ArtReview January & February 2017 by ArtReview

The town has a beach and two piers

Where do we go from here?

FUTURE GREATS New artists for a new era Alterity Disco

Style

CURIOSITY Happiness

INFILTRATION Memory

Lightness

Potentiality

Transmutation

Honesty

REFRAIN

Sincerity

January & February 2017

SOCIAL SCULPTURE, Truthfulness

Civic trust.

NEW YORK

MILAN

HA U S E R & W I R T H

MARIA LASSNIG A PAINTING SURVEY, 1950 — 2007 1 MARCH — 29 APRIL 2017 23 SAVILE ROW LONDON W1S 2ET WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

GÄRTNER IM SCHNEE (GARDENER IN THE SNOW), 1986/1987 OIL ON CANVAS 205 × 145 CM / 80 3/4 × 57 1/8 IN © MARIA LASSNIG FOUNDATION

Tim Noble and Sue Webster

STICKS WITH DICKS AND SLITS 3 February — 25 March 2017

London | 4 Hanover Square Image: Standing (A Lovely Pair), 2017, Photo: Peter Mallet

AMY FELDMAN Breath Myth 11 February — 8 April 2017

Berlin | Potsdamer Straße 77–87 Image: Moon Mood (detail), 2016, Photo: Timothy Doyon

MAURIZIO CATTELAN, SOUVENIR, 1994, DIFFERENT MATERIALS, V.D.

ROB PRUITT, SUICIDE PAINTING, 2015, ACRYLIC ON LINEN, 96.5 X 96.5 CM

TRUE AND FALSE. WIKILEAKS PUBLISHES DOCUMENTS ABOUT WAR, SCANDALS, CRIMES AND OTHERS SECRET FILES.

THE POWER OF IMAGES. KEVIN SYSTORM AND MIKE KRIEGER LAUNCH INSTAGRAM.

20 YEARS OF IMAGES AND A FEW LIES. MAURIZIO CATTELAN AND MASSIMO DE CARLO CELEBRATE THEIR 20 YEARS COLLABORATION.

INFO@MASSIMODECARLO.COM

@MDCGALLERY

MASSIMODECARLOGALLERY

URS FISCHER, TBD (EYEBALLS (ONE), 2016, GLASS, WAX, METAL ARMATURE, 65 X 80 X 64 CM EACH

IN 2010

WWW.MASSIMODECARLO.COM

DAvID SALLe

DAvID SALLe, While i’m Gone, 2016 (DeTAIL) © DAvID SALLe / vAGA, New yoRk, 2016

PARIS MARAIS JANUARy – MARch 2017 RoPAc.NeT

PARIS MARAIS PARIS PANTIN SALZBURG

NEW GALLERY SPACE OPENING APRIL 2017 POTSDAMER STRASSE 81E 10785 BERLIN

28 January – 18 March 2017

IRMA BLANK LIFE LINE

P420 is participating in: Arco, Madrid 22–27 February 2017 The Armory Show, New York 2–5 March 2017

Via Azzo Gardino 9, Bologna IT

P420

info@p420.it

www.p420.it

LEE BUL JANUARY 12-FEBRUARY 11, 2017 536 WEST 22ND STREET, NEW YORK | lehmannmaupin.com

EXHIBITION RUN

18 FEBRUARY - 14 MAY 2017 MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART AND DESIGN G/F De La Salle-College of Saint Benilde SDA Campus Dominga St., Malate, Manila, Philippines www.mcadmanila.org.ph /MCAD.Manila @MCADManila

Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Ghost Teen, 2009. Vinyl print. 147 x 222cm. Courtesy of the artist.

Yuko Mohri Moré Moré (Leaky) 9 February – 11 March 2017

white rainbow 47 Mortimer Street London W1W 8HJ

white-rainbow.co.uk info@white-rainbow.co.uk +44 207 637 1050

HENK VISCH

26 January - 11 March 2017

TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY

ArtReview vol 69 no 1 January & February 2017

Critic’s Credo As ArtReview went to press, news broke of the death of the British art-critic, broadcaster and author John Berger, who died at the age of ninety. Berger was a remarkable figure: a lifelong Marxist, he blazed a trail through the postwar decades with a style of art criticism that sought to bring art and life – social, political, historical – into closer dialogue. His 1972 tv series, Ways of Seeing, remains an inspirational example of how art criticism can broach complex ideas for the broadest public. During 1955, Art News and Review (as ArtReview was then called) published a series of opinion pieces – under the common title ‘Critics Creed’ – by art critics on how they understood the role of criticism. In his contribution (titled ‘Critics Credo’), the twenty-nine-year-old Berger reflects on the nature of ‘public’ as opposed to ‘studio’ criticism, on the difference between interpretation and judgement, and (taking issue with his fellow critics) on what makes criticism more than a merely subjective activity. Sixty years on, Berger’s forthright position still resonates, which is why ArtReview thinks you should read it now.

Two quite different types of criticism are frequently confused: Studio criticism and Public criticism. Studio criticism really amounts to a form of art-teaching (if painters will excuse the impertinence of that phrase) in which the critic is only concerned with advising the artist. It is – if one uses the word in its broadest sense – technical criticism. The critic accepts the artist’s aims and concerns himself to commenting upon his methods. “That blue comes forward too much”. “The drawing of that hand is first rate”. If Studio criticism is ever concerned with questioning aims, it is so only in direct relation to the artist’s personality. “Are you sure you’re not trying to be too intellectual?” “Do you realise that the effect of this is horrific rather than tragic?” Public criticism, as the name implies, is addressed to the general public. The critic, instead of identifying himself with the artist, identifies himself with the spectator. He cannot consider the works in question as works in progress – a progress which his comments might influence; he must consider them as presented works and must try to evaluate them in relation to the world to which they have been presented. If the distinction between these two forms of criticism was more generally recognised, artists who expect press criticism to be “understanding” would be spared much disappointment, and the public would be spared a great deal of (to them) boring and obscure writing which assumes that they are initiates of the studio. The next important point to realise is that Studio criticism has always and will always exist. It can be given by amateurs, other painters, teachers, or anybody who is articulate enough and has sufficient technical knowledge and imagination. Public criticism on the

other hand is a comparatively recent innovation, barely two hundred years old. Its very existence is a result of the separation of art from public life. If the function of the public critic is to relate works of art to ordinary life, it follows that either the works themselves are remote from that life as it is normally understood, or that the public are so confused by art that they cannot see the connections which do exist. Thus, the critic who is truly concerned – not with a few of his studio mates who happen to be painters – but with all the possibilities of art as a human activity, – works, like a doctor, to make his own job unnecessary. I believe that finally the art critic will be unnecessary. Writers and thinkers will always consider art as one of their subjects, but the exclusive art critic will become an anachronism. Granted, however, our present situation, what should be the public critic’s method? He can of course avoid the problem altogether as Eric Newton did in his Credo [in a preceding issue of Art News and Review]. He can simply describe his own experience in front of a work of art in a prose “as precise, as vivid and as persuasive as he can make it” – and leave it at that. I am not suggesting that the critic shouldn’t describe his aesthetic experiences as well as he can – but that is the most elementary part of his job. The real problem is not how he should communicate his experience, but how he is to connect it with what is simultaneously happening in the world. I am often accused of dragging politics into art. But surely, it is criminally irresponsible for any intellectual today not to consider his and every subject in relation to the threat of the H bomb! Yet apart from the H bomb (if such a phrase makes sense) there are other reasons why the problem of criticism is fundamentally the problem of connection. First, the critic, as I have already said,

represents the spectator, and the majority of the average spectator’s pre-occupations are not aesthetic. Secondly, it is only on the perimeter of one’s thinking and feeling that it is possible to separate and label issues – Aesthetic, Moral, Social, Political, Sensuous, Spiritual, etc. Within the development of anyone’s total experience all these issues coalesce into a general attitude of human faith (or despair) of which art is one, but only one expression. Thirdly, if as I have already implied, art today suffers from its isolation, it is obviously the duty of the critic to try and break down that isolation by showing its connection – at the worst negative, and at the best positive – with our whole human experience and predicament. And lastly, as a Marxist, believe that there is a definite causal connection – though by no means an automatic one – between the art, religion, philosophy, ethics, policy, and economic structure of any society. But of course it is very much easier to explain why one should connect, than how. One can list the critic’s minimum qualifications: that he should understand the processes or art, if possible by personal experience: that he should have looked at many works: that he should have a sense of history: that he should have a finger on the pulse of significant contemporary affairs: that he should make himself familiar with all the different divisions and levels of taste in our society: that he should know something about the way artists live and the conditions of their employment (or unemployment): that he should be at least equally concerned with those who challenge the fashions as with those who make them: that he should follow, if only as an amateur, the development of the other arts besides his own: and over and above all this, that he should have

a passionate love for art, that he should never forget, however trivial certain situations in which he may find himself, that art is one of the noblest achievements of man. But the question still remains, granted all these qualifications. How does he connect – which is to say assess, judge and interpret? If he is dealing with works of the past in relation to their historical setting, the problem is comparatively easy, for the facts, having been discovered, sorted out, and estimated in perspective, will suggest their own logical connections. When he is dealing with contemporary works or with works of the past, in relation to their significance for the present, I believe that he can only connect by making an imaginative leap. He must have the knowledge and experience which I have listed in order to sustain his imagination – but the final process is bound to be an imaginative one. And it is here that I disagree with most of my colleagues for I do not believe that the critic’s imaginative function lies in re-creating or simply interpreting the work, but in assessing its likely effect, however small, on the general development of life. He must not only look at it from his own personal point of view, but from that of the artist, other painters, the conscious and unconscious mind of the spectator, the general public and even, if possible, future generations. If he does this, he will have a chance of being able to assess its objective effect instead of its totally unimportant subjective effect on himself. I only want to add that what I have written is a Credo. It is what I believe is necessary for sound and valuable criticism. It is not a description of what I think I personally achieve. First published in Art News and Review, 14 May 1955

Timeless

Adrian Ghenie Recent Paintings

510 West 25 th Street, New York January 20 – February 18, 2017

MICOL ASSAËL, NORBERT BISKY, MONICA BONVICINI, CLAUDIA COMTE, JOSE DÁVILA, ELMGREEN & DRAGSET, TUE GREENFORT, KATHARINA GROSSE, JEPPE HEIN, CAMILLE HENROT, NATHAN HYLDEN, ANNETTE KELM, ALICJA KWADE, HELEN MARTEN, KRIS MARTIN, JUSTIN MATHERLY, MICHAELA MEISE, AMALIA PICA, ANSELM REYLE, NATASCHA SADR HAGHIGHIAN, MICHAEL SAILSTORFER, ANDREAS SCHMITTEN, JOHN SEAL, JEREMY SHAW, TATIANA TROUVÉ, DANIEL TURNER, RINUS VAN DE VELDE, JORINDE VOIGT, CORINNE WASMUHT, MATTHIAS WEISCHER, JOHANNES WOHNSEIFER, ERWIN WURM, DAVID ZINK YI

KÖNIG GALERIE

ST. AGNES ALEXANDRINENSTR. 118–121 D-10969 BERLIN

T +49.30.261 030 80 F +49.30.261 030 811 INFO@KOENIGGALERIE.COM

OPENING HOURS TUE–SUN 11–18 H KOENIGGALERIE.COM

Art Previewed

Previews by Martin Herbert 35

page 40 Sam Durant, God wills us free (John Jack’s epitaph, Thoreau’s flute), 2016, bronze and marble, 91 × 46 × 61 cm. Photo: Heather Rasmussen. Courtesy the artist and Blum & Poe, Los Angeles, New York & Tokyo

January & February 2017

Future Greats

Future Greats by Oliver Basciano, Victor Burgin, Gabriel Coxhead, Natasha Hoare, Sunjung Kim, Catalina Lozano, Kiki Mazzucchelli, Philippe Pirotte, Dieter Roelstraete, Ben Street, Joanna Warsza, Mike Watson 52

Memos for Now by Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Aaron Angell, Athanasios Argianas, Tania Bruguera, Cao Fei, Heman Chong, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Olafur Eliasson, Renata Lucas, Dóra Maurer, Rick Lowe, Anna Maria Maiolino, Otobong Nkanga, Nedko Solakov, superflex, Nil Yalter, Heimo Zobernig 67

Future Imperfect A conversation between Adam Thirlwell and Pankaj Mishra 88

page 86 Zachary Cahill, The Future, 2014, watercolour on paper. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

THE E YAL OFER GALLERIE S Global Sponsor

Supporting Sponsor

Supported by

With additional support from the Robert Rauschenberg Exhibition Supporters Group, Tate Americas Foundation and Tate Patrons

Art Reviewed

exhibitions 94 Revolt of the Sage, by Laura Smith Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck, by Kimberly Bradley Painting After Postmodernism: A Manifesto Exhibition, by George Stolz Against Nature: Young Czech Art Scene, by Robert Barry Amelie von Wulffen, by Raimar Stange Ed Atkins, by Louisa Elderton Figurative Geometry, by Hettie Judah Saskia Olde Wolbers, by Dominic van den Boogerd Michaela Meise, by Fi Churchman Po wiecu / After the Rally, by Phoebe Blatton Tobias Spichtig, by Aoife Rosenmeyer Animality, by Gabriel Coxhead Matthew Darbyshire, by Sean Ashton The Ulm Model, by Will Wiles The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, by Joyce Dixon Kelly Akashi, by Ciara Moloney Concrete Islands, by Jonathan Griffin David Ostrowski and Michail Pirgelis, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Loie Hollowell, by Owen Duffy Kai Althoff, by Joshua Mack Georgie Nettell, by David Everitt Howe

Sara Cwynar, by Bill Clarke Edgar Orlaineta, by Kim Córdova Marcelo Cidade, by Oliver Basciano The Afro Matrix and the Formal Elements, by Claire Rigby Kenpoku Art 2016, by Adeline Chia art life 126 Paris, by Louise Darblay books 132 Here Is Information. Mobilise., by Ian White Fantasies of the Library, edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, by Donna J. Haraway Animals, edited by Filipa Ramos the strip 138 a curator writes 142

page 106 Gabriel Orozco, Porcupine Eating a Tortilla, 2016, pigment print, 41 × 51 cm. Courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London

ArtReview

PROGRAMme

2017

FEB MAY

JUNE SEPT

Feb 3 – May 8

June 14 – Sept 10

ALL WATCHED OVER BY MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE

DIORAMAS THE DREAM OF FORMS

TARO IZUMI

HAYOUN KWON

ABRAHAM POINCHEVAL

GARETH NYANDORO

MEL O’CALLAGHAN

SEPT

DORIAN GAUDIN

OFF-SITE EXHIBITION IN CHICAGO

EMMANUEL SAULNIER ANNE LE TROTER

April 21 – 23 DO DISTURB

OCT JAN Oct 18 – Jan 7, 2018 “CARTE BLANCHE” TO CAMILLE HENROT

Marie Lund, Stills, 2013 (detail). Private collection. Courtesy of the artist & galleries Croy Nielsen (Vienna) ; Laura Bartlett (London) ; joségarcía ,mx (Mexico City)

EMMANUELLE LAINÉ

Palexpo / 26 – 29.01.2017 / artgeneve.ch

galleries Tornabuoni Art | Taste Contemporary | Sommer Contemporary Art | Skopia / P.-H. Jaccaud |

SAY CHEESE!

Work No. 2661, 2016

Photo: Hugo Glendinning Courtesy the artist & Hauser & Wirth

Martin Creed Voorlinden Museum & Gardens — Buurtweg 90 Wassenaar, The Netherlands — www.voorlinden.nl

Art Previewed

The second Halifax Rural Areas Quality of Life Survey ranked Uttlesford District as the 4th best place to live in the uk out of 114 rural authority areas surveyed 33

marinus boezem

oude kerk

— 26 Mar 2017 Amsterdam

oudekerk.nl for information on the exhibition and public programme including performances, concerts and lectures

Previewed Desert X Coachella Valley, Palm Springs 25 February – 30 April

Give Me Yesterday Fondazione Prada, Milan through 12 March

A.K. Burns New Museum, New York 18 January – 23 April

Helen Johnson ica, London 1 February – 2 April

Robin Rhode Stevenson, Cape Town 19 January – 4 March

Sam Durant Blum & Poe, Los Angeles 7 January – 4 February

Monica Bonvicini Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead through 26 February

Rita Ackermann Malmö Konsthall through 22 January

Rosa Barba Neuer Berliner Kunstverein through 27 January

John Currin Sadie Coles, London through 21 January

1 Desert X 2017 site view, Palm Springs. Courtesy Desert X

January & February 2017

Kunzru’s Balzac-quoting, Mojave Desert-set The desert, Honoré de Balzac wrote in Une 2011 novel Gods Without Men, is apparently passion dans le désert (1830), is ‘God without men’. inviting established and emerging artists to That phrase filters into Neville Wakefield’s the free-to-visit project; said artists will use 1 curatorial statement for Desert X, an expansive, indoor and outdoor locations to engage with site-specific show that resembles a biennale but ‘global and local issues that may range from won’t necessarily happen every two years. The climate change to starry skies, from Tribal sandy region in this case is California’s Coachella culture and immigration to tourism, gaming, Valley, whose myriad preinstalled associations and golf.’ Golf art? Sold. range from retreats for Hollywood wheelerAmong the current generation of young dealers into Palm Springs idylls, to the collec2 painters, the élan and personality of Helen tivist rush of Coachella’s annual music festival Johnson’s playful, issue-driven work stand (with which Desert X synergistically coincides). out. Her canvases are at once sociably inclusive In the desert, Balzac also wrote, there is ‘every– matching Italian postmodernist design with thing and nothing’. Here, if the ‘nothing’ is miniature cartoon narratives and political the desert’s entropic encroachment, the ‘everyissues (eg Women discussing patriarchy, 2015) – thing’ has yet to be revealed – no artist list so and speckled with self-conscious distancing far – though it’s characterised as ‘art without constraint’. More specifically, the well-connected techniques such as compositional windows Wakefield, who has perhaps browsed Hari and frames, textile accoutrements and humour.

That distancing is only to foreclose hectoring, though. For the Melbourne-based artist’s show at London’s ica, close to where the British colonisation of Australia was plotted, Johnson mounts images on a zigzag structure related to the plan of Canberra, Australia’s prefab modernist capital. Expect, amid the offbeat fluency of her compositions, images of white imperialism and, among other things, men masturbating to the Australian national anthem (the usual, then). ‘Architecture is the ultimate erotic act / 3 Carry it to excess,’ Monica Bonvicini spraypainted across a wall in Zürich’s Migros Museum in 2002. A melding of the bodily and the built, language and control, has been the Veniceborn, Berlin-based artist’s métier for decades – whether via the video Wallfuckin’ (1995–6), in which a naked woman humps a corner wall,

2 Helen Johnson, Great Depression (detail), 2016, acrylic on canvas, synthetic fabric, 370 × 320 cm. Courtesy the artist

3 Monica Bonvicini, Harness, 2006. Photo: Jens Ziehe. © the artist and vg-Bild Kunst, Frankfurt. Courtesy Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead

ArtReview

5 Robin Rhode, Three Nudes (detail), 2016, c-print, set of three, 59 × 73 cm each. © the artist. Courtesy Stevenson, Cape Town & Johannesburg

4 Melanie Bonajo, Thank You for Hurting Me I Really Needed It (detail), 2008–16, wallpaper, dimensions variable. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Fondazione Prada, Milan

arrays of dangling s&m-like hammocks (Never Again, 2005) or declarative yet ambiguous text sculptures (Satisfy Me (Big), 2010). The survey her hand around the room cherry-picks Bonvicini’s muscular oeuvre and its exploration of subliminal shapers of identity: expect glaring lightworks, a staircase of chains and steel pipes, a substantial selection of drawings, and newly commissioned works. ‘The aim’, Bonvicini once said, paraphrasing Lenin, ‘is to be more radical than reality is. Try that!’ In Bonvicini’s home country, meanwhile, the Fondazione Prada looks backward. We mean 4 that in a good way. Give Me Yesterday, a title observers of geopolitics might approvingly or despairingly echo, joins the dots between our moment, where smartphones and Instagram have made photographers of us all, and the informal, diaristic photography first floated

by Nan Goldin, Larry Clark, Wolfgang Tillmans et al and extended by the 14 Italian and international artists here, including Ryan McGinley, Joanna Piotrowska, Leigh Ledare and Melanie Bonajo. Unlike the rest of us, of course, these artists (perhaps) aren’t just fishing for likes. Instead the show focuses on unceremonious photography as an agent of control apropos the gazes of observer and observed, and a format that upraises individual and/or collective selfhood. All of which will be essayed within the Fondazione’s new, apparently photography-centric exhibition space in the (originally) nineteenth-century Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, one of the world’s first shopping malls, on the level of the dome shielding the arcades. Let’s linger in Italy a moment longer. Robin 5 Rhode, the South Africa-born, Berlin-based

January & February 2017

artist, rose quickly a decade or so ago to rippedoff-by-ad-agencies levels of fame for works that intermingled video and animated graffitistyle wall sketches, and post-Muybridge serial photography of progressively developing drawings. Since 2005, when he was featured in the Venice Biennale, he’s been a regular visitor to Northern Italy, particularly Turin, and for his third solo at Stevenson, Paths and Fields, Rhode draws on the influence of the country, specifically artists such as Giovanni Anselmo, Giuseppe Penone and Giulio Paolini, and the general repurposing ethos of Arte Povera. And he draws on the gallery walls, using charcoal sculptures as his tools, as well as presenting works involving video shot in post-Katrina New Orleans, with hopeful intent. Wall-scrawling is a childlike procedure, but for Rhode that’s the point, an evocation of innocent creativity

7 John Currin, Happy House Painters, 2016, oil on canvas, 178 × 132 × 3 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Sadie Coles hq , London

6 Rita Ackermann, Freezer Burn, 2014, acrylic, enamel, chalk, spraypaint on canvas, 198 × 112 × 4 cm. Courtesy the artist and Malmö Konsthall

8 A.K. Burns, production still, 2016. Courtesy the artist

that can locate freedoms by, as he said in a 2015 out of erasures, aggressive rubbings-out interview, tapping into ‘that psyche that’s not anti-intuitively ensuring, Ackermann has tainted by reality’. said, that what’s being expunged becomes 6 Rita Ackermann also first became recogmore visible. She’s prone to quoting Paul Virilio nised for her drawing practice, but it couldn’t in support of this practice of disappearance, have been further from Rhode’s. Cast your mind but what these paintings do – and how they back to the Budapest-born artist’s overlapping smartly expand upon Ackermann’s decadesoutlines of doe-eyed sylphs, edged with bloody long interrogation of painting and drawing – smears, anxious fixtures on the postrecession needs little theoretic exegesis. 7 art scene of early-1990s New York after she John Currin began exhibiting paintings moved there in her early twenties. Ackermann of unclothed women around the same time still works in that visibly beautiful/violent style as Ackermann, but – here comes another pivot sometimes, where much of the subject matter – otherwise their outlooks and aesthetics seems to be transpiring off-canvas, and she’s couldn’t be more different. Currin, famously moved through various diaphanous and or notoriously, takes a neoclassical aesthetic, expressive phases in between. But as is affirmed harking back particularly to sixteenth- and by her first Scandinavian show, mixing early seventeenth-century European painting, and and recent works, she’s also lately focused on merges it with low-cultural signifiers (from Chalkboard Paintings (2013–), which are composed porn, a ‘cliché of transgression’ in his words,

ArtReview

to cheap cinema) to create a psychological problem-space, seductive in some ways and deeply uneasy in others. The developments in his sixth exhibition at Sadie Coles hq , focused on pairs and couples, are symbolism, Surrealism and, perhaps, the plot-twist of restraint. Figures sport ice-cream-cone horns or gleaming fish wrapped around their faces, there’s a play of dripped paint between two embracing women, and all the while Currin’s academic painterly precision pulls in one direction, the teasingly vacillating oddity of the scenarios in another. More Surrealism? The style is shaping up as apposite for our present stranger-than-fiction world, though admittedly it’s only one strand 8 of A.K. Burns’s project as artist-in-residence at the New Museum, and her broader cycle of speculative fiction works in video installation and sculpture. To the extent that Burns updates

*Aargauer Kunsthaus 22. 1. – 17. 4. 2017 Aargauerplatz CH–5001 Aarau Tue – Sun 10 am – 5 pm Thur 10 am – 8 pm www.aargauerkunsthaus.ch

Teresa Hubbard / Alexander Birchler Movie Mountain (Méliès), 2011

Cinéma mon amour Film in Art Martin Arnold (A), John Baldessari (USA), Fiona Banner (GB), Marc Bauer (CH), Pierre Bismuth (F), Candice Breitz (ZA), Janet Cardiff (CAN) & George Bures Miller (CAN), collectif_fact (Annelore Schneider, CH & Claude Piguet, CH), Tacita Dean (GB), Stan Douglas (CAN), Thomas Galler (CH), Christoph Girardet (D) & Matthias Müller (D), Douglas Gordon (GB), Teresa Hubbard (IRL) / Alexander Birchler (CH), Samson Kambalu (MW), Daniela Keiser (CH), Urs Lüthi (CH), Philippe Parreno (F), Julian Rosefeldt (D), Hiroshi Sugimoto (JAP), Sam TaylorJohnson (GB), Mark Wallinger (GB)

André Breton’s movement, it’s with ancillary postminimalist sculpture. Durant has since doses of theatre, sci-fi, queer politics and explored and mooted monuments for slaughpost-Donna Haraway cyborgian theory, and tered Native Americans, works highlighting for a moment of pronounced bodily and the us’s long history of executing its incarcerecological anxieties. Here, following on from ated (and, in other works, collaborations with prisoners) and many other intricately researched 2015’s four-channel video A Smeary Spot, which projects. His work rarely appears untimely even the institution describes loosely as a ‘parallel when it digs into the past, but with America cosmology where aspects move or flow, are seemingly on the brink, it feels increasingly controlled, measured, used, or cared for, raising urgent of late. Given that Durant tends to be larger questions about how value is allocated highly location- and time-specific, we’re looking and perceived’, Burns will set up an in-process forward to whatever he does in Los Angeles, video installation exploring the subjugation in Build Therefore Your Own World. Right now, of the body. though, our only clue is Dream Map, Polaris Subjugated bodies throughout history 9 have recurred in the work of Sam Durant (who (2016), a star map made from pennies glued to the dark field of a surplus military blanket. staged a show titled Invisible Surrealists in 2014, To which there’s a link to Rosa Barba’s but we must press on) which early on engaged 10 current show. But it’ll take a moment to get with the contemporaneous histories of the Civil there, moving past the loud, rattling, positively Rights movement, the arc of 1960s rock and

sculptural film projectors that are a hallmark of her art – less for nostalgic reasons than as part of her longstanding investigation of the materiality of cinema, and the relationship of film to memory. The film Subject to Constant Change (2013), for example, shot the uk in Kent and Manchester, explored the end of the industrial age, ranging from Manchester locals considering bygone objects to the surreal sea forts in the Kentish estuary. At n.b.k., meanwhile, in the ‘cinemasculpture’ The Colour Out of Space (2015), the Italian artist presents footage of stars and planets shot at the observatory in Troy, New York, along with a dense sound collage of interviews with artists, writers and astronomers on the relation between cinema and the cosmos: the pairing evoking, like the scale of the universe itself, a situation that outpaces human perception. The starry heavens, then: told you we’d get there. Martin Herbert

10 Rosa Barba, The Color Out of Space (still), 2015, five coloured glass filters, steel base, hd video, colour, sound, 36 min. © the artist. Courtesy Fondazione Prada, Milan

9 Sam Durant, The Meeting House, 2016 (installation view, the Old Manse, Concord, ma). Photo: Alex Jones. Courtesy Trustees of Reservations, Old Manse

ArtReview

MONICA BONVICINI her hand around the room 18 November 2016 – 26 February 2017

Traces of the Future 27 Jan – 26 March ’17

art. dance. ideas.

New work from Evgenia Arbugaeva and Mariele Neudecker exploring the archaeology of modern science in Africa

PERPETUAL MOVEMENT

A NEW EXHIBITION AT THE LOWRY

CURATED IN COLLABORATION WITH RAMBERT

Nunnery Gallery 181 Bow Road, E3 2SJ Open Tues-Sun, 10-5 Tube Bow Road DLR Bow Church Image courtesy & © Evgenia Arbugaeva (detail)

UNTIL 26 FEBRUARY 2017 FREE ENTRY thelowry/visualarts

Michaela Zimmer, ‘16090_1234’, 2016 (detail)

TracesAd_ArtReview.indd 2

20/12/2016 12:08:22

Florian Roithmayr ir re par sur 20th January –18th March

JESSICA CARLISLE 4 MAN D E V I L L E P L AC E LOND O N W1U 2 B F

VERONICA SMIRNOFF 8 FEBRUARY – 4 MARCH 2 0 1 7

T U E S DAY–SATUR DAY 1 2 – 6 P M I N F O @JESSICACARLISLE.COM W W W.JESSICACARLISLE.COM

ETERNITY IS THE MOST DANGEROUS RIOTER OF ALL , EGG TEMPERA ON WOOD, 40 X 30 CM

Larry Achiampong & David Blandy, Barby Asante, Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom, Phoebe Boswell, Kimathi Donkor, Evan Ifekoya, Cedar Lewisohn, Harold Offeh, Ima-Abasi Okon, NT, Barbara Walker.

14 JANUARY – 19 MARCH 2017 FREE ENTRY

Image credit: Appau Junior Boakye-Yiadom, P.Y.T., 2009

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UNTITLED: art on the conditions of our time

LIZ MAGOR you you you 18.2 – 7.5 2017 MAJA BAJEVIC 20.5 – 13.8 2017 J I M M I E D U R H A M 26.8 – 5.11 2017 Extra Bodies — The Use of the ‘Other Body’ in Contemporary Art 18.11 2017 – 4.2 2018 Limmatstrasse 270 CH–8005 Zurich migrosmuseum.ch migros-culture-percentage.ch

AN INSTITUTION OF THE MIGROS CULTURE PERCENTAGE

Call for entries

Summer Exhibition 2017 Entry by digital submission only Submission deadline 15 February 2017 roy.ac/submit

George Samuel Bothamley

18.01.2017 – 26.02.2017 Jerwood Space

Exclusive171 renaissance Union Street inspired artwork London SE1 0LN

Originals jerwoodvisualarts.org available to purchase on request @JerwoodJVA

Commissions considered #JVASolo

www.georgebothamley.co.uk

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Image: Anna Bunting-Branch, SENSAWUNDA (The Discovery), acrylic paint on paper, 2016

JERWOOD SOLO PRESENTATIONS: ANNA BUNTING-BRANCH BEN BURGIS & KSENIA PEDAN IMRAN PERRETTA

George Samuel Bothamley

16/12/2016 11:57 Untitled-1 1

Exclusive renaissance inspired artwork Originals available to purchase on request Commissions considered

www.georgebothamley.co.uk

20/12/2016 11:51

ONE AND OTHER

MASTER CLASS: ARTIST TALKS

The Trial of Superdebthunterbot

Ed Atkins, David Blandy, Cécile B. Evans, Leo Gabin, Isa Genzken, Rashid Johnson, Tim Noble & Sue Webster, Ferhat Özgür, Jon Rafman, Ugo Rondinone, Amalia Ulman, Ulla Von Brandenburg, Gillian Wearing

1 February: Heather Phillipson 2 February: Chantal Joffe 4 February: Eve Sussman 5 February: Susan Hiller Free, 7pm

Annual exhibition curated by MA Curators from The CASS at London Metropolitan and Chelsea College of Art Ed Atkins, No one is more WORK than me, 2014. (detail) Courtesy the artist and Cabinet, London

Helen Knowles, Installation View of The Trial of Superdebthunterbot, 2016

INVITES: HELEN KNOWLES

TESTING GROUND

19 January–26 February

ZABLUDOWICZ COLLECTION

Where do we go from here?

FUTURE GREATS

in association with

INTRODUCTION

‘We have to heighten our curiosity to uncover meaning and value in unfamiliar places.’ That’s Rick Lowe describing the importance of curiosity as a value for art during 2017. The Houston-based artist is one of 17 to have contributed to a list of key values for art production in the coming year that is published as part of this edition of Future Greats. But Lowe might also have been describing the core values that lie behind the Future Greats project itself: each year for the past 11 years ArtReview has asked a number of leading artists, curators and critics to introduce artists they think will be setting new agendas over the coming year but who have not yet been offered a platform from which to reach a broad audience. The exercise itself is (ideally) risky and speculative: sometimes a nominated artist goes on to have major exhibitions or win awards; sometimes (albeit much less often) relatively little is heard of them again. What’s important to ArtReview about this issue, though, is not the ways in which it might offer itself as a list of artists, for those blessed with the cash, to buy cheap and then sell a lot less cheaply; rather, it provides a survey of the diverse and evolving interests and agendas that make contemporary art… well… part of the blurry, oscillating, unstable substance of ‘now’. At a time when large parts of the world might feel more intolerant and less inclusive than some of us (actually, given that you’re already reading this magazine, ArtReview’s going to assume a certain sympathy and say ‘all of us’) would like them to be, offering such a stage for the free expression and subsequent interrogation of ideas about our relationship with the world (that’s ArtReview’s key interest in art today, btw) seems more important than ever. That’s one of the reasons why ArtReview and ArtReview Asia have partnered with K11 Art Foundation to expand the Future Greats programme over the next two years. Established in 2010, the foundation provides a creative platform that nurtures young talent from the Chinese art scene but also encourages international dialogue between that scene and its international counterparts. This partnership, then, is a marriage of two like-minded organisations, further witnessed by the fact that during 2016 alone the foundation has hosted exhibitions by two former Future Greats: China’s Guan Xiao and France’s Neïl Beloufa. The support of K11 Art Foundation will allow us to expand the Future Greats project and enable a dialogue between the respective positions of ArtReview and ArtReview Asia. A dialogue that, over the coming years, promises to be as much about what art can do as it is about what art’s trying to say.

IZA TARASEWICZ

selected by Oliver Basciano Tarasewicz explores

CHAOS THEORY through

the choices she makes in the production and installation of her art: every small

VARIATION inextricably changing the work’s effect on the viewer

Turba, Turbo (detail), 2015, titanium white, iron yellow, iron red, iron brown, iron black, chrome green, iron cobalt, ash, metal, cement, hemp fibre, resin, asphalt rubber, water glass, plant glue, metal rope, stranded wire, metal hoops, 1000 × 150 cm. Courtesy bwa Warszawa

January & February 2017

Five metres of looped handmade hemp and asphalt-rubber rope hang chaos theory and how the slightest variances can effect great change. in drooping arcs from the ceiling of the Zacheta National Gallery of She is also interested in hylozoism, the idea that all matter, in some Art in Warsaw. Below, suspended by a series of cables also attached sense, is ‘alive’. While these ideas are commonly spoken of within to the ceiling, is a large rusting structure hovering half a metre or so the framework of mathematics, physics and philosophy, Tarasewicz above the gallery floor – 25 metal hoops connected to form a tunnellike explores them in the aesthetic realm through her intricate sculptural frame. This installation – the rope titled Arena (2014), the suspended installations. Knight's Tour (2016), for example, made during a resisculpture Turba, Turbo (2015) – was Iza Tarasewicz’s contribution to dency in Tbilisi, takes a diagram of the moves a knight might make on the nominees exhibition of the 2015 Views Award, Poland’s biggest a chessboard and uses it as the basis for a (again, ceiling-hung) work that replicates the piece’s route in three-dimensional space through art prize, which the artist went on to win. I encountered Turba, Turbo again a year later, at the Bienal de São a series of jointed wood poles. As all chess players know, the choice Paulo (visitors to the 2016 Gwangju Biennale would have the chance between any two moves will radically alter how the game develops. to see a version of Arena). Or rather, I encountered a work under the In another project, developed for the Bienal de São Paulo, Tarasewicz same title – probably the same metal structure – but with various traced the pan-cultural variants to mazurka, a dance originating subtle differences. Throughout both iterations, a series of small in sixteenth-century Poland that has now spread globally (including platforms, in identical rusting metal, are attached to the looping to Brazil). frame. On these sit semiprecious stones, rope coils and piles of variWith this theme in mind, I began to consider my own reaction to ously coloured pigments – dark red iron oxide, green chromium seeing Turba, Turbo in two of its iterations. Each decision in an artist’s oxide, light sodium silicate and more. The exact arrangements making and installation process – that is the process, in hylozoistic differed, however, and there were other slight changes: this version terms, of catalysing the interaction of different matter – can change was floor-based; both installations had metal discs attached across the effect a work has on its viewer. It struck me how precarious the the work, but the São Paulo version had more; conversely, I seem Warsaw version of the installation was – how it swayed slightly; how to remember a larger amount of stones in the Warsaw work. Later someone knocked it at the busy prize opening, causing the work to I discover that Tarasewicz has shown the work with sections of the shudder, risking the upset of the treasures resting in the pools of hoops hanging individually from the ceiling, in a show at the Kostka colour across the structure – and how much more sturdy and robust – a hulking, brutal thing – the São Paulo Gallery in Prague. Tarasewicz is based in Warsaw. Her work is included adaptation proved. With just the slightest These changes to a single work resoin a group show at Croy Nielsen, Vienna, in January of changes, they became, to all intents and nate with the context of Tarasewicz’s wider and in Anu Pöder. Be Brave! Be Fragile at the Center purposes, two different works, two different artmaking and the research that fuels it. In for Contemporary Arts Estonia, Tallinn, in March. Warsaw, the artist told me of her interest in realities. ob She is represented by Croy Nielsen and bwa Warszawa.

Iza Tarasewicz, Arena, 2014 and Turba, Turbo, 2015 (installation view, 2015 Views Award nominees exhibition, Zacheta National Gallery of Art, Warsaw). Courtesy bwa Warszawa

ArtReview

ADELITA HUSNI-BEY

selected by Mike Watson If Husni-Bey’s work seems somehow sullied by its

INSTITUTIONS, it is only because it points to the COMPLICITY of the ARTWORLD with the wider world connection to major art

it reflects and critiques

Being a vocal proponent of anarchism and working in the contem- Quadriennale. (Indeed, the power games that can be seen at play porary arts is tough, not least for the constant contradictions and between journalists, politicians and bankers are reflected in the intercompromises such a position entails. The artworld is complicit necine structure of the Quadriennale itself, which this time featured with the political and financial mechanisms that the anarchist rails 11 curators who picked 99 artists to be featured in parallel themed against. As such, any convincing representation of anarchist values group shows. Controversially, artists received no funding from the requires that an artist deal with the contradictions of their own prac- museum for the show, leading to an exhibition built on pacts between tice. It is her ability to do this that has convinced me of the strength collectors, gallerists and artists.) of Adelita Husni-Bey’s research. The Libyan-Italian artist, who grew La luna in folle (The Neutral Moon, 2016) is a circular stage upon up between the uk, Italy and Libya, and is now based in New York, which three television sets sit. On each a debate is shown on loop, is capable of maintaining a fluid exchange between institutional and filmed respectively in the style of a political discussion, a reality anti-institutional codes, while hollowing out a space for horizontal show and a talkshow. Through these performed conversations, the dialogue within hierarchical structures. Her workshops, plays and work critiques the lottery of immigration law and the shallowness videos engage with notions of the institution and of legal and political of political debate in the West in the post-truth era we are living. Yet processes, incorporating a light – yet hands-on – approach in order to the resounding question is how much difference such statements can place spectators and participants at the heart of legislative processes. make within the closed realm of the institutionalised contemporary For example, her 2014 videowork Agency giochi di potere (Agency Power art exhibition (the work is currently on show at maxxi, for example). Games) – one of two currently displayed at Rome’s 16th Quadriennale – If Husni-Bey’s work seems somehow sullied by its connection to documents a three-day workshop undertaken in a secondary school, major art institutions, it is only because it points to the complicity of in which students were divided into five professional categories (jour- the artworld with the wider world it reflects and critiques. Of course, nalists, politicians, workers, activists and bankers) in the context of an exposing the hypocrisy of institutional systems from within is a election campaign, as a means of analysing power relations in capi- thankless task, which is itself subject to accusations of hypocrisy. It’s talist society. Aside from being a didactical stroke of genius, the work a tightrope walk that ‘political’ curators and artists are familiar with, though few manage it as well as Husni-Bey. – first shown at Rome’s maxxi museum in Husni-Bey is based in New York. Her work was recently 2014 – by its critical nature asks crucial quesThis year will see her participate in the Italian shown at the Sursock Museum, Beirut, and in the tions about the structure of the artworld and, Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, the biggest 11th Gwangju Biennale. She is represented shown in this context, of Rome’s controversial artworld stage, and institution, of all. mw by Laveronica Arte Contemporanea, Modica (Sicily).

January & February 2017

From the series Agency giochi di potere, 2014, c-print, 110 × 147 cm. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

La luna in folle (stills), 2016, three-channel video installation resulting from collective-writing theatre workshop. Courtesy the artist and Laveronica Arte Contemporanea, Modica (Sicily)

January & February 2017

CAMERON ROWLAND

selected by Natasha Hoare Rowland rejects metaphor and symbolism,

OBJECTS he exhibits to BEAR WITNESS to the LABOUR instead allowing the that produced them

Cameron Rowland’s sculptures unfold as unflinchingly direct mani- of Corcraft, a supplier of various items made with prison labour (and festations of his in-depth research into the structural conditions operated by the New York State Department of Correctional Services), that underwrite political and social realities. In person, a conversa- from whom the exhibited objects were bought. Featuring objects tion will mercurially leap from landmark court rulings to neoliberal fabricated by inmates – variously desks, benches and protective suits financial products to the formation of corporate conglomerations. (worn by inmate firefighters, also unpaid) – the exhibition rejects The work itself is unapologetic in its minimalistic presentation of metaphor and symbolism, instead allowing the objects themselves to objects – often found – from a specific nexus of social and economic bear witness to the labour that produced them. That this labour was relations. The caption for Loot (2014), a plastic crate housing copper unpaid and forced upon largely black, incarcerated subjects makes a pipes, locates these items as the material traces of the transition powerful statement on the extension of economic and social subjuof public utilities from state ownership to privatisation, going on gation linking America today with its slaving past. In this Cameron to detail the pipes’ theft and resale as scrap metal – at which point draws on critical race theory, a theoretical framework that positions Rowland isolated and inserted them into an art context and into a the continuation of racial power under us law. Through incisively new reading. Removed from banal daily encounters, these objects bringing to light the conditions of labour through which the penal – such as Pass-Thru (2014), for which Cameron constructed a bullet- system economically benefits, Rowland exposes narratives of justice proof box modelled on those used to protect transactions of money and liberty, central to American society, to be constantly co-opted and and goods at a bank or shop – become totemic markers of complex collapsed. webs of control, exploitation and capital. These almost indexical or In a recent conversation, Rowland and I discussed his investievidentiary assemblages sidestep sentiment while challenging the gations of social impact bonds, a financial product pioneered in the viewer to reassess the stuff that surrounds us as material evidence uk and now active in the us, which are offered by both governments to encourage private investment in public services (such as rehabilattesting to the function of power. 91020000, his widely lauded solo exhibition at Artists Space in New itation). The subject extends Rowland’s examination of the public York last year, was a gut-punch confrontation of the prison-industrial realm’s contamination by the forces of unbridled capital, and in the Trump era – which we can speculate will accelcomplex in the us that implicated the show’s Rowland is based in New York. He has solo exhibitions erate privatisation and has already flared racial institution in the very processes he sought to at Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, and Établissement prejudice – Rowland’s works possess an even critique. ‘91020000’ was the number assigned d’en face, Brussels, this spring and his work will be to Artists Space upon registering as customers greater urgency and potency. nh included in the Whitney Biennial, opening 17 March.

ArtReview

The Attica Series Desk is manufactured by prisoners in Attica Correctional Facility. Prisoners seized control of the D-Yard in Attica from 9–13 September 1971. Following the inmates’ immediate demands for amnesty, the first in their list of practical proposals was to extend the enforcement “the New York State minimum wage law to prison industries.” Inmates working in New York State prisons are currently paid $0.16 to $1.25 an hour. Inmates in Attica produce furniture for government offices throughout the state. This component of government administration depends on inmate labour. Rental at cost: Artworks indicated as ‘Rental at cost’ are not sold. Each of these artworks may be rented for 5 years for the total cost of the Corcraft products that constitute it.

Attica Series Desk, 2016, steel, powder coating, laminated particleboard, distributed by Corcraft, 152 × 182 × 73 cm. Rental at cost. Courtesy the artist and Essex Street, New York

Courtrooms throughout New York State use benches built by prisoners in Green Haven Correctional Facility. The court reproduces itself materially through the labour of those it sentences. Rental at cost: Artworks indicated as ‘Rental at cost’ are not sold. Each of these artworks may be rented for 5 years for the total cost of the Corcraft products that constitute it.

New York State Unified Court System, 2016, oak wood, distributed by Corcraft, 419× 146 × 91 cm. Rental at cost. Courtesy the artist and Essex Street, New York

January & February 2017

KATIE SCHWAB

selected by Ben Street Her work illuminates an

ALTERNATIVE HISTORY

of art, one in which the creative act is

COLLECTIVE, conversational, handmade and a form of EDUCATION in itself

Sampler, 2016, hessian, Grandma’s wool, cotton thread, pine, sapele. Photo: Tom Nolan. Courtesy the artist and Collective, Edinburgh

ArtReview

Katie Schwab in collaboration with Simon Worthington and Florence Dwyer, Making the Bed, Laying the Table, 2016, furniture, ceramic, household paint. Photo: Max Slaven. Courtesy the artist

Work Hands, British Folk Art Open Studio, 2014 (view of Tate Early Years and Families workshop, Tate Britain Clore Studio). © Tate Photography. Courtesy the artist

Katie Schwab’s work is a quiet call to arms. In its nonetheless insistent painting, although composed of a dispersed range of stitch patterns way, it embodies a proposition for how contemporary art might revive drawn from a manual of modernist designs. The slow act of making creative practices of the past. It’s a modest proposal, for sure: Schwab’s is presented as a kind of attention. Schwab’s work illuminates an work is discreet to a fault, whispering its politics, often finding its alternative history (and future) of art, one in which the creative act forms in the domestic and the decorative, but with an emphasis on is collective, conversational, handmade and a form of education in the shared physical space of creative labour. itself. Making works designed for domestic use (like her plates for the What unifies Schwab’s diverse methods – including tapestry, Hotel Ufer, in Düsseldorf) is her way of extending the life of an object ceramics, embroidery, furniture, printmaking, video and more – is a through socialisation. These are ideas embedded in design history, sustained investigation into collective manufacture. Built on exten- and their revitalisation in the art context feels like a corrective. sive research and the learning of traditional craft techniques, her I don’t know if she’d agree, but I see Schwab’s work in gallery educawork revives the historical craft and design workshop as a sort of tion as of a piece with her practice as an artist, and the key to underapplied anthropology. Schwab’s ceramic and tapestry works elude standing her work’s political purpose. Extending and testing the ideas historical framing, resembling at once modernist patterning, pre- in her work through practical workshops for Tate, the Serpentine Columbian Aztec carving and 1980s graphic design. Their plea- and others is a means of letting air into her ideas, enabling a mutual sures, at first, are in this teasing historicity, the stylistic switchbacks exchange that is very like the kind of educational institutions she that continually evade resolution. For her show Together in a Room (at reveres: the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, of course, but also Collective Gallery, Edinburgh, in 2016) – whose title reflects Schwab’s tapestry studios such as West Dean College, West Sussex, and the emphasis on shared interior space as the epitome of a creative ideal Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh. There’s something about the embodied – the artist made a large embroidery piece entiduration of a handcrafted object, the implication Schwab is based in Glasgow. Her work has recently tled Sampler (2016). Mounted and framed on of time shared, that triangulates student, teacher been shown at Jerwood Space, London, the wall, the work read at first as an abstract and maker. For Schwab, it’s all the same thing. bs and Glasgow Sculpture Studios.

January & February 2017

HAIG AIVAZIAN

selected by Gabriel Coxhead

HISTORY as iconic spectacle or PERFORMANCE – albeit one in which people seek to preserve a moment AGAINST the PASSAGE of time, and simultaneously

There’s a sense of

express its disappearance

Haig Aivazian makes work about history. In that sense, he’s following wrenched feet left in place; a copy of Chicago’s statue of Michael in the footsteps of other historically minded artists to have emerged Jordan midgame, with all but his feet removed. In these works and from Lebanon in the past few decades – artists such as Walid Raad others, the sense is of history as a sort of iconic spectacle or perforand Akram Zaatari, who have gained international recognition for mance – albeit a paradoxical one, in which people seek to both works that deal with the recent political and social narratives of the preserve a moment against the passage of time, and simultaneously country. Yet Aivazian has a quite different focus from this older gener- express its disappearance. ation (he was born in 1980). For all that his work explores aspects of More recent pieces have seen Aivazian casting his historical political power and violence, the civil war itself barely features – in net wider. The allegorical objects in Rome is Not in Rome (2016), installed fact, Lebanon as a whole doesn’t get much of a look in. And rather like an archaeological arrangement within a ruined palace during than emphasising ideas of documentation and archiving, Aivazian’s the Marrakech Biennale, drew upon various episodes of scientific approach is more lyrical, more romantically bound up with narra- discovery, fantasy and reenactment from a span of over 2,000 years. tive and storytelling. His works, across a variety of different media, But his most extensive body of work is his investigation into the are like concentrated historical parables, tracing how certain motifs cultural legacy of the Ottoman Empire – and is also, perhaps, his most thread their way between disparate times and locations – often, personal project, given his partly Armenian heritage (he was included indeed, focusing on how history itself is invoked as a trope. in the Golden Lion-winning Armenian Pavilion at the 2015 Venice The video piece Into Thin Air Into the Ground (2011, the first ‘chapter’ Biennale). In a series of entrancing sound, sculpture and film pieces, of the four-part The Unimaginable Things We Build, 2011–12), for he explores the magnificent variety of musical traditions across example, is a smart essay about the Burj Khalifa skyscraper in Dubai, former Ottoman territories, their differing development becoming using a voiceover and advertising imagery to reveal the contradic- metaphors for grand narratives of change and renewal, functioning tions behind its hubristic history-in-the-making claims and ‘history as a sort of a threnody to history. rising’ slogan. Parting Kisses (2013), meanwhile, comprises a series of This year he has a residency in Kadist in Paris, where he plans to small bronzes, like maquettes for commemorative monuments, that make a follow-up to his 2014 video, How Great You Are O Son of the Desert!, elide notions of historical and sporting eras: about Franco-Arab identity. It will be absoAivazian is based in Beirut. His work was recently included in the different generations of Nike Air trainers; lutely fascinating to see where – and when – Marrakech Biennale 6, and the Biennale de Montréal 2016. Saddam Hussein’s toppled statue with his his work leads to. gc He is represented by Sfeir-Semler Gallery, in Hamburg and Beirut.

ArtReview

Into the Air Into the Ground (still), 2011, video, colour, sound, 30 min. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg & Beirut

Rome Is Not In Rome, 2016, fer-forgé, leather upholstery, clay, red and yellow copper, zelige tiles, dimensions variable. Photo: Jens Martin. Courtesy Marrakech Biennale

Parting Kisses (Air Jordan vii & xix), 2013, bronze, marble, brass, 33 × 14 × 14 cm. Courtesy the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery, Hamburg & Beirut

January & February 2017

JUNE CRESPO

selected by Catalina Lozano Encountering Crespo’s work was one of those

MOMENTS where I realised I came short in verbalising my opinion about a work of art. Somehow, I felt

CHALLENGED to ‘like’ without

fully ‘understanding’, and therefore to defend

RELATIONSHIP to art that doesn’t involve a COGNITIVE grasp

other instances of a

that can be fully explained

Chance Album nº1 (detail), 2016, heating radiators, duratrans lambda print, magnets, plastic folders with flowers and dust, glass, glazed ceramic, dimensions variable. Photo: Juande Jarillo. Courtesy the artist and et Hall, Barcelona

ArtReview

Chance Album nº1, 2016, heating radiators, duratrans lambda print, magnets, plastic folders with flowers and dust, glass, glazed ceramic, dimensions variable. Photo: Juande Jarillo. Courtesy the artist and et Hall, Barcelona

January & February 2017

June Crespo always makes sense of her work after the fact. It is not biological and infrastructural. The idea of that which flows beyond simple intuition, but a methodological strategy by which she produces sight has led to the production of a series of ceramic pipes glazed forms and combines them, revealing a tension between the elements on the inside surfaces, adopting traditional techniques learned in a manifested in their friction, amalgamation or slight distance. They workshop in Galicia. Chance Album Nº 1 was in part shaped by a picture take their own time to form, to become a more or less stable volume. of a woman shooting heroin that features in a magazine placed within Crespo’s work operates on the borders of art and language, where the sculpture: the needle entering through the arm, a fluid meeting words do not suffice but are almost enough. She hints at a series of another fluid inside the body. The image informs the work – dealing references to popular culture but intentionally cuts them short before with the idea of concealed, channelled fluids – but it’s invisible to the they can enunciate something. viewer, yet physically present, vibrating in the assemblage. There is a dialectical relationship between the fortuitous, timid Craftsmanship serves to divert intentionality and point at the forms that result from experimentation with new techniques, and the importance of the incidental that appears in the learning process, memory embedded in the accumulation of practice. As Crespo puts it, finding its place once it has been born as form. This methodology it’s like a vessel that contains all the manual gestures of all previous flattens any hierarchical relationship between the elements that are vessels. Her sculptures are made up of a series of objects often piled combined in her works, to become plinth, frame and sculpture at the together with images held in between. Found in 1970s magazines same time. Her work is the result of a series of conscious and unconor created by the artist, images in Crespo’s work are treated as three- scious decisions, a translation of the intuitive to the sensuous, of the dimensional objects, with a thickness, and are sometimes concealed. latent to the visible, without giving into narrative – even if this can In such cases, they become content that is not visible but somewhat emerge later. The human body in relation to space seems to determine present in the assembly of objects granted their own agency. the scale of her work and the relationship one can establish with it, but it emerges fragmented, truncated, and yet In her recent work Chance Album nº 1 Crespo is based in Bilbao and Amsterdam. whole: in the artist’s own words, ‘a closed but (2016), Crespo deals with those conduits Her work has recently been shown at et Hall, Barcelona, that channel fluids, human and nonhuman, broken form’. cl and the Museum of Contemporary Art marco, Vigo.

Chance Album (Queen), 2016, resin, magazines, metal and glass, 140 × 7 × 300 cm. Photo: Juande Jarillo. Courtesy the artist and et Hall, Barcelona

ArtReview

17 MEMOS FOR NOW

Published posthumously in 1988, Six Memos for the Next Millennium is the text of a lecture series that ITALO CALVINO had been due to deliver at Harvard University in the autumn of 1985. The Italian writer died that September. The texts were structured around SIX VALUES – lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and consistency (the last text was never written) – that he thought would be IMPORTANT to the literature of the COMING MILLENNIUM. ‘My confidence in literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that ONLY LITERATURE can give us, BY MEANS SPECIFIC TO IT,’ he wrote by way of introduction. We feel the same about ART. So at a time when what we value – on social, POLITICAL and economic levels – and how we value it seems a matter of particular CONTESTATION around the world, ArtReview decided to ask a number of artists to propose values they think will be USEFUL to art in the coming year.

ALTERITY – OTHERNESS The values of the Occident, and their confused relationship with the rest of the world, should CHANGE. This unequal vision of the other creates CHAOS. Think for a second how the OTHER, with his values, — NIL YALTER looks at you. —

CIRCULARITY/CENTRALITY When you asked me to describe a value that would be important to art production in 2017, I spent a few days wondering how to name the interest of working with the surroundings to create certain consequences in the interior of a subject: working with the MARGINS to produce an EFFECT in the CENTRE, or applying a force in the centre to create a change of direction in a given context (the margins). What interests me is to work with this MOVEMENT between the — RENATA LUCAS centre and periphery. —

CURIOSITY Things are changing rapidly. We have to heighten our CURIOSITY to — RICK LOWE uncover MEANING and VALUE in unfamiliar places. —

DISCO STYLE To make a prognosis for the visual arts for the very short time of 2017 is a nice JOKE. There are tendencies visible, but our time is so diversified that no one of them can have clear priority, which is quite 68

good. There is a new LIGHT, COLOUR GEOMETRY coming that I like, and it would be great to see it more, because it enlarges the mind of people open for fantasy and transcendence. In 1980 the American curator Barbara Rose started a travelling exhibition with the title American Painting: The Eighties, which was envisaged in 1979 as an era FIGHTING AGAINST the primacy of MINIMAL ART and the opinion ‘painting is dead’. This show was displayed also in Budapest. I was a bit indignant at this forced prognosis, so I made a chain of interviews with some Hungarian art-historians and my artist colleagues, asking them what they expected from the development of art in the world and especially in Hungary in the next decade. The most impressive answer was that of the painter Ákos Birkás, who after a long explanation of the social state in Hungary arrived at the conclusion, ‘So let’s all do operetta IN DISCO STYLE’. Now I borrow his statement, changing the word ‘operetta’ to ‘avant-garde’.

—— DÓRA MAURER

HAPPINESS Happy not to concede under the pressure of the Trump-era art market. Happy to be in SOLIDARITY with those who are discriminated against, put aside and ignored. Happy to be in the place where INJUSTICES are happening, saying the things those in POWER — TANIA BRUGUERA do not want to hear. —

HONESTY Too

MANY LIES of any kind around, including the artworld’s — NEDKO SOLAKOV deceptions. — 69

INFILTRATION — BASEL To be where you should not be. — ABOU-RAHME

ABBAS AND RUANNE

LIGHTNESS — HEIMO From Lightness to enlightenment. —

ZOBERNIG

MEMORY Memory could become a redundancy. Memory leads to benchmarks being FLIPPED OVER here and there – in order to RECONCILE the existence of a CITY. The landscape in front of OUR EYES — CAO FEI is determined by scenery we never see. —

POTENTIALITY Pinna nobilis – the ‘giant silk mussel’ – has a SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP with little soft-shell shrimp that live and reproduce inside its shell. In return for the mussel’s protection, the shrimp – there are often more than one – provide, almost prosthetically, sensory perception. On sensing DANGER, the shrimp will pinch a nerve that flicks the mussel’s shell to close. The Pinna on its own has no real sensory organs to PROTECT ITSELF from predators. This unlikely coupling is a great example of coping in times of crisis: being wide-open to make links you have never considered before, 70

to take UNPRESCRIBED ROUTES. Find a new home; find a new strategy for fighting back; or just stick it out until — ATHANASIOS ARGIANAS the storm is over. —

REFRAIN To curb. To abstain. To halt. To contain. To clog. To cool off. To cool down. To hinder. To rein. To hold back. TO HOLD DOWN. To impede. To decline. TO AVOID. To pass. To refuse. My deepest regrets, he wrote, but I think we’re done. To quit. To fail. To — HEMAN CHONG discontinue. Yes, let’s call it a day, she said. —

TRANSMUTATION The almighty Pajarito mushroom (Psilocybe mexicana) grows out of shit: that’s the best example of what to do with art in the context of our society nowadays, characterised as it is by CORRUPTION, INEQUALITY, INTOLERANCE, AUTHORITARIANISM, POVERTY, FASCISM, INDIFFERENCE, lack of education and so on. Humble as the Pajarito is – along with San Isidros and Derrumbes – these little magic beings are the evidence of a powerful alchemic process we need to learn from. We need to produce the most DELIRIOUS and HALLUCINOGENIC substances, so as to transform not only our perception of reality, but reality itself, changing ourselves in a trip that could have no way back. It’s — ABRAHAM CRUZVILLEGAS our right, it’s our responsibility. —

SINCERITY WHERE might one find the liberating SPIRIT OF POETRY, of art,

in these moments of history disturbed by so many social conflicts, in the face of so many AMBIGUITIES, futilities and superfluities? I think we need, now more than ever, to operate with sincerity as a possible instrument of SIMPLICITY and CLARITY in exercising artworks. I would therefore like to echo the words of the poet Fernando Pessoa: ‘SINCERITY is the great obstacle that the artist must overcome. Only enduring discipline, a learning to feel things only literarily, — ANNA MARIA MAIOLINO can take the spirit to this climax.’ —

SOCIAL SCULPTURE; LIFE OF THE ARTIST’S STUDIO; INCLUSION; ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE ECHO; ACTION; CIVIC TRUST —— OLAFUR ELIASSON 15

VOICE AAAAAAAAAARRRRGGGGGGGGGG YOU, ME, I, US, WE, THEY, SHE, HE Looking for some TERM that could UNITE us HMMMMMMMMMMMMM Like a GLORIOUS CHOIR in sync —— OTOBONG NKANGA

TRUTHFULNESS In an era where BIG POLITICAL and historical TRUTHS don’t seem to matter, an era seething with DEVILS so blatantly deceitful, we might do well instead to turn our bullshit detectors inwards, to audit ourselves and our rarefied world for what really matters. To invoke more PARANOIA, more SUSPICION, and through this distil more truth. Be suspicious of your desire to produce images. Be suspicious of art – but more so, be suspicious of its subspecies, its toy breeds. Be suspicious of those cottage-industry faces, those ARSE-SPIDERS who would rather die than be seen to work in anything other than the artworld, who seek to be both parasite and host. You spend too much time on too many of them – they are excessions. Be suspicious of delicious, preordained lifestyles and those who inhabit them. Be suspicious of anyone who SAYS they are interested in your work, for they are the type of person who is interested in art in the first place. Be suspicious of people who organise ‘events’. Be suspicious of ‘events’. Be suspicious of GROUP SHOWS, they are almost always not even an idea. Be suspicious of people who only make art, it is AMORAL. Do the other thing. HELP people who live close to you and help other artists. Be alone often and extract your work from yourself. Like Ivor Cutler, look for truth with a pin. Crystallise POETIC TRUTHS rather than depicting global ideas. Cook — AARON ANGELL for friends and look after their children. —

—— SUPERFLEX

IF VALUE THEN COPY.

SANDRA MUJINGA

selected by Kiki Mazzucchelli Mujinga’s work addresses how self-representation is

DIGITAL MEDIA – but it also points to what is LOST when the subject is reduced to a CONSTRUCTED IMAGE performed in

ilynl (It’s Like You Never Left) (stills), 2016, hd video with sound, 12 min 23 sec. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Throwing Voice, 2016, hd video (44 min 8 sec), audio (22 min 5 sec), three lexan plates (200 cm × 150 cm) with Perlon wires. Courtesy the artist and Oslo Kunstforening

In a world where social interaction is increasingly mediated by social fulfilment is measured by the amount of ‘likes’ it gets on any given media, Sandra Mujinga investigates the mechanisms of self-image social platform. In a recent interview, the artist spoke of a ‘fear of solipconstruction on digital platforms from the viewpoint of a user- sism’ that emerges when most of our daily interactions take place producer of her own subjectivity. Like many artists of her generation, online and we begin to exist in a constant feedback loop, even if our Mujinga has grown up with the centrality of the web in daily life as sense of isolation is mitigated through sharing our output with others. an undeniable fact, but her works stand out from the ‘postinternet’ What is interesting about her approach, however, is that it can crowd as intimate existential meditations that focus on the human hardly be perceived as a one-dimensional lament on the subject’s element of the equation. Indeed, her work is not about the web. On loss of complexity. Mujinga fully embraces the diy ethos fostered the contrary: hers is a very personal perspective from someone who by digital technologies: she shoots and edits her videos, composes happens to have experienced a great part of life through digital tech- the soundtracks, designs the costumes. In this sense, online tools are ambivalently positioned as both instruments for increased artistic nologies, and for whom these have become second nature. In the video installation Throwing Voice (2016), the artist’s android- freedom and the source of new types of neuroses that result from like avatar, created through a live model clad in a futuristic faux- lack of physical interaction. As a Norwegian citizen born in the snakeskin jumpsuit, is projected against a chroma-key green back- Democratic Republic of the Congo, and currently working between ground. The screen is placed behind a group of cylindrical structures Malmö and Oslo, her own experience reflects the entangled system in clear Perspex that refract the green light onto the walls, merging of different time zones that characterises digital life. In the video the immaterial space of the video with the physical space of the ilynl (It’s Like You Never Left) (2016), also shown at Oslo Kunstforening, gallery. Mujinga’s figure paces back and forth, seemingly stripped of the same avatar reappears multiplied in a multiscreen surface that any sign of character or subjectivity. The only index of a human pres- includes mobile phone footage taken in Africa and Europe, someence in the work is the sound of YouTube tutorials by black women times layered with emojis. The artist navigates these time zones giving advice on contouring (the application of makeup to highlight simultaneously, at one point remarking on the deathly-empty streets one’s cheekbones). of Malmö on a night out and the contrasting vibrancy in Rwanda at Mujinga’s work, which I first encountered at her solo exhibition the same time, a trivial comment that highlights the unnatural condiReal Friends at Oslo Kunstforening last autumn, addresses how self- tion of being split into two or more places at once. At times visually representation is performed in digital media, engaging and distressing, but also silly and Mujinga is based in Malmö and Oslo. A solo exhibition, but it also points to the anxiety generated funny, Mujinga’s works are ongoing experiLovely Hosts, is on view at Mavra, Berlin, by what is lost when the subject is reduced ments in how to exist as a subject in a hyperthrough 22 January, and her work will be included in to a completely constructed image whose mediated world. km the Norwegian Sculpture Biennale, Oslo, from 1 June.

January & February 2017

RAPHAELA VOGEL

selected by Philippe Pirotte Vogel entangles the viewer in a perverse, voyeuristic

SURVEILLANCE, control and PHYSICAL TRESPASS story that deploys notions of

In Raphaela Vogel’s works, technology (in the form of scanners, action a power relationship that might have sadistic or masochistic undercameras and drones) is not simply a means to an end, but an active tones is steered more towards a zone of contact that resembles a trap. protagonist. Her short performance-based films feature pulsing She subverts the active, masculine ‘fetishistic gaze’, often supported footage of various environments (manipulated by advanced editing by technology, and commonly giving men the power to control and techniques and often accompanied by powerful – including heavy- halt the action, by directing that technology herself. In doing so she metal – soundtracks), which is then projected onto installations made sets up a site in which far more complex and asymmetrical power of metal rods, ropes, foils and various readymade objects. In most dynamics are articulated. The installations, or ‘video-sculptures’, as of the works, Vogel herself is also insistently present, the alluring the artist calls them, reveal their machinery while simultaneously heroine of film installations such as mogst mi du ned, mog i di (2015), a evincing a fascination with it, which in turn exploits our very familiwork that takes matters a step further to negotiate the relationship arity with the dynamics of the contemporary ‘experience industry’ in between body, space and technology. Employing the most contempo- order to generate a relational engagement from viewers. Ultimately, rary devices, such as drones equipped with minicameras, Vogel entan- the work relies on our role as a fetishistic spectator who is simulgles the viewer in a perverse, voyeuristic story that deploys notions of taneously aware of the fiction and of the technique – knowing our surveillance, control and physical trespass. pleasure resides in the experience of both. In the past, Vogel’s miniVogel herself is an insistently present, feminine and, to a certain format cameras have not only been fixed to drones but also to horse extent, exhibitionistic persona. In some of her sculptural environ- limbs – as if combined into some sort of hybrid modern-primitivist ments, painted animal hides resemble reliclike objects (for example device that exposes the primal elements that lie hidden within the Raphaela, 2015), or constructions with urinals and shisha-pipes (She shell of contemporaneity. By alternating imagery from the physical Shah, 2016) suggest, and at the same time appropriate, the typical decor environment with projected images of a lake, a tongue or a Carrara stone quarry, she blurs the lines between of the private clubs in which men gather Vogel is based in Amsterdam. She has a solo exhibition, the familiar, the abandoned and the new to conduct rituals channelling their baser She Shah, at Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster, instincts. Here, though, any suggestions of promise of technology. pp through 12 February. She is represented by bq, Berlin.

ArtReview

Raphaela, 2015, oil, enamel, silicone on elk and goat leather, polyurethane elastomer, plastic net, 234 × 131 × 40 cm. Photo: Roman Maerz. Courtesy the artist and bq , Berlin

January & February 2017

Mogst mi du ned, mog i di (detail), 2014, chromed metal rods, flamingo (plastics, metal), Nesquik can, plastic foil, 2 loudspeakers, video projector, Mac mini, audio and video cables, plinth, video (colour, sound, 6 min 25 min, loop). Courtesy the artist and bq , Berlin

Mogst mi du ned, mog i di (still), 2014. Photo: Simon Vogel. Courtesy the artist and bq , Berlin

ArtReview

HAYOUN KWON

selected by Victor Burgin Kwon’s analytically

COMPLEX

PRECISE, POETICALLY

and self-effacing works offer a timely

corrective to facile

POLITICAL posturing.

I first saw Hayoun Kwon’s work at the Centre d’Art et de Photographie Another of Kwon’s works in the Lectoure exhibition, Village de Lectoure, in southwest France, in summer last year. The curator of modèle (2014), is a large maquette of a ‘model village’ constructed the exhibition, Francette Pacteau, presented four works by Kwon about by North Korea on a margin of the dmz visible from the South. the demilitarised zone (dmz) that divides North from South Korea. The ‘village’ is in reality an uninhabited set, built purely for propEach work offers, in Pacteau’s words, ‘a representation not simply of the aganda purposes. Kwon’s model, assembling buildings of transdmz as a geopolitical entity, but of the imaginary of an impenetrable parent plastic in a white-painted terrain, is accompanied by a digital and unknowable terrain’. Since its creation in 1953, the dmz has been film composed of camera movements through the maquette that closed to all human incursion other than military patrols. It has also emphasise its play of evanescent light and shadow. Her reducedbeen repeatedly sown with antipersonnel mines. In the more than 60 scale imitation of a full-scale fake, in turn mimicked and doubled years since its inception, the dmz has become a world apart, a zone of in projection, is accompanied by a soundtrack from an official propgreat natural beauty and biodiversity that threatens death at each intru- aganda film about ‘life’ in this village that no one may visit, in a sive step. The title of the Lectoure exhibition – 489 Années (489 Years) – place where no one may live. In Kwon’s installation, the architecrefers to the length of time it has been estimated it would take to clear ture of propaganda is shown as essentially immaterial – known only the dmz of its more than one million mines. It is also the title of a 2015 through the shadows it casts, shadows with more substance than work by Kwon: a single-screen digital projection, also presented in a the entities that cast them. virtual-reality version. On the soundtrack of the work is the voice of The word ‘great’ has become the property of nationalist demaa former South Korean soldier, ‘Mr Kim’, recounting his memory of a gogues. Moreover, given the world’s needs, the expression ‘great patrol in the dmz at night. On the screen is an evocation of what the artist’ is surely an oxymoron. Philosopher Michel de Montaigne soldier might have seen, in a computer simulation of the dmz ecosystem said that the opposite of stupidity is not intelligence but humility. commissioned from a videogame-environment designer. The artist It might be fatuous to call Kwon ‘great’, but her analytically precise, deploys her virtual camera to accompany Mr poetically complex and self-effacing works Kwon is based in Paris. In 2015 she was awarded Kim as he recalls his personally transformative offer a timely corrective to the facile political the Prize of the Friends of Palais de Tokyo. nocturnal journey. The effect is at once informposturing and self-aggrandising stunts now Her work was recently screened at the Berkeley as much a staple of the ‘political’ art biennale ative and uncanny, a staging of documentary Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, as of electoral politics. vb fact as a midsummer night’s dream. and at the 2016 San Sebastian Film Festival.

January & February 2017

489 Years (stills), 2015, video, colour, sound, 11 min. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

Village modèle (detail), 2014, model: wood, plastic, 230 × 120 × 20 cm; video: colour, sound, 9 min. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2017

ALEXANDRA LAUDO

selected by Joanna Warsza Laudo offers us the opportunity to

THINK

EXHIBITIONS not in terms of square metres – but in units of MINUTES, HOURS or days about

Slide from An intellectual history of the clock, 2016, performative lecture. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

An intellectual history of the clock, 2016, performative lecture conceived as a narrated exhibition, presented at Malongen, Stockholm, with the collaboration of Tove Brigersson, Maja Jönsson, Jesper Nyberg, Àlex Serrano, Pedro Torres and Gideonsson/Londré. Photo: Álvaro Campo. Courtesy the artist

Before calling what he did ‘curating’, Harald Szeemann, who was that, until 1995, was divided by the International Date Line, before in many ways responsible for shaping the current definition of the addressing laziness and unproductivity by describing Mladen discipline, used to describe his exhibitions as ‘staged’. He brought Stilinović’s Artist at Work (1978) and considering the concept of punctudramaturgy and performativity into the genre, elements upon which ality via Tehching Hsieh’s One Year Performance (1980–81), in which the Catalonian artist-curator Alexandra Laudo’s recent exhibition- artist punched a time clock every hour for a year. As Laudo moved into performance An intellectual history of the clock (2016) is also founded: relations of time, money and labour, we were asked to read an extract however, here we don’t see any artworks; we only hear about them. from Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013), in The etymological roots of the word ‘clock’ lie in the Latin clocca (bell): which the author examines the relations of ubiquitous consumerism and a related will to abolish human sleep. The artist-curator’s narraoriginally the passing of time was something to listen to. Laudo stages her work through the self-initiated, Barcelona- tion closed with As slow as possible (1987), by John Cage (scheduled to last based curatorial platform Heroínas de la Cultura, and in An intellec- until 2640, it is currently being performed at Halberstadt Cathedral in tual history of the clock, a wonderfully narrated combination of histor- Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, with tickets being sold until 2091). ical research, artworks, a diary and a lunch, she contextualises the An hour later, lunch was ready for us at the exit. Having experinotion of time, its measurements and synchronisation, and its rela- enced this performative exhibition at speed, I was left thinking about tion to capitalism and the future. All within the space of 60 minutes. the fact that, while it may have been brief, it had been quality time. As we entered a semidetached house in Stockholm (belonging to Laudo had offered us the opportunity to think about exhibitions the Nordic Art Association), we encountered a kitchen table covered not in terms of square metres, but in units of minutes, hours or days. with ingredients, each labelled with their respective cooking times: Lecture-performances are not a new genre, having had a momentum red peppers – ‘grill 16 minutes’; meat – ‘bake 1 hour’; parsley – ‘deep- since the early 2000s. Many artists, such as choreographers Xavier fry 20 seconds’. As a chef began to perform the prescribed actions, we Le Roy or Jérôme Bel, inspired by poststructuralism, turned from were invited into a small auditorium, welcomed by the pips of the producing movement to speaking about movement; Slavs and Tatars Greenwich Time Signal. eloquently create their own discourse, as if to preempt potential “Good afternoon. It is 12 o’clock here in Stockholm and in the rest of writers on their work; while Hito Steyerl shares parts of her ongoing Sweden. It is also 12 o’clock in Barcelona and in the rest of Spain, except research and makes art through her own presence. But with Laudo’s on the Canary Islands, where it is one hour less.” Laudo’s narrative work one encounters an entire narrated exhibition as a perforcontinued, taking us through various conceptualisations of time, from mance, without artworks, only their narrated trace, which ultimately its standardisation as a result of the Industrial Revolution to the story becomes an artistic endeavour in itself – it is simply too much for of a journey on the Orient Express from Paris to Constantinople across ‘curating’ as we know it. Laudo is currently developing a series of several time zones. Our host went on to intronew narrated exhibitions, sequels that focus Alexandra Laudo is based in Barcelona. on the act of sleeping, on velocity and on the duce us to a work by Mexican artist Julieta She is the founder and director of the curatorial platform Aranda, about Kiribati, a Pacific archipelago ritual of birthdays. I can’t wait. jw Heroínas de la Cultura.

January & February 2017

KANG JUNGSUCK

selected by Sunjung Kim The

BOUNDARY between reality and game space is COLLAPSING, and conversely REALITY has begun to look and feel more like a

GAME: this is the space Kang explores

With the recent proliferation of digital technology, we live in a time evoke the segmentation of time, the real-time-ness and the flatness when the boundary between the real and the virtual is increasingly of images in the game world. Kang could not continue the Simulating blurred. Smartphones allow us to access the digital world with rela- Surface series, as his friend was fired from the game company only tive ease, saturating everyday life with the new tasks of searching for seven months after he started working there, which hints at the online news, sharing photos, watching videos, messaging, emailing expendability and high turnover of employees in this field. and playing games. The modernist distinction between leisure and Kang’s latest work, game i (2016), combines a simulation of a real-time online game with multiple players, animated gifs and labour has long disappeared. Kang Jungsuck is a Korean artist whose work explores the inter- the ‘speedrun’ approach to gameplay. In the speedrun method, the section of technology and life in videos that capture the everyday player aims to complete an entire game in the shortest time possible, experiences of his friends while drawing upon the particular cultural as opposed to enjoying the responsive narratives or complex developecology that surrounds the gaming industry. Simulating Surface A ment of personalised avatars. This videowork is accompanied by two (2014), for example, shot using his smartphone’s video function, publications, titled Walkthrough Text and magazine i, that contain explores the life of a friend who works for a game company. By research findings on the history of videogames, their soundtracks and recording his friend’s daily commute to work – which repeatedly an interview with a collector of gaming magazines. shows the bland interiors of the subway, the flood of advertisements, Game space has evolved into an immersive virtual reality envithe masses of strangers and the identical scenery outside the window ronment that operates in real time. The boundary between reality – this video emphasises a sense of urban malaise, set in striking and the game is collapsing, and conversely reality has begun to contrast to the surplus of spectacles that are such an abundant feature look and feel more like a game. Your activities – from what you buy of our shifting, everyday environments. and read, to the number of steps you take, to how many times your In Simulating Surface B (2014), Kang turns attention to his friend’s heart beats – are all saved as data, producing a new entity stored profession, using their casual conversation about his job as the online that is much like a character in a game. This virtual identity scrolling subtitles in a video comprising imagery and a soundtrack gradually accrues more information and depth, becoming a living appropriated from his work as a game designer. Cropped images index and active agent that can have real consequences beyond from Simulating Surface A show Kang’s friend waving towards the the digital realm. Kang’s work raises timely questions about the camera, and these make rhythmic appearances throughout the video. possibility of subjective judgement and cognition in the onlineThe use of computer-generated graphics and gaming world, where reality and fantasy are Kang is based in Seoul. His work has recently been shown intertwined. sk the fragmentary nature of the pasted images at Doosan Gallery and Insa Art Space, both in Seoul.

ArtReview

game i: Speedrun Any% pb, 2016, single-channel hd video with walkthrough text, 27 min. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2017

ZACHARY CAHILL

selected by Dieter Roelstraete I was relieved to discover that someone out there was

POLITICAL ART, invested in the craft of PROPAGANDA and generally keeping the dream of building socialism ALIVE making shamelessly

ourpyschicconnection, 2014, watercolor on paper. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

For what it’s worth, Zachary Cahill’s art matters more to me person- chapters of the ussa narrative, inaugurating new departments and ally than the man may ever fully understand, but let’s just say for now quarters of the project’s sprawling conceptual archipelago in the that it all began with my visiting what was advertised as a souvenir process: an orphanage, strangely, to begin with; a giftshop, wellstore temporarily installed inside the Chicago Cultural Center in the ness centre and ‘assembly’ (in the making); flags, hymns, pageantry summer of 2012 — the full title of Cahill’s immersive installation – all slanted towards that old stalwart of rudderless utopian hopes, being ussa 2012: The People’s Palace’s Gift Shop. This happened shortly the Soviet experiment in human engineering. (I am very interested after my arrival in the Windy City, and I was relieved to discover that in an evident turn towards religious imagery in more recent outings someone out there was making shamelessly political art (as opposed to of the ussa.) The ussa Wellness Center made a particularly transmerely ‘making art politically’), invested in the craft of propaganda formative impression, as it is here that a somewhat generic installaand the social realist paradigm (a longstanding guilty pleasure of tion-art-institutional-critique-relational-aesthetics sensibility made mine) and generally keeping the dream of building socialism alive — place for the frantic, half-hallucinogenic neo-expressionist brushor so, at least, it seemed. I have been a believer and follower of Cahill’s work that is now a fully fledged hallmark of Cahill’s practice. Here, Cahill enacts a turn to painting at its most unreconstructed, spurred ever since. Chicago-based multimedia artist, critic, curator, teacher and on, ironically, by a project that proposed painting as a species of occuwriter Zachary Cahill is clearly something of a Renaissance Man. pational therapy. For this, in fact, is what Cahill’s work boils down to, If that sounds so timeless it could be construed as somewhat old- and what can make the uninitiated, hurried consumer of contempofashioned, a certain quasi-militant quaintness likewise suffuses his rary art fashions dizzy with discomfort at the sight of so much nonattachment to the ethic of the gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of negotiable earnestness: a fully postironic belief in the healing power of art. The totalising project that has commanded Cahill’s artistic and art. Indeed, in the New World Order instituted by the abomination intellectual energies for close to a decade of Donald Trump, and in a world that is now Cahill is based in Chicago. His work has recently now is the acronym ussa, which we are without both Fidel Castro and Leonard Cohen been shown at Iceberg Projects, Chicago, and at Illinois free to read as, say, United Soviet States of (‘Everybody knows that the boat is leaking / Wesleyan University Gallery.He has just been America. Over the years, a series of exhibiEverybody knows that the captain lied’), it is appointed curator at the University of Chicago’s Gray tions has allowed the artist to unveil different time for the healing art of Zachary Cahill. dr Center for Arts and Inquiry.

Tourist Trap, 2012, part of ussa 2012: The People’s Palace’s Gift Shop, Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago. Photo: Maureen Cooper. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2017

FUTURE IMPERFECT From the French Revolution to the alt-right and Islamic

ADAM THIRLWELL and Indian essayist and novelist PANKAJ MISHRA discuss: have the UTOPIAN ideas of the Enlightenment led us to a NEW DARK AGE?

State, British novelist

adam thirlwell I thought we could start this discussion of utopia with the Enlightenment – and the way you’ve been thinking about Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau as opposing figures in a major argument. One of the things that interests me is that they’re not only philosophical figures, but they’re also both important in the history of the novel. In fact, Diderot is probably at his most interesting when he’s a novelist – in his novel Jacques le fataliste et son maître [1796]. Whereas with Rousseau it’s the opposite: his novels, so popular when they first came out, seem unbearably didactic and flat to me – but his philosophy is much more exciting. So, I wonder if we could begin by talking about where this secular utopian ideal comes from? Why did these Enlightenment figures get so interested in the idea? And why this instability between the novel and philosophy? pankaj mishra The idea of the novel itself is one of describing individual moral adventure, the emancipation of the individual from all constraints – whether of religion, tradition or hierarchy – which in many ways is the utopian project as it was outlined philosophically during the late eighteenth century. And, of course, that took a political form in the French Revolution, and then in various other revolutions throughout the nineteenth century, finally arriving in large parts of Asia and Africa. The idea of putting the past behind you, of starting on a new adventure, thinking of yourself as an individual as opposed to being a member of a collectivity dependent on someone else, deferential to

someone else, to some authority or other, is basically an idea that was outlined at the time: a liberation from all norms and boundaries. The novelist, as you point out, was there right at the beginning. But it’s not an accident that Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau were all novelists, and, in fact, that their most successful works were as novelists. They are, in the novels, charting the growth of the emancipation of the individual, and trying to imagine the forms of fulfilment available to this newly emancipated individual. at But do you think utopianism is intrinsically part of a revolutionary discourse? And is it always a secular utopia? A lot of your work recently has been on the self-styled Islamic State (is), after all. What’s the relationship between a religious utopia and a nonreligious one? Is paradise utopia? pm Well, it was certainly presented as a secular utopia right from the very beginning, because the thing to be liberated from was religion and religious authority: more precisely, the Catholic Church. So it was very much conceived as a secular utopia in which people would employ individual reason to figure out the challenges of life. It wouldn’t be the church telling them what to do, it wouldn’t be the church guarding their consciences or binding them with various prohibitions – and of course, all kinds of inhibitions, too. The idea was to get away from all that and have the power to employ your reason, to create a perfect society. In many ways,

ArtReview

you could argue that this idea of utopia carried over religious elements: the idea of creating a perfect society, which so closely mimics the idea of the kingdom of God on Earth. Practically every concept that the Enlightenment thinkers – and, of course, then the French revolutionaries – put forward as part of their package deal for a new society was suffused with religious terminology. In fact, there’s a wonderful quote by Alexis de Tocqueville, in which he talks about that period leading up to the French Revolution. He says that the French Revolution basically announced a new religion, and ‘like Islam, [it] flooded the earth with its soldiers, apostles and martyrs’. So, the greatest secular event of all time, the event that inaugurates the modern world, is fuelled by a kind of religious passion. Religion, contrary to what we think, did not go away; it incarnated itself in various utopian schemes of social engineering. Essentially, remaking man and remaking society. at Does this mean that for you the idea of utopia is discredited? As if utopia is always an alibi for reaction? Can you imagine an innocent utopianism now? pm Probably not. Maybe because we are living through the consequences of innocently conceiving utopia. In the eighteenth century, a network of intellectuals, mostly writers, were thinking up some interesting thoughts about what the next society should be: free of religion, free of monarchs, free of aristocratic and royal

authority. Their heads were filled with these – essentially optimistic – notions about what individual human beings could do with reason alone. Of course, the natural sciences were also developing at that time, so there was also this idea that science combined with this individual deployment of reason was going to open up scope for what would be, essentially, a perfect society. They could not anticipate that these very innocent ideas – and all admirable ideas, even to this day – had contradictions built into them, all the way through. Those tensions would never be resolved. That’s one reason why someone like Rousseau is still worth reading: the issues he dealt with are still alive. To give you just one example, you kill the king – you actually behead him – but the king denoted sovereign power, for centuries and centuries, in practically every society. What do you replace that with? You come up with the idea of the people; the people are going to be sovereign. But the people are many – the people are plural. So you are insisting on unity, indivisibility, and again these are theological ideas, you still have the idea of God working in your head, so you’re still thinking, conceiving of sovereignty as transcendental, as unified, as indivisible. So you say the people are going to be sovereign now. The problem is that the people are diverse, pluralistic by nature, so what do you do? You insist that they’re going to be one. Now, at the very basis of things like the recent burkini debate in France is this obsession that you’re still thinking of the people as one, that they cannot be seen as plural. You’re still thinking of the people as sovereign. These contradictions are still with us. at Another way of putting this is that the French Revolution is both the ur-utopian moment, and the ur-terroristic moment. And yet its theorists try to separate the two, and say that the terror was unnecessary, while revolution is still morally pure. You see the same debate again in later theories of Marxist history. But do you think there’s really a way of separating utopia from terror? pm Not in this model form, probably. Think of someone like Leo Tolstoy who conceives of a different kind of utopia – a small-scale vision of a society of self-sufficient farmers. I don’t think he was thinking that could be generalised across the world. The larger vision of utopia is universalist, and that’s where the problem is: in the notion that everyone can be the same or everyone can be a certain way. That particular obsession you see incarnate all the way through both communism and Nazism. Today, too, new liberal globalisation projects say that everyone has to consume the same things, everyone has to subscribe to a certain way of consuming, or to having a particular kind

of economy. That is essentially a utopian vision, and it cannot but be accompanied by violence: violence of a very overt, brutal kind, but also structural violence that we don’t see, except in reports of famines, earthquakes and now, increasingly, the forms of devastation brought by climate change. So, in a way, it’s not surprising that the last 200 years have been some of the most violent in human history, because of these various projects of utopia, which have involved a great deal of social and physical reengineering. at Talking of which, an epigraph I considered but abandoned for my first novel, Politics [2003], which was a minifarce of utopian thinking, was something Tom Stoppard has Alexander Herzen say in his trilogy of plays The Coast of Utopia [2002]: ‘What is the largest number of individuals who can pull this trick off? I would say it’s smaller than a nation, smaller than the ideal communities of Cabet or Fourier. I would say the larger number is smaller than three. Two is

The larger vision of utopia is universalist, and that’s where the problem is: in the notion that everyone can be the same or everyone can be a certain way. That particular obsession you see incarnate all the way through both communism and Nazism. Today, too, new liberal globalisation projects say that everyone has to consume the same things, to subscribe to a certain way of consuming possible, if there is love, but two is not a guarantee.’ The ironic theory is that utopia can, at best, only happen in private. Once you have three people, the smallest society possible, there will be inequality. And of course, what’s jealousy and humiliation on the bedroom scale, becomes what Nietzsche called ressentiment when this utopia goes global. You explore this sense of ressentiment in your new work, and I wondered if you could explain this a little more. pm I think the notion of the individual set free, without any clear limits – apart from those imposed by the state or rule of law – and free to do in private whatever they wish, is something you see, very early on, in the Marquis de Sade’s experiments with sexual transgression. He’s trying to work out this idea of individual freedom and he ends up with some of the most absurd experiments in exploring the boundaries of sexuality. Ultimately, he begins to identify

January & February 2017

transgression with freedom. In many ways, what these is boys – these adolescents who go out there, raping, killing and enslaving young women – are doing is also testing those boundaries. This notion of individual freedom, individual autonomy, which is supposed to be an ultimate good, is an idea that can be taken in very many different directions. This is why I keep insisting on the fact that this was a type of utopian project, one that brought with it all the burdens that individuals, traditionally, had coped with through various institutions: the family, the community, as well as various other intermediate institutions between you and the world at large. So all the feelings of envy, hurt, ressentiment, were diffused and their effects were cushioned. I’m making a huge jump here, but now people are exposed to these things, exposed to these free-floating emotions, without too many cushions. In fact, there’s so much in the culture that’s actually aggravating those emotions, those ideas, that the idea of individual freedom has come to take a different complexion altogether: it can be achieved. Or, at least, it seems like it can be achieved, in a variety of ways. One of the ways, it turns out, is that somebody tells you on the Internet to go out to Syria and Iraq, and behead people on television or enslave an eleven-yearold girl. That is, in many ways, a consequence of utopian thinking, and I think we made a huge mistake in thinking of this as something originating from some thirteenth-century hadiths and some theology that some obscure guy in Mesopotamia wrote a long time ago. This has to be seen as a modern phenomenon, a modern experimentation. at And yet, I still want to recuperate the Enlightenment a little – my beloved eighteenth century! I guess I mean: can you imagine a desire for justice that was not utopian, if that makes any sense? There were obviously ways in which killing the king, or at least dismantling the structures of the ancien régime, were not without moral reason. And there were ways in which the structures you’re talking about, the family or religion, were at that time, as they still can be, forms of imprisonment. Sure, one can condemn someone like Diderot or Voltaire for not understanding the implications of their ideas, but their desire for justice, however socially restricted, their idea that people should not be enslaved, had a noble aspect to it. Do you think that there are ways in which one might fight for a form of justice that don’t entail terror? pm Yes, absolutely. But I think that justice has to be defined in a particular context. There are forms of justice that have to do with equality, there are forms of justice that have to do with the redressal of historical injuries. So, one cannot generalise and say that justice invariably requires extreme violence of that kind. I think the reason

the ideas of the Enlightenment are still with us is because they carry a lot of charge, they carry a lot of potency, and there are some things we have to uphold. But, at the same time, we have to acknowledge the other side of them, and I think this is what we have consistently failed to do, especially during the last 50, 60 years. The idea of justice is a very troubled, very fraught notion: that which is justice for you can be a deep injustice for someone else. at I wonder if this is also a problem of maps. There’s a way in which, geopolitically, utopianism will be read as terror: it all depends on your perspective. The same idea in a different place has a completely different valency. The ideals of the French Revolution, when appropriated by José Martí in Latin America, say, don’t create terror. They lead to liberation. pm It’s summed up in the commonplace saying: my terrorist is your freedom fighter. Again, in the geopolitical context, where there are multiple, multiple contexts, that notion of justice becomes much more complicated. The other thing is that when they were devising these notions during the eighteenth century, people were thinking of a society to replace the one that was passing, the society ruled by kings, a society ruled by popes or their various representatives. And when they were thinking of a new social contract, they didn’t really give much thought as to how that society was going to be regulated. We are still, in many ways, grappling with that particular problem. The notion of justice was very powerful, it was powerful all through the revolution and afterwards. It manifested itself in demands for equality, demands for revolution, demands for a new order, but I think this particular question – how do we regulate ourselves in a given society? – had many answers: you come together, you make the people the sovereign, you create a nation and you’re all citizens of that. Alternatively, there was the idea of the market society, where we’re all self-interested individuals, and somehow our interests will be naturally harmonised. These particular notions are what we are still dealing with, and we now know that they are actually in deep tension with each other: whether it’s Brexit, or Trump or the idea of creating a society, creating its institutions, this is a never-ending circle. One way to think

about this is, essentially, as a problematic. Something with which we have constantly to struggle. There is no destination. I think the problem with utopia was that it always posited a destination and always thought or assumed the present to be a transition on the way to that destination. So many of our assumptions are based on the broad idea that we are in a transition to something else. at I remember speaking at a conference at the Stedelijk Museum in 2014 with Francis Fukuyama, and it was fascinating to watch him having to recuperate his mistake, his obsession with the end of history. I realised that that the Hegelian dialectic, this vision of some point towards which history is moving, is a very easy game to play – because you can always claim that your prediction was simply premature. I felt then that to believe in some mystical conclusion – whether Marxist or liberal-democratic – was hopelessly naive and parochial, in a way. I mean parochial on a temporal

scale – as if human history were being assumed to be much grander than it really is, by these futureoriented thinkers, in a planetary or cosmic perspective. pm Fukuyama had many critics when he made that prediction, but some of the people who backed him, surprisingly, were from the left. People who were so wedded to this notion of a history that is constantly moving forward like a straight arrow had very little trouble, essentially, with thinking of liberal capitalism as a final destination instead of communism. To give you an example, probably the most prominent and intelligent Marxist thinker in the world today, Perry Anderson, wrote a glowing review of Fukuyama’s book, which just shows you how much these projects that we, quite complacently, Georg Heinrich Sieveking, Execution of Louis xvi, 1793, German copperplate engraving. Licensed to public domain

ArtReview

categorise as ‘left’ and ‘right’ actually coincide in their vision of time, in the vision of the present as a stage for something bigger, something better. I think it’s very difficult to have or to summon up that kind of faith any more. The person who was very critical – although he didn’t take on Fukuyama directly – of the notion that the West was now going to see a utopia of liberal capitalism was the Czech writer and politician Václav Havel. He confessed that he was ‘taken aback by the extent to which so many Westerners are addicted to ideology, much more than we who live in a system which is ideological through and through’. It was a failure to recognise, he said, that ‘the era of arrogant, absolutist reason is drawing to a close’. The collapse of communism was one sign of that, and since then we’ve seen many more such signs. at I love Havel’s essays. I often wonder if the great moment of European literature in the twentieth century will be seen as that group of writers and philosophers caught in the Soviet imperialist mincer: Havel, but also novelists like Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Danilo Kiš, along with Jan Patočka and Leszek Kołakowski. They have their differences, both political and aesthetic, but they’re linked by an absolute pessimism in relation to any theory of utopian history, of individual reason. Kołakowski, after all, was a great historian of Marxist theory who also wrote brilliantly on the necessity of the idea of the devil, of evil. The devil was a more convincing theory of history, to him, than the Hegelian dialectic. Behind this utopian discourse there’s a deeper opposition, perhaps, between optimistic and pessimistic theories of human nature – which very easily slide into theologies. As if you have to decide how far you believe in the idea of a Fall. pm Well, I suppose that goes to show that we are, essentially, religious beings, however hard we might deny that fact: that fundamentally, the need to believe, the need to make sense of the world through transcendental concepts is never going to be diminished, it’s always going to be with us. I think we fool ourselves thinking that we’ve liberated ourselves from these old superstitions: that we don’t really need any transcendental explanation, that we can rely upon individual reason alone to figure out our past, our present and our future, and our own place in the world. Essentially, all our secular notions are theological concepts in disguise. Kołakowski

is a fascinating example, and so is Czesław Miłosz, who was also a proper believing communist but then embraced (although I suppose he never really abandoned it) Catholicism more fervently after his experience with the Polish government. I think his greatest poetry comes out of that particular vision, which also reminds you – although I’m not making a pitch for religion – that so much art has been driven by an essentially or explicitly religious vision. I think that’s one reason why it’s very difficult to imagine vital art in the future: because those energies – that drove the tensions and the contradictions – have faded. Especially with our faith in progress now diminishing, it’s really interesting to imagine what kind of art there will be. There will be mostly entertainment, I suspect, of which you could argue there’s a lot already. at I’m not so sure. I mean: what’s the right form of language to discuss this demented world? We’re in the age of journalism: of the report, and the opinion piece. But those forms are inherently monologic… Someone like Diderot fascinates me because he’s able on the one hand to edit the Encyclopaedia – a monument to absolute rationality – but also write a zany, upside-down novel like Jacques le fataliste (indebted to Laurence Sterne’s even more zigzagging novel, Tristram Shandy [1767]), in which the catchphrase of one of the characters is that everything happens because it is ordained on high, while the novel itself relentlessly and comically demonstrates in its incoherent plotting that absolutely nothing is ordained on high, that there is no presiding spirit governing the logic of events. That kind of ironic hectic playfulness makes me wonder if perhaps this is the perfect era for the novel, or a certain kind of novel. The utopian ideal is everywhere – which means dark irony has infinite content to enjoy. pm I think the scene has shifted from Europe to parts of the world that are now undergoing the kind of tumult that produced the greatest art of the nineteenth century. So it would be interesting to see what comes out of those parts of the world, which are also those in which the majority of the world’s population, today, lives. I think at the same time, one has to remember that even those places have been disenchanted, in the Max Weber sense of the word. The notion that was important to Diderot was that if you have states where the rule of law is very fragile, where religious authority is diminished, then you have spaces that are not clearly bounded. Individuals find themselves in a situation in which there’s nothing to push against; there’s only your will and the temptation to exercise it in some way or other. Either through checking your email or sending out a tweet or, to go to one extreme, to become a troll or an extremist: those kinds of temptations are various and multiplying all the time. So this notion of art that we’ve all grown up with, that emerges out of a certain friction,

emerges out of a certain tension with your condition, with your circumstances, is missing in many places, even in places that are currently experiencing some of the convulsions and trauma of the nineteenth century. I shouldn’t generalise too much because critics are always made to look foolish by new works of art that come out of nowhere and dazzle you, but I think the historical conditions that facilitated so much of modern art have changed to the point where you have to wonder what new set of circumstances will produce the art of the future. at What’s also interesting is how a form migrates. Reused on another continent, it might acquire a new and richer meaning. There’s someone like Machado de Assis, this brilliant Brazilian nineteenth-century novelist. For the first half of his career, he wrote three or four very ordinary novels in a conventional realist mode, but then he suddenly switched and wrote The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas [1881] – a novel that borrowed

So much art has been driven by an essentially or explicitly religious vision. I think that’s one reason why it’s very difficult to imagine vital art in the future: because those energies – that drove the tensions and the contradictions – have faded. Especially with our faith in progress now diminishing, it’s really interesting to imagine what kind of art there will be: mostly entertainment, I suspect the antic form of Tristram Shandy (I seem obsessed by displaced versions of this novel!), but in that borrowing transformed it. The great Brazilian Marxist critic Roberto Schwarz wrote a book on de Assis, arguing that his genius was to see that the voice of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, this narrator who wilfully toys with the unequal relationship between a narrator and a reader, this monster of caprice, was the perfect expression of a ruthless, rapacious bourgeoisie. It maintains that its power is only whimsy, is only cute – whereas in fact that cuteness is the demonstration of its absolute terror. pm That’s a very astute point, because you see that in large parts of the world today where artforms that originated in particular circumstances in Europe have travelled. Those artforms emerged out of a certain kind of struggle, whether against religious authority, against the bourgeois in many cases, but in other contexts they are adopted by the bourgeoisie

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themselves. So they become a kind of plaything in their hands. What we see now is the upper middle classes of many, still very poor countries adopting Western artforms out of a sense of entitlement, wearing them as a badge of fashion. So, in many cases, that particular transfer hasn’t worked out well. All it has done is introduce artistic fashions and literary fashions into a culture. It’s not particularly creative; it’s mostly sterile, because the conditions are missing. Going back to the previous point, if it is in conditions of actual struggle that you find a voice for yourself, and for likeminded people, and then you incarnate that voice in your work of art, then imitating it from the outside, 10,000 miles away, two centuries later, you’re going to be filling it up with completely incongruous elements. And those works are going to be, in the end, essentially imitative. Occasionally you’ll have a once-in-a-century figure like Gabriel García Márquez who comes in and redefines the model, at least for two or three generations. Or you have the Japanese, who bring to it a very different sensibility altogether, breaking with the nineteenth-century novel in significant ways – I’m thinking of Yasunari Kawabata and Jun'ichirō Tanazaki – but those experiments have turned out to be few. at Do you think there’s a difference between an artistic form and a political idea? Do you think the one is more portable than the other? pm Political ideas can be catastrophic when they are imported without paying heavy customs duty. I think of the idea of the nation state, for instance, which has proved to be utterly disastrous for large parts of the Middle East. The idea of the people who are one and indivisible. So much energy, so much investment in ideologies – whether it’s Islamism, or Hindu Nationalism, or indeed Secular Nationalism – has gone into places like India and Pakistan, and into this fantasy of ‘the people’. As it turns out in the end, what this means is that the only way you can define a people is by defining the other who are not the people, who should be ostracised and, in some cases, killed. That’s how you define yourself and your community, so political ideals have actually proved to be calamitous in that sense. ar This conversation is an edited version of a discussion between Thirlwell and Mishra that originally took place on 20 September 2016, as part of a series of think tanks onboard Fluxland, a moving sculpture and interactive sound-piece floating on the River Thames, created by artist Cyril de Commarque. Adam Thirlwell’s most recent novel is Lurid & Cute (2015). Pankaj Mishra’s The Age of Anger: A History of the Present is published in February

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The centre of the town commands spectacular views, though lower-lying parts are prone to occasional flooding 93

Revolt of the Sage Blain/Southern, London 24 November – 21 January ‘The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.’ So wrote Henri Bergson in Matter and Memory (1896); 120 years later, those words seem a fitting description of Revolt of the Sage. Featuring 16 artists’ works, from 1956 to 2016, this exhibition takes its title from a 1916 painting by Giorgio de Chirico, in which a shallow and confined pictorial space teems with wooden frames, planar objects, measuring devices and biscuits, alongside other unidentifiable edibles, all warped by an unnerving raking perspective. In a letter to Guillaume Apollinaire, de Chirico described the painting, which is sadly not present in the exhibition, as one of his ‘metaphysical interiors’, referring to a body of work in which he endeavoured to depict two realms: that of our mortal condition (and the senses of loss and longing that that finitude inspires), and a secondary dimension in which ‘the past and future appear to us as equal [and] memory blends with prophecy in a mysterious union’. Through his peculiar marriage of everyday objects and distorted architectural spaces, de Chirico sought to create what he described as a jolt of revelation within the viewer, a dislocation between past, present and future, and between the individual subject and the space s/he inhabits. Curated by artist Simon Moretti, who also features in the exhibition, with Craig Burnett, Blain/Southern’s director of exhibitions, the works included use collage, juxtaposition, fragmentation and layering to examine ruptures, unions and confluences in time and mortality. Looming morbidly in the exhibition foyer is Lynn Chadwick’s bronze Cloaked Figure ix (1978), appearing almost as a bad omen, while other bronze works, Monitor and Monitor iii (both 1965), cast their ominous, all-seeing eyes over the main room and stairwell respectively. A gang of his smaller, maquette-like works, including Kink (1964) and Pyramid iv (1965), animate the lower gallery. Although leaning

towards the abstract, Chadwick’s forms always take humanity and its history as their starting point, collapsing the distinction between figuration and abstraction: ‘I shall never neglect humanity. Even in my most abstract figure, the Pyramids, I took man as a starting point.’ Indeed Pyramid iv’s highly reflective surface somehow breaks down its own form, merging with our reflections and those of the room around us – incorporating all three with liquidlike effects. Collages by John Stezaker, Goshka Macuga and Haris Epaminonda also recur throughout the spaces. Stezaker’s Masks and Flashes (those shown here dating from 2016 and 2007, respectively) make frequent appearances, their deceptively simple format – two images spliced together – of tunnels, bridges, woodlands, grottoes and waterfalls with the faces of film actors; or 1950s images of children playing imposed, literally, as a flash or star, over static items of furniture, create windows into or through to temporal and spatial moments. Epaminonda’s small, subtle collages also allow a particular action to appear simultaneously in different times and places. Incorporating images of antique pottery, Ancient Greek columns, plinths, niches and ruins culled from old magazines and books, Epaminonda makes minimal cuts or impositions to her images, often replacing a background or viewpoint with a foreign landscape or flat colour, accumulating myriad visual histories in one work. Meanwhile, Macuga’s Frame for Tichy 20 (2013) consists of newly printed images from Czech photographer Miroslav Tichý’s clandestine photographs of women, captured in his hometown of Kyjov from the 1960s to the mid-80s. The negatives that Macuga has chosen to print from, often double-exposing two images in one or collaging the photographs with scraps of pattern, are evidently Tichý’s rejects, so damaged that Macuga’s resultant prints appear to flicker before your eyes, like a vcr on pause.

facing page, top Haris Epaminonda, Untitled #22 c/g, 2011, paper collage, 28 × 20 cm. Courtesy the artist and Rodeo, London

Elsewhere, two sets of Sigmar Polke’s manipulated photocopies convey a variety of distortions, physically blurring and smearing the human form. Hanne Darboven’s collaged drawing Dostojewski, Monat Januar (1990) conflates a recorded span of time (the month of January in 1990) with her admiration for Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky, diagrammatising the idea of time as an abstract system, while documenting the actual time of an artist’s labour. Erin Shirreff’s photographs and large-scale cyanotype consider the semantic distance between objects and their representation, capitalising on the potential ambiguity of the objects she photographs (blank geometric forms) to create her austere yet suggestive imagery. As with Bergson, de Chirico’s reflections on time came from his understanding of duration as ineffable and describable only through discrete images or events. Mark Lewis’s video The Night Gallery (2014) perhaps demonstrates this most strikingly. Set in the dark in the Louvre’s Sully Wing, home to medieval figurative sculpture, this silent video consists of a camera’s slow surveying of the surrounding figures while a flashlight pulses off and on, leaving only traces of a visual, as some sort of retinal memory. This seems to create a new kind of temporal space in which the paths of the eye and of memory are confused and duration is marked only by the infrequent surges of light. Although the exhibition contains works of significantly different genres and eras, they all share a common ground that acknowledges this way of understanding or creating durational shifts, and they all employ tactics such as collage, abstraction, cropping and inversion to generate or simulate a temporal jolt. Testing our ideas around memory, anachronism and repetition, the exhibition recapitulates de Chirico’s want towards the implosion of past, present and future, and leaves one feeling intrigued and absorbed, if a little anxious. Laura Smith

facing page, bottom Lynn Chadwick, Cloaked Figure ix, 1978, bronze, 185 × 101 × 140 cm. Photo: Peter Mallet. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Blain / Southern, London & Berlin

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January & February 2017

Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck Electoral Autocracy (Venezuelan Case) Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna 30 November – 14 January Crowds looting a bakery, hunger strikers with concave bellies, a young man claiming the currency in his hands is cheaper than toilet paper – these are some of the social mediasourced clips in Alessandro Balteo-Yazbeck’s video installation Homeland’s Agenda (2016). Showing on the upper level of Galerie Martin Janda, the video alternates the aforementioned clips with footage of Venezuelan politicians and pundits vehemently denying problems; the late dictator Hugo Chávez glossing over issues of his time, for example. Looped on a flatscreen set into an upended shopping cart (and made in collaboration with Ana Alenso), the installation represents a disarming collage of disconnected realities and image circulation, propaganda and rising public revolt. These are just some of the themes that resonate through the exhibition, which follows the Venezuela-born artist’s practices of historicisation and artistic research into politics in his home country and beyond. The gallery’s main space is dominated by Love Washing Machine Made in the People’s Republic of China (2012–16), a ceiling-mounted sculpture composed of 400 washing-machine instruction manuals hanging from threads in a spirallike cascade; each is rubber-stamped with ‘Chávez Corazón de mi Patria’, a message from the dictator’s last electoral campaign (weirdly, one of Chávez’s campaign promises was the sale of half-price front-loaders on credit). Also on the ground floor is a photographic series of eight archival jet prints: Humboldt Planetarium Fragments,

circa 1960 (from the series Nostalgic Apparatus, Caracas: Heaven’s branch on earth, 1998) shows the Caracas skyline silhouetted along the projection dome of the city’s Humboldt Planetarium, an institution initiated by an oil-financed dictatorship in the 1950s but inaugurated in 1961 under a democratic government. Blurry, sepia-toned and atmospheric, the prints offer a shadowy representation of a city shaped by political tumult since its rapid colonisation. Other works come from several series created or initiated in the past decade: Corrupted Files (2006–8) includes pieces from the project Plan Caracas, 1974–1976; here the artist has manipulated two photographs depicting children living in favelas that the Venezuelan government intended to provide with new infrastructure in the early 1970s. Despite the influx of oil money at the time, only two settlements were revamped. Balteo-Yazbeck overlays one image with black horizontal bars (echoing the prisonlike vertical window bars seen in the original image). Another image of children smiling into the camera is split and scrambled, distorting its documentary intention, just as the project that inspired the photographs was so dramatically distorted after its announcement. Two pieces come from the Modern Entanglements series (2015), which intertwines art-historical tropes and forgotten political histories. In the print Merchandise Exhibition – First Class – 1965, Balteo-Yazbeck colour-codes two femurs in the colours of the Cuban and

Corrupted file from page 14, [v1], 2006−08, from the series La Vega, Plan Caracas No. 1, 1974–1976, digital c-print from faulty scanner, 113 × 113 cm. Courtesy Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna

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Venezuelan republics, the upper (Cuban) one marked d-i-c-t-a-t-o-r in cursive handwriting, the other (Venezuelan) s-t-u-d-e-n-t, reenacting a Marcel Broodthaers 1964–5 piece showing two thighbones, one painted in the colours of the French flag, the other Belgian. And in the gallery basement, images from the same series delve into lost visual memory: on one wall are 19 bright logos of Venezuelan institutions and museums, many of which emerged through the country’s graphics tradition of melding pre-Hispanic and European elements (researched in collaboration with designers Aixa Díaz and Álvaro Sotillo) but were discontinued in 2006 in favour of one umbrella emblem, shown here on another wall next to a bmw logo. The works in this thought-provoking exhibition carry substantial background information (provided in an accompanying pamphlet), but even without knowledge of Balteo-Yazbeck’s extensive research, their formal and documentary qualities manage to communicate the interlayered, often emotional narratives on propaganda and even nostalgia that longterm authoritarianism can cause; the memory and agency that it can erase. I left the gallery with a horrific sense of foreboding, recognising that the ‘Venezuelan Case’ so deftly illustrated (the country is currently truly on the brink of disaster) is perhaps a dire warning for all of us to look more closely at the precursors to a multitude of autocratic ‘cases’ so quickly unfolding, right now, in many other places around the world. Kimberly Bradley

Painting After Postmodernism: A Manifesto Exhibition Vanderbought and Cinema Galleries / The Underground, Brussels 15 September – 13 November Joan Miró, emerging from Cubism’s dusty, rubble-strewn aftermath, fancied himself a murderer, intent on ‘assassinating’ painting – a pose he adopted precisely in order to be able to breathe life into his own radical yet earnest and highly painterly practice. It is not difficult to imagine Miró’s ghost prowling around this exhibition, nodding approvingly at the combination of compositional inventiveness and technical solutions shared by this particular gathering of 16 painters who continue producing, with deadly seriousness, their own magnificently unironical canvases. Painting After Postmodernism stakes an ambitious claim: to find a way of taking the measure of painting today – painting per se and not at the service of other, more discursive agendas – in such a way as to be able to link it to the larger arc of art history that mid-twentiethcentury movements claimed to have interrupted. Yet at the same time, the show eschews the international survey model, instead limiting itself to artists from the us and Belgium. Somehow, even counterintuitively, it works: the tight focus reveals as much if not more than would the wide-angle lens (to borrow the terminology of painting’s so-called nemesis). Moreover, the show itself is nothing if not

in-depth in its presentation of the modest number of artists, with over 200 paintings spread out over four floors of a stunningly massive early-1930s building in central Brussels, and extending into a nearby art-deco cinema building from the same decade. Larry Poons is the gravitational centre of Painting After Postmodernism, greeting visitors in the show’s entrance with a host of immense paintings dating from the 1970s to the present. The American artist’s work, such as Tantrum 2 (1979), blends a range of approaches and techniques – accumulation, materiality, gesture, chromaticism – into paintings that call attention to their essential condition as objects while also making viewers pause in the face of their compositional and technical audacity and ask, head-scratchingly, ‘How did he do that?’ Poons, who’s been in the painting business since the early 1960s, continues to cut an impressive figure. The rest of the show maintains a nearly uniform level of technically accomplished work, yet even so, that of certain artists stands out. Karen Gunderson’s participation, for example, includes a number of black paintings that, like Poons’s work, achieve something remarkable with the basic, fundamental fact of paint, although to a very different end. Gunderson's

singular brushwork, with its rhythmic impasto strokes, stirs up a lustrous but elusive blackness, as if the canvases in the exhibition space were traversed by slippery moonlight, as in Rounding the Cape (2004). Jan Vanriet, whose work is the most figurative in the show, contributes a number of dreamlike, fragmented tableaux that are as delicate as they are sure-handed, including the disturbingly haunting Women in the Forest Red (2015). A similar hauntedness is evoked by Paul Manes’s large painting In the Heat of the Night (2008), a dense and intense vision of the bayou – viscous swamp, gnarled trees – as if in flames, while the show’s scope is also wide enough to include work such as Melissa Kretschmer’s Sound (2016), a minimalist-inflected piece that straddles the divide between painting and sculpture, and the detail-laden patterned paintings of Werner Mannaers, such as The Costello Series (Chapter 2, The Garden of Earthly Delights) (2016). Painting like this, so steadfast and even isolationist in its own internal discourse, seems to offer the suggestion that irony as strategy has, at least for the moment, run its course: a reading that reverberates deeply in today’s increasingly – and terrifyingly – unironical world. George Stolz

Larry Poons, 20-20 and Blue, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 175 × 273 cm. Courtesy City of Brussels

January & February 2017

Against Nature: Young Czech Art Scene Národní Galerie, Prague 5 October – 15 January On the day I visited Prague’s national gallery, two contrasting visions of contemporary Czech society were being presented. On the ground floor I squeezed through crowds of participants for a bustling conference called ‘The Shape We’re In’, attended by the country’s centre-right defence minister and sponsored by a neoliberal think-tank. But upstairs, at the top of the former trade-fair palace, a different picture of Czech culture was on display. Curated by Chris Sharp and Edith Jeřábková, with video, sculpture and wall-based works by 13 emerging artists spread across a whole floor of the stark functionalist block, Against Nature is the result of around 50 studio visits and many more casual conversations over three separate research trips. Collectively, the works recall J.K. Huysmans’s description, in the 1884 novel from which this show takes its name – as have many exhibition projects, from Dennis Cooper’s 1989 group show at Los Angeles’s lace to last year’s London Photo50 showcase – of a florist’s shop as a ‘microcosm’ peopled by ‘rare and remarkable’ monsters. And so Kateřina Holá’s Untitled series from 2015–16 collages rough-hewn fabrics, plastic bags, magazine pages and food packaging into abstract woven assemblages stretched over wooden frames like scarred flesh pulled taut over bone; and Tanya Nikulina’s video Distant

thunder from the east won’t disturb a morning car wash (2016) builds up a highly musical composition through the montage of simple, repetitive actions undertaken in surreal costumes adorned with bells, ping pong balls and metal bars. But the most immediately charming works here are all gathered together on a single shelf under the rubric ze série Dno oceánu (Ocean Floor series, 2015– 16) by David Fesl. Fesl’s microsculptures rarely exceed a finger’s length in height or diameter, but they exhibit a wealth of imagination far in excess of their small stature. Lego bricks appended with little lobster claws, a bottle cap shrouded in a nest of wire and string hoisting a tiny photocopied picture of some glue guns like a flag, a tiny cairn with a photo of a man’s face at its peak, and some two dozen other little agglomerations of flotsam and jetsam: each one is a perfect little assisted readymade, seemingly composed by rummaging down the back of the sofa. If they immediately recall something out of a Joseph Cornell box or so many shrunken Markus Meurer sculptures, the title suggests something leftover from a congress of hermit crabs, the work of piscine surrealists diligently scouring the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. ‘Anti-monumental’ is the term used by the gallery’s chief curator, Adam Budak, in his catalogue essay for the show. Chris Sharp, a few pages later, speaks of the importance of ‘craft

and the handmade… a certain expressiveness that is not expressive in the traditional sense’. It is in this sense that Against Nature so sharply distinguishes itself from the grandstanding about ‘national security’ and ‘economic potential’ at the conference five floors down. The mood, certainly, is different: more playful, less triumphal. Though we might question exactly what the ‘monumental’ – or, indeed, ‘nature’ – is being asked to stand in for, in a city whose other major contemporary art exhibition right now is a panegyric to Václav Havel. But despite a hastily tacked-on reference to the Chinese persecution of Falun Gong in one of Holá’s patchwork canvases, Against Nature is too cannily droll for crude anticommunism. Few works sum this up better than the three pillars (Pillars 1–3, 2015) of Ondřej Filípek. These unsteady stanchions in plaster and steel each seek to undercut the grandeur of the classical column by borrowing from organic and industrial forms in Giger-esque fashion and fashioning these into a personable asymmetry. One pillar in particular is appended with an additional limb that juts off to the side and ends in two prongs of stiff wire jammed into the floor, balancing the main shaft: a support which itself requires support. One of the last exhibits in the show, it provides a perfect end to a catalogue of homespun art with a sophisticated sense of humour. Robert Barry

Ondřej Filípek, Pillars 1–3, 2015, plaster and steal, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Národní Galerie, Prague

ArtReview

Amelie von Wulffen The Dead in the Swamp Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin 15 September – 29 October In her first solo show at Galerie Barbara Weiss, Amelie von Wulffen startles viewers with genre paintings that seem oddly antiquated: they predominantly depict people sitting at tables in rural settings. The first image in the exhibition shows four elderly people seemingly in mid-discussion and before a light-green background. The image, based on a historical photograph, presents two figures we may recognise: the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who had dubious ties to National Socialism, and the Jewish religious scholar Martin Buber. Also depicted is the artist’s grandfather, who arranged this gathering in 1957 to allow the two thinkers to discuss their attitudes towards National Socialism. The paintings in the exhibition do not primarily constitute a biographical self-inquiry, but rather an exploration of the question of guilt, and the ongoing tradition of rightwing thought, in Germany and beyond. Another painting – all works are untitled and dated 2016 – shows a family of five eating a meal together in the parlour, a scene recalling a more-or-less kitschy nineteenth-century painting. A cross hangs in a corner of the room; the people are clothed colourfully in traditional dress; paintings hang from the walls. In the foreground the artist has painted a cute little

boy, crying, with schoolbooks under his arm. However, hovering somewhat spookily over the room, and painted in black and white and with greater realism than the other figures, is a portrait of Paul Celan, whose well-known poem from 1944–45, ‘Todesfuge’ (‘Death Fugue’), attempted to capture in words the horror of the Nazis’ persecution of the Jews. This collage of various styles and eras is typical of most of the exhibition’s paintings, which consciously invoke works by historical genre painters such as Franz Defregger or Gustave Caillebotte. Other paintings reference rightwing philosophy less directly, but throughout this exhibition there lingers an atmosphere of demonic destruction: above all, perhaps, in images of burning cities, which recall, not without intent, the bombing of Dresden in February 1945, or in von Wulffen’s grotesque scenes depicting absurd fantasies of angstinspiring monsters, burning children and mysterious cats. In naming the exhibition The Dead in the Swamp, the artist is playing off the titles of cheap crime novels and popular tv crime series. Concerning the latter, von Wulffen once said in an interview that in postwar Germany these served as a ‘catalyst for the horrifying, guilt-ridden images of human torment and

mass murder in the concentration camps’. Her paintings also reflect the amalgamation of guilt, rightwing ideology and the media, and it is this quality, combined with her very own medium, namely painting and its potential to free the imagination, that makes this exhibition so convincing. Von Wulffen shows, for instance, that genre painting reflects not only an ‘ideal world’ utterly devoid of social and political problems, but also that these fraudulent idylls expose the exploited nationalist longings for unspoiled nature, a pure völkisch homeland and harmonic family life. The fact that this emotional trinity still prevails today in wide swathes of Western society, as current rightwing populism has unfortunately laid bare, makes artistic and historical deconstructions like von Wulffen’s all the more urgent. In this context, therefore, a painting that on first glance may seem harmless, such as an almost romantic depiction of three children playing music for an old woman in a rural, interior setting, becomes imbued with exceedingly critical ideology. On second glance, the viewer perceives that the children are painted wearing modern everyday clothes, while the old woman is in antiquated traditional dress… Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Jonathan Lutes

Untitled, 2016, oil on canvas, 50 × 60 cm. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin

January & February 2017

Ed Atkins Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, and Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte, Rivoli 11 June – 18 September There is often a disjuncture between how people behave in the real and digital worlds, distinctive possibilities occurring in each, complicating our behaviour and the concept of the self. Try to remember the last time you gave someone the thumbs up, or curled your index fingers inward to show that you ‘heart’ them. Now skip to your social media account, if you have one (Facebook recently reported it has 1.18 billion active daily users), where disembodied body parts are frequently offered up in emoji form. It is by navigating such differences that Ed Atkins evaluates contemporary subjectivity, drawing upon the relationship between real versus representation, as mediated by technology. A retrospective of the British artist’s work is mounted at Castello di Rivoli and the nearby Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo: the former presents five video installations dating from 2013 to 2015 and a 2016 video, while a series of sculptural wall-works are on show at the latter. Atkins is known for high-tech, computergenerated videos that use facial-recognition software to depict introspective male characters and render realistic surfaces such as glass, liquid, hair and skin; yet it’s his unique approach to sound that is emphasised by this exhibition. Atkins has conceived of the Castello di Rivoli’s building as a body and chosen to install the exhibition on the top floor – its ‘head’. Here, a large room is divided into five spaces without ceilings, each dedicated to an individual work, but with the sound from all intermingling in the rooftop rafters. As such, one’s focus is continually interrupted by peripheral noises: you hear

awe-inspiring renditions of Bach and Atkins’s own singing voice bathetically disturbed by a fart in Ribbons (2014), and merged with the poetry of Gilbert Sorrentino in Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths (2013) and the staccato slapping sounds of Even Pricks (2013). The effect is disarming, wrong-footing, a constant shifting from one register into another – from the sublime to the ridiculous. In Happy Birthday!! (2014), Willie Nelson’s Always on My Mind (1982) plays amidst visuals of a naked bottom, a hazy moon and black liquid that seeps from a man’s mouth, preventing him from speaking and then drowning him. Sound and image disjointedly cut from one thing to the next, from humour to tragedy, including a spoken list of dates such as “six months to a year”, which refers to the artist’s father’s illness and subsequent death in 2009, an influential period that has shaped Atkins’s practice and its exploration of existential themes including time, death and love. By not allowing the viewer to settle into any one moment – constantly being sidetracked or jolted by sound – in Brechtian fashion, you remain aware of your viewership, of your condition as a disconnected observer, yourself isolated. In the past Atkins has cited French theorist Maurice Blanchot’s idea of the cadaver: that the representation of oneself is only truly achievable in death, meaning that any work of art (or online avatar) necessitates the death of the original. One of the exhibition’s most affecting films, presented at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, is Safe Conduct (2016),

a three-channel video depicting a man’s passage through airport security and onto an airplane. Airports are places of control and fear, where we are subjected to body scans and searches in the name of security, and where the rise of planejackings has increased an awareness of our fragile mortality. In the video, body parts are slopped into trays – wet brains, piles of ears, teeth, blood, a pineapple (bathos again). A bruised, decaying cadaver removes its own disintegrating body parts, including fingers and arms; skin of mottled red and brown forms a masklike face that is pulled off repeatedly. Indeed, countless examples of fragmented corporeality feature in further works: fingers and penises poke through holes in Ribbons; a giant ear rests next to a bed in Happy Birthday!!; an inflating thumb fills the screen in Even Pricks; a severed head counts as it bounces down the stairs in Counting i & ii (2014). Not to mention the uv-print-on-Perspex sculpture Untitled (2016): flat fragments where feet, bottoms, fingers and skin have been seemingly merged in Photoshop, disrupted and blurred as strange, fleshy forms whose outlines recall country or state borders. Unlike many artists classified as ‘post-Internet’, Atkins uses computer-generated animation with a unique approach to disjunctive sound, channelling the inherent anhedonia of the digital space to highlight the vulnerability of the human condition – and does so in an age where we willingly disembody ourselves within a world of pixels, hoping that these might ultimately bring us love, eternal youth and companionship. Louisa Elderton

Untitled, 2016, uv print on Perspex, dimensions variable. Photo: Giorgio Perottino. Courtesy the artist, Cabinet, London, & Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin

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ArtReview

Figurative Geometry Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia 16 October – 2 April The smell of linseed oil hits at the threshold of Figurative Geometry. Like the aroma of baking bread pumped from the entrance of a supermarket, the message is clear: we got paint! And it’s fresh, no mistake! Organised by Bob Nickas – curator, author of (among much else) the book Painting Abstraction (2009) – the exhibition’s stated preoccupation is the teasing dance between abstraction and representation in recent work by nine (mostly American or us-based) painters. But as the olfactory component suggests, the stronger works in this elegant (if somewhat cool) show suggest an associated theme of engagement with the materiality of surface. Three new tableaux by Sadie Benning are pieced together from gauged slabs of Medite, sanded to a curve at the edges and painted with milky casein, buttery smooth and matt as kid leather. Described in these painted puzzles are graphic black and red forms on a ‘ground’ of white that have superficial kinship to Jannis Kounellis’s Alfabeti (1959–63). But Benning’s errant glyphs – arrows, dots, a hooked cross like a malformed swastika – feel better moored, less transient. With their many components, the images, like the tableaux themselves, are fragmented parts of larger things, recalling the pixels that shattered the artist’s early works shot on a kid’s Pixelvision camera.

A different kind of shattering comes courtesy of Nicolas Roggy (the one artist not based in the us), whose untitled acrylics on wood and aluminium read like shards of wall, their pink ‘plaster’ apparently picked into to reveal underlying structure, or embedded with stubborn strands of images long since ripped off. Unlike those of Benning and Roggy, meanwhile, Robert Janitz’s works pronounce themselves as paintings with a capital ‘P’, to the point where they’re more or less portraits of the brushstrokes themselves. Janitz loads huge brushes with oil, wax and flour, leaving a rich spumy trace that feels at once liquid and solidly sculptural. In The Merry Widow is an Operetta (2016), vertiginous strokes in imperial purple dive from ceiling to floor on canvases the height of the gallery; in The common ground of large hopes (2016), ghostly cream writhes like entrails. Paintings with a capital ‘P’, maybe, but this suggestion of three-dimensionality in the strokes themselves allies Janitz to Benning and Roggy in producing materially alluring objectlike pictures. Controlled, geometric works by both Richard Tinkler and Xylor Jane establish schemata based on repetition and echoing. Jane’s grid- and graphlike forms – indebted to an earlier digital era – remain incomplete, their sequences of dots and lines petering out like unfinished texts. Where Jane’s works seem

open to ongoing possibilities, Tinkler’s are closed systems. Tightly canted penlines fill sheets of paper with netlike grids. In paint, his grids are worked up in wet layers with traces of coloured substrate picked up by the moving brush as it creates the layer above, producing gradated paint strokes that add a geometrical depth of field. Tinkler’s works feel imbued with superstition: like Sudoku puzzles, their purpose is somehow fulfilled in their completion. Alex Brown, who, like Jane, featured in Nickas’s Painting Abstraction, revisits the idea of the pixel as an abstracting mechanism with figurative works teetering on the brink. In some instances – such as Pilgrim (2012), in which a messianic figure emerges from a grid of blue pyramidal forms – this can feel a little stuntlike. Gang (2015), in which the titular grouping is virtually invisible in a plane of Op-y green dots on a red ground, suggests a deeper engagement with ideas of visibility. True to its name, Figurative Geometry is a beautifully balanced and structured show. Nickas has a weakness for the well-composed canvas, which at times leaves one wishing for ruckus. Despite the generous materiality of many of the standout series in the show, some works read as self-referential to the point of hermetic, but as an argument for borderland abstraction as a dynamic zone, this is compellingly made. Hettie Judah

Robert Janitz, The Merry Widow is an Operetta, 2016, oil, wax, flour on linen, 197 × 152 cm. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Meyer Riegger, Berlin & Karlsruhe

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Saskia Olde Wolbers Yes, These Eyes are the Windows Stigter Van Doesburg, Amsterdam 15 October – 19 November In 2012 a Chinese businessman bought a house, unseen, in London at an auction. The house, 87 Hackford Road in Lambeth, is where Vincent van Gogh lived when, from 1873 until 1874, he worked as a junior assistant in his uncle’s art dealership. A blue plaque marks the historical significance of the dilapidated house. I cannot afford his paintings, the new owner told the press, but I can afford his house. Two years later, Saskia Olde Wolbers made an audio installation in this flaking wreck, concerning the events that took place there. And then came the film Yes, These Eyes are the Windows (2015), its title taken from Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851) – ‘Yes, these eyes are the windows and this body of mine is the house’ – and refers to the notion that the Hackford Road house is much more than, to quote the film, “old bricks and bad plumbing”: in some miraculous way it appears to have become human, as if the artist’s spirit has crept into the gaps in the floor and the cracks in the plaster and holds sway over its inhabitants’ lives. The house itself is therefore the main character and does the talking. The fragmented narrative, beautifully voiced by actor Tom Brooke, is based on the letters and memories of previous tenants, former owners and their descendants, a postman, a council official, an art valuer and a few more characters (a few too many, in my opinion; pay attention or

you will soon lose track). We hear that the house, due to be demolished, was saved thanks to the attic room’s former lodger. Why? “It was in this house that Vincent’s character was beginning to form into that of an artist,” it is said. The nineteen-year-old lodger from the Netherlands is described as a religious fanatic, an alcoholic troublemaker with radical socialist ideas. He is said to have fallen in love with Eugenie Loyer, the landlady’s daughter, and to have twice asked her to marry him, to no avail. This unrequited love is believed to have plunged him into a depression that was to be the cradle of his tormented artistry. Are the anecdotes based in truth? Mostly not, but occasionally yes. As often is the case in Olde Wolbers’s work per se, the line between illusion and reality is fluid. The images are mesmerising. Beautiful shots of the vacant house show peeling wallpaper, discoloured net curtains in the window, a shaft of sunlight in a twilit room. At times the residents themselves appear. Hearing their words indirectly, through voiceover, only enhances the ghostliness of their appearance. The images alternate with shots of odd structures that appear to be underwater. We see an attic room waving sluggishly, a balustrade dripping slowly in psychedelic colours. It is astonishing how images from different genres (documentary, costume

drama, science fiction) blend effortlessly into one lingering, feverish vision. Gradually we lose all footing and everything becomes uncertain. In the Poe-style storyline of the postman who copies Van Gogh paintings in his spare time, the master speaks to him via the portraits of postmen (as is well known, a curious subgenre in Van Gogh’s portraiture). The madness acquires disquieting features when Vincent no longer believes he is Vincent but instead the reincarnation of his brother, who died at a young age. “The painful longing that affects him so is not just for the brother he never knew, but also for another version of himself.” “I have been born twice,” the young man calls out euphorically, “I am the resurrected!” Here resound the echoes of Spiritualism, which was in fashion during Vincent’s brief stay in Victorian London. What the film resembles most is a séance that has got out of hand. The fluidity of facts in the imaginative narrative about what may have happened in the house partly reflects the boundless mystification of Van Gogh as a tortured genius, a myth that clearly fulfils a deeply felt need. Half reconstruction, half invention, the film moves between present and past, between fantasy and reality, and dissolves the chronology of history in the timelessness of the imagination. Dominic van den Boogerd Translated from the Dutch by Suzanne Jansen

Yes, These Eyes Are the Windows (still), 2015, hd, 18 min 25 sec, voice-over: Tom Brooke. Courtesy Stigter Van Doesburg, Amsterdam, and Maureen Paley, London

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ArtReview

Michaela Meise Mare Nostrum Standard (Oslo) 11 November – 10 December There’s a town in the South of France where the Rhône reaches the Mediterranean and merges into an expanse of silty saltwater marsh. Situated on this edgeland, Saintes-Maries-dela-Mer is named for the three biblical Marys said to have sailed from Alexandria, Egypt, in an attempt to flee the persecution of Christians. In some accounts Mary Magdalene, Mary Salome and Mary Jacobe (also known as Mary of Clopas) were not alone. According to Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend (c. 1260), with them travelled the saints Lazarus, Maximin, Martha, Cedonius and Sara, a servant girl who was later consecrated: the first Christians to arrive in Europe. Shortly after reaching the shores of the town, these ecclesiastical émigrés parted company, their relics supposedly discovered across the South of France. Michaela Meise’s Mare Nostrum (which translates to ‘our sea’) consists of seven ceramic sculptures depicting the saints. St. Maria Magdalena (2014) reclines, one leg hooked over the other, in a quasi-yoga pose: heavily marked with the artist’s fingerprints, she looks freshly

dug from the marshes, purplish glaze pooling in the dents left by her maker’s hands. Other saints stand on square canvases set into black plinths. St. Sara la Kali (2016) is the only sculpture with loose ephemera (a tabletop menu, a coin necklace), which allude to tributes left by the passing pilgrims and Roma who gather each year in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer on 24 May to honour her as their own. Past works have included playful sculptures of abstracted toothless jaws, Cheshire Cat smiles, peapods and grapes; here Meise returns to relics for inspiration. But these saints are not what they seem. St. Cedonius (2015), to whom Jesus restored sight, clutches a rough oblong into which is carved the Apple logo, his glasses hauntingly Steve Jobs-esque; St. Maximin (2016), carrying a small naked figure on his back, is wearing a football uniform: he’s also Allan Saint-Maximin, a nineteen-year-old French footballer who plays for sc Bastia; meanwhile St. Lazarus (2015) stands atop a canvas covered with patterned fabric by German fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm. Meise presents

these sculptures as relics used in the worship of saints, but they also represent desirable lifestyle choices, contemporary ‘icons’ and things that are consumed: sports careers, yoga, fashion, smartphones. Yet among these figurines lingers a little melancholy, manifesting itself in St. Maria Salomé + St. Maria Jacobé (2016), who cling to one another, faces pressed together. They look sad and uncertain. It is not hard to make the connection between the saints who were forced to leave and the refugees who are now crossing the same sea seeking safety and peace away from violent and volatile states; for whom a mobile phone is not a fashion accessory but a means of communication that allows contact between family and friends, clothing provides warmth and dignity, and aspirations for a better life drive the will to live. Meise’s sculptures are beautiful to look at: rough, glazed, earthy and bright. And through them, the subject matter also demands to be seen. In this poignant and poetic show the saints stand quietly in the room, separated across the space. Fi Churchman

St. Maria Salomé + St. Maria Jacobé, 2016, glazed ceramic and ink, wooden plinth and fabric, 145 × 55 × 60 cm. Photo: Vegard Kleven. Courtesy the artist and Standard (Oslo)

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Po wiecu / After the Rally Galeria Studio, Warsaw 24 September – 25 November As thousands repeatedly took to Warsaw’s streets, demonstrating against proposed extensions to Poland’s stringent abortion laws, it seems appropriate that the city should be home to an exhibition about mass participation. A number of women at After the Rally’s opening were dressed in black, the uniform of the protest for women’s reproductive rights, often passing across the projection of Tomáš Rafa’s documentary Krzyz, Tragedia Smoleńsk (2010), about a mass gathering in Warsaw that took place in 2010, when the city’s Catholics (many of whom would oppose the ‘black protest’ some years later) attempted to install a cross in front of the secular Presidential Palace following the aeroplane crash that killed President Lech Kaczyński. Just as the latest protest has permeated the gallery, the exhibition (curated by sometime ArtReview contributor Barbara Piwowarska) made an offering to the events outside. A tabletop display of Instruments for Making Noise (2016), by Karolina Breguła, was quickly emptied by visitors engaged with the ‘black protest’, satisfying the artist’s wish that the instruments be put to use. Crafted from material remnants of previous exhibitions and scraps from artists’ studios, these objects, designed to be beaten and shaken, convey an urgent, rustic resourcefulness in the face of new struggles, while responding to the contradictions of making overtly political art within an institutional paradigm. In this

instance, the relative autonomy of the art institution is thrown into relief: Galeria Studio is housed within the imposing opulence of the Palace of Culture, a Polish landmark of distinctly Soviet origins. Breguła’s distinctly analogue work also contributes to a tension brought out in the exhibition between the physical nature of rallies and their counterlife online. This is especially present in Ewa Axelrad’s Fetor. Greetings from the ongoing series Plague (2014–), which refers to ‘riot tourism’; individuals, unaligned with a specific political agenda but who seek camaraderie, identify and join demonstrations that are about to ‘blow up’. Eleven identical postcards are presented. The composite digital image of police in riot gear surrounding a central fire suggests how easily such situations are manipulated. The postcards’ versos bear the same banal ‘Greetings from’ salutation, and stamps from places that have all seen mass demonstrations. In materialising an anonymous, web-based phenomenon into a minor yet tangible form that risks obsolescence, the postcards seem provocatively quaint. Many of the 20-plus artists here hail from Eastern Europe, and their contributions largely reflect on regional concerns. Dissidence (2008–10), a film by Minerva Cuevas mapping protests in her native Mexico City, is an exception in this regard, and crucially widens the question of how mass actions speak to each other. The inclusion of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wall of Oil Barrels

– The Iron Curtain, Rue Visconti, Paris (1961–2) alongside KwieKulik’s Open Form (1971) films provides historical moorings for an otherwise youthful parade of artists who are no less concerned than their elders with past events: Zuza Ziółkowska/Hercberg’s quest in the filmed public action Disavowed Among Disavowed – Dabrowszczacy (2016) seeks commemoration for Polish soldiers who participated in the Spanish Civil War. In the Ukrainian collective r.e.p.’s Chosen (2016), a telescope fashioned from a sniper’s rifle is positioned at an open window looking onto Warsaw’s Defilade Square. Peering through the magnifying scope, the viewer experiences a contradictory feeling of distance as unsuspecting passersby are caught in the lens’s crosshairs. This is felt in the potential power over another individual, and in the projection of the self onto a casual victim. The success of the exhibition is that the spectrum between the individual and the masses is so variously explored. Its reflections on the ‘body politic’ of 2016 contrasts to a ‘postreality’ attitude to history in the (almost) concurrent 9th Berlin Biennale, which crucially took place at a moment when Trump’s presidency was not yet concrete, merely speculatively spectacular. As one assesses After the Rally’s abiding tone, parochialism, historicism and the question of the self in relation to the collective gather into a powerful and timely chorus. Phoebe Blatton

r.e.p. (Ksenia Gnilitskaya, Nikita Kadan, Zhanna Kadyrova, Vladimir Kuznetsov, Lada Nakonechnaya, Lesya Khomenko), Chosen, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Katarzyna Chmura. Courtesy the artists and Galeria Studio, Warsaw

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Tobias Spichtig Like Deadlines in Heaven Galerie Bernhard, Zürich 18 November – 28 January A sign on the door warns visitors that they enter at their own risk; there are no instructions as to how to navigate the sea of furniture inside. I crawled between table legs, surfacing occasionally; others climbed over the top. The ultimate impression suggested by Tobias Spichtig’s exhibition staging is of an unwilling, melancholic homecoming: forced by a house sale; this might be the last chance to save mementos. Several dozen assorted tables have been stuffed into the modest gallery, pushed up to the canvases – the exhibition – that line the three walls, preventing passage and creating the air of a provincial auction house with mediocre goods on offer. And this is a homecoming: Zürich is where the artist studied and worked before he took flight for the West Coast of America and then Berlin. After recent works in film, video, sculpture, painting with printer ink and textiles, Spichtig’s paintings here are old-fashioned oil on canvas, just two (official) sculptures the exception to the rule. In the window, I don’t want to know why and I hope I never will. (all works 2016) is one of an ongoing series of headless figures made in clothes petrified by resin. Whereas others in this grouping have been hipsters, perched

on snowboards or clutching fags, this one suggests a pietà in which Jesus is seized by rigor mortis. Inside, Spichtig repeatedly demonstrates that no era is too distant to be ploughed over, churning historic subsoil together with the present. References are the immaterial stuff upon which he has built his practice. While formally he is a skilful chameleon, producing pleasing and often seductive arrangements in whichever media he puts his hand to, nods to his artistic heroes have been a constant; Duchamp and van Gogh are the most obviously cited here. In recent years Spichtig’s exhibitions were additionally occupied by pop-cultural allusions, to music in particular. He has not abandoned these – the seven paintings all start with inkjet prints ironed onto the canvas, like early merchandising T-shirts – but the woman pictured in On the Way to the Airport, looking like a young, serene Marina Abramović and to whom I keep being drawn back, is framed by a bright, solid orange background, the Madonna in a new Byzantine icon. Ritter ohne Schwert (Knight Without a Sword) pictures a medieval suit of armour, though his deadpan response to being disarmed – the German

expletive ‘scheisse’ printed on the canvas beside him – is timeless. In Like Deadlines in Heaven most canvases feature a single photograph or found image, silhouetted in monochromatic oil. Here, Spichtig includes biographical images for the first time: friends, relatives and his father, pictured asleep on the invitation or revealing a wired-up Jack Nicholson grimace in Father after Surgery. Despite its vaguely maudlin air, it is an exhibition in suspense – a celebration of the flippant snapshot, of its lightness and its heft. An attempt to make both sides of a coin visible at once. The figure at the foot of the staircase could be ascending or could be lynched, its title equally paradoxical: So eine schöne Geschichte und keiner weiss, wie sie geht. (Such a lovely story, and nobody knows how it goes.) The tables block the way, but hold us captive – to look – as well. By almost obscuring the works they frame, they force the viewer to engage wholeheartedly with the exhibition if they want to see it at all. Spichtig has orchestrated an atypically deliberate viewing dynamic. Maybe he’s saying that references can fly as fast as digital images, but it’s sometimes worth holding on to both for longer so we don’t miss their significance. Aoife Rosenmeyer

Like Deadlines in Heaven, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Galerie Bernhard, Zürich

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Animality Marian Goodman Gallery, London 3 November – 17 December Animals are, as Claude Lévi-Strauss asserted, ‘good to think with’. Good, that is, for giving form to human imagination, for structuring our understanding of the world and core cultural beliefs. And good too, you’d therefore rightly expect, for being the subject of an exhibition – one that allows for all sorts of wildly disparate artworks and artefacts to be corralled together. Curated by Jens Hoffmann, Animality is a menagerie of visual culture, a vast and fascinating mixture of historical and contemporary works that trace a mostly serious, occasionally frivolous pathway through the science, ethics and mythology of animal existence. The initial and strongest strand of the show explores traditions of knowledge and natural history – and, following a late print of Albrecht Dürer’s notoriously conjectural The Rhinoceros (c. 1620, reprinted from an original 1515 woodcut) that opens the exhibition, this basically means post-Enlightenment concepts of scientific observation. Across several vitrines, a variety of zoological illustrations are displayed, most of them exquisitely beautiful: the coiling intricacies of Albertus Seba’s reptilian scenes (1734–65), for instance; or the luminescent, near-psychedelic patterns of Louis Renard’s marine dissections (1754). Early photography, too, is brought in, though in a way that feels slightly more cursory given the vastness of the terrain: apart

from the obligatory Eadweard Muybridge locomotion studies, the only works are by George Shiras, whose pioneering use of flash in the early twentieth century lent his nocturnal images of American wildlife a strangely frigid, spectral quality. Still, this isn’t a show that claims to be comprehensive in any way – it’s more of a meandering, philosophical essay, suggesting links and correspondences across history. Among contemporary pieces, the most obvious, if ironic, correlates are Balthasar Burkhard’s monochrome photographs from the 1990s, where the uniform poses of animals suggest ideas of domestication and typological classification; and also Hiroshi Sugimoto’s images depicting taxidermied, denatured animals in museum dioramas. Throughout, the exhibition is punctuated by headings and wall texts – ‘Origins’, ‘Markings’, ‘Extinctions’ and so on. Not sections, really, so much as thematic readings. But it’s just as rewarding identifying other conceptual lineages. The sheer alien strangeness of animal forms, for example, connects Jean Painlevé’s silent films from the 1920s depicting undulating undersea fauna, with the slowed-down semiabstraction of (Peacock) Mating Season (2016), a 16mm projection by João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva. Another motif is anthropomorphism: from Roe Ethridge’s photographs of livestock given human names, through

Maurizio Cattelan’s cartoonish mouse-voices emanating from behind a tiny door (Untitled (Mouse House), 2000), to J.J. Grandville’s wonderful etchings in which clothed creatures function as mid-Victorian social caricatures. Yet amidst the huge diversity on display, there are also some disappointments. Some works seem rather glib, for a start, the most egregious probably being John Baldessari’s sculpture of a lifesize camel and gigantic needle – whose eye, therefore, unlike in the biblical parable, the camel might conceivably pass through – which just feels like an awfully grandiose gesture for such a simple joke. More fundamentally, it’s hard to shake the sense of a lacuna at the heart of the show. ‘Why Look at Animals?’, asked John Berger in a 1977 essay, arguing that human-animal encounters always involve us confronting the limits of language and comprehension. But, in a show packed full of hundreds of artworks by over 60 artists, it’s striking how few directly address this paradoxical difficulty of communication, this threshold of mute otherness. Only Pierre Bismuth’s The Jungle Book Project (2002) really takes such ideas seriously, modifying the Disney cartoon so that every character speaks a different language version of the film, as a way of alerting us to the ridiculous fantasy of mutual intelligibility between species. Gabriel Coxhead

Balthasar Burkhard, Animal / 028 – Bison, 1996, black & white silver gelatin print on baryt paper, 41 × 48 cm (framed). © Estate of the artist

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Matthew Darbyshire Passive Sensor Herald St, London 11 November – 16 December The four sculpted figures in Matthew Darbyshire’s Passive Sensor, helical abstractions modelled from a clay-resin compound, attract and repel in equal measure. Based on his wife Grace, and coiling spirally from the top of the head down to the ankles, they give the initial impression of having been forced out of a machine as a single (turdlike) extrusion. On closer inspection, however, the hands and feet are rendered naturalistically. And despite their cloacal morphology and queasy ochre hue, there’s a lightness to them. The steel frames in which they are housed resemble scientific devices, teleportation pods, lending them the appearance of aliens beaming in from elsewhere, things ‘materialising’ rather than wrought. The varying poses described in their titles – Sensor Series No. 1 (Grace Standing); Sensor Series No. 2 (Grace Sitting); Sensor Series No. 3 (Grace Dancing); and Sensor Series No. 4 (Grace Walking) (all works 2016) – augment this temporality: though separate works, they remind me of Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic captures of a single subject seen at different stages. As display mechanisms, the frames also place the figures in a kind of ‘shop window’, emphasising their status as freshly packaged

goods, which continues Darbyshire’s ongoing excoriation of style and contemporary design. I first saw his work at British Art Show 7 in 2011, where he presented An Exhibition for Modern Living (2010), a collection of consumer objects – including Union Jack cushions, retro telephones, imitation Arne Jacobsen chairs – arranged on shelving units in what the artist (in an interview with Tom Morton in the 2015 book An Exhibition for Modern Living) called a ‘parody of the constant instructional, lifestyle coaching, bullshit mantra we have to spend every waking hour dodging’. Subsequent projects have explored the visual character of our increasingly ersatz surroundings by subjecting material culture to what might be called an archaeology of the present, viewing it as if from some rhetorical future standpoint. This is key to the fifth work here, Hoggin (2016), which functions as a backdrop for the figures. Darbyshire has covered the entire gallery floor with crushed stones and fragments of broken plastic objects – an aggregate of relics from a late-industrial age – accompanied by four Victorian-style park-benches and fake ivy hanging forlornly from the ceiling. Hoggin is a seductive work in its own right, its

repurposed trash transfigured into something reminiscent of a path through a Japanese garden; but it’s more effective as a presentational vehicle, blithely counterpointing the figures’ painstaking mode of production with the prospect of landfill, simultaneously promoting and undermining the Sensor Series. It is always more interesting to see Darbyshire combine his own fabricated objects with readymade elements, and here he ups the ante. Readymade artefacts are inscribed with a specific history, after all, and their incorporation with the boxfresh, labour-intensive fruits of the studio suggests a willingness to subject both to the same judgement. If that judgement is more detached and acerbic in an earlier work like An Exhibition for Modern Living, it has a more self-reproachful register here: might art be contributing to our ersatz material culture rather than critiquing it? Artists, Darbyshire appears to acknowledge, are in the business of making luxury goods, and he’s not afraid to subject his own offerings to the ambivalence he shows towards other consumer objects, reminding us that sculpture is merely the valorised end of a continuum that begins with base matter. Sean Ashton

Passive Sensor, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Andy Keate. Courtesy the artist and Herald St, London

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South Africa: The Art of a Nation British Museum, London 27 October – 26 February With this wide-ranging survey show, the British Museum takes on the task of telling a complete history of South Africa, with the anachronistic subject of nationhood as a central and governing theme. The selected works span a range of chronologically ordered categories, with contemporary South African artworks addressing apartheid politics displayed alongside archaeological artefacts. More disturbing (than even this sorting through the museum’s seized cultural booty and trophies of colonial conquest), the show actively encourages a retroactive recategorisation of the archaeological artefacts as works of art – in the contemporary sense. Take, for example, a naturally eroded smooth, reddish-brown jasperite stone, on the surface of which is a set of facelike features, complete with deep-set eyes and a small mouth: this is the Makapansgat Pebble, believed to have been collected (and treasured) by an Australopithecine human ancestor three million years ago. It is described as an example of ‘found art’, as if early humans possessed a predilection to a Western art sensibility. The Creation of the Sun (2015), a collaborative textile work by contemporary indigenous artists of the Bethesda Arts Centre in the village of Nieu Bethesda, expresses Bushmen mythology in warm oranges and yellows, and draws in its style from San ‘rock art’. An archaeological term typically associated with early human illustrations is here reincarnated in contemporary artmaking and storytelling. The assimilation of this style exemplifies the building of a particular South African cultural identity. As if to ram the

point home, the Zaamenkomst Panel (discovered c. 1800–1900, dating from 1,000 to 3,000 years earlier), an early example of rock art in the archaeological sense, is showcased nearby in a lit vitrine. It is in the noticeable slippage between the vocabularies of art and archaeology that this show reveals its inherent problematics: a relaxed consideration of the extent to which the object was intended to be art in the contemporary sense and of what might constitute an artwork in the first place. The African origin of modern humans is this show’s choice of departure. This rather questionably invites the viewer to claim the South African story as theirs too. The discovery of the ‘Taung Child’, the fossilised skull of a young Australopithecus africanus, is commemorated by artist Karel Nel in a bright print of a brain scan. Nel, who is white, draws frequently on the interface between science and art; this work establishes a South African identity through a scientific story of collective African origin, passing over more contemporary political and historical factors. These variable approaches to identity and nationhood then inadvertently highlight the fallibility of nationhood as an organising conceit. South Africa’s colonial artistic heritage is showcased in examples of ‘explorer art’. In an 1847 portrait by George French Angas, a Zulu woman in visiting dress is painted in a picturesque style; the museum’s written interpretation encourages the viewer to reflect on the artist’s demonstrated ‘respect’ towards his subject, though no mention is made of

the racial language – the words ‘kaffir’ and ‘Hottentot’ that annotate the Romantic image. Later this sympathetic tone is counterpoised against the objects on display in a room entitled ‘Questioning Colonial Collections’. Elsewhere, in a room that includes contemporary work and artefacts concerning South African apartheid and subsequent and ongoing national socioeconomic inequality, two works of similar proportion are set side by side. Charcoal Negotiations (1989), by William Kentridge, is adjacent to the superiorly striking Anguish by Helen Mmakgabo Sebidi (1988): textured, busy, animated and depicting, through layered paint, people and contorted faces, it captures the mental and physical schism inherent within the black postcolonial apartheid consciousness. Archival photographs from artist Santu Mofokeng’s archival work The Black Photo Album / Look at Me: 1890–1950 (1991) are projected onto a wall. The projection alternates between blackand-white photographs of black South Africans in modern dress during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and intertitles that pose unanswered questions: ‘Are these images of mental colonisation?’, ‘Do these images serve as testimony to mental colonisation?’ and ‘Who was gazing?’ Gaze, and in particular the museological gaze, is a problematic worthy of explicit attention in the context of this show: it is tellingly demonstrated in a South African headdress that lies trapped under a bell jar, preserved as an object of natural history, forever pointing both to the culture that produced it and the culture that collected it. Nadia Quadmani

Zaamenkomst Panel, 1,000–3,000 years old (discovered between 1800 and 1900), stone and ochre, Maclear District, Eastern Cape Province, South Africa. Photo: Neil Rusch. © Iziko Museums of South Africa, Social History Collections and sarada, Johannesburg

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Jeni Couzyn and Sandra Sweers, The Creation of the Sun, 2015, textile. © Bethesda Foundation Limited, Nieu Bethesda

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The Ulm Model Raven Row, London 5 October – 18 December Despite being the preeminent West German design school of the 1950s and 60s, the Hochschule für Gestaltung, or Ulm School of Design, has never had quite the stature of its prewar equivalent, the Weimar Bauhaus. Nevertheless, in recent years it has been enjoying more recognition. It had a prominent place in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s splendid 2008 exhibition Cold War Modern, and Jonathan Ive has acknowledged the debt his work for Apple owes to Ulm confederate Dieter Rams. Take, for instance, the tp2 portable transistor radio and phonograph, designed by Rams and exhibited as part of this retrospective of Ulm’s extraordinary legacy. White, rectilinear but for a faint radius at the corners, a nearunadorned tuning dial: it’s a prototype iPod – near enough. The Ulm aesthetic was the minimalism of Bauhaus with the avant-garde abstraction knocked out of it and a solid industrial functionalism in its place. Ulm’s designers invented and refreshed whole typologies, setting a tone for electronics design that is still clear today. Hans Gugelot’s Carousel s-av causes the visitor a moment of confusion – is this exhibit out of order? No – we are not supposed to be watching a slideshow, it’s the projector we should admire: the first-ever with a rotating circular rack for the slides, covered

in sensitive functional touches like a generous rocker power switch. The objects are mundane: desk fans, coffee grinders, hifis. Many of the technologies are redundant: vinyl and reel-to-reel. But their icy purity still reaches out to a transcendent modernity that often continues to elude us. The sk4 Phonosuper record player – Rams and Gugelot, among others, 1956 – is something like the monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), its awesome simplicity emanating from a higher intelligence. Its enclosure is a single piece of white-painted steel, folded four times; here is the first use of Plexiglas for a phonograph’s lid. Labelling is kept to a strict minimum, with the purpose of the controls indicated by their location, shape and hierarchy. It is refined in the most refined sense, without being sealed away from comprehension and use. It is poetry. The Ulm School was founded in 1946 by educationalist Inge Scholl and graphic designer Otl Aicher. They were joined the following year by Bauhaus alumnus Max Bill, who steered the school from its early general curriculum to a focus on industrial design. Underlying the founders’ intentions was a clear conviction that thoughtful, socially aware design would buttress West Germany’s infant democracy and civil society. The United States agreed, contributing

to the funding of the school as part of a ‘spiritual Marshall Plan’ to make its occupied territories a paragon of comfortable consumer capitalism. The ‘Ulm model’ that gives this exhibition its name was the school’s intimate partnership with industry, most notably the consumer goods giant Braun, where Rams worked from 1955. It’s a model that might have relevance today, if we could imagine schools and companies having the same shared concern for civil society and the greater good, which isn’t easy. But for this story you must turn to the exhibition guide, and the lucid accompanying explanatory essay by curator Peter Kapos. Both these publications are free, and deliciously designed by Cartlidge Levene. And amid all the soothing rationalism on display, there’s no sense of the vicious doctrinal infighting and rancour that dogged the Ulm School’s short history, ultimately contributing to its demise in 1968. If we are considering how design might bolster democracy and civilisation, and the difficulty involved in that task, then it is important to understand the beginning and the end of the Ulm experiment. Kapos might have let that story intrude more into David Kohn Architects’ glacial exhibition design: some blood spatter on Raven Row’s white mouldings, perhaps, or a coat of ruin dust on the reel-to-reel. Will Wiles

tp 2, portable transistor radio and phonograph, 1959, designed by Dieter Rams for Braun. Photo: Marcus J. Leith. Courtesy Braun p&g / Braun Collection, Kronberg

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The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture The Hepworth Wakefield, Yorkshire 21 October – 19 February Conceived as an alternative to the age-restricted Turner Prize (albeit limited to a specific medium), the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, a new £30,000 biennial award, aims to recognise the sculptural contribution of a uk-based artist of any age, at any stage in their career. The inaugural exhibition features the work of four shortlisted artists – David Medalla, Phyllida Barlow, Steven Claydon and Helen Marten – 60 years of sculptural practice and an abundance of visual language that is sometimes poignant, sometimes playful, sometimes opaque. Filipino artist David Medalla melds sculpture with installation, performance and kinetic art. He has reworked a number of sculptures for the exhibition, but his seminal work, Cloud Canyons (1964/2016), remains the most arresting: seemingly self-generating towers of foam creep upwards from plastic tubes and collect in clouds, bobbing gently in the slipstream of passersby. Its substance is familiar and evocative – bubble baths and warm drifts of washing-up liquid – but Medalla disrupts its friendliness with the allusions in his accompanying poem, ‘The Bubble Machine’, pinned to the back wall: fragrant coconut cream; hot hops frothing in an Edinburgh brewery; a soldier in Manila, dying beneath a flotilla of crimson hibiscus flower (‘I saw tiny bubbles coming out of his mouth / tiny rainbows /

mixed with blood’). Medalla’s memories bring a new depth of meaning to the work, settling in the fertile space where language and material meet. Next door is Phyllida Barlow’s monumental architectural offering. Entering through the cavelike underside of untitled: screestage (2013), we are invited to navigate its cement geology before emerging to the openness of an apocalyptic landscape of broken boards, punctured by one-eyed, alien-looking columns. Crudely painted in synthetic pinks, reds, yellows and greens, it is gaudy and artificial, like a stage set. Beautiful and broken, untitled: screestage is not so much viewed as populated by its audience, their presence completing the work. Steven Claydon’s sculptures are similarly setlike and immersive. Yellow plastic panels hang in the doorways, emitting a citronella tang: floor-length mosquito traps with an abattoir aesthetic. Pushing through the plastic curtain to the other side, one comes upon a line of wall-mounted fluorescent lights that bathe the room in blue. These are the lures used in nocturnal squid-fishing, but here, removed from that context, they suggest the buzz of fastfood insect traps and the blue glare of nightclub toilets. Decontextualisation is characteristic of Claydon’s works: his repositioning of objects liquefies their meaning, allowing allusions

and associations to work their way in. The rest of the room is an odd assemblage of artefacts, hybrid and obscure: African masks, camera lenses bristling with wires and antennae, a gilded pill packet and a model of a Velociraptor’s voice box – an oblique Jurassic Park reference pointing at the possibilities and pitfalls of scientific meddling. Claydon’s work is intriguing, fusing history, archaeology and anthropology in a curious narrative, underpinned by the ambient sound of electricity thrumming gently through Charles Darwin’s prostrate bust. The now prizewinning (the winner was announced on 17 November) display is that of work by Helen Marten (also the winner of the 2016 Turner Prize), whose pictorial vocabulary is as playful as it is opaque, a seemingly omnivorous accrual of mementos and materials. On one wall sit pastel-lacquered wooden carvings, festooned with found objects and cheap lengths of polyester; opposite, a cartoon cat strolls from one screenprinted panel to another, and along its own tail, to be greeted by a nest of tobacco pipes and a coffee-bean skull. The room is partitioned by a maze of metal strips, bent into a stretched-out shirt shape, a suitcase sitting enigmatically at its base. Marten offers no answers – only language interrupted and things made strange. Joyce Dixon

Work by Helen Marten (installation view, The Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, 2016). Courtesy The Hepworth Wakefield, Yorkshire

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Kelly Akashi Being as a Thing Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles 12 November – 23 December The presence of a pockmarked steel lump, about the size of a pomegranate, is immediately apparent upon entering Kelly Akashi’s solo exhibition. Positioned around head-height in a window cut into the gallery wall, this piece was cast from a ‘Sumo’ citrus, according to the press release. Also known as dekopon in Japan and hallabong in Korea, this hybrid fruit was invented by a Japanese farmer during the 1970s in an attempt to combine the sweetness of California oranges with the easy-peel qualities of the Japanese satsuma. Titled Be Me (JapaneseCalifornian Citrus) (all works 2016), the hybrid origins of this sculpture serve as a metaphor for Akashi’s Japanese-American heritage, and it turns out to be one of many proxies for the artist in the exhibition. Indeed, the first thing that visitors to Being as a Thing will encounter is the artist’s own hands, cast in bronze and hung from two lengths of rope at the entrance to the exhibition. With their distinctive nails and (presumably) unique fingerprints, the hands of At Rest connote Akashi’s physicality, despite being detached from their owner. This motif recurs in the next, sparsely populated space, one of two galleries in the exhibition, where several bronze digits dangle from Finger Figure. In this configuration, comprising two interlocking circles tied with

thread and recalling the form of a Native American dreamweaver, the artist’s hands acquire a more mystical resonance. In the same room, six small photograms are enclosed in walnut frames. These works depict rounded, embryonic forms, which appear phosphorescent against muddy green, brown and black backgrounds. With their glowing membranes, the mysterious shapes suggest both microscopic cells and cosmicscaled solar systems. They were created by placing blown-glass objects on photographic paper before exposing them to light. These works evoke biological processes that have been artificially engineered. The blown-glass pieces used to make them reappear in the second, dimly lit gallery, arrayed across the Arrangement sculptures, a series of tablelike structures made from cherrywood and decked with bulbous glass orbs, plant matter, fingernails and candles in various stages of use. With these works, Akashi exploits the myriad aesthetic possibilities of candlewax – see the sludgy puddles dripping down the legs of Activity Table, the thick, melted phallic stems oozing across its top and carefullylooped intestinal brown coils resting on its box stretcher. The wall above Wall Candle (Tentacle) is blackened with scorch marks,

and wax drips down to a mound of ash on the floor below, the aftermath of a candlelighting performance by the artist on the show’s opening night. The air is heavy with the smell of wax. Bursting with quasi-organic matter, the works in Being as a Thing have been deftly manipulated, moulded and shaped by Akashi to resemble a self-contained ecosystem, subject to its own logic of entropy and homeostasis. On the one hand, the candle works are ephemeral, whereas others, like Tall Weed, a slender bronze plant with delicately veined leaves, appear to arrest time. The glass elements in the Arrangement series, which were hand-blown by the artist, capture her breath and give it permanent form. Yet to what ends? Many of the assemblages of Being as a Thing resemble the aftermath of some pagan spell, and the proliferation of ritualistic references summons up connotations of occult practices. Akashi is clearly interested in symbolism, conjuring up her own presence almost everywhere one looks, from the casts of her fingers to the innocuous little Sumo citrus. However, her imbuing of inanimate matter with vitality feels more like a demonstration of her own alchemical virtuosity than a profound enquiry into the nature of things. Ciara Moloney

Activity Table (detail), 2016, cherry wood, wax, glass, wick, 183 × 102 × 160 cm. Photo: Marten Elder. Courtesy the artist and Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles

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Concrete Islands Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles 5 November – 7 January Writing is full of holes. Holes between the letters, within the letters, between the words and sentences and paragraphs, holes between thoughts and intentions and meaning. Writing is as much there as it is not. It is a wonder that it holds itself together at all. Much doesn’t. In the catalogue for Concrete Islands, a group show curated by Douglas Fogle and Hanneke Skerath, several of the listed and illustrated works are not, actually, present in the gallery. These include Marcel Broodthaers’s Pense-Bête (1964), a half-unwrapped bundle of the artist’s poetry books sunk into plaster, and Bas Jan Ader’s installation Thoughts unsaid, then forgotten (1973). Why shouldn’t an exhibition about the gaps between words and images, and the things made to fill them, itself contain some meaningful lacunae? When used in the context of literature, the term ‘concrete’ usually refers to concrete poetry. In this sense, concretion is what happens to words and letters when they are set in place, only intended to be seen rather than heard or even read. Before he began making his typed dactylopoèmes during the 1960s, concrete poet Henri Chopin recorded sound poems that he scored only in his memory. He regarded those

sound poems as reconstituting ‘the space of limbo that we lost when we discovered the written word’. His dactylopoèmes – examples of which in the exhibition date from 1978 to 2001 – evoke not spaces between things but solid edifices built from typed letters. Titles such as The Great Pyramid (1980) and Monument en Mouvement (1985) reinforce this impression. In addition to concrete poetry, actual concrete (and its close relatives mortar, cement, Jesmonite and plaster) is present in the exhibition too. If that sounds like a bad curatorial pun, several artists used these materials to reflect with precision on the ways in which words can manifest physically. In Michael Dean’s sculpture Analogue Series (‘daysy’), ffff unfinished notes (2016), a wrinkly slug of cast concrete supports a steel armature on which dangles a pamphlet of phrases penned in repeating digital glyphs. (‘Written out in fuck’ possibly reads the barely legible back cover, in Kalashnikovs.) The material for Jimmie Durham’s humble sculpture These Twelve Bricks Were Used to Represent the Dawn Sky in Venice (2015) was scavenged from sites around Venice. The low stack, some bricks with blue-painted plaster

still clinging to their sides, just about conjures a watery landscape. On top, two bricks have ‘a cloud’ written on, faux-dumbly, in marker. (The mute patches of fresco are infinitely more eloquent.) It is presumably a mad coincidence, in an exhibition about letters and words, that many of its artists share the same initial: Mark Manders, Mark Leckey, Michael E. Smith, Martin Boyce and Michael Dean. In addition to these familiar names, less widely known figures also make remarkable contributions. Irma Blank (whose name is also too perfect) began what she called her Eigenschriften during the late 1960s, neatly filling pages with lines of calligraphic marks that look, only from a distance, like handwriting. Fluxus artist Robert Filliou used writing, as in Black Granite and Hostile Preceded by Naked Skull (1973), in much the same way as he used collage and drawing. In the exhibition text, the curators pose the question, ‘where does language end and the world begin?’ If anything, this exhibition shows that there is no separation between language and the world: the world is language, and language allows us to perceive it as the world. Jonathan Griffin

Concrete Islands, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles

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David Ostrowski and Michail Pirgelis Nothing Happened Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles 15 November – 23 December The dialectic of intention and accident has been perhaps the most sustaining and nourishing paradigm for art of the modern period. Marcel Duchamp’s readymades presented it in three dimensions; Jackson Pollock perfected it in two. Richard Tuttle has spent a lifetime burrowing into the poetic heart of it. And more contemporary artists, such as Tino Sehgal and Wade Guyton, have expanded its field, both institutionally and technologically. Martin Creed, for his part, has salted it with irony. The list doesn’t end there. David Ostrowksi and Michail Pirgelis are firm adherents of the high modernist branch of this dialectic. No irony for them (ok, maybe a touch; their exhibition is titled Nothing Happened, after all), just abstraction taken to certain well-defined but nevertheless extreme limits. The two have worked and shown together for some time, yet one gets the sense that, of the two, Pirgelis has set himself the more difficult task. Working with pieces of decommissioned commercial aircraft sourced from the boneyards of the Mojave Desert (the aerospace industry’s favoured cemetery), Pirgelis offers cuts of cargo-bay flooring, fuselage and tail wing that, apart from his excisions, are presented as is.

One would be mistaken to ascribe to Pirgelis’s work that cliché of the readymade – that the work mines the poetics of the everyday – because few of these materials will be familiar to anyone outside of an airline’s ground crew or manufacturing plant. Yet they are mundane: sheets of aluminium and fibreglass riveted together. Ninety-degree angles reign, as they do with works that serve equally well as horizontal expanses stretching along the floor (Beer or wine, 2014) and as pictorial gestures mounted on a wall (Honey Depression, 2016). The colours and stripes and marks of use belong to others (accidents), but the attempt to offer them just so (intent) is Pirgelis’s alone. He’s not always successful. The monumentality of a tail rudder (Sam sitting, 2016) installs awe as easily as the app store, of course accidentally. The intent was something closer to Ellsworth Kelly. Ostrowski is less burdened. Yes, painting is fraught (too much history, too much money), but only if you let it be. The ease with which Ostrowski tackles composition is reminiscent of classical Chinese brush painting, or even certain styles of Japanese calligraphy, in which empty space is what the artist attempts to shape

through some ratio of abandon and control. That Ostrowski often presents his large paintings hanging from the ceiling, like hovering shoji screens, can augment the sense of their environmental stakes, but it can also come off as defensive, as a need to be as present as Pirgelis’s works (‘Look, I’m material too!’). Ostrowski is weakest when this defensiveness takes over, such as in the painting F (A thing is a thing in a whole which it’s not) (2015), a wink at Frank Stella’s striped works whose title is another wink at Carl Andre’s old dictum that ‘a thing is a hole in a thing it is not’. Better to work with one’s eyes wide open. The question one can come away from Nothing Happened with is: how far can this go? Do intention and accident hold a secret to the present age? Is their dynamic tension an epiphenomenon of a deeper contradiction at work today, one which our contemporary artists – seers and feelers all – are trying to isolate like some signal in the aesthetic noise? I’m not convinced the answers can be found in Nothing Happened, but one should be willing to entertain the results. Jonathan T.D. Neil

David Ostrowski and Michail Pirgelis, Nothing Happened, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Robert Wedemeyer. Courtesy Sprüth Magers, Berlin, London & Los Angeles

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Loie Hollowell Mother Tongue Feuer/Messler, New York 27 October – 18 December The term jouissance comes to mind when describing the pulsating orifices and Technicolor flesh of Loie Hollowell’s glorious new paintingreliefs. Jouissance refers to a kind of enjoyment, but with a more carnal subtext: the ineffable pleasure of orgasm. The term was also a favourite of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who claimed that jouissance beckoned subjects to step beyond their self-imposed limits of pleasure. As objects of desire par excellence, Hollowell’s works emit visual pleasure from their gently protruding surfaces, which she builds up with acrylic medium and sawdust. In her paintings, the body is abstracted. But gratification most certainly is not. The leap into three dimensions is a notable departure for Hollowell, whose last exhibition at the Brooklyn apartment-gallery-cumcontemporary-painter-incubator 106 Green relied solely on painting’s illusory space constructed in two dimensions. The venture into actual space befits her, and provides a compelling incentive for viewers to commune with these works other than via a screen: yes, Hollowell’s paintings make for luscious, screen-ready images, but their real power

must be experienced in person. Works such as Incoming Tide (all works 2016) revel in an unabashed formal virtuosity: radiant tulip forms drift in colour from plum to lilac, evoking a bilateral symmetry not seen since Georgia O’Keeffe. Before too long, a viewer might read the flowers as spread legs, adorned with two chakralike points that not too subtly demarcate a vagina and an anus. A key detail that cannot be apprehended in frontal images: both are gently raised – a quarter inch or so – from the painting’s surface. Negatives become positives brimming with energy. In the section of the work beneath the flowers/legs, Hollowell has recessed a black, hourglass-shaped inversion of the bodily form above it, which is surrounded by a blue gradient. Hollowell’s paintings resist their own reduction to mere images. To varying degrees, Incoming Tide and Hollowell’s other painting-reliefs conflate the body and landscape. Some, like Incoming Tide, are more overtly anatomical. Works such as Deep Canyon teeter further into abstractions of terrain, albeit, in this case, deploying a similar compositional logic to Incoming Tide. A pale yellow sun, moon or distant planet hovers over a desert

gulch, all splendidly rendered in shades of ochre and rust. Underneath, a recessed black triangle registers as an absence. Hollowell’s paintings strike a balance between polarities within their own formal logic; likewise, the more vulvic paintings are not without phallic counterpoints, such as in Hung (down), where two red-crowned protrusions almost converge at a vertical beam of energy that morphs upward into a spectral body. Close looking reveals a surface of meticulous, obsessive gestures that resemble body hair. As our eye moves across what Hollowell’s brush has made, the central form shifts from autumnal gold to steely blue, radiating outward to become the priapic figures in profile. Moderately scaled to provoke bodily confrontation, Hollowell’s works excel at being many things. Emitting a sense of new-age unity, these painting-reliefs are sites of erotic liberation, astute formal explorations and talismanic icons. They are also Rorschach tests with sacred geometries, asking us what we see, and what we feel, from within our own bodies. Hollowell presents an aesthetics of pleasure without pain. Owen Duffy

Deep Canyon, 2016, oil, acrylic medium, sawdust and high density foam on linen over panel, 122 × 91 cm. Courtesy the artist and Feuer/Messler, New York

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Kai Althoff and then leave me to the common swifts (und dann überlasst mich den Mauerseglern) Museum of Modern Art, New York 18 September – 22 January Kai Althoff has transformed a suite of galleries at moma into a fever dream of neurosis and autobiography. White fabric tents the space, which has been opened to form one long room. A sweet perfume the artist concocted infuses it. Music he composed plays as background noise. Things Althoff made, or selected, are placed everywhere. Paintings and drawings dating from his childhood and more recent work hang on freestanding walls, lean on shelves or are wrapped in brown paper and stacked as if in storage. Vitrines are filled with items such as perfume bottles, a feather boa, dolls and lace. The contents of torn upholstered furniture spill onto the floor near a diorama of a charred Middle European village. Obvious precedents for this mise-en-scène include Renaissance wunderkammern, the work of Joseph Beuys and Expressionist film sets. Where these suggest an intellectual history, Althoff’s paintings and drawings nod to homoerotic dysfunction in twentieth-century Germany. Their subject matter ranges from androgynous boys to Hasidic Jews, from

upper-class, Wilhelmine German students to a bright-eyed country boy perhaps on his way to becoming a fascist tough. Much of this work is rendered in attenuated lines, seductive, jewellike colours and a flattened pictorial space that recalls Emil Nolde, André Thomkins and Egon Schiele, to name but a few. Style, content and sources are less clues to the meaning of the work, however, than they are annotations or entries in what must be understood as an autobiography told by and through the material production and collected souvenirs of Althoff’s mind, here jumbled together physically in the way that experience is often jumbled in memory: compressed, contemporaneous and associative. It is just stuff until either the artist or his audience makes connections between it. A painting inscribed with ‘Ich bins’ (it’s me), which stands near the entrance to the show, drives home the point. One cannot see everything here. There is too much, and the placement of works on high shelves or in detritus-strewn bays precludes direct viewing. But it is impossible to ‘see’

everything about anything or anyone, after all. Perhaps the Hasidim who strive to sense God’s Time in the quotidian are apt doppelgängers for Althoff, or for anyone who yearns to catch a whiff of the divine, however one experiences it. Tellingly, a painting of the (doubting) Apostle Thomas is placed next to one of a Hasidic family. In an untitled drawing from 2012–14, a Hasidic man dances in reverie. According to DovBer Naiditch, a Lubavitch rabbi who is friends with the artist and who wrote for the exhibition catalogue, the dancing man’s pose suggests that he senses a Messianic Time beyond time, much as the wounds Thomas touches are keys to the prophetic. Althoff’s is clearly an exhibitionist, fragile self. In an interview published in the catalogue, he answers questions taken as obtuse with puerile vexation. And in its excess, the show can seem like the overflow of a mind that cannot stand its own static. What viewers take from the show depends on how ready they are to listen to that noise, and to the noise in their own minds. Joshua Mack

and then leave me to the common swifts (und dann überlasst mich den Mauerseglern), 2016 (installation view). © the artist. Courtesy Museum of Modern Art, New York

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Georgie Nettell Multiple Choice Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York 13 November – 18 December Georgie Nettell is Reena Spaulings to a fault. The London-based artist’s work offers the perfect embodiment of the gallery’s house style: defeated Marxism. It points to the unstoppable pervasiveness of capitalism by emptying out traditional symbols of Marxist thought and radical utopianism, only to reconstitute both as just another brand logic. In the case of Multiple Choice, American flags, peace symbols made of assault rifles and other symbols of soiled radicalism are appropriated, combined and tweaked digitally to create a kind of ‘simulated intimacy of a café or Airbnb apartment’, as the cloyingly poetic exhibition handout states. On paper this sounds really cool. In person, it’s boring and tired. In her previous Reena Spaulings outing, 2013 (2013), Nettell combined her trademark paintings of found imagery – in this case the recycling logo, often blown up and deteriorated like a shitty, pixelated image – with bins of dirty dishes resting on a couch and a nearby desk. There was something comically resonant about the pairing of painting with object, as if one helped flesh out the other. The paintings

were too flatly direct in and of themselves. Rotting in the space after four weeks, the dirty dishes were somehow animating. With Multiple Choice, the inkjet prints, sans any accompanying objects, prove their point too quickly. In a chunky, graphic colour palette of white, black and petrol-blue, each print combines a source image – variously scaled – with crinkly, blotchy black marks redolent of a bad Xerox copy or toner gone amok. Though unlike Wade Guyton’s trademark printer fuckups on canvas, here all are produced with Photoshop, not mechanically, in real time. Nettell’s characteristic, appropriated recycling logo makes an appearance in No Future (all works 2016), its title spelling out pretty heavy-handedly our bleak environmental destiny, while in Radical Thinkers, the publishing house Verso’s logo is reconstituted as a flattened, hollow signifier of the leftwing, intellectual content for which it has become well known. This reduction to a cheaply-reproducible style seems to be a pervasive strategy of Nettell’s, as all the works are meant to look something like funky Ikea art – which they do.

No Nations sports the American flag, its billowing stars-and-stripes tendrils coming apart like blocky pixels, as does the United Kingdom’s flag in The Divided Kingdom, which, with its centre all drippy, looks like a hastily executed graffiti stencil. (Another exhibition of Nettell’s riffed off jpegs of street-art tags, upping their contrast and scale to render each nearly illegible – the lesson being that graffiti is just another countercultural trope for corporations to appropriate and monetise, though of course Nettell does the same thing, just in the context of the artworld.) Subculture, an adjacent work, features that word emblazoned with a barcode, driving the point home. We’ve seen this kind of art before, particularly during the 1990s. Such no-nonsense, capitalist critique doesn’t seem fresh or new any more. If we are to believe Nettell, this is the point: the artist has stated before, in an earlier text about her paintings, that ‘as with all style trajectories, this one is involved in a spiralling descent to mediocrity’. Maybe Nettell is too good at this, because the works are, well, pretty mediocre. David Everitt Howe

Multiple Choice, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Joerg Lohse. Courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York & Los Angeles

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Sara Cwynar Three Hands Cooper Cole, Toronto 28 October – 4 December Awarded the Baloise Art Prize during Art Basel last June for her Soft Film (2016), the Brooklynbased Canadian artist Sara Cwynar investigates what we can and can’t learn from looking at photographs, and how our relationship to objects can change over time. Central to Soft Film – and the photo-based works in this show, produced concurrently with the film – is a cache of snapshots from the 1970s, which the artist came across during one of her regular trawls through eBay. Cwynar’s found photos document a Kenyan businessman’s tour of a factory in South Korea. In the triptych Business Trip (each individually subtitled Handshake, Measurement and Point; all works 2016), Cwynar scans, enlarges, cuts up and arranges details of the photos in loose grids, focusing on facial expressions, gestures and body language in an attempt to determine the overall vibe of the business meeting: how comfortable was the lone woman among this group of businessmen? Why does this visitor warrant so much attention? Are the smiles sincere? What were these people’s lives like outside of work? Like the photographer played by David Hemmings in Michelangelo Antonioni’s

Blow-Up (1966), Cwynar obsessively, perhaps futilely, mines these images for visual clues in an effort to resolve questions that can’t be answered conclusively. The work’s appeal lies in the visual rhythms and repetitions that result from Cwynar’s reworking and rephotographing of the source material, and from the strangely comforting knowledge that at a time when answers can usually be obtained with a few taps on a screen, some images will elude explanation and retain some of their mystery. In addition, such images, unmoored from their original context, raise questions about the preservation of print archives and vernacular photography in the digital age. Hands, the most expressive parts of the body after the face, are a recurring motif in the works here. An image of a black woman’s hands, Hands (Re-enactment), photographed by Cwynar and reprinted at the scale of 1.5 by 2.5m, mimics the pointing gestures that recur throughout the business-meeting photos, but also seems freighted by our current sociopolitical circumstances – one hand curled into a fist, the other’s sharply manicured index finger pointing accusingly. Likewise, in Hand Model, a woman’s suntanned hand, holding

Three Hands, 2016, sublimation print, 178 × 244 cm. Courtesy the artist and Cooper Cole, Toronto

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a vintage Kodak-branded pen, rests elegantly across a glass-topped desk. The aesthetic is slick late-1970s magazine advertising, harkening back to an era when women were more likely to be depicted in the mass media as secretaries than as ceos, the subjects of photographs rather than their creators. The largest work in the show gives the exhibition its title and is essentially a storyboard for Soft Film. It looks like an enormous laptop screen with dozens of open jpegs spread across its surface (or like the Pinterest board of someone with ocd), overflowing with seemingly random images and objects that appear throughout the film, including postcards of the Twin Towers, bunches of plastic grapes, nudie playing cards, a bust of George Washington and a print of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). Fragmented thoughts about the slippery nature of pictures and objects are handwritten among the detritus: ‘Something that added up but then didn’t’, ‘Whole thing shot through with a false promise’ and, most tellingly, ‘What truth is there in objects?’ Indeed, in our current ‘post-truth’ era, what certainties are to be found in anything? Bill Clarke

Edgar Orlaineta History is taking flight and passes forever Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City 18 November – 14 January ‘History is taking flight and passes forever,’ wrote Isamu Noguchi from the Poston War Relocation Center internment camp in Arizona in a letter to Man Ray, expressing his frustrations at the us policy towards Japanese Americans during the Second World War. In his exhibition titled after the famed designer’s lamentation, Edgar Orlaineta presents new sculptural works and an installation that considers the political and artistic legacies of Japanese-American icons of midcentury art and design who had been interred in concentration camps in the us, a history that was something of a suppressed anathema in contemporary American consciousness and is now being invoked into broad awareness by Donald Trump’s proposals. Orlaineta’s work often is characterised by midcentury pastiche as he creates obsessive quantities of sculptures that are inspired by or sometimes directly appropriate Eames-era industrial-design objects. In History is taking flight and passes forever he doesn’t entirely avoid these derivative trappings; however his use of explicitly racist vintage pop-culture ephemera as well as archival documents that refer to political and social antagonism towards Japanese Americans contextualises and charges his sculptures’ formal midcentury motifs with an incisive dualism of beauty and pain.

The main gallery is crowded. There are four Ruth Asawa-inspired pieces; five works refer to Larry Shinoda’s automotive designs; and 12 Noguchiesque walnut biomorphic sculptures. With this volume of works it’s easy to miss some of the most biting inclusions in the show. Anachronic Shrine-Desert Memorial (after Isamu Noguchi) (all works 2016) has a copy of the internment order issued to Los Angeles residents tucked into the supports of a desertscape painted by a Manzanar camp detainee; three sculptures feature ‘Jap hunting licenses’ set reverently on their walnut supports; and another work references the naivety of ushering in the atomic age by placing a curling rendering of a test explosion next to a spinning top with the same shape as the blast’s cloud. The precariousness of the brittle and yellowing paper ephemera that Orlaineta has gently arranged, unfixed, on sleek supports seems to underscore the importance of remembering hateful histories lest their suppression clear the way for repetition. Seen and Unseen (Road Elements) is an exhibition highpoint. In this installation Orlaineta uses a c-print of a disassembled Shinodadesigned Corvette Sting Ray, Japanese paper lanterns and a Brancusi-like chrome torpedo figure to connect the dots between the streamlined midcentury American automotive

design, Modernism and missile technology. However, it seems odd that in making sculptures that reference Asawa’s work, Orlaineta would opt to use wood instead of, for example, the weaving techniques for which Asawa is most widely known and that she discovered in Mexico. The tragedy of midcentury design – dating from the 1930s onwards – is that the refinement of its early aesthetics often makes for too beguiling a fantasy. How easy it is to forget that the nostalgia for simpler times that these skinny-legged designs now invoke are the products of an era that was anything but. These are the products of years that ushered in events so horrific that the philosopher Theodor Adorno said they rendered poetry thereafter ‘barbaric’. Orlaineta’s production for the exhibition was underway long before the us election, but so was the casual and normalised racism that led to the rise of the alt-right that helped elect Trump. In light of the vitriolic campaign rhetoric that seemed to hold a special regard of disdain for Mexico, History is taking flight and passes forever reads as particularly socially urgent. In Mexico City, surrounded by all these lithe sculptures adorned with hateful propaganda, Orlaineta skips over concern that ‘this could be us’ and states, simply, ‘this is us’. Kim Córdova

Anachronic Coffee Table-Moon Dancer (after Isamu Noguchi), 2016, walnut, wax, March 1953 issue of Coronet, vintage pin, news clipping, Measured Time clock and kitchen timer (designed by Isamu Noguchi, c. 1932). Photo: Patrick López Jaimes. Courtesy the artist and Proyectos Monclova, Mexico City

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Marcelo Cidade Nulo ou em Branco Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo 27 September – 5 November ‘Crime shapes cities,’ writes Geoff Manaugh in his offbeat 2016 book on urbanism, A Burglar’s Guide to the City. In this solo show, Marcelo Cidade looks at theft through the lens of urbanism. The subject makes its most obvious appearance in A___________ social (2015), a series of board-mounted scanned photographs in the upper gallery. Each image looks like it has been taken from a police crime report and depicts a burglar stuck midway as he climbs through a window, a hole in a fence or similar. It’s the kind of ‘dumb criminal’ shot in which the press periodically delight (to the extent that entire trash-tv shows are dedicated to the subject): crooks caught by their own apparent stupidity and publicly humiliated for our brief amusement. Corpo mole (Lazy Body, 2016), however – a series of cardboard boxes, variously flattened and intact, covered in concrete and installed on the floor throughout the same space – effectively cuts through the snideness by eliciting our sympathy. The poverty of the men (and they are all men) depicted in A___________ social is apparent in their clothing (or lack thereof: some are barefoot and shirtless), and consequently it does not take much for the viewer to link a presumed economic desperation that

has led them to crime with the cardboard box as a motif of homelessness (especially given that this show is happening in São Paulo, a city where, at the last census, there were approximately 16,000 people sleeping rough, often using boxes for shelter). From here Cidade widens the theme of theft to consider its more political forms. A pair of sculptures, empty wall-mounted metal fixtures for fluorescent tubes, reference Dan Flavin in their towerlike arrangement; these sit between a vast photographic image pasted onto the wall, depicting a semicompleted viaduct; a concrete approximation of a voting booth is installed in the middle of the gallery. All these works, in one way or another, reflect on curtailed political dreams. The specific Flavin sculptures appropriated here are two of the American artist’s ‘Monuments’ for V. Tatlin, made during the mid-1960s, which in turn reference Tatlin’s Tower, the Russian constructivist’s unrealised monument to the Bolshevik Revolution. The viaduct scene is devoid of people. There’s the suggestion that the building project, like so many commissioned in Brazil during its recent boom years, has been permanently abandoned now that the economy has

Nulo ou em Branco, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Galeria Vermelho, São Paulo

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tanked; a sign advertises the half-built viaduct as being for sale (most of Brazil’s infrastructure is financed and built by the private sector). Nulo ou em Branco (2016), the polling booth sculpture, is also topical: the show comes after the impeachment of elected president Dilma Rousseff and her replacement by Michel Temer, her rightwing vice president, who takes the position by default (with many on the left painting the situation as Temer having ‘stolen’ the presidency – he certainly has a popularity rating that suggests he wouldn’t ever be elected in his own right). Yet this is not just a show about Brazil’s problems, however much the country’s general feeling of political angst pervades. In the foyer of Vermelho, a length of string is stretched like a washing line across the room. Hanging on it is the 18 June 2015 international edition of The New York Times. The lead image is of a desolate figure, his head held in his hands, sitting on some concrete steps; a caption reveals that the image relates to a story concerning Greece’s debt crisis. It’s a typically bleak detail in a show that provides a more general lament to lives stolen by the political and social problems of our times. Oliver Basciano

The Afro Matrix and the Formal Elements Galeria Superfície, São Paulo 17 November – 23 December Despite its billing as a purely aesthetic, formal exploration of aspects of the ‘African matrix’ in Brazilian art, this compact show begins with a sacred artwork by Mestre Didi (1917–2013), the Bahian artist who was also a priest in the thriving Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé. His 1985 sculpture Xaxará no. 14 is a closely packed raffia staff – a xaxará – sheathed in tight bands of leather and encircled with rows of beads and cowry shells, one of many such objects made by the prolific artist over a 95-year life in which he also wrote widely on West African ritual, on his religion and on sacred art. Facing it diagonally on the wall on the other side of the room and also made of raffia palm is a Kuba textile from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, its complex, interlinked design embroidered in rough, plush relief. The hanging is one of two wholly African items in the exhibition: the other, laid on a sideboard in the back room, is a soft, silk-and-cotton Ghanaian kente cloth. In the field between the Kuba cloth and the xaxará lie a set of works whose connections hinge on geometry and angular, repetitive forms, hinting at parallels between the patterns and shapes of the African textiles and the sharp corners of Brazilian Concretism. Three precisely folded linen-and-lace textile works by Martinho Patrício mix Concrete forms with the fabric used in the

African robes still worn in the Brazilian state of Bahia, where many of the millions of slaves brought to the Americas arrived. Sharp geometry, mixed with equally schematic, repetitive beadwork, is most compellingly explored in Emanoel Araújo’s white-painted wood sculpture Untitled (2005), hung beside the Kuba cloth in a soaring puzzle of forms whose regularity is punctured by subtle glitches – a sudden, unexpected sliver of space between a single pair of planes – and in the shifting dimensions as your gaze travels from top to bottom. A pair of 1967 paintings by Rubem Valentim (Pintura A and Pintura C) bring Candomblé symbology to bear on sturdy, colourful geometric forms, while a set of nine charcoal rubbings by Rodrigo Garcia Dutra from the 2015 series Tabom Concreto are graceful echoes of the kente fabric from which they were traced, like a pattern faxed over and over, fainter with each pass, becoming merely vestiges. In that sense, the rubbings seem to reflect on the fate of the old, discredited notion of the Brazilian experience, and of Afro-Brazil as a vibrant, shared national patrimony: inarguably alive in aspects of Brazilian culture such as the music and dance of samba, the cuisine and to a lesser extent in art, but a washout in terms of society, policing and politics.

In the work of the Brazilian anthropologist Darcy Ribeiro, the ‘African matrix’ of this exhibition’s title was, alongside the Tupí matrix and the Luso matrix (indigenous and Portuguese, respectively), one of the cornerstones of Brazil’s multiracial society – a progression of Gilberto Freyre’s utopian, fondly held 1930s concept of Brazil as a ‘racial democracy’ – an idea that has long since plunged out of fashion in the face of the normalised racism that underpins Brazilian society, riddled with inequality and casual segregation. In the Brazilian artworld, that reality has been addressed head-on in the occasional performance-action Presença Negra, planned by artists Moisés Patrício and Peter de Brito since 2014, in which groups of black artists and friends turn up at São Paulo gallery openings. Not at this exhibition opening, though, where a white crowd chilled on the pavement outside the gallery in the warm spring night. One black presence, a boy of eleven years old or so, slid through the crowd and dipped a hand into one of two ice-filled barrels to help himself to a cold drink. “Assim não, menino,” said a hipster with a full patriarchal beard: “Not like that, boy.” The child drew back and soon faded away; but he might just as well have asked, “Then how?” Claire Rigby

The Afro Matrix and the Formal Elements, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Gui Gomes. Courtesy Galeria Superfície, São Paulo

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Kenpoku Art 2016 Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan 17 September – 20 November An area northeast of Tokyo known for mountains and beaches, Ibaraki Prefecture is traditionally more suited to the nature-lover and fresh produce-hunter than the art-goer. Its first contemporary art festival, Kenpuko Art, has the perky and unpretentious tagline of Sea, Mountains, Art!, and in a way this serves as the event’s best introduction. For the most part, it is an uncomplicated crowd-pleaser that demands nothing from the viewer other than a liking for fresh air, open vistas and photogenic installations. Like many other rural art events, Kenpoku’s touristic agenda is strong. The 100-plus artworks are strategically spread out among the region’s ‘greatest sightseeing hits’: among them the majestic Fukuroda Falls in Daigo and the Oiwa Shrine in a magical cedar forest near Hitachi. The art, geishalike, demurely ushers the visitor to the region’s many other charms.

At the helm of this inaugural event is Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum director Fumio Nanjo, who has been behind other first editions of festivals, including the Yokohama Triennale (2001) and Singapore Biennale (2006), and was recently appointed curatorial director of the first Honolulu Biennial, which takes place this spring (2017). For Kenpoku, spread out over six regional cities in the north of the prefecture, Nanjo aims for a ‘collaboration between art and cuttingedge science and technology while engaging in dialogue with nature’. Visitors will probably remember the nature-themed works better, as they have the most visibility and drama. Along the scenic Takado Kohama coast, there is Thai artist Sudsiri Pui-ock’s boulder-size sculpture of a shell from which human fingers protrude like the legs of a hermit crab (Soul

Shelter, all works but one 2016), and nearby, Russian-born, us-based artists Ilya and Emilia Kabakov have erected a large painting of a blue sky with fluffy clouds (The Fallen Sky, 1995/2016). On a clear day, it looks like a piece of sky has chipped off and wedged into the sand at an angle. An hour inland, just outside the city of Hitachiomiya, in a village called Yawara, Israeli artist Zadok Ben-David fills a riverside school gymnasium with 27,000 of his trademark laser-cut aluminium plants, black on one side and coloured on the other (Blackfield). Meanwhile, Akane Moriyama orchestrates a magical moment with her web of iridescent plastic hanging between cedar trees at the Oiwa Shrine (Mirage in the forest). Besides the celebration of nature, a scientific strain is scattered throughout the festival, in reference to the history of industrial

Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, The Fallen Sky, 1995/2016, oil on wood, 700 × 800 cm. Photo: Keizo Kioku. Courtesy the artist and Kenpoku Art 2016

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innovation in the area. Ibaraki’s most famous city, Hitachi, is the origin and namesake of the well-known Japanese electronics company, and the prefecture is also home to the prominent research-based University of Tsukuba. In 1985, Tsukuba also hosted a seminal international science exhibition (Expo ’85), one of the first places where robots were showcased to a wider public. In Kenpoku, forward-looking works include Tenshin Memorial Museum of Art’s exhibition of the ubiquitous Tokyo-based ‘ultra-technologists’ teamLab, whose interactive installations combine programming wizardry with environmentally friendly messages. As we move further afield to more obscure locations, the art gets a little riskier and weirder. Take the bioart showcase held in the grey brutalist building formerly known as the Natural Recreation Village Management Centre. Inside are the collaborative bcl’s origami cranes made of paper infused with some funky dna nanostructures (Origami Mutations), 3d printouts of resin made from natto bacteria (Vide Infra)

and several altars at which you can kneel and pray for dead organisms in Petri dishes and plastic containers (Memorial service for the spirits of microorganisms and artificial cells/lives). This last work is by artist-biologist Hideo Iwasaki and other members of bioart collective metaPhorest, who subscribe to the animist belief that all objects, even the bacillus in Yakult, have souls. An accompanying video shows examples of other Japanese commemorative structures to unlikely objects, such as broken needles and dolls. As part of their project, the artists have also set up two stone monuments to microorganisms and artificial cells at an old sake brewery in Hitachiota. According to the wall text, the carvings on the large stones include representations of ‘aspergillus, bacillus, yeasts, cyanobacteria, natto, soy sauce and sake bottles’. Finally, there are works involving local participation and social histories, but these are more modestly realised and often crammed indoors. A concentrated number of them can be found in the area outside Hitachi-Daigo

train station in several old shops and houses. In a former bank, Singaporean Song-Ming Ang shows Daigo Lost and Found, a set of tv screens showing 8mm archive film footage of the area accompanied by rearrangements of old Daigo folk songs. This evocative exhibit gets a space to itself, but ten other works are sardined into another building nearby. Mariko Kinoshita’s The Book of Tea, a tearoom completely wallpapered with the Japanese artist’s rhythmic calligraphy, is particularly hard-done-by. Even by Japanese standards, the space is small. On its walls are words that are cut, pasted and remixed from Tenshin Okakura’s 1906 treatise of the same title, an essay that popularised the Japanese tea ceremony to the West. Okakura was also Ibaraki’s most famous artist and intellectual – the Tenshin Museum is named after him. If Kenpoku Art wants to engage more compellingly with local cultural histories, more prominence and breathing room devoted to such pieces would have been good – which could be a thought for future editions. Adeline Chia

Akane Moriyama, Mirage in the forest, 2016, installation. Photo: Keizo Kioku. Courtesy the artist and Kenpoku Art 2016

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Taipei Biennial: Gestures and Archives of the Present, Genealogies of the Future: A New Lexicon for the Biennial Taipei Fine Arts Museum & Taipei Artists’ Village 10 September – 5 February The Novacore suit is one of four that were made during the second part of the 1980s out of a material that had been invented by the workers of the Roanne Technical Construction Workshops in France at the beginning of the decade: by the decade’s end, the nation’s synthetic textile industry was in ruins, the workshop was closed, its patents and assets had been sold to the Swiss; the four suits were made from leftover stock. The two-piece suit, instantly suggestive (in an art context) of Joseph Beuys’s Felt Suit (1970), is one of Jean-Luc Moulène’s 39 Strike Objects (2000–3), excerpted from the French artist’s photographic archive of objects produced by (mainly) French strikers during stoppages dating from 1968 to the 1990s that are in some way ‘détourned’ to promote the workers’ grievances. These images, appended with brief descriptions of the objects, are included in the Taipei Biennial as part of a cheaply produced pamphlet (it’s hard to tell if the suit is grey or blue) printed in an edition of 20,000 copies and

available for visitors to take away. The image of the Novacore suit is also the emblem of this edition of the Taipei Biennial (curated by Corinne Diserens), displayed on a massive banner in the entry lobby of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum. And it does a better job of introducing the overwhelming, 76-artist-strong exhibition’s themes – how we interpret signs and symbols, how we interpret the past, the role of the archive in doing all this, and what that might tell us about our present and future – than its unhelpfully long-winded and wilfully (but perhaps necessarily, given its proposition) obscurantist title (also on that banner). If the language of the biennial title, which presupposes a certain familiarity with the work of Michel Foucault, and the limited-edition nature of Moulène’s contribution (presumably the organisers expect more than 20,000 people to attend the biennial) perhaps unconsciously speak to contemporary art’s infuriating need to protect some sort of special, self-important or

elite status, then that’s a sensation that recurs irritatingly with the inclusion of works such as Sven Augustijnen’s Summer Thoughts (2012–16). This last is an installation relating to the present rise of fascism and its historical precedents together with largescale printouts of accompanying letters (addressed to curator Marta Kuzma) that begin with lines such as, ‘I’m travelling again on the Amtrak from Bard College to the city’; ‘I’m about to take-off to Trondheim, to set-up my exhibition at Helena’s little space’; ‘We didn’t really get the chance to talk in Kassel’; ‘It has now been already a month since I was driving with Corinne into one of those groves on the road from Kosovo to Montenegro’ – as if (however interesting the stories they tell) they were lifted from some Evelyn Waugh novel about the dying days of a peripatetic British aristocracy. So much for workers’ revolts? Well, not quite. Although almost half the artists included are local, there’s a sense in which the international participants act as hubs, a reflection perhaps of

Minouk Lim, The Promise of If_Cave-The Weight of Hands, 2010, hd single-channel video, colour, sound, 13 min 50 sec. Courtesy Platform L, Seoul

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French curator Diserens’s self-professed limited preparation time and limited experience of the region’s art scene. Peter Friedl’s Rehousing (2012– 14) features ten detailed architectural models of a variety of dwellings, displayed spotlit on simple metal tables. Based on documentary evidence and in some cases the artist’s own photographs, the architectural models represent the private residence of Ho Chi Minh, the artist’s parents’ home in Austria, Luigi Piccinato’s unrealised Villa Tropicale from Italy’s fascist era, an anonymous nineteenth-century Louisiana slave cabin, Martin Heidegger’s hut in the Black Forest in Germany and a shack built by African refugees in Berlin and demolished by the police in 2014. The remaining four maquettes were created specifically for the biennial: one of Cambodian Vann Molyvann’s (an architect whose work is also the subject of an exhaustive project, featured elsewhere in the biennial, by Pen Sereypagna) 1967 ‘100 Houses’ for workers in Phnom Penh, a Chinese nail house, a mid-1960s dome from Drop City in Southern Colorado and a recent container house from a refugee camp in Jordan. Friedl’s antispectacular microstructures ask to what extent political, social and economic meanings are built into architecture and how

many of those meanings we interpret from the structures rather than, armed with a narrative, start to project onto it. How does the private dwelling relate to a public one, and the projections of a private consciousness to a shared one? And, of course, more generally still, what readings are actually projected by a work of art and what readings do we project onto it? How much of the significance of these dwellings lies in context rather than in the dwelling itself? With all that in mind, there’s a natural danger that the coherence of this biennial might start to fall apart. And to a certain extent it does as you wander past, say, Santu Mofokeng’s photographs of South Africa under apartheid (Diserens curated his retrospective Chasing Shadows, 2011, works from which appear here). Somehow the works included in the biennial resist the globalising, equalising, easily exchangeable affect we have come to expect of biennials, and each work becomes about nothing more than itself. For what do Mofokeng's photographs really have to do with past or present urban conditions in Phnom Penh? Does the decline of the textile industry in 1980s France have anything to do with the long-declining textile industry in Taiwan? How do we take,

for example, the experience of Friedl’s Rehousing to a work like James Ming-Hsueh Lee’s Spectrum (2016), comprising a series of bottled teas bought from supermarkets and convenience stores, and arranged, unlabelled, according to their varying shades of darkness: does it mean anything more than its aesthetic effect and display of difference combined with whatever we project onto that? Architecture and indexical urbanism (tackled with various degrees of activist intent in artworks by locals Yi-Chih Lai and Chen Chieh-jen, and Korea’s Minouk Lim) reappear as somewhat obsessive themes of the biennial, almost to the point of distraction. They do however place a sustained emphasis on how we construct and interpret the world around us, a focus that might perhaps prevent us from becoming like the actors in Park Chan-Kyong’s seductively eerie Citizen’s Forest (2016), a blackand-white, three-channel video, updating an unfinished panoramic sketch (The Lemures, 1984) by the late Korean artist Oh Yoon, in which victims of a series of modern Korean tragedies – including the Donghak Peasant Revolution, the Korean War and the Gwangju Uprising – process, zombielike, to their doom through a jungle. Mark Rappolt

Yeh Wei-Li & Yeh Shih-Chiang, Hammer, ysc Shuinandong Residence, 2016, lightjet print, acrylic face mount, reclaimed wood frame, 124 × 154 × 5 cm. Courtesy the artists

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Art Life Paris The second in a new series of multiple-show city reviews takes on contemporary art in the French capital by Louise Darblay

Félix Vallotton, La Charge, 1893, proof, woodcut on paper. Photo: Pierre Guenat. © Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Pompidou, Paris and Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie, Besançon. Courtesy Centre Pompidou, Paris

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Smash it up ‘Reconsider some of the proposals made by the Surrealists for embellishing the town… The obelisk on the Concorde: round it off and put a steel feather of the right size on the summit.’ As I exit the metro at Place de la Concorde, I try the exercise, suggested by the French novelist Georges Perec in his 1974 Espèces d’espaces (Species of Spaces), a collection in which the author systematically questions all the units of space we inhabit – from the bed to the street, the neighbourhood, the city, until he gets to the nature of space itself. Paris, the city of my childhood, can sometimes feel ossified by its much-vaunted cultural heritage, which makes for invigorating viewing through an alternative, Perecian lens. With that in mind, I pick up the pace and head towards the Jeu de Paume, where Soulèvements (Uprisings), a historical show curated by the philosopher and historian Georges Didi-Huberman, sets out to capture the commonalities and motifs in the representation of revolt and protest across media, ages and geographies. Raised arms, raised fists, shouting mouths, placards and barricades constitute the exhibition’s leitmotifs, recurring again and again in

a series of photographs that take the visitor through the streets of Athens during the 1944 clashes in the leadup to the country’s civil war, Havana during the Cuban Revolution, Derry during the 1969 protests and back to the ruins of the Hôtel de Ville after the Paris Commune. It’s ambitious in scope and a venture that feels timely and rousing now, in the tense climate following the terrorist attacks a year ago, as well as France’s ongoing corruption scandals and the rise of the far right ahead of the coming presidential election. The exhibition takes you on a journey that is structured around various understandings of ‘uprising’ (as a physical, elemental force; as gestures, words; and, more poetically, as an inner drive to act), allowing for free-flowing associations that mitigate what might otherwise appear to be random criteria for a work’s inclusion. The psychic movement laid down in Henri Michaux’s mescaline drawings from the 1950s echoes Goya’s investigations into the power of the imagination over the forces of reason in his Caprichos (1797–8); the argument for a greater artistic engagement with society is articulated in Dada manifestos and in Danish painter Asger Jorn’s later posters (from 1968) featuring slogans like ‘Smash the frame that

stifles the image’; and Joan Miró’s abstract line drawings L’Espoir du Condamné à Mort i, ii et iii (The Hope of a Condemned Man i, ii and iii, 1974), made in homage to a student anarchist executed by Franco in 1974, resonate with the persistence of the weekly marches led by mothers of the ‘disappeared’ – those taken by the Argentine military dictatorship during the 1970s and early 80s – and captured in a series of photographs shot in 1982 by Eduardo Gil.

Charged As I leave, one particular work stays with me: La Charge (The Charge, 1893), a woodcut by Félix Vallotton (an artist and printmaker associated with Les Nabis) depicting a confrontation between police officers and protesters. Despite being more than a century old, it feels familiar and contemporary: its composition recalls that of photographs taken during clashes between police and members of the leftist antiestablishment movement Nuit Debout in the streets of Paris over the past year. Today the kepis and swords have been replaced by riot gear and teargas. Energised, by the time I reach Place de la République (the agora

Francisco de Goya, Los Caprichos, 1799, etching, aquatint and burin, second edition, 1855. Photo: Jean de Calan. Courtesy Sylvie and Georges Helft Collection Alberto Korda, El Quijote de la Farola, Plaza de la Revolución, La Habana, Cuba, 1959, vintage gelatin silver print on Baryta paper. © adagp, Paris. Courtesy Leticia and Stanislas Poniatowski Collection

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reclaimed and occupied by Nuit Debout) I fully expect to find the square populated, as it had been on my previous visit a month earlier, by crowds of fiery agitators voicing their discontent. Like them, I too am ready to voice my views about the government’s attitude to issues ranging from climate change to the housing crisis and animal abuse. But as I enter the square I discover that the community initiatives and open debate have given way to popup coffee shops and street peddlers. Where have all the mutineers gone? Are they only to be found within the polite confines of exhibition spaces?

When two become one My state of agitation is somewhat soothed in the sculptural conversation at play between the work of artists (and couple) Athanasios Argianas and Rowena Hughes at Galerie pcp (newly established in Mor Charpentier’s former gallery space). Shapes, textures, curves and angles oppose each other and come together in a rhythmic display, within which it is sometimes hard to attribute an individual work to a specific maker (with good reason: some works are collaborative). On the wall, Argianas’s

electroformed pinkish, black and silver copper-plated sheets imprinted with the forms of oyster shells, knotted ropes and other objects (from the series Clay pressings, all works 2016) read like the translation of percussive actions into tangible score. Processes of compression are also at play in Wrung or Pressed Against, the a4-size glass compositions by Hughes. Elastic bands, glass ink and printed strips evoking film rolls are squashed between two glass sheets, becoming like specimens fixed on slides and offered up for observation under a microscope. There seems to be in both works a desire to give shape and texture to things transient and intangible. In the middle of the room, resting gently on compressed-foam plinths, knobby, irregular flint stones collected by Hughes adjoin artificially coloured silicone replicas (Elasticity, Fracture & Flow series), their embrace offering harmony to a mind overstimulated by all the politics at the Jeu de Paume.

Feeling the burn Paris’s cheapest bars, Chinese supermarkets, Jewish-Tunisian couscous restaurants and plantain-selling cornershops: Belleville.

I’m on its hilltop and make my way through the now mostly ‘bobo’ crowd who’ve repopulated this once-working-class neighbourhood. It was also the childhood home of Perec, whose memories of the area form the background to his semiautobiographical novel W ou le Souvenir d’Enfance (W, or the Memory of Childhood, 1975) – as well as the place I would meet my friends to hang out and drink pints of cheap lager as a student. Around 20 galleries have made their home in this alternative art hub, but today I’m drawn immediately to Saigon Immolation, a group show organised by the Los Angelesbased project space Full Haus at Balice Hertling’s secondary space. Featuring work by five us-based artists, the show looks at processes of image appropriation and the use of other people’s voices and stories as ways of positioning one’s own identity. Perhaps the most literal example is William Kaminski’s Interview ’94 (2015): in a one-minute excerpt from a video interview with John Frusciante, the on-off guitarist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the musician defends his heroin habit (almost-toocompellingly): “It’s just a way of making sure you stay in touch with beauty, instead of letting the ugliness of the world corrupt your soul.” Kaminski superimposes his own face over the

William Kaminski, Interview ’94 (still), 2015, video, 1 min 1 sec. Courtesy the artist and Balice Hertling, Paris

Rowena Hughes, Elasticity, Fracture & Flow 3, 2016, flint nodule rock, silicone rubber, 22 × 32 × 26 cm. Photo: Philippe Servent. Courtesy the artists and Galerie pcp, Paris

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rock star’s in an identification process that circles back to the show’s title: is drug-taking a form of protest through self-harm? In a more intricate manner, Sowon Kwon’s series of drawings dongghab (2003–), titled after the Korean belief that people who are born in the same year share a social relationship, connects her own year of birth – 1963 – with Ed Ruscha’s bookwork Twentysix Gasoline Stations. Taking that year and ‘gasoline’ as common denominators, Kwon looks for other historical and cultural events to weave into her dongghab – among them the contemporaneous selfimmolation of Thích Quang Ðúc in Saigon in protest against the treatment of Buddhists by the South Vietnamese government – and spells them out in words, replicating the typography and design of Ruscha’s book cover, to position herself in a web of systemised connections and convergences. As I walk back to the metro, I ponder the unfortunate dongghab for people born in 2016 – Brexit and Trump’s election alone making for a scary thread of connections – and glance with nostalgia at Castillo/Corrales, knowing that it will have shuttered by the time you’re reading this. Though the founders will continue to work together, they have said that it is time to sever ties with the space and the

responsibilities it entails. One of the few artist-run spaces in the city, the 30sqm gallery, which also housed a library for small presses as well as its own publishing house (which will continue to exist), was a pivotal organisation for Belleville’s artistic community, notably for advocating more fluid and flexible ways of exhibiting and collaborating, including takeovers and exchanges with spaces and galleries abroad (very much in the way Balice Hertling is doing now).

Head ‘Take good note that the town hasn’t always been what it was,’ Perec warned his readers. The Marais was, up to the twelfth century, a swamp. Unstable terrain comes to mind at Galerie Perrotin, where Bharti Kher offers a carefully measured but precarious balancing act. Three composite sculptures installed on cylindrical cement plinths feature granite hammers, wooden compasses and other elements evoking more-or-less recognisable tools, all arranged in gravity-defying clusters. Elsewhere, bindis (something of a signature material for this artist) are deployed in great

numbers along the surfaces of heavy doublesided wood cabinets to form a series of larger shapes akin to blooming flowers. It’s the esoteric nature of Kher’s sculptures that makes the work so magnetic: they seemingly reference classical mythology (the 2016 Heroides series is named after the letters of classical heroines who were neglected or abandoned in Ovid’s eponymous collection of poems), autobiography (The half spectral thing, 2016, is made up of a cast of the artist’s mother’s head, presented on its side on a plinth, like the subject of an autopsy) and the hidden potentiality of each material. In another room, three gigantic triangular wooden frames, each with an equally oversize compass hanging from its apex, are held aloft by a pulley system. The cement counterweights on the other side of the rope seem comparatively slight, however, and through a game of pushing and pulling forces, Kher tests the apparent properties of her materials. Imagination and reason in conversation again.

Bowl movements When it comes to distilling the psychic essence of objects, the late Sarah Charlesworth was a master.

Bharti Kher, The half spectral thing, 2016, wax, concrete, plaster, hessian fibre, brass, 127 × 29 × 29 cm. Photo: Claire Dorn. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Perrotin, Paris

Bharti Kher, The laws of reversed effort, 2016 (installation view). Photo: Claire Dorn. Courtesy Galerie Perrotin, Paris

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Most notably in the iconic series Objects of Desire (1983–8), in which she would cut out figures or objects from popular magazines and rephotograph them, stripped bare of their context, against fields of saturated colour to expose the power dynamics and sexuality at play in consumer culture. But for the current exhibition at Campoli Presti, Charlesworth’s fellow artist and friend Liz Deschenes has selected works from the former’s perhaps lesser-known series 0+1 (2000). Moving from the sexual to the realm of the sacred, these monochromatic works each present a single white object (among them a skull, a monkey, an altar) photographed against a similarly colourless background. The results are devoid of depth, tridimensionality or any sense of scale. The more you look, the harder it is to tell if the objects are receding, slowly fading away, or if, on the contrary, their outline is becoming sharper. Bowl and Column, one such work from 0+1, reprises a similar piece from the earlier Objects of Desire series, in which the cutout images of the objects – a simple bowl and a Corinthian column – set against an electric-blue background are loaded with sexual symbolism; in their later, ethereal form, however, the pristine objects seem to transcend earthly references and evoke a more metaphysical duality.

Reflection On the top floor of an adjacent building, Campoli Presti has opened a new, apartmentlike space that is home to an installation by Deschenes herself. Bound to Charlesworth’s work by a shared conceptual and deconstructive approach to photography, Deschenes’s output is characterised by a return to the fundaments of the medium – light-sensitive paper and its exposure – turning away from its representational function to emphasise photography’s material qualities and the photograph’s status as an object in and of itself. Two slightly tilted silver-toned photograms mounted on aluminium are held in freestanding white wooden frames (Inverse #1, #2, 2016), partially mirroring each other and reflecting the characteristic interior features of the apartment (inbuilt fireplace topped by gold-framed mirror, ceiling mouldings and fishbone-parquet floor).

Man Ray lost the original; the copy’s gone up in price It’s probably fair to say that what Perec was to literature Marcel Duchamp was to art. This is

made apparent in a show at Thaddaeus Ropac that is entirely focused on one of the five Porte-bouteilles readymades exhibited by Duchamp. ‘What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms,’ Perec wrote in L’Infra-Ordinaire (1973). In 1959 Duchamp, invited to participate in Art and the Found Object at the Time-Life Reception Center in New York, decided to include one of his Porte-bouteilles (a simple bottle rack bought at Paris’s Grand Bazar de l’Hôtel de Ville). He then wrote to his friend Man Ray asking him to send the 1935–6 version, supposedly in the latter’s possession. But having lost the original, Man Ray bought a replacement from the same department store and sent the new acquisition to New York, where it went on display before being bought by Robert Rauschenberg (who was also exhibiting work in the show). Today the work is on view, prior to being auctioned (only bids by museums will be accepted) by the Rauschenberg Foundation. Passing displays of paraphernalia associated with the work – including the 1916 letter from Duchamp to his sister coining the term ‘readymade’ (‘You take for yourself this bottle rack. I will make it

Sarah Charlesworth, Bowl and Column, 2000, Fujiflex prints with lacquered wood frames, 112 × 86 cm (each).Courtesy Campoli Presti, London & Paris, the estate of the artist and Maccarone, New York & Los Angeles

Liz Deschenes, 2016 (installation view). Courtesy Campoli Presti, London & Paris, and the estate of the artist

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a “Readymade” from a distance’), exhibition posters and drawings – we finally reach an entire room devoted to the work, dramatically hanging from the ceiling under two spotlights casting larger shadows. On the base ring of the rack, one can read the inscription: ‘Impossible for me to recall the original phrase. M.D. Marcel Duchamp/1960’, added (at Rauschenberg’s request) by Duchamp a year after its acquisition and referring to the lines written on the lost original. What the show makes evident is Duchamp’s supreme skill in placing the status of an object in oscillation: is it a product, a tool, an artwork, a remaking of an artwork (and if so, who made it such)? All are in play. One thing that’s certain, though, is that the Porte-bouteilles will sell for a lot more than the $3 Rauschenberg paid for it.

From provocative to quaint – a clean breast Over at Almine Rech, I run into another exhibition that is grounded in a moment of art history. On show here are works by late American Pop artist Tom Wesselmann. Largescale, freestanding irregularly shaped

canvases populate the gallery, in which blown-up dicks, feet, mouths and tits are presented in layered arrangements alongside domestic objects from the bedroom (picture frames, tissue box, alarm clock, etc) like some erotic still life. The show takes its cue from a 1970 exhibition by the artist at New York’s Sidney Janis Gallery that gravitated around his Bedroom Tit Box (1968–70), a framed box inserted into the wall that featured fully dimensioned, sculpted and painted replicas of a wooden vase, ashtray, orange, lotion bottle and box of tissues – and a woman’s breast: that of a performer bending over the box behind a fake wall. Although the work may have seemed provocative in 1970, in our days of omnipresent pornography it feels slightly quaint – especially given that, on my visit, the ‘live’ breast has been replaced by a wooden replica.

Heads Although it’s only 5pm, it’s already pitch-dark outside; but there’s still time for one last stop at Air de Paris, located in the lesser-known urban experiment that is the Olympiades area.

No belle-époque buildings here – rather, modernist designs and new towers inherited from François Mitterrand’s Grands Travaux, constructed around the majestically minimalist Bibliothèque Nationale and its esplanade. On the other side of the Avenue France, a vast construction site unfolds almost indefinitely, like a disaster zone. When I enter the gallery I find an odd resemblance to all this in Sadie Benning’s Building (all works 2016). The rectangular work, part of a series of wall-mounted, jigsawlike assemblages of found imagery and objects affixed to wooden panels, combines cut-out black-andwhite images of buildings on a black-andwhite background with three other colour vignettes (including a Kiss album sleeve and a Polaroid of people partying in an apartment) and a figurine of an old bureaucrat in a grey suit. The effect is like peeping into the windows of the hermetic, towering concrete facades. Midway between painting, sculpture and collage, these seductive tableaux resemble intuitive assemblages of memories or impressions, a bit like peeking into someone’s head. As for what’s going on in mine, well… it’s 6pm. Still time to catch the happy hour in Belleville.

Tom Wesselmann, Bedroom Tit Box, 1968–70, wood, oil, acrylic, assemblage and live tit, 15 × 30 × 22 cm. Photo: Rebecca Fanuele. Courtesy the estate of the artist and Almine Rech Gallery, Paris

Marcel Duchamp, Porte-bouteilles, 1914/1959, signed 1960, galvanised iron, 59 × 37 cm. Photo: Glenn Steigelman. © Estate of the artist / adagp, Paris. Courtesy Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York

Sadie Benning, Building, 2016, Medite, aqua resin, casein and acrylic paint, found objects, photographs, digital prints, 82 × 149 × 17 cm. Photo: Marc Domage. Courtesy the artist and Air de Paris

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Books

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Here is Information. Mobilise. by Ian White lux, £22 (hardcover) The title of Ian White’s posthumous collection of writing brings to mind the comments and instructions posted on social media since the American election last November, accompanied by lists and databases detailing which civil rights organisations to support and which politicians to hassle. The ‘information’ in this book, edited by Mike Sperlinger, White’s former colleague at lux (the London arts agency where the curator, educator and artist spent his final years), isn’t so practical as the directive to ‘mobilise’ might suggest, but it does detail its author’s working and thinking methods, with texts on video, film and moving image that are concise, sometimes sharp, politically minded and always self-conscious. The collection begins with texts from the early 2000s – writings for publications such as Afterall and Untitled, as well as ArtReview, which published many of his pieces between 2002 and 2008. These are typically breathless descriptions, often springing from personal reflections, replete with long lists of adjectives. The book closes by reproducing the blog posts, poignant but often darkly hilarious, that White posted in the final years of his life, while he was receiving treatment for cancer. In between is a decade’s worth of essays for artists, ruminations on film programmes he’d curated and texts for performances White developed in collaboration with artists such as Jimmy Robert and Martin Gustavsson. While, broadly, White writes about

moving image, the underlying subject of the texts collected here seems to be the attempt to define the nascent medium of ‘artists’ film’ at the turn of the twenty-first century; to wrest it away from 1970s visions of ‘experimental’ and ‘expanded cinema’; and to locate it more accurately as an ambiguous public meetingpoint of cinema, theatre and art gallery. White’s best insights often sneak in quietly, punctuating longer descriptions of works. Within a list of possible themes being addressed in the work of Markus Schinwald, he drops in ‘the camera’s ability to turn an object into its opposite’, as if it’s a casual fact. But that seemingly simple observation contains a lot of White’s concern with the materiality of film and video, which included everything from what format it was on, to distribution, viewing spaces and the audience themselves. In the text describing his 2007 ‘Kinomuseum’, a project focused on the relationship between cinema and the museum, he describes it as ‘equally about finding limits, the inadequacies of industrial cinema in a cultural field, and the radical proposal that a differentiated cinema replaces both this and the museum’. The line also sums up many of his overarching preoccupations. Yvonne Rainer is a sort of patron saint of the book, hovering over many of the ideas of performance, politics and film as tools for subjectively exploring context. If there is one

criticism of this publication, it is that the preoccupation with this earlier avant-garde seems to weight it more towards looking back, with texts on Rainer, Jack Smith and Peter Gidal; and while there are essays on the work of Sharon Lockhart, Oliver Husain and Ruth Buchanan, the collection does not reflect a great deal on the younger generation of artists that White championed or the vitality of the moving-image scene that he helped create over the past 15 years. But of course any selection can only be incomplete (perhaps in the way White describes his own work at one point in the book: a ‘selection… an occupation, which is multiple, not an inscription, which is singular’). Though much of the tone is broadly curatorial – in an explanatory mode and sometimes quite formal – it’s what White was actively seeking that gives the book its energy. In the text on Husain’s work, it’s as if he’s found it: ‘a semi-porous membrane in/through the mind and a physical reorganisation of space and bodies has occurred, an endless series of exits that are entrances. Cinema, actually, remodelled, almost without us noticing, into a model for a new society. Nice.’ White’s method – his ‘information’ with which to ‘mobilise’ – was to be constantly present, aware and questioning of what structures we participate in, to take part while also locating new models: an approach that is both useful and imminently necessary. Chris Fite-Wassilak

Fantasies of the Library Edited by Anna-Sophie Springer and Etienne Turpin mit Press, $24.95/£18.95 (hardcover)

The first in a series of ‘books as exhibitions’ published in both print and as digital openaccess readers, Fantasies of the Library positions the book and the library as exhibition spaces and fertile ground for curating through a series of essays, an artist intervention and various interviews with founders of alternative libraries. Visually this translates into an interspersing of text and image via a multilayered design (different texts unfolding in parallel to each other across the same spread), which, in a ‘choose your own adventure’ manner, challenges the linearity of the book format – to a mostly confusing effect. Reading experience aside, Anna-Sophie Springer presents a stimulating essay titled ‘Melancholies of the Paginated Mind: The Library as Curatorial Space’ (which runs on odd-numbered pages throughout the

book), a historical survey of the library from Alexandria to modern times that reflects on the library’s changing roles and questions how its organisational systems shape knowledge. Along the way, Springer cites Aby Warburg’s library, based on the spatial activation of books through constant shuffling; Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet (1881), the story of two clerks who are consumed with desire to amass scientific knowledge but lack the creative thinking to do so; and the Occupy movement’s subversion of the library as institution through the creation of street libraries, symbolically claiming back the right to knowledge. But the most interesting project here is Andrew Norman Wilson’s 2012–14 ScanOps series. For two years, the artist collected ‘anomalies’ from Google Books – scans of pages revealing the hands of people doing the

January & February 2017

scanning, as well as distorted or blurred images caused by accidental movements – which together attest to the human labour behind the digital end-products. An important aspect of Wilson’s work (he makes colour inkjet prints of the faulty scans) lies in the manual process of its creation, and its new status as a unique art object (the prints are presented in custom-made, painted frames). This gets lost, however, in the black-and-white images reproduced here, which come across as mere secondary illustrations, perhaps pointing to the limits of Fantasies of the Library: while there may be a fruitful space for exploration in the overlap between the book, the library and the exhibition, this ‘book as exhibition’ fails to transpose the spatial and material articulations experienced in an actual exhibition display. Louise Darblay

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Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene by Donna J. Haraway Duke, $26.95/£18.99 (softcover) Language, says Donna Haraway, can provide a route away from environmental catastrophe. That might sound implausible, but for this philosopher, ‘It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas.’ And language is the way we express these ideas and flow them into public consciousness. One key linguistic expression she thinks we should reconsider, Haraway explains in this book (which knits together various recent essays), is the increasingly popular terming of our current geological epoch: the ‘Anthropocene’. It’s not that she denies the basic tenets of the Anthropocene (that humankind has become the biggest influence on earth’s environment); rather, it’s that she believes the term imbues consideration of climate change and earth’s many other environmental problems with an unhelpful and unproductive degree of inevitability, not least because it places humankind at the centre of everything. It is this affirmation of an anthropocentric perspective that Haraway argues is responsible for our problematic relationship with the natural world. Instead, echoing her much-cited 1985 ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, she calls for the flattening of any supposed interspecies hierarchy (an idea that has had much currency in the recent work of artists such as Phillipe Parreno, Pierre Huyghe and Joan Jonas). Instead she offers the ‘Chthulucene’, a complex, productive call-to-action against the Anthropocene. The etymology of her term stems from the Pimoa cthulhu, a species of spider (common to the

stumps of redwoods in the writer’s native California and typical of the personal references that populate Haraway’s arguments); she uses the spider’s web as a metaphor for a vision of the world in which there is no hierarchy between humans and nonhuman animals, where instead all lives are interwoven. ‘Weaving… performs and manifests the meaningful lived connection for sustaining kinship, behavior, relational action – for hózhó – for human and nonhumans’ (hózhó being a word from the Navajo language variously translated as peace, balance or harmony; again a defining aspect of Haraway’s writing is its mixing of terms from a variety of cultures and mythologies). Hammering home the point, Haraway compares the symbiotic relations between nonhuman animals with the way humans have organised themselves in the industrial, urban and agricultural systems built under capitalism. ‘Critters interpenetrate one another, loop around and through one another, eat each another [sic], get indigestion, and partially digest and partially assimilate one another.’ What humans have built, however, is a political and economic structure that is ‘ecosystem-destroying, human and animal labor-transforming, multispecies soul-mutilating, epidemic-friendly, corn monocrop-promoting, cross-species heartbreaking’. All of this, of course, would come across as passive handwringing if Haraway’s burlesque of language failed to lead anywhere. How do we turn the idea of the Chthulucene – this inter-

woven, nonhierarchical, symbiotic mode of living across species – into a reality, something we ‘live and die with, not just think and write with’, as she puts it? Haraway provides a few examples of small-scale art-activist-environmentalist projects (for example, an illustrator and an animal behaviourist collaborating on a Malagasy-language children’s book in which a lemur appears as the hero – encouraging a new generation of Madagascan children to look after the primate’s habitat), but none of these are convincing as real solutions to such great problems. This is easily where the book is at its weakest. Where Haraway is far more radical – and offers a convincing strategy for harmonising human and nonhuman animal relationships, utilising her newly established vocabulary – is in her call for concerted efforts to reduce the world’s human population. Attacking ‘bounded individualism’, but acknowledging that population control has historically been led with ‘the interests of biopolitical states more in view than the well-being of women and their people’, her argument is brave and persuasive: we can be as ‘green’ as we like, but with the current estimate of a world human population of 11 billion by the end of the twenty-first century, it’s not going to make much difference. Instead – and given Haraway’s interest in language, it perhaps comes as no surprise that she encapsulates her solution in an elegant catchphrase – she pleads: ‘Make kin, not babies!’ Oliver Basciano

Animals Edited by Filipa Ramos mit Press, $24.95/£16.95 (softcover) From Pierre Huyghe’s creepy monkey-child in Human Mask (2014), to the bees and fish in Joan Jonas’s They Come to Us Without a Word, her us Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale, to curator Jens Hoffmann’s Animality, which (at the time of writing) is on show at Marian Goodman Gallery in London, the notion that animals should be the cipher through which we interpret our own relationship to the world is something of a contemporary-art trend right now. And here they come to us with the words – in a collection of texts edited by Filipa Ramos, with Huyghe’s monkey gracing its cover (Ramos also cites the artist’s Untilled, 2012, as an originary moment for this collection), a text (by Vincent Normand) from the catalogue to Huyghe’s 2013 Centre Pompidou retrospective and a poem by Jonas,

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among the 50 or so excerpts and contributions. But no Sredni Vashtar among them? No extract from Watership Down? The trouble with reading collections like this is that you’re always thinking about what should have been included but is not. Let’s leave that aside for the moment and consider what the book is really about: ‘By locating the animal at the core of an intersection of multiple disciplinary terrains, this survey promotes a dialogue between the humanities and sciences, technology and ethics, reinforcing such meeting points by intersecting diverse specialisms across the vector of contemporary art,’ writes the editor. With that kind of turgid prose, we can rest assured that this collection will be no monument to great literature (though there are some excellent pieces of writing here,

ArtReview

by Walter Benjamin and Will Self). Nor really about animals. It’s about art (and its status as a space in which various specialisms can intersect – or being a practice in which it’s good to be a jack of all trades and master of none). Where the book rises above the humdrum is in its tracing of how certain thoughts bounce around through history. Perhaps the key text here is John Berger’s ‘Why Look at Animals?’ (1977), in which he characterises zoo animals as ‘the living monument’ to their own disappearance. His thoughts are less elegantly reprised by Normand’s text, and interestingly critiqued in a 2001 text by animal historian Jonathan Burt. But with its focus firmly on the contemporary, this type of collection lacks the depth to follow such histories to an interesting end. Mark Rappolt

17–19 17–19 Feb Feb 17–19 Feb 17–19 17–19 Feb Feb 2017 2017 2017 2017 2017

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For more on Ludovic Debeurme, see overleaf

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Contributors

Adam Thirlwell is a British novelist and London editor of The Paris Review. In 2011 he became the Samuel Fischer Guest Professor of Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität Berlin, and in 2015 he was chosen as an Honorary Fellow of the Metaphysical Club at the Domus Academy in Milan. In 2015 Thirlwell received the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has written three novels, a novella and a number of essays that have been published in The New York Review of Books, The Times Literary Supplement and The Guardian. In this issue, Thirlwell and Pankaj Mishra discuss the risks of a new dark age. Pankaj Mishra is a novelist and writer of political essays. His novel The Romantics, published in 2000, won the Los Angeles Times Art Seidenbaum Award, and over the years he has contributed to numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Yorker, London Review of Books, Financial Times and The Wall Street Journal. In 2009 he became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2014 he was awarded Yale University’s Windham-Campbell Literature Prize.

Future Greats 2017 Nominators Victor Burgin is an artist and writer based in Paris; Gabriel Coxhead is a writer, critic and curator based in London; Natasha Hoare is a curator at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam; Sunjung Kim is director of the Art Sonje Centre, Seoul; Catalina Lozano is an independent curator and writer based in Mexico City; Kiki Mazzucchelli is an independent curator and writer based between São Paulo and London; Philippe Pirotte is an art historian, critic and curator, and rector of the Städelschule, Frankfurt; Dieter Roelstraete is a curator and a member of the curatorial team for Documenta 14; Ben Street is a freelance art historian, writer and curator based in London; Joanna Warsza is a curator and head of Curator Lab at Konstfack, Stockholm; Mike Watson is a curator and theorist based in Rome. Louise Darblay is assistant editor at ArtReview and ArtReview Asia. In this issue she roams the galleries of her hometown, Paris, for the second in a new series of city-based reviews marathon.

Contributing Writers Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, Aaron Angell, Athanasios Argianas, Robert Barry, Phoebe Blatton, Dominic van den Boogerd, Kimberly Bradley, Tania Bruguera, Victor Burgin, Cao Fei, Heman Chong, Bill Clarke, Kim Córdova, Gabriel Coxhead, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Joyce Dixon, Owen Duffy, Louisa Elderton, Olafur Eliasson, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Natasha Hoare, Hettie Judah, Kim Sunjung, I. Kurator, Rick Lowe, Catalina Lozano, Renata Lucas, Anna Maria Maiolino, Dóra Maurer, Kiki Mazzucchelli, Pankaj Mishra, Ciara Moloney, Otobong Nkanga, Philippe Pirotte, Nadia Quadmani, Claire Rigby, Dieter Roelstraete, Aoife Rosenmeyer, Laura Smith, Raimar Stange, Ben Street, George Stolz, superflex, Adam Thirlwell, Joanna Warsza, Mike Watson, Will Wiles, Nil Yalter, Heimo Zobernig Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Mikael Gregorsky, Ludovic Debeurme, Anna Vickery

Ludovic Debeurme (preceding pages)

“A vortex of inert matter being set into motion

As he approached thirty, however, working fulltime

vulnerability to Lucille and its 2011 sequel, Renée

under the brisk strokes of the brush.” This is how

as an illustrator had taken its toll: “I was out of

(translated into English in 2016 by Top Shelf),

the Paris-born Ludovic Debeurme recalls “the

breath, and above all, out of meaning,” he says.

reinforced by Debeurme’s drawings and dialogues

alchemy” of seeing his father, a painter, at work.

He would find meaning again making comics.

floating free of any panel or balloon borders. Adding

Debeurme would stand for hours behind his

His first short ‘silent’ piece appeared in Comix 2000,

to this fluidity, the ‘real’ and surreal shift seamless-

father’s back, fascinated by how his gestures to

a 2,000-page tome of wordless strips published

ly, and Debeurme portrays unsettling bodily

and fro between palette and easel would make

in 1999. Embarking on his debut complete graphic

metamorphoses that mirror his subjects’ height-

the unconscious become conscious on the blank

novel, Céfalus (2002), the start of an ongoing

ened states of mind.

canvas. His conviction, however, that painting

relationship with the fiercely artist-driven publisher

would also be his own ideal medium for conveying

Cornélius, Debeurme understood that “in my heart,

and guilt are transmitted intergenerationally in

the human psyche was shattered when he began

my return to this artform, which mysteriously

families, Debeurme is deepening his enquiry into

his studies at the Sorbonne. “The contemporary

conjugates line and word, allowed me to reconnect

human-kind’s responsibility for our failing eco-

art I encountered there was so conceptual and

with my childhood, as much as it allowed me

system in his new Strip for ArtReview and his forth-

antifigurative, I stopped drawing for the first

to write my future”.

coming trilogy Epiphania, the first volume of which

time in my life,” he says. Instead, for the next

His major departure and breakthrough was

From exploring in Lucille and Renée how shame

is to be published this April by Casterman. “The

three years, he devoted himself to music, energised

Lucille (2006), which won the Prix René Goscinny

question of man in his environment, his way of

by the direct link with the public, a passion he

for best scenario and an ‘Essential’ prize at

being in the world, haunts all my books. But in recent

pursues to this day as a guitarist and composer,

the Angoulême Comics Festival. Five years and

years, my work has undergone a radical reversal,

notably in the band Fatherkid.

450 pages in the making, it recounts the tangled

from showing ‘being in this world’ to ‘the impossi-

lives of two teenagers fumbling towards love

bility of being in this world’. In such a major crisis,

drawing through illustration, with commissions

and struggling with emotional inheritances from

as committed as my work is, it must not dispense

for youth-oriented editions of Robert Louis

their parents. Lucille is an anorexic living with

with the imaginary. It is the imagination which

Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

her mother, while Arthur is the son of an unem-

ensures that we can overcome our present urgency

(in 2001) and Rabelais’s Gargantua (in 2004).

ployed, alcoholic fisherman. There’s an intense

and possibly invent a tomorrow.” Paul Gravett

Debeurme eventually found his way back to

140

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Where do we go from here?

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Art and photo credits

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on page 132 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 142 illustration by Anna Vickery

January & February 2017

141

A Curator Writes January & February 2017 I clear my throat and brush the remnants of crispy wonton from the lapel of my velvet smoking jacket. Ordering a Chinese takeaway had been the idea of the editor, who insisted that the local outlet Suey Hong was, in his words, “bang up to the elephant”. I watch him shovelling a fried crab claw into his mouth and feel the same frisson of anxiety as when I first encountered Doris Salcedo’s crack in her mesmerising 2007 Turbine Hall installation. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I begin. “We are all familiar with Future Greats, the issue of ArtReview where an esteemed panel pinpoints artists on the cusp of the marvellous.” I gesture at the editor, who is sitting with the team of curators, critics and artists who come up with Future Greats. The editor waves a bit of crab claw at the audience – a mix of curators, bright-eyed and eager, intermingled with the venue’s regular punters, who sport big hair and thick, dark eyelashes. I ruminate that if Nicolaus Schafhausen were here, he could flit effortlessly between the two groups. “But here tonight we are celebrating a perhaps more profound phenomenon,” I continue. “Those who were once the future! This is a state that I provisionally call the ‘past discontinuous’…” I see the curatorial team of Artissima furiously scribble this phrase down in their leather-bound notebooks, delighted to have discovered a title for another section of the fair. “…And to underline the futility of meritocracy as a conceptual framework for a just society, today I present not a conference or series of papers but an activity that none of these once-greats have any talent for – boxing. So, kicking things off here at this legendary East London boxing venue, York Hall, let me introduce our first fight of the evening!” I end by bending my knee and bowing, the traditional British curtsy, in a gesture that brilliantly fractures gender and class identities simultaneously. The first pugilists appear. From one corner of the grand room, the electroclash and performance group Fischerspooner jogs towards the boxing ring. Their breakout hit Emerge booms from the pa. I see Matthew Higgs and Scott Rothkopf fist-pump in the crowd while mouthing the lyrics “Feels good! Looks good!” to each other. But an eerie silence falls as their opponents appear on the other side of the hall: it’s been years since I laid eyes on the few living members of the legendary 24-strong Documenta Council. The council produced Documenta’s fourth edition, an effort at collaborative aesthetic judgement. For me its total failure marked the beginning of the end of postwar consensus. The old men hold up a cardboard cutout of Sisto Dalla Palma, the late general secretary of the Venice Biennale. I recall Sisto introducing me to the works of the innovative Polish theatre director Jerzy Grotowski and I am overcome with emotion as a I realise that my humble occasion tonight pays homage to Grotowski’s radical idea of ‘poor theatre’. My reverie is halted by the action in the ring. Casey Spooner, wearing his famous hair-suit, punches Warren Fischer gently in the chest and then throws a pair of red vinyl panties to the floor. Then, in a brilliant moment of antitriumphalism, both men and their backing performers prostrate themselves in front of the Documenta Council. Jeffrey Deitch, Fischerspooner’s onetime

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gallerist – and ringside manager for the evening – enters the ring and proclaims the winner by holding up the arm of the oldest Documenta Council member. The crowd roars its approval as Achille Bonito Oliva makes his way to the ring for the second fight of the evening. There is no sign of his opponent, billed as Princess Leia. Instead Oliva steps into the ring and starts reading his seminal 1981 essay ‘The International Trans-Avant-Garde’. As he gets to the bit about the revival of archaic motifs, the pa system drowns him out with the words from Eminem’s Without Me: “Guess who’s back? Back again?” The crowd go wild as Julian Schnabel and Tony Blair enter the hall. Blair is wearing a wrestling cape emblazoned with ‘I was the future once’. Schnabel, in his trademark silk pyjamas, vaults the ropes, does a forward role and with a flourish punches Fischer hard in the stomach. The latter collapses to the floor of the ring. Schnabel is clearly fired up by Achille’s referencing of archaic motifs. He executes a lotus kick, and in the chaotic melee a couple of elderly Documenta Council members, inexplicably still in the ring, hit the deck. Thankfully the chaos is stopped by Blair, who has regally moved to the centre of the ring. He hauls Fischer up and puts an arm around Schnabel. He takes the microphone from Deitch. He turns to the audience and, with a trademark hand-gesture of peace and reconciliation, speaks: “Let us think about the words of the Buddha. Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” The hall falls silent. We look at each other, inspired by all who have taken part in the fight. We understand that we are here in an inexorably beautiful present. And filled with humility and wonder, we realise that we are all the future. I. Kurator