières. Each watch raises 100 USD, GBP, or EUR for the Nobel Peace Prize winning humanitarian organization. And still these handcrafted mechanical watches with the red 12 cost the same as the classic models from NOMOS Glashütte. Help now, wear forever. Funds raised are donated to Médecins Sans Frontières USA, UK, or Germany, depending on the specific model purchased. For MSF UK, the registered charity no. is 1026588. Available at selected retailers in the three participating countries, as well as online. Find your nearest NOMOS retailer at nomos-watches.com or order online at nomos-store.com

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In with the old and out with the new ‘The end is nigh!’ That’s what it says in ArtReview’s diary at the beginning of December. Not just because earlier this year a priest was busy whispering in its ear that Judgement was coming (sooner than anyone might expect), while constantly (and somewhat disturbingly) dousing himself in the juice milked from the packet of wet wipes he kept producing from within his holy pocket, nor was it just because pretty soon this year’s diary will be consigned to the wastebasket, having run out of relevant months, no. Rather, in the main it was to signal the approach of the unholy Babylon of Art Basel Miami Beach, with its tumble and jumble of parties and chitter-chatter, and introductions (normally self-administered) to flesh-pressers who do something connected to art but are unable to articulate what exactly it is that they do (now you know why wet wipes have been on ArtReview’s mind). And so it was also a reminder to ArtReview that it should think of this issue of its magazine as an antidote to all that. In fact, at one point it was going to be entirely dedicated to what ArtReview portentously termed ‘The New’ (imagining a movie-trailer-type voiceover announcing it to each and every reader), after ArtReview read Michael North’s excellent book on the problem of novelty in contemporary culture earlier this year. That book’s suggestion that art people’s constant quest for the next new thing might amount to little more than an aggravated marketing stunt (given the generally accepted philosophical view that nothing comes out of nothing, and consequently ‘newness’ is impossible) seemed to chime with some of the ‘experiences’ ArtReview had had while on the receiving end of an Agincourt-esque volley of art-marketing patter (not just from galleries about the artists they were showing, but bumf about the art of automobiles, hotels, fashion labels, tobacco products, alcoholic beverages, etc) in Miami last year. Most of it concerned how new, exciting and life-changing the various ‘art’ experiences on offer were going to be. And needless to say… Well, let’s not get bogged down in past disappointments.

The New

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You see, ArtReview isn’t only about problems. It’s into solutions too. Particularly when they fall into its lap. And after a year of travelling around and going to art lectures and exhibitions, it started to wonder whether or not its obsessing about the ‘problem’ of the new wasn’t unconnected to the fact that it needed to reevaluate its definition of novelty (and the fact that people at art fairs and even some readers keep asking it what’s new all the time). Sometimes there are new things to be found in studies of what seems to be old. And not just stuff that’s been newly framed and ‘rediscovered’ on a stand in Frieze Masters. Recently ArtReview saw shows of not-new work by Malevich, Reinhard Mucha, various exponents of Dansaekhwa and of the Zero group, and even Anselm Keifer, among others, that gave it pause for thought. And not just because, having seen a bunch of contemporary shows, it started to think, ‘Oh yeah? That’s been done before.’ It made ArtReview think about some of its own heroes – like Rebecca Horn, whose work was one of its earliest motivations for going to galleries – and want to look at them again. Perhaps to get back to something of the unjaded original pleasures ArtReview got from looking at art back then. A bit like having a second marriage ceremony, although as ArtReview worried that Horn might think that was a bit much, it sent one of its German-speaking contributors to see her instead. What’s wrong with what’s already there? Does good art have a sell-by? An endpoint? OK – to be clear here – ArtReview isn’t looking for one of those handwringing debates about ‘the end’ of art (it doesn’t have the space or the appetite right now); rather it wonders whether the new can be found in the old. Not even in the old, but rather in what’s already there. In fact, perhaps it’s about reimagining the potential of what’s already there. At least that’s why ArtReview sent one of its operatives to talk to Olafur Eliasson about his experiments concerning the potential for art to exist as a contributing factor in society at large, to expand the reach of art. So where’s all this going? Well, maybe with Miami round the bend, this issue is about reminding you that it’s not all bad. ArtReview

Which booth did you say it was?

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richard Pousette-Dart

510 West 25th st NeW York throUGh JaNUarY 10, 2015

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ArtReview vol 66 no 9 December 2014

Art Previewed 29

Previews by Martin Herbert 31

Annabelle Selldorf Interview by Tom Eccles 60

Points of View by J. J. Charlesworth, Maria Lind, Mike Watson, Mark Sladen, Sam Jacob, Andrew Berardini, Jonathan T. D. Neil & Oliver Basciano 45

Dimitris Daskalopoulos Interview by Mark Rappolt 66

Merlin the wizard on zombie abstraction Interview by Matthew Collings 56

The Law and Its Ideas by Daniel McClean 70

page 36 Alexander Hnilitsky, neoGeo, 2006, oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist’s family

December 2014

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Art Featured 73

The New by Michael North 74

Yang Fudong by Aimee Lin 92

Olafur Eliasson by Martin Herbert 78

Beautiful Evidence, Pretty Lies by Hettie Judah 98

Rebecca Horn by Gesine Borcherdt 86

Africa: Art in Context by Marie Darrieussecq 101

Rebecca Horn, Finger Gloves, 1971, fabric. Private collection. Photo: Achim Thode. © the artist / VG Bild Kunst / ARS

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ArtReview

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Olafur Eliasson Contact

18 December 2014 – 16 February 2015 Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr

Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York

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Art Reviewed 107

Iulia Nistor, by Olga Stefan David Lamelas, by Aoife Rosenmeyer There Is No Place Like Home, by Mike Watson Elmgreen & Dragset, by Roos van der Lint Christian Falsnaes, by Raimar Stange ˙ Agnieszka Brzezańska, by Barbara Piwowarska Anna Gaskell & Douglas Gordon, by Christopher Mooney Susie Wong, by Sherman Sam 31st Bienal de São Paulo, by Oliver Basciano

Exhibitions 108 David Hammons, by Pavel S. Pyś Steve McQueen, by Dan Udy Michele Abeles, by Sean Ashton Jon Thompson, by J.J. Charlesworth Gerhard Richter, by Brian Dillon Jonathan Baldock, by Helen Sumpter Pierre Huyghe, by Chris Fite-Wassilak The Mechanical Garden and Other Long Encores, by Louise Darblay Josh Faught, by Susannah Thompson Cory Arcangel, by Orit Gat Strauss Bourque-LaFrance, by David Everitt Howe Justine Kurland, by Siona Wilson Harun Farocki, by Brienne Walsh Geta Brătescu, by Joseph Akel Edgar Arceneaux, by Ed Schad Cayetano Ferrer, by Jonathan Griffin Lisa Anne Auerbach, by Andrew Berardini Glenn Kaino, by Christian Viveros-Fauné This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time, by Sam Steverlynck Ryan Trecartin, by Karen Archey

books 138 Memory Theatre, by Simon Critchley Curationism, by David Balzer The George Kuchar Reader, edited by Andrew Lampert Loose Monk, by Fabian Peake thE stRiP 142 oFF thE RECoRD 146

Steve McQueen, Ashes, 2014, Super 8 film transferred to hD video, single-channel continuous projection with sound, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, London & Paris

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erwin wurm november 07 — december 20 2014 w w w.bjergga ard.com

ART BASEL MIAMI BEACH DECEMBER 04 - 07

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Tiril Hasselknippe Sophanes Perils. Your biggest gripes. Tug of war. Initiation. Square this. Brought to the end. Not requiring any more work. Completed. Done. Into the abyss. Age least. The state of the union. So stark. You scamp. The sky is soft. Softer around your frame. Riding the creature. Flinching. Filing. Holding. The perfume is reactive. Weighing down the air with alcohol. Breaking out. All of it. Most of it. Stay congruent. Rooted by default. Words fail. Thousand Islands dress up. I was here first. He didn't tell me until it was too late. After the fact lores. The two rules of life. Love your best friend and cry. Seal the story. Keep it safe. Sage advice. Don't remind me. Movement already. The plates are migrating. This is not a painless flight. Moving and removing. I will not tell. Keep it still. Stay in this bed. Bed peace. Uninstall. Deinstall. Reconfigure. Program this. Show me the games you made. Demonstrate distortion. Warps. Sound waves like the ocean. Collect all the times I put my head on your shoulder. Forget. The hands are so small. It is a wonder they can preform at all. Brace. A brazen landscape. Vapors exit. No truth in these temperatures. The car moves with me. We move alone. The third eye speaks. Providing structure. The old world was cultivated. Define your needs. Standards. Plural. Always. You go in pieces. Parts of you stay. Sand digging into the surface. Chafing. Layer protection. Look at the pictures. See the evidence. See them again and quantify. Study the gaze. Suffocate hope. Stare it down until it whimpers. See the truths. See the likes. Winks. Links. Kill it now. Let it die. Die in pieces. Brace. Brace. Lift off. I smell acetone. I roll them up. Coiled eyes. The right card at the right time. Place the message. Ready the earth grid and prep the ground. Going the distance. Running to Marathon. Platitudes notwithstanding. Display. Coaxing the sky. Tell me all the ways to anchor. The release of weight in the right place. I don't like leaving. Sophanes told me the truth. All the reasons and the secrets of the sun. The sun points to the moon and tells me he is interesting. Things are sweet. He kisses softly at night. Curl. Hone. The moon has a few freckles on his shoulders. And a strong nose. She leaves every morning boarding her flight. This is what they say about space travel. Amateurs talk about technology. Professionals talk about insurance. The sun pleads with Sophanes to borrow his anchor. Inland pathways. Command ending. Shorten the distance. Tighten. The whispers leave. The whispers linger. Slipping. Bury this. Slide Some parts stay. A sum of totals. Chained to my cuirass. Be seated forever.

December 17, 2014 - January 23, 2015

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Art Previewed

MEL MEL MEL! I think I’m in love with you! I say this every week. Your ballsy, straight-up attitude and straight talking is incredible. I want to see more ‘you’ with your outfits, though. Don’t let the conservative look take over – dress so that your true personality shines through. Shout out to your #browqueen – tell her I miss her! 29

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Visit artreview.com to review the 2014 FutureGreats and FutureGreats Asia, a guide to the artists who will be setting agendas for the coming year

Practitioners of the craft of private banking efginternational.com

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Previewed Caragh Thuring Chisenhale, London through 1 February

Huang Yong Ping maxxi, Rome 19 December – 24 May

Brent Wadden Peres Projects, Berlin through 10 January

R.H. Quaytman Gladstone Gallery, New York through 20 December

Artes Mundi Various venues, Cardiff through 22 February

Art Experiment: 32 Questions from John Cage Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow 22 December – 11 January

Xu Bing lacma, Los Angeles 13 December – 26 July

Tunga Pilar Corrias, London through 17 January Pietro Roccasalva Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp through 20 December

Kochi-Muziris Biennale Various venues, Fort Kochi and Mattancheri 12 December – 29 March

7 Pietro Roccasalva, Il Traviatore, 2014, charcoal and pastel on paper on panel, 113 × 81 cm. Photo: Peter Cox. Courtesy Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp

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1 Caragh Thuring makes paintings for, and against, a world that barely has time for such an unhurried, substantial medium: mostly composed of bare brown canvas, they’re flecked with imagery that is sparse and fragmented, yet dosed with complexity. In Rope (2013), the eponymous cord wraps around a wall-mounted metal hoop before vectoring out of frame, while Hunter (2013) is a frieze of exploded slivers and architectural details, a jigsaw lacking most of its pieces. For the Brussels-born, Londonbased artist’s Chisenhale show, a specific logic of substitution is in play. Thuring considers arrangements of objects in the picture windows of Dutch suburban homes as portraits of their owners – how the inanimate might replace representations of people is a fascination of hers – and makes paintings that list, stolidly and densely, all the churches within the Square Mile

of the City of London: summarising and compliautobiographical and contingent elements into her work, from references to where her art is cating, swapping things for people and words shown, to family and friends and fellow artists. for things, accepting the pressured gaze and O Tópico, Chapter 27 (2014), shown here, was strategising, in the teeth of what she’s called commissioned for Inhotim, Brazil, and interlaces ‘the speed of absorption’, to slow it down. the Fibonacci sequence, Brazilian and American Comparably fascinated by, as she’s written, artists, and, says Quaytman, a particularly 2 ‘how – not only what – we see’, R.H. Quaytman’s relevant line by Hélio Oiticica: ‘Brazil diarrhea, silkscreen-heavy suites of Chapter paintings (2001–) read as sentencelike structures, ones that what matters: the creation of a language…’ suggest, in critic Martha Schwendener’s words, 3 The creation of a language: in 1988, Xu Bing first exhibited Book from the Sky (1987–91), an that ‘how we look at images and the world installation of books and scrolls covered with a right now may be provisional, another chapter plethora of Chinese-looking characters but whose in the story of vision, technology and humanity’. What these images are constructed from, too, language, carved laboriously into thousands feels personal and edged with happenstance. of woodblocks and then printed, was invented The Boston-born Quaytman – daughter of a poet by the artist. Collapsing together Chinese and Western modernist traditions and opening and an artist, former assistant of Dan Graham up a space of imagination and possibility that and cofounder of the influential, now-defunct accepted and yet circumvented China’s heavy New York gallery Orchard – often filters

2 R.H. Quaytman, O Tópico, Chapter 27, 2014, encaustic, acrylic, polyurethane foam and gesso on panel, 102 × 111 × 69 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels

1 Caragh Thuring, Dutch Details, 2013, oil, gesso, acrylic on canvas, 240 × 180 cm. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London

3 Xu Bing, The Character of Characters, 2012, animated film, 17 min. © the artist. Courtesy Xu Bing Studio, Brooklyn

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Huang Yong Ping, Serpent d’Océan, 2012, Saint-Brevin-les-Pins, France. Photo: Bernard Renoux/ADAGP, Paris

5 Omer Fast, Continuity (still), 2012, 40 min. Courtesy GB Agency, Paris, and Arratia Beer, Berlin

past, the work originally caused a sensation in China; in the West, its meaning shifts, seemingly by design. Cross-pollination is a central issue for Xu: see A Case Study of Transference (1994), two pigs printed with language (one from Book from the Sky, the other with nonsense sequences of letters from the Roman alphabet), left to mate in a pen scattered with books in different languages. Don’t expect pig sex in The Language of Xu Bing, LACMA’s two-decade survey, but do expect Book… and Xu’s ‘magnum opus’, The Character of Characters (2012), the evolution of Chinese language explored via more than 1,000 hand-drawn sketches, digitally blended. Xu and Huang Yong Ping have exhibited 4 together, and not surprisingly: both are doyens of Chinese avant-gardism and both have performed productively destructive, miscegenating acts on language. Contemporaneously with

Book from the Sky, in The History of Chinese Painting as the press info notes, a reference to the biblical and the History of Modern Western Art Washed in book of Exodus: ‘Aaron cast down his staff the Washing Machine for Two Minutes (1987) Huang before Pharaoh and before his servants, and put a Chinese art-history book and an English it became a serpent.’ one through a wash cycle and turned them to Now in its tenth year, Artes Mundi – whose 5 pulp, then exhibited the result on a wooden first winner, in 2004, was Xu Bing – is a biennial box. Following the Tiananmen Square massacre, prize with a conscience (and a £40,000 pot, making it the UK’s biggest art award), intended his work shifted towards Buddhist and Taoist concerns while still merging Western and to celebrate artists worldwide who reflect the Eastern aesthetics: see, for example, 100 Arms human condition and lived experience. This of Guan-yin (1997), which splits the difference year, the nine shortlisted figures include Omer between a many-armed Chinese deity and Fast, Theaster Gates, Sharon Lockhart, Renzo Martens and Karen Mirza & Brad Butler, whittled Duchamp’s bottle rack. At the MAXXI show, down from a list of some 800 entrants by curators Bâton Serpent, expect, among other monumenAdam Budak and Sabine Schaschl; the work is tal installations, a huge aluminium serpent, shown in three venues in Cardiff (the National ‘ideally representing an encounter between Museum, Chapter and Ffotogallery); the winner East and West and proposing a critical analysis is announced on 15 January; and the event’s of the contemporary geopolitical situation’: media partner is, well, yes, ArtReview. Live events somewhere between a Chinese dragon and,

December 2014

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in collaboration between Artes Mundi and ourselves will be running in January. (See artesmundi.org for details.) 6 Over four decades, Brazilian artist Tunga has developed a Joseph Beuys-esque iconography that, alongside works in film, drawing and poetry, charges a select range of talismanic objects – currently crystals, glass, ceramics, sponges, rubber – with ritual significance. Raised up on plinths, strung through their steel legs or scattered on the ground beneath them, the elements he uses intersect contemporary aesthetics with a cosmology that is ancientfeeling yet self-invented, such that the work comes across like a fictional anthropology and also an insight into something real, if speculative: the origins of modernity in antiquated, tribal aesthetics, and our larger need to invest significance in mute objects. His show From

‘La Voie Humide’, which features sculptures and who doesn’t stop there: his work branches into Tunga’s related ink drawings, has toured around film, tableau vivant, neon and more, engendering situations that have a structural logic but in the last year or so: here, in his second show are full of ellipses: the title of his latest solo at with Pilar Corrias, related but new works arrive Zeno X, The Queen of Gaps, feeling highly approin London. An ineradicable propensity for belief priate in this regard. 7 underwrites Pietro Roccasalva’s work, too: Also in painting-not-painting: Brent 8 from Intelligent Artifice(r) (1999–2003), a painting Wadden, who weaves what look like abstract, that looks like a cyborgian Christ, to The Fourteen geometric canvases from secondhand lengths Stations (You Never Look at Me from the Place I See of yarn. The Canadian artist, who only began You), a mix of drawings and 14 framed Moleskine weaving four years ago, tends not to have enough notebooks from 2010 with Judeo-Christian material and so fills in the gaps with other overtones in its title, to recent canvases in which shades, lending his work an offhand quality that, like the fuzziness of his line, undercuts what faith and elevation become metaphorical (via would be precise compositional structures. iconography featuring balloons, for example), Not so far removed from Caragh Thuring, then, the Italian artist seems to ask what one does with Wadden insists on the handmade and the slowly the need for transcendence when one doesn’t accreted: there’s nothing digital in his work, have faith, when one is alienated from religion. but the dematerialised context is present enough. Like Victor Man and a few others, he’s a painter

6 Tunga, Untitled (Rubber Pod), 2014. Courtesy Pilar Corrias, London

8 Brent Wadden, TBT, 2014, handwoven fibres, wood, cotton and acrylic on canvas, 182 × 231 cm. Courtesy Peres Projects, Berlin

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SAM FRANCIS

Blue, Black, Red, Green (SF62-144) 1962-1963 Gouache and watercolor on paper 11” x 10-1/4” (27.9 x 26 cm)

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10 Artists K.G. Subramanyan, Jitish Kallat (left) and Suresh Jayaram (right) in a Kochi Biennale Foundation-sponsored talk, August 2014. Courtesy Kochi Biennale Foundation

9 Alexander Hnilitsky, neoGeo, 2006, oil on canvas. Courtesy the artist’s family

The chief lesson here, though, appears to be: listen to advice. A few years ago, the Berlin-based Wadden was painting and his friends were telling him his works would make great textiles. He paid attention, and now, while untrained in weaving and working to the dimensions of his own kitchen table – that was the last we heard, anyway – he’s starring in his own ripping yarn (sorry). Chance-related art for the younger generation seems to be a growth area. Following Carsten Höller’s giant dice for children to clamber inside at the last Frieze Art Fair, December 9 heralds Art Experiment: 32 Questions from 10 John Cage at Moscow’s Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, this year’s example of the institution’s so-called Art Experiment. It’s Christmas (and New Year) and the juniors are out of school: what better distraction than, say, using

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a hydraulic press to turn any object (homework?) into dust and have the recording of said process turned into a cd, or conducting a ‘multichannel virtual orchestra’ consisting of 13 robots? Gentrifying these, we’re told, is something more like an exhibition: lightand sound-based artworks and installations by Russian and international artists including Cage himself (‘questions’ from whom serve as a guide through the show), Ukraine’s Institution of Unstable Thoughts, the workshop of ‘sound sculpture’ innovators François and Bernard Baschet, etc. The first Kochi-Muziris Biennale was conceived by two Mumbai-based artists, held two years ago in Kerala, and constituted India’s first biennial. It didn’t lack for teething problems. The event was dogged by controversy over lack of transparency in the allocation

of funds, and artworks being held up in customs or delayed for other reasons meant that, at the opening, the show was only partly installed. That being said, it was far from a failure: 10,000 visitors attended in the first week and 400,000 in total, the art scene in the area was reportedly catalysed as a result and the second edition, Whorled Explorations, is now here. Indian newspapers report extensive sponsorship for the biennial, which is curated by artist (and first-time curator, working unpaid) Jitish Kallat and features 95 artists from 30 countries – including Anish Kapoor, Bharti Kher and Dayanita Singh – as well as a ‘Student’s Biennale’ and a film festival. ‘The strength of the biennale is its fragility… of doing what you can with what you have’, says Kallat, who’s clearly no slouch in the spin department. Martin Herbert

ArtReview

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A ConferenC e & e xeCutive eduCAtion P rogrAm Presented By Sot H eBY ’S inSt it ut e o f Art In Collaboration With t H e g et t Y Le AderS Hi P inSt it ut e C LA r emo nt g rA duAt e univ erS it Y CALifo r niA LAW Y erS fo r t H e A rtS

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January 26–28 2015, Los Angeles

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January 30–31 2015, Los Angeles 12 MCLE credits (1 ethics credit)* fACuLtY And LeCturerS WiLL inCLude

* MCLE credits administered by California Lawyers for the Arts in CA. Approval for other states contingent upon state bar requirements. † Denotes Sotheby’s Institute of Art faculty member

Sotheby’s Institute of Art is a Division of Cambridge Information Group

Hillary Bauer, Tom Christopherson†, Stephen Clark, Brad Cohen, Sarah Conley Odenkirk†, Kate Fitz Gibbon, Simon Frankel, M. Franklin Boyd†, David Galligan, Fred Goldstein, Melody Kanshat, Lawrence M. Kaye, Kibum Kim†, Jonathan Petropolous, Judith Prowda†, Joshua Roth, Mary Rozell†, James Salzmann, Sergio Sarmiento, Ronald Spencer, Lucian Simmons KeY note AddreSS BY SHePArd fAireY

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Nov—Feb

Free admission Until 6 April 2015

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Lee Bul, Seoul, July 2014. Photo: Na seung

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Sigmar Polke „Für ein Rasterbild“ (Don Quichotte, Serie „.....Höhere Wesen befehlen“), 1968 © The Estate of Sigmar Polke, Cologne/VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2014

5.12. — 8.3.

».....Höhere Wesen befehlen« Works on Paper from the Frieder Burda Collection Unter den Linden 13/15, 10117 Berlin Daily 10 am – 8 pm, Mondays admission free; deutsche-bank-kunsthalle.com

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CHTO DELAT? RENATA LUCAS PETER BARTOŠ 21.11. 2014 – 25.1. 2015

secession Friedrichstraße 12, A-1010 Wien, www.secession.at

Classical Modern and Contemporary Art

5 – 8 March 2015

Karlsruhe Trade Fair Center www.art-karlsruhe.de

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13/11/2014 17:27

Points of View J.J. Charlesworth Butt plugs and burning churches Maria Lind A funhouse in Paris brings to mind a classic fairytale

Jonathan T.D. Neil Art seals the deal in Detroit’s ‘grand bargain’

Sam Jacob Do novelty products reveal the future of design?

Mark Sladen Kill or cure: has archivism replaced activism?

Andrew Berardini Peaches & cream

Mike Watson Capital ideas? Looking ahead to the Venice Biennale

Oliver Basciano Off-space No 24: Tidens Krav, Oslo

J.J. Charlesworth Butt plugs and burning churches President François Hollande is really into butt plugs. That’s right, you heard it here first – the president of the French Republic is totally up for the popular anal pleasurement devices. Sort of. OK, so maybe I’m paraphrasing a bit. But what he did say was, ‘France will always be on the side of artists, just as I am on the side of Paul McCarthy, whose work was sullied, no matter what one’s opinion of the piece may have been.’ Hollande was of course reacting to the street assault on the American artist by an irate, unknown passerby, who had taken strong exception to McCarthy’s inflatable sculpture Tree (2014), while the artist had been overseeing its installation on the Place Vendôme, ahead of Paris’s FIAC art fair in October. The bright green shape, a blunt cone on a cinched pedestal, could be seen as a schematised Christmas tree, but for most Parisians, irate or not, it resembled a huge green bum cork, and after a couple of days in situ, and subject to various incidents of attempted vandalism, FIAC and McCarthy gave up and took the inflatable down. Obviously, by siding with McCarthy, Hollande was trying to show that he is a fearless defender of freedom of artistic expression and cultural tolerance. It was similarly the point that members of the French section of the International Association of Art Critics (AICA) were trying to make when they held a demonstration in support of McCarthy, holding aloft

photographs of the by-now-removed Tree. AICA France’s protest against what one might call ‘censorship from below’ is merely the latest incident in which artworks face calls for them to be banned or removed, not by state authorities, but by various groups of upset or offended citizens. In ArtReview’s November issue, Daniel McClean reported on the campaign this summer by an Italian children’s rights group against the

Identity politics initially emerged out of the claims of particular oppressed groups, but now every minority group has realised that since everyone else can demand protection from criticism, they too should get in on the act exhibition of a work by the Chapman Brothers included in a show at Rome’s MAXXI, which finally conceded and removed the work from display. In London in October, a group of activists succeeded in forcing the Barbican Centre to cancel its run of theatre-installation work Exhibit B (2014) by white South African director Brett Bailey, declaring that the piece was an affront to black people in its use of black actors to depict scenes of slavery. The same month, the curator

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of the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid faced a lawsuit from the Spanish Association of Catholic Lawyers for the removal from the group show Really Useful Knowledge of a work by Argentinean collective Mujeres Públicas’s Cajita de Fósforos (Matchbox, 2005), which, according to outraged campaigners, was an incitement to set churches on fire and an insult to those of faith. And at the beginning of November, organisers of the Paris Le Mois de la Photo caved in to a handful of letters of complaint, one from a ‘survivor of incest’, by removing photographs by Diane Ducruet of the artist cuddling and kissing her child. Art has long been a flashpoint for controversy and censure, but this new culture of outrage is different; it’s not just a matter of traditional rightwing and religious moralists getting upset. Every sort of minority interest group – ethnic minority activists, antipaedophile campaigners, Christians – finds cause to get hotly offended, and to demand that offending artworks be banished from the public eye. In part, this mixed-up situation represents the point where the logic of identity politics converges with the growing culture of deference towards the figure of the victim of abuse – whether present or historical. So when it comes to the now-regular campaigns against works deemed in some way obscene, these are led not by old-school moralists but – in the paranoid and delusional culture

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of child-abuse panic – by campaign groups who claim to represent the interests of victims of abuse, and who claim the absolute right to judge an artwork, regardless of anybody else’s opinion. So, during the Exhibit B controversy, the campaigners rejected every assertion – even, to the point of absurdity, by the all-black cast itself – that the intention of the work wasn’t racist: if you’re a ‘survivor’ and offended, it’s your version of reality that counts, and no one else’s. Identity politics initially emerged out of the claims of particular oppressed groups – blacks, gays, women – but now every minority group has realised that since everyone else can demand protection from criticism, they too should get in on the act: as a pro-Christian petition against the Reina Sofía show argued huffily, ‘It would be reprehensible for a religious denomination to request money from the government to insult feminists.’ Of course, the number of pro-Catholic contemporary artists who have received public funding to make artworks critical of feminists is, I suspect, precisely zero. But that, ironically, takes us back to McCarthy’s butt plug, or rather Hollande’s solemn but rather hollow defence of freedom of expression; in reality, the president’s self-important championing of freedom

only really extends to the freedom of artists to express the sort of mildly transgressive liberal values that the liberal political establishment is comfortable with – an establishment that by contrast is pretty intolerant of traditionalist or religious values: in a country where you can erect a giant butt plug on the Place Vendôme, you’ll nevertheless get arrested if you walk across it wearing a niqab.

The number of pro-Catholic contemporary artists who have received public funding to make artworks critical of feminists is, I suspect, precisely zero That the cultural establishment is relaxed about the supposedly ‘transgressive’ gestures of artists such as McCarthy, Bailey or the Chapmans suggests that, in reality, their rather dismal and misanthropic view of people and society has become commonplace. McCarthy’s puerile conflation of patriarchal culture, consumerism and abjection is easily swallowed by a culture that prefers cynical disenchantment to idealism; the Chapmans’ frigid posthumanism sees

people as thoughtless, instinct-driven insects; and Bailey’s rehearsal of past barbarism turns art into a kind of therapy, as if white people today should be made to feel somehow still responsible for the past suffering of black people. Ironically, the inheritors of once-radical-seeming, psychoanalytical critiques of normality that artists like McCarthy draw on are the new victim-protesters, who see psychological trauma hidden in every innocent image, and emotional violence constantly lurking below the surface of everyday life. Artists don’t deserve to get punched in the street, and artworks don’t deserve to be pulled from public view, however upsetting they are to a few, however traumatised they declare themselves to be. To give in to such pressures is to give up on the possibility of debating the value of an artwork for the broadest audience, in cowed deference to the narrowest – at which point you might as well give up on art criticism, for fear of offending anyone. Yet freedom of expression also means the freedom to criticise it – to criticise the everyday orthodoxies that lie behind shitty artworks. To be on the side of artists, ‘no matter what one’s opinion’, makes art, and opinion, equally worthless.

Mujeres Públicas, Cajita de Fósforos, 2005. Courtesy Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid

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ArtReview

13/11/2014 17:42

Maria Lind A funhouse in Paris brings to mind a classic fairytale How much can something grow before it outgrows itself? How much expansion is possible until things fall apart? Visiting the newly inaugurated Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris’s lush Bois de Boulogne provoked many thoughts about expansionism, commercialism and bad art, and some feelings, primarily negative ones. It is described in French on the English website as ‘une nouvelle aventure culturelle’, a new cultural adventure. Or fairytale? In some languages, like Danish, an adventure (eventyr) is precisely a fairytale. Frank Gehry’s vaguely organic-looking building is truly spectacular. With its many peculiar spatial setups, dwindling staircases, odd balconies and curved windows (who will clean them, and how?) it resembles a funhouse at an amusement park. Art itself is present as yet another kind of attraction, as something by which to be impressed and entertained. There are two crucial aspects here: scale and make-believe. Everything is oversize, even the artworks are blown-up to fit in both with the large scale of the exhibition spaces and the expectations of the attention economy. And it is about a fairytale-style approach to what is at hand. It is Marie Antoinette busy with her socialising and fussing over her pets on the brink of the Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II ordering ever more Fabergé eggs while the uprisings begin. It is romantic and regressive, exaggerated and escapist. No wonder, then, that the artworks are treated as crown jewels in a theatrical treasury connected to different members of a royal entourage. There is no context, neither historical nor contemporary, neither art-specific nor social, neither political nor economic. There is also no form of embracing what has been selected and

combined outside of an attempt at canon-making. Canon-making as a method of writing history, as a method of curating and as a principle of running an art institution is far from a new phenomenon. It has been known in various forms since Giorgio Vasari’s Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1550), an amusing piece of writing that is not devoid of fairytalelike accounts of the lives of the ‘creatives’ of the Renaissance. However, with the boom of the commercial art market and its need for legitimacy and promotion, canon-making has regained new strength and influence. The most surprising part of the story is that this way of working is nowadays employed by some of the recent past’s most pronounced supporters of deconstruction and its critique of grand narratives, master discourses and other power hierarchies. But as this place is a funhouse, there is a strong suspicion that the crown jewels must be fake. The royal patrilineage quickly reveals itself as a blunt and anachronistic form of creating a narrative. Descending yet another staircase, and catching a glimpse of water falling on wide steps, I suddenly remember the amusements in the royal parks of St Petersburg. Peter the Great, Catherine the Great and the other rulers of Russia excelled in commissioning awesome and charming waterfalls, fountains and other games. The most skilled engineers and inventors of their time helped to construct costly wonders for the pleasure of the royals, not unlike how Gehry’s technical solutions are highlighted here. So decadent-looking is the luxury goodsreliant Louis Vuitton Foundation that even the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris. Photo: © Iwan Baan. Courtesy Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris

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nestors of philosophy have raised their voices. Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy and Georges Didi-Huberman among others just published an article in Mediapart where they argue that the critical voices in art have also been bought by the wealthiest companies in France, which now compete for influence over the conditions of artistic production. It is not at all about patronage but about speculation and accumulation and preservation of capital, the philosophers argue, and they are of course right. The owners of these companies not only want to dominate our work, they also want to control our attention. And this current symbiosis between capital and the media, the authors contend, is only possible because the artists have allowed their work to be absorbed and become ‘designed’ art. What puzzles me most is not that the artists agreed to be part of this funhouse – most of them are not that interesting or sophisticated in the first place – but that the Arnaults and Pinaults of the world are so conformist and uninventive. About to leave the Gehry building, I realise that there is a real fairytale that might say something about this: Jack and the Beanstalk. When Jack’s widowed mother asked her son to sell their only cow (as it no longer produced milk), he instead exchanged it for some magic beans offered to him by a stranger. The beans grew fast, stretching above the clouds, where they reached the palace of a rich giant. Jack climbed the beanstalk, and aided by the giant’s wife, he took some of the giant’s riches. Discovering the theft, the giant chased the boy, who was faster and managed to cut down the beanstalk, thereby killing the giant and living happily off the loot forever after. The question is: who is Jack in our tale?

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Mike Watson Capital ideas? Looking ahead to the Venice Biennale Okwui Enwezor’s presentation of his curatorial vision for the 56th Venice Biennale – which is to be held between 9 May and 22 November next year – appears on initial impressions to represent a serious reflection upon these unstable times. Titled All the World’s Futures, the Biennale will attempt to address ‘the ruptures that surround and abound around every corner of the global landscape today’, as Enwezor told an audience assembled at the Biennale headquarters, close to Venice’s Piazza San Marco, in late October. It remains to be seen whether Enwezor’s Biennale lives up to his ambitions, though the centrepiece of his proposal – to have performers read all four volumes of Das Kapital (1867–94) over the entire course of the Biennale – promises to provoke intense debate. Above all, one might ask whether this act, at one of the world’s most prestigious art events, presents an opportunity to put Marx’s thought at the centre of debate on the ongoing economic crisis or, rather, hammers a final nail into the coffin of the left. Is politically motivated art resilient enough to withstand the inherent contradiction of Kapital taking centre stage during the Biennale’s exclusive opening days (from 6 to 9 May), when its reading will begin in front of an assortment of the artworld’s most powerful players? Beneath these questions lies a deeper one: how art might be most useful in a social context. The Fondazione Prada’s Art or Sound – an exhi bition that was on show (between 7 June and 1 November) at nearby Ca’Corner and examined the relationship between art and audio – allowed

for reflection upon vastly different approaches to art’s role in relation to both society and audience empowerment. Artists and craftsmen as diverse as Giovan Battista Cassarini, Marcel Duchamp, Theo van Doesburg, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Artschwager, Bruce Nauman, Ken Butler, Martin Creed and Ruth Ewan were among those represented by its 180 works. The resulting cacophony presented a carnivalesque journey through the history of sound art. Highlights included Gebrüder Wellershaus’s earlytwentiethcentury fairground

When has a person ever been responsible for wrongdoing while in a moment of detached contemplation? organ, a loud, impossibly clunky machine that recalled the deeply machinic and physical aspect of music reproduction in times gone by. Two works on display exemplified two vastly different approaches to both social art and the role of sound in empowering the individual. Cassarini’s Contralto Viola (1687) is a violin made of white marble with intricately laid marble paste inlays. The piece, beautiful to look at but unfit for playing, could be seen to represent both the distance of music from the uneducated masses and the necessary remove of artistic endeavour from everyday life: aesthetic reflec tion arguably demands critical distance from social problems. From this distance, novel

solutions may emerge. Yet aside from this, such an approach to art can have a meditative aspect that is of value in itself. After all, when has a person ever been responsible for wrongdoing while in a moment of detached contemplation? At the other extreme, Ruth Ewan’s A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World (2003–) is a CD jukebox loaded with discs featuring over 2,000 tracks categorised into sections such as ‘War’, ‘Feminism’, ‘Civil Rights’, etc. Ewan’s work is an ongoing archive to which the public can submit song suggestions by web links as well as choose which songs play within a given display setting. The extreme opposite of Cas sarini’s violin, it conveys very direct political messages via predominantly folk and protest songs, offering a high level of interaction. Such works aim to promote direct debate, though arguably lose the aspect of critical distance that reflection allows. While it is unclear to what level the reading of Das Kapital at the 56th Biennale will be an interactive experience, it should represent – in terms of visibility – a new highpoint in the recent history of directly political art actions on the world stage. Whether it has the potential to move the cause of political art forward remains to be seen. With history being arguably cyclic, the performance may read more like an elegy ahead of a sharp turn towards purely aesthetic values. In the meantime the socially engaged artworld contingent would do well to develop the positive potential of reflection as an adjunct to its more direct activity.

Ruth Ewan, A Jukebox of People Trying to Change the World, 2003–, CD jukebox, listing of songs, 140 × 100 × 70 cm. Courtesy the artist and Rob Tufnell, London

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ArtReview

13/11/2014 17:42

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13/11/2014 17:27

Mark Sladen Kill or Cure: has archivism replaced activism? During the late 1950s two gay artists began a strange project that infiltrated a local library in London. The figures in question were Joe Orton, subsequently a celebrated playwright, and his lover Kenneth Halliwell. The artists collaged their own pictures and texts onto existing book covers, creating new, imagined publications that promised surreal, subversive and homoerotic smut. The lovers were consequently prosecuted, spending six months in jail, and the episode is most often recounted as the founding incident in Orton’s public notoriety. However, in a recent exhibition at Artists Space, New York, the episode was reread as a curious case within the ongoing triangulation between art, the book and the library. The exhibition was The Library Vaccine, an exploration of six distinct projects spread over the institution’s two spaces – including its Books & Talks annexe. These projects ranged chronologically from the time of Orton and Halliwell’s prank to the present day, and each consisted of a grouping of books, although these sets were formed according to a variety of organising principles. Some of the groupings took the form of a library – or addressed the principle of circulation – while others might more properly be called collections. Some were put together by artists, while others were assembled by curators or publishers. And some contained artist books, while others contained a much wider variety of texts. One prominent theme in the exhibition was the relationship between the library and authority. This was implied in Orton and Halliwell’s attack on the institution of the library, but was also raised in two of the exhibition’s more recent projects, which presented personal libraries embodying antiauthoritarian logics. One belongs to the author Helen DeWitt, who displayed her own library, arguing for it as an open presentation of her writing practice. A second was that of Colin

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de Land – the impresario behind American Fine Arts, who died in 2003 – which has been kept together by a collector and made available for exhibition, its eccentric contents continuing to act as an index of the freewheeling approach that this influential New York gallerist took to art and its institutions. Another question raised by the exhibition is how artist books – as a distinct category – might relate to this principle of collection and circulation. The exhibition took its title from curator and writer Edit deAk, who, in a 1981 text, spoke of artist books as ‘the library vaccine, a healing agent formed from the very disease they cure’. This text also reflects the library’s role as a symbol of authority, as well as the powerful idea,

The artists collaged pictures and texts onto book covers, creating publications that promised surreal, subversive and homoerotic smut originating during the 1960s, of artist books as an alternative or utopian form of publishing – a phenomenon that was figured in the exhibition by a re-presentation of Vigilance, a project curated by Mike Glier and Lucy Lippard in New York in 1979. As the poster for Vigilance announced: ‘Although it is far from living up to its populist potential, the artist’s book can be produced in great numbers and distributed internationally. Even though it has volume, it is intimate much like a letter, and, like a letter, it invites dialogue Everything Is About to Happen, 2014, curated by Gregorio Magnani (installation view, The Library Vaccine, Artists Space, New York, 2014). Photo: Daniel Pérez

between the sender and receiver. The artist’s book is a successful democratic form looking for compatible subject matter.’ The Library Vaccine gathered many of the publications that had featured in the original exhibition, including artist projects touching on a wide range of social and political issues, and featuring books such as Rape Is (1972/76) by Suzanne Lacy. Vigilance stood as a magnetic pole within the exhibition, as the most activist interpretation of the relation between art, the book and the ‘corpus’. However, The Library Vaccine also described a countertendency, whereby, as the curators argued, these political aspirations have been gradually subsumed ‘within broader tendencies towards collecting, archiving and the re-circulation of knowledge’. The exhibition’s presentation of projects with such a wide range of organising principles – it also contained a selection of books produced over many decades by the artist-turned-publisher Hansjörg Mayer, and a collection of recent artist books assembled by the curator Gregorio Magnani – emerges as an attempt to construct a partial history of this larger cultural process. Do we agree, as the curators of this exhibition suggest, that the activist paradigm in our culture has been gradually replaced by the archivist one? It’s a depressing thought – and the exhibition could have expanded more on its argument – but there is surely a broad truth in it. This interpretation certainly chimes with the dominance of the collating function within our own digital lives, the lead example being our relation to social media. However, The Library Vaccine also demonstrates how flexible the logic of archiving and recirculating can be, its ability to register personal, social and artistic nuance. These highly divergent collections show how artists and others have been able to use and abuse the form of the library to make – in Helen DeWitt’s phrase – their own social machines.

ArtReview

13/11/2014 17:42

Sam Jacob Do novelty products reveal the future of design? Remember Big Mouth Billy Bass? Sure you do, that animatronic plastic fish mounted like a taxidermied trophy that would wiggle around and sing Bobby McFerrin’s novelty hit Don’t Worry, Be Happy (1988) or Al According Green’s Take Me to the River to Wikipedia, (1974) when you triggered its Al Green motion detector. It was an claimed to have idiotic product, but it shifted received more millions of units between royalties from 2000 and 2001. Its ubiquity Big Mouth Billy even saw it appearing among Bass than any a collection of ornaments other recording owned by one of the sinister of the song characters in Joshua Oppenheimer’s 2012 documentary The Act of Killing, a banal joke among the harrowing aftermath of an Indonesian terror campaign. Billy Bass is the epitome of a novelty product. It’s stupid, funny (if you are that way inclined), cheap and useless. But it’s also an amazing combination of technology and production, combining sensors, programmed chips, mechanics and injection moulding, all delivered at remarkably low cost. In fact, we could see most novelty products as simultaneously idiotic and sophisticated: their novelty often conceals real innovation. They’re a testing ground of the possibilities of technology and price at any given moment. Novelty products have an additive, recombinant tendency, and it’s from this coming together of two things that their ‘novel’ quality emerges. Recently we’ve seen this recombinant-ness become part of the manufacturing process itself, as though novelty products had gained just enough machine intelligence to self-generate. This first came to prominence when a series of offensive T-shirts emerged on Amazon with

slogans like ‘Keep Calm and Hit Her’. Their total lack of moral compass wasn’t a human failure but the result of machine generation: slogans made by an algorithm that combined verbs and pronouns from a list of terms imported from the Internet, and posted jpgs of hundreds of T-shirt designs to Amazon to be printed on demand if ordered. Not a traditional design decision in the whole of the process. And though the offensive designs were withdrawn, we can assume that there is a whole range of inoffensive machine-designed comedy T-shirts out there somewhere. Using a similar process (for different ends), the artist Eric Drass, aka Shardcore, proposed a line of ‘Hipsterbait’ T-shirts by developing an algorithm that would pair band names with a picture of the wrong band to produce the ultimate ironic T-shirts. Shardcore’s algorithm acts as the author of junk-culture artefacts, producing an endless churn of novelty. It’s precisely its meaninglessness, the aping of this desire for novelty, that is, we assume, the point. The way we consume online leaves data trails whose paths manifest like the jagging forks of synaptic electricity. Is it possible that computers are already algorithmically generating entire product lines from the adjacencies of our consumer records? And even if they were, would this be a bad thing? After all, Netflix’s remake of House of Cards came from analysis of the viewing habits of its 33 million subscribers (there are now 50 million), which matched the original 1990 BBC The Social Network ’s miniseries with producer recently Kevin Spacey and The predicted that Silicon Social Network (2010) Valley will replace director David Hollywood Fincher.

Could this, as manufacturing process evolved to handle custom production, data and the possibilities of recombination, be a new form of design innovation? This is the product-design equivalent of an infinite room of monkeys and typewriters churning out potential hybrids, scraped and spliced into new species. Is this the start of a self-organising world of stuff? The beginning of an inanimate world of materials assembling itself into products, starting to offer itself to us in ways its rudimentary artificial intelligence thinks we want? Novelty products are punts, bets that look to turn cheap components into high-volume sales. They might – like the mental image Billy Bass – explode of an exploding fish (not literally, but in sales terms). More likely they will totally fail. They are, in other words, products at the coalface of market economics. With only their novelty to rely on, they have to forge their way without recourse to utility, need, luxury or other qualities of non-novelty products. Yet maybe they are not so different. Novelty is a close cousin to those more patrician ideas of newness and innovation. ‘Innovate or die’ is the prime directive of contemporary technology and knowledge economies. It’s the mantra repeated in the boardrooms where business meets design. Innovation, we are told, is one of the key drivers of advanced economies – the source of both growth and progress. But it also inevitably produces a surplus of redundancy – of things that never caught on, that failed to capture our imagination, that end up remaindered and discontinued. In fact, the relentless pursuit of newness eventually renders everything in the present outmoded and, eventually, destined for landfill.

hipsterbait T-shirt from hipsterbait1.tumblr.com

Eviatar Bach, A picture of a Big Mouth Billy Bass at Rest, 2010. Licensed under Creative Commons

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Andrew Berardini Peaches & cream Tucked under the velveteen fuzz of this tame well the lust is as plump as the fruits, but so church lady’s Easter dress is something sticky, is their possession. a splurt of nectar that slobbers from lips and drips Peaches promptly belong in modern art, down chins. A colour drawn from the sliced flesh looking a little sickly in Manet and robust in Renoir, but it’s Cézanne who best brushes the of a fresh peach, that hairy little heartstone is soft colour into preternatural appeal, alluding a tooth-chipping dirty joke underneath all that and eliding, softening and blending, when some lovely sweet meat. “I really love your peaches, Calvinist Netherlander might make that mouthwant to shake your tree,” croons Steve Miller watery succulence look all stone and no fruit. in his ‘pompatus of love’. A wholesome desire, carnal without corruption, its colour a soft blush ‘Painting from nature is not copying the object,’ Cézanne said, ‘it is realising one’s sensations.’ on a virgin’s face: even a toothless oldster can You know Picasso’s channelling his only master gum one and feel the sexy life of this pliable when he says, of notably dubious attribution, stonefruit as it dribbles down through creased ‘One does a whole painting for one peach and skin, syrupy fruit one of the few sensual pleaspeople think just the opposite – that particular ures left to those at a late end. While Georgians and South Carolinians like peach is but a detail.’ But a painting of a peach isn’t really a peach after all, ceci n’est pas une pêche. nothing better than proclaiming their peaches, it is on the mountain slopes of China that this But peaches certainly don’t belong to boys alone. “I’m amorous but out of reach, a still life drupe first drooped. First pictured lingering on a Pompeian panel, the peach still-lifes through- drawing of a peach,” sings Fiona Apple (her tart out tourist-tramped miles of museums. For bite is better for her eponymous fruit). Marilyn Caravaggio the plump little beauties, invariably Minter harrowingly details each delicate hair handled by handsome young men, glow on a woman’s face in her work from 2003 called of course Peach Fuzz. The Teaches of Peaches (2000) in these gentlemen’s baskets and hands like has the songstress clearly a couple of gently shaved balls. When Haim Also the strapline Steinbach, master collector, organiser, revealdeclare in each word and in a New Burlington er of bric-a-brac meanings, posts in a print turn of her hard struts Sheer Indulgence that a little fuzz is fun for on found wallpaper in 2011, ‘I went looking pantyhose all mouths. for peaches and came back with a pair’ –

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Peach is not lust, just the suggestion of it, the sensuality a dream of possibility, and so this soft tone fits fully as another of those colours that oozed out of California in the 1970s. Goldenrod and avocado for the kitchen, peach for the bed and bath. A cover shade of a Rod McKuen book; a leisure-suit hue for cocktailing in the Hills; the beachy watercolour on a brochure for a cult. No mystery that the 1960s finish-fetishists found room for peachy sheens, as did James Turrell in his softly lit chambers; we understand why the colour leaks through the sci-fi landscapes of William Leavitt, or more recently colours the paintings of younger practitioners: in Friedrich Kunath’s coastal dreams and tie-dye washes, in the cryptic peachy poetry of Alex Olson’s action-packed screens, folded in a cracked chevron in a Rebecca Morris abstraction or as the background hue in Dianna Molzan, flecked like a fastfood countertop. It is a sunset colour seen through smog, a juice smear of light at the beginning or end of the day over the sea. Peach begins as a fruit, but this soft shade clearly peaks in apotheosis as a colour, the pure embodiment of itself, a gummy lusciousness that by any other name is just as peachy.

Haim Steinbach, i went looking for peaches and came back with a pair, 2011, screenprint on wallpaper, 97 × 45 cm. © the artist. Courtesy White Cube, London, Hong Kong & São Paulo

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Jonathan T.D. Neil Art seals the deal in Detroit’s ‘grand bargain’ Market news in the artworld in the autumn, particularly during the first two weeks of November, is often and rightly dominated by the auctions in New York. There and then one finds the big prices for big game. As of this writing, Sotheby’s had already clocked in a recordbreaking $422 million Impressionist and Modern Art auction on 4 November, which was helped along by the $100m paid for Alberto Giacometti’s Chariot (1950). We know what motivates these numbers: a love of art combined with a love of status conferred by big purchases. Economists call the latter ‘conspicuous consumption’ or ‘price utility’: when the numbers themselves create a certain satisfaction, a certain demand. Non-economists know it as Birkin bags. But three days later, on 7 November, a different $100m turned up in a different arena of market reporting: bankruptcy rulings. That was when the honourable Steven W. Rhodes of federal bankruptcy court approved the plan that will eventually raise the City of Detroit out of the nearly $10 billion sink of unsecured debt that had threatened, among other things, to see the city’s art collection, anecdotally valued in the range of $2.8bn to $4.6bn, sold off and the proceeds disbursed to the city’s creditors. One hundred million dollars is what the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) and its supporters pledged to the ‘grand bargain’, a 20-year, $816m package of state funds and, significantly, major pledges by some of the US’s biggest foundations, the Ford Foundation among them, in order to keep the art in Detroit.

Now the DIA and the foundations’ millions ostensibly go to help pay Detroit’s pensioners, just one class of creditors who ultimately agreed to a 54 percent markdown of the $3.1bn they were owed directly by the city – in other words, there was plenty of pain to go around. But those millions would not have materialised at the start if it had not been for the DIA and its collection and what the two represented, not just to the city and its inhabitants, but as embodiments of ideals that can make money purposeful, something more than mere purchasing power.

Economists call it ‘conspicuous consumption’ – when the numbers themselves create a certain satisfaction. Non-economists know it as Birkin bags As the Detroit Free Press reported in its excellent ‘How Detroit Was Reborn’ on 9 November, roughly a year earlier, federal judge Gerald Rosen, the Rhodes-appointed mediator for Detroit’s bankruptcy case and the man responsible for the ‘grand bargain’, had gathered the heads of 12 major foundations in his chambers: He asked the foundation heads to talk about their areas of interest, probing for who might be Diego Rivera, Detroit Industry (detail), 1932–3, frescoes sited on the north interior wall of Detroit Institute of Arts. Courtesy DIA

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willing to help and where. He shared his hope: Raise money to help offset pension cuts and save the DIA. He pitched his appeal to the philanthropic missions in the room – urban revitalization, cultural interests, humanitarian concerns. Art isn’t central to those missions, but it has its role to play in each and, in certain circumstances, can encapsulate them (think of Theaster Gates or Ai Weiwei). Rosen’s plea set off a cascade of commitments, with one foundation after another promising tens and sometimes, as in the cases of the Ford and Kresge foundations, hundreds of millions of dollars to Detroit’s pensioners and, in turn, to the DIA, whose collection of city-owned art will be transferred to a charitable trust, thus protecting it from any future fiscal upheavals suffered by the city. The art was central to Rosen’s mission, because it could draw others to act. The art would take the quibbling questions about the past (who owes whom, and how much? Why didn’t I get mine?) and turn them into challenges for the future (what are we going to do? How will we be remembered?). And though it wasn’t at all clear at the time, I’m sure, it makes sense that Rosen found success with the private foundations he approached: those foundations, after all, are the best answers to the question of remembrance. So with auction season over and the big money counted, we would do well to remember that raising a paddle or casting a nod to the front of the sale room, though conspicuous, is only one of the more minor actions that one can make in the name of art.

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Oliver Basciano Off-space No 24: Tidens Krav, Oslo

Tidens Krav has closed its door for the final time. The four artists who ran the odd wood-panelled space in the centre of Oslo are off to concentrate on their own work and other projects. It wasn’t just the fact that the small social space that adjoined the gallery – a big table in the middle, and a bar to one corner seemingly constantly stocked with beers straight from the crate – looked like a sauna that made this artist-run initiative unique. It was also the way Øyvind Aspen, Anders Holen, Linda Lerseth and Mercedes Mühleisen, using a moniker that translates roughly as ‘time’s craving’, or with more nuance, ‘whatever is required by the now’, ran the space. Take, for instance, the open call they staged in 2011, the year the gallery was inaugurated. Or rather, take how they took the ‘open call’ term literally, picking artists for solo exhibitions entirely through the voicemail pitches left on a specially set up ansaphone. One can still listen on the gallery’s website to the crackly recordings, collectively titled Tele-applications, of various ideas being laid out in Norwegian and English, together with the automated callbacks made to those successful pitches. The pitch of one artist, Düsseldorf-based Chris Succo, was succinct to the point of contrariness. When it comes to the moment in the message where the artist is supposed to describe the show, Succo just says: “Right, I’d like to make an exhibition in July or August next year titled Tornado. Thank you and goodbye.” The weird thing is, it sounds like

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the German artist, who was then based in the UK, is actually saying ‘tomato’. Even Tidens Krav wasn’t sure at the time, but buoyed by Succo’s chutzpah, they accepted him, alongside the six other artist proposals with perhaps more verbosely made pitches. Or one could consider the further semantic play the gallery indulged in when invited to take part in 24 Spaces at Malmö Konsthall, a show that formed part of the 2013 Malmö Nordic festival.

They took the ‘open call’ term literally, picking artists for solo exhibitions entirely through voicemail pitches The artists behind Tidens Krav say that they saw the festival as setting out to ‘celebrate the Nordic’. Their response was to bake a 1:200 scale cakereplica of the konsthall and turn the whole thing into an actual celebration (though with the public’s cake-eating restricted to within the red line demarcating their allotted space within the Konsthall, in deference to the institution’s ‘no eating’ rule). On my visit to the space earlier this year, there was an exhibition of Sissel Blystad’s mesmerising psychedelic tapestries, programmed Tidens Krav & Sverre Gullesen, Collection as Allocated Objects, 2014, poker game. Courtesy Tidens Krav, Oslo

by the gallery, that at least at first glance seemed to lack the usual contrivances of the way it normally operates. Perfectly hung, Blystad’s work was intricately made and very desirable (although the Norwegian artist’s 40-year career remains, for now at least, head-scratchingly under-theradar), and everything about the show seemed to belie Tidens Krav’s normal jesterlike tactics. That is until visitors read a sheet of paper explaining the gallery’s policy for sales. Complicated (and at times sounding comically like some sort of pyramid scheme), it outlined a 50/50 split with the artist. However, after a year, should any money be left in the Tidens Krav coffers once their rent was paid, it was split between the buyers, but only those that were also artists. Tidens Krav’s jokes aren’t just jokes for the sake of it, but work as little digs or niggles to the accepted systems of the artworld. Their final blowout was no exception and again addressed questions of distribution and circulation within art. Various collectors, institutions and even the Nasjonalmuseet were invited to play poker, each staking a work from their collection. The whole thing was filmed and commentated on (complete with the kind of graphics that cable channels use when televising the card game). Collector Nils Wogsted won the game, picking up a ten-work pot. It wasn’t just a win for Wogsted on that 123rd hand, though; it was also a full house that saw Tidens Krav reach the end of their game.

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Great Critics and Their Ideas No 34

Merlin the Wizard on Zombie Abstraction Interview by Matthew Collings

Merlin was born of a mortal woman but sired by an incubus; hence his supernatural powers. He is first mentioned c. 1136 in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae.

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ARTREVIEW Hi. Have you been casting spells? MERLIN THE WIZARD Not so much. This isn’t an age of my kind of spells; but it’s certainly an age of enchantment. At least if you think of the power of advertising and promotion, what Walter Benjamin calls ‘phantasmagoria’ – a world of illusions created by the mass media, in which modern people find models for their everyday behaviour but also their attitudes and prejudices, and even their deepest beliefs. He is expanding on his own ideas about the arcades in Paris, during the nineteenth century, via Marx’s notion in Capital of the phantasmagorical powers of the commodity. Rather than spell-casting, I’ve been reading writing on art. AR What magic terms did you find there? MTW Instead of Moloch and eye of newt, I found Tracey Emin and greatness; that’s where modern incantatory meaning is at its densest, in the sense that the structure imitates ads for new cars. AR You mean Jonathan Jones in The Guardian. What’s so bad about his review of Emin, as art writing? MTW He’s not joking when he says the exhibition is ‘a lesson in how to be a real artist’, and things like, ‘Great drawing has to be done from life’ – and, ‘She’s looking in the mirror and striking a pose, just like the old masters did. She just happens to be naked when she does so.’ AR They are legitimate opinions, aren’t they? MTW They are subjective in a way that is out of control. Objectively, drawing has no fixed definition and is a constantly changeable form. This is so even in the West, where the concept ‘Old Master’ has a meaning but an inextricable part of it is that Dürer is different to Tiepolo. The meanings of portraying oneself, and processing ‘life’ as art, are also changeable if you are thinking historically as opposed to dreamily. If all this dissimilarity through the ages and around the world has now become a uniform totality, how was that accomplished? It was in fact the illusion the show succeeded in creating, at least for an audience already conditioned to believe in this artist’s greatness. It made them fall into an even deeper sleep and dream that Rembrandt had returned as Emin. It may well be that there’s an achievement there, but it’s a complicated one. The review doesn’t step back and consider it, but attempts instead to climb up onstage along with the magician and imitate it. AR What’s wrong with subjectivity? MTW I like it when Sean Landers vents about it, because there is a modernistic concern with language as raw material. That used to be true of Emin as well. Like him, she violently deformed norms of linguistic usage recognised in many

contexts involving art and writing, and used conceptual art strategies to line up the products and make magic sense of them. In fact it was within the same few months during the early 1990s that her first show at White Cube was staged and his novel was published, entitled [sic]: the Latin term employed in publishing when correcting texts to mean, ‘This is how it was written, even though it seems questionable’. The book is a facsimile of handwritten, all-capitals, nonparagraphed scrawling for hundreds of pages. His dyslexia is allowed to stand, as well as the rambling quality of his thought processes. The narratives that emerge become more and more engaging. Knots of content build up in which are entwined descriptions of art and artists (‘ON KAWARA BIG DEAL FAT MAN IN SANDELS’) and attempts to understand identity

This magic-spell onslaught by the art market has been countered by spells flung back by critics – they say it’s only the market that’s significant in the zombie abstraction phenomenon. They don’t mention that art-market speculators have far more power to affect culture than critics, or that the zombie triumph is only the most obvious sign of today’s critical impotence

AR Tremendous! What else? MTW Because art is a made thing as well as the bearer of ideas, there’s always an interesting contrast of differences involved in writing about it. There’s a visual object, something you can perfectly well see for yourself, and which has a lot of visual complications, which can’t easily be described in words. And then there is everything you could possibly bring to the object in terms of the whole body of ideas about it that is already well established, and for which the object acts as a trigger. It directs you to those ideas, which are assumed to be the entirety of the experience, as if that other thing that is not them – the visual object that is also there, the made thing – is not really there at all, or was long ago disposed of as an issue. An essay by T.J. Clark on Abstract Expressionism, in his 1999 book, Farewell to an Idea, is a great example of writing on art that can dramatise and eke out vivid content from that dichotomy. AR What about historical art writing?

(‘THERE’s NOT AN OUNCE OF MIC OR GRIK SENSABILITY IN MY LAZY AMERICAN ASS’). AR OK. What other art writers do a better job than Jones? MTW One is Griselda Pollock. Her book Differencing the Canon, published in 1984, includes an essay that looks at several women important to the story of Manet’s practice. We don’t learn by the end that they are just as great as him, but that artistic achievement while real enough on its own terms is always also a mythology in which structures of domination play a role. Another is Julia Kristeva, an important influence on Pollock. You might think the famous opening paragraph of Kristeva’s 1980 book, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, would make an appropriate facing page A miniature illustrating Robert de Boron’s poem ‘History of Merlin’ (c. 1280–90), showing conception of Merlin by a devil and a nun. Courtesy Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris

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epigraph for the Emin show, especially if you substitute ‘art’ when the word ‘literature’ is mentioned. But Kristeva’s Rimbaud-like poetic writerliness would put the show’s visual complete deadness in the shadows. ‘Throughout a night without images but buffeted by black sounds; amidst a throng of forsaken bodies beset with no longing but to last against all odds and for nothing; on a page where I plotted out the convolutions of those who, in transference, presented me with the gift of their void – I have spelled out abjection. Passing through the memories of a thousand years, a fiction without scientific objective but attentive to religious imagination, it is within literature that I finally saw it carrying, with its horror, its full power into effect.’

MTW Cézanne is a great enchanter but different to Clark in that in his letters he reveals truths without seeming to know he’s doing it. In a famous one, you’re being told something about simplicity. It is to the Symbolist painter Émile Bernard, who’s just visited Cézanne: ‘May I repeat what I told you here: treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone…’ The quote comes to mind because of its bold straightforwardness about an elusive artistic idea. Few really comprehend it. When I say simplicity, I don’t mean the message is that if you wish to depict nature then you should see things in nature in a simplified way so they can be made into art. I mean I think he’s saying that in his view a painter seeks out simplified large forms in the painting that’s being created, into which can be arranged complex visual content that comes from nature. But in relation to this quote, I always think of another less famous one in a letter to his son. Here he mocks Bernard and gives him a ridiculously fancy

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name: Emilio Bernardinos. He says this character’s art is rubbish, he’s full of fantasies and he has no feeling for nature. He adds the caveat that he’s sure Bernardinos is right in the praise he offers to Cézanne in a letter that Cézanne is passing on to his son for him to examine. There’s a distinct impression that Cézanne is expressing fear. He even ends suspended in midair, as if he’s temporarily unsure who it is he’s addressing: ‘You will correct me if I am mistaken –’. For me the two letters, 28 months apart in time, with their light and darkness, comprise an equivalent of Clark’s observations on Abstract Expressionism’s ambiguity; this art movement that in Clark’s view demands that its audience refine itself and at the same time partly panders to the audience’s vulgarity. The interest of Clark’s essay for me is the praise/attack rhythm, giving and taking away, or affirm/refuse. And likewise, Cézanne’s second letter disturbs the earlier one. You hear something more in what he’s saying there if you think of what he’s saying by mistake later: the task of artistic organisation is impossible and attempting it goes with endless dismaying personality disintegration. AR If these are spells, what are they doing? MTW Something is undone: the obvious. An undoing of the habit of seeing work by artists like Cézanne, or belonging to movements like Abstract Expressionism, as part of artistic appreciation that doesn’t require new thought. Clark’s ‘In Defense of Abstract Expressionism’ is self-consciously clever criticism, written for a cultured audience capable of enjoying the contradictions he dishes up. Cézanne’s letter to a respectful but uninformed son is a pathetic confession of doubt disguised as scornful

dismissal of another’s weakness. They are literary utterances in different modes possessing different levels of awareness. But in each I value the revelation of truth through integration of contradictions. AR What do you think of Artforum? MTW It is as delicious as a human body created by a warlock. A lot of the images actually are bodies. Fashion bodies in the many fashion spreads, for example, or images of painted bodies, or bodies in videos. They are experienced along with the physical objectlike substance of the magazine when opened up, with its sheeny curves and promising gully. AR Phew, it sounds great! MTW With all this body feeling it is almost not surprising that there is so much ownership on offer as well: private collections, museum collections, auction sales of peoples’ collections. It reminds you that often writing on art is encountered in a glossy context. You can consume it without reading it. Obviously it’s different if you do read it, and I’m not saying reductively that the writing is always unreal or doesn’t matter. AR Anything else that’s bewitched you? MTW I’m attracted to the knocks dealt by art critics to zombie abstraction: these paintings by Oscar Murillo and others, falling out from the

market success of Wade Guyton. Works of art are selected for acquisition by speculator-collectors based on certain repetitive features. They show signs of process, and they’re abstract but not in a tradition of abstraction, more a tradition of postpainting, societally critical conceptualism. Only not actually that but merely nominally that: that is, they don’t have much to say, but what little there is has to be explainable in the gallery press release in terms of critique. A lightweight version of important content is accompanied by a visual impression of hands-off effortlessness. Plus they’re mass-produced. It’s incredibly effective financially. This magic-spell onslaught by the art market has been countered by spells flung back by critics – they say it’s only the market that’s significant in the zombie abstraction phenomenon. They don’t mention that art-market speculators at the moment have far more power to affect culture than critics, or that the zombie triumph is only the most transparently obvious sign of today’s critical impotence. On the other hand, these discussions are intelligent largely because the work in focus does not awe the critics and they feel they can give it a good kicking. And in feeling relaxed in that way, something becomes uninhibited in their descriptive energies. As a result the artworks become intriguing for the reader simply because the degree of sheer information about them on offer is so high. Between the market, the artists, the collectors and the critics, it’s a spell crescendo. But spells aren’t real. You’re left with an impression of moves in the artworld. And a feeling something like: ‘Hmm, yes, moves. They have their limitations.’ NexT MoNTh Rimbaud on artists’ statements when they apply for grants

An illustration showing Merlin’s building of Stonehenge, taken from Roman de Brut, a verse epitome by the poet Wace, written in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. Courtesy British Library, London

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Other People and Their Ideas No 18

Annabelle Selldorf Interview by Tom Eccles

Annabelle Selldorf was born in Cologne and studied in New York, where she established Selldorf Architects in 1988. Since then the practice has worked on a mixture of public and private projects, gaining along the way a reputation for an elegant minimalist approach that has made it the ‘go-to’ architect for gallerists on both sides of the Atlantic. Among those Selldorf has designed gallery spaces for are David Zwirner, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Gladstone Gallery, Michael Werner and Acquavella Galleries. She has also designed the tent for Frieze Masters and studio spaces for Jeff Koons, David Salle and Not Vital. Among others, Selldorf is currently working on a project for the Luma Foundation to renovate a series of buildings on an 8-hectare former SNCF site, Parc des Ateliers, in Arles, France.

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Artreview In a number of recent articles and interviews, your work has been compared to, and you yourself compare it to, ‘slow food’. In fact you say: ‘I feel like I’m the equivalent of slow food in architecture. What we do isn’t spectacular. Unless perhaps it’s a slow spectacle.’ What does that mean?

generalisation that has happened in architecture as a result of a culture that develops and consumes much more rapidly than the speed at which it can be digested. It does not seem that permanence and longevity are necessary values, and so that has changed the paradigm.

AnnAbelle Selldorf Our work is seldom about spectacular gestures but rather about a series of decisions which come together and pertain to structure, proportion, light and specific use, the strength of which reveal themselves more gradually. On another level it refers to the speed of my brain…

Ar You are famous for (among other things) the design of David Zwirner’s gallery in Chelsea that exemplifies a heightened sense of auratic experience. You’ve been perhaps unfairly associated with a ‘minimalist’ approach to organising space or at the very least having a ‘restrained’ approach to architecture. I know you’ve said you don’t want to be Donald Judd or Richard Serra, and that architecture is not art, but how would you describe your work in relation to minimalist strategies?

Ar I thought you might be referencing a kind of Arts and Crafts movement: a resistance to acceleration and perhaps a whiff of ‘taste’. A response to accelerated capitalism, and initially a reaction to a proposed McDonald’s at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome, the slow food movement proposes ‘sensual pleasure and slow, long-lasting enjoyment’. ‘Knowledge’ and ‘discernment’ are other qualities of the cooking school of thought. I wonder if the analogy worries you? Perhaps that’s too aggressive. AS Aggressive indeed – Arts and Crafts, taste… These are big words that conjure up connotations that I do not like so much. And then when you go on to ‘knowledge’ and ‘discernment’, I get very nervous – absolutely! Enough with the analogy! Certainly though there is a distinct

AS I think that strategies in architecture address fundamentally different conditions than those in art. Perhaps it could be said that they have to serve a wider set of circumstances and references for that matter. Minimalism in architecture has become a question of style, which I am not very interested in. I believe that we always have to start with utilitarian purpose, above David Zwirner, New York, with exhibition of work by Dan Flavin. Photo: Jason Schmidt. © 2013 Stephen Flavin / Artists Rights Society (ArS), New York facing page Annabelle Selldorf. Photo: Dean Kaufman

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but obviously that is not enough. There has to be an idea – it includes how and for what purpose people use space, but more importantly how they experience it. It seems to me that finding a very narrow path where an intervention does as little as is necessary – never too much but enough to be monumental – is a goal. To that end, analysis and a quest for resolution is the means. Somehow it is about a very rational approach that is rigorously subjective – if that makes any sense. Ar Maybe you could unpack some of those concepts in real terms, say in terms of David Zwirner’s gallery. What is rational, subjective and utilitarian about it? AS David Zwirner’s building is a good example of all that in my mind: to begin with, there was a definition of the spaces and their attributes. It was evident that the central need was to provide a large, tall, column-free exhibition space that would be mostly lit with daylight, yet have the flexibility to be divided in different configurations to serve different kinds of art, and that other aspects of the programme – more exhibition space on the second floor, showrooms, a kitchen for those working in the building, etc – could all be rationally organised. But the choices that pertain to how the structure is expressed, the juxtaposition of varying

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proportions and exposure to differently orientated windows together with a concrete staircase winding upward in a tall skylit space, as well as the choices of few materials, are subjective and wilful decisions. Yet I view them as a deliberate attempt to get to that tenuous balance of doing nothing too much but not failing on account of not enough. I think of the building as a whole, which occupies a tight spot in an urban context, and therefore the facade as an exercise of the same balance.

developers had hired a well-known architect – a starchitect. I thought that this actually represented a positive trend in commercial architecture: developers hiring an architect known to design buildings of a certain quality rather than an unknown licensed professional to build the least expensive building with the most square-footage. It got more complicated though, because then architects became part of the ‘branding’ for buildings, and quickly the starchitect word was entirely pejorative.

AR I think that could probably be said of many of your projects, including the Neue Galerie in New York, where you renovated a 1914 Carrère & Hastings Fifth Avenue mansion into a museum for Ronald Lauder’s collection of early-twentieth-century German and Austrian art, including Klimt’s famous Adele Bloch-Bauer I [1907, one of the most expensive paintings ever to be sold]. Or Hauser & Wirth’s former premises in Piccadilly with the transformation of a 1923 bank building by Sir Edwin Lutyens (what you call ‘a jewel box of a building’), provide evidence of an astonishing level of restraint on your part. What makes these buildings now Selldorf buildings? Where is your signature?

AR Without bringing on a libel suit to this magazine or to you, can I ask you about the recent brouhaha with Zaha Hadid in which she was incorrectly quoted as being indifferent to labour conditions in one of her

AS The question about signature is always interesting because it is about the difference between legibility and individual imprint. I don’t perceive it to be my responsibility to provide the ‘easy to recognise’ attribute, though I believe that there is a distinct handwriting in our work. Naturally in projects that are more about renovation / restoration or repurposing I prefer an attitude of restraint, whereas in new construction it is more possible to establish a vocabulary, or a grammar that answers to its own rules, as it were. In all cases – new construction or renovation – it always comes back to trying to find a path of resolution and clarity. AR That’s an incredibly restrained answer! What do you really think about the phenomenon of ‘starchitects’? AS I wonder who came up with this word in the first place. It does not contribute anything qualitative – it does certainly not say anything good – is a starchitect similar to a starlet? It is a word full of innuendo, but I am not sure to what end – damn architecture as a whole or just the architects to whom this label is attached? I remember that when Richard Meier did the apartment buildings on West Street and Perry Street, people became interested in the fact that

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but reporting of the circumstances was so mixed up and wrong that one had to wonder if – at minimum – the publishing magazine had done any fact-checking whatsoever. Certainly I did not think that Hadid’s lawsuit seemed commensurate to the understandable irritation about being seemingly wilfully vilified. But the question of ethics has to enter the picture – it is worrisome that large commissions around the world get realised by well-known architects and transgressions are taciturnly overlooked. While it may not be the architect’s role to negotiate labour conditions, it seems that the status of ‘starchitect’ offers an opportunity to be outspoken and to direct the eye of the public to unacceptable conditions. Needless to say, any public criticism may come at the cost of those commissions, which presumably explains the lack of any vocal outreach. While there are differences between the multinational corporation and the leading architect – the corporations actively negotiate the conditions, whereas the architect may have merely a voice readily heard – ethical responsibility exists for both. AR In an age where the public and private are essentially blurred, can architecture clarify or does it mask the difference between the two?

projects for the World Cup in Qatar? It does, though, raise the question of ethics and responsibility among today’s leading architects. Do you think they are any different from, say, multinational corporations with their own particular brands to maintain, etc? AS It appears that it all started with a journalist’s book review gone awry. Rather than focusing on the book, the disproportionate attention fell on Zaha Hadid’s decidedly glib response to questions about labour conditions on projects in the Far East in another newspaper interview, Exterior of David Zwirner, 2oth Street, New York. Photo: Jason Schmidt

AS This is damn hard to answer and I am not sure how to tackle it. Where to begin? Everybody talks about public space – where in spatial terms the blur of public and private happens – and what it has to deliver. Nothing interests me more. Public space has become synonymous with ‘available to everybody’, which then in turn often means that it can only be less specific and consequently precludes a sense of privacy or intimacy or focus. It gets very complicated very quickly, though I believe that articulating differentiated spheres without accepting exclusivity as a tradeoff is entirely possible. But then we’ll have to get more concrete… AR Recently in New York, the Museum of Modern Art tore down the Folk Art Museum designed by Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. While the building was far from loved among many New Yorkers, how did you react to a cultural protagonist destroying the work of fellow architects? AS First of all, I think that there were many New Yorkers who did love the building; I am sure there were as many or more who did than

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those who did not like it. In fact people have been passionate about the building from the day it was built. Like it or not, it was a remarkable building in New York’s increasingly bland streetscape. Rather than focusing on Diller Scofidio + Renfro, whose commission it was to prove that the building is fundamentally flawed and cannot be repurposed, I think the greater attention has to be given to the institution that was hellbent on this very argument being the only possible one. Obviously that did not go over all that well in the [architectural] community. After all, was MoMA not the first museum to include the art of architecture in their mission? Of course there could have been a different attitude to the building, but the desire to tear this little building down in favour of a streamlined circulation loop existed long before DS+R was hired – though I do not mean to exonerate their decision to oblige. All explanations by the museum and their new architects are perfectly plausible, except that they do not go to the core of the issue. What is fascinating is that ultimately it is private property, and that’s all that there is to it – the public has no say.

AR What would you like to do next? I could imagine you making the most exquisite library. Slow reading? AS What would I like to do next? I am insatiable, so I want to do it all… On second thought, maybe not all. What I would like to work on are projects that are about public space. I want to do new construction – build! A new art museum would be great. A new library would be excellent. We have recently completed the renovation of an existing library at Brown University, called John Hay Library. What was interesting about it was the fact that the very beautiful main reading room in the classical 1910 Shepley, Rutan and Coolidge-designed building resembled

in proportion and expression some of the great reading rooms in the world, like Cambridge, for example, but the actual proportion of the space was much smaller. Anyway, working on this library was fascinating to me because libraries today need to do such different things than they used to. Universities, but also public libraries, are so much less about books – as more and more information is available digitally – and instead so much more about providing spaces to meet, learn and study. Renovating this old library, we reinstated a certain formality in the grand old room, but we made it very light and airy, and apparently students love spending time there. So, it would be extremely interesting to build new and define new spaces relevant today: maybe grand and beautiful, but without the intimidation of authority. It goes back to the earlier conversation of public meeting private. It could be a worthwhile task to find a way to give great private spaces with dignity to people in the context of larger welcoming public space. And then I also hope that books will continue to be around…

Neue Galerie, New York. Photo: Adam Friedberg

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13/11/2014 17:29 06.11.14 16:34

Great Collectors and Their Ideas No 7

Dimitris Daskalopoulos Interview by Mark Rappolt

Athens-born entrepreneur Dimitris Daskalopoulos built his fortune transforming a family dairy business into a vast food company in Greece. Today he is one of the world’s leading collectors of contemporary art. The D. Daskalopoulos Collection has formed the basis of exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, and he is a member of the Board of Trustees and the Collections Council of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, the Tate International Council, the New Museum’s Leadership Council and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago’s Director’s Vision Council. He established NEON, a nonprofit organisation based in Athens in June 2013, which aims at ‘broadening the appreciation, understanding, and creation of contemporary art in Greece in the firm belief that this is a key tool for growth and development’, via public discussions, commissions, exhibitions, a grants scheme and an educational programme aimed at teenagers in public schools. The organisation has a particular focus on the ways that art can activate public space. For example, NEON’s City Project Program is an annual commission to create an artwork for a public space; this year Aemilia Papaphilippou’s site-specific work Pulsating Fields was installed in the Ancient Agora. The group exhibition A Thousand Doors, curated by Iwona Blazwick and produced in collaboration with the Whitechapel, took place this summer at the Gennadius Library in Athens (where this interview also took place) and this autumn, an exhibition of works by Tino Sehgal was held in and around the city’s Roman Agora. Earlier this year he was the recipient of the 2014 edition of the Leo Award, given annually by Independent Curators International (ICI) to an important figure in the artworld.

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Artreview Coming from London – where I think public space doesn’t really exist, because it’s all privately owned or full of video cameras – I was wondering what idea of public space NEON has? Do you think that art can play a role in shaping a definition or a consciousness of what public space is? Dimitris DAskAlopoulos Yes, and even more than that, I think that art in public space can shape the thinking and the way of life of citizens in a city. It can make their experience more attached to their own city, where we are mostly itinerant passersby going from one place to another. Here in Greece there is a strong sense of public space, in the sense that we do not really appreciate private space. When something is public, meaning belonging to the state, people feel they have many rights to it, some of them not legal. So I think the other stronger idea about public space in the south of Europe, and in Greece particularly, is that we use it to be outside – we are outside a lot because of the weather. In that sense, I feel that charging these spaces with the ideas of contemporary art, charging them or interrupting them in a creative way with the thought processes or the reactions, the emotional, positive and negative, that contemporary art can create is educational and is very positive overall for our way of thinking. I keep saying that the crisis Greece went through was a big economic crisis, but at the root of it was a cultural crisis, because of the way we let ourselves behave in the last 30 years. I think in order to avoid that, we should work on our way of thinking; open our minds, work together. That’s one of the challenges – in public spaces there’s always a debate, like you said. What is a public space? What are we allowed to put in it? Who is allowed to intervene? And why? And under what criteria? Well, I think these are great challenges to have somehow resolved. Because the easy way in many places, in Greece definitely, is, ‘We can’t answer these questions easily, so let’s do nothing’. I think that is sick. That’s why our approach at NeoN is, I would say, invasive. Ar Can you tell me about NEON’s Discovering the National Garden project [a landscape proposal for the rejuvenation of eight specific locations in the garden and a one-off exhibition of contemporary art for two months in partnership with the Whitechapel Gallery]? It seems to have caused some controversy… DD Well, this started because we made a proposal to the municipality of Athens – and it has been accepted and approved – to have an exhibition for two months in the National Garden of Athens. Of course there is great resistance to that, and some of it justified, and it has been taken to the High Court. We are expecting an indication

of the High Court’s idea, but this is not a legal issue: the legality is so complex that you can interpret it basically any way you want, so there would be no one overarching solution given by the courts. I think the answer to ‘yes or no?’ and ‘how often?’ and ‘where?’ will be given by the citizens of this city. A lot of the people in opposition to the National Garden project have come here [to the exhibition at the Gennadius Library], where we are today, initially, I suppose, to find arguments against us. But they left with many arguments against themselves, because this is beautiful, this is harmless, this is intriguing. What we say is, regardless of the questions or the anxiety that these things can cause us, especially in this country, we have to sit down together and make something work and make it beautiful, because it’s easy to bicker for ages, one against another, about what we have not done very well.

I’m pushing my own ideas, but somehow, you know, Greeks are very good at finding the reason behind what everybody did. You drop your lighter on the floor; they’ll find six reasons why this happened. So with me it’s even worse. What kind of an agenda do I have personally? Which can only be put aside by just doing what you believe in I called the opponents, I wrote them a letter and said, ‘Please come and be part of the team that will decide together with the Municipality and the Ministry what we’re going to do, so if you have fears, put them on the table and we avoid them, and that’s the way to go forward. Don’t take us to court to stop this. Help us make it like you feel it should be.’ That’s a challenge for Greek society. That’s why I say, if we’re going to avoid another crisis, we have to change the way we think and work together. Ar Do you think the ambition with them is partly political? DD Yes, absolutely. Ar Do you think that for you art has a role in shaping those politics? DD Yes. You know, I’ve been a businessman, I’ve been sort of political through my job at facing page Dimitris Daskalopoulos. Photo: Trevor Leighton

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the Hellenic Federation of Industries and I’ve been an art collector. All these things, if you put them together, they sound rather incompatible, but they all have the same source and motivation, I think, which is a concerted effort to contribute whatever I can to making this society work better, [to become] more progressive or bring out its creativity and its abilities. So I did that in my business, I did it with the Federation, I try to do it with art. Ar Do you think there is a risk, maybe, doing it as a private person, that people would think it’s you trying to push your ideas about art or about life onto people, that it’s still your collection, it’s still your foundation and your ideas? DD It’s worse than that. It’s not just that I’m pushing my own ideas, but somehow, you know, Greeks are very good at finding the reason behind what everybody did. You drop your lighter on the floor; they’ll find six reasons why this happened. So with me it’s even worse. What kind of an agenda do I have personally? Which can only be put aside by just doing what you believe in and letting it be seen and judged, and that’s what I’m doing. I do answer the obvious questions; I have said the foundation is not about my collection, and in the exhibitions we are doing, there will not be exhibitions of the collection and for the collection. Of course the collection is a resource. Ar Would they ever have an exhibition of things you didn’t like? DD I always wanted to do that, yes. So with the National Garden the first thought was, ‘Oh, he wants to use public space to show his collection.’ So I said, ‘Very easy answer, there will never be any work from my collection in any of the exhibitions in the Garden. Fine, ok, what’s your next one?’ Well, they are looking for it now. Ar The next one they’d come back with is whether the work will be in the exhibition and then be in your collection afterwards? DD Oh, ok, I’ll avoid that too. Ar You also have relationships with public institutions abroad, the Tate for example. Is that different from what you do here? DD I try to use it as an example in two different ways here in Greece because, as I say, I want our institutions to wake up to change, to be contemporary. So I tell them, I live here and they don’t know about me. I spend most of my time here, but when anyone is talking about art, gifting, contributions, etc, it’s always in London or in New York that it happens to be, because those museums ask for my help. You know, they don’t give me much in return, some flattery, that’s all. So I can do with just a little bit of flattery here

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and you’ll find I can give you a lot. The other thing I tell them is the fact that I’ve been around: all these relationships with these museums have allowed me to see how interested all these people out there are in Greece, in creativity, in what can happen in Greece. I tell them, you know, we have to use that and I can help you bring it here, can help you build relationships with these international institutions. We have a huge museum of contemporary art now, and they were always on a small budget because they really didn’t even have their own space. Now we’ve had the crisis, and all the small budgets are cut in half on top of that, so how are you going to live without private money, without collaborations? So that’s another challenge. AR So maybe the collaborations in the UK, for instance, are really aimed at changing things here? That you’re picking up experience from the Tate or elsewhere about how they work, and at the back of your mind you’re thinking, ‘OK, I’m learning stuff that we can then use in Greece’? DD No, I put it another way – I said I realised how interested they are on their own, before me showing up, in exchanging with Greece, because for them it’s also an exchange. AR So how did you first start collecting contemporary art? Was there a moment? DD It was the only art I could collect, because I couldn’t have the Rubens and the Goyas: they are all where they should be. Also it’s very compatible with my mentality: a bit of addressing the today and tomorrow of our society in a rebellious and creative way. That was what I was trying to do in my business as well. So I found a lot of rapport with the artists and their ideas in contemporary art, and it just took off like a wildfire. AR Are you attracted to works of art that somehow agree with your points of view about life, or do you like works of art that disagree with them? Do you look for challenges? DD Well, I’ve chosen a subject and I think I’ve been told that one of the positive aspects of my collection is that it’s coherent and focused. My focus is on the marvellous creativity of the human being in the short time of his activity and lifespan, so I look for artists that express this. It’s a tension between finality and the need to make a mark. That’s a subject I don’t have specific views on, but I love to see or talk about creativity around that subject matter. AR Do you have a lot of the collection in your own home or your house? DD None. AR None?

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DD Almost none, just little pieces that I would buy and I want to see for a while. Very few can fit anyway, because, you know, I do buy larger installation sculptures. AR So what will happen to the collection in the long run? DD Already I say I feel I don’t own this art, that I’m a temporary caretaker. That it acquires its meaning when it is seen and when it interacts with the public. The other issue about a private collection is that it’s very specific to a passion and way of thinking of the individual who builds it, so when he or she is not there any more, it becomes irrelevant, it cannot be continued, it’s a capsule in time. So in that sense, I think these works somehow have to be returned to the public domain. AR In the institutions you collaborate with? DD Yes.

I find that I’m representing the fragility of the human being very well, and the creativity despite this fragility. I have avoided showing the dark side of the human being: it’s not in my collection at all. I think it’s because we manage to overcome it in most cases AR Let’s say you meet an artist and you don’t like them as a person but you already have their work – does the social interaction with the artist change how you feel about them? DD No, not at all. When I have an artwork it’s because I think it communicates, it is strong, and, you know, the character of the artist does not take away or add to my idea of what the artwork emanates. I think that’s true also because an artwork requires more meaning the more it is seen. Each person has his own interaction with an artwork, and that adds to it in that way. Also, so that I don’t get into that problem, I don’t particularly go after the task of meeting the artists, it’s not important for me because I think they have expressed it in an artwork. AR How do you feel when your collection is on view to the public and you have to engage with reactions from other people? DD That is my greatest happiness in the sense that I have been blessed with three museum exhibitions, so almost 1.2 million people have seen the artworks that were there. I wouldn’t call

it my collection, because they were curated exhibitions by the museums, and one of them was in juxtaposition with the museum’s collection, in the case of the Scottish National Gallery. So that’s what I look for – people being around an artwork with their children and discussing something other than what we will have for dinner. AR If they are saying, for instance, ‘This is terrible, this is the worst thing ever, what a waste of time’, do you get upset about that or do you not mind? DD No, because the next time they will see another or a similar work of art, they will not be as hostile, they will try to think around it, they will have a different view, and that is already a contribution. AR Do you think that people, when they see parts of your collection like that, are able to make a portrait of you out of the works? DD Yes, a few do, and, you know, if you concentrate on the more visceral or more challenging works, it might be a picture of a demented sick person. AR Do you see it that way yourself, that somehow when you allow the works to be exhibited like that, that some part of you is also on show? DD Yes, but I don’t mind, because I think these are strong artworks, and when they are together they speak together. They have a more universal subject than, ‘Who is Dimitris Daskalopoulos?’ Who cares anyway in the end? AR The museums care! DD Well, I think they’ve been giving me the compliment that I’m a different kind of collector, which sounds good. AR With NEON, for instance, do you ever worry that you’re just an incredible optimist and that in the real world people don’t really care for this stuff? DD I’m fifty-seven and I say, you know, my biggest success is that I always had pharaonic dreams and have been happy enough to surpass them many times. So, in that sense, yes, a careless optimist. AR For instance, when I moved from London to Vienna, the biggest difference was that in London, if you say you’re an artist, that means most people would assume that you’re a drug addict, a dropout, somebody who couldn’t find a proper job. DD Really? AR I think for the average person, it’s not a job in the same way as if someone says they are a lawyer or a doctor, whereas in Vienna it was perfectly accepted that this was as legitimate a profession. I was just wondering how that is in Greece?

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DD About artists? AR About art and artists – I guess, if it’s like Britain, contemporary art isn’t talked about much in the public, outside of a very niche area of the press. DD That’s true. I think we are helping in that, with the fact we have 10,000 people here in this exhibition. There are people who say, ‘Thank you, because you opened our eyes.’ I mean, these kids out there [volunteers acting as guides throughout A Thousand Doors] are remarkable, they are fantastic, they did more than all the artists and the curators put together in allowing this interaction with art. I’d say artists are generally respected here in Greece, but they are untouchable. More so than university professors, who are also very respected, to the point that they run our country together with the politicians. What is not good at all in Greece is a collector, that’s not a good word. People don’t understand that. They think you are somebody who spends his not-well-earned money on beautiful things for his wall, to show off to his friends, and then sell for a huge profit. But thankfully, I think, there are quite a few collectors in Greece who are shooting holes through this stereotype.

DD No. I never got involved even for a minute with what the curators did with my collections. I particularly enjoyed that because I could see how many different iterations of this central theme can be shown by the view of the collector. I realise things. I said about one of the rooms that Achim Borchardt-Hume did in the Whitechapel, the last iteration [between 10 June 2010 and 22 May 2011, the Whitechapel put on a series

AR Did you know right from the beginning that you’d want to show your collection in a public way? Presumably the initial impulse is, ‘I would like to have this work to look at when I want.’ DD I don’t remember that time, because very quickly I bought bigger works, more important works, things that I couldn’t see anyway. Then I said it’s available to anybody and we’ve been lending so many works to so many exhibitions. AR Since the beginning?

DD In 20 years I’ve only sold about 10 works.

DD Yes. AR Are there any kinds of work you just wouldn’t collect outright – war imagery or sexually explicit material?

AR But do you have a moment where you buy a work because it seems amazing, you’re really committed to it at the time and then maybe ten years later you think, ‘What was I thinking, who was that person?’

DD Yes, in talking about the human struggle, I find that I’m representing the fragility of the human being very well, and the creativity despite this fragility. I have avoided showing the dark side of the human being: it’s not in my collection at all. I think it’s because we manage to overcome it in most cases, and as a society we do manage to put our better selves together to progress. So like you said: war, gore, blood, I don’t touch.

DD Actually I don’t, no, and even works that I bought that are from artists who nobody ever heard of, I still believe in them. The ones I sold were when I was just starting – during the late 1980s – and then it became irrelevant for me. When the core of your collection and its theme gets more dense, there are things that are just thrown out in the periphery, but very few I’d say.

DD Was I wearing that? AR Exactly, why did I even think this was a good thing? What’s it like for you when a curator makes a selection from your collection? Do you ever think, ‘Why not this one?’ Are there moments when you think, ‘No, you should have…’

of four exhibitions exploring various aspects of the D. Daskalopoulos Collection, Keeping It Real: An Exhibition in Four Acts the last titled Material Intelligence], ‘I have no idea why he put these works together’, but I know inside of me that I Giuseppe Penone, Spazio di Luce, 2008 (installation view, A Thousand Doors, Gennadius Library, Athens, 2014), bronze, gold, 250 × 220 × 160 cm. Photo: Natalia Tsoukala

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AR Do you think those selections tell you about those curators? Do you learn something new about them? In a way, if the collection to some degree is, however abstractly, a portrait of your thought, their selections become a portrait of their thought in that context. Do you see it working like this, like a social interaction? DD Yes, it was. I mean, I have deeply and very genuinely thanked the curators for doing what they did with my collection and for the public.

AR Do you sell work from the collection?

AR It’s interesting. You’re better than I am with clothes. I keep looking in the wardrobe and thinking, ‘What?’

bought them for that same reason and they were the newer works, the less traditional ones. I was so happy to see that somebody saw the common thread that I saw too, and there were other new ones that made me think, ‘Oh, wow, what a way to look at these works together.’

AR To what extent do you look at what other people are collecting? Does that have an influence on you? DD No, I love to go see what other people are collecting, to see their exhibitions, but definitely not in a marketing sense. AR In a competitive sense? DD No, because I have a lot of things that they would like to have.

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Artistic Attribution – A Game of Cards

from top A disputed version of Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps, currently on loan to the Museum of the Order of St John, London; and Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps, c. 1594, displayed at Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

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The Law and Its Ideas No 10 by Daniel McClean

Background Alleged misattributions of artistic authorship are often the source of bitter controversies and legal disputes in the artworld as values rise and plunge depending on the ascribed identity of the artist behind the artwork. The recent claim in the English High Court between Lancelot Thwaytes and Sotheby’s auction house (London) is no exception. The claimant, Thwaytes, is aggrieved because Sotheby’s identified and listed his painting, which it sold at auction in 2006, as being by a ‘follower of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’ rather than by the Italian baroque master. Little was known about the painting when Thwaytes took it to Sotheby’s – it had been purchased by his relative (a surgeon in the Royal Navy) in 1962 for the sum of £140. The painting appeared to Sotheby’s experts to be a copy of Caravaggio’s well-known The Cardsharps (c. 1595), which sits in the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (some experts believe that Caravaggio made other versions of this work). The Cardsharps depicts an affluent young man playing primero (a forerunner of poker) and falling victim to two conmen (an old cardsharp who signals to his young accomplice while furtively spying on the young man’s hand of cards). Lancelot Thwaytes’s painting was sold at auction in London in 2006 for £42,000, when it was purchased by a leading Caravaggio scholar, Sir Denis Mahon (who died in 2011). This would prove to be something of a curse for Thwaytes, as Mahon researched the painting and subsequently attributed it to Caravaggio. The painting is reportedly now insured for £10 million. It is currently on loan appropriately to the Museum of the Order of St John in Clerkenwell, London, where it can be publicly viewed (Caravaggio fled to the sanctuary of the Order in Malta in 1607 after killing a man in a brawl in Rome). Thwaytes is suing Sotheby’s for failure to take reasonable steps to correctly attribute his painting and consequently for damages estimated to be in the region of millions of pounds. In particular, Thwaytes alleges that Sotheby’s failed to sufficiently examine and test the painting (in particular, it allegedly did not carry out infrared tests on the painting) prior to its sale and to consult with experts in the field (Sotheby’s relied upon its own internal expertise). Both parties in the dispute have lined up experts to support their respective case: Thwaytes is relying upon the Vatican Museum’s director, Antonio Paolucci, and Mina Gregori, the president of Florence’s Roberto Longhi Foundation, to support his case. While Sotheby’s is relying upon a team of experts that includes Professor Richard Spear and Letizia Treves of the National Gallery (who originally catalogued the painting while at Sotheby’s), who will

apparently testify that other lead experts in the field do not believe the artwork to be by Caravaggio. Sleepers The dispute between Thwaytes and Sotheby’s is a variation of the classic problem of the ‘sleeper’: when authorship of an artwork lies hidden. In the art market (particularly for Old Masters), fortunes are made by dealers spotting sleepers at sale, buying them at a lower value (like Mahon did in this case) before reattributing their authorship to the ‘hidden’ artist and benefitting from the consequent upside. The loser in this process is clearly the seller (who sold at an undervalue). However, the loser can also be the auction house or art dealer, who as well as losing out by obtaining a lower sale commission on the sold artwork, can also be potentially sued by the angry seller for negligence. It is established law that the auctioneer as the seller’s agent owes the seller a duty to exercise reasonable skill and care when valuing the seller’s property, though auctioneers like Sotheby’s and Christie’s typically try to limit this liability in their terms and conditions. This duty was established in the case of Luxmoore-May v Messenger May Baverstock (1990), a case involving the sale by a provincial auction house of a pair of paintings of foxhounds which it failed to identify to the seller as being painted by George Stubbs. In bringing this latest sleeper claim against Sotheby’s, Thwaytes’s lawyers (led by Henry Legge QC) will need to establish two main things in court. First, that on the balance of probabilities, the painting is by Caravaggio – which would appear to be by no means easy, given the spectrum of expert opinion on this subject; second, and assuming the painting can be judged by the court to probably be by Caravaggio, that Sotheby’s was negligent in its attribution and valuation of the painting at the time, ie, that it did not exercise reasonable skill and care, which will hinge on the specific facts in question. Though it is not the purpose of this article to comment on the merits of the case, this claim would seem uncertain, not least because Mahon’s attribution of the painting on the basis of his connoisseurship after he had the painting cleaned is not commonly shared among experts. Interestingly, Sotheby’s will seek to argue that the catalogue was distributed among the world’s leading curators, art historians, collectors and dealers, and had they deemed the attribution to have been different than that offered by Sotheby’s in the sale catalogue, then the price would have doubtless reflected that at the sale. Whatever the conclusion to this dispute, it illuminates the uncertainties and vagaries of the art market, where millions of pounds can turn on experts’ attributions of artistic authorship – a game with its own rules that might at times seem as risky and chance-dependent as playing a game of cards.

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I’ve been promoting Disney On Ice Celebrates 100 Years of Magic, which I’m honoured to be the ambassador for. It’s an amazing show. During my many interviews that day I was asked how Bista got along with Millie and if she likes dressing her in pink. I said she doesn’t like pink, she likes blue. But she’s liked blue for ages now. 73

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New Art Now by Michael North

If contemporary art is art always happening ‘now’, can we ever really make sense of the present? And can anything ever really be new? 74

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In order to be counted as art, then, an object or expression must be For much of this past summer, stretches of Sunset Boulevard were lined with banners bearing the arresting slogan ‘New.Art.Now.’ new, and its newness is strictly defined by the temporal limits of the Drivers catching the flipside of these banners would have seen that present moment, now. But this is where the synonymy of the three they were actually advertising the Hammer Museum’s second bien- terms starts to look like a contradiction. Burke warns that ‘those nial, titled Made in l.a. So the punchy three-word come-on is just a things which engage us merely by their novelty, cannot attach us for subtitle of sorts, and its relative absence from the catalogue and other any length of time’. This is apparently why he puts such emphasis on promotional material surrounding the biennial makes it seem an that which ‘continually’ presents the new, just as Groys proposes a afterthought. Nevertheless, the Hammer was not alone in pushing cycle in which the profane continually refreshes the sacred. Just how ‘the now’ last summer. Prospect New Orleans, another contempo- tight must this cycle be, though, before it closes altogether? How rary art biennial, declared that the title of its third iteration would be long is the ‘any length of time’ in which the new can retain its charm? Prospect.3: Notes for Now. The Art Now Fair in Miami Beach, which has How long is now? been around in some form since 2007, is announcing its 2015 season One classic answer to this question is that now contains no time at already. And Galerie Perrotin in Paris showed the works of Daniel all. According to an argument first made by St Augustine, the present Arsham under the title The Future Is Always Now. The now is very now is but a nondimensional line between past and future, and it cannot contain any time within its own limits because if it did then there right now. And not just in LA. And yet these are just recent and in fact rather late examples of would be both past and future within it and thus another present, ad what art historian Richard Meyer, in his book What Was Contemporary infinitum. Many centuries later, Einstein confessed that he was terriArt? (2013), has called the creeping ‘now-ism’ in current art history. fied by the idea of now, because it has such a hold on human consciousWithin that history, ‘now’ is not just a name for the present moment ness though it does not, in a universe understood relativistically, have but the flag of the contemporary, and the contemporary is what we any real reference. From a cosmic perspective, that is to say, there is no have instead of the postmodern, which is what used to stand in be- now, because there is no moment in which all temporal perspectives tween us and the temporal illogic of the modern. If the term ‘modern’ can be uniformly synchronised. Some of the philosophical and scientific dodginess of ‘now’ is apparent even stands for some period quite long ago, when things were very different, then in ordinary speech, for ‘now’ is a very difSome of the philosophical and it can hardly do its traditional duty of scientific dodginess of ‘now’ is apparent ferent sort of deictic than, say, ‘there’. It is standing for the present. Thus there is impossible to say ‘now’ without actually in ordinary speech, for ‘now’ is a very no name for the present, which has grafeeling the referent slip out from underdually slipped out from underneath the different sort of deictic than, say, ‘there’. neath the sign. They Might Be Giants make hay with this in a song called postmodern and threatens to do so again It is impossible to say ‘now’ without Older (1999), which begins, “You’re older in respect to the contemporary. ‘Now’ is actually feeling the referent slip out than you’ve ever been”, and ends with a just the current placeholder and has the advantage of being almost completely repeated, “And now you’re even older”. from underneath the sign without qualities, so it seems to stand at If art remains new, and thus remains the far edge of a process by which the present is gradually stripped of all art, only within the temporal confines of now, then perhaps it remains distinguishing features, except the sheer temporal fact of happening art for exactly no time at all. The Hammer Museum ironically plays now. Without any specific qualities or features to fall out of fashion, with the terrors of this situation on their website for the biennial, which features a calendar in the form of a timeline. On it the current ‘now’ is always up-to-date and need never get old. Of course, ‘now’ is a pretty terrifying word. One of the problems it date is marked as ‘Now’, and everything below that date is marked as poses is highlighted by the Hammer biennial’s three-word subtitle. ‘The Past’, and everything above it as ‘The Future’. Helpful sliding At first glance, the three words ‘new’, ‘art’ and ‘now’ might be consid- links are provided that allow the time-traveller to quickly ‘Scroll Up ered synonyms. From Edmund Burke to Clement Greenberg to Boris for the Future’ and then just as quickly jump ‘Back to Now’. This Groys, critical voices have distinguished successful art from kitsch suggests, in a slightly undermining way, that the subtitle of the bienby its originality, its novelty. For Burke, the simplest of all human nial is correct only today, 25 August 2014, say, and not on any of the emotions is curiosity, a taste for the new, and the most basic of all other dates on the timeline, though they all fall within the time-span aesthetic satisfactions is that provided by variety, so that we are drawn of the exhibition. What will happen when there is no future to jump to whatever is ‘continually presenting somewhat new’. This novelty, forward into and ‘now’ becomes inaccessible? To be accurate, in any which is the source of art for Burke, is positioned by Greenberg, at the case, it seems the timeline should be more finely calibrated, for it is other end of history, as its goal, so that art is constantly stripping away hard to think of a date, a full 24 hours, as now. The line marking ‘now’ the old and redundant, finally to arrive at its fully pristine origins. In should be hair-thin and not as thick as a day, and thus the time-span his 1992 book On the New (which was published for the first time in within which the art on show can be considered new should vanish English earlier this year), Groys makes this a cyclical process in which into nothing. But these are all questions that this interesting calendar the profane constantly comes in to replace the sacred. In this analysis, is meant to evoke. This jokey timeline reinforces the sense given by the new is neither source nor goal but simply ‘a shift in the boundary the blocky type and screaming colours of the posters that ‘New.Art. separating the valorized, archived cultural tradition from the realm Now.’ is not just a subtitle but an ironic comment, a kind of take-off on of profane things’. Neither a stable state nor a historical process but a the rampant ‘now-ism’ of the current art scene. It suggests that ‘now’ is already a little outmoded as a synonym for the steady churn, the production of the new still funcfacing page Marketing artwork for Made in l.a., tions to delimit art from everything it is not. contemporary. That ‘now’ is now old. 2014.Courtesy Hammer Museum, Los Angeles

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They Might Be Giants, Older, 1999, music video still. Courtesy ABC Television / YouTube

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A rather different sense of the relation between new and now can new over time. Instead of producing images, it might be said that be gleaned, however, from at least some of the artists included in artists like Dodge produce information, as long as information is not Made in L.A. Harry Dodge, for example, supplemented his drawings, understood as Walter Benjamin once defined it. For Benjamin, ‘The videos and sculptures in the show with a pamphlet, excerpted from a value of information does not survive the moment in which it was work-in-progress called The River of the Mother of God, v.2. In it, Dodge new.’But this is to limit the notion of information to the message itself, complains about the human tendency to push ‘later away from now’. In whereas the original formulation of information by Claude Shannon reality, ‘everything is next to itself. And is happening at once.’ A draw- identified it with the system that produces messages. Shannon once ing of this situation features a long tube curled so that the two ends called the quantity he measured ‘surprisal’, a word that emphaspeak to one another. This is an image, for Dodge, of ‘what might be sises the stipulation that redundant or expected messages carry no information. The capacity of a signalthought as present, of presence’. It’s a bit of a jolt to see these words, almost 50 If art remains new, and thus remains ling system to generate new, unanticiyears of disapproval after Michael Fried’s art, only within the temporal confines pated messages is therefore measured as notorious ‘Presentness is grace’, 50 years information. Novelty in this sense does of now, then perhaps it remains art not emerge full-blown from nothing, in which Derridean deconstruction of nor is it recruited from the ranks of the presence has worked its way so far into for exactly no time at all profane, but it inheres in the power of the educated consciousness as to have become invisible. But what Dodge has in mind is even older, the con- a system to generate novel combinations. Contemporary art practinuous present of Gertrude Stein, the expanded present of William tices that deemphasise image-making in favour of manipulating, James. What is described here is a kind of time that is not a line but staging or reassembling prior materials do not abandon the notion a constant pooling of nows, getting deeper and deeper without dif- of novelty but substitute a different definition of the new. As art hisferentiating itself into past and future. In this time, in which now has torian David Joselit puts it, ‘What now matters most is not the producsomething to do other than keep the past and future apart, there is a tion of new content but its retrieval in intelligible patterns through acts of reframing, capturing, reiterating, and documenting’. Perhaps it constant ability ‘to have leaping or new thoughts’. It makes sense then that Dodge, like many of the artists repre- is one of the larger purposes of such work to remind us that this is sented at this biennial, works in video, assemblage and what might one of the principal ways in which new things have always been be called ‘word art’ rather than conventional image-making. For the made. In this way, some new art may actually free itself from the image traditionally inhabits the restricted now that gets steadily less limits of now. ar

Harry Dodge, Made in L.A., 2014 (installation view, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles). Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy the artist

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Olafur Eliasson

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Combining artmaking, technical research and the establishment and operation of a socially and environmentally responsible business, the Danish-Icelandic artist continues to offer new ways by which to measure and exploit the impact of contemporary art by Martin Herbert

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Let’s get this out of the way: Olafur Eliasson’s studio is big. Sprawling Eliasson is making undulating treelike columns that double as a over four floors of a redbrick former brewery in Prenzlauer Berg, sculpture – “a nice experiment with inflatable steel structures: they’re Berlin, it’s – well, here are some scale markers. “This is the canteen; robot-welded, then we have a pressure chamber, then we can press it they published their own cookbook,” says the Danish-Icelandic into a shape like that” – and the studio’s first soup-to-nuts commisartist as we glide through the space where his team, which numbers sion, from door handles upward, for a foundation in Denmark. upwards of 80, takes a communal information-sharing lunch every Amid this hive of activity, while Little Sun’s clean light is being day. (The book is the covetable TYT [Take Your Time] Volume 5: The Kitchen, rolled out across 13 African countries and installations are being 2013.) A moment after, while we’re touring the “fastest-growing unit polished for a French billionaire purveyor of luxury goods, other in the studio”, the area that houses the fresh-faced research team for projects are unfurling, their logistics being crunched. The Institut für Eliasson’s solar-powered, award-winning LED lamp, Little Sun (2012) – Raumexperimente, or Institute for Spatial Experiments, the pedagoga group distinct from the 25-person research team serenely labouring ical collaboration (lectures, workshops, experiments) with Berlin’s downstairs – the artist will casually note that “we just bought the University of the Arts that Eliasson ran for five years in his studio, building next door”. has just ended its tenure, and when we meet, a final fanfare, Festival of A short elevator ride later, we’re in a series of spaces where Eliasson Future Nows, is soon to open in the city’s Neue Nationalgalerie. We pass is testing for Inside the Horizon (2014), 43 mirrored columns edging an a model for Riverbed (2014), lately opened at the Louisiana Museum indoor pool, which a fortnight hence will open the Frank Gehry- of Modern Art in Denmark, one of those tiny little projects where designed Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris: vast mirrors that are the artist transports an entire Icelandic landscape (rocky slopes and “just plastic wrapped around a stretcher, but with very little distor- a stream) into a gallery, complete with intricately adjusted lighting, tion on it”. Also here are giant balls of glass that operate as incred- temperature and humidity, in order to turn the institution insideibly sharp fisheye lenses. Then, just as swiftly, we’re in a sector dotted out. In a few weeks, Eliasson will set up Ice Watch (2014), a collaborawith photographs and design plans. This is the architecture depart- tion with geologist Minik Rosing for which 100 tons of Greenland ice are being transported to Copenhagen’s City Hall ment, its current projects including a collaboraLittle Sun, 2012, in use. Square, to raise awareness of climate change. He tion with Toyo Ito on CapitaGreen, an ecologPhoto: Studio Olafur Eliasson, doesn’t even mention it. ical highrise in Singapore, for whose base level Berlin & Copenhagen

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When we sit down to chat, and after Eliasson has commended the trust in art, I was very confident in this being a way of going against GarageBand recording software I’m using for its “great time-coding”, irony and self-obsession, and that introducing the viewer as coauthor I suggest that Riverbed and Little Sun, taken together, might be neatly would dematerialise the sheen or objecthood of the artwork, critically paradigmatic for what he does. That is, moving art, in a manner so often deconstruct it. But,” – the Scandinavian collectivist in him emerges – concerned with light, colour and landscape, into the outside world “I was also fundamentally interested in what it means to share a space. and the outside world into the purview of art, establishing porosity It’s not just about the work of art and the viewer. It’s also both of them between inside and outside, art and science, art and social project or and another viewer in what might be an institution, or might be a education or architecture – as see everything from the aforementioned street. What does it mean to be two people on the street, and to what works to the Green River series (1998), in which he poured uranin, a extent does the street facilitate disagreeing, or agreeing? Does it, actubright green luminous dye used to test plumbing leaks, into rivers; ally? Does the street, by virtue of its architectural footprint or planThe Weather Project (2003), his misted artificial sun for Tate Modern’s ning, exercise hospitality, does it alienate people if they’re different? Turbine Hall; and the four manmade waterThese are questions that are very good to be falls he set up in New York, New York City In my mind, everything I do is art. tested in museums, galleries, small works of Waterfalls (2008). Eliasson agrees to some art in small spaces.” But whether it’s art or not has, degree: he’s relentlessly patient and affable, This, for Eliasson, is one reason why there I think, become secondary to the should be an interchange between outside even if you say something a bit silly. But to world and artworld; and also, one would him, evidently – as he fiddles, at first without question, ‘Does it have impact, success, with the cap of a mineral water bottle or not?’ For me it’s also a way to see think, why there are so many mirrors in his work, and so many opportunities for group and then snaps it off on the edge of his desk – borders aren’t that interesting in themselves. that art is capable… of operating… interaction. Ask him about his rationale for What matters is the real-world pragmatics of the Institute for Spatial Experiments, though, outside of its ivory tower what happens when they’re dissolved. and the scale of his vision expands further. “Riverbed was for the Louisiana Museum, whose architecture is “I remember a while back calling it ‘Po-Co-Kno’,” he says. “Profrom a period where the seamlessness between inside and outside duction, communication, knowledge, production being the studio; was introduced, as were a number of modern illusions of openness,” communication, the institution; and knowledge, knowledge produche says by way of preface. “Within this very contemplative museum, tion. Normally in the artworld these are separated, with knowledge but also this very well functioning exhibition machine, I wanted being an education facility. And I think if we look at what all of this something that would almost have the volume and scale to destabi- is about, it’s about art. Never anything else – if there wasn’t art, those lise the museum a bit, pressure it. So I wanted it to look almost like three things wouldn’t exist. I think we sometimes forget to focus on a rock garden, but also to have a sense of a mudslide. Brutal, death- why we do all this, and if we look at art, rather than the structures, it’s like; it’s almost an alien landscape, and really it’s there to introduce clear that the potential of art is not necessarily only in the museum; destabilising qualities that one experiences outside – you’re walking it might be in the art school, in studio processes. Art is now taking on a slope, keeping your balance, recomposing your walking to fit the on so many different shapes, trajectories, languages – fields of operlandscape – but you don’t really notice, you take them for granted. So ating – that the structures should fit the work, not vice versa. So one I don’t only move the landscape in but also the microconflicts: sud- should have an artist’s studio in the museum, and also an art school denly we don’t take them for granted. This is what is interesting: the in the museum, a museum in the art school, and so on, and not be experience, the activities you do, also become exhibited. It’s as much afraid of mixing it.” about the interaction as about the actual plateau, the platform, on That intermingling, I note, extends to his amalgam of artistic and which people are walking.” scientific processes. “I have an ongoing relationship with science, but This isn’t the first time that Eliasson has set the conditions for a that doesn’t mean I’m interested in changing fields,” says Eliasson. coproduction between artist and viewer. Making his aims explicit, in “There are so many methodologies around us, within theoretical the past two decades he’s created many, many works with Your in the discourses, natural science, social science, where systems of criticality title – at random: Your Compound Eye (1996), Seeing Yourself Seeing (2001), can be very easily adapted and used to push art ahead. It’s not to leave Your Utopia (2003). When we talk, it’s just after U2 have forced a very art, it’s to gain more specificity and show that art is very easily connected bland record into everyone’s iTunes account, and I’m wondering if, to the world – it shouldn’t be marginalised into a disconnected path.” in order to be widely successful, art also has to be vague, concerned The most thoroughgoing example of Eliasson’s connection with with generalist sentiments, universals: love, light, landscape, pseudo- different methodologies, surely, has been Little Sun, developed with empowerment; and how strategic Eliasson is about such things. Yet engineer Frederik Ottesen and, says its website, ‘a social business when I ask him why he thinks that art over the last couple of decades focused on getting clean, reliable, affordable light to the 1.2 billion has become widely coproductive, and how his work fits into that, people worldwide without access to electricity’. Launched in 2012 at Eliasson begins to clarify the dimensions of his thinking, the preci- Tate Modern, Little Sun is indeed a business, an avowedly humane one sion in the rainbow fog. aimed at saving energy expenses, reducing pages 78–9 “I came out of a generation – in the 1990s CO2 and sparking local business in Africa, Riverbed, 2014. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. ie, distribution for the lights, which have – where phenomenology was very imporCourtesy Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk tant. For me it represented a new confidence rolled out in the hundreds of thousands and pages 80–1 in the subject being capable of making sense which look like cute schematic sunflowers. Model Room, 2003. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. of the world today. And in my positivistic But is it art? Courtesy Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk

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“In my mind, everything I do is art. But whether it’s art or not has, I think, become secondary to the question, ‘Does it have impact, or not?’ For me it’s also a way to see that art is capable – not always, but sometimes – of operating with great precision outside of its ivory tower. It’s also a way of looking at the artworld and seeing how far the resources it claims to have translate into action. I started Little Sun to see if I could push something out of the studio; the team’s knowledge – international relations, retail infrastructure, logistics – has influenced the studio in return. And if we ask if this is an art project, we should see the artistic relation: the effort of pushing something out and what it pays back. And maybe this is where the potential really lies. Sometimes we underestimate that, for many people, art is something very different to what we think of it as in the normal artworld.” Eliasson takes a breath. He’s got a story to tell. “A year ago, I was with an elderly woman, very beautiful, just south of Addis Ababa. I was explaining the Little Sun to her and she was holding it in her hand, and I was telling her it would be better for her not to burn petroleum inside her kitchen; it’s very unhealthy, this Little Sun would be cheaper and she could spend the money on something else. She looked at it, and clearly this woman has spent 50 years burning kerosene right up in her face. That’s a tough sell. Then I said, besides that, it’s also art. She was very surprised; she asked what I meant. I said, it’s just a work of art – it’s a source of energy the same way that art can be. She said, ‘Do you mean like in the church?’ That took me by surprise – for her, the only place she would find art would be in the church, probably Coptic paintings. And I said yes, well, exactly. And she smiled, she really smiled and looked at the lamp, and then she really thought it was amazing.” Now, I confess myself naturally unsure about art’s extended purview, and I’m not wholly convinced that placing melting ice in the middle of a town square is really a cogent wakeup call (I also want

to know what energy it took to get it there; ditto over 180 tons of Iceland rock for Riverbed). But Eliasson has a way of at once concretising and abstracting the practical and enlightening – excuse the pun – functions of art that is hard to outthink. ‘Experiment’ is one of his favourite words (along with ‘precision’) and he frames everything he does within the speculative. And when he does – to tune back into his thoughts on Little Sun – you hear things like this: “This is where the arrogance of market economies falls a little short. I can go out without blinking and say, this originated from somewhere where creativity was the main force. Whether we call it art is, actually, less important; the main thing is, it’s a muscle that carries a certain energy. I’m still looking for the right characterisation of it – because the truth is, I’m now talking to the UN, the World Health Organisation, the [Bill and Melinda] Gates Foundation, and I’m talking about art like I always do, but in the context where ideas about it are very different. It’s to show where art is a force, a dynamic quality. We just need to learn how to translate it to change society, to become a coproducer of reality, a reality machine. Sadly the institutions, museums, etc, have failed this and become places where, by passing in, you step out of society and into some kind of dream palace.” An assistant interrupts, asks how it’s going – “Oh, we could talk for two days,” says the artist chivalrously – and taps his watch. I grab my laptop, and Eliasson steps in the elevator and ascends, as is his wont, to the next level. ar Olafur Eliasson: Riverbed is on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, through 4 January; Eliasson’s Inside the Horizon (2014), a site-specific installation of 43 mirrored columns, can be viewed at the recently inaugurated Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, along with a solo exhibition of his work that opens there on 17 December, running through 16 February; for more on Little Sun (2012), see littlesun.com

Loading ice at Nuuk Port and Harbour, Greenland. Photo: Group Greenland

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Rebecca Horn by Gesine Borcherdt

Her work populates the collections of major museums, and alongside celebrated names such as Nam June Paik, Joseph Beuys, Marina Abramović and Yoko Ono, the German artist is one of the most influential of her generation. Yet there’s a sense that she’s still relatively overlooked by an art scene constantly chasing the next big thing… 86

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above Metamorphoses Between Rock and Butterfly, 2014 facing page Revelation of a Tree, 2014 both Installation views from The Vertebrae Oracle, Sean Kelly, New York, 2014. Photos: Jason Wyche. Courtesy Sean Kelly, New York

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Finger Cloves, 1971, fabric Courtesy private collection.Photo: Achim Thode

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When someone moves back to their place of childhood late in life, to understand this, though, we must start from the beginning. If need it is certainly not because she has put it behind her. Especially not if be, from the Odenwald. that someone is Rebecca Horn. The woman with the saffron-red mane Horn grew up here with a Romanian governess who introduced stands in a courtyard among a mix of buildings; her wide, black clothes her to painting. Her father loved opera. The war had just ended and, flutter like feathers in the wind. In 1990, the now seventy-year-old from that point on, teachers did not know how to teach history. Even returned to her father’s former textile factory in the Odenwald moun- though they were industrialists, Horn’s parents supported her art tains in Germany in order to gradually transform it into a studio, work- studies in Hamburg. They died shortly thereafter. Horn became ill in her lungs, “because I had worked shop and museum for her own works. Among trees, the splashing creek and Horn was one of the most important with poisonous materials”, as she says. chicken coops, a chimney crowned with Although it fits almost too perfectly into pioneers of the day. Her prosthetics, her artistic biography, she was confined mirrors now towers in the air, shining bandages and masks referred, at night in the moonlight like a halo. to a sanatorium for over a year, without Horn named the place where she invites in a soft, minimal-mystical language, contact with others. Sketches of hoses friends to celebrate, work and meditate and pipes that can be attached to breasts, to gender roles and the social corset Moontower Foundation. Admittedly, it fingers and the face became the basis for in which one moved doesn’t exactly sound like the next hip a series of 22 body sculptures that funcpilgrimage site for the art scene. tion as interactive art. With Trunk (1967– “It was a long night,” sighs Horn, whose first show – The Vertebrae 9), Pencil Mask (1972) and Finger Gloves (1972), which the artist puts on, Oracle – with Sean Kelly in New York took place this summer and who she extends the body into space, where it carries out gentle moveis at the moment preparing a show at Galerie Lelong in Paris, followed ments. She puts her friends in body fans, feather cocoons and hair by another at Galerie Thomas Modern in Munich; a site-specific masks. The performance Unicorn (1970) is specifically designed for a sculpture in the Busch-Reisinger Museum at Harvard is up after that. classmate with a rigid gait, who moves through the forest as if in a To this day the commissions flow for her like good energy, which she trance with a metre-long pole on her head. “It couldn’t be repeated,” also wants to conjure up in this place. Horn has been anything but says Horn. “The energy was not the same the second time.” sedentary; for 20 years she named her place of residence in her biogAt a time in which space became the main theme in art – Maurice raphy as ‘on the road’. Since exhibiting in 1972 in Harald Szeemann’s Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1945) and Gaston Documenta 5 (as the youngest artist in the show), one offer followed Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space (1958) had just been translated into the next. Horn moved to London, New York and Paris, and travelled English – Horn was one of the most important pioneers of the day. Her for exhibitions more around the world than through Germany. In 1993 prosthetics, bandages and masks referred, in a soft, minimal-mystical she became the only German woman thus far to have a major show in language, to gender roles and the social corset in which one moved. the Guggenheim Museum; one year later she had a show in the Neue When in ‘Of Other Spaces’ (1967) Michel Foucault writes that ‘we do Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the city where she taught for 20 years at the not live in a homogeneous and empty space, but on the contrary in Academy of Arts. Tate owns an extensive selection of her works and a space thoroughly imbued with quantities and perhaps thoroughly fantasmatic as well’, his thoughts can be translated directly to Horn’s has bought all of her early work. And so now: the Odenwald. “The other exhibition spaces always take my works down in the sense for atmosphere, as it also unfolds in her later works. And it is for end,” says the artist while climbing from floor to floor up to the roof these – her mechanical sculptures – that Horn is best known today. of the museum, turning switches on and off, and thereby setting her The first was called The Chinese Fiancée (1976) and stood in the gallery of kinetic sculptures into motion. Each time she does, a gentle, dance- René Block in New York, where one happened upon it like a trap. The like magic radiates, which spreads to doors closed, Asian voices whispered in works by Meret Oppenheim, Jannis the dark – one had the feeling that the Hammers, spoons, pumps and Kounellis, Joseph Beuys, also on display sculpture was alive. pendulums begin to move, spray paint in the space – it feels somewhat as if the Horn now stood at a turning point: or hit each other, seizing the entire ghosts of her past, as a child and as an from this point on, mechanical apparaartist, haunt the building. tuses would take over the role of humans space with minimal gestures. In fact, one might ask where Horn in entering into dialogue with space. Mercury in a vitrine goes crazy under actually stands today. Companions Electric fans made of feathers, brushes the influence of a magnet such as Nam June Paik and Beuys rank and metal wave lightly, as if by magic, high in the canon of art history. Franzup and down (Peacock Machine, 1979–80). Erhard Walther and Ulay are celebrating huge comebacks. Anselm Hammers, spoons, pumps and pendulums begin to move, spray paint Kiefer and Georg Baselitz serve the establishment. And while Eva or hit each other, seizing the entire space with minimal gestures (Ballet Hesse and Ana Mendieta are worshipped as goddesses due to their of the Woodpeckers, 1986). Mercury in a vitrine goes crazy under the influtragic early deaths, Marina Abramović and Yoko Ono have turned ence of a magnet (Snake Piano, 1988); hammering typewriters hang, in to entertainment. Rebecca Horn, though? She is here, on the market the Chorus of the Locusts (1991), from the ceiling and cause glasses to and in museums – but she has no place in the younger art scene. That vibrate. Mirrors, eggs, shells, feathers and whips appear over and over someone scaled Mount Olympus early on, and to this day unswerv- – utensils, as if out of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (1899), ingly deals with the same subjects, apparently does not automatically transformed into surreal, playful or nervously aggressive protagonists make her a cult figure. But Horn, in actuality, is exactly that. In order from an erotic alchemistic, yet still reduced poetry.

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Unicorn (film still), 1970, wood, fabric, metal. Courtesy Tate, London

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Ballet of the Woodpeckers, 1986 (installation view, Theater am Steinhof , Vienna), mirrors, hammers, feathers, egg, carbon, metal conctruction, transformers, motors, dimensions variable. Private collection. Photo: Gérard Zugmann

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At the end of the 1980s Horn was one of the artists who went to historical places in order to reanimate Germany’s past directly onsite: for Skulptur Projekte Münster in 1987 she opened up a tower in which people were tortured during the Third Reich: small steel hammers, flickering lights and an ostrich egg created an almost breathing memory space that, with its filigree sensuality, became the perfect antimonument. ‘My machines have almost human features,’ Horn once said. ‘The tragic or melancholic aspect is important to me. I don’t even want them to work forever.’ The poetry that this approach embraces has its roots in the poems that precede each work. “I have always written. For me it is not about reality, but rather about finding different images,” explains Horn. “My texts are essentially scripts for the sculptures.” In fact, speaking of scripts, she has also made films – not just to document scenes with body sculptures, but also scenes with a particular narrative in which, in addition to the figures, pieces of furniture in the space also become protagonists (eg, The Gigolo, 1978). She reached her zenith, in this regard – and perhaps also as an artist – in 1990 with Buster’s Bedroom. Here, in a sanatorium near Santa Barbara, California, where Buster Keaton was once treated for his alcohol problems, there lives a group of failed artists whose crazy cosmos is permeated by Horn’s motifs like a total installation – butterflies, shells, whip, straitjacket – and where her prosthetic world culminates in a chamber drama in which Geraldine Chaplin goes crazy as an ageing diva in a wheelchair

and Donald Sutherland dances with snakes. Each figure is assigned his or her own space, which reflects their characters. Actual topographies become psychosocial ones; they appear as cocoons in which one dreams, suffers and remembers, similar to those that Bachelard describes in The Poetics of Space: ‘We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell.’ When one considers that Horn’s sculptures from the last five years – like Muschelschlaf (2009), Zen der Eule (2010) and Sonnenzentrum (2014) – still pulse, push and wink, and appear as libidinous as Bachelard’s spaces, one gladly ignores the excess of Zen that covers everything like a robe. Back in the courtyard, Horn squints through the sunlight up to the treetops: a raven circles above as if remote-controlled. “He wants to get into the chicken coop,” she says and laughs. Of course. She who has built a world for herself, as hermetic and fragile as an egg, has never left her nest, despite all her high-flying adventures. And what, if not this, makes a cult figure? ar Translated from the German by Emily Terényi A solo exhibition of work by Rebecca Horn is on view at Galerie Thomas Modern, Munich, until 21 February; Horn’s site-specific sculpture for the Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was unveiled on 16 November

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Yang Fudong The Chinese artist, known for haunting formal experiments in black-and-white filmmaking, captures the light of the Norwegian summer and imagines the darkness of its long winter in a project unveiled late last summer on a beach north of the Arctic Circle by Aimee Lin

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preceding pages, above and facing page The Light That I Feel (stills), 2014, eight-channel black-and-white-film installation. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Shanghart, Shanghai

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Located in Norway, north of the Arctic Circle, Sandhornøya is a small (2000), a photographic triptych, went some way towards introducing island with a human population of about 300 families, where for thou- this theme. Over the three images in that work, the same bloodied, sands of years conditions have created an environment rich in fish and harried businessman stands in the middle of a road, brandishing a animal life, attracting, in turn, the humans who survive on the fauna. brick in one hand as if caught in the moment before hurling it. Perhaps This past September, on the occasion of the opening of a new arts and as a precursor to the stillness of Yang’s later films, this unlikely insurmusic festival, SALT, Chinese artist Yang Fudong unveiled The Light rectionist’s pose barely changes over each of the triptych’s parts. Yang’s That I Feel, his outdoor film installation for the beach of Sandhornøya. 76-minute 35mm film An Estranged Paradise (1997–2002) develops the theme of bourgeois alienation through a Yang made the work in situ, filming for portrait of a young man made sick by his a month on the island (using, as the artist For a man who lives in a city always does, black-and-white stock), emwith a population of 23.8 million, discontent with life. Yang refers to the film ploying local dancers to perform in it and as his ‘minor intellectual movie’, the start of Sandhornøya is simply editing it at the Nordland College of Art a habit of giving each of his moving-image and Film, Kabelvåg (a small village on the works descriptive monikers. The Seven Intelthe quietest place in the world. archipelago of Lofoten). Yet the site-speciAs polar summer came to its end lectuals in Bamboo Forest (2003–7), a series of five films that premiered at Robert Storr’s ficity goes further. The screens are arranged and polar winter took over, 52nd Venice Biennale and which takes a in correlation to the stars – easily discernstark look at China’s youth, is given the ible in this remote idyll, far from the light it was also a place that brought appellation ‘abstraction film’, for example. pollution of the artist’s home city, Shanghai into sharp focus the fact Or there is his ‘peripheral-vision film’, the – specifically the North Star and its relation that light is the source material nine-part Dawn Mist, Separation Faith (2008), to its seven counterparts in the Big Dipper asterism. The first screen features an almost in which, like his work for the Sandhornøya for all film still frame of a baby sea hawk. The ruffle of beach, the artist has created a spatial instalthe bird’s feathers in the wind provides the barest of movement. It is lation that forces viewers to see all projections simultaneously, out of a typical opening scene for Yang – earlier works have similarly started the corners of their eyes. with animals, people or plants shaking in the elements – and becomes The formalist studies as to what constitutes a film mount up: his the artist’s signature imagery, registering his acute feeling for the 2009 work Dawn Mist, Separation Faith, a ‘marching (on-going) film’, physical manifestation of sensation coupled with a taste for alienation. treated the process of filming itself as a film. The work consists of only Born in Beijing, Yang first gained internanine scenes but lasts 180 minutes. For Yang, as Push the Door Softly and Walk In, Or Just Stay tional attention for works that explored the he explained in conversation with curator Li Standing Where You Are, 2013, spiritual world of intellectuals, or what he Zhenhua that year, ‘on one hand, it is a multimultichannel video installation, 16 screens, 10–20 min. calls the ‘minor literati’. The First Intellectual screen film; and on the other, it possesses the Edition of 6. Courtesy the artist

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features of video installation from the cinematography itself’. So it could be viewed as a film composed of only nine scenes, or equally as nine single-scene films, each constituting a minifilm. Even occasional departures from the moving image (while Yang works mainly with moving image and photography, he originally trained as a painter and occasionally still works in that medium), such as a commissioned project for the first issue of ArtReview Asia (Spring & Summer 2013), nonetheless remained an investigation into the medium. Titled 402, Snow, A Fox Outside the Window (2013), the magazine project consisted of a series of images annotated with sketched-out narratives. The work came from a question asked by Yang when he came across a film magazine while studying at the China Academy of Fine Art, Hangzhou, that included an article, with accompanying stills, on Federico Fellini’s 8½ (1963), a film that at that point the artist hadn’t seen. The question was: could text and stills in a publication constitute a film for those who had never seen it? To answer that, Yang created in effect what the artist calls a ‘film on paper’ or a ‘film for reading’. Besides the baby hawk, The Light That I Feel contains myriad images – naked dancers, flowers in the wind, a stone lying in the sand – that provide a notion of equivalence between the human and the natural world. They also provide a perfect example of what Yang has called ‘image as film’ – or in relation to his recent commission from the Sharjah Art Foundation, Push the Door Softly and Walk In, Or Just Stay Standing Where You Are (2013), a ‘single-frame film’. It is based on the idea that the process of shooting a film is to stick successive single-frame photographs together. If a film can be seen as a series of

still photographs, then each photograph is a single-frame film. The Sharjah work related to the Norway project in another way, too. The former, the first work Yang created outside China, was shot in the UAE and Granada, Spain, and was an attempt to capture in a series of still-photograph-like shots the ‘breeze’ of his new working environment. Related to his ‘abstract film’, it’s a word that he uses to refer to a feeling of excitement that cannot be described in words. In The Light That I Feel, the ‘breeze’ is the quietness that he experienced in Norway. For a man who lives in a city with a population of 23.8 million, Sandhornøya is simply the quietest place in the world – ‘as if a moose just passed by your house’. As polar summer came to its end and polar winter took over, it was also a place that brought into sharp focus the fact that light is the source material for all film. Standing in the open air, each of the screens became a lamp in the deepening darkness of a Nordic night in September, as well as a reflection of the stars that puncture it. And so, with the screens finally installed in Sandhornøya, the beach was illuminated. However, ‘the light that I feel’ was not only the light that Yang saw and created, but also what he expected to see when he was imagining the darkness of the polar night – and the aurora. It might be a coincidence, or perhaps it was prewritten, but the very night on which the installation was completed, Sandhornøya witnessed the first aurora of the year. For those who still commune with nature, it was at this moment, as a pale, weak, newborn aurora reluctantly shimmered in the dark blue sky, that The Light That I Feel felt complete. ar

The Light That I Feel, 2014 (installation view, SALT festival, Sandhornøya, Norway, 2014). Photo: Gunnar Holmsted. Courtesy SALT, Tromsø, Norway.

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Finger Cloves, 1971, fabric Courtesy private collection.Photo: Achim Thode

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Beautiful Evidence, Pretty Lies As the collection of data about everything and everyone has become an increasingly ‘normal’ part of life, the question of what to do with all this ‘material’ – at least that part of it that is made available to the public – and how to make the big numbers ‘easy’ for people to digest has emerged as a growing concern.But when it comes to visualising data, are we talking about something that is more in the realm of subjective than objective truth – more artform than science? by Hettie Judah

above Ingo Günther, World Processor, 1989–2012 (installation view, Big Bang Data, CCCB, Barcelona, 2014). Photo: Jose Betancourt. © the artist. Courtesy CCCB, Barcelona facing page Kamel Makhloufi, Function, 2010, charting deaths in military engagements in Iraq between 2004 and 2009 according to, on the left, the four groups suffering those deaths; and on the right, the chronology of the deaths (blue – friendly troops; turquoise – host nation troops; orange – Iraqi civilians; grey – enemies). Courtesy Tactical Tech, Berlin & Bangalore

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As surveillance culture and the mass gathering of data have grown, so too has the culture of data communication. All the information swept up in the efficient, automated gluttony of the informationtechnology data grab needs to justify its rude acquisition – with every movement, transaction or conversation becoming potential fodder in the scramble to find meaning in the pattern of human behaviour, the less sensitive fruits of ‘big data’ are released to the public, making humanity en masse not simply the subjects of the data gathering but, increasingly, the enthusiastic consumers of it too. Given that little of the world’s population is equipped with advanced skills in statistical analysis, or even nimble numeracy, increasingly the way we consume the data made available to us is in the form of diagrams. In the broad sense, the field of data visualisation dates back as far as the earliest analytic or technical diagram, but in the specific contemporary sense – the translation of data sets into the visual language of graphs, maps, charts and diagrams – it emerged properly during the nineteenth century. Thanks to a combination of factors – which include not only data proliferation but also the espousal of the medium by international broadsheets including The Washington Post and Le Monde Diplomatique, and dynamic educators in the field – we are now in its flowering. Data visualisation has already yielded bestselling books such as David McCandless’s Information Is Beautiful (2010), and iconic works such as social scientist Eduardo Salcedo-Albarán’s Mexican Drug Cartel ‘La Familia Michoacana’ (2010), which maps the complex web of connections surrounding an organised crime group in an elegant rosette. Within the space of a decade, data visualisation has become a bona fide popular artform, embraced and trusted with a delight seldom afforded the kind of ‘raw’ statistics and data that lie beneath. “One reason we trust images more than data is because we’re wired to respond to them – data and information need a different language to reach people,” explains José-Luis de Vicente, cocurator (with Olga Subirós) of Big Bang Data (2014) at CCCB, Barcelona. The first in a series of exhibitions looking at crisis, technology, economic models and emerging phenomena, Big Bang Data examined data’s status as the cultural expression of the computer age. Sections within

the show looked at the physical weight of data, emerging fields of analysis and the structure of data-gathering systems, as well as the limitations of the worldview provided through the prism of big data. The dynamic, immersive nature of the exhibition was testament to the inventive heights that data visualisation has now reached. The inclusion of works such as artist Chris Jordan’s seven-metre-wide, six-panel ‘photograph’ of 2.3 million prison uniforms evidenced, too, a cross-disciplinary fascination with the field. A linked ‘Data Cuisine Workshop’ during Barcelona’s June–July Sónar Festival generated visualisations through food, illustrating emigration patterns from Spain via nation-specific fish recipes, or preferred routes to orgasm through varisized splats of coloured sugar. The ragged, handmade results of these ludic exercises underscore the gulf between the quasi-scientific prestige that data visualisations enjoy, and their actual status as created works. “It’s a completely subjective way of representation,” explains de Vicente. “It’s not a space of scientific enquiry; it’s a cultural area.” Unlike ‘raw’ data, which can make issues seem overwhelmingly complex, confusing and even chaotic, most data visualisations are graphically calming, even as they illustrate unpalatable facts; they appear to reverse the terrifying creep of entropy, bringing harmony to disorder. The power of a good visualisation lies in its seductive comprehensibility and graphic punch, though there are pitfalls to both. Oversimplification can make a mockery of the data it is trying to communicate, while visual loveliness can distract from the message. Yale professor Edward Tufte, whose Beautiful Evidence (2006) is one of the key texts in the field, warns against the phenomenon of ‘content indifference’: ‘For serious work in reasoning about evidence, the essential test of text/image relations is how well they assist understanding of the content, not how perfectly stylish the pages look.’ The voguish status of data visualisation within popular culture leads to design tendencies that detract from its function as a tool of communication. Designer Stephanie Hankey cofounded Tactical Tech just over a decade ago to negotiate a gulf she had identified between NGOs and graphics studios. Working on advocacy campaigns such as the right to water, or protecting sex workers against violent

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attack, Hankey’s workshops for NGOs help them understand the impact that visualisations can have in their work. For organisations whose be-all and end-all is the gathering of information, the urge is always to cram in as much as possible: “It’s hard to resist the temptation to put everything in – we try to give [NGOs] the confidence to just pique someone’s interest.” On the flipside, Hankey finds it necessary to steer cutting-edge graphic studios around cultural sensitivities and to avoid clichés in the representation of African women, or even death, in an infographic. ‘Cool’ graphics that might be a hit on Tumblr pages or data-visualisation Pinterest boards, where they will be of interest for the novelty of their design, seldom translate as effective tools of mass communication. In Tactical Tech’s recently published Visualising Information for Advocacy (2013), the most powerful visualisations are those in which the aesthetic aspects of the design take a backseat – eg, Wikileaks’ baldly comprehensible Spy Files (2012) project, which allowed readers around the world to find out which companies were making and selling surveillance tools, Visualising Palestine’s Across the Wall (2012), which uses an apparently simple bus map to show relative freedoms of movement on either side of the ‘green line’ between Israel and the West Bank, and Kamel Makhloufi’s translation of deaths in Iraq between 2004 and 2009 from a chronological hodgepodge into a clean set of blocks showing the proportion of those killed in military engagements divided between ‘friendly’ troops, host-nation troops, Iraqi civilians and ‘enemies’. For Tufte, the visual display of information ‘is a moral act as well as an intellectual activity’. Beautiful Evidence describes uncluttered, multilevel flights through data from a ninth-century zodiac diagram to PowerPoint crimes (‘the metaphor is the map, not stupidity’) and an epidemiological diagram tracking the spread of SARS. While Tufte reiterates the duty to pure representation and the honest translation of data into the visual field, other practitioners argue that not only is the notion of objective representation of information impossibly utopian but that it also skims over any bias, deliberate or otherwise, in the ‘raw’ data itself.

In his essay ‘Disinformation Visualization: How to Lie with Datavis’ (2014), designer and theorist Mushon Zer-Aviv picks apart the ‘evidence’ presented in contradictory interpretations offered from a single set of statistics by organisations on either side of the pro-choice / pro-life debate in the US, and analyses the emotive tools in the resulting data visualisations. His workshops on the same theme have encouraged students to ‘lie with datavis’ to produce diagrams that are either selective in their interpretation of data (such as a map showing the link between high alcohol consumption and creativity) or manipulative in their use of visuals (the near stranglehold on the Finnish grocery market by two large supermarket chains represented as a benign force, under threat from a hostile incomer). Zer-Aviv admits that an image can potentially be ‘evidence’: “But to think that it is pure truth and unchallengeable – it’s not really the case. More and more people are creating data-driven images – we need to learn how to read them and to develop discourse. We shouldn’t be afraid of them, but we shouldn’t see them as text or actual data.” Instead of ‘beautiful evidence’, Zer-Aviv argues for data visualisations to be considered ‘beautiful arguments’ – images that we assume to have an agenda. “The more ethical perspective on data visualisation is one that doesn’t hide the questions and ambiguities.” Concurrently with the popular rise of data visualisation, big data, its methods of retrieval and the attempt to find meaning through the creation of systems in archives, libraries and object affinities have all emerged as important concerns in the work of artists including Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen and Camille Henrot. While they may share common aspects of visual language, it is this rejection of ambiguities within data visualisation – echoed in a tendency towards an aesthetically resolved quality that buttresses against the chaos of the world – that marks the important point of separation between the two fields. ar Big Bang Data will be shown at Fundación Telefónica, Madrid, 4 March – 24 May, and will tour to venues in London and Singapore in 2015–16

Erik Kesse, 24 Hrs in Photos, 2011 (installation view, Big Bang Data, CCCB, Barcelona, 2014). Photo: Gunnar Knechtel. © the artist. Courtesy CCCB, Barcelona

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Art in Context

Oh my God, what a manic first week it’s been since getting out of the CBB house! It was weird spending my first night alone in my bed. I found it quite emotional. And I keep getting into the shower with my underwear on because I got so used to doing that in the house! I haven’t seen Ricci since the wrap party and have no immediate plans to, although I’m sure we’ll all get together for nights out soon… 101

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Art in Context

A yearlong survey (in monthly instalments) in which artists, curators and cultural commentators explore the question of what African art (of the contemporary flavour) does or can do within various local contexts across the continent

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V Marie Darrieussecq The French novelist and writer visits Maputo and encounters the work of two artists who are successfully negotiating the dominant ‘national art’ style

Butcheca and Gonçalo Mabunda Mozambique is the fourth poorest country in the world. But I found Butcheca lives on the corner of Avenue Karl Marx and Agostinho Maputo, the capital, to have a melancholy sweetness, like an island in Neto, near Avenue Mao Tse Tung (one can also find an Avenue Kim an ocean of poverty. The Portuguese part – ‘Cement Maputo’ – is an Il Sung). He is building an aeroplane in the courtyard of his building. ensemble of 1960s and 70s architecture that has become magnificently Or an aeroplane-fish-aeroplane. Or an aeroplane-fish-chicken, once he tropicalised. The decrepit facades crumble beneath lianas and bougain- has mounted on it the two feet he showed me a sketch of. The metal villea. There’s also a very beautiful Gustave Eiffel-designed station, structure, suspended in the middle of the courtyard, occupies the colonial houses that recall Brazil and white sandy beaches leading whole space. One part of the fuselage is already covered in flattened into the Indian Ocean… But the capital for the most part remains an beer cans. The eyes are painted streetlamp globes. Sliding one’s head immense shantytown. The country is in full ‘Angolisation’: gas and inside the cabin, one finds it occupied by little passengers. The wings oil have recently been discovered in quantity, and a small, hyperrich are stretched canvas painted red. group close to the government is monopolising the resources. The Butcheca, born in 1978, is an autodidact who knows well what seafront is in mutation, with five-star hotels and casinos pushing up he’s doing. He also paints, on large canvases, which he shows me in his basement by the light of an electric bulb. It is hard to find mateout of the earth. No schools or new hospitals. Independent since 1975, Mozambique was ripped apart by civil rials and he has to do a lot of ‘cooking’: mixing sawdust, wheat flour war between 1977 and 1992. The country’s best-known sculptor is and wood glue to prepare his canvases. When he was younger he Alberto Chissano (1935–94): one is greeted at the airport by a group passed through the Nucleo de Artes, an artist collective for which of his large-headed, skinny-bodied Malangatana and Chissano also worked creatures, contorted and agglutinated. in the 1950s. Butcheca’s work, to me, Butcheca’s is an art that can be seems to take the best of this national Chissano hollowed out tree trunks, often universalised: one could be anywhere art, which is otherwise ageing badly. of sandalwood, from which to extract that human beings walk the earth, His subjects are material ones: Farmers’ his humanoid forms. He has a museum to himself, the Chissano Gallery, and is Meeting, Public WC, By Bicycle, The Chicken’s or are prey to dreams and anxieties. also a presence in Maputo’s National Journey… but it’s an art that can be The characters are often relieved Museum of Art, where he rubs shouluniversalised: one could be anywhere of their heads; one seems to be turning that human beings walk the earth, or ders with Malangatana Ngwenya (the are prey to dreams and anxieties. The other major national artist), the landinto an owl… characters are often relieved of their scapist Mucavele, the ceramicist Reinata Sadimba and the young Anésia Manjate, born in 1976, whose canvases heads; one wears red shoes; another seems to be turning into an owl… incorporate cowries, shells that are emblematic of many African coun- Butcheca shows regularly in Mozambique, Angola and Portugal: just tries. In an effort to honour the suffering of the people and the beauty thirty-six years old, he’ll soon, I’d wager, be showing all over the lusoof Mozambique, the National Museum of Art gives a sober impres- phone world. sion. This is neither art brut nor the ‘first’ art heritage of masques and Butcheca next takes me to his friend and neighbour Gonçalo rites, but effectively what I will call, for want of a better expression, Mabunda. At the entrance to the studio I am met by a striking national art. The lively colours, expressionistic faces and figuration Christ made of bullets, rockets, Kalashnikov magazines. I’ve come tending towards the abstract curiously, for me, recalled the National for the thrones constructed from recycled armaments that have Museum of Bolivia, which also showed recent – political and founda- made Mabunda’s reputation, but it is his masks that really seduce tional – art. But there are no visitors here, and the hospitable director me. The simple parabolic antenna, with two screws for the eyes, a piece of metal sheeting for the nose, wire spectacles, a trace of rust is from the president’s family. for the smile… it’s a sort of moon on acid. And One must go to the border of Cement Maputo facing page Butcheca, Fish-aeroplane, 2014, that petrol-can base onto which is soldered a and Mafalala, a historic shantytown from the mixed media, dimensions variable. sardine tin and two imploring washers: it’s war of independence, to find an artists’ quarter. Courtesy the artist

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another face, a victim of terrors. And this boiler with two handles and a detonator for a mouth: a theoretician of massacres? And this gas meter, all bearded with cartridges: a philosopher of chaos? A military deserter? I can already see myself trying to convince Air France that the welded rocket launcher and torpedo that I’m carrying in my suitcase are actually art… But Mabunda only sells via his gallerists in Paris (Magnin-A), London (Jack Bell) or Johannesburg (Afronova). At thirty-eight, he looks like a rock star: he has the allure, the insolence and the panache. And he has no issue with showing me the photo of him with Bill Clinton. In the stairwell I come upon a magnificent dog made of scraps of wood – an elegant work in an unexpected material: “Oh, that,” says the artist. “That took me ten minutes.” And he makes a nonchalant gesture with his hands, as if twisting raffia. There are two well-established modes within the art exported from the continent of Africa: art that recycles tins and bottle tops (the Ghanaian-Nigerian El Anatsui is a past master) and art that recycles arms. In 1995, three years after the ceasefire, the Christian Council of Mozambique encouraged ten local artists to work with turned-in weapons. Similar initiatives took place in Cambodia, in the

US and in Congo: thus in Kinshasa the artist Freddy Tsimba often constructs works from bullet casings; in 2005 A Tree of Life was shown at the British Museum by four Mozambican artists: Kester, Hilario Nhatugueja, Fiel dos Santos and Adelino Serafim Maté. (Kester, by the by, narrowly avoided losing his life after a rocket exploded in his studio.) Butcheca has also tried this type of recycling. The rivalry is harsh, and I find it hard to say who, out of all these artists, was the first to hit upon the idea of making thrones. But it is Mabunda whose thrones are shown from New York to Tokyo, passing through Düsseldorf, Amsterdam and Vancouver en route. And it’s also his thrones that Dior chose for a fashion shoot in 2010. And his Silla de la Bota (2012) upon which the ex-president of Mozambique has perched his august buttocks. Mabunda showed me these photos, framed, at his studio. But I returned fascinated by his masks: with them he has passed beyond the ‘Arcimboldo’ manner of metal assembly. His art is freed of constraints or messages. Each of these masks looks to me like the new face of Ubu Roi. ar Translated from the French by Hettie Judah

Gonçalo Mabunda, Loves with Loneliness Throne, 2013, decommissioned welded arms, 65 × 81 × 86 cm. Courtesy Jack Bell Gallery, London

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It’s just one drama after another with Kerry Katona, isn’t it? I couldn’t believe she said she was planning another baby with George Kay, just days after he was detained under the Mental Health Act! It would be the last thing on my mind. I think Kerry’s got her priorities all wrong. It’s strange that she’s already thinking of more babies… 107

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David Hammons White Cube Mason’s Yard, London 3 October – 3 January For David Hammons, the context of his showing will inevitably foreground certain readings of his practice over others – a retrospective at New York’s MoMA will carry a different message to one at the Studio Museum in Harlem. His exhibition at White Cube is forced to grapple with questions of artwork and commodity, especially given the market’s recent voracious appetite for Hammons’s work. On the ground floor are four drawings, each made by repeatedly bouncing a sullied Spalding basketball against paper. Jutting slightly out into the space, the frames have leather and cloth suitcases tucked behind, and those titled Traveling (2001–2 and 2002) cite ‘Harlem earth’ as their material. With Hammons’s city literally imprinted onto their surfaces, the drawings allude to ‘travelling’ as a basketball penalty, as well as the hopes and aspirations invested in the sport as a ‘way out’, a road to fame and fortune. The suitcases convey Hammons’s often-itinerant working practice, where the city street has acted as his exhibition space – the empty lots in Harlem where he created ‘bottle tree sculptures’ or Lower Manhattan, where

in Pissed Off (1981) he documented his arrest for urinating on a colossal Richard Serra sculpture. Downstairs are four recent paintings (all Untitled, 2014), each in a colourful, gestural AbEx style and draped with tarpaulin found on the street. The surfaces peek through the grubby sheets, forcing interplay between the painting as a coveted commodity and what could be read as its torn, damaged covering. Hammons further emphasises this relationship through his treatment of the gallery space, drawing attention to how the soiled outdoor world is dragged into the pristine white cube. Cracks outlining a large loading door are left unplastered, with one of the paintings hung directly over the line demarcating the hinges. The sliding security grills are pulled down by a third above the entrances, while the light-diffuser panels are removed and stacked in a corridor area, with The New Black (2014), an orange-painted African tribal mask, perched on top. Just as the ‘basketball drawings’ suggest movement, so does the exhibition’s staging downstairs, creating a dialogue between outside and inside, seen and unseen, refuse and artwork. Dirt Drawing (2014),

a white rectangular wall space outlined by grime, distils these polarities – an artwork in its own right, or perhaps the trace of where another had hung before. Purposefully chosen by Hammons, Agnes Martin’s Untitled #9 (1999) acts as counterpoint to the works downstairs. Square and covered in subtle bands of colour, Martin’s painting also draws from the outside world (inspired by the New Mexico plains, where she lived), but with a more clean, reduced result. Reflecting on Hammons’s mid-1970s sculptures made with grease, bones, hair and rubbish, curator Lowery S. Sims wrote in Art As a Verb (1988): ‘[He] confronts our commoditypredicated notion of the dear, the beautiful, and transforms our perception of and reception to the humble detritus of our urban society.’ While Hammons continues to imbue the street into his work, bringing with it its poor materials and concomitant sociocultural issues, the exhibition at White Cube sides closer with issues of market value – heightened by the need for a dedicated invigilator guarding The New Black and the nearby Untitled (2007), a fur tarnished with streaks of paint. Pavel S. Pyś

Untitled, 2014, mixed media on canvas and blue tarpaulin, 348 × 312 cm. © the artist. Courtesy White Cube, London & São Paulo

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Steve McQueen Ashes Thomas Dane Gallery, London 14 October – 15 November 2014 A large screen hangs in the middle of a darkened room, on it projected some shaky Super 8 footage that punctures the blackness with the glare of the Caribbean sun. A young man, slim and athletic, stands on the end of a boat, posing for the camera and drawing us in with a flirtatious smile. As green islands bob up and down behind him, he sits down on the edge and occasionally glances back. At one point he falls into the water, splashing drops onto the camera. The intimacy of Steve McQueen’s film is palpable, like a public airing of a private home video; it would feel invasive were it not so alluring. What soon becomes apparent, though, is that something is not right, and the audio is at odds with what’s onscreen. The sounds of crashing waves were recorded at the shore, and Ashes (2014) takes place out at sea. Discarded from his 2002 work Carib’s Leap, the footage – shot by cinematographer Thomas Müller – was left for 12 years before McQueen returned to Grenada in the hope of tracking down its subject,

the namesake of this new work. What he found instead was that Ashes had died, the story of which is now retold in a series of interviews that make up the plaintive soundtrack. Ashes’s friends describe how he found a stash of drugs hidden on a beach, deciding to take them for himself and make some money. Soon afterwards he was hunted down by dealers looking for their stolen goods and was shot in the hand, back, legs and stomach, mostly after he had turned to run away. At Thomas Dane’s other gallery, a few doors along the street, McQueen ventures away from the moving image into the field of sculpture. Presented in relation to Ashes, Broken Column (2014) consists of two objects, both polished columns carved from Zimbabwean granite. Roughly broken off before the top, they symbolise a life cut short, embodying the film’s protagonist in their own peculiar, abstract way. The smaller version occupies a Perspex case, powdered rock resting on its surface, while a large column is placed on a wooden pallet in the adjacent room.

The artist’s declaration that his ‘only doctrine… is to not allow the dust of the past to settle’ is placed at the head of the gallery press release, making unmistakeably clear his intentions for these works. McQueen has hardly been one to indulge in ‘art for art’s sake’, but here especially he undergirds seductive aesthetics with a heavy political punch. Violence is deferred, retold through stories or solemnly implied, but this absence by no means lessens its impact. Trayvon Martin, Mark Duggan and Michael Brown are already etched into our cultural consciousness, though it must be remembered that these are just the few who made the headlines. Ashes captures viewers with a polished sheen and a playful smile before a sharp reminder of the dangers that come with having a black male body; it is moving, disturbing and leaves an emotional mark. Although the literal dust may have settled atop Broken Column, McQueen continues to agitate. He reminds us why we still need a resolutely political art. Dan Udy

Ashes, 2014, Super 8 film transferred to HD video, single-channel continuous projection with sound, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy Thomas Dane Gallery, London, and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, London & Paris

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Michele Abeles Find Out What Happens When People Start Getting Real Sadie Coles HQ, London 4 September – 25 October Michele Abeles’s first show at Sadie Coles HQ draws mainly from three series of photographs, Jungle, B&W and Watches (all 2014). The last of these, presented in the South Audley Street gallery, comprises nine pictures of women wearing expensive-looking watches, snapped in the street as they pass by, their faces and feet cropped out. Each image is digitally superimposed against a black background, with simulated lace ribbon bearing droplet motifs running behind. Though presented as the main subject, the watches throw the viewer’s eye towards other details: the string handles of designer shopping bags (Watches #1320), a hand clutching an iPhone and a packet of Marlboros (Watches #37). Initially, these signifiers of capitalist recreation recall the slick grotesqueries of Jessica Craig-Martin, but where she emphasises social context, Abeles withholds it, and your attention drifts away from the cosmopolitan trappings of her subjects, dwelling instead on their corporeality: moles, midriffs, a tensed vein on a forearm, frayed shorts bunched up over a crotch. Downstairs are five large photographs from the B&W series. For these, Abeles converted some of her existing images (we are not told which)

into algorithms and rendered the data visual again as black-and-white grids of Tetris-like pixels. B&W #01 and B&W #05 seem like rudimentary abstractions at first, but become more intriguing as you contemplate their source: shadows thrown from a virtual realm into a physical one. In B&W #06, transparent prints of office buildings and water are applied to the glazed surface, a strategy repeated in B&W #04 and B&W #02, but for me these appendages detract from the mystery of not knowing the origin of the ‘host’ image, introducing a different axis of representation. This supplemental tendency is also evinced by the inclusion of works from two further series, Boat and Street (2014), which feel like arbitrary cameos rather than integral components of the show. In the Balfour Mews space are eight photographs from the Jungle series. In each case, the same image – tropical plants shrouded in mist, watermarked ‘2014’ – is reprinted but differently cropped, and rectangular ceramic tiles are fixed to the glass in a configuration that quotes Marcel Broodthaers’s retabulating of Mallarmé’s poem ‘Un Coup de Dés Jamais N’Abolira le Hasard’ (1897) as a set of black stripes in a book of 1969. It’s a rigmarole,

conceptually speaking, but the development of the image beyond the picture plane is more considered here than with the B&W series, the tiles reading as a continuous strip across all eight photographs, redacting information from the image but adding new information for those familiar with Mallarmé’s poem. How important is typology to Abeles’s process? Perhaps the recurring subjects are decoys: it’s not watches that interest her, but the particular part of the body they allow her to focus on. If typological photography – as practised by August Sander or Bernd and Hilla Becher – tends to be stylistically neutral in order to document the subject ‘objectively’, this is challenged by Abeles, whose serial approach is combined with a formal experimentation that introduces an extrinsic dimension to the image. Watches and Jungle activate the space behind and in front of the image, and with B&W there is an ‘elsewhere’, an entire metaphysical counterpart. In her best work, something is discovered in the space between the image’s capture and its presentation, the camera less an indexical witness to a past event than a means of generating a new one. Sean Ashton

Watches #37, 2014, archival pigment print, 112 × 76 × 4 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ , London

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Jon Thompson The Lyotard Suite Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London 18 September – 25 October If abstract painting currently gets a lot of positive attention in contemporary art, the flipside is that many of the tropes of abstraction are indulged without really being scrutinised, and consequently run the risk of becoming stylistic nostalgia. The ‘heroic’ moment of abstraction is long gone, and although senior figures like Bridget Riley still command respect, it’s easier for most to accept the sceptical squeegee-ing of a Gerhard Richter or a Christopher Wool, while young painters get plaudits for the slightest of chuck-it-at-the-canvas conceits. ‘Hard’, geometric abstraction has few exponents, so it’s good to see someone like Jon Thompson show what it means to be rigorous with the means a painter decides to deploy. Thompson’s work since the 1960s has been overshadowed by his reputation as an educationalist and a critic, but these latest paintings demonstrate Thompson’s acute critical understanding of his medium, and its continuing potential. Hard-edge, colour-field – these are figures one instantly recognises among Thompson’s Lyotard Suite paintings (all works 2014). There’s little here that offers harmony or equilibrium or totemic authority, however. Instead one finds a vibrant, dancing sense of instability. Across every canvas Thompson plays with the inability of our

visual perception to handle unresolved and conflicting forms, where one’s eye and mind is looking for recognisable patterns, rhythms or sequences. These paintings are full of the optical clash of complementary colours, in which solemn primaries jostle against cheery, decorative tones of orange, ochre, mint, cyan or purplish grey. Thompson’s geometric forms, meanwhile, seem to slide around, open up or unfold on the canvas, provoking a sense of them possessing not just good-old-fashioned ‘optical depth’, but an almost bodily imitation of an ‘inside’ into which we find ourselves peering. Delay, for example, is a sort of dull orange saltire formed in the spaces between four light-blue triangles, subtly varied in tone and hue. No line projects to meet another, and the whole is jointed together off-kilter, rotating like a Catherine wheel, with the points of the triangles producing bouncing retinal aftershadows with each move of one’s eyeballs. It’s an effect which provokes the apprehension of physical movement and material space, of an aperture in the moment of closing or opening. Similar triangles appear to be prising apart in Stretch or Fissure, or, as with the complicated diamond of Sponge, unfold, like origami petals, from the picture plane. That these paintings

begin to seem active and almost animate, organic things isn’t accidental. Nor is there anything perfection-obsessed about these canvases. All over these apparently flat areas of colour are dapples of barely visible brushmarks. Pencil markings appear at close range – in the flutter of buntinglike triangles scattered across the grey ground of Blazon one or two triangles are left uncoloured. Thompson isn’t being casual; rather the looseness makes for a further cognitive tension just at that point when one’s visual attention shifts from detail to whole. One might investigate Thompson’s stated interest in philosopher Jean-François Lyotard, and the latter’s unfinished commentaries on the Confessions of St Augustine (398), in which, the press text informs us, the philosopher ‘adopts a phenomenological approach to the relationship between body and spirit, sensing and thinking’. But even without this, Thompson’s paintings make their own case for the libidinal (to use Lyotard’s favourite term) pleasure produced when strictly visual sensations seem to open on those of touch and movement, as one’s thoughts struggle, surprised and delighted, when faced with an object that appears both constantly, restlessly changing and yet irrefutably, perfectly still. J.J. Charlesworth

Delay, 2014, acrylic and oil on canvas, 160 × 180 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London

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Gerhard Richter Marian Goodman Gallery, London 14 October – 20 December ‘Late style’ be damned, and its attendant notion that octogenarian artists are apt or even dutybound to alchemise down their work to a precious residue. For his first commercial gallery show in London in almost 20 years, Gerhard Richter throws it all in the pot, excepting painterly figuration. Here is an elegant array of mostly abstract tendencies, which are as disparate as ever in process, plus some familiar effects freshly arrived at or deployed. In the first room of Marian Goodman’s new gallery, adjacent pairs of vast grey painted-glass panels are retwinned on opposite walls, so that the space contracts a little around a huge central sculpture, 7 Panes of Glass (House of Cards) (2013), that drolly invokes both Richard Serra’s cliffs of leaning steel and Caspar David Friedrich’s The Sea of Ice (1824). Richter’s bristling caucus of glass is not only a pellucid take on those artists’ vaulting sublime; it will also comically isolate a viewer’s reflection, elevating you at some odd angle to the gallery below.

Richter’s customary sport with transparency and reflection is pursued throughout the show in a series of smaller decade-old paintings, in which subtle adjustments are required between the surfaces one is looking at: flat planes of grey, clumps of compact strokes like fused mint humbugs, patches of gallery wall in shadow where the paint has not covered the glass. Amid all this monochrome, one’s first glimpses of Richter’s recent flow paintings are astonishing. These lurid agglomerations of colour are achieved by lowering glass supports onto maplike expanses of liquid enamel, arresting the paint in a giddying variety of forms, hues and textures. Tracts of solid colour seethe at the edges into honeycomb lightness; certain zones have begun to dry and pucker before the decisive moment, so produce crazed patterns of amazing geometric intricacy. Richter traces the thinnest of pigment lines through the seeming chaos, which is in fact scrupulously disposed. Chance

intervenes only at the last second, when the glass descends and the slightest movement blurs the edge of the new painting. Up close, the flow paintings are all frontiers and intrusions. Some lakes of colour improbably abut one another and will not relax their meniscal tension, others bleed and leach and creep like oil spills or alluvial deposits. It seems Richter is not done yet with inventing new kinds of blur: successors to the swashes and veils of his best-known paintings. The most extreme technique is the one he employs in his largescale strip works, which are the result of digitally segmenting and folding older paintings, until the picture plane becomes a smear of coloured horizontal lines on which it is near-impossible to focus as you get closer. If he kept going with the process, Richter says, the whole would dissolve into white noise, its colours reverting to toneless neutrality – which is where we came in. Brian Dillon

933-7 Flow, 2013, enamel on glass mounted on Aludibond, 105 × 210 cm. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, London, Paris & New York

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Jonathan Baldock Notes from the Orifice Vitrine, London 8 October – 15 November Male and female, hard and soft, alien and familiar, comfort and danger, abstract and figurative, art and craft, magic and myth, fun and fetish – all possible word pairings that might come to mind when thinking about Jonathan Baldock’s work. This exhibition of new sculptures and wall pieces (all works but one, 2014), constructed using combinations of candy-coloured fabric, print, paint, ceramics, wood and modelling clay, can box-tick them all. The literal ‘orifices’ of the show’s title take the form of holes. They manifest as peepholes in the freestanding padded, patchwork-felted wall, Peephole-wall, that fills the gallery’s floor-toceiling window space, and through which one can view the show from the street and vice versa. Among them is the hole at the centre of the giant doughnut-shaped sculpture, Philomena, which perches on three spindly lilac-coloured wooden legs. And there are the small round holes neatly edged in embroidery thread that are cut out of

a pattern-printed muslin curtain dividing the back of the gallery from the front and that also appear in hessian wall works presented on stretchers like paintings. One of these, Peach with Feet, is of human proportions and leans against the wall, pink plaster feet protruding from underneath, embodying the idea not just of holes, but of a series of glory holes. The exhibition’s title is taken from academic Robin Lydenberg’s 1985 essay on the materiality of language and the body in William Burroughs’s counterculture novel Naked Lunch (1959). Baldock’s soft sculptural aesthetic and pastel palette may initially seem far away from the harder, seedier, more bodily subject matter of Burroughs, but there’s enough ambiguity in these works to allow not only the corporeal element but also the sinister and the sexual and the violent to seep through. Take the two small felt sculptures, Form with Protrusions, that not only stand on legs in the shape of large nails

but have nails bashed into them like totems or torture implements. Then there’s the pair of club-shaped felt sculptures suspended from the ceiling on rope. They don’t exactly scream out ‘severed heads’, but considered with their title, Atlanta’s Lovers, and with Atlanta being the virgin huntress from Greek mythology who beheaded a procession of unsuccessful suitors who failed to beat her in a running race, severed heads is exactly what they are. Perhaps the human-scale, masked grey and pink knitted figure slumped in the corner exuding kapok stuffing, The Guide, is Atlanta herself. The fleet-of-foot huntress was said to have worn armour to give her suitors a sporting chance. The thick strips of jersey fabric used to knit this figure create an effect not dissimilar to chainmail. During Frieze London week, the unstuffed figure was worn by artist Florence Peake for a series of performances. It isn’t hard to imagine that she might still be in there. Helen Sumpter

Notes from the Orifice, 2014 (installation view). Courtesy Vitrine, London

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Pierre Huyghe In. Border. Deep Hauser & Wirth, London 13 September – 1 November Try to remember what the weather was at this time exactly two months ago. This September just gone might have been the driest in the UK ‘since records began’, but I’m pretty sure that doesn’t stop any of the daily weather-nattering, the ‘oh, that’s nothing compared to last year…’ What about a year ago, a hundred years ago, or 30 million? Pierre Huyghe’s three most recent aquarium works in his solo show In. Border. Deep blink and go opaque intermittently; at points you can see fish among the lily roots and the salamanders struggling up to the surface before the glass walls turn milky white. The contents of each Nymphéas Transplant (all works 2014) are taken from the ponds that Monet built in Giverny during the 1890s, and the stuttering of the switchable glass that contains each is programmed according to records of the weather during the four years between 1914 and 1918 during which Monet painted his Nymphéas series. What Huyghe is giving us is a glimpse beneath the familiar water lilies of the paintings, to the life underneath. And the glass tells us… when it was cloudy? Or maybe just overcast. How do we tell the difference between drizzle, downpour or fog? It is, admittedly, a trivial quibble, but Huyghe’s

attempt to reanimate the paintings through visualising meteorological accounts of those wartime days is a limited insight (no pun intended), as we occasionally glimpse the limited and proscribed ecology in each tank. He might, if we’re being generous, be suggesting that the temperatures and notes that archive the weather conditions and Monet’s paintings are equal ‘facts’, that each can be used as tools in accessing, activating and remembering the past. But then it’s just a blinking aquarium. Prometheus-like attempts to reanimate or create new life fill the darkened gallery: La Déraison is a classical sculpture of a headless reclining woman, a heating element running through the marble and concrete apparently emulating the human circulatory system, and encouraging moss and spiders to nestle in its warm crevices; De-extinction is a video that dwells for 12 minutes on the details and textures of a piece of amber, finally settling on an unlucky pair of insects who were caught mid-intercourse, trapped together in their compromised position for millions of years. The star of this menagerie is undoubtedly in the video Human Mask, where in a post-Fukushima abandoned sake house, a sole, odd figure lurks: a Macau monkey,

wearing a porcelain-white mask of a young girl’s face, complete with a flowing wig of black hair. It’s mesmerising and all too human, as the monkey sits comfortably in the darkened space, jogging its leg and playing absentmindedly with strands of hair. It’s a competent, compelling existential mood-piece. But compared to footage of the mundanely bizarre true story on which it’s based, where the proprietor of an establishment in Utsunomiya, Japan, dresses his two pet monkeys in gaudy, chubby-cheeked masks with crude makeup and lets them deliver hot towels to giggling customers, Huyghe’s video is a smooth, but needless, one-liner. The title of the work doesn’t help, being at once literal, but also sounding like the title of a trite, throwaway sci-fi story, perhaps with the tagline, ‘We’re all just monkeys trapped in an abandoned sake house’. Huyghe’s work has always been haunted by origins, tracing the filaments of authorship and control, often unspooling them until they release a shimmering echo of associations. Here, his wayward Prometheus keeps Huyghe’s creations on a short leash, where they remember their pasts too clearly and are still too closely tied to their sources, left feeling flat and inert. Chris Fite-Wassilak

In. Border. Deep, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Alex Delfanne. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London

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The Mechanical Garden and Other Long Encores Dilston Grove, London 21 September – 26 October In the now-derelict, early twentieth-century poured-concrete church of Dilston Grove, artists Ben Burgis, Stuart Middleton and Richard Sides have realised their own version of the Mechanical Garden, curated by Naomi Pearce, an installation, sketched out but not realised, by late British avant-garde artist Stephen Cripps (1952–82). While not an accurate realisation of the original design – Cripps’s garden resembled a themepark straight out of Jean Tinguely’s brain, where everything is mechanised, from a self-erecting tree and spinning garden umbrellas to rows of flowers that dig and chuck earth about – the trio’s installation is an evocation of and a tribute to his work. Known for his ephemeral performance-based works, which combined mechanical sculptures made from found objects, urban sounds and explosives, Cripps’s spirit emerges from this highly sensory sculpture and sound installation, which in turn leaves you feeling somewhere between nostalgic for the past and anxious for the future. Occupying almost the whole of the nave, an accumulation of rubbish, mattresses, cushions, scrap metal, plastic bags and random objects including a laundry basket, a number plate and an abandoned fish-shaped cuddly toy, is held aloft by a large net, looming overhead like a precarious ceiling; at the end of it, standing in the place of the altar, other pieces

of junk and urban debris float around in the russet foaming water of an artificial pond, in which only a few water plants manage to survive. Improvised sofas and camping chairs invite visitors to sit and listen to a sound piece that resonates in the acoustics of the space, and which features, among other things, interviews assembled within an essay by writer Alice Hattrick, sound recordings from construction sites and explosions, musical contributions by experimental artist and percussionist Z’EV and Berlin-based musician Steven Warwick (aka Heatsick), and an essay by writer Patrick Langley reflecting on the installation through the history and metaphor of the garden. Particularly captivating, Hattrick’s essay featuring recollections and anecdotes by Cripps’s friends and collaborators (such as ACME studios founder Jonathan Harvey, artist Richard Wilson and performer Anne Bean) conjures up (not without nostalgia) a time of collectivism and selforganisation when Cripps was living among a large colony of artists unofficially established in the empty Victorian warehouses of Butler’s Wharf. Beyond preserving the legacy of an underground artist, it points out the relevance of Cripps’s way of producing and showing art for contemporary artists (which is in turn illustrated by the collaborative crowd of artists, writers and musicians involved in this show). If Butler’s

Wharf was an early flagship of the gentrification and privatisation process during the 1990s, this is again becoming an urgent issue for contemporary art spaces today (the Woodmill, a studioand-gallery-space group behind the production of this exhibition, is currently in search of an affordable new location). But what resonates even more in this Mechanical Garden is Cripps’s fascination for the city, its noises and all the waste it generates – which he harvested from the riverbanks and recycled into his sculptures, turning them into archaeological relics of the postindustrial city. Urban sounds collected in London, poems and a psychogeographic narration guiding us through Bermondsey and beyond by Laura Oldfield Ford enhance the city as a focus, which is materialised through the trio’s accumulative installation. Only here, the scrap metal of the mechanics that were to populate and activate Cripps’s garden have been replaced by proper trash, and nothing seems to function any more. In times of heightened environmental awareness, Burgis, Middleton and Sides’s Mechanical Garden has emancipated itself from Cripps’s archaeology of metal objects, to become a rather alarming dystopian projection of days to come; as I leave the exhibition, an automated voice from Simon Werner’s sound piece chants mechanically, “What’s the remedy? What’s the remedy?” Louise Darblay

The Mechanical Garden and Other Long Encores (installation view), 2014. Courtesy the Woodmill, London

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Josh Faught I know I Came into This Room for a Reason Kendall Koppe, Glasgow 6 September – 30 October On first encounter, it’s hard to know just what to make of Josh Faught’s work. I expected to hate it. I left as an enthusiastic (chastened) convert. The seven works that make up I Came into This Room for a Reason are not easy to love. They look like some kind of throwback to either postminimalist, Eva Hesse-inflected forms (avant-garde) or the type of crafting-as-catharsis hobbyist assemblage you could imagine Claire’s mother making in the early 2000s HBO series Six Feet Under (kitsch). In reality, they are both, and so much more. But let’s face it – woven and crocheted sculptures in hand-dyed hues of daffodil, baby-blue and raspberry do not, immediately, ‘look like’ cutting-edge contemporary art. The Mauve Decade (#1) (all work 2014), for example, could be a hippy’s room divider or dysfunctional hemp windbreak. But this is their real power – underestimate at your peril. Faught’s anachronistic, irreverent aesthetic acts as a critical Trojan horse for highly sophisticated, politicised works that embody serious, thoughtful concerns. All of the works consist of handwoven, hand-dyed textiles adorned with assorted (usually found or gifted) ephemera – badges, small text-based signs, fake foods, mugs, greetings cards, sequins, books and so on. In some works, such as Bookends (Raspberry Rut) and Interiors, Faught’s own (virtuoso) weaving

and crochet is linked with painstakingly sourced jacquard afghan coverlets that conform to a specific nineteenth-century American weaving technique called ‘summer and winter’. These are ostensibly ‘reversible’ blankets in which different (and therefore ‘seasonally appropriate’) colours can be woven on each side. They aren’t dissimilar to Lucy McKenzie’s trompe l’oeil-esque blankets as part of Atelier E.B. or Lucienne Day’s zodiac silk mosaics in colour scheme, style and imagery. The titles and accompanying descriptions also provide a ‘way in’. The title of The Mauve Decade, for example, refers to the 1890s, in which the colour mauve (and lavender) was – as it continues to be – seen as a signifier for homosexuality (see the classic line in Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, 1991, or the prominence of mauve in LGBT flags). This isn’t the first or last reference to identity politics in Faught’s work, and the history of the role of craft – textiles in particular – in and as political activism is clear both here and in previous works, eg, in his replication of sections of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. Emotional Friend is another leading title, and the work’s inclusion of actual greetings cards, badge, mug and similar items attached to the woven material highlights the artist’s interest in ‘mechanisms of survival’ – emotional and psychological props such as comfort eating, self-help or how-to manuals. These, and the

homespun and workplace wisdom of the numerous badges, signs and pins bearing passive-aggressive adages and clichés could be seen as ironic (many are very funny). But if they are, they also manage to be humane, even poignant, in Faught’s hands. There is certainly no ridicule of people who indulge in such interests. As well as detailing absorbing personal and social histories, these items reflect another recurrent theme of the exhibition – history and the passage of time. Many pieces incorporate clocks, calendars, cards and other devices that mark or track time in some way, and the subject is explored literally through material and image – the slow, labourintensive making of the works (handwoven, hand-dyed), forecasting (fashion, colour, astrology) and the accelerated, quick-fix forms of one-liners, aphorisms, found objects and fake snack foods such as cookies. Faught has described such snacks as representing liminal spaces, foods we eat ‘in between’ which are both comfort and vice. To Glasgow-based gallerist Kendall Koppe’s credit, I Know I Came into This Room for a Reason is the first time Faught’s work has been seen in a UK or European gallery. It should be the start of far greater interest in an artist whose work encapsulates what that overused term ‘practice’ should entail. Susannah Thompson

I know I Came into This Room for a Reason (installation view), 2014. Photo: Max Slaven. Courtesy the artist, Kendall Koppe, Glasgow, and Lisa Cooley, New York

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Cory Arcangel Team Gallery, New York 7 September – 26 October What happens when an exhibition does not reflect an artist’s breadth of thinking? In his first New York exhibition in three years, Cory Arcangel shows nine works presented on as many flatscreen televisions, which have been rotated from landscape to portrait format and are accompanied by clutters of cables connecting them to media players. All part of the series Lakes (2013–4), they are each different iterations of the same work: a digital image that the artist transformed using a ‘lake’ Java applet (a small bit of code that gives an effect of a reflection in water, doubling the image in a blurry way). The images – Puff Daddy boarding a jet (Diddy / Lakes, 2013), an Instagram of Larry David and Skrillex (Creative Class / Lakes, 2014), a foot in running shoes against a wood floor (Asshole 2 / Lakes, 2014) – are almost interchangeable in their mix of pop culture and consumer products (there’s also a pair of snazzy sunglasses).

The clunky lake effect makes all of the either hi- or low-res images – culled from the Internet or the artist’s own files – seem uniformly outdated. It’s a look Arcangel excels at, and while visualising obsolescence is an interesting theme for an artist who seems able to overcome any malfunction in old videogames, this series of works does not examine the banal but actually becomes it. (Appropriate, then, that the day I visited Arcangel’s show I saw televisions turned sideways in three other shows.) Sameness is not always a weakness, but it is here. An exhibition including works that reflect the range of Arcangel’s technological capabilities would better demonstrate the complex ways in which he thinks about technology. Pro Tools, his 2011 solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art, was just that: it included Arcangel’s now-iconic messing with videogames and a series of prints that

tinkered with Photoshop to create colourful abstractions from the software’s gradient tool. They are simple to describe, almost like an elevator pitch (‘just the clouds from Super Mario Bros. moving across the screen!’), but they are also considered pieces that show a sophisticated and witty approach to the optical unconscious of technology. Could the same be said of Lakes? Maybe. Like the Photoshop prints, Lakes offers a straightforward use of commonplace technology exaggerated for effect. But while earlier works, such as Arcangel’s ‘self-playing’ bowling games, raise questions about the physicality of absence, and the Photoshop prints make direct reference to the history of abstract painting, the Lakes series is a body of works that, like Narcissus looking at his own image in the water, is stuck in the loop of addressing little beyond its own terms of production. Orit Gat

Creative Class / Lakes, 2014, single-channel HD video, looped digital file, 178 cm flatscreen, armature, various cables, 201 × 93 × 28 cm. Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy Team Gallery, New York

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Strauss Bourque-LaFrance No Aloha Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York 7 September – 19 October It’s striking how much Strauss BourqueLaFrance’s work has changed in the past four years, since his first major two-person exhibition at Bodega, Like Flex / Like Flex (2010). The work in that show featured a lot of imperfectly handmade, blobby clay and plaster objects perched atop, among other things, fake cardboard cigarettes. Another installation featured fake marble high-heels, and fake orchids (next to a bag of plastic googly-eyes). While a fondness for synthetic things remains, Bourque-LaFrance has gone all-out-Koons for his first exhibition at Rachel Uffner Gallery: there’s very little of anything handmade in sight; almost everything has been fabricated, most notably the geometric fireplace mantels that march across the striking, wall-to-wall black-and-whitestriped carpet (yes, wall-to-wall). They don’t look anything like mantels, though, unless your picture of a fireplace derives from a casino, circa 1983. Instead, they resemble gloriously tacky Stonehenge structures, almost as if fashioned from the depths of suburban tracthome interiors; they’re like minimalist totems, as learned from Las Vegas. All red-and-white stripes, the mantel Split Vision: Pattern (all works 2014) is nothing

but flat, shiny surface, like a circus tent turned altar. Another, Split Vision: Marble features uninterrupted, richly veined marble. Though of course, just as with the other mantels, it’s made of lacquered MDF and laminate, that cheap flooring and counter surface made almost entirely of plastic. If minimalists had a penchant for purity of form and material – Carl Andre’s copper plates were just that, copper plates – BourqueLaFrance flips that logic on its head. What is laminate really made of, anyway? Dashed dreams? Budget restrictions? Nobody really knows, except that it’s cheap. Ironically, the only thing here made of anything remotely fancy or expensive is the bronze cast of a TV remote, Showpiece, resting on Bourque-LaFrance’s marble mantel. It’s a cheeky gag: what should be expensive is cheap, and what should be cheap is expensive. What’s nice, if anything, about No Aloha is its play with relative value. Less interesting are Bourque-LaFrance’s ‘vacation paintings’, framed sheets of plastic mesh with spraypainted abstract shapes and forms. There’s enough abstract painting in this world to go around, even if this variety is made of mesh and, in its larger examples, such as

The Difference Between Happy and Ness, is goofy and imperfect (note the sheets curling at the bottom). I’d rather linger at the artist’s sushi bar, Sushi for Scene Six, propped on top of Split Vision: Martini. The sushi, with its geometric, Pop inflections, would look at home in Beetlejuice (1988), served by the Deetz family at dinner before it ate their faces off. This Tim Burton feeling isn’t arbitrary; his film is referenced by the exhibition’s press release when describing how mantels like Split Vision: Martini can be seen as entrances to alternate realities. The work has no empty cavity, but rather a black surface where a gaping hole would be, framed by two skinny martini glasses. While I really wish Rachel Uffner Gallery harboured a portal to the other side, I only found a checklist and the press release, which contained a refreshing reference to the Memphis Group, that quintessentially 1980s Italian design and architecture group. The Memphis influence shines through and through here, and saves the show from being another redundant redux of spare, overly elegant abstraction. While it has some of that, No Aloha is a little wacky and a little weird – just enough to keep things interesting. David Everitt Howe

No Aloha, 2014 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Rachel Uffner Gallery, New York

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Justine Kurland Sincere Auto Care Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York 4 September – 11 October With her young son onboard and a bed built into the back of her van, driving cross-country has long been part of Justine Kurland’s peripatetic artistic life. In This Train Is Bound for Glory (2009), she began to include references to her own roving existence in the cameo parts played by her bedraggled son and the brief appearance of their shabby van. With Sincere Auto Care, the maintenance of the van and the predominantly masculine spaces of automotive America are now the main subject of the work. This also marks a temporal shift from the nineteenth-century mythology of the American West (trains, wilderness and hobos) to the nation’s defining twentieth-century motif of the motorcar and its twenty-firstcentury demise. The aged Cadillacs, Fords and Corvettes that appear across this series of photographs conjure up the everyday economics of use and reuse that form the messy afterlife of Detroit’s dying industry. Kurland describes the necessities and passion of a practice of ‘sincere auto care’ in the cut-price spaces

of junkyards, low-cost custom paint jobs and aftermarket parts. This masculine world is saturated with death and melancholia. The aftermath of fatal accidents appears in numerous images, including the spewed guts of a car’s front end, Crash (2013), and the caved-in windshield of Death Seat (2012). The close-up view on a custom paint job of cackling skeletons amidst licking flames, Spray Fire Custom (2013), suggests male bravado in the face of death. And the street term for a car with a matt black paint job and blacked-out windows, Murdered Out (2013), points to an urban poetics of death, all in a photograph showing a laboured surface of supreme prosaic beauty. These compressed spaces create an intimacy that is heightened by the sharp clarity of Kurland’s large-format camera. Her scenes of stillness and suspended activity demand an attitude of caring attention to the sensual tactility of the surface of the print. Many of these oil-stained spaces include tattooed male bodies, quietly working or caught in moments of solitary rest.

The lack of eye contact between photographer and these subjects marks the closed nature of the milieu. For Abigail (2014) is one of the few images that suggest the well-known sexualised decor associated with the world of men and cars. A pinup poster is visible in blurred vagueness, but Kurland keeps her camera’s focus on the tattooed skin of the mechanic turned away from us. The ‘Abigail’ of the photograph’s title is another figure of death, memorialised by a large winged crucifix tattoo, the name in tombstone filigree lettering spread across the man’s bared upper back. The grimy child’s hand of Baby Tooth (2011), a closeup and sensually lit image of Kurland’s son’s palm cradling his broken tooth, suggests the boy’s affinity with the spaces of Sincere Auto Care, an affinity that his mother lacks. Perhaps the melancholic aura that permeates the whole series is less socioeconomic and more psychical, driven by the inevitable loss of her child as he enters the adult male world. Siona Wilson

Draped Glass, 2014,inkjet print, 41 × 51 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York

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Harun Farocki Parallel Greene Naftali, New York 9 September – 4 October There are two works in Parallel: Parallel I–IV (2012–4) is a four-part video installation projected on screens that hang like veils in the gallery. The work charts not only the development of computer graphics from the pixelated lines of the 1980s to the hyperrealistic videogames of today, but also the shift in imagemaking from what the late (he died six weeks before this show opened) Harun Farocki saw as representation (film) to construction (virtual reality). Ein Bild (An Image) (1983), on the other hand, is a documentary about a four-day photoshoot of a single German Playboy centrefold. Both works capture different types of imagemaking: one programmed on computers using 1s and 0s, and the other captured on analogue film by photographers using models. As a nongamer, I was initially fascinated by Parallel I–IV. Farocki is not interested in the societal implications of videogames, which often allow users to commit violent and illegal acts virtually, but rather in how the visuals behave structurally. Programs are constantly improved

to create breathtaking details like sea spray coming off a wave and leaves rippling in a slight breeze. The landscapes have limits and boundaries entirely of their own making, which create rules completely divorced from the ones that dictate our own world. For example, characters walk through solid objects, bang against invisible barriers beyond which are vast black voids and encounter ‘twilight beings’, characters that cannot be tampered with or destroyed. Watching these images, I could hear the voice of Werner Herzog saying, “Life in these lands must be sheer hell”. The hell in the games comes nothing close to the hell in the German Playboy studio, however, where a bunch of men and women sporting normcore dress scurry around making adjustments to a gorgeous blonde with crimped hair, full bush and a flawless body. They fluff and spray her nipples. They make her sit in unnatural positions for long periods of time. When her arm eventually gives out from exhaustion, the photographer says, “You should do

some sport, pet.” This just after saying that she looks spastic. When the film wraps, the model’s legs have gone to sleep. “I can’t stand up,” she says. The photographer quips, “There are tears in my eyes.” Thirty years after this film was made, women’s bodies continue to be degraded by the media. When divorced from any staid academic dialogue about the rhetoric of the image, Ein Bild adds nuance to a contemporary feminist concern with digital-image technology. With the invention of Photoshop, which carves the ‘perfect’ form in postproduction, are women now freed from the face-to-face humiliations of posing for a photographer who claims, on set, that he is not a “miracle worker”? Is the former actually more humane? That’s not the question posed by the work, but it’s a question worth asking. Through the confluence of a male artist exploring images of sex and violence intended for a male audience, what this exhibition really highlights is the need for more female voices in the artworld, and beyond. Brienne Walsh

Parallel I-IV (still), 2012–14, two two-channel videos, two one-channel videos. Courtesy Greene Naftali, New York

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Geta Brătescu Matrix 254 Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive 25 July – 28 September Given the large scale of some recent retrospectives (Koons at the Whitney comes to mind), it has become rare to leave such shows feeling like one hasn’t seen enough of an artist’s work. But such is the case with this retrospective of Geta Brătescu’s art, the Romanian artist’s first solo exhibition at any US museum. With only two rooms dedicated to exhibiting an output spanning the decades between 1974 and 2000, the collection of drawings, collages, videos and several sculptural installations that are on view provide an electrifying, if woefully abridged, introduction to an artist still largely working in obscurity. Based in Bucharest, Brătescu, who is now eighty-eight, lived in Romania during the brutal reign of communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, whose regime terrorised that Eastern European nation from 1967 to 1989. In the 40 collages that comprise Memorie (Memory, 1990), similarly sized rectangular strips of paper, painted with black and indigo tempera, display beneath them the word ‘memorie’, handwritten by the artist. While Brătescu claims to eschew overt political commentary in her

work, the conflation of the term with the repetition of opaque fields, in conjunction with the series’ production date (a year after Ceausescu’s public execution), would seem to commemorate a period of lost reminiscence, forcibly or otherwise imposed. Among the two black-and-white films included, Atelierul (The Studio, 1978) documents Brătescu in her Budapest studio enacting a series of performances, among them drawing on the walls and floor, playfully interacting with found tools and clapping wood tablets together. Highlighting the potential for finding the fantastic in the quotidian material that surrounds her, Brătescu’s use of common objects reflects a resourcefulness born of withering state-controlled rations. Meanwhile, in Mâini. Mâna trupului meu îmi reconstituie portretul (Hands. The hand of my body reconstitutes my portrait, 1977), Brătescu’s hand, resting on several sheets of paper and shot from above by artist Ion Grigorescu, enacts a series of gestural performances (tying a knot and adjusting her wedding ring, among them). The film concludes with Brătescu tracing an outline of her hand.

Asserting her subjectivity within the work itself, the literal hand of the artist is depicted as both agent and artifact of the creative act. Notably, the anatomical hand is a symbolic form that recurs several times throughout the show. Fals Joc de-a Fapta (The False Game of Deed, 1985), a vitrine filled with lambent marbles and small, polished stones, also includes several white gesso casts of splayed hands. And in the text accompanying the black ink illustration of an outstretched hand, Mâna (The Hand, 1974–6), Brătescu notes that, at the time, ‘having a model was out of the question’. ‘I realized’, she concludes, ‘that the hand is as alive as the model.’ Brătescu’s large-scale installation Didona (Dido, 2000) pays titular homage to the lovestruck queen of Carthage. Tacked upon one wall of the exhibiting gallery, a snaking line of black felt, pinched and looped by matt black wooden clothes pegs, encircles seven felt-framed panels of household aluminium. A totemic ode to domesticity, these everyday materials, at the hands of Brătescu, ultimately transcend their utility. Joseph Akel

Memorie (detail), 1990, 40 collages with tempera on paper, 62 × 37 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Ivan, Bucharest

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Edgar Arceneaux A Book and a Medal: Disentanglement Equals Homogenous Abstractions Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects 6 September – 18 October In 2008, Edgar Arceneaux showed a sculpture called Giant Fractures Glass Tripod, which featured a hunched skeleton painted in enamel on broken glass. The sculpture was the heart of an exhibition, also at Susanne Vielmetter, that attempted to make connections across a number of fields, ranging from biology, geology and history to religion and even the zodiac. Giant Fractures Glass Tripod was a direct reference to Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23) and To Be Looked at ( from the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (1918), placing a primal man or forefather to humanity in the place of Duchamp’s enigmas. What Arceneaux wanted, it seemed, was to present an origin-of-the-world story, where art synthesised conflicting cosmologies by pointing to similarities in science and religion, which would hopefully transcend their fraught relationship and give a sense of something larger than themselves. The problem, at that time, was that the different sources (both scientific and religious) were poorly defined, and Arceneaux’s referential layering only made

matters worse. The entire proceeding came across as simply a number of loose concepts set free inside a Duchampian funhouse with nowhere to go. In Arceneaux’s current show, thankfully, the subject matter and the dilemma it presents are clearly stated. The exhibition grapples with two documents: one a redacted anonymous letter sent from the FBI to Martin Luther King, Jr, threatening King with the exposure of his marital infidelities if he did not commit suicide; and the other a statement by King’s daughter protesting the sale of his Nobel Peace Prize and Bible at auction. Using these letters, the exhibition presents a complex portrait of the Civil Rights figurehead. At one point, Arceneaux (a top-notch draughtsman) simply draws King from different angles. Copies of the letters are placed in vitrines and backlit. A number of windows hang from the sides of the gallery like didactics: some windows have the letters on the glass, others are surfaced with collages speaking to King’s complicated personal relationships, his

controversial politics and the collateral material generated by his public rise. The crescendo of the exhibition is a video involving the primal man, King’s last speech and the music of Underground Resistance, all set in an abandoned Catholic church in Detroit. Overall, the exhibition feels like a rebuke to Civil Rights museum installations or other manners of PR-approved storytelling. As an alternative to these thin rituals of packaged history, Arceneaux wants to keep the story intact, complete with its rough edges and enigmas, and fortunately his presentation is rich enough that one really does desire to understand King in all his complexity. In fostering this desire, Arceneaux’s thick Duchamp references then start to work with profound effect. Just as the glass in Duchamp’s Fresh Widow (1920) is darkened by black leather and Duchamp’s desiring machines ultimately grind to a halt, so our interest in King is heightened through Arceneaux’s presentation of King’s many paradoxes and the deftness with which King’s story eludes our understanding. Ed Schad

A Book and a Medal (detail), 2014, painting on mirrored glass, handcrafted steel frame, 105 × 477 × 4 cm. Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy the artist and Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects

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Cayetano Ferrer Composite Arcade Château Shatto, Los Angeles 20 September – 7 November I was once in the house of some very wealthy people (OK, some billionaires), and the French curator of their furniture collection was showing me how a sheet of marble can be folded, with 45-degree cuts, to create the impression of a solid block. He told me that he was surprised how easy it was in Los Angeles to find the craftsmen skilled enough to achieve such seamless illusion. Cayetano Ferrer has an alternative technique for augmenting nature: he uses Photoshop. Four Quarry Composites are installed halfway through his exhibition Composite Arcade at the new LA gallery Château Shatto. Each oblong monolith, supported on a steel stand, incorporates broken pieces of marble reportedly salvaged from hotels and casinos. Through a laborious process of digital reconstruction, Ferrer fills in their missing parts with printed PVC to make perfect marble rectangles, the hybrid slabs ending up more fantasy than fact. Ferrer’s attention to detail makes these appealing material koans. Where the original marble is scratched or stained, he digitally scratches or stains his synthetic PVC extensions to match. In Quarry Composite Wall Plate (all works 2014) he consolidates two separate pieces of

marble – which, for all I know, may not even be the same kind of rock – within the same PVC panel. Marble is, of course, itself an amalgam, as advertised by its veined and fissured patterning. Ferrer pulls off a related trick in Fragment with Infill, in which he replicates not marble but a chunk from an art deco frieze, modelling its (conjectured) continuation in brown plaster. When Ferrer’s source material is not millenniaold rock but modern design tropes, the mind begins to swim. Thin plaster tiles, some of them broken, are shuffled around the front of the gallery by the staff each morning, or left in stacks. Chimaera Tile lays arabesques over Moorish star-shapes, Mayan zigzags and triangles, Egyptian spirals and so on. Frank Lloyd Wright’s tiled Ennis House never seems far from view, but neither do the casino interiors of the Las Vegas strip. The most dominant work in the gallery, the floor-to-ceiling Infinite Screen Wall (Vertical Section), is no denser with ideas than the smallest, Fragment with Infill; its scale, however, allows its tawdriness – each brick is carved from polystyrene – to show through. Ferrer is a master of what people not involved in art often call ‘art direction’; he uses

coloured lights, for instance, to mask the ordinariness of his media, and to create drama where there may not be any real action. This eagerness to please may be part of his critique; the atmosphere of paranoia and desperation in a casino, for instance, would be unbearable without the distractions of colour, noise and alcohol. (Could the same be true of an art gallery?) The first time I saw Composite Arcade was after dark; in daylight, it was a much less sanguine viewing experience – and all the more intelligent for it. The installation Endless Columns – the show’s climax, at the furthest end of the ‘arcade’ – is untroubled by daylight. A mirrored room, sealed by a black curtain, reflects a Mayan-style column at its centre, which lights up sequentially in projected rainbow colours. Repeating columns disappear in all directions, but as they get further away, the wobbles in the mirrors exponentially increase and space becomes unstable. The listed media for the installation reveal that the bottom tier of the endless column is an ashtray from the MGM casino. That nugget of information feels like the realest part of the exhibition, the rock around which everything else was formed. Jonathan Griffin

Endless Columns, 2014, salvaged MGM ashtray, polystyrene on wood frame, Aqua-Resin, mirrors, sound and light projection, one-hour loop, 550 × 550 × 305 cm. Courtesy Château Shatto, Los Angeles

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Lisa Anne Auerbach Spells Gavlak, Los Angeles 13 September – 18 October I haven’t read half the books on my shelves. Besides hefty catalogues and library borrows, read books, if loved, get gifted on. Only the unread linger. My bookshelf doesn’t collect acquired knowledge, only failed intention and impulsive, unconsummated desire. While I tinkle ice and whiskey into glasses in the kitchen, dates cruise my shelves, trying to design who I am by the culture I consume, silently deciding if I deserve the mercy of their affections. Lisa Anne Auerbach first documented her own bookshelves in one of the sundry zines in her one-woman publishing house. Here, in Spells, she weaves the titles and position of her books into elaborate tapestries. So we read and play the game of guessing who the artist might be by her books and their juxtapositions (Soapmaking: A Magical Guide near The Tao of Meow) in these elaborate knitworks. Early and iconically, knitting in her work took the form of sweatery outfits, marked with pronouncements and protests, ribald jokes and radical sloganeering first meant to be read by passing motorists as she bicycled across the city. A few spooky

effigies of the artist clad in her own knitwear linger around the empty floors of this show. Stretched into rectangular wallworks, the first woolly tapestries I saw offered a spread-out list of resolutions, the New Year’s variety. Mostly affirmative, a few dangerous, all firmly made intentions for the unknown future. Here hang a few similar lists. On one tapestry, the artist collected advice from psychics, crafting a map of self-helpish advice that hardly foretells a future. Other knitworks obsess over cats or fuck around with meme hashtaggery, a mix of political commentary (#IraqtheNewIraq, #gazastrippers), personal statements (#equaltotheloveyoumake, #freetobeme) and, well, other (#adderallsummer, #trannyhookercorner). In a side gallery hide hypersharp photographs of a BDSM porn mag Auerbach found shredded in an airport parking lot in 1989 and kept, treasured even, for decades. Massively blown-up in tightly focused closeups, Auerbach exposes the full force of these scraps’ battered sexual longing, just snatches of nipples and slips of tautly drawn leather. And just a few feet away,

let’s not forget those two beautiful women at the opening in the centre of the gallery, who turn, with gloved hands, the pages of American Megazine (2013), a massive 150cm-tall publication documenting megachurches in an appropriate Costco family-size. A survey of sorts for the Los Angeles-based artist unshown in her hometown since 2007, these varied works all locate hope or desire made manifest: sexuality as a form of liberation, crafting a better world rather than just buying it, marking others’ attempts to purchase their ways out of a fearful future through supersize religion and entrepreneurial mysticism. It appears for the artist that our real struggles can be alleviated through individual and collective action, but they are more often assuaged by dubious preachers, for-hire soothsayers and creep-job politicians. We can summarise our conditions in hashtag newspeak, but what, if anything, can we actually do about them? One smaller tapestry offers not an answer but perhaps a direction. Writing across a sweater in bold white letters, Auerbach has knitted: ‘Bad Ideas Are Better Than No Ideas’. Andrew Berardini

The Natural World, 2014, knitted wool on linen, 203 × 160 cm. Photo: Jeff McLane. Courtesy Gavlak, Los Angeles

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Glenn Kaino Leviathan Kavi Gupta, Chicago 19 September – 20 December Conceptual artist Glenn Kaino is a protean talent. A former chief creative officer of Napster and now senior VP at Oprah Winfrey’s media company, the LA-based artist is also very much a Johnny-on-the-spot in the artworld. Currently he has two major public commissions on view – one in Washington, DC, and the other at the Prospect.3 biennial in New Orleans – as well as a sprawling protest-minded installation at Kavi Gupta’s new warehouse gallery in Chicago. For the latter, Kaino has done like a globavore chef and travelled near and far for provisions. In a show aptly titled Leviathan, he has sourced materials from as close as Ferguson, Missouri, and as distantly as Cairo, Egypt. An artist long known for his recombinatory approach to turning standard models into innovative forms (aka ‘kit-bashing’), Kaino remains an artist staunchly committed to pitting art’s symbolic power against the instrumentalising effects of raw finance. Mismatch or not, the artist likes his long-term odds. At his show at Kavi Gupta, for instance, he introduces ten new works that explore – among other radical impressions – the precarious balance that keeps certain cultural ideas ascendant and others struggling to upset the status quo.

The works in Leviathan aim to represent what Kaino sceptically views as a zero-sum game. If several of his sculptures illustrate instances of intellectual and physical combat, the show’s title also foregrounds the Goliath-like forces confronting the world’s Davids. The idea of balance, consequently, is a principal theme. A wall sculpture titled Escala (all works 2014) presents a set of ten interconnected scales that have been finely weighted so that the structure achieves perfect equilibrium. A second sculpture, Suspended Animation, consists of an industrial conveyor belt extended so that the belt is horizontal to the floor, the whole teetering on two rather than all four of the points on its base, which appears to be performing something akin to a static wheelie. On closer inspection, it becomes clear that the machine’s rock load is the only thing keeping it from crashing to the ground. Courtesy of Kaino’s farflung travels (he travelled to Egypt as the US representative to the indefinitely postponed Cairo Biennial) and a network of collaborators and friends (in the Philippines, Indonesia and Crimea, among other locales), the belt’s random chunks of cobblestone and asphalt serve as a second through-line for this smart ‘connect-the-rocks’ show.

Take, for instance, the works the artist refers to as his ‘dent paintings’. Polished steel squares and rectangles arrayed in typical door and window configurations, they represent – divots and all – the official architecture of American embassies (Turkey, Greece and Syria) after they’ve come under attack by protesting mobs. Another rock-based work, Don’t Bring a Gameboy to a Gunfight, presents a pile of candycoloured stones printed using the 3D printer MakerBot. Having chosen a reproduction process that takes many hours per work, Kaino was forced to outsource the printing to online assistants. Because the US State Department regulates the digital transfer of munitions, with this piece Kaino established a criminal network – at least metaphorically. And then there’s Excalibur, the first artwork one sees upon entering the exhibition. Without question the painted, cast bronze sculpture is the most direct and succinct piece here. A trompe l’oeil version of a slingshot, its projectile-bearing pocket lies trapped within a hole inside the Sheetrock wall. Which raises the question: is Kaino’s approach really that of a streetfighting artist-revolutionary? Or is he a hardbitten realist after all? Christian Viveros-Fauné

Don’t Bring a Gameboy to a Gunfight, 2014, PLA printed rocks, 46 × 74 cm. Photo: Joseph Rynkiewicz. Courtesy Kavi Gupta, Chicago & Berlin

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This is the Time. This is the Record of the Time Stedelijk Museum Bureau Amsterdam (SMBA) 13 September – 9 November Never before now have we bombarded each other with so many messages – whether by email or SMS – and immortalised ourselves with such a profligacy of digital images. At the same time, the archiving of this data has become deeply ephemeral and intangible, the majority of it condemned to disappear forever or become obsolete due to changing technologies, in which new models replace previous ones. These could themselves be used as a record or memory of a certain time. But how can one do that in a more lasting way? This is the question addressed by This Is the Time. This Is the Record of the Time – the title’s words drawn from the lyrics of Laurie Anderson’s From the Air (1982) – which features nine artists based in Amsterdam or Lebanon. The exhibition is part of SMBA’s Global Collaborations programme (afterwards travelling to the American University of Beirut Art Gallery), and Lebanon, with its troubled history, its layers of civil wars and conflicts, was probably not chosen by chance. With What Job’s Wife Said (2014), Walid Sadek refers to this palimpsestic history in a somewhat simple way, presenting an X-ray of a generic painting in order, ostensibly, to reactivate the past. Kristina Benjocki also refers to the loaded history of her native Serbia, but does so via carpets, a popular means of storytelling and

capturing historic events in her culture. In Study of Focus (2014) she transfers text fragments and pictures from Yugoslavian history books, uniting two forms of chronicling. The carpets also include ‘pixels’ replicating the printing of the books, as well as coffee stains on the pages: more traces of time. For Waiting for a Manifestation: One Week (2014), Rayyane Tabet measures time in a way even older than carpetmaking – with tally marks. During a week he drew as many marks as possible, sometimes covering an entire wall, elsewhere a long horizontal line throughout the space, even continuing into the toilets. A comparable linear movement can be discerned in Sebastián Díaz Morales’s video Pasajes IV (2014), wherein a woman walks through rough landscape in Patagonia. Traversing deserted paths accompanied only by sheep, she hikes through an industrial site dotted with pylons, back to old ruined houses: from past to present and back, as in a long travelling shot throughout time and space. Esmé Valk, too, captures the past via video. In her beautiful What Belongs to the Present (2013), she films, in black and white, a dancer performing an Ausdruckstanz, a German expressionist dance that was characteristic of the zeitgeist almost a century ago. Valk brings this dance

– by its nature ephemeral – back to life by recording it for a contemporary and future audience. Still photography, however, traditionally the medium of freezing and immortalising the past, is strangely absent here, unless one considers work where it exists at a remove. For Tourists at the Distance (2014), Priscila Fernandes uses negatives of photographs that she pierces with a needle and paints over in vibrant colours before developing them – a kind of reenactment of pointillist painting in combination with photography – and Daniele Genadry does something similar by deploying a kind of neo-Impressionism by translating snapshots of landscapes in her paintings, rendered in vivid colours with an artistic blur mimicking the overexposure of the original picture. Both works are rather uninspiring and less relevant to the show’s theme, and express more or less the same idea. One of them could have easily been left out. This is a minor flaw, however, in a show that is simultaneously coherent, varied, intelligent and poetic. The variety of media is not used for the sake of it, but is articulated as a considered way of engendering an understanding of different manners of recording time by tackling the subject from as many angles as possible. And, not unimportantly, to do so in more lasting ways than on iCloud. Sam Steverlynck

Kristina Benjocki, Study of Focus, 2014, woven tapestry, wool. Photo: Gert Jan van Rooij. Courtesy the artist & SMBA, Amsterdam

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Ryan Trecartin Site Visit KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin 14 September – 11 January Ryan Trecartin’s Site Visit at KW, his first solo exhibition in Germany, consists of a video installation and what he terms a ‘sculptural theatre’. The sculptural theatre is essentially rows of souped-up La-Z-Boy armchairs that a viewer can sit in while listening to a sound installation. These chairs overlook a recessed theatre comprising another seating installation – a mixture of cinema seating and portable camping chairs – which is surrounded by projections of Trecartin’s newest film, Site Visit. (In actuality, everything is subsumed under that title, though it appears there are discrete works that make up the larger exhibition.) Made in collaboration with Lizzie Fitch and Rhett LaRue, Trecartin’s video parodies the wellworn scary Hollywood movie (The Blair Witch Project, 1999, the Scream franchise, 1996–, even the lampooning Scary Movie, 2000–), this genre itself comfortably out of vogue with mainstream audiences for at least ten years. It follows a band of characters inside a haunted Masonic temple in Los Angeles, who attempt to spend the night in a colony of tents inside the building while putting up with the hijinks of perturbed (potentially imaginary) ghosts. Spliced between rapid montages of footage from the Masonic temple (sets designed by Fitch) are 3D animations by artist LaRue. The video, frantic in pace, with

rapidly changing camera angles, is amusing but nothing to write home about, and dangerously plays into the platitude that such frenetic camerawork somehow sheds light upon our goldfishlike attention spans, supposedly fractured by the new omnipresence of advanced technology. KW’s press release for Site Visit touts the fact that Trecartin was heralded by Peter Schjeldahl of The New Yorker as ‘the most consequential artist to have emerged since the nineteen-eighties’. But what exactly is so new about Trecartin’s work? Upon closer inspection, not that much. In a September 2014 New York Times article, embarrassingly titled ‘Post-Internet Art Waits Its Turn’, author Scott Reyburn writes that Trecartin’s video installations fetch anywhere from $1 million to $2 million. What exactly is new or radical about a young male artist fetching millions of dollars for his work? And from an art-historical perspective, Trecartin’s work comes from an obvious lineage of video installation – Pipilotti Rist, Dara Birnbaum, Ant Farm, Michael Smith, Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy, Matthew Barney, etc. I’ll give Trecartin one thing – his longstanding visibility of queerness is something to be lauded. But Site Visit also retreads some familiar problems. First, how can this be considered Trecartin’s first solo show in Germany if,

well, it’s not really a solo show? Even the title of the piece (which, as previously mentioned, is the entire show), is captioned as such: ‘Site Visit is an artwork by Lizzie Fitch / Ryan Trecartin, 3D animations made with Rhett LaRue’. While Trecartin’s collaborative working method is certainly unique, it’s difficult to ascertain how it represents anything other than the age-old problem of a well-known artist’s brand subsuming the efforts of their lesser-known counterparts. Given that Fitch and Trecartin are currently showing a similar exhibition at the Zabludowicz Collection in London and an almost identical one at Regen Projects in Los Angeles, each of which credit both artists, it may be that this accreditation problem lies with KW. Further, in terms of gender representation in Trecartin’s work, it must be stated that cisgendered (nontransgendered) actors parodying the stereotype of another gender (eg, men wearing pink clothes and blonde wigs, women wearing flannel shirts and fake beards) do little to further our understanding of the fluidity of gender. That a ‘male’ acts ‘female’ and vice versa simply upholds, rather than challenges, the problematic binary understanding of gender. What would’ve been really new is if Trecartin made transparent how conventional his practice really is. Karen Archey

Animation Companion (detail), 2014, photo story originally published in Modern Weekly, Guangzhou. Courtesy the artist; Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York; Regen Projects, Los Angeles; and Sprüth Magers, Berlin & London

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Iulia Nistor (i)… (ii)… (iii)… (iv)… Aiurart, Bucharest 17 September – 7 November In her latest solo show, the young Nurembergbased artist Iulia Nistor explores the uncertainty and disorientation of the wanderer, who allows herself to be led aimlessly through space, encountering objects and elements along her way that have stories to tell, narratives to be imagined. And it is exactly these imagined narratives, and later more generally the realm of possibility, that also inform Nistor’s approach in titling her exhibition as if offering four different options of interpretation. The show is in two parts, spread between the two floors of the gallery and divided stylistically but loosely connected conceptually. The two rooms of the ground floor each contain a single installation featuring a painting, a wall drawing made of tape and an artist book. The large paintings are nebulous constructions that play with perspective and empty space by juxtaposing recognisable forms with abstractions and seemingly randomly placed everyday objects (a book, wrapping paper, etc), painted from a bird’s-eye view. The wall drawings in the corner extend onto the floor through a series of connected lines

and dots, and resemble constellations in three dimensions. The artist books reveal the concept behind this puzzle: Nistor chose some points on her paintings from reproductions of the work, which were then transferred through vellum paper onto a photocopy of a page in a book lying around in her studio. The text of the page was taped over, so that only the words corresponding to the points remained visible. These points were also marked as yellow dots on the vellum, then connected by lines, and the resulting form was recreated as the wall drawing mentioned above. The titles of these two works (i. primind cadere Ochiul acum sprijina alta se-nvirteste intre and ii. primind cadere Ochiul acum sprijina intre se-nvirteste alta, both 2014) result from four possible ways of reading those words in groupings that are both nonsensical and poetic, undermining the dictatorship in meaning-construction that a specific title would engender. Multiple narratives and readings, as well as the approximate cartography of objects in space, are repeated thematically in the works in the basement, but the form is radically

different. Paint lines left on transparent plastic film through a process of scratching away (as might be the case when creating the block for a woodcut print) reveal an abstract form and an obsession with materiality and process that eludes a clear concept – which is also a weakness of this body of work. In one of the rooms, two large-scale paintings of the aforementioned type might vaguely allude to landscapes, albeit ones so distorted that they collapse into pure abstraction. An installation in another darkened chamber combines the sound of a ventilator with the painted plastic film formed into a circular tunnel that invites you to walk through and wonder about the enigmatic lines and shapes you encounter. The artist’s stated aim of circumventing meaning, however, leads her into the realm of the purely aesthetic, which can be a trap if not balanced carefully. And yet there seems to be a search undertaken by Nistor to combine form and materiality with the arbitrary subjectivity of individual viewers, an approach that needs to be clarified conceptually a bit more to be successfully presented. Olga Stefan

Green buc, 2014, oil on transparent plastic film, 185 × 178 cm. Courtesy Aiurart, Bucharest

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David Lamelas V Kunsthalle Basel 21 September – 2 November Argentine-born David Lamelas, experimenter in film and form, has been exhibiting since the early 1960s, but his profile has remained such that a spate of recent shows – his first French retrospective at FRAC Lorraine in the summer of this year, for example – sheds light on unfamiliar aspects of his five decades of work. The Kunsthalle Basel can boast that this is not their first collaboration with the artist, as he had a solo exhibition there in 2000, and perhaps in that confident spirit this second show is a spare one. All but one of six works and a couple of work-cum-documentations presented in the bookshop revisit concepts from between 1965 and 1970. The first sculpture, in grey painted wood, has a serif at its base from which it turns 90 degrees to create an upright Y, or V, as echoed in the exhibition title. The work’s title is Study of Relationships Between Volume, Space and Gravity (1965/2008); as well as the physical relationships referred to, the vaguely handlike V held aloft like a gesture and its dominant position at the top of the Kunsthalle stairs also suggest a social and political context. This determination to look beyond what is before us bookends the exhibition. Inside, in the largest, sky-lit gallery,

Time (1970/2014) is a white diagonal bisecting the space. In 1970 Lamelas was concerned with dematerialising art, and instructions are given for the activation of the performance that the white tape is the guideline for, involving people standing shoulder to shoulder along the line, one stating the time, ‘keeping it’ for 60 seconds and passing it on to his or her neighbour. Unfortunately Time did not happen for this solitary visitor on a Tuesday afternoon, and the feeling of a missed event persisted for the new work in this exhibition, 1416m3 (2014), a composition for string quartet and tenor performed in situ on the first day of the exhibition. The title – and lyrics, which repeat the title in German – states the volume of the gallery, and after the opening, one person huddled into one corner can listen to the recording on headphones, effectively constrained from exploring that volume. Indeed Lamelas’s works are frequently inherently contradictory, as becomes plain in Film 18 Paris IV.70 (1970), a 16mm film of three of the artist’s friends, each recorded for three minutes, from their announcement of the time of day to their stating of the time again three minutes later. By marking the time, pacing

and looking at their watches, they are also missing it. While Lamelas was killing time in Paris, Alighiero Boetti was frustrating audiences in Italy: his Lampada Annuale (Annual Lamp, 1966) contained a lightbulb programmed to illuminate for just 11 seconds a year. It’s likely few people waited for long enough to see that happen, and Lamelas too seems to toy with driving his audience from the gallery. The final work shown is one of the artist’s earliest films, created for an exhibition at Camden Arts Centre in London, A Study of Relationships Between Inner and Outer Space (1969). It begins by limning the architecture of the gallery where the film was first to be presented, then extends its investigation to activities in the space and staff members, before surveying London in terms of transport, population, climate and methods of communication. To finish, people on the street are asked how they feel about a moon landing (the Apollo 10 mission was then ongoing). The most vital territory is beyond the white cube, the film suggests, or the gallery is only completely understood within its broadest context. Long before aesthetics were made relational, Lamelas was making art that had to be related to its situation to be fully grasped. Aoife Rosenmeyer

V, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Gina Folly. Courtesy the artist

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There Is No Place Like Home Via Aurelia Antica 425, Rome 26–28 September There Is No Place Like Home, organised in a house under construction on Rome’s Via Aurelia, was held over three days and nights in September and distributed work – including performance – by 29 artists across the building’s two floors. Participants ranged from young international artists such as the US-Lebanese Daniele Genadry and English-born Thomas Hutton to internationally known Italian artists such as Flavio Favelli and Alessandro Piangiamore. The show was conducted with no institutional partners and installed via a constant process of dialogue between the participants, under the direction of exhibiting artists Stanislao Di Giugno, Giuseppe Pietroniro, Marco Raparelli and Alessandro Cicoria: essentially, then, this was a noncurated exhibition. The empty shell of an incomplete, detached house – its familiar grey skeletal structure casting a silhouette on a rough-hewn landscape – appeared, under these auspices, as much a reflection on space per se as on the idea of home as a precarious construct, one linked to the fragility of its human architects and inhabitants. Of the works performed and installed, several could be taken as emblematic of the show’s overall effect, in which the objects themselves responded independently to the notion of ‘the home’ as subject.

On the space’s enclosed lower floor, for example, Alessandro Cicoria’s Untitled (2014) consisted of a closeup digital print of a tree, positioned on one of the space’s concrete walls: a work influenced by Rome’s famous Trevi fountain, where relief carvings of foliage demonstrate mankind’s attempts to link themselves to nature by copying it. While Cicoria here conveyed the intensely naturalistic aspect of homebuilding, Thomas Hutton’s adjacent Hearth (2014) represented a different relation to nature via plans for a fireplace by the office of architect John Soane, intended for the Bank of England, though probably never built. Austerely minimalistic and comprising lime plaster mixed with black and white pigments on Dibond, Hearth’s cold, stark simplicity and sheer surface (it had a total depth of no more than 2mm) conveyed a primeval attachment to the home as a space associated with protection from the sublime natural elements, the hearth or fireplace being the focal point of the community and, above all, a place of warmth and safety. Nearby, Raparelli’s Mondo Cane (Dog’s World, 2014) – several tree stumps cut to varying heights and painted with cartoonish emphasis of their knotty features – continues the artist’s practice of referring to the language of animation in order to reflect

on human behaviour. We often forget just how much we anthropomorphise our household pets, who nevertheless view the world from a different angle. Upstairs, one had to look from a different angle to see Favelli’s Come into My Life (2014), a collage of Italian pornographic movie posters from the 1970s to 90s that adorned the ceiling, albeit also visible from outside due to the lack of any exterior walls. For Favelli, the posters evoke memories of those placed outside cinemas, past which his mother rushed him when he was young. In the context of There Is No Place Like Home, these ones also attested to home as a site of familial regimentation – of gender roles, sexual orientations, etc – but also as the location of sexual practice. What lies behind the facade was referenced again when, during the opening night, Milan-based duo Goldiechiari let off coloured smoke canisters on the lower floor of the house as part of a performance completing their exhibited work, Medusa Black Mirror (2014), a mirror featuring a digital print of black smoke: a representation of the home as a place of illusions. Because while there is no place like home, the outsider or guest rarely sees what the home really contains. Mike Watson

Alessandro Cicoria, Untitled, 2014, digital print on acetate, 200 × 150 cm. Photo: Altrospazio. Courtesy the artist

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Elmgreen & Dragset Biography Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen 19 September – 4 January ‘Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas’. The flashy sign is smashed to the ground, pole (and concrete base) in the air, message crumpled onto the floor of the darkened gallery. The lightbulbs are still intact, illuminating the Airstream caravan over which the sign has fallen. There is no trace of the owners, but the license plate hints at the ‘Unbridled Spirit’ that took hold of this family from Kentucky. Nearby, behind a chainlink fence, an illuminated swimming pool contains the floating body of a dead man – first seen as part of The Collectors, the makers’ standout work for the 2009 Venice Biennale Danish and Nordic pavilions. Yet we’re not in Venice, or fabulous Las Vegas, but in Copenhagen, where Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset first started performing some 20 years ago, after meeting in a club named After Dark. Three large-scale installations, each containing new and existing sculptures and objects, make up Biography, the second iteration (the first was at Oslo’s Astrup Fearnley Museum) of what is effectively a midcareer retrospective unfolding through a series of shows (and a book) under that title. The architectural frameworks for each installation suggest fragmented stories from which most of the characters have disappeared: those that remain (as lifelike waxworks) seem to be sleeping or daydreaming; others are dying, one is dead. But by entering the installations,

visitors are invited to step into their lives. A sense of misery persists throughout, but grimness never prevails. Hyperrealistic details give the artworks a larger-than-life quality. A porcelain Rottweiler (The Guardian, 2014) that guards the swimming pool looks exactly like a dog you might find in someone’s garden. In Elmgreen & Dragset’s oeuvre, objects are inverted, their functionality reduced to mere decoration, their details sometimes revealing characters’ personalities. A mazelike installation, made from new and existing works reconfigured as a single installation, brings to mind a public institution, the sterile corridors accommodating objects and public services that don’t function as we would like: picture a ticket office that is closed, a baby left at an ATM, an emergency exit blocked. Seven wrongly designed, dysfunctional doors, part of the socalled Powerless Structures (1997–), offer no way out. Biography makes for a constant play between social status and the future that life holds. A four-storey apartment building (The One & The Many, 2010) inside the lobby reveals clues about the lives of various inhabitants through its windows (one cannot enter the vast structure). The building entrance contains everyday piles of rubbish, mailboxes and a written note announcing a house party. Most of the citizens seem to have suddenly left their rooms (leaving

burning cigarettes in ashtrays, for example), but not a single room – eg, the one with a rice cooker, a TV showing karaoke and a poster picturing an Asian pop star – leaves the voyeur much doubt as to what type of person lives there. No need for acting in this one-dimensional world. ‘Ieder huisje zijn kruisje’ – ‘We all have our troubles’ – is written on the building’s doorbell panel, a souvenir of an installation of the work in Rotterdam in 2011. Ten inhabitants appear on the nameplates, some not as unknown as you might expect: among them collaborators ‘C. Urroz’ director of Arco Madrid, and ‘M. Torp’, curator of Biography. Added twists cannot, however, prevent the wider practice of recycling from affecting the artworks’ significance, too. Flat characters make for empty lives, and once you see that, it doesn’t really matter whether they run off to the casino or drown in their wealth. The one and the many turn out to be the same after all, their private dreams dully predictable if not banal. In another apartment, a screensaver shows images of palm trees and exotic fish. Beside the computer is a globe, on the wall a large poster depicting a young couple kissing on a perfect beach. One leaves the exhibition wondering just who is throwing that house party tonight. If the setting is any indication of the level of conversation – somewhat exaggerated stories told too often – then I’m glad to have missed it. Roos van der Lint

Welcome (detail), 2014, illuminated aluminium sign, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy the artists and Galleri Nicolai Wallner, Copenhagen

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Christian Falsnaes Performance Works PSM, Berlin 18 September – 1 November Showing performance art in galleries is often a problem, and one usually solved by the artist performing at the opening and presenting video documentation as the exhibition. The young Danish artist Christian Falsnaes doesn’t take this easy way out. In his solo exhibition at PSM Gallery, he attempts to assert the works displayed in the gallery as ‘performance works’ and thereby resolve the supposed contradiction between action and object. For example, a white primed canvas hangs on the wall: one searches in vain for any artistic composition. What it turns out to state, bluntly, is that in a gallery one must pay money in order to get art: if someone buys the white canvas (Many, 2014), they don’t just get the empty canvas but also a certificate. The latter precisely describes how, after purchase, the buyer can create a painting, drawing and photo on canvas together with the artist and according to a script in the gallery space. Collecting appears here not as passive consumption but, rather, as an active process that makes the moment of performing the ‘open work’ – as Umberto Eco famously called it – tangible for the recipient. At the same time,

Falsnaes poses a question in this work – one that he frequently acts out in his other performances – about the relationship between artist and audience. Since the artist tells the collector how to paint the canvas, he plays the ‘boss’, presenting himself as authoritative and undemocratic. To what extent does the audience follow these roles? When does one refuse the collaboration? It is these questions that each collector must answer for him- or herself in the exhibition. Another example of these performative art objects are small white framed sheets of paper painted with blue lines. Upon purchasing one of these tentative images, from the series Time / Line / Movement (2014–), the collector commits to painting the image on a second paper sheet of the same size, and is given a time limit for doing so. Again the new owner of the work becomes artistically active, and again he follows the artist’s instructions. In addition he promises – as it is stipulated on the certificate for this work – to burn the original (the already painted image he bought) after copying it. A photograph then documents this process. In this ‘performance work’, Falsnaes decidedly calls into question

the mechanisms of creation of value through art, which generally happens in the art market by purchasing and collecting expensive originals. In a second, smaller space of the gallery is a computer monitor on which performances by Falsnaes are on display. However, again the artist cleverly refuses mere documentation. Rather, the performances are dissected: 32 distinct situations, characterised by specific actions, are shown in short clips. So, for example, the performance Opening, which took place in September 2013 in Berlin’s KW Institute, is not shown here at full length. Only individual moments are on view, such as the audience, under the artist’s guidance, yelling loudly at each other or later affectionately embracing. From such scenes, isolated from the context of the entire performance, the buyer of the work can choose five situations, which Falsnaes then arranges for the new performance Sample (2014). It’s a work, or a proposal for a work, emblematic of an exhibition that successfully initiates something unusual: a more or less cooperative dialogue between collector and artist. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Emily Terényi

Performance Works, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Lotte Løvholm. Courtesy PSM, Berlin

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˙ Agnieszka Brzezańska Ziemia rodzinna / Ma Terra Aleksander Bruno, Warsaw 27 September – 21 December ˙ Agnieszka Brzezańska is widely recognised as a painter, being known for her allusive abstractions and quasi-scientific series revealing secret cosmic phenomena. Here, though – in a show that was the most surprising, unobvious and yet coherently sublime presentation during the recent Warsaw Gallery Weekend – we learn that she is also a sculptor, a maker of spectacular ceramic vases and a very keen user of clay in general, perversely repeating the primeval gesture of potting. This extensive show com˙ bines Brzezańska’s most recent Informel clay paintings and drawings (such as Jawia, all works 2014), photographic inkjet prints on cotton paper (the Honomeia series) and female breastpots (all untitled) – each making references to Slavic, Pre-Slavic and prehistoric mythologies, and especially to Lusatian culture (kultura ˙ łuzycka). This culture, dating earlier than 1500 BC, still causes controversy among archaeologists: its existence, for example, subverts the hypothesis of the indigenous descent of the Slavs in Polish territories. ˙ For years, Brzezańska has conducted her own research on patriarchal-matriarchal aspects of prehistoric cultures, focused on female imagery and Mother Earth-related iconography, following projects such as Max Dashu’s Restoring Women to Cultural Memory (2008), referencing sources in her Suppressed Histories Archives

or participating in her course, ‘The Secret ˙ History of the Witches’. Brzezańska superimposes such alternative archaeologies onto Polish and Slavic prehistories – revealing the lesser-known face of the ‘unheimlich’ Slavdom. Moreover, she plays with Slavic stereotypes, fake theses and faked scientific sources for Slavic history (delivered by both German / Western and Eastern European scholars through the last two centuries), proposing her own determinedly ‘vague’ (artistic) interpretation, which forms the core of the show. One of the constellations on the wall in the middle gallery consists of abstract-realistic works: the photo series Honomeia, depicting microscopic views and magnifications of various grounds / soils from different places, is juxtaposed with expressionistic abstract ‘clay-portraits’ of Domowoj and Nawia – figures from Slavic mythology, now barely known. (Domowoj was a spirit-guard of the house; Nawie were daemons of dead people.) In every room of the gallery, the works hanging on the walls are watched and guarded by big ceramic vases featuring female breasts, recalling ceremonial breast-pots found in various ancient cultures in all continents, but particularly those found in the Lusatia region. The title of the exhibition features a ˙ Brzezańska neologism, Ma Terra, suggestive of ‘matter’, ‘my land’ and ‘my ground’ – her own

playful equivalent of the Polish term for the ‘motherland’ or ‘family land’ (ziemia rodzinna). As such, it directly references one of the most famous, highly idealised and aestheticised propaganda album publications in Poland: Ziemia rodzinna (1955), published at the end of the Social Realist era and edited by two famous figures from postwar literature – Tadeusz Kubiak and Artur Miedzyrzecki – with photographs by a legend of Polish photography, Edward Hartwig, and including his choice of other photographers’ images. The book consisted of photography and poems by the main Polish poets (eg, Antoni Słonimski, Leopold Staff, Konstanty Ildefons Gałczyński, Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Władysław Broniewski). At that time, Miedzyrzecki was an author of propaganda poetry and Kubiak an author of military and popular propaganda songs. Hartwig chose some prewar ‘impressionistic’ landscapes, and many samples of so-called motherland photography, accompanied by poetry praising ‘high, smoky chimneys’. Deliberately mocking of all this, the view of the ˙ motherland proposed by Brzezańska is more realistic, more unheimlich, less scary. Unlike the interpretation of ziemia rodzinna from the 1950s, where the motherland’s real roots are lost and hidden, and landscapes are subject to ideology, Ma Terra operates in ironic and direct relation to earth, ghosts and matter. Barbara Piwowarska

Honomeia, 2014, inkjet print on cotton paper, 70 × 50 cm. Courtesy Galeria Aleksander Bruno, Warsaw

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Anna Gaskell and Douglas Gordon Vampyr Yvon Lambert, Paris 6 September – 25 October In 2009 Yvon Lambert closed his London gallery, in Hoxton Square, after a year in business. In 2011 he closed his Chelsea gallery in New York, which had opened in 2003. This December, his longest-standing and last remaining gallery is closing, the one he opened in the Marais, in Paris, in 1986 – 20 years after his first Paris gallery opened. Thus comes to a conclusion Lambert’s half-century at the forefront of contemporary art dealing. For his parting shot, Lambert has chosen an odd, two-headed swansong, given the range of artists he represents, and the impressive number to whom he has given their first European shows, consisting of films and photos by the American artist Anna Gaskell, first seen during Art Basel last summer, and a mix of new and old wall, floor and corner works by Gaskell’s ex, the Scottish artist Douglas Gordon. It is, however, and despite the title’s nod in a different, gothic direction, indeed a swan song, for swans do, indeed, predominate – taxidermically incorporated into many of the Gordon works, and, in the form of Svetlana Lunkina,

the Bolshoi prima ballerina, dancing across Gaskell’s screens. Lunkina is the strongest artistic presence in the exhibition, and Gaskell’s photographs and films of her, dancing, relaxing backstage or posing, nude, or half-nude – one has her lying facedown in a bed, her shoulder blade arched up and out like, yes, a swan’s wing – are affecting, particularly the graceful way in which Gaskell shoots her performance, which is in fact not a performance but a rehearsal, and not for Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake (1875–6) (which Gaskell worked with in SOSW Ballet, 2011, and Lunkina performed last year in Canada) but Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet (1935). Gaskell, here, has the ballerina follow the original choreography of the opera’s balcony scene, but solo, without her Romeo. In the main film, & Juliet (2013), Lunkina, earthbound, falls out of character during her unsupported lifts, and the pas de deux becomes a monologue – but the dancer’s fixed gaze to camera pulls the filmmaker, and us, into the dance. Much less effective is Gordon’s contribution, which feels phoned in, and phony.

The earlier works are entangled strands of lit or smashed lightbulbs, and they are nice enough. The new works, all produced within the last year, are swan’s wings and dismembered swan heads and necks splashed with black paint and glued to aluminium sheets hanging on the gallery’s walls; or stuffed wolves, splattered with white paint and pushed headfirst into the corners of the room. In some cases the bird bits have slipped from their posts and are lying forlorn on the floor, having streaked paint on the wall during their descent. One of the wolves has also streaked and scratched his corner of the wall. According to the gallery, the works were ‘selected to offer visitors the sensory experience of the profound duality of human nature: love and hate, seduction and violence, life and death…’ Now, it is unfair to hold an artist responsible for the empty bumf a gallery will use in his name, but please, Mr Gordon, tell me that there is more going on in these new works than the fact that your neighbour in Berlin, a taxidermist, has given you free access to his freezers. Christopher Mooney

Vampyr, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Rebecca Fanuele. Courtesy the artists and Yvon Lambert, Paris

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Susie Wong [after image] My Beautiful Space Cottonseed, Singapore 5 September – 5 October Drawing tends to be associated with recording or study; as an act, it is both discipline and practice, and, for some, even thinking. Sketching or depicting from life, for example, has traditionally been considered a way to exercise both eye and hand in terms of seeing and translating what one sees. It had a speed and directness that was unsurpassed till the invention of photography. But, at first glance, Susie Wong’s drawings have none of these qualities: none of the immediacy or intimacy. Her works are the result of tracing enlarged archival images off a lightbox. The result of this process, in which she constructs an image through a series of small staccato marks, is an impression of mechanical reproduction. That is, despite their meticulous, handmade nature, her marks recall the dot matrix of an inkjet printer. In fact, somewhat like Gerhard Richter’s paintings, they seem to hold off a sense of directness and instead convey a quality of mediation. There are three groups of drawings on view, all on light paper-stock pinned delicately to the wall. The first and largest group are of the

Javanese or Sumatran landscape, with lines gleaned from Joseph Conrad novels inscribed under each image; the second consists of two drawings of cherry blossoms; and the final brings together five large images of the artist’s father near the end of his life. For example, in The sun was fierce, the land seemed to glisten and drip with steam (2012), a view of a tree-laden landscape is obscured by steam (as the title suggests), or clouds, or perhaps even smoke. Two thirds of the image undulates under the feathery whiteness of this atmosphere, while below it is the eponymous quote from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Are these depictions of a lost landscape? Is Conrad’s writing being used to evoke a colonial past? Are we meant to conclude that memories are fictions? There is an ambiguity about all this. Despite the regularity of her markmaking, each of these images nevertheless conveys a sensitivity of touch. On the occasional drawing, jotted on the bottom near the image, are numbers corresponding to the types of pencil used. Like the changing weights

of the marks – some lighter, some darker – these numbers appear as slight irregularities in an otherwise mechanical process. They are another kind of record: a measure of the hand and perhaps a reminder to the artist of a moment. Taken together these drawings seem like an attempt to gather the past, both as image and as process. It is as if the drawing itself were trying hard to make manifest a memory. This is most evident in Weightless (2012), the quintet of images of her father, a thin, elderly Chinese man, which are near lifesize. Picturing him standing topless and depicted from front, side and back, across five works, they seem like an attempt to record his very presence from all sides. In writing about Van Gogh, the critic John Berger described his drawings as an act of devotion: ‘for him the act of drawing or painting was a way of discovering and demonstrating why he loves so intensely what he was looking at’. Likewise Wong’s ungraspable drawings, pieces of paper pinned to the wall, remind us of the ephemeral nature of memory. Sherman Sam

Weightless 3, 2012, 95gsm Maplitho paper, 94 × 127 cm. Courtesy Space Cottonseed, Seoul

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31st Bienal de São Paulo Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, São Paulo 6 September – 7 December The problems of the world weigh heavy on this exhibition. In its curation of this 31st Bienal de São Paulo, titled How to (…) Things That Don’t Exist (insert from the curators’ list of different terms into the blank, including ‘look for’, ‘recognise’, ‘fight for’, ‘use’, ‘imagine’), a five-strong collective, assembled by curator Charles Esche, is not interested in subtlety. Which is actually pretty refreshing. Instead they look to places where pragmatic struggles for survival outweigh philosophical or aesthetic absorption. There is, in short, a prevailing preference for the political suckerpunch. The motivations for such polemics are as varied as problems in the world. The angry, corrosive lyrics of Halil Altındere’s eight-minute ‘music video’, Wonderland (2013), one of the first works that the visitor encounters (at least aurally), sets the tone. Running through their native slum neighbourhood a Turkish rap collective rhymes boastfully of gunning down police. They spit out disgust for capitalism, for neglect, for regeneration. They parade their identities with a mixture of pride and anger: alienated youth, disenfranchised males, their Kurdish and Roma heritage a prison. The bassline echoes beyond the viewing room, offering an unintentional soundtrack to Ana Lira’s nearby sculptural installation, Voto! (2012–). Various tattered and graffitied election posters are transferred onto transparent Perspex panels hung floor-to-ceiling. The weatherbeaten nature of the original advertisements offers a cynical vision of government after the campaign promises. The alienation of Altındere’s Near East youth gets picked up in the expressions of Eder Oliveira’s mournful, emotionally wrenching wall paintings, in which eight young men – black and mixed-race,

bare-chested, their arms held behind their backs – stare out across the Bienal’s ground floor. Beside the murals, a stack of crime supplements from the local newspaper of Oliveira’s hometown in the northeast of Brazil makes explicit the artist’s source material for the portraits. Yet this is also a show in which one’s ability to thrive or survive is inextricably linked to identity. This notion defines Armando Queiroz’s dry but nonetheless worthwhile Ymá Nhandehetama (2009), a film made with Almires Martins, a Guarani activist, whom the viewer sees bathed in artificial blue light, addressing the history of his people’s oppression. We see identity struggled with in Nurit Sharett’s excellent 52 minutes of filmed interviews with Jewish people on the subject of matrilineality, Counting the Stars (2014): those who are able to relate their five generations of Jewish heritage are countered with new converts who heartbreakingly bemoan the alienation they feel within their adopted religion. This investigation into identity and activism continues throughout a vast landscape of works. Some are domineering – like the architecture structure erected by Indonesian collective Ruangrupa to host ad hoc workshops, craft activities and, on my visit, karaoke – and can be glimpsed from different floors of the ramped, open-walled Oscar Niemeyer-designed exhibition space. Others are given their own space, like Dios Es Marica (God Is Queer), a small, self-contained exhibition sited in a set of temporarily erected sidegalleries. Here, work from 1973 to 2001, by four artists and collectives dealing with the queer body and gay activism, are presented. The late Spanish artist Ocaña’s is the most exuberant. A monitor shows the documentation of one of his carnival parades, staged during Franco’s

facing page, top Sergio Zevallos (Grupo Chaclacayo), Ambulantes, from the series Suburbios, 1984. Courtesy the artist

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dictatorship, which affronted its contemporary, conservative audience by rubbing the symbolism of Catholic ritual up against the performative camp of transvestitism. Marrying this video is a tableau of lifesize, naive papier mâché sculptures depicting Jesus and a host of cherubic angels, also by Ocaña. The papier mâché makes them appear warped, however, surrealist with their misshapen heads and lumpy bodies. Equally transgressive, and more overtly filthy, are Peruvian Sergio Zevallos’s black-and-white, almost devotional photographs, taken under the guise of Grupo Chaclacayo collective (1983–94). Again made during politically turbulent times (as Maoist guerrillas battled Peru’s military during the 1980s), Ambulantes, from the Suburbios series (1984), shows two androgynous lovers in a variety of abandoned spaces: a blowjob on a ruined balcony; a hand dexterously inserting objects into an anus among the rubble. What are the things that don’t exist? The abstract, but dominant codes of life: nationality, religion, social class, cultural origin, the labels of sexuality and gender. Human constructs. The Bienal presents a multiplicity of voices from within these – so many that they jostle for one’s attention – voices that are either battling those constructs or battling on their behalf. Whether challenger or cheerleader, a cacophonous cry of injustice rises from almost all the works on show. Like the wars, insurrections and tragic stories that mundanely flick across the news media, the Bienal begins to wash over me, desensitised as I am, in the epoch of rolling coverage, to the ambient horror of the world. Yet though individually the works lose some of their power amassed as they are, perhaps that is apt: this being, curatorially, a portrait of the powerless. Oliver Basciano

facing page, bottom Halil Altındere, Wonderland, 2013, video, 8 min 30 sec. Courtesy the artist and Pilot Gallery, Istanbul

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Books

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Memory Theatre by Simon Critchley

‘All I remembered from that morning in the pharmaceutical factory was Jilted John on the radio – “Gordon is a moron” – and blood all over the floor.’ In 1978, when Simon Critchley was eighteen, he almost lost a hand in a workplace accident. Instead he lost swathes of memory: most of his childhood was sliced away, bits of it later reattached via family snapshots and anecdotes tirelessly rehearsed. He has ever since had a sense of the waywardness of recall, the labour and skill required to corral the skittish past, tether it in place. Hence, he says, his abiding interest in classical mnemotechnics and an obsession with Frances Yates’s 1966 book The Art of Memory, in which the scholar describes the fullest elaboration of that hermetic tradition: the fantastical memory theatres of the Renaissance. In the most audacious of these, says Critchley, a total encyclopaedic memory was imagined, ‘the unity of the human and the divine’. All of the above is true, and so is a good deal else in Memory Theatre, a novella of sorts with aspects of memoir, essay and outright absurdist invention. The narrator is a version of Critchley: a middle-aged English philosopher living in New York a decade ago and enjoying a period of unaccustomed mainstream success. Maybe unwarranted too: he thinks his latest book, on the deaths of famous philosophers, is ‘funny,

Fitzcarraldo Editions, £9.99 (softcover)

full of impressively wide reading, and utterly shallow’. His agent recommends he write a book about happiness: ‘Thoughts without a thinker. Cool.’ Returning to England to clear out his old office, Critchley finds a cache of documents that belonged to a colleague, now deceased. Michel Haar – he’s real too – was author of books on Hegel and Nietzsche; he died in France in the vicious heatwave of 2003. In the skewed universe of Memory Theatre, it turns out he was also an astrologer and has predicted Critchley’s death, on 13 June 2010, in Den Bosch. ‘But where the fuck was Den Bosch?’ At times Memory Theatre reads like the sort of semifictional jeux d’esprit that academics are sometimes seduced into when they’re otherwise written out or have begun to fantasise about real literary work and its rewards. The book’s plot is pure Umberto Eco, but radically foreshortened and rendered bathetic rather than symbolically overdetermined. There are hints too – more than hints – of the premise and structure of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder (2005). (Critchley and McCarthy are cofounders of the International Necronautical Society.) The fictional Critchley quits his post and moves to the Netherlands, where at ruinous expense he begins to build an actual memory theatre, based on sixteenthcentury designs by Giulio Camillo Delminio and furnished with reminders of Critchley’s own

life and learning. At the moment of his death, he will have attained the total recall dreamed of by the Renaissance thinkers, and become ‘transfigured, radiant, perfectly self-sufficient’. Over 60 or so pages, Critchley has a good deal of metaphysical fun with the history of the memory theatre and its apparent influence on Shakespeare and Hegel, among others. Readers of his On Humour (2002), The Book of Dead Philosophers (2009) or The Hamlet Doctrine (2013) will recognise the trademark Critchley swerve from philosophical abstraction to personal or pop-cultural reference point: ‘Repetition, repetition, repetition – I thought of Mark E. Smith of the mighty Fall’. The breeziness sometimes seems calculated to enrage academic colleagues of more austere and ingrown style; but Memory Theatre is also more than a mere diversion, or slightly fanciful lecture in intellectual history further tricked up as fiction. Critchley is actually at his best here when describing bodily rather than metaphysical predicaments: raging insomnia and its jagged aftermath; the grisly episode when he was eighteen; or the florid hallucinations of his declining narrator. At such moments the ghosting text is not Yates or Hegel or McCarthy but Freud’s protomodernist case study, Schreber: ‘I was the living switchboard of the universe. My skull was a magnetized globe.’ Brian Dillon

Curationism: How Curating Took Over the Art World and Everything Else by David Balzer Consciously targeting a general audience, Curationism aims at tackling the ‘problem’ of curating, through its evolution from a calling to a profession within the artworld during the postwar years, culminating in the person of Hans Ulrich Obrist. The current status of curating, the author convincingly argues, is as the defining cultural and social activity of the first decade or so of the twenty-first century, when the curated experience is used to market and sell everything from an individual and a lunchtime snack to a corporation and a lifestyle (the author invokes examples such as iTunes and the Subway sandwich). Needless to say, the scope here is broad – ‘If you work in digital you are also getting paid to curate’, the author states at one point – and perhaps in the case of the author’s analysis of artworld systems a bit too broad (anyone who thinks, like the author, that David Zwirner’s London townhouse gallery is

Coach House Books, $13.95 (softcover)

‘reminiscent’ of a kunsthalle simply hasn’t been to many kunsthalles). But fortunately that author, David Balzer, a Toronto-based art writer, has the clarity of thought and strength of argument to make such instances seem like relatively minor quibbles. The book is divided into two unequal sections: ‘Value’ (big) and ‘Work’ (small). The first clearly and effectively traces the rise of curators as bestowers of value in the artworld (and elegantly glosses struggles for the control of value – between critics, dealers, artists and curators – along the way), up to the point at which curating’s deskilling and populism means that everyone can do it and inherently contradicts the discipline’s quest to professionalise itself via academic courses and qualifications. Starting from that, the second is broadly focused on the spread of ‘curationism’ into the ‘real’ world and the problems of celebrity, social elitism and labour

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relations (issues touched on in the first section) that it generally conceals in its wake. For the artworld initiate, it’s this section that is the most interesting, but at the same time the most rushed. Throwaway lines such as, ‘Gathering things, connecting them, sharing them with others in a way that positions one as a taste-making host: sounds fun, doesn’t it? This is precisely why everyone is now doing it’, undermine the analysis as a whole, and various chicken-and-egg-style questions relating to whether or not the issues Balzer focuses on are incubated within art and then hatched out into society at large, or a case of art reflecting the world around it, remain unanswered (although the book’s subtitle suggests a favoured direction). And yet, despite all that, this is an insightful, provocative and entertaining overview of many of the key issues in both art and cultural life today. Mark Rappolt

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The George Kuchar Reader Edited by Andrew Lampert Primary Information, $27.50/£19 (softcover) In the fuzzy snapshot on the cover of this book, George Kuchar is sitting next to a giant inflatable Santa Claus doll and gazing at us with the twinkling eyes of a happy pervert. It’s a good hint of the carnival to be found in the 300 pages of collected detritus that follow, and in the 200 or so films – mostly shorts and fragments – that he left his oddball fingerprints all over from the 1960s until 2011: trashy, a little disconcerting and weirdly heartwarming. Pieces of private mischief arranged according to an incomprehensible syntax, antic and excitable as Tex Avery’s cartoons, the typical Kuchar film – if such a thing can be said to exist – is a sloppy concoction of pulp horror, hysterical melodrama and homemade Surrealism containing frequent throbs of homoerotic longing. Their titles are a joy to recite: The Deafening Goo (1989), Hold Me While I’m Naked (1966), The Mongreloid (1978), Fill Thy Crack With Whiteness (1989)… He was an unashamed chronicler of the body’s everyday filth – nobody else has found so much sorrow in filming motel toilets. What’s oddest of all about them, perhaps, is that you never think he’s getting nasty thrills at any genre’s expense but cherishes them all with the same goofy fervour a schoolgirl might save for some Tiger Beat magazine dreamboat. Out of all his underground bedfellows – Jack Smith or John Waters in his especially grotesque early

years – Kuchar finds the most genuine delight in Hollywood’s flights of fancy. But his works also possess a disarming contemporary resonance: compulsively personal to the point of childlike inscrutability – long before such things were routine – they pay attention to nothing beyond their own freakish whims or immediate surroundings and depend upon the cheapest means available to transmit them. Bruce LaBruce, Alex Bag and Sadie Benning – to name a few – might all claim Kuchar as the magical (and promiscuous) grandfather who inspired their own experiments. Add to this ever-intensifying sense of prescience the fact that he and his twin brother, Mike, conjured up several brainscrambling masterpieces while they were teens in the Bronx, and Kuchar starts to look almost heroic. This wayward scrapbook makes for a fantastical counterpart to the films, cataloguing all sorts of junk and wonders into a stream-ofconsciousness bizarrerie. It includes various bemused responses from science magazines to Kuchar’s reports of alien encounters, a grungy photograph of George Lucas, a touching centrefold painting of his beloved dog Bocko as a splayed and dreaming swirl of fur, purple watermelon testicles and all, plus a dirty comic strip about Marlene Dietrich – Kuchar’s cartoons are lively, wicked and jelly-smooth in their

execution. His prose has a hallucinogenic irreverence, too, involving a screwball riot of ‘angels sneezing green slime on their harps’, ‘Cocoa Puff cosmology’ and memories of boys participating in ‘full-figured shenanigans’. In all this cavorting you might miss the peculiar pathos of everything here and forget that, say, Eclipse of the Sun Virgin (1967) is at heart something like the reverie of a hornier Joseph Cornell, just as moony and vulnerable, with equal tenderness for domestic ephemera and suburban gloom. Pawing through someone’s archive always has an attendant melancholy even when the contents look as if they were compiled by a lustful monster movie enthusiast. Here and there this stuff has the capacity to be as seemingly insignificant but devastating as Kuchar’s six Weather Diaries (1986–90), videotapes that are at once lulling accounts of the aftermaths of storms, full of empty fields and fog, and raw confessions about his ageing body narrated in his trademark adenoidal whine. Anguish rumbles through the book’s last section, which consists entirely of his deathbed intimations to a friend about his lovesickness over a longtime – and outwardly straight – companion. The whole thing aches with strange desires, things that need to come out somehow, ‘otherwise’, as he confides towards the end, ‘it all gets very confusing’. Charlie Fox

Loose Monk by Fabian Peake Akerman Daly/Ridinghouse, £14.95/$20 (softcover) In this smartly designed (by Fraser Muggeridge) collection of Fabian Peake’s poems, Peake’s words splutter across the page without recourse to poetry’s classical constitution. In ‘amalgam’ (2010), for instance, the title word seems to be endlessly repeated (though on closer inspection it’s more complicated than that: the poem starts ‘amalgammaglamaamalgammaglam…’ before segueing into ‘maglamaamalgammaglamaamalgammaglamaa…’ ), creating a block of type. Yet while in some instances Peake is operating within the tradition of concrete poetry and plays with the shape of the whole work (in the mode of fellow visual-artist-turned-poet the late Ian Hamilton Finlay, or perhaps most famously E.E. Cummings and Apollinaire), his interest seems mostly piqued by the spatial qualities within

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a poem. Peake employs large, lingering spaces between words or phrases, suggestive of ponderous gaps in the reading. ‘Mistake’ (2012), for example, is made up of delightful islands linking up to an atmospheric archipelago whole. It begins, to give you a taste: the mistake was in the sky my hand bathroom window filthy as a thought

back the

Despite the abstract qualities, the poems are frequently adept at conveying narrative. Take the opening lines of ‘Hiatus’ (2001): ‘….. would of course be … so … / … realised that Gillian’s ancestor ….. / some sort of fight’. One can imagine a

family feud, perhaps spoken of over the telephone. This feeling of disruption, of being asked to imagine the full story, continues in my favourite work of the volume, ‘this alley a brick wall’ (2011). It starts, ‘this alley a brick wall / this from or is a / plume out I notice steam / opposite out of the wall – / smoke the my of itself.’ When one reads the poem aloud, the erroneous words, and the discordant ordering, feels as if the poem’s transmission is being disturbed, uneasily interrupted. Yet on the page, there’s a visual effect, more akin perhaps to digital corruption, of something breaking up. The poem, in effect and typical of this often-mesmerising collection, has two almost independent lives: one aural and narrative, one visual and abstract. Oliver Basciano

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Olafur Eliasson, Copenhagen, November 2014. Photo: Till Janz

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For more on Max, see overleaf

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Contributors

Charlie Fox

Michael North

is a writer and critic based in London, currently at work on a project about recluses. This month he reviews The George Kuchar Reader. For further reference on the crazed films of Kuchar, Fox reckons this stuff should do the trick: the Fleischer Brothers’ pre-Hays Code Betty Boop cartoons, the collected oeuvre of the Little Rascals, created by Hal Roach, particularly the snowy song-anddance dream sequence in Our Gang Follies of 1938 (1937) – “You’ll be singing your opera in the streets with a tin cup in your hand!” – and Tristan Tzara’s ‘Dada Manifesto’ (1918), with special attention paid to the line about floating in a ‘mouth full of honey and excrement’.

is a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of eight books, and his articles have appeared in journals such as Critical Inquiry, PMLA, Modernism/Modernity and Modern Language Quarterly. His most recent book, Novelty: A History of the New (2013), received the Robert Motherwell Book Award. This month he writes about ‘the new’ in art. For further reference, he recommends, among others, What Is Contemporary Art? (2010), edited by Julieta Aranda, Brian Kuan Wood and Anton Vidokle; On the New (2014), by Boris Groys; and After Art (2013), by David Joselit.

Dan Udy

Hettie Judah

Contributing Writers Joseph Akel, Karen Archey, Sean Ashton, Andrew Berardini, Gesine Borcherdt, Matthew Collings, Marie Darrieussecq, Tom Eccles, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Charlie Fox, Gallery Girl, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Sam Jacob, Maria Lind, Michael North, Barbara Piwowarska, Pavel S. Pyś, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Sherman Sam, Ed Schad, Mark Sladen, Raimar Stange, Olga Stefan, Sam Steverlynck, Susannah Thompson, Dan Udy, Roos van der Lint, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson, Siona Wilson Contributing Editors

is a freelance writer and PhD candidate at King’s College London. His research explores strategies of knowledge exchange and self-representation in queer alternative video, focusing on navigation of the American medical system in relation to HIV/ AIDS and trans healthcare. This month he reviews Steve McQueen’s recent exhibition at Thomas Dane Gallery, London. For further reference he recommends bell hooks’s We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004).

is a London-based writer and editor. Currently a regular contributor to ArtReview, SHOWstudio and Business of Fashion, her work appears in international publications including the Financial Times, International Herald Tribune and Time magazine, as well as a number of British magazines and newspapers. She works closely in association with MoMu, Antwerp, and has written and edited numerous books on fashion, design and contemporary art. This month she writes about data visualisation. For further reference she recommends Edward Tufte’s extraordinary publication Beautiful Evidence (2006) and Tactical Tech’s rather more practical Visualising Information for Advocacy (2013), which is now available as a free download.

Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Till Janz, Max, Luke Norman & Nik Adam

Max (preceding pages)

For more than four decades, from Spain’s local countercultural margins to international acclaim today, the ever-changing comics of Spanish artist Max, alias Francesc Capdevila, have responded to his personal perspectives and the spirit of the times. Max emerged under the repressive Franco regime, debuting his work in 1973 in truly subversive ‘underground’ comix that the authorities pounced upon for ‘infringing public morals’. Post-Franco freedoms unleashed characters such as his angry radical Gustavo; then Peter Pank, his punk distortion of J.M. Barrie’s fantasy; and more recently the bizarre, balding Bardín, inheritor of ‘superrealist’ powers from Luis Buñuel’s Andalusian dog. Max’s latest graphic novel – published in English last year by Fantagraphics – purifies and condenses his cartooning and thinking still further. Vapor charts the struggles and strange encounters of Nicodemos, a long-haired, long-nosed monk who has quit the ‘gigantic muddle’ of the world to seek transcendence in a desert through selfdeprivations. Max admits, “Some people say my concerns are too philosophical, but they grow from

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plain reality. What can you do if, like me, you can’t stand the world as it is now? What if I leave everything behind, go to the wilderness, stay quiet there, let things flow? Will I find peace of mind, or find a God or something?” Beset by hunger, thirst, boredom and desire, Nicodemos, or ‘Nick’, meets (or imagines?) a no-nonsense Felix-like cat, a magpie whose stolen food saves his life, a pig-farmer whose axe chops down a vast forest, his own shadow, which abandons him, and the Queen of Sheba’s seductive parade. Somehow overcoming all distractions, Nick finally faces the beaked, one-eyed flexible force of Vapor itself and must make the ultimate choice. The gallery world has been discovering the power of Max’s ideas and graphics. Having toured Spain, Mexico and Brazil between 2011 and 2012, Max’s career retrospective Max. Panóptica 1973–2011 was updated and expanded in 2014 at the Arts Santa Mónica Gallery in Barcelona. Max was also given carte blanche by one of his regular employers, El País newspaper, to create a new piece for Arco Madrid art fair at the beginning of 2013. Paseo Astral (Astral

Stroll) turns 45 newsprint pages into single-sheet panels composed of ink drawing and collage. As Max explains, “It’s about an artist looking for inspiration. He falls asleep reading the newspaper and starts an astral trip, travelling through all the pages (international, national, economics, editorial pages, society, culture…) looking for the muse and meeting the Devil – at a crossroads, of course.” As inspiration for Max’s new untitled Strip for ArtReview, he ponders his mixed experiences of the artworld and its tendency for po-faced self-importance. In his view, “The ‘visual’ look of comics has been assumed as a trend, as part of ‘pop’ and ‘pulp’ aesthetics. But the core of comics is telling stories through visuals, whereas contemporary art seems uninterested in stories; it is just interested in theories. And it wants to be ‘serious’. There is a huge cultural prejudice against fun. If something is fun, it can’t be taken seriously.” Contradicting this, the vehicle of comics permits Max to blend the playful and the profound into a metaphysical tour de force. Paul Gravett

ArtReview

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Photo credits

Text credits

on the cover and on page 141 photography by Till Janz

Quotations on pages 29, 73, 101 and 107 come from New! magazine’s website and were written by, respectively, Katie Waissel, Peter Andre, Lauren Goodger and Chantelle. New!’s 10 November 2014 edition is headlined, ‘On the brink of burnout’. new-magazine.co.uk/latestnews/view/64834/ Katie-Waissel-s-Xplosive-X-Factor-column-/; new-magazine.co.uk/peterandre; new-magazine.co.uk/ chantelle; new-magazine.co.uk/laurengoodger

on pages 138 and 146 photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam

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Chairman Dennis Hotz

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Off the Record December 2014 Early December. I look up from my plate of roast woodcock. “Why have they served the head split in two on top of it?” the curator seated next to me asks, quivering slightly. He’s wearing a skinny-fit suit-jacket from last winter’s ASOS Collection. I feel a shiver of disgust. “Look, just eat it. And then suck up the brains,” I snap back. “This is exactly the attitude that means you’re unable to deal with the shiny future of the artworld. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re all here!” I gesture expansively around the table, a gathering of dealers, curators and one sad-looking collector assembled at my behest at ArtReview’s favourite supper haunt, St John. I realise that now is a good time to make my speech. Channelling Britain’s future prime minister, Ed Miliband, I get up with no notes and immediately forget entirely what I was going to say. “Let’s leave the past behind, and talk futures!” I bellow. “You, curator! Didn’t you once advise the Tate Triennial? What about you next to her? Didn’t you once have a gallery in Vyner Street? And you? Didn’t you write for Art Monthly? You! That artist over there! Weren’t you once shortlisted for Beck’s Futures? And you, don’t you have Scotland’s biggest collection of Dexter Dalwood? Well forget about all these things, that was yesterday! Or even the day before yesterday!” I sit down and tuck into the bird, its innards satisfyingly mushed up on top of some fashionable bread. I have a sip of the 2005 Pauillac. “Splendid. I’ve never tried the Duhart-Milon,” I remark to the curator. As I sip it I am taken back to the first time I tasted Pauillac, perched on the knee of one of the Turner Prize also-rans. He made tangled paintings of landscapes. I knew he’d never make it. Heady days. I’m trying to remember where the painter and I were when the curator gently nudges me. “Erm, I think we might be ready for the second half of your motivational talk, Gallery Lady of a Certain Age.”

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I look at him, startled, and get back to my feet. I realise I have absolutely no idea who these people are. What happened to Dicksmith Gallery? Hotel? Tim and Sue? Listening to handsome Jake from the Approach tell us about his love life? Those nights of congoing around the bar at the Rivington? “Everything is connected in life! The point is to know it and to understand it!” “Erm, isn’t that from Gillian Wearing’s Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say… series from 1992–3?” the gallerist from Vyner Street gently points out. “Well, you’d know!” I shoot back. “I’ve still got it! Like Sugar Ray Leonard said, ‘I’m a guy who likes to see how close he can get to the edge of the mountain!’” “But you’re not a guy,” says the collector. There’s silence around the table. I sit down again, and poke the side of Savoy cabbage. The curator nudges me again. I stagger back up. “Look Gallery Middle-Aged Person, cut the crap,” shouts the Scottish collector. He looks angry. “We’ve paid £300 each to your publisher to hear your tips about the future. This is rubbish. I want my money back!” I stare at him. I know the publisher has spent the entire dosh raised from this evening on a weekend’s bender for the editorial team in the Liquor Rooms in Dublin. I try to think back to Frieze week. It’s a haze. Then thankfully I remember an evening slumped in the Old Selfridges Hotel, pumped up on my last supplies of Benzo Fury, now sadly consigned to illegality and the grave of history. “Denim! Thai Denim! Lots of it! And vapes! Groups of Thai boys smoking vapes! That’s the future! That’s the future, damn it! What does it all mean? I’ve no idea, but that’s the future. How many of you vape?” Everyone shakes their heads. The writer shakes a packet of Marlboro Lights at me sadly. “Get out! Get out, all of you. Go and get some vapes and come back and then shake them around like Korakrit’s boys. Then come back inside. You can all be the future again!” They rush out, making for the newsagent next door, knocking over plates of Welsh rarebit, grilled lamb hearts and a braised ox kidney on the way. I sit back and survey the chaos before picking up the ox kidney and chewing a corner. I flick out my vape pen and take a drag, winking at the waiter. And then as I remove my Frank Galasso wig, and put it on the table, I realise that the first glass of Pauillac I drank was exactly here, under these white-washed walls, just 20 short years ago. Gallery Girl

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galleries Albert Baronian | Almine Rech Gallery | Anne Mosseri-Marlio Galerie | Bartha Contemporary | Ber-

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