ArtReview December 2015 by ArtReview

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26/11/2015 – 2016

Kingdom of all the animals and all the beasts is my name Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Every Camel Tells A Story Adriano Costa

Dec 2015 Art Basel Miami Beach Jan 2016 Paramount Ranch

Image: Adriano Costa

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Early Mondrian Painting 1900-1905 26 November 2015 - 23 January 2016

Polder Landscape with Silhouetted Young Tree 1900-1901 (detail) Oil on cardboard 12 ¾ x 11 inches (32.5 x 28 cm) Private Collection, London

David Zwirner London

SPACE AGE

ANSELM KIEFER, DAS GRAB IN DEN LÜFTEN (THE GRAVE IN THE AIR), 1991

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Matt Mullican, Untitled (World), 1982-1984, Embroidery on cotton, 90 x 120 cm / 35 2/5 x 47 1/5 inches | Piotr Uklanski, Untitled (Active Galaxy), 2014, Electroplated embroidery thread, cotton and polyester embroidery floss, rhinestones, gemstones and crystals, ceramic beads, leather and glue on velvet, 52 x 52 x 4.5 cm / 20 1/2 x 20 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches | Elmgreen & Dragset, Powerless Structures, Fig. 303, 2001, Wood, ceramic, styrofoam, 138 x 100 x 90 cm 54 21/64 x 39 3/8 x 35 7/16 inches | All images are Courtesy of Massimo De Carlo, Milan/London.w

In 2001.

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A new century begins with a new perception of space as the first interstellar tourist spends eight days in orbit.

A new century begins, but it’s also ‘The End of All Things’, a collective exhibition at Massimo De Carlo with Elmgreen & Dragset, Steven Parrino and Piotr Uklanski, among others.

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ArtReview vol 67 no 9 December 2015

Power to the People

You may have noticed that someone has defaced ArtReview’s beautiful cover this month. Normally ArtReview would have taken out the vicious scribbler with a drone strike (apparently that’s how justice is meted out these days), but in this case it’s rather fond of the intervention (the scribbling, not the drone strike). Not because it’s going soft, but because that intervention seems to unmask a lot about the nature of these covers and provide for a moment of reflection on what ArtReview itself is all about. Back when ArtReview started its magazine in 1949, it always featured a self-portrait of an artist on the cover. Everyone knows that these days the selfie has replaced the self-portrait (and that many artists don’t ‘do’ drawing), so ArtReview goes halfway and gets a portrait photographer to shoot artists for the cover instead. Why have artists and not artworks on the cover? In part because it says something about where ArtReview feels it sits in the art ecosystem (and we all know that contemporary art is ever-so-fond of systems – see this issue’s report on Chile’s pre-, during- and postdictatorship art for more on that). When ArtReview started out it was very much about critiquing works of art. And sometimes pub paraphernalia. But nothing else. That’s how it got its name. But over the years ArtReview has realised that as much as critiquing works of art is important to it, it’s fundamentally also about people. The people who make the art, the message or stimulus they want to communicate and the people who receive those messages or stimuli. Because that’s one test of how well an artwork functions (although some of ArtReview’s regular contributors might violently disagree with that). Particularly if you believe, as ArtReview does, that art can play a role in shaping society, in how society thinks about social or life structures and in how we talk to each other in general. ArtReview likes to think it offers its readers a perspective not only on artworks in and of themselves, but also on the spaces between the artist and the artwork (Why did they make it? What context or conditions informed the making process? What does the artist hope to achieve? etc), and the viewer (What does the artwork actually communicate? Is it worth looking at?). Hence portraits of people on the cover. Of course, ArtReview is aware that (most) artists aren’t fashion models

The ‘erotics’ of meat marketing…

or film stars, and not always comfortable in front of a camera (and, hey, most normal people don’t like the idea of being ‘shot’). And that a portrait can often tell you very little useful information about their actual work. Therefore each of ArtReview’s covers is something of a negotiation between the artist and the magazine – how can we create an image that describes both what the magazine you’re holding is about (and in an ideal world makes you pay money for it) and that tells you something useful about the artist – who they are rather than how they look. In many ways this cover is the perfect fusion of the two – articulating the erotic lure that ArtReview’s friends at Condé Nast are always telling it a good cover needs in order to sell ‘the product’, the artist’s discomfort about this and perhaps a little about how her own work functions to question limits to expression and explore social conventions and constraints. And perhaps it’s pleasurably uncomfortable that it’s ArtReview’s conventions that are the constraint here. But ArtReview’s not here to put itself on the couch. That’s what it does to artists. Most of the time. In last month’s issue – home to ArtReview’s big annual power list – the focus was on contemporary art’s heavy hitters, most of whom have some relation to contemporary art’s established order and systems (and art these days is something that’s convention-heavy). So it seemed only natural that this month ArtReview should have something of a focus on artists who – without necessarily hitting things with lesser force – go outside of art’s usual comfort zones (galleries, museums, art fairs in places like Miami – that sort of thing). So, in this issue ArtReview takes a look at French street artist jr’s work with marginal communities; cover artist Tania Bruguera’s quest for a socially useful type of art; Melanie Smith’s utilisation of Mexico City’s chaotic infrastructure as a subject and inspiration; and, in Colombian artist Lucas Ospina’s article, what the label ‘Latin American’ might mean in the context of art. And, in case you hadn’t guessed already, in this issue ArtReview is announcing the expansion of its interest in the art scenes of Latin America. Right. In the notes that ArtReview’s marketing people try to press on it when ArtReview’s writing these introductions, it says: ‘Say something funny about Art Basel Miami Beach, something that’s critical of both capital and spectacle and the way they’ve become such a big part of the fashion in which people consume art these days. That’s what readers expect as a proof of your commitment to what it’s really all about: art. People will praise you for it as they’re getting on their jet planes and taking off their wedding rings.’ But in the spirit of breaking convention, ArtReview won’t do that. Ha ha ha… ArtReview

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Art Previewed

Baudelaire on the duty of art critics Interview by Matthew Collings 56

Previews by Martin Herbert 33 Points of View by Jonathan T. D. Neil, J. J. Charlesworth, Andrew Berardini, Oliver Basciano, Laura Oldfield Ford, Jonathan Grossmalerman 43

Lorenzo Fiaschi Interview by Mark Rappolt 60

page 39 John Hilliard, Mixed Palette, 2015, pigment print on Hahnemühle paper, 115 × 132 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin & Paris

December 2015

Art Featured

Tania Bruguera by Tom Eccles 70

JR by Christopher Mooney 90

Technology, feedback and exile in art and politics in Santiago de Chile by Stefanie Hessler 76

Reading the Air by Naomi Pearce 94 Artist Project by Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski 99

Melanie Smith by Chris Sharp 82 The Fall of the House of Daros by Lucas Ospina 87

page 82

Melanie Smith, Fordlandia (still), 2014, hd video, 29 min 42 sec Courtesy the artist and Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo

ArtReview

INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR OF BOGOTÁ OCTOBER 27 - 30, 2016 ARTBO.CO

Art Reviewed

Richard Hawkins, by Andrew Berardini Frances Starck, by Jonathan Griffin Ann Hirsch, by Dean Kissick Jessica Stockholder, by Stephanie Cristello Clement Siatous, by Joshua Mack Nari Ward, by Orit Gat Justin Adian, by Iona Whittaker Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba, by Gabriela Jauregui 34º Panorama da Arte Brasileira, by Camila Belchior Li Wei, by Aimee Lin

exhibitions 108 Greater New York, by Jonathan T.D. Neil 13th Lyon Biennale, by Oliver Basciano Imran Qureshi, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Sofia Hultén, by Mark Prince Hito Steyerl, by Raimar Stange Chris Martin, by Sherman Sam Fredrik Værslev, by Sara Cluggish Susan Philipsz, by Barbara Casavecchia xii Baltic Triennial, by Michelangelo Corsaro 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, by Sam Steverlynck Merlin Carpenter, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Liquid Architecture 2015, by Stefanie Hessler Gianni Colombo, by Mark Rappolt Kara Walker, by Louise Darblay Willem Weismann, by Charlie Fox William Kentridge, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Ai Weiwei, by Helen Sumpter Last Year’s Snow: The Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde in the 1970s & 80s, by Gabriel Coxhead Voces: Latin American Photography 1980–2015, by Kiki Mazzucchelli Zhang Ding, by Robert Barry The Gap: Selected Abstract Art from Belgium, by J.J. Charlesworth Ian Law, by Sean Ashton

books 142 Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse), by John Cage Nicotine, by Gregor Hens nsk from Kapital to Capital, edited by Zdenka Badovinac, Eda Čufer and Anthony Gardner The Contemporaries, by Roger White the strip 146 off the record 150

page 130 Katalin Ladik, Poemask ii., 1982, silver gelatin print, 13 × 18 cm. © the artist. Courtesy of Austin / Desmond Fine Art, London

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Art Previewed

If it is White’s turn to play, he can prevent Black from making two eyes by playing as indicated in Figures B or C 31

Previewed Duh? Art and Stupidity Focal Point Gallery, Southend through 26 March

Šejla Kamerić Arter, Istanbul 11 December – 28 February

Anne Hardy Modern Art Oxford through 10 January

Recto Verso Fondazione Prada, Milan 3 December – 7 February

John Hilliard Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin through 9 January

Guangzhou Triennial / 1st Asia Biennial 11 December – 10 April

Agitprop! Brooklyn Museum 11 December – 7 August

John Giorno Almine Rech Gallery, Paris through 19 December

They Printed It! Kunsthalle Zürich 21 November – 7 February

Donald Baechler Cheim & Read, New York through 30 December

December 2015

Walk around an art fair nowadays, picking up stupid – whereas, as Clinton and Gritz also messages or details in their backgrounds and only surface impressions, and you might come point out, certain types of intellectualism can versos. Artists include Gerard Byrne, Sarah to the conclusion that most art is pretty stupid, themselves appear ridiculous, even senseless. Charlesworth, Roy Lichtenstein and Giulio with high production values serving a purpose Duh? Precisely. Paolini, and don’t be too surprised if the equivalent to a balding man’s combover. But Nor is this the only current example of a entrance is round the back. only a subset of artistic practice actively wants curatorial approach upturning a widely accepted Some might argue that art should stay the premise. Take the fact that we’re supposed to heck away from trying to effect direct social 1 to play dumb, as Focal Point’s Duh? Art and Stupidity demonstrates. ‘To work from a position look at paintings from the front, and that they change – or that it can try, but not expect to be of stupidity would appear to be a good way to accordingly have a back that is hidden. The good art at the same time. But a third group counter knowingness and intellectual superishow this month, the Brooklyn Museum’s 2 group show Recto Verso – put together by the ority’, write curators Paul Clinton and Anna memorably named Fondazione Prada Thought 3 Agitprop!, again takes a contrariwise view. It’s Gritz, who’ve assembled new and existing works Council (Shumon Basar, Elvira Dyagani Ose, likely to make a persuasive, carefully edited case by artists including bank, Isa Genzken, Ryan Cédric Libert and Dieter Roelstraete) – chooses for the force of images in relation to established Gander, Annika Ström, Rosemarie Trockel, conversely to rove backstage, rewinding to, causes, surveying a century of agitating propaAndy Warhol and a dozen or so others in a convoy variously, trompe l’oeil renderings of stretcher ganda (to return the title phrase to its constitof calculated folly that has a logical bent: if the bars rooted in the trickeries of Flemish golden uent parts) in support of, among other things, conventional view of art is that it ought to enage painting; the French 1960s movement women’s suffrage, antiwar protests, environlighten us and preserve us from stupidity, then Supports / Surfaces, which did away with the mentalism and economic equality, via a gamut fresh territory lies in resisting that norm, perhaps picture plane to emphasise the armature behind of media-convoking public events, websites, via methodical idiocy. This is, circularly, not it; and more contemporary works that conceal prints, digital files, songs and more. Expect to

1 Erik van Lieshout, Rotterdam – Rostock (video still), 2006, dv transferred to dvd, wood, carpet. Courtesy the artist and Maureen Paley, London

2 Giulio Paolini, Senza titolo, 1963, paper, Masonite, 40 × 40 cm

ArtReview

5 John Hilliard, A Studio Palette For Charles Landseer And Walter Crane, 2015, pigment print on Hahnemühle paper, 102 × 124 cm, edition 1 of 3. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin & Paris

4 Šejla Kamerić, Bosnian Girl, 2003, b/w photograph, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Arter, Istanbul

encounter work by Chto Delat?, Coco Fusco, Jenny Holzer, Martha Rosler and a raft of collaborative groups, plus contributions from many writers, advisers and volunteers. Meanwhile, the show promises the kind of structural vitality lacking in a staid, fixed museum display, changing over its course: beginning with a countering of historical and contemporary works, then adding successive waves of new art. Art doesn’t have to be agitprop to be political, meanwhile: one would hardly confuse 4 Šejla Kamerić ’s work with art-for-art’s-sake, though it’s also broader than a biographyderived reading might suggest. An intensely researched recent work by the Bosnian artist consisted of a walk-in mortuary fridge containing 85 hours of video footage relating to the 9,000 people still missing after the Bosnian war. Meanwhile, Bosnian Girl (2003), her most indelible work, took the form of public posters,

magazine ads, billboards and postcards featuring a photographic portrait of the artist on which was superimposed a hand-scrawled list graffitied during the early 1990s by a Dutch soldier from the un Protection Force then stationed in the republic: ‘No teeth…? A mustache…? Smel [sic] like shit…? Bosnian Girl!’ Kamerić’s first exhibition in Turkey, entitled When the heart goes bing bam boom and taking its name from a punk rock lyric that points to ‘the coexistence of exhilaration and a constant sense of insecurity’, will offer a broad overview of her practice, which has veered between specific geopolitical trauma and ongoing, widely experienced existential ones. In 1971, the British conceptual artist 5 John Hilliard produced Cause of Death, a work exemplary of his longstanding investigations into the status of photography as art and as bearer of truth. Here, four differently cropped

December 2015

versions of the same image – a body partly covered by a sheet – were appended with different causes of demise: ‘crushed’ (some rocks in the foreground), ‘drowned’ (a shoreline visible), ‘burned’ (a fire nearby), ‘fell’ (a building behind). Such investigations into photographic veracity may seem familiar now, but Hilliard was a pioneer of them – as well as, during the 1980s, explorations of the semiotics of photography in commercial culture and, during the 90s, an increasing proclivity for signal-jamming via scale and heavy processing. Hilliard showed with Max Hetzler as early as 1980, and he’s come full circle in other ways too. What we’re likely to see here, similarly to works he showed with Richard Saltoun in London last year, is work that unites photography with painting and installation, the format with which Hilliard began his career during the mid-1960s, and from whose documentation his interest in photography arose.

At the same halcyon moment that Hilliard medium to new formats and new audiences. to feel universalised – to a personal iconowas exploring one new medium for artistic In a New York show earlier this year, the graphy articulated in a language that mixes 6 practice, John Giorno was inventing another. near-octogenarian showed rainbow-gradient neoexpressionism with thickly outlined retro In 1965 he set up Giorno Poetry Systems in order paintings inscribed with phrases such as cartooning, Pop and graffiti-related styling. to connect audiences with poetry via new media; living in your eyes and i want to cum in Baechler, it appears, has long been fascinated in 1967 he inaugurated his well-known ‘Dialyour heart. Going gently into the good night by how something in the world becomes yours, A-Poem’ events, wherein audiences could pick doesn’t appear to be an option. a public vessel for private feelings – not least up the phone and hear poetry. Partly through It is, indeed, a good moment for elder statesof complicated nostalgia. Here we see where his collaborations with successive waves of men, as Cheim & Read are rewinding through this all began. 8 7 Donald Baechler’s past right now. In Early artworld figures, including the Beat writers, A few years ago, Anne Hardy inaugurated Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, denizens Work 1980–1984, the artist’s gallery of the last a retrospectively logical twist on the intricate of the 1970s downtown scene and more recently 16 years revisits a period when the Connecticutphotographs of constructed environments Pierre Huyghe and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Giorno born painter, then in his early twenties and that she’d become known for: photographs has long been connected to the artworld; he’s just returned from studies at Frankfurt’s that tended to open onto flickering narratives also been a long-term aids activist (and follower Städelschule, held six solo exhibitions over five – balloon-strewn party scenes in dirty comof Tibetan Buddhism). But it’s only over the last years that clarified his approach: sifting and pounds, Christmas trees piled up in hand-built five years that he’s begun having gallery shows filtering existing images, then adding selected rooms – and a kind of strange circularity in of his ‘poem paintings’, a process that – just ones – bodies, buildings, sex toys, teapots, which one recognised the artist’s great pains to like Dial-A-Poem – serves to transfer his core planes, all reduced in detail until they start not fully communicate something. She started

7 Donald Baechler, Self Portrait, 1984, acrylic and paper collage on paper, 91 × 91 cm. Courtesy the artist and Cheim & Read, New York

6 John Giorno, CHACUN EST UNE DECEPTION TOTALE, 2015, screenprint and enamel on linen, 102 × 102 cm (framed). © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Almine Rech Gallery, Paris, Brussels & London

8 Anne Hardy, Twin Fields, 2015 (installation view, Common Guild, Glasgow, 2015). Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

exhibiting sculptural environments themselves: ominous little cabins, colour-coded rooms dotted with semisculptural artefacts. Unlike, say, Mike Nelson, though, Hardy’s work doesn’t feel seeded with clues; it’s inspired more, we’re told, by the inner worlds in the novels of Haruki Murakami, J.G. Ballard and Tom McCarthy. As such – as this new installation, field, ought to restate – Hardy sits at once in the literary tradition of British art and estranges it, since there’s no story to be had except the one you bring to it. Can’t decide whether or not to go to 9 the Guangzhou Triennial? Note, then, that it’s now fused with the 1st Asia Biennial. Admittedly we don’t quite understand this.

10 They Printed It! at Kunsthalle Zürich makes But essentially there’ll be a lot of art and a handily binary theme: ‘World Time’ (or Western, some grand claims: that these formats are, or global time), with its insistence on acceleraif you hadn’t noticed, ‘experimental’ art themtion and capitalism, among other qualities, selves – and also (more obviously) a form of versus ‘Asian time’, with its emphasis on peace, self-marketing. The show, additionally, reflection and concentration. The six curators, which will perforce bring together a great Zhang Quing, Henk Slager, Ute Meta Bauer, amount of this stuff in the form of a public Kim Hong-Hee, Sarah Wilson and Sun Ge workshop and research project, is intended (an even East/West split, notably), apparently as participatory: visitors are invited to create aim to use this dichotomy to explore ways of an ‘online-archive’ of press bumf, which dosing ‘World Time’ with an Asian perspective. may say something about the increased Artists include Ming Wong, Natascha Sadr importance of press releases in the art infraHaghighian, Armin Linke, Omer Fast, Yue structure. We have no idea how this is going Minjun and dozens of others. to work, but we’re off to the recycling bin Finally, finally, someone made an exhibition now in order to prepare our contribution. about press releases and exhibition invites. Martin Herbert

9 Yuan Gong, Collecting Soil of Zhougong Temple, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou

10 Courtesy Kunsthalle Zürich

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B ERTO B

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14.11.2015 TO 13.03.2016

CALDER FOUNDATION IS PLEASED TO ANNOUNCE THE 2015 CALDER PRIZE LAUREATE

HAROON MIRZA

Haroon Mirza, Adhān, 2009, installation view. Courtesy hrm199 Ltd and Lisson Gallery

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Points of View

‘We cannot not periodize.’ So goes one of Fredric Jameson’s maxims from his short theoretical essay ‘A Singular Modernity’ (2002). I find myself returning to this text often in order to come to terms with the advent of what we call the ‘contemporary’ in contemporary art. If periodise we must, then what to do with the contemporary? A quick look at university syllabi on the topic, most from art-history departments, shows no genuine consensus. (Market analysts generally accept that contemporary art is work made by anyone born after 1910; not helpful.) For some, our contemporaneity begins in 1967, with the publication of Michael Fried’s Art and Objecthood, which set the terms of debate, and the stakes, for what qualified as serious or advanced (at the time) contemporary art; and perhaps more significantly, with the civil rights and global student movements, which marked a social and political upheaval that many still view as a decisive break. Others, notably architecture critic Charles Jencks, would date it to 1972, specifically 3pm on 16 March, when the first building of the Pruitt-Igoe housing projects in St Louis, Missouri, was dynamited into oblivion. Pruitt-Igoe had been built on the high-modernist architectural principles set forth by figures such as Le Corbusier, and with its demise, so went the legacy of Modernism. Jencks took his date to mark the beginning of Postmodernism (at least in architecture, where the term first carried the most currency), but that is just what the contemporary was called then. More recently, the period from 1989 to 1991 has served as the contemporary’s start date (see Suzanne Hudson and Alexander Dumbadze’s Contemporary Art: 1989 – Present, 2013, which gathers essays and position papers on the period from critics, historians, curators and artists). The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union brought, according to Francis Fukuyama, ‘the end of history’, after which global geopolitical alignments would be determined not by ideology, but by markets and people’s access to them. The neoliberal economic order brought down restrictions on international trade and capital movements. In art, it

contemporary stagnation or

The End of Days by

Jonathan T.D. Neil brought huge new wealth in search of social acceptance and distinction, as well as a pluralism of forms, politics and practices that either ignored or affirmed the dominant economic culture. But given 25 years and a more macroeconomic look, 1989 doesn’t appear so much a break as it does a high-water mark for trends that had begun nearly two decades earlier. Jencks’s year if not his date, 1972, looks more like the beginning of something and the end of something else. On one measure (from the National Bureau of Economic Research), multifactor productivity in the us averaged a respectable 2.26 percent over the 50 years leading to 1972. Between 1972 and 1996 it dropped to 1.04 percent, after which it briefly rebounded on the rollout of the Internet until sinking back down to a paltry 0.83 percent after 2004. Employment, though up and down through the five recessions the us has experienced since 1970, has been on a general downward slope due to the increasingly common phenomenon of the ‘jobless recovery’. And what the oecd calls ‘social spending’, the various benefits that low- or no-income people receive in the us, doubled from around 10 percent of gdp in 1970 to almost 20 percent in 2014 (this number stands at around 22 percent in the uk). Much of this decline is charted by the Nobel Laureate economist Edmund Phelps in his book Mass Flourishing, published earlier this year, which holds up the ‘modernist economies’ of the West in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, mainly in Britain and the us, as hothouses of ‘indigenous innovation’. Neither

December 2015

increased access to capital, land, trade or commerce, nor headline inventions or investments in science explain the ‘takeoffs’ of these nations roughly 200 years ago. Only the dynamism of their ‘economic culture’ does. I like two things about the term economic culture. First, it holds at bay any charge of vulgar Marxist analysis that views the plane of the economic as some ultimate determining instance of the sandcastles of culture. Second, it invokes history, and so periodisation. Economics may be structural, with aspirations of being a science, of developing and discovering certain laws of production and consumption and value, but culture has a history, and so demands the messiness of empirical context and locale. Economic culture invokes how economics is lived, and what is meaningful about that living, not just today, but in the past. What Phelps offers is a macroeconomic history of modernity and Modernism, a period when the economic culture in the West was characterised by dynamism and grassroots innovation, which translated into productivity, employment, inclusion and ‘mass flourishing’. That period is over. We’ve known this from the cultural standpoint for a while now, but we haven’t quite understood it from an economic perspective, even if we have bandied about the catchphrase of ‘neoliberalism’ to make ourselves sound informed. The international biennials of contemporary art, which eke out their differences either through links to this or that globalised ‘condition’ or through the lifestyle branding brought by their lead curators (or both), fail to stir anyone to genuine political or social action. The international fair circuit, with its highly conventionalised rituals and products, are stuck on repeat. Museums march on, building more, showing more, but somehow come off looking and feeling all alike. At the very least the art of the modern period, like its attendant economic culture, was suffused with purpose. Today it’s something else. I’m not for a return to modern art. But purpose would be welcome. What the economist Tyler Cowen has dubbed ‘The Great Stagnation’ may just be the period we’re in, on both fronts, in art and the economy alike.

THE INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR FOR PHOTOGRAPHY AND MOVING IMAGE

APR 29 - MAY 1 2016 PARAMOUNT PICTURES STUDIOS LOS ANGELES

You know what? I don’t care that a painting by Modigliani – Nu couché (1917–18) – just sold for $170 million at auction. Yes, I know, I’m supposed to offer up a fierce denunciation of the out-of-control art market and its megacollectors. Because that’s all us critics seem to do these days, in a time when the critical consensus, wherever you go, tends to be a rankling frustration with the spectacle of the art market, its glittery novelties and totemic antiques, and its bizarre hold on popular consciousness. And while political debate is fixated on the excesses of the so-called one percent, on apparently ungovernable financial speculation and on growing inequality, the default response is the vaguely manic-depressive feeling that, in the end, there’s just nothing ‘we’ can do about it. But those are the received ideas of our time, and I don’t buy them. I don’t buy them because, rather than stellar art-auction prices and torrents of financial liquidity being signs of excess, of there being too much wealth, they’re signs of the opposite: it may sound weird or even slightly heretical, but rather than too much wealth, there’s just not enough of it. Let me try to explain. Too much of current economic debate has a schizophrenic attitude to wealth; one side of the schizophrenic attitude is that there’s plenty of wealth, but it’s just in the wrong place – too much spending by the rich, too much cash coursing through global financial markets and art markets. And then there’s not enough wealth – not enough spending on public services in an age marked by the austerity experienced by millions around the globe, too much debt loaded onto individuals and too much borrowing by states. These are the common reference points for what is usually the critique of neoliberal economics – of the one percent feathering their beds at everyone else’s expense, the cash flowing all one way. And yet the glut of cash we see everywhere (except in our own payslips) and the glut of debt we see everywhere else is really only the financial consequence of the fact that the growth of real wealth – the production of stuff that millions of people need and want to live happy, comfortable lives – has ground to a halt. Economies in the West are barely growing, if at all, while businesses sit on cash piles they don’t want to invest to make more, better and cheaper stuff. Apple alone sits on a cash reserve of $206bn – a sum bigger than that held by

real value in which

J.J. Charlesworth wonders why we can’t just relax about the big spending at art auctions

Amedeo Modigliani, Nu couché, 1917–18, oil on canvas, 60 × 92 cm. Courtesy Christie’s, London

December 2015

some medium-size countries – yet doesn’t seem to know what to do with that money. But if one says that what we really need is more of everything, lots more of it, that everyone deserves higher living standards everywhere, more stuff and more leisure, in rich and poor economies alike, suddenly the conversation goes quiet. Suddenly, there’s too much wealth, too many people in the world, who all have too much stuff – we’re suffering from ‘stuffocation’, according to the latest antimaterialist lifecoaching bestseller, which wants us to switch from worrying about having ‘too many’ things to cherishing ‘experiences’. Search for ‘minimalism’ on Amazon and you’re as likely to find a self-help book on minimal, make-doand-mend, learning-to-love-austerity lifestyle modification as you are a book on the boring American 1960s art movement; which emerged, ironically, at one of the highpoints of American prosperity. There’s too much cash and not enough stuff, and we work too hard for it. And a truer critique of neoliberalism would be that the cash no longer knows where to go, so it pours into hedge funds, futures, commodities; into artworks, art foundations in gentrifying neighbourhoods, museums in the desert. Which is why I don’t care about what price someone paid for that Modigliani. It’s boring. It’s a sad sort of economics. Who cares? It’s a sign of desperation. But what’s interesting to think about is what’s so interesting about Nu couché. All that blather cranked out by underpaid art historians – about its status in the history of modernist painting, its radical, even shocking take on the nude at the time it was painted, how few nudes Modigliani ever painted, and so on, which then gets converted into status markers of special quality – doesn’t actually mean, looking at it in 2015, that it’s any more or less enjoyable than a good bit of soft porn. And good soft porn is plentiful, and doesn’t cost $170m. Which is, of course, no use to the tidal wave of financial liquidity that doesn’t know where to go, and which would rather be absorbed in the ownership of a thing of extreme scarcity. So as I say, I could care less about what was paid for that painting. Criticism is a conversation, not about why something costs a lot of money, but why it’s good. And why everyone deserves more – lots more – of it. That is real value. The rest is just numbers.

Felipe Arturo - Cosmo Café, 2015

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‘There’s artwork by Murakami, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michael [sic] Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein – basically, all of the T-shirt graphics at uniqlo.’ Kristen H. in a Yelp review, 17 October 2015 A bouquet of steel tulips. Through a concrete cave, a long escalator disgorges me at the petals of these giant, mirror-polished stainless-steel tulips. Unwilted and unwilting, the candycoloured flowers will never die, a speculation on immortality and value. That’s always art’s gamble. As with grand architecture. Standing on the third floor of Eli and Edythe Broad’s newest museum, in the heart of a cultural district the Broads helped invent in a sprawling metropolis that Eli, through his real-estate development company, helped build, the relationship between power and money, cities and art, feels a lot less clear than does the room reflected back at me in the mirror polish of Jeff Koons’s Tulips (1995–2004). Behind the giant flowers, The Broad has hung a series of untitled paintings by Christopher Wool from 1990 that say in giant blocky, black stencil letters: ‘Run Dog Run Run Dog Run Run Dog Run.’ I try not to take it personally. In 2012, Eli named his memoir/success guide The Art of Being Unreasonable, combining the two aspects for which he’d like to be known: art and being unreasonable. Eli is a difficult and demanding philanthropist and his new museum feels like many of his other acts of generosity: welcome but somehow also tainted. One begins to question why he gets to dictate the terms. How could one family acquire so much money and what does all that money actually buy? The $140-million-dollar museum houses $2 billion dollars worth of art collected by the Broads over the last four decades. Wandering over the polished concrete floors under the diffused light of cleverly designed skylights, you see room after room of large works, individual galleries mostly focused on single artists,

broad’s way In which

Andrew Berardini considers the relationship between power, art and money, and

the mixed blessings of philanthropy in Los Angeles

from top The Broad museum’s lobby with escalator. Photo: Iwan Baan; installation of works by Christopher Wool and Jeff Koons in The Broad’s third-floor galleries. Photo: Bruce Damonte. Both images courtesy The Broad and Diller Scofidio + Renfro

December 2015

or complementary works between two to three artists, much of it by familiar pop icons. Mostly blue-chip, approved by markets and some version of consensus, the work that sticks out is the easiest to trash: Eli and Edythe really loved the artists of the 1980s in New York. I find it the only ripple of personality in an otherwise anonymous exhibition of international power. It’s easy to scoff at the neo-expressionists and hothouse figurative painters of those years, but that’s probably more fashion and over-speculation talking than anything else. For sure, some of those guys (mostly men, though one of Susan Rothenberg’s horses prances along the wall) were dicks and blowhards, but altogether they embodied boththe terrible inequalities and glassy possibilities of that time. There’s a certain glee in seeing those speculative objects, a plate-piece by Julian Schnabel or the suburban dread of a figurative painting by David Salle, that most well-educated museum curators often keep stored away. And even amongst the blue-chips and consensus buys there are many works that sing, sometimes literally, as in Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012). Across nine channels of video a band passionately plays, separated by rooms and screens, a simple melancholic tune through a rambling old mansion, coming together in a procession across the fields and ending as a man silently walks through the house and turns off all the cameras one by one. The neighbourhood that once occupied South Grand Ave was wiped away by the city 40 years ago, and The Broad displaced only a parking lot. Whatever the system that made an Eli Broad and his billions possible, today neither you nor I is going to defeat it. So many signs of wealth and power and being unreasonable abound in this chilly mausoleum, but still we have this museum filled with works you can love or hate and still see freely, without any admission costs, whenever you want. You can return to The Visitors as many times as you desire to catch a few minutes or the whole hour of this beautiful performance. You can ride that escalator up through the cavern six days a week and look at your reflection in those steel tulips and sooner or later figure out, better than I have, the tangled nature of beauty and power, immortality and art, the mixed blessings of power’s munificence.

To walk around the ‘old town’ of Warsaw – mixing with the tour groups snaking past the collection of ornate churches, souvenir parlours and tourist-friendly antique shops, cafés and restaurants – results in a disconcerting feeling. There is something slightly off-kilter about the scene. Something not quite right, which at the time I had trouble identifying. It’s only later, when visiting the seventh edition of the annual Warsaw Under Construction festival (staged by the city’s Museum of Modern Art and Museum of Warsaw), that I realise what it is. The cobbled streets in the apparently medieval old town feel far too wide for the rows of tall narrow houses that run on either side of them. In actual fact this old town is nothing of the sort: like most of Warsaw, its construction was overseen between 1945 and 51 by the Warsaw Reconstruction Office, the body formed to rebuild a city more than 80 percent destroyed during the Second World War. An argument between modernists and traditionalists had split this new government office. The former wanted to start again and implement a modernist grid; the latter to faithfully restore the old city. The modernists won out – Warsaw is mostly now laid out without any discernible centre – but the oldest bit of the city was recreated. Yet as a concession to practicality, the architects widened the roads of this sham old town to allow better car access. Hence my learned sensibilities to space and architecture – that old areas have narrow winding streets and spacious urban planning is a twentiethcentury invention – were thrown off. This sense of instability is perhaps apt. Warsaw Under Construction’s main exhibition, Reconstruction Disputes, housed not in either of the museum spaces but in a former school (the building is being sold off by the government for private redevelopment; with an average of 1.3 children per woman in 2013, Poland has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world), chimes with two other concurrent shows in the city, at Zacheta National Gallery of Art and Foksal Gallery Foundation. Taken together, the exhibitions suggest a country in a state of flux, concerned for its future, looking to its past. As is often the case, this uncertainty comes from a society that does not seem to have fully dealt with its history, and particularly the aftermath of a terrible twentieth century. Logically Poland should be running along smoothly and looking to the future with ease – it avoided the euro crisis in part because it was denied monetary union when it joined the eu in 2004, and the country has one

warsaw You can rewrite history but you can’t reinvent the past by

Oliver Basciano

top Untitled (Polish-German friendship is not for me; I’ve hated Germans since the day I was born), 2015, c-print bottom Untitled (Monument to the Heroes of Warsaw 1939–1945, Warsaw), 2015, gelatin silver print both images Courtesy the artist and Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw

ArtReview

of the highest economic growth forecasts on the continent. Yet signs of pervading insecurity – see the electorate’s maddening embrace of the far right Law and Justice party in recent elections, for example – are reflected in the striking titles to Piotr Uklański’s new photographs, taken by the artist on a series of roadtrips across the country and being shown at Foksal. Untitled (Polish-German friendship is not for me; I’ve hated Germans since the day I was born) (all works 2015) captures a red-and-yellow blur of candle flames and sits alongside images that range from Auschwitz at sunset to grey, melancholic portraits of war memorials. While this invocation of Nazi atrocities would always feel devastating, what really gut-punches is the sheer sadness of the fact that ripples from this trauma are still being felt – in the psyche of this artist, at least. With his out-of-focus photograph of blurred pink tulips, Untitled (And in the spring let me see spring, not Poland), Uklański seems to acknowledge an inability to shake off the past. If Uklański is reflecting a more general attitude, it’s as if the country is as unsure and afraid of the future as the faces that endlessly populate the photographs, original documentary footage and paintings of Zacheta’s historic museological exhibition Zaraz Po Wojnie (Just After the War). Nor is this after-effect just psychological. The day after my visit to Reconstruction Disputes, I’m walking along a block fairly close to the Palace of Culture and Science, a rare landmark in the city. I pass the remains of a 1950s brutalist block, half-torndown, its guts hardly covered by the green safety netting erected over the side. It used to be a Warsaw government building; now, like the old school, it is being sold off by the state for commercial redevelopment into offices and shops. It immediately reminds me of another ripple effect. For the Warsaw Reconstruction Office to achieve its postwar masterplan, in the early 1950s Bolesław Bierut, the first general secretary of the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, annulled all private ownership of central Warsaw land laid waste to by the war. With this nationalised land now being sold off in 2015, there is a growing resistance movement arguing that, even after 65 years, a process of profit restitution to the original prewar owners (or their descendants) should be put into place. I didn’t go to Poland looking for history, but as this tangible battle shows, alongside the less concrete fight with shadows of the twentieth century, for the time being at least the past seems inescapable.

National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

Barking Reach, Datura stramonium, splits into four chambers, spilling black seeds… It’s all starting again, the giddiness and euphoria of November, you can feel the fracture lines opening, the eruptions of energy. A hot autumn, a constellation of flashpoints – Lewisham, St Pancras, Brick Lane, Lambeth – one after another, a cascade of epiphanic moments. The veil is thin. Back in the van with twice as many bundled in the back – a124 Canning Town to Barking. A corridor of new developments. Circles of traffic. Wickes car park where you see them all waiting for work, blokes gathered round dinted caravans; tides of cigarette ends, polystyrene cups, catering drums of Nescafé. Under the a13 flyover, glowing red, windows down, roofs down, cacophony of radio frequencies – Point Blank, Lightning, Metro Love. Hexed projects – Riverside development 2025 – Barking Reach rebranded, tidal marshland corralled into the failed Thames Gateway plan. You see the violet outlines of blocks half-built, structures in the fog, violet mirages, looping culs-de-sac of eco homes. That haunting mix Asim keeps playing – Jam City, Earthly 6. He says when it came out a few weeks ago he couldn’t hear it, he knew it had to lie dormant – and now in the blackness, the smell of cordite, the flashes of red – it is activated, it floods this new time. You hear those voices, suffocated voices, coming up for air. Deep sediments, psychic tectonics – your past and future rising from blasted speakers. Bestway cash and carry, Goresbrook towers. Shells of new cities emerging from abandoned construction sites. Fords, ghost of assembly lines, strike of 1971. Ornamental lakes, recreational grounds, cherry trees. Leaves still clinging, copper,

the township Past convulsions and present energies coalesce around a ruined pub by

Laura Oldfield Ford carmine, shards of citric yellow. Turn off into the industrial estate, jolt across a fractured road, heaps of tyres and elevated containers, sprawling yards behind corrugated iron. You see those markings again: black triangles, elegant runes, slicks of black paint. You’re seeing them all the time now, signs swarming in subways, petrol stations, backrooms of pubs. The threshold is gauzy. Van halts next to trucks and decommissioned buses, a nomadic city emerging in a forlorn landscape. A load of crew hanging round, black puffa jackets, baseball caps. Pallets and bonfires, charcoal circles marking the ground. The strangeness of warmth in November, the stillness, the way sound carries from the Thames, across marshes – arcing whistles, wheeling screams of distant fireworks. You can feel the presence of the decommissioned power stations, A, B and C; you can still see a phosphorescent glow, hear that low buzzing. 1954/1978–9/1981/2015/2025 You walk through sycamore, briars, rubble, potholes, a collapsing lane strewn with barrels

and plastic bags. This is where they’re staying, behind some billboards, a row of pebbledash houses. The garden is a coiled thicket of briars. Sprawling rosebushes form dense tunnels. It is November and blooms are still clinging to black stems – coral, ivory, pink like sugared almonds. You push through a metal door, follow a path of broken paving stones, smashed pumpkins and candles in jam jars. An upstairs window is open, you shiver at the sound of a mesmerising track, grime filtered through Houston, the hallmarks of trap. You only heard it for the first time the other day and now it wraps around, owning this moment, saving it up for you. The houses are austere, you suppose 1950s, must have been built at the same time as Power Station C. You wonder how it must have felt then, looking out across rose gardens at the vast glowing husk. Three-Day Week, Winter of Discontent: you think of those candles under the sink, the lights going out. The door is ajar, frosted glass and a warm yellow light. You step into a kitchen with black-and-white tv, 1980s mdf fittings, mottled wallpaper. Crew sitting round a table, cans of Red Stripe, a scattering of Rizlas… They’re on about the madness kicking off in Lambeth a couple of weeks ago, then the scenes on Bonfire Night, the Million Mask March. Some of that Scum Tek crew have gone to ground over here – a joining of forces before the next phase, a place to burrow, lie low – you can feel the energies coalescing, the recharging before the next round. This terrain is a network of bunkers, provisional shacks. Asim tells you about breaking into a network of underground service tunnels – a dislodged manhole cover was all it took to open a seam of brick corridors spanning the site of the old power stations, the docks at Dagenham and the a13. Bottles of bleach, sacks of fertiliser, 1980s wallpaper, maps circled with marker pen. A cluster of cells. Asim guides you through the three interconnected houses, sledgehammer holes leading from one gaff to the next. He shows you upstairs, opens the door to a dusty box-room with a filing cabinet and a mirror propped up on the window ledge. You can get ready in here, plug your straighteners in, put your makeup on: gold eyeshadow, fluorescent rose on cheeks. Now that you are out of range, your confidence has come rushing back like a diverted tributary in a river current. Things have been stressful since September, paranoid and uncertain; the kickoff down Brick Lane, Old Bill turning up with forward-intelligence team looking for faces, Section 18s, seizure of sound systems and laptops.

You’ve heard A is thinking about you, asking about you all the time… The last you saw was the smashed phone on the bedroom floor. When you go back out to the yard, the crew are standing around a bonfire with bottles of rum. Everyone’s talking about the next wave of protests, the melting of Black Friday, the channelling of Christmas crowds. You recognise a few faces from Carpenters Estate. You ran into your mate Ayesha in Stratford the other day, she was telling you about the situation there, ongoing evictions, police throwing rough sleepers out of the shopping centre, closing the whole place down. You set out walking in a group of about 15. Narrow tracks, an unmapped network spanning ashen fields, goods yards, dark chambers under motorway bridges. Corridors open up in the rubble, embers of violet light. River Road, scrap-metal merchants, recycling plants, recovery yards. You see those markings again, dense shoals of black crosses. As far as you know, the Old Bill don’t know about this party yet – there’s no escort, no helicopters. It’s happening in an abandoned yard on the site of the old power station. You’re heading to a pub first, there’s a night on there – an annex to the sprawl of rigs surrounding it. You use the lights on your phone to illuminate a narrow lane – slicks of sump oil, carburettors and exhaust pipes. You are guided by the heavy juggernaut bass of a soundsystem, dub tracks

rumbling through the ground. The pub appears like an apparition, a capsule of glowing chambers in an expanse of black. You recognise it as a survivor of the wreckage, black paint hurled across walls, signs of occupation. 1971/1981/2010/2015/2025 This is a township operating out of sight – fires in barrels, cans of Tennent’s, men who have crossed the continent concealed in the back of trucks. The front of the pub is Sitexed up, steel grilles emitting a perforated amber glow. You go round the side to get in, find your way through towering stacks of tyres and battered caravans. You step into a yard, still has the trappings of a beer garden, wooden booths, strings of coloured lights. You feel the concrete floor buckling, emitting a remembered heat. Woodsmoke, vetiver, night-blooming jasmine. You climb a fire escape up to the function room. A load more crew dressed in black puffa jackets, hoods, dilated pupils – lads you know from Ilford – m25. English splintered with Urdu, winding in code. The upstairs room is glowing orange, Calor gas heaters, builders lamps looping over the walls. You huddle at the bar, vats of hot cider laced with acid. Red flock wallpaper, black circles burned in the walls. The Shahada, the Syrian revolutionary flag, the three red stars. The pub has become a labyrinth, alcoves branching in black mirrors. Dark mahogany tables obsessively gouged: West Ham, two heavy hammers crossing, replicating across the surface. They used to have gigs on up here, punk, new wave, goth – it existed on its own, an anachronism. You remember how it always seemed stranded, an echo of another time. Blokes from the power station supping downstairs,

punks in torn denim jackets, Class War patches, gathered outside. The place had closed in the early 2000s, a tin shell reverberating with the sounds of that strange jukebox – Thin Lizzy, Dexys Midnight Runners, Talk Talk. Standing here now triggers the luminosity of a forgotten episode, the late 1990s, some party on the Creekmouth industrial estate. You’d been up all night, ended up collapsing in a bundle of duvets in the back of a Transit van. You remember staggering out in the ruby light of a December afternoon, the ground blue with frost. There were half a dozen of you wandering in the vague direction of Beckton dlr and all the coordinates had shifted. You remember seeing the pub, the crimson glow through leaded windows. You could hear a band soundchecking upstairs, stark drumming and shrieking commands. You walked into the front bar, felt a warmth, a familiarity in the claret walls, amber corridors, velvet banquettes. There were others in bomber jackets, smelling of wood smoke, eyes pinned with chemicals, and you formed circles, newly energised on rum and cokes. And you remember the sensation of sublime jarring as Spirit of Eden came on the jukebox – you knew that record opened up portals, allowed them to come through. And hearing it loud like that, the way it saturated the room, you recognised it as a séance. And now these memories coalesce in a maze of images. Time has circled, and you know he is near – 1993/1999/2003/2011/2015/2025

Hélas pour moi! How could this be?? I’ve just been misquoted in the most horrific way imaginable… and just as my career is seeming to finally get back on track! Friends, I fear this may be my undoing. All because a reporter for a small art blog misheard a word or two. Can you believe it!? As you know, these last six months have opened up major new opportunities now that I’m showing at the newer, hipper and less ‘on the radar’ gallery Nozzlebaum & Gack. And a whole new generation of the superrich are discovering that they really like large canvasses of colourful vaginas with, but just as often without, penises in them. But now, with fortune scowling at me, I exist on the brink of a precipice! One mere misstep away from career extermination! All because of a simple misquote! It was only the other morning that I was walking happily down Sixth Avenue, enjoying the beautiful autumn weather and smiling at all the ladies… with their hidden vaginas… concealed from view, cozily nestled behind cotton and twill, biding their time… waiting… When I got a call from an art ‘blog’ called www.iloveart.com asking me to comment on my upcoming show at the Walker Center. The connection was terrible and I considered asking her to call back, but I didn’t want to miss the opportunity to talk about my work because, I admit it, I was feeling pretty amped. After all, the paintings are coming out really well, and also I had maybe done a little bit of cocaine (it was Wednesday). In any case I was confident that this would be my greatest show. Perhaps the greatest painting exhibition ever. And I proceeded to tell her so. After a long and nuanced description of the paintings I’m working on, I exclaimed, “This exhibition shall be my own erotic Austerlitz!” Something I thought to be an obviously playful reference to Napoleon’s life-defining victory over the Russians. I continued on to say that the show would be superextreme and that I wouldn’t hold back and that the museum might want to consider putting up a sign saying ‘No prudes!’ I really don’t know why I added that last part, because, as you’ll see, once it’s misquoted it really compounds the misquote from the first

from napoleon to polari In which

Jonathan Grossmalerman, painter, discovers the hazardous combination of

contemporary Internet journalism, daytime cocaine abuse and

a bad signal

December 2015

part. Now, anyone with half a brain would know that I’m making a Napoleon reference. I mean, right??? And nobody likes prudes, right? They’re always messing everything up and generally keep to themselves in a mysterious and unsettling way. We’re all on the same page here, yes? Because that’s not how it ended up in the article. That is not how it ended up in the article at all! It ended up… ooh… this just makes me so mad! She quotes me as saying, “This exhibit shall be my own erotic Auschwitz!” Auschwitz, for crying out loud! In that context my next line about the show being extreme makes a really different impression. You know, when instead of thinking about hot fucking you’re thinking about state-sponsored genocide!!! I mean, it just really reads differently. … And I don’t even know what ‘erotic Auschwitz’ is supposed to mean! I wouldn’t want to go see any ‘erotic Auschwitz’. Would you? Gosh. Even an ‘erotic Austerlitz’ sounds faintly ridiculous to me now, with the benefit of hindsight and not being crazily high. I’m not entirely sure what I was getting at with the ‘erotic Austerlitz’ bit, but I can assure you, it certainly had nothing to do with an ‘erotic Auschwitz’. Hell, I don’t even want my name associated with Auschwitz, but there it is all the same. Type in ‘Jonathan Grossmalerman’ to the Google, and the first thing that pops up is ‘erotic Auschwitz’ followed by ‘vicious anti-Semite’ and then ‘vomits in public video’ right before ‘passed out in street’. Only after that does ‘vaginas’ show up. Which, kind reader, is not good! I guess I should be thankful she misheard ‘No prudes’ as ‘No ’ludes’ and not that other thing. ‘No ’ludes’ doesn’t really even make a lot of sense outside of 1970s New York club culture. Come to think of it, on closer inspection, a lot of my answers in this article appear to be in some combination of 1930s newsie talk and Polari. It’s full of “why I oughta…” and “don’t nickel-and-dime me, buster” and “Bona nochy” and “Aunt Nelly danglers”. How odd. Gosh, maybe I did say all those things.

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December 1st to 6th, 2015 Art Basel in Miami Beach

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A Gentil Carioca, Anita Schwartz Galeria de Arte, Casa Triângulo, DAN Galeria, Galeria Fortes Vilaça, Galeria Leme, Luciana Brito Galeria, Galeria Luisa Strina, Mendes Wood DM, Galeria Millan, Galeria Nara Roesler, Galeria Raquel Arnaud, Silvia Cintra + Box4, SIM Galeria, Vermelho

Paralelo Gallery

Art Untitled.

Scope Art Show

Baró Galeria, Central Galeria, Galeria Pilar

Sergio Gonçalves Galeria

Miami Beach Convention Center 1901 Convention Center Drive

On the beach Ocean Drive and 12th Street

Midtown | Wynwood Arts District 2901 NE 1st Avenue

Pinta Miami Mana Wynwood 318 NW 23rd Street

Mercedes Viegas Arte Contemporânea

Scope Pavillion 801 Ocean Drive

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 43

Baudelaire on the duty of art critics Interview by

Matthew Collings despite his poor memory, the inventor and ‘poster boy’ of art criticism is made to focus on identifying the key aspects of the discipline amidst

the fog of facebooking, consensus-based opinion formation and spectacular fluff that obscures it today

Charles Pierre Baudelaire, born 1821, was a French poet and essayist. His prose-poetry influenced Rimbaud, he championed Delacroix and was a close friend and encourager of Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. An opium addict and alcoholic, he died in a nursing home in 1867 after becoming paralysed following a massive stroke.

ArtReview

artreview So, here we are. What do you think’s happening?

they might be aware I had something to do with the birth of modernist sensibility.

charles baudelaire The poet enjoys the incomparable privilege of being himself and someone else as he sees fit.

ar Salon art was concerned with immutable beauty as found in the eternal classical model. But you said beauty should be sought in the transitory. Rather than a goddess it might be an unknown woman buying something in a shop, in the interior spaces of the arcades, with their invitation to stroll – as opposed to out on the street, which was useless for strolling because Paris hadn’t been redesigned yet.

ar Ha, ha, yes, that’s so true. Well, we’re recording a talk for this art magazine. I interview dead people for it. They have to have something to do with writing about art or creating the ideas that shaped art. The column is called ‘Great Critics and Their Ideas’. I conceived of it years ago. It’s a way of criticising the present. I was surprised when the editors aped it and started having flattering interviews with art officialdom and calling them ‘Great Collectors and Their Ideas’, and ‘Great Curators and Their Ideas’. It completely misses the point. I met one of the magazine’s writers in an art school once, and he said, “Many of us envy that spot you’ve got.” Again, I was surprised it was considered a spot, like something institutional, rather than something I made up. cb Who reads them? ar Hardly anyone, I expect. Potential readers probably think they’re introductions to art history for novices. Anyone who’s had any experience of art history would think of that kind of thing as beneath them. While anyone who hasn’t, the majority, isn’t going to start now. cb So what do you want to ask me? ar It’s clear you don’t remember we’ve met before; I already interviewed you five years ago and we talked about a range of issues. Can we narrow the scope down and concentrate on art criticism? You’re considered one of the inventors of it in a lineup that has become a mantra: Diderot, Baudelaire, the Goncourt brothers. Of the things you’re associated with, wandering the city, being a flaneur, observing a cynical new consumer society from the margins and encouraging the birth of a kind of art that can tell the truth about it, which would you say was the most important? And is it always the duty of art critics to do it? cb Jules Laforgue said I was the first to speak of Paris as someone condemned to live in the capital day after day. Someone now might associate me with teenage bedrooms and poetic intensity, Patti Smith, Montparnasse Cemetery and Les Fleurs du Mal. They wouldn’t know much about my life, which was criticised sharply by Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘The perverse individual deliberately chose the most banal and the most rigid of moral codes. The refined man of the world went with the lowest harlots. A taste for squalor kept him hanging around Louchette’s skinny body, and his love for the affreuse Juive anticipated his love of Jeanne Duval.’ This would all be a blank to people in the artworld now. Interested in the art of my time more than my poetry, which I don’t suppose they’d understand,

cb Beauty and buying would have a whole different problematic meaning nowadays if you’re asking about a critic’s duty staying the same. ar You conceived the term ‘modernity’. cb Refugees stand for it now, photos of them show the new world being born. An artist with his piles of videos showing a demonstration

Someone now might associate me with teenage bedrooms and poetic intensity, Patti Smith, Montparnasse Cemetery and Les Fleurs du Mal. They wouldn’t know much about my life, which was criticised sharply by Jean-Paul Sartre. ‘The perverse individual deliberately chose the most banal and the most rigid of moral codes. The refined man of the world went with the lowest harlots’ in the street, unedited, languidly wondering where his remote control is, perhaps that’s the equivalent of my other concept, nouveauté – novelty. Destroying the classical past: today we think of classical art in Palmyra being destroyed, and classical scholars murdered. ar Do you think art should be of its own time at all times, or can it sometimes be timeless? cb What’s the modern truth whose paradoxes art should address now? Is it isis in Iraq and Syria, is it paedophilia monitoring, or gender altering, or global warming, or nationalism? Should we be thinking of the institutions that promote and cause to exist, and create popular acceptance for new performance art, like Poppy facing page Nadar, Portrait of Charles Baudelaire, c. 1855

December 2015

Jackson nude outdoors up on a gable for four hours a day, critiquing the subject’s invisibility, making actionist work exploring the female body as an autonomous zone? ar It’s considered hardcore. She might have fallen off. cb She was wearing a health-and-safety harness. There’s no quality guide to performance art that says death spoils the act. The opposite, in fact: if you think about the role of death in Rudolf Schwarzkogler’s mythology. The Viennese actionist’s early death in 1969 from cutting off his penis in a performance, or so it is believed, is considered majorly hardcore. In fact the film that exists of the event shows a model posed by Schwarzkogler for a fake cutting, and Schwarzkogler’s real death, from falling out a window by accident, was nothing to do with performing. ar Either way it’s remote from the flaneur ironically strolling. cb The flaneur’s leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour, which makes people into specialists. It is also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. The flaneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them. ar They’re sort of hipsters? cb If the flaneur had had his way, progress would have been obliged to accommodate itself to this pace. ar Hipsters with soul? cb Marx is always joking about the commodity having a soul, and Walter Benjamin said the flaneur is something like Marx’s soul of the commodity. I can’t remember why – it’s something like: the commodity, if it were a soul, would have to be the most empathetic ever to have existed in the realm of souls, because it would have to see in everyone the buyer in whose hand and house it wants to nestle. ar What do you think of the commodity critique, in terms of art? cb An art writer might seem never to have heard of it or to be perversely overlooking it if he or she says the brush structuring a surface in a certain way in a painting really achieves something or fails to achieve it. Maybe it would be worth bringing it in if a writer wanted to investigate the cause of the unlookatability of, say, Frank Stella, for 40 years. What happened with him? It’s not easy for anyone to say why his style changed and why it resulted in decline or what the nature of the decline is. That’s the duty of an art writer, to investigate attractiveness. The commodity critique can only take you so far.

ar Well, what do you think about Stella? cb I picture a colour put on a surface for no reason other than to be different to all the other equally arbitrary colours nearby. You’re looking at a void and not a good one. ar How about Damien Hirst, do you think he’s rubbish, too? Have you been to his gallery in Newport Street? cb The magnificent spaces in which new art is shown off are jests on a theme of excess that our present-day kings expect as the natural backdrop for their moveable courts all over the globe. Although you can see John Hoyland is a good painter and Hirst’s interest in how he animates a structure through colour is sincere, you have to almost strain to keep up this reading. The architecture is so wildly alien to the paintings that they become parodies on formalism executed by an entirely different artist. That’s the immediate feeling anyway. Perhaps a feminist painter is looking at a bygone abstract sincerity in order to make a modern point about gender. This could be the interpretation, if you didn’t know, of a roomful of paintings done in the early 1970s where Hoyland’s palette suggests lipstick and makeup. It could be a comment on femininity. But I saw no reason to find anything about the situation rubbish and I don’t think Stella is that either. He’s worthy of great respect.

The most basic elements that define painting were reduced to a zero point by him in 1958 and then made to seem exciting for at least 15 years. There have been other famous style changes: Philip Guston; Brice Marden. Both these worked out ok. Unlike Stella’s change during the mid-1970s, both were about going from middle-level tasteful predictability to something more exciting. The change from Bauhaus to Miami, to gaudy shallowness, with Stella, is not dislikeable because an art critic might be cross with the artworld becoming shallow during that time, as one reviewer of the Stella retrospective at the Whitney Museum attempted to argue. Shallowness in art is just dislikable. The art critic in that case, Ben Davis on the Artnet site, seemed confused about visual ideas in art generally and unable to understand the basic premises of the work: Stella’s concern with division and pattern, for example, and his sense of colour as a material you work with as a physical entity. The article chaotically claimed that Stella isn’t interested in social content and his art doesn’t have the humanity of Rothko. You feel like saying, “Gosh!” and “Silly old Stella to forget to put humanity in.” Jerry Saltz, on the Vulture site, observed that the Whitney show was good at indicating that Stella’s career is really all of a piece, and the same rules and structures govern everything he does. Here an art critic comes up with a nuanced and believable take,

John Hoyland, 28.2.71. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates. © the artist’s estate

ArtReview

giving with one hand while taking away with the other. It makes you want to see the show even though you’re being told most of it is impossible. Unlookatability is carefully considered. ar Should art critics be on Facebook? cb Many of them are: they want the attention. It’s not necessarily right for criticism. It’s really for identity formation. You post things in order to create a feeling in yourself that you’ve got an identity at all. Part of the process is that anything present in your personality that you fear might make it unlike everyone else’s can be gradually got rid of. You can post it like pushing a pram out into the traffic. If the baby gets run over, you remember not to say that next time. The reason it’s problematic for art criticism, though, is that analysis, the primary requirement, can’t be merely consensual. The whole point of Facebook is that you’re agreeing to be shaped by a group agreement about a single mass fake ideal personality. On the other hand art magazines are pretty much that, too, now. So Facebook is only as mad as them. Therefore it’s not surprising that art critics post on it. It’s their duty to make it clear they know it’s questionable but they’ve got something in mind, and not to give the impression they want to be liked. next month: T.S. Eliot on Raqs Media Collective

L A N DSC A PE R ECON F IGU R E D Ellen Hyllemose Saturday 21st November 2015 to Saturday 16th January 2016 158 New Cavendish St London W1W 6YW

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Other People and Their Ideas No 25

Lorenzo Fiaschi is one of three directors (with Mario Cristiani and Maurizio Rigillo) of Galleria Continua, which has for a number of years operated out of three spaces, in France, their native Italy and China, and besides the last, often away from urban, financial and hence traditional-artworld centres. Now the gallery has opened a fourth space, in Havana. ArtReview set off to find out why Interview by

Mark Rappolt

ArtReview

artreview How did the new gallery come about? What made you decide to open it? lorenzo fiaschi Our history with Cuba began more than 15 years ago with a Cuban artist, Carlos Garaicoa. And the Havana Biennale was one of our must-see events: a place of discovery. But our relationship intensified thanks to another biennial, in Marrakech. In Morocco, in February 2014, a Cuban, Laura Salas Redondo, then studying to become a curator, came across Michelangelo Pistoletto’s project The Third Paradise (2003–12) and said that it would be important to bring the artist and this project to Cuba. We proposed this to the director of the next Havana Biennale, Jorge Fernandez Torres, who immediately understood the importance of the project and invited Pistoletto. When he let us know the theme of the 12th Biennale – Entre la idea y la experiencia (Between the Idea and Experience) – we naturally proposed a number of other artists who had an affinity with it. Alongside Pistoletto, Jorge Fernandez chose Daniel Buren, Anish Kapoor, Shilpa Gupta, Nikhil Chopra and José Yaque. And consequently we jumped into this adventure with enthusiasm. Jorge Fernandez’s own passion (in addition to directing the Biennale, he’s the director of the Wifredo Lam Centre for Contemporary Art), the heartfelt support of the president of the Consejo Nacional de las Artes Plásticas, Ruben del Valle, along with the interest and motivation offered by the Minister of Culture, Julián González Toledo, gave us an even greater desire and determination to get fully behind all the projects for the artists involved and all the Cubans who helped us. We also came up with other projects, emphasising spaces like the Cinema Fausto and the Cinema Aguila de Oro. It ended up being not only a success but an emotional experience, shared by artists like Pistoletto and Buren, both with many decades of experience behind them. And so we decided to ‘continue’ the Cuban cultural experience by opening a space in Cinema Aguila de Oro, in the Chinatown district of Havana. ar What interests you about the Cuban art scene and Havana in particular? Will you be adding new artists to the gallery as a result of the new space? lf When with Mario Cristiani, Maurizio Rigillo (always friends, companions and cofounders of the gallery) I came to Cuba for the 12th Havana Biennale, already working with a Cuban artist and given the large number of other artists we work with, we had no intention of working with other Cuban artists. But we couldn’t resist the temptation to visit artists’ studios. And that was it! You never know when the spark will ignite. We let our hearts guide us towards one, then

two, then three artists, culminating with the opening (on 27 November) of the space with six Cuban artists. Given the richness and quality of Cuban art, it would be nice if Cuba changed the law banning private galleries to allow art lovers and supporters of Cuban artists to open spaces and show off the quality of Cuban culture to the world. Art must circulate. Thanks to art we arrived in Cuba, and in creating the performance of The Third Paradise on a boat on the Havana sea, drew a symbol that represents the possibility of merging two opposite roads into a third common way: and that was 16 December 2014, the day before Obama and Raul Castro spoke on the telephone after 54 years of insults and silence between their two countries. One example of a positive sign, blown by the wind on the water – does that suggest it was the right choice? We don’t know, but we do know that art is magical and that the wind and art have little to do with boundaries!

We’re not interested in shipping crates of work from other continents and then sticking them on walls in Havana. We want it to be an opportunity for Cuban artists to show their work to the world ar What are your ambitions for the new gallery? lf If we open a space in Havana, it’s to build a bridge between different cultures, to create opportunities for meetings, for exchange, for an enriched reciprocal culture. Our intention with this Cuban project is to transport humanity, not the objects, even if they are artistic. It’s important to us that artists, the whole world, should come to Cuba to breathe in the air, talk to people, understand the country, have a life experience that allows them to create art beyond experience. We’re not interested in shipping crates of work from other continents and then sticking them on walls in Havana. We also want it to be an opportunity for Cuban artists to show their work and its sensibilities to the outside world, and that the journey should be, for them too, an opportunity to see other places and a source of cultural enrichment. We’ve already brought José Yaque to do exhibitions outside of Cuba – in Italy this February and in France facing page, top Maurizio Rigillo, Ai Weiwei, Lorenzo Fiaschi and Mario Cristiani on occasion of the exhibition Ai Weiwei, Galleria Continua, Beijing, June 2015. Courtesy Galleria Continua, San Gimignano / Beijing / Les Moulins / Havana facing page, bottom Arte Continua space in Chinatown, Havana. Photo: Lorenzo Fiaschi

December 2015

this May – shows that intrigued and fascinated a very demanding public. We asked Alejandro Campins to undertake a residency of almost two months in France, in our space there, where he produced a great exhibition for an international audience. And next, in February 2016, it will be the turn of Reynier Leyva Novo in San Gimignano. And that’s just the beginning. ar At the same time as you opened the gallery in Cuba, there have been controversies within the country regarding free speech – involving, most notably, Tania Bruguera. Did that make you nervous? How does the situation impact on Continua? lf We love Tania Bruguera’s work and we worked with her in Tuscany on the project Arte all’Arte in 2000. We were very upset about what has happened to her in Cuba, like it upset the whole Cuban artistic community. Cuba has supported her work and Tania has been free to travel the world and express herself as she wished, she could come and go to Cuba when she wished, and was also invited – which she accepted – to teach and give courses at the isaInstituto Superior de Arte. I didn’t understand her gesture however of flying to Cuba immediately after the telephone conversation between Obama and Raul Castro to try to do a performance that she had already been permitted to do in Cuba in 2009 for the 10th Havana Biennale at the Wifredo Lam Centre (which is owned by the Cuban government and has been the heart of the Biennale for 30 years). Tania knew only too well that in the mythical space that is the Plaza de la Revolución this would be a problem. I don’t think that the church would give me permission if I wanted to go to Rome and be in Piazza San Pietro and give a speech on secularism and then give the floor to everyone. Tania knew what she was up against and will have had her own reasons for doing it. But I found it excessive that they took away her passport, and I’ve said that both publicly and privately to public figures and politicians in Cuba. That they have this law in these circumstances is something of which I don’t approve, but Tania would have known this was the case. I also hope that Cuba, when it ends this isolation from the rest of the world, which has been imposed for almost 55 years, can resolve the issue of freedom of expression, and the other measures that they have put in place to protect themselves. We have faith that many things can change and that an outcome where there is respect for difference, which is the essence of culture, can soon establish itself. But this is the case anywhere in the world. Over the last 18 months we have travelled to Cuba seven times, for more than 15 days at a time, so we have seen a lot of the true reality rather than reports in media outlets. We think, on the basis of our modest personal experience, that in reality things are

a long way off from what we have heard about Cuba in recent years.

ar Could you imagine opening a gallery in a major financial centre like New York or London?

ar You work with Ai Weiwei and are currently showing his work in Beijing. Did the experience in China inform the operation in Cuba?

lf I don’t think that those are cities made for us. But never say never. For certain they are places of great interest, centres of capital and culture full of energy, through which millions of people pass, including, frequently, all the world’s collectors. For us it’s clearly impossible to get the audience numbers that pass through London or New York to San Gimignano, Les Moulins, Beijing or Havana. But those who do come to visit find that when they leave they have an understanding of a different way of making and experiencing art, and that’s important to us. In order to exist, art needs an audience that’s rich in diversity, but it also has a need for an economy that allows the construction of artistic projects, the financing of adventures, and for that you need an economic system, but as a means of creating culture and not as an end in itself. Collectors are fundamental to this, not only to create this economy, but also to circulate works in ways that allow them to be seen by others. Collecting, as well as being an expression of a passion, is a vehicle for culture.

lf It’s important to understand from the beginning that the stories of Ai Weiwei and Tania Bruguera are miles apart. We’ve known Ai for 11 years. His route and story have led him to choose to undertake an artistic voyage along a risky, bumpy road that merits the greatest respect. It’s a choice that comes from a long way back, from his childhood. The histories of China and Cuba are very different but touch on one point: communism. Our experience of China was initiated by one of the greatest artists of our time, Chen Zhen, and it was he, although he died in 2000, who brought us to this country. We were the first foreign gallery with an international programme to open in China, and we’ve established a solid relationship with the Chinese cultural community and beyond. But to tell all that would take up your entire magazine. I can only say that we our proud to be in China, where we have learned a lot, and now Continua Beijing is hosting the first solo show of Ai’s work in his own country, which can only tell us that we made the right choice. Last year the Fondazione Italia Cina, sponsored by the Italian and Chinese governments, awarded us the Premio Eccellenza. But Cuba is a whole new story to write, and we can only write it with the Cuban people, just as we did with the Chinese in Beijing. ar You now have galleries in three continents, each with a very particular location. Are the programmes in each separate entity responding to the local contexts and conditions? Or does the gallery have an overall programme that’s international? lf We’ve been friends since we were thirteen. When, in 1990, we decided in San Gimignano, a small village in Tuscany, to launch into the contemporary art adventure, it was immediately clear that we had to aim at a public that was as big as possible, because culture must be for everyone. We left San Gimignano, a decentralised reality, with the idea of giving some continuity to our heritage of cultural renaissance, which is where the name ‘Continua’ comes from. When we have tried to create a programme aimed at a specific audience, it has never worked out as we hoped, but when the choice has been more risky and casual, we’ve had some positive surprises. We’ve carried this experience with us over the years and to the new openings, like in China and France and now Cuba, to do what pleases us, almost as if the three of us were our initial public. At least we were the first to be satisfied. To a degree, this has been our recipe: to be ourselves everywhere.

In order to exist, art needs an audience that’s rich in diversity, but it also has a need for an economy that allows the financing of adventures ar It’s been 25 years since the gallery began. What have been the biggest changes in the roles of a gallery and the conditions in which it operates in that time? lf From San Gimignano in 1990, to Beijing in 2004, to Les Moulins in the Parisian countryside in 2007, and now Cuba, an extremely diverse reality has given us the possibility of understanding a large chunk of the world and, in a few cases, to anticipate certain aspects of it. A lot has happened and the role of the gallery has also changed a lot. In many cases it’s taken on a more public role, and to some extent this is a positive thing. The gallery has increasingly become a laboratory in which to develop projects, an energy source that can give artists the ability to realise their dreams, including big projects, and so allow them to express their creativity. The ‘Unlimited’ section of Art Basel has frequently given us the opportunity to present large-scale projects. We like challenges, and thanks to this section we were able to express the work we do with the artists. Then there’s the novelty of the art fairs, which in these last decades have taken on an important role in stimulating and appreciating culture. Even New York galleries take part in New York art

ArtReview

fairs, London galleries in those in London, and go halfway around the world from Shanghai to São Paulo, from Hong Kong to Paris, Mexico City to Miami and Dubai, to encounter new audiences and new cultures. It’s amazing! ar Continua has three founding partners – do you always agree about what you do as a gallery? lf There are three of us, but we’re not a democracy. By this I mean that a decision isn’t made by two votes to one. We’ve been friends since 1978, and in the name of that friendship we decided that if one of us falls in love with an artist, that’s because of something the other two haven’t seen. So we let the other pursue his love. But that’s not the end of it. He also has to try to explain what convinced him, to light our way through the darkness. That’s a wonderful exercise that has expanded our field of interest and led to a more open attitude. And this also goes for the big strategic choices we make as a gallery. There are also moments when we can strongly disagree, like over the choice of a format and image for an invitation, or whether or not to host a seated dinner or a buffet! ar Your ‘mission statement’ says that Continua thrives on two core values: generosity and altruism. Can a gallery be generous and altruistic and a successful business? What forms does this generosity take? lf Yes, we think art should be generous and selfless. To achieve this when we opened Galleria Continua as a for-profit private enterprise in 1990, we also set up a nonprofit cultural association, Arte Continua. Galleria Continua set out to be a company that could sustain artists by selling their work, and through this activity we liked the idea that we’re creating jobs. With Arte Continua we wanted to interact with public institutions to make projects with artists and to bring art into the city, in squares, in the streets, with the aim of bringing cultural activities to the people and stimulating as much of a growth in sensibility in civil society as possible. Artists want to create, and to exhibit the fruits of their labours, and if this happens in a gallery, a museum or just in a square, the important thing is to share it and to do that in a way that humanity can encounter it, understand it, accept it, beyond any differences. That can only be the basis for a shared cultural and spiritual enrichment. Certainly it hasn’t been easy to combine a private, commercial enterprise with a nonprofit association; but in cultural terms, for us at least, they share the same logic: to grow the appreciation of culture. If you think, as I said before, that the business must be the means of creating culture, then there’s no contradiction. What matters is that we can look back and say that our lives were rich with experience.

INTERNATIONAL CONTEMPORARY ART FAIR www.arco.ifema.es

24-28 FEB 2016

ORGANISED BY

1900-2000 Paris 3+1 ARTE CONTEMPORÂNEA Lisbon 80M2 LIVIA BENAVIDES Lima lAD HOC Vigo ADN Barcelona ADORA CALVO Salamanca

lAGUSTINA FERREYRA San Juan lAIR DE PARIS Paris ALARCON CRIADO Seville lALEXANDER AND BONIN New York ALEXANDER LEVY Berlin ALFONSO ARTIACO Naples ALTXERRI San Sebastian ÁLVARO ALCÁZAR Madrid lANAT EBGI Los Angeles ÀNGELS BARCELONA Barcelona ANHAVA Helsinki ANITA BECKERS Frankfurt ANITA SCHWARTZ Rio de Janeiro lANNET GELINK Amsterdam ANNEX14 Zurich ANTOINE LEVI Paris ARCADE London lARREDONDO \ AROZARENA Mexico City lARRÓNIZ ARTE CONTEMPORÁNEO Mexico City ART BÄRTSCHI Geneva ASTUNI Bologna AURAL Alicante BACELOS Vigo BAGINSKI Lisbon BARBARA GROSS Munich BARBARA THUMM Berlin BARBARA WIEN Berlin

lBÄRBEL GRÄSSLIN Frankfurt BARÓ São Paulo lBARRO Buenos Aires BENDANA I PINEL Paris BETA PICTORIS Alabama BO BJERGGAARD Copenhagen lBRAND NEW GALLERY Milan CARLES TACHÉ Barcelona CARLIER / GEBAUER Berlin CARMEN ARAUJO Caracas CARRERAS MUGICA Bilbao CASA SIN FIN Madrid lCASA TRIANGULO São Paulo CASADO SANTAPAU Madrid CASAS RIEGNER Bogota CAYÓN Madrid CENTRAL São Paulo lCHANTAL CROUSEL Paris lCHRISTOPHER GRIMES Santa Monica CONTINUA San Gimignano CRÈVECOEUR Paris lCRISTINA GUERRA Lisbon CRONE Berlin lD21 PROYECTOS DE ARTE Santiago De Chile DAN GALERIA São Paulo DANIEL FARIA Toronto lDANIEL MARZONA Berlin lDEL INFINITO ARTE Buenos Aires DENISE RENÉ Paris DEWEER Otegem lDOCUMENT ART Buenos Aires lDOHYANG LEE Paris EL MUSEO Bogota ELBA BENÍTEZ Madrid ELVIRA GONZÁLEZ Madrid lEMMANUEL HERVÉ Paris ESPACIO MÍNIMO Madrid ESPAIVISOR Valencia lESTHER SCHIPPER/JOHNEN GALERIE Berlin ESTRANY - DE LA MOTA Barcelona lETHALL Barcelona F2 Madrid FERNÁNDEZ – BRASO Madrid FILOMENA SOARES Lisbon FORMATOCOMODO Madrid FORSBLOM Helsinki lFORTES VILAÇA São Paulo lFRANCO NOERO Turin lFRITH STREET London DE LA OFICINA Medellin lESTAÇAO São Paulo GANDY Bratislava lGARCÍA GALERÍA Madrid GIORGIO PERSANO Turin GRAÇA BRANDÃO Lisbon GREGOR PODNAR Berlin GUILLERMO DE OSMA Madrid HEINRICH EHRHARDT Madrid HELGA DE ALVEAR Madrid HENRIQUE FARIA FINE ART New York lHILARIO GALGUERA Mexico City HORRACH MOYA Palma de Mallorca IGNACIO LIPRANDI ARTE CONTEMPORANEO Buenos Aires INSTITUTO DE VISIÓN Bogota ISABEL ANINAT Santiago de Chile ISABELLA CZARNOWSKA Berlin ISABELLE VAN DEN EYNDE Dubai IVAN Bucharest l JAN MOT Brussels JAQUELINE MARTINS São Paulo JAVIER LÓPEZ & FER FRANCÉS Madrid JÉRÔME POGGI Paris JOAN PRATS Barcelona JOCELYN WOLFF Paris lJOHANNES VOGT New York JOSÉDELAFUENTE Santander lJOSEPH TANG Paris

lJUANA DE AIZPURU Madrid KEWENIG Berlin KLEMM'S Berlin lKRINZINGER Vienna KROBATH WIEN I BERLIN Vienna l KUBIK Porto KUCKEI + KUCKEI Berlin l KURIMANZUTTO Mexico City l L21 Palma de Mallorca LA CAJA NEGRA Madrid LEANDRO NAVARRO Madrid lLELONG Paris LEME São Paulo LEON TOVAR New York LEVY Hamburg LEYENDECKER Santa Cruz de Tenerife lLISSON London LUCÍA DE LA PUENTELima lLUCIANA BRITO São Paulo LUIS ADELANTADO Valencia lLUISA STRINA São Paulo lMAI 36 Zurich MAISTERRAVALBUENA Madrid MALONEY FINE ART Los Angeles MARC DOMENECH Barcelona lMARIAN GOODMAN

JUAN SILIÓ Santander

London MARILIA RAZUK São Paulo MARIO SEQUEIRA Braga MARLBOROUGH Madrid MARTA CERVERA Madrid MARTIN ASBAEK

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If, on the other hand, it is Black’s play, he can save his group by playing at 1 as in Figure D, for it is now impossible for White to play on the corner 69

Tania Bruguera Her performances and actions have made her one of the most influential Cuban artists of her generation. Here she talks about the role of art in society, her recent detention and her longterm project to create a ‘useful’ art Interview by Tom Eccles

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artreview You were born in Cuba in 1968 and you grew up during the period of the Cold War. Can you describe your childhood during those years? Was there a moment of political awakening for you? tania bruguera I was the daughter of a diplomat, so my childhood was defined by living outside of Cuba. I grew up inside embassies in France, Lebanon and Panama; I lived inside a propaganda machine designed to export Cuban reality – a place from which Cuba was also intervening in the political life of those countries, a place in which political alliances were formed. But I was just a child. Only while I was in Beirut did I have the opportunity to ‘escape’ this environment to study at the Lycée Français, where the education was Cartesian rather than the doctrinal system we had in Cuba. I experienced the stress of being in danger (from the bombs during the war in Lebanon and, later, during the us invasion of Panama), a very concrete experience of conflict, which is something that in Cuba was just a threat. I guess that is the ‘Cold War’ that I was experiencing – very different from the one I found when I returned, age eleven, to live in Cuba. This living abroad also made me see the world in a perspective that was broader than that of an islander. At that time Cubans could not travel, and once I returned to Cuba I had a hard time readjusting to a place that seemed very restrictive, as if each of us were responsible for the ‘Cold War’, which we only saw in the scarcity and the constant militarisation of our lives (always ready to go to the underground antimissile shelters, to train in Las Milicias de Tropas Territoriales, mtt, to recite the daily slogans by heart instead), which seemed to me, after having real war experiences, more a representation than an actual requirement. We were saying what was expected and not what we thought; we would do things not out of belief but out of duty. Reality could become very confusing. I was shocked by the presence of lying in everyday life as a consequence of those representational mandates.

One thing that defined us during those years was being closer to the ussr and the Eastern European countries than to our more natural neighbours, which made Cubans see themselves as more international people. For us Angola was not a country in Africa but the place where someone you knew died ‘for another country’s benefit’. The world became really small and touchable. Things were not evident but ideological, they were not really tangible but they were present. Of course the us was this construction that took the blame for everything, no matter what it was. We lived in constant anticipation of an invasion that never happened. The government gave permission to be disrespectful and even offensive in terms of different political views (Fidel cursed us presidents, called them names in public speeches for instance).

Because the term ‘Cold War’ was so overused, the Cold War didn’t seem real, just a justification for government malpractice and caprice. Remember, this was the 1980s, long after the missile crisis and closer to the Glasnost era. So in a way my generation lived something more like the deception of a failed project and the impotence of attempts to present a new model rather than the traditional Cold War-era fear. I became politically aware when I started asking questions about the incoherence of what was said and what was done to our reality. above Immigrant Movement International, 2011, performance, New York. Photo: Sam Horine. Courtesy Creative Time, New York facing page Museum of Arte Útil, 2013 (installation view, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, 2013). Photo: Peter Cox. Courtesy the artist and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

December 2015

I became political to others when I didn’t want to lie in a world that was full of double standards. ar Why did you choose to go to art school? tb I wrote short stories and drew all the time inside those walls at the embassy; when we arrived to Cuba, my mom thought art would be a good transitional element for me in this new reality. But when I became serious about being an artist, that led to a big fight with my parents, who wanted me to be a scientist (their argument: good grades were going to be thrown in the garbage). But in art I found a way to solve things, it was a way to think, a way to recuperate freedom, a way to be honest. ar Can you describe your earliest performance works? Do you indeed consider yourself a ‘performance artist’? tb When I was at the elementary art school (this would be from twelve to fifteen years old), we had a class with a great Cuban artist called Juan Francisco Elso Padilla that was truly multidisciplinary and form-free. For exercises we were challenged to work outside of the classroom and with ‘nonartistic’ resources such as tapestry or collective actions: we even went to rural areas to do ephemeral sculptures and some performances (but it was called art). Then when I was at middle art school (sixteen to eighteen) I was part of a group of artists and actors that were doing performative presentations in public spaces such as urban ruins or parking lots (but that was called theatre). Then, during the 1980s, a group of Cuban artists started doing actions and performances in Cuba as a way to challenge the status quo. I identified what performance was at that point, and it was clear that it was what I wanted to do. Then I went into doing the piece Tribute to Ana Mendieta, which is my first performance work. The project lasted just over ten years [1985–96]. I called myself a performance artist at the beginning because it was a quick way to identify what I was doing to other people and to distance my work from more mainstream

ArtReview

December 2015

proposals at the time. I even decided to come to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago because they had a practice-based performance department. But once I started studying the history of this practice (from a us perspective; back then Latin American performance was not on the reading lists) I discovered everything that separated what I was looking for in my work from most such performative traditions – mostly the vision of my work as a gesture. After I left the school and after a heavy [Michel] Foucault induction, I called what I was doing Arte de Conducta, to make sure that any analysis would start with the social and political implications of the work. Today, after working on the Arte Útil [useful art – in Bruguera’s words, one that seeks ‘to imagine, create, develop and implement something that, produced in artistic practice, offers the people a clearly beneficial result’] concept, I see myself as an initiator (rather than a performer or even an artist). By that I mean that what I’m doing is setting up the conditions for things to happen, where the audience has as much responsibility as I do for where the work goes. It is a way to acknowledge that with social and political public work we do not own all the work and that the ways by which these works can be sustained are by the intervention, care and enthusiasm of others. ar Of course the most famous of these ‘initiations’ or ‘behavioural’ works was your attempt to place an open microphone in Revolution Square in Havana this past December. It led to your detention by the authorities. The title of that series of works, Tatlin’s Whisper, suggests the failure of the revolution, of a tower that was never built. You previously staged this work [Tatlin’s Whisper #6 (Havana Version)] in 2009, offering attendees the chance to ask for ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, an act that the government denounced as ‘shameful opportunism’ that ‘offends Cuban artists and foreigners who came to offer their work and solidarity’ at the time of the Havana Biennale. With the recent iteration, did you expect to get arrested and was that the ultimate intention of the piece?

tb Indeed the title of that series (which also includes a work in which mounted police use crowd-control techniques on the audience in a museum or a dark space where people are pushing you around) relates to the state of utopia in an atmosphere of brutal pragmatism and short-term efficiency anxiety. But it’s important to say that this series was born before the existence of the upsurge of alternative social movements like Indignados, Tahrir Square and Occupy Wall Street. All the

iterations of Tatlin’s Whisper are a call to take power into your hands (for example speaking freely when you can’t in your everyday political above Documentation of an Ana Mendieta performance, from Tania Bruguera’s Tribute to Ana Mendieta, conception year: 1985; implementation years: 1986–96. Medium: Recreation of works. Materials: Ana Mendieta’s artworks and unrealised projects, lectures, exhibitions, interviews, texts.Photo: Gonzalo Vidal Alvarado. Courtesy Studio Bruguera previous spread Museum of Arte Útil, (installation view, Van Abbemuseum, 2013). Photo: Peter Cox. Courtesy the artist and Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven

ArtReview

life, saying no to the police), to provide a process by which to do what I have called transforming audiences into active citizens. This is proposed and put into practice via two conditions I use in all of the pieces: it is always happening inside a cultural/art institution (looking as if it was an unauthorised moment), and it takes its visual references from events covered by the press. The sense of being at something that is ‘unauthorised’ or that goes beyond permissible lines is what creates the discomfort and challenge to the audience; it is the moment when the learned behaviour struggles with the desire provided by the freedom and permissibility of the moment. The link with the news is what provides the extrañamiento (alienation), because such information is only ethically connected to you when you have not experienced it in the flesh; by having it happen right there, your response is needed, you can’t change the tv channel or turn the page because it is actually happening to you. There is no ‘correct’ answer in my work, there is no ‘envisioned’ outcome, the piece is a test and a testimony to the way in which things are, politically and socially, at a specific moment, and this information is provided by people, not by institutions or governments. The difference with the structure of #YoTambienExijo (#yte) [which is the name of the 2014 restaging of the work] is that we did not use a news event as a mnemonic device but rather a previous artwork and its political consequences, which were in people’s memory (Tatlin Whisper #6, Havana Version – after which, as I learned in 2013, I was forbidden to show at any Cuban art institution). We proposed to go one step further by trying to do it in a place where it could go beyond the symbolic: in a public space with its own history of power and speech acts. The proposal was to make the gesture as vulnerable as possible, to remove any protective layers (especially the ones provided by the contract between art and its institutions). I have to say that this piece is dedicated to / inspired by two people: the first one is Claudia Cadelo, a blogger in Cuba who was in the audience during the presentation of Tatlin’s Whisper #6, Havana Version. At the time she

said, ‘I hope one day freedom of speech doesn’t have to be a performance.’ With that comment, Cadelo actually signalled the limits of the work as it was unveiling and brought the challenge posed by art as being that of a mere representation and escape valve rather than… the actual thing. It brought to light the frustration of art as a temporary space for freedom, and the limits of bringing an exercise into a situation where reality had indeed to be changed. The second inspiration was Please Love Austria – First Austrian Coalition Week [2000], by Christoph Schlingensief. It is one of my favourite artworks – I think it is obvious why.

to others about what at least the core values of the work are, and you need to defend them. Because it is the only clear element of the work while people are figuring out the form you are using. There are many people that think that because I have proposed things like Arte Útil and what I call ‘political-timing-specific art’ I’m renouncing art; it is actually the contrary, it is claiming the right that art has to be redefined as an active part of other things, it is the rights artists have to be more than producers. Many people asked me if I knew (and accused me of knowing) that I was going to be arrested. Well, I did not know that when

ar It was also called Foreigners Out! For that work, which took place at a time when the rightwing fpö had won enough seats to be invited into a new coalition government, Schlingensief set up a realityshow-type event within a container and asked viewers to phone in daily to vote out (or deport) two of the 12 ‘asylum seekers’ held within. Schlingensief basically took politicians’ words and the notion of their ‘popular’ mandate to their extreme conclusions. Who is the intended audience for your work? tb #yte’s main intended audience was people who are not natural museumgoers. Regarding the institutional response to the 2009 presentation of the piece, their arguments (and I tried to work with them) were so simplistic and basic that there was no way I could accept them: they all proposed that I reject a core belief of my work (audiences as coauthors) by saying that I regretted the participation of the audience. Cuba is the political-pr case-study par excellence, and part of that is to present things as an offence to the good people (as you said when you quoted the government response: that ‘offends Cuban artists and foreigners who came to offer their work and solidarity’) and always in traditional moral terms that pretend to be protecting a good society in construction, one that is vulnerable to attacks manifested as voicing a different opinion, a threat to unity and of course a challenge to the ‘only’ valid opinion. When you are an artist dealing with the limits of art and life, you need to be very clear

I proposed the piece. So far, in Cuba, artists have been treated as a special class with a lot of privileges, and I have used those to push political boundaries. But for this work I was treated not as an artist but as a dissident: that was clear the day Rubén del Valle, the president of the Arts Council, literally told me that he was going to wash his hands and have nothing more to do with me and my project (basically saying that from that moment on I was going to be transferred to the attention of the Ministry of Interior). They even started a fierce campaign to say that I was not an artist any more as a way of justifying the treatment they gave me. But even when Tatlin’s Whisper #5, 2008, performance, Tate Modern, London, 2008 © the artist. Courtesy Tate London

December 2015

I knew that all such avenues were closed (once I tried to negotiate with the Arts Council during two four-hour meetings and with the police for the street permits) and it was clear that imprisonment was a potential outcome, I went ahead anyway. I realised that the intention and the meaning of the piece changed from showing the vision of Cuba desired by the general Cuban population – it was no longer about how people could participate in the decisions about the future of their country, about the right to express themselves and to have access to public spaces as a citizen – and had become a device by which to take the masks of everyone’s double standards away, at least for a while. It became a piece that uncovered the mechanism the state uses and that most people are not seeing or do not want to see. It became a piece about talking directly to the power structure, and I have to tell you, as a political artist, what could be better than to look the authorities in the eyes and say, ‘I do not fear you, now can we talk’? I think this piece is the best case-study for my ideas about Arte de Conducta (Behaviour/ Conduct art), politicaltiming-specific art and the ‘aest-ethics’ concept (a term I use to talk about the ethics as the aesthetics in political and socially engaged work). I wish one day it could be an example of Arte Útil. I tried. I proposed to the state police that I would work with them in the creation of a Law for Freedom of Expression / manifestation and against political hate. They were very adamant to make me a ‘collaborator’, and I said that would be the only thing I would do as a collaboration. They just played with me, saying that they would check with their superiors and even tried to calm me by making promises, but they were just promises; they never became real proposals. I have to say that I’m still open to working with the government if it is to create this legislation against political hate, because it would make the piece an Arte Útil case. For me it is very important that art goes beyond ‘showing’ things. Instead we need to propose change and implement it through art. ar

Technology, feedback and exile in art and politics in Santiago de Chile by Stefanie Hessler

The year is 1970. Juan Downey, a Chilean artist who had relocated to sociopolitical change, or as Downey puts it in his text ‘Architecture, the us five years earlier, buys his first video camera. Between 1973 and Video, Telepathy. A Communications Utopia’ from 1977: ‘Even class 1977, prompted by the coup d’état in his home country, Downey will struggle is present in concepts such as Feedback… Self-comparison… embark on various trips through the American continent to make should be work open to all members of society… Cybernetics is a videowork. In 1976, he will live for eight months among the Yanomami call for social change… I am calling for an Information Revolution.’ indigenous people in the Venezuelan Amazon. During this time, Looking back from today we know how the tale continues. Cybersyn he shoots footage for The Laughing Alligator (1979), a video merging will never be fully functional, and on 11 September 1973, Augusto anthropology and autobiography in an attempt to, as the writer Coco Pinochet’s military junta stages its coup d’état, backed by the cia and Fusco put it, ‘recuperate his culture’. Scenes from the rainforest are Richard Nixon’s policy of economic warfare, the us fretting about the merged with shots from New York. A voiceover spoken by Downey first democratically elected Marxist government in Latin America; or, critiques the supposedly objective documentary genre and ‘fly on perhaps more precisely, about their own investments in the country. the wall’ role commonly assigned to the ethnographer. In one scene, The political and institutional crisis that follows largely paralyses the video follows a Yanomami on a hunting expedition through the the artistic scene in Chile. Artists who have not emigrated earlier like forest. The man disappears into the woods and suddenly reemerges Downey can barely work under the repressive circumstances – singer pointing his rifle at the cameraman – and hence also at us viewers. and activist Víctor Jara is arrested, tortured and shot dead shortly after Downey’s voiceover explains how the coup.During the late 1970s, when Much art of the time is marked by he kept filming through his camera, the worst of the repression has ended, discontinuities and a focus on the body the ‘Escena de Avanzada’ (‘Advanced which seemed to take on the symbolic function of a weapon, until tension Scene’) emerges producing perforas a site onto which the effects of lessened, arms were lowered and the mance, body art and happenings. Much the political situation are inscribed journey continued. Video as a medium art of the time is marked by discontinuienables instant feedback and reflexivity, projecting Downey’s posi- ties, fragments and a focus on the body as a site onto which the effects tion – that of the artist, ethnographer and individual in search for his of the political situation are inscribed. The Avanzada includes artists own roots – back into the work. like Alfredo Jaar, Carlos Leppe, Catalina Parra and Lotty Rosenfeld. As if foreseeing today’s Internet, Downey develops his concept of The latter’s action Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A mile of crosses ‘invisible architecture’, an all-encompassing cybernetic web of rela- on the pavement) (1979), in which she places white tape orthogotions that he intends to transgress all of society, including material nally over road marking lines to subvert symbolically the organboundaries, in, as the artist wrote in 1973, ‘an attitude of total commu- ised flux of bodies, was shown in the Chilean pavilion of this year’s nication within which ultra-developed minds will be telepathically Venice Biennale, alongside Paz Errázriz’s photographs from the time cellular to an electromagnetic whole’. Simultaneously, during the depicting transvestites and other subcultures. Rosenfeld also forms early 1970s, the Socialist government in Downey’s home country part of the Colectivo de Acciones de Arte (cada) together with sociinvites British cyberneticist Stafford Beer to Santiago to shape ologist Fernando Balcells, artist Juan Castillo, writer Diamela Eltit what then-president Salvador Allende called ‘the Chilean road to and poet Raúl Zurita. The group develops the slogan ‘no+’ (no more), socialism’. Within less than two years, Beer implements what comes which is soon tagged on walls all over the country by artists. The to be known as Project Cybersyn. The decision support system is an public add their demands to the parole, for instance ‘no+ miedo’ (no early algorithmic network approach to organisation and commu- more fear). no+ becomes a symbol for resistance leading up to the nication. It collects and links information with the goal of aiding referendum in 1988 that heralds the end of Pinochet’s time in power. management of the country by modelling and prototyping different Just like Downey describes social struggle as implicated in cybernetic future scenarios. And it is during these years that Chilean biologists feedback loops, no+ evinces that art does not operate in a vacuum, but Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela coin the term ‘autopoiesis’ can be a tool for fostering socio-political transformations. And while to similarly describe cells as self-generating feedback systems. cada’s actions are influenced by the situation of the time, they also At the time, technology is expected to be at the service of radical leave their imprint on the changes to come.

ArtReview

Juan Downey, The Laughing Alligator (still), 1979, film, 27 min. Courtesy Juan Downey Estate, New York

December 2015

Eugenio Dittborn, Weakness Made it Happen (Airmail Painting Nº -01), 1983. Courtesy moma, New York / Scala, Florence

ArtReview

Lotty Rosenfeld, Una milla de cruces sobre el pavimento (A mile of crosses on the pavement), 1979. Photo: R. Goldschmied. Courtesy the artist

December 2015

Iván Navarro, Post, 2013, neon light, one-way mirror, mirror, energy, 183 × 61 × 61 cm. Courtesy Baró Galeria, São Paulo

ArtReview

Instead of following the example of many of his peers and leaving galleries. Among them are Galeria Metropolitana, located in a the country himself, the pioneer of mail art Eugenio Dittborn sends southern part of Santiago, and Galeria Chilena (gch), founded by his letters abroad. In an interview from 2010 printed in the catalogue artists Diego Fernández, José Luis Villablanca and Felipe Mujica of the exhibition Juan Downey: The Invisible Architect, held at the Bronx in 1997. For almost a decade, gch organises nomadic talks, parties Museum and mit’s List Visual Arts Center, Dittborn explains retro- and exhibitions in changing locations, for instance a subway station spectively: ‘I am outside without being exiled, and I am inside without under the military academy. When it stops in 2005, architect Paul being confined and isolated.’ With his airmail paintings, he forms part Birke opens Die Ecke, a gallery dedicated to artists born towards of a network of artists including figures like Brazilian Paulo Bruscky the end of the dictatorship. Yet, the problem of a diminished scene, and East German Robert Rehfeldt who exchange ideas in the form of resulting from widespread emigration during the dictatorship, will texts, drawings and photographs by post. Slipping their enveloped not ameliorate for some time as Chilean artists continue to move messages back into the system gives them the freedom to infiltrate it abroad. Mujica leaves for New York in 2000, yet his fascination with with their thoughts, speak their minds and escape from islation, all Latin American modernism and the fragility of its ideals continues to permeate his work. His large-scale fabric panels recall the visual while operating under the radar of control. A similar strategy of elusion is used by the Museo de la Solidaridad, codes of geometric abstraction and function as walls that guide the founded by Allende, based on donations viewers’ actions as well as their relations The problem of a diminished scene in support of his social and political to one another. Also based in New York, project. Shortly after the coup, the colIván Navarro makes work more expliwill not ameliorate for some time as lection is taken abroad under the name Chilean artists continue to move abroad citly processing his country’s history. ‘Museum of Resistance’, and according He often uses neon, fluorescent and to the museum’s website comprises 2,650 works given in support by incandescent light in reference to electricity being cut off by the junta artists like Frank Stella, Yoko Ono and Lygia Clark before moving into government in the evenings to enforce curfews.The feedback loops its new home in Santiago in 1991. Both the museum’s and Dittborn’s from the past remain present. The 2006 and 2011–13 student protests strategies show the importance of international solidarity during (the former, also known as the Penguins’ Revolution, aimed at hightimes of political turmoil, but also the crucial role of the network. school reform; the latter, known as the Chilean Winter, demanded While the physical body is more easily controlled and scrutinised, the further structural changes in the country’s education systems) were individual dissolved into information and collective artistic action is directed against the profit-oriented organisation of higher education rendered less tangible, and the exiled museum composed of donated – a result of the economic policy of the Pinochet era – and the high level works is all the more visible. The networks of relations behind both of inequality in the country. The information revolution that Downey strategies point to the technological amplification of the ubiquitous imagined and Cybersyn attempted to implement turned against its creators, to become a neoliberal technocracy leaving its traces in the web we experience today, and art produced in, through and about it. In the decade after Chile’s return to democracy, a new generation present, and a complex legacy for artists to continue negotiating. And of artists is in search of an identity that differentiates itself from what so they keep dissecting historical and current events, both affected by some perceive as the heroic mythical vision of their teachers, many and feeding back into the chains of influence forming that system we of whom were part of the Avanzada. New independent initiatives call society. With more artists present in the Chilean scene today, the are founded as alternatives to official institutions and commercial deflections will be interesting. ar

Colectivo de Acciones de Arte, no+ (Rio Mapocho), 1983. Photo: J. Brantmayer. Courtesy Lotty Rosenfeld

December 2015

The Edge of Elsewhere Interview by Chris Sharp

Melanie Smith was born in England, moved to Mexico City in 1989 and has lived and worked there ever since. During that time, the city has been an important source of inspiration for her artwork, which often chases the legacies of Modernism and Postmodernism in Latin America and the themes of spectacle, entropy, destruction and reconstruction. In 2011 she represented Mexico at the Venice Biennale 82

ArtReview

above and facing page Fordlandia, 2014, full hd video, 29 min 42 sec

December 2015

chris sharp So perhaps the best place to start is at the beginning (or a kind of beginning). When did you move to Mexico City? And why?

in the baroque your work did become much more about the urban. Can you talk a little about how that happened?

melanie smith I moved here in 1989, after leaving Reading University. At the time I didn’t think much of why I was coming, but when I look back on it, it was the end of the Thatcher era, with not many prospects for becoming an artist in the uk at that moment, and I just wanted to carry on working, so Mexico seemed like a good idea. There was a group of ex-art students wanting to come here, with the idea of doing a selfinitiated residency for six months, so I sort of tagged along, not knowing much about Mexico.

ms Just by living in the city: not knowing how to understand where I lived. All these ways in which the city grabs you, the frustrating slowness of getting stuff done, the overload on your senses all the time, and how the body reacts to that. It had something to do with my inability to see any coherence. Now I realise it was a constant tussle with excess, consumption, artifice and

cs And yet it’s indivisible from your specific experience – by which I mean, your experience of being a foreigner (an Englishwoman) in Mexico City at a particular point in time. The fact of being a foreigner from a colonial nation comes with a certain amount of postcolonial baggage and even tension, which I think you negotiate more directly in your recent video Fordlandia [2014] – which we had the great honour to show at Lulu (the gallery in Mexico City I cofounded) this last August, and which is a kind of antivoyage to Henry Ford’s epic failure of a manufactured, rubberproducing city in the Brazilian Amazon. I am wondering to what extent these tensions, if at all, might have played a role in the video Xilitla: Dismantled 1 [2010], which you showed at the Mexican Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2011, your famously refracted meditation on Edward James’s concrete menagerie of surreal architecture located in Xilitla, Mexico.

cs Mexico City and the art scene there were very different back then – in fact, as I understand it, there wasn’t much of a scene at all. It was only four years after the 1985 earthquake. So in a way you landed in a kind of tabula rasa (even though there is no such thing as a tabula rasa). What kind of work were you making before you came? Did Mexico City prompt a (big) change in your practice? ms I was really influenced by abstraction and particularly Minimalism in art school, with a lot of emphasis on surface. This changed 180 degrees when I arrived in Mexico, which was much more influenced by the baroque and was a place where Minimalism didn’t seem to belong. When I first arrived here my work was all about painting and sculpture. But the city made my practice take on a different meaning, and it changed my whole relationship to abstraction. The surface was not enough. I had to dig deeper, but I felt ill at ease in the urban environment. Maybe that’s why all this work with plastic happened – a kind of bodily rejection of the artificial world. Most of the time we would be showing in each other’s studios or alternative spaces that had no relationship to the market, but that was good, because it gave us a chance to just do stuff without external pressures; stuff that didn’t necessarily work, but that you got out of your system. cs The issue of the baroque is quite interesting, especially vis-à-vis Minimalism. What a monumental shift, to go from thinking about Minimalism to the Latin American baroque, in both contour and time (but then maybe not entirely)! Despite your interest

scale in the city and our sense of orientation. Everything spins around on itself. I have always had a problem with not being able to see the horizon in the city, and the loss of horizon in the film causes groundlessness. The spiral of the helicopter resembles Smithson’s Spiral Jetty [1970], making the urban sprawl appear like geological crystalline structures. To me the piece is like a document from the past and a bleak sign of the future; there are no longer any vanishing points, but multiple perspectives that give rise to a new kind of visuality (again before the Internet).

how to possess one body and many bodies – and all pretty much before the baroque spatiality of the Internet! cs So I guess the film Spiral City [2002], in which you, or the camera, assume an outwardly spiralling bird’s-eye view over Mexico City, could be seen as an (inevitably failed) attempt at imposing some kind of coherence upon it and even mastering it, to a certain degree. Can you say a little about this haunting and, as far as I’m concerned, still totally contemporary work? ms It is haunting, I think. The video was about seeing the city as a micro/macrocosm. So, it is about the impossibility of understanding

ArtReview

ms As an artist I’m trying to break down old binaries of being from here or there, or abstraction and representation, or Latin America and the West, etc. So this baggage, as you call it (which we all have somehow), well, I try to break it down by shaping a hybrid gaze, which is in these videos that you mention. Both are made of layers of meaning, history, multiple narratives and interpretation of these specific sites, and yet at the same time I am taking them out of their geographical context, by not describing them or where they exist in the world. The viewer has to figure that out. In that sense both Xilitla and Fordlandia are a sort of antijourney (thinking here of colonisation and the nineteenth-century travellers who ‘discovered’ exotic places). The films only really exist in their own dreamlike state of

the present; you can’t really work them out as such, but they do have a certain latent pulse. I think this need of mine to shift the compass in these far-off locations is somehow related to the condition of not belonging, but is that the same as being a foreigner? cs You’re totally right about the baggage. It’s like in Álvaro Uribe’s Morir más de una vez [2011], when he writes (I paraphrase from memory): ‘You never go to Paris for the first time.’ Otherwise, the fragment and the detail seem to dominate your work, both in the videos and the paintings and photocollages. There is an almost lyrical beauty to the depiction of these details. Some people might see a contradiction here. While there is, if not a self-aware rejection, the cultivation of a hybrid gaze regarding the outsider and the colonial, postromantic ‘elsewhere’, the unapologetic beauty of your work is nevertheless liable to lead the viewer to fantasy. ms I think the question is what and where that elsewhere is. Of course, my work comes from a dread of how we are forced to lead our daily lives, and a certain annoyance with artworks that I felt in the past have tried to somehow resolve political and social issues while leaving very little

margin for the viewer. My work is unapologetic in that sense; it doesn’t set out accountable answers, and yet it is trying to deal with this other ‘elsewhere’ (the kind of outside / on the edges of / overflow) of political and social issues while leaving very little margin. So somehow it always comes back to abstraction; the work is abstracted from context, or perhaps it’s better to say that it makes abstracted models of temporal experience (in the case of the videos), and in the case of the paintings there is an even greater slowing down. I’m always aware of painting’s fixed conditions of display, and I question that in response to the moving image. I think that is where the detail comes in: the detail is always out of context and always part of a bigger whole that might have to be pieced together in a new way, but the reference might be unknown. Scale, displacement and fragment are important in that sense. Within all that I want to disorder the world’s restrictions, away from the rationalisation of everyday life.

Fantasy – maybe; turning against a false certainty of progress – for sure. cs You have spoken about your work’s relationship with the urban and the extra-urban, as if it were moving away from one and towards the other. Perhaps in concluding you could say a few words about how that has happened? ms I’m not sure it moves from one to another – the two are in a constant ebb and flow. My work has become more about the loss of nature, and how nineteenth- and twentieth-century industrialisation and colonisation suppressed animal and natural forces as a way of being in the world. This is clear I think in Fordlandia, where I make equivalences between man, machine and animal through the nonhierarchical mode of filming and montage. There’s a kind of fold or inversion, where the ‘presentness’ of nature (instinct, twitching movement, pulse) produces an ontological dislocation of the timing of modernity (industrialisation, man, progress). That fold is where the last years of my work has focused, in that irrational, fuzzy and unclear space where we might think about our subjectivity beyond mere economic returns. ar

above Fordlandia vi, 2014, acrylic enamel on acrylic, 150 × 180 cm facing page Spiral City (video stills), 2002 all images Courtesy the artist and Galeria Nara Roesler, São Paulo

December 2015

The Fall of the House of Daros How the closure of the Rio base of one of the premier collections of and meeting places for Latin American contemporary art provides an opportunity to rethink what ‘Latin America’ means by Lucas Ospina

Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Fabio Caffé. Courtesy Casa Daros, Rio de Janiero

December 2015

Last March, Rio de Janeiro’s Casa Daros presented an exhibition titled the palace’s 150 servants. One of these, perhaps the most visible among Made in Brasil. This palace, with its 500 windows, 12,000sqm of space, a them, the curator Hans Michael Herzog, who had served the busicourtyard and imperial palms, hosted part of the Daros Latinamerica ness almost since its beginning, declared: ‘I don’t know why it won’t Collection, the vast holdings of the latest in Latin American art owned continue. But it didn’t surprise me. Since July 2014, when they let me by Swiss collector Ruth Schmidheiny. To many, Casa Daros seemed a go, it was clear that Casa Daros could not carry on without a curator.’ dream come true, a meeting point for all art made in Latin America, Daros was founded in Switzerland in 1995 by Stephan Schmidheiny, a region where more is known about art made thousands of kilome- a man who during the last two decades has gone from wearing the suit tres away, in the us and Europe, than in a neighbouring city, in the of a global asbestos magnate to dressing in the robes of philanthropy. next country over, in all these other nations that share a language but It was a place to stockpile his art collection, and only later, thanks to where, apart from successful Latin pop tunes and a telenovela here or business interests in postcolonial territories, did he launch the Daros there, little information manages to cross borders. Casa Daros seemed Latinamerica brand, in 2000, together with Ruth, his then-wife. With a divorce in the middle, she now holds to want to fix this. In the belly button of Latin America, with the resources The rhetorical questions we’d accustomed 70 percent of the stock (the owner of to translate everything into Spanish ourselves to as a means for interpreting art the remaining 30 percent is a mystery). and Portuguese, it made a bold wager, ‘It’s the perfect spot for a casino,’ in light of the problem of ‘Latin America’ noted a Rio Times commentator, referpledging to become a laboratory for analysing, hands-on, the similarities could give way to other lines of questioning ring to a possible new use for the Casa Daros land. As it happens, this and differences between nations in outlandish comment turns out to be perfectly appropriate for a site this chain of countries. Casa Daros was also the setting for a roundtable on the question: in the sprawling city’s rapidly gentrifying Botafogo area that has gone ‘Is there such a thing as Brazilian art?’ Whether or not Brazilian art from disused orphanage to temporary housing for more than 1,200 exists, what is certain is that several days later this existential ques- works of Daros Latinamerican art to prized accommodation for a new tion extended to the entire ‘castle of cards’ of ‘Latin American art’, educational enterprise. The fate of Casa Daros seems a story worthy when it became known that its queen, Schmidheiny, had sent a letter of a narrator who, like Edgar Allan Poe, could bring it all together in to some of the 120 or so artists in the collection, announcing that Casa an allegory of power and decline, delusion and duality. ‘I feel that the Daros – just two years after opening (following six years of remodel- period will sooner or later arrive when I must abandon life and reason ling at a cost of $25 million), with the scent of perfume from inaugural together, in some struggle with the grim phantasm, fear,’ writes celebrations featuring the art elite of five continents still in the air – Poe in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (1839). It’s a story that could be would cease to exist. The news came as a surprise to the artists and to adapted to a local kind of genre: Tropical Gothic.

Antonio Dias, A Ilustração da Arte/Economia/Modelo, 1975 (installation view, Made In Brasil, Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro, 2015). Courtesy Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro

ArtReview

The fall of the House of Daros is a turning point, and a good moment for thinking about the boom we’ve seen in Latin American art. Fear is in the air, given the economic uncertainty the year ahead presents. It’s not only Casa Daros that’s faltering; the Latin American economy, buoyant for many years and with a middle class that has doubled in size in the past decade, is now confronting doubts about its ability to maintain this rhythm of life, the rise and fall in income levels. How many will be prepared to give up the privileges they’ve acquired? Will they seek to extend these benefits in a democratic way to other, needier social groups, or will they close ranks around increasingly conservative political projects in order to preserve their perks? In the fairytale version, each collapse of a Casa Daros is followed by 20 independent spaces rising up to create support networks where state and private institutions have failed. But conversely, a dystopian intellect might point out that a conservative spirit courses through Latin America and that in 2015 its effects on art are already evident: the censorship of Hermann Nitsch at the Museo Jumex, the erasure of several murals for Peru’s Art Lima by a local mayor and the fights between powerful and powerless gallery players at the ArtBo art fair in Bogotá are stories worth recounting. Equally, the rhetorical questions we’d accustomed ourselves to as a means for interpreting art in light of the problem of ‘Latin America’ could give way to other lines of questioning. At the World Cup of national identities, first we were political muralists, and later fantasy surrealists. Now, in the clinical judgement of the most recent curatorial clichés, we are said to have suffered from incomplete modernity, validators of the modern canon, cannibals, Tropicalistas, natural-resource explorers, poetic conceptualists, subjects torn between the aesthetic and the political in the ups and downs of autocratic regimens. And of

course we will continue to be these things: languages are global, themes are local and there will always be a local colour that, as in any region, for purposes of exoticism and self-exoticism, we can provide. But perhaps we can begin this new period of shakeup with new questions. The Argentinian film director Lucrecia Martel has mentioned in various interviews a series of anxieties that are always present in her features (La Ciénaga / The Swamp, 2001; La Niña Santa / The Holy Girl, 2004; La Mujer sin Cabeza / The Headless Woman, 2008). Martel’s concerns are equally relevant to art, especially now that elitism is an inherent condition of perception and its subsequent conversion into ‘taste’. ‘Cinema suffers from an illness,’ says Martel. ‘It rests in the hands of just one social class. For a long time, and all around the world, it has been in the hands of the upper middle class… And this has resulted in a fairly evident homogeneity. We have very good sentiments and great sensibility. This mix leads us to a preoccupation with social conflicts that we don’t really know, as though they were objects that were easy to get close to… There is a shortage of self-criticism and an abundance of reiterations of representation of the social classes, especially the working class, from a very demented place, from guilt or a paying off. And later, when we represent our own class, we turn, with much indulgence, to ‘the artist’, as if this act will save people from the evil intentions of their fellow humans.’ Following the Fall of the House of Daros, we could take up these questions and use these ‘evil intentions’ to make art rather than convert malice into method, into gasoline for a powerful system of self-perpetuation and self-delusion that only reveals the cunning with which we hide from our fears. ar Translated from the Spanish by David Terrien

La Ciénaga (still), 2001, dir. Lucrecia Martel, 103 min

December 2015

JR Interview by Christopher Mooney

“I’m not trying to work illegally, but sometimes that’s the only option” 90

ArtReview

Born on the outskirts of Paris, jr started out as a teenage graffiti tagger using the moniker Face 3. After transitioning to photography he began exhibiting his photographs by pasting them on the walls of Paris and its train system. His first large-scale street photopasting project, Portrait of a Generation, began in 2004, and since then he has taken his art worldwide, from Rio de Janeiro to Sierra Leone, often responding to social conflicts or disasters. His first solo museum exhibition took place at the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, in 2013, and he has exhibited everywhere from Tate Modern to the Venice Biennale, won a ted prize and produced special issues of the French newspaper Libération and The NewYork Times Magazine and films, among the most recent of which is Les Bosquets (2015). artreview How did Portrait of a Generation start? jr I’ve worked in a ton of neighbourhoods, but nowhere longer than in Clichy-Montfermeil. It’s where I pasted my first enlarged photo, the one of Ladj Ly holding his video camera like a weapon. I did it without authorisation, and the city sued me. I left France for a year because I didn’t want to pay the fine. I was nineteen or so. A year later, in 2005, the riots exploded, at exactly that same street corner where the two kids that hid in the substation died and the first car was torched, right in front of that photo – the epicentre of the largest riot in France since the French Revolution. And all over the media, my

photos were in the background. That’s when my work really started. People asked me to take photos there for press agencies. What I was doing was ‘vandalism’, that’s what it was called, not ‘street art’. But I said, ‘No, I want to create images where I control where they’re going and how they impact on people. So I want to continue what I was doing in that neighbourhood a year ago, but now I want to get closer to the people there.’ I think that’s the real beginning for me.

The last time someone tried to make a film, with John Travolta, in 2008, they burned all the cars. So we had to go door-to-door to explain it to everybody. It was a huge undertaking ar And how has it evolved? jr After the riots, the state decided it had to do something radical and rebuild everything, and to do so they had to first destroy everything. So two years ago I pasted those same faces inside buildings, and we filmed their demolition, which revealed the portraits – all of this without above Morro da Providencia favela, Rio de Janeiro, 2008 facing page 28 Millimetres, Portrait of a Generation, b11, Destruction #5, Montfermeil, France, 2013, colour photograph, matt Plexiglas, aluminium, wood, 179 × 134 cm

December 2015

authorisation. Which is interesting, because two years ago my work was pretty well recognised in France, but I still couldn’t get authorisation. ar Do you often work without authorisation? jr The way I explain it is, I’m not trying to work illegally, but sometimes that’s the only option there is to make sure the work makes sense for the people involved. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to get arrested for it afterwards, it just means that that’s the way it has to happen, in that grey zone. ar You brought the ballet in for the film without authorisation? jr That was possible because the people in that neighbourhood knew the work I’d done for all those years, so they let me bring 100 dancers into the streets where the riot happened, in one of the tensest neighbourhoods there is, and make a film. A lot of the film is shot at night, so we had to ask people to keep their lights on, and we put on loud music outside and built a stage the size of the opera in the middle of their neighbourhood. The city told us – it was the city of Clichy this time, because Les Bosquets had been destroyed – the last time someone tried to make a film, with John Travolta, in 2008, they burned all the cars. ‘We’ll give you whatever authorisation you want, but it won’t matter, you have to talk to the community there.’ So we had to go door-to-door to explain it to everybody, to make sure they understood. It was a huge undertaking, weeks and weeks of planning.

ar Did you have to convince them to do it? Or were they open to it? jr There was a lot of convincing, a lot of questioning. They trusted the idea of it as art much more than if it were a feature movie. But they never imagined we would bring the best dancers from the Paris Opera and New York City Ballet. I was afraid that a ballerina in a tutu walking the street there might be problematic, depending on the different religions and stuff that are in that neighbourhood. But there was no problem. A lot of the people had never seen a ballet; it was like two worlds meeting, two completely opposite universes. I got as much enjoyment from the process as from the final result. ar Is the film the final work in the project? jr Each time I think it’s finished, it becomes the beginning of something else. It’s confusing, knowing when a project is finished, because it seems to be always a moment where it would make even more sense than before. The funny thing is, last year the French president wanted to know more about this project. I showed him the whole ten years. The film was not done yet, I’d just shot everything but it was not edited yet, so I just went through the rushes with him on the computer and I invited a few people from that neighbourhood to be there. We’ve talked about process and I said, ‘Look, all I’m showing here we’ve done without authorisation, but it doesn’t mean that I’m not proud to show it to you or that I’m reproaching the government or anything, because I think it actually made sense to be done that way for the people there. They’re the creators, they decide how it happens, and in that process everyone felt they were part of it.’ And now you know, they’re building a ‘Villa Médicis’ annex there – an artist residence centre right in Les Bosquets. I guess that’s one of the reasons why he wanted to understand the project – because they don’t know how to talk to and involve the community. So we had a really interesting conversation on how things have to happen organically. Nothing can beat that, because a bureaucratic approach, even with good intentions, is difficult in places and communities where there’s always been a lack of attention. That’s the main statement in the film: ‘All we needed was attention; we wanted to exist.’ That sums up the film for me, and every place I’ve ever worked. Not only in poor places, everywhere. Everyone wants attention, dignity, and no matter where I go, I always find that same concern, but it maybe resonates more in people’s hearts and heads when it comes from a neighbourhood that we see a lot in the media, not always for good reasons. So, yes, that exchange was really interesting.

ar Did he ask you to participate in the Villa Médicis? jr His office asked if I would get involved. We’re talking right now. I told him they should contact Ladj Ly. ar Is what you do a form of activism, or is it entirely artistic? jr It’s an entirely artistic project. I’ve always hated the word ‘political’. Someone once told me that what I do is always political, because I go outside the walls and work in the streets. But my work is not politically driven to push you to vote on one side or another. It raises questions and doesn’t give answers. Some people see its social component more than others, but it’s up to them to interpret it, and use it. People in the neighbourhood, in Kenya, in Brazil, they’ve used the work to spread their own fight, but the exact same work presented in another country becomes just art, just a way to discover another community,

That’s the main statement in the film: ‘All we needed was attention; we wanted to exist.’ Everyone wants attention, dignity, and no matter where I go, I always find that same concern, but it maybe resonates more in people’s hearts and heads when it comes from a neighbourhood that we see a lot in the media, not always for good reasons another place. In Brazil, in Liberia, it’s taken completely differently. I’m very curious to see how people outside France see this film. In France they get it, they understand what happened, but in other places they’ll create parallels, depending on their own story. I’ve shown it to kids in Chicago who don’t even know there were riots in France, but it relates to what they know. ar What happens, in your opinion, when you take something like Les Bosquets and convert it into an aesthetic object? jr Every image I’ve pasted there, and the ballet, sparks… incomprehension in people. ‘What is it? What does that mean?’ I don’t know if incomprehension is the right word, but it creates… it raises questions constantly. That’s when I know it has hit the right spot. People ask questions because there’s nothing written on

ArtReview

the photo, and no one’s giving them any answers. For me, the discussions that come from this are the best part of the process. In every country, people just stop and look and don’t understand. Then they realise it’s for them to figure out, that no one is going to be like, ‘That’s what you should understand from it.’ Their interactions and interpretations are much more interesting than mine. Like, there was the drug-dealer head of the Commando in Brazil, who asked me, very straightforwardly, ‘What is the purpose of your project?’ ar How do you respond to this type of question? jr It’s super-hard. I say something like, ‘Alright, my work does not have a direct purpose, it is meant to bring community together.’ In the case of Brazil, I wanted to paste a photograph of a woman in her own community. ‘But why do you want to do that?’ he asked. I said, ‘I think women are the pillars of the community and I want to give a different image of them than what I see in the media, where they’re always hidden in the background.’ The drug dealer says, ‘But what is that going to change?’ Really straightforward, and I’m like, ‘Actually, maybe nothing.’ ‘So why are you doing it then?’ I say: ‘Because I believe that if we all get together and paste it, maybe we’ll get seen and maybe people will change their opinion about the place. If they don’t, it doesn’t matter, we will have left something – just paste and paper, that might not even last until the next rain.’ ar Your Phaidon book is titled jr: Can Art Change the World? What’s the answer? jr I guess I don’t have a direct answer, but I think a lot of conflict in the world is caused by misperception. Once in Liberia, there was a big crowd watching us paste up images, and someone said, ‘I don’t know where you’re from, or what you do, but I’ve been listening to the people standing around here discussing this, and no one really knows what this is about. So I think if this is art, then maybe art is about making people not think about their main worries of the day for a moment, and just question what’s happening now. I think that’s what you guys are trying to do.’ I could never have even come up with something like that. I was speechless. And if that’s what it meant for him, then definitely it’s a complete other frame of reference, and that’s the kind of thing I’m curious to know about in different countries, how different people approach these images. So, if you can change people’s perception, one image at a time, and create that spark I mentioned earlier, maybe you can change people’s perception of the world, and that’s a way of changing the world. ar

above 28 Millimetres, Portrait of a Generation, Les Bosquets, In the Mist, Montfermeil, France, 2014, colour photograph, matt Plexiglas, aluminium, wood, 270 × 180 cm all images © jr-art.net. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris, New York & Hong Kong

December 2015

Reading the Air by Naomi Pearce

Anicka Yi, Odor in the Court, 2015 (installation view, 7,070,430k of Digital Spit, Kunsthalle Basel, 2015). Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

The atmosphere at musician Terre Thaemlitz’s talk at Café Oto in self and other. This atmosphere was elegant: ‘California Minimalism London smelled cultured and expensive – too much Comme D and created a gracious social space in its glow and reflection.’ It was also Le Labo. A friend who loves perfume would say that they were ‘scents durable. Look at a work by Peter Alexander now and its surface still with strong sillage’ – French for wake and the ‘correct’ way of refer- shimmers like it was made yesterday. ring to the musky trails that fragrances radiate: invisible reminders In the wake of perpetual technological updates and rolling news of physical presence. streams, permanence doesn’t feel like something worth striving for any Thaemlitz, who is based in Japan, spoke about silence and with- more. A list of mass deaths and apocalyptic visions remembered since drawal as strategies of resistance. Hostile towards the online ‘sharing my childhood: the Cold War, aids, y2k, the greenhouse effect, famines economy’, she began by quoting a 1979 interview with Susan Sontag, in ‘Africa’ as told by Comic Relief, bird flu and all the disaster films published in Rolling Stone: ‘You want to share things with other people, I tried and failed to watch due to fear. Who needs things to last forever but on the other hand you don’t want when forever won’t be that long? to just feed the machine that needs Standing in the second room of It is difficult to define ‘atmosphere’ millions of fantasies and objects and Anicka Yi’s Kunsthalle Basel exhiin relation to artworks. A total products and opinions to be fed into bition this summer, seduced by her it every day in order to keep on going.’ phenomenon, largely nonrepresentational, translucent glycerine soap slabs: minimalist elegance now comes in a I go through my notes the day an immaterial quality that’s felt after. Written in the corner of one fragile form. In the bacterial patterns page is Japanese saying: ‘reading the air’. of her Petri dish stickers, I imagined a luxury fashion store at the Kuuki wo Yomu, which translates awkwardly in the English tongue, end of the world: mould spoors multiplying in the damp creases of means to be sensitive to the atmosphere of social situations – to be leather handbags. aware and to value what’s unspoken between a group of people. In As an experience, 7,070,430k of Digital Spit: A Memoir releases itself order to avoid conflict and remain polite, it’s important to be percep- slowly, an incremental oozing interrupted by bursts of olfactory tive to the ‘air’, to read and obey it. ‘ky’ is an abbreviation with nega- sensation. Yi follows a strange kind of recipe, combining unstable tive connotations used to describe people who ignore the ‘air’: those organic ingredients such as tempura-fried flowers with cool clinical who say too much or not enough, who say things at the wrong time, objects – steel, plastic tubing, ultrasonic gel – to create an atmosphere who stick out. of instability. With her fragile compositions, Yi stages perishability I go on an online forum for expats, read a comment from yagian, as something that is intimately connected to our sense of self as it is ‘an ordinary Japanese salaryman living in Uptown Tokyo’: transformed by increasingly digital technologies. ‘I’m trying to be “ky”, even if someone is angry at me, because Among these Frankenstein fusings, Yi’s perfume-impregnated I believe that nothing will come out of “reading the air.”’ exhibition catalogue rotates slowly above a single flame: she asks that Recent exhibitions by Anicka Yi, Michael E. Smith and Anne you burn it after reading. Heat releases Aliens and Alzheimer’s (2015), Imhof, all of which I’ve experienced over the last six months, have the fragrance Yi designed in collaboration with a French perfumier. activated atmosphere both as material and conceptual tool. I’ve read Their brief: to create the scent of forgetting. The air of the gallery is their air and made connections between the ways they employ reduc- literally filled with loss. Resisting remembering provokes a world with no ends, no monutive processes – be it taking away light, replacing speed with slowness or prioritising smell over sight. These removal strategies provoke us ments to visit or minutes of silence to mark. Yi is not nostalgic: she to pay attention differently. They challenge sustainability, clarity and made her muse perpetual mutation. Alongside the soap-slab sculpproductivity as dominant languages that ‘feed the machine’, Sontag tures are living, shifting paintings bred from the air and samples observed more than 30 years ago. collected from surfaces of the kunsthalle; they contain bacterial traces As that awkward translation ‘read the air’ suggests, it is diffi- of the institution’s every past exhibition, visitor and event. cult to define ‘atmosphere’ in relaTo make her cultures, Yi sticks tion to artworks. A total phenomswabs in mouths and scrapes geniIn the wake of perpetual technological enon, largely nonrepresentational, tals. Decorating walls with the dirt updates and rolling news streams, an immaterial quality that’s felt. ‘An of bodies, she fills the air with their permanence doesn’t feel like something atmosphere is neither an object, nor many secretions. Like Timothy Morton’s desire for a ‘queer ecology’, a subject; neither passive nor neutral’, worth striving for any more Yi challenges the fantasy of ‘Nature’ argues German philosopher Gernot Böhme. We are unsure whether to attribute atmospheres to the as something other than ‘human’. Morton writes: ‘Society used to objects or environment from which they proceed or to the subjects define itself by excluding dirt and pollution. We cannot now endorse who experience them. We are unsure where atmospheres lie. this exclusion, nor can we believe in the world it produces. This is literIn his discussion of West Coast Minimalism from the 1960s – ally about realizing where your waste goes.’ Yi harnesses the atmosthink Larry Bell’s transparent cubes or James Turrell’s Light and Space phere to make us think about how insignificant we are within it. experiments – Dave Hickey writes about the work harnessing atmos‘Air has entered the list of what could be withdrawn from us,’ writes phere as a benign presence. The artists cooked materials like chemists: Bruno Latour, drawing on the theories of Peter Sloterdijk. Since the oxygen, neon, lacquer or chrome – ‘this is a world that floats, flashes, use of mustard gas in Ypres in 1915, a science of atmospheric manipulacoats and teases’ – exposing the fullness of empty space as it flirts tion has been declared. Latour argues that with this activation, air has with the boundaries between object and atmosphere, mind and body, been reconfigured: ‘You are on life support, it’s fragile, it’s technical,

December 2015

Anne Imhof, For Ever Rage, 2015 (installation view, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin, 2015). Photo: David von Becker. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Michael E. Smith, Untitled, 2015, jacket, baseboard heater (installation view, Michael E. Smith, De Appel, Amsterdam, 2015). Photo: Cassander Eeftick Schattenkerk. Courtesy the artist

December 2015

it’s public, it’s political, it could break down – it is breaking down – it’s shapeshifting apparition, it’s not visible to anyone but the ‘infected’, being fixed, you are not too confident of those who fix it.’ Be suspicious it doesn’t run, it doggedly walks. The soundtrack is a droning elecof that which you cannot see, the air might be the death of you too. tronic collage of corrupted synths that fills you with dread. Detroit’s It’s September, and I’m watching Anne Imhof’s Forever Rage (2015) planned obsolescence colludes with the film’s no-sex policy. There’s at the Hamburger Bahnhof and trying to hold the dead-eyed stare pathos in the girl’s puppy-fat youthfulness surrounded by the city’s of one of its performers: she’s giving off bad vibes. Never felt cool architectural decay. At first I don’t notice the lack of light in the Michael E. Smith exhienough for Berlin: lack the ambiguity, got a face that shows I care too much. We’re dispersed around the room’s edges, hugging the walls. bition at De Appel in Amsterdam. The greyness of the day meets the In the centre, four punchbags hang like pillars above concrete troughs greyness of the gallery in a seamless transition. The lights aren’t just of buttermilk. This stage is a cage: six beautifully strange performers, off: Smith has taken the fluorescent tubes away and left the power on. its animals in captivity. The lights are low and diffused, giving the Real or imagined, the air tastes of electricity. Unbleached fabric scrims mask off most of the windows, outward space that divides us a flat oppressive density. It’s the opposite of spotlighting: we have to decide what’s important. It’s too dark to post on views are refused, the space contracts. Despite this appearance of separation, light is extraneous to the gallery; our visibility depends Instagram: this work resists sharing. Imhof’s performances are long and slow. See them as dances that on the weather’s whims. After I notice the light, I hear the sound. It’s withhold or images that emerge over time. Clandestine movements coming from two monitors in the entrance, the screens are green – such as the hand signals of nightclub doormen or the gestures of night-vision footage – the image is forgettable, the abstracted white pickpockets are borrowed and reworked. These body codes are only noise is not, it follows. Smith’s sculptures are often described as unsetintended to be visible to the initiated; in this way they are an inti- tling. The exhibition text repeats the word ‘morbid’ a couple of mate but exclusive shorthand. As any school bully knows, alienating times. There’s something camp about reading sculptures made from atmospheres rely on the strength of the clique. discarded things as ‘dead’. “What – do – you – want,” the performers chant, finishing each Smith can’t shake off Detroit, having lived there for many years other’s sentences, they all get a word each. It’s a rhetorical question; until recently, and his work brings its baggage. This city was allowed they sound kind of bored. White bodto crumble slowly, writes Dora Apel ies in generic clothing: tech trainers, The demon doesn’t have a single identity, in her book Beautiful Terrible Ruins: Detroit and the Anxiety of Decline (2015), loose-fitting T-shirts, ripped jeans. it’s a shapeshifting apparition, its decay the result of a ‘more gradual They look apathetic, entitled in the way that the culturally gentrified do: it’s not visible to anyone but the ‘infected’, and hidden process of divestment, emigration and radicalised discrimiit’s sexy. A guy bends his knees, covers it doesn’t run, it doggedly walks. his face, thrusts his crotch forward nation’. Detroit made the news in 2009 The soundtrack is a droning electronic and sways his hips. Slowly. I can’t tell when a local man was found encased collage of corrupted synths that if he wants to fuck or fight. At interin ice at the bottom of an elevator shaft vals the air smells sweet but aggresin an abandoned building: he’d been fills you with dread sive. Stockpiles of energy drinks get there a month. Charlie LeDuff, the cracked open rhythmically, sometimes they’re swigged, most of the journalist who broke the story, received criticism from the local white time they’re not. The implication: bodies are stimulated into action, art community for perpetuating the city’s ‘bad press’; they asked, what penetrated by chemicals. A tortoise is brought out, held in outstretched about the good things? The do-it-yourself initiatives, the hardworking hands and left to crawl on the floor. Walter Benjamin wrote about citizens? ‘When normal things become the news,’ LeDuff responded, turtles in his The Arcades Project (1927–40), recalling the Parisian mid- ‘the abnormal becomes the norm.’ nineteenth-century practice of walking with one on a leash in order Smith’s work demonstrates just how normal things can become. to slow down one’s pace; to look intently at the urban landscape, and His objects are made from the most familiar of things: two steel poles run vertically from floor to ceiling, a pair of xxl tracksuit bottoms to be transformed into the bohemian object of to-be-looked-at-ness. To slow dance down is to confront modernity’s energetic project crumpled at their base like trousers caught around ankles. In the same of progress-driven, ever-changing motion. In his discussion of chore- space, two seedpods fused to a pair of nail guns are fixed high up on ographer Jérôme Bel’s work, André Lepecki points to slowness as a wall. Objects of potential construction, be they plants or houses, a means of ‘decelerating the blind and totalitarian impetus of the have been decommissioned. Despite this, they resist categorisation as kinetic-representational machine’. Imhof problematises the way we either dead or alive: it’s ‘choose life’, but not as we know it. In the mateconsume the body – we’re given a long time to objectify this beautiful rial interventions Smith performs on these objects – dipping hooded youth, we desire them as they refuse to be productive, to participate. sweatshirts in rubber, removing the weighted bases of pallet jacks – he Lepecki argues these unsatisfying slow movements create a body ‘seen activates an atmosphere of stasis: the ‘edgelands’ of urban spaces aren’t less as solid form and rather as sliding along lines of intensities’. out there; the wasteland is in your head. Slowness can be scary too. “It was never about going anywhere I’d seen the exhibition with a friend; he couldn’t get over how really”, sighs Jay, the cherry-lipped blonde protagonist of It Follows affective it was in its lack. Afterwards, stoned from joints smoked (2014), a recent ‘sex equals death’ paranoia horror film shot in Detroit. while wandering through Amsterdam, we talked about the show as Boy-meets-girl teenage romance is actually boy takes girl’s virginity, a kind of antiexperience, a nullifying retort to the spectacle of total spunking cum laced with a supernatural curse. “This thing, it’s going installation. A couple of months later I emailed him about ‘reading to follow you,” he says. The demon doesn’t have a single identity, it’s a the air’. He responded immediately: ‘I’ll keep trying to.’ ar

ArtReview

Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski

In an ongoinging series of commissions, Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski reflect on their concerns about the place of the artist in contemporary society, which increasingly seeks to commodify creativity. These poems, also presented as scripts to accompany their film Alternative Equinox (2015), were written on a series of walks around London, a paradoxical landscape that despite recent rapid developments never really changes as much as we think December 2015

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Trim: 200(w)x131 (h)mm

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Art Reviewed

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Greater New York moma ps1, New York 11 October – 7 March On the occasion of this Greater New York, moma ps1’s quinquennial exhibition of all that is contemporary in New York’s artworld, when one enters the museum grounds, before getting to the building proper, one is confronted with the vw Dome, a temporary structure that houses events and programmes and is sponsored by Volkswagen. In an earlier life, the Dome and its programming played a role in ps1 director Klaus Biesenbach’s efforts to draw attention and money to the Rockaway Beach community of New York, which was badly in need of help in 2012 after having been rocked by hurricane Sandy. Now the dome sits in ps1’s forecourt, somewhat pathetically bearing the stain of corporate malfeasance and venality that the letters ‘vw’ cannot but now signify: the world’s largest automaker, with a devoted customer base and vocal commitments to environmental responsibility and reform as well as artistic culture – a company in which one could, perhaps stupidly, believe – rigged its cars to beat emissions tests; the company, we now know, is a devious polluter, a cheater, a liar. With David Hammons’s green, red and black Untitled (African-American Flag) (1991/2015) flying overhead, it is fitting that what one first encounters is the vw Dome, because the tenor of this exhibition, or the pathology that it symptomatically exhibits, is something along the lines of an existential cynicism. This is not to suggest that the art in the exhibition is cynical (little of it is), or that the artists are (perhaps a few might be); it’s to state that one cannot seriously attend to all this exhibition has to offer without experiencing a slow but steady revelation of one’s own – that is, that to entertain even a hair’s breadth of hope for our shared future is witheringly foolish, and yet here we are. On the evidence, art making and meaning in New York has become a Sisyphean task minus any sense of Beckettian perseverance. There is no failing better, there is no failing because there is no succeeding, there is just going on. With Greater New York we’re made to feel this tragic persistence rather than have it pointed out to us. One might identify, for example, with Ugo Rondinone’s waxwork nude (2010) and the subtle exhaustion it figures; he’s almost tapped

out. One might be baited by Kiki Smith’s Lure (1995), taken in by that gentle crouching figure only to get hooked, mindlessly, by its line. It is with kiosk’s 1,303 People (2005–15), an archive of objects, mostly small manufactured goods of one insignificant kind or another, that the shape of Greater New York’s malaise comes more clearly into view. Collected by Alisa Grifo and Marco ter Haar Romeny, the sentiment that stands behind kiosk is of the stop-andsmell-the-roses variety, though in this instance, it’s the wildly diverse profusion of mostly cheap stuff that the world and its many cultures and lands put out in the name of consumerism that one is meant to take the time to appreciate. All of the items are numbered and placed in their own clear corrugated plastic containers, which are then stacked high, creating a maze of little trinkets and foodstuffs and craft items. It’s like the physical manifestation of the lower reaches of some Craigslist search. By calling a local New York City line, and dialling in an item’s associated number, one hears a computergenerated voice tell a story about it, often detailing how it works and its origins and why it’s worth your attention. Whether intentionally or not, 1,303 People models an insouciance to the glut of consumer junk that proliferates seemingly of its own accord, and the egotism that underlies the curatorial act of selection, not to mention the privilege of globetrotting collectors. Though kiosk’s project may be informed by a redemptive impulse – it’s not junk if you take the time to appreciate it – this is just the setup. The letdown comes when, not quite being able to take it all in, one realises it’s all a piece of the throwaway culture that dominates today. That fashion figures prominently elsewhere in the show reinforces this throwaway logic. The collagist, anticraft, antiaesthetic of pieces by Eckhaus Latta (with Annabeth Marks) and Susan Cianciolo play well to the Chloe Sevignyside of contemporary art’s cool reserve, but fast fashion and runway spectacles are some of our biggest sources of material and visual waste. Even if Cianciolo or Slow and Steady Wins the Race (another label taking part in the show) pay lip service to the idea of resistance – on its

facing page, top kiosk, 1,303 People, 2005–15, mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Alisa Grifo & Marco Romeny (kiosk) with Rebecca Forgac, Gary Murphy, Anny Oberlink, Jason Rosenberg & Ryne Ziemba. Photo: Pablo Enriquez. Courtesy the artists

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website sswtr claims to offer a ‘considered response to the hyper-consumerist pace of fashion’ – the distance between Zara-esque hyper-consumerism and what’s on offer in Greater New York is negligible to the point of invisibility. Cynicism infects even the most earnest work in the show, such as Yoshiaki Mochizuki’s high-polish and deftly scored palladium-leaf paintings, or Stefanie Victor’s finely crafted linear metal sculptures. When viewed next to John Finneran’s lazily executed symbolist canvases, for example, one feels that Victor didn’t get the memo. In these rooms, such a level of investment in surface or form comes off as naive at best and crassly commercial at worst. Photographic work by Alvin Baltrop, James Nares, Gordon Matta-Clark and Roy Colmer root Greater New York in an earlier but now lost moment when New York City was still in some sense open, when inhabitants could seize space and make it theirs. But their work also points to what would come next: aids, Ed Koch, broken-windows policing, the culture wars and the growing kingdom of finance and real estate, crowned today by vacant $80 million condos owned by foreign nationals. And speaking of architecture, when I studied it, Lebbeus Woods was some otherworldly God of parasitic design, yet I’d never noticed until this show how windswept and worn he’d endeavoured to make his futuristic work appear. They weren’t relics, as so many liked to think; they were blighted, abandoned. It’s unfortunate that Woods’s drawings and models weren’t set up next to Nick Relph’s photo-based renderings of more contemporary architectural monstrosities, which are subject to some rough handling and wave distortions of their own, as if starring in some Spaghetti Western set in downtown Baghdad circa 2003. The ‘greater’ part of Greater New York surely lies with the achievement of its curators, Peter Eleey, Douglas Crimp, Thomas Lax and Mia Locks. They have captured how New York itself feels today: overfilled, overcapitalised, underserved. Everyone and everything is tight, which, one must assume, is why so much of the art is not. Jonathan T.D. Neil

facing page, bottom Lebbeus Woods, solohouse – Exterior View 2, 1989, watercolour and coloured pencil on board, 50 × 71 cm. © estate of Lebbeus Woods. Courtesy Aleksandra Wagner

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13th Lyon Biennale: La vie moderne Various venues, Lyon 10 September – 3 January As titles go, it’s broad: La vie moderne – modern life. Attractively archaic, it’s also curiously ambiguous. Any use of the word ‘modern’ in an art context shifts our attention from the here and now to the historical, to Baudelaire and his 1863 essay ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. Yet there is no art from this period in curator Ralph Rugoff’s sprawling Lyon Biennale; just works by 59 contemporary artists installed in two main venues. But if the show isn’t ‘modern’ – in its arthistorical meaning – then it must be about, er, life. I mean, life. As crazy as it sounds, Rugoff takes this humdinger of a theme and actually goes some way towards nailing it. Like the curator’s 2007 exhibition The Painting of Modern Life, at the Hayward Gallery, the London institution he directs, and after Baudelaire, this is an exhibition that spans from the grand themes to the intimacies of the everyday (in 2007 these were represented by – two examples from many – Gerhard Richter’s portrait of the grieving Jacqueline Kennedy, Woman with Umbrella, 1964, and Malcolm Moreley’s monumental painting of chatting cruise-liner passengers, On Deck, 1966). So too, La vie moderne. After a bombastic start (the worst offender being a one-liner installation by the incomprehensibly popular Céleste

Boursier-Mougenot involving peanuts falling from a height onto a drum kit), the type with which visitors to Rugoff’s later series of familyfriendly sculpture shows at the Hayward – the 2009 Walking in My Mind for example – will be familiar, the biennale settles into a welcome, dreamily detached meander through the tropes of the first 15 years of the twenty-first century. Some of these are the big themes of the day: celebrity (Johannes Kahrs’s brutal oil-on-canvas depictions of Justin Bieber and Amy Winehouse, for example); urbanism (Magdi Mostafa’s The Surface of Spectral Scattering, 2014, a large sculpture that, activated by sound, maps an imagined pilot’s-view of Cairo in led lights, replicating the pathos of arriving in a city after a long night-flight); ecology (Lai Chih-Sheng’s expertly dispiriting Border, 2013–, a room space in which the artist has piled all the rubbish generated during the biennale’s installation); and race (the acutely strange and enjoyable music video created by Cecilia Bengolea and Jeremy Deller in which an older white man walks through his expansive suburban house rapping in French while a troupe of young black women dance and twerk). These are countered by several works that have a far more personal outlook: Cameron Jamie’s series of photographs, hung in a higgledy-

piggledy domestic way and taken in the lead-up to Halloween, of the decorated front lawns in his Los Angeles neighbourhood, is a paean to the artist’s hometown; Alex da Corte’s claustrophobic installation of everyday objects, the whole room washed blue by overhead coloured lights, references illness and the closed intimacy of mental health. There are a few stupid moments, such as Jon Rafman’s usual look-here-is-theInternet banality and Simon Denny’s laddish installation The Personal Effects of Kim Dotcom (2013), but generally Rugoff’s exhibition is an immensely enjoyable thing to walk around – not least because of the endless visual quotes the curator employs to hold all these diverse stories together. The car emerges as a motif. Gorillas are in absurd proliferation too, including within one of the best works of the exhibition, Sammy Baloji’s installation of archival colonial-era images depicting Congo. Strung together, what emerges is an exhibition that reminds one of an issue of Life or the Picture Post (with Rugoff as picture-desk editor) in which disparate portraits of the modern world – ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’ (to quote Baudelaire slightly out of context) – are filed from near and far. Oliver Basciano

Cameron Jamie, Front Lawn Funerals and Cemeteries, 1984, 35 b&w photographs. Photo: Blaise Adilon. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Berlin & Koln; Gladstone Gallery, New York & Brussels, Bernier/ Eliades, Athens and de la Biennale de Lyon 2015

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Imran Qureshi Idea of Landscape Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris 12 September – 17 October Deeply affected by the global changes that occurred after 9/11 and the ensuing wars on terrorism in Islamic countries, Imran Qureshi began using expressive symbolism to revive and engage the highly demanding tradition of Mughal miniature painting, which he teaches at the National College of Arts in Lahore. The dreadful spate of suicide bomb attacks in his city during 2010 caused him to shift drastically towards the urgency of gestural abstraction, introducing gory red splatters into the otherwise delicate, illustrative practice of Mughal painting. Qureshi is thus performing a poignant yet hopeful dialogue between destruction and life, the latter symbolised by his meticulous description of florid foliage, a typical embellishment in miniature painting along with gilding. His first solo show at Thaddaeus Ropac is no exception and spreads a vast ensemble of 29 artworks (all 2015) over two floors. Foliage arises here from what can be best described as a figurative bloodbath, which scales up traditional Mughal miniatures from small sheets of paper to large canvases. At the entrance, Qureshi’s sanguinary vision of nature begins discreetly with an

actual miniature on handmade wasli illuminated with gold leaf: Threatened depicts five luxuriant trees on a plain blue background soiled with red gouache blots, from which arabesque stems emerge like new arteries of life. The same goes for Inside Story, in which the foliage of three trees is made out of flourishing vermilion stains. Undeterred by terror, then, life over-comes adversity – or, in these instances, grows back. As a hardly subtle yet splendorous consequence, the gorier Qureshi’s art is, the lusher it gets. Indeed, on the same floor his coalescence of blood and foliage extends onto much larger formats, in composite paintings verging on abstraction. For the partly gilded diptych and triptych both titled This Leprous Brightness (a title taken from Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s famous poem ‘Subh-e-Aazadi’ (‘The Dawn of Freedom’), in which the Pakistani intellectual wrote about his mixed feelings on the eve of his nation’s independence in 1947), red acrylic paint was first splashed onto two and three aligned canvases respectively. Qureshi later placed them in different orders so as to infuse the slightly ethereal impression of a mysterious organised chaos into his final blooming compositions, in which

the lavish foliage is outlined amid the disarranged spatters with fine white markings. Also ambiguous yet arousing more corporeal sensations of carnage and death, You Who Are U Love and My Life’s Enemy Too and Love Me, Love Me Not resemble wounded flesh and evoke the heartbreaking situation of those closely associated with terrorists, red being here the colour of bloodshed as much as affection: while Love Me, Love Me Not continues upstairs in a series of smaller paper works in which bloodlike drippings end up in flowering buds like germs of hope, All Are the Colour of My Heart presents a full naked body print of the artist, who used himself as a living brush, thus brutally echoing and reversing Yves Klein’s 1960 performancepaintings Anthropométries, in which female performers made bodily imprints in blue paint. The eight-minute video loop Breathing concludes the show with a pristine display of Qureshi’s extraordinary sensibility, fragile sheets of gold leaf falling down and slowly crumpling in the air against a neutral greyish background. It is said that a miniature painter has to hold his breath for an instant when gilding, and this exhibition is appropriately breathtaking. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

This Leprous Brightness, 2015, emulsion, acrylic paint and gold leaf on canvas, 137 × 198 cm. Photo: Charles Duprat. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris & Salzburg

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Sofia Hultén Truckin’ Daniel Marzona, Berlin 16 September – 24 October Among the functions of the frame around a painting or the plinth under a sculpture is to assert: ‘This is the art’, and to exile everything else to the realm of unobserved, untransformed reality. The critic Michael Wood has called the inverse of this conceit ‘elision’: when a film invites us ‘to ponder the missing minutes or years’ between its cuts. There’s something intriguingly dodgy about this insistence on context, as though the artist were a hedgefunder drawing on phantom capital, or a quantum physicist firing a particle into an accelerator in which it will branch into two simultaneous outcomes. The Swedish artist Sofia Hultén is a consummate elider. Her art is always intimating parallel universes by casting the present form of her sculptures and films as one among others they might have taken. A nicely serendipitous example is the fate of Black and Blue (all works 2015), two unassuming-looking rucksacks placed next to one another in the corner of the gallery. Originally, one was all black and the other all blue, but they have exchanged parts to become hybrids. They are positioned to face away from one another, like Siamese twins weary of the sight of the other’s face. By rendering the rucksacks dysfunctional as branded products (a McKinley bag bears an Eastpak zip), Hultén

has created new, two-tone designs. But when I first saw this exhibition, this work was absent and has since been remade, because one of the original pair was stolen at the opening. I imagine it surreptitiously exiting the gallery on someone’s shoulder, its hapless other left as an artistic window onto the elided future of its twin. Even if we discount the theft, the remodelled rucksacks are a dual sign of their own individual incompleteness, a deficit only filled by the context of the other. The overt ‘madeness’ of Hultén’s work – the found objects with which she begins are rewelded, resewn, supplemented, appendaged – is always being effaced or supplanted by its disembodied negative, the loose threads of alternative eventuality that shoot off outside the physical limits of the art object, a gallery’s walls or a film’s running time. In the film Truckin’, Hultén undertakes a mini-odyssey wearing a military parka, like an urban guerrilla. In the course of her walk she keeps coming across another pair of old trainers lying in wait for her to exchange for the pair she has on. The film loops, committing her to a Beckettishly infinite slog. Despite her purposefulness, the Hultén character is ambivalent. Is she a thief or a performer? Are the trainer props distributed en route or stolen property? Which is to say,

is this art space or real space, reel time or real time? The play between contingency and artifice proves to have moral overtones. The illegal separation of the original rucksacks is a manifestation of this dichotomy that might have been suggested by the film. Hultén exploits how an artwork’s disowning of its artifice to assume the guise of contingent reality allows her to disown the pretence of artistry as well as an artwork’s commodity value, at least symbolically. After all, if a work’s content is contingent upon an absent, implied context, the value of its own objecthood becomes ambiguous. On entering the gallery, one is confronted with a three-metre-high shop shutter, hung on wires from the ceiling (Scramble), with its horizontal slats shuffled. Losing their thread where the slats meet, strokes of spray graffiti resemble garbled handwriting on lined paper. The shutter might be a Christopher Wool spray painting from the 1990s, with Wool’s elegant, gestural flourish and inflated market value suspended, like the scrambled shutter, and each stroke of spraypaint, halted by the junctures between slats, left to reach out to all the ways it could proceed in order to recover its air of undiminished authority and value. Or else take another direction, rejecting that value as not worth its attainment. Mark Prince

Indecisive Angles xv, 2015, found metal trolley, 113 × 90 × 50 cm. Courtesy the artist, Daniel Marzona, Berlin, Galerie Nordenhake, Berlin & Stockholm, and RaebervonStenglin, Zürich

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Hito Steyerl Left To Our Own Devices kow, Berlin 17 September – 5 December Hito Steyerl’s Factory of the Sun (2015), which drew much attention at this year’s Venice Biennale, invokes the aesthetic of post-Internet art. The same can be said for Liquidity Inc. (2014), her video installation currently on show at kow. The video tells the story of former Lehman Brothers analyst Jacob Wood, born in Vietnam, who began a career as a professional kickboxer after his employer went bankrupt in the 2008 financial crisis. The artist uses collage effects to spin a dense web of references presenting the supple flexibility of water as a metaphor for financial liquidity and the fluid nature of capital, as well as for the movements of a martial artist and for the natural catastrophes caused by climate change: a kickboxing arena; Wood preparing for the fight; ring-card-girls strutting their stuff; a flatscreen in the rafters showing a surfer riding ocean waves. Suddenly the flatscreen is sitting in the modernist offices of a financial firm, and a moment later the surfer appears on smartphone display. In voiceover, the former analyst draws parallels between his previous and current professions. In this video, at every turn employing state-of-the-art computer animation, the categories of space and time continually collapse in on themselves. To paraphrase Paul Virilio, the speed of the most modern media

– which we surf everyday, predominantly on the web – has enabled the confluence of everything at any time. In Liquidity Inc., this image of everything always influencing everything finds its metaphor in a ‘capital weather report’, in which ‘trade winds’ and ‘data clouds’ determine global events. This work is compelling not least for its rapid succession of appealing, albeit suggestive images of thoroughly modern production and a style bespeaking the aforementioned post-Internet art, while Steyerl – and this sets her apart from this genre – addresses explicitly precarious issues like financial crisis and climate change. The ‘politainment’ of Liquidity Inc. is juxtaposed by three augmented lecture-performances in the basement of the gallery, providing a serious, indeed almost scientific form of political engagement. These works comprise PowerPoint presentations and clips of Steyerl presenting her talks. In Duty Free Art (2015), for example, the artist speaks of the correlation between the operating system of art, the arms industry and the neoliberal financial world. The point of departure in this case is the function of museums not only in promoting national identities, but also in the creeping redistribution of public assets into private hands after armed conflict, such as the targeted

establishment of a National Museum in Syria, in which the Louvre, the British Museum and starchitect Rem Koolhaas all play a role. Later, of course, Duty Free Art also examines how art – in the context of globalisation – is degenerating into a lucrative object of speculation. The so-called freeports, where expensive works of art are stored, trafficked and sold duty-free, command the focus of the nearly-38minute talk, illustrated by images of Geneva’s freeport and a letter from Koolhaas to the Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. The artist presents the lectures in a style that is conspicuously perfect, indeed almost aseptic. Although at times they are edited to parodic effect, they seem to conform to academic requirements in every respect; the artist hereby succeeds in explicitly countering the standards of supposedly professional work with the cliché of ‘activist chaos’. As persuasive as this exhibition is, however, the shown works nevertheless raise the difficult question of whether their formal perfection actually precludes the artist’s intended political effect. That is to say, perhaps this art plays along all too well with the system it criticises. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Jonathan Lutes

Duty Free Art, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Ladislav Zajac. Courtesy the artist and kow, Berlin

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Chris Martin Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 9 October – 2 December It seems funny that there isn’t an equivalent in visual art to the tribute band or cover version. Not that Chris Martin’s paintings are either covers or tributes, yet the idea of celebrating cultural figures seems deeply lodged within his oeuvre. Forrest Bess, Miles Davis and Amy Winehouse all feature, either in image or name, in the 13 paintings on view here, while inspirations such as Alfred Jensen, James Brown and Bill Jensen have appeared in previous works. Names and images are not the only form of tribute, either; the darkly coloured surface of Untitled (2012–13) is covered with old vinyl records, white dots of paint splodged around either their edges or the peripheries of their labels. Perhaps these represent spots of light or magical energy emanating from each object, or maybe they’re daubs that demarcate territory. Maturing with the neo-expressionists, Martin is uninhibited and freewheeling in his kleptomania of technique, form and material. Glitter, cardboard boxes, Styrofoam, tarpaulins and bits of newspaper are all fodder for a formal

vocabulary that brings together abstract gesture, geometric forms and patterns with a more laissez-faire expressionist figuration. Martin is known both for giant, graphic, wall-size paintings and tiny dense ones, but these pieces mostly fall somewhere in between (averaging approximately 114 × 93 cm); their visual intensity, however, remains undimmed. For example, the alternating waves of deep greens, blues and reds in Untitled (1988–2015) are covered entirely with glitter, a material he discovered working as an art therapist for aids sufferers and one more associated with arts-and-crafts than with fine arts. Its use, with the glamorous sheen it delivers, could be construed as a tribute to disco, but the resulting work is also an object that encapsulates periods of elapsed time. The painting’s duration is not just recorded in the 27-year period marked by its dates, but also by the three years inscribed on the work itself (2015, 2013, 2008). Perhaps, then, these sparkly waves of colour could also suggest strata? Another painting, taz (2007–15), has those three letters written in blue on the lower left

taz, 2007 – 15, oil, glitter and collage on canvas, 109 × 76 cm. Courtesy Anton Kern Gallery, New York

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corner, while an image of a seated Miles Davis is collaged under a painted palm tree. An acronym for ‘temporary autonomous zone’, it refers to the eponymous 1985 treatise by Hakim Bey that argues for a temporal, anarchic sociopolitical space in which societal control is suspended. It is a motif that Martin returns to time and again. Bey’s concept was later taken up by ravers, but this notion could also describe the site of Martin’s painting. It is a moment where the rules and formal language of painting are in abeyance. Martin, however, describes his work as spiritual. The spiritual for him, rather than the metaphysical or mysterious, is the idea of something real. He compares it to the breath, something present but not entirely there. ‘Our job as artists or as human beings’, he has said, ‘is to investigate what we really think is real, and to come back to the tribe and say, this is what the world feels like to me.’ By this he means that he creates, as he said elsewhere, an ‘abstract painting [as] a humble hand-painted recognition of humanness’. And that is certainly what his art celebrates. Sherman Sam

Fredrik Værslev Inner Beauty Museo Marino Marini, Florence 20 September – 28 November For Inner Beauty, the Norwegian painter Fredrik Værslev has produced new Trolley and Glass paintings (both series 2013–) made directly in response to the Museo Marino Marini gallery space. Occupying a century-old former crypt with low vaulted ceilings, recessed alcoves and no natural light, the gallery presents several challenging restrictions. As the building is listed, it is impossible to interfere with the existing architecture; Værslev, however, embraces the constraint as an opportunity to further his longstanding engagement with the relationship between painting and architecture. To produce the 11 large-format Trolley paintings on view, Værslev applied diy-store paint with the type of line-marking machine often used to map a parking lot or mark a sports field’s boundaries. At first, the works appear uniform – all a standard size, of a similar colour palette (inviting reds, yellows and whites) and all bearing a title that reflects their first space of display: Untitled Marino Marini (Trolley Painting) (2015). While the surfaces of previous Trolley paintings contain unruly and scattered diagonal streaks, these new ones juxtapose tidy patches of brick-size red marks with bold, circular splodges of other colours. The clusters of red lines recall the exposed masonry found on the facades of many crumbling Italian buildings or even the part-stone, part-stucco

walls of the gallery space itself. Milky white, warm yellow and red pools of paint are layered over the faux brickwork and then worked further by Værslev using solvents and turpentine. This process weakens the original coloration, leaving splashy, watermarked stains akin to graffiti after being jet-washed. The resulting paintings create pleasurable tension between order and disorder, pattern and individual mark-making. It is the final stage of a work’s development, rather than the performative, alluring gesture of adding paint to a canvas that determines the success of each piece: the level to which the material is subtracted out is what makes the work enticing. Instead of displaying all the paintings around the crypt’s perimeter, Værslev forces a selection of works into the gallery space, hanging them back-to-back on rusted scaffolding wedged between floor and ceiling. A modular wire-track lighting system of cheap halogen bulbs illuminates each painting, casting long, angular shadows across the grey tiled floor. In the case of one painting, a single bulb is hidden directly behind the canvas, silhouetting the marks on its surface and underlying stretcher and scaffold. This display solution points towards the other works on view – a series of glass paintings, each mounted on identical wooden supports and backlit by

warm, incandescent lightbulbs positioned a few centimetres from the paintings’ verso. These seven works, Untitled Marino Marini (Glass Painting) (2015), are made by spraying dense pools of pink, red and white spraypaint onto panes of frosted Plexiglas approximately the size of a car-door window. Pushing the analogy further, Værslev uses an ice-scraper to texture their delicate surfaces, and sometimes presses the still-wet panes of glass onto the discarded scrapings or other surfaces. These works cluster obediently to one side of the space and are mounted on wooden plinths, each specially constructed by a joiner who had worked on the display that houses the museum’s permanent collection. The bespoke stands, with their honey-grain wood, lacquered finish and gentle curves, appear less as plinths and more like contemporary church furniture, in incongruous contrast to the paintings they hold. Værslev’s Trolley and Glass paintings combine an awareness of the methods of production deployed by modernist abstract painters with material and formal references to their immediate architectural surroundings. Almost sitespecific, Inner Beauty inevitably foregrounds the architectural over the painterly. Indeed, the works meld so successfully with their setting that it’s hard to imagine them anywhere else. Sara Cluggish

Inner Beauty, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Museo Marino Marini, Florence

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Susan Philipsz Follow Me Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Villa Croce, and other venues, Genoa 10 September – 11 October Glitches, clicks and muffled resonances followed by short silences, as if an echolocation instrument was in operation, fill the frescoed rooms on the ground floor of Villa Croce. It feels like entering the belly of a whale or a submarine, ears suddenly alert. With Elettra (2015), Susan Philipsz stages an archaeology of connectivity by paying homage to Guglielmo Marconi (1874–1937), Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the telegraph. Elettra was the yacht that he turned into a floating scientific lab to transmit electromagnetic waves at magically long distances, from the Mediterranean to Sydney and Rio de Janeiro. After Marconi’s death, his ship was acquired by the Italian state, confiscated by the German navy during the Second World War and foundered off Zadar: only fragments now survive. Philipsz reconstructed Elettra by documenting all its dismembered parts, disseminated in museums in Santa Margherita Ligure, Venice, Trieste, Bologna, Abruzzo, and presenting these in large, framed black-and-white photographs, mutely leaning against the walls but vivified by the audioscape. In an accompanying publication, the artist describes the latter as an experiment ‘with sonar technology and underwater recordings from Gulf of Tigullio near Genoa, Leith harbour in Edinburgh’ – where the Elettra was built – ‘and Zadar on the Dalmatian coast

to create a multichannel sound installation that evokes the unseen and what exists below the surface’. Marconi believed that sounds propagate endlessly across the universe, and Philipsz seems here to be searching for traces of his presence, by navigating material and immaterial waves, as well as years of history. Jointly produced by the museum in collaboration with the Istanbul Biennale, Elettra demonstrates once more Philipsz’s power to enhance the experience of site-specificity. Villa Croce overlooks Genoa’s harbour and the same blue sea where Marconi performed his tests, so that the installation naturally connects present and past, here and elsewhere. The entire exhibition extends beyond the building: visitors can walk around the city to find other works (The Internationale, 1999; The Dead, 2000; Follow Me, 2004; Stay with Me, 2005; The Lost Reflection, 2007; and Lachrimae, 2010, all lent by Italian collections), installed in palaces, theatres and museums. Here is an extended exercise in listening, in isolating intimate spaces of attention within the urban fabric, its noisy soundtrack and busy streets. The historical centre of Genoa, and in particular Via Garibaldi (once Strada Nuova), along which the artist located most of her sound installations, is a unesco Heritage Site, famous for its Palazzi dei Rolli, a series of Mannerist follies where architecture

Elettra, 2015, b/w photograph, 150 × 200 cm. Courtesy the artist

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serves both as status symbol and fantasy, so that enchantments abound along the way. Memories do too, as is seemingly always the case with Philipsz, who almost forces you to chronicle accounts and viewpoints – maybe ‘hearpoints’ would be more appropriate? – in the first person. Experiencing the same works in different settings from the original ones also induces the side effect of comparing one’s past self to the current one, and measuring the distance. For me, the killer is Stay with Me, heard while quietly sitting on the wooden stalls of a richly gilded chapel in the ex-monastery of San Francesco di Castelletto, now a conservation laboratory. Philipsz chants Nothing Lasts Forever (1997) by Echo and the Bunnymen, Watch with Me (1994) by Joe Wise and Pyramid Song (2001) by Radiohead, singing a cappella – literally ‘like in a chapel’ – as she used to as a child with her sisters in the church choir. Though I had encountered this work in Turin in 2006, I was carried back to teenage years and their discomforts, while being moved in the here and now. Recently, I heard Philippe Parreno describe his exhibition-making as the possibility of creating a ‘dramaturgy of the ritual’. He has a valid point: good art can literally choreograph the way we walk around as well as our inner responses. In Genoa, I was grateful to follow. Barbara Casavecchia

xii Baltic Triennial cac, Vilnius 4 September – 18 October Discourses about the notion of the future flit between polar opposites: the risk-assessment prognostications of insurance companies at one end and individuals’ feelings of optimistic expectation at the other, for example; or policymakers’ agendas versus the indulgent pleasure of imaginative visions. In the latest Baltic Triennial, what ‘future’ means is appropriately interpreted, in multifarious and heterogeneous arrays. Curator Virginija Januškevičiūte here stages a controlled disorder of ideas and images, which point in various directions while being sensuous and ironic enough to cohere. Equally incisive is the architectural design of the exhibition, by Andreas Angelidakis (titled The Palace of Re-Invention, 2015), a visual and architectural aesthetics of the unfinished using leftover materials from the venue’s storage area. Black carpets hanging from the ceiling are used as black boxes to display videoworks, temporary wall structures are rearranged into mazelike partitions and crates fill up interstices and corridors. Exhibited works remain suspended between predictions of impending future(s) and ingenious narratives of times to come. Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas postulate new encounters between human and nonhuman knowledge in The Psychotropic House (2015), an installation

resembling a laboratory for complex structures and forms based on the organic growth of fungal organisms. In a video by Robertas Narkus (The Race, 2015), drone’s-eye-view footage combines with a techno soundtrack and a voiceover reciting a compilation of traditional proverbs. Each proverb is altered to include the word ‘drones’; as it relentlessly repeats, one feels literally surrounded by the devices. Darius Mikšys and Nick Bastis realised a Kickstarter campaign and a video (Augmented Sound, 2015) to promote a smartphone app that alters the output of a car’s sound system according to the inertial forces applied on the car: you turn left and the sound floats to the right, you turn right and it floats to the left. Margarida Mendes and Jennifer Teets organised a series of public talks over the telephone (The World in Which We Occur, 2014–) around issues such as climate change and molecular colonialism. Visitors can listen to these lectures on a phone resting on top of a massive wooden staircase: it feels like a leap back in time, to when you’d pick up the landline phone and your mum would be already speaking on the line in the other room. In the introduction to her book The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Ursula K. Le Guin sketched out a distinction between futurologists and sci-fi writers: ‘Prediction is the business of prophets,

clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.’ Insofar as, for Le Guin, lying means to describe the present by means of preposterous images, symbols and metaphors, lying is artists’ business as well. In this sense, the xii Baltic Triennial seems to have reached a seductive balance between predictions about the future and narratives that use the future to speak about the present. An additional work, or rather a series of works, should be mentioned here, as it sums up the ambiguity of this balance, between prediction and narrative invention: Sociological Record (1978–90), a series of photographs that Zofia Rydet produced over the span of 12 years. Declaring, perhaps with provocative hyperbole, that certain types of artist (from well-known professionals to amateurs and folk artists) risked becoming, to quote the exhibition booklet, ‘extinct’, she began photographing them in their apartments, accumulating around 5,000 photographs, shot in black and white and strongly flash-lit. Whether she was right and these artists are on the verge of extinction, or whether these photographs are a metaphoric comment on a permanent state of precariousness, might be difficult to decide today because such a wipeout has not yet took place. Let’s keep it in mind for the future. Michelangelo Corsaro

Andreas Angelidakis, The Palace of Re-Invention (detail), 2015. Photo: Andrej Vasilenko. Courtesy the artist

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6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art Pavilion No.1, vdnkh, Moscow 22 September – 1 October Desperate times often call for desperate measures, the curator of the 6th Moscow Biennale must have thought. When Bart De Baere, director of Antwerp’s m hka, handed in his final proposal in November 2014 for an ambitious show in the Manege, the exhibition hall near the Kremlin where the previous biennale took place, he heard to his surprise that the venue would now be used for other purposes – officially on the demand of Vladimir Putin himself. In addition, with the fall of the rouble, De Baere saw his budget evaporate to around a third of what it originally was. Instead of dropping the project, however, De Baere decided to proceed by a radical route: by making a biennale that didn’t present existing pieces and newly commissioned works for months on end, instead adopting a festivallike model that only lasted ten days. The resulting artistic-social laboratory, involving talks, debates and performances, focused on the question How to Gather? – more of an ephemeral meeting place than a typical biennale. Hence it made sense to include two fellow curators – Nicolaus Schafhausen and Defne Ayas – while also inviting lecturers from diverse domains, such as Greece’s controversial former finance minister Yanis Varoufakis and Maya Van

Leemput, an academic specialising in future studies, to tackle the biennale’s themes. Of course there were still artworks on view, mostly made in situ in front of a live audience (also a clever way of avoiding logistical costs). So when I entered Pavilion No. 1 of the vdnkh – a huge 1953 pavilion complex, a kind of a Giardini-in-overdrive of Soviet aesthetics – Chinese artist Qiu Zhijie was working on a huge mural depicting the map of the continentspanning region of Eurasia (a contested notion in Putin’s Russia, since it encompasses an east and west beyond Russia’s borders). Fabrice Hyber, meanwhile, was making portraits of visitors in the style of the painters of Montmartre, using crude oil from Dagestan instead of watercolour. The moment he spent with each model was also a pretext for dialoguing with locals: the School of Montmartre plus relational aesthetics, if you like. Honoré ’O used each day of the biennale to tackle one of the Ten Commandments by means of performances, films and installations. During my visit (on the second day) he gave himself up to idleness, following the biblical commandment not to make ‘any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above’. The performative aspect made every visit to the biennale a different experience. At one point,

Taus Makhacheva, performance, 2015. Courtesy the 6th Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art

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I bumped into a movable mirror wall and rail used by artist Leon Kahane and his ballet teacher for his daily 2pm class. The same spot – the pavilion’s central hall crowned with a communist star – was later the setting for a performance by Taus Makhacheva that was equally embedded in Soviet tradition. Dressed in tight black clothing, a group of acrobats formed a human pyramid while holding aloft copies of Social Realist paintings (sourced from the Dagestan Museum of Fine Arts), in order to physically ‘activate’ that heritage. Some hours later, one could discern a classical orchestra playing through holes in the wall, revealing only their arms and legs: an orchestra as seen through glory holes, if you want, in a work by Gabriel Lester. Live music, performances, acrobatics… the biennale was not the kind of cerebral, dry event one might have initially feared. Rather, the curators managed to find a clever and at times poetic solution to practical issues, while reconsidering the biennial format and skirting the trap of art-as-commodity. The result was one big work-in-progress, a lively meeting place that might have been over in a flash, but lives on in a website, a book, a film by Ho Tzu Nyen and, perhaps most importantly, the imagination. Sam Steverlynck

Merlin Carpenter Midcareer Paintings Kunsthalle Bern 19 September – 1 November Merlin Carpenter’s Midcareer Paintings tests how much bunkum an art institution can sustain. Twenty-two of these ‘paintings’ are displayed in the Kunsthalle Bern’s seven galleries; each one is 234 by 198.5 centimetres, each a brownish packing blanket made from recycled fibres mounted on a stretcher. They are named after the seven commercial galleries that the British artist works with, each gallery of the Kunsthalle occupied by one dealer. Thus the entrance features three iterations of Courtesy Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York (all works post-dated 2016), the central gallery contains five repetitions of Courtesy Simon Lee Gallery, London and two Courtesy Formalist Sidewalk Poetry Club, Miami are relegated to the basement. There’s just one more element to the show – according to the work list, the works are not for sale. Carpenter joins the rear of a century’s worth of artists trying to divine what art amounts to and why we look at it; this makes the presentation more than the sum of its meagre parts. The artist has long been illuminating corners that could hide artistic aura to see if the art

establishment and the art market can cope with demystified objects. What makes art art, how is it valued and for whom? In the past Carpenter’s Marxist investigation of creative industries has laid bare the networks of influence in the artworld. In this exhibition the focus seems to be price: he has avoided almost any kind of skilled production and used materials with scant intrinsic value, yet by stating that the works are not available, he articulates the possibility of sales – generally invisible in institutional settings – and future value based on external, contextual factors, such as prestige. In truth we know that the art market can cope very well with both demystified and dematerialised art, so Carpenter’s is a safe bet; a whiff of the unattainable is likely to make any further works in the series even more liable to speculation. But what if buying is not on the agenda, and we overlook how the exchange of information –taking place by virtue of this exhibition – is ultimately serving the market? If we imagine the Kunsthalle could be a place apart from

commerce, what does Carpenter offer the visitor? There is the artist’s striptease, as one by one he removes the elements of quality or skill that might justify his occupation of this space, then brazens it out when bereft of anything but a concept. The funny thing is that the viewer still plays a part in the exercise. We actualise the naked emperor’s parade as we walk through the galleries, looking from afar, from close up, considering the building and the idea. We want to see something and we find it. From a distance, brightly coloured threads make impressionistic strokes on the blanket canvases; close at hand, the dense tumult of woven materials has the look of compressed Abstract Expressionism. Art’s durable history of the visible and the invisible is edifice enough to withstand Carpenter’s interrogation, and indeed he reaffirms the freedom offered by this method of presenting and looking at pictures. Whether Carpenter can challenge how art is exchanged – and whether an artist who works with seven galleries really wants to – is another question. Aoife Rosenmeyer

Midcareer Paintings, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Gunnar Meier. Courtesy the artist

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Liquid Architecture 2015 Various venues, Australia January–October Goethe called music liquid architecture. For 16 years, this denomination has provided the title for Australia’s largest sonic arts festival. Its second edition under new directorship bypassed the festival logic in favour of a continuous programme with a culmination of events touring from Melbourne to Sydney, Brisbane and Perth during the months of September and October. The statement for this year’s programme in Melbourne, ‘Capitalist Surrealism’, read as if Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and the Invisible Committee had joined forces. Referencing artists as creative entrepreneurs, accelerationist horizons and algorithmic exploitations, the curators wrote: ‘Listening can enable us to sound unconscious capital.’ The subject scores high on the discursive agenda in Australia as cities undergo rapid ‘development’ (read gentrification). The programme nestled up to sonic theorist Seth Kim-Cohen’s noncochlear approach to sound in that it did not deny auditory dimensions, but reached beyond to the interactions involved in the making of sound and its contextual perception. The majority of works were performances, often involving spoken words, rather than installations playing sound-in-itself from speakers for the audience’s discrete perception.

Sean Dockray’s contribution to an evening of lecture performances at the National Gallery of Victoria used voice recognition software to create text in a Google Doc. While he explained how data is collected and analysed to stochastically assemble more or less meaningful phrases, the audience observed how Dockray’s own voice became part of the same big data machine. Inevitable misunderstandings between voice and software formed funny slips: Karl Marx, an economist, became Karl Marx, a communist. Two nights later, Jennifer Walshe’s performance The Total Mountain (2014) hyperbolised the Internet as externalisation of our emotions and memories, which – as Douglas Coupland once put it – have become ‘mashable, stealable and tinkerable’. Walshe performed in front of a projection featuring SoundCloud scrub bars, Facebook status updates and Twitter feeds, alongside clips of the artist in various disguises, resulting in a succession of schizophrenic duets. Two digital avatars of the artist – one bearded and the other a deformed tiger – listed the percentages of daily Internet-induced versus organic memories. Walshe’s precise performance spoke of and simultaneously evoked stimulation overload, intersected with a silent short film introduced by the hashtags #arbus and

Frances Barrett, Curator, 2015, 24-hour performance. Photo: Keelan O’Hehir. Courtesy Liquid Architecture 2015

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#experimental, and accompanied by vocal hissing sounds. Artist-run project space Blindside dedicated an exhibition to musician Antony Riddell, whose balance and speech were affected after an accident, leaving – in the artist’s words – “fingerprints on the surface of the brain”. Drawings of germs and pupae were shown alongside sci-fi stories of alien vertebrates and noise pieces titled Amoeba Rice (1988) and Strange Eggs in Even Stranger Containers (1991). Along these lines, Richard Dawson performed his wonderfully abrasive community ritual songs in the whispering gallery of Mission to Seafarers, a peculiar hybrid between snooker bar and Salvation Army hq. Liquid Architecture was rounded off with a focus on feminist methodologies, involving a 24-hour performance of Frances Barrett entrusting herself into the care of her curators, and with sound researcher Frances Dyson’s talk on echoes and amplification through the people’s microphone during Occupy, and law scholar James Parker’s lecture on thanato-sonics and acoustic jurisprudence (in Sydney and Brisbane). Even though explicit in its theme and with some works tapping into didactic overkill, Liquid Architecture succeeded in conveying the political dimensions of sound amidst the logic of capital. Stefanie Hessler

Gianni Colombo The Body and the Space Robilant + Voena, London 2 October – 20 November In the best of his work, Gianni Colombo makes the viewer feel like a cross between drug taker, space explorer and laboratory test rat. Such is the case here when you enter his Topoestesia – Tre Zone Contigue (Itinerario Programmato) (1965–70). It’s a large black box containing a darkened three-corridor tunnel lined on every face with a seemingly rational grid of luminous green elastic. It’s like you’re in an early videogame or on the set of Tron (1982). And then it changes. As motors pull the elastic, distorting the grid, surfaces seems to slope, your perception of the space’s carefully articulated and apparently fixed geometry and your position within it becomes unhinged, and you’re somewhere else entirely: given the presence of flashing blue and red lights, a giddy disco perhaps. More importantly, a space you thought was fixed and measured now seems to be anything but that. And it’s a weirdly liberating experience. That experience continues via several wall works from Colombo’s Spazio Elastico series

of the 1960s and 70s, elastic geometries that are either mutated by motors or by viewers rearranging them (almost as if to animate the artist’s drawings), but in these examples in a less all-over and more educational way, where you’re more fully conscious of the mechanics Colombo deploys or of the ways in which the artwork is merely a cipher for a dialogue between their creator and their viewer (although with Colombo’s work you feel a bit more a part of it than that word implies). Meanwhile works like Cromostruttura (1970) and Sismostruttura (1962) focus on the transformational effects of light and colour. Intriguingly, in the midst of this an early (and static) ceramic work (Vocale con Accento, 1957), which in another context (particularly with the current craze for ceramics in art) might have been an art-historical curio or treasure, seems lumpen and intert. There’s little doubt on the evidence here that Colombo (who died in 1993) was a pioneer, both in the way in which he moved kinetic art into the realm of kinetic installations and for

the crucial manner in which perceptual psychology and audience participation (way before voguish theories such as relational aesthetics) lay at the heart of his research. It’s bizarre to think that this is Colombo’s first one-man show in Britain. And yet it’s hard not to see some of the artist’s output as stranded between the precise yet fluid concepts behind them and art history’s (and art collecting’s) obsession with preservation. Most notably when witnessing the gallery’s paranoia when some of the works – with their fragile and cranky original motors – are turned on, however briefly. And perhaps there’s a sense that Colombo’s often noisy motors and mechanical pulleys have been somewhat surpassed in a digital, virtual age. But one look at the videowork (a collaboration with Vincenzo Agnetti) Vobulazione e Bieloquenza Neg (Wobulation and Bieloquence Neg, 1970), with its floating, morphing, flickering geometries, and you’re reminded that in many ways Colombo’s work anticipates that as well. Mark Rappolt

Topoestesia – tre zone contigue (itinerario programmato), 1965–70 (installation view). Courtesy Robilant + Voena, London

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Kara Walker Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First Victoria Miro, Wharf Road, London 1 October – 7 November It’s hard not to think about the racial upheaval that recently escalated in the United States when one visits Kara Walker’s new show, Go to Hell or Atlanta, Whichever Comes First. In the main upper gallery, one is greeted by a vast black-and-white photograph of Stone Mountain, Georgia (made in collaboration with photographer Ari Marcopoulos), a site claimed by the Ku Klux Klan as their spiritual birthplace in 1915, and onto whose rock face was later carved the Confederate Memorial, a huge bas-relief of three mounted Civil War leaders from the South (with all the associations of racism, slavery and white supremacy this history entails). The carving’s continuing existence has been the subject of heated debate, most recently since the Charleston shooting of ten African-American churchgoers last June by a white man. Applied as wallpaper to the whole surface of one side of the gallery, it looms over the visitor as an inescapable presence throughout the show and acts as a starting point for Walker’s personal exploration of the history of racism in America and the myths of nationbuilding, and how these often distorted narratives feed into contemporary racial politics. In a series of some 40 darkly humorous penciland-watercolour drawings, Walker reinvents

Stone Mountain by projecting various fantasies still associated with the site, such as burning crosses and black men on the stake, reimagining the bas-relief with racist and fascist slogans, or as a memorial to Dylan Roof, the man who confessed to the Charleston murders. Walker’s historical farce takes full form in 40 Acres of Mule (all works 2015), a large, carnivalesque charcoal-on-paper triptych hanging on the other side of the gallery, where rearing mules, black and white men, and black women, all with penises, are depicted chaotically riding one another in the midst of swords and money bags, a Confederate flag and fading Ku Klux Klan figures laughing in the background. The cartoonish style of the characters, who seem straight out of a Civil War comic book, is made even more apparent in The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin, a striking example of Walker’s cutout silhouette tableaux, which unfolds on the adjacent gallery wall like a grotesque danse macabre. The series of 12 black-and-white drawings in the lower gallery, Tell Me Your Thoughts on Police Brutality Miss ‘Spank Me Harder’, adopts a less comic and more realist style to depict violent scenarios of abuse of black men and

The Jubilant Martyrs of Obsolescence and Ruin, 2015, cut paper on wall, 420 × 1775 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London

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women, which resonates with recent cases of police violence that have led to riots and unrest in the us (An Unarmed Black Man brings to mind the Ferguson killing of an unarmed eighteen-year-old African American by a police officer). Members of a riot squad also seem to populate the three large Four Idioms on Negro Art, which depict darkly lit scenes of an orgy and/or brutal encounters painted in artistic styles often associated with ‘low art’ (primitivism, graffiti and folk art), adding yet another satirical point to her agile deconstruction of racial stereotyping. Although at times very disturbing, there is something almost cathartic about the grotesque intensity of Walker’s fables, where tales of violence, sex and death are pushed to the point of caricature. Intertwining references to historical and contemporary events with fantasised elements, these nightmarish visions make it hard to draw the line between reality and fiction – or hell and Atlanta. But then, the image of the Ku Klux Klan rally planned this November at Stone Mountain to contest the erection of a ‘Freedom Bell’ in honour of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr, atop the hill might leave one wondering too. Louise Darblay

Willem Weismann Alphabet Soup The Nunnery, London 2 October – 20 December To produce a warm and fuzzy feeling, the Dutch artist Willem Weismann named this show of 12 new paintings, which mostly depict teenage girls reading, after a childhood dish. In its spirit, plenty about confusion, youth and language swirl in the works’ Day-Glo broth. You might slurp them up as a) considering reading and painting as twin states of reverie; b) a witty but melancholic reflection on the era of Weismann’s youth (the 1980s to 90s) as the last analogue decades (check The Green Ray, 2015, with its lysergic sunset scene that will induce bittersweet déjà vu in viewers familiar with the conclusion of Rohmer’s 1986 film Le Rayon Vert); or c) a mock-goofy celebration of ‘the reading girl’ as an angelic presence in the history of painting, one whose devotees include Vermeer, Corot and Gerhard Richter. That’s before you can even footnote the waves of Magritte-like weirdness created by Weismann’s obscuring the faces of his subjects in the wings of their books, or consider how the artificial exuberance of all the colours – the lava-lamp orange, AstroTurf green and

lollipop red – suggest their maker is a child peaking on a Ritalin-and-ice-cream speedball. Weismann isn’t addicted to his sugary palette; four paintings are black as a goth’s bedchamber, showing apocalyptic marshes alongside some burned books. With their balloon animal silhouettes, these scenes aren’t scary but simulate conditions within a fogged-out imagination struggling over this term’s text. Wherever it appears, the teen physique – all acned skin like scorched bacon and hair flowing in treacly coils – is late Guston with an extra Ren & Stimpy (1991–5) glow, which feels, for once, like an accurate way of conjuring the body during the awkward age. Meanwhile a photocopier, reigning matronlike over empty chairs and desks and turning a corner of the gallery’s main room into a creepy approximation of an abandoned classroom, reproduces fragments of a painting titled The Reader. The work becomes a voyeur’s jigsaw puzzle: an abstracted shot of her mouth here mixed with a disconnected expanse of plaid there. The most tantalising enigma of them

all, this is also a whip-smart lesson in encouraging peculiar longing and revealing how to read is also a way to disappear. If there is a mournful subtext rumbling through Weismann’s works, it relates to the supposed loss of that capacity for real daydreaming or solitude in our contemporary maelstrom of data and distraction, but such glum thinking is difficult to square with the woozy joy on offer. (Was reading, still the most powerful breed of waking dream commercially available, necessarily the favourite narcotic for an average kid in the 1990s? Weismann has been hanging out with Lisa Simpson too much.) Nostalgia can’t take all the credit for a world where the sky is wallpaper waiting to be unfurled and the sun is green not only à la Rohmer film but also Jules Verne’s adventure novel Le Rayon Vert (1882) – today’s chapter is on the desks. Amid such delights the bedazzled response, scrawled in the margins of your book, or discovered floating in your soup, can only be ‘H-U-H?’ Charlie Fox

The Green Ray, 2015, oil on canvas, 105 × 85 cm. Courtesy Bow Arts, London

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William Kentridge More Sweetly Play the Dance Marian Goodman Gallery, London 11 September – 24 October Most gallery-goers have had a Kentridge moment, spellbound by his drawings, films and installations that treat History as a dream from which we never awake. I would bet most often that moment would be, as it was for me, watching one of his Drawings for Projection (1989–2011), the well-known series of animations made from layered charcoal and pastel drawings that veer between floaty allegory and harsh directness in attempting to come to grips with modern-day South Africa. Crucially, the method carried the message, the erased lines of charcoal still visible as the drawing struggled to change, the animation carrying a homemade honesty that also spoke silently about how memory and meaning accrue. The Kentridge moment is strongest the first time; there’s a constancy to his shadow plays, cartoonish liveaction videos and, yes, the operas he’s directed, as they continue to pick at the threads of the past, to layer and tangle them. Kentridge is assured at finding, again and again, the tragicomic note of unrooted jumping back and forth that seems to define our contemporary understanding of history. And while it’s never the wrong note, it just always feels like the same note. Dictionaries and maps form the backdrops for the drawings and video that make up half

of his solo exhibition More Sweetly Play the Dance. Large ink drawings of flowers and vegetables sweep up across dozens of thin pages of definitions in English and Chinese, one two-metrehigh image of a lily slanting over parts of the ‘S’ section (from ‘snake buzzard’ to ‘snuff box’). Empty slogans abound over the vegetal still lifes and spill on other pages across the walls: ‘Hope for the clean slate’, ‘Eat bitterness’, ‘Use the wind to rescue speech’. This is Kentridge in darkly ironic humanist mode, jumping between nods to Paris’s Commune of 1871 and demonstrations of 1968, events from Mao’s Cultural Revolution and back to protests in Johannesburg. Smudging between these upheavals, he seems to suggest that all revolutions are merely an attempt to shift who is supplying the definitions and giving the imperatives. In the upstairs gallery, an unlikely procession of brass bands, ambiguous protesters, politicians, bureaucrats and cowed lackeys pulling along a chorus line of dancing skeletons march across a grey landscape. The massive eight-screen video More Sweetly Play the Dance (2015) combines live action and animation footage to make a jaunty, musical merging of carnival, funeral, protest and mass exodus.

It’s slow and sad, everyone worn and a bit manic, presented to a tune almost forcibly upbeat; there’s a sense that this is the parade of life, as fun as it gets. The expanse of another pan-continental gesture, though, starts to wear a bit. The video was originally commissioned for this year’s Lichtsicht projection biennial, an outdoor screening event in the German spa town of Bad Rothenfelde, and it bears the marks of being a biennial commission: oversize, overstated, unambiguous while still being unspecific. Kentridge’s merging of histories begins to feel less like an entangling of related events and more like a simplification of situations. In his Drawings for Projection, the sense of history being made, moment by moment by each of us, is palpable. Here, while the Kentridge note remains, our role in all this seems to have shifted. Both videos in this show are ostensibly inviting, surrounding the audience with lifesize figures dancing or gesturing frantically; but as one of the slogans appearing in Notes Towards a Model Opera (2015) states, ‘The greater the hardship, the greater the hardship.’ We are cast as spectators to a history that is already written and to which we must, however jauntily, resign ourselves. Chris Fite-Wassilak

More Sweetly Play the Dance, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Stephen White. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, London, New York & Paris

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Ai Weiwei Royal Academy of Arts, London 19 September – 13 December Ai Weiwei is often at his most affecting when all his different concerns – activism, craftsmanship, cultural history, materials, architecture and minimalism – combine in a single work, as in Straight (2008–12), made from 90 tons of twisted metal rods, reclaimed from the rubble of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, in which badly built schools contributed to the huge number of student deaths. Hammered straight and laid out in alignment, the rods, now a vast rectangular floor installation of undulating layers, are shown with the self-explanatory wall work Names of the Student Earthquake Victims Found by the Citizens’ Investigation (2008–11). It’s by far the most poignant room in this first major survey of the Chinese artist’s work in a public uk institution. The background to many of the works may be the Chinese state’s lack of regard for and repression of certain freedoms of its citizens, but this exhibition also has a sense of celebration. The long-awaited return of the artist’s passport following his own 81-day incarceration and interrogation in 2011 (during which time

Ai was made an honorary ra) meant that, for the first time in years, the artist was able to attend one of his own openings. Ai’s art, however, does have its detractors, critical of what they view as ‘one-liner’ ideas, and uneasy that the focus for his activism is increasingly himself. I don’t have a problem with the simplicity of works like Straight. Even the more repetitive ideas – the many sculptures in wood, aluminium and porcelain that reference China’s geographical outline, for example, are as much about form and materials as they are about containment and control. And it’s this combination of accessible politics and material aesthetics that contributes to Ai’s wide public appeal. I’m less sure about how I feel about the works that are most directly about Ai himself. Among the many large-scale installations – the reconfigured Qing Dynasty furniture and the composites of dead trees – is s.a.c.r.e.d. (2012), six model recreations of the cell in which Ai was held during his 2011 imprisonment (first seen in Sant’Antonin church during the 2013 Venice Biennale), each containing realistic scenes

depicting aspects of his strict routine, endured under the intrusive scrutiny of two ever-present guards. In the ra these works are surrounded by Ai’s blingy wallpaper design of gold handcuffs, surveillance cameras and Twitter logos. Not to deny the terrifying and humiliating ordeal that Ai was subjected to, nor the no-doubt-cathartic impact of making the work, but the invitation, in the packed ra galleries, to queue up and peer in at these tableaux has a troubling funfair association. In Straight the art-historical association in terms of form and materials could be Carl Andre. But the wallpaper is more reminiscent of Andy Warhol, a more acknowledged reference for the artist. In December there’ll be an opportunity to consider this relationship in greater depth when Australia’s National Gallery of Victoria opens an exhibition comparing the two artists, including their use of selfpromotion, media and medium. The ra show is a timely celebration, but the Warhol pairing may prove the more interesting context. Helen Sumpter

Free Speech Puzzle, 2014, hand painted porcelain in the Qing dynasty imperial style, 51 x 41 × 1 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Ai Weiwei Studio

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Last Year’s Snow: The Hungarian Neo-Avant-Garde in the 1970s & 80s Austin / Desmond Fine Art, London 9 October – 13 November Think of Hungarian artists and chances are it’s names like László Moholy-Nagy or the photographers Brassaï and Robert Capa that spring to mind – all modernists who rose to prominence between the wars, and who were shaped by a Hungary whose intellectual outlook was international. Postwar Hungary, by contrast, was utterly different, a Soviet satellite whose underground artists were virtually unknown in the West. It’s this art-historical lacuna that Last Year’s Snow fascinatingly addresses, featuring ten of these artists, part of the so-called neoavant-garde that emerged during the late 1960s, forming a radical alternative to officially sanctioned art. What’s immediately striking, however, is how little of their work is overtly political. Rather, the pieces divide roughly into two main types. On the one hand, there are works of pure formalist experimentation – such as Relief Berlin (1983) by György Jovánovics, a plaster cast of shallow, abstract shapes whose delicate surface has been punched through to create a deeper, more violent indentation; or the photographs and photograms of Dóra Maurer, today probably the best-known of the group (she featured in the Whitechapel Gallery’s recent Adventures of the Black Square show, for instance), in which

various mathematical permutations of gridlike, angled panels are bathed in beams of light. The other type of work, taking in the majority of pieces, is conceptual – but conceptualism mostly of a particular sort, in what might be called a poetical-whimsical mode. The single piece that best encapsulates the lighthearted, vaguely winsome tone is Géza Perneczky’s Art Bubble (1972), a photograph of a performance in which the nearby word ‘art’ is reflected in blown soap bubbles, in such a way that it appears as if the word is contained within them. The implications are clear – that art is something pristinely beautiful and fugitive, even magical; yet also something that exists within its own little world, cut off from real-life concerns. A favourite tactic, indeed, is for works to refer back to themselves or their authors’ actions. Endre Tót’s photographs are a bit like that old graffiti joke: ‘Why are you reading this?’ I’m glad if I can hold this in my hand (Geneva) (1976) – part of a series based around statements beginning I’m glad if… – shows the artist bearing a placard with the titular sentence; while Nobody saw me writing this (Geneva) (1976) similarly depicts its message scrawled on a wall. The works of the late Miklós Erdély, too, are often about closed circuits of meaning. In the photo-sequence Relaxation

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(Work) (1983), nails get hammered which then function as hooks to hang the hammer. And even more prosaic is Klein-Jug (1976), a photograph of a type of glass vessel that loops around on itself to form a single continuous surface. That’s not to say that politics never comes into things. There’s identity politics, for one thing, in Katalin Ladik’s Poemask (1982) photosequences depicting her spray-painting her own face like a sort of canvas. And there are other occasional pieces, mainly following neighbouring Czechoslovakia’s ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968, that engage in social commentary. Yet even here, direct criticism is couched, presumably out of necessity, in tones of wistfulness or irony. The sealed, battered vacuum flask in Erdély’s Last Year’s Snow (1970) is primarily a Piero Manzoni-like conceptual gesture, for instance, but with a subtle, background hint of freezing and thawing as a metaphor for state control. In the end, it’s fitting that perhaps the most directly political work is also, in purely objective terms, the most mute and inscrutable: Tamás Szentjóby’s Czechoslovak Radio (1968 /2015), which refers to Czech reformists parodically protesting the banning of radio by carrying around joke painted bricks; but which is also, at the same time, simply a brick. Gabriel Coxhead

Voces: Latin American Photography 1980–2015 Michael Hoppen Gallery, London 10 October – 9 January Although the title of this exhibition may suggest a comprehensive survey of photographic practices, Voces is in fact a modest group show that nonetheless includes an interesting selection of artists whose works are virtually unknown in the uk. Among these, there are both experienced names whose contributions to artistic experimentation are yet to be acknowledged internationally and upcoming practitioners, all of whom deal with photography beyond its traditional conventions. Brazilian Rosângela Rennó, for instance, works mainly with images appropriated from public and private photographic archives that are recontextualised into films, installations and objects. Rennó, whose trajectory dates back to the beginning of the 1990s, is renowned for her investigations into the conditions and ethics of image production in different contexts, having delved into prison records, family albums or photographs of the workers recruited for the construction of Brasília during the 1950s, to name just a few examples. Here she is represented by pieces that are less politically oriented and more concerned with the nature of the photographic image. The two large wall works from the 2014 Insólidos series are composed of found black-andwhite images of domestic settings printed on translucent organza sheets. Hanging vertically, the same images are superimposed in different orders, each time revealing or obscuring certain elements. Suspended between the layers of fabric are real objects that refer to these photographs – a lightbulb or a spool of thread – but these are also partially obscured. The spectral quality of

these works seems to evoke the way our memory operates, an ever-evolving process where certain images gain momentary clarity while coexisting with blurred reminiscences. The use of appropriated photographic material is also a prominent feature in the work of younger artists. In his series Lonesome Encounter with Melancholic Corpses (2011), Chilean Nicolás Franco documents film stills covered with fragments of plastic, creating an elegant and uncanny sequence of black-and-white images that resonate with the atmosphere of Luis Buñuel’s movies – one of the main references in the series. A completely different approach is taken by Jonathan Hernandez in his Vulnerabilia works (2002–). The Mexican artist has been systematically collecting and cataloguing thousands of photographs from newspapers, images that bombard us on a daily basis and are easily forgotten and disposable. Hernandez eliminates any textual reference to these images and groups them together according to subject, potentialising their dramatic effect. Some subjects are more predictable than others, such as the collection of recent worldwide demonstrations (Vulnerabilia (demonstrations), 2008–10), but the group formed by political leaders photographed while in transit in their official cars (Vulnerabilia (interiores), 2013) is both revealing of a less obvious photojournalistic trope and of certain traces of these politicians’ characters not often captured during public appearances. Also on display are Leonora Vicuña’s handpainted photographs of Chilean nightlife taken during the dictatorship period, when bars and clubs remained one of the few spaces for free

self-expression. These are candid, if slightly kitsch images that document a different side of daily life under a brutal regime. Fellow Chilean Andrés Durán, on his turn, seems overrepresented by too many works from his series Edited Monument (2014), a sort of one-liner where he digitally intervenes on images of statues of national heroes scattered across the streets of Santiago. In these images, the portrayed subjects are almost entirely enveloped by a section of the plinth; only their arms or legs stick pathetically out of the stone blocks. The exhibition is also an opportunity to see the work of Anna Bella Geiger, one of the key figures in Brazilian conceptualism. The eightytwo-year-old, who is still active, has used photography as one of many other mediums in a practice that spans more than six decades. On view are two scroll-like objects from her Rrolos (2011) series that combine photo serigraphy, metal and a blue pigment allegedly gifted from fellow artist Yves Klein. These are a more recent take on the idea of geographical borders that has permeated much of her practice, mostly in relation to the ideological dimension of cartographic representation and the notion of centre and periphery. Geiger also shows an earlier work titled Camouflage (1980), a sequence of five photographs where an anteater – one of Brazil’s native species – is seen climbing on the artist’s shoulder as she stands in the middle of a jungle with her back to the camera. In the last image, the animal is gone and her hair and clothes have camouflaged into the colour of its fur, evoking the idea of Brazilian identity and communion with nature. Kiki Mazzucchelli

Leonora Vicuña, Jugadores, Bar de pescadores, Horcón, Chile, 1979–2008. Courtesy the artist

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Zhang Ding Enter the Dragon Institute of Contemporary Arts, London 12–25 October Sound leaves behind a residue. It sticks to the walls and the furniture, making the air ‘leaden and angry’. Such is the hypothesis of J.G. Ballard’s 1960 short story ‘The Sound Sweep’, about the relationship between an ageing opera singer and Mangon, the mute operator of a ‘sonovac’, a machine for hoovering up all this leftover sound-stuff. Stepping into the ica’s theatre and beholding the four large planes of sound-absorbent material on the walls, I was reminded of Mangon and his sonovac. After two weeks of this, what residues might they have absorbed? What would the air feel like? These four corklike boards aside, Zhang Ding’s installation rendered every surface in the room reflective. Inspired by the final scene of Enter the Dragon (1973), in which Bruce Lee fights his adversary, Han, in a disorientating room full of mirrors, the theatre looked like a cross between a coked-up 1970s supper club and a carnival funhouse. At each end of the hall, four big, mirrored obelisks rotated asynchronously. Behind them, a performance stage. Each night, for two weeks, 26 musical acts faced off in a series of quasi-adversarial musical

performances. Two groups a night, at either end of the room. They played sometimes together; sometimes taking turns. But always the gigs seemed to be determined at least as much by the setup and the layout of the room as by the usual repertoire of the performers in question. Selected partly from the artist’s own wishlist, partly by open call, the bands represented a broad swathe of contemporary music, from the widescreen dubstep of Amnesia Scanner to the frantic, psychedelic postpunk of Bo Ningen via the more ruminative, processoriented sounds of Rosen (aka Rachael Melanson). With bands given only a few minutes on the day of the performance to rehearse their interactions, the range of responses to the situation was equally varied. One day, Casual Sect and Chrononautz took relatively discrete turns, track by track. A week later, Moon Zero and Diaphragm Failure issued an almost permanent volley of improvised sound back and forth, unrelenting. There were moments when I wished the groups had been given longer to plan their dialogues, but on reflection I think that would

Zhang Ding: Enter the Dragon, 2015 (installation view, ica, London). Courtesy k11 Art Foundation, Hong Kong

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have ruined the whole Lee vs Han spirit of the thing. This was an experiment, after all. Presented with a set of conditions, how would the subjects respond? Given the confrontational setup, it is perhaps unsurprising that once the opposing players did dive in and start playing together, a tendency towards escalation tended to set in. Several of the concerts I saw faced rock bands against electronic artists. White noise and feedback seemed to be the easiest place for them to meet in the middle. It then quickly became a battle for full-spectrum dominance. There were subtler exceptions: on the penultimate day, Cam Deas’s swirling modular electronics were interleaved with a montage of voices (broadcast from the laptop of Natasha Trotman) reciting their early memories to haunting effect. But even at its most brutal, these concerts were never dull. Buffeted by waves of noise from each side, with stage spots glistening into infinity through a multitude of reflective surfaces, the situation constantly highlighted the physicality of light and sound as wave phenomena moving through space. Robert Barry

The Gap: Selected Abstract Art from Belgium Parasol Unit, London 9 September – 6 December Selected by Belgian painter Luc Tuymans, The Gap could appear as something of a niche artworld Venn diagram subset – art by Belgian artists who work in what could be called an ‘abstract’ mode, and who can be divided between those working now and those working in a period somewhere between the 1950s and the 1970s – perhaps the first ‘gap’ declared by the show’s title. Tuymans might be feted for his laconic, ironising everyday take on figurative painting, but in curating a show of apparently nonfigurative work, the painter plays on how representation is, in its most fundamental definition, a practice of drawing attention to something through something else. And what slinks, filters and bleeds through these at-first-glance hermetic works is not the old chestnut of abstract-versus-representational, but something bigger – the nature of realism. Many of the works Tuymans has assembled point outwards, so to speak. Raoul de Keyser’s Zevende Linnen Doos (1971), a canvas-stretched standing rectangular slab, mostly a turf-green with a thick white frame, like goalposts, echoes the formal codes of the football pitch. It’s not some trite homage to the national game, but makes the point that all visual forms can’t help but exist in a context – cultural, social, urban. Things are intertwined. That intertwining is most succinctly articulated in the hangingmirror Column (2015) by Carla Arocha and

Stéphane Schraenen: open frames of mirrored Perspex are suspended around a supporting pillar in the gallery, while we and the surrounding gallery are broken into a thousand fragmented reflections. Arocha and Schraenen’s Column surrounds a pillar that is itself part of a wall painting (Transition, 2015) by Philippe Van Snick, wherein the painted pillar corresponds to the colours used in the two rectangular elements painted on a nearby wall. Van Snick’s Transition makes the deft but forceful point that how we see real things and representations is relational – the ‘abstract’ field suddenly becomes the ‘representation’ of the column, by dint of proximity. Similarly, Pieter Vermeersch’s painting Untitled (2015), a delicately tonal gradation, plays a strange trick, making one wonder if the tonal shift is in fact due to the lighting conditions in the gallery. The realisation that Vermeersch’s painting might not achieve this effect in different conditions plays havoc with our sense of just what real object we’re supposed to be looking at – painting, or surroundings, or both? – the vaunted ‘autonomy’ of abstract painting shot to pieces. But what’s so Belgian about all this? What Parasol Unit’s midsize gallery spaces manage to hold on to is these works’ sense of interior space – not public, civic white-cube gallery space, but domestic space, a gloomier sort of quotidian private space, which Belgian social life and

culture – northern and bourgeois and windswept – has shaped itself around. It’s the interior as private space that suffuses these smallish works; in Gaston Bertrand’s 1954 Peinture Froide, which for all its de Stijl-like geometric mannerism hovers uncomfortably close to an architectural plan rather than ‘abstract’ painting; or in Guy Mees’s peculiar lace-stretched tondos (both Untitled, 1965) where the dainty fabric conceals purple strip lights, sparking a strange clash of visible and invisible sensation; or even in the utterly claustrophobic installation by Boy and Erik Stappaerts, glossy black coils lying in an almost-blacked-out room. And yet the outside world is always poking through, such as in Francis Alÿs’s series of tactile little canvases of colour-spectrum and grayscale blocks – the designs of old tv test cards – one of which is painted over a monochrome image suggesting some indistinct reportage photograph of gunmen in a pickup truck. It’s a nod to Tuymans’s own prolific reprocessing and distancing of public imagery via the private form of studio and paintbrush. That distancing – the process of making reality no longer synonymous with its presentation – is what’s really at work in The Gap. Abstraction and figuration are interchangeable, since in each, what is being invoked is something other than what is there – a grander notion of presence, beyond presentation. J.J. Charlesworth

Francis Alÿs, Untitled, 2013, oil on canvas on wood, 18 × 13 × 1 cm. Courtesy the artist

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Ian Law You’re Adjusting Rodeo, London 10 October – 21 November Three large canvases dominate Ian Law’s show, bright blue acrylic sketches of budgerigars with amorphous blotches of birdseed glued to the surface. Made to fit over the windows of the gallery, they all share the same title, Reflections on absent others (all works 2015), and suggest a no-nonsense painter in the gestural vein. But that impression is misleading, for the other works here evince an expanded approach to the discipline that is more representative of his practice as a whole. The wait is over is made from a row of benchseating from a waiting room, the upper part sliced off and presented on the floor. The object’s previous function is initially unclear, and further mystified by the removal of the fabric, the underlying foam pitted with holes. It takes a while to see that these holes are carefully fashioned into the silhouettes of flowers: one moment you are looking at a piece of salvaged junk, the next at a sort of jardin trouvé, the existing stains in the foam magically transformed into background scenery. The title alludes to some unspecified appointment, probably a medical one given the gist of Law’s exhibition text, which speaks of ‘nervously [picking] at chairs as we wait within the assigned spaces of care institutions’. Such spaces, we

might infer, add significance to otherwise mundane fixtures, which acquire fresh intensity in the face of imminent diagnostic doom. The wait to see the specialist is indeed a long one, engendering an existential shift, and Law’s work is a low key monument to the ordeal. There was a body, I was there, was a body uses more boxfresh elements: a standing group of medical privacy screens draped in fake fur and curtain netting, the whole thing cocooned in shiny translucent giftwrap. Again, there’s a suggestion of corporeal unease in the title, and again a pictorial axis stops the appropriations from conveying it too didactically, the mass of objects blending into an indistinct purple-green blob that muddies their straightforward signification of a medical environment. Though Law is at his best when working with readymades, the aim seems always to be to fish for the image in the object rather than focusing on its tactile qualities or on its mass: an image enmeshed within the particularity of a ‘host’ artefact that comes replete with its own cultural associations, as opposed to one inscribed on a specially prepared neutral surface. In fact, the more you look at his gallery portfolio, the more atypical those large budgie paintings seem, for most of his other work

demonstrates a fascination with that area where image and object overlap, the bias constantly shifting and the balance beautifully struck in standout pieces like The wait is over. Evidently, the use of real bird seed to produce the blotches in the paintings (which look like bird shit, though from a much larger and hopefully now extinct species) is part of that overlap, but it’s subordinate to their pictorial schema, albeit intended to complicate their representational fidelity. But this use of the real within a painting seems more indebted to a well-worn tradition than Law’s ability to wring images from existing things – which seems to me exciting and unpredictable. The only unassisted readymade here is Untitled, a wall-mounted hygienic-hand-rub dispenser that emits fluid onto the floor every five minutes, conceptually bridging the gap between the paintings’ avian subject matter and the rest of the show – for the mechanised squirt resembles a bird shitting. I like the way it dares you to dismiss it as a prosaic Duchampian nomination, before gradually leaching into your consciousness as an aural accompaniment to the viewing experience: an object not to be looked at but rather heard in view of the others. Sean Ashton

There was a body, I was there, was a body, 2015, medical privacy screens with soft toy fur fabric and curtain netting, gift-wrapped, 171 × 108 cm. Photo: Plastiques. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, London & Istanbul

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Richard Hawkins New Work Richard Telles Fine Art and Jenny’s, Los Angeles 24 October – 12 December Curdled skins stretch over knobby bodies coloured with the silty hues of tattered rainbows. These corporeal deities convulse and sneer in grotesque splendour on fields of peyote buttons, almost squelchingly flabby and fetid. Are those bloody entrails, symmetrically arranged, meant to be the sacrifice or the deity? The title Cannibal’s Feast (2015) only cues direction to its eventual consumer. On view at both his usual la gallery, Richard Telles, and the angelic upstart Jenny’s, Richard Hawkins’s current body of work deepens the spiritual portents of his fleshy oeuvre. Hawkins has spent a career both in deep, decadent literary readings and with a penchant for the sensual pursuits of his particular desires. Beddable young men from Tiger Beat to Thailand (along with cameos from Proust and Huysmans) have populated his collages, paintings and sculptures across a 30-year career, ever tinged with a hint of lusty exoticism.

Channelling Antonin Artaud’s peyote dances of 1936, here Hawkins casts a series of glazed ceramics and collages nightmarish spiritual and psychedelic visions: shitting rats snap at sacrificed, frightening fleshy mamas; a ‘eunuchthizing’ machine, casket monsters, goddesses epitheted ‘Syphilitic’ and ‘Gynandromorphic’ (the latter denoting a biological anomaly wherein a creature is literally half-female and half-male). Disembodied cocks swim in creamy polychrome soup, tits (multi and pendulous) droop and poke from off these sculptures, hanging like wallworks and looking like shrines. Artaud looked to primitive culture to throw off the shitty falsities of deteriorated Western civilisation, uncovering and rediscovering primal magics lost with modernity. Dispensing with the rationalism of European theatre, Artaud fingered its ritual heart as visceral, totemic spectacle: ‘we should become as victims burning at the stake, signaling each other

through the flames’ (The Theatre and Its Double, 1938). In Mexico, Artaud sought a ‘voyage to the land of speaking blood’. He wrote the account of his voyage, D’un Voyage au Pays des Tarahumaras (A Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara, first published in 1945), during a long, electroshocked sojourn at the Rodez clinic from 1943 to 46. Hawkins’s recent sculptures formally express the articulate convulsions of Artaud’s ecstatic sufferings. The cut and colour of these figures and tableaux do feel fully continuous with Hawkins’s work of prior years. Alongside recent paintings of both corpulent men and their obscure, often svelte objects of desire, Hawkins has fleshed out the architecture of their psychic terrains in multitiered bordellos and haunted houses. These shrines, literary in inspiration and carnal in form, would easily slip in between such ramshackle haunts, the most fitting gods for Hawkins’s shadowy, erotic domain. Andrew Berardini

Casket Monster I, 2015, glazed ceramic in artist’s frame, 65 × 58 × 5 cm. Photo: Ruben Diaz. Courtesy Richard Telles Fine Art, Los Angeles

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uh-oh: Frances Stark 1991–2015 Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 11 October – 24 January I don’t believe it is cruel or unfair to say that a museum is probably not the natural home for Frances Stark’s work. The artworks that she has made over the past 24 years (the timespan covered by this retrospective) are many things – epistolary, diaristic, notational, self-referential, accretive, serial, slapdash, intricate – but they are not, in the main, the kinds of forms that museums are traditionally built to house. En masse, in the generously proportioned and high-ceilinged galleries of the Hammer Museum, Stark’s delicate carbon paper, pencil or gouache text pieces and collages (to cite just a few of her myriad media) are somehow too much, and not enough. They over- and underwhelm. And this is not their failing, because Stark is one of her generation’s most strident and original voices. The problem is that of the museum, which is incapable of reshaping itself to accommodate her output. The issue is something to do with the architecture, which is designed to house masterpieces that are big enough to absorb many gazes at once or bold enough to project across a room. (Mark Bradford’s recent Hammer

exhibition is a case in point, as is the new but lifeless Broad museum.) Stark’s work mostly asks to be read – up close and slowly, even held in one’s hands. Careful attention must be paid to its layered literary references and recurrent motifs. In front of one of the exhibition’s salon-style walls of framed drawings and collages, a visitor’s head is liable to swim. Bobby Jesus’s Alma Mater b/w Reading the Book of David and/or Paying Attention Is Free (2013) is arguably Stark’s Guernica, her mature work that comes closest to the designation of ‘masterpiece’. A text- and music-based video projection overlaid on a wall of mainly found images, the work synthesises many of Stark’s long-range concerns about motherhood, pedagogy and sexuality with the realities of her life in 2013, when she was locked in battle with the administration of the beleaguered art school (at usc) where she taught and had also just begun working with a young muse named Bobby. Along with issues that pertain only to Stark (and her work can, at times, feel solipsistic), Bobby Jesus’s Alma Mater also surprises by opening up to racial politics and religious faith.

The masculinised category of the masterpiece, however, does not seem to be something that Stark is interested in. Instead of singular statements, she tends to compile dossiers of related works; for example, the series of ‘chorus girl’ collage drawings that punctuate the exhibition, or the trio of large collages, beginning with Push (2006), that play off the signage on her studio door. Stark really comes into her own in her performances-cum-lectures-cum-PowerPoint presentations, one of which – I’ve Had It and a Half (2011), in which she confessed her Chatroulette addiction – she famously performed at the Hammer. The museum retrospective is inadequate for representing such events, just as it is in displaying Stark’s Instagram feed or her series of Cat Videos (1999–2002), both of which are here shown on monitors but which really belong online. uh-oh, this exhibition’s title, evokes the real risks involved when a practice like Stark’s unfolds in real time, at 1:1 scale to the artist’s life. It is full of anxious excitement for whatever might come next. It is the precise antithesis of a museum’s tendency to survey, to look back, to slow down and distance. Jonathan Griffin

Bobby Jesus’s Alma Mater b/w Reading the Book of David and/or Paying Attention Is Free, 2013 (installation view, Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, 2013), multichannel projection with sound, inkjet mural and takeaway offset posters, 7 min 20 sec. Photo: Brian Conley. Courtesy: Marc Foxx Gallery, Los Angeles

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Ann Hirsch Dr. Guttman’s Office Smart Objects, Los Angeles 24 October – 27 November The gallery walls are lined up to head height with burnt-orange carpet, suggesting the intimacy of a domestic space but also the soft walls of an asylum. They are hung with three large paintings directly reproducing old drawings of imaginary, glamorously attired women that the artist used to make obsessively and repetitively in her child-therapist’s office as a high-school student. Although recreated on a much grander scale, the images still maintain a teenage-notebook aesthetic of manga cartoons, childhood dolls and prom movies. One painting shows a young lady in ball gown and heels with a trompe l’oeil hole ripped out of her body, another gouged above her eye. The second shows a small girl crying, a woman with her arms bound and the gloomy, unattached head of a girl with a scribbled-in face. The third, a lurid pink painting of popularlooking schoolgirls in halter tops, tight flares and boas engaged in some sort of confrontation, seems to express a sense of not belonging. While the paintings are suffused with teen angst, another set of small, wholly original portraits in coloured pencil point towards a preoccupation with growing old. The subjects’ diseased, androgynous faces appear to be rotting, showing all the colours of decompos-

ing fruit. The artist revels in the grotesque, exaggerated depiction of the ageing process, and so the physical degradations of age are explored as well as the psychic terrors of youth. Ann Hirsch has always harboured a compulsion to describe the ways in which women are encouraged to appear. Embedded in the carpeted walls are four short films that adopt and sometimes pervert the prevalent online-video forms of pornography, the bedroom confessional, the homemade tutorial and the karaoke song. One uses operatic arias to soundtrack screencaptured footage of a porn site with all its theatrical fellatio and animated erectile-dysfunction advertisements. Another has the artist demonstrating how to apply lipstick and nail polish, masturbate, practise oral hygiene and monogamy, take a selfie, shake a booty and so on – essentially, how to perform the contemporary rituals of adolescent womanhood. A third attempts to explain her art through a video diary outlining Hirsch’s anxieties; for example, that having a video of her vagina available online was as horrifying a thing as she could imagine, and thus, like all fears, was best fully confronted: the fourth video shows her singing the West Side Story song I Feel Pretty (1957) with her labia and fingertips superimposed over her mouth,

a not-even-slightly-pornographic act of vaginal ventriloquism. Out of the cacophony of theatrical Ann Hirsch monologues emerges a fractured self-portrait, one that echoes the doubting, contradictory flux of thought patterns. “Now there’s all these feminists,” she announces in one, referring to the recent wave of young, self-proclaimed feminist artists; “it’s a battle to see who can be the most honest, most self-aware, or boundary-pushing, or showing themselves.” But in another she suggests, “There’s no feminist agenda here, I’m not proving anything… all it is really is a document of how good I look at this age… I might as well get naked now while I still can… before I’m completely and utterly ashamed of myself.” Unusually vulgar and autobiographical in its nature, this is an exhibition that mines the contemporary tendency towards oversharing one’s emotions and images of one’s body. It suggests how forms of portraiture, whether scribbled privately in notebooks or published online as video diaries might have a therapeutic effect, and proposes new ways in which the personal becomes political in a pornography-soaked Internet age. Dean Kissick

Dr. Guttman’s Office, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Smart Objects, Los Angeles

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Jessica Stockholder Door Hinges Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago 12 September – 16 January There is no one word in the English language that rhymes with ‘orange’. Perhaps this is why we hear of ‘tangerine’ trees and ‘marmalade’ skies in song, while ‘orange’ is left out of popular melodies. Its closest assonance is ‘door hinge’, which, to credit the source, I believe I heard through one of Salem’s observations in an episode of Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I remember thinking how great it was that ‘door hinge’ conceptually mirrored the action of thought – a turning, a pivot – required to achieve a solution for the word without a rhyme, just as ‘orange’ contained its own phenomenology, since it is both a thing and a colour: an orange is orange; it explains itself. The impressiveness of language is that both ‘orange’ and its makeshift rhyme operate on both auditory and visual levels. Jessica Stockholder’s exhibition can be seen as a plural performance of this relationship. On the border of cacophonous, the visual tone of the exhibition is purposefully dissonant – a false rhyming scheme of its own. An overall palette unites the disjointed paintings and assembled objects

on view. Brilliant purples, sharp corals and vivid blues are rolled onto the walls in haste; swathes of carpet are geometrically installed in jagged shapes along the floor and continue to scale the wall upward; security mirrors are installed at various heights, multiplying the effect of the gestural space while also making it appear smaller in the distance. The images seen in the mirror reflect the viewer within this cartoonish maze. While the exhibition appears dominated by sculpture and features Assists 1–3, her latest body of work, Stockholder’s installation is executed in the expanded field of painting. The all-over style of the installation uses the gallery itself as a canvas. Within this landscape, the three primary objects for the Assists sculptures are placed: a Smart electric car, a piano and a vintage desk. The itinerant ‘art objects’ (mainly brightly coloured materials or abstract cutout forms) are pressed up against these main items, though not always directly bound to them. Each of the readymade objects is tightly hugged by a bright yellow strap with

Door Hinges, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Evan Jenkins. Courtesy the artist and Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago

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the text ‘Lift-all Load Hugger’ repetitively stamped across its surface in black ink. The potential that these items are made for lifting sets up a Sisyphean tone to the installation. Stockholder’s statement on painting carries a succinct message: the mass of its history will always weigh heavily on conceptual practices. And still we lift it. The quality of Stockholder’s undying formalistic approach to the readymade object, which in the past seemed to be loose and indirect, shines in the context of Door Hinges. When Stockholder has control over the space, a viewer gets the sense that she has landed. As a medium known for its many deaths and reinventions, painting is taken to the extremity in Stockholder’s practice as both a formal and intellectual object to be wrestled with. The installation appears to satisfy Stockholder’s want to find the right object-based language to equal painting’s long past. Her verse is congruous enough. Even if it is a false rhyme, it is harmonious. Stephanie Cristello

Clement Siatous Sagren Simon Preston Gallery, New York 12 September – 18 October In 1973 the British Government forcibly expelled the indigenous inhabitants of the Chagos Islands, a strategically located Indian Ocean archipelago, to facilitate the establishment of a us naval installation on the atoll of Diego Garcia. Crucial to the us’s Cold War strategy of containment, the island has more recently served as a base for bombing and reconnaissance flights over Iraq and Afghanistan. Concurrent with the removal, the British authorities initiated a programme of historical erasure, claiming that the Chagos Islands had never hosted a permanent population, an obfuscation made easier by the scant visual record of this remote territory. The history of the archipelago is a nexus of conflicting narratives and disproportionate political power: the Pax Americana, the War on Terror and the Chagossians’ memories of their home and their desire to return. The islanders’ longing is summarised by the Creole

word ‘sagren’, and it is embedded in the work of Clement Siatous, who was born on Diego Garcia in 1947 and has lived in Mauritius since 1973. His paintings (those shown here were created over the past 15 years) depict an idyllic life based on copra production, fishing and small-scale guano mining. In one, a massive crab scales a palm tree. In another, a robust woman carries a basket of massive coconuts. Such images of contented plenty contrast with others, such as one of Chagossians sailing into exile, or a representation of the overgrown island of Perhos Banhos, with its rotting jetty the last evidence of its former inhabitants. Siatous inscribes each work with a descriptive notation and a date, as if it were an ethnographic view or documentary photo. Together the paintings form a history cycle of rootedness and removal. The bright, acrylic palette, its infelicities of scale and perspective, which recall the few extant nineteenth-century watercolours

of the area, and the inclusion of small details, such as a pair of donkeys, one resting its head on the back of the other, that watch as the last inhabitants sail away from Diego Garcia – all this heightens the cycle’s poignancy. Like Native American or Palestinian artists who incorporate traditional motifs or references to popular culture, Siatous is reclaiming heritage to resist its wilful obliteration. The show itself constitutes part of the New Atlantis Project, maintained by Paula Naughton (who also directs Simon Preston Gallery), which documents Chagossian history and advocates for repatriation and reparations. Yet the force of Siatous’s work derives not from its political intent but from its emotional sincerity. It is as much about the life the Chagossians lost as their memories of it, and thus of the ties to tradition and to place that bind a people to a land and cannot be explained wholly by theory, documentary or ‘fact’, but by spirit alone. Joshua Mack

Îles Perhos Banhos abandonnées en 1973, 2006, acrylic on linen, 75 × 112 cm. Courtesy the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York

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Nari Ward Breathing Directions Lehmann Maupin, New York 9 September – 1 November The upright piano at the entrance to Lehmann Maupin’s Chrystie Street gallery is a found object, to which the artist has attached hundreds of worn door and lock keys hanging on nails. Presumably it’s still a functioning piano, but it is not there to be played. Instead, a soft – too soft – sound emanates from a flatscreen television affixed to its back. The soundtrack is of a flute, playing slowly; it’s not exactly harmonious, but it instils a sense of sentimentality. The installation, Spellbound (all works 2015), was created for Ward’s exhibition at the Savannah College of Art and Design’s Museum of Art early in 2015 and brought back to New York from Georgia – not without sacrificing some of the energy of the earlier locale (more on that in a moment). The scenery in the eight-minute video is presumably also from Savannah: a town square, the hands of a man as he unhurriedly weaves a plant, an abandoned building, the kind of places and people who may have had use for those keys, stand-ins for overlooked histories and places. The keys return in a floor piece, Ground (In Progress), which is composed of dozens of

bricks wrapped in copper and arranged in a square. The viewer is invited to walk on the sculpture, noting the different patterns made via the oxidisation of the copper as well as key patterns imprinted in it. Inexplicably, there is a single lemon placed atop one of the bricks on the corner. Perhaps it’s a pun on the fact lemon can be used to polish copper, or a comment on the labour such cleaning would entail. The surprising thing about this work is how effective it is. The bricks crackle under your feet. They feel unstable. You want to rush off but can’t for fear of falling down. This use of copper ties the exhibition together. On the back walls of the gallery are the Breathing Panels, three wood panels covered in the metal. Ward created the abstract forms on the panels by stepping on them wearing shoes covered with a darkening patina. Copper nails hammered into the panels’ surfaces serve as the centres from which Ward engraved rays that stretch to the end of the works’ frames. There’s a backstory to the Breathing Panels: the patterns refer to cosmograms from the Congo, religious symbols Ward learned about during a visit to

the First African Baptist Church in Savannah. (As often happens, this account is not communicated through the work but rather through a text accompanying the exhibition.) As abstract panels, they are impressive, and invoke Warhol’s oxidation ‘paintings’. As an attempt to bridge visual cultures and draw attention to unrecognised traditions, they are smart and political. Work like this raises the question of whether it is best served by being shown in a gallery. The pieces on view lose steam when divorced from the conditions in which they were created – especially for Ward, whose work oftentimes reacts to its surroundings, be it in public art projects (he recently ‘packaged’ the smiles of residents of Harlem in tin cans, selling them for $15 each and giving the proceeds to a local charity) or installations like the one on view here, with its strong link to Savannah. In presentation as well: a savvy curator would have seized the opportunity to bring up the volume of the video and allow its sound to haunt the other works, intensifying the experience of the art and its emotive nature. Here in the gallery, it’s a missed opportunity. Orit Gat

Spellbound (detail), 2015, piano, used keys, Spanish moss, light, audio and video elements, 140 × 77 × 158 cm. Photo: Max Yawney. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong

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Justin Adian Fort Worth Skarstedt, New York 10 September – 24 October These paintings by Justin Adian, part of a series he has been working on since roughly 2010 (all works here are from 2015), are pitched at an unusual point between the look of Minimalism or hard-edge painting and an evocative ripeness that is Adian’s own. The paintings – for this is what they are, according to the artist, despite turgid volumes protruding some 7 – 12 centimetres from their surfaces in a sculptural fashion – are made by enveloping foam shapes in heavy canvas, placing them with other shapes and slapping oil-based enamel paint on them. Most of the works marry two components together, though one (Slip It In) has seven parts, another four (Fortune Teller). Their flat colour, unbroken shapes and level depth is reminiscent of the work of artists who have influenced Adian, among them Ellsworth Kelly. A subtle balance is struck between individual shapes, which have been carefully cut and thoughtfully combined, and the more organic puckering of canvas over bodies of spongy material. The paint, applied last, in the main creates

smooth, glossy surfaces, but it has also been allowed to pool slightly and congeal in some of the seams where two shapes nudge against each other, creating minor elastic textures in the cracks. One has the impression of works that are principled, but not purist in their execution. Even without prior knowledge that this series is inspired by the artist’s Texas hometown, which lends the show its name, the paintings collectively deliver an atmosphere of place or locale. This might be traced to different aspects of the show. The works, in the way that they bring different shapes into relation with each other, adhering physically, so as to seem both intimate and pleasantly incongruous (in a manner almost anthropomorphic in some cases, and often emotive when seen alongside their titles, for example Slow Goodbye or Outfeel), amount to a conversant community of forms. In terms of colour and texture, the show has undertones of machinery, perhaps shiny automobiles, or blatant signage. There is a feeling of continuum between the

works, which were designed specifically for this gallery space and show, as if each were a moment in a broader narrative. Adian’s practice to date has drawn inspiration from books and music as well as stories or specific memories of his own life. A solo exhibition at Skarstedt in London last year was accompanied by short stories he had written. The works on show in New York lack such an accompaniment, but when combined with their titles, they retain a certain air of unselfconscious, lo-fi poetry that upholds a consistent character. Names such as Orange Crush, Shoot Out and Valley High are almost Pop – certainly not esoteric – and convey a sense of freedom beyond the works’ careful formal decisions. It is clear that Adian finds fulfilment in the continuation of this long-running series. Although the works presented here were completed within a short period, one has from them a sense of nourishment and purpose, rather than quick assemblage. Fort Worth is a show that instils confidence. Iona Whittaker

Fortune Teller, 2015, oil enamel on ester foam and canvas, 138 × 133 × 7 cm. Courtesy Skarstedt, New York

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Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba ¿por qué no fui tu amigo? Kurimanzutto, Mexico City 17 September – 24 October Its title translating as why was I not your friend?, Daniel Aguilar Ruvalcaba’s debut show at the project space in Kurimanzutto makes a nice pairing with Minerva Cuevas’s show in the larger space, since they both approach similar issues of consumption and follow the money behind cultural artefacts from different perspectives. While perhaps best known as a great supporter of other young artists through Bikini Wax, the space he cofounded, Aguilar is an artist in his own right, and his show is part of an ongoing project centred around his receipt of an artist’s grant from Fundación bbvaBancomer. The three works in the show interconnect and form a closed circle that addresses not only the act of public funding and collecting, but even the wider status of the work of art and the role of the artist. The premise of the exhibition is that when Aguilar was young, his father lost his own house to a bank (Bancomer). Aguilar decided to apply for the Bancomer grant and looked for someone with his father’s name and a debt with Bancomer, so that he might give this person the award money, to be used to pay back that debt. This is revealed in the first work on show, Anuncio de periódico (2015), a newspaper ad stating that if ‘your name is Juan Manuel Aguilar and

you have debt with Bancomer’, the artist might help such a person pay it off. The ad ran on three separate days, and eventually a man who had debts of 12,000 and 120,000 pesos did get in touch. But Bancomer got wind of Aguilar’s intentions and told him he couldn’t use the grant money to pay a person’s debt with the bank; that he had to make ‘art’. And so the second work, Invertir las inversiones materiales (2015), arises as a circuitous way to pay the debt: with the grant money, Aguilar bought some hi-tech equipment (a nice Mac, great cameras, a super hard-drive, etc) to shoot and edit a video (not included in this show) and to print the third piece in the show: some counterfeit banknotes. The equipment is to be auctioned on an eBay-like platform and will either remain as functional equipment or be bought by a collector, which would mean the objects will then live on as an artwork. The idea is to sell this expensive equipment for 12,000 pesos, which means Aguilar is both devaluing these goods (which cost him more than that) and questioning their aesthetic, technological and economic value through this gesture. The third and final piece is perhaps the most complex: it represents the man’s larger debt. Aguilar took his father’s credit card and

Nueva Poesía Precolombina / Nueva Poesía Novohispana, 2015, print on poetry paper, dimensions variable. Photo: Abigail Enzaldo. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

Invertir las inversiones materiales, 2015, electronic equipment, dimensions variable. Photo: Abigail Enzaldo. Courtesy the artist and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City

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withdrew 6,000 pesos in denominations of 100 and 200 pesos, then photographed the notes 20 times to make counterfeit bills with actual serial numbers. He nevertheless systematically returned the money so no debt was accumulated in the process. He then went to a well-known collector of artist editions and proposed to sell him the entire edition of 800 bills. It’s essential to note that, closing the circle neatly, the collector’s money happens to be an inheritance coming from Bancomer money. One could also call this a form of poetic justice, since the two works in the final piece are referred to by the artist as ‘books’ and not banknotes (Nueva poesía precolombina and Nueva poesía novohispana, 2015): they are printed on paper made from recycled books of poetry by the poets featured on the two denominations (Nezahualcoyotl on the 100-peso bill and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz on the 200). And so a show that might have seemed a bit empty or sparse is actually revealed to be full of meaning at various levels: with a few simple gestures, the artist manages to question and reflect upon his personal history, the economy of language and poetry, the circulation of works in the art market and their relative value, as his work traces a circle that turns from the personal to the political in surprisingly effective ways. Gabriela Jauregui

ArtReview

34º Panorama da Arte Brasileira: Da pedra Da terra Daqui Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo 3 October – 18 December The Panorama da Arte Brasileira was created in 1969 to showcase emerging contemporary art from Brazil. Its 34th edition proposes an audacious and alternative genealogy for Brazilian art, so often seen in light of the ‘cultural cannibalism’ expressed by Oswald de Andrade in his Manifesto Antropófago (1928), in which he proposed devouring and transforming European practices in order to create a new Brazilian culture. Curated by Aracy do Amaral and adjunct curator Paulo Miyada, Da pedra da terra Daqui (From Rock From Land From Here) shows the work of six artists. The smallest group invited to a Panorama to date is formed by strong selection: Berna Reale, Cao Guimarães, Cildo Meireles, Erika Verzutti, Miguel Rio Branco and Pitágoras Lopes. Their work is presented in relation to 60 precolonial stone figures (zeolites) dating from between 4,000 and 1,000 bc, found in sambaquis (manmade shell mounds) – dominant landscape features along the coast of southern Brazil all the way into Uruguay. Very little is known about the Sambaqueiros (the shellmound builders), the earliest people to occupy these areas. A series of glass vitrines with zeolites crosses the main exhibition space, forming a guiding line and counterpoint to the contemporary works. A floor-to-ceiling projection by Guimarães stands by the entrance. Filme em Anexo (2015) interlocks footage of workers at an unusually located shell mound, under an overpass in the city of Florianópolis, with that

of other sambaquis, and adds email exchanges with Miyada about producing this artwork, blending textures and collapsing time and location in a style and rhythm unique to Guimarães’s way of portraying typically unnoticed details and fragments of life. Reference to archetypal fallen and degraded societies is common in Rio Branco’s universe, and here these are presented in an acclimatised immersive space filled with tropical plants, fragments of walls and piles of stone to echo ruins, with old televisions on the ground showing his photographic series. Meireles’s Arte Física series (1969) is a group of discreetly complex land-intervention projects, documented here through a series of videos, photographs and models. One of them, now executed, consists of increasing by a centimetre the highest landmass in Brazil, located in an Amazonian reserve of the Yanomami, by welding a piece of kimberlite stone onto the highest rock. Meireles’s contribution to the show also contains details of the negotiations and expeditions surrounding the realisation of this work, including the artist’s permission slip to enter the protected areas. Meanwhile, Erika Verzutti’s Cemeteries (2013–14) is a series of grouped objects – rocks and gourds; soaps, vegetables and fruit roughly cast in cement and different materials – individual elements and fragments from previous projects by the artist that did not work out, but which she has retained and are now organised on the floor to create varying

topographies. They reflect the array and territories of the artist’s research in a quasiarchaeological gathering that displaces her past ‘failures’ by bringing them into focus in the present. Lopes’s 2015 Untitled paintings are large, rugged and oneiric renderings of unspecific places and times where alien-type figures meet human and aquatic forms in violently intriguing images, while Berna Reale’s comment on violence is less dreamy and referenced through an installation room with active sirens on the ceiling, pierced walls and meringues served on cake plates to the sound of police radio commands. Next door, a video, Habitus (2015), shows the production of bodybags. Together the works successfully intertwine and blur different rituals, cultures, times and locations to propose a new look at the complex formation of identity and culture in Brazil through its contemporary and ancient artmaking. In light of the little known history of the Sambaqueiro culture and the legacy and artefacts they left behind, this Panorama shows contemporary art with an affinity to telluric qualities and an interest in themes such as ritual, time, territory and land, all of which can be related to the earliest people occupying Brazilian land, much before European influences arrived in the country during colonisation. This novel approach, which looks at qualities inherent to Brazil as opposed to de Andrade’s emulated transformation of European culture, raises a powerful and fresh discussion. Camila Belchior

Erika Verzutti, Cemitério com Franja, 2014. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion di Persano. Courtesy mam São Paulo

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Li Wei Nobody Cares Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing 22 August – 22 September Nobody Cares – The Death of the Toy asia now Paris Asia Art Fair, Paris 20–22 October Still Nobody Cares a2z Art Gallery, Paris 17 October – 7 November Li Wei’s latest project, Nobody Cares, and its subsequent chapters, span three venues in Beijing and Paris. The first part, at Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing, took the form of a solo museum show, on the face of it featuring a series of sculptures and installations: in a small, narrow, aisle-shaped room, 800 fluffy yellow chicks were lying on the floor. They were made of painted fibreglass, silicon and artificial fur, all of which gave them the look of being only recently dead. Another bigger room was styled to look like an abandoned bedroom. In the wall was a window, outside of which were more than 100 greenbottle flies, some stuck to the window’s glass, most obviously dead, more piled up on the ledge. There were still a few alive, flying crazily in the confined space – it was not unreasonable to expect that they would come to their own deaths very soon. Connecting these two rooms was a third, bright and spacious, in the middle of which stood a six-metre-long table, covered with white tablecloth and loaded with beautifullooking chicken dishes prepared by a wellknown local chef. They tasted as delicious as they looked, and most of the visitors to the opening reception stayed here to enjoy the food and drink, despite the dead chickens and dying flies they had just witnessed. If you looked carefully, you might also notice an array of hidden video cameras in

the exhibition rooms, their blinking red lights indicating that they were recording. In fact the opening of the show was really designed as an unscripted performance, the visitors unconsciously playing a part in it. After the opening, the product of the six hidden cameras – footage of people viewing art and eating chicken – was projected onto the dining table. And the project still continued. After the opening, Li started to sell those handmade chicken sculptures online, for ¥1000 each. Meanwhile, he collected selfies of the buyers with the chickens they bought, and invited them to tell their story about a chicken they had raised in their childhood. These stories were later made into a 130-minute multiscreen videowork titled Nobody Cares – the Death of the Toys (all works 2015), which premiered at Asia Now, an art fair in Paris. In the booth, the chicken sculptures were also available, each costing €200. In China, baby chickens or ducks are for many people a shared childhood memory. These cute creatures, normally bought in the traditional market, are often given to kids as a toy, and unsurprisingly almost all of them end up dead. What causes these deaths and what happens to the creature afterwards? That bit is never the stuff of childhood memories. Or as Li Wei puts it: nobody cares.

facing page, top Nobody Cares, 2015 (installation view), Red Brick Art Museum, Beijing. Courtesy the artist

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Though, in the narratives he collected, many people insisted that they did care for the dead chicken, for Li the cute yellow chick is a symbol of Chinese people’s indifference towards life: the daily tragedies of contemporary China, which occupy the newspaper headlines and social media forums, are just like the dead toy chick – they grab everyone’s attention and conversation, but under the carnival of public emotion, there remains an indifference towards life. At the time of the project at Asia Now, Li Wei also opened a solo show at a2z Art Gallery in Paris. For the opening reception he invited 300 people to the gallery, but didn’t show anything. Interestingly (but not surprisingly), the opening was a success: the gallery, supposed to be a stage for artworks, was filled up with people talking and drinking. It didn’t seem to be a big issue that the artworks were absent. By categorising this piece as performance, and titling it Still Nobody Cares, Li shifted his criticism from social conditions to the art system. The Nobody Cares concept had come full circle: Li had successfully worked through a complex plot, incorporated the grand stages of contemporary art and yet still highlighted key social issues (a scary indifference of art-lovers to art and of everyone else to life). Aimee Lin

facing page, bottom Still Nobody Cares, 2015, performance, a2z Art Gallery, Paris. Courtesy the artist

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Books

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Diary: How to Improve the World (You Will Only Make Matters Worse) by John Cage Siglio Press, $32 (hardcover) ‘Dreamt I’d written a piece, all the notes of which were to be prepared and eaten…’ Reading this svelte and dizzying volume by John Cage allows you to monitor the switchboard of the composer’s brain in all its anarchic activity. As well as providing glimpses into the curious rabbit-holes of his dreams, it also supplies the ingredients for a Cage cookbook and captures his thinking about aquariums, schools, nuclear bombs, cats, philosophy and maybe 40 other subjects. Published in fragments but never collected together before and exactly recreating Cage’s original design, the notes here range from 1965 to 1982 with jazzy typographic extravagance: no two pages look the same, and they all come in rainbow colours. They track his transformation from the puckish gentleman who reshaped modern music while looking like a Cold War lab-technician to the wise paterfamilias of several art movements at once. Contemplate the epochal fireworks in the surrounding landscape over that 17-year span, such as John Ashbury’s poetry, the mad parties staged by the Fluxus crew or Laurie Anderson’s irradiated song-suite Big Science (1982) and you’ll find Cage at work somewhere, either as genuine presence or instructive spirit. If this diary were a more traditional mess, crammed with avant-garde nightlife or chess against Duchamp, it would be an enlightening hoot. But the man who wrote music involving cacti and water, Finnegans Wake (1939) and radios looked askance at the traditional. You don’t

discover him here in a new light, just the warm and enigmatic one he always exuded. If his philosophical one-liners can feel overfamiliar, they’re still revivifying: most of what we call thinking, about music and so much else, is just unquestioned habit. He created carnivalesque upheavals where the boring and the numinous were rethought and often switched places entirely. All the noise beyond the concert hall – the hum and crash of everyday life – runs wild in its hushed interior. ‘Home’, he advises, ‘begins outside.’ As the title indicates, Cage is thinking about how to ameliorate social troubles in the new climate of the 1960s with all its chaotic data (‘something needs to be done about the postal service’), whether through art, education or sound. History’s whirlwind goes unnoticed except for the sudden announcement ‘Martin Luther King assassinated: apocalypse’, but examine the book’s substance more obliquely and it emerges as a valuable account of the utopian thinking that took flight over that decade. Cage’s gnomic thoughts are frequently prescient – ‘privacy to become unusual rather than an expected experience’; ‘look for energies above ground: sun, wind, air’ – or tantalising in their outré ingenuity, including the golden outline of something about making music via specially amplified woodland. The story of Cage senior, a backyard inventor from turn-of-thecentury California who built his own doomed submarines, throws his son’s antics into a more unusual focus. They shared the same eagerness

for experiment and unorthodox thought, and various reminiscences scattered here indicate his curious investigations of the world were as crucial an influence on Cage’s adventures as Erik Satie or Zen. As Cage turns away from the future, his writing dissolves back into the same flow of paradoxes and wisecracks found in his 1958 essay ‘Indeterminacy’: ‘When, at death’s door, Stravinsky’s hands turned black, his doctors concluded a mistake had been made.’ There are many possible Cages to celebrate – including Cage the mushroom hunter – yet it still seems rare to prize him as a writer, though his dry tone discloses all kinds of play, wit and daring. He was Robert Rauschenberg’s most eloquent supporter when the young devil first hit the scene, dragging those festive assemblages of junk behind him. Is the following Cage or Elizabeth Bishop? ‘The rocks are worked with lichen, grey moon-bursts splattered and overlapping…’ Nature, which lies at the heart of his project, similarly strikes him as rich but unreadable – ‘canoe on northern Canadian lake, stars in midnight sky repeated in water, forested shores precisely mirrored’ – and much here in its fractured and beautiful form rewards the same careful attentions as poetry. To the last page, the whole game is wideopen. Drifting into the final decade of his life, Cage remains eager to discover ‘another part of the forest’. The composer vanishes; his search continues. Charlie Fox

Nicotine by Gregor Hens Fitzcarraldo Editions, £12.99 (softcover) Gregor Hens’s portrait of his lifelong association with smoking (in English translation, by Jen Calleja, for the first time), written shortly after the German author gave up for the final time, is as much about Hens’s relationships with his own family as it is about his addictive relationship to nicotine. For the large part the two are inextricably entwined, from the passive smoking ingested by he and his brothers from his parents’ cigarettes on daylong family car journeys, and his first drag on a fag aged five at a New Year’s fireworks party, to the visit to the house of his recently deceased aunt Anna.

Hens recounts how his aunt’s pension settlement had included a monthly cigarette allowance, which she would often share with her nephews and which, despite her recent demise, would continue until 2071. Following the introduction by Will Self – equally qualified to write his own version of Nicotine – it’s this last anecdote with which Hens begins the book. These personal snapshots – the author’s first cigarette in eight years, prompted by a cycle accident, the hypnosis session undertaken eight months after last smoking – are far more revealing than when

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the focus is solely on the pathology of the addiction itself. Having smoked through most of my own formative years, and given up more than once, I have no difficulty empathising with Hens’s experiences. Whether the following bears any relation to the author’s, or indeed my own likelihood for remaining an ex-smoker I’m not sure, but whereas for Hens, all the cigarettes he smoked seem integral to his memories of the times during which he smoked them, in reading this book I realised that cigarettes play no role at all, in any of my own memories. Helen Sumpter

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nsk: From Kapital to Capital: An Event of the Final Decade of Yugoslavia edited by Zdenka Badovinac, Eda Čufer and Anthony Gardner mit Press, $49.95 / £34.95 (softcover)

From October 1984, when the band Laibach, artist collective irwin and the theatre group Scipion Nasice Sisters announced that they would form the Neue Slowenische Kunst (nsk) collective, this newly united gang seemed to have an unerring knack for choosing images that plucked at the very core of their nation’s identity. A poster designed in 1987 by New Collectivism, the graphic-design team created by the three allied groups, was submitted to a national competition to find a publicity image for Slovenia’s forthcoming Youth Day celebrations. It was selected with the unanimous approval of the judging committee, only to be subsequently revealed to be modelled almost exactly on a work of Nazi propaganda by the German artist Richard Klein dating from 1936. The resultant furore was among the greatest scandals in Slovenian art history. Provocation was in the dna of nsk however, when Laibach had first launched themselves upon an unsuspecting public, seven years earlier, and set about fly-postering for their very first gig, in the mining town of Trbovlje, they were immediately proscribed. Their very name – the German word for Ljubljana, evoking painful memories of occupation – was deemed an offence to good taste.

The group responded by substituting a Suprematist black cross (though the band refuse to acknowledge it as such) in place of their moniker, as if Malevich’s modernist icon and the historical trauma of fascism remained ultimately interchangeable. ‘The political poster’, went a 1987 New Collectivism ‘Proclamation’, ‘must be like a blow into an open wound.’ During the 1980s, Yugoslavia – particularly Slovenia – was positively festering. It is hardly surprising, then, that they managed to generate such a lengthy paper trail of critical comment, much of which is collected here alongside new essays, original manifestos, plus pages and pages of lavish illustrations (although, curiously, only rarely do the images used to illustrate a given article correspond to the works discussed therein). This wealth of historical articles is at once a boon and a curse to From Kapital to Capital – after all, nobody really needs to be reminded of all those historic, local debates about the meaning of Postmodernism. But the presence of archive essays by the likes of Marina Gržinić, Taras Kermauner and Slavoj Žižek stands as testimony to the cultural significance the nsk collective was accorded. Arguably, the nature of the nsk project makes the contemporary responses the group elicited – positive and

negative alike – as much a part of their work as their records, paintings and theatrical productions. As such, this generous 600-page book has a good claim to be its definitive account, to be coveted by fans and treasured by scholars. Early on, positive appraisals of the nsk were dominated by Žižek’s notion that the group’s practice was characterised by an ‘over-identification’ with the trappings of totalitarianism, as a strategy to produce in the press and public a reaction that would expose their own latent tendencies. By emphasising every veiled fascist impulse already present in the dominant ideology, the nsk produced alienating effects in the populace at large. More provocative still, perhaps, is Mladen Dolar’s suggestion – in his 2015 essay ‘State of Art’, included in the present volume – that nsk’s insistence on the noncontradiction between art and totalitarianism retools the very definition of both art and state to the point at which the two become almost indistinguishable. Far from, as is often assumed, ironically asserting a cynicism towards all utopias, nsk, for Dolar, is the very model of a universal utopia to come, ‘a placeholder for the absent concept of the state.’ Robert Barry

The Contemporaries: Travels in the 21st Century Art World by Roger White Bloomsbury USA, $28 / £19.99 (hardcover) In his elegantly written, humorous, but nevertheless sophisticated study, artist and critic Roger White takes on the big questions surrounding the global business that is contemporary art: what’s this contemporary art stuff really all about and why should anyone pay attention to it? To an artist emerging into the contemporary scene, ‘The whole thing resembled, in scale and complexity, a hybrid of fashion, continental philosophy, organized gambling, and adjacent sectors of the entertainment industry into which art seemed to be rapidly dissolving,’ is the description he offers in his introduction.

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To find out what lies behind those appearances, he sets out on a journey through time (an artist’s career from school to having made it in various sorts of ways) and space (America, from New York to California). White begins in an mfa crit (where he’s one of the tutors, and though no one seems to know where the ‘art’ begins or ends, let alone what it’s about, everyone tacitly agrees – by being there – that being an artist is now a ‘viable’ profession), moves on to studio assistants – a cross between medieval serfdom and microserf-style corporate employment – regional art scenes, artists who’ve found major critical and market success (Dana Schutz), artists who come from outside the system (Mary

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Walling Blackburn), before ending with conceptual artist Stephen Kaltenbach, who deploys many of the tools and contradictions White (a kind of knowing Candide) encounters on his travels to engage the artworld in ‘a 40-year game of hide and seek’. While the overriding sense may be that no one really knows what’s going on, there’s also a sense that White, often staying with friends as he travels, is actually uncovering a community of people who are constantly cementing and testing the bonds that tie them together. And while there have been sociological studies of the artworld before, in its frankness, thoroughness and intimacy this one sets a new benchmark for those to come. Mark Rappolt

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For more on Marcel Ruijters, see overleaf

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Contributors

J.J. Charlesworth has just been appointed ArtReview’s new publisher. He is an art critic who has written for the magazine since the early 2000s and has been a member of the ArtReview editorial team in various capacities since 2006. He lectures and teaches widely, and has been a juror for art and art-writing awards both in Europe and Asia. Consequently he brings a wealth of knowledge, both about ArtReview and ArtReview Asia, and the live events produced by the titles, and about the international art scene in general, to his new role. Daniel Arnold is a hound for sneaking beauty and unchecked human behaviour and is consequently never off-duty. His lyrical candids of New Yorkers in transit have distinguished him as an abstract storyteller and earned him a broad and enthusiastic following. On long walks lately, his soundtrack staples have included Brian Eno, Sonny Sharrock, Chipmunks on 16 Speed, Ice Cube, George Jones, Black Sabbath and Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. If you get a chance to watch Les Blank’s Leon Russell documentary, A Poem Is a Naked Person, he says do it.

Kiki Mazzucchelli is a curator and writer working between London and São Paulo. She is currently a member of the curatorial team of Sitelines – Site Santa Fe biennial, launching in July 2016. She is currently reading Flávio de Carvalho’s biography O Comedor de Emoções (1994), by J. Toledo, an out-of-print publication on the life and work of the multidisciplinary avant-garde artist from Brazil. Naomi Pearce is a writer and cofounder of the Woodmill, long a project and studio space, now a curatorial platform, based in London. She is an editor for collaborative publication A-or-ist and is currently exploring the critical potential of correspondence with critical studies students at the Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam. This month she writes about the use of atmosphere in the work of Anicka Yi, Anne Imhof and Michael E. Smith. She is currently reading two books with bird characters: The Wallcreeper (2014), by Nell Zink, and H is for Hawk (2014), by Helen Macdonald.

Contributing Writers Sean Ashton, Robert Barry, Camila Belchior, Andrew Berardini, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Barbara Casavecchia, Sara Cluggish, Matthew Collings, Michelangelo Corsaro, Gabriel Coxhead, Stephanie Cristello, Tom Eccles, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Charlie Fox, Gallery Girl, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Stefanie Hessler, Sam Jacob, Gabriela Jauregui, Dean Kissick, Maria Lind, Joshua Mack, Kiki Mazzucchelli, Christopher Mooney, Laura Oldfield Ford, Lucas Ospina, Naomi Pearce, Mark Prince, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Sherman Sam, Raimar Stange, Sam Steverlynck, Iona Whittaker Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Daniel Arnold, Mikael Gregorsky, Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski, Marcel Ruijters

Marcel Ruijters (preceding pages)

Next year marks the 500th anniversary of the death of Jheronimus van Aken, world-renowned as the Early Netherlandish painter of earthly delights, Hieronymus Bosch. His quincentenary is being trumpeted by the Bosch500 Foundation in various ways, but few so strikingly original as Hieronymus, the graphic biography commissioned by the foundation from Dutch underground cartoonist Marcel Ruijters. As only a limited amount of information about Bosch’s life has survived, Ruijters has filled in some of the blanks by drawing on other sources, such as what is known of his contemporaries Matthias Grünewald and Martin Schongauer, and Bosch’s financial records. After all, as Ruijters comments, “The way a person spends his money says a lot about his character.” To flesh out the life story further, Ruijters invents a master miniaturist, Brother Gerardus, with whom Bosch could plausibly have trained. Equally revealing for Ruijters’s research were the paintings’ connections with theatre and popular culture of the period, as analysed by Belgian scholar Eric De Bruyn. These layers of meaning make Bosch’s masterpieces, all of them commissioned, ripe for reinterpretation. Plenty of myths have arisen about

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the works and their maker, which Ruijters takes great pleasure in debunking. For example, “There are references to alchemy in his work, but the popular misconception that Bosch was some kind of heretic is ruled out by the fact that the church at that time was not opposed to alchemy.” As for how he invented those unforgettable demons, Ruijters clarifies that “Bosch did not use drugs to come up with those crazy visions, he used his ears. Medieval Dutch reveals how closely connected his work is to oral history and how his demons are based on wordplay.” In 2015 Ruijters was awarded the Stripschapsprijs, the most prestigious Dutch prize for comics, for his entire oeuvre. His career began during the late 1980s when he emerged first in self-published comic books, before contributing to alternative anthologies such as the Rotterdam-based Zone 5300, which he went on to edit. The art of the Middle Ages had a profound effect, transforming his work from the late 1990s: “Besides its obvious otherworldliness, I found medieval art to be quite like comics. There’s often a narrative, the art is symbolic, linear and usually crammed into tiny boxes.” In a vigorous woodcut style, his Sine Qua Non (2005) plunges the reader into

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a feverish fable about nuns and demons, devoid of dialogue but laden with mystical symbolism. In 2008 he adapted Dante’s Inferno, taking inspiration from Giovanni di Paolo and Bartolomeo di Fruosino, among others, and in 2012 he compiled convincing, make-believe lives of women martyrs into All Saints. Ruijters’ new Strip for ArtReview serves in part as an epilogue to the biography and is based on the writings of José de Sigüenza, a Spanish Hieronymite monk and historian. “In the mid-sixteenth century Sigüenza defended Bosch against posthumous accusations of heresy circulating around the Spanish court,” Ruijters points out. The medieval world was changing. At one point in Hieronymus, Bosch’s tutor and fellow religious painter Gerardus speculates as to whether or not ‘… our fine profession will be destroyed, not so much by the printing presses, but by those who wish to worship an invisible god, as the Moors do?’ Here Ruijters is giving us a premonition of the Protestant revolution, which was to begin one year after Bosch’s death. “I am not hinting at the rise of Islamism here,” Ruijters explains, “but the digital revolution, which in my view poses a much bigger threat.” Paul Gravett

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Photo credits

Text credits

on the cover photography by Daniel Arnold

Phrases on the spine and pages 31, 69 and 107 come from Stepping Stones to Go, by Shigemi Kishikawa, published in 1965 by Charles E. Tuttle Company, New York & Tokyo

on pages 142, 150 photography by Mikael Gregorsky

December 2015

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Off the Record December 2015 I look out the window at the building site next to the gallery and remember my key strengths. “Building! More building! That, Sir Nicholas, is my key strength.” I reach under the boardroom table and pick up the hard hat I brought into the interview. Perching it on my head, I continue. “The thing is, Sir Nick, you might think that you’ve done something with these Tanks.” I gesture vaguely out the window. “But as your new director, these Tanks will merely be a beginning. I will use the Tanks to go and park my tank on the Globe Theatre. Let’s put a roof on it and annex it! We can stick Jake and Dinos’s The Chapman Family Collection on the seating bits. When was the last time we got Michael Craig-Martin’s 4 Complete Clipboard Sets out of storage? We could give that to the ushers.” “You would keep the ushers?” the great man asks. The others on the interview panel look at me intently. I ignore them and instead stand up, resplendent in my interview uniform of a red Tom Ford mesh-panelled stretch-crepe gown matched with Gucci fringed-suede pumps. “Times are changing! Do you stand on the members balcony and observe a scene that looks like Victor Pasmore’s The Quiet River: The Thames at Chiswick? No! For one thing, we’re nowhere near Chiswick. But also this is no longer the quiet river. Skyscrapers are zooming up as I speak. St Paul’s will hardly be visible to us soon! Now is the time to build on the legacy of the great Chris Burden!” “Do you mean Chris Dercon?” “The burden of Dercon!” I yell back. “This is visionary stuff, Gallery Girl,” Sir Nicholas intones gravely, his voice filled, as ever, with a very slight melancholy. I look at his impossibly handsome visage and those immaculate rimless spectacles and am overcome with the last line of D.H. Lawrence’s poem ‘Piano’. “I weep like a child for the past,” I mutter almost inaudibly. “Sorry?” Sir Nicholas says. “Can you remember the days when it was you, Norman Rosenthal and Julian Spalding up for the Tate job?” I ask. I realise I’m going off-script, but I can’t stop myself. “Was it all meant to end this way? Institutionalising performance art and sticking on a big show of Georgia O’Keeffe as next year’s blockbuster?” I rip off the hat and fling it to him. “Set yourself free, Sir Nick! Leave this place. Come with

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me and let’s take the riverboat to Greenwich and have lunch in Zizzi before taking photos of just the two of us either side of the meridian and Instagramming like young lovers!” A few hours later and Sir Nick and I are clinking glasses of spiced apple mojitos. “Would you care for some garlic bread?” I ask. “Look, Gallery Girl, I can’t give you this job,” Sir Nick replies. I stare at him frostily and take a sip of the spiced apple mojito. It tastes of chilli powder. “Look, it’s not personal. It’s just that Chris Dercon was director of Haus der Kunst and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen prior to coming to Tate…” “I’ve done a one-year diploma at the world-renowned Sotheby’s Institute,” I remind him. “And I’ve had more unpaid internships than Chris Dercon’s had hot dinners.” I push the plate of garlic bread towards him in a passive-aggressive way. Suddenly he’s angry. “Actually, it’s not really about Chris’s cv,” he thunders, as a number of yummy mummies turn to us in alarm. “I heard that you did your ‘let’s build’ speech to Hans Ulrich at the Serpentine, going for jpj’s job. Apparently you said that all the Princess Diana memorial playground needs is a SelgasCano large-plastic-bag-style roof on it and Hans Ulrich can do a 192-hour marathon in it.” He slams down the yellow builders hat on the table, almost knocking over the fonduta di formaggi. I look down at my Gucci pumps. “Well, it’s not easy in the job market these days, you know,” I mutter. “You have to double up applications…” “Double up? I thought your speech for us was unique! I saw visions of taking over large swaths of the South Bank, of installing Tony Cragg’s On the Savannah where the Founders Arms currently is. Perhaps even reaching as far as Nando’s on Clink Street!” “I totally forgot about Nando’s,” I say brightly. “We should have gone there instead.” The great man narrows his eyes and gets up. “If I’d known I was just one of many, Gallery Girl, I wouldn’t have let you past the Cruzvillegas.” And with that he’s off, leaving me with the garlic bread, the fondue and the bill. Gallery Girl

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