Manufacturers of laundry starch supply excellent directions for the use of their products
uk £5.95
vol 67 no 1
9 770004 409093
01 >
Colombia
January & February 2015
23/12/2014 14:00
AR-JanFeb-Cover.indd 1
Mateo López
AR-Dior.indd 458 277658_Dior_ArtReviewJan9th_x1a.indd 2-3
23/12/2014 12:59
800.929.Dior (3467) dior.com
ROSE DIOR BAGATELLE COLLECTION White gold, diamonds, fancy pink diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, Paraiba tourmalines and tsavorite garnets.
AR-Dior.indd 459
23/12/2014 12:59 12/17/14 12:43 PM
AR-Margaret Howell.indd 462
23/12/2014 12:59
AR-Margaret Howell.indd 463
23/12/2014 12:59
HA U S E R & W IR T H
DJORDJE OZBOLT MORE PAINTINGS ABOUT POETS AND FOOD 14 JANUARY – 21 FEBRUARY 2015 32 EAST 69TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10021 WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM
POET SMOKING, 2014 ACRYLIC ON ICON BOARD 70 × 60 × 5 CM / 27 1/2 × 23 5/8 × 2 INCHES
2014_3591_235x300_HWNY__Ozbolt_Artreview.indd 1 406_AR.indd 406
04.12.14 11:32 23/12/2014 13:00
2014_304
2.14 11:32
HAUSER & WIRTH HAUSER & WIRTH SOMERSET
PIPILOTTI RIST LONDON WORRY WILL VANISH 27 NOVEMBER 2014 – 10 JANUARY 2015
SOMERSET STAY STAMINA STAY 29 NOVEMBER 2014 – 22 FEBRUARY 2015
MERCY GARDEN RETOUR SKIN, 2014 AUDIO VIDEO INSTALLATION (VIDEO STILL, DETAIL)
2014_3044_HWLO_235x300_Rist_Artreview_rechts.indd 1 406_AR.indd 407
07.10.14 16:48 23/12/2014 13:00
CROSS SECTION OF A REVOLUTION ALLORA & CALZADILLA BROOMBERG & CHANARIN LIU XIAODONG HAROON MIRZA RASHID RANA WAEL SHAWKY SANTIAGO SIERRA
30 January — 7 March 2015 52 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com
Lisson DPSindd.indd 402
23/12/2014 13:01
Tony Oursler
30 January — 7 March 2015 27 Bell Street, London lissongallery.com
Lisson DPSindd.indd 403
23/12/2014 13:01
Mamma Andersson Behind the Curtain January 8 - February 21, 2015
David Zwirner 519 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 212 727 2070 davidzwirner.com
412_AR.indd 412
23/12/2014 13:01
Diana Thater Science, Fiction January 8 - February 21, 2015
David Zwirner 533 West 19th Street New York, NY 10011 212 727 2070 davidzwirner.com
412_AR.indd 413
23/12/2014 13:01
Jan Schoonhoven January 9 - February 14, 2015
David Zwirner 537 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011 212 517 8677 davidzwirner.com
414_AR.indd 414 1068275B2_18.504x11.811_JS.AT_ArtReview_FA_DPS.indd All Pages
Photo by Aad in ‘t Veld
23/12/2014 13:02
Al Taylor Pet Stains, Puddles, and Full Gospel Neckless January 9 - February 14, 2015
David Zwirner 537 West 20th Street New York, NY 10011 212 517 8677 davidzwirner.com
414_AR.indd 415
23/12/2014 13:02 11/21/14 12:00 PM
Wilhelm Sasnal
15 January – 21 February 2015 Sadie Coles HQ 62 Kingly Street London W1B 5QN www.sadiecoles.com
409_AR.indd 409
Sadie Coles
HQ
23/12/2014 13:02
THOMAS DEMAND MATTHEW MARKS LOS ANGELES
420_AR.indd 420 MM_TD_ArtReview_120314.indd 1
23/12/2014 13:02 12/3/14 7:58 AM
Paulo Nazareth
Mende s Wood DM Rua da Consolação 3358 Jardins São Paulo SP 01416 – 000 Brazil + 55 11 3081 1735 www.mendeswooddm.com facebook.com/mendeswood @mendeswooddm R. Marco Aurélio, 311 Vila Romana São Paulo SP 05048 – 000 Brazil
MendesWood-ArtReview-January.indd 1 MWD-ArtReview.indd 436
15/12/14 13:03 15:28 23/12/2014
MendesW
Ziad Antar
‘Untitled 1, series Cactus, Lebaa, Lebanon 2014’
‘Untitled Limits’
January 22 — February 28, 2015
ALMINE RECH GALLERY Abdijstraat 20 rue de l’Abbaye, 1050 Brussels · t +32 (0)2 648 56 84 contact.brussels@alminerech.com · www.alminerech.com
Almine Rech FP.indd 447
23/12/2014 13:03
kurimanzutto FP2.indd 18
23/12/2014 13:07
BJARNE MELGAARD THE CASUAL PLEASURE OF DISAPPOINTMENT PARIS MARAIS FEBRUARY – MARCH 2015 ROPAC.NET
PARIS MARAIS PARIS PANTIN SALZBURG
450_AR.indd 450
23/12/2014 13:43
Paul Seawright The List 30 January –21 March 2015 Kerlin Gallery
www.kerlingallery.com
Kerlin Galleries FP.indd 434
23/12/2014 13:43
나는 콜롬비아를 사랑 새해 복 많이 받으세요 Damn! Do you know how long it took ArtReview to learn how to say that? So long that its tutor, ArtReview Asia (who has been ‘learning’ ArtReview at the same time as publishing a new edition of its own magazine – go buy it!), is now convinced it is a total idiot. You see, all this came about because originally this issue was going to be about North Korea, but ArtReview had to cancel that plan so that those emails detailing its true feelings about certain artists and gallerists, and the ‘confusion’ about its travel expenses wouldn’t be made public. And so that the newsstand at the Nisa on Old Street wouldn’t be blown up and no one would ‘come after’ James Franco for once having been an ArtReview agent and having appeared in certain ‘films’ that no longer exist. ArtReview blames the press for having definitely wanted to cover the stuff that would have been placed in the public domain by North Korean hackers, even though that stuff hasn’t yet been leaked. As George Clooney says, ‘It’s a serious moment in time that needs to be addressed seriously, as opposed to frivolously.’ And that’s ArtReview’s motto of every second of every minute of every hour of every day. It’s even forced one of the trainees to write it up in Korean on the office whiteboard (after they’ve finished making Jerry Saltz delete those tweets about how ‘the bad guys won’). Still, fortunately for you, and ArtReview’s publishing ‘schedule’, last year it took a fact-finding trip to Colombia (scheduling and translating courtesy of Felipe Villada, for which, thanks), a country it hadn’t yet visited, but whose artists – or more precisely, their works – it had encountered with increasing frequency and increasing interest over the past few years. It was there as a tourist – how else can you describe a one-week trip through three cities? – but its aim was to get an overview of the art scene and to understand the context or contexts that had generated the works. Mainly through
The North Korea issue
21
AR-JanFeb-Editorial.indd 21
23/12/2014 14:00
conversations with people who live there and who knew more about the place than it did. One of the things that struck ArtReview was the way in which the image and reality of the place are often completely different things. Believe in the work of painter Fernando Botero and you’d think that Colombia is a nation of fatties, the biggest of whom occasionally go down in a hail of police bullets while wandering shoeless and seminaked over Medellín rooftops. Believe in the work of Benicio Del Toro and you’d think that Colombians’ domineering personalities leave their nephewin-laws in a confused state about their priorities. (You know that the Puerto Rican actor would be portraying a friendly uncle in Escobar: Paradise Lost, 2014, one who showered his nephew-in-laws with love and good advice, if Colombia had invested in its own state-sponsored pr firm or ‘Guardianes de la Paz’.) Perhaps all that is one of the reasons ArtReview got interested in the work of Mateo López: for the way in which it closes gaps between reality and representation. It’s also why it forced one of the people it met in Bogotá – artist Lucas Ospina – to write about the gap between the reality and perception or international projection of the country. And it’s why, when its trainees have finished ‘learning’ Korean and ‘convincing’ people to delete various tweets, they’ll be forcing others of the people ArtReview met on its Colombian travels to commit more of their ideas and insights to paper in the coming months. Bah, this is starting to turn into something like one of Kim Jong-un’s rambling speeches. And you know – or would if you’d hacked through its cigarette-smoke ‘firewall’ and into its it ‘system’ – that ArtReview is not allowed to go there… Mejores deseos para un feliz año nuevo. ArtReview
The ArtReview filewall
22
AR-JanFeb-Editorial.indd 22
23/12/2014 14:00
Hiroshi Sugimoto Still Life
6 BURLINGTON GARDENS THROUGH 24 JANUARY 2015
HS_London_Art_Review_Jan_1210.indd 1 423_AR.indd 423
12/11/14 4:50 PM 23/12/2014 13:49
INFO@MURIASCENTENO.COM WWW.MURIASCENTENO.COM ADRIANO AMARAL NEVER FROM CONCENTRATE 17|01|15 - 20|02|15 PORTO GABRIEL LIMA I BURN PARIS 21|01|15 - 27|02|15 LISBOA CARLA FILIPE
ZONA MACO SUR 04|02|15 - 08|02|15
FEEL FREE TO CONTACT
ArtReview vol 67 no 1 January & February 2015
Art Previewed 31
Previews by Martin Herbert 33
Rimbaud on artist statements Interview by Matthew Collings 62
Points of View by J. J. Charlesworth, Jonathan T. D. Neil, Maria Lind, Sam Jacob, Mark Sladen, Mike Watson, Andrew Berardini, Jonathan Grossmalerman & Oliver Basciano 45
Lauren Cornell, Ryan Trecartin and Sara O’Keeffe Interview by Tom Eccles 66
page 38 Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles International Airport, 1964, gelatin silver print, Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson. © artist’s estate. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-ContentsRESUPPLY P25.indd 25
25
23/12/2014 14:01
Art Featured 77
Mateo López by Mark Rappolt 78
We Need to Talk About the ’Toons by Oliver Basciano 104
Colombia Is a Normal Country by Lucas Ospina 84
The Influential Generation: Mexican Women Artists from the 1970s and 80s by Gabriela Jauregui 108
The Devil in Cali by Stefanie Hessler 88
Varda Caivano by Terry R. Myers 114
Carlos Motta by Andrew Berardini 94
Forever Young: A Short Guide to Some Paradoxes of Contemporary Art by Suhail Malik 118
Walead Beshty by Helen Sumpter 98
page 108 Pola Weiss, photography of the performance La Venusina Renace y Reforma (The Venutian Is Reborn and Reforms), 1980. Courtesy Fondo Pola Weiss at the Centro de Documentación Arkheia, muac-unam, Mexico City
26
AR-JanFeb-Contents.indd 26
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:01
419_AR.indd 419
23/12/2014 13:50
Art Reviewed 123
Pavel Büchler, by Mark Prince Stephen Shore, by George Stolz Hans Op de Beeck, by Sam Steverlynck Panda Sex, by Michelangelo Corsaro Enrique Ramírez, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Gabriel Lester and Haegue Yang, by Chris Fite-Wassilak Carlos Zilio, by Claire Rigby Miao Ying, by Iona Whittaker Taipei Biennial: The Great Acceleration, by Aimee Lin
exhibitions 124 Marie Lund, by Paul Pieroni Richard Serra, by Ben Street Susan Hefuna, by Helen Sumpter Art & Language, by Robert Barry Carrie Mae Weems, by Mark Rappolt Laura Oldfield Ford, by Sean Ashton Willem de Rooij, by David Trigg Jonathan Gardner, by Susannah Thompson Kader Attia, by Orit Gat James Hoff, by David Everitt Howe Frank Stella, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Judith Scott, by Brienne Walsh Klaus Lutz, by Joshua Mack Jonas Wood, by Ed Schad Yuri Ancarani, by Jonathan T.D. Neil Brian Bress, by Andrew Berardini German Pop, by Kimberly Bradley Peter Gallo, by Sherman Sam Beware Wet Paint, by Gesine Borcherdt Glitch: Interference Between Art and Cinema, by Barbara Casavecchia
books 154 The Miraculous, by Raphael Rubinstein Lina Bo Bardi 100, edited by Andres Lepik and Vera Simone Bader Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain, by Robert Hewison Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller, by Chloé Griffin the strip 158 off the record 162
page 149 Gabriel Lester, Living by the Light of Fiction, 2014. Photo: Simon Vogel. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam
28
AR-JanFeb-Contents.indd 28
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:01
ARCO FEBRUARY 25–MARCH 01 THE ARMORY SHOW MARCH 05 — 08
JANNIS KOUNELLIS FEBRUARY 06 — APRIL 11 2015 W W W.BJERGGA ARD.COM
GBB_Kounellis_111214.indd 1 Bo Bjerggaard.indd 425
11/12/14 16.11 23/12/2014 13:50
museo_jumex_placed.indd 453
23/12/2014 13:50
Art Previewed
Meat Juice – See Section ii, ‘The Removal of Spots and Stains from Fabrics’ 31
AR-JanFeb-Dividers.indd 31
23/12/2014 14:02
Shirin Neshat The Home of My Eyes 23 March – 23 June 2015 Yarat Contemporary Art Space Baku
Shirin Neshat, Javid, from the Home My Eyes series (detail), 2015 Silver gelatin print and ink, 152.4 x 101.4 cm. (60 x 40 in.) Copyright Shirin Neshat, Courtesy of the artist and Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels
www.yarat.az
451_AR.indd 451
23/12/2014 13:51
Previewed Marlene Dumas Tate Modern, London 5 February – 10 May
Barbara Hammer kow, Berlin 10 January – 14 February
The Lulennial Lulu, Mexico City 7 February – 17 May
Melgaard + Munch Munch Museum, Oslo 24 January – 12 April
Melanie Gilligan Casco, Utrecht through 25 January; de Appel, Amsterdam 24 January – 29 March; De Hallen, Haarlem through 1 March
Monika Sosnowska Museu de Arte Contemporânea de Serralves, Porto 19 February – 31 May
Otobong Nkanga Museum Folkwang, Essen 23 January – 18 May By Proxy James Cohan, New York through 17 January
Nick Mauss 303 Gallery, New York 26 February – 11 April Garry Winogrand Jeu de Paume, Paris through 8 February
2 Bjarne Melgaard, Untitled, 2001, drawing, 75 × 55 cm. © the artist / bono 2014
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-PreviewedRESUPPLY PP 33+34+36.indd 33
33
23/12/2014 14:04
While other painters of her generation lapse classical pietà compositions to suggestions just the start. Munch’s paintings will hang on 1 into lucrative stylism, Marlene Dumas remains of sexual violence. That work will nestle amid wallpaper featuring images of Melgaard’s juicy, gratifyingly exploratory. When ArtReview intera hundred or so others, including, if the Stedelijk chaotic previous installations; a new one will presentation is followed, early collages, rarely viewed the South African-born, Amsterdambe on show too. Meanwhile, we’re invited to shown drawings and new paintings. based artist in 2012, she characterised art as a ponder the surprising similarities between two autobiographical painters orbiting around Dumas’s London solo show in 2012 featured leap of faith, a stab in the dark, and the cluster a soundtrack by Winehouse and Spector, and themes of sex, death and alienation. (And, preof portraits she was making – constellating existentialist painting plus pop is now a thing, sumably, not think at all about the idea of an Christ, Osama Bin Laden, Amy Winehouse and it appears: the Munch Museum’s unlikely double- adept controversialist clambering on the shoulPhil Spector – felt as precarious and dogmaquestioning as any she’d made. Don’t expect 2 header of Bjarne Melgaard and Edvard Munch, ders of a relative giant.) midcareer dropoff, then, in Tate Modern’s Dumas The end of it all has already happened, will include ‘A species of Land art for the twenty-first retrospective, The Image as Burden. Touring from audio by Diana Ross, Dolly Parton, the Carpenters, century’, is how Dieter Roelstraete, in ArtReview’s etc. This, Melgaard apparently said at a press her hometown’s Stedelijk Museum, it’s named 3 last Future Greats issue, described Otobong after a 1993 painting whose starting point was Nkanga’s blend of drawing, painting, photogconference, is a counterbalancing of light a photograph of actor Robert Taylor carrying and darkness that parallels the bright anguish raphy, installation and video, where ‘land’ – such of Munch’s The Scream (1893–1910). But for as that in her native Nigeria’s oil-rich Niger Greta Garbo: between the male figure’s nudity and the woman’s blue face, this small canvas Melgaard, who avowedly wants to upend staid Delta – is synonymous with natural resources. conveys a spectrum of associations ranging from perceptions of the older Norwegian, music is Landscape, here, is always filtered through
1 Marlene Dumas, The Image as Burden, 1993. Private collection, Belgium. © the artist. Photo: Peter Cox
2 Edvard Munch, Sørgemarsj (Funeral March), 1897. © Munch Museum, Oslo / Munch-Ellingsen Group / bono 2014
3 Otobong Nkanga, Whose Crises Is This?, 2013, two drawings, acrylic on paper, 30 × 42 cm each. Courtesy the artist and Lumen Travo Gallery, Amsterdam
34
AR-JanFeb-PreviewedRESUPPLY PP 33+34+36.indd 34
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:04
5 Barbara Hammer, Pink Pickup, 1982, handpainted photograph and collage, 20 × 25 cm. Courtesy the artist and kow, Berlin
4 Xu Yhen, Light Source – Bathsheba Holding King David’s Letter, 2014, oil on canvas, 86 × 98 cm. Produced by MadeIn Company, Shanghai. Courtesy James Cohan Gallery, New York & Shanghai
the body, the subjective, storytelling, memory and the work of art is not completed by the artist, at the treachery of objects and images. Nkanga’s 4 least according to the premise of By Proxy: James Museum Folkwang show will relate to the instiCohan’s strong-looking, 13-artist group show. tution’s collection, and she has maximised It includes Duchamp’s With Hidden Noise (1916) constrained means before. See her Diaspore (2014) and extends the work-completing category from at 14 Rooms in Basel last year, where seven black audience to fabricators. The result promises to women carrying Queen of the Night pot-plants traverse a century of styles of outsourcing, with participants ranging from John Cage, Alighiero on their heads stepped tentatively across cartoBoetti and Yoko Ono to Jon Rafman, Wade graphic flooring, living sculptures negotiating space and identity. Or Contained Measures of Guyton, Oliver Laric and Xu Zhen. But this Shifting States (2012), her durational performance is surely only the beginning, and enterprising at Tate Modern’s Tanks in 2012, which rifled artists should now start considering how not to have their own ideas at all, not make the work through Tate’s collection and invited viewers to interact with and parse imagery including – as those borrowed ideas are based on and not underNkanga recently pointed out to The White Review – stand its meaning either. deceptively placid images of war-torn Sudan. A pioneer of queer cinema with around 80 5 films under her belt, Barbara Hammer has Speaking of interacting viewers, there’s plenty of flex in the Duchampian notion that gear-shifted from making experimental films
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-PreviewedRESUPPLY PP 33+34+36.indd 35
during the 1970s that explored formerly taboo subjects such as menstruation, the female orgasm and lesbian sexuality, to 1980s films using optical printing that made a virtue of the fragility of 16mm, and then archival essayfilms such as Nitrate Kisses (1992) and poetic selfdocumenting such as A Horse Is Not a Metaphor (2008), made as she battled stage-three ovarian cancer. Over the last half-decade, she’s been increasingly recognised by the mainstream artworld, not least thanks to film retrospectives at moma in 2010 and Tate Modern in 2012. Her reputation established, Berlin’s kow can now veer away from the core of her work: this show features tough, lyrical collages and painted photographs that Hammer made in parallel to film projects, mostly during the mid-1980s, and has never shown before.
35
23/12/2014 14:04
6 Still from The Common Sense, 2014, dir Melanie Gilligan
8 Monika Sosnowska, Stairway, 2010, metal, pvc handrail, 565 × 250 cm. Photo: Jens Ziehe. © the artist. Courtesy Capitain Petzel, Berlin, and Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
7 Gabriel Orozco, Breath on Piano, 1993, c-print, 41 × 51 cm. Courtesy Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London, and Kurimanzutto, Mexico City
6
It’s the near future in Melanie Gilligan’s of physical space. To see it all, you’ll have to visit approach, from Jiri Kovanda’s subtle, to-camera largest project to date, the three-part sci-fi film three overlapping shows: at Casco, Utrecht, until interventions in the everyday (gesturing while riding an escalator, for instance) to Gabriel The Common Sense (2014), and capitalism-driven 25 January; at De Hallen, Harlem, until 1 March; technological advancements have created and at de Appel, Amsterdam, until 29 March. Orozco’s minor-but-momentous photograph of condensed breath in the process of evapo‘The Patch’, which allows people to directly You’re not schlepping, though; you’re having a ‘nomadic viewing experience’. rating on a piano’s polished black top. Other experience the bodily lives of others. Then A trilogy of a different stripe in Mexico, artists range from Lygia Clark to Karin Sander, the tech breaks down, causing psychological crises and withdrawals; when it’s working again, meanwhile: this column often features a biennial Lee Lozano to La Monte Young, and so we feel the population cleaves into those who use – in fact, we can do that, typically, while ignoring confident in recommending this rather than, say, the technology and others who form resistance several biennials every month, such is their super- the New Museum Triennial. Maybe we’ll cover groups. In what sounds like a sequel of sorts that next time. 7 abundance – but we’ve never had a Lulennial before, nor a biennial so easily navigable. Held 8 to Gilligan’s Popular Unrest (2010), where all Monika Sosnowska mostly doesn’t do small. transactions are overseen by something called Instead, the Polish artist’s tendency is towards at Lulu, the compact Mexico City space co-run by ArtReview contributing editor Chris Sharp, ‘The Spirit’, this future is also an allegory for big, disorienting para-architecture: mdf mazes, a present in which capitalism’s target is no and timed to coincide with the city’s art fairs, it’s spatially warped rooms and – not infrequently – longer just our wallets but, via gadgets and aptly themed around the idea of small gestures stairways that lead nowhere. Tatlin’s tower is a social media, our very minds. Perhaps against regular implicit reference here, as the intellectual that have a disproportionately big impact, that, the Canadian artist is also forcing the issue and balances older and newer examples of that backdrop of Sosnowska’s work is the collapse of
36
AR-JanFeb-PreviewedRESUPPLY PP 33+34+36.indd 36
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:05
CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AUCTION LONDON 10 FEBRUARY 2015
VIEWING 7 – 10 FEBRUARY YVES KLEIN Untitled, Blue Monochrome (IKB 241), 1960. Estimate £2,000,000–3,000,000 Enquiries +44 (0)20 7293 5477 34–35 New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA. Register now at sothebys.com © ADAGP, PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2014
AR-Sothebys.indd 37 1419384_ArtReview_CTP_Klein_v2.indd 1
23/12/2014 13:51 22/12/2014 11:18
modernist idealism that was intertwined, complexly, with the fate of Eastern Europe over the last century. In her hands, once-upright forms melt and buckle, and if the ostensible influence is her experience of seeing Warsaw’s modernist architecture torn down around the turn of the century, the entropic associations spread far beyond the local. For Architectonisation, Sosnowska takes over seven gallery spaces with a parcours of objects and installations from the last dozen years, from corridor and pavilionlike works to discrete and more decisively sculptural pieces – some of which, it seems, are also to be activated by a performance programme. Over the last decade or so, via drawings, paintings, furniture, painted curtains and more, 9 Nick Mauss has outlined a sensibility, a fragmentary but literary-feeling sphere of influence, 10
via imagery including bourgeois eighteenthcentury drawing rooms, writers and composers, and patterning reminiscent of old book endpapers, tentatively laid out – as if the New Yorkbased artist were trying to figure out why he’s attracted to such things. (‘My process involves accumulation, sometimes in ways I’m not consciously aware of, and then sorting things out,’ he told Mousse magazine a few years ago.) This sweet, cart-before-the-horse confusion is the charm of the work, whether in loose-looking gallery installations or, as in Mauss’s stage for a series of ballets for the 2014 Frieze Art Fair in London, a live event. What seems most of emotional value in the work is what’s unvoiced, blocked or yet to unfurl; incompletion carries it towards us. Incompletion carries a different value in Garry Winogrand’s work. Though he’s now
recognised as one of the last century’s greatest street photographers – a visual poet of America’s vivacity and violence – Winogrand didn’t edit or print the majority of his work during his lifetime, and left behind some 6,600 rolls (a quarter of a million images) of unprinted film when, in 1984, he died suddenly at age fifty-six. His first retrospective in a quarter-century, co-organised by sfmoma and Washington, dc’s National Gallery of Art, combs the archives to include a hundred unseen images. Expect freaks on the streets of la, monkeys riding in convertibles and a lot of beautifully ragged edges. As a talking head says on the accompanying minidocumentary, “What he was trying to do was big and sprawling and messy.” En masse is the way to appreciate it. Martin Herbert
9 Nick Mauss, F.S. Interval ii, 2014, 24 tiles with reverse glass painting, mirrored (3 panels), 297 × 249 × 85 cm. © the artist. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
10 Garry Winogrand, Los Angeles International Airport, 1964, gelatin silver print, Garry Winogrand Archive, Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson. © artist’s estate. Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco
38
35, 38 AR-JanFeb-Previewed.indd 38
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:03
doosan_placed.indd 427
23/12/2014 13:51
GALERIA LA COMETA_letf_.pdf
1
18/12/14
15:51
C
C
M
M
Y
Y
CM
CM
MY
MY
CY
CY
CMY
CMY
K
K
AR-LaCometa.indd 460
23/12/2014 13:52
GALERIA LA COMETA_right_.pdf
1
18/12/14
15:55
C
M
Y
CM
MY
CY
CMY
K
AR-LaCometa.indd 461
23/12/2014 13:52
418_AR.indd 418
23/12/2014 13:52
“iart” is an annual art and cultural event in Saudi Arabia, Jeddah City. 20 days of celebration starting from the first of February and it will be the most important and premier event for modern and contemporary arts and culture inside Saudi Arabia, especially Jeddah the capital city of art. The event focuses on how deep and how fast the progress of art and culture is in Saudi Arabia, through a collection of shows that cover all types of visual arts, in collaboration with all art and culture related organizations in Saudi Arabia. “iart” is a message to each professional, as well as, amateur artist to participate in this phenomenon and present him/herself to the whole world. The event will act as a bridge between us and the whole world of art and culture, showing Saudi Arabia’s artistic and cultural progress of the past 5 years. “iart” is a melting pot of visual arts, theater, video and performance arts, spread across several venues in the city of Jeddah alongside the main and official venue “TheGallery” Art Space which is located at the heart of Jeddah City with the astonishing view and spectacular atmosphere covering more than 4000 m2 space. “iart” is one of the initiatives by Arabian Wings for Fine Arts Foundation, founded by Najlaa Felemban and Mohammed Bahrawi in Saudi Arabia. It is regarded as a non-Profit art Foundation, and officially registered in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Since its foundation in 2006, it has been keen on achieving the goals of its strategy to support modern and contemporary arts in MENA region.
#iart # انا ـ فن- www.arabian-wings.com
dis Art Reviwu.indd 1
dis Art Review.indd 431
12/13/14 5:19 PM 23/12/2014 13:52
AR-CasaRiegner ML.indd 44
23/12/2014 13:53
Points of View J.J. Charlesworth Copy / Erase
Sam Jacob How to pick out curtains for the dmz
Andrew Berardini That place – what was it exactly?
Jonathan T.D. Neil These days, everyone’s a…
Mark Sladen Blank verse
Maria Lind A Tehran sensation
Mike Watson How do we exist?
Jonathan Grossmalerman The benefits and pitfalls of the sharing economy Oliver Basciano Off-space No 25: ApArt, Copenhagen
J.J. Charlesworth Copy / Erase I admit I don’t spend too much time in my ArtReview writings discussing the merits of Banksy, Britain’s best-loved graffiti artist and comedy situationist. But since September, the art of Banksy has become something of a preoccupation for the citizens of my seaside hometown of Folkestone. At the end of September, with the town’s contemporary-art Folkestone Triennial in full swing, the wall of a local amusement arcade became the site for Banksy’s latest work of unsolicited muralism, Art Buff. Greeted with enthusiasm by locals and the local press, the image, of an old lady dutifully listening to an audioguide while looking down at an empty plinth, was soon covered with a sheet of acrylic, apparently to protect the masterpiece from some less-thancomplimentary graffiti. But on the closing weekend of the Triennial in November, residents woke to discover an out-of-town building crew diligently and professionally cutting Art Buff, bricks, mortar and all, out of the wall of the arcade. The expert removal of Art Buff was the doing of sometime celebrity photographer and now art dealer Robin Barton, the latest of a number of removals of Banksy works that Barton has then gone on to sell privately. Art Buff, Barton explained to irate local artists and the press, would be shipped off to Miami, to be auctioned, the proceeds to benefit a cancer trust established by the owners of the arcade, inheritors of recently deceased local amusement property tycoon Jimmy Godden. Art Buff did turn up in Miami, but not at auction, appearing on the stand of Hamptons-based New York street-art gallery Keszler Gallery. At time of writing, it’s still for sale on the gallery’s website. Art Buff turns out to be a hipster variant of the ‘Emperor’s new clothes’ complaint against contemporary art, in which gullible ordinary
people (the old lady) are told by the powerful (the ‘official’ artworld, represented by the plinth) that there is something meaningful to see where there isn’t. Squarely aimed as pithy critique of the urban-regeneration-and-art jamboree that is the Folkestone Triennial, Art Buff missed its mark, since this year’s Triennial (curated by Lewis Biggs) comprised works that were pointedly didactic and self-consciously accessible to a nonspecialist public, to a generally positive public response. But Banksy has a habit, by now, of producing images that, while dressed in the garb of ‘edgy’ street art, are really very conformist. Conformist
Perversely, the habits of art market exclusivity, social hierarchy and artworld cultural elitism reproduce themselves in the supposedly demotic space of street art in the sense that whoever Banksy might be, their opinions tend to articulate the current political and cultural views of educated urban liberals. As The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones put it, Banksy’s ‘glib satire is typical of his instinct for trendy political content to impress his bourgeois public. Homing in… on a widely discussed issue, Banksy addresses not the teenagers who used to be graffiti’s users, but – if I may – Guardian readers.’ By October, however, Jones’s spinning opinion-compass was back to defending Banksy’s profound political insights, lamenting the obliteration, by the local council in Clacton-on-Sea following complaints of ‘racism’, of another mural, this time satirising the supposedly antiimmigrant attitudes of local people; five dumpy
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-POV.indd 45
grey pigeons holding up placards declaring ‘migrants not welcome’, ranged against a solitary, colourful ‘foreign’ bird. ‘This is the best Banksy I have never seen,’ declared Jones, metaphysically. The work’s obvious contempt for the ‘provincial’ attitudes of dullard, ordinary folk isn’t exactly subtle. But then such street art was only really ever speaking to a cultured, metropolitan public, which is why it has become a hit with art collectors. As Keszler Gallery’s Stephen Keszler declared haughtily to Folkestone’s local paper, Banksy’s work is for ‘people with taste and money’, adding that ‘every complainer would stop complaining if Banksy would paint on their property’. Maybe. But for the time being, the ‘people with taste and money’ are keen to keep it for themselves. Local authorities, meanwhile, tend to play into the hands of this odd market for bricks by fretting about its potential market value. And local opinion – barring the occasions where Banksy’s contempt for locals exceeds even their tolerance – tends to buy into this culture of exclusivity, petitioning, as they did in Folkestone, for the return of ‘our Banksy’. So, perversely, the habits of art market exclusivity, social hierarchy and artworld cultural elitism reproduce themselves in the supposedly demotic space of street art. There’s a simple solution to all this, though. Since there are no intellectual property rights at stake (who knows who Banksy is?), we’re at liberty to copy these murals as much as we like, even if we think they’re terrible. Make every wall a canvas for everyone or not at all. Or to stop these images from entering the closed circuit of private consumption, paint over them the instant they appear. Copy. Erase. Just don’t fetishise.
45
23/12/2014 14:06
Jonathan T.D. Neil These days, everyone’s a… Nearly $1.5 billion worth of contemporary art changed hands in November, and on cue, the opinion pages rolled out the mindless machinery of whiny decriers – Bendor Grosvenor in the Financial Times most recently – who claim that art has lost its way, that the market is rigged, that it’s a bubble, that it needs regulation, that contemporary art is a hoax, a sham, a fraud. This has been going on for years now, for as long as the contemporary market has been on its exponential uptick, which is to say since the beginning of the new millennium roughly, when the seasonal auctions have offered regular opportunities for the moneyed to buy expensive art and the unmoneyed to bitch about it (and haven’t we been hearing the ‘fraud’ and ‘hoax’ bit since the days of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon?). These complaints, no matter who writes them or where they Start taking notes, appear, all share here comes a list some basic features: 1
2
The writer assumes a position of superior knowledge. Only he or she knows that there is a con game being played, that a Rubens is more valuable, more important, than a Robert Gober, and that the markets have bubbled up to a breaking point that threatens to undo the very name of ‘art’. These writers speak simultaneously to two audiences. The first audience is the every-
3
4
man, the sensible salaried masses who do not have millions to spend on art and who presumably care little about it except for the fact that some other people seem to spend so much money on it and the newspapers like to let them know about it. It’s a brilliant backbend, to pander in one breath, and in the other to condescend. The second audience consists of the billionaires themselves, who these writers hope will come to their columns like the converted to their prophet in order to have it revealed that great sums of their hardly earned money have been thrown away on worthless trinkets. It’s not the poor dupes’ faults, though, such writers tell us, because the market, namely the auction houses, allow for all sorts of shady practices – third-party guarantees, irrevocable bids, gallerists protecting their artists’ markets – which buyers could never hope to understand (even if a twelve-year-old can) and which scream out for regulation. Someone, they all seem to think, needs to save this whiter-than-white-collar class from itself. And finally, History, the writers know, will judge our contemporary moment harshly. What is proffered on the contemporary auction block just doesn’t compare to the giants of the past – which are still wildly expensive, mind you, but credibly so – nor does it compare to the
best work being made today, which ducks the hungry billions, some of it by getting down on its hands and knees in the dirt and weeds of media theory and social practice, the flyover country today’s collectorate looks down upon while jetting to the next art fair, but a flyover country that still needs your money. Again the pandering; again the condescension. Though it might not look like it, today we are a long way away from Tobias Meyer’s 2007 claim that ‘the best art is the most expensive because the market is so smart’. Few believe that the big evening sales reveal anything other than the willingness of an exceedingly small class of exceedingly wealthy people (fewer than 500) to spend money on the work of an exceedingly small number of artists (fewer than 100). It’s a wealth issue, not an art issue. What the decriers lament isn’t some loss to the name and history of art, it’s the credibility that they believe this money is meant to reflect. Despite themselves, then, they are defenders of the wealth of the rich, who they believe are being victimised by some apparent breakdown in the apparatus and who would – if they would just listen! – align their millions to the taste of those who know better than they the value of art. Everyone’s a critic? No, today it seems everyone’s an art adviser.
Robert Gober, Three Urinals, 1988, enamel, plaster, wire, lath and wood, 55 × 39 × 36 cm (each). Courtesy Christie’s Images Limited 2014
46
AR-JanFeb-POV.indd 46
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:06
Maria Lind A Tehran sensation The sensation is not the acclaimed collection of Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art with its Calder mobile and Judd ‘stack’ currently on display. Neither is it the remarkable Monir Farmanfarmaian’s permanent mirror work at the (virtually untouched since 1978) Niavaran Cultural Center. Nor is the sensation the many interesting young artists, curators and writers active in Iran’s capital today. The real sensation is something less expected: the late architect Hans Hollein’s 1978 project for the Glassware and Ceramic Museum of Iran. I learned about this well-kept secret after seeing Armin Linke’s photographs, which were included alongside those of Aglaia Konrad, in the recent Hollein retrospective (Hans Hollein: Everything Is Architecture) at Vienna’s Museum für Angewandte Kunst and was taken by their ‘out-of-time-ness’. Inaugurated in a former Qajar palace in the centre of the city, the museum was founded to hold works dating from prehistory, through Achaemenid times and the Islamic period, and on to the twentieth century. Of necessity, a collection of glass and ceramics needs protection, so showcases became central to the presentation. In fact, the vitrines are the lead characters in this theatrical display: sculptural structures inhabiting all the spaces of the museum. As with other examples of inventive display techniques, such as Frederick Kiesler’s
theatre exhibitions in Vienna and Paris during the 1920s, new practical and aesthetic solutions were pushed by the requirement that they should not touch the existing walls in the lavishly decorated interiors. No less than 120 different types of both classic- and science-fictional-looking showcases in highly polished stainless steel and chromeplated steel feature here. They have a pronounced presence in and of themselves, openly defying the assumption that display settings could, or should, be neutral, with technical fittings such as integrated and cleverly used lighting, air conditioning and humidity control. All of the cases look surprisingly postmodern for their time, and each is radically different from the next. The language is recognisable from Hollein’s shop designs in Vienna, as well as from his well-known art museum in Mönchengladbach – the man evidently had a firm grasp of the rhetorics of display, commercial as well as museological. With the Tehran museum, Hollein himself expressed the ambition both to allow for an educational approach and to highlight the status of the items on view as artworks – to facilitate emotional encounters with the objects. For example, glass is revealed as an example of early Armin Linke, Museum of Glass and Ceramics, Tehran Iran, 2014. © and courtesy the artist
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-POV.indd 47
mass-production, and as something that can be an exquisite unique piece. A glass rosewater sprinkler from eleventh-century Gorgan and a mould-blown glass bottle from first- or secondcentury Azerbaijan stand out among the latter. But what was meant as a distinct and yet integrated presentation is actually divided: in texts on Hollein’s contribution to the museum, mention of the items in the collection is absent, while in the material found at and transmitted by the museum, the architect has ‘disappeared’. It is as if there is an elephant in the crystal store. Tehran’s Museum of Contemporary Art, the Niavaran Cultural Center and the Glassware and Ceramic Museum were all connected to Farah Diba, the wife of the last Shah. They testify to her cultural ambitions and now appear as time capsules. Rulers and regimes come and go, as do demonstrations and other countermovements, while these institutions remain the same. In this context, Hollein’s display comes across as out of time but not due to the same 1970s-aesthetic flavour that haunts the art museum and the cultural centre. Since its genesis, Hollein’s museum concept has played on the antique and futuristic at the same time, thus being genuinely temporally ambivalent. Or truly anachronistic, to speak with the langage of theorist Mark Fisher. It is indeed the most intriguing collection display that I have ever seen.
47
23/12/2014 14:06
Sam Jacob How to pick out curtains for the dmz United Nations-blue is a smokey blue. An odd unsaturated blue that embodies a midcentury design sensibility (it was originally chosen for lapel pins for the first meeting of the un, in 1948). It is, to quote the organisation, ‘the opposite of red, the war colour’, but its symbolism also carries with it the colour of our planet. It’s the colour of a pale winter sky. Pantone 279 is a 92 percent match. But however you choose to describe it, it’s a strange colour for curtains. Yet here they are, stiffly pleated hessian panels, the kind of fabric in a Photo-Me booth, hung over the tiny patches of glazing they try to obscure. But then these are no ordinary curtains. Rather than the product of an interior designer’s ‘mood board’, they are the result of geopolitics, of the history of the twentieth century, the result of 65 years of Cold War politics. These are the curtains that hang in a Portakabin-type structure positioned directly over the border between North and South Korea in the Joint Security Area (jsa), the point of contact between two countries that are still officially at war. The building – the Military Armistice Commission Conference Room (mac), to give it its full title – is the fulcrum of a complex spatial choreography orchestrated around military aggression and diplomatic protocols. The border is marked by a line of concrete slabs that run midway between two buildings facing off against each other. On the southern side is Freedom House. Despite this overblown propagandese (endemic, at least on the southern side, where a village in the northern sector of the dmz is dubbed ‘Propaganda Village’ while a southern equivalent is, of course, ‘Freedom Village’), it looks like a regional airport building
48
AR-JanFeb-POV.indd 48
displaying the strangely formless quality that is the result of all the freedoms of corporatedesign decisions and market-led construction practices. On the northern side is a sober classicalmodernist pavilion, an authoritarian, austere form of architecture. In other words, both structures come straight from central casting. The border passes right through the centre of the mac building, and it’s the axis around which the interior is arranged. Inevitably this creates a conceptual intensity, despite the hut’s banality (blue curtains excepted). A table sits on the line of the border, glossy-laminated in mahogany-effect. Seats are arranged on either side, allowing officials to remain notionally
The strange interiority of the hut is unique. The room is a kind of thickening of the notional line of border that allows the abstract idea to be occupied within their own space during negotiations. Microphones – apparently on, 24/7 – sit on the exact borderline. At either end is a door, locked by key from the inside to prevent unauthorised access from either side. This strange interiority of the mac hut is unique. It sits not only within the jsa but within the Demilitarized Zone too: a 4km-wide strip of land that runs the entire width of the Korean peninsula. Within these (roughly) 100,000 hectares is the mac room (something like 4 by 10 metres), a space within like a trick compartment in a magician’s prop. The room is a kind of thickenPhoto courtesy the author
ing of the notional line of border that allows the abstract idea to be occupied. The discussions that take place here are the discussions that have constructed the border itself, and this room is the place where the mechanics of the border condition can be maintained, adjusted and tuned. This space within the border, in other words, is the space in which the border itself is constructed. If the mac and its strange interior are the product of the Korean peninsula’s own specific history, so too are all borders. The notional edge of a nation is an expression of that nation’s own self-identity. It’s where the politics and myths of a nation are made real. It’s at the literal extremity of a state that its identity is articulated. And at their most extreme, these borders are precipitated as separation walls that divide places such as the West Bank, that run along the Greece–Turkey border in Cyprus, that form parts of the Mexico–United States border and so on. The same gesture that slung Hadrian’s Wall across the northern limit of the Roman Empire. Even the most liberalised idea of a border, say the ones you can cross without a passport (for eu citizens, at least) from one eu member state to another, is an expression of a political idea. The very same lines that history has etched into the landscape, over which blood has been spilled for generations, are now lubricated and covered over by the ideology of free movement. The absence of border, in other words, is as much a defining act as the highly policed border. But that a border is a fundamentally architectural construction is worth remembering as rising waves of European nationalism lobby to bring stiffer controls aligning with their own idea of nationhood, at the same time as globalisation and multinational corporations are eroding the very idea of the nation state.
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:06
HANS ULRICH OBRIST ANAÑAM-YOH-REYA Conversations in Colombia. ANAÑAM-YOH-REYA Conversaciones en Colombia.
Álvaro Barrios María Fernanda Cardoso Antonio Caro Danilo Dueñas Beatriz González Mateo López María Angélica Medina Jorge Orlando Melo Antanas Mockus Oscar Muñoz Bernardo Ortiz Luis Ospina María Isabel Rueda Gabriel Sierra Doris Salcedo José Antonio Suárez Londoño Juan Gabriel Vásquez Edited by Karen Marta Published by La Oficina del Doctor, Casas Riegner www.casasriegner.com
a book by
Distributed in North America by ARTBOOK | D.A.P.
casa_r_RHP_FINAL.indd 49
23/12/2014 13:53
Mark Sladen Blank verse Ryan Trecartin and Ed Atkins are both artists who conspicuously employ the technologies and styles of the digital world in their work and who, moreover, are often thought to comment on the place of digital technology in our culture. Both artists have enjoyed significant institutional exposure in recent years, and last year both had high-profile exhibitions in London, offering an opportunity for comparison. One feature of this conjunction was the way it made apparent an aspect of Trecartin and Atkins’s works that is less frequently commented upon, but which is arguably central to their depiction of the digital era: the role of language. Trecartin showed at the Zabludowicz Collection, where he presented a reworking of Priority Innfield, a large installation – premiered at the Venice Biennale in 2013 – in which a group of the artist’s films are staged within sculptural environments made with his regular collaborator, Lizzie Fitch. At the core of the installation are videoworks featuring the same cast, sets and fictional world: a future society in which posthumans study their human ancestors through a game-slash-university, revealed in a disjointed sequence of funny and disturbing scenes. Atkins’s London show, earlier in the year, took place at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery. Its central work was a set of three synchronised projections titled Ribbons (2014) – cgi works featuring a self-pitying digital avatar called Dave who is trapped in a cycle of drinking, singing and soliloquising. Commentators on Trecartin’s films have tended to concentrate on the club kids and other exhibitionists who populate his works, their campy performances and the Internet-era video style through which Trecartin presents them. However, what becomes more apparent when viewing the core films of Priority Innfield is the central role played by Trecartin’s script. A set of key words and phrases repeat throughout these films, including ideas of evolution and
50
AR-JanFeb-POV.indd 50
devolution – the citizens of the future have apparently evolved into animations, just as dinosaurs apparently evolved into chickens – and a mashup of terms coming from frat culture and reality television. This vocabulary is on full display in the films’ credits, which feature designations such as ‘alphabetical stunt chicken items’, ‘basic animated concept babe’ and ‘basic sorority audition troll’. In contrast, commentators on Atkins’s work have tended to emphasise the hyperreal qualities of his high-res animations, and the uncanny qualities of the bodies that populate his world. But even a superficial encounter with Atkins’s work at the Serpentine would have revealed the importance of language in his practice. Ribbons is composed of a tissue of textual fragments, including speech, song, subtitles, intertitles and a host of tattooed words that appear on Dave’s forehead and naked torso (‘Don’t Die’, ‘Bankrupt’). Much of this material derives from a prior text by Atkins (released to accompany the current showing of Ribbons at Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin) in the form of a prose poem addressed to a character called X, a love letter by turns affectionate, despairing and nihilistic (‘So X, asleep at the wheel, windscreen tear-streaked, speeding’), and which was echoed in the London show by a set of annotated text panels that were propped up around the gallery. The language employed by Trecartin and Atkins in their various scripts is superficially distinct, the former’s highly demotic and the latter’s often absurdly literary. But both use language that is characteristic of the digital age, freely blending the jargon of marketing and social media. The following is a typical exchange between a group of Trecartin’s characters: “There’s a rumour that there’s like an antiviral on the market… And it will turn you into Ed Atkins, Ribbons (detail), 2014. Courtesy Cabinet, London, and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin
a consistent state of night vision… And this state of constant night vision will forever lock you into linearity… Sounds really stupid right?” There is a sense of individuals attempting – and often failing – to map themselves via corporate product, its processes of allegiance and promises of transformation. Atkins also deploys such jargon-heavy language, as for instance in this excerpt from one of the aforementioned text panels, replete with pseudo-precise lingo that offers so much more than it delivers: ‘As in: what will suffice to prevent disastrous interpretative divergence? – The judicious application of exclamation marks: a deft shuffle of enthusiastic dark-haired auditionee surrogates?’ Moreover, Ribbons also contains an oblique but furious commentary on social media’s spurious processes of This column affirmation and disavowal, and is may help sprinkled with references to trolls, prevent haters and likes (‘publicly nursed disastrous image, pruned in careful threeinterpretative quarter profiles and vapid proclidivergence vities’, as the Berlin text has it). Both Trecartin and Atkins are shrewd observers of the role of language as a system through which the subject negotiates his or her place in the world. Both also have a keen understanding of the oddities and particularities of contemporary language systems, most notably those that spread their dominion over digital junkspace. Beyond this, both artists create loops of language, endlessly rehearsed and re-rehearsed, within narrative structures that resemble nothing less than nightmarish videogames offering only an illusion of advancement. The two artists may deal with very different identities in the projects analysed here – Trecartin with variously queer and female identities, and Atkins with that of a straight male melancholic – but both reveal a horrific vision of the contemporary subject’s entrapment, an entrapment defined primarily through language.
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:06
Mike Watson How do we exist? In Michel Houellebecq’s novel Atomised (1998), the French novelist presents a kind a nihilistic image of the human species as a pathetic scourge that will shortly drive itself to its own extinction due to the advance of genetic cloning. The book’s end features an epitaph to humanity: ‘we think it just to render this last tribute to humanity, a homage which itself will one day disappear, buried beneath the sands of time. It is necessary that this tribute be made, if only once. This book is dedicated to mankind.’ Although being by all accounts a misanthrope, even Houellebecq cannot resist expressing a sense of nostalgia for the blighted human project via his premature eulogy. Indeed, in the moment that a nihilistic statement is uttered – for example, ‘there is no inherent purpose to existence’, or, simply, ‘we don’t exist’ – a contrary statement is immediately bought to the fore. Put simply, a hypothesised lack of purpose to existence presupposes the possibility of a purpose. For this reason, some of the bleakest philosophers are – wittingly or not – the most life-affirmative. Among them is Ray Brassier, who in 2007 published Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, a book that questions the very basis of human existence on several counts. For Brassier, the chemical composition of thought itself and the fact that scientists can trace both the beginning and the impending end of the universe (‘roughly one trillion, trillion, trillion years from now’) – thus sandwiching human life between two endless voids and thereby making it redundant – are just two facts supporting the nihilist hypothesis. Though this lends itself to a resounding rhetorical question: if we don’t exist, how do we account for the
clearly visible changing forms and sensory impressions that make up our perceived reality? However, this can be simply countered with the following argument: the impressions and feelings which make up ‘reality’ are merely complex chemical interactions within one essentially purposeless object (the human object) positioned among endless others (including cars, scooters, trees, china dolls, pebbles, wheelchairs, chocolates, Santa Claus and tumbleweed). How, given this, does one ultimately extricate oneself from the void of nonexistence?
How do we account for the clearly visible changing forms and sensory impressions that make up our perceived reality? The exhibition Todestriebe (Deathwish), dedicated to the works of the Italian artist-filmmaker duo Masbedo (Nicolò Massazza and Iacopo Bedogni) at the Fondazione Merz, Turin, presents a response to such a question. Of the nine videoworks on display, two arguably point to the inherent contradictions that restore the living, existing human subject to the heart of a null existence. Ionesco Suite (2013) is a 17-minute video shot in Iceland in an interior room of an isolated house. The work features a table filled with sumptuous glass vases and containers, onto which fall confetti and marshmallows, evoking a light, if not saccharine mood. This continues until, in the last minutes of the film, a thick
grey-brown concrete sludge is poured onto the table, smashing the glassware and obliterating any trace of the buildup of confetti and marshmallow. As the concrete begins to cover the floor, a distinct shift in mood is created as an apparent violence is done to the seeming ‘innocence’ of the prior table arrangement. Despite the action taking place in an enclosed room (in which even the artists were not present during filming), it is essentially the human viewer who makes the scene possible and who, further, distinguishes different moods associated with the inanimate objects that interact in the space. While it could be argued that the scene was created by the artists to evoke specific moods and therefore is not the same as normal lived experience, it could be countered that normal lived experience precisely comprises the interaction of random objects that are only given sense by the human object, via its unique nervous apparatus. Often the role of art is to draw attention to this fact. Elsewhere, the earliest work in the show (a two-channel video installation made in collaboration with Houellebecq, as one of several collaborations between the artist duo and the author) features a text adapted from Houellebecq’s 1999 collection Rester Vivant – La Poursuite du Bonheur and ends with the line: ‘Your mission is to go towards truth… I’m not afraid. Fundamentally, you’re already dead.’ And herein lies the central antimony evidenced by the works of Masbedo and Houellebecq (even if he might be loath to admit it): if these are the conditions of our nonexistence, the human being is peculiarly defiant in disobeying them and giving meaning to the meaningless.
Masbedo, Ionesco Suite, 2013, single-channel video transferred to hd, 16:9, 16 min 55 sec, edition 5 + 2ap. Courtesy the artists and Sammlung Wemhöner, Herford
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-POV.indd 51
51
23/12/2014 14:06
Andrew Berardini That place – what was it exactly? A message would arrive a few days before. An address with a time, always after nine. Later just the day. I knew about it from its inception, the protracted negotiations to secure its location, the various collaborators, the tireless fundraising. I saw it under construction, a raw shitty box first kissed with glassy Venetian blue plaster, then cork flooring, finally a dead forest of white oak: angled, benched, lockered and tabled, designed by Edwin Chan after his quarter century working with Frank Gehry. I sat at the piano handed down for decades at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, played (probably) by Beuys and loaned by Christopher Williams, a regular after his retrospective opened. The painting by Mark Grotjahn hung a few feet away, the photograph by Jeff Wall in the long hall; the unmistakable aquarium by Pierre Huyghe filled the heart of the second chamber. None of these legends required mythmaking beyond whatever myths the artists themselves made. All three came besides. Just after it opened, the emcee, proprietor, author and artist of this strange social sculpture, Piero Golia, stood above the aquarium with its floating stone pouring a scintillating shower of live bait, each little creature a golden shimmer wriggling through and down to the strange crustaceans dancing along the bottom, tracing
52
AR-JanFeb-POV.indd 52
drawings in the sand with their spidery legs. Ball-capped and bearded, skin snaked with tattoos, with a single gemstone in his front tooth, Golia tended to everything and everyone with deft subtlety during the 15 or so months his indefinable project lived. What was it precisely? A private club, an old-fashioned salon, a gesamtkunstwerk, a happening without the rough-hewn counterculture of Kaprow or the Hollywooding of Doug Aitken (though it was behind an unmarked door in Hollywood in the back of a historic theatre that this project lived, a glowing neon for a defunct beauty school as a beacon above it)? The Chalet was all these things, but more precisely, the subtle emanations of what a space could be. Every time a new cast of characters, a series of odd encounters. Some were hired, like the magician that hid my five of diamonds on the shelf behind us, the elegant bartender with the wise face who asked with invariable kindness whether I would like something to drink; a few just started showing up, like the white-robed Indian fellow who sat quietly in the corner and engaged anyone in deep discussion. The ∞ Angeles Ladies’ Choir volunteered. I saw all the museum directors of the city there, most Exterior view of the Chalet, Los Angeles, 2014. Photo: Jeremy Bittermann
aka My great fuckin’ life going to clubs you’re not invited to (and now never will be)
of the critics, quite a few artists, art dealers and oligarchs, along with the odd actor and novelists, Orlando Bloom and Sasha Grey, Bret Easton Ellis and Balthazar Getty, and these were only a few from a pop culture of which I’m mostly ignorant. Even if unrecognised, anonymous or celebrated, you figured whoever stood there had done something right to end up there. I did not see it all. I saw the Polynesian dancers but was travelling during the Tom Lawson Ideas of exclusivity and meritocracy show in the back of the intimately linked here moving truck and the Stephen Galloway dance performance. I definitely regretted missing Stefan Simchowitz whipped by the dominatrix, but I did catch the ucla Bruin Marching Band, brass blaring, drums thumping, gold-sashed and ostrich-plumed, on its second and final march past a roasted pig and through the last night of the space, a celebration of the first day of installation for Huyghe’s retrospective opening at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Now that this enigma has sunsetted off Sunset Blvd, the mystery still pulsates, its generosity sorely missed. A beguiling carnival that pulled its stakes before I could understand how deep were its wonders, how curious was its passing.
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:06
AR-Galeria Nueveochenta.indd 468
23/12/2014 13:54
Jonathan Grossmalerman The benefits and pitfalls of the sharing economy I’ve just discovered the most amazing thing… Kickstarter! Do you know about it? It’s a place on the Internet! Just past the porn part. You can go there and ask for money, and then, rather than one big person giving it all to you, a thousand veritable nobodies chip in what they can, and through the magic of maths it becomes a whole lot of money! It’s absolutely astounding! I didn’t believe it myself until my assistant Neal showed me how easy it was to set up a so-called Kickstarter ‘campaign’. In no time at all we were off and running! Boom! Free money! You see, I’ve been in one of those jams… a money jam… the kind that happens when you want something very badly but don’t have the money. You understand, after all, that it’s not been an easy year for me, what with my fruitless search for a gallery and the return of my high-maintenance muse Joyce. Yes! It’s true! She’s returned from the cold, black night! The band is back together! I already feel as though I’m on firmer footing with the world. Regardless of my financial situation, which has forced me to learn how to budget. And I’ve had to do it all on the sly! I’m simply too scared to look into those big brownish, maybe blue or hazellike eyes and tell her I’m broke! If she does already know it, she’s too kind to let on and, bless her, continues to spend generously. I’m so desperate I’ve even taken
to watching ‘Life Hacking’ videos on YouTube! I’ve learned stuff too! Like, for instance, milk lasts several days longer ‘in the fridge’ than left on the counter. The same rule applies to any number of things, and I now, frankly, really enjoy the daily ritual of putting items ‘in the fridge’, which, in turn, has gotten awfully full of things. It’s an embarrassment of riches in there! Did I tell you I also heat my entire 200sqm loft with a tea light under a flowerpot? It’s amazing, or at least it would be if it worked! God it’s cold in here! In any case, what I meant to write about was Kickstarter and how awesome it is. You can just ask for money! Can you believe it? And then they give it to you! I’m repeating myself, aren’t I!? Kickstarter is awesome!!! But it’s true! Anything! Let’s say, for the sake of argument, you wanted a helicopter. Perhaps a Robinson r22 Beta ii, nothing too big, but certainly large enough to get you and a few friends where you want to go… eg, your beach house in Amagansett (you know, just as an example) without having to deal with that miserable Long Island Expressway traffic (what the hell is up with that, right?). Or maybe you need it for a show where you were going to paint a helicopter… or hell, maybe you want to paint a few helicopters! I mean, no point in holding yourself back, and
with Kickstarter, the sky’s the limit. I mean, it doesn’t only have to be a helicopter, although who doesn’t want a helicopter? It could be any number of things. Things such as paint, brushes, canvas, a Warhol, nice shoes, making a video, a suit that actually fits right, a bionic hand, camera people who have been waiting patiently to be paid, a good Calder print, production assistants, makeup lady (less patient), Soho Liquors, studio assistant, ‘research’ trip, more hb pencils, entertainment lawyers, a boat, an ingenious invention, an electronic scale, etc. The only sticking point seems to be in filling out the ‘Kickstarter Rewards’ boxes. Am I supposed to send Grossmalerman knickknacks to these people? If so, what? What could I possibly send them that isn’t worth a great deal more than the paltry $25 they’ve deigned to send me? Which, I might add, is only worth anything to me provided it is ‘bundled’ with the $25 a few Everything thousand other people have sent is cool when me. I suppose I can come up with you’re part of a team some tchotchke or other, but the thought of it really grates on me. It suddenly feels as though I’m working for the money, and that’s not very ‘sharing economy’, is it? A real conundrum. Is it possible that I have stumbled upon Kickstarter’s Achilles heel?
Courtesy the artist
54
AR-JanFeb-POV.indd 54
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:06
THYSSEN-BORNEMISZA ART CONTEMPORARY PRESENTS THE AGE OF
FEB 19 – MAY 31 2015
AI WEIWEI ◊ REVITAL COHEN & TUUR VAN BALEN THE OTOLITH GROUP ◊ CHARLES STANKIEVECH CAMILLE HENROT ◊ ARSENIY ZHILYAEV ◊ ROGER HIORNS URSULA MAYER ◊ IAIN BALL ◊ JULIAN CHARRIERE KATIE PATERSON ◊ MARGUERITE HUMEAU JEAN KATAMBAYI MUKENDI ◊ OLIVER LARIC ERICK BELTRÁN ◊ SUZANNE TREISTER GUAN XIAO
CURATED BY BORIS ONDREICKA AND NADIM SAMMAN
THYSSSEN-BORNEMISZA ART CONTEMPORARY–VIENNA WWW.TBA21.ORG
AR-TBA.indd 55
23/12/2014 13:54
Oliver Basciano Off-space No 25: ApArt, Copenhagen I probably should have looked at the email from my colleague a bit closer. Instead I just noted down the address of the Copenhagen hotel, printed out my boarding pass and left the office for the day. My flight lands around midday. I look up the metro stop (Nørreport) and end my journey, bag in hand, at the reception of the Kong Arthur, a fairly swanky establishment a stone’s throw from the banks of the Peblinge Sø, one of the Danish capital’s three rectangular lakes. I give the receptionist my name. She looks me up on the reservation system, and says, “Oh, you’ll be needing the key.” I nod, in the manner of someone who is not sure how to respond to so obvious a declaration. Perhaps understanding this, she elaborates: “The lift key.” I’m not sure how to articulate a more comprehending nod so I say nothing. “Come with me,” she says. We walk over to the lift together. As we step in, she presses the door-close button and places what seems to be a staff-only key into a slot above the buttons for each of the hotel’s floors. “You turn it like this, and this will then take you to the apartment.” As the lift rises, so does my level of confusion. We step out beyond the advertised top storey into a small corridor. A pair of musical instruments are placed on a shelf. There’s a door that the receptionist unlocks, leading me into a private apartment. There’s a gouge that runs the length of the wall, mortar dust still evident on the chic wooden floors. Next to the light switch is a handrail; the sort that was installed in my grandma’s house. “The kitchen,” the receptionist announces. It is nice, big: the apogee of Scandinavian-design cool. A Post-It with the wi-fi code sits on the vast central table. Passing a bedroom, we squeeze past an armchair placed
56
AR-JanFeb-POV.indd 56
in the middle of the passageway. A noise becomes apparent. A radio seems to be tuning itself, restlessly moving from station to station. In a spacious lounge, two wood boards are mounted on opposing walls, half covered in foil, and connected by wires that stretch across the room under a central rug, emerging either side as messy trip hazards. As we enter the last room, the bedroom from which the noise is emitting, the receptionist smiles. “You can turn it off when you go to sleep, of course.” “Uh, ok, thanks.” All becomes a bit clearer when my despairing colleague arrives an hour later. He explains that since 2010 this apartment has doubled as a project space programmed by Hans Christian Smed, who invites (mostly) Danish artists and curators to coordinate a revolving series of exhibitions, the space both open to the public during the day and available to rent as accommodation at night. That gouge in the kitchen? That’s an installation, Head to Mouth (all works, 2014), by a Danish artist who goes by the name of Pind. The old bit of rope hung on a screw, next to an empty brass hook in the kitchen? Both by him too, Untitled. As is the placement of the chair, part of an ongoing series that attempts to throw the viewer off his pace by skewering – making odd – the everyday. The wall works and rug in the lounge are by fos. These peculiarities – what would be annoyances in the context of a hotel room or rented apartment – are made normal under the context of art. The shelf with the saxophone and recorder, Swedish Rhapsody, is a collaboration between the two artists. fos, Someones Functions Lonely As It May Seem, 2014. Courtesy the artist
Not all the exhibitions at the space are site-specific. Sophie Dupont staged a durational performance last summer. Titled Marking Breath (2014), the artist scratched a tally on a sheet of metal for every breath exhaled while remaining at a desk in the apartment from sunrise to sunset. Erika Severin exhibited her intricate War Paper Tapestries (2014) last spring; Mads Lindberg showed a series of abstract, ‘process based’ paintings in 2013, taking over almost every inch of wall space; and Suzette Gemzøe exhibited her dazzling blue abstract watercolours on both paper and fabric, hung from the walls and ceiling, in spring (though the show was titled Blue Pressure of a Chambermaid). My lack of preparation for encountering fos and Pind’s exhibition, You Are Welcome, proved enlightening. It allowed these small modifications to one’s everyday knowledge of ‘good’ interior design to be experienced in the rawest sense. I encountered the odd, out-of-place handrail not in the safety of ‘art’ (by fos, it’s titled Someones Functions Lonely As It May Seem, 2014) but in the cold reality of everyday expectations (cool design and mobility issues don’t go together, the work notes). My lack of expectation also brought into focus the allowances made for art. A cable stretched across the room? Unacceptable in a hotel room, totally allowed once it’s identified as art. That night we go out to a party. I get back late, a bit drunk. I go to the bathroom. As I clean my teeth, leaning slightly on the sink, I stare for an age at an empty toilet roll tube, its holder attached directly to the otherwise magnificent Jacuzzi bath. What a weird place for a hotel to put the toilet roll, I think.
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:06
2011-13
E, 2009
JOHN VIRTUE, THE SEA, PAINTING NO.7, 2011-13
17 January - 12 April
John Virtue The Sea
ORI GERSHT, EVADERS, ON EDGE, 2009
7 February - 26 April
Ori Gersht Don’t Look Back
towner Devonshire Park College Road Eastbourne BN21 4JJ townereastbourne.org.uk John Virtue: The Sea presented in association with Marlborough Fine Art & The Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts.
Towner FP -.indd 445
23/12/2014 13:55
Entry by digital submission only
Call for entries
Submission deadline 13 February 2015
royalacademy.org.uk/submit
Summer Exhibition 2015 B P S P OT L I G H T S N E W B R U TA L I S T I M A G E 1 9 4 9 – 1 9 5 5
‘ P O O R M A N ’ S P I C T U R E G A L L E R Y ’ : V I C TO R I A N A R T A N D S T E R E O S CO P I C P H OTO G R A P H Y M A R LO W M O S S S PA C E S O F B L A C K M O D E R N I S M : LO N D O N 1 9 1 9 – 1 9 3 9 KAREN KNORR WILLIAM HOGARTH DAV I D H A L L : T V I N T E R R U P T I O N S CAROLINE ACHAINTRE W I L L I A M H A Z L I T T: T H R O U G H T H E E Y E S O F A C R I T I C ARCHIVE: RECEPTION, RUPTURE AND RETURN: THE MODEL AND THE LIFE ROOM FREE ENTRY O P E N DA I LY 1 0 . 0 0 – 1 8 . 0 0 P I M L I CO / W E S TM I N S T E R
VA U X H A L L
TAT E G A L L E R Y @ TAT E TAT E . O R G . U K
AR-58.indd 58
23/12/2014 13:22
2015
HELGA DE ALVEAR
GALERIA
DR. FOURQUET 12, 28012 MADRID. TEL:(34) 91 468 05 06 FAX:(34) 91 467 51 34 e-mail:galeria@helgadealvear.com
www.helgadealvear.com
Feb—May
AN INSTITUTION OF THE MIGROS CULTURE PERCENTAGE
XANTI SCHAWINSKY
15 de enero — 16 de mayo de 2015
Isaac Julien “Playtime”
May—Aug
21.02.–17.05.
TOYS REDUX —ON PLAY AND CRITIQUE
25 de febrero — 1 de marzo de 2015
ARCOmadrid Booth 7A05
Aug—Nov
30.05.–16.08. 16 — 19 de abril de 2015
MOON KYUNGWON & JEON JOONHO
Art Cologne 2015
29.08.–08.11.
Nov—Feb
migrosmuseum.ch migros-culture-percentage.ch
RESISTANCE PERFORMED
CENTRO DE ARTES VISUALES FUNDACIÓN HELGA DE ALVEAR Las Lágrimas de las Cosas P r o y e cto d e M a r t a G i l i 26 de abril de 2014 — 5 de abril 2015
21.11.–07.02.2016 Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst Limmatstrasse 270 CH–8005 Zürich
AR-59.indd 59
Cáceres, España
www.fundacionhelgadealvear.es/apps
23/12/2014 13:23
Classical Modern and Contemporary Art
5 – 8 March 2015
Karlsruhe Trade Fair Center www.art-karlsruhe.de
Witte de With XXV
ArtReview Live presents
Karen Mirza and Brad Butler
For an evening of drinks and discussions 23 January 2015 7–11pm ArtReview Bar 1 Honduras Street London ec1y 0th
Art In The Age Of… Energy and Raw Material 23.01.15 – 03.05.15 Character Is Fate Willem de Rooij 27.01.15 – 03.01.16 In Light Of 25 Years 27.01.15 – 03.01.16
AR-60.indd 60
Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Witte de Withstraat 50 3012 BR Rotterdam www.wdw.nl
23/12/2014 14:48
John Marchant Gallery
D’un chateau I’autre, 2014, installation image: Martin Erik Andersen, John Marchant Gallery, Brighton
London Art Fair 2015 Art Projects Stand: P3 Martin Erik Andersen Hernan Ardila Fabrice Cazenave Victoria Halford & Steve Beard www.johnmarchantgallery.com 44 7906275098 @JohnMarchantGallery Brighton, UK JM_AD.indd 1
john marchant ours.indd 435
05/12/2014 13:29
23/12/2014 13:55
Other People and Their Ideas No 35
Rimbaud on artist statements for grant applications Interview by Matthew Collings
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French symbolist poet. His work was barely noticed in his own time but profoundly influenced the Surrealists during the 1920s. Because of his reputation for antisocial behaviour, he became an icon of youthful revolt. He was born in Charleville, northern France, in 1854. By the time he was twenty-one, he had stopped writing poetry and spent most of the rest of his life in Africa working as a commercial trader. He died at thirty-seven in Marseilles from cancer.
62
AR-JanFeb-Great Minds-Collings3.indd 62
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:07
artreview You made a statement about your work that has gone down in history: ‘I is an other’. What do you think of artist statements today? jean nicolas arthur rimbaud They are a bureaucratic form relating only to the monetisation and capitalisation of art education. ar It’s a much more helpful kind of language, though, isn’t it? I make these objects and I have these ideas. jnar A feature of it is that objects seem without substance and ideas are interchangeable. An artist says he or she takes a critical view of social, political and cultural issues; they mention an idea that they know will sound important from their experience of the professional sphere in which they seek to advance; it’s for the same reason that they inserted such ideas into their work in the first place. They say things like: I am arranging familiar visual signs into new conceptually layered pieces. ar Statements by Mondrian or someone are hard to fathom, most people find. jnar A statement for Mondrian, as it is for myself, is always a polemic. He writes to a friend in 1943: ‘Only now I become conscious that my work in black, white and little colour planes has been merely drawing in oil colour. In drawing, the lines are the principal means of expression. In painting, however, the lines are absorbed by the colour planes; but the limitations of the planes show themselves as lines and conserve their great value.’ He highlights relationships that are concrete but extremely narrow. The insight itself is narrow; he wants it to be noticed that an apparently confined mere set of visual proposals is actually doing something.
ar Well, OK. On a different track: what’s it like being the model bohemian artist-rebel? jnar In some minds I’ll always be the evil, teenage genius and great corruptor. ar What did you corrupt? jnar Poetry; art: the whole thing. You know, Paul Verlaine was a great poet, and his letters to me had memorable lines such as, ‘I am your old cunt ever open’. His wife burnt most of them. She had about 40 and she was going to produce them in court for the divorce she wanted on the grounds of his disgusting relationship with me. But she got the divorce anyway, for his physical cruelty, and didn’t need to show the letters. ar What do you think about that kind of language now? jnar I think it’s fine. I thought Étienne Carjat, who took the famous photo of me age seventeen, was an old cunt too. It’s a different usage, but context is all, it’s obvious what is meant: he was a cunt who took a photo of me that I couldn’t care less about. With Verlaine’s letter to me, the meaning is clear – I can always use him sexually – but also perverse – he’s got an arse, not a cunt. And he also brings in the sense in which I viewed Carjat as nothing but an old cunt, because Verlaine was besotted with me, but he knew I would betray him, the old cunt. ar You sound absolutely horrible! What did you think of London when you lived there? above Rashid Johnson, Cosmic Slop ‘Black Orpheus’, 2011, black soap, wax, 245 × 306 × 5 cm. Courtesy Hauser & Wirth, London, New York & Zürich facing page Arthur Rimbaud in 1872, age seventeen. Photo: Étienne Carjat
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Great Minds-Collings3.indd 63
jnar How can I describe the dull daylight of unchanging grey skies, the imperial effect of these buildings, the eternally snow-covered ground? Here, with an odd flair for enormity, are reconstructed all the wooden wonders of classical architecture. I visit exhibitions of paintings in halls 20 times the size of Hampton Court. ar Ah I see, you’re feeling you’re there right now: what exhibitions in particular did you like? jnar In a daze we found ourselves face-to-face, in a show of French art, with Fantin-Latour’s group portrait of poets round a table, including Verlaine and me. Ourselves looking out at us in London: “Fantin forever!” Verlaine yelled, because we were drunk, as we always were. ar Do you go to shows much today? jnar I just saw Jonathan Meese at Modern Art, and then I walked a long way to the Chisenhale Gallery and saw Caragh Thuring. At first I said to myself: these shows are good followed by bad: good fun and energy followed by meek obedience that just makes one glaze over. Then I thought the opposite: the first was tedious in its obvious masculinism and the second good in its visual sophistication and impressively minimalist design. a black, e white, i red. o blue, u green: vowels. One day I’ll tell your embryonic births… ar Are you hallucinating? jnar Painted masks beneath a lantern beaten by cold nights, a stupid water nymph in shrieking garments deep in the riverbed. ar You wrote most of your poetry in a four-year period starting at the age of sixteen. Where did it come from?
63
23/12/2014 14:07
jnar At first it was a rocking of existing conventions, and then it was something genuinely new, based on exploring subconscious realms, which I did partly by a logical derangement of all the senses, through the use of drugs. I became a seer. ar How do you mean? jnar I got used to hallucinations, pure and simple: I would see, fair and square, a mosque where there was a factory, a drum-core of angels, coaches on the roads in the sky, a drawing room at the bottom of a lake; monsters, mysteries; horrors leapt up before me from the titles of some vaudeville. ar And that was always the source? Were there any other ways of generating content? jnar And then I explained my magic sophisms by turning words into hallucinations! ar Uh-oh, are you going off on one now? jnar The song is very rarely the work of the singer – that is, his thought, sung and understood. For I is an other. If brass wakes as a bugle, it’s not its fault. That is quite clear to me: I am a spectator at the flowering of my thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I draw a bow across a string: a symphony stirs in the depths, or surges onto the stage. ar What do you think of painting these days? jnar I saw The Forever Now exhibition at moma. It seemed provincial, and the reviews I read were incapable of seeing any big picture other than mentioning other artists who seem just like the ones who are in the show but lamenting them not being in it. Also a basic premise of the reviews, absorbed from the catalogue essay, that the artists in the show feel at home with painting from the past, seems untenable: from the evidence of the paintings, it’s more that they seem at home with superficial impressions of art of the last few decades only. ar What’s the difference? jnar Painting dealing with light, or indeed with anything in physical reality – for light is only a particularly powerful and immediate way in which the complexity of the totality of physical reality is revealed to us – was foreign to the show. The ‘past’ is not really available to these people as far as is indicated by anything they actually do, only the past from neo-Expressionism onwards. It’s as if they see the whole history of art in terms of Neo-expressionist quotes from it; so they never get beyond manneristic signs. Hardly any reviewer failed to celebrate Rashid Johnson’s referencing of the paintings of Dubuffet. But these politely provocative all-black surfaces, made of soap and wax and titled with
64
AR-JanFeb-Great Minds-Collings3.indd 64
the youthful mass-media cliché ‘cosmic slop’ – which had a very different, mind-freeing resonance when George Clinton originated it 40 years ago in the context of funk – really reference the commonest, least interesting or engaging, mere sign of a Dubuffet surface, and maybe a few Fontana surfaces, too. The Johnsons share with everything else in the show the ability to look instantly and simultaneously lovely and completely insulting and sad.
that we don’t necessarily see things in reality in the way a basically Renaissance visual structure suggests. He did something in painting that effectively was a response to new ways of seeing that were already in place, and if anything, they were in place because of how ‘seeing’ works in a shared ‘visual imaginary’ (as Rancière would call it, referring to the always altering interactions of politics, society and culture), not because of how painting works.
ar In the art community today there’s a feeling that painting is the sell-out medium, and critical art is better. Do you agree?
ar What about Martens again?
jnar Yes. But only if this show is what is meant by ‘painting’. But it is probably more like the kind of painting that sells, so it possesses authority just from being represented a lot in shows and fairs, which makes it likely it will get gathered together in a museum at some point. The artists don’t necessarily elect to be sellable
The song is very rarely the work of the singer – that is, his thought, sung and understood. For I is an other. If brass wakes as a bugle, it’s not its fault. That is quite clear to me: I am a spectator at the flowering of my thought: I watch it, I listen to it: I draw a bow across a string: a symphony stirs in the depths in the way that a critical artist such as that Belgian or Dutch guy who puts on his Enjoy Poverty events in the Congo elects to be critical. ar Renzo Martens; he’s Dutch but lives in Brussels. jnar Yes, it’s not important: him. This is a brilliantly creative and, you could certainly say in conceptual terms, ‘beautiful’ series of artistic actions, endlessly subtle. The painters in The Forever Now by contrast are not at fault for being insufficiently brilliantly critical but for not being of much interest (as yet) as painters. The criticality of painting works in a way that has its own subtlety. Criticality as it is understood in art contexts today is just a mode. Martens’s revelations about all sorts of systems of economy operating in concert are easily found out by other means, by reading books and following what is reported by the mass media. He crystallises such information brilliantly, but only like Monet, in my time, crystallised by visual means information about objects and fleeting light. Monet didn’t discover light. Or even discover
jnar Ultimately Martens isn’t much use on the high-moral-ground terms on which critical art is purported to operate, and that’s because this ground is fictional. In economic terms critical art needs something to compensate for its lack of immediate attractiveness so the myth of actually being effective as revolt is encouraged in the selling of that art. Martens is an artist developing certain themes from the Hans Haacke days, coming up with superb refinements on the concept of complicity. The element of the superb is real. The problem of the painters in The Forever Now is how lost they are in relation to equivalent concepts in their own fields. But if they were more acute, it wouldn’t make them less sellable or more sellable. ‘Art’ has its own peculiar structures that must be respected, as Marx and Engels often stated: these great fellows from my own time; like Monet. In any case, it’s only later Marxists who went a bit mad, such as Lukács, who insisted that art only has value if it directly addresses by conventional means the issue of emancipation. ar People today love Laura Owens’s paintings because they’re very free about modernist rules. She can paint a flower if she wants, or just brushstrokes. jnar The largely abstract paintings in The Forever Now, whether they had free-floating signs of flowers, or perhaps seemed to be bubbling pools of black mud, or were reduced merely to the sign for a man that a child might draw, were not beautiful or effective or successful or meaningful because of how much a flower was evoked, or a mud pool seemed to be right there, or innocence was evoked. If the paintings release us from habits of seeing, or make the world as a totality newly vivid to us – which unfortunately they didn’t much in this show, but if they did – then that emancipatory content would be, effectively, critical. We would be empowered by it, because we’d be temporarily enabled to see ourselves: to see life. But it would happen because the works, in their own language, did something new, that we didn’t already know about, and did it efficiently. next month Lord Krishna on Jenny Saville
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:07
12/14 09:56
sp-arte2015-an-artreview-JAN.indd 3 sp-arte-.indd 429
16/12/14 09:56 23/12/2014 13:56
Other People and Their Ideas No 20
The New Museum Triennial Curators: Lauren Cornell, Ryan Trecartin and Sara O’Keeffe Interview by Tom Eccles
Organised by Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin, with Sara O’Keeffe, assistant curator, the third New Museum Triennial, which runs from 25 February through 24 May, is titled Surround Audience and will feature 51 artists and artist collectives from over 25 countries. Previously executive director of not-for-profit new-media platform Rhizome, Cornell is a curator at the New Museum and cocurated its first triennial, titled The Generational: Younger Than Jesus, in 2009. Among the artists featured in that exhibition was Ryan Trecartin, whose exhibition Site Visit is on show at the KW Institute, Berlin, through 11 January.
66
AR-JanFeb-Great Minds-Eccles2.indd 66
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:08
artreview The title for your Triennial is Surround Audience, a term coined by artist Ryan Trecartin that suggests a double bind: one in which we can surround others, making ourselves visible and empowered by such visibility, but at the same time one in which we are, in effect, encircled by others through technology. You also chose to collaborate with Trecartin as a cocurator of the show. Why collaborate with an artist and why Ryan Trecartin? Does his work crystallise a moment, is it a watershed beyond which the Triennial chooses to explore? lauren cornell I wanted to cocurate the show with Ryan for many reasons. First, the fact that I’m inspired by his work and have had a long relationship with it, as I’ve worked with him many times. His work, as you know, is seen by many as iconic of our era. And yet I find there is actually a dearth of good writing on his videos, because critics seem to go into a kind of ‘generational shock’ when they see them and spout vague words like ‘millennial’ and ‘Internet’ in rapid sequence. His work is so much more complex and deep than these terms, for it reflects the psychological and social effects of new technologies, not in themselves, as gadgets or tools, but as they intersect with our world. For instance, his film K-CoreaINC.K (section a) (2009) took up the politics of globalisation: in it, entities called ‘Global Koreas’ such as ‘Iran@-itzerland Korea’ and ‘Mexico Korea’ attend a meeting in which all they do is evince egomaniacal bratty behaviour and cat-fight. His characters are like applications, constantly retooling and rewriting themselves, a fluidity that is apt in an age in which our identities are increasingly managed by ourselves and across many different platforms (state, media, corporate). (Actually, I proposed the title Identity Management for the exhibition but he discouraged it because it was too dark, and I think he was right.) The ideas in his work did very much inspire the research in the show: when I was travelling and meeting with artists, I always had his works on my mind and would, ultimately, return to a dialogue with him and, later, Sara [O’Keeffe, assistant curator], when she joined the team. (The process was such that I did the research, internationally, but always shared artist portfolios with him for final consideration.) The second reason is, frankly, that Ryan is a great person, with whom I knew sharing an incredibly huge project for over two years would be a positive experience, for myself and the artists. There is a reason that the actors in his films recur: he’s wonderful to work with. He’s generous, collaborative, totally open to everyone’s ideas, and he honours everyone’s investment. These are ideal qualities in a curator. When I invited him into the show, it struck that chord of generosity in him: he told me that his
astrologer (Morgan Rehbock, who also helped us choose the date of our opening!) had told him that, in 2015, he would play more of a producer role, rather than solely that of a creator. I don’t believe in astrology but I was so glad he readily accepted! Sara joined a year ago, as part of a broader position at the museum. In her interview, she expressed a desire to work closely with artists on realising their works. And indeed, besides working to co-wrangle all aspects of the exhibition, she has worked with me rigorously, onsite, with all the artists. About half of the work in the show is new or commissioned, and our dialogues (sometimes even soul-searching debates) with all participating artists have been really extensive. sara o’keeffe To add to what Lauren has already said about Ryan’s work, I feel Ryan addresses the hybrid ways identities are managed, performed and channelled today, at times in an exhilarating (and dizzying) cacophony, and always against the backdrop of capitalist forces.
Most commissions started to arrive during the summer of 2014, in the wake of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and in Hong Kong, the Ebola outbreak and events in Gaza. In response, we found that many artists were thinking about the body as a nexus point, a site where questions about visibility, safety and agency are staged These issues inform the research for the show, but the works in the Triennial do look very different from Ryan’s works. Working with an artist as curator set in motion our thinking about the ways artists could drive other aspects of the show, traditionally managed by the museum. Surround Audience, the title Ryan coined, also speaks to the ways some artists in the Triennial conceive of their works for audiences beyond the museum walls. We found that a number of artists are choosing to bypass the gallery system or think beyond it. For instance, Casey Jane Ellison, an artist and comedian, will film episodes of her comedy show, Touching the Art (2014–), for the Triennial, which will air on Ovation tv; artist collective K-Hole works as a ‘trend forecasting’ group and will produce the exhibition’s ad campaign. facing page, from left Lauren Cornell and Sara O’Keeffe. Courtesy New Museum, New York
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Great Minds-Eccles2.indd 67
ar Ryan, what commonalities do you share with the artists in the exhibition? ryan trecartin I think many artists in this Triennial are actively inventing space for themselves in culture – rather than creating work that functions solely as an act of rejection or, conversely, making work that just accepts the status quo or well-worn art-historical narratives, their work operates as an act of invention, drawing freely and widely from diverse aspects of culture and multiple histories. I think that I’m naturally drawn to artists who care as much about form, craft and skill as they do about concept, ideas and vision. Many of the artists in the show assume a position that attempts to push past tired and reductive binary logics, while finding more expanded ways to explore social and political ideas. ar How do the commissioned projects differ from others in the show? sok In one sense the commissioned projects root the show firmly in a particular time. Though we were in conversation with artists for years, most commissions started to arrive at their final form during the summer of 2014, in the wake of protests in Ferguson, Missouri, and in Hong Kong, the Ebola outbreak and events in Gaza. In response to those events, we found that many artists were thinking about the body as a nexus point, a site where questions about visibility, safety and agency are staged. There were periods when the artists we were in dialogue with in Hong Kong and Israel became mute on email – they were deeply involved with the protests, and our projects with them had momentarily to go on pause. One of these Hong Kong-based artists, Nadim Abbas, is constructing a series of chambers, replete with comforts of a domestic space on their interior – beds, posters, books – but completely sealed from the outside world. Viewers can feel inside these chambers by placing their hands into medical grade gloves on the glass walls. While Nadim’s works spur questions about locating a safe space for the body, we found other artists were working through questions about their own bodies in space. niv Acosta, a transgender Brooklyn-based artist has been in residence with us since the autumn, and speaks about ‘impossible bodies’, a term he uses to describe the lived experiences of people whose bodies do not conform to the ideals promulgated in mass media. niv is developing a performance for the Triennial with a cast that includes Monstah Black, Alexandro Segade and André D. Singleton (aka Sista Bublz aka Brohogany), titled discotropic, which attempts to situate a Black American experience between the genres of science fiction,
67
23/12/2014 14:08
astrophysics and disco. niv has spoken about feeling ‘impossible’ in spaces outside of his community, and discotropic draws from archetypes in film, music and literature to develop a space for empowered expression. At times, developing these new commissions has been an emotional journey; we faced impasses – material and otherwise – but it has been deeply rewarding. Lauren and I were floored by the generosity with which the artists welcomed us into their processes. ar The main difference between a biennial and a triennial is of course that you get an extra year to develop your ideas. Can you tell me about your research methodology for Surround Audience? I know you travelled fairly extensively in what sounds like good old-fashioned ‘boots on the ground’ international curatorial research with studio visits, etc. What does that extra year afford you? lc I would say the real benefit of a longer lead was that it gave us time to fundraise for and facilitate new commissions. We built the list over the two-and-a-half-year lead-up, but we started working with some artists – Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, dis, Onejoon Che, Aslı Çavuşoğlu and Luke Willis Thompson among them – quite early, and their projects have germinated over a long time. That said, you’re right, it did also provide time for traditional ‘heels on the ground’ research. I visited over 30 countries, and developed a team of incredible curatorial advisers on the way. Sara also visited Johannesburg, and Ryan focused on the us. My past work may associate me with ‘all things digital’ but my preferred way to encounter a work is in the studio with an artist, to talk with them and see the work (or past work) in person, to truly grasp the work and commit to it. sok As Lauren mentioned, we did do ‘heels on the ground’ research, but having this additional time also allowed for an additional step: we were able to invite artists who Lauren met in these countries – New Zealand, Turkey, South Korea, Brazil, Argentina, among others – to come to New York and develop new pieces here. We hosted Triennial artist residencies for extended periods, allowing time for artists to research and develop new ideas. The show is international – artists hail from over 25 countries – but because some pieces by international artists were developed against the backdrop of New York, they also feel rooted in a local context. For instance, New Zealand-born artist Luke Willis Thompson was in residence last summer, when the deaths of Mike Brown and Eric Garner took place. Of Fijian descent, Luke developed a piece in homage to the Floyd v. City of New York case, in which a group of men filed a class action lawsuit against the city and repealed nypd
68
AR-JanFeb-Great Minds-Eccles2.indd 68
stop-and-frisk policies on the basis of racial discrimination. ar The last two New Museum Triennials (The Generational: Younger Than Jesus in 2009, curated by Massimiliano Gioni and focused on artists born after 1976, and The Ungovernables in 2012, organised by Eungie Joo and which profiled artists born between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s) seemed to privilege so-called generations, particularly younger generations of artists. I know that you considered older artists for your project and in fact made some reference to the work of pioneers Nam June Paik and Stan VanDerBeek. The mid-1970s seems the cutoff point for Surround Audience. In simplistic terms, these are all artists that grew up in the digital age. What common traits would you say emerge from the artists and their work that you have chosen?
A binary between online and offline, object and ephemera, is out of date in a society where online platforms mediate our lives, our social relationships and our existence, and artworks exist within a chain of materialisation, dematerialisation and rematerialisation. Our show includes works that move easily between the gallery and other platforms lc As a museum initiative, the Triennial is dedicated to ‘emerging artists’. Successive curators of the show have dealt with this differently. Surround Audience doesn’t have an age cutoff; at the same time, most artists are young. Personally, I don’t believe that generations are always bracketed by age: the ‘contemporary’ is clearly a sphere composed of multiple timezones and differing social influences that create connections between artists, internationally, across their date of birth. At the same time, I didn’t want to replicate the convention of ‘rediscovering’ older artists, who’ve already had careers, within this context. All to say, instead of age as a strict marker, we organised the show around connections among artists we felt strongly about. These connections or lines of inquiry included: how are representations of the body and persona evolving in an image-laden culture in which surveillance is widely dispersed and editorialising one’s life in public is the norm? How does
the seepage of state and corporate power into our intimate spaces (say, via social media) change the terms of critique (ie, if we can no longer stand outside of the powerful forces, how do we resist them)? How are artists reconsidering the boundaries of fine art through activism and engagements with an expanded popular culture? Many of the artists in the show are engaging with the notion of what we are casually calling a surround culture – Josh Kline’s installation reflects a dystopian world in which we are wilfully surrendering our private data; Exterritory Project seeks to find space for the circulation of images outside of potentially censorious networks; Juliana Huxtable’s self-portraits are inspired by her work on social media in which she consciously constructs an evolving persona for a growing audience. In these works, we see the possibilities of a culture in which we are increasingly ‘surrounded’ as well as emergent anxieties about being invaded or overseen. Again, these are only a few of many themes. sok Another that emerged was artists attempting to combat and slow down the accelerated flow of information today. For instance, in a piece for the Triennial, Tania Pérez Córdova asks a friend to lend her a sim card from their cell phone for the duration of the exhibition. It becomes embedded in a terracotta wall on view, and for this period, their phone is rendered useless. Our hope is that work in the show feels like it addresses critical issues of our time, but isn’t strictly confined by age brackets. ar K-Hole’s branding/poster campaign for the Triennial has a couple of slogans that stand out. One is ‘Sex. Gossip. Success.’ The other is ‘Nothing lasts forever’. I hope this doesn’t sum it up? lc K-Hole’s ad campaign developed out of a long residency with us, and a mutual desire to consider how artists could inhabit sites outside of dualistic in the building/out of the building, online/offline options, such as its many channels of communication and self-promotion. We invited them to develop a campaign that offered a kind of institutional critique, one that would inject humility and provocation into the marketing effort, and respond to the show’s parameters. Their resulting campaign is titled Extended Release and features text statements – besides the ones you listed, other examples are ‘No Past No Present No Problem’, ‘Everyone Dies at the End’, ‘I’m Not U’ and ‘Don’t Look Behind You’ – accompanied by anthropomorphic illustrations of pills (here, as sordid and colourful characters screaming into cell phones, playing tennis, riding cars off the road, etc). It pinpricks the artworld’s celebrity and career obsession, in which any large show of this kind inevitably participates, and also alludes to some of the show’s themes.
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:08
K-Hole represents an alternative model for an artist collective – one that seeks to get outside established conventions of art presentation (the gallery) and patronage (selling objects). While some question the commercialism in their project, I find their honesty – their explicit while still critical embrace of the market – to be super-refreshing. ar I was taken aback most by how many of the artists you have selected actually make ‘things’: sculptures, installations, even paintings… My surprise is maybe because of your (Lauren) longstanding notoriety as a foremost curator in the digital realm but also because I didn’t think that so many younger artists continue to work with objects as such. Among video and photography, the ‘plastic arts’ seem alive and well in this Triennial. Did that surprise you too? lc I think there is an anticipation that, with our backgrounds, Ryan and I might organise a show that would be made entirely out of holograms, or only be online, or be on one heavy app, but I think this comes out of a misunderstanding of our work and how artists engage digital tools today. It’s true that Ryan and I are both very interested in contemporary culture and emerging media; and many people see his work as emblematic of the ‘digital age’. But those interests are not separate from objects. A binary between online and offline, object and ephemera, is out of date in a society where online platforms mediate our lives, our social relationships, and our existence, and artworks exist within a chain of materialisation, dematerialisation and rematerialisation. Our show includes works that move easily between the gallery and other platforms, for instance social media and performance, showing that a kind of versatility between disciplines and cultural spheres is a way artists take advantage of an expanded cultural terrain. Let me ask you, because I genuinely want to get a better grasp on this expectation, what did you imagine the exhibition would look like? ar Given your history as the director of Rhizome, with which you are perhaps overly associated given your track record of many more exhibitions (like Free, in 2010, at the New Museum, or the first Triennial), it’s not outside the realm of possibility to anticipate that the Triennial might be a transformative moment in which
art, as it is produced and distributed through online platforms, would be ‘delivered’ through the gallery space. What might that look like? Well, one would probably imagine very video and media heavy. A cross between Ryan Trecartin and a Harun Farocki installation? I know this is a parody, but you did ask! lc I think that transformative moment you describe happened during the 1990s and early 2000s with online work being shown in galleries – primarily on computers. Today, we have a different challenge: online platforms surround us, as extensions of our bodies and integral parts of society. Commenting on them or using them is not an activity reserved for a
lc Exterritory Project proposes ‘extraterritoriality’ as a mode of being and thinking – trying to imagine our lives out of national territories and their accompanying belief systems. Its new video for the Triennial examines how tightly movement is policed, by surveillance video that tracks individual passage, around the borders of Gaza. Its work raises questions about visibility, such as how to protect or manage one’s image or presence when surrounded by cameras seen or unseen, that other artists in the exhibition are mulling over. ar If you had had four years rather than three, do you think the exhibition would be different?
certain group of artists, nor can it be done in isolation. Writing in The New York Times in 2010, William Gibson, who coined the term ‘cyberspace’, wrote: ‘Cyber-space, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical.’ One aspect of Ryan’s work is that it points to this physicality or embodiment. Juliana Huxtable, Untitled, 2014. Courtesy the artist
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Great Minds-Eccles2.indd 69
ar What is interesting to me is that you have brought together a truly international group of artists, many of whom make work out of quite specific local contexts but which speak to a larger whole. You commissioned the artist team Exterritory, Maayan Amir and Ruti Sela, for example, who you describe as addressing ‘the potential to get outside existing territories of image production and reception through a process they call “image smuggling”’. For the piece Blockade they envisioned transporting controversial (and perhaps forbidden) images across the Rafah strip in Gaza by carrier pigeon. It’s quite a good metaphor for the whole show.
lc If you read through the catalogue, I think it’s clear that many of the works began crystallising into final form last summer. While I don’t want to reduce the formal complexity of the performance, installation, painting and so on, within the exhibition, I think it’s clear that international events – the conflict in Gaza, the potentially racist shooting in Ferguson – provide a backdrop to artists’ concerns. Several works also engage tools that are emerging now: as we write, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané is working with the University of London to situate a work within the Oculus Rift, and Frank Benson’s sculpture of Juliana Huxtable is being printed with the latest 3d printing technology. These things would inevitably shift with another year. Perhaps I would have also taken a little more vacation. Surround Audience, on show at the New Museum, New York, opens on 25 February
69
23/12/2014 14:08
FRENCH RIVIERA Wedelien van Oldenborgh Beauty and the Right to the Ugly
17.01.15 – 29.03.15
Samuel Levack and Jennifer Lewandowski Alternative Equinox 25 - 30 November 2014
16 - 25 January 2015
309 Bethnal Green Road London E2 6AH frenchriviera1988.com Open Friday - Sunday 12 - 6pm
Performances by Berry Patten, Megan Rooney Patrick Goddard and BADFOOD curated by Attilia Fattori Franchini
Image credit: Wendelien van Oldenborgh, Beauty and the Right to the Ugly, 2014, stills from the film (55 mins). Courtesy Wilfried Lentz Rotterdam and the artist. Beauty and the Right to the Ugly, 2014, was produced in collaboration with Auguste Orts with the generous support of the Mondriaan Fonds, Amsterdam, Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and Collective, Edinburgh.
Funded by:
www.collectivegallery.net
Park Chan-kyong Pa-Gyong (Last Sutra Recitation) Exhibition Space 1
Park Chan-kyong & Lina Selander
Lina Selander Open System — Silphium and Other Works Exhibition Space 2
14 January — 21 March 2015
Image (Top): Park Chan-kyong, Sindoan, film still, 2007 Image (Bottom): Lina Selander, Silphium, film still, 2014
AR-70.indd 70
23/12/2014 13:24
AR-71.indd 71
23/12/2014 13:25
by Morgan Lloyd-Malcolm and Rachel Parish A sensual, exciting and terrifying production fusing film, music, immersive design and theatre. Inspired by a classic Japanese horror story by Ryunosuke Akutagawa, set in the contemporary London art world, and featuring live action film sequences and animation, Hellscreen follows an artist, his daughter, and a collector on their descent into hellish greed and obsession.
Men Gather, in Speech... Emma Charles Rose English Abri de Swardt Preview: Thursday 22 January 2015, 5.30 – 7.30pm In Conversation: Thursday 22 January 2015, 4.30pm Exhibition: 23 January – 21 February 2015 Mon – Fri: 10am – 5pm, Sat: 11am – 5pm
25 February – 8 March, 8pm VAULT Festival The Vaults, Leake Street, SE1 7NN
vaultfestival.com/hellscreen
Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee 13 Perth Road, Dundee, DD1 4HT www.exhibitions.dundee.ac.uk ExhibitionDJCAD Cooper Gallery DJCAD
AR-72.indd 72
Image: Rose English, Plato’s Chair, Laing Art Gallery 1985. Courtesy of the artist and Locus+
Firehouse Creative Productions and double barrel productions present
23/12/2014 13:25
21—25 January 2015 Business Design Centre London N1 OQH Book Tickets londonartfair.co.uk
Saturday 7 February 2015, 9:30am | Kings Place Discover the art you love; meet the experts; understand more about the art market - whether your tastes run to works on paper or contemporary sculpture, old master drawings or photography.
LONDON
CHAIRED BY:
This half-day conference gathers together gallerists and dealers, curators and established collectors, art fair directors and auction house specialists in lively panels and discussion groups that will advise and inspire anyone thinking of buying art for the first time or extending an existing collection.
Jan Dalley Arts Editor Financial Times
Speakers: Michael Benson, Director, Prix Pictet Alan Cristea, Owner and Managing Director, Alan Cristea Gallery Philip Mould OBE, Director, Philip Mould & Company Valeria Napoleone, Art Collector Matthew Slotover, Co-founder, Frieze Art Fair
Peter Aspden Arts Writer Financial Times
Tickets are £52 including refreshments and lunch Special Offer: ArtReview readers save 10% off tickets. Enter the code AR10 when booking Lead sponsor
Associate sponsor
www.ft-live.com/ artcollection @FTLive #FTHowTo
AR-73.indd 73
23/12/2014 13:25
ctaf_artreview_2015_FA.indd 1 416_AR.indd 416
2014/11/11 8:04 AM 23/12/2014 13:56
jan 29 – feb 1, 2015 | the barker hangar 1301PE LOS ANGELES ACME. LOS ANGELES Altman Siegel SAN FRANCISCO American Contemporary NEW YORK AND NOW DALLAS The Apartment VANCOUVER Michael Benevento LOS ANGELES Brand New Gallery MILAN Brennan & Griffin NEW YORK Shane Campbell Gallery CHICAGO CANADA NEW YORK Ana Cristea Gallery NEW YORK DUVE Berlin BERLIN Anat Ebgi LOS ANGELES Derek Eller NEW YORK Et al. SAN FRANCISCO Foxy Production NEW YORK Carl Freedman Gallery LONDON François Ghebaly Gallery LOS ANGELES Greene Exhibitions LOS ANGELES Grice Bench LOS ANGELES Jack Hanley Gallery NEW YORK
The Hole NEW YORK i8 Gallery REYKJAVÍK Ibid. LONDON / LOS ANGELES KANSAS NEW YORK Johann König BERLIN David Kordansky Gallery LOS ANGELES Galerie Christian Lethert COLOGNE Levy.Delval BRUSSELS Josh Lilley LONDON Louis B. James NEW YORK Luce Gallery TORINO Gallery Luisotti SANTA MONICA M+B WEST HOLLYWOOD Macaulay & Co. Fine Art VANCOUVER Monitor ROME Mihai Nicodim LOS ANGELES / BUCHAREST Peres Projects BERLIN Praz-Delavallade PARIS Marc Selwyn Fine Art BEVERLY HILLS Tif Sigfrids LOS ANGELES Fredric Snitzer Gallery MIAMI Spinello Projects MIAMI
STANDARD (OSLO) OSLO SULTANA PARIS team (gallery, inc.) NEW YORK / VENICE Richard Telles LOS ANGELES TORRI PARIS Rachel Uffner Gallery NEW YORK UNTITLED NEW YORK Valentin PARIS Various Small Fires LOS ANGELES Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects LOS ANGELES Jonathan Viner LONDON WEINGRÜLL KARLSRUHE Tracy Williams, Ltd. NEW YORK Workplace Gallery GATESHEAD / LONDON Special Projects ForYourArt LOS ANGELES
artlosangelesfair.com PRODUCED BY FAIR GROUNDS ASSOCIATES
art_LA_new_placed.indd 75
23/12/2014 13:56
452_AR.indd 452
23/12/2014 13:57
Art Featured
Mayonnaise Stains – See ‘Salad Dressing’ in Section ii, ‘The Removal of Spots and Stains from Fabrics’ 77
AR-JanFeb-Dividers.indd 77
23/12/2014 14:02
78
ArtReview
Mateo López by Mark Rappolt
January & February 2015
79
above Casa Desorientada (Disoriented House), 2013. Photo: Sebastiano Pellion preceding pages Casa Desorientada (Disoriented House), 2013. Photo: Julián Roldán
80
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Mateo.indd 80
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:08
Every art critic’s favourite map is the Bellman’s Map of the Ocean, about it in terms normally associated with an estate agent. There’s a which appears as a navigating tool onboard a ship in Lewis Carroll’s wooden bed, a bathroom and a kitchen area. Although this estate ‘The Hunting of the Snark’ (1874–6). ‘He had bought a large map doesn’t incorporate any of the land you’d normally connect with the representing the sea,’ Carroll’s rhyme goes, ‘Without the least vestige term – last year, at Bogotá’s artbo, the work, which was inspired by of land: / And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be the artist’s travels to Canada and San Andrés island in the Caribbean / A map they could all understand.’ The map turns out to be a blank Sea, just off Colombia, and the stories he heard about poor settlers piece of paper, a clean slate, the ultimate terra incognita. And from in Newfoundland being evicted and having to turn their houses into catalogue essays to reviews, it’s cited time and time again (curator ships or moving between islands in floating dwellings, was installed in Hans Ulrich Obrist’s 2014 compendium Mapping It Out being one of the middle of a lake in the city’s Botanical Gardens. In a sense the idea the most recent). On the one hand you might think this critical ob- of a home became performative rather than inert, both in relation to session is ironic, given the extent to which the average art critic’s job its shifting locations and its prospective inhabitants (indeed, during seems to be about making sure all the blanks are filled in, and on the artbo it was the site for a dance performance by Rafael Duarte). other hand perhaps it’s not because a critic looks for the blank waiting López himself studied architecture for two years, before switching to be filled in. But this isn’t about art critics. It’s about Mateo López. An to art. “I thought it was going to be an interlude,” he says, “but I never artist who was based in Bogotá, but now, when ArtReview is focusing went back. Paper and cardboard were somehow the resources availon Colombia, has moved to New York (for three years, at least, while able, and drawing and sculpture became bigger concerns. I continued his wife is studying there). But that’s ok. He too works with blanks to exploring the sphere of ideas that surround the meaning of architecbe filled in. And in any case, travel has been one of the primary gener- ture. Once Johann Wolfgang von Goethe called architecture ‘frozen ators of his work. “When you get to a place, you are a stranger,” the music’; then Quincy Jones says: if architecture is frozen music, then artist says, “and you are kind of a ghost at music must be liquid architecture. I think for me, the transition of matter is more the same time. You are absorbing informaThe house is entered by climbing interesting than the actual definition, tion, trying to understand, and little by up a metal stepladder onto the to find myself between art and architeclittle you go through the different layers of roof of the structure, where there is ture.” While Casa Desorientada conjures the place. I believe the way you answer to associations with early-twentieth-century situations and places is the same way your a sort of terrace, and then down work answers to situations and places. It is architectural experiments such as Le a flight of plywood stairs into you talking through matter.” Corbusier’s obsession with the ideally what might generously be proportioned Modulor living space or R. My first encounter with López’s work Buckminster Fuller’s mass-production was in itself an encounter with somedescribed as an open-air patio. thing of a blank: his Casa Desorientada Dymaxion House (1930), and even the critFrom there it’s through a set ical architecture of a 1960s outfit (that (Disoriented House, 2013), made in collaboraof glass doors and into a strange, tion with architect Lucas Oberlaender, is a worked primarily on paper) such as Italy’s giant plywood box measuring 4.83 by 4.83 Superstudio, López’s work somehow inspartan residence-cum-studio sists on remaining at once an idea and a by 3.3 metres (each side featuring 12 square wooden panels, the roof having a span of 16), which was installed on reality. Like a child’s chemistry experiment, it comes in a box, but ends the booth of his Colombian gallery, Casas Riegner, at that year’s Art up going everywhere. Basel in Switzerland. And when I say on the booth, to all intents and The suggestion that home or the studio is something you take purposes it was the booth, filling it almost completely, obviously itself with you has long (if ‘long’ is a word you can use of an artist who a container and not so obviously the booth’s content (because other today is still under forty) been a theme in López’s work. In 2006, for than the container – albeit very beautifully constructed – nothing the exhibition Adentro y en Medio (Inside and In Between) at Casas Riegner else seemed to be on show). A perfect summation of what a temporary in Bogotá, López recreated his studio in the gallery, and worked in art-fair booth is, it nevertheless stood out from the showier works it throughout the duration of the show, making three-dimensional on the stands around it (on booths that provide punters with the paper reproductions of objects from his ‘real’ studio in Bogotá. The strip but not the tease) for having something of the look of a giant, exhibition served to collapse production, reproduction, the virtual but blank, Rubik’s cuboid. A puzzle, then; and perfect fodder for the and the actual (yes, we live in a digital age), and notions of the original hungry critic. and the copy into an interchangeable, constantly oscillating single The house is entered by climbing up a metal stepladder onto the entity. “I got to learn the history of art from slides, books, magazines roof of the structure, where there is a sort of terrace, and then down and a lot of photocopies,” López says, “so my memory is much more a flight of plywood stairs into what might generously be described about reproduction and blurred back-and-white versions of what you as an open-air patio. From there it’s through a set of glass doors and find in the museums.” into a strange, spartan residence-cum-studio. Or perhaps it was more At this point I’d introduce López for what he really is: a draughtsproperly an idea of a home/studio, given that we were in an art fair. It man. But that doesn’t tell half the story. Sure, he always keeps a is at once the kind of thing that an architect might show you on paper sketchbook in his pocket (which he describes both as being like an or in model form – inside there a few objects that suggest that the image bank and as containing ideas for drawings), but many of his Casa Desorientada might be lived in – many of which are three-dimen- works expand the notion of drawing as it is commonly perceived. sional items made of flat materials, such as balsa wood cutlery and López’s 2007 exhibition Topografía Anecdótica (Anecdotal Topography), paper plates – and it’s the kind of property that demands that you talk also at Casas Riegner, expanded on a previous project from earlier in
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Mateo.indd 81
81
23/12/2014 14:08
the year, Diario de Motocicleta (Motorcycle Diary), which is both a travelling exhibition that took place at venues in Cali and Medellín, and a record of López’s journey from Bogotá to those venues: the exhibitions were generated while the artist travelled around Colombia (and both cities) on a 2,153km trip by Vespa with a ‘portable studio’ – two changes of clothes, notebooks, music, a camera, a tripod and a camera lucida – strapped to its back. The studio was an artwork in itself, titled Portable Workshop No 25 (2007), and the artworks that artwork generated became the shows, while the scooter itself was installed both in the earlier shows and Topografía Anecdótica. With López a narrative generates another narrative, and one work flows into the next. There’s a nod, here, of course to Ernesto Che Guevara and his journal of a coming-of-age (both physically and politically) trip around Latin America during the 1950s, as López explores and documents the world around him. But the project is also about technique and has closer connections with another book, David Hockney’s Secret Knowledge (2001), in which the British painter proposes that early Renaissance masters used a combination of science (camera obscuras, camera lucidas) and artistry to achieve their greatest works. As much as they tell a narrative, these works are about a certain degree of skill and precision. Alongside maps and photographs, plants and found objects, the works (all 2007) collected in Topografía Anecdótica include a Camera Dirkon, a printed cardboard pinhole camera, rolls of 3m tape and drawing tools made of paper, a replica 3m cardboard box and pinand-paper dolls. And that’s merely to scratch the surface. There’s also a croissant that appears to be made of a single, rolled piece of beige paper; a wood and enamel lollipop; Cartas Cruzadas – two brown envelopes folded at tight angles so that, brought together, they form a cross. Next to that, in the exhibition catalogue, is a photograph of two
paper-wrapped bars of soap positioned in front of a hotel mirror in such a way that they too look like they’re forming a similar-looking cross. All in all, López comes across as a mixture of the German naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, who between 1799 and 1804 travelled through Latin America, describing it for the first time from a ‘modern scientific point of view’ (as part of more than 30 vowlumes of travel writings), an English grand-tourist swanning through the ruins of classical Italy and a sixteenth-century Spaniard, reeking of salt water and man-sweat, grinning and waving a potato at a puzzled European farmer. Everything is at once as ordinary as it is extraordinary, and all of it presents the notion of an artist who uses his skill to consume and then excrete and then reingest the world around him, to construct a contingent, but present reality. “What you process comes from the outside world,” López says. “You take it inside the studio, transform, wrap and put it back. It is like the Chinese whispers game (or broken telephone), a continued chain that someone can reveal or continue deconstructing.” Within that, drawing becomes a line for connecting experiences, apparently random objects, memories, the subjective to the objective, and the act of creation to the fact of existence. Ultimately there’s something about López’s work that reminds me of the Italian tv series La Linea (1971–86), which featured a man, drawn in a single continuous outline, who walked along the seemingly infinite extension of that line, encountering and overcoming a series of objects and obstacles that rose out of the same endless line. Like that line, López’s work manages to offer up something that is inert yet vital, framed but continuous, and the site, to drag in another architectural theory (this time completely out of context), for immensely complex, yet nevertheless entertaining (and pleasure is definitely an important element in the experience of this work), animate form. ar
Nowehere Man, 2011. Photo: Oscar Monsalve
82
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Mateo.indd 82
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:08
Casa Desorientada (Disoriented House – Furniture and Objects), 2013 (installation view, 43rd Salón (Inter)Nacional de Artistas, Medellín, 2013). Photo: Julián Roldán all works Courtesy Casas Riegner, Bogotá
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Mateo.indd 83
83
23/12/2014 14:08
Colombia Is a Normal Country by Lucas Ospina
In 1953 the us writer William Burroughs spent three months travelling around Colombia. The aim of the trip was to try yagé, a drug to which Burroughs attributed telepathic powers. The voyager, through the ingestion of this ancient medicine, was looking to advance to a level of nonverbal communication. ‘Yage may be the final fix,’ wrote the author at the end of his book Junkie (1953). Burroughs’s impatience, and the little luck he had with his yagé doses, meant that he was unable to get liftoff from the everyday or escape self-isolation on his trip. Overwhelmed by anxiety and frustration, he let loose in correspondence. Here is how he portrayed the country’s capital in a series of vitriolic letters to his friend Allen Ginsberg:
Obrist’s seal of approval has been endorsed by other travellers, such as the three explorers Artforum sent over during the past three years, always in the week of artbo, Bogotá’s art fair. Their accounts, of course, were not published in the printed version, which is dedicated to pages, pages and more pages of advertising for exhibitions, fairs, biennials and galleries – Adforum – alternating with stubborn, longwinded articles and reviews that privilege International Art Language. Artforum’s society photos and notices are published in Scene & Herd, an editorial bed where astute rumour shares the sheets with camouflaged press releases, a glamorous who’s who that spews out names and boosts the reputational capital of the renowned. The entries, diaryBogotá is high and cold and wet, a damp chill that gets inside you like with a literary tint, are vignettes and gossipy tidbits that could like the inner cold of junk sickness. There is no heat anywhere and serve as sketches for a present-day Balzac writing his human comedy you are never warm. In Bogotá more than any other city I have seen with artworld personalities. Nothing but a smart editorial move by in Latin America you feel the dead weight of Spain sombre and Artforum, a play to draw traffic to ‘.com’. Scene & Herd is more digestible oppressive. Everything official bears the label Made in Spain… than the majority of the Artspeak texts published in this ponderous So here I am back in Bogotá. No money waiting for me (check magazine that is forever loitering around the 300-page mark. apparently stolen)… Bogotá is essentially a small town, everybody In a 2012 Scene & Herd diary entry titled ‘New Normal’, Dawn Chan worrying about his clothes… reports that Bogotá is living one of its many renaissances. The circles of private security, with their muzzled The perception of foreign visitors to ColObrist’s seal of approval has been Rottweilers, are signs of a latent danger, ombia has changed in the past decade, strong evidence being the impressions of but the Creole jetset seems ready to start endorsed by other travellers, one of the groups that control the distrisuch as the three explorers Artforum spending more time in their country, and is bution of the deeply felt: artworld travopen to receiving visitors in their immense sent over during the past three years. ellers. In contrast to Burroughs, who apartments. Chan sprinkles her sketch sought to distance himself from words Their accounts, of course, were not with artistic names and events, but then and their worldly noise, these art partyseems to have the intention of abandoning published in the printed version crashers come in search of high, merry the tone of an infomercial in order to go doses of the spoken, and they have found it, to the point that Hans deep into criticism: she speaks of a mural featuring the word ‘mierda’ Ulrich Obrist, supreme curatorial head of the global village, has given (‘mess’, ‘shit’, ‘rubbish’) as a protest against the death of a murdered this positive assessment of the country: ‘The Colombian art scene is journalist (Chan gets the name of the journalist wrong, writing ‘Jamie one of the best in the world.’ Garzón’ instead of ‘Jaime Garzón’). She describes a torrential downIn February 2013 Obrist led a procession of more than 40 British pour in a neighbourhood on its way to gentrification and mentions and Austrian curators who, on a four-day trip with the Thyssen- how, through the rain, she sees a small crowd of mourners calling Bornemisza Art Contemporary World Tour, visited cities such as for justice because, ten years earlier, 300 of their own had been killed Cartagena, Cali and Bogotá. These celebrated visitors received a with complete impunity (she gets the number wrong: more than select group of local artists, who cast aside the local language in order 3,000 members of the old Unión Patriótica political party died). Chan to practice their English and show their portfolios before a public intends to give her entry another layer of depth: ‘Like everything else, audience (there was no simultaneous translation for monolingual the art scene was “complicated”,’ she writes, ‘the response I received natives). These travellers’ breakfasts, lunches and dinners were put throughout the week to so many questions. Everything was complion the tab of various members of the local aristocracies, heirs to the cated.’ So she gets to this point, and then, well, it seems this space – the power of the Spanish crown, who took charge of serving a special social pages – isn’t the place to address social complexities. menu of traditional fruits and natural products in contemporary In 2013 Chan was replaced by Kevin McGarry, who in his column, form – typical fusion cuisine – while showing off their tax-free art ‘Existential Environments’, describes a looser art scene, less complicated than Chan’s, and mentions different art hothouses in Bogotá collections and philanthropic foundations.
84
AR-JanFeb-ArtistProject-OspinaRESUPPLY ALL.indd 84
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:09
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-ArtistProject-OspinaRESUPPLY ALL.indd 85
85
23/12/2014 14:09
86
AR-JanFeb-ArtistProject-OspinaRESUPPLY ALL.indd 86
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:09
and Medellín, highlighting their flower-growers and naming the cheerful social fauna of butterflies and bumblebees. In 2014 the task fell to Frank Expósito, who in his diary entry, ‘My Bo’, reveals a safe country where the traveller feels at home, takes the place over and mingles at breakfast, dinner and parties with other artworld travellers and celebrities. The vision of these peasant-chroniclers is contrary to that of Burroughs; they seem resigned to showing that they are satisfied, selfsatisfied and even very satisfied with what they’ve seen, including in their cautious repositioning vis-à-vis the equation ‘Colombia = drugs’. Chan quotes a ministry of culture adviser who tells her that ‘artists escaped to the safety of universities in the 1990s, after art got a bad name when “drug men used [it] as a way to wash their money”’. She concludes: ‘It seemed he was saying that Colombian art was better off, now, for the time it spent incubating in ivory towers.’ McGarry, in a bus headed towards a traditional drinking and dancing establishment on the outskirts of Bogotá where the party is safe and euphoria guaranteed in an environment as patriotic as it is folksy, reports that upon passing in front of a ‘formidable chateau’, someone murmurs: ‘Narcos love castles’. McGarry doesn’t get complicated, lets the image drop and closes the passage claiming that he left the party early, but not without first dancing a Macarena – adding that he missed an important Venezuelan collector doing the same atop a table later in the evening. As evidence of the sophisticated and politically correct state of the local art scene, an elegant gallerist offers McGarry coke, but in the form of a tea that relieves the symptoms of altitude sickness. He also has a conversation with a play-it-safe curator who’s opened a gallery
where the intention is to highlight the ‘links between art and nature’. McGarry interprets this to mean that the dynamic of the place will be one of mixing illustration with historicism, and ‘the violence that has shaped so much of modern Colombian consciousness and culture with “botanics” (drugs)’. For his part, Frank Expósito runs into a rabble-rousing artist, forgotten but on the point of being rediscovered, who tells him: “It used to be so bad here that the cartels would steal my Artforums… They needed it to sneak in drugs.” Drugs or conflict in the country are present in all three profiles, but only in small doses, and in the picturesque terms of providing local colour. The myth of the good or bad Colombian savage seems to have been switched for that of the modern or ‘savvy’ postmodern Latino. Visitors pronounce themselves happy to have found vestiges of modernity where they would never have expected it; just as pre-Hispanic ruins are useful to archaeologists, for these hustling ethnographers of contemporary art, there is a gilded modernity that deserves to be recovered. The fluid dialogue between enlightened Creoles and illustrious visitors, as contained in these lightning visits, gets one to lofty peaks of intensity for brief moments, instances of epiphany in which junkies and art groupies cross social and cultural lines, all with the aim of communicating and continuing to communicate the communicativeness of communication, a form of telepathy particular to these kinds of global and cosmopolitan commercial exchanges. Guatemala may be the final fix. ar Translated from the Spanish by David Terrien
all images Collaged screengrabs from Artforum’s online Scene & Herd entries ‘New Normal’, by Dawn Chan, published 9 November 2012; ‘Existential Environments’, by Kevin McGarry, published 10 November 2013; and ‘My Bo’, by Frank Expósito, published 15 November 2014
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-ArtistProject-OspinaRESUPPLY ALL.indd 87
87
23/12/2014 14:09
The Devil in Cali
by Stefanie Hessler
In a city once notorious for drug cartels, many of Cali’s artists mine the dark side of its history of violence, economic inequality, magic and salsa
88
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Cali.indd 88
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:10
above Cerro de las Tres Cruces (Hill of the Three Crosses), Cali, 2010. Photo: Momentos Fotografía facing page Fernell Franco, Untitled, 1970, silver gelatin print, from the series Prostitutas, 1970. © the artist’s estate. Courtesy International Center of Photography, New York
January & February 2015
RESUPPLY PP 89,90,93.indd 89
89
23/12/2014 14:11
The air in Cali is thick and humid, and it gets dark at 6pm every day. The blood is obtained from young locals, whom he and his helpers The old part of town is framed by one-storey buildings into which hunt and let bleed to death. While analogies to Taussig’s analysis small shops are squeezed, offering plateau-soled shoes and freshly and the metaphor of capitalist plantation owners as bloodsucking cut pieces of pineapple in plastic cups. And then there is the occa- vampires are striking, the film can also be seen in relation to historsional strikingly more ‘bling’ building, richly embellished yet not ical trauma in Colombia and the sociopolitical unrest known as La referencing any particular style. Ornamental abundance itself is the Violencia (in effect a civil war spanning the decade between 1948 and theme, from architecture to plastic surgery, of which Cali is Colom- 1958). The trashy aesthetics make one think of Nigeria’s Nollywood bia’s hub. My favourite piece of narco arquitectura, a genre that has splatter movies, another troubled country with a tropical climate. Similarly, writer Andrés Caicedo’s obsession with horror films and emerged since the 1970s, is Parque Jaime Duque. It was erected by a pilot after he mysteriously came into the possession of large sums of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Cyril Connolly and H.P. Lovecraft money. Any resemblance to the permeates his own texts. His short stories feature female cannibals as Taj Mahal is not by chance. Outside of Colombia, the capfuturistic prototypes devouring ital of the Cauca Valley is perhaps the traditional caleño masculinity. best known for the notorious Cali As Joseph Conrad did in Heart of Darkness (1899), Caicedo depicts Cartel. Also referred to as Cali’s the monstrosities and fears of Gentlemen, the group (active in Cali between 1977 and 1998) the tropical driving people mad, made itself a questionable name yet he does this in the countercultural spirit of the 1960s and and dragged that of the city down 70s, and as an appropriation of with it. Too often, though, depictions of the country focus only on the pulp literature and vampire crime and drug violence, and do films of the time. Alongside Ospina, Caicedo is considered not pay tribute to its rich cultural past and contemporary art scene. one of the founders of Caliwood and the Tropical Gothic genre. Many artists today address the conflict-laden history and hierYounger generations of artists archical society that is deeply have continued the legacy, such ingrained with socioeconomic as Helena Producciones, an interinequalities. The figure of the disciplinary collective that reguDevil has become a synonym for larly organises the International these problems and a fascination Performance Festival in Cali, and in 1999 dedicated the exhibition at the same time. In 1980 Michael Taussig pubTerror y Escape to the topic. lished The Devil and Commodity Legend has it that the Devil Fetishism in South America, a study had resided in Cali long before of the magical beliefs among the industrial capitalism arrived. In sugarcane cutters in the Cauca 1837 three crosses were erected on Valley. In the seminal piece of the local mountain overlooking the city to get rid of Satan, after fictocriticism, he describes how male proletarianised plantation he had been dancing in fire circles workers enter into a secret condisguised as a giant bat, causing tract with the Devil to increase more mischief than the archdiocese was willing to tolerate. productivity. However, the money made from these deals is barren and cannot be turned into produc- However, the exorcism allegedly had the opposite effect: rather then tive capital. According to local belief, it has to be spent immediately being kept out, the Devil was locked into the region forever. Giovanni on alcohol and other luxury goods, bearing malign consequences and Vargas’s La Oscuridad No Miente (Darkness Does Not Lie, 2008) consists of causing illness and premature death. The barter with the Devil, an found footage ranging from jittery views off the hill, to narco arqui‘exchange that ends all exchange’, is synonymous with an economic tectura neighbourhoods illuminated by festive Christmas lighting system replacing use value with exchange value and communality and scary Internet curiosities. The video is backed by eerie music and with self-interest, and in which people are ultimately forced to trade fade-ins of text fragments recounting the Devil legend, transmitting their souls for commodities. a feeling of terror and suspense. In Film Shock (2002) Ana María Millán The Devil and the legends surrounding it have entered many works stages dramatised situations in a colonial building in Cali, referencing by artists from the region. In the feature film Pura Sangre (1982), Luis cult Italian horror-film director Mario Bava. One morning while waiting for a taxi, I spotOspina depicts a powerful sugarcane magnate Gabriel Sierra, estructuras para transición #10 suffering from a strange disease, forcing him ted the headline ‘Buenaventura criminals make (que hora es afuera), 2013, wood, dimensions variable. constantly to transfuse blood in order to survive. Photo: Oscar Monsalve. Courtesy Casas Riegner, Bogotá use of witchcraft to escape the authorities’
90
RESUPPLY PP 89,90,93.indd 90
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:11
Ana María Millán, stills from Film Shock, 2002, single-channel video, 3 min 20 sec. Courtesy the artist
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Cali.indd 91
91
23/12/2014 14:10
Fernell Franco, Untitled, 1970, silver gelatin print, from the series Prostitutas, 1970. © the artist’s estate. Courtesy International Center of Photography, New York
92
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Cali.indd 92
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:10
prefacing the local newspaper. Wondering what public opinion on such causalities may be, I asked the concierge for advice. She concurred that indeed black magic was in play, and recommended an almost Goethean precaution (à la ‘the spirits that I summoned up’ from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, 1797) using white magic instead, before calling up her brujo to book me in for an appointment. Sorcery of different sorts is widespread in the valley, as is yagé, a psychedelic brew ingested during shamanistic ceremonies. My fascination lies in the different views these experiences may enable, and what knowledge can be accessed via the chemical changes in our brains, concerns that are also present in bogotano artist Gabriel Sierra’s design elements such as bent walls or mural cuts as means of passing into other worlds. Aside from a fascination with the sinister, Cali has made a name for itself through salsa and excessive parties. In the downtown clubs, the air is thick and electric from live music and the ecstatic energy of dancers. The late Fernell Franco’s series of silvergelatin prints Prostitutas (1970) bears witness to these notorious establishments. The photojournalist documented women working in a brothel in Buenaventura, the formerly prosperous port city near Cali, sensitively capturing urban precariousness and destruction. Franco’s initial exhibition took place in 1972 at Ciudad Solar in Cali, the country’s first alternative space. The building is located downtown in an alley next to the
Archaeological Museum and Cultural Centre, the latter of which was built by Colombian modernist architect Rogelio Salmona in his signature red brick. Artist-run spaces have played an important role in the city, which boasts only one public art museum, Museo de la Tertulia, and one private gallery, Jenny Vilà. Lugar a Dudas, whose name translates as ‘space for doubt’, was founded in 2006 by Oscar Muñoz, another artist whose career began in Ciudad Solar. It functions as exhibition space, research centre and residency programme with a separate building in the bohemian neighbourhood San Antonio. It was an exhibition I curated at Lugar a Dudas, combined with a residency, that first brought me to Cali. During this visit I also learned about La Nocturna, a recent initiative organised by Hernán Barón, Herlyng Ferla, Ericka Florez and Mónica Restrepo. It takes place at the initiators’ homes and promotes a discursive format rooted in the local sociocultural context. I experienced a session myself, starting with Florez’s project Hegelian Dancers (2014), which aims at teaching dilettantes how to move by overcoming the Cartesian gap between mind and body. Salsa is usually not danced by the upper class and thus is symptomatic of class divisions and racial prejudices. This project symbolically stands for the socioeconomic struggles and cultural hybrids of the city, which, alongside local mythologies, have shaped Cali’s diverse and energetic artistic scene. ar
Fabio Melecio Palacios, Bamba 45, 2000, from a performance in the exhibition Terror y Escape, at the International Performance Festival, Cali. Courtesy Lugar a Dudas, Cali
January & February 2015
RESUPPLY PP 89,90,93.indd 93
93
23/12/2014 14:11
Carlos Motta Archiving Suppression and Pre-Columbian Blowjobs by Andrew Berardini
Tucked into the trees just beyond the lapping blue waves of a tropical sea, imagine a naked shaman pausing to gently pull a cock out of his puckered mouth and let out a long and portentous sigh. He’s just sighted, cresting a distant horizon, the first masts of strange ships. Though unknown to him, they’re Spanish caravels captained by Christopher Columbus. The first people who met Columbus, the friendly and peaceful Lukku-Cairi or Lucayans of the Bahamas first contacted in 1492, were to the last child murdered or enslaved by 1520, when the final 11 of an estimated 40,000 were cleared from their homeland by Spanish soldiers. Pre-Columbian: whole civilisations over millennia reduced to the arrival of a single cruel, greedy and altogether psychopathic Genoese sailor. Pioneering the enslavement and conversion of two continents seems to grant Columbus naming rights to at least one country, Colombia, along with the civilisations he helped destroy. After conquering their own diverse peninsula, the Spanish applied those lessons in advanced warfare, religious intolerance and torture to conquering any other random civilisation they bumped into by accident. Wiped out entirely, absorbed or kept as an underclass for centuries, between the conqueror and the conquered a circuit is formed, the scars of the whip and the shame of the torturer get carried into the future, woven into ancestry and borne through traditions, the violence responds with violence, a body that attacks itself. All Americans share in that legacy. What happened to the peoples now painfully dubbed pre-Columbian is just one arcing history that includes almost countless individual stories within it, and with all its tragedy, still only just one of many such histories. And across racial, sexual, gender, ethnic and
94
AR-JanFeb-Feature-CarlosMotta.indd 94
religious boundaries, oppressed peoples can and have found common cause. Jean Genet, writer, poet, criminal and homosexual, came to America for three months to lecture at the invitation of the Black Panthers, and later that year spent six months in Palestinian refugee camps. Both of these groups, like him, were criminalised for their impulse towards freedom. Peering back on history, looking out from his homeland of Colombia and into the nature of his own desires, artist Carlos Motta has found in his multivalent, multimedia artwork this common cause. An illicit archivist of criminalised longing, chronicler of the conquered and abused, desirous dreamer, Motta makes work that explicitly engages with political history, as he writes, ‘to create counter narratives that recognize suppressed histories, communities, and identities’. The speeches of assassinated Colombian leftist political candidates yearning for peace are uttered again, the history of homosexual repression in Ukraine gets clearly written (incidentally part of the artist’s winning entry for the 2014 Future Generation Prize in Kiev), the struggles of Latin American immigrants in the ‘model’ country of Sweden are carefully documented: these things add up, and he makes them into public declamations in street performances and bus posters, online repositories and real-life gatherings. Though often distinctly informational, they can also be dreamy, and when artefacts do not exist, they are imagined: an archive of views from the windows of colonial prisons, documentation of fantastical pre-Columbian statues in sultry homosexual congress or the smushing of all the nations in Latin America with seemingly intractable political problems into a single weirdly shaped Pangaea (one way perhaps that North Americans lump together their neighbours). Though Motta takes great care in his historical reexaminations, the collapsing of struggles, the uniting of causes with bodies and desires, is what titillates the mind.
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:12
this page, from top Stills from Nefandus, 2013, 13 min 4 sec, hd 16:9, video, colour, sound; and Naufragios, 2013, 12 min 31 sec, hd 16:9, video, colour, sound. Both courtesy Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon; Instituto de Visión, Bogotá; and Mor Charpentier, Paris facing page Hacia una historiografía homoerótica #7, 2013, pencil and watercolour on paper (drawn by Gata Suba and Carlos Motta), 23 × 30 cm. Courtesy Instituto de Visión, Bogotá
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Feature-CarlosMotta.indd 95
95
23/12/2014 14:12
BRIEF HISTORY OF HOMOSEXUAL REPRESSION IN UKRAINE Second half of the 16th century – end of the 18th century Punishment for Homosexuality in Zaporizhzhya Sich (1855–1940), According to Dmytro Yavornytsky (1855–1940), Cossacks historian at the Academy of Sciences of the Ukraine Soviet Socialist Republic (SSR), one of the most serious crimes in Zaporizhzhya Sich, the name for part of what is now Ukraine, was sexual intercourse between two men. As punishment, they were chained to what was commonly called a “pole of shame,” beaten with sticks and sometimes to death. Yavornytsky, D. The History of Zaporizhzhya Cossacks. Kiev: Nauk. dumka, 1990–91.
April 26, 1715 Penalty for the “Sin of Sodom” under Peter the Great The Military Article is enacted. Chapter twenty, “On the sin of Sodom, violence, and fornication,” cites punishment for voluntary sodomy (though the form of punishment is not specified) and for violent sodomy (punishable by exile or death penalty). http://www.hist.msu.ru/ER/Etext/articul.htm
August 15, 1845 First Criminal Code that Penalizes Sodomy Decree of Czar Nicholas I (1796–1855) confirms a code of criminal penalties and corrective actions, effective May 1, 1846. It requires that a person who commits an act of sodomy be deprived of all property rights and exiled to Siberia. Additional punishment includes beating by whip. If the offender was Christian, he was also required to repent before a spiritual leader (Article 1293). Aggravated sodomy, that is an act committed with violence, to a minor, or to a developmentally disabled person, merits a brutal sentence: ten to twelve years of hard labor, beating by whip, and the imposition of a stigma (Article 1294).
1920s - 1980s Lesbians in the h USSR
April 4, 1998 Big Boy Club
m as the laws w only Lesbian sex w was not a crime prosecuted m men. Young w women charged w with m homosexuality (especially those age fifteen to m nineteen) w were sent to a psychiatric hospital for three m months and treated w with drugs. O Once released, they had to register as m mentally ill w with a local psychologist, a designation that hindered careers and even the ability to pass a driver’s license exam. m
Big Boy Club, the first and longest-running gay nightclub in Ukraine, opens on April 4, 1998 in Kiev. In 2002, it will change its name to Androgin and will close in early 2014.
The first w widespread exclusively lesbian subculture that appeared in Soviet times m arose from m Joseph Stalin’s concentration camps and in w women’s m m prisons. Historian O Olga Zhuk, w who has explored the subculture at camps, believes that it gradually m spread from m these zones of exile to all Soviet society. The culture reflected a clear division of gender roles in a strictly patriarchal structure (i.e., butch/femme), making it especially popular mm m among working-class and lower-class women. m w w w m
Ministry of Justice officially registers the first lesbian organization, Women’s Network. Its participants will organize flashmobs, summer camps for lesbians, and Race for Life events, as well as actively advocate for LGBT rights. Today the organization has nearly ceased to exist.
http://www.savanne.ch/tusovka/ru/pilot/homosexuality-russia.html
1973 Questioning the h Prosecution of Gays m w manual, m In a criminal-law Soviet legal scholar, criminologist, and Odessa native Michael Shargorodskii m O M (1904-1973) becomes m one of the first to question the prosecution of unqualified (that is, consensual) sodomy. that “in Soviet legal literature m He writes w no one has never tried to bring sound scientific basis for criminal liability for voluntary sodomy, m m and the only argument that is usually given m (moral depravity of the subject and a violation m of the rules of socialist morality) cannot be m upheld, because the negative properties of the individual cannot serve as a basis for criminal m liability and immoral actions are not to declare mm them There are ... serious doubts about m criminal. m the feasibility of preserving criminal liability for m unqualified sodomy.” m M.D. Shargorodskiy and P.P. Osipov. Rate of the Soviet Criminal Law. 1973.
1885 Reduced Penalties for Consensual Homosexual Acts Voluntary sodomy is penalized by depriving the individual of all “special personal and property” rights and imprisonment for four to five years. Christians are still mandated to repent (Article 995). The same article disciplines men who engage in anal sex with women. Violently sodomizing a minor is still punishable by hard labor in exile for ten to twelve years.
Prominent m film m director Sergei Parajanov (1924– 1990) is arrested in Kiev—where he w was visiting —w his sick son—and charged w with sodomy — m under Article 122, Ukrainian C Criminal Code, parts 1, 2. A m C Parajanov w will be sentenced to five years in prison but released in early D December 1977, thanks m to a letter of amnesty signed by other m major m filmmakers. mm http://www.segodnya.ua/ukraine/vcja-pravda-o-cudimoctjakhcerheja-paradzhanova.html
1987 First Case of H HIV/AIDS
http://sprosi.d3.ru/comments/584659
March 22, 1903 New Article on Sodomy The Criminal Law of 1903 combines the laws about voluntary and violent sodomy m in Article A 516, ”On O Lasciviousness.” A guilty verdict verdic for consensual sex earns one up to three months in m prison. Aggravated sodomy A m requires three years and, during crackdowns, up to eight years of w hard labor. http://sprosi.d3.ru/comments/584659
1917–1934
Decriminalization of H Homosexuality m m — Relative Tolerance
A m w After the criminal code is repealed following the October Revolution of 1917, the antiO homosexual law m w also ceases to be valid. The first two Code of the w editions of the Criminal C m C Ukrainian SSR (1922 and 1927) have no specific laws (usually termed w against homosexuality m m “sodomy”). However, gay men m w m could be pursued by other laws w (e.g., rape). Kolos, M. Criminal Law Ukraine. 2011.
January 11, 1934 Recriminalization of Sodomy m m Chairman of the A All-Ukrainian C Central Executive C m Committee Grigory Petrovsky (1878–1958) C mm G signs the Kharkiv resolution of criminal liability m for sodomy. a law m This act reimposes m w against sodomy code. A Article m in the national criminal m 165 (1) states that the penalty for voluntary intercourse between two men is imprisonment w w m m m for up to five years. Sodomy with m committed mm w violence, by taking advantage of the dependent status of the victim, workers, or in m or by sex w public, w warrants up to eight years. Of Criminal Liability for Sodomy. Resolution of the Presidium of the USSR on January 11, 1934. PO SSR. – 1934. Number 5, Article 38.
April 17, 2000 First Lesbian Organization
Geidar, L. and A. Dovbakh. Being a Lesbian in Ukraine: Gaining Strength. Kiev: Zhenskaia set, 2007.
September 1, 2001 Exclusion of Sodomy from the New Criminal Code Article 122, which criminalized “sodomy,” defined as consensual or violent intercourse between two men, which was severely punished with imprisonment of different durations, with fines and other forms of punishment, is removed from the new Criminal Code. http://zakon2.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2341-14
October 2001 Sunny Bunny Molodist International Film Festival presents The Other Love, a program dedicated to the LGBT community. Later renamed Sunny Bunny, it will become a world-class queer program within a major festival. The Sunny Bunny Prize for LGBT films is second only to the Berlin International Film Festival’s Teddy Award in importance and reputation. https://www.facebook.com/sunnybunnyfest/info
December m 20, 1973 Arrest of Sergei Parajanov
http://www.istorya.ru/referat/6279/1.php
One of Us Magazine. Number 2-3 / 11 (68), March-June 2008.
The first cases of HIV/AIDS A D are discovered in the Ukraine SSR during the first large-scale screening of people w with antibodies to HIV. By the end of the year, six HIV-positive permanent residents m and seventy-five HIV-positive foreigners are found and, following the law, w w deported. By 1994, the spread of HIV/AIDS slow, A D remained m w and its m main m means of transmission were through m w heterosexual acts. International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine. People and HIV. Russian edition, Kiev: International HIV/AIDS Alliance in Ukraine, 2006. http://www.aidsalliance.org.ua/ru/library/our/peopleandhiv/pdf/ ph3.pdf
December m 12, 1991 Decriminalization of H Homosexuality in m m Ukraine SSR The Supreme m C Council of the Ukrainian SSR passes law responsibility for voluntary w abolishing “criminal m homosexual relationships,” effective January 20, m 1992. A Article 122 remains on the books but only m criminalizes sex between men that is “committed m w m mm with the use of physical violence, threats, or use w the helpless state of the victim”—with m —w punishment m of two “committed w to five years in prison—and — mm by a group of persons or against a m minor, or a person w who has previously committed a crime”— mm m — with up to eight years. w http://zakon4.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/1974-12/ed19911212
1993 Mykolayiv Association for Gays, M Lesbians, and Bisexuals ‘LIGA’ The A Association of LGBT G People, w which w will form m the basis of the later M Mykolayiv A Association for G Gays, Lesbians, and Bisexuals (LIGA), GA begins its activities in city of N Nikolaev. LIGA GA is the oldest active LGBT G organization in Ukraine. http://www.lgbt.mk.ua/league.php
M March h 7, 1934 Criminal Liability for Sodomy m m in Russia
M May 13, 1994 Ganymede m
Criminal C m liability for sodomy m (intercourse between w men) w was introduced in the Russian Soviet m Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), after having been passed at the Presidium m of the All-Russian C Central Executive C Committee of A mm the RSFSR on D December 17, 1933. This decree m makes several amendments to the Union m m m of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) criminal m code, w which duplicates the article for sodomy m that had been in the Russian code. Voluntary sodomy m in the USSR is punishable by three to five years in prison, and aggravated sodomy, m due to violence or the dependent status of the victim, will last until m is five to eight years. The law ww 1961.
The M Ministry of Justice registers G Ganymede, m the first national association to position itself as an LGBT organization. It w will cease operations in G 1999. http://www.drsu.gov.ua/show/211
February 15, 1996 One of Us M Magazine
September 21, 2003 Mileage in the Name of Life During Mileage in the Name of Life, the masssports charity event to support people living with HIV/AIDS along Khreshchatyk Street in Kiev, members of the LGBT community were confronted by representatives of religious sects and were attacked by fascists. In 2003 Women’s Network started the event to express solidarity for men, women, and children living with HIV/AIDS as well as draw public attention to the disease.
http://lgbt.org.ua/lgbtruh/advocating/show_1574
May 16-19, 2012 First KievPride – MARCH CANCELLED KievPride, the first LGBT Pride celebration, takes place. However, the march is cancelled due to threats from right-wing activists. As part of KievPride, the first Equality March will occur in 2013. http://www.amnesty.org/en/news/ukraine-first-ever-kyiv-pridecancelled-face-ultra-right-threat-2012-05-20
June 30, 2012 ELTON JOHN’S APPEAL Elton John used an AIDS charity concert in Kiev to make an emotional appeal to Ukraine to stop what he called “persecution of gays.” http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/30/entertainment-usukraine-elton-idUSBRE85T0LD20120630
October 2, 2012 Law 8711 A public action is held against the Draft Law 8711, criminalizing “homosexual propaganda.” Unfortunately, that day the bill passes during the first reading with 289 deputies, including the Chairman of the Verkhovna Rada Volodymyr Lytvyn, in favor. The law is not adopted at its second reading, due to harsh criticism from the international community and from human-rights organizations. http://w1.c1.rada.gov.ua/pls/zweb2/webproc4_1?pf3511=40734
May 25, 2013 First Equality March Approximately pproximately fifty to sixty participants of the Equality March for LGBT rights march on Victory Avenue near the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kiev. The police arrest thirteen people for trying to interfere march.. with the march http://kiyany.obozrevatel.com/politics/41972-marsh-ravenstvavzglyad-iznutri.htm
September 21, 2003 Love against Homosexuality Movement
November 6, 2013 Bogdan Globa’s Coming Out
First Love against Homosexuality protest is held. For three hours, homophobic activists stand in Independence Square with banners that read “Homosexuality = AIDS,” “Homosexuality = a sin,” “Gays are not born. They become gays,” “Same-sex love does not exist,” “Ukraine = Christian country,” “Freddie Mercury died. Decide!” and “Homosexuality = enemy of the family.” Over the next eleven years, the organization will organize public actions against LGBT people and advocate for the homophobic laws, among other activities. On April 21, 2009, Love against Homosexuality, now a nongovernmental organization (NGO), described as a “social movement of people from the future,” will receive a state registration.
Speaking before parliament, Bogdan Globa, LGBT activist and executive director of the Ukrainian charitable organization Tochka Opory (Fulcrum) becomes the first openly gay person to formally address the state’s highest legislative body.
http://love-contra.org
May 17, 2005 First Protest for LGBT Rights On March 22, 2005, a gay student at the Interregional Academy of Personnel Management (MAUP) was expelled because he was distributing to his classmates printed materials with a call to protect the rights of gays and lesbians. He later sued the school. The Holosiyvsky Court ruled in favor of the student and ordered the IAPM to pay him compensation of 600 hryvnias (U$120). In response, on the International Day against Homophobia (May 17), the NGO Our World organized the first public action for LGBT rights in Kiev to protest the student’s removal from the university. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. Department of State, United States. 2006. Country Report on Human Rights Practices: Ukraine (March 6, 2007).
February 15, 2011 Adoption of Children by Same-sex Couples Verkhovna Rada (Supreme Council of Ukraine) ratifies the revised European Convention on the Adoption of Children, which allows same-sex couples to adopt. In April 2011, the Ministry of Justice will issue an explanation of parliament’s unprecedented decision, noting that the convention “gives the right (but does not establish the obligation) to States, taking into account their national law, to apply this Convention to samesex couples.”
http://lgbt.org.ua/news/show_919
December 14, 2013 Prime Minister on LGBT Rights At a meeting of authorities as well as supporters and opponents of the anti-government Euromaidan (during the first month of the Dignity Revolution), Prime Minister Mykola Azarov says that in order to establish visa-free travel to the European Union (EU) countries, Ukraine should “legalize same-sex marriage and adopt a law of equality for sexual minorities.” Azarov, however, insists that Ukranian society is not ready for this change and that religious organizations of various denominations will oppose it. http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2013/12/14/7006832
May 2014 79 percent of the representatives of the Ukrainian LGBT community were discriminated From May 8 to 18, the main LGBT website, known as the National LGBT Portal, conducts an online nationwide survey about discrimination. Of the 1,024 respondents, ranging in age from sixteen to sixty-eight and hailing from all twenty-four regions and Crimea, seventy-nine percent had experienced discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity at least once in their lifetime. The biggest offenders were relatives, classmates, friends, and acquaintances. http://lgbt.org.ua/en/news/show_1459
May 13, 2014 Anti-discrimination Law Ignores Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity With 233 votes in favor, Verkhovna Rada adopts an anti-discrimination law that does not specify sexual orientation and gender identity as the EU, human-rights organizations, and the Ukrainian LGBT community had earlier demanded. http://lgbt.org.ua/news/show_1413
http://zakon4.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/3017-17
One of Us M O Magazine is registered as a m media company. The first issue of this LGBT m G publication will be released on D December 19, 1996. N Now w m w subscription-only, the m magazine could previously be found in Kiev, regional centers, and other major cities and by subscription. m
June 20, 2011 Copying the Russian Ban on Gay Propaganda
The updated criminal m code of Ukraine SSR, which duplicates the Russian code and w was w adopted on O October 27, 1960, goes into effect. Article 122 m mandates for sodomy A m up to one year in prison and for belonging in a homosexual m relationship, expulsion from m one’s home m and mandatory resettlement for up to three years. m m
M Ukranian Ministry of Health issues the first decree in the independent Ukraine regulating sex transitions. The ministry will m w repeal the decree on February 3, 2011 (Order of Ministry of Health of O M Ukraine N. N 60).
http://zakon4.rada.gov.ua/laws/show/2001-05/ed19911212
http://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2013/12/14/7006832
http://w1.c1.rada.gov.ua/pls/zweb2/webproc4_1?pf3511=40734
April 1, 1961 New N w Law w on Sodomy m in Ukraine SSR
With the election of Ombudsman Valerie Lutkovska in 2012, the LGBT community’s visibility problem begins to change. The office’s 2012 report contains the first mention of the community, stating in particular: “The Commissioner draws attention to the fact that the recent cases of outright daring attacks and commiting physical violence against sexual minorities, including LGBT activists.” In 2014 for the first time, the ombudsman’s annual report, which covers 2013, will include a special section, “Discrimination Based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity.”
http://neuletay.aids.ua/gazeta/7-82003.htm
Draft raft Law 8711 is first registered in parliament. The authors are six members, representing all parliamentary factions (Communisty Party of Ukraine, Our Ukraine, former prime minister Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, Party of Regions), except the Lytvyn Bloc. The bill calls for amendments to the laws governing the media and bans the products that “promote homosexuality.” For importing, manufacturing, or distributing alleged gay propaganda, individuals face up to three to five years in prison. Later parliament will file two bills prohibiting “homosexual propaganda” aimed at minors (No. 10290) and propaganda “of homosexuality, lesbianism, bisexuality, and transgenderism” (No. 10729). None of these homophobic laws have been adopted to date.
http://www.libussr.ru/doc_ussr/ussr_3970.htm
2012 Ukrainian Ombudsman Becomes the First Authority to Recognize Discrimination against LGBT People
https://www.facebook.com/odynznas
M March h 15, 1996 Official Procedure for Sex-change h Operations
This is the first print run of this newspaper, Brief History of Homosexual Repression in Ukraine, 2014, which was edited by Maxim Ivanukha and Carlos Motta, as part of Motta’s participation in The Future Generation Art Prize 2014 exhibition at the PinchukArtCentre, Kiev, October 2014–January 2015. Endless copies. Special thanks to Bogdan Globa and Maxim Eristavi. Front illustration based on an anonymous photograph, found at the Schwules Museum in Berlin, drawn by Humberto Junca and Carlos Motta in 2012.
Carlos Motta and Maxim Ivanukha, Brief History of Homosexual Repression in Ukraine, 2014, newsprint broadsheet, 42 × 57 cm. Courtesy the artists and Pinchuk Art Centre, Kiev
96
RESUPPLY p96 ndd 96
ArtReview
23 12 2014 14 49
With videos and conferences, sculptures and activism, Motta fin- politics of their region, each has their own perspective, ranging from gers the underbelly of the conqueror’s histories, the humans crushed the horrified and aggrieved to the confused and unaware. The effects of beneath the wheel of one winner or another that refuses all other ideology and political policy can be easily discussed in abstraction, but ways of being other than their own. His project, the Nefandus Trilogy, here its real legacy can be found in the citizens of the affected countries. began at Galeria Filomena Soares in Lisbon in 2013 and expanded Motta rarely does this alone. To him, these objects are not things through numerous iterations and additions. The Latin word nefandus separate from people or their histories, and this attitude makes collabis a kind of catchall used in Colonial America for the impious, abom- oration normal. Even as that history gets carefully listed on a blackinable or unnamable (it is also unsurprisingly the name of a satanic board in Brief History of us Interventions (2006), this obvious didactic tool Swedish black metal band). Central to this unfolding project is the is unstuck. Alongside the carefully handwritten interventions on the film Nefandus (2013). Motta in Spanish and his collaborator Arregoces board, the artist includes chalk and erasers for the audience to quesCoronado in Kogi (the language, according to Wikipedia, of the only tion, assert, add and erase. Teacherly authority can and will always be unconquered Andean civilisation) discuss on a boat trip along the adulterated by our individual interpretations, the fluxing, subjective placid brown waters of the Don Diego river in Colombia sexual prac- nature of history. As the board gets layered with amendments and flattices of the peoples of America before contact. Lingering with fairly tened by erasures, the mess of chalk is as easy to read as the history that dry language on some wet subjects, the possibility of homoerotic love it attempts to understand. While this work hinges on an exhibition object, Motta’s work as an in the Americas and the punishing dictates of Catholic morality on the artist deals less with things and more with people, not male body (for example, “the anus became the locus of male vulnerability”). The lush green of the stillonly (as already mentioned) in documented inwild jungles and the calm flow of the water terviews, but often as an organiser of conferbecome witnesses not only to this discusences, a collaborator with other artists as sion but to all that have passed through well as choreographers, historians and ordinary people who find themselves it over the centuries. The landscape, witnesses and victims of oppression. the physical, is what unites the indigenous and their colonisers, as well From May 2012 to November 2013, as Carlos Motta, a native son of a Motta spearheaded four confercountry long at war with itself ences, We Who Feel Differently: A and still, in its conservatism, not Symposium at the New Museum, the easiest place to be a gay man, New York; Gender Talents: A Special another group struggling under Address at Tate Modern, London; active suppression. Godfull: Shape Shifting God as Queer at the iarsj, Union Theological The ideas contained in their discussion unfold into objets d’art Seminary, New York; and ritual of in a cracked model of Columbus’s queer rituals at Witte de With, Rotsunk Santa Maria, colonial torture terdam. These various symposia devices rendered in floor vinyls and are each underlain with ‘difference’ a series of drawings of pre-Columas a central tenet, whether the vast and bian artefacts reimagined for lusty fluid spectrum of gender identification, homosexual purposes. In Hacia una histothe invocation of the term ‘queer’ as a stand riografía homoerótica (Towards Homoerotic Histoagainst assimilation or the physical space of exchange for sexual and gender inclusion created in riography), #1–13 (2013), the placid faces of stylised ancient Americans get stuffed with erect cocks. The sculpturally the first floor of the New Museum (along with that symposium and a elegant figures pull each other into acrobatic sexual positions and rather robust online resource). Nixing equality as synonym for samedozens-deep assfucking trains. While Motta’s work can sometimes ness, Motta expresses his philosophical position and social activities disappear into the causes he champions, here the ancient figurines as a way not to simply rewrite past histories but also as an attempt to caught in flagrante have a bit of that physical joy that comes with amend history’s first draft towards an inclusive celebration of differfucking, deeply individual and which never makes much sense ence (or the more adjectival ‘differently’). Rather than flipping the based anywhere but in an individual body, the most intimate site of table of history, Motta seeks in his poetic objects and social actions agency. Motta’s theoretical constructs are crystalline, but the work a redemption for all our stories, united by our differences too often shimmers when clearly sited in bodies. Idea becomes engorged form erased by a dominant culture. in a carved stone cock (Untitled, date unknown), almost punishing No matter how delightful an act the pre-Columbian blowjob in its phallic force, to be used in the imagined sex rituals of a disap- might imaginably be, knowledge of homoeroticism in the Americas almost entirely disappeared with its possible practitioners in the peared civilisation. In his more directly archival works, though distinctly less lasciv- Spanish Conquest. Carlos Motta though doesn’t have to look far to find their legacy. It is within him, within ious, the ideas are still activated by individuals. Hacia una historiografía homoerótica #7, 2013, the bodies and stories, actions and art of all When, in The Good Life (2005–8), he asks over 360 pencil and watercolour on paper people in the streets of 12 Latin American cities (drawn by Gata Suba and Carlos Motta), 23 × 30 cm. Americans, each an ancestor to the oppressed about the United States’ interventions into the and the oppressors. ar Courtesy Instituto de Visión, Bogotá
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Feature-CarlosMotta.indd 97
97
23/12/2014 14:12
Walead Beshty by Helen Sumpter
How the la-based artist turns both his process and society’s rules and restrictions into his art 98
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Beshty.indd 98
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:13
September 2014: I meet Walead Beshty at London’s Barbican Centre, His Travel Pictures (2006/08) – photographs that show the striped where he is working on his commission for the Curve gallery, an marks caused by X-ray damage when unexposed photographic film installation of over 12,000 blue cyanotype photograms titled A Partial is put through airport security – had their beginnings in a series of Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random photographs Beshty took in 2001 in the abandoned Iraqi diplomatic Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All office to the former ddr in Berlin. Beshty recounts the story of how Over the Workbench. Beshty and his assistant are completing the final this building had been partially destroyed by a fire that had raged photograms: holed up in a temporary studio hidden behind the out of control because the German government didn’t know who to Barbican’s main gallery, they coat objects made from paper and card get permission from to enter the space, and how, because Iraq had with the light-sensitive cyanotype solution. The materials on which another embassy in the former West Berlin, this was not only an obsoall these prints are being made – from flattened-out cardboard boxes, lete embassy but an obsolete embassy in an obsolete country. “Those newspaper pages and paper plates to dinner menus, sugar sachets tensions were interesting to me, because they’re about the abstracand business cards, as well as the objects exposed on them, which tion of international law. Here was this real building in Berlin, but include paintbrushes, a spoon, a hammer, pliers, scissors, a step- because of the Vienna Convention, it wasn’t Berlin, it was a soverladder, a G-clamp and goggles – are all tools, remnants or debris from eign territory of another country, and on top of that, it was a modern the artist’s working life. ruin, a leftover space.” The opening of A Partial Disassembling… will mark just over a year When the events of 9/11 took place shortly afterwards, followed since Beshty began making these cyanotypes back in la, where the by the Iraq War, Beshty chose not to exhibit those images to avoid an inevitable association with the British-born artist has lived conflict. But after the film was for the past ten years. When unveiled, the prints are presaccidently damaged by X-rays at airport security, he did show the ented in a chronological, packresulting prints – the distorting ed, salon-style floor-to-ceiling hang, along the full length of pinky-purple and green glare the long, arcing Curve space. on the images shifting their It’s an overwhelming, poetic, subject focus to that of visible sweeping patchwork mosaic, markers of invisible borders, a reference both to the limbo of impossible to view in its entirety from one position; a bank of airport security and to the limbo ghostly images, both remnants status of the embassy. These and reminders of over a year of works are less about the indiviartistic activity and an instaldual images than the process lation that is both the work and used to make them, what Beshty has described in terms of a game the document of the artist’s making of it. that’s made up of its rules, Despite the show’s looming rather than of achieving particdeadline Beshty is happy to talk ular outcomes. His related series and we begin our discussion of FedEx works (2007–) – glass with the proposition of ‘transsculptures constructed with diparency’, a term increasingly mensions to fit exactly inside used by politicians to indicate FedEx postal boxes, also operopenness and honesty. It’s a ates under sets of rules, those proposition that’s particularof both FedEx and Beshty. Each ly relevant to this project. “In time the sculptures are exhibthe politics of aesthetics, power can be as much about concealing as ited, they are ‘FedExed’ to their destination and displayed on top of the revealing the process of how something is made,” Beshty points out. packing boxes, any travel damage – cracks and chips in the glass – func“A Partial Disassembling… is about inverting that and trying to turn tioning as a set of visible markers of their otherwise invisible journeys. that idea of total disclosure into the product. It’s a work that selfA Partial Disassembling… uses diaristic conventions, but it’s not a narrates, but because there’s an excess of information, the narrative is diary. Beshty’s use of studio ‘debris’ in this way is not to focus in on the both totally transparent and totally incomprehensible.” minutiae of his own life, but to reveal and give equal value to everything The idea of a duality of visibility and invisibility runs through in his working life and to show how it all connects. Beshty also makes Beshty’s work. The artist made Island Flora (2005), a series of colour a point of photographing people he works with – assistants, fabricaphotographs of planted highway median spaces (traffic islands), short- tors, framers, graphic designers and writers too: after we’ve talked I pose in the gallery, to be added to this ly after moving to la, because he found above A Partial Disassembling..., 2014 (installation view). something compelling in these areas Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images. Courtesy Barbican Centre, London process. Beshty uses the photographic of lush vegetation that could be seen by medium, but he’s not a photographer in facing page Fold (300/600/90o/1200 directional light sources), anyone driving past but at the same time the truest sense of the word: “I was never December 31st 2012, Los Angeles, California, Ilford Multigrade iv mgf.1k, 2013. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London were totally isolated and inaccessible. engaged with making the perfect print.
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Beshty.indd 99
99
23/12/2014 14:13
100
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Beshty.indd 100
23/12/2014 14:13
101
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Beshty.indd 101
23/12/2014 14:13
above FedEx Kraft Box 2005 fedex 330504 10/05 sscc, Priority Overnight, Los Angeles-Miami trk#865344981299, October 29-30, 2008, Priority Overnight, Miami-Ann Arbor trk#861049125115, March 03-04, 2009, Standard Overnight, Ann Arbor-Los Angeles trk#868274625749, July 09-10, 2009, Standard Overnight, Los Angeles-San Francisco trk#878069766471, August 27-28, 2009, Standard Overnight, San Francisco-Los Angeles trk#870342520145, November 12-13, 2009, International Priority, Los Angeles-London trk#798269222978, April 10-12, 2012, 2008–. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London preceding pages A Partial Disassembling..., 2014 (installation view). Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty Images. Courtesy Barbican Centre, London
102
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Beshty.indd 102
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:13
I’m much more interested in photography as a place where picturemaking or a discourse on images intersects with reality and also in the glitches and the noise that the different kinds of technologies produce.” As an early photographic process, cyanotype carries with it an air of nostalgia. It’s a medium for which I confess to having a particular fondness; indeed I spent much of my time at art school playing with light-sensitive chemicals and paint to produce prints in similar ways. Beshty’s interest in the medium relates, as does the title A Partial Disassembling…, to the late experimental filmmaker Hollis Frampton’s views on anachronistic technologies, in particular Frampton’s 1979 lecture ‘The Invention Without a Future’ (a title that refers to the Lumière brothers’ somewhat misguided description of cinema), in which Frampton suggests ‘A Partial Disassembling…’ as the title the lecture seemed to deserve after he had prepared it. “Frampton viewed old technologies as having a kind of freedom because they are no longer the dominant currency, which is an argument that also resonates with me,” says Beshty. It’s a subject that seems especially relevant now, in the age of digital images. As Beshty points out, it’s easy to think that images no longer have materiality, but in the end “there’s always an object or a substratum, a video projector or a computer”.
Six weeks after the October opening of A Partial Disassembling… I’m at the opening of another Walead Beshty exhibition, at his London gallery, Thomas Dane. Titled Marginalia, the works here look very different – elegant and minimal – and include several large canvases covered in abstract blue lines. They’re the protective drop cloths on which Beshty coated the materials for his Curve cyanotypes, the perfect continuation of and counterpoint to that work. I come back to the idea of transparency. Returning to the Curve, I’m drawn to one particular print among the thousands of others; the object placed on it is a strip of blank photographic film. It’s a print made with one obsolete photographic process on which the image is of the material of the now also-obsolete photographic process that replaced it. ar Walead Beshty’s A Partial Disassembling of an Invention Without a Future: Helter-Skelter and Random Notes in Which the Pulleys and Cogwheels Are Lying Around at Random All Over the Workbench continues through 8 February at the Curve, Barbican Centre, London. His exhibition Marginalia continues through 24 January at Thomas Dane, London
Marginalis (London, United Kingdom, September 12–21, 2014), 2014. Courtesy the artist and Thomas Dane Gallery, London
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Beshty.indd 103
103
23/12/2014 14:13
We Need to Talk About the ’Toons – They’re Taking Over by Oliver Basciano
104
RESUPPLY_104_105_106.indd 104
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:14
In the 2003 Warner Bros film Looney Tunes: Back in Action there’s a chase brandscape. Longly’s performance at the Serpentine Gallery in 2013 sequence that, for various convoluted reasons, ends up in the Louvre. took the form of a fashion show, and involved an altered line-drawing Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny are being pursued by their longtime of Fred and Barney smoking, taken from a 1950s advert for Winston nemesis, the shotgun-wielding Elmer Fudd, and they decide that cigarettes, appended to the clothes. (Longly isn’t the only one to notice their best course of action is to hide inside the paintings of the muse- that toons can be fashion: in June last year Jeffrey Katzenberg, ceo of um’s fictionalised collection. First they jump into Dalí’s The Persistence DreamWorks Animation, told the Licensing Expo in Las Vegas that of Memory (1931), Fudd following, his gun going as limp as the paint- Felix the Cat was ‘a true icon [and] we plan to make him one of the most ing’s floppy clocks. They jump out and into The Scream (1893–1910), desired fashion brands in the world’.) Likewise Fornieles’s mixing of the clean lines of the three characters becoming as wavy as Edvard the Family Guy (1999–) baby with any number of other Generation-Y Munch’s brushstrokes. It ends when Bugs and Daffy lure Fudd into tropes in his 2013 installation Despicable Me 2 at Mihai Nicodim, Los Georges Seurat’s A Sunday on La Grande Jatte (1884–6) and, with an elec- Angeles, updates a dubious lineage that counts Jeff Koons’s Banality tric handheld fan, blow apart the pointillist dots of paint that make up series (1988, in which Koons co-opted cultural motifs from his generathe hunter’s form. tion including the Pink Panther and Michael Jackson) as a predecessor. Back in the real world, the population of Toontown (which Robert In Fornieles’s work, in a manner akin to navigation in the online world, Zemeckis’s 1988 film Who Framed Roger Rabbit locates as being near Hol- Stewie joins myriad images loosely connected by tenuous association. The majority of artists discussed lywood) hasn’t quite made it to the here, however, to varying degrees Louvre yet, but they seem to be getengage in questions pertaining to ting everywhere else in art. Let’s take an ontology of the cartoon character, a quick, no doubt incomplete, stockcheck of recent artists who have incorpulling the image out of the pictorial porated motifs from the pantheon of fiction and into the ‘real’ world. Western toons in their work. All to a The toon is an image imbued with greater and lesser extent owe a debt to a nostalgia for the cultural history of post-1969 Philip Guston, and his dark cinema and television but also narratives that operate in the hermetic corralling of American pop culture: bloodshot, nihilistic and hungover, world of Toontown itself. So an image post-Woodstock (where Guston had of Bugs can be read within the context of cultural or personal histories moved in 1967 and lived until his (he first appeared in 1940; I remember death in 1980). There’s Ian Cheng with Bugs and Fudd in his shooterwatching reruns on television during game-style animated video for the the 1980s but always preferred Yogi Liars’s dark, pounding 2012 single Bear), yet it can also be read within the Brats, Dan Colen (the Kool-Aid Man, mythology of their world (Bugs has a Roger Rabbit and Wile E. Coyote), love–hate relationship with Daffy, Ed Fornieles (Stewie Griffin), Anthea and they both hate Fudd). Hamilton (various characters from The double-life status of the toon The Simpsons, 1989–), Paul Housley is perhaps most simply described, (Snoopy and Woodstock), Sam Keogh perhaps unintentionally, in Mark (the Smurfs), Mark Leckey (Felix the Leckey’s narration of his video Cat), Oliver Laric (Disney’s Mowgli Prop4aShw (2010/13). As 3d renderings and Christopher Robin), George of landscapes give way to a lecture by Henry Longly (Fred Flintstone and the artist watched over a webcam by a Barney Rubble), Bjarne Melgaard man dressed as Felix the Cat, Leckey (the Pink Panther), Joyce Pensato (predominantly Felix again, but also monotones, “This is a proposal for a show that will be populated by Mickey Mouse and Homer Simpson), Zach Reini (Mickey Mouse) and things that have one foot in this world and one in another. And it’s Jordan Wolfson (Bart Simpson and Charlie Brown). This is without going to toggle between the two.” And while Roy Lichtenstein’s Look considering the artists who do not utilise specific characters but Mickey (1961), his near-faithful reproduction of a Mickey Mouse and have invoked the aesthetics of traditional animation (Peter Wächtler Donald Duck cartoon strip, was basically formalist commentary and Mathias Poledna) or who borrow the tropes of grotesque carica- (produced as Lichtenstein had grown weary of the spiritual grandture and anthropomorphisation from the toons (George Condo and standing of Abstract Expressionism), and from our contemporary list of artists, Housley’s repeated use of the Snoopy and Woodstock Armen Eloyan). Of the artists listed above – space prevents me from going into motifs are receptacles for the artist’s process-based experiments in the possibilities of paint; many of the the detail of each – we can perhaps above Zach Reini, wwmmd?, 2011–14, latex on canvas, 183 × 244 cm. separate them into two camps. The artists working with toons seem to be Courtesy the artist and Bill Brady Gallery, Kansas City first are those who use toon imagery engaging in the opposing struggle to facing page Anthea Hamilton, Moe / Chess (Upper + Lower), 2009, in a Warholian sense, invoking the pull the characters out of their own memorabilia from The Simpsons, acrylic, Murano glass, glass tiles, motifs as one of many on the capitalist pictorial world and into our own. face paint, 66 × 50 × 50 cm. Photo: Sussie Ahlbürg. Courtesy the artist
January & February 2015
RESUPPLY_104_105_106.indd 105
105
23/12/2014 14:14
The show that Leckey describes in Prop4aShw, the touring The Uni- Felix the Cat to Homer and Lisa Simpson and South Park’s (1997–) Eric versal Addressability of Dumb Things, would include David Musgrave’s Cartman – Pensato showed Joyceland in London 1981–2014 (2014), an Animal (1997), a bisected 3d model of Snoopy that shows the bipedal installation of toys and other cartoon ephemera the artist has accumudog’s internal organs. Musgrave, characteristic of contemporary lated in her Brooklyn studio. Mickey Mouse costume heads sit among artistic users of cartoon motifs, seems to be indulging in a real-world Cookie Monsters and armies of Elmos; Kenny and Cartman hobnob materialisation to complement the Toontown anthropomorphis- with Donald Duck. Yet despite the fact that some of this merchandise ation (though toons are quite often distant relatives, aesthetically, to is animatronic, there was something strangely lifeless about all these the animals they’re supposed to represent – Bugs doesn’t look much toys when compared to Pensato’s actual paintings. Similar to Anthea like a bunny – hence my use of ‘toon’ as a catchall moniker). So while it is Hamilton’s use of latex Simpsons masks (for example in Moe / Chess one thing when, in a Peanuts (1950–2000) strip, Snoopy’s toon-human (Upper + Lower), 2009, in which the rubbery, seemingly decapitated head owner Sally has to write about animals as part of her homework and of the Springfield bartender is encased in a glass vitrine), in Pensato’s asks for Snoopy’s help, and Snoopy thinks to himself, ‘How can I help? paintings the toons are simultaneously familiar and monstrous. I don’t know any animals’, Musgrave giving Snoopy an oesophagus, a Staring straight out of the canvas, the view close-cropped to their stomach and a colon – pulling him from the flat place of the cartoon faces only, they take on the guise of antiheroes, capturing the mania and violence of Toontown more than into the ‘living’, ‘breathing’ material world – is another. Leckey has said any of the marketing ephemera in the of Musgrave’s sculpture, ‘I like this artist’s installation work ever does. idea of a cartoon having real viscera, Theodor Adorno argued that these kind of internal organs as if it’s cartoons taught capitalist conformity, a live thing ’cause we believe Snoopy writing in 1969 that ‘Donald Duck in the cartoons and the unfortunate in is alive – well I do anyway.’ If Musgrave has permitted one real life get their thrashing so that the toon a digestive system, then Bjarne audience can learn to take their own Melgaard has given another all kinds beating’. Yet I think it is Who Framed of other physiological urges. The Roger Rabbit’s Judge Doom who is more Danish artist keeps returning to on the money in his description of the figure of the Pink Panther; but Toontown. Christopher Lloyd’s character (who, it turns out, wants to in Melgaard’s vision, Friz Freleng’s demolish the city to build a freeway suave and sophisticated catification lined with malls and fastfood joints) of 1960s style has fallen on disastrous says in the film, “My goal as Judge times. In his 2013 exhibition Ignorant of Toontown has been to rein in the Transparencies at Gavin Brown’s Enterinsanity. To bring a semblance of law prise, New York, Melgaard produced multiple versions of the toon in and order to a place where no civilised fibreglass. These three-dimensional person has ever been able to set foot.” Pink Panthers were characterised, It is this sense of anarchy – the lack of however, by their bloodshot eyes, control that often breaks into violence; trampy appearance and, in the largthe ‘fear’ that, as Walter Benjamin est version, toking on what could wrote in 1931, characterises the world well have been a crack pipe. Which of Mickey Mouse – that seems to atis all quite socially acceptable when tract artists to toons. Dan Colen, again compared to Melgaard’s work for the at the 2013 Lyon Biennale, made a Lyon Biennale the same year. Here series of realist sculptures including the Pink Panther towers over a realist sculpture of a human woman Roger Rabbit and the Kool-Aid Man, showing them crashing through and, wearing a top hat, fucks her from behind with a grossly outsized the internal gallery walls, their progress marked by appropriately sequinned penis. Besides the obvious shock Melgaard is engineering shaped holes. Similarly the young Denver-based artist Zach Reini by debasing an icon of childhood nostalgia in such a way, the artist is has made a number of latex-on-canvas works titled wwmmd? (2011– also playing the game of toon materialisation. To see this lecherous 14, presumably an acronym for ‘what would Mickey Mouse do?’) in Pink Panther, the viewer had to wade through piles of old clothes on which the Disney icon has fled the frame, leaving just a silhouette void the floor. It was actually quite difficult terrain, instilling an awareness in his wake. The toons – the massive, freewheeling, instantly recogof one’s own physicality, making the shock of the Lothario pussy even nisable icons that they are – are there to muck up the status quo. In the end, perhaps the two camps of artists using the motifs aren’t so harder to stomach. There was similar immersive busyness to Joyceland, Joyce Pensato’s different, and the reason that so many toons have made it into contem2014 exhibition at London’s Lisson Gallery. Alongside a series of paint- porary art of late is that they are recognised as ciphers for the contemings – characteristically smeared, dripporary role of the artist itself, toggling David Musgrave, Animal, 1998, py, enamel portraits of cartoon charbetween the two worlds of anarchy resin & enamel, 22 × 14 × 3 cm. Photo: Marcus Leith. acters ranging from Donald Duck and and consumption. ar Courtesy Greengrassi, London
106
RESUPPLY_104_105_106.indd 106
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:14
Paul Housley, Woodstock, 2013, oil on canvas, 56 × 41 × 2 cm. Courtesy the artist
January & February 2015
107.indd 107
107
23/12/2014 14:14
With so many avant-garde, overlooked and wholly underrepresented Mexican women artists from the past half-century, someone should open a gallery for them alone. We start by taking a look at an influential generation with roots in the 1970s and 80s by Gabriela Jauregui
Not so long ago a British curator wrote to me wanting to discuss to happen in Mexico in the vein of moca’s wonderful wack! Art and Mexican female artists that I might recommend for a show she was the Feminist Revolution (2007), spanning several generations of local putting together. I emailed her a big list of women whose work female artists, from the better-known Frida (Kahlo), Tina (Modotti) I have long admired and younger artists whose work I continue to or Leonora (Carrington) to the underground post-riot-grrrls of today. discover, but it was only after we had met to discuss it that I realSo now picture yourself in Mexico City. The year: 1979. You kick ised that everyone on the list had something in common other than off your platform boots and happen to turn on your television set their gender and nationality: they were truly underrepresented in as an attractive young woman who holds a taco appears during a the Mexican contemporary art scene, not just because they aren’t news programme. Is this advertising? Is this a documentary? Is this a represented in terms of exhibitions, but because most of them aren’t joke? No. The woman’s name is Maris Bustamante and she, or rather represented by commercial galleries. “She doesn’t have a gallery here,” the taco she has just patented, invites us to “commit an erotic act, I kept responding to the curator when she asked how to get in touch eat a taco!” (La Patente del Taco, 1979). Full of a sense of parody, her with individuals on the list, all the while thinking that one could open patent not only includes the taco as an ‘Element of cultural penetration’, the taco as a literary and creaa great gallery with these artists alone. tive act, but also the possibility of its That conversation made me anxMaria Bustamante has been kidnapping. Along with the other ious, sad – even angry – and served as known to call herself a ‘stridentist (male) members of the collective / inspiration for this text. Due to space neopostransconceptual visual artist’ group / antigroup No-Grupo (to which constraints, I’ve decided to focus on a generation of artists who started or the ‘queen of performance’, which is Bustamente belonged from 1979 until its disappearance six years later), she is working during the 1970s and 80s, and a tongue-in-cheek way of giving one of the pioneers of happenings and who have been all but forgotten despite the whole establishment (and its need performance art, mail art, installations the fact that they have been influential on or in dialogue with artists who and non-object-based art in Mexico. to establish her) the big finger are now better known than they. I wish Working during a historical period I could have included the previous generation of pioneering women, that is now known to have been a ‘soft’ dictatorship, like the other such as sculptor Helen Escobedo, or the publications of Martha women discussed here, Bustamante not only managed to question Hellion, or Magali Lara and her collaborations with photographer her place as a woman in society but also the role of art, what it could Lourdes Grobet, or even those of the generation following the one ‘look like’ and mean in a conservative and relatively closed society; discussed here, including the delicate work of Perla Krauze, or slightly and, of course, to question the myth of the (male) artist. She was part later, Silvia Gruner’s erotic and beautiful use of materials, to mention of what is now finally being recognised as a genuine avant-garde that only a few. But the common trait in the work of the artists discussed took place in the shadow of the official art that was being paraded here is also its distinct edge or avant-garde aesthetics – the works are by the government and commercial galleries but was of little artseldom conventionally beautiful; rather they have a raw, hardcore historical value. She has asserted that art never began and does not quality – its current influence on younger artists and the fact that, end with an easel. This may sound obvious today, or even back then despite being underrepresented, most of those artists continue to in some other places, but in a country whose avant-garde Modernism make work today. Nevertheless, it is clear that their work should was either architectural or based on the very macho and painterly have greater exposure, and there is a much-needed survey waiting muralism, it was almost sinful.
108
AR-JanFeb-Feature-MexicanWomen.indd 108
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:15
Maris Bustamante with other (male) members of the No-Grupo collective, at the Espacio Escultórico on the unam campus, Mexico City, 1982. Courtesy Maris Bustamante
January & February 2015
RESUPPLY P109.indd 109
109
23/12/2014 14:16
top Mónica Mayer, El Tendedero (detail), 1978, installation. Photo: Víctor Lerma bottom Pola Weiss, Retrato Cíclope de Pola Weiss (Cyclops Portrait of Pola Weiss), 1987. Courtesy Fondo Pola Weiss at the Centro de Documentación Arkheia, muac-unam
110
AR-JanFeb-Feature-MexicanWomen.indd 110
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:15
Her work spans from avant-garde theatre and what she calls herself as a feminist as well. Simultaneously Mayer had seen and was ‘counterspectacle’ to television (she has collaborated on designing interested in No-Grupo’s work. When they finally met, they began a props for her brother, who is a popular comedian in Mexico called friendship and collaborative process that lasted formally for ten years el Güiri-Güiri) and even advertising. Still, in recent interviews, with and that, informally, is ongoing. Prior to this collaboration, Mayer had her characteristic sense of humour, Bustamante has been known to participated in the Feminist Studio Workshop in Los Angeles from call herself as a ‘stridentist neopostransconceptual visual artist’ or 1978 to 1980 and is the only Mexican artist to be included in the aforethe ‘queen of performance’, which is a tongue-in-cheek way of giving mentioned wack! Like Bustamante, her work is also multifaceted and the whole establishment (and its need to establish her) the big finger. varied, and she not only is a practising artist but has also worked as a She has been teaching as part of her practice for the past 30 years, and curator and cofounder, along with her partner Víctor Lerma, of Pinto throughout its various media, her work strives to bring art down from Mi Raya: a process-oriented minigallery / artist-run-project filled with its pedestal and back into everyday discourse, activating the possi- a similar sense of humour to that which characterised Mayer’s work bility for nonconnoisseurs to become a part of her works and partici- with Bustamante. pate in a world that might otherwise seem foreign and distant. This On a separate but parallel track, and approaching feminism, was clear from No-Grupo’s very earliest work, in which the group femininity and working as a female artist from a different angle, members sent masks of themselves as an act of sabotage for the 1977 Pola Weiss’s psychedelic experimental ‘televisual performances’ are Paris Biennale, so that people could wear them and embody the absent composed of layers and screens with various images as well as choreand not-invited artists, a work that, in light of the recent ‘disappeared’ ographies jump-cutting or dissolving into one another. Weiss had students in Mexico and the demonstrators who wore masks of their travelled to Europe and New York during the mid-1970s, where she faces, takes on a new and powerful layer of meaning. And it’s also clear met Nam June Paik and other video artists and realised that her in her more recent actions photographed in her kitchen, which share preoccupation with tv as an artform, which in Mexico had found little if no echo, was an established part of the scene elsewhere. Back and open private space and intimacy with a touch of the absurd. in Mexico, she made her first video in After the dissolution of No-Grupo, 1977: Flor Cósmica was a brief but ironic Bustamante began collaborating with Pola Weiss affectionately called ‘visual fiesta’, as it was called when it was fellow feminist artist Mónica Mayer: her camera La Escuincla (the kid, first shown at the Carrillo Gil Museum they called themselves Polvo de Gallina Negra (‘Black Hen Powder’ – named after the daughter). She committed suicide in Mexico City, where the rhythms of her a black dust sold in local markets to ward tv-created kaleidoscope were accomin 1990, and legend has it she shot panied by the electronic music of Isao off the evil eye and formed to protect the herself in front of her Escuincla, Tomita, creating a video choreography artists from the ‘patriarchal magic that although this is disputed. Long of sorts that announced her ongoing makes women disappear’). Their objective was to question the role and image interest in dance and video. forgotten or relegated to footnotes, of women in art and society at large by In 1979 Weiss had her first internaher pioneering work can find tional exhibitions (in Venice, Paris and taking art into the streets to shake up the echoes in those of Pipilotti Rist elsewhere), which, while a mark of sucmacho art establishment. So now you are cess, also underscored the fact that her in Mexico City once again; it’s 1987. Some or Kristin Lucas’s early works work was better appreciated or underof the buildings that were destroyed by the 1985 earthquake are still ruins littering the landscape. The city has stood abroad. In Mexico she primarily worked in educational teleoutgrown itself, just as you’ve forsaken those worn platform boots vision and as a teacher, all the while saving up her meagre earnings for some creepers as you walk around and find yourself face-to-face to produce her videos. During 1979 she created the first works that with Bustamante and Mayer, two young women who are pregnant (or really blended her choreographies with video, as in Videodanza, viva is that a pregnancy suit?). One of their most ambitious art projects, video danza, a type of ‘video-event’ in which the camera is as alive as ¡madres!, began with their getting pregnant together (their offspring the choreography itself, rather than operating as a static observer, were born only three months apart) and turning maternity itself into and where her body, wrapped in a sheer dress, confronts the city a work of feminist art. ¡madres! (in Spanish the exclamation means (for these works are not shot in a studio) and the observers become both ‘mothers’ and something like ‘holy shit!’) took the shape of characters in a plotless narrative. In January 1980, while her work mail art (not to be confused with male art), but also street perfor- was shown at the Pompidou Centre, Jean-Paul Fargier wrote in the mances where people were invited to become pregnant or where the Cahiers du Cinéma that her work verges on enthnofilm as she dances two artists sawed their fake bellies off, poetry readings and even a tv with the backgrounds of a pyramid, a pauper, traditional dancers, performance on Mother’s Day, where the male tv anchor, Guillermo people on the streets of Mexico, and as she ‘glides around with her Ochoa, was deemed Mother for a Day and given an apron with a camera-butterfly… creating a hypnotic effect’. Her preoccupations huge belly and several other basics for surviving maternity. Their and her work as a female artist are perhaps best encapsulated in one complicity started even before they had met, when Bustamante saw of her many self-portraits, Autovideatos (1979–), which express her a work by Mayer called El Tendedero (1978), in which the artist invited many fears, likes, dislikes and so on, revealing her as both producer 800 women to complete the phrase ‘As a woman what I dislike the and subject, behind the camera and in front of it; or in the 1978 video most in the city, is…’ on little slips of pink paper that were then hung Somos Mujeres. But there are dozens of videos one could cite as well. on a washing line in the Modern Art Museum in Mexico City. When The female body is ever-present and multilayered, always moving. she saw the work, Bustamante felt an affinity and a need to express The camera is pointed at herself but at the spectators as well. She is
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Feature-MexicanWomen.indd 111
111
23/12/2014 14:15
Pola Weiss dancing with her camera, 1980. Courtesy Fondo Pola Weiss at the Centro de Documentación Arkheia, muac-unam. Courtesy the artist
112
RERESUPPLY PP112-113.indd 112
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:16
viewer and viewee. For instance Ejercicio con Mo (1985) employs all these pen: Nadie es inocente. The guy at the stand mumbles something about aspects of her work and intersperses them with a good measure of it being a bootleg copy of an essential film by some pioneering chick. mythology (Aztec, Hindu and Western): an eye peeks out of a mouth, Back at your place, you slide it into the player and you see the direca woman dances, writhes, alternating with a Tanka, then a painting of tor’s name – Sarah Minter – which appears with the credits over a shot Mughal lovers, a body thrashes, a mouth kisses its reflection and then of people walking around a train station. almost kisses its way out of the screen, an apple is an ass, that is then Then the film begins: sitting in a train, its protagonist watches a pair of lovers. In all her works she creates textures and layers, and the slums slide by as he waxes poetic on his life. Minter began working in 1982, but this, her groundbreaking 1987 docudrama, focuses transforms the recorded medium into a live one. on a gang of kids who live in Ciudad Weiss affectionately called her camera Suddenly you notice a Beta Neza at the periphery of Mexico City. La Escuincla (the kid, the daughter). She committed suicide in 1990, and legend tape that seems interesting. There’s The video is not only beautifully scored has it she shot herself in front of her with classic punk anthems, it also reveals a title carefully handwritten in Escuincla, although this is disputed. Long the deep poetry found amidst the trash, Gothic script with a marker pen: the huffing, the stark misery. Minter’s forgotten or relegated to footnotes, her pioneering work, which can find echoes Nadie es inocente. The guy at the stand videowork started off focusing on urban youth, as with Nadie es inocente (followed in those of Pipilotti Rist or Kristin Lucas’s mumbles something about it by Nadie es inocente: 20 años después, 2010), early works, was finally recently exhibbeing a copy of an essential film and Alma Punk (1991), its female-oriented ited in Mexico during a retrospective at the muac, La tv te ve (2014). counterpart, to mention just three among by some pioneering chick Since I can only gloss over a few examher many works, and moves with ease ples of female artists and their work, I ask for the reader’s forgiveness into video installation. Always simple and direct in its aesthetic, as and hope that this text is an invitation to look into these artists’ work Minter explains, her work reflects her own human condition, “a being with greater detail. As a coda, please jump to 1988. You are in Mexico amongst beings”. Her works have been shown in Mexico and abroad, City, walking around in military-style boots. You are at the Chopo but like all the women mentioned here, it would seem as if it is often market, ready to trade a bootleg album by the Clash. Since nafta has forgotten in more official (commercial?) art-historical discourses. Like not been signed yet, you can mostly find foreign music in the form the artists mentioned above, Minter has also taught for many years, of pirate albums, or some that have been painstakingly imported on and I believe it is no coincidence, for all of these women have a vision the downlow. Suddenly you notice a Beta tape that seems interesting. and a politics to share. Appropriately, then, Minter is now creating There’s a title carefully handwritten in Gothic script with a marker a work that focuses on utopian communities in the world. ar
Sarah Minter, Nadie es inocente: 20 años después, 2010. Courtesy the artist
January & February 2015
RERESUPPLY PP112-113.indd 113
113
23/12/2014 14:16
Varda Caivano by Terry R. Myers
Untitled, 2014, 0il on canvas, 130 × 71 cm
114
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Caivano.indd 114
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:17
Evoking but never representing, British-Argentine artist Varda Caivano’s paintings exist somewhere on the edge of nameability
Untitled, 2012, oil on canvas, 186 × 72 cm
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Caivano.indd 115
115
23/12/2014 14:17
Untitled, 2004, oil on canvas, 51 × 41 cm all images © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro, London
116
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Caivano.indd 116
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:17
I could argue that Varda Caivano has in productive and meaningful of the most transporting and transformative exhibition spaces in ways been painting versions of the same painting – her painting – the city. Speaking with Caivano recently, she was reticent to identify ever since I first met her in 2002, soon after she had started the ma precisely what she was planning to include, other than that it would in Painting course at the Royal College of Art, London, and I had be a new body of work: mixed-media paintings, works on paper, begun a two-year stint there as visiting professor of painting. Writing collage and – tantalisingly – a new piece of writing. I was prepared for this now, I am looking at the small takeaway card she produced for her reticence because I recognise it as a part of her thought process, a the rca’s degree show in 2004. On the necessary part of what it takes for her to hold the work as open as possible. front is an image of one of her paintings I remember that the paintings from that exhibition; on the reverse her It is ideal that the exhibition will from the beginning had achieved a level name, email address (now changed) and open in February and close in April of continuity that is not common mobile number (still the same). Anyone as Chicago – hopefully – transitions who has paid attention to Caivano’s from winter to spring. It is impossible even in the work of strong painting work over the past decade would immenot to consider nature as a language students (if only because too many that Caivano uses and deliberately diately recognise this painting as hers. people, including myself, provide Like most of her work from that time, holds open in her work by way of Untitled, 2004 (it was included in her the tried-and-true components of contradictory feedback) painting: shape, line and colour. As 2006 Kunstverein Freiburg exhibition), is a smallish canvas (51 by 41 cm), in this case a vertical one. Painted Barry Schwabsky wrote in 2009, ‘Caivano’s paintings neither reprein oil (she would switch to acrylic for two years while pregnant), it sent nature nor put the artist in its place, and yet they remind us of pieces together what can be best described as moments of muted nature.’ I would add that Caivano’s paintings, in resolutely visual colours (blues, greens, yellows, purples and several browns) to make ways, ‘talk’ to us about nature but, most importantly, do so as nature, a roughly ovoid shape that takes up all but the left and bottom edges in keeping, I would argue, with one of my favourite lyrical questions: of the canvas. It presents itself as a contemplative accumulation of Morrissey’s “Nature is a language – can’t you read?” Caivano’s paintgentle contradictions, as it is somehow as clear about its ambiguity ings frequently come across as having been brought right up to the as it is equivocal about its clarity, fully present yet perpetually in a point of nameability as only a thing in and of itself. For example, a state of becoming (she’s very, very good at putting down paint that recent painting (Untitled, 2014) appears as if it’s on the verge of repreappears material and ethereal all at once), a painting that discusses senting a particular landscape or place: numerous discrete areas of abstraction, the landscape and/or the body while being all and none different blues-to-purples occupy most of the bottom two-thirds of of those things itself. the canvas. One area of green has been placed at the work’s horizontal I’ve used ‘discusses’ above on purpose. At first because my conver- midpoint, echoing a larger fully exposed area in the upper right corner sations with Caivano between 2004 and 2006, while I commuted from as well as more of it that emerges from behind layers of other colours Los Angeles, were, of course, discontinuous, each time very much not (including bits of red and yellow) across the entire top of the canvas. picking up from wherever we left off, but instead retracing steps At this point my inadequate description makes the painting sound from our prior conversations to enter into the new work at hand, as if it were abstract; however, the inclusion of one painted line that finished or not. I do remember that the paintings from the beginning runs vertically down the entire canvas disrupts it and keeps it from had achieved a level of continuity that is not common even in the becoming an image of a landscape by reasserting the entire thing as work of strong painting students (if only because too many people, nature itself – that is, the painting as nature that is (always) a language. including myself, provide contradicIn my conversation with Caivano, Her paintings, in resolutely visual she did convey to me that she consitory feedback), evidence of her early commitment to a level of focus and a ders the new work for Chicago as conways, ‘talk’ to us about nature… type of simmering development that stituting “a third moment”, deshas served her work very well ever since. The inclusion of one line that runs down cribing to me her desire to attain a the entire canvas disrupts it and keeps certain level of complexity between Then there is the way in which Caivano drawing and painting (including, it regularly describes her paintings, most it from becoming an image of seems, writing as well) by incorporecently in The Independent: ‘I think a landscape by reasserting the entire the paintings are like thoughts.’ Put rating drawing more directly into the another way; thinking about thoughts paintings, even to the point of using, thing as nature itself on occasion, chalk. Her plan is to have is, in itself, always a discussion. On the occasion of her first solo exhibition in the United States, everything as different as possible: media, sizes, types, positions (at at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Caivano has Tomio Koyama in Kyoto in 2009 she placed unstretched canvases on been given prime real estate to introduce her painterly thinking to a the floor in front of paintings on the wall), etc, all coming together by meaningful conversation that has been taking place in Chicago for way of the consistency and variation of her pictorial thoughts to trans– as of 2015 – a century. Not known these days for being particularly form her third moment into many more moments for the rest of us. ar painting-friendly in its programming, the Renaissance Society nonetheless provides Caivano an ideal think-tank for her work: situated at The first US solo exhibition of work by Varda Caivano is on view the end of one of the floors of architect Henry Ives Cobb’s 1892 Gothic at the Renaissance Society of the University of Chicago from 22 February through 19 April Revival building that was modelled after those at Oxford, it is one
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Feature-Caivano.indd 117
117
23/12/2014 14:17
Forever Young
by Suhail Malik
A Short Guide to Some Paradoxes of Contemporary Art
118
AR-JanFeb-Feature-TheNewRESUPPLY PP 118+120.indd 118
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:18
Contemporary art is condemned to newness – or, at least, to its newness. 1 Art history’s grudging admission of ‘the contemporary’ has come In contrast to the apprentice–masterpiece model of Classicism, and to about for two reasons: first, the pressure of students’ increasing Modernism’s claim to organise the development of art according to an interest in contemporary art (as well as the development of rival intrinsic logic tied to historical development, not only is every artist in ‘Visual Cultures and Curating’ departments in universities studycontemporary art obliged to be distinct to every other (new with regard ing current visual practices in and beyond art) has led art history as a to everyone else), but each ‘work’ an artist produces has to be different professional field to pay increasing attention to art made now or very with regard to every other of his or hers. That is: new. recently, thereby incorporating it into the canon constituted by the As Minimalism and Pop taught us, serial repetition in art is unlike discipline. Second, the notion of ‘contemporary art’ is backdated to the industrialised mass production that it riffs on, because each re- all historical moments, because every art is made in its time. Here, iteration in art is an addition to what has been made before and marks the contemporaneity of contemporary art is taken to be a phase in the a difference to it in time and experience. Even the direct repetition of existence of all art at its emergence, the immediate circumstances of precedents is distinguished by the act of reiteration, coupled with the exhibition and discussion, its impact-in-formation before it becomes now-standard claims about questioning a historical object. This makes sense in Contemporary art is characterised the authority of the canon. The (near-) terms of the discipline if it is to establish identical is something new. In cases where by the proliferation of the apparently a fine-grained, fully historicising account the art looks a lot like other already wellunconstrained newness that it permits of how art comes to have the orthodox established work, recourse to the inevimeanings and status it does (as well as the tably unique biography, history or other circumstantial claim of pro- heterodox meanings sometimes proposed by art history itself). The duction (‘the time of labour’) or coming-to-visibility provides the neces- condition such a task assumes, however, is that the standard distincsary passport to secure access to the required newness. In the best-case tion between the newness of the contemporary (the active present) and scenario, something new can be made of contemporary art on each oc- the oldness of the historical (a studied past) consequently dissolves – casion it is experienced and interpreted (‘each viewing is a re-viewing’). that core distinction of modernity flattening out in an entropic dissoAssertions and defences of what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ contemporary art are lution of history with currency (a flattening convergent with the all up for debate and part of what makes for being involved in art now ubiquitous currency fabricated by the Internet). – they are only assertions or defences, not truths. Authority over what 2 This growing irrelevance of the distinction between the present counts as new in art accordingly devolves from its traditional bases in and the past is frequently demonstrated in art education, where the artist, the critic, the patron and the museum to instead become a emerging artists often remake art using strategies and forms similar thoroughgoing debate rather than a given. It is a democracy in action. to those of art since the early 1960s, if not earlier. Contrasted with the In this general, broad and systemic endorsement of newness – of postmodernism of about a generation-and-a-half ago, historical work its newness – contemporary art is chronically restless. Attached to the is not taken up here as citation but as a set of permissions, resources present and its passing, contemporary art is definitionally, and someand standard formats for current artistic ambitions. Contrasted with what tautologically, the name of all new art that is being made today. the repudiation of the old that is the cliché of Modernism, current As such, contemporary art is wholly amenable to the logic of the uppractices are not discredited because of their perpetuation of histordate, synchronous with the dynamism of your Facebook and Twitter ical art but only if the new work does not differentiate itself in some feeds, as it is to the apparently tempestuous but always insistent moveway, however minor, from its precursor by introducing an additional ments of fashion, to the social and market advantages of knowing element – usually something emanating from the artist’s biography before others, to the mobile insiderism and outsiderism of its irreor claims about contemporary conditions and urgencies. Taken as deemably plastic social scene, to the rapid transformation of the very an immediate precedent, the historical terms of debate, medium-relevancy and source is unaged, artistically contempoThis growing irrelevance of topic. News itself, if you follow it. And rary in every way to new work, perhaps the distinction between the present just like the general news, contemporary just with a greater authority. Equally, art makes no overall sense. Committed and the past is frequently reversing the equation of new and old, the and bound to the new and all the attenart-historical survey show is frequently demonstrated in art education dant celebration of singularity and irrepresented by the telling proliferation of producibility, systemic and general prescriptions for art are ruled out. museums or institutes of contemporary art in terms of its paradigIn this, the chronic reinvention of contemporary art – the interminable matic importance to contemporary practices. The emerging artist and multivalent reinvention that is contemporary art – completes and is a much-prized consumer of such exhibitions, their interest in the surpasses modernity’s injunctions to shape anything whatsoever achistorical survey closing the circle by demonstrating the proximity cording to current and future needs rather than the sacrosanct bases rather than distance of common concerns and strategies of the work of tradition, including those of modernity’s programmatic prescriptions. on show. On the other hand, the celebration of the young emerging Distinct from Classicism and Modernism, contemporary art is then artist, much vaunted in contemporary art, serves as a much-needed an art adequate to the movement of the now in its polyphonic diver- affirmation of this affinity of interests and strategies. Precursors of the sity. This perpetual currency of art to its time in general is a great if art being made now are but contemporaries to it, and simultaneously, ambiguous achievement, but it also results in contemporary art’s art’s spontaneous practice today affirmatively canonises art’s contemweird, multiple and paradoxical colonisations of art and history, three poraneity to its time then. Furthermore, contemporary art’s perpetual of which will be outlined here. currency and regeneration are confirmed by its effervescent refreshing
January & February 2015
119 AR-JanFeb-Feature-TheNew.indd 119
119
23/12/2014 14:18
effervescent refreshing of an ever-renewable (which is to say disposable) cache of young artists (a scenario effectively satirised by the generational indistinction and time-buying that is the central conceit of Andrew Niccol’s 2011 science fiction movie In Time). 3 The diminishing distinction of past and present under the banner of the contemporary itself corresponds to two leading historical transformations in global political conditions over the period of the 1970s to now, in which contemporary art has become the hegemonic mode of art. First, as the art historian Hans Belting has elaborated, contemporary art is now a geographically ubiquitous condition of artmaking, establishing a common kind of art that can take place more or less anywhere. It is a ‘global art’ distinct from the traditional category of ‘world art’, which was a Western universalist overview of distinctive arts from different cultures, some of which did not recognise what they fabricated as art. The de-ethnicisation of art in favour of its globalisation via contemporary art, demonstrated on each occasion by the international biennial’s characteristic cosmopolitanism with local flavours, is a consequence of a couple of interrelated factors. On one hand, contemporary art’s emphasis on the now, rather than on school or tradition as the basis for art, admits the relative arbitrariness of the now as the criterion for salience. On the other hand, art today takes the history of art as a usable resource rather than as the unsurpassable authority of tradition’s irrefutably hierarchical asymmetry between the stability of the culture of the past and its current relative ephemerality. That is, contemporary art proceeds by a kind of cultural resource extraction. Second (and geopolitically synchronous with the emergence of globalisation during the 1990s), the diminishing of substantial difference or antagonism between the now and the then corresponds with the claims made, most notably by Francis Fukuyama, for the ‘end of history’ with the demise of Soviet Communism in 1989. Fukuyama’s claims have their roots in Hegel’s notion of historical progress as the overcoming of contradictions, such that the demise of Soviet Communism and the consequent outright global domination of Western liberalism putatively mark the end of ideological struggles at a world level. Globalisation is built on the consequent common settlement. The ‘end of history’ in these terms does not mean that nothing ever happens again, but rather that all subsequent systemic transformations are variants of the domination of Western liberal capitalism.
And while the various countervailing contestations of parliamentary liberalism since the fall of the Soviet Bloc reveal that this diagnosis of the post-1989 condition may be palpably wrong with regard to politics in general, it is fully attained in contemporary art’s easy sliding between the present and the past for its generation of newness. For this reason, contemporary art better realises the promise of the postideological condition that otherwise failed to materialise with the collapse of Soviet communism. For all of the specifics of its particular content claims, that is its overarching political act. For these reasons, every iteration of art as ‘contemporary’ art is a truly global achievement. Again, it is not that nothing new happens in these conditions: on the contrary, the paradox of art’s ageless contemporaneity – which underpins the colonisations of history, education and world-space just outlined – this ‘timeless time’ that Manuel Castells proposes as typical of network societies, means that contemporary art is characterised by the proliferation of the apparently unconstrained newness that it permits. The sci-fi-horror scenario of Shane Carruth’s Primer (2004) provides a useful analogy here: the film’s conceit is the invention of time-travel that is limited, for technical reasons, to very short times of a few minutes or days. The consequent proliferation of concurrent and proximate pasts, presents and futures corrodes temporal distinction. The destruction of the past by the present – by which individuation, orientation and sense are each time uniquely effectuated, an evisceration that tradition is set against – this ineradicable differentiation wears thin, as then does the difference of the future from the present. That is, contemporary art erodes the systemic transformation of what and how the future of art might be. For all of their redolence with the paradoxes of time conceived simultaneously in its presence and as a flux, the paradoxes of contemporary art are not however primarily due to its testimony to time but rather to the near-tautology that is contemporary art’s identification with the now. The ageless and smudgy present of contemporary art’s nowness is distinct to the now of time because it is also the historicality of art. Its timeliness marks it out, in a final paradox, not as a category of time but of a durable configuration of art mostly to one side of time’s corrosive and destructive passage. A repudiation of time as the ineliminable and irrecuperable transition from one moment into another, contemporary art’s newness is a holding pattern for the metastable configuration proliferating the kind of art we’re familiar enough with, a genre called contemporary art. ar
Still from Primer, 2004, dir Shane Carruth. Courtesy erbp film
120
AR-JanFeb-Feature-TheNewRESUPPLY PP 118+120.indd 120
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:18
448_AR.indd 448
23/12/2014 13:57
Galleries | 10 Chancery Lane | 303 Gallery | A | Acquavella | Aike‑Dellarco | Air de Paris | Alisan | Andersen’s | Andréhn‑Schiptjenko | Arario | Arndt | Atlas | Aye | B | Balice Hertling | Beijing Art Now | Beijing Commune | Bernier/Eliades | Blum & Poe | Boers‑Li | Breeder | Ben Brown | Buchmann | C | Capitain | carlier gebauer | Casa Triângulo | Castelli | Cera | Chemould | Chi‑Wen | Chouakri | Cohan | Contemporary Fine Arts | Continua | Corrias | Cristea | Crousel | D | Dane | De Carlo | de Sarthe | Delhi Art Gallery | Dirimart | Drawing Room | E | EIGEN+ART | Eslite | Exit | F | Freedman | G | Gagosian | Gajah | Gandhara | Gerhardsen Gerner | Gladstone | Gmurzynska | Goodman Gallery | Marian Goodman | Richard Gray | Greve | Grieder | Grotto | Gupta | H | Hakgojae | Hammer | Hanart TZ | Hauser & Wirth | Herald St | I | Ibid | Ingleby | Ishii | J | Jacobson | Jensen | Johnen | Juda | K | Kaikai Kiki | Kalfayan | Karma International | Kasmin | Kelly | Keng | Kerlin | Koyama | Krinzinger | Kukje / Kim | L | Lam | Lansberg | Lee | Lehmann Maupin | Lelong | Lelong Editions | Lett | Lévy | Lin & Lin | Lisson | Lombard Freid | Long March | M | Maggiore | Magician Space | Mai 36 | Malingue | Marlborough | Mayer | Mazzoleni | McCaffrey | Meessen De Clercq | Meile | Mendes Wood | mennour | Meyer Riegger | Mezzanin | Miro | Mitchell‑Innes & Nash | Mizuma | Modern Art | mother’s tankstation | Müller | N | nächst St. Stephan | Nadi | Nahem | neugerriemschneider | Ning | Noero | O | O‘Neill | Obadia | One and J. | Osage | Ota | Oxley9 | P | Pace Gallery | Pace Prints | Paragon | Peres Projects | Perrotin | PKM | Platform China | Polígrafa | Presenhuber | R | Rech | Roesler | Rollins | Ropac | Rosen | Rumma | S | Sadie Coles | SCAI | Schipper | Schöttle | Anna Schwartz | Semarang | Shanghai Gallery | ShanghART | ShugoArts | Sies + Höke | Silverlens | Skape | Skarstedt | Soka | Sprüth Magers | Starkwhite | STPI | Sullivan+Strumpf | T | Take Ninagawa | Tang | Taylor | Templon | Thomas | Tokyo + BTAP | Tolarno | Tornabuoni | V | Vadehra | Van de Weghe | Vielmetter | Vitamin | W | Wentrup | Werner | White Cube | White Space Beijing | Murray White | Wilkinson | Winter | X | Xu | Y | Yamamoto Gendai | Z | Zwirner | Discoveries | am space | ARATANIURANO | Blindspot | Carroll / Fletcher | Eleven Rivington | Experimenter | Hales | Hopkinson Mossman | Knight | Kraupa‑Tuskany Zeidler | Francesca Minini | Mujin‑to | Night | Plan B | RaebervonStenglin | Raster | ROH | Shrine Empire | Star | Workplace | Insights | 100 Tonson | 1335Mabini | 55 | A Thousand Plateaus | Artinformal | Athr | Chambers | Chiba | de Montferrand | EM | IHN | Inoue | Michael Janssen | Ku | Leeahn | Leo | Liang | Nanzuka | Nasu | Nature Morte | Ora‑Ora | Pékin | Pi | Project Fulfill | Rossi & Rossi | Shin | Side 2 | Standing Pine | tanzer | TKG+ | van den Eynde | Wei‑Ling | Yamaki | Yavuz
ABHK15_Ads_235x300.indd 1 AR-Art Basel HK.indd 467
18.12.14 13:58 18:43 23/12/2014
Art Reviewed
Urine Stains – See Section ii, ‘The Removal of Spots and Stains from Fabrics’ 123
AR-JanFeb-Dividers.indd 123
23/12/2014 14:02
Marie Lund Dip Laura Bartlett Gallery, London 28 November – 18 January I’m standing before a blue-grey canvas (Stills, 2014). Having just consulted the gallery text, I know that the canvas was originally a curtain. Further provenance is sketchy. It is simply described as having come from a ‘Milwaukee home’. Pulled taut over a stretcher, forced to become painting (in the high Modern sense, that is: a flat thing), the curtain reveals something distinguished. Years of exposure to sunlight have faded parts of its surface. One can trace the ghostly border of the window it once hung before and the undulating folds of its once relaxed state. Here – bleached in – is the pale light of the American north. In his essay ‘The Libidinal Economy of the Dandy’ (1973), the philosopher JeanFrançois Lyotard writes of the exceptional light of the north European city in November, ‘all the buildings, all the objects, the faces, the cars, the trees, are ultimately exchangeable (chromatically) into blue-grey.’ Lyotard’s
referent is of course Paris, but Stills (of which there are three identically titled similar versions in the exhibition) has me imagining instead the lucent ambience of Milwaukee in late autumn. All that desolate light draining the colour from the city. It could be depressing. But those of a northern manner (Marie Lund herself, a Dane, or her audience in London) perhaps take solace in the season’s turn; and note a certain lyricism to it all. A negotiation between presence / absence underpins two further work groups in the exhibition. A suite of quadrilateral concrete sculptures cluster around the far righthand corner of the gallery (all Torso, 2014). Five in total, each features the trace of a thick-weave jumper that has been torn from the concrete following the casting process. Dotted around, a further set of sculptures (all Hand Full, 2014) see the negative space of Lund’s own blue-jean-pocket cast and transformed into five diminutive bronzes. Some
of the pockets occupy lonely spots on the floor. Others perch on top of Torso blocks, their metal surface offering a visual foil to the concrete bases and their cosy anthropomorphic silhouettes. Both the Hand Full and Torso series, while less profound when compared to the three Stills canvases, serve an important function within the exhibition as a whole. Lund’s wit is clearer in these sculptural works. They draw Dip back to a gainful interstice between earnestness and levity. It seems Lund is unwilling to allow herself to slip fully into the postminimal poetics of someone like Richard Tuttle (another textile obsessive). And for this I’m grateful. Her project is just a bit too wry for that lark. Indeed she would probably just shrug at my talk of Lyotardian blue-grey and the ‘lucent ambience’ of Milwaukee. Transcendence, if a concern at all for Lund, is to be located in the profane things of the world: curtains, jumpers, baby-blues… Paul Pieroni
Dip, 2014 (installation view). Courtesy Laura Bartlett Gallery, London
124
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 124
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:19
Richard Serra Backdoor Pipeline, Ramble, Dead Load, London Cross Gagosian Britannia St, London 11 October – 28 February Drawing Gagosian Davies St, London 11 October – 22 November When David Hammons took a leak on a Richard Serra sculpture on a New York street in 1981 and, as legend has it, got arrested, titling the whole event Pissed Off, he took it for the team: what more eminently defaceable public sculpture than that of Serra? Yet if Serra’s slouching slabs seem inert in a municipal plaza, when inside a gallery, as in Gagosian’s two-part show in London, an inversion of public and private space occurs that is uniquely the artist’s. Take Ramble (2014), a mazy layout of 24 23cm-thick slabs of rolled steel, of varying heights, arranged in uneven rows. Shunted Frogger-style through angled alleys, which alternately rise and dip like a pixelated sea, the viewer’s means of intellectual negotiation is restaged as anxious public movement: the jerking dash of crossing a street between humming trucks. Serra’s work obliges – often bullishly – a viewer / work relationship that is both heightened and sharpened by the blank mass of industrial matter, like Cary Grant and the crop duster.
In Backdoor Pipeline (2010), two tall walls of curved steel meet and form an ogee arch. The 15m-long walkway within is part-cave, partoesophagus; turn right out of the other end and it’s a rusted doughnut; turn left and it’s a robot’s ribcage. In Serra’s extrapolations of the essential premises of 1960s Minimalism, such allusive whimsy is beside the point; ‘It is what it is, and it ain’t nothin’ else’, as Dan Flavin had it. Yet it’s hard to miss in Serra’s autumnal period – meant, irresistibly, both in terms of his work’s weathered orangey-browns, and his own advancing years (he’s seventy-five) – a pictorial quality that belies the conceptual roots of his practice and gives it a communicative urgency. Dead Load (2014), for instance, takes the form of two steel slabs, one lying on the other, each around 80cm thick. Because the upper slab has been left to weather outside, it’s taken on the mottled patina of a Richter abstract, and its slightly wider footprint gives the thing the tension of an object flipped on its back, the first steps of an inverted
ziggurat. Its visual associations – sarcophagus, sacrificial altar, the Looney Tunes anvil – are deathly. It is what it is: an image of a smaller thing pressurised by a larger, forced downward. Serra’s phenomenological thrills are hard to sustain and even harder to repeat. Where his work succeeds best – where it avoids the merely spectacular – is in its insistence on the graphic integrity of sculptural form. In Gagosian’s second space, a huge black paintstick drawing, Double Rift #2 (2011), is charged with the residue of bodily pressure, striated with thick marks more gouged than applied. Serra’s work has always elided the making hand with the thinking mind, most effectively here in London Cross (2014), an installation of two steel walls, each 214cm high, which bisect one room from corner to corner, one resting on the other at their midpoint. In the gallery’s floorplan, it’s an X, like a drawing, suggesting at once the inaccessible – two parts of the room remain hidden – and a kind of existential cartography: you are here. Ben Street
Richard Serra, Ramble, 2014, weatherproof steel, 24 plates, 183 × 1196 × 960 cm. © the artist. Courtesy Gagosian Gallery, London
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 125
125
23/12/2014 14:19
Susan Hefuna Cairotraces Pi Artworks, London 14 October – 22 November The first thought that strikes me on encountering Susan Hefuna’s two tall rectangular sculptures in the centre of the gallery (Untitled, all works 2014), each comprising three vertically stacked crates, crudely made from strips of palm wood tied together with string, is that they have no doors. Small square windowlike gaps, yes, but definitely no doors. This concerns me, as I’m interpreting them as either stacked cages – for containing chickens or some other poor creatures – or as the skeletal infrastructure of a model for a prototype tower block. They may be based on both these things, but in actuality they’re neither; they’re one of the many manifestations of Hefuna’s ongoing interest, whether in sculpture, on paper or as movement in space, in the connecting formal structure of the grid. Cairotraces is Hefuna’s first solo exhibition at Pi Artworks’ London gallery. She’s had two previous solo shows with Pi at their more established Istanbul space, and as such this
exhibition functions as something of a showcase of signature-style works by the established German-Egyptian artist. Accompanying the wood sculptures are five smaller, unique black bronzes, each titled Building, plus two series of drawings. The freestanding bronzes might also reference a cage or dwelling, but in place of geometric uniformity the angles in these are jagged and irregular, creating latticelike structures that suggest something crushed or distorted, and which may be solid in terms of material but have no outside, inside or centre. The series of drawings is where all this ambiguity and ambivalence between solidity and hollowness, structural conformity and abstract architecture come together best. Displayed as a panel, nine framed drawings of loosely sketched geometric shapes are filled in with equally loose crosshatched brushstrokes in varying densities of black watercolour. All titled Cairotrace, they allude not only to grids, armatures or architectural plans but also to maps,
screens and grills, all of which may function equally as protection and prevention. In the second series of nine drawings (like the bronzes, each titled Building), Hefuna renders these structures in both ink and graphite on separate sheets of translucent tracing paper and layers them together. There is an added dimension and tension to these in the way that the paper buckles and crinkles with the wetness of the ink. The most often mentioned visual reference in writings about Hefuna’s work is that of the mashrabiya – the decorative screen or grille used for privacy in traditional Egyptian houses. That, and the artist’s dual cultural heritage, particularly in relation to different urban architectures. While these themes clearly resonate, what stops these, and all Hefuna’s works, from being allied too closely to either cool minimal abstraction or social comment is the competent but nevertheless wobbly irregularity of the lines and forms, a reminder not only of the artist’s hand but also of human vulnerability. Helen Sumpter
Cairotrace, 2014, watercolour on paper, 43 × 35 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pi Artworks, London & Istanbul
126
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 126
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:19
Art & Language Nobody Spoke Lisson Gallery, London 14 November – 17 January ‘I love his use of light and shade.’ As a child, I thought this one phrase was all art critics ever said. I have no idea where I got it from, but the idea delighted me in the same way that jokes about sex will delight one too young to understand them. There was the whiff of something scandalous about the suggestion, as if by repeating this I was puncturing some vast adult hypocrisy. I was reminded of this as I walked among the 16 vitrines of Art & Language’s new work Tell Me, Have You Ever Seen Me? ii (2014). In each glass box sat two sheets of paper, one atop the other. The uppermost bore a detailed textual description, we are led to assume, of the portrait concealed beneath it, each one of a different significant contemporary political figure. These texts speak almost exclusively in terms of light and shade. So we hear about ‘a brightly lit patch over the upper eyelid of the right eye’ of Hugo Chávez, and of ‘a shadow on the right-hand side of the neck’ of Xi Jinping.
But this vast accumulation of detail, of light and darkness, blackness and white, obscures not only the images themselves. In concentrating so intently on the minutiae of shading, we neglect what is actually most apparent about the work: the grid of their arrangement, the names that make it up and the relationships (of power, influence, contiguity) between them. Hence Tony Blair finds himself with Rupert Murdoch on one side and Mahmoud Abbas on the other, Barack Obama to his left and Benjamin Netanyahu to his right. Is this painstaking detailing of highlights and shadow, then, supposed to be the work of the artist – a model of art obscuring art, or obscuring truth – or the critic? Am I being accused by this work in the same voice I once delighted in? The covering up of images has been a part of Art & Language’s practice since their Secret Paintings of the late 1960s, black squares with a note informing the viewer of the existence of some hidden depiction within. It’s a part
of the project they set out on the very first page of the first issue of the group’s journal Art-Language (1969), of ‘questioning the condition that seems to rigidly govern the form of visual art – that visual art remains visual’. For all that, over their near half-century, they have built a substantial catalogue of recognisable icons that are repeated among the drawings and sculptures in the Lisson show: from the percentages of their 1968 100% Abstract series to the trophies of their Lovely Slang paintings (1998–). All these emerge, variously obscured, besmirched or cut up, across the Sea Ghost (2014) canvases, Drawings from the Winter (2012–13) and the installation Nobody Spoke (2013–14) that make up the rest of this exhibition. But if little here will surprise those familiar with the Art & Language oeuvre, the questions the group is asking – about art’s entrapment in the market, its complicity with power, its conceptual basis – are more urgent than ever. Robert Barry
Drawings from the Winter, drawing 115, 2013, ink on paper. © the artists. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 127
127
23/12/2014 14:19
Carrie Mae Weems Color: Real and Imagined Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London 10 October – 15 November Is it significant that the opening sentence of Pippy Houldsworth Gallery’s press release labels this a ‘carefully curated selection’ of Carrie Mae Weems’s work of the past 30 years rather than as an exhibition? I hope so. For what’s on show is more like a sampler than the pointed, focused (more-or-less), coherent whole we expect from a contemporary art exhibition involving a single artist. As much as this show introduces Weems’s work to a new audience (the press release, having downplayed things in its opening line, can’t resist a return to foregrounding significance in the next, in which it points out that this is the American artist’s first solo show in the uk), it also serves to reduce the physical presence of the objects on display to a series of prompts for further reading (which can be acted upon via the literature in the gallery’s viewing room, offered as an appendix to the main show, where a number of the artist’s films are also available). All in all, what’s on show – one new print, from which the exhibition takes its title, a 2006 photograph from the artist’s Roaming series,
five photographs from her groundbreaking Kitchen Table Series of 1990, a Colored People grid from the late 2000s, two related works from the late 1990s and, in the corridor, the triptych Slave Coast: Grabbing Snatching Blink and You Be Gone (1993) – feels like someone (and it’s not clear whether that someone is the gallery or the viewer) is dipping a toe into the water rather than taking the plunge. But perhaps all that is to dwell on a ‘problem’ where there shouldn’t be one. Other than the fact that these days we’re conditioned – in part by what’s going on in, say, many of the big West End galleries that surround Pippy Houldsworth – to expect commercial gallery shows to perform what was traditionally the function of a major museum presentation (which in Weems’s case was carried out by the Guggenheim in New York earlier this year). That is, to present major bodies of work, or work that is on show above all else to enhance the feeling of its significance (press releases that shriek about the work’s novelty, bravery
or, most empty of the lot, ‘importance’) without the matter of its availability for purchase coming particularly to the fore. So where does all that leave this exhibition? Ironically, given those nods to further reading, the photographs on show – from Color: Real and Imagined (2014, an archival pigment-print portrait onto which a grid of rectangular blocks of red, yellow, green and blue has been printed), to Magenta Colored Girl (1997, an image of a young black girl tinted magenta) – suggest that they, rather than any text alone, are formidable tools by which to analyse the power and control exercised by language and the extent to which aesthetics (or aesthetic projection) can act as a dominating and distorting force when it comes to issues of politics, gender, race, class and the social construction of identity. It seems odd that Weems’s work hasn’t been more exposed in the uk. The main feeling you walk out of here with is one of wanting to see much, much more. And for that, it’s hard to know whether I love this show or hate it. Mark Rappolt
Magenta Colored Girl, 1997, gelatin silver print with text on mount, 76 × 76 cm. Courtesy the artist and Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London
128
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 128
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:19
Laura Oldfield Ford Seroxat, Smirnoff, thc Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston upon Thames 9 October – 29 November The uk political establishment still sees the housing market as a reliable source of trickledown prosperity for all. Others see an engine for social cleansing. To paraphrase the press release for Laura Oldfield Ford’s Seroxat, Smirnoff, thc, the obsession with private ownership has created new social demarcations, bankers billeted in ‘Zones of Refuge’ and zero-hours contract workers exiled to the ungentrified ‘pogroms’ of Catford and Streatham, the ‘Zones of Sacrifice’. “The idea of a collective space is there,” she says in Pray for Love (all works 2014), a 25-minute audio piece listened to on headphones. “But surely one could do it better.” A typical Oldfield Ford painting depicts youngish figures in downbeat municipal contexts, council flats or abandoned modernist buildings. These ciphers of the ‘melancholic left’ stare glassily into the middle distance, surrounded by handwritten text, musings on the character of suburban England, whose shifting social sands the artist has chronicled in her Savage Messiah blog for nearly a decade. The works made during her recent Stanley Picker Fellowship both consolidate and expand this format, with language given a new primacy. The paintings have a seductive, dissipating warmth, the cool pink ground showing through the drab
architecture like the embers of a coal fire at dawn. Deal or No Deal (4+1 Edmunds Heirophant) shows two men and a woman in a spartan interior, the bare mattress suggesting a squat, nostalgic reflections hovering around them in white capitals: into town centre, bleached white in the neat pedestrianised zone + treaty centre where robbo worked as father christmas 1992. The protagonists look too young to own these memories; if the words caption the image, they do so in terms that Barthes might have called ‘relay’ rather than ‘anchorage’, diverting your thoughts elsewhere. Effectively, language is a rejoinder to the sovereignty of the painted image, lest it be seen to draw aesthetic consolation from the political status quo. Though not an explicit critique of the neoliberal hegemony ushered in by New Labour and fortified by the Bullingdon Club, the entire atmosphere of Oldfield Ford’s work is shaped by its social divisiveness. Her militant contempt for the beneficiaries can make her sound like a character from a late J.G. Ballard novel, a hoodlum psychogeographer glowering at the smug fauxhemia of Patisserie Valerie. Untitled, a freestanding mdf billboard, dispenses with painting altogether, using printed images of flowers and a woman drinking wine as a
backdrop for a handwritten rant against ‘networked leisure provision for yummiemummies’ and ‘the rattling concerns of mumsnet’. The phrasemaking feels fresh, disparate phenomena yoked together into lists that have a peregrinatory rhythm, perhaps subconsciously metered by the writer’s own footfall as she paces the pavement. Maybe there’s room to experiment with how word and image are combined. I wondered about the possibility of embedding text within the pictorial space rather than emblazoning it across the surface – which risks promoting language to a countermanding rather than countervailing force. I kept returning to the small oil sketch A132 Hounslow, a view into a mouldering garden, bungalow in the background, washing line and white plastic chair in the foreground, the words i’ll fuck you up next time you whining set of cunts chalked on the image. The utterance matches the mood of the painting, both texturally and semantically, the hurriedness of the handwriting and its sentiments echoing the expedient technique. In the other paintings, an omniscient speaker cuts across them, whereas here the verbal and pictorial are interlaced, the voice in character. Sean Ashton
a312 Hounslow, 2014, oil on mdf board, 41 × 31 cm. Courtesy the artist
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 129
129
23/12/2014 14:19
Willem de Rooij Arnolfini, Bristol 21 November – 8 February Expressions of anger, frustration, sorrow and grief fill Willem de Rooij’s Index: Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration (as represented in newspapers, January 2000 – July 2002) (2003). The work comprises 18 framed panels crammed with constellations of images, culled from magazines and newspapers, depicting protest marches, riots and vigils. Interrogating the aesthetics of protest and commemoration, de Rooij’s collection exposes the ways in which the media frame such events and how participants choose to stage themselves for the camera. While a broad range of political and geographical contexts are included, there are striking similarities among these captionless images (punching the air is common, as is crying, and protesters of all stripes seem to enjoy shouting and burning things). Accompanying Index is Bouquet v (2010), which, as its title suggests, is a large bouquet of flowers perched on a plinth. Comprising single stems from 95 different species, the work deliberately avoids any
hierarchy, speaking to the diversity and tension between the politics of collectivism and individualism – a reading underscored by the flowers’ proximity to de Rooij’s images of protest. Considering this is a rare solo exhibition for the Dutch artist, it is surprising that only two works are included; moreover, that they are not particularly recent. Indeed, Index is over a decade old. By this choice, de Rooij encourages a consideration of a specific historical period. The years represented here, which, among other things, cover the 9/11 terror attacks and the subsequent build-up to the invasion of Iraq, are certainly poignant. But how might this work appear if it were extended to included images of the many antiwar marches of 2003, or more recent anticapitalist demonstrations, or Arab Spring protests? One suspects there would actually be little difference. For sure, banners and placards would change, but the displays of raw emotion, from sorrow to outrage, would persist.
In this, Index recalls Aby Warburg’s epic Mnemosyne Atlas, started in 1927 and left unfinished at the time of his death in 1929. The collection of 79 wooden panels, covered with some 971 photographs arranged into various categories, with room for planned additions, attempted to map the ‘afterlife of antiquity’, demonstrating the ways in which particular motifs, gestures and emotions reappear throughout the history of art and visual culture. Though less anachronistic, de Rooij’s work similarly points to an emotional and behavioural continuity. Mnemosyne Atlas does not include a category for ‘protest’, but many of the images in this exhibition would not seem out of place in Warburg’s idiosyncratic archive. Yet, while de Rooij asks who controls the way in which such images are constructed and presented, the question must also be turned on the artist, whose process of selecting and editing, like Warburg’s, may not be entirely impartial. David Trigg
Index: Riots, Protest, Mourning and Commemoration (as represented in newspapers, January 2000 – July 2002), 2003 (installation view, 2014). Photo: © Max McClure. Courtesy Arnolfini, Bristol
130
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 130
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:20
Jonathan Gardner Mary Mary, Glasgow 15 November – 17 January In spite (or perhaps because) of feminism’s current fashion ‘moment’, gracing the front cover of Elle magazine (December 2014, ‘The Feminism Issue’), being touted as ‘a good thing’ by actor Benedict Cumberbatch and British deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, and generally being bandied around like this season’s colour, it still remains difficult – deeply unfashionable, in fact – to employ feminism as a critical perspective if you veer towards scepticism with regard to an artwork’s potentially dubious gendered representation. It’s almost as though, in questioning the exhaustive and incessant reduction of the female body to a trope, you’re being too obvious, a bit critically clumsy, a bit boring. So Jonathan Gardner’s eight candy-coloured oil paintings, over half of which depict nude or semiclothed, blank-faced female ‘types’ or disembodied breasts and legs, might be, as the press release tells us, ‘representing a style of painting as opposed to representing a subject’, but it is nevertheless women’s bodies (not animals, men, food or landscape) that are both style and subject matter here. Apparently, then, the fact that he focuses so frequently on nudes influenced by canonical art history, from neoclassicism to (particularly) Surrealism and Pop (Ingres, Magritte, Lindner and Currin are all mentioned in the pr) is incidental. Really? What year is it again? Allen Jones recently said of his 1960s mannequin / furniture sculptures that he ‘was not
making an object out of women – women were the subject, the object was a sculpture’ (he also said that dressing his mannequins in fetish gear ‘enhanced their sculptural form’, a point that was made evident with almost pneumatic clarity). Gardner seems to be attempting to construct a similar equation, explicitly so in the case of Table Torso (all works 2014). These aren’t women, they’re paintings of women, and what’s more, the fact that these are nude women is neither here nor there, as he (press release again) ‘places no greater importance on this part of the paintings than on the wallpaper, towels, tables and books he includes’. Apparently, then, ‘these “objects” [inverted commas as per the press release] exist as blank slates upon which he can insert [where are the inverted commas?!] his own idiosyncracies, interests and references’ (cue Sid James-style laughter). ‘The figures’, it goes on to say, ‘are void of personality or any recognizable trait, functioning in the same way as a brushmark or abstract motif.’ But they don’t, and with these words, Gardner is damned by his own press release. If these paintings are not strategically arch, kitsch or parodic in some way, if they’re not even (in their repetition) a lascivious wink at the oversexualisation of women in art history, then what are they doing? If, as has been suggested, the symbolism of the works
is removed from the context of the work or movements these paintings cite. The works seem to be composites of existing images and symbols, but without the creative or critical free association of, for instance, Sigmar Polke. Instead we have a compendium of Magritte’s faces, breasts and torsos (Inner Living, Daisy), Hockney’s la colour, line and geometric design (Zig Zag), Balthus’s figural composition and languid pose, the blank expression, outline and stillness of Léger’s women (Women in White) and Picasso’s demoiselles in Superga trainers (Superga). This ‘tissue of quotations’ is just that – imagery lifted and placed into new paintings. What exactly is Gardner’s point, other than a bit of standard copying and aura stripping? The paintings certainly seem devoid of the critical potential of classic appropriation art. The artist is ‘keen to offer an openness in interpretation’, as opposed, presumably, to making some kind of critical statement, but to my mind, this sounds like a get-out clause. He might have said: ‘With regard to the tits and arses, people, it’s over to you. I absolve myself of accountability.’ These paintings are by a contemporary us artist who must be aware that the female nude, especially the female nude painted by a man – is a problematic and loaded genre. As such, throwing us the old ‘network of meanings’ and ‘open-ended interpretation’ shtick just won’t cut it. It’s 2014 ffs! Susannah Thompson
Torso Table, 2014, oil on canvas, 102 × 81 cm. Courtesy the artist and Mary Mary, Glasgow
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 131
131
23/12/2014 14:20
Kader Attia Show Your Injuries Lehmann Maupin West 26th St, New York 8 November – 9 December Lehmann Maupin Chrystie St, New York 8 November – 14 December The first thing one sees at Lehmann Maupin’s Chelsea location is a drywall inlaid with patterned, multicoloured pieces of glass. It’s a decorative, beautiful work that sets the tone for Kader Attia’s project, which alters the gallery’s architecture and alludes to the fact that nothing is what it seems at first sight. Very soon one discovers the other side of that wall, which reveals that those decorative wedges are the verso of a broken stained-glass window set into the plaster. Reconfiguring the gallery using temporary walls, Attia’s exhibition unfolds in a maze of small rooms. It opens with an untitled installation that includes a slideshow of album covers of African music that are clearly marketed for a Western audience (one is labelled ‘authentic music’), with the music playing in the background. This theme of cultural export is then picked up in the following room with Dispossession (2013), a series of images of art objects from the Vatican’s ethnographic collection, accompanied by video interviews with intellectuals and others about the status of these objects. Further on there are sculptures
mimicking African tribal art; a composition of artificial legs arranged in a circle; a copy of Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913); a series of collages interposing Greek sculptures, indigenous art and pop culture; and a group of raw canvases cut and sewn together in a gesture that should be reminiscent of Lucio Fontana’s canvases but looks more like a wound stitched by a field doctor. If this sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. As fitting as the slight claustrophobia of Attia’s labyrinth may be, it also adds to the somewhat muddled nature of the show: it’s hard to build a coherent narrative from all of these disparate pieces, and the exhibition’s title, Show Your Injuries, doesn’t exactly help in tying it all together. The fact that the work is unequal never detracts from the strength of Attia’s interest in the marginalised, and the implications – cultural, socioeconomic – of colonialism. The result goes beyond identity politics and personal injury, and speaks to broader structures of exploitation and to the traumatic circulation of people and culture.
At the gallery’s second New York location, on the Lower East Side, one finds Asesinos! Asesinos! (2014), an installation of over 100 doors, each cut in the middle and then positioned in an A-shape, with megaphones attached on top. Large and inaccessible, the installation looks like a mass of people in a demonstration, silent despite the amplifying devices. In scale and approach, it’s reminiscent of Attia’s impressive Kasbah (2009), where the gallery’s floors are overtaken by the kind of corrugated sheeting used for roofing buildings in poor urban centres – a direct reference to Algerian citadels in this case – complete with discarded tyres and makeshift antennas. Visitors are invited to walk on the sheeting, their inevitable instability bringing to mind the tenuous state of citizens in conflict zones. In Asesinos!…, the silence should function the way the rickety steps do in Kasbah, but instead it leaves one hoping for the sound, the demands, the shouts of a rally. The difference between the works is not in participation: it’s in the strength of the statement. When he is forceful – as in the Chelsea exhibition – Attia is incredibly convincing. Orit Gat
Show Your Injuries, 2014 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York & Hong Kong
132
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 132
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:20
James Hoff Skywiper Callicoon Fine Arts, New York 2 November – 21 December There’s something a little schizophrenic about James Hoff’s Skywiper, which looks like a feelgood painting show but is actually a big, fat middle finger to the medium. With a cuntiness that makes me clap my hands and wiggle my hips, Hoff declared, in a recent bomb interview, that abstract painting was a ‘kind of culturebound illness’. Thus, in Skywiper, he ruthlessly subjects the genre to common computer viruses – either Skywiper or Stuxnet, both of which have infected computer systems in Iran. Hoff’s infected digital images of blank, monochrome canvases and aluminium surfaces turn chirpily fucked up, with striated lines and tiny pixels of red, yellow and blue forming striped, wavy and repetitive patterns, like radio waves would look if pinned down to a surface and rendered in brilliant Technicolor. Hoff transfers these corrupted images onto aluminium plates using a dye sublimation process, and then attaches them to wood substrates and hangs them like paintings. They’re impostors, though, more
like painting undone than painting created, and in their generic pleasantness, they point to painting as a disposable pop idiom rather than a relevant form of artistic expression. What makes Skywiper such an interesting success – or failure – is how patronising Hoff is towards the medium and yet how he ultimately propagates it tenfold with examples that are almost joyfully decorative, like bite-size pocket paintings that would complement any piece of furniture. Stuxnet No. 7 (all works 2014) looks as if a long line of colour had been applied across the width of its surface, only to be combed up and down with something fine-toothed. Skywiper No. 1 resembles a zoomed-in still of grainy tv footage; a deep blue pool of colour suggests some sort of vague, alien landscape, with the atmosphere above interrupted by thin horizontal lines, like surveillance footage breaking down into unintelligibility. Skywiper No. 12 seems to feature the same landscape, albeit refracted into repeating quadrants, while Skywiper No. 2
is just a hot mess of thin coloured stripes. There’s something vaguely Wade Guyton-y about these works, in that the image’s technological breakdown, or failure, is so important. Though here that failure is embedded in the coded guts as opposed to the printing apparatus. Literalising the somewhat implied violence of the two-dimensional works, Hoff also infected a jpeg of Callicoon’s gallery wall and then removed whole sections of the actual Sheetrock based on the compromised image. The paintings then hover somewhat comically over wide, jagged sections of removed wall that span the entire length of the gallery. With only studs remaining and wires spilling out along the floor like entrails (and in one section, an old misplaced shovel from some earlier construction), the installation is a welcome act of institutional aggression, though only to a point; Hoff ultimately bows to his gallery trappings such that he’s having his cake and seemingly eating it too. David Everitt Howe
Skywiper, 2014 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Callicoon Fine Arts, New York
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 133
133
23/12/2014 14:20
Frank Stella Sculpture Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York 7 November – 20 December What should we make of Puffed Star ii (2014)? Well, for one, it’s big: almost six metres high and wide. It’s shiny too: pure polished aluminium. And it’s regularly geometric: a 20-pointed, equal-sided star with protuberant – ‘puffed’ – planes. If it hadn’t been made by Frank Stella, one could be forgiven for thinking that Jeff Koons had turned his attention to Christmastree decorations. That might be good for Koons, but it’s not for Stella. In all fairness to Jeff, he would never allow chipped tips or misaligned facets to make it into the public eye (Puffed Star has both). In all fairness to Frank, he likely could care less; merchandise has never been his thing. But then what is his thing here? Puffed Star ii is juxtaposed with a similarly sized work from nearly 20 years ago, Fishkill (1995), whose geometries are as far from regular as one might get. A car wreck of cast stainless steel, Fishkill shows how Stella embraced digital modelling and manufacture early, but only as part of a sustained attack on the formal coherence
that had dictated his earliest painting series and which Puffed Star ii resumes. The tension between regular geometries and irregularity is taken up more singularly in K.150 (2014), a ‘tabletop’ sculpture of digitally printed abs, a thermoplastic that is a staple of the rapid-prototyping industry. K.150 delights in the sectioning and intersectioning of regular three-dimensional forms: Stella’s newfound star form is present, twice, one in Irish green and the other in cyan. Both have been sliced by the digital knife and merged with a series of circular springs, apparently a favourite form for cad jockeys in training. All of this is held up by a folded, polka-dotted plane, which returns the work, at least rhetorically, to the problem of relief, with which Stella has contended in one form or another for decades. As if to push the point home, K.150 is placed next to Creutzwald (1992), a duo of earlier mangled steel constructions, one compact, the other winglike, situated on a low base.
These pairings are unsubtle to say the least, but that’s a complaint about curating, about the logic of selection, not the logic of the work. Stella deserves the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the new pieces, and here the comparisons to the earlier work are helpful, at least as heuristics. Because what the new works speak to is the kind of techno-utopia that has largely been confined to screens, both film and computer, but which is coming to the civilian sphere in the form of MakerBot and other 3d printers, the capacities of which K.150 is just an advanced example. If the historical works in this show speak to the apocalyptic obdurateness of heavy metal, then Puffed Star ii and K.150 speak to the formal promiscuity of our plastic future, which will be big on shape, but lack weight, let alone substance. The works are there, and yet their being there, or here – their being at all – seems inconsequential. That, this, is what the world of 3d printing promises, and Stella has been ahead of his time before. Jonathan T.D. Neil
Puffed Star ii, 2014, polished aluminium, 570 × 570 × 570 cm. Photo: Jason Wyche. © the artist / Artists Rights Society (ars), New York. Courtesy the artist and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York
134
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 134
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:20
Judith Scott Bound and Unbound Brooklyn Museum 24 October – 29 March One’s immediate impulse when encountering the work of a developmentally disabled artist like Judith Scott – she was born with Down’s syndrome, and was largely deaf and mute until her death in 2005 – is to use her biography to inform criticism. In this exhibition of over 60 of her works at the Brooklyn Museum, most of them three-dimensional fabric assemblages, this is largely dissuaded. ‘Such a narrow focus can undermine a full understanding of the work’, reads an introductory wall text. But what makes a work of art compelling is an artist’s unique viewpoint, whether it is informed by abuse, oppression, physical or intellectual disabilities, or banal context. In Scott’s case, that viewpoint is informed not only by her inability to communicate in a conventional manner, but also by her cloistered existence, first at the institution in Ohio where she lived for 36 years, and later at Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, California, where she shared a communal studio space exclusively with other disabled artists. What emerged from this personal experience were dense, complex forms consisting of various fabrics woven tightly around found objects such as twigs, shopping carts and electric fans. The works might be made
by a developmentally disabled artist, but they could arguably be made only by Scott, and this makes them exquisitely sui generis. The exhibition is organised chronologically, with the objects laid horizontally on low platforms throughout the two galleries. A single untitled work (all of the works in the exhibition are untitled) from 1988 hangs on a wall near the entrance. Consisting of colourful ribbons, balloons and cream fabric woven around wire rods bundled together like kindling, it energetically spirals away from the flat surface, demonstrating Scott’s ability to generate friction in empty space. Visual references to deep-sea creatures abound throughout, rendering the space a surreal sort of aquarium. A work from 1989 made from a tangled web of red, periwinkle and copper threads resembles a manta ray. Another from 2002 could be an earth-toned sea anemone. A 1994 piece created using paper towels scavenged from the bathrooms and kitchen in her studio is redolent both of a barnacle and the sculptures of Lee Bontecou. The comparisons are admittedly superficial. What the works really comment on is the power of Scott’s abstractions. A messy, olive-green
piece from 1989 elicits the question: ‘Did Scott experience sexual desire?’ Of course this reveals more about the viewer than the artist. It’s tempting to read some sort of evolution in Scott’s practice, but the only thing that seems to change are the colour palettes she used and the materials she was given to work with. The wall texts betray that powerhouse collectors such as Beth Rudin DeWoody, Eileen and Michael Cohen, Pamela and Arthur Sanders, and even moma have acquired some of her later work. No doubt credit for this is due to Matthew Higgs, director of the nonprofit space White Columns, who along with organising this show at the Brooklyn Museum also paired Scott with Dan Miller, another Creative Growth artist (he suffers from severe seizures), in a 2013 exhibition at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, in Ridgefield, Connecticut. There’s a certain do-gooder aspect to championing art made by people with disabilities. But just because Scott had an extra copy of a chromosome doesn’t make her any more of an outsider than the type of artist who creates for no other reason than that she is compelled to create. Today, this is the real aberration. Brienne Walsh
Untitled, 1989, fibre and found objects, 94 × 86 × 13 cm. Photo: Benjamin Blackwell. © Creative Growth Art Center, Oakland
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 135
135
23/12/2014 14:20
Klaus Lutz Selected Stories The Kitchen, New York 30 October – 21 December The enigmatic work of the Swiss artist and filmmaker Klaus Lutz (1940–2009) can be placed somewhere between the musings of a recluse and the fantasies of a utopian visionary. He moved from Europe, where he’d been engaged primarily as a teacher and printmaker, to New York in 1993, and he transformed the kitchen of his East Village apartment into a studio for diy stop-motion animations. In Vulcan (2004) he alternately cooks and eats pasta and rolls a runelike disc across diagrammatic structures that appear to float in deep space. In Titan (2008) he flies on paper wings over an anti-wto protest to Arabia, where he vanquishes the black-clad avatar of war. Lutz’s jerky movements, subdued grey tonalities, and amateurish props recall the movies of film pioneer Georges Méliès while lending his own work a deceptive tweeness. That two of the three works screened here are projected onto large balloons, a method the artist himself used, reinforces the madcap
and gives one the sense of entering an addled mind. However, his use of images that resemble the Nazca Lines or Man Ray’s Dust Breeding (1920) suggest that sophisticated research lies behind his work. His titles hint at the mystical. Lutz believed that a universally comprehensible language of signs would soon supplant speech, precluding misunderstanding and engendering a more just society. Before moving to New York he had made etchings based on the Kabbalah and the stories of Robert Walser. Those shown here appear to translate their sources into agglutinative ideograms or show stick figures in networks of curving lines similar to what one sees in the films. How these diagrams actually relate to their sources remains unclear, just as the language of Lutz’s movies is enigmatic; but it is less as symbol or linguistic theory than as performance that the latter, at least, should be understood. He concluded a typed text introducing the structure of Titan with the hope ‘that you
enjoyed this first lesson of my grammar’, suggesting that he aimed to delight, not to educate. His work was an act of humility and generosity. What he eschewed was ego. Often appearing as a miniature figure in his films, and in creating a transparent graphic code, Lutz strove to circumvent individual interpretation, which holds to the self as the arbiter of meaning. Similarly, Lutz’s withdrawal into fantasies brought to life in his kitchen seems less an act of neurotic isolation – though there is that – than an effort to inhabit a world in which selfabnegation rather than self-assertion ruled. In a text he describes Vulcan as an ‘indefinite series of endless loops’, and his antics – in a 1999 documentary made by Frank Matter and titled The Beauty of My Island – Shooting Klaus Lutz, he wears Tweety Bird boxer shorts – suggest he embraced Sisyphean absurdity as the existential baseline of life and as an antidote to ego. Joshua Mack
Selected Stories, 2014 (installation view). Courtesy the Kitchen, New York
136
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 136
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:20
Jonas Wood David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles 8 November – 10 January The world of Jonas Wood often has a shaky but lovingly attentive feel. His paintings and drawings are calm and reflective, many showing the interiors of what look like happy lives. Wood seems genuinely to like his subject matter, to dwell nostalgically on the good memories and good people in his life. Wood’s exhibition at David Kordansky’s new space is somewhat of a survey of his collected themes. The first of three galleries contains his plant paintings, usually featuring the ceramics of his wife, Shio Kusaka, while a second gallery features Wood’s paintings of collectable sports cards (usually baseball or basketball). The last gallery brings in the rest of Wood’s genres – landscapes, portraits, sporting events and interiors – in a salon-style hang of drawings and several large paintings. Wood’s paintings and drawings start as photo-collages assembled from many views of the same subject. He also starts new productions
from previous ones, reworking the same content into a meditation on how his life has changed or how his attitudes towards his subjects change. For instance, Rosy in My Room (2014) pictures Wood’s father in the artist’s childhood room holding a cat (presumably a surrogate for the son who has left the nest), while Self Portrait with Momo (2014) shows Wood in the same room, holding his daughter. The simple gesture is about the passage of time, about growing up and about fatherhood, all contained in the subtle flicker between two similar but slightly different images. In Manny Sanguillen (2009), a small gouache and coloured pencil on paper, one can see the efforts of a young boy with an urge to draw the bigger-than-life baseball players he sees on television. The boy focuses intently on the contours of the uniforms. He uses lines rather than shading to define the forms. The boy’s line is unpractised and shaky but earnest. He grinds the nubs of coloured pencils to fill
shapes. He has no need to study or get precious about volumes. All told, the boy is not interested in skilfully recreating the player; instead he mimics the attention and love that he shows the baseball cards that he hoards in his room. He has looked at them so much that looking is no longer enough. This innocent exuberance, which comes from Wood’s ability to inhabit and mimic childhood as much as reflect on it, is remarkable. It is fitting that the touchstones one most often finds associated with Wood are David Hockney and Vincent van Gogh. Wood’s spaces are built through technique and practice, the labour of a man in a world of exponentially multiplying images. But ultimately these works owe allegiance to emotion and memory. What we see is a product of how Wood feels, and his feelings are coherent and heartening, thankfully free of the temptation to manufacture drama or to exaggerate. Ed Schad
Manute, 2014, oil and acrylic on canvas, 305 × 122 cm. Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 137
137
23/12/2014 14:20
Yuri Ancarani Hammer Museum, Los Angeles 27 September – 18 January Few people outside of film circles in the United States will be familiar with Yuri Ancarani’s work, and one hopes this series of short films, which is being screened continuously at the Hammer Museum, will remedy that fact. Rather than showing Ancarani’s works intermittently as part of a regular schedule and larger lineup, which museum film programmes are wont to do, the Hammer has three of his best works, Il Capo (2010), Piattaforma Luna (2011) and Da Vinci (2012), a trilogy that the artist calls La Malattia del Ferro (The Disease of Iron), on continuous view in a single side-gallery appointed with comfortable beanbag seating that suggests one should get comfortable. And indeed one should. Ancarani, born in Ravenna and living and working in Milan, has been showing his work in art exhibitions for more than a decade, but since 2009 his films have been making the festival rounds, and awards have been stacking up. Spend just a little time with Il Capo and one understands why. This film is ‘about’ the operations of a Carrara marble quarry and the grizzly but sad-eyed foreman who directs the excavators
that break off enormous, impossibly geometric slabs of the rock. The soundtrack consists only of the hacking roars of the excavators’ engines and the piercing clanks of metal on metal and loud knocks of metal on stone, all punctuated by moments of seeming near silence when the foreman surveys the cuts just made. In one sequence, he stands in front of a wall of marble, which an excavator gradually takes down from behind and below to reveal the mountain quarry’s opposite slope, dusted white with what look like grains of light. Piattaforma Luna goes from the extreme environment of the quarry to the no less extreme containment of a deep-sea mining operation, where Ancarani’s camera is trained on a group of divers who move around their cramped, pressurised quarters with careful deliberation. The only sound here comes from the constant hum of the rig’s environmental controls and the occasional squawk of the divers’ voices, rendered comically high-pitched from the mix of helium in the air they need to breathe at such depths. Da Vinci opts for even more claustrophobia as it records the actions of a da Vinci Surgical System
– a robotic platform that doctors use to keep major surgeries minimally invasive – at work inside a patient’s body. Ancarani is not afraid of the still camera and the centred shot. This formal language, combined with his favouring of ambient, synched sound and far-from-equilibrium environments, gives the trilogy its signature definition. If Il Capo remains king here, though, it’s only because the beauty and the violence of that film is less contained than in the other two. The vastness of its geological scale, of its brute industry, is more palpable than the fluid dynamics of Piattaforma Luna or the invisible electronics of Da Vinci. Yet, because this is a trilogy, one needs to recognise how the technological refinement of ‘excavation’, for which the films together serve as a kind of allegory, is not really, or not only, progress – these scenes and their actors are all contemporaries – but a kind of repression as well. The deeper we go into the interior of the earth or the body to excise or extract the things we need or want – or, in the case of Da Vinci, the things we don’t want – the less of us we are apt or able to see. Jonathan T.D. Neil
Il Capo (still), 2010, 35mm film, colour, 5.1 Dolby Digital audio, 15 min. Courtesy the artist and Galleria Zero, Milan
138
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 138
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:20
Brian Bress You Can’t Sleep on a Door Cherry & Martin 8 November – 3 January The stillness of a picture and movement of the living: technological magic animates creatures on the other side of the looking-glass, curiously camouflaged as fantasyland harlequins and dreamy chimeras, costumed creepsters and mirrorland pillowmen; sometimes only an oddly coloured hand or two appears, rolling and snaking clay of the same weird hue. Framed and hanging on the whitewalls without any obvious gadgetry in the form of trailing wires or digital players, these pictures possess flatscreen televisions. Some are partially occluded by either anonymous abstractions (the kind Dianna Molzan affectionately enlivens in her curious paintings) or, as in Pendulum (all works 2014), where its maker, Brian Bress, Artschwagerishly employs glossy wood panelling found in retro countertops, with a single triangle cut to fit an image of an unmoving humanoid, hands painted grey, wearing a head like a kaleidoscopic geode cracked smooth down its centre and sitting in a hanging chair, swinging back and forth, ceaselessly. Over the last years, the slow and silly logic of Bress had aged the plodding pace
and silly logic of Saturday-morning cartoons into a beautifully surreal, and often discomforting, adulthood. Here the artist has dived beyond the pyjama-ed half-sleep of sugarcrusted children’s television and into the dreamscape of the night before, sweaty sheets tussled and weird visions dancing across shuttered eyelids, moving with lugubrious, almost spooky slowness. These wouldn’t be the first moving pictures to hang in a white cube, but it’s hard for me to recollect ones that move so much and so well in relation to their screen. One partially occluded led shows a marshmallowy pillowman (no relation but spiritual to Martin McDonagh’s play) power-sawing holes into his tableau that fit the holes in the panel covering it (Four Acts), or in a diptych, two playdough-faced gentleman draw Pablo Picasso-ish drawings on the glass of the screen that separates us from them (Doctor / Patient #1 (on tan and violet lines)). The cracked crudity and elegant lines, the displacement of time and space, weirdly square with Bress’s curious compositions, his own unique varietal
of sophisticated childishness. Masks and other manner of subterfuge played a part in Picasso’s aesthetic, leading him to declare imperiously to Gertrude Stein upon seeing a cannon painted with camouflage on the Boulevard Raspail, ‘C’est nous qui avons fait ça.’ Kiddies hardly ever see (or know to name) a harlequin; camouflage after Warhol (and militarily, after satellite imagery and sonar) is more fashion than function; and the heads of sleeping babes now fall onto the surrealistic pillows of touchscreen computers, a visual toy Picasso certainly lacked. Our visions dance with a light we can finger. Though it takes a certain amount of time for a civilisation to absorb and retain a new technology before artists can successfully transmit through it as medium, Bress’s graceful video-pictures don’t seem to date themselves from their handling, but rather engage with a complex visual imagery the proverbial metaphor of painting as a window or mirror, a weird screen that projects our desires, our visions, our dreams back at us. Andrew Berardini
Pendulum, 2014, walnut, hd single-channel video, colour, hd monitor and player, 193 × 117 × 10 cm. Photo: Brian Forrest. Courtesy Cherry & Martin, Los Angeles
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 139
139
23/12/2014 14:20
German Pop Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 6 November – 8 February At a time in which labels for art movements are quickly coined and appropriated (postInternet art’s vague definition shifts faster than extreme weather), the Schirn Kunsthalle is looking back at art history and rebranding an aspect of it. German Pop, an ambitious survey exhibition, extends Pop art’s remit beyond its conventional Anglo-American reference points and explores how consumer culture’s imagery affected the art of 1960s West Germany, whose society was still collectively licking the wounds of the Second World War. ‘German Pop’ is an admittedly invented designation; during the early 1960s, not even its protagonists were sure what to call what they were doing. Pictured in the exhibition catalogue is an invitation to a 1963 exhibition in Düsseldorf; it lists the names Manfred Kuttner, Konrad Lueg, Sigmar Polke and Gerhard Richter as well as a repeating list of labels: neo-Dada, Capitalist Realism, Junk Culture, Anti-Kunst, Common Object Painting and Pop art. These influential Düsseldorf artists are usually called Capitalist Realists; other cities had other scenes, often called other things. Yet Pop’s influence is clear throughout. To tie things together, curator Martina Weinhart delineates the exhibition geographically – separating 150 works by 34 artists (including three seldom-shown women: Bettina von Arnim, Christa Dichgans and Ludi Armbruster) into a series of spaces labelled, in turn, Düsseldorf, Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich.
In the first space, Neon-Text 1–4 (1973), a multicoloured neon word piece by kriwet, illuminates H.P. Alvermann’s Denkmal für die deutsche Sozialdemokratie (1965), a traditional cabinet painted red, embossed with the letter ‘F’ and ‘Wohlstand für alle’ (wealth for everyone) and topped with a helmet, a fox’s head poking out where the missing human face would be. In another part of the Düsseldorf section (definitely the show’s beating heart), Kuttner, Lueg, Polke and Richter come together again. Here, Polke’s dotty Junge mit Zahnbürste (1965) echoes Lichtenstein, Lueg’s Herr und Frau S (1965) takes a swipe at German narrowmindedness, Kuttner’s neon-pink sculptures incorporate everyday objects and Richter’s works depict images like a folding laundry rack (Faltbarer Trockner, 1962) and a young Elizabeth II. A surprising highlight is Richter’s 14-minute film Volker Bradke (1966), the blurry black-and-white outlines of which predict his later painted abstractions. Coming from artists and dealers largely imported from the Rhineland, work from Berlin ranges from the obviously neo-Dada to more political statements later in the decade. Displayed in a vitrine, K.P. Brehmer’s Aufsteller 13 (1965) are hilarious stand-up cardboard images, mostly of ladies in tight 1950s underwear; Wolf Vostell’s Lippenstift-Bomber b52 (1968) is a silkscreened aircraft dropping real lipsticks as missiles. The two featured Frankfurt artists concern themselves with seriality: Peter Roehr’s short film loops of American highways and
swinging hair are still hypnotic, while Thomas Bayrle shows his famous plastic raincoats and more socio-critical work, like Nürnberger Orgie (1966), a motorised sculpture in which a stiff swastika’ed arm rises before a background of tiny faces in a crowd. In Munich’s section – marked by artist collectives more aligned with Situationism than Pop per se, like the spur group – some of Lothar Fischer’s sculptures (like Große Tube, 1968, a tube of toothpaste) are reminiscent of Claes Oldenburg, while Heimrad Prem’s collages recall Tom Wesselmann.The show’s choreography underscores a certain provincialism, but the divisions succeed as a guide to the unfamiliar: many works here have not been on view for decades, if ever. What connects the protagonists of Germany’s version of Pop to each other, and divides them from their lighter-hearted American counterparts, is a twinge of melancholy and subtle critique of an increasingly conservative, economybased culture – Warhol silkscreened Marilyn and Liz in garish colour, but Richter painted four black-and-white views of a dumpy ‘Dr Knobloch’. At the same time, some of these works grabbed, for just a moment, the banal, fun parts of mass culture, before Europe’s late-1960s protests popped Pop’s bubble. And this is not even to mention the coda, a sizeable collection of graphic and print-based works. German Pop is a show worth seeing, if only to witness a familiar aesthetic’s darker, Teutonic side. Kimberly Bradley
German Pop, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Norbert Miguletz. Courtesy Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt
140
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 140
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:20
Peter Gallo Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin 8 October – 3 December The largest work in Peter Gallo’s exhibition, Stultifera Navis (2008–11), depicts a creamy yellow ship floating on mostly bare canvas, surrounded by pale flesh-pink and tan daubs of oil paint. The sketchy painting feels like a dream image or a faint memory; it is as if the artist were trying to imagine the vessel into existence. To accompany the painterly touches, the canvas itself seems tattered. It is seemingly constructed from two pieces of fabric, the bottom edge hanging tawdrily down from the stretcher further enhancing the painting’s scruffy nature. Given that Gallo is based in Vermont and makes his living as a psychiatric social worker in a rural health agency, and given his work’s abject appearance, it’s easy to extrapolate that he is an outsider. His nailed-on canvases, one of them even shaped like Bambi, are slathered with globs of paint in a Band Aid-coloured palette and have all the classic hallmarks of the self-educated naïf. Add to this the unusual surfaces that he has transformed into paintings – among them a skateboard, books, a tabletennis bat, even a large basting pan – and the picture is complete. However, the intensity of his touch belies the knowingness of the
artist himself; Gallo has a PhD in the history of art, and in his doctoral thesis, entitled ‘Bio-Aesthetics and the Artist as Case History’, he writes: ‘A central thesis of my project is that during this time artists and their works move into a new bio-aesthetic zone of indiscernability. In this zone, the “living being” of artists, their individualized “bare” or biological lives, enter into new “biographical” arrangements with their artistic production.’ Via Kant, Foucault and others, Gallo’s thesis (available online) offers an ambitious and alternative approach to interpreting art and its history through the embodied presence of the viewing subject, as opposed to a history focused on the iconography of objects. Perhaps, then, the aforementioned galleon is not just an armature for making painting. Its title alludes to the Ship of Fools, a literary allegory that originated during the fifteenth century about a navigatorless boat of idiots, but also one that, according to Foucault in Madness and Civilisation (1964), may have really existed as a way to cordon off the mentally ill. So are these haptic, playful, James Ensor-referencing objects (one work has the Belgian master’s name painted across a pair of hands rising out of a landscape
like a sunrise) dishonest in affecting outsiderness? Or do they hold more weight? In keeping with Gallo’s biologically themed thesis, the notion of skin is one way to consider these objects. In the argot of the tattoo parlour, skin is sometimes referred to as a canvas, and in Gallo’s case some of his canvases are literally tacked onto the front surface with words painted on them. Certainly words are important; ‘Intifada’, ‘Friendship’, ‘Modernism’, ‘Dreamland Motel’ and ‘She wants stars’ are some of those used, adding sentiment and suggesting memories. In some of the works, this creates a nostalgia in keeping with the object’s careworn nature. Ultimately, Gallo brings together the emotive with the handmade, and this imbues the work with its charm. Just as the viewing body is in the world, his paintings are really objects, things in the world. ‘It is this corporealization’, he writes in his thesis, ‘this embodiment, of artistic identity and experience that I capture under the rubric of bio-aesthetics.’ That is, they seem to be physical manifestations of ideas, ideals or sentiments, as if Gallo were trying to make them real. That, perhaps, is his proposition. Sherman Sam
Friendship & Modernism, 2011, oil, wood on canvas, 102 × 76 × 5 cm. Photo: Mark Woods. Courtesy private collection, London
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 141
141
23/12/2014 14:20
Beware Wet Paint Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin 29 October – 1 February At the moment there are names in the artworld that arouse suspicions: those of David Ostrowski, Oscar Murillo, Parker Ito and Ned Vena, for example. Such young abstract painters are often associated with six-figure auction prices that have yet to be legitimised by institutional or discursive support – which at first makes this art look like the paradigm of a market in which paintings change hands faster than the paint can dry. It is quite possible that the title of the exhibition Beware Wet Paint plays exactly with this suspicion. Nevertheless, the curator Gregor Muir has successfully put together a double show – at the London ica and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin – which offers perhaps the most exciting overview to date of… well… postInternet painting, as one must call it: abstract painting that feeds on online access and digital reproduction. This scavenger approach doesn’t spare an artist’s own works either. Christopher Wool, who will be sixty this year and who acts as a guiding spirit in the exhibition, has been asking since the mid-1980s what a painting can be. Early on he transferred floral forms onto the canvas with roller stamps; then came the famous ‘word paintings’, in which sentence fragments in dripping black paint screamed at the viewer from the canvas. In contrast, a painting like Untitled (No Halloween) (2003) seems like a digital photo of graffiti that someone unsuccessfully tried to wipe off the wall. In fact, though, it is related to one of Wool’s older paintings: the artist printed the image on a new canvas
and partially reworked it by hand. Wool nonchalantly discards painting’s interaction with the image sources and claim of originality. The same is true of all the younger artists in the exhibition. Among them, and by far the oldest, is Jeff Elrod, born in 1966. His canvases look like low-quality photographs of a Jackson Pollock painting that have been zoomed-in on to such an extreme that the contours become blurred. In actuality, having developed his technique while working nightshifts in the printing house of the Houston Chronicle during the 1990s, Elrod uses Photoshop to create forms that he then projects onto the canvas and fixates with spraypaint. Here Abstract Expressionism seems at most like background noise from an era whose suffering gave way to a laconic laissez-faire. Ned Vena’s canvases, also based on computer design programs, strike the same tone. Vena makes stencils using a digital plotting machine, subsequently spraying over these vinyl templates. Graffitilike traces remain, lending the serial minimalistic pattern a raw touch. As with many paintings in the show, digital and manual production, and urban and abstract aesthetics flow into each other. The sprayed wall-paintings by Isabelle Cornaro come across as similarly uncomplicated. At first glance one thinks of classic Colour Field painting – of flowing monochromatic reductions of landscapes. However, Cornaro’s works are anything but sublime. Her series Reproductions (2014) traces back to a 16mm film that documents
the creation of ten wall paintings whose proportions are derived from the space. The Reproductions are blowups of these filmed paintings: the role of painting as reproducer of reality is reenacted, so to speak. Cornaro’s painting has, like all the works in the exhibition, something cool, smart and completely unemotional about it. Subjectivity and content give way to the question of how painting, in a world overflowing with images, can look today without appearing completely reactionary – albeit by relying wholly on transformation processes and visual effects. If older generations carried through life the legacy of Yves Klein, Barnett Newman or Blinky Palermo as a backpack full of formal questions, today’s image producers have trained their eyes via mtv and the Internet. And in contrast to Tomma Abts or Sergej Jensen, who ten years ago tried to reanimate modern utopias and formalistic discourse, the vibe of these paintings is pure Pop. Beauty, style and sexiness are the new ingredients for a medium with which artists struggled until now, instead of simply grooving through it like through Google. This nihilism almost appears as liberation. These artists react to the -isms of the avant-garde – Suprematism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Postmodernism – like pupils in the last row: feet on the table and leaning back at ease. But when rocking the chair, one can quickly fall backwards. And then coolness just comes across as clumsiness. So one should, indeed, Beware Wet Paint! Gesine Borcherdt Translated from the German by Emily Terényi
Beware Wet Paint, 2014 (installation view). Photo: Edoardo Piva. Courtesy the artists and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin
142
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 142
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:20
Glitch: Interferences Between Art and Cinema pac, Milan 11 October – 6 January In the dense booklet accompanying Glitch, curator Davide Giannella sums up his field of action as ‘the ever-expanding territory disputably labeled as art cinema’. Accordingly, this show maps and regroups the last generation of Italian artists under the banner of their production of moving images (of all formats and lengths, from 2000 onwards), while trying to bridge the gap between two distinct categories of Milanese arty public: that for contemporary exhibitions, and that for film festivals. Quite surprisingly, though, instead of emphasising the hybrid and spectacular nature of expanded cinema, the layout is rigidly split in two: cinema on one side, art on the other. Three large rooms on the ground floor of pac have been turned into movie theatres, with thick velvety curtains, video projectors and wide screens, to grant the best viewing conditions possible, as an antidote to our indigestion from laptop and iPad screenings. Each room runs (on alternate days) two programmes, in loop, amounting to a total of 64 films and videos produced by around 50 artists and groups, plus a few special screenings of new works (by Rä di Martino, Luca Trevisani, Gianluca and Massimiliano De Serio, Alina Marazzi and Masbedo, for instance) on given evenings. The rest of the museum is occupied by silent and still installations, sculptures and
photographs, the only kinetic exceptions being Rosa Barba’s ‘filmic sculptures’ – 35mm-celluloid spooling around inside shaped objects, activating a rolling bar inside them – Color Clocks: Verticals Lean Occasionally Consistently Away from Viewpoints (2012) and Virgilio Villoresi’s amusing animated flipbooks-cum-typewriter Click, Clack (2014). Most works are related to their cinematic counterparts, and yet presented as autonomous pieces, somehow elliptically. Mastequoia op. 09–13 (2009–13), akin to a giant film roll, runs across pac for 20 metres and reproduces 34 stills of the visionary, distorted vhs film Mastequoia op. 09–13. Rotterdam, Tokyo, Fès (2013), shot by Gabriele Silli, Giacomo Sponzilli and Carlo Gabriele Tribbioli. The series of triangular white and red signs To Say Nothing of the Dog (#1) (2014), by Ettore Favini and Antonio Rovaldi, suggest possible routes for navigating the exhibition, as they do in reality along the shores of the Po river, in the eponymous travelogue shot by the artists. New Void: The Books (2013–14), by Alessandro Di Pietro, turns into mute printed pages the 945 scanned images from Gaspar Noè’s movie Enter the Void (2009) upon which Di Pietro’s latest film, New Void. The Movie (2013–4), are based – hat tip to the eerie soundtrack by Enrico Boccioletti, aka Death in Plains.
The contrast between the two sections is manifest: one can be viewed relatively quickly, the other is a hostage to extended duration, and thus requires hours and multiple visits. I returned twice, also to take advantage of the small documentary room on the first floor, where all the titles of the programme can be viewed on demand on a touchscreen, somehow contradicting the paradigm of slowness and full immersion proposed downstairs. My personal playlist included Ambaradan (2014), by Alterazioni Video, a caustic music video shot in collaboration with the Ethiopian Karo tribe, doing its best to rip up the ethnographic gaze; Negus – Remembering a Night in Shasha (2014), by Invernomuto, an attempt to reconstruct, via drawings and oral memories but no recorded images, an evening spent together by this duo of artists, videomakers and musicians in the Rastafarian community of Shashamane, again in Ethiopia, as part of their ongoing project Negus; and the lovely Before They Break, Before They Die, They Fly! (2014), by Anna Franceschini, on the magic of levitating objects and moving images. Of course, I couldn’t see everything and felt guilty because of it, as much as being glad to access so much at once, never mind the overload. Damn, I wish I went to art cinema festivals much more often. Barbara Casavecchia
Alterazioni Video, still from Ambaradan, 2014. Courtesy the artists
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 143
143
23/12/2014 14:20
Pavel Büchler Back to Work Tanya Leighton, Berlin 18 October – 15 November Collage – placing something next to something else that has no causal relation to it – was a crucial modernist trope. The juncture is a clash of elements which only art conjoins, implying a contingency underlying all cultural juxtapositions. It is a rupture offering the possibility of conciliation, or reconciliation. It comprehends a modern culture in which relations between signs are multiplying exponentially and chaotically. Combining referentiality and serendipity, it is an ideal method for Pavel Büchler, who likes his allusions to have the air of experiments. In an interview, the Czech-born, uk-based artist alluded to W.H. Auden’s famous claim that ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ by saying ‘when I say that I make nothing happen, I mean that there are things in the world which already have their shape but seem like nothing, and you can activate them by merely noticing them. Suddenly they become “something” in quotes’. Auden’s exempting of art from having to justify itself pragmatically becomes Büchler’s revealing of the exceptionality of the familiar. What seems remarkable about this selection of his collages from the 1970s and 80s is how the likenesses they discover between diverse images have a flattening effect, subversive because it militates against the conventional dynamic of the method, which is to emphasise heterogeneity. Büchler shows the proliferating imagery of postmodern culture throwing up what Foucault called ‘similitude’ – the similar relating to the similar in the absence of any original object on which the copies are based. Büchler has also said that ‘the poetic is by definition disinteresting’. If these collages have
a disinterested, impersonal air, he offsets them with signs of personal testimony. A series of framed works are supplemented by his diaries, presented in vitrines, in which a modified photograph / illustration for the week converts a diary page filled out with quotidian trivia – ‘11.30 – Hygienist!’ – into an artwork. Often, a superimposed sliver of contemporary culture gently puns on an art reproduction. Yuri Geller bends a spoon with one hand, while his other, cropped out, is supplied by a figure in a Roman relief, flexing his bicep. The contemporary, like the subjective, is a rogue imposition on arthistorical precedent or on the generic, printed layout of a diary. By association, Büchler’s self-revelation personalises the appropriative idiom of the wall-hung collages – appropriation being the use of things not your own. It never seems possible that Büchler took the photographs he is collaging. The framed works mostly feature two images the size of an over-thecounter print, in a passe-partout frame. They show gatherings of people working, playing sports, demonstrating, queuing. These are all ‘public’ images that confirm Walter Benjamin’s linking of photography with ‘the metropolitan masses’. The divide is usually a straight vertical, but Untitled (1987) stacks an Asian crowd over a Middle Eastern one, so the former, pictured from a greater distance, appears to recede behind the latter as a single human mass. Untitled (1987–8) has a musical troupe juxtaposed with four Samurai warriors. Hilariously, all are wearing long red gowns as though they were part of the same contingent, and the four Japanese, pictured from further away, were dwarfs.
The photographs do not register as glimpses of contingent reality, but as cultural signs short-circuited by their juxtaposition, and by its tendency to highlight the materiality of the prints, like a John Stezaker collage. But whereas Stezaker brings that materiality to signify the unknown particulars lurking behind photographic artifice, Büchler uses his collaged junctures to place the fact that these are photographic prints, and therefore artificial, ‘in quotes’. The contrasting function of the diaries is to suggest the hands-on dailiness of the process that has been applied to images which seem to have been condensed out of the cultural ether. The collages in the second room mostly consist of art-historical reproductions, the crops more virtuosic, the conjunctions more facetious. Büchler’s savvy referencing makes these works seem the opposite of ‘disinteresting’. The discovery of homogeneity where we would expect rupture is less effective because the context is the narrower one of the alreadymediated reality of art. Manet’s naked picnicker finds herself among Ingres’s odalisques. Picasso’s demoiselles muscle in on a social realist peasant. But dry humour occasionally redeems a display of cleverness. Two Antonins (105. Antonin Slaviček – 106. Antonin Hudeček) (1980–1) combines two bucolic nineteenth-century impressionist landscapes, one phasing into the other as though they were a single idyll. Each was painted in 1898 by one of the two Antonins of the title, Büchler disinterestedly crediting the accidents of history for his undeniable sleight of hand. Mark Prince
Untitled, 1985–6, collage on museum board, 36 × 56 cm. Courtesy the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin
144
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 144
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:20
Stephen Shore Fundación Mapfre, Madrid 19 September – 24 November The pictorial field in Stephen Shore’s photograph Lookout Hotel, Ogunquit, Maine, July 16, 1974 is occupied almost entirely by a partially completed jigsaw puzzle. The puzzle’s pieces are spread across a mustard-yellow tablecloth, its synthetic material stitched with a simple pattern that lends it a cushioned texture. Pink-and-white embroidered chair-seats can be seen on the sides of the table, and beyond the chairs an Oriental rug extends, slightly out of focus, to the edge of the photograph’s frame. The compressed layering of truncated patterns creates no depth; the camera angle is such that the table seems to tilt upward, threatening to spill the entire puzzle onto the floor; it almost feels like we might as well be in a Manet interior or a Cézanne still-life as in a motel in rural Maine in the 1970s. While a striking photograph in itself, Lookout Hotel, in its specific depiction of a jigsaw puzzle, also serves as something of an emblem for Shore’s fuller artistic modus operandi. Like jigsaw-puzzle pieces, Shore’s individual photographs transmit a sense of fragmentation and incompleteness, yet each is shaped with such meticulous craft that they often feel nothing short of inevitable. And at the same
time, his images come together (or can be made to come together) to form another image, an aggregate, interlocking, puzzlelike portrait of the overarching subjects of his photographic series (usually determined by place). While these traits are especially prominent in the series Uncommon Places (1973–81) – a rambling, cross-country, on-the-road portrait of the United States – they are in fact present across the arc of his long career, from his portraits of Andy Warhol’s coterie during the mid-1960s to his recent photographs from Ukraine, as is made clear by this judiciously selected and impeccably presented overview. As evidenced in it, Shore’s work is insistently formal – but formal in a dual sense. On the one hand, it is at all times concerned with form, composition, surface, line and colour, through which it achieves its characteristically muted (but nonetheless extraordinary) beauty. But it is also formal in the sense of formality, of seeming to actively suppress all signs of spontaneity, to seek and maintain a kind of studied distance, even when it partakes of the conventions of the snapshot. For instance, an exquisitely composed photo such as J.J. Summers Agency, First Street, Duluth, Minnesota, July 11, 1973
(1973) depicts a quiet, nearly empty storefront – there is something almost Hopper-like in the pathos of the lonely adding machine, crank upraised, being offered for sale in the streetfront window. In Washington Street, Watertown, New York, August 1, 1974 (1974), meanwhile, a woman strides towards the camera, dressed in a light-green pantsuit and surrounded by the sidewalk’s unkempt weeds and foliage, the soloist in a sudden morning’s symphony of green. And Trail’s End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973 (1973) converts a breakfast special at what is presumably a roadside diner into a carefully composed constellation of circles, dominated by an oversize pile of butterdrenched pancakes. This same tabletop depicted in Trail’s End Restaurant also contains a barely noticeable popular magazine entitled American Essays, perhaps making a sly reference to Walker Evans’s American Photographs (1938). If so, the reference is unnecessary, for Evans’s spirit pervades Shore’s work in myriad ways: in its scrutiny, in its compositional mastery and above all in its capacity to convey – beyond documentation, beyond narrative, even beyond beauty – an incontrovertible sense of place. George Stolz
Trail’s End Restaurant, Kanab, Utah, August 10, 1973, 1973, c-print, 51 × 61 cm. © the artist. Courtesy 303 Gallery, New York
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 145
145
23/12/2014 14:20
Hans Op de Beeck The Drawing Room Botanique, Brussels 6 November – 4 January Let’s start with a small confession. When visiting art fairs like Artissima in Turin, Art Dubai or Art Brussels, I’ve often come across watercolours by the internationally known Belgian artist Hans Op de Beeck. When seeing these works on paper, which look a bit scholarly, lightly romantic and sometimes annoyingly would-be poetic, I couldn’t help thinking: this is the kind of stuff that pleases collectors for its gentle recognisability, by an artist who, in between bigger projects, makes such things to finance his more interesting and ambitious pieces. (These, in Op de Beeck’s case, include immersive installations, sculptures, videos, novels, the set design for Gluck’s 1762 opera Orphée et Eurydice directed by Frédéric Flamand and a play he is currently working on and will direct for the Schauspiel in Frankfurt.) So upon hearing that the Botanique wanted to dedicate an entire show to these works on paper – not exactly the strongest section of the artist’s varied production – I started having doubts. Botanique, a concert venue with an exhibition hall, does not have natural light in its show spaces – a condition that triggered Op de Beeck to show his watercolours, which he makes alone, at night, when his army of assistants has gone home. If a feeling of solitude is also present in the lifesize installations and videos he’s best known for, it registers more strongly here,
perhaps due to the work’s isolated creative process. It is exactly that sense of melancholia Op de Beeck manages to transfer to the scenography of his exhibition, which offers a kind of retreat in the middle of a lively music venue. The exhibition space has been darkened, the drawings are scarcely lit, the walls are painted grey and a soft carpet mutes visitors’ footsteps. Op de Beeck is clearly a master of scene setting, as previously illustrated with his fine installations of, for example, the deserted highway restaurant in Location (5) (2004). Here, he adeptly plunges the spectator into his universe, inviting him/her to an internal journey. At the same time, though, the question arises: would these watercolours also work on their own merits in a less-poetic setting? It’s clearly not via these works’ subject matter that Op de Beeck gains points for originality: the drawings depict a flock of birds, the sea (in three different formats), landscapes with or without snow, a cat… The artist seems to have a penchant for stereotypes. But unlike some of his contemporaries, he does not tackle these with the slightest irony or make pastiches from them. He is bloody serious. He uses tropes and easy metaphors for solitude, like a deserted highrise city lit at night, as if they had never been done before. Op de Beeck can make beautiful watercolours, fair enough, but he lacks
imagination, and his work often borders dangerously on the banal. A handful of these surpass that problem (like the mysterious lady in a cheongsam, Dress (2), all works 2014) or the cropped depiction of a woman’s leather boots (Black Boots), but most don’t. Sometimes the work becomes pure kitsch: like the reflected image of a nude in front of a house (The Theatre Stage) or a woman wearing a raincoat and carrying suitcases, ready to leave everything behind (Window), the kind of scene that could be used for the cover of a pulp novel. It goes to show that these works, even the better ones, do have a strong illustrative and anecdotal side. Op de Beeck’s watercolours are also brought alive in the animated video Night Time, a kind of slideshow of images of melancholia. Though some of these works are beautiful, as a whole this is a bit lame, predictable and lacking in substance, like the show as a whole. If you want to show watercolours nowadays, you have to come up with a personal and original style or at least an amazing technique. Op de Beeck does neither. While the soft sense of poetry that characterises his installations and videos may appeal, on paper it easily becomes cheesy and predictable. In this pure and honest medium, there is no way to hide. Sam Steverlynck
Snow Landscape (1), 2014, b/w watercolour on Arches paper in wooden frame, 290 × 110 × 4 cm. © the artist
146
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 146
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:20
Enrique Ramírez Los durmientes Palais de Tokyo, Paris 20 October – 23 November “Buscar algo que no se ve…” (“Looking for something that can’t be seen…”), eighty-year-old actor and playwright Alejandro Sieveking mutters, in voiceover, at the beginning of Enrique Ramírez’s 15-minute video triptych, Los durmientes (all works 2014). Onscreen, in a single long take, the elder slowly walks his way down to a beach in Quintero, Chile, carrying a dead fish on his palms, as if about to return it to the sea. The title of the piece, which is also that of the exhibition, relates to the particularly gruesome circumstances of the murders of over 500 political opponents to General Pinochet following his 1973 military coup d’état. All of them, after being tortured by the Chilean secret police, were attached to lengths of railway track and thrown into the Pacific Ocean from helicopters, so that their remains would not resurface and their disappearances leave no trace. That is until the body of Marta Ugarte, a member of the Chilean Communist Party, washed up on a beach in Los Molles (Playa La Ballena) in 1976, and later in 2004, following the testimony of retired military officials on trial, a couple of railroad ties were found offshore in Quintero, giving more (yet so very little) evidence of the unspeakable atrocity that occurred during the dictatorship era. In this exhibition, Ramírez – who grew up under Pinochet’s military regime – doesn’t investigate the death flights per se but offers
a heartrending visual allegory of the trauma his nation has suffered ever since. For the lack of incriminating clues and the memory ‘loss’ of the perpetrators and witnesses have ensured that most crimes committed at the time remain unchallenged to this day, leaving the effort and duty of remembrance open like a permanent wound. In the 11-minute video loop Bell uh-1d Iroquois, the artist subtly addresses the deadlock that justice faces in regards to those ‘missing’ – the Iroquois being a helicopter that, unlike the Puma models operated by the Chilean death squads, is specifically used for medical evacuations. Only here, with no site to check and no body to be found, no rescue can be attempted: the chopper slowly takes off, turns around itself three times and lands right back where it was, endlessly. Next to this, Latitudes, a series of 30 engraved sheets of black glass, each a4 size, presents imaginary mappings of the locations (marked by white dots) where the victims disappeared. With no geographical indications except the north arrow, the compositions are captioned with quotations from newspapers and the 1991 report of the Chilean National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, which, it states, ‘arrived at a moral conviction that the so-called “disappearance” is not a disappearance at all’. Echoing the introductory wall text of the show, which reads, ‘The sea is Chile’s true
graveyard’, the two-minute video Pacífico is a silent, static shot above the ocean. Recorded at 60 frames per second, the result is petrifying: powerful waves unrelentingly kneading the surface render the dark waters distressingly gloomy and impenetrable. Back to the long shot of Sieveking walking down the beach in Quintero, the middle panel of the video triptych Los durmientes: once he reaches the sea, he momentarily disappears behind a stranded fishing boat to give way to a younger man (played by actor Jorge Becker) carrying a body bag in place of the former’s dead fish. In the meantime, a helicopter takes off on the left panel and flies over the ocean, while the right panel shows an ephemeral sea graveyard, floating crosses tossed by the tide. With no disruption, Becker keeps going along the shore, his steps only paced by his poetic voiceover: “Fabrica la vida… el silencio… el miedo… la búsqueda…” (“Fabricate life… silence… fear… quest…”), in other words the very paradox that paralyses Chilean society with regard to uncovering its tragic history. Finally he enters the ocean, where the old man waits for him. As they exchange dead fish and body bag in a final, poignant embrace, the camera is brutally thrown from the helicopter of the left panel into the deep waters and the image turns black. Ni olvido, ni perdón. Violaine Boutet de Monvel
Los durmientes, 2014. Photo: Aurélien Mole. Courtesy Palais de Tokyo, Paris
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 147
147
23/12/2014 14:20
Panda Sex State of Concept, Athens 28 November – 17 January In a time of their likely extinction, sex among pandas is a rare and desirable event, as much as it has become a profitable business for Chinese zoos – who rent out their pandas internationally – and Far Eastern diplomats. Panda Sex also makes for a quite catchy exhibition title. For his show at State of Concept, then, curator Tom Morton followed an anticonceptual thrust, choosing to avoid the choice of a theme and pragmatically picking an animal, the unfathomable and phlegmatic figure of a panda bear. If the sexuality of a panda might not sound like a pointed or profound enough subject on which to found an exhibition – pace the commitment of zookeepers and environmental conservationists – next time it could be a dolphin or a honey badger. Deprived of a theme, Panda Sex is instead structured by bullet points about how to put together a group show: mainly black and white; scarcely sexualised; bits of colour here and there. The bigger picture, then, does reflect the impassive character of the titular elusive bamboo-chewer (and its colour scheme and low sex drive), while the single works rejoice in their individual freedom to face in disparate directions. Indeed the only apparent connection between the works of the 12 selected artists
is exactly this: mostly black and white with infrequent flashes of colour, and not particularly lustful. Aliki Panagiotopoulou diligently turns the appearance of a panda into a ceramic sculpture placed on a black-and-white drawing (The Occasional Snap, 2014). In Television Advertisement (2013–14), Scott King comments on an old advertisement for rbs, a bank that was bailed out in 2008 due to the financial crisis. In an old video by Natalia ll, Consumer Art (1972–5), naked women engage in nasty play with various types of sexy food. The only splash of colour is Alexander Tovborg’s painting Hyperion’s Song of Destiny (2014), while Sophie Jung chooses instead to speak about the colour black. In a touching performance on the opening night, cos of the Grand Change (2014), she recites the lyrics of Johnny Cash’s Man in Black in a black outfit from fashion retailer cos, possibly creating a poignant mismatch between the words of the songwriter and the uniform of a normcore disciple: “Well, we’re doin’ mighty fine, I do suppose / In our streak of lightnin’ cars and fancy clothes / But just so we’re reminded of the ones who are held back / Up front there oughta be a Man in Black.”
An exhibition abiding by a set of rules is a classic approach that feels progressive enough, especially in times of automated problemsolving and workflow patternmaking. In a science-fictional near future, the rules could be fed into an algorithm for curating the perfect exhibition: what tasks could such a tool perform? Selecting artists through Facebook, weighing their connection between your friends and the friends of your friends? Sorting them according to their media or their nationality – or possibly their eligibility for funding opportunities? Could this process measure their success along with the activity of their accounts on a wide range of social medias? Or browse their portfolios and select works via a tagging system? Eventually, would such a tool turn curators themselves into an endangered, or at least unemployed, species? For the moment it might be better not to fantasise too much about similar scenarios; they might be coming anyway. In the meanwhile, it feels quite pleasurable to be reminded how the unemotional expression on the face of a panda represents the essence of, say, my Nike trainers: not very sexy, aesthetically undemanding and fitting with everything. Michelangelo Corsaro
Aliki Panagiotopoulou, The Occasional Snap, 2014. Courtesy the artist and State of Concept, Athens
148
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 148
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:20
Gabriel Lester and Haegue Yang Follies, Manifold Bonner Kunstverein 23 September – 23 November Dress a man up like a puffed-up Swiss Guard, and it’s considered an avant-garde gesture; remake the costume as a sculpture and it is, apparently, a folly. Follies, Manifold, a two-person exhibition bringing together works by Haegue Yang and Gabriel Lester, takes its starting point from the landscape architecture feature of the folly, and the way it can, as the gallery claims, ‘animate the landscape and activate fantasy within the viewer’. Yang’s Boxing Ballet (2013) turns one half of the gallery into a reworking of Oskar Schlemmer’s 1922 costumed dance work Triadisches Ballett, with replicas of five of the Bauhaus teacher’s bulbous and exaggerated figures, from a female figure made of hoops to a circle that looks like a flattened stickman. Here, Schlemmer’s figures are reimagined as golden bell-covered shapes on wheels or wire frames hanging by a wire from the ceiling. As they all come with handlebars, it seems we are meant to provide the choreography, stiffly pushing, say, a giant roosterlike creature around like an awkward shopping trolley. This is counterbalanced on the other side of the large gallery by vip’s Union (2014), an arrangement of 72 chairs lent by the ‘movers’
of Bonn: gallerists, academics, musicians and more than a few directors of some institution or other. A small children’s chair carved into the shape of a creepy clown with its tongue out comes from the head of the Bonn Landesmuseum; the two wooden chairs and a table covered in a web of coloured duct tape, from a professor at the University of Bonn’s radiology clinic, is the most lively thing there. The rest is a collection of fairly drab office chairs, which might say something about the mentality of the supposed ‘movers’: who actually chose the list of vips is never disclosed. Presenting these together, though, Yang seemed to suggest her sources – the Bauhaus ballet and vips – as equal forces that shape our encounters with the art institution and how we are allowed to move within it. In between all this is Gabriel Lester’s darkened cinema space, in which it looks at first glance as if a bunch of potted plants is watching a film. The screen that transfixes them is How to Act (1999–2014), a blank, white rectangular space animated only by a set of red, yellow, white and green lights. A soundtrack suggests a Hitchcock-like thriller unfolding, with the
sequencing of the lights providing motion (fluttering in time with the sounds of a street filled with traffic), mood (turning green with tense, suspenseful strings, or red with sultry saxophones) and even hints of character (I, at least, begin to imagine a male protagonist being denoted by the appearance of yellow). It’s remarkable what just a set of blinking bulbs can conjure, though Lester’s use of recognisably Hollywood ‘scenes’ perhaps tells us more about what conventions of genre narrative we’ve absorbed than anything else. The most instructive representation of the audience’s role in this exhibition are the 17 imitation ferns and palms on plinths of various heights that are ostensibly, as the title proclaims, Living by the Light of Fiction (2014). A group of plastic plants enraptured in the light of a deconstructed film: the most they can do is watch the predictable story play out in front of them. Both Lester and Yang make apparent the structures underlying their clever, theatrical displays; but they also make apparent how proscribed our relationships with those structures already are. Chief among the manifold follies on show here is the fantasy of interaction. Chris Fite-Wassilak
Gabriel Lester, Living by the Light of Fiction, 2014. Photo: Simon Vogel. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Fons Welters, Amsterdam
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 149
149
23/12/2014 14:20
Carlos Zilio Paintings Galeria Raquel Arnaud, São Paulo 9 October – 19 November Looming sadly through a maelstrom of paint in Carlos Zilio’s Tamanduá, os continentes e o cosmos (2013–14), a shadowy black figure stares into the distance, its curved bill suggesting a rook, a crow or, following the cues offered by its almost cartoonish form, maybe even a penguin. The brooding figure, repeated in all the paintings in this exhibition, is none of those things: it is, as the name of this painting (Anteater, the continents and the cosmos) and all the other paintings state, an anteater. The subject of dozens of paintings by the Rio de Janeiro-based artist since the 1980s, the animal is for Zilio a Proustian figure, representing for him a kind of hereditary saudade – a Portuguese word meaning ‘longing’, ‘nostalgia’. So the story goes, the animal was a pet belonging to Zilio’s father as a child during the 1920s, which met a sudden death when it tumbled down the staircase of the family home. Earlier works have shown an anteater in freefall, sailing over a staircase or sloping dangerously down the canvas; but in these paintings the animal is portrayed upright, poised and, so many years after the fall, perhaps even resurrected. This new series was inspired by a stain on the granite floor in the hallway leading to Zilio’s studio, which once he had noticed it, had the unmistakable form of the animal, paired with a second shape spied on the same floor – for
Zilio, according to the titles of these works, a continent, or a lost continent. In many of the works, forms mass behind the animal figure in a pulsing, whirling vortex of paint reminiscent of 1980s and 90s works by Zilio, where thick paint and lavishly textured brushstrokes told wordless, eloquent stories – daubs of green rushing this way and that in Matisse’s Garden (1984); glowing, evocatively sunny yellows in Leonardo Goes to the Beach (1999). In Tamanduá e os continentes (2013–14), the painted mass is to the fore as a flat wash of acrylic over the anteater / floorstain, like a white mist shrouding the omnipresent animal, which shines through regardless, in light, glowing peach. Strong saudade, the mythical nature of family legends and the recherche du temps perdu converge in the shape of this insistent family pet; yet the revisiting of such a distant tragedy, over and over, seems more curious than ever in the light of Zilio’s own history, which has all the drama of a thriller. Zilio trained with the expressionist painter Iberê Camargo during the 1960s, in an early career that took off around the same time as that of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Showing conceptual, political art such as Luta (Struggle, 1967), an aluminium lunchbox containing a yellow masklike face, its mouth obscured by
a screenprinted word, ‘lute’ – the imperative of the verb ‘to struggle’ – Zilio took part in a number of important exhibitions, including Opinião 66 (1966), A Nova Objetividade Brasileira (1967) and the ninth São Paulo Bienal (1967). In 1968, Zilio abandoned art to immerse himself in politics, joining the revolutionary guerrilla group mr-8 and dedicating himself to the armed struggle. Severely wounded in a shootout in 1969, he was arrested and spent the next two-and-a-half years in prison, later going into exile in France in 1976. In the catalogue text accompanying these paintings, the curator Ronaldo Brito invokes Gerhard Richter’s October 18, 1977 (1988), 15 hazy paintings based on news images of the Baader-Meinhof gang, including some of the members lying dead in their cells. There’s reminiscence in the black-and-white palette, and a hint, perhaps, in Zilio’s dark Tamanduá e os continentes, of Richter’s meticulous obfuscation in Arrest 2. For a fleeting moment, Zilio’s hook-billed form suddenly looks like a rifle, a machine gun; but the real similarity between the works, in the end, is the in the inchoate, dreamlike shadows that haunt both series of paintings, and in the mysterious ways of memory, simultaneously concealing and revealing the anteater, its fall and the fallout from long-ago political passion. Claire Rigby
Tamanduá e os continentes, 2013–14, enamel, mixed media and graphite on photograph, 110 × 264 cm. Courtesy Galeria Raquel Arnaud, São Paulo
150
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 150
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:20
Miao Ying .gif Island V Art Centre, Shanghai 10 October – 10 December Internet art is, by its very nature, concerned with the most populous, unrelenting, expansive and diverse aspect of contemporary culture. .gif Island presents a measured reflection – and not without humour. As one approaches the gallery, Lionel Richie’s Hello (1983) can be heard blaring from the first videowork, Is it me you are looking for?! (2014). In it, a loop of the song’s 1984 music video showing Lionel falling for a blind girl who fashions a sculpture of his face plays via a YouTube link. Its schmaltzy scenes are followed – or preceded – by three lan Love Poem .gifs (all 2014), which variously pair screenshots of ‘website unavailable’ notices (from censored sites) with floating or revolving texts in kitsch, colourful fonts that act like abstract slogans haunting the broken links. ‘To be missed is another kind of beauty’, reads one; another, ‘When cigarettes fall in love with matches the cigarette gets burned’; or (this time the text appears in a Google Search box), ‘Holding a kitchen knife cut internet cable, a road with lightning sparks’. The blocked web pages are a fact – they have been barred by the government in an overt bid to curb viewers’ use of the web. The overlaid gif text that caresses the unavailable -site pages is whimsical and tacky, yet with a certain poetic reach; a sense of futility against the
firewall seems emphasised here via these incongruities of unembellished censorship and kitschy visuals. There is a strong note of the absurd here, which could be a remark on the strange nature of human attachment, and its denial. app-nosis (2013–14) consists of three open metal pyramids with real turf and large cushions (printed with extracts from Apple ads) laid at the base. From the top of each metal frame is suspended an iPhone inviting one to recline below, gazing up at it. On the wall beyond, one of the pyramids projects the blank background hue of an app, minus the app itself (a surprisingly satisfying, minimal image with graduated tones). A soothing, oceanside soundtrack plays. This deconstructive gesture muses, one feels, on forms of attention and detachment that the handheld screen has raised to new heights. The minimal overall aesthetic is punctured by a small space in which a case of brightly lit glittering devices encrusted with diamante stand or revolve (#mememe, 2014). Fake Apple accessories – cigarette lighters, for example – flank iPads and phones whose cases are photographic ‘selfie’ images harvested from the web and further enhanced by the artist. Selfie prints, sticks and printed towels complete this installation, pointing to the desiring culture of ownership
and self-image. The advertising upon which such dreams are built finds artistic form in a series of digital prints on canvas (Tech Abstractionism, 2014). Scaled up from the perfect reflections on black products in Apple advertising, these are the most direct works in the show. But perhaps the greatest draw in this exhibition is a pair of reclining chairs draped with emoji-printed towels (Landscape.gif, 2013). Encroaching on them in angled holders are a number of touch-screen devices on which different trembling, animated gifs repeat delirious imagery featuring whirling sandwiches, pink cloudlike cats, seals and rainbows. A mass of wires and crumpled paper bearing the Chinese Internet meme Zan (close to the ‘like’ of Western social media) litter the floor. Thus does .gif Island explore the contemporary relationship with devices in ways both insightful and visually apt. A certain low-key sublimity underlies these works, which, as much as they represent forms of desire, kitsch and ephemerality attached to net culture, notice also its slight poetry and potential absurdity. No man is an island, as the saying goes; in turn, digital technology – far from remaining a separate, nonemotive realm – absorbs and emits human sensibility through these works. Iona Whittaker
Is it me you are looking for?!, 2014, hd single-channel video, 1 min 14 sec. Courtesy the artist
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 151
151
23/12/2014 14:20
Taipei Biennial: The Great Acceleration Taipei Fine Arts Museum 13 September – 4 January This year’s Taipei Biennial, curated by Nicolas Bourriaud and titled The Great Acceleration, makes an effort to respond to recent theories in science and philosophy. To do this, Bourriaud draws on two key sources: one is a concept borrowed from geological science, the Anthropocene, which refers to the current epoch in which humans and their societies have become a global geophysical force, while the other is objectoriented ontology, a metaphysical movement that rejects the privileging of human existence over the existence of nonhuman objects. Prior to the opening of the biennial, Bourriaud released his notes for the exhibition, as if to till the ground before sowing the seeds of his project. However, the biennial starts for real with a relational work in the Taipei Fine Art Museum’s lobby: Brazilian collective Opavivará!’s Formosa Decelerator (2014), in which people are invited to make and enjoy local tea and to take a break on the hammocks provided – to experience the essence of ‘slowness’ and, conversely, if this attempt is not corrupted by the leisure lifestyle and festival atmosphere that dominates these kinds of event, to reflect on the velocity of contemporary civilisation. It’s an entertaining work that foregrounds the keynote of the biennial’s address: it’s going to be visitor-friendly. Following this prelude, the biennial unfolds by following the changing status of nature in the light of artificial materials and translating it into a three-act structure, effectively turning the three-storey museum into an archaeological dig that offers prospecting viewers all kinds of materials (the human being one of them) and each participating artist or collective a relatively equal space to ensure a rather complete presentation of each one’s works. And most of those are perfect artistic interpretations (albeit on different levels) of the curatorial subject. For example, Wu Shanzhuan & Inga Svala Thórsdóttir’s Thing’s Right(s) Declaration (1994) is a series of witty speculations on the rights of objects and a perfect fit with trendy objectoriented ontology (although, compared with those dry, dull philosophical writings, Wu’s text is, as you’d expect, both sexier and more charming). The biennial also showcases artists’ imaginings of the Anthropocene and its
aesthetics. For example, a mini solo exhibition of work by Shezad Dawood consisting of a piece of sculpture, four paintings on vintage textiles and a new videowork, Towards the Possible Film (2014): collectively they present a world that is built upon knowledge and visual references from archaeology, anthropology, folkloristics and classic sci-fi films. Timur Si-Qin’s Premier Machinic Funerary: Part 1 (2014) is a ritual scene that creates a calm, clean, seminasa / semi-Zen atmosphere, in which the artist has transformed the material being of a distant human ancestor (a male Paranthropus boisei who lived around 1.7 million years ago in what is now Kenya) from organism to digital data, then synthetic, through 3d-data and printing technology. Bourriaud points out in his notes that The Great Acceleration is presented as a tribute to the coactivity of the human and nonhuman, the assumed parallelism between them, and their negotiations. However, certain works offer alternative voices. For example, as a response to Bourriaud’s emphasis on the collapse of the human scale and a new type of ‘ghost dance’ in the age of the Anthropocene (subjects become objects, and objects subjects), Taiwanese artist Po-Chih Huang, in his Production Line – Made in China & Made in Taiwan (2014), manages to rebuild a live production site, in which workers’ names and stories are written and told, thus bringing what is, in terms of manufacturing these days, generally metahuman to a ‘human scale’. In contrast to Opavivará!’s for-the-occasion tea ceremony, which appears to be entertaining, celebrative and lifestyle-esque, Shimabuku’s works always express his negation of some of today’s most popular values. My Teacher Tortoise (2011/14) offers a real tortoise living in the gallery, to inspire people to consider the benefits of staying still (with ‘stop / stop and think / return / occasionally run’ printed on a poster). Mobile Phone and Stone Tool (2014) shows how one of the more recent technological inventions of humankind is similar to a tool from the Stone Age. Yet these works should not be categorised alongside many of the others in the biennial that are presented by Bourriaud as a tribute to the coactivity of human and nonhuman, because
facing page, top Shimabuku, My Teacher Tortoise, 2011/14, Sulcata tortoise, pen, lamp, title sticker and poster, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist, Air de Paris, and Wilkinson, London
152
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 152
in Shimabuku’s art, humour, human emotion and human behaviour (all as different expressions of ‘human scale’) always play a major role. In general, The Great Acceleration is, in a simple, direct way, easy to digest, though some people may expect it to be more intensively presented. While Bourriaud provides an interesting viewpoint on the world and a new relation between every different kind of ‘thing’ or different scales, most of the artworks that he has selected tend to be either a literal or an illustrative interpretation of the biennial’s subject. In a way, Bourriaud’s The Great Acceleration and Luc Besson’s 2014 film Lucy (partly filmed in Taipei) might be seen as two variations of one story: some great, uncontrollable acceleration (caused in the film by a synthetic chemical substance, cph4) has broken the boundary between the human and the material world, thus changing the human view on everything. Furthermore, viewed in a new way, the world no longer works under the same old ‘universal’ rules, therefore ultimate concerns such as the start and endpoint of history (a very typically Western thought, derived from the linear concept of time, though Bourriaud stated previously that he would take the opportunity in Taipei to trigger a dialogue between Western and Asiatic philosophy) and the universe are pursued. Besson’s Lucy doesn’t tell a convincing story, but the visuals, performances and rhythm of storytelling are first rate. The Great Acceleration spells out Bourriaud’s new grand narrative in a static, archaeological way, but does allow the voices of individual works to provide their own commentary. Last but not least, if we agree with the accelerationist vision described by Bourriaud, the compound sculptures created by Sterling Ruby and his contemporaries – though what Ruby is showing here is a series of his early nail-polish paintings – will become the symbolic visualisation of humanity’s imagination of the material world of the future. No wonder the production design of the future supercomputer in Lucy is so ‘Sterling R uby’. The last time that people saw such a revolutionary and symbolic visual so widely distributed was in 1999, when the first poster for the Wachowskis’ The Matrix was released. Aimee Lin
facing page, bottom Po-Chih Huang, Production Line – Made in China & Made in Taiwan, 2014, mixed media, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:20
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Reviewed_RESUPPLY ALL PAGES.indd 153
153
23/12/2014 14:20
Books
154
AR-JanFeb-Books.indd 154
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:42
The Miraculous by Raphael Rubinstein A compact book of 50 numbered vignettes, The Miraculous, by New York-based poet and art critic Raphael Rubinstein, is a retelling of selected pivotal moments in postwar art. Each is written ‘blind’, so that the artist remains unnamed, though an index at the rear provides the list of artists. So a romantic retelling of Daniel Spoerri’s Topographie Anécdotée* du Hasard (An Anecdoted Topography of Chance, 1962) begins as follows: ‘One day in 1961, a slim, dark-haired young man is sitting at a table in his cheap Latin Quarter hotel room. Although he has with him neither paint nor canvas nor any of the traditional studio accoutrements, he is about to begin his next work of art.’ Spoerri documents everything on the table in front of him, in a moment that has now, itself, been canonised. Each parable is only a couple hundred words long, and orbits around the ‘miraculous’ moments in which chiefly conceptual works are realised, in an attempt to tell art history a different way – charmed, Perecian moments of revelation at the scale of a Lydia Davis story. It might seem that writers on art should be struggling far less with ekphrasis – the art of translating one artform into another – when
Paper Monument, $16 (softcover)
discussing the kind of conceptual work that can be described quite quickly, and with some accuracy. One can very literally repeat one of Yoko Ono’s instructional texts or Alison Knowles’s making of a salad. The ghost haunting the title is that of Bas Jan Ader, of course, and inevitably we are told the tragic tale of the artist’s death during In Search of the Miraculous (1975), in time-honoured weepy fashion, emphasising romance above all else, and prefaced by the fact that ‘recently he’s mailed out postcards that carry a photograph of him convulsed in tears. The caption reads: “I’m too sad to tell you.”’ Why should this make me bristle when it’s all essentially factually correct? The book is undoubtedly a sweet thing: a celebration of the Damascene moments that see artists breaking with existing forms, which do have an undeniable, transformative magic to them. For those who don’t know the works described, it might be a pleasurable experience to live art history though these fascinating protagonist-actors. I feel desperately uncharitable writing that the parablelike nature irks me so much, but it’s deeply
invested in the cult of solo genius, and very, very cute. One short enough to relay in full here is number 37: ‘In 1979 an artist decides to shake hands with every employee of the New York City Sanitation Department. It takes her eleven months and two days to shake the hands of all 8,500 workers’. This is true, but somehow this important work, Touch Sanitation Performance (1979–80), by Mierle Laderman Ukeles, now appears less political, less invested in the economic, ideological and spiritual troubles of a city and a very large community, here transformed into a romantic solo struggle and personal endeavour, stripping Ukeles away from the context and the people that she sought to make visible and to whom she sought to give voice. This sort of practice is actually a time-honoured problem, rather than an experimental transformation. This book might not be aimed at me, and is perhaps intended more as a poetic, pic’n’mix reflection. However, in too many cases the artists appear far more toothless than they should; the sweets here taste too much of saccharin. Laura McLean-Ferris
Lina Bo Bardi 100 Edited by Andres Lepik and Vera Simone Bader
In a corner of the covered patio, surrounded by lush foliage and before the steps up to the glass-wrapped house Lina Bo Bardi built herself in a suburb of São Paulo in 1951, the visitor to Casa de Vidro might notice the Italian-born architect’s Roadside Chair (1967). Its rustic design at first seems at odds with the modernist furniture inside the property (not least the iconic Bowl Chair Bo Bardi designed in 1951). Three roughhewn tree branches are bound together into a tripod, a thicker branch attached horizontally as a seat. It’s the kind of construction that one might find a worker in the Brazilian countryside resting on, and as is made clear in this densely researched new monograph, packed with 12 thematic essays and 13 lengthy project profiles (ranging from the designs for Casa de Vidro, the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and the sesc Pompeia cultural centre to lesser-known projects such as Casa do Benin in Salvador), it is this
Hatje Cantz, €49.80 (hardcover)
connection with the vernacular that marked Bo Bardi out from her peers. Vera Simone Bader, in her essay on Bo Bardi’s early career, traces the foundations of the architect’s interest in everyday, often rural design to her formative years as an architecture critic and illustrator in Italy. In 1946 Bo Bardi transposed this interest to Brazil, landing in Rio de Janeiro before settling in São Paulo a year later. She travelled extensively in the northeast of the country, an area where indigenous and African culture remains strong. She read and was deeply affected by Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropófago’ (1928), in which the poet called for Brazil to swallow European culture as a means of destroying it, and Bo Bardi made a concerted effort to preserve local cultural identity in her work. Casa do Chame-Chame, built in Salvador in 1958, is perhaps the most pronounced result of this goal, with many
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Books.indd 155
references to the myths and rites of the Candomblé religion, not least hundreds of objects, some sacred, some more prosaic, embedded in the external walls of the building. Bo Bardi’s desire was to create a Modernism that was in harmony with its local surroundings and culture, and which, as well as looking forward, communicated with the ancient. In 1961 the architect wrote, ‘Today Brazil is on its way to a battle of culture. In the next ten, maybe five years, the country shall have finished the sketches of its cultural structure and fixed on an ultimate course: being either a country with an autonomous culture built on roots of its own or an inauthentic country with a pseudo-culture consisting of inefficient, imported schemes.’ As excellently written about and illustrated (with archive and newly commissioned photography) throughout this hefty book, hers was a project to fight for an independent Brazil. Oliver Basciano
155
23/12/2014 14:42
Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain by Robert Hewison Verso, £14.99/$24.95 (softcover) Sponsorship or censorship? Sometimes it’s hard to tell which is worse. But politicians and governments have always wanted to meddle in art and culture using one or the other. In Cultural Capital, Robert Hewison recounts the history of British cultural policy from 1997, when Tony Blair’s New Labour took office, to the Conservative–Liberal coalition’s realisation of the 2012 Olympics in London. It’s primarily the first 13 years of that timespan – during which New Labour presided over a ‘golden age’ of public spending on the arts – that figure here, though Hewison has had time enough to account for the coalition’s reactive, austerity-driven period of spending cuts and political drift. Hewison is a scrupulous and accomplished historian, excavating the buried layers of thinktank reports, policy documents and other aptly named ‘grey literature’ to offer a lucid (and surprisingly entertaining) picture of how New Labour’s cultural policy was shaped inside Westminster’s corridors of power. Starting out with Blair’s opportunistic claiming of the mantle of ‘Cool Britannia’ and the hasty business of making the inherited project of the Millennium Dome happen, Cultural Capital then goes on to review, in close detail, the increasingly destructive consequences of New Labour’s obsession with instrumentalising cultural funding to meet its social policy objectives. ‘Creativity depends on taking risks; the corollary is that the risk-taker must be trusted to understand the risk being taken,’ Hewison sensibly argues, but as he shows, trusting artists and arts organisations was
the last thing New Labour had on its mind. Instead, in exchange for its massively increased funding, it demanded that subsidised culture should set to work in the service of its goals of greater audience participation, education and inclusion, as if more access to the arts could somehow solve problems of social division and economic disadvantage. This, mixed with New Labour’s borderlinedelusional fascination with the idea of the ‘creative industries’ (as a way of talking itself out of the intractable problem of real economic decline), produced a policy mix that saw arts funding as part of a greater continuum in which culture is principally understood as a tool or vehicle – of economic activity, or social engineering – but not, however, something valuable in and for itself. Cultural Capital is, if nothing else, a sobering primer on how not to do things for any triggerhappy would-be policymakers; New Labour’s condescending attitude towards the public arts sector only managed to produce a toxic combination of centralisation, micromanagement and an obsession with collecting evidence to meet policy targets – the increased participation of the supposedly culturally disenfranchised – which stubbornly failed to materialise. Yet there is a question as to whether or not Hewison is still secretly attached to the idea that subsidising culture can make society better – instrumentalism, but in a softer, less offensive guise. Hunting round for a benign model of state intervention, Hewison tends to exaggerate an
overarching critique of ‘neoliberalist’ ideology at work, in which the state is seen as the servant of the market. Countering this, Hewison falls back on the old argument that ‘the role of government is not to occupy or dominate the public realm… but act as the guarantor of its integrity’. But following on from his otherwise damning account of an administration’s constant meddling in the ‘public realm’ of noncommercial culture, it’s hard to see how this is not hopelessly nostalgic. New Labour’s experiment with cultural policy didn’t fail because of the endless shambles of petty politicking and departmental infighting that Hewison so assiduously relates; it failed because manipulating artistic activity to suit political ends – in principle – destroys culture’s only real worth – its freedom to act according to its own criteria of value, and not those of either the market or the state. And both New Labour’s and the current government’s incursions into civil liberties prove that government is not, and never was, a guarantor of any of those freedoms. Still, Hewison is on the right track when he concludes that ‘public funding should be treated as a form of leadership, and defended… because of the possibilities of collective experience it offers, and because it sustains cultural resources and keeps them in the public realm’. But this begs the question of what ‘cultural resources’ are worth keeping in the public realm, by what criteria this should be decided and who gets to do the deciding. Questions, in a general election year, that are as pressing as ever… J.J. Charlesworth
Edgewise: A Picture of Cookie Mueller by Chloé Griffin b_books Verlag, €22 (softcover) Chloé Griffin’s illustrated biographical tribute to Cookie Mueller (who died in 1989 at the age of forty), a pivotal character in downtown New York’s punk avant-garde during the late 1970s and 1980s, reveals Mueller’s roles as actress, performer, nascent writer and critic, wife, mother, lover, sometime go-go dancer and drug dealer, and fulltime partygoer. Griffin tells her story through the words of the friends and family who knew and loved her best. These include cult film director John Waters, whose early films she acted in; Mueller’s son, Max; her longtime lover Sharon Niesp; and a host of other underground artists, writers, poets and filmmakers, a total of 80 interviews, undertaken over a seven-year period.
156
AR-JanFeb-BooksRESUPPLY P156.indd 156
With little context as to who the less well known members of this vast cast are (the biographies are all at the back), Griffin’s use of edited quotes from these interviews as the main text makes this book initially difficult to engage with. The more one reads, however, the more this approach pays off. Not only does the reader gradually get to know Mueller, who was by all accounts a likeable, inspirational, creative free spirit, often chaotic but also caring and warmhearted, but one also gets to know the entire cast as members of a big, if somewhat dysfunctional, extended family. Most, like Mueller, emerge as lower- and middle-class suburbanites with a desire for a more creative life, a desire that drew them
all to a New York that was, at the time, rundown and virtually bankrupt, where property and drugs were cheap, where sexuality was acceptably fluid and where creativity and club culture could flourish – that is until aids decimated the community, taking Mueller with it. Not all embraced that life with quite the degree of enthusiasm, optimism and openness that Mueller did, but those are the qualities that attracted others to her at the time, that drew Griffin – herself an actress, artist, author and underground filmmaker – to want to research her story and that will draw readers, this one included, to want to read more of Mueller’s own writings. Helen Sumpter
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:42
Mateo López, New York, December 2014. Photo: Boru O’Brien O’Connell
artreview.com/subscribe Also online at artreview.com and through the iTunes Store
AR-JanFeb-Subsad.indd 157
23/12/2014 14:43
158
AR-JanFeb-Strip.indd 158
23/12/2014 14:43
For more on Dylan Horrocks, see overleaf
159
AR-JanFeb-Strip.indd 159
23/12/2014 14:43
Contributors
Lucas Ospina
Stefanie Hessler
is a professor in the art department of the Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá. He holds an mfa in sculpture from Temple University, Philadelphia. Exhibitions of his work include La imaginada y el seudorretórico (Cali, 2013), Esta es la cosa nostra (Bogotá, 2012) and The Enlightened (Berlin, 2010). He has also curated numerous others. This month he writes on the perception of Colombia in the international art press. For further reference he suggests, ‘Live Review #31: The Independent and the Market’, on esferapublica.org, a 2011 Spanish-language podcast in which Juan Pelaez discusses the role of independent spaces.
is a curator and writer. Based in Stockholm, she is the cofounder (with Carsten Höller) of the art space Andquestionmark. Recent curated projects include Klara Lidén: The Myth of Progress (Moonwalk) at Lugar a Dudas in Cali. She is currently curating an exhibition at the mamam Recife and cocurating the 8th Momentum Biennial in Moss. This month she writes about art from the city of Cali. For further reference she recommends Michèle Faguet’s essay ‘Me Voy Pa’ Cali: Reclaiming a Regional Identity and Practice’ from the sfmoma exhibition catalogue Six Lines of Flight: Shifting Geographies in Contemporary Art (2012).
Suhail Malik
Gabriela Jauregui
is a visiting faculty member at the ccs Bard, Annandaleon-Hudson, and holds a readership in critical studies at Goldsmiths, London. New publications include On the Necessity of Art’s Exit from Contemporary Art (2015), and he is coeditor of three forthcoming publications, Realism Materialism Art, The Flood of Right and Genealogies of Speculation. This month he responds to Michael North’s essay ‘New Art Now’, published in the December issue of ArtReview. For further reference he recommends Lee Smolin’s Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (2013), Thomas Metzinger’s The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self (2010), the films Interstellar (2014), Déjà Vu (2006), Triangle (2009) and, crucially, both Bill & Ted movies (1989/1991).
is the author of Controlled Decay (2008) and coauthor of Taller de taquimecanografía (2012). She holds a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Southern California, an mfa in creative writing from uc Riverside and an ma in comparative literature from uc Irvine. She is a founding member of the sur+ publishing collective in Mexico. This month she writes about Mexican women artists from the 1970s and 80s. For further reading she recommends the exhibition catalogue for the Museo de Arte Moderno’s 2011 show No-Grupo: un zangoloteo al corsé artístico, edited by Sol Henaro, as well as Mónica Mayer’s archive at pintomiraya.com and Pola Weiss: tv sees you (2014) published by muac, Mexico City.
Contributing Writers Sean Ashton, Robert Barry, Andrew Berardini, Gesine Borcherdt, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Kimberly Bradley, Barbara Casavecchia, Matthew Collings, Michelangelo Corsaro, Tom Eccles, Chris Fite-Wassilak, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Stefanie Hessler, Sam Jacob, Gabriela Jauregui, Maria Lind, Suhail Malik, Terry R. Myers, Lucas Ospina, Paul Pieroni, Mark Prince, Claire Rigby, Sherman Sam, Ed Schad, Mark Sladen, Sam Steverlynck, George Stolz, Ben Street, Susannah Thompson, David Trigg, Brienne Walsh, Mike Watson, Iona Whittaker Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Hettie Judah, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Luke Norman & Nik Adam, Dylan Horrocks, Boru O’Brien O’Connell
Dylan Horrocks (preceding pages)
In his debut solo graphic novel, Hicksville (1998), Dylan Horrocks envisages a modest, perhaps unattainable utopia for his chosen medium in the eponymous remote coastal town in his native New Zealand, whose every citizen appreciates the wonders of comics. Hicksville’s symbolic lighthouse brims over with a Borgesian library of masterpieces, including unknown comics composed by Lorca and Picasso. Horrocks soon found himself hired, in 2003, by New York giant DC Comics to script, but not draw, commercial comic books like Batgirl (1961–), a dream ticket for some, but for Horrocks a nightmare he had to escape. “It almost killed me as a cartoonist. I was writing in a voice that wasn’t mine and felt trapped in other people’s wish-fulfilment fantasies. Eventually I lost my cartooning voice entirely, and my lifelong faith in stories and art.” To rebuild that faith and find his voice again, Horrocks eventually devised another metafictional myth, not a paradise, but a pulp-confessional fairytale about the joys and pitfalls of making comics a playground for your wildest imaginary desires. In Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen (2014), as Horrocks explains,
160
AR-JanFeb-Contributors.indd 160
“the legend of the Magic Pen has been passed by word of mouth from cartoonist to cartoonist for generations, offering a small glimmer of hope to struggling freelancers and frustrated dreamers”. All it takes is one puff of breath, and paper and ink become flesh and blood, and a creator can step inside his panels and consort with his characters. Sam Zabel plays Horrocks’s alter ego, frozen with cartoonist’s block and torn between the need to express himself in marginal autobiographical strips and the need to pay the bills by working on corporate-owned franchises. Zabel is whisked between genres, confronting the male gaze and its escapist clichés, whether as a pneumatic superdominatrix, a green-skinned Martian harem or a manga fan’s tentacular pornotopia. Horrocks admits, “I allowed the story to take me in directions that made me distinctly uncomfortable, because I felt the need to be honest. I’m fascinated by artists who allow themselves to be indulgent, who dive deep into their fantasies and desires. They’re like spelunkers exploring the depths of our strange mind–body cave systems. But do I worry about
what we’ll find down there? Do I believe we should always bring it to the surface and share it around? That’s more complicated.” At one crucial stage, neither Horrocks as narrator nor Zabel as his avatar can bring themselves to assert that we are morally responsible for our fantasies. Nevertheless, thanks to the magic of comics, that unvoiced opinion and those fantasies appear on the page. “I don’t want the reader to try and work out my answers, I want them to explore the questions for themselves. To experience the pleasure and power of fantasy, even as they question what it means. I don’t trust simple answers, I just think it’s a conversation worth having.” Stimulating doubt and debate, Horrocks’s meditation on the power of images and stories finally raises cautious hope for the fresh magic waiting in every cartoonist’s pen. But Horrocks cautions, “If you’re feeding me a wish-fulfilment fantasy, it better be your wishes, or it won’t ring true. It’s very hard to lie about desire. Mind you, people fool each other with fake orgasms all the time. So who knows?” Paul Gravett
ArtReview
23/12/2014 14:44
ArtReview
Editorial
Publishing
Production
ArtReview Ltd
Editor-in-Chief Mark Rappolt
Publisher Patrick Kelly patrickkelly@artreview.com
Production Director Allen Fisher allenfisher@artreview.com
Galleries
Operations Executive Letizia Resta letiziaresta@artreview.com
ArtReview is published by ArtReview Ltd 1 Honduras Street London ec1y oth t 44 (0)20 7490 8138
Editor David Terrien Associate Editors J.J. Charlesworth Martin Herbert Jonathan T.D. Neil Senior Editor, Web Editor Helen Sumpter Managing Editor Oliver Basciano Editor, ArtReview Asia Aimee Lin Copy Editor Hettie Judah Editorial Assistant Louise Darblay
uk and Australasia Jenny Rushton jennyrushton@artreview.com Benelux, France, Southern Europe and Latin America Moky May mokymay@artreview.com Northern Europe Indra Moroder indramoroder@artreview.com North America and Africa Debbie Shorten debbieshorten@artreview.com
Art Direction John Morgan studio
Asia, Middle East and Russia Florence Dinar florencedinar@artreview.com
Designers Julien Savioz Pedro Cid Proença
Lifestyle
office@artreview.com
Stacey Langham staceylangham@artreview.com
Chairman Dennis Hotz
Distribution Consultant Adam Long adam.ican@btinternet.com
Managing Director Debbie Shorten
Finance
Subscriptions
Finance Director Lynn Woodward lynnwoodward@artreview.com
To subscribe online, visit artreview.com/subscribe
Financial Controller Errol Kennedy-Smith errolkennedysmith@artreview.com
ArtReview Subscriptions 3rd Floor North Chancery Exchange 10 Furnival Street London ec4a 1yh t 44 (0)20 8955 7069 e artreview@abacusemedia.com
Charlotte Regan charlotteregan@artreview.com
Reprographics by phmedia. Copyright of all editorial content in the uk and abroad is held by the publishers, ArtReview Ltd. Reproduction in whole or part is forbidden save with the written permission of the publishers. ArtReview cannot be held responsible for any loss or damage to unsolicited material. ArtReview (issn No: 1745-9303, usps No: 021-034) is published monthly except in the months of February, July and August by ArtReview Ltd, 1 Honduras Street, London ec1y oth, England, United Kingdom. The us annual subscription price is $64. Airfreight and mailing in the usa by agent named Worldnet Shipping Inc, 156–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, ny 11434, usa. Periodicals postage paid at Jamaica ny 11431. us postmaster: Send address changes to ArtReview, Worldnet Shipping Inc, 156–15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, ny 11434, usa
Photo credits on the cover and on page 157 photography by Boru O’Brien O’Connell on pages 154 and 162 photography by Luke Norman & Nik Adam
January & February 2015
AR-JanFeb-Contributors.indd 161
Text credits Phrases on the spine and on pages 31, 77 and 123 are from How to Clean Everything, written by Alma Chesnut Moore and published in 1954 by T. Werner Laurie Ltd, London
161
23/12/2014 14:44
Off the Record January & February 2015 I stare out the window into the weak January sunshine. The bare branches of trees sway desolately. The editor is doing one of his weekly ‘Catalyst’ meetings that he’s designed to energise the staff. I don’t think he’s wearing anything underneath his Belstaff Roadmaster waxed-cotton jacket. “Think and dream without limitations!” he barks. “There’s no judging in brainstorming. Right, Gallery Girl, what are your priorities this year? I try and leap into the air, forgetting that this is a stand-up meeting, so instead do a semipirouette, swinging the arms of my Isabel Marant black Douglas knitted jumper flamboyantly. “Right, Editor. Basically, this year – no drugs and definitely no kidnappings. Check this out!” I wave the gps antikidnapping bracelet that the finance director gave me for Christmas, fed up with the increasingly outrageous ransom payments he was having to shell out for me. The rest of the staff whoop. I look triumphantly at the editor. “So where you sending me for this issue?” I ask. He looks at my bracelet and laughs derisively. “Colombia.” A few days later, after a surprisingly pleasant business-class journey with Avianca, I step through customs carefully. I’m guessing that the team have set up a comedy kidnapping routine or, even more hilariously, have bribed an official to stuff a bag of the country’s finest marching powder into my Gucci canvas carry-on duffel bag. But I sail through without a problem and am met by my host, the curator Faustino Asprilla, who guides me into his Renault Duster. “The thing you have to understand, Gallery Girl, is that we’re all now post-Fernando Botero,” he says in perfect English. “The Bolero?” I yell. “Love it. Thought that was Cuban! Pepe Sánchez and all that.” I make sure that Faustino can hear me as I am curled up in the footwell of the passenger seat desperately hoping I’m not going to get shot at through the window.
AR-JanFeb-GG.indd 162
Asprilla hauls me up by the back of my Chloé guipure lace top. “What are you doing down there, gg? It is totally safe these days – relax. The number of millionaires here has grown by 39 percent since 2007. Bogotá made Phaidon’s list of 12 art-cities of the future.” He keeps going on about new wealth, collectors and what this has meant to him given the legacy of Colombia’s problematic past. I doze off as he rambles on. “… what burden of representation must our young artists carry?” I suddenly realise Asprilla must have locked the doors. It’s obviously a trap. I wrench the door handle. It opens and I fall out into the road while Faustino hits the brakes. Everything hurts. I scrabble around trying desperately to hit the button on my gps antikidnapping bracelet. Asprilla stops as quickly as he can. A doorman from the b.o.g. Hotel pulls me gently up before taking my bag. I throw myself on the bag, before Faustino picks me up again. “Did you know this was the hotel? I’m so sorry, I should have locked the car door properly. Here let me take your bag.” I reluctantly hand over the bag to Faustino, watching him like a hawk. “Of course last year Colombia attracted $16 billion in foreign investment, but I know you want to ask what that means for politically committed art like that of Doris Salcedo.” I nod, crouching low behind a pot plant before spinning round the room in quarter tai-chi marching turns to survey exit routes. “I want to quote Pablo…” “Pablo Escobar! I knew it, he’s not really dead!” I yell, diving behind a sofa. “… Léon de la Barra, who has noted that the younger generation of artists are exploring a desire for normalisation.” I’m literally shaking with fear as I’m escorted into the lift. This is it. I just know that this is when ‘Faustino’ is going to turn out to be a hired killer sent from that guy with the crazy trousers who flogs advertising for Artforum. “I mean I know that the whole Murillo thing was a little crazy,” continues Faustino as we exit the lift and he graciously unlocks my door, before pointing into a luxuriously appointed room. “Are you ok, Gallery Girl?” he asks, noticing me demeanour. “Do you need anything to pep you up before our gallery tour?” “Thank God, I thought you’d never ask,” I manage to reply. “My nerves are shattered. I’ve just got to pull it together. I think just a quick refresher.” Faustino smiles blankly. “I mean,” I continue, “I wouldn’t normally ask at this time. But by any chance do you have any, you know… do you have any coke?” Faustino beams. “Sure thing, it’s in the minibar. There’s an icebox too! See you in the lobby in half an hour!” And with that he bounds back into the lift. I sit on the bed and start crying uncontrollably. Gallery Girl
23/12/2014 14:44
COLOMBIAN GALLERIES FEATURED IN ARCO-COLOMBIA ARE PROUDLY SUPPORTED BY ARTBO, INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR OF BOGOTÁ, A PROGRAM OF BOGOTÁ CHAMBER OF COMMERCE FEBRUARY 25 – MARCH 1
INTERNATIONAL ART FAIR OF BOGOTÁ | OCTOBER 1 – 4, 2015 | ARTBO.CO
ArtBo FP.indd 440
23/12/2014 13:59
421_AR.indd 421
23/12/2014 13:59