ArtReview January & February 2016 by ArtReview

John Akomfrah

Future Greats – the artists to look out for in 2016

HA U S E R & W I R T H

MARK WALLINGER ID 26 FEBRUARY – 7 MAY 2016 23 SAVILE ROW LONDON W1S 2ET WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

STILL FROM SHADOW WALKER, 2011 VIDEO INSTALLATION, SOUND 3 MIN 39 SEC

HA U S E R & W IR T H

LARRY BELL FROM THE ’60s 3 FEBRUARY — 9 APRIL 2016 32 EAST 69TH STREET NEW YORK NY 10021 WWW.HAUSERWIRTH.COM

LARRY BELL IN MARINE STREET STUDIO, VENICE, CALIFORNIA, CIRCA 1959 PHOTO: JERRY McMILLAN

John Akomfrah

Line

Curated by Drawing Room Athanasios Argianas Ceal Floyer Monika Grzymala Victoria Haven Susan Hiller Sol LeWitt Richard Long Tom Marioni Jonathan Monk Julian Opie Florian Pumhösl Fred Sandback Maximilian Schubert Jorinde Voigt K. Yoland

ANDREW GRASSIE FABRICATION JANUARY 22 – FEBRUARY 27, 2016 — JOHNEN GALERIE MARIENSTRASSE 10, D – 10117 BERLIN WWW.JOHNENGALERIE.DE

ARCO MADRID FEBRUARY 24 – 28, 2016 STAND 7E06

CHRISTOPHER ROTH BLOW OUT FEATURING VER(USCHK)A JANUARY 22 – FEBRUARY 27, 2016 — ESTHER SCHIPPER SCHÖNEBERGER UFER 65, D – 10785 BERLIN WWW.ESTHERSCHIPPER.COM

ARCO MADRID FEBRUARY 24 – 28, 2016 STAND 7E06

W W W.BJERGGA ARD.COM

YEHUDIT SASPORTAS VERTICAL SWAMPS 21/01/16–19/03/16

ARCO MADRID 24–28/02/16 THE ARMORY SHOW 3–6/03/16

Tom Wesselmann Collages 1959-1964 January 29 - March 24, 2016

Still Life #44, 1964 (detail) Mixed media, acrylic paint, and collage on board with Plexiglas overlay 48 x 48 inches (121.9 x 121.9 cm) Art © Estate of Tom Wesselmann/Licensed by VAGA, New York, NY

David Zwirner London

A new century begins with the new collective intelligence of Wikipedia. An ‘Hello, World!’ inaugurates the era of accessible knowledge.

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

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

www.massimodecarlo.com info@massimodecarlo.com

@mdcgallery

massimodecarlogallery

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

In 2001.

20/02 – 25/03 2016 Thiago Martins de Melo North and East Rooms Paulo Nimer Pjota West Room

Feb 2016 Arco, Madrid Jan 2016 Paramount Ranch, LA

Image: Thiago Martins de Melo

Mend e 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

ILSE D’HOLLANDER January 8 - February 6, 2016

‘

475 TENTH AVE NEW YORK 212 239 1181 SKNY.COM

Tomorrow is a long time 28 January - 12 March 2016

ELLEN DE MEUTTER GELITIN KATI HECK ANTON HENNING FRIEDRICH KUNATH JONATHAN MEESE PETER ROGIERS ED TEMPLETON RINUS VAN DE VELDE AARON VAN ERP HENK VISCH FRANZ WEST

TIM VAN LAERE GALLERY

ArtReview vol 68 no 1 January & February 2016

Fired! It’s a given, a habit even, that the beginning of a new year is a time for looking forward. For ArtReview that means it’s the Future Greats issue. Unlike most such forward looking features however, Future Greats is more of a summary of how the ground lies rather than an an inside tip on runners and riders for the year ahead. It’s a chance to read what artists, curators and critics think the key issues of 2016 will be and which artists, those who perhaps haven’t recieved the recognition or publicity (for increasingly that’s what recognition equates to) they should, are tackling them. The artists profiled come from all over the world, and their work addresses a spread of issues and concerns that are accordingly diverse. Those artists range from the young to the old and even to the deceased. Because ArtReview believes strongly that contemporaneity is not a linear system. Rather, the now is made up of multiple strands that are still at a stage where they might go off in any direction. Future Greats, in other words, is a guide to possibilities, predicated to some extent on what our selectors think art is capable of. And as with most years, ArtReview thinks that it is capable of a great many things and, as this edition of Future Greats demonstrates, myriad paths and possibilities. It’s important though that this issue is not about embracing anything and everything. Not all art is good, after all, let alone great. Art may often be about faith, but it’s certainly not a religion. Future Greats is also about choice and taste, about the decision to commit to this body of work rather than that.

What ArtReview’s colleagues have been doing over Xmas…

It’s an eye for possibilites too that lies at the heart of a series of works by Johanna Calle that are also featured in this issue. Her Caja de Procesos are boxes containing collections of works the artist has gathered together through a series of specific, random and intuitive connections, which in turn assist Calle in the generation of new works with their own, different, connections to the works that preceeded them. The Caja de Procesos then, are intriguing first because they are complete (each is a finished work in itself) and at the same time open-ended (in the sense that they generate new works). The boxes also remind us that potential is not just something to discover and then exploit; rather it’s something to nurture and grow. And in an age in which rapid results and easy conclusions are privileged above all else, there’s an element to the art in this issue that argues for a certain slow down for contemplation, whether that’s in the apparently ‘easy’ abstract paintings of a Future Great such as Philippine artist Maria Taniguchi or the travel-based films of American Janet Biggs, or in the work of an established filmmaker such as ArtReview’s cover artist John Akomfrah. Akomfrah’s career as a pioneer of moving image began during the 1980s, when he was a member of the Black Audio Film Collective, which used the medium to work through issues of black identity within the context of a (at that time) sometimes violently troubled idea of Britishness. In 2015 he premiered a compelling new work, Vertigo Sea, at the Venice Biennale, and he’s included in this issue of ArtReview, alongside the Future Greats, in part as a way of recognising that whether they are unknown or established, artists can always produce work that can fire a viewer’s neurons in a different way. ArtReview

Hiroshi Sugimoto Sea of Buddha

510 WEST 25TH ST NEW YORK FEBRUARY 5 – MARCH 5, 2016

edouardmalingue.com

Sixth ﬂoor 33 Des Voeux Road Central Hong Kong

Art Previewed

Previews by Martin Herbert 33

T.S. Eliot on Hey Ya! Interview by Matthew Collings 52

Points of View by J. J. Charlesworth, Maria Lind, Jonathan T. D. Neil, Laura McLean-Ferris, Laura Oldfield Ford, Sam Jacob, Jonathan Grossmalerman 41

Beatriz González Interview by Mark Rappolt 56 RoseLee Goldberg Interview by Kathy Battista 60

page 39 Ian Cheng, Emissary in the Squat of Gods, 2015, live simulation and story, infinite duration. Courtesy the artist, Pilar Corrias Gallery, London, and Standard (Oslo)

January & February 2016

Art Featured

Hannah Black, selected by Heather Phillipson Julia Weist, selected by Orit Gat Maria Taniguchi, selected by Lauren Cornell Kyun-Chome, selected by Ushiro Ryuta Juliana Huxtable, selected by Lynn Hershman Leeson Em'kal Eyongakpa, selected by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung 68

Future Greats Deborah Salt, selected by Mary Corse Part-time Suite, selected by Hyunjin Kim Aaron Fowler, selected by Amanda Hunt Max Hooper Schneider, by Jonathan Griffin Cédric Nové-Josserand, selected by Sarkis Kelly Akashi, selected by Andrew Berardini Anne Speier, selected by Helen Sumpter Loretta Fahrenholz, selected by Omer Fast Ana Mazzei, selected by Kiki Mazzucchelli Zahoor ul Akhlaq, selected by Rashid Rana Janet Biggs, selected by Lynn Hershman Leeson Ann Hirsch, selected by Karen Archey Tao Hui, selected by Aimee Lin Nguyen Phuong Linh, selected by Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran Gerard Ortín, selected by Daniel Steegmann Magrané

John Akromfrah by Erik Morse 112 Something and Nothing by Johanna Calle 119

page 112 John Akomfrah, Tropikos, 2016, single channel video. © Smoking Dogs Films. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, Milan & New York

ArtReview

CONTEMPORARY ART EVENING AUCTION LONDON 10 FEBRUARY 2016

Viewing 6 – 10 February JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT Despues de un Puno, 1987 Estimate £6,000,000–8,000,000. Enquiries +44 (0)20 7293 5744 34–35 New Bond Street, London W1A 2AA. sothebys.com/contemporaryart © THE ESTATE OF JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT / ADAGP, PARIS AND DACS, LONDON 2016

Art Reviewed

Jen DeNike, by Andrew Berardini Martin Kersels, by Jonathan Griffin Tavares Strachan, by Christian Viveros-Fauné Paul McCarthy, by Stephanie Cristello Alina Szapocznikow, by Karen Archey Tom Burr, by Brienne Walsh Zineb Sedira, by Siona Wilson Rachel Rose, by Iona Whittaker Cinthia Marcelle, by Claire Rigby

exhibitions 132 Kota Ezawa, by Orit Gat Political Populism, by Raimar Stange Mark Leckey, by Kimberly Bradley Roman Signer, by Violaine Boutet de Monvel Lucy McKenzie, by John Quin Scott Myles, by Martin Herbert Caselle di Anton Bruhin, by Barbara Casavecchia Ed Ruscha, by Sherman Sam Von Calhau!, by Justin Jaeckle Ignasi Aballi, by Keith Patrick Göteborg International Biennal for Contemporary Art, by Sara Arrhenius David Claerbout, by Stefanie Hessler Charlotte Prodger, by David Trigg Dorothy Cross, by Sean Ashton Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen, by Oliver Basciano Grazia Varisco, by Mark Rappolt Gianfranco Baruchello, by Paul Pieroni Ben Burgis and Ksenia Pedan, by Tim Steer The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies, by J.J. Charlesworth Don McCullin, by Helen Sumpter

books 162 Vie? ou théâtre?, by Charlotte Salomon Vade Mecum: Essays, Reviews & Interviews, by Richard Skinner Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth, by A.O. Scott Auto-Destructive Art: Metzger at the aa, by Gustav Metzger the strip 166 off the record 170

page 153 Charlotte Prodger, Stoneymollan Trail (still), 2015, hd video. Courtesy the artist and Koppe Astner, Glasgow

ArtReview

Art Previewed

Books are no longer read but eaten, not made of paper but of some informational substance, fully digestible, sugar-coated 31

P420 Inaugurates its new space with the exhibition

NAIVE SET THEORY Paolo Icaro Bettina Buck Marie Lund David Schutter

30 January — 26 March 2016 curated by Cecilia Canziani and Davide Ferri opening Saturday 30 January 18.30 – 00:00 Via Azzo Gardino 9, Bologna IT • info@p420.it / www.p420.it

Previewed Marrakech Biennale 24 February – 8 May

Cally Spooner Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam 16 January – 13 March

François Curlet Air de Paris 15 January – 27 February

Making Africa – A Continent of Contemporary Design Guggenheim Bilbao through 21 February

Terry Richardson Galerie Perrotin, Hong Kong 14 January – 20 February

Ian Cheng Migros Museum, Zürich 20 February – 16 May

Jakob Kolding Team Gallery, Los Angeles 31 January – 6 March

Mark Wallinger Hauser & Wirth, London 26 February – 7 May

Nairy Baghramian Museo Tamayo, Mexico City through 13 March

Laura Poitras Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 5 February – 1 May

6 Mark Wallinger, Shadow Walker (film stills), 2011, video installation, sound, 3 min 39 sec. © the artist. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth, London

January & February 2016

‘Not New Now’ is certainly an unlikely title for a biennale, if not for a secondhand shop. Well 1 played, Marrakech Biennale, you have our attention. What they’re likely to do with it – specifically, what’s been planned by biennial overseer Reem Fadda, the New York-based associate curator of Middle Eastern Art for the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi – is both timely and logical. The host city is to be situated as a symbolic and literal intersection of different worlds: the Arabic world, the pan-African diaspora, the West. The sixth edition of the event is responding also, it appears, to modish notions of the contemporary by resisting them. ‘How do we surpass the cultural orientation towards newness?’, the curatorial statement wonders, going on to vaunt art as a site of cultural resistance. Expect, alongside all that, artworks to overtake public heritage sites such

across boundaries of art, photography, design, as the Palais el Badi and the Palais Bahia. architecture and film, the works veer from As regards further details, at press time the Cyrus Kabiru’s flamboyantly baroque metal official position was, in effect, ‘Not Releasing ‘eyewear sculptures’ to Robin Rhode’s already the List of Artists Now’; but Fadda did lead us iconic (particularly to advertising creatives) to expect contributions from Yto Barrada, Farid animated art to architecture by David Adjaye Belkahia, Omar Berrada, Ahmed Bouanani, and Francis Kéré, while the timeline also tracks Khaled Malas, Jumana Manna and Sam Gilliam. back to postcolonial Africa, showcasing not Staying with Guggenheim- and Africaonly the pioneering photography of Malick related projects, February offers a last chance 2 to catch Making Africa – A Continent of Sidibé et al but also the first flush of confident architecture that came in the wake of African Contemporary Design, if you’re passing the nations’ independence. Guggenheim Bilbao. Those who mentally The rhetoric underpinning public space is categorise African design in terms of, say, hot-coloured patterning should prepare to 3 equally a core issue for Jakob Kolding, though differently articulated and skewed towards be thrown for a loop by this 120-practitioner Western capitalist aesthetics. The Berlin-based show, curated by Amelia Klein at the Vitra Danish artist goes big on the latent effects of city Design Museum, where it originated (with ‘consulting curator’ credit for Okwui Enwezor). architecture, exploring its subliminal feedback Digitally driven, globalised and hopping effects on behaviour, specifically how we read,

1 Khaled Malas, Windmill in Arbin, Eastern Ghouta, 2015. Photo: Yaseen al-Bushy. Courtesy Marrakech Biennale

3 Jakob Kolding, Twoism, 2015, digital print on birch veneer, steel, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Team Gallery, New York & Los Angeles 2 Making Africa – A Continent of Contemporary Design, 2015 (installation view). © Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

ArtReview

4 Cally Spooner, And You Were Wonderful, On Stage, 2013–15 (installation view, Spike Island, Bristol). Photo: Stuart Whipps. Courtesy the artist

and treat, our fellow citizens. Here, 2d wooden cutouts of figures are blazoned with instantly recognisable photographic imagery – if, as we expect, similar to Kolding’s show last year at Team in New York, it may include shootinggallery targets and nineteenth-century dioramas – as a way of pointing to the manner in which we unconsciously, and immediately, size up and type people. All of which, Kolding stringently attests, points to how the capitalist edifice per se encourages typecasting and stereotyping, and throttles individuality at street level. Kolding has shown at the Stedelijk Museum, 4 but from January onwards it’s Cally Spooner’s turn. Or second turn: as the London-based artist heads towards the closing stages of her multipart project And You Were Wonderful, On Stage (2013–15) – which thus far has taken the form of live performances involving celebrity

controversies, aspects of Broadway musicals Johnny Knoxville sporting nipple clamps, and high-art performance tropes, plus an James Franco in matriarchal drag, Amy exhibition showing the editing of all this into Winehouse staring down a querulous cockerel, a film – she returns to the venue that, in 2013, Dennis Hopper all but obliterated by cigar smoke, Lady Gaga in a dustbin, lots of men originally commissioned it. The Stedelijk, 5 with their dicks out and upright: Terry under Beatrix Ruf’s auspices, has a visible yen Richardson’s reputation as a subtle and for live performance (see, elsewhere, the past reticent photographer is, shall we say, nonyear’s continuous retrospective for Tino Sehgal). existent. Instead, this son of a freewheeling So it’s appropriate that they should work with 1960s fashion photographer has, since the the London-based Spooner, whose sui generis 1990s, set himself up as the anti-Avedon work not only turns on language – using it as – a remarkably consistent purveyor of neara kind of evolving sculptural material, against the-knuckle, structurally impertinent, brashly the way it is used in corporations and in social colourful celebrity portraiture and fashionconventions – but also, relatedly, concerns magazine editorial; a figure dogged by rumours itself with the loss of ‘liveness’ in daily life. of highly ungentlemanly behaviour towards So here, finally, is the completed film itself, his models (which he denies); and, clearly, an in what the institution’s press corps describes, instinctive master at commandeering attention. amusingly enough, as a ‘space-filling multiSynergistically coinciding with the publication screen installation’.

January & February 2016

of a full-dress monograph, Volumes 1 & 2: Portraits of installations that Poitras is presenting – which human beings. What we do know is that, across and Fashion (2015), the la-based lensman and both Savile Row galleries, there’ll be multimedia ‘incorporate documentary footage, architectural work including the film Shadow Walker (2011), and erstwhile punk-rock bassist, who has shown interventions, primary documents, and narrative that Wallinger’s focus, here, is on how the self his work in galleries for the last 18 years, cherrystructures to invite visitors to interact with the picks from the half of his oeuvre perhaps most – one’s identity, one’s behaviour – is expressed in material in strikingly intimate and direct ways’ – suited to such venues: the portraits, which here a culture of ever-increasing scrutiny from above. are ‘partly inspired’ by the Snowden archive. Scrutiny from above and its vast discontents mix celebs with unknowns. After Peanuts ended (with Charles M. Schulz’s 8 death), at the end of the 1990s, François Curlet Guessing what might be included in Mark 7 have also been a leitmotif of Laura Poitras’s 6 bold and risky work as a documentary filmWallinger’s first exhibition for Hauser & Wirth felt his sympathy piqued for the newly unemmaker, and the influence of her work – not least is a fool’s errand. From portrait paintings of ployed characters and built a peanut-selling Citizenfour (2014), her film about the unfolding people who appear to be homeless to a ferry that stand for Charlie Brown, partly on the basis that situation around Edward Snowden’s revelatory separates travellers into biblical ‘sheep’ and this archetypal sad-sack figure, at a remove from leaks of information concerning nsa surveil‘goats’, to his landmark reconstruction of peace society, had overtones of the artist about him. lance – has filtered into the artworld. (She’s since protester Brian Haw’s antiwar protest outside That’s typical of Curlet’s lateral thinking since collaborated with Ai Weiwei, for example.) Parliament, State Britain (2007), the British artist the late 1980s, which takes familiar cultural Snowden is a shadow presence in Astro Noise, has made a three-decade high-wire act out of forms and inflates and unmoors them: Moonwalk her first exhibition as an artist. The title echoes not repeating himself on a formal level, while (2002), consisting of signs for pedestrians, serves frequently concerning himself thematically with the name he gave to an encrypted file of evias a despotic injunction to imitate Michael dence he passed to her in 2013, and the series affiliations and absurdities that divide and unite Jackson’s tricky dance move; Rorschach Saloon

7 Laura Poitras filming the nsa Utah Data Repository construction in 2011. Photo: Conor Provenzano

8 François Curlet, Toast Cannibale, 2014, motorcycle, foam, resin, 220 × 200 × 50 cm. © dr. Courtesy the artist and Air de Paris

ArtReview

MICHAEL JOO Radiohalo 10 February – 24 March 2016 4 Hanover Square London W1S 1BP

(1999), which this writer once encountered creatures – are allowed to proliferate in ways in a building in Iceland where the Cold War that often register nature’s most brutally accords were thrashed out, offers shots of vodka Darwinian side, filled with stumbling and sprouting mutants; buzzy, droning and scraping or whiskey, the choice of which positions the soundtracks; and scraps of broken language. viewer on one side or another, East or West. That, one might think, reflects the irrevocable Among Curlet’s other subjects have been Willy melding of human and technology today: Wonka, Benny Hill and a motorcycle marooned a development that, Cheng’s work suggests, on a giant slice of sculptural toast; so if you’re was on the cards and is irreversible. The upside not at least amused by whatever’s contained of this, he’s said, is that his art – ‘a live simulation at Air de Paris in Curlet’s show Frozen Feng Shui, that we can feel, but does not give a fig for us’ – maybe you’re Charlie Brown. functions as a mode of adaptation to change: Art often benefits from eluding its maker’s a ‘neurological gym’. Here, amid Swiss order control, but few artists allow that process such 9 latitude as Ian Cheng. The American, who and decorum, Cheng will present a new screen’s worth of unspooling chaos. studied cognitive science in Berkeley before I’ve been looking at Nairy Baghramian’s 10 making art, now creates digital works that work for several years and appreciating its taut model emergent systems: starting with a few atmosphere without ever quite accessing what’s relatively simple parameters, these generative behind it. There is, presumably, a reason why those works – which feature landscapes and hybrid

tasked with describing her exhibitions erect hedging qualifiers like ‘complex’, or merely describe the works’ forms – hooked shapes derived from cranes, for example, cloth sacks stuffed with material, or wiry frames – or resort to phrases like ‘taut atmosphere’. The Iranian-born, Berlin-based artist’s sculptures seem to be waiting for something else, or about to converse with something outside them, and indeed it appears as if the priority for Baghramian, who’s lately moved galleries to Marian Goodman, is contextualisation, the addition of a supplement: how arttheoretical debates shape form, for example. The Museo Tamayo, meanwhile, offers us another chance to get a grip, presenting eight works from 2015, ranging from hollow, furniturelike forms to pale and bulbous sculptural works affixed to the wall. And if you’re still not sure, then as one of the titles advises, Chin up. Martin Herbert

9 Ian Cheng, Emissary Forks at Perfection, 2015, live simulation and story, infinite duration. Courtesy the artist; Pilar Corrias, London; and Standard (Oslo)

10 Nairy Baghramian, Chin Up, 2015 (installation view, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City). © the artist. Courtesy the artist; Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, Paris & London; Kurimanzutto, Mexico City; and Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York

ArtReview

Lucy + Jorge Orta

ANTARCTICA

January 14 - February 20, 2016

JANE LOMBARD GALLERY 518 West 19th Street New York NY 10011 Tel +1 212.967.8040 Fax +1 212.967.0669 janelombardgallery.com

Points of View

‘The purpose of the public museum is to ensure the long-term availability and display of art.’ With his first sentence, Chris Dercon, soon-tobe-former director of Tate Modern, had already lost the argument. Back in June last year, Dercon gave a speech as part of a symposium made up of international art-museum bigcheeses, at the private Louis Vuitton Foundation, to consider such burning questions as ‘What are the challenges facing public and private museum collections today?’, ‘Who makes art history now?’ and ‘What is the impact of the growing role played by the art market in this field?’ In his speech, recently published in The Art Newspaper, Dercon rehearsed a well-worn case for the superiority of public-museum values over the apparently more dubious motives of the private collector and the ever-encroaching ranks of private museum foundations. Speaking darkly of ‘the new pseudo-philanthropists’, Dercon warned that ‘we public museums cannot afford to give up to them the production of memory and the writing of art history’. Perhaps a little jaded by his own experience handling the tricky interface between Tate Modern’s public role and the private interests that enter it, Dercon tried to reassert the authority of the public museum over the demands of private interest: ‘I feel that we must establish new standards for cooperation between private collectors and public museums… The collector who works with a public museum must accept the museum as a place of symbolic value – in the long term – for art,’ Dercon fingerwagged sternly. What’s interesting about Dercon’s defensive and rather schoolmasterish chiding of all those naughty collectors and private art foundations out there is the complacent sense of assurance that the museum does, in fact, hold the rights to the ‘production of memory’ and the ‘writing of art history’, and holds the sole licence for being a ‘place of symbolic value’. Demanding that museums claim the supreme right to decide

the public museum against the public in which

J.J. Charlesworth asks: why adhere to the myth of the ‘big’ institutions and let them push the rest of us around? what is of quality, rather than a different bunch of private institutions, doesn’t even start to acknowledge that, perhaps, the museum’s role in monopolising value judgements is itself a bit of a problem. After all, if museums make qualitative judgements about what should be kept in their collections, what should be shown and how it should be understood, they are making claims about the artistic and cultural value of some works over others. And yet no one form of institution should, in a healthy public culture, believe itself to be the prime mover in that process of evaluation. And indeed, up until only relatively recently, big public art museums did not wield such great authority over contemporary artistic activity. While museums traditionally employed curators to preserve and research the knowledge of historical collections of art, those artworks were produced and given value outside of the machinery of the museum. What was of value was determined elsewhere – in the enthusiasms of private collectors, in the response of the public to exhibitions and,

January & February 2016

especially in the modern era, by the independent activities of artists setting up their own exhibitions, and their own relationships with patrons and publics. Museums, charged with preserving the art of the past, always lagged behind – the Tate included. Half a century went by after Duchamp’s Fountain (1917) before the Tate Gallery gave the Frenchman a retrospective. Dercon seems to forget that many big museums like his were established on the basis of the enthusiasms and interests of private collectors. The process of becoming more ‘museological’ is a recent innovation, especially as curating has become an ever more active and interventionist occupation, and the museum has come to see itself as a key site for the production and presentation of contemporary art, rather than simply a custodian of the art of the past. Really, Dercon’s opening assertion that the museum’s function is to ensure the long-term availability and display of art is now the least of it. If this were truly its purpose, it would accept and declare that its choices of presentation, especially of contemporary work at the moment of being produced, were only provisional, subject to multiple voices and different interpretations, and endlessly open to revision and rethinking. At the core of that, however, would be a faith in the notion that art’s value can only be determined by open, critical discussion among a diverse and often fractured public – not a bureaucratic arrogance that declares that value should be assigned by internal committees of career curators with art-theory degrees. Ironically, while Dercon and no doubt many other of his art museum colleagues will decry the cynicism of collectors who understand that museums add cultural value so that they can add monetary value, it is only because museums have cultivated the status of legitimiser that this can happen. So why not build your own art foundation? Doing so only mimics the monopolising effect of value-making the public museum never had a right to in the first place.

A forest of smoking chimneys in the sunset, more than a hundred constructivist buildings and a really interesting biennial – this is a selection of what Russia’s fourth largest city can offer right now. Covered with a thin layer of powdery snow on my visit in late October, Ekaterinburg seems to be part of a story larger than life and yet boiling down to some precise instances of world history in the twentieth century. On the site where Tsar Nicholas II and his family were shot in 1918 are a big oniondomed church and billboard-size photographs of the royals looking down on passersby. A few blocks away the Metenkov House Museum of Photography is hosting an exhibition with mugshots and other archival material concerning men who were executed in the region during the Stalinist regime of the late 1930s. Another kind of time machine is the newly built palace for the local representative of the president of Russia – it looks exactly like a mid-eighteenth-century Russian mansion, just bigger. This is the fertile ground of the 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, entitled Mobilization. It refers to efforts towards qualitative improvement of interaction between art and its surrounding reality, to the industrial past and present, and artists’ particular sensibility to the situation. An embedded biennial with a residency programme, collaboration with local industries for the fabrication of artworks, children’s programmes, a performance platform and other events, it forms a powerful presence of contemporary art in an environment where art is rare. The main part of the biennial takes place in the constructivist ‘chekist village’, a part of town with apartments for kgb families and a curved ten-storey dormitory for single kgb officers. Later converted into a hotel (now defunct), this curved building houses many artworks, which inhabit one room each, making the viewing experience one of entering and exiting many small spaces. Among the works on view are Jonathas de Andrade’s photographs of Brazilian landless workers, whose simple housing is based on the same functionalist principles as constructivist architecture, making a rudimentary alphabet out of sugar cane plants. Pratchaya Phinthong is showing closeups of methane hydrate, an unassuming yet peculiar substance between gas and water with massive implications for future energy development. In one room there is a video shot from the sky

on fertile ground In which

Maria Lind discovers ekaterinburg, the main industrial centre of the Ural Federal District, located at the heart of the former Soviet Union, and an unlikely site for a successful biennial

from top Fyodor Telkov, Domestication, 2015 (installation view), photo: Peter Zakharov, courtesy the artist and 3rd Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art; Iset Hotel, Ekaterinburg, photo: Vyacheslav Soldatov

ArtReview

showing contemporary Chinese land-art in the form of gigantic slogans marked in the vegetation that say things like ‘surmount every difficulty to bring victory’. In another room a video depicts a man with a torch setting dandelions on fire as he walks quickly across a field. The two curators, Biljana Ciric and Li Zhenhua, are responsible for one section each, but given the structure of the building, the sections are easily read together. I stayed the longest in a room belonging to a third section, that of the residency artists. It is the room of Fyodor Telkov, who spent time in the nearby Beloyarskaya nuclear power plant as it was preparing to launch its fourth fast-neutron reactor. The Ekaterinburg-based artist has made an allover installation with plenty of photographs of the complex and its workers, particularly of all the pot plants kept in the workplace. A special zone in more ways than one, the power plant is simultaneously a site of imminent danger and a second home to the workers, the absolute mundane cohabiting with an invisible threat to life. In this haven of early modernist architecture, most of the constructivist buildings are falling apart. Both the still-active cultural centre in the Uralmash factory complex and the so-called White Tower, originally a water tower, are quickly turning into ruins. This was the heartland of the Soviet Union, temporarily even named after Lenin’s sidekick Yakov Sverdlov, who allegedly ordered the killing of Nikolai Romanov and his family. Today Ekaterinburg remains an active industrial centre specialising in heavy machinery, including military production. The cityscape features commercial ads on billboards familiar to most consumerist societies and shopping malls. Familiar and strange at the same time, like the faces of the royals and the terror victims on the photographs in the Museum of Photography staring back at us, they exist side by side with large ads for the biennial. Overwhelmed by my visit to this complex place, and while checking in for my departure flight, I notice a type of sign that I have never seen before: ‘Weapon hand-in/hand-out room’. On the plane to Moscow, I learn about an exhibition happening at the same time as the opening of the biennial: in neighbouring Nizhny Tagil, one of the world’s largest armament displays has just taken place.

We know that the Islamic State or isis or isil or Daesh, or whatever we want to call these organised Islamist mass-murderers, are interested in at least two things: money and culture. The former they want to accumulate and the latter they want to destroy. Before the attacks in Paris, the culture that IS took pleasure in destroying belonged largely to the rich legacy of Mesopotamia and its ancient history. We know that 2,000-year-old Greco-Roman temples and structures, many from the city of Palmyra, have fallen to IS explosives. We know that Assyrian sculptures going back at least ten centuries bc have fallen to IS sledgehammers, and much else. Yes, Assad’s warplanes and Western policymakers can take some blame for this violent, contemporary rocking of the cradle of civilisation. There’s much fault to go around. But the Islamic State’s theologically inspired iconoclastic zeal sets it apart from other contemporary fundamentalist movements. The destruction of culture is not well stomached by what we like to call the West, which, whether or not it is as idolatrous as its new Islamist foil would have it, goes to great lengths to house and protect both its own and others’ material history (fully acknowledging that many of the West’s ‘treasures’ came from colonial looting campaigns). This is part of the problem, however, because the Islamic State is interested in money too, and one of the ways we know it gets its money is by not quite destroying all of those antique sites and artefacts it appears to stomp across and instead selling them into the market, black though it may be. We must accept then, too, that all of the immediately public and spectacularised images that IS distributes of its minions jackhammering and blowing up unesco heritage and other cultural sites in the Euphrates River Valley are meant not only to raise the West’s defenceof-history-and-liberal-values ire, but also to prime the West’s chequebook. The uploaded videos and media coverage of IS’s archaeological calamities are just the lead generators of its antiquities marketing and sales group, whose target customer is the insatiable Western collectorate, with its love of culture and of universal history, which, by the way, far outstrips the ambivalent moral cringe that hits its face when viewing wave upon wave of Syrian and Iraqi refugees breaking on the beaches of Europe and dampening the gates at jfk. Back in February, the un – not exactly the quickest-off-the-line of the world’s governing bodies – passed a resolution (2199) ‘noting with concern’ that ‘isil’ and the ‘Al-Nusrah Front’ were using looted cultural heritage to fund their activities, and called on member states and unesco to take steps to monitor and shut down illegal cross-border trade in artefacts removed

culture wars is IS benefiting from the commodification of culture? by

Jonathan T.D. Neil

isis-releases images of explosives and the destruction of the ancient Palmyra temple of Baalshamin, August 2015

January & February 2016

from Iraq (since 1990) and Syria (since 2011). Then in August, the Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a warning to antiquities dealers in the us not to be so much as caught downwind of these artefacts, lest they find themselves unwitting sponsors of terrorism, with all the conspicuous lack of rights and privileges that comes with that accolade. I don’t have the numbers, but I am not so cynical as to think that these and related actions by international agencies that issue guns to their foot soldiers have had little effect on the market for looted antiquities. My guess is that revenues from loot are down. It’s unclear whether trade in oil or hostages, Islamic State’s two other ugly sources of income, are making up for the falloff. Then came Paris. Whatever else they were, the attacks in Paris in November were murderous assaults against everyday people, most of whom were taking part in ‘culture’. Whether that culture is specifically ‘Western’ is largely beside the point. Attending a concert, going out to dinner or a football match – these are cultural pursuits, part of the habitus of human life, which finds great utility in such intimate and collective social engagements, even more so today as part of the ever-growing ‘experience economy’. Many political and security observers noted that the Islamic State’s indiscriminate massmurder of both French and international citizens marked a turning point in its strategy, which before 13 November had largely looked like some nightmarishly Hobbesian attempt at statecraft. The move into spectacularised murder was not something new, either, as anyone who has witnessed Islamic State’s videos of mass beheadings will recognise. But the Paris attacks had none of the Islamic fundamentalist specificity as did, say, the murder rampage a week later in Mali, where gunmen allegedly freed hostages who could recite verses from the Koran and murdered those who couldn’t. In Paris, culture was a target. The question is: to what end? The lesson of Islamic State’s campaign of visibly and menacingly reducing the supply of antiquities in order to up their demand and so Islamic State’s revenues needs to be well learned here. It would be a mistake to see Paris as a merely symbolic lashing-out of a religiously psychopathic political player in its geopolitical adolescence, unless we want to understand that lashing-out as having been brought on by the West’s effective cancelling of one of IS’s credit cards. Nevertheless, Paris had a purpose. It may be larger, and more abstract, as the experience of culture, and the culture of experience, often are, but Islamic State’s new terrorism export isn’t, or isn’t solely, iconoclastic. To what end Paris? Follow the money.

“I’m leaving because this is bad. Because it’s really bad, isn’t it?” At a performance of the play Apartment (Mother Courage) (2015) by New Theater at the Whitney Museum, this statement/question was thrown into the audience by critic Claire Bishop as she dramatically walked out halfway through. Bishop happened to be sitting in the row in front of me, before she exited with a group of friends and colleagues. “Was that staged?” I heard someone behind me whisper. Later that evening I was at a friend’s birthday party, where one of the walkouts approached me, recognising that I had been seated behind him. “Did people think it was staged?” he asked. The Whitney performance was to be the swansong for Berlin’s New Theater, a finale that was to draw to a close the activities of the artist-theatre project, run by Americans Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff. Berlin is a place I rarely visit, so the only experience I had of their plays before the Whitney was Jory Rabinovitz’s play xy naught, which travelled from the Kreuzberg space to Abrons Arts Center on New York’s Lower East Side in 2014. I mention this because the project, as far as I understand it, operated as a form of scrappy community theatre, and was something of a for-us-by-us project, and I want to be clear that I can’t and don’t speak from that community. I had admired from afar, however, the way in which the project seemed to open up alternative space for thinking about what artists are doing and why they are doing it by opening a low-fi theatre instead of another clean, white box with fluorescent lighting, and by defining working together in terms of performing jobs or roles. Staging plays with artist friends and other members from a local social scene, the project had the kind of attitude that inevitably created insiders and outsiders; but that the moment at which the project transferred to a well-appointed museum was the moment that it drew its own kind of theatrical response (a declarative walkout) seems worth reflecting upon. That audiences had to be id’d when picking up tickets from the museum’s admissions desk and warned that alcohol would be served (so that there could be a bucket of Tecate at the entrance) is as good a sign as any that one space was sitting awkwardly in the other. Not that there should be a problem with awkwardness. New Theater had elements that were professional, shambolic, compelling and serious. The articulations and voices of the plays veered between bad karaoke, political speech, hammy slapstick, pseudo and actual philosophy,

how museums perform Do the fancy new performance spaces in museums destroy what was beautiful about the performances they were built to house? by

Laura McLean-Ferris

New Theater (Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff), Apartment (Mother Courage), October 2015, performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Courtesy the artists

ArtReview

in-jokes, standup comedy and discussions of meaning staged in a branch of Dunkin’ Donuts. The New York rendition of Apartment featured a steel-drum-and-vocal rendition of Madonna’s La Isla Bonita (1987) that was a joy to behold, but also some solemn notes about selling out and giving up. Published in this magazine, Karen Archey’s profile of New Theater (see ArtReview, April 2015) gave an elegant summation of Henkel and Pitegoff’s project and, in particular, the politics and risk of a type of embarrassment that connects people to each other. In Henkel’s words, ‘It’s a really deep love when you see someone onstage and feel afraid for them and it makes you connect in this bizarre, fucked-up way. I think this generosity happens more in this space where people don’t really know what they’re doing.’ Is this embarrassment, this awkwardness, the use of untrained actors and people who don’t know what they’re doing, the same thing as Bishop’s “this is bad”? The performances were certainly not slick. Did the brand-new theatre space in the beautiful new Whitney create different expectations? Possibly. But what does this tension between high-performance facilities and low production-values mean for curators of performance given that the former are being built in museums across the world? That Apartment’s metanarrative, set in a bar threatened with closure, circled around the issues of nostalgia and gentrification that plague cities like New York and Berlin (it was better in the old days, it was cheaper in the old days, things had more political meaning in the old days) also connects to the gentrification of performance – high ticket prices, good facilities. When museums set up their institutional stall for professional theatre, they alter the readings of the unrehearsed and unprofessional in a way that incites a clash between the desire and the delivery – the audience is set up to feel wronged. When I think of André Breton leaping onto the stage at Tristan Tzara’s play in 1923 and starting a fight, I think of artists within whose work something is at stake. Was it better in the old days? What’s at stake here between high performance culture and an amateur community? Work hard, be professional, answer your emails on time, talk the pr talk, don’t be late. Banker, ad executive, tech startup, artist, whatever. There’s nothing like looking at grainy 1970s photographs of downtown performances, but maybe running a project for yourself, then shutting it down with no statement, no photographs, no fanfare and no scaling up is a way to go against the grain today.

Think maybe the hangovers are getting worse: the shrill, branching corridors, the clattering thoughts. You’re bundled under a blanket. Scan the screen with the usual fractured attention and see an email, unsolicited, from him. You can’t mention his name, thinking that if you say it out loud you might summon him, trigger the next sequence. It’s been weeks since you spoke, and you’d resolved not to get back in touch. It was like giving up smoking, everyone pleased as if you were overcoming something bad. You pause before you open it, want to suspend the moment, gauge what it is you might be hoping for. You think maybe you should just delete it, destroy the shoots of delusion before they start to grow. You read it three times and feel the possibilities opening like winter anemones in the ruby light of the room. Another pseudonym, another address, but coded so you know it’s him. He’s coming back to England. The message is succinct but insistent, he needs to see you. You feel conflicted, frustrated by the way you’re lighting up, the walls shifting out of alignment as the possibilities begin to radiate. Cardboard boxes in the corridor, holly woven in jagged bunches. You glance with a momentary scattering of pleasure at the shimmering lights, the blue spruce scenting the room with pine. He’s coming back next week. He doesn’t say for how long. He must have a new passport, somewhere to hide out. You know you shouldn’t see him, it’s taken you this long just to get used to it. All those punishing walks to banish the hectoring voices, the icy determination to get on with it. Without your mates, without Asim and Dee and all that crew, you could easily have been knocked off-kilter. But in spite of yourself, the days leading up to Christmas seem prismatic now, shimmering like opals in the greys of a London winter. At the start, the chance encounters, the coded messages – it felt like those winter nights when subdued yards suddenly light up with bonfires, filigree patterns on walls and fences. He’d emerged in the eye of a heatwave, 30-degree heat every day for a fortnight. London had simmered, come off its hinges. You’d drifted in circles, long unravelling walks through the old dockyards, the lilac

december commercial road, whitechapel, london Coded messages and crystalline waiting trigger a kaleidoscopic city by

Laura Oldfield Ford shadows of Whitechapel. That time indelibly marked you, the cherry blossom, the magnolia suddenly there. The way he sought you, mesmerising you in a blaze of letters, you could never step out of the circle. Then the limbo of late summer, his disappearances, speaking of that other life, sultry August leaching into parched September.

ArtReview

In those last days he’d alluded to walls closing in, flats getting raided, conspiracy charges. You’d always known he wasn’t really yours, that other forces eclipsed his commitment. You’d heard soon after, in the tendrils of barroom chat, that he’d left London. You wondered how he stood it, moving across the continent between a network of squats and concealed apartments. You knew he must feel a sense of dislocation, that it couldn’t really be what he wanted. You sensed his yearning for London. Sometimes, as you retraced your steps across the city, you tuned into his longing for those tracks and hidden paths. And now this message. In spite of yourself, you feel stupid waves of hope. You know you shouldn’t even think about meeting him, shouldn’t even give him a chance to explain, but you can’t crush the thought that maybe this Christmas will be different, you’ll be hiding out like you used to. * The days have been moving slowly, crystalline oblongs of waiting. tv property shows on repeat. Dee lying on the damask settee, Dee with her red hair, pale face, eyes shiny with drink, cobalt flaring round the pupils. You holding a shard

of mirror. Gold and pink eyeshadow, three coats of mascara, kohl under the eyes. Anticipation locked in the scent of almond oil, hot in the hairdryerlike marzipan. Dee wants to walk to the pub with you, still trying to talk you out of it. Been rolling her eyes since you told her. Wants to walk with you through the terrain where the templates were cut, the old snooker hall, the derelict warehouses. You just want to see him, let him explain. * White lights, perfect discs pulsating. One drink, rum and coke, any minute he’ll be here, off the train, Aldgate East, out of the station, along the platform where yellow lights sculpt the black. A litany of names like poetry, imagine how it will make him feel to hear them again, Stepney, Whitechapel, Aldgate East. Surging through the barriers, crush to the street, to the frozen rain. Bomber jacket, hood pulled against winter dark, lighting a cigarette. Feel the nerves sparkling beneath the ribs. Outside the window, men hanging round, eyeing you up, looking across the street, the derelict pub, the halal chicken shop. Wonder how you’ll appear when he comes – how he’ll see you. That scent Hermès, Eau des Merveilles, amber, violet, patchouli cutting through the cigarette smoke, the spilled beer. The maroon walls, the circles of light pulsing, the memory of those kisses, the ones you hadn’t allowed yourself to think about, coming now in cascades. Separation is like a comedown, black pearlescence outlining every kerb, cornice and doorway. Last summer, the city had shown you signs and you were subsumed in it, slinking through walls,

melting into bricks. He came to you like a shock, a jolt of memory. Those nights, the violet rooftops, the concrete emitting a remembered heat, it was like you’d been there before, connected in another time. And those concrete stairs, the magenta light in your room, you had hidden there, sealed in a world so intense it had become telepathic. And now, the pavements are sparkling black, street lamps illuminating the dancing fall of heavy snowflakes. The men outside coming in, noticing, observing. tv in the corner, mute beneath the jukebox, and that Calvin Harris song – How Deep Is Your Love – always there, marking everything, capturing memories in its pale blue tendrils. London Tonight, traffic disruption on the North Circular, trains delayed at Victoria. That’s why he’s late, it’s obvious. You call Dee to tell her. Dee wants you to come home, doesn’t want you sitting there in the pub alone. You’re on the cusp of dizziness with the drink, an unmooring sensation, trying to hold back the scuttling visions of airport

security, holding cells, the seizure of that new passport. You’re drinking too fast. You reach for the cracked Nokia, knowing you can’t even text him. You wait half an hour, feel powerless, immobilised. Dee is calling you, asking you to come back. The disappointment is heaping in drifts. Dee tells you she is coming to get you, tells you to start walking down Commercial Road towards home. Stiletto heels scratch the icy pavement, you feel overdressed, suddenly embarrassed by the fur coat and short black dress. Dee is there on the other side of the road. You step out of the snow into your building, stop in the dusty loading area to light a cigarette. The industrial lift with its concertina door is still broken and you climb through heaps of boxes and the zigzag whir of sewing machines to your latest hideout, on the eighth floor.

In stories, pirates bury treasure. They lock it in chests and drop them in deep sandy pits to conceal their overflowing booty of doubloons and gemstones; to hide it from the light that makes it glint so promiscuously. But in the main these are just stories. Often about how these vast riches vanish back into the earth, as if the ground itself had swallowed up all trace of value, returning human wealth to the geology from which it came. Ashes to ashes, and all that jazz. But in London right now there’s another kind of wealth being buried: giant pits dug beneath the homes of the wealthy into which very twenty-first-century forms of surplus capital are concealed – vintage cars, art collections or simply vast, newly created expanses of prime residential square-meterage. They are called iceberg homes, these London residences of the megarich. For like icebergs, only a little shows above the surface. But in reality they are something far stranger. These are not buried homes, but camouflaged decoys that form an entirely inverted skyline, an invisible cityscape of voids that lurk beneath. The latest to hit the headlines is Damien Hirst’s Regent’s Park mansion, a John Nash-designed Grade I-listed building bought for a reported £34 million in 2014. Not content with 14 bedrooms over five storeys, Hirst has obtained planning permission to demolish a gardener’s cottage and replace it with a new portal to a vast underground private art store. Hirst faces the same problem as others among the London megarich: the possibilities of wealth are constrained by planning regulations. The exterior character of these residences can’t be changed; they can’t be built higher, and they certainly can’t be razed. So with the only way down, engineering and machinery are deployed to mine vast quantities of habitable space from the depths of London soil. These huge holes are transformed into subterranean extensions – extensions in area and to the very concept of domesticity. Lakshmi Mittal, the Indian steel-magnate, has a jewelled subterranean swimming pool in his Kensington home. A residence at 21 Grosvenor Mews has a car lift, garden with sliding roof and, through the entire height of two aboveground and two subterranean storeys, a decorative nine-metre interior ‘waterfall’. In Holland Park, under a Victorian villa, is a 25m

yo ho ho and

an underground bunker in which

Sam Jacob digs up some twenty-first-century buried treasure

from top Underground lair of spectre, in the fifth James Bond film, You Only Live Twice, 1967, dir Lewis Gilbert; Lakshmi Mittal’s residence in Kensington Palace Gardens, London, courtesy Malkalior at English Wikipedia

ArtReview

swimming pool, entertainment room, wine cellar, cigar room, massage rooms, two-level gymnasium, dance/yoga studio, hot tub, sauna and steam rooms. You get the idea. In each, the historic London typology is entirely eviscerated. The heritage (and legally protected) outer casing remains intact, but its innards are (often) scooped out and dumped. Inside, an entirely new idea of living is constructed. Like ‘grow houses’ – those suburban homes transformed into marijuana farms – the exterior of the house remains only as camouflage for an entirely different kind of interior. We could also pursue other psychological avenues. Iceberg homes are more bunker than house. Their gaping holes may be filled with luxurious programmes and lined with the fabulous glister of exotic materials, but they are entirely private worlds. Their typology is related to infrastructures of defence. The world of the superrich is paranoid, characterised by extreme power and extreme vulnerability. The world belongs to them, but is also the source of innumerable threats to their existence: of violence and robbery, of regulation and taxation, of revolution and regime change. Digging down exercises the power to create a new, secure, private world. In this sense, these spaces are nothing less than cavernous panic rooms, a place to retreat from the threats of the aboveground world. It’s no wonder that these fantasies of extreme liberty and total fear resemble the underground lairs of cinematic supervillains.

But what these homes show perhaps most of all is the meaning of wealth in the twenty-first century. For storybook pirates, wealth was material. It was mineral and metal, made valuable by its scarcity. But wealth now has become something far stranger: immaterial digits, disembodied signifiers of value that float through networks cut free from physicality. And in turn, what we see in these iceberg homes is the pit – for pirates, the mechanism of concealing wealth – transformed into the thing of value itself. The hole is the treasure, the void is the ultimate product of riches beyond our wildest dreams.

So, Miami – we meet again… I’ve survived the unpleasant turbulence that played with our hurtling vessel, careening through space, batted about by the unseen paws of some capricious celestial feline (that’s supposed to be a metaphor for the last several years of my life for the most part, but also, coincidentally, what upset the brittle plastic cup on my tray table, spilling its contents on my lap and implying a pee stain, which I assure you it is not…. What else can I say? Turbulence freaks me out.) Anyway, I hope my beautiful paintings had a smoother trip. Crated and lovingly strapped into a truck. At least I hope they were crated. Goddamn it! I bet they used travel frames. Paintings stare out like caged animals from those! Trapped behind wood slats. Garrotted! Any malevolently careless art handler could take a spike or what-have-you and poke a painting through a travel frame. In the hands of an art handler, a travel frame is worthless. Have you ever met an art handler? I don’t like to disparage a whole profession, but art handlers are real shitbags! It’s a well-established fact. You know Caravaggio once killed one? No, travel frames are really just a minimum of protection! Actually, a minimum of protection is the dreaded window box! That’s when a gallery doesn’t care or have the money to use real wood and merely folds some cardboard around the edges with a 5cm lip, haphazardly wrapping plastic around it, which in turn is meant to hover over the surface of the painting and protect it as if by magic. It’s awful to even watch art handlers perform this barbarism. The evident guilt in their furtive movements. Momentarily seized with feeling as though a regular person. Like hired goons murdering a child. They know they are doing wrong, yet there they are, doing it anyway. Afterwards

the wrong trousers In which

Jonathan Grossmalerman worries about the ingenious devices shippers use in order to ruin his precious art and

what Miami people will think about his soiled outerwear

January & February 2016

they skulk silently and cannot meet anyone’s gaze for some time. I’ve seen this many times and it never gets any easier. There is absolutely nothing more insidiously criminal than a window box! Of course, I could arrive to find they’ve simply bubble-wrapped my paintings. Perhaps separated them with sheets of cardboard? My chest tightens at the thought of what horror might have befallen them on their hellish death march. Manhandled within an inch of their lives by the grubby paws of every shiftless meth-addled art handler in New York. Laughed at and spat upon! Placed back-tofront! Terrible sculptures nudged up against them incautiously! Perhaps even set on fire! Who knows what these art handlers do? Has it ever been documented!? They exist in an entirely grey area! A dank middle-world of bitterness and regret! Something must be done! What I hoped would be a triumphant reentry is now ruined. I am a worried mess, clutching my carry-on awkwardly so as to hide my drink-/urine-stained trousers and close to tears as I limp down the aisle. The stewardess winces as I pass, not even offering a rote “buh-bye”. Wrapped in bubble wrap! Wrapped in bubble wrap! Perhaps just wrapped in plastic! Why not? All bets are off now. The resignation sets in. The fires of excitement in my heart are extinguished. It’s true, I’m showing with a young, seemingly artist-run Bushwick gallery at Pulse, one of Miami Basel’s many satellite fairs. Yes, my paintings have probably been mishandled by syphilitic criminals. Molested in the most perverse and unkind ways. But will the pleasant tropical breeze not be the same after all? Will thonged vaginas not frolic under the palm trees paired with browned bouncing breasts? And won’t the ultrarich be in the general vicinity? Will my hotel porter be any less hot, Latino and gay for me showing at a lesser fair? I may be on the outside looking in, but is the view not wonderful? It is. It is wonderful. Hello, Miami, I love you. Now is there a place I can get some clean trousers?

BOOK NOW Until 13 March Supported by

Maryam and Edward Eisler With additional support from the Frank Auerbach Exhibition Supporters Group and Tate Patrons

Jasmina Metwaly Remarks on Medan (Tahir Version) Open Gallery | The London Art Fair

Private View - 19 January 2016 20 - 24 January 2016 www.opengallery.co.uk Art Projects (Stand P5) Business Design Centre 52 Upper Street London N1 OQH

Frank Auerbach Evening Standard

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Frank Auerbach Head of William Feaver 2003 Collection of Gina and Stuart Peterson © Frank Auerbach, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art. Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd.

Great Critics and Their Ideas No 44

T.S. Eliot on Hey Ya! Interview by

Matthew Collings A keen Facebook observer, this pioneer of literary modernism talks about contemporary art’s diminished capabilities, Vermeer’s aunt, the importance of ‘distance’ and

the relative merits of popular music promotional videos from the early 2000s

With his poem The Waste Land (1922), Thomas Stearns Eliot (born St Louis, Missouri, 1888; died South Kensington, London, 1965) significantly contributed to the rise of Modernism. His essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, published three years before The Waste Land, argued the paradoxes that art must be judged not only for originality and newness but also continuity with the past, and in fact it is only because of the element of continuity that it can be original at all.

ArtReview

artreview Nobody likes you because you’re rightwing and anti-Semitic, but it’s pretty amazing that you’re available for an interview. What do you think about art now? Do you like conservative, apolitical paintings by Peter Doig? t.s. eliot I certainly observe that he’s loved on Facebook: there are always posts with someone discovering him and saying it’s amazing. They post images of Francis Bacon and find it amazing, too. I saw a post the other day of stills from a 1961 bbc interview with Bacon and the comment was, ‘It’s the first time I’ve seen him smiling.’ The form of communication with Facebook seems appropriate for the content: an announcement, no one has to think much either making it or reading it. The opposite could be announced with minimal difference in the effect. It’s very telling about art reception now. In fact the answer to the question of art’s ontological essence is right there: it has none. Today’s art isn’t the inheritor of premodern art. Art like Peter Doig’s isn’t the modern equivalent of a painting in the seventeenth century. This doesn’t reflect badly or well on his achievement (which happens to be erratic). The artforms of today where there’s imagination, a response to the moment, where the conditions of the moment are addressed in a form that comes from the moment, are movies and music videos. The fact that these are popular art not high art doesn’t matter. High art can run out. At the moment it exists but it isn’t socially significant except as alienation, meaning that the illusion of significance is only that, an illusion. So it might as well have run out. ar Do you mean no one should make it? tse They have to accept if they make it that it can be anything from case to case. But art is no longer a category of experience where the expectation is that it’s going to help or elevate anyone and be entirely separate from and better than other forms of visual communication. It’s not going to picture anything significantly or deeply any more than ads do. The motivation to criticise, for example, as opposed to selling a product, doesn’t result in an expression of the times that has more subtlety than an ad or a video unless the artist has cleverly come up with something original that could just as likely happen with an ad – so the critical mode as such isn’t the important thing. And this is the same with art as such. ar What ads are you thinking of? tse A music video is an ad. OutKast’s funny video for Hey Ya!, which you can watch on YouTube today, has no less subtlety, intelligence and playful artificiality than an art event by Thomas Hirschhorn that draws attention to

social contradiction. And in fact, rap and hip-hop videos generally often do that, too – with equal inventiveness. ar They’re like art, you mean? tse They’re more like art as it was in the past than it is now. Art’s famous deskilling since Modernism entails a heightened expectation of directly apprehensible meaning where previously meaning was partly clear and partly not, part immediate and part slow-burning, all in the same object. ar If I look at a Hirschhorn, I immediately like its exciting ideas. tse You are a privileged exception, able to know that there even are any ideas, and how something that does not seem like an idea actually is one, though not the same one that a face-value appreciation might suggest – a photocopied page from a book by Bataille is not actually an idea that Bataille had or a Bataillelike idea. Audiences today don’t know why they’re supposed to like the art of their time.

There’s artistic distance equally with conceptual art and with paintings by Francis Bacon and Peter Doig. Any art has it, high or low. The word ‘art’ is almost impossible without the notion of distance But they feel it can’t, surely, be only a manipulation of the same kind that applies with politics, whereby global financial systems have been handed all the power and politicians representing individual nation states are only front men, as confused and uninformed as anyone else. And in that space of bafflement, the art audience looks for reassurance about art’s helpfulness of a kind whose effective truth probably had its last moment mid-century. It was during the 1950s that art culture was experienced as beneficial, but unfortunately only to a few, not the many. In the intervening period and particularly in the era of neoliberal capitalism, in which everything that exists does so in order only to be monetised, art’s benefit to anyone has become as questionable as the aims of politics in terms of bringing about a better society for all. ar An ordinary audience immediately likes Vermeer and immediately likes Peter Doig.

facing page T.S. Eliot, 1951. Photo: George Douglas/Picture Post/Getty Images

January & February 2016

tse Immediacy alters over time. If few know who Diana is any more, in the pantheon of Roman deities, or if the audience for paintings expands so that those who don’t know are just as likely to encounter a painting representing her as those who do, then it can’t be said that an immediate symbolic meaning in a painting of her is there today in the same way as it was when the painting was first created. The immediacy of recognition that it’s a woman is still there, of course. But her gestures and the surrounding context of other figures also gesturing have lost their meaning. It can be recovered, but only in a distanced way. After all, you can read the label that says what the painting represents. You can look up a bit more information on your iPhone. You can listen to the audio guide. You can buy a book about Vermeer in the museum gift shop and attempt to read a few passages while you’re still on your holiday touring Europe. You can get a hint. With Peter Doig, who knows what the applause is for (or what hint of meaning it is you’re supposed to be struggling to understand)? Is it for colour textures organised marvellously or a recasting of the relationship between photography, painting and reality in the tradition of Gerhard Richter or a conjuration of images that have the feeling of a dream or look vaguely like art? The aims are distanced phantoms approaching and receding. ar But you’re saying music videos aren’t distanced; the meanings are all vivid? tse They’re layered, or at least they can be, they are vivid but also thoughtful and dense. So in fact there is a distance there, too. There’s artistic distance equally with conceptual art and with paintings by Francis Bacon and Peter Doig. Any art has it, high or low. The word ‘art’ is almost impossible without the notion of distance. But we were talking about what art is now, and I was saying high art isn’t continuous with art of the past; it’s its own thing, whereas I see some popular forms as genuinely continuous with the past. The play of distance and immediacy seems to be part of it. There was distance even in the initial supposed immediacy of art, because an audience in the know, in the seventeenth century, was aware Diana never existed. And a representation of her in a painting was also not really of her – because it was a representation of a staged scene involving a paid model. The painting was a manifestation of a tradition of representations that are fictions. And then one has to acknowledge that a similar distance is there today for anyone, however new to art and art history they may be. This is because they will be unlikely to believe, on reading the label for Vermeer’s earliest known painting, Diana and her Nymphs, that the young Vermeer, only twentyone or twenty-two at the time, had seen the

actual Diana, who they vaguely know to have been a goddess, alerted by certain signs – it’s art: it often pictures supernatural entities – before him in his studio. But then again a general distancing that is the product of the fact that the painting was made centuries ago and therefore expresses the concerns of an alien culture causes the tourist audience for such a work to be baffled by everything about it except a photographic quality it seems to have. Girl with a Pearl Earring and View of Delft in the same little room at the Mauritshuis, in The Hague – each possesses the same quality. Maybe it was always the important element. Not the photographic as such. For, as we know, photographs didn’t always exist; in fact, for such an audience the amazing thing about the art of the past is that it seems to have the quality of photographs, and yet cameras as we know them hadn’t been invented: what geniuses those artists were! But looking as such.

placement – speak of the use of the lens, then why aren’t the same marks in the work of other artists who used a lens? Why aren’t they in Caravaggio? And why aren’t they in all paintings by Vermeer? Thirty-seven works by him are acknowledged. He is thought to have painted 45. That’s a high survival rate. (The proportion of surviving-to-destroyed works by Piero della Francesca, another great art-historical figure whose present-day reputation, like Vermeer’s, only began to be established in the nineteenth century, is much smaller.) With three of them Vermeer’s authorship is disputed. But of the ones remaining, only a few have those kinds of marks, either spitlike flecks or pointillist-like tiny blobs or dots, deployed here and there, in relation to particular depicted surfaces, brick walls, say, or the wooden planks of a boat in a seaport.

ar Looking? tse Having an image before you that tells you about looking. It might tell you about this girl in her yellow outfit or that goddess with her attendants washing her lovely feet or that port city, Delft, with its towers. But the mode in which it tells you of those matters is visual. An artist looked at something and captured it in an image, and now you’re looking at that image and something is conveyed to you through a combination of your own looking and what the artist is offering in the product of his looking. The general audience, distracted, uninformed, receives this profundity and tells itself, wrongly, that it’s the amazement of something that looks so much like a photo before the advent of the modern camera. In fact the amazement of all art of the past, the audience believes, is its photolike quality, which is summed up by and distilled in the work of Vermeer. It helps with the attractiveness of mystery rather than detracts from it that it turns out Vermeer may even have used something like a camera – it’s the first thing ordinary information about art lets a tourist know. But this issue of the lens and Vermeer is muddled and circular even in the theories of experts. Treatises of long ago mention the camera obscura as a useful tool for art. But there is no existing evidence for its use in a particular painting from the past. Evidence for it is perceived only because the seer wants to perceive it. If some of Vermeer’s marks in their looseness but also their exactness – looseness of form but exact

ar Where are you going with this? And what about your hatefulness? tse Ha ha, patience, Matthew! Terry Eagleton once criticised a book about me written by the poet Craig Raine. Eagleton said my reputation as a poet is established beyond doubt. Trying to wash away my flaws like doting parents deaf to criticism of the obnoxiousness of their children does me no favours. I’m fine with that; we must live with our mistakes. As for the camera obscura, it doesn’t explain the rise of fascination with Vermeer, which originated in the nineteenth century and out of which was born the trajectory of popular love for him that reaches its saccharine culmination in the movie Girl with a Pearl Earring. The cause is refinement of visual

Johannes Vermeer, View of Delft, c. 1660–61. Courtesy Mauritshuis, The Hague

ArtReview

balance. If you are a visually aware viewer, you are forced, on looking at View of Delft, to reflect on your own seeing. This is not because of the presence of strange dots unfamiliar in works by Vermeer’s contemporaries who also used a lens (the use of such an object by artists was apparently widespread and had been for at least a century). It’s because of Vermeer’s emphasis on organisation at the expense of anything else: what art historians in the twentieth century used to call the ‘pictorial’ content as opposed to symbolism or narrative, or descriptive depiction – what is also present in a picture other than what is commonly understood to be ‘the picture.’ ar And Hey Ya!? tse That, too, is a matter of achievement in terms of intensity. It has a multilayered self-consciousness into which the audience enters, even if unconsciously, as far as manipulation is concerned. But there is always a degree of consciousness, because that’s how codes work. Vermeer’s original buyers, or receivers of the gift when he gave his work away sometimes, as it’s thought he did, were familiar with the visual codes he worked with. And the same goes for the music-buying audience in the early 2000s. Those people were familiar with the codes of hip hop and rap. Neither audience feels itself to be in a specially heightened intellectual situation regardless of the levels of content that the work in question might be said to possess. Vermeer’s aunt, Ariaentgen Claes van der Minne, to whom it is likely he gave his painting of The Little Street, which pictured the house where she lived, and which he knew very well, no doubt thought, ‘That’s good, it’s a picture of my house.’ And a consumer in 2003 watching mtv tells herself, ‘That’s good, it’s a video of Hey Ya!’ Between Vermeer and OutKast, the user of the camera obscura and the rap act that benefits from the invention of the video camera, there is continuity. But it’s nothing to do with lenses. It is a matter of the work being both immediate and profound. And of the audience for which it’s made being absolutely in touch with the aims of its making. This cannot be said of today’s new popular audience for art, because their relationship with it as with practically every aspect of social life is one of mere alienated familiarity. next issue: Rosa Luxemburg on art fairs

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Other People and Their Ideas No 26

Beatriz González is a Colombian artist who was among the first to draw inspiration and content from mass-media sources and was considered to be one of Latin America’s leading Pop artists. Having reached adulthood during the period of ‘La Violencia’ (a ten-year period of civil war in the country, 1948–58), González’s work has often displayed her interest in the fates of ordinary people and local cultures. Today she is among the most influential living artists in Colombia Interview by

Mark Rappolt

Gonzalez's first solo exhibition took place at the Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogotá in 1964, and her work is now in the collections of moma, New York, Tate Modern, London and other museums around the world. It is currently included in The World Goes Pop at Tate Modern, London through 24 January

ArtReview

artreview Which were the artists (or other things) that influenced you at the beginning of your career? And why did you decide to become an artist? beatriz gonzález At the beginning of my career, Picasso and Degas. In college, it was my painting professor, Juan Antonio Roda, and Fernando Botero, who was just rising up in the early 1960s. My family, teachers and classmates in primary school saw talent in me; however, when choosing a profession, I didn’t initially think of art but rather architecture, maths or photography. Even when I started going to art school at Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá, I thought of switching to philosophy. In fact, in parallel to fine art, I also studied metaphysics for six semesters. It was only during my third year, when they gave me, alongside three other students, an atelier, that I felt the will to become an artist. It had to do with the competition.

creating a painting or series of paintings on canvas for a gallery?

elements, unless you alter the photo or decide to intervene in it.

bg Auras Anónimas was conceived as part of a programme influenced by the theory of the ‘counter-monument’. For that reason, it was a work that was supposed to last only for two years; nonetheless it has been there since 2009. What happened? Well, little by little it became a symbol, an icon, and has gotten to symbolise the memory of the victims of a violence that has dominated the country for over 50 years. When I try to look in retrospect at my pictorial work, I find the inclusion of various objects, many of them objets trouvés, that I intervene with painting, so I find similarities in this case. Just as if the abandoned cemetery was a found object.

ar Your work is currently in a show about Pop art at Tate Modern [through 24 January], and you’re often described as being a Pop artist. What does ‘Pop art’ mean to you, and is it something you feel a part of?

ar Was it politics (the era of La Violencia) more than other artists that shaped your work? And do you consider your work to be political? bg I don’t think that period marked my work in terms of politics. All my life – except during my childhood and adolescence – I’ve been a witness to the country’s violence, so I don’t think it has to do with that. It’s been the critique of power that has impregnated my work. For that same reason, I don’t think of it as ‘political’; it just has a commitment to ethics. ar Do you think of yourself as someone whose work records the history of your country? (I’m thinking of work such as Mr. President, What an Honor to be With You at This Historic Moment, but also Auras Anónimas [both 2009].) bg Without me seeking it, my work has turned into a recollection of the country’s historical events. Someone once said that ‘art tells that which history is unable to’. ar Thinking more of Auras Anónimas, in which you stencilled 8,957 silhouetted images of victims of violence, sourced from newspaper photographs, on the coffin spaces of a disused crypt, once the burial place of the anonymous poor, how did the project come about and do you think that art has an important role to play in the field of collective memory? And how does a project like that differ in process to

ar Is being an artist a gift or a responsibility? bg First, it is a gift. A talent you are born with that develops in the right conditions. When it develops it turns into a responsibility. ar What does it mean for an artist to transform a photograph into a painting? (I’m thinking of the Sisga Suicides [1965], or your works that use images from print media.) What does the painting do that the photograph does not? bg Photography takes the place of the model in academia. I think that photography’s particularity lies in its ephemeral quality, while the essence of painting lies in its endurance. In the source photography for The Suicides of El Sisga I found what I was looking for and I took the elements I needed, while others I discarded. In photography it is very difficult to discard above Auras Anónimas, 2009. Courtesy Banco de Archivos Digitales, Departamento de Arte, Universidad de los Andes

January & February 2016

bg I have never considered myself as a Pop artist. I didn’t know the work of those artists, because in Colombia there was very little information available, and when the information arrived I didn’t understand it and it didn’t attract me. Nonetheless, my work from the 1960s has a few coincidences, among them my attraction to poorly printed photographs, publicity ads, works of art reproduced for mass consumption, etc. But it also never crossed my mind that I was the ‘local Warhol’. Pop must have been in the air, because I started to be labelled as Pop. I was in the middle of something else, I was interested in the subject of taste, even in the philosophical sense of the word. When I was invited to the Tate show, I clarified my feelings, but I was also very honoured to show my work there. ar Did you feel that you were ever having to fight academic conventions that placed European-style painting as a ‘higher art’ than the kind of work that appeared in more everyday culture? You’ve worked a lot with iconic European paintings in a manner that seems to be at once homage and a process of assimilation into a different culture… bg I wasn’t trying to make a homage, like Botero and other artists were. I had a theory, just as I presented at the 1978 Venice Biennale: ‘the transformations that the work of art endures in underdeveloped countries’. That is, the way in which images arrive; such exquisite icons as Vermeer’s Woman with a Pearl Necklace [1662–4] are presented here [in Colombia] in a bulletin on sexual education; reproductions of Leonardo’s The Last Supper [1495–8] are placed in houses as a protection against thieves. ar How much of an impact did Marta Traba have on your career? She seemed to be a key figure when I visited Colombia, and I wonder today whether or not an art critic could have such an influence? bg Marta lived in Colombia for 16 years. From all of the countries she lived and worked in,

Colombia was perhaps the one in which she was the most influential. She defined the work of different generations because she found that people didn’t know contemporary art that much. As a critic she was combative, she initiated institutions like the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá and was a teacher to many. She was my art history professor in college and she supported me as an artist during all of her life. ar You’ve been described as one of the ‘founders’ of Colombian art. What makes Colombian art different from the art produced in other countries in Latin America? Is the very idea of a country-specific art an outdated one in a world in which communication is supposed to be seamless and every experience is a shared one? bg I don’t think I’m a founder. The development of Colombian art, as in the rest of the countries in Latin America, has its particularities, its stages and influences: in Colombia academia arrived late, 1873, and for that reason we were dependent on travellers. Marta Traba

attacked the influence of Mexican Muralism and nationalist art, she exalted artists who were showing contemporaneity. Now, globalisation makes it impossible to establish ghettos or borders. Latin American art is an entelechy. ar Do you think your art is received differently by audiences in Colombia than it is by audiences in the rest of the world? bg I once said my work wasn’t well received in Europe. I thought if it was received it was maybe like something curious, a curiosity. Now it doesn’t matter, I’ve seen it at Tate, at moma, in the words of European and American critics. ar Did becoming a teacher of other artists influence the development of your own work? bg As a pedagogue specialised in art, I’ve had influence on a few artists; like María Inés Rodríguez [the Colombian director of capc Bordeaux] says, I have the gift of transmitting knowledge. As far as my influence in other generations, they are the ones to say.

The Suicides of El Sisga, 1965. Courtesy Banco de Archivos Digitales, Departamento de Arte, Universidad de los Andes

ArtReview

ar What have been the biggest changes for you as an artist since you first began your career? bg There are major differences: when I painted The Suicides of El Sisga, back when my work revolved around taste, I assembled a painting with a metal support. That had a profound impact, as I started the furniture pieces; when I stopped making versions of universal works of art and turned to observing power in ruling classes (Zócalo de la Comedia, 1983, and Zócalo de la Tragedia, 1983); when, due to the sorrow brought by the holocaust of the Palace of Justice siege [a 1985 attack against the Supreme Court of Colombia by members of the m-19 guerrilla group who held the Supreme Court hostage; after a controversial military counter-raid, 11 of the 25 Supreme Court Justices were left dead, alongside 48 Colombian soldiers and 35 members of m-19; 10 other people are ‘missing’], I found the death caused by narcos (Las Delicias, 1997); or when I found I could turn images into icons or signs.

Whitechapel Gallery Electronic Superhighway 2016–1966 How is the internet changing art? Book now: 29 January – 15 May 2016 whitechapelgallery.org Aldgate East / Liverpool St.

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Other People and Their Ideas No 27

RoseLee Goldberg If you had to appoint someone as responsible for the current love affair between art institutions and performance (and not just in the art sense), it would be art historian and curator RoseLee Goldberg Interview by

Kathy Battista

RoseLee Goldberg founded the biannual performance-art festival Performa, which recently concluded its sixth iteration, in 2004. Since then she has been instrumental in bringing performance art into the mainstream contemporary artworld and its institutional cultures (outside her work with Performa, she has curated exhibitions such as 100 Days, 2009, with Klaus Biesenbach, on the history of performance art, and Jay-Z’s 2013 performance-art video for his song Picasso Baby). Following recent controversies about artists’ pay in general and a contested w.a.g.e. (Working Artists and the Greater Economy) report that was critical of Performa, ArtReview spoke with her and Esa Nickle, producing director and international affairs for Performa, about the state of performance art today, its relationship with the art market and the future of the organisation they helm.

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artreview Why do you think performance art has become so prevalent on the contemporary art scene? roselee goldberg At each critical moment in history, several disciplines fed each other, for example Paris in the 1920s or New York in the 1950s and 1960s. I think the 1970s idea that performance art was disturbing and unnerving has changed. Performance is accessible and can draw crowds to museums. My idea is to put performance on a new path and to open up the possibilities. That was why we used the subheading ‘new visual art performance’ [for Performa]. ar Now that we have Performa and museums commissioning performance, do you think that performance art can still be a radical gesture? rlg I think museums are responding to things that are going on in the wider culture. Just because a museum is doing a Dada show doesn’t make it any less radical. It’s like saying that somebody can’t be eighty years old and still be radical. Joan [Jonas] is as radical as she ever was, so is Yvonne [Rainer], so is Yoko [Ono]. I don’t see the museum as dampening that. I think it’s essential to start incorporating performance into the museum. It’s still a very radical idea to pull things from so many different movements and to do it well or to do it in a context that can reach a lot of people. Museums, though, are filled with performance-related material that is hiding in plain sight, starting with the Futurist noise machines, Dada and Surrealism, to Rauschenberg,

Oldenburg, Kaprow, and through to relational aesthetics and Matthew Barney. There isn’t a contemporary artist whose work wasn’t made for or related to some kind of live event. ar Do you think that the establishment of more departments of media and performance is bringing performance to the fore now? rlg Exactly. Every museum is eventually going to have a performance department. Actually, one of the subtitles I wanted for Performa in the beginning was ‘we are your performance art department’. ar Do any of the Performa commissions get acquired by collectors or museums? esa nickle No particular Performa commission has been acquired. One of the main reasons is the scale of the things that we produce. Our productions have so many moving parts. It is not typically a score or a recipe that can be easily recreated. A lot of artists are also in their works. ar If an artist were to sell part of the work related to the commission, does s/he give Performa a cut similar to a nonprofit getting a percentage of an exhibited artist? en We have a very similar strategy with anybody who invests in performances or productions, where if it makes money, the production cost is given back. facing page RoseLee Goldberg.Photo: Patrick McMullan above Adam Pendleton, The Revival, 2007, a Performa commission. Photo: Paula Court

January & February 2016

ar As I understand it, you’re like a film production company, where you might be able to cover your salary, but everything you want to do you must raise money for? rlg Yes, absolutely. ar And the artist gets paid a fee or a commission? rlg It’s standardised. We can also work as agents if a piece is not our own, by advising or negotiating a realistic price or fee for the artist. en We know that it is very important to be in partnership with the artist. We don’t just give them the money and say, “Go produce this.” It is a conversation that starts with the curators and then goes into production and then fruition. rlg We’re hugely collaborative as an organisation. From the first Performa, which we put together in six months, it was both practical and also a desire to involve everyone I knew at different venues. It’s a curatorial conversation with the organisations about what would be suitable partnerships for us. For example, I remember the first year we met with Art in General and realised Sharon Hayes was on their annual schedule. We asked to put that in Performa. ar How do you raise the money? Do you look to a gallery or individuals for help? rlg It’s a complicated puzzle that we put together, because obviously we look to the foundations as a steady base, but it’s not always that steady. Then as you said, with each project, we think, ‘Who are the people who will support

this?’ It’s not like somebody sponsors the whole thing. You can have one project that will have a cocommissioner or a copresenter, and a couple of individual philanthropists’ support. We do our galas, of course, which are a big part of that.

that and developed it, and the total was $60,000. Contrary to the w.a.g.e. report, which was flawed in that it’s just inaccurate, we’ve done the absolute opposite: we’ve created a model for supporting artists.

en We don’t really have anything stable from year to year, except for the Andy Warhol Foundation, which gives specifically for the commissioning programme.

en I completely understand what [w.a.g.e.] were doing, and it’s a valid endeavour, but I called them and asked, “How many people actually responded to this survey about being in Performa?” It was around 20…

rlg Compared to a lot of biennials around the world, we have a fraction of the funding they receive. Other biennials can start with $5 million from the government. We start with zero every year. en Or we have to charge $300 per ticket. I do the math of how many people see a work compared to what it costs. We don’t even count the box-office income, because it’s really so marginal. ar Would you ever build an income stream as a way to fund or build a programme?

rlg Out of 500 artists… en That’s not a valid sample size. I think especially because the survey was done around the time of the Futurism Performa [2009], when we had a huge consortium programme. I think we had 150 events that year. Fifty of them were ours. We don’t police their programmes… Now we have our eyes open a little bit more. rlg Yes, and then to discover that they’re refusing to make the distinction between consortium and others.

rlg You have to invest in that area in order to make money from it. It’s about supporting that vision. So it doesn’t negate working with the marketplace in the sense of: here are some extraordinary ideas to fund. My favourite comment to collectors is, “For every dollar you put on the wall, put it back into the community and nurture this next generation, because otherwise we’re really going to be in trouble.” For example, with [American conceptual artist] Adam Pendleton in 2007, he’d never done live performance before. He’d barely shown anything. In fact, he was only twenty-three years old. We didn’t say to him, “Here’s $5,000.” We said, “What’s your dream?” We ran with

rlg It’s a curatorial decision. It is just a lack of understanding of how it works at Performa. ar We have seen many times in the history where artists wanted to create a union and it never works because art is a subjective thing. en You’re putting values on things that it’s impossible to. The reality is that with all the people we work with, we actually have standardised fees. ar Everybody gets the same fee, emerging or veteran artist? rlg We have two scales. Basically, we have the Performa commission, which is higher, and then we have Performa projects. en We have a lot of smaller projects that come out of curatorial think tanks of our group. I think it’s so interesting that everyone wants to find out if we are selling work. We can make a lot more money if we bring it to Broadway than if we try to sell it through the art market. ar Will that ever happen? rlg Sure, why not? This is a dream that I had. I felt a real necessity to bring an intensity to what was going on in New York in 2004. We were getting too market-driven. I thought, ‘You know what, I live in this town. I came here in the 1970s. We have to get back to that spirit. There’s a necessity for a community.’

Francesco Vezzoli and David Hallberg, Fortuna Desperata, 2015, a Performa commission. Photo: Paula Court. Courtesy of Performa, New York

en We actually did the certification process. We got to the end, and they were like, “Yeah. You guys pay everybody really well.” Then they wanted us to police the consortiums. We couldn’t get certified because we have partnerships with people that we are not financially involved with.

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Roche Court Exhibition Programme 2016 Shaping a Century: Works by Modern British Sculptors Robert Adams Kenneth Armitage Clive Barker Reg Butler Anthony Caro Hubert Dalwood George Fullard Barbara Hepworth Phillip King Henry Moore Tim Scott William Turnbull

Lost: a new work by Bill Woodrow Material Language: New Work in Clay curated by Sarah Griffin & Alun Graves including Neil Brownsword Phoebe Cummings Richard Deacon Keith Harrison Nao Matsunaga James Rigler Marit Tingleff Annie Turner

Bruce McLean: Ceramics Darren Almond: new work in the gallery and park Anthony Caro: Artist Boss curated by Jenny Dunseath & Mark Wilsher

Anthony Caro Ian Dawson John Gibbons Guy Martin John Wallbank

and Laura Ford at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, Kendal Blackwell, The Arts & Crafts House

Roche Court East Winterslow Salisbury, Wiltshire SP5 1BG

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Future Greats

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Introduction People often ask us how we know what’s going on in the artworld, where we look to find new artists, how we know about exhibitions that are at the end of roads less travelled. In part we do it through travel and research, but more than that it’s because we are in constant conversation with numerous artists, curators and critics about what’s interesting or motivating them at any given moment: in short, because we, as editors of ArtReview, acknowledge that we are part of a community; or to strip that bare, a network. As much as it is about informing you, our readers, about artists we think deserve to be centre-stage in the coming months, Future Greats has, since it first began, also been about ArtReview revealing its own network, of plugging its readers directly into the source, so to speak. And why does ArtReview do that rather than simply take its collaborators’ suggestions and then pitch the ‘greats’itself? Because it wants you to know the importance of local knowledge – that these artists are put forward by people with local knowledge of specific scenes – and to some degree to present a picture of what artists, curators and critics from around the world are thinking about right now. ArtReview

Sponsor’s statement In the five years that efg International has been associated with ArtReview and its Future Greats issue, it has been fascinating to watch many of the artists first introduced to us in these pages go on to achieve further renown in the world of art and beyond. And while the increasingly comprehensive coverage of global art scenes can make the world seem a smaller place, it also reveals that the networks of artists, writers, curators and thinkers that make up these scenes are more far-reaching and diverse than many of us would expect. Which is why, for Future Greats as it is for us in our business, local knowledge is so important. At efg International, we’re used to working within a rapidly changing climate and being at the forefront of new initiatives, and it’s a pleasure to support a feature that tracks similar developments in art. Keith Gapp Head of Strategy and Marketing, efg International Practitioners of the craft of private banking efginternational.com

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Deborah Salt

selected by Mary Corse

Deborah Salt lives and works in Los Angeles where for 15 years placement of Salt’s paintings is always in For me a work enters the realm of art when she has sustained a method of painting that involves counterpoint to the the right-angles of the it makes me feel and know the reality of minimal geometric abstraction; one painting informing walls on which they are placed, addressing my human state in its essence – an abstract, the next and so on, to the present. successfully an issue of a painting creating perceptual experience beyond thought. I am Selected by Mary Corse, artist, Los Angeles its own autonomous existence in relation to interested in a painting that is about itself. Not political, not a cartoon, nothing interesting, just a pure percep- itself, to architecture and to three dimensions that has long challenged tual experience of the moment, the experience before the idea, not artists – John McCracken's leaning sculptures are another example. the limited finite thinking but rather an alignment with the infinite, The sides of Salt’s canvases generate a ‘glow’ of colour that radiates onto the surrounding wall. By using natural light to dissolve the bigger picture. Salt’s paintings do this. The whole object is the painting – the the edges, Salt changes the relationship between the white central surface of the canvas is painted in white, occasionally black, while the surface and the surrounding layers of monochromatic paint in a way sides are painted in 12-to-20 monochromatic layers of brush strokes that poses a further extension of a similar effect seen in the 1960s Edge of a different, more intense colour. Rectangular in shape, of varying Paintings of San Francisco-born Sam Francis (1923–1994). dimensions, each painting is hung at an angle, with its lower left Both the oblique placement of Salt's work and the mutable corner directly beneath its upper right corner. Each painting has its ‘glowing’ edges that softly permeate and dissolve into the surrounding own inner equilibrium by maintaining an space create a conscious (direct) meditative above Vertical, 244 × 15 × 6 cm, acrylic on canvas. abstract vertical to the floor. The diagonal experience of the present for the viewer. Photo: Ed Glendinning. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2016

Part-time Suite

In place of producing physical objects, the collective have focused instead on their own physical labour

ArtReview

selected by Hyunjin Kim

Part-time Suite are a collective, initially of three (Byoungjee Lee, a video of a performance in which members Artist collective Part-time Suite work with Jaeyoung Park and Miyeon Lee) who formed as graduating strung their bodies together with rope and installation, documentary, photography, students in Seoul, South Korea in 2009. They have been operating walked on the edge of the precarious railing drawing, performance, workshops and other as a duo (without Byoungjiee Lee) since 2013. methods. Their first series of projects (in 2009), on top of an old building (Loop the Loop). Selected by writer and curator Hyunjin Kim, Seoul which included Under Interior, off-off-stage and In place of producing physical objects the Loop the Loop earned attention as a rare example of self-organisation collective have often focused instead on their own physical labour, by a younger generation of artists in Seoul, revealing and exploring engaging in activities similar to those of a small-scale industry, several different locations in the city that were marginalised, physi- such as rug weaving or pounding-down cement by foot, the colleccally, aesthetically and socio-economically. The artists rented dark tive’s emphasis on immaterial artistic practice is strongly bound to or castoff spaces – basements, vacant lots, the disregarded rooftop ideas surrounding labour economics. They have also organised film of a small manufacturing plant – for around one or two months at a screenings, debates, and other activities that serve to unite their local time with funds amassed from their own part-time jobs. They used art community. Drop by Then (2010), featured projects made during a these sites firstly as temporary private studios in which to investigate, road trip near North Korea’s Demilitarised Zone.Their most recent produce, curate and organise, and finally as a public space for audi- work, The Ballad of Real Estates (2015) was made during a trip to ences to visit and experience the particularity of each site. The projects Spain and continues the collective’s interest in marginalised urban symbolised a glimmer of hope for the precarious sense of feeling adrift space by exploring areas that included those squatted or occupied, within Korean society’s economic structure and the institutional in cities such as Madrid, Seseña, Málaga and Granada. Welcoming environment of the art world: they included these newly encountered communities, that above The Ballad of Real Estate (still), 2015, 2-channel flooding a mildew-ridden basement to exagstand in contrast to some of today’s more hd video, 23 min 21 sec inhumane social structures, what Part-time gerate its humidity, (Under Interior); installing facing page, from top Loop the Loop (still), 2009, Suite consistently creates is something that a feebly-blinking light in a dark, abandoned single-channel video, 7 min 32 sec ; Car Video (still), 2012, single-channel hd video, 10 min 31 sec lot in the middle of the city centre, turning is both experimental and poetic. all images Courtesy the artists it into a form of stage set, (Off-off-stage); and Translated from the Korean by Bob Liles

January & February 2016

Aaron Fowler Aaron Fowler graduated from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Aaron Fowler incorporates three-dimendress – is seated at a spinning wheel, modern Arts, Philadelphia and has an mfa from Yale. He lives and sional objects into the elaborately built, fixings at her side (Pringles, Cape Cod chips); works in Harlem, New York. intuitively constructed surfaces of his wild, Fowler is the tired warrior seen entering the Selected by Amanda Hunt, assistant curator, the Studio weighty, massive assemblage-paintings, canvas from the right, armed with provisions Museum, Harlem, New York which are constructed from various pieces for the family. of furniture and crude objects sourced from his local surroundings, The urgency of Fowler’s connection to his family and friends is and which harness great power and feeling. Each work has a narrative alarming in the honesty of its depictions. Where much of contempodrawn from events from his own personal history: cousins incarcer- rary painting embraces abstract, digestible representation disconated, friends gunned down that affected the artist or his family and nected from the figure, Fowler provides an antidote. He grapples with other friends in St. Louis, the city in which he grew up and to which a personal history that connects us to his experience as a black man he remains deeply connected. Fowler’s work is a way of processing – and a member of a black family – in America. He elegantly depicts these events and the weight of their impact – the narrative is in those who have suffered the consequences of blackness in violent, the materials. tragic ways. Understanding and viewing Fowler’s work in the current Fowler often depicts himself as a pirate, or a renegade in his work; moment – which lawyer and social justice activist Bryan Stevenson many of the figures in his paintings allude to religious iconography. calls ‘the second era of the collapse of Reconstruction’ – is imperative. bff (2015) shows the artist and his mother at home in her kitchen. I won’t call the work cathartic, but I am blown away by Fowler’s ability Mother – a welcoming, smiling woman in leopard-print frontier to capture such pain and beauty so honestly.

above Family, 2015, mixed media, 386 × 339 × 41 cm. Courtesy the artist facing page, from top bff, 2015, mixed media, 213 × 264 × 25 cm; He Was, 2015, mixed media, 340 × 419 × 274 cm; Aaron Fowler looks for a way out of the City of Destruction, 2015, mixed media, 227 × 170 × 15 cm. Courtesy the artist and Diane Rosenstein, Los Angeles

ArtReview

selected by Amanda Hunt

January & February 2016

Max Hooper Schneider

above Accidental Menagerie, 2015, mixed media, 305 × 247 × 38 cm facing page Blackwater Jacuzzi, 2015, refurbished jacuzzi, live freshwater ecosystem, pond dye, schooling cyprinid fish, 94 × 216 × 216 cm all images Courtesy the artist and Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles

ArtReview

selected by Jonathan Griffin

Max Hooper Schneider was born in Los Angeles where he a monolith for the end of civilization, The first time I saw Max Hooper Schneider’s continues to live and work. He studied landscape architecture at adorned with a vertical grid of specimen work was at an art fair on a movie ranch. In Harvard Graduate School of Design, with additional degrees trays containing such grotesqueries as a corner of a wooden shack, wet black newts in urban design and biology. He participated in both the 2012 and 2014 editions of the Mongolia Land Art Biennial. bones (some human), a dead snake, barbed nestled in a model of a woman’s cervix, wire, a revolver, maggots and fish tails, all blue-lit and mist-shrouded in their glass Selected by British-born, Los Angeles-based writer, critic, editor and curator Jonathan Griffin encased in resin. In an unlit rear gallery, I tank. The sculpture, Morphogenesis System: spent a long time gazing into a plastic hotMedian Section of Female Pelvis and Fire-Bellied tub’s churning black-dyed water trying to confirm a rumour that it Newt (2014), seemed like a glimpse into the post-human future. The next time I encountered his work, it was raining so hard in contained several large carp. I don’t know whether the shapes that I la that I was afraid to get out of my car. In the Santa Monica Canyon, glimpsed in Blackwater Jacuzzi (2015) were fish or simply the shadows where Schneider had installed his work, Living Epoxy: Disarticulation of my darkening imagination. of Delphinapterus leucas (2013), in the large-glass-windowed space that Schneider is an artist who makes things that would be captisometimes operates as Gallery 169, storm drains chundered deluges vating in any context; in contrast to so many of his peers, he does of water toward the ocean. It was night, and the work, in the form not make art about art. Perhaps that is because of his background of glowing blue beluga whale skeleton hung on chains from a metal in science and design, or his equal enthusiasms for death metal frame. Schneider showed me a photograph in which the same home- and arcana, or defunct technology. On Facebook and Instagram, he made phosphorescent pigment that he used in this work, had been posts photographs of preposterously ugly dolphins, and messages applied to rocks in the Gobi Desert, and also a tank containing such as ‘Does anyone know a grey-market pet shop in Paris?’ His a chrome-plated Buddha’s hand citrus-fruit and live snails. living sculptures raise the stakes for both the viewer and the owner. The title sculpture Schneider recently exhibited at Kayne Griffin Schneider is fiercely alive to the world, and sensitive to our current Corcoran in Los Angeles, in his exhibition Accidental Menagerie (2015), moment at both the micro and macro levels. According to his preincluded no living animals but plenty of dead ones. It looked like apocalyptic art, we may be at the beginning of the end.

January & February 2016

Cédric Nové-Josserand By means of a rigorous work process, Cédric French painter Cédric Nové-Josserand lives and works in Lyon, France. determination of textures is essential to this After studying at the École Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Nové-Josserand creates on his canvases work process. Strasbourg, he received his first exhibition in 1993 in the city’s Musée a live space that operates as an interface Then, Nové-Josserand lifts the frame d’Art Contemporain alongside artist Patrick Neu and more recently participated in the group show Préfiguration at the Centre between a colourful inwardness and the over his head to allow for the blind transd’Art Contemporain - Halle des Bouchers in Vienne, France (2014). light from the outside world. His works mission of his gestural energy on the surface Selected by Sarkis, artist, Paris are junctions between subject and reality of the canvas. In the enclosed and defined and question the pre-eminence of the gesture in painting – or how to space of his studio – which he knows down to the centimetre – he paint without touching the canvas, simply by evoking the essence of engages in a hand-to-hand wrestle with the painting that he handles life. This introspective process allows him to engage with the world, at arm’s length. In full awareness, he manipulates the frame to generate a movement: his mental projection of the paint moving through vibrating images; sublime, inflammable images in fusion. Nové-Josserand stretches raw linen onto human-sized frames on canvas dictates variations of pace to his body. Without following (180 × 180cm, like his height) that he himself builds. He then pours any system, he imposes varying fluctuations to the movement of the the colours onto the canvas, defining their distribution with preci- canvas, at times abrupt and frenetic, at others more reserved and delision to respect a certain balance: the frontiers between each layer of cate; he may sometimes favour a certain inclination to force the fusion colour placed on the surface are left separated by a few centimetres. and interlacing of flows of colours gorged with pure pigments, but The consistency of the paint he uses is also subject to meticulous all the while, he’ll maintain the necessary instability to create these attention: liquid, fluid, transparent, or dense, viscous, thick – the vivid, free-flowing images.

above Un agneau souffle sur son âme pour qu'elle s'envole, 1993, oil on linen, 240 cm × 200 cm facing page, from top Untitled, 2011, vinyl paint on linen, 175 cm × 175 cm; Untitled, 2013, vinyl paint on linen, 175 cm × 175 cm all images Photo: Sébastien Nové-Josserand. Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

selected by Sarkis

Without following any system, he imposes varying fluctuations to the movement of the canvas

January & February 2016

Kelly Akashi

ArtReview

selected by Andrew Berardini

Sculptures are bodies. Objects inscribed with Kelly Akashi is based in Los Angeles. She studied at the University fill their containers like viscous liquid. Her a human stain, often shaped by hands and of Southern California and the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main. series of chandeliers might, unlit, look selfShe has had solo shows at Michael Jon Gallery, Miami; Chin’s contained, but when alight they leak like existing in space, their generally inanimate Push, Highland Park; and Beige Cube, Frankfurt am Main. ruptured flesh often onto pillows placed tangibility a thing to measure our soft tissues Selected by Andrew Berardini, writer, Los Angeles beneath to capture the splatter and the against, their time moving at different speeds than the squelch and splurt of our soft-tissue corpora. Sculptures are chance beauty that comes with hot wax and gravity, or they drip into Frankenstein’s monster, Pygmalion’s dreamgirl, leftovers from one ritual patterns directly onto the floor, leftovers from some strange of a hundred gods who breathed life into clay to make humans. In mass, black or otherwise. The human hand, the artist’s hand, often her curved undulating glass and bronze, the fleshy fragility of her gets cited by writers and theorists on art, its disappearance or appearwax, both cold and candled to melt, the coiled knots like hair braids, ance in any given work an excuse for ideology, and in Kelly’s work Kelly Akashi makes bodies. These forms are not Pygmalion’s cleanest her hand literally appears, cast in wax, again and again, resting on a ivory but rather contain the gross magic of viscera, made of materials half-globe of melted candle, suggestively fingering a glass container. that attract rather than repel. Akashi’s wax candles and structures So much of sculpture may be shaped by fingers, but the glass works tentacle out with slippery skins and sweat when heated. Sea creatures by Kelly Akashi are shaped by breath. In Five Breaths Piercing a Wall, from Rubens’s nightmares, sinister fingers from some otherworldly 2015, each marbled, candied blown glasswork, shaped by a wet gust of the artist’s breath made form, breaks garden of earthly delights. above sslml or 5 breaths piercing a wall, 2015, blown glass the solidity of architecture. Poking out and When Kelly frames her visceral objects in facing page, from top Untitled Objects, 2015, wax, blown through the wall, their slick skin invites the display of a freestanding wall, it is only glass, painted wood; Structure II, 2015, bronze, a toke. Though static beyond breezes and a tease of containment: the walls punched 32 × 22 × 17 cm; Tangle 3, 2015, epoxy, clay, wax, drips, these objects carry the vivid physiwith holes look splooged with spacey brass rings, bronze wire paint, they rest, fallen, on pillows. When cality of their maker in a tension of sensual all images Photos: Zack Balber. Courtesy the artist and her sculptures arc and hang in rooms, they allure and corporeal repulsion. Michael Jon Gallery, Miami & Detroit

January & February 2016

Anne Speier

Anne Speier was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, perhaps printmaking and playing with scale, Food and cooking, tongues and licking, appropriately sharing a home country with fairytale-writing-anddepth and distortion, particularly in the sidesplitting laughing, singing with publishing siblings Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. She now lives and works use of food photography, Speirs imagery gusto, dancing with wild abandon. in Vienna. In 2015 she had solo shows at Silberkuppe, Berlin; Galerie der Stadt Schwaz, Tirol and Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt. could only be possible in a digital age. Emotion, taste – in different senses of the word, and the dynamics of everyday Take the collage Crystal-ball in Refusal – Bad Selected by Helen Sumpter, Senior Editor / Web Editor, ArtReview social situations are central to the collages Moods with the Mentalists (2015), in which and sculptures of Anne Speier. Not that the quartet of larger-than- two painted female protagonists disco-dance round a distorted image life guffawing restaurant staff, depicted in Untitled (Red Cabbage of a crystal ball. Instead of a painted body, one of the women ‘wears’ a / Laughing Cooks) (2014), would probably care about any form of warped photograph of two lemon halves, in much the same way as the etiquette, they’re too preoccupied cracking up in the kitchen as they playing card soldiers in Alice in Wonderland both ‘wear’ and ‘are’ their slice up red cabbage. cards. When expanded into 3d this effect is only heightened. Speier’s Along with her chuckling chefs, Speier’s cast of predominantly sculpture Feeling the Wall (2015), one of a series of three in her exhibut not exclusively female characters, bition Feeling the Contemporary (through above Untitled (Red Cabbage/ Laughing Cooks), 2014, paper, watercolour, acrylic, pencil, inkjet print and varnish. rendered in a colour palette more psyche30 January at Silberkuppe, Berlin), has Courtesy the artist, Neue Alte Brücke, Frankfurt am Main, neither head nor body, but consists only delic than natural, have cartoon features Silberkuppe, Berlin. of a pair of giant dinosaur legs on which evocative of folk or fairytales. They facing page Crystal-ball in Refusal – Bad Moods with sits a long, ribbon-like tongue, lapping might also appear timeless if it wasn’t the Mentalists, 2015, mixed media collage on paper mounted against the gallery wall, feeling the mood for Speier’s multilayered collaging techon aluminium, 150 × 120 × 2 cm. Photo: Timo Ohler. nique. Combining pencil, painting, and in a form of blind tasting. Courtesy the artist and Silberkuppe, Berlin

ArtReview

selected by Helen Sumpter

Instead of a painted body, one of the women ‘wears’ a warped photograph of two lemon halves

January & February 2016

Loretta Fahrenholz Loretta Fahrenholz lives in New York and Berlin. She has had solo with a familiar image: the streets of New Think about your average massive cataexhibitions at Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Kunsthalle York after disaster, dark and deserted and strophic event. (I do. Many times. Every day.) Zurich; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne; Ludlow 38, New York; Project What is the most violent, yet contradictorily Native Informant, London; and Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York. littered with trash and dead bodies (more than a few among the dead are hipsters, so least-easy-to-pin-down thing about it? If Selected by Omer Fast, artist, Berlin this must be Brooklyn). A distorted voice, you answered, “Well, Omar [sic], that would be a disruption in the symbolic order,” then give yourself a week off of cinematically gravelly, sets the scene from somewhere beyond. We reading the news and buy yourself a beer. And while you’re drinking, don’t know what happened but nothing moves. Death is everywhere. let’s remember that one of fiction’s most important jobs is to antic- And then the zombies come out. Crawling, twitching, twisting, stagipate what such a disruption in the symbolic order might look like gering, these are nevertheless not exactly the sluggish undead we and – using the topsy-turvy terms of a disordered world – to actually expect: They’re lithe, acrobatic and young – and they’re black and show us what our present, ordered reality ‘really’ looks like. Here’s an stylish and ghetto. The footage of these zombie dancers achieves an example: the devastating social changes well under way in American ecstatic, uncanny beauty, both electrical and sensual, which is easy to cities during the 1970s are strikingly reflected in the post-apocalyptic consume and very hard to create. And then, just when you’re comfortfilm genre of the same decade (albeit from a very white-male middle- able watching them do their thing, the zombies talk – channelling class perspective.) Movies like The Omega Man (1971), and Escape From everyday encounters they’ve had with the police – and the camera New York (1981) are easily read as parables for white anxiety and white switches to documentary clips of New York after Hurricane Sandy. flight in the face of urban decay and that perennial bogeyman: the Black Lives Matter meets global warming. Sounds heavy, but it’s ever-migrating, ever-threatening, non-white ‘Other’. The fantastic done subtly. The illusion of fiction – or more appropriately of perforveneer of these movies – both compelling and campy – barely masks mance – is never really broken. Moreover, it is at these nodal points the catastrophic real-life social relations they are otherwise depicting. between the ecstatic and the catastrophic that the work smuggles in its true, radical other: the real. It’s also where the work disrupts its Has anything changed? Loretta Fahrenholz’s film Ditch Plains (2013) pays homage to this own symbolic order, presenting its protagonists as both heroic survigenre but also subverts it in delicate ways, offering a stunning, poet- vors and outcasts. I saw Ditch Plains in a group exhibition in Berlin and ically charged portrait of contemporary urban America. It begins I will never forget it.

all images Ditch Plains (stills), 2013, hdv, 30 min. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York

ArtReview

selected by Omer Fast

January & February 2016

Ana Mazzei

Ana Mazzei lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2013/14 she In the first months of 2015, visitors to Pivô – a of ecstasy: face up, arms outstretched and was selected for the residence at Cité des Arts, Paris and in 2014/15 knees bent. The title of the piece refers to the non-profit space located at the iconic Copan she was selected as one of two guest artists for the 46th edition building in downtown São Paulo – were of São Paulo’s Anual de Artes at faap and nominated for the pipa Spanish village that became famous during prize. She is also a founder member of Teatro Facada. greeted by an unusual presence. The recepthe 1960s when four local schoolgirls claimed tion desk had been placed on top of a high to have witnessed the apparition of the Virgin Selected by writer and curator Kiki Mazzucchelli, London and São Paulo wooden platform, so that, upon entering the Mary on several occasions, each time falling lobby, members of the public had to look up in order to communicate on their knees in a trance with their heads tilted back and eyes looking with the gallery’s employee. On the back of the structure, a golden up. However, the religious subtext seems less important than the idea disc attached to a metal bar framed her head like a halo, giving her of performing bodies and the attempt to project a parallel reality that a goddess-like appearance. Placed on the floor facing the desk stood depends on a certain viewpoint or “building a scene that is quickly a tall wooden prop representing a rock. The Monolith and the Sentinel, dissolved”, as Mazzei puts it. as many of Mazzei’s projects, had a theatrical quality, with objects Other works operate in a smaller scale, such as her series of floor arranged as props for some kind of unknown ritualistic ceremony, and installations formed by groups of small geometric works in felt, encompassing the viewer as performer. To the challenge of occupying concrete or wood that resemble architectural models of ancient cities, what is originally a place of passage at Pivô, the artist responded with amphitheatres, or monuments. Far from being formalist exercises, a work that effectively shifted the way in which our bodies behave in these floor works seem imbued with some unidentified narrative composed by mysterious archetypal shapes. This double movement this specific space. The relationship between body and space is, in fact, central to of simultaneously suggesting and holding back the symbolic value Mazzei’s practice. Garabandal (2015), resem- above Monolito e a sentinela, 2015. Photo: Everton Ballardin of form is a recurring feature of her practice. Clearly staged, Mazzei’s own ‘theatre of the bles a piece of furniture built in iron and facing page, from top Speach about the sun, 2015; Et nous, fabric where the seat, armrests and knee pads absurd’ creates fleeting realities that momennous marchons inconnus, 2014 were specifically designed to place the sitter’s tarily disturb our conditioned relationship to all images Courtesy the artist and Galeria Jaqueline body in what the artist describes as a position objects around us. Martins, São Paulo

ArtReview

selected by Kiki Mazzucchelli

January & February 2016

Zahoor ul Akhlaq

ArtReview

selected by Rashid Rana

Zahoor ul Akhlaq was born in Delhi in 1941. He studied at the entrenched. Yet, Akhlaq was able to overturn At first glance, to predict the increased popuNational College of Arts in Lahore (nca), graduating in 1962, expectations and lay open claim to influences larity of an artist’s practice belies a belief in before attending the Hornsey College of Art and the Royal College as diverse as Minimalism and traditional the linear progression of time. As if fame and of Art in London, and then Yale University, New Haven. He taught at Bilking University, Ankara, and served as a professor Indian and Persian manuscript painting. In recognition lie quietly in wait at the end of a at the nca for over 25 years. He died in 1999. retrospect, I believe that Akhlaq’s work set a proverbial tunnel. I am proposing however, Selected by Rashid Rana, artist, Lahore that notions of visibility and temporality are precedent that provided frameworks to many not as simplistic, particularly in Pakistan, contemporary artists, for shaping questions where multiple chronologies coexist simultaneously. Therefore, of identity and its relationship to physical and chronological location. the artist I am choosing to shed light on is Zahoor ul Akhlaq, born Akhlaq’s work has been typically pigeonholed as late modernist, 1941, died 1999, the trajectory of whose career is already in front of us. which is an erroneous and ethnocentric category that presupposes a Akhlaq was my teacher at Lahore’s National College of Arts and his causal relationship between a European and North Atlantic modermentorship and practice has singularly influenced a greater number nity and the particular inquiries of other regions. In my view the term ‘modern’ is misleading in the context of regions such as South of artists from Pakistan than any other figure. Artists are often occupied with a negotiation between the actual Asia, which haven’t undergone ‘modernity’ in the sense it was imagand the remote. The former is something close at hand that can be ined, understood and practiced in the West. Thus works by artists experienced directly, while the latter is composed of indirect sources of from South Asia in that era were often unfairly regarded as derivaknowledge that may be scattered across space and time. Akhlaq’s pecu- tive. However, while the modernist period was one of obsession with liar synthesis of the actual and the remote is manifested in his critical originality in the West, it was an age of concurrent acts of assimilatake on ideas of tradition as well as the notion of a universal present tion and rejection in post-colonial, non-western regions. It is impormoment: he engages with both the past and the present beyond the tant also to note that a posthumous contextualising of Akhlaq’s work limited scope of geographical borders but is happening in light of the increased popuabove Mustard Fields, 1981, oil on wood, 123 × 91 cm. remains unsubscriptive to either. This is all larity of contemporary practices from the Collection Naeem Pasha the more significant if we examine the context region, and is expected to generate fresh readfacing page A Visit to the Inner Sanctum 4, 1996, acrylic of the time in which he practiced where ings that will establish Zahoor ul Akhlaq’s on canvas, 211 × 142 cm. Collection Nurjahan Akhlaq the ‘East’ and ‘West’ dichotomy was more and Sheherezade Alam legacy both there and beyond.

January & February 2016

Janet Biggs Janet Biggs has had solo exhibitions and film screenings at the leads to a reconstructed narrative of time Janet Biggs’s fascination with science may mac Montréal; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington d.c.; and travel. The armature of these works has the have been the motivation that incited her Tampa Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in the first particular quest for travel to dangerous and strength to support unique and fragile arenas International Biennial of Contemporary Art of Cartagena; (for the less brave) inaccessible regions of of impermanence. the Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon; and the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts. the globe, from the High Arctic to witness Biggs’s subtle and nuanced videos the sharp end of global warming for The inform, transform and ultimately confirm Selected by Lynn Hershman Leeson, artist, New York and San Francisco Arctic Trilogy (2010–11), to navigating the the solidity and grace that are embedded in Taklamaken Desert in western China on a camel to make her 2013 film tenuous landscapes. She has culled an aesthetic that balances focus Point of No Return. Like formerly hidden salt mines, for instance. Once with disappearance in her immersive four-channel video about there, she sources material that will be gleaned for memories when Alzheimer’s, Can’t Find My Way Home (2015), while reminding us, in transformed into projected provocations that extend interpretations other works, such as the three films shown at Echo of the Unknown, a of their origin and raise direct and unexpected questions about the recent solo show at the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston, of the atmosenvironment and the nature of humans. Experiencing Biggs’s work pheric moment and divine moments of perceptual shifts.

above Point of No Return (still), 2013, single-channel hd video, 10 min 16 sec facing page, from top Brightness All Around (still), 2011, single-channel hd video, 8 min 36 sec; Fade to White (still), 2010, single-channel hd video, 12 min 28 sec all images Courtesy the artist; Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York; Analix Forever, Geneva; and Connersmith, Washington, dc

ArtReview

selected by Lynn Hershman Leeson

Bigg’s subtle and nuanced videos inform, transform and ultimately confirm the solidity and grace that are embedded in tenuous landscapes

January & February 2016

Ann Hirsch

With an mfa in art video from Syracuse University, New York, Ann Los Angeles-based Ann Hirsch is one of Hirsch’s most recent effort is hornylilHirsch has had solo and two-person exhibitions at Smart Objects, the foremost young artists working with feminist.com, a website the artist updates Los Angeles, American Medium, New York, and Arcadia Missa, issues related to contemporary feminism. regularly with quick, witty videos. In yuppie London. Her work is included in Electronic Superhighway (2016 – 1966) at Whitechapel Gallery, London, 29 January – 15 May. The body, its incarnations online and the life (2015), Hirsch screen-records herself representation of women in popular media scrolling through her own department-store Selected by Karen Archey, writer and curator, New York and Berlin are all her fodder. Yet, perhaps unexpectwedding list to the Lesley Gore 1963 anthem edly, she is also incredibly, profoundly funny, making appearances You Don’t Own Me. Another, vaginal hygiene haul (2014), features Hirsch on reality tv shows and creating short, one-liner videos under the narrating, deadpan, a haul video of various vaginal hygiene products. moniker horny lil feminist (collected as a work of the same title That Hirsch can convincingly perform so many versions of femininity created 2014–15). without coming off as mocking is one of her unique strengths. She One of her earliest works, The Scandalishious Project (2008–9) has been extensively quoted as saying, ‘Whenever [a woman puts her] finds her as an ebullient hipster YouTube CeWebrity who convul- body online, in some way you are in conversation with porn.’ sively dances along to pop songs. Though Hirsch was parodying the Hirsch’s first institutional solo show at mit List this month ‘camwhore’ stereotype, her Scandalishious YouTube channel gained includes the video about her Frank the Entertainer experience, an a real cult following, from an audience unaware this was an act. She installation of her Scandalishious project, and a jailbroken iPad with further experimented with playacting to a mass-media audience the digital work Twelve. This app narrativises Hirsch’s preteen expein her appearance on Frank the Entertainer In A Basement Affair, a 2010 rience in chatrooms and was developed in tandem with her 2013 reality television show airing on vh1 in which she competed as fun- work, Playground, an autobiographical play starring ‘Annie’, a twelveloving artist Annie to wed Frank, a reality tv star who lives in his year-old Hirsch who hangs out on instant messenger and Jobe, a parent’s basement. In Here For You (Or my Brief Love Affair with Frank twenty-seven-year-old guy roaming chat rooms for underage girls. Maresca (2011) she documents the manner she was kicked off the show Ever the frontierswoman, Hirsch has seen both her app and publisher for purposely straying away from her sweet-but-weird girl-next-door banned from the iTunes store, as Apple contends Twelve contains character by singing a lascivious song during a singing contest. content related to child sexuality.

ArtReview

selected by Karen Archey

above Dr. Guttman's Office, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy the artist and Smart Objects, Los Angeles facing page Here For You (Or My Brief Love Affair with Frank Maresca) (stills), 2011, digital video, 14 min. Courtesy the artist

January & February 2016

Tao Hui

this page, from top The Dusk of Teheran, 2014, single channel hd video, 4 min 14 sec; Talk about Body, 2013, single channel hd video, 3 min 45 sec facing page Excessive, 2015, hd video, color, sound 19:32

ArtReview

selected by Aimee Lin

Tao Hui was born in 1987 and raised in a small village in I got to know about Tao Hui’s art through crises and the people who populate enterSichuan (now Chongqing Province), China and now lives his first gallery solo show at Aike-Dellarco, tainment culture such as television drama or and works in Beijing. He was awarded the 2015 Grand Prize Shanghai, this year, in which there was an reality shows at the 19th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil: SouthernPanoramas, São Paulo, Brazil. installation in two parts comprising a sound In the video Talk About Body (2013), Tao sits piece, titled 1 Character, and a silent video, in a bedroom, wearing female Muslim dress Selected by Aimee Lin, editor, ArtReview Asia titled, 7 Materials. To my eyes, the combinaand gives a first-person speech to an assembled tion of sound and visuals proved both charming and clever. In the group about his body type. The speech is an anthropological report on main space the seven video clips that formed 7 Materials (for example Tao’s own body. His latest work Excessive (2015) is a silent video using a group of girls half-buried in a soil pit in the rain, a reporter inter- subtitles to present dialogue. It tells the story of a girl, who was born viewing a corpse), were projected in random order on a screen built with an eleventh finger, the additional digit causing a series of family to resemble a bus shelter. Accompanying this was a small room that dramas. In this work, Tao adopts a strategy used by Lars Von Trier in looked like a telephone box or confessional in which headphones his film Dogville (2003) – he reduced the environment and audio to a relayed the tragic life-experience of a female protagonist. The random minimum, and relied on the character’s performance and the narraassociation between the subjective audio and the visual fragments tives presented to reveal the absurd and dramatic nature of daily life. created a narrative structure that is not only postmodern, but also an Tao’s works are impressive not only because of what they deal open-ended demonstration of Tao’s subversive thinking on the linear with (body, identity, narration and performance of ordinary people’s emotions), but also because they are clever and crafty, sarcastic yet narrative in video art. From his works, it can be seen that Tao has a deep interest in ordi- sincere, showing the artist’s personal insight into human beings nary people’s performative expressions. He often uses first-person and his interesting understanding of narrative structure in moving narration. Sometimes the stories are absurd and the performances of images. His recent work also highlights his experiments with video the characters are exaggerated, which indicates the interesting cross- installation, which perhaps will lead to new language. Something influence between ordinary people’s personal (emotional or identity) that I look forward to seeing.

January & February 2016

Nguyen Phuong Linh

Nguyen Phuong Linh Lives and works in Hanoi, Vietnam. In 2010 she Calling herself a ‘travelling artist’ who goes In 2013 Phuong Linh co-founded founded in:act, an annual international performance art festival in Nhà Sàn Collective, a group of experion endless expeditions to learn and make Hanoi. She also founded Skylines with Flying People, a network of events mental young artists and also the name art, Nguyen Phuong Linh’s activities may and opportunities for artists in Hanoi. of a new alternative art space, associated recall the mobility of Renaissance artists in Selected by curator and writer Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, Ho Chi Minh City with Hanoi’s Nhà Sàn Studio (Vietnam’s Europe in the sixteenth century; however, her journeys reflect more the urge to excavate untold histories, where first non-profit experimental space). The daughter of Nhà Sàn fragmented realities and fictions lie beneath dust, dead generations Studio’s co-founder, Phuong Linh spent her teenage years among the and ordinary communities. In her current project focused on colonial pioneering generation of contemporary artists in Vietnam of the late rubber plantations in Central and Southern Vietnam, Phuong Linh 1990s and early 2000s. has been excavating various facets of the material rubber. It all started Alongside projects such as Dust (2011), for which Phuong Linh one evening two years ago as she wandered through a forest of rubber collected dust from locations in Vietnam, Japan and Korea as the trees surrounded by unnamed graves, and became fascinated by the starting point for works that included images, sculptures and instalred basalt soil found in the area, the hazy darkness, shining moon, lations, Phuong Linh’s most notable project is Salt (2009), for which smell of the forest and the ghost stories told about rubber workers she travelled to five fishermen’s villages to learn about the production who died during the years of French colonisation. of salt by local women and children. The shape of her outstanding Like tracing forensic evidence, Phuong Linh investigates the Boat sculpture (2009) reminds both of a rice grain, symbolising the material in its natural structure and history: how the rubber trees nation’s agricultural tradition and a boat, evoking the history of travelled through the Global South, brought from Africa to Vietnam Vietnamese boat people. The boat shape could also reminiscent of a by Doctor Alexandre Yersin to be cultivated, in the late nineteenth vagina – a recurrent image in Phuong Linh’s earlier feminist work. century; the emergence of the socialist proletariat in the plantations From salt to dust and now rubber, Phuong Linh has mastered her and the contemporary globalised chain of interpretation of materials both formally above Boat, 2012. Photo: Trumpie Photography rubber production, consumption and land and conceptually. Nguyen Phuong Linh’s art facing page, from top Still from an in-progress videowork on brings together the poetry of a lone explorer, exploitation. The artistic results of this colonial rubber plantations; The Dust Project, 2011–12, blueprint photograph research are expected to be showcased in the rich history of an inquisitive narrator and 2016 and 2017. above all, the seduction of aesthetic quality. all images Courtesy the artist and Post Vidai Collection

ArtReview

selected by Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran

It is like tracing forensic evidence: red basalt soil, hazy darkness, shining moon, smell of the forest and ghost stories about rubber workers who had died there…

January & February 2016

Gerard Ortín

above from top Intravia, 2012-14, night walk for groups of 12 participants. Photo: Marc Vives; Vijfhoek, 2015, walk for groups of 8 participants facing page Intravia, 2012-14, night walk for groups of 12 participants. Photo: Mirari Echávarri all images Courtesy the artist

ArtReview

selected by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané

Gerard Ortín graduated in Fine Arts from the University of Barcelona Barcelona has today one of the most David Bestué, Luz Broto, Marc Vives, and currently lives and works in Donostia, San Sebastián, where exciting art scenes I know about and surGabriel Pericàs, Tamara Kuselman, Daniel he completed his Masters degree. He also studied at Barcelona’s l’Aula prisingly one of the most ignored interJacoby, Daniela Ortiz, Ryan Rivadeneyra, de Música Moderna i Jazz (Conservatori del Liceu). nationally. Born and raised in that city Nuria Güell, Rasmus Nilausen, Marc Larré, Selected by Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, artist, Rio de Janeiro but living away for a decade, anytime I Jaume Ferrete, Martin Vitaliti, Ana García come back to the shores of the Mediterranean I’m surprised by the Pineda or Efrén Álvarez are some of the names of a longer list I’m inventiveness of the local artists, and on how little they rely on to being unfair in cutting short. continue their work: even with an almost non-existing governIt is the work of Gerard Ortín that I would like to write about mental support, a very weak gallery scene and art institutions today however. Deeply concerned with both our perception of nature wounded from the economic cuts, the city is still one of the most and the nature of our perception, Ortín’s work explores the contradiccreative ones I know. tions, gaps and translation failures between natural phenomena and My generation (born in the 1970s) grew up with the exhibi- linguistic depiction. tions held at Sala Montcada, Metrònom and Espai 13 as references, Highly sophisticated forms, full of phenomenological and haptic and while those were the spaces one wanted to show at one day, the tricks that trigger the unknown and the uncanny, populate his conceptual course of the city was written by Manuel Borja-Villel, first videos, walks and sound-works, and put into circulation the trianas director of the Fundació Antoni Tàpies and afterwards the macba, gulation between the language, the real and the symbolic, eroding until 2008. There he showed an amazing list of artists – extremely their separation. poetic, deeply conceptual, intellectually rigorous, formally experiThese are works that explore the absence of nature, because the mental and most importantly, able to rewrite the historical account differentiation between the self and nature no longer makes sense. The of contemporary art. body is in the landscape and is the landscape, the micro touches the In this habitat and under the wings of a previous generation of macro, and in the outskirts of a city, a fern and a Coca-Cola bottle share artists such as Ignasi Aballí, Jordi Colomer, Pep Agut, Luis Bisbe, equal status. There’s no more res cogitans and res extensa, but a deeply Alberto Peral or Francesc Ruiz (all involved in teaching or in the intertwined entanglement of beings and of realities. Which is maybe programming of diverse spaces) a new generation sprout: why Ortín is so fond of forests, tunnels, holes, thickets and roots.

January & February 2016

Hannah Black Hannah Black is an artist and writer based in Berlin. Her work has been the material.’ There is a singular talent I’m thinking about how Hannah Black’s shown at W139, Amsterdam, Embassy, Edinburgh, 155 Freeman/Triple for redrawing sensible realities at play work feels, and it feels tough and ready, like Canopy, New York, Museum of Modern Art Warsaw and Sala Luis Miro a new apple, and with the same tendency Quesada Garland, Lima. She was a studio participant on the Whitney isp in Black’s politically charged materials 2013–14 and is a contributing editor at The New Inquiry. and materially charged politics – in her to bruise. It feels unprocessed, like a gust collapse of body and thing and theory. of rain in your face. It delivers the freshSelected by Heather Phillipson, artist, London But ‘theory’ is not even an accurate word, ness of the outdoors, slamming suppositions the way the wind obliterates shoddy structures. It feels restless, because her works, frequently, glow with emotion, until it’s more and like all that is nearly incommunicable. But Black’s work enacts a like ‘flaying’. She applies pressure on structures – sometimes literkind of brutal optimism – it matters to try this. How can I tell? Because ally – with knives. Her marks are invested with as forceful a feeling as the subject – or maker – can bear. They are alert to more, cut into my nerves are snapping. Black writes, makes videos and objects, draws, speaks. She calls out more, leave more exposed. Because, Black seems to say, there is a volley gender, race, class, sex, sexuality, love, subjugation…but, above all, she between minds and bodies, ricketiness is inevitable, as are cracks and shoves us into our incarnate selves, contiguous with these constructs, eruptions. Black’s works bear the precise opposite of heavily managed until to define Black’s work via medium/message feels wide of the surfaces. Appearances are disdained. Nothing gets polished here. point. What is the point? Black gives weight – to bodies, and inte- Each expression arrives authoritative and trembling. riors. Even her tweets have the impact of mouths or fists – popping up According to Hejinian, ‘The shark doesn’t sleep…anxiety is vigito lick or smack at skin. They open living wounds, and dare to just touch lant’, and so I take Black’s observations seriously – as a shark. Hannah them. Anything is worthy of Black’s attention, especially anything we Black is that rare combination: a really vigilant thinker, maker and disregard, until, cumulatively, Black defines what attention is. writer. She has a way of making other comments seem both overdone The poet Lyn Hejinian wrote that, ‘If…poetic language contrib- and underdone. She is virtuosic, without display. Black just steps up utes critically to making realities sensible, it must address both and confronts major problems. Or rather, she makes clear: there are the material character of the political and the political character of no minor problems.

this page, from top left Not You, 2015 (installation view); Blanket (Etihad), 2015, airline blanket, shelf, perspex, 87 × 120 × 28 cm; Blanket (Lufthansa), 2015, airline blanket, shelf, perspex, 812 × 121 × 26 cm facing page Black Quadrilateral 1, 2015, steel, matt emulsion colour matched to artist’s arm painted on mdf board, 183 × 243 × 40 cm all images Photos: Lucie McLaughlin. Courtesy Arcadia Missa, London

ArtReview

selected by Heather Phillipson

She calls out gender, race, class, sex, sexuality, love, subjugation… but, above all, she shoves us into our incarnate selves

January & February 2016

Julia Weist

At the time of writing this piece, there are Weist’s meddling with Steinbach’s search Born and based in New York, Julia Weist has a bfa from Cooper Union School of Art and a Masters in Library and Information 2,810 results on Google for the word ‘parbunresults brings up nuanced questions about Science from Pratt Institute. She has a solo show at New York’s 83 how meaning is constructed: is Steinbach’s kells’. When I first looked it up, Google only Pitt Street, through 21 February. idea of the work’s subject more legitimate served up one result: Julia Weist’s website. Selected by Orit Gat, writer and critic, New York and London than a meaning repeatedly dispersed in Parbunkells means ‘coming together through the binding of two ropes’, and the word hadn’t been used much reputable art magazines? Does weighting a search result transform since the seventeenth century until in 2015 Julia Weist printed it on the work? And how is Google’s algorithm dictating the way we assess a billboard in Queens, New York as part of public art series 14x48. information. Weist distils these questions into her work, which also She called the project Reach, and whenever someone subsequently includes collections of books deaccessioned from public libraries; an googled the word they would stumble upon a page with a text by ongoing attempt to find and photograph multiples of garage-sale the artist, beginning, ‘This is where I came to be alone. We’re here knickknacks, without using eBay, and a self-penned romance novel together now.’ For each page click a light bulb lit up in Weist’s home titled Sexy Librarian, with an accompanying self-explanatory shelfwork titled, All The Library-Owned Copies Of Sexy Librarian I Was Able To in Upstate New York. Reach was not the first project by Weist to employ Google search Borrow (2009). results. In the work titled After, About, With (2013–15), she skewed the The obscurity of the word parbunkells is so long gone that it now reading of Ham Steinbach’s vinyl wall piece ‘And to think it all started features on Redbubble – online seller of meme-themed T-shirts, with a mouse (1995/2004), by actively manipulating the search results for cards, mugs, totes etc. But the transition from a public artwork to it. By partnering with various writers (I was one of them) she ensured the feeling of being alone on Google is both a unique experience and something that couldn’t exist at any that the same reference – that the work was above After, About, With (detail), 2013–15, other time. Google has become a mediator in fact about Disney – was planted in artivinyl lettering, iPad with search result set, instant film, through which we understand the world. cles in numerous publications from the Paris artist book. Courtesy the artist The implications thereof has become, in Review to the Brooklyn Rail. The Disney reading facing page Reach, 2015, billboard, search result set, Weist’s work, a subject that is as poetic as it became the most commonly found record of webpage, lamp in the artist’s home. Courtesy the artist the work’s meaning. At least if you googled it. is necessary. and 14 × 48, New York

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ArtReview

selected by Orit Gat

January & February 2016

101

Maria Taniguchi

Her works address not only how art is fabricated in-studio, but also how its materials are sourced

102

ArtReview

selected by Lauren Cornell

Time is material in Maria Taniguchi’s large- Maria Taniguchi was born in Dumaguete in the Philippines and [they] take time and help me regulate my lives and works in Manila. She is currently participating in the scale acrylic paintings, each one composed own production, my thinking. They set the 8th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, through 10 April of hundreds of small painted rectangles, tone for the rest of my work.’ 2016, and is the winner of the 2015 Hugo Boss Asia Art Award. in a brick-wall pattern. The artist outlines The tone in the rest of Taniguchi’s work, Selected by Lauren Cornell, curator and associate director the gridded composition onto the canvas which includes video, sculpture and instalof technology initiatives at the New Museum, New York before painting one brick at a time, over a lation, is similarly poetic and languid. The period of months. On first sight of Taniguchi’s works, this writer single-channel, black-and-white video that is part of the work Figure made a connection between her strict, meditative process and the Study (2012), shows a pan around two workers digging in a thick, series i am still alive (1970–2000) by Japanese conceptual artist On lush jungle, catching light as it passes over their arms and faces, Kawara, consisting of 900 telegrams sent to friends and colleagues with the sound of the wind rustling through the leaves; this long, over three decades, all of which carried the succinct titular message. uneventful take ultimately reveals that they are digging for clay. The i am still alive is darker in tone than Taniguchi’s more physically video is accompanied by two clay slabs, the same size as the video demanding work – On Kawara could, in fact, have been dead by the monitor, a connection that suggests a collapse of material distinctime the telegram was received – but the burying of emotion, story tions between them. Taniguchi is attuned to the details of how art and personal detail in an obsessive act, runs parallel in both artists’s is made. Her works address not only how art is fabricated in-studio, work, as does their pairing of the artistic but also how its materials are sourced, how above Untitled, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 304 × 545 × 5 cm. process with the bare fact of living. Of her it is preserved and recreated. And yet each Photo: Nick Ash paintings, Taniguchi has said: ‘People look of her works seems transcendent, capturing facing page Figure Study, 2012, video installation at these works and see abstract pictures, but moments that would otherwise be fleeting in reality they serve a very practical purpose... all images Courtesy the artist and Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin or ignored.

January & February 2016

103

Kyun-Chome

The Japanese female-male duo, comprising Kyun-Chome are an artist duo who came together in 2011. In 2015 by a suicide to hang themselves, they have they showed their work at The Jam Factory, Bangkok, and the Eri Homma and Nabuchi, who started their made serious and risky attempts to focus on Taro Okamoto Memorial Museum, Tokyo, having won the Taro artistic practice after the 2011 Great East the harm we do to others without noticing. Okamoto Memorial Award for Contemporary Art in February. They live in Tokyo. That they manage to be literate in art but Japan Earthquake, is a great example of how art in Japan has become more political in Selected by Ushiro Ryuta, artist and member of Chim↑Pom, Tokyo without any ethical judgment, makes them not only different from the kind of activism the post-Fukushima era. Its works employ radical actions that engage wide-ranging issues such as Fukushima, that is based on social consensus, but also from the many victimsuicide, the Emperor of Japan, is, while retaining a poetic sensi- playing young artists in a society where depression has spread wide bility. But the two artists are introspective persons: Nabuchi is a and fast. hardcore manga maniac, who was cooped up at home for years In 2015 they came to greater attention after they were awarded (‘otaku’). Bridging the gap between the seemingly opposite values the 17th Okamoto Taro Memorial Award for Contemporary Art, one – otaku and politics, they have successfully represented reality in of the biggest art awards in Japan. In a society in which everyone is Japan in a humorous way. From Flower xx (2012), in which the audi- constrained by keeping up with what’s popular on the Internet and ence have to step on a flower bed in order to enter the exhibition by social monitoring, young people are getting increasingly conservspace, to Rhythm of Survive (2015), for that the artists ask people in the ative. As an opposition to this, Kyun-Chome’s future output will street to rope-jump using a rope which had previously been used always be of interest.

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ArtReview

selected by Ushiro Ryuta

this page, from top Flying Carp and Me, 2014, video, 6 min 23 sec; Flow in red, 2013, 1 ton of rice, plaster, warning tape, video facing page New Japan Paradise, 2013, radioactive waste, paint all images Courtesy the artists

January & February 2016

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Juliana Huxtable

above There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed, 2015. Photo: Julieta Cervantes /© moma, New York facing page There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed, 2015. Courtesy the artist

106

ArtReview

selected by Lynn Hershman Leeson

Juliana Huxtable is a Texas-born, New York-based, poet, artist underlying spine of a generational culture For Juliana Huxtable the Internet and social and DJ. She attended Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, where that speaks a multiversed language of provomedia are essential outlets in which to she studied art, gender studies, and human rights. explore the wildest reaches of communicacation. The moma and Performa commission Selected by Lynn Hershman Leeson, artist, New York tion. She embarks on endless escapades and There Are Certain Facts that Cannot Be Disputed and San Francisco forages mutable identities and community (2015) melds samurai-sword-wielding protagcombines in work that reflects a shifting gendered space of being; a onists and an intersexed body scanned into recycled trauma. The Tumblr-ised, mutiplatform arena for collaged rap and visual rapture vulnerable trash and delusional self-history becomes this generation’s that includes those precious elements normally discarded. At the heart shameless ‘other’. The outages and depth of outrageous filters rewards of her excavations, Huxtable unearths a longing for the castoffs and through the creation of seminal trans-craftings that are original and normally throwaway meta-garbage. This becomes the saviour, the often breathtaking.

January & February 2016

107

Em’kal Eyongakpa

Trained as a botanist and ecologist, Em’kal Eyongakpa has exhibited in Remember when uncle Amiri Baraka in what is told and what is left out of the institutions and biennials including Kadist, Paris (2015), draf, London talked about thought being more imporpicture, and why. But he is especially (2015), savvy Contemporary and nbk, Berlin (2014), Sesc_Videobrasil, tant than art and then he went on to say interested in what stays or has stayed in São Paulo (2013), Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester (2012), Dak’Art 2012: Prospects and Challenges), and Bamako Encounters 2011. that ‘to revere art and have no undercollective and transgenerational memostanding of the process that forces it into ries, in ritualistic practices, and what has Selected by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, founder and artistic director of savvy Contemporary, Berlin and curator-at-large of Documenta 14 existence, is finally not even to underbeen passed over generations through stand what art is?’ Well, if uncle Baraka performativity and corpoliteracy, rather had, before his passing on, met the young Cameroonian artist Em’kal than what has been canonised or sculpted in the history books and Eyongakpa (born in 1981), the former – a poet, critic and activist would encyclopaedias. In other words, he is not interested in those collective have found in the latter – an artist, poet and performer – a creator mediums, which Mutabaruka summarises in his 1987 Dub song Dis whose thought forms and deliberations, processes and encounters, Poem as ‘the Bible, your prayer book /Playboy magazine, New York Times, and experiences, agonies, endurances and felicities stand at the core Reader’s Digest /, the cia files, the kgb files.’ of his artistic practice. Inasmuch as Eyongakpa’s experiences and It is fair to say that in his quest to understand the thoughts and processes are his, he is a direct reflection of his society, which is to say processes that force themselves into an existence called art, Eyongakpa he is the singular that reflects the plural, as Jean-Luc Nancy would practices some kind of epistemological disobedience, bringing to the have put it; or in more scientific terms, Eyongakpa is that black body fore some of those things that were once considered irrational and that at the same time is as good an absorber as it is a good emitter ungodly (eg, sorcery) and juxtaposing them with common media of energy. In this process, Eyongakpa’s thoughts, which are indeed considered to be within the realms of the rational, thereby perverting a sphere of human thoughts, the noosphere, are translated into such obvious margins between reality and surreality. photography, video, sculpture, sound, text and embodied in perforEyongakpa’s upcoming work for the São Paulo Biennial places a mances, that one might choose to call art or just containers of ideas. spotlight on fungi-culture, especially mycelial farming in contempoLike many artists of his generation and from the part of the world rary time-based art, tracing an arc between his autochthonous epistewhere he comes from, Eyongakpa is interested in historical narrations, mological systems and imported Western knowledge systems.

108

ArtReview

selected by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung

above Untitled (t)here, 2014, photograph facing page Full Moons Later / Letters from Etokobarek, 2013–14, wires, motors, light, video, sound, found objects, scribblings both images Courtesy the artist

January & February 2016

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Art Featured

Anyhow, the criterion of common sense was never applicable to the history of the human race. Averroës, Kant, Socrates, Newton, Voltaire, could any of them have believed it possible that in the twentieth century the scourge of cities, the poisoner of lungs, the mass murderer and idol of millions would be a metal receptacle on wheels, and that people would actually prefer being crushed to death inside it during frantic weekend exoduses instead of staying, safe and sound, at home? 111

The Oceanic Ecologies of John Akomfrah by Erik Morse

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ArtReview

New screenings of the British filmmaker’s work highlight his long fascination with an identity politics of the (post-)human

facing page and above Vertigo Sea, 2015, three-channel video installation, original format hd colour, video, sound, 48 min

January & February 2016

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ArtReview

Among the standout works in Okwui Enwezor’s All the World’s Futures tenets of postcolonial Marxism. Certainly Vertigo Sea’s numerous at last year’s contentious – and occasionally overwrought – Venice images of vivisected whales, brutalised West African slaves and miBiennale was experimental filmmaker John Akomfrah’s subdued grant corpses littering the Greek shoreline epitomise some of the cine-paean to the ocean, Vertigo Sea (2015). A 48-minute, three-screen most heinous atrocities committed by the West under the aegis of installation bringing together material sourced from thousands Empire. But Akomfrah’s knotty portrait of sea life, of whale and of hours of archival footage, screened alongside various austere, whaler, slave and slave-trader, is neither completely romantic nor Victorian-inspired tableaux of the littoral, Akomfrah’s film explores intransigently macropolitical. Rather, he frames its contents, and a difficult range of histories – from whaling, nuclear testing and deep- actors, as bound by a certain utopian resolve within an oceanic sea executions to the recent Mediterranean migrations – all under the ontology – a frontier of the human oikos in which identity formaheading of what he calls ‘oceanic ontologies’. On view through April tions are determined by continuous diaspora and what Akomfrah at Bristol’s Arnolfini for its uk premiere, Vertigo Sea has been released calls the sea’s “mesh of rhythms and mortalities”. It is not surprising, in combination with a career-long retrospective of Akomfrah’s work then, that he will partner Melville’s incantatory Liberalism with the at Lisson Gallery, London, both of which highlight the auteur’s sui speculative poetics of Williams’s Whale Nation (1988): ‘Free from landgeneris image-making of political identities. based pressures: / …Larger brains evolved, ten times as old as man’s... “There’s a little-known biographical detail,” he explains when we / The accumulated knowledge of the past; / Rumours of ancestors, begin discussing the particular origins of Vertigo Sea, “which is that / …Memories of loss’. I almost drowned twice in [the ocean] as a kid. Once, just escaping, “If you say you’re interested in formations of identity, and those because someone saw me at a beach in Accra being pulled under and formations of identity could be either of the racialised or sexualised swam out and got me. So, in the back of my mind there’s always been or gendered variety, then at some point the space of the aquatic binds this reverence and to some extent a fear of that space.” certain subjects together,” he explains. “So how does one find a way It is this acute attention to collective memory and the personal – to talk about the Vietnamese drowning at sea in their thousands in traits that have imbued all of Akomfrah’s work, beginning during the the [19]70s with political prisoners being dumped at sea by both the 1980s with the avant-garde Black Audio Film Collective (bafc) – that French in Algeria and the militant junta in Argentina? Once you start elevates Vertigo Sea from mere wildlife to connect those things, you begin to ‘I almost drowned twice as a kid. Once, documentary to a dense, philosophthink that if a politics of identity as ical meditation on eco-poetics and the just escaping, because someone saw me opposed to ‘identity politics’ has any value then surely at some point it posthuman condition. Echoing somebeing pulled under and swam out might be important to dwell on the thing of Peter Sloterdijk’s recently and got me. So, in the back of my mind question of sentience itself as a kind translated Spheres Trilogy (originally published in German, 1998–2004) – of register.” there’s always been this reverence which uses images of the bubble and This acuity for metahistory is reand to some extent a fear of that space’ flected in the film’s various intertitles, foams as phenomenological leitmotifs – and Martin Heidegger’s post-Being and Time (1927) essays on ecology, which jump from fifteenth-century Newfoundland to 1970s South Vertigo Sea builds upon the contention that the story of globalisation, Asia, an ambitious trek made all the more profound by its recurin both its political and geographical connotations, commences with ring allusions to the current Libyan sinkings. No doubt part of the present European immigration crisis stems from a First World state the sea and the utopian urge to bisect and ‘conquer’ its frontier. “Even in conventional understandings of settled identities, one of amnesia, Akomfrah contends. A condition that owing to its urban should at least acknowledge that one arrives at this epistemological complacency amid schematic transportation technologies has ceased or ontological idea of settlement by engaging in the process of flight to acknowledge the embedded cosmopolitan impulse of the human to the other,” Akomfrah explains of the film’s metahistorical roots. to move, escape and resettle. “… [T]he ‘here and there’ were intimately bound up with each other.” Akomfrah’s focus on events, themes and characters of the African Interspersed over Vertigo Sea’s soundtrack of burbling spume, news diaspora originate with his cofounding in 1982 of bafc, which reports and whale songs are bardic recitations of Friedrich Nietzsche included current collaborators Trevor Mathison, David Lawson and and Heathcote Williams, as well as Herman Melville’s transcendental Lina Gopaul. Akomfrah, himself, had fled with his mother to London seafarer’s tome Moby-Dick (1851), which supplied the project’s initial, from Ghana immediately following the country’s 1966 coup, and ecological springboard. “It’s sold to you as a novel, and of course it is his own experiences of both migration and multicultural identity a novel,” says Akomfrah. “But it’s also this vast, philosophical specu- informed the collective’s aim to merge a black, British urban politics lation about aquatic space, and the way in which that space [poses] with a radical, modernist aesthetic. The latter was, for the aspiring questions of mortality, of becoming, of relativity, the demarcations director, represented in the filmworks of Dziga Vertov, Andrei of human and nonhuman. And, of course, the coming of multicul- Tarkovsky and Sergei Eisenstein, among many others, which he first tures and how they are formed. All of these are the speculative shape encountered while studying sociology at Portsmouth Polytechnic. of Moby-Dick… There’s a discursivity to it, of those protean forms and Akomfrah’s first directorial feature with bafc, Handsworth Songs (1986), chronicles the riots in that area of Birmingham with shapes that most authors get into over 10 or 20 novels.” Vertigo Sea’s thematic emphasis on Melville’s urtext on the just such a hybridity of social realism and formal experimentaAmerican colonial imaginary also complicates tion, displaying ‘the serene confidence of its facing page Vertigo Sea, 2015, what might be assumed, at least initially, to be experimental essayism’, according to Mark three-channel video installation, original format a film directed towards the more doctrinaire Fisher, writing in a 2011 issue of Sight & Sound. hd colour, video, sound, 48 min

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‘Instead of easy didacticism, the film offers a complex palimpsest comprising archive material, an empathic sound design and footage shot by the Collective during and after the riots.’ Subsequent films like Seven Songs for Malcolm X (1993), The Last Angel of History (1995) and Riot (1999), many of which were broadcast on Channel 4 as the last vestiges of ‘workshop’-era cinema, followed a similar experimental structure, combining assiduously researched archival footage with formalist interventions of sound, elliptical storytelling and dramatic reenactments. The end of the bafc in 1998, however, marked a distinct shift in Akomfrah’s aesthetic, one that would turn away from what critic Brian Winston calls a ‘Griersonian’ model of empiricist documentary towards a utopian ideal, in which explicit questions of place-ness, nomadism and posthumanism would take precedent. “I think the urban paradigm was eating itself as a cliché,” he explains. “Because I just felt it was necessary to try and avoid this kind of cul-de-sac we could potentially find ourselves landing in. You want to find another way of coming at the same questions or even ask yourself different questions… [And] part of it is this turn from the dystopian scenarios of Last Angel, for instance, to the utopian scenario of The Call of Mist” – alluding to his 1998 short film that meditates on the death of his mother alongside topics like cloning, technology and landscape. The Call of Mist and Memory Room 451 (1997) also signal the filmmaker’s deployment of neo-expressionist tableaux and a saturated, digital colour palette. Their focus on narrative and phenomenological abstractions, blending rich chromatic sequences with references to various memories, dreams and myth-structures, anticipate

Akomfrah’s Romantic figurations of liquid and other natural ecologies, which come to supplant the dominant urban topos situating most of the bafc projects. Similarly, The Nine Muses (2012), perhaps Akomfrah at his most densely literary, pairs extensive footage of the Alaskan tundra and English Shires with bricolaged recitations of Homer, James Joyce and T.S. Eliot to evoke a sense of the sublime in the perambulatory histories of migration and settlement. “Underpinning all of that is a deeply felt need to return to some ‘big questions,’” he concludes. “And to pose the question of identity inside those larger questions of being and becoming.” For Akomfrah, the human is not only a rational animal, he is also an assemblage of climates, cartographies and languages, both inhabiting and resisting the territories across which he ceaselessly moves. As the consummation of this intensifying eco-poeticism in his filmography, Vertigo Sea shifts the conventions of social documentary from the purview of the human agent to that of the earth, exploring an ontology in which global man is placed in service of the sea. Its rich, aqueous panoramas, spread from screen to screen, remind us of Whale Nation’s closing verse: ‘From space, the planet is blue / From space, the planet is the territory / Not of humans, but of the whale.’ In capturing this world, Akomfrah reorients the possibilities of identity politics from conventional sociocultural categorisations of race, gender and sexuality to a politics of being itself. ar Vertigo Sea is on show at the Arnolfini, Bristol, from 16 January to 10 April. John Akomfrah’s work is also on show at Lisson Gallery, London, from 22 January to 5 March

Handsworth Songs, 1986, original format single-channel 16mm colour film, sound, 59 min

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The Last Angel of History, 1995, single-channel colour video, 45 min all images © Smoking Dogs Films. Courtesy Lisson Gallery, London, Milan & New York

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Call for entries

Summer Exhibition 2016

Entry by digital submission only Submission deadline 12 February 2016 roy.ac/submit NORMAN ACKROYD RA © PHIL SAYER

Eugène Delacroix, Lion Hunt (detail), 1861 © The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois

Calum Colvin Portrait of Charles Edward Stuart (after William Mosman)

Limited Edition Print Giclée print on 310gsm archival quality paper. Signed and hand numbered by the artist. £295 from the National Galleries of Scotland online shop Edition of 100, plus one artist’s proof. Size 29.7 x 40cm. Print is unframed and unmounted.

17 February – 22 May 2016 Book now Members go free

nationalgallery.org.uk

Something and Nothing Johanna Calle’s Caja de Procesos How does an artist construct her visual language? Often via a process that is buried beneath a finished ‘result’. Johanna Calle’s Caja de Procesos series is an exception to this, appearing to be part diary, part collection of hieroglyphs, part cabinet of curiosities and perhaps also nothing more than a memo to self

artreview How did the Caja de Procesos works first come about? johanna calle I used to hang small pieces of work that were the result of research processes on the walls of my studio. By placing the loose pieces one next to another, they somehow began to resemble signs that allowed me to make visual references and subjective associations. This worked as a sort of grammar for constructing other works. There was a certain order that I regarded as sentences. Then I decided to frame them in order to preserve the unity of information. ar What guides the selection of items in each box? jc The selection and sequence of items respond to free associations and a subjective way to read

each sign/piece. It is an accident. Each box is an accident by itself. At the beginning, people thought that these boxes were made of sketches, but they are not. The pieces are finished works. Techinques are completely different in each item; what I try to do is to write with them. Each box is like a complete sentence. Each box is different. Each sentence is different.

they start relating to each other. Many different processes are revealed. The range varies from traditional drawing processes to not traditional ones (like drawing with wire, puncturing wood, using screws as points, etc). In sum, from the point of view of mediums, these boxes are an inventory of different processes that I have been using in my art practice.

ar And what process do they reveal?

ar What do you hope to convey by showing them?

jc Each box is composed of several items treated in singular ways. Form, subject and surface in each piece is a result of a research process on how to use specific materials or how to address certain facts. When putting together pieces from different dates, in different mediums, of different sizes and with different characteristics,

jc They show somehow a visual grammar I use in composing works, but nothing in particular, as well. Each box is a summary, testimonies and records of my researches. They comprise the result of my researches on materials, subject matters and different techniques I have developed.

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Caja de Procesos 1, mixed media, 2008–10, 166 × 96 × 5 cm

Caja de Procesos 2, 2008–10, mixed media, 66 × 80 × 5 cm

Caja de Procesos 3, 2008–10, mixed media, 66 × 68 × 5 cm

Caja de Procesos 4, 2008–10, mixed media, 66 × 107 × 5 cm

Caja de Procesos 5, 2008–10, mixed media, 66 × 107 × 5 cm all works © Pérez & Calle. Photos: O. Monsalve. Courtesy Pérez & Calle and Casas Riegner, Bogotá

Art Reviewed

A smart machine will first consider which is more worth its while: to perform the given task or, instead, to figure some way out of it. Whichever is easier. And why indeed should it behave otherwise, being truly intelligent? For true intelligence demands choice, internal freedom 131

Kota Ezawa Thirteen Stolen Works Murray Guy, New York 30 October – 9 December It starts after midnight. 00:47 to be exact. 17 March 1990. The security camera footage shows a man in a trenchcoat walking into a building. Camera 2 is directed at the street outside where a car awaits, its lights on. Six minutes later, the man in the trench gets into the car, which leaves the frame. The footage is from a video released by the fbi in August 2015 of the feed from the cctvs at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum one night before the biggest art heist in history. On 18 March, two men disguised as Boston policemen coaxed a nighttime museum guard into letting them into the building and later left

with 13 artworks estimated to be worth upwards of $500 million. The fbi released the video with the hope that members of the public would recognise the suspect from the night before. In his show Thirteen Stolen Works of Art and a Videotape, Kota Ezawa recreates not only the security footage but also the stolen artworks. The footage is presented as a six-minute animation, looped on two screens. Ezawa uses the same software to make digitised renderings of the stolen masterpieces, which are presented in lightboxes, as he does to animate the video. The aesthetic is highly stylised. For example, a car is simplified into a box with two lights

The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, 2015, led lightbox, 157 × 127 cm. Courtesy Murray Guy, New York

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in its front, a Manet looks like a completed colour-by-numbers sheet, the Vermeer a scene from South Park. The video looks half-noir, half-Pink Panther. The images are recognisable, their relation to the original material plain to see, but they communicate a generic nature because of the repetition of style. One of the reasons the Gardner theft remains so present is that the museum’s bylaws stipulate that no work may be removed from display. Since the thieves cut the canvases out of their frames, the latter remain hanging on their walls in Boston. The absence of Vermeer’s The Concert (1658–60), the five Degas drawings,

the Manet portrait, the three Rembrandts is now institutionalised. Ezawa’s digital versions are proxies of works that are now part of some incidental conceptual gambit. Yes, they may not be the real thing, but they give presence to this absence. Is Ezawa relying too heavily on the history that informs this project? Possibly, but the story is enough for him to create a memorable statement on the circulation of images. Only, Ezawa’s practice has not changed much with the development of imaging technologies. His past works are similar, digital renderings made of recognisable videos

(the jfk shooting, John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s ‘Bed-in’ for peace) and photographs (by photographers from Nan Goldin to Ansel Adams in the project The History of Photography Remix, 2004–06). In all, the aesthetic remains the same: highly stylised, simplified images not much informed by current thinking about the effect of Google Images on circulation, or the way that Photoshop has changed how we think about photography’s documentary status. Ezawa’s work reflects a very different strand of thinking about image circulation, one that is about the gap between how we remember an image and what it really was. The original is never shown

next to his transformed version: there’s no need for it. It’s already presumed to be there in the viewer’s mind. Ezawa refers to his process as ‘image theft’, but it’s not exactly that. Though he appropriates existing material, be it video footage, paintings or classic photography, the transformations wrought by his work make the latter appear at once suspicious and inconspicuous, like they belong on television and not as objects unto themselves. Maybe that’s the only way we’d like to experience events like the O.J. Simpson trial, the jfk murder or the Gardner heist: as fiction, not reality. Orit Gat

A Lady and Gentleman in Black, 2015, led lightbox, 132 × 109 cm. Courtesy Murray Guy, New York

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Political Populism Kunsthalle Wien 7 November – 7 February The sun glimmers over a desert; a complex of buildings, fenced in by barbed wire, enters the image; an American flag waves in the wind. Suddenly a transporter approaches, the gate to the mysterious grounds opens and men climb out. In his two-channel video installation Eighty Nine Landscapes (2015), Trevor Paglen shows moving-image clips of more-or-less secret, high-security zones of the nsa and gchq , Britain’s intelligence service. The 24-minute film discloses these public institutions in long, almost meditative shots. The resulting impressionistic blurredness gives the images a romantic beauty while their shimmering quality recalls the difficult circumstances under which the revealing images were taken. This aestheticisation of the film not only distinguishes Eighty Nine Landscapes from a documentary film, it charges the film with tension: the length of the shots constructs an arc of suspense, suggestively drawing the viewer into the goings-on. Eighty Nine Landscapes is currently part of Kunsthalle Wien’s clever and engaged, 25-artist group show Political Populism, the concept of which can be easily deduced from this striking video installation. On one hand, the works selected by Nicolaus Schafhausen, the director of Kunsthalle Wien, address themes such as

surveillance, economic crisis or the refugee crisis – that is, themes that rightwing populists in Europe today are using to position themselves, more or less successfully, as the people’s alternative to democratic parties. On the other hand, the works presented here demonstrate populist strategies yet draw on them to refute populism. The strategy of dramatisation just described is found throughout the exhibition as often as that of simplification, personalisation and polarisation. These very strategies are of decisive importance for any sort of populism. Goshka Macuga’s sculpture Model for a Sculpture (Family) (2011) is an excellent example of the populist strategy of simplification. In the middle of the exhibition stands a typical nuclear family: mother, father and a small child reading a book. This 7m-high group of figures, made of plaster and cement, is inflated to be larger than life and depicted in a sort of crude realism. In its naive monumentality, Macuga’s family portrait, which has already been propagated by National Socialists, ultimately reveals itself to be a stultifying ideology, ignoring with propagandistic unconditionality other possible forms of cohabitation. Philosophers such as Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau have asserted that populism

Hito Steyerl, Factory of the Sun (video still), 2015. Courtesy the artist

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is not solely reprehensible, for it can bring drama and emotionality into political discourse. In this regard Mouffe stresses that polarising conflicts between ‘opposing camps’ and ‘the political mobilisation of passions’ are essential for democratic processes; otherwise, politics would be left to bureaucratic and ultimately elite, neoliberal consensus democrats. In her installation Factory of the Sun (2015), Hito Steyerl carries polarising forms of emotional ‘politainment’ to the extreme. Her video installation uses popular genres such as tv news, video war games and karaoke for political video art. The work, which was already shown at the Venice Biennale to great acclaim, addresses the precarious role played in today’s democracies by large banks like Deutsche Bank. A swanky spokesman for the financial institution announces: “Deutsche Bank did not make Greece go broke.” Almost sounding critical of the system, he adds: “This is a free country, a democracy. I can tell you whatever I want.” Cut, to the aesthetic of a computer game, as an alleged terrorist is shot. The bank confesses to the deed, “but not in the actual sense”. Raimar Stange Translated from the German by Jonathan Lutes

Mark Leckey + Alessandro Raho We Transfer Secession, Vienna 11 September – 1 November Like most of us, Mark Leckey is haunted by images. Stuck on them, obsessed by them. Some – stills or snippets of moving pictures, familiar or uncannily foreign forms – might echo in his head for years. The artist describes these pictures, in this show’s press materials, as an ‘autistic’ grid: the irrational detritus and highlights in the visual life of a modern person, in this case, a Generation x man from the north of England. We Transfer, Leckey’s first solo exhibition in Austria (which, under the auspices of Secession’s ‘invite a friend’ offer, he chose to share to a degree with Alessandro Raho), is in part the physical manifestation of his attempt to exorcise these images; to work with them by working through them with healthy doses of both humour and darkness. On the walls of the Secession’s darkened main space, ten led screens – some of them having appeared singly or in other constellations within other shows in Leckey’s busy exhibiting schedule – act as supersize gifs, showing short loops of images that the artist’s synapses have fixated upon: a fishnet-stockinged female leg, dancing dudes, the ominous shadow of Disney’s

Pinocchio as donkey boy, a closeup of a drag queen’s face, a full moon in clouds, a bobbing, disembodied penis-like object (a digital take on Herman Makkink’s Rocking Machine from 1969, well known to fans of A Clockwork Orange), an rgb abstraction in bold patterns of, yes, red, green and blue. In one of the exhibition’s smaller side spaces, the motif of an additional led screen, The Ecstasy of Always Bursting Forth (2013) – in which a bespectacled older man in polka-dotted drag (a rather poignant still of an unnamed German actor from Billy Wilder’s 1961 film One, Two, Three) kneels as if in ecstatic prayer – gets much closer examination by both Leckey and Raho. The screen version shows the man in black and white, with only the polka dots of his dress and hat flickering in glaring rgb; but the image repeats in various sizes and iterations elsewhere in the room. Leckey’s versions appear as black-and-white and colourised silkscreens; the gentler, smaller painted canvases are by Raho, whom Leckey also invited to show in the Graphisches Kabinett upstairs. A few steps further into the room’s black box,

a ‘moving still’ sees Leckey’s own wide eyes peering from behind the Polka Dot Man’s specs in a closeup. It is enough to make a viewer gasp, then laugh – Leckey, here, pokes fun at his own autistic grid for ‘sticking’ to this image enough to dedicate two rooms to it and even become part of it; and at us for joining in on the joke. It’s unusual these days to see a Leckey exhibition that’s largely in two dimensions (another black box shows a series of his older films twice a day, plus a new film based on Louise Bourgeois’s Nature Study, 1984). The led pieces are in fact distinctively painterly – mentally erase their electric cords and they are even displayed as such, and their psychedelic approach and range call Sigmar Polke to mind. But filtering through all the while are Leckey’s perennial concerns with the notions of object personification, image replication and how the technology humans create in turn creates humans. In We Transfer, Leckey succeeds in converting his visual obsessions into ours; here his exorcism, indeed transcendence, becomes our thought exercise. Kimberly Bradley

Mark Leckey, We Transfer, 2015 (installation view, Living Within The Ecstasy of Always Bursting Forth, Secession, 2015). Photo: Iris Ranzinger. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin, Cologne & New York; Cabinet, London; and Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York

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Roman Signer Sculptures Art: Concept, Paris 30 October – 23 December Among the ten sculptures in Roman Signer’s fifth exhibition at Art: Concept is Stiefel RotBlau (2015), a pair of rubber boots displayed in a poorly lit, glass-fronted wooden box. In his studio, the seventy-seven-year old Swiss artist had ignited blue and red smoke-bombs inside the right and left shoes respectively, soiling the case internally with soot and dyes. With its burnt blue and red hues – colours that, since the terrorist attacks in Paris, have never felt so patriotic – the dim ensemble on a table in a back corner now conjures, however involuntarily, the horror and desolation that overtook the city at nightfall on 13 November. Yet to be fair, the first time I saw Signer’s grimy boots, prior to the deadly attacks, I was absolutely thrilled at the prospect of ironising explosive art. My digression about the sorrow they convey to me in the aftermath is only to demonstrate the evocative and cathartic power of the artist’s unconventional aesthetics, which are concerned with completely nonsensical yet meticulously orchestrated engineering experiments that propel trifling forms into high art. On the opening night, for example, Signer set off Pommery (2015), cautiously inserting a half-opened bottle of champagne – whose cork he’d just painted blue – into a curved metallic tube fixed on a metre-high post at the entrance. Pressure popped the cork out of the other end

like a bullet: it hit the opposite wall, leaving a dribbly stain. Signer then proceeded not to serve the champagne and left the full bottle on the floor as part of his sculpture, thus keeping all subsequent visitors thirsty upon entering. While creating suspense out of ordinary objects, diverting their purpose absurdly, he certainly enjoys teasing us as much as he likes to play with fire. Kabine (2015), the remains of an explosive charge in a cratered piece of clay, which was detonated outside, is no exception: Signer blew it up from a wooden booth by sneezing into a microphone connected to the payload through an amplifier (a wall text informs us), then moved the entire apparatus into the gallery, leaving the microphone on for the curious to cough into, should they so wish. Any sympathetic sneezing would be drowned out by the cacophony produced by three other sculptures. While Stuhl (2014), in which the front legs of a motorised chair rocking up and down on its back legs plunge in and out of a basin filled with water, damply beats time throughout the gallery, the remainder truly makes a terrific racket. Kamin (2012) resembles a chimney pierced at eye-level by a hole: visitors are invited to throw in red crumpled sheets of paper, metaphorical flames that are quickly expelled by a hidden fan, sparkling around until they fall and somebody else picks them up to repeat

Stiefel Rot-Blau, 2015, mixed media, dimensions variable. Photo: Dorine Potel. Courtesy the artist and Art: Concept, Paris

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the gesture. Ventilator mit Brett (2015) simply consists of a sheet of hardboard, its base aligned with a wall, blown continually back and forth by the gusts of another fan, which faces it. Contrary to the other artworks, these three don’t crystallise any past explosion or action, but are meant to be in perpetual motion during opening hours (if, that is, they don’t drive the staff insane). A tension between the finite and the infinite thus informs the exhibition as a whole, further symbolised by Uhr (2008), a shallow wooden box that supports a stopped clock next to a cut-out hole of the same shape, which confronts an instant – the frozen hands – against eternity – the void. Between these two poles, some of Signer’s actions are purposely constrained. For Drei Regenschirme gleichzeitig geöfnet (2014), he had electrically triggered in his studio the simultaneous opening of three umbrellas within a vitrine too narrow to contain their full extension, therefore ending up displaying them neither completely put up nor down. Finally Kajak (2014) offers another paradox: here, the artist cut a kayak – his signature form – into three sections, confined the middle one with the cockpit in a trunk, which he left opened for view, and threw out the others. Forever amputated, yet ready to ship. Violaine Boutet de Monvel

Lucy McKenzie Inspired by an Atlas of Leprosy Galerie Buchholz, Berlin 20 November – 23 January Charlottenburg, in West Berlin, has undergone a makeover that aims to rejuvenate its moribund shopping thoroughfare, the Kurfürstendamm, and its sleepy memories of Weimar-era dynamism. There are nightspots named for a once-glorious past (the Grosz Restaurant, the Lang Bar); nearby on upmarket Fasanenstrasse, meanwhile, Lucy McKenzie has revamped the interior of a Wilhelmine apartment on the second floor of Galerie Buchholz. The Glasgwegian artist’s penchant for trompe l’oeil renderings features strongly here: there is much faux wood, imitationmarble surfacing and other illusionist trickery. McKenzie acquired her proficiency in these techniques at an artisanal school in Brussels where white work-coats and a deferential attitude to patrons are reputedly the norm. The spaces she simulates here belong to the world of business leaders, a zone of capitalist reality. The first room is an office of sorts, with paintings of pinboards from McKenzie’s Quodlibet series (all works 2015) featuring tax returns and business-account credit-card correspondence from the Royal Bank of Scotland. Other memos congratulate the absent owner on their recent appointment as a company director. In the corridor/waiting

room a table is covered with painted French interior design magazines; elsewhere an impressively large painting details a map of Holland, its cities and their coats of arms highlighted. The sun is depicted shining its beneficent rays over the territory; a goddess extends her hand over the lucky homeland. Then there is a sparsely furnished, cell-like spare bedroom for the maid with a portrait of the Virgin Mary looking down on a stripped and striped mattress. The main office-space features a mighty faux-marble desk on which sit two flat painted items, a cup of coffee and an iPhone. There’s an actual lamp in the shape of a seashell that recalls Victor Horta’s stylings. On the wall is another large canvas, this time illustrating the Dutch East Indies, the colonised lands, with a sailor staring out at the conquered treasure, a cannon at his feet. Is this an oil company office belonging to Shell, perhaps? Maybe I’m imagining a briny tang of Conradian skullduggery… The main bedroom features another eye-tricking gimmick, a lilac-coloured makeup bag, opened up like a mussel that includes a mascara stick below a real mirror. Two comically dull abstracts line the walls of this corporate hell. The bathroom is rendered as one large

canvas, an Oskar Schlemmer-like linearity conveying some stairs. Later I peer behind a closed door and discover a real bathroom: the materiality of its white tiles momentarily shocks. Quite what all this has to do with leprosy, as per the title, is not immediately apparent; perhaps the transactions imagined here are unclean. Maybe with those maps in mind we are meant to think of Indonesia today, where there are an estimated 16,000 new cases a year, a forgotten side-effect of Western rapacity. McKenzie’s rooms have none of the spooky menace or implied horror of Mike Nelson’s or Gregor Schneider’s. Instead there is an autistic delight in perfection of execution, in technique, the handmade, that dares to be labelled as regressive, even conservative. But the ambiguity of what we see extends to its meaning. Lapidary verities are not to be trusted. It is not clear what has ‘inspired’ this work, and there is the lingering suspicion that our legs are being ever so gently pulled. Speaking of legs: be careful of the carpet at the top of the stairs as you leave; it is ripped and ready to trip you up. And it is not a painting. McKenzie’s revivalist style here, as with the cosmetic remaking of West Berlin, is a coy, risky affair, not so much mock-rock then as mock bloc. John Quin

Quodlibet lxi (Cerfontaine Coiffeuse), 2015, oil on canvas stretched on mdf, copper, mirror, 142 × 98 × 50 cm. Courtesy Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Berlin & New York

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Scott Myles Spiral Bound Meyer Riegger, Berlin 21 November – 19 December The fellowship of the West End Presbyterian Church in Richmond, Virginia, worships in a building slightly less than holy, unless you consider capitalism a clandestine religion. It used to be a catalogue showroom for Best Products, a sort of us equivalent to Argos that went bankrupt during the mid-1990s. The Presbyterians not only run the space as a church, but also as a refuge for asylum seekers and as a food bank. There used to be consumer goods here; now, thanks to the reverberations of the American Way, they’re here again. Not only that, but the building was designed – by James Wines of architecture practice site – in a way that almost predicts this doleful trajectory, as a ‘ruin in reverse’ that was built to look weathered from the start. Such are some of the ironies that attend Scott Myles’s investigation into this specific, yet symbolic, historical continuum – which here takes the form of a series of canvases the dimensions of the artist’s studio door in Glasgow, overlaid with screenprinted ‘True-Grain’ film on which are imprinted dense confluxes of photographic material related to the Richmond church and its byzantine past.

The above, though, is nevertheless just a thumbnail sketch of Myles’s research-driven process, which also involved him interviewing Wines – a moment memorialised in one of the tenebrous, wall-based works, in which we can see Myles’s hand holding the keys to the architect’s office – and, elsewhere, discovering how the Best owners were major art collectors and had sought to offer Wines, himself a former artist, Best products in return for a piece of his art. Art and commercial products, both subject to rises and falls in their fortunes, entangle strongly here. Their meshing, indeed, is suggested in the very materiality of Myles’s works, which are so dense in their multiple exposures that one can’t always see what’s going on: a fragment of architecture here, some shelves containing food-bank products there, an abstract painting that might have belonged to the Best owners, all coalescing into merging forms. We see the past, and present, through a print darkly. There are two ways into this. You either go down the footnote-rich rabbit hole of Myles’s investigations, admiring his ability to ferret out mordant connections, or you take on the poetics

of his aesthetic, which signals the complexity and unpredictability of the historical process and, particularly, the instabilities and switchbacks that attend capitalism. It’s notable that the work leads back, quite literally, to Myles’s studio door, ie, to art, and that his countermanding interest is in gift exchange. In a recent project titled Potlatch (2014), not on display, he replaced the gift-wrapping paper for Galeries Lafayette Maison with Bible paper imprinted with images of Guy Debord’s shuttered house: the inactivity of the great critic of consumerism was here reversed into mobility and circulation emanating from a centre of consumption, and pinned to the notion of the gift. One senses that Myles, when not engaged in attentive archive delving, has closely read Lewis Hyde’s classic 1983 study of art as pay-it-forward contribution, The Gift. One takeaway from Spiral Bound and its food-bank endpoint might be that if capitalism continues to unravel and spread ruination, we are bound to spiral back towards older forms of exchange and generosity – ones in which art, while currently conflated with commerce, might still be exemplary. Martin Herbert

Untitled, 2015, screenprint and true grain on canvas, a4 inkjet on paper, envelope, 204 × 120 × 10 cm. Courtesy Meyer Riegger, Berlin

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ArtReview

Le caselle di Anton Bruhin (**i.e. Anton Bruhin’s “boxes”, “squares” or “pigeonholes”**) Istituto Svizzero, Milan 23 October – 12 December It’s easy to fall in love with Anton Bruhin – clever jokes, goofy tallness, liberal beer belly and heavy mountaineering boots – and even more so when he fishes his trümpi, or Jew’s harp, out of a kitchen Tupperware and starts playing it as if it was a synthesiser or a shamanic didgeridoo, as he did twice during this show’s run. In Italian, the instrument is called a scacciapensieri (‘dispeller of worries’), a perfect word to describe what Bruhin can do with it, stretching from folk to trance music and Neue Musik. It takes him little to work technical wonders: the resonator for his electrified instrument is a plastic tube filled with water. Bruhin enjoys turning everyday objects into diy musical devices, as he’s been doing for five decades. To play, by all meanings, is key for him. The outcome is conceptually rigorous and refreshingly ludic. Born in 1949 in Lachen, an artist’s artist and underground hero of the Zürich avantgarde scene (where he befriended David Weiss, to whom is dedicated the silkscreen series Hice for Weiss, 2012, on show here), Bruhin started his career in the 1960s by creating happenings and performances, self-publishing books and experimenting with concrete poetry and sound.

With a hundred works, mostly drawings, paintings and mosaics, ranging from 1975 to the present, the exhibition is a retrospective, but avoids all didacticism. It’s cleverly installed along the walls: many series are grouped in swarms, in regular grids or irregular flocks, with a few pieces ‘flying’ well above the regular line of vision, up to a few inches below the high ceiling of the main room, as if by consequence of their natural levity. Chirps and tweets fill the space: the small backroom hosts a selection of sound poems and records, like the mesmerising cycle of bird songs Vogelsang/Vogelsong/Vogelsung/Vögelsäng (1977), now reissued by Alga Marghen. The overall effect is that of an amused study in combinatory logics, a personal grammar made of recursive signs (palindromes abound, for instance) and universal icons (clowns, ice creams, letters, buildings), where the human hand and wit rule over the technically reproduced. The display is divided into two opposing thematic areas, at whose point of intersection stands the acrylic Selbstportrait mit Mickey (Self-portrait with Mickey, 1984), where the ‘Mickey’ in question is an older painting on stretched canvas hanging nearby, shaped like a mouse

head: Suprematistischer Mickey (Suprematist Mickey, 1980), a deadpan black-and-white combination of two icons of the Cold War, the us’s Mickey Mouse and, from the ussr, Malevich’s Black Square paintings (1915–), both figurative and abstract, Pop and modernist. On one hand, the exhibition celebrates Bruhin’s love for painting en plein air, with luminous colours and traditional brushwork, as a revolt against the Duchampian idea of the death of art, although the subjects of his impressionist landscapes are ordinary buildings covered in scaffoldings and unpicturesque urban scenes (Panorama Letzigrund, 2012; Gasthaus Banhof Schübelbach, 1989). On the other hand, it reveals all his passion for geometry, serialisation, repetition and graphic modulation. For his latest mosaics, for instance, he uses black and white flat Lego blocks – the quintessential ‘pixel’ and toy – to mimic computer-generated imagery. For Bruhin, he’s said, such work points back to a thousand-year history of digitalisation, taking in folk textiles and Mesoamerican carvings, and devolving into the binary, yes/no logic of punch cards and coding. Again, it doesn’t take much to think and practice out of the box. Barbara Casavecchia

Le caselle di Anton Bruhin, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Matteo Nazzari. Courtesy Istituto Svizzero, Milan

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Ed Ruscha Mixmaster Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Turin 7 November – 8 March It seems entirely appropriate that a small thematic survey of Ed Ruscha’s work should take place in a gallery located above a shopping mall that was once a car factory. Organised by Turinese curator Paolo Colombo around Ruscha-esque thematics such as ‘Cinema’, ‘Cars’ and ‘Mountains’, the exhibition matches the la-based artist’s work with objects from local collections. An actual 1939 Fiat 500 Topolino, for example, is central to the room dedicated to the automobile. There the vehicle sits alongside drawings and designs of cars by the (also Turinese) architect and designer Carlo Mollino as well as Ruscha’s warm photographic closeups of car gearshift handles (eg, Chevy, 2010). The exhibition, with 62 Ruschas selected by Colombo – mostly drawn from the artist’s archive – and 268 objects chosen by Ruscha, offers a unique introduction to a world of books, word-laden drawings and paintings, film (Ruscha’s 1975 short film Miracle is here paired with stills by Mollino), gas stations, mountains and noir. Also situated among the automobiles is a pastel drawing, Pontiac Catalinas? (1976): he walks into a meeting hall full of workers and yells out “o.k. what is it

you guys want, pontiac catalinas?” is emblazoned across a pale brown-yellow-red field. It’s archetypal Ruscha: words conjure images, while in other works pictures make meaning, and more latterly they combine – as in Baby Jet (1998), included in the ‘Mountain’ section, where the eponymous words float over a triangular rocky ridge. That is, words and images elide and confound. Ruscha offers things so familiar they seem to become representations of themselves. One might accordingly agree with critic Dave Hickey’s suggestion, decades ago, that what Ruscha creates – sometimes even via images of ‘Standard’ petrol stations and restaurants called ‘Norm’s’ – are standards and norms. This exhibition offers another kind of standard for the Nebraska-born artist’s work. By situating Ruscha within a place – Los Angeles – and then – innovatively – amidst things, Colombo teases purpose and meaning from his combinations. Hence the innocence-associated word Angel (2006), in a gothic type running diagonally upwards on flesh-pink ground, suggests a tattoo and irony when viewed, in the ‘Criminals’ section, among death masks, maps of body tattoos and mugshots. If the slippage

Mixmaster, 2015 (installation view). Courtesy Pinacoteca Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, Turin

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of meaning can be accentuated, as here, through context, then formal qualities are equally made apparent. The inspiration for the elongated text of the tall and narrow Baby Doe Study II (1995) in the ‘Cinema’ section is made apparent by several early-twentieth-century anamorphic images that require a tubular (or magic) mirror to be illuminated. The result of a frieze commissioned by the Denver Public Library, the three studies seem as much Ruscha fooling with his traditional horizontal format as they are linguistic portraits of historical personages from the American West. Ruscha has described the response to poor art as ‘Wow! Huh?’ and the opposite as ‘Huh? Wow!’ This exhibition might lead one to a similar sense of surprise to the latter reaction: confusion at first, followed by approval. In 2012, Ruscha created unusual combinations of paintings and objects from the collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna; this time he has gone further and added his own work to the mix. Instead of pictures with words, there are now objects and art – that is, things adding purpose to his thought-pictures, and narrowing, in the process, the substantial gap between Los Angeles and Turin. Sherman Sam

Von Calhau! Oximoroboro Culturgest, Lisbon 24 October – 23 December In the work of Von Calhau!, a Portuguese duo comprising Marta Ângela and João Alves, a shamanistic imaginary steers an esoteric practice using film, print, music and performance as its instruments. The duo’s puckish theatricality and decidedly analogue vocabulary of 16mm, drawings, radiophonics and the body incants a libidinal atmosphere of ritual and carnival. Oximoroboro offers a tour through Von Calhau!’s cosmogeny. A walking stick (Bengancho, 2015) juts out from the wall in the exhibition’s first room: clawing mechanically and blindly at the air in a piece of sculptural slapstick, it suggests both vaudevillian hook and symbolic crook. A leopard-print curtain-collage (avesso (cortina), 2011) conceals the entrance to the darkened second room, where totemic depictions of a mammoth and a dodo face each other, spotlit on opposing walls. Within each animal’s outline, an Arcimboldo-esque drawing depicts scenes of fantastical conflict. Smoke monsters with laser eyes emerge from a bird’s chimneyhat; priests are subsumed by warfare; a monkey raises a bow against a rain of daggers. The sign of the beast proliferates. In another pitch-black space, a projected sequence of line drawings rotates across the inner surface of a cylinder (A Condução Cega, 2012–14), the images changing to a drumbeat

soundtrack. Recalling the graphic trickery of Victorian inversion illusions, the drawings mutate in appearance as they twist across the screen. A clown face inverts to become a crusader’s ship. The vagina and anus in a pair of buttocks warp to become a winking face. It’s a joyous work, with a touch of the gravitas of Plato’s Cave; the drum infers ritual, the drawings prehistoric rock art, the illusions the bawdy fun of the fair. Quadrologia Pentacónica (2010) and avesso (2011), both 16mm films transferred to digital, play in the next room. avesso sees Von Calhau! costumed in hooded fake-fur coveralls, linked by a guide rope-cum-umbilical cord, as one protagonist struggles to lead the other across a dramatic craggy landscape. A blind man-child in a foil cave appears allied to their progress and its macabre end. The pantomimic psychedelia of the four-part Quadrologia, meanwhile, sees the duo playing hopscotch in matching beards, a snake-puppet hypnotising a glittery group into another dimension, and the female Von Calhau! tempting the male Von Calhau! into putting a noose around his neck, before causing a landslide with her laser eyes. Oscillating between conflict and collaboration in elemental settings, the duo nod to the occultist camp of Alejandro Jodorowsky and Kenneth Anger.

A linear hang of Von Calhau!’s graphic screenprints fills another room – visual and verbal puns, posters for their films, ambigrams from A Condução Cega, alongside the labial-insignia flag featured in avesso – transmuting the duo’s slippery dream logic to two dimensions. In the show’s final film, Eulusionismo Antilusionistu (2015), a topless and leather-gloved female Von Calhau! whips her long hair back and forth, crushes a painted egg and toys with a €2 piece (whose eagle motif here reads as distinctly Third Reichian). A hand-drawn mouth explodes from the buttocks of a Greco-Roman sculpture of naked male wrestlers. Dressed in monochrome faux-fur, our protagonist raises a pair of knives, then a cymbal appears onscreen, triggering an actual cymbal in the exhibition’s anterior room to be hit by a mechanised drumstick – as if the film has conjured action in reality. As terminology within his religion of Thelema, occultist prophet Aleister Crowley added a ‘k’ to ‘magic’ to differentiate between illusionistic trickery (magic) and mystical changes enforced by the power of will (magick). Oximoroboro situates the work of Von Calhau! – similarly lovers of symbolic word play – in the space between these poles: seeking magickal transcendence while revelling in stagecraft. Justin Jaeckle

avesso (still), 2011, 16mm film transferred to hd video, 16 min. Courtesy the artists

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Ignasi Aballí Without Beginning / Without End Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid 28 October – 27 March Ignasi Aballí is one of the few artists to have successfully reinstated the formal, linguistic and social enquiries of early Conceptualism, investing them with contemporary relevance, a leavening humour and a grasp of contemporary technology that, in his films, drags those silent one-reelers of the 1960s and 70s into the present. Employing numerous media and methods of display, the investigations of the fifty-seven-year-old Barcelonan artist – who has won the 2015 Joan Miró Prize – encompass art history, painting, books, the media, photography, installation and, yes, film and video. In a series represented by Dust (10 years in the studio) (2005), Aballí literally turns dust into an artform, leaving canvases to collect the grime of the studio for protracted periods. The exhibition could have focused more on this seminal series, as it provides an easy entrée into two of the artist’s main themes: time and accumulation. In the ‘newspaper’ series, specific words cut from a national paper’s headlines are reassembled as collaged lists, establishing taxonomies and timeframes that critique the media’s supposed objectivity. For example, in 2012–13 the usa was referenced over 600 times compared to Estonia’s solitary inclusion. While exposing surprising political and linguistic relationships, here – as in Aballí’s 2015 thesauruslike compendiums of descriptive terms for basic colours – this linkage becomes an exhaustive cataloguing of thematic variations. The sheer overload leads to

a paradoxical redundancy of meaning, returning information to the status of objecthood. This underpinning sense of absence within presence – or, conversely, an existential quest for meaning within nothingness – was first developed from the 1980s in the ‘resin paintings’ (acrylic gel), again underrepresented, in which a semitransparent patina stands in for the picture plane. The theme continues in pages extracted from books, leaving only those with an index or chapter numbers as an armature upon which to reconstruct the absent whole. Elsewhere, an art-history lecture is assembled from slides bleached to incoherence by lengthy exposure to sunlight. Referencing 1960s experimental filmmaking, light – cinema’s fundamental medium – is again the point of enquiry in Film Projection (2012), where the camera looks directly into the projector lens during a screening. An indexical relation to the ongoing movie is maintained, but any sense of narrative is lost as the image deconstructs into an ethereal, undulating incandescence. Much of Aballí’s work addresses the specifics of museological display, such as titles simply identifying the white in which a wall is painted. Photographed corners in Amsterdam reveal the confluence of streets named after famous artists in a parody of the ‘arbitrary’ conjunctions between artists’ works in museums. In a further photographic series, typical museum signage

Imagen texto (Exhibition continues), 2012, digital print on photographic paper, 70 × 50 cm. Courtesy the artist

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warns us not to touch or of cctv surveillance, but we are never quite sure if these are actively addressed to us or are passive images subsumed within the exhibition. Building on this in-between status, vitrines become art objects in their own right. Bearing self-referential texts and images, they continually return us to their Plexiglas corporeality in an unending conceptual loop that vacillates between art as messenger and as the thing-in-itself. Foregrounding the display inevitably broaches the age-old relationship between museum approbation and commercial value. Again, this is approached with understated humour: here, eight monochrome ‘paintings’ – standard fare for the modern museum – are composited from shredded banknotes. The colour of money initially equates with face value; the context reminds us that it is institutional approval that confers commercial worth. While Aballí’s plural concerns are compressed like his shredded banknotes, though in more denominations, common threads weaving between different series turn a cacophony into a rich and coherent tapestry of provocative questions. Crystallising the interdependence of absence and presence, finality and processes without end, Aballí achieves this with a subtlety and economy that pays reverent homage to its conceptual lineage. Keith Patrick

A Story Within a Story: Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art Various venues, Göteborg 12 September – 22 November Entering curator Elvira Dyangani Ose’s densely layered, multivocal exhibition through a Kader Attia installation – a narrow corridor – I was struck by how, over the years, the biennial (now in its seventh edition) has already formed an identity. Attia’s work, Los de arriba y los de abajo (The ones above and the ones below) (2015), a replica of a street in Hebron and its spatial segregation of Jewish and Muslim inhabitants, articulates the biennial’s recurring interest in contemporary history, and in artists using documentary and archival methods with a political edge. As one of the previous curators, I might be a bit biased towards this event per se, but in my opinion A Story Within a Story is one of the strongest Göteborg Biennials so far. It builds on the documentary legacy of the earlier shows with a concentrated curatorial concept and theoretical thoughtfulness. Dyangani Ose elegantly recycles Umberto Eco’s definition of the ‘open’ artwork as a way of writing history. Past time is viewed as a growing archive of stories that can always be rewritten from a different perspective or in another voice. History becomes a collective cultural endeavour, in which this exhibition gives the artist a narrator’s role as important as that of the academic historian.

As a consequence, a recurring gesture is the use of archival fragments, photographs, films or documents. It is notable that, even today with digitalisation and the critique of the photograph as a bearer of truth, the indexical image still carries an aura of evidence. In the wide-ranging anthology that accompanies the exhibition, Achille Mbembe writes beautifully on archiving being a symbolic burial, done to ensure that the dead are separated from the living. Quite a few of the works in the show, too, could be described as archaeological rescues of forgotten historical moments from the archival tombs. Sara Jordenö’s thrilling excavation of the industrial history of the northern Swedish town of Robertsfors, The Diamond People Project (2005–15), with its unexpected links to the diamond mines of South Africa, is just one example. Even if the documentary, in its extended form, is the preferred mode of expression in the show, it is the works that take other routes that stay with me. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s fictional portraits have me remembering faces that never existed. Simon Starling’s evocation of a lost artwork, El Eco (2014), speaks about corporeal memory through the reenactment of a dance performance. The layered storytelling of Phoebe Boswell’s

multisensory, multimedia installation The Matter of Memory (2014) takes me to Kenya’s colonial past. A pivotal point in the exhibition is the notion of decisive moments in history – instants when the order of things was questioned – and how this struggle for change was carried on over time by certain ideas that were transformed into collective energy. Especially in focus in this show is the African continent in the process of liberation, and the way that the political activities of this epoch were connected with similar movements elsewhere in the Southern Hemisphere. Maryam Jafri’s archive of the first Independence Day ceremonies in various African, Asian and Middle Eastern countries depicts the first rituals celebrating independence, and the way that the departing colonial powers still influence the chosen protocol. Jafri’s assemblage of old photographs from very different geographical and political contexts seems to seek to decipher the narratives hidden within major historical currents: stories within stories that can tell us what really happened at these crucial moments, and whether another world was ever possible. Sara Arrhenius

Phoebe Boswell, The Matter of Memory, 2014 (installation view, Hasselblad Centre, Göteborg, 2015). Photo: Hendrik Zeitler

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David Claerbout Marabouparken, Stockholm 9 October – 14 February ‘“Time is out of joint”: it is off the hinges assigned to it by behaviour in the world, but also by movements of world.’ Gilles Deleuze’s quotation from Hamlet in Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985) describes how, since modernity, time no longer functions as a measure for movement or actions, but rather begins to appear for and by itself. Similarly, the six videos on show here, spanning some 15 years of David Claerbout’s production, turn time tactile, almost sculptural; and while duration is not their subject matter, they render it phenomenologically perceptible. As in previous presentations, such as at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2007, the works are shown in proximity to each other, projected onto the walls and a translucent sheet of white fabric that spans the space diagonally. Oil workers ( from the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain (2013) depicts a group of men seeking shelter under a bridge. Some are en route on motorbikes, some on foot, with a large puddle of muddy water visible in the foreground of the almost painterly composition. The camera appears tenaciously to rotate around the men in three-dimensional space, while the picture

itself remains still. At the end of the sequence, the focus turns to the subtly animated water, then reemerges and repeats the rotation in an elliptical movement. Claerbout constructed the image using 3d technology, after a jpeg file found on the Internet carrying the tagline that lends the work its title. The workers seem to be waiting – for the rain to pass, or for better days. Time passes slower when we wait, and waiting is economically unproductive and hence unpaid. The specific temporality of the piece and that of the ‘actual’ world surrounding it in the exhibition space are conflated as distinct durations that coexist within a single event. In contrast to those waiting moments, time speeds up when we enjoy ourselves. In The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment (2008), 600 projected photographs capture an instant of a recreational football game on the rooftop of a building in the casbah, when a man stops to feed a seagull. The still images are accompanied by light Arab guitar music and shown in a sequence unfolding the single moment over a period of time. The work both presents a moment in time, and concurrently represents time through the montage of shots that surpass the empirical timespan they depict. Conflating

techniques of photography and cinematographic montage, Claerbout creates a hybrid between what Deleuze calls ‘time-image’, a direct presentation of time rather than its representation through movement, and ‘movement-image’, an image of time diverging from the ‘actual’ durational period of the depicted. With its multiple perspectives upon the same moment stretched in time, the work reminds us of the impossibility of subjective certainty and epistemological conclusions. The translucent projection surface dividing the space at Marabouparken lets the six works seep through one another. The room is not darkened in black-box manner, and so allows the viewer’s time-space to entangle with that of the exhibition, reminiscent of what Henri Bergson describes as the real being reflected in the virtual. With time the denominator of the show, the confluence of disjointed visual content is partly diverting, yet also points to the simultaneity of realities, filmic and otherwise mediated. The exhibition demands time and patience. Considering today’s superfluous media-created imagery and accelerated time perception, paying (durational) attention to a single moment seems like a pertinent attitude. Stefanie Hessler

The Algiers’ Sections of a Happy Moment, 2008, single-channel video projection, b&w, stereo audio, 37 min and 12 sec loop. Courtesy Kunstmuseum St. Gallen and Schenkung Senn bpm ag

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Charlotte Prodger 8004–8019 Spike Island, Bristol 10 October – 13 December There’s something deliciously ironic about displaying camouflaged ponchos made for winter warfare within the pristine space of a contemporary art gallery. They are, after all, designed to be imperceptible amid white environments. Here, however, they are exposed, their blotchy patterns offered for close inspection. Themes of exposure and disclosure flow throughout this show, which is Charlotte Prodger’s largest to date. Take for instance the covers of the normally hidden underfloor electrical sockets. Prodger has removed these, replacing them with powder-coated aluminium versions. Coloured with varying hues of brown and placed adjacent to the open recesses, they punctuate the space, drawing attention both to themselves and the exposed sockets. Echoing these works is the nearby Power Covers (all works 2015), a video comprising a dull sequence of individual colours taken from the ral colour standard (the industrial colourmatching system from which Prodger’s exhibition derives its title). As the colours – ranging from copper brown (ral number 8004) to grey brown (ral number 8019) – flash momentarily onto the screen, your eye is distracted by the

neighbouring video in which a small shoal of panda moor goldfish dart through glistening water as they attempt to flee a human hand. This piece, titled Panda Moors, is infinitely more engaging, yet in both works the content plays second fiddle to the mode of presentation. For each of these, in a move recalling Haim Steinbach, Prodger has designed identical shelving units to support the Pioneer 7300 dvd players and boxy Sony pvm monitors (for years a staple of the broadcasting industry) on which the videos are shown. This is typical Prodger, an artist for whom audiovisual equipment is selected as much for its subcultural aesthetic and place in design history as its technological capacity. In privileging her mechanisms of display, Prodger fetishises her objects, accentuating their materiality. The austere formalism of these sculptural works is replaced by a heterogeneous riot of content in the feature-length video Stoneymollan Trail. This work, projected in a cavernous space accessed via a melange curtain, mixes a huge range of visual material from multiple sources; footage ripped from decaying Mini dv tapes is juxtaposed with iPhone videos and

high-definition scenes shot near Prodger’s Glasgow studio. Unidentified landscapes with lines of corrupted pixels give way to images of a sleeping fox, mountain goats and retro graphics courtesy of a test-pattern generator. This seemingly random stream of imagery is accompanied by a recorded voiceover, spoken by the artist, in which personal anecdotes and missives are intertwined with found texts. Quotes from Nancy Holt regarding the creation of her iconic Sun Tunnels (1976) are included, as are graphic accounts of furtive sexual encounters lifted from writer Samuel R. Delany’s autobiography. But with no coherent narrative, any attempt at making sense of all this seems futile. The exhibition guide informs us that the video uses language ‘to explore subjectivity and the sequencing of desire’, as well as ‘the contingent limits between self and other via intimacy and labour’. While this may be true, the work is so dense and multilayered that such intentions are hard to identify. Prodger ostensibly prefers some things to remain hidden. In the words of the late Ian White, whose email to the artist is quoted in the film, ‘it only needs to make sense to me’. David Trigg

Stoneymollan Trail (still), 2015, hd video. Courtesy the artist and Koppe Astner, Glasgow

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Dorothy Cross Eye of Shark Frith Street Gallery, London 11 November – 23 December Twelve dilapidated cast-iron bathtubs arranged in a four-by-three grid line the gallery floor. Above them, set into the wall at head height, is a marble recess containing a small sealed box. Inside, we’re told, is a shark’s eye. As with religious reliquaries, we take the truth of the hidden contents on trust, but the votive suggestion is enough to give the glazed aperture the character of an eye watching over its cracked and corroding disciples. There’s a further twist to Dorothy Cross’s Eye of Shark (2014): the tubs’ tidemarks are gilded, suggesting occupants who bathed in elementally altered conditions, the enucleated shark’s saintly status adding ritualistic import to their ablutions. The gilding is very subtle; not superimposed, King Midasstyle, but immanent to the natural chemistry, blending sufficiently well with the orange rust to suggest an evaporate, albeit of a more mythic kind of liquid than water. The same as that through which the sacred shark once swam? If gold is often thought of as a signifier of the transcendental, here it’s brought into contact with the profane, like a reverse theology with an animal as its godhead – though the syntax of ‘eye of shark’ also hints at witchcraft.

Buoy (2014) uses the skin of a blue shark, hollowed out and gilded with white gold on the inside, and positioned atop an easel displaying a blank slab of alabaster. The slab is less a tabula rasa than a means of suggesting an image that has escaped from its surface and assumed concrete form in the shape of the shark – which looks more like a papier-mâché facsimile than the real thing. This is the signal quirk of taxidermy, the perverse aim of which is the creation of a three-dimensional image of an animal using the animal itself. By gilding the creature’s interior, Cross reveals the dead void that the craft must conceal in order to achieve its melancholic artifice, that look of frozen vitality, while giving new representational life to her material – a highly satisfying contradiction. At first sight, Buoy seems like a straightforwardly wacky juxtaposition, a belated addition to the surrealist canon, but on closer inspection it proves a mesmerising work. After these existential thrills, the bronze sculpture Bond (2015) feels somewhat orthodox. A 180 cm-long cast of a real shark is fused with a submarine scaled down to the fish’s size, the two predators seen in terms of one another.

Buoy, 2014.Courtesy the artist and Frith Street Gallery, London

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The conning tower as a counterpart for the shark’s fin is a nice visual pun, but the overall equivalence is suffocated rather than consolidated by the bronze, a unifying material now so ubiquitous it has lost its efficacy. As the aforementioned works demonstrate, Cross is so skilful with other, more perceptually engaging or more symbolically fertile materials that this neutral art material feels like a step down. Seven photographs complete the show. Shark Fin (2014), a closeup of a dead shark’s fin – dried, wrinkled, depressingly autumnal – suggests a more documentary mode, while the others form the series Wormhole 1990 (2015). These depict rectangular pools occurring naturally in coastal rock on the Aran Islands, off Galway in Ireland. According to Cross, the geological formations have similar proportions to the 370 handball alleys once dotted around the country, and her documentation relates to a 1999 work, Chiasm, which involved filming the pools’ water and projecting it onto the floor of a pair of handball alleys. The project underlines her interest in equivalence: not an immediately apparent theme here, but an important one on reflection. Sean Ashton

Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen Within a Hollow Sphere Corvi-Mora, London 5 November – 23 December Juha Pekka Matias Laakkonen’s exhibition comprises the following items, all arranged in the middle of an otherwise empty gallery floor, in a row, close to each other: a neatly chopped log, approximately 30cm in length, a wool rope tied through four cleanly hollowed holes, the end of the rope wrapped around upon itself and resting in the crook of a v-shaped cut to the opposite end of the log; a wrinkled yellowbrown bag, which one might surmise held vegetables or something similarly earthy (the materials list reveals this to be a cow’s intestine, but to the casual viewer there’s no real suggestion of its organic origin); a more obviously designed black wool bag; a second smaller log, again neatly hewn, resting on a folded piece of black wool material. There is a visual poetry to the untitled objects (it’s a poetry that also translates linguistically, incidentally: a log, a bag, a bag, a log has a nice symmetrical rhythm to it), but nonetheless to list these objects methodically seems appropriate: the manner of their installation is reminiscent of a Boy Scout’s kit, carefully laid out for inspection.

Corvi-Mora is a big space with high, barnlike ceilings, and the sheer emptiness of the gallery is almost overwhelming. The blankness of the walls is relieved only by the final sign of the artist’s hand: around 30 drilled holes, seemingly randomly made (though a gallery text reveals them to map the constellation of stars the night Pekka Matias Laakkonen made the wood sculptures). The lowest are around 30cm off the ground, the highest 3m. In many ways Within a Hollow Sphere ruminates on aesthetic themes of centuries past: the frictional tension between the sublime and the beautiful. The objects fit quite neatly into Edmund Burke’s description of how beauty might be discerned: ‘balance’, ‘smoothness’, ‘delicacy’. Yet presented in such a lonesome fashion, characteristic of the way the Finnish artist works more generally, they indeed approximate the ‘some degree of horror’ that Burke wrote the sublime would evoke. The sparse exhibition whispers of human absence and presence: it speaks of human activity in the past tense, the results of some sort

of ritualistic act by the artist, perhaps. Pekka Matias Laakkonen’s handiwork is signposted – the mortar dust is still fresh, the manner of the folded material, or the whittled wood, is like a footprint in mud – but standing in this all-but-empty space, one is left with a feeling of ghostly loneliness. The show invites meditations on the ‘Anthropocene’ too. It would perhaps be apt to mention survivalism and survival (this is the artist, after all, who lived on an uninhabited island above the Arctic Circle to produce a previous work). Or to question whether the scene that Pekka Matias Laakkonen approximates is a posthuman future, or preagrarian past. With his restraint, after all, the artist is effectively connecting Burke to Bruno Latour and the latter’s writings on the ‘disconnect’ of humans in the face of an apocalyptical disaster (ironically) of their own making. By invoking an intimacy, and a reestablishing equilibrium with nature, Pekka Matias Laakkonen attempts to craft a bridge over this abysmal gulf. Oliver Basciano

Untitled, 2015, wood, wool, cow’s intestines, 46 × 18 × 20 cm. Photo: Marcus Leith. Courtesy Corvi-Mora, London

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Grazia Varisco If… Cortese Gallery, London 1 October – 28 November The first thing you see on entering Grazia Varisco’s first solo show in London is the Italian artist’s Gnonomi (1986). Mounted so that it’s viewable through the gallery’s shop window, the sculpture comprises a series of steel elements that end up resembling quadrilaterals, distorted so that they appear to occupy multiple planes. They project outwards from the gallery wall in such a way that they produce a series of variously distorted squarelike shadows, some painted and others real, that appear to flutter up the wall like geometric forms in flight – perhaps away from an absolute formal definition as much as anything else. It sets a tone for the type of gently subversive fusion of Minimalism and geometric abstraction at which the seventy-eight-year-old Varisco is expert. She was famously a member of Gruppo T, which counted Gianni Colombo and Giovanni Anceschi among its founding members, which Varisco joined for its second exhibition in 1960, and which was dedicated to using art to explore the interrelation of space and time, often by

putting form in motion through kinetic processes. But while this exhibition of around 30 works, best described as a limited survey show, features a number of her kinetic and participatory works (Tavola magnetica. Sferisterio, 1960, for example, a metal board with moveable magnetic elements; or the motorised neon Schema luminoso displays from the early 1960s, which rotate overlapping screens across the light to create an effect similar to animating one of Victor Vasarely’s Op art works), it’s in Varisco’s more static output that her true talents shine. In Meridiana (Sundial) (1974), brass quadrilateral fragments mounted on painted wood conjure the play between light, shadows and geometric forms that comprise the main ingredients of Varisco’s work, the painted and shadowed lines here producing a minor cacophony of distorted quadrilateral forms. More simple still, the relatively recent Quadri Comunicanti in acciaio (2011) articulates a line and its distortions: four quadrilateral steel elements, each involving two right-angled corners and two

Meridiana, 1974, brass profiles, wood, 50 × 50 cm. Photo: Thomas Libis. Courtesy the artist

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irregular angles, and looking collectively like they might form a square, are hung in such a way as to articulate a line from which they seem suspended. Or so that they might simultaneously reveal both a line and a plane: ie, they convey one- and two-dimensional space; and taking into account the (not so substantial) thickness of the steel, perhaps a third as well. The more you stare at this work, the more it seems to grow, to twist and turn in space despite being so obviously fixed and static on the wall. The curious effect of all this productive economy of means is that the earlier motorised works – which you might assume to be the most dramatic and absorbing element of Varisco’s output on show here – seem rather like the product of an excess of effort. Perhaps, in the context of Quadri Comunicanti (a 2008 version of which is also on show here), even a waste of effort. But maybe that is a testimony to how powerful Varisco can be at her best. Mark Rappolt

Gianfranco Baruchello New Works Massimo De Carlo, London 12 October – 21 November ‘From now on if you only do this work, I promise you that in two years you’ll be the greatest newspaper gluer of all time.’ Advice (or was it an order?) given by legendary dealer Ileana Sonnabend during a 1972 meeting with a young Gianfranco Baruchello, then making sculptures composed of newspaper, wire wool, radio circuits and other objects fixed to painted board. Vexed by Sonnabend’s cynicism, the Italian replied in a flash: ‘I’m sorry but I'm done. Now I want to do something else!’ True to his word, Baruchello – now aged ninety-one – has consistently eschewed the traditional means of visual art, establishing a reputation based on the diversity of his interests and outputs. There have been various philosophical excursions, including the 22-hour-long video Starting from the Sweet (1979), which drew thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard, Félix Guattari and Paul Virilio into collaboration; the founding of a limited company called Artiflex, its humble aim to ‘commodify everything’; and the project that perhaps best shows off Baruchello’s

experimental largesse, Agricola Cornelia s.p.a. (1973–81), a pioneering example of that high counterculture trope, the art farm. However, Baruchello’s practice does have its constants. Somewhat ironically, around the time he was conversing with Sonnabend, he began a series of paintings that, in form and general approach, continues today. Indeed, contra to titular suggestion, the ‘new works’ in this exhibition, their all-white surfaces populated by a ‘universe’ of small images and symbols, actually suggest an unbroken continuum in Baruchello’s art, one that goes back more than 50 years. Occupying the ground floor of Massimo De Carlo’s Mayfair gallery are five equilateral aluminium canvases – all titled La Formula (2013/14). Just about apparent in the superficial blankness of each canvas is a filigree of precise, brightly coloured depictions. Allusions are made to the order of the natural world: bugs, leaves, flowers, cocks and balls are set into schematic relation through a host of lines and interconnecting frames. Beyond that, it’s not particularly clear what is being illustrated.

Downstairs, things carry on in a similar manner. Instead of covering aluminium, Baruchello’s cryptic webs sprawl over routed, whitewashed wood shapes or cover cardboard and Plexiglas set inside deep, wall-mounted display boxes. Any colour present in the works upstairs has drained. Things get moodier and weirder. Murmur (2015) – a double-head-shaped object displaying an impenetrable matrix of black stoner-doodles – sets the tone, like the box-frames also present, cultivating a fuggy, neurotic feel for the lower gallery. Though exploiting a certain instructive visual language, the overall effect of Baruchello’s painting remains disorientating. It’s tempting to suggest that the drive to interpret these works as being representative of x or y is the particular Holzweg to be avoided here. Perhaps this way of working has remained central to Baruchello’s practice for so long precisely because it resists the good path towards certitude, allowing his complex imagination much-needed room to stretch and breathe. Paul Pieroni

Connect / Disconnect, 2015, Indian ink on cardboard and Plexiglas, wood, 70 × 100 cm. Courtesy mdc London

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Ben Burgis and Ksenia Pedan Oikos Union Pacific, London 14 November – 12 December On the opening night of the exhibition the lights are off; a soundtrack of dance music, complementary dirty martinis and large groups of people enjoying both fills the space. Before I go in, a friend describes the scene as looking like a goth’s living room. Inside, the installation, music (by London-based producer David Aird) and performances hit all the senses. Not only what is seen and heard, but what is touched and used, things that are tasted, the smells of bodies working among bodies, all housed in what feels like a kind of psychically slanted space. The performers (artists Keira Fox, Adam Christensen and Jermaine Gallacher) are both part of the environment and the crowd, supplying a campy amplification of the party’s audience as they move through and interact with visitors, reading from a script and improvising on their headset mics. During the day, with the lights on, the picture of the exhibition is clearer. Every surface of the gallery is covered in protective plastic sheeting marked with dirt on both its inside and out. Aird’s soundtrack and recordings of the performances from the opening night are playing. The only breaks to the messy sheeting are openings for doorways and a cutout for the

gallery window. The cover loosely dresses and frames the scene of a home and references the show’s title, Oikos (Ancient Greek for ‘household’ or ‘family’, in the sense of a societal unit). It is a domestic environment that is part melted or somehow fluid and oddly diffracted; the interior is decorated with imprecise and sometimes inarticulate forms of household kitchen counters, freestanding shelves, stools, chairs, tables, wall panels and sculptures made from resin, wood, foam and metal. The forms of furniture and household objects are legible, but also indistinct; rendered with curves and distentions as if they were visually distorted through a glass. The all-encompassing mass of waste and bulging, deformed furniture recalls Burgis’s previous project The Mechanical Garden and Other Long Encores (curated by Naomi Pearce and produced by the artist alongside Richard Sides and Stuart Middleton for an exhibition at London’s Dilston Grove in December 2014), and Oikos shares a similar irreverent and dystopic tone. Though it looks like a surrealist and defiled William Leavitt installation, what sets the show apart from the American’s eerily archetypal domestic environments is its laboured filth,

or ‘gubbish’, as the artists term it (a portmanteau of ‘garbage’ and ‘rubbish’ coined by Philip K. Dick). The traditional white cube is a space that wants to disappear and is dependent on its aloof pristineness – its no-touching, -rubbing or -spilling policy (raucous private views aside) – to achieve it. Dirt invites a more relaxed approach. There is real and lived dirt in the exhibition – hair, old shoes, party waste, metal dust, trodden dirt – but this isn’t the kind of filth that makes you feel repelled or jagged. It’s of a different order. It’s more like preserved and maintained dirt (the smell of glue/resin and welding is still thick in the air) that invites you to feel at home in the rooms. The waste isn’t contained or neatly packaged, the surface of this dirt is total and it redraws new and slanted borders. It’s a coating over everything, asserting a zone or attitude of informality that levels hierarchies of how a space should be treated and occupied. The show doesn’t elevate or reduce some cultural or social material to be analysed and assessed, but rather stages an attitude for community and social space. The house is dirty and people are partying… so everyone’s invited. Tim Steer

Oikos, 2015 (installation view, with performance by Kiera Fox). Photo: Amy Gwatkin. Courtesy the artists and Union Pacific, London

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The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies Furtherfield, London 17 October – 22 November ‘Cryptoeconomy’ and ‘cryptocurrency’ aren’t wildly popular terms, but they’re the general concepts upon which, among other things, the digital currency phenomenon called Bitcoin has gained a degree of notoriety. Bitcoin, and other ‘cryptocurrencies’, are complex bits of algorithmic programming that, in an age of immaterial finance and liquid capital, herald the possibility of a stateless, decentred, collectivised economy. So admittedly, it’s a fairly complicated frontier of maths and computing that attracts a peculiar following of net-utopians, anarchocapitalists, techno-communists and, unsurprisingly, digital artists. Which makes The Human Face of Cryptoeconomies interesting, since in contrast to the more nihilistic, identity-obsessed tendencies of much ‘post-Internet’ art, these are consistently inquisitive and politically inflected works by artists who would see what art can be made out of a questioning of the algorithm’s impact on culture and economics rather than whether your self-image, gender or personality have all gone a bit wobbly because – hey – there’s just so many images out there and you spend all your time on Chatroulette. The doughty little Furtherfield gallery (indeed it is housed in a converted toilet building

in the middle of London’s Finsbury Park) acts as the meatspace outpost of Furtherfield’s online commissioning and community platform, furtherfield.org, and the works gathered for Cryptoeconomies hover appropriately somewhere between real matter and virtual parallels. That the show is specifically about the nature of economic currency complicates things nicely, since currency is conventionally both an object and an abstraction. So Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion’s video-projection treasure-trove of Internet-found gifs of gold objects, Gold and Glitter (2015), which periodically refreshes in a cascade of gold coins, ingots, trinkets and statues, unpicks the convergence of scarcity and desire that gold represents, through a scavenging exercise of worthless representations. Gold’s scarcity, though once a real index, is an economic fiction today, but the art object’s scarcity value is another thing; Rob Myers’s pithy Shareable Readymades project (2011–) targets contemporary art’s increasingly cynical appropriation of mass production, by taking ‘iconic’ works of art (Duchamp’s urinal, Magritte’s pipe, Koons’s balloon dogs) and offering these as free-to-3d print models, displayed in the gallery. Artists appropriate – but nobody owns –

the shape of balloon dogs or urinals. Myers’s objects are unnamed, their status as art is merely in our heads. In Cryptoeconomies human subjects are seen as activated by, and activating, economic and social systems, rather than merely being the passive channels of psycho-emotional disarray. So Jennifer Lyn Morone is perfectly in charge when, in a video projection, she elaborates with corporate-speak aplomb how she has converted the production of her personal data into the property of her own corporation. “If corporations can make money from my information… then so can I,” she declares. If there’s a ‘human face’ to be seen in Cryptoeconomies, it’s in the development of the digital realm as the place in which the individual might claim greater autonomy. It’s still art, inasmuch as art always flirts with the space between the possible and the fantastic, but it’s also about trying things out in the real world of these new systems. Either way, Cryptoeconomies champions a more expansive view of artistic practice that intervenes in nonart systems and economies rather than itself being the product of the art economy. J.J. Charlesworth

Émilie Brout and Maxime Marion, Gold and Glitter, 2015, website, found Internet gifs and helium balloon. Photo: Pau Ros. Courtesy Furtherfield, London

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Don McCullin Conflict – People – Landscape Hauser & Wirth Somerset 15 November – 31 January At a press launch for the 2016 Photo London art fair (19–22 May), which is honouring Don McCullin as its ‘Master of Photography’, McCullin expressed his unease about photography’s incorporation within art. “Photography is not so much an artform as a way of communicating,” he said. “I’ve photographed people in pain and in peril. I find it difficult to be part of the ‘art’ narrative.” One can understand his feelings. McCullin’s photographs, taken over a nearly-60-year career (he turned eighty in 2015) include some of the most searing witness statements to the late twentieth century’s worst military, social and political conflicts: Cyprus, Cambodia, the Congo, Northern Ireland, Vietnam, Biafra, Beirut, and not forgetting Britain’s own urban poor and homeless. Comprising 56 prints, the largely chronological display at Hauser & Wirth Somerset may be relatively small but includes some of McCullin’s most iconic and haunting images – the shellshocked us Marine in Vietnam clutching his gun as he stares into the middle distance; the direct, impossibly dignified gaze

of the skeletal young Biafran mother, her baby clawing futilely at her empty breast; the homeless Irishman in a derelict Spitalfields in 1969 whose eyes, framed by wild matted hair, stare out from under a weather-beaten face that’s more mask than man. Neither familiarity nor the elapsed decades diminish any of the horror or emotional impact of these images, testament not only to McCullin’s nerve and skill with a film camera but to what took him into these situations: his compassion and burning desire to communicate the human effect of conflict. There are some occasions where the passage of time becomes only too apparent, such as the 2007 photograph of the Temple of Bel, in Palmyra, Syria, reduced to rubble in 2015 by isis terrorists, and also in the work in two accompanying vitrines. These display the actual magazine covers and spreads in which some of the images were first published: weekend newspaper supplements that in all but a few examples have long since replaced such groundbreaking photojournalism with celebrity and consumer lifestyle.

Tormented, homeless Irishman, Spitalfields, London, 1969. © the artist / Contact Press Images. Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Somerset

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The main context for this exhibition is neither art nor photography but geography. McCullin has been a Somerset resident for many years, and this display, showing alongside group show Qwaypurlake, based on a waterlogged reimagining of the local landscape, is an unusually site-specific piece of programming in Hauser & Wirth’s West Country outpost. The local landscape also features in McCullin’s images: the final five prints (bar the very last) are beautifully composed dark and detailed scenes, devoid of people, showing sunlight breaking through clouds and reflected back in the streams, ponds and snow-covered fields of the Somerset Levels. McCullin chooses not to end on such a serene note, however, but on another direct gaze. The final image is of a crying teenage Zambian boy in 2000, at the funeral of his father, who has died from an aids-related illness. It’s for this that McCullin rightly deserves the title ‘Master of Photography’: making images that are uncomfortable to look at but impossible to look away from. Helen Sumpter

Jen DeNike If She Hollers Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles 14 November – 19 December ‘The Pimp’ lures you in. ‘The Boxer’, blindfolded, kisses you with his fist. ‘The Cat’ mostly just chills in your pool. The trio of eponymous videos (all works 2015) by American artist Jen DeNike stand back-to-back on adorned metal stands, coming together like a strange tree and surrounded by photographs, mostly drawn from onscreen, all of it waxing atmospheric about gender and place in mysterious stories. The gowned Pimp luxuriates in a trickedout garage, pinked, catwalked and draped with a silver curtain, vaping, with lidded eyes, a Wonderland caterpillar’s smoke trailing while a distorted sax purrs a few midnight notes. In a montage of scenes, hustlers contort and gyrate on the chequered catwalk that tongues out of the garage and into the night. Rubbing lustily against the wall, the dancers resist clear binaries, their amorphous appearances ranging from femmy ladies to a butch sailor, an opiated drag show happening in a suburban garage posed as luxury Amsterdam window brothel.

The Boxer opens with a young barechested fellow getting blindfolded and set into a ring with a half-dozen or so opponents, also all blindfolded. They search and find with their gloved fists some other boxer or boxers to scrum. The pacing flows like an underwater ballet, punctured with bursts of fast, punchy sweat storms. As it ends, one boxer plants into the mat, another pants, still standing but without any other outward indications of victory. The last movie of the series, The Cat, makes for the weirdest. A grown man clad in a Cheshire Cat onesie languid as he prances, plays and paddles in the rippling sun-dappled cyan of pool after pool in what appear to be Southern California backyards, each locale cut with a numbered film leader. It concludes at the last pool (backdropped with a killer view of Los Angeles) when our protagonist meets another swimmer. This new character is clad only in a yellow bathing suit and the

painted grin of the Cheshire on his lips. Is what follows lusty wrestling or a fight? Hard to tell, but the yellow-suited doppelganger prevails as he shoulders his opponent/partner off-camera. The artist and director of these movies titled her exhibition If She Hollers, drawing from Chester Himes’s hardboiled Los Angeles novel of race, labour and sexual violence from 1945, If He Hollers Let Him Go. In the book, a black labourer struggles with racism and rage in the Port of la. It might be notable here that almost all the players in DeNike’s dramas are people of colour and primarily black. The race politics of Himes mingles with numerous Lewis Carroll references and gender-bending played out in mostly stony long shots and half speeds. DeNike’s blendered trilogy holds this disparate melange together stylistically with its fluid weirdness, quietly absurd bends and glimpses of outright cinematographic beauty. Andrew Berardini

If She Hollers, 2015 (installation view).Photo: Michael Underwood. Courtesy the artist and Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles

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Martin Kersels Seen and Heard Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles 22 November – 16 January Brown furniture, they call it. It’s the stuff that nobody wants: wooden wardrobes, dining tables and armoires, too bulky for the contemporary home, once family heirlooms but now superseded by disposable Ikea furniture. When an artist needs some wood, the source closest at hand is usually not the lumberyard but the thrift store. Martin Kersels’s exhibition Seen and Heard, his first with Redling Fine Art and the second in the gallery’s expanded new premises, draws heavily on the inherent pathos of repurposed brown furniture. Three freestanding kinetic, sound-emitting sculptures and nearly twodozen wall-mounted collages are made largely from slats of mismatched wood, in various states of disrepair. This is by no means the first time that Kersels has worked with sound. As long ago as 1994, he made a work titled Brown Sound Kit, obliquely recalled in Seen and Heard, which consisted of an apparatus emitting an ultralow frequency designed to prompt the listener to lose control of his or her bowels. The most straightforward sculpture here (not straightforward at all, in fact) is Fire Box (all works 2015). Floating on an armature a

couple of inches above the seat of an old chair, a wooden jewellery box has a cup wedged into one side. With a wink to Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961), the cup broadcasts the crackle of burning tinder when a metal handle is wound beneath the chair. As with the two other sculptures in the room (and unlike the Morris piece), the noise is mechanical rather than recorded; in Fire Box and in the nearby Droner, a spring-wound Victrola motor activates inner workings and amplifies them through the chambers of the object itself. Though not the most spectacular, Fire Box has the edge on the other two because of its neat synchronicity between form and content. Droner, in which a dramatic ziggurat of drawers lurches faux-perilously into space while a handle turns to produce a soft cello-string hum, does not have the same tautness of rhyme and reason. Snorer, which issues a wheeze then a croaky honk when the viewer pumps the wooden handle, is charming because of the way the sound anthropomorphises the box from which it emanates. Much of this exhibition is concerned with the disconcerting results of lifeless objects appearing to assume the qualities of the living, and vice versa. This categorical confusion is

Seen and Heard, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Brica Wilcox. Courtesy the artist and Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles

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the basis of slapstick physical comedy; Kersels based much of his early work around the idea. Three sequential photographs from 1995, not on view here, titled Tripping 1 (A), (B) and (C), show him launching his own large frame towards the sidewalk, while a passerby looks on in horror. The recent works, though subtler, rely on related effects. Kersels has fixed thin strips of wood over vintage lp record sleeves, obscuring the recording artists pictured thereon save for googly round eyeholes. The results are often hilarious, reworking the old pie-in-the-face gag. We laugh especially hard (don’t we always?) when we recognise the faces getting pied; in The Beatles: A Hard Day’s Night, four pairs of holes gaze balefully through the wall of their wooden prison. Another series does a similar thing with old black-and-white photo portraits and thin skins of cracked veneer. These are somehow less funny, and more poignant. Unlike the preening pop stars, the anonymous sitters appear to have done nothing to deserve their ignominious fate. Kersels’s point, a fair one, is that such indignity comes to us all in time. At its best his art is universal, applicable not just to the artist or to famous faces but to all humanity. Jonathan Griffin

Tavares Strachan Seeing is Forgetting the Thing that You Saw Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco 6 November – 11 December History is a weapon, the late historian Howard Zinn tells us. It doesn’t so much reveal what happened as provide interesting stories of how select things took place, as told by people with competing perspectives, agendas and ideals. That view is endorsed by conceptual artist Tavares Strachan in his newest exhibition. An exacting object-maker who is also an insightful amateur historian, Strachan here devotes himself to making visible history’s hidden protagonists. Titled Seeing Is Forgetting the Thing that You Saw, Strachan’s nine new artworks continue his investigation into the lives of individuals who have made important historical contributions but whose names go largely unnoticed in their time. In his Bahamas Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, Strachan took inspiration from the world of Matthew Alexander Henson, the African-American explorer who guided Robert Peary to the North Pole in 1909. In his latest works, the Nassau-born artist turns to the scientific achievements of Rosalind Franklin

– an English chemist whose X-ray diffraction images helped decipher the helical structure of dna. Though Franklin’s findings in other areas were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of dna were mostly recognised posthumously. Because a young Strachan learned a great deal about the world by reading Britannica’s print precursor to Wikipedia, he pays backhanded tribute to encyclopaedias in two wallmounted works that consist of entries for the letters ‘C’ and ‘D’. Transferred digitally onto stretched linen, the entries’ images are all whited out. A second flat wall work (Rosalind, all works 2014–15) features a large black-andwhite collage portrait of Franklin’s face made up of approximately 10,000 image fragments. These free-associated reproductions include pictures of Martin Luther King, Haile Selassie, vibrantly coloured birds and the enduringly flamboyant Jimi Hendrix. Elsewhere, Strachan makes his own use of science to address the freighted issues of

exposure and concealment. In a series of works titled The Invisibles, the artist presents five museumlike vitrines containing disparate items such as a cricket ball, a microscope, surgical instruments and a pair of nurse’s shoes, each half-submerged in containers of mineral oil. All of the objects contain biographical connections to Franklin. Uncannily, the individual articles carry forward their physical properties as a light-refracted shadow within the oil due to the artist’s having cut off the submerged ends of the original objects and replaced them with glass prostheses. But the exhibition’s pièce de résistance consists of a neon sculpture of a human skeleton and cardiovascular system: Franklin’s, we’re made to understand by means of artistic elision. From this floating Christ-like effigy pulse lights that mimic blood, nerve impulses and the daily flows that animate the human body. History is also in there, Strachan seems to say, drawn out of the dark by an interior current. Christian Viveros-Fauné

The Invisibles (Rosalind Franklin), 2014–15, cricket bat, mineral oil, Plexiglas, glass, wood, 109 × 33 × 33 cm. Photo: Tom Powel. Courtesy the artist and Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco

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Paul McCarthy Drawings The Renaissance Society, Chicago 8 November – 24 January Included in the selection of 75 of Paul McCarthy’s drawings on view at the Renaissance Society are preparatory sketches for the set and screenplay of ws, which debuted at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in 2013 and whose initials stand for McCarthy’s ongoing series of drawings, sculptures and performances White Snow (2009–). The film, which will be screened at the end of the show’s run, features a compendium of sexstarved dwarfs, their nymph mom, her role reversal as ‘daughter’ with the introduction of a Walt Disney character named Walt Paul, and flagrant scenes of pleasure in excess. McCarthy’s drawings are independent works and thus function without the film’s character structure. Instead, what we’re offered is a collection of graphite pinup renderings, retro-cartoon styles and vintage photographs collaged onto the surfaces of paper, either intended as inspiration or emphasis. Dwarfs perform in orgies. Forest animals behead the prince. Snow White bends over on all fours. There is far less at stake in the transgressions pictured in the film than there are in the drawings. Much of this has to do with the conventional uses of each medium. The

access one has to ws-type content online makes McCarthy’s filmic deviancies much less potent, while the drawings retain an equivalence in tone to the early, pre-Disney versions of the fairytale that the works reimagine. The drawings are not interesting for their pornographic content (which has more to do with McCarthy’s mining of the 1937 Disney film), but because of their closeness in tone to the original early-seventeenth-century narrative. In the 1812 Brothers Grimm version of the tale (Little Snow-White), as a punishment for her attempted murders, the evil queen is forced to step into glowing-hot iron shoes and dance on burning feet until she drops dead. (Being the second fairest really is a bitch.) The drawings’ frenetic marks, their hurried handling, echo a comfort with this violence, with revenge and the macabre. In a piece called Dwarf House (2009), Snow White’s face appears to at once rise out of and crush the set of the dwarfs’ house, while small vignettes are drawn into this main event; Snow White pleasures herself above the labia-shaped door, illustrated within her own face, while studies for phallic nose shapes occupy the corners of the paper.

Dwarf House, 2009, pencil and collage on paper, 203 × 246 cm. Collection Rena Conti

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This type of cyclical construction and deconstruction of the image – both selfcannibalising and generative – is always engineered through the figure of Snow White. Her role in the drawings carries a type of power. She is less a character and more a recurring force, which comes with a vengeance. In fairytales, women are often mirrors who reflect back the desires of the male characters in the plot. What makes McCarthy’s drawings different from his adaptation of the film is that Snow White’s agency in the drawn compositions resists this reflective trope. McCarthy’s biographical entry into the work is also an important structural element, as the set for the film models the artist’s Mormon childhood residence. While the characters in the drawings fall less into systematised modes of representation than the film, McCarthy is still himself implicated. From the perspective of a white male, he asks: what kind of culture produces these aberrant narratives? The answer is unapologetic: ours does. Mirror, mirror, on the wall. In these drawings, each reflective, the fairest one exists no more. Stephanie Cristello

Alina Szapocznikow Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York 31 October – 5 December Alina Szapocznikow’s preoccupation with the body and its frailty comes perhaps from her extraordinary biography: she grew up in Polish Jewish ghettos and concentration camps amid the Second World War, and, as an adult, battled tuberculosis and later cancer, to which she succumbed in 1973. Throughout her life, Szapocznikow’s work evolved from Socialist Realism (communist Poland’s preferred style) during the 1950s, to Pop- and Surrealisminflected sculptures that abstract and segment the body. These underknown works, often made of polyester resin, feature the artist’s own body in its sexuality, diminishing and decay, and laid the conceptual groundwork for secondwave feminist masterworks such as Eleanor Antin’s Carving: A Traditional Sculpture (1972) and Hannah Wilke’s documentation of dying from lymphoma, Intra-Venus (1992–3). Szapocznikow shares many traits with the better-known German-Jewish postminimalist sculptor Eva Hesse, who also worked with toxic materials,

such as fibreglass and latex, and succumbed to brain cancer in 1970. Szapocznikow’s exhibition at Andrea Rosen, her first since the gallery began representing her estate in 2014, focuses on the body, culling lifesize figurative sculptures from the 1960s and 70s. The show is divided across two spaces: a front room showcasing the artist’s figurative works with uneven results, and a backroom showing Szapocznikow’s series of functional sculptural lamps. The standout of the front room is Alex (1970), a boxy body of yellowing polyester resin mummified with clothes and photographs. The face of ‘Alex’ is a photograph covered by a layer of resin, its wraithlike quality not unlike a Christian Boltanski altar (though less aesthetically blunt). Sous la Coupole (Under the Cupola) (1970) features two puddles of polyurethane foam, recalling melted adipose, connected by a pair of nylon pantyhose emanating out of one mound and usurped into the other. The piles of foam and pantyhose remnant bring to

mind the liquefying of human bodies amid the Holocaust, perhaps under the cupola (or furnace) of Bergen-Belsen. In the back are Szapocznikow’s tinted polyester resin lamps, dating from 1966 to 1970. Sculpture-Lampe and Sculpture-Lame VI (both 1970) perch diaphanous casts of the artist’s breasts, lips and buttocks, tinted tangerine, white, red or orange, atop an opaque flesh-coloured phallus. Illuminowana [L’illuminée] [Illuminated Woman] (1966–7), a plaster body stretched vertically, Giacometti-thin, sports large feet and no arms. It dons illuminated breasts, pink and red, and a blue and white resin head made out of sprays of cast breasts and facial segments, unfurled like a hand of cards. These works come off as Pop, and industrially fabricated, yet domestic. Like the petite moma retrospective in 2012, Alina Szapocznikow: Sculpture Undone, 1955–1972, the exhibition at Andrea Rosen further proves that the continued revival of the Polish artist’s work is a task worth undertaking. Karen Archey

Illuminowana [L’illuminée] [Illuminated Woman], 1966–7, plaster, coloured polyester resin, metal, electrical wiring, 155 × 57 × 40 cm. Photo: Fabrice Grousset. © adagp, Paris. Courtesy the estate of Alina Szapocznikow / Piotr Stanislawski

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Tom Burr Circa Bortolami Gallery, New York 29 October – 23 December The first thing that comes to mind in Tom Burr’s Circa is waste. The first gallery contains a series of eight black-and-white photographs of manicured – and barricaded – lawns in Palm Beach, Florida, taken by the artist in 1999. These images lead into a main gallery dominated by Circa ’77 (1995), an installation that consists of living trees and bushes planted in soil littered with the sorts of things one might find left behind in a public park: bottles, plastic detritus, condoms, etc. The installation is dying. The flora cannot photosynthesise the gallery lighting. It is a wasting of life made more acute by its juxtaposition with the photographs of Palm Beach, which like much of the United States – and the rest of the world – has experienced record droughts in recent history. In this context, installing living things in a gallery just to die there seems wasteful to the point of excruciation. This is not the point of Circa ’77, however, which recreates a portion of the Platzspitz, a park next to the National Museum in Zürich that,

in 1977, was known as a place where gay men could cruise. It has since been cleaned up; the work mourns, presumably, the loss of an underground culture in the scrubbed-clean, homogeneous one that replaces it, where everyone is accepted, and nothing sexual is verboten. A waste of fun, perhaps. A wall text accompanying the work offers context. It quotes a 1970 text by Robert Smithson. ‘Probably the opposite of waste is luxury.’ But really, the exhibition argues that they are one and the same. Smithson again: ‘Then there’s a kind of middle class notion of luxury which is often called “quality.” And quality is sort of based on taste and sensibility.’ In the corner, just beyond Circa ’77, is Partitions (1995), a work of quality. It consists of two partitions made from pine, polished mirror and a grid of white plastic squares. It originates from 42nd Street Structures, an exhibition by Burr at New York's American Fine Arts in 1995, in which he evoked Times Square’s peep shows, video booths and sex shows in the wake of their destruction by then mayor

Circa ’77, 1995, wood, soil, trees, found objects, dimensions variable. Courtesy the artist and Bortolami Gallery, New York

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Rudolph Giuliani, using nothing but their barest building components. In another life, the work could live happily as a display in an Ikea store. The work’s quality is determined by its presence in the gallery, whose very space, suspended between luxury and waste, is a validation of middle-class taste and sensibility. In the final gallery hangs Grips, a 2015 series of seven sculptures by Burr that consists of geometric shapes carved out of hot-rolled steel, upon which are printed, shakily, images of sneakers, rubber gloves, windows on industrial buildings; they rest on a ledge and at intervals along the wall. Grips is about the ‘various manifestations of being held tightly in place’, the press release says. Waste comes into play a final time here; this time as a waste of space. The sculptures are not only ugly, but they also fail to accomplish what they intend. One very easily walks out of the room in which they are held, feeling nothing, thinking nothing, confused about why they are being shown in a gallery. Brienne Walsh

Zineb Sedira Present Tense Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York 12 November – 16 January Ships, sugar and cars are well-worn figures of ‘globalisation’ and its economic discontents in contemporary art. Ships and sugar link colonial and neoliberal configurations, but they can tend towards the clichéd. After Kara Walker’s monumental sugar sphinx, A Subtlety, installed in a disused Domino sugar factory in Brooklyn in 2014, any other appearance of the material can seem pretty limp. Even if they predate Walker’s work, this is unfortunately the case with the diminutive anchor and propeller sculptures of Zineb Sedira’s Sugar Routes II (2013) and the two colour prints of near-identical empty and full sugar warehouses in France, Sugar Silo (Diptych) (2013). But Sedira’s photographs and video about Algerian lighthouses do address the issue of trade networks and colonial history in ways that the overworked terrain of sugar does not. As a beacon to distressed ships, the lighthouse is a romantic figure that evokes subjective states such as isolation, longing and selfdiscovery. That Sedira is aiming at such anthropomorphism is in evidence in The Lovers I (2008), an unapologetically sentimental photograph

of two rust-eaten ships leaning against each other like ageing lovebirds. But this charming scene of romantic maritime decay is soon undercut in a short documentary video about the labour involved in working a lighthouse. Listening to the narrator’s matter-of-fact account of the work of a lighthouse keeper in Lighthouse in the Sea of Time (2011) made me question my initial metaphoric reflections. Now the shattered glass in the closeup photograph Broken Lens i (2011) reads less as a romantic fragment and more as evidence of the care involved in tending failing structures in the context of long-term austerity. Likewise the actual-size photographs of the pages of logbooks from the final months of the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), Registre du phare (2011), chart the prosaic workings of the keepers of old. The French originally built all of the lighthouses visited by Sedira, and the ever-worsening infrastructure of present-day Algeria finds them continually subject to power outages and breakdowns. If the daytime activities of a lighthouse keeper are relatively slow moving

– more way of life than working life – then the nights can be fraught with deadly worry. Sleeping with one eye open, the keeper is responsible for guarding against unexpected equipment failures. This profound sense of responsibility is all the more powerfully felt for being so lightly worn. Despite the careful cataloguing of day-to-day tasks, the main keeper, who is also a painter, was drawn to this way of life for much the same romantic reasons that we all can imagine. Metaphor and materialism, it turns out, coexist in this snapshot of an older mode of working life. Sedira’s video is much more effective in documentary mode than the elegiac tone of the installation The End of the Road (2010). This two-channel view of cars crushed in a wreckers’ yard suffers from being badly installed (poor sound and washed-out visuals). I would have preferred more space given to the lighthouse keepers’ experiences than the artist’s elusive musings on history and time in the barely audible voiceover of The End of the Road. Siona Wilson

Broken Lens i, 2011, c-print, 120 × 80 cm. © the artist / dacs, London. Courtesy the artist; Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York; and Kamel Mennour, Paris

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Rachel Rose Everything and More Whitney Museum of American Art, New York 30 October – 7 February Everything and More (2015) is a new 11-and-a-halfminute video by Rachel Rose. A plush black carpet laid in front of the screen is reverently avoided by most visitors, who choose instead to stand or perch on the bench along the back wall – perhaps better to bask in the gently enveloping imagery that Rose has put together to achieve something between collage and a ‘universal’ narrative. Watching Everything and More entails a subtle cocktail of seduction and dread. It is a sumptuous piece of work, with footage of colourful liquids accompanying descriptions of space travel heard in the voiceover, which is taken from an interview with astronaut David Wolf, among whose recollections are the sensation of no up or down and colours he had never seen before. Wolf wonders, additionally, if he has ruined his life by leaving earth. Rose’s imagery is not as remote as outer space seems to most of us. Much of it is rendered close up and viscous (she achieved many of the video’s effects by mixing different oils and pigments herself and then filming them).

Also shown is footage of a neutral-buoyancy lab, which is used to train astronauts. We waver below and on the surface of its waters, and see a craft submerged at the bottom of the pool; bubbles rise through an intense blue environment of crisp hd colour. Back amid the equipment around the edge of the training pool the camera swoons up to a pure white spacesuit, the image of which begins to split into sliding prismatic fragments; we look out through its facial shield into the oily galaxies again. Later in the video come pop-sublime shots panning a rock-concert crowd, which is moving ecstatically in slow motion and tinted in red as if in a darkroom. Quivering, soulful strains of a female voice (Aretha Franklin’s, actually – manipulated – singing Amazing Grace) siphon up at times, lending spiritual lift and a sense of poetic abstraction to the visual sequence. There is a degree of trust required to commit one’s eyes and attention to any video piece. Rose is a good researcher and adept at fusing direct, research-based footage with that which is more purely aesthetic – here there are facts, but there

Everything and More, 2015 (installation view). Photo: Ronald Amstutz. Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

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is also visual persuasion. To date her work has investigated life, death and purposefulness. Outer space represents a uniquely and universally compelling subject for human beings: a combination of mortality and the unknown, according to Mike Massimino, another astronaut who spoke recently in New York of his experiences. There is an undertone of mortality in Everything and More, as well as wonderment about whether any individual life is essentially important, or meaningless, like a rush of images that will be recalled by few and lost, just as Rose’s slipping marbled liquids are quickly wiped away. Watching Everything and More is at once disorientating and soothing. In the intense work it must have taken to make this short piece, one senses a channelling of anxiety. Rose has found ways to make things vivid for herself and, in turn, for us. She matches the dark fascination of her subject matter with visual and aural analogues, conveying that fascination without being overbearing. The result is a work of memorable creative presence tied to the unending threat of human absence. Iona Whittaker

Cinthia Marcelle em-entre-para-perante Silvia Cintra + Box 4, Rio de Janeiro 28 October – 28 November Entering a gallery to find the walls hung with flags and banners, all devoid of images, words or signifiers other than a white stripe shot through the equally white cloth, the average Brazilian will know instantly what she is looking at. Improvised banners on hot tin roofs; flags at barred windows; knotted sheets strung cell to cell – these are the motifs of a prison rebellion, a familiar sight in Brazil, where the prison system passed breaking point a long time ago and where, in some jails, 60 men live year-onyear in cells made for six. In these scenarios white flags, far from signifying peace or surrender, suggest savage and violent uprisings against unthinkably brutal regimes. Rape, hostage-taking, torture and murder are par for the course in Brazil’s prison mutinies, with decapitation one of the favoured barbarities. In an uprising in Paraná state in 2014, two prisoners’ severed heads, said one report, were used to torture other prisoners. We don’t learn how.

Far from Paraná, inside the cool white exhibition space at Rio de Janeiro’s Silvia Cintra + Box 4 gallery, Cinthia Marcelle has conjured a dozen or so sheetlike flags and banners into a system of signals about imprisonment, rebellion and plans for escape. Beneath the swathes of fabric, some which would have originally been black but have been painted with white acrylic by the artist, rows of tools, weapons and implements are laid out with precision across the concrete floor in an immense, mesmerising composition. Alternated fields of vertical and horizontal formations form an irregular grid; but despite the wealth of metal in the room, there’s no glint of steel on the machetes, spanners, hammers and hatchets: each piece is tightly, neatly wrapped in lengths of black shoelace cord. Over to one side, hanging on a wall just outside the main space, a sheaf of pages comprises a fax sent over and over, every day throughout the exhibition, bearing an image

of an open manhole, its cover placed to one side and a handful of ropes lying half in, half out. Escape, imprisonment, autonomy, oppression – the ideas are plotted on the floor in the tight black layout, and strung from the walls in the flags and knotted sheets. The result is as beautiful, ordered and methodical as a prison mutiny is dirty, messy and violent – an aestheticised expedition into a dreadful, chaotic reality. There is no disruption here at Silvia Cintra + Box 4, but that seems intentional: there’s a contradictory poetry in the tightly bound, precisely placed knives, cleavers and secateurs; in the clusters of spanners, screwdrivers and hammers; and in the rigid columns of drills, lathes and spatulas. Tools for escape, tools for rebellion; wordless revolts and the demand to be heard – as ever, Marcelle’s work surfaces important ideas then infuses them with beauty, creating space for reflection with a delicate, perfectly executed touch. Claire Rigby

A V, 2015, acrylic paint on fabric, shoelaces, ironmongery, dimensions variable. Courtesy Silvia Cintra + Box 4, Rio de Janeiro

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Books

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Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think About Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth by A.O. Scott Penguin Press, $27.95 (hardcover) Every critic has a stock answer in tow for the ‘What gives you the right to critique someone else’s work?’ question. A.O. Scott, the New York Times co-chief film critic (with Manohla Dargis), doesn’t settle for an instant reply. His book, Better Living Through Criticism, is a response to the ‘How is it a job?’ question, but also a guide to how that job is done. Scott, an astonishingly productive and admired critic – there’s a Tumblr dedicated to his one-line zingers; example: ‘I’m not judging, just describing’ (Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon, 2011) – takes his trade head-on. The book is not a defence of criticism: it’s a consideration of its conventions, use and impact from antiquity through George Orwell and up to Yelp, using examples that elucidate both the role of criticism in the way we look at culture and how thinking about art is a constantly evolving process. Scott has an amazing way with examples. He reads Rilke’s poem about an ancient Greek torso (that the German poet had seen in the Louvre), which ends with ‘you must change your life’, as a way of thinking through how art can promote self-examination. His discussion of visitors crying when sitting in front of Marina Abramović in The Artist Is Present (2010) shows a more layered understanding of how emotion is communicated in art than any art critic I’ve read on that work. And his writing on Godard – ‘Breathless is a movie without precedent, full of

freshness, youthful vigor, and the air of Parisian postwar reality’ – made me rush to YouTube to watch clips of Jean Seberg walking down the Champs-Élysées in her New York Herald Tribune T-shirt. These examples return time and again throughout the book, pushing the narrative and the polemics forward while always remaining close to the thing Scott is trying to touch – art, and why we read, watch, listen to and look at it. The book is divided into two forms: essays and a series of Q&As, in which Scott has an internal dialogue. The main chapters deal with the requisites, such as a quick history of criticism (including an unfortunate divergence to a 20-page digestible Kant), but also illuminate the backstage of criticism, like the relationship between the critic and the artist – the chapter is titled ‘The critic as artist and vice versa’, and asks about the status of criticism as an artform – and a section called ‘How to be wrong’, which is a combination of a nuts-and-bolts discussion of the decisionmaking that goes into writing and a reflection on the possible effects of opinions. The Q&As, however, are the real highlight: Scott discusses reading criticism in The Village Voice as a teenager; his affinity with Anton Ego, the critic character in Ratatouille (dubbed by Peter O’Toole, the lonely, committed, tormenting and tormented Ego is a memorable critic figure in recent cinema, with his famous ending monologue, after the rat cooked him his ratatouille:

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy, we risk very little”); and his beliefs (“It’s the job of art to free our minds, and the task of criticism to figure out what to do with that freedom”). Scott’s position on criticism implies a twofold responsibility: to expand the conversation about criticism generally and film criticism specifically, and his commitment to his readers, which seems especially pertinent considering that The New York Times, which covers the majority of films in theatres in that city (the paper had a policy of covering every single one until last year), acts both in the service of readers who want to know what to watch and as an intellectual record of film production of the time. But Scott’s discussion of writing itself outshines his thinking through the economic implications of criticism as a recommendation engine and a validating force, and he glosses over the changing face of publishing, even considering the amazing question: ‘What does the future of argument look like?’, which Scott never quite manages to answer (but who could?). In directing towards the practice of criticism the same kind of close examination with which a critic like Scott would take up any subject of inquiry, Better Living Through Criticism proves its own title: criticism is a method through which to explore the world. And like the book itself, it’s intellectually stimulating and rewarding, but somehow still never enough. Orit Gat

Vade Mecum: Essays, Reviews & Interviews by Richard Skinner Zero Books, £9.99/$16.95 (softcover) This compilation brings together a selection of about 30 essays, reviews and interviews originally published between 1992 and 2014. Although his subjects are often familiar, Richard Skinner tackles them from unusual and refreshing angles, navigating with ease between Kazuo Ishiguro’s use of unreliable narrators and the psychological dimension of Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1610–11), the ‘eerie angst’ of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films and Krzysztof Kieślowski’s metaphysical cinema – to name just a few. A novelist, poet and director of the fiction programme at the Faber Academy in London, Skinner is also a film and music critic, writing reviews and features for the likes of The Guardian and the Financial Times,

as well as numerous essays for Faber’s blog and other platforms. His most compelling (and most substantial) piece though is probably his essay ‘Dub: Red Hot vs Ice Cold’ (2013), which charts the evolution of dub music from the warm beats of Jamaica to the colder rhythms of Europe and North America, with Skinner striving along the way to elevate dub from subgenre to a complex artform. The passionate prose is invigorating (‘Dub is a virus. It infects the body and wraps the mind,’ he writes) and symptomatic of Skinner’s own incubation in the music while growing up in Trinidad during the 1960s and in the uk from the late 1970s.

January & February 2016

Skinner’s texts are seasoned with personal anecdotes, from his encounter with Kieślowski in the dining room of a Brighton b&b, to how, while working at London’s Gatwick Airport as a teenager, he came across Werner Herzog’s diary Of Walking on Ice (1978) and a stash of heroin ‘the size of a bag of sugar’. But just when you think you’ve figured out the author’s formula, along comes a whimsical essay like ‘Flickers’, in which a succession of fragments from cinema’s classics unfold before your eyes via a loose process of word- and thought-association: ‘Robert Duvall preparing himself to be executed in The Eagle Has Landed. Birds in Psycho. The bird in the cage in Jean Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï. Alain Delon as the most handsome man in cinema.’ Louise Darblay

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Vie? ou Théâtre? by Charlotte Salomon Le Tripode, €95 (hardcover) From 1940 to 1942, between the ages of twenty-four and twenty-six, German artist Charlotte Salomon created ‘etwas ganz verrückt Besonderes’ (‘something really crazy special’). It was the product of the special, crazy times and situation she found herself in. In 1939 Salomon had fled Berlin, where she was the last Jewish student at the city’s art school. She sought refuge in France with her grandparents on her late mother’s side in the region of Nice. On 4 March 1940, she watched helplessly as her grandmother threw herself from a window to her death. Only then did her grandfather reveal the family’s secret: she was the last survivor of a maternal line, all of whom, for three generations, had committed suicide. When she was eight, Charlotte had been told her own mother passed away from influenza; now she learned the truth, that she too had jumped and killed herself. In exile and solitude, under the long shadows of this tragic heritage and the immediate menace of Hitler’s forces, Salomon would barely eat, drink or sleep to finish recording her family’s histories and her personal experiences in an unprecedented magnum opus of pictures and words. It sprang from an outpouring of around a thousand gouache paintings on Canson paper, made from only three primary colours and clearly influenced by the German Expressionists and Marc Chagall. From these,

she edited 781 into ‘ein Singspiel’ or a musical play, which she titled Leben? oder Theater? (‘Life? or Theatre?’). She opened with the suicide in 1913 of an Aunt Charlotte, after whom Salomon was named. Initially, she hand-lettered characters’ dialogues and thoughts, as well as her narration and musical and theatrical references, onto separate librettolike overlays. Gradually, her brushstrokes became looser and she wrote more texts directly onto, and into, her images. The penultimate nine paintings are overwhelmed by her densely-packed third-person coda, barely containing the emphatic brush capitals. On 7 October 1943, Salomon, five months pregnant, and her companion were deported to Auschwitz and executed. Fortunately, through her doctor, her unseen masterpiece was preserved by her surviving father and stepmother. In 1971 they entrusted it to Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum. The following year, this institution exhibited for the first time 250 paintings, less than one third of Leben? oder Theater? Further exhibitions, including a North American tour in 1983–4 and a showing at the Royal Academy, London, in 1998, and various editions, catalogues and a cd-rom have to date given a fuller but not complete impression of this oeuvre. Weighing in at 4.6kg with 840 pages of 28 sq cm, Le Tripode’s French doorstop of an edition at last allows us to see and read her paintings

faithfully reproduced at actual size. Accompanied by insets of all of her sheets of text, the entirety of Salomon’s complex creation is on display. Also presented are insightful essays and a key unseen first-person letter by Salomon. This comprises 25 pages, 9 at the start and end of typed transcripts of lost paintings, the middle 16 of additional bold text-only gouaches, previously unaccounted for and now restored to their proper context. Dating probably from February 1943, her final recorded words express a prayer that ‘all humanity, tested by suffering and the hardest experiences, will walk in front of a life that is more true, more alive’. Through such exposure as Franz Weisz’s 1981 Dutch movie and David Foenkinos’s acclaimed 2014 biography, Salomon herself has almost become better known than her work. The atypical hybridity of Leben? oder Theater? has meant that it has remained somewhat marginalised. In 2016, its journey comes full circle for an exhibition at the Musée Masséna in Nice. It is also becoming more acknowledged for anticipating by 30 years the enrichment of comics through frank autobiographical graphic novels and the rise of women cartoonists, and for its affinity to multilayered transmedia of the digital age. To paraphrase Salomon’s title, if one asks is it ‘Art? or Literature?’, the answer is surely, ‘Both, and much more besides’. Paul Gravett

Auto-Destructive Art: Metzger at the aa by Gustav Metzger Bedford Press, £10 (softcover) ‘Society is deteriorating. Is it not rather insensitive of artists to go on making works that are supposed to be permanent?’ asked artist Gustav Metzger in a talk he gave at London’s Architectural Association on 24 February 1965, the transcript of which has been republished with a new preface by Tate curator Andrew Wilson. Metzger was writing at a moment the Cold War risked turning into a full nuclear one. Yet while this danger was a very real one – the Cuban Missile Crisis was two years prior – Metzger argues it was a horror that was far from fully comprehended by the general public and artists alike. If society cannot ‘make adjustments required to take control of the post-bomb era,’

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he tells his audience, it is ‘failing in the most important task of life – its preservation.’ Metzger had first prescribed his new artform, auto-destructive art – large outdoor sculptures (constructed from ‘material that is undergoing a process of transformation in time’) that would self-destruct, either suddenly, with a bang, or by decaying over a long period of time – six years previously, as a means of shaking a prospective public into action. In this talk he goes into the specifics of works he wishes to make (though he notes that they may not be practically possible – financially or technologically). A 24-by-18-foot steel sculpture that would corrode over ten years, for example, or a 30 sq ft

ArtReview

cube packed with computer equipment ‘programmed to undergo a series of breakdowns and self-devouring activities’. Reading this timely reprint, as the imminent nuclear threat fades and climate change surpasses it as the next apocalyptic emergency, gives rise to the question of what kind of art we need to help solve the most pressing threat to human survival. It won’t take the form of yet more objects flown around the world to stuff galleries (indeed, Metzger rails against the commercial system). Instead it must be a type of work that is as ‘dangerous’ to our blinkered mindset as Metzger hoped auto-destructive art would prove 50 years back. Oliver Basciano

Trim: 200(w)x131 (h)mm

Ragnar Kjartansson, photographed by Ari Magg for ArtReview May 2014

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For more on Tillie Walden, see overleaf

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Contributors

Erik Morse is the recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant for 2015. He is the author of Dreamweapon: Spacemen 3 and the Birth of Spiritualized (2005) and Bluff City Underground: A Roman Noir of the Deep South (2012), and a contributing writer to The Paris Review, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, Times Literary Supplement, The Believer and LA Review of Books, among others. He has also been an adjunct professor at Southern California Institute of Architecture (sci-Arc). This month he spoke to John Akromfrah. Johanna Calle is an artist based in Bogotá. She has a retrospective of her work, Silentes, at Museum of Art, National Bank, Bogotá, and touring to Museo Amparo, Puebla, with previous solo exhibitions at Casas Riegner gallery, Bogotá; Marilia Razuk Gallery, São Paulo; Krinzinger Gallery, Vienna; Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach; and North Dakota Museum of Art. She was inclued in the iv Trienal Poli/Gráfica, Puerto Rico, this year, and siteLines: Unsettled Landscapes, New Mexico, and the 31st Bienal de São Paulo, both 2014. In 2012, the Central Bank of the Republic of Colombia minted two coins after her drawings, circulating as currency at present. This month she presents an artist’s project.

Lauren Cornell is curator and associate director, technology initiatives at the New Museum, New York. In 2015, she cocurated the New Museum Triennial, Surround Audience, with artist Ryan Trecartin, and coedited Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the 21st Century with Ed Halter. This month she is among the selectors of the annual ‘Future Greats’ feature. Orit Gat is a writer based in London and New York. Apart from regularly writing art criticism, for which she was a recipient of a Creative Capital/Warhol Foundation Arts Writers grant for 2015, she also writes about the Internet – and how much she worries about it – for a wide variety of magazines. She is the features editor of Rhizome, managing editor of WdW Review and aCCeSsions, and contributing editor of Momus and The White Review. She organises a reading group in New York and London that meets monthly to discuss a different title. This month she is among the selectors of the annual ‘Future Greats’ feature, in addition to her regular reviewing from New York.

Contributing Writers Karen Archey, Sara Arrhenius, Sean Ashton, Kathy Battista, Andrew Berardini, Violaine Boutet de Monvel, Kimberly Bradley, Barbara Casavecchia, Matthew Collings, Lauren Cornell, Mary Corse, Stephanie Cristello, Omer Fast, Gallery Girl, Orit Gat, Paul Gravett, Jonathan Griffin, Jonathan Grossmalerman, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Stefanie Hessler, Amanda Hunt, Sam Jacob, Justin Jaeckle, Hyunjin Kim, Maria Lind, Kiki Mazzucchelli, Laura McLean-Ferris, Erik Morse, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, Laura Oldfield Ford, Keith Patrick, Heather Phillipson, Paul Pieroni, John Quin, Arlette Quynh-Anh Tran, Rashid Rana, Claire Rigby, Ushiro Ryuta, Sherman Sam, Sarkis, Raimar Stange, Daniel Steegmann Magrané, Tim Steer, David Trigg, Christian Viveros-Fauné, Brienne Walsh, Iona Whittaker, Siona Wilson Contributing Editors Tyler Coburn, Brian Dillon, David Everitt Howe, Joshua Mack, Laura McLean-Ferris, Christopher Mooney, Niru Ratnam, Chris Sharp Contributing Artists / Photographers Johanna Calle, Wenjei Cheng, Mikael Gregorsky, Benjamin McMahon, Tillie Walden

Tillie Walden (preceding pages)

It is hard to write anything about comics

Siblings Lars and Maja, Walden’s main

external pressures bring them literally down to

‘Future Great’ Tillie Walden without mentioning

characters in her unsettling fable The End of Summer,

earth. “Young and unaware, the girls feel displaced

her age, or rather her youth, a liminal nineteen

are “basically a mishmash” of her and her twin

from the environment around them. Their size

years. Her first two graphic novels came out last

brother, John. A looming three-year winter locks

changes as their lives change, and their love makes

year and show that she is still close enough to

away sickly boy Lars and his family, sealed tight

everything around them smaller. But this also shows

her childhood and adolescence to genuinely

inside their castle’s vast, vacuous splendour,

how, when kids are in love, they often ignore

recapture their intensity, yet with a craft and

as tensions and tempers rise. This reflects Walden’s

everything else, often to a negative effect.”

maturity that belie her youth. This bright American

contradictory relationship with the natural world,

has her father to thank for that. “When I was

which she at once fears and finds beautiful and

becoming a theme in her stories. “I am interested

a kid,” she recalls, “my dad got me one of those

relaxing. “Part of me envies the family trapped

in the dynamic of being a kid and dealing with

huge collections of Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo

inside, but another part wants nothing more than

issues that force you to grow up. That’s how I felt

in Slumberland [1905–26]. It was so big (and I was

to open the door and breathe in the real air.” Walden

as a kid, and by drawing characters dealing with

so little) that I could sit on top of the pages and

finds that drifting close to sleep or wakefulness

that I’m working through my own issues.” These

read the comics.” What better way for Walden to

produces the perfect in-between state for ideas

will also come through in her two next projects,

immerse herself in the popular surrealism, years

and drawings to flow. “Some of the most important

which she is working on simultaneously, one about

before the surrealists, of McCay’s early-twentieth-

moments in The End of Summer originated from

her 12 years as a competitive synchronised skater,

century Sunday newspaper pages about a boy-

mornings waking from a vivid dream.”

the other about a girl on a spaceship, related to her

dreamer, and soak up his refined art-nouveau

Walden applies McCay’s playful shifting in

Children who are not quite still children are

new Strip for ArtReview. While very different in

draughtsmanship, fantastical architecture

protagonists’ sizes in I Love This Part, tender inter-

setting, both let her explore young lives on the cusp

and distortions of scale. Equally formative was

ludes in whole-page vignettes of the all-obscuring

of adulthood. Her work can be seen in London in

Japanese culture, whether the manga of Osamu

love between two girls-turned-giants, reclining over

Comix Creatix: 100 Women Making Comics, at the House

Tezuka or the anime of Hayao Miyazaki.

mountains or skyscrapers, until self-doubt and

of Illustration from 5 February. Paul Gravett

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ArtReview

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Photo credits

Text credits

on the cover photography by Benjamin McMahon

Phrases on the spine and pages 31, 111 and 131 are from The Futurological Congress (1971), by Stanisław Lem

on pages 170, 178 photography by Mikael Gregorsky on page 173 photography by Wenjei Cheng

January & February 2016

169

Off the Record January & February 2016 I stroll into our Fitzrovia gallery to find Oliver, the still-debonair fiftysomething art dealer whose name is above the front door, hunched over his Toshiba Satellite laptop. “I know what you’re looking at, you filthy old man!” I playfully joke. “It’s Carolee Schneemann’s Meat Joy from UbuWeb, isn’t it?” I slam the laptop screen closed on his wiry old fingers. “Ouch!” he yells. “Pull yourself together, my man.” Wordlessly he reopens the laptop and punches the return key, firing up the screen again. He is streaming something, but it’s not Carolee Schneemann. I take a closer look before screaming and dropping my Pret A Manger Swedish Meatball Hot Wrap down my Isabel Marant oversize double-breasted coat. “It’s Marc Spiegler! What are you doing watching him? You know he is my nemesis!” I shout. I instinctively drop into a Shotokan Karate Heron Leg Stance, wary lest the legendary art-fair director and sometime martial arts disciple be hiding in a cupboard. “Don’t worry, Gallery Girl, he’s not here. This is a YouTube video of his recent talk ‘10 questions every gallerist should be asking themself now.’” I slowly rise from the stance and flick meatball from the Marant. “Ten questions? I’ve got ten questions gallerists should always ask, like, ‘Who the fuck are you, how big’s your collection and why should I sell this to you when I told Simcho that for a fellow who’s not too much to look at, he has the instincts of a champion?’” “No, gg,” Oliver says wearily. “Questions we should be asking ourselves. According to Spiegler, we’re doomed. He says that connoisseur-collectors are dying out. The type we depend on to buy this esoteric 1970s conceptualism that we flog. According to Spiegler, instead we have to deal with hedge-fund managers and dot-com kids who want to see the work on Instagram and then buy it through a twenty-three-year-old adviser.” “I can deal with that. They’d love this stuff…” But as the words leave my mouth, I look around the walls and realise that Oliver is right. “I guess we should do one of our rethinks,” says Oliver sadly, “where you tell me that we should do a show entirely curated by people you’ve met swiping right.” I look at Oliver and my eyes narrow. “No, Oliver! We’ve been down that road.” I fish a book out of my Saint Laurent quilted leather shoulder bag and slam it down next to the Toshiba. “Gifted Hands: The Ben Carson Story,” Oliver says, reading the title. “Hmm, would this be the inspiring biography of the great hope of America who despite being raised in poverty overcomes his angermanagement issues to become a pioneering brain surgeon, motivational speaker, cameo-actor in the Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear comedy Stuck on You and no-nonsense candidate for the Republican presidential nomination?” “That’s it!” Oliver puts it down and holds up a hand. “‘Do what you have to do so–’” he begins. “‘–so that you can be what you want to be!’” I finish. “You’ve read it already?”

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“Read it? I’ve got three copies, seen the film four times and am trying to get a green card so I can move to Wyoming in order to vote for Ben!” I look at him slightly bewildered. “I know, Gallery Girl, let’s take Spiegler’s words as a challenge. He says let’s move with the times, let’s be accessible to these new collectors! Well, what would Ben Carson do?” I shrug, flummoxed by this unexpected reply. “As Spiegler says, let’s get rid of the metaphorical velvet rope. And that’s all that this intellectual high-mindedness really is!” He hurls a text-based piece about feminism from a nearby wall to the floor and starts running around the gallery. “Out with this oh-so-tasteful minimalist front desk,” he shouts, wrestling with a table. “Let’s just stand around with name badges on! Let’s have a one-click-purchase button on our website with prices clearly displayed.” He stamps on the Toshiba. “What else does Spiegler say? No more mention of waiting lists to would-be collectors. No asking what else is in their collection!” “Oliver, I think you need to hold on a second, Ben Carson might like waiting lists…” “And what was that other thing Spiegler said? No more unsmiling desk bitches covered in Marant or Dior…” He looks at me and his eyes narrow. I suddenly realise that Spiegler’s so-called lecture has been designed specifically to strike back at me. “Out!” Oliver shouts. “No! Can’t you see! It’s all a ploy…” “Out! Spiegler’s right! Carson’s right! Out!” “But, but Spiegler knew you would watch it, he’s planted this just to get to me…” It’s too late. With a surprising turn of strength, Oliver has turfed me out onto Riding House Street. I’m just about to pick myself up when I spot a hardcover book arcing through the air towards my head, and the last thing I see is the smiling face of Ben Carson. Gallery Girl

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